Arbora&Ausonia

A. How did you find this company? What are the main facts about its activities?

According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer nearly 400.000 women die every year because of breast cancer all over the world. Thanks to the several breakthroughs on treatments and early diagnosis, mortality due to this type of cancer has been significantly reduced for the last ten years.
Arbora & Ausonia shows how a big company can also play an important role on improving its environment and contribute to make people’s life easier while is making profit with its activities.
Arbora & Ausonia is a source of inspiration for us as we know that the corporation has a commitment with society to especially take care of all of what concerns to nowadays world’s problems: health, environment and climate change and employee satisfaction.
Arbora & Ausonia is a leading company in the personal care and hygiene market in Portugal and Spain. It is mainly dedicated to the manufacture and marketing of absorbent hygiene market, in child and family, feminine hygiene and adult incontinence. Currently it is 50 % owned by the consumption products multinational Procter & Gamble and 50 % owned by the spanish holding company Agrolimen. Its headquarters are based in Barcelona.
Abrora & Ausonia’s products are developed together with Procter & Gamble, through the use of advanced technologies and deep market research, innovation takes place. It also applies a strict quality policy in all its products. Currently it employs over 1.300 workers in its offices and plants.
Some of its flagship products are: Diapers and wipes for children Dodot, Wipes Kandoo, Charmin Wipes, Towels and protectives Evax, Towels and protectives Ausonia, Tampax tampons, Incontinence products Ausonia Evolution, Incontinence Products Lindor and Salvacamas.

B. What are the Ethical challenges this company is addressing?

As for the Corporate Social responsibility the company has three main objectives:

• 1. To improve the company’s involvement and its brands with the social factors in the environment: through its brands, Arbora & Ausonia offers society useful information on health at different stages of people’s lives, and works with specialists and professionals in different fields on projects focused on their different customers:

• • a. Childhood: an example is the Dodot collaboration agreement with Unicef. The objective is to eliminate tetanus in babies. For each package of a Dodot product that the consumer buys, one vaccine is sent to developing countries where it is still not eradicated.

• • b. Teenagers: with initiatives such as "La adolescencia y tú" (Adolescence and you), run on a joint basis with the Child and Adolescent Gynaecology Group, and with the aim of creating a website for teenagers where they can solve questions about the changes experimented in adolescence.

• • c. Women: the most famous campaign in this field is the agreement between Ausonia and the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC) to get money for investigation to fight breast cancer. For each package of Ausonia product bought, 1 minute is added to the investigation of the causes and to discover possible cures for the illness.

• • d. Elderly: the firm has several publications about incontinence to solve questions and help to improve people’s life.

2. To be one of the top companies in the sector that minimizes the environmental impact: Arbora&Ausonia has the objective of reducing the consumption of energy and water, as well as to decrease the amount of waste generated. The firm also tries to continuously improve the package of its products in order to reduce the environmental impact.

3. To be considered a good place to work at: this is achieved by offering flexibility to workers in order to improve the work environment and to ensure equality among employees.

C. What makes this company really inspiring to you and why would you trust it?

We really think that this company is ethical because is promoting something that is not that direct as giving money to poor people or to African countries, which is quite popular in many companies. They are helping in the most important part and not in the most direct for this cause that is investigation on cancer treatment. It’s not a short-term result where they can show the efficiency of the investment because it comes with time so they are really betting on something that can be really risky if they only want to use it as propaganda because it might not be effective.

Adding the fact that they were already leading this market sector so they didn’t really need a big campaign like this one to have a better position on it but of course this is not the main reason to think they are ethical.

To analyze if one company is being ethical we should check its collaborators too and taking a look at AECC and knowing it from a quite close view because of personal experiences we can say that is a really strong reason to believe that their investment is not in vain and that’s really helping to investigate in this field.

The cause they are supporting it affected us in a further or in closer level and it’s easier to understand what the company is doing why we need that action. That makes us to have a stronger faith on these cause than in others which for us are far aways. This is our everyday.

D.What are the possible challenges facing the company in the future and how do you think this company may improve?

One of the possible challenges they can face is the mistrust from people because maybe we are not going to see the result of this collaboration and that can make people feel disappointed with the initiative or they can just take it as a too long term project and not feel they have to be involved in but taking a look to statistics we can affirm that almost everyone had a close cancer case that make them be aware of the importance of this investment.

And looking at it in a different way we can hopefully see that investigation in cancer is successful and they find the final treatment for this. If the health problem is solved they will no longer have this cause as their motivation but we are sure they will find another one because there are many illness and many struggles who affect the women and where they act in and I talk about women sector because is the sector they are working for but who knows, they might find the inspiration on helping the other sex and focusing on prostate cancer, which is said that is going to be the next breast cancer for men. That will show solidarity towards someone who is not a consumer but who they can help too.