CNBC Business | BRIGHT GREEN

BRIGHT GREEN

From eco-builders to electric car champions, from homecare heroes to forward-looking industrialists, environmental entrepreneurs come in many shapes and sizes. We take a look at ten of the most exciting eco-businesses today

ADAM LOWRY AND ERIC RYAN
FOUNDERS, METHOD

If you thought that household cleaning products were dull, Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan would be the first to agree. Since 2000, the pair have been sexing up the sector with their pink grapefruit hand-wash, French lavender all-purpose cleaner that smells more like a gift bought on rue Saint-Honoré than something found under the kitchen sink, and products such as Wood for Good – non-toxic, biodegradable bamboo fibre wipes.

It appears that the high school buddies from Michigan, who met by chance a decade later in San Francisco – Ryan was working in marketing, Lowry, a scientist researching climate change – might be on to something. Annual turnover at their company, Method, now exceeds €65m, Baby and Kid lines have been launched, and expansion into the lucrative toothpaste and personal health sectors is being hinted at. And now they are planning a major push to clean up in Western Europe.

In stark contrast to the price-driven chemical cocktails from the likes of Unilever and Reckitt Benckiser – and more engaging than the pious offerings from sainted Belgian brand Ecover – Method’s products suggest health and fun. Every ingredient is listed with explanations: “what it is”, “what it does” and “why we use it” and every bottle is transparent for no-fuss recycling. The underlying message is both premium and homemaker-friendly, if not gratingly Californian, with a ‘humanifesto’ punctuated by “EVERYBODY INTO THE POOL!!!!”, while Lowry’s business card reads Chief Greenskeeper. Of course, it doesn’t exactly harm Method’s image that its founders are so clean-cut; one of the FAQs on the website being “Are the founders single?” (The answer is no; they’re both married).

Ryan – Luke Wilson to Lowry’s Vince Vaughn – says when they first brainstormed, they scribbled three big ideas: “Cleaning is a price-driven, low-interest category whereas home is high interest”; “Aveda for the home – treating cleaning products the same as you’d treat luxury cosmetics”; and: “Why do we pollute when we clean?” – a reference to the widespread use of chlorine, bleach and phosphates in household cleaners.

The pair say Method is a scientific take on Body Shop and that it’s hard to make cleaning products that actually work. In other words, Lowry stresses, it’s done in the lab not by buying cocoa butter from tribes in Africa, even if the products are natural. While their philosophy increasingly chimes with the times, Lowry says it took five years to turn a profit. The pair had entered an unfashionable sector just as the dotcom boom was imploding in 1999 and venture capitalists were harder to spot than bacteria on a breadboard. “The worst point came in November 2000 in a restaurant when our credit cards were refused when we tried to pay for dinner after a meeting with potential backers,” says Lowry. “At that point we had $16 in the bank and owed $300,000.”

The company is still owned by 20 investors, made up of family and angels, though it now has 97 employees and a Californian manufacturing base. Currently, the products sell in the US in retailers such as Home Depot, and in the UK in Waitrose, Tesco and Homebase, and Lowry says Method is close to entering France next, then Benelux, then Germany. Both founders say they have no idea whether they would sell Method – after all, Ben & Jerry’s was swallowed by Unilever, while Cad-bury gobbled up Green & Black’s Organic chocolate – or float.

Ryan says he could have never come up with Method had he started at a conglomerate such as Procter & Gamble: “I would just have accepted the way things were and moved on.” Adds Lowry: “Premium is more than green; it is about fragrance, design, and above all working as well as anything else that’s not green.”

SUMMER RAYNE OAKES
MODEL, CONSULTANT, AUTHOR, ACTIVIST, OTHER

With an Ivy League degree in natural science and entomology, and published, peer-reviewed papers on waste management, Summer Rayne Oakes isn’t your typical model. A fashion industry innovator, she eschews clotheshorse vacuity to work to her own rules and values.

Oakes knew she could offer more than just a pretty face, and founded company SRO to provide a ‘two-for-one’ of modelling and consultancy – fronting campaigns while advising a company on sustainability. Her understanding of the linkages between substantive green strategy and appropriate marketing action got her noticed by sustainability consultancy SJR Group, where she is now a partner.

Her CV in this field includes notable commissions from the Alcoa Foundation, the second largest corporate foundation in the world;

Payless ShoeSource, where she helped design, source and market a new range of sustainable footwear; and Portico Home, which supplies high-end bath and body products to Hyatt Hotels and Resorts.“The secret of successfully communicating sustainability issues is to be authentic and not over-promise,” she says.

