JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Julie Rizzo. She’s a CEO and founder of Recycled Granite. Welcome to Green is Good, Julie Rizzo.
JULIE RIZZO: Thanks, John. Thanks for having me on.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Julie, before we get into your great company and talking about Recycled Granite and recycledgranite.com, can you share a little bit about the Julie Rizzo story. Did you grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur or is this something that evolved over time or came from mom or dad or college? Who and how did you get here?
JULIE RIZZO: You know, I worked in the investment world for about ten years and that was fun and then I had a real estate company for about 15 years and that was also really fun. I love real estate but I always like construction and building things and I think all of the TV shows kind of taught me to reuse and repurpose things and I liked that. I loved the fact that you could reuse things instead of throwing them away so when I was doing some consulting for a granite company after the real estate market took a hit, I saw this huge dumpster of stone and I just knew there was something that we could do with it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, you started a company called Recycled Granite and as a URL, you’re recycledgranite.com. What year did you start recycledgranite.com?
JULIE RIZZO: I purchased, I think, in 2008 but I didn’t start using it initially very quickly. I had to do research and develop the market and see what the market was. There was this large mountain of granite at this granite fabricator’s shop and come to find out, there were between five and ten thousand and at that time, back in 2008, up to 20,000 fabricators, some people said, at that time because the building market was still fairly good. It was going pretty well then so 30,000 pounds times 20,000 fabricators on average, the numbers are astronomical. I knew there was a ton of stone out there.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right, right. So you launched the company in what year then?
JULIE RIZZO: 2010, I’m going to say. I always sold stone. I did a lot research. I started out with mosaics and the machinery wasn’t really developed to do what I wanted it to do. I was selling landscaping pavers and I would work at flea markets and do all of the entrepreneurial things and every time I was at a flea market or one of these trade shows, I would bring these little pieces of stone, these little slivers we called them, and at that time, everyone would stop by because they were really sparkly so people would stop by my booth and they would say, ‘Do you have more of this product?’ and I never had it because the machine wasn’t developed so I met a gentleman at another trade show who built a smaller version of a machine that made that product so the moment I saw that machine, I knew that I could make this whole business explode so that’s what I did. I started out with that little machine and from then on, I improved the machines and kind of made them bigger and better.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. Talk about 2010 to now. How small was it when you started? How many orders did you do the first year and how big is now in 2014, now that you’ve evolved the business, you’ve kept investing in more machinery and better machinery? What’s the evolution been like?
JULIE RIZZO: We started with nothing. Recycled Granite didn’t really exist. No one did anything with it because they would throw it in landfills. It started out with pavers and I started selling pavers and that was good but people would look at the pavers and they would say they were only one and a quarter inches thick because they’re the countertop thick and that kind of made them believe that it’s too thin. It’s not strong enough to be made as landscaping pavers. In fact, it’s three to five times stronger than any concrete paver that you’ll put out there but I had a problem with perception so I had to figure out how could I take that material and turn it into a variety of products rather than just one product that I know is great but if I can’t sell that, it doesn’t help anybody so I had to figure out how to turn all those into different things and I worked with a bunch of machines and so now we manage the stone so now when I go out to network members throughout the country, I teach them how to manage that stone. Back in 2010, I started out having a little hard time with the pavers, with $100,000 a year. I don’t remember the exact numbers but now we’ve sold, with my network of over 35 people throughout the country, we’ve sold over $5 million out of Recycled Granite products.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re saying prior to 2008 and 2009, no one was recycling granite in the US? Everyone was basically just landfilling it when it came to its natural end of life?
JULIE RIZZO: Absolutely, and it still happens today. We haven’t even touched the market yet. No one even believes me that there is even that much waste. When people are tearing down these buildings, I think they don’t realize that when you walk into a metropolitan city, if you look at every high rise around you, or if you’re in any big hotel, on every single building in the ground, it’s all granite. All those buildings are flanked with granite and I get calls from contractors all over the country who don’t want to throw it away. No one wants to throw this stuff away because it’s beautiful. It’s millions and millions of years old so they’ll want me to go to New York City or California or wherever to pick up all this demolition material to do something with it but because it’s too far and I don’t have enough granite recycling plants throughout the country yet, I can’t do that. It breaks my heart but it’s not feasibly possible.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, and to a layman like me and for our listeners out there that mostly are laymen at this, what’s the difference between new granite and recycled granite? Would any of be able to ever tell the difference?
JULIE RIZZO: Not at all. Recycled Granite is when you order a granite countertop and you really, 55 by 120 inches, it’s a big slab so they take that slab, lay it on a surface, and cut out your granite countertop, which is usually straight edge pieces. From that slab, there’s up to 30% waste, so we take that waste so it’s essentially new granite but according to LEED, it’s post-consumer waste because the consumer did purchase that slab but it’s the waste from that slab so that’s what it is. It’s still new granite but it’s generally going straight to a landfill.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that are developers and want to build these gold LEED certified buildings, if they used your product, that would help make them closer to their goals in terms of building Gold Certified?
JULIE RIZZO: Oh absolutely, yeah. Our material, since it’s 100% waste because it was headed to the landfill, they get a multitude of points for using it, and because of the granite recycling centers throughout the country we’ve strategically placed to help builders achieve those LEED points everywhere, except for New York. I need more people in New York and California.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Basically what you’re creating here, it didn’t exist and you’re creating a whole brand new marketplace in recycling.
JULIE RIZZO: Yeah, exactly. It’s an industry. They talk about electronics and all the other plastics and everything is wonderful but granite, the dollar that we’re getting for our granite after it’s manufactured and repurposed into a variety of products, I can get 25 dollars for a necklace that is handcrafted by individuals with disabilities. We’re literally sending billions of dollars to the landfill without even thinking about it. My innovation has been recognized in the Congressional Record, which is really good, but I’m self-blended. I don’t have any investors so I use every single one of my dollars to create this industry. It’s difficult but the rewards are amazing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about that. You brought up something about necklaces and other things so let’s talk about how does using recycled granite not only help the environment but also the greater sustainability movement at large?
JULIE RIZZO: Not only does it divert the waste, we like that, but it creates tons of green jobs throughout the country, not only for the manufacturing side, which is what I’m mainly involved in, but for installers who are installing the tiles, who are installing the landscaping pavers, the salespeople who are selling the tiles. It’s just so many factors and our aggregates, we’re tapping more into aggregate products right now that will be pervious so those are amazing products that we haven’t launched yet but they’re touching everybody. They are a new product that is creating tons and tons of jobs on multiple levels.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Also, when I was reading about you, Julie, and learning more about the great work that you’re doing and for our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Julie Rizzo on. She’s the CEO and founder of Recycled Granite and you can learn more about Julie and go to her website at recycledgranite.com. You’re also very proud of your Green Abilities program. Share with our listeners the great work and the important work that you’re doing there? What is that Green Abilities program?
JULIE RIZZO: My Green Abilities program, when I was working with my machine, my manufacturing processes are very monotonous and very repetitive and the average person gets very bored with that and so I have a couple friends with children with autism so I went to my local high school and asked if I could work with some of the students, if they can come in my shop. These students were between the ages of 18 and 22 so they’re a little bit older but I brought them in. I volunteered my time and brought them in and I had no idea what I was going to do. I had never worked with special needs people before so I knew nothing but they came in, they spent a year there. I worked with two different schools and my sister and I created these procedures that they were able to follow so I play off their strength. I knew what I needed to get done so I learned what their abilities were and a lot of these people can’t speak and definitely can’t read and write but they can do every single thing that I do. I worked with over 75 students and 95% of them, including people in wheelchairs and just everything. I have tons of videos on YouTube too that talk about my Green Abilities program so they’re just amazing people.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, it’s basically, people with disabilities, mental and physical, they’re growing through your Recycled Granite artisan apprentice certification program?
JULIE RIZZO: Yeah, exactly. It’s like a college, you know, regular people go to college, and it’s a certification. We put them through a test and now I employee individuals at Opportunity Enterprises in Valparaiso, Indiana. They’re the first special needs facility in the country, in the world, to ever open a granite recycling center and now we have others lined up, ready to go, to open more granite recycling centers in locations throughout the United States.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So far, you’ve recycled over 20 million pounds of granite, what it says on your website.
JULIE RIZZO: It’s higher than that now. It’s about 30 or even 40 million pounds. There’s just so much. I was trying to give you a number of how much granite waste is in the world or how much we’re throwing away and the numbers are just crazy. It’s over 5 million tons, which is a lot, and 1 pound can be worth anywhere from 10¢ cents to $10, even more than that, $20, because if we’re making jewelry and wine stoppers, we can make a lot of money out of that waste. The revenues are amazing. The potential is amazing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: The potential is amazing. For our listeners around the world, this isn’t just a United States opportunity for you. You could take Recycled Granite around the world, I take it.
JULIE RIZZO: Yeah, you know, shockingly, I get calls and emails from people all around the world. The website gets hit from 15 countries every single month and I don’t pay anything for search engine optimization and just this morning, a gentleman from India contacted me saying, ‘Can you help us with our waste here?’ so we are definitely the global leaders in this industry that I’m creating and it will affect people throughout the world.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about potential. You’re a businesswoman. You’ve been in banking before and real estate so you know exactly what you’re doing here. What is the potential? We’re down to the last five minutes or so. Can you share with us your vision for the next five years for Recycled Granite and what you’re doing?
JULIE RIZZO: It’s so big! I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t know if I can answer that question. There are so many things that we can do with this stone. It’s just racks. It’s racks that were headed to the landfill and we’re figuring out ways to put those racks to use. Because it’s so valuable, I’ve created, as an example, aggregates in between permeable pavers. Right now, they’re mining all over the country and all over the world. We have a special formula size that works well because granite is angular and the color blend we have matched too so if we can use that in between our permeable pavers instead of mining stone, it only makes sense. There’s just so much money. There’s so many different ways, so many profitable things to do, it’s definitely billions of dollars and I’m excited. There’s so much. I’m very excited about it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Speaking of the largeness of the market, how is it? You are a woman entrepreneur before it was cool to be a woman entrepreneur. Before the whole lean in vernacular had permeated society, you were already leaning in 25 years ago with regards to banking and breaking ceilings and real estate and now of course, on your own with Recycled Granite. What is that like and where is that going? Where is that movement going? Is this now the generation for a woman to take over and really make their mark? How has that evolved in your lifetime and where do you see that going in the years ahead?
JULIE RIZZO: I don’t think of myself as a woman. I don’t need all that woman stuff. I think it’s great that people do that but I think if people see a vision and a goal and they see opportunity, they should take it and that’s always what I’ve done. When you see an opportunity, especially in a marketplace that’s not being tapped into, and something just tells me to do it, it’s always very difficult and I have a lot of pushback but I just keep going because if I know it’s a good thing, it’s a good thing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, which is great advice for the young entrepreneurs that we have with us that listen to the show because we get tons of emails from entrepreneurs, not only in the United States but all over the world that want to be the next Julie Rizzo so when you started the company to where it is, how has it gone? What were you expecting to happen and what were you expecting or not expecting that also happened? How has that broken out since 2009, 2010?
JULIE RIZZO: Everybody told me no, no, that will never work. No one’s doing it. It will never work and I think that’s true for most entrepreneurs. Most people say no, that’s not going to work because no one has done it before. In my opinion, you must believe in yourself. You’ve got to believe in whatever is that you do because if you don’t believe in it, you’re not going to be able to sell it and it’s not going to work and it’s okay to fail because you learn so much from your failures. No doesn’t mean no. It just means not today so you have to keep going.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last two minutes or so. Right now, if there’s a listener that wants to recycle their granite in a different state, do they just contact you, they go to your website and they contact you and you tell them if you can recycle, pick it up from them, or they get it to you somehow?
JULIE RIZZO: On my website, it says ‘Where to buy’ so there’s a list of my 35 network vendors because I license my business model throughout the country to teach people how to manufacture their material, their own waste in their market. We need more network members because I don’t want to ship my garbage from Indiana to California or New York so I teach people in those markets to do it so they can go there and look for a local granite recycling center. If there isn’t one there, contact us because we need you there. Your environment locally needs you there. There’s money there to be made. There’s opportunities to be made.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Although you’re thinking globally, obviously, with your opportunity, as you said, with the email you got this morning from Indiana and others that come in from around the world to you, really this is a local business, as you said about shipping and reverse logistics and things of that such so basically, you’re franchising the model and licensing the model with your proprietary machinery and your know-how?
JULIE RIZZO: I do. Exactly, yes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s brilliant.
JULIE RIZZO: Yeah and listen, it doesn’t make sense. There’s enough business in these local markets to make business, so that way, we don’t worry about the logistics and shipping because once you add the shipping on it, it’s going to double the price and cost of your product so that’s no fun.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So you’re going to be the Ray Kroc of granite, it looks like, right?
JULIE RIZZO: I just hope to make a difference. I hope to change lives and my motto is: Create jobs, reduce waste, and make the world a better place and those are my goals.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, that’s great and that’s a perfect way to end today’s show. Thank you for coming on today. Julie, of course, anytime you want to come back, you are always welcome or listeners out there who want to join Julie’s network or talk to Julie or email Julie about recycling granite in their country or in their area, you can go to her great website, www.recyclegranite.com. Julie, you are truly making the world a better place and you’re a sustainability superstar and, therefore, truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good and we’re so excited to have with us today Vicki Robin. She’s the author of the upcoming book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us. She’s been called the prophet of consumption downsizers. Welcome to Green is Good, Vicki Robin.
VICKI ROBIN: It’s nice to be here.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Vicki, before we get into talking about your upcoming book and everything you’re doing, can you talk a little bit about how did you get that title from The New York Times, ‘prophet of consumption downsizers’?
VICKI ROBIN: Yeah, well I want to say that it’s not just an upcoming book. It’s actually a book that’s now for sale.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay.
VICKI ROBIN: It came out last month and it’s called Blessing the Hands that Feed Us and how I got that title was that I’m the co-author of a book called Your Money or Your Life, which was and still is an international bestseller, even 22 years later. It’s amazing and so I worked for a decade in the ’90s believing that we could stop the runaway train of overconsumption in North America, that we could actually gird our loins and pull in our consumption because I could see that overconsumption in North America was the major driver of spreading this ethic of consumerism around the world and driving us into overshoot so I did everything in my power to communicate a message that there is such a thing as an enough point. There is having enough and then you have more than enough. More than enough means the things that you have invested money and time in that you don’t use that clog your garage and your closets that actually cost you money because you bought them on credit, that is stuff that’s clutter in your life and it is not the reward of you working hard. It is the driver of you going back to work and working hard for the rest of your life so I really try to communicate to people that there is such a thing as sufficiency and, you know, it was a New York Times bestseller. It was a Businessweek bestseller for more than five years and that’s what made me a prophet and now in a way, I’ve shifted my attention. I’m still into sustainable consumption but I’ve shifted my attention from money to food.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And Blessing the Hands that Feed Us, is that natural evolution then from the money to the food issue?
