The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

Ask anyone who’s been a CEO, CFO or any other variety of C-suite executive and they’ll tell you the roles today are very different from what they were 20 years ago. Different challenges demand different skills, experiences and aptitudes, and the role of chief sustainability officer is no exception. For one, in most companies the role didn’t exist 20 years ago, and in the past two decades it’s tumbled, twisted and catapulted to a seat at the table.

What started as a nice-to-have, feel-good role for many companies has now, in some cases, become a strategic pillar of their core business endeavors. And the position continues to evolve, shaped by mounting environmental pressures, shifting stakeholder expectations and an increasingly complex political and regulatory landscape.

Acting like chameleons

CSOs, at their core, are masters of resilience. In today’s geopolitical landscape defined by increasing volatility and uncertainty, they adapt to whatever the moment demands like chameleons. When the spotlight calls, they become compelling storytellers, championing their company’s vision. When discretion is needed, they work behind the scenes, quietly building coalitions and forging consensus.

Dave Stangis, a veteran CSO, offered a particularly insightful perspective in Weinreb Group’s 2025 CSO Report: “CSO leadership is like Aikido: It takes the right mix of art and science. Ten years ago, the CSO needed a 50/50 split to establish the position. These days, the demands of the role have shifted to more like 75 percent art and 25 percent science.”

John Davies, president of the Trellis Network, often speaks of the CSO role as chief translation officer, given different functions speak different “languages”: financial executives most often speak in terms of risk mitigation and return on investment, while operations leaders focus on efficiency gains and process improvements and human resources professionals consider talent attraction and retention.

The artful CSO learns to speak all these languages, crafting arguments that resonate with each audience while maintaining consistency in the underlying message. This requires not just analytical skills but emotional intelligence, cultural sensitivity and a deep understanding of organizational dynamics.

The most effective CSOs become organizational anthropologists, studying the formal and informal power structures within their companies to identify the most effective pathways for driving change. But there are easy tricks to get started on this path. For example, Microsoft’s Jim Hanna asks leaders two questions: “What keeps you up at night and what are you incentivized on?”

According to Weinreb Group’s 2025 CSO Report, CSO’s top key attributes are: corporate chameleon aligning with a diverse set of internal and external stakeholders; operating at both the big-picture and general levels; and systems thinking.

Maintaining core identity

The chameleon analogy is particularly powerful because it highlights a crucial distinction: While a chameleon may change its color to suit the environment, it doesn’t change its fundamental nature. Similarly, the most effective CSOs and their teams maintain a consistent core identity and set of values while adapting their approach to different contexts and challenges. This balance between adaptability and authenticity is one of the most difficult aspects of sustainability leadership to master.

One critical step in this effort is to know thyself and which of the six corporate sustainability archetypes your company fits: Box checker; Risk reduction driven; Immediate returns driven; Brand and reputation driven; Purpose and impact driven or innovation driven.

Many CSOs went into their roles to drive societal impact and therefore skew towards purpose and impact as their default mode. This worked well when these programs were philanthropic and additive, but as they have become core to adding business value, this orientation can derail some. The CSO today has to be able to hold conflicting ideas in their head at the same time. A type of mental origami that is difficult to perfect.

Consider a story we once heard: Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia was challenged by his sales team on how they were to meet their ambitious sales targets when the company was promoting the limits of growth and anti-consumerism in its campaigns. He told them that holding that tension and finding ways to manage it was the job and walked away — leaving the team to find a way to achieve both. They did. Some version of this challenge is the one many CSOs face as ESG efforts become more business-integrated and aligned.

CSOs who understand the complexity of the moment, varying points of view, experiences and incentives, and mold themselves to their reality while staying true to their fundamental purpose will be best suited to deliver on the conviction that business can and must be a force for positive change in the world and do well in the process.

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Ingka Group is backing Shanghai-based plastics recycler Re-mall as part of a planned $1.16 billion investment in companies that can help IKEA’s largest retailer meet its goals of repurposing and reusing more materials in the products it sells.

The move is Ingka’s first in support of a circular economy infrastructure company in China, one of the world’s largest markets for plastic waste. 

Re-mall, founded in 2015, specializes in producing high-quality post-consumer recycled propylene from food packaging, which is notoriously difficult to process because of the organic residue left on it. Its production facility is in Jiangxi province, a hub for plastic waste streams from Shanghai and Guangzhou.

The plastic pellets and materials Re-mall creates can be used in many different products, including toys, tableware, cosmetics packaging and woven textiles. The company is building closed-loop relationships with its biggest customers — collecting materials from those brands before feeding recycled materials back into their supply chains. 

“Re-mall’s strong supplier network and partnerships with leading Chinese food delivery service providers are already allowing it to create impact at scale in the local recycling market,” said Lukas Visser, head of circular economy investments at Ingka Group.

