A Green Hardware Store on Every Corner? It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You May Think

The house in Boulder, Colo., was beautiful. The floors were cork, the carpets were made of recycled plastic bottles — the whole place was being redone on sustainable, environmental principles. “It was mind-expanding,” says Jason Ballard, the co-founder and CEO of eco-friendly home improvement retailer TreeHouse. The house belonged to Ballard’s instructor in a wilderness EMT program. Ballard was staying there shortly after college, and he was inspired by his instructor’s efforts to remodel his home to make it more environmentally friendly. “It was such a lovely vision of what was possible,” he says.
But the more Ballard learned about sustainable home improvement, the more he realized how difficult it was to find attractive, well-designed products. That insight — and that vision of what was possible in the home — led Ballard to create TreeHouse, a company that’s aimed at transforming the home improvement market and, with it, the home itself. Among the wares and services available are recycled glass countertops, electric lawn tools and solar-panel installation. Ballard says customers often call his company “the Whole Foods of home improvement  —  and it’s not too far from the truth.”
Ballard has always had an eco-conscious mindset. His grandfather was an early role model. “He wouldn’t have called himself a conservationist,” Ballard says, “but he gave me both a conservation ethic and a tremendous sense of wonder about the natural world.” He studied conservation biology in college, where he started to learn about the enormous impact our homes have on the environment. “All we hear about on TV is gas-guzzling SUVs,” he says, “but the real problem is the buildings we’re living in every day.”
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Private residences are the biggest users of energy, the biggest users of renewable and nonrenewable materials, the biggest producers of landfill waste and the second-biggest users of water. Most exposure to toxins also takes place in the home. “I realized that if I wanted to make an impact with regard to these existentially challenging issues, then the best area for me to focus on was, in fact, the home,” says Ballard, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform. Through GLG, Jason and his team have learned about inventory management, retail strategy, in-store user experience and customer data management to help the company implement best practices across multiple locations.


Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.


After college, Ballard worked in green building for a while, learning all he could about the market. “What I noticed was that everyone had the same set of problems,” he says. It was hard to find sustainable products, and when he did find them, they were expensive, and only available from a few boutique companies. “The obvious blocker to the whole industry moving forward is access to products at a decent rate, and with some level of curation and education around those products,” Ballard says.
TreeHouse is built on a few core ideas. First, Ballard says, most home improvement products are terrible — poor quality, toxic and unsustainable. Second, most home improvement services aren’t very good, either. Anyone who’s ever embarked on such a project knows that they’re often delayed and routinely run over budget. The industry also hasn’t gone digital yet, making it difficult to get information on the status of your project when you want it. “The whole experience around home improvement needs to be reimagined,” Ballard says. “We are now trying to make not just the products great, but the technology great and the service great.”
TreeHouse aims to make sustainable options appeal to more than just die-hard environmentalists. “If we want healthy and sustainable homes to be the norm, they have to be better than conventional homes. And everything around the process has to be better,” Ballard emphasizes. That’s part of why he decided to start a for-profit company to accomplish his environmental goals. “If you’re in a for-profit business, all of your assumptions are tested all the time,” he says. “It forces you to very quickly arrive at what works to affect change.”
Ballard has ambitious goals for TreeHouse. Today, the company has one brick-and-mortar store in Austin, Texas, and is opening two more this year, including one in Dallas. Within the next two years, he plans on opening still more stores, and expanding beyond Texas. Right now, TreeHouse touches only a tiny fraction of the 80 to 100 million homes in the country, Ballard says. He believes 20 stores — a benchmark he hopes to hit in five years — would drive that figure up to 10 percent. The ultimate goal: Launch 300 stores nationwide to reach 80 percent of all the homes in the U.S.
“Our plan is to run hard at those milestones,” Ballard says. “We don’t have a thousand years to figure this out. We are making decisions in the next hundred years as a species that we will have to live with for the next two thousand years.”

