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I was riding in the back of a cab some where between Detroit and Troy, Michigan when I knew he had died.  The Maine area code on my iPhone told me even before I heard the voice on the other end that Rush Kidder was no more.

Posted: June 7, 2010

Left to themselves companies -- particularly big businesses -- have always been and always will be nothing but profit-pursuing machines, blindly chasing their bottom lines without concern for society.  Thank God for the corporate responsibility movement and the new laws coming down.  These will finally force business to think about more than the bottom line and care about society.

False.  False, and... False.

Posted May 26th, 2010

After a bruising health care battle, financial reform still hanging in the balance, a still-struggling economy, and (oh yeah!) mid-term elections around the corner how can the Obama Administration make progress on climate change and corporate responsibility?  The same way government has pushed forward on lots of other social change programs: use the power of the purse.

Report shows progress in adopting sustainable campus and endowment practices

The College Sustainability Report Card, now in its third year, found that 66% of the 191 schools it evaluated over the last two years improved their overall sustainability grade, “in part reflecting concern about climate change and the realities of rising oil and gas prices.”

The report, produced by the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute in Cambridge, Mass., this year looks at 300 colleges that together hold more than 90 percent of all university endowments.

Embedding eco-consciousness starts with measuring environmental impact and following market trends, regulations

Like it or not, the carbon-constrained economy is coming. It’s an economy where marketplace forces will demand that companies minimize their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in response to the global climate change issue. It’s an economy where a company’s carbon footprint and GHG emissions profile will have a significant impact on its bottom line. And it’s an economy where companies that apply carbon-savvy thinking to their business decisions will have a clear competitive advantage over those that don’t.

Looking ‘Upstream,’ Waste Management bulks up on materials management

Every corporate board is—or should be—focused on how to minimize its environmental footprint, and waste-solutions provider Waste Management, the largest recycling outfit in North America, is in the mix when it comes to many of those discussions and consultations.

A public company with $13.3 billion in revenue last year, Waste Management is a power in waste-to-energy production, materials management, recycling and trash hauling.

Jim Cramer, the sometimes-trash-talking host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” recently termed Waste Management CEO David Steiner, who has led the company since 2004, “the most pro-shareholder guy I know” among CEOs outside the oil and gas industry, adding that Waste Management is “a really good company” with lots of financial clout.

Product supplier offers small businesses, consumers gift cards for old equipment

Office Depot recently launched an electronics trade-in system that pays customers to recycle their old small to medium-size electronics. The project is powered by services and product-support provider NEW Customer Service Cos. and is intended to both help the environment and people and businesses affected by the economic downturn, the company said.

Sustainable website management part of technology company's larger green program

As millions of tennis fans visit the U.S. Open tennis tournament website in the next two weeks to check on the fates of Venus Williams or Rafael Nadal, IBM is operating the site with 54 fewer servers than it did two years ago, in an efficiency push reflected in the company’s larger green initiatives.