Understanding Environmental Justice Policies

Jan Lee
Jan Lee | Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 0 Comments

Environmental_Jusice_Policies_Estuary_Pk_Oakland_Brooke_AndersonAsk Americans today about the importance of the civil rights movement and most can tell you something about its history, what decade most defined its success, and who its leaders were. But ask those same people to describe this country’s environmental justice policies, their history and significance, and you may not get as confident an answer.

Yet in many respects, the two movements are inseparately linked. Environmental justice, the right of all people to be treated fairly and equally when it comes to the development and enforcement of environmental laws and policies, was a revolutionary concept when the civil rights movement began to take shape more than 30 years ago. The idea that low-income residents near an industrial zone, for example, had the same rights when it came to noise or air pollution limits as a middle-income family on the other side of the town had never been adequately addressed.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

podium [Your News Here]

McDonald’s Customers Don’t Buy Salads – But Whose Fault is That?

| Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 3 Comments

Mcdonalds mealBob Langert, McDonald’s VP of Sustainability told Bloomberg last September that “McDonald’s can be a very healthy lifestyle. I love to be healthy and I love the variety. I love that I can have a wonderful grilled chicken salad today, and a quarter pounder with cheese tomorrow…”

Langert’s diet sounds indeed balanced but apparently it is not very common among McDonald’s customers, at least not the salads part of it. McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson said last week that salads make up two to three percent of U.S. restaurant sales. In other words, McDonald’s customers might be into a grilled chicken but not so much into a grilled chicken salad.

The company seems to believe that this trend will continue. “I don’t see salads as being a major growth driver in the near future,” Thompson said according to Bloomberg, adding that “instead of advertising salads, the company may push hamburgers and chicken sandwiches.”

Does it mean that McDonald’s is losing hope in selling more fruit and vegetables? Not at all! Thomson explained that “there are other ways to sell more fruits and vegetables. For example, some of the chain’s new McWraps have tomato and cucumber slices, as well as shredded lettuce.”

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Women in CSR: Jennifer Dudgeon, CA Technologies

| Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 1 Comment

women-csr-banner
Welcome to our series of interviews with leading female CSR practitioners where we are learning about what inspires these women and how they found their way to careers in sustainability. Read the rest of the series here.
JDudgeon headshot

TriplePundit: Briefly describe your role and responsibilities, and how many years you have been in the business.

Jennifer Dudgeon: I am the Principal, Office of Sustainability at CA Technologies.

I’ve worked at CA Technologies for 2 and a half years. My primary responsibilities are:

  1. Ensure that our GHG footprint is transparent, accurate, inclusive, third party verified, and communicated correctly internally and externally.
  2. Develop and lead our global Green Team program. Through this program we are engaging our colleagues around the globe and harnessing their energy, enthusiasm, ingenuity and knowledge in this space so we can make our offices more efficient, educate our colleagues and raise awareness on our successes in this space.
  3. Support the development and execution of corporate sustainability strategy.
  4. Report on our progress to CDP, DJSI, Maplecroft, Bloomberg, IW Financial, Customer RFPs and other organizations looking for information on our sustainability program.
Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Great Lakes Governors Work to Protect $7B Fishing Industry from Asian Carp

Eric Justian
| Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 0 Comments
When disturbed, silver carp jump out of the water with enough force to break a boater's arm.

When disturbed, silver carp jump out of the water with enough force to break a boater’s arm.

It was a marvel of civil engineering, but today there’s growing support for undoing some of the damage caused by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, now from the Governor of Illinois, himself. Four particularly damaging species of invasive carp dubbed “Asian Carp” are poised to cross over from the Mississippi waterways into the Great Lakes via the canal, threatening a $7 billion Great Lakes fishing industry, as well as tourism and ecosystems, by crowding out existing fish populations and filtering out organisms at the base of the food chain.

In a meeting with Great Lakes governors on Saturday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn referred to the separation of the Great Lakes and Illinois and Mississippi watersheds as the “ultimate solution” for the Great Lakes. This development could be a huge turning point for groups trying to keep the invasive carp species out of the Great Lakes.

How did this threat to the Great Lakes get started?

