Two Steps Forward — Sustainability Meets Business Reality

How does a corporate sustainability professional meet the moment? That’s one of the questions we posed to Unilever’s chief sustainability and corporate affairs officer Rebecca Marmot in a live-on-stage podcast recording session during this year’s London Climate Action Week. Marmot, who joined Unilever 18 years ago after stints at L’Oreal and in the U.K. government, discussed the some of the keys t...

How much circularity can one company squeeze out of a toothpaste tube? That’s the mouthwatering challenge taken on by Colgate Palmolive, the iconic 220-year-old company whose chief sustainability officer, Ann Tracy, has been leading the charge to make Colgate toothpaste tubes not just recyclable, but potentially turned back into new tubes. It’s not just toothpaste, as Tracy told us. If the process...

Financial services is high on the list of the most fascinating and challenging sectors for sustainability. Ellen Jackowski, Chief Sustainability Officer at Mastercard, is one of the sector's leaders. In just a few years at the financial services giant, she's helped pioneer approaches to using payment systems to inspire, inform and enable change at a mass scale. Jackowski talks about her co...

Hawken's latest book, “Carbon: The Book of Life,” explores carbon's role in living systems, not just an evil gas contributing to climate change. He criticizes the climate movement for objectifying carbon and advocates for a shift in narrative from fear to possibility. Hawken highlights the limitations of technological solutions like direct air capture and bioenergy carbon capture systems and encou...

“I'm excited for this moment,” Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, an advocacy group that works for racial, economic and climate justice, told us right off the bat. “It's a tough moment, but I'm excited for it,” he said, citing the group’s 20-year history of harnessing culture and storytelling to “shape our political experience.” In this episode of the Tw...

The tech giant’s chief sustainability officer reflects on how she’ll make the most of this critical time in the two decades since she’s been working to advance sustainability, in the debut episode of our biweekly podcast Two Steps Forward.  Soon to celebrate 10 years at Google — preceded by sustainability leadership roles at the White House and Defense Department — Kate Brandt, the chief sustainab...