Minimizing the environmental impact of our business is very important to us. Here are some of the things we do to reduce our carbon footprint and work towards a circular economy:
Using public transit is the best way to cut your carbon emissions related to transportation (if you cannot walk or bike to your destination).
Most of our meetings are online, but when we meet clients in person, we try to use public transit as much as possible. For example, TTC to downtown meetings, GO Bus 27 to Mississauga to the middle of “pill hill”, GO train to Oakville and VIA Rail to see our Montreal clients.
VIA Rail First Class is a surprisingly luxurious way of completing the Toronto-Montreal trip, not more expensive than flying, not much more time consuming (considering going to/from airport and wait times), offering great views of Lake Ontario and time to comfortably get work done while you travel.
Using FSC (forest stewardship council) certified paper for printing, reducing the number of pages you print and printing double-sided are obvious choices, along with paper recycling.
Printer cartridges were something we had not found a good solution for thus far. Recently, we came across this website: https://everycartridge.com/canada/
We decided that we will collect empty cartridges and send them into the Konica Minolta program once we have enough (20 is the minimum). The program is free, and it works for any cartridge brand. They partner with a company that re-manufactures the cartridges, which is better than just recycling the materials.
We also collect our electronic waste and drop it off at the local waste transfer station, where it will be disassembled, valuable materials extracted and fed into re-sale/re-use or recycling streams.
Since our offices are remote, i.e. home-based, our home energy = office energy. We are investigating options for use of solar and/or geothermal energy. Both have challenges in the Toronto climate. However, the Canadian government is giving incentives to transition.
Since much of today’s business, and particular data collection, happens “in the cloud”, there is also a question of where the servers that make up various “clouds” get their energy from. However, this is beyond our powers to discern… It will be interesting to see if in the future green energy-run server farms could be a competitive differentiator for some cloud providers and/or cloud-based software and service providers.
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