Vancouver Island Green Business Program: Leading Sustainable Certification for SMEs (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I'm Craig Sorokin with the Vancouver Island Green Business Program. Over the last year we've been working with offices, restaurants and retail outlets to certify them for their sustainable practices that they're currently taking. We're also encouraging them to use our checklist as a source of information to take more action based on the current actions they're also taking. We're tracking all that information and so far this year we've had great uptake in the first year. We've had 40 businesses certified and we're looking to certify another 30 businesses this year. We've had some great success stories. Truffles Group for example have had all of their liquor stores certified from South Island up to Courtney. They've had their catering operations certified. We're working with clusters of different businesses such as Royal LePage, great support from partners like Vancity. We're hoping to expand up Island next year as we've had a lot of interest from all across Vancouver Island. So we'll be a truly Island wide certification program in the next years to come. We're hoping to have a few hundred green certified businesses done in the next two years so that we can show the rest of Canada that we're leading by example. So it's been really important to engage with smaller to medium sized business owners and get them into something that's quite accessible. So the program is fitted to companies under 100 that some of the larger national certifications don't service. So this is really a small and medium sized enterprise program that's meant to really engage the public and be accessible. The certification is an indication that they know businesses are being proactive and taking steps to improve their environmental footprint. And as a business it's a way that you can track and let the public out there know about the steps you're taking to be a more sustainable business.