The latest developments supporting a shift toward sustainable consumption, as well as specific ways brands are encouraging less wasteful behaviors.
Is your grocery store’s meat aisle becoming obsolete? If it’s started carrying Beyond Burgers and sausages, it might be. That’s not because meat as we know it — the kind made from animals — is disappearing (at least not yet). Rather, the credit (or blame) goes to entrepreneurs such as Beyond Meat’s Ethan Brown, who argues convincingly that “protein aisle” is not only the more accurate way to describe the offerings there, but also the best location for his own Beyond Burger, a “muscle” made from peas that is so succulent and juicy you’d swear it came from a cow.
Coca-Cola Great Britain has launched a new design for the Coca-Cola range, featuring new-look packaging for original Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola zero sugar. The changes unify both varieties with the trademark Coca-Cola red and form part of the company’s commercial strategy to encourage more people to try Coca-Cola zero sugar. Along with the redesign, a £5 million marketing campaign communicates the changes to consumers, featuring 10- and 30-second ads alongside out-of-home advertising. The ad, “One Way or Another,” reminds consumers they can enjoy Coca-Cola, with or without sugar.
In Nestlé Waters North America's second annual survey of 6,142 US consumers and experts on water-related topics, released this week, respondents ranked clean water higher than getting enough sleep (25 percent of consumers and 22 percent of experts) and eating healthy foods (23 percent of consumers and 25 percent of experts) as factors important to living a healthy life.
The co-working startup WeWork made headlines recently with a new policy banning meat from company functions and barring employees from expensing any meat dishes. The move is intended to reduce the company’s environmental impact, with the company predicting a reduction in carbon emissions by 445.1 million pounds and saving over 15 million animals. Miguel McKelvey, WeWork’s co-founder and Chief Culture Officer, speaks of the policy as not just creating an environmental benefit, but also changing the minds of his employees and creating a culture of personal accountability at the company.
Serial entrepreneur David Yeung wants billions of consumers to join him on a quest to transform Asian cuisine into a leaner, healthier, more environmentally friendly version. And his latest venture, Omnipork, may just be the product that brings people along on the journey.
Coca-Cola Great Britain and Coca-Cola European Partners have partnered with Merlin Entertainments to offer 50 percent discounts at some of the UK’s best-known attractions in exchange for empty plastic drink bottles. Specially created reverse vending machines will be on-site at four of Merlin’s leading attractions and will instantly reward those who deposit their used bottles between July 25th and October 19th, 2018.
Last week, over 2,000 representatives from our global community of sustainability practitioners, brand strategists, product and service innovators, thought leaders and other change-makers converged at SB’18 Vancouver to share their latest insights on a multitude of themes pertinent to all of those committed to improving business around the world. Here, we dig into brand and organizational efforts to get consumers to deliver their part of the equation, through responsible consumption. P&G: The road to responsible consumption By Marissa Rosen
Recycle Now, a WRAP campaign that helps people in the UK recycle more things, more often, has launched a new communications toolkit for local authorities and partners, introducing a social norming messaging style designed to motivate citizen behavior change to improve recycling.
Jennifer Motles Svigilsky detests cigarettes. But she recently began focusing on the ambitious vision to help 1.1B smokers quit smoking within a generation. Which is how she found herself in front of a crowded room at SB’18 Vancouver, representing one of the world’s largest cigarette companies.
New research released by environmental charity Hubbub reveals that 44 percent of people in the UK don’t realize that synthetic fibres such as polyester, acrylic or nylon are actually plastic. Despite that synthetic clothing is on the rise – it now accounts for an estimated 60 percent of all clothing produced – many are unaware of what the microfibres they release and the resulting threats to the environment.
Consumers want simple solutions. They need simple messages. And yet when it comes to truly sustainable products and packaging, the reality is quite complex and often requires consumer behaviour change. Leading brands are increasingly investing significant resources to develop and implement innovative solutions that ensure a sustainable lifecycle for products and packaging. The same brands then face a communication challenge: How should they effectively tell their story of progress and innovation in a simple and compelling way that both informs and leads to behaviour change?
The Welsh Government and City to Sea, a group campaigning against single-use plastics, are collaborating on the development of campaigns to encourage refills and change residents’ behavior to make tap water their first choice for hydration. While the campaigns will help people ‘see the value of water,’ the government has also announced an additional £15 million of capital funding to further improve Local Authority recycling collection systems and infrastructure, including for plastics.
An announcement today from Procter & Gamble’s laundry brands, Ariel and Lenor (the European sister brands of Tide and Downy, here in the States), revealed that their ‘Long Live Fashion Formula’ could extend the life of clothes by four times, keeping them looking new for longer. By switching from a powder to liquid or single-unit-dose format such as Ariel pods; adding a Fabric Conditioner, such as Lenor; and washing on a cold and quick cycle, consumers can quadruple the life of their clothes.
One in four children are affected by anxiety disorders, putting our next generation of leaders and innovators at higher risk to perform poorly in school, miss out on important social experiences and engage in substance abuse.
A night of celebration for a friend moving for a new job turns to tragedy in a new virtual reality (VR) experience from Diageo about the dangers of binge drinking. In a follow-up to 2016's "Decisions," which placed viewers in the front seat of a fatal drunk driving crash, "Decisions: Party's Over" immerses consumers in a first-person, interactive story.
Imagine buying a pair of shoes and being able to address the carbon emissions from those shoes’ production and transportation right when you buy them. To date, this hasn’t been possible: We didn’t have blockchain to immutably and transparently track the carbon; point-of-sale integrations were cumbersome, and the carbon market has only worked in tonnes while a pair of shoes is around 12kg of carbon.
Just over a week ahead of the five-year anniversary of the devastating Rana Plaza factory collapse, Better Buying and the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) have announced an 18-month partnership in Bangladesh to support and promote responsible buying practices within garment industry supply chains. The two NGOs will invite Bangladeshi garment factories to anonymously evaluate their buyers using the Better Buying online rating platform, which gives buyers anonymized ratings from suppliers on seven key aspects of purchasing practices:
The world’s first curbside recycling program started where I live. Ontario, Canada’s Blue Box program made its official debut in the City of Kitchener in 1981 and became a blueprint for recycling programs in more than 150 countries around the world. Many Canadians don’t realize recycling “started” here in the Great White North, and unfortunately, many also don’t know what can go in their blue boxes these days.
2018 has already seen a number of environmentally conscious trends — such as a switch to electric vehicles and plant-based diets — make the headlines.
We’re increasingly living in a world of purpose-led brands, as growing numbers of consumers are more interested than ever in the “big world” issues related to the products they buy, and how they use them. And yet, when it comes to the sustainability sector, we still struggle to apply some of the most basic communications principles to the issues we are trying to solve.