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If necessity is the mother of invention, then the state of the environment should be driving innovation around the world. And indeed it is. In our new series "The Big SHFT: 10 Innovators Changing Our World," we team up with Ford Motor Company to profile leading innovators who are shaping new sustainable businesses and influencing positive change around the world. Executive produced by SHFT......read more
Tom Szaky is the quintessential eco-entrepreneur. While a freshman at Princeton, Szaky founded a company that recycles garbage into plant fertilizer, then packages it in discarded soda bottles. Fast forward five years, and TerraCycle Plant Food is available in every Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, and more than 3000 other locations. Today, TerraCycle is finding new uses for trash, creating products......read more
Today, Alice Waters is the queen bee of sustainable food movement. But it was flavor, not sustainability, that led the owner of Chez Panisse to local, organic food. Since founding the Berkeley eatery 40 years ago, Alice has helped inspire nothing short of a culinary revolution. These days, you won't find her in the restaurant's kitchen because she is too busy heading up the Chez Panisse......read more
If there was a hall of fame for sustainable business, Dr. Mike Biddle would be one its first inductees. Twenty years ago, the trailblazing plastics engineer launched MBA Polymers in his garage. He was determined to prove that complex polymers from consumer plastics could be recycled into useful raw materials. Mike developed a patented series of techniques for separating and refining plastic waste......read more
Michael W. Crooke's résumé reads like a young achiever's dream bio. The former Navy SEAL (underwater demolition team) holds a Ph.D. in management and has held senior executive roles at a number of companies in the outdoors industry, including Yakima, Kelty Packs, Pearl/Izumi and Patagonia, where he was CEO from 1999 to 2005. It was Crooke's time at Patagonia -- the company founded......read more
Van Jones is a lawyer and activist who is America's leading advocate for green jobs. He is a co-founder of three successful non-profit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change and Green For All. Van's first book, The Green Collar Economy, is a clear-headed and optimistic discussion of the need for clean energy solutions to......read more
In 2000, Bill Ford spearheaded a sustainability report for the company his great-grandfather founded nearly a century earlier. "Sustainability issues are neither incidental nor avoidable," he wrote in the report, "they are at the heart of our business." At the time, the green ideas were not well-received. Today, in the wake of rising fuel prices and global economic crisis, they are at the center......read more
David Hertz is widely recognized as one of green design's leading innovators. At the Studio of Environmental Architecture, the LA-based design firm he founded, Hertz focuses primarily on custom residential projects with particular experience in climate responsive, environmentally sustainable homes. He is perhaps best known for the seminal Wing House, an imaginative Malibu residence constructed......read more
Ten years ago, when Harrison Dillon and his partners founded Solazyme in a garage in Palo Alto, CA, their goal was to create clean, renewable diesel fuel from algae. And so they did. But it was clear after a couple of years that they needed to find other applications for algae-based biofuel to make their business fly. Today, the San Francisco-based company's technology is being used to......read more
Yves Behar and his team at fuseproject are the go-to design group that companies turn to for game-changing ideas. From the $100 XO laptop and Puma's waste-saving Clever Little Bag to the sleek Leaf LED lamp and SAYL Office Chair for Herman Miller, Yves' work merges must-have design with a firm commitment to social and ecological responsibility. That's what makes him one of the design world's......read more
