There’s no denying banks make the biggest impact on the world with how they lend and invest their money. While TD has come out with a $100 billion commitment toward sustainable finance, it has also drawn the ire of environmentalists for being named one of ten largest bank financiers of fossil fuels globally.

Although smaller in scope than its financing activities, we can’t discount the environmental impact that TD (and its 85,000 employees) has throughout its operations. Enter Michelle Albanese, on the 14^th floor of the mostly open concept office. The head of responsible sourcing and supplier diversity is tasked with making sure that the financial services corporation’s supply chain is socially, ethically, and environmentally up to par. Any third-party company that services the bank needs to be cleared by her and her team.

Working with TD’s vendors—22,000 every year—to help them manage and reduce their emissions is a major focus for Albanese. TD’s global business operations became carbon neutral back in 2010. And for the past four years TD has been working with the Climate Disclosure Project—a non-profit group that encourages corporations and cities to disclose their environmental impacts. “We were the first Canadian bank to join the CDP Supply Chain Program and report our own emissions, of course, but we also encourage our key suppliers to report their own.”

Equipped with an environmental toxicology degree, she started out her career in government as a risk assessor at Environment Canada. “It’s always been important for me to contribute to protecting the environment,” says Albanese, who grew up near Oakville, Ontario’s Bronte Creek Provincial Park. Her love for nature was instilled in her as a child during the hikes she took with her family every weekend. “I grew up with a very environmentally conscious father,” she says with a smile.

While Albanese spent some time in the non-profit sector in organizations like The Nature Conservancy of Canada, most of her career has been in sustainability consulting, which gave her background knowledge in a number of sectors. After eight years in consulting, she joined TD as a procurement manager in 2013.

Sounds mundane, but making sure your office paper supplier isn’t cutting old growth forest and your computer manufacturer isn’t linked to toxic e-waste dumping in the developing world has become critical.

Procurement may be a less high-profile aspect of sustainability, but it has been gaining importance in the corporate conversation. The 2019 Sustainable Procurement Barometer—a study released by CSR performance platform EcoVadis and NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business—found that, in the past three years, 81% of the 210 purchasing entities and 400 suppliers surveyed have heightened their dedication to sustainable procurement. Virtually every large corporation and government body, from municipal to federal, has responsible procurement policies in place to make sure any goods and services purchased meet environmental, social and governance standards.

Sounds mundane, but making sure your office paper supplier isn’t cutting old growth forest and your computer manufacturer isn’t linked to toxic e-waste dumping in the developing world has become critical. The public is increasingly aware of just where the companies they support get their goods.

“We had been doing green procurement through our Environmental Procurement Policy since 2009,” says Albanese, “but wanted to expand our scope to include social and ethical criteria in addition to environmental.”

As the manager of TD’s Supplier Diversity Program, Albanese makes sure there’s a more level playing field for certified minority-owned vendors who are interested in providing goods or services to TD Bank Group. In order to participate and register under this program, a supplier must be certified as a majority woman-owned and operated business or a majority LGBTQ-owned and operated one for example.

“We support Aboriginal-owned businesses through this initiative and for a company to be eligible, the supplier must be certified as 51% Aboriginal-owned and operated.”

When I ask about the obstacles she faces, Albanese says her challenge isn’t so much with large vendors. “They’re already doing what we expect of them,” she tells me. But smaller vendors aren’t necessarily educated about what’s involved in corporate social responsibility and meeting the wide cross-section of ethical procurement standards.

“It’s a conversation,” Albanese says. “Everyone can improve, but we need it to be a priority for our suppliers, just as it is for us.”

The post The ins and outs of greening one bank’s supply chain appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Born and raised in a small village near Sidon, Lebanon, Dagher immigrated to Canada a little over thirty years ago during the last few years of the country’s crushing civil war. When she arrived in 1989 as a 17-year-old new mother, she was fleeing political strife and a challenging arranged marriage. She didn’t speak a word of English.

“I’m incredibly proud of all the hardships I’ve gone through from being born and raised in a war zone and spending most of my early life in a bomb shelter to coming here and learning everything from scratch.”

