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If food waste was a country, it would emit more CO2 than all the countries in the world except China and the U.S. “Wasting food is a tragedy, but the real tragedy is that we’re wasting people,” says Robert Egger, a genius with a vision.

Who are the people being wasted? Older people released from prison who can’t get a job and young people emerging from the foster care system who are statistically headed to the streets or prison.

Egger decided to tackle all of these issues at once, so he took food waste and created a culinary school to teach felons and foster kids how to cook. Once the culinary students graduate, they are hired by restaurants or social enterprises.

It’s a brilliantly simple plan. The first step was to create a nonprofit and a social enterprise in Los Angeles. Here’s the story of how this innovative philanthropic business model works.

The nonprofit: LA Kitchen

The LA Kitchen is a 20,000-square-foot food processing hub that accepts donated food. It works with local farmers and produce wholesale companies to gather fruits and vegetables that will not be sold due to cosmetic issues or lack of demand. In the U.S. 40 percent of edible food goes to waste, and 50 percent of that is healthy fruits and veggies. Bent, bruised, broken, wrinkled, over- or under-ripe fruits and veggies don’t ever find a home. They get discarded.

Egger told us he spoke to a fruit seller earlier in the day, who offered to give him pallets and pallets of pineapples for free. The pineapples were perfectly ripe and ready to be eaten that day. The problem was that no one would buy them. People don’t want to buy what they have to eat today; they want to buy something they can eat in three to five days.

Social programs send the LA Kitchen two types of people: youth who have been recently released from foster care and seniors who were recently incarcerated. This is an especially amazing opportunity for the recently incarcerated since the three things that make it especially hard to get a job are: lack of job skills, old age and a criminal record.

California Proposition 47 states that older prisoners can be released early. On the surface it sounds compassionate, but some speculate the real reason is that the government doesn’t want to pay for the prisoners’ healthcare as they age. Often these people have been imprisoned since they were 15 years old. Sadly, these men and women can’t find jobs, so they end up on the streets. Enter the LA Kitchen, giver of second chances.

The social programs that partner with the LA Kitchen vet the potential students to make sure they are ready to enroll and learn culinary skills. The mix of young and senior students is intentional. Egger says hopefully the older students will tell the younger ones, “I’m not going to let you make the same mistakes I did. I’m going to work with you, and we’re going to do this together.”

Once the students learn cooking skills, they will manage the volunteers who come to help transform fruits and veggies into nutritious meals. Egger created a similar nonprofit in Washington, D.C. called DC Central Kitchen. Presidents Obama and Clinton have both volunteered there.

Egger says when you put a president in a kitchen beside someone imprisoned for decades and task them with cooking for 5,000 people, at some point the president suddenly turns to the felon and asks, “Am I doing this the right way?” And the felon replies, “No sir, you do it this way.” And in that moment, that person who was formerly incarcerated can feel extremely proud of his skill-set and the knowledge he has gained.

“That’s the power of food," Egger says. "Every morsel of food should be tied to empowerment, inclusion and uplifting, not just giving people free food.”

Volunteers and culinary students will chop, freeze, refrigerate and cook donated food that is about to expire (like the pallets of pineapple). The goal is to “take time and temperature out of the equation,” so the food will stay fresh. LA Kitchen will reclaim a million pounds of produce within its first year and serve up 990,000 meals, snacks and products.

The nutritious meals will then be distributed for free to social service agencies in Los Angeles, including after-school programs, drug rehab centers and empowerment programs for the homeless. The main emphasis, however, will be on the older population who Egger says will soon be the poorest segment of society. “Whoever is at the bottom is who we serve,” he says. “A balanced diet is one where both rich and poor have equal access to healthy food.”

Ironically, food is not what people hunger for the most, Egger tells us: “The deepest hunger across the U.S. is to be part of something bigger than ourselves.” People want to do something good with their lives. This model is brilliant because it not only feeds physical hunger, but it also feeds the students and volunteers’ emotional hunger for purpose and meaning in life.

The LA Kitchen is not just a kitchen in LA. It is the kitchen of LA. It represents all of LA in that it supports and uplifts people of all ages and from all walks of life. Egger says, “Everyone has a role. Everyone has something to contribute. Everyone has a gift.”

Egger hopes to make the LA Kitchen even better than the DC Central Kitchen due to the abundance of produce grown in California as well as the largest elderly client population.

Improving on the DC Central Kitchen is saying a lot. In the past 25 years there, 1,000 men and women have earned jobs that keep them out of prison and off the streets and produced over 30 million meals. About 60 programs in other cities and 40 school-based kitchens emulated the model based on open-source knowledge. The 100th culinary class recently graduated from the DC Kitchen. (This is the part where you give a standing ovation.)

The social enterprise: Strong Food

In addition to the nonprofit, Egger also created a social enterprise called Strong Food. It is a for-profit subsidiary that will hire graduates of the LA Kitchen’s culinary program. The business will compete for foodservice contracts and create wholesale and retail products. It’s an innovative, robust model that will be self-sustaining once funded and operational.

Strong Food will use purchased product and compete with other companies for senior meal contracts with the city and county. It may also strike deals with local hospitals, universities and other entities. For example, Egger told us he just received information about a potential prison contract, which would pay for a million pounds of food per year of cut produce for the prison system.