VICKI ROBIN: Yes, it is and because money is more impersonal and what we say in Your Money, Your Life is that money is an abstraction that gets its value only because people are willing to take in exchange. We deify it. We think it’s like eternal, that it actually has value. It’s pieces of paper and metal so we invest ourselves in making money worth something because we invest something that’s real, which is our lives, in something that’s unreal, which is money, which weaves us into a corporate industrial system that really does not have, our bottom line is not their bottom line, really. But food is primary consumption. Food comes, not from some abstraction. It comes from the earth so this work is really talking about our relationship with food and the hands that feed us, our relationship with the system that feeds us so that we can actually wean ourselves from the corporate industrial food system. Food is a commodity that is traded on the stock exchange, which means that it’s out of our control and you can do the whole narrative about Monsanto and vertical integration and concentration of ownership. You can do all that narrative but where I’m paying attention is how can we the eaters, in our own lives, start to reclaim our right and power to feed ourselves intelligently, which means knowing where our food comes from, knowing where it’s grown, being able to grow some of our own, being able to work with natural ingredients and not just have to have packaged food, how do we do all of that? So that is where my attention has gone, from secondary consumption to primary consumption.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we have Vicki Robin on with us today. She just wrote the book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us and to learn more about Vicki and also to buy her books, both books, you can go to www.vickirobin.com. You recently did a TED Talk on relational eating. Can you share a little bit about what’s the premise of relational eating?
VICKI ROBIN: Yeah. Really, we are largely disconnected eaters and even people who have tried every diet in the world, from ethical diets, whether it’s vegetarianism to veganism, it’s a little bit like money. We’re believing experts on what we should put in our body and the latest and greatest thing that Doctor Oz says is sort of what zips through the culture and so you read somebody who says you should be a vegan, you should never eat meat. It’s unethically produced and it’s bad for you every which way from Sunday and then you read the Weston A. Price people and they say no, you should eat meat and butter and animal fat, that’s the natural diet for the human and so what does the eater do? The eater is completely out of touch with the natural capacity of their body to know what it needs. I was just thinking this morning that there’s this phrase, ‘eat like a horse’. We don’t eat like a horse because a horse will go to a salt lick and get salt when the body needs salt and will stop eating salt when the body doesn’t need salt anymore but we’re out of touch. We’re out of touch, we’re out of relationship with our own body intelligence about what kinds of food our body needs at different times of the day, different times of the year, different health conditions. You might find yourself craving bananas. You might think that’s a tropic fruit and I shouldn’t eat it, that’s fattening but your body is asking for potassium so you don’t even have to know this if you have a relationship with your own capacity to taste food, your own appetite. And relational eating is your capacity to cook, your household food system. It’s your herbs on your windowsill or kale on your deck, your capacity to understand herbs, spices, sugar, salt, and fat, acid, and lemons and all that does in transforming whole foods that sit on your counter into delicious meals. We really have lost that one. Recipes are great but eventually, food intelligence is your capacity to have a direct relationship with these things that you can eat and also, to understand that there are thousands of varieties of edibles in this world and we’re down to about 60 different foods that show up in our supermarket so we can’t go out into nature, not just foraging, but we don’t really even remember our patronage as a species is like food all around. We live in food. We are food. We have a capacity to find food. All of this is missing now for us and then the relational part is if you’re not going to dig in the dirt, if you’re not going to cook, then it’s your relationship with the hands that feed you, which are the chefs that use the whole foods and local ingredients and it’s the farmers who grow your food and once you’re out at that level of relational eating, relational eating actually does become being an activist because you start to understand how far our food system is from that wholesome midscale possibility of relational eating and you start to want to make change at that level so all of these are what I include in the term relational eating versus disconnected, anywhere, any way, anytime eating in the vast food courts of the world, whether it’s healthy food courts or junk food courts.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: If relational eating is the macro, then let’s look at the micro, your premise of local eating and local food. Can you share what you believe is now the evolution of local food and eating not just being a market for hippies and yuppies anymore but we should all be engaging in local foods and local eating.
VICKI ROBIN: Yeah, we all can do that. We can adopt just one vegetable that grows in our region. We can seek out locally produced food in our supermarkets, and there’s not much but we can start to ask for it, so we can be intelligent local shoppers even a little bit growers so everyone can do that and we can also realize that pricing distorts our perspective. First of all, we spend the lowest percentage of our budget on food of any country in the world. In other words, we have an expectation of food as being plentiful and cheap and so when food is a little bit more expensive, we don’t read that as maybe better food for us. We read that as too expensive, I’m going to go buy the other stuff. I do the whole analysis in Blessing the Hands that Feed Us of the fast food burger and the cost of a fast food burger versus a local food burger and when you factor in the time to drive to the fast food joint and you factor in the actual amount of meat on the burger and you factor in that if you bought at a higher price well grown, grass fed, grass finished or green finished, locally grown, you could see the cow that you’re going to eat burger, you could actually make yourself a quarter pounder at home and pay yourself for the driving time and the waiting time and the long line and actually come out equal and right now, in my town, we have a baker who’s moved into the town and she’s bought a grain mill so she is actually grinding local grain and making a totally local loaf of bread. You frequent the restaurants that feature local food. You go to the stores that feature local food and you start to learn how to work with ingredients so that fast food no longer appeals to you even though they’ve figured out our taste buds, so that you no longer have a taste for it, either financially or physiologically.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: One of your premises is about reconnecting with ourselves and our own vitality and our place of belonging here on this planet. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by active belonging in perspective to both local food and Blessing the Hands that Feed Us?
VICKI ROBIN: Yeah. Thanks for that question. The way I got into this was I became aware of the unsustainability of our food system and I live on an island so that was particularly poignant for me because if the ferries don’t run, we don’t eat and we were a food producing island 100 years ago. There was plentiful food. A hundred years ago, we won the prize of growing the most tonnage of wheat per acre so it’s a fertile place and we have outsourced our eating so I decided to do an experiment. I called it a ten mile diet and I ate within ten miles of my home for a month just to see what would happen and to test the sturdiness of our food system and that really taught me everything I know. It opened the door to everything I’m interested in now about food. What was the exact question?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: About active belonging with regards to local food.
VICKI ROBIN: What happened was, my search for the sources of food, meat and cheese and vegetables, all of that, took me out to my farmers and I had a little route. I have an electric bicycle and I had a little route where I went around and I got my eggs and I got my cheese and I got my meat and I got my vegetables and I got my fruit and every act was a conversation and I had a sense that I had never lived anywhere because I had never eaten from anywhere. I had never committed myself to a place on the planet and trying to eat in my community made me realize that I am a living creature in a living world and I utterly depend on the abundance, prosperity, plenty of the food system here if I commit to here and so it is my natural desire, if I am my food system, it’s my natural desire to have that be a healthy and plentiful system, which sort of got me into this, the way you act with your family, which is you would do anything for your family because your family is this source of belonging. Well, this became my source of belonging because I live here. It was such a simpler idea but it made me realize how disconnected we all are from our sources of nourishment so that’s when I came to realize that eating is an act of belonging. It expresses your relationship with your place and we’re the only animal that voluntarily eats from beyond what’s in front of them. Every animal is adapted to local eating but we have the privilege of not doing that and I’m not saying to be an extremist. Most people have access to maybe five or ten percent of their food produced within 100 miles.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s pause there and talk about food that’s available to us. Now you have the tremendous opportunity and foresight to have an electric bike and do your rounds and pick up all the local great food that’s close by to you. A lot of people have to rely on supermarkets. Why is part of your thesis on localness and a sense of belonging also partially related to your belief that we have an over-reliance on supermarkets? Can you explain why you feel we have an over-reliance on supermarkets?
VICKI ROBIN: Nothing wrong with supermarkets. I love supermarkets. That’s where I get most of my food but supermarkets are currently constituted as the endpoint of an industrial system. It’s shelf space. It’s competitive for shelf space and large scale processors and producers gain shelf space and part of why they gain shelf space is they can guarantee the grocer an unlimited supply of whatever the product is that they- because you know, the grocery store has to have the appearance of everything is always full at all times or else you’ll go to another grocery store so our expectation is that the grocery store has everything at every hour and in order for the grocery store to accomplish that, their relationships are with the other distributors. Also, it’s very hard for them to have 50 accounts of 50 different growers so that’s what you have in a grocery store, which is why we are very lucky at this point to have the whole market of direct sales, which is the community supported agriculture, the food boxes delivered to your door.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Farmers markets now have come into vogue across America, right?
VICKI ROBIN: Yeah and you know, where you are, in New York City, you have fantastic Union Square. You have farmers markets. These trucks are coming in. You have the Hudson Valley and New Jersey. You have Eastern Long Island. If you go out 100 miles and draw a circle, there is plentiful food, not enough for every New Yorker by a long shot but for people who want it, there’s plentiful food and I just want to point out again that as we learn to cook simple things like grains and beans and oatmeal, as we learn to cook simple whole foods in a way that’s delicious, we’re actually going to cut our food budget. For example, you could cook organic grains in your rice cooker for less time and money than you can cook a pilaf that’s in a box, where you cook the rice and there’s this little packet of seasoning, which is really just oregano and basil and some salt and pepper and maybe some turmeric to make it look yellow. You figure some of these things out and that pilaf takes you more time and attention than your rice cooker.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. You’re right.
VICKI ROBIN: And so this is why you have to see it in a whole system way, where you start to understand that if you increase your competency as a cook, you locate wherever to are. Me, I’m on an island. Some people are in cities but you start to locate your 10 or 100 mile food and you start to commit yourself at least to one grower and buying at least one food from that grower. Then you start to integrate yourself into a very different system and that’s what I’m hoping people will do and for me, I’m a whole systems thinker and an activist so I go from discovering something for my own health and happiness and taking a look at how everybody could have it and so not everybody is going to follow the path that I have but if you want to, you can go to Blessing the Hands Facebook page and follow me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s perfect. Vicki, thank you for your time today. Our listeners out there can go to vickirobin.com. You can also go to Amazon’s website and buy her great book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us or on her website, watch her great TED Talk. Vicki Robin, your words are inspiring to all of us, which makes you truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and we’re so honored to have with us today Kyle Wiens. He’s the Co-Founder and CEO of iFixit,
ifixit.com. Welcome to Green is Good, Kyle.
KYLE WIENS: Hey. Thanks for having me on.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey Kyle, first time on this show. We’re so excited to have you on because you really are changing the world for the better but before we get into your great website, ifixit.com and what it does, talk a little bit about the Kyle Wiens story, the biography, your history. You’re still a very young man. What got you to this point of co-founding this great website and what did you do before?
KYLE WIENS: Sure. I grew up in Oregon and moved down to California to go to engineering school and I was a couple months into engineering school when I dropped my laptop off of the bed and on to the power plug and it was one of those things where if I held it just right, I could get it to work and I thought there’s got to be a way. Inside there was just a loose connection and it’s working sometimes if I wiggle it just right so I started to try to take that computer apart to put a little bit of solder on that connection that was broken and I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out how to take it apart. Folks my age tend to assume that if information exists, it’s on the internet and so I started Googling for disassembly instructions. I wanted the service manual for the computer so I could get inside it and I couldn’t find that information anywhere so I ended up getting the computer apart but I broke some stuff along the way, got it back together. I got the computer working but it wasn’t as good as it would have been if I had had a manual and so I started doing a little bit of digging to see why isn’t there a service manual for this computer. I learned that Apple has specifically been using legal threats to keep their service manuals off the internet. They don’t want anyone but their technicians to know how to fix their computers. There’s a lot of reasons for it but one reason is planned obsolescence. They just want you to move on to the next product and so I said that’s not really okay and in a fit of peak, I figured out how to take the computer apart. I know how to do it now. I didn’t before but I know it now so why don’t I take some pictures, put them online, and we’ll see what happens so we did that and that’s kind of the nice thing about being young and stupid is you don’t really know what’s not possible. Nobody told me I couldn’t write a repair manual for Apple’s laptops. I just did it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right and therefore, that was the epiphany and the aha moment of starting to think there’s probably a lot of other OEMs that need this to be done and I’m going to do it.
KYLE WIENS: I didn’t think there was going to be a whole lot of demand. I did it for my own gratification. I put it online and we had like 10,000 hits the first weekend that we put this repair guide online. Clearly, there’s a lot of pent up demand for this. People want to get in to fix these things so we started writing manuals for more things and covering more OEMs and I think it just kind of snowballed from there.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What year did you launch iFixit.com? For our listeners out there, it’s
www.iFixit.com. Simple and it says exactly what it is. What year did you launch that site?
KYLE WIENS: We started back in 2003 so we’ve been at it almost ten years. It’s a little more than ten years and we’ve just been systematically adding more repair guides and it’s a community site so anybody can share manuals so if you know how to fix a blender or a toaster or a digital camera, you can take some photos of the process and share it on the site and over the course of the last decade, collaborating with repair technicians and interesting people around the world, we’ve managed to build the largest online repair manual.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Unbelievable and I know you’re a humble guy but I’m on your website now. First of all, it’s visually beautiful and it’s easy to operate and easy to work with but let’s talk about these 11 fascinating years. How big is the site now in terms of traffic and how big is it in terms of compendium of information, of how many items you could find manuals for to fix?
KYLE WIENS: We help over 3 million people a month, all around the world learning how to fix things. I got an email from somebody last week saying, ‘Hey thanks, I fixed my toaster using a manual on the site. Somebody posted a photo on Twitter this morning of them fixing their iPhone. It was probably a dead battery. The batteries on these phones go out after a year or so and it’s pretty easy to out a new battery in an iPhone so people all around the world in every country on earth are able to get online, get access to the free information, and learn how to do the repairs.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And now there’s hundred of thousands of repair manuals on your great website?
KYLE WIENS: We have right now about 10,000 repair guides but more are being added every single day.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. Do you still get the same satisfaction now that it’s 2014 when you get these photos or these emails? Three million people. Talk about a person and talk about a company that’s making the world a better place. Are you still as jazzed as ever before when you even started the company?
KYLE WIENS: Yeah, I feel like we’re still just getting started. There are so many things out there that people just don’t know how they work anymore. We’ve kind of forgotten how physical things work and the moment that you open any kind of electronics, it’s challenging. It takes you out of your comfort zone and most of us are not electrical engineers. We’re not really accustomed to what’s inside these electronics but if you have a repair guide to walk you through the process, I think it’s really impressive what people can do.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so great and then e waste, I know that’s a growing problem. It’s probably the fastest growing solid waste stream in the world. What got you specifically into e waste? I know that you’re bombarded with so much information every day and have so many things pulling at you. Why e waste being an interesting topic that you’ve taken a larger interest in?
KYLE WIENS: I’ve been really interested in the problem for a while and I had heard a lot of environmental groups and Greenpeace talking about the problem and I wasn’t really sure whether to believe them or not and I had heard reports of some of the electronic burnings that had happened around the world where people are mining electronics for raw materials and I decided to go and find out for myself so I went to Ghana and Agbogbloshie, which is this famous scrap yard in Ghana, just to visit and talk to these guys and find out what they’re doing and it turns out a lot of these folks that are mining these things for raw materials would much rather be repairing them than burning them and getting a small amount of copper out of these old computers. They just don’t know how. They don’t have the knowledge and the training. The manufacturers, ‘We only make service information available to our authorized service centers’. Apple and HP and Dell don’t have authorized service centers in Accra, Ghana. They’re not over there training anybody and so what ends up happening is you have all these very complex toxic electronics that end up in Africa because people need to use electronics in Africa. They don’t have a formal recycling channel there and they don’t have the information they need on how to repair and maintain and keep these things lasting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so you went there first hand and met the people there?
