Environment Forum

Finalists named for “Nobel of Sustainability”

If the Nobel society had an award for sustainability, it would resemble the Katerva awards, a new international prize for the most promising ideas and efforts to advance the planet toward sustainability.

Minus the money.

Katerva, the new UK-based charity, today announced winners for 10 individual categories, who are now shortlisted for a single grand prize to be awarded in New York on Dec. 7.

Awards are for “game-changers and industry breakers; ideas that leap efficiency, lifestyle, consumption and action bounds ahead of current thinking,” their website says.

Video Q + A with sustainability expert Matthew Kiernan

Did you know companies could negotiate lower interest rates by convincing their lenders it pays to be sustainable?

Implementing a sustainability strategy can mean stronger sales, stronger cash flow and reductions in costs, says Dr. Matthew Kiernan, founder and chief executive of Inflection Point Capital Management and author of Investing in a Sustainable World.

Companies must take the lead in telling their financiers how an improvement in environmental performance can bolster their bottom lines, he told the Green Employers 2010 Conference in Toronto this week.

Institutional investors are the slowest of all industrial sectors to wake up to the need for sustainability, Kiernan says.

We asked Kiernan about sustainable investment and the potential impact of the climate bill currently under consideration by the U.S. Senate. Here are his answers.

Q: What are the next steps people have to take to get financiers to take the environment into account when lending money?

Q: What can companies do to get their lenders to take environmental concerns as seriously as they do?

Top 10 trends in sustainable business

– Giselle Weybrect is author of The Sustainable MBA: The Manager’s Guide to Green Business. Any views expressed  are her own. –

Sustainability is taking the business world by storm. It seems that every day a new company is getting on board in an incredible range of different ways. While some are still only approaching it on a very superficial level, plenty of others are really taking sustainability seriously, exploring what it does and can mean to their business, their suppliers, their employees, their customers and the role that they can plan in strengthening society and the environment while also running an increasingly successful business.

Here are ten interesting trends happening right now around the world in sustainable business.

1. A deeper understanding of what sustainability means.

The days of sustainability strategies being principally about putting recycling bins in the office and printing on both sides of the printer paper are (hopefully) increasingly behind us. Although this is still an important part of most strategies, sustainability in a business is about so much more regardless of the size of your business, and we are quickly moving away from a ‘sustainability is all about saving the world but not about business’ mentality into the ‘using sustainability to strengthen my business while also having a positive impact on society’ one. Companies such as General Electric are leading the way.

2. Your employees are your secret weapon.

Blue business washes in

Green is good and blue is better.

Keeping a business sustainable – or blue – goes beyond philanthropic nods to the environment. It needs to be a core business goal, says Adam Werbach, creator of Wal-Mart’s sustainability program and chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability wing of the marketing and consultancy company.

Blue innovation embraces the social, cultural, and economic aspects of business along with green issues like protecting our last wild places and reducing carbon emissions.

“Sustainability is about long-term profitability. It doesn’t mean just the environment,” Werbach told a room of 100 business professionals in Toronto on Wednesday, pointing to the four-part breakdown of sustainability built on social, economic, cultural and environmental trends in addition to an integral value of transparency.

“The idea is to think a little bit broader. Of course we need to protect the environment, but there are so many other things to connect to it,” Werbach said, exploring a theme in his new book Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto.

“This is an extraordinary business opportunity that’s been left to the environmentalists and we need to steal it back and make it the business opportunity to grow companies that are going to be the companies of the future.”

Victoria Kamsler, chief ethics officer and research director at Greenfiniti Consulting and Investment in Toronto and former professor of environmental ethics at Princeton University, said Werbach was on to something with his ideas about internal changes in business culture having to do with transparency and engagement, and motivating employees to engage in purposes that align with their own values and ideals larger than themselves.

Designers must serve as environmental visionaries

– Natalia Allen is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Parsons Designer of the Year. She is founder and creative director of Design FuturistSM, a brain trust and design lab specializing in the development of sustainable, innovative fashion and textiles for client such as Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Quiksilver. The views expressed are her own. –

Designers have a tremendous amount of power, and responsibility, in fostering human health and creating a sustainable global economy. Most consumer products such as electronics are hazardous to human health. They contain plastics and heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and mercury, which can cause serious adverse health effects, especially in children. Present education does not provide designers with the necessary insight and skills to practice sustainably.

There is a void in understanding how to build consumer products that are truly sustainable. Many universities and public policies address the sustainability challenge by promoting recycling and the use of recycled materials. However, recycling only prolongs the life of some materials. Recycling does not prevent materials from becoming toxic waste. Presently, each time a product is recycled it looses value and quality.

Eventually the product can no longer be recycled because it is worthless. All recycled products end up in a landfill one day, where they contaminate essentials to life, such as clean air, water and nutrient rich soil. In order to recycle products continuously into new products of equal value, designers have to build with that intention.

Another popular sustainable practice is to use everything with efficiency and in increasing moderation. The regulation of harmful materials and processes help limit exposure to pollutants in the short-term, only when demand is low or there is an accessible alternative. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, world population is expected to pass 9 billion by 2050, with it, there will be an increasing appetite for western consumer goods. Therefore, limiting emissions or the use of toxic materials is not a viable long-term solution. Simply using the pollutants more efficiently will only prolong the worsening of air, water and soil quality.

