It’s been incredible here at Fortune’s Brainstorm Green conference – and educational. Meeting and talking to so many concerned and influential folks interested in climate change, environmental practices and the business of sustainability has been really encouraging. I also appreciated the opportunity to participate in the panel called Traceability: How Well Do You Know Your Supply Chain? This took place on Tuesday and it was a fascinating discussion moderated by one of Fortune’s contributing editors, Marc Gunther. Other panelists included Jill Dumain of Patagonia and Michael Kowalski, CEO of Tiffany & Co.
Kathy Abusow, President & CEO at SFI
During the traceability panel we also heard from Arlin Wasserman, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship at Sodexo. Sodexo employs 350,000 people worldwide and serves some 50 million people a day in 85 different countries. They provide facilities management, energy management and food service to corporations, hospitals, schools and government buildings. Sodexo is in a unique position to influence environmental practices and they stressed the importance of transparency, traceability and certification.
Arlin Wasserman, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship at Sodexo
We were also able to spend some time with Rich Lechner, Vice President of Energy and Environment at IBM. IBM has had a corporate sustainability agenda since 1971. You’ll find a few similarities between some of IBM’s best practices and the requirement we have for independent third party auditors (it has to do with management, measurement, monitoring and transparency through third party verification). In our conversation, we talked about how sustainability fits into IBM’s corporate and business objectives, how IBM supports sustainable forestry and lessons learned re: sustainability.
