If you’ve been around the building products industry in the last five years, you’ve probably encountered conversations about transparency — around material health, chemical hazards, environmental impacts, you name it. To be fair, if you were around the building products industry 10 years ago, no one was really talking about transparency (at least not like today). The buzzword of the day back then was recycled content. Before that, it was indoor air quality. And over time those attributes have become commonplace for most manufacturers; transparency is the next attribute to achieve. But the ..read more

As of the writing of this article, the year 2020 is a mere 450 days away. Can you believe that? 450 days! For the sustainability community, 2020 is a particularly important date: 2020 Sustainability Goals have become highly fashionable; unless you have been living under a rock, you are familiar with phrases such as “20 percent reduction [insert carbon, energy, waste, water, etc] by 2020.” According to the website Pivot Goals, within the Fortune 250* there are 330 energy, climate or greenhouse gas (GHG) goals with 2020 as the target date. I can attest firsthand to ..read more

By Greg Zimmerman, Executive Editor Green At a green building conference a few years ago, Dr. Claudia Miller, assistant dean of the University of Texas School of Medicine, made a rather bold statement: “Architects have a greater ability to improve public health than medical professionals,” she said. The same could certainly be said for facility managers. That’s because facility managers are the ones who choose products on an ongoing basis for the life-cycle of the facility. Decisions facility managers make regarding products brought into a facility have a profound effect on the health and well ..read more

CDP, RobecoSAM, EcoVadis — they are all organizations that assess the sustainability performance of companies worldwide. They all have their own agenda and targets, and of course, their own methodology to assess a portfolio of companies.  Globally, +/- 60 percent of companies that publicly communicate sustainability data are answering to sustainability assessing organizations(1)(2). It is not an easy task: A survey of sustainability managers internationally has identified that replying to sustainability questionnaires was the biggest pain point in sustainability data management in 2016(3 ..read more

“All I really need is the word to be brought up.” “If they aren’t talking about it, then it can’t be important to them.” At WAP Sustainability, we work with manufacturers and brands to help them meet customers’ expectations on sustainability, many of which receive requests through The Sustainability Consortium (TSC).  In the course of our work and discussions with suppliers of Walmart, we have recently been reminded that sustainability is still a small part of the total equation of doing business with the retail giant; and we noticed it becoming less and less of a factor as of late. One o ..read more

Sustainability reporting trends Sustainability is a trending topic and since 2010, a large number of American companies have started a sustainability reporting: according to the G&A Institute, the proportion of S&P 500 companies that issue a sustainability report rose from less than 20% in 2011 to more than 80% in 2015. How will this reporting trend evolve over time? First, let’s get back to the basics: what should a relevant sustainability report contain? Frameworks such as GRI are here to guide you: they provide a large list of sustainability issues a company should deal with. In add ..read more

But does answering all these frameworks really enable companies to manage their sustainability issues? A panel of experts at Edie’s conference in 2017 explained that “broad reporting frameworks have created a tick-box system for external gratification”. However, put together in one report don’t necessarily provide relevant information for the various types of stakeholders. According to them, reports that are created mainly to respond to GRI, SASB, CDP and other frameworks, “failed to truly present the benefits of firms’ sustainability actions”. There is something here that I believe will reson ..read more

It is December, hard to believe I know, but the end of the year is among us.  Now that we are on the latter side of Thanksgiving, the Holidays are among us.  One of the most anticipated decisions this Holiday season involves your Christmas Tree. A few years ago, we were part of the the first-ever ISO-compliant third-party peer reviewed life cycle analysis (LCA) of Christmas trees. The LCA sought to answer a number of questions, with the areas of most interest being what overall environmental impact Christmas trees have on environment, and if there is a significant different between r ..read more

The sustainability job market has been very active for the past six months. Sustainability Leads average number of job posts each week has doubled in the latter half of 2017. While this is not hard science, it is a signal that the sustainability job market is healthy. Perhaps this uptick in new jobs is that organizations feel added responsibility in response to political changes and have elected to hire, or turnover could just be higher in 2017. Regardless of the drivers, if you are a sustainability professional, now is as good of time as ever to dust of the resume and shop new jobs. One aspec ..read more

October is always a dynamic and busy month for the sustainability industry. Suppliers to Walmart receive their annual influx of emails kindly demanding each to complete an assigned number of Sustainability Consortium Product Sustainability Toolkits. These emails serve as a "gentle" nudge to manufacturers and brands, reminding each of the work they have or have not completed since the last survey. Based on the number of registered companies at the time of this blog, 5,799 manufacturers and brands were logged on to SAP’s Product Sustainability Network answering one or more of the over 100+ surve ..read more