Category Archives: Good Fact

Canada’s Supreme Court Rules Companies Have to Pay for Environmental Damage

industryIt might seem obvious that companies should pay for damaging property, but that wasn’t the case for years. Up to now companies in Canada were able to extract resources from land (poisoning entire ecosystems) and leave the cleanup costs to be covered by the government. Privatize the profits and socialize the costs. The Supreme Court ruled that if a company goes bankrupt then environmental expenses have to be covered before creditors get their money back.

Hopefully this discourages banks from loaning to companies that pillage and flee.

The top court ruled 5-2 to overturn the earlier ruling. In doing that, it said bankruptcy is not a licence to ignore environmental regulations, and there is no inherent conflict between federal bankruptcy laws and provincial environmental regulations.

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“This is good news for landowners, taxpayers and the environment,” said Keith Wilson, a lawyer who represents landowners with oil and natural gas wells on their properties. Among his clients are those with wells sitting idle on their land for decades.

“The concept of polluter pays is alive and well in Canada.”

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Living a Zero-Waste Life is Getting Easier

beans

Zero waste living seems like an impossibility given the amount of packaging everything is put in. Ordering a small item can lead to 10x the packaging of the item itself. The use of packaging seem so out of control that we can’t avoid it. We can.

Back in 2010 a UK based family created only one bin of trash throughout the year. In 2012 we looked at a town in Japan that already practices zero waste living. In the years since it’s actually gotten easier to practice a zero waste lifestelyl. Stores are popping up that are reducing their waste to save costs and the environment by providing customers with alternatives to recent packaging trends.

For most zero-waste shops, the pitch is simple: Customers arrive with their own packaging materials — jars, tote bags, whatever, or buy one of the jars on sale at the store, weigh them, and then subtract the weight of the receptacle from the weight of the goods added to get the final price. That way, nothing ends up in a landfill, at least on the customer’s end.


For the business itself, however, things are more complicated. Owners, who are responsible for the shipment of all products, are tasked with finding ways to reduce the carbon footprint and waste of the complicated process of shipping goods, and some goods are more high-maintenance than others.

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Wrap Experiences Instead of Objects

Finding the perfect physical gift for someone can be hard so don’t do it. Instead you can gift someone an experience through UnWrapIt. A friend of mine (clearly I’m biased) created the company to make it easier to gift experiences to one another. The goal is to reduce the amount of shipping of goods while providing more meaningful gifts. It’s a very neat service which also works with traditional gift giving.

“We had someone from Sioux Lookout build a scavenger hunt for a family member in Newfoundland. It had him going around St. John’s to eventually reveal what the gift was: dinner at his favourite restaurant,” says UnWrapIt founder Peter Deitz.
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“A lot of people reported anxiety about picking out the right kind of gift,” he says. Other stressful factors included the actual wrapping of the gift and, if ordered by mail, worrying if the gift would arrive on time — a pressing concern this year given Canada Post’s cancellation of its holiday delivery guarantees.

The flexibility of experience gifts can minimize that stress. By gifting dinner at a restaurant of the recipient’s choice, instead of a meal at a specific location, “They won’t worry about whether they picked out the right restaurant,” Deitz says.

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Save Money and Lives with Smaller Fire Trucks

the suburbs
Firefighters are making cities harder places to live in, this might seem like an odd thing to read. It’s counterintuitive since we’re used to thinking blindly that the firefighters (and EMS as a whole) have our best interests at mind. In North America, fire fighters are blocking initiatives to make cities more livable because of the size of their trucks. Places want to add bike lanes, widen sidewalks, add housing, and other civic enhancements but this makes it harder for massive trucks to navigate streets. The solution: make fire fighters buy smaller vehicles. Smaller response vehicles can also help with life saving too!

Another potential safety improvement: Don’t send a truck unless you have to. In the U.S., only 3 to 5 percent of fire department calls nationally are related to building fires, according to the report. Dispatching a 80-ton fire-fighting vehicle to respond to a possible heart attack doesn’t necessarily make sense. American cities could take a page from international peers that use smaller vehicles—even motorcycles and bikes—to respond to less-urgent medical calls. (And perhaps to those poor kittens caught in trees.)

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Swag Bags are a Drag

things

Professional conferences which suffer from being described as boring try to appeal to people using consumerism in the form of a “swag bag”. A swag bag handed out to conference attendees usually contains useless gizmos like stress balls to appeal to a basic human tendency: acquiring stuff. Going to one conference and getting a single swag bag might not seem like much, but when you realize the scope of the swag industry the numbers grow exponentially. This is why people are pushing back and rejecting bags of useless marketing trash.

Ensuring an ethical supply chain and materials with the smallest carbon footprint, of course, tends to increase costs. We see a parallel here with the fast fashion industry, which also focuses on making things as inexpensively as possible, so you can buy a T-shirt for a few bucks at H&M or Forever21. But over the last few years, reporting on these practices has drawn attention to their enormously damaging environmental footprint, which includes producing water pollution, toxic chemicals, and terrible waste. The human impact is just as terrifying: Workers at low-cost factories that make fast fashion products often labor under inhumane conditions, and many have died because of a lack of workplace safety standards.
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We could get rid of cheap swag altogether. What if you left your next conference or trade show without heaps of notepads, pens, and USB drives stuffed in a cheap tote bag, all of which will eventually end up in the trash?

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