In 1900, the first portion of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds for the first time ever. The canal reversed the flow of the Chicago river so the growing city’s waste could be flushed down the Mississippi rather than into Lake Michigan where the drinking water came from.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we’re starting to notice all sorts of invasive species from international trade using the Mississippi/Great Lakes connection as a highway to invade aquatic ecosystems in huge portions of the Continental U.S.’s waterways. The canal enables invasive species to hop easily from the enormous Great Lakes watershed on over to the sprawling Mississippi watershed, and vice versa.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Indian CSR Bill Promotes Environmental Management and Women’s Safety in the Workplace

3p Contributor | Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 0 Comments
Women doing road construction in Rajasthan, India

Women doing road construction in Rajasthan, India

By Riaz Zaman
In an effort to encourage socially responsible companies, a bill before the Indian legislature would require companies to spend two percent of their net profits annually on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. The Companies Bill, 2012, includes a CSR annual spending requirement, amongst several other requirements that aim to strengthen corporate governance. The lower chamber of the Indian Parliament, the Lok Sabha, passed the bill on December 18, 2012, and it is now being considered in the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of Parliament.  Support for the bill is strong.

CSR activities are specified in Schedule VII of the bill and include ensuring environmental sustainability.  The bill may promote better environmental management especially when read in conjunction with the a corporate environmental responsibility requirement issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).  The MoEF recommends a Corporate Environmental Policy (CEP) as a prerequisite to obtaining an Environmental Clearance (EC).  The EC evaluating committee can require a mandatory CEP on a case-by-case basis.  An EC is required for industrial and construction operations.

Regarding the Companies Bill, 2012, the CSR spending requirement would apply to companies registered in India with a net worth in excess of Rs 500 Crore (about US $92 million), a turnover of Rs 1,000 Crore (about US $184 million) or more per year or a net profit of Rs 5 crore (about US $920,000) or more per year.  The bill would require companies to form a Corporate Social Responsibility Committee to recommend and monitor CSR policy.  The committee would submit recommendations to the corporation’s board of directors, in order to undertake Schedule VII activities.  Companies would be required to submit annual reports documenting their CSR activities or provide a legitimate reason as to why CSR spending is not possible.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Accelerating Appalachia: Supporting Nature-Based Business for Good

3p Contributor | Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 1 Comment

Accelerating AppalachiaBy Dayna Reggero

We are in a time of opportunity – a fruitful place where economy, environment, human rights and culture are uniting. People are starting to ask where the things they buy come from. They want to know the conditions for the workers who made their products. How it affected the environment. Is their food safe to eat? People want to know the real cost of their products and services. We are getting dangerously close to losing all relational character for money and how it is spent. Who is benefiting?

Rosa Lee Harden, co-founder and producer of Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) and HUB Bay Area, says, “Exchange of goods for services is part of how we acquire things. It is a fact of life. If we want to be moral people, we have to figure out a way to do this for good. And, make it an underlying piece in business.”

Social entrepreneurs are taking on sectors like safe food systems, value-added food and natural products, biomaterials, energy, green building, craft brewing and distilling, sustainable supply chain technologies, sustainable fibers/textiles, agritourism, ecotourism, and outdoor industry, and other advanced nature-based innovations.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

A Solar Fridge for Fresh Food in Hot Climates

GreenFutures
GreenFutures | Thursday June 6th, 2013 | 4 Comments

By Ian Randall

The University of Cincinnati responds to food shortages with solar-powered cold storage for farms.

Food shortages in India are compounded by a lack of cold-chain storage facilities, but a new solar-powered cold storage device, developed by the University of Cincinnati in partnership with industry, could put this problem on ice.

SolerCool has been designed to provide cooling at the individual farm level. The size of a large garden shed, it can be easily transported to farms on the back of a truck.

