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Cleaner for the Environment, Not for the Dishes

“Most Americans want to do things that are good for the environment, but not everyone wants to pay the price,” said Elke U. Weber, director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University.

Timberland's Stakeholder Engagement Calls

Timberland’s CEO Jeff Swartz regularly hosts stakeholder engagement calls to “inform, inspire, and engage others about Timberland’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.” 

Last week, he hosted one with Mountain Equipment Co-op CEO David Labistour. They discussed “the need for comparability of products’ environmental impacts to inform consumers’ responsible purchasing decisions.”

You can listen to a podcast of the call (and past calls) at the link above. 

Bold Public-Private Venture Aims to Make Ore. City an 'Icon of Sustainability'

“The Oregon Sustainability Center, slated for construction at the edge of Portland State University’s downtown campus, will generate all of its electricity, consume only the rain that falls upon it, and process all of its wastewater. The ‘triple-net-zero’ building will have offices for businesses with an eye on the triple bottom line—economic, social and environmental sustainability—as well as space for municipal urban planners, nonprofit environmental groups, and university administrators, faculty and students.

‘We aspire to this driving Portland as an icon of sustainability,’ said Lisa Abuaf, a senior project manager with the Portland Development Commission, the city’s urban renewal agency. ‘At the same time, we want it to be something replicable, so that the knowledge base created by this building is exportable.’”

Why Environmentalists Must Work with Big Corporations

Gwen Ruta, Vice President for Corporate Partnerships at Environmental Defense Fund discusses the risks and opportunities of working with big corporations on their environmental policies.

The opportunities outweigh the risks.  She says: “The horror of the BP oil disaster is the scope and impact that it’s having on the Gulf coast. Yet Fortune 500 companies, precisely because of their large scope and impact, can also use their leverage for good. EDF, for example, works with Walmart. The retail giant is hardly a darling among Progressives, but it provides unparalleled leverage in the consumer goods supply chain. If Walmart adopts higher environmental standards for product design and packaging, say, then those standards very quickly change operations at hundreds of thousands of factories around the world.”

The Timberland Company announced its Q1 2010 CSR performance report

Highlights from this quarter’s performance are organized by Timberland Four CSR Pillars: energy, product, workplace, and service.