As standards become more well-defined and consumers demand more transparency, companies are increasingly in need of the skills to, first of all, begin that difficult process toward the ever-evolving “sustainable” business. But for those already on that path, an understanding of how to report and communicate their successes and hurdles is becoming essential as well. [...]

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By: Brian Thomas Most of us greet news of a looming threat with skepticism. “Show me” is the usual reaction. We are like the mayor of the fictitious Amity Island in Jaws, who refuses to shut down the town’s beaches because officially acknowledging shark attacks would hurt tourism. People who maintain that climate change demands [...]

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[Hub Stories]: Q & A with The Curator of Spices [Name]: Chris Pemberton [Areas of Expertise]: Cooking, International Development, Sustainability Consulting, Green Technology By Samantha Kanofsky I wouldn’t have guessed that I would be discussing exotic flavors or mountain climbing in Kyrgyzstan on a Monday morning, but here I was. Drinking tea with Chris Pemberton [...]

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Jaime Nack explains that although some may consider the Proposition 23 vote a debate over the issues, it seems instead to be a stakeholder battle funded by corporate interests. Let’s first consider the fact that the majority of the support for Prop. 23 (and the opposition to AB 32) comes from out-of-state gas and oil companies. Pouring millions into campaigns promoting Prop. 23, companies like Tesoro and Flint Hill Resources are simply looking to protect future profits. They claim that clean fuel legislation has a negative effect on California’s economy and a major instigator of un-employment. Simply, not so.

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With two factors at play – an economy trending toward freelancers and consultants and the heightened need for qualified specialists to carry out sustainability initiatives – a new consulting model is emerging using networks of consultants who team up on specific projects.

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By Matthew Savage I recently interviewed Julie Menter, senior consultant at Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting. Blu Skye is a strategy consulting firm dedicated to introducing business to sustainable practices. She shared some great insights into the innovative, and sometimes misunderstood, world of Sustainability Consulting. Julie has been at Blu Skye for a year helping clients [...]

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Image credit:Processing Magazine Operators of energy-intensive US industrial facilities, having benefited from years of USEPA ‘enforcement light,’ now face an old-fashioned onslaught of environmental reporting requirements. USEPA is poised for action – gathering what information it needs before revised or new regulations are published. Even though new industry rules by EPA – reporting previous year’s [...]

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by Kelly Flores Making your products “sustainable” is no easy task. There are a variety of issues for product managers, designers, and engineers to consider about design, materials, packaging and transportation. In a recent study of best practices, we found that companies approach the challenge of creating sustainable products in several stages.

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By Vijay Kanal, CMC, Kanal Consulting NGOs, or Non Government Organizations, have long been known for promoting socially responsible activities and engaging in philanthropic efforts. What is less known is that several are also partnering with major corporations around the globe on environmental sustainability efforts. On the surface, such partnerships may seem strange, since historically [...]

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By Kelly Flores, Kanal Consulting It’s quite possible that if you don’t have a sustainability program in your company, you probably do and just don’t know about it yet.  In the process of conducting a recent study with 25 leading companies to identify best practices in sustainability, we discovered many formal, established sustainability programs originated [...]

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By Ryan Young, Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting There is no need to wait millions of years for deceased organisms to compress into fossil fuels to burn.  Forget about how the wind doesn’t always blow hard enough to move wind turbines, or that the sun doesn’t shine on solar panels at night.  A typical U.S. dairy [...]

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I had the pleasure of attending Sustainable Silicon Valley‘s (SSV) two-day Sustainability Change Agent Training with Alan AtKisson, November 16th and 17th. It was a packed workshop full of information and interactive exercises.  Parts of it fully engaged me and parts of it left me feeling frustrated, so I decided to wait a few weeks [...]

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As Geoff Barneby noted in his earlier post Doing the Right Thing in Business: Are You Doing it Right?, several critical questions must be considered before launching a strategic sustainability program, including: What is your corporate vision for sustainability? Do you have clear and measurable sustainability goals? Who will sponsor and lead your sustainability initiative? [...]

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“Climate change and climate policy in Europe and the U.S. – Opportunities and Challenges in the Run-up to the Copenhagen Summit and beyond” Thus was billed a recent conference I attended last week at the Aspen Wye River Conference center located in rural Maryland along the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The two-day conference [...]

