By Shane Price, Forbes Councils Member via Forbes • Reposted August 19, 2023
So much of business goes on behind the scenes. A million and one factors go into building a company, selling a product and marketing a brand. But increasingly, there’s one issue that’s been at the crux of consumer behavior: Not how good the product or service is but how good it is for the planet.
Sustainability is more than just a buzzword, it’s the backbone of decision making for many consumers, particularly the up-and-coming generation. Comprising roughly a quarter of the world’s population, Gen-Z are expected to account for 40% of U.S. consumers once they come of age. Their motivations are drastically different from previous generations—they’re less brand loyal, they’re the first digitally-immersed cohort in history and they currently command a whopping $360 billion in purchasing power.
Beyond those dramatic differentiations, they’re also the driving force behind a tectonic shift in consumer priorities. Approximately three-quarters of them make their buying decisions based on sustainability, not brand name.
Let that sink in. No matter how good your product or reputation is, a huge subset of consumers will put that on the backburner if your company isn’t doing its part to lessen its environmental impact. From reducing your carbon footprint to implementing sustainable packaging to CSR strategies that contribute to global change, there are a lot of ways companies across all industries and verticals can make a difference. So, why aren’t more doing it?
Going green hasn’t always been a big part of the national identity, let alone consumer drive. In the 1960s, only 7% of all waste in the United States was recycled or diverted from landfills. Today, that number is closer to 35%, a 5x increase. That seems like great news until you look at that figure alongside the amount of waste produced. In the 1960s, the U.S. generated approximately 88 million tons of garbage. Today, that amount has more than tripled to 292 million tons.
More sustainable solutions are critical to the health of the planet. Gen-Z’s focus on environmentalism is a welcome change from the previous “waste not, want everything”ethos. But sustainability solutions are also critical to the health of your business. According to a joint study from McKinsey and NielsenIQ, products making environmental-, social- and corporate-governance-related claims averaged 28% cumulative growth over a five-year period, versus 20% for products that made no such claims.
The need is evident, but action isn’t universal. Although 90% of business leaders think sustainability is important, only 60% of companies have a sustainability strategy. For some, defining and measuring sustainability is a challenge. Others may be duped by an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. But for many, fitting eco-friendly practices into their business case is simply too daunting a prospect and the benefits too far a reach. Being sustainable does often come with a significant cost, whether in materials, packaging or practices, but the long-range benefits are clear.
The McKinsey NielsenIQ study found that 60% of respondents of any age would pay more for a product with sustainable packaging. And they’ll keep coming back for it. A recent report found that 77% of consumer products and retail organizations saw that sustainability leads to a significant uptick in customer loyalty.
What’s more, sustainability can actually help make your business run better—companies with strong sustainability programs have higher employee morale (55% higher in companies with strong sustainability programs) and increased employee loyalty (38% higher). Increased motivation and morale, in turn, can help reduce absenteeism and boost productivity.
To recap: Sustainability can attract new customers, boost your bottom line, create a loyal customer base, foster a better employee culture and, last but certainly not least, help the planet thrive.
If you’re at the helm of a business and haven’t implemented sustainability into your organization, the time is now. Here are a few ways you can get started:
• Find your champions: In your business, who cares deeply about sustainability in their own lives? Who can help you lead the charge? Sharing the buy-in can help shepherd initiatives from the idea stage through the implementation process.
• Pick one big goal: Although there are many ways to become sustainable, focusing on one big, bold goal can help define your efforts and keep you from getting overwhelmed in the process.
• Be transparent: There will be challenges along the way, but sharing successes, failures, roadblocks and big wins internally and externally is a great way to be both accountable and authentic (two of Gen-Z’s favorite things).
• Partner up: You don’t have to do this alone. No matter your industry, chances are someone has a service, product or approach that can help you start and sustain these practices.
• Brag for the brand: Adopting sustainable solutions is a huge positive step, and people deserve to know. Make your team and customers a part of your success by celebrating your wins.
Being sustainable isn’t always easy, but it is worth it. We now know that without a healthy ecology, we will not have a healthy economy. By marrying the two, you can make sure your business doesn’t get left behind.
By Robert Brown from Global Trade Daily • Reposted: August 18, 2023
Franchise owners can make a significant impact on the world. Their collective teams and resources kickstart movements to help people and the environment, depending on which industry the owner enters.
These are some of the best franchise concepts because they’re socially responsible, impactful and profitable.
Sustainable Seafood Companies
Many consumers assume seafood is a better industry for future franchise owners because it doesn’t use the same business processes as beef farms. Although sustainable fishing supplies are readily available, corporations sometimes rely on methods like trawling to keep up with high demand.
Trawling drags large nets across the ocean floor. They pull up thriving coral communities and plant life without guaranteeing a full catch of the intended fish species. Trawlers also create significant amounts of carbon dioxide, contributing to the issue of global warming.
Entrepreneurs can mitigate this issue by opening sustainable seafood companies, like a franchise with Shuckin’ Shack. The brand works with a sustainable seafood supplier, recycles its oyster shells and has multiple approvals from ocean-focused environmental groups like the Plastic Ocean Project. By working with a brand such as Shuckin Shack, the franchise owner’s corresponding eco-friendly business models would rely on similar production methods to avoid harming endangered plant and marine animal species.
Plant-Based Meat Brands
Cultures transform meats with widespread arrays of recipes, but it’s not the best ingredient for the environment. Livestock industries contribute 12–18% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Becoming part of a franchise that tries to reduce that statistic is a significant way to create positive change for the planet.
Home Care Businesses
While mainstream companies focus on catering to younger generations, entrepreneurs can enter the socially responsible home care industry. The demand for in-home assistance is projected to rise by 29% through 2024, leading to a higher demand for more home care service providers throughout the U.S.
There are numerous reasons why people prefer to age at home. They may not be able to afford an assisted living facility. Some people live in rural areas that don’t have those facilities or have health conditions that require specialized care.
It’s especially beneficial if the prices for those home care services match the economic abilities of older adults in the surrounding area. When patients and their loved ones don’t have to go into additional medical debt to access health care, franchise services become humanitarian efforts.
Junk Removal Trucks
Municipal solid waste is a challenge wherever people live. Based on the most updated research, it contributes an average of 35 million tons of garbage to landfills, but it doesn’t all belong there. People often throw out reusable or recyclable goods, not realizing those options are available or have them nearby.
Junk removal franchises are a socially responsible way to fight this ongoing issue. Gone for Good is one brand to consider that donates whatever goods it can while recycling leftover materials from client pickup sites. It’s a convenience consumers appreciate because it makes their lives easier while keeping landfill waste from polluting the environment.
Learning Center Brands
Daycares help parents return to work, but only if they can afford it. The average parent pays between $5,357–17,171 annually for childcare. It’s a significant financial burden, but learning center franchises can solve this systemic challenge.
Learning centers provide daycare for young kids while combining their daytime activities with learning opportunities. Each parent’s monthly payment becomes an investment in their child’s academic success. Kids can learn custom curriculum lessons that help them later in life and prepare them for grade school.
The key is matching the daily, weekly and monthly care costs with the economic abilities of families in the surrounding area. Discounts also make learning centers more affordable by merging socially responsible business models with what people can comfortably manage.
Solar Panel Franchise
Social and environmental responsibility merge with solar panel installation franchises. They allow homeowners to reduce their monthly utility bills by harvesting solar energy from their rooftops. Saving money is why 92% of homeowners who installed solar panels went through with the purchase or seriously considered it.
Using less electricity from power plants also helps the environment. The plants don’t have to produce as much electricity for surrounding areas, leading to fewer carbon emissions per plant.
Entrepreneurs with green values can open a business with franchise brands like Solar Grids. The company provides the training and management resources a new business owner needs to launch a successful enterprise. Solar Grids also assists with training installation specialists so every newly installed panel works at peak efficiency.
Green Landscaping Companies
Landscaping is a foundational part of many neighborhoods, but it’s not always helpful for the planet. Sprinklers use excessive water to keep plants alive, while chemical-based products kill insects and leak into surrounding habitats.
Nearby clients would ensure the environment benefits from organic fertilizers, chemical-free pesticides and recommended plant choices to reduce water usage. Expert team members could also provide landscape design appointments to pitch ideas like hardscaping. Utilizing rock formations, fire pits and patios would make any yard better for the environment while making the homeowner’s yard-care routine more manageable.
Urgent Care Clinics
Prioritizing the health of a community through a franchise is one of the most socially responsible and impactful business models. Research shows over 100 rural hospitals shut down between 2013 and 2020, forcing people to travel an average of 20 miles farther for essential services.
Urgent care franchise locations can assist with this issue. Entrepreneurs often reach out to companies like American Family Care to open clinics in medically underserved areas like rural communities.
The brand helps new owners navigate the legal steps of providing new medical services while streamlining the location’s success with tailored marketing and developmental plans. The centers become crucial to the region’s medical infrastructure, guaranteeing long-term success and positive social impact.
Franchise owners can also look into providing services for affordable rates based on the average wage in the surrounding city or zip code. Gallup polling shows 38% of Americans skipped medical care in 2022 due to the rising costs of essential services. Meeting a community’s needs with affordable medical treatments at an urgent care venue would merge humanitarian and franchising opportunities.
Open a Franchise With a Purpose
Humanitarian needs range from a healthy planet that provides a long-term home to affordable medical services. Franchise owners can fill those gaps, depending on the type of franchise they open. Entrepreneurs must consider these impactful business opportunities to start the career they desire while making lasting positive changes in their communities.
Eastman Chemical has more than $1 billion in sales annually from bioplastics made from cellulose acetate. PHOTO: EASTMAN CHEMICAL/REUTERS
Bioplastic production is growing at a record clip amid strong demand from fashion and food-packaging companies, in particular. By Dieter Holger from the Wall Street Journal • Reposted: August 18, 2023
The future is more plastic. Plant-based plastic, that is.
Plant-based plastics, or bioplastics, have accounted for just 1% of the world’s plastic production for well over a decade, according to a review of more than 100 companies by research organization nova-Institute. Bioplastics haven’t taken off largely because they are typically 50% to 80% more expensive than traditional fossil-fuel-based plastics, but their production is now growing 14% a year, putting them on track to reach up to 3% of the plastics market in the next five years.
Bioplastics are expanding faster than recycled plastic in some cases, such as in Asian countries like China and Japan that are mandating more ecologically friendly materials, nova-Institute founder Michael Carus said. Even if global plastic recycling rates someday reach 70% compared with around 9% today, bioplastics alongside materials made from captured carbon dioxide will have a big role to play asthe world transitions away from fossil-fuel-based materials, he said.
“Not one of them can do it alone,” Carus said, referring to the sustainable materials that will drive the green transition. Regional share of biobased polymerproduction, usually for plastics, in 2022Source: nova-InstituteAsiaEuropeNorthAmericaSouthAmerica0%1020304050
Bioplastics’ benefits
Bioplastics are usually derived from plants rich in starch, sugar or pulp, such as corn, wheat, sugar cane, wood and cotton, which makes them costlier than plastics made from fossil fuels because crops need fertilizer and other resources such as water. However, the environmental benefits of plant-based plastics are increasingly appealing to companies promising to use more sustainable materials by the end of the decade.
Plants absorb the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, which cuts the greenhouse-gas emissions from making bioplastics to at least half that of fossil-fuel-based plastics. Bioplastics can also sometimes cause less pollution when they degrade in the environment.
Broadly, there are two types of bioplastics: Materials that have similar performance to plastic, such as pulp-derived cellulose acetate found in eyeglasses and textiles, and bioplastics that are chemically identical to conventional plastics, such as a polyethylene, polyester and nylon. Around half of today’s bioplastics are biodegradable, according to nova-Institute, meaning they break down more naturally and are less harmful to habitats. Still, many of these bioplastics require industrial composting facilities to degrade and aren’t designed to be thrown away in a home garden.
A Lululemon shirt containing plant-based nylon. PHOTO: LULULEMON ATHLETICA INC.
The strongest demand for bioplastics is currently from fashion and food-packaging companies, but interest is also rising from companies in cosmetics, electronics and more durable goods such as tools, Eastman Chemical’s Chief Technology Officer Chris Killian said.
Eastman, formerly a division of Kodak, earns more than $1 billion of its $10 billion or so in yearly sales from bioplastics made from cellulose acetate, a material it has produced for more than 70 years. Cellulose acetate, which Eastman makes from cotton linters and wood pulp, was first used in Kodak film in the company’s early days, but it is now expanding into packaging, textiles and other applications. In 2022, Eastman signed an agreement withWarby Parker for the material to be used in eyewear. Share of produced biobased polymers byproduct type, in 2022Source: nova-InstituteFibersPackagingAutomotiveandtransportBuilding andconstruction0%102030
“It has a great deal of legs,” he said of the cellulose acetate-derived plastics.
Challenges ahead
Plant-based plastics remain a tough sell because fossil-fuel-based plastics are much cheaper, but prices could fall if companies continue to buy more bioplastics and governments encourage their use. This year, the Biden administration called on the federal government to assess the potential for biomaterials, including for plastics, fuels and medicines. And last year, the U.S. Defense Department said it would invest $1.2 billion in biomanufacturing. The European Union is also considering mandating bioplastics under packaging rules that are being discussed.
In the U.S., there is government support at the state and federal level to convert biological raw materials into fuels such as ethanol, but that level of support doesn’t yet exist for plant-based plastics, said Manav Lahoti, chemical giant Dow’s global sustainability director, olefins, aromatics and alternatives.
“The market is ready to take off on the demand side,” he said. “But to make the economics work, there is some regulatory support that is required.”Global biobased polymer production, whichusually is for plasticsSource: nova-Institute2018’19’20’21’220123456million metric tons
Another hurdle to scaling up bioplastics is what happens at their end of life. Only plant-based plastics that are chemically identical to fossil-fuel–based versions can enter the existing and growing recycling infrastructure. The world’s limited amount of feedstock, which often goes to feeding cattle and other livestock, also presents challenges to using more bioplastics.
One answer: turning agricultural waste into recyclable plastics.
This year, Dow struck an agreement with biomass refinery startup New Energy Blue to buy bioethylene made from the stalks and leaves of corn grown in Iowa. Dow will then make conventional and recyclable plastics from the material and sell to companies in transportation, footwear, and packaging.
Dow is already providing bioplastics for Crocs shoes and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s perfume packaging, and sees demand outstripping supply, said Haley Lowry, Dow’s global sustainability director for packaging and specialty plastics.
“We are trying to find more sources,” she said. “The demand from our customers is there; it’s really finding the sources of biofeed that makes sense.”
By Christopher Faires, Postdoctoral Researcher in Supply Chain Management, Iowa State University and Robert Overstreet,Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management, Iowa State University via The Conversation Reposted: August 17, 2023
Back-to-school sales are underway, and people across the country will be shopping online to fill up backpacks, lockers and closets – and they’ll be taking advantage of free returns.
In 2022, retail returns added up to more than US $800 billion in lost sales. The transportation, labor, and logistics involved raised retailers’ costs even higher. Product returns also increase pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste in landfills, where many returned products now end up.
So how can retailers fix this problem and still provide quality customer service?
We conductresearch in reverse logistics, focusing primarily on the intersection of retail returns and customer behavior. Here are some insights that can help reduce the abuse of free returns and lower costs without losing quality.
Where a product is returned makes a difference. Items returned to the store can be restocked an average of 12 to 16 days faster than those that are mailed. Mailed returns also cost companies more: The difference between the most expensive shipped returns and least expensive in-store returns is $5 to $6 per item. That adds up quickly.
Studies show that customers may be willing to change their return behavior – with a little help.
Behavioral nudges are a technique used in decision-making to steer a person toward a specific behavior. Putting candy at eye-level at the grocery store checkout counter to encourage impulse purchases is an example, or making employee participation in a 401(k) savings program the default option. Another type of nudge involves providing more information.
If you’ve ever shopped online and seen statements like “10 out of 10 customers recommend this product” or “Only 2 items left in stock,” you have experienced the use of information to influence your decision. Nudges emphasizing sustainability may also appeal to customers and have a positive impact on return behavior.
Returning items to a store can avoid extra transportation, shipping and packaging, saving money and avoiding waste and emissions. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
In a recent survey, 94% of merchants said customers were concerned about sustainability, according to a report from Happy Returns, a logistics firm that works with retailers.
However, a much lower percentage of customers actually make sustainable return decisions. That suggests that customers do not fully understand the environmental impact of their return choices – and it offers a way for retailers to help.
Our research found that when customers were given information about the environmental impact of the different return options, they were nearly 17 times more likely to choose an in-store return rather than returning an item by mail. Nudges like this offer a simple and inexpensive way for retailers to alter customer behavior in favor of sustainability.
Picking up returns to speed up the process
Some customers request to return an item but then wait weeks before mailing it. It’s known as customer procrastination, and it also has a cost. The longer these products remain unprocessed, the more value they can lose.
High-priced electronics, such as laptops and tablets, have short product life cycles and lose value quickly, sometimes at a rate of 1% per week. Seasonal items, such as back-to-school supplies or winter coats, become more difficult to resell if retailers get them back on shelves after demand has bottomed out. A returned item’s resale value determines its destination: It can end up back on store shelves, sold to liquidators for pennies on the dollar or sent to a landfill.
Transportation is a large expense for retail returns, for both companies and the planet. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
A home pickup service for time-sensitive returns could reduce delays in a way that is also useful to the customer. A small number of pickup vehicles collecting returns from customers could avoid multiple shipments, reducing total miles traveledand cutting vehicle emissions, while also avoiding the need for each return to be individually packaged.
Our research found that a pickup service could help retailers collect returns faster and reduce product value loss, particularly for high-priced products and products that lose value quickly, such as consumer electronics.
How to change policies without losing customers
While several retailers have stopped offering free returns or changed their return policies over the past year, our research suggests that changes affecting all customers might not be the best choice.
Broad policy changes that affect everyone might involve limiting the number of returns per customer, charging a fee for returns or shortening the window for returns. An alternative is a targeted return policy that applies only to people who abuse the system. For example, retailers can restrict free returns for people who repeatedly buy more items than they intend to keep, knowing they can return the rest.
We conducted two studies to explore how customers would view changes to a retailer’s return policies.
In the first study, 460 participants were significantly more likely to speak negatively about the retailer – a fictitious company, in this case – when the retailer’s returns policy change applied to everyone and affected everyone equally.
Our follow-up study asked 100 online customers about their thoughts regarding generalized versus targeted policy changes. When the return policy change targeted customers who abused returns, 44% of the participants expressed positive emotions, and only 13% expressed negative emotions.
Those positive emotions included comments like, “I would feel proud of the company for taking action against people who try to cheat the system.” Such responses indicated that participants understood that cheaters were increasing the price paid by everyone.
But when the return policy change applied to everyone, 64% of the participants expressed negative emotions. Nearly half indicated they would speak negatively about the policy change to family and friends, and 42% said they would shop at another store.
Other ways to help customers make better decisions
Retailers can also change the online shopping experience before the customer makes a purchase to avoid the need for returns.
One way is to obtain detailed customer feedback on returns and use that to provide better product descriptions to customers. Another is to avoid incentivizing the wrong behavior. Well-intentioned free shipping on orders over a set dollar amountcould encourage customers to overpurchase and later return products.
Posting videos of items for sale can help buyers spot problems that photos might hide. Virtual fitting rooms that use an avatar of the customer to try on clothes virtually can help customers choose the right size the first time.
There is no doubt that managing retail returns is a difficult task. To make the process more sustainable, retailers need to help customers make choices that limit the need for a return or that minimize the impact of a return on the environment and, of course, the retailer’s bottom line.
By Jon Chorley, Contributor via FORBES • August 15, 2023
Organizations today understand the need for comprehensive environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) strategies, and many have set aggressive goals for the coming decades. While it’s great to see so many lofty ESG pledges, we are seeing many organizations finding the journey to reduce environmental impact more difficult than expected.
For ESG programs to be successful, there needs to be organization-wide engagement. It can’t just be driven from the top. Creating a sense of responsibility for ESG throughout the business is needed to plan, execute, and track progress effectively. This often requires deep organizational change that can be quite challenging.
With the right education, planning, communication, and technology assistance, engagement flourishes and efficiencies follow. Here are some ways to create more buy-in and a sense of shared responsibility at all levels of the business:
Top executives should create a north star for the rest of the organization to follow. This often starts by clearly articulating the company’s mission and high-level ESG goals, which can then be used to outline priorities for all employees and partners. This guidance and direction must then be operationalized by delegating responsibilities and translating goals into simple, actionable steps for everyone involved.
Proper planning is the connective tissue that enables a company to meet its sustainability goals and drive engagement. These plans start with high-level ESG goals and provide the necessary detail for teams to activate. This will provide the clarity needed for everyone to see the big picture and understand their role within it. Having well thought out and comprehensive plans will also help avoid rash decision making and potential mishaps due to a lack of strong direction.
The supply chain is also an area where lack of planning can lead to significant inefficiency and increased environmental impact. For example, if a company forecasts accurately and plans for spikes in demand, it can work with enough lead time to source from the most sustainable suppliers and use the most efficient forms of transportation. Without strong forecasting and planning, organizations spend more money and create more environmental impact scrambling to get product on air freight.
A powerful example of optimizing transportation and logistics can be found in the multi-national consumer packaged goods company, Unilever. Using intelligent transportation management, Unilever was able to reduce the distance its fleet of trucks drive by 29 million kilometers annually, and reduce carbon emissions by 9 percent.
