“Net positive is what I see as the next step in the evolution of corporate responsibility,” says Josh Prigge, founder and CEO of the sustainability consulting firm Sustridge, and host of the Sustainable Nation Podcast.
Before starting his own practice, Prigge directed sustainability and regenerative development for Fetzer Vineyards in Northern California. He helped the winemaker go carbon neutral, become the first Zero Waste certified company in the world in 2014, and get certified as a B Corp in 2015. The vineyard also won an Environmental Leader award last year for their regenerative wastewater treatment system.
Prigge served as a judge for this year’s awards and spoke about moving beyond sustainability at this year’s Environmental Leader & Energy Manager Conference. We sat down with him to find out what net positive means for businesses.
How did the net positive movement emerge?
We started back in the ’80s with corporate philanthropy. A lot of that was PR-driven. In the ’90s that moved to corporate social responsibility, when triple bottom line came about. Companies were taking good works projects and bringing them in-house.
That evolved in the 2000s to corporate sustainable development and corporate sustainability, when companies were realizing that they could create a competitive advantage with a commitment to sustainability. Now basically every Fortune 500 company has a sustainability department.
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