Esty Rebrands as Viridis Strategy Group

Sustainability consulting firm Esty Environmental Partners, which counts Coca-Cola, FedEx and Xerox among its clients, re-launched this week as Viridis Strategy Group.

In addition to the name change, the firm now offers a set of packaged services that adds to existing practices for strategy advising, data benchmarking and executive education.

Viridis recently deployed one of these new services, called Breakthrough Acceleration, to assist Procter & Gamble in defining a road map to achieve its renewable energy goals. Viridis engaged experts from its network and ran an on-line innovation tournament followed by a live workshop. In doing so, the firm says it dramatically condensed the time needed to generate energy plans for three P&G manufacturing sites that can be used as models for plants around the world.

Viridis other packaged offerings include Sustainability Goals 2.0 (enterprise goal setting); Sustainability Traction (gaining alignment at the business unit level); and Employee Engagement (creating sustainability culture).

“In response to the rapidly maturing needs of the sustainability sector, we have expanded our mix of offerings and redesigned how we deliver them,” said George Favaloro, Viridis managing partner, based in Boston. “Our new solutions respond directly to the challenge that the Chief Sustainability Officer faces in ensuring that the sustainability function creates measurable value within the global enterprise.”

Viridis says it will continue to evolve and apply the frameworks-based approach originally presented in the book Green to Gold, written by Dan Esty and Andrew Winston in 2006. Esty was one of three founding partners in the firm. In 2011 he accepted an appointment as head of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) and concluded his involvement with the consulting firm. Andrew Winston, who also wrote Green Recovery, is an active consultant for Viridis.

“Viridis has a singular focus, which is to make sustainability executives more successful in delivering business value,” said Amy Longsworth, Viridis partner in Washington DC. “Sustainability leaders in a global enterprise break new ground every day – that’s the job description. We want to help them execute effectively in what is a very dynamic environment. So we conduct research, track data, run working groups, and continually evolve solutions – often in partnership with our market-leading clients – that enable sustainability to be better managed, measured, and integrated into the business.”

Viridis also announced that it has the financial backing of angel lead investor John McCall MacBain, chairman of European Climate Foundation. The funding will be used for staff and market expansion, as well as continued service solution development.

Bart King is a PR consultant and principal at Cleantech Communications.