More than 75 Chicago small business owners recently walked away with ideas about how to green their operations and save money after attending a Wicker Park meet-up with sustainable vendors and organizations.

In late March, the Wicker Park Bucktown (WPB) Chamber of Commerce organized a half-day Green Business Resource Fair for its members and others to meet more than 30 green vendors, according to Adam Burck, the chamber’s executive director.

Mr. Burck joined with other community partners to launch the fair, including chambers of commerce and merchant groups from nearby Logan Square, West Town, Lincoln Park, and Old Town. The event was held at the non-profit ReBuilding Exchange in a vast warehouse on Ashland Avenue near Bucktown’s eastern edge.

The WPB chamber that day unveiled a new green initiative intended to inspire local businesses to become more sustainable. On its website, the chamber lists about 30 ways business owners can green their operations. When at least 10 of them are adopted, they will be noted as a WPB Green-designated business on the chamber’s website and they’ll have the option of putting a promotional sticker on their front door.

The rows of tables set up at the fair represented a who’s who of green-oriented service providers and groups in Chicago. They included: Green Wheels, Christy Webber Landscapes, Consolidated Printing, GreenChoice Bank, Foresight Design Initiative, CNT/CNT Energy and the Chicago Conservation Corps.

i-Go’s Nissan Leaf

There was cool eye candy there too: i-Go Car Sharing brought a Nissan Leaf electric car from its fleet; Icon Modern encouraged people to lounge in their sustainably-sourced furniture; and Upper Ground, a vertical landscaping company, drew lots of interest with its glass-encased beehive.

Crain’s spoke with Mr. Burck about the recent event and his plans for future green endeavors for his group’s members and the surrounding community.

Crain’s: What was the main objective of the fair?

Mr. Burck: I’ve been at the chamber a year and a half and one of the challenges the board placed on the newly-formed green committee after I arrived was to develop new ideas for helping members become more sustainable. The idea for the fair came out of those developments. We also came up with the WPB Green designation as a way to encourage companies to start on the road to being green.

Crain’s: What were some of the most useful things business owners learned from attending the fair?

Adam Burck

Mr. Burck: Many of them didn’t know about ComEd’s Small Business Energy Savings Program and all the different initiatives. Some people discovered green vendors in their own lines of business they didn’t even know existed. For example, some restaurant owners weren’t familiar with The Green Chicago Restaurant Coalition.

During a panel discussion, we discussed some of our SSA (Special Service Area) initiatives, including a pilot recycling program. We’re piloting a shared recycling dumpster between two businesses to show that companies can do this affordably.

Many business owners also didn’t realize how cheap it would be to make some of these changes and have such a big impact on their energy consumption and costs. For example, exit signs have to be on all the time, according to (city) code. There’s two costs associated with that: energy and ongoing maintenance to constantly replace the bulbs. By putting in an LED retrofit for those exit signs, (which was offered by one of the vendors and is subsidized in part by ComEd), energy consumption will be reduced while you’re saving money. The LED bulbs can last a minimum of 10 years. And if you forget to change the standard bulbs and that’s found during an inspection, you’ll end up paying fines. So there’s a potential cost savings there too with a retrofit.

Crain’s: Do you think other Chicago business groups will replicate this kind of fair and will the WPB Chamber do it again?

Mr. Burck: These kinds of events should be a regional thing and could be replicated anywhere. We invited neighboring chambers to promote it and invite their members and they were all glad to participate. It makes sense to partner with others. We plan to do this again and we’re meeting this week to discuss ways to make it even better next time around. This event exceeded our attendance expectations (many locals working in the green industry turned out to network too), but next year we’ll consider holding it on a week night or weekend day so even more people can come.

Also, There are some businesses in our area that are struggling and adopting green initiatives can really help their bottom line. If companies don’t have green on their radar because they’re just trying to keep their doors open, they’d learn that going green will help their bottom line. More of those businesses should come in the future.

Crain’s: Are there other upcoming green events you’re working on?

Mr. Burck: Our next sustainable event is the Green Music Fest, planned for June 23 and 24. A new Green Village will be part of the music fest this year, which will be a designated area that will have lots of educational demonstrations of ways the general public can go green. We’re also greening the fest with a robust recycling program that will be run by Bright Beat (a local green event consulting firm). We want these events to be as sustainable as possible, too.

