Circular Economy incubator launches the second edition

Could wood become the material of choice to build the cities of tomorrow? The further we move into the 2020s, the more pressing this question becomes. The answer could never be as simple as a yes or a no – steel is here to stay and thankfully so with its insurmountable benefits, and neither is concrete going anywhere.  Yet side-by-side, the environmental and sustainability agenda continues to chug along, with governments actively pursuing their goals of net-zero emissions and efficient resource usage, potentially making wood a government mandated material.  The question also develops into how well timber products and steel framing (light gauge or structural) could complement each other at a mass scale, or, can they do so at all? 

Welcome to our blog series on the people behind Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at Cisco. Each blog in this series will highlight a different Cisco employee who works closely with CSR initiatives across the company. Enabling an inclusive future for all requires that we care for the planet we all share and do our part to address global challenges. A key tenet of this is enabling a circular economy, moving from a linear economy where products are developed with the expectation of a single use, to a circular model of resource conservation, use, and reuse. Katie Schindall is at the forefront of this work as the Director of Circular Economy at Cisco, leading her team and partnering with company-wide stakeholders to enable a circular economy across Cisco. She has a Master of Environmental Management and an MBA coupled with diverse experience across corporate sustainability.  

More than a year since the emergence of COVID-19, the pandemic continues to devastate lives and economies. There is hope in vaccination programmes, but we have a long way to go. Our sympathies lie with those struggling with physical and mental health, grief and financial problems.
We must overcome this pandemic, for all of our sakes. But as we do so, we must understand that COVID-19 is not something we can fix, forget and return to normal.

In mid-April, nearly 150 local environmentalists marched to the gates of Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining facility in upstate New York, in a last-ditch effort to block its expansion. Their objection: that the creation of the cryptocurrency, an energy-intensive process in which computers compete to solve mathematical puzzles, may harm efforts to limit global warming. Three days later, the planning board in the small town of Torrey voted 4-1 to allow Greenidge Generation to more than double the number of machines it has mining bitcoin.