Corporate Environmental Champions

Green corporate identities are becoming a feature of the new business environment. They tend to be individualists, but they have a significant impact on others. This is teaching by example, and the real innovators of the environmental movement have developed methodologies which have spread around the world. With the concepts they've developed, environmental impacts have been drastically reduced, and new design models have revolutionized the whole concept of industrial production.

Ben Cohen

Ben Cohen was the founder of Ben and Jerry's, an ice cream business in Burlington, Vermont which began in the 1970s. Cohen's idea for ice cream was driven by two factors: A need for flavour, and a concept of sourcing natural raw materials. The result was a runaway success, based on natural flavours and a strongly sustainable business model.

It was also a blow for real food. Modern "ice cream" is a combination of materials which include a lot of artificial materials, and is expensive to make, as well as an inferior quality product. Many dieticians have expressed the view that the human metabolism is designed to eat real organic foods, not artificial materials, and Ben and Jerry's proved by its success what people wanted. The business was taken over by the giant US food manufacturer Unilever, which maintained the concept. It was a major success in terms of identifying the relationship between sustainable products and commercial best practice in the food industry.

Anita Roddick

Anita Roddick is the founder of The Body Shop. This business began as part of a quasi-entrepreneurial, sole trader home business which Roddick describes as a combination of economic necessity and inspiration from her travels around the world experiencing different cultures. From that combination was born a synthesis of natural products and good business practice.

Roddick's business idea, based on natural materials, has become one of the great success stories of modern business. From a small beginning to over 1000 outlets around the world, the Body Shop is the upmarket model of environmental consumerism.

Ray Anderson

Ray Anderson of Interface Inc. is a highly acclaimed environmental industrialist. He was originally a conventional carpet manufacturer running a business he'd started himself in 1973. He had what he describes as a "spear in the chest" revelation reading Paul Hawken's 1993 classic sustainability-themed book The Ecology of Commerce. This was the inspiration for a major change in methodologies in an industry which was highly environmentally unfriendly, using lots of petrol products and producing large amounts of waste.