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Today, McDonald’s announces that it will begin purchasing verified sustainable beef in 2016, the first step on a quest to purchase sustainable beef for all of its burgers worldwide.

The land management initiative led the company to commit to source-only palm oil certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil by 2015. All of its fish worldwide come from fisheries certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. McDonald’s requires its suppliers to source 100 percent Rainforest Alliance certified coffee for its espresso in the United States, for all of its coffee in Australia and New Zealand and all of it in Europe except for decaf.

Langert says McDonald’s isn’t yet ready to commit to a specific quantity it would purchase in 2016, or when it might achieve its “aspirational goal” of buying 100 percent of its beef from “verified sustainable sources.” (The company only will say, “We will focus on increasing the annual amount each year.”) Realistically, it could take a decade or more to achieve the 100-percent goal.

Interface reconstituted its Dream Team, “a collection of experts and friends who have joined with me to remake Interface into a leader of sustainability,” as Anderson wrote in the company’s 1997 sustainability report.The original team included Sierra Club executive director David Brower; Buckminster Fuller devotee Bill Browning, then with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI); community and social activist Bernadette Cozart; author and entrepreneur Hawken; Amory Lovins, RMI co-founder and chief scientist; L. Hunter Lovins, RMI’s other co-founder; architect and designer William McDonough; John Picard, a pioneering consultant in green building and sustainability; Jonathan Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future; Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael; Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, a sustainability framework; and Walter Stahel a resource efficiency expert. (Additional members would be added over the years, including Biomimicry author Janine Benyus.)

One example is Net-Works. Launched in 2012, it helps turn discarded fishing nets into the raw materials for nylon carpeting in some of the world’s most impoverished communities.

But Ray Anderson’s sustainability vision was always about more than just a “green manufacturing plant.” He wanted Interface to be a shining example, an ideal to which other companies could aspire, a test bed for new ideas that stood to upend how business is done — and, not incidentally, an opportunity to stand above the crowd in the world of commercial flooring.Climate Take Back is the noise the company wanted to make.

"Most of the activity that actually touches society is happening in the supply chain," says Polman, "and that's why we take responsibility from sustainable sourcing to sustainable living." The company looks to find materials from sustainable sources, but then also looks to encourage sustainable choices on the consumer end.

A similar effort is aims at ending illegal deforestation. Unilever and other companies "made a commitment not to sell anything anymore from illegal deforestation by the year 2020 -- soy, paper, pulp, beef, palm oil. And if a big association representing $3-4 trillion of consumer sales makes that commitment, it sends a very strong signal into the whole value chain," he says

Unilever and other companies "made a commitment not to sell anything anymore from illegal deforestation by the year 2020 -- soy, paper, pulp, beef, palm oil.

Millions upon millions of games, dolls, trinkets and other baubles are churned out for the entertainment of children around the world.

As the titans that make them start considering their complete environmental footprints, they are making big strides in protecting the planet's natural resources, albeit by disparate approaches.

by 2020 Hasbro plans to reduce waste to landfill by 50 percent, energy consumption by 25 percent, GHG emissions by 20 percent and water consumption by 15 percent.