Best of Toronto
The Best Green Services in Toronto
Bullfrog Power has been voted the best green service in Toronto, beating out competition offering a wide range of services. With their high-profile clients and partnerships, such as with Wal-Mart and the Steam Whistle Brewery, it is no surprise Bullfrog powered their way to the top of the list. They also make it easy to convert your home to green power, and a glance at their list of converts confirms the widespread interest.
With their commitment to high-quality offsets, and the ease of purchasing those offsets, CarbonZero comes in number two. By no means, however, are green power and carbon offsetting the only services to round out the winner's circle.
With this year's best services, you will be able to go green in your next catering event, avoid chemicals in your home or laundry cleaning needs, wash your clothes with clean energy, and plant a green roof.
An interesting omission from the winners is Zerofootprint, who won this year as the best green organization. Although they provide superb carbon calculators, Zerofootprint's focus is not on offsets, which likely gave CarbonZero the edge in this category.
Combined, this year's winners will go a long way to helping your business or personal life get a lot greener. So without further ado, here are the Best Green Services in Toronto, as voted by you.
Top photo, left to right, by blogTO flickr poolers mikeghenu, kevbo1983 and tysonwilliams.com. List photos are from the organizations except the Bullfrog photo by mikeghenu and Green Garage photo by 416Style.
Bullfrog Power
Making it easy to go green, signing up for service takes a matter of minutes and requires no infrastructure changes. Then you can tell your friends that 100% of your power comes from air and low-impact hydro sources. More »
CarbonZero
Whether it's for our everyday lives or special events (getting married?), CarbonZero helps you calculate and neutralize your carbon emissions with their high quality offsets. More »
Vert Catering
Toronto's leading green caterer, by hiring Vert Catering you ensure your event will be stocked with local, fresh and seasonable food and all excess food will be composted at Vert. More »
EnviroMaid
Getting your home or business cleaned from top to bottom is made easy with the service of EnviroMaid, and they won't use a single toxic chemical in the process. More »
Eco Cleaners
Toronto's first non-toxic cleaners not only do all of your clothes cleaning services with environmentally friendly products but will pickup and deliver your clothes for no additional cost. More »
Beach Solar Laundromat
Reduce your carbon footprint at this eco-laundromat, where all of the power you use, from running the machines, including the hot water for your whites, and heating the building, comes from eight solar panels on the roof. More »
Green Team Courier
Operating from Eglinton to the water, Dufferin to Bayview, this courier will get your goods delivered, on-time, by walking, cycling or Riding the Rocket. More »
Green Garage
Reduce energy consumption and beautify your roof by working with these experts on turning your garage roof into a glorious garden. More »
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All it does is charge you more to invest in building green infrastructure for power generation in the future, which, if the government was really serious about becoming green, should be done anyways.
You raise an interesting discussion, and you're right that if you switch to Bullfrog Power you will still get your electricity from the regular grid. However, according to <a href="http://bullfrogpower.com/home/ontario.cfm"; target="_blank">Bullfrog</a>, "We inject green power onto the Ontario grid to match the amount of power your home uses." That should reduce the amount of "dirty" energy produced, even if it technically still enters your home.
What I find ironic is that your criticism of Bullfrog doubles as praise :)
As for charging more to invest in future generation, they do claim to have <a href="http://bullfrogpower.com/clean/producers.cfm";>current suppliers</a>. No guarantee that those suppliers will be meeting the actual demand of Bullfrog customers at any given minute, of course, but that's still different from not actually providing anything.
While I'm a happy Bullfrog Power customer, it'd be nice if there was some way to support ALL carbon-free electricity sources, including nuclear and large-scale hydro-electricity. Gotta fight the battles you can, though.
Bullfrog has a nice <a href="http://bullfrogpower.com/clean/on_clean.cfm"; target="_blank">chart</a> showing where our power comes from. I find it interesting that nearly 40% of Ontario power comes from nuclear sources, and another 20% from hydro, but not "low-impact" hydro. I think Bullfrog is firstly taking aim at the 37% coming from coal, oil, and gas. I suspect if that number falls under 5% it will be a lot harder for Bullfrog to make the case that their power is better than "regular" hydro and nuclear power.
I also find it ironic that we pay the Hydro bill when hydro sources account for under 25% of our power.
Yeah, the coal, oil, and gas was the reason we switched to Bullfrog. I couldn't in good conscience have my money go to support destructive technologies like that. Sure, it's mostly a symbolic gesture, but then again, Bullfrog keeps announcing new wind power starts, so it's hard to complain!
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