“I don’t like participating in the system, but at the same time I’m intrigued by the idea of felons sending local healthy food back to other felons.” He feels it might be a good way for those in prison to hear about Strong Food and the LA Kitchen, so when they are released they know a place that can help them.

You be the judge. If you were a senior, hospital patient, university student or incarcerated prisoner, which meal would you rather eat? The frozen dinner on the left or the beautiful, colorful and nutritious meal on the right? I think Egger is on to something.

Although Strong Food will compete for a variety of contracts, the emphasis will be on winning contracts for senior citizens because they are the ones who will soon have the greatest need for inexpensive nutritious food, Egger says. Nearly 80 million baby boomers are headed into retirement, and most don’t have enough money saved.

“What you see is a frightening number of people who will be old and poor. Every single morning in America, 10,000 people turn 68. They don’t have enough money in the bank for the extra 10 years science is going to give them.” They will soon be the poorest people in the U.S. Already, 450,000 Los Angeles seniors are living below the poverty line.

The new era of philanthropy

The nonprofit LA Kitchen and social enterprise Strong Food form a robust new form of philanthropy. In Egger’s words: “It’s a cool rockin’ badass machine of love” that makes amazing things happen every single day.

Social enterprise is a business model that is becoming quite popular. Young people in particular are deciding they don’t want to choose between making money and doing good.

“They don’t want to have to decide whether to work for a .com or .org," Egger says. "They want to blend everything. The idea for them is that philanthropy is how you make your money AND how you spend your money. It’s your life. It’s not just a check you write at the end of the year.”

This is the reason millennials are pounding on the doors of socially-conscious companies like Strong Food, wanting to join them so they have work with meaning. It’s also why they want to buy from socially-conscious companies as consumers. Their careers and purchases can be ways they create social justice and make the world a more beautiful place.

Egger believes in what he calls, “relentless incrementalism -- this idea of never stopping.”

“Some days big strides, some days small, but never stopping.” Saying to yourself, “‘I’m not going to stop, I’m going to keep moving forward.’ Badass movement all the time.”

“Every time a person stands out and acts up against injustice, they send forth a small ripple of hope that can turn into waves and wash down the mightiest walls of oppression.”

Image credits: 1-4 & 6-7 - The LA Kitchen; 5 - Renee Farris

California is proving to the rest of America that economic success does not require increased pollution.

The state recently reached an economic development milestone: It is achieving superior and sustained economic growth while also reducing climate changing pollution.

At a time when the California economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy, the California Air Resources Board reports that the state has reduced greenhouse gas emission by 1.5 million metric tons.

Breaking the link between economic growth and pollution

Since the Industrial Age, the foundation of economic development has been that increased pollution was a necessary evil to achieving economic success. The public policy positions of fossil-fueled electric utilities, the oil industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been, and continues to be, that America cannot afford more environmental regulation. They have held this position since the 1960s Clean Air Act. Their defense of pollution is that a community must accept increased environmental impacts or face economic stagnation.

The facts could not be further from the truth. Since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, and subsequent increased regulation of pollution through amendments in 1970, 1977 and 1990, the U.S. economy has tripled in size. What the Clean Air Act did challenge was the competitive positioning of companies that gained economic advantage through pollution. These regulations forced businesses to successfully compete on price, product performance and environmental protection.

The International Energy Agency's 2014 report further advances the delinking of pollution growth and economic growth. The Energy Information Agency reports that, for the first time in recorded modern human history, the world has achieved economic growth while also reducing greenhouse emissions. This achievement was driven by shifts to renewable energy and increased energy efficiency by China, the U.S. and other nations. The EIA reports that the U.S. use of energy and economic growth has decoupled as we continue to increase our energy efficiency.

California pioneers the carbon-free economy

California is moving past the question of whether pollution is necessary for economic success. It is pioneering a new economic model where economic success is achieved by eliminating, not containing, greenhouse emissions. The scale of California’s success in growing its economy while reducing its GHG emissions deserves the attention of all states.

California’s economy is booming even in the face of a historic drought exacerbated by global warming. For all the public attention on the economic success achieved by the great state of Texas, California’s economy is twice the size of the Lone Star State’s and is creating more jobs. California’s economy has grown to be the seventh largest economy in the world and is larger than Brazil’s, Russia’s and Italy’s. Only the U.S., plus China, Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, have larger economies.

What state would not like to lure the companies now headquartered in California? They include Disney, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Tesla, SolarCity, HP and Genetech. California’s San Francisco metro area accounts for over 40 percent of all venture capital invested in the United States. Boston, at 11 percent, ranks a distant second.

To ignore California is to turn a blind eye to the world capital of innovation. While some pundits compare California to Greece in terms of its economy or Russia in terms of its centralized controls, the economic reality could not be further from the truth. California has bet big on entrepreneurship and technology innovation. Its bet on entrepreneurship and innovation has resulted in the state leading the U.S. in agriculture, technology and manufacturing revenue growth.

California’s economic success has not come through taxpayer subsidies used by most states to pay a business to locate a plant. It doesn't have an economic development government agency, nor does it fund economic development. California pursues economic development by creating markets for disruptive technologies to drive down their unit prices through economies of scale. The state’s Million Solar Roofs initiative created the domestic market for rooftop solar that is now challenging grid power prices across the U.S. California’s pricing of carbon emissions is driving automobile innovations. The California electric car market now accounts for 1 out of every 2 electric cars sold in America.