Inevitably, perhaps, Oakes is also an author (Style, Naturally: The Savvy Shopping Guide to Sustainable Fashion and Beauty), a TV host for the Discovery Channel, editor-at-large for Above, a UK green lifestyle magazine, and in January is overseeing the launch of a B2B website for fashion and interior designers to search, rate and buy sustainable materials. “The thing I realise about myself is that there will never be that one thing I’ll concentrate on. This is my life; from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed I’m working on these projects. I totally believe you have to go out there and trailblaze a new path and say ‘you know what? This path can exist too!’.

POORAN DESAI
FOUNDER, BIOREGIONAL AND BIOREGIONAL QUINTAIN

Zero carbon, zero waste, sustainable transport, local and sustainable materials, sustainable water, natural habitats and wildlife, culture and heritage, equity and fair trade, health and happiness. It might read like a wistful extract from Al Gore’s letter to Santa, but according to Pooran Desai, this could be your new way of life.

The 10 principles form the bedrock of One Planet Living (OPL), a sustainable development framework developed by the WWF and BioRegional, a charity founded and run by Desai. And the word is starting to spread. Through partnerships with private developers and the public sector, OPL communities are cropping up across the UK, the US, South Africa, and China. BioRegional and the WWF were even contracted to devise the sustainability action plan for Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s multibillion-euro sustainability beacon. Desai is also founding director of BioRegional Quintain, the UK’s leading sustainable property business (50% owned by BioRegional Properties Ltd and Quintain Estates).

The company’s belief in the OPL mantra is such that the principles are written in its shareholders’ agreement. Last year saw the unveiling of One Brighton, a 100-home, 100-workspace community combining artful design, a green credo and simple planning at the cost of an equivalent brownfield development. Other BioRegional Quintain projects include One Gallions, a 233-home scheme chosen by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone to be the flagship zero-carbon project in the Thames Gateway, and the 750-home RiversideOne in Middlesborough. Desai’s foray into sustainable community design came when BioRegional failed to find any suitable office space so helped to create the mixed-use Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED), which bamboozled UK construction archetypes and inspired the UK government to launch its Eco-Towns initiative.

A former physiologist, Desai is all about healthy systems: “As real estate developers we consider ourselves now as the new frontline in health provision. The way to deliver a truly sustainable community is to look at lifestyles. It’s a radical approach but it’s relatively straightforward to deliver.”

DR. CARLO MONTEMAGNO
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, DANFOSS AQUAZ

The severe shortage of freshwater could become one of the greatest humanitarian crises. Tackling this head on is Denmark-based Danfoss AquaZ, which is applying the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of aquaporins – proteins which regulate the passage of water across cell membranes – to the production of mankind’s most basic need.

“Basically you’re incorporating life, physiology, within an inanimate material that is stable and producible,” says Dr Carlo Montemagno, who developed and patented the first aquaporin nano membrane. As chief technical officer and co-founder of Danfoss AquaZ, he is bringing to market the technology that could make desalination plants five to 10 times more energy efficient, finally making it economically viable to transmute seawater into water for consumption and agriculture.

Aquaporins isolate water molecules using electrostatic physical recognition and their intrinsic efficiency means they function at the thermodynamically lowest energy level for water purification. By developing the material for the nano membranes in which aquaporins are embedded, Danfoss AquaZ allows the proteins to retain their essential properties while expanding their environmental tolerance.

“It is different to any other membrane technology,” says Montemagno.“They will operate over much wider temperature regimes, in much harsher environments than would normally be found in native protein.”

Danfoss AquaZ is set to release its preliminary product in 2010, and is also eyeing other areas besides water purification. “It could become extraordinarily big,” he insists. “The basic technology is being used for water; we also have the opportunity of making membranes that are selective for different minerals and elements. It will change the way we engage in delivering technical products, whether it’s high-quality water or industrial process. It can change the quality of the environment of many people’s lives.”

ARE BØRGESEN
FOUNDER AND CEO, TIDAL SAILS

It was a perfect day for a regatta. The wind was plentiful, the sun was out and the crew was primed for victory. Then disaster struck: the sailboat hit a powerful current, and with a propulsive wind behind the spinnaker, it ground to an unceremonious halt. However, all was not lost: the defeat got crew captain Are Børgesen thinking. What if the boat had been flipped upside down and the spinnaker thrust into the tidal power lurking beneath the surface?

