ZooShare searching for 33 new Toronto-area members to qualify for FIT contract… please consider joining!
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012
As previously mentioned, I recently was elected a board member of the ZooShare Biogas Co-Operative in Toronto. It’s a social venture that’s trying to build an anaerobic digestion system at the Toronto Zoo that will turn animal poo, local kitchen grease and grocery store waste into biogas, which will be used to generate green electricity. The electricity produced from this 500 kilowatt plant will be sold to the province over the next 20 years under the feed-in-tariff program.
Funding for this project will come partly through the issuance of community bonds, which will pay a 6 to 7 per cent annual return over five years (and can be renewed). The hope is that the co-op can begin issuing these bonds to the public later this year. But to get to that stage we need a FIT contract, and to get a FIT contact we need a certain number of co-op members who are landowners in Toronto. Don’t ask me why you must be a landowner, or why you must be from Toronto, but that’s the rule.
So with this post I hope to attract some new Toronto-based members to the co-operative, hopefully before the end of September. The membership fee is $100 (one-time charge), and once the project is up and running and community bonds go on sale you can apply that $100 against your first bond purchase. For more info about the project check this story I wrote last year.
You can find out more information about membership by going to www.zooshare.ca or click here for Membership Form v.1.3.
I hope you can support this initiative. It’s a great local project with huge potential to be replicated around the world.
Tyler Hamilton is associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and former business columnist for the Toronto Star. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005.