The proof of California’s strategy is that, since the 2001 peak in the state’s carbon intensity, it has achieved a 23 percent reduction even while its GDP has grown by 6.6 percent.

The green economic revolution

The green economic revolution I projected in 2007 is now a reality. China, Germany and California are investing in technologies and public policies that will delink economic success and pollution. The question is no longer if, but how quickly, this new economic model will replace the Industrial Age.

Significant barriers to this green economic revolution do exist. But they are not technological or economic. The barrier to the new economic model being pioneered by California comes from states and companies still dependent on pollution to win competitive advantage.

While these states and companies can retard our country’s path to a cleaner and stronger economy, they cannot stop the green economic revolution. America’s free marketplace will continue to open the door for companies that provide consumers with price competitive “in me, on me and around me” solutions. Companies that deliver products that cost less and mean more in terms of improved human health will win.

California is providing this. It is only a matter of time when the California path to economic development will become the norm for all states.

Image credit: Flickr/Brian Kusler

By Beth Sirull and Brenna McCallick

What’s standing in the way of impact investing exploding in the United States?  We are seeing lots of intention.  Everywhere we turn, we hear more and more from investors who are excited about impact investing.  Bain Capital and Blackrock have created dedicated impact practices.  High net-worth individuals and family offices are starting to gather on a dedicated platform, ImPact, to share deals, ideas and experiences.  Foundations are sharing best practices and forging ahead on Mission Investors Exchange.  Even pension funds are making some Economically Targeted Investments (ETIs) to earn appropriate financial returns and create economic opportunities in low-income areas.

And yet, the amount of dollars invested in real projects and actual businesses is still a minuscule percentage of all invested capital. What’s holding us back?

While changes in public policy won’t automatically open up floodgates of impact capital, creating a policy ecosystem that allows — and encourages — impact investing, is a necessary, but insufficient, condition.  Changes in policy are arguably step one.  Let’s look at an example:

• ERISA. In 2008, the Department of Labor (DOL) issued an interpretive bulletin on the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, which sets the standards of fiduciary duty for pension funds. The bulletin established what is known as the “rigid rule,”­ a mandate that pension fund managers invest solely with a view to maximize returns for their beneficiaries, and prohibiting the consideration of other factors, such as environmental, social or governance (ESG) issues, in investment decisions. The rule has since been seen to have a “chilling effect” on ETIs made by pension funds, many of which view such investments as too risky or in violation of fiduciary duty.

Retracting the rigid rule would open the door for pension funds to invest for social and environmental impact alongside ― and not at the expense of ― competitive returns for their beneficiaries. This would constitute big win for impact investing, and not only because pension funds represent over $22 trillion in total assets in the U.S. alone.  While ERISA technically only applies to private pension funds, it effectively sets the standards of investment for other large fiduciaries, and any changes to the policy have the potential to create a ripple effect beyond those it directly governs.

These changes are necessary, although we are not likely to see a change in investing the day after they’re made.  But once these changes are realized, we can move to step two: reaching out to pension fund managers and their advisors, as well as the lawyers, accountants and investment managers that advise the thousands of foundations in the U.S., to educate them on the availability of impact investments.  This outreach will need to showcase examples of solid investments that have worked, and we will need to demonstrate that impact investments can be made effectively and efficiently.  But  the culture shift we need will not be achieved without the catalyzing power of policy change.

With the importance of these policy changes — and others — in mind, Pacific Community Ventures was excited to launch the Accelerating Impact Investing Initiative (AI3) project in 2013, in partnership with the Initiative for Responsible Investment and Enterprise Community Partners, and with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Surdna Foundation. Our goal is to explore concrete, specific opportunities and strategies for enacting critical policy changes that will strengthen the impact investing ecosystem in the U.S.

Throughout 2014, we convened and consulted with stakeholders from across impact investing and community development realms, and collaborated with the U.S. National Advisory Board and the Social Impact Investing Taskforce.  From these collaborations, we developed tools for making sense of the various ways the federal government can and has enabled impact investing in the U.S. ― tools to help advance meaningful policy change going forward.

The AI3 recently released a “mid-term” report, a framework for understanding and assessing policy ideas. Entitled Financing Social Innovation: Analyzing Domestic Impact Investing Policy in the United States, the report offers a brief look at historic and existing public-sector activity in support of impact investing, and provides tools for practitioners looking to navigate the complex universe of U.S. policy levers that harness private investment for public benefit.

The AI3’s work is far from done; we will continue to identify specific policies — particularly changes in guidance and regulation, rather than in legislation, understanding that Congressional gridlock can hamper such efforts — that both allow and incentivize impact investing.

We encourage you to join the conversation.  Send your comments and questions to ai3@pcvmail.org.

Image credit: Pixabay

Beth Sirull is the President of Pacific Community Ventures, a social enterprise dedicated to creating jobs and economic opportunities in low-income communities. She is a co-recipient of the James Irvine Foundation California leadership award, and has been named to Forbes’ “30 Top Social Entrepreneurs” and the San Francisco Business Times’ “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business.” Beth holds a Masters of Business Administration from Boston University and a Masters in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Brenna McCallick serves as Research Associate for PCV InSight, supporting PCV’s domestic and international impact investing policy initiatives. In her work with the Accelerating Impact Investing Initiative (AI3), Brenna conducts research on U.S. public policy as it relates to impact investing and produces content for AI3 publications.

