When you build an environmental services company, you can measure what you do in a lot of ways. Awards. Certifications. Headcount. Office locations.
We’ve always measured the one thing that matters most to the clients who hire us: closed files.
This week we updated our published production numbers covering 2017 through 2026. Here is what nine years of work looks like across our four core deliverables:
- 12,193 Environmental Site Assessments
- 1,883 Reclamation Certificate Applications
- 1,303 Regulatory Submissions
- 1,132 Remediation Projects
More than 16,500 environmental files closed across Western Canada.
What These Numbers Actually Mean
These are not visits, hours, or open projects. These are completed deliverables. Each one represents a specific outcome for a specific client.
Environmental Site Assessments — 12,193. Phase 1 and Phase 2 ESAs are the foundation of every real estate transaction, every regulator submission, and every closure plan. Behind each ESA is a landowner, an operator, a lender, or a regulator who needed assurance before issuing a certificate.
Reclamation Certificate Applications — 1,883. In Western Canada, the Reclamation Certificate or equivalent is the gold standard. Proof that an site has been returned to a condition equivalent to its surrounding land. It is the document operators need to formally end their liability on a site. Every Rec Cert in that count represents a closed liability and a piece of land that has come full circle.
Regulatory Submissions — 1,303. The bridge between the technical work and regulator acceptance. Each submission is a structured document package walked through review, comment cycles, and final acceptance.
Remediation Projects — 1,132. Active intervention to address contamination, from hydrocarbon impacts at upstream facilities to legacy industrial sites in urban brownfields. Each one is a physical change to the ground, and each one requires planning, execution, and verification.
What’s Behind the Numbers
Volume of this kind is not an accident, and it is not a function of size alone. A few things have made it possible.
Field-first culture. Field crews who work in difficult conditions, on stretched timelines, in remote locations across four provinces. Our teams travel hard, and our operating discipline is built around making field time as productive as possible.
Speed-to-closure as a strategic anchor. From the beginning we have built our processes around getting files closed — not opened, not in progress, but closed. Every internal system is oriented around moving sites through to certificate.
Technology investment
Our GCL One platform — the internal toolset our teams use for Phase 2 ESAs, RoSC submissions, reclamation workflows, and regulatory packages — was built specifically to reduce the friction between field data, reporting, and regulator submission. We have invested in AI-assisted workflows, UAV and remote sensing capabilities through our partnership with the academic institutions, and a regulatory submission pipeline tuned to the agencies we work with.
Relationships that compound
Our largest-volume clients are repeat clients. The same operators who hired us for one site have come back for ten, fifty, two hundred. That repeat business is the most credible measure of whether the work we did the first time was actually good.
Vision: A Results-Based Environmental Services Company
Our vision has always been to be the most results-oriented environmental consultancy in Western Canada. These numbers are what that looks like translated to outcomes.
Not certificates earned. Not press releases issued. Not awards on a wall.
Files closed. Liability cleared. Sites reclaimed. Land returned to use.
That is the work we are in business to do, and it is the measure we will keep holding ourselves to.
Thank You
To every client who has trusted us with their sites and their timelines over the past nine years: thank you. We do not take that trust for granted, and we never will. Each of you is in those numbers.
To the GCL team — current and past — every one of those 16,511 files moved because someone showed up. Field crews, project managers, technicians, regulatory specialists, ops staff, communications, IT, and the founders and senior staff who built the original processes. The numbers are yours, and we are proud to work alongside you.
To our broader network — the regulators we engage with, the labs we depend on, the Indigenous communities whose traditional territories we work on, the contractors who execute alongside us, and the consulting firms whose prior work we have built upon — site closure is a team effort. None of this happens in isolation. Thank you for being part of the work.
What’s Next
The numbers will keep moving. With major partner commitments now in place across Western Canada, and meaningful capacity scaling planned for the next several years, the next chapter at GCL is going to look bigger than the last.
We’re just getting started.