Operationalize Technology
The right tools and technology play a significant role in executing and tracking sustainability initiatives. Supply chain management solutions and platforms powered by AI and machine learning can be valuable resources in empowering teams of all levels to contribute to ESG initiatives and holding them accountable to the goals. Automating the measurement of ESG initiatives takes tedious work off employees’ to-do lists and ensures accuracy and transparency. For example, a $40 billion insurance company is already tracking and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) Protocol Scope 1 and 2 emissions and estimating and reporting upstream and downstream (GHG Protocol Scope 3) emissions using an integrated suite of applications that helps automate emissions reporting.
These technologies also enable real-time tracking to help guide the company in the right direction with each important decision. This allows organizations to align on financial and operational goals for ESG initiatives, gaining buy-in from leadership, employees, and business partners to work towards a common goal.
While emerging technology is a critical piece of the puzzle, it’s important to remember that the tools and new processes must be operationalized and integrated into the organization’s systems to ensure optimal efficiency. With new tools, business leaders can empower people at multiple levels throughout the supply chain, HR, finance, and customer experience to play an active role in achieving ESG goals.
While the challenge ahead of us may seem daunting, the potential upside of truly embracing ESG as a core tenant of a company’s mission is huge. Research has shown that people are more likely to buy from, work for, and invest in companies that can clearly demonstrate the progress on ESG initiatives. Helping employees to become more engaged in these initiatives can help the planet and the bottom line.
By Yusuf Amdani, Forbes Books Author via Forbes.com • Reposted: August 12, 2023
While 90% of executives state that sustainability is important, not as many are acting on green policies, according to the report “Investing For a Sustainable Future” which appeared in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Only 60% of companies have sustainability strategies in place. Without a green vision at the top, operational levels run the risk of using more resources than needed in everyday practices.
It may be a question of time: the world’s population grew from 2.3 billion in 1937 to 7.8 billion in 2020, per the Green Business Bureau. With more people, the carbon in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million to 415 parts per million during that same timeframe. Globally, organizations are recognizing the need and searching for a solution to become more earth conscious.
Those interested in funding businesses are just as interested in sustainable solutions, with 85% of investors considering environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) factors as they make decisions, according to Gartner research. Among banks, 91% monitor ESG performance of investments. These groups see that consumers are asking for green strategies and that sustainability can lead to long-term profitability and performance.
Setting the tone for both current and future generations begins with effective, ongoing efforts that coincide with the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. These outline actions for all countries—both developed and developing—to carry out in a global partnership. When businesses step up and implement changes, others will take notice and be ready to join in.
Here are some of the proven sustainable practices that can generate business:
1. Opting for Renewable Energy
In developing countries, the infrastructure may not support 24/7 electricity in every town and village. For companies that depend on uninterrupted processes and timely deliveries, putting in a solar-powered system could be the answer. Drawing from the sun’s rays to produce and circulate energy, operations can continue while simultaneously lowering electricity costs. Companies that lean into renewable energy will also benefit from the opportunity to show shareholders and customers that they are actively working to reduce their carbon emissions.
2. Sourcing Recycled Materials
Switching from ready-made supplies to recycled fibers in a textile plant can have a significant impact. Waste is reduced, products are manufactured with repurposed materials, and customers can join the cause by purchasing finished items. Among Gen Z shoppers, the up-and-coming consumer demographic, 73% are willing to pay more for sustainable products, per a report from FirstInsight. Looking for ways to recycle materials within a plant can lower manufacturing expenses and enable companies to prepare for upcoming regulations.
3. Promoting Plants and Nutrients
By 2030, the Amazon rainforest is predicted to be downsized to such an extent that it will not provide enough water to support its plant life, as reported by the Green Business Bureau. While companies can certainly fund reforestation campaigns, they can also start their own—right in their backyard. Industrial parks may have spaces where they can plant new trees and house a nursery. New flowers and trees could be distributed among the community. Organizations can also look for an area to carry out composting efforts like the Bocashi method, which yields organic fertilizers that can be used on plants.
Sustainable practices that deliver results, including reduced costs, greater efficiencies, and higher levels of well-being among workers, will be the drivers of tomorrow’s companies. To be prepared for heightened awareness and regulations surrounding ESG, organizations will do well to start today. Looking at what can be done and taking small steps can lead to long-term results and a lasting presence.
By Kirstie McDermott from Nature World News • Reposted: August 5, 2023
In an inspiring initiative to protect the environment and promote sustainable practices, leading brands have teamed up to make a significant difference in nature protection. This collaborative effort, named Bravo for Oceans, aims to hire local fishermen to clean up local bodies of water from debris and waste, and consumers can actively support this cause simply by making a purchase from one of the participating brands. Through this innovative approach, these brands are demonstrating their commitment to corporate social responsibility and fostering positive change in their communities.
Empowering local fishermen for cleaner waters
As concerns about environmental pollution and its impact on ecosystems continue to rise, businesses are increasingly recognizing their role in making a positive impact on nature protection. In a joint effort, several brands have come together to support local fishermen in their mission to clean up water bodies, such as lakes, rivers and coastal areas, from accumulated debris and waste.
By collaborating with local fishermen, who possess a deep understanding of their surrounding ecosystems, the initiative harnesses their expertise and knowledge to restore the health of these vital water sources. The fishermen are empowered to carry out clean-up activities in a responsible and sustainable manner, ensuring that aquatic life and habitats are protected throughout the process.
Consumer support through responsible purchasing
Consumers now have a unique opportunity to contribute to this meaningful initiative simply by making a purchase from the brands participating in this nature protection project. Each transaction made with these brands will directly support the hiring of local fishermen and enable them to take effective action in cleaning up water bodies, preserving natural beauty and conserving marine life.
By choosing to support these brands, conscious consumers can actively play a role in environmental conservation and invest in a greener future. Each purchase becomes a powerful statement in favor of sustainable practices and the protection of our planet’s invaluable water resources.
Bravodeal.com’s role in the initiative
Among the prominent brands actively participating in this noble initiative is Bravodeal.com. Founded in 2018, Bravodeal.com is a renowned coupon site that specializes in providing discount codes for users looking to save money on online purchases. The platform offers a wide selection of coupon codes, deals and promotions that can be used across major online retailers.
With an extensive network of partner brands, Bravodeal.com is committed to supporting sustainable initiatives and driving positive change. By initiating the idea and partnering up with an organization to carry out the hiring and cleaning, they are leveraging their platform to encourage responsible shopping choices that positively impact the environment.
It’s no secret that the past few years have created seismic changes in the retail industry.
Economic and supply chain issues have made it harder for consumers to shop. In fact, 88% of global consumers experienced availability, pricing and shipping issues. Retailers have responded by adding serious muscle to their e-commerce capabilities and expanding their BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) capabilities.
To boost the productivity of associates and make their jobs easier, retailers have turned to handheld digital devices. This technology changes everything, from how employees conduct inventory and re-stock to having more information available.
Even with this additional technology, the retail industry continues to suffer from a chronic worker shortage. Retailers have far more unfilled job openings than the availability of unemployed workers with retail experience.
Unfortunately, 2.6 million tons of e-commerce returns end up in landfills since it is cheaper to dump returns than process and resell them. In the U.S. in 2020 alone, shipping returns from online orders pumped 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere—equivalent to the emissions generated by powering 2 million homes for a year.
Moreover, the handheld devices retailers rely on are prematurely ending up in landfills, too. According to the Global E-Waste Monitor 2020, the U.S. produced roughly 6.9 million metric tons of e-waste in 2019. A U.K. government report says, “New software updates are often not supported on older hardware, meaning it becomes necessary to replace the hardware despite the physical product still working.”
Our research report found that enterprises are aggressively chasing new upgrades and fresh hardware rather than maintaining, updating, diagnosing and fixing devices they already have. For example, 60% of IT decision makers said their ruggedized devices, tablets, laptops and wearables are being discarded unnecessarily.
How To Get To A More Sustainable Retail Future
Retailers can encourage their IT departments to use an enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution that can extend the lifecycle of handheld devices. So, instead of investing in new hardware prematurely, an investment in an EMM solution will allow the IT department to remotely monitor, diagnose and repair devices to expand their lifecycles.
Modern retailers leverage rugged devices that enable smarter supply chains, logistics, warehousing, distribution and inventory management. But handheld devices are powered by batteries, and batteries can begin to fail after a number of charging and discharging cycles. As a result, IT teams routinely discard entire sets of batteries to avoid the downtime that unexpected battery failures can cause.
Monitoring of battery life needs to be a core component of the e-waste conversation. Retailers need to predict battery failures before they occur and replace only those batteries that are predicted to fail. With an EMM that provides intelligent battery analytics, the lifespan of batteries can be prolonged, keeping them out of landfill sites as well as reducing costs by avoiding unnecessary battery replacement.
A more sustainable approach is vital, especially as retailers augment their capabilities with drones and autonomous vehicles. A reduce-reuse-and-recycle mentality will enable retailers to make better, more sustainable choices that make the most out of every investment.
Retailers have the potential to shrink their overall carbon footprint and provide better real-time data to consumers—but getting the best results will require changes.
Sustainability is what consumers want, and investors are taking note, too. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink put it in a recent letter to CEOs, “Sustainable investments have now reached $4 trillion. Actions and ambitions toward decarbonization have also increased. This is just the beginning—the tectonic shift towards sustainable investing is still accelerating.”
Getting to a more sustainable future means thinking more about the long term. Retailers should whiteboard out their use cases and think about where they can gain efficiency. With the right technology in place, retailers can easily manage their fleet of mobile devices across multiple locations and employees under a single pane of glass.
Retailers need to begin thinking about their businesses as a set of data flows. They need to optimize how they use data all the way from the retail floor back into the extended supply chain, considering how and where data is collected and making sure all those connections are rock-solid.
An estimated 7.6 million young people have taken part in Fridays for Future protests in support of climate action, like this 2019 demonstration in Zürich, Switzerland. But protesting isn’t the only way for people to make their voices heard. Photo: Tom Seger – Upsplash
By Mary Mazzoni from Triple Pundit • Reposted: August 4, 2023
The anti-ESG movement, led primarily by a small set of right-wing politicians and pundits, continues to target the use of environmental, social and governance factors in investing. The pushback against ESG and “woke capitalism” is set to be central in the next U.S. presidential election cycle, with critics ramping up the discourse in advance.
Still, the public appears uninspired by the far-right’s latest bogeyman, with only about 35 percent of U.S. voters viewing “woke ideologies as a ‘major threat’ or a ‘very important’ issue when thinking about their 2024 vote,” according to July polling from Morning Consult.
Those growing tired of the anti-ESG discourse don’t have to resign to simply tuning it out. We spoke with Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a nonprofit foundation that promotes shareholder advocacy, about powerful ways everyday people can voice what they really think about ESG and the shift toward more sustainable and socially responsible ways of doing business.
Take action: Counter anti-ESG narratives by learning and sharing
The much ado about anti-ESG may not have the effect critics intended. While the majority of the public remains ambivalent, anti-ESG criticism has also sparked new conversations where there were none before. “The good news is there are tens of millions of people who’d never heard of ESG who now have heard of it. They’d never heard of sustainable investing — they didn’t know you could invest sustainably,” Behar said. “Now they’re aware their investing has an impact. And actually a lot more people are coming to ESG investing because of it. I think it’s really backfiring.”
Still, anti-ESG narratives can create confusion about what ESG criteria are actually meant to do. Last year, As You Sow launched the AmplifyESG content library to counter the misinformation about ESG online. It’s curated by an editorial review board that includes representatives from business and both U.S. political parties, Behar said.
Hosted on Hootsuite, the library is updated at least a few times a week with articles, quotes, videos and other resources about ESG, which users can easily share across their social media platforms as they choose. Shares from AmplifyESG have reached nearly 3 million people over the past year, and anyone can get involved in driving more evidence-based conversations about ESG in business.
Take action: Leverage your right to vote
No, we don’t mean at the ballot box. Of course that’s important, too, but in this case we’re talking about the proxy voting rights afforded to everyone who owns shares in a publicly-traded company. “If you’re an individual who has bought shares on E-Trade or Schwab or Robinhood or whatever, you have the right to vote — even if you own just one share,” Behar said. “And that vote is very, very important.”
An estimated 25 percent of all shareholders do not exercise their proxy votes, he explained. “If those 25 percent decided to get off the bleachers and get on the playing field, that makes a big difference. That makes the difference between a majority vote or one that’s just under the majority line.”
But exercising the right to vote by proxy is traditionally not a user-friendly process for individual shareholders. “It’s always been difficult,” Behar said. “Generally you get an email that says, ‘Time to vote.’ But when you look at the ballot, there’s 20 or 30 decisions to make. Who’s on the board? How much do the executives get paid? Who’s the auditor? What about all these shareholder resolutions? It’s very complex.”
As You Sow has published annual proxy guidelines for decades, outlining votes they deem to be aligned with ESG principles. Three years ago, it automated the process by embedding its guidelines into Broadridge Financial Solutions’ ProxyEdge platform for institutional investors. The paid service allows institutions like asset managers, endowments and foundations to vote in an ESG-aligned way in only a few clicks. They can also customize their votes from As You Sow’s defaults as they choose.
This year, As You Sow went a step further with a free service for individual investors at AsYouVote.org. “You can now redirect that email so we will automatically fill in the ballot,” Behar said. “It’ll all be filled out in an ESG-aligned way, and you can make adjustments.”
This simple shift allows individual shareholders to move from being overwhelmed by proxy voting emails to automating the process of voting with their values, with the option to customize if they’d like. “I think a lot of people feel guilty. They see all these proxy statements piling up in their inbox and they think, ‘I just can’t deal with it.’ What you’ll get instead is, ‘Thanks for voting.’ You’ll feel great about yourself, and it takes literally two minutes to set up.”
Take action: How mutual fund and 401(k) investors can make their voices heard
Traditionally, people who invest in funds rather than individual stocks have a much harder time making their voices heard come proxy season, but this is beginning to change thanks to new technology.
“If you own shares in a mutual fund, you have the right to vote. Right now, you have abdicated that right to Vanguard or BlackRock or State Street or whoever, and they’re voting on your behalf. They’re probably not voting the way you like,” Behar said. “You might want to vote for a livable planet. You can demand that. You can say, ‘I want that vote,’ and they will give it to you. It’s very new. The technology is just unfolding.”
Technology advancements mean that individual mutual fund investors can vote their own proxies, with the fund manager voting in alignment with the aggregated results at a company’s annual shareholders meeting. This is known as pass-through voting.
In April, As You Sow linked up with the cloud management company Iconik to make this option available to investors in an S&P 500 mutual fund. Hundreds of investors have already taken advantage of it, Behar said, with more funds on the horizon. “We’re now in conversations with every other proxy voting service,” he said. Broadridge Financial Solutions, a major tech provider for institutional investors, is among those working with fund managers to make this option available to their customers. Get in touch with your fund manager to see what options you have.
Similarly, those who invest in 401(k) plans through their employers also have the right to vote by proxy, but they need to reclaim it from the fund managers associated with their plans. “If you’re in a 401(k) plan — where you probably own a target date fund, which is a fund of funds — you’re going to need to go to your plan administrator and say, ‘I want to vote.'”
If employees band together to ask for their vote, the employer can decide to work with the fund manager to make the option available. As You Sow is in talks with employee-organized groups at companies including Google and Microsoft, who want to leverage the voting power associated with their 401(k)s.
The bottom line: You have more power than you think
Counter to the anti-ESG narrative, most people want to see business operate sustainably, with 99 percent of millennial investors, 82 percent of women and 72 percent of people overall saying they would choose to vote their proxies with sustainability in mind, according to polling from As You Sow.
“We know we’ve got this vast majority of folks who actually want to vote to get corporations to provide a livable planet,” Behar said. “It’s a matter now of just getting people to talk about it and say, ‘Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll click that.'”
Where market forces are already driving business closer to ESG principles, everyday people realizing and claiming the power they hold could open the floodgates.
“People abdicate their power. The way people give away their private personal information to Facebook, they abdicate the power of their money to Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock. It’s amazing. People give away all their power and all their information for nothing,” Behar said. “We have a culture where people look at things like climate change and think, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’ No. You have so much power. You just choose not to use it.”
We take a look at the top 10 startups demonstrating dedicated action to mitigate their climate impact, including Aurora Solar, AMP Robotics, and more. By Lucy Buchholz from Sustainability Magazine • Reposted: August 4, 2023
The path to sustainable operations is a tricky one, laden with unexpected pitfalls, significant sacrifices and lacking a unifying expectation of what ‘sustainable’ actually looks like in practice. Yet, getting a grip on emissions, waste and renewable resources among other elements – not to mention all the associated policy and process changes – is of vital importance in the coming years.
Enter the startup world. Often renowned for their ingenuity, scalability and passionate problem-solving, startups are perfectly poised to take on the mantle of sustainable practice and generate innovative solutions. Uninhibited by legacy tech and embedded processes, startups are free to assess sustainability in more efficient, effective ways.
Here, we take a look at the top 10 sustainable startups of 2023 to see which are prioritising the planet over personal gain and devising sustainable solutions.
Headquarters: California, US – CEO: Christie Obiaya – Total funding: US$332.6m
Renewable energy technology company Heliogen is focused on eliminating the need for fossil fuels in heavy industry and powering a sustainable future. The company’s AI-enabled, modular concentrated solar technology aims to cost-effectively deliver near 24/7 carbon-free energy in the form of heat, power or green hydrogen fuel at scale – for the first time in history.
The company’s HelioHeat technology was recognised by TIME on its prestigious Best Inventions of 2020 list and Fast Company honoured Heliogen with a 2020 World Changing Ideas Award.
Headquarters: San Francisco, US –CEO: Stuart Landesberg – Total funding: US$606.5m
Certified B Corp, Grove Collaborative, is a one-stop shop for brands that love the planet. Offering over 200 brands, from cleaning products to wellness items, each item has been carefully selected having undergone thorough evaluation to meet stringent criteria for guaranteed sustainability.
The company also proudly holds the distinction of being the world’s first plastic-neutral retailer. When consumers buy plastic packaging from the business, it takes responsibility by collecting an equivalent amount of nature-bound plastic pollution through our partnership with rePurpose Global.
Headquarters: Paris, France –CEO: Guillaume Fourdinier – Total funding: US$40.6m
In 35 m2, Agricool can produce the same amount of food as 4,000 m2, with no pesticides, no transportation and with 100% renewable energy. To achieve this, the business has created a paradise for fruits and vegetables in recycled shipping containers, to provide the best lighting, temperature, irrigation and air quality. Through these innovative containers, usually seasonal fruit and vegetables can be grown all year round, while water use and carbon emissions are reduced.
Headquarters: London, UK – CEO: Mauro Cozzi – Total funding: US$16.6m
Emitwise takes the creativity out of carbon accountancy by providing an easy-to-use platform that accurately measures, tracks, reports targets and reduces emissions across the supply chain.
The journey to reduce a company’s carbon emissions begins within its owned operations – but extends much further beyond. Emitwise’s platform ensures that clients have access to the same level of detail, accuracy and insights throughout your entire supply chain. In fact, 1 in 4 Emitwise customers have set a net-zero target and 85% of the emissions the business tracks are Scope 3.
Headquarters: New South Wales, Australia – CEO: Guy Hudson – Total funding: US$105m
To help solve the climate crisis, Loam works with 4.5bn years of evolution. As microbes have changed the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, Loam is ensuring they can do it again. By gaining a better understanding of how microbes influence the carbon cycle, Loam is creating new planetary-scale opportunities for carbon sequestration and improving agricultural productivity.
The business delivers high-quality CO2 removal with environmental co-benefits, by providing growers with unique tools and connecting them to business leaders who are driving the global path to net-zero.
Headquarters: Colorado, US – CEO: Dr. Matanya Horowitz – Number of employees: X – Total funding: US$324mn
By applying AI and automation, AMP Robotics is modernising and scaling the world’s recycling infrastructure to increase rates and recover recyclables reclaimed as raw materials for the global supply chain.
AMP’s technology is widely deployed across North America, Asia and Europe to recover various valuable materials from different sources. This includes the retrieval of plastics, paper and metals from municipal waste, precious commodities from electronic scrap, high-value materials from construction and demolition debris and valuable feedstocks from organic materials.
Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts – CEO: Bob Mumgaard –Total funding: US$2bn
With the fastest, lowest cost paths to commercial fusion energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is collaborating with MIT to utilise decades of research combined with new groundbreaking high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet technology.
CFS is also constructing SPARC, the world’s first commercially relevant, net energy fusion demonstration device – a significant stepping stone towards ARC, the first fusion power plant that will provide power on the grid. Ultimately, CFS’s mission is to deploy fusion power plants to meet global decarbonisation goals as fast as possible.
Headquarters: California, US – CEO: Adrián Ferrero –Total funding: US$25m
Silicon Valley-based Biome Makers has become a global AgTech leader, setting a high standard in soil health with BeCrop® technology – the largest global taxonomic database of 14mn microorganisms.
Built on industry-leading AgTech expertise and driven by data and science, Biome Makers connect soil biology to agricultural decision-making to optimise farming practices and reverse the degradation of arable soils.
With a global team passion about preserving, restoring, and improving soil health, Biome Makers have impacted over one million acres of land across the globe.