In other green news:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the city of Chicago has saved $2.2 million in recycling service costs during the first six months of competitive bidding, paving the way for a complete citywide recycling expansion by the end of 2013. Beginning in 2013, the city will roll out blue cart recycling services to the 340,000 remaining households in Chicago.

Chuck Templeton is building a new kind of sustainable online start-up that encourages people to share what they already have and stop buying stuff they may not need.

He launched OhSoWe with partner Arun Sivashankaran a little over a year ago as a digital meetup that connects neighbors by encouraging them to borrow household goods from each other so they don’t have to buy things they won’t use often. Mr. Templeton, 43, started OpenTable.com, a national restaurant reservation site, and sold it before moving to Chicago, where he created OhSoWe.

OhSoWe already has more than 15,000 registered users, with about 60 percent of them located in Chicago, mostly on the North Side. There are some smaller pockets of people in Utah, California and New York who also have joined in the last year. Members can post a request to borrow something they need — a ladder, a blender, or extra chairs — and chances are good there’s someone living close by who’s a member on the site and will be happy to loan it out for a short while.

So far, the site isn’t generating revenue, but the co-owners are working on ideas about how to create income down the road. For now, Mr. Templeton is keen on promoting the idea that we have more than we need. He’s encouraging individuals and businesses to re-think consumption, focus on a local economy, and foster a stronger sense of community.

Mr. Templeton, a San Francisco native, is passionate about sustainability beyond his new business venture. He and his wife are converting their Lakeview house to a net-zero energy home, they’re raising chickens in their backyard, and they’re down to one car that they’ve owned for about a decade.

Crain’s met with Mr. Templeton recently to learn more about the ideas behind this innovative, green venture.

Crain’s: How did you shift from starting a service company like OpenTable.com to this very different website, OhSoWe?

Mr. Templeton: I always had a green sense of myself. My dad recycled, we lived efficiently, my grandma was a Depression-era person and was very frugal. With the birth of my first daughter almost eight years ago, I started to look at the world in a new way and wondered what it was going to be like when she grows up.

Templeton

Here’s my new worldview: Tthe primary currency isn’t money but social capital and how we value each other beyond what’s in our bank accounts. And I thought, let’s build a business that doesn’t sell anything but one that builds our local community and reduces the impact of our dependence on natural resources that are going to run out one day.

Crain’s: You said you did a lot of reading in the time between selling OpenTable.com and creating OhSoWe. Was there anything in particular that had a great impact on changing your perspective?

Mr. Templeton: One of the biggest influences was Bill McKibbon’s book, “Eaarth.” There’s lots of emphasis on resilience and rebuilding community. I decided I wanted to encourage more of that.

Crain’s: Can you describe the purpose of this website and how people can benefit from joining?

Mr. Templeton: About 80 percent of the items we have in our house aren’t used even once a month. There are 60 million drills out there, and we don’t need more drills — we need more efficient ways to share those drills. If you think of the natural capital and human capital and energy it takes to make those things, it’s a shame for them to sit around unused.

Recently I needed a 12-foot extension ladder, so I posted it on OhSoWe and seven neighbors on my block all responded by the next day. That means there’s at least six extra ladders on our street alone. We see people on the site giving help on gardening, moving furniture, sharing bread makers, air compressors and giving computer assistance. Instead of having someone pop in a car and drive in from Evanston, let’s have neighbors help each other out.

Crain’s: So what does OhSoWe really mean?

Mr. Templeton: It’s the rediscovery of what should be obvious to us: Oh, so we don’t have to buy that — we can borrow it. Oh, so we can get to know our neighbors. It’s a reminder of what we as humans know should be obvious being part of a community. It’s also a way for us to be more resilient at the local level.

And it was also a short URL, which is tough to get these days.

Crain’s: The business model you’ve set up seems counterproductive to consumerism since the website encourages people NOT to buy stuff. Is there a way for local businesses to benefit from the community you’re nurturing?

Mr. Templeton: We haven’t gone after businesses yet, but they will have to think about how they do business differently in the future. This model of getting a shovel for 99 cents from China and reselling it for much more can’t last forever. Eventually we’ll run out of resources. Instead of selling a drill or some other tool, maybe a business will rent you the drill, or sell you a shoveling service.

Also, businesses have a lot of space they could be better at renting out. If you have a conference room you only use 10 percent of the time, a neighbor nearby might want to rent that for a few hours. One small business could be really good at marketing, and another could be good at accounting. How do we connect them so they can help businesses solve problems with each other that are nearby?

