Three Women to Watch in ESG

Sustainability is one of the fastest growing professional careers in the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given ESG’s focus on social and governance sustainability, women leaders are stepping up and showing how it’s done.

Here are three Canadian women to watch, as they create change in some seriously important ways.

Rachel Morier

Beer might be traditionally a man’s world, but Rachel Morier is fast making it her own.

Morier is Director of Sustainability at Ontario’s The Beer Store, a brewer-based cooperative that runs over 400 retail stores across the province, as well as storing and delivering brewers’ products across the province to thousands of retail stores and licensees, such as restaurants, bars, or special event venues.

Morier’s credentials are impressive, with over 15 years’ combined experience in sustainability, consulting, and project management for packaging, she has worked with Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods and retail clients, developed a design guide for sustainable packaging and worked with a North American not-for-profit industry association to identify sustainable solutions that lead to zero packaging and food waste.

At The Beer Store (TBS), Morier oversees the return of over a billion containers annually, with consumer return rates above 75%. In 2020, TBS was recognized as one of Canada’s Greenest Employers. In the same year, TBS established a drive-through program to collect container returns with minimal contact, discontinued single-use plastic bags at retail outlets and upgraded or replaced refrigeration units to increase efficiency under Morier’s direction. Her team has also established a collaborative program with the LCBO to combine alcohol deliveries to retailers and venues, reducing the number of trucks on the road.

Morier graduated with a Master’s in Environmental Studies at York University, and a Graduate Diploma in Business & the Environment from the Schulich School of Business. She presented research at the 2012 Zero Waste Conference in Vancouver and continues as a guest speaker on sustainable packaging.

In addition to her senior leadership and public speaking roles, Morier is Board Chair at the B.C. Brewers’ Recycled Container Collection Council, a Director at the Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation and President of the Alberta Beer Container Corporation.

She describes her professional goal as “to encourage more informed and more sustainable decision-making and develop practical business solutions that minimize environmental impacts and promote collaboration.”

Brandy Burdeniuk

Beginning her career as an industrial designer, today Brandy Burdeniuk describes herself as an entrepreneur, active citizen and trouble-maker.

Raised in Alberta, she now calls Toronto home where she is the Chief Customer Officer of Green Business Certification Inc. Canada (GBCI Canada), where she is responsible for identifying and securing new business for service offerings including LEED, TRUE Zero Waste Certification, Investor Confidence Project (ICP), and SITES. Each of these services supports the building and construction industry to develop more sustainable buildings, with Canada being the second-largest market for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) globally.

Burdeniuk describes her role as follows: “I’m responsible for establishing a persistent customer-first approach while developing and growing strategic partnerships and relationships with industry and government.” She has built her career around a passion for healthy, sustainable buildings, including co-founding an Edmonton-based, women-led consulting firm, which advises clients on incorporating social, environmental and economic sustainability into building projects.

Not content to limit her impact to her day job, Burdeniuk has also run for City Council, finishing top-three in her ward, sat on the City of Edmonton’s Energy Transition Advisory Committee and is a past chair of the Canada Green Building Council – Alberta Chapter. She also volunteers with the Friends of Kensington Market, supporting the area’s unique cultural value and focussing on master plan community outreach and the recent “Hate has no home here” campaign.

Brandy is a regular public speaker, and has been invited by the City of Edmonton as a keynote speaker as part of its Building Green and Building Bridges – Change for Climate Talks.

Jane Abernethy

There are certain things that give you clues as to how much a company truly values sustainability. When you visit their website and find that it talks more about its CSR programs than the products it sells, it’s a pretty good insight into what matters. Humanscale is the company, a global designer and manufacturer of ergonomic products, and Jane Abernethy is its Chief Sustainability Officer, who has redefined what sustainability means for the organization.

Abernethy began her career as an industrial designer, working on everything from sporting goods to medical devices to furniture. She developed a passion for sustainable design and manufacturing processes, and since taking on the CSO role at Humanscale, she has set the vision for the company to make a net positive impact on the world.

A major initiative spearheaded by Abernethy is the design and manufacture net positive products – that is, products that, when made, leave the planet measurably better off. To be certified net positive, manufacturers must report on their products’ impact on place (locations of manufacture and extraction of raw materials), water, energy, the contribution of the product to the health and happiness of users, use of materials that are ecologically restorative, transparent and socially equitable, and equity – the extent to which companies go beyond CSR to be leaders in creating a better world.

Humanscale also prioritizes material transparency, whereby all products are labelled with the materials used in manufacture, evaluating them for their impact on the environment and people and replacing chemicals of concern with safer alternatives. As of January 2021, Humanscale published one third of all Declare and HPD labels that exist in the entire furniture industry.

In addition to her work with Humanscale, Jane is a regular speaker at major global events, and was recently invited to be a curator at the US Pavilion at the XXII Triennale de Milano International Exhibition, focussed on design in a broken natural world. Abernethy is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Red Dot award and the GB&D Women in Sustainability Leadership Award.

Feeling inspired? So are we!