Bright airy offices, beautiful landscaping, and climate controls that don’t force you to wear a sweater in the office in summer or sweat during the winter months—these are just some of the things workers enjoy about green buildings. Happy workers are more productive and tend to stay in their jobs longer. Companies appreciate these advantages of environmentally friendly buildings, along with lower energy bills and maintenance costs. The best among them also take pride in being part of an environmentally conscious, sustainable building program. But make no mistake—green building isn’t a well-intentioned “save the whales” kind of social movement—it’s big business, generating an estimated $10 billion in revenue just this year.

Photo by Civitas

An architect’s rendering depicts the flow of people through the science garden, which will surround Beloit’s Center for the Sciences with native plants that eliminate the need for irrigation, mowing, and pesticides.

Beloit College will add to this ever-expanding green economy over the coming year as it builds the Center for the Sciences, 116,000 square feet of environmentally friendly construction. From the native plant landscaping to the green vegetated roof, the Center for the Sciences will be a state-of-the-art teaching facility that is also a four-story monument to ingenuity and technology. Storm water run-off will be captured to water plants in the greenhouse, sinks and other plumbing will reduce water consumption by 40 percent, myriad windows will reduce the demand for electricity, and paints and flooring will emit fewer harmful fumes. Many building materials and furnishings will be made from recycled materials and supplied by local and regional sources to cut down on the carbon footprint created by shipping over long distances. At least 50 percent of construction waste from the project will be recycled, but the College is striving to do even more, potentially recycling as much as 95 percent.

With these innovations and others too numerous to mention, Beloit is expected to receive LEED certification at the silver level when the building is completed in 2008.

Created by the U.S. Green Building Council, LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. Its Green Building Rating System is the de facto national benchmark for measuring the “greenness” of sustainable construction projects. LEED measures the performance of environmentally friendly buildings in five critical areas: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. Building projects are awarded points for meeting criteria in each area.

Photo by Dan Hamerman

Peter Strugatz’77, co-CEO of IceStone, is shown at the company’s plant in Brooklyn, N.Y. IceStone turns rejected windshields and bottles and post-consumer glass into colorful terrazzo-style countertops, flooring, and wall coverings. Inc. Magazine named the company one of its “Green 50” businesses.

“The institutionalization of LEED has set a standard that is transforming the construction and architectural market,” explains Peter Strugatz’77, an eco-entrepreneur who prides himself on creating “green collar” jobs.

Strugatz is co-CEO of IceStone, a company that manufactures countertop, flooring, and wall-covering products out of recycled glass. IceStone takes rejects from bottle and windshield manufacturers, combines them with post-consumer glass, crushes it all together, mixes the glass fragments with cement, and transforms it into a product that has a look and feel similar to terrazzo. Strugatz and his company are donating some of the IceStone countertops to be used in the Center for the Sciences, an attractive part of the buildings’ recycled content.

Another Beloit connection is the GreenGrid roof manufactured by ABC Supply Co., a Beloit-based business owned by College Trustee Ken Hendricks. Founded in 1982, ABC is now the largest wholesale distributor of roofing and siding materials, tools, and supplies in the United States. While it began with a product offering of traditional building supplies, Hendricks has incorporated more and more eco-friendly solutions into ABC’s product line, including GreenGrid and another system of roofing that integrates solar panels with steel roof systems.

"It’s to improve the world, if you will,” Hendricks says of his eco-business ventures. “I don’t like waste, and I want to make America more efficient and use the assets that are available to us in the most efficient way possible.”

Photo by Dan Lassiter

At the Center for the Sciences April groundbreaking ceremony, College Trustee Ken Hendricks, CEO of ABC Supply Co., helped students plant a section of his company’s GreenGrid roof. Beloit’s first green building will feature the modular roofing system with plantings that provide year-round insulation and reduce heat reflection and storm water runoff.

Hendricks has also acquired other companies with a green bent, including two European manufacturers in the wind turbine industry and The Garick Corporation, a nationwide processor and distributor of waste-to-market products. The company converts waste into goods such as bagged mulch, soil amendments, landscape stones, pavers, and wood chips.

“What we’re talking about here,” explains Hendricks, “is wasted energy and wasted product that goes to the landfill, and what we’re trying to do is conserve our natural resources.”

The GreenGrid green roof going on the new Center for the Sciences is made to do exactly that—conserve resources. Aside from being visually appealing, GreenGrid and other vegetated roof systems offer many benefits: sound insulation, lower heating and cooling costs, and storm water management.

A GreenGrid roof can soak up more than 90 percent of a one-inch rainfall. Once the roof reaches saturation, the water slowly percolates down to street level, reducing run-off and in some cases eliminating the need for costly retention ponds or systems on developed sites.

GreenGrid is made up of a series of square modules constructed from recycled plastics, developed in response to a demand for green rooftops that allow access to the roof structure for repairs.

The green-grid is modular and comes pre-planted with the type, number, and color of vegetation the customer chooses, or GreenGrid can make the selections. Modules can be switched out to reflect the growing seasons, and the replaced modules can be stored until the following season, so that if perennials have been planted in them, they won’t have to be replanted the following year.

A green roof also helps cool the urban atmosphere. A traditional asphalt roof soaks up heat all day and then radiates it back into the atmosphere, creating a hothouse effect that can make cities as much as 10 degrees warmer than surrounding areas. The plants on a vegetated roof return moisture to the air and have a cooling effect.