Pure Harvest Smart Farms is a pioneering, technology-enabled agribusiness headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, focused on sustainable year-round production of premium-quality fresh fruits and vegetables. The business is committed to delivering on their mission of farming extraordinarily flavourful, affordable and fresh produce. They achieve this by innovating across the full value chain of controlled-environment agriculture (CEA), including technology design, procurement, construction and farm operations.
Pure Harvest Smart Farms’ world-leading yields are the result of their inventive approach to farming. They introduced the Middle East’s first semi-automated, high-tech hybrid growing system and incorporated horticultural best practices to address significant regional challenges, such as food security, water conservation, economic diversification and sustainability demands.
Pure Harvest Smart Farms has secured over US$334.4m in capital commitments from a global investor base that spans from California, USA to Seoul, Korea. These investors recognise the value of the company’s mission and their unwavering commitment to sustainable agriculture.
Headquarters: California, US – CEO: Christopher Hopper –Total funding: US$523.5mn
Aurora’s cloud-based software revolutionises solar design, sales and delivery. By simply providing an address and electric bill, Aurora enables individuals to generate comprehensive, precise and customisable designs for each client – ultimately, securing immediate agreements.
The company contributes to the advancement of renewable energy by supporting numerous solar projects every week, aiming to make solar power accessible to all. Aurora calls for a departure from outdated power grids and the adoption of the solar future, simplifying tasks, discarding obsolete technology and accelerating business growth.
Now, more than 7,000 of the industry’s top organisations rely on Aurora and over ten million solar projects have been designed with the platform globally. The San Francisco-based company was the only climate tech business named to the 2022 Forbes AI 50 and was voted the best solar software by Solar Power World in 2021.
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard captured headlines and received accolades last year when he announced that the outdoor retailer would begin donating nearly the entirety of its profits to fighting climate change. In that same vein, an October 2022 IBM study found that 73% of respondents considered sustainability when shopping.
Both of these speak to broader trends in the way consumers are viewing corporate responsibility, particularly when it comes to environmental concerns.
How can companies respond to shifting consumer values to get ahead of both competitors and economic headwinds? Based on the 3 P’s of sustainable businesses(planet, people and profit), brands need to demonstrate transparency around ongoing sustainability efforts, engage customers in genuine conversations about what matters to them and craft engagement-based loyalty programs that recognize and reward shared social values. Here are three ways brands can accomplish this.
Communicate Tangible Impact On The Planet
Consumers don’t just want to hear “sustainability” as a buzzword. They want to see the concrete actions companies are taking to achieve it.
Brands like Cotopaxi provide a template to follow. Rather than hiding behind the vague “greenwashing” language media-savvy consumers know all too well, the company provides transparency into its sourcing partners and factories globally as well as the sustainability efforts at these factories and carbon offsetting for bulk shipping.
Brands still in the midst of their own sustainable transformation can also highlight the actions they’re taking to achieve the environmental objectives consumers value. Athletic wear brand Allbirds, for example, notes on its website the sustainability goals the company aims to meet by 2025, how Allbirds falls short of them now and the steps the brand is taking to meet them by its own self-imposed deadline.
Much like many companies themselves, consumers are going through their own green transformations and understand that such efforts take time. Rather than penalizing brands with less-than-ideal carbon footprints, consumers will likely reward transparent companies making an earnest effort to attain sustainability—even if they’re not there just yet.
Engage Customers In Sustainability Conversations
Rather than waiting for consumers to come to them, brands should attract the sustainably minded with content that speaks to their needs and goals.
Proactive sustainability brands can create informative and entertaining content that educates and engages consumers by leveraging the full power of their digital marketing channels. Patagonia uses an interactive webpage to illustrate the negative impact the clothing industry has on the environment and showcase the actions it’s taking to remedy it—including recycling materials, growing its own organic cotton and selling used gear at a discount to keep it out of landfills. As a result, consumers gain a clear understanding of how the company aligns with their values and what Patagonia is doing to achieve its sustainability goals.
Brands that engage their customers in conversations about sustainability are able to clarify the ecological topics consumers care about while also proactively guiding them toward products that align with their values. By taking an active role in their sustainability education, companies can establish trust with consumers and reinforce their own sustainable value proposition as they work to change old purchasing habits for good.
Reward Customers For Shared Values
As consumers set their sights on companies and products that share their environmental values, brands that reward them for their sustainable purchases have the chance to attract—and retain—both new and old customers.
One of our customers, Back Market, has developed a business model that not only drives sustainability and circular economy but also drives profits with the Gen Z audience that cares about reuse.
With the constant emergence of new technologies and the consumer desire to always have the latest and greatest device comes many gadgets that end up in a landfill. Back Market was created to help reduce all this e-waste. Sellers can quickly and easily get rid of the “old” gadgets they don’t want anymore, and buyers can grab gently used, high-quality gadgets for a great price.
Loyalty programs tied to sustainable purchases encourage consumers to make the shift toward eco-friendly products and provide an incentive to keep doing so in the future. Customers also develop a greater sense of commitment to the brand, which they see as a reliable vehicle for attaining their own sustainability goals. By rewarding customers for making purchases that align with their shared values today, companies become trusted partners they’ll turn to when making more in the future.
Through marketing efforts that reflect consumers’ identities and reward them for acting on their values, brands can form meaningful bonds with customers and turn them into lifelong patrons. As consumers continue to positively interact with the brand, they encourage others in their network to do so as well and foster new customer relationships—creating a virtuous cycle.
Through targeted rewards programs, brands can ensure the health of not only their bottom line but the planet as well.
Privatizing space could bring immense benefits to humanity, but is the industry thoughtfully considering the impact of emissions, space debris and employee well-being? By Vartan Badalian via Greenbiz.com • Reposted: August 2, 2023
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave one of his most historic speeches as he catapulted the U.S. into the space race against Russia. His words still hold immense passion and foresight today: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won… We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
In the short time humans have focused on space, we have landed humans on the moon, studied the deepest parts of the galaxy and privatized the industry. Right now, you can even pay as low as $257,000 on SpaceX’s website to ship your cargo to space.
At the same time, however, this great desire for space exploration is driving concern over short-term environmental and social impacts.
The problem with space
The sustainability challenges associated with space exploration and other commercial activities fall into three categories:
The emissions produced from launching spaceships;
The space junk that is quickly increasing and floating in Earth’s orbit; and
Potential harm to known or unknown species, along with human/employee rights concerns.
The space industry is truly different when it comes to measuring or assessing issues such as these, according to Paul Holdredge, director of industrials and transport at consultancy BSR.
“The industry is talking about sustainability, but they’re not yet using the same language that you and I might use,” Holdredge told me. “Many of the ESG rating systems, questionnaires, methods of evaluating companies — they frankly don’t apply to the space industry.”
The launch emissions
Consider the process of sending rockets into orbit. “There are a great number of launches forecasted, and the impact of those emissions in the upper atmosphere from various rocket chemistries is still not well understood,” Holdredge said.
While the percentage of fossil fuels burned by the space industry is 1 percent of what is burned by aviation, the fear among experts is that the emissions impacts of launches on the upper atmosphere and ozone layer are still widely unknown, especially as the frequency of launches increases. Also concerning is the fact that emissions have a tendency to linger longer.
Commercial space companies are driving a $500 billion industry right now, growing about 9 percent per year. That puts the sector on a path for about $1 trillion by 2040, according to Holdredge. This growth will bring an increase in spaceship launches, across both the private and government sectors. In 2022, 180 successful rocket launches happened, 44 more than in 2021. Much of this growth is led by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, which launched a rocket once every six days on average. That doesn’t account for the impact of launches by two other high-profile private space companies, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
Emissions reductions could come in the form of less carbon-intensive fuel chemistries — but that will take ongoing research and development. Other solutions that could help decarbonize the industry include a carbon nanotube space elevator that stretches into space, allowing for a more cost efficient and less energy intensive way to travel. Almost like a transit system but into space. But as this article points out, by the time we are able to build a space elevator, it might not be necessary given how quickly commercial space exploration is evolving.
Littering in space is the status quo, for now
A big concern beyond emissions is orbital litter. More than 25,000 pieces of space junk and debris larger than 10 centimeters are floating in Earth’s orbit, according to the World Economic Forum.
This junk includes anything from components left behind during launches to decommissioned satellites to other objects and chunks of material caused by asteroids hitting satellites or satellites hitting each other. Over time, this debris builds and floats in orbit, a concept known as the Kessler Syndrome. The fear is that this growing cloud of stuff could pose a danger to launches over time. Last year, SpaceX had to issue a statement amid concern by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites might cause a collision with the International Space Station.
The solution to space waste? Several companies and early-stage startups such as OrbitGuardians and ClearSpace focus on debris retrieval and removal. The work of the Space Sustainability Rating, launched by the World Economic Forum and developed by a group of industry players including the European Space Agency and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also a source of potential solutions.
The system offers recommendations for how aerospace companies can improve the long-term sustainability and longevity of their launches and satellite design, as well as address debris mitigation. The rating is based on a four-badge system from bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
Other aspects of sustainability
Aside from environmental factors, Holdredge said companies must increasingly consider the human impacts of space exploration. Among the concerns they’ll need to consider: how to take care of employees working in space; how to feed them; howto care for their waste; how to protect them from radiation; and more. These issues fall under the umbrella of human and employee rights.
As we colonize other planets, what rights must we consider for other potential life — known or unknown?
Human-driven climate change is causing the extinction of species on Earth that we have little knowledge about. We should strive to avoid bringing about the same harm to other planets.
By Kathryn Unger from Triple Pundit • Reposted: August 1, 2023
As Earth’s temperatures continue to rise, it has become evident that protecting the planet will require global cooperation and direct action across every single industry. The healthcare industry is no exception. Indeed, the connection between environmental health and human health underscores the importance of the medical community’s role in reaching net zero carbon emissions.
The healthcare sector contributes an estimated 4.5 percent of global emissions. Some of these greenhouse gases are produced from healthcare facilities; others are the result of the industry’s supply chain of goods and services. Yet when it comes to climate change, the healthcare industry must go beyond focusing on treating the health conditions resulting from environmental degradation — and increasingly, we’re seeing industry starting to shift toward helping to prevent those health conditions by addressing climate change itself.
Boston Scientific is among those medical technology companies working to reduce emissions. Our ambitious effort will involve reevaluating every aspect of business and making changes to support achieving net-zero emissions along the company’s entire value chain. This work represents a considerable challenge, and one whose time has come.
“Climate change will affect almost every human disease in some way,” says Dr. Kenneth Stein, chief medical officer. “For those of us in the healthcare industry, who are dedicated to improving health and patient outcomes, that’s a worrisome thought. But we can apply our considerable innovative skills toward becoming part of the solution.”
Fortunately, we have a couple of important factors working in our favor. They are ingredients which, I would suggest, every company needs to succeed in meeting its ESG goals: A thoughtful, realistic, and science-based sustainability plan in development, along with full-throated support for our initiative at every level of our organization.
Making the business case for sustainability in healthcare
Within the medtech sector, some sustainability changes involve tracing products back through the supply chain to reimagine the way those products are sourced, manufactured, packaged and shipped. Doing so is a significant undertaking – so much so, that if an organization doesn’t have a clear understanding that its sustainability goals are in line with a clear mission to improve health outcomes, it might shy away from the challenge.
Paudie O’Connor, senior vice president in charge of Boston Scientific global supply chain, points out that for that reason, it’s important to dispel myths that there is tension between the two goals. “There is no reason why we can’t further healthcare to help decrease the plight of human suffering, and work to improve the environment at the same time,” he told me.
In fact, Boston Scientific was the first medical device company to commit to carbon neutrality within its manufacturing network, as well as to receive approval for its net zero target by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international organization that provides clear guidance for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the latest climate science.
Already, we’ve made progress toward carbon neutrality goals by shifting our electricity sources in the U.S. and Europe to 100% renewable electricity – contributing to 76% renewable electricity across our global manufacturing and key distribution sites – putting us on track for 100% renewable electricity worldwide by 2024 in our manufacturing and key distribution sites. All are important milestones on the path to achieving the company’s net zero emissions target across the entire value chain by 2050.
However, some sustainability goals are more complicated. For instance, physicians and patients need medical products that are sterile, safe and reliable – and those standards are highly regulated. Now, teams must consider the environmental footprint of products at every life cycle stage, from design, sourcing, production and distribution to waste disposal and recycling.
“We spend a great deal of time thinking about how we can structure our supply chain to support growth and environmental sustainability,” O’Connor says. “For example, thinking of ways to reduce packaging, digitize instructions for use, target sterilization practices and use strategic modes of distribution.”
Shipping is a good example. Medical device manufacturers have long shipped products to their destinations by air as a matter of convenience and, importantly, speed, so that devices are always available for patients who require immediate intervention. “Our supply chain has a purpose statement: ‘delivering for patients,’” says O’Connor. “Getting high-quality products to patients when they need them.”
Rail and maritime transport are far more carbon-efficient than air transport, but take longer; for example, a product that takes four days to get from Costa Rica to Boston by air may take 14 days by boat and rail. Thus, in switching to moving products by land or sea to key distribution hubs, a company must carefully reexamine the timetables by which products are sent and adjust them accordingly. Mapping out such thoughtful, deliberate changes can result in meaningful carbon reduction, making the effort well worthwhile.
Tackling environmental challenges for better health
This is one of the biggest challenges that the global population has faced, let alone the healthcare industry. But by viewing environmental sustainability as a step toward improving human health, the goals of both the medical community and those of global supply chain teams can come together as one. I believe that such a holistic view is precisely the way to frame the important sustainability work ahead of the healthcare industry. Dr. Stein agrees: “To reduce healthcare disparities, we can’t ignore how environmental and climate changes will affect health, especially for society’s most vulnerable.”
There is so much more work to do to continue to advance our collective efforts to contribute to a healthier planet. Regulations are increasing and evolving. Customer expectations are evolving. Science is constantly evolving and changing the things that we can accomplish for our customers and patients. But the industry is making meaningful changes — and by holding ourselves and each other accountable, we can accelerate progress and achieve more together.
By Dylan Siegler, SVP, Sustainability via Green Buzz Weekly • Reposted: July 31, 2023
State and federal policymakers on the right were not targeting corporate sustainability programs when they began lobbing anti-ESG rhetoric and proposed laws into state and national legislatures.
But what began as a campaign against making environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities part of investment decisions predictably spread, just as high-profile battles over drag shows and critical race theory took over the news cycle. Bans against banks and financial services companies that “boycott” fossil fuels, as in Texas Government Code Chapter 809, became a pressure on companies to back away from social impact as well as environmental measures.
This spring, there were increased reports of ESG backlash from shareholders (and their partisan advisers) when they voted on investor proposals at public company annual meetings. About a third of anti-ESG shareholder proposalsfocused on pressuring companies to stand down on DEI initiatives. Climate also took a hit (although it’s important to note that the data is more complex in that area, where pro-ESG shareholder engagement is advanced). Many of these proposals failed; passing didn’t seem to be the point.
Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence indicates that more companies are “greenhushing,” or taking a quieter approach to sustainability communication. A sustainability head for a Fortune 500 red-state-based company, who spoke to me only if I didn’t identify him or his company in this newsletter, confirmed that anti-ESG rhetoric has caused his employer to communicate to the public less often and less comprehensively about sustainability efforts, and we hear similar accounts from members of our GreenBiz Executive Network, a peer learning forum for sustainability executives from large companies.
Another continuing issue potentially abetting the anti-ESG movement is that despite bold public climate goals and other commitments, many of the same companies hold back from advocating for progressive policy, and sometimes actively lobby against those interests. Specifically, some fund PACs that support political candidates who may espouse rhetoric in conflict with a company’s own ESG strategy. Even unintentional firewalls between government affairs and sustainability can cause companies to talk out of both sides of their mouths.
What to do about anti-ESG rhetoric
I asked Deborah McNamara, co-executive director of ClimateVoice, a nonprofit focused on helping climate-positive companies influence policy, what actions a sustainability professional should take to counteract the ESG backlash. In an email, she said anti-ESG rhetoric is “a new form of climate denialism” and exhorted companies with sustainability commitments to, effectively, stay the course and focus on impact. “Employees and sustainability professionals should talk about how ESG investments help them build a better and more profitable business,” she said. Companies should “remain focused on aligning all levels of business operations and advocacy with achieving meaningful climate goals, and continue to advocate forcefully and consistently for climate policy progress on all fronts.”
The Fortune 500 sustainability head who told me he sees more greenhushing gave an important and reassuring caveat: While his company may not be shouting from the rooftops about ESG, the company’s real-world actions in sustainability have not markedly changed in response to the shift in political tone.
It would be satisfying to raise a fist and advise sustainability professionals to speak out brashly against the backlash and encourage their companies to do the same in the face of political pressure. But not every company has a sustainability head with high company-wide social capital, a mature sustainability program with a proven business case or the executive support to withstand ever stronger political headwinds. Almost 70 percent of the top five earning executives in U.S. S&P 1500 firms are affiliated with the Republican party, which has made opposing ESG one of its calling cards in the current election cycle. Some professionals — and their companies — will simply need to choose between being brave and being safe.
Here are three straightforward ways you can push back against the anti-ESG campaign:
Low lift If your company is in a greenhushing phase, use it to your advantage. When you say less, my Fortune 500 source points out, it’s more straightforward to prioritize accuracy and assess any risk that might be associated with your disclosures. Less can be more — especially if you’ve historically not seen eye to eye with your comms colleagues.
Medium lift Get to know your government affairs department. Do they understand your motivations, and vice versa? What risks are they focused on? If you don’t have a dialogue, start one.
Heavy lift Sign your company on to the Ceres / We Mean Business Coalition-led initiative Freedom to Invest. The campaign mobilizes business and investor interests “around a unified message to policymakers: Protect the Freedom to Invest Responsibly.”
Big ambitions? Do all three. But whatever you do, do something.
“It can either be that all of us decide, ‘I have a lot of other work to do to sell my product or service. I don’t want to stick my head up. I don’t want to [have] what Disney has [experienced] happen to me. I’ll let somebody else fight this.’ That’s one example,” said Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Sustainable Markets Accelerator at Ceres on the main stage at last month’s GreenFin 23 event.
“The other one is that we all decide to get involved. The future of this industry is up to literally the people in this room … so I hope all of us reach out to people — Democrats, Republicans — all kinds of folks. If everyone here writes a letter to the editor, or does social media or an op-ed, or signs a petition or whatever you want to do — what GreenFin in ’25 will be like will be determined by what each of us do in the coming months.”
In today’s world, sustainability has become a pressing global issue, and organizations increasingly recognize the importance of incorporating sustainable practices into their operations. Corporate leaders are playing tug-of-warwith anti-ESG (environmental, social, and governance) warriors.
In the face of the ESG backlash, companies’ reactions vary. Some are going quiet about their initiatives and accomplishments. The Washington Post refers to this behavior as “greenhushing”.
However, others are doubling down on their commitments to sustainability. For example, hundreds of companies released a letter last spring claiming their commitments to ESG positively impacted governance and asking policymakers to respect their freedom to make responsible investments.
Most of the press covering how companies are pushing back on the anti-ESG forces focus on senior leaders. However, all employees, no matter where they sit in the organization, can play a significant role in this fight.
If you care about sustainability, you can act within your company regardless of your title or position. You can take steps to support ESG and develop a strategy for influencing and supporting the senior leaders in taking a stand.
Here are some ways to fight against the anti- ESG pressures.
Educate yourself about the organization’s ESG goals and initiatives. Stay on top of the anti-ESG messaging and look for ways to refute it with evidence and data.
Staying informed about sustainability efforts allows you to communicate effectively and address concerns raised by anti-ESG individuals.
Participate in ESG training sessions and educational programs organized by the company. Understanding the value of sustainability and its long-term benefits can help you become a more effective ESG advocate.
To influence higher-level managers to keep their commitments, gather compelling evidence on the benefits of sustainability initiatives.
Include data on cost savings, risk mitigation, enhanced brand reputation, and customer loyalty. Include how organizational sustainability contributes to a culture of engaged employees. and point out the benefits of this culture to the success of the company.
Using information strategically, you can demonstrate the tangible advantages of embracing sustainability and counteract the attacks on ESG.
Organize Advocacy for ESG
Encourage and lead open discussions about ESG initiatives and their importance within the organization. Engage with colleagues and management to promote more active support for sustainability and dispel misconceptions associated with ESG.
Leadership development specialist and coach Dr. Andre Taylor says a key to effectively advancing sustainability is to form advocacy coalitions. He suggests CEOs are more receptive to ideas and initiatives supported by a cross-section of leaders throughout the organization.
Form coalitions for collective advocacy dedicated to sustainability. A cross-functional approach allows diverse perspectives and strengthens your clout.
Identify influential allies who can provide guidance and support and act as champions for sustainability efforts. Collaborating with them can amplify the message and create a shared sense of purpose across the company.
As these partnerships and coalitions grow, sustainability will become more deeply embedded into the culture. And robust and supportive cultures make stepping away from sustainability commitments more difficult.
Communicate Positively
Use constructive communication to appeal to both heads and hearts. Tell stories of how the company’s ESG efforts support the wellbeing of stakeholders.
Through examples, you can shift the perception of sustainability from a standalone effort to a strategic imperative.
Highlight how sustainable practices align with the business’s core values and contribute to long-term profitability.
