Coca-Cola, DEKA team on clean water technology. Courtesy of The Coca-Cola Co. Coca-Cola Co. plans to put DEKA's "Slingshot" water technology to work in Africa and Latin America. The Coca-Cola Co. partnered with DEKA R&D to bring clean water to the Third World using DEKA’s “Slingshot” technology. “The Slingshot water purification system uses a vapor compression distillation system that runs on low levels of electricity,” Coca-Cola said in a statement. “The system boils and evaporates any dirty water source – river water, ocean water and even raw sewage – and then allows the pure water to condense and be collected. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) said it wants to deliver millions of liters of clean drinking water in 2013 to schools, health clinics and community centers in rural regions of countries within Africa and Latin America.
In total, the partnership is expected to add more than half a billion liters of clean drinking water annually to the global water supply. From the Atlanta Business Chronicle. How To Be In Business Forever: A Lesson In Sustainability. Its time to kick off my Skillshare class on Sustainability. I will do a post each week this month (on Mondays of course). I will do office hours on Google Hangouts on Mondays at 6pm eastern for 30 minutes all month. We will do a project together which is to create a sustainable business model canvas. And there are groups you can create or join to allow you to collaborate with each other to complete the project and the class.
To join today's Office Hours on Google Hangouts, please check out the Skillshare page. I will start with a post on Short Term Profit Maximization vs Long Term Business Health and then will end with some comments on our Business Model Canvas project. If you want to stay in business forever, you have to focus on the long term. Many business schools teach executives and entrepreneurs that business is about profit maximization. Let's use an example.
Clay Christensen talks about this kind of thing all the time. Sadly most executives make the latter choice. Good luck. The Ann Arbor Chronicle | Sustainability Goals Shape Corridor Study. Ann Arbor planning commission meeting (Sept. 18, 2012): Two projects converged at the most recent planning commission meeting: A draft report of a South State Street corridor study, and next steps toward incorporating the city’s new sustainability goals into its master plan. The Sept. 18, 2012 Ann Arbor planning commission work session focused on South State Street – an aerial map of the corridor is spread out on the table. To the right is Kristin Baja, who provided staff support for the project. She’ll be leaving the city to take a job in Baltimore, and was praised by commissioners for her work. (Photos by the writer.) Eric Mahler recalled that both projects had been highlighted at a planning commission retreat two years ago, and that in some ways their completion marked a new era in city planning.
The corridor study is the first project that incorporates the sustainability goals. Several University of Michigan students attended the commission’s regular meeting on Sept. 18. Michigan's Sustainable Businesses Inspired by Bill McKibben. Bill McKibben speaks at Green Meets Black conference at the University of Michigan. Sustainability is a common attitude in cities like San Francisco and Austin, but for many it doesn’t immediately spring to mind when thinking about business in Michigan, home of the auto industry and one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. However, there are many stories of sustainability in Michigan, including a large furniture company with a long history of corporate citizenship, an insurance company which undertook a major LEED project in the heart of the recession, a company who goes out of its way to hire the homeless, and, most importantly, individuals with the faith and perseverance to believe that Michigan, and other less-recognized cities and regions, can advance a sustainable agenda.
Herman Miller is familiar presence at sustainable events, but some lesser-known companies also had some impressive tales to tell. Scroll down to see comments. Enlightened business strategy: closing the sustainability gap | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. Too many businesses are sleepwalking towards extinction, without truly appreciating just how short their lives will be. Conventional business models and strategies, largely founded in the last century, offer limited value in the challenging world of today. Whichever way one looks, the assumptions of the past are being severely challenged. Business strategists can no longer rely on a world that has an endless supply of resources, cheap fossil fuels, a benign climate and limitless capacity to absorb waste, where consumer demand and economies grow forever, enabled by cheap credit.
This landscape will never return. Yet these business critical factors still have little impact in many boardroom discussions and investment decisions, and many are slow to take advantage of the business opportunities offered by the green economy. But the strategic challenge for business is stark: adapt or die. Should oil companies stay in fossil fuels, or make a transition and become a renewable energy company? Why sustainability pros need to attack from the middle. Embedding sustainability is a term I have jousted around for a decade.
What kind of embedding is working today? How has the embedding work shifted? Certainly in the past two years, we have seen significant shifts from external to internal drivers. Employee engagement is a key theme in embedding CSR internally. Today’s column is co-written with Grant Ricketts, CEO of Tripos Software, who has developed software to engage employees and has a substantial background in learning and talent management. From his conversations with practitioners, he is well positioned to understand their challenges in embedding sustainability. The challenge to embedding sustainability is that everybody has a day job, and sustainability is often not seen as integral to it. Build a base level of awareness: Disarm blockers with a focus on real business opportunities. Making sustainability relevant to the job role Next Page: Chipping away at resistance.
Watching the Water Run Out of the Tub. Last week in London I delivered a presentation on sustainability to about 120 middle and senior managers from within BT. Afterwards we explored climate change, at the new and very impressive Atmosphere Gallery in the Science Museum. Recently I have taken to introducing my presentations using the measure of how many planets worth of resources humanity is using and how that number is growing. If you are not familiar with it, this web site from Global Footprint Network explains the concept. Another analogy I like to use to illustrate the concept is a bathtub with water running in from the tap and out through the plughole. The water running out the plughole represents the resources we are using.
The rate of water running in through the tap represents the earth’s ability to replenish those resources. Currently the water is running out the tub at 1.5 times the rate it is coming in (the world average). Of course in practice, different resources will exhaust at different times. Connect: Why SASB is a game changer for sustainable business.
