Beyond Green to Clean
September 2008
NW Airlines "World Traveler" – Given the price of oil, the imperative to conserve energy and the nationwide concern about mounting garbage and toxic waste, the assortment of new businesses known as "clean technology" has all the earmarks of a perfect 21st- century investment. And the Seattle area is once again at the forefront.
"If it produces fewer emissions or less waste, then it's clean technology," says Steve Gerritson, business development manager for Enterprise Seattle." We have about 400 companies in the region that we consider clean technology." Among such businesses, he explains, are those that deal with alternative fuels, recycling, clean energy, water quality, remediation (as in toxic clean-up), energy efficiency (as in retrofitting buildings) and clean manufacturing, defined as processes in which waste is recycled and sometimes even reused.
"We see this as part of the longer-term trend that has really taken off here," Gerritson says. "First, of course, Seattle has an amazing natural environment that people want to protect. And second, you can make good money protecting that environment."
One example, he says, is McKinstry Co., a third-generation plumbing and electrical contractor with a 50-year history in the Seattle market. About five years ago the firm added retrofitting buildings to its list of services, and today this niche makes up some 40 percent of the company's business-about $150 million a year.
Many of McKinstry's customers are commercial enterprises that retrofit "because it makes good business sense," Gerritson says. "Clean technology is not only the right thing to do, but it'll save businesses a lot of money.”
In a region rife with thousands of "Microsoft millionaires"- young retirees sitting on personal software fortunes - Gerritson says clean technology is "taking off," in part because so many investors recognize "there's money to be made. And because it's the next big thing."
In fact, he says, "The market is already demonstrating that what we're saying is true." Greenwood Technologies began in 2005 with three employees and now has 25. It developed a line of closed loop wood burning furnaces that are extremely efficient. Instead of heating a single room, the furnaces are designed to heat entire houses. Another local success story, Blue Marble Energy, was the idea of a man who'd been working for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. "One day," Gerritson says, "he decided he was going to do something to make the world a better place." So he procured an old fishing boat, and now he sails Puget Sound collecting algae, which he turns into biodiesel fuel.
-D.P.
