Liberty Tire Recycling has kept 100 million rubber tires from landfills--or the equivalent of 25 percent of the country's annual scrapped tires, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association. Crumb rubber is turned into artificial turf, playground surfacing, doormats, and mulch.
You won't find Eco-Products' cups, cutlery, and food containers in landfills--or if you do, they won't be there for long. They are certified compostable, which means that 90 percent of the material will disintegrate within 120 days and will leave no toxic residue.
Flipswap, founded in 2004 by Sohrob, Cyrus and Rahmeen Farudi, Edo Cohen and Andrew Berman, has collected over a million cell phones. The phones mostly come through retailers that collect old phones when a customer gets an upgrade, and through a free-shipping rebate program on its website. It resells 98 percent of the phones, mostly to retailers in China, South America, and South Africa. For every phone Flipswap can't resell, it plants a tree through American Forest's Global ReLeaf program.
A client asked that their old carpet not end up in landfill but CEO Thomas Holland couldn't find anywhere to send commercial carpet. So TexasCarpetRecycling.com was created as an offshoot of Corporate Floors, diverting 1,500 tons of carpet from landfills in 2008 and on track to double that this year. About half can be reused as carpets, and some are ground into pellets to power cement kilns.
When CEO Chris Mittelstadt and his team started showing up to corporate offices with fresh seasonal produce from local growers, eventually everyone started saying, "the fruit guys are here!" The FruitGuys have now set up hubs in Chicago and Philadelphia to serve more customers without having to ship products more than a couple hundred miles.
Daniel Sandoval had 12 years’ experience working on waste fuel technologies for other companies, but now, as the CEO of Source Technologies, he can also be considered, at least in part, as a matchmaker. The company is able to match big power users to the waste products that can fuel them. Source Technologies has developed patented technology to convert toxic gas into a source of renewable energy.
"We basically took a Cheeto and reformulated it,” says Ed Boehmer, CEO of StarchTech, a company that produces biodegradable packing peanuts made from renewable resources. StarchTech packing peanuts are made from the byproducts of corn starch and dissolved in water.
Dr. Pearse Lyons, who founded Alltech in 1980, thinks highly of animal health, especially that of livestock. That's why he started Alltech, a manufacturer of natural ingredients for use in animal, alcohol, and food production, mainly animal feed supplements. Lyons’ goal is for Alltech to be Kentucky’s third “super-brand”—after Kentucky Fried Chicken and Muhammad Ali.
