Consumers’ growing interest in environmental sustainability has prompted companies to launching major ad campaigns touting their green credential, often with misleading claims. Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA) software can have the infrastructure necessary to hold greenwashers accountable.
Andrew Winston, founder of Winston Eco-Strategies, kicked of day two of the Sustainable Brands 2010 conference with an informative talk on how the difficult environmental, economic and supply challenges that business and industry face, have changed that game and how those challenges are presenting opportunities.
A newly-released Pew Center report “From Shop Floor to Top Floor: Best Business Practices in Energy Efficiency,” documents that US companies are increasingly pursuing innovative energy efficiency strategies to boost productivity and cost savings, while reducing their carbon footprint.
Companies are now requiring their suppliers to address carbon management as a core business issue. A plan to deselect some suppliers in the future for failing to meet carbon management criteria set by the companies. These organizations are increasinigly developing strategies for engaging with suppliers on carbon related issues amd have emissions or energy reduction plans in place.
Verdantix, recently released a free report, that explains why the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) is needed, defines the role of the CSO, and provides a profile to guide the appointment of the CSO. It also explains why organizations face a climate change and sustainability management deficit, why fixing sustainability governance gains is becoming a major priority by a growing number of firms, how the CSO can spearhead business transformation, who the ideal candidate for the chief sustainability officer role is, and what are the three priority areas of domain expertise.
The Department of Energy is awarding $47 million to support the development of new technologies and knowhow aimed at improving energy efficiency in the information technology (IT) and communication technology sectors. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that 14 projects across the country will share in this award. Information technology and telecommunications are vital and rapidly growing sectors of our overall economy and will become even more central as the smart grid is deployed. As our country increasingly comes to rely on an information economy in sector after sector the underlying physical infrastructure that supports it, such as the data centers, networks, routers and so forth, is expected to continue to rapidly grow.
Today, Newsweek launched a ranking of the greenest companies in America in its current issue and Hewlett-Packard took top honors. The Newsweek Green Rankings is the first-ever report based on companies’ actual environmental footprint, policies and practices. The twelve-page report in the September 28 issue, features a green ranking of America’s 500 largest publicly-traded companies as measured by revenue, market capitalization and number of employees. On Newsweek.com, users can search and sort the data in several ways, analyze the detailed methodology of the study and submit and review comments.