This article is part of a series on “The ROI of Sustainability,” written with the support of MeterHero. MeterHero helps companies and organizations offset their water and energy footprints through consumer engagement. To follow along with the rest of the series, click here.

At Sustainable Brands 2015, we asked thought leaders to define the ROI of Sustainability in their words. In this video, Monique Oxender of Keurig Green Mountain shares some thoughts:

https://youtu.be/5-P8-yo4UVA

About Monique Oxender: Monique Oxender leads the efforts of Keurig-Green Mountain to brew a better world. She joined the company in 2012 and has navigated a path for integrated sustainability management during the recent period of growth and change. This journey travels directly through the intersection of world benefit and business value, informed by meaningful internal and external stakeholder engagement. Prior to joining GMCR, Oxender designed and developed a leading supply chain sustainability program for Ford Motor Company.

By Sarah McKinney 

Today the global population is being confronted by immeasurable social and environmental challenges. At the same time, the Internet gives everyone with a computer or smartphone unprecedented visibility to on-the-ground realities. This hasn’t just increased our awareness of what’s going on, but has also allowed us to connect on a more emotional level.

Countless nonprofits have been established to improve complicated situations, touching on issues such as human rights, climate change, education reform, disease prevention and poverty (to name a few), and the desire to donate money in support of these nonprofits is strong – particularly among millennials.

A recent study found that 87 percent of millennials gave money to a nonprofit in 2014. The “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge” campaign raised well over $100 million dollars for a single nonprofit last year, and millennials played a big part in its success. But for most nonprofits, standing out from the crowd and securing continued financial support from millennials has never been harder. And leveraging technology in a way that resonates with them has never been more important.

This is the problem that Taylor Conroy, the founder and CEO of Change Heroes, is focused on solving. After returning from a trip to Africa in 2009, where he visited a number of different villages and was able to see a library come to life as a direct result of the donation he made to the nonprofit Free the Children, he became determined to uncover what motivates his millennial peers to deepen their engagement in philanthropic giving.

He spent several months conducting creative experiments and in-depth interviews, and uncovered five key drivers:

1. Group mentality: They were more apt to give when doing it as part of a group.
2. Tangible outcomes: They wanted to see visual proof of their impact.
3. Micro giving: It was easier to part with small amounts daily than one lump sum.
4. Personal connection: The relationship between the fundraiser and donor was key.
5. Recognition: It mattered to them, and it inspires continued engagement.

He launched Change Heroes in 2011 with a business model based on these findings. Unlike other donation platforms, Change Heroes began with a very singular focus – asking “campaign runners” to rally 33 of their friends to give $3.33 every day for 3 months and raise $10,000 to build a school or library in Africa.

Free the Children was established as the platform's first implementation partner, and Change Heroes retains 6 to 10 percent of all funds raised – generating revenue needed to cover operational expenses and scale growth.

Particularly unique to Change Heroes is its personalized video invites that campaign runners can choose to send out to each potential donor – an intuitive task for a generation that uses Snapchat, Vine and FaceTime to communicate with friends. Those who take advantage of personalized videos are 80 percent more likely to reach their funding goal (than those who send the same video to everyone), and 50 percent of the people who receive a personalized video invite end up making a donation.

While the specific amounts can now vary (i.e., the daily donation, number of people giving, days the campaign is running, and total fundraising goal), the basic formula for Change Heroes has remained the same – and it’s working. To date, Change Heroes users have given $2.1 million dollars through 555 campaigns funding 210 projects, and positively impacting 210,000 children in 15 developing countries. The average donation is $246, and the average campaign raises $5,000. The company has an online dashboard that reports many of these statistics in real time, along with a Top 25 Change Heroes leaderboard, where full names are listed next to total donation amounts. But that’s just its consumer offering.

At the end of 2014, Change Heroes raised a seed round of investment and launched a white label B2B product that is revolutionizing the way charities, nonprofits and socially responsible corporations tap into millennial giving. The software allows any organization to create a custom campaign so they can better diversify their funding portfolio, and decrease reliance on large-scale yearly donations from major sources. And because the Change Heroes model of giving is so popular with millennials, organizations are expanding the age range of their donor base while giving young people a fun and easy way to pool their friends and rally support for outcomes they believe in, and perhaps didn’t know how to support in the past.

This generational transition, from relying predominantly on baby boomer donations to developing transactional relationships with millennials that are based on transparency and trust, is important to the sustainability of every single charity and nonprofit organization in the world.

One example of a for-profit company using Change Heroes’ software is Royal Bank of Canada Insurance (RBCI). The company wanted to do more for its charitable partner, and supporting economic empowerment initiatives was aligned with its corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals.

So, the bank worked closely with Change Heroes to create a custom campaign asking individuals to rally their friends and raise $3,000 to provide a community of mothers in Ecuador with much-needed education, business skills training and support. RBCI used social media and its existing network to spread the word. By the end of the first month, 66 campaigns were launched and $94,000 was raised – far exceeding the company’s expectations.

Other clients to date include Disney, Morgan Stanley, United Nations Foundation and Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project, a youth and teen homelessness program formed in 1984 in response to the growing number of homeless teens in New York City.

