The Globe and Mail: Richard Blackwell

As an unabashed advocate of free enterprise who once owned a million-dollar software firm, Ron Dembo hardly seems like a tree-hugger. But he calls himself a committed environmentalist and his reputation as one is certainly on the rise since his company, Zerofootprint, signed a deal to let Air Canada customers offset the carbon generated by their flights.

Mr. Dembo, the firm’s chief executive officer as well as its founder, and his dozen or so employees work out of the third floor of a renovated factory sandwiched between an ambulance station and a transmission shop just off Toronto’s trendy Queen Street West.

Amid creaking floors, broad beams and industrial-sized windows, he steers a venture that is part social network, part green consultancy, part carbon-offset broker—and certainly a business.

The “new green” exemplified by Zerofootprint recognizes that people will try to make money while helping the environment. There’s no contradiction in that, Mr. Dembo says.

“Typically in the green movement there has been very little good business practice, very poor knowledge of risk management, and a lot of religion,” he said. “I think there’s a whole new group of people like ourselves that are trying to bring [business] standards into the green movement.”

If the current public focus on the environment is to be sustainable, he says, it is crucial that the business community get “deeply on side.” Otherwise things will look like they did in the 1980s, and “it could disappear as just another fad.”

Born in South Africa, the lean, tanned 58-year-old Mr. Dembo taught in the computer science and management departments at Yale University before coming to Canada in the mid-1980s and launching Algorithmics Inc., a hugely successful risk-management software firm. The company was sold for $175-million (U.S.) in 2004, and his share was “enough that I’d never have to do any work again.”

Early in 2005, while at a conference of wealthy entrepreneurs, Mr. Dembo came up with the idea of creating an enterprise that would appeal to people who care about the environment but don’t support more radical organizations such as Greenpeace.

He now has spent about $1.5-million of his own money on Zerofootprint, which is a non-profit entity when it helps people reduce their carbon footprints, is out to profit by consulting and selling environment-related products.

In future the company may get into industrial carbon trading – a sector that may explode when formal carbon markets are established in North America.

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