Dagher had studied accounting and finance in Lebanon at Middle East College, but finding a job in Canada was initially challenging. Her earliest role in telecommunications was as a Bell telemarketer. By the end of her fifteen years there, she had climbed through the ranks to a director post.

“I don’t have a master’s degree in technology or engineering or anything like that, I was just determined to succeed no matter what.”

Dagher left Bell to take an executive sales director job at Dell Canada before eventually becoming vice president of the computer firm’s data storage division. In 2019, she joined Cisco Systems Canada—the networking hardware and telecommunications equipment and service provider—as president.

“I got to where I am today because of my determination and the passion I have for technology and people,” says Dagher.

This passion for people shows up in her leadership. “My style is very simple,” she remarks, “it’s servant leadership.” She believes in empowering her team and is adamant about the importance of building and supporting the people she works with. “People join organizations, but people leave people,” she says matter-of-factly.

But she agrees that it’s not that easy for women to succeed in the tech sector. While it’s even more challenging for someone with her earlier history, the industry has a long way to go. Dagher’s three-pronged recipe for success for women in the corporate world: advocate for yourself, find a mentor and raise your hand.

“I’m incredibly proud of all the hardships I’ve gone through from being born and raised in a war zone and spending most of my early life in a bomb shelter to coming here and learning everything from scratch.”

She also stresses the importance that failure had in her life, clarifying that she was always keen to learn from it. “Giving up,” she goes on, “was never an option.”

Dagher likes to pay those lessons forward. Case in point: She heads a Cisco career development group called Connected Women that makes sure young female employees and interns feel like they belong and can have influence within the company.  “Our summer internship program is very well paid and we’re very proud of it. We fly them out to San Jose [Cisco headquarters] for a week or two of training and they actually work on innovative challenges,” she explains. The competitive program last year saw 700 applicants for 22 positions.

And with her own experience with forced displacement, Dagher made it a point for Cisco Canada to be involved with Lifeline Syria—a not-for-profit organization that assists in sponsoring, welcoming, and resettling Syrian refugees in Canada—by training and hiring refugees in the tech sector.

These days, the private sector’s foot-dragging on environmental issues is what worries her most. “We’re not moving fast enough. Not enough companies are jumping on it, and a lot are still parking it in the back.”

In an era of accelerated progress, technology is at the heart of every industry disrupting business as usual. If, as a tech corporation, you’re not thinking about the environment and sustainability in relation to your technology, Dagher argues it will be very difficult to succeed.

“At Cisco we take a lot of pride in ensuring we are part of giving back from a responsibility perspective.” For one, Cisco’s Bridge to Possible campaign highlights all the ways in which the company aims to connect people, places, ideas and things through a secure network, and to minimize emissions generated by transportation. That includes enabling workers at companies around the world to work from home and call in through WebEx technology instead of driving into the office.

“We’re not moving fast enough. Not enough companies are jumping on [sustainability], and a lot are still parking it in the back.”

Cisco’s sustainable procurement practices aim to eliminate one million tons of greenhouse gases from the company’s supply chain by next year. Circularity, like for other tech companies, is also a critical point. The company’s products are designed to be maintained and upgraded, ensuring that they remain within the market and away from landfills. Nearly 14,000 metric tonnes of those products were returned and recycled last fiscal year.

Dagher’s achievements are hard to miss. She was named 2019’s Woman of the Year by Women in Communications and Technology—a national association that provides opportunities for networking and professional development for women in these notoriously male-dominated industries.

She is the kind of successful immigrant that Canada loves to embrace. She worked tirelessly within the challenging corporate system to rise to the top and now makes sure to help others in return. “I’m a very proud Lebanese and a grateful Canadian,” Dagher likes to say. As an Arab immigrant woman myself, Dagher is a role model. I tell her that I recently obtained my Canadian citizenship and that interviewing her is moving for me. “Ahlan wa sahlan ou alf mabrouk [welcome and congratulations in Arabic]” she responds warmly.

“You can be anything you want to be here if you have determination.”

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“From a young age, I was very aware of the incredible need to preserve beautiful places and the importance of the conservation of nature,” Brandt tells Corporate Knights in a phone conversation from Google headquarters in California’s Silicon Valley.

