INSPIRING BROWN INDUSTRIES TO GREENUP – A CONVERSATION WITH DAN HENDRIX
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More than 400 purchasing gurus and sustainability wallahs gathered in Minneapolis for the 5th annual Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC) May 14-16. SPLC has become the premier event where professionals with purchasing responsibility and budget interact with corporate, government, university and sustainability strategists.
Circular economy, stewarding embedded water, deforestation, sustainable financing, and challenges with global recycling markets were just a few of the issues, trends and innovations that were debated, discussed and dissected.
A highlight every year is Connect, where attendees can book as many as twelve 20-minute one-on-one meetings with peers, suppliers, customers and experts. Conversations were focused, useful information was gleaned and many a lead harvested.
More than 25 diverse organizations from Ecolab, Cubehydro, Interface, and TreeZero to the United Nations were represented in the exhibit area – a recycled train depot.
A highlight was SPLC’s 5th anniversary party held at US Bank Stadium – the Gold LEED Certified – home of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings. Attendees were treated to a behind the scenes tour of this marvelous 68,000 plus capacity stadium that somewhat resembles a Viking ship.
US Bank Stadium is 100% powered by renewable wind energy. Rainwater is collected, stored, filtered and slowly recharged into the local aquifer – eliminating the need to pump runoff into the city’s sewer system. Nearly all packaging used in the stadium is compostable. Administrative offices use 100% post-consumer recycled paper. As host of Super Bowl LII, 91% of all game day waste, more than 63 tons, were recycled, composted, reused or donated.
The 6th Annual SPLC will be held in Portland, OR in mid-May 2019. TreeZero plans to attend again because we’ve seen the ROI in a number of ways, not only in our business deals coming out of the Summit, but also the invaluable brand visibility in front of hundreds of sustainability and procurement leaders.
There are many ways you can incorporate sustainable practices into your personal and professional life. From recycling at home to encouraging your company’s supply chain to adopt sustainable practices, sustainability is becoming a part of our everyday lives. Another way to impact your sustainability goals is through socially responsible investing or sustainable, “green” or ethical investing. Investors employing this strategy seek to consider both financial returns and social good to bring about a social change. This Round-Up covers several interesting items related to “the news” on sustainable investing.
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Over the years many investing trends have come and gone, but ESG investing appears to be here to stay. In Schroders Global Investor Study 2017, 78 percent of more than 22,000 investors claimed that sustainability is more important than it was five years ago. Sixty-four percent claim that they have increased their allocation to sustainable funds over the last five years.
Schroders said that sustainable investing was the most commonly selected choice from a list of investment topics that investors said they would like to learn more about, ahead of topics like asset classes and the effects of compounding (Tweet about this)
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Additional News
See you next time!
Jeff Foote
Of the estimated 133 billion pounds of food that goes to waste every year, much of it is perfectly edible and nutritious. Wasting food also means wasted water. The impact on the environment continues when food waste goes to landfills where it produces methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times worse than carbon dioxide.
This is an arena where doing the wrong thing just makes no sense at all. We can learn that eating the things we waste can save tremendous amounts of money. It can feed those around us who go hungry. It can make a dent in climate change. And it can taste awesome.
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WASTED! THE STORY OF FOOD WASTE – Available Everywhere October 13 – In Theaters, On Demand, Amazon and iTunes – WASTED! THE STORY OF FOOD WASTE aims to change the way people buy, cook, recycle, and eat food. Through the eyes of chef-heroes like Anthony Bourdain, Dan Barber, Mario Batali, Massimo Bottura, and Danny Bowien, audiences will see how the world’s most influential chefs make the most of every kind of food, transforming what most people consider scraps into incredible dishes that create a more secure food system. WASTED! exposes the criminality of food waste and how it’s directly contributing to climate change and shows us how each of us can make small changes – all of them delicious – to solve one of the greatest problems of the 21st Century. (Tweet about this)
Highlighted Stories
Additional News
See you next time!
Jeff Foote
Have you heard about the Power of One?
