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Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

CTIA: Outlining How Wireless Technology Drives Sustainability

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The Challenge

With more than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions around the world, and more than 100 million (and rapidly growing) machine-to-machine communications, wireless technology is ubiquitous, convenient, and increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Nonetheless, it is not clear how wireless technology has been deployed to enable solutions to longstanding environmental and social problems.

Our Strategy

After consulting with more than 20 wireless industry experts and analyzing data from a wide range of sources, we developed two substantive reports focused on the wireless impacts on the environment and society. In “Wireless and the Environment,” we reviewed the role wireless can play in reducing the environmental footprint of the transportation, utilities, agriculture, and public services sectors. “Socioeconomic Impacts of Wireless Technology” explored the development of wireless technology in society through four lenses: health care, finance, education, and community empowerment.

Both reports noted the growing potential for innovative wireless solutions to improve the environment and societies around the world, such as “smart” wireless traffic-control devices that could reduce emissions by 20 percent, or wireless health care initiatives that dramatically improve access to health care information and could save up to US$2.1 billion annually in the United States alone.

At the same time, the reports call attention to ongoing challenges resulting from the manufacture and use of wireless technology, including the environmental costs of the manufacturing and disposal of products, as well as concerns about privacy, freedom of expression, and supply chain labor rights.

Our Impact

Through discussions among professionals in various fields and presentations of these reports at industry forums, our work has demonstrated some of the possibilities for wireless technology to address human and environmental needs. It has also encouraged a deeper debate about the role of wireless technology in a sustainable society, and it called attention to the need for solutions to ongoing environmental and human rights challenges associated with the production and use of wireless technology.

Lessons Learned

This project highlighted three lessons about the use of technology to support progress in sustainability:

1. Since wireless technology can monitor data at any time and any place, important information can be communicated instantly, enabling more sophisticated resource allocation and providing data-driven evidence to encourage behavior change and operational efficiencies.
2. Collaboration leads to innovation. Combining experts in urban planning with wireless-application developers, for example, can lead to new ideas about using wireless technology to manage and improve traffic flow.
3. New solutions can result in new sustainability risks. Whether it’s protecting the privacy of wirelessly available personal health data or managing the environmental impact of distributed microsensors, the industry should identify and address emerging concerns to ensure that opportunities are not derailed by concerns about impacts.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Twin Metals Minnesota: Using Early Stakeholder Engagement to Improve Strategy

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The Challenge

In developing one of the world’s largest underground copper mines—at a site near a popular outdoor recreation area—Twin Metals Minnesota must assure stakeholders and the public that it can mine in a socially and environmentally responsible way.

Although construction of the mine is several years away, Twin Metals sought to develop a meaningful new stakeholder-engagement and community-expectation strategy that would weave sustainability into the cultural fabric of the company, while serving as an effective framework for the company to identify, address, and measure the social and environmental impacts and opportunities of the project.

Our Strategy

BSR worked with Twin Metals to develop a three-part strategy based on early engagement with a broad range of stakeholders:

1. Interview a broad range of stakeholders early. We interviewed stakeholders from local, state, and federal government offices, as well as community leaders and representatives of environmental NGOs. These interviews revealed connections between interrelated stakeholder groups and issues, which helped the company identify opportunities to maximize project benefits for surrounding communities.
2. Incorporate stakeholder interviews into the company’s emerging sustainability strategy. Twin Metals is in the process of building a sustainability strategy from the ground up by incorporating the issues, concerns, and opportunities gleaned from more than 50 stakeholder interviews—ensuring that the company’s strategy will resonate with local communities.
3. Embrace innovation. The stakeholder interview process gave Twin Metals several innovative ways to analyze the social and environmental impacts of the project. For example, we helped identify partnership opportunities for workforce development and local procurement to ensure that local workers are well-trained for technical mining jobs, and that local sourcing of materials is embedded in the company’s strategy. Engagement with environmental NGOs gave the company a more holistic understanding of the environmental issues that are important to these stakeholders and the opportunity to develop more effective mitigation techniques.

Our Impact

By starting the stakeholder-engagement process early—and planning from the outset to incorporate the ideas generated into its sustainability strategy—Twin Metals will be able to build a stronger, more credible strategy. Through this process, the company has identified opportunities and risks early enough to act on them, and the company’s approach is establishing a strong foundation for future collaboration with stakeholders.

