Looks like an advertisement to me 
I can only hope that Anna also knows a lot about greenwashing and that she will remember what roles the German “TUEV” and other German companies played in the old conflicts of her time. All she needs to do is looking at the old endless “debates” in the Internet … to figure out that business is mainly about money and consumers mostly act on feelings.
“Other German companies have also played a role in the conflict. When it reviewed the palm oil operations, employees at German sustainability auditor TÜV Rheinland deliberately played down the clearing of settlements in an earlier report for Wilmar. TÜV auditors now concede they acted incorrectly at the time.” Source: Spiegel, A Tangle of Conflicts: The Dirty Business of Palm Oil
Engineering knows the physical background and environmental costs … that’s not the main problem. Marketing/MBAs are. I’m sure Anna will also remember Volkswagen’s … unusual corporate culture. The VW engineers knew what they were doing.
“VW had this special culture,” he said. “It was like North Korea without labor camps,” he added, quoting a well known description of the company by Der Spiegel magazine. “You have to obey.” Source: NYT, The Engineering of Volkswagen’s Aggressive Ambition
A fair VDI publication should include those stories as well, so they will be remembered. If an auditor get’s hired by a company … he has to audit … those audits are seldom neutral. If an engineer cannot talk openly to his supervisors … VW will have to pay a lot of money … but not to the people that bought the cars or to the people that will loose jobs because of this. It would be nice if VDI fiction would point out those social and monetary dependencies as well. Just what comes to my mind after reading the chapter … for the “discourse”. I’m not against the publication at all!
But often I think … why did they do this or acted different? And normally from their perspective it’s just the choice about staying in business or not. A story that is often not told … because the market is about money and not so much about good ideas/transparency.