Executive Summary

For 10 years, Sustainable Industries has researched and provided news and analysis on the latest in sustainable business. Now, with our partner, the Institute for Environmental Entrepreneurship, we are providing an analysis and synthesis of sustainable industry sectors by aggregating sector information in a retrospective context.

If you are tasked with investing, business planning or regulation, this is a powerful source of information you can contract with Sustainable Industries and the Institute for Environmental Entrepreneurship to use. You don't have to reinvent the wheel – we can provide fundamental information on a sustainable industry faster than any other source of its kind. 

Sustainable Industries and the Institute are offering an historical analysis chronicling various green industry sectors from 2003-2012, though an intensive analysis of all Sustainable Industries magazine articles published on that particular sector. With the barrage of sustainability information that can appear as a hodgepodge and not aggregated in any way, new knowledge can be created through this type of analysis and synthesis. Most of what we need to know was already done, but the Institute has consolidated Sustainable Industries’ information in a way that makes sense, provides a rich history, and a context for where the industry is headed.

We started with the attached retrospective focused on the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification, both because there have been many Sustainable Industries articles on it over the years, and because a thorough, independent history of LEED is difficult to find. This sample retrospective seeks to help interested parties understand where LEED came from – as well as where it might go.

Can your sector analysis and projections benefit from knowing the history and evolution of that sector? What sustainable industry sector would you like us to dig deeper on? 

Long-term, we seek to make sense of the mile-wide-and-inch-deep field of sustainability so that it can be more useful. The retrospectives hope to demonstrate that, in the language of the old "X Files," "The answers are out there."