How Atlantic Businesses Big and Small are Moving Towards Net Zero
HALIFAX — Businesses of all sizes came together on April 5 to weigh in on the path to Net Zero and what Atlantic Canadian businesses could do to get there, at an event hosted by APEC.
The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council has released a series of reports looking at the region’s move toward net zero and its impact on the economy.
At its conference, three speakers from businesses of significantly different sizes shared how they were trying to move towards net-zero goals.
JD Irving’s director of sustainability and indigenous relations, Andrew Willett, spoke about the impact of Net Zero policies on the forest supply chain and selling to an international audience.
“We are a large manufacturer and therefore we’re a large consumer of energy. We use a lot of fossil fuels. We use a lot of electricity. The cost of energy with climate policy and electricity policy is going to have significant impact on cost of business,” he said.
He went on to argue that, as a company that exports a significant amount of product, especially to the United States, the fuel taxes and regulations like the Clean Fuel Standard are going to have an impact on competitiveness.
“As an exporter, it makes it very challenging because our competitors [in the] United States don’t have these sorts of taxes. It makes it very challenging to pass some of these additional costs on onto our US consumers.”
He acknowledged how climate change has a direct impact on the product that JDI harvests – trees.
“The tree we plant today is going to be cut down in a very different environment 40 years from now. And so there are risks associated with climate that we need to understand.”
Trying to quantify and calculate its carbon footprint is a difficult task for a large company like JDI.
“Understanding your carbon footprint … can be quite complicated for a supply chain that’s as long as ours, from seed all the way to shelf.”
JDI has identified the three different scopes of emissions it creates. Scope one is direct emissions generated by the fossil fuels the company uses in its day-to-day operations, like gas in company vehicles for example. He estimates they make up 22 per cent of the company’s carbon footprint.
Scope two is the emissions created from generating the electricity that the company uses, one step removed from their actual business. Sources like coal-fired plants contribute to these indirect emissions.
Scope three is the emissions generated by supply chain. These indirect emissions are generated by products that the company uses to do business. He says the biggest source of these emissions is freight to their customers.
He estimates the company generated 2 million tonnes of emissions in 2021.
With freight to customers being the single biggest contributor to that total, and electricity coming in a close second, without a replacement for diesel at scale and without changes to how power is generated, “it’s going to be very hard to think about how we decarbonize our supply chain.”
Emma Theriault is the vice president and co-founder of D.A.S Concrete Countertops in Dieppe, NB. She says sustainability is a key facet of the business and one that factored into the space in which they are working.
Leasing an older building with poor insulation, out-of-date lighting, and inefficient heating was a problem that they overcame by working with their landlord.
“We were able to work with our landlord while we were negotiating our initial lease to have new heat pumps installed, to have new phrase spray foam insulation installed and to have LED lighting installed in that space,” Theriault says.
She says the landlord agreed to pay for the improvements upfront, and allowed them to amortize the cost via payments over the five-year lease.
Theriault says the company is positioning itself to take advantage of the potential federal government procurement opportunities that may be coming as the switch to Net-Zero marches on.
Ron Smith, manager of business development at Masstown Market in Nova Scotia. He says the market has taken matters into its own hands to reduce waste and pollution.
“We have a full-fledged, small municipal wastewater treatment system on site here to deal with the byproducts of the creamery and the butchery for example,” he says. “We have always looked at any way we can to save on that electrical bill from a refrigeration point of view. New compressors when they become more cost-efficient, LED lights…We use heat recovery from our bakery operations and our grocery operations to preheat water to keep them storage tanks.”
They’ve also taken measures to generate their own electricity.
“What we came up with is 610 solar panels,” he says. “Over three phases, which spread across the year, we had approximately 277,000 watts of power being generated which is reducing 212 tonnes of co2.”
“What we’re hoping is that it replaces about 20% of our cost which is about $300,000 a year in electricity right now … this week, for example, that several days where we are actually producing more than 100% of our capacity.”
Alex Graham is a Huddle reporter in Saint John. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].