Canada the good?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 4 Comments

Steve White/CP

For the third year in a row, Maclean’s has partnered with Jantzi-Sustainalytics, a global leader in sustainability analysis, to present the Top 50 Socially Responsible Corporations. The companies’ efforts vary—Merck has donated 1.3 million doses of its rotavirus vaccine to babies in Nicaragua, for instance, and Sony Corp. has diverted 205,000 kg of old electronics from landfills since 2008. But they all provide lessons (starting on page 46) on how to be better corporate citizens—lessons that, based on how Canadian companies generally compare to others on this measure, are worth taking note of.

Canadian oil sands companies were caught blinking in the international spotlight when world leaders met at the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen. In the run-up to the meetings, foreign activists and newspaper columnists dubbed the industry “dirty” and hell-bent on transforming a large swath of northern Alberta’s boreal forest into a barren moonscape. Ottawa, meanwhile, was accused of being one of the biggest stumbling blocks to global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Getting branded as the world’s environmental villain was an unfamiliar and uncomfortable experience for Canadians, many of whom were eager to dismiss foreign criticisms as the rantings of a handful of fringe groups. But anti-oil-sands sentiment has only grown louder in Europe over the past few years and, increasingly, it’s being echoed in some quarters of the United States, the biggest importer of our oil sands crude. Granted, resource extraction has never been a warm and fuzzy business, but many Canadians have been left wondering whether the industry could do a better job insulating itself from such criticism.

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Retail Activist

By Mike Doherty - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Zoe Norfolk

The signs on the doors of Selfridges’ flagship department store on Oxford Street in London promote giving “the gift of self-indulgence.” Having sold an £85 sandwich, a £1,000 Swarovski-encrusted water bottle, an £1,800 Spanish ham, and a £10,000 children’s electric car, Selfridges is not exactly known for preaching restraint. And yet, in launching Project Ocean, its creative director, Alannah Weston, is doing just that.

“Just because you sell beautiful things doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the right thing,” says Weston, perched over a cup of tea in the downstairs restaurant of the 650,000-sq.-foot store owned by her father, billionaire Galen Weston. Project Ocean, which she has organized with Jonathan Baillie (a childhood friend, and director of conservation for the Zoological Society of London), promises nothing less than “retail activism”: it’s a multi-pronged attempt to save the world’s fisheries from collapse, starting by providing only sustainably sourced fish at Selfridges.

It’s also a transformation of the store itself, with commissioned artwork both madcap and meditative, a sea-themed fashion exhibit including Lady Gaga’s silver lobster hat, well-known chefs in the food hall teaching customers how to cook unpopular seafood, frogmen marching around the aisles, and cheeky but stark messages in the store’s iconic window displays about the depletion of fish stocks.

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10 ways to help save the planet

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 12:05 PM - 35 Comments

1. Sell solar power back into the grid

Solar panels are costly, so only the most committed environmentalists have thus far been willing to install them on the roofs of their homes and businesses. But new government programs that permit small renewable-energy producers to sell excess energy back into the power grid are making it easier for anyone to jump on the solar bandwagon. Last week, the Ontario Power Authority launched Canada’s first feed-in tariff program, which will offer a buy-back rate of up to 80.2 cents per kilowatt for solar power—more than seven times the rate paid for other forms of green power, like wind.

Want in? A grid-connected system at home, including installation, will cost about $10 per watt of output. If you installed a 2,000-watt system (at a cost of $20,000), then depending on your energy consumption you could bring in roughly $1,850 in revenue each year, recouping your investment in just over 10 years. And considering solar panels can last 30 years or longer, that’s a fairly sunny long-range forecast.—Jen Cutts

2. Fake trees

Trees, we all know, are carbon catchers. Problem is, they don’t catch enough of the stuff, and the process is slow. So scientists have built a better mousetrap, so to speak. According to a new report out of the U.K., the most effective way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) levels is to construct hundreds of thousands of artificial, greenhouse-gas-scrubbing trees.

Prototypes already exist—they’re made up of a type of mesh suspended between a two-pronged fork, and look like gigantic fly swatters. As air blows through the structure, CO2 binds to an absorbent compound, a process that removes the carbon 1,000 times faster then normal plants.
There are problems: the trees are expensive—more than $20,000 each—and “planting” 100,000 of them would offset only 60 per cent of the CO2 produced by a country the size of the U.K. With enough government funding, though, fake forests could start popping up around the world within the next few years.—Tom Henheffer Continue…

Wasting away

By The Editors - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

Often the best course of action is also the simplest, and that’s especially true where the environment is concerned.

Everyone agrees water is a precious resource, so we should treat it as if it’s truly valuable. The same goes for electricity, food and everything else we take from our environment. The greenest thing we can do is stop wasting what we’ve got. Continue…

Sustainability: a special report

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 2 Comments

You can’t argue with the logic of sustainability. It makes perfect sense—if we want humanity to last, we need to start saving the planet now.

So why has progress been so slow? Why are people still driving SUVs instead of hybrids? Why aren’t homeowners lining up to install solar panels on their rooftops? Why don’t they understand?

The truth is, when we implore people to adopt sustainable practices, what we’re really suggesting is that they voluntarily lower their standard of living now for the sake of future generations they will likely never know. It’s a lot to ask.

If we want consumer behaviour to change quickly, we need to offer some short-term rewards, and consequences. In this special report, Maclean’s examines ways to do that. For starters, we should stop government subsidies that actively encourage people to waste resources. If something is cheap, we waste it—so why do governments insist on policies that keep prices low for water, electricity and food?

We also look at how to better market the green movement—the most effective ways to convince people to buy into sustainability. And we examine the smartest, cheapest and most innovative environmental ideas out there—everything from solar power solutions that can actually make you money, to seaweed wraps for your home.

Changing our culture of waste and environmental insensitivity is a tough task. It’s time we got started. Continue…

The trouble with a No Impact Planet

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 8 Comments

Outdoorsy types have for ages practised no-impact camping, with its charming motto, “Take only pictures; leave only footprints.” The rationale is not complicated: the central conceit of going camping is you are entering the “wilderness,” a realm free of civilization with minimal evidence of human activity. If you vacate your campsite and leave a bunch of used flashlight batteries and empty Chef Boyardee tins lying around, it kinda spoils the effect for the next group. In short, no-impact camping is the only way to make the experience sustainable for everyone.

But this idea, that what matters to sustainability is the effect our activities have on our future welfare and our descendants’, is one we often forget when it comes to thinking about the economy and the environment as a whole. Which is a bit weird, since the Brundtland commission, convened by the UN in 1983, explicitly defines a sustainable economy as one “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Continue…

Lean, green war machine

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 11:20 AM - 11 Comments

The final slide in Dan Nolan’s token PowerPoint presentation is an overhead photograph of the Pentagon, the famous five-sided headquarters of the U.S. military. It’s a pretty standard shot, the kind you see on postcards and T-shirts all across Washington. Except for two things: the solar panels on the roof and the wind turbines near the parking lot.

The added features are fake, of course. But the message Nolan is trying to convey is very real. “If we don’t have that in five years, then I’ve failed,” says the retired army colonel, who now advises his former employer in its pursuit of energy-efficient technologies. “We are only limited by our imaginations.”

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