The 34-year-old has been at the helm of all things sustainability-related at the second-largest internet company in the world for a little over three and a half years now. Her mission: build sustainability into everything Google does. Brandt has overseen the company’s sweeping green agenda, including becoming the largest purchaser of renewable energy to offset the energy used by its data centres and offices and making sure its data centres get closer to sending zero waste to landfill. “My role is really rooted in driving the overall strategy at the company and ensuring we continue to find ambitious goals and remain leaders in this space.”

From the outside, it may seem like a daunting responsibility, but Brandt has been in charge of ambitious green agendas before. In 2015, then-U.S. president Barack Obama appointed her as the nation’s first federal chief sustainability officer. This wasn’t her first role at the White House. As a fresh-out-of-school Cambridge scholar in international relations, she was hired to work on the Women for Obama campaign before becoming part of the Obama-Biden presidential transition team. She then quickly rose from an energy policy analyst at the Office of Energy and Climate Change to overseeing the greening of the U.S. Navy at the Pentagon before a stint at the U.S Department of Energy as senior advisor.

Brandt became instrumental in helping execute the president’s climate action plan. It was a mammoth job. She was tasked with leading sustainability tactics across the federal government’s 360,000 buildings, 650,000-vehicle fleet and $445 billion in annual goods and services purchases.

“It was a great honour, and an incredible chapter in my career,” recalls Brandt. “I worked a bit directly with the president and he’s truly a hero of mine.”

Brandt became instrumental in helping execute the president’s climate action plan. It was a mammoth job across the federal government’s 360,000 buildings, 650,000-vehicle fleet and $445 billion in annual goods and services purchases.

A year and half before Obama’s greening efforts would come to an end under the Trump administration, Brandt decided to shift into public sector to take on a new challenge: greening Google. Brandt says she’d always been interested in the technology industry and its opportunities to create innovative solutions for global sustainability.

“It’s been exciting getting to come to Google,” she highlights, “This is my first experience in the private sector and I’ve become such a strong believer of the opportunity that we have to drive change. There’s great leadership coming from the corporate sector.”

However, Silicon Valley – notorious for its male-dominated “bro culture” – can be a challenging place for women. Back in November, thousands of Google employees around the world staged walkouts to protest the poor handling of sexual harassment claims as well as gender inequality. Google’s 2019 diversity annual report indicates its leadership is comprised of just 26.1% women and only 31.6% of its global workforce is female.

To her experience, Brandt says that she gets to work with remarkable women at Google and has a positive view regarding the representation of women in the industry. “In the sustainability sphere, we’ve seen a lot of really important and influential female leaders like Lisa Jackson at Apple or Hannah Jones at Nike. I’m always really excited to see that.”

These days, she says she’s mostly looking forward to growing opportunities for AI applications in sustainability. For one, Google has applied machine learning to its cooling system within its data centers (where a lot of energy use takes place) to curb energy use by 30%. Other AI tools are empowering conservation organizations around the world. Non-profits Oceana and SkyTruth partnered up with Google to develop a way of using Google’s satellite technology to track and share global fishing data in almost real-time at no cost. They created Global Fishing Watch to allow governments or organizations to better monitor the commercial activities on a worldwide scale and combat illegal fishing.

“There’s a feeling of tremendous urgency. We have only so many years left to make a drastic shift in our relationship to natural resources.”

Google’s AI for Social Good program has teamed up with Carbon Tracker, a climate change think tank, and non-profit WattTime to measure global power plant emissions from space. Google had issued an open call to organizations around the world to submit their ideas for how they could use AI to help address societal challenges and 20 were selected for support. Sharing Google’s satellite imagery with Carbon Tracker and WattTime has been heralded as helping to lift the of veil of secrecy shrouding pollution from power plants around the globe.

The challenge for Brandt is knowing what to prioritize. “There’s a feeling of tremendous urgency,” she confesses. “The science is clear that we have only so many years left to make a drastic shift in our relationship to natural resources. We have a lot of commitment, but it’s about where can we have the most impact.”

