But since images of wildfires ravaging the Amazon rainforest captured global hearts and minds, efforts to reforest the planet have taken centre stage. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began urging political leaders in Canada and around the globe to look to tree planting as part of a Natural Climate Solutions campaign to tackle global heating. Adding fuel to the tree-planting fire, a Swiss study published in the journal Science made waves when it concluded that planting 1.2 trillion trees worldwide could absorb and store an astonishing 205 gigatonnes – effectively removing two-thirds of all human-made carbon from the atmosphere, once those trees fully mature.

Keeping a trillion young trees alive all the way to maturity in the face of climate-change-aggravated droughts, wildfires and pests, as well as human pressures, will be an enormous challenge. As well, the Guardian’s George Monbiot (a founder of the Natural Climate Solutions campaign) recently cautioned that “in many places rewilding, or natural regeneration – allowing trees to seed and spread themselves – is much faster and more effective, and tends to produce far richer habitats.”

Regardless, the wave of mass tree-planting pledges has begun. Here’s a sampling of the latest initiatives:

• Ireland plans to plant 22 million trees every year for the next 20 years, totalling 440 million trees.

• New Zealand aims to plant a billion trees by 2028.

• A record-breaking 350 million trees were reportedly planted on a single day in July in Ethiopia, as part of a push to plant four billion trees there by October.

• Pakistan has committed to planting 10 billion trees over the next five to eight years.

• More than 20 African countries are in the midst of planting a Great Green Wall, with plans to reforest 247 million acres of degraded land.

• In Canada, the federal Liberal Party promised, if re-elected, to use revenues from the Trans Mountain Pipeline to pay for two billion trees to be planted.

Not that tree planting should negate efforts to decarbonize the economy, but as Swiss researcher Jean-François Bastin says, “Governments must now factor [tree restoration] into their national strategies.”

The post Planting billions of trees could be natural climate solution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Sadly, there is no shortage of choice for the title of Worst Company on Earth. A host of sweatshops surely qualify, as do any number of corrupt corporate kleptocracies, mismanaged monopolies, climate-action-obstructing fossil fuel companies, price-gouging pharmaceutical companies, weapons manufacturers…the list goes on.

The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Mighty Earth recently took a stab at identifying the ultimate bottom-feeder in environmental governance and decided to award the dubious honour to Cargill, the agri-food giant.

The rap sheet against Cargill, the U.S.’s largest privately owned company, is a long one. In the foreword to Mighty Earth’s 7,000-word report, former U.S. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman writes: “The people who have been sickened or died from eating contaminated Cargill meat, the child laborers who grow the cocoa Cargill sells for the world’s chocolate, the Midwesterners who drink water polluted by Cargill, the Indigenous People displaced by vast deforestation to make way for Cargill’s animal feed, and the ordinary consumers who’ve paid more to put food on the dinner table because of Cargill’s financial malfeasance – all have felt the impact of this agribusiness giant. Their lives are worse for having come into contact with Cargill.”

The report is especially scathing in regard to Cargill’s role in vast deforestation in Brazil by farmers from whom it buys massive amounts of soybeans (which largely become livestock feed).

Nonetheless, the choice of Cargill is somewhat surprising. Environmental activists even lauded it in the past for agreeing to a moratorium on buying soybeans grown on land stripped of trees in the Amazon rainforest. Cargill received a Leadership in Environment award in 2015 from the Keystone Policy Center, a non-profit.

Cargill stoutly defends itself against Mighty Earth’s charges. It noted in a statement that it donated almost US$60 million to charities in 54 countries and has agreed to a zero-deforestation commitment over a period of time in its cocoa, palm oil and soybean supply chains.

“It’s hard to hear,” Ruth Kimmelshue, the company’s chief sustainability officer, told the New York Times. “It doesn’t feel very good.”

Indeed, some may argue that other companies have a stronger claim to be the world’s worst. But in an era when business people constantly pat each other on the back with awards for excellence, no matter how obscure the achievement, it’s not a bad idea to highlight at least some of those that fall short.

Heroes: Business Roundtable

In August 19, more than 180 of the U.S.’s most powerful businesses broke with a long tradition by pledging to serve not only their owners, but also workers, customers, suppliers and communities. The Business Roundtable, America’s most influential lobby group of corporate leaders, retreated from its longstanding position that corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders.

Yet even as they did so, there was no shortage of evidence that many of these companies – and others – remain squarely focused on maximizing profits and driving up the price of their shares.

On the very same day as the announcement, three tech giants – Amazon, Facebook and Google – vowed to fight a 3% “digital” tax that France imposed earlier this year to counter the companies’ unrelenting efforts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. A week later, an Oklahoma judge ordered another Roundtable signatory, the pharmaceutical group Johnson & Johnson, to pay US$572 million for its role in causing the opioid crisis that, in his words, had “ravaged” the state.

These are hardly the signs one would expect of a more caring and inclusive business community.

Even so, the Roundtable’s statement signals a welcome break from the past. Its original 1997 mission statement declared, “The paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders.” The interests of other stakeholders, like employees or local communities, were only “relevant as a derivative of the duty to stockholders.”

Now, says the Roundtable, “Each of our stakeholders is essential.” To its credit, the new approach recognizes that rising public anger over issues like executive pay (and, more broadly, income inequality), climate change and the opioid crisis has sullied the reputation of business. As Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO and Roundtable chair, put it, “the American dream is alive, but fraying.”

The question is how effective the Roundtable’s new approach will be. Corporate Knights has suggested following up on the statement of purpose with concrete commitments to carbon-zero business plans and paying a living wage, for starters. Without these kinds of concrete commitments, World Resources Institute’s Kevin Moss says the Roundtable’s new statement “shows 200 CEOs are stuck in yesteryear’s (corporate social responsibility).”

However true that may be, the Roundtable’s new approach at least enables society to hold businesses to a standard based on more than quarterly earnings and return on investment. Let the scrutiny – and the consequences that flow from it – begin.

The post Heroes & Zeros: Business Roundtable evolves, while Cargill named worst company on earth appeared first on Corporate Knights.

If the pilot goes well, McDonald’s will join the growing ranks of restaurants and meat producers that are betting the farm on plant-based meats. And none too soon, by the looks of the latest research from Coller FAIRR, a $16-trillion investor network that raises awareness of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks and opportunities caused by intensive livestock production.

The Index assesses 60 publicly listed animal protein producers with a combined market cap of $324 billion. FAIRR’s key findings?

• Suppliers to McDonald’s, Tesco, Nestlé and Walmart ranked as worst offenders in areas such as greenhouse gases, antibiotics and deforestation, despite pledges.

• 77% of major meat, fish and dairy producers don’t measure all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and don’t have meaningful targets to reduce them, undermining the climate commitments of major brands.

The world’s meat, fish and dairy industries are under serious threat from climate change impacts, said Jeremy Coller, founder of FAIRR and chief investment officer at Coller Capital. He added, “The weight of evidence highlighted by the Coller FAIRR Index has left investors concerned that the sector is failing to act. The Paris Agreement is impossible to achieve without tackling factory farm emissions. Coal is a stranded asset, and cows are the new coal.”

On the bright side, the Index found “plant-based investments booming”: 25% of animal protein producers (15 of 60 firms) now have some investments in alternative proteins such as plant-based meats, including Canada’s Maple Leaf Foods and Tyson Foods in the U.S..

And the Canadian Prairies just so happen to be at the heart of that boom, as veg-friendly companies like Beyond Meat turn to yellow peas for protein. Canada is the world’s largest grower and exporter of yellow peas, but most pea protein processing has happened offshore. That’s starting to change. Manitoba recently scored its second pea-protein processing facility, a $65-million plant near Winnipeg. The province is already in the process of building a $400-million pea-protein plant – the world’s largest.

In 2017, Avatar director and environmental advocate James Cameron (owner of Verdient Foods) opened a multimillion dollar pulse processing plant southwest of Saskatoon (the province is world’s leading exporter of lentils and dried peas).

Whether McDonald’s restaurants in Prairies will carry Beyond Burgers remains to be seen.

The post If cattle are the new coal, are Canadian peas the new solar? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To put that number in perspective, if a rich country like Canada were to invest 1% of its GDP planting new trees over a period of just eight years, it could remove up to half of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been deposited by humankind in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

Former ExxonMobil scientist Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham also won a Nobel prize this year for his pioneering work in the development of the lithium-ion battery for the company in the 1970s. In its citation for the prize, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: “This light-weight, rechargeable and powerful battery is now used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles. It can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power, making possible a fossil fuel-free society.”

For whatever reason, after Whittingham’s initial breakthrough, Exxon put the rechargeable battery project on ice, citing high manufacturing costs and safety concerns.

That wasn’t the only time Exxon scientists developed potential breakthrough technologies to decarbonize the global economy. Exxon holds more low-carbon patents than any company on the planet, according to a Chatham House report.

Exxon’s annual sales are more than triple Ethiopia’s GDP. One wonders how different the world would be had the company invested its vast resources in a better future rather than holding it back. Exxon’s shareholders should be asking this question too. Over the past 10 years, Exxon’s stock has been a dog, returning just one dollar for every six generated by an equivalent investment in the broader U.S. stock market.

The reason for this is the best news possible: economics. The low-carbon way is now the better, cheaper way. This is true across a host of critical technologies from electric vehicles to renewable power and storage.

To wit: A recent report by BNP Paribas Asset Management (which has US$469 billion in assets under management) found that oil needs a long-term breakeven price of $10–$20 per barrel to remain competitive in mobility, which accounts for more than a third of demand for crude oil. The report concludes the “economics of oil for gasoline and diesel vehicles versus wind- and solar-powered electric vehicles are now in relentless and irreversible decline, with far-reaching implications for both policymakers and the oil majors.”

It’s good news that investors are waking up to the greatest threat to humanity, and even better news that it is for economic reasons, as that suggests the possibility of a massive scale-down of financing of climate problems in favour of climate solutions. But it’s not happening fast enough.

It’s as if our house is on fire and we are waiting for the boxing day sale on sprinklers.