There has been a lot of talk in the news about climate change, from record-breaking heat to more extreme weather events.
“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
Now you can go forward with confidence knowing that you can take on climate change and make a difference. As Jane Goodall said, “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
Oh, and never forget about the Power of One.
Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reduce Global Warming, brilliantly edited by Paul Hawken, is just what we need. Its a straight forward narrative providing over 100 solutions to global warming. Simply reducing carbon emissions below an arbitrary percentage, from a randomly selected base year, is not enough to stem the impacts of anthropogenic climate change.
Drawdown is the collective work of a qualified and diverse group of researchers from around the world. They were tasked to identify, research, and model the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change.
The title of the book is derived from an atmospheric term. According to Paul Hawken, “drawdown is that point in time at which greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline on a year-to-year basis.” Hawken’s goal of the Drawdown project was to identify, measure, and model substantive solutions to determine how much we could accomplish within three decades.
Read more: Pedaling to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint: Bike to Work Day
Much of the systems, knowledge and technology we need to deploy to create a meaningful drawdown of GHG (greenhouse gases) already exists. Yet, a blueprint to get them to work in unison did not. Until now. Drawdown provides such a roadmap using systems thinking. Hawken sets forth in Drawdown that “we found a plan, a blueprint that already exists in the world in the form of humanity’s collective wisdom, made manifest in applied, hand-on practices and technologies that are commonly available, economically viable and scientifically valid.”
In fact-filled, one-to-three page vignettes, Drawdown offers and ranks its solutions – most feasible today – and projects the potential impact (in gigatons) of reduced CO2 as well as global implementation costs and potential financial savings. Solutions are organized into seven sectors – Buildings and Cities, Energy, Food, Land Use, Materials, Transport and Women and Girls. The solutions presented range from afforestation, electric vehicles and food waste reduction to recycled paper, regenerative agriculture and refrigeration management.
Drawdown is a must read for business, NGO and government leaders regardless of their organization’s sustainability efforts or positioning on climate change. Each solution is described in concise, superb prose that will inspire practical application for any organization interested in reducing its impact on climate change.
What Drawdown makes clear is that no government, NGO, international conglomerate or philanthropist can solve climate change alone. It is going to require an all-of-the-above strategy with worldwide collaboration. Using Drawdown as a playbook, we have an opportunity, as Hawken states, “…to see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius.”
I encourage you to buy a copy of Drawdown, read it and implement relevant suggested solutions. My hope is that, like me, you’ll come away with a sense of optimism and promise dispelling thoughts of doom that we can’t solve the climate crisis.
Paul Hawken has written seven books published in over 50 countries in 29 languages including four national bestsellers, The Next Economy, Growing a Business, and The Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest. Natural Capitalism, co-authored with Amory Lovins, was read by several heads of state including Bill Clinton who called it one of the five most important books in the world. He has appeared on numerous media including the Today Show, Larry King, Talk of the Nation, Charlie Rose, and been profiled in articles including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Washington Post, Business Week, and Esquire.
His writings have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Resurgence, New Statesman, Inc, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, Utne Reader, Orion, and other publications. He founded several companies including the first food company in the U.S. that relied solely on sustainable agricultural methods. He has served on the board of several environmental organizations including Point Foundation (publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogs), Center for Plant Conservation, Trust for Public Land, and National Audubon Society.
There has been a great deal of discussion regarding climate change in the news over the past few weeks. The climate change debate is not new and unfortunately is not going away anytime soon.
The climate is changing, we have known it for a long time, and we can and must take action to stem the tide. This Round-Up covers several interesting items related to “the news” on climate change.
The three-minute story of 800,000 years of climate change with a sting in the tail (Phys.org)
There are those who say climate has always changed, and that CO2 levels have always fluctuated. That’s true. But its also true that since the industrial revolution, CO2 levels in the atmosphere have climbed to levels that are unprecedented over hundreds of millennia. Here’s a short video to put recent climate change and CO2 emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years. (Tweet about this)
See you next time!
Jeff Foote
What do you think about when you think of trees?
