World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Walmart’s Project Gigaton is a supplier-focused initiative to prevent one gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions across their global supply chain over 15 years (2015-2030). Project Gigaton aims to inspire suppliers to reduce emissions across their own operations and supply chains.

There are six pillars of Project Gigaton through which suppliers can reduce emissions: energy, agriculture, forests, packaging, waste, and product use. World Wildlife Fund works with Walmart on several of these pillars to help suppliers reach their sustainability targets, and, in turn, further WWF’s conservation mission. In this blog, Monica McBride, Manager of Food Waste at WWF, shares why the waste pillar is so important to Project Gigaton.

How does food waste contribute to climate change and emissions outputs within a company’s supply chain?

The link between food waste and its impact on the environment is significant. Food production accounts for an estimated 70 percent of biodiversity loss, 70 percent of freshwater use and 50 percent of soil erosion. When we waste food, we also waste out all the intensive labor, land and resources that go into its production. Wasted food represents about eight percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is a main contributor to deforestation and the depletion of global water sources.

In fact, food waste actually helps contributes to climate change at two different phases in its life cycle.

First, the production of food requires land, fertilizer, water and other chemicals that collectively account for 25-35 percent of global GHGs – the single largest environmental impact of any human activity. And when you factor in the energy required to transport that food to market, the impact is even greater.

Second, the disposal of wasted food generates additional emissions. Organic waste that’s disposed of in landfills produces methane, which contributes 25-85 times more to global warming than carbon dioxide. Composting food is a better disposal option. Even though it also produces carbon dioxide, its overall impact on our climate is less than that of methane.

WWF’s No Food Left Behind report provides the latest data and context around North American post-harvest.

If a supplier has already set an emissions reduction goal, what is the value of joining Project Gigaton?

There is tremendous incentive for companies to join Project Gigaton, even if they’ve already charted their emissions reductions path. For one, it’s good for business. Companies can receive recognition for the good work their doing and get increased visibility and recognition for it. They also gain access to key resources that can help them achieve their goals and commit to even more ambitious targets in the years to come.

Importantly, when companies join Project Gigaton, they send a signal to other suppliers, including many of the smaller companies that may have otherwise been wary about reporting their waste numbers. Together, these companies can help generate the critical mass needed to shift the entire industry – and ultimately the entire private sector – toward more climate-smart business practices.

If a supplier is just starting out on their sustainability journey, what needs to be done to get them ready to join Project Gigaton? Who can help?

The question for companies to answer is: where do you sit along the food waste chain, and what is your specific point of impact? From there, the sustainability journey begins.

The first step for any company is to establish its food waste baseline. This is the only way for a company to truly understand its current impact and identify opportunities for improvement. From there, WWF recommends turning to the industry standards regarding food waste. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 — a global, collective 50 percent reduction in food waste by 2030 — should be the North Star for companies looking to set realistic goals. The Science-Based Target Initiative also offers some guidance on food waste reporting, along with other useful measures of supply chain efficiency.

Project Gigaton and experts like us at WWF can offer advice on setting – and meeting – these goals.  

The Project Gigaton website – and its section on waste in particular – makes it easy to start the process.

If a supplier is considering joining Project Gigaton and making a commitment for waste, should they also consider setting goals in other areas like energy and forests? What’s the value in signing up across the platform?

The impact of food waste isn’t just felt at the disposal end of the spectrum, so companies will be able to find areas of overlap.

For example, if you’re a food supplier working on the production end and have a direct impact on land use, there’s an inherent overlap with goals for agriculture. If you’re a transport company, you can look at waste for understanding your resource efficiency, while simultaneously setting fuel emissions goals.  
What resources are available to help those already committed, those looking to commit, and those who feel there’s an entry barrier for a supplier of their size.

There are many valuable resources to help companies that have already committed to Project Gigaton as well as companies that are looking to join. When it comes to food loss impact, World Resource Institute’s Food Loss and Waste Protocol is an excellent beginner’s resource on what to measure and how to measure it.  

To audit your waste footprint or track it over time, companies can turn to consulting firms that specialize in improved food management and are equipped to help address hot spots for food waste within manufacturing facilities.  

Can you give one example of a participating Project Gigaton supplier who is really leading the way in food waste?  

Taylor Farms is a strong example of a supplier that is making the most with the food they grow and harvest. Through innovative solutions they’re taking fresh and wholesome product that was no longer needed for its primary purpose of processed fruit and vegetable products and repurposing them into new product offerings like bagged slaws and kits. Taylor Farms is actively looking for opportunities to improve crop utilization, be it through donations, compost, animal feed, or waste to energy rather than turning to the landfill.

