Prescott Arizona News and Events - Read It News Magazine

If Prescott Valley decides that adding a Wal-Mart to their town is a good idea, there may be a silver lining. Or rather, a green one.

In a recent interview with journalist William Rice, Wal-Mart’s media relations go-between Steven Restivo said, “Our environmental goals at Wal-Mart are simple and straightforward: To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and our environment.”

Huh?

Wal-Mart is the company so many love to hate, or at least that we hate to shop, but lately it’s doing its best to lead what is amounting to a substantial wave of interest in sustainable business practices. It’s doing this not only by adding solar panels and skylights to some of its stores but by putting organic produce in its food aisles – at the low prices that personify (and sometimes vilify) the Wal-Mart way of doing business.

It’s not just Wal-Mart, either. DuPont is looking into nicer chemicals and GE has launched “ecomagination,” a program that vows to significantly reduce GE’s green house gas emissions and sell $20 billion dollars worth of environmentally friendly products by 2010.

With that in mind, we decided to take a look at what businesses closer to home are doing in the way of sustainability. The results were mixed, but amid the blank stares and red herrings, I did find a few great examples of profitable sustainability.

I talked to two companies here in Prescott that have worked on decreasing their water and power usage, The Top Shop and Exsil. In both cases, the businesses are motivated less by idealism and more by their bottom lines. For example, the Top Shop’s Tod Makela and his wife, Theresa Ebarb-Makela, installed a power conditioning system (courtesy of Western Watt, Inc.) in the hopes of lowering the Top Shop’s substantial electricity bill. They also use water recycling systems to filter and recycle the flood of water their machines require to cut the granite counter tops that make up about half their business.

On a larger but still local scale, the folks at Exsil, a silicon-wafer recovery operation, have increased their hydro-efficiency seven-fold over the last seven years. Far from being a hummus-lovin’ hippy co-op, Exsil is a high-tech recycling company with a corporate culture of protecting the environment and increasing efficiency that practices a successful business model, stating that it’s cheaper and nearly as effective to recover used silicon wafers as to make new ones.

Green chamber

These are the only two local businesses I encountered in my quest for green businesses that aren’t members of a local green chamber of commerce, the Green to Gold network. Entrepreneurs Jan Bryan and Mary Lin launched Green to Gold in 2005, and right now it has around 21 members (compared to the Prescott Chamber of Commerce’s roster of 1,400).

Like a typical chamber, Bryan says, Green to Gold members want to engage in dialog at the community level.

“We represent a pretty sizable chunk of this local economy – we are successful business owners who ascribe to sustainability values and ideas and guidelines,” said co-founder Bryan, a financial planner who specializes in social investing. “If indeed resources are limited and future business profitability is linked to sustainability, we think it’s a good thing to dialog with the City.”

It’s not hard when the City, or at least one council member, is already a member. Bob Luzius said he joined in order to educate himself and to be a liaison to a city government with a great record for encouraging business – and a blank stare where sustainability is concerned.

Green energy

At a slightly higher level in government, though, things pick up.

Prescott’s District 1 representative Lucy Mason helped give renewable energy a big shot in the arm by writing a bill that gave consumer rebates on solar purchases.

“With all the sun and wind we have, Arizona needs to be a leader in developing sustainable energy,” she said.

That bill and the increasing tendency for people to buy affordable land “off the grid” have kept Ben Mancini’s business, EV Solar, hopping.

“There’s enough sunlight that strikes the planet to power the entire planet for a year,” said Mancini. “It’s just a question if you have the technology to convert it.”

Or the money. Right now, a solar system costs $11,000 after state and other rebates, but Mancini says that he thinks that within the next 10 years the cost of solar power will be on par with conventional utility power. That’s not just because the price of fossil fuel is rising, either. He predicts that solar technology, already growing cheaper and more reliable, will become more accessible as it develops.

Arizona Public Service (APS) has jumped feet-first into the race to develop bigger/better/faster/stronger renewable technologies, among them, solar. While an order from the Arizona Corporation Commission to supply five percent of their power from renewable sources by 2015 was certainly the starting pistol, they’ve hit their own stride.

“I think that the paradigm shift is being forced on APS, but I think APS is responsive to that shift,” Prescott College Professor and climatologist Jack Herring said.

And they’re willing to try anything.

One of their more exciting (and slimy) projects involves growing algae using CO₂ from their Redhawk Power Plant. Once cultured, the utility is processing the algae into ethanol and biodiesel, giving new meaning to the phrase “Grow your own.”

Another (sort of) local business, Flagstaff-based Southwest Windpower, has created a media stir with its recently unveiled energy appliance, the Skystream 3.7. The company says it’s the first wind generator that’s simple enough to be bought and used by people who aren’t necessarily energy gurus. Add to that the relative silence of the Skystream and its ability to produce energy even in light breezes, and Southwest Windpower – and the market – says it’s got a winner.

Tri-cities lagging

Southwest Windpower’s success hasn’t been lost on the Flagstaff Greater Economic Council, Flagstaff’s economic development folk. They’ve been working to court more clean and sustainable industry to come to Flagstaff – so much so that they produced the Southwest Sustainability Expo from 1998 to 2005.

The same green push is mostly absent here in the tri-cities. While the economic development folks I talked to in Prescott and Prescott Valley all agreed that they don’t encourage water-intensive industries to come to the area, they also all agreed that it’s tough to attract clean industry, and not high on their list of priorities in any case.

“We face a couple of issues; one is the availability of land and two, the price of land,” City of Prescott Economic Development Director Karen Greenspoon said.

Her Prescott Valley counterpart, Greg Fister, says while he doesn’t specifically seek green industry, he does quiz prospective businesses about their practices.

“I ask the simple questions, like do you have skylights?” he said.  “I ask them because I’m curious about how you deal with increased energy costs. I like to see what they’re doing, like whether they bale up their cardboard for recycling. It’s not anything that we require, but those kinds of small things do add up.”

Fister said that he thinks that larger companies will become more interested in sustainability as time goes on. And those companies, including Wal-Mart, might just have an impact on sustainable business practices locally.

Fister said, “I think it’s starting to make a difference.”

Online Editor's Note: Do you know a local business with sustainable practices? The business could be using organic food, helping people increase energy efficiency, using earth-friendly chemicals — whatever you can think of, let our readers know! Leave a comment below.

To read a story about this story, visit LighterFootstep.com. Thanks to Chris Baskind for writing it.