This past weekend I attended the Net Impact Conference in Philly with seventeen others from BU. It's an annual event that draws 2,400 MBAs and professionals from across the world to discuss issues relating to environmental and social sustainability in business. My goal was to meet lots of people from L.A. and people who are currently in a sustainability type of role. I learned a lot of fun stats while I was there:

• Wal-Mart is ranked the #25 GDP in the world. (And probably the only one that's not shrinking at this moment). Eight cents of every dollar that goes to any cash register in the U.S. goes to a Wal-Mart cashier.
• It takes 142L of water to make one liter of Starbucks Latte.
• It takes 1.77L of water to make one liter of Coke, and their goal is to shrink it down to a 1:1 ratio.
• The Bank of America "Keep the Change" campaign was conceived by an industrial design firm that's successfully applied its creative process and "design thinking" to addressing business and societal problems. They're now working on a way to make energy efficiency "sexy" for the Dept. of Energy.
• 50 corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports were published in 1992. In 2007, there were 2300. That's a 153x increase in fifteen years.
• In 2006, 2,600 "green" products were launched. In 2007, there were 6,000.
• Current demand for consumption (for raw materials to make food and goods, attributed mostly to developed countries - aka you and I) is 1.25 times what the planet can sustain in the long term. If developing nations reach the same level, we would be consuming 11 times what the planet can sustainably provide.
  
  Now tell me again why no one is hiring for CSR jobs?