Environment

As the year draws to a close, Cone evaluated 365 days’ worth of Purpose-driven campaigns to bring you the top 10 trends of 2018. Join us as we count down through what trended in 2018, the implications for businesses and what’s on the horizon for 2019.

Shane Gerkin is a project engineer with Glumac, A Tetra Tech Company, based in Irvine, California. As part of Tetra Tech’s High Performance Buildings Group, he specializes in sustainable design projects for state and local municipalities, and commercial clients. Shane has a degree in mechanical engineering from Iowa State University. We talked with Shane as part of our #TtInspires campaign celebrating the passion of Tetra Tech employees. Follow #TtInspires on social media for more stories.

Tetra Tech is providing volunteers, employees, and contractors across Australia—who may be exposed to bushfire risks in their duties or activities—with formal training on how to maintain awareness of and respond safely to bushfires to support resilience.

On November 28, 2018, community officials, the Liberian government, and officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) celebrated the dedication of the Sanniquellie City water treatment plant. As part of the USAID Liberia Municipal Water Project (LMWP), Tetra Tech designed a solar-powered water treatment plant and public distribution system, placing kiosks within 500 meters of homes to reduce the time families spend collecting water to under 30 minutes. This is one of the largest solar-powered treatment plants in Liberia and West Africa.

With increasing pressure on natural and man-made resources, innovative companies are taking a lifecycle assessment approach and tackling circularity from as early as product development, with the goal of reaping the reputational and commercial benefits.

SCS Global Services (SCS), a global third-party certification body, announced today that Ledesma SAAI, an Argentinian agribusiness company that produces 40% of the nation’s printing and writing paper has earned Carbon Footprint Verification for its Office Ream paper product. This internationally recognized verification demonstrates Ledesma’s strong commitment to product transparency as part of its overall leadership in product stewardship and environmental sustainability.

“Water security is the single largest investment opportunity in the years ahead. It is the foundation for healthy people, planet and profit. Water security investments ensure social and environmental returns, as well as possible financial outperformance,” states writer Thomas Schumann

We’ve had quite the year here at TriplePundit, as there was no shortage of news stories, from brands taking stands to more advancements in clean energy technologies to more companies jumping on the circular economy bandwagon. Over the weekend, we crunched the numbers along with taking a look at the talk we generated on social media – and came up what we conclude are the ten most popular stories for 2019. The articles’ authors are mentioned at the end of each summary.

Jeremy Grantham, the co-founder of Grantham Mayo Van Oterloo, only one of the largest asset managers in the world recently stated, “We are racing to protect more than our portfolios from stranded assets and other climate change impact…But for those portfolio managers who happen to be human, we have a much more important job. We are racing to protect not just our portfolios, not just our grandchildren, but our species. So get to it.”

Essity’s new targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emission have been approved by the Science Based Targets initiative. With this, Essity’s sustainability targets are now aligned with the Paris agreement objectives to keep global temperature increase below 2°C.