Sustainability and Climate Change

The $45 trillion-dollar consumer market—60 percent of global GDP—is the largest driver of human practices impacting sustainability. However, an insignificant number of products offer any insight into product sustainability. Labels like Fair Trade, though useful, have minimal market penetration. In the absence of sustainability information, consumers make purchases based on traditional indicators of product value like price, color, and brand but have no product-specific information on broader human values for issues like child labor, greenhouse gases, worker safety, or endangered species.

A straightforward 1-to-5 star sustainability rating (coupled with an in-depth sustainability profile) on each consumer product would harness the power of the market's invisible hand, efficiently steering manufacturing decisions toward sustainability precisely to the degree that global consumers are concerned about social and environmental issues. Sustainability ratings would tweak the global market with every purchase in the tiniest of ways, but multiplied trillions of times over, these small tweaks could transform the marketplace and change the world. Consumers could take sustainability into consideration with every item they purchase. Manufacturers would strive to improve the ratings of the products they make. Store managers could choose to stock only highly-rated products.

The world's largest purchasers—entities like Walmart or the U.S. government—have enough market leverage to unilaterally introduce sustainability ratings for the products they procure, setting the stage for a global-scale system. Several different mechanisms can be used to create credible sustainability ratings. This article describes the novel approach of crowd-sourcing consumer preferences to reliably achieve a 1-to-5 star rating for each product.

High-performing companies have a sense of purpose, engaged employees, and a strong culture, in part due to an integrated Corporate Responsibility (CR) strategy that guides pursuits, decision making, and actions. While many companies have CR elements in recruitment, hiring, and onboarding processes, for most companies, there is room for deeper integration in their professional development, evaluation and promotion, and retention practices. This article highlights examples of such integration from two leading companies, and provides questions and exercises to catalyze CR analysis and planning.

Carbon and nitrogen footprints are increasingly common metrics used to consider the environmental impacts of activities and consumption by institutions; an institutional water footprint complements these assessments by providing a third metric: water use. This study calculated the water footprint of the University of Virginia (UVA) as a summation of direct water use and virtual water use. The latter was estimated using purchasing records for utilities, food, transportation, paper, research animals, and hospital purchases for calendar year 2014. The direct water use portion of the footprint was 1.7 million m³ water. The virtual water footprint was 15.2 million m³. The utilities sector is responsible for 46 percent of UVA's total water footprint, and food production 23 percent. The UVA Health System contributed 17 percent, and paper, transportation, and research animals each constituted less than 3 percent of the total footprint. The most water-intensive inputs were biofuels, hydroelectricity, and animal products. This water footprint assessment supports carbon and nitrogen footprint-reduction strategies, such as replacing coal with natural gas and reducing beef consumption. Water footprints also require explicitly considering the impacts of renewable energy sources, such as biofuels or hydropower. The water footprint of the University of Virginia provides an additional measure to address the environmental implications of the institution's resource demands and this approach is broadly applicable to other institutions.

Sustainability initiatives in higher education can flourish as the result of collaborations among those engaged in teaching, research, and operations. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), the Food Science Department and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies teamed up with Wisconsin Union Dining Services for such an initiative. Building on previous work that estimated carbon footprints for menu items at a popular campus eatery, Ginger Root, this article tells the story of a new menu item created with sustainability in mind. First, this article describes the rationale for the new dish. Second, it reports how the dish moved from a test kitchen to a commercial kitchen. Third, it explains why the recipe cannot be made public. Finally, it describes what makes this vegetarian dish unique and compares its carbon footprint to the current meat-based best seller at Ginger Root.