How does Brandt stay centred amidst it all?  Meditating every morning helps, that and generally staying connected with nature—hiking, biking, skiing.

“I recharge by being outside,” says Brandt. “It’s really why I fell in love with this work in the first place.”

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“Hard to believe that it’s been 20 years. If you had told me that when I’d joined HP I wouldn’t have believed it,” Edmonds muses.

In her two decades with the company, she’s helped shift the printer-and computer-making IT giant away from the old ‘take, make and dispose’ model towards a more circular one before many other companies put an emphasis on closing the loop on waste.

In a world where sustainability departments have often been staffed with marketers and communications experts, Edmonds has always brought a deeper vantage point to the table, thanks, in part, to her roots in environmental science. In her early days of working as a scientist testing water quality for a local UK water authority, Edmonds witnessed firsthand how industrial discharges were polluting natural ecosystems. It sparked an early desire to be part of the solution.

When Edmonds moved to Canada and was first hired at HP (back in 1999 when it was still called Hewlett Packard) as an environmental health and safety manager, the position initially had more to do with making sure internal environmental standards were being met. But her role expanded as she and her team began putting some of Canada’s earliest extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs in place. As provincial governments across the country started to implement EPR regulations, she utilized HP’s experience in product take-back and recycling to set industry standards for managing electronics end-of-life. She helped form Electronics Product Stewardship Canada, the not-for-profit industry-led association that still today works with provincial bodies to implement electronics waste management regulations.

Soon, Edmonds started to strategize about the value of what HP was attempting to construct for the future. “I wondered ‘How do you really shape a strong program that builds on the history of investment that we’ve had in sustainability?’ We’ve been a leader in this sector for so long, but there was no real competitive advantage in [being green] because we weren’t really telling our customers or our partners about it.”

Educating the public has become a life mission for Edmonds and she circles back to it again and again in our conversation. For one, Canadians have been taught that the solution to everything is recycling, having been brought up on the blue bin. “But, of course, it isn’t,” Edmonds says.

“What’s the point of recycling if you’re not creating the market for it? There’s a disconnect between people wanting to take action and how they actually buy.”

She does a lot of public speaking, including a 2016 Tedx Talks entitled Why Going Green is Good for Business. In her experience, almost everyone in any given audience raises their hand when she asks who recycles, but fewer hands go up when she asks how many people buy products specifically tagged as recycled content. “What’s the point of recycling if you’re not creating the market for it? There’s a disconnect between people wanting to take action and how they actually buy.”

Now that she’s heading sustainability at HP Canada, Edmonds has turned almost all of her attention to sustainable procurement, trying to harness the influence of corporate purchasing. “We’re missing an opportunity for business and government to put their procurement power behind creating the change they want to see. Procurement is the least used tool to drive us to a circular economy. It is the most nimble of tools compared to regulations. ”

Having been in the business for so long, Edmonds has seen the industry grow and shift. The corporate responsibility sector itself has visibly mainstreamed. Customers and investors are demanding more from the corporate world, but what’s holding us back, offers Edmonds, beyond a lack of education and transparency, is a lack of concrete commitments to using purchasing power to propel a greener economy. “Most organizations purchase on price above any other criteria including lifecycle costs of operating the product. We need a stronger commitment to keep going forward.”

“Procurement is the least used tool to drive us to a circular economy. It is the most nimble of tools compared to regulations. ”

All these years after Edmonds started with the company, female employees are still underrepresented in the tech world, but she’s seen a marked improvement in gender diversity at HP Canada. According to this year’s Global 100 ranking of the world’s most sustainable corporations (in which HP Inc. is the top-ranked computer peripherals company), its board is now 40 percent women and 28 percent of its senior executives are female.  HP Canada’s current CEO Mary Ann Yule happens to be a strong advocate for representation of women in the corporate sector. “I don’t know that the industry in general is heading that way. We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” says Edmonds.

To help create opportunities for women in the sustainable impact world, Edmonds took over running a monthly women’s networking group called Eco Babes. The idea is to connect sustainably-minded women, in a casual environment, and forge bonds of solidarity and create opportunities for mentoring within the industry. “When I was first handed the mailing list for Eco Babes there were 50, maybe 100 women, and now, about six or seven years later, we have over 500 women.”

