Sustainability Reporting

Preface

My interest in sustainability reporting comes from being witness to the many detrimental effects of human activity on the natural world. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s on the island of Okinawa, Japan, I spent a lot of time with my family on some of the most beautiful and pristine beaches in the world. Plastic bottles and bags did not exist on the beaches of Okinawa; that has changed. In 2013, on less than a mile of an Okinawan beach, 134 pounds of washed-up trash were ­collected.1 There is considerable plastic debris floating currently in the Pacific Ocean. Recent scientific research on 192 coastal countries found that in 2010, between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic entered the oceans.2 This plastic does not ...