John Sterman
DIRECTOR, MIT System Dynamics Group

This year's MIT Sustainability Summit morning keynote will delivered by Rick Ridgeway, VP of Environmental Affairs at Patagonia. Rick will discuss Patagonia's work to reduce the environmental and social impact of apparel and footwear products around the world. He will speak about the company's role as a founding member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition as well as discuss Patagonia's Common Threads Initiative, which aims to push consumers to reduce, repair, reuse, and as a last resort, recycle goods and products. We invite you to join us to learn more about how Patagonia is taking action toward a more sustainable future.

Rick Ridgeway
VICE PRESIDENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS, Patagonia

This panel will explore the feasibility of widespread adoption of green products within various industries (primarily targeting consumer-facing industries). We will attempt to understand who the key stakeholders are in encouraging this shift towards green products and what the different roles / levels of interaction are currently between consumers, businesses, non-profits and governments / regulatory bodies.

Jon Dettling
MANAGING DIRECTOR, United States, Quantis

Michael Dupee
VICE PRESIDENT, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters

Mark T. Petruzzi
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF OUTREACH AND STRATEGIC RELATIONS, Green Seal

Rick Ridgeway
VICE PRESIDENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS, Patagonia

Land conservation ensures that multiple public values endure on any particular property or region. This is especially true in urban settings, where land is at a premium and the needs of the public are more immediate; livability, access to green space, public safety, and urban vitality are deeply intertwined. This panel is convened by the Trust for Public Land, a leader in land conservation and livable communities especially in urban environments. The panel will highlight how local groups are creating “triple bottom line” open spaces to meet social, economic, and environmental goals.

Margaret Dyson
DIRECTOR OF HISTORIC PARKS, Muddy River Restoration Project

William "Buzz" Constable
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, A. W. Perry, Inc.

Kevin Essington
STATE DIRECTOR, Trust for Public Land

Glynn Llloyd
CO-FOUNDER, City Growers

One popular way to promote sustainable behavior is by preferential investment in companies that demonstrate desirable values. Nonetheless, the total amount of money invested in funds of this character is vanishingly small compared to the total value of the markets. This panel will cast a critical eye on this venue of action, asking questions about the different available models, strategies for mainstreaming these values, and any effects that can be seen in resource use, environmental impact, labor rules, etc. due to the models. Are these effects changes that would not have happened without such investment?

Katie Grace
PROGRAM MANAGER, Initiative for Responsible Investment, Harvard Kennedy School

Lisa Hiserodt
PROGRAM DIRECTOR, Leaders in Energy Efficiency Financing, Sustainable Endowments Institute

Rebecca Levanthal
DIRECTOR, Business Development Team, Social Finance

Annie White
MANAGER, Research Products, Sustainalytics

This year's MIT Sustainability Summit afternoon keynote will be delivered by Katherine Gajewski, Director of the Mayor's Office of Sustainability for the City of Philadelphia. She will speak about her office's efforts to implement the ambitious and far-reaching Greenworks Philadelphia plan, which targets improvements in energy efficiency, air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, green infrastructure, and green economy jobs, among others. She will speak about successes and challenges both in achieving the goals of the plan and in developing new relationships with stakeholders both inside and outside of government necessary for the plan to be successful.

Katherine Gajewski
DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, City of Philadelphia

Our global economy is linked together by phenomenally large and complex multi-modal logistics chains, moving raw materials, finished products, and waste around the world with astounding reliability, speed, and environmental impact. In the United States, new models of delivery are bringing the near-instant gratification of brick-and-mortar shopping to the convenience of online retail. As consumers increasingly demand sustainable products and practices, how are manufacturers and retailers (both brick & mortar and online) altering their logistics operations in response while maintaining the service levels their customers expect? What roles do transport and supply chain logistics play in a sustainable future? And what role can sustainability play in transport and supply chain logistics decisions?

Daniel Aronson
FOUNDER, SustainabilityOS

Edgar Blanco
RESEARCH DIRECTOR, MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics

Mark Buckley
VICE PRESIDENT, Environmental Affairs, Staples, Inc.

Jim Bruce
VICE PRESIDENT, UPS Corporate Public Affairs

As is commonly cited, the world has reached an urbanization tipping point. While cities take up approximately 2% of landmass worldwide they represent over half of global population, two-thirds of the world's energy usage, and over 70% of the world's carbon emissions. Due to these impacts and the on-the-ground experience of climate change, city leaders are leading the world to a more sustainable future. While national governments have been slow to navigate the difficulties of climate change politics, urban innovators form the public, academic, and private sectors are making material progress. In addition to bold new ideas, however, sustainable change at the urban scale requires innovative partnerships between agencies and actors. During this session, attendees will hear from both thinkers and doers at a variety of scales who have developed creative solutions to pressing sustainability challenges while utilizing innovative partnerships to achieve their success.

