Greening the economy: Sudbury social enterprise helping organizations with sustainability goals.

AuthorMyers, Ella
PositionGREEN REPORT

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By all accounts, going green is the socially conscious thing to do, but now it may be the business savvy direction to take, too.

A Sudbury program is seeking to help local businesses harness the practical benefits of becomin greener.

"We want to show the competitive advantage of being more sustainable," said reThink Green's executive director, Rebecca Danard.

ReThink Green, a local non-profit sustainability networking group, launched Green Economy North in April, with Sudbury miner Vale as a founding partner. It is a membership-based initiative in which businesses set at least one sustainability-related target for themselves. A typical example would be to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20 per cent over 10 years.

The program joined seven others that are part of the Sustainability CoLab network spanning Ontario and including Ottawa, Niagara, Hamilton, Waterloo, and York Region. Other CoLab communities have membership retention rates of 90 per cent, and have collectively resulted in the reduction of 290,000 tonnes of GHG emissions by participants since 2009.

This Northern extension is being supported by a $315,000 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the second largest Trillium grant ever received for this territory.

Denard anticipates most of the targets will revolve around carbon emissions to mitigate risk and prepare for new environmental policies around carbon over the next few years.

"The current policy regime is pushing sustainability," said program manager Richard Eberhardt. "We will have the capacity, if new incentives are introduced, to help members access them, and clients will be impacted less."

Frank Javor, Vale's manager of the environment and air, said as a large company, they will be hit hardest but that the cost will trickle down, impacting even the smallest businesses.

"Putting a price on carbon and creating tough regulations is top on the Ministry of Environment's agenda," said Javor. "There will be some monies to be saved by becoming more energy efficient."

One benefit will be the businesses' ability to market themselves as green.

"There will be consumers who want to do businesses with businesses that are greener than others," added Javor. "The first part is establishing yourself, and drawing a line in the sand saying, I'm going to set a target about this."

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