Lessons Learned

BSR’s work with Twin Metals revealed that early engagement with a broad range of stakeholders is an essential part of building a strong relationship with stakeholders—especially for a company just launching a sustainability program. Stakeholder views can both strengthen a company’s approach to sustainability and lend credibility to the company within the stakeholder community. This project also demonstrated that it’s possible for stakeholder engagement to provide valuable insight and guidance that will lead to the development of a more sustainable mine.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Bradesco: Helping a Brazilian Bank Engage Society on Common Concerns

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The Challenge

In every major economy, the financial sector forms the nexus between stakeholders, investors, and business, making it a potentially valuable enabler of sustainable business. In Brazil, a few banks have started to engage with stakeholders on issues such as financial education, social and environmental risk, climate change, and energy efficiency, but they sometimes struggle with how to address those challenges through their operations.

For Bradesco—an institution with 105,102 employees, 65.4 million clients, 4,636 bank branches, R$789,550 million in total assets, and a presence in every municipality in the country—the challenge was even more pronounced.

The company turned to BSR to help find an answer.

Our Strategy

Our goal was to develop a strategy that consolidated engagement activity across several departments and Bradesco organization’s affiliates in a unified way to inform the company’s direction on sustainability. Key questions included:

• How best to offer banking and insurance services to the more than 50 million people who do not yet have access to financial services?
• How to address risks in the R$5.473 billion of projects monitored by the bank for social environmental impact?
• How best to direct R$566.5 million in social and environmental projects?

We started by assessing the activities already occurring throughout the organization—in retail, insurance, customer services, marketing, corporate, and environmental/social risk assessment—to understand best practices and key challenges.

BSR then worked with Bradesco to design a structured, centralized engagement of external actors to inform how the bank selects and reports on priority issues.

Next, we facilitated two sessions aimed at capturing Bradesco’s impact on business and society. The first session gathered bank executives, client companies exhibiting sustainability leadership, NGOs critical of impacts of major infrastructure projects, and regulatory agencies. Participants provided practical suggestions to inform the organization’s strategy on key issues: They suggested key performance indicators for assessing financial institutions, and they identified ways to connect sustainability issues within the strategy.

In our second session, managers from different areas across the bank met with specialists to discuss specific solutions to financial inclusion, social/environmental risk, governance and transparency, client relations, climate change, and strategic social investment.

Our Impact

Based on these workshops and BSR’s research, Bradesco will create working groups involving bank executives to advance sustainability solutions within their operations. The company’s sustainability committee will use the engagement process BSR helped create to regularly assess performance.

As a result of these changes, Bradesco has already received praise from NGOs and other stakeholders, who applauded the company for its commitment to "treating [sustainability challenges] internally as opposed to a one-off conversation." The process has also been praised by internal participants as “the most open discussion on real challenges important to our future success.”

Lessons Learned

We learned two main lessons from our work:

• To achieve sustainability goals, banks must build the organizational capabilities that allow for these external signals to influence the company’s direction.
• An essential step in our engagement approach was securing buy-in at the organization’s highest levels and developing a process that involves all areas of the bank.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

The Boeing Company: Assessing the Maturity of Environmental Systems

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The Challenge

As the world's largest aerospace company, whose commercial jetliners and defense, space, and security systems are used in 150 countries, Boeing operates a diverse network of manufacturing facilities that produce and maintain aircraft and aviation systems. In today’s operating environment, the company faces growing pressure from customers and reporting standards to quickly aggregate common data from across its manufacturing sites and report on its overall environmental performance.

Additionally, Boeing’s five-year environmental targets focus on key impacts, including carbon-dioxide emissions, energy use, water use, and waste. The company was on track to meet or exceed its 1 percent absolute reduction goals, which were set to expire in 2012, and Boeing needed to develop a comprehensive set of new targets. Additionally, given the steady increase in requests for corporate sustainability information from surveys, analysts, and customers, the company wanted to ensure that new targets could satisfy future data needs.

Boeing enlisted BSR to help develop its next set of performance targets and assess the viability and usefulness of the company’s current data, and the systems underlying environmental management at the various manufacturing sites.

Our Strategy

Our goal was to understand the state of Boeing’s environmental data across key manufacturing sites, and whether these data were “mature,” or robust, useful, and forward-looking enough to satisfy emerging sustainability data requirements. BSR and Boeing also created a “maturity model” to assess governance of environmental data across manufacturing sites.

