Business News

We can recycle everything we use, so why don’t we?

Within the broad range of sustainability concepts and activities, recycling is without doubt the most easily understood and accessible: individuals and groups, old and young, communities and institutions can participate. When we buy a candy bar, we own the wrapper after the short life of the product; doing something with that branded possession, rather than adding to waste, feels good. Recycling is empowering to consumers and, in the case of traditionally recyclable materials such as glass, paper, rigid plastics and certain metals, economically viable. Recycling not only diverts potentially valuable materials from landfills and incinerators, it also offsets demand for virgin materials, helping to keep carbon in the ground. Recycling aligns human consumption with nature’s activities. But as human-generated waste streams continue to evolve in diversity and volume, the global community faces the mounting challenge of developing viable recycling and waste management solutions at a comparable pace. For example, electronic waste is currently the fastest growing solid waste stream, increasing two to three times faster than other waste streams. More broadly, industrial activities currently generate nearly 7.6 billion tons of solid waste in the US each year – that’s 3000% of the total municipal waste generated by Americans annually. As the world enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the ecological implications of not prioritizing sustainable resource management are dire. Image: OECD Economics, not high science, is what determines recyclability: a material is recycled only if one can by Advertise” href=”https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/we-can-recycle-everything-we-use-so-why-don-t-we/#35366683″>FINANCE the collection of packaging, with much of the waste being incinerated – not much better than land-filling from an environmental perspective. Recycling is the more expensive option, but as the late, great eco-capitalist Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, posted on the side of her company’s trucks said: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” With evident […]

A four-day working week will not only improve wellbeing – it could save the planet

A shorter working week has re-emerged as a prominent subject of political and economic discussion in recent years, with the TUC, the Green Party and Labour taking a reduction of working hours seriously as a policy that could increase workers’ well-being, boost productivity and face the challenges of automation. In Germany, the IG Metall, Europe’s largest industrial union, led a strike last year that mobilized 1.5 million workers and won the option to individually reduce working time from 35-hours per week to 28-hours per week, while securing the option to return to full-time employment afterwards. While a shorter working week is often framed as a tool to fix a broken economic model that is working for the few, rather than for the many, the increased interest in working time reductions coincides with the emergence of powerful global movements that highlight another crisis that is facing humanity today: the depletion of resources, the degradation of our natural environments and above all the rapid heating-up of our planet. Here, too, pressing issues of intra- and intergenerational justice emerge, with people in the global south and the poor more likely to suffer the fall-out of an economic system that largely favours the capital-owning class in the global north. For decades now, the sustainability debate has largely been dominated by calls for ethical consumption, rather than facing the systemic root of the problem: an economic system that prioritises profit-making over workers’ well-being and even the preservation of the very natural basis of our collective life. To develop a sustainable economic model, it is becoming clear that we need to break with the imperatives imposed by the necessities of capital accumulation (endless “growth”) and find a way to provide a decent standard of living while honouring planetary boundaries. At the same time, our current working time and […]

A new network of leaders changing the system together

For over 20 years, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has recognised social entrepreneurs as a new breed of leader – values-driven, inclusive, compassionate, entrepreneurial individuals who develop sustainable new models in business, social development and environmental initiatives. They have been at the forefront of R&D for society and civilization, accelerating how we solve problems and imagining new futures through experimentation, iteration and practice. In these two decades, we have curated and gathered over 350 leading social entrepreneurs from 70 countries in the Schwab Foundation community and embedded them into the platforms of the World Economic Forum. Together, they have demonstrated significant progress on how we approach environmental sustainability and consumption, health and education, rural development and job training, and finding new ways to advance human rights and equality in different contexts around the world. However, poverty, inequality and climate change are too large and complex for any single social entrepreneur or institution to tackle alone. It should be recognized that many of these issues are interconnected. \The underlying causes also run deep in history, politics and culture, and our best solutions are often constrained by outdated rules and skewed power structures. We are seeing that, in order to create real change, dynamic interactions and multi-stakeholder partnerships across ideological divides are critical to making the radical changes that we know we need. We need social innovation diffused within every sector so we can adopt, adapt, diffuse and scale what this societal R&D has shown to be possible and sustainable – whether it be self-sustaining eco-businesses in the desert, or community-based, tech-enabled healthcare. Those driving the social innovation ecosystem require imagination, compromise, resilience and, above all, committed, courageous innovative people. Therefore, the Schwab Foundation has expanded its remit to recognise and support an ecosystem of pioneering actors who share a common purpose: to accelerate our progress towards the Sustainable […]