Include appeals to emotions. Sure, data can be important for swaying the opinions and actions of others. However, when you also appeal to their feelings, you are more likely to persuade them.
Crafting compelling stories that educate, showcase, and highlight how sustainable and unsustainable practices impact people can evoke emotions and inspire action.
Remember You Are a Key Stakeholder
As an employee of the company, you are among the most critical stakeholder groups. You must speak up!
Share with your colleagues and managers how you feel about the importance of the company’s sustainability pledges.
Speak passionately about how these commitments impact your engagement with the company and your loyalty to it. Talk about how you would feel if the company gave in to the anti-ESG forces.
In the battle against anti-ESG sentiment, every individual’s contribution holds significance, regardless of seniority level.
You must not remain passive and leave the responsibility for the fight solely to others. Embrace your role in the struggle for sustainability and ESG, as your efforts can substantially impact your organization, its leadership, and the world.
Recognize that the stakes are significant, and you can contribute to positive change. You can and must contribute to a more sustainable and responsible future for all by actively engaging and collaborating.
By Mary K. Pratt from Techtarget.com • Reposted: July 28, 2023
Just as with any journey, a sustainability journey requires understanding some keys to success.
Many organizations are struggling to build sustainability programs and implement more environmentally friendly practices. Furthermore, some companies have exaggerated their sustainability records, a practice known as greenwashing.
“Sustainability maturity ranges quite a bit,” said Michelle Benavides, executive director of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, a professional association of sustainability practitioners. “There are leaders who have been working on this for a long time. But many others are in the early stages of setting commitments and trying to figure out how to hit those commitments.”
More companies are starting on their journey toward environmental sustainability as top leadership prioritizes the issue.
Environmental sustainability ranked as the number eighth strategic issues for CEOs heading into 2023, according to the “2022 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey.”
In addition, consumers have become more interested in the environmental records of those they buy from and engage with. Employees are seeking more action from their employers on this front. Many governments around the world have added environmental regulations and reporting requirements.
Organizations looking to meet those demands can consider 10 actions to help enable sustainability success.
1. Understand the environmental impact
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to limit further global warming is at the core of ensuring a livable world, and business leaders can have major impact.
Working to understand the direct and indirect carbon footprint is key, both in terms of direct and indirect emissions.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a widely used classification system for emissions reporting, has laid out three scopes of direct and indirect emissions:
Scope 1 includes direct greenhouse emissions.
Scope 2 includes indirect greenhouse gas emissions from energy a company purchases.
Scope 3 includes a wide range of indirect greenhouse emissions across the value chain, from sourcing through disposal.
Carbon emissions are not the only environmental impact a company has. Leaders should also understand their effect in other areas, from the physical waste they produce to their organization’s use of natural resources, and how their company’s actions affect water, air and land quality.
Moreover, sustainability includes environmental impacts besides climate change as well as broader social and business issues.
“The sustainability journey is so much more than taking emissions out of the business,” said Vinay Shandal, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group.
2. Create a sustainability roadmap
Once company leaders understand how and where the organization affects the environment, they can start to analyze and measure those impacts as well as benchmark themselves against other organizations — determining if they’re laggards or leaders in sustainability work.
That information helps each organization create a strategy for improving their sustainability, Benavides said. “It’s always critical to understand your baseline so you understand where you can go and can break down how to get there.”
Executives can start with areas that they can directly control — such as creating more energy efficient buildings and operations — and then focus on how to improve sustainability in other areas such as their supply chains, Benavides said.
Looking to the biggest potential wins can also be fruitful.
Executives should identify areas where changes could yield the biggest improvements in sustainability and prioritize those, Shandal said.
3. Go after easy sustainability wins
Some organizations have yet to implement the fundamentals of an environmental sustainability journey. In these cases, leaders can look to what can be achieved with little effort, Benavides said.
Lower energy consumption by powering down lights, devices and other electronics when not in use.
Install smart fixtures that automatically shut off and energy-efficient equipment, such as LED lighting.
Create sustainability awareness programs that encourage a reduce-reuse-recycle mentality in the workplace and support it through corporate actions by, for example, replacing bottled water vending machines with water dispensers designed to fill reusable water bottles.
Digitalizing business processes to reduce environmental impacts such as paper waste, excess business travel and commutes to the office.
Switching to renewable energy sources, where possible.
Executives should aim to encourage, empower and train their teams to do their part, Benavides said.
“This truly is a mission and commitment that everyone has to get involved in, so build foundational knowledge across the entirety of your staff,” she said. “You want to make sure staff across the board can deeply understand the commitments being made by the sustainability managers, why it’s so critical, how they fit into the puzzle and how they can act to meet those goals.” Communication about sustainability is key. “Make sure everyone is equipped and then go forward from there with a solid action plan.”
5. Get top-level buy-in
As with any important initiative, support from the top is key.
Creating a more sustainable organization requires support from senior leaders and the board, Benavides said. To build sustainability into the fabric of the company, top-level buy-in is necessary. When that buy-in is absent, the results are unlikely to be successful.
“[Sustainability] becomes a more siloed effort and it becomes harder to reach any sustainability commitments the company might have set,” she said.
6. Bring sustainability to the supply chain
Most organizations are part of complex networks. This means business and IT leaders need to consider the sustainability of their supply chain, their suppliers and their business partners. The criteria for evaluating these varies by industry as well as by each organization’s own objectives.
Many organizations consider the carbon footprints of those with whom they do business, said Abhijit Sunil, an analyst at Forrester Research whose research focuses on environmental reporting and sustainability strategies.
As part of that carbon footprint evaluation and as part of other sustainability considerations, organizations also may consider what materials their suppliers use, how they source those materials, how they produce their materials or products, and how they ship their products, he said.
Some organizations also consider their suppliers’ product designs and packaging and whether materials and products can be repaired, recycled or reused. These are key principles for reducing environmental impacts and cutting back on waste and encouraging a more environmentally friendly circular economy.
7. Measure and track
A slew of companies, nonprofit entities and government agencies have been announcing their plans to become carbon-neutral and less environmentally impactful. But many may lack the ability to measure their existing environmental impact, track progress toward their stated goals and accurately report their sustainability metrics.
Think about where value is shifting and, ‘How do I position my business to play and win in this new economy?’Vinay ShandalManaging director and senior partner, Boston Consulting Group
To address that, sustainability chiefs should work with their executive colleagues to create processes for quantifying their environmental impacts and tracking their improvements in those areas, Sunil said. Organizations also should create KPIs based on the objectives they have for their sustainability programs.
CIOs can play a leading role by helping select software for capturing, quantifying, analyzing and reporting sustainability-related metrics. For example, governance, risk and compliance software as well as environmental health and safety management software often have modules for carbon accounting, Sunil said.
CIOs could bring other technologies to bear here too, Sunil said. IoT, for example, can help companies track and analyze information and provide more visibility into their environmental impact.
8. Understand how technology impacts the environment
They should be evaluating their own department’s environmental impact as well as how and where they can bring improvements, Sunil said.
IT equipment consumes significant amounts of energy, with some technologies — such as generative AI — requiring more power than other types of digital solutions.
Data centers — whether on premise or with cloud providers — use not only large amounts of power but also use significant amounts of water for cooling and often require large tracks of land.
However, CIOs can opt to consider their technology suppliers’ sustainability records along with performance criteria when selecting vendors, Sunil said. They can also work with hardware providers to ensure they have solid take-back programs so end-of-life devices can be reused or recycled. They can promote the use of software designed for sustainability.
In the near future, CIOs may have no choice but to become more sustainability minded.
Seventy percent of leaders in the area of technology sourcing, procuring and vendor management will have performance objectives for their functions that focus on environmental sustainability, according to Gartner’s “Predicts 2023: Environmental Sustainability Is Now an IT Sourcing Imperative.”
9. Take a holistic approach
Enterprise executives should remember that environmental sustainability is one part of environmental, social and governance ESG efforts. They should consider their sustainability initiatives through the environmental lens as well as the social and governance lenses.
Leaders should think end to end, Shandal said. For example, electric vehicle makers should be considering how and where the materials to create the batteries are sourced; how they’re handled at end-of-life; the environmental and social impact of that work; and how all those pieces will be monitored and governed according to the policies, standards and objectives established by the vehicle maker.
10. Look for opportunities in a sustainability-focused economy
Going on a sustainability journey can unlock new sources of revenue.
Companies should identify what opportunities they may have as they and others increasingly embrace sustainable practices, Shandal said.
For example, as companies turn away from using chemicals that harm the environment, they’ll be looking for environmentally friendly alternatives — a shift that opens up a market opportunity for those ready to meet the changing market demands, Shandal said.
“Think about where value is shifting and, ‘How do I position my business to play and win in this new economy?'” he said.
What costs $1.2 TRILLION and continues to get more and more expensive? The answer: Americans’ summer travel. In line with the increasingly prominent green trends sweeping the nation, it’s important that we approach our summer adventures with a mindful consideration of their environmental impact. By EREF Staff • Reposted: July 27, 2023
What costs $1.2 TRILLION and continues to get more and more expensive? The answer: Americans’ summer travel[1]!
Now that it’s officially summer, many Americans are headed out of town. Whether weekends at the beach or months abroad, this summer is set to witness the strongest air travel since the pre-pandemic era, possibly making it the most robust ever. Over a quarter of Americans (26%), an increase from 19% in the first quarter, are preparing to embark on leisure travel in the coming three months[2]. This increase in travelers will translate into an approximate 12% growth in passengers for the three biggest U.S. airlines, expected to ferry 8.6 million people during the summer season[3]. While this mass mobilization symbolizes an exciting era of discovery and relaxation, it’s crucial to remember that our travel plans, while invigorating for us, can impose a heavy toll on the environment. In line with the increasingly prominent green trends sweeping the nation, it’s important that we approach our summer adventures with a mindful consideration of their environmental impact.
This summer’s surge in travel activity can unfortunately translate into increased waste production, with potential negative implications for our environment and lifestyle. Moreover, maintaining the allure and accessibility of our favorite scenic spots and lakes depends significantly on how well we protect them from pollution and trash accumulation. In a world where single-use plastic is commonplace, the path to sustainability can seem daunting. But a little planning can go a long way in fostering eco-friendly travel.
Unfortunately, it’s rare to see recycling bins at rest stops and gas stations, which makes it difficult for travelers to responsibly dispose of recyclables like plastic bottles or cans. As a result, these items often end up in general trash bins, destined for landfills. By including more visible and accessible recycling facilities at these high-traffic areas, we could make a substantial contribution to reducing travel-related waste.
As you plan your travel, consider these tips. When driving, pack snacks from home, carrying reusable beverage containers, and maintaining separate trash bags for recyclables and other waste in your car. Make a game out of minimizing waste – it not only teaches sustainability but can add a fun twist to the journey. When traveling by plane, one could manage waste by having a meal before a short flight to avoid single-use packaged snacks. For longer flights, taking advantage of in-flight meals helps reduce waste as these meals would otherwise be discarded. Train travel, in addition to being an efficient mode of transportation, also offers a refreshing respite from the bustling city traffic. If your travel requires documentation or tickets, digital documents on your phone or tablet help save paper and are less likely to be lost.
Choosing larger, shareable items, using snack cups for family members, and reducing hotel service to only when needed are effective ways to cut down waste. Don’t fall for the convenience of disposable utensils. Carrying reusable utensils, dishes, straws, and cloth napkins might seem like a chore, but such small steps can significantly lessen the landfill load.
Whether you’re headed to the beach, mountains, cities, or abroad, there are specific steps you can take to reduce waste. For beach or lake visits, the use of items that could be swept away by the wind or tide should be minimized. In the mountains, a pack it in, pack it out mindset goes a long way in preserving the natural beauty. City travelers can cut down waste by enjoying meals in local restaurants instead of opting for takeaway. When traveling abroad, especially to European countries known for their waste minimization efforts, be sure to pay attention when you have items to discard as most offer a more diverse suite of options for disposal than the average American city and in many cases have separate recycling bins for plastic, glass, metal, paper and food.
These small steps may seem minor, but collectively, they can significantly impact our environment, potentially steering the future of the tourism industry towards a more sustainable path. As you make summer travel plans, and add to that $1.2 trillion price tag, consider a pledge to travel responsibly and sustainably.
We’ve all been there, right? The mountain of reusable bags we forget to take to the store. The burger that should have been plant-based. The over-packaged product you just splurged on. These gaps between intention and action manifest when we start to diet, to start a hobby, go to the gym and especially when we try to live sustainably. We are all a hot mess of un-met intentions.
Because rather than gap, consumers face giant barriers. Reframing from gaps (which imply something missing in consumer morality), to barriers (which aren’t consumers fault) is empowering for business. The barriers range from price, availability, and structural factors that require infrastructure change, to myths, awareness, and availability, that can marketers can tackle.
To bust these barriers, we need to ask ourselves a crucial question when promoting a product, service, or action: Are we effectively selling the benefits? Because only benefits can bust through barriers. Let’s break it down into three key categories of benefits – functional, emotional, and social:
Functional benefits play a crucial role in selling sustainable products. Consider how sustainability can add value for money, enhance performance and efficacy, improve quality, save time, or contribute to safety. Understanding and emphasising these functional benefits can make sustainable choices more appealing to consumers.
Emotional benefits are equally important. As retailers, it’s essential to acknowledge that the consumer is the hero, not us. The feel-good factor associated with buying sustainable products can be a significant motivator. Does sustainability strengthen sensory enjoyment, provide physical comfort, offer an exciting experience, boost self-worth, or offer a sense of personalisation? These emotional benefits can truly make a difference in consumers’ decision-making.
Finally, let’s not forget about social benefits. How does sustainability impact family dynamics, desirability in the eyes of others, the perception of being cool, smart, or part of a community? Highlighting these social benefits can create a sense of belonging and encourage individuals to embrace sustainable choices.
By Mary Riddle from Triple Pundit • Reposted: July 26, 2023
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to release its long-awaited climate disclosure rule this fall, and businesses are preparing for change. The intent is to create a framework for companies to make climate-related disclosures in a way that is standardized and allows for comparison.
“I think it is helpful to frame the SEC proposal not as a climate proposal, but rather as a proposal to enhance and standardize climate-related financial disclosures,” said Emily Pierce, chief global policy officer at the carbon accounting firm Persefoni and a former SEC lawyer involved in developing the proposed rule.
What’s different about the SEC climate disclosure rule?
The SEC’s forthcoming climate disclosure rule has been over a decade in the making. In 2010, SEC staff issued guidance stating that climate change could impact business operations as it carries material risks that affect financial performance, Pierce said. And anything that could impact financial performance should be communicated to investors.
Five years later, the investor demand for information was growing steadily. “By 2015, there was a collective concern about investor demand for sustainability information,” she said. “Investors were not getting the information they were asking for, and the marketplace was inefficient.”
The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) rose up to meet that demand shortly after the Paris climate agreement was adopted in 2015. “TCFD developed helpful disclosure frameworks for governance, strategy and risk management processes,” as well as metrics and targets to measure a company’s greenhouse gas footprint, Pierce said.
“TCFD is a market norm, but it wasn’t always complete and comprehensive, and it didn’t allow for comparison,” she explained. “The SEC was inspired by the TCFD framework that investors and companies have found useful.”
What do we know about the new rule?
The SEC’s proposed rule covers how companies communicate their climate-related risks. Companies will be required to disclose material risks, including physical risks and transition risks, related to climate change. These may include sea-level rise, more frequent extreme weather events and wildfires, or changes in government regulation and consumer demand.
Importantly, the rule will not initially apply to all companies, but will be phased in over time. “Phasing is an important part of the proposal, because it’s our way of managing implementation,” Pierce said. “We have to strike the balance between investor protection and creating a rule that is feasible for companies to implement. I think the most likely scenario is that, if it is finalized this year, companies will need to gather data next year for fiscal year 2025.”
The rule will also hold companies’ feet to the fire for claims made about net-zero and emissions reductions. If a company has a public target related to cutting emissions, the SEC will require additional disclosures and obligations related to that target.
“A lot of companies calculate their greenhouse gas emissions today,” Pierce said. “But they do it in a way that does not have as much control over their data, calculations, and outputs compared to what they would have in their financial calculation reporting. When you’re making information investor-grade and compliance-ready, you should bring lessons you have learned from the financial space into the carbon accounting space.”
Emissions created by a company’s direct operations — Scope 1 emissions — and emissions associated with the company’s purchase of energy — Scope 2 emissions — will need to be externally assured, Pierce said. But smaller companies will not need to disclose value chain emissions from assets the company does not own — Scope 3 emissions — unless they set an emissions target for Scope 3, she predicted.
What’s next?
The climate disclosure rule should not contain any surprises compared to the SEC’s current proposal, Pierce said. But the timing of release will be later than anticipated, due to the unprecedented number of public comments and feedback. Many analysts agree it will be released this fall.
“To be ready for climate disclosure, companies need to bring discipline and processes to their broader corporate thinking about governance, strategy and risk management,” Pierce said. “Additional discipline and processes will help them communicate about what they’re doing.”
A lot of companies are already thinking about these issues, calculating their emissions and gathering the necessary information, Pierce said. “There are market rewards to decarbonizing, and they see the value in that. We will see an increase in the market rewarding sustainable behavior, whether it is in access to capital, customer preference, more business-to-business relationships or consumer demand.”
To solve society’s most pressing problems, we need a new type of entrepreneur.
Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of the consultancy Futerra, describes these changemakers in her new book, “The Solutionists: How Business Can Fix the Future.” Townsend defines a “Solutionist” as part-entrepreneur and part-activist who is exclusively focused on solving problems. This type of mindset is needed to tackle a wide range of societal problems such as biodiversity loss, social division, racism and exclusion, she argues.
Townsend said she coined the term to help like-minded people find and identify each other.
What distinguishes a Solutionist from a traditional entrepreneur is that their purpose lies in solving problems. “They don’t approach social or eco-entrepreneurism and sustainable business as the latest fad for an additional value-add for business,” Townsend wrote. “Their companies, inventions, strategies and solutions are designed explicitly to confront problems — that’s the Solutionist way.”
And these problem-solvers are focused on action. “A traditional entrepreneur is driven probably by excitement, by their product and vision, [and] financially where they can be front page of Fortune, front page of Forbes,” Townsend told TriplePundit. “But a Solutionist is driven by [the fact that] their product, their service, their business is going to solve the world’s problems.”
In her book, Townsend outlines energy, infrastructure, transport, food, materials, finance, biodiversity, digitization, culture and the creative industry as key areas in which Solutionists can solve problems.
For example, Solutionists in the food industry might work on the research and development of foods that can help people reach optimal nutritional levels — and that they actually want to eat. Or they might work on developing marketing campaigns that encourage consumers to participate in the industry’s transition to net-zero emissions.
It’s time to communicate about solutions
The urgency of many of the world’s problems, like climate change, is already clearly communicated, Townsend said. Now, it’s crucial to engage with the entertainment and culture sector to tell stories about solutions.
“We’ve got so many of the technological solutions that we need. We know what policies we need, they’re just really difficult to get signed off,” Townsend said. “We have got so much of that infrastructure [of] solutions already worked out, it just needs to be implemented. The thing which we don’t have yet is the story.”
That means engaging with creative industry professionals like scriptwriters, musicians, artists and social media creators to tell creative and impactful stories.
“We’re in a dystopia,” she said. ”We don’t need any more dystopia stories. And we don’t need utopias either because that would be comforting but not very helpful. What we need is adventure stories of how we’re going to get from where we are to the solutions.”
Compelling narratives not only kickstart conversations about challenges like climate change, but they also educate consumers about the solutions required to tackle them — especially in niche, complicated areas. Right now, funding and resources should be put toward telling stories about these solutions, Townsend said.
Solitaire Townsend, author and co-founder of the consultancy Futerra.
How aspiring Solutionists can overcome challenges
Being a Solutionist comes with its own set of challenges, like traditional entrepreneurship. However, there are some key differences. Entrepreneurs require funding to kickstart their projects. But Solutionists should ensure their investors are as interested in their business impact as they are in income, Townsend told 3p.
This path is a long-term pursuit that does not come with immediate rewards. “You tend not to save the world in the first two years of trying to do it,” Townsend said. Having grit, tenacity and flexibility in adapting your plans is important. She encourages balancing a determined mindset to accomplish your goals, while being relaxed and flexible in how you achieve them.
Solutionists, especially young people, can benefit from managing expectations of themselves and their impact realistically, Townsend said. This means taking breaks, making mistakes, and alleviating themselves from the pressures of perfection and failure. And instead, focusing on the big picture — that they are working on solutions that they know are impactful, notwithstanding external validation.
Seven in 10 surveyed companies said the political and regulatory environment has had a positive impact on their sustainability initiatives in the past 12 months. By Marina Mayer from Honeywell International from Supply Chain Executive • Reposted; July 25, 2023
A sizable majority of global companies surveyed are planning increased investments in support of their sustainability targets, despite economic uncertainty, according to data released by Honeywell in partnership with The Futurum Group.
“The latest Environmental Sustainability Index confirms that large global companies are continuing to stay on pace and invest in technology and staff to achieve their environmental sustainability goals,” says Evan van Hook, chief sustainability officer at Honeywell. “Sustainability is top of mind for leadership, and they are activating top-level staff to increase involvement and traction toward goals. At Honeywell, we are well on our way to delivering on our commitment to reaching our 2035 goals, and we are helping our customers to do the same with our ready-now solutions.”