Katherine Gajewski
DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, City of Philadelphia

Caroline Howe
DIRECTOR, Civic Consumption Program, Groundswell

Nigel Jacob
CO-CHAIR, Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics

Christoph Reinhart
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN BUILDING TECHNOLOGY, MIT

In the face of weakening international resolve for traditional top-down approaches to great global sustainability challenges such as climate change, bottom-up voluntary commitments may represent an increasingly important mode for stimulating action. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) held in June 2012, for example, generated by some counts over $600 billion in new commitments toward sustainability, from governments, private sector, civil society and development banks. Other venues such as the Major Economies Forum have promise to stimulate real action on climate change by the world’s largest emitters. Panelists will discuss some of the major voluntary commitment models, outcomes of Rio+20, as well as mechanisms to track and generate more progress from all actors.

David Berry
PARTNER, Flagship Ventures, Inc.

Jacob Scherr
DIRECTOR, Global Strategy and Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council

Henrik Selin
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, Department of International Relations, Boston University

With the success of businesses such as Netflix and Zipcar the business model for collaborative consumption – organized systems of lending, sharing, bartering, and swapping instead of direct purchase - has been proven successful, but what other opportunities for application may be out there? This panel discusses the collaborative consumption movement, and features speakers utilizing this model to drive value to their customers while simultaneously maximizing the utility of both durable and less-tangible goods. Additionally, this panel presents a special focus on the challenges of establishing a new business within the collaborative consumption area, including experiences from our panelists, and the techniques they used to overcome those challenges.

Luka Carfagna
SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT, Boston College

Ryan C. C. Chin
MANAGING DIRECTOR AND RESEARCH SCIENTIST, MIT City Science Initiative

Mark Chase
PARKING AND TRANSPORTATION DEMAND CONSULTANT, Livable Streets Alliance

Antje Danielson
CO-FOUNDER, Zipcar, Inc.

Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) is in the process of implementing a ban on commercial and institutional entities sending food waste to landfills. There are several benefit on the landfills and farming industry by the implementation of this ban, but there are needs to be able to make this program work properly. The objective of this panel is to focus on the facts and challenges of implementing this waste ban as well as the steps being taken to create a "closed loop food waste management system" in Massachusetts.

John Fischer
BRANCH CHIEF, Waste Planning and Commercial Waste Reduction, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP)

Zoë Neale
DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, Save That Stuff, Inc.

Sabrina Pashtan
SUSTAINABILITY COORDINATOR, Boston University Dining Services

David Pierotti
GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS SPECIALIST, Harvest Power

For every new LEED platinum office building and net zero energy house, there are hundreds or thousands of fifteen, fifty, and hundred year old buildings that make up a vast majority of built space in cities. No sustainable future, therefore, can be achieved without dealing with this built stock of energy guzzlers. This panel features the new models for attacking this problem.

Richard J. Costello
PRESIDENT, Acela Energy group

Joseph P. DeManche
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, Engineering and Operations, Ameresco, Inc.

Bernard Lynch
CITY MANAGER, City of Lowell

Harvey Michaels
DIRECTOR, MIT Energy Efficiency Strategy Project

Gabe Shapiro
VICE PRESIDENT OF OUTREACH PROGRAMS, Next Step Living, Inc.

In popular discussions of sustainability, personal environmental footprints are often targeted for reduction. But is this really the best venue to address our society’s resource addiction? And if it is, what types of changes can actually make the proverbial difference? In this panel, we engage experts in the environmental impacts of various activities of daily life to discuss and debate the relative impacts of changing diet, alternative working patterns, responsible product consumption, purchasing offsets, and others.

Chris Durkin
DIRECTOR OF MEMBERSHIP AND COMMUNITY RELATIONS, Harvest Co-op Market

Amanda Graham
DIRECTOR, MIT Energy Initiative Education Office

Susan Hunt Stevens
FOUNDER/CEO, Practically Green, Inc.

Sharon Wall
REGIONAL COMMISSIONER, FAS New England Region

James Balog
ACCLAIMED PHOTOGRAPHER AND FOUNDER, the Extreme Ice Survey

BioLite develops and manufactures advanced energy products that make cooking with wood as clean safe and easy as modern fuels while also providing electricity to charge cell phones and LED lights off-grid. We feel a strong sense of responsibility not just to develop products that work well but also to create businesses that make a positive contribution to the global community.

