In January, Mark Carney told the crowd at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting that the middle powers, like Canada, have the capacity to build a new world order and that allies will need to diversify to hedge against uncertainty. For Canada, the government is partly betting on a lower-carbon economy to meet this middle-power moment. The federal government’s climate competitiveness strategy aims to leverage clean technology and the nation’s abundant natural resources to boost Canada’s economy and position itself as a climate leader.

Though there are federal actions that have undercut this ambition, such as continued oil and gas subsidies, and evidence that curbing emissions in Canada has stalled, the economic case for climate action in Canada is strong. Some 66% of investments in Canadian oil and gas infrastructure are at risk of becoming stranded, according to a 2025 report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Canadian pension giant La Caisse saw investments in renewable energy tripled between 2017 and 2025, from $9 billion to $27.4 billion. Jobs within the environmental and clean technologies sector have grown faster compared to the broader economy for three years straight, according to a 2026 Statistics Canada study.

It’s against this backdrop that Toronto Climate Week (TOCW) 2026 will bring together innovators, business leaders, policymakers, researchers, artists and community members from all over the world. The second annual week-long event, from June 1 to 7, aims to showcase local and Canadian innovations while connecting to global opportunities, all while tapping into the discourse around the future of the global sustainable economy.

“I think Canada has a major opportunity right now to shape the global conversation around the clean-energy transition, and how the benefits of that transition to green energy can be an economic benefit for Canada,” says Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, a global network of mayors from major cities working on climate action.

Cities lead on climate

Johnson, who is attending the Toronto event, has seen several climate action weeks pop up around the world. In some ways, that’s no surprise: “[Cities are] really the first responders,” she says, when it comes to climate change impacts, which intersect with rising energy bills and housing costs. Cities want to respond holistically to these overlapping crises, but it’s challenging, she says. Cities in the C40 network share resources and clout, and they’re making the case that it’s smart to use climate-smart solutions to address broader concerns.

Toronto Climate Week is “a really great opportunity just to get a pulse of what’s happening, not just in Toronto, but in Canada more broadly,” Johnson says. The event is expected to attract around 10,000 attendees to more than 200 scheduled events across the city. On the agenda are things like carbon solutions, the circular economy, cleantech and environmental justice.

Carbon focus

One of the flagship events, Carbon Solutions: Canada’s Competitive Advantage, will look at several carbon-removal and -management solutions in Canada and global markets. Carbon removal is forecast to be a US$1.2-trillion industry by 2050, according to a 2023 McKinsey report. With 20% of the world’s fresh water, 347 million hectares of boreal forest, 62.2 million hectares of farmland, more than 240,000 kilometres of coastline and an abundance of nature, Canada has ample opportunities to leverage its resources to help support climate action – and a lot to protect, too. Several companies have already started to look to Canada’s landscapes to sequester carbon.

Brady Paron, senior vice president of carbon market partnerships at Mast, a reforestation company working on restoring landscapes after wildfires, will be on a panel at the carbon-solutions flagship event. Mast takes trees that were killed in wildfires and buries them deep underground to prevent the wood from further decomposing and releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. To fund wildfire cleanup and landscape restoration expenses, Mast sells carbon credits to companies.

So far, there has been only a pilot project in Montana, but Canada is on Mast’s radar. “We see there’s a huge opportunity for biomass burial projects in Canada, given that we’ve got tons of forests in Canada,” Paron says, “and we’re unfortunately also seeing increasing wildfires here as well.” Paron is Canadian and based in Toronto but works for a U.S.-based company. He says this hybridity affords him a useful lens for TOCW: it’s not just about highlighting the incredible innovation in Canada, but also showcasing solutions to the entire world. “Canada can be a superpower for this moving forward.”

Sequestration strategy

Undo, a U.K.-registered company, has also focused on carbon sequestration projects in Canada. Working with farmers in Ontario, Undo offers enhanced rock weathering, a method that crushes abundant silicate rocks into a powder, through carbon credits sold to companies. The crushed rock both captures carbon from the atmosphere and can improve soil health, creating a win-win for the climate and farmers.

Peggy Sue Deaven, general manager for Canada at Undo, thinks that climate-solution companies like Undo need to showcase that they can make just as much business sense as the conventional big emitters. “We are a robust, competitive, for-profit, eat-your-heart-out [business], and we do good things.” Deaven, who will also be on a panel during the flagship TOCW carbon-solutions event, adds that climate solutions is an area where Canada can already own its leadership status in the world and that there are solutions that make economic sense.