This blog is part of a series. Please see our Project Gigaton Q&A on forests here and on agriculture here. You can join Project Gigaton by submitting your own emissions target, or by submitting goals that fall in one or more of the six pillars. Links to join can be found at: www.walmartsustainabilityhub.com/project-gigaton

Walmart and Unilever are changing the way we think about saving the world’s forests and mitigating climate change.

How? Walmart is teaming up with its vast network of suppliers, including Unilever, in a novel approach to tackle deforestation. If successful, this will keep massive quantities of carbon locked away in healthy forests rather than released to the atmosphere when forests are felled. Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart’s Chief Sustainability Officer, made this exciting announcement at the Global Climate Action Summit in September.

To understand how big a deal this is, let’s take a step back. When Walmart launched Project Gigaton two years ago, it encouraged its suppliers to use voluntary sustainability standards, such as the Forest Stewardship Council or Roundtable for Responsible Palm Oil (RSPO), to ensure that their purchases do not drive deforestation but, instead, contribute to the project’s overall goal of avoiding one billion tons of carbon emissions before 2030. These standards effectively pair consumer demand for responsibly-produced goods with farmers and producers who demonstrate good management practices. However, global deforestation is proving to be a daunting challenge that requires even greater effort and innovation to move the needle at scale and across entire landscapes.

And that’s where Walmart’s announcement comes in.

The company will launch a platform to mobilize its suppliers to support locally-led, multi-stakeholder initiatives that are tackling deforestation in key commodity-producing regions where they purchase soy, beef, palm oil and timber. These “jurisdictional approaches” align producers, local governments, global companies, and others within a single geography around a shared vision for balancing production, protection and restoration, and inclusion of local communities. Partnerships like these can combine the policymaking power of governments with the market pull of major corporations to overcome challenges that no one entity could take on alone.

The potential benefits for global forests and climate are enormous. For example, 38 states and provinces (also known as “jurisdictions”) make up the Governors’ Climate and Forest Task Force, which works to advance jurisdictional approaches that promote economic development while reducing deforestation. If successful, jurisdictional approaches in these 38 places alone could avoid over 500 million tons of carbon emissions each year through 2030.

The rubber will meet the road where Walmart and its suppliers support place-based solutions in important sourcing regions. We already have a great example of that. On the heels of Walmart’s announcement, Unilever announced that it will be the first supplier to support a jurisdictional initiative using this new platform. Speaking at the climate summit, Unilever’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Jeff Seabright, declared the company’s commitment to support restoration of two critical wildlife corridors and two riparian reserves in the state of Sabah, Malaysia, as well as to support growers in achieving both the State’s policy commitment of MSPO certification and RSPO certification of 60,000 hectares of palm oil. These activities demonstrate Unilever’s continued commitment to jurisdictional approaches and will be an important contribution to the State’s goal of bringing 100 percent of its palm oil production in line with MSPO and the RSPO standards by 2025, complementing the actions that other stakeholders are taking in the landscape.

With Walmart using this new platform to forge connections between suppliers and key forested jurisdictions, more partnerships can be anticipated around the corner to help tackle the diverse challenges of commodity-driven deforestation in different regions.

WWF, Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy will team with Walmart and its suppliers to facilitate these connections and advise on how best to engage in each geography along the way. It will be an exciting journey. And one that is desperately needed right now if we want to save the world’s forests.

When WWF and TRAFFIC conducted a survey of 2,000 Chinese consumers earlier this year in China, we were hoping to see a decline in ivory buying now that the country has a trade ban in place. We were pleased to find that was in fact the case. What was concerning, though, was the finding that one consumer group has actually increased its buying: people who regularly travel outside mainland China.

That means that the consumers with the means to travel – giving them access to ivory in places where it’s still available on the market – also have the most desire to keep buying and ignore the law.

Chinese consumers are the driving demographic for ivory sales globally. Laudably, the Chinese government implemented a domestic ban on selling and buying ivory at the end of 2017 to address its role in the elephant poaching crisis. Now it’s essential we curb consumers’ desire to buy ivory outside of China to ensure the ban does what it was intended to do for elephants.

Unfortunately, some of the destinations most popular with Chinese travelers still have ivory on the shelves: Thailand, Laos, Hong Kong, Vietnam. Even though it is unlawful to bring ivory out of one country into another without special permits, travelers are still risking it.

