First German Sustainability Day!!

Hi everyone! Sorry, after a long absence, I'm writing again.

I was invited to the German Sustainability Day which took place yesterday. All in all it was a good symposium, but I enjoyed the dinner event waaaay more!

The day started with some opening comments from some high-level politicians and then some prizes were given to the most sustainable companies. Here are some of the winners:

• BASF - most sustainable company... BASF does chemical stuff
  
• Henkel - most sustainable brand... they do non-food consumer goods and chemical stuff
  
• Wuppertal - most sustainable city (I work there, yeaay!)
  
• Lifetime achievement award - Klaus Töpfer (this is like the third time I'm seeing him live this year, he's just everywhere!)... if you don't know who he is, you should find out. He was the ex UNEP executive director and was the German environmental minister
  
• Special Achievement Award - HRH The Prince of Wales (Prince Charles)... I didn't know he spoke a bit of German :-). He's doing a lot for the environmental cause, especially rainforests.
  
• Humanitarian Award - Annie Lennox... I never really took notice of her, but she's really awesome and energetic!
  

The consulting company A.T. Kearney did the awarding of companies. I might have chosen different winners, but I think all the winners deserved their wins.

Uhm, I forgot some of the other winners and I can't find it on the internet yet. Some of the things I learnt and found very interesting:

• Annie Lennox' campaign SING (check it out now!) is a very causeworthy campaign for fighting HIV/AIDS especially in relation to women and children. She's very inspiring! Click here to find out how you can also help.
  
• Steinbeis paper company recycles paper and produces recycled paper exclusively. They were - I think - the smallest amongst the nominated companies
  
• Maria Mena (spontaneously?) did 3 songs in this small hall at 1 AM in the morning. No one really knew her but I've been listening to her songs a LOT in the last couple of months, so I was in the first row and I didn't even have to fight for it :-). Even got to talk to her for like half a minute backstage :-)
  
• Prof. Schellnhuber, a climate scientist, who's quite famous in the German sustainability scene (and who also worked a lot on the UN IPCC report) works closely with the UK and even with Prince Charles. Through the IPCC he's a Nobel prize winner. Very impressive person, I like his no-nonsense approach.
• Henkel, the German non-food consumer goods company, has some really cool initiatives and sustainability is part of the "company DNA". I didn't know this, since they don't commercialise it too much - which makes them even more sympatethic :-).

They even made a sustainability report on the whole event and compensated the CO2 emissions. A lot of the lighting in the dinner hall was with LEDs (these are even more efficient than conventional energy-efficient CFL lamps).

The dinner event was awesome, the food was awesome and the girl I took along was really cool. A really awesome night!!