The SolerCool project is a partnership between the University of Cincinnati and three local companies – Acutemp Thermal Systems, SimpliCool Technologies International and SAS Automation – funded by a Procter and Gamble higher-education grant.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Johnson & Johnson’s Project Phoenix Helps Brazilian Garbage Scavengers Rise from the Ashes

| Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments
MEANINGFUL LIFE Iraci Leandro dos Santos finds purpose in the mantra “We recycle and the Earth benefits.” Image credit: Johnson & Johnson

MEANINGFUL LIFE Iraci Leandro dos Santos finds purpose in the mantra “We recycle and the Earth benefits.” Image credit: Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson’s Project Phoenix started with a desire to get more post-consumer recycled waste into Band-Aid boxes. The boxes in question are manufactured in Brazil, and the personal care product company was looking for a local supply of used paper to convert into box material. In Brazil, recycling happens not at the hands of a municipal recycling agency,but at the hands of scavengers called “catadores.” The World Bank estimates that 1-2 percent of urban populations makes their living through scavenging. Catadores have the dangerous and thankless job of picking through landfill refuse to find useful materials that might be resold.

Brazilian catadores have things a bit easier than scavengers in other countries because the government mandates that catadores organize themselves into co-ops, which provide a bit of additional structure and security for this vulnerable population. There are currently around 500 co-ops in Brazil employing around 60,000 pickers. This infrastructure is fairly unique and provided Johnson & Johnson a prime opportunity to help one co-op formalize its approach and thereby raise the standard of living for all its members, while providing a ready supply of used paper for their supply chain.

Paulette Frank, VP of Sustainability at Johnson & Johnson spoke from the heart about this initiative at Sustainable Brands 2013.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

WAM versus Facebook: Tallying the Score

Jan Lee
Jan Lee | Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments

Facebook_policies_WAM_statement_WAM

The dust is still settling from Facebook’s encounter with the women’s rights organization Women, Action and the Media (WAM!) and the Everyday Sexism Project (ESP) last week, but activists are already tallying their accomplishments.

According to an opinion piece by WAM! activist Soraya Chemaly that was published on CNN’s website last Friday, the fight to get the media company to remove hate speech and violent content from its pages actually began in the fall of 2012. What may have seemed to the women’s rights activists as a straightforward request for the media company to remove and monitor offending content became a six-month-long process that went nowhere.

Chemaly says part of the problem had to do with Facebook’s own definition of violence against women.

“I came across ‘humor’ pages with names like ‘Raping Your Girlfriend,’ and text and images of popular rape memes depicting about-to-be-raped, incapacitated girls,” says Chemaly, as well as “videos of girls and women frightened, humiliated, bruised, beaten, raped, gang raped, bathed in blood, and, in a recently publicized case, beheaded.” Many of these pages were indexed under Facebook’s “humor” classification.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Marissa Feinberg Reflects on 5 Years at Green Spaces

| Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 2 Comments

Green Spaces partyCoworking spaces are on the rise. According to the latest Global Coworking Census, Deskwanted, released in March, more than 110,000 people currently work in one of the nearly 2,500 coworking spaces available worldwide, an increase of 83 percent and 117 percent respectively from last year. In the U.S. alone, there are now nearly 800 commercial co-working facilities, up from about 300 only two years ago.

Many of these places, explains author Anne Kreamer, became attractive to the growing numbers of entrepreneurs and freelancers by offering collaborative networks, built-in resources, and a dynamic ecosystem, fostering innovation and making starting a business simpler. These key features seem to be describing Green Spaces, one of New York City’s 20-plus coworking spaces that celebrated its fifth anniversary last week.

Green Spaces, which also has another location in Denver, Colorado, has a vision of becoming a catalyst for “values-driven communities of people who innovate, celebrate and do good.” This vision not only made Green Spaces a place where social entrepreneurs feel at home, but also transformed it into an important hub for the green business community in New York. To learn more about the journey Green Spaces went through in the last five years, I spoke with its co-founder and director, Marissa Feinberg.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Wrag Wrap to Turn Tents into Reusable Gift Wrap

Leon Kaye | Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments
Wrag Wrap, United Kingdom, reusable gift wrap, camping, Louise Oldridge, Nicky Rajska, camping season, RPET, reusable wrapping paper

Wrag Wrap Summer Trees, Cadmium and Cardamom

Camping season is well underway with school soon ending and summer vacation beginning. On both sides of the pond, plenty of festivals will launch and turn meadows into what will appear to be large swaths of brightly colored confetti. A fair number of those tents will be left behind as the combination of mud and partying will render them uninhabitable. But one enterprise in the United Kingdom aims to turn those unwanted tents into reusable wrapping paper.