With Chinese travelers predicted to make a staggering 200 million trips a year by 2020, we know that to reach them effectively, we need help.

This month, WWF and the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) signed a memorandum of understanding to find new ways for the travel industry to halt illegal wildlife trade. More than 100 WTTC members have signed onto a declaration to tackle wildlife crime and educate customers and employees about the issue.

In Thailand during Golden Week – the first week of October and one of the most popular travel holidays in China – WWF partnered with the Tourism Authority of Thailand to reach tourists visiting there. Thailand, which has an open ivory market, is the most popular foreign destination for Chinese travelers, who comprise more than half of all tourists to Thailand. Chinese travelers’ access to ivory in Thailand could seriously undermine the effectiveness of China’s market closure unless addressed.

Since Chinese travelers are digitally connected when they travel, we enlisted online influencers to share our messages with them, messages we knew from our research are effective with this audience. We used blog posts, customizable social media visuals and short messages – which reached consumers with Chinese smart phones when they were in the Bangkok airport, at popular shopping districts and at markets where we know ivory is available.

NokScoot airlines, a budget carrier that flies between China and Thailand, passed out elephant souvenirs on certain Golden Week flights and invited passengers to join WWF and NokScoot at a pop-up art installation in Bangkok meant to raise awareness about the plight of elephants.

This kind of campaign -- combining the best available insights into ivory consumers, highly targeted digital outreach and collaboration between the conservation and corporate sectors -- is an essential tool to reduce consumer demand for ivory.  WWF is excited to apply the strength of our influence and join forces with so many other powerful voices who support us in tackling the threats that undermine progress of our conservation work.

It is our hope that this campaign encourages people to change their view of ivory as an appropriate holiday purchase and, ultimately, make ivory socially unacceptable.  

In advance of this year's FT Water Summit, Viv McMenamin, CEO, Mondi South Africa, and Mornè du Plessis, CEO, WWF South Africa, remind us that water risk and stewardship is too complex a challenge and too great an opportunity to explore alone. This blog was originally posted on Medium.

We live in times of unprecedented change. Partnership and collaboration are paramount. The global challenges – and opportunities – we face are too big and too complex for one business, NGO or government to tackle alone.

Looking beyond our own borders, working pre-competitively across sectors, engaging in stakeholder dialogue and mastering stewardship of natural resources, are all fundamentals of business success.

And the UN Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs), our blueprint for a sustainable world, will only be met through collective effort.

Growing water risk

The urgency with which we need to engage is particularly acute for SDG 6 on 'water and sanitation for all'. Freshwater is not only a shared resource, essential for well-being, enterprise and prosperity, but in its scarcity, also a shared risk.

Most pressingly, 2.1 billion people – or three out of every ten worldwide – lack safe drinking water at home and face increased risk of cholera, dysentery and typhoid.

Beyond these basics of human dignity, droughts, floods and water pollution are bad for the economy, costing business US$14 billion in 2016 – a five-fold increase over 2015. During South Africa's recent drought, for example, revenue from agricultural commodities in the Cape region fell by around US$500 million, with the grape harvest falling 20% in 2018, resulting in a 9% decrease in the volume of wine sold.

And the outlook is equally concerning. As a water scarce country, water demand in South Africa is predicted to outstrip supply by 17% by 2030.

Creating shared value

While a decade ago, few in business were seriously considering water risk and water stewardship, water crises now feature prominently in the World Economic Forum's annual Global Risks Report and private sector collaboration with others to manage water resources and promote good basin governance – the essence of good stewardship – is becoming the norm. If we don't collaborate to find solutions, we all lose.

Water is vital for Mondi's business and for more than fifteen years, WWF and Mondi have worked in partnership to pioneer and define water stewardship, first in South Africa and now globally.

Through our work in South Africa, we've worked with water users in the forestry, sugar and dairy sectors, as well as local and national government, private and communal landowners, insurers and finance partners.

For us, working collaboratively at a landscape level, and looking across whole catchments in KwaZulu-Natal and the Southern Cape, has been fundamental to improving production processes and managing shared water resources effectively.

Through a 'social learning' approach, we've helped different sectors, businesses and land users come together and look beyond their own individual water risks toward creating shared value and securing resilient communities and freshwater ecosystems.

Globally, this has given our partnership a springboard for promoting water stewardship in the packaging and paper sector, including enhancing the WWF Water Risk Filter, and addressing critical business risks such as water scarcity, deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Together possible

In partnership, we can share and combine experience, expertise and means to find innovative, lasting solutions that ensure equitable access to shared resources – for people, for business and for wildlife.

