Green Capital is a corporate sustainability program run by the Total Environment Centre. Its objectives and means of reaching them are detailed in our Charter.

The Green Capital program is self-funding for its expenses and those associated with using TEC's services. Green Capital is funded through a variety of different sources.

As a small but influential environment NGO, TEC relies heavily on its reputation as an independent organisation acting on behalf of the millions of people concerned about environmental issues. By setting up Green Capital to advocate to and engage with the business sector, TEC creates two potential risks:

1. That we have a real or perceived conflict of interest created by financial arrangements or simply through the act of engagement with business, and

2. That businesses will use the reputation of TEC to greenwash themselves by association with the organisation.
TEC and Green Capital have made efforts to minimise the above risks by setting up the following processes as part of its management:

• TEC does not endorse any business, program or product since we do not have the resources to carry out a full assessment. The partners to the Green Capital program support the concept of a constructive dialogue on corporate sustainability issues.
• Use of the TEC name and logo requires approval by TEC. This allows us to prevent any misleading use of our name, logo or reputation.
• Partners to the Green Capital program do not have any decision making power over TEC or Green Capital's activities.
• TEC regularly disagrees with Green Capital program partners. TEC has also publicly criticised Green Capital partners.
• Partners to the Green Capital program pay TEC an annual partnership fee. In total, partnership fees represent less than 30% of the Green Capital revenue and less than 10% of TEC revenue.

The policy of keeping partnership revenue to below 30% and maintaining a wide range of choice of partners was put in place to reduce the risk of conflict of interest.

TEC believes that these actions minimise the risks and that they have worked well to date. However we recognise that they may not eliminate the risks altogether and there may be more that we can do. We welcome ideas that would assist us in reducing this risk still further.

Suggestions can be directed to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or (02) 9261 3566.