Crain’s: How do you intend to make money with this website, or is that not part of the game plan?

Mr. Templeton: The idea isn’t to become the next Bill Gates, but we want to make it sustainable long term. We’re exploring some ideas: You wouldn’t charge a neighbor to use your shovel, but maybe you would for a power washer. We would enable it to happen through the website and get a piece of the transaction. We’re testing a few different things. We want to create a local economy so the currency can stay local.

Crain’s: Are you engaged in other business ventures?

Mr. Templeton: I’m fortunate. I had some success with OpenTable, but I’m also now a director on the boards of a few different companies. I sit on the board of GrubHub and Getable, and I’m an adviser to Braintree. I’ve also dramatically reduced what I spend on stuff. When you do that, your dollar lasts that much longer.

Read more about OhSoWe in Crain’s: “Neighborliness is latest venture for OpenTable founder Templeton”

IN OTHER GREEN NEWS:

Fracking is coming to Illinois, for better or worse: The state, which has sat on the sidelines as new technologies using high-pressure fracturing techniques to extract natural gas have launched energy booms in long-dormant states, could see a boomlet of its own in coming months. Read the full story on Crain’s homepage.

David Miller is among a relatively new breed of financiers targeting investments in the local, sustainable farming sector.

Last week, the UIC Forum in Chicago was transformed into the Good Food Festival & Conference, where more than 3,500 people engaged in the local food economy met over three days to learn about new policy initiatives, networking and financing opportunities, and share ideas.

I met Mr. Miller at the trade show standing behind a table and next to a huge photo of a field of wheat gently blowing in the wind on a farm in Illinois. After 35 years of working in real estate and banking, Mr. Miller, based in Winnetka, formed Working Farms Capital to bring new capital to the field of sustainable agriculture. The photo was taken at the company’s primary venture, Iroquois Valley Farms LLC, a 600-acre parcel of land in Iroquois County, Ill., where about 35 investors own an equity stake in farmland that’s operated by farmers with long-term leases.

For the last five years, the company has been investing in Illinois farmland, with an eye toward transitioning what’s grown there to organic and sustainable crops for the local food network, says Mr. Miller, president and CEO. Last year, he raised $1.2 million in new capital and bought two more farms.

Mr. Miller’s setup is not your typical network of angel investors who invest in a standard equity structure. Rather, people invest in an operating company that buys farms as a business and then negotiates long-term leases with farmers that do the hard day-to-day work of running the farm.

Between handshakes at the trade show, Mr. Miller spent some time discussing his innovative business model.

Crain’s: Investing in farmland is a far cry from big city real estate and banking. How did you make the crossover?

David Miller

Mr. Miller: My family comes from farming communities and the switch from my corporate background was inevitable. In 2005, I bought my Uncle George’s 10-acre farm in Iroquois County, where he was growing conventional corn and soybeans. In the process of figuring out what to do with the farm, I reconnected with family members who were farming organically and I transitioned that land to organic. The idea of investing in more farmland came out of that.

Crain’s: How do you scout for new farmland to purchase?

Mr. Miller: We don’t have to. Farmers are coming to us with opportunities. A farmer has a parcel of land that comes up for sale near his farm, and they might come to us to help them with the financing. We’re typically working with mid-size family farmers that already own anywhere from 80 to 800 acres of land.

Crain’s: Entrepreneurial experts call these types of ventures impact investment. Can you describe the philosophy behind what you’re doing and why you set up an advisory board to help out?

Mr. Miller: Our mission is to impact local and organic agriculture and we want to bring more local and healthy foods to more people. We’re trying to be thoughtful about how to impact the local food movement, so we set up an advisory board. Board members include Jamie Jones (assistant director of the Social Enterprise program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business), Helen Cameron (co-owner of restaurant Uncommon Ground) and Irv Cernauskas (co-owner of Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks, a local organic food delivery company). This will help us expand locally.

Now we’re going to focus on investing in smaller farmers too. we’ll be buying smaller parcels of land so we can work with a more diverse group of farmers, such as vegetable and dairy farmers, and those with pastured livestock, like grass-fed beef, and even permaculture farmers. Dealing with grain farms was easy, they just had to be certified organic. When you’re growing 100 different types of fruits and vegetables, it’s not so easy. The advisory board will help us with this.

Crain’s: Have investors done well so far by purchasing private equity shares in your company?

