Fortune USA – September 2019

71

FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019

HEAD WRITERS

Erika Fry

Matt Heimer

LEAD RESEARCHER

Natallie

Rocha

CONTRIBUTORS

Danielle

Abril

Eamon

Barrett

Lydia

Belanger

Katherine

Dunn

Robert

Hackett

Emma

Hinchliffe

Clifton

Leaf

Rey

Mashayekhi

Jake

Meth

McKenna

Moore

Sy

Mukherjee

Brian

O’Keefe

Aaron

Pressman

Anne

Sraders

Jen

Wieczner

pollution become increasingly urgent, more

companies are embracing the idea of a “circular

economy,” one in which products last longer

and are close to 100% recyclable. That idea

animates Daisy, Apple’s iPhone-repurposing

robot (No. 16); the reusable “smart grid” cir-

cuitry manufactured by French giant Schneider

Electric (No. 9); and many other innovations

featured here. Expanding opportunities for

your own employees can create another posi-

tive loop. That ideal guides $514 billion retailer

Walmart (No. 5), which is paying for higher

education for thousands of its employees, and

$398 million restaurant chain MOD Pizza

(No. 28), which has built its workforce around

formerly incarcerated people and others who

struggle to get hired elsewhere.

We selected the 2019 list in collaboration

with our expert partners at Shared Value Ini-

tiative, a consultancy that helps companies ap-

ply business skills to social problems. As MOD

shows, small companies are just as capable as

multinationals of fitting that bill. This year’s

smaller candidates were particularly potent.

Our 52 honorees include at least nine compa-

nies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue.

“Small” doesn’t mean “money-losing,” how-

ever. These companies here have built their

do-gooder ideas into real business models, and

are either turning a profit with their help or

have credible plans for doing so. (Please see

more about our methodology on page 76.) The

Change the World list doesn’t score companies

on their charitable generosity, nor does it rate

them on some cosmic scale of good and bad. It

celebrates the nexus where daring ideas over-

lap with the desire to make the world better.

Loop, which has signed up 80,000 custom-

ers in the U.S. and Europe since its launch in

May, sits in that sweet spot. It’s not going to

make the Great Pacific Garbage Patch disap-

pear. But be patient: Many world-changing

ideas start small. —Matt Heimer

You might not expect modern corporations to
tackle an urgent problem of the 21st century
by looking back to the 1950s. But that’s what
one group of companies is doing with a new
service called Loop, whose backers refer to its
approach as “the milkman model.”
As that Leave It to Beaver–era nickname
implies, Loop delivers supermarket and drug-
store staples—including toothpaste, deter-
gent, mayonnaise, and ice cream—to consum-
ers’ homes in durable, reusable containers. It’s
a “zero waste” initiative, an effort to alleviate
the planet’s plastic-pollution crisis. Several
consumer-goods giants are Loop partners,
including Unilever and Nestlé (which are
packaging their brands in Loop’s bottles and
tubes) and retailers Kroger and Walgreens.
The company that conceived Loop, however,
and will distribute, clean, and refill all those
containers, is tiny TerraCycle, a 302-employee
startup in Trenton, N.J., whose CEO, Tom
Szaky, founded the business 18 years ago in
his Princeton dorm room.
TerraCycle holds the No. 10 spot on For-
tuneÕs fifth annual Change the World list. The
list honors companies that recognize public
health, environmental, economic, and social
problems as major challenges—but also as
opportunities to initiate a so-called virtuous
circle. They understand that doing good for
society and the planet can help them bring in
more revenue, which can help them do more
good, in a self-reinforcing loop.
The TerraCycle project embodies another
kind of virtuous circle: As the threats posed by

CHANGE

THE

WORLD

Where Business Creates Virtuous Circles

Introduction

These 52 companies are using the creative tools of business
to meet society’s unmet needs.