Wrag Wrap is striving hard to change the Brits’ wrapping habits. Louise Oldridge and Nicky Rajska of Devon in southwestern England founded the company in part as a reaction towards living in a world where resources have become more constrained.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

SemiFreddi’s and Crogan’s Green-Certified Food Service Business

Bill Roth | Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments

SemiFreddie's Bill Roth Earth 2017“Living in the United States of Food Waste” is how Bloomberg Businessweek defined the scale and cost of food wasted annually. America wastes 40 percent of its food supply at an estimated cost of $250 billion annually. It is a cost that is unsustainable in the low margin food service industry. Professional estimates are that a restaurant can achieve at least a 10 percent cost savings from implementing a food waste management system.

Restaurants are also the most energy-intensive commercial buildings in the United States. It is estimated that the restaurant industry consumes three times the energy of an average commercial building. Cooking equipment, refrigeration appliances, HVAC systems and lighting are restaurant cost centers and a major element of their environmental footprint. It is estimated that the bottom line profit for a restaurant that reduces energy costs by $1 is equal to selling $12.50 in food at an 8% profit margin.

Moms’ focus upon restaurant air quality

There is also an emerging awareness over chemical use by restaurants and their impacts upon indoor air quality led by Concerned Caregivers. The top five things these EcoAware Moms are using more of are:

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Why We Encourage More Companies to Report Their Sustainability Performance

CSRHUB | Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments

The following is part of a series by our friends at CSRHub (a 3p sponsor) – offering free sustainability and corporate social responsibility ratings on over 7,300 of the world’s largest publicly traded  and private companies. 3p readers get 15% off CSRHub’s professional subscriptions with promo code “TP15.″ 

reportAs previously seen on the CSRHub blog.

By Bahar Gidwani

We were recently invited by our friends at Trucost to moderate a webinar.  Our shared goal was to encourage more companies to start reporting their sustainability performance.

You can download the webinar from the Trucost site here.  However, I thought I’d share a few of the things I learned from preparing for the talk and from the other panelists.

I started the webinar by sharing some figures from the CSRHub database.  I showed the audience that only 30 percent of companies in developing countries outside the U.S. are using one of the three main reporting systems (the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Disclosure Project (now CDP), and the UN Global Compact or UNGC). U.S. companies lag far behind—with only about 10 percent of the companies we track reporting via these systems.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Qualtek Manufacturing: Fabricating Success through Sustainability

Sustainability4SMEs | Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments

pipeQualtek, a 70-person, Colorado-based manufacturing company, looks to sustainable business practices as a way to enhance its market competitiveness and financial performance. The sustainable business journey began with electric and water cost reduction programs, and has also addressed risk mitigation, waste management, corporate culture and employee well-being. This is the story of the company’s roadmap.

To hear pundits tell it, you’d think manufacturing is dying in the U.S. and, indeed, it is true that a significant number of manufacturers have gone out of business in the past 30 years in this country. So it’s no mean feat that Tony and Mary Fagnant and their team at Qualtek Manufacturing have not only survived, but continue to grow the company.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »

Soccer Meets Fair Trade to Change Lives On and Off the Field

3p Contributor | Wednesday June 5th, 2013 | 0 Comments

By Santiago Halty

What do soccer and Fair Trade have in common? Both have an enormous potential to improve the lives of millions of people, and combined they offer a unique recipe for positive change. I started Senda Athletics in an effort to combine two passions, to make Fair Trade soccer balls and support nonprofits using soccer to improve communities. I want to empower consumers to make a real difference through their purchases.

Lets start with soccer, the most played sport in the world. The beauty of the game lies in it’s simplicity. All you need to play is a ball. In many countries, a ball is a loose term for any object that can be kicked, whether it be a milk carton or a rolled up ball of socks. The ball brings joy to those who play.

soccer1

Power Soccer allows players on wheelchairs to play sports, and experience a feeling of independence.

In the United States and abroad, there are hundreds of nonprofit organizations leveraging the popularity and passion for soccer to transform at-risk communities.

Click to continue reading »

Permalink CONTINUES » discuss Discuss This »