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Interview with Ken Kurtzig, Founder and CEO of iReuse
Imagine you work for a large company and it’s your job to dispose of unwanted equipment or materials - often tons of it. And you want to dispose of the materials in a environmentally friendly way, while saving money and possibly helping a nonprofit organization get needed materials? This is not an easy task. Fortunately, there’s iReuse to the rescue.
In this interview, iReuse founder and CEO Ken Kurtzig reveals how a insightful discovery at a taco stand led to the creation of a thriving business that helps companies reduce their environmental impact, through its sustainbility consulting and waste removal services.
In just over 3 years of operations, iReuse has won numerous awards for its environmental leadership.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- iReuse helped Birkenstock save $170,000 and get positive publicity by donating unwanted shoe material to help horses instead of throwing them away
- How the iReuse “matchmaking system” connects company’s surplus materials to wishlists for non-profits
- How companies can actually save money while diverting waste from landfills
- The success of iReuse’s innovative reuse program created the opportunity to provide additional “green” consulting services to companies
- How transparency and documentation gives iReuse an edge in backing up its environmental claims
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY LAWRENCE, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello, this is Judy Lawrence from Green Business Innovators.com, and I’m very pleased today to be speaking with Ken Kurtzig, the founder and CEO of iReuse based in Sausalito, California, and the website is www.iReuse.com.
iReuse is a leading sustainability consulting firm in the field of corporate reuse and waste reduction providing comprehensive services to help companies go green and save green. iReuse provides services for businesses, individuals and non-profits. This innovative 3 year old consulting firm works with many leading bay area companies like Charles Schwab, Autodesk, Adobe Systems, PG&E, Birkenstock and many others to help manage the internal redistribution, sales, donations, recycling and disposal of their surplus materials thus saving these companies time, money and energy, while at the same time they’re helping the community and the environment.
In a way, iReuse is like a matchmaker between corporations wanting to get rid of surplus goods in a socially conscious way and the non-profits needing to acquire material supplies in a fiscally reasonable way. In fact I understand, in 2007 alone, iReuse redirected over 230 tons of materials from the landfill and much of that went to over 200 non-profits such as The American Cancer Society, Mission YMCA, Trip for Kids and numerous other great non-profits throughout the Bay Area.
So Ken welcome and please feel free to highlight more of your variety of services and recent accomplishments and awards. I know you’ve certainly received awards. So thank you.
KEN KURTZIG: Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here and it’s been a fun 4 years, a little over 4 years developing our program and starting to work with some of these large corporations and helping them do the right thing and in many cases saving not only money but also the environment.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And how about — well, let me just backup a little bit with how you got started. I kind of love hearing as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story.” Tell me more about what inspired you to start the company, when and where your passion for reducing, reusing and recycling was ignited. Was there something even in your childhood experience that related to this passion?
KEN KURTZIG: Soon after I graduated from college actually, I went to the corporate center and worked for PeopleSoft (now Oracle) for some time and then eventually went to an internet start up during the dot com boom, which is very exciting and doing business development and strategy. And I loved the fiscal responsibility and the kind of drive of the corporate sector, although we were developing HR software and implementing software, and so I wanted to see if there’s other things I could do that kind make a larger contribution to the community and the world. So I ended up going to a non-profit sector for several years to an organization called CompassPoint where we consulted and trained other non-profits.
And I loved the mission orientation of the non-profit sector really trying to make a difference or actually making a difference not even trying in most cases. And I’ve always been a huge environmentalist so I was looking… Okay, and I’ve always wanted just try my own kind of organization and business. So I was trying– How do I tie those three things together– the fiscal financial responsibility of corporate sector, the mission and passion of the non-profit sector, and my environmental interest– and so that’s how it kind of started iReuse.
One day that taco shop in Sausalito, talking to the owner of the shop who was paying– I can’t remember I think it was $50 a month or $50 every two weeks or something, to have her used vegetable oil as hazardous material and I knew lots of people that would love to take her old vegetable oil and use it as biodiesel or save vegetable oil for their vehicles, which is now becoming more and more popular, this was five years ago.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Sure. Oh yes.