With an existential threat like climate change, it’s important to connect with others, Deaven argues. “The soaring potential for folk to come together audaciously and to think what’s next, how are we pulse-checking with one another – that kind of community coming together is exceptional,” she says. “Toronto’s such a hub for innovation, so it does bring out the best in folk there.”

Corporate Knights is a media sponsor of Toronto Climate Week. This article was produced independently by the Corporate Knights editorial team, and Toronto Climate Week did not review or approve the content prior to publication.

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California-based shareholder advocates As You Sow and Corporate Knights today released the new cohort of the Carbon Clean200, a global list of 200 publicly traded companies leading the sustainable clean energy economy.

From China to France, the United Kingdom to the United States, this crop of industry-leading companies generated $2.5 trillion in revenue from services and products that reduce demand for fossil fuels and water while offering investors more than double the returns of the fossil-fuel-heavy MSCI ACWI Energy Index. They also beat the global benchmark MSCI ACWI by 30% from July 1, 2016, to January 29, 2025.

Clean200 data show that for the large companies that make up 80% of global market capitalization, sustainable revenues and capital expenditures are growing more than twice as fast as all other revenues over the past five years.

This trend holds across sectors and regions and puts sustainable companies on a path to dominate the global economy by the end of the next decade, despite political attacks. (All figures in PPP, purchasing power parity, which is based on the rate at which the currency of one country is converted into that of another country to buy the same amount of goods and services in each country.)

Key findings include:

• The top 10 companies on the list by revenue include Apple, Contemporary Amperex Technology, Microsoft, Tesla, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Volkswagen.
• Thirty-five countries are represented in the Clean200, including the United States (41), China (21), Japan (18), Germany (14), and France and Canada (11 each).
• Clean200 companies earned more than $2.5 trillion in sustainable revenue in 2023 (the most recent year for which full-year results are available).
• Clean200 companies generated a total return of 190.9% on a sustainable-revenue-weighted basis, outperforming the MSCI ACWI index (162.0%) and the MSCI ACWI/Energy Index of fossil fuel companies (76.7%) on Total Return Gross – USD Basis from the Clean200 inception of July 1, 2016, to January 29, 2025.
• $10,000 invested in the Clean200 on July 1, 2016, would have grown to $29,090 by January 29, 2025, versus $17,670 for the MSCI ACWI/Energy benchmark for fossil fuel.
• The industrial sector accounts for 52 companies on the list, followed by information technology (32), and consumer discretionary and materials (29 each). IT companies had the highest total sustainable revenue, a cumulative total of more than US$687 billion.

The 10 companies that contributed the most to the Clean200’s performance over the past year were from China (3), the United States (2), France (2), Taiwan (1), Germany (1) and the United Kingdom (1). They include sustainably certified tech hardware, electric vehicles and electric rail equipment.

“In 2016, we created the Clean200 in response to investors saying, ‘If we divest fossil fuels, there is nothing to invest in,’” says Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow and co-author of the Carbon Clean 200 report that accompanies the ranking. “The Clean200 has consistently demonstrated that the ‘clean energy’ future of eight years ago is now the clean energy present. This year, the scale and global diversity of leading companies continue to expand and redefine the term ‘cleantech’ to be any company with products and services that will reduce demand for fossil fuels and water.”

“It is telling that clean energy stocks generated more than double the returns of fossil fuel stocks since 2016, despite political headwinds, underlining that stock markets care more about economic materiality of the parabolic growth in clean energy than the political leanings of the day,” says Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights and co-author of the report.

The Clean200 utilizes the Corporate Knights Sustainable Revenue database, which tracks the percentage of revenue companies earn from sustainable economy themes ranging from green power to electric vehicles to plant protein and smart buildings.

The list excludes companies that are flagged on Corporate Knights’ list of “red flag” companies and As You Sow’s Invest Your Values suite of mutual-fund transparency tools that identify companies involved in fossil fuels, deforestation, the prison industrial complex, weapons and tobacco, as well as the exclusionary screens that form part of the Corporate Knights Global 100 methodology.

“We will continue to track and share the emergence of the clean energy economic powerhouse,” Behar says. “There is clear financial evidence showing a broad spectrum of companies defining this economic transformation away from an extractive economy and into a regenerative economy based on justice and sustainability. The job growth and resilience demonstrated by these companies are our greatest hope in controlling climate change and achieving a safe, just and sustainable world that benefits all.”

Methodology

The Clean200 are the largest 200 public companies ranked by clean revenue. The ranking was first calculated on July 1, 2016, and publicly released on August 15, 2016, by Corporate Knights and As You Sow. The current list has been updated with data through January 29, 2025.

