Corporate Sustainability News: Feeling Hopeful
Part 8 of corporate news in the wherefrom newsletter
Ikea plans on becoming a fully circular business by 2030! That is not an easy task. They’ve recently announced a new partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (the gold mine resource for the circular economy) focusing on designing for closed-loop furnishing and promoting circular offers to customers.
In terms of design, they will engage young designers and lobby for legislative changes that help advance the circular economy. Products and materials will last longer through reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and, as a final option, recycling. This is really important because recycling is often seen as an important part of circular principles, however, it should be considered as a last resort. This is because we should be elongating the useability and life of products rather than turning them into something new.
For their customers (i.e. basically all of us… how many pieces of furniture do you own from Ikea??), the brand will introduce rental and refurbishments schemes, as well as expand their take-back models for furniture and textile recycling.
How are they doing so far? 80% of Ikea’s projects have been approved against their circular design principles, with 60% of products using renewable materials and 10% containing recycled materials. For instance, they expect that 60% of their polyester inputs will be recycled.
Lucozade Ribena Suntory (LRS) wants to keep Ribena local… meaning that they’ve invested over half a million pounds to develop new varieties of climate-resilient blackcurrants to continue sourcing from the UK. Did you know that 90% of Ribena’s blackcurrants are grown in the UK? This helps shorten their supply chain and reduce transportation emissions.
With the help of the James Hutton Institute, LRS is trying to save the blackcurrant crop, which is currently threatened by the UK’s rising temperatures… The crop needs periods of cold weather to yield more fruit. The 5-year research will look at how new varieties can cope with climatic changes and be naturally more disease and pest resistant, thereby reducing the need for fossil fuel-derived pesticides. They say that this research will benefit farmers as they will be able to boost yields and improve the sustainability of their crops.
This isn’t the first time that LRS has been working with the Institute. They’ve actually invested around 10 million pounds since 1991 to support efforts to improve the sustainability and quality of blackcurrant crops.
A vital collaboration has just materialised between Google and WWF Sweden, which will help professionals in the fashion industry become more sustainable by understanding their supply chain impacts and risks. The two major players are developing an environmental data platform to provide pollution information and emissions impacts of business decisions.
More specifically, the tool will help fashion professionals assess impacts like water scarcity and water pollution, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. It will include geographical contexts, the benefits of more sustainable sourcing, and innovative technologies or agricultural systems to help sustainable transitions.
Google will provide its cloud, machine learning, and big data analytics to track the impact of commonly used materials, like cotton and viscose, at all stages of the supply chain. WWF will provide its vast knowledge of the environmental impacts in specific contexts and typical supply chain processes. The two hope that their combined expertise and data will help companies understand the true impact of their supply chains, which is especially important considering the difficulty of data collection in such fragmented and globalised chains.
Photo: Fashion.ie
