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.
IKEA’s test kitchen, SPACE10, has been developing dishes with alternative ingredients such as insects, algae, and lab-grown meat. The chef-in-residence and their team reimagined several of IKEA’s classic menu items into healthier, more sustainable, yet still delicious dishes. They may not be available at IKEA retailers anytime soon, but they may be the fast food of the future!
Fast fashion giant H&M has named the five winners of its latest Global Change Award, who are harnessing the power of technology to rein in the fashion industry’s extensive environmental and social impacts. This year’s winners include dissolvable thread, sustainable algae-based dye and clothes made from mushroom roots.
Yogurt manufacturer Chobani has unveiled the nine food startups participating in its third Chobani Incubator. The Spring 2018 class is comprised of companies disrupting and improving high-potential food categories in the US, from new and innovative snack products to healthier energy drinks and nutritious foods that can help kids learn to love veggies.
With the world population projected to reach 10 billion by 2050, 70 percent more food will be needed, making sustainable food and agricultural solutions an imperative. Urban farming and alternative proteins are emerging as viable and intelligent approaches to meet growing nutritional demands with minimal environmental impacts.
A new online tool developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and social enterprise Searious Business could help stem the massive tide of microplastics entering the world’s oceans each year. The tool, dubbed Plastic Scan, allows businesses to measure their plastic emissions and provides recommendations on how to reduce impact across the textile supply chain.
Guided by its Sharing Beauty with All global sustainability program, beauty giant L’Oréal has revealed plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2019 for all 21 of its US manufacturing and distribution facilities.
"We want to create "radical impact", as we like to call it: create access to better quality coffee than the one sold by the leading multinationals and make sure that the people growing our coffee make a better living by bringing value-adding activities back to their countries. But how do we measure and show what we actually do with Moyee?” said Guido van Staveren van Dijk, CEO of Moyee Coffee, describing one of the key challenges his company is facing.
Imagine a drone, hovering high above your home. A package is released from its clutches and gently drifts to the ground, aided by a parachute. And just like that, the package you ordered only 30 minutes ago is delivered to your yard. The scenario sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but recently, e-commerce giant Amazon was granted a U.S. patent for this innovation.
Cross-Posted from Chemistry, Materials & Packaging. The US’s infrastructure is falling apart beneath our feet. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave our infrastructure a “D-” on its infrastructure report card. There are so many considerations for infrastructure repair, it’s mind-boggling. From aviation to wastewater systems to public parks, it all needs work. There are two common threads throughout: energy and concrete.
The Cradle to Cradle (C2C) Products Innovation Institute has revealed the winners of the latest Cradle to Cradle Product Design Challenge.
We know that carbon emissions, particularly carbon dioxide and methane, are a major contributor to global climate change trends, and that the challenge of mitigating and even reversing this trend is highly complex. We also know that — like so many other sustainability challenges we face — managing carbon is a challenge faced by the natural world and solved through its own adaptive strategies that have evolved over 3.8 billion years. In short: Nature sees carbon as a building block — and we can, too.
My uncle once claimed he could magically tell you the day of the week if you gave him any calendar date (day, month and year). He said he could visually see the answer in his head and swore he didn’t have any quick calculation or trick. My father was skeptical. He bet my uncle $100 that he could develop an algorithm to do the same. The next day, my father produced a page of calculations that, lo and behold, would produce the correct answer. I was in awe; my uncle was not as impressed. But, my dad still won the money.
A year after the launch of its Heathrow 2.0 sustainability leadership strategy, Heathrow Airport is encouraging UK businesses and organizations to apply for the first Sustainable Innovation Prize.
Furthering its mission to close the funding gap and help women launch startups and raise capital, nonprofit Women Who Tech has released the names of the 10 finalists selected for the sixth Women Startup Challenge. The finalists will pitch their ideas in a Shark Tank-style competition to top investors and an audience of tech industry executives at Google’s New York campus in March.
Many aspects of sustainability involve upending our conventional approaches to business — and the way we design, produce, market, distribute and service our offerings. This channel highlights products, services, design approaches and entire business models that are helping organizations of all sizes deliver on their sustainability ambitions and establish a new “business as usual.” It also examines forward-thinking principles, methodologies, processes and tools being leveraged in business model innovation around the globe.
This week, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the Carlsberg Group launched the Carlsberg Young Scientists Community in an effort to address some of the world’s biggest challenges surrounding climate change and water scarcity. The Community offers an opportunity for budding scientists to build on achievements made at the Carlsberg Research Laboratory and develop cutting-edge sustainability projects that set new standards for science-based and partnership-driven sustainability research, creating solutions for a low-carbon, circular future.
Today, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), with the support of Wendy Schmidt, lead philanthropic partner of the foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative, awarded a total of $1 million to five new recyclable and compostable packaging solutions that are helping stop plastics from becoming waste.
The future of food is one in which circularity and sustainability thrive, where waste is redefined as a valuable resource to be used again and again, supply chain collaboration is second nature and environmental and social impacts are minimal. Helping cultivate this future is the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) and the BBC, which are equipping key industry stakeholders with the necessary tools to achieve their sustainability ambitions and drawing attention to the pioneering retailers, farmers and producers driving the change.
The business world is undergoing rapid transformation, as consumers’ — and employees’ — expectations of companies increase, largely in regards to social purpose and environmental performance. It’s no longer enough to deliver high-quality products at low prices with good availability. They need to be delivered in a way that does no harm — either to people or the environment.
Between climate change and a rapidly expanding population, the future of food security is uncertain. Scientists at the John Innes Center, University of Queensland and University of Sydney have been working around the clock to develop a new “speed breeding” technique that could prove promising in helping feed the nine billion people excepted to inhabit this planet by 2050 in the face of unpredictable climatic conditions.