New Economy @ MIT, in partnership with the New Economics Institute, is organizing a day-long workshop and hackathon to create practical tools and projects for advancing more sustainable and fair economic models in our communities.

Do you have an idea for a project that could transform how we produce, consume, or share together? Are you working to build the new economy in your neighborhood and in need of tools (apps, mapping tools, software tools, visualizations, etc...) in order to solve a problem you're facing or take your work to the next level?

Are you a programmer, developer, designer, engineer or creative maker interested in applying your know-how to the kinds of challenges facing community groups, city planners, and MIT grad students working to build more sustainable and fair economies on our campus, in our neighborhoods and cities?

Then this is for you!

The Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF) is a leader in the creation of preferred futures. This workshop will guide participants through futures methods and concepts, using our scenarios and forecasts in issues like vulnerability, food security and access, geoengineering, and others. An interactive group exercise will challenge your foresight capabilities and help you consider how your innovations, products, and organizations can contribute to and thrive within alternative futures of sustainability in 2030.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will role-play in a sustainability-focused simulated negotiation, The Cup Game. Participants will assume the roles of representatives of organizations negotiating to increase the sustainability of their value chain. Specifically, this value chain seeks a more productive end of life for used paper coffee cups. However, individual business within this supply chain have interests that might not be easily included in the agreement for the proposed changes.

Our food philosophy is driven by simplicity. I’d rather have you shocked by how delicious our turnip soup tastes than impress you with an exotic ingredient or fancy technique or flowery menu description. This workshop will focus on sustainable cooking and food sourcing in the Boston area.

New Economy @ MIT, in partnership with the New Economics Institute, is organizing a day-long workshop and hackathon to create practical tools and projects for advancing more sustainable and fair economic models in our communities.

Do you have an idea for a project that could transform how we produce, consume, or share together? Are you working to build the new economy in your neighborhood and in need of tools (apps, mapping tools, software tools, visualizations, etc...) in order to solve a problem you're facing or take your work to the next level?

Are you a programmer, developer, designer, engineer or creative maker interested in applying your know-how to the kinds of challenges facing community groups, city planners, and MIT grad students working to build more sustainable and fair economies on our campus, in our neighborhoods and cities?

Then this is for you!

Essmart bridges the gap between essential technology manufacturers and households that need their products by creating a marketplace for these products in local retail shops. We demonstrate a catalogue of products at the community level, distribute to local retail shops, and facilitate manufacturers’ warranties. We started operations in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, India, and we invite you to join us as we deliver the goods.

The flourishing of human and other life on earth forever. Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? It is a possibility that catches our attention, and inspires us amid the intense challenges of unsustainability in our economy and society. And at the same time, it makes us uneasy, like “is that really possible? How can we possibly get there?” What is the pathway? We might feel particularly skeptical if we’re in the muck as innovators and advocates, trying to convince people to “get on the bus” and facing all kinds of resistance and defense of the status quo.

We’ve got some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that the doubt, resistance and defensiveness we encounter are our own fault. As much as we might think the enemy is a "they" – the 1%, the fossil fuel companies, the politicians, the climate deniers – we can be our own worst enemy. When people think of us as “environmental whackos” it may be… because we are! We lunge forward with our passion and dedication and we tumble into pitfalls of activism – self-righteousness, ideology, blame, and despair. How’s that for flourishing? The good news is that we think there are pathways around those pitfalls. These are habits of living, speaking, relating, organizing, and innovating that massively increase our effectiveness, take us beyond preaching and whining to “the choir,” and allow us to have a lot of fun in the process. But we’ve got to figure them out together.

So this is a conversation. It is hosted by two young advocates for sustainability who are willing to poke fun at themselves, and inviting others to join in the fun. We’ll share the pitfalls and pathways we’ve identified, share our stories, and invite you to share yours. We believe the result of this conversation can be profound - a transformation of the sustainability movement, making it a context for the flourishing of our lives on the way to the flourishing of all life.

Workshop to solve specific problems around encouraging peers to change behavior in common locations like dorms, offices, etc. Further details to be announced.

The existing suite of mobility services still presents a car-dominant face. In this workshop you will be asked to propose a new mobility service that would most decrease carbon dioxide, traffic or make moving as fun as an amusement park ride in Boston or your own city. We will then hone the ideas to consider financing issues, mental models that might get in the way of implementation and synergistic effects this set of new solutions might have if deployed together. To kick the session off you will learn about three transportation projects as well as receive a short overview of today's mobility ecosystem. These are 10^5, a prize for an open-interfaces and modular vehicle, Mobi, a start-up working to create a mesh network of modes and a new research group looking at the adaptive nature of transportation and energy infrastructure. All backgrounds are encouraged to participate.