KYLE WIEN: I tend to not trust other folks. I want to see with my own eyes and talk to people and really understand the problem from beginning to end and it starts with when you’re digging raw materials out of the ground to make a product and goes through however long people are using things and then where these things end up at the end of life, I really wanted to know and there’s a global travel of these electronics that is completely unintuitive. You know, you might use a phone for a while and then sell it and then where does it end up afterwards?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. Let’s go back to a couple of words that you used at the top of the show. Is planned obsolescence, the words you used, still a problem, the issue that’s underlying e waste and other items right now?
KYLE WIEN: You can ask yourself why can’t you put additional storage in an iPad? iPads come with 16 gigabytes, 32 gigabytes. It would be super easy and there’s still plenty of space inside for there to be a micro USB slot for storage in your iPad but they make so much money selling those upgraded models, they want to push you on to the next one. There’s no way they’re going to make it upgradeable.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So planned obsolescence is still really part of our society in so many ways with products.
KYLE WIEN: I think there’s an opportunity for consumers to push back. The manufacturers that have been making renewable upgradeable products haven’t been rewarded in the marketplace so we’re seeing products like, people might not realize the iPad is glued together. It’s not upgradeable. It’s got a battery that lasts a couple of years and then it’s designed to go in the trash.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so excited to have Kyle Wiens with us. He’s the Co-Founder and CEO of iFixit.com,
www.iFixit.com, very simple and intuitive and just an amazing website, 3 million people a month, over 10,000 manuals on how to fix your own materials. Kyle, what are the most common breakdowns now with regards to PCs, smartphones, other electronics? What are the most common that you get emails or you get queries on?
KYLE WIEN: The most common thing is batteries in phones, particularly phones that have batteries where you can’t just pop the back panel off and put a new battery in so that’s phones like the iPhone and a bunch of others, where you have to have special screwdrivers to get in. It’s usually pretty easy to swap the batteries once you get in. You just have to have the right tools so that’s number one. Broken glass on tablets and smartphones is number two so whether that’s a Galaxy Tab or an iPad or a Dell tablet, all the way over to on the phones, Samsung Galaxy S3 and 4 and the iPhones and HTCs. It’s pretty straightforward to get replacement glass for those devices. We sell replacement screens and tools but you can get them from a variety of places and that’s why you’re seeing all these small local repair shops popping up all over the place. They’re just using the online manuals and parts they can get online to do repairs.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right. When we talk about planned obsolescence, since you’ve been at this specifically for 11 years, with regards to the technological revolution, 11 years makes you really like one of the godfathers of the industry then. Are the lives getting shorter or standing still or getting longer? If you were to choose between all three of those, when you see the biggest OEMs, are they creating shorter lives?
KYLE WIEN: That’s a good question. It depends. I think the trend that we’re seeing recently is laptops in general have been lasting longer, the upgrades cycles on laptops, and I don’t think people have much of a problem holding onto a laptop for five years now. Where we’re seeing accelerated life spans is on the cell phones and tablets. The average American hangs on to a cell phone for about 18 months now. Even though the contract is two years, we’re only using the phones for 18 months and there’s a couple reasons for that but I think the biggest driver is that the batteries in phones only last for about 400 charges so at the end of 400 charges, the battery is pretty weak. It’s not intuitive how easy it is to replace batteries in these things. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, the battery isn’t lasting that long, Let me just go and get a new one,’ so that’s a result of the manufacturers building a consumable end of the device that’s not replaceable. A battery is just like the tires in your car. It’s something that needs to be replaced after a while.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Besides a brilliant entrepreneur like you, who has now evolved to become, really in many ways, a social entrepreneur or a conscious capitalist in that what you’re really doing and the problems that you’re solving, you’ve changed the world on a micro basis with your amazing website. Basically, you’ve democratized the process. On a macro scale, what policy changes are required to encourage more repairs to happen?
KYLE WIEN: Right so our goal is to shift people’s behavior and our culture around our things away from a culture where we’re just consuming thing after thing to start to be where we’re more a part of the process and that involves getting information in the hands of more people. We’ve been writing repair manuals as fast as we can for ten years and we’ve got 10,000 repair guides online. The problem is that at CES, the big Consumer Electronics Show every January, they introduce about 20,000 new electronic gizmos so as fast as we can write manuals and get them online, we’re not able to keep up.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s interesting. Wow, gotcha.
KYLE WIEN: And the great irony of what we do at iFixit gathering information and putting it online, is that the manufacturers already have repair manuals for everything that we’re disassembling and figuring out how to fix. They’re just not sharing it with the rest of us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: No kidding. I’m sure you’ve gotten their attention by now. Even at this point, they haven’t tried to broker a truce with you and just hand them over?
KYLE WIEN: I don’t know. You’d be surprised. Well, you tell me, on the electronics recycling side, do you get information from manufacturers on how to recycle electronics?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: No, they’re asking us typically. They’re asking us. They want to come and watch us recycle it so they can maybe make it better. Actually, in the last years, they’re coming and watching us recycle so in theory, they can make their products greener with less disposable materials, more recyclable materials or make the products more recyclable. That goes for some of the OEMs. Obviously, as you know and I know, some of the OEMs never come to our facilities and watch us recycle because that’s, again, not their goal so you’re absolutely right.
KYLE WIEN: Again, that’s a good thing that they’re watching but it seems crazy to me that you’re the one doing the R and D on their behalf to figure out how to recycle their product.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re 100% right. That’s a great point and that’s a fascinating data point. CES puts out, highlights or platforms 20,000 new products and to me, 10,000 manuals sounds amazing. That’s what you’ve accomplished in 11 years with 3 million people a month. That’s amazing but I guess, like you say, we have a long way to go yet and speaking of that, when I asked you about how you feel after 11 years and you still feel like it’s the top of the first or second inning, which is such a great way of putting it, where is this going to go? Where is iFixit going to go and where do you want it to go in the next three to five years? As an entrepreneur, what’s your vision, Kyle?
KYLE WIEN: Sure. Our mission is to teach everyone how to fix everything. That’s where we’re going. iFixit is like Wikipedia. We are the comprehensive place where you go to learn how to fix anything and if we don’t have the repair information yet for how to fix the thing you’ve got that’s broken, then that’s something we need to work on and we’re adding more manuals all the time for things like appliances and we even have how to change the oil on a John Deere tractor so our goal is to get the information in the hands of the people that need it and we’re going to keep plugging away, whether that’s us creating manuals or partnering with manufacturers or even, there’s been some work to pass some right to repair laws recently. In Massachusetts last year, they passed a right to repair law that requires manufacturers to share service information about cars and that’s fantastic. That’s what the local repair shops need and that’s our goal is to get that kind of information out there so when people have stuff that’s broken, they can actually affect a repair.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Now that your company has become very successful, Kyle, and quite large in terms of its touch and its relevance and value, who do you look up to as an entrepreneur? Who is your CEO role model that’s out there and doing it right and someone that can help guide your company in terms of evolution and things of that such? Do you have one or two role models that you could share with our audience that you look up to currently?
KYLE WIEN: Sure. That’s a great question. Probably the company and the CEO that I look up to the most in the world right now is Patagonia. Patagonia has a company ethos that carries through everything that they do. Yvon Chouinard, the Co-Founder and CEO, making climbing gear and then they got into clothing and they have really gone all the way to the roots. They’ll go to the farms where they’re growing cotton and then they share and they show photos and they tell people, ‘Here’s the farms. This is where it goes all the way through. Here’s the geese that we’re plucking the down from to make the down jackets,’ so I think there’s an honesty in what they do and an authenticity that has been very impressive.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so interesting. We’re down to the last two minutes or so. There’s a lot of young people that listen to this show, not only in the United States, Kyle, on Clear Channel’s iHeart network, but also after it uploads on iTunes. We get thousands of iTunes downloads every week around the world and there’s a lot of people that will look at what you do but I love the photo of you. It is like the great All-American entrepreneur and our listeners can go and see it on greenisgoodradio.com but what can you share backwards with the youth around the world that want to be an entrepreneur like you that makes the world a better place?
KYLE WIEN: There’s something that I said about being young and not knowing what’s not possible. I would say don’t take no for an answer and don’t be afraid to fail because sometimes, if you set your expectations a little lower and you say, ‘I have no idea whether this is going to work or not. Let’s just try it,’ and that’s something as we get older, we have more fear of failing and so we take fewer chances and we tend to do less interesting things. I would chase any opportunity no matter how crazy it seems.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great and Kyle, I just want to say this: I think what you’re doing is so important. Being in the e waste industry myself and having just a snippet of knowledge of what’s going on, what iFixit is doing is truly revolutionary in so many ways and is really making the world a better place and for our listeners out there that want to share their version of a manual back with Kyle or go and learn how to fix something, please go to Kyle’s great website,
www.ifixit.com. It’s a great website. It’s easy to access and easy to use and I encourage everybody to be part of the process and part of the solution. Again, Kyle, this was great today. Thank you so much for coming on Green is Good and we’re going to have you back on so you can continue to tell your story and thank you again for creating a great website that democratizes our ability to fix electronics. You’re a sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and I’m so excited to have my friend on as our second guest, Leo Raudys. Leo is the Founder of and the social entrepreneur and conscious capitalist behind Riduvit. Welcome back to Green is Good, Leo Raudys.
LEO RAUDYS: Hi, John. Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey Leo, even though I know the story, and I’ve known you for many years now, I want you to share with our listeners who Leo Raudys is, where you’ve been, and how you’ve got to become now a conscious capitalist and a social entrepreneur, really changing the world with your great new company, Riduvit.
LEO RAUDYS: Oh thanks. Yeah, you know, there’s a whole lot to say but I’ll just boil it down to the essentials. I’ve spent most of my adult life in the environmental protection field, primarily on the regulatory side but I moved over into the private sector about five or six years ago to focus on some trends that I thought were pretty compelling around electronic waste and the need to more properly manage all that stuff that we’re generating as a culture so I spent just quite a bit of time, again, on the regulatory side, working in policy, helping to make the world a better place and went on to do I think some interesting things on the business side and that leads me to where I am today, decided to found a company that focuses squarely on trying to help businesses make it easier to recycle electronics.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Also, let’s be honest here. You’re a very humble guy. I’ve known you for years. You’re a great friend and I’m so excited to have you on because your new business has so much to offer our listeners out there and around the world but before we get there, you were one of the big guys. You were the Head of Environmental Sustainability at Best Buy and I don’t want our listeners to not know that because that’s so important. You were both on the public side, a very integral part of one of the most successful takeback programs in all the world, actually and now you’ve come to this point with Riduvit.
LEO RAUDYS: Yeah, thanks. My time at Best Buy was extremely rewarding. I just worked with some amazing people and learned quite a bit but I thought we did some pretty nice things and I look back on that time very, very fondly.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Now you’ve done those two pillars of your adult life, the Best Buy experience on the corporate side, your public policy work prior to that and the public service work you did. What was the aha moment to make you create Riduvit? And before we go into that, I want our listeners to go to your website. It’s beautiful. It’s so well done and it’s also spelled really differently. It’s
www.riduvit.com. Share that epiphany moment or how that aha thing happened for you.
LEO RAUDYS: Yeah. Well, let me first just tell you what it is, which I think will help you sort of set the stage. Very simply, it’s an online platform that makes it easier for companies to find very qualified and cost effective recyclers to recycle electronics and ITS and the key word there is responsibly and when I talk about electronics and ITS, it’s typically what you would think of, computers, mobile devices, TVs, stereos, pretty much anything with a chip or a board in it is the best way to think about what we cover but as far as how I came to this idea, over the last five years, as you mentioned, I’ve been deeply involved in efforts to make it easier for consumers to recycle responsibly and again, responsibly is the key word because, as you know, too often that’s still not the case but even though it’s gotten better over time, there’s still a lot of room for improvement on the consumer side of things but on the business side of things, it’s still an extraordinarily confusing landscape. It’s unfortunate but it’s still too hard for companies to find reliable, responsible recyclers that are also cost-effective and the funny thing is, it’s kind of a paradox of choice out there because there are hundred of recyclers on the market and companies have a hard time making the right choice because there are so many so they’ll either make a wrong choice or they won’t make a choice at all and either one of those choices, in my opinion, is a risk. What I did was started doing some research in the market and pretty quickly found two things to be true and we found these things to be true over and over and over again. First, we figured out that companies just don’t understand what third party certification means when it comes to electronics recycling or why they should even care and specifically, I’m talking about e stewards and R2. These are the two third party certifications for electronics recycling so just a fundamental lack of awareness and understanding. Second is it’s apparent that very few people understand how the industry has been changing over the past few years and why those changes have improved things, both on the security side -When I say security, I mean both data and environmental- but also on pricing so as business models have evolved, as capabilities have evolved, as companies have gotten bigger and more sophisticated on the recycling side, it’s pretty clear that the companies that need those services really haven’t kept pace with that so what does that mean? It means that companies who need the recycling service are not getting the help that they deserve and they’re probably paying too much for it so based on these two observations, it’s led me to conclude that there’s a pretty significant marketing opportunity out there and it centers around just the notion of simplicity. I know you’re a fan of Richard Branson. he talks about complexity being the enemy and specifically, there’s this great quote that he has. He says, “Any fool can make something complicated. It’s hard to make something simple,” and I completely agree with him and it absolutely applies to this problem so I decided to do something about it . I took something that’s way too complicated for companies and I boiled it down to its simplest elements and those are service, risk, and cost.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great so let’s talk about that. What are the costs of using your great website? For listeners who have just joined us, we’ve got my friend on, Leo Raudys. He’s now an entrepreneur who has started a website,
www.riduvit.com. Talk a little bit about the costs of service and what you’re providing with this great website.
LEO RAUDYS: Well, it’s free to use and that’s part of the beauty of it. If you’re a company that needs to find a responsible recycler, you can use it for free to get connected with companies that I think are the best in the business so no commissions, no membership fees. The ultimate cost of a recycling program is going to depend on a number of things so you can imagine if you’re a company that has a load of electronics, whether it’s servers or iPads or devices, etcetera. Based upon where they are and what they need and what that material is, it’s going to cost them X or Y or Z but the cost to use the service to get in touch with those recyclers and to find the best in the business is free. The way I look at the value that we’re able to provide companies that use us is they can essentially take comfort in knowing they are working with recyclers that have been vetted and we have all their certifications on file. I’ve visited the facilities and I know the people very well and for companies that have a lot of other things to do. They’re running a business. They can’t necessarily afford the time or the energy or the money to do that vetting so we do that for them, essentially for free.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: This goes back to your history though because both as a regulator and a business leader, this is sort of the convergence and culmination of all of your experience in that you know the companies that you’re pointing people to. You also know the pitfalls and the real bad things that could happen if people recycle their electronics incorrectly. Can you share that a little bit? Because it used to be all about the environment and it still is in many ways, Leo, but can you share a little bit about what’s going on now with regards to data protection and whether you’re the person on the street or a government agency, a small company, or a big publicly traded company that warehouses lots of information for lots of your clients. How does this all play into the great model that you created at
riduvit.com?
