Sustainability manufacturing
Businesses find one's waste is another's feed stock
Tuesday, March 13, 2007Peter Krouse, Plain Dealer Reporter
On a recent winter's night, inside the Tasting Room of Great Lakes Brewing Co., the topic of discussion wasn't beer, but food.
Kari Moore, a sustainable-farming supporter, stood before a packed room and offered the "Eat Local Corporate Challenge," which urges businesses to spend 10 percent of their food budgets on items grown or made locally.
Then Brad Masi of the New Agrarian Center presented his version of the "low-carb diet," only in this case carb was short for carbon, not carbohydrate. His point; a lot of fuel gets burned up hauling food long distances, so buy local.
Next week, the Tasting Room will play host to advocates of energy efficiency. Case studies will be shared and business opportunities discussed.
In May, a Michigan furniture manufacturer will explain its audacious goal of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2020.
Later in the year, biomimicry will be on the agenda. Biomimicry? It's billed as a new science that looks to nature for inspiration and guidance in design.
In the middle of it all is Holly Harlan, 47, founder of Entrepreneurs for Sustainability, or E4S for short. Her group organizes the regular monthly meetings at Great Lakes Brewing Co., the town square for Greater Cleveland's thriving sustainability movement.
Meetings that once drew 12 to 25 people in 2001 now average about 140.
"She definitely has captured the interest of a lot of people," said Bill Oatey, a member of the E4S board and vice chairman of plumbing products manufacturer Oatey Co.
Typical environmental fare, you might think, but it's not. Harlan is all for a cleaner world, but she's a champion of manufacturing first, with the allure of sustainability providing her motivation.
"What she's about is finding solutions that work for the environment and the economy," said Michael Kinsley of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado nonprofit devoted to sustainable business practices.
Harlan likens sustainability to the total quality management movement that began in Asia before being embraced in the United States, only this time the wave started in Europe and spread across the Atlantic. And just as TQM has been woven into the fabric of everyday business practices, sustainability is inspiring change in the way products and processes are designed, she said.
One of Harlan's loftier goals is to have local industry copy nature, where there is no such thing as waste. Whatever's left on the kitchen or manufacturing floor becomes the raw material for yet another production process.
It's not mere recycling. It's designing a manufacturing process knowing beforehand how the waste can be used by somebody else. The question then shifts from being how do you minimize waste to how much waste should you produce, she said.
To that end, Harlan has convened regular meetings of what she calls the "waste equals revenue roundtable," which includes such local industrial heavyweights as Alcoa and Arcelor Mittal. The goal is to have neighboring industries compare their material streams to see if discards for one can be inputs for another.
Local construction and demolition debris recyclers Rosby Cos. and Kurtz Bros. are part of the roundtable, as is Zaclon Inc., which makes zinc fluxes used to galvanize steel products.
Zaclon has already found success buying waste lime from Alcoa and using it to lower the acidity in Zaclon's water treatment plant. Thanks to the roundtable, Zaclon may also start acquiring caustic soda from Alcoa.
Harlan, who grew up mostly in Iowa and graduated from Iowa State University, has an unusual background for someone who would like to turn manufacturing on its ear. But that's what makes her effective. She's an industrial engineer by training, so companies that might resist the efforts of a straight-line environmentalist know Harlan speaks their language, too.
Harlan spent eight years with General Electric Co., including two years in its vaunted manufacturing management program, and was well on her way to becoming a wealthy corporate executive when she took a new direction. Harlan had already worked for GE in New York, South Carolina and Georgia when she found herself on the verge of a transfer from her Cleveland-area job to Parkersburg, W.Va..
Not willing to leave the city and desiring a more entrepreneurial experience, Harlan quit. She went to work advocating for manufacturers, first with CAMP Inc., which is now MAGNET, and then with Shorebank Enterprise Cleveland and Wire-Net.
She was still at Wire-Net when she had her epiphany. It came in the spring of 2000. She went to a Cleveland Green Building Coalition meeting at the Cleveland Public Library downtown to hear Amory Lovins talk about something called natural capitalism.
Lovins is chief executive of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Natural capitalism is a concept that measures cost not in short-term dollars, but in the long-term effect on people, the planet and profits.
"I left there with what they call an 'aha moment,' " Harlan said.
So did Pete Accorti, president of Talan Products, a small metal-parts stamper. When he and Harlan walked out of the library at twilight, it was as if they had just seen a great movie and couldn't stop talking about it.
"It was very compelling," Accorti said, "because [Lovins] made the case from a business perspective."
Harlan dived right in. She attended an institute workshop in Des Moines, Iowa, then accepted a seven-week internship at the institute's Colorado home. She returned to Cleveland brimming with confidence that sustainable ideas would sell here.
Harlan started E4S in late 2000 and got a boost in 2002 when the Gund Foundation gave her a small grant. She hired her first two staffers in 2004. Without an office of their own, they met in local wireless cafes.
At first, mostly entrepreneurs were eager and willing to sign on, while manufacturers largely resisted, Harlan said. But that's starting to change, as corporate leaders such as GE and Wal-Mart have publicly embraced sustainable concepts. Now E4S is as much a resource for large companies and progressive thinkers as it is for entrepreneurs.
E4S has about 120 members who have paid from $50 to $350 to join the organization. That entitles them to individual help from Harlan and her staff, who now operate out of a 2,000-square-foot office in Shorebank's Glenville Enterprise Center on a budget of $400,000.
And, of course, there are always the monthly meetings at Great Lakes Brewing Co. They are free and public. At the last one, Moore took in 15 pledges for her "Eat Local Corporate Challenge."
To the sustainability crowd, Harlan is referred to as "kind of the network weaver," Moore said, and she has been instrumental in bringing critical mass to the effort in Northeast Ohio.
"Holly has a unique talent for the big picture," she said, "and seeing the whole system."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
pkrouse@plaind.com, 216-999-4834