In partnership, we can address global challenges at scale – pursuing the SDGs could generate economic opportunities in food and agriculture, energy and materials, cities, and health and well-being worth at least US$12 trillion by 2030; and bold climate action could deliver at least US$26 trillion in economic benefits through to 2030.

Together, we can overcome collective anxiety by connecting to others, moving toward our shared humanity, acknowledging the value of the other, and co-creating solutions to complex problems out of diverse conversations.

And we can achieve goals that at first may seem too ambitious.

In Nelson Mandela's words, 'it always seems impossible until it's done'.

The FT Water Summit will examine how companies can collaborate to solve shared water challenges and generate return on investments through water stewardship.

Investing Wisely in Water Requires Much Better Information
In advance of this week’s FT WWF Water Summit, Margaret Kuhlow, WWF’s Finance Practice Leader, urges the financial sector to get serious about water risk and calls for the disclosure of asset-specific location data to help realize water investment opportunities.

Business needs nature
WWF is in the business of saving life on Earth. And even though we don’t like to put a price on nature, we can.

Every year, the services that nature delivers, such as freshwater, pollination, soil fertility and climate regulation, are worth an estimated $125 trillion to the global economy. Yet as WWF’s forthcoming Living Planet Report 2018 will show, we are using up our natural capital faster than the Earth can replenish it. To sustain our current global levels of consumption, we would need 1.7 planets – but we only have one.

Troubled waters
In many countries, climate change and demographic pressure are set to worsen water shortages, jeopardize food production, put businesses at risk of drying and drowning assets, undermine the license to operate, and pollute and degrade natural ecosystems.

In WEF Global Risks Report 2018, four of the top five risks in terms of impact are environment-related, including water crises, which are both an environmental and human tragedy as well as a business risk.

Businesses are already feeling the effects of too little, too much, or too dirty water, either through a fall in revenue or an increase in capital expenditure.

The recent IPCC special report on Global Warming of 1.5°C shows the heatwaves, flooding and extended droughts we previously expected to see with a 2°C increase are likely to manifest through a 1.5°C change or less.

And while the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress could be 50% lower at 1.5°C than at 2°C, a 1.5°C increase will still expose 250 million urban residents to severe drought and increase flood risks by 100% by 2100.

With a 1.5°C change, freshwater reserves could fall by 9% in the Mediterranean, 10% in Australia and 7% in north-east Brazil while 800 million people in Asia who rely on the continent’s mountain glaciers for water could have to deal with a third less.

Globally, corporate respondents to the CDP Water Questionnaire indicated droughts, floods and water pollution cost business $14 billion in 2016 – a five-fold increase over 2015. Almost half expect a substantive change in business operations, and in 2017, reporting companies committed $23.4 billion to tackle water risks.

As we transition into a world of uncertain extremes, climate risks that manifest through water are real and growing – relevant to investment decisions we make not in a decade but today.

It is time for the finance, investment and insurance industries that support these businesses to assess and respond to water risk. Financial scenario analysis must account not only for carbon transition but also water-related risks and opportunities on the ground.

Bankability
Water-related risks, whether reputational, regulatory or operational, offer opportunities for profitable investment in areas such as irrigation, wastewater treatment, water supply, leakage prevention, flood defense, wetland restoration and clean technology.

At this week’s FT Water Summit, a new report from WWF, ING and BCG, Seizing the Water Opportunity, will demonstrate how blended private and public finance can help achieve SDG 6 on ‘water and sanitation for all’ and secure economies and bottom lines.

In fact, meeting the estimated $1 trillion investment needed for water infrastructure means private sector involvement is essential.

In Turkey’s Büyük Menderes basin, for example, textile manufacturers around Denizli are implementing cleaner production methods, reducing costs and cutting pollution in an area that is rich in biodiversity and a vital source of water for communities; and the government is planning a ‘green industrial park’ as part of a global initiative with the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

In Portugal, Lisbon’s water company, EPAL, cut water losses from more than 20% to less than 10% between 2005 and 2015, achieving total savings of $78.7 million for an initial investment of $2.3 million followed by $570,000 per year over the same period.

More broadly, freshwater is key for delivering almost all the SDGs and realizing economic opportunities in food and agriculture, energy and materials, cities, and health and well-being worth at least $12 trillion by 2030.

Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure
Supporting investments in bankable water projects can help companies gain a competitive advantage and benefit from lower costs, more resilient supply chains, and a better reputation with customers and regulators.

The key to realizing financial return is disclosure of meaningful data.

In June 2017, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) issued recommendations for voluntary, consistent climate-related disclosures for investors, lenders, insurers, and other financial companies. Over 500 companies have so far expressed support for the recommendations, and the first reports are starting to appear.

Both the TCFD and CDP offer frameworks with which we can start quantifying material water-related risks that pose systemic risks to the financial system as serious as those driven by exposure to fossil fuels, as well as identifying opportunities for investment. And in many cases, water and climate risks and opportunities are related.

Better disclosure of material water and climate risks would make critical information available for financiers, investors and insurers, enabling them to assess risks more accurately and invest in business models that contribute to both water security and climate resilience.

Without access to additional, more specific and more standardized data, investments will languish in pilot and testing stages.

Location, location, location
We must evaluate exposure to water risk and identify opportunity for response at both basin and operational levels.

WWF’s Water Risk Filter will soon offer enhanced features, enabling financiers, investors and insurers to asses water risk, analyze TCFD-linked scenarios, estimate impacts on company value, and evaluate the appropriateness of mitigation measures.

But there is a crucial gap.

What the Water Risk Filter needs, and many investors lack, are asset-level location data on the specific whereabouts of operational and supply chain factories and farms. Some information, such as mining asset location, is openly available but assets of the Global 2000 are not comprehensively covered.

Without this information, context is lost. And without context, accurately evaluating both water risk and opportunity is impossible. This is the single biggest impediment to better integration of water risk within financial decision-making.

The TCFD has created momentum for disclosure. Now we need a clear signal from the financial sector that accounting for water risk is also ineluctable, and the provision and disclosure of high quality, consistent and specific asset-level data, fundamental.

The FT Water Summit will examine how companies can collaborate to solve shared water challenges and generate return on investments through water stewardship.

During the 2018 REBA Summit, Penguin Random House became the 78th company and first publishing house to join the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles. As part of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, WWF leads the Buyers Principles, which tell utilities and other suppliers what industry–leading, multinational companies are looking for when it comes to buying renewable energy. We caught up with Claire von Schilling, head of corporate communications and social responsibility at Penguin Random House, to share why renewable energy is a priority for the company.

In June, my colleagues at AT&T and I traveled to Laredo and took a 90-minute bus ride into the Texas countryside to join NextEra Energy Resources for a ground-breaking celebration at a new AT&T-backed wind energy center that is expected to generate 300 megawatts (MW) of clean, renewable energy. The energy generated by this project, along with another 520 MW from two other sites in Texas and one in Oklahoma, will save carbon equivalent to taking more than 530,000 vehicles off the road each year.

It was an exciting moment, but as the dust from our shovels cleared the air, we knew that we were just getting started.

As one of the world’s largest companies, we know that how we source our energy is critical; our scale allows us to help enable a clean energy future. That’s why, at the beginning of the year, we announced that we are going big to deliver renewable energy, support educational programs, help create jobs and support America’s transition to a low-carbon economy.

How are we doing it?

It starts with one of the largest corporate renewable energy purchases in the United States. This year, we purchased 820 MW of wind energy between the sites in Laredo, Texas, and Oklahoma. These wind energy centers will also feature more than 200 wind turbines that use no water for power generation and will allow the land to remain in agricultural use.

While the benefits of renewable energy are clear, purchases of this size and scope are complex. AT&T worked hard on these agreements, and we have looked to groups like the Business Renewables Center and the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance for their expertise in this space. We have also signed on to the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles, a group led by World Wildlife Fund (WWF). These Principles helped serve as a guiding light as we navigated these important – and large – purchases.

This investment will also help to strengthen the renewable energy workforce. Wind turbine technician is one of the fastest growing jobs in the U.S. From 2016-2026, job growth is projected to be more than 96 percent. That is one of the reasons why we announced a $50,000 contribution to Texas State Technical College (TSTC) to create the AT&T Wind Energy Scholarship fund.

The fund provides financial assistance for students earning a TSTC wind energy degree or certificate, and is open exclusively to students from counties with AT&T-backed wind energy centers (Webb, Duval, Wilbarger and Hardeman Counties). NextEra Energy Resources has committed to interviewing graduates of the TSTC program for future wind technician positions, as they become available, as well as internship opportunities.

We could not be more excited about our renewable energy commitment; it is a key component of our 10x Carbon Reduction Goal and is part of our larger commitment to the environment. We look forward to the road ahead.

