A new era of sustainability is emerging, focused on operational execution, infrastructure, and the organizational authority to build both. It’s a lot harder than the old days of voluntary commitments, aspirational targets and PR strategies.
In dozens of conversations in recent months, corporate sustainability leaders — whether they work in finance, manufacturing, logistics, real estate, or consumer goods — tell me the work is intensifying, even if the communications around it are not.
They are zeroing in less on what they intend to do and more on how, specifically, to do it. The questions, and work to be done to answer them, have gotten harder and more concrete: Which battery storage configuration is needed for our footprint? How do we get procurement and engineering to agree on AI governance? Where does circularity sit in the org chart when it stops being a pilot and starts being a regulatory requirement?
Three forces are driving this shift: AI, energy demand and circularity compliance. They are also the through lines we’ll be going deeper on during Trellis Impact 26 starting tomorrow and running through Thursday at the Moscone West in San Francisco. I’ll explore all, and point out relevant event sessions, too.
Will you be there? Come find me and tell me if you agree or (even better) disagree with my take.
AI is starting to change sustainability in real ways
The AI boom is behind an explosion in data center energy consumption as well as big investment in new ways to fuel it: grid hardware, energy management software, batteries and next-generation geothermal. While this energy demand is a complicated variable for companies that spent years building science-based targets, it is spurring unprecedented financial support.
AI is also enabling sophisticated tools that sustainability teams are beginning to deploy in earnest. Think AI-assisted lifecycle assessment, automated Scope 3 data collection, satellite-based deforestation monitoring and investor-grade disclosure analysis.
At Okta, a cybersecurity company, a team of sustainability, engineering, technology, and global operations staffers is rolling out AI tools that show which models for tasks like writing, coding, or analysis are most energy efficient.
The cross-functional team “treats sustainability criteria as a design input for technology decisions rather than a reporting obligation attached afterward,” Alison Colwell, Okta’s Senior Director of Sustainability & Responsible Technology, told me.
On the investor side, financial giants like Goldman Sachs and sustainable investment specialists like Parnassus Investments are using AI to surface material risks buried across mandatory filings and voluntary ESG reports at a scale and level of rigor that was previously impossible.
You can see Laura Sennett, from Goldman Sachs’s Sustainable Investing Group, and Marcy McCullaugh, Sustainability Research Director at Parnassus, at the How AI is changing investor analysis session at Trellis Impact 26 tomorrow June 23.
Energy has become a strategic bottleneck
In many markets, renewable energy has finally become attractive because it’s the fastest available path to new capacity. That may prove more durable than any policy mandate.
The C-suite is now making decisions about battery storage, distributed energy resources, power purchase agreements and on-site generation on speed-to-power logic as much as emissions logic because grid interconnection timelines stretch three years or more in many markets.
Steelmaker Nucor and data center operator Aligned have invested in large-scale on-site battery storage — not primarily as a climate play but because getting reliable power quickly demanded it.
Maersk and Bloom Energy, meanwhile, are turning to microgrids, distributed generation, and flexible on-site infrastructure as faster options. Check out Maersk Head of Energy Procurement Carlo Bertani and Bloom Energy’s Kaushal Biligiri, Senior Energy Transition Champion, during the Near-Term Solutions for a Constrained Grid session at Trellis Impact 26 on Wednesday June 24.
Circularity is a regulatory reality (not just a voluntary philosophy)
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation arrived faster than most corporate sustainability teams anticipated.
Packaging regulations across states including Colorado, Maine, and Oregon, where enforcement carrying penalties of up to $25,000 per day, took effect last year. Registration for California’s textile EPR program begins next month. There’s even growing momentum toward a national circularity framework.
The focus has shifted to harder operational questions, like how do you build a circular fiber supply chain at scale? How do you synchronize supply and demand for recovered electronics? How do you operationalize reverse logistics so that the cost of collecting, sorting and reprocessing materials doesn’t exceed the value recovered?
Data center hardware offers a window into how this is taking shape. iFixit, a longtime advocate for right-to-repair policy, is extending the useful life of devices through open-source repair guides that keep hardware in service longer. Molg is building robotic microfactories to disassemble servers that have reached their “end of life” into components, and recover far more value than conventional recycling allows. “We’re energized by this generational moment,” Rob Lawson-Shanks, Molg’s CEO, told me, where advances in AI and robotics are “converging into a massive opportunity to reshape circular infrastructure” — and eventually scale it “beyond data centers to all electronics.”
Meet Lawson-Shanks and iFixit sustainability director Elizabeth Chamberlain at the Next Frontier of Circularity in Data Centers session at Trellis Impact 26 on Wednesday June 24.