Grounded World

Get Grounded with us for Green Friday this week! While lucrative for brands and retailers, Black Friday is not profitable for our planet. Over recent years, green is becoming the new black. Instead of participating in the Black Friday madness, try out Green Friday with us! We have put together quite the starter guide of good reads and watches in our latest edition The Get Grounded Newsletter, including: 💚 What is Green Friday? Black Friday Alternative (2024) updated by Lindsey DeMarinis 🎄 Sustainable Holiday Tips: Reducing Waste During the Most Wonderful & Excessive Time of the Year by Danielle Jezienicki 🎁 61 B Corp Gift Ideas for Green Friday by Paloma Jacome And so much more...like our featured App of the Month Good On You and upcoming events ending 2024! #TimeToGetGrounded #GreenFriday #BlackFriday #BCorps #SustainableHolidays

Did you miss Green Friday?! 😳 Have no fear Cyber Monday is here 🦾another opportunity to support purpose-driven businesses! This holiday season at Grounded World, we’ve compiled a long list of our favorite B Corps to celebrate and support 💚 When you shop B Corps, you’re backing companies committed to reducing their carbon footprint, paying fair wages, and ensuring an ethical supply chain. Instead of gifting low-quality items destined to be discarded, invest in purpose-driven presents crafted with care for both people and the planet. It’s a small but powerful way to make a difference this holiday season and beyond. So, skip the impulse buys and opt for gifts that give back—to the people who make them and to the planet we all share. #TimeToGetGrounded #CyberMonday #SustainableShopping #BCorps #Gifts B Lab U.S. & Canada

2 days till Green Friday! To make your sustainable holiday shopping easier this year, we put together the ultimate list of 61 B Corps to shop this Green Friday and Cyber Monday! In this green gift giving guide, we've covered all the gifts on your wishlist and then some! From sustainable fashion, eco-friendly footwear, organic undergarments, ethical jewelry & accessories, sustainable toys, games, & kids’ gifts, outdoor & adventure gear, and clean beauty & zero-waste personal care as pictured. The B Corps we've pictured below and included for clean beauty & zero-waste personal care gift ideas are: Innersense Organic Beauty - Innersense offers hair care products made from organic ingredients that hydrate and nourish your hair while being gentle on the environment. Their formulas are free from harmful chemicals, providing healthy hair and a cleaner planet. Ethique - Ethique’s plastic-free beauty bars for hair, face, and body use natural ingredients and come in compostable packaging, making them a sustainable alternative to traditional liquid beauty products. The Body Shop - The Body Shop offers cruelty-free, fair-trade beauty products that promote sustainability. Their skincare is made with ethical ingredients, supporting social causes and providing beauty with a purpose. KraveBeauty | Certified B Corp - KraveBeauty provides eco-friendly skincare with simple, effective ingredients in recyclable packaging, helping you care for your skin while minimizing environmental impact. The 7 Virtues Beauty Inc. - The 7 Virtues creates fair-trade perfumes using sustainably sourced ingredients, supporting peacebuilding and community rebuilding through ethical practices. Dental Lace - Dental Lace offers plastic-free dental floss in refillable packaging, providing an eco-conscious alternative to traditional floss while reducing waste. Aleph Beauty Aleph Beauty offers vegan cosmetics made with sustainable ingredients. Their clean beauty ethos ensures no animal harm and minimal, recyclable packaging. Rain Organica - Rain Organica creates skincare with natural ingredients and eco-conscious packaging, offering effective solutions that protect both skin and the planet. Hemp Heros - Hemp Heroes provides eco-friendly CBD products focused on wellness and relaxation while prioritizing sustainable sourcing and environmentally friendly packaging. The Solid Bar Company offers a variety of plastic-free hair, body, and pet care products. Their sustainable formulas help reduce plastic waste while being effective and eco-friendly. @BambuuBrush® | B Corp™ Bambuu Brush creates bamboo-based, plastic-free dental care products that help reduce waste while promoting a more sustainable approach to oral hygiene. Check out the full B Corp list here: https://lnkd.in/gz_FWJHW #BlackFriday #CyberMonday B Lab U.S. & Canada #GreenFriday #BCorpList #GreenGifts #SustainableHolidays

With Black Friday just days away, it’s time to consider our shopping habits. Black Friday continues to dominate shopping trends, but this shocking statistic from Queue-it reveals that in 2023, 60% of Gen Z consumers regretted a Black Friday purchase. This raises an important question: Are we making mindful purchasing decisions or are we getting swept up in the pressure to "buy now"? Enter Green Friday 🌿 🌍 Green Friday is an alternative to Balck Friday, celebrated on the same day, encouraging sustainable shopping choices. Whether it is supporting small businesses, prioritizing quality over quantity, or simply buying less, Green Friday promotes thoughtful consumption and circularity. It helps us avoid impulsive purchases that we may regret later. This holiday season, we should take a moment to reflect on how our consumer habits impact the world around us. To learn more about Green Friday, visit: https://lnkd.in/efqzsMbT #GreenFriday #MindfulShopping #BlackFriday