Learn more about AT&T’s commitment at: www.att.com/renewable-energy 

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The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of WWF.

Walmart’s Project Gigaton is a supplier-focused initiative to prevent one gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions across their global supply chain over 15 years (2015-2030). Project Gigaton aims to inspire suppliers to reduce emissions across their own operations and supply chains.

There are six pillars of Project Gigaton through which suppliers can reduce emissions: energy, agriculture, forests, packaging, waste, and product use. World Wildlife Fund works with Walmart on several of these pillars to help suppliers reach their sustainability targets, and, in turn, further WWF’s conservation mission. In this blog, Sandra Vijn, Director of Dairy at WWF, shares why the agriculture pillar is so important to Project Gigaton.

How does agriculture contribute to climate change and emissions outputs within a company’s supply chain?

Most greenhouse gases from the production of meat, dairy or eggs are emitted before the products leave the farm gate. Emissions are released by beef and dairy cows when they digest feed. Growing feed crops for animals also contributes to the GHG footprint, of which the majority comes from the production and application of fertilizer as well as the plowing of land for crop production. Lastly, manure from these animals releases significant amounts of GHG emissions.

Cows, however, can also help increase soil’s capacity to store carbon through managed grazing of perennial forage crops and native grasses. Feed crops, including corn, soy, and wheat, can also be managed in ways to improve soil health and store carbon through practices such as no-till, cover cropping and optimized fertilizer use. Opportunities and solutions exist today to reduce emissions from manure and enteric fermentation, which could be scaled up through knowledge sharing, financial support, and other incentives from processors, traders, and other supply chain stakeholders. Project Gigaton could be a platform where learnings about solutions can be shared.

If a supplier has already set an emissions reduction goal, what is the value of joining Project Gigaton?

Project Gigaton is a way for Walmart’s suppliers to get recognition for their GHG reduction efforts, allowing them to show how progress towards their own emissions reductions is contributing to the Project Gigaton target. At the same time, supplier participation provides the opportunity to leverage Walmart’s communications platforms and extensive reach to be more widely recognized as a business leader fighting climate change. Additionally, by joining Project Gigaton, suppliers can cumulatively show progress over time for their category; lifting all boats in the grocery aisle sends a powerful message to consumers.

When companies join Project Gigaton, they are provided access to resources that can help suppliers advance their goals, including tools that can help them track and report progress over time. If companies are already responding to the GHG emission CDP survey, they could opt to submit that CDP information to Walmart, which then gets credited towards the supplier’s participation in Project Gigaton.

If a supplier is just starting out on their sustainability journey, what needs to be done to get them ready to join Project Gigaton? Who can help?

Eligibility for joining Project Gigaton requires goal-setting, so this is where companies should start. To begin the goal-setting process, companies need to first understand the source of their carbon footprint by undertaking a materiality analysis or life cycle-based footprinting assessment to help show where their GHG emissions hotspots are across their supply chains. There are resources listed at the bottom of this blog that provide more insights into these hotspots for animal agriculture supply chains in the US. The tools included in Project Gigaton can help companies identify GHG emission baselines for their own supply chains and set targets accordingly.

Additionally, they can look to setting science-based targets, an initiative championed by NGOs and leading companies in which hundreds of firms are already participating.

Finally, companies must be SMART about the goals they set for Project Gigaton—that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-limited.

Suppliers can join Project Gigaton at any time through the Gigaton website. And if they are ready, they can report progress between October 1 and November 12, 2018.

Can you give an example of a supplier who is really leading the way in agriculture?

Leading companies establish meaningful goals, publish strong sourcing policies, report transparently on their progress, engage collaboratively with suppliers, and seek practical, long-term opportunities to reduce GHG emissions across their supply chains.

For example, several dairy companies have set targets or are in the process of doing so while working with their supply chain partners to identify opportunities for GHG reduction. Schreiber Foods, a Wisconsin-based dairy company, is a supplier to Walmart with worldwide reach. Its participation in Project Gigaton sets an example of how a dairy company can set realistic and actionable targets. The company has had sustainability goals in place since 2008 and is currently going through the process of setting science-based targets in its operations and supply chain, while developing a strategy to work with its stakeholders to meet them.  General Mills, which has set science-based goals for GHG reduction across their entire enterprise including in its supply chain – a 28 percent reduction by 2025 – has worked with one of its suppliers to develop baselines for its milk supply, calculate sustainability impact, and drive continuous improvement through the FARM Environmental Stewardship module. General Mills continues to coordinate regular stakeholder meetings with its suppliers and expert resources to identify ways to reduce emissions collaboratively.  

