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 United Kingdom government has launched a new tool to help businesses and governments understand the environmental impacts of energy and emissions policies.The Global Calculator — produced with input from more than 150 experts worldwide — is a model of the world's energy, land and food systems that allows users to design their own version of the future up to 2050 and see the implications for the climate.Soft launched in 2010, the online tool has previously only been used exclusively by governments such as China and India. China has been using the calculator to support the development of its economic and energy strategy, and to train officials on the energy challenges it faces.
What happens when you send three young fashionistas to a Cambodian sweatshop for a month? Aftenposten, Norway’s biggest newspaper, answered this question with a five-part, online reality TV series.In “Sweatshop: Dead Cheap Fashion,” fashion-conscious Norwegians Anniken Jorgensen, Frida Ottesen and Ludvig Hambro fly to Phnom Penh, where they work with and interview people that work in the type of facility that produces clothes for some of their favorite brands. The three step fully into the life of the average textile worker, sleeping on concrete, living on $3 a day and sewing for eight hours a day.
The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) has partnered with Canvas.net to offer a free, open online course called, Biomimicry: A Sustainable Design Methodology. The course is an introduction to biomimicry, a sustainability framework that studies nature’s best design ideas to help us solve our own design challenges.
If you ask Daniel and Tiffany Andrew — the husband-and-wife team behind Canadian men’s fashion brand Two Birds Apparel — what sustainability means to them, they’d say local, ethical supply chains and environmentally friendly materials, which is exactly what their brand encapsulates.Launched in 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, and now headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Two Birds is fairly new to the stage, but is trying to diverge from the status quo by sourcing, manufacturing and distributing all of their clothing domestically.
San Diego company Net Zero Aqualife says it has beat its crowdfunding deadline and now has the funds to begin production of high-quality organic shrimp at low cost. The farm is expected to produce 100 percent organic, non-GMO, self-sustained shrimp, without emitting any waste or pollution, or consuming any water or energy, through a closed-loop system.The company hopes to provide a sustainable method of producing the popular shellfish domestically; currently, the US imports a whopping 91 percent of its shrimp.
In this new age of mobile phones, many of us suffer from “Shiny Object” syndrome — where we always want the latest and greatest toy Apple, Samsung or one of the other multitude of manufacturers can think up. Most of the more than 1.8 billion mobile phones sold worldwide in 2013 replaced devices that were less than two years old. Nearly a billion of these devices were smartphones.
The World Resources Institute (WRI) has unveiled new guidance for companies to measure emissions from purchased electricity.The first major update to the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard responds to the rapid growth of renewable energy and other major shifts in the electricity market, WRI says. The GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance provides a consistent, transparent way for companies to show how different types of electricity purchases count toward their emissions targets, and will inform corporate decisions on what kind of energy should power their business.
Every day, women in developing countries spend a combined 200 million hours collecting clean water for their families. To raise awareness of this issue as part of the global water crisis and to help provide solutions, Belgian beer maker Stella Artois has launched its first global social impact campaign, “Buy a Lady a Drink.” With the support of Water.org and its co-founders Matt Damon and Gary White, “Buy a Lady a Drink” aims to help put a stop to these water-collecting journeys. The campaign formally launched on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, of which Stella Artois is an annual sponsor.
Dow and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) have designed a new tool to help companies estimate the business value from nature on and adjacent to their sites, as well as the public value from lands on-site, according to a new progress report on Dow and TNC's six-year Collaboration.
Chemical giant BASF has partnered with Save the Children to develop solutions related to improvement of water accessibility and quality in Mumbai, and livelihoods and food security in the Turkana region of Kenya.The two organizations plan to use a co-creation methodology known as “empathic design” for research and development. This technique combines in-depth problem observation with target group interaction to develop better solutions for pressing challenges in India and Kenya.
Recovery specialist Axion Consulting, Johnson Matthey Fuel Cells Limited and Technical Fibre Products (TFP) have developed a new recycling process to recover high-value materials from waste fuel cells.Funded by Innovate UK, the UK government's innovation agency, the Recover project aims to establish the technical and economic feasibility of recovery and reuse of high value materials from fuel cell membrane electrode assemblies and ultimately to establish the potential for a new UK-based global recycling business.
Consumer products, manufacturing and heavy industry sectors are getting the best financial returns on solar power—the most popular renewable power technology for corporates—according to a new report by RE100, an initiative of The Climate Group in partnership with CDP.
On Tuesday, the Biomimicry Institute and the Ray C. Anderson Foundation announced that the latest Biomimicry Global Design Challenge — an annual competition that invites people around the world to address critical sustainability issues using nature as a guide — is now accepting entries for commercially viable, nature-inspired solutions to this year’s theme: food system challenges. The grand prize, to be awarded in 2016, is $100,000.
On Monday, Ford Motor Company and Redress — a sustainable fashion charity organization — announced the winners of The Redress Forum: Ford Design Challenge, in which 10 emerging designers from around the world transformed sustainable seat fabrics from Ford vehicles into couture garments as part of The EcoChic Design Award 2014/15 at Hong Kong Fashion Week.
Sustain:Green has created a new biodegradable MasterCard® rewards card, which provides carbon offsets for everyday purchases — specifically, helping to fund Nike’s Mata no Peito rainforest preservation projects in Brazil.
Chemical giant BASF is on a mission to connect people and ideas in six locations worldwide with the Creator Space™ tour, a yearlong event series aiming to address challenges in the areas of energy, food and water, and urban living. The first stop, in Mumbai, India, will take place from January 16-23 at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), with a focus on water sustainability.
Many companies already use manual systems to collect data on and manage their sustainability programs, but a growing number are using software tools that were professionally-developed for this purpose, according to a new white paper by CSRHub and French software company Tennaxia.
It is not easy being a fast food restaurant chain these days. New fast-casual restaurants such as Panera Bread and Chipotle offer diners more updated and healthful menu options in a setting much more appealing than the dreary and dingy plastic cafeteria environment typical of fast food chains. And as more consumers want to know where their food comes from and what those companies do with those profits, fast food restaurants as they stand are about as unsustainable as they come.
Impact Infrastructure has unveiled AutoCASE, a new cloud-based tool that enables triple-bottom line business case analysis to become an integrated part of a Building Information Modeling (BIM) project design workflow.The analysis tool goes beyond exploring only the engineering aspects of a design to embrace an accounting framework with three parts: social, environmental and financial. This makes triple bottom line business case analysis more affordable, easier to produce and more accessible to infrastructure professionals around the world.
Concept cars are always great fodder for gawking at automobile shows, and in turn they do a fine job of generating buzz and stellar photographs. But at this week's North American International Automobile Show (NAIAS) in Detroit, one concept car suggested a game-changer: Sustainability and affordability can work together and finally offer consumers a compelling gasoline-free driving option.