Sustainability Article Features

Chip Reavley's picture
Chip Reavley
The business challenges of the past few years—labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and inflation—have accelerated the long-term trend toward automated packaging operations.  All types of...
William A. Levinson's picture
William A. Levinson
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is growing in popularity as a metric to guide investment decisions. What does ESG have to do with productivity, quality, or stakeholders, aka relevant...
Gleb Tsipursky's picture
Gleb Tsipursky
Shortly before the layoffs at Salesforce, Marc Benioff, co-founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, sent a companywide Slack message complaining about the low productivity of recent hires made during the...
Rick Gould's picture
Rick Gould
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last month saw the launch of new guidance to support the logistics industry on its journey to net-zero emissions. Davos attendees got a first glimpse into...
Zeyi Yang's picture
Zeyi Yang
The year ahead is already shaping up to be a hard one for semiconductor businesses. Famously defined by cycles of soaring and dwindling demand, the chip industry was expected to see declining growth...
Mark Hembree's picture
Mark Hembree
When I started working from home in 1998, it wasn’t by choice. I was writing for a major record label that decided—in so many words—that I was like a painting that didn’t go with the furniture. (Fine...
Costas Xyloyiannis's picture
Costas Xyloyiannis
During the early 2000s, I was a recent software engineering graduate. Along with a friend and fellow graduate, I landed some project work with a major pharmaceutical company. The CEO, who had just...
Joshua Sadlock's picture
Joshua Sadlock
Yup, that’s me in the photo. You’re probably wondering how I ended up hanging under a bridge over the Mississippi River. I’m a certified bridge safety inspector. If you have questions after seeing...
Bryan Christiansen's picture
Bryan Christiansen
Every day, manufacturers rely on a large number of tools, machinery, and infrastructure to produce their goods. And while all of those assets help you generate profit, they are a significant...
Leeza Garber's picture
Leeza Garber
In late spring 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged an elite investment adviser for “misstatements and omissions” about environmental, social, and governance (ESG)...
Matthew Inniger's picture
Matthew Inniger
The inability to gather good data has challenged many food manufacturers for decades. But not anymore. As sensor technology has improved, and technology platforms have become more accessible and...
Ula Chrobak's picture
Ula Chrobak
Thirty miles east of Reno, Nevada, past dusty hills patched with muted blue sage and the occasional injury-lawyer billboard, a large concrete structure rises prominently in the desert landscape. When...
Kevin Kanimyar's picture
Kevin Kanimyar
Amidst the rise of conscious consumerism, corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs are fast becoming an essential part of any business. With about $20 billion spent every year by Fortune...
Jennifer Lauren Lee's picture
Jennifer Lauren Lee
As mechanical objects, gears have been around for so long that people generally take them for granted. But gears are sophisticated parts that play a vital role in cars, airplanes, construction and...
Abdul Salam's picture
Abdul Salam
Water is the most essential resource for life, for both humans and the crops we consume. Around the world, agriculture accounts for 70 percent of all freshwater use. I study computers and...
Seb Murray's picture
Seb Murray
In 1924, a cartel of light bulb manufacturers including General Electric and Philips agreed to artificially limit the lifespan of their products to about 1,000 hours—down from 2,500. The scandal,...
Sarah Murray's picture
Sarah Murray
John Foye remembers what sparked his passion for finding solutions to climate change. Backpacking in Utah’s Uinta Mountains with high school friends one day, they came across a patch of forest that...
Quality Digest's picture
Quality Digest
One question led the founders of Nemo’s Garden, a subsea farming platform, to embark on its mission to take agriculture beneath the waves and bring better harvests to market: “Seventy percent of the...
Otto de Graaf's picture
Otto de Graaf
Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, and smart tech that enables the transition toward the factory of the future, for many manufacturers sustainability still feels like an afterthought rather...
Anisur Rahman's picture
Anisur Rahman
Researchers at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ONRL) have developed an upcycling approach that adds value to discarded plastics for reuse in additive manufacturing, or 3D...