Happy (Earth) Mother's Day!

Greetings loyal readers,

I recently interviewed Mark Trotzuk, president of Boardroom ECO Apparel, for one of the articles I'm currently writing for our upcoming June responsibility supplement, which is a mini-issue about all kinds of great stuff like corporate social accountability and environmental stewardship.

Mark was a wealth of knowledge on both subjects. Unfortunately, he also gave me way too much material to fit into my article, so I thought I would print some of it here in bits and pieces. We'll start with what was actually my initial reason for calling him: Boardroom ECO Apparel's membership in an organization called 1% For The Planet. Below is a rough transcription of Mark's explanation of the group and a few of its perks:

Mark Trotzuk: What they do is they have a list of environmental organizations all over the world that they have audited and done the due diligence to make sure that they're legitimate and they fit within the framework of 1% For The Planet. Then, they allow companies who join, so you know, it could be a clothing manufacturer, it could be an artist, it could be whoever, to join 1% For The Planet, and you pay a fee, depending on how much revenue you have or make, and you are allowed to donate 1% of your revenue back to any of these [environmental] organizations. And there are like 6 to 700* organizations on their list. So what I usually do is look for organizations in my little territory here, I'm in Vancouver Canada, so a lot of times I'll just donate to the David Suzuki Foundation. … I'll also donate money to Al Gore's The Climate Project. Depending on where I want my money to go, I have a lot of different opportunities to send it to ... nonprofit environmental organizations.