Technology usually isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.
You think of them for the shade they offer, the fruits they bare or even as a raw material for paper! But UK company BioCarbon Engineering recently revealed how quickly hundreds of trees could be planted – how entire ecosystems could be restored – with the use of drones.
Competing in the Drones for Good Competition, they utilized technology as an enabler showing how to reach difficult places and plant trees where they are needed.
The results are a brilliant and creative way to combat deforestation.
Oxford Based Company Plans to Use Drones to Plant One Billion Trees Per year (BioCarbon Engineering)
Can you plant a billion trees in a year? Oxford-based company BioCarbon says it’s not just possible – it’s already under way.
The company’s system works in two stages: first, a drone flies about and maps out the land, gathering intel on terrain, nutrients, and biodiversity.
Next, a planting drone fires biodegradable seedpods at targeted positions. Multiply that by 150 swarms of 6 drones each, BioCarbon believes it could eventually scale to 10s of billions of trees planted each year. (Click to Tweet)
See you next week!
Connecting People to Nature is this year’s theme for World Environmental Day. World Environment Day, celebrated each June 5th, was first designated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972. In 100+ countries, this day is the UN’s signature annual event for encouraging environmental stewardship. From your backyard to your favorite national park, nature is closer than you think. It’s time to get out and enjoy it. Be a part of a world-wide event and share your photos and videos using #WorldEnvironmentDay or #WithNature.
I frequently spend time outdoors to connect with nature. A hike along the Chattahoochee River or a walk or swim in my neighborhood brings me closer to nature. My travels take me across this country and the globe – to all the seven continents.
The Rocky Mountains: the majesty of nature
Recently, I witnessed the majesty of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The colonies of aspens, magnificent elk, soaring golden eagles, playful prairie dogs and yes, even snakes, took my breath away.
No matter where my travels take me, I’m always amazed by nature’s grandeur, stunning beauty and the plethora of free environmental services such as clean water and oxygen to soil and pollination. Today few organizations or individuals directly pay for the environmental services received from nature. Compounding this free rider status, many of the related externalities (waste) of commerce based on extraction of natural resources are not accounted for on the cost ledger of our organizations. If we don’t start accounting and paying for these environmental services that we all enjoy – how will our quality of life be impacted? What are the risks to our businesses? At a minimum, might we all be ignoring an enormous bill that is already past due?
I would argue that the status quo is unsustainable.
As much as 80% of the environmental impact of a brand comes from the activities of our supply chains. Businesses, NGOs and governments all have opportunities to collaborate with suppliers and partners to protect and preserve the environment. Here are some questions to consider posing across your supply chain:
This World Environment Day, I encourage you to take steps to connect your brand, organization and yourself more closely with nature. If you are not routinely asking questions like those above to your suppliers, my question to you is, what do you have you to lose?
Friday, May 19th is Bike to Work day. It’s time to swap out your car keys or subway card for two wheels. Will you be a participant?
Why Should You Bike to Work?
There are many reasons including staying fit, saving money, or avoiding traffic delays. The reason we at TreeZero like best is that it helps reduce your carbon footprint. According to The League of American Bicyclists, 40% of all trips in the U.S. are less than two miles, making bicycling a feasible and fun way to get to work. With increased interest in healthy, sustainable and economic transportation options, the number of bicycle commuters in the U.S. more than doubled since 2000.
You can do it
It sounds simple because it is. Whether you’re an experienced cyclist or a beginner, Bike to Work Day is your chance to give it a try. In fact, many of the largest U.S. cities will host Bike to Work Day events. Your effort make a difference. Many people who participate in a Bike to Work Day promotion as first-time commuters become regular bike commuters. Everyone’s commute is improved when people ride a bike.
Do it for fun
Leave the car at home and dust off the bike. Enjoy your commute for once. Notice the people, the buildings, the trees and much more. Then you don’t have to limit yourself to just bicycle commuting to work. Try riding your bike whenever possible. Ride with your entire family. Maybe it’s a trip to a local farmer’s market or just exploring your city – just remember to have fun!