KEN KURTZIG: And so as opposed to her paying twenty-five hundred dollars a year to have it hauled away, someone would gladly take it for free or even potentially pay her. But there was a disconnect between supply and demand so then I started looking and going to check local landfill and transfer stations and seeing all this great stuff go to landfill and that’s where it kind of all began.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What were some of your initial challenges and some of those surprises during your startup days, and right now what are your current challenges or even some on the horizon with this type of business?
KEN KURTZIG: Our business has evolved dramatically over the last four years. We started off actually focusing on the reuse of materials mostly for individuals so that when people wanted to get rid of their couches or vacuum cleaners, we were developing that– basically a Craigslist killer on eBay; a really advanced eBay tool for larger items because eBay is not really well-suited for large, things that don’t have a great return and value.
The thing about the reuse market is everything is basically dependent on supply and demand pretty much like any business but in this case you have people that want to get rid of stuff, you have people that need stuff and then you need to figure out the best system to match supply and demand and also get it to that demand. And so we’ve really focused on the matching supply and demand.
Now, the reason why eBay and Craigslist and Freecycle are so successful is because they have a huge supply of people that want to get rid of stuff and people that want stuff. And so as we started developing our initial web tools and everything; we didn’t have that same demand so the matching was not as successful. And there were a lot of smaller kind of matching sites, but again, they’re having a hard time. But what we started doing is we started creating this wish list system so that non-profits and businesses could come to our site and tell us their wildest dreams, what they wanted.
Then we quickly built up this huge demand and with that demand we were able to go to corporate clients who didn’t have a good vehicle for getting stuff to new homes and ended up trashing a lot of stuff and saying hey, we already have a huge demand of buyers and non-profit and exactly what they need to let us help you match that supply really efficiently.
And so then we started working with Autodesk, our first corporate client in Marin County, and they had a warehouse full of stuff. They didn’t want to trash it. They had a donation program, but we kind of helped dramatically improve their reuse and donation efforts so now they’re at about 95 plus percent donation and reuse rate whereas before, they are paying a lot of money to just have stuff sitting there stored so that they don’t want to trash it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Do you run into any resistance yet from corporations for this type of service?
KEN KURTZIG: There are certain resistances. It really depends on the client. The thing about environmental solutions, no matter what you’re doing is you have to make it easier than the alternatives. And in many cases, especially for corporations, you have got to make it cheaper for many alternatives. Some clients just want to do the right thing no matter what. But I think that’s a pretty small proportion.
I mean, we work with clients like Charles Schwab and Wells Fargo and PG&E and Kaiser Permanente. They really want not only fiscal responsibility but environmental. And they’re not going to do… I mean, Salesforce.com and these clients have shareholders, investors, and if they’re spending ten million dollars to reuse a couch, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. So the key is looking in how do you make it fiscally responsible?
Sometimes, depending on the project and if it’s three hours to get stuff out of a building, it could be easy just to put in a dumpster outside the building. It is expensive to dump stuff so it all depends on the timeline and the availability. If the stuff has a resale value, that obviously increases the return on investment, if there’s any benefit for tax purposes or helping the community in terms of donations, if there’s recycling value. So we kind of help manage that whole process to maximize the return investment for our clients versus putting something in the dumpster– there’s no return investment. There’s no maximizing anything other than maybe efficiency in getting it out of the building.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And that’s about the only benefit out of that.
KEN KURTZIG: Exactly right. Yeah. So if you have three hours to get stuff out of a building that’s probably one of your only solutions. And we have hauling services where we’ll take it off site and then coordinate donation offsite so that’s become pretty effective even for the short projects but, if you have a couple weeks or a month or two months or more, certainly utilizing a service like ours that maximizes every reuse opportunity is the best.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Now how do you — I know you’ve already started to say this a little bit, but how do you differentiate yourself from the other hauling and recycling companies, since we’re seeing more and more of them, as well as the municipality recycling services, in terms of your actual services and charges? I know you’ve explained some of it but how do you get the businesses and the consumer to see the differentiation there?
