Growing greener good for business

Group hoping to find new ways to turn waste material into profit

The Akron Beacon Journal
May 05, 2008
By Paula Schleis
Beacon Journal Business Writer

Maybe it was Wal-Mart`s pressure on suppliers to adopt environmentally friendly packaging. Or General Electric`s Ecomagination, a commitment to ecologically sound products and services.

Or perhaps it was Al Gore`s global warming alert in An Inconvenient Truth. Or something more immediate, like rising energy costs. Whatever the reason, a Northeast Ohio group founded eight years ago to help startup companies learn about ``sustainable`` business practices has been attracting a lot of attention from veteran companies, nonprofits, academics and government agencies.

Today, some 5,600 people have joined Entrepreneurs for Sustainability, known as E4S. The organization runs training programs for companies looking to reduce their environmental footprint, and last year the Cleveland-based group started holding regular networking events in Akron.

``Until a year or two ago, not that many people knew about it,`` Holly Harlan said of E4S, which she founded in 2000. Now many people are finding benefits to sharing their stories and hearing others. ``These ideas are still new and you can learn a lot from your peers,`` Harlan said.

Supported by funding from the GAR Foundation, E4S hosted three events in the Akron area last year. This year it will hold six meetings. Meanwhile, monthly meetings at the Great Lakes Brewing Co. in Cleveland will continue as they have for seven years. The meetings typically involve a one- to two-hour program — which could be a panel discussion or local companies presenting their own green practices — with plenty of time before and after to network.

``Every month what surprises me are the number of connections, people who meet each other and find new customers, new suppliers, new financing,`` Harlan said.

The next meeting, on May 14, will introduce half a dozen businesses that are finding ways to turn waste into a business opportunity. Joseph Hensel of Akron`s Polyflow Corp. said he began attending E4S meetings more than five years ago looking for strategic partners or the occasional investor.  This month he will attend the Akron meeting as a presenter, explaining his company`s ongoing development of a way to recycle mixed plastics and mixed rubber.

Arguably, polymers (plastics, rubber) are the most useful material known to man, but their durability has also been their Achilles` heel.  While there is a recycle market for water bottles and milk jugs, products that use many different materials — like children`s toys, tires, carpet — are destined for landfills, Hensel said.

Polyflow is close to commercializing a process that reverts those ``mixed plastics`` back into monomers, their building blocks. Monomers, normally derived from crude oil and natural gas, are used by the petrochemical industry to make polymers.

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