A group of Sorbonne Institute of Business Administration students and their host. Left to right: Jacobus Boers, instructor at Georgia State; Charles Delavault, Marjolaine Matray, Florian Piot, Jerome Fauchet and Lotta Bonde.

A delegation of French business students from the Institute of Business Administration at Sorbonne University in Paris were surprised by the amount of waste created by common American activities, a situation running counter to trends in Europe.

The comments were made during a panel discussion at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University Oct. 29.

The students were participating in the Sorbonne Seminar on International Marketing, which has partnered with Georgia State to bring groups of business professionals studying for graduate degrees to Atlanta since 1999, according to Marjolaine Matray, a professor at the Sorbonne.

The most recent group visited from Oct. 23-30 and heard lectures on marketing and buyer behavior from Georgia State professors.  They also visited U.S. retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. as well as Atlanta-based companies Coca-Cola Co. and Chick-fil-A Inc.

During trips to local manufacturers and retailers, members of the most recent group were struck by how willing the American market is willing to accept products that are not environmentally friendly.

“In Europe social responsibility and the environmental issue is big,” Jacobus Boers, an instructor at Georgia State, told GlobalAtlanta following the discussion.  “That’s something (marketers) cannot afford to ignore.”

Jerome Fauchet, an environmental marketing representative at Renault Sport Technologies and a Sorbonne student, was surprised at the amount of plastic and paper products involved in everyday activities such as eating a fast food meal or producing one bottled beverage.

He added that Renault, an automobile manufacturing company, is beginning to power its manufacturing plants using solar and wind energy as opposed to older, less environmentally friendly technologies.

Florian Piot, a product information representative at Renault who was also on the trip, said European marketers talk about their products from a socially conscious perspective while American companies are only concerned with sales.

These opinions are supported by the results of Atlanta-based United Parcel Service Inc.’s 2007 Business Monitors, annual polls of businesspeople in the United States and Europe.  The results of these studies showed that Europeans have a greater regard for the environment than Americans.

A poll of 1,450 European businesspeople asked to select the top three priorities for business and political leaders found that 45 percent of respondents placed “protecting the environment” at the top of the list. 

Other leading answers were “sustaining economic growth” at 40 percent and “securing future energy supplies” at 33 percent of respondents.

A poll of 600 businesspeople in the United States found that 58 percent of respondents placed “sustaining economic growth” at the top of their list of priorities.  “Changing the health care system” was the second highest priority, gaining 56 percent of the vote and “securing future energy supplies” was third at 45 percent.

“Protecting the environment” ranked fifth on the list of priorities with 30 percent popularity, behind “fighting terrorism” with 35 percent.

The results of the Business Monitor studies were released ahead of the UPS Small Business Forum, a trade conference for small- to medium-sized enterprises that will be held Nov. 16 at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.

The agenda for the forum includes a panel discussion based on global business trends as revealed in the Business Monitor studies.

Mr. Boers added that France is far from solving its own environmental issues, particularly in the continued use of nuclear power as an energy source.