Mr. Miller: The original 2007 investors have more than doubled their investment. Few people have sustainable farmland investments in their portfolio. If you believe that people will want to continue to eat healthy, then you should have some money in this area. It’s also good if you want a diversified portfolio. Over 60% of our investors use their IRA or pension funds to invest.

Crain’s: You’re working on getting a new round of equity financing this year. How much are you expecting to raise and what are your investment plans?

Mr. Miller: We’ll be raising $1.5 million and some of those shares have already been pre-sold. We’ll be investing in more farmland, and we’re trying to work on a new venture to help younger farmers get started.

In Iowa, there’s a non-profit group called Practical Farmers of Iowa (that promotes diverse and sustainable agriculture). They have a starter program for new farmers and we’ve been working with them for the past year to see how we can bring investment capital to a new entity focused just on beginner farmers. They’re so passionate about farming and consumers want the local, organic food. It’s not such a leap of faith to think people would want to invest in it.

The Green Home Chicago showroom

Karen Kalmek calls herself a late bloomer.

She waited till her fifties to launch a business of her own that combined her interests in art, saving the planet and job creation. But Ms. Kalmek’s decision to open Green Home Chicago in 2008, just as the sustainable interior decor movement was taking off, seems to have been well-timed.

She opened her showroom in the Fulton Market area when most interior designers weren’t yet seeking green home products for their clients and the trend for such finishes in commercial space was still considered cutting-edge.

Green Home Chicago’s interior finishing products include flooring, tiles, paint, carpets, furniture, lighting, fabrics and one-of-kind pieces made by local artists. The showroom carries a custom cabinetry line that’s made locally with FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) certified wood.

The market for these goods has grown since her first days in business. Last year, sales rose 70% from the year before (she declines to specify dollar amounts), but 2010 was slightly worse than the year before, she notes. About two-thirds of the company’s revenues come from residential clients, but Ms. Kalmek is placing more emphasis on growing the commercial side of her customer base through architects and interior designers.

Karen Kalmek

Ms. Kalmek began her career as a speech therapist in her native South Africa and worked for Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. She then veered toward entrepreneurial ventures, including a stint with a non-profit that imported home decor products from Africa that helped combat poverty in communities on that continent. And throughout, she was also an artist.

The locally manufactured chair

Ms. Kalmek is expanding her business by adding a manufacturing component to source more design products closer to home. She’s working with a mechanical engineer on the North Shore who’s crafting handmade chairs from sustainable North American wood that’s primed with soy-based, formaldehyde-free technology. The chairs are laser-cut out of one sheet of material (reducing waste) and flat-packed for easy shipment anywhere in the world.

But she has bigger expansion plans: Ms. Kalmek is trying to convince city officials to establish a partnership with her to turn some vacant warehouse space into a small-scale manufacturing plant for countertops made from recycled glass.

Ms. Kalmek is an advocate for green design even outside her showroom. She’s in the midst of organizing a panel discussion event in May that will focus on the bigger picture of sustainability in building.

Crain’s met up with Ms. Kalmek to learn more about her business and green philosophy.

Crain’s: How do you define eco-design?

Ms. Kalmek: I see design at the end of the line of a construction project. Heating, air quality and other big things that go into construction are very important if you’re trying to build green. But if you have products inside that are off-gassing, you’ve defeated the purpose. Interior design is at the end of the budget, so it gets value-engineered out of the project lots of the time. I try to work with the decision-maker to change their minds about what’s really important.

Crain’s: How would you characterize the local green design sector in Chicago?

Ms. Kalmek: It’s emerging. When I started my research in 2007 there wasn’t much green design. Today, many people still don’t know what’s available, others think it’s too expensive. And then there’s human nature. People are used to doing what they always do. I have designers coming in here saying their clients are asking for green and that’s why they’re here for the first time. There isn’t much green design in the Merchandise Mart, but there’s lots of lip service and greenwashing there.

Crain’s: You’re very particular about what you choose to sell in your showroom. Can you describe your 10-point green classification system?

Ms. Kalmek: It’s a system that educates clients and allows them to find the right mix between aesthetics, price and sustainability. On my 10-point scale, saying things are local is big. It creates jobs locally, supports our community and keeps people from moving elsewhere.

I also look at how the product is made, what’s in it, what kind of toxicity is put in the atmosphere to make it — not just the final product. In my field, I want to do the heavy lifting and dig in and get people the real story.

