Energy & Infrastructure

Val Smith, managing director and global head of corporate sustainability at Citi, discusses how The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability serves as an important framework for benchmarking and understanding best practice for sustainable business leadership.

Andrew Plepler, global head of ESG at Bank of America, discusses how the Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability provides the company with a comprehensive framework for corporate sustainability leadership.

Catherine Gunsbury, director of sustainability and transparency at General Mills, discusses the value of stakeholder engagement.

TURNING POINT: Corporate Progress on the Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability is a new assessment released by Ceres that examines how more than 600 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. are responding to urgent calls to act on climate change and other sustainability threats, such as water pollution and scarcity, and human rights abuses, and positioning themselves for success in a world shaped by these unprecedented environmental and social challenges.

It’s not often that captains of industry have epiphanies about climate change. So it was remarkable when, after reading The Ecology of Commerce in 1994, carpet manufacturer Ray Anderson set out to clean up his petroleum-intensive operation and succeeded in cutting net carbon emissions by more than 80 percent.

The city of Philadelphia’s football team won the big game for the first time ever and its long-suffering fan base celebrated the victory in kind. In February, the city held a massive parade for its football team, a turnout that some estimated teetered over 700,000 people. With this great turnout came its inevitable byproduct: trash. Lots of trash. Roughly 90 tons of trash, the most the city has ever generated for a single event and nearly double its previous record of 58 tons for a victory parade for its baseball team in 2008.

Philadelphia came prepared. The city’s Department of Streets mobilized a team of 300 workers, using 100 kinds of equipment, to follow the procession of the parade to clean up the immediate aftermath.

The Gerald R. Ford International Airport is being recognized for having one of the best and most energy-efficient airports in the region. Consumers Energy presented a rebate check for $151,631 to the Gerald R. Ford International Airport (GFIA) today, as part of the company’s energy efficiency program which is saving the airport energy and money.

Lichen, a modular plank carpet system from Mohawk Group, was the Best of Competition winner in the 2017 Nightingale Awards. The collection blends concepts of sustainability and biophilic design.

SAN FRANCISCO – Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) Renewable Energy and Environmental Finance today announced it has completed $49 million in tax-equity funding for the new 540-acre solar generation facility known as MS Solar 3 in Sumrall, Mississippi. One of the Southeast’s biggest solar projects, it will generate enough clean energy to power more than 11,400 homes.

As the demand for computing power grows exponentially, there has been a push from both outside of, and within the IT sector to reduce the carbon emissions and energy consumption associated with the world’s rapidly expanding IT infrastructure, which consists largely of data center facilities. The reality is that efficiency improvements won’t be enough to meet the exploding demand for data, and the compute power necessary to provide it.

Kimberly-Clark Corporation today announced it has won a 2018 Climate Leadership Award for Excellence in the Greenhouse Gas Management (Goal Setting) category, the company’s second Climate Leadership Award in two years.