Thirty-five years ago, Milton Friedman wrote a famous article for The New York Times Magazine whose title aptly summed up its main point: "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." Never mind that most companies don't pay the full price for the pollution they create, or the...

Earlier this week, Beacon Power, a company that builds systems to stabilize solar and energy power, declared bankruptcy. The company's Massachusetts plant will continue to operate at full capacity, but its finances will be restructured. This is big news mostly because Beacon Power received $43 million...

Over a decade ago, EPA began developing new regulations to cut dangerous pollution from power plant smokestacks. These plants churn out most of the mercury, acid gas and arsenic pollution in our air, and the new rules will dramatically slash this pollution, saving up to 17,000 lives and preventing...

Recently in Harvard Business Review, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote about "The Big Idea" -- that companies must take the lead by "creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges." Driven by win-win success stories, by a vacuum...

Written by Gwen Ruta, VP of Corporate Partnerships, Environmental Defense Fund and Bob Langert, VP of Corporate Social Responsibility, McDonald's Corporation

Twenty years ago this month, corporate America experienced a paradigm shift. McDonald's announced that it would phase out its iconic Styrofoam clamshell containers, switching to...

The ruckus over Frito-Lay's recent decision to pull some of the compostable bags it uses for SunChips snacks is missing the point. The point is not whether compostable bags are too noisy -- that was the complaint that precipitated the bag redesign -- but whether they really are better for...

Remember when a summer job meant scooping ice cream at the local Dairy Queen? Not anymore. This year, a crop of 51 bright young business students found $350 million worth of business savings over their summer break.

As members of Environmental Defense Fund's Climate Corps, these...

While federal leadership on climate change was AWOL for most of this decade, big business represented an opportunity to cut emissions and bring new technologies to the market now. One of those businesses was BP. My organization, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), worked with BP to test carbon-trading systems...