Sustainability is a business practice important to all businesses of all sizes that is beginning to impact across the entire supply chain, as more and more global firms begin to see securing a green supply chain as a strategic priority. Integrated reporting increases the transparency of the organization, highlighting the issues and the impacts towards governance and structure.
Announcement for the upcoming: UNEP FI 2011 Global Roundtable sustainability conference that is occurring on the 19-20 October 2011 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, in Washington, DC. This is a biennial, high-level conference that typically attracts a select group of 600 plus sustainable finance and responsible investment leaders and thinkers for an intensive, two-day dialogue.
In this post Elaine gives some examples of successful sustainability goals and examples of goals that fall short of the mark, arguing that reporting needs to address what companies WILL do not just what they HAVE done. This post seeks to give insight on what is the right way for companies to establish sustainability goals.
Lean manufacturing practices and sustainability are conceptually similar in that both seek to maximize organizational efficiency. Where they differ is in where the boundaries are drawn, and in how waste is defined. Sustainability expands the definition of waste to include the wider range of consequences of business actions including environmental and social consequences. Lean processes are inherently less wasteful and in this sense promoting lean processes can help organizations become more sustainable.
In discussions on the merits of distributed solar power too little focus has been given to the many important benefits that result from increasing the use of distributed solar power. These benefits accrue to both the utilities and presumably their rate payers as well and to society (and the tax payers) at large. This post summarizes a recent paper “Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain?” that attempts to give these benefits a tangible quantified value in order that the debate on the merits of solar power also begin to include this side of the cost / benefit analysis. A side that is all too often glossed over and largely overlooked.
This post examines the importance of successfully communicating the importance of sustainability for the bottom line, in terms of risk mitigation, value opportunities and business benefits associated with sustainability to an organization’s CFO. The CFO is typically ultimately responsible for investor relations, facilities, purchasing, human resources, IT and have a large impact on all organizational resource allocation decision making in general, and CFOs can have a major impact on the ultimate success or failure of an organizations sustainability programs.
This post examines how to communicate the business value of CSR to the stakeholders those important external groups that are linked with and can have large impacts on a company. The post goes on to point out various ways effective CSR initiatives can have a positive effect on the business and how it is becoming […]
In this post Robert focuses on the green marketing gap, the perception gap that exists and results in most Americans perceiving green as an elitist phenomena. He outlines some of the principle problems that have caused this state of affairs to develop and argues that marketing should be geared to reinforcing the benefits that your product offers the planet.
This post explores the concept of an end-to-end ‘green’ power, water, and community eco-system based around mega-watt scale power and cooling requirements in a real world environment of limited financial resources and stringent system availability requirements. It suggests that huge power hungry data centers should consider incorporating on-site biomass electricity generation as an integral part of their operations systems.