LEO RAUDYS: Yeah. Thanks. I definitely lean on my experience as a past regulator and enforcer of regulations to think about how I approach this business. In the case of electronics recycling, this is just a huge issue so if I go back to the time that I spent as a regulator, I can tell you that I’ve seen the good. I’ve seen the bad. I’ve seen the ugly and everything in between and the truth of the matter is at least in recycling or any business, there are good actors out there and there are bad actors out there and then there’s just a whole lot that’s in between and unfortunately, when it comes to recycling electronics and ITS, the margin of error is extremely thin. You mentioned data security issues. That’s just a huge risk that companies are able to manage. particularly today. There is no excuse for taking risks with customer or company data by improperly recycling or liquidating old products so just think about all the news around data breaches lately. It’s only going to continue and the sad fact is that cyber criminals are always going to find the easiest ways to steal your data and the analogy I like to use is if you leave your door open when you leave for work in the morning, you think about that in the context of improperly recycling or liquidating electronics. It’s like leaving the door open and it’s going to leave it open to trouble and eventually it will walk right in and it’s going to do something bad.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk a little bit about the possibilities. When you were envisioning Riduvit, who are your potential target markets that you’re looking to guide the right way and advise the right way in terms of responsibly disposing of their electronic equipment and waste?
LEO RAUDYS: Yeah, well, the universe can potentially be pretty broad. I mean any company that has electronics or IT equipment to recycle can use the service but for our purposes, the first year we’re targeting a handful of sectors. We’re targeting banks, law firms, retailers, the Telecom industry, and hospitality industry and the reason we’re focusing on those industries first is that they tend to have more dispersed operations and can probably more greatly benefit from the scale that we bring to bear so all the recyclers that we work with are national scale so we can cover the entire continental US so that’s our target market and I should also mention that we also provide this service for liquidating electronic products. We think about retailers, for example, that have to liquidate returned or damaged electronics and this could be quite a bit of material. There are liquidation channels out there that do that work and some of them are not third party certified, which I think is pretty important from a risk management perspective so we provide a service to responsibly and at a lower risk liquidate those electronics that have to go out the backdoor of a retailer. I just can’t imagine a CEO these days that doesn’t spend at least part of his or her day thinking about data security, how to avoid having a problem and I think we feel that our service is giving somebody some peace of mind.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, you know, if we all think about sustainability as a global issue but we say think globally, act locally. What’s more local than the cell phone or the iPad or the laptop, our possession as to how to dispose of our own things as concerned people correctly? Then when you start thinking about environmentally, as you say, responsibly, which I think is the best way of putting it, then thinking about our own personal data, you scale that up to any company that we all work for or are involved with or know, I think then almost everyone is a potential universe of clients down the road. Is that not true?
LEO RAUDYS: Absolutely and it’s exactly for those reasons and it really does come down to those two compelling risk issues, the environment and data, and each of them presents its own particular set of problems and absolutely, we live in a global economy and all these products that we’re talking about, they move around the world as global commodities but the fact of the matter remains that all too much of it still moves around without the appropriate security or environmental control so if you can imagine, if you’re disposing of some sort of electronic device and it ends up in a place in the world that you don’t want it to end up in, bad things can happen, either to the data or from an environmental perspective because it’s just not being managed properly so it’s definitely a problem that’s still out there and I’ve seen this both as a regulator and in my work at Best Buy and I hope that we continue to make progress in some pretty compelling problems.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What changes are you seeing? What trends do you have visibility on that you feel will help make Riduvit even more compelling as the months and year ahead of us continue to move forward?
LEO RAUDYS: I’d say it’s two things. One is that IT spending is still pretty healthy. One of the reports that I just read, well north of 400 billion is going to be spent worldwide on IT purchasing so that’s new stuff and new stuff replaces old stuff. That means that there’s a lot of equipment that’s going to need recycling so I think it just feeds the overall growth and it’s already a pretty large recycling market. Then the second one is what we’ve already been talking about, which is increasing emphasis on data security so I believe that there are going to be many more companies out there asking a lot harder questions about where their electronics are going and who’s handling them and I think in years past and maybe even months past, many companies could get away with just doing what they would normally do. I just don’t think that that’s going to continue. I think there’s a much greater demand for data security and transparency around where things are going and I think that’s just going to drive more business our way.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Leo, last week in Washington D.C., there was a hearing on electronic waste. One of the senators held a hearing. Can you share a little bit about what’s going on with the federal government, the GSA and this issue of cyber security around electronic waste and, again, responsible recycling of electronic waste? What’s the connection between what’s happening with the US federal government and cyber security and what Riduvit is doing and wants to continue to do and to grow with?
LEO RAUDYS: I think at a policy level, things are moving forward slowly in bits and pieces and unfortunately, we haven’t been able to land on a national regulatory framework for e waste recycling. I think there are some protections in place but I think pretty much anybody who knows anything about this area believes that more can be done, that there needs to be a national framework, similar to what’s happened in half the states in the United States so the hearing once again was an opportunity to hear about what’s happening on a policy level to get a handle on control and where this stuff is going and making sure that it’s responsibly recycled but the very interesting thing from my perspective is what’s happening on the cyber security side so the federal government issued a cyber security framework a few weeks ago that they’ve been working on for quite some time and it’s a fairly simple approach, I think, and it’s just basically a framework for managing cyber security risks. What I was very happy to see was that the framework specifically called out the need to have formal approaches for managing the disposal and recycling of ITS and so I think that’s going to move companies more and more in the direction of having formal processes set up and thinking about who they’re using on the back end to recycle these goods because it’s being called out as a potential security threat.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know we’re down to the last two minutes here and for a budding and growing audience who wants to be entrepreneurs, who want to be the next Leo Raudys, who want to change the world for the better and make the world a better place. Any good advice on how to be more involved and how to be a conscious capitalist or a responsible entrepreneur?
LEO RAUDYS: I would just say that you just have to pursue your passion with a tremendous amount of dedication and recognize the fact that there is really enormous amount of opportunity out there in areas that provide a significant social and environmental benefit so if you have a passion for that type of work, and you have an area of expertise that aligns with that, go for it and pour your heart and soul into it and I think you’ll find success and I think that’s true in any endeavor but certainly when it comes to developing businesses in a social environmental space. I think it really comes from a point of passion.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right and that’s a perfect way to leave today and I’m so happy, Leo, you came back on Green is Good and now with your new venture and I can’t wait to have you back on to discuss how it’s evolving and how it’s growing and I’m sure it’s going to be a massive success and for our listeners out there again who want to use Leo’s great new website, please go to
www.riduvit.com. Leo Raudys, you continue to be a sustainability superstar and are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good and we’re so excited to have today with us Marc Dreyfors. He’s the Founder of Greenway Transit. Welcome to Green is Good, Marc.
MARC DREYFORS: Hey, we’re excited too.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey Marc, we’re so happy to have you. Before we get into talking about your great company, Greenway Transit, and all the nice things you’re doing with it, can you share a little bit about your journey, your story, how you even got here, and why you started this company?
MARC DREYFORS: Yeah, I grew up in D.C. and I spent a lot of time in the woods as a child and saw the world change around me pretty quickly as development started creeping into my childhood woods and then moved to North Carolina and kind of saw the same thing happening there, where we kind of love nature to death a little bit too much and went to U.N.C. Wilmington undergrad and did my masters at Duke, studied Environmental Chemistry and then did Resource Economics at Duke and became kind of fascinated with big picture issues, particularly with market externalities and loss of biodiversity, the problem with our economy and why it’s not really valuing the important things in life at a proper valuation. Got interested in fair trade, biodiversity concentration, and did handicraft development for about 20 years and then just saw that market get more and more difficult. We did trade shows across the United States, in New York, Atlanta, San Francisco and we were trying to sell these beautiful handicrafts from very biologically diverse places to all sorts of stores and shops and it became more challenging and even putting a carbon footprint price on those goods that are traded internationally became really challenging so we just said, ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s go local,’ and biodiesel was the thing. We thought that biodiesel made from local waste was a real smart and potentially profitable way to go and then started moving a lot of biodiesel and then learned that that was kind of a volume game. People didn’t want to pay a whole lot for their fuel. We’ve been both blessed and cursed with cheap energy and it was kind of a challenge to get people to pay for the bio even though it’s so valuable to us and then we got into this idea of moving people around in buses and that actually took off and there’s plenty of margin there and it’s just been a really awesome opportunity.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So you started Greenway Transit in 2008 so talk a little bit about the genesis of Greenway Transit now that you gave the back story. Why did you decide to create your own brand and how has that been since 2008? We’re now in 2014 so you’re six years into it. How has that evolution been?
MARC DREYFORS: Well, we’re cranking at this point. It took a little while. We bought an old bus, got one available to us and just started moving people around. We got phone calls from people asking for buses that are running on biodiesel and we kept calling the local bus companies saying, ‘Hey, you want to buy some of our biodiesel and run people around? We’re getting a lot of calls.’ They just did not want to touch it and we were like, ‘You know, let’s go for it. Let’s try it out’. From all the guys that we knew, it’s just a plug and play fuel. It runs in any diesel engine and you don’t have to do that much changes, a couple filter changes and you’re there, so we started growing the business from that and it just took off. It’s done really really well for us. There’s still challenges. Right now, we’re in another polar vortex and biodiesel doesn’t do really great in the winter time but it’s working and people appreciate the message. We do a lot of protest bus. We move a lot of students around in Durham. We don’t even do that much marketing. It’s just by word of mouth that people found out about us and it’s really kind of a community that really appreciates what we’re doing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about your business model. I’m on your website and for our listeners out there that want to go and see what you’re really doing and see your great website, please go to
www.iridegreen.com. It’s a beautiful website. It’s very simple but can you walk our listeners through if they want to sign up or they want to become a part of the Greenway Transit system?
MARC DREYFORS: Yeah, I think most of our customers are searching us on the way and they find out about us but then once they do, the word moves around but the site is simple and we wanted it that way. We like the simplicity of the message too, what we’re trying to achieve, waste to fuel to transportation, real simple business model. Most of our customers are local so I’d say 80 percent of our gigs are party bus or moving people for conferences but then we do have some intrastate and interstate so there’s a section there that shows you the type of equipment that we have so you can go to that and see. Most of the time, it’s people asking me questions and I ask them to send me an email with exactly what it is that they need and I just respond with the best solution. We’re really about energy efficiency. We don’t want those buses to be idling. We don’t want the buses to not be utilized in the most efficient manner so we tend to end up both saving them money and also lowering our footprint at the same time, which is kind of the unique thing about being green and being in this type of business so the website’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s real easy. We’ve got information about the background on us, information on the vehicles, our rates. Our rates are competitive. We offer a competitive service to other non green, non alternative fuel companies. It’s a highly competitive industry and is pretty heavily regulated as well so we maintain our certifications, do inspections, have a high level of maintenance on the vehicles so that’s all important. It’s all in there on the website so people can understand that we’re not only a competitor to the other companies but we have a different value proposition.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And it says you have everything from the big pink party bus to pedicabs so is it all sorts of events and trips that you’re being hired to handle?
MARC DREYFORS: Yeah, we do a lot of weddings. The pedicabs are great for weddings. We take the bride and groom away from wherever the reception is to the hotel or take them for just a short trip as an exit and then we have larger vehicles that allow people to move around and then interstate types of tour buses but I would say the majority of our services are party busing people at the fraternities and sororities here in the area. They’re interested in greening. They know what’s coming down the road and we offer them a pretty good competitive service and then it’s also just an opportunity to give them our elevator speech about what we’re doing. We’re trying to brand the message both internally and externally on the buses and get the information out to the students about what it is we’re trying to achieve and how they can plug in.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right, right, and for our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Marc Dreyfors with us. He’s the Founder of Greenway Transit and to learn more about Marc’s company, go to
www.iridegreen.com. Marc, give our listeners just a quick overview. Running this kind of green transportation company that relies on a certain type of energy rather than one that runs on fossil fuel, what is the differential there and is it more difficult?
MARC DREYFORS: It’s hands down more difficult. There’s no doubt and I can understand why a lot of the bus companies are like you know, forget about it. There are challenges. Biodiesel is a beautiful fuel. It is amazing and it’s such an awesome fuel it really needs to be in every school bus across the country. We just can’t produce enough of it to make a real dent and there are complications. When you put biodiesel into a diesel vehicle that’s been running a long time on diesel, for instance, you will be cleaning out the whole system. Biodiesel has a solvent effect so you will be changing fuel filters probably a little bit more and after a while, it will clean the system out and then you’re back to a normal fuel filter change but then there’s issues of the solvent effect on fuel lines. You can break down the old rubber fuel lines pretty quickly, depending on how degraded they are, and so you may have to swap out fuel lines but that’s an easy fix. The storage of the biodiesel is another thing. We’ve got to bring it in. We were making it for a while and it’s just more cost effective for us to collect the veggie oil, sell it, and buy the fuel from some of the other producers in the area. We had about 100,000 gallon capacity reactor system and there’s a lot of bells and whistles there and a lot of variability and volatility in the availability of the raw materials to make the fuel so it’s so much easier for us, given the fact that we’re 100 percent in on the transportation, to just focus on that right now and we can make fuel at any time and we’re collecting the veggie oil and it’s not a problem to make. It’s actually pretty easy chemistry. The storage of the fuel is really important to keep the tanks really clean, make sure that there’s no moisture in them so that algae doesn’t grow.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So let’s just say there’s a lot more to it than just meets the eye. It takes a lot more work on your behalf. How about the savings? If I use your transportation, for our listeners out there, and list your transportation over traditional types of transportation, what are the fuel savings because you’re using?
MARC DREYFORS: That’s a great question and usually that’s the one and usually that’s the one everybody goes to. Will I save money? I would say no, you’re not going to save money but it has about the same B.T.U. value as regular diesel. It increases lubricity so that the engine runs more easily and it has higher compressibility. In other words, from compression to ignition, it’s faster so the engine works more efficiently so the B.T.U. ends up being, the amount of energy that you get out, the miles per gallon, ends up being about the same. You’re getting about the same miles per gallon so you’re going to be paying. Right now, we can go to rack and get the fuel at about 40 cents cheaper than the current diesel price at the pump so we have a tanker truck. We go to the rack and fill up and get 2,000 gallons at a time, bring it back to our site, drop it in our storage tank, and then run it into our buses. We also have wholesale customers that we deliver to and a couple of retail pumps that we run so we’re pretty busy but having those additional revenue streams helps move volume and that makes things a little bit easier.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So it’s just not about the vehicles, you’re actually a green company in many aspects?
MARC DREYFORS: Right. It’s a hybrid model. We have multiple green businesses sharing the site. We all help each other out. We use a non profit to manage the site. It’s an old brownfield petroleum site that we’re fixing up and it’s a great model. We run a green jobs training program at our site, working with ex offenders and underemployed so we’re doing a lot. We’re trying to maximize the use of the property so it’s a real commercial property play in that we have multiple green businesses there but we’re actually revitalizing and fixing up a piece of green property, our brownfield property, trying to turn it green at our site.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s always fun to understand your client base right now. Why are people coming to you? Is it the young students all around North Carolina who are on fire for the green and sustainability revolution or is it others now who really see the opportunity to the fact that we are on a tipping point in this world and that we’ve got to make better choices and the age group of your clients has really changed and has grown? What is the social study behind your client base?
