Five Sustainability Courses

In case your Christmas present to yourself is to invest in your personal development, here are some sustainability courses that might fit the bill.  Merry Christmas!

  1.    University of Cambridge Masters in Sustainability Leadership

  2.    One Planet Leaders 

  3.    The Natural Step

  4.    Two Tomorrows

  5.    Our Sustainability Communications training

Five Leading Sustainability Journalists

Five of the most influential writers on environment and sustainability issues worldwide.

   1.    Fiona Harvey, The Guardian

   2.    Toby Webb, Ethical Corporation

   3.    James Murray, Business Green

   4.    Joel Makower, GreenBiz

   5.    Francois Le Goff, ENDS Europe

Five Natural Treats

  1.  Ginger tea Ginger is so good for you and really warming in the winter or when you feel under the weather.  Just slice up some ginger root and add hot water.  Breathe in all that delicious ‘gingeriness’.

 2. NewTree chocolate This Belgian chocolate producer is taking the US market by storm with its range of chocolate, cookies and spreads.  If ever you wanted to claim chocolate is good for you, NewTree will help you with products that contain less fat, more fibre, added goodness and are certified organic.  And if that’s not enough, NewTree has a beautiful website with really stunning photos.

3.    Green juice Kathryn is allergic to fructose (the sugar in fruit) so she’s a big fan of green juice.  Admittedly, the rest of the Team still needs some convincing.  Juice cucumber, celery, parsley and fennel with a big hunk of root ginger and prepare to cleanse!

4.    Raw almonds A superfood and super healthy snack, and while raw almonds are healthier than the toasted and salted variety, we like to think that they’re all better than many conventional snacks.

5.    Seaweed salad Not just for eating in Japanese restaurants, a wide range of dried seaweed is available in health food stores.  The challenge is to get the right balance of sweet, sour, spicy and salty in the dressing.  We could really eat this every day.  Read more about seaweed. 

Five Tips for More Sustainable Gifts

Source: Greatgreenbe Wordpress

The holiday season involves a certain amount of consumption but you can enjoy the festivities without going overboard or being Scrooge-like.  Christmas gifts need not be throwaway junk transported halfway round the world.  Choosing ethical or local handmade gifts over mass-produced rubbish works for the gift-giver, receiver and the wider community.

Our Five Favourite Ethical Brands

Source: MuMu organic

  1. Patagonia A firm favourite with outdoor types, Patagonia also wins the hearts and minds of non-outdoorsy environmentalists.  With campaigns like Don’t Buy This Jacket and a commitment to repair clothing though the Common Threads Initiative, this company leads the field in sustainable business.  Patagonia is still privately-owned by Yvon Chouinard whose book ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ we mentioned in our ‘Five Inspiring Sustainability Reads’ post.  Yvon is co-founder of 1% for the Planet, which Sustainability Consult is a proud member of.  And Kathryn certainly wouldn’t set foot on the mountain without her Patagonia Backcountry Guide Pants.

  2.  Oxfam A brand, you say?  Surely Oxfam is a development NGO not a retail brand?  And yet in some countries, for example the UK where Oxfam was set up in 1942 as the Oxfam Committee for Famine Relief, Oxfam has built up its retail operations and has not just second-hand clothing and bookshops but their own brand of fairtrade and ethical products.  You can even ‘buy’ a goat, a chicken, clean water or renewable energy through the amazing Oxfam Unwrapped products.  In Belgium, Oxfam organises fairtrade breakfasts (check out our photos from 2011 and 2012) and promotes both local agriculture and fairtrade.  They also have a policy division who we’ve worked with in the past.

3.    MuMu organic MuMu organic is an up and coming ethical fashion company from Greece who we have been helping on their start-up path.  Truly breathtaking designs with natural and fairtrade fabrics, MuMu organic is one to watch.

4.    Ecover Belgian natural cleaning products company, Ecover, is the cleaning product of choice for the Sustainability Consult office where we can’t resist taglines like ‘Feel Good Cleaning’.  Our favourite products are the floor soap with linseed oil, the lavender handwash and the loo cleaner.  They all smell good enough to eat, not that we recommend it, and they come in large refill sizes. We’re waiting to see what their ‘Small Steps’ environmental campaign will look like.

5.   Triodos  Rethinking banking, Triodos invests ethically and offers a full range of banking services.  They have a great one-minute video on how they do things differently.  You can also see where they will invest your hard-earned cash.  With banking services in a number of countries, now ethical banking is within reach.

Five Top Sustainability Speakers

  1.  Al Gore Former Vice President in the Clinton Administration, Al Gore helped bring climate change to the forefront of our minds with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.  The film won an Oscar and Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

  2.    David Cook Executive Ambassador of The Natural Step, Briton David Cook was Chief Executive of the organisation until 2009.  Companies who have used The Natural Step methodology to understand their impact speak highly of the process and Cook is certainly a no-nonsense, straight talker who manages to challenge and inspire industry.

3.  John Elkington Founder of our favourite news service Environmental News Daily Service (ENDS) and a raft of other environment and sustainability businesses, John Elkington is one of the UK’s top sustainability speakers.  Elkington has published a series of books on sustainability and originated the term triple bottom line.

4.  Annie Leonard Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute animation which aims to shed light on the wastefulness of our consumer society.  She also blogs for Patagonia.  Check our her recent piece on the holiday season.

5.  Philippe Van Parijs Perhaps less well-known internationally, Professor Van Parijs is Belgium’s homegrown ethical champion.  Professor of ethics at the University of Louvain, Sustainability Consult’s Aris Koutentakis was so impressed by a presentation given by the bearded academic, he blogged on it on our Thoughtshower blog.

Five Green Cities Around the World

Source: Bobzworldcity

We asked our friendly sustainable architect Noémie Benoit and this was her selection, the hot picks for new sustainable cities.  Noémie says:

Top-down or bottom-up approaches are propelling cities to be front-runners in sustainability.  Every month, new initiatives begin and new cities get engaged.  It always makes me very happy to see how much will and determination the sustainability path engages.  These five top cities are my current source of inspiration.  Although we do not hear so much about them, they are actually doing it.