While service industries don’t have smokestacks and may have less environmental impacts than a manufacturing facility, they too can benefit from sustainable business strategies to mitigate risks and capture new business opportunities.
However, it is not uncommon for service based
Consider sustainability as a profit center: crazy talk or real possibility?
According to an Aberdeen Group study, The ROI of Sustainability: Making the Business Case, top performing organizations view sustainability as a “must have” strategy for long term business viability and success. The top drivers for
An international initiative this fall will encourage hundreds of organizations to assess their use and recycling of plastics in a push to call more attention to the vast amounts of plastic waste entering the environment.
While many companies and organizations are familiar with their “carbon footprint” and are taking steps to
Offshore wind power as an industry is set to undergo intense growth over the next 10-20 years. The EWEA (European Wind Energy Association) has established targets of 40GW of offshore wind power production by the year 2020, and 150GW by 2030. This move towards a European grid represents a
The emerging practice of quantifying the financial value of sustainability has been getting a lot of attention- internationally and locally. Canadian firms are asking: is this activity worth the effort, are the valuation strategies sound and are they going to be adopted widely by companies? It’s still early days, but the
The financial pressures and business sustainability risks felt heavily during the economic downturn forced many companies across all industries to take drastic reduction measures to simply survive. These actions placed many supply chains in less than stable shape, as ‘bullwhip’ effects rippled up the
Toymaker Mattel Inc. says it will stop using packaging from a Singapore-based company accused of clear-cutting swaths of Indonesian rainforest.
Mattel’s action follows a campaign by Greenpeace that targeted, among other products, the packaging used in Mattel’s popular Barbie doll.
In 1896 Charles Dow created the Dow Jones Industrial Average to track the nation’s leading nine companies. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average or Dow 30 is made up of 30 leading US companies. It is the world’s best known stock index and everyone has heard of it.
Southwest Baking, supplier of dough to Subway stores in Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Southern California will be adding a 300 kilowatt solar energy system at its facility in Tolleson, Arizona.
According to the Phoenix Business Journal, the solar energy system will be a ground mounted system and
On April 18, 2011, Molycorp, a U.S. based producer of rare earth metals and owner of the largest rare earth mine outside of China, announced that it has acquired a processing facility to manufacture rare earth magnets. According to CNET, Molycorp paid $17.5 million to Japan-based Santoku for its U.S.
In 2009 China became a net-importer of coal. In 2006 the New York Times reported that China was already using “more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined.” Today the amount of coal demanded in China is greater than ever. The coast of China is 7,000 miles (11,265 km) from the
The Obama Administration has taken another step to reduce the Federal Government's environmental footprint and to advance clean energy opportunities. On Tuesday morning, I joined General Services Administration Administrator Martha Johnson in Chicago, Illinois, at the first-ever GreenGov Supply Chain Summit to announce a voluntary collaboration between the Federal Government and vendors and suppliers to create a greener and more efficient supply chain.
The Federal Government purchases $500 billion in goods and services annually, so you could say the Federal supply chain represents an enormous opportunity to support a clean energy economy. Through our new GreenGov Supply Chain Partnership, Federal suppliers can agree to voluntarily measure, reduce, and report their greenhouse gas emissions to help GSA design an incentive-based approach to developing contracting advantages for companies that share our sustainability goals. We've already partnered with 60 small businesses for a pilot program that will explore the benefits and challenges of measuring greenhouse gas emissions for small business participants.
More than 150 companies – large and small – joined us at the summit. Companies shared their corporate sustainability priorities and their experiences greening their own supply chains. Two themes emerged in the conversation. First, we have an extraordinary opportunity to foster innovation and entrepreneurship through the Federal Government's commitment to sustainability and the GreenGov Supply Chain Partnership. Second, to fulfill that opportunity, we've got to develop straightforward incentives that make it easy for small and emerging businesses to work with us.
The Federal Government has a responsibility to lead by example to cut energy use, reduce pollution and save taxpayer dollars. Yesterday's announcement is another step in the right direction.
Article by Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality
Which companies are committed to reducing the causes of climate change? The Carbon Disclosure Project recently released its 2010 reports on companies in both the Global 500 and S &P 500. The reports chronicle companies’ efforts to be more transparent about their carbon emissions and their efforts to reduce them.