MARC DREYFORS: Yeah, that’s a great question and it’s really, to me, the most fascinating element of what we do. Our population of customers is very diverse. Some people just hire us because we’re competitive in prices and then all of a sudden, they realize that we’re green and it’s kind of hilarious. Some of these people are pretty conservative and are like, ‘Maybe we should have gone with the petroleum company,’ but we get them on board and give them our spiel and if they don’t get it, we have to drive them around the block one more time. It’s kind of a captured audience. There is just a huge following from a passionate group of both young and old. We ran ten buses down to the Moral Monday protests in Raleigh, which are some of the biggest protests in America right now, in the backlash of G.O.P. nuttiness and the crazy legislation that they’re trying to pass through and we run protest buses up to D.C. all the time so that’s about a six hour run and we’ve got a group of Planned Parenthood folks that are headed to the protest at the Supreme Court at the end of this month. I just came back from the Keystone Pipeline protest this weekend, where the kids were lashing themselves to the White House fence and getting arrested. We are really about mission and building movement. What’s so cool though about the bus business is that it’s heavily dominated by minority communities. Most of our drivers, of course, are minorities, most of the bus companies that are out there that are our competitors that are also our friends. In the bus business, buses go down and you want a bus to be there and so we have very good extensive friendships amongst our competitors, who tend to be almost all African American and they’re really cool people and they tend to be like lay ministers, involved in churches within the minority communities, throughout our community and this area, so there’s a connection and there’s opportunity to build movement for this national transformation, this global transformation, and how we both interact with each other and interact with the planet and that, we feel, is the core component of our mission at this point, to build that relationship.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so interesting and we’re down to the last four minutes or so, so not only are you doing jobs training and making the most, as you say, of your property and of your business model, but you are an activist organization in many ways so you’re not only part of the sustainability evolution. You’re really on the cutting edge of the revolution.
MARC DREYFORS: Absolutely. Well, that’s our tagline. We’re a revolution in motion.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome.
MARC DREYFORS: Really what we see with this model, the idea is that we’ve got to build resiliency at a local level very, very fast and the idea of waste to fuel to transportation is a really good tool chest of opportunities for communities that both want to fix up urban areas that have been blighted. You can take over a brownfield, use some of the infrastructure that the petroleum industry has left behind and green those places and spaces, interact with the community, but I see that this model can be brought to scale, the appropriate scale for each community, taking the waste stream and turning it into fuel and value adding it. Then it can be implemented in other communities where they have a passion to become more green and more sustainable and more resilient but the most important thing is that when you make fuel locally, when you make biodiesel locally, that money stays in the community, and we lose money out of our communities by both food, energy, and capital so if we can figure out ways to plug that leakage, we can create more jobs within our community and build that resiliency and if we add the social justice component of really reaching out to minority communities, we’ve got something really solid and it’s just amazing the messages that we are able to convey to the people that we work with, the community membership who we’re working with and our clients and folks that we are working with in the community.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: In the last couple minutes, let’s talk about the future here. Greenway Transit won People and Planet Award, big award. How come and when is Greenway Transit, then going to scale up and go to every city? Because it sounds like you have an amazing model. There’s so much that can be accomplished in the community with your model. What’s the future hold for your great company?
MARC DREYFORS: Well, we’re working on an investors’ circle elevator kind of presentation so we’re hoping to get some capital. We need to buy the property that we’re in right now and that’s top priority so then we can make some investments and improve the site and really crank it up a notch but we’re also looking to maybe go on a dog and pony show and maybe exhibit at the green festivals and tell our story to other folks and find other organizations that we can partner with. We don’t necessarily want to open up a Greenway Transit in every college town but we certainly want to find partners that can take some of what we’re doing and maybe replicate it and we can provide them assistance so we need some money and we need some talent. We’ve got to find some really good people who are Jacks of all trades. Green is good but green is also brown. When you’re dealing with veggie oil, it is pretty nasty so we need people that can roll up the sleeves, who can think strategically but also are passionate about the message and can convey what we’re trying to do to community members, to clients so finding that talent mix, we’re looking to maybe be finding ex military, guys who have worked in fleet management who can not only turn a wrench, but also have good leadership skills and get them passionate about the whole environmental movement. I think they understand it. The military’s greening faster than just about any branch of the government. They understand biofuels because they’re putting it into a lot of their vehicles so finding the talent, getting the capital, and spreading the message is the key at this point.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Great, great, great and so for our listeners out there that want to either hire Marc’s firm, Greenway Transit, book their next ride or their next event, you can go to
www.iridegreen.com. That’s a great website and Marc, you’re very inspirational and I think your company has so much ways to grow and we wish you luck and we’re very thankful for you coming on today. You are a revolution in motion, Marc Dreyfors, and truly living proof that green is good.
MARC DREYFORS: Thanks for having me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited and honored to have with us today Ben Lecomte. He’s an open water swimmer. He’s an adventurer. He’s also the founder of The Longest Swim, because Ben is going to tell you one of the greatest stories ever. Welcome to Green is Good, Ben Lecomte.
BEN LECOMTE: Thank you very much for having me. It’s very exciting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Ben, you are one of the most fascinating human beings that has ever been on our show. This show is five years old. We’ve had wonderful people from around the world but truly your story, when I was reading every word of it, had my eyes as big as silver dollars and my mouth open because I’m just so in awe of your accomplishments already and also some of your dreams of what you are going to accomplish. Before we go into talking about The Longest Swim, I want you to please share with our listeners the Ben Lecomte story, what you’ve done before, what led to this moment in your life and what you’re about to do and talk a little bit about your story and your journey up until this point.
BEN LECOMTE: Thank you very much for your kind words there. I was raised and born in France and my father was very much involved in my life and I had the opportunity to have parents that exposed me to many things, the environment, sports, and basically a way to find myself was to go through all the different sports or different activities that I was involved in and my father taught me how to swim in the Atlantic when I was five years old. Unfortunately, my father passed away at an early age from heart cancer. For me, that was a very important moment in my life as a young man because it gave me the opportunity and the strength to follow my passion, which was open water swimming, adventure swimming and I wanted to do something in his memory so as I was contemplating about swimming open waters and doing a swim across the Atlantic Ocean, my big focus and objective was to do it in his name and to raise money and to raise awareness for cancer research so that was my big motivation to do that at the time and then after one year finishing university and then going back to a normal life, I always knew that my passion was still there but I became a father so now that I have children and being influenced by everything that’s happened around me, I still had that passion of doing that big swim, which was becoming the longest swim in The Pacific but the objective changed. I’m looking at my kids. I’m looking at what I can do to make positive impact in their lives and in their future and really bring those moments that I had with my father. I know that the environment was very important in all the activity that we had and I want to give my kids the same opportunity that I had by making a little difference or using my passion as a way to make a little difference in the environment and creating a more sustainable world so that’s basically my main objective now with my upcoming swim is to get the attention around that issue.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, it’s about sustainability.
BEN LECOMTE: Exactly. I think that the solution is in our hands and what I mean by that is that if all the entities here in the U.S. and overseas were all more conscious about the problem and making little changes in our lives, we would make an amazing impact on the sustainability and environment.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we talk about The Longest Swim coming up, just quickly give a brief overview because I want our listeners to be truly amazed by your strength, not only your physical aptitude, but your mental strength that you swam from Cape Cod to France. You did the Atlantic swim and what year was this in?
BEN LECOMTE: In ’98.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: In ’98 so now for all of us, age is not in our favor when you’re doing superhuman feats so this is now 16 years or so later and now you’re going to do a feat that’s much greater than the Atlantic swim.
BEN LECOMTE: Right. In some aspects, age is not in our favor when you talk about speed or when you talk about strength but when you talk about extreme endurance, you can become better as you age and not only that is that mind strength is much more important because it’s mind over matter. Once your body is used to doing something at the slow rate, you can do it days after days but you need to have a very strong mind to keep on doing that and I know that when we are young, we are just about instant gratification but that changes as you get older so I found out that getting older works in my favor here.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s amazing so you’re really just breaking your last record. You’re breaking the Atlantic record by now doing the longer swim across the Pacific.
BEN LECOMTE: Yeah, that will be much longer and so it’s a bigger preparation and for me, it’s just a way to get the attention. Of course, in a personal way, it’s something that I like to do. It’s something that I’m passionate about but without a greater purpose, it wouldn’t mean that much.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Two quick fun stories about the first swim: When you finished the first swim back in ’98, what were your first words when you landed in France?
BEN LECOMTE: It was, “Never again.”
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m thankful and the environmental world is thankful and all of us are thankful that you’ve decided you’re going to do it again because I know you’re going to raise major awareness by doing this Pacific swim. I think when people start hearing about it, they’re going to be as amazed and our listeners today are as amazed as I am when I started learning what you’ve accomplished and what you intend to accomplish. I saw a picture of you on your knees and it wasn’t because you were weak or because you collapsed. Talk about when you got to France, why you were on your knees.
BEN LECOMTE: I proposed to my wife. I thought that was the appropriate time and so we had something very unusual, which is video clips and news footage of me proposing to her.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’ll tell you what, even in all of that exhaustion and in the middle of doing one of the greatest accomplishments anyone could ever do, you still had the thoughtfulness and the romantic spirit to do something super nice. For all the men out there that are listening today, remember you can’t be too romantic and you can’t do things in too nice of a way but wow, what a way to propose to your wife, huh?
BEN LECOMTE: You know, to be truthful, I asked her when I left and she was very smart in telling me, “I’ll give you my answer on the other side.”
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So she really gave you no other choice than to make the right proposition at the right time?
BEN LECOMTE: Exactly.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, good. That was a good reason that you made it across to the other side. That is just great. For our listeners out there, we’ve got Ben Lecomte on with us today and he’s going to be doing The Longest Swim. It’s going to start hopefully, later this year, December of 2014. To learn more about his great accomplishment and what he’s intending to do, please go to
www.thelongestswim.com. Ben, let’s get to some action points here. How can people get involved? When they start hearing our story and your story become something very viral, which I expect it to become, how can people and organizations get involved and support your mission of sustainability and getting the word out there that if we all make small differences, we can make big changes?
BEN LECOMTE: I think there are two steps. The first step is that we are going to have a crowdfunding starting in the spring and that will be paired with eight to ten different swims that I will do across North America so to put the word out and to start some of the budget that we need for the longer swim and then after, when The Longest Swim takes place, it will be live stream so you will be able to watch my crew on board the ship or boat. We will be able to enter that on a daily basis with people on land and we will have a platform that could allow people from different countries to bring their experience and to share a story on how they are making a difference on their local level that we can share with others and we want to engage people to just think about what they do on a daily basis that can make a difference. For example, a lot of people, if they can see that in a different country, where recycling is much more important in one country than another and right now, recycling is pretty much coming in different pockets, where we don’t know much what other countries and other people are doing. I’d like to use that opportunity to look and to see what we can do and what we can adapt from a program that is successful in that other country or other part of our country and adapt it to different areas in the world but it’s a very organic way to approach the issue.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: On the crowdfunding, Ben, how much money are you looking to raise and how many sponsors are you looking for?
BEN LECOMTE: The sky is the limit. We have the crowdfunding that will be put out in the spring and so $1 million crowdfunding but just to take into consideration is there was a crew member on the boat. You have the boat. You have live streaming and it requires amazing connectivity and all that costs a lot of money together and along with that, we also have sponsoring that’s going to take place. We want to have a two step approach with the crowdfunding to start at the grassroots because what is important is the people’s involvement and the communication and conversation that will take place throughout the event. It’s not about finding sponsors and just swimming across with a big sign on the shoulder. It’s basically the involvement of people that is important to us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How are you preparing? If the swim is going to be starting later this year, how are you preparing physically, mentally, dietarily? How is that working?
BEN LECOMTE: I’ve been preparing for the swim for the past three years so it’s working out three to five hours a day and I do different type of workout so running, bicycling, gainage, and also I do swimming, of course and I eat it, I dream it, I sleep it. It is in my mind throughout the day. When I am in the pool or when I am exercising, my thoughts are always about the swim and trying to visualize it and making it an internal journey.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Is The Atlantic harder to swim than The Pacific or The Pacific harder to swim than The Atlantic? How do they compare as water bodies and what are the differences in the swim that you’re going to be facing and that you’re thinking about?
BEN LECOMTE: The big difference is the distance. So, the Atlantic was about 3,500 miles. The Pacific is 5,500, but as far as the weather pattern or current, you can compare them both. They are pretty much the same. I will be swimming from the west to the east because in The Atlantic, I caught up with The Gulf Stream that took me from Tokyo away with the Kyosho, which is a long current that pushes toward the U.S. coast.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What blocks of time do you swim and then you get on the boat and eat a little something, sleep, and then go back in the water? How many hours a day? What does a typical 24-hour cycle look like for you when you’re swimming on this Longest Swim?
BEN LECOMTE: The first thing I do when I wake up is to eat because I have to consume between eight- to 10,000 calories per day and I cannot take a lot of food while I am swimming so the first thing I do is eat, get ready to go in the water, and swim eight hours. During those eight hours, I only get liquid food every 20 to 30 minutes and after I finish with those eight hours, go back on the boat and the first thing I do is eat again and then sleep, wake up, eat again, and then I still try to have a full night of sleep and what happens very often is that I was so hungry that in the middle of the night, I had to wake up and eat again and then when it comes the next morning, the boat will take us back to the position where I stopped my swim the previous day and I will start back the swim there.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What kind of dietary restrictions or food do you eat that keeps your stomach calm but also fuels all the cells in your body to keep going? What are you eating and drinking to be the most efficient through your body so it doesn’t upset the rest of your body when you’re facing all the other external challenges?
BEN LECOMTE: That’s a very good point because one, you are swimming so you are in one position for eight hours. It doesn’t help with the digestive system and I found out that I need to stay away from any type of food that is sweet so I stay away from high glycemic index food and if it’s carb, it will be just complex carb, wheat based product and a lot of salty product and fat because also, I try to keep my insulin level pretty much unchanged. When you take sugar and it’s white, your insulin level is going to shoot up. You are going to feel good. You are going to feel the sugar rush but you are going to feel low once that sugar rush is over so I try to stay away from those roller coasters and level my insulin by just not taking any sugar, just like I was saying on the high carbs and fat and protein.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last two minutes or so but here’s just a question that sounds silly but for your sake, I’m worried. Are you worried about sharks or trash or any of that kind of stuff in your swim? Is that something that crosses your mind or your crew’s mind?
BEN LECOMTE: Sharks there are so it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when and I had a shark following me for five days in The Atlantic so now you have different ways to deal with it, of course. You have people looking over. You have sonar but also you have a device that you put out in the water that creates a magnetic field and sharks are very sensitive to magnetic fields so they stay away so that’s a good way to deal with it but the other part of your question was about trash so I’m going to cross The Galvich Patch and during that time, we’ll do some measurement on how much trash we can see, how much trash we can collect, and to physically show the world that whenever you don’t recycle your product properly, it’s not going to end up in your backyard. The ocean is where the piece of trash will be. Because of the water runoff, it goes into the river and the river goes into the ocean and all those are being collected in The Galvich Patch so what we do on land is very important to what we find in the ocean and how we affect the life of a sea creature. That’s an important thing that we want to address when we go there. That’s why we have the live streaming so we can bring content as we go along and engage people throughout the journey.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect. Well, Ben, you’ve been an amazing guest. I want you to come back on after you’ve done the swim and talk all about it, but for our listeners out there to support Ben and to become part of the process and to become part of the solution and sponsor him, please go to
www.thelongestswim.com. He’s going to have a crowdfunding event this spring and Ben, I agree and I know our listeners will agree that together we can make the world a better place and you doing this swim is going to be further proof of that. You’ve swum yourself into all of our hearts today and our souls and are truly living proof that green is good.
