Who would have thought the corporate sustainability profession would arise?

On Jan. 1, the new International Maritime Organization regulation for reducing the sulfur content of marine fuels from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent will take effect. With the change comes the need for inspections and enforcement to give the new rule "teeth" and force compliance.

Academia has gone green in a big way in recent years, but some doubt whether it will make much difference to the planet.

For decades, the main argument against climate action has been economic: Even if the climate is changing, the argument went, addressing it at the scale needed would force companies, cities and institutions into bankruptcy. In short, it would tank the economy.

When I used to behave like an entitled teenager, my mother always used to say, "You’ve only one mouth but you’ve got two ears." It used to drive me crazy. But as with most things, she was right.

Stories are everything — in corporate sustainability as in life. Facts and numbers help explain the world as it is, but narratives give it meaning.

In 2015, United Nations member states, together with civil society and business, came together to prepare a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all by 2030.

If sustainable plastic sounds like an oxymoron to you, you wouldn’t be the only one. But with the sleeping giant of public opinion beginning to awaken to the unsustainability of plastic around the world — roughly 40 percent of which is found in packaging — some innovators are starting to look for ways to avoid using the material.

Forget green. The next clean economy is blue. Blue, as in the deep blue sea.

There’s been a noticeable uptick lately in buzz around chemical recycling, and the promise of technologies that can fix the broken recycling system.