Efficient contamination of our natural resources is not a real solution. Human imagination and ingenuity hold the potential to innovate and create consumer products that are a beneficial to our life-cycle. The Threat

Failure to invent sustainable methods for transporting, housing, feeding and clothing the population will have devastating consequences, ultimately resulting in a shortage of natural resources, life quality and expectancy. There is not enough money on the planet to feed a growing population, when the agricultural land is contaminated from excessive chemical pesticide use. Nor is there enough money to bring quality of life to individuals suffering from disease brought about by industrial pollutants, such as sulfur emissions to air, lead from gasoline, phosphorus in detergents, and some heavy metals. The Solution

Newsweek’s Green Rankings: Perception meets reality

Newsweek, encroaching on territory usually mined by activist groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, has unveiled its innaugural NEWSWEEK Green Rankings, which ranks the 500 biggest U.S. companies based on their “actual environmental performance, policies, and reputation.”

The magazine pointed out that compiling such a list was a challenge “because comparing environmental performance across industries is a bit like analyzing whether Tiger Woods or LeBron James is the world’s greatest athlete—there’s an inevitable apples-and-oranges element.”

Still, it believes it’s system makes sense. To come up with the greenest company, the magazine assigned each a “Green Score” that was then compared to the average score of the collective group. You can find out more about Newsweek’s methodology here. But, in terms of weighting, Impact and Policies were each given 45 percent and Reputation received 10 percent.

The results? I’ll let you be the judge. But I found it noteworthy that the top two overall are also the top two PC makers in the world — Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And five of the top 10 are tech companies, blamed for manufacturing products that end up contributing to mountains of electronic waste in developing nations.

What do you think? Will the rankings affect who you do business with? What would your green rankings look like? Leave your comments in the box below.

from Shop Talk:

Molson Coors-sponsored survey finds water pollution key concern

What is the latest and most important environmental concern these days? Global warming? Disappearing ice caps and rain forests? Reliance on non-renewable energy?

Wrong. According to a new survey sponsored by Molson Coors Brewing Co, water pollution ranked No. 1, followed by fresh water shortages, depletion of natural resources, air pollution and loss of animal and plant species.

The survey was commissioned by Circle of Blue, a nonprofit affiliate of the Pacific Institute, a water and climate think tank. It polled people in 15 countries, including the United States, Mexico, China and India, about their views on water issues including sustainability, management and conservation.

Molson Coors, maker of Coors Light and Molson Canadian beers, sponsored the survey as a first step in trying to understand how people in international markets -- where it hopes to expand its business -- view water. 

Molson Chief Executive Peter Swinburn said that as the company expands internationally, it must understand what a local community's issues are and try to address them before spending money and building a factory.

"We're a branded organinzation. We live by research and consumer opinion," Swinburn said in an interview. "To try and address a problem without going to consumers and understanding their perceptions is difficult to do."

Of the seven "focus" countries, consumers in Mexico seemed to take the problem of water pollution the most seriously, with 90 percent of respondents calling it a "very serious problem." The rest of the countries ranged from 58 percent in Britain to 71 percent in Canada.

Sailing around the world on sunlight

    Nearly 500 years ago, Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the world. With wind and sails, the journey was certainly a green one.

    Now a Swiss engineer wants to match the feat — with a catamaran called “Planet Solar,” powered entirely on the sun’s energy.

    It’s a clean-tech adventure designed by Raphael Domjan to promote solar power, energy efficiency and sustainable mobility. Domjan calls it “the path towards a lasting world.”

from Shop Talk:

House-made WHAT?

"Sparkling or still?"   Remember when that question, asked with a certain downward gaze, would make you feel like a tactless tightwad for requesting tap? Did you try to lessen the shame with a smile and a clever nickname, like "I'll have 'New York's Finest'"?   Restaurants and hotels across the country are blurring the lines between these choices, as they stop serving bottled water due to a perception that it is environmentally unfriendly. Critics object to the waste left behind by the plastic and glass bottles, as well as the fuel and other natural resources used to manufacture and ship the bottles all over the world.   "In the world of trying to live in a more green, sustainable environment, I think water is the most obvious, simple thing that we can do," said Joseph Bastianich, a business partner of Mario Batali and co-owner of restaurants including Babbo, Lupa, Esca and Del Posto.   Bastianich told Reuters he is in the process of phasing out water across all his restaurants, following in the footsteps of other environmentally-conscious restaurants like Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.   In its place, Bastianich is installing filters made by Natura Water, which purify a restaurant's tap water and allow users to get still, sparkling or room temperature tap water. The restaurants can adjust the amount of carbonation, allowing them to tout the water as made in-house.   The Natura system, which comes with reusable water bottles for serving, can be rented for about $400 a month.    Company founder Marco De Plano, whose customers also include L.A.'s  Ciudad, San Francisco's Foreign Cinema and certain Four Seasons hotels, said that with prices of high-end bottled water bubbling as high as $10, high-traffic locations can recoup their losses quickly.   "When we started this a year ago, everybody was talking about the green aspect," De Plano said.    Bastianich says a liter of Natura water costs him about 50 cents and sells for about $4. That profit margin is slimmer than before, when he would pay about 80 cents for a liter of premium bottled mineral water and sell it for up to $9.    "We think the loss of margin is an investment that's very worthwhile making," Bastianich said. 

The sacrifice to margins would lessen as sales of house-made water increase.

As the backlash against bottled water heats up across the country a host of local governments have cut bottled water out of their budgets.  Virginia, Illinois and New York are among the states that have banned buying bottled water with state funds.

(Photos: Reuters\Eric Thayer)