Ingka’s backing — the amount of which is undisclosed — is characterized as growth capital that will expand its commercial capacity.

Source: Ingka Group

The bigger picture

Ingka’s climate transition strategy includes cutting the carbon footprint of product end of use, which accounted for 1.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 — 7 percent of the total. 

The absolute amount is down 15 percent from 2016, the year Ingka uses as the baseline for its goal of halving emissions by 2030. Ingka also intends to become “fully circular” by the end of the decade.  

Ingka Investments announced its $1.16 billion (1 billion euros) investment plan in January. Re-mall is the fourth publicly disclosed company in its portfolio. The others, all European, are:

• RetourMatras, a mattress recycler that processed more than 1 million mattresses in four facilities in 2024, avoiding an estimated 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (tCO2e). RetourMatras sells recycled material to customers such as IKEA to use in new production. 
• Morssinkhof Rymoplast, which handles high-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate and polypropylene plastics. Ingka acquired a 17 percent stake, helping to double Morssinkhof’s capacity.
• Next Generation Group, which provides equipment to the plastics recycling industry. 

In its latest environmental progress report, Ingka estimated that these ventures have so far recycled approximately 1.9 million metric tons of materials, avoiding 5 million metric tCO2e.

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When Dow decommissions the natural gas turbines at its Seadrift, Texas, plastics manufacturing site later this decade, it plans to switch on a first-of-its-kind small nuclear plant instead.

The project, awaiting a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was requested in March, is backed by up to $1.2 billion from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Advanced gas-cooled nuclear technology from X-energy that operates at higher temperatures than legacy equipment will provide the industrial steam Dow needs for plastic pellet production.

Dow owns or contracts services from dozens of gas turbines and other combined heat and power systems across its petrochemical manufacturing footprint. Several years ago, it began evaluating the potential of small modular reactors to help reach its goal of reducing emissions by 5 million metric tons annually by 2030, according to an executive who anaylzes Dow’s capital investments in energy systems.

“Don’t discount the possibility of nuclear,” said Kreshka Young, North America business director for energy and climate at Dow. “There are a huge amount of benefits. It provides clean, firm power, and the cost can be very competitive. I would recommend that people not be afraid to look at it.”

High hopes for small nuclear

X-energy’s technology classifies as a small modular reactor — that is, one with a capacity of less than 300 megawatts. The current pipeline of such reactors is more than 47 gigawatts, which will require an investment of at least $360 billion, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie. 

Dow’s installation will initially include four X-energy base modules, which have a capacity of about 80 megawatts. The ability to stack the units was important for reliability, Young said. Dow also found the compact size of X-energy’s system — about the dimensions of a gas turbine — appealing. The project is subject to ongoing review and ongoing government funding. “We take a very measured approach to this,” Young said, referring to Dow’s energy investments. “We are not in a situation to write blank checks.” 

Small modular reactors are attractive because the timeline for building them is more predictable and cost-effective than legacy nuclear project development, said Alison Hahn, technical adviser for new nuclear technologies at the Nuclear Energy Institute. That’s because components can be constructed on an assembly line, enabling developers to standardize design and manage several processes in parallel, Hahn said.   

The three largest artificial intelligence and cloud computing companies — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — are all considering advanced nuclear to power their data centers. Amazon was part of a $500 million funding round for X-energy in October 2024, which was increased to $700 million in February. 

“X-energy provides an impactful solution to a critical challenge — and the support Amazon, Dow and other major corporations have provided underscores its potential and merit,” said Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of lead investor Citadel, when the initial funding was announced.

Amazon is looking to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of X-energy’s technology by 2039, starting with a four-unit, 320-megawatt project in central Washington that is being developed by Energy Northwest. The plan calls for the installation to be tripled over time.

The Dow project, however, is likely to be online first — as early as 2028, if project timelines stay on schedule. Its construction permit could be approved within 18 months, thanks to a new executive order by the Trump administration. After construction is complete, Dow and X-energy will need to apply for an operating license. 

The Amazon and Dow commitments atop X-energy’s DOE funding will give backers the confidence to finance X-energy’s manufacturing and supply chain ramp-up as well as the workforce training that will be needed to support operations, said Hahn. 

“Building out that order book allows you to confidently invest,” she said.   

X-energy’s innovation: the ‘pebble bed’

What makes X-energy’s offering unique is the tristructural-isotropic (a.k.a TRISO) fuel used by its reactors — poppy seed-size particles of uranium clumped into billiard-size balls and spread out in a pebble bed. Helium is pumped through the pebbles, and heat is extracted for steam generation. TerraPower, which raised $650 million in June from investors including Bill Gates and NVDIA’s venture arm, uses a similar design.

