Interview with Ken Kurtzig, Founder and CEO of iReuse
Imagine you work for a large company and it’s your job to dispose of unwanted equipment or materials - often tons of it. And you want to dispose of the materials in a environmentally friendly way, while saving money and possibly helping a nonprofit organization get needed materials? This is not an easy task. Fortunately, there’s iReuse to the rescue.
In this interview, iReuse founder and CEO Ken Kurtzig reveals how a insightful discovery at a taco stand led to the creation of a thriving business that helps companies reduce their environmental impact, through its sustainbility consulting and waste removal services.
In just over 3 years of operations, iReuse has won numerous awards for its environmental leadership.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- iReuse helped Birkenstock save $170,000 and get positive publicity by donating unwanted shoe material to help horses instead of throwing them away
- How the iReuse “matchmaking system” connects company’s surplus materials to wishlists for non-profits
- How companies can actually save money while diverting waste from landfills
- The success of iReuse’s innovative reuse program created the opportunity to provide additional “green” consulting services to companies
- How transparency and documentation gives iReuse an edge in backing up its environmental claims
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY LAWRENCE, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello, this is Judy Lawrence from Green Business Innovators.com, and I’m very pleased today to be speaking with Ken Kurtzig, the founder and CEO of iReuse based in Sausalito, California, and the website is www.iReuse.com.
iReuse is a leading sustainability consulting firm in the field of corporate reuse and waste reduction providing comprehensive services to help companies go green and save green. iReuse provides services for businesses, individuals and non-profits. This innovative 3 year old consulting firm works with many leading bay area companies like Charles Schwab, Autodesk, Adobe Systems, PG&E, Birkenstock and many others to help manage the internal redistribution, sales, donations, recycling and disposal of their surplus materials thus saving these companies time, money and energy, while at the same time they’re helping the community and the environment.
In a way, iReuse is like a matchmaker between corporations wanting to get rid of surplus goods in a socially conscious way and the non-profits needing to acquire material supplies in a fiscally reasonable way. In fact I understand, in 2007 alone, iReuse redirected over 230 tons of materials from the landfill and much of that went to over 200 non-profits such as The American Cancer Society, Mission YMCA, Trip for Kids and numerous other great non-profits throughout the Bay Area.
So Ken welcome and please feel free to highlight more of your variety of services and recent accomplishments and awards. I know you’ve certainly received awards. So thank you.
KEN KURTZIG: Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here and it’s been a fun 4 years, a little over 4 years developing our program and starting to work with some of these large corporations and helping them do the right thing and in many cases saving not only money but also the environment.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And how about — well, let me just backup a little bit with how you got started. I kind of love hearing as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story.” Tell me more about what inspired you to start the company, when and where your passion for reducing, reusing and recycling was ignited. Was there something even in your childhood experience that related to this passion?
Interview with Elizabeth Royte, Author of Garbage Land and Bottlemania
In this interview, Elizabeth Royte (a freelance writer reporting on science and the environment) shares highlights from two of her books I really enjoyed - Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. I highly recommend these books to people who enjoy books such as “Fast Food Nation” or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” that combine nuanced and thoughtful investigation into our lifestyles with wonderful storytelling.
Elizabeth Royte’s books show that great storytelling can engage people in wanting to know more about industries that you might not think are interesting - like garbage and bottled water, which are fascinating, by the way.
Everyone enjoys a great story. Are you using great storytelling in your business?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- The adventures of tracking the truth about our trash - sneaking over fences & paddling away from police
- The “business model” of being an environmental journalist and writer
- How tansparent business practices often lead to healthier business practices for people and planet
- The social, environmental, and political implications of the bottled water that you buy
- The real issue with landfills, and where most waste actually comes from
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Patrick from Green Business Innovators, and today I’m going to be talking with Elizabeth Royte about two terrific books that she’s written. One is about the business of bottled water and the other is about the business about garbage.
One thing I liked about the books is that they use what I would call investigative storytelling. Because they combine deep investigation into the environmental impacts of business and consumer behavior. And they also have captivating personal stories. I’ve seen great reviews of these books in the media, on sites such as the New York Times website, the LA Times, Salon, Treehugger and so forth. Fortunately the news media are giving attention to these books so that more people can get exposed to that fascinating information that these books have. I found both books to be inspirational and really a tremendous personal call to action in terms of my own life. Welcome Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH ROYTE: Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Elizabeth, what was your motive for writing these kinds of books? There’s a lot of things you could be writing about. Why these topics?