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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.
Homepage photo by Kirsten Kaiser

The Big Idea That’s Growing Green Business in America

After a lifetime of eating with disposable knives and forks, Michael Caballero, a 25-year-old industrial engineer at FedEx, looked the plastic cutlery in his workplace cafeteria in a new way. “I think in terms of process,” he says, tallying the environmental upheaval required to manufacture each fork — the extraction of oil from the ground, the overseas shipping, the refining and molding in a factory, the waste created by its packaging — a massive amount of pollution created for just a few minutes of usage before being tossed in a landfill.
Today, thanks to EcoTech Visions, a Miami incubator for green enterprises, Caballero’s 18-month-old company, Earthware, Inc., is building better disposable silverware. At EcoTech Visions’s current headquarters in Liberty City, Fla., Caballero is a member of a class of 26 “ecopreneurs” who receive 15 months of support and have access to office space, manufacturing equipment and other environmentally-minded folks. In the co-working space, architects and designers chat with electricians and engineers — a technical collaboration that’s rare but vital to successfully manufacture products, from battery-run motorcycles and aquaponics systems to plastic-based handbags and aloe salves.
APPLY: EcoTech Visions is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The buzzing incubator is the vision of Dr. Pandwe Gibson, an African-American businesswoman who wanted to spark a sea change in commerce by supporting green jobs, particularly manufacturing ones. Because the consequences of environmental harm are so visible in southern Florida (as atmospheric temperatures rise, the sea levels follow, causing the Atlantic’s high tides to annually creep nearly one inch closer to the art deco real estate along Miami’s coastline), city residents are eager to embrace products that won’t further damage the Earth in the process. When Gibson first came up with EcoTech Visions three years ago, she used her iPad to share the idea with anyone who had time to listen to her elevator pitch. Since its launch, the incubator has created 15 new jobs, won grants for nine of its companies to work on prototypes and helped three other businesses obtain seed funding to kick start operations.
Last year, EcoTech was one of NBCUniversal Foundation’s 21st Century Solutions grant challenge winners, supporting progressive community solutions. “What we love is that it has the four Cs — it’s a catalyst for out-of-the-box solutions, it offers a destination for collaboration, it’s building a community for idea-creators and problem solvers and it’s driving local change by expanding small businesses and jobs,” says Beth Colleton, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at NBCUniversal.
EcoTech Visions played a vital role in helping Earthware produce a durable alternative to the 16 billion pieces of plasticware thrown away in America each year (its cutlery is made with a corn-based resin that decomposes in just six months) and grow to its current state. Perhaps most importantly, the incubator covers the entry-level costs that can prohibit a business from entering the market — office space and manufacturing equipment — while Caballero still works at Fed-Ex to make a living. Without the support, he would have needed to front the money for Earthware’s first injection molding machine (which spits out products in the shape of pre-made molds) and a consultant to help him pick the right one; instead, Caballero pays a small rental fee to EcoTech in order to use the machine they purchased on his behalf.
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Additionally, the incubator introduced Caballero to other locals that could bolster his burgeoning enterprise, including sustainability advocates and potential customers, like the local school board, which recently put out a request for compostable cutlery bids. “The whole goal is to become a leading provider of compostable, sustainable products, using Miami as a hub into Latin America and the Caribbean,” footholds to an international expansion, Caballero says.
Clean tech and green manufacturing, as sectors, could provide the biggest hope of restoring jobs that have been lost due to the historic decline in American manufacturing (nationwide, about 5 million have disappeared since the millennium). Unlike other compostable products, which ship foreign-made cutlery to the U.S., Caballero’s eco-friendly business aims to create high-paying, manufacturing jobs right here in America; the two dozen other companies at EcoTech Visions will only add to this green wave of business. Caballero believes green industries will be most successful if others join the movement. The demand for sustainable products is already there, he notes, but supply will only match those levels if more entrepreneurs and manufacturers arrive on the scene. Even though they’ll technically be his competitors, there will be enough supply that prices will fall and consumers generally will see planet-friendly products as the new standard.
EcoTech Visions is looking to expand nationally, starting with Los Angeles next. If it achieves its goals, not only will Caballero be just one of countless American manufacturers producing environmentally-conscious items and providing jobs around the country, but the incubator could find itself leading the United States into the green industrial revolution.
EcoTech Visions is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!