BEN LECOMTE: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and today we’ve got my friend, Sam Geil on the show with us. He’s the founder and CEO of the International Green Industry Hall of Fame. Welcome back, Sam Geil.
SAM GEIL: Hello, John.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How are you today?
SAM GEIL: Good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get going and talking about all the amazing things that you’ve done since you’ve created the International Green Industry Hall of Fame, I know you very well. I know your family but I want the listeners to hear more about your history, your journey leading up to the founding of the International Green Industry Hall of Fame and what you and your family have done prior to this great organization being created.
SAM GEIL: Sure, sure. The concept of having a hall of fame for folks in the green industry came about over about a five- to six-year period. When I first came back from Fresno to join the family business, there were a number of opportunities within our business to green it up and I had been working on a sustainability plan in the company that I had left prior to the family business had just written a white paper on sustainability for the corporation. That was Grundfos Corporation out of Denmark and I took the essence of that white paper and my own desire to live a more sustainable life to the business and we basically greened up our business and then we acquired a company that had a line of green cleaning products so in the process of doing so, I attended numerous conferences and conventions, got certifications in green build and such to really understand first hand what not only the problems were but what were the remedies and then applied those in our business and one of the things that I observed and learned at the conferences at the conventions that I attended was there was really nobody giving these wonderful pioneers and inventors and innovators much credit and recognition for their work so when I went to these different booths and talked to different innovators from around the world of entrepreneurs, the one thing that was missing was that recognition and most of them didn’t have the money for marketing and promoting their products so I kind of had an epiphany that, geeze, if there was a way to do that and do that cost effectively, which is sustainable, that would be a really cool thing to do so then that kind of planted the seeds in my mind about how we go about doing that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What year was that?
SAM GEIL: That was a period of time so I would say 2004 to 2008 and one of things that I had learned and picked up when I live in Kansas City was how Kansas City, Missouri, transformed their city by bringing in the Negro Baseball League Hall of Fame and the Jazz Hall of Fame and it basically transformed a whole section of Kansas City, Missouri, and there was kind of a rebirth of that area, kind of an economic development effort and it was really cool and I liked that sort of planted the seed of a Hall of Fame and so that was the framework that I used to kind of put together the business plan so it would be under the auspices or under the title of a hall of fame and then selected green industry because I like the idea of green. It’s really the best way to describe ecological sustainability for all ages, from kindergartners all the way up and then the industry being more industry focused, versus advocacy focused. The industry didn’t really have an organization that was really focused on putting together the whole industry. Solar has solar. Wind has wind. Biofuels have their groups and so on and so on but there wasn’t anybody or any group really bringing it all together because it is interconnected. It is synergistic so I think to split it off is great for those individual industry sectors but let’s all come together and let’s all work toward a common goal or a common good and that’s more sustainable. Collaboration is obviously more sustainable than not collaborating so the business plan was built and it was built around that and it was built around education that while we were able to capture the stories of all of these wonderful people and it’s in its infancy. The industry is in its infancy, which would be a great time to get all those stories in video and audio and then have a library where people can then access that library free of charge and that’s the website so the website is going to hold all of the information that we gather throughout the years and that’ll be free to the public. Everything is built on that there’s no charge. There’s no charge to be nominated. There’s no charge to be selected. There’s no charge to attend for those people and all of our inductees, which we call members, really for a lifetime don’t have to pay money to be a part of the hall of fame.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, I’m on your website now. It is so gorgeous and you’ve done such a great job, both with the website and with building this organization from just a kernel and dream that you had. The testimony is to you because for our listeners out there that have tried to start a business or now are currently ecopreneurs or entrepreneurs, everybody knows how hard it is when everyone else says no or it hasn’t been done. Sam took this and I know personally, has made it his mission in everything he has done an amazing job with it but for our listeners out there, go to
www.gogreenhall.org. It’s a great website. You can see everything that’s happened the year since Sam’s started it and obviously, the upcoming great event that’s about to happen so talk a little bit about who are the people you’ve honored along the way and some of the more memorable speeches or some of the more memorable inductions that you’ve done. I know you and I are both huge fans of Ray Anderson so speak a little bit about the people that you’ve met along the way that have touched you and touched the organization and therefore, shared their story and inspired so many others.
SAM GEIL: Right. You hit on a big icon there with Ray C. Anderson. I attended a couple of conferences up in San Francisco and had the opportunity to meet with Ray. One of them was rather small. It was put on by Sustainable Industries Magazine and there might be 150 people there so when Ray was finished, I had the chance to pull him aside and we must have talked for half an hour and it was probably one of the most enlightening half hours I’ve ever had but I shared with him the business plan and the idea of having this hall of fame and he was so supportive. He just thought it was a great idea and that really helped. That was very, very inspiring to get that kind of endorsement so he’s definitely at the top of the list, if not number one. John, you have been very supportive over the years and I watched your transformation and that’s been very inspirational so I would have to put you up there in the top three.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re too kind.
SAM GEIL: And then I would say probably a guy by the name of Jim Core. Jim Core is an engineer out of Winnipeg, Canada, and he’s developed a car for what he would call the common man, ‘The Common Man’s Car’. It can go 300 miles to the gallon and they’ve just done some great things. I call it the Tesla for the everyday guy and he’s been extremely motivational and he’s been extremely motivational and supportive and that was 2011. That was our first year that we inducted folks into the Hall of Fame and that includes A Corps and Grundfos and The City of Fresno’s recycling program, Driptech out of the San Francisco Bay Area, Duke’s Smart Homes at Duke University and then we had another ceremony, an induction in ’12 and that included some really cool people and we did some new things there. We actually started an Advocacy Award and awarded that to Climate Ride, a cycling event that they hold on the west and the east coast and they ride 350 miles and all the money that they raise goes towards organizations that are advocating for sustainability.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And you’ve done that ride.
SAM GEIL: Yeah, I’ve done it three times. I’ll be doing it again this year. I was actually on the Board of Directors there when it got started and then left once things got going but that’s a wonderful organization and then we also started the Innovation Award and the first year we did that was Aqua Q and they actually got acquired by Badger Meter out of Milwaukee and what’s interesting, John, is that a number of our inductees have actually used our platform of being inducted as a springboard to success and that’s why we’re here and that’s what we want to do and so last year, we held our conference in Stockton, California, and it was sponsored by the Stockton Chamber of Commerce. You scratch your head there and say Chamber of Commerce? They actually have done more in the area of advocacy and education in The Central Valley than any group that I’m aware of and we’re actually going to induct them this year into the Hall of Fame because of their work. They call it Green Team San Joaquin and it’s amazing so there are just a number of amazing stories and I’ll give you a couple. Delight Design, they design lights that are powered by solar units for villages in Africa and what these solar lights do is they replace the kerosene lamps in these villages that are toxic and also very dangerous because if they tip over, they’ll basically burn the hut down and by using these lights, these special solar powered lights, the children can read at night and they can read without having the fumes from the kerosene and it’s safe and then we abducted another group called Empower Playgrounds. They make playground equipment that produces electricity, John. They make a merry-go-round that the kids play on because these kids love the merry-go-round. You get about 25 kids and as the merry-go-round spins, there’s a generator in the middle of it and it generates enough power for the entire village.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is awesome. For our listeners that just joined us, we’ve got Sam Geil on. He’s my longtime friend. He’s also the founder and CEO of the International Green Industry Hall of Fame. Learn more about what Sam’s doing at the Green Hall of Fame at
www.gogreenhall.org. We’ve got about seven minutes left, Sam. Talk a little bit about what’s coming up, your big annual event, and how our listeners can get involved because the key is I want people to listen and then join, listen and then contact you and get involved with the great work you’re doing.
SAM GEIL: Thank you, John. This year’s event will be held in the San Francisco Bay Area at San Jose State University March 28th and it’s an all day event starting at eight o’clock and ends at five and they can get involved by attending. We also streamed the event live over our website, which you’ve mentioned and so they can watch the ceremony live by going to our website and we do that because it’s the right way to go. You have to spend money traveling and getting to the site so those who can’t can log on and enjoy the event. We have a number of keynote speakers. We have John Lanier, who is the grandson of Ray C. Anderson, who’s going to talk about the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, which is doing great work, so this should be a pretty emotional keynote. Jim Kor, as I mentioned earlier, is going to talk. His topic is A Car for this Century; Why a small dedicated team quietly created a unique car, and named it URBEE. Then we have plenary sessions and those are folks that are going to present for 45 minutes. Rod Diridon is going to talk about transportation and the transformation of the transportation industry. Richard Cummings from UC – Merced is going to talk about Green from the Ground Up and that’s building a green university from the ground up. We’re also going to feature Tom Cotter talking about financing in the solar industry and then we have Farmer Al Courchesne from Frog Hollow Farms talking about organic farming and his organic farm university, exquisite stuff going on and so those are some of the highlights. We scholarship about 125 students from various universities and high schools that will be in attendance. We have schools driving 200 miles to attend. We have students from Stanford, Santa Clara, San Jose State to attend and they come free. We scholarship them in and we stick them in the front row so they can watch the proceedings and the speakers right up front. That’s our audience. We’re trying to influence the next generation to take this to another level and do it as quickly as possible because we know the urgency.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re right and I love the whole model, education and honoring people and honoring well-deserving people. If our listeners want to be considered next year or they want to be involved or they want to donate, how does it all work? How do they contact your colleagues? How do they get involved to support the Green Industry Hall of Fame?
SAM GEIL: First thing I’d like to share with our audience is how they can best help us. It’s not the money. It’s getting online and nominating people and organizations that you feel are deserving of recognition and there’s no cost to do it. Simply go on our website, put in the nomination, and that’s it. We do the rest of the work. The second thing that people can do to help us out is come to the event and witness and be a part of what’s happening because the people who do come leave totally inspired and it does transform minds. We know that. We get that feedback and it’s an ongoing process. If you want to donate, great, but it’s not the highest priority at this point. The organization isn’t such that we need it. We don’t have any staff. We have no paid staff. Everything we do is 100% volunteer. One of my missions in life is to make templates for nonprofits that are sustainable and part of ecological sustainability is economic sustainability and so our model is also to make sure that the money that we have we use 100% towards the mission and that’s recognizing excellence in the green industries so that’s how people can get involved. Come to the event. Go on the website and watch it on March 28th and really, live green. Live the most sustainable lifestyle you possibly can. That at the end of the day is the mission and preserve this for the next generations.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it, and for our listeners out there, again, to learn more about Sam and his great work and all of his colleagues and what they’ve created at the Green Industry Hall of Fame, please go to
www.gogreenhall.org. The annual event’s coming up on March 28th and like Sam said, you don’t have to actually come and create a bigger carbon footprint and actually come to the Bay Area. It’s all live stream and you can watch it and enjoy it and get involved and like Sam said, that’s the thing to do. Get involved because we can all become part of the solution. Sam, you’re a friend and I’m obviously very biased but truly, to have created this out of nothing and to have affected so many people and inspired so many young people, it’s just great to see that and I’m just honored to have you as a friend and you are really truly leading the way and the truth is you’re a true visionary. You’re a collaborative ecopreneur and in sum, you are one of the best green champions I’ve ever met and therefore, truly living proof that green is good.
SAM GEIL: Thank you John, and God bless.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re so honored to have with us today Reinhold Ziegler. He’s the CEO and founder of Synergy International. Welcome to Green is Good, Reinhold.
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Welcome. Hello. Good day.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Listen, before we get talking about your great company, Synergy International and everything you’re doing there, Reinhold, talk a little bit about your story, your journey, and how you even got there and what led up to you founding it and running this great organization.
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Okay well, it’s been quite a journey. We all started out as college students. I was very fascinated by science and I was sort of a science major. We went through a lot of experiences here, of course, with everything leading up to the Vietnam War and then on into the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s I became a participant with some groups of people, engineers, scientists in Berkeley, California, and we did a lot of experimentation and through that experimentation, we set up one of the first wind machine companies in the U.S., in the world so we started doing wind energy systems and within years, we were active as wind farm developers and ended up doing some of the first wind farms in the world and that gave me the picture that wow, this is a serious enterprise. Renewable energy is here. It’s at its nexus right now and so we learned that if we covered those lands with wind turbines, we saw that there were other applications that could happen to the land so the land could speak to us and you meet all the other experts and the botanists and the permaculturists and what came together I think, for me, was a need to put together a company that could bring together all of these different disciplines, all these different skills that people have go into almost a kind of synergy, there’s that word, see, or a way to create almost like a symphony with various experts who are all looking at the same problem from their perspective. It kind of drew me to I’m sort of the ringleader. I’m sort of the quarterback of this company but that’s what we do.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, for our listeners out there that want to learn more about your great work, they can go to
www.synergyii.com. Today, we’re going to talk about just part of the great work that you’re doing. We’re going to talk about remediation parks on land and at sea with bioshelters. Can you start explaining what this means? What is a remediation park?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Sure. A remediation park is an eco-industrial park. It can be a portion of a city or it can be on the edge of a city and usually we don’t know what to do with our waste. We produce a tremendous amount of waste every year and so what we do is we sort of transport that to a little area called a landfill and then over time, we kind of bury that landfill and move on to the next one and so we talk to mayors in the world today. Their biggest headache is garbage and waste treatment so we decided to take this on so as you look at the waste stream, you can separate things out. You can separate the glass, metals, and those have tremendous revenues once they’re collected again and then the second area is to transform the actual resource, which is garbage, into other things like we can gasify it. We can make a gas out of it so we can run it through engines, which makes electricity. We can pressurize that thin gas, that synthetic gas and then under 400 atmospheres of pressure, it becomes liquid again and that liquid, there are liquid fuels that are everything from gasoline to jet fuels, you name it, biodiesel, so it’s a process where we can recycle and reclaim all these nutrients that we call waste.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: With regards to your organization, Synergy International, and the sub organizations contained therein, how are your organizations working with your remediation technologies to take waste and create new things out of them? How is that nexus and evolution going?
REINGOLD ZIEGLER: It’s going very well. It’s sort of a three part situation structure. Leading in the charge is the International Academy of Natural Sciences, which is a 501 C 3 not-for-profit research and development organization out of Arizona and so that entity compiles all the sciences, all the different knowledge that we have about what are the chemical processes required for transforming things so that’s our hub and the additional surrounding them are consultants and other companies who provide services to then build the various facilities so really what we’re talking about here as far as the remediation park, the core of it is then a waste treatment facility. We are taking the waste and reprocessing it, sequestering certain things out of the waste stream and so on and then the larger picture is that area then is surrounded by various enterprises like an incubator or two or a company that is working with plastics so they are taking the plastics that we have pulled out of the waste streams and have made and make new products out of it and so that leads to job creation and it leads to business development and tied to that then is the biological resources so first of all, you can have an energy farm from that remediation park. That’s the idea. It can also have a wind farm. You can also have solar farms and you can have regular farms that take advantage of the biological content that we have. It’s a symphony. It’s hard to describe in a few words but that’s the core of it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Are you doing this specifically in California or is this happening in other parts of the country?
