Saving the planet is good for everyone
There's a maxim used around the offices of General Electric to describe the corporation's loving embrace of eco-friendliness: "green is green."
In other words, being kind to the environment isn't just for the alpaca-poncho-and-sandal crowd - business can rake in huge piles of money at it.
The GE brass are convinced that unless we clean up our act, the world is headed in the opposite direction and the global economy will go straight down the high-flow toilet. And if GE can reach new levels of profitability helping out, all the better.
"It feels good," admitted Jeff Fulgham, chief marketing manager for GE Water and Process Technologies, who was in town last week for a conference.
Everybody wins, he explained. When GE sells a customer green technology, the customer saves money through efficiency, the environment stays a little greener, and GE gets a little richer.
In fact, the corporation's green technology - from fuel-efficient jet engines to wind-generated power - was worth $10 billion in sales in 2005. But the biggest area of opportunity for the corporation, Fulgham said, is connected to a commodity that most Canadians take for granted: water.
Canada is home to 0.5% of the world's population, but 9% of the world's fresh water supply, so it's easy to assume that we have nothing to worry about.
But there's a growing crisis around the globe, and it's slowly making its way here. In the southern U.S., about a third of the nation is in the grip of a protracted drought that has forced cities to take brutal conservation measures like forbidding children to play with hoses at home on hot days.
For the past decade, the drought has been creeping northward. Presently, two billion people around the globe - one third of humanity - are affected by water scarcity, and that figure is expected to climb dramatically.
And with oilsands companies sucking up ever-increasing quantities of water in northern Alberta to keep their plants humming to feed the world's ravenous appetite for fuel, it won't be long until we reach what Fulgham calls the "tipping point" where there simply isn't enough water available to keep up with demand and we're faced with a full-blown ecological catastrophe.
No water, critical to the oilsands extraction process, means our economy, and ultimately the entire Canadian economy, will grind to a halt.
The solution, Fulgham says, is to reuse the contaminated wastewater wallowing in the oilsands projects' massive tailings ponds, rather than continue draining the Athabasca and Peace basins.
ECONOMICAL
The technology is available and it's getting cheaper. It won't be long, he says, before it's more economical to treat old wastewater than to draw fresh water and pollute it.
And the oilsands are a drop in the environmental bucket for companies like GE.
China alone plans $125 billion worth of water treatment projects in the next decade.
Massive developments in parched parts of the world, such as Dubai, are going to have to make every drop of water count.
And even in water-rich places like Canada, water is going to become increasingly expensive. As it stands now, Canadians pay about one tenth of the rates that consumers in places like Germany do to get water out of their taps.
Corporations, governments and even individual homeowners will be forced to be as efficient and green as possible.
And GE, which sold $2.3 billion worth of water conserving technology last year, will be there to help.
Who knew there was so much profit to be made by doing the right thing?
Sunday, July 1, 2007
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