Foam Concrete, an environmentally friendly building material

If you want to rank Foam Concrete (FC) on how environmentally friendly (or damaging) it is, consider this list. Igloo made from snow. Mud bricks from locally found mud Log cabin in the woods Foam Concrete Dome shaped house Box type house made from Foam Concrete FC compared to all those other building products and “normal“ concrete, because you can make a house with less cement, is less damaging to the environment. Simply because it takes a lot of energy to make Portland Cement. About 7% of greenhouse gases come from the production of concrete. It is also one of the lowest cost building materials, and if we can equate the costs directly with energy use, or greenhouse gas production, than we are way on top of the list. Foamed concrete is simply a concrete mix with a lot of air in it and the aggregate left out. To get the air into the mortar mix, foam is mixed in. The foam is made from a special foaming agent and water and this mix is put through a foaming machine to create small bubbles. The only disadvantage of this material is that it is not as “strong” as normal concrete; however there are special mixes that come close. There are also other ways to make a “light weight concrete” such as replacing the aggregate with polystyrene foam or expanded clay pebbles, pumice, and a few others. The disadvantage of these are the cost, environmental impact and the difficulties in making the mix right. Depending on the climate and geologic conditions, the construction can vary from light and simple to cold climate and earthquake proof. I put the Dome shape into the mix as that it is the strongest form made with the minimal amount of material. This means that it […]

What is ‘ecological economics’ and why do we need to talk about it?

Anitra NelsonAssociate Professor, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University Brian CoffeyVice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, RMIT University As environmental crises and the urgency to create ecological sustainability escalate, so does the importance of ecological economics. This applied, solutions-based field of studies is concerned with sustainability and development, rather than efficiency and growth. Also, given that cities account for 70-80% of global economic activity and associated resource use, emissions and waste, they are central to finding solutions to the challenge of sustainability. Ecological economics recognises local to global environmental limits. It ranges from research for short-term policy and local challenges through to long-term visions of sustainable societies. Ecological economists also consider global issues such as carbon emissions, deforestation, overfishing and species extinctions. Core concepts You’re probably familiar with some core concepts of ecological economics. These include “steady-state economies”, “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprints” and “environmental justice”. A steady-state economy is both relatively stable and respects ecological limits. Drawing on the work of mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, economist Herman Daly elaborated the model, editing a 1973 anthology, Toward a Steady-State Economy. In 1990, Daly co-founded the International Society of Ecological Economics (ISEE). It had three key principles: the human economy is embedded in nature, and economic processes are actually biological, physical and chemical processes and transformations ecological economics is a meeting place for researchers committed to environmental issues ecological economics requires transdisciplinary work to describe economic processes in relation to physical reality. Joshua Farley, who has worked with Daly, discusses some of these principles in an opening address to the Australia New Zealand Society of Ecological Economics (ANZSEE) conference at RMIT University later this month. In a partnership program of several North American universities, Farley teaches Economics for the Anthropocene postgraduates. They apply ecological economics to “real-world environmental solutions”. Some will talk at the conference about their research. Today overconsumption is measured against Earth’s carrying capacity. William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed the […]

“Harbinger households”

In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households’ purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail — that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these “harbinger households.” In the new paper, the researchers consider very large data-sets on consumer goods and fashion purchasing, house-buying, and political donations, to examine whether being a “harbinger household” correlates to other predictors of failure, and find that these households are also likely to buy real-estate that makes lower profits (or generates larger losses) than nearby properties; they are likely to buy fashion and consumer goods that get discontinued due to lackluster sales; and they are more likely to donate to losing politicians’ campaigns than winners. The researchers also claim that harbinger households voluntarily cluster: that when a harbinger household moves, it is likely that it will move to another habringer ZIP code (and nonhabringers move to nonhabringer households). Moreover, harbingers don’t appear to learn their preferences from one another — a nonhabringer household that locates in a harbinger ZIP code doesn’t alter its purchasing and political contributions to “loser” products and candidates. Harbinger households tend to be white, suburban and headed by older, less-educated single parents. They tend to make above-average use of coupons, and the coupons they use have above-average values. The researchers don’t claim a causal relationship between these different factors — donating to losing political candidates doesn’t make you prefer Crystal Pepsi, for example — but rather speculate that there is an “unobserved intervening variable” that explains both factors. Using data from multiple sources, we have shown that the phenomenon of harbingers is surprisingly widespread. […]