KEN KURTZIG: There’s a couple things. One is we’re really providing now comprehensive sustainability consulting for our corporations so waste reduction has become one part of our services. We work with clients like Delta Dental and Kaiser Permanente on greening their entire facilities so power, water waste conservation, green procurement, carbon footprint analysis analysis, IT, etc. So we really provide a good comprehensive sustainability program, as well as comprehensive tracking recording.
So specifically for the reuse programs and the waste reduction programs, again, we really focus on developing systematic approaches and solutions for our corporation clients. So what we developed actually awhile back was for surplus material, is that we call it the trickle down process, the iReuse trickle down process.
The most environmentally friendly cost-effective solution in most cases that a client can do is reuse materials internally so if one Adobe location is getting rid of stuff, maybe they can use it at another Adobe location. Or Wells Fargo or Union Bank or wherever it is. They have a great desk, they don’t need it in one location because they’re shifting or transitioning or whatever. Let’s see if another facility can use it.
They reduce purchases and cost, they reduce hauling and disposing costs, etc. And again it’s for reuse. The second best option in many cases is sales because you get a return on investment obviously, if you have 15 nice cubicles or chairs or something, and you can oftentimes sell it and get a return investment.
The next option is donation, so as opposed to having stuff hauled and trashed, which is expensive because you have to pay for the labor to get everything out of the building and then pay it to get it to a transfer station, and then you dump it and a transfer station charges you fees, if you can get it picked up at the curb by a non-profit, or depending on the situation we have it picked up at different locations, that can oftentimes be a much more cost effective solution.
Then comes recycling. Reuse obviously being much better than recycling. Reusing materials as is. So if I can use this desk that I am looking at right now, again as a desk, that’s much more environmentally friendly than chomping it up into bits and using it for some other purpose, trying to remanufacture something else because that takes a lot of energy for all the paper on my desk.
Reuse is about 93%, actually more, efficient than recycling so maximizing reuse, then recycling, then the worst, the worst is disposal. For most of our projects, our corporate projects, we reuse through internal reuse, sales or donation about 80% of materials. If you take something to a transfer station it’s going to be 100% recycled or disposed of, so the last two options. They don’t even look up the stream at the top three options; they just look at the bottom two.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Now what percent would you say ends up finally being disposal?
KEN KURTZIG: It depends on the project. We’ve had projects, I’m just going through some of our statistics, we had a huge project in Novato that is 95 tons of material for an office space; 93.34% was reused through sale and donation, 3.52% was recycled and 3.14% was land filled out of 96 tons of material.
Birkenstock — we have the statistics on our log… Again, it was 95% reuse through sale and donation. The biggest impact on whether this stuff goes through landfill is the time that we have to coordinate the reuse or recycling of materials so if we have two months that percentage goes way down. If we have two hours that percentage goes up.
And the second thing is also the quality or quantity. With a lot of our corporate clients the stuff is in great condition and we now have in the Bay Area a wish list of I think like 4,000 plus business and non-profits and who wants what, for example, in the Bay Area. So we have people — we have startup businesses that have nothing, that just looking for any type of desk or chair to use.
We have non-profits that serve low income families who got transplanted by a hurricane or something and they’re looking for any utensils and forks and plates and everything they can use. So I’m not going to say someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure because we don’t like to call it trash but there’s often times you get an opportunity for reuse.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: On the corporate level, I love this story that I read about Birkenstock, how in their inventory they had this excess, what is it shoe padding?
KEN KURTZIG: Yes.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I’ll let you tell that story and then I’m curious when you tell it, how do you go about finding these unique homes and connections? So tell that story with Birkenstock.
KEN KURTZIG: Birkenstock, the shoe company up in Novato was moving out of their facility; they had a warehouse and an office space so about a total of 150,000 square feet I think, and so we sold all their furniture and cubes and chairs and all that stuff and then they had in their warehouse parts and materials for manufacturing shoes and putting shoes together for their distribution and sales, which they were moving their distribution center and so that had some surplus. This padding you’re mentioning had been there for like 20 years or something that they weren’t using because it was old shoes that they were used for.
