Des Moines author and sustainability expert Adam Hammes released his second book in January, and it’s already making a splash both in Iowa and nationally. The book, “Sustainable Business in Iowa: How Leading Companies Profit From Environmental and Social Responsibility,” recently won two national awards — an Independent Press Award and a National Indie Excellence Award.

I first met Hammes back in 2009 when he was getting Urban Ambassadors off the ground and I wrote a Business Record profile about his passion for sustainability, which has proved to be quite sustainable over the past decade. Looking back through that article, I still think it’s cool that he wrote the business plan for Urban Ambassadors while riding on a three-week, 750-mile sustainable-living bicycle tour from San Francisco to the Mexican border. 

His new book is a primer on designing and implementing profitable corporate sustainability programs. More than 30 Iowa companies’ initiatives are featured in the book, including Barilla America, Frontier Co-op, Principal, Sky Factory, Workiva and West Liberty Foods. 

Several business schools have begun using it as a textbook to make the topic more relevant to students, including the University of Iowa, Central College, Grand View University, Southeastern Iowa Community College, Mount Mercy University, Morningside College, Buena Vista University, and Simpson College.

Hammes, who helped lead Kum & Go to some sustainable successes as its first manager of sustainability from 2010 to 2014, has also taught a corporate social responsibility class to Tippie College of Business MBA students for the past five years. He actually used a draft of his book for teaching a class earlier this year and used feedback from the class to make some last-minute tweaks prior to it being published. 

“I wrote ‘Sustainable Business in Iowa’ because I heard business students, friends and colleagues saying that Iowa businesses were not leaders in sustainability,” Hammes said. “From my work, I knew that was false. There are, in fact, many Iowa companies doing excellent work in both environmental and social responsibility — and doing it profitably, so I wanted to explode that myth.”