Congratulations to our corporate partners, The Co-operators, who have just been ranked number two among the 50 Best Corporate Citizens in Canada by Corporate Knights!

This is the result of several years of hard work on the sustainability front, led by Barb Turley-McIntyre, Director of Corporate Citizenship.

The Co-operators has been working with The Natural Step since 2006 and has made great leaps towards sustainability ever since. They want to act as a catalyst for a sustainable society and one of their efforts towards this goal is the Impact conference, bringing together youth from across the country to talk about sustainability.

Click on the video below to hear The Co-operators CEO Kathy Bardswick talk about their sustainability accomplishments and challenges. 

As the world’s greatest soccer players take to the fields at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, many are wearing jerseys made almost entirely from plastic bottles rescued from landfills in Japan and Taiwan.

It is, if nothing else, good publicity for Nike, the maker of the jerseys and the official sponsor of nine teams, including the United States, Brazil and Portugal.

Yet what many might view as a gimmick is also part of a broadening effort by the company to incorporate sustainability, or environmentally responsible practices, into its product design. Around the globe, a growing number of manufacturers are including more recyclable or biodegradable components into products.

Along with our partners at the Whistler Centre for Sustainability, The Natural Step Canada would like to congratulate our friends at The City of Williams Lake for winning the 2010 Sustainable Community Award from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. We applaud the community’s impeccable leadership and dedication to sustainability.

Enjoy the following story on the award from the Williams Lake Tribune:

City wins Canadian sustainability award for planning framework

The City of Williams Lake is the winner of a 2010 Federation of Canadian Municipalities Sustainable Community Award for its Integrated Community Sustainability Planning Framework.

Mayor Kerry Cook and Chief Administrative Officer Brian Carruthers received the national FCM Sustainability Community Award at the FCM convention in Toronto on Saturday, May 29.

As the building blocks of society, communities play an essential role in addressing the challenge of sustainability. Canadian communities face numerous sustainability-related challenges, from rising energy and housing costs, traffic concerns, and climate change, to long-term water supply challenges. Municipalities are therefore increasingly leading the call for and implementation of sustainability in infrastructure and planning in Canada.

Since communities are complex and diverse systems with multiple stakeholders, there are often many interpretations of sustainability and very different ideas about how best to achieve it. The Natural Step provides a clear, compelling, science-based definition of sustainability and a strategic planning framework to help communities make smart decisions that will move them step-by-step towards a successful and sustainable future.