Featured Work

Allbirds designs and produces comfortable shoes with natural materials. Allbirds engaged Clean Agency to support them in their commitment to sustainability using Life Cycle Assessments thinking and tools for their supply chain. This internal tool, mentioned in Forbes, allows the brand to analyze scenarios and estimate their product impacts based on material blends, manufacturing processes, manufacturing location and so on to enable quick and sustainable decision making throughout their supply chain. Clean supported in raw data collection, verification and developed the multi-user accessible LCA based product optimization tool and dashboard.

“Clean Agency leveraged their expertise to help us create an LCA tool fit for our business and desired outcomes.”
– Hana Kajimura, Sustainability Manager, Allbirds

Cisco Systems engaged Clean Agency to conduct a Supply Chain Sustainability workshop in their headquarters.  The project was a guided workshop to cultivate and support employee engagement and target setting around specific supply chain sustainability issues.

Clean Agency build a plan to support Cisco’s supply chain goals to increase transparency and promote real time continuous improvement. The workshop enabled employees to comprehend and confront the depth of relevant sustainability issues and set realistic targets to achieve each year. The successful workshop conducted in San Jose is expected to be modeled across the globe in Cisco’s various divisions to promote and incorporate the culture of sustainability and continuous improvement.

Clean has worked with the company for over four years on many projects. These include global sustainable fish sourcing, carbon reduction around LED lighting program,supply chain impacts and support for suppliers around the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project).

Caesars Entertainment has over 50 casinos in 6 countries. Their corporate structure is continuing to improve its global environmental impacts and reports yearly  GRI CSR report.. Clean has also participated in a cross industry brainstorm around sustainability in Las Vegas with various casino brands. Caesars included Clean in their women minority certified program (WBENC).

Recently, we had the opportunity to work with ettitude, a sustainable lifestyle brand that specializes in organic bamboo bedding. We conducted a cradle to gate LCA, where we compared their carbon and water footprint to published results on cotton fabric. The results were impressive.

• An ettitude sheet set saves at 52% in GHG emissions over a conventional cotton sheet set; the savings is equivalent to charging 3,000 smart phones, or 3 gallons of gasoline.
• In addition, an ettitude sheet set contributes up to 500X less in water depletion than a conventional cotton sheet set, which is equivalent to over 500 showers.

As an ongoing effort to improve the recyclability of their packaging, Frito Lay engaged Clean to research a variety of end-of-life options to significantly decrease the amount of their chip packaging going to landfill. The approach was to identify key partnerships in U.S. regions to test a closed loop system. Some research challenges were timing toward legislation, how far can a program reach across the country and how good is the integrity of the material stream. The company was able to take our research and begin to roll out some partnerships with regional EOL facilities.

Clean Agency conducted Life Cycle Assessments to measure the “before & after” environmental impacts of two recent packaging changes to Gerber products. We engaged a cross-functional team to gather data for the assessments, calculated the before and after results, and identified, tested and recommended environmental improvement strategies. For one of these packaging transitions, Clean also conducted an indepth recyclability study to evaluate the recyclability of the package and recommend messaging in conformity with the requirements of the Federal Trade Commission’s green guides.

In phase II of this work, Clean distilled the results of these assessments into sustainability communications guidance materials for use by Gerber’s consumer- and customer-facing employees when describing the packaging transitions.

LA Metro sought to develop green acquisitions policy and framework in order to guide future purchases of services and products in as socially, ethically and responsible a manner as possible. Clean interviewed internal stakeholders analyzed LA Metro’s current programs and worked with collaborators to develop a baseline assessment of green acquisitions and provide recommendations for future improvements. The results of these activities brought forth relevant concepts to this project, including public agencies’ staffing and workload pressures related to sustainability, as well as providing relevant information to the community and external stakeholders.

As part of this effort, Clean also assisted in developing workshops with internal stakeholders and developing presentations for external stakeholders in order to communicate progress. In addition, Clean provided research and subject matter expertise in professional services, construction, peer examples, and best practices.

Nomacorc and Clean Agency established their relationship in 2011, the year of Nomacorc’s inaugural sustainability report. Clean has conducted review and external assurance for the wine closure maker’s sustainability reports from its inception and the relationship continues to be strong.

The sustainability reports follow the GRI reporting format and most recently the 2014 report was upgraded to GRI G4. Clean Agency has also actively engaged in Nomacorc’s stakeholder activities around issues of sustainability. Based on our recommendations in the previous years, it is noteworthy that Nomacorc LLC has laid out goals to consistently improve upon and implement most of our recommendations, by which their data collection process, sustainability target setting and stakeholder engagement continues to grow stronger every year.

Clean has also engaged with Nomacorc in reviewing the company’s first full Life Cycle Assessment Study for their Classic and Classic+ closures.

Pelican Products is an American multinational company that designs and manufactures portable lighting systems, temperature-controlled packaging and protective cases. Their products are used in many industries including military, law enforcement, fire safety, and consumer entertainment.

Working with Pelican Sr. Management, Clean assisted Pelican in developing a sustainability strategy in line with United Nations Sustainability Development Goals. Clean outlined sustainability messaging, including the development of a sustainability website, as well as copy for the public.

The Port of Los Angeles (the Port) operates and supports a wide variety of sustainability programs, with varying functions and objectives. The Port’s Environmental Management Division engaged Clean to hold a series of strategic sustainability planning workshops, with the intent of developing a holistic and comprehensive planning framework to codify existing sustainability programs and to guide future efforts in the near- and longterms.

In the first workshop, Clean presented research on the status of sustainability reporting and planning among competing global ports, similar organizations, and the Port’s own customers. Based on best practices extracted from this research combined with our deep knowledge of the Port’s sustainability experiences, our team developed a sustainability planning template for the Port. Subsequent workshops were spent working with internal teams to fill in this template by identifying key areas of sustainability on which to focus future efforts, brainstorming sustainability objectives and goals, defining sustainability actions to pursue, and isolating metrics with which to measure success.

Reformation engaged Clean Agency to support the budding fashion brand’s pioneering efforts in quantifying and communicating their product impacts.

Clean engaged in the review and verification of data collection and methodology based on Life Cycle thinking. The  methodology modeled included water use and carbon emissions from growing/manufacturing fiber, dyeing process, manufacturing fabric, transportation and packaging. The result of background data collection and synthesis was put together into a consumer facing snapshot called RefScale. Through this snapshot a consumer can compare the water use and carbon emissions of a Reformation product with respect to a comparable “industry standard” product that would typically be made of less sustainable material and shipped from China.

Reformation seeks to continuously improve upon their RefScale model to create a robust industry benchmark for quantifying apparel product impacts. RefScale was released on Earth Day 2015 and Clean continues to support Reformation in creating a benchmark in sustainable fashion.