Business & Finance

Chris Madsen needed a career change. After owning and operating his own construction business for over 20 years, a hand injury propelled him to look in other directions. At 45, the father of two enrolled in the plant operations program at Walla Walla Community College. “An area that is focused on heavily [in the program] is the chemical process we use in order to utilize bioenergy,” says Madsen, who also completed a summer internship at biorefinery developer ZeaChem, an industry partner of the Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest project.

A rise in investor demand for environmental, social and governance (ESG)-conscious exposure within funds meant those that were inclusive of sustainable investment options could hold a greater competitive advantage in an evolving marketplace, according to UBS Asset Management. UBS’s Global Sustainable Equity strategy captured the investment opportunity of ESG-conscious companies that offered access to global equity markets, including large, mid and small-cap companies in one strategy.

Watching the world food system race towards a moment when it can’t possibly produce enough food to nourish the world’s population, the World Wildlife Fund launched last week a Markets Institute to Advance Sustainable Food Production with the help of some big food companies. Mars, Kellogg, Unilever and others are involved. Their mission is to quickly scale market-based solutions across the industry to change how food is grown, procured, shipped and distribute so that natural resource will be sustained to grow food for future generations, too. ...

Driven by concerns about food safety and illegal fishing, major seafood companies are working to improve how they trace fish through the industry’s complex supply chains. But in many parts of the world, fish are caught by artisanal fishers, not by massive trawlers. For these small-scale fishers, existing tracing technologies are often too cumbersome, complex, or expensive to use. This means they are often ineligible for sustainability certification (and the economic benefits that entails), because they can’t prove where, when, and how their fish were taken.

Amazon has a reputation for forward thinking, but when it comes to sustainability, the company has often fallen behind the times. For years, it has weathered criticism over its worker treatment, recycling and other sustainability metrics. Recently, however, the online retailer has signaled that a change may be on the way. Dara O’Rourke, a leading expert on global supply chains, has joined the company’s sustainability team.

Sustainability, sometimes under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR), used to be a specialty practice used by only a few companies, like Nike and Coca-Cola, to manage risks to their high-value brands.

A host of major tech companies like Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB) and Amazon (AMZN) are part of a new investment fund managed by UBS, that brings sustainability investing to life. ...