Our Principles

When making lending decisions, we look not only at financial risks and returns, but also at the social and environmental implications of a project or proposal. In simple terms our lending strategy considers a number of positive and negative criteria before a loan application is approved.  

We lend for socially and environmentally positive activities

Prometheus lends to projects/proposals that have positive effects in relation to  ecosystems, natural resources, public health, social structures, cultural heritage, animal welfare and human rights.

Examples of positive activities are:

  • Sustainable land use: including Organic, Bio-dynamic and Permaculture approaches to agriculture.
  • Conservation of natural resources: including habitat protection and native forest regeneration.
  • Renewable energy: solar and wind
  • Eco-building and energy efficient housing
  • Recycling and resource recovery
  • Sustainable transport: including low-emission and fuel efficient vehicles
  • Complementary Healthcare
  • Environmental technologies
  • Providing high quality products or services that benefit the community
  • Good practices in areas of employment, communication and equal opportunity 
  • Good customer practice for stakeholders
  • Education  and training

 

We avoid lending to negative activities

We explicitly exclude a number of activities from our lending. These are activities that are by their nature an obstacle in the long term to the creation of a sustainable, humane society and which result in negative social or environmental effects.

Products and services with negative social and/or environmental effects are:

  • Tobacco, drugs and large-scale alcohol production (we occasionally lend for niche organic wineries)
  • Intensive factory farming
  • Unnecessary animal testing
  • Pesticides
  • Genetic manipulation 
  • Gambling
  • Nuclear energy
  • Arms industry
  • Forest depletion and non-sustainable mining

Practices with negative effects are:

  • Exploitation, child labour
  • Poor working conditions and poor wages
  • Corruption
  • Pollution
  • Speculation
  • Discrimination and poor human rights
  • Pornography
  • Breaches of health and safety


Total ‘purity’ is hard to achieve and all investors are different in terms of their ethical, social and environmental values. Also, some negative activities are indispensable to the proper functioning of our present society and exceptions must be allowed.

For example, we provide finance for recycling companies to purchase trucks and other heavy equipment as these are essential to their core operations (which we wholeheartedly support) but which are nevertheless a heavy emitter of climate change gases.  Where there are no alternative and sustainable technologies available to enable otherwise positive activities we will lend in such circumstances.

Often the dividing lines are not entirely clear-cut, which makes it difficult to establish fixed lending criteria.  A key part of Prometheus’ role is to use the combined years of experience of our loan management team together with any external advice to decide if the positive social or environmental implications of a project or proposal sufficiently counter any negative implications for that loan to be approved.

We may often lend to an organization or business if it is clearly taking a significant lead in developing a more sustainable approach in an otherwise largely negative activity.  This is part of our vision of helping our economy and society move toward sustainability, supporting and encouraging small steps where larger ones are not available or possible at that time.