Dave Fox was named a Clean 50 Emerging Leader

A note on the date above: our archive records the year of this award but not the day, so this post is stamped 1 January 2019 as a placeholder. The year is right. The day is a convention, and it will be corrected once we dig out the announcement. [TOM-REVIEW]

In 2019, two years before Quantify Environmental was founded, Dave Fox was named a Clean 50 Emerging Leader.

What the award is

Canada’s Clean 50 recognizes individuals for their contribution to clean capitalism and sustainability. The Emerging Leader category recognizes people early in that work rather than at the end of it — which, in Dave’s case, turned out to be accurate. The exact official wording of the award as it should be written is something we are confirming before we set it in stone anywhere else on this site. [TOM-REVIEW]

Why it belongs in our newsroom anyway

It is not a company award, and we are not going to pretend it is one. Quantify Environmental did not exist in 2019. But the reason Dave was recognized is the reason the company exists: he had already spent years walking Canadian factory floors working out how to cut water, energy and product loss in production, usually with paybacks under a year, and usually by finding waste that nobody in the building had a number for.

Two years later that work ran into its own limit. An audit is a photograph of a factory on the day you took it, and factories change the day after. Putting permanent instruments on the equipment instead — so the picture never goes stale — is what Quantify was founded to do.

What has changed since

The award was for reduction work done with clipboards, temporary meters and a great deal of walking. The same work now runs on permanent wireless sensors reporting continuously to one dashboard, which means the fixes get verified rather than assumed, and the savings get defended rather than estimated. Same objective. Better instruments.