Net Positive: The Future of Sustainable Business
by Tim Greiner
12 May 2015
I highly recommend this insightful article by Jeffrey Hollender, Former CEO and Co-Founder of Seventh Generation and Founder and CEO of Sustain. He challenges businesses to chart a path that is net positive, restorative and regenerative. Sharing his experiences as CEO of a sustainable condom company, he highlights the work he and I did together to develop a "roadmap to becoming net positive" by developing a framework for tracking both positive and negative impacts in four areas important to Sustain's mission. It's a work in progress, but one that other companies can learn from and be inspired by.
Net Positive: The Future of Sustainable Business By Jeffrey Hollender | Apr. 29, 2015
Business efforts must become more sustainable and responsible to turn the tide on social inequity and environmental decay. Net positive is a new standard that can help ensure a resilient and regenerative world.
“Governments no longer govern the world, or even their little bits of it. The nation state—yes, even America and China—has been usurped as the pre-eminent unit of power. Save for extreme outliers like North Korea, all governments now share power in a shaky but so far relatively steady balance with the largest of the multinational corporations. No one has asked us, the public, whether we approve of this new arrangement; it happened while we were busy shopping.”—/TheRules, “One Party Planet”
Forum for the Future, WWF-UK, and the Climate Group have recently articulated a new vision that businesses should adopt to ensure that our planet and its inhabitants have a future that provides the best chance for common well-being. They have called this new standard net positive. While embracing this concept, I believe that we have yet to develop the operating principles and metrics required to fulfill this vision.
Written by Tim Greiner
Tim Greiner, a Pure Strategies Co-founder and Managing Director, has pioneered approaches to building environmental and social integrity into products, brands, and businesses. He is also a co-founder of the Chemical Footprint Project and has guided sustainable chemicals management strategies for companies across diverse industries. His experience spans the spectrum from developing sustainability strategy, drafting sustainability goals, designing product sustainability programs, creating approaches to transform sustainable supply chains and facilitating a landscape level stakeholder process to improve climate and water quality outcomes.
Tim's recent projects include helping build a leading climate strategy for Ben & Jerry's, developing sustainability goals for King Arthur Baking, creating a corporate sustainability strategy for Lush, and developing a regenerative grazing standard for Timberland.
