Product, service & business model innovation for regeneration
On Tuesday morning, sustainability expert Andrew Winston challenged
businesses to ask: “Is the world better off because your company is in it?”
Winston and Paul
Polman,
co-authors of the just released book, Net Positive, argue that the role of business is to
improve the wellbeing of people and planet. As emcee of the day’s plenary
program, Winston introduced several examples of organizations innovating for
regeneration, in an attempt to do just that.
Material issues
Marci Zaroff
Marci Zaroff — author, entrepreneur and CEO of ecofashion Corp —
believes the conscientious growing of ubiquitous textiles such as
cotton
could make fashion a powerful vehicle for averting catastrophic climate change.
“Regenerative agriculture is about rebuilding soil health — the greatest
solution to climate change mitigation because soil acts as a carbon sink,” she
said.
Zaroff urged the audience: “Let’s set our own carbon-reduction goals, net-zero
vision and empower those along the supply chains. Build tangible strategies with
timelines and roadmaps. Don’t underestimate the power of textiles to meet your
regeneration goals.”
Amanda Nusz, SVP of Corporate Responsibility and President of
Target’s Target Foundation,
explains how the retailer put goals around regeneration, equity and co-creation
at the heart of its Target Forward
strategy.
“We co-create with our business, our community and our stakeholders; and the
work will be better if we do it together.”
For its part on textiles, Nusz revealed Target is working on a circular solution
for cycling end-of-life fabrics back into raw materials.
Speaking of circular solutions, production of Air Company’s carbon-negative
Air
Vodka
removes rather than emits CO2. As co-founder and CEO Gregory Constantine
explained, for every liter of Air Vodka produced, 1lb of CO2 is removed from the
air (in contrast with conventional vodka production, which emits 15lb of CO2 per
liter).
Innovative engagement
Hershey's 'Her She' campaign
After a break, Jose Gorbea — Global Head of Brands, Agencies and
Sustainability Innovation at HP Graphic
Arts — switched gears to
explain on how the company is driving impacts through personalization of
packaging. He cited a campaign with Kleenex that taught Korean grandmas to
read and write and then publish their poems on Kleenex tissue boxes as a moving
example of a co-created digital campaign.
Santhi Ramesh, CMO International at The Hershey
Company, described a
collaboration with HP Graphic Arts on a campaign in Brazil called “HER
SHE,”
which celebrated unsung women in society, co-created with women influencers to
drive gender equity.
Daryl Fairweather, Chief Economist at Redfin, described how the real
estate site has added climate-risk
data
for prospective home buyers to consider. “For any neighborhood where we operate,
you can go on our website and see what the climate risks are,” she says, with
the risks including flood, heat, drought and fire risks.
Cleaning up our messes
Victor Aguilar, Chief R&D and Innovation Officer; and Virginie Helias,
Chief Sustainability Officer at Procter &
Gamble, discussed the
company’s progress using LCAs to make diapers more efficient and less wasteful —
Pampers are now more absorbent, thereby reducing the number of diapers
needed by 25 percent. P&G is also exploring hybrid diapers with a washable outer
layer.
And Lonely Whale Executive Director Dune Ives brought the day’s keynotes
to a close with insights from one of the nonprofit’s latest collaborations to
help end marine plastic waste — this time with designer Tom Ford, who
created the first luxury
timepiece
made from 100 percent ocean plastic. Together, they created the Tom Ford
Plastic Innovation
Prize
to find a solution to the 180bn thin film polybags used in the fashion industry
each year.
Engaging consumers as suppliers in a circular economy
An afternoon panel explored enlisting the help of consumers to enable a viable
circular economy. APCO Impact Senior Director Jennifer Butte Dahl
offered an eye-opening statistic through the context of her own child.
“My two-year-old is in Generation Alpha and that’s the (next) largest age
cohort,” she said. “There will be two billion of them by 2025.”
While the number is staggering, what’s more is the potential and influence that
the current and next generation will have in terms of buying power and what they
want out of their brands. Chief among them? Business behaviors that equate to
circularity.
“Unless your production is truly net-positive today, the most sustainable
product your brand has is the one that’s already produced,” said Recurate
co-founder and COO Wilson Griffin, whose platform helps apparel brands own
the resale process. This more formal secondhand arm of the apparel industry is
perhaps its fastest-growing sector.
Consumers young and mid-age expect brands to engage in these types of practices
as a starting point and that demand is only growing.
BBMG founding partner Raphael Bemporad shared highlights of a survey,
conducted in partnership with GlobeScan, revealing that among 30,000 people
polled in 30
countries,
73 percent agreed that we need to consume less, those identifying as “Gen Z”
feel largely guilty for their general consumption, and those under 30 want to
change their habits “by a great deal.”
Delterra President & CEO Shannon Bouton brought in a global perspective
through the work the nonprofit is doing as an independent spinoff of consulting
giant McKinsey & Co. In countries such as Argentina and Indonesia,
Delterra is giving citizens the tools to separate garbage into potential
recyclable categories, empowering people on the ground to make planet-positive
decisions. It draws similarities to the consumer mindset that prompted creation
of The North Face’s
Renewed
refurbished apparel platform, which BBMG helped devise; and Recurate’s resale
partnership
with Kelly Slater’s apparel brand, Outerknown.
Each speaker brought not only their own perspective on circularity’s impact and
potential, but how to engage consumers in a relevant way. With leaders in the
room from various industries including apparel, credit cards and consumer
packaged goods, the conversation seemed especially timely as brands examine how
to balance the need to keep selling
goods
with the need to reduce their overall impact.
“The way we did things in 2020 (and prior) no longer cuts it,” Butte Dahl said.
