Smithfield Foods Invests in Sustainable Agronomics: Q&A with Bill Gill

In early December 2016, Smithfield Foods became the first major livestock company to set an absolute supply chain goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The world’s largest pork producer committed to cutting emissions in its US supply chain 25% by 2025.

“We’re getting a lot of input from our customers, NGOs, and different groups as to how we can participate in an effort to reduce our carbon emissions,” says Bill Gill, assistant vice president for sustainability at Smithfield Foods.

Gill, who has been with the company for just over 30 years, heads up environmental and sustainability efforts there. He says that Smithfield has partnered with the University of Minnesota and the Environmental Defense Fund to develop a science-based approach for reducing emissions.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive Healthcare in Rwanda

Think globally; act locally. This is the mentality CARITAS Rwanda embraces to achieve its mission. As one of Rwanda’s largest international NGOs, CARITAS manages nearly 30 percent of healthcare facilities in the country, each treating a range of health issues from HIV to malaria. The organization firmly believes that all interventions should address issues raised by the community, which is why it relies on CARITAS community volunteers and Community Health Workers, a government-funded national health program that places trained health workers in every village, to collect and report paper-based health data. Without their reporting support, CARITAS would not have accurate data at a scale sufficient to understand its target market.

The National Diversity Council Stands With Starbucks

The National Diversity Council (NDC) is proud to support Starbucks in their efforts to educate employees on racial tolerance after two black men were arrested last week in one of their Philadelphia stores.

Earth Day Flash Sale Happening Now!

Join the Chamber Foundation’s fourth annual Sustainability and Circular Economy Summit: Translating Value to Ignite Action May 9—10 in Washington, D.C. Come learn the practical knowledge, skills, and applications needed to most effectively communicate sustainability and the circular economy, both within and outside your organization.

New Erb Institute Business Sustainability Toolbox | Climate Change Strategies for Detroit Small Businesses

The Erb Institute partnered with the Detroit Climate Action Collaborative (DCAC) to produce the toolbox Climate Change Strategies for Detroit Small Businesses. This newest toolbox in the Erb Institute’s Sustainability Management Toolbox series lays out four broad climate change goals that apply to all businesses and institutions, large and small alike. In an interview with Erb Institute Managing Director Terry Nelidov, he explains how this toolbox was created and how Detroit small businesses can leverage it to create change.

Tyson Foods’ Workforce Education Initiative Continues to Expand

Tyson Foods’ Upward Academy, an in-plant education program that provides classes at no cost, recently surpassed 100,000 hours of instruction to more than 1,000 of the company’s team members.

Upward Academy launched in 2016 at one of the company’s plants in Springdale, Arkansas, and is now offered in 27 facilities in Arkansas, Missouri, Texas and North Carolina. Forty plants are projected to offer the program by the end of September 2018, and expansion will continue over the next several years to cover the company’s entire footprint.

To Go Circular, First Go Vertical

In a world where there is growing regulatory (and economic) momentum for companies to manage the full life cycle of products, vertical integration provides a key step toward the circular economy by managing waste and providing raw materials to secure demand for recycled materials.

At Bloomberg, We Work on Purpose

It’s been over 35 years, and we’re still growing strong. Bloomberg now has almost 20,000 employees — and our products and services are dramatically more sophisticated than they were when I first started here, 21 years ago. But our culture is still largely the same.

DOZN: Advancing How We Evaluate the Greenness of Chemicals

Samy Ponnusamy, a green chemistry fellow at MilliporeSigma, explains the development of DOZN’s scoring system to Chem.info, saying, “We wanted to differentiate ourselves from other companies offering to perform similar testing, so we decided to take these principles and use them as our basis for evaluating products. We developed a complex algorithm for each principle. Then, using our 300,000 product portfolio, we tested relative greenness against each of the 12 principles, and from there produced an aggregated score from zero to 100, with zero being the best possible score, meaning the most green.”