Responsible Retail & Consumption Highlighted by Climate Confidential

Climate Confidential’s theme of “Unconventional Wisdom” is the fourth and final story from this group of writers who fund their work by Crowdsourcing through Beacon Reader in The United States. This article explores the ways that retailers and resellers of apparel are extending the life and value of their products, as everyone from conscious consumers to fast-fashion fiends get hip to recycled clothes. It’s good for business, but what about for the Earth? Read More

Climate Confidential’s  theme of “Unconventional Wisdom” is the fourth and final story in this issue explores the ways that retailers and resellers of apparel are extending the life and value of their products, as everyone from conscious consumers to fast-fashion fiends get hip to recycled clothes. It’s good for business, but what about for the Earth?

Climate Confidential is a collective of writers who fund their work by crowdsourcing through Beacon Reader in The United States. You too can support writers by going to Beacon Reader.

Come Again? The Rise of Resale Retail

By Mary Catherine O’Connor in Climate Confidential & Beacon Reader (27 April 2014):

Reporters who cover the environment (myself included) are just now recovering from the Earth Day Blitz. As early as January and right up until April 22nd we are hit with a barrage of emails from marketers eager to hawk their eco-friendly, water-saving, organically grown, fair-trade products, as if they are gifts to Mother Earth rather than stuff derived from her belly.

Meanwhile, the greenest choice you can make as a shopper is to buy nothing at all—at least, nothing that requires materials, manufacturing, or shipping. Clothing seems innocuous enough, but according to the World Bank, textile manufacturing generates up to 20 percent of industrial wastewater in China. The other end of the lifecycle isn’t pretty either, especially in the United States. According to the EPA’s 2012 figures, we trashed 14.3 million tons of textiles – or around 90 pounds per person, that year.

That is clearly a conundrum for retailers seeking to cultivate an environmentally responsible image while still boosting revenue. Typically, apparel makers’ bottom line is tied to a basic belief among customers: that they need new things and ought to buy them, season after season. However, a handful of retailers in recent years have pioneered new models that seek to address their products’ environmental impacts and use of natural resources while still generating revenue. Patagonia and Eileen Fisher are buying back apparel from customers, and then reselling it. H&M is plying consumers to recycle their used textiles by offering store credit to buy more. Programs like these force consumers to look at their wardrobes in a new way. Whether they can also lighten apparel’s environmental toll, however, is up for debate.

Grow, Grow, Grow Your Brand, Gently Down the Stream

On Black Friday (November 25) 2011, the outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia broke new trail in the world of confrontational marketing, launching its Don’t Buy This Jacket campaign with a full-page ad in The New York Times. “Black Friday,” it read, “and the culture of consumerism it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that supports all life firmly in the red.”

The ad campaign also launched a partnership with eBay, through which consumers who take the retailer’s Common Threads pledge to only buy what they need, repair what they can, and recycle the rest, would have their used Patagonia clothing postings appear both on eBay and on Patagonia’s Common Threads page. That boosts their chances of a sale.

To date, nearly 70,000 people have taken the Common Threads Pledge. They’ve sold 57,000 Patagonia items through the eBay and Patagonia online storefronts in the U.S. and U.K. That mountain of fleece and Gore-Tex represents 57,000 potential retail sales that Patagonia did not make—not that anyone at the Ventura, Calif., based company noticed a lull at the tills. As a business, Patagonia had been thriving before the Don’t Buy This Jacket campaign – part of a wider growth in the outdoor gear industry – and since its launch, sales continued to grow—by 30 percent, in fact.

“Sales have continued to rise since the ad, absolutely,” said Nellie Cohen, a Patagonia corporate environmental associate. But she contends that the growth is not just the result of the ad campaign. Its customers also respond to the company’s effort to be transparent and responsive to environmental impact, so if they’re going to invest in outdoor gear, they invest in Patagonia.

