Celebrating company champions: OLG’s Sam Fera bets on green

Sam, who’s been with OLG for over 20 years, drew on both his personal passion for the environment and the formal requirements of his job to launch a green team at his workplace in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He then helped transform that grassroots action into a corporate-wide program called Bet on Green, which established green teams across every OLG office and site. Today, OLG is also an active participating company in WWF-Canada’s Living Planet @ Work program. Sam’s account of the challenges and milestones in his sustainability journey highlights the importance of committed and enthusiastic bottom-up participation in shaping and bringing to life top-down leadership and direction. Read on for excerpts from our interview with Sam – it’s a celebration of Sam, OLG and the power of people!

(c) Sam Fera
On bringing personal commitment and values into the workplace:
I’ve been on environmental teams here for, oh, about 18 years. Even back then, the notion of not wasting things was top of my mind. I’ve always walked to work, tried to have less of an impact, and felt that just from a commonsense approach, you shouldn’t be wasteful. My job in the procurement department is bringing in new strategies. I would say to the buyers, “Let’s look at this in a greener fashion. Okay, cleaning supplies. When you send out the next competitive bid, do it for environment-friendly cleaning supplies along with the standard products, and let’s see what the costs are and what the product variety is, and if we can buy some greener supplies.”
On shaping workplace practices to consider the environment and building support from colleagues:
We also looked at ways to reduce our secondary packaging, because we ship a lot – slot machines, for example, come in to one central point. They have to be tested, certified, and then shipped again out to the casinos and racetracks. We found more environmentally-friendly packaging that we could use less of; but initially, the response I got from the buyers was hesitation. So I did a lot of research to raise awareness and build support from the buyers in order to get those environmental specifications in. There was a lot of training at first, but we gained momentum, and it became a standardized part of what they were doing.
On seizing an opportunity to engage colleagues and building capacity to advance sustainability:
That’s when I went to my boss and said, “Okay. Let’s try a green team.” From being in procurement, I come across everybody in this corporation on a regular basis, so I had an idea of who fit the mould of what I wanted for the team – someone who embraces things, who’s energetic, who has strong feelings about doing things a better way, and who would be self-motivated. I chaired the meetings but everybody actively participates. We brainstormed and came up with three projects to focus on and complete: have people be more efficient in the way they used their computers at work; have a complete recycling program in the building; and have greener meetings. Everybody agreed that those were things we could do without changing a lot or requiring significant spending.
On evolving from local, grassroots action to corporate-wide initiatives and targets:
We were up and running for a little more than a year when Bet on Green came along as a corporate project. About four years ago, our interim president was at a town hall forum and was asked by one of the staff why we didn’t have a formal environmental program. That got the ball rolling. Leadership decided to make this the greenest lottery jurisdiction in North America, so it became a formalized program with four targets: Employee engagement; energy management; paper reduction; waste reduction. Within each of those, they established targets such as with paper reduction: reduce the size of the instant tickets and lottery tickets as much as possible so less paper is used.
On balancing formal and informal processes to enhance effectiveness:
I’m very, very impressed with the corporate Bet on Green program. When I was sitting on those first committees, I thought, “You’re out of your mind. There’s no way in the world you are going to pull some of this stuff off.” But they’ve done a great job of doing it the right way. Our job at Bet on Green is to have a corporate program that is formal – the number-crunching, the policies – so that we can keep the grassroots level – the local green teams – informal. Some decisions have to be made at the corporate level, but we also try to reduce our own individual and local site footprint, so there are two different avenues that support our overall objectives.
On balancing top-down with bottom-up – one isn’t effective without the other when it comes to support and action:
The success of the corporate Bet on Green program legitimizes what the local green teams are doing. People buy into it more, because when we send out something, we say “From your Green Team and the Bet On Green program.” We brand everything that way. Our Green Team – the 10 or 12 of us here in our building – people know who we are. We’re out on the floor, we’re doing things. We’ve gotten good participation activities like WWF’s Earth Hour and Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-Ups. We have a complete recycling program throughout the building now: paper, plastic, glass. That’s been our biggest achievement. We have definitely moved forward in creating awareness about green in the building. That’s our number one goal, always – increasing awareness.
*Since the time of the interview, Sam is still involved on the team but has passed the baton as green team chair to the very capable hands of Tammy Champagne-Rajotte and Jennifer Borrelli at OLG’s Sault Ste. Marie office.