Change Heroes works with each organization to ensure their campaign isn’t just brand-aligned, but also successfully tells the story the companies want conveyed through optimizing design, copy and video campaign components. This kind of heavy hand-holding is important, as the employees working to drive social and environmental progress from within organizations are often being pulled in a million directions. And Change Heroes wants to make sure they don’t miss out on meeting millennials where they are, in what is quickly becoming a global movement of online giving.

Image credit: Change Heroes

Sarah McKinney is a freelance writer and consultant with over a decade of experience in market research and an MBA in sustainable management. Follow her @sarahmck 

By Marc de Sousa Shields

Walmart recently announced it will require all suppliers to pay warehousing and shelf-stocking fees. The new policy, the company says, brings consistency to supplier treatment as some vendors had been charged in the past, whereas others had not.

The retail giant claims the changes are aimed at working with suppliers to serve "shared customers" and achieve the low prices "they expect and deserve."

There are at least three worrisome sustainability implications raised by these fees, which are symptomatic of emerging retail and distribution trends not unique to Walmart.

The lines between retail and distribution are blurring

Not so long ago, when we wanted to buy something we either had to go a store or order it from the anxiously awaited Sears catalog. Then along came Amazon et al, and we thought the end of brick-and-mortar retail was nigh.

It wasn’t, and online selling is now just one more way to get the things we want.

Walmart’s move to charge fees, in fact, is simply another salvo in the youthful “omni channel” retailing and distribution era, where everything is available everywhere pretty much instantly. If the deep fryer you found on sale at Walmart while visiting Aunt Tina in Peoria is out of stock, you simply take out your smartphone, pay online and order a pick-up at your local store in Springfield for when you get home.

Simple on the surface, omni channeling is complex, requiring great scale and sophistication to manage. But it has also created new opportunities, particularly for selling spare warehouse space and distribution capacity.

An example: Your sister is in a small store in Portland. She takes a picture of a purse she thinks you might like and sends it to you. You love it, and order it online from the store, which, when it receives your text, sends a note to Amazon that, in turn, locates the purse at a JC Penny in Flagstaff, Arizona, that ships it via Fed Ex to your home in Chicago. At each transaction point a storage and delivery fee is paid.

Walmart’s new fees simply reflect the trends underlying the fast blurring lines between retail and distribution, where in-store shelving, warehouse space, stock management and delivery capacity are not just means to a sale but income-generating assets in their own right.

Of course, not all of this is all that new either.

Shelf space/stocking fees, also known as slotting, has been going on formally and informally for years. While many suppliers complain it gives unfair advantage to larger companies, retailers claim it helps to allocate shelf space for sales maximization. It can also act as a hedge against new product failure (given that over 20,000 new products compete annually with 50,000 established products, this risk is real, especially as 90 percent of new products are withdrawn every year).

How much do stores make selling space? No one knows for certain, but some estimates are as high as $18 billion a year. Indeed, retailers can earn more from carrying some products than from actually selling them.

Three sustainability issues

From a sustainability perspective, there are three worrisome considerations.

First: Are universal slotting and warehousing fees just another way for Walmart to take margin at the expense of suppliers?

It’s hard to say. But if you’ve been a Walmart vendor (as one of my companies nearly was), you know the great and continuous pressure to provide ever lower prices, often with a host of equally challenging delivery conditions.

Many venders have already cut costs to the bone, so it’s not hard to imagine how this new squeeze might tempt suppliers, particularly in lax jurisdictions, to externalize labor, environmental and social costs more than they already might do. A recent Harvard study showed an ironic and demonstrative sustainability impact of pushing costs down the chain when it found suppliers paying for their own social audits had more undisclosed violations than those paid for by retailers.

Meanwhile, other studies have shown slotting, and by inference selling warehouse space, is done at the vendors’ expense, adding only to the retailer’s bottom line with few savings being passed on to “deserving” consumers. 

Second, as noted, slotting is thought to create an unfair barrier to small business, who without the cash to compete with large companies can’t get shelf space. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is agnostic about this, saying there’s no evidence that slotting results in anti-competitive advantages or unduly affects consumer interests. Still, in some countries such as Poland, slotting fees are illegal and others, such as China see periodic crack-downs on the practice.

Small, nimble firms may have an advantage early on in the emerging omni channel economy, but as systems mature toward greater scale and slimmer margins, larger players will naturally dominate. It is not inconceivable that smaller vendors may soon face the same competitive pressure Walmart was said to have had on local shop owners in the 1990s.

Third and most challenging, if sustainability is truly about consuming less, the world hardly “deserves” low prices on much of the stuff it sells – stuff, not incidentally, all produced by the lowest bidder.

Where to now?

New sales and distribution channels are rapidly evolving, and it’s not entirely clear how small companies and sustainability will be affected over the long term.

In the meantime, downward price pressure on suppliers will have fairly predictable outcomes on supply chain sustainability aspirations and not necessarily to the benefit of consumers.

Image credit: Flickr/Walmart

Marc de Sousa Shields is Managing Director at ES Global a corporate sustainability advisory based in Mexico. Marc has worked in over 40 developed and developing countries, focusing on corporate sustainability strategy, brand, and returns. He is author of the soon to be released Sustainable Century by Design or Disaster and host of the Sustainable Century Podcast Series. See www.thesustainablecentury.net www.csrcounts  or www.esglobal.com

By Nicholas Buccheri

It’s difficult to imagine why office furniture matters outside the office. Until you see a thousand-line spreadsheet of items destined for the landfill, there’s little to connect your sleek new executive chair – or anything else in your office, for that matter – to an ongoing environmental and social issue.

