2Sustain

Some are calling it “the world’s largest conservation agreement.”

On Tuesday, Canada’s leading pulp and paper companies, in unprecedented partnership with nine environmental groups, announced the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which calls for ground-breaking environmental standards of forest management and conservation, protecting species at risk and action on climate change.

The historic agreement covers more than 72 million hectares of public forests licensed to FPAC member companies across Canada. It specifically recognizes the shared role that governments, industry and environmentalists play  in protecting and sustainably managing the Boreal Forest.

From the agreement: (more…)

Last month, the Sportlifestyle company Puma introduced an innovative sustainable packaging and distribution system that the company says will offer significant reductions in waste and CO2 emissions, compared to traditional product packaging, such as shoe-boxes and apparel polyethylene bags.

Puma partnered with designer Yves Behar, of San Francisco based fuseproject, to rethink the way the millions of pairs of shoes that it sells each year are packaged. Ultimately, Behar designed a “Clever Little Bag,” replacing the cardboard shoebox with a re-usable shoe bag. Although it lacks the structure of a box, Puma says the bag adequately protects each pair of shoes –from the factory until the consumer takes them home.

Naturally, less packaging requires fewer raw materials and less use of water and energy to produce. Using the bag instead of a box also means there’s less weight to ship and less waste for disposal.

According to Puma, the “Clever Little Bag” will reduce water, energy and diesel consumption on the manufacturing level by more than 60 percent per year. It will also save 500,000 liters of diesel during transport. (more…)

Taking a page from Walmart’s playbook, the Procter & Gamble Company has launched a supplier environmental sustainability scorecard and rating process to measure and improve the environmental performance of its key suppliers.

The new scorecard is the result of 18 months of close collaboration with P&G’s Supplier Sustainability Board, which includes more than 20 leading supplier representatives from the company’s global  supplier network.  It will assess suppliers’ environmental impact and encourage continued improvement by measuring energy use, water use, waste disposal and greenhouse gas emissions on a year-to-year basis.

It’s worth noting that P&G also took the additional step of making the scorecard “open code,” so that any interested organization can use it. According to a press release, that’s all part the company’s effort to create an initiative that can have far reaching cross-industry impact. In fact, P&G is encouraging its suppliers to use the scorecard within their own supply chains. (more…)

Kodak, now known as the world’s foremost “imaging innovator,” has launched a new logo to help promote both its eco-friendly products and its overall commitment to environmental stewardship.

The company is adding a green and yellow leaf logo (pictured left), plus the tagline “Kodak Cares,” to marketing, advertising materials and packaging that include claims directly addressing its environmental improvements or programs.

In addition to the new branding, Kodak has launched a new sustainability website dedicated to its policies and performance from the perspectives of innovation, stewardship and responsibility.

And, the company says it will soon be reporting on progress toward its sustainability goals in the areas of social responsibility, product responsibility and operational responsibility. (more…)

Businesses in Cleveland are out in front, pioneering what some are calling the “next green wave:” large-scale composting of food waste.

According to The Plain Dealer, several of the city’s major food-waste makers are spearheading an effort to keep tons of biodegradable food scraps out of landfills. They dump their food waste into biodegradable bags (often made out of potato starch), and then a composting company hauls them away to be turned into a high-quality soil additive. (more…)