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
German multinational automakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler are seeking larger shares of the U.S. urban mobility market. BMW has entered the car-sharing market with the launch of its ReachNow service in Seattle, Wash., while Daimler is merging its route-planning service with a mobile ticketing company to form a North American unit of its mobility services unit, moovel Group.
The world is picking up on the fight against global warming and more renewable energy capacity is under construction. In this transformation, impressive pieces of cleantech engineering are seeing the light of the day; major wind farms, massive solar panels and intelligent waste-to-energy plants, just to mention a few. The record-size Hornsea Offshore Wind Farm In line with these impressive pieces of engineering is the forthcoming Hornsea Project One Offshore Wind Farm, located 120 kilometres off the coast of the UK, built by the market leader within offshore wind construction, DONG Energy.
There is widespread consensus in the global Sustainable Brands community that purpose is trending in the business world, especially among brands that are looking beyond the next quarter and trying to figure out how to thrive in the middle and long run. Such brands are not only wisely taking actions to future-proof themselves, but are also smartly leveraging a strong zeitgeist of purpose-driven behavior in society in general – that verifiable wave of health-conscious consumers, meaning- and balance-seeking employees, future-focused students and increasingly influential faith-based and spiritual communities.
Cedar Anderson loves bees. So much so he spent 10 years developing a product called Honey Flow that allows beekeepers to easily extract honey with little to no intrusion on the bees (or the beekeeper). In 2015, Anderson raised over $12 million worth of backing (over 17,000% of his goal) on Indiegogo to develop his Flow Hive; by using design to make bees’ lives a little easier, he might just contribute to the preservation of an entire species.
Nature has inspired all kinds of innovation – from Ford looking at geckos’ sticky toe pads to improve adhesives to Airbus building a stronger, lighter-weight galley partition that mimics cell structure and bone growth. Biomimicry is also influencing building design across industrial, commercial and residential projects.
Today, the adidas Group launches its Sustainability Strategy, “Sport needs a space,” as part of its 2015 Sustainability Progress Report. Rooted in the company’s core belief that sport has the power to change lives, the Strategy translates the Group’s sustainability efforts into tangible goals and measurable objectives through 2020.
Building a stronger and more equitable food system requires the fresh thinking, talents, and skills of our youth. We have the potential to feed everyone, including the millions of people globally who are most vulnerable to hunger and its serious consequences. Having worked for one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies for more than a decade, I know that the next generation of farmers, business managers, NGOs, public advocates, and students can together help us reach the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goal aimed at ending hunger (SDG 2).
This week we welcomed the latest in a spate of recent challenges aimed at overhauling our broken food system: In partnership with Campbell Soup Company and General Mills, Net Impact launched the Forward Food Competition, an opportunity for innovative food companies and industry disruptors to pitch their original sustainable food idea to a panel of industry experts. Applicants can submit their ideas through the Net Impact website until May 15, 2016.
Move over Prince Ea, there's a new spoken word artist promoting sustainability. To help reach a wider audience for its newly-released 2015 sustainability report, Heineken recruited Dutch rapper and vocal artist Kevin "Blaxtar" de Randamie to transform the report into his own artistic expression.
When you’re shopping for your next hoodie, this startup is hoping you’ll choose to plant as many as 93 trees: ch8se (choose) is a new experimental fashion brand from Amsterdam that has decided to donate its would-be advertising budget towards planting trees or providing food or water to those in need. “This is an attempt to democratise consumer activism. We believe that conscious consumerism is our most effective tool for making a change and it's currently extremely under-utilized,” ch8se co-founder David Eros told Sustainable Brands in an e-mail.
A consortium of leading financial institutions and investors today announced a new partnership under the Catalytic Finance Initiative (CFI), to direct $8 billion in total commitments toward high-impact sustainability investments.
As the legal briefings pile up over the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), I’m inspired by the growing number of companies and business organizations standing up for the most significant step in U.S. history toward reducing climate pollution. The bar continues to rise for companies that want to lead on sustainability, and it’s great to see companies aligning their corporate sustainability strategy and policy advocacy. Today’s corporate-led amicus briefs in support of the Clean Power Plan and smart climate policy are the latest example.
New companies have the opportunity to manage their business in progressive and innovative ways from the start, but it is not always easy – their hands are full just maintaining viability. The B Team, a group of influential business leaders, believes that the integration social and environmental purpose into a company’s core business model from the very start will allow the company to realize significant benefits for their investors, shareholders and customers.
Telecommunications firm Vodafone and Philips Lighting announced a new partnership earlier this month that will focus on smart street lighting systems.
The trade organization representing investor-owned electric companies, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), has hired a communications consultant who will help utilities rebrand themselves into something more appealing to the public. The changes will include shifts in messaging, such as from “utility-scale solar” to “community solar.” A new communication plan is expected to be presented to the organization’s members within a month.
The landmark international climate change nearly 195-nation agreement that came out of COP21 late last year sent a message to the world that a low-carbon future is imminent. The Paris Agreement, for the first time, brings all nations into a common cause based on their historic, current and future responsibilities. Its main aim is to keep a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The 1.5 degree Celsius limit is a significantly safer defense line against the worst impacts of a changing climate.
It’s a great time to be a salad on a fast food menu. A generation ago, there was no happy medium between lunch hour at a fast food joint or at a sit-down restaurant — and either option was, and still is, calorie-laden. But concerns over the nation’s food supply, growing environmental awareness, and the disturbing obesity rate here in the U.S. has led to the growth of the “fast-casual” food concept, and many chains in this category are more socially conscious than conventional restaurant chains.
Do you ever have that Charlie Brown moment? You know, the moment when you’ve done something again for the umpteenth time, hoping for a different result, but you get what you’ve always gotten? That’s my current relationship with the Eco Mode on my one-year-old, fairly expensive dishwasher. I rinse the dishes (wondering if I’m just making environmental matters worse), pop them in the dishwasher, press the Eco Mode button and hope for the best. And then I sort through the dishes when the cycle is done, pull out the ones that actually appear to be clean and leave about a quarter of them in the machine, to be washed a second time when it’s full (in Regular Wash mode).
When Oren Lyons, traditional faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation, addressed the United Nations in 1977, he highlighted the relationship between people and animals:
British multinational grocer and retailer Tesco sourced 100 percent of its own brand Easter eggs from programs that promote responsible cocoa, and teamed up with LEGO to offer a special limited edition toy created as a healthy alternative present to chocolate eggs.