The year 2020 seems to be the magic number for carbon reduction targets. Many companies have used that as the cut off point in their public commitments of reducing emissions and implementing new environmental initiatives. Brazil is the latest entity to join this race as the country recently announced it will reduce 36 [...]

Newsweek published its first annual Green Rankings in September, a list of the S&P 500 companies ranked and scored by the magazine for their environmental impact and reputation.
The list, which reportedly took 18 months to compile, was created with the help of environmental research groups, including KLD Research & Analytics, Trucost and CorporateRegister.com.
The top 5 [...]

Paul Revere Transportation, LLC, a Boston-based bus company agreed to pay $650,000 in fines after the company was found liable of leaving its vehicles idle for long periods of time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought charges against the company in June for violating the federal Clean Air Act and local Massachusetts laws against [...]

China knocked the United Kingdom out of the top five countries considered most attractive for investment in renewable energy, according to a quarterly report released by Ernst & Young. In fact, the two countries

Though the two transatlantic rivals may be bitterly fighting for the rights to a U.S. government contract, Boeing and Airbus do see eye-to-eye on one critical issue: cutting the carbon dioxide emissions from their planes. Both companies are aggressively working towards developing

H&M is the second largest retailer in Europe and has stores around the world, and now it no longer accepts wool from Australia. This came about after the Australian wool industry showed signs of hesitation on its plan to stop mulesing sheep by 2010. Though H&M admittedly uses only a “very small [...]

Air France today announced a pledge to spend $3 billion annually (until 2020) to cut carbon emissions and noise levels for its aircraft. The company is also hoping to cut fuel consumption by 15 to 20 percent within five years. You can see a bunch of other numbers over

Chevron announced yesterday it will be giving its largest single donation in company history to the United Nations backed Global Fund, a program that helps to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases throughout the world. This also marks the largest single donation to the Fund by a company, which makes Chevron the Global Fund’s [...]

Norway may have been beaten to the punch by Vatican City, but in a long-standing tradition of doing things better than the rest of us, the “Land of the Midnight Sun” clearly hasn’t given up its goal of becoming carbon neutral before everyone else. Originally slated to become a “zero-emission” state by 2050, the [...]

Stop the presses! Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and environmentalists everywhere are going to need to find a new hobby because global warming has just been stopped. Limousine Eighteen, the international “ground transportation company,” has purchased one hybrid SUV for their fleet of ground vehicles. This was revealed to the world in the [...]

Target became the most recent retail company in the United States to announce it would end the use of polyvinyl chloride (more commonly known as PVC) in some of the products it sells, most notably children’s paraphernalia like eating utensils and lunch boxes. By 2008, the company wants to eliminate PVC from changing [...]

Two major settlements relating to oil spills were reached this week. Polar Tankers, a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips, was fined $2.5 million dollars for an oil spill in the Pacific Ocean in 2004. A criminal penalty represented $500,000 of the fine, and the other $2 million went to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit [...]

A new study discovered that U.S. and U.K. consumers want businesses to be more environmentally friendly, but have a hard time naming specific companies focusing on the issue. However, the study discovered a number of “big brands” in each country that are recognized for climate-change awareness more than others. In the U.K., those leaders [...]

Sonoco, a global supplier of industrial and consumer packaging, launched a new program today that provides manufacturers with “productivity savings by identifying ways to reduce waste materials going to landfills, and increase profitability by converting waste streams to revenue streams by finding alternative uses for a facility’s previously unrecycled wastes,”

London based Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing awareness on global climate change, released their annual Climate Disclosure Leadership Index (CDLI) today.
The list, compiled from responses to a questionnaire CDP sent to over 2400 companies worldwide, compares FT 500 companies in each sector on how transparent they are on regarding their [...]

A federal judge tossed out a global warming related case on Monday brought against U.S. automakers by California’s attorney general. The case was the first suit seeking compensatory damages from companies that cause global warming through green house gas emissions. The attorney general argued that the six automakers on trial, General Motors Corp, [...]

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. announced the release of their 2006 Report on Ethical Sourcing, an annual document containing information on the company’s Ethical Standards Program. The report detailed that high risk violations of the company’s Standard for Suppliers code decreased more than 23 percent in 2006. The company cites educational outreach as the primary [...]

Australia’s largest supermarket chain, Woolworths, admitted to lying about its claim of environmentally sustainable toilet paper and tissue products. An independent audit of the Indonesian company that supplies pulp to Woolworths, along with ABC Radio’s PM program, found evidence discrediting the company.
The company is still awaiting accredation of its suppliers’ Indonesian operations from an [...]

Dole Food Company announced that its Costa Rican subsidiary, Fondo Nacional de Financiamento Forestal, the National Forestry Financing Fund and an entity of the Ministry of Environment and Energy of CostaRica partnered to create a carbon neutral supply chain for banana and pineapple products. The products moving from Costa Rica to North America and [...]

In hopes of setting the standard in its industry, banking powerhouse Barclays recently began a new trend in corporate responsibility. This will include screening £1.5 billion in supplier expenditures.
The company introduced a “corporate responsibility supplier questionnaire” last year with a goal of ensuring that Barclays “engages with the right suppliers and that they have [...]

New research coming out of Australia suggests that office laser printers can damage lungs in a very similar way as smoke particles from cigarettes.
A team of Australian scientists from the Queensland University of Technology found that almost a third of all business laser printer models emit dangerous levels of toner particles into the ambient office [...]

Fisher-Price has announced a recall of nearly one million Chinese-made toys over concerns of lead-based paint.
The worldwide recall affects 967,000 Nickelodeon and Sesame Street toys, including such popular items the Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters.
In an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, David Allmark, general manager of Fisher-Price, said the problem was [...]

With great fanfare yesterday, Xerox Corporation unveiled a first-of-its-kind paper for digital printing that uses half as many trees as traditional paper, while lowering the cost to mail printed material.
At the core of the development are Xerox’s technical achievements, which have increased the amount of a tree that can be used (doubling the yield per [...]

Cadbury Schweppes has announced a plan to cut its net “absolute” carbon emissions. In doing so, it is promoting itself as the first UK food manufacturer to commit to using “absolute” measures in fighting climate change.
By 2020, the confectionery company intends to slash half of its net absolute carbon emissions, with at least [...]

Wal-Mart is reporting that it is ahead of its self-imposed of environmental goals for the company to achieve in an effort to respond to mounting criticism against the world’s largest retailer, which included reducing waste, using more renewable energy and stocking more green products.
One division in particular, Wal-Mart’s transportation department, has reported extensive improvements [...]