Using recycled, sustainable, or earth-friendly products like GreenGrid and IceStone in new construction can be slightly more expensive up front, but savings in utilities, maintenance, and other operating costs make green building more economical in the long run. Some green building products yield a return-on-investment in as little as two to five years.

LEED certification can also translate into other financial rewards. Hundreds of cities and several states offer tax rebates, zoning allowances, and other incentives for companies that earn it.

"When you consider those components, it’s just goofy how economical building green is,” says Tim Taylor’72, CEO of Seattle-based Environmental Home Center, a chain of three all-green building supply stores in the Pacific Northwest.

Photo by Wanda Benvenutti

Tim Taylor’72, CEO of the Seattle-based Environmental Home Center, is a pioneer among environmentally friendly retailers (think Home Depot, but with a 100 percent green product line). “Generally, if something isn’t energy-efficient, resource-efficient, or better for your health, we don’t carry it,” says Taylor.

"We believe we are the largest pure-play green building retailer in the country,” says Taylor. “That’s all we do. Generally, if something isn’t energy-efficient, resource-efficient, or better for your health, we don’t carry it.”

When Environmental Home Center was launched a decade ago, many people didn’t know about alternative building supplies, like insulation made from shredded denim instead of fiberglass. Today, with more and more people seeking earth-friendly products, it’s a $10 million per year enterprise.

“We’ve grown the business 12 times its size since 2000,” says Taylor. “It’s been quite a growth opportunity.”

Environmental Home Center’s three stores carry more than 3,000 products, including non-toxic paints, natural carpets, sustainable wood products, energy-efficient light bulbs, water-saving faucets, fixtures, and toilets, and green cleaning supplies.

"On a very technical level, our goal is to increase our product offering, increase the stores we have, and expand to different cities,” says Taylor. “On a more mission-oriented basis, we really want to be part of not just selling, but also providing information and facilitating better and better products coming to market—products that are meeting our mission and coming closer and closer to our ideal of being a perfect green product.”

Taylor was actually instrumental in bringing one product to market. He saw an ad in a newspaper taken out by a woman who was making countertops out of recycled glass, paper, and granite. She had received a grant from Washington State to develop the product, which she had been creating using a cement mixer in her garage. Taylor immediately grasped the product’s potential, and he spent a year in development with her to bring Squaw Mountain Stone to market.

“We didn’t have to do that, but it’s a great product, and it’s a great story, and we’re just thrilled as we can be to have a unique product like that,” Taylor says.

Today, Taylor says he sells well over $100,000 of Squaw Mountain Stone products each year at the Environmental Home Center. The company has a department devoted to researching existing products, looking for new products that meet the needs of the marketplace, and finding new entrepreneurs who are inventing the next generation of green building products.

While some green businesspeople methodically set out to create sustainable businesses with a triple bottom line that includes financial, social, and environmental factors, others, like David Lehlbach’95, just fell into it.

David Lehlbach’95 wants to keep wooden shipping pallets out of landfills and transform them for a second use. His company, PalletFlooring, out of North Carolina, turns the castoff crates into hardwood floors with an antique patina.

“I happily call myself an environmentalist,” he jokes, “but I don’t drive a Prius.” A few years back, Lehlbach “just got sick of the whole corporate thing and left.” He wanted to get his M.B.A. degree and was looking for things to do when his brother-in-law, who works for the Green Building Council in Asheville, N.C., told him about an unusual opportunity.

“He said, ‘There’s this flooring company, and nobody wants to run it,’ so I said, ‘I’ll run it.’”

Lehlbach found out that North Carolina State University had done research on recycling wooden shipping pallets into hardwood flooring after the Environmental Protection Agency came out with a study showing 1 percent of all landfill waste is composed of these pallets, which are typically shipped once, then discarded.

“I have always been somewhat into the green movement,” Lehlbach says. “I now have a true passion that I didn’t have five years ago, making sure that these pallets don’t get into landfills anymore and showing the market that you can buy something as important as flooring in your house, and it doesn’t have to be new.”

Lehlbach says he’s had great success with PalletFlooring in the local market, and now he is looking to take his business to the next level.

“I would like to see this company grow to the point where we can have a steady production and sell worldwide. I see a market for this way outside of Asheville. I’d really like to see it grow.”

Making small, socially conscious business ventures mushroom into big-time brands is just what IceStone co-CEO Peter Strugatz spent eight years of his life doing. Strugatz invested in nascent brands like organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm and the car-sharing service Zipcar before stumbling onto IceStone and raising the funds needed to transform it from a great idea into a great product.

“The potential of IceStone was magnetic, and we also saw a product that was upcycling recyclables,” says Strugatz. Upcycling involves recycling a material into something nicer than what it started out as, for example, making terrazzo-style tiles out of broken glass bottles. Downcycling would be taking that same glass and crushing it for use as road material. Strugatz notes that 80 percent of all glass goes through neither process and is used once before it is landfilled.

Strugatz calls IceStone a social mission-driven business and says the management has a deep commitment to the social and environmental bottom line, not just the financial bottom line. Strugatz believes that all three components working together help contribute to building the brand and its future potential for profit.

“You don’t have to leave your values at home,” says Strugatz. “There are for-profit businesses that have the philosophy that people, the planet, and profits can live together. I want to instill that in the next generation of leaders that hopefully Beloit is producing today.”

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