2023 winners of World Changing Ideas

I’ve been following www.fastcompany.com’s World Changing Ideas Awards for a couple of years and this year’s winners had so many across-the-board topics that it made it difficult to pick out which ones to center on for this column. For the complete list, check out the website for an interesting read.

Most innovative? My vote was for Dole who, partnering with L&C New York and Ananas Anam, found a new use for its discarded pineapple leaves: vegan leather. This earned them the award in the Marketing and PR category.

Each ton of harvested pineapples generates three tons of leaves that go to waste. In 2020, New York creative agency L&C partnered with food giant Dole to address this problem. Together with marketing firm Peppercomm, they found a solution in Ananas Anam, the company created by textile entrepreneur Carmen Hijosa to commercialize her patented process for turning fibrous pineapple leaves into a vegan leather called Piñatex.

Ananas Anam (ananas Spanish for pineapple) had been operating for seven years and needed more leaves. The partnership, made official in 2021, was launched with an educational film that captured both the problem and the Piñatex solution and garnered more than 1.7 billion impressions.

Piñatex has been used by 1,000 brands worldwide, including Hugo Boss, H&M, and Nike (with its Happy Pineapple shoe collection). In addition, pineapple farmers have been given a new stream of income, and Dole has reduced its overall fruit waste.

They say, “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” but in the future not all diamonds will be coming out of the ground. Diamonds by Pandora is another winner of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards in the Consumer Products category.

Mining diamonds involves creating large, destructive holes in the earth and then having people do the dangerous job of digging them out. Hence, the commercialization of synthetic diamonds, created from carbon in a lab instead of underground, should be a boon for both the environment and worker safety. Sounds like a total win for both? Not exactly because it will happen only if jewelry companies adopt the new technology.

In 2022, just 10% of diamonds sold were grown in labs. But a new product line by Pandora, the Danish company that’s the third-largest jewelry retailer in the world, could help change that by its determination to feature only lab-grown diamonds. The company’s diamonds are grown by third-party suppliers using only renewable energy and are fitted onto jewelry made with recycled silver and gold, one step in the company’s plan to use recycled metals exclusively by 2025 (the first major jewelry company to make such a commitment). Pandora plans to transition to lab-grown diamonds across all of its products.

The collection’s silver ring, with a 0.15-carat lab-created diamond, retails for $300 but only has about the same amount of embedded emissions as a T-shirt. Its highest-priced item, a $1,950 1-carat lab-created diamond set in a 14-karat solid-gold ring, has fewer emissions than an average pair of jeans. The lab-grown diamonds themselves have just 5% of the carbon footprint of a mined diamond.

The line is designed to offer diamonds at lower price points and jewelry beyond fancy engagement rings. The most important goal, however, is to also show the jewelry industry that there are environmental alternatives to the ways it has traditionally operated.

Another award winner comes from Trane Technologies that designed a unique food cart that will keep street vendors’ produce cool, resulting in the reduction of food waste and boosting profits. And by keeping produce cool, the carts can help reduce the nearly 1 billion metric tons of food that gets discarded every year, much of it winding up in landfills, where the United Nations estimates it contributes 10% of global climate-warming gases as it decomposes.

The carts rely on a canopy that’s made from a film developed by SkyCool Systems. The film reflects sunlight to prevent fresh produce from overheating, passively cooling the area beneath by up to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) and saving food from spoiling and being tossed out before it can be sold.

The company has been testing a pilot program in Kolar, India, which led to a recent order of 300 carts and Trane is now working with the UN to expand adoption of the cooling carts to other locations beyond India.

Another World Changing Ideas Award winner went to New York’s Brooklyn Public Library for its program to provide 500,000 banned books to teens around the U.S. The award was in the Social Justice category.

America has a long history of book bans, ever since a critique of Puritanical government was outlawed in 1637. Prohibitions continued throughout history, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Harry Potter. But the start of this decade ushered in a new era of politically charged book bans, driven by fears over “critical race theory” and transgender rights. 2021 saw the most challenges to books in 20 years, with almost 1,600 separate titles removed from classrooms and library shelves across the country.

In response, last year the Brooklyn Public Library made its entire catalog of 500,000 digital titles available to anyone ages 13 to 21 across the country with its Books Unbanned program.

Under this program, enrollees receive an electronic membership card granting access to the complete digital catalog for free via the library’s website or app — without the need for parental sign-off. Since April 2022, BPL has registered more than 6,000 young people in all 50 states, who’ve checked out 70,000-plus books.

The collection includes frequently banned books, but more generally it’s a resource for all sorts of titles. Most importantly, it’s a move to protect against a new threat to First Amendment rights.

Peg DeMarco

Peg DeMarco is a Morganton resident who writes a weekly features column for The News Herald. Contact her at [email protected].

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