LG Corporation is a multinational South Korean conglomerate company headquartered in the city of Seoul, South Korea. It comprises 13 key affiliates with LG Electronics remaining the world's second-largest LCD television manufacturer since 2008, and is considered one of the world’s leading producers of consumer electronics. The company oversees 128 operations worldwide, employing 83,000 people across 80 different nations. LG has recently come forward with news regarding its environmental future; the launch of LG’s ESG Committee is close at hand, set to operate within both the holding company and the branching affiliates in order to promote better ‘transparency and long-term sustainability of the group’.

Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) refers to the three central factors in measuring the sustainability and societal impact of potential investments in a company or business. Historically, decisions regarding where financial assets should be placed showed predominant inclinations towards fiscal return, with maximizing revenue being commonly accepted as the most important gauge of investments’ successes. Following increases in awareness about the environmental and social repercussions of risky investments, however, the assumption that ethically directed investments were by their nature likely to reduce financial return fell out of favor with both companies and the public at large. ESG became a newer, more conscious set of criteria for investors to measure their financial decisions with; sustainability and the potential for exacerbating the climate crisis became major indicators for the ‘investability’ of a company, and the environment became a playing factor in shaping the decisions and future of corporations.

LG’s to-be implemented ESG Committee aims to do exactly this: to make the environmental and social aftermath of the company’s decisions carry more weight in deciding whether that move should be carried out. Even though LG has already been partaking in many environmental campaigns, such as their LG Global Volunteer Day on June 5th that brought together over 50,000 employees worldwide in volunteer campaigns in celebration of World Environment Day, the ESG committee promises to serve as a more direct channel for environmental governance to influence its corporate decisions.

The world’s speedy consumption of electronics and the usage of technology is a major factor in driving home several pollution charges. Air, water, heat and noise pollution can all be caused by producing and using technology, and manufacturing technology further creates large amounts of waste, with used computers and electronics contributing to the recycling and polluting problem by being thrown out without proper disposal methods to take care of the toxic chemicals once they become outdated or broken. LG’s contribution towards the ESG corporate governance movement will hopefully lead to new solutions being found for the pollution problem of the electronics industry, and furthermore motivate other companies to begin making more environmentally conscious business decisions through its precedent.