How Nestlé is pursuing ‘Good food, Good life’ through its brands
L-R: Royal Dairy's Austin Allred, Nestlé's Emily Johannes and Emma Cofer, and Simon Mainwaring (moderator)
In this interactive session, Nestlé and some of its
partners shared their approach to crafting brands for purpose and the
opportunities for brands to be a force for regeneration.
Nestlé has committed to fostering regenerative food systems at scale. But
there’s more work to be done.
“We want to communicate that we’re on a journey,” said Emma Cofer, head of
Global Corporate Marketing Initiatives at Nestlé. “We’re not sitting on our
laurels; we don’t want to say we have all the answers. We want to talk about the
direction of travel.”
Nestlé endeavors to set a standard for the industry through meaningful leverage
of the brands under its banner.
Nestlé doesn’t have a poster child brand that carries its ESG
strategy: All brands are
working towards achieving targets and moving forward, each owning its own unique
sustainability strategy to achieve the corporate vision.
Cofer exhibited Nespresso as an example of
how Nestlé brands push sustainability, from engaging
farmers
with education and fair wages to recycling initiatives for Nespresso pods.
Nespresso’s efforts highlight the impacts possible when product quality and
sustainability are intertwined into one cohesive whole.
“We see ourselves as a convener of partners and leaders, and we want to do so
with humility and a desire to bring everybody to the table to find good
solutions,” Cofer said.
Nestlé is the number one buyer of dairy in the world; dairy represents 16
percent of the company’s US carbon footprint. The
Carnation brand worked with dairy
alliances to drive sustainability on the ground, leading to a groundbreaking,
carbon-neutral partnership with a California
dairy
supplying Carnation milk.
While this particular farm was a success, Nestlé recognizes each farm is
different, requiring different solutions and metrics to measure success.
Nestlé’s malleable approach to regeneration at scale empowered Royal
Dairy to implement powerful regenerative
solutions.
Royal Dairy has gone beyond carbon neutral: It’s drawing down carbon and storing
it where it belongs: The soil. The cascading effects do more than paint a pretty
picture in ESG reports, but seriously drive productivity on the farm.
Royal Dairy’s ingenious worm bed wastewater
filter
eliminates 40,000 tons of CO2e annually. Other regenerative practices including
no
till
and methane reductions have further reduced emissions while boosting
productivity. Thanks to partners such as Nestlé, Royal Dairy is converting waste
into value-added resources that add revenue to its operation while creating
regenerative food systems.
And Nestlé’s culture of cross-pollination ensures lessons learned at the lowest
level aren’t lost to the whole.
“If one brand is doing something amazing there’s incredible cross pollination
and sharing of practices,” Cofer said. “If one part of Nestlé figures something
out, it scales really, really quickly.”
Nestlé will help provide resources and promote policy to help suppliers such as
Royal Dairy access regenerative resources to create net-positive impacts and
help foster “Generation reGeneration.”
Versatile new materials and material conversions revolutionizing a variety of industries
Image credit: The Hurd Co.
The material preservation and conversion conversation is typically largely
limited to plastic and its related products — but what about other, more natural
materials and those byproducts?
A Wednesday afternoon panel discussed that very issue at length, with four
leaders changing the game in regenerative uses of natural waste. It was a
largely forward-looking panel, but one that drew on past successes and
challenges to illustrate future potential.
“Waste is only waste if we waste it,” said moderator Sam Ruben, Chief
Sustainability Officer and co-founder of Mighty
Buildings
— which is pioneering low-carbon, 3D-printed, sustainable construction.
Beyond all of the stark climate and planet warnings heard throughout the
conference, this particular panel offered a potentially rosier look at how
byproducts of plants and more can lead to renewable sources of building, apparel
and print materials.
One of the key themes was that mass-market opportunities to produce and
distribute these renewable products have two-fold benefits: They save waste that
may have entered a landfill or contributed to carbon buildup, and they keep new
products from entering circulation.
“We’ve (traditionally) cut down trees because it’s easy and that’s the way we’ve
been doing it,” said co-founder & CEO of ECOR Global, Jay Potter,
speaking of commerce as a whole. His company is at the forefront of a range of
positive-use cases, including using an annual grass from Amsterdam’s
Schiphol Airport grounds as a building material sold back to the hub as it
builds a new terminal.
Co-founder & CEO of The Hurd Co, Taylor
Heisley-Cook, spoke from the apparel side — her company makes fabric from
agricultural waste.
“The apparel industry is unique in that we’re constantly buying new things and
the rate at which we throw away those things is pretty nauseating,” she said.
Echoing other panels this week at SB’21, she noted that buying used or
secondhand is likely the best way to reduce apparel’s impact, but in some cases
that’s not realistic, so using minimally impactful materials for production is a
next-best practice.
Kamp Solutions founder/curator Jurriaan Kamp highlighted how Stone
Paper, on which his magazine and the
SB’21 program was printed, could lead a big shift in the general impact that
paper production has on natural resources.
Get the latest insights, trends, and innovations to help position yourself at the forefront of sustainable business leadership—delivered straight to your inbox.
Christian is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and outdoor junkie obsessed with the intersectionality between people and planet. He partners with brands and organizations with social and environmental impact at their core, assisting them in telling stories that change the world.
Geoff is a freelance journalist and copywriter focused on making the world a better place through compelling copy. He covers everything from apparel to travel while helping brands worldwide craft their messaging. In addition to Sustainable Brands, he's currently a contributor at Penta, AskMen.com, Field Mag and many others. You can check out more of his work at geoffnudelman.com.
Published Oct 25, 2021 11am EDT / 8am PDT / 4pm BST / 5pm CEST