The state of the sustainability profession report 2024 has just been published by the Trellis Group – and it makes interesting reading. 🔦   Did you know for example that 63% of vice presidents in sustainability are female in 2024 - making roughly $22,000 more in base compensation than their male counterparts? But, as the national political landscape here in the USA shifts to the right – in many respects it would appear – away from any real concern or accountability for ESG, the role of the ‘ESG controller’ and the need for sustainability reporting and carbon accounting software is predicted to grow and keep pace with the mandatory reporting requirements at the company level. (CSRD and California legislation both require the reporting of scope 3 emissions, for example). As such, the size of the sustainability reporting market for software is expected to grow to $4.34bn by 2027 and sustainability professionals collectively earned 460% more on Upwork in 2022 than they did in 2019! According to data in the report, only 11% of CEOs in 2024 'own or are very engaged' when it comes to sustainability, and 31% say they are interested but don’t consider it a priority. And yet, the percentage of sustainability executives reporting to the CEO has increased from 22%-30% over the past 2 years! Based on my own experience over the past couple of years, 'greenhushing' is on the rise, budgets are being scaled back, teams are being asked to do more with less (or not bother at all) or they are being disbanded or ‘restructured’. So what’s going on I wonder? Are we just witnessing more lip service, political bullet dodging and corporate posturing? Or are we in fact still tracking along on a slow but inevitable transformation to a stakeholder economy? Will the more future focused strategic and intersectional role of the executive level sustainability professional continue to hold any sway? Is it, (as the report suggests) going to come down to how seriously companies are committed to true sustainability in the form of innovation, incubation and horizon scanning (vs. sustainability as form of corporate reporting and data gathering?)   What do you think? I’d love to know! #timetogetgrounded.

There's a great book by Christian Busch called 'The Serendipity Mindset' (I was fortunate enough to join a work session on it with him a few years back) that unpacks how to create the conditions for coincidences to arise. And then, how taking advantage of them when they do, is the secret to connecting the dots of seemingly random events and turning them into beneficial experiences that improve our lives. (i.e. Luck) So, imagine the double dopamine sized dose of serendipity that hit when Serendipity Labs opened up in our home town of Westport, Connecticut! Moving from fully remote agency operation to a hybrid model here at Grounded World (to cover more geography across the US, UK and Europe) has become a bit of an imperative. So, here we are. Welcome to our new HQ! Hope to see you here if you happen to be passing through California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin..or Bristol, Cambridge and Manchester in the UK. #timetogetgrounded 

Some food for thought for today… “For a field built around the long-term view, it’s up to us to do the uncomfortable work and reach across part lines. If we don’t make addressing polarization a priority, will the rest of work be worth it?” #TimeToGetGrounded #ElectionDay #Depolarization #ClimateCrisis

In case you missed our newsletter, Paloma Jacome from Grounded, took us along her journey in India with rePurpose Global for their annual #PlasticRealityProject to personally experience the global waste crisis and learn directly from rePurpose Global + their impact partners on how they're scaling circular solutions. They were exposed to the unbelievable impact of the waste crisis- mountains of trash piling up dumpsites, mass pollution in all natural places, and plastic waste being burned in open air. Reflecting on her experience, Paloma shared: "It was an emotional experience seeing how much plastic waste there is polluting our beautiful planet and witnessing the horrors of young informal waste pickers sifting through the world's trash in the most life-threatening of conditions. In turn, it was beyond inspiring to see women-led and operated teams pioneering waste management infrastructure in their villages. All while expanding the mission and recruiting other women along the way for not only an equitable employment opportunity, but to change the culture around waste in their communities. I feel honored to have met some of these heroes building the circular economy we desperately need." See what else Paloma had to share from their journey linked below 🔗 #TimeToGetGrounded #Circularity #PlasticPollution

Happy Halloween! Here's a treat for you- getting grounded in the roots of the circular economy through our participation in rePurpose Global's #PlasticRealityProject. Our intrepid, Paloma Jacome, joined the Plastic Reality Project across India to unpack the plastic waste crisis and experience first-hand the innovative solutions accelerating the global transition to a circular economy. In addition to Grounded, other purpose-driven brands and organizations that joined this year's journey included: Thrive Market, Olyra, Innersense Organic Beauty, Lintbells | Home of YuMOVE, VAHDAM® India, Goodwin, Great Eastern Sun Trading Company, Inc., Andersen Corporation, and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH! As always, we've curated some must reads, watches and listens for this edition of #CircularEconomyMonth, including some *tricks* to slash your trash next Halloween... because there's nothing scarier than WASTE!

October is Circular Economy Month, and this week (October 21-27) marks Waste Reduction Week—a perfect time to focus on sustainable practices in our everyday lives! A recent article from KPMG highlights the pivotal role of sustainable practices in paving the way for a circular economy, particularly in the consumer goods and retail sectors. The insights shared underscore how businesses can innovate and implement strategies that not only reduce waste but also create lasting value. As we reflect on our consumption habits this week, it’s inspiring to see how companies are stepping up to adopt circular principles. From optimizing supply chains to enhancing product lifecycle management, every effort counts towards a more sustainable future. Read more in the article below 🌍🌿☀️ #CircularEconomy #WasteReductionWeek #Sustainability #RetailInnovation