Why Fighting Climate Change is Good Business

Tackling climate change isn’t risky businesses. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
As Co.Exist reports, corporations that are taking action on climate change are seeing more profits, better stability and offer stronger dividends to shareholders compared to other businesses. Climate-aware companies have “an 18 percent higher return on equity (ROE) than their peers, and a 67 percent higher ROE than companies that don’t disclose climate change-related actions,” and have “50 percent lower volatility in earnings over the last 10 years and 21 percent strong dividends to shareholders than companies with less transparency,” the publication writes.
These findings are based on information from the CDP (the not-for-profit organization formerly known as the Climate Disclosure Project, that allows corporations to reveal their environmental information) and its 14th annual CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report.
For the report, the CDP surveyed nearly 2,000 major international companies on their green initiatives and what they’ve done to curb emissions for the past year. From that information, the CDP created its first-ever “A List” — an index of 187 companies that are “climate performance leaders,” according to a press release. About 30 companies on the list are American, including Microsoft, Google, CVS Health, Lockheed Martin and Bank of America.
MORE: 5 Very Simple, Practical Things You Can Do to Curb Climate Change
“The A List represents just nine percent of the 1,971 companies scored this year but accounts for US$23 billion of the annual investment to reduce carbon emissions – just under half of the US$50 billion invested by the full sample,” the release states.
Encouragingly, even businesses in unlikely industries are adapting to the needs of a warming planet. Scientific American reports from the CDP report that General Motors, for example, reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 244,000 metric tons a year by “developing and promoting more fuel-efficient vehicles, adopting energy efficiency programs at its plants, and tweaking its supply chain to move more vehicles by rail instead of on highways,” which ultimately saved the auto-giant $287 million.
It’s more important than ever to be planetary stewards. The overwhelming takeaway from the newest climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that there’s no time to lose to mitigate climate change. However, if international governments and corporations act now, the worst can be avoided.
As Paul Simpson, chief executive officer of the CDP, says in a statement,”The businesses that have made it onto our first ever global list of climate performance leaders are to be congratulated for their progress; they debunk economic arguments against reducing emissions. However, global emissions continue to rise at an alarming rate. Businesses and governments must raise their climate ambition. The data shows that there is neither an excuse nor the time for lethargy.”
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DON’T MISS: The Best Narrator on the Planet Takes on the World’s Most Important Issue

What’s the Outcome of Combining Science with Business Savvy? Transformative Ideas

There’s plenty of startups chasing energy innovation, but the part that’s often forgotten is the scientists behind these solutions, who pore over research for years and are permanently fixated over microscopes. These researchers are the foundation of our future — but they’re also unequipped with the business acumen or the political wherewithal to transition their work into commercial ventures.

But if you’re one of these budding scientists (and not Elon Musk) looking to save the world, the Resnick Institute at the California Institute of Technology may be your next stop. With a $30 million endowment, the newfangled program accepted its first class of postdoctoral fellows earlier this month.

“Energy is a challenging thing to develop infrastructure for, so it’s not really suited for the venture mindset,” says Neil Fromer, the executive director of the program. “But there are innovative ways to fund early-stage ideas.”

Plucked from around the world, the four fellows will focus on transformative energy solutions that are typically ignored by venture capitals looking for a sound return on investment, but have the potential to change the world. Such ideas include green chemical synthesis, fuel efficient vehicles and energy conversion research on batteries and fuel cells, according to a press release.

While there’s no shortage of bright ideas and big solutions, the tricky part is translating the dense language into a sexy, business pitch for potential investors. The Caltechstaff will not only work with students on developing their work into potential commercial ventures, but with the help of their own funding source, the pressure is off to produce immediate results.

“In some ways we’re trying to reclaim the thought leadership on this issue,” Fromer tells Fast Company.

While Caltech is not home to the only sustainability institute, by focusing on the intersection of science, business and technology, it may be the one that can save the world.

MORE: Get Schooled on How to Earn a Computer Science Education for Free

Download This App, Fight Global Warming. (And Transform Your Business, Too.)

These are a little different from the usual round-up of green apps, but they just might be what you need to move your business or social enterprise to the next level. On this list, you’ll find 20 sustainability apps that do everything from encourage transparency about building materials in real estate to predict the effect of chemicals in home products that get dumped down the drain. The apps also use innovative tools like gamification and cloud computing to help entrepreneurs go green. What they all have in common is helping people connect, share and collaborate to solve our society’s biggest challenges.
Source: Greenbiz