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Green Business Trends
July 24, 2009
Wal-Mart Launches “Sustainability” Index
On July 16, Wal-Mart unveiled the "sustainability index" it has been developing for more than a year, which it says will result in green labeling on its products in two years. Its 60,000 suppliers will be asked to participate by using a tool known as Life Cycle Assessment to measure the environmental impact of a product through manufacture, use, and disposal.
Wal-Mart says it doesn't want to own the sustainability index. It will turn the index over to a consortium of the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University, consumer-goods companies Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Tyson, and Unilever, and other big box stores who accept Wal-Mart’s invitation to join. Wal-Mart says the index will eventually be run by a nonprofit group financed by retailers and suppliers.
Among the unknowns are the standards on which the assessment is based and Wal-Mart has not yet confirmed whether those details will be made public.
Women in the Green Economy
The Business and Professional Women's Foundation (BPWF) announces its new program, Moving from Red to Green: Working Women in the Green Economy.
BPWF chair Roslyn Ridgeway, says, "Women are underrepresented in 'green' sector jobs, and we’re focusing our efforts to make sure women are trained, recruited, and retained for the sustainable jobs of the future."
To help connect women to the growing green economy, BPWF will establish a pilot program and award grants of $60,000 to four organizations to expand their green job-training capacity. They will work to increase diversity in the workplace, expand the workforce of trained professionals, and help improve the lives and careers of women by readying them for the burgeoning green-job market.
Smarter Appliances
GE and Tendril announce a collaboration to connect their ‘smart appliances’ to the grid. Smart electricity meters and the interactive power grid allow utilities to impose variable or time-of-day pricing. With GE’s new plan, if you start cooking dinner when electricity rates are high, your stove can tell your fridge to temper the cooling until dinner is served.
These demand-response appliances will allow utilities to avoid building new power plants to meet peak demand or firing up dirty ones to avoid brownouts.
Learn more »Investment advisors and asset managers could be sued for negligence if they do not consider the environment and other social issues when making investment decisions, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.
Investment Advisors: Think Green–Or Else
Money managers have a legal responsibility to raise environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues when tendering investment and advising clients, a law expert and one of the report's authors said.
The report said that in the wake of the economic downturn, investment professionals now had a central role in using global economic stimulus money, estimated by HSBC to be around $2.8 trillion, to fund the transition to a low-carbon and resource efficient 'green' economy.
One author said the worst financial and economic crisis in generations paled in comparison to what he called a looming "natural resources crisis" that would require investment professionals to rethink where they put clients' money.