Aussies Seek Sustainable Shopping: The Rise and Impact of B Corp Certification in Australia
As more businesses sign up for certification, sustainably minded consumers take note
4 min
Shopping never used to be this hard. Once a matter of whether there was enough cash in your wallet or room on your credit card, now consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the cost of buying something new not just for themselves, but the planet as well. Nearly 60 percent of Australians value sustainability more than they did two years ago, according to a recent survey by market analysts NIQ.
Yet just 37 percent say they could shop sustainably with ease versus
a global average of 50 percent. Bombarded with slogans and social media touting a brand’s “eco- friendly” or sustainable credentials, consumers struggle to cut through the greenwash.
Environmental claims are a powerful marketing tool and in Australia it is illegal for business to make false ones. But for customers or investors looking for certainty, the market has provided it through a growing movement called B Corp.
Companies that meet high sustainability standards can attain B Corp Certification — an internationally-recognised tick of approval. It was introduced by B Lab, a United States non-profit organisation founded in 2006 by three friends wanting to make business a force for good.
Companies have to prove to B Lab they’re making a positive impact on the “quadruple” bottom line: people, planet, profit, purpose.
‘B’ stands for ‘benefit for all’ and the fee-based application process is rigorous.
Unlike Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting frameworks, B Corp measures a company’s entire footprint, from supply chain practices and input materials to employee benefits and governance structures.
Businesses submit detailed evidence to B Lab on these standards and must be scored 80 or above on their B Impact Assessment. Once verified, a company’s score appears on the global B Corp Directory.
They can also use the distinctive B Corp logo — an encircled black B — in marketing.
While B Corps don’t carry any particular legal or government status in Australia, the logo carries weight with consumers.
“Most market research finds
that the most important thing to consumers is a company’s reputation or credentials,” Emma Herd, EY Oceania Partner in Climate Change and Sustainability Services, says.
“B Corp Certification is a
quick and recognised way of demonstrating you are taking voluntary action to address sustainability issues that affect your markets, consumers and banks.”
There are more than 6,000 B Corps globally, including about 470 in Australia and New Zealand.
Big names include Danone and Patagonia.
The latest Australian business to join the ranks is designer furniture and lighting supplier Living Edge.
With showrooms nationwide, the luxury retailer has a 15-year history of sustainable practice, from partnering with eco-friendly brands to using electric vehicles.
Living Edge Sustainability Strategist Guy Walsh says that certification — a “great validation of what we have achieved so far” — has provided pivotal business insights.
“We always believed we had a sustainable portfolio of products but going through the B Corp certification process was the first time we could look at an actual metric,” Walsh says.
“We found in the 2021-22 financial year, 69 percent of our revenue was generated from the sale of products certified to internationally recognised environmental accreditations.
“Another one that I found interesting, and which is so important for creating industry circularity, is that 21 percent of our revenue is coming from recycled materials. This data gives us a clear baseline to improve on.”
Constant improvement lies at the heart of B Corp. Businesses must recertify every three years as standards evolve. Australian firm WOWOWA Architecture, known for its whimsical and sustainable creations, was recently recertified after gaining B Corp status in 2019.
Director Monique Woodward says they “lost some points but gained others and that’s OK.”
She says certification has provided a “road map for growth” and helped the firm attract environmentally- focused clients.
“Our favourite residential family clients come to us because they believe what we believe, then also want a deliciously colourful and wildly textured home,” Woodward says. “Crumpler came to us wanting a fresh but nostalgic look thatspoke to their motto ‘bags that will probably outlast you’. We are now doing all their stores.”
For Woodward, industry and supply chain sustainability can improve if more firms jump on the B Corp bandwagon.
“Moving forward, all projects need to far exceed current regulatory requirements. Award winners
need to push hard and set new benchmarks for zero carbon, no waste, no gas as the bare minimum,” she says.
According to B Lab, B Corps are 4.5 times more likely than other businesses to use 100 percent renewable energy and 7.3 times more likely to be carbon-neutral.
EY Oceania sustainability expert Herd says the pressure is on business to be more sustainable.
“The investment thesis of ESG and sustainability is that a well-managed company on ESG credentials is generally better run and more profitable,” she says.
“We are seeing it’s harder for companies to do nothing on sustainability and ESG. We’re also seeing an increased push from business in Australia to government to provide consensus building around accredited certification schemes. There is a hunger from business to have a benchmark.”
For newly-minted B Corp Living Edge, certification is a gamechanger for business and consumers.
“Now we have got a measure for how sustainable our products are, we can be more targeted when we bring brands to market,” Walsh says.
“Our brand is not about throwaway consumables or fast furniture. We’re building a socially responsible and sustainable business. B Corp Certification is valuable to our customers because it gives them third-party assurance that we’re trying to do the right thing.”
BNW Developments has established a Sydney presence, joining Arada and Sobha Realty among the growing number of UAE developers pursuing Australian buyers and development opportunities.
Australian shares fell on Thursday as Wall Street weakness, rising oil and persistent rate concerns weighed on most of the market. The S&P/ASX 200 declined 0.72 per cent to 8,702. The All Ordinaries lost 0.66 per cent to finish at 8,897. Mining stocks were hit particularly hard, while real estate also dragged on the index. …
Continue reading “ASX falls 0.7 per cent as miners and property stocks retreat”
OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
High-end homeowners are choosing to upgrade rather than relocate, investing in bespoke design, premium finishes and long-term lifestyle value.
Australia’s housing market rebounded sharply in 2025, with lower-value suburbs and resource regions driving growth as rate cuts, tight supply and renewed competition reshaped the year.