We gathered this information by reviewing management systems documentation and holding a series of meetings with facility and corporate environmental leaders at multiple sites. We also interviewed select manufacturing peers within the BSR member network to understand their approaches to environmental data governance. Based on this, we facilitated a discussion with senior management about the development of new targets, highlighting where Boeing could set ambitious targets verses where continuous improvement to systems and processes could be made to address future needs.

Our Impact

Our work produced a more detailed understanding of how environmental data varied across Boeing sites, the maturity of environmental governance, and the company’s readiness for increasing the scope of its existing environmental metrics. Boeing developed a set of post-2012 environmental targets based on this new understanding.

Lessons Learned

• By assessing the maturity of the data, we were able to highlight both the gaps and the opportunities for future reporting needs.
• Traditional environmental, health, and safety data; systems; and processes need to shift to an overall sustainability framework—one that is future-looking and takes into account stakeholder needs.
• Boeing has relatively standardized data and processes to collect that information, and this is supported by strong management systems. Nonetheless, variation in data still exists. Potential benefits of data maturity include:
  • Reputation/brand enhancement and risk reduction: Better, more proactive responses to public reporting and customer environmental data requests can reduce risk.
  • Streamlined operations: Standardized, centralized, and automated data systems improve access, reduce duplication, and simplify monitoring.
  • Opportunity identification: Tracking and highlighting opportunities can further reduce impacts such as waste.
  • Improved best-practice sharing: Improving internal communications makes it easier for sites to track and compare each other’s performance.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Helping Companies Ensure Respect for Human Rights

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The Challenge

Ever since BSR was founded, we have been working with business to address human rights impacts, from labor rights abuses in global supply chains to freedom of expression on the internet.

Though human rights is not a new challenge to business, one of the big obstacles has been a lack of consensus and clarity on the exact responsibilities of business and a dearth of resources to help companies meet those responsibilities.

After UN Special Representative John Ruggie’s Protect, Respect, Remedy Framework provided that consensus in 2008, BSR supported Ruggie’s UN mandate to help find answers to the next question: How companies can ensure that they do not infringe upon human rights?

Our Strategy

As Ruggie and his team set out to develop the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, our support for their work was based on three objectives:

1. Share BSR’s experience and perspective with the UN mandate to help shape the principles.
2. Connect the UN mandate with BSR member companies to enable mutual learning.
3. Help companies implement human rights strategies and management systems aligned with the principles.

BSR provided input to the UN mandate as a stakeholder at in-person and online consultations, and we hosted representatives from the UN mandate at in-person events in Tokyo and Hong Kong and at virtual events for our members in North America and EMEA. These events covered topics such as human rights strategy, due diligence, and grievance mechanisms.

We also hosted Ruggie and his team at the annual BSR Conferences to share their thinking and gather business leaders’ perspectives on what does and does not work when managing human rights impacts.

Most importantly, we held several cross-industry and sector-specific workshops for our members, and we worked one on one with companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Teck Resources, and Telefonica to develop human rights policies and management systems. After the Guiding Principles were published, we developed sector-specific assessment frameworks and strategic guidance, such as our 2011 report on applying the Guiding Principles in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector.

Our Impact

Since 2008, we have worked with companies in the ICT, extractives, energy, media, consumer products, automotive, and financial sectors on how to implement the Guiding Principles. In May of 2012, we launched the BSR Human Rights Working Group. In all of our work, we use the UN Guiding Principles as a baseline for companies, but we also go “beyond respect,” helping companies identify opportunities to use their core competencies to help advance human rights.

Lessons Learned

A key lesson we draw from this work is the importance of collaboration when addressing complex challenges. The UN mandate’s inclusive stakeholder engagement approach led to a global consensus in an area that as recently as 2005 saw almost complete disagreement between business and human rights groups.

We also learned that while the human rights risks faced by each industry are very different and require unique responses, many sectors share common management challenges. For example, a mining company obligated to use an abusive military force to protect its mine, and an ICT company required by local law to filter human rights content from online searches face the same challenge: how to effectively use their limited leverage over the government to change the negative behavior.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

Bettercoal: Improving Performance in the Coal Supply Chain

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The Challenge

In the next 25 to 50 years, despite efforts to shift to lower-carbon energy sources, increasing demand from large emerging economies means that coal will continue to be critical to meet energy needs. And, increasingly, future production is likely to be based in countries such as Mongolia, Mozambique, and parts of Indonesia that, to date, have had modest coal mining operations.

