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Wainwright Bank Receives $420,000 Award From CDFI Fund

Wainwright Bank & Trust Company (Nasdaq: WAIN) has been awarded a 2005 Bank Enterprise Award of $420,000 from the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund of the U.S. Treasury. The award was provided in recognition of Wainwright’s 2005 lending activities in distressed communities and for providing $7 million in financial assistance to the Boston Community Loan Fund. The bank was one of only two Massachusetts and fifty-three financial institutions nationwide to be recognized. The Bank Enterprise Award (BEA) Program provides incentives for FDIC insured financial institutions to annually increase the levels of financial services provided to economically distressed communities. Such services may include financing for needed community facilities, commercial loans to small businesses, loans to rehabilitate rental housing, mortgages for first-time homebuyers and direct investments in Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). The awards are in varying amounts based on a financial institution’s increase in community development activities over a pre-defined period of time. Of the fifty-three banks nationwide sharing the $13.9 million award total, Wainwright received the twelfth largest amount. “We are honored to have our community development lending efforts recognized by the U.S. Treasury for the eighth year in a row. We’ve used the awards to create a donor advised […]

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McDonough Braungart Launches Cradle-to-Cradle Certification Program

Having helped manufacturers large and small redesign their products for the “next industrial revolution,” McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) has now created a product certification program. The new program recognizes products that conform to MBDC’s Cradle to Cradle? (C2C) protocol. MBDC aims to release the first certified products on September 1, 2005. The C2C certification program seeks to be recognized by government agencies and others as an identifier of environmentally preferable products (EPP). Prior to launching this program, MBDC worked with the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS) on its Sustainable Textile Standard, but that collaboration fell apart in 2003. C2C certification now appears poised to compete with MTS and with EPP programs from Scientific Certification Systems, in the growing field of EPP certification.The C2C protocol is based on the principle that all products should be made using materials that can be recycled indefinitely with minimal environmental impact. Inspired by natural systems, in which nutrients are recycled indefinitely (waste = food), MBDC promotes the use of “technical nutrients,” which are recyclable in industrial systems, and biological nutrients, which are reused in nature. This recyclability requires that biological nutrients and technical nutrients not be intermingled in a product and that […]

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Domtar: An Unequivocal Commitment to Sustainable Forestry

Domtar Inc., based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, is the third largest producer of uncoated free-sheet paper in North America. It is also a leading manufacturer of business papers, commercial printing and publication papers, and technical and specialty papers. What sets Domtar apart from the crowd, however, is its commitment to producing environmentally and socially responsible, FSC-certified papers, all the way from stem to the market.Domtar owns a total of 455,000 acres of forestland in Canada, of which 75,000 acres are currently under FSC forest management certification. The remaining 380,000 acres are currently under assessment, which is expected to be complete by the end of this summer. In addition to those lands that they own, another 6.5 million acres of public lands are licensed to be managed directly or cooperatively by Domtar. These lands are also currently under assessment, also expected to be complete by the end of this summer. An additional 15 million acres will go under assessment between the end of 2005 and 2006. If all lands pass the assessment phase, there is potential to have a total of nearly 22 million acres of lands under Domtar’s management as FSC-certified.On the manufacturing side, Domtar operates 11 pulp and paper […]

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