Food Recovery Network founder and Executive Director Ben Simon may only be a senior at the University of Maryland, but he is already making a major impact in the field of food waste. Simon started the program in 2011 after noticing that food was going to waste at the end of every day at Maryland’s campus dining halls. Simon wanted to recover this food and provide it for the needy throughout the Washington, D.C., region. The program was a success from day one, and it has now recovered 165,000+ pounds of food at 23 college campuses across the country.

“Food waste is one of the biggest environmental issues,” Simon says. “A lot of people don’t know this, but food is America’s #1 waste stream. Forty percent of the food in America ends up landfills.”

Founded in 2004 by Mark W. McElroy, the Center for Sustainable Organizations is a nonprofit specializing in context-based sustainability that conducts research, develops, trains and consults for, and with, companies around the world interested in improving the sustainability performance of their operations. Context-based sustainability is an approach for measuring, managing and reporting the sustainability performance of organizations that takes contextually relevant social, economic and environmental limits and thresholds explicitly into account.

“Our mission is to improve the quality of sustainability management in business and commerce,” McElroy explains. “We offer assistance to help companies who are interested in taking their practices to the next level.”

The Center for Health, Environment & Justice is an organization that works to prevent harm from toxic chemicals in homes and schools, often in communities directly affected by industrial chemical facilities, plants and incinerators. Toxic chemicals like bisphenol-A, phthalates and PVC are known to cause asthma, cancer, development disabilities and more, and they are found in so many everyday products. CHEJ was founded to empower communities across the country that are concerned about toxics issues. Mike Schade has helped CHEJ identify and assist more than 11,000 cities and towns across the country.

“[CHEJ] is not a traditionally environmental organization,†Schade explains. “We work at the intersection of environment and public health to prevent harm from chemicals that are linked to serious diseases.â€

Autodesk‘s mission is to help people imagine design and create a better world. The company is a leader in 3D design technology, helping engineers, architects and designers bring their designs to life. With 100 locations in 42 countries — each staffing approximately 7,500 employees — Autodesk’s carbon footprint is a major issue. Ben Thompson, the brand’s Sustainable Business Program Manager, has spearheaded the company’s longterm greenhouse gas reduction target. But launching toward an 85% greenhouse gas reduction by 2050 is quite the task.

“We have an annual target of about 4% reduction year on year,” Thompson says of the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. “As a result, we are very focused on how we can save our environmental impacts and reduce carbon. We work with our facilities managers to try to examine what the best opportunities for savings are given the unique operating scenarios of each location.”