Joel Makower

I met Chuck Bennett in the early 2000s, when he was The Conference Board’s thought leader on corporate citizenship. In 2007, he moved over to be head sustainability at Aveda, the natural care products company, which had been acquired 10 years earlier by the Estée Lauder Companies.

Here’s the most noteworthy finding among the spring 2013 crop of surveys and polls on Americans’ environmental attitudes: “Millennials Pretend to Care About the Environment,” a headline from DDB’s most recent Life Style Study that concluded, “When it comes to being environmentally friendly, Millennials are talking the talk, but not walking the walk.”

So much for the incoming class of citizens and consumers.

This week marks the publication of The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability — Designing for Abundance, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.

As data increasingly spews from everything — buildings, vehicles, transit systems, cash registers and potentially every light fixture, switch, plug and machine — there’s a growing opportunity to capture it and make it useful for consumers and professionals. Some of it is making its way into apps.

Science fiction writers and fear-mongering pundits have long railed against the “rise of the machines” — a point at which large swaths of daily life would take place without human intervention, with machines interacting with other machines. That future has played out in many ways, though it’s invisible to most of us and lacks the sci-fi drama many envisioned. And it is emerging as a key enabler for radical efficiency and corporate sustainability efforts.

Exit Interview is an occasional series profiling sustainability professionals who have recently left their job.

Sustainability is a vibrant topic on Twitter, but the corporate crowd is just catching on. A small but growing corps of corporates are now tweeting, to varying degrees.

One of a series of excerpts from the 2013 State of Green Business report (download here).

The 2013 State of Green Business report, our sixth annual, has just been published. It tells a story of the shifting business reality — a world slowly coming to grips with a changing climate, economic volatility and great risks to business as usual.