The latest ways brands are supporting a shift toward sustainable consumption, and best practices for brands aiming to encourage more conscious consumer behavior and lifestyles
While people, organizations and superheroes around the world are preparing to take part in Earth Hour — an hour of darkness to raise awareness of climate change — tomorrow at 8:30pm local time, Durex condoms is taking the opportunity to encourage people to “reconnect” with each other whilst the lights are out. Read More...
At Shelton Group we’ve been polling Americans regularly for nearly a decade to understand their attitudes and behaviors related to energy and the environment so we can best help our clients define and leverage their sustainability stories. Until late last year our studies were consumer-focused, though much of our client work is actually on the business-to-business side. So late last year we fielded our first-ever B2B Pulse study to better understand the role sustainability plays as business decision-makers are making purchasing decisions. Read More...
When wrestling with the attitude-behaviour gap and grappling with the emotional and often-irrational nature of the human animal (aka any of your business's stakeholders), you’ll need all the help you can get. Whether you’re crafting a communications strategy to encourage positive behaviour change or facilitating a process to unleash new ideas and breakthrough innovation on a project, thankfully, digital media is facilitating the rapid sharing and diffusion of smart, practical ways to create change. Read More...
ExxonMobil for the first time ever has agreed to publish a Carbon Asset Risk report on its website describing how it assesses the risk of stranded assets from climate change. The report will provide investors with greater transparency into how ExxonMobil plans for a future where market forces and climate regulation makes at least some portion of its carbon reserves unburnable. Read More...
Not long after Mars jumped on board earlier this month, this week the deforestation-free consumer products bandwagon got even fuller with new commitments from General Mills and Colgate-Palmolive. Read More...
As global meat consumption continues to drive accelerating deforestation, drought and other threats to endangered species, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) launched a new campaign this week urging Americans to “take extinction off your plate.” The campaign says eating less meat is one of the best ways people can reduce their environmental footprint.“Many people don’t realize the devastating toll meat production has on wildlife and the planet,” said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the CBD. “The livestock industry has nearly driven animals like wolves extinct, and it’s responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than cars, trains and airplanes combined.” Read More...
In a bold and understandably unpopular move this week, the City of Paris banned half its motorists from driving their cars and motorcycles on Monday after a series of warm days and cold nights caused the city's worst pollution levels since 2007, BBC News reports.Part of a scheme to reduce the number of vehicles on the road — and the resulting pollution — the ban was originally planned for Monday and Tuesday; only motorists with odd-numbered number plates were allowed to drive on Monday, and only those with even-numbered plates were to be allowed to travel on Tuesday. Read More...
According to global tire manufacturer Michelin, British motorists could be spending over £1B a year and needlessly emitting more than 2B tons of CO2 per year due to under-inflated tires.Michelin’s research suggests that three-quarters of Britain’s 31.5 million cars could have under-inflated tires, leading to unnecessary fuel consumption and excess greenhouse gas emissions.As an averagely under-inflated tire results in roughly 3 percent less fuel efficiency, the company says an average driver could be wasting in the region of £65 a year solely due to the increased rolling resistance. Potentially, more than one billion liters of fuel could also be wasted every year because drivers are not checking tire pressures regularly enough. Read More...
Singapore-based palm oil trader Golden Agri Resources (GAR) announced Friday it will extend its forest conservation policy across all of its third-party suppliers — pledging that all palm oil it produces, sources and trades will now be deforestation-free. GAR’s commitment, combined with the similarly sweeping commitment made by the world’s largest palm oil trader, Wilmar International, in December, means that over half of the world's palm oil is now covered by zero-deforestation pledges. Read More...
Greenpeace launched another massive campaign this week, this time demanding Procter & Gamble end its role in rainforest destruction through its careless sourcing of palm oil. Read More...
Kellogg Company has announced a commitment to work with its global palm oil suppliers to source fully traceable palm oil, “produced in a manner that's environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable.”To do so, Kellogg is working through its supply chain — from suppliers to processors to growers — to ensure that its palm oil is sourced from plantations that uphold the company's commitment to protect forests and peat lands, as well as human and community rights. Read More...
Greenpeace certainly is on a roll, counting two major successes in as many weeks with commitments from fashion brand Burberry and retailer Primark to eliminate toxic chemicals from all of their products and production processes by 2020. Read More...
Last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the launch of the WaterSense H2Otel Challenge to encourage hotels to use best management practices that will save water and money, while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change. Read More...
Subway announced late last week that it is removing a curious ingredient from its bread — a compound known as azodicarbonamide (or E927), whose other common uses include increasing the elasticity of items such as shoe soles and yoga mats, according to CNN. Though Subway insists the compound is safe and it is commonly added to all types of breads, the company’s decision to remove it comes after pressure from blogger Vani Hari, otherwise known as “Food Babe,” who started a petition to have Subway eliminate the chemical. Read More...
On Feb. 5, drugstore chain CVS Caremark announced that it will stop selling tobacco products.It’s a big deal. Here’s why.It signals a step towards more businesses saying, “It’s wrong. So we’re stopping.” Even when the financials — what the sustainability world calls “the business case” — don’t support it in the short term.I’d like to suggest that CVS’ announcement moves the ball downfield for more business decisions based on social and environmental impacts. It creates new, safe middle ground to operate more openly from the “morals” argument as a valued partner to the “money” business case argument. Read More...
Experts in public health have struggled with enabling behaviour change for years. The sustainability sector should learn what it can from their experiences. Consumer behaviour change is the challenge of our time. As governments and brands are beginning to realise, upstream improvements are relatively easy to make compared with the herculean task of shifting consumer behaviours downstream. While the sustainability community is just beginning to get to grips with the gravity of this challenge, our colleagues in public health have been wrestling with it for decades. Great progress has been made, but hard lessons have been learned — costly, time-consuming lessons that we can all learn from. Read More...
In a bold yet intuitive move for a pharmacy, CVS Caremark announced Wednesday that it will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products at its more than 7,600 stores across the US by October 1, 2014. It is the first action of its kind by a national pharmacy chain.With more than 480,000 deaths annually, smoking is the leading cause of premature disease and death in the United States, CVS says. While the prevalence of cigarette smoking has decreased from around 42 percent of adults in 1965 to 18 percent today, the rate of reduction in smoking prevalence has stalled in the past decade. Read More...
WWF says it is cautiously welcoming a first attempt at a Sustainable Forest Management Policy (SFMP) by Indonesian pulp and paper giant Asia Pacific Resources International Ltd (APRIL), released Tuesday. WWF notes that a commitment to support forest conservation areas equal in size to its plantations sets a new standard for the pulp and paper industry in Indonesia, but is concerned about certain loopholes in the policy, which Greenpeace says is ‘essentially a license to continue forest clearance.’ Read More...
In the latest in a string of recent efforts to engage children in the joys of healthy eating, First Lady Michelle Obama announced last week that Subway® restaurants has joined the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) and Mrs. Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative in a three-year commitment to promote healthier food choices to kids. As part of its commitment, Subway will launch a series of fun, engaging campaigns aimed at increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in children; set and implement new marketing standards to kids; and strengthen its children’s menu offerings, which the chain says are already nutritious. Read More...
16 of the nation’s leading food and beverage companies sold 6.4 trillion fewer calories in the United States in 2012 than they did in 2007, according to the findings released last week by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The companies, acting together as part of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), pledged to remove 1 trillion calories from the marketplace by 2012, and 1.5 trillion by 2015. The independent evaluation found that the companies have so far exceeded their 2015 pledge by more than 400 percent.The 16 companies committed to the HWCF calorie-reduction pledge are: Read More...