We need to turn the firehose on. For decades, dealing with climate change (now a climate emergency) has been a massive collective action problem with little incentive to be a first mover, because it has been viewed as an environmental problem. Any single actor (with the exception of China or the U.S.) could not hope to make more than a dent on their own, and the benefits would not be reaped for decades into the future.

But when viewed through the lens of economics, the first mover disadvantage becomes an advantage. Those who lead the race to the rising low carbon economy stand to reap the biggest gains.

Which brings us to Canada, eh. With our energy industry on the ropes and struggling to remain relevant in what Shell CEO Ben van Beurden describes as a “lower forever” oil price world, the sooner we change our mindset to see the low-carbon economy as something to fight for rather than against the better.

Ditto for the rest of our economy — from the beleaguered internal combustion auto sector and energy-inefficient heavy industry to buildings and the balkanized electrical grid — embracing the opportunities of a low-carbon economy could bring our country together instead of driving it apart.

But it will take a serious chunk of change: about $300 billion over the next six years, according to The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity, a Corporate Knights report for the Council for Clean Capitalism.

The simplest most effective way to move Canada to the front of the global low-carbon economic expansion would be for the federal government to initiate a large clean stimulus package backed by an annual $50 billion green bond program that would provide grants for businesses to deploy climate solutions.

As the global economy enters a period of contraction, the timing for such a stimulus could not be better.

Using the best models available, such a bold move could add as many as 900,000 jobs and $700 billion of GDP growth over six years.

Unlike Ethiopia we have abundant means to do this. A $300 billion pot of free money would focus the imagination of Canadian businesses. We should not underestimate our ability to capitalize on the awesome low-carbon growth opportunity.

The post The world needs more Ethiopia and less Exxon appeared first on Corporate Knights.

If the remaining two supermajors, BP pledged to align its business with the aims of the Paris Agreement and has begun linking some staff bonuses to its low-carbon progress, and Chevron plans to set targets and tie executive compensation and rank-and-file bonuses to carbon reductions.

Of the largest 308 companies in the 14 most carbon-intensive sectors tracked by TPI, fully 107 of them now link senior executive pay to climate performance (including Cenovus, Enbridge, Imperial Oil, Teck Resources, TransCanada – now TC Energy – and Suncor in Canada).

Despite political battles over climate change measures at the government level, the topic is moving to the top of corporate agendas. It’s becoming not just a public relations exercise but also about competing. Competing for investor capital that is increasingly attuned to the risks of the energy transition, not wanting to get stuck holding a bag of stranded assets. Competing for customers who are consciously choosing vendors whose policies dovetail with their own. Competing for talent looking to impact the world and help ensure the long-term sustainability of our society, and who will steadfastly not work for companies lagging behind critical megatrends.

Executives are increasingly aware of the importance of sustainability issues and have been for the last number of years. According to a 2016 survey by the UN and Accenture, 98% of executives believe sustainability is important to the future success of their businesses. The problem is, up until recently, few of them had their performance linked to sustainability metrics.

Of the largest 308 companies in the 14 most carbon-intensive sectors, 107 of them now link senior executive pay to climate performance.

For the last 30 years, executive compensation has been tied to financial targets and shareholder returns. Despite its popularity, compensating executives for total shareholder return is fundamentally unfair since so much of that return is beta (a measure of a stock’s volatility in relation to the market), which is something they can’t control, and alpha (the investment return over and above a benchmark index) is notoriously hard to find in certain sectors. CEOs will tell you they focus on what they can control: so why have boards been tying executive compensation to share performance, which management can’t control, and not to sustainability practices linked to surviving and thriving in the transition to a low carbon economy, which they can control?

Decades ago, when companies were facing issues with quality control in the manufacturing sector, boards of directors began to include quality metrics in compensation to focus executives on a key factor affecting the bottom line. CEOs embraced the idea because they like control, measurements and meeting targets. The same thinking should be deployed to address climate-related risks and harness climate-related opportunities.

Managing climate risk and opportunity

When it comes to management of climate risk and opportunity, businesses have many metrics from which to choose, but comparable metrics are not yet commonly deployed. Every business leaves a carbon footprint, so measures to reduce that footprint could be easily adopted (although it’s not always most relevant to a business case). Financial-services firms can allocate a percentage of capital to climate-friendly projects, such as renewable energy, climate-resilient infrastructure or sustainable agriculture. All companies could commit to zero-carbon energy targets. They could also commit to more climate-resilient infrastructure. Finding the right company-specific metrics to incentivize efficiency and sustainability over the medium to long term is key.

Doing so can bolster a company’s reputation among its stakeholders and generate political capital with government regulators (who can grant the company great freedom of movement, amend legislation and regulations or provide greater tax exemptions). Many climate-related measures can provide a return on investment through reduced energy consumption and waste over the medium to long term. And of increasing importance, they can avoid costs by proactively managing future climate risks and reducing “emergency” responses and spends.

It’s not only about downside risk. Companies can use compensation incentives to support the creation of new products and services to address urgent needs around the world, such as scarce water supplies, hunger and the need to support renewable fuels and clean electricity development.

As the World Economic Forum’s January 2019 publication on effective climate governance for boards sets out, monetary incentives for senior management teams should be tied to long-term organizational goals that contribute to resilience and prosperity over time. There is little to prevent linking climate-risk and opportunity-related factors to compensation schedules. There have already been significant advancements in linking corporate social responsibility (CSR) to executive compensation, and it’s worked.

Europe’s largest firms are already well on their way to incorporating climate change into executive compensation, according to the CDP, a global non-profit that measures sustainability impact. Looking at firms worth three quarters of European market capitalization, they found that 47% of companies reward senior management for managing climate topics, with one in four tying incentives to climate targets. For example, BNP Paribas aligns top managers’ compensation to climate-related indicators, such as financing renewable energy projects and carbon pollution targets (measured as carbon-equivalent per employee).

In Canada, the information is spottier, but major financial institutions are leading the way and beginning to incorporate the climate crisis into compensation schemes. For instance, RBC and TD’s senior executives have monetary rewards linked to environmental commitments and targets. And the Quebec pension fund La Caisse has linked compensation to climate targets across the organization. Although these are admittedly “small carrots” in the larger compensation picture, the carrots appear to be helping nudge towards alignment of corporate and climate-related goals.

Executive compensation can be an effective tool to spur innovation and rapid movement towards a low-carbon future and organizational stability in a climate-adjusted future. To actualize the urgent transition required, we’ll need to pull out all the tools the market has to offer, and fast.

Laura Zizzo is the founder and CEO of Mantle314, a climate risk management consulting firm.

The post Climate bonus: Is paying executives to address the climate crisis good business? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s been just over a year since Greta Thunberg felt compelled to take time off school every Friday to demand more from those in the halls of power. Twelve months later, she may be the highest-profile sustainability leader under 30 (having graced the covers of Time, GQ and Teen Vogue), but she is far from alone in her leadership. Young people are rising.

In Canada and around the globe, youth are stepping up to create a more sustainable world. There are over 1.8 billion people on the planet between the ages of 15 and 30 right now – and they feel more empowered than the generations that came before. “Sixty-one percent believe their generation has more ability to effect change than others,” according to Viacom Velocity’s Power in Progress study, which surveyed 11,000 young people in 10 countries.

Millennials (now the largest generation in the Canadian workforce), as well as up-and-coming Gen Zs (the young professionals who will soon outnumber millennials), are redefining and disrupting the status quo, demanding more equitable, transparent and sustainable workplaces. They’re calling for values-driven companies and brands with purpose. (The “statement of purpose” declaration issued in August by almost 200 influential CEOs is a clear sign that corporations are listening to the drumbeat of shifting paradigms rising from the street).

As North America’s largest voting bloc, millennials and eligible Gen Zs are demanding more from elected politicians. They’re leading differently, too. As Forbes put it, “Having young people lead great change is at least as old as Alexander the Great. But several things have changed since early Greece ruled the world.” Today’s youth are building new power dynamics in collectives that work to empower and transform.

Taking bold and transformative steps to shift the world onto a sustainable path is exactly what the UN set out to do with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015. Purpose-driven corporations, organizations and politicians around the globe have since been incorporating SDGs into their mandates, but as the UN said, “Youth are the torchbearers of the 2030 Agenda – young people all over the world are contributing to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.” So, this year Corporate Knights, with support from RBC, thought it was only fitting to ask our 30 under 30 nominees how their work advances the holistic set of sustainability goals.

Given the problems plaguing the planet, it’s not surprising that so many are climate activists, renewable-energy champions, green-city builders and zero-waste advocates. Narrowing the list was tough, but the final roll call of young sustainability champions – budding Indigenous leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, academics and beyond – will inspire you to believe in the power of youth to lead us swiftly toward the new green economy this world so urgently needs.

Nominations for the list opened in June with only two requirements: nominees must be under age 30 and either work in Canada or be a Canadian working abroad. An internal team brought the submissions down to a shortlist of 50, then a panel of judges each submitted their top 30 picks and the votes were tallied (note: the list appears in no particular order).

Corporate Knights asked five judges to help us select this year’s final 30:

Dianne Saxe,
Former Environmental Commissioner of Ontario

Priyanka Lloyd,
Executive director of Green Economy Canada

James Henry,
Sustainability lead at Google Canada

Toby Heaps,
CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights

Adria Vasil,
Managing digital editor of Corporate Knights and bestselling Ecoholic author

We know there are countless more young people in Canada being the change they want to see in the world. Be sure to let us know about any sustainability change-makers under 30 (like 15-year-old Indigenous water activist Autumn Peltier) that you think should be considered when nominations open again in the spring of 2020.

Arjun Gupta
29 | Toronto | Regional Director, Projects – Philippines at UGE | SDGS: 7

By the age of 21, Arjun Gupta had already helped electrify close to 10 villages across rural East India with solar photovoltaic systems. He saw first-hand the impact it had on the villagers: the children could study after dark, and the adults could work longer hours into the night when needed, without inhaling toxic fumes from kerosene lamps. “People need clean water and food to survive but electricity to thrive,” he says. Distributed renewable energy in particular, he realized, can provide access to electricity in villages where the central power grid is not available. An engineer by training, Arjun has worked eight years in renewable energy. He now works for the Canadian company UGE implementing solar and microgrid projects in Brazil, Panama, Guatemala, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Turks and Caicos, Canada, the U.S. and the Philippines.

Ana F. González Guerrero
28 | Ottawa | Co-founder and Managing Director,
Youth Climate Lab/Innovation Fund | SDGs: 5, 8, 10, 11

Ana F. González Guerrero founded Youth Climate Lab in 2017 after she and co-founder (and Top 30 Under 30 alumni) Dominique Souris noticed a lack of youth participation in decisions affecting their future. The duo wanted to help spark and scale up youth-led climate projects and businesses. Since its inception, YCL has developed 11 projects, including Greenpreneurs, Our2030 and Y-NEXT, in six countries. YCL’s newest project, Future X Change, connects youth from Canada’s Arctic Gwich’in First Nation and southern Canada to collaborate on activating climate action in their communities. Ana also works at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Partnerships for Municipal Innovation in Local Economic Development, where she manages a small-scale innovation fund for inclusive economic development in Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Vietnam, Cambodia and Bolivia.

Aliénor (Allie) Rougeot
20 | Toronto | Climate Justice Activist, Fridays for Future
| SDGs: 8, 11, 13, 16

If you participated in one of the nearly 300 climate strikes that took place across Canada, you can thank the passionate climate organizers that made Fridays for Future demonstrations a reality. In Toronto, that’s head strike organizer Aliénor Rougeot (or Allie, as she’s known). She has been a human rights and environmental activist since the age of 10 and these days is focused on building a Climate Strike coalition that includes traditional environmental, Indigenous and migrant rights groups as well as racialized youth and workers. What inspired her to join the strike movement? “I was active in the different sustainability groups on campus. However, I felt very frustrated encouraging small, individual changes to students.” A gnawing sense that “we need to question the whole system” drove her to take on strike organizing and speaking at schools to try to inspire more university students to get engaged. “My dream would be that every student graduating in 2020 and 2021 feels as though they are a climate leader, no matter which field they go into.” Image courtesy of Toronto Star.

Taylor Morriseau
25 | Niverville, Manitoba | PhD Candidate, Health Researcher | SDGs: 3

Growing up in Manitoba, Taylor Morriseau saw how diabetes dominated conversations about Indigenous health in her extended family and community. “As a consequence of the intergenerational effects and ongoing colonialism, Indigenous youth are disproportionately burdened by diseases like early-onset type 2 diabetes,” she says. As a PhD candidate at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, Taylor studies the molecular mechanisms underlying youth-onset type 2 diabetes, and her recent contribution to the Journal of Endocrinology examines how gestational diabetes influences long-term health trajectories and chronic disease. The goal of her work is to uncover new therapeutic strategies and disrupt the vicious cycle that perpetuates poor health outcomes across generations. “My work is simply one outlet to honour the commitments of those before me,” she says, “and to pave a brighter future for those to come.”

Jordan Kasarjian
25 | Montreal | Venture Capital Associate, Inerjys | SDGs: 7, 8, 12

At his day job at Inerjys, Jordan Kasarjian provides funding and commercialization expertise to cleantech start-ups. Funding early-stage enterprises means he’s assessing the potential of companies with little or no revenue, so standard financial analysis tools aren’t helpful. “I tend to look at the team,” he says. “It’s fine to invest in innovations, but I like to invest in innovators.” Outside of this, he founded the sustainable clothing brand Voyageur, which produces carbon-neutral rainwear designed to withstand intense outdoor activity. Jordan was a canoe-tripping guide for Northwaters Langskib, sharing his love of the outdoors with youth, and comes from a family of entrepreneurs, so Voyageur was a good fit. “I want Voyageur to be an expression of how I think business should be done,” he says. “Net carbon neutrality is just one small piece of that.”

Rachel Wang
29 | Toronto | Founder, Evoke Creatives | SDGs: 11

Rachel Wang knows how much popular culture and music have affected the way she thinks and what she cares about. She also understands that many experts, when communicating about climate change, don’t fully consider how young people acquire knowledge. That’s why she founded Evoke Creatives to bring more racialized youth to the frontlines of the environmental movement using hip hop, with the understanding that music can be a powerful catalyst for change. This summer Rachel worked with organizers of hip hop and Caribbean music festivals to engage racialized youth as volunteers to manage waste and help make those events more sustainable. Prior to founding this social enterprise, Rachel worked for WWF and was a facilitator for the Active Citizens program in Canada.

Rachel Parent
20 | Toronto | GMO Educator/Food Activist | SDGs: 2, 3, 12

Rachel Parent led her first march calling for genetically modified ingredients to be identified on labels when she was 13 years old. Since then, she’s become a major force in the GMO labelling movement and a globally sought-after speaker who engages thousands to think critically about their food choices (including CBC host Kevin O’Leary in a punchy live debate when she was just 14). In addition to founding Kids Right to Know, she’s now the youth director of Regeneration International, a global network for regenerative agriculture and land use practices, and founder of Gen-Earth, an educational platform designed to inspire youth to take action through filmmaking and activism. Her advice to young people looking to hold corporations accountable? “Don’t be disheartened by their antics to bring you down.” She adds that “constructive dialogue and putting in place action plans that corporations can participate in is a way of not only holding them accountable but making sure they’re transitioning to systems that [contribute to] social good.”

Vincent Morales
25 | Calgary | Technical and Policy Analyst, Pembina Institute | SDGs: 3, 7, 13

Vincent Morales has one motivation: tackling climate change. His interest in sustainable energy began when he was 15 and did an internship with his father, who sold commercial rooftop solar photovoltaics in southern France. A study-abroad semester in Quebec inspired him to apply his expertise in Canada. Now on the other side of the country as an analyst at Pembina and treasurer of the Calgary Climate Hub, Vincent works on multiple fronts to drive climate action in Calgary. He has presented to city council in support of strong climate policy, organized clean energy forums, trained youth changemakers and frequently speaks on francophone media about energy and climate in the province. Although Alberta lags in the transition to a clean economy, Vincent says the province’s great solar and wind resources, skilled citizens, and the growing number of Albertans working to accelerate the energy transition inspire him to keep fighting for positive change.

Fatin Tawfig
25 | Germany and Toronto | Early Career Climate Fellow, UN University – Institute for Environment and Human Security | SDGs: 11, 13

This young Sudanese-Canadian calls herself a “climate policy wonk” who’s passionate about securing a prosperous future for all. Fatin Tawfig studied green growth policies in the Republic of Georgia and is currently in Bonn, Germany, as part of the inaugural cohort of Early Career Climate Fellows hosted by the UN Climate Change Secretariat and the UN University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security. Her research there focuses on building resilience, particularly in private sector engagement and adaptation finance. “Although adaptation action generally falls to communities and the public sector by default,” Fatin says, “the private sector has an unprecedented opportunity to benefit from and to accelerate resilience building and adaptation efforts.” The University of Toronto alumni was one of 100 “green ticket” winners offered carbon neutral travel to the first ever UN Youth Climate Summit in New York this September.

Larissa Crawford
23 | Toronto | Public Speaker, Researcher, Trainer | SDGs: 7, 10

While working in the energy sector on the government side, Larissa Crawford was being invited to energy ministerial meetings, international policy negotiations and youth energy roundtables and realized there was an urgent need for anti-racism and Indigenous leadership in renewable energy policy. “It highlighted the importance of having someone like me do the work that I do,” says Larissa, who channelled her talent for communication, specialized experience and her lived experience as a woman of Métis and Jamaican ancestry to launch her own consultancy, Larissa Crawford Speaks. She’s since served as head Canadian delegate at the 2018 G7 Youth Summit, where she lobbied successfully for Indigenous climate action in the G7 Summit. Most recently, she brought her message of inclusive clean energy development to an international delegation at the 2019 Clean Energy Ministerial meetings. She currently works as the Indigenous community liaison with the Calgary-based non-profit Calgary Learns.

Lucy Cullen
27 | Toronto | Co-founder, Terus; Founder and CEO, EarthPup | SDGs: 12

After years of watching uneaten food get tossed in the garbage while working in the hospitality industry, Lucy Cullen knew she needed to take action. The company she founded in response, Terus, has diverted almost 150,000 pounds of waste from the landfill by working with restaurants to improve waste management systems, reduce food prep waste, shift to sustainable suppliers and inspire restaurant staff as agents of change. Her newest venture, EarthPup, combines the expertise she built in food sustainability with her love of dogs by producing organic, planet-friendly dog treats. A portion of the company’s revenue helps to rehome rescue dogs. Photo credit: Nikki Leigh McKean

Kelly Lovell
27 | Waterloo, Ontario | Youth Mobilizer, CEO, Lovell Corporation; Founder MyEffect, Youth2030 Challenge | SDGs: 4, 8, 10

Before she was commanding rooms full of world leaders, Kelly Lovell was an introvert. The first time she spoke live was to a stadium of 7,000-plus students, when she gave the opening speech at the 2012 We Day in Kitchener, after having found her passion mobilizing youth at the local Volunteer Action Centre as a teen. Now she’s an eight-time UN speaker, a three-time TEDx speaker and an active champion for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Through her company, MyEffect, Lovell has developed an app that connects young people with partners around the globe to take action on SDG-aligned sustainability projects, tracking everyone’s impact. To those who underestimate the power of youth, Kelly says, “Youth are resourceful, tech-savvy self-starters with an innate drive to make an impact and [have] unjaded creative minds – the leadership ingredients we need from stakeholders to achieve the ambitious targets of the SDGs over this next decade.”

Christie McLeod
29 | Winnipeg and Toronto | Founder & Director of Human Rights Hub, Law Student | SDGs: 5, 11

As the founder and director of Winnipeg’s Human Rights Hub, Christie McLeod knows more than most that the climate crisis can violate fundamental human rights to life, liberty, security and access to food, shelter and more. “A pivotal injustice is that those most impacted by climate change are those least responsible for the emissions that contributed to climate change,” says Christie. She had her “light bulb” moment to go to law school after reading about Canadian First Nations’ constitutional right to water. Now a specialist in environmental and Aboriginal law in the final year of her law degree and a Master’s in Environmental Studies, she has advocated for the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation and helped launch the Friends of Shoal Lake 40 coalition, which helped secure an all-year access road to the community. Stay tuned for the findings of her current research on what Canada’s “fair share” of emissions reductions ought to be.

Nirwair Singh Bajwa
27 | Edmonton | Sustainability Analyst, Stantec | SDGs: 9

Nirwair Singh Bajwa had recently moved to Edmonton from India to start a master’s degree in chemical engineering when he became aware of the pressing need to make Canada’s buildings more efficient (at this point, they’re responsible for roughly 20% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions). Nirwair now works as a sustainability analyst on Stantec Edmonton’s Sustainability and Building Performance Team. And thanks to his efforts, the 66-storey Stantec Tower in Edmonton has health and wellness woven into its design, complete with a Community Supported Agriculture drop-off program and access to 13 kilometres of pedestrian paths to promote employee health. The chair of the Emerging Green Professionals (EGPs) program at the Canada Green Building Council is also active with PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) Alberta, where he’s helped remove financial barriers to the retrofit economy.

Liz Gosselin
28 | Halifax | Co-founder and Creative Director, R&G Strategic | SDGs: 17

R&G isn’t your typical branding, marketing and communications agency. Liz Gosselin’s company, based in Halifax, works exclusively with sustainable businesses moving toward circular-economy business models. She gives her clients the sustainable marketing expertise needed to reach their business goals as they develop innovative ways to manage the planet’s natural resources and act on the climate crisis. Some of her projects include helping Nova Scotians learn about their homes’ solar potential with SolarAssist, promoting electric vehicle adoption with EV Assist and Next Ride, and working with organizations leading Canada’s shift to a clean economy, including Efficiency Canada and Sustane Technologies.

Rylan Urban
26 | Toronto | Founder, energyhub.org | SDGs: 7, 12, 13

Something struck Rylan Urban about the fact that the Canadian provinces that are home to some of the best renewable energy resources, like Alberta and Saskatchewan, were also the “dirtiest.” The creative strategist saw the lack of information about renewables as a major impediment to the adoption of solar power and other clean energy across the country. So he created energyhub.org to bridge that gap. The site has since reached over 150,000 Canadians and brokered over $1 million in residential solar system sales across five provinces. He’s clearly got more winning ideas up his sleeve: Rylan won the Pembina Institute’s 2019 Youth Energy Policy Design Competition for his policy package on how Canada can reach 2030 international climate targets. As well, the master’s of sustainability management student recently co-organized a two-day conference, Let’s Talk Sustainability, for 500 middle school students in Peel Region.

Alexandra Tavasoli
29 | Toronto | CEO, The Solistra Corporation; Chemical Engineer | SDGs: 7

As an environmentalist chemical engineer, Alexandra Tavasoli has always felt an internal tension about the pace at which chemical engineering is implementing change and the urgency of the climate crisis. Now, as the CEO of Toronto-based cleantech start-up Solistra, she and her team are developing a revolutionary chemical conversion technology that uses solar energy to convert greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels and products like plastic – using solar-activated nanocatalysts Alexandra developed during her PhD in materials engineering at the University of Toronto. “I believe that technologies that are able to facilitate the transition of large industry into a cleaner future will be vital to…building a pluralistic climate-fighting strategy,” says the MaRS Women in Cleantech finalist, who also hopes to inspire the next generation of female engineers.

Corbin Lowe
28 | Vancouver | Co-founder, Planted Meals | SDGs: 13

Corbin Lowe had thought transitioning to a plant-based diet would be impossible. In 2015, he reached what he calls his “breaking point” when he realized the extent to which his meat-based diet was fuelling the climate crisis (livestock contribute to roughly 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – on par with the entire transport sector). As a triathlete who loved to lift weights, he wanted to eliminate meat from his diet but had ingrained assumptions that high-level athletes couldn’t be vegan. Then his friend Natalie Young introduced him to high-protein plants and some delicious vegan recipes, and Corbin was surprised to find that his athletic performance didn’t suffer. Inspired, he and Natalie founded Planted Meals, a vegan meal-prep and delivery service, serving up to 1,500 meals a week, with an estimated carbon savings of 2.5kg/CO2 per meal. Now, the Vancouver-based company prioritizes convenience, affordability and positive messaging to normalize plant-based eating for a cleaner, kinder planet.

Angela Li
17 | Toronto | Student, Founder TheTwentyThirty.org |
SDGs: 5, 11

At 17, Angela takes an interdisciplinary approach to advancing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, using business, technology and social advocacy platforms to address pressing environmental issues. She set up her own non-profit organization, the Twenty-Thirty Project, to introduce the UN SDGs to others around the world. Twenty-Thirty is now in more than 20 countries, with chapters in Syria, the Philippines, Jamaica and India. Every few months, Angela’s organization focuses on a different SDG. For example, in honour of International Women’s Day and SDG #5 (gender equality), her non-profit organized menstrual-hygiene-product fundraisers and was able to distribute 11,000 biodegradable female sanitary products to rural slums in India and to homeless shelters in chapter cities. As a result of her work, she was invited to the United Nations Economic and Social Council’s 2019 Youth Forum.

Marina Melanidis & Caroline Merner
24 and 24 | Vancouver
Founders, Climate Guides | SDGs: 13

Caroline Merner and Marina Melanidis were aboard the Ocean Endeavour cruise ship – crossing the Davis Strait from Resolute, Nunavut, to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland – with Students on Ice when they discovered a shared passion for climate action. With their Vancouver-based non-profit, Climate Guides, they hoped to replicate the energy and mentorship model that naturally evolved on the ship between Indigenous Elders, professionals and students in various fields. Climate Guides matches youth with climate professionals to implement climate action projects, including Youth4Nature, a capacity-building group that promotes youth and marginalized communities as catalysts for nature-based solutions to the climate crisis.

Aaron Joshua Pinto
28 | New York City | Trade Commissioner – Foreign Direct Investment, Consulate General of Canada in New York | SDGs: 16

As a Bahrain-born Indo-Canadian whose family moved to Canada from the Middle East following the Gulf War, Aaron Joshua Pinto has always been driven to address the injustice in global inequities. He’s travelled to Malawi as part of a Commonwealth Observer Group monitoring the 2019 tripartite elections, produced research on applying Canadian best practices in water management in Kazakhstan, and helped create an award-winning biodegradable mosquito net for malaria prevention in Africa. “Initiatives and policies are important,” he says, “but there are also lessons we can learn about community trust and well-being. We must pay attention.” Aaron now works as a trade commissioner for the Consulate General of Canada in New York.

Jessica Iida
28 | Vancouver | Sustainability Operations Lead, lululemon | SDGs: 12

Although she started her career as a consultant, Jessica Iida wanted to drive corporate sustainability changes from the inside to help see things through. That instinct, combined with an interest in lightening fashion’s massive environmental impact, took her to lululemon. As Sustainability Operations lead, Jessica’s overseen the reuse, donation and recycling of more than 2.5 million garments and rolled out lululemon’s sustainable packaging policy. “There’s such a need to move the industry forward,” says Jessica. And because the company is so consumer-facing, she says, “there’s this incredible opportunity to tap into something everyone can relate to and leverage the power of brands like lululemon to inspire action.”

Brandon Raco
26 | Guelph | Manager of Sustainability at University
of Guelph, Co-founder Green Gryphon Initiative | SDGs: 11

Brandon Raco was still an undergrad in environmental governance and business when he co-founded the Green Gryphon Initiative, a $26.2 million investment in energy and water conservation retrofits at the University of Guelph. Now, as sustainability manager for the same institution, he has established a thirty-year, $46.2 million Sustainable Campus Action Fund, finding ways to reduce single-use plastics on campus, and is collaborating with the City of Guelph to improve access to alternative modes of transport, all while earning his master’s degree in planning and development. Brandon credits his accomplishments to his ability to engage groups to work toward common goals with “pragmatic optimism.”

Supriya Verma
27 | Toronto | Product Manager and PR Director, Belnor Engineering; Entrepreneur | SDGs: 11, 12

When Supriya Verma isn’t working on her own digital magazine, SustainabilityX.co, or running her e-boutique, Sustainabilista.store, in her spare time, you’ll find her at Belnor Engineering. She’s in charge of procuring sustainable building materials from around the globe and is largely responsible for starting the renewable-energy-solutions arm of the company. Her pet project: encouraging Belnor’s use of “transparent solar glass” – architectural glass that generates solar energy from invisible photovoltaic modules.

Jessica Peixoto
27 | Toronto | Sustainability Specialist, Celestica | SDGS: 7, 12

Manufacturing electronics is an energy-intensive business. Jessica Peixoto’s mission is to keep it in check for Celestica, a Canadian multinational electronics manufacturing company. “Businesses have an obligation to reduce their greenhouses gas emissions in line with the latest science,” says Jessica. At Celestica, Jessica is developing a science-based target to reduce emissions and tracks progress all while finding ways to reduce energy usage, boost building and machinery efficiency, and increase renewable energy use throughout the company’s global facilities. “It’s not an easy task,” says Jessica, but “senior managers must be on board with these goals to support changes within all aspects of the business.”

Alison Carr
29 | Vancouver | Co-founder and COO, Nada | SDGs: 12, 14

Alison Carr considers it serendipitous that a colleague showed her a market research survey from the original founder of Nada while she was in her last year of university. Deeply interested in waste issues and rapidly approaching graduation, Alison started volunteering at Nada and then got herself a grant to become the first employee of the package-free grocery store. As an undergraduate student of geography, she made the connection between our food systems and the health of our oceans. Now, as co-founder and COO of Nada, she works to reduce plastic pollution at the source, working with all levels of the supply chain to reduce packaging waste and implementing a reusable container program for suppliers. Alison’s team advocates for policy change via the City of Vancouver’s Food Policy Council, small business roundtables and Zero Waste 2040 strategy consultations. Photo credit: Guy Fergusen

Sukhmeet Sachal
25 | Vancouver | Founder, BreaktheDivide.net and Vantage 720 | SDGs: 13

Sukhmeet Sachal saw the degradation of the Arctic first-hand when he volunteered to teach science to Indigenous youth in the Northwest Territories in 2017. There he learned from Indigenous Elders about the impact of climate change on physical and mental health, as well as the real effects of melting sea ice, rising ocean levels and changing animal migratory patterns. Sukhmeet founded BreaktheDivide.net to connect youth in the Canadian North to youth in southern Canada to share and explore the mental-health effects of climate change. Break the Divide has since expanded beyond Canada, connecting youth in India, South Africa and Taiwan. His next start-up? Vantage 720 uses virtual reality technology, local Indigenous knowledge and storytelling to help users, particularly in Zambia, experience the effects of climate change first-hand in hopes that the personal experience will lead to action. Sukhmeet received a 2019 Diana Award for his activism and is now a medical student at UBC.

Bianca Dahlman
28 | Winnipeg | Master of Architecture Student, University
of Manitoba | SDGs: 11

While completing her bachelor’s in environmental design in Winnipeg, Bianca Dahlman was tasked with developing an architectural project that would serve the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation two hours north of the city. The result was the Weave Cultural Centre, “where the community of Shoal Lake 40 can reconnect with and celebrate their history in a modern, multi-purpose space that embraces culture and green building design.” Weave earned her a Canada Green Building Council Award for students leading sustainability. Since then, a new architectural course has been created for students to design spaces inspired by Weave. Bianca hopes to become a certified architect who can contribute to the design of net-positive buildings.

Eashan Karnik
25 | Mississauga | Legal Analyst, Smart Prosperity Institute Researcher | SDGs: 6, 13

As Eashan Karnik sees it, youth have a particular advantage when coming up with solutions to the climate crisis, since they’re not as quick to get hung up on complex ideas with big budgets and large teams. “The biggest impediment to innovation is complexity,” says Eashan, a legal analyst, Smart Prosperity Institute researcher and Juris Doctor candidate at the University of Ottawa. Beginning as a young volunteer in the City of Mississauga, he’s since given talks on youth innovation on Parliament Hill, co-led the First Nations Drinking Water Initiative for Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, represented Canada as the head delegate to the World Trade Organization’s Public Forum in Geneva and the United Nations Youth Assembly in New York, and is co-leading a project that explores how intellectual property laws affect clean energy innovation at Smart Prosperity.

Rachel Scott
28 | Toronto | Co-owner, Zoom Illumination | SDGs: 7, 12

Rachel Scott got the bright idea to found Zoom Illumination, an LED lighting retrofit company, in 2016 when she learned there weren’t many reliable businesses offering turnkey LED lighting solutions. The environmental studies major had always been interested in saving the planet while growing a profitable company. Since the company’s founding in early 2016, Zoom has grossed more than $2 million in sales, all while saving businesses money and reducing their energy consumption. In May of this year, Rachel’s company branched out into the water market with a pilot project to reduce water consumption and hydro bills in both commercial and residential buildings. Her advice for young entrepreneurs? “Delegate your weaknesses so you can focus on your vision. Take risks, believe in yourself, work hard and enjoy the ride.”

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“There’s Ivy,” says Wall, who became MEP’s director of research and conservation early this year. He points to one icon with a long, meandering digital trail. The thread indicates the 35-year-old elephant’s movements, which are being recorded thanks to an inventive software platform called EarthRanger, which Wall helped develop while undertaking a PhD in elephant spatial behaviour at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since then, EarthRanger has gone on to become the gold standard for protected-area management initiatives throughout Africa.

“Delta Team is waiting,” Wall says. “They’ll wait until they get a geo-fence break from Ivy. That might happen at 10 pm, it might happen at 2 am. The elephants are more active at night because of people.”

In simple language, a “geo-fence break” means that Ivy is, once again, leading her herd into temptation — crop raiding. Her heavy Kevlar collar — with its lithium batteries, GPS software, very high frequency (VHF) beacon and Iridium satellite transmitter that connects data straight to EarthRanger for real-time, 24/7 tracking — gives her away. The software is equipped with analyzers that, when a new data point is registered — such as Ivy moving to within a kilometre of a village — an algorithm is triggered and sends an alert to MEP staff. Unbeknownst to Ivy, that’s lucky, as one of MEP’s six ranger teams, such as “Delta,” consisting of four to eight rangers, will receive the exact coordinates of Ivy’s nefarious activities on their phones via short message service (SMS). Because they live not only on MEP headquarters but in temporary camps scattered about the vast range MEP monitors, the rangers can react quickly to an alert, jumping in a Land Rover cruiser and motoring over rough, dirt roads to where the crop-raiders are. The rangers will then frighten the elephants away with non-lethal deterrents like chili bombs, which launch pepper spray at the animals, or fly drones over their heads. The high-pitched whining and diving sends pachyderms scurrying, possibly because the noise reminds them of bees.

Mara Elephant Project rangers try to spot a crop-raiding elephant on their drone flight controller.

The rangers, who are trained in conflict mitigation, will record every detail of the marauding: where the event was, what type of crops were damaged, were there preventions such as electric fences, what time did the event occur, how long did it take to shoo the animals away? “We’re hoping that data collection will help inform our conservation practices,” says Wall. These include determining patterns, such as the most likely time of night and time of year elephants raid crops. “One of the things we do is build up a picture. We want to move from conflict to coexistence.”

Easier said than done, with a cascade of social, economic, cultural, climate-change and deforestation factors at play, including a mushrooming human population that is putting enormous pressure on elephants’ range. Pachyderms traverse vast distances, up to 65 kilometres a day, through forest and over grasslands in order to consume the huge amounts of food they need — as much as 270 kilograms a day for a bigger animal. Increasing populations has meant more land is being fenced off, while forests that provide rich and varied food for elephants are being decimated by people clandestinely clear-cutting trees — even in protected areas — and burning them to make charcoal, which is then sold locally and to other African countries.

Elephants decimated

The world has changed dramatically for elephants since the turn of the 20th century. Kenya’s population has grown to 53 million from 2.8 million, and that number is projected to rise to 67 million by 2030. On the continent, the elephant population is now deemed “vulnerable,” plunging to just 415,000 today from 10 million in 1930, the World Wildlife Fund states. The population nosedived with the popularity of big-game and ivory hunting. More recently, from 2011 to 2015, African elephant poaching skyrocketed when the price of ivory tripled in China; 100 pachyderms a day met a violent end, according to World Elephant Day.

In the Maasai Mara, there are 2,400 elephants, their status as a keystone species making every single one of them invaluable. They are Africa’s gardeners, boosting plant biodiversity and spreading nutrients thanks to their seed-laden dung. Dung beetles also carry elephants’ plant-heavy manure underground, a sublime form of carbon sequestration, says Wall. Elephants uproot bushes, push over small trees and dig up soil. Such behaviour, rather than being destructive, is architectural, controlling bush overgrowth and keeping grasslands open and healthy for other animals like gazelles, antelopes, zebras and wildebeests.

A 2019 report by Nature Communications indicates that poaching has declined in the past few years, thanks to China’s ban on ivory in 2017. However, raw ivory is still in high demand in other Asian countries. In the Maasai Mara, poaching has diminished due largely to MEP’s intelligence operations, which the organization focused heavily on during its first full year of operations, in 2012, when 96 elephants were killed, says MEP CEO Marc Goss, a tall, Swahili-speaking, Errol Flynn type with a boisterous laugh. Goss flies MEP’s helicopter, which had been lent to the organization by the Karen Blixen Camp Trust, operated by a nearby eco-tourism safari facility of the same name. In those early years, says Goss, MEP’s intel unit set up sting operations with armed KWS officers to bust ivory dealers and confiscate their illicit caches of tusks. “It used to be very exciting,” Goss recalls. “Death threats, hiding in the bushes, jumping out.”

Mara Elephant Project’s CEO, Marc Goss, lands his helicopter on the edge of the Nyakweri Forest, accompanied by an armed member of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Photos by Tallulah.

Human-elephant conflict

Last year, poaching fatalities fell to four. The big worry today is what Wall calls human-elephant conflict, which killed 12 elephants in 2018. Wall points to another icon on the TV screen. “This is Fred,” he says. “He’s crossed the river. He’s on the other side.” Fred likes to tag-team with co-conspirator Kegol, another collared elephant, when he has mischief on his mind. “The two of them might be lining up to go crop raiding,” Wall says. It’s going to be a busy night for the MEP rangers.
Wall compares elephant crop raiding to human consumption of alcohol. There are the binge drinkers, the occasional tipplers and the teetotallers. Ivy — first collared by MEP in late 2011 — is a binger. Distinctive for having only one left tusk, Ivy has successfully raised two babies and is a much-admired as well as notorious elephant. Wall is a big fan. “She’s super smart. She’s an important elephant to be tracking. She keeps crop raiding, so we’re using her as a beacon for other elephants, as she’s not on her own; she’s with other elephants.”

Despite being attacked in the past with arrows, and in spite of MEP’s ranger teams regularly chasing her away from farmers’ maize and sorghum crops, Ivy continues plundering. It makes for uneasy relations with local Maasai villagers, although the creation of conservancies in regions like the Maasai Mara have made elephant raiding more tolerable to native Kenyans. There are 14 privately managed conservancies in the Maasai Mara region that are run for the benefit of tourists, wildlife and local Maasai tribespeople, who receive guaranteed revenue generated from lease fees in return for leaving their land open to wildlife. MEP’s headquarters, with its permanent housing for rangers, as well as brand-new accommodations and mess hall for visiting researchers, is located in the Lemek Conservancy. MEP operates across all 14 conservancies, which cover just 1,500 square kilometres of the vast area it monitors, including the unprotected areas where human-elephant conflict most commonly occurs.

But even in those areas where Maasai are receiving regular lease payments, human-elephant conflict inevitably arises, while villagers’ patience dwindles. This year, Goss, in order to save a young bull elephant who was running for his life from villagers who had peppered him with 24 arrows, landed the helicopter in between the attackers and the elephant to protect the terrified pachyderm. Goss then flew the helicopter to pick up the veterinarian. They managed to track down the still-fleeing elephant, even though he wasn’t collared. Goss, the vet and MEP rangers tranquilized the animal, pulled arrows out of both sides and treated the deadly wounds, any of which could have become infected, leading to septic shock and organ failure.

Ivy is now on her fourth collar (it costs MEP $26,000 to collar an elephant, which covers the hardware, helicopter and veterinary time, drugs and ongoing digital and field monitoring). Despite her roguish ways, Ivy is one of the elephants enriching the Maasai Mara and the tribal Maasai who inhabit the area, grazing their cattle and growing crops. That’s because elephants are a huge tourist draw. In the Maasai Mara, 600,000 people every year — mainly well-heeled Westerners — come to see the wildlife and especially the elephants. (Tourists also come to the area to see the famous Great Migration of more than two million zebras, wildebeests and gazelles that travel north 800 kilometres from the Serengeti plains in Tanzania into the Maasai Mara, starting each May.)

Each pachyderm brings from US$1.4 million to US$1.6 million in tourism dollars into Kenya in its lifetime, according to Kirsty Smith with the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which for 42 years has been rescuing baby elephants, orphaned by poachers, and rehabilitating them back into the wild. This huge figure compares to the comparatively paltry sum of $21,000 that organized traffickers receive — the poacher receives far less — for a set of tusks on the black market in Asia.

An elephant mother and her calf near the Mara River are among the pachyderms monitored by Mara Elephant Project’s six ranger teams. Photos by Tallulah.

Ivy goes raiding

Early the next day, Delta Team reports that its rangers have indeed spent the night chasing Ivy and an additional nine elephants from her herd out of a crop field. Several hours later, at 7 am, Delta Team responded to a call from a village just one kilometre away from their temporary camp. A big bull elephant was inside a maize, sorghum and bean field. Residents had tried to protect their village from elephants by installing an electric fence. The animal, however, crashed through the gate, the only portion that wasn’t electrified. He then panicked and couldn’t find his way out. The electricity had to be turned off, allowing him to run through the wire to safety. Sairowua takes out the MEP drone and does a flyover to see how far the rogue animal has fled. He is long gone. Says villager Johnson Moseti, “We love the elephants, but they are causing destruction all the time.”
Back at headquarters, Wall is apprised of the situation and says with a sigh that the big male will likely have to be collared. Sometimes, Wall admits, he’d love to return to pure research and start digging into the massive amount of data he’s accumulated, rather than reacting to such day-to-day concerns as protecting maize-munching elephants. Analyzing the data from EarthRanger will give answers to the big questions related to elephants’ future safety and welfare. Where are the important elephant migration corridors? How much rangeland do they need? What crop alternatives can villagers grow that elephants will find unpalatable, thus lessening human-elephant conflict? Driving all of this is Wall’s concern and deep respect for elephants like Ivy, who walk the earth with such dignity and intelligence. “The world is better with her in it,” he says.

Mara Elephant Project 2018 highlights

The Mara Elephant Project (MEP) has 57 rangers, who monitor the Maasai Mara, and an intelligence arm, which works with the Kenya Wildlife Service to nab poachers. Highlights from 2018 include:

• 46 total arrests
• 356 kilograms of ivory seized
• 324 snares removed
• 203 human-elephant conflicts
attended to
• 17,640 kilometres patrolled on foot
• 141,729 kilometres patrolled by
vehicle

Roberta Staley is an author and magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science, gender and business reporting.

All photos by Tallulah Photography.

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The three big makers of gas turbines are General Electric, Siemens and Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems, and together they have seen global sales – as measured by total megawatts of capacity – decline by half since the high-water mark in 2014.

Faced with growing competition from low-cost clean energy options, all three companies are cutting back global operations related to the gas-fired power business after ramping up in anticipation of a shift away from coal and nuclear.

Renewable power is now competitive with new gas generation across much of the world – especially outside North America, which still benefits from a glut of the fossil fuel, according to reports from groups like Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) and McKinsey & Company.

As a result, renewables are grabbing a bigger share of the market than had been expected.
“Until just a few years ago, solar and wind power were more expensive than fossil-fueled electricity in most places, but cost parity has now arrived,” Jules Kortenhorst, chief executive officer at Rocky Mountain Institute, wrote in a September blog post. “Some argue that renewable costs will stop falling. But the evidence suggests that prices for renewables will drop far below incumbent energy sources, and fast.”

Those shifting fortunes are masked somewhat by the ongoing boom in gas demand. Turbine sales are down from historic highs, but even the lower volumes result in additional gas in the global power mix. Gas consumption grew by 4.6% in 2018, the fastest pace since 2010, the International Energy Agency noted recently.
However, declining turbine sales and the steep drop in the price of clean power raises new questions about the role of natural gas as a transition fuel in the drive to a zero-carbon future.
At stake is whether the decarbonization of the world’s energy systems can occur rapidly enough to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees C, or preferably 1.5 degrees.

A rapid transition – consistent with Paris climate goals – would see fossil fuel use in the electricity sector peak over the next decade before steadily declining, while a more gradual trajectory projects continued growth in gas, in particular, through to 2040, according to The Speed of the Energy Transition, a report by the World Economic Forum published this September.

Betting on the wrong horse

Gambling on long-term gains for natural gas is proving to be a costly error. General Electric Company is still struggling after making a bad bet on the gradual scenario four years ago.

In 2015, the company paid US$13.7 billion for the electricity generation and distribution assets of France’s Alstom. The acquisition came just as the market for gas turbines turned down, forcing GE to write off assets and lay off staff.

In early 2017, GE projected that sales of gas turbines between 2017 and 2026 would total 78 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity. By the end of that year, it had cut that forecast nearly in half, to 40 GW, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) noted in a recent report.

“The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels – particularly expensive imported thermal coal and gas – into low-cost, zero-pollution domestic renewables such as wind and solar,” Tom Sanzillo, IEEFA finance director, said. “This is where the smart money is, but GE failed to pick the trend – and ultimately failed.”
GE declined to comment for this article, but the company says that it is retooling its gas turbine business and that it expects gas to play “a vital role” in the global power sector in the coming years.

With the impacts of global warming becoming more dramatic with each passing year, energy executives – and their government owners and regulators – are increasingly committed to reducing their greenhouse gases, Paul Browning, president of Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS) America, told a conference in Toronto this August.

“Right now, our customers around the world have a very high focus on decarbonization of the power grid,” he said. “And so we’re very focused on developing and commercializing the technologies that our customers are going to need to continue down the path to decarbonization.”

While Browning said MHPS’s gas-turbine sales have held up better than its competitors, he acknowledged that future prospects are not as bullish as was forecasted just a few years ago.

The Japanese company is making a bet on hydrogen, both as a storage medium and as a renewable source of energy that can be burned in gas turbines to power the grid. (Hydrogen is a manufactured source of energy. When the power used to make it is solar or wind, it is a low-carbon source that can be dispatched at times when those intermittent renewables are not available.)

Currently, MHPS turbines can run on up to 30% hydrogen, combined with natural gas. Browning said the future models will be able to run completely on hydrogen.

Current battery technology is competitive for short-term storage, but other options – vastly improved battery designs, renewable hydrogen or carbon-capture-and-storage – will be needed to ensure grid reliability over longer periods, the MHPS executive said.

Renewables getting cheaper all the time

The slump in gas-turbine sales has both cyclical and long-term causes, said market analyst Mark Axford, who tracks the industry for global power customers.

In 2014, global sales of gas-powered turbines hit 60 GW, but sales fell to 31 GW last year, Axford said. He expects sales this year will be roughly equivalent to the 2018 figures.

There was a spate of new construction prior to 2015 that will take some time to work off, even as China’s economy – a key market – has slowed from its breakneck growth pace.

But there is also a faster shift to renewables as falling costs and government subsidies drive sales. The subsidies “are doing exactly what they were intended to do – they’re distorting the market in favour of renewables,” Axford said.

However, new analysis suggests that renewable power – coupled with demand management – is cheaper than gas even without subsidies or carbon pricing. In the United States, a clean energy portfolio of solar, wind, storage and demand management would provide lower-cost power than 90% of the proposed 68 GW of gas-fired power now being planned, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) says in a new report.

In September, Los Angeles approved a solar plus battery storage project that will procure 6 to 7% of the city’s power at record low prices (3.3 cents per kilowatt hour).

New analysis suggests that renewable power – coupled with demand management –
is cheaper than gas even without subsidies or carbon pricing.

Indeed, assuming clean power technology continues to fall in price, the cost of new power from those fossil-free sources will be lower than the operating costs of gas-fired plants within 15 years, the RMI report says. In that case, utilities will face pressure to close the gas-fired plants prematurely, just as they did in moving away from coal to gas over the last several years.

Some two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries where wind or solar – or both – are the cheapest source of new electricity generation, BNEF said in its annual outlook. “By 2030, new wind and solar ultimately get cheaper than running existing coal or gas plants almost everywhere,” the report said.

Within five years, batteries will be the most cost-effective way to meet the daily peaks in electricity demand, and by 2030, battery storage will compete with gas as a source of power for when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, BNEF said.

BNEF’s forecasts are based on a “least cost optimization” outlook, which assumes continued declines in renewable and battery costs and that utilities will adopt the most cost-effective power.

If the world shifts from two-thirds fossil-fuel power in 2018 to two-thirds zero emissions by 2050, half of the world’s power will come from renewables such as wind and solar, BNEF said.

However, under its forecast, gas-fired power capacity would still double between now and 2050, with the fossil fuel serving to meet peak demand and back up the intermittency of the renewables.

As governments around the globe push utilities to get to 50% – and eventually 100% – non-emitting, the grid will need either gas “peaker” plants (that fire up when demand spikes) coupled with carbon-capture or far more storage capacity for renewables to provide a steady stream of power.

BNEF analyst Seb Henbest said the world’s power mix may be on track to meet its 2030 Paris commitments, but after 2030, it goes off course with the stubborn reliance on gas and legacy coal plants.

The outlook does not factor in technological breakthroughs or the potential for more aggressive government policies to reduce emissions, such as carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards or eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, he said.

“Beyond 2030, you need to accelerate beyond the least-cost options to meet targets,” Henbest said.

Gassing down

Among the more bullish supporters of the dash to gas has been the International Energy Agency (IEA), whose executive director, Fatih Birol, has touted the potential for liquefied natural gas (LNG) to reduce coal use in Asia, where coal plants are still on the rise.

In the IEA’s sustainable development scenario – which is meant to reflect 2 degrees C Paris commitments – gas demand continues to grow to 2025 before flattening out. It sees gas as the only fossil fuel for which demand in 2040 is higher than today.

Some analysts warn that natural gas will face the same fate as coal, with stranded assets whose operating costs are undercut by cheaper, zero-carbon options. “The financial shocks now being experienced in the natural gas sector are reminiscent of similar patterns in the coal sector, where euphoric forecasts of growth based on East Asian demand a decade ago led to over-expansion and financial collapse,” said Global Energy Monitor in a report, The New Gas Boom, released this summer.

“The financial shocks now being experienced
in the natural gas sector are reminiscent
of similar patterns in the coal sector.”
—Global Energy Monitor

Critics have urged the IEA – which advises global governments on energy policies – to produce a scenario that is fully consistent with a 1.5 degrees scenario and that relies less on fossil fuels and carbon storage technologies to capture CO2 after it’s emitted.

At the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, major oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and Norway’s Equinor touted the role of natural gas as a cleaner-burning fuel that can be instrumental in eliminating emissions from the global power sector.

However, the companies are making slow progress in reducing the fugitive release of methane, a powerful short-term greenhouse gas, even as U.S. President Donald Trump moves to kill federal regulations that would force the industry to capture the methane in all new oil and gas facilities.

“The challenge for natural gas is that methane emissions work to undo much of the climate benefit that we thought we were getting from gas in the switch away from coal,” Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of Energy at Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview.

Equinor recently had its wrists slapped by the U.K.’s advertising regulator after running spots on the Underground that implied natural gas is a “low carbon” fuel.

“While the oil industry is pinning its hopes on gas and is working hard to convince politicians that we’ll need gas for decades to come, they simply can’t stand up to these kind of claims,” said Murray Worthy, a senior campaigner for Global Witness, which launched the complaint. “And since gas isn’t low carbon, it has no place in the U.K.’s zero-carbon future.”

Shawn McCarthy writes on sustainable finance and climate for Corporate Knights. He is also senior counsel for Sussex Strategy Group.

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Carbon fibre is a material perfectly suited to electric vehicles. Manufactured from long strands of carbon blended with plastic resin (think fibreglass, with carbon replacing the glass), it’s far stronger than steel – up to 10 times as strong – and much lighter. Plus it doesn’t corrode. Owing to these advantages, carbon fibre has been coveted by car makers since it was first introduced in the early 1980s. Because of its steep price, though, it has until recently been used primarily in racing cars and next-generation prototypes. (Carbon fibre costs as much as US$7 per pound wholesale, compared to about 40 cents per pound for steel or 80 cents for aluminum.) The explosive growth in electric vehicle sales, however, creates a unique and potentially enormous market for carbon fibre – especially if the manufacturing costs of the stuff can be slashed somehow.

And this is where Alberta’s oil sands come in. Alberta produces nearly three million barrels of bitumen from the oil sands each day – heavy oil in need of expensive and energy-intensive processing to be turned into transportation fuel. The industry faces an uncertain and perilous future as the high cost and large carbon footprint of its product becomes harder and harder to sell as demand for oil begins to level off and eventually decline, in part due to the rise of emissions-free technologies such as electric cars. Might there be a place for bitumen instead in the carbon-fibre frames of those vehicles?

This was the question Alberta Innovates, the Alberta government’s research arm, aimed to answer with its Bitumen Beyond Combustion program, launched three years ago to begin exploring new commercial uses for bitumen. The program’s research identified a range of potential new markets, including asphalt for paving and the production of vanadium, a metal present in relatively abundant quantities in bitumen and in increasing demand as a component in new battery technology. But nothing else so far has shown the “major mid- to long-term potential” that carbon fibre has. What’s more, its greatest weakness as a transport fuel – its heaviness, owing to the very large carbon molecules that comprise it – becomes an asset.

“Bitumen is a bigger molecule, and you are competing with lighter oils as transportation fuel,” John Zhou, vice president of clean energy at Alberta Innovates, explains. “You are always at a disadvantage. But when you are making big molecules like carbon fibre, that high carbon in the bitumen compared with other oil becomes a competitive advantage.”

To transform bitumen into the lighter crude oils that are refined into gasoline and transportation fuels, oil sands operations either add a lighter petroleum product called diluent to their bitumen to make it flow down a pipeline to a distant heavy oil refinery or use costly, energy-intensive upgrading facilities that “crack” the bitumen into smaller molecules, turning it into synthetic crude. In recent years, oil sands companies have been developing “partial upgrading” technology, which cracks off a smaller piece of the bitumen molecule and allows it to be shipped without diluent. One of the heavy carbon molecules cracked off the raw bitumen is called asphaltene, and it shows enormous promise as a feedstock for producing the long carbon fibres that go into the lightweight, ultra-strong carbon-fibre panels used in cars like the Toyota Prius Prime.

Asphaltenes make up around 15 to 18% of a typical barrel of bitumen. Produce 100 barrels of bitumen and send them through a partial upgrader, in other words, and you have 15 to 18 barrels of asphaltene on your hands. The world’s current supply of carbon fibre is about 100,000 tonnes per year, a total that oil sands operators could easily exceed with the widespread use of partial upgrading.

“The supply is not the issue,” Zhou says. The big question is whether carbon fibre produced from bitumen could cut carbon fibre costs to the point where the material made sense not just for a flagship Prius but for Honda Civics and Ford Fusions. “If you can reduce the cost of carbon fibre by 50% or more, you will have a chance to get into medium-priced vehicles. So you will open up a much greater market.”

It’s an enticing possibility, especially for an oil sands industry battered by low prices, fleeing investment capital and a barrage of criticism over its expanding greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. “It’s early days in looking at the potential for carbon fibre production from bitumen; however, we think there’s value in looking at different ways of optimizing our barrels – value in the traditional sense and in potential environmental benefits,” says Carrie Fanai, who is leading Suncor’s participation in the carbon fibre project at Alberta Innovates. With partial upgrading technology perhaps only three years away from commercial-scale operation, oil sands companies will soon have stronger motivation to find uses for the by-products of bitumen processing.

“When you are making big molecules like carbon fibre, that high carbon in the bitumen becomes a competitive advantage.”

–John Zhou, Alberta Innovates

The carbon fibre market, though, remains a young and volatile one, and that means any plans regarding its future role come freighted with caveats. Cecilia Gee, an analyst with Lux Research who tracks the carbon fibre market, explains that carbon fibre is at present a niche product, and many factors beyond the price and availability of the raw material, in the automotive market and beyond, will determine future demand. At present, the use of carbon fibre in EVs, for example, is limited by a lack of standardized production and supply chain certainty, and as much as 70% of the cost associated with using carbon fibre comes from the high price of manufacturing and installing components made from carbon fibre – not from the cost of the raw material the oil sands might one day supply. Meanwhile, plummeting battery prices are taking some of the pressure off EV manufacturers to pay a premium to reduce the weight of their vehicles. BMW, for example, recently announced it will no longer be using carbon fibre in some of its electric cars as it expands production.

“Is there an opportunity for the oil sands? Yes,” Gee says. “Are there a lot of unknowns about that future? Also yes. But if they have the opportunity to make things more circular, more green, why not?”

In any case, Alberta’s carbon fibre industry is a long way from supplying frames for hundreds of thousands of Civics; at present, it’s not even an industry. In the wake of the Bitumen Beyond Combustion program’s final report in January 2018, Alberta Innovates freed up $2 million in seed money for a handful of initiatives, one of which is a laboratory at the University of Alberta now working on developing an industrial process for converting bitumen-derived asphaltenes into carbon fibre. The early results have been so promising that Alberta Innovates has already connected the lab with industry heavyweights like BASF and Mitsubishi Chemical. A representative from SGL, a market leader in carbon fibre manufacturing, has paid multiple visits to the lab and has made plans to connect the researchers with similar projects at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy’s top energy research lab.

These are, to be sure, very early days. There remain many hurdles yet to clear. But presuming that partial upgrading expands at the rate Zhou and his colleagues in the oil sands hope it does and that the lab research on bitumen-derived carbon fibre continues apace, there could be viable commercial-scale carbon fibre production in Alberta by around 2030 – which just so happens to be around the time experts predict electric vehicle sales will roar into overdrive worldwide.

Zhou concedes that from an investor’s point of view, the project is very much in the high-risk, high-reward category. At a recent funding meeting with federal officials in Ottawa, he compared it to the $50 million the government recently invested in General Fusion, a Vancouver start-up working on nuclear fusion reactors. Still, the long timeline and uncertain payoff don’t worry Zhou much. “If in 10 to 15 years we can create a multi-billion-dollar business in Alberta, I will be very happy,” he says. Significantly less time, come to think of it, than it took bitumen production to go from Karl Clark’s lab at the University of Alberta to the first mine site north of Fort McMurray.

Chris Turner’s most recent book is The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands.

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One option under the microscope: plastics that come from the earth and – the hope is – return to the earth. Seafood shells, sawdust, cornstarch, algae, tree bark, chicken feathers – pretty much any natural substance you can think of is being converted to plastic. Compostable plant-based plastics in particular have been officially pinned to the vision board of a new circular economy. In August, Molson Coors became the latest of 125 corporations (including L’Oréal, Mars, PepsiCo, The Coca-Cola Company and Unilever) to join the Ellen MacArthur Foundation pledge to phase out unnecessary plastic packaging and work toward “100% reusable, recyclable, or compostable plastic packaging by 2025.”

Behind the scenes, chemical giants, packaged good firms, university labs and start-ups are hustling to find workable plant-based options. Even oil companies are getting in on the action: a joint venture led by global French oil major Total is lobbying to have its sugarcane-based PLA bioplastic replace conventional cups, plates and the like in airports, food courts and restaurants across India, as the country brings in a national single-use plastic ban in October.

Some analysts suggest that, with aggressive growth, bioplastics have the potential to replace up to 49% of conventional plastics by 2050, which Project Drawdown, founded by environmentalist Paul Hawken, estimates could save a whopping 4.3 gigatonnes of carbon (equivalent to taking 1 billion cars off the road for one full year) by 2050, particularly if we make those plastics out of waste. So why are plant-based plastics facing pushback from critics and a barrage of bad press? Unless some thoughtful solutions are cooked up before the coming wave of revamped packaged goods hits stores, bioplastics may be wasting their big break.