ELIZABETH ROYTE: I think I write about the environment because I care deeply about the environment, and I’m interested in all kinds of science topics, learning about how the world works and I used to write a lot about conservation and people doing work with animals and plants and things.
Actually, my first book was about rain forest scientists, but my interests have sort of shifted with the garbage book to the human part of the equation and what people are doing to the environment. And the garbage book followed where garbage went, all kinds of all different types of garbage, after they left us. And research on that book led into the bottled water book because I started to see all these plastic bottles lying around and I saw them as disposable single use packaging and I wondered how we had gotten to this point. I’m now in this niche of writing about what we as consumers are doing to the world around us.
Interview with John and Katy Weiss of Chickity Doo Doo
Chickity Doo Doo first caught our interest due to its attention-grabbing brand name. But behind the name is a company that has transformed something you might think most people wouldn’t want (chicken doo doo) into a mass market product - an organic fertilizer made from 100% chicken manure, that’s being used as a replacement for synthetic chemical fertilizers in farms and sold in retail stores.
In this interview, John and Katy Weiss reveal the inner workings of their business and share the story of where the product idea came from. Who knew doo doo could be so interesting?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- How a waste material was turned into a useful product
- Creating a branding strategy for products sold at big box stores vs independent retailers
- Why higher oil prices means better business for Chickity Doo Doo
- How education plays a key role in Chickity Doo Doo’s marketing efforts
- How Chickity Doo Doo attains certifications in order to back up its product claims
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY LAWRENCE, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Judy Lawrence from www.GreenBusinessInnovators.com, and I am here speaking with John Weiss and Katy Weiss from Chickity Doo Doo, located near Madison, Wisconsin.
Chickity Doo Doo is an organic fertilizer made from well, chicken doo doo, 100% organic chicken manure. I actually heard about your unique company while I was back in Wisconsin visiting some family and friends, and Katy, your mother-in-law told me about this young start-up company, and I was intrigued by the idea that the novelty of it, the practicality and the recycling aspect of this business. As you begin, I’d love you both to share the story of how Chickity Doo Doo was conceived, your backgrounds. I believe you grew up on a chicken farm, which seems like a natural fit, and then how the company is succeeding in growing. Welcome John and Katy.
JOHN WEISS: Well, thanks very much for having us. I can kind of give you a start, and Katy can jump in too with her thoughts on where we got to this point. My father specifically has been in the poultry industry for about 40 years. His name is Ray. And he and my mom owned a chicken farm together. We technically didn’t live on that farm, it was actually away from where we grew up, but we knew about the farm growing up and the farm they purchased back in 1975. My father and I, in 1999, decided to form a partnership and buy my mom out in order to refinance and do some other things on the farm, and that’s when I got involved. My background is actually in teaching and coaching basketball, and I decided in 1999 that this might be a little nice side investment, and it’s actually been running my life ever since then, thankfully happily.
Interview with James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo
Here’s a company that can provide you even more motivation to recycle - the bottles you toss into your recycling bins may end up as the centerpiece of your kitchen! Vetrazzo collects discarded glass from recycled bottles and decommissioned traffic lights and and transforms it into beautiful, eco-friendly surfaces such as countertops and tabletops.
James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo, reveals the details of their products’ sustainable design (85% of the product is from recycled glass) - and how their unique combination of sustainable design and aesthetic design is giving their products an edge in the marketplace.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Drive your marketing efforts by featuring unique sustainable design to stand out from the crowd of look-alike products
- The flip side - the challenges of being amongst the first companies with a unique product feature
- Vetrazzo’s strategies for growing the company’s sales and reach
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JANIS MARA, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Janis Mara from Green Business Innovators. I’m speaking with James Sheppard, Chief Executive of Vetrazzo, a 3 year-old business that makes countertops with glass, salvaged from sources including traffic lights, curbside recycling containers and the manufacturing plant of Sky Vodka. The 35-employee company is part of a cluster of green businesses in a former Ford assembly plant located just off the freeway in Richmond, California.
Tell me James, how did you get the idea to recycle glass and into countertops?
JAMES SHEPPARD: Well Janis, I’d like to take credit for thinking of the idea, but Vetrazzo has actually been on the market since 1996, as the original recycled glass surface. I got the idea to purchase the business and relaunch it on a national level a few years ago, when my business partner showed me her gorgeous Vetrazzo countertops that she’d had since 1999, and I knew the time was right to take this product to the national stage.