Those in corporate real estate and facility management know well that large organizations continually shuffle people around, renovating and moving offices and discarding older furniture, equipment and supplies in the process. The real eye-opener is how much of this furniture makes its way to the dump – somewhere in the millions of tons annually in the United States and Canada. (It’s actually so poorly monitored that there is little data to go by).

It shouldn’t be as easy as it is today to ignore hundreds of thousands of tractor trailers filled with usable furniture and supplies, if not more, traveling to the dump each year. If we’re ever to effectively control the greenhouse gas emissions, harmful leachates and habitat destruction associated with landfills, practices like this have to end.

Then there’s the tremendous economic loss. In the process of dumping usable goods, billions of dollars in recoverable natural and synthetic resources are lost. It’s a huge amount of economic activity to short circuit -- and well before these products even come close to the end of their lifecycle.

And while the issue isn’t likely to make the sustainability headlines with the likes of climate change or global water scarcities, its solution isn’t nearly as complex either. There is little more than a lack of imagination, experience and planning preventing organizations from effectively repurposing and recycling no-longer-needed assets.

Part of the problem is that clearing out an office seems straightforward. Until you’re staring down the barrel of that thousand-line spreadsheet, it seems plausible, maybe even likely, that everything can be resold or donated easily. After all, businesses invest a lot into their office equipment and naturally assume it can be resold for a comparable amount.

By the time decision-makers realize that the second-hand furniture market is limited and that large-scale donation is itself a complex project, they’ve wasted too much time to implement an effective solution. They’re left with no real plan and a dwindling timeline. At the risk of delaying other components of a broader workplace project, they turn to the only option that requires neither time nor strategy: a liquidator (or worse, a junk-removal service).

In either case, a majority of the items are landfilled. Liquidators tend to sell the most valuable items and dump the remaining inventory by the ton. Junk-haulers will sell various pieces for scrap returns and landfill the rest. The result is garbage — literally and figuratively. These solutions achieve little-to-nothing and virtually guarantee that usable products and materials will be wasted. Hence the millions of tons of waste produced each year.

Turning an environmental risk into a social opportunity

To solve the problem, two main things have to change. First, organizations have to take seriously the way they manage surplus office furniture. As long as it is an afterthought to a broader workplace project, usable products will continue to be haphazardly discarded.

Second, the commercial sector needs to recognize the risks and opportunities that come with managing commercial equipment – more specifically, how to turn the environmental risk into a social opportunity. A higher standard of planning and integration can recover measurable value where there is typically only a loss.

In-kind donation, for instance, is cost-effective, and environmentally and socially beneficial when properly executed. It removes the hard costs of landfill and provides nonprofit organizations – some of which go decades without updating their office interiors – the opportunity to improve productivity, employee satisfaction and even safety. It can also free up budget for core programs and activities. Plus, it’s a novel, cost-effective way for corporations to engage with community organizations and nurture community partnerships.

Combined with resale and recycling, it becomes a powerful triple-bottom-line tool for businesses.

But it requires decision-makers to reevaluate their used office assets and start planning early. This means working with multiple departments to capture value -- from those on the ground floor, like facilities teams, to those who care most about the outcome like sustainability and communications teams. It means tracking the landfill diversion rates and community impact across all office projects to benchmark performance and work toward improvement. And it means changing procurement practices and vendor relationships to better close the loop on office waste over time.

It strikes me that the way businesses currently manage and dispose of used office furniture serves as another gut-wrenching example of just how wasteful we can be, even with corporate sustainability and social responsibility entering the business mainstream.

Office equipment makes a difference, not only in the way we use it (as in completely and utterly depend on it in nearly every aspect of business), but also in the way we treat it at the end of its life. And, as we’re seeing across the board with waste, energy and water, amazing things can happen once you challenge the complacency of an industry -- things that directly help businesses, the communities in which they work and the greater environment.

That office furniture has impact isn’t up for debate. The only question is: What are businesses doing to make sure its a good one?

Nicholas Buccheri is the marketing and communications manager at Green Standards, a specialized sustainability firm that helps corporations manage their office assets responsibly, and a freelance communications consultant to mission-driven organizations and businesses.

A new report from business leaders alliance, the Aldersgate Group, shows that tackling climate change can provide significant economic opportunities for the UK and make its economy far more competitive and resilient to shocks in the future.

The report, A Brighter, More Secure Future: Low carbon priorities for the new government, gathers contributions from leaders drawn from sectors as varied as the telecoms, manufacturing, finance, retail, construction, cement, energy and engineering consultancy industries as well as prominent academics, consumer groups and NGOs.

Nick Molho, executive director of the Aldersgate Group said: “The recommendations that business, academic and civil society leaders have set out in this report will help the UK meet its emission targets on time, on budget and in a way that’s economically beneficial. We urge the government to take note of them and put forward stable policies for the decade ahead.”

Responding to the report, Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd said: “This report shows the scale of the economic opportunity around low-carbon growth. A technological revolution is already underway and the UK is powering ahead with innovation, enterprise and competition.

“We will push for an ambitious deal in Paris that helps create confidence and a level playing field for business to thrive while helping to combat climate change.”
 