The apparel maker, which began selling fleece made from recycled plastic beverage bottles before some of its younger customers were even born, is also advancing sustainable textile technology. Last year it established a venture fund called $20 Million & Change and just this week announced its first investment in a Denver-based startup called CO2Nexus, which uses liquid CO2 to process fabrics, displacing the need for water or energy-intensive dryers.

Yet, the tension between rolling back its environmental impact while still growing was clearly agitating Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard during a business conference last year hosted by GreenBiz.com “The elephant in the room that no one talks about is growth,” he said, adding that Patagonia failed in its intentions, dating back to the 90s, to stay small and shrink its product line. “We didn’t pull it off. We were being pulled to grow, grow, grow. But we’re readdressing it now.”

One means to this end, he said, is to add functionality into each product while winnowing out superfluous items—essentially making them more valuable, durable, and harder to part with. Patagonia is also tinkering with its sales model. In October 2012, the retailer began experimenting with mini resale shops inside four of its stores across the U.S. Customers could bring used durable gear (things like waterproof shells and down jackets) into the store and “sell” it back to Patagonia in exchange for store credit—generally for around half the value the store managers expected to be able to resell the apparel.

In September 2013, three more of these “Worn Wear” shops opened in Chicago, Palo Alto, Calif., and Seattle. But in January, Patagonia discontinued the program in all but the Portland store. Being able to dedicate adequate space inside the stores for the Worn Wear shops was a major issue, said Cohen. “It’s a very intense business process, in terms of running a resale business inside a regular store, so we need to figure out a better system.”

Does that mean we might soon see entire brick-and-mortar stores dedicated to reselling Patagonia clothes? “Anything is on the table,” she said. “We do love the concept, so it’s just figuring out what makes the most sense.”

High-End Rethreads

Four years ago, the eponymous women’s apparel company Eileen Fisher began collecting used apparel from its nearly 1000 employees. “We have so much clothing, it’s like a sickness,” admitted the company’s director of social consciousness, Amy Hall. The plan was to launder, repair (if needed) and resell the garments. They were available only in the Eileen Fisher Lab store, a special boutique near the company’s Irvington, New York, headquarters. The Lab store also sells factory seconds and samples to raise funds for the Eileen Fisher Foundation, which supports programs for women and girls.

In addition to used items from employees, the company began asking for items from consumers. Unlike Patagonia’s Worn Wear, Eileen Fisher offers a $5 store credit for each piece of apparel brought into the store, whether it is a scarf or a cashmere sweater. “That opened the flood gates,” said Cheryl Campbell, managing director of the Eileen Fisher Community Foundation.

When Eileen Fisher, the founder, learned that the inventory of used garments had quickly grown to 35,000 units, she realized it was time to start a separate venture, dedicated to selling used clothing. In March 2012, the first Green Eileen retail store opened, in Yonkers, New York. Last year, a second opened in Seattle.

“I had no idea what the supply chain would be,” said Campbell. “That was my primary worry, but it’s no longer a worry.” That’s thanks largely to a successful ad campaign that launched in time with Earth Day last year. The ad’s tagline simply reads: “We want our clothes back now.”

While it didn’t match the shock factor of “Don’t Buy This Jacket,” it did pique the interest of Eileen Fisher loyalists, who brought in 70,000 Eileen Fisher garments to stores across the country in the few months following the campaign. A total 150,000 garments were collected throughout the year, and that helped the Green Eileen stores reach $1.5 million in sales last year.

Factor in the costs of running these retail stores, staffing them, collecting, shipping, cleaning and (if needed) repairing all those pieces of apparel, and the $3 million in sales that Green Eileen has generated since it launched in 2009 is not enough for the project to turn a profit. But the company expects a 25 percent jump in sales in 2014 that should cover organizational costs and allow the venture to break even.

