It was an active month of June for Big Room Co-founders Trevor Bowden, Jacob Malthouse and Anastasia O’Rourke, as they travelled key events to share with and learn from colleagues in the sustainability purchasing arena.
Anastasia presented to the ‘Informing Green Markets: What Makes a Difference and Why’ conference hosted at the University of Michigan and organised by the Erb Institute and the Sustainability Consortium on assessing the credibility of ecolabels (click for presentation PDF).
Jacob spent three days in Zurich at the ISEAL Alliance Annual Conference on Sustainability Challenges in the Textile and Apparel Sector. He moderated a panel exploring the unique social and environmental challenges found throughout the supply chain of the textile and apparel industries. The discussion focused on the difficulty of enforcement and the need to create proper incentives through reputational risks to businesses. It also emphasized the recent gains that have been made throughout the industry in regards to sustainability. A full summary of the panel can be found here.
Trevor traveled to Seattle where he participated in the latest Green Products Roundtable meeting. For a number of years Big Room has participated in this multi-stakeholder meeting. It is an initiative aimed at improving the sustainable decision-making facilities of consumers, product manufacturers, businesses and institutional buyers as well as working to define and identify green products.
Trevor also met with a number of organizations in San Francisco regarding the Ecolabel Index Application Programming Interface (API). This feature allows for the sharing of Ecolabel data with other information providers, in order to reduce the burden of creating information that the Ecolabel Index already has. Check back soon for more information regarding specific Ecolabel Index API partnerships.