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The first online Sustainable Brands Boot Camp produced by the folks at Sustainable Life Media who convene the annual Sustainable Brands Conference kicked off yesterday. CEO KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz recently spoke to one of the SB community members, Diane MacEachern, Founder and CEO of Big Green Purse about what drove the launch. We’ve published the [...]

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Lost in all the talk about whether or when nations and industries will have emissions targets, is the question of who, exactly, is going to measure those targets. Without a pool of trained and certified professional GHG managers, climate change initiatives — from the United Nations Framework down to the sustainability plan for the shop [...]

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It’s a Consumer Reports or CNET type of comparison shopping service for the eco-conscious crowd. Eco-rate is the brainchild and a labor of environmental love and activism founded by a Seattle couple, Brycelaine Self and Colby Self. “The Eco-rate idea is to allow people to compare common household products, based not only on their green [...]

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Today, many companies acknowledge that they can play a significant role in addressing climate change and sustainability in general.  Some have even begun proactively beating a path to transform their businesses, reaching for lofty goals such as zero waste, carbon neutrality, or even restoration of degraded ecosystems.  Most, however, are only just starting to figure [...]

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By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact Ever since I studied adaptive leadership with Ronald Heifetz at Harvard, I have been interested in the intersection between organizational change, systems theory and sustainability issues.  Many sustainability professionals seem to lack an understanding of what it takes to create enduring, lasting change within an organization or system. As illustrated [...]

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These days, we hear more and more that a company’s stance on social and environmental issues plays a significant role in choice of employer. A recent survey found that over 50% of American workers report being inclined to work for “green” companies.  Women and Generation Y in particular want their company’s mission to go beyond [...]

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Employee engagement is a growing strategy for driving performance and building competitive advantage for companies with a commitment to sustainability. “The engaged workforce will find more opportunities to get lean and identify more opportunities to innovate and create products and services that lower customers’ environmental impacts. All of this work will improve the top and [...]

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By Deborah Fleischer, Green Impact Planet Metrics is a relatively new start-up with a solution to help corporations model and analyze the life cycle of carbon emissions and energy use throughout their entire supply chain, from cradle to grave. Fast Company covered the start-up  in June and called their Rapid Carbon Modeling “a potentially powerful [...]

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If more people perceived the word “sustainability” to be synonymous with “wealth creation,” I imagine many of the barriers to forming a green infrastructure simply wouldn’t exist. Blue Skye, a San Francisco-based sustainability consulting firm, is seeking to establish that synonymy, helping business leaders use sustainability to craft new, inventive wealth generating strategies. The message [...]

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A centerpiece of the stimulus package is an effort to put 3 and 4 million people back to work over the next two years. The site Recovery.gov includes a map of the U.S. with the estimated jobs expected under the Recovery Act superimposed over each state. California leads with 396,000 anticipated jobs, while North Dakota [...]

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Driving sustainability into the operations of a company is an oft-stated goal for sustainability departments. How many times have you heard (or said!): “My vision is that one day our department will go away…and sustainability will be just part of everyday business, and the sustainability department will be out of a job.”  But how do [...]

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We all know what we need to do to make our companies more environmentally friendly: use less energy, water, and paper, travel less and make less garbage. But yeah, it’s easier said than done especially if you’re in a carbon intensive business like manufacturing or energy production. What’s the company without a lot of time [...]

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Environmental Defense Fund and Ashoka are organizing three upcoming Green Innovators Unconferences in Boston, Silicon Valley and Austin. The goal of these gatherings is to connect participants with other innovators to share experiences and ideas, explore new trends and opportunities and brainstorm out-of-the-box solutions to the challenges we’re all facing. Unlike traditional conferences, there are [...]

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Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Branding for Sustainability conference at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. This was the real deal – not some day long seminar on “How to Greenwash Successfully.” The seminar focused on how companies can most effectively tell their sustainability stories, and how they can ramp up [...]

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Note: Fore more on Sustainability Consulting, see our special archive here. Management consultants live near the top of the economic food chain. They have the ear of Global 1000 executives, spend heavily on business research, and are constantly looking for new ways to reduce client costs and increase client competitiveness – core services that help [...]

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With an abundance of companies going green, and a corresponding explosion of green themed conferences sprouting up, this is to be applauded. And yet, there’s a remnant of the old paradigm that sticks up like a weed out of the smooth green path: Swag. You know, those little things that companies give away at conferences [...]

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