In spite of this, there is currently no agreed-upon global standard for coal mining; performance varies widely across the world; and there are significant ethical, social, and environmental risks and impacts associated with coal mining.

To fill this gap, several major energy utilities—DONG Energy, EDF, Enel, E.ON, GDF Suez, RWE, and Vattenfall—worked with BSR as the lead facilitator to form Bettercoal, the first global, multi-company initiative aimed at improving conditions at the mine level. Bettercoal will seek to fulfill its mission by conducting independent mine assessments, facilitating industry best practice sharing, and offering support to develop resources and capabilities at the mine level.

Our Strategy

Since the beginning of 2011, BSR has supported the founding members with both group facilitation and content expertise on a range of issues, including ethical, social, and environmental risks and impacts in mining.

Using our deep experience building collaborative initiatives, we have engaged civil society and companies in the coal supply chain to help create a coal-mining code for social, environmental, and ethical performance; draft the articles of association; incorporate the entity; define its operating principles; manage antitrust issues; and hire an executive director. BSR also worked with third-party service providers to develop the infrastructure and tools to support Bettercoal.

Our Impact

In the first year, BSR has successfully assisted in the launch of Bettercoal, and we will continue to support the organization as the Bettercoal Code and assessment tools proceed through a multiphase, public consultation process that will reach individuals and community-based organizations in key coal-producing countries. (Information about this will be available at www.bettercoal.org.)

In the future, Bettercoal will focus on increasing the uptake of the initiative by suppliers and stakeholders.

Lessons Learned

Through the development of Bettercoal, we learned two important lessons about collaborating with several independent companies to establish a new entity:

1. Involving relevant staff from each of the founding companies in different activities was a highly effective way to imbed the work in the organizations and ensure that the project had necessary resources. For instance, the project communications departments were involved in developing the communications strategy, sustainability experts helped develop the code, and compliance officers established the operating model.
2. To ensure trust among companies—a fundamental part of maintaining both momentum and our schedule—we needed to ensure that we developed and had consensus on our mission from the outset.

Case Studies | Monday October 22, 2012

CiYuan: Building Cross-Sector Partnerships to Enhance Social Investment in China

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The Challenge

In China, economic growth is perpetuating a multitude of challenges, including a lack of human rights protection for migrant workers, environmental degradation, and income disparity—and government is not fully able to address these issues. There is an opportunity for civil society to fill these gaps, but without business’ help in strengthening the country’s nascent nonprofit sector, that progress has dramatically less potential.

BSR founded CiYuan to address the biggest barriers to the development of China’s nonprofit sector: limited strategic partnerships and opportunities for dialogue between nonprofits and business; a foundation sector with limited experience in partnering with and supporting grassroots organizations; a restrictive environment for nonprofit registration and fundraising; and weak governance and transparency, which generates a lack of public trust in nonprofits.

Our Strategy

In April 2010, we started our three-year CiYuan initiative (which is funded by the U.S. Department of Human Rights and Labor) by launching three main activities:

Improving NGO transparency

Our “Disclosure Guide for Charitable Organizations” helps nonprofits identify and communicate their information. We also trained more than 200 grassroots nonprofits to emphasize the rationale for disclosure and the steps to become more transparent. And we created an online giving platform for nonprofits to communicate their vision and attract online funding.

Supporting foundation development

We are providing foundations with international best practice and resources with tools such as our “Chinese Foundation and Development Handbook,” (PDF) which was distributed to 800 nonprofits to strengthen their operations. And we are going deeper with four foundations to create models for how to enhance support for grassroots organizations.

Building corporate-NGO partnerships

Through six diverse demonstration projects between companies and nonprofits, we are demonstrating different models for cross-sector collaboration. We are also providing training to more than 200 companies and NGOs, and we launched an awards program to raise awareness about the benefits of partnerships.

Our Impact

Since 2010, CiYuan has helped more than 460 nonprofit organizations enhance their transparency and develop effective partnerships with foundations and companies.

Our corporate-NGO demonstration pilots, case studies, and tools are providing companies and nonprofits with concrete examples of how to identify and assess potential partners and project opportunities, navigate partnership challenges, and evaluate partnership impact.

