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Product, Service & Design Innovation

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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E-Commerce Platforms Powering the Local Food Movement

The local food movement has thrived in recent years, bolstered by consumers’ growing concerns over what is in their food and where it came from – and startups are jumping at the opportunities it presents. From California to New York, a host of apps and business models are connecting growers, buyers, sellers and eaters. At the same time, many small farmers are still struggling.

Sustainability: Separating the Talk from the Action

In 2010, I wrote a piece on sustainability. At the time, my point of view was that it’s a challenge too big and too complex for governments alone; particularly with the financial growth of nations such as China, Brazil and India, where consumers were beginning to get a taste of their newly acquired buying power. Back then I thought it would take a change in human behavior to have a real impact on business practices … people seeing the threats to their environment the way they once saw the threat of smoking to their health. So, it’s 2016, where do we stand?

Why Embracing Profitable Good — Not CSR — Will Help You Stay Ahead

For all the talk about the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the truth of the matter is most executives don’t believe it drives direct bottom line business benefit, or that it effectively addresses societal problems. The authors of Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society interviewed 70 CEOs and found that they view CSR as commercially irrelevant, believing it focuses more on boosting employee morale than addressing the way a company engages with society’s concerns.

Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Finalists Revolutionizing Healthcare, Farming, Housing in Developing Areas

The Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Awards, now in its third year, has attracted the highest number of entries to date. The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), which runs the competition with Unilever and Ashoka, says it received over 900 entries from over 99 countries from young entrepreneurs creating a safer, healthier and brighter future.

Timberland Extends Rigorous Environmental Standard Across Entire Product Portfolio

Global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland prides itself on its commitment to innovate and operate in an accountable and responsible manner — in terms of its products, the communities in which it operates, and the outdoors. As part of this commitment, the company today announced the implementation of its rigorous environmental standard — the Timberland Environmental Product Standard (TEPS) — across all of its product categories, beginning with its Spring 2016 collection.

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Food and Drink, Inc: How Big Food Is Aiming to Connect with Conscious Consumers

Food dominates our lives; it influences our health and has becomes a defining theme of 21st-century popular culture. No wonder then that the sustainability issues that influence the things we eat and drink have taken on such importance with the public worldwide.

Is Privatizing National Parks the Solution to Sustaining Them?

2016 is the centennial of the National Park Service (NPS), and in February the agency got a present from the biggest tech company in the world – or, more accurately, the world got a present from Google and the NPS: On February 11th, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell hosted an event at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site to announce a Public-Private Partnership between Google and the NPS.

Trending: America's Pastime, Swedish Ingenuity Spur Proliferation of Recycled Textiles

SustainU, a West Virginia-based leading producer of apparel using fabrics from 100 percent recycled, domestically manufactured materials, this week announced a partnership with Major League Baseball (MLB) to produce licensed apparel for the 2016 season.

BMW, Daimler Expand Car-Sharing Services in the U.S.

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.

7 Trends at the Intersection of Sustainability and Purpose to Watch This Year

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.

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How Design Can Save the World

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.

Trending: Buildings Inspired by Nature Absorb Pollutants, Collect Water, Keep You Cool

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.

adidas Launches Latest Sustainability Report, New Strategy Aimed at Protecting Power of Sport

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.

SDG #2: Young Entrepreneurs Are Key to Feeding the World

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).

Net Impact, Campbell's, General Mills Seeking Next Great Sustainable Food Solution

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.

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Blaxtar Offers 'Frank' Distillation of Heineken's Sustainability Progress in New Video

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.

Apparel Startup Forgoes Ad Budget to Plant Trees, Feed Kids, Provide Water

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.

The B Team Launches ‘Born B’ to Support Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurs

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.

Sweetgreen's Uphill Battle to Transform Fast Food

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.

An Open Letter to Manufacturers

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).

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