Globe and Mail
Published on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2010 5:15PM EST Last updated on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010 8:51AM EST

Save cash, enhance your brand – what’s not to like?
by: RASHA MOURTADA

It was the exhibition of affluence that prompted Ron Dembo to start a charity to help the environment.

The founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, an organization that helps companies and individuals measure, track and offset their environmental impact, went to a technology conference in Monterey, Calif., in 2005. Among those in attendance were major players such as the founders of AOL and Google.

“It was curious to me that there’s a group of people who are changing the world but consuming a lot of the world to do it,” he says.

His theory applied not just to business types: “David Suzuki has got to have one of the biggest travel footprints out there, for example, but he’s doing a lot of good in the process.

“I realized, here’s this immense problem but no one is using software as part of the solution. It struck me as a very interesting opportunity.”

An opportunity to help the environment, yes. But it would also become a way to help companies make sustainability part of their business model. And that’s something, he says, no company can ignore.

“There was a time in the corporate world where you could get away with things. Today that’s not the case. Today it impacts financial results,” he says, pointing to giants such as Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola, who have made sustainability a visible part of their operations, even though it is not core to their business or products. “No company interested in longevity can afford to ignore this.”

And the South Africa-born Mr. Dembo knows a thing or two about companies with longevity. After an 11-year stint as a computer science and management professor at Yale University, he took up a post at Goldman Sachs in 1986. He left the financial firm the following year to start what would become the world’s largest enterprise risk-management software company, Algorithmics, which he sold for a nine-figure sum in 2005.

His brainwave at the California conference prompted Mr. Dembo to start a charitable foundation with the goal of massively reducing the environmental footprint of non-profit organizations, such as governments and schools. The foundation, which he called Zerofootprint, would rely only on funds raised by the sale of its products and services. In other words, Zerofootprint wouldn’t solicit donations – from the government or otherwise.

Continue Reading at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/