The term circular economy continues to gain traction in the private sector across Europe and the United States as a powerful approach to product and service development, urban infrastructure and economic development for maximum resource efficiency and effectiveness by closing loops in design, distribution and disposal of products and materials. An Ethical Circular Economy emphasizes systems thinking, social values, impact and equity through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals in addition to the traditional approach to circular economy. This interactive Tutorial will be  facilitated by circular economy, innovation and sustainability experts from Arizona State Univesity, which was named the nation’s most innovative university in the US for four straight years by US News and World Report.

GreenBiz 19 In-Depth Tutorials are intensive half-day sessions held prior to the start of the conference. These are designed to offer participants an opportunity to dive deeper into a topic of interest and develop tangible knowledge and skills. In addition, attendees will have a greater opportunity to network with their peers in these interactive sessions. Concurrent tutorials will be held the morning of Tuesday, February 26, and are available only to those who purchase an All Access Pass.

A surge in emerging technologies and blurring of lines between work/life experience has caused a shift in employee expectations around work. What used to be a top down approach to talent management is becoming a shared responsibility, where employees desire a personal connection to work - and a greater sense of purpose in all that they do. What results are leaders - and employees - expecting from this shift? What are some of the unintended positive or negative impacts being seen? Join us for an interactive breakout to explore the ROI of purpose in the employee experience.

Organizations today are shifting their focus from just measuring outputs to better understanding the outcomes that they are creating for stakeholders and the impacts they are creating for society. This shift is providing valuable input for reporting, but perhaps more importantly, for goal setting and decision making. Join this session to learn about methods for impact measurement and examples of how leading financial organizations use impact measurement every day.

An increase in the consumer awareness around ocean plastics has spurred meaningful corporate action to combat marine debris. However, an effective, circular supply chain for plastics requires stakeholders to look beyond the ocean in order to turn off the plastics tap. Hear how experts from the across the value chain are rethinking packaging for a sustainable future from design and materials to strategic investment and unlikely collaboration. 

In sustainability circles we talk a lot about the voice of “the investor” – but what does an investor look like and what information do they seek? The diversity of types of investors offers an opportunity for companies to consider engagement, but presents a challenge in focusing information that a variety of investors will find “decision useful”. How do we balance diverse needs for information with the risk of information overload? This session will review work by the Sustainable Stock Exchange Initiative, World Federation of Exchanges and even state-level initiatives that are driving data availability for investors.

Measuring progress in the circular economy is far from a linear process. As competing and often conflicting metrics and frameworks pop up across industry sectors, there is a clear need to align definitions at the product, company and supply chain levels. During this interactive session, attendees will learn about the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s framework to measure circularity; hear from companies employing this methodology; and have the opportunity to provide input on this model.

Thanks to a sharp decrease in battery prices, energy storage technologies can help large companies cut peak demand charges and improve their ability to withstand unforeseen electricity outages. Energy storage also has the potential to maximize onsite generation projects — when paired with renewables such as solar photovoltaic installations. This session will explore existing and emerging technology options, the benefits they bring to large companies and ideal use cases for pairing storage with onsite renewables.

Employees increasingly bring their passion for causes into the workplace and expect management to respond to their expectations with new behaviors both inside and outside the workplace. It is only logical that the values these employees express through these causes also would be reflected in the ways in which they would invest their money in their company retirement plans — if given the opportunity to do so. Yet, less than 1 percent of 401(k) plans offer some type of socially responsible fund for employees. Learn why this is so and what your company can do to align its retirement plans with its values.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Sixty-four percent of consumers worldwide will make a purchasing decision based on a brand’s social or political position (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2018). While many corporations limit their political outreach efforts to lobbying activities, this needs to change in the face of unprecedented challenges like climate change, immigration reform, gun violence and racism. What are the pitfalls and benefits of addressing politically heated issues through communications and stakeholder engagement? What are the risks of remaining politically neutral? And what can we learn from recent headlines about Amazon, Exxon, Salesforce and Patagonia? Join former Edelman Executive Vice President and “Let Science Speak” creator Christine Arena to learn and share ideas about the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Join Sustainable Packaging Coalition's Kelly Cramer to discuss approaches to enhancing recycling and recyclability programs and practices, from designing products and packaging for recyclability, to engaging with consumers about recycling in a meaningful way. How do consumers perceive the value of labels like How2Recycle, and how does labeling change recycling behavior? This discussion will offer insights and opportunities for navigating these challenges.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Over the past year, some of America’s largest companies have leveraged their brand recognition to help tackle societal and environmental issues, including Nike, Levi's, Walmart, and, most recently, Gillette. Should your company join them? There are risks of doing so. But as consumers, employees, NGOs, and investors increasingly expect companies to speak out on public issues, sitting back and letting others do the talking can pose an even greater risk to a company's brand and bottom line. Join Future 500’s Director of Stakeholder Engagement, Kellen Klein, and take some dos and don’ts back to the office with you on what goes right – and what goes awry – when brands take stands.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