One of the best things that’s actually interesting is obviously you wouldn’t know about this story except for the fact that there is a TV segment on Birkenstock in our project and that’s another benefit of what we do. Not only did Birkenstock in this project save (I think it was a $170,000) but they got all this press about how green they were.
So they had this padding, which was like 20 years old, and we were trying to figure what to use it for. I mean it was great. It could have been used for school projects or something but there were like pallets of this padding and so through our wish list system we had a non-profit that wanted to take it and use it for their horse stables for the padding so that, the horses that they had didn’t injure their hooves or their legs and it was amazing. We get some of the most– we’ve reused airplane hangars!
We did– one of my favorite stories, one of the early, early stories. We had a couple getting married and as opposed to trashing all their flowers, which they spent $4,000 for 20 minutes of fame at their wedding… All the flowers right after the wedding got donated to the local hospice for all the patients in the offices and they got a $4,000 tax donation. So again, matching out the supply and demand.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And I love those kind of matched stories. In fact, you had one with some koi fish I think?
KEN KURTZIG: Yeah, yeah. That was again at Birkenstock. We had the – we have to get pictures I think. I don’t know if it’s on our blog of us fishing out these koi fish because one of the, Birkenstock’s moving and out of their space and all the employees felt guilty they didn’t want to abandon these koi fish that obviously would have died if they hadn’t been fed and so those went to a local school I think.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So I’m always curious…how you make that match? So this match actually came about by having your wish list on your website?
KEN KURTZIG: Exactly. We have a couple different ways. So we have the wish list of people tell us exactly what they want. Obviously, people did not say, “we want koi fish.” But we posted koi fish in our system; we have newsletter that goes out to a lot of different recipients based on the need. So in the case of the koi fish, we knew most likely that a school or an environmental organization would most likely be interested so we’re able to connect pretty quickly based on the location of that, in this case the koi fish, those items.
And then we also have online places where people can search for items. So there are a couple of different vehicles for matching supply and demand as efficiently is possible. We have a really nice tool so when we put inventory online it automatically notifies the best matches in the area. So let’s say we’re doing a project for Charles Schwab in downtown San Francisco and we put on task chairs and filing cabinets or whatever, we put into our system and the next part of our system automatically notifies – if it’s for sale, it notifies the buyers. If they’re for donation, it notifies the non-profits within that area within a five mile radius that want those items. So it doesn’t go out to southern California or Wisconsin, it really matches based on geography again for environmental purposes.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And keeping it very efficient.
KEN KURTZIG: Exactly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Now I had mentioned earlier that your service is not only for corporations and non-profits but individuals as well. So is there a reason for the consumer to use your service versus the Craigslist or a Freecycle to get rid of their own surplus things? When would it behoove them to use iReuse?
KEN KURTZIG: I think Craigslist and Freecycle and eBay and a lot of these marketing places are phenomenal resources for specific purposes. I think eBay is a phenomenal resource for selling stuff that has a great value. It’s not a great place to sell a two dollar item unless you bought the item for thirty cents or ten cents, and so you’re getting a big return investment. So a used couch is obviously not a good vehicle for that.
Craigslist is great for people that want to post smaller inventories so if you want to – it’s not the best place if you want to clear out your entire house, unless you want to put stuff on your curb or something. And the other problem with Craigslist is a lot of times you’ll get “looky lous”, where people that will come and check it out and then they don’t want it and you’re left there with your end of your lease or your rent and you got to be out today and now you have 20 items, a couch and a chair and a refrigerator still on your hands. And Freecycle has been very successful in, again, matching free stuff and kind of connecting people.
The benefit to us or specifically for individuals, we have a hauling service so similar to many haulers that come and take away all your stuff. We charge a fee for our hauling service for individuals. Our fees are usually much cheaper than competitors and other hauling companies, because they take everything to a transfer station and they pay a fee for the disposal of items. We get as much donated as possible so we don’t have to pass through those dump fees.
