The latest products, services, design approaches and business models that are helping organizations of all sizes deliver on their sustainability ambitions and establish a new business as usual
A water- and space-efficient gardening system has been announced as the inaugural winner of the student Living Product Prize, a new initiative of the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. The AquaCity Garden is a modular hydroponic system designed to grow food and plants on indoor walls.
Two products have earned unprecedented recognition from the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program, raising the bar for building materials. This week, the program awarded its first-ever Platinum-level certification and named the first homogenous flooring product to earn Gold-level certification.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) launched the Living Progress Challenge (LPC) last year to inspire entrepreneurs across the globe to create software applications and digital services that improve lives.
Mark Manning, former oil industry insider and director of acclaimed Iraq war documentaries The Road to Fallujah and Caught in the Crossfire, has turned his lens to another battle taking place in the Gulf, this time on the U.S.’ Gulf Coast. The upcoming feature-length documentary, The Rising, details the devastating effects not only of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, but of the company’s cleanup efforts following the spill and the apparent large-scale cover-up of their health impacts on the coastal communities.
Product-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions represented 74 percent of sports retailer Decathlon’s total emissions in 2015. With a new goal to stabilize its emissions by 2019, the company estimates it will need to reduce product-related impacts by 20 percent per year if it is to meet its target. Decathlon says its design teams have taken up the challenge and are progressively integrating environmental criteria into the quality-price combination of all of its products.
The first five years of a child’s life are a critical window for learning and development, but we have yet to master how best to teach and engage children throughout that time. Hoping to advance preschool education, Sesame Workshop, the non-profit educational organization that produces Sesame Street, has partnered with IBM to develop new educational platforms and products using Sesame’s early childhood expertise and IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology.
UPS today announced it has achieved its goal of driving 1 billion miles in its alternative fuel and advanced technology fleet one year earlier than planned, and marked more than 10 years of learning from its “Rolling Laboratory.” UPS’s long-term commitment to sustainability is helping to transform commercial transportation and logistics, spurring growth in the clean fuels market and powering critical engineering advances. The company’s wider sustainability progress is detailed in the 14th annual Sustainability Report, released today.
Roughly a decade ago, Hamdi Ulukaya was just beginning his journey to popularize Greek yogurt in the United States as a healthier alternative to the sugar-loaded, artificial preservatives-filled cups and tubes of yogurt Americans were consuming. After 18 months of studying and recipe-testing, he launched Chobani in 2007. Now, the company is worth somewhere between $3 and 5 billion, and Greek yogurt makes up about half of the American yogurt market.
News Deeply, in partnership with Sustainable Brands, has produced a series of profiles looking at how brands are tackling some of the world's biggest challenges. The goal is to examine trends and gather insights from a new wave of corporate citizenship – in an era when the private sector is increasingly expected to play a positive role in improving our lives and societies. This is the 3rd article in the series.
Sustainability is the new key driver to innovation these days and ICTs play quite a pivotal and influential role in enhancing and boosting productivity of agricultural value chains that are responsible to uplift the process, smallholder farms in particular. E-agriculture has fast gained popularity since the rise of e-commerce, e-fashion, and e-detailing; practically everything has been transformed to apply to the digital world.
Information and communications technology (ICT) is expected to play an influential role in the future of agriculture. News this month provides some insight into just how significant it could be: Bayer and DuPont have joined what Reuters is calling an “ag-tech investment boom,” while the startup creating artificial intelligence-based solutions for farms that supply Walmart and other major retailers has completed a $7 million Series A funding round.
Anellotech, a sustainable technology company focused on producing cost-competitive BTX (benzene, toluene and xylene) – petrochemical-based aromatic hydrocarbons - from non-food biomass, has announced Toyota Tsusho Corporation, a member of the Toyota Group, as a multinational strategic equity investor and corporate partner in the renewable aromatic chemicals supply chain.
The United States, the world’s second-largest emitter of CO2, is faced with the task of converting its energy system from black to green. Offshore wind can help get the job done. Danish energy company DONG Energy believes that the US has the perfect conditions for exploiting the potential of offshore wind. The company, which has built roughly a quarter of the world’s current offshore wind capacity, has acquired the rights to establish wind farms in two areas off the country’s east coast, and expects offshore wind energy to be cheaper than fossil energy within 10 years.
When you set out on your purpose journey, what steps can you take to ensure that your purpose will be genuinely transformational for your business? In the ten years that we’ve been championing purpose and helping organisations to craft purpose-led visions, we’ve learned lessons about how to ensure that purpose sticks. Above all, we’ve seen how vital it is for purpose to be grounded in reality. Right from the start, you must root your purpose in the political, economic, social and technological context in which you operate. We call this the ‘dig’ phase: a period of intensive research and analysis of the current environment and future trends that affect your business.
Not only is chocolate ice cream one of the most popular flavors worldwide, it has now emerged as the most powerful flavor: A new partnership between the world’s third-largest ice cream manufacturer, R&R Ice Cream; resource management company, Veolia; and Iona Capital is turning inedible ice cream waste into biogas for the National Grid, with chocolate producing the most energy of any flavor.
Currently, 663 million people lack access to safe drinking water, and by 2025, half the world’s population could be living in water-stressed areas.
For the eco-conscious American, it may seem counterintuitive to invest in companies notorious for deforestation. Unfortunately, they may be unknowingly supporting such corporations through their retirement funds. “When Americans put their hard-earned money in savings and retirement accounts, they believe they are preparing for a better future. But large asset managers undermine that very future, globally speaking, by putting this money into destructive agribusiness firms, generally through complex investment chains and failures in due diligence,” said Jeff Conant, the senior international forests program manager at Friends of the Earth.
This week, SolarWindow Technologies, Inc. announced an ‘invisible’ system for transporting electricity within the company’s transparent organic coatings, which are applied in thin layers onto glass surfaces. The SolarWindow™ Intra-Connection System moves electricity generated in the coating to ‘invisible wires,’ which in turn transport electricity to the edge of the glass and connect to building electrical systems.
Here are two innovations that give new meaning to the phrase "magic mushrooms": An Italian textile manufacturer has used a skin extracted from giant mushroom caps to create a leather-like material similar to suede; and a Colorado-based startup has found a way to use mycelium molecules to block bitter tastes on a person’s tongue as they eat, meaning they’ll only taste the other flavor profiles of the food.
Today, energy management and automation specialist Schneider Electric launched a collaborative online platform to help commercial and industrial companies find the right tools and financial vehicles to meet their sustainability goals.