Interview with Dan Gill, CEO and Co-Founder of Huddler
“Giving passionate, knowledgeable people a platform and a voice”
Combine people, products, and passion… mix in user-generated content, product reviews and discussions… and you have an ambitious web site called Huddler, that aims to create a “social commerce” community.
In this interview, “chief Huddler” Dan Gill shares with us how he started the business and his vision for the growth of their Green Home Huddle, which focuses on products and content connected to sustainability. Hear the inside business scoop on lessons they’ve learned along the way, how their business is funded, and how they engage their community.
- Huddler’s unique efforts to build communities to provide a more informed and social shopping experience
- How Huddler develops partnerships to get new green products in consumers’ hands and boost site activity
- How Huddler monetizes traffic to its site
- Lesson learned: The “release early, release often” approach allows users to guide web site development
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amie with Green Business Innovators and I am here with Dan Gill, CEO of Huddler.com. Do you want to introduce yourself quickly?
DAN GILL: Hi everyone out there in the green blogosphere world. This is Dan Gill. I’m the co-founder and CEO of a site called Huddler.com. I guess most specifically we’ll be talking about our site, GreenHome.Huddler.com, which you can find a link to directly from Huddler.com and we’ll talk all about it and tell you a little bit about what we’re up to.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Great. So do you want to tell us a little bit about Huddler.com and what you do here?
DAN GILL: Sure, sure. Huddler was actually, the concept that my brother… My oldest brother and I founded Huddler together. And the impetus for Huddler comes from “old school” discussion forums. Some people are really familiar with them, some people are not, but they’re pretty well unchanged from the mid-90s. So if you’ve ever seen the discussion forum at some point where someone can post a question and anyone can come back and respond and a conversation begins in a threaded fashion. There are some wildly popular sites out there that are great resources for people. And they’re always very topical.
The sites that we used the most, they are sites focused on cell phones and mobile technology, and they are sites focused on home theater equipment and really, really deep diving into those topics because they are specific to a given interest. The really knowledgeable, passionate people, they gravitate towards those sites. But from a technology perspective they’re very, very broken from a content creation perspective and from a content distribution perspective. So the original impetus for Huddler was, we wanted to build a platform that really empowers those knowledgeable, passionate people who have all this knowledge and they want to share and they want to interact with other like-minded people, but provide a much better interface, so that we can distribute that content and make it broadly available. Because if you have ever seen a discussion forum before, my mom couldn’t use it if her life depended on it, and that’s not to say there’s not information that would be really valuable to her in there, but the interface is just really hard to use.
Interview with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc.
If you’re ever shopping for a new article of clothing at Gap, Banana Republic or Old Navy (all brands owned by parent company Gap Inc.), on the way to the cash register you may be wondering in the back of your mind how much progress the company is making toward reducing the environmental impact of the clothing you just purchased.
With the sheer size of Gap Inc., moving toward sustainability is a huge task, but even small changes can make a large impact. Banana Republic started communicating about its sustainability efforts last spring with the tagline “Greener. One step at a time.” In this interview, Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc., shares her insights into Gap Inc.’s next steps in their journey toward sustainability.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Kindley’s personal path to becoming a sustainability leader inside a large corporation
- How Gap Inc.’s environmental initiatives layers on and connects with its social responsibility practices
- An overview of Gap Inc.’s ECO-strategy
- Insights on how to best communicate environmental initiatives to customers
- One reason why marketing Gap Inc.’s “green initiatives” to customers is difficult - most of Gap Inc.’s sustainability practices are behind the scenes and not glamorous
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I am here today with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc. Kindley, do you want to briefly introduce yourself?
KINDLEY WALSH-LAWLOR: Sure, Hi good morning. I’m Kindley and I work in Gap Inc. Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs. I’ve been with the company about 11 years, but in this space only for about 18 months. I had the opportunity to work at two of our brands, Banana Republic and Gap for the first 9 years at the company, which gave me a great education on what the brands were up against and what kinds of challenges they face day-to-day especially as we dig deeper with the brands on operational, sustainability, opportunities to redesign product, etc. So it’s been a great thing to bring into this role.
Interview with Jared Blumenfeld, Director, San Francisco Department of the Environment
“Mobilizing San Francisco to be a More Sustainable City”
80% of the world’s CO2 comes from cities. So strong action by cities is required to reduce the carbon emissions that they produce.