What resources are available to help those already committed, those looking to commit, and those who feel there’s a barrier of entry for a supplier of their size.

Reporting on commitments is the cornerstone of Project Gigaton. Companies that have a significant share of GHG emissions from agriculture in their supply chains can look at the Project Gigaton reporting options to understand which tools they need or questions they can ask their own suppliers to start developing baselines and assess progress over time. 

Various organizations, including trade associations and NGOs, are instrumental in providing tools and resources to companies regarding GHG baselining and GHG reduction opportunity identification for animal and crop production, for example:

• Beef: Cattlemen’s Beef Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef
• Dairy: FARM Environmental Stewardship Tool, National Milk Producers Federation; the Innovation Center for US Dairy
• Pork: the National Pork Board
• Poultry and Eggs: FAO I-GLEAM GHG calculator for livestock
• Fertilizer Optimization
• Field to Market

It’s also important to note that Project Gigaton has a very user-friendly, intuitive website so companies can easily access the information they need once they’re on board. Every target counts, and it’s important that all suppliers, especially small and mid-sized ones, know that they are an indispensable part of the solution.

This blog is part of a series. Please see our Project Gigaton Q&A on forests here and on food waste here. You can join Project Gigaton by submitting your own emissions target, or by submitting goals that fall in one or more of the six pillars. Links to join can be found at: www.walmartsustainabilityhub.com/project-gigaton

It’s no secret that as the world’s population continues to rise, so does our demand on its resources. Between growing incomes and the need to feed more people, the rate of consumption will continue to far outpace the systems necessary to manage this consumption. Because our waste systems simply can’t keep up, uncollected or leaked waste will continue to wreak havoc on the environment. Litter doesn’t just affect the beauty of our environment – it affects the health of ecosystems, biodiversity, and humans alike.

At World Wildlife Fund (WWF) we work to stop the flow of waste into nature, but we realize that changes are needed earlier in the material management system to eliminate the potential for massive downstream effects even before they become an issue. We need to develop innovative solutions that work to improve the entire system from the earliest stages of product development.

WWF’s Cascading Materials Vision is the foundation for what a holistic material management solution looks like. We’ve recently joined the NextGen Cup Consortium, led by Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy and in cooperation with founding partners Starbucks and McDonalds, to help bring part of this vision to life through a multi-year initiative.

Launching this week is the Consortium’s inaugural initiative, the NextGen Cup Challenge, which will seek to transform one of the most recognizable single-use items: the paper cup. The challenge, managed by OpenIDEO, aims to catalyze ideation and action leading to the adoption of a new, sustainable, single-use cup that can be recycled or composted on a global scale. 

The challenge will analyze the cup as part of the larger system it fits into and designers will strive to create a new fiber cup that is one part of a more sustainable global waste management strategy.

While single-use cups are only part of our waste problem, this challenge is the Consortium’s first step in revolutionizing the recovery of materials in the packaging industry.

Why is this challenge necessary?

Most paper cups distributed today are sent to a landfill. Therefore, a critical piece of the challenge is designing a cup that can be recovered at the highest scale globally and across a range of regions that have different infrastructure systems. Ultimately the greenest cup is the one you bring with you, but until this practice becomes a cultural norm, we need to make sure our fast-moving consumer cups have minimal environmental impacts.

We produce over 250 billion paper cups each year. While these cups must always meet health and safety standards and be convenient, lightweight, printable, durable, and functional across a wide range of temperatures, there has never been enough pressure to source and produce these cups in a sustainable way. This challenge is necessary because the current cup is created and used on such a large scale that it has enormous waste management impacts. In addition, we are wasting valuable resources that could be given new life and we are constantly demanding virgin materials to produce more cups.

Technically, traditional paper cups (as well as almost anything), can be recycled if broken down physically or chemically. However, for recycling to actually occur on a meaningful scale, there must be value for the recovered material. The economics of recovery must be such that the value of the re-processed material is still higher than the costs of re-processing. In addition, there needs to be a large enough volume of the specific material to make it profitable. Therefore, the more uniformity in sustainable packaging materials, the easier it will be for a global system to recapture the value of the material.

Why is WWF involved?