Our foundation handbook, the first of its kind in Chinese, provides Chinese foundations with a structured approach to operations, from registration and defining their mission to social impact measurement—a tool that can help more foundations in China flourish.

Lessons Learned

Through our experience working with global companies and global and regional NGOS, we identified many factors that can influence successful partnerships:

• Level of ambition: The most effective partnerships require a greater commitment—and risk—than traditional philanthropy, and they have an equal potential for greater impact.
• Alignment of vision: Programs need to be aligned with the company’s social investment strategy or link to its core business, and nonprofits need to focus on what they can deliver.
• Mutual investments: Partners need to take time to understand and adapt to differences in organizational structures and working styles—and be flexible with goals and timeframes when priorities change.

For the remainder of the CiYuan initiative (which runs through February 2013), we will continue to work across these areas to build greater private-sector support for nonprofit development in China.

Case Studies | Friday June 3, 2011

BSR Conference 2010: ‘Innovate. Integrate. Inspire.’

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The BSR Conference 2010—“Innovate. Integrate. Inspire.”—brought together more than 1,100 senior business executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders from the public sector and civil society to connect with their peers and define the business models essential for future success.

The BSR Conference 2010 was a central gathering point for BSR member companies and a diverse array of partners and innovators.

The 44 sessions at the Conference provided the unique insights and diverse perspectives business leaders need to shape a sustainable future. Breakout sessions ranged from one-hour conversations with industry experts, such as internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon and Walmart’s global sustainability leader Matt Kistler, to interactive, two-hour workshops covering topics as wide-ranging as “Sustainable Investment in Emerging Markets,” “Responsible Sourcing and Conflict Minerals,” the “Art and Science of Reporting Water-Related Risk,” and “CSR and Policy: Improving Collaboration Between Business and Government.”

I³ plenary presentations, a new addition to the Conference, featured personal reflections on the Conference theme from visionary leaders. Highlighting universal aspirations and innovative leadership, presentations from the Museum of Modern Art’s Paola Antonelli, Women for Women International’s Zainab Salbi, and Naif A. Al-Mutawa, creator of the comic series “The 99,” demonstrated how each of us has the potential to create awareness and drive change on important issues like health care, access to information, and education.

Plenary and breakout sessions emphasized how innovative partnerships are essential to the creation of solutions with large impact. “Company leaders who understand our globalized, integrated, collaborative world will be best positioned to succeed,” said BSR President and CEO Aron Cramer. “They will be the ones who capture increased market share and access to markets through new products and services that deliver sustainable value. They will create new business models that take advantage of the collaborative spirit of our times. And they will be more likely to meet the needs of vast new markets in rising economies. The result will be more prosperous companies and a more sustainably prosperous world.”

Case Studies | Friday June 3, 2011

Driving Innovation Through Partnerships

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Since BSR’s founding, we have been strongly committed to achieving our mission through powerful partnerships. BSR’s Partnership Development team is dedicated to catalyzing collaboration between business and social and environmental innovators in the public and nonprofit sectors to make progress on systemic sustainable development challenges.

With grant support from public and corporate foundations, governments, and multilateral institutions, we design unique partnerships on topics ranging from women’s health to the environmental impacts of port operations. By working with funders ranging from a Swedish aid agency to the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, BSR leverages “venture capital,” our member company network, and our own expertise as well as the expertise of our diverse project partners to help solve development challenges in emerging economies.

HERproject | www.herproject.org

We expanded our factory- and farm-based women’s health training program—HERproject—with a major investment from the Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency and ongoing support from the Levi Strauss Foundation. This support allowed BSR to link member companies with local partners who designed and provided training for female workers on health-related issues in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Kenya from our original base in China, Egypt, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam. These training programs, now active in 50 factories, have impacted more than 70,000 women. Based on return-on-investment metrics, this training has not only brought improved worker health and awareness, it has led to reduced absenteeism, lower turnover, and increased productivity.

CiYuan (China Philanthropy Incubator) | ciyuan.bsr.org

With support from the U.S. Department of State, CiYuan is designed both to increase the impact of social investments in China, and to build the capacity and expertise of Chinese nonprofit organizations and their project partners to fund and implement additional efforts. For example, BSR is supporting a new, cross-sector collaboration that includes a multinational company (HP), a U.S.-based nonprofit (the Taproot Foundation), a local nonprofit (Huizeren), and a local foundation (the Narada Foundation) to advance the pro bono service model in China. Our hope is that this model will allow companies and civil society organizations to share skills and build stronger organizations capable of partnering with a wider range of partners.