Back when Edmonds was juggling responsibilities as a working mother when her children were younger, she says the best advice she received from a senior manager was that “you get judged on what you achieve not how you achieve it.”

Besides supporting younger women, what excites her most these days is the idea of putting sustainability at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution (think waste-saving 3D printers) and the surging global interest in shifting to a circular economy. HP happens to have one of the fastest growing business-to-consumer processes in the circular economy—the HP Instant Ink program. Instead of buying ink, you buy a subscription to a printing service. HP includes recycling bags so ink cartridges can easily be mailed back to its Montreal-based plant as part of a closed-loop recycling process. Globally, HP has produced more than 3.8 billion cartridges from more than 784 million recovered cartridges, 86 million apparel hangers and 4 billion plastic bottles, including half a million pounds of ocean-bound plastic bottles from Haiti.

Of course, she says, HP can be the most circular company on the planet, but if people aren’t buying with end-of-life in mind things can’t change. Circularity requires everyone to be playing a part in it.

The post Women in leadership: Frances Edmonds on the end of the ‘take, make and dispose’ economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This is the narrative of one of the awareness campaign videos about Zéro Mika (plastic bag, in Moroccan Arabic dialect) made by the Moroccan Coalition for Climate Justice (MCCJ) that circulated the country a little over a year and a half ago.

Previously considered one of the largest consumers of plastic bags on the continent, Morocco was estimated to use three billion of them annually. With a population of 34 million, that’s an average of roughly 88 bags a citizen. And along with their various harmful effects on the environment and estimated lifespan of up to 1,000 years, the Zéro Mika video doesn’t seem quite as surreal.

To eliminate them, he North African kingdom established Law 77-15, effective July 1, 2016. With the exclusion of industrial, agricultural, freezer and isothermal bags and those for waste collection, the law prohibits the manufacturing, import, export, commercializing and use of plastic bags. Different but surprisingly tough fine structures exist for each offence, ranging from 20,000 dirhams (C$2,700) all the way up to 1,000,000 dirhams ($135,000), along with the potential for prison time.

This is not Morocco’s first attempt at curtailing the issue. Although not a total ban at the time, in 2010 the government introduced a law that prohibited non-degradable and non-biodegradable plastic bags. More than 40 countries across the world have now either banned, taxed or moved to restrict plastic bag use, including Rwanda and most recently Kenya. But not all countries have been as successful at implementation. And Africa has been struggling with the litter for years.

In Rwanda, a zero-tolerance enforcement regime has been in place since 2008. It imposes harsh penalties for smugglers and any businesses found by inspectors to be breaking the law, combined with strict border controls and networks of informers. Yet across the border in the Congo, there’s little evidence of any reduction in plastic bags – the country is in fact one of the biggest sources of smuggled plastic bags into Rwanda, according to recent news reports.

Morocco has embraced a middle path, combining some enforcement measures with financial support for businesses as they transition, as well as supporting public education campaigns to gain long-term support for the measure. It also didn’t widen the scope of the ban as far as Rwanda did, which targets other forms of plastic waste beyond consumer hand-held bags.

Part of the government messaging is built around Morocco’s reputation for supporting sustainable development, including a gradual shift towards renewable electricity sources and a raft of other eco-friendly policies.

Yassine Zegzouti, president of Mawarid: Environment and Energy, a Moroccan non-profit organization that promotes ecological sustainability, is pleased with the progress but realistic about the ongoing significant cultural shift. His organization was responsible for one of the first awareness campaigns in the country about the issue in 2012, called Marrakech without Plastic Bags. Habits revolving around plastic bags are deeply rooted, he notes, describing the general culture the ban was born into. “It’s related to our modes of consumption,” he says. “When [Moroccans] go to the market they take plastic bags; they also keep them and use them for garbage.”

MCCJ, comprising almost 150 Moroccan organizations, networks and unions, launched the large-scale Zéro Mika media campaign a few weeks before the law was implemented for this very reason. Its aim: to raise awareness of the impact of plastic bags and to mobilize their collection as a companion initiative to the nationwide ban.

