GLOBE 2020: Now is the time to act
GLOBE Series is North America’s biggest and longest-running sustainable business summit and innovation showcase. We’re pretty big fans of sustainable business and climate innovation, so we at Bullfrog Power were thrilled to attend GLOBE 2020 and be bronze sponsors of the event.
This year, the speakers and attendees came together with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose. Manuel Gorrin, the Sustainability and Stewardship Manager at Nature’s Path, noted that the audience was diverse and really keen to learn new ways of doing business. “It was really exciting to see small companies interested in building the foundations of their social purpose,” he added.
We know what we must do to avert the climate crisis, and we’re more motivated than ever to get down to it. With that in mind, these are some of our key takeaways from GLOBE 2020:
Climate change is happening now. We caused it, and we are already feeling the effects.
David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, reinforced that we caused half of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions in the last 30 years—during which time we knew about the dangers of climate change. Our ancestors didn’t create this issue, we did. And we did so knowingly.
This may sound bleak, but there’s a grain of hope in this realization: we are the authors of this story. In 30 years, we brought the climate to the brink of catastrophe. We now have 30 years to reverse that course.
We can’t waste time waiting for the perfect time to act.
It’s tempting to blame slow-moving policymakers for our lack of climate action—but in truth, there will never be an ideal time to overhaul our society. We have limited time to make big changes, and we can’t afford to delay action until the perfect policies are in place.
We should all focus on putting changes in motion instead of waiting for an external sign.
Organizations can and should create a more circular economy.
A key topic of discussion this year was how organizations can collaborate to create a more circular economy, particularly for plastics. Currently, 91% of plastics are not recycled. Not only do these plastics pollute the environment, they’re also wasted resources that require fossil fuel-intensive processes to replace.
During a Circularity in Plastics panel, BASF Canada introduced reciChain, a pilot program in B.C. that will incentivize plastic recycling and help break the current linear lifecycle. The program will use a scalable blockchain solution to track and trace plastics through various value chains.
Looking forward
GLOBE convened people who are ready solve the sustainability problems we face in Canada and worldwide. We were inspired to meet and collaborate with so many business leaders who put the planet first, and we look forward to being part of the climate solution.