PRESS RELEASE -
As the Earth’s population continues to grow, so does our agriculture and energy usage, pollution and overall consumption. Last year, the global demand for resources was 1.7 times more than what the Earth can support in one year.* And it’s getting worse.
WASTE NOT -
If you’re visiting a hotel this holiday season for either work or pleasure, take a moment to observe the way food is prepared and served at the buffet or your holiday party dinner.
Is it presented in abundance? Are people taking more than they can eat? Is the hotel staff replenishing the buffet even as the party is winding down? How much food is going back to the kitchen? Can you tell if the hotel is donating edible food or composting its scraps?
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
Continuing this year’s wave of near-constant innovations aimed at responsible management of post-consumer plastics are new advancements from both the private and public sector.
BASF making products with chemically recycled plastics
BASF announced it has broken new ground in plastic waste recycling with its ChemCycling project. Chemical recycling provides an innovative way to reutilize currently unrecyclable plastic waste, such as mixed or uncleaned plastics. Depending on the region, such waste is usually sent to landfill or burned with energy recovery.
THE NEXT ECONOMY -
The fashion industry has kicked December off with a bang, launching a number of game-changing initiatives and partnerships aimed at further improving its image by reducing its impacts.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
After an intensive global campaign by Greenpeace, Wilmar International has published a detailed action plan to map and monitor its palm oil suppliers.
This week, the world’s largest palm oil trader, Wilmar International, published a detailed action plan to map and monitor all of its suppliers. If implemented, this would put the palm oil giant — which supplies 40 percent of the world’s palm oil — one step closer to finally eliminating deforestation from its supply chain, and would have major implications for the rest of the industry.
COLLABORATION -
This week, two fashion giants with extensive brand portfolios announced partnerships that show promise for cleaning up “dirty fashion.”
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
This week, more momentum on the anti-plastic front: Unilever will develop a crowdsourced, plastic-free laundry solution to combat single-use sachets; while Stora Enso and Sulapac are developing renewable drinking straws.
Unilever to invest €100K in crowdsourced alternative to plastic packaging
CPG giant Unilever has announced that it will invest €100,000 in a new, plastic-free laundry tablet — a crowdsourced innovation that has the potential to replace single-use sachets of laundry powder, a popular format for laundry detergents in the developing world that is problematic in terms of plastic waste.
MARKETING AND COMMS -
What Gen Z want from brands is the new Holy Grail for marketers — you only have to look at the myriad surveys and reports published recently that seek to analyze their preferences and intentions.
This obsession with Gen Z is understandable — after all, this new generation of consumers already are two billion strong and have a combined $44 billion in purchasing power.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
US-based multinational 3M launches approximately 1,000 new products each year; starting in 2019, 100 percent of them will have sustainability built in: Today, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24), 3M announced its first formal requirement that, beginning in 2019, all new products will include a Sustainability Value Commitment that demonstrates how they drive impact for the greater good.
BUSINESS CASE -
Nearly three-quarters of organisations surveyed (72 percent) mention the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their annual corporate or sustainability reports — an increase of 10 percent on last year, according to a new study by PwC. But concrete measures and integration remain elusive for many as organisations struggle to identify actions beyond business-as-usual targets.
PRESS RELEASE -
HUNTSVILLE, AL, November 28, 2018 – BASF’s facility in Huntsville, Alabama received the Green Excellence Recognition in Waste Stewardship Award by Honda of America Manufacturing. The award recognizes BASF’s continuous and innovative efforts toward sustainability by significantly reducing production waste and achieving a Zero Waste to Landfill validation from UL. Less than 0.2 percent of waste goes to the landfill at the production facility.
PRESS RELEASE -
Information and communications technologies (ICT) have revolutionized the way we communicate, collaborate and work. Now, they’re emerging as a critical tool for slashing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by helping companies and consumers consume energy in a more intelligent and efficient way. While ICT is being used to shape smarter cities, transportation systems, industrial processes and more, the industry is also a net source of GHG emissions.
MARKETING AND COMMS -
WWF Germany recently published a report, Boom in Raw Materials: Between Profits and Losses, which offers one of the first concrete rebuttals from a major environmental group against the notion that industry actions alone are enough to move the global industrial mining sector towards greater responsibility.
PRESS RELEASE -
Signs the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment at the Our Ocean Conference.
THE NEXT ECONOMY -
It’s a conflict which threatens to change the way we eat, shop and live. But unless you pay attention to the business pages, you may not have heard of the “retail wars.”
For the uninitiated, ‘retail wars’ is the name given to the intensifying conflict between online retailers and their more traditional, physical counterparts over an increasingly crowded retail space.
BEHAVIOR CHANGE -
During this season of giving, many of today’s more discerning consumers won’t be joining the masses scrambling to answer the siren call to stock up on discounted “stuff” — they’ll be remembering the values meant to be at the heart of this season, by taking REI’s advice to #OptOutside to enjoy nature and giving back by cleaning up; and when they do shop, they’re increasingly basing their loyalty and purchasing decisions on companies’ reputations rather than just product features and price.
WASTE NOT -
It was 2014 and social entrepreneur Samir Lakhani was working on sustainable aquaculture projects in the villages of Northern Cambodia. Watching a mother wash and bathe her new baby using laundry powder rather than soap is a vision that has stayed with him to this day.
It was also the inspiration for his next business venture.
“I noticed that nobody seemed in good overall health — whether it was an infection that wouldn’t go away or a child with diarrhea,” he told Sustainable Brands in a recent interview.