From Grassroots to Growth: How Impact Zero Is Rewriting Canada’s Climate Startup Playbook
Voices: An Interview with Erin Andrews, Impact Zero
Over here at Climate North, we’ve been having conversations with some of the most forward-thinking leaders in the climate space —conversations that are too important and too inspiring to keep within closed circles. So we’re opening the doors and bringing you along. Welcome to Voices. This isn’t just about storytelling; it’s a call to action, a community of ideas, and a reminder that the future we dream of is one we build together.
In this latest edition of Voices, we connected with Erin Andrews who is the Founder and Executive Director of Impact Zero, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering underrepresented founders to commercialize climate solutions. With a mission to drive the transition to a greener economy, Erin has built Impact Zero into a hub for developing diverse climate innovators through programs like the Go-to-Market Sprints, which boast a 60% success rate in helping startups generate revenue and scale.
Erin’s journey into circular entrepreneurship began in 2018 when she founded her first circular economy business. Her career has since spanned corporate sustainability, environmental consulting, and scaling a high-growth climate tech startup, where she led the commercial team to achieve 4x revenue growth quarter-over-quarter. This experience cemented her commitment to fostering inclusivity and innovation in the climate sector.
Under Erin’s leadership, Impact Zero is on track to support 100 climate solutions by 2025, working with startups, universities, and sponsors to create meaningful change in the fight against climate change.
Impact Zero is offering the Climate North community an exclusive discount to their community membership. Use the code NORTH20.
This discount provides 20% off membership fees, which gives access to Impact Zero’s programming that helps founders go-to-market.
Tell us about Impact Zero and how it all got started?
Originally, Impact Zero began as a community group with a goal of launching circular economy projects and collaborating with innovators to build climate solutions in Toronto. In 2021 we decided to start an accelerator program focused on supporting innovators in building their own businesses. Over time that program has expanded - not only to help people start their businesses operationally but also support them in figuring out how to fund their work. That is because the biggest barrier to building businesses that are climate focused or circular economy focused is simply getting the money to keep working on it.
Through my own personal experience in the small business and climate tech world, I’ve learned that access to capital is not the easiest thing to come by. That is why Impact Zero helps people bootstrap – training them to generate sustainable revenue and grow through sales and smart growth tactics.
What is the mission that Impact Zero is on? What problem are you looking to solve?
Our mission is to empower underrepresented founders to build climate solutions. I've personally seen a lot of people with really good climate solution ideas get pushed out of the startup world in Toronto because they “don’t fit” the image of an entrepreneur. People also don’t have a ton of money to take the risk of starting a business themselves - it takes time and resources to build a technology and test its market readiness.
The main problem that we're solving is the education gap around what is possible for folks who want to build a thriving sustainable business without being trapped in the venture capital and investor cycle. Not only is this better for business but it's also better for building businesses that have sustainability and climate values at their core. I don’t see much programming available for new founders in this space, so we built it ourselves.
We actually encourage people to hold down a full-time or part-time job as they build their business (VC’s think that’s a red flag and founders “aren’t committed” if that’s the case). The training we provide is for people who don’t have thousands of dollars to drop on developing a prototype, and we help them get to market quickly so they can bring in some revenue and build sustainably.
Why do you believe it’s important for people to be aware of this problem and have access to a business like yours?
I think that most people understand the value and community benefits that small businesses offer – especially now, with the potential tariffs and tensions created by our dependence on the US and other economies, so of course we have to support Canadian businesses. However, I do think that the conversations often revolve around typical businesses like energy, resource extraction-- things like that.
It’s important to recognize business and entrepreneurship as a form of activism and climate action, as well as an economic driver. By supporting entrepreneurs who want to build climate solutions that are commercially viable, I'm hoping that people can really connect the dots - that small business, economic, and social justice initiatives are not separate. In fact, they’re incredibly linked, and we hope to build our programming in a way that supports and recognizes that climate justice is deeply reliant on folks being empowered, paid, and able to work on purpose-driven efforts.
What projects and/or products are you excited about expanding on in 2025?
This year we have a lot of exciting initiatives planned. One main shift is to a new program called ‘Go-to-Market Sprints’. This is an evolution of our 7-month accelerator program that is laser-focused on helping climate founders generate revenue and helps folks bring their climate technology to market. This has been a really important evolution for us because not only can we serve 10x more founders every year, but we also don't need to have significant funding to deliver high value.
What bothers me about most accelerator and incubator programs out there is that they’re very planning-focused, and less action-focused. For example, they show founders how to build a business plan but they don't tell you how to go out and talk to customers and how to determine if your business idea is worth pursuing. I think that this year, we’ll really be able to differentiate ourselves and it’ll become more obvious that Impact Zero has experience bringing climate tech to market and can help founders actually make financial progress to self-fund their growth through revenue.
In addition to our educational programming, we also have monthly online and in-person events. We have some really cool larger events coming up this year like our annual Climate Innovation Pitch Night in November every year. We’re also fundraising for a Circular Textiles & Plastics Symposium, the first of hopefully more materials-specific events to bring together innovators, large brands, and passionate consumers to increase adoption of climate tech in Canada. That’ll be publicly announced in the summer if we hit our fundraising goal!