You’ve made your commitment and mapped out your sustainability plan for tackling your biggest supply chain hotspots. Now what? Join Elizabeth Sturcken, managing director of Supply Chains at Environmental Defense Fund, for a discussion about “the middle miles” – that arduous period of implementation, measuring, reporting and scaling. What road blocks are you hitting? Which stakeholders haven’t been responsive? This lunch will address how to overcome these challenges, engage the right allies and stakeholders, and achieve your most ambitious supply chain goals.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the number of ESG ratings out there and do you struggle with how to prioritize where to spend your time? This lunch discussion will address which ESG ratings your peers are prioritizing and why. Join Christina Wong, Director at SustainAbility as she shares findings from the first part of SustainAbility's Rate the Raters research and explores different approaches for how you can streamline your ratings approach.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Business resilience starts with understanding risks and opportunities, and ESG topics are high on the list of challenging issues for business. Companies are seeking new data-driven insights using tools like AI to inform their business strategies. Join this lunch discussion with Linden Edgell, Global Sustainability Director at ERM, and Donato Calace, Director of Innovation at Datamaran, to learn how to use data to transform your materiality assessment process and add real value to your business.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

The desert background provides the perfect setting to discuss the necessity of healthy and abundant freshwater systems to support business and our communities. Join Val Fishman, Chief Development Officer at Bonneville Environmental Foundation and Fawn Bergen, Global Water Stewardship Manager at Intel, as we talk about leading corporate environmental water stewardship strategies and programs, and dive into the challenges, opportunities, and experiences around collaboration among businesses and NGO's on water restoration projects.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Buildings are where the magic happens in our organizations. It’s where company culture forms. They house and support our businesses and our employees, and they enable collaboration and unlock creativity. They keep us warm in the winter, cool in the summer and they can make us both healthy and unhealthy, if operated improperly. In the day and age of maturing IoT technologies, our buildings can run far more efficiently: they can optimize themselves, track our workforce, improve campus security, and make a major dent in our organizations’ environmental footprints. Having real-time data on workspace utilization, for example, allows us to not just reduce building energy use, but reduce our building footprint altogether, without compromising productivity. This discussion will address how IoT and Connected Buildings technologies could, are and should be used to advance our organizations’ sustainability initiatives and goals.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Several researchers have argued that a 'culture for sustainability' is necessary to become a sustainable organization. But what does that mean? Is there one organizational culture that rules them all? Join Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Shirley-Ann Behravesh for a discussion about different organizational cultures and their varying paths to sustainability.

Join interactive moderated lunch discussions around a particular topic. Each table discussion will be led by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants.

Sustainability practitioners are no strangers to alphabet soup, but as SASB, TCFD, ESG gain momentum, Investor Relations teams need to be well-versed in how corporate sustainability initiatives can translate to long-term shareholder value. Hear from CSOs and investor relations executives as they share the lessons learned and big wins that can be uncovered when sustainability strategy is fully integrated with investor communications.

Achieving meaningful circular economy and zero waste efforts are a priority for corporate sustainability professionals. However, managing a corporate waste reduction and recycling program is oftentimes labor intensive and difficult to manage. This process makes it problematic to understand companywide recycling and material reduction performance, which in turn poses challenges when rolling out a zero waste program. Learn about advances in technology, including machine learning, AI, and photo recognition solutions, that enable sustainability, procurement and facility management professionals to quickly gather and process data and confidently launch a circular economy program at their company.

Tech Tools Showcases are sponsor-led technology demonstrations addressing the thorniest challenges of corporate sustainability including assessment, measurement, reporting, risk management and materiality and more.

Forests offer numerous benefits to ecosystems and society, providing clean air, clean water and quality of life advantages, as well as contributing a wide array of products vital to our everyday lives. Yet, while many brands and retailers have built procurement policies to avoid negative outcomes like illegal logging and deforestation, few have recognized how their procurement practices could actually drive positive impact. Understanding how these outcomes are driven and enhanced by sustainable procurement practices, and how to effectively include your supply chain in this strategy, can help define your brand. Learn how responsible sourcing of forest products can enable your company and customers to achieve sustainability goals, and how to work with your supply chain to grow a successful strategy.

The launch of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission’s (COSO) final guidance on Applying Enterprise Risk Management to Environmental, Social and Governance-Related Risks marks a milestone in the integration of sustainability into the mainstream. This unique collaboration brought together the skills and experience of two of the world's leading organizations in risk management and sustainability to provide the language, tools and skills to help businesses and other organizations to future proof their operations and strategy. The guidance is designed to help organizations respond to the increasing prevalence and severity of ESG-related risks, ranging from extreme weather events to produce safety recalls. Join this session to understand how the guidance and tools available can help your organization begin to better integrate ESG-related risks into the wider risk management process to improve business resilience and long-term success.