86% of the 751 global companies surveyed indicated that they plan to increase their sustainability budgets.
Seven in 10 surveyed companies said the political and regulatory environment has had a positive impact on their sustainability initiatives in the past 12 months.
74% of respondents said they were optimistic about attaining sustainability goals, particularly with respect to 2030 energy goals – a strong number but 3 percentage points lower than the last index.
Budget increases are slated across four sustainability categories: energy evolution and efficiency, emissions reduction, pollution prevention and circularity/recycling.
Improving energy evolution and efficiency is the top sustainability commitment across all geographies, with 87% of respondents citing it as a priority.
Some 25% and 20% of organizations in Latin America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), respectively, plan to boost their investment in energy evolution and efficiency by at least 50% in the coming 12 months – outpacing the budgetary commitments being made in North America and the Asia-Pacific.
For manufacturing and energy companies, sustainability has become their top priority, with roughly eight in 10 organizations in both sectors citing sustainability goals as their most important initiative for the coming six months. These companies indicate that sustainability is far outpacing their other corporate priorities, including financial performance, market growth and workforce development.
82% of these organizations are optimistic that their reporting methods will meet disclosure requirements that may emerge in the next year. Managing the reporting process is a bit trickier, however, as only 38% say they have a centralized person on staff to track sustainability efforts.
“The fourth release of Honeywell’s Environmental Sustainability Index provides new insight into how organizations are reporting and tracking their previously set commitments toward sustainability,” says Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner of The Futurum Group. “This quarter, we are seeing increases in investment and transparency of efforts along with a balanced approach to technology versus process when it comes to reaching goals. As we move into 2024, we look forward to sharing data about our year-over-year comparison.”
In today’s business world, many functions are outsourced. For example, at my company, we outsource payroll, IT, legal services and taxes because of the highly specialized knowledge required to do the tasks and the economies of scale achieved by the vendors. It doesn’t make sense for us to hire a full-time, in-house attorney with expertise in contracts, employment law, litigation, etc., when there is a buffet of highly specialized lawyers I can access through one relationship with a law firm—and I can rely on them as needed.
A similar theme is emerging in sustainability services. As an expert in providing outsourced CSO services, my company and others in the space help firms achieve their sustainability goals.
One of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today is finding people to assimilate all the knowledge needed to maneuver the energy transition, which places increasing pressure on businesses to reduce emissions, promote circularity and track sustainability. According to LinkedIn’s Global Green Skills Report 2022, demand for “green skills” is outpacing supply, and the specialization of “green skills” is proliferating—from climate and renewable energy to environmental awareness and corporate social responsibility.
Companies are responding to this need by appointing a chief sustainability officer, or CSO, who is expected to lead the response to the energy transition. The skills required to do this are complex, technical and often beyond the abilities of one person. It requires engineers, legal experts, market analysts, investment bankers and project managers.
Outsourcing CSO services, like outsourcing legal and accounting, allows businesses to access specialized sustainability experts. Outsourced CSOs can provide sustainability, business strategy and operational guidance related to the energy transition.
Making The Decision To Outsource
Whether you are leading a small startup or a large publicly traded firm, here are several instances where outsourcing CSO services can be an effective way to address some of today’s carbon challenges:
• New climate startups: You have launched a successful business model and are fortunate enough to be juggling multiple balls—hiring and training, sales and business development, investor relations and more. Your leadership team may not have time to keep up with global climate policies, emerging incentive programs, new competing technologies, evolving carbon markets, data standards and carbon accounting rules.
• Small or midsized privately held businesses: You have loyal customers who like your products or services, and you are growing steadily in a stable environment. Recently, these customers have been asking casual questions about the company’s sustainability efforts. The leadership team doesn’t have the time or the baseline knowledge to analyze the company’s sustainability.
• CEOs or CFOs: It’s time to update investors and shareholders about profit margins, strategic plans and key performance indicators, and they also want to see an analysis of energy transition risks and climate risks. As a believer in risk-averse governance, you know you should include this in your quarterly report, but you are not clear where to start.
• One-person sustainability departments: Pressure from the board and upper management has forced one person to research and respond to a variety of questions over the years, and their role has evolved to include “sustainability expert.” But the questions are becoming more complex and overwhelming. A climate scientist, a policy analyst and a process engineer are needed on the team to fully respond to the situation, but the budget doesn’t allow this.
Of course, outsourcing a task core to a business’ strategic direction is not always a good idea. A CSO is a part of the leadership team and has access to confidential information that is key to a company’s success and competitive advantage, which are not things that can be shared with an outside firm before establishing a high level of trust. In these cases, it is better to plan to have an in-house CSO who can incorporate these business secrets into a long-term sustainability strategy.
Getting Started With An Outsourced CSO
The CSO is usually key to building the company’s “green team” that has the passion for facilitating the energy transition and the specialized skills needed to perform the critical analysis needed. If you are outsourcing a CSO, make sure you have established an internal team with diverse skill sets; these include climate scientists, market analysts, process engineers, policy advisors, etc.
The energy transition requires a business to rethink how it’s doing business, and a CSO must frequently interact with purchasing, marketing, legal, accounting and operations, and talk their language.
A key CSO function is communicating complex technical concepts in simple language. Ask your CSO to conduct an analysis of the risks and opportunities your business faces, so when a customer or an investor casually asks what you are doing on the sustainability front, you can give a clear and confident response.
CSOs lead a company’s response to the energy transition: Look for someone who is unbiased, data-driven, aspirational in their approach, has a strong grasp of internal and external stakeholder needs, and a peer network that includes policy analysts, engineers, auditors, carbon life cycle experts, etc.
The biggest challenge in deciding whether to outsource the CSO function is how to integrate someone external into the day-to-day details of your team’s workflow. Should you give them a company email? How much confidential information should you share? Who should be the main point of contact internally for the outsourced service? Each company has to develop its own processes to govern the level of outsourcing it wishes to put in place.
Some companies starting fresh on the energy transition journey need a temporary leader with a full team of external technical resources that they can use as needed. Others, further down the path, may have an internal CSO on the team, but they need to outsource technical expertise and receive policy briefings and technical analyses, as needed.
Outsourcing the CSO function can make it easier for businesses to make sustainability and strategic decisions. An outsourced CSO can analyze the risks and opportunities a business faces due to climate policy, carbon pricing, consumer preferences or even severe weather events, so when a customer or an investor asks what you are doing on the sustainability front, you can give a clear and confident response.
Investors, customers and regulators have clued in to greenwashing and are stepping up enforcement. By Stephan Liozu from Industry Week • Reposted: July 21, 2023
The era of making fake and false sustainability claims is over. Consumers, NGOs, investors, and regulators are watching closely and are holding businesses accountable. Think twice before making sustainability claims. Do what you say and say what you do. The number of greenwashing lawsuits have exploded for the past five years. A 2020 report by Foley and Lardner reported a doubling of greenwashing lawsuits in the oil and gas industry in just 5 years.
Lawsuits are public and at times very costly. They touch all sectors across all geographies. Let us look at some examples.
Delta Airlines is facing a class action lawsuit over claims that it misrepresented its environmental impact by presenting itself in advertising and promotional activities as being “carbon neutral.”
Nike is being sued by a consumerbecause they “deceive consumers into believing that they are receiving products that are ‘sustainable,’ ‘made with recycled fibers,” and can reduce one’s carbon footprint in a move to “zero carbon and zero waste.
Hyundai Motor UK was fined for claiming that if 10,000 of their hydrogen-powered Nexo cars were on the road, the carbon emission reduction would be the equivalent of planting 60,000 trees
Deutsche Bank is under investigation by regulators in U.S. and Europe because the bank’s asset management arm allegedly sold investment products worth $1 trillion as more environmentally friendly and “sustainable” than they actually were.
Walmart was fined $3 million for making deceptive green claims” about some textile products.
Shell’s 11 board directors were sued for breach of their legal duties under the Companies Act when for adopting and implementing a so-called “Energy Transition Strategy” that fails to align with the Paris Agreement.
Let us start by defining what greenwashing means. It is a practice used by businesses to represent themselves as more sustainable than they truly are. It includes providing misleading information regarding a product’s sustainability or labeling an offer as “green” when it is not.
Greenwashing is not a static concept. It occurs on a spectrum, ranging from wishful thinking to outright deceit. Greenwashing can also be unintentional, as rules and regulations change over time. Finally, it now extends to broader sustainability concepts such as social good and human rights. Government enforcement actions and civil suits alleging greenwashing are on the rise through a myriad of different laws, including securities regulations, consumer protection laws, fraud and misrepresentation statutes and advertising standards. Bottom line, it is serious business!
I propose five steps to avoid greenwashing-related litigation.
1. Review the claims you are making across your business: Conduct an internal inventory of what claims are made and communicated to the market through all the formal and informal channels. That includes written and verbal claims. You might be surprised by the lack of governance and the variability of claims made at the divisional and regional level.
2. Review the exposure related to claims and the quality of the back-up data: Based on this inventory, evaluate the level of risks associated with the most definitive sustainability claims: The above-mentioned lawsuit examples provide a good illustration of how companies might potentially be exposed to greenwashing claims. One of the lessons to be taken from recent legal filings is that companies should avoid sweeping statements about their sustainability efforts. If a company can support concrete statements with concrete data, they are better able to neutralize and defend the greenwashing claims that are now flooding the litigation landscape.
3. Provide training on ESG, green marketing and the associated risks: Part of the sustainability and ESG capability building program should include training on greenwashing and about making sustainability claims in sales and marketing. Teams should be aware of the risks of making unfounded or exaggerated claims. In addition, the same teams should understand the need for solid and concrete data to support claims (including customer data, research data and technical data).
4. Establish a dynamic review of changes in the regulatory landscape and update the governance model: If you pay attention to sustainability reporting requirements, you realize the level of dynamism. Rules and regulations are changing by industry and by country. If you work across many industrial verticals, regulatory changes might happen without your realizing it. Dynamism therefore relates to the speed and complex nature of changes in your regulatory landscape. A review combines the use of the right regulatory benchmark software as well as the involvement of internal experts who scan the landscape. It is really hard to keep up. You might be compliant today but miss an important update in reporting requirements that could impact your sustainability, marketing and communication strategies.
5. If in doubt, bring in the experts. experts include suppliers, consultants, and your internal risk management teams. Do not improvise. It could be costly. Establish regular reviews of your marketing and sales materials by these experts as part of the governance process. Quickly take action if your claims are overstated or non-complaint.
If you are an industrial organization, you do not want to be on the naughty list of greenwashers. That is a given. You must have an internal discussion about the claims you are making to avoid potential risks of litigation. Remember that your customers, investors and regulators might be more sophisticated that you are, and they might reverse-engineer your claims. So, do what you say and say what you do.
Stephan Liozu is founder of Value Innoruption Advisors, a consulting boutique specializing in industrial pricing, XaaS pricing and value-based pricing. He is also the co-founder of Pricing for the Planet, which specializes in pricing for sustainability. Stephan has 30 years of experience in the industrial sector with companies like Owens Corning, Saint-Gobain, Freudenberg and Thales.
By Christopher Faires,Postdoctoral Researcher in Supply Chain Management, Iowa State University and Robert Overstreet, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management, Iowa State University via The Conversation • Reposted: July 20, 2023
Back-to-school sales are underway, and people across the country will be shopping online to fill up backpacks, lockers and closets – and they’ll be taking advantage of free returns.
In 2022, retail returns added up to more than US$800 billion in lost sales. The transportation, labor, and logistics involved raised retailers’ costs even higher. Product returns also increase pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste in landfills, where many returned products now end up.
So how can retailers fix this problem and still provide quality customer service?
We conductresearch in reverse logistics, focusing primarily on the intersection of retail returns and customer behavior. Here are some insights that can help reduce the abuse of free returns and lower costs without losing quality.
Nudging: In-store vs. shipped returns
Where a product is returned makes a difference. Items returned to the store can be restocked an average of 12 to 16 days faster than those that are mailed. Mailed returns also cost companies more: The difference between the most expensive shipped returns and least expensive in-store returns is $5 to $6 per item. That adds up quickly.
Studies show that customers may be willing to change their return behavior – with a little help.
Behavioral nudges are a technique used in decision-making to steer a person toward a specific behavior. Putting candy at eye-level at the grocery store checkout counter to encourage impulse purchases is an example, or making employee participation in a 401(k) savings program the default option. Another type of nudge involves providing more information.
If you’ve ever shopped online and seen statements like “10 out of 10 customers recommend this product” or “Only 2 items left in stock,” you have experienced the use of information to influence your decision. Nudges emphasizing sustainability may also appeal to customers and have a positive impact on return behavior.
Returning items to a store can avoid extra transportation, shipping and packaging, saving money and avoiding waste and emissions. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
In a recent survey, 94% of merchants said customers were concerned about sustainability, according to a report from Happy Returns, a logistics firm that works with retailers.
However, a much lower percentage of customers actually make sustainable return decisions. That suggests that customers do not fully understand the environmental impact of their return choices – and it offers a way for retailers to help.
Our research found that when customers were given information about the environmental impact of the different return options, they were nearly 17 times more likely to choose an in-store return rather than returning an item by mail. Nudges like this offer a simple and inexpensive way for retailers to alter customer behavior in favor of sustainability.
Picking up returns to speed up the process
Some customers request to return an item but then wait weeks before mailing it. It’s known as customer procrastination, and it also has a cost. The longer these products remain unprocessed, the more value they can lose.
High-priced electronics, such as laptops and tablets, have short product life cycles and lose value quickly, sometimes at a rate of 1% per week. Seasonal items, such as back-to-school supplies or winter coats, become more difficult to resell if retailers get them back on shelves after demand has bottomed out. A returned item’s resale value determines its destination: It can end up back on store shelves, sold to liquidators for pennies on the dollar or sent to a landfill.
Transportation is a large expense for retail returns, for both companies and the planet. AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
A home pickup service for time-sensitive returns could reduce delays in a way that is also useful to the customer. A small number of pickup vehicles collecting returns from customers could avoid multiple shipments, reducing total miles traveled and cutting vehicle emissions, while also avoiding the need for each return to be individually packaged.
Our research found that a pickup service could help retailers collect returns faster and reduce product value loss, particularly for high-priced products and products that lose value quickly, such as consumer electronics.
How to change policies without losing customers
While several retailers have stopped offering free returns or changed their return policies over the past year, our research suggests that changes affecting all customers might not be the best choice.
Broad policy changes that affect everyone might involve limiting the number of returns per customer, charging a fee for returns or shortening the window for returns. An alternative is a targeted return policy that applies only to people who abuse the system. For example, retailers can restrict free returns for people who repeatedly buy more items than they intend to keep, knowing they can return the rest.
Offering free returns carries a cost for retailers, but ending return policies can also turn off customers. Photo: Johannes Eisele / AFP via Getty Images
We conducted two studies to explore how customers would view changes to a retailer’s return policies.
In the first study, 460 participants were significantly more likely to speak negatively about the retailer – a fictitious company, in this case – when the retailer’s returns policy change applied to everyone and affected everyone equally.
Our follow-up study asked 100 online customers about their thoughts regarding generalized versus targeted policy changes. When the return policy change targeted customers who abused returns, 44% of the participants expressed positive emotions, and only 13% expressed negative emotions.
Those positive emotions included comments like, “I would feel proud of the company for taking action against people who try to cheat the system.” Such responses indicated that participants understood that cheaters were increasing the price paid by everyone.
But when the return policy change applied to everyone, 64% of the participants expressed negative emotions. Nearly half indicated they would speak negatively about the policy change to family and friends, and 42% said they would shop at another store.
Other ways to help customers make better decisions
Retailers can also change the online shopping experience before the customer makes a purchase to avoid the need for returns.
One way is to obtain detailed customer feedback on returns and use that to provide better product descriptions to customers. Another is to avoid incentivizing the wrong behavior. Well-intentioned free shipping on orders over a set dollar amount could encourage customers to overpurchase and later return products.
Posting videos of items for sale can help buyers spot problems that photos might hide. Virtual fitting rooms that use an avatar of the customer to try on clothes virtually can help customers choose the right size the first time.
There is no doubt that managing retail returns is a difficult task. To make the process more sustainable, retailers need to help customers make choices that limit the need for a return or that minimize the impact of a return on the environment and, of course, the retailer’s bottom line.
CNH Industrial worked with Monarch Tractor to create the New Holland T4 Electric Power, an all-electric utility tractor with zero tailpipe emissions. Photo: CNH Industrial
By Tina Casey from Triple Pundit • Reposted: July 19, 2023
With their reliance on massive combines and other large pieces of diesel-powered equipment, the agriculture and construction industries present a major challenge for electrification. Nevertheless, suppliers are beginning to offer electric options, and the global firm CNH Industrial illustrates how careful strategizing can yield rapid results.
A head start on electrification
The Electrification Portfolio Management team is a relatively new addition to CNH Industrial as the electrification industry picked up steam over recent years. The sector’s rapid rise has enabled CNH Industrial to recruit talent from a deep pool of accomplished electrification experts.
“Now that the technology is known, there is a well-defined supply chain and expertise in the market, we decided to look at the market and bring in that expertise,” said Mario de Amicis, head of the CNH Industrial electrification team.
Knowing both the customer and the technology is another foundation of the company’s strategy. While some firms have gained publicity by electrifying massive pieces of machinery, CNH Industrial assessed the demand for relatively small, lightweight utility tractors, taking particular note of the specific benefits that electrification would bring to customers.
Collaborating to accelerate electrification
Another leg of the strategy involves forming partnerships with experienced electrification companies, helping to accelerate the timeline from concept to market. For its inaugural electric tractor project, CNH Industrial enlisted the U.S. firm Monarch Tractor as a strategic partner.
The result was a prototype version of the T4 Electric Power, an all-electric utility tractor for CNH Industrial’s New Holland Agriculture brand. The prototype was produced in record time and unveiled at the company’s tech day event in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2022.
A production model will extend to CNH Industrial’s Case IH brand as well, where the company has also introduced an all-electric mini-excavator.
Electric vs. diesel vehicles: Compare and contrast
Around 70 percent of the CNH Industrial’s electrification team comes from the automotive industry, de Amicis said. That experience shows up in T4 features that have become standard fare in electric vehicles, including battery range that can last up to a day depending on the type of work. Another key element is fast-charging capability: a bi-directional charging system enables the tractor to provide power to electric tools (such as welding machines and drills) and function as a generator for emergency or daily use.
The commercial version of the T4 will launch with remote and autonomous features. Similar to those in other electric vehicles, these elements are expected to result in significant productivity improvements.
“Farmers can remotely activate the tractor via a smartphone app,” the company detailed in a recent announcement. “Shadow Follow Me mode lets operators sync machines to work together. A 360-degree perception system detects and avoids obstacles. Telematics and auto guidance keep all functions in check for operators.”
CNH Industrial also took care to incorporate a power take-off feature and other standard elements for attaching implements to a tractor, with a high-tech twist. The T4 comes with a fleet management controller that recognizes and links the attachments, enabling farmers to run the tractor remotely through all stages of use.
All the benefits of electrification
As with all electric vehicles, the T4 eliminates tailpipe emissions and offers a significant savings on operating costs. CNH Industrial estimates a savings up to 90 percent over the cost of fueling and maintaining a diesel engine. The electric drive also delivers improvements in responsiveness, traction control and all-around handling, according to the company.
In terms of agricultural use, the electric tractor eliminates the risk of soil contamination from spills or accidents, de Amicis said. That’s an especially important consideration for regenerative agriculture, which prioritizes soil health.
On a more holistic basis, regenerative practices also prioritize worker health, making a zero-emission tractor all the more attractive.
The T4 reduces noise by up to 90 percent, according to company estimates, and tamps down on vibrations, too. That’s a significant improvement in the well-being of both workers and farm animals, while lessening disturbance for nearby neighbors.
Similar benefits are at work in CNH Industrial’s electric mini-excavator. It is sized to enable it to pass through doorways and conduct work indoors, free of the diesel fumes and noise of conventional equipment.
Next steps for decarbonization
CNH Industrial also offers farmers a methane biofuel option for New Holland’s T7 and T6 tractors. These models are a particularly good fit for livestock farms with digester equipment, which extract biogas from manure.
“Farmers grow crops and use waste products to generate biomethane, which powers the tractor, which, in turn, helps to grow those very crops,” New Holland’s website reads.
Electrifying combines and larger pieces of equipment involves another set of challenges. Here, CNH Industrial is focusing on a hybrid strategy to satisfy customer demand for both performance and efficiency, while also achieving a sharp reduction in carbon emissions, de Amicis said.
“Battery-electric, with no combustion, is a really good application for small machines,” he explained. “But when we move up, we know that — due to the limit of the power density and cost of the battery — we need to talk about hybridization for medium to large machines.
Much of the equipment attached to farm and construction vehicles is driven by hydraulic systems, which lend themselves to electrification.
“Electrification is an opportunity for efficiency,” de Amicis said. “A tractor is pointless alone. It is intended to pull and provide energy for something else — for implements. There is a lot of opportunity because of the hydraulics in implements, and if we move to electrification, we can improve controllability.”
Beyond EV batteries
As much as CNH Industrial and other firms have been helped along their electrification journey by the size and maturity of the on-road electric vehicle market, further progress in the off-road area will require a tailored approach.