A perfect example is paint. No VOCs (volatile organic compounds) is a good thing (and widely available). But most paints are still petrochemical based. And the bigger story is the tints. I found out through a client that tints in most paints are filled with chemicals and toxins.The only line I carry is Green Planet Paint because the base is not made from petrochemicals, it’s clay and soy-based. And the tints are from natural minerals. This is especially important for people who have immune deficiencies or have young kids.

Crain’s: Even though Green Home Chicago is a for-profit venture, you exude a mission-driven ethos. Can you describe that philosophy?

Ms. Kalmek: It’s really important to educate people about the choices they have and what it could mean for the producers of those products and for the planet as well. For example, I began selling Arzu handmade wool carpets imported from women in Afghanistan and other carpets from Tibet. The sales were helping women there earn a fair wage to support their families and give them health care, and the end user took home a beautiful product.

When a business thinks about the people who are making things, they see they can have a bigger impact through the power of their choices. That’s also why I want to help manufacture more products right here in Chicago.

Crain’s: You’re meeting with representatives of World Business Chicago this week to try to get in on some exporting opportunities. What are you hoping to accomplish?

Ms. Kalmek: There are thousands of empty warehouses in Chicago. I’d love for the city to give me one for a dollar in a private/public partnership to keep costs down and I’ll create a place to manufacture countertops. This is a project that I know is in huge demand in the U.S. and overseas, in the Middle East in particular. It would create 12 jobs initially, and we’d be using recycled glass to create beautiful things, sell it locally and export it too. I’m ready to go.

The growing popularity of food hubs is creating new market opportunities for entrepreneurs.

A food hub is a wholesale distribution network that connects small and medium-sized producers of local food to large-scale food companies, institutions, schools and other buyers. They might buy fresh produce and goods from a wide variety of family farms and artisanal foodmakers, and sell them directly to consumers, restaurants and grocery stores, or through distributors like Sysco and Compass Group. The centralized system aggregates products from many small suppliers and makes larger, more efficient deliveries to customers of all sizes.

Food hubs are just beginning to sprout in Illinois to meet a hearty appetite among consumers for fresh, local food, says Kathy Nyquist, founder and principal of New Venture Advisors LLC, a Chicago firm that works with entrepreneurs and others to launch businesses in the local food and sustainable agriculture arena. She’s moderating a panel discussion on food hubs and produce procurement next week at the three-day Good Food Festival & Conference in Chicago, organized by FamilyFarmed.org. Three of the four panelists are operating different types of food hubs and will discuss how they work.

The Illinois state government is getting behind this trend, too, by supplying some expertise and funding mechanisms. To give that sector a boost, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity recently released a new tool kit and guidelines for creating food hubs. Ms. Nyquist and Jim Slama, president of FamilyFarmed.org, were among the guidelines’ key authors.

FamilyFarmed.org and New Venture Advisors have collaborated to help start food hubs in Illinois, Wisconsin, Virginia, and soon in Northern California. Three were launched in 2011 and six more are in development for later this year and into 2013.

Crain’s met with Ms. Nyquist this week to learn more about food hubs and why local entrepreneurs should pay attention to this trend.

Crain’s: Can new food hubs in Illinois make a difference in connecting local food producers with consumers that want those products?

Kathy Nyquist

Ms. Nyquist: In Illinois, consumers spend $14 billion (annually) on fruits and vegetables alone. The data is a little squishy, but we estimate that only 6 percent of this is grown in the state. It’s a small fraction of the total. Yet national grocery and restaurant associations report that the large majority of consumers want locally produced food. We have heard from hundreds of buyers and growers who say food hubs remove the main barriers to increasing local food production and procurement. Illinois needs a network of food hubs large and small that connect growers with local customers. It barely exists.

Crain’s: Where are these food hubs already established in Illinois? How many Illinois farmers and other small businesses are already participating in these networks?

Ms. Nyquist: We helped two Illinois food hubs launch in 2011 and will help four to five new food hubs launch this year. These and a few previously existing hubs are brick-and-mortar facilities located across the state, operating at varying scales and providing a variety of services. They are probably connected to about 30 Illinois farms and artisans, and many of these will be exhibiting at the Good Food Trade Show and Festival on March 16-17.

Crain’s: Why are food hubs a great way to increase access to local foods?

