Responsible Business

(Collagraph print of Rana Plaza by Catherine Cartwright)

How the Fashion Industry is Picking Up the Threads After Rana Plaza

We can’t get enough fast fashion. Globally, we consume more than 80 billion pieces of clothing each year, many of them hyper-trendy, low-cost items that move from runway to sale rack at breakneck speed. Fashion is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry that increasingly relies on rock-bottom retail prices. The amount of made-in-Canada […]

Eco-polymaths, illustration by nik harron

Creating a Values-Driven Career

We spend most of our lives at work—where levels of disengagement are at an all-time high, according to the Conference Board of Canada. This is bad for our economy, since disengaged workers are less productive. It’s also bad for workers and their families, who live the daily physical and mental […]

Panel at the WEAR Conference. A\J AlternativesJournal.ca. Photo: Tammy Thorne

Pushing Fashion Sustainability Forward

THE FASHION INDUSTRY has a serious environmental footprint. Cotton, one of the most popular fabrics in the world, uses a significant amount of pesticides, while many textile preservatives and disposal methods cause pollution. Animals are exploited in order to help generate a profit, and many workers are placed in extremely harsh […]

Lufa Farms Ahuntsic at sunset

Are Rooftop Greenhouses the Food Solution We’ve Been Waiting For?

Imagine a city that produces enough food to feed its population, a city that grows food without monopolizing more land; imagine a city of rooftop farms. This vision is precisely what the founders of Lufa Farms are aiming to make reality. In 2011, Lufa built the world’s first commercial rooftop […]

The Carbon Rush book by Amy Miller

The Carbon Rush: The Truth Behind the Carbon Market Smokescreen

The success of Amy Miller’s 2013 documentary The Carbon Rush has propelled the creation of an accompanying book of the same name. Originally planning to create a follow up to her previous  Canadian film Myths for Profit by focusing on Canada’s carbon offsets, Miller kept encountering the same questions. “But […]