The Clean200 companies are ranked by their clean revenues in U.S. dollars. The data set is developed through assessment of a company’s revenue that aligns with the definitions laid out in the Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy, primarily sourced from Corporate Knights research. To be eligible, a company must earn more than 10% of total revenues from clean sources.

The Clean200 uses negative screens. It excludes carbon laggards in the cement industry, oil and gas companies and those found on the Global Oil & Gas Exit List, coal companies found on the Global Coal Exit List, all utilities that generate less than 50% of their power from green sources, the top 200 carbon reserve owners in the Carbon Underground 200 list, fossil-fuel financers found on the Banking for Climate Chaos list, fossil-fuel insurers found on the Insure Our Future list, companies involved in for-profit prison operations recommended for divestment by the Investigate project of the American Friends Service Committee, companies involved in severe environmental or human rights violation, and those which were involved in illegal activities where the ratio of fines, penalties or settlements over revenue for the most recent twelve months period exceeded 1.0%. In addition, the Clean200 excludes weapons companies, including major military arms manufacturers found on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Top 100 arms-producing and military services list, as well as cluster munitions, nuclear weapons, and civilian firearm manufacturers screened on As You Sow’s Weapon Free Funds. The Clean200 also excludes palm oil, paper/pulp, rubber, timber, cattle, and soy producers that are screened on As You Sow’s Deforestation Free Funds; companies that use child or forced labor, are involved in the manufacture of harmful pesticides, and that engage in negative climate lobbying are not included.

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“In an attempt to solve two environmental problems at once, researchers at the University of Kitakyushu in Japan have found that shredded nappies can be used to replace between 9 and 40% of the sand used in making concrete without reducing its strength,” reports the journal Nature.

Siswanti Zuraida, a civil engineer at the University of Kitakyushu—and mother of a toddler—began to think about diapers as a potential resource while lecturing at the Bandung Science Technology Institute near Jakarta.

“Single-use nappies are typically made from wood pulp, cotton, and super-absorbent polymers, small amounts of which have been shown to improve the mechanical properties of concrete,” the news story states. They are also widely available in places like Indonesia and other low- and middle-income countries, where population numbers are growing, “leading to more babies, more nappies, and more demand for low-cost housing.”

Zuraida decided to replace different percentages of sand with cleaned and shredded diapers in a concrete slurry, to see how it would affect durability. The experiment did end up lowering concrete’s comprehensive strength, so structural elements like beams and floors needed greater concentrations of sand than “architectural elements” like concrete blocks and wall panels.

The latter remained functional even when 40% of the sand was replaced by shredded diapers. Floors, on the other hand, stopped being weight-bearing when the percentage of diaper waste went above 9%. Demonstrating that a significant amount of diaper waste could be used as a building material—thereby curbing landfill waste and increasing affordable housing—Zuraida and her team calculated that up to 27% of the sand needed for a small, 36-square-metre single-story concrete house could be replaced by shredded diapers.

Single-use nappies are typically made from wood pulp, cotton, and super-absorbent polymers, small amounts of which have been shown to improve the mechanical properties of concrete.

 

– Nature journal

But multi-floored dwellings would need far more sand: a three-storey house would not stand with more than 10% of diaper waste in its concrete mix. Pressed for time, the researchers ended up using metal beams for the structural components in their demonstration house, using diaper-infused concrete only for architectural elements. “In total, the house used around 1.7 cubic metres of nappy waste, which made up roughly 8% of the total composite material volume,” Nature reports.

That could make a decent dent in the construction world, where as things stand, cement production is responsible for almost 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, consuming around 50 billion tonnes of sand each year, with a devastating toll on ecosystems.

Christof Schröfl, a chemist who researches sustainable building materials at Dresden University of Technology, praised the team’s effort to turn non-recyclable waste into a resource as “a nice and really worthwhile piece within a step-wise process.” But he cautioned that keeping the supply chain between households, processing plants, and construction sites simple and short could prove tricky.

Zuraida agreed that pulling nappies from the waste stream would be challenging in the real world, Nature writes. “There’s no supporting system in the municipal waste management to separate diapers,” she said.

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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Apple has been leading the charge on American tech companies pursuing the ambitious goal of sourcing 100% of their energy from renewable sources. It hit this target in 2018 at its global facilities and is working towards 100% renewable energy sourcing throughout its entire supply chain by 2020. Apple is now the leading purchaser of solar energy in the U.S, and according to its annual Green Bond Report, the company issued two green bonds in 2016/2017 that raised a total of $2.5 billion to pay for that renewable energy.

