*NEWS*FROM GARBAGE TO GOLD

[Anonymous]

From Garbage to Gold
Entrepreneurs
are creating companies that exploit the creative opportunities in other
people’s junk, sparing the environment in the processTwo years ago, Eli
Reich was a mechanical engineer consultant for a Seattle wind energy
company when his messenger bag was stolen. The environmentally
conscious Reich, who rode his bike to work every day, decided that
instead of buying a new one, he would simply fashion another bag out of
used bicycle-tire inner tubes that were lying around his house.Soon
compliments on his sturdy black handmade messenger bag turned into
requests. “That was the catalyst,” says Reich, who obtained a business
license, gave up his day job, and quickly launched Alchemy Goods in the
basement of his apartment building. The company’s motto: “Turning
useless into useful.”For a slew of new entrepreneurs, garbage is not
just a matter of personal opinion, it is, ahem, their business. In
other words, they’re creating new companies out of other people’s junk.

WORKING
SOLO.  While innovation has always been the entrepreneur’s trademark, a
growing interest in the green movement is propelling small business
owners to create new products and services that also happen to be
inventive recycling solutions for the country’s vast waste heaps (see
BusinessWeek.com, 6/19/06, “Do You Need to Be Green?”. “The
sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing
opportunities in many fields of small business,” says John Stayton,
co-founder and director of the Green MBA program at San Francisco’s New
College of California.Reich’s Alchemy Goods grew quickly. At the
outset, he worked solo, making about 5 to 10 bags a month. Now there
are three employees. “In our first year, we probably made about 125
bags,” he says, “since last year we’ve probably made another
1,000.”Initially marketing consisted of word of mouth, and the products
were sold on the company’s Web site. Today the bags can be found in
retail outlets in Washington, Oregon, Pennsylvania, California,
Montana, and two stores in Japan.

SECOND LIFE.  And the
products, made from materials found at local junkyards and bike shops,
have grown, too. Alchemy now offers different styles. The classic
messenger bag ($148) and the smaller Haversack bag ($88) are made from
recycled inner tubes and seat belts. The Adbag, a $30 tote, is
fashioned from old mesh outdoor advertising banners.Reich says he is
looking to broaden his product line and expand his distribution
channels. “After we started the company, I didn’t see a lot of other
recycling [products],” he says. “I’ve learned quite a bit about
companies taking similar innovative approaches to product design. It’s
a niche now, but it’s a growing field. People are becoming more aware
of what products are made of and where they go after they are done
owning them.”It is estimated that America produces about 380 million
tons of waste a year. This also generates a number of harmful gasses
and emissions into the atmosphere and maintains the nation’s dependence
on landfills. Entrepreneurs who have taken to creating businesses based
on the trash of others are not only launching new livelihoods but
giving a second life to discarded rubbish while helping the environment.

RUBBER
RESULTS.  In 2001, outraged at seeing 26 trees marked for destruction
in her Gardena (Calif.) neighborhood because their growth was damaging
area sidewalks, Lindsay Smith, a Hollywood screenwriter, unwittingly
became an activist and an entrepreneur, soon launching Rubbersidewalks.
“These were healthy, mature trees that were being destroyed because the
city couldn’t afford to repair the broken sidewalks,” she says. “We
weren’t even given the opportunity to weigh in on the choice.”Smith
went into action. “It turns out this was a really big problem,” she
says. And not just in her neighborhood. According to Rubbersidewalks,
330,000 miles of U.S. sidewalks are damaged annually. Moreover, many
municipalities simply cut down the trees because it has become too
costly to constantly repair the sidewalks.After doing some
investigating, Smith got a grant from the state of California to do
research on using rubber pavers as a substitute for concrete sidewalks.
Smith spent two years in R&D, eventually coming up with a product
made entirely of recycled rubber tires.

PILING UP.  The
pre-molded, prefabricated rubber squares are cut to fit and are
installed over a layer of crushed granite. Interlocking dowels connect
the pavers. For repairs, individual pavers can be unlocked and
removed.Smith’s rubber sidewalks created a solution to four problems.
First, they reduce the number of tires piling up in dumps—according to
the Rubber Manufactures Assn., every year more than 250 million scrap
tires are thrown out in the U.S.Second, using rubber pavers, which are
unbreakable, reduces the cost of repairing sidewalks, as well as the
number of lawsuits resulting from injuries sustained from people
tripping on broken concrete. Rubber sidewalks also help preserve trees,
and they don’t add to what’s called heat-island effect, the increase in
urban air and surface temperatures due to pavement, asphalt, and
building infrastructures.According to Smith, Rubbersidewalks have been
installed in 60 cities across the country and Canada. She says she’s
gotten requests from metropolitan centers in Asia, Europe, Australia,
and New Zealand as well.Moreover, Smith says she has heard from senior
citizen homes interested in installing rubber sidewalks because they
are safer and easier on limbs. “We’ve had 1,000% growth this year,” she
says. “We will have more growth next year—it has skyrocketed.”

WASTE
STREAM.  Four years ago, Dan White, a naturalist, decided that he
wanted to start a company that helped the environment. He founded Rapid
Refill Ink, in Springfield, Ore., which remanufactures and sells inkjet
and laser toner cartridges at a 40% to 70% savings to consumers.”There
are 1 billion cartridges in landfills,” he says. “We can refill one
cartridge over 20 times— that’s a huge environmental savings.” Today
the company has expanded to include 70 stores and an additional 300
franchise contracts nationwide (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/28/05,
“Upstarts Spread in the Ink Wars”).In addition to creating an
environmentally friendly product, White went even further, making sure
the stores themselves were made of repurposed materials. Rapid Refill’s
walls are made of corn stalks, the marble-looking countertops are made
of sunflower seed shells, and the carpets are composed of recycled
materials like milk cartons.”There are so many products generated in
our culture,” says the Green MBA’s Stayton. “Consumers are encouraged
to purchase more and more, but what happens to all those products?
Without being mindful of the final destination, we are going to end up
with a world full of junk. We need companies that are creative and
innovative and will take products out of the waste stream and turn them
into something new.” In doing so, they prove that one man’s garbage can
be an entrepreneur’s goldmine. 

[Author]

January 2, 2007 at 11:58 AM