Shoppers browse the resale retail racks. Photo: Green Eileen

Initially, Green Eileen was operated through the nonprofit Eileen Fisher Foundation. That meant it could not advertise or benefit from economies of scale from within the corporation and had to outsource everything from facilities management to graphic design. Now that it is transitioning to the company, Green Eileen has a better chance of making a profit in the coming years. Most items sold in Green Eileen stores sell for a third of the original price—though new items, still bearing their original tags, fetch half of the original price.

Emotional Attachments, Survival Tactics

Like Patagonia apparel, Eileen Fisher clothing — much of it flowing tunics and sweaters in rich fabrics and conservative pallets — is a premium product that devotees hold in high regard. Campbell said consumers often approach Eileen Fisher in public. Someone might come up and say, “Eileen, do you remember that blue dress from 2002?” and then will tell her a personal story that relates to that dress. “And they are reluctant to get rid of these items. Women of a certain age, we change sizes and hair colors. But we’ve invested in these clothes and we don’t want them to go to waste.”

Likewise, climbers, mountaineers or other outdoor adventurists might associate the emotions they felt during their most intense or rewarding outings with the Patagonia jacket that kept them dry.

These are the exceptions, however. In the U.S., most of our clothing is utilitarian and, increasingly, fleeting.

In 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that U.S. consumers tossed all but about 13 percent of their clothes into landfills, once they were done with them. Since then, the percentage has only inched up to 15.7 percent, while the quantity of clothes being trashed has grown. Mattias Wallander, CEO of textile recycler USAgain, said that uptick is due largely to “fast fashion,” the type of trend-focused, low-quality, low-cost clothes from stores like Forever 21 and Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M).

Teens (and many adults) love this stuff, but fast fashion has suffered from public image problems, and not only because the clothes have short life cycles. In 2012, a fire in a Bangladeshi garment factory that killed more than 100 people exposed the dangerous working conditions inside garment factories linked to many fast fashion purveyors.

H&M is one retailer that has been working to clean up its image and bolster its environmental credibility. Its textile factories have reduced water consumption by 65 percent, and the company recently launched a line of denim made from 20 percent recycled fiber.

It has also gotten into the resale market, but takes a very different approach. Bringing in used textiles—of any brand, not just H&M, earns shoppers a credit toward future purchases. The retailer then sells the collected clothes to textile collection services provider I:CO. Levi Strauss & Co. is also working with I:CO to establish take-back points in San Francisco (to meet the city’s goal of having zero landfill waste by 2020), the U.K. and France. The jeans giant has also significantly reduced the amount of water its factories use and is sourcing raw materials from recycled plastic bottles—it has used 9.4 million of them in 1.2 million pieces of apparel so far. It is also starting to make products with repurposed textiles, such as a limited edition Parachute Trucker jacket made from U.S. military parachutes.

For a company like H&M that relies on huge volumes and low prices, the motivation to buy back textiles from customers is not just about giving consumers a way to assuage guilt about their packed closets. If it wants to keep offering products with recycled textile content, it needs to help make sure the market for recycled fibers is robust.

Technology could play a role in closing the loop on textiles and boosting the quantity of garments that are turned back into new products,  said Jennifer Gilbert, I:CO’s chief marketing officer. As tons of used garments move through sorting facilities, the vast majority of sorting is done manually. I:CO is preparing to run pilot tests this fall to ascertain where radio frequency identification (RFID) or other types of sensor technology, applied to garments early in the supply chain, could make sorting mixed streams of used garments more efficient and cost-effective.

Plus, as clean water becomes scarce and climate trends continue, the environmental and financial costs associated with producing water-intensive crops like cotton are also likely to rise. That will help to make recycled textile more attractive from an economic standpoint.

The Textile Trade

All of this means that now is a good time to be in the textile reuse industry. For-profit companies like I:CO and USAgain exist in order to extend the life of textiles. They service a $1 billion global market of resellers (organizations that sell clothes as clothes) and recyclers (companies that turn unable clothes into wiping rags, upholstery stuff or insulation).

