Articles from canada.com

It’s Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun. Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Sure, it’s not a lot on its own – but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you’re seriously helping to melt some Greenland glaciers. (Read Full Article)

Martin Smith is the founder of Justmeans.com, which rates the social and environmental performance of the top companies in the world. Justmeans was founded in 2008 has 250,000 users. Smith, 28, was a keynote speaker at the recent Tremblant Forum on Sustainability. He spoke to The Gazette about how he feels sustainability is vital for the survival of businesses. Do a lot of companies now simply view sustainability as a public-relations stunt? Yeah, especially in the United States. If you look at a company like Target, most people see it as a sustainable company, but the company doesn’t disclose its environmental performance. If you look at companies like Marks and Spencer in the UK, and you look at their environmental performance, it’s like comparing apples to oranges, because (companies in Europe are) so far ahead of retailers in the U.S. So I think in the ... (Read Full Article)