As Torontonians get more and more environmentally conscientious, recycling, composting, not using plastic bags for their groceries, a second-wave sort of feeling can set in. Are we doing enough? Or are all these little things we do just that, little things that don't add up to enough to have any real effect?
And this questioning can extend to the corporate world, as well. If a hotel says it's being green by using low-flow showerheads, or an office building toots its own horn because it turns off all its lights at night, are they greening, or greenwashing?
According to Doug Webber, the green building practice leader for
Halsall, an engineering and consulting firm that helps corporate clients use their energy more efficiently, turning off an office tower's lights at night is no small beer.
According to Webber, an average tower tenant expends about a quarter of its energy on lighting. So if they only turn on their lights between 7am and 6pm, instead of keeping them on all night, "That's 50 per cent of the hours that the lights are off. You could save 12 per cent of your energy just by turning the lights off at night."
Another quarter of corporate tenant's energy tends to go to information technology, so turning computers off -- and reducing the number of servers that need to be on all the time, whenever possible -- when they're not in use can have a similar effect.
"One of the problems with accusations of greenwashing, if they're not careful, is that they can throw cold water on what might be legitimately good first steps," says Chris MacDonald, visiting scholar with the
Rotman School of Business's
Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics who also runs the
Business Ethics Blog "A company may be trying to get some credit for doing the right thing, but then figures they're getting crapped on, so they'll stop."
For his part, MacDonald reserves the term for companies he thinks "have just an atrocious track record and they're really holding up something tiny that isn't central to what they do."
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Doug Webber, Chris MacDonald
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