At the risk of showing my age, when I was very young I was fascinated by the man that passed by our house every other week with his horse and cart letting out the cry of “any old iron!” He was a rag and bone man and one of the last of a dying breed that made their living collecting anything that people wanted to get rid of – metal or not. “Put it outside for the rag and bone man” was a familiar refrain in our house.

The rag and bone trade came to my mind towards the end of the first Global Sharing Day, another step forward in the emergence of the “sharing economy”. …

The phrase “In praise of Barclays”, used during this, of all weeks, and with Wimbledon coming to a conclusion, surely elicits only one response: “You cannot be serious!!” Well, no, not exactly serious. In fact, most definitely not serious, because the company’s performance has been nothing short of woeful at best and disastrous at worst. So, why the headline?

I will remodel it: “In praise of Barclays individuals that I know have worked patiently and diligently for over a decade or more to drive change against all the odds, and in praise of the tens of thousands of frontline Barclays staff who are being vilified daily by the media. They have surely felt …

SustainAbility is now in its 25th year and as part of its celebrations launched The Regeneration Roadmap – a look backwards and forwards by some of the brightest folk from the frontline at the successes, failures, hits and misses of 25 years of “sustainability thinking”. From where I stand the glass could be half full or half empty, but what’s more important is “what’s next”? Are we making progress at the rate we need to? How can we accelerate? It’s not that we don’t have …

I write as I begin my life at SustainAbility, at the close of a weekend which saw Cambridge – my home town – hosting WordFest, a wonderful mélange of ideas and people. And if I needed any further convincing of the importance of the work I am about to undertake, then this weekend did the trick.