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
The Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition's (BCFN) Young Earth Solutions! (YES!) program is running its fourth innovation contest to encourage young researchers and university students under the age of 35 to develop innovative solutions to problems within the global food system.Past BCFN YES! finalist ideas include more informative food labels, the incorporation of more plant-based meals into school lunches, apps to help consumers make healthier choices, waste-free technology for fruit and vegetable processing and more.
Driven by consumer demands, and greater concern for resource scarcity and productivity, more companies are tracking and reporting performance in an effort to meet corporate sustainability goals. But once the low-hanging fruit is picked, further improvements can require sophisticated tools, such as emerging big data and geospatial analytics, to help companies make more informed decisions about sustainability goals, according to a new report from Lux Research.
At the World Travel & Tourism Council 2015 Global Summit in Madrid today, Sustainable Travel International (STI) unveiled an industry-wide campaign, entitled “10 Million Better,” to monitor and scale up social and environmental benefits from travel and tourism.The 10-year initiative convenes leading tourism corporations, organizations and destinations around the globe with the goal of tracking and demonstrating improvements in the lives of at least 10 million people and their families by 2025. Improvements to be monitored include growth of income and opportunity, and better protection of destinations’ natural, cultural and heritage sites.
On April 24, the first annual Risk and Value Creation Forum, a finance innovation conference focused on evolving the concept of risk (as a key constraint in achieving sustainability goals), new risk frameworks, and biomimetic technology innovation as a sustainable value creation opportunity (at the startup and public company level), will take place in Mountain View, CA.
Though the cost of solar panels continues to decline, many homeowners still can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for a solar energy installation. Short of installing their own system, there aren’t a lot of options for sourcing residential solar energy especially for renters or those with poorly positioned roofs.Launched Monday, Yeloha, a peer-to-peer solar sharing network, hopes to change all that by making solar available to all homes through the purchase of a solar subscription, which is said to be cheaper than the cost of electricity from their utility.
Today, Sony Pictures Entertainment — which itself has led the charge in sustainable filmmaking with its carbon-neutral production of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) — is celebrating a decade of environmental innovation at its Screen Gems film label. The media giant says Screen Gems’ dedication to and implementation of creative, low-impact moviemaking practices has helped drive industry awareness of environmentally friendly technologies and new approaches to production.
Today, Wells Fargo announced its selection of four clean technology startups for the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), a five-year, $10 million program to foster leading-edge environmental technologies. The program is funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation and co-administered by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This marks the first philanthropy program of its kind within the financial services industry.
Looking for a clean place to swim in London? City dwellers will have a freshwater, natural pool at their disposal in King’s Cross beginning in May. Designed by Rotterdam Studio, Ooze architects and artist Marietica Potrč, the chemical-free outdoor pool is the first of its kind in the UK. The King’s Cross Swimming Pool is a manmade, freshwater pond kept clean and filtered through natural processes. At forty meters long, the pool will accommodate up to 100 swimmers at a time within the new Lewis Cubitt Park.
The latest innovation in the fight against plastic water bottles comes in the form of an edible and flexible water “blob” container called the Ooho!, made by startup Skipping Rocks Lab. To use it, consumers can bite the blob and suck out the contents or eat the entire thing, casing and all.Asking people to carry around their own water bottles and containers has had limited success; unfortunately, it is often just more convenient to buy and drink from a disposable container. The Ooho! claims to offer that convenience without introducing more plastic into the waste stream.
Clean energy is “key” to climate action, according to a senior advisor to President Obama in a blog post published last week, which discussed the United States’ official greenhouse gas emissions-cutting target to the United Nations. The proposal formalizes a U.S. commitment to reducing emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
New York City-based tech startup Project Exergy is one step closer to developing a technology capable of heating smart homes using computers, following a successful crowdfunding campaign.The concept involves transferring the computation done in data centers into millions of home and office computers and putting the normally wasted heat to use through a liquid cooling system that can efficiently extract and thermally store the high-temperature heat.
As sustainability management becomes ever more closely linked to company resilience and reputation, CSR goals are coming into sharper focus for companies that are truly on the journey. But there are many choices to be made among a broad range of sustainability initiatives that could achieve those goals; just as in the world of product development, where there is an unlimited number of possible new product ideas and features, there will always be too many ideas and not enough resources. So how do you prioritize your company’s sustainability initiatives for maximum value and impact?
According to the World Economic Forum, water scarcity ranks first among all long-term risks worldwide. Australia, Brazil and the United States are only a few examples of where droughts have affected everything from agriculture, hydropower and those everyday tasks most of take for granted. California’s annual snowpack this year was only 12 percent of normal — which has had a huge impact on the state’s skiing industry as well as its growing dairy sector. Finding solutions has proven to be a political minefield.
After years of searching for a solution to the worldwide problem of textile waste, pioneering textile upcycler Worn Again has joined forces with fashion retailer H&M and luxury, sport & lifestyle group Kering to bring to market a revolutionary innovation in clothing production and recycling.
Cross-Posted from Marketing & Communications. Everyday conversations about food are shifting from questions about whether to eat gluten or saturated fat to a new era in consumer food choices: sustainable diets. Some of this focus stems from recent findings reported by the federal government linking dietary choices to environmental impact and is bolstered by consumers’ awareness that their choices affect both their health and the environment. Consumers have long been seeking healthy food options and now the majority of consumers state that they intend to make changes in their diet for environmental reasons.
IKEA has announced that its line of flat-pack refugee shelters are going into production after being tested among refugee families in Ethiopia, Iraq and Lebanon.The “Better Shelter” is a temporary shelter with an expected lifespan of three years — far longer than conventional refugee shelters, which last about six months. Delivered in flat packs, it is designed with special attention to transport volume, weight, price, safety, health and comfort, and it can be assembled on site without additional tools and equipment. It also has a solar panel and lamp to provide light during the dark hours.
A lightbulb with lower energy emissions, longer lifetime and lower manufacturing costs, and made with graphene — said to be the first commercially viable consumer product using the super-strong form of carbon — is poised to hit the market this year, thanks to a University of Manchester research and innovation partnership.The bulb’s developers — a Canadian-financed company called Graphene Lighting — expect the dimmable bulb to use 10 percent less energy than conventional bulbs, last longer and be priced lower than some LEDs, at roughly $20 each. It was designed at the University of Manchester, where the revolutionary material was discovered. The University’s National Graphene Institute was opened this month.
If you doubt the mainstreaming of mindfulness, look no further than a key session at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, called Mindfulness Meditation.It’s a new era, where technology can directly measure and influence our moods, attitudes and behavior, which when woven together into a societal tapestry, could be a Trojan Horse for a more sustainable ethos.
A new report from the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing finds that investing in sustainability has usually met and often exceeded the performance of comparable traditional investments, both on an absolute and risk-adjusted basis, across asset classes and over time. “We believe sustainable investing will be a key in the mobilization of private capital towards addressing global challenges, but the growth and development of this space remains hampered by a lingering perception that sustainable investments require a financial trade-off. Our review addresses the investment performance concern head-on, and the findings are very positive,” said Audrey Choi, CEO of the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing.
The market for thermal coal is in structural decline in the United States, according to a new report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.The US Coal Crash – Evidence for Structural Change (PDF) finds that, in the last few years, US coal markets have been pounded by a combination of cheaper renewables, energy efficiency measures, increasing construction costs and a rash of legal challenges, as well as the rise of shale gas.