Letter from the Executive Director
WSBC 2017: The Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution
Last week Cool Choices co-hosted the 10th Annual Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council (WSBC) conference at the American Club in Kohler, Wisconsin.
The event – which draws hundreds of attendees from a variety of Wisconsin businesses each year – aims to create a forum where business leaders who are actively working on sustainability issues can share ideas and insights. The event is unique in that all of the conference presenters are people leading sustainability efforts within a company, rather than consultants selling particular approaches. That means there’s plenty of frank talk about lessons learned, enabling the attendees to avoid repeating costly mistakes while accelerating ideas that have a proven record of success.
Employee Engagement: Don’t Overlook Hearts & Minds
Corporate sustainability leads often spend a lot of time on technology—identifying the upgrades that will reduce water, energy and emissions. At one level that focus makes sense, especially right now when there’s so much emerging opportunity around smart devices.
Amid the enthusiasm for technology, though, it’s important to remember that people—employees—are at the core of every operation.
Building Momentum Around Sustainability
Environmental sustainability is one of those interesting fields where being successful can make your work more challenging going forward—reducing waste gets harder and harder as you have less waste to eliminate.
Delivering Short and Long-Term Sustainability Results
From the onset, the team at Cool Choices has been obsessed with results. Perhaps it’s to be expected: we’re a nonprofit, with a mission of inspiring voluntary actions that reduce emissions associated with climate change. More, the scale of the challenge we faced—inspiring behaviors (which is always difficult, even at the personal level) to address climate change (an issue that can feel insurmountable)—was both hard and important, not leaving a lot of room for error.
Addressing Employee Suggestions: A Real World Challenge
“The suggestions from building occupants can get pretty overwhelming – how can I be responsive, as you recommend, when we can’t address everything immediately?”
Engaging Employees to Accelerate Sustainability Efforts
We say it a lot as an explanation of what we do; “we help companies accelerate their corporate sustainability efforts via employee engagement.”
But how exactly does employee engagement accelerate sustainability?
Optimizing Energy Efficiency: The Engineers Are On It
Last week I attended the World Energy Engineering Congress (WEEC), a gathering of engineers focused on energy and energy efficiency.
Speak Up! Share How You’re Hitting Sustainability Goals!
While the US government scales back its response to climate change, businesses are taking the lead in reducing resource use, cutting emissions and eliminating landfill waste. There are nearly constant headlines about the efforts of big companies—from Apple’s efforts to transition from newly mined minerals to recycling used components to Unilever’s overall leadership that helps it attract and retain talent—examples abound.
BECC Beckons
In a few weeks, several Cool Choices staff will attend the annual Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) conference. This will be my ninth time attending the annual BECC conference and I look forward to this event every year because for me, BECC is reinforcing, challenging and inspirational.