The idea lodged his mind and a few months later, Tidal Sails was born in Haugesund, Norway. Since its formation in 2004, the company has moved to claim it can offer the lowest cost and highest profit potential in the cluttered marine energy market. The record for marine energy generation is thought to be around 0.31€/kWh, but Tidal Sails says it can produce a figure at a fraction of that.

While the physics and product composition differs for tidal, river and wave applications, the basic concept is the same. Sails are attached to a continuous wire loop and angled to resist the pressure of the water. They react by pulling the wires, which rotate round pulleys. Power is extracted at the pulleys and used to drive generators.

“We cannot understand how any of the technologies on the market will have a chance of coming close to us,” says Børgesen, an airline pilot who has had an interest in renewable energy since he built his own house in 1995 using innovative power-saving solutions. This year, Tidal Sails will deploy its largest prototype yet, and with investment prospects on the horizon, commercial production could come as soon as 2012. “We are looking at the combined market of ocean energy as our upper limit,” Børgesen smiles.

JONATHAN ROBINSON
FOUNDER, THE HUB

Before he’d even graduated from university, Jonathan Robinson had commandeered the Royal Festival Hall for a millennial ideas festival, masterminded a social enterprise community on a Soweto mountaintop as a part of the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, and written a book about his sustainable business heroes. Now at the age of 31, he’s driven by an incessant urge to beget businesses for the low carbon era through a rapidly spreading phenomenon known as The Hub.

An amalgam of members club, innovation agency, public space, hotdesking service, and think tank, The Hub is where business models are exploded and collaborative ideas come to flourish. Membership is open to anyone, and you can pay-as-you-go or sign up for the long term.

“The world is in trouble, we don’t need to keep bashing on about it, we need to get started with a whole set of new models, new ideas, new relationships that transform and see the opportunity in the crisis,” says Robinson. Twelve Hubs have sprung up across four continents and its 3,000 members range from venture capitalists and big business suits to community activists, policy makers and maverick technologists.

To date, Hubbites have created 1,534 ventures, including profitable businesses such as Onzo Smart Meters, urban wind turbine firm Quiet Revolution and recycled footwear gurus Worn Again. The Hub has also curated educational and social events and worked with UNICEF.

“I have a fascination with the journey of taking ideas from a scribble on the back of a beer mat to something that’s really achieving signifi -cant change in the world,” says Robinson, who has ambitions to open 50 Hubs across the world in the coming years. “I’m the person that wants to grab on to the people and the beer mat doodles they’ve made in the hope that there’s a way of making them happen.”

RAY ANDERSON
FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, INTERFACE

Fifteen years ago, Ray Anderson challenged his resource-hogging carpet-manufacturing company to become a sustainable, restorative operation and pioneer of the paradigm “doing well by doing good”. Dyed-in-the-wool industrialist Anderson a had just had his mind blown by Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce – an excoriating analysis of deleterious business practice.

By civilisation’s definition, Anderson was a captain of industry, but Hawken’s unflinching polemic made him feel like “a plunderer of the earth and a thief”. This was the genesis of ‘mission zero’, one of the most comprehensive, and influential, instances of environmental corporate responsibility ever seen.

Carpets are a dirty business and Interface is a huge company – turnover last year was €730m – yet, with a deadline of 2020, the mission is now 60% complete, and has yielded astonishing results such as $405m saved on waste reduction since 1994, and carpet products inspired by biomimicry. Meanwhile, InterfaceRAISE, a peer-to-peer consultancy, is showing businesses like Wal-Mart the way.

While Interface continues to set an example, Anderson, now 75, has emerged as one of the most respected authorities on green business issues. There’ve been books and cameos in documentaries such as The Corporation and The 11th Hour, but mostly there’s been speeches: 1,300 since 1994. Meticulously scripted, and suffused with can-do vibes, an Anderson speech is delivered like a sucker-punch to the gut.“If you really want to unleash the creativity in an organisation you have to state aspirations that are so bold they take people’s breath away,” he says. “I say things that if an environmentalist said it, it would fall on deaf ears. But I’m an industrialist, a profit-minded businessman who’s in this not just to save the earth but to make a profit too. It gives me a credibility and I can get away with it.”

GILDAS SORIN
CEO, NOVALED

From televisions, mobile phones and laptops, to signage and lighting, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) look set to revolution-ise the way we experience light. Semiconductors of extremely thin electroluminescent layers of organic material, OLEDs require no backlighting and emit diffuse, energy-efficient and brilliant light and have the potential to be curved, rolled, transparent and even wearable.

