CHEMISTRY, MATERIALS & PACKAGING - Businesses and manufacturers will pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging waste, under a major new government strategy unveiled late last month by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
MARKETING AND COMMS - As we wrap up work for the year and prepare for 2019, we reflected back on all that occurred this year within our niche realm of sustainability communications — and when looking back, it was apparent that 2018 was the year of brands taking stands.
WASTE NOT - If you’re visiting a hotel this holiday season for either work or pleasure, take a moment to observe the way food is prepared and served at the buffet or your holiday party dinner. Is it presented in abundance? Are people taking more than they can eat? Is the hotel staff replenishing the buffet even as the party is winding down? How much food is going back to the kitchen? Can you tell if the hotel is donating edible food or composting its scraps?
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION - Continuing this year’s wave of near-constant innovations aimed at responsible management of post-consumer plastics are new advancements from both the private and public sector. BASF making products with chemically recycled plastics BASF announced it has broken new ground in plastic waste recycling with its ChemCycling project. Chemical recycling provides an innovative way to reutilize currently unrecyclable plastic waste, such as mixed or uncleaned plastics. Depending on the region, such waste is usually sent to landfill or burned with energy recovery.
WALKING THE TALK - To bring companies closer to young people and to enable this proximity to drive enhanced brand innovation capacity — in essence, this is the ambition of the Millennials Lab, created in the Rio 2015 edition of Sustainable Brands, and which is now preparing to scale up, reaching other states in Brazil in 2019.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION - What better way to commemorate the season of giving than with gifts that really give more?
COLLABORATION - California is still reeling from the series of devastating wildfires that gutted its landscape — again — in the past few months.
THE NEXT ECONOMY - The fashion industry has kicked December off with a bang, launching a number of game-changing initiatives and partnerships aimed at further improving its image by reducing its impacts.
WASTE NOT - New initiatives from both the private and public sector aim to further chip away at the UK’s food waste issue, as the nation attempts to rebound from being designated Europe’s biggest food waster in 2015. Kellogg's Cornflakes adding sweet touch to Throw Away IPA
COLLABORATION - This is one of a series of interviews by students and alumni from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) with practitioners from the Sustainable Brands community, on a variety of ways organizations can, and are, Redesigning the Good Life.
THE NEXT ECONOMY - As a record number of global investors calls on governments to accelerate action on climate change, a new CDP analysis shows that some of the largest U.S.-based corporations view climate change as an increasing risk to their bottom line and reputation among consumers and investors.
CHEMISTRY, MATERIALS & PACKAGING - Report: Chinese viscose sector’s sustainability roadmap fails to deliver
BUSINESS CASE - Nearly three-quarters of organisations surveyed (72 percent) mention the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their annual corporate or sustainability reports — an increase of 10 percent on last year, according to a new study by PwC. But concrete measures and integration remain elusive for many as organisations struggle to identify actions beyond business-as-usual targets.
SUPPLY CHAIN - Let me tell you a few things about failure — a subject on which I’m something of an expert.
COLLABORATION - A solid argument can be made that corporate America has made significant progress in the sustainability arena.
LEADERSHIP - Following the analysis of over 6,000 studies, the world’s leading climate scientists at the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last month released a Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. The main conclusion from the report was that global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C in just 12 years if current rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue. To halt warming at 1.5°C and thus avoid the most disastrous impacts of climate change, the IPCC states that anthropogenic GHG emissions must reach net zero by 2050. This is a monumental task and one that will require what the IPCC calls “rapid and far-reaching transitions.”
MARKETING AND COMMS - A growing roster of celebrities are no longer satisfied with endorsing corporate products, instead creating (or at least investing in) their own. Think George Clooney, Dr.
FINANCE & INVESTMENT - Today, the Corporate Reporting Dialogue — a coalition of major international corporate reporting standard setters and framework providers — announced a groundbreaking, two-year project focused on driving better alignment in the corporate reporting landscape, to make it easier for companies to prepare effective and coherent disclosures that meet the evolving information needs of capital markets and society.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE - Corporate culture sets the groundwork for how your team interacts with each other and your customers.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION - This is the first in a series of posts by Dr. Gregory Unruh about geomimicry and its implications for sustainability.