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.
Sir Ian Cheshire | Image credit: The TimesFirst, let’s quash the rumours that have been circling ever since Sir Ian Cheshire announced he would step down as group chief executive of Kingfisher, Europe’s largest home improvement retailer.
Daniel Yu, founder of Reliefwatch — which makes software to help medical clinics in the developing world to digitize and manage inventory records for better patient outcomes — has won the Prince of Wales Young Sustainability Entrepreneurs Prize.As part of the prize, Yu has been awarded €50,000 ($56,500) and will be supported with a tailored mentoring program delivered by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Unilever experts over the course of 2015. The six runners up each will receive a cash prize of €10,000 ($11,300) in addition to mentoring and support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finnish dairy producer Valio has become the first company in the world to sell products to consumers in carton packaging made entirely from plant-based materials. Consumers are able to buy these packages at retail shops in Finland beginning this week.
A new report from WorldFish shows that resource-poor Bangladeshis can participate in commercial aquaculture, challenging conventional assumptions that this was not possible. The report also highlights that more of the very poor in Bangladesh are profiting from commercial aquaculture than was previously thought.
Uber seems to be under fire from all directions. The ride-sharing service is being blocked by some cities and entire nations, dealing with accusations of a driver having sexually assaulted a passenger, addressing a story by a reporter who felt threatened when a company executive suggested they try to squash negative coverage, receiving criticisms over surge pricing during the recent incident in Sydney, and being sued for allegedly making false claims about the safety of its service. You’d be right for wondering if Uber might fall even faster than it rose.
On January 20th, one of these companies will be crowned king of entrepreneurship at The Circular Economy Awards. You’ve already met those leading the charge. So, we’re taking a closer look at the eight finalists for the inaugural ‘Circulars,' who are undoubtedly biting their nails as they wait for the announcement of the winners at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
This week at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, Whirlpool is helping attendees imagine the future of a fully connected home ecosystem — from smart products such as the first connected, donation-enabled laundry pair, to a socially networked kitchen environment concept with smarter surfaces.
Toyota has announced it will invite royalty-free use of approximately 5,680 hydrogen fuel cell related patents held globally, including critical technologies developed for the new Toyota Mirai.The list includes around 1,970 patents related to fuel cell stacks, 290 associated with high-pressure hydrogen tanks, 3,350 related to fuel cell system software control and 70 patents related to hydrogen production and supply.