The next step involves forming new supply chain partnerships to develop a battery designed specifically for high-voltage systems, de Amicis said. “We can’t simply copy and paste what the automotive industry is doing. Due to the specific requirements linked with our environment, a customized solution is required.”
The decarbonization of the agriculture and construction industries is only just beginning. But equipment suppliers such as CNH Industrial are poised to overcome the technology challenges and accelerate the transition away from fossil energy.
Hot Bread Kitchen is a New York City-based nonprofit organization that creates economic opportunity for immigrant women and people of color with training and job placement in the food industry. (Image courtesy of Hot Bread Kitchen)
When we look at what it takes to be successful in the workplace — and what makes a workplace successful — it becomes immediately apparent that workers need agency over their choices, goals and actions. It’s also clear that women and people who identify beyond the gender binary are systematically denied agency in the workplace — as in, the opportunity to make decisions, take purposeful action and pursue goals.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted myriad barriers to women’s agency in the workplace, attributable to outdated societal gender norms. In the first months of the pandemic in the United States, women’s employment fell precipitously in comparison to men. The reason? Women still tend to be more likely than men to leave their jobs or downsize their positions to take care of children and/or elderly family members when the need arises.
For those that remain in the workforce, factors limiting the agency of women and gender-expansive people abound. Women’s agency is hindered because they are more likely to fill service-industry jobs that tend to offer limited flexibility or benefits, and women with lower educational attainment are hit the hardest.
Transgender and gender-expansive people face workplace barriers due to being generally underrepresented in the U.S. workforce, and consistently enduring threats of violence, discrimination and stigma. Lack of guaranteed healthcare or paid leave, limited access to childcare, inflexible schedules, fewer opportunities to build knowledge and skills, and much more intersect to limit women and trans people’s freedom to pursue their professional goals.
This shift toward lower workforce participation among women and trans people — and the increased gender inequality that follows — has lasting implications for the future options and decision-making of workers, not to mention for younger generations. Further, lack of workforce diversity is both a result of, and leads to, lack of leadership diversity, further entrenching these conditions.
Mindful of lessons learned from the pandemic, and with the knowledge that women and gender-expansive people are critical to business’ success, we are more aware than ever that organizations and workers excel when they are led with wisdom and compassion. When ranked by their employees, 55 percent of women leaders were perceived to have these two critical traits, versus 27 percent of men. The point is not that women are necessarily better leaders, but rather that they tend to embrace leadership practices that foster more inclusive work environments for everyone, which in turn creates a bulwark against the trends listed above.
The existing gender gap in workplace leadership has real ramifications for the bottom line and for our culture. When various industries’ current leaders (who, generally speaking, tend to be men) continue to take a “traditional” approach to leadership and company policies — one that favors business-as-usual over humanity and equity — it further entrenches norms that exclude women and gender-nonconforming people from leadership positions, diminishes overall productivity, and has larger implications for generational wealth. And, as we saw in the early days of the pandemic, these approaches can push women out of the workforce entirely and limit agency for the longer term.
By embracing an approach focused on wisdom and compassion, employers — from major corporations to local nonprofit organizations — can play an important role in advocating for women’s and gender-expansive people’s agency and success in the workforce and beyond, ensuring all workers have the resources they need to excel at work and at home.
Hot Bread Kitchen provides immigrant women and people of color with culinary skills training and professional readiness programs, job placement, food business entrepreneurship assistance, social services support, bridge training, an extensive employer network, and more. (Image: Wini Lao for Hot Bread Kitchen)
How Hot Bread Kitchen supports empowered workers
This is where Hot Bread Kitchen comes in. Hot Bread Kitchen is a New York City-based nonprofit organization that creates economic opportunity for immigrant women and people of color using the vibrant food industry as a catalyst for personal and professional growth.
We support our program members — who are disproportionately affected by social and economic barriers to wealth generation and long-term stability — as they pursue their career ambitions. We support women and gender-expansive people by providing culinary skills training and professional readiness programs, job placement, food business entrepreneurship assistance, social services support, bridge training, an extensive employer network, and more.
In the years since our founding, it has become clear that these strategies are critical tools for advancing women’s ability to find and sustain employment, grow in their careers, make choices for their families, and achieve their goals.
This holistic approach has been an evolving aspect of Hot Bread Kitchen’s model. When our organization started in 2008, we were a bakery with a simple, but important, mission: teach women bakery skills and connect them with food industry employers to secure jobs. Many other workforce development programs still drive toward a similar goal today: get people who are looking for work in the door, give them relevant skills training, and connect them with a job.
While there’s no arguing that this is an important objective, working side-by-side with our participants over the years has evolved our understanding of what it means to ensure women’s agency, a thriving career, or a meaningful public life. At Hot Bread Kitchen, we learned that for our members to be successful in the long run, we needed to do more — to take an approach that supports the whole person, not just the worker.
Empowering women to succeed in the workplace demands a comprehensive approach to overcoming obstacles, both at work and beyond. But what exactly does this look like, and what can you do to help?
In 2018, Everlane made an environmental commitment to eliminate all virgin plastic from its supply chain. For Earth Month in 2023, the brand celebrated its progress with a limited-edition collection of “ReTrack” styles. Photo: Courtesy of Everlane
By Maura Brannigan from Fashionista via Yahoo Life • Reposted: July 18, 2023
As the fashion industry becomes more and more implicated in the climate crisis, brands and retailers are beginning to take more and more responsibility for their roles in it.
“Responsibility” takes many forms, of course: There’s true accountability and transparency, and then there’s greenwashing, in which companies of all makes and models invest more in marketing themselves as being sustainable than in tangibly tackling their environmental impact. It’s no surprise that the former is easier — and, often, more appealing — than the latter. That’s because in fashion, the climate crisis is an issue of systemic proportions. But a growing number of businesses are making key C-suite hires to rebuild those systems from the inside.
Enter the chief sustainability officer, a role tasked with addressing an organization’s approach to climate responsibility and, theoretically, minimizing the company’s environmental impact. And the job description is being written in real time.
“One of the toughest challenges in my career was creating a job for myself that hadn’t existed before,” says Reformation‘s Chief Sustainability Officer and VP of Operations Kathleen Talbot, who first joined the brand in 2014. “Sustainability was a brand-new field. When I reached out to Reformation, I had no background in fashion or business, but I was committed to learning and passionate about helping define what sustainability would look like at Reformation in the long term.”
Now a decade in, Talbot has worked to define Reformation’s environmental practices, from investing in green building infrastructure to publishing the brand’s quarterly Sustainability Report. But every retailer is venturing into this work from its own unique starting block, which makes this position a particularly challenging one.
Ahead, we spoke with folks at companies like Everlane and Depop about what a chief sustainability officer (or an equivalent title) actually does, why their job matters and how to break into the field for yourself.
How to get your big break in sustainability
Full-time roles in the intersection of fashion and sustainability are few and far between, which means that the people who currently hold them are at the top of their proverbial game — and have the experience to show for it.
While this often takes the form of a stacked resume, those in the field have an innate fascination with and appreciation of this planet, as well as knowledge of how to do better by it.
“I joke that I fulfill every stereotype you may have of a Seattleite,” says Reformation’s Talbot. “I’ve been interested in sustainability my whole life and have been aware from an early age that our future is dependent on changing our relationship with the environment.”
Talbot began her career in academia, having gotten a master’s degree in sustainability before looking to find ways to bridge the concepts she was teaching with action. Consumer products presented a new challenge: “There’s such an enormous opportunity to make things differently.”
Like Talbot, Kirsten Blackburn entered the apparel space from the outside, having previously worked in the policymaking and nonprofit sectors. While building out the advocacy program at The Conservation Alliance, which funds and partners with grassroots organizations working to protect wild places across North America, she began to explore the ways in which consumer structures, like fashion brands, can most efficiently move policy.
“When businesses pool resources and advocate for causes they care about, it makes a difference, more so than other actors in the policymaking space,” says Blackburn, director of Keen‘s environmental and social justice program, Keen Effect. “Brands — particularly privately-held, family-run brands like Keen — have a really huge opportunity to affect change.”
Justine Porterie, Depop‘s director of sustainability and DEI, entered sustainability from the corporate side, supporting large investors and fast-moving consumer-goods companies, like Unilever and PwC, with their responsible investment and sustainability strategies. After nearly a decade, Porterie joined a social incubator that investigated business opportunities to turn waste into resources.
“I stumbled upon fashion and was shocked by how wasteful the industry is,” she says. “One truckload of clothes ending up in the landfill every second — that’s mad, and what triggered the idea for my own company.”
Called Outstand, Porterie’s business specialized in curating secondhand fashion as an answer to curbing apparel’s waste crisis. She connected with Maria Raga, Depop’s former CEO, not long after, and began consulting with the peer-to-peer social e-commerce platform to help create its first sustainability strategy. Porterie officially joined the team in February 2020, and the rest, as they say, is history.
What your day-to-day might look like
At the highest level, a director of sustainability is responsible for identifying new ways to incorporate a climate focus across a brand’s operations. It’s a broad and seemingly ambitious set of obligations, but experts explain that typically, their job descriptions can be broken down into various subsets, including (but not limited to) supply chain management, political advocacy and PR and marketing.
To execute this position effectively, these folks need to touch every part of the business. At Reformation, for example, Talbot leads a team of six sustainability professionals to rally the brand’s 1,000-person employee base around a high-level vision.
“I consider us to be catalysts,” she says. “How do you actually adopt material innovations and key transitions? Identify and build relationships with strategic suppliers for decarbonization programs? Reduce transportation emissions? This work happens through daily decisions and doing ‘business per usual’ in a different way, so we’re constantly facilitating and pushing the team forward.”
The role extends beyond internal communications, of course: To functionally move the needle, those actually consuming the product need to “buy in” to the mission, too. This is where annual “sustainability reports” come in: They have different names from brand to brand, but serve a similar purpose of outlining goals and, more crucially, holding themselves — and their progress — accountable as they work toward those goals.
Everlane’s Impact Report, for example, outlines a short- and long-term strategy around its sustainability objectives by establishing three pillars: 1) Keep Earth clean, 2) Keep Earth cool and 3) Do right by people. Katina Boutis, the brand’s director of sustainability, isn’t only responsible for defining these intentions —she’s also tasked with bringing them to life.
“Our success hinges on our customers being brought along this journey with us,” says Boutis. “A really big part of what we’re doing is translating the work we do behind the scenes, not just to our own internal teams, but also to our broader community that we’re trying to foster.”
The skills you’ll want to hone
There are a number of opportunities in sustainable fashion, and Depop’s Porterie finds they all require a slightly different skillset. Working in the sustainability team at a fashion company is different than in, say, business development at a circular fashion company, or in the field at a regenerative cotton farm. But all three positions contribute to advancing the sustainability agenda in the industry. For the wider team at Depop, stakeholder management is particularly essential — after all, Porterie says, their aim is to make their agenda everyone’s agenda, so influence is critical.
“I always recommend that people keen to break into sustainable fashion start by interrogating what they’re good at and what excites them first,” she says. “Is it data, reporting, policy, technology, agriculture, marketing, design?”
Beyond individual interests, these positions also require a profound and technical understanding of sustainability and the wider fashion industry. For Kenneth Loo, co-founder and CEO of communications agency Chapter 2, this includes knowledge of the reengineering of production processes, recycling, certifications and various sustainable materials and chemicals.
“The narrative has shifted,” says Loo, whose Sustainability division at Chapter 2 supports clients in the clean-fashion spaces. “We no longer discuss mere factories, but technology platforms striving for innovation and ‘future-proofing’ that seek recognition from industry leaders.”
Finally, experts recommend a quality slightly less quantifiable, and that’s work ethic, fueled by an unrelenting growth mindset. At Keen, Blackburn describes this as a “fail-fast and fail-forward mentality,” to take the challenging, largely systemic problems you’ve been handed and come up with creative solutions to fix them.
“How can you take learnings from something that didn’t go well and celebrate it? Every day we’re uncovering something we don’t know, and that’s not unique to KEEN — that’s sustainability and climate writ large,” says Blackburn. “We’re hoping that we’re collectively doing more of the right things so that we’ll collectively make an impact in the future.”
What you’re working toward
“Sustainability is now non-negotiable in fashion, thankfully,” says Reformation’s Talbot. “Given our industry’s outsized environmental impact, there’s more customer demand to integrate sustainability into brand and product than ever. It follows that we’re seeing more career opportunities in the field open up, even compared to just five years ago.”
In short: We’re at a tipping point because people — and regulators — are no longer having it. Depop research shows that 60% of the platform’s users would rather buy from a company with environmental and social standards, and they’re not afraid to walk away or even publicly boycott those who do not meet their standards.
“Navigating increasing stakeholder expectations and changing legislative landscapes alongside business priorities is not an easy task,” says Porterie. “Until sustainability is entirely embedded in the DNA and ways of working of fashion companies, there will be space for sustainability professionals to keep on driving the agenda from within.”
These professionals have their work cut out for them, to be sure, but progress is afoot: Just last month, EU parliament voted to support a set of anti-fast-fashion recommendationsthat force the fashion industry to operate more sustainably. Then there’s New York’s Fashion Act, which aims to hold major clothing labels (i.e., those with over $100 million in global revenue) accountable for their environmental and social impacts.
“These policies are not something that I think anyone would’ve necessarily thought would be possible,” says Everlane’s Boutis. “Sustainability professionals are critical at any level in any organization, but I think there’s a special place in certain industries, like fashion, that have this ability to cut through cultural movements and spaces in that way.”
‘Regenerative’ has become the latest trend — a label that’s stuck on anything as a way of making it sound positive and reassuring. To guarantee genuine progress, we need a universal set of principles underpinning regenerative economics and a standardised way of quantifying success. By Amanda Powell-Smith from Sustainable Brands • Reposted: July 17, 2023
“Regenerative” is the new “sustainable.”
Globally, mentions of the word have gone up by 43 percent in online news stories and 282 percent on social media in the last year. Increasingly favoured by brands and companies to describe their positive approach to environmental challenges, regenerative is being stuck on everything from architecture to fashion, tea, travel, skincare and even leather.
But what does it really mean? Originally, it was mostly used to describe an approach to agriculture. Regenerative farming is about producing food while restoring degraded soils and depleted wildlife populations and plant species. In this context, the use of the word ‘regenerative’ makes sense — it’s about keeping living ecosystems in balance. Metrics exist to measure tangible outcomes, like an increased percentage of organic matter in the soil or an upswing in insect numbers. We can track change.
Things become trickier when we apply the term ‘regenerative’ to human systems. What does a regenerative economy look like and how do we judge its success? As things stand, the term remains too broad-brush to be able to answer these questions in a consistent and meaningful way.
When applied to economics, it bears many similarities to the idea of a wellbeing economy — which is about healing, recovery and recuperation. However, the use of the word ’wellbeing’ offers much greater clarity because an existing suite of metrics exists to enable measurement of both healthy people and a healthy planet.
For example, the World Health Organization provides global figures on life expectancy and mother-and-child mortality rates. Likewise, for the animal world, the International Union for Conservation of Nature updates a red list of wildlife at threat of extinction. Plant and tree species numbers can similarly be tracked; no equivalent exists for the descriptor ‘regenerative.’
To guarantee genuine progress, we need a universal set of principles underpinning regenerative economics and a standardised way of quantifying success. Otherwise, the ‘regenerative’ epithet will lose its meaning and become just another empty badge exploited by greenwashers and climate deniers alike.
For those of us working in communications, this means — as ever — being careful with our use of language. We mustn’t decide that the word ‘sustainable’ is no longer important or relevant. Its meaning is critical but remains widely misunderstood with many aligning it to the environment only — when it’s about building an inclusive and resilient future for both people and the planet.
The United Nations defines sustainable as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs;’ and we won’t achieve that without the repair, renewal and regeneration of our natural world.
We can’t let ‘regenerative’ become the latest trend — a label that’s stuck on anything as a way of making it sound positive and reassuring. Those who want to use words such as ‘sustainable’ and ‘regenerative’ must always ally them with real substance, thought and impact. Words are important and what they stand for matters to us all.
Over two-thirds of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 are likely to purchase from companies committed to Sustainability. From Viant • Reposted: July 17, 2023
IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jun. 6, 2023– Viant Technology Inc.(NASDAQ: DSP), a leading people-based advertising technology company, today released the findings from its new Consumer Sustainability Study, revealing that over two-thirds of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 are likely to purchase from companies committed to sustainability. Furthermore, of the more than 1,000 consumers surveyed, 69 percent agreed that businesses have a responsibility to reduce their environmental impact. As sustainability priorities continue to grow among brands, Viant’s new report underscores the importance of sustainability for consumers and how sustainability is a key driver of consumer purchasing decisions.
Key takeaways from Viant’s Consumer Sustainability Study:
When it comes to sustainability, consumers prefer action over words: When asked how important it was for brands to take action towards reducing their carbon footprint, versus just talking about their commitment to sustainability, 65 percent of consumers cited that action was important.
Gen Z and Millennials hold businesses accountable for sustainability: Consumers 18-34 years old feel most strongly that businesses have a responsibility to reduce their environmental impact, more so than those 35 and older.
Renewable energy can positively impact brand perception, especially among younger consumers: Almost three-quarters (74%) of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 expressed that they would view a brand positively if they are utilizing renewable energy sources. When analyzing all age groups (18+) surveyed, 67 percent of consumers cited that they would view a brand positively if they are utilizing renewable energy sources.
“Our latest research demonstrates that consumers are increasingly looking for brands to not only talk about sustainability and about reducing their carbon footprint, but to take real action,” said Jon Schulz, Chief Marketing Officer, Viant. “As sustainability remains top of mind for both brands and their customers, we are pleased to offer our clients a number of leading-edge solutions, including our Adtricity program, which help brands take real action to achieve their sustainability goals.”
To further support brands and agencies in understanding their carbon footprint from advertising, this week Viant launched its new Carbon Emissions Calculator to help advertisers assess the carbon impact of their digital campaigns.
To learn more about the findings from Viant’s Consumer Sustainability Study, please click here.
About Viant’s Consumer Sustainability Study
This survey was fielded online and reached a total of n=1,197 respondents. Respondents were consumers in the US (18+) who were representative of the national population. The survey was fielded between May, 1st, 2023 – May, 2nd, 2023.
AccountAbility, the trusted global ESG Consulting and Standards firm with a three-decade history in guiding leaders to build better companies, is pleased to announce that CEO Sunil (Sunny) A. Misser recently engaged in an exclusive interview with Nareit, the worldwide representative voice for REITs and listed real estate companies with an interest in U.S. Real Estate and Global Capital Markets.
AccountAbility, the trusted global ESG Consulting and Standards firm with a three-decade history in guiding leaders to build better companies, is pleased to announce that CEO Sunil (Sunny) A. Misser recently engaged in an exclusive interview with Nareit, the worldwide representative voice for REITs and listed real estate companies with an interest in U.S. Real Estate and Global Capital Markets.
In the interview, Mr. Misser shared insights on the latest trends in ESG practices, and the evolving landscape of sustainability within the corporate sector. This was framed against the ESG predictions and patterns observed by Mr. Misser over the past decade. Notably, the Consolidation and Standardization of ESG Frameworks and Standards at the highest level, and the significant shift as ESG metrics sit alongside financial metrics in predicting the future health of a company.
“Standardization and Consolidation of ESG Standards, Frameworks, Reporting, and Disclosure has occurred. ESG Metrics are now entering the mainstream of business. With this, ESG metrics will not be used to just report and disclose a company’s financial health, but more importantly predict it,” comments AccountAbility CEO Sunil (Sunny) A. Misser.
Mr. Misser spoke in detail on emerging ESG Trends that are shaping the corporate agenda, including the impact of geopolitical disruption across all facets of the global economy: Disruption of Supply Chains, Cost of Capital, Managing Inflation, Access and Cost of Energy, and Clear Direction of Monetary Policy. Business will need to respond to this New “G” (Geopolitics) in ESG while maximizing resilience to macro shocks and prioritizing uninterrupted service delivery.
Corporate Boards have long played a key role in setting an organizations culture, values, and business practices. Now, the structure of Boards is changing. Mr. Misser spoke to this trend and the emergence of Boards that will be purpose built with diversity of thinking (beyond just diversity of pigmentation) sitting alongside gender, socio-economic, professional, and cultural backgrounds as central to effective, future-focused Boards.
These emerging trends, as detailed within the AccountAbility 7 Sustainability Trends 2023 Report, together with the economic factors impacting specific geographies and industries, make clear the need for companies to integrate sustainability into their core business strategies to remain competitive and resilient in today’s rapidly evolving global market.
The AccountAbility 7 Sustainability Trends 2023 – Highlights
The Net Zero Landscape: Against an unprecedented volume of net zero commitments, what are the risks for those that fail to act, and the opportunities for businesses to lead?
Stakeholder Activism Is Getting Louder: As businesses face increasing pressure to take a stance and demonstrate actionable progress on a range of ESG issues, how best can leaders balance this with the imperative to maximize shareholder value?
Geopolitics: The New “G” In ESG: In an era of increasingly globalized business operations, how can organizations address the outsized role that the new G (Geopolitics) is playing in the business landscape?
Building an Effective, Future-Focused Board: As demands and expectations shift, how best to equip future-focused Boards to meet the requirements of the evolving business environment?
