Going Green the Way of the Future?

Exhibitors and attendees at Organic Islands Festival at Glendale Gardens in Victoria. The largest outdoor green festival in Canada, Organic Islands provides a venue for green businesses to showcase their products. (Shari Macdonald)

While some small “green” businesses have been around for decades, it was only about 15 years ago that a number of companies began greening their business practices in order to meet a strong consumer desire for businesses that operate in an environmentally sound manner.

Businesses with a green focus and an emphasis on sustainability began sprouting up, and the sector has grown rapidly in the years since.

Today, green business is an extremely profitable part of the business world and boasts a wide range of companies, from large multinationals to small, locally based businesses. And with environmentalism continuing to grow, the green sector will naturally grow along with it.

Green businesses take the triple bottom line (TBL) seriously. Approaching social, economic, and environmental issues in a comprehensive and integrated way, TBL is a departure from doing business based solely on the financial bottom-line.

“Your profit is certainly still there, the economic component, but there are also the social and environmental factors,” says Deborah Morse, founder and director of Organic Islands Festival.
 
Based in Victoria, each year Morse’s festival—the largest of its kind in Canada—provides a venue for green businesses to showcase their products and raise awareness of what’s available, which in turn creates more demand for green products.

“I think the aim of the festival is to create change,” says Morse. “It’s to create changes in the way that people live their lives, to empower them to make choices that are healthier and more sustainable.”

However, she is quick to point out that green business is “not just about ‘let’s stop buying this stuff and let’s start buying green stuff’—we want to buy less stuff.”

This is echoed by Maria Emmer-Aanes, director of marketing and communications for Nature’s Path Organic Foods.

“The less people buy the better really. Don’t get me wrong, we’re about generating sales, but not at any cost,” she says.

Nature’s Path is a real green business success story. Founded in 1985, the Richmond company employs around 350 people at its four facilities in Canada and the United States. Privately held and family-owned, Nature’s Path produces breakfast foods and snacks that are sold in 40 countries.

The company buys the ingredients for its organic cereals from local farmers, and through its EnviroKidz Giving Back Program has donated over the last decade a total of $1.2 million to non-profit organizations that support endangered species, habitat conservation, and environmental education for kids.

Both Nature’s Path and Level Ground Trading, a direct fair trade coffee company based in Victoria, have showcased their wares at the Organic Islands Festival.

“It’s important to support the festival, since a lot of great things go on there. It’s an arena where missions and values and sustainability bring us all together,” says Level Ground marketing director Rick Stark.

Level Ground works directly with small-scale coffee producers at each of its five coffee origins in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

To ensure that farmers receive a fair and sustainable share of the total price paid for green coffee beans, Level Ground calculates the cost distribution for every pound of green coffee beans purchased and shipped to them. They know the folks who grow their coffee personally and are committed to a relationship with them.

“Knowing what the farmer gets allows us to ensure that justice is inherent in every trade transaction. We import coffee directly and pay farmers 40 percent more than conventional coffee importers, and 19 per cent above the Transfair certified minimum price,” states the company’s website.

Toronto-based Susan Mey went from being a six-figure corporate executive with Kodak Canada to starting Green Cricket, an online business selling green products. Mey’s focus is to make it easy, convenient, and affordable for people to buy green.

She says green business is one of the few sectors actually growing in the current depressed economy, and predicts that most retailers will be green within 10 years.

“With increased demand and with increased scrutiny over what is green, I think you’re going to see more regulation around certified organic in Canada, labeling requirements, and I think manufacturers and suppliers will become better and produce more, which hopefully will bring all the prices down considerably over the next five years or so,” she says.

“Once these events occur you will find that green will become more mainstream than it is today. I do see a big shift in the way people are shopping.”

Many big mainstream companies are already on the green bandwagon. Nabob is marketing a brand of coffee that is 30 percent fair trade, and Wal-Mart has a broad environmental program, including some pilot stores that reduce energy use in areas such as lighting, refrigeration and water.

Morse says that as a result of concerns about climate change, at the global level people have come to realize the need to take individual actions and make choices to lessen their environmental footprint, and this has benefited the growth of green business.

“There was a demand there before; now it’s exploding,” she says.