This week marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of my first book. Titled, Office Hazards: How Your Job Can Make You Sick , it chronicled the transformation of office environments and office-based work that was taking place at the time. Looking back three decades later, a lot has changed — and some things haven’t. (The book, long out [...]

The notion of factories without Dumpsters isn’t new. Xerox, for one, began an internal initiative in the early 1990s known as the Waste-Free Factory. It hasn’t yet achieved that goal, but it has driven the company to reach a 92 percent recycling rate for non-hazardous materials. Along the way, other companies have put “zero waste” squarely in [...]

Our recent webcast, “ A New Life for Plastics: End-of-life Solutions in the Age of Greener Materials ,” drew a sizeable audience — and a sizeable number of questions. We only were able to address a handful of them during the webcast, so we asked the three participants — William Hoffman, environmental scientist in green chemistry at UL Environment ; [...]

Today, Stonyfield Farm , the organic yogurt company, is unveiling a new packaging solution : A yogurt cup made from corn. It’s not the first revolution in yogurt cups, or the first packaging innovation made from corn. But Stonyfield’s journey to today is a case study in sustainability, innovation, persistence, and systems thinking that I think is worth sharing. First, the basics. Stonyfield’s [...]

Procter & Gamble’s announcement today of a new “sustainability vision” is a noteworthy moment — not just for the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company, but for the world of sustainable business. It represents another yardstick of how major corporate players view their place on the sustainability landscape: being “socially responsible,” of course, but also seizing [...]

It’s been exactly a year since Walmart’s historic launch of a  Sustainability Index and other measures to assess suppliers and products and, remarkably, the sun still rises in the East and sets in the West. As I  stated in my analysis that day — July 16, 2009 — “There is both more and less going on here than [...]

I’m writing this en route home from Shanghai, where I’ve spent most of the past week touring, visiting, meeting, and experiencing this Asian megacity for the first time. The occasion was Expo 2010 , the world’s fair situated on both sides of the Huangpu River, which runs through the center of China’s largest city. I came to Shanghai primarily [...]

There’s an old trope that, if men were able to get pregnant, we’d have long since embraced wide-ranging, comprehensive maternity leave policies in the U.S., science would have developed a fail-save birth control method, and so on. News published by Kaiser Permanente today may lead to an equivalent scenario for bisphenol A. The chemical that’s been [...]

COLUMBUS, OH — A new life cycle assessment (LCA) tool developed by the Ohio State University Center for Resilience brings a new dimension to LCA by taking into account ecosystem services like soil erosion, pollination, flood prevention and cropland. Eco-LCA is a free, online tool that acts as a complement to other LCA tools by showing how different products [...]

TOKYO, Japan — Toshiba, Samsung and Dell have all taken a hit the latest quarterly rankings from Greenpeace on green electronics for failing to meet their self-imposed deadlines on removing toxic chemicals from their products. The 15th edition of the NGO’s Guide to Greener Electronics finds all three companies losing ground, while Nokia and Sony Ericsson retain [...]

Have you noticed? A food revolution has begun — with the goal of making our food and agriculture systems better for us, better for the environment, maybe even better for workers and democracy. So, at least, says Marion Nestle , the author, activist, NYU professor and corporate critic, who gave a rousing closing speech at Cooking for Solutions , a [...]

"Everything’s up for reinvention," according to keynote speaker Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials .  Surace spoke to more than 250 building operations executives at the Sustainable Operations Summit in San Antonio, Texas. In a theme repeated by many of the speakers at the conference, he urged attendees to think outside the box and pursue disruptive innovation. While innovation [...]

San Francisco, CA — Despite efforts to improve operations, cruise ships that ply North American waters must go a lot further to become environmentally responsible, says Friends of the Earth , whose latest report card on the industry gives 11 major cruise lines green grades ranging from B- to F. Holland America Line , which received a B-, had the [...]

OAKLAND, CA — Cradle-to-Cradle design is going into the public domain and worldwide with the launch of the Green Products Innovation Institute (GPII), a nonprofit that will develop standards for individual products, intended to accelerate the transition to safer materials and advance California’s Green Chemistry Initiative . "We’re hoping this will be an innovation engine for companies," said William McDonough , co-founder [...]

LAS VEGAS, NV — Dutch giant Royal Philips Electronics took the wraps off its 12-watt EnduraLED light bulb last week at the Lightfair International tradeshow and heralded the latest addition to its EnduraLED line as the "industry’s first" light emitting diodes replacement for the commonly used 60-watt incandescent light bulb, bringing a new measure of energy efficiency to [...]

VILLENAVE-D’ORNON, France — Wine companies and retailers have been switching away from glass bottles in order to lighten the environmental footprint of their packaging, but in doing so they are shortening the lives of some wines. White wine stays fresh for only six months when it is in plastic bottles and bags, according to a study by [...]

I attended a sustainability conference recently in which the main speaker, a seasoned lifecycle assessment engineer, gave an overview of the LCA process, using range of products as examples. During his overview, he pointed out the stark differences between the big-impact elements and the small ones and suggested, in so many words, that an impact really [...]

Green beans, peas, soup, even food labeled "healthy" or "organic" are all some of the canned foods found to be contaminated with bisphenol A (BPA) in a report released today by the National Workgroup for Safe Markets , a coalition of U.S. public health and environmental health groups. An FDA-certified lab tested 50 cans of food for the group. Cans [...]

Eating common canned foods is exposing consumers to levels of bisphenol A (BPA) equal to levels shown to cause health problems in laboratory animals, according to a new study released today by The National Work Group for Safe Markets, a coalition of public health and environmental health groups. The study, No Silver Lining, tested food from [...]

As noted in my last column, it’s been a great few weeks for German-American collaboration on sustainability . My last column covered the German Embassy’s recent conference on innovation in green buildings. That conference was closely followed by a two-day forum on Green Purchasing and the use of environmental product declarations (EPDs), which provide new levels of transparency [...]