What Jansan Professionals Can Learn from Sustainability All Stars

In August, Fortune magazine released its 2019 list of Change the World companies including 10 Sustainability All Stars, seven of which are headquartered in the U.S.

This year’s All Stars list, which includes companies like Walmart Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc, should remind jansan professionals about the importance of sustainability, according to Stephen Ashkin, president of The Ashkin Group, a consulting firm specializing in green cleaning, who helped develop ISSA’s Distributor Efficiency Analytics & Learning (DEAL) program.

“Something the entire jansan industry should also note, is what most of these companies are also doing,” Ashkin says. “They select their vendors based on their sustainability efforts. This way, all of their vendors and suppliers are on the same sustainability team.”

Fortune selects 52 Change the World companies each year that have proven they are taking significant steps to reduce their impact on the environment.

This year’s seven U.S. Sustainability All Stars include:

• Apple Inc. – Announced a goal in 2017 of making all of its products from recycled and renewable materials. Apple has created a robotic recycling system, which can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour, so the parts can be reused in new electronic devices.

• Accenture plc – Has reduced its per-employee environmental footprint by 52% since 2007

• IBM – Has been converting to green power and now receives nearly 40% of its energy from renewable resources.

• Intel Corp. –Recycles 80% of the water it uses, returning it to a “pre-use” state

• Prudential Financial Inc. – Owns US$14 billion worth of buildings that all meet LEED certification standards.

• Walmart – Diverts 78% of the waste it produces away from landfills and incineration; the company has also encouraged its network of suppliers to do the same

• Salesforce – Developed an app that tracks green metrics, helping organizations measure and analyze their carbon emissions for a wide range of business activities.