By Jedd Ferris • June 28, 2010
Change starts from the ground up. That’s the attitude of these four innovative entrepreneurs who are looking beyond the bottom line to build community.
MARK LILLY
mobile farmers market
If you live in the city gridlock, it’s often hard to make it to the farmer’s market. But if you live in Richmond, Va., Mark Lilly will bring it to you. Lilly is the owner of Farm to Family, a business he runs out of a 1987 school bus that’s been converted to look like a country store on the inside. At the beginning of the week, Lilly drives out to small farms in central Virginia and fills the bus with locally grown fresh fruits and veggies. Then he spends the rest of the week taking his mobile market to different spots in Richmond’s busy urban areas. He’s been at it for less than a year, but brisk business proves Lilly is on to something. He provides the missing link for those who feel stuck with corporate grocery options. Read more here…
MATT MAHLER
bags from bike scraps
With a little perseverance, Matt Mahler has turned a nighttime hobby designing new products with reusable materials into a thriving independent business. Mahler is the owner of Tierra Ideas, which makes high-quality messenger and travel bags out of recycled bike inner tubes.
Mahler, who still works as a full-time air quality engineer for the state of North Carolina, was inspired while visiting his sister at Earthaven Ecovillage, an intentional community located across the state in Black Mountain. There he visited a building constructed entirely out of wood from recycled apple crates, and he immediately became fascinated with making products from reusable materials. Back home he bought a sewing machine on Craigslist and took lessons on threading the needle. Then he started experimenting with bike tubes in his garage for five frustrating months until he successfully made his first bag. Read more here…
CHARLEY WILSON
organic mechanic
Fixing cars is a dirty business, but Charley Wilson doesn’t mind taking a few extra steps to clean it up. Wilson runs the Organic Mechanic—an innovative auto repair shop in West Asheville, N.C., that’s found ways to reduce the greasy grimy impact that comes with working under the hood. Wilson relies especially on bioremediation—using naturally occurring organisms to clean up grease, oil, and other pollutants. His permeable concrete lot directs any runoff to a deep gravel bed where bacteria break down any remaining contaminants. He also has a strict recycling policy. Instead of an industrial-size dumpster, he only generates one residential garbage can of trash every two weeks. He even recycles oil, which is sent off to be re-refined so he can use it again.
“This is a business that constantly deals with contaminants, so my goal is to make sure they don’t get beyond my shop.” Read more here…
JOE FOX
green-living dirtball
Joe Fox was sick of seeing jobs disappear from his native North Carolina, so he’s bringing them back, one recycled t-shirt at a time. Two years ago, Fox started Dirtball Fashion—an eco-friendly apparel company with products made solely in his home state. Fox spent 10 years as a professional race car driver. When he decided it was time to slow down, he found his calling from an old buddy, who made him a hat with the Dirtball logo. Soon Fox was getting constant inquiries about where he got it. From the response, he decided to go back home to Hickory and start a company that could help the local economy.
Dirtball’s funky t-shirts are made with 65-percent recycled cotton and 35-percent recycled polyester. The poly is made from recycled water bottles. For every 100,000 shirts that he produces, 400 tons of carbon emissions stay out of the air, 500 barrels of oil aren’t used, and seven full-time manufacturing jobs are saved. Read more here…