Next Generation ESG Disclosure and Reporting: A shift from voluntary to mandatory ESG Disclosure is set to heighten attention on corporate sustainability disclosure practices. How will these changes impact ESG Reporting?
The Road to a Sustainable Value Chain: How can the integration of sustainability criteria into supply chains drive organizational shifts towards a more context-aware and competitive value chain?
Nature Based Assets Will Drive Valuations: As nature-based assets are increasingly recognized for their significant impact on valuations, what steps can companies take to achieve nature-based performance goals?
AccountAbility is committed to fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration and to helping advance the Global ESG agenda. By engaging in discussions with industry leaders such as Nareit, and with their 7 Sustainability Trends 2023 Report, the firm continues to advance the collective understanding of ESG trends, challenges, and opportunities that are shaping the business landscape.
The full Nareit interview with Mr. Misser can be viewed here.
A growing industry solution to plastic packaging pollution is to create food products that are more stable and compatible with more minimal and sustainable packaging materials. By Marty Kolewe from Sustainable Brands • Reposted: July 15, 2023
Addressing this issue requires a shift in how we develop and package our products — and compostable packaging plays a significant role in enabling a sustainable future. By increasing awareness and educating consumers on the benefits of viable, compostable alternatives, individuals can make more informed purchasing decisions and drive positive change.
But the bottom line is that the only path to sustainability is for industry to break its dependence on plastic. One widespread belief fueling our habit is that the functionality of sustainable packaging materials needs to match that of traditional plastic. This isn’t necessarily true; there are many applications where the functionality of plastic is just not needed. Take, for instance, all the baggies of screws and parts that come with an item that needs to be assembled — several more sustainable packaging options could get that job done.
Food packaging, on the other hand, does require certain functionalities. It protects the food from the environment, aids in preservation, and helps maintain the integrity and safety of the product. However, foods have varying packaging needs; so, there’s no quick fix. It’s important that we work together and think creatively to develop and support food packaging solutions that are both functional and sustainable.
Admittedly, adopting sustainable packaging is not without its challenges. Governments and regulatory bodies play a crucial role. While it appears highly unlikely that any domestic regulatory body will tax — or really, in any way discourage — the manufacturing of something as prevalent and lucrative as plastic packaging, they can incentivize the use of sustainable materials through credits or offsets for the incremental costs. Creating a favorable regulatory environment encourages companies to prioritize sustainable packaging, which would lead to more widespread adoption and a corresponding reduction in negative environmental impacts.
Valid concerns over product integrity and compatibility also pose technical hurdles. Finding materials that meet a product’s unique requirements can be particularly difficult, especially for foods with a high moisture content — such as yogurt or hummus — that do not have an inherent barrier like that of fresh fruit. While environmentally unsustainable, the water barrier functionality that plastic packaging provides is critical.
Overcoming these challenges requires innovation and long-term investment. Brands and manufacturers have the opportunity to lead the change by integrating compostable packaging options and supporting the development of new materials. Inertia within established supply chains can be overcome through the adoption of long-term impact innovation and support from well-established companies or ESG-focused investors.
But what does this innovation look like? What should these brands and manufacturers be investing in? It’s time to reevaluate how we’re approaching the solution to our packaging problem: Change the product, not just the packaging.
It is possible to create food products that are more stable and compatible with more minimal and sustainable packaging solutions. Modifying a food itself, so that it requires less functionality (e.g. barrier protection) from its packaging, allows for compatibility with a broader set of materials that include more sustainable and bio-based solutions. Integrating barrier materials in the form of coatings or outer layers is an underutilized but growing solution in sustainable packaging. Companies such as Mori and Apeel make edible barriers that are designed to be applied to fresh foods’ existing peels and to extend shelf life. Foodberry uses biomimicry to replicate the properties of fruit skins and peels — creating coatings made of fibers, phytonutrients and minerals that manufacturers can use to create self-contained, bite-size versions of their signature products. The coatings create a functional, edible barrier — just like fruit skins found in nature — meaning that even hydrated foods can be distributed in bulk, or sold in compostable or biodegradable packaging.
The benefits of sustainable packaging extend to businesses, consumers, the environment and the entire economy. It stimulates innovation and product differentiation, appealing to consumer preferences for sustainability. By bringing new solutions to the market, businesses can leverage sustainability as an innovation catalyst — reducing environmental harm, improving human health, and fostering a healthier and more sustainable future.
But progress is being made in laying the strategic groundwork for embedding sustainability into organizations’ DNA. By Vincent Ryan from CFO • Reposted: July 13, 2023
“Sustainability is probably one of the biggest culture change jobs or change management jobs within a company,” said Levi Strauss’s chief sustainability officer at a National Retail Federation trade show earlier this year. “And if you’re working for a company with a very strong culture, I often find that you can use it to pull your strategy forward,” reported Sourcing Journal.
Building a culture that embraces sustainability can serve as an accelerant, agreed the Conference Board and accounting firm Baker Tilly in a report released on July 10. For example, a prime benefit of embedding sustainability into the culture is ensuring “that sustainability is integrated into the company’s business planning processes and the microdecisions employees make daily,” according to the Conference Board report.
Environmental, social, and governance efforts and sustainability — which the Conference Board defines as “the full range of initiatives designed to promote the long-term welfare of a company, its multiple stakeholders, society at large, and the environment” — are increasingly on the minds of business stakeholders.
In addition to upcoming regulatory mandates, it’s why 494 companies in the S&P 500 disclosed some level of ESG-related information for reporting periods ending in 2021, 30 more than in 2020, according to a recent release from the Center for Audit Quality. And 320 S&P 500 companies disclosed having some ESG metrics audited, up from 282 the year before.
Slow Progress
But reporting is one thing, shifting company culture another.
So far, not many companies that participated in the Conference Board research have reached the goal of deeply embedding sustainability into their companies’ cultures. (The data is from a working group of more than 250 executives from 160 companies that the Conference Board interviewed in multiple sessions over eight months in 2022.)
According to the Conference Board, many companies are laying the essential groundwork before focusing on the cultural aspects.
It may take two to three years before a company begins to make tangible progress on the cultural front.
According to the Conference Board, the “prerequisites” for building a company culture infused with an ethos of sustainability are:
Conducting a strategic analysis to determine the sustainability areas the company should focus on;
determining whether those areas intersect with the company’s business and processes;
setting goals in those key areas and deciding how to provide incentives to achieve them;
establishing appropriate governance structures at the board and management level to achieve those goals; and
developing a core narrative that tells the company’s sustainability story.
“Once a company has those strategic elements in place, it can turn to culture — recognizing that changing culture will take time and resources,” according to the Conference Board report. “Indeed, it may take two to three years before [a] company begins to make tangible progress on the cultural front.”
The CFO’s Role
The CFO would be crucial in at least four of those strategic tasks. But a CFO also has a big responsibility to help the CEO (who the Conference Board says should take the leadership role) build the business case for sustainability and, as part of that, bring in the perspective of investors, business partners, and regulators.
However, CFOs should note that making the case for building a sustainability culture involves “both the positive ROI (return on investment) and the negative ROI (risk of inaction),” according to the Conference Board.
“Explaining the negative consequences of failing to change can be a powerful initial motivator that supports the positive case for how increasing the organization’s focus on sustainability will improve the company’s performance in the marketplace, including the markets for products and services, talent, and capital,” the report said.
Positive ROI shouldn’t be neglected, however. As columnist Steve McNally suggested on CFO.com more than a year ago, “Sustainability initiatives can impact long-term planning and value creation. Seek sustainability initiatives with a positive ROI to benefit the organization’s bottom line.”
Target Middle Management
For a cultural change to take root, it must have widespread employee buy-in. A culture of sustainability requires training employees, instilling in them a sense of personal responsibility and accountability, encouraging cross-functional collaboration, and providing incentives like senior management recognition, compensation, or both to change behaviors.
To do that, the Conference Board recommends focusing on middle management — the people making business unit-level decisions and running day-to-day operations.
“Savvy and well-resourced middle managers build buy-in and participation by translating company vision [into] day-to-day execution.”
IMAGE: ELENA REYGADAS’ ROSETTA RESTAURANT IN MEXICO CITY
The Food Made Good Sustainability Standard is the only certification designed to measure restaurants’ social and environmental impacts, wherever they are in the world. It also highlights areas for improvement and provides credibility in communicating sustainability practices to customers. From Sustainable Brands * Reposted: July 12, 2023
After 15 years of operating in the UK, the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) has launched a globally accessible platform to allow hospitality businesses everywhere to take 360-degree accountability for sustainability to a standard that is recognized by industry and consumers alike.
In response to the universal scale of food-system issues within hospitality, juxtaposed by a genuine desire from chefs and industry workers to contribute to a solution, the SRA has developed the holistic, functional and global Food Made Good Sustainability Standard— which aims to level the playing field by providing businesses with trustworthy, expert-led and up-to-date accreditation, as well as guidance on continued improvement in their commitment to sustainability and credibility in communicating sustainable business practices to customers.
Developed with input from leading food businesses and international experts — including the Ellen McArthur Foundation, WRAP and the Ethical Trade Initiative — the newly global Standard is the only certification specifically designed to measure a restaurant’s social and environmental impact, wherever they are in the world.
The Food Made Good Sustainability Standard builds on The SRA’s signature Food Made Good assessment — which has been the sustainability accreditation of choice for UK foodservice businesses – covering more than 12,000 sites – since its launch in 2010, and has been used as the basis for judging the sustainability award for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and Bars and all of its regional offshoots since 2013. Used by world-renowned chefs — including France’s Raymond Blanc OBE, Mexico’s Elena Reygadas, The Netherlands’ Richard Ekkebus and Spain’s Ángel León, all of whom embrace sustainability as a cornerstone of their cuisine — the new Standard is designed to measure a business’s social and environmental impact and is built on a 10-point framework, organised across three pillars: Sourcing, Society and Environment. In order to be both effective and globally applicable, the Food Made Good Standard is closely aligned with international norms — including the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
“In an environment in which chefs and restaurant operators understand the need to act urgently and decisively, we recognized the need for a holistic framework defining what ‘good’ looks like across both environmental and social issues,” explains Juliane Caillouette Noble, Managing Director of The SRA. “Issues like food waste, treating staff fairly and animal welfare are universal. Now’s the moment for a global conversation about what it means to be a good restaurant in every sense — with a certification that is digestible for every business, supplier, owner and guest. We are setting the Standard by which a restaurant in Buenos Aires, Beijing or Birminghamcan accurately compare its sustainability achievements and join the Food Made Good movement to build a better industry for our planet.”
Since 2010, The SRA has worked to advance sustainability in hospitality across the UK. Now, with the global Food Made Good Standard, it aims to connect businesses around the world to accelerate change towards a hospitality sector that is socially progressive and environmentally restorative. Areas of focus within each of the three pillars include:
Sourcing 1. Celebrate provenance 2. Support farmers and fishers 3. Serve more plants, better meat 4. Source seafood sustainably
Society 5. Treat staff fairly 6. Feed people well 7. Support the community
Environment 8. Reduce your footprint 9. Waste no food 10. Reduce, reuse and recycle
To achieve the Food Made Good Standard, restaurants must submit answers and evidence on the Food Made Good digital platform and must score at least 50% in the evaluation across the three pillars. Each submission is evaluated, evidence-checked and subjected to a final enquiry from SRA experts, before a final report is completed with a score and an action plan for improvement. Those that score 50-59% will be awarded a 1-Star rating; those scoring 60-69%, 2 Stars; and 70%+, 3 Stars.
“The work The SRA is doing through globally standardizing sustainability in our industry is not only inspired but essential,” Chef Blanc says. “We, as restaurateurs and business operators, need to understand where we are today to work out where we’re going tomorrow. By creating the tools needed to turn the individual’s commitment to sustainability into measurable, reportable action, the Standard is offering accountability and transparency, which are fundamental to the future of our livelihoods and indeed our lives.”
The SRA invites any restaurant, anywhere in the world to start its journey at standard.foodmadegood.org. Its ambition is to help 100,000 restaurants to transform what we eat, how we eat and the impact this has on the world by 2030.
By Tina Casey from Triple Pundit • Reposted: July 12, 2023
Leading U.S. retailer Target disappointed human rights organizations earlier this year when it failed to push back against a wave of aggressive anti-LGBTQ behavior related to its Pride Month merchandise. Now Target has another chance to get it right, and the stakes are high.
Target backs down when anti-LGBTQ activists come calling
Anti-LGBTQ activists confronted staff at several Target stores in May, during the runup to Pride Month. Instead of pushing back, Target removed the offending displays. “Target is pulling some LGBTQ merchandise from stores that it rolled out for Pride Month after confrontations with customers,” Jessica Guynn of USA Today reported on May 23.
Guynn cited a statement from Target, in which the company referred to “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety,” as well as “volatile circumstances” and “confrontational behavior” that influenced its decision to remove merchandise.
That decision was roundly criticized by hundreds of human rights groups in a letter organized by the Human Rights Campaign on June 5. However, some saw it as a case of better safe than sorry. The confrontations at Target go beyond the actions of a few scattered individuals. They reflect a dangerous environment of anti-LGBTQ entitlement leading to physical attacks on LGBTQ events and individuals. That includes confrontations sparked by the white supremacist organization Proud Boys, a group the Justice Department has connected to the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021.
This environment of entitlement has built up over years of sustained, state-sanctioned attacks on LGBTQ rights. Critics say former President Donald Trump imprinted anti-LGBTQ activists with approval from the highest office of the land throughout his tenure ending in 2020. That was followed by a fresh torrent of state-based anti-LGBTQ legislation in 2021, on the heels of the January 6 insurrection.
New anti-LGBTQ legislation has been cropping up ever since, including a rising tide of book bans directed against LGBTQ authors. That also includes anti-ESG (environmental, social and governance) legislation, which leans heavily on the “woke capitalism” canard to stop businesses from pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion goals.
State attorneys general double down on hate
Social media has also played a key role in raising the profile of anti-LGBTQ activists. The social media effect burst into full flower in April when activists aimed their fire at a promotional relationship between the trans actor and influencer Dylan Mulaney and the Bud Light brand of AB-InBev.
Rightwing commentators including Matt Walsh said the social media campaign against Bud Light aimed to “make ‘pride’ toxic for brands,” Fortune’s Ellen McGirt reported. Guynn of USA Today quoted another such activist, who wrote on Twitter: “Target deserves the Bud Light treatment. We will work to put the pressure on them.”
Seven state attorneys general — representing Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina — appeared to get the message.
On July 5, they issued a joint public letter to Target CEO Brian C. Cornell that all but threatens legal action unless Target stops selling any “potentially harmful” products to minors. “As the chief legal officers of our States, we are charged with enforcing state laws protecting children and safeguarding parental rights. … In light of these responsibilities, we wish to communicate our concern for Target’s recent ‘Pride’ campaign,” they wrote.
This goes way beyond Pride
The letter sparked a wave of media attention, much of it focused on several products that the attorneys general singled out for removal. However, the letter is far more interesting for its recommendations on what to put in, not what to take out.
“It is likely more profitable to sell the type of Pride that enshrines the love of the United States,” they recommended. “Target’s Pride Campaign alienates whereas Pride in our country unites.”
“We live in a different day and age from our nation’s founding. But certain immutable precepts and principles must always endure so long as America is to remain free and prosperous,” they admonished.
As for what type of products and images reflect “love of the United States” and “immutable precepts and principles,” the letter leaves that up in the air. It does, however, strongly suggest that removing all LGBTQ symbolism from products is just the first volley in an attack on any kind of image that appears to be “anti-Christian.”
“Target also sold products with anti-Christian designs, such as pentagrams, horned skulls and other Satanic products,” the attorneys general note.
More fact-free legal action from the usual suspects
The anti-Christian accusation is sensational, but it appears to be woven out of thin air. The letter apparently refers to images in a weeks-old social media post that were identified as fabricatedback on June 2, yet here they are popping up again in an official letter from seven state attorneys general.
Spotting “anti-Christian designs” where there are none is just one more example of the fact-free thinking that has come to characterize policy-making by many Republican office holders from the Supreme Court on down. It’s no surprise to find the same mindset at work elsewhere in the letter, where the attorneys general attempt to show that Target’s Pride campaign was an abrogation of its fiduciary duty to stock holders.
“The evidence suggests that Target’s directors and officers may be negligent in undertaking the ‘Pride’ campaign, which negatively affected Target’s stock price,” they charge.
That’s news to Wall Street analysts. Target’s stock was on the downswing long before the Pride controversy, falling 32 percent in 2022, according to an April analysis posted on Forbes. The analysis, conducted by Trefis, linked the company’s wavering stock price to “a slowing economy, supply chain worries and shifting consumer sentiment,“ along with inventory issues and higher logistics costs.
By May, MarketWatch discerned a spark of good news. “After a difficult 2022, when Target was one of the more highly visible examples of the inventory glut that plagued retailers last year, the benefits of being cleaner were notable in the [company’s first quarter 2023] report,” D.A. Davidson analyst Michael Baker wrote on the platform.
Bringing the news up to date on July 6, the investor organization Motley Fool was even more optimistic. “Target is dealing with major sales and earnings challenges stemming from a sharp demand shift away from merchandise categories that were booming during the pandemic,” observed Motley Fool reporter Demitri Kalogeropoulos, who completely ignored the steamy rhetoric from anti-LGBTQ activists. “Yet inventory levels are down, potentially setting the business up for a solid rebound over the next few quarters.”
If Target learned anything from Pride Month, it’s that nothing will satisfy anti-LGBTQ activists, whether it’s an unhinged individual loudly confronting a store clerk or a phalanx of state attorneys general quietly issuing letters. The best defense is a good offense, as the saying goes. And the retailer has a real opportunity to change its tune.
By Benson Hill via Food Dive • Reposted: July 12, 2023
The question was simple, yet profound.
We were at a recent conference where startups were pitching creative products to meet the needs of our changing world. The audience was full of executives and investors with the cumulative financial power to fund those changes.
During a conversation about upcycling, a leader from a global CPG beverage powerhouse raised his hand and asked the speaker, “How do you know what you’re doing is the best possible use?”
At first, a few of us were puzzled. Then he explained it was his job to find the best use of their time and money when it came to environmental, social and governance-related initiatives (ESG).
With more options available today for CPG food and beverage manufacturers to create workstreams and dedicate resources to certain initiatives, how do they choose which ones to green light? How do they know where to start or who to trust? And how do they influence authentic action while operating in times of unparalleled scrutiny?
The business world is becoming increasingly more conscious of the impact of ESG, and the food and beverage industry stands at the forefront of industries that can make a positive impact. Many of these companies want to do the right things, but they’re grappling with a unique set of challenges. They strive to avoid greenwashing. They try to reduce their carbon footprint. They focus on minimizing food waste, ensuring ethical sourcing and fostering diversity all the way back to the farm level.
Their willingness to grow and learn means the stage is set for great ESG growth. However, there are still complex hurdles to clear as they sprint from the desire to change to the finish line of ESG-related ROI.
ESG moves the needle, but is it enough?
The good news is positive consumer sentiment toward sustainability and ESG-related purchases have been growing. But there are still gray areas between how customers say they want to live and shop vs. what they actually purchase. Consider this research:
A recent analysis by McKinsey and NielsenIQ found products making ESG-related claims averaged 28% cumulative growth over the last five years (2018-2022), compared to 20% growth for products that made no ESG-related claims.
Meanwhile, an October NielsenIQ report found 78% of consumer respondents said a sustainable lifestyle is important to them.
The ESG-related retail growth stats, while significant, suggest customers don’t always buy sustainable products at a rate that backs up how they say they feel.
So why don’t they? Forty-one percent of NielsenIQ respondents said sustainable products are too expensive, while 35% said it’s hard to find ESG-related products at the store. And perhaps the most telling stat may be who they see as responsible for driving sustainability product changes: 46% said brands were responsible, 40% said local government was responsible and only 37% pointed at consumers themselves.
That misalignment of expectations may further confound CPG executives trying to make the best possible use of their budget when funding ESG products and initiatives. But it does bring one thing into relief: Short of government regulation forcing product changes, evolution in the ESG space rests on CPG’s shoulders.
A framework for vetting potential ESG partners
There are no instant ESG solutions in the CPG space. The sustainability evolution inside your company – and in the market as a whole – requires a staged approach and a fundamental adoption of new ways of working.
That’s why it’s imperative you start your ESG product innovation journey now. Your CPG brand must fully vet, substantiate and compare multiple initiatives to ensure it’s making the right choices.
Savitha Chelladurai, Benson Hill’s Director, ESG & Sustainability, said CPG leaders should think about these five things when evaluating with ESG innovators:
Look for partners – not just suppliers: Find innovators who are willing to develop programs or products together to meet your specific needs.
Validate affluency in ESG: Look for innovators who show they understand your current state and goals, and can help you lead in the space.
Connectors: Find innovators who can bring other partners to the table to jointly develop holistic solutions.
A complete view of sustainability: Find innovators who understand how sustainability goals affect your full organization.
Identify quick wins: Partner with innovators who can implement solutions that work within the context of your current business model, allowing you to see immediate impact while working through longer-term investment and infrastructure changes.
Food and beverage companies know they must redefine their product offerings for all of us to have a sustainable future. But before they can do that, they need ESG innovators to clearly answer the original, crucial question: Is this the best possible use?
