BEHAVIOR CHANGE -
The U.S. Forest Service is the latest organization to be targeted by environmental groups demanding action related to the California drought. On Tuesday, the Courage Campaign Institute, Story of Stuff Project, and Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service for allowing Nestlé to illegally bottle water from San Bernardino National Forest.
NEW METRICS -
How do you make a problem you can’t see important? This is a big theme across all the breakouts at New Metrics ’15 this week — the importance of finding the accurate and appropriate measurement tools for the challenges that face us.In a session titled “Practical Tools for Evaluating and Reporting Water Use,” the panel discussed the challenge of putting a tangible value to an intangible problem — water management.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE -
Gaming, hotel and resort company Caesars Entertainment Corporation released its sixth annual Corporate Citizenship Report, Inspiring Citizenship, this week. The company achieved most of its 2015 targets early and has established new interim targets for 2020 in accordance with their goals for 2025.Highlights of environmental progress include:
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
Levi Strauss & Co. has led the charge in dramatically reducing the environmental impact of its garments by improving the efficiency of its processes: As the company announced in March, it has saved more than 1 billion liters of water since the inception of its Water<Less™ process in 2011.
BEHAVIOR CHANGE -
Nestlé’s Pure Life® Purified Water recently announced a new campaign dedicated to encouraging children to drink more water. A recent study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that a little more than half of all children and adolescents don’t get enough hydration. Although excessive dehydration — which is rare in the developed world — is associated with serious health problems, even mild dehydration can cause issues including headaches, irritability, poor physical performance and reduced cognitive functioning.1
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
Unilever Foundry’s new idea platform today announced the winners of its first three sustainability challenges. The debut round of idea sourcing saw over 70 community members submit more than 150 ideas across the three categories. A panel of Unilever judges have now selected a grand prize winner for each challenge.
CHEMISTRY, MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
Today, Sealed Air, the packaging solutions company that brought you Bubble Wrap®, released its latest sustainability report. The report outlines new goals for 2020, including reducing operations intensity by 25 percent.
CLEANTECH -
Water and wastewater treatment typically account for 35 percent of a municipality’s energy budget, which would mean big savings for local governments that can make the facilities energy neutral — that is, increase energy production to a level equal to or greater than the amount of energy it consumes.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
In a time when water conservation increasingly is becoming a top-of-mind issue, showers remain a guilty pleasure even for many of the eco-conscious. After toilets and clothes washers, showers are the third-largest water hogs in an average U.S. home — a typical eight-minute shower uses around 20 gallons of water, according to the Alliance for Water Efficiency.
WASTE NOT -
The water, energy, packaging and waste-reduction initiatives have been tallied up, and PepsiCo, Inc. asserts that its environmental sustainability initiatives have saved the company more than $375 million since its goals were established in 2010. The company proudly announced this week that it also delivered double-digit net revenue and operating profit growth during the same time period, demonstrating a solid business case.
MARKETING AND COMMS -
Designer Chris Onesto created California Water Company to highlight the state’s historic drought. The company’s water bottles are only about 6 percent full, to reflect the current capacity of California water reservoirs.“The Golden State is turning a toasty golden brown all thanks to a record drought,” reads the project’s website. “Oddly enough Southern Californians could care less. In response I created the California Water Company, bottled water that moves the drought from a startling thought into a disturbing reality.”
CLEANTECH -
Leading scientists and urban planning experts will gather at BASF’s Creator Space™ Science Symposium on November 10 and 11, 2015, in Shanghai, China to share the latest insights into the area of sustainable urban living. The symposium is part of the worldwide Creator Space™ program for the 150th anniversary year of BASF.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
Last week, Procter & Gamble (P&G) announced two new 2020 goals: delivering 15 billion liters of clean drinking water through its Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program (CSDW) and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from its facilities by 30 percent.
NEW METRICS -
California’s record-low snowpack this year actually may be far more historic than previously thought — at its lowest in more than 500 years, according to a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, The Los Angeles Times reports.To reconstruct centuries-old snow conditions, researchers analyzed data from snowpack measuring stations in the Sierra Nevada, as well as two tree-ring studies. The first study used measurements from 1,500 living and dead blue oak trees to estimate rainfall back to the year 1400. The second included tree-ring data from a different group of trees to model temperatures for the same period.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
Climate change is only one of the issues to which corporate leaders must be attentive. We live in a world that increasingly sees acute water problems — in some areas too little (drought), in others too much (flooding), and elsewhere poor quality (pollution, algal blooms, or saltwater intrusion, among other issues). New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has pointedly stated that governments that are inattentive to water issues “are playing with fire.”Companies must become increasingly adept at not only running their core business well, but also demonstrating judicious water management and stewardship.
CHEMISTRY, MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
Climate impacts already cost billions in economic damage each year. Global drought losses are expected to surpass $8 billion in 2015 alone. A 2010 study by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) predicted that extreme drought will threaten large parts of the U.S., Central and South America, and Southern Europe by the 2030s.
WASTE NOT -
Arizona State University Professor Peter Lammers and researchers at New Mexico State University are developing an energy-positive wastewater treatment method using a special kind of algae, The Guardian reports.The researchers believe that algal systems ultimately could eliminate sewage farms’ electricity bills, which can account for up to 60 percent of operating costs today, or even generate a surplus.
CLEANTECH -
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the total number of people without access to clean drinking water now stands at 663 million; each year, more than 840,000 globally die from water-related diseases. A key challenge in developing effective water filter technologies has been making them cheap and portable for distribution to those who need them.
NEW METRICS -
The Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER) — a technical coalition of leading global beverage companies working to advance environmental sustainability within the beverage sector - has leveraged its expertise to develop a user-friendly tool to help facilities better estimate their “true cost” of water. This interactive tool can help facilities within the beverage industry and beyond better determine direct costs associated with their most water- and resource-intensive processes.
CHEMISTRY, MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
Plastic bottles are some of the worst offenders in packaging waste, but sales of bottled water continue to grow: U.S. bottled water volume apparently rose 7 percent last year.