Can you tell us about some recent success stories or breakthroughs in the work you are doing?
Every year, we work with such interesting innovation – I would say between the startups we supported over the last year, we have a few that are making some awesome progress after leaving our programs. Unlike other accelerator programs we don’t measure how well people do while they’re with us, we care more about what they do after. There’s no point in setting folks up for failure, so we measure outcomes during our programs and also future-focused success metrics after they leave.
One of the first startups we worked with was Circulr, who has done so much after leaving our program in 2021, including raising government funding to develop a reverse vending machine to make reverse logistics programs easier to implement.
More recently, we worked with Carboform in 2024, who is currently raising both non-dilutive and dilutive funding to help them scale their tech that diverts biomass waste from landfills. Their tech processes waste to produce low carbon aromatics. Carboform’s technology has the potential, at scale, to produce aromatics for sustainable aviation fuel from biomass waste with a 50-80% reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions when compared with traditional aviation fuel.
Just last month, we worked with Earthub, who launched a revamped waste collection service in Ottawa to empower residential members to divert certain materials (e.g. mesh produce bags, crayons, egg cartons, electronics, plastic film, etc.) from landfill, and focus on reuse first and recycling second.
This year, we secured government funding from the City of Toronto and have the generous support of our partners like 5REDO, Humi, The Green Clothing Company, and all who have helped us work directly with 16 climate tech companies and engaged 70 others already through free commercialization training in 2025, tracking towards our goal of working directly with 100 startups during 2025 to get their work funded.
What are common challenges that you encounter in your industry and while growing your business?
Impact Zero exists to help people navigate the confusing phase between coming up with an idea and having product-market fit generating sales. Unfortunately, we still aren’t able to provide funding ourselves to our founders because of the funding challenges that nonprofits experience - although that is changing! As we grow, we will open up access to FedDev funding and other provincial and federal support, to ideally become a funder ourselves for founders.
We do have programs for folks to sponsor the training for a startup founder, so there aren’t program fees for deserving entrepreneurs -- it’s the best we can do for now to ensure we can continue to provide these services!
Ultimately, it all comes down to money and who will pay for climate action. Unfortunately, the people paying for it are founders who quite often self-fund the experimentation of green business models and bringing climate solutions to market.
What motivates you to keep pushing forward?
It’s actually funny because people think that I care a lot about the Earth, plants, and animals. As much as I love nature, I’m more motivated by empowering women, youth, and new immigrants to make a boatload of money while doing purpose-driven work.
The startup space – and climate tech is no different – is full of well-funded individuals who have the personal financial backing to buy themselves time to do that experimentation and find product-market fit for their climate solution. That doesn’t mean these folks are doing anything wrong, it’s just unfortunate that they’re able to capitalize on climate transition work when the folks most impacted by it cannot.
I’m motivated to break down these financial barriers as much as one organization is able to, and help the people who are most impacted by climate change, to be the ones to capitalize on it. That’s why we have free monthly training about how big startups approach sales, marketing, and growth. I often tell our cohorts that they don’t need VC backing to act like a VC-backed company - as long as they have the knowledge that we provide for free, a bit of patience, strong values, and a willingness to burn their current value proposition to the ground and rebuild it based on customer feedback - they will be successful (and keep their values intact in the process).
What type of impact do you hope that Impact Zero will have on communities, ecosystems, or the planet at large?
If Impact Zero is successful in our mission, the Canadian economy will reduce its reliance on resource extraction and instead have a thriving mid-market and corporate climate sector. The companies that would be implementing climate tech will be led by diverse leaders, representative of the Canadian population.
Climate North is all about bringing people together to encourage real time action. How can individuals, communities and/or other organizations support your efforts?
First and foremost, founders who are working in the space should definitely visit our website for free resources, join a webinar, or a founder dinner/social to build relationships in the climate founder space.
Individual consumers can engage with Impact Zero and our business community by doing business with small Canadian climate companies! We have a marketplace on our website, and it’s easily searchable by a specific product you might be looking for.
For employees looking to change their company’s operations, I’m always available for conversations if folks are looking for Canadian climate-friendly service providers (e.g. catering, packaging, software, etc.) I do a lot of connecting, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
For organizations that want to help us educate our startup founder community or otherwise deepen their connections with our network in other ways, I’m always open to exploring collaborations!
If you wanted people to walk away remembering one thing about the work you’re doing, what would you want it to be?
There are so many climate solutions being piloted every day in Toronto and we have so much power to help them thrive. Folks can do that by being early adopters, connecting with the founders to offer their professional skills, and telling friends about the solutions that exist to help combat climate anxiety because there really are so many.
Where can people stay in-the-know about Impact Zero?
We have a newsletter where we keep folks updated on our webinars and socials, and we also post a monthly grant watch on the 1st of the month so founders don’t miss funding opportunities.
Folks can follow just our events on Luma: https://lu.ma/impact-zero
I also post a lot of sales training and founder-focused content on socials. Our handle is @impactzero.ca on TikTok and Instagram.
This interview was hosted and edited by Chloe D’Agostini.