BHP Billiton Sustainability Report Case

Executive summary This short paper discusses relevant stakeholders that the multinational conglomerate company BHP Billiton encloses in their 2013 Sustainability Report. The components that are briefly touched upon is related to the various stakeholder influences, report and not reported costs (referring to the triple bottom line), but the majority of the paper primarily focuses on the environmental and social factors that BHP Billiton discloses in relation to their sustainability program, because the indicators seem to have the biggest impact on the outward-looking legitimacy of the company. We found that NGOs, local communities and unions highly affect how BHP chooses to report their operations, as these organizations/interest groups have a very close relationship to the firm; both negatively and positively. Furthermore, the paper tries to account for costs not included in BHP’s sustainability report, and it appear that some of these are cost-reporting on corruption, specific environmental issues, anticompetitive behaviour, and transportation. The paper do recognize that BHP is in fact a very active proponent of sustainability reporting, but on the other hand do question to what extent the reporting actually reflect the company’s inner workings, as BHP has been publicly criticised for this before. Question A: Influence of all possible stakeholders of BHP Billiton in terms of environmental and social factors. BHP Billiton is a multinational mining, metals and petroleum conglomerate with many stakeholders in many countries, across continents. They have developed the BHP Billiton charter, which commits the company to core values of sustainability, which is written down in their Group Level Documents (GLDs) with minimum mandatory performance requirements on health, safety,