Entrepreneurial Dominion

   Brenda Robinson

Waste Not, Want Not

Environmental Solutions, Inc., has built a growing business converting industrial waste into marketable raw materials. Coming soon: a waste “exchange.”

The business model of Environmental Solutions, Inc., could be described pithily by the old adage, “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” The Richmond company has carved out a niche in the environmental engineering field by specializing in the recycling of industrial waste products.

For instance, power companies spend millions of dollars getting rid of coal ash, the residue of combustion. ESI found a way to use the waste as a raw material for a quick-set concrete it calls “ceracrete.” Then the company identified customers – airports, primarily -- willing to buy it. Today, ceracrete can be found in runway patches as far afield as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The ceracrete initiative was so successful that ESI founder Brenda Robinson recently spun off the business as a free-standing company, Ceratech, headquartered in Baltimore. While Ceratech has a great future, says Robinson, she sees even more potential in keeping ESI focused on innovation and product development: helping manufacturers convert waste streams of paper sludge, scrap metals, tobacco dust, peanut shells and the like into products that someone will buy.

The time is right for a company like ESI. The last decade has brought a sea change in environmental regulation, creating a demand for more creative solutions like those ESI provides. Under the old command-and-control model, Congress would pass laws, bureaucrats would translate them into thick rulebooks, and violators would be punished. The approach was effective, like a sledgehammer was effective, but it was inflexible and did not encourage the development of new technologies and business practices.

But quietly, in a trend largely overlooked by the news media, the marketplace is taking over as the arbiter of environmental standards. Government agencies and major corporations are insisting that suppliers hew to environmental standards such as ISO 14000, used in manufacturing, and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), employed in building construction. Meanwhile, insurers are rewarding businesses that reduce their exposure to environmental risks. The Securities Exchange Commission is considering rules that would require publicly traded companies to reflect environmental liabilities on their balance sheets. Even the Environmental Protection Agency is pushing waste minimization strategies.

“All the pieces have come together,” says Robinson. “You have a business driver, a financial driver and a policy driver. You have everybody’s attention.” Now, instead of waiting passively for the next wave of laws and regulations, companies are moving proactively to reduce their environmental impact. Companies are taking a closer look at their raw material sources: Can they extract the materials they need from someone else’s waste stream? Meanwhile, they’re examining their own waste. Can they modify their byproducts so make them useful to someone else?

Those are the kind of challenges that get the juices flowing at ESI. “Our vision,” says Robinson, “has been to take new technologies and use them to create new [environmental] solutions.”

Sonoco Products Company, a packaging company with operations in Richmond, is a case study of the ESI method. The company recycles waste newsprint and cardboard into cardboard stock. A few years ago it called in ESI to help deal with accumulating volumes of paper sludge. ESI devised a novel remedy: Build a composting facility that combined the waste paper with wood chips collected from nearby real estate developers, then sell the formulation to nurseries, garden shops and landscapers. It’s an elegant solution, says Robinson: “We took multiple waste streams and made them into a product.”

In another example, ESI has partnered with American Electric Power to build a manufacturing facility in West Virginia that manufactured a concrete block from coal ash. In this case, the engineering company used the block for riverbank and shoreline stabilization. As a bonus, ESI won contracts to install some of the stabilization projects as well.

For Robinson, it’s been a long and winding road. Her entrepreneurial forays go back nearly two decades. In the 1980s, she was a Reynolds Metals executive, working in management information systems; her husband Phil was a metallurgical engineer and small businessman. They worked with others to launch Richmond’s first small business incubator, located in Tobacco Row, and formed a technology association to address the issues of small technology companies like raising capital and filing patents.

Those activities inspired the Robinsons’ first husband-and-wife business venture. They started a consulting firm with the idea of working through embassies and commerce departments to match up U.S. companies with French, Finnish and Australian firms possessing complementary technologies and capabilities. They became so enamored with an environmentally friendly technology developed by an Australian company – it made products that substituted for rip-rap in shoreline protection – that they decided to start their own business. Cutting a deal to become the company’s strategic partner in North America, they founded ESI 14 years ago.

One thing led to another. In devising environment solutions for customers, the Robinsons licensed existing technology wherever they could. No point in reinventing the wheel. But sometimes they had to develop their own. Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology provided indispensable assistance in bringing the ceracrete technology to fruition, Robinson recalls. In the early stages, the Robinsons also hired university consultants to expand the expertise they could draw upon. Then, as business grew, they found themselves building their own organization. Today ESI has 18 employees with backgrounds not only in engineering but technology, regulatory matters, business and marketing.

About four years ago, tragedy struck. Phil Robinson had a stroke, leaving him paralyzed on the left side. He battled back, only to find that he had cancer. He stayed involved in the business until the very end. The company, says Brenda, “was the love of his life.”

Phil passed away in 2002, but Brenda had little time to grieve. The Ceratech business was taking off and demanded her attention. She had to find expansion capital, build an organization, find a contract manufacturer and recruit a CEO to run it as an independent company – all without her husband and closest confidant. Now, having completed the spin-off, and retaining a 20 percent stake in the company for her efforts, she’s refocusing her energy on ESI.

Robinson sees opportunities around every corner. Her next big project is to create a waste “exchange.” Most waste ends up in a landfill or a sewage treatment plant because companies don’t know what else to do with it. In a soon-to-be-announced partnership, ESI and the Virginia Manufacturers Association will search for solutions in support of manufacturers' environmental program goals.

“There are a number of waste exchanges out there,” Robinson says, “but they’re passive.” They comprise little more than websites where people can post their information and hope that someone comes and takes a look. “What we’re doing is creating an exchange and putting the organization behind it with the expertise to actively search for solutions, and become a matchmaker or broker.”

Robinson is driven not only by a passion to grow the business but the conviction that she is helping build a better world. The application of innovation and technology, she hopes, will result in a cleaner environment, new products and markets, and economic development opportunities for Virginia. Says she: "I feel we can be part of solving the problem."

-- August 4, 2004

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