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.

With the holidays fast approaching many of us are scrambling to make last-minute purchases for friends and family.

Chemicals and materials in products, processes, and packaging are facing greater scrutiny and growing demands from retailers, regulators, competitors, and consumers - new rules of the game are rapidly emerging.

In June 2013, air pollution levels in Malaysia and Singapore reached record highs, closing businesses. The cause? Thousands of fires set by both plantation managers and small farmers in neighboring Indonesia to clear land to plant oil palm trees.

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.

World Food Day is the annual beacon illuminating the need to end world hunger and malnutrition. It reminds us that our current food system is falling short on feeding the population, while it also highlights agriculture’s destructive relationship with the environment on which it depends. We look to this year’s World Food Day with a view to silver linings and the hope emerging sustainability initiatives bring to the future.

Seventh Generation, the Vermont-based household goods company known for its pioneering work on ingredient disclosure, has found success linking bonuses to sustainability goals. The bonus tie-in increased employee awareness of the company’s priorities and ownership of the four sustainability goals selected — helping the company meet all of these goals in 2012, as detailed in the company’s 2012 Corporate Consciousness Report.

Just one year ago, Walmart launched a novel tool that is proving to quickly and effectively align their massive supply chain on sustainability priorities — the Sustainability Index. Dairy suppliers were among the first to be brought into the Index through answering a category-specific survey about their performance in sustainability.

There’s a revolution underway. When the store where you buy cereal plans a major initiative to work with grain growers to reduce fertilizer impacts, you can feel the ground shift beneath your feet. When buyers routinely move their conversations with suppliers from price and shelf space to product recyclability, we’re definitely in a new millennium.

There was a palpable energy on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange among the business leaders, NGO representatives, investors, consultants, and media in attendance at the launch event for CDP’s 2013 S&P500 Climate Change Report. As one of CDP’s U.S. consulting partners, Pure Strategies attended this exciting launch event.