For more than 20 years, the Holy Grail for sustainable business has been to engage investors. If only they could understand the competitive advantage and reduced risk afforded companies that manage their operations, people, and supply chains through the lens of environmental and social well-being — well, the theory goes, investors would vote with their dollars and companies would have no choice but to change. Reality, of course, hasn’t been so simple. Few investors — particularly the large pension funds and other institutional investments that can move financial markets — have viewed sustainability as a relevant investment criterion. Even when shown studies that sustainability leaders outperformed their peers on key financial indicators and ratios, including stock price, most analysts and fund managers haven’t been impressed.
Only hardcore "socially responsible investors" hew to the theory. Times are changing, though. “Materiality” is a legal term, defined by the U.S. Zero-waste event showcases Kittery's sustainability efforts. Members of the Mitchell Elementary School Green Team, from left, Emerson Hale, 7, Autumn Yurick, 8, and Addyson Hale, 9, hold up their trophy at the zero-waste event at Fort Foster in Kittery, Maine, on Sunday.Cheryl Senter photo By Joey Cresta jcresta@seacoastonline.com September 24, 2012 2:00 AM KITTERY, Maine — Public Works Commissioner Mary Ann Conroy said she might expect a typical town event or gathering to generate four or five bags of garbage.
That was not the case Sunday, when the town highlighted its "zero waste" initiative at a celebration at Fort Foster. "This is all we have for trash," said Susan Johnson, co-director of the Kittery Parent Teacher Association's Seaside 4-Miler run held in conjunction with the zero-waste event, as she held up one half-filled garbage bag. The event served as a way to highlight the town's and school district's efforts to reduce waste, with an ambitious goal of eventually becoming a zero-waste community. "It's a paradigm shift," she said. Reuters launches sustainability site. By Chris Roush Reuters launched Friday a site that focuses on covering sustainability issues. “Focusing on sustainability — for ourselves and for our customers — is good business,” said James C. Smith, chief executive officer, Thomson Reuters, in a statement. “This new Thomson Reuters website encompasses a broad range of issues, products and practices concerning the environment, economies, corporate citizenship and risk management.
It is intended to serve and encourage sustainability initiatives across the global community of professionals.” Sustainability will provide multiple perspectives on energy and environmental issues, including on-topic news, analysis and opinion from Reuters news; content and analysis for professionals from Thomson Reuters businesses; insight from outside experts working in specialist fields such as climate, energy, health, law and corporate governance/ Future plans for the site include tools and unique resources, which will be introduced as they become available. Coca-Cola says Rio 2016 sustainability efforts to be "bigger and better" Guidelines for events Coca-Cola's sustainable Games project co-ordinator Olivia Knight-Adams told delegates that she is currently working on guidelines to help the Rio 2016 sustainabilty and events teams build on its London 2012 strategy.
"Making a bigger effort is always the goal so we're hoping to do even more for Rio 2016. For London 2012 we were lucky to have support from everyone in the top levels of the company, who knew that we had to allocate the required resources to make London a success," she said. Sustainability champions Knight-Adams went on to outline how Coca-Cola set about organising its ambitious sustainability project, assigning "sustainability champions" in its various brands and internal departments. "We made sure that not only senior level staff were involved, but also more junior staff who were enthusiastic about the cause. Carbon footprint Meanwhile, a Street Games project to get young people involved in sport was supported by Coca-Cola.
For Professional Sports Teams, Sustainability Isn't Just a Game. This is an archived story. The information and any links may no longer be accurate. Stadiums, arenas, playing fields and other sports venues present a unique management challenge for waste management, water conservation and electricity consumption. Consider your average home game. In a few short hours, thousands of fans leave an impact on parking lots, restrooms and consume huge amounts of food and drinks. Countless kilowatt hours of electricity go toward displaying stats and random fan videos.
And how do fans get there? So, it is great to hear that energy efficiency, renewable energy, recycling and composting are becoming far more common in the professional sports world. Of the 126 professional sports teams in the five major North American leagues, 38 have shifted at least partially to renewable energy and have energy efficiency programs, reports the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Green Sports Alliance.
There are other motivations. Here is NRDC's report: PwC: Almost Half of Execs Using Sustainability Valuation. September 7, 2012 About half of corporate executives polled – 46 percent – say they use sustainability valuation methods to compare and prioritize their sustainability initiatives, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey. In the poll of 1,400 executives, 36 percent said their biggest challenge is prioritizing sustainability initiatives. Another 10 percent said they are beyond prioritization and are now in the stage of asking how much capital to allocate to sustainability. However, many respondents indicated that they struggle with putting a dollar value on sustainability initiatives — 39 percent have not attempted any valuation techniques (see chart).
The survey also found that 31 percent of respondents were interested in quantifying the impact of sustainability in shareholder value, and about 17 percent said direct cost savings is what matters the most. A May report published by PwC, Sustainability Valuation: An Oxymoron? Siemens, Air France-KLM, BMW lead Dow Sustainability Index. BMW, Air France and Siemens were named as some of the world's leaders in sustainability by one of the longest-running sustainability indicators, which released its latest listings today. The 2012 Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI) review was announced by SAM, the Swiss-based investment company that focuses on sustainability investing.
SAM partners with Dow Jones Indexes in the development and publication of the DJSI, which tracks the financial performance of some top international companies. The DJSI uses a “best-in-class” approach for measuring sustainability. The world’s largest 2,500 companies are annually invited to report on their sustainability performance. Broken down into 57 sectors, those businesses are then analyzed by a variety of social, economic and environmental criteria -- especially regarding risks and opportunities within their specific industries. Those 57 sectors are then combined into 19 “supersectors,” which SAM uses to identify top industry leaders.