Innocent Drinks: Creating shared value in Ethiopia

Between 2006 and 2009  iDE UK and drinks company Innocent helped set up over 250 apple farms in Ethiopia - providing small family run farms with additional income, improving their livelihoods and making apples readily available for all. iDE UK provided access to low cost irrigation systems to farmers, set them up with robust seedlings and trained them in apple husbandry (looking after the trees, growing the best fruit and so on).

 

This project proved what iDE already knew - that poor Ethiopian smallholder farmers can use innovative irrigation technologies to grow high value crops and earn a good living. In Addis the price fetched for apples is incredible – as apples are often hard to come by in Ethiopia - the dry conditions and limited water supply mean that not many people grow them. As a result of this success iDE has expanded to their work to support over 60,000 farming households (360,000 people) today.

Read more at: Business Fights Poverty

Unilever: Crowdsoucing sustainable products for the future

Unilever is turning to crowdsourcing in its bid to help develop the world's first commercially viable shower of the future that can operate with a sustainable level of water use. In-home use is responsible for a significant proportion of the carbon footprint of shower products and this latest initiative is designed to help Unilever take increased responsibility for the way in which its brands are consumed.

Unilever feels that the global nature of crowdsourcing has the potential to deliver a coherent solution to a complex challenge and will facilitate the initiative through its open creativity platform. The move comes after the announcement of a partnership between Unilever and co-creation community eYeka to further tap into this platform across Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Russia and South Africa. Through the partnership, eYeka's online community of over 250,000 creators will have the chance to develop ideas for a number of familiar Unilever brands. 

Source: edieWater

Turning marker pens into clean energy

JBI, Inc., a clean energy company that recycles waste plastic into liquid fuels, has announced it is partnering with Crayola on its "Colorcycle" program, which converts markers into clean energy. JBI, Inc. has a proprietary process for converting waste plastics into ultra-clean, ultra-low sulphur in-spec fuels. The emissions from its P2O process are less than what a natural gas furnace of the same size would produce.

The program will be conducted throughout the United States in participating K-12 schools and encourages students to responsibly dispose of used Crayola markers through an in-school collection process. Markers will be sent to JBI, where they will be used as feedstock to produce diesel and other liquid fuels using JBI's Plastic2Oil® ("P2O") process.

Source: SustainableBrands.com

One year of Google searching equals one mile of car driving

Google's footprint falls as users emit eight grams of CO2 per day http://t.co/433rVTr61m
— BusinessGreen (@BusinessGreen) August 14, 2013