REINGOLD ZIEGLER: Our key project, our private project has been the Phoenix Remediation Park, which is under construction in Phoenix, Arizona, and we have been asked by other locations. We just did a massive design in the Philippines to do the waste treating of Manila and about 10 different cities there so it’s something that is extremely relevant and hasn’t been talked about very much. We have got to find a way to recycle more. There is no such thing as waste. Waste is a misallocated resource so we have to start thinking in terms of recovery as well as throwing things away. There is no away. It doesn’t go away.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: When does your Phoenix industrial park open?
REINGOLD ZIEGLER: It’ll be a couple more years before we’re ready there but so far, what we have done is just to assemble the various gasifiers. We now have margins of gasifiers that are in 40 foot containers so they’re very shippable and what they can do is 500 kilograms of this waste that we’re talking about produces 500 kilowatts of energy so not bad, you know?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How does gasification really work? Can you explain to our listeners what’s the process of gasification?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Okay, that’s a really good question. Basically, when we tell people that you’re burning something, they have this image in their mind of somebody burning it and it’s in the open air or it’s in a factory and there are smoke stacks and all the smoke comes out from what’s being burned and this is a different process because we’re burning in an enclosed chamber so there’s absolutely no emissions into the atmosphere and so what we’re doing is we’re heating up through other means whatever we’re trying to burn so let’s say we’re trying to gasify wood, for example. We heat up the wood and as we’re heating it up, it begins to get so hot that it catches on fire, uses up the gas, uses up the oxygen within the enclosure, and then it goes out and then what’s left is this gas and the gas basically is methane. It’s carbon monoxide. It’s hydrogen, things like that and so that’s what we’re doing. We’re using pyrolysis, or what’s called in chemistry destructive distillation, to heat up the biomass or whatever we’re trying to gasify and what we are then left with is a gas that is flammable and it can then run through an engine. It can run through turbines or it can be compressed and, using the Fischer-Tropsch Process, we can compress that thin gas and make liquid fuels out of it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So it’s, in essence, a very clean process?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: It is very clean. Again, the focus is there’s no environmental emissions at all so that’s the beauty of it. You can have one of these things operating in your neighborhood and there’s no smoke stack. You wouldn’t even know it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Is this on of the areas where energy is going, gasification?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Very definitely. This is the preferred way of doing it. This system was developed in World War Two. After the Germans couldn’t get oil from the Pelosi Fields near Romania, they couldn’t get anymore petroleum, so then they began to look at a process where they could heat up coal and drive the gas off coal and make gasoline from coal and so this has been adapted now to more commercial uses of it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, we’re honored to have today with us Reinhold Ziegler and Reinhold’s the CEO and founder of Synergy International and to learn more about his great work, you can look it up at
synergyii.com. Talk a little bit about a couple of the great benefits of having a remediation park or a waste to energy plant in your community or in your states. Just give us two or three great benefits please, Reinhold.
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: The benefit is that either you’re using waste as a resource and you’re getting the maximum use out of it. It’s also a way to sequester some of the toxins that accumulate in the environment. There’s basically two large cycles that we are working with and one of them is the organic cycle so you can put organics back into the ecosystem and there’s a cycle for them where they will recycle into the organic matrix of our living world, our biosphere. The other one is the industrial cycle so there are certain man made objects and things, processes that do not fit into the ecosystem. There’s no place for dioxins. There’s no place for PVC. It’s just not part of the ecosystem so we have to find new ways of integrating those materials back into the industrial cycle so that’s what this really fulfills in a sense.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How does a waste to energy plant perform? Is it high performance? Is it a slow process? I don’t know much. Our listeners would love to hear from you what kind of performance can we expect?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Tremendous output. Like I said, I’ll give you the analogy with our container gasifiers. This is a 40-foot container that you could drop off in a neighborhood and what we have been interested in is trying to find a way for people to get involved in this process so in our plans, we are basically paying for people to deliver garbage but bring in source separated materials to us and then that has been sent through the gasifier. The gasifier then makes sure it’s dry. By dry, I mean it has to be about 10 to 20% moisture content and then it’s fed into the system and so it’s producing electricity, lots of electricity and the final residue of the output is charcoal or char and there’s a whole other story that we can get into on biochar, where we have now found that if we put the return carbon back into the earth, it improves the performance of the soil so much more so rather than letting the carbon go up into the atmosphere, where it’s collecting to create a greenhouse effect, we are filtering that carbon and we are sequestering that carbon and then putting it back into the earth, which is where it should go and we’ve been rewarded for that too by the sequestration funds that are available for that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How much does one of these systems cost?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: It can be as little as say two-and-a-half million dollars for a basic gasifier system that can be installed in the community. I’ll give you the numbers again so it’s like 500 kilograms or 1,200 pounds of waste produces 500 kilowatts of energy so that’s enough to feed several neighborhoods on power and it comes from one 40-foot container and basically, it’s consuming 1,200 pounds an hour and if you keep feeding it that, it will produce 500 megawatts of energy in an hour. If it’s on for 24 hours, it’s astronomical how much power this thing produces and the residue then is charcoal, biodegraded charcoal or biochar, things like that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Once your Phoenix place is up, do you believe it will be used as a paradigm that then many other states and cities will follow, look to and then follow?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Yes. There are already lots of gasifiers in operation. We could show you one in Phoenix right now that is basically a back up power system for a server farm, a computer server farm and it’s very attractive in how it’s been laid out. There’s no smoke stacks. There’s no waste around it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: The people in the Philippines, Manila and the other cities that contacted you, do they want this system or do they want some other form of waste energy technology that Synergy is involved with?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: It’s a situation that’s actually tragic. If you took a drive around, we are choking in our own waste as a civilization. Take a look at what’s happened to the oceans, you know, so there’s a tremendous amount of waste. Unfortunately in these developing countries, that waste has been put down close to the water and so we’re looking at that and we’re saying, ‘Oh my God, the waste is at sea level so we have got to get rid of this debris, which is down by the water.’ Then we have these landfills where there are methane pockets that are inside. The organics then decompose into methane gas and so you could have a methane explosion. That happens quite a bit so what we’re trying to do is to just deal with this tremendous amount of waste once and for all. In Manila, it’s like 8,500 tons per day of waste so they have to put it somewhere and this is something that is a really important aspect of our civilization and I think most of us, if we’re careful, we could also do very well, which leads to a lot of jobs. It leads to a lot of skills that are transferrable all over the world.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Reinhold, we’re down to the last 40 seconds or so. Do you have any last thoughts for our listeners as we have to sign off now? Is there any last final thoughts you’d like to make?
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: I’m delighted by your program and I think we should celebrate more solutions. The world could look like a terrible place. There’s all kinds of bad news every day but I think what we really have to focus on is how can we solve this? There’s got to be a way that we can solve some of these problems and make that our priority to not put it off any longer and deal with these recurring problems of waste, energy, food. I haven’t even talked about our food solutions. There’s a tremendous story, almost another interview, John, so we have lots of good news so let’s focus on that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect, and I appreciate you and I appreciate all your great work. For our listeners out there that want to contact Reinhold or see more of his great work at Synergy International, please go to
www.synergyii.com. Reinhold, thank you for all your important work with your remediation technologies and Synergy International. You are truly living proof that green is good.
REINHOLD ZIEGLER: Thank you very much, John.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Linda Demmler. She’s the Vice President of IBM’s Global Financing and Global Asset Recovery Services Division of the great and iconic IBM brand. Welcome to Green is Good, Linda Demmler.
LINDA DEMMLER: Thank you. I’m very pleased to be here today with you.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, we’re honored to have you on today obviously and also for our listeners out there today that want to follow along and hear the great things that IBM is doing in asset recovery, you can go on to
www.IBM.com/financing and I’m on it right now and it’s a great site and it gives a lot of the story of what you’re going to be discussing today, Linda. Before we get into you talking about all the great things that you’re doing and the great brand, IBM, is doing in this sector, first share a little bit about your journey and how you got there. Was this a dream come true? Was this a lot of serendipity? Was this a lot of planning? How did you get this position at IBM and what led up to it?
LINDA DEMMLER: You know, it’s funny, John. I am a planner by nature. Anyone who knows me knows that I have the day planned, the week planned, the year planned, and the five year plan but I would say going into this business, this was not a plan. It sort of evolved and it’s been a great evolution. I grew up in the New England area. I spent a lot of time outdoors in the camps, spent time with my family in the Narragansett Bay off Rhode Island and always have been very sensitive to environmental affairs as it relates to water preservation, energy conservation, and the like and never thought I would go into a business area that would afford me the opportunity to have an impact in that area as well as be good business so it’s been a fun evolution. I’m currently Vice President of Global Asset Recovery Services of North America and in that, I’m responsible for recovering value for IT assets and so what does that mean? It really means making sure that we reuse what we produce as much as possible and not over manufacture or create new where we can extend the life of existing assets so that has a huge impact on the environment around us and it’s been very, very fun for me to be a part of that. You and I were chatting earlier about New York University. Prior to that, I was at Syracuse University and an engineer by schooling so it’s been an interesting path for me to follow to move from engineering by schooling to sales operations and asset recovery but it really has been. I’ve been active in the IBM asset recovery practices almost my entire career and I think it’s been that passion that allows us to link what we do to the benefit of the communities and honestly, the world around us that keeps it interesting and makes it fun day after day.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, that’s a great segue to going back to what you said in terms of asset recovery and reuse. Reuse, for our listeners out there, Linda, is a very credible form of recycling.
LINDA DEMMLER: Absolutely, and you’ll find that for us at IBM, reuse is the key for us. We focus much more on reuse because it reuses the asset, gives it a second purpose, hopefully gives it a third purpose and it reduces what we consume in manufacturing now or our natural resources around us so reuse is a huge enabler for our clients to extend the life of the assets they have as well as our focus on re-selling those assets after they’ve come back to us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Linda, can you go into how you’ve put your own spin on it, the innovation that you’ve implemented at IBM with regards to global asset recovery and the advantages that you believe that you bring to the table, given that you’ve got a massive platform to deploy that innovation with?
LINDA DEMMLER: Yes. It’s been a very interesting evolution. IBM has long recognized our responsibility to sustainability so back in the ’60s, we had corporate policies that insured that we were following best practices for environmental stewardship and over the years, once IBM global financing was created as an organization in the early ’80s, it was very clear that as a leasing company, you have to deal with the disposal of assets because some of those assets come back and in that disposition of assets, we really demonstrated that we had best practices in not only disposing of assets when they come back in an environmentally sound manner in a way that protects the IBM brand image, protects the data that clients have on those assets, and eliminates that so that it never goes out into the public atmosphere, but that we really help clients extend the life of the IT within their own installation and so realizing that we had best practices across IBM, in the late ’90s, IBM Global Financing was given this mission across the IBM corporation to manage the recovery of assets and be the single point of sale of used equipment across IBM worldwide and that really allowed us to invest in this singular mission of recover value and minimize waste, minimize excess production, and reuse and recover value as much as possible and we do that in very innovative ways. I would say as passionate as I am about the business, I work with a team of people across IBM that are as passionate about reuse and wake up every day thinking of new ways to reuse these assets and I’ll give you a couple examples: We actually take products back and because of our products being predominantly upgradeable, we can turn those returned assets into latest and greatest technologies. We can reuse those within IBM, within our own operations. We have something called an exchange offering that we work with clients on. Where clients have an existing product on their floor and they need something more, we will actually take used equipment and replicate what that client has on their floor and then put new IBM parts into it and roll that in side by side with the client to run a parallel transition over a period of time and then return that older asset back to us and then we’ll go repurpose that older asset, either within IBM or in the external marketplace and that’s a way where we really, our focus on the client is helping clients accelerate their transformation by reducing the time, cost, and risks of IT transformations and business transformations and the way we do that is things like exchange offerings, where we allow customers the parallel time, the transition time, the lower cost, the affordability of an end to end solution that really addresses what their business requirements are instead of just always selling the latest and greatest new technology and transferring out what’s on the floor and disposing of it so we really pride ourselves on being very innovative in that area.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Linda, let’s talk some wow numbers. Your company is one of the biggest companies in this space in the world in terms of the number of products you produce. What number of machines or pounds — I don’t know how you measure things at IBM — but, what is wrapping your arms around it and saying what is the progress this year? What is the total that you’re processing every year and keeping out of landfills and either reusing, repurposing, or recycling in an environmentally sound way?
LINDA DEMMLER: As I mentioned, sustainability being such a key point for us, we really do focus on keeping things out of landfills and that really is a differentiation for us in that we’re in the business to reuse and re-sell and our two objects ironically don’t appear to have anything to do with asset recovery but to enable IBM sales and be a consistent proof point for IBM environmental leadership so the way we do that is we get about 30,000 units of stuff back around the globe per week and we remanufacture or demanufacture that, which means we either remanufacture it to be reusable inside of IBM. The majority of what we do with our product is reuse it within IBM, which is great all the way around, right? It reduces our own cost of operations. It keeps it out of the secondary markets, which would compete against our new IBM sales and it helps us understand exactly how to remanufacture these products so that it’s always the highest IBM quality. We’re co-located in IBM facilities for our remanufacturing operations. That means when it comes out, whether it’s manufactured new or remanufactured as a returned box, it comes out with the same IBM quality, the same IBM performance, the same IBM standards that a client would expect and we use that internally so we remanufacture and demanufacture about 70 million pounds of equipment each year and for me, that’s a hard poundage to get my head around. What we really focus on is last year, we reused or recycled 99.7% of the equipment that we processed within our operations so that 30,000 units of stuff per week, we reused or recycled 99.7% so less than half-of-a-percent actually ended up in landfill or incineration, like you referred to and of that total equipment that came back to us, 90% is actually reused or resold.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s an amazing number, frankly. That’s incredible.
LINDA DEMMLER: It really is. IBM’s leadership in the environment is well known. IBM’s leadership in patents well known. What I don’t think is as well known is even within our Global Asset Recovery Services organization, we have eight patents alone and those patents speak to our methodologies and our processes on remanufacturing and demanufacturing to yield the highest result and we just had a recent patent in October of this year that focused on the packaging materials. It’s a great example of, Christmas time is coming, the holidays are here and lots of shipping boxes, lots of presents, lots of packaging materials building up and when we get all those products as an individual, we don’t typically keep all the packaging, right? We crush them. We put them out in the trash and that’s what happens with IBM when clients acquire technology. When they go to return that product or ship that product back to IBM, we were finding that a lot of damage was occurring because original packaging wasn’t being used so what we’ve done now is we’ve redesigned some of the machines where there’s actually physical components on the machine to attach it to the materials regardless of what those materials are to minimize the damage in transit, which makes the machine more reusable and you can see how the whole cycle of life extends and so the whole eight patents, remanufactured pounds of equipment, we do this around the globe. We were the first enterprise to open up remanufacturing operations locally in China, in Shenzhen, so that we would be on the ground there consuming all of the equipment as China goes through such explosive growth. We would consume all of the equipment that was becoming idle or returned locally in China and repurpose it there, again, locally in China and the first operation approved by the government in China.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, now, what you’re saying to me and to our audience is that you use technology to further the mission of reuse and recycling. Talk a little bit about the de-manufacturing and the evolution of recycling that you have stewarded over at IBM because it used to be about demanufacturing and protecting the environment but now you have the concurrent issue of also protecting the data that’s contained therein. Can you explain to our listeners all the care that you put into that, in making sure that the one two punch of environment and data protection are taken care of while you create this tremendous success story at IBM where you’re basically recycling everything you produce?