In this interview, Jaren Blumenfeld, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, explains some of the innovative legislation and actions that San Francisco is initiating as one of the world’s greenest cities.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why the biggest sustainability challenge is sustaining people’s attention
- How the SF Department of the Environment is encouraging more sustainable business
- San Francisco’s cutting edge “Eco Map” project
- How San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom contributes to the green agenda
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amy Vaccaro with Green Business Innovators. I am speaking today with Jared Blumenfeld, who is the Director for the San Francisco Department of the Environment. Hi Jared.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Hi.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So my first question today, I’m interested about your background, how you got here, and kind of the snippets of bios I could find about you…Talk about your work in animal welfare campaigns and then moving into this job. It seems like a huge transition. I’m curious how it came about.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, I started doing international environmental law and I went to law school and it was the time of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. So we, with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, did this big report on the connection between human rights and the environment. If your rain forest is chopped down do you have a legal right against the company who did it, because your livelihood depended on those trees? So that was kind of how I started. Then I worked for Cambridge University doing international environmental law. Then I went to work for NRDC, the Natural Resource Defense Council and we did all these campaigns and reports on what countries had done to follow-up on the Rio Earth Summit.
Upcoming Green Business Events 2008
Save the date - many exciting green and socially responsible business events and conferences are just around the corner! To keep you, our audience, in the know, Green Business Innovators has put together a diverse list of green/socially responsible business events, forums, festivals and conferences happening throughout North America over the next couple of months. Get out there, and get green!
If your green business event is missing from this list, please share the details of your event by submitting a comment below. Cheers! (And a special thanks to Kate Krueger for compiling this list)
October 13, 2008
Social Capital Markets
San Francisco, CA
At SoCap08, attendees will learn what works and what doesn’t in this new world of social capital and social entrepreneurs, which hybrid social & business models reach sustainability and which don’t, and where this emerging industry is headed. Attendees will be able to network with their peers, discovering a whole new realm of people they had hoped existed - organizations, groups, and individuals who share the same intention to launch and support sustainable businesses designed to impact global and local problems. Investors and entrepreneurs will find themselves helping to build a new community, gaining encouragement as they realize that they are not alone, but are part of something big, important - and rapidly growing.
Event Website: http://socialcapitalmarkets.net/index.php
Speaker Lineup: http://socialcapitalmarkets.net/speakers.php
October 14, 2008
Sustainable Industries Economic Forum
Portland, OR
In a stormy and unprecedented economic climate, businesses large and small are pursuing economic advantage through ambitious environmental innovation and social responsibility. The West Coast — Portland, Seattle and San Francisco in particular — is home to successful business thought leaders who have long understood the economic potential of sustainability. Still, tough viability questions and real economic context are sorely lacking, as are authentic, inspirational events that capture the true opportunity in going “beyond green.” Sustainable Industries helps address this need with our annual, reputable Sustainable Industries Economic Forums.
Event Page & Speaker Lineup: http://www.sustainableindustries.com/forums/portland
October 14-16, 2008
Associations and Social Responsibility: Carrying the Movement Forward
Online Summit
Hosted by ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership, the Global Summit on Social Responsibility united more than 800 association professionals and stakeholders in Washington, DC and 19 connected locations around the world and online to co-create a social responsibility agenda for the future of the association profession. The Project Action Teams that emerged from this pioneering event have refined their goals, outlined necessary action steps, and broadened their recruitment of colleagues and other organizations ready to move beyond conversation to actual identification of the business opportunities and substantive impact of positive change-making for a just and healthy world. Join ASAE & The Center, Appreciative Inquiry creator and Professor David Cooperrider, Ph.D.; and the iCohere/OvationNet Team as they facilitate an always-available, online-only summit, Associations and Social Responsibility: Carrying the Movement Forward, that marks the next leg in our sector’s journey toward greater sustainability.
Event Page: http://www.icohere.com/gssr/index.htm
Speaker Lineup: http://www.icohere.com/gssr/presenters.htm
Interview with John Borg, Founder of Eco Imprints
“Green Your Swag”
As a veteran of many trade shows and conferences, it is appalling to me to see to the huge amount of swag and cheap freebies given away at events that seem destined to be thrown away almost immediately. So it is great to find a company carving out a new approach to more environmentally friendly product promotions in the $18 billion promotional product industry.
