How to start an eco-friendly business

Diana Conway breezes into a Vancouver coffee shop. Her magenta-flowered minidress glows in the afternoon sun as she sits to sip her coffee and describes how inspiration came to her in the form of a decades-old produce bag.

"Two of my friends started this business 17 years ago," explains Conway, 53. "They made reusable bags to replace the endless fruit and vegetable plastic bags thrown out every day." Conway was still carting her veggies in those bags long after her friends had moved on to other things. And with some stores in Canada now charging for plastic bags, "it was definitely an idea ahead of its time," she says.

Capitalizing on an eco-friendly trend

Last year, Conway, deciding it was time for a change in her life, resurrected the idea. "I've always been a reuser and recycler," she says. "And since I was still using their bags 17 years later, I knew this product had value. As well, I could see that cloth shopping bags were finally catching on. So I approached my friends about starting the company up again. They wished me well and I was off."

The resulting stretchable bag, called a Carebag, is both funky and functional. The material is sourced in Taiwan, but the bags are designed, sewn and distributed in Vancouver. The tightly woven, breathable textile can hold small nuts and grains, but also expands, allowing it to cradle a ragged head of lettuce. Conway says people use Carebags for both transport and storage—dropping fruit and veggies into them as they shop, and then using them to wash and store the same produce at home. (See also: Handbags with heart.)

"The market response is so enthusiastic; new vendors approach me almost every day. Even though the first-year start-up costs have meant putting everything back into the business, I have a very good life," says Conway. "If you think your life is terrible, then it's going to be."

Seize an eco-friendly opportunity

"When you're used to being so busy, the thought of doing nothing is terrifying," says Hope Milner via telephone from Beaconsfield, Que. Milner is talking about how abruptly her world changed. She had built a business from a basement-based gift basket venture into Canada's largest single independent gift retailer. And then she received a call.

She claims the out-of-the-blue offer to buy her business was her "Cinderella moment." It was a lucrative deal, and in six weeks it was done. Suddenly, the all-consuming 16-year-old business was no longer hers.

But, then 48, with three teenagers and a still-employed husband, Milner felt too young to retire. For the next year and a half, she said yes to consulting, writing, speaking and seminars, too afraid to stop and take stock, but knowing that whatever she did next had to have meaning.

Not all "aha" moments come with parting skies and trumpets: Milner's came while she was bagging up old T-shirts for the local charity. As she loaded her car, she was thinking about how the charity clothing system worked. She knew her old T-shirts were better sent to a charity than to landfill. (On average, seven kilograms of textiles per person end up in landfills throughout Canada each year.) 

But how to approach the roadblocks?

Yet Milner was aware that more than half of her donations would be sold to developing nations, where the cheap shirts would undermine local clothing enterprises. She wondered if they could be repurposed. Looking at the colourful designs, it dawned on her that they might make nice tote bags. At the same time, she knew filling her days with work she wasn't passionate about had to stop. She wanted to try something fun and different. The resulting cloth tote caught the attention of friends. They all wanted one, as did their friends—and an online business was born. ReTeez takes previously loved T-shirts and transforms them into practical items—from baby bibs to crocheted belts.

And it's not as though Milner, now 51, is pocketing all of the ReTeez profits. "I love that my kids' generation is so motivated to give back, while we were all programmed to make money. Well, we've made the money, and discovered that's not all there can be."

Giving back to the community

Milner's 19-year-old daughter, Samantha, is living proof of her mom's observation. For every T-shirt donated to ReTeez, Milner gives her daughter a donation of up to $4. In the summer of 2008, Samantha spent six weeks in Vilanculos, Mozambique, with a charity called African Impact. Last December, her daughter returned there, with ReTeez donations in hand, to help improve local education.

Last year, while hunting for T-shirts in her local Value Village, Milner noticed something else: buttons. Bags and bags of buttons. What if those were made into brooches, earrings and key fobs? ReFashioned became her next venture.

ReFashioned is now carried in more than 1,000 stores in the United States, and in more than 200 stores in Canada. To date, she'd sold more than 120,000 rings made of repurposed buttons that would otherwise have been bright spots only in a dump.

"It's fascinating," says Milner, taking a deep breath, "to take what's already out there and make it into something brand new."

Solve a ecological problem

Sitting in her South Vancouver office, Shannon Boase, 43, is holding up something that resembles a hedgehog. She explains to a mystified visitor that it's actually a palm husk. It's also a useful prop for illustrating how her business, Earthcycle Packaging, has made a difference both in Malaysia and here at home.

Rewind five years when Boase was living in Malaysia and would often find herself coughing from black smoke so thick it would force the local airport to close. Overwhelming smog was partly the result of the Malaysian palm oil plantations, which burned millions of tons of fibrous waste left over from their palm oil pressings. With Malaysia producing about 42 per cent of the world's palm oil, the waste factor was significant.

But Boase saw a way through the haze.

With help from the Malaysian government, she started a business that converts the fibres into compostable paper products. Boase started in food packaging because of its low design requirements. She found investors, partners and suppliers for the Malaysia factories; she also sourced buyers in a market slow to kick its plastic packaging dependence—never doubting that her vision made sense. Her focus paid off.

Boase's Malaysian partner and supplier runs the factories, employing more than 100 locals, while back home, her Canadian company takes care of design, marketing, sales and distribution.

Waving the hedgehog/husk, Boase explains, "This is what's left after the small palm fruits are removed to be pressed for their oil. We steam, chop and mulch it, then make it into pulp." The dried form is sold to paper companies and the wet pulp is piped to an adjacent factory to be pressed into moulding machines for food packaging. Boase has successfully convinced such big players as Walmart and Loblaws that her product is the answer to increasing consumer demand for more eco-conscious packaging.

"No one else is doing this," Boase says quietly, shaking her head at what, to her, seemed so obvious.

Meet more women changing the world: Handbags with heart. And don't forget to make a difference yourself with 20 ways to do good and 20 more ways to do good!

You can also read about trading a corporate job in for seaweed, eco-friendly travel, or find out if you're an eco-worrier. (And no, that's not a typographical error!)

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of More