Davos 2020: What mattered

McKinsey global managing partner Kevin Sneader during the 2020 WEF Annual Meeting panel: Leading a 21st Century Corporation, held January 22, 2020. By Kevin Sneader January 27, 2020 Unseasonably and somewhat unnervingly mild temperatures provided a fitting backdrop for what emerged as the top issue at the 2020 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: climate change and its risks. But that was far from the only topic. At the end of this year’s Annual Meeting, I sat down with Rik Kirkland, our director of publishing, to share my reflections. Climate risk is firmly established as a C-suite issue. Research published in reports like the McKinsey Global Institute’s “Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts” has clearly convinced more and more global policy makers and business leaders that the problem of climate change has moved from a far-off priority to a here-and-now risk that demands action. Personal experiences, whether from watching the wildfires in Australia or California or numerous other small examples, have also brought home the reality that this is a topic that requires leadership from the top. While there wasn’t much debate about the science, executives and investors were concerned about the lack of reliable data on the efforts companies and society are making, not to mention their impact. Greater clarity is required in order to speed development of new standards to help markets act more efficiently and reward progress. Beyond metrics, the leaders I spoke with are thinking about the problem in new and creative ways. They are taking a clear-eyed look at what is driving their carbon footprints, beginning to quantify the cost of inaction, and asking how they can accelerate positive change in a way that fits within their core business agenda. That’s a huge shift in tone from even a year ago. The short-term economic outlook is […]

‘Don’t be the villain’: Niall Ferguson looks forward and back at capitalism in crisis

The roots of discontent with global capitalism run deep, according to the historian. By looking back, business leaders can get a clearer view of what’s coming. Capitalism is in crisis, as usual. There will always be people questioning the legitimacy of the system. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942, capitalism has at its heart creative destruction, and that creates pain; it creates losers. This is the normal state of affairs, and we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s going on. Without the financial crisis, the trends that were increasing income inequality might have led to some kind of political backlash. But trends often need a crisis to bring them to the forefront of people’s minds. That’s one of the lessons of history: trends, if they unfold over decades, don’t necessarily produce big political outcomes; there needs to be some kind of catalyst. In 2008–09, we had the biggest financial crisis since 1929. It was perfectly clear at the time—and I remember writing this in early 2009—that there would be a backlash. The shock was an enormous one. It affected some countries—Greece, for example—as severely as the Great Depression. If there had not been some kind of reaction, that would have been remarkable. It took the financial crisis to make everybody start talking about inequality, even though if you look at the data on income or wealth inequality, it had been widening since the 1980s in the United States, and indeed in quite a few other countries around the world. Nineteenth-century parallels To understand where we are now, you need to go back to the late 19th century, which saw a period of extraordinary globalization. I tend to think of it as the first age of globalisation: enormous increases in trade, in capital flows, in migration. And then […]

Blowout: Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All

by Rachel Maddow Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humour, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe—from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea—exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains. The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidising the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Greta: the voice of climate activism who says ‘don’t listen to me’

She’s the voice of a global movement who mobilised millions of young people to demand action against climate change. Yet Greta Thunberg’s message to the US Congress – a hotbed of climate scepticism – was: “I don’t want you to listen to me. Little more than a year ago, we hadn’t heard of Thunberg. That changed after August 2018 when she held her first skolstrejk för klimatet, a ‘school strike for climate’, ducking out of class to protest outside Sweden’s parliament. “I want you to listen to the scientists.” Before long others joined her school strikes and, within a matter of months, a global movement was born. By March 2019, more than 2 million students across 135 countries were holding school strike demonstrations. Thunberg has come a long way in a year, both literally and figuratively. Just weeks after her 16th birthday she attended the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, where she famously urged world leaders to “panic” at the seriousness of the situation. “I don’t want your hope,” she told the audience. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I do. Every day. And want you to act. I want you to behave like our house is on fire. Because it is.” In March Thunberg was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Time magazine named her one of the world’s most influential people ans put her on its cover. She has addressed the European Parliament, the French National Assembly, the UK’s House of Commons, and met with Pope Francis. Now she is addressing the United Nations Climate Summit, a meeting she travelled to by carbon-neutral yacht. “It is insane that a 16-year-old would have to cross the Atlantic to take a stand,” she told reporters on arrival at the harbour. “The climate and ecological crisis is the […]

«‹ 12 13 14 15 ›»