Unilever’s war on waste, Lego power and better jeans
Unilever cuts food waste
Unilever Food Solutions, the professional food service division of consumer goods giant Unilever, is tackling food waste head on with its United Against Waste initiative.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about 27% of America’s food is thrown out – in 2010 alone 33m tonnes of food was tossed into landfill.
UFS issued its World Menu Report on sustainability in late 2011 and found that nearly 80% of American diners were concerned about the amount of food thrown away every day in restaurants. The report also highlighted the benefits of reducing food waste, like cutting disposal costs and boosting kitchen efficiency.
UFS in Ireland also commissioned a study with 100 chefs and operators through the Restaurant Association of Ireland, which showed that Irish restaurants each throw out food waste annually that costs every establishment just under €9,000 on average.
To reduce the waste, the United Against Waste programme is helping to educate food operators, government bodies and trade associations on the issue, and is encouraging them to share best practices and learn new ways to make improvements, says Kara Phillips, category mix marketing manager (soups) at UFS North America.
For example, the company’s American market developed a host of action ideas under the “Your Kitchen” umbrella, while UFS’s UK and Ireland operations launched a toolkit that’s been downloaded by more than 360 organisations. UFS UK is also working closely with the Waste and Resources Action Programme to improve the way the food industry operates.
The United Against Waste programme dovetails with Unilever’s overarching Sustainable Living Plan, which is designed to reduce impacts across the lifecycle of its products. It includes ambitious goals for 2020, such as helping more than one billion people improve their health and well-being, reducing the environmental impact of its products by 50%, and sourcing 100% of its agricultural raw materials in a sustainable manner.
TCO label gets a social update
TCO Certified, an international IT product labelling system, has expanded its requirements beyond meeting performance and environmental standards, and will now include social responsibility criteria.
The TCO Certified label is carried by more than 70 brands, and roughly half of all PC displays worldwide are TCO-labelled. The update will first come into effect for notebooks, desktops, all-in-one PCs and computer displays, while projectors, tablets and headsets will be included in the next refresh (TCO does not label servers, printers or mobile phones).
According to Claire Hobby at TCO Development, the organisation has been working towards the latest revamp for years, given the increasing shift towards sustainability among PC-using organisations, and their subsequent scrutiny of IT vendors’ responsibility practices.
“Our mission is to constantly move IT design in a more sustainable direction,” Hobby says. “We have been working to advance sustainable IT for 20 years, and including CR is a natural step.”
TCO Development collaborated with industry stakeholders, users and field experts to determine the most impactful social criteria that could also be independently verified and would be rigorous enough without disincentivising companies from complying, to help “facilitate real progress towards compliance with the key ILO conventions,” Hobby says.
The first computers donning the new label will launch in late May this year, while computer monitors will feature the label by September.
Lego’s owner invests in wind power
Lego’s parent company Kirkbi is putting big bucks into a new wind farm project off the coast of Germany, which will generate enough power to offset the energy consumed by all Lego Group’s global facilities through 2020.
The €400m project will take four years to construct and is a combined venture of Kirkbi, Dong Energy, and the Oticon Foundation (via William Demant Invest). The project is being heralded as the largest-ever Danish corporate investment in wind power.
“One of our fundamental values is to enable future generations of children to grow up in a better world,” says Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego chief executive. “We do that first and foremost through our play materials – but also by improving the energy efficiency of our production, and reducing the volume of waste. In the field of renewable energy our objective is an ambitious one.”
Let’s hope the project isn’t missing any pieces.
Target stops selling sandblasted wears
Target is jumping on the anti-sandblasting bandwagon, joining other retailers such as H&M and Levi Strauss & Co, and will stop carrying clothes that have been sandblasted – a process that gives jeans a worn-in look but has caused severe health issues for the workers who carry it out.
Sandblasting uses high-pressure machines to blast crystalline silica onto fabric to create a weathered appearance, and is linked to air contamination and silicosis, an incurable lung disease.
Worker advocacy organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign have been pushing for an industry-wide ban on sandblasting for years. Recently, Target’s product development and fabric engineering teams reviewed research conducted by Levi’s on sandblasting, to better understand the associated health concerns and assess viable alternatives. According to Jessica Carlson at Target, the company subsequently expanded on how it would remove sandblasting across its supply chain, and communicate the change to its vendors and suppliers.
Instead of sandblasting, Target will revert to older processes that create a similar weathered look, like distressing denim by hand. “The safety of factory workers should not be compromised for the sake of fashion,” says Jey John, a lead fabric engineer for denim and wash at Target. “We hope that Target serves as a meaningful example to the apparel industry, both in the United States and around the world.”
Target will stop carrying sandblasted wears by the end of 2012.
Nike’s new textile dyeing machine
Nike is gearing up to revolutionise the textile dyeing process. The sportswear giant has partnered with DyeCoo Textile Systems, a Dutch company that has fashioned what’s believed to be the first commercially viable waterless textile-dyeing machine.
Essentially, the machine uses fluid carbon dioxide in place of water during the textile dyeing process, thus eliminating millions of tonnes of water waste. On average, 100-150 litres of water is required to process just one kilogram of textile materials.
DyeCoo’s unique technology has a host of other environmental benefits, as well, such as reducing energy consumption and operational costs (compared with standard dyeing processes), eliminating wastewater discharges, enabling greater control over the dyeing process, removing the need to dry textiles, and operating twice as fast.
“We believe this technology has the potential to revolutionise textile manufacturing, and we want to collaborate with progressive dye houses, textile manufacturers and consumer apparel brands to scale this technology and push it throughout the industry,” says Eric Sprunk, Nike’s vice-president for merchandising and product.
Bandages with a bonus
The next time you cut yourself, a new bandage kit won’t just provide you with relief, but could also help save another person’s life.
According the US National Marrow Donation Program, more than 10,000 people in America need a bone marrow transplant each year, are there are not enough donors to keep up with demand.
Help Remedies, an American start-up pharmaceutical company, is working to address this need with the “Help, I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life” kit, which comes with 16 standard adhesive bandages (in two sizes), plus a very simple bone marrow test kit.
When you cut yourself, all you do is simply use the kit’s cotton swab to take a drop of blood, and place it into a prepaid envelope, along with your sign-up sheet, which was narrowed down from the usual multi-page form to just your name, email address and age, in order to process the initial sample. The envelope is then mailed to DKMS, the world’s largest bone marrow donor organisation, which will process the swabs free of charge.
The idea was conceived by Graham Douglas, whose brother survived leukaemia because of a bone marrow donation. But when Douglas approached several large companies with the bandage and bone marrow kit concept, they didn’t bite. And that’s where Help Remedies stepped in.
“We have always been willing to take risks – it’s required when you’re a start-up in a mature category,” says Nathan Frank, Help co-founder and creative director. “So when Graham Douglas came to us with the idea, our response was an immediate yes. The genius of the registry kit idea is that it works so seamlessly with the way people already behave.”
Help Remedies makes a host of other kits to tackle common ailments, including “Help, I Have A Blister”, and “Help, I Have a Stuffy Nose”. Help products are available on their website and in 10,000 retail locations throughout the US, with hopes to expand to Canada by the end of 2012.