The other thing that we do is we donate for a hauling service; roughly 75% of the stuff that we pickup gets donated. We get tax receipts, which go to our customers so our customers get donation receipts for all the stuff that we pickup that we’re able to donate to local charities and because of our matching system, being able to match stuff so efficiently between one place and another, that allows us to donate 35% of the stuff and get tax receipts. So we pickup your couch and your television and all your kitchen supplies and we get it donated locally. And you’re going to get tax receipts.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So even though this industry is not regulated, that’s one way you can prove that you’re actually doing what you say you’re doing…
KEN KURTZIG: Exactly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Because you present them with that tax receipt?
KEN KURTZIG: I think what you’re saying is a very important point; transparency in the environmental sector across the board is key. If I can show that we donated 35% of our stuff because I give you a tax receipt, and a list of exactly what we donated, it’s obvious. If I am doing a little project for a corporation, we document every single thing that comes out of the facility and exactly where it goes, so it’s absolutely transparent. And we have measurements for desks and quantities and volumes and green house gas emissions for so — I mean our reporting is pretty extensive.
We work with the EPA and local governments to really develop really nice comprehensive reports. I think anyone looking for an environmental solution should ask: what transparency does that service provider have? There’s other haulers that say they do reuse materials. I would ask, where’s it going and how much of your stuff is being reused? And what happened to my stuff? If they don’t give you reports or tax receipts or any evidence of what happened to your stuff, I wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt just because they have a green name.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And that’s a good point. That’s probably your way of differentiating yourself too.
KEN KURTZIG: Yes.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Are there other models that you’ve found in the country or world or other parts of California that are doing something similar to what you’re doing?
KEN KURTZIG: Yeah, there’s people doing different parts of this but I haven’t seen anyone that provides a really good comprehensive solution. You said, there’s online marketplaces, eBay and Craigslist and all those… There are liquidators who will buy furniture. The problem with liquidators is they’ll come in and take either part of the inventory or they’ll take all of the inventory and trash 80% of it to get the 20% that has good resale value.
There are non-profits. Obviously, they’ll come in, take up stuff from different recipients. The problem is often times they’re kind of picky so they won’t pickup everything, they’ll pickup just the stuff that they really want or their user base will take or buy and so then you’re still left with stuff so we come in as kind of a comprehensive solution. We’ll manage the entire process and make sure that everything is cleared out in the most cost effective, environmentally friendly manner possible.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So it’s the comprehensiveness that seems to be your real edge and so you can be taking away the electronic computers and the refrigerators and the washer, dryers, all things that people now have been paying for, just to have picked up from their home or their site and so then you’re saying you’ll take all of it and you’ll be the final solution for everything?
KEN KURTZIG: Exactly. And again for corporations, that’s one of the keys is they want a simple solution; they want a simple turnkey solution. They don’t want to deal with themselves. They want a professional organization that’s done this for lots of other corporations, and I think also the reporting that we do and the tracking and the transparency is also critical because people are getting scrutinized over. They say they are green but what does that really mean? You can say that you recycle stuff but, that’s wonderful and all but what’s the tonnage? What’s the total volume? What does that mean by recycling?
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So this is where the kind of the greenwashing is, filtering in in this industry too.
KEN KURTZIG: Yes. We’re not a big fan of green washing. Not that we don’t help our clients do promotion of their results. I mean like I said the Birkenstock TV segment we heard a hundred percent on the – this is what the material was, this is what happened to it and Birkenstock, they’re rock stars because they really push the envelope. Not only did they save all this money but they also diverted a 150 tons of materials from the landfill.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And that sounds like one of the bigger sections for marketing because I’m curious… What else do you do specifically for your marketing efforts that seem to pay off the most? You’ve got your website, you’ve got a lot of PR it seems. And your internet…You’ve got some blogs from there. Are there trade shows or other ways of marketing that you’re finding as a business that are starting to payoff?
KEN KURTZIG: Yes. A lot of what we do is customer referrals which are always wonderful; partnerships and relationships that we have and also continuing to expand our service offerings. So we started off in this waste reduction service, helping initially with couches, and okay, and then we’re going to start working with… And then other Autodesk brought us on and our volume of reuse, went through the roof – we’re now doing about four tons a day and then our clients came back to us and said, “Okay, you’re the green guys; what else can you do for us?”
