Green Consumer Compilation – TV Clips with Julia Hailes from 1988-90
Many people will be surprised to know how much interest there was about green consumerism in the late 80s and early 1990s. It was kicked off by the publication of The Green Consumer Guide, co-authored by myself and John Elkington, in 1988. The book had 11 print runs in the first month, shot to the […]
National Trust – Forever for Everyone Sustainable Business Workshop (Jul11)
What a brilliant slogan – Forever For Everyone. I was one of two outside speakers at the National Trust’s sustainability workshop, which was looking at how to make this slogan mean something across the whole organisation. Whilst the Trust has superb examples of sustainability in practice, they’re looking at what they might do across the whole […]
Interface Carpets – Tomorrow’s Natural Business (Jul11)
Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpets radically changed his approach to business in 1994, after reading The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawkens. I went to a workshop at Interface hosted by Andy Middleton from Tyf. Entitled ‘Tomorrow’s Natural Business’, the workshop aimed to show how biomimicry could be used as a template for creating organisations fit for a different […]
Newcastle University MBA Sustainability Challenge (Jun11)
Procter & Gamble recommended me for the inaugural public lecture at Newcastle University’s Sustainable Business Week, where MBA Business students from Scotland and Northern took part in a competition. The central theme was about the role of consumers in greening business. The students had to respond to a question posed by P&G – ‘How can our company influence […]
Green Mobile Company Lives and Dies – C Mobile (Jun11)
C Mobile promised a greener approach to using your mobile phone. Their idea was to give a proportion of their profits to community renewable energy projects, to minimise waste, offer re-conditioned hand-sets and recycle phones wherever possible. Unfortunately they both launched and folded in 2010 and 2011 – they weren’t able to keep up with the big […]
Confessions of a Radical Industrialist (Jan 11)
I’ve just finished reading Ray Anderson’s Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. It’s the inspirational story of how Ray turned his billion dollar company around to become one of the leading green corporations in the world. In 1994, when he had what he describes as an ‘epiphany’, he says that Interface was a company ‘so oil intensive you […]
The Secret Life of Stuff (Jan11)
Julie Hill thought I’d be uncomfortable with her view that we’ve had enough of green consumerism, where people are left to choose to be green or not. What we want, she says, is more ‘choice editing’. That effectively means that businesses and retailers only offer products that have a minimal environmental impact or are deemed to […]
Second Nature Partnership – Advisory Board (Nov10)
South Africans, Charles Perry and Mark Griffiths, co-founded this partnership in 2009. The philosophy is to make sustainability ‘second nature’. I’ve worked with them on a few projects and in 2010 they set up an advisory board, which I agreed to sit on.
C Mobile Advisory Board (Jun10)
I’ve joined the newly formed Advisory Board of C-Mobile. This company is late lunching a pay as you go mobile phone package in partnership with Orange. It’s early days but they plan to invest a proportion of profits to green initiatives and campaign to improve the environmental performance of the mobile phone industry.
P&G – Expert Advisory Panel on Detergents (Apr10)
This was the fourth Expert Advisory Panel on detergents and cleaning products and the second time for batteries. Held in Geneva, there were only a couple of us who had been at the original meeting, along with a new cast of European opinion formers.
Expert advisory panel on detergents (Fabric & Homecare) 2007-2010
The first meeting of the Fabric & Homecare expert advisory committee took place in March 2007, at a splendid location outside of Brussels. The idea is to provide an external perspective and help identify emerging environmental trends. Although the focus is on detergents and cleaning products, we have had presentations from other sectors within P&G, […]
M&S listening to underwear concerns! (Mar10)
Mike Barry – Head of Sustainable Business at M&S I buy most of my underwear from M&S. You won’t be surprised to hear that this winter I’ve bought some thermals! Reading the pack I was surprised to see the following instructions – ‘It’s easy to look after too – just put it in the […]