Progress towards a global system of material recovery is exceptionally difficult due to the scale of the issue and the number of stakeholders that must be involved to achieve meaningful results. WWF not only recognizes the scale of this problem but also the enormous potential for positive change. As the world population grows, so does demand for goods and packaging and our natural resources suffer. Items such as paper cups are thrown away every day without regard to their potential value in a circular economy. Recovering materials such as single-use fiber cups means taking advantage of an opportunity to do more with less.

WWF serves as an advisory partner on the NextGen Cup Challenge because we look at environmental issues from a broad and comprehensive lens. WWF will provide guidance throughout the competition to ensure that as one environmental issue is being solved, others are not created. WWF’S ability to recognize and evaluate tradeoffs will help inform decisions made by the NextGen Cup Consortium and the team at WWF is already at work helping establish the criteria for a successful and sustainable fiber cup.

Join the challenge! Here’s how:

The NextGen Cup Challenge will officially launch on October 9 when entrepreneurs, designers, and companies are encouraged to submit proposals. Several phases, including reviews and refinement, will occur before the top ideas are announced in February 2019.

Moving Forward

The NextGen Consortium is actively looking to partner with other companies, as they recognize that increased support from other partners will trigger market signals that reverberate throughout the entire value chain. The paper cup is one of those challenging single use items whose re-design for recovery can open the door for wide-scale recovery of other single-use packaging. We know that the global solution to material waste will not be successful through individual attempts at solutions. We must collaborate on a systems approach to maximize our collective potential for success. We believe that, by inviting the full suite of actors to the table, the NextGen Consortium is talking strides towards a promising solution to single-use material waste.

To stay informed as the NextGen Cup challenge progresses, check out https://nextgenconsortium.com

The expanding footprint of food and agriculture represents one of the biggest threats to biodiversity on the planet. Even more problematic, it’s estimated that the US wastes 63 million tons of food every year, and 90 percent or more of that ends up in a landfill where it causes potent greenhouse gas emissions. But go into most K-12 classrooms and the environmental impact of our food system probably isn’t a hot topic yet.

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) serves more than 31 million children in over 100,000 schools each day, while the School Breakfast Program (SBP) serves over 14 million – both providing free and reduced meals to eligible children. Last year, WWF conducted a pilot program in Washington, DC and engaged schools across the city to understand the best ways to reduce food waste in schools and ensure edible food doesn’t get tossed. To do this, WWF introduced the Food Waste Warrior curriculum, which works with teachers and student leaders to conduct food waste audits in their cafeteria and calculate the environmental impact of wasted food.

When we waste food, we waste the energy, water and often wildlife habitat that is sacrificed to grow that food – which means a food waste curriculum fits nicely with other topics. The Food Waste Warrior lesson plan can be paired with science, ecology, habitat conservation and sustainability curriculums, and it’s free for educators as part of WWF’s Wild Classroom platform.

Conducting regular student-led food waste audits can help schools better understand which foods are being wasted most and why. It also encourages participation from food service professionals to get students eating healthy and ensuring healthy food does not go to waste. As we went into schools, the WWF team worked to organize a comprehensive educational toolkit, which included the resources like the Guide to Conducting Student Food Waste Audits produced by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Melissa Terry of the University of Arkansas. These resources help to clarify rules and policies for share tables and food donation programs, which can be a source of confusion for school administrators.

What we found after going into cafeterias was that school food waste is a complex and challenging topic that requires diverse partnerships to tackle. Partnering with schools and introducing our lesson plan created a unique opportunity to leverage students' passion for wildlife and nature. However, it quickly became evident teachers can’t do this alone and need help to make these programs come to life.

To that end, WWF has teamed up with The Kroger Co. Foundation to gain support in expanding this program, which aligns with Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste social impact plan. With Kroger’s help, we’re encouraging eight more cities across the US to take on this food waste reduction challenge. WWF is initiating a Request for Proposals (RFP) to the following cities: Seattle, Portland (OR), Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Columbus (OH), Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Nashville. Independent consultants and experienced organizations are encouraged to send proposals to organize food waste reduction programs in schools from January through June of 2019. The RFP can be found here.

In Atlanta, the program has already been kickstarted with an additional exciting grant from EPA Region 4. This will allow student food waste reduction to go further faster and serve as a guide for other cities and schools.

The Food Waste Warrior program attempts to get us all thinking differently about food and its impact on the planet. For many students, there is no connection between the food on their plate and wildlife and the environment. Teaching students, educators and food-service staff about the true value of food is now an imperative for our future generations if we want to ensure they inherit a healthy planet.

Learn more about the DC pilot program and best practices for implementing Food Waste Warriors at your school here.