Business leaders are facing the rising importance of measuring and disclosing climate risks. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommends that companies and investors publish forward-looking information on the financial implications of the direct physical risks and indirect transition impacts of climate change in annual reports and financial filings. Adopting these recommendations presents organizations with a number of challenges, including questions around how climate-economic scenarios can be interpreted in useful financial terms and how to link top-down scenario impacts to future business performance. Join this session to learn practical steps to move forward from the team that helped the UN and leading banks develop critical elements for an actionable framework for assessing climate risks and opportunities that supports strategic and executive-level decision-making.

We have 12 years to turn this ship around! Join sustainability leaders from Quantis, McDonald’s, Tillamook and WRI as we build the urgent business case that aligns corporate strategy with science-based goals. From each person’s experience on this mission, we’ll look at opportunities seized as well as how to overcome obstacles when setting, committing to, engaging on, and reaching goals that will truly be sustainable.

Join this session to explore how large companies can and should be working together on pre-competitive partnerships so as to cultivate and scale groundbreaking innovations, evolve packaging supply chains to be more sustainable and change complex systems with many levers. Using the NextGen Cup Challenge as a case study, we will explore and debate insights from embracing this novel, exciting pre-competitive approach and how it can apply to other material and supply chain changes.

With a growing emphasis on global water security, many corporations and environmental groups are responding by developing innovative approaches to water stewardship. Join this session to learn how corporations and environmental NGOs are creating water stewardship initiatives, how these partnerships are driving results, and best practices for corporations to develop and implement their own water stewardship strategies. Hear how Intel Corporation is achieving its commitment to restore 100% of its global water use by 2025, and how two key environmental NGOs, The Nature Conservancy and National Forest Foundation, are implementing successful water stewardship initiatives to replenish water and support the natural resilience of our water environment.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about climate and water issues for decades. If anything, however, the American public’s awareness and willingness to act has declined. What do we know about how Americans really relate to water and climate change, and how those issues intersect?  How can we all do a better job of engaging our employees, customers, neighbors, and audiences in mobilizing action and creating solutions that transcend political, economic, geographic and ethnic divides? What do we do when it seems even basic science lacks public trust? Join Amy Skoczlas Cole, managing director of American Public Media’s Water Main initiative, and Cara Pike, executive director of Climate Access, in an interactive session designed to debunk engagement myths, retire ineffective strategies, and move the conversation from preaching to the choir to building genuine public will and engaged constituencies that are poised and able to take action.

According to World Economic Forum's 2018 Global Risks Report, most large companies face increased environmental, economic, geopolitical and technological risks to their businesses. While many organizations understand the risks of inaction, it can be difficult to develop a strategic plan for combatting climate change. This session will offer perspectives from various leaders about how their companies are adapting to today's (and tomorrow's) climate risks by embracing planning strategies, technologies and innovative financing approaches.

Green and ESG-linked loans are relative newcomers to sustainable finance but their rapid growth has made a mark, with over $32B financed for corporate sustainability programs in 2018.  What has caught the eye of corporate finance and treasury departments is that these loans are often tied to a lower lending rate for companies that can improve their performance on sustainability measures. Join this session to learn about this exciting trend, how companies and investors are using green and ESG-linked loans, and why some say that corporate sustainability performance as a path to lower borrowing costs could be a game changer. 

Several large tech companies have committed to 100 percent renewable energy — and procured enough solar and wind power to match their consumption and reach that milestone. However, most businesses struggle with the process of negotiating power purchase agreements (PPAs) or other types of RE contracts directly with developers. This session will explore creative ways that companies can collaborate to aggregate their demand for renewable energy — thereby sharing costs, resources and project risk.

Corporate boards are increasing their oversight of societal and environmental trends that put their operations and value chains at risk. There is now an emerging set of best practices in board sustainability oversight that investors and governance professionals expect. With the risk and business case for sustainability established, it is a fiduciary responsibility of directors to build their sustainability capacity and know-how to responsibly govern their organizations. This session will describe the standards that will impact company boardrooms and enable sustainability practitioners to elevate these governance practices with their boards and C-suites. It will delve into the drivers, trends and best practices of board sustainability governance, and the role of sustainability practitioners to influence the board agenda from the perspective of investors, corporate directors, risk managers and sustainability leaders.

As the realities of climate change become more evident, pressure is increasingly being placed on financial institutions to be more responsible in their lending – particularly when it comes to fossil fuel companies and projects. Dozens of financial institutions have embraced sustainable finance commitments that aim to support economic growth while reducing pressures on the environment, addressing carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions, minimizing waste, and improving resource efficiency.  However, because there is no agreed-upon methodology or approach regarding the types of transactions included when accounting for progress against sustainable finance goals, the long- and short-term impacts and overall value of these commitments are often unclear.  This panel will discuss TCFD recommendations and other disclosures financial institutions can make with regard to their sustainable finance commitments in order to satisfy their stakeholders’ demands for more responsible environmental finance.

During a 15-minute personalized one on one coaching session with ICF-certified leadership coach and GreenBiz columnist, Shannon Houde, you will have time out to get perspective on what you personally want to be achieving in your work and life. You could: