With files from Rick Spence and Susanne Ruder.
The glass ceiling at Canada’s greenest companies is getting pretty thin, and the women at the top have their sights set on climate change. “I personally don’t know of any senior leaders in Canada that don’t think [climate change] is a risk, and I couldn’t say that five years ago,” says Laura Zizzo, CEO of Manifest Climate.
In 2019, Corporate Knights reported that gender diversity on boards had become the leading issue investors wanted directors to address, alongside executive compensation and climate change.
But have corporations actually prioritized female leadership in the years since, when pandemic-related job loss affected women disproportionately? In March, Equileap found that “there are more CEOs named Michael and Mark than female CEOs in Canada”.
There’s been a sliver of progress in the U.S., where women run 8.8% of Fortune 500 companies, and the percentage of women on the boards of that country’s 1,000 largest public companies increased by 4.4% from 2019 to 2021.
This isn’t just for optics. It’s actually better for a company’s bottom line, according to the Harvard Business Review, which found that in 2021 that “firms with more women in senior positions are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide safer, higher-quality customer experiences.”
The women leading Canada’s fastest-growing green companies prove that expertise coupled with entrepreneurial acumen can lead to funding opportunities and growth. With growth rates starting at 103%, these visionaries are leaving the naysayers in their dust.
Company: Manifest Climate
CEO: Laura Zizzo
Growth Rate: 260%
“This is not a drill; we are going through a climate crisis,” says Laura Zizzo. With climate risks and regulations always evolving, how can companies keep up? Zizzo founded Manifest Climate in 2020 to help companies track and report on climate change. As a trained lawyer and environmental studies specialist, Zizzo has a long list of accomplishments under her belt – the most noteworthy might be that she is a delegate to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), attending annual COP (UN climate summits) meetings since 2007.
The company she founded uses analytics and AI to organize climate information so companies can benchmark and project climate risks to understand their impact. And it’s paying off. In March, Manifest announced it had completed a $30-million round of funding co-led by the BDC Capital Women in Technology Venture Fund and Climate Innovation Capital.
Manifest says its software helps organizations understand their current climate change disclosure and how to improve it while levelling up their internal competence for climate risk management.
Zizzo says that “people are feeling disruptive, they understand the need to integrate science into their business decision-making.” And that’s where Manifest comes in.
Company: Clear Blue Technologies
CEO: Miriam Tuerk
Growth Rate: 103%
“When you think about power, and you know half the power infrastructure in this world could go wireless, and we are the first and leading company to be wireless, I’m not kidding when I say we could be a billion-dollar company,” Tuerk told The CEO Magazine.
Company: Summit Nanotech
CEO: Amanda Hall
Growth Rate: 158%
Amanda Hall’s vision for Summit Nanotech originated from a moment on top of a mountain in Tibet some years ago. She saw a monk using a cellphone and came to the realization that lithium batteries were truly anywhere and everywhere. She founded Summit Nanotech in 2018 to unlock more lithium resources for the world’s growing demand, as the clean energy transition takes hold.
“We’ve been told we’re one of the top three in the world in terms of technology, so I think the future is very bright for us,” says Sandra Bjurstrom, head of marketing and communications for Summit Nanotech.
“When you have a CEO as powerful as Amanda, I think that women see that they have a powerful role model and are set up for success in the company,” says Bjurstrom.
Company: Polystyvert
CEO: Nathalie Morin (CEO since June 2022)
Growth Rate: 139%
When Polystyvert founder Solenne Brouard Gaillot stepped back as CEO, she passed the baton to Nathalie Morin, who was the company’s CTO in 2021. Morin brings industrial expertise to the role that supports Polystyvert’s goal of scaling up its recycling technology. She was the general manager of Quebec power operations at Rio Tinto before she joined the company and also managed the construction of an Enerkem biofuels plant in Quebec.
And as the world battles plastic waste, she says the scaling up of Polystyvert’s technology can’t happen fast enough.
“Millions of tonnes of [styrene-based plastics] are ending up in the landfill every year, and our recycling facilities will bring them back into a circular, plastic-to-plastic economy with a strong positive impact on GHG emission,” says Morin.
Polystyvert is preparing a patent-pending chemical solvent that dissolves a synthetic polymer called polystyrene (which is used to make plates, utensils and containers) so it can be pelletized and recycled. At the end of 2021, they closed $3.5 million in government funding.
For public companies, growth rate is based on their one-year revenue (generally, 2021 sales over 2020 sales). For privately held companies, growth rate is based on the S&P Capital IQ database, with data on recent fundraising rounds, and sorted based on percentage growth of capital raised from the two most recent years of fundraising rounds.
