Recycling

Sustainability: Good for the Planet, for Business, and for Scouting

At first glance, Knorr soup, Dove soap, Lipton tea, Hellman’s mayonnaise, and Dirt is Good laundry products seem to have little in common. But they share three important characteristics: They are part of Unilever’s Sustainable Living portfolio, they are the company’s biggest products, and they (along with Unilever’s other sustainable brands) delivered nearly half the…

Touching the Elephant of Sustainability

A familiar parable from the Indian subcontinent describes a group of blind men examining an elephant. One man touches the elephant’s tail and thinks it’s like a rope. Another touches the elephant’s side and think it’s like a wall. The man who touches an ear imagines a huge hand fan. Feeling a leg convinces the…

Moving From Wasteful to Zero Waste

Denise Coogan generates more trash at home each week than her entire office has generated in a dozen years. And her office isn’t some eco-friendly coffee shop or organic farm. Instead, it’s Subaru’s 3.8-million-square-foot assembly plant in Lafayette, Ind. The plant and its 3,700 workers produce 300,000 vehicles a year but virtually no waste. In…

How Irvine Ranch Outdoor Education Center Is Embracing Sustainability

Ask a dozen people what sustainability means, and you’re liable to get a dozen difference answers—and each of them may be correct. That’s because sustainability is about a lot more than just recycling. Yes, it’s about saving the planet, but it’s also about taking care of people and making sure organizations have long-term viability. The…

Hometown USA Award rewards Scouts for efforts to Keep America Beautiful

Always leave a place better than you found it. For more than 100 years, Scouts have followed that doctrine everywhere they go. It’s in our DNA. And it’s why the Boy Scouts of America has teamed up with Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit devoted to ending littering, improving recycling and beautifying America’s communities. The embodiment of that partnership is the Keep America…

The Unintended Consequences of Sustainability

Just minutes after an event like the Super Bowl ends, sports fans can go online and order T-shirts emblazoned with the winning team’s logo. The same is true for the World Series and other major sporting events. Such instant gratification is possible only because vendors hedge their bets and order tens of thousands of T-shirts…

Taking Out the Trash Is Complicated—but It Doesn’t Have to Be

Most businesses have one: that repository of old furniture, office equipment, and computers that have been removed from service but are still serviceable. The repository may be a closet, or it may be a warehouse, but it’s there nonetheless. And getting rid of what it contains can be as hard as getting rid of a…