From the Conference Board • Reposted: July 11, 2023
Just 13 percent of executives say sustainability is deeply embedded into their firm’s cultural DNA. Most companies are generally at the early to middle stages of building a sustainability culture, with 49 percent saying it is moderately embedded and 37 percent saying it is slightly embedded.
That is according to a new report by The Conference Board in collaboration with Baker Tilly. The report, Building a Sustainability Culture, is the culmination of a series of Working Group sessions, at which executives from companies in various sectors discussed how to develop and maintain a corporate culture that embraces sustainability.
“To take advantage of the transition to a sustainable economy, companies need to build a sustainability culture that becomes an indelible part of their organization’s character,” said Paul Washington, Executive Director of The Conference Board ESG Center and co-author of the report. “The Building a Sustainability Culture Working Group served as a valuable step in helping leaders equip their workforces with the behaviors, training, resources, and capabilities necessary to meet the unprecedented challenges and opportunities in the areas of corporate governance, sustainability, and citizenship.”
“The findings of our report underscore the need for embedding sustainability into business as usual, in addition to highlighting the distance still left to travel on the journey to a sustainable economy,” said Srinand Yalamanchili, Baker Tilly Director−ESG and sustainability. “Embedding sustainability into culture and business strategy can only be achieved by prioritizing the ‘why’–the positive return on investment and risks of inaction–and taking ownership at both an organizational and individual level.”
The Working Group convened more than 250 executives from 160 companies who met over the span of eight months to focus on how to develop and maintain a culture in which those at the organization think and act with sustainability in mind. The report provides insights into five areas: 1) what is a sustainability culture?; 2) why does it matter?; 3) how do companies build a sustainability culture?; 4) who is responsible?; and 5) how do companies measure success?
Key insights from the report include:
Companies are in the early stages of building sustainability into their culture.
Just 13 percent of executives say sustainability is deeply embedded into their company culture, with 49 percent saying it is moderately embedded and 37 percent saying it is slightly embedded.
Sustainability and cultural change need to be closely linked to the execution of the company’s business strategy.
30 percent of the respondents cite the CEO as best suited to lead the cultural transformation of the organization, followed by 28 percent who cite those responsible for the company’s business strategy and operations.
Both the positive ROI (return on investment) and the negative ROI (risk of inaction) are driving the case for building a sustainability culture.
An initial motivator: Explaining the “Risk of Inaction”—the negative consequences of failing to change.
A constant motivator: Explaining the positive case for how increasing the organization’s focus on sustainability will improve the company’s performance in the marketplace, including the markets for products and services, talent, and capital.
Employees need to feel a sense of ownership when it comes to building a sustainability culture.
75 percent of participants cite a “sense of ownership” as the most important aspect of a sustainability culture, followed by a clear mission, purpose, and values.
Companies may need to move beyond traditional training and compensation to motivate progress.
Only half (50 percent) of participants cite compensation as the most effective way of recognizing and rewarding behavioral change. By contrast, 61 percent cite internal recognition from senior management as the most effective, and 54 percent cite promotions and career opportunities.
About The Conference Board ESG Center
The Conference Board ESG Center serves as a resource, platform, and partner to help Member companies address their priorities in corporate governance, sustainability, and citizenship. ConferenceBoard.org/ESG
James McGowan’s career journey spans startups, agencies and multinationals, with sustainability at the core. By Shannon Houde from green biz.com • Reposted: July 7, 2023
James McGowan is a sustainability marketing leader who has taken on several of high profile roles in his career so far, working with charities, agencies, startups and multinational corporations, as well as studying for a master’s in sustainability. Currently, he leads marketing at Maeving, a British company that creates electric motorcycles.
Before Maeving, McGowan led marketing at Muddy Trowel, a company that makes gardening more accessible. Prior to that, he spent four years at Unilever — three of them as senior global marketing manager for its $3 billion Persil and Omo business.
I recently connected with McGowan to learn more about his career journey as a sustainability marketing expert. Here he draws from his wealth of experience to share advice on the need to see sustainability more holistically, how to leverage a knowledge of sustainability as a differentiator within marketing and the one piece of advice that helped him level up his career.
Shannon Houde: James, when did you spot the clear crossover between a career in marketing and sustainability?
James McGowan: It was in 2013 when I was working for an agency and I noticed a lot of organizations had a website that seemed to articulate sustainability beautifully, when the reality was that it was greenwashing. It dawned on me that nothing in the world is perfect so why give a false narrative when your sustainability journey could be your marketing campaign? That spurred me to do a master’s in sustainability. And at that point, I was at a crossroads — should I be switching my career into a sustainable lead role, or continue with marketing?
At the time, Unilever was only three years into its Sustainable Living Plan and the sustainability sector was still emerging. It was clear for me to stick with marketing because that’s where my strengths are, but to increasingly bring my understanding of sustainability into that role. Now, everything seems to be about sustainability. There’s no new innovation that can’t be launched from the marketing side that doesn’t meet certain sustainability criteria.
Houde: Is it fair to say that even as a marketer you can’t really do your day job without thinking about sustainability?
McGowan: I think there’s a more holistic side to sustainability. A lot of people jump into the environmental side but there’s a huge social impact to sustainability that people forget about. Some of the initiatives that we were driving while I was at Unilever were around stereotyping, for example. I worked for the laundry brand Persil and not that long ago it would be very common to find only a female in those advertisements. So, I take a fuller view on sustainability covering the social side and the environmental side. Ultimately, we need to serve people. Until we start serving people, we can’t really generate the profits, we need to then protect the planet so seeing sustainability through just an environmental lens is quite limiting.
Houde: Speaking of customers, is the demand push or pull on sustainability, do you think? Are companies pushing out the agenda or are they responding to consumer demand?
McGowan: There is a pull there. But take the example of laundry again. Eco is probably the most sustainable but technically it doesn’t clean as well and it’s slightly more expensive. So the technology is there, but it’s just not affordable, and we’ve got to create new markets for that. But there is certainly a lot of pull. From, say, 2025 to 2030, you’re going to see a huge change in the way that we consume these products, so I feel very confident about big businesses being able to solve these issues. But there’s some work on cost-benefit that needs to be done.
[It’s the same on] infrastructure. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of investment in waste collection and recycling around the world but there just isn’t that infrastructure. And the question is; who’s going to pay for that? These things unfortunately do take time. And I think that’s part of the role: resilience and patience.
A lot of it comes back to storytelling. I inherited a project that had been attempted five times. So, how do you get a research and development team back on board a project that’s had so many knocks?
Houde: How do you differentiate yourself as a marketer and leverage that sustainability element?
McGowan: I never trained in marketing, but I’ve got a marketing career with a sustainability master’s. So, I think one of the key parts of my role is to be able to speak to people with the science and the technical skills and then translate that back into the marketing piece.
Often there tends to be a bit of a disconnect. Particularly when marketers go and talk to the science teams they don’t feel listened to but, with my sustainability piece, I could actually access the science and bring that back into the role. Within big organizations, it’s the marketer’s job to connect the outside world to the individuals within that organization, and make sure that we are getting everyone’s perspective into key decisions.
I’ve had quite an atypical career. I set up my own business, worked with subject matter experts and been at an agency and a charity. And I think — when applying to Unilever, for example — that was quite unique.
Houde: What would be your one piece of advice to others looking to break into sustainability?
McGowan: I think it’s very easy to get completely caught up in the global issue of sustainability and climate change. I remember being with some friends at a restaurant a couple of years ago and we were talking about the plastic crisis. We asked the waiter to mention in their next team meeting the plastic straws they used and even through a discussion like that you can have a lot of impact without really having to do a lot. In the last few years, I’ve certainly tried to focus on what I can do personally as well as what I can do in my career.
But other than that, keep hustling. There are amazing jobs out there. Even if you start small. Your next move is about laying the foundations for the move after that. So don’t try and solve it all at once.
LinkedIn is just a fantastic tool too. I found every job through the platform and I built a network. It’s a different kind of nepotism. It’s not your parents or your uncle that will get you a job but it’s still the people who you know and that is what LinkedIn is for.
Houde: And similarly, what specific advice has really helped you personally in moving your career to the next level?
McGowan: One of the most valuable exercises I did was looking at my own values, looking at what makes me tick and then translating the skills and traits I have to identify what work I wanted to do. When you think of sustainability, it’s incredibly broad. There’s so much to do and having a very clear purpose about what you want to achieve is really important. You’ve got to find something that you care about, and that makes you tick, because work has to be fun.
A new Forrester report shows how and why to launch an active sustainability strategy. By John Edwards, Technology Journalist & Author from Information Week • Reposted: July 6, 2023
When it comes to creating an environmental sustainability agenda, many firms do little more than announcing vague plans and goals.
A recent Forrester report finds that as many enterprises dawdle, customers and other stakeholders are increasingly demanding authentic and effective environmental sustainability initiatives and strategies that demonstrate an understanding of and commitment to tomorrow amid growing economic and geopolitical uncertainties.
The report also notes that while many enterprise architects and their teams are well positioned to prepare their organizations for the next wave of optimization, transformation, and disruption — having worked on sustainability initiatives for decades — many more enterprises are just beginning their planning.
The challenge facing sustainability planners is that while most enterprises believe sustainability is a good idea, day-to-day operational issues, staffing challenges, and budget cuts can make it hard to prioritize goals. On the bright side, the most successful sustainability initiatives not only lower costs but also improve revenue and enhance margins.
To help tech leaders kick-start their sustainability planning, Forrester distilled hundreds of conversations with CIOs, enterprise architects, and teams, to identify five strategic areas of opportunity and key actions that can be taken to improve their sustainability maturity.
Set goals and add environmental metrics to your strategic plans and budgets.
Implement tools for environmental sustainability measurement and reporting.
Integrate sustainability outcomes into your transformation initiatives.
Evaluate the role of emerging technology in achieving your sustainability goals.
Seize innovation and partnering opportunities to enhance sustainability.
Implementation Basics
Abhijit Sunil, a Forrester senior analyst, says the initiative that repeatedly came up in all conversations, across all regions, was the challenge of implementing the environmental monitoring tools and solutions required for carbon accounting. “In our research we found that the majority of organizations at this time are in a maturity level where they are automating their carbon accounting and trying to create workflows that will enable data collection from across the organization,” he says.
Sunil notes that the need for strong, reliable environmental monitoring tools is reflected in the arrival of solutions from an array of providers, including software specialists, product firms, and even consulting organizations. “We compared some of them in our report on environmental monitoring software tools,” he says.
Environmental technology tools are a prime medium for a wide range of enterprises, Sunil says. “The technology leader has a big role to play in understanding how these tools differ from each other and how they can be plugged into existing systems within an organization,” he states. “For example, how these tools can plug into ERP systems or HR management systems, and how some of these tools may be able to provide insights into data center management and cloud optimization as well.”
Getting Started With Sustainability
Embarking on a new sustainability journey requires a different approach from bringing an IT leader into a strategy that’s already at an advanced maturity level. “Our report emphasized how the tech leader can start playing a role or optimize their role in sustainability,” Sunil says.
The best way to start a sustainability mission is by understanding the contribution of IT to the overall sustainability or carbon footprint of the organization, Sunil says. The next step, he notes, is to identify the most feasible opportunities within the enterprise to make the biggest impact on sustainability.
Leadership Is Critical for Successful Sustainability
Top-down leadership buy-in is essential for a successful sustainability initiative, both within the overall organization as well as the IT stack. “The best way to counter opposition is to have a clear understanding of the ROI of investing into various sustainability levers,” Sunil says.
The report advises IT leaders to challenge their innovation teams to eliminate scope-1 emissions. “As your organization explores new materials and manufacturing processes, examine the data to find opportunities to collaborate with other ecosystem partners,” the report suggests. “Ask your existing innovation facilitators to run dedicated campaigns to collect ideas to improve your environmental sustainability and consider sharing the findings with your strategic partners and long-term suppliers.”
Sunil notes that an organization might monitor, for example, exactly how much money data center energy optimization is conserving along with carbon footprint savings. “This is also how initiatives can be funded — sustainability is often synonymous with optimization and vice versa,” he says. “In many cases, green energy may be cheaper than conventional energy.”
Sunil adds that working directly with vendors and infrastructure suppliers can be extremely helpful for technology leaders planning a sustainability agenda. As the report notes: “Together, you can move faster, identify opportunities, and leverage their ecosystem of partners to help with projects, such as data center and network optimization, automation, and software platforms.”
Climate change affects everyone but in vastly unequal ways. To address this and drive real, sustainable change, businesses must ensure their sustainability strategies do not exacerbate existing inequalities even further. By Isabel Shopley from Sustainable Brands * Reposted: July 5, 2023
When it comes to genuine sustainable development, businesses still have a blind spot. Collectively, we’re failing to address the systemic risk posed by mounting levels of inequality. This is a humanitarian tragedy and a barrier to long-term, meaningful sustainable change.
Addressing inequality — a business imperative
According to calculations by Credit Suisse, 54 percent of the $127.5 trillion in new wealth created between 2012 and 2022 went to the world’s richest 1 percent. And only 0.7 percent went to the four billion people who make up half the global population, predominantly in the Global South.
As the reality and challenge grows starker and harder to ignore, businesses are waking up to the urgent and systemic risk of inequality. It erodes trust in our political and economic system, unravels the social fabric, fuels civil and political unrest and constrains economic growth. In May, a group of more than 30 major corporations convened under the Business Commission to Tackle Inequality (BCTI) to launch a flagship report asserting that growing inequality is bad for business. The report highlights how rising inequality contributes to:
an increasingly volatile business operating environment;
supply chain insecurity;
the erosion of productivity and innovation;
regulatory and compliance risks; and
reputation risk.
It’s no surprise, then, that corporate performance on inequality-related matters is increasingly recognised as an investor priority because it creates ‘systemic risk’ to their entire portfolio. In response to this, a new framework is being developed for financial disclosures for social and inequality-related risks. The aim is to develop a disclosure framework similar to the TCFD and TNFD frameworks for climate and nature.
Inequality and climate change: 2 sides of the same coin
Aside from the business and economic cost and the vast humanitarian consequences, inequality also undermines the world’s ability to address existential global threats such as climate change. As wealthy countries outsource industries and labor to developing nations, emissions are driven up — as these nations have usually not had their industries regulated through global climate policies or modernised to become more sustainable. Additionally, poverty in developing nations often forces communities to put more pressure on the environment — which can lead to unsustainable agricultural practices, deforestation and overexploitation of natural resources.
So, inequality worsens climate change — which simultaneously fuels inequality. For example, poorer countries lack the resources to recover from extreme weather events brought on by climate change. Similarly, access to resources such as clean water, food and adequate housing is reduced as the climate worsens — further exacerbating insecurity and inequality.
Sustainable solutions must incorporate all voices
It’s clear that not everyone will feel the impacts of climate change equally. Many communities will lose more than others, compounding deep-rooted societal and systemic inequalities. Despite this, it’s these very people who will feel the effects of climate change most acutely that are often left out of the conversation when it comes to business solutions. This dangerous discrepancy can limit perspectives on the climate issue and the success and relevance of proposed solutions. It’s crucial we address the needs of those worst affected by climate change and incorporate their voices and knowledge into decision-making.
Doing so will help futureproof organisational strategies, too. To date, businesses haven’t been particularly proactive at including the perspectives of those groups most likely to be negatively impacted by climate change into their conversations and strategies to address it. But they should be. Consideration of their challenges and insights is not only fair — it can also be the difference between success and failure when it comes to setting short- and long-term sustainability priorities.
Rethinking business impact and rightsholders
The introduction of double materiality is set to change this and is driving a monumental shift in the way businesses consider impacts and rightsholders. Double materiality requires organisations to engage with two types of stakeholder: users of information and affected stakeholders, or ‘rightsholders,’ who are or could be affected by the organisation’s activities. To support this shift, companies must assess the significance of an impact according to its severity and likelihood. This methodology draws on established human rights impact-assessment methodologies with an emphasis on the rightsholder.
This is good news from an inequality perspective. By considering the views of rightsholders, a company is much more likely to take on board the opinions of those who face greater levels of inequality.
The way forward
Climate change affects everyone but in vastly unequal ways. To address this and drive real, sustainable change, businesses must ensure their sustainability strategies do not exacerbate existing inequalities even further. This won’t happen overnight; but it starts with a greater understanding of who your rightsholders and affected stakeholders are and how your business’ contribution towards climate change could impact them.
Double materiality and the BCTI’s new framework for financial disclosures on social and inequality-related risks can help with this. Ultimately, both reflect a broader, positive shift towards addressing and disclosing business impacts on sustainability-related issues — not just the impact of those issues on the business. This holistic approach to impact is key to reducing inequalities and creating meaningful sustainable change.
Image credits: Hannah Busing/Unsplash and Krystal Hardy Allen
By Amy Brown from Triple Pundit • Reposted: July 4, 2023
Weight discrimination is a common but under-identified aspect of workplace inequity that is finally getting some attention as organizations look to embrace a wider and more holistic definition of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Addressing the problem isn’t just the right thing to do, experts say — it is a fundamental aspect of social justice.
“Weight discrimination would be any form of offense, harm or oppression at the expense of one’s weight that could be detrimental to an employee’s mental, emotional or physical health,” said Krystal Hardy Allen, founder and CEO of K Allen Consulting and author of “What Goes Unspoken: How School Leaders Address DEI Beyond Race.”
Weight discrimination affects individuals across various industries and occupations. In fact, studies show the majority of employers would prefer not to hire a candidate who ais visibly overweight.
There are significant ramifications to weight discrimination in terms of lower compensation, fewer promotions, denial of health insurance and other aspects of employment. Some employees are required to meet weight requirements in order to qualify for full healthcare coverage, and studies show that overweight people earn less in their lifetimes compared their colleagues.
The mental health consequences of weight discrimination should not be overlooked as they can affect spiritual well-being and the ability to operate while working, Allen said.
“Trauma can occur in a workplace environment from peer to peer or from managers to direct reports and vice versa,” she said. “There’s a very real connection between a feeling of inadequacy or imposter syndrome and the work climate and conditions in which a manager or supervisor, for instance, may not grant you certain opportunities because they don’t feel you are ‘the right face’ for the organization or the brand.”
Weight discrimination should be on the radar of every organization’s DEI strategy as a matter of policy, practice and social justice, she advised. A native of historic Selma, Alabama, Allen grew up in a space where discussion around social justice advocacy and activism was “as normal as learning how to read a map.” For her, weight discrimination fits into that space.
“Any form of harm, injustice or oppression is an injustice,” she said. “And so, any commitment we make to bettering the world for humans is social justice work.”
Krystal Hardy Allen, founder and CEO of K Allen Consulting and author of “What Goes Unspoken: How School Leaders Address DEI Beyond Race.”
EI
While in the U.S., weight discrimination might more commonly affect those who are of a heavier weight, Allen points out that it depends a great deal on context and geography.
“Different countries present different realities for workplace climate and conditions,” she said. “In certain countries, there are body types that tend to be ‘the average’ or what one would consider to be the ‘normative’ body type or weight. It’s not just about being heavier. In some cultural contexts, being too skinny or small can be the target of discrimination, where being more voluptuous is the norm and seen as a sign of being healthy.”
Organizations need to be inclusive of weight discrimination
There are few legal protections specifically targeted at weight discrimination in the U.S. Michigan is the only state with a law making weight a protected category. And discrimination based on weight is banned in only a few cities such as San Francisco, Madison and, most recently, New York City.
Without much legal recourse, the onus is even more so on organizations to ensure this issue is acknowledged and addressed in their DEI strategies, Allen said. The first step is being aware that this type of discrimination exists and that a thoughtful approach is required to solve it.
“It takes a lot of intentionality for organizations, when they make a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, that they are not pigeonholing diversity and inclusion to only be about one identity and one lived experience,” she said.
Creating the conditions for change
Once weight discrimination becomes part of an organization’s awareness, it is a matter of creating the right conditions and climate for change. A helpful approach that Allen recommends is liberatory consciousness, a concept developed by thought leader Barbara J. Love.
The framework uses four elements — awareness, analysis, action and accountability/allyship — to change systems of oppression. And it is a way for an organization to be conscious of all forms of oppression before it applies any action, Allen said.
“It could include being mindful even in the process of planning events — for example, an outdoor physical team-bonding activity — and giving everyone an opportunity to raise concerns confidentially if needed, to be as accommodating and thoughtful as possible to every individual who works there,” she said.
For Allen, the bottom line is that “every organization should be open to an intersectional approach or a diverse way of thinking of identity and lived experiences.”
Along with awareness raising, the right policies and practices are critical, she adds. Capacity building and learning opportunities give people the knowledge of what an equitable policy actually is and bring to the forefront any biases they might be operating under.
“A change in practices and policies is vitally important because it pushes the organization to ask if they are being true to what they believe,” Allen said. “And it certainly gives protection to those who are on the receiving end of harmful acts and treatment because it gives them a sense of psychological and emotional safety, that they are cared for, that they do matter, and that the organization is invested in making sure that they are 100 percent part of this team.”
When organizations undertake an analysis, like auditing their practices, they can better understand the experience of their employees, Allen said. “That can be through a survey, focus groups [or] one-on-one interviews, but you have to ascertain and understand the current state before you move to action and develop a real plan to shift your policies, to shift your language and other unconscious forms of bias around weight discrimination.”
The good news is “that we’re incrementally getting better when it comes to this topic,” she said. “I invite all organizations to have more intentionality around weight discrimination as a way to evolve their DEI approach.”
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