And then we started really expanding our services and bringing in experts on– we brought in power experts, lighting experts, HVAC experts, we brought in waste experts that will kind of streamline an entire waste stream practice, so the client is paying ten thousand dollars a month for their waste bills.
We’ll come in; we’ll develop a program and focus on reducing our waste bills down to $3,000 a month and their diversion up to 70, 80%. And we have the experts in house to do that and we have experts that have worked on comprehensive sustainability programs for Wal-Mart and a lot of large corporate clients.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So I take it to reduce their cost, and even after the paying you their fee they’ll still come out ahead in many ways?
KEN KURTZIG: In many cases some — there’s really three components to assist in the sustainability effort. There’s the financial impact of a project, there’s the environmental impact for a project and the stake holder community impact.
So our waste reduction program, those usually have clear financial benefit, and it’s a no brainer and for our power savings and our water savings and oftentimes our green purchasing and green IT; there’s often opportunities for major cost savings and also improved efficiency and environmental benefit. There’s other things like employee programs, where there may not be a direct financial benefit but there may be a dramatic increase in employee satisfaction and retention, which indirectly has some value obviously.
I talk about all the time, putting solar on your roof is wonderful and it has a huge stakeholder benefit for if employees see it and your customers see it and everyone thinks that you’re the greenest company in the world; but actually reducing your power usage by 20% just by getting your lights all off at night at 5 o’clock or having sensors, which is making sure that all your lamps are efficient as possible, is much more environmentally friendly and cost effective than solar panels on your roof.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And that’s what you go in and help do?
KEN KURTZIG: We do, exactly. We go in and we do a comprehensive assessment to say okay, here’s all the things you’re doing, which is wonderful. Here’s all the opportunities for improvement. And also depending on the organization’s goals, you kind of help develop a comprehensive program. So we say okay, solar is great, but first let’s focus on reducing your power use by 30% or whatever it is to be as efficient as humanly possible, and then let’s look for alternatives that says solar or green power and things like that so they get the kind of the most efficient or biggest bang for their buck, I guess depending on what their programs are.
I think in a lot of cases, clients, a lot of our corporate clients, are just so overwhelmed. There’s so much information out there on green and what’s green, what’s not green that they get kind of overwhelmed and so we can help develop a well-thought out, well-organized, comprehensive program which helps them maximize their greatest potential and the greatest benefits.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And as you said, you become that simple turnkey solution for them so they can just get it done, know they’re getting it done probably and environmentally and they can move on.
KEN KURTZIG: And they’re maximizing their goals. So if a company comes to me and says, “I care about being green. That’s great, and I care about my employees being great, but right now with this economy I need to save as much money as humanly possible.” We’ll come in and okay, here’s the fifteen programs that we would recommend you do and one of them is not going to be putting solar on your roof. It’s going to be like let’s look at your waste bills right away and get that down. Let’s look at your water usage, let’s look at your power usage, let’s look at myriad of other things and see how we can get those expenses down.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And when we’re talking about the marketing you had mentioned partnerships. So I noticed that recently you had partnered up with the College Hunks Hauling Junk? How is that working and how has that expanded your service?
KEN KURTZIG: We had a couple initial haulers we worked with for some time, and it’s gone really well. We’ve had shipping as one of our partners and we love them, they’ve done a great job and they have other services as well and we continue to expand a lot of our programs so with College Hunks, they had a vested interest in reusing materials. They’re, again, like any hauling company, they pick up materials. They didn’t have a really efficient way of getting stuff to non-profits or a systematic approach, and so we’ve brought them in, and now they add another ten regions for our hauling services.
So now we have much more comprehensive services and the LA and the Bay Area and etcetera, which continues to help expand our hauling services and compete again with the waste haulers that just take everything to a transfer station like some of the biggest hauling companies — I won’t name any names, which we’re also trying to get them to do the right thing and promote our services and some of them are coming around, which is great. And continue to expand our hauling services and focus on reusing materials whenever possible.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So this is also your way – then you can start expanding out of than just the Marin area?