Eco Imprints is a San Francisco-based company that sells eco-friendly promotional products (i.e. products you can put your logo on) for you to use at trade shows and as gifts for clients. In this interview, Eco Imprints founder John Borg shares insights about how “eco-friendly swag” is different, and the compelling story of how following his personal values led him to start this business.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- “A landfill is not really where you want to see your logo, that’s for sure!”
- What are the in-demand eco-products for trade shows and corporate gifts
- How to rethink the environmental impact of an $18 billion industry
- Marrying passion and skill sets: the business owner’s Holy Grail
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
PATRICK DOMINGUEZ, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Patrick Dominguez from Green Business Innovators, and today we’re interviewing John Borg, who is the founder of Eco Imprints. Welcome, John.
JOHN BORG: Thank you for having me.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay, so let’s start off by, John, why don’t you tell us what Eco Imprints does?
JOHN BORG: Eco Imprints is a corporate merchandising firm, and we try to bring a fresh approach to the promotional products industry, which is an $18 billion industry. In an industry of 20,000 distributors, we’re among the first to focus on more responsible ways of doing business.
Deviants Unite!
(reporting from the trenches of the West Coast Green Conference in San Jose, CA)
I am sitting and eagerly awaiting Al Gore’s arrival for his keynote address at the San Jose Convention Center, the location of the West Coast Green Conference. I am secretly hoping that what he is about to say is somehow different from what I have heard him say before. I want to hear, Al Gore, the thought leader. Yes, I do want him to inspire, but more than anything I want to see someone in his position be able to give us a blueprint of a solution that he believes will get us out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. It’s time for the business community to be the solution and we need a leader with a simple, yet-cohesive plan. Industry by industry we can radically change and that change has to happen now.
So it was a good kick in the pants to hear Jerry Brown and Al Gore clearly direct us all to be leaders. Each one of us needs to be a change agent of the new movement arising out of a system that is currently failing. It’s failing itself and it’s failing the people in it.
Jerry Brown literally called us out. He said that visionaries tend not to run for office and so it’s up to us to be visionaries, not the politicians. It’s up to us to be the deviants. If we don’t deviate from the current culture, we will die with the culture. We need a big shake-up to create even a minimal shift.
Jerry Brown was a hard act to follow, but Al was up to the task of proving that he is the spokesperson for the greatest challenge facing mankind. The crowd noise was deafening and the energy was palpable as he walked onto the stage. What I love about Al Gore speech was that it was obviously more than a speech He is deeply passionate about global transformation and facing the climate crisis head on. He lives it and breathes it. And it is certainly infectious.
“If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” is an African proverb that Vice President Gore loves to change up a bit. Yes, we now need to go quickly and we need to go far.
“Enough baby steps!” So what’s the plan for going quickly and for going for in the sustainability movement?
To have a plan one needs to have a goal. It’s time for a bold approach. Al proposed to embrace the goal of having the U.S. produce and source 100% of our electricity from renewable resources and clean technology within the next 10 years. He talked about restructuring our entire electrical grid and empowering households to know where they are wasting energy. Gore also pointed out that we need to develop the technology to transmit energy (with less loss than now) from places where it’s cheap to create to urban centers where energy resources are more scarce.
“It’s time for us to make up our mind that we can provide this kind of independent energy leadership to the rest of the world. There’s been this bail out of the financial market. Well I think we need a ‘bail in’ of renewable energy and green building. I actually do think that the green revolution is the solution to the financial crisis, the national security crisis, the debt crisis, and the climate crisis.”
Martin Luther King once said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The same applies to the current climate crisis - increase of CO2 emissions anywhere is a threat to people everywhere.
Here’s an outline of Gore’s proposed solution:
20% - way of the way we deal with forests
25% - efficiency and conservation, including new ways of thinking
55% - new energy source with a new energy infrastructure
Yes, the situation is currently grim and the road ahead seems long and arduous. “So how do we maintain an adequate amount of hope in the crisis? … by being a part of the solution. Being on the sidelines doesn’t work.
“All the bad news can be depressing. But where there’s danger and challenge, there is an opportunity.
There are millions of people who are going through personal transformation – seeing with their hearts and with their minds the need for change.
As more people realize this, there will come a moment. There will come a time when there’s a monumental shift.
We will find that we are in the effective majority of people who are actively shaping the future. There will be a new way of thinking and new consciousness of who we are as human beings.”
We can all breathe a sigh of relief, Al Gore is still the “deviant” on the case.