CDP and CSR reporting season has barely passed before over-worked sustainability managers must turn their attention to customer sustainability surveys. While these can be resource-intensive, they also present opportunities to further your sustainability initiatives internally, elevate your brand’s standing with key customers, and stand out in the marketplace. Before survey season hits, you should start gathering relevant information and, more importantly, devise a plan to improve your performance.

Radio Flyer and Beautycounter stand among leading companies taking proactive steps to manage chemicals in their products and supply chains. These and just over twenty other firms benchmarked their programs and performance in the newly launched Chemical Footprint Project.

The Guardian featured Pure Strategies’ report, Advancing on the Path to Product Sustainability, in an examination of the financial benefits of sustainability. Our research found the top business value gained was employee engagement, with 33% of survey respondents realizing $5m or more.

The 10 Principles draw from Cheryl’s experience consulting on sustainability for several of the world’s leading food industry brands and retailers, her academic background and prior experience working within the food industry.

Unfortunately, taken as a whole, the corporate response wasn’t aggressive enough, brilliant enough or visionary enough. The gulf between the scale of the challenges and the level of response is too vast, with too many companies still citing modest, multi-year reductions in emissions or water use as the sum total of their sustainability goals.

As Ben & Jerry’s and Seventh Generation demonstrate, having a clear direction that aligns with consumers’ values is an important business foundation. These companies have created loyal networks of consumers and employees and have successfully leveraged their enthusiasm in pursuing campaigns for political change.

The gripping new Showtime docu-series, Years of Living Dangerously, tackles climate change with a combination of Hollywood star power, heavyweight scientists, and frontline reporting. Sending big name such as Harrison Ford, Thomas Friedman, Lesley Stahl and Jessica Alba into the field as correspondents to document the human impact of climate change, the series conveys the issue’s urgency with drama and facts.

If there is a good side to the third consecutive year of drought in California, it is that many business leaders are finally taking water seriously.

With the excess of New Years’ Eve parties behind us, it’s a good time to check in on food waste – a problem that continues to scream for progress.

The most recent photos of air pollution in the City of Harbin in northeastern China were otherworldly. Visibility was so poor that traffic lights disappeared and buses got lost on their routes. The smog closed schools, shut the airport, and disrupted city transport. The Beijing smog emergency last January reminds us that this is only the beginning of the winter heating season’s abysmal air quality in many Asian cities.