KEN KURTZIG: Yes, so we serve the entire Bay Area for most of our services. We serve the LA area for some of our services and especially for our individuals in our hauling services and for our corporate sustainability services, a lot of our clients have nationwide and international offices, so we’re really working on programs nationwide for a lot of our sustainability stuff. The sustainability, the power and water and conservation and IT and procurement and cover for print analysis is much easier to do pretty much anywhere in the country. The reuse piece is a little bit more difficult because again, it’s dependent on supply and demand.
So if we need to do a project in Chicago, I need to buildup the demand as well as get the supply. We’ve done projects for clients in New York. Union Bank is clearing out a couple floors of material; we’ve done five or ten projects in New York as well as in a couple of in Wisconsin I think, and Chicago. We’ve done some projects and the client says, “We’ve got a building. We’ve got to get rid of stuff. Can you guys do it?” And as long as we have enough time to, again, buildup that supply and demand, then we can do that. And then we have that existing supply and demand to serve future projects.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes I see. So as we finish up, I was wondering what do you feel is – you’ve got many of them, but what would you say is the greatest contribution so far with what you’re doing with your business?
KEN KURTZIG: My greatest contribution? When we started iReuse four and a half years ago, I was really focused on a solution that was really… makes it better, faster and cheaper to do the right thing than the wrong thing. I’ve always been a big environmentalist, and actually my father was a huge environmentalist, and that’s where I got a lot of my environmental interest. And my mom was actually an extremely successful businesswoman. So maybe I’ve also tied those two together.
I think the key is to get to every single consumer or user in the nation and I don’t know — I think the strong, environmental push and kind of criticism of current practices hasn’t worked really well. I think getting these corporations to do the right thing just because you can message it or communicate in a certain way or prove that it’s just smarter to do it this way than another way makes it really easy to convince people to improve efficiency, reduce environmental impact, etcetera, and so that’s really been our focus… is how we implement programs that just make it a no brainer to do the right thing as opposed to just criticizing someone because they’re using too much lighting or something. We say, okay great. They’re using too much lighting? Let’s figure out how do we make it more efficient? If I can save them a $100,000 by using less lighting, what CEO isn’t going to agree to that?
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS Any suggestions for green business entrepreneurs who are out there and starting up with an idea, and they’re wondering does it pay to move forward? What does it take to be successful in a competitive market, especially in this economy? Any suggestions for someone who’s out there just thinking of starting their business?
KEN KURTZIG: I think it’s a really exciting market. I mean especially with the upcoming election I think Obama and McCain are both fairly interested in the environment, obviously one more than the other, but I think there’s going to be a lot of movement in the sustainability sector in general; clean technology in general and solar panels and wind, etc.
I think that the key over the next five years again is develop programs or services or products that make it easier or better or cheaper to do the right thing than the wrong thing because you have people in the Midwest who are just trying to put food on the table to feed their family. There’s no way they’re going to put solar on their roof that cost $16,000. I mean, I put it on my roof but I had to; I run an environmental company, etc.
It’s pretty easy to implement energy efficiency practices and save them $50 a month on their energy, so they can buy $50 more worth of food for a month for their family or whatever it is. So how do you develop systems or services that maximize efficiency or products, etc. that really make it better to do the right thing? And I think that that’s the key.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And before we finish, I want to give you an opportunity to mention some of the awards and recognitions you’ve received recently.
KEN KURTZIG: It’s been wonderful to receive some of the Green Entrepreneur Of The Year awards and the Green Business Of The Year awards and we got the Actor Business, Screen Business Of The Year award along with Adobe and I can’t remember some of the other clients or some of the other recipients, where we got the — what are some of the other ones? Oh, the Going Green 100 Top Private Companies award, which was an honor; we’ve gotten lots of contacts through that, because it really recognizes us as an industry leader and I think that we’re going to continue to see more and more green companies really developing great models and great systems and that’s what excites me more than anything.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And did you get a special congressional recognition?
KEN KURTZIG: Yes, from Assemblyman Joe Mason. We got the Green House Promoter Of The Year award. That was in 2006. That was fun to get to meet Joe and to get that recognition.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Well Ken, thank you so much for this interview and for sharing your business experiences and your insights and inspirational comments.
KEN KURTZIG: No problem. Thank you so much.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Alrighty. Thank you!
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