Migration Linkages

A four-year program in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, our Migration Linkages initiative helps protect the rights of migrant workers who are moving between developing countries. We connect multinational companies and their business partners with civil society groups, international organizations, labor unions, and governments to make the global migration system more transparent and advance responsible labor practices. In 2010, we launched a pilot program to protect human rights in the recruitment process for migrant workers in Malaysia and in the Persian Gulf.

Green Ports and Energy Efficiency

With new funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and building on our experience with BSR’s Clean Cargo Working Group, this project is aimed at evaluating the environmental performance of freight carriers, and working to make ports and terminal operators more sustainable. As a first step, we identified ports’ most significant sustainability issues and developed a framework for ports to consistently report on their performance on those issues. This funding also will allow BSR to expand our Energy Efficiency Partnership, a China-based effort to enhance the energy efficiency of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the Pearl River Delta.

Major Funders in 2010: Private, Corporate, Government

• British Consulate General in Guangzhou
• GE Foundation
• International Finance Corporation
• Levi Strauss Foundation
• MacArthur Foundation
• Rockefeller Brothers Fund
• Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency
• U.S. Department of State

Case Studies | Friday June 3, 2011

Creating Business Opportunity by Tackling Sustainable Consumption

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The Challenge

In China, economic growth is perpetuating a multitude of challenges, including a lack of human rights protection for migrant workers, environmental degradation, and income disparity—and government is not fully able to address these issues. There is an opportunity for civil society to fill these gaps, but without business’ help in strengthening the country’s nascent nonprofit sector, that progress has dramatically less potential.

BSR founded CiYuan to address the biggest barriers to the development of China’s nonprofit sector: limited strategic partnerships and opportunities for dialogue between nonprofits and business; a foundation sector with limited experience in partnering with and supporting grassroots organizations; a restrictive environment for nonprofit registration and fundraising; and weak governance and transparency, which generates a lack of public trust in nonprofits.

By nearly any measure, the way we consume natural resources is unsustainable: Research suggests that we are currently using 50 percent more natural resources than the Earth can sustain.

As the global population continues to grow, from almost 7 billion today to 9 billion in 2050, it is imperative that we develop new ways to enable all of the world’s people to live a dignified life, with access to basic products and services, while also preserving healthy ecosystems.

That challenge is at the core of an initiative BSR began in 2010 to raise business awareness of this issue, and to recast it as an opportunity for innovation. To explore how business can lead the shift from “super” consumption to sustainable consumption, we launched a series of work that includes applied research, collaborative learning opportunities, and consulting pr

Defining the Issue, Identifying the Opportunity

We kicked off our sustainable consumption initiative with the release of “The New Frontier in Sustainability: The Business Opportunity in Tackling Sustainable Consumption,” which identified business pathways in three parts of the “value chain cycle” that often have been overlooked in sustainability efforts to date:

• Product design: using sustainability to guide design approaches to products from the earliest stages of conception and development
• Consumer engagement: influencing what and how people consume
• End-of-use: recapturing products at the end of their useful lives and converting them to serve as raw materials for other purposes

To test the ideas outlined in our research, we held two workshops with member companies and experts in the field of closed-loop systems and consumer insight. A number of key themes emerged:

• Sustainable product design is not just a matter of reducing the impact of existing products, but rather rethinking how to deliver the equivalent value in new ways.
• Sustainable consumption means that business models encouraging the quick disposal of products, or “rapid obsolescence,” will have to change.
• Influencing consumer behavior will require that we tap into social networks, peer groups, and communities. It also will demand that companies broaden their understanding of consumers—not just as “shoppers” but as citizens.

What’s Next

Feedback from the workshop and other discussions with members has sharpened our focus for 2011, when we plan to look at rapid obsolescence, its problems, and potential solutions. Also in 2011, we will conduct an interview series with design thought leaders to examine some of the emerging approaches to sustainable products. Ultimately, we hope this work will provide our members with practical guidance for designing more sustainable products, inspiring consumers to shift their purchasing habits, and developing end-of-use solutions.