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Title: Doing Well By Doing Good: Sustainable Businesses Make Inroads In The Quad Cities.
Source: Read It Here
Author: Erica Ryberg
Date: February, 2007
Doing Well By Doing Good:
Sustainable Businesses Make Inroads
In The Quad Cities


If Prescott Valley decides that adding a Wal-Mart to their town is a good idea, there may be a silver lining. Or rather, a green one.

In a recent interview with journalist William Rice, Wal-Mart’s media relations go-between Steven Restivo said, “Our environmental goals at Wal-Mart are simple and straightforward: To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and our environment.”

Huh?

A Green Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart is the company so many love to hate, or at least that we hate to shop, but lately it’s doing its best to lead what is amounting to a substantial wave of interest in sustainable business practices. It’s doing this not only by adding solar panels and skylights to some of its stores but by putting organic produce in its food aisles – at the low prices that personify (and sometimes vilify) the Wal-Mart way of doing business.

It’s not just Wal-Mart, either. DuPont is looking into nicer chemicals and GE has launched “ecomagination,” a program that vows to significantly reduce GE’s green house gas emissions and sell $20 billion dollars worth of environmentally friendly products by 2010.

With that in mind, we decided to take a look at what businesses closer to home are doing in the way of sustainability. The results were mixed, but amid the blank stares and red herrings, I did find a few great examples of profitable sustainability.

I talked to two companies here in Prescott that have worked on decreasing their water and power usage, The Top Shop and Exsil. In both cases, the businesses are motivated less by idealism and more by their bottom lines. For example, the Top Shop’s Tod Makela and his wife, Theresa Ebarb-Makela, installed a power conditioning system (courtesy of Western Watt, Inc.) in the hopes of lowering the Top Shop’s substantial electricity bill. They also use water recycling systems to filter and recycle the flood of water their machines require to cut the granite counter tops that make up about half their business.

On a larger but still local scale, the folks at Exsil, a silicon-wafer recovery operation, have increased their hydro-efficiency seven-fold over the last seven years. Far from being a hummus-lovin’ hippy co-op, Exsil is a high-tech recycling company with a corporate culture of protecting the environment and increasing efficiency that practices a successful business model, stating that it’s cheaper and nearly as effective to recover used silicon wafers as to make new ones.




Green Chamber
These are the only two local businesses I encountered in my quest for green businesses that aren’t members of a local green chamber of commerce, the Green to Gold network. Entrepreneurs Jan Bryan and Mary Lin launched Green to Gold in 2005, and right now it has around 21 members (compared to the Prescott Chamber of Commerce’s roster of 1,400).

Green to Gold founder Jan Bryan poses in her home on which she says she's doing a green remodel. Bryan says the remodel which includes tighter windows, non-toxic paints among other improvements will increase the resale value of her home, a good example of doing well by doing good.

Like a typical chamber, Bryan says, Green to Gold members want to engage in dialog at the community level.

“We represent a pretty sizable chunk of this local economy – we are successful business owners who ascribe to sustainability values and ideas and guidelines,” said co-founder Bryan, a financial planner who specializes in social investing. “If indeed resources are limited and future business profitability is linked to sustainability, we think it’s a good thing to dialog with the City.”

Who is the Green To Gold Business Network?

It’s not hard when the City, or at least one council member, is already a member. Bob Luzius said he joined in order to educate himself and to be a liaison to a city government with a great record for encouraging business – and a blank stare where sustainability is concerned.

Green Energy
At a slightly higher level in government, though, things pick up.

Prescott’s District 1 representative Lucy Mason helped give renewable energy a big shot in the arm by writing a bill that gave consumer rebates on solar purchases.

“With all the sun and wind we have, Arizona needs to be a leader in developing sustainable energy,” she said.

That bill and the increasing tendency for people to buy affordable land “off the grid” have kept Ben Mancini’s business, EV Solar, hopping.

“There’s enough sunlight that strikes the planet to power the entire planet for a year,” said Mancini. “It’s just a question if you have the technology to convert it.”

Or the money. Right now, a solar system costs $11,000 after state and other rebates, but Mancini says that he thinks that within the next 10 years the cost of solar power will be on par with conventional utility power. That’s not just because the price of fossil fuel is rising, either. He predicts that solar technology, already growing cheaper and more reliable, will become more accessible as it develops.

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