USAgain maintains 14,000 collection boxes across 19 States. Trucks pick up those goods and bring them to 12 different warehouses around the country. The clothes are then moved through a network of sorters and graders that determine which items should remain in the U.S. and what should be sent abroad. Then it’s passed to wholesalers, who sell the goods to thrift stores such as Goodwill. About 50 percent stays in U.S., said Wallander. Of that, 15 to 20 percent is in insufficient shape for resale and is instead sold to textile recyclers.

“We are diverting more and more, we’re not able to keep up with increasing consumption,” Wallander explained, adding that USAgain is growing 10 to 15 percent each year. Collectors are not the only part of the textile reuse supply chain that are thriving. Goodwill Industries’ revenues grew from $67.9 million in 2008 to $105.2 million in 2011.

If the battle is merely between reducing demand for apparel, starting at the beginning of the supply chain, versus increasing the amount of it we reuse or recycle, then reuse is clearly in the lead.

Despite the strong appetite for used textiles, it’s hard not to see H&M’s approach as merely enticing consumers to buy more fast fashion by occasionally dropping off a few dated togs for store credit. It’s a criticism I:CO’s Gilbert has heard before. “I understand the reduce approach – buy less and buy quality. But you have to look at the reality of society. Not everyone will change, so you have to provide other avenues to do the right thing. There are a lot of different ways to go at this problem.”

Besides, it’s not a completely different approach from the one Patagonia and Green Eileen are taking. While clothes brought into H&M will go into the wider reuse and recycling supply chain rather than being resold within the same stores, in all three cases consumers are lured in by store credit…with which they have no choice but to buy more stuff.

Source: www.beaconreader.com/climate-confidential/come-again-the-rise-of-resale-retail

Transformational Change Needed. Palm Oil Industry Hits Tipping Point

The Business Times in Singapore had a front page story last week that made many – palm oil companies as well – sit up and take notice. The palm oil industry has reached a tipping point. Two palm oil giants who together trade about half the global supply – Wilmar International and Golden Agri Resources – have declared that their sustainability policies would apply not just to their own plantations, but also to those of their suppliers. And one of the biggest palm oil users in the world  - Unilever – who have instituted some of the strictest policies and practices, is continuing with its overarching Sustainable Living plan, but boss Paul Polman really wants to see transformational change in the way all businesses operate. Read More

Sustainability: new ball game for palm oil firms

But higher bar set by Wilmar, Golden Agri won’t have big immediate impact: analysts

By Andrea Soh in Business Times (28 April 2014)

The palm oil industry has reached a tipping point.

In the last five months, two palm oil giants who together trade about half the global supply – Wilmar International and Golden Agri Resources – have declared that their sustainability policies would apply not just to their own plantations, but also to those of their suppliers.

About half of all fresh fruit bunches bought by Wilmar come from third parties, while the amount for upstream palm oil player Golden Agri is much lower, at 7 per cent.

The two palm oil groups’ resolve to set a new sustainability standard in the industry has prompted others like First Resources to look into doing the same.

“Although our third-party purchases are small, we will be reviewing our procurement policies with the aim of incorporating our sustainability values into our supply chain,” said a First Resources spokesman.

The pressure from non- governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Greenpeace has been mounting for a decade, but the catalyst for these recent developments was the changing tide of sentiment among consumer goods firms.

A month before Wilmar’s announcement last December, Unilever – the world’s largest user of palm oil at 1.5 million tonnes a year, or 3 per cent of global production – committed to buying only palm oil that can be traced to known sources by the end of this year.

The Anglo-Dutch group uses palm oil in products such as its Dove shampoo and Flora margarine.

Unilever’s decision follows similar commitments by Ferrero, Nestle, Kellogg and L’Oreal to buy certified palm oil, or oil that comes from plantations managed and certified according to certain sustainability criteria.

Since then, the tide has swept along more palm oil buyers. M&M maker Mars and Colgate-Palmolive late last month announced their plans to use only certified palm oil by the end of next year; Procter & Gamble, which was recently the target of a global Greenpeace campaign, committed on April 8 to ensuring no deforestation in its palm oil supply chain.

