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Innovation & Technology

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

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Investors Gave This Sustainable Food Startup $108M to Do the 'Impossible'

Sustainable food startup Impossible Foods recently raised $108 million in Series D funding, bringing their total funding to date to $183 million. The Redwood City, California-based company is creating meat and dairy alternatives from plant ingredient... View More

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Skeleton Tech's Graphene-Based Ultracapacitors Could Revolutionize Long-Life Storage

Out of 37 nominated startups, Skeleton Technologies won the Gold ECO15 London Award at the Ecosummit 2015 conference. The company manufactures high-performance, graphene-based ultracapacitors — energy storage devices with much higher power and long... View More

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The Making of Fairphone 2 (or How to Design Products to Tell Sustainability Stories)

“I want our new phone to be a storytelling product.” This was the exciting and daunting challenge laid down to us by Fairphone CEO Bas van Abel, just over a year ago, in the first briefing for their new ethical phone handset design. ... View More

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New App Aims to Disrupt Retail by Cutting Out Big Box Middlemen

Flipping the business-to-consumer (B2C) model on its head, San Francisco-based startup WUSIC wants to disrupt the retail industry through a “consumer-to-business” (C2B) model where consumers go straight to manufacturers for the largest savings po... View More

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Loliware’s Edible Drinkware Attracts $600K Deal on ‘Shark Tank’

Frustrated by the amount of disposable packaging discarded at events and the amount of time it takes for disposable cups (including biobased plastics) to degrade, Chelsea Briganti and Leigh Ann Tucker created a “biodegredible” – biodegradable a... View More

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U.S. Renewable Energy Rises to Historic Levels While Coal Use Sags

U.S. reliance on wind, solar and other renewable sources of energy has reached historic levels and is poised to make even greater gains in the near future, according to new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).A Tectonic Shift in Am... View More

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Farm-to-Air Fresh: JetBlue, TERRA Launch Blue Potato Farm at JFK Terminal 5

JetBlue Airways and TERRA® Real Vegetable Chips today revealed the T5 Farm – a blue potato farm and produce garden at Terminal 5 (T5) at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. An experiment in ‘farm-to-air’ innovation, the farm wi... View More

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Shell CEO Calls for Carbon Pricing; Environmentalists Say Devil Is in the Details

Royal Dutch Shell PLC CEO Ben van Beurden promoted a carbon-pricing plan at the Oil & Money conference in London on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reports that the plan will encourage investment in renewables and favor cleaner-burning natural g... View More

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Solar, Wind Now Cheapest Electricity to Generate in Germany and UK

Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, claims a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). This is the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 econom... View More

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Cropdots Cultivating Local Food Movement by Connecting Growers to Eaters

On a blazing hot Saturday in Los Angeles last month, the Venice High School Garden, also known as The Learning Garden, hosted the latest in a years-long string of community events – this time, a “Tomato Late Harvest Summer Tasting,” hosted by l... View More

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Levi's New Wellthread Collection Launches Water<Less Fabric, Holistic Approach to Sustainable Design

Levi Strauss &amp; 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 in... View More

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Kuli Kuli's Moringa Green Energy Shots Create Jobs, Fight Deforestation in Haiti

Energy shots such as 5 Hour Energy have proliferated in recent years as they have taken up an increasingly large portion of the multibillion-dollar energy drink market. The smaller, sugar-free energy shots often position themselves as a healthier alt... View More

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IoT: The Solution to Sustainably Feeding 9 Billion?

A 2014 National Geographic article, “One-Third of Food Is Lost or Wasted,” reported that 3.5 billion acres of land, an area larger than Canada, was plowed in 2007 to grow food, support livestock and dairy production that was never consumed. As fo... View More

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Have an Idea for the Future of Food? Unilever, Cargill, General Mills, and More Want to Hear It

Startups that are innovating around nutritious, sustainable food are invited to pitch for a £3000 cash prize and a three-month mentoring program with the Unilever Foundry. The competition is open to innovators tackling food system challenges such as... View More

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8 Finalists Join First-Ever Biomimicry Accelerator on Mission to Feed 9 Billion

The 2015 Biomimicry Global Design Challenge (BGDC) attracted hundreds of ideas inspired by nature from nearly 2000 designers, architects, biologists, engineers, students, nature-lovers, and food enthusiasts from over 70 countries to rethink our food ... View More

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Redefining the Role of Business to Achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Thanks to the ingenuity of private businesses and the leadership of intergovernmental organizations, humanity has made monumental leaps forward since the dawn of the 21st century.I am not talking about the rise of the smartphone. I am talking about t... View More

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Report: 91% of Top Firms View Climate Shocks as Business Risk

Ninety-one percent of companies in the S&amp;P Global 100 Index see extreme weather and climate change impacts as current or future risks to their business, but many struggle to translate long-term, global climate data into short-term and local risks... View More

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Forbes Names 6 Social Entrepreneurs Finalists in Under 30 $1M Change the World Competition

More than 2,500 young social entrepreneurs applied to the Forbes Under 30 $1M Change the World Competition. Six finalists will compete on the main stage at Forbes’ second annual Under 30 Summit for a portion of the $1 million prize money. ... View More

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Unilever Foundry's Ideas Platform Announces Winners of First 3 Sustainability Challenges

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 Unileve... View More

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New Tool Helps Businesses Act on Sustainable Development Goals

GRI, the UN Global Compact and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have launched a new tool to help companies navigate and contribute to a new set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations... View More

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