Bruce Taylor, P. Eng., is President of Enviro-Stewards Inc., an international environmental consulting firm. He is a chemical engineer with 20 years of experience in the environmental consulting field and has expertise in the fields of toxics reduction, pollution prevention (P2), energy efficiency (E2), and sustainable process design.

Enviro-Stewards has experience in delivering sustainability reports that provide credible third-party tracking of progress, verification of gains, and identified projected gains linked to planned conservation measures. The company commonly engages facility and corporate staff to identify and quantify key performance indicators (KPIs) and provides third-party tracking of progress towards goals, verification of gains implemented to date, and projected gains associated with potential conservation measures to be implemented.

Mr. Taylor's work with the North York General Hospital Chain substantially reduced each leg of their environmental footprint (energy, GHG, water, solid waste, biomedical waste, subject pollutants and hazardous waste) and lead to their receipt of a national Pollution Prevention award from the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (2008).

How are you Calculating your Environmental Footprint?

Companies everywhere are calculating their baseline environmental footprint and using this process as a basis for managing and reporting. Companies reporting under Carbon Disclosure Project, Global Reporting Initiative, Dow Jones, NASDAQ and other invester indicies are determining their environmental footprint baseline and measuring their progress (see examples  Apple, Sealy, Weyerhaeuser ).  Municipalities and institutions are doing the same. 

In an era when sustainable companies experience increased market share; operational savings on energy, water, solid waste and environmental compliance; and the attraction and retention of the best employees, environmental footprint measurement and management is increasingly a core competency for business competitiveness.  Furthermore, economically, environmentally and socially sustainable companies are also attractive to investors due to higher returns and lower investment risk.

The ecological and environmental impacts of companies, which include greenhouse gas, water and waste footprints, are among the popular measures today spurred on by these reporting systems.  Even supply chain leaders such as Wal-Mart, Proctor and Gamble, Philips, Nokia and Cisco are increasingly basing their purchasing decisions on these measures.

In this program we will examine how waste, water, energy, emissions and greenhouse gas environmental footprints are the basis for comparative advantage in Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility and Socially Responsible Investment reports today. 

We will introduce the concepts of ecological and environmental footprint, discuss the approaches used by “best practice’ companies, examine Enviro-Stewards 5-step system to environmental footprint assessment and explore continuous improvement to meet footprint and overhead cost reductions.  Learn about achieving sustainable operations through the evolving concepts of industrial metabolism,  materials flow and substitution, input-output analysis, life cycle assessment and industrial symbiosis.

Learning Objectives

Using current case studies, best practice examples and hands-on activities you will:

2. Define Ecological and Environmental Footprint, industrial metabolism, materials flow and substitution processes, input-output analysis, life cycle assessment and industrial symbiosis and understand what they mean for your company.

3. Examine the 5 Steps to your Environmental Footprint Sustainability Assessment.

4. Learn how to quantify and prioritize environmental footprint wastes through measurement, observation, and facility records.

5. Identify root causes as to why waste is generated in the first place. Learn how to design and perform financial & technical analysis of alternatives.

6. Prepare an implementation plan that categorizes each opportunity within an immediate, medium-term or long-term time frame.

7. Evaluate measurement methods and the basis for reporting.

8. Examine different methods of visually representing results and discuss the use of results in energizing employee engagement.

Tom Ewart, Managing Director, Network for Business Sustainability

Tom will share the findings of the newly released report on the Ecological Footprint of Business.

The Network for Business Sustainability is an independent, non-profit research group that produces authoritative resources on important sustainability issues – with the goal of shaping management practice and research.

The organization connects thousands of researchers and professionals worldwide who are interested in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and who believe in the value of research-based practice and practice-based research.

• Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility Directors, Managers, Personnel
• Green Supply Chain Managers
• Environmental Health and Safety Practitioners
• Facilities Managers
• Purchasing Personnel
• Plant Managers
• Engineers Quality
• Anyone in the industrial, commercial and institutional sector measuring and reporting their environmental footprint