Always
out front.

Join Jib Ellison and Chris Mann, CEO/Chairman of the Gourd of Guayakí Sustainable Rainforest Products, importer and marketer of yerba mate on March 7 at 6:30 PM in Santa Rosa for what promises to be a stimulating discussion on the future of sustainable business.

It's become an encouragingly common story to see evidence of how recycling can generate more value than landfilling waste. The recent GreenBiz article The Successes Possible from a Jigsaw Puzzle Theory of Recycling outlined one such business model, Donco Recycling Solutions -- a firm constantly seeking innovative uses for scrap or waste from one industry in manufacturing streams of others. In essence, a high value matchmaker who plays a small but meaningful role within the larger puzzle of this untapped system.

For most retailers, the sustainability journey begins on the operations side of the business – with a focus on what they can directly control - the environmental footprint of stores, distribution centers, and logistics – and covering a range of eco-efficiency issues including energy, waste and water. And this makes perfect sense as the place to start. However, for most retailers the footprint of their operations is a relatively small slice of the overall footprint – 10-20 percent. The lion’s share of the impact of retail is in what goes on the shelf – the products and the impacts along the supply chain of extracting or harvesting raw materials, processing and manufacturing, transport and packaging, and consumer use and end of life. And having an impact on that 80-90% of the retail footprint very quickly demands collaboration with suppliers to understand impacts all along the value chain and to identify and pursue innovation opportunities to reduce that footprint.

After almost two years of collaboration V1 of the Apparel Index is ready for testing and publicly available at www.apparelcoalition.org.  The Index is an industry-wide tool for measuring the environmental and social performance of apparel products and the supply chains that produce them.  The Sustainable Apparel Coalition welcomes comments and feedback on the tool to continue to improve it.

Join Evolutionary Collective Conversation host Patricia Albere and business expert Tom Curren for an interview with John Whalen, a principal at Blu Skye Consulting. Blu Skye is making big ripples in the corporate world by helping companies like Nike and Microsoft as well as entire industries move towards sustainable practices.