Sustainability | Green Leader

Posts Tagged ‘Sustainability’

Powerful approach to accelerating sustainability

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Reported by Debbie Deland, President of Net Impact Orlando

‘The Designers Accord’ is a creative approach to accelerating sustainability and a role model for other job disciplines or industries. So what is ‘The Designers Accord’? It asks designers worldwide (new product developers, architects, interior designers) to commit to 5 sustainability principles for themselves and their businesses. It is about addressing sustainability on every project with every client. Designing sustainability into a new building, a new product/service, etc. is the best way to achieve sustainable results. (more…)

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Why focus on business for sustainability action?

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Biggest resource consumer and polluter

Based on reliable data from numerous sources, business and organizations use the most world resource and create the most pollution and waste. As undeniable, business enables a lifestyle across America that is not sustainable in that: (more…)

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“The water content of things” to choose what you use and consume?!

Monday, August 10th, 2009

Fresh water is increasingly an issue. Over 1.2B people don’t have access to safe water today. Safe water and good sanitation are two key foundations for a healthy human and animal society. Incredibly, less than 1% of the world’s fresh water is accessible to humans. This second statistic, like the metaphor of our atmosphere being like a piece of paper around a soccer ball, always reminds me that the Earth is a lot smaller than I imagine especially knowing I share it with over 6 Billion brothers and sisters. But, that’s not new. Have you thought about the water content of things in our everyday lives and in our businesses? I have to admit that I hadn’t thought much about it. (more…)

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A lot more impact than ‘I’m just one person’!

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Deb Albers is a hero of mine because she took on sustainability within her company in a way where she and like-minded employees could contribute. Her initiative led to a lot more employee involvement and a lot more sustainability progress for Dell. She didn’t think of herself as ‘just one person’, but someone who had a passion to contribute on sustainability through her day job. (more…)

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Insufficient, outdated coverage doesn’t help economy

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

The small article on Wal-Mart’s major move to eco-rate deserved front page coverage and a different angle. Positive action toward green or sustainable living commensurate with the size of our problems is news I want to read. The news limelight on N. Korea, Iran, even to some degree all of the Middle East is counter-productive. As they say ‘what you measure is what you get’. Perhaps what you consider news is what you get. These hot spots need addressing, but with the issues we face, they seem almost irrelevant to having a livable future based on the current reality of our$700B/year foreign oil dependence, natural resource depletion, severely declining eco-systems, the onset of climate change, etc. (more…)

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American personal freedom challenge

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

We were raised with the ideal that ‘all men are created equal’. It took us a long time to achieve this ideal at least in policy/law, and our consciousness, if not yet in all our actions, except probably for the Gay community today. In fact, we had to make the ideal more real because our founding fathers excluded some (at least women and blacks, gays for sure) from the equality ideal. We’re still working on race and other biases and the mental models or generalizations we have for each other. Our strength is in our diversity, our commitment to equality, along with a willingness to update our mental models to get closer and closer to the ideal that ‘all men are created equal’ in all aspects of our society. (more…)

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Posted in Sustainability, US | 3 Comments »

Systems thinking blog (part 3)

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Easy Way to Identify A System

From Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows:

How to know whether you are looking at a system or just a bunch of stuff:
A) Can you identify the parts? AND
B) Do the parts affect each other? AND
C) Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own? AND perhaps
D) Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances. (more…)

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A different level of consciousness

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Not sure this is a good match for a post on this site, but here goes. Over the past few months, I’ve experienced a different level of consciousness for my own sustainability. I am not sure why except that I am so much more aware and interested in our progress through reading a lot about sustainability and writing about it. Awhile ago, my family made some of the common lifestyle changes to begin living more sustainably: (more…)

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Posted in Sustainability | 8 Comments »

Another way to a green job

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Recently, I came across NET IMPACT (netimpact.org). I was blown away by their vision, their network, their tools and best practices, and that they involve student members and professional members. As many of you have heard, one of the ways to a green job is through volunteering. However, it can be hard to find volunteer opportunities that can impact climate change or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in the community. Is I do, Net Impact believes in the power of business and its employees. (more…)

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Systems thinking blog — our energy system traps (part 2)

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Our energy system actually exhibits three kinds of system traps or archetypes. The first is Tragedy of the Commons in two ways:

  • No one is managing the atmosphere, so everyone is free to pollute. Everyone keeps polluting until some kind of management of the commons, our atmosphere, is put in place. (more…)

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Posted in Sustainability, Systems Thinking, United States | 2 Comments »

Systems thinking introduction and our energy system (part 1)

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Humans are linear thinkers and event focused. Our focus on events is natural and fed by the media that provides event after event, usually giving no context of time or quantity. The complex systems of our energy structure do not behave linearly. Broad understanding of systems thinking is pivotal to accelerating the deployment of renewable energies, energy efficiencies, and lifestyle change. The public is perfectly capable of understanding the concepts of systems thinking. However, I am not sure any of us understand the lifestyle sacrifices we have to make to fulfill our moral obligations to the planet and humanity. (more…)

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Posted in Sustainability, Systems Thinking, US | 2 Comments »

Corporate Responsibility: a dead parrot?

Monday, May 18th, 2009

As the Recession has started to bite, budgets have been slashed and projects mothballed across all sectors and industries. Investments in Sustainability, Corporate Responsibility and Carbon Management have been no exception. For many, who see such spend as purely discretionary, the demise of such, potentially “distracting”, initiatives has been loudly heralded. But is the “parrot” really deceased, or are the obituaries premature?

Is CSR a dead parrot?

Is CSR a dead parrot?

The reality is that in cash-strapped times like the present, the principles of Sustainability, applied in a materially relevant way, should be seen as more - not less - important in ensuring long-term organisational survival. Properly planned and implemented, such initiatives can provide a stimulus for all sorts of good business practices, whether cutting costs through targetted reductions in energy use, enhancing loyalty through increased employee engagement, or speeding up planning processes through effective stakeholder management> in all such instances the effective implementation of the right initiatives in the right way can rapidly and meaningfully add to a companies bottom line. (more…)

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Posted in Sustainability, UK | No Comments »