This book provides an extensive historical account of environment-related events and the resulting transformations of communal policy and practice that have occurred in America, dating all the way from the Pre-Columbian Era to the modern day Twenty-First Century.

A Circular Economy seeks to rebuild capital, whether this is financial, manufactured, human, social or natural, and offers opportunities and solutions for all organisations. This book, written by Walter Stahel, who is widely recognised as one of the key people who formulated the concept of the Circular Economy, is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to quickly get up to speed with this vitally important topic for ensuring sustainable development. It sets out a new framework that refines the concept of a Circular Economy and how it can be applied at industrial levels. This concise book presents the key themes for busy managers and policymakers and some of the newest thinking on the topic of the Circular Economy from one of the leading thinkers in the field. Practical examples and case studies with real-life data are used to elucidate the ideas presented within the book.

Although every country is distinguished by its history, culture and language as well as its unique economic, environmental and social conditions, it can be expected that international operating companies will exhibit common patterns since sustainability challenges do not stop at national borders. Building on original data based on results of the International Corporate Sustainability Barometer survey, this book depicts and analyzes the current state of corporate sustainability management and corporate social responsibility. Part I describe the approach and summarizes the broad results, outlining the methodology and offering an overview of results of the ICSB survey. Part II presents specific findings for each of eleven countries surveyed. Part III provides a comparative analysis and highlights broad patterns in the international results. Most strikingly, the book reveals surprisingly widespread similarities among the sustainability management practices of large companies in economically developed countries all over the world.

In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart present an integration of design and science that provides enduring benefits for society from safe materials, water and energy in circular economies and eliminates the concept of waste.

The circular economy describes a world in which reuse through repair, reconditioning and refurbishment is the prevailing social and economic model. The business opportunities are huge but developing product and service offerings and achieving competitive advantage means rethinking your business model from early creativity and design processes, through marketing and communication to pricing and supply. Designing for the Circular Economy highlights and explores 'state of the art' research and industrial practice, highlighting CE as a source of: new business opportunities; radical business change; disruptive innovation; social change; and new consumer attitudes.

Publisher description
This work provides an account of how the environmental movement has led to profound changes in the perceptions and practices of large-scale corporations, as shown here in the chemical and petroleum industries. The book traces how market, social, and political pressures drive corporations to respond to environmental issues, analyzes the cultural frames that organizations use to come to terms with these external influences, and describes the resulting changes in organizational culture and structure.

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Publisher description
This book provides a broad discussion on the future of sustainable development using the views of 'visionary' thinkers and professionals in the sustainable field. Their assessments look at the future prospects of human activity and how future developments can be sustained to adequately address economic, social, and most importantly environmental issues.

Via 150 signed entries, Green Business: An A-to-Z Guide provides an overview of key principles, approaches, strategies, and tools businesses have used to reduce environmental impacts and contribute to sustainability. Entries reflect the expertise of scholars and practitioners from varied fields and provide references to other entries as well as citations for further reading.

The issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility have become vital discussions in many industries within the public and private sectors. In the business realm, incorporating practices that serve the overall community and ecological wellbeing can also allow businesses to flourish economically and socially. Green Business: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source for the latest research findings on the challenges and benefits of implementing sustainability into the core functions of contemporary enterprises, focusing on how green approaches improve operations. Highlighting a range of topics such as corporate sustainability, green enterprises, and circular economy, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for business executives, business and marketing professionals, business managers, academicians, and researchers actively involved in the business industry.

This book uncovers the significant origins of environmentalism as a moral and intellectual reaction against the growing power of corporate capitalism. It shows how, during the postwar era's anti-communist crusades, environmentalism provided a relatively safe space from which to critique government and corporate culture; and narrates how environmentally minded green consumers constructed a separate "green economy" and a distinct subculture, including organic foods, natural-fiber clothing, clean water, and alternative energy.

Economies around the world have arrived at a critical juncture: to continue to grow fuelled by fossil fuels and exacerbate climate change, or to move towards more sustainable, greener, growth. Choosing the latter is shown to help address climate change, as well as present new economic opportunities. This Handbook provides a deeper understanding of the concept of green growth, and highlights key lessons from the experience of green transformations across the world following a decade of ambitious stimulus packages and green reforms.

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Publisher description
Environmental issues now loom large on the social, political, and business agenda. Over the past four decades, "corporate environmentalism" has emerged and been constantly redefined, from regulatory compliance to more recent management conceptions such as pollution prevention, total quality environmental management, industrial ecology, life cycle analysis, environmental strategy, environmental justice, and, most recently, sustainable development. As a result, understanding the intersection of business activity and environmental protection has become increasingly complex, and there has emerged a focus in academic research on business decision-making, firm behavior, and the protection of the natural environment. This handbook reviews the state of the field as it grows into a mature area of study within management science, its achievements, and its future avenues of research.

Are profits and sustainability compatible? This book brings unique perspectives to this key debate by exploring the history of green entrepreneurship since the nineteenth century, and its spread globally in industries including renewable energy, organic food, natural beauty, ecotourism, recycling, architecture, and finance. The book uses the lens of the extraordinary and often eccentric men and women who defied convention and imagined that business could help save the planet, rather than consume it. The social and religious beliefs that drove many of these individuals are explored as the book looks at how they overcame huge obstacles to execute their strategies. The green entrepreneurs seen here are shown to have created new markets and industries, and driven innovations in sustainable practices, even at times when most consumers and governments marginalized the entire subject. The struggles of early pioneers appear to have been rewarded by the growth of environmental awareness among consumers, business leaders, and others in recent years, but the Earth's environmental health continues to deteriorate. If profits and sustainability have proved challenging to reconcile, the book argues that one reason was how they were both defined.

The concept of green business originated recently, but the phenomenon has a longer history which offers many lessons for today and the future. This book provides rich new empirical evidence on green business as it examines its variation between industries and nations, and over time. It demonstrates the deep historical origins of endeavors to create for-profit businesses that were more responsible and sustainable, but also how these strategies have faced constraints, trade-offs and challenges of legitimacy. Based on extensive interviews and archives from around the world, the book asks why green business succeeds more in some contexts than others and draws lessons from failure as well as success. This book emphasizes the importance of context for explaining the choices which explain the varieties of green business. Government policies, both local and national, cultural and religious values, and national images, are amongst the contextual factors which are identified. The book's distinctiveness lies in the use of original empirical data and the fact that it considers both successful and unsuccessful cases. An unusually wide geographical scope means that it covers not only the United States and Europe, but also less studied settings, including Chile, Costa Rica, New Zealand and Japan.