Europe, the third-largest import market for palm oil after India and China, has led the demand for sustainability in the palm oil sector. In France, food companies have started using “palm oil-free” labels as a badge of honour.

Concern is growing that the palm oil industry will suffer if it remains deaf to these demands from its customers.

Said Wilmar CEO Kuok Khoon Hong at its results briefing in February: “If this clash continues, maybe the EU governments will stop using palm oil for biofuels under pressure from all their consumers. You can see some very big companies already saying that they don’t use palm oil. It’s a selling point (for them).”

“If they stop using palm oil for biofuel, if all the big consumers there stop using palm oil, crude palm oil (price) may drop by US$200-300 a tonne. What’s the point of planting another 15,000 hectares (then)?” he asked.

Wilmar has therefore decided to take the lead in the industry. “We’re hoping for other companies, other plantations to join us, to try to make the whole industry sustainable.”

But these changes will not come without cost, say analysts.

While the impact on the profitability of palm oil firms would not be significant in the short term, “(it) could slow down their ability to grow due to the more stringent policies that they have adopted”, said CIMB analyst Ivy Ng.

A Wilmar spokeswoman conceded that its business will be affected in the short term. “We recognise that this is something we have to do, both for the business and the environment. We believe the long-term benefits will outweigh the challenges facing us in the short term,” she said.

Committing to sustainability, however, is only a first step, said Greenpeace head of forest campaign Bustar Maitar. “The next step – and a big one – after that is to actually implement the policy itself.”

This will be important in gaining the trust of the market, said Scott Poynton, executive director of Forest Trust, a Swiss non-profit organisation. “There’s still a lot of cynicism and mistrust about these companies. If they can prove that they are not just greenwashing, they will start winning confidence back from the broad market and the NGO community.”

Challenges abound for palm oil firms. For one thing, the definitions of peat land and high carbon forest are hazy. Standards are also always moving higher.

In view of this, Carey Wong, an analyst at OCBC, says a continual raising of the bar may bode well for the industry ultimately.

“We believe it is a good thing – it raises the standard for the whole industry and makes them appear on a par with practices in the Western world,” he said.

Customers who are more discerning are also willing to pay more, he added. “So that could still be a ‘win-win’ for the companies that are RSPO-certified, for example.” RSPO, or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, is an industry body that promotes the use of sustainable palm oil products.

And there may be no two ways about it – those who refuse to adapt will be left behind. Said Mr Poynton: “In time, the buyers will desert them. The change is coming. Their resistance will ultimately be undermined.”

Source: www.valuebuddies.com/thread-5058-post-81043.html

Unilever struggles to sell customers on Sustainable Living

By Jessica Shankleman  (29 April 2014):

Unilever has seen the total environmental impact of its products rise 5 percent during the past four years, as it acquired a new shampoo business and struggled to convince consumers to use less energy for hot showers.

The consumer products giant yesterday released an update on its ambitious Sustainability Living Plan, through which it aims to halve the greenhouse gas impact of its deodorants, food, detergents and other products between 2010 and 2020, confirming it is on track to meet the overarching goal for its full value chain despite challenges in some areas of the business.

The report revealed the company has made good progress on a number of fronts, including slashing the carbon emissions impact of its manufacturing processes by 32 percent compared to 2008, primarily through the installation of advanced clean technologies and encouraging more efficient behavior by employees.

The company confirmed it has also made strides in reducing emissions from its transport fleet and refrigeration technologies, and has slashed energy use from its offices.

However, Unilever revealed its overall emissions per consumer rose by 5 percent since 2010, mainly because it acquired Alberto Culver, which produces a number of major brands including TRESemme, Alberto VO5 and St. Ives.

As such, the company admitted it was likely to miss a target to get 200 million consumers to buy products and tools that will help them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while washing and showering by 2015.