LINDA DEMMLER: Absolutely, so being IBM, we’re a large seller of IT, of course, but we’re also a large consumer of IT so whatever problem a client has, we have for our own operations as well so we’ve spent a lot of timing on looking at the asset recovery process from many different facets. There’s the financial aspect of it, which is, I only want to pay for what I’m using, and that’s where our leasing operations become very valuable to clients. We can write leases on technology to allow customers to acquire technology, pay for what they use, and then return it to us. It’s our core competency, typically not clients’ core competency, to dispose or reuse or remanufacture or otherwise re-deploy that asset. Second is the typical side, the practices we have on reusing and recycling, and then what you’re getting at is the intellectual side. How do I keep the soft stuff and not only reusing and building a client strategy for acquiring and disposing that’s minimizing costs, minimizing risks, making it very affordable, but also ensuring that we protect the soft stuff, the data, so I mentioned we have co-locations and all our high end gets returned to our facilities so I aim facilities on the high end and remanufactured under the same scrutiny in security that we go under for our new manufacturing processes as well as for anything we’re doing across IBM. We also have sold off some of our logistics operations that used to be IBM and they are still following the same IBM processes based on the IBM intellectual capital, using our proprietary system, following our high standards consistently worldwide and I think that’s one of the differentiators for us is that at a point in time, we did operate as islands around the globe. We now are one global asset recovery footprint. We have 10 remanufacturing centers around the world. We have 20-plus operation centers around the world and we adhere to the same consistent standard in each one of those centers so regardless of what country we’re operating in and what the laws and regulations are there or what’s enforced, we still operate to every single one of our standards.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: If I’m getting this right, Linda, whereas other OEMs sell their equipment and all the neat things that they make and they basically walk in the other direction, you don’t do that. As part of your sales cycle, IBM sells their new equipment but then there is a sustainability life cycle that you’re involved with the equipment from beginning to end and beginning again so it goes in one big circle and you maintain that and you touch the client in every element. You just don’t walk after you sell.
LINDA DEMMLER: Absolutely. We do pride ourselves on focusing on the cradle to cradle as opposed to the cradle to grave because we hope it goes through a couple cradles before it actually has to hit the grave and as I mentioned earlier, it’s become very personal for all of us. I have a nine-year-old daughter and we recently had to do an ecological footprint study for every child in the elementary school and it was eye-opening to me because I think I’m so passionate about this. I try and reuse and conserve and repurpose personally and professionally on a daily basis and yet our family’s results were not where I would have liked them to be and so I think it really emphasizes that as good as you think you are, you can always be better and we really do challenge ourselves to be maniacal about extending this life of IT and reusing it and it’s the attitude across our entire team and what we’ve found with clients is it’s very easy to acquire and it’s very hard to get rid of it so when we focus on this end to end of you’re acquiring that today, how are you going to dispose of that in the future? Can we take out all the surprises and put that on a lease where when you’re done with it, you just return it to us and then beyond that, can we help ensure that there’s a robust certified secondary market for products that we actively participate in so that we know that clients, when they’re acquiring IBM certified products or manufacturer certified products, that they are products that they can trust to have the same reliable consistency that they would get if they were purchasing the equipment new? And that does become this holistic life cycle of focusing on the clients’ needs because if you walk in with one arrow in your quiver, the client will always seek other alternatives but the fact that IBM is so focused on listening to the customer and understanding what their business transformation challenges are and focused on how we can pull from the breadth of the IBM portfolio, reducing their risk, time, and cost of that transformation, it brings us into that position of where we’re trying to be viewed as the trusted advisor in all cases.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, you’re doing it at IBM. You’re doing good and doing well at the same time. Linda Demmler, thank you for your time today. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about all the great things IBM is doing in global asset recovery, it’s
www.IBM.com/financing. Linda Demmler, you’re an inspiring sustainability leader and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and today we’re so honored to have my friend, Steve Levine, on. He’s the President and CEO of AtmosAir. Welcome to Green is Good, Steve.
STEVE LEVINE: Thank you so much for having me, and I’m very excited to be talking with you. After our last meeting in New York, we’re anxious to share our air purification solutions.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, you have a great story. Before we get to talking about your air purification solutions, Steve, talk a little bit about Steve Levine. Talk a little bit about your story and how you even ended up here and running this great company and creating this great company and then we’re going to talk about the solutions you’ve created.
STEVE LEVINE: Absolutely. Well you know, my background is in the air purification space but how I got here was I really thought the green initiatives that companies were taking was a place I wanted to focus and a lot of people were focused on water and a lot of people were focused on energy and I thought the one area that was lacking was air quality and I really wanted to make a difference in this world and I think that the water we drink, the air we breathe, how we take care of the planet going forward, it’s just a passion of mine and so I started in the air testing business. I wanted to test the quality of the air and some people did and some people didn’t because of what they might find and I wanted to make a difference in that respect and so that’s my background. I started another business a while back. It was in the alarm industry. We built a large company and we protected people. We saved lives, We protected property and I wanted to take my new life after 20 years in that business and really try to make a difference going forward in the business of air quality.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You created this great company in 2004.
STEVE LEVINE: Yes, we did.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Great, and for our listeners out there that want to look at Steve’s great company while we’re talking here today with Steve, you can go to
www.atmosair.com. Steve, talk a little bit about your company, what it does, and how unique your technology is.
STEVE LEVINE: Well, you know, it has a great history. It has a history that goes way back into the days of Albert Einstein and initially when I looked at the technology, because again, we were measuring air quality but we were looking for ways to make it better. I saw a company in Europe that had a great history. I didn’t initially believe it but I wanted to check it out. It had roots to Albert Einstein. In fact, Einstein’s sister was sick with tuberculosis and she was told the best place to get better was The Alps. Go to the mountains. Breathe that fresh, clean air and actually, Einstein wanted to understand why. Why is the air so much better in the mountains? And he developed this theory that there was a natural conductivity in the mountains and that conductivity was actually caused by these negative and positive ions so Einstein’s friend, Conrad Habicht, basically invented a technology around his friend’s theory that would replicate clean mountain air by delivering ions to the space and he commercialized it in Europe. Back in 2004, I bought that technology and that company and brought it over here to the United States and started our business and that’s actually how it started and I thought that the best way to bring it to the marketplace would be through sports. I said if we could take this technology that had a great affect on pulling dust particles out of the air, breaking down mold spores, attacking odors, and volatile organic compounds, and bacteria, viruses, and germs and we could bring this to the sports world, we would be able to take care of all the professional sports teams. The colleges would follow. The schools would follow and eventually the consumer would follow and I have to say that’s what’s happening right now. We actually installed out system in California in The Staples Center, in the entire Staples Center and now we’ve done USC and the Los Angeles Airport. Every terminal is putting in our system. UCLA is starting to look at our system so it’s really growing and that’s exactly where I am today. I’m actually in Louisville, Kentucky talking to the Yum Center because they’re looking at installing our system and the beautiful part of it is it started in sports but now we’re in office buildings, hotels, hospitals, and actually in the consumer’s home so we’re making a difference, having a great time doing it, helping people, so at the end of the day, it’s a technology that really, really works because I can measure and validate it before and after so that we can really show the difference because remember, I come from the air testing business so it’s important that you validate a test because there’s a lot of green products out there that actually say that they work and unless you validate and test them, you really don’t know.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, I want you to share this because I know I had the benefit of spending a delightful two hours or more with you a few months back. Talk about your system cleaning well against odors, bacteria, viruses, and germs. How does it do it and how well does it work against those issues?
STEVE LEVINE: Well, the beautiful part of it is if you have a central air system, you can actually put it into the central air system and where normal technologies would be on the return side of that air system, like trying to catch stuff with the filter or with the UV light or with the air coolers themselves, our technology goes on the supply side. We actually want to deliver these ions into the space and when they’re in the space, what the ions do is they cause this what we call a conglomeration process. They pull these little particles together, make them a bigger particles, which makes it easier for your filters to pick up because it’s bigger and the other stuff might drop out of the air to the floor so our main goal in life is to take that three foot to seven foot space that we breathe in and pull all the bad things out of that and so that’s how the technology works against particles. It breaks down mold spores. It breaks down odors. Actually, if there’s any type of odor or smell, it’ll break that down and make it smell cleaner and fresher and it really does a great job of breaking down viable pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and germs so the beautiful part is when we bought the technology, we didn’t know that there was also going to be an energy saving opportunity because think about it. All these buildings are bringing in so much outside air. When they’re bringing in this outside air, they’re also bringing in the pollutants with it so with our technology, we actually are allowed to bring in less outside air and re-circulate and recycle the clean air and so there’s less air that you have to heat and less air that you have to cool so it really becomes a great energy saving opportunity while you’re cleaning the air at the same time and that’s what everybody is trying to take advantage of right now. Wow, what a great thing if you can save energy dollars and cleanse the air at the same time and measure and validate those results.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we’ve got Steve Levine on with us today. He’s the President and CEO and the founder of AtmosAir. You can look him up at
www.atmosair.com. Steve, now we’ve talked about some of your big and amazing projects, Staples Center, USC, you’re down in Louisville today. For our listeners out there that have allergies or other breathing related issues or who just want to live more sustainably and have cleaner air in their home or their office, can anyone go to your website and get this for their home, office, or for their large business that they’re involved with?
STEVE LEVINE: Absolutely. We take care of commercial buildings like Deloyt and UBS and we do the Dallas Cowboys and we have the Kansas City Chiefs now as clients but also, people that work in those organizations that suffer from allergies and asthma that are caused by dust particles, that are caused by mold spores, we actually pull out those things from the air so that people who have allergies and asthma, which is really one out of every four people, suffer. They’re the ones writing us testimonials because we can take our same technology and put it right into their mechanical system or even deliver it in a little portable unit to their home or to their bedroom so that they’ll be able to create a cleaner healthier environment for them to live in as well and so those people that have allergies and asthma, those are really the people that notice us first before anybody else and so that’s a great point and obviously, we’re open to everybody. We want to help everybody.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, they go on your website,
www.atmosair.com, and they can order or call and they can get the technology that suits their home, their business, their company they work for or any things of that such. Now, do you install it and then service it or how does that work in terms of ordering and installation and ongoing service?
STEVE LEVINE: Sure. We have authorized dealers around the country, 140 of them now and growing because people want to carry our product and we want people properly trained that if we’re going to put it inside of your air conditioning or heating system that it is a very simple installation, probably takes all of about an hour to an hour and a half to install, uses very, very little energy. Our systems work on five watts of power so it’s very easy to install and then once a year, this technology lasts for about 8,800 hours. At the end of the 8,800 hours, we have to change this tube so people can do it themselves or if we have an authorized dealer in that area, we’ll be happy to do that for them.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Also, we have a lot of listeners internationally because after the show airs on the iHeart Network here in the United States, it gets uploaded to iTunes and to the internet and the blogosphere and we have listeners literally that listen to our show from Shanghai to Mumbai and Brazil and everywhere in between and do you also do your great work and does your brand service clients around the world?
STEVE LEVINE: Yes. We actually opened up an office in Shanghai. We actually just are in a joint venture arrangement with a company called Shanghai Electronics, which wants to put our technology in cars, in buses, and in trains and so we’re doing work in India. We’re doing work in Dubai and China is just exploding. Obviously, they have serious issues there and our goal is to help pull those little particles out of the air in their commercial establishments. Obviously, it would be nice if we could take one big tube, one big technology and put it over everywhere but unfortunately, we can’t so in indoor environments is where we make the difference and if we’re able to do this in cars, in buses, in trains, I know the next logical question is when are we going to be able to put our technology in an airplane and we can’t talk about that right now but it’s coming.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. You said that this is technology brought in from Europe and it’s the best in the world and obviously with all the success you’ve had, you’re proving it’s the best in the world with all the amazing brands that you’ve mentioned, from Staples to Dallas Cowboys and everyone in between. Who is your competition and do you even have competition, Steve?
STEVE LEVINE: Well, there’s many ways people clean the air. The traditional way is a filter. The traditional way is a UV light. The traditional way is electronic air cleaners and those ways are fine. There’s nothing wrong with them and believe me, we compliment a filter. I’m not saying take your filter out and put our system in. The way our system works is all those technologies are reactive. They’re actually asking the airflow to bring the particles and the spores to it rather than, our technology is proactively going after it so one is an active and one is a reactive and so I think just being proactive and attacking the particles in the air is the reason that we’re so much superior to these other technologies today.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know Steve, you and I met at a wonderful Green Sports Alliance and RDC event in New York City and just had a lovely and delightful chat for a couple hours. Besides Green Sports Alliance, are there other organizations that you’re involved with that are spreading the great word about AtmosAir, your great company?
STEVE LEVINE: Well, absolutely. Besides the Green Sports Alliance, there is a whole college of sustainability alliance right now and so I was actually at a meeting not too long ago where athletic directors and sustainability officials were attending this meeting together and these were 50 major universities that are very interested in bringing new green initiatives to their colleges and being a part of that, just like the Green Sports Alliance, just like groups like the NRDC that’s helping to consult people on best practices and Green Build. We just came back from Philadelphia, from the Green Build, where people are really looking at LEED and other initiatives to create a healthier and greener environment and facility and that’s what we’re all about. If we can be one small part of the whole picture and really add some significant value, I think we make a difference and that’s all I’m looking to do. We want to help people. We want to make a difference and I know we have the technology that will do that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That was your dream back in 2004, to start a new company that makes profit with a purpose.
STEVE LEVINE: Exactly right.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, we’re down to the last two minutes, Steve, and there’s a lot of listeners out there that are the next generation, the kids, and you and I were even talking about that when we were together. Can you share some thoughts of inspiration? Because they’re going to listen to this show and they listen to our guests and I get emails all the time. They want to be the next Steve Levine. Can you share some pearls of wisdom backwards for them? They’re in high school, they’re in college, they’re in grad school, and they want to go out and they want to wake up and be involved with a company or be an entrepreneur and know that they’re changing the world every day when they go and create a company or they go get a job. Share some of your pearls of wisdom and experience with them, please.
STEVE LEVINE: Well, I think the most important thing, and I tell my kids this, too — and I have kids that are 25 and 28 now, so I’ve been around it a little bit — I think you always have to try to do what you love. If you don’t love it, at least you should like it a lot and if you wake up every morning and you go to work and you don’t really like or love or feel like you’re making a difference, then you should probably do something else. There’s a lot of ways to help people in this world and I really believe that if you get involved, not just for making a dollar, but in something that you love that will make a difference and that will really help people, and at the end of the day, I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to give back. If you do all these things, I really believe you become a well rounded person and you love getting up every morning and you love going to work. I have to love what I do because every day, I make a difference. We make a difference. We have a great team. We’re expanding the team and hey, for any of your listeners that are really motivated by helping people and making a difference in the sustainability world or air quality world, feel free to contact me. I’m always looking to grow and I want to surround myself with the right people and that’s my two cents.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just great and I assume you feel real bullish on 2013 and beyond. You’re ten years into this and you feel that the best is in front of you.
STEVE LEVINE: At least 50% growth this year so that’s what we’re talking about.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect. Well, I just want to tell our listeners again, if you want to breathe clean air and you want to buy Steve’s great products, please go to
www.atmosair.com or if you want to get a job, if you really want to wake up every morning and change the world, you can contact Steve through that great website. Steven Levine, you are a sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.
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