X-energy’s reactors operate at temperatures higher than lava’s, making them appropriate for energy-intensive processes such as hydrogen production or petroleum refining. The design is explicitly meant to prevent meltdowns.

X-energy will manufacture its TRISO fuel at a facility it’s building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The company, which employs about 600 people, is based in Rockville, Maryland. 

The spent pebbles in X-energy’s reactors can be replaced by new ones on a daily basis, so shut down is not necessary, said Harlan Bowers, senior vice president and director for the Dow project. 

“We see that as an advantage,” Bowers said, “but it does pose some additional challenges for the regulator, because most fuels are not moving, so there are some statistical aspects to calculating reactivity within that core. That means there are new techniques that the NRC will have to use to evaluate our safety case and ultimately approve our design.”    

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Sometimes it’s hard to tell what corporate actions are really making a difference. But according to a survey of more than 800 sustainability experts, these actions are the most impactful over the next five years:

• Tech innovation and R&D (70 percent)
• Corporate sustainability-linked compensation (65 percent)
• Commercialization of sustainability via products and services (65 percent)

Actions such as integrating sustainability within companies (64 percent) and adopting circular economy practices (63 percent) also rank in the top 10 in a list of 23 potential ways that business can drive positive sustainability outcomes, according to the survey by Trellis data partner GlobeScan in collaboration with ERM and Volans.

What this means

Experts are shifting focus from compliance and culture-building toward systemic, performance-driven strategies. The emphasis on technology and commercialization as key levers reflects a growing consensus that sustainability must be profitable, scalable and embedded — and not treated as peripheral.

At the same time, experts are calling on businesses to act as systems integrators, aligning across stakeholders and domains. They also want businesses to anticipate the convergence of expectations around innovation, circularity and supply chains, lead with transparency and embed sustainability into core strategy rather than approaching it as a separate or siloed initiative.

Based on a survey of 844 sustainability practitioners across 72 countries conducted April-May 2025.

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American consumers and businesses are experiencing sticker shock this summer when they open their electricity bills.

A combination of soaring demand from power-hungry data centers, scorching weather and pass-along costs from utility infrastructure investments is driving electricity prices — which had been relatively stable for a decade or so prior to the pandemic — to alarming highs.

The effects of President Donald Trump’s drastic tariffs could push power prices even higher as the raw materials for transmission lines become more expensive and utilities scramble to keep up with the demand of new generation.

New U.S. manufacturing capacity, aided by federal onshoring policies, will further drive increases.

Energy earthquake

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average retail price of one kilowatt-hour of electricity in the U.S. rose 6.5 percent, to 17.5 cents from 16.41 cents, between May 2024 and May 2025.

Some states have been hit especially hard: ratepayers in Maine saw prices jump 36.3 percent in that period, followed by Connecticut (18.4 percent) and Utah (15.2 percent).

The effects are being felt by Las Vegas Strip merchants and New Jersey homeowners alike.

“Yesterday’s earthquake wasn’t tectonic,” wrote a member of the Midland Park, NJ Facebook group on August 3. “It was every NJ resident opening their PSE&G bill at the same time.”

NV Energy, which serves southern Nevada including Las Vegas, requested a 9-percent rate increase from state regulators earlier this year. The projected cost of its giant transmission project, Greenlink, has nearly doubled, to $4.2 billion from $2.5 billion, and could balloon even more as a result of the administration’s 25 percent tariffs on many relevant products from Mexico.

Don’t blame renewables

It’s often claimed by clean energy opponents — including U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — that more renewable generation on the grid drives higher energy prices, but the data shows otherwise (see this deep dive on Sustainability by numbers for the full picture). Solar and wind, being variable resources, do drive volatility in prices, which helps contribute to public perceptions of a power grid out of whack.

And the Trump administration’s assault on federal support for renewable energy projects is bound to lead to higher prices, according to a recent report from think tank Energy Innovation. Some of the biggest increases will likely come in red states.

The primary driver of price increases, though, is still demand. Looking ahead, the data-center boom — and the resulting demand spike — shows no sign of slowing down.

Annual energy use by data centers will nearly triple, reaching between 74 and 132 gigawatts by 2028, according to a recent forecast by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; that represents 6.7-12 percent of total U.S. electricity demand. Many large operators, like Google and Microsoft, are investing heavily in low-carbon generation to meet their needs. Unfortunately, on the public grid, renewables alone cannot meet future demand growth.

Bloomberg NEF’s New Energy Outlook 2025 found that future load growth will help prolong the hydrocarbon era. Sixty-four percent of the increased generation for data centers will come from fossil fuels, and “added data-center demand could help extend the life of existing coal and gas plants.”

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