“Two thirds of our value chain GHG impacts are in consumer use, primarily heated water for showering and bathing, which is more difficult for us to influence,” the report stated. “External factors such as decarbonizing energy grids and effective carbon pricing will play a critical role in reducing GHG emissions, as well as product innovation and consumer behavior change.”

Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, said it had been easier to achieve environmental targets directly within the company’s control, but it was now looking to develop more innovative solutions to reduce consumer energy use.

“We’re making good progress in reshaping our business for sustainable, equitable growth,” he said. “But we need to do more.”

Unilever also today added three new targets to its Sustainable Living Plan, aiming to boost fairness in the workplace, improve gender equality and develop an “inclusive business.”

“We have always recognized the bigger role that businesses need to play, and now is the moment for Unilever to step up and expand efforts in key areas, driving transformational change where we know we can make the biggest impact,” added Polman. “In this way we will leverage our scale and work collaboratively in partnership with others to reach a tipping point in areas that will make a significant difference.”

Despite the difficulty of convincing consumers to cut their environmental impact, Unilever has been broadly applauded by green groups for taking leadership in the battle to reduce carbon emissions.

“It is really exciting to see a huge multi-national business take such a bold and progressive approach to how it recognizes and leverages its size, scale and influence,” said Ben Kellard, head of sustainable business at Forum for the Future, in response to the latest report. “Learning and adapting is important in any business strategy, but it’s even more impressive when companies, like Unilever, revise an already innovative plan with the intention of bringing about broader change on a global scale. We hope this new plan — which includes stepping up plans to tackle several major global sustainability challenges — helps Unilever to achieve the scaling up of the delivery of sustainability across its business and brands that we believe it is capable of.”

This article originally appeared at Business Green.

Source: www.greenbiz.com

Last word

Everything is connected!

Always remember a wonderful BBC TVseries – probably before your time, dear reader – when James Burke explored inventions and conventions of the scientific and technological kind (circa 1978, with sequels in 1994 and 1997), showing how everything’s connected.

Same feeling experienced when I went about my work over the last six weeks or so -  attending conferences, speaking engagements, writing articles, getting chapters written for the next book, networking, communicating, meeting creatures and people great and small – that everything’s connected.

I was thinking about all this when I met with various people in the past few weeks who are all doing good in related fields, wearing different hats, but remarkably connected. Working in unison for the sake of the planet and us all. In different ways. Sometimes not even known to each other. 

When speaking about climate change and energy at a couple of workshops in the last week, I reminded the audience/fellow participants of what the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies came up with in 2005 in their landmark study Americans and Climate Change( www.environment.yale.edu) described  “the perfect problem”. Climate change was just that because it couldn’t be pidgeon-holed or put in one discipline or even two. It implicated all the sciences and practices you could think off,  because again, everything was connected.

Weather, climate, energy, environment, food, water.

All the elements and all the outcomes – a perfect problem with no perfect answer.

This nexus came to light and was enunciated very clearly at the last Singapore International Water Week two years ago. It went beyond water issues  and opportunities to “connect the dots” with clean energy, waste management, recycling, clean air – nothing is left out and all’s included.

Which makes the problem all the harder to describe and prescribe solutions. We are so used to going to the doctor or specialist for a prescription, for something to heal us, cure us.  But if we are honest there are no specialists for the climate change, those best able to help us understand are generalists, good communicators, those who bridge disciplines and understand .

They are creative thinkers or they are engineers who think outside the box. Scientists like Ian Lowe and Peter Doherty, environmentalists like David Suzuki or advocates like Jonathon Porritt. Or even an economist like Nicholas Stern or a paleontologist like Tim Flannery or an engineer like David Hood.

I was thinking about all this when I met with various people in the past few weeks who are all doing good in related fields, wearing different hats, but remarkably connected. Working in unison for the sake of the planet and us all. In different ways. Sometimes not even known to each other. 

