Climate Action

In September 2011, one month after Ray C. Anderson died, his two daughters—Mary Anne Lanier, now 60, and Harriet Langford, 57—were summoned to his lawyer’s Atlanta office. Anderson had founded Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet-tile manufacturer, and he left his daughters a $50 million philanthropic trust.

The countdown begins—it’s less than three weeks until the BSR Conference 2017! This year will feature a wide variety of valuable networking and self-development opportunities. These are some of the activities that we are most excited about.

For the past three years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has been on a journey to help the private sector and communities realize the value and implement the principles of the circular economy in the United States.

We’ve hosted tours and conferences, released research and case studies—but today, I’m excited to announce the next step in our circular economy journey: the city location for our Beyond 34: Recycling and Recovery for a New Economy project.

On September 12, 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) announced a new project with long-time strategic partner, PwC, to jointly create a Center of Excellence (CoE) in Kolkata, India, to advance development for future cities. Together, HPE and PwC are capitalizing on the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape to create opportunities for city administrators to optimize their assets and provide citizen-centric services.

Rich Serino has more than 40 years of federal, state, and local emergency management and emergency medical services experience. Mr. Serino was appointed as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Deputy Administrator in October 2009. In this role, he worked directly with Administrator Craig Fugate to promote the “whole community” approach to emergency management, which seeks to build, sustain, and improve the agency’s capacity to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Rethink. Those concepts are not new. In fact, they exist in nature. If we look at nature, we see no waste. Everything in nature is reused and recycled, right down to every tiny bone and every small leaf. Waste is a man-made invention - and in the world with a growing human population and increasing resource scarcity, nature can inspire humans to a more circular thinking. And it is about time.

Bechtel is building Edmonton’s Valley Line light-rail transit extension, the largest infrastructure project undertaken by Alberta’s capital city in Canada. It will expand the commuter-rail system by eight miles (13 kilometers), linking the urban center to distant suburbs across the Saskatchewan River. Edmonton has committed to reducing its carbon footprint by 111,000 tons per year by purchasing renewable energy, which will provide electricity from cleaner sources to power the trains.

Getting your supplier to help you use less of their product may seem counterintuitive, but that is exactly what Domtar’s procurement team did with our pulp bleaching chemical supplier. And thanks to the strategic partnership we have built with them, they agreed to help us.

By leveraging our supplier’s chemical expertise and our process knowledge, we identified opportunities to improve chemical efficiency through audits at all of our mills with bleach plants.

Mike Bloomberg appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to discuss his co-authored book with Carl Pope, "Climate of Hope" (plus see a blast from his past).