Gender diversity is an increasingly common topic of discussion for U.S. businesses these days. Until recently, much of that national discussion has centered around what isn't working and why it doesn’t work: the types of jobs that don’t offer equitable pay opportunities  for women; the lag in corporate on-the-job training or career advancement for women that has plagued some business sectors; or the challenges that women face in trying to break the glass ceiling.

One corporation that is helping to dramatically change the tempo of that dialogue is MGM Resorts International, the parent corporation to Las Vegas casinos such as the Luxor, New York, New York, Excalibur and MGM Grand. It has received numerous accolades in recent years for the innovative employee diversity programs run on all of its 15 properties in Nevada, Michigan and Mississippi.

In 2012 the company launched its Inspiring Our World production, a 90-minute musical on the value of diversity, presented exclusively for its 62,000 employees. The fact that the concept was pioneered and led by employees, and was enjoyable and engaging, helped to drive home its essential message: Diversity of thought is an important element in creating a cohesive, creative corporate culture. The 70 employee-performers not only talked to their audience about diversity, but they also shared their life stories, their challenges, and their dreams for being accepted and successful members of the company.

The musical helped deliver the message that diversity is not only okay but broadly supported at MGM Resorts. Its leadership, recruitment programs and mentorship programs, which range from summer internships to robust, year-long upper management programs, reinforce that message even further by providing structured advancement opportunities for all staff, irrespective of gender, identity or ethnic background.

To get a sense of how MGM Resorts addresses diversity and women’s leadership opportunities, we talked to Michelle DiTondo, senior vice president of human resources for MGM Resorts. DiTondo’s team came up with the concept for Inspiring Our World as a means of teaching its 62,000 employees the importance of a cohesive and inclusive corporate culture.

Diversity starts with an inclusive recruitment process

“We have a lot of focus on pipeline programs: bringing leadership into the company in conjunction with our recruitment program, and developing new leaders,” DiTondo told TriplePundit. The company also tailors its pipeline programs to meet the attributes best represented by the applicants they recruit.

A key example of its pipeline programs, said DiTondo, is the Management Associate Program (MAP), a 12-month program geared to recent college graduates that provides new hires with on-the-job training and exposure to a variety of jobs in their area of interest.

Participants also receive leadership training and mentorship in a cohort setting, where they are encouraged to establish connections with other employees. “The reason we do that is so they get to know one another,” DiTondo said. Forming teams that are supportive and inclusive is an important element of MGM Resorts' leadership training strategy, she told us.

“We have a number of our senior leaders who entered the company through MAP," said DiTondo, who noted that the program has been operating for more than 20 years.

The company also runs a Hospitality Internship Program (HIP) which it staffs through yearly recruitment at universities across the country. Hirees attend a 12-week program that gives them wide exposure to the industry, the company's structure and on-the-job training. As in the MAP, employees have the opportunity to network through regularly scheduled meetings, tours and training.

MGM Resorts' more unusual pipeline program is Boots to Business, which is open to both external applicants and MGM employees who have served in the military.

“The idea behind Boots to Business is we identify veterans for their personality traits and the skills they gained in the military, like leadership, teamwork [and] discipline,” all qualities that do well in a hospitality setting. Mentorship plays an important role in this program as well.

“We have had some women veterans participate in the program,” DiTondo said. The program helps veterans reach past the standard challenges that many often face after active military service: limited work experience and insufficient on-the-job training. At the same time, it focuses on those characteristics that would be most beneficial in a hospitality setting.

Top-notch casinos and resorts in Las Vegas have their own cadre of professional chefs, and MGM Resorts properties are no exception. Keeping the busy kitchens staffed with talented chefs is essential, which is why the Culinary Associate Program (CAP) serves as an essential network for culinary staff who want to excel in their careers. MGM Resorts recruits at culinary institutes, but it also maintains an open-door policy for MGM staff who want to learn to become chefs.

Internal leadership programs nurture growth

In some companies, training programs are only open to supervisory and management level employees. MGM Resorts offers training to all levels of its staff, from hourly workers who have their eye on supervisory career, to managers who wish to further their career as directors, vice presidents or presidents of MGM properties. The Aspire and the Management Academy programs, for example, provide training for hourly employees who wish to move up the ladder, while the Management Institute is MGM Resorts’ equivalent of an MBA program.

“The intent of the Leadership Institute is to take people who are great leaders [such as front-desk supervisors and hotel directors] and give them exposure to a broader perspective of the company,” DiTondo told 3p.

The program gets a high amount of interest from women looking to move up the managerial ranks because it helps to address a common factor in the hospitality industry: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 45 percent of the 1.1 million food service managers in the U.S. were women in 2014. Fifty-five percent of the 146,000 lodging managers fit within that category as well. Leadership training that allows women to break out of low- and mid-management jobs is one of the perks of working for MGM Resorts.

But that isn’t the only way that women are able to excel in their respective areas of interest. According to DiTondo, mentoring and sponsorship create powerful mechanisms for ensuring high-performing employees and managers get the training and opportunities they seek.

“In every one of our programs you will find a mentor,” said DiTondo, who added that upper management are required as part of their jobs to have one or more mentoring relationships.

“In the gaming industry, formal talent management hasn’t been a big part of how people were promoted through an organization,” DiTondo said. Up until the 1990s, a job search in Las Vegas was most successful if you knew someone in the respective company network who could vouch for qualifications. “It was largely who you know,” she said. “To change that culture and to promote people on their experience and their knowledge and competencies … we have had to put into place a number of formal development programs and tools to help us.”

