Red Canary: Cristina Howorun
Ron Dembo looks like he could’ve fallen out of the pages of a Calvin Klein catalogue. Clad in a pair of tight black jeans, fitted white t-shirt and black sandals, you’d think the lean, tanned and energetic software-guru-cum-environmentalist was in his thirties.
The springy Dembo certainly acts young; he leaps out of his chair to draw diagrams, turn off lights and open the windows of his loft-style downtown Toronto office.
But when the founder and CEO of Zerofootprint starts talking about carbon emissions, carbon calculators and his firm’s deal with Air Canada, his breadth of knowledge (not to mention the grey hair and wisdom lines) betrays his 58 years.
Launched in 2005, Zerofootprint is a hybrid organization: part green consultancy, part carbon-offset broker and part social network. To date, Dembo has invested more than $1.5 million in the start-up that has grown to about twelve employees.
Their carbon dioxide calculators enable consumers to tally the impact their everyday lives have on the environment; measuring everything from their air and car travel to their food consumption habits.
“You’re not conscious of how much energy you use because you don’t see it,” Dembo explains. “If you turned on a tap and just let it run, you’d see how much water you were actually consuming. You’d be more vigilant in watching your use.”
Zerofootprint’s website helps users not only track down their carbon footprints but also reduce their impact on the environment through carbon offset purchases.
Consumers can also purchase carbon offsets – a tonne costs $16, or they can calculate how many offsets they require to cover the environmental impact of specific flights, driving a vehicle for a year, or their home’s energy consumption.
While Dembo couldn’t provide specific sales numbers, they have attracted an impressive roster of clients and partners, including Roots Canada, the University of Guelph and Air Canada.
Zerofootprint’s recent deal with the airline allows customers to offset the carbon generated by their flights. Customers booking flights online now have the option to include the cost of carbon-offset credits into their flight cost.
Finding the green in the green
For the most part, these offsets are sold on a not-for-profit basis, although wholesale sales do generate revenue for the environmental start-up. Carbon_offset_seal.jpg
“You can think of offsets being sold at two levels- retail and wholesale,” explains Dembo. “Retail is not-for-profit such as [the agreement with] Air Canada- and we don’t make money off of that. Wholesale, that’s where we make money. So if you’re a company like Shell and you need to buy 100,000 tonnes, we’ll make a small profit.”
Revenue generated through offset sales helps to cover the cost of Zerofootprint’s carbon “farms”.
Zerofootprint has tree-planting initiatives in Michigan, and their Degraded Land Restoration Project in Maple Ridge, BC is one of Dembo’s points of pride.
Since 2006, they’ve developed over 200,000 tonnes of credits over the approximately 83-hectare area, planting over 25,000 indigenous trees. They expect an additional 100,000 trees to be planted by year’s end.
“Our trees are probably the most well-managed tress anywhere,” boasts Dembo in his South African accent. “They have one hundred years of legal protection in B.C. They have two levels of scientific oversight. On top of all that they are risk managed.” And, true to Dembo’s business roots, they are ISO 14064-2 validated.
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