In the year 2000, the United Nations brought together a group of CEOs to hash out how the global business community could become a force for environmental sustainability. The result was the UN Global Compact, a framework designed to guide companies in their efforts to lessen their impact on the earth’s ecosystem. Today the UN Global Compact has 13,000 corporate participants, all of which are making concrete strides toward averting what many scientists believe could become the defining crisis of our age if unchecked. The following five organizations exemplify how the private sector can, in fact, do its part to make the world a cleaner, safer place. 1. Greenstone Plus Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” The team at Greenstone certainly took this maxim to heart. The company produces a software platform that allows its clients to collect various forms of data on carbon emissions, energy usage, waste, water, and fugitive gasses to bring them in line with international standards. Greenstone also supplements its software solution with unlimited human support to ensure that real improvement begins where measurement ends. 2. Goodera Goodera is an international company with a global purpose—to allow users to collect and analyze environmental inputs, regardless of what language they were originally reported in. The platform’s interface then provides unified reporting to all stakeholders to help them reduce their environmental impact while actually improving their profitability. Goodera was founded on the idea that the best way for companies to grow is to foster teams of people who know their efforts are helping make the world a better place, and it continues to operate on that basis. 3. SupplyShift It is often the most seemingly mundane details that create the biggest impact. SupplyShift understands this, which is why it focuses its efforts on helping companies manage and optimize their supply chains. Co-founders Alex Gershenson and Jamie Barsimantov saw that making it possible for companies to consolidate all of the information about their supply chains in one place would allow them to make decisions about them that were as responsible and productive as possible. 4. TerraCycle We are smothering our planet in trash. While more people are recycling than ever before, current methods still fall far short of what is necessary. Fortunately, TerraCycle has an ingenious solution to this serious problem. The organization has developed a process to recycle materials that until now have been considered “non-recyclable,” from ballpoint pens to coffee pods to cigarette butts. 5. Pernod Ricard Pernod Ricard, one of the world’s largest spirits companies, has sustainability at its heart. Founder Paul Ricard loved the sea and spent much of his free time sailing. It was this love that led to him to found the Paul Ricard Oceanographic Institute more than 50 years ago, Ricard’s legacy lives on through the actions of the company he founded. Over the last decade alone, the company has reduced its water consumption per liter of alcohol by 20%, its carbon emissions by 30% per unit of production and waste from 10,253 tons to a total of 748 tons to landfill. It has also publicly announced it will be transforming every element of its operations to fully support United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.