Julia Hailes MBE is a leading opinion former, freelance consultant and speaker on social, environmental and ethical issues. Her important work includes environmental reviews, management briefings and advising companies on policy, strategy, communications and stakeholder engagement. Julia Hailes writes regularly for national newspapers, including Telegraph online and the Financial Times, as well as writing blogs and fact sheets.
Julia has spoken at a wide variety of events, from corporate conferences to campaigning organisations, seminars and workshops world-wide including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, the US and all over Europe. These engagements cover diverse topics including waste, energy, IT, chocolate, detergents and nappies. She has also presented to the European Management team at McDonalds and communications executives at Shell, as well as being the key note speaker at the Green Funeral Exhibition and participating in a Question Time style debate with David Milliband.
As Julia puts it “My style is light, accessible and often humorous. Where slides are used they’ll be pictorial.” She has also made numerous television and radio appearances in Britain and abroad including presenting a weekly series of environmental programmes on UK network television.
Julia Hailes is author or co-author of nine books, including the international No.1 best-selling Green Consumer Guide’ published in 1988 and selling over one million copies worldwide. Other books include: Green Pages - the business of saving the world (1987); The Green Consumer's Supermarket Shopping Guide (1989), The Young Green Consumer Guide (1990); The Green Business Guide (1991), Holidays that Don't Cost the Earth (1992); Manual 2000 (1998) and The New Foods Guide (1999). Her most recent book, The New Green Consumer Guide was published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster.
Recent and current clients include: British Gas, Marks & Spencer, McDonalds, Morrisons, Orange, Procter & Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser and Shell. Past clients include: British Airways, Bulmers, Dow Europe, ICI, Novo Nordisk and Unilever.
In 1987 Julia founded SustainAbility Ltd with John Elkington, a leading edge consultancy with an international profile. Between 1994 and 2000 she was a non-executive director of Out of this World, a small chain of 'alternative supermarkets' and between 2001 and 2006 a non-executive director of Jupiter Global Green Investment Trust, set up by Jupiter Asset Management.
In 2003 she co-founded the Haller and is still a Trustee. This charity supports sustainable living projects, such as farmer trainer, community education and building dams in Kenya.
She also sits on the Food Ethics Council, which promotes sustainable food and farming practices, is a Trustee of Waste Watch and sits on Advisory Boards for Ecotricity, M&S on packaging, P&G on detergents, batteries and babycare, for environmental consultancy Second Nature and for a new greener mobile phone company called C-Mobile.
Julia has a lot of experience in eco-renovation. She has been a Trustee of the Ecos Trust, which provides which provides information and support for green building projects - and is currently eco-renovating a London flat. She writes and speaks on these issues.
Julia has been on a number of judging panels including Great Britons both 2005 and 2007, the Green Awards 2006 and the Rushlight Awards for renewable energy technologies in both 2007 and 2008. In 2008 and 2009 she worked with the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) on their Chilling Facts campaign on supermarket refrigeration, which is a major contributor to global warming. She is currently setting up a campaign on E-Waste.
She wrote a regular monthly column for BBC online and the Western Daily press on food and sustainability issues; worked with the International Institute of Environment & Development (IIED) on benchmarking supermarkets progress towards a greener fairer food system; has sat on the UK Eco-labelling Board since it started in 1989 and was appointed Deputy Chair to its successor the Advisory Committee on Consumer Products and the Environment (ACCPE) from 1999 to 2005, when it was disbanded. And in 2003, Julia stood down from being a District Councillor in South Somerset.
In 1989 Julia Hailes was elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour for her ‘outstanding environmental achievements'. She was awarded an MBE in the New Years Honours List in 1999. She lives in Somerset with her three sons, Connor, Rollo and Monty, aged 16, 14 and 12.
