The issue launches with our investigation into GFL, the behemoth GTA waste management company with the vivid green trucks that bills itself as “green for life” but has left a trail of environmental violations, out-of-compliance warnings, fires at its facilities, and complaints from its neighbours in its wake. Reporter Wency Leung spoke with people from North Carolina to Hamilton, Ontario and pored through environmental registries, databases, and auditor general’s reports for her story. “The fact that GFL’s impact on the environment hasn’t hampered its growth,” she writes, “reveals a lack of regulatory oversight and enforcement over the industry in which the company has flourished—an industry that, by its very nature, is anything but green.”

Over the next two weeks, we’ll dive into other companies using the language of sustainability in their marketing materials while demonstrating very different priorities in their operations. We’ll publish features on a Canadian bank and a natural gas company that are both responding to public environmental pressure, though in very different ways. We’ll look at smaller business owners in the city, from companies looking to sustainably retrofit Toronto’s buildings, to car mechanics anticipating a transition to electric vehicles and wondering what that will mean for their garages and their livelihoods.

We’ll also write about another way the “green economy” is making money move in Toronto, as governments are increasingly aware of the monetary value of conserving and restoring the natural world. That recognition is key if we want to lose the asterisk and turn a green* economy into something genuinely sustainable.