There’s Andrew Affleck who set up Armstrong Asset Management to raise enough money to fund clean energy projects in South East Asia. An enterprising private sector initiative which was successful in amassing US$164 million to do the job. In the process winning an award from Asian Investor magazine for the best infrastructure fund launch. www.armstrongam.com

And my old friend Martin Blake has been back in Singapore after a very successful time in Australia where he brought together – with a little help from our friends – an amazing collection of like-minded people to form Blue Australasia, which offers a unique business model that assists organisations to maximise efficiency and to unlock resources and opportunities that are presently being overlooked. Spread the word. www.blueaus.com

David Hunt, is one of those very capable Australians in the Blue team and he knows Asia well too. In Singapore we met to see how we can work together to both raise funds to support clean energy and clean tech projects in the region, and effectively promote the good work that is going on. He takes charge of BE Intermediary services. www.imperiuminvestment.com

John O’Brien, who runs Australian Clean Tech, was back in Singapore speaking at the Sentosa conference on clean tech. He has done an amazing job promoting clean tech businesses and establishing indexes for Australia and China. Maybe Singapore and South East Asia could be next. He connects the  dots and shows what the private sector can do. www.auscleantech.com.au

I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Jeff Obbard the other week at National University of Singapore for a special Asian student’s workshop looking at climate change and sustainability. He describes himself as more than an engineer – he’s an ecologist. And his bias towards the environment and clean energy is obvious. He was telling me about what he’s come up with. AiRazor Technologies Ltd – a university spin-off company dedicated to the invention and supply of indoor air quality control devices. Best to get hold of Jeff through LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jeff-obbard-ph-d/23/18/635

So you don’t think I am totally favouring Westerners, let me draw attention to the wonderful work of Eugene Tay in Singapore. Besides being one of the city-state’s most active activists on all things green – he also went to Taiwan with me in March to participate in the Asia Productivity Organisation event – he has organised a series of workshops on Sustainable Singapore, to get maximum input from community organisations and the private sector to advise Government. www.greenfutures.org

Then there’s no forgetting Rob Cawthorne, Carbon Reduction Institute and Syntech International.  He is one of the survivors in the carbon space (in Australia) and when visiting Singapore he told me he’s keen to spread the net and get involved in developing his business in Asia. We’re here to help of course. He’s also a Blue Australasia supporter. www.noco2.com.au

And just while you’re thinking they’re an all-male lot, we introduce four of the other gender. The very creative sorts:

Laura Allen runs an outfit called Gone Adventurin’. We met at the Hall and Partners event. She’s doing wonderful work to not only highlight important issues – like water pollution – but effectively brings the private sector on board with “authentic stories and sustainable brands”. www.goneadventurin.com

Lekha Patmanathan and I met at Eugene’s Sustainable Singapore workshop and she’s keen to promote solar as the clean energy of the future. She’s a successful and savvy lady in the recruitment business, but keen to demonstrate her enthusiasm for all things sustainable.

Andrea Hessmo is an enthusiastic writer who is keen to turn her hand to promoting the good things in life and what’s good for the planet. While we are working together to get some attention for a Singapore start up, we’re also keen to promote opportunities for other writers.

And lastly, I promise, Andrea introduced me to Camilla Hall, who is not only an enthusiastic follower of Ashok Khosla and Gunter Pauli – which puts her very much in the blue and sustainable territory –  but she probably has even more hats than I have! And all of them for the good of us all. Swedish water included!

So I could go on about more wonderful people and events, and issues and opportunities, explored in the past few weeks. There’s more to tell about Crowdsourcing and our plans for “Writers of the World Unite”. But we’ll restrain ourselves or there won’t be anything to talk about next time.

Meantime, keep in touch through our LinkedIn Group – Sustain Ability Showcase Asia (SASA) – or other means of communication. And if you haven’t made it to our “honours list” this time, maybe I’m just saving you up for something better next time.

- Ken Hickson

Source: www.sustain-ability-showcase.com