UPS delivers famine relief, Ikea’s renewable commitments and how to map water use
UPS ships food to Horn of Africa
United Postal Service has offered its global logistics expertise to organise and deliver critical food supplies to the famine-ravaged Horn of Africa.
More than 12 million people across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are at risk of starving from the worst drought in more than 60 years. UPS is helping transport 110 tonnes of food to Nairobi, including “Plumpy Sup”, a high-calorie, nutritious paste made from peanuts designed to renourish children.
The UPS Foundation also donated $100,000 from its Emergency Response Fund to further support Unicef’s relief efforts in the region.
Recently, UPS has provided disaster support in Samoa, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Haiti, Japan and across the US.
“All organisations have something valuable to share with their community,” says UPS spokeswoman Ronna Branch. “In this case, UPS logistics expertise was even more beneficial than other giving.”
Ikea UK goes solar
Savvy Swedish home furnishings retailer Ikea is making good on its commitment to go 100% renewable.
The company has bought a wind farm in northern Scotland that will offset more than 10,500 tonnes of CO2a year, accounting for 30% of its UK electricity use.
Additionally, Ikea is installing £4m worth of solar panels on 10 store rooftops (totalling 39,000 panels), which will generate 5% of each store’s energy. If all goes well, the solar panels should cut Ikea’s UK CO2production by roughly 660 tonnes a year.
“As well as reducing our impact on the environment, these initiatives come with a strong financial incentive, as consuming less energy means we spend less money, which helps us lower the prices on our products,” says Steve Howard, Ikea’s chief sustainability officer.
Ikea hopes to have 70-80% of facilities using renewables exclusively by 2015.
Revolutionary water mapping consortium
Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, and other companies have partnered with the World Resources Institute (WRI), academia, and NGOs in a consortium to help map and respond to global water risks.
According to the Carbon Disclosure Project’s first water report, 96% of the 147 responding international companies say that water issues are already affecting their operations. As water scarcity becomes increasingly critical, companies are analysing their “water footprint” to better manage this precious resource.
According to WRI’s Rob Kimall, the new Aqueduct Alliance moves beyond companies’ water footprint and examines water risk to understand how a company’s dependence on water, especially in water stressed regions, creates risk for the company and its investors.
GE and Goldman Sachs contributed expertise in two different but equally important fields. Goldman provides financial risk analysis, while GE, the sixth largest US company, offers unique insight into a multinational conglomerate that’s successfully developed innovative water solutions worldwide.
“Water risk is emerging as one of the greatest threats to long-term economic and environmental sustainability,” says Jeff Fulgham, chief sustainability officer for GE Power & Water. “Our customers around the world are addressing physical, operational, regulatory, social and reputational and financial risks all relative to water. Aqueduct will enable us to help our customers better assess and proactively address these risks.”
Dow Chemical, United Technologies, Talisman Energy, Bloomberg and Coke also joined the alliance to share their sector-specific water risk profiles, and Coke offered its global database of water risk information to bolster the alliance’s efforts.
The Aqueduct Alliance consists of a global water stress database and a river basin level in-depth analysis. The stress maps are available online now and will be updated in 2012. The river basin level analyses require more time, as thousands of data points must be collected on the physical, regulatory, and socioeconomic drivers of water risk for each river basin.
But in the next three years, the hope is to complete global mapping and in-depth analyses for at least 10 priority river basins, and to teach others how to use this publicly available database to analyse their water risks.
“Since water resources are shared and vary dramatically from place to place, the only way to truly manage the resource is to work with other companies, sectors, governments, and communities to balance everyone’s water needs,” Kimall says.
Visit here to access our detailed briefing on water resources.
Ford and SunPower get connected
Ford and SunPower have joined forces to offer Focus Electric car owners in the US a rooftop solar system that can generate enough renewable energy to offset the energy needed to charge their cars.
