As we all know, the climate is warming. In fact, it’s doing so about 10 times faster than it ever has in the past 65 million years, and it’s easy to point fingers when looking for the perpetrators.
The good news is that we’re developing adaptive, inventive ways to mitigate climate change. And as it turns out, innovating for sustainability is good for business: According to McKinsey, the top three reasons companies address sustainability are to improve efficiency and lower costs, improve their reputation and meet their own business goals.
“We’re finding more and more that consumers are increasingly choosing brands that share their sense of purpose,” says Paige Francis, vice president of global marketing for Starwood Hotels and Resorts’ Element chain, the first LEED-certified hotel chain. She adds that growth momentum of eco-conscious business is “incredible” and “sustainability is no longer optional.”
Where some see a threat, others see a challenge and an opportunity, which is what successful companies do best. Brought to you in partnership with NRG, here are the inventive ways some of the world’s most powerful companies have embraced sustainability.
Hewlett Packard: Powers Data With Less Energy
Meg Whitman, HP’s executive officer, has spoken on several Climate Week NYC panels about economic growth and the environment, urging a culture of doing more with less.
“[W]e still say a lot less than what we are capable of,” Shelley Zimmer, HP’s environmental leadership program manager, stated. “There’s always the concern about greenwashing and not wanting to over-promise.”
HP used its edge in all things data-driven to create the Moonshot, a high-volume server that uses up to 90 percent less energy than current data center servers, or 1.5 watts per chip on average compared with the 20 watts per chips leading servers use. HP also boasts that the Moonshot costs 77 percent less than a traditional server environment – all essentials for a manufacturer that ships 3.5 products per second.
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It’s just a small part of Unilever’s targets, which are to increase national recycling rates and, ambitiously, to power all of its U.S. operations using renewable energy by 2020.
Starbucks: Recycling Where It’s Impossible
Seattle-based Starbucks is now using renewable energy options in more than half of stores globally, and will cover 100 percent by the end of this year, in addition to making all their cups fully recyclable.
For example, in Chicago, where the recycling infrastructure is inefficient at best, Starbucks is privately collecting recyclable cups from its own stores in order to process them into napkins for its national chains.
Starbucks is also getting experimental with its in-store sustainability applications, with plans to reduce water use by 25 percent by the end of the year, and it’s already built its first LEED-certified store in the company’s hometown.
Oh, and let’s not ignore this very cool store made of refurbished shipping containers.
NRG believes that corporate sustainability is not only the right ethical choice, but the right economical one, too. Learn more about the economics of going green through Generation Change, a partnership between NRG and the Huffington Post.