The promise

At this point in the game, plant-based bioplastics are still a drop in the bucket: just 1% of the 330 million tonnes of plastics churned out globally. But that market is growing quickly. A potential boom in bioplastics could be a boon for Canada, too, where the conventional plastics-manufacturing industry now rakes in $35 billion annually. A third of that manufacturing is for packaging, which MSCI – a global provider of stock market indexes – warned in August could end up as stranded assets if the global trend of restrictions on single-use plastics continues.

Today in Canada, there are coffee lids being developed from shrimp shell waste in Vancouver, cling wrap from canola stalks in Alberta and Guelph, and water bottles from sawdust in Sarnia. At one Toronto start-up, hungry bacteria are turning food-waste slop from green bins into plastic packaging. And researchers in BC and Toronto are even working on capturing waste greenhouse gases and converting that to fuels and plastic.

It’s all quite innovative and exciting in that start-up kind of way. These second-generation waste-based materials in development should avoid many of the shortcomings of first-generation bioplastics: the corn- and sugarcane-based plastics that currently dominate the market have been slammed for diverting arable land from food crops, using resource intensive industrial agriculture, clearing rain forests (which increases greenhouse gas emissions) and other environmental woes.

And the compostable plastic varieties among them should have an extra green edge. While recyclables are often shipped halfway around the planet and are increasingly rejected and shipped back home, you can’t haul rotting food long distances. That means composting facilities are usually within 200 kilometres (and often under 50 km) of your kitchen green bin. Except that for a host of practical reasons, the majority of those bioplastics are currently condemned to  landfill (where even 40-year-old hot dogs have been found perfectly preserved). What gives? It turns out solving the plastic crisis isn’t as clear as, well, a Ziploc bag.

What do you mean, “bioplastic”? Regulating plant-based plastics

For businesses looking for feel-better packaging options, bioplastics seem like a win-win: you’re replacing petroleum with plants and they’re supposed to be biodegradable. Right? The thing is the term bioplastic is a loose catchall for a wide range of plastics made of biological materials. They can be as little as 25% plant-based. And the lion’s share – 80% of bioplastic – isn’t designed to biodegrade at all. In fact, most are designed to last – like the bioPET now being used by Hasbro in some of its toy packaging and Coca-Cola/Dasani in their PlantBottles. Once manufactured, they’re molecularly identical to regular PET pop-bottle plastic – it’s just that the ethanol they’re made with is partly derived from sugarcane. And they’re designed to be recycled, not green binned – or tossed in an ocean for that matter.

A plastic bag after being submerged in sea water for three years. Courtesy of University of Plymouth.

After three years in seawater or soil, even a bioplastic bag labelled “biodegradable” was found very much intact and able to hold groceries, in a recent study by the University of Plymouth in England. A thin bag labelled “compostable” did dissolve after three months in seawater, but it’s a crapshoot, since certified compostable plastics are designed to break down in the 55 to 60 C heat of industrial composting facilities. New “marine biodegradable” labels for bioplastics are coming out of Europe, though certified plastics could take anywhere from 28 days to a year to fully break down in the ocean.

Confusion about what bioplastics are and do led California and now Washington State to ban the sale of plastic products that call themselves “biodegradable” or “compostable” – unless they’ve been certified compostable to a specific standard. Last summer, Amazon coughed up $1.5 million in settlements after two dozen California district attorneys went after the retailing giant for carrying pseudo-compostables.

The big hitch is that – except for some green bin liners in certain cities – even products that are certified to the highest compostability standards aren’t accepted by the vast majority of curbside green bin programs in Canada. That’s partly because people dump all kinds of plastics into their green bins, and neither green bin nor blue bin processing facilities can tell the difference between a genuinely compostable coffee cup from a regular plastic one, let alone a quasi-biodegradable one that doesn’t really break down.

As Emily Alfred, Toronto Environmental Alliance’s waste campaigner, puts it, “It basically ends up being an expensive trip to the landfill.”

In September, a British parliamentary committee warned that without proper industrial composting infrastructure in place to make sure this type of packaging breaks down correctly, compostable bioplastics were confusing consumers, possibly encouraging littering and contributing to ocean plastic in the British Isles. “Fundamentally, substitution [with bioplastics] is not the answer,” concluded the committee’s chair, MP Neil Parish.

This after Oregon’s composting facilities penned an open letter to America’s largest compostables certifier, the Biodegradable Products Institute, in April explaining that they no longer accept compostable packaging, partly because “not all ‘certified’ compostable items will actually compost as fully or quickly as we need them to.”

Add to that recent headline-grabbing studies finding that fibre-based compostable packaging at big food chains like Chipotle was grease-proofed with persistent perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) and you get a taste of the controversy dogging compostable plastics.

Banning PFAS from food packaging, as Denmark did this September, would help. So would having national rules and regulations around compostable packaging, which is exactly what the Compost Council of Canada, Recycle BC and others have been lobbying the feds to take on.

If compostable plastics are to be rescued from the “good ideas gone wrong” trash heap, the right regulation will be key.

Good things grow in Ontario?

Back in June, Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MOECP) set up a Compostable Products Technical Working Group to set clear rules for compostable packaging and “ensure these materials are accepted by existing and emerging green bin programs across the province.” The group has been holding multi-stakeholder consultations all summer trying to hammer out solutions.

By all accounts, finding common ground between composters and packagers has been tricky. “Half the room was from the composting industry, half the room was from the packaging sector, and the two of us don’t see eye to eye on this at all,” says Paul Taylor of Bio-En Power, which runs one of the largest organic waste processing facilities  in Canada. “Some of the packaging guys don’t understand why we’re so negative and unwilling to get on board.”

Taylor warns that compostable plastics are going to face more systemic hurdles since Canada’s composting sector has been steadily moving away from old-school open-air aerobic composting sites – the kind that were capable of processing genuinely compostable plastics. Instead, more and more regions, like Durham and Peel, are shifting to less odorous (read: less complaint-prone) airless anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities. At this point, AD plants, like the city of Toronto’s, can’t handle compostable plastics, and all the weird stuff people put in green bins – plastics, glass, ceramics, trailer hitches – get fished out on the first day and sent to the dump.

So now what?

Put a stripe on it

First things first: if Ontario and Canada opt to regulate compostable plastics, advocates suggest they follow in Washington State’s footsteps. While outlawing non-certified compostables, it also forced manufacturers to stop making certified compostable packaging that looked like regular plastic. It must now be easily identifiable, through labels and high-visibility markings like green stripes. Some in Europe are experimenting with adding digital watermarks to items like compostable yogurt cups and such so that optical sensors can easily ID them as compostable, just as they do other plastics.

Putting clearly identified compostable packaging in blue bins (instead of green bins) where it could be sifted, sorted and sent to industry-funded composting facilities might be one answer for cities like Toronto.

Making brands pay for composting compostables

Getting industry to fork out the costs of composting its waste is something the Compost Council of Canada’s Susan Antler has been advocating for years. “We’ve watched blue box funding from industry climb every year, and recyclables make up just 15 to 20% of the waste stream. Meanwhile organics [green-bin-type waste] makes up 40 to 50% of the waste stream and we’ve never had any industry funding.” Adds Antler, “There’s a huge opportunity to work together.”

Alan Blake of the Packaging Consortium (PAC) is on board with making producers of compostable packaging pay into extended producer responsibility (EPR) models like BC’s and soon Ontario’s, where packaging producers are responsible for paying the full costs of managing their packaging at the end of its life. Says Blake, “If Canada is serious about a zero-plastic-waste economy, boy, we’ve got to step up pretty quickly to incentivize the industry to deal with [bioplastics] rather than send it to landfill or burn it.”

Reps from Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment told Corporate Knights that the province is looking at how EPR should be applied to “all paper and packaging in Ontario, including compostable products and packaging.”

Not that simply having EPR will solve all of bioplastic’s woes. In BC, compostable packaging like clear corn-based PLA cups found in blue bins, along with other non-recyclable plastics, are typically turned into engineered fuel to be used as a replacement for coal in industrial processes. If found in Vancouver’s green bins, compostables are currently sent to landfill. It’s not quite a circular economy dream come true. But Recycle BC’s David Lefebvre says they’re working on it. “[We’re] trying to solve the riddle everyone is trying to solve.”

Propping up the single-use economy?

Even if that composting riddle is solved, Sarah King, Greenpeace Canada’s plastic campaigner, is concerned that bio-based packaging is a distraction. Like the British MPs, she wants to see a fundamental shift away from single-use packaging altogether and worries that switching to disposable bioplastics will only delay the transition to a genuinely circular economy that has reuse/refill models at its centre. But, King adds, “if some compostable alternatives were going to work, they would need to be derived from existing [bio]waste and be made from post-consumer content.”

Setting high recycled-content targets (for both bioplastics and regular plastics) will be essential. As Marcelo Lu, CEO of chemical company BASF Canada (which makes certified compostable green bin liners and now produce bags), tells Corporate Knights, “There will be no need for new plastic in the future.” Particularly if national standards also restrict unnecessary and hard-to-recycle packaging and

set firm targets for reuse models – like the reusable $4-deposit takeout containers just introduced at Farm’r Eatery and Catering on Toronto’s Esplanade or the $5-deposit rentable cups in 200 Montreal cafes.

The future for bioplastics

New research tells us the Plastic Age is already etching itself into the earth’s fossil record. While it’s still early days, bioplastics that truly return to the earth without doing more harm may have a role in rectifying that. For the time being,  businesses looking to serve up compostable plant-based plastic will have to bypass residential green bins altogether. Some sporting arenas, festivals, concerts and facilities like the National Arts Centre in Ottawa (which started diverting 500,000 food and drink containers to composters in May) have made certified compostable servingware work since they can control what products are used on the premises and they’ve contracted willing composting facilities to process that waste directly.

“Compostable plastics may not be ready for prime time yet,” says Michael Okoroafor, one of the minds behind Coke’s PlantBottle and VP of global sustainability at McCormick Foods, which has signed on to the global pledge to go 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. But he adds, “Here’s the good news: We now have a rallying cry that is galvanizing industry to drive forward with the circular economy.”

A version of this Corporate Knights story appeared in The Toronto Star.

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