The Drive Green for Life initiative is an auto industry-first. The idea took root as Ford continually heard from its electric vehicle customers that they were interested in doing more with renewables. Similarly, focus group data showed that more than 40% of solar power customers were considering buying an electric car. And so the Drive Green for Life initiative was born.
Ford Electric customers can buy SunPower’s 2.5kW solar package when they buy their new car, and SunPower will install the system at customers’ homes. The solar package costs about $10,000, depending on whether the customers’ US state and/or utility offers additional incentives. For example, Ford spokesman Michael Tinskey says the system should cost about $5,300 for customers in Austin, Texas, and $7,700 for those in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ford is big on electrics, with plans to launch five electric vehicles in North America by 2012 and in Europe by 2013.
“The Ford and SunPower partnership shows how two companies can come together to meet consumer demand and help society in a way that neither company could alone,” says Tinskey.
Zara supplier caught by Brazilian authorities
A factory raid in São Paulo by Brazilian authorities found a supplier of high-street brand Zara was illegally using a subcontractor that employed “slave like” working conditions.
Zara is owned by Spain’s Inditex, the biggest clothing retailer in the world, which acted swiftly upon hearing the news, and said that 15 people were working for the subcontractor without their knowledge, and demanded that the supplier improve the workers’ conditions immediately and provide financial compensation as mandated by Inditex’s Code of Conduct and Brazilian Law.
Inditex is also working with the Brazilian ministry of labour and employment to “strengthen oversight of its production system, both at this supplier and at the other companies with which it works in Brazil, for the purpose of preventing similar cases in the future”, the company says.
In Brazil alone, Inditex has 50 suppliers with more than 7,000 workers. The company conducts more than 1,000 audits of its global suppliers annually to ensure compliance with its code of conduct, and enacts “corrective action plans” in the event abuses are found.
Patagonia and eBay say stop buying new stuff
Patagonia has partnered with eBay to get consumers to buy fewer new items.
The Patagonia Common Threads Initiative is a multi-seller store on eBay that encourages users to buy and sell used Patagonia items. The site reflects Patagonia’s long-standing mantra to reduce, repair, reuse, and recycle: reduce the purchasing of new products if they’re not really necessary; buy durable, well-made products that can be repaired (a not-so-covert assertion of the quality of Patagonia’s products), and reuse or resell the items you no longer want. And when that’s all exhausted, customers should recycle items that have reached the end of their wearable life.
To sell on the new site, users must first sign the Common Threads Initiative pledge to reduce their environmental footprint, and commit to buying used whenever possible and consider selling what’s not needed.
The partnership is the latest step in Patagonia’s Common Threads Garment Recycling Program, which began in 2005 with the aim to collect worn Patagonia Capilene garments and reprocess them into new polyester fibres for new garments.
Phone charger for off-grid users
Nokero Internationalis helping the world’s poor gain affordable access to energy to charge their mobile phones.
Mobile phone usage is growing at an astounding rate, with more than five billion users worldwide, according to the International Telecommunication Union. To put that number into perspective, that’s more people than have access to a toilet.
Nokero founder Steve Katsaros has just returned from Kenya, where he spent time with a group of Masai people who had little material wealth, but practically all owned mobile phones. To recharge their batteries, they often have to walk for miles to hook them up to car batteries that in turn are charged using diesel or gas generators.
“These phones are really important to people – they talk to one another using SMS and exchange really important information about each other’s health, farming practices, weather, and all the things that matter in their daily lives,” says Katsaros. “It would be so much better to be charging them using the power of the sun – it would be easier, cheaper, and they could reliably keep their phones charged every day.”
Nokero’s Power Panels don’t require batteries, are USB compatible and come with phone adapters. They are made of high-temperature ABS plastics and should last for five to 10 years.
The P101 Power Panel, generating 1 watt, charges an average phone in three hours, while the 2-watt P102 cuts that time by half. The panels can also charge other small electronic devices.
The panels currently retail for $29 and $49 on the company’s website, but these are “sample-only” prices and will be reduced once brought to market.