“When you give demonstrations at exhibitions you don’t need to give an explanation, people are immediately convinced. They realise ‘wow, I want to have it’,” says Gildas Sorin, CEO of Novaled, which is at the cutting edge of OLED technology with over 440 patents to its name, as well as several world records in power efficiency. Last year, it was the fastest-growing mid-sized company in Germany, experiencing average revenue growth of more than 400%. Novaled proprietary materials are currently tapping into OLEDs’ vast potential through collaborations with partners as disparate as ArcelorMittal and Kodak.

What sets Novaled apart is its PIN OLEDTM technology, which, by doping the charge carrier transport layers, allows for higher conductivity and structural optimisation. This amounts to lower energy consumption, longer lifetimes, and greater temperature stability. Its methods also expand compatibility with available substrates, for products that could be thinner, lighter, more versatile, perform better picture quality, and require fewer production steps than LCD or Plasma.

“Everytime we discuss with architects and light designers, they are immediately excited by the possibilities for innovative products using OLED technology,” Sorin enthuses. Novaled is also well-placed to be a dynamic player in the broader revolution in organic electronics, a market expected to exceed €22bn by 2014, and its sister company, Heliatek, is using the company’s technology to develop organic solar cells.

ARTUR DELA
CHAIRMAN, ENERGYMIXX

Two years ago, Artur Dela launched a new type of renewable energy company, which promised its investors high returns for relatively low risk by being flexible about where and how the energy is created. Swiss-based EnergyMixx secured €500m in financing from Deutsche Bank for a variety of ventures, ranging from wind and solar energy projects in Italy to thermal cooling technology in the US. In June 2008, EnergyMixx acquired HelioDynamics, a Cambridge, UK company behind a range of multipurpose solar energy products now being rolled out worldwide.

While 2010 could be a significant year all round for EnergyMixx – it is hoping for a full listing before the year-end in Frankfurt, where it is now listed on the Open Market – the company is anticipating a particularly bountiful windfall from Italy. It plans to add around 75MW of wind and solar renewable energy generation in Puglia and at least 35MW in Sicily from an assortment of other industrialsize solar roofs.

Although the Frenchman concedes that “the pace of growth has been set back by the recession, which has made capital raising harder”, he says the falling price of solar panels and wind turbines has partly compensated. By cherry-picking high-yield markets – although Dela also reels off other opportunities in the US, Brazil and France – Dela hopes to be generating around 1GW of energy, the equivalent of a massive conventional power station, by 2011. He says: “Energy is the biggest challenge of the century. I love to go fast and go big and never has there been a more urgent need for that than now.”

But where Dela finds love there is usually money. The 53-year-old serial entrepreneur began his career advising Apple on its European launch before founding Luxembourg-based Eneris and GeoSat, a founding component of Eutelsat, the €4.5bn French satellite company. He says HelioDynamics may turn its first profit this year. The company’s technology is already being trialled in the US and Greece, which, given the demand for air conditioning, represents a massive commercial opportunity.

SHAI AGASSI
FOUNDER AND CEO, BETTER PLACE

It’s hard to think of anyone with a more disruptive business model than 39-year-old Israeli Shai Agassi, who, in founding Better Place just two years ago, laid out his stall as the architect of an upheaval in personal transportation. Agassi’s vision was of an electric car infrastructure including not just smart charging points, but ‘switching stations’ that allow drivers to swap a depleted battery for a charged one in less than three minutes.

This will be a huge year for Better Place because it will roll out large-scale pilot schemes in Denmark, through a joint venture with DONG Energy; in Tokyo, where some of the city’s 60,000 taxis will go electric; and in Jerusalem, where a deal was struck with the mayor leading to a whole network of electric charging points. Agassi has also forged joint ventures with the Province of Ontario in Canada, and infrastructure giant Macquarie in Australia. Meanwhile, Agassi’s home state of California is partnering with him to draw up a blueprint for the revival of the US car industry alongside €700m of infrastructure investment in the Bay Area. Finally, Hawaii state governor Linda Lingle has called for mass adoption of electric vehicles by the end of 2012, using Agassi’s infrastructure.

Behind every announced deal is a renewable energy provider and a cornerstone (but non-exclusive) joint-venture with Renault-Nissan, which claims it will have a dedicated, mass-market electric vehicle on the road by 2011. Putting all the parts together amounts to what Agassi calls “Car 2.0”. Despite only being in business since 2008, he professes to be frustrated with the speed of technological integration. “Until we have an iPod/iTune combination – that is, until the consumer can just drive and know that they’re comfortable and everything has been taken care of, we don’t know what will happen – but the need is there.”