Over the past 50 years, consumers have looked more and more to nutritional labels on their foods to guide their shopping decisions. What would happen if consumers began to notice a food's carbon footprint the way they notice calories, grams of carbohydrates, or sugar content?
Recently, some investors have been focusing on companies that consider more than just maximizing shareholder value. And companies that explicitly work to improve the physical and social environment stand to benefit from this revised interest. Social investing is attracting more and more investment dollars. Witness the latest letter out of BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), one of the world's largest asset managers, which makes the case explicitly: "We believe that sustainability should be our new standard for investing."
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