In addition to major investments in renewable energy, Apple has made some progress on electronic waste, but more work definitely remains. E-waste is a massive problem in the technology sector. Electronics often end up being recycled by rural communities in Asia and it can have devastating social and environmental impacts. To deal with this problem, Apple developed a recycling robot named Daisy that’s capable of dissembling 1.2 million phones a year. Though to put that in perspective, the company sold over 217 million new phones last year.

Unfortunately, Daisy’s work is meant to keep all Apple product repairs in-house. Apple has actually been a vocal opponent to the Right to Repair movement (in sharp contrast to its support of climate action). It has successfully lobbied to stop California’s Right to Repair legislation by claiming that customers would harm themselves if they fixed their own iPhones and it went so far as to sue independent iPhone repair shops for using aftermarket iPhone parts.

Embarrassingly, both Apple and Samsung were fined €10m and €5m respectively in Italy in 2018 for deliberately slowing down phones with operating system updates that caused “serious malfunctions and significantly reduced performance, thus accelerating phones’ substitution,” according to Italy’s competition authority. It’s a big deal since keeping old phones around longer significantly reduces your phone’s environmental footprint.

Labour issues are another major concern. Investors have long known about worker rights violations in Apple’s supply chain, many of which stem from Taiwanese electronics company Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (ticker: HNHPF), better known as Foxconn. In 2010, 18 Foxconn employees attempted suicide by jumping off the roof of a facility. The suicide attempts were blamed, in part, on horrendous working conditions in the factory that assembles iPhones and other consumer electronics. The situation hasn’t improved: Apple’s 2019 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report detailed 27 core labor and human rights violations. These included 24 working hours falsification violations, two debt-bonded labour violations, and one underage labour violation.

How about Samsung? Samsung Electronics is a major South Korean electronics manufacturer that doesn’t just make smartphones, it also makes semiconductors, TVs, home appliances and more. Samsung hasn’t had as many flashy green announcements as Apple over the last few years, but that’s because Samsung was doing corporate sustainability before it was cool. According to its 2019 Sustainability Report, Samsung established its first e-waste take-back and recycling centre in 1998 and started building sustainability into its design process in 2004. The company reduced its CO2 emission intensity by 59% from 2008 to 2013 and plans to source renewable energy for 100% of the energy used by its factories, office buildings and operational facilities by next year.

Note: the use of renewable energy by both companies doesn’t boost their clean revenue scores (see scorecard below), since Corporate Knights considers it the equivalent of a mining company offsetting its pollution with renewable energy generated onsite. While commendable, both Apple and Samsung would need to up their recycled content to avoid the impacts of mining their components.

Like Apple, Samsung discourages repairing its products by making them hard to repair. According to the iFixit’s Smartphone Repairability Score, most EPEAT Gold iPhones have an average score of six or seven out of ten, while Samsung EPEAT Gold mobile phones average a three or four out of ten.

As well, Samsung did poorly on Greenpeace’s last electronics guide from 2017. Case in point: it scored a D- on hazardous chemical elimination while Apple earned a B.

Samsung also flounders when it comes to doing right by its employees. Samsung’s CEO makes 478 times more money than average worker, and an investigation by the Associated Press in 2016 found more than 200 cases of Samsung factory employees contracting illnesses like leukaemia, lupus, lymphoma, and multiple sclerosis. When families sought more information about how these employees got sick, Samsung asked the South Korean government to not disclose types and volumes of substances for fear of revealing trade secrets. Last year, Samsung finally apologized and committed to compensate former and current employees suffering from work-related illnesses.

From a financial perspective, it’s a bit of a toss-up. Both companies have performed well over the past five years with more potential growth as new innovations emerge that keep consumers lining up for product launches.

Sustainability-wise, while Samsung may have been ahead of the curve ten years ago, it’s starting to fall behind on a few fronts. Meanwhile, Apple still has more to do, but it’s been more aggressive about some of its environmental goals.  I would consider the companies tied for now but it won’t be long before Apple takes the lead if it continues on the current trajectory.

Either way, tech news and review site Engadget was right when it declared that “you can’t buy an ethical smartphone today” in North America. I think I’ll just get my phone’s screen repaired and wait until the Fairphone finally comes over from Europe.

The following scorecard is based on 2017 data.

Beta is a measure of a stock’s volatility in relation to the market. By definition, the market has a beta of 1.0, and individual stocks are ranked according to how much they deviate from the market. A stock that swings more than the market over time has a beta above 1.0. Lower beta means less risk.

Have a company in your portfolio that you want to replace with a more sustainable option? Write us an email or send us a tweet!

Tim Nash blogs as The Sustainable Economist and is the founder of Good Investing.

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