Ron Dembo looks like he could’ve fallen out of the pages of a Calvin Klein catalogue. Clad in a pair of tight black jeans, fitted white t-shirt and black sandals, you’d think the lean, tanned and energetic software-guru-cum-environmentalist was in his thirties.

The springy Dembo certainly acts young; he leaps out of his chair to draw diagrams, turn off lights and open the windows of his loft-style downtown Toronto office.

But when the founder and CEO of Zerofootprint starts talking about carbon emissions, carbon calculators and his firm’s deal with Air Canada, his breadth of knowledge (not to mention the grey hair and wisdom lines) betrays his 58 years.

Launched in 2005, Zerofootprint is a hybrid organization: part green consultancy, part carbon-offset broker and part social network. To date, Dembo has invested more than $1.5 million in the start-up that has grown to about twelve employees.

Their carbon dioxide calculators enable consumers to tally the impact their everyday lives have on the environment; measuring everything from their air and car travel to their food consumption habits.

“You’re not conscious of how much energy you use because you don’t see it,” Dembo explains. “If you turned on a tap and just let it run, you’d see how much water you were actually consuming. You’d be more vigilant in watching your use.”

Zerofootprint’s website helps users not only track down their carbon footprints but also reduce their impact on the environment through carbon offset purchases.

Consumers can also purchase carbon offsets—a tonne costs $16, or they can calculate how many offsets they require to cover the environmental impact of specific flights, driving a vehicle for a year, or their home’s energy consumption.

While Dembo couldn’t provide specific sales numbers, they have attracted an impressive roster of clients and partners, including Roots Canada, the University of Guelph and Air Canada.

Zerofootprint’s recent deal with the airline allows customers to offset the carbon generated by their flights. Customers booking flights online now have the option to include the cost of carbon-offset credits into their flight cost.

Finding the green in the green

For the most part, these offsets are sold on a not-for-profit basis, although wholesale sales do generate revenue for the environmental start-up.

“You can think of offsets being sold at two levels- retail and wholesale,” explains Dembo. “Retail is not-for-profit such as [the agreement with] Air Canada- and we don’t make money off of that. Wholesale, that’s where we make money. So if you’re a company like Shell and you need to buy 100,000 tonnes, we’ll make a small profit.”

Revenue generated through offset sales helps to cover the cost of Zerofootprint’s carbon “farms”.

Zerofootprint has tree-planting initiatives in Michigan, and their Degraded Land Restoration Project in Maple Ridge, BC is one of Dembo’s points of pride.

Since 2006, they’ve developed over 200,000 tonnes of credits over the approximately 83-hectare area, planting over 25,000 indigenous trees. They expect an additional 100,000 trees to be planted by year’s end.

“Our trees are probably the most well-managed tress anywhere,” boasts Dembo in his South African accent. “They have one hundred years of legal protection in B.C. They have two levels of scientific oversight. On top of all that they are risk managed.” And, true to Dembo’s business roots, they are ISO 14064-2 validated.

A big fish who saw the big picture

Dembo’s foray in the world of green commerce is just another addition to an already impressive resume. Dembo taught in the computer science and management departments at Yale University before coming to Canada in the mid-1980s. In short order he launched Algorithmics, one of the world’s largest risk management software firms, with offices in 15 countries.

The company was sold in 2004 for $175 million US, affording him the opportunity to never have to work again.

Looking around his office, you’d find that hard to believe.

White boards and calendars permeate the office, filled with speaking engagements, interviews and other commitments over the next few months. His desktop calendar is packed with colour-coded meetings, even during his scheduled vacation. His blackberry sounds off three times in 20 minutes, while his next meeting waits patiently outside the door.

Dembo may be able to afford a life of repose, but he chosen not to lead one. In fact, affluent activism is behind Zerofootprint’s genesis and target demographic.

At a 2005 conference of what he dubs “the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs”—citing Bill Gates as an attendee—Dembo was alarmed by the lack of awareness of individual environmental impact.

“We got these goodie bags, so to speak. Large packages filled with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise,”.

Dembo explains that many attendees were sending these packages home via courier, simply because they could afford to. “They could get these home in three hours, even though they didn’t need to,” he says. “The carbon emissions coming from those planes weren’t really necessary.”

These were people who genuinely cared about the environment, he says, but didn’t realize the impact their lifestyle choices were having on global warming. Zerofootprint has these people, and others with disposable incomes, in their crosshairs.

“(Parkdale) residents aren’t producing the carbons. These are people who take the train, don’t run their dryer a lot and probably don’t even have dishwashers. It’s not to say that we don’t want to get everybody, but right now, we’re after Rosedale.”

Collective efforts to combat climate change

Several cities, including Seattle, Boulder, CO. and Toronto have signed on to Zerofootprint’s cities initiative.

Using Zerofootprint’s GoZero! Platform, municipalities are able to leverage data collected through social networking and the database to create targeted plans to combat climate change, such as bulk purchases of solar panels or organizing car-pooling groups.

“This is the first product of its kind, that I know of in the world, that targets the bottom-up initiative,” Dembo says.

Toronto is gearing up for phase one, where all 40,000 city employees will be able to calculate their environmental footprint and create goals to reduce and track their footprint over time.

The second phase will see the platform opened up to all Torontonians, so that the city can devise targeted initiatives to combat climate change.

You can’t just buy yourself green

Concerted efforts, Dembo says, are more valuable than offsets. “Really, offsets are a final step.” Awareness and calls-to-action need to come first and Dembo practices what he preaches.

His farm, north of Caledon, ON, is powered entirely by geothermal energy; a renewable energy source that has minimal impact on the environment. Opened windows not air conditioning cool his downtown office and lights are turned off on sunny days.

“We can’t expect others to do it for us. We can’t expect developing nations to be environmentally responsible when we (the industrialized countries) are the ones largely responsible for climate change.”

With the multi-millionaire behind a global success story flipping the switch, you can be sure that Zerofootprint will continue to shine a spotlight (green and high-efficiency, of course) on the public’s environmental conscience.

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