The Law Times / Canadian Lawyer In House: Jennifer McPhee

Businesses around the world are taking action on the environment because the environment is becoming big business, according to Ron Dembo, the founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, who spoke to lawyers at a Canadian Corporate Counsel Association conference in Toronto recently.

“There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made doing good,” says Dembo. “This is the new tech.”

Dembo started Zerofootprint — a company that helps businesses and consumers measure and reduce their environmental impact — two years ago because he was observing a tipping point “in the sense that business, which was traditionally sort of antagonistic to the environment, would become co-opted into the environment. And that’s clearly what’s happening now.”

“First of all, people are really believing there is a crisis, and secondly, I think business believes it really has a role, and thirdly, people are seeing they can make a lot of money doing it.

For instance, Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest global investment banks, began to invest in wind power two years ago and made $1.5 billion in profit from it last year, Dembo says. And today, Wal-Mart is actually doing more for the environment than Canada is.

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