And the results of both, at first glance, are noticeable.

Walking through the streets of Morocco these days, something does seem different – visibly different. Whether at the suburbs of the capital Rabat, the narrow streets of the Fez medina, the avenues of the financial district in Casablanca or the neighbourhoods of Marrakech’s New Town, plastic bags are missing. The plastic bag, seemingly a fixture in this North African country’s collective cultural unconscious and landscape for decades, appears to have finally disappeared.

The law seems to be completely enforced in large cities, public spaces, malls and supermarket chains, like Carrefour and Marjane, where only fabric bags are available. National news reports, however, circulate about the existence of a black market. Within the first year, according to the Ministry of Interior, more than 421 tonnes of plastic bags, 70 manufacturing machines and 16 vehicles had been seized across the country, and 55 people implicated in this informal sector had been arrested.

More recently, according to H24Info, last August, in the province of Berrechid, Casablanca, the Royal Gendarmerie dismantled an illegal unit and seized its production machinery and almost 20 tonnes of plastic bags. A couple of months later, in October, in the Nouaceur province of the same city, they seized two tonnes and 500 kilograms of plastic bags, broke up the illegal unit manufacturing them and arrested two people involved.

Clandestine production and distribution is active. According to Zegzouti, whenever you prohibit something in any sector a black market naturally emerges – often populated with desperate unemployed youth. For example, he explains, “In Casablanca, some industrialists voluntarily lowered their prices before the law came into effect to sell their stocks.” The majority of the remaining plastic bags, he goes on, come from previous stocks held, from small informal production units in the country and illegal imports from Spain.

Said, a salesclerk at a convenience store in Hay Ryad, a predominantly upper middle-class neighbourhood in Rabat, says he and the owner don’t use plastic bags anymore. “They’re banned. Plastic bags litter the environment,” he explains, as his employer, Mohammed, keeps an ear to the conversation. “There are customers that accept it and there are customers that don’t accept it. We can’t control that,” he continues. Shop vendors in more popular neighbourhoods, however, are generally wary about discussing whether or not they still use plastic bags. Many refuse, assuming being questioned is part of an underground governmental search.

Yassine, an owner of a small clothing shop in the popular Jamaa El Fna square in Marrakech, explains, as he looks away, that he no longer uses plastic bags and that none of his clients asks for them. “Plastic bags negatively affect society and the environment, we don’t need them,” he says, as if on cue. But when asked if Morocco is capable of eradicating them altogether, he answers more confidently, perhaps more honestly: “Inshallah (God willing), in three or four years they’ll disappear.”

Further along the square, Mbarek, a vendor who sells snack foods, spices and beverages, is vague about whether he still uses them. “They’ve lessened a bit,” he recognizes, “but people still work with plastic bags.” He says they haven’t been completely retired; they’ve just become more expensive to purchase. “There are customers who still ask for plastic bags. The value of plastic bags hasn’t disappeared.”

He expresses a frustration mainly with the price of the fabric bags, the most common alternative, which they generally buy from travelling salespeople. “You used to get plastic bags for 18 dirhams [a kilo] (about C$2),” he says. “Now, if you go through 100 fabric bags in one day, that’s 30 dirhams (about $4). It’s an added struggle.”

Inadvertently, it is the small shop vendors who feel the higher costs most. Prioritizing ecologically beneficial initiatives, like the plastic bag ban, is also an element that isn’t easy for struggling working-class vendors to accept. “There are many other things that should be taken care of before focusing on the mika,” Mbarek adds.

Although measuring the complete success of the ban so far is tricky and layered, governmental efforts are clear and recognized. “There is a success at the level of the will of the government and the local authorities to apply the law. At the beginning we thought maybe it was just marketing for the global climate change conference (COP22) in November 2016 but on the contrary, they hired agents and mobilized funds. There has been a real effort to be considered,” Zegzouti affirms.

Nonetheless, he concedes that awareness efforts – on how the ban of plastic bags is helping the country and its people move forward into a more sustainable future – are still very much necessary.

The post They haven’t disappeared appeared first on Corporate Knights.