After another record financial year, Federated Co-operatives Ltd. is thinking green in ways that go beyond the colour of money.
FCL held its 79th annual meeting in Saskatoon in early March attended by nearly 400 FCL delegates.
Optimism about the future and improving business practices were at the forefront of the meeting, but there was also an undercurrent of environmental awareness.
“We must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs,” said president Glen Tully in his keynote address.
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Environmental concerns were also on the mind of chief executive officer Art Postle during his speech.
“(A) solid financial foundation has set Federated up to address issues concerning the environment, whether that is ethanol, biodiesel, greenhouse gases, recycling programs, or annually evaluating our environmental stewardship … to be sure we are in compliance with environmental regulations,” Postle said.
Terry Bell, FCL’s vice-president of consumer products and logistics, also highlighted environmental concerns.
“The food department, the general merchandise department and logistics have worked together to come up with an environmental program to reduce and recycle plastic in the system,” he said in his speech.
Bell said part of the program is a recently launched reusable grocery bag that is made from 100 percent recycled materials. The bag sells for 99 cents and is part of FCL’s effort to reduce the use of plastic in its grocery and convenience stores.
The Responsible Choices program also involves taking used plastic bags and pallet wrap from FCL stores and shipping them to Trex, a company in the United States that recycles the plastic into decking material.
In a later interview, Postle said that there was probably an increased emphasis on the environmental concerns at this year’s meeting, which he attributed to greater public awareness of the subject.
However, he was quick to point out that such projects aren’t new for FCL.
“We’ve been doing recycling for probably 10 or 15 years, of our plastic shopping bags, and 10 years ago we had a recycled cloth bag, but it wasn’t one of those things that caught on so much, but nowadays it does,” he said.
“If there’s one message I wished I could get across to people, people seem to think that we’ve just been blithely going on ignoring the environment, which is a total untruth,” said Postle.
“That seems to be the picture that environmentalists want to portray….Well, we haven’t been ignoring the environment at all. Doing things as fast as some people that have an environmental bent to them? Yeah, we haven’t moved that fast, but sometimes that’s for good reasons, (for example), technology.”