Mentoring nurtures the management skills of the leadership trainee by pairing the individual with seasoned managers. It also provides a means by which corporate management can identify new talent for up-and-coming positions.

Many of those leadership promotions come through sponsorship, in which an applicant is recommended for career advancement. “Sponsorship is what comes out of mentorship,” said DiTondo, and it is a valuable tool for career-oriented hospitality managers. At MGM Resorts, approximately half of those who apply for sponsorship are women, increasing the demand at the corporate level to ensure that the opportunities at its 15 properties reflect the diversity of the applicants.

“We do work very hard in the recruitment to make sure the programs are diverse in representation,” DiTondo said.

And while MGM Resorts’ history of women leaders demonstrates that these strategies work, sponsorship in the global work sector hasn’t always been as available to women as it has been to men. The Harvard Business Review reports that, as recently as 2010, women still found it much harder to get sponsored in their line of work than men. In contrast, MGM’s sponsorship structure is available to both women and men, DiTondo said.

Employee networks reinforce inclusiveness

Perhaps one of the most powerful offshoots of the Inspiring Our World was an appreciation of employee networks. MGM Resorts has 18 employee networks that serve to connect people with similar interests, backgrounds and identities. But most valuable, said DiTondo, is the personal reinforcement and support that comes from employees knowing there are others in MGM’s expansive population that hold similar views, interests and backgrounds.

Being part of a network, and knowing that it’s okay to be who you are, gives empowerment and tells employees that they can have the courage to pursue their career goals.

MGM Resorts’ Women Leadership Conference is open to all

This July, the MGM Grand will host the company's most renowned management program, the Women’s Leadership Conference. It is MGM Resorts’ only gender-directed leadership program, and the turnout it received last July suggests that it is filling a void for women who seek more networking and more opportunities in their fields. The conference is well-attended by MGM Resorts employees (both women and men may attend), and provides another venue for women to fine-tune their leadership knowledge and skills.

And, like many of MGM Resorts’ other novel programs, it is helping to redefine leadership in the hospitality sector. With increasing studies showing that leisure and hospitality companies actually win by building diversity into their ranks, MGM Resorts’ management programs are setting a standard that improves opportunities for both companies and their future leaders.

Images courtesy of MGM Resorts

This past week has certainly been an eventful one, enough so that this important bit of news on the climate change front might have slipped by unnoticed.

Three of the top 10 carbon emitting nations -- the U.S., China and Brazil -- announced new carbon reduction commitments in a joint news briefing on June 30. The countries pledged to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources, not including hydropower, by 2030.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was in Washington for the announcement. Brazil, which is considered the seventh largest emitter (if the EU is treated as one country), further announced that they would restore over 46,000 square miles of forests, an area the size of England, while pursuing “policies aimed at eliminating illegal deforestation.”

For its part China pledged to reduce its emissions, relative to the size of its economy, by 60 to 65 percent by 2030. This adds specificity to the agreement China made with the U.S. back in November. Back then, the Chinese simply said that their emissions would peak by 2030. Their target at that time was a 40 to 45 percent reduction. So, this represents a significant uptick. Given the size of China’s economy, it’s clear to everyone, including the Chinese, that whatever they do could determine the outcome for all. China is now both the largest producer and largest customer for solar energy products.

For the U.S., this would mean tripling renewable energy output by 2030. That sounds ambitious, but given its recent rate of growth for solar alone, which is doubling every three years, it seems fully achievable. Still the U.S. will need substantial contribution from wind and other sources, including geothermal, to meet that goal. Beyond this, the U.S. will depend on new EPA regulations for both motor vehicles and power plants to meet its target.

This agreement, as the New York Times reported, adds “momentum” to the cause of addressing climate change, and positions the major powers well for a historic agreement in Paris at the end of this year.

“Following progress during my trips to China and India, this shows that the world’s major economies can begin to transcend some of the old divides and work together to confront the common challenge that we face — something that we have to work on for future generations,” President Barack Obama said of the announcement:

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said, “Over the past 24 hours, we’ve seen a very nice example of the diversity of countries engaging on the climate solution.” But she added, “The sum total of these does not get us to 2 degrees.” (The U.N. Environmental Program says capping global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius is critical.)

What will it take to get over that hump? Well, for one thing, some major polluters, such as India and Japan (No. 4 and No. 8, respectively) have not yet submitted their plans to the U.N., as required by last year’s Conference of Parties in Lima, Peru.

But most experts are saying the Holy Grail will be a global market-based deal that establishes a price on carbon. What’s ironic about this is the fact that a) China is already doing this, and b) the U.S., where the idea first originated and who is probably the world greatest supporter of market-based solutions to everything else, is not. The reason why, of course, is the fact that many Republicans are not only refusing to do anything, but continue to even acknowledge that the problem even exists. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, is using his skepticism of China’s commitment as an excuse for inaction, essentially saying: "Why should we act if we don’t believe they will?" This latest commitment gives Inhofe less to stand on, not unlike the polar bears whose Arctic ice floes continue to shrink.

Another yet unresolved issue is money for the developing countries that need assistance -- not only to transform their economies, but also to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions. President Obama has already pledged $3 billion toward the Green Climate Fund, but Republicans are not willing to let him have it.

Image credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service: Flickr Creative Commons