Ms. Nyquist: They make it easier for producers to sell to local customers and for customers to buy local food. If producers spend less time selling to customers and making deliveries, they can spend more time in production. We know a lot of farmers who would be quite happy to NOT get up at 3 a.m., drive 100 miles to the farmers market and stand in the rain for five hours.

If buyers don’t have to spend time finding and managing multiple small suppliers, they will buy more local food. And sometimes food hubs bridge scale differences: We have a national food system designed for large tractor-trailers but many small- to mid-size producers don’t have the docks or trucks to plug into that system. The food hub takes care of all of this.

Crain’s: Do you have any estimates of projected growth of food hubs in Illinois in the next few years?

Ms. Nyquist: It will be strong if the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity keeps at it. DCEO believes local food can be an economic engine for Illinois. They just released the business planning guide, which we helped author and publish. They also formed the USDA/DCEO Food Hub Partnership to make it easier for entrepreneurs to access state and federal funding for food hub development. DCEO Director Warren Ribley is speaking next week in Chicago on a panel with Colleen Callahan from USDA Rural Development at the Good Food Financing Conference on March 15.

Crain’s: Are there other aspects of the food hub trend where entrepreneurs can get involved?

Ms. Nyquist: There’s a big need for more processing kitchens in Illinois, and that’s a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. A lot of artisanal foodmakers are relying on farmers markets and french markets for distribution and they’ll max out at a certain point in time. So if you have a great spaghetti sauce or sausage recipe and need a larger certified kitchen for production, you’ll probably have to look way outside your region. Sort of ruins the idea of local.

When we studied the Illinois market for processing, we found that access to a local commercial kitchen would have a significant positive impact on farmers and local enterprises such as artisanal foodmakers, independent restaurants and natural food stores. The kitchen would help them expand existing efforts, enter new lines of business and grow their revenues.

Crain’s: What other parts of the country already have successful food hubs established?

Ms. Nyquist: The U.S. Department of Agriculture counted 170 food hubs in 2011. We mapped locations for about 100 of these and see the strongest networks in coastal California, New England, the mid-Atlantic and a ribbon stretching from Chicago to Minneapolis.

Still there’s so much opportunity. Our national food system is composed of thousands of processors and distributors grossing millions. We just visited an impressive food hub in Minneapolis with almost $20 million in sales, which is about the average for fruit and vegetable distributors in the U.S. This can be replicated.

The second annual Clean Energy Challenge convening in Chicago today will send home more startup winners than last year with about twice as much in cash prizes, too.

The highlight of today’s day-long event will be fast-pitch presentations from eight to 10 finalists in each of two categories: early-stage companies already along the path of developing a product or service in the clean-energy sector, and students launching ventures while still in school. The winner in each group will take home $100,000. An additional $10,000 prize will be awarded to five more of the competing student finalists. Last year, the winner took home $100,000, and smaller prizes totaling $40,000 were awarded to a few concept companies.

Judges include venture capitalists, corporate investors and business leaders with expertise in various segments of the renewable-energy sector. The event is sponsored by the Clean Energy Trust, a Chicago nonprofit that connects startups and entrepreneurs to expertise and capital. The Trust launched in 2010 with backing from Nicholas Pritzker, Chicago energy entrepreneur Michael Polsky and others.

The competition was widened this year to include candidates from eight Midwestern states; last year, only Illinoisans participated. More than 100 applications were submitted by the Dec. 1 deadline, and evaluators narrowed that pool to 18 finalists from seven states, says Amy Francetic, executive director of the Clean Energy Trust.

Challenge winners will be announced at the end of the day.

Crain’s met with Ms. Francetic to talk about this year’s competition.

Crain’s: You have two categories this year — one for student-led companies and the other for early-stage. Why did you set it up that way?

Amy Francetic

Ms. Francetic: With the help of key partners in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio, we applied for funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for a university student business competition and were fortunate to win the Midwest award. That grant is funding our student prize of $100,000. CET (Clean Energy Trust) and the other state partners are funding an additional $50,000 in state-level prizes for the students. CET and the U.S. DOE are funding the early-stage company prize of $100,000, as both organizations did last year.

Crain’s: Are you trying to use the challenge to inspire students to be more aggressive about thinking of company formation sooner in their careers?

Ms. Francetic: One of our goals of the student prize is to encourage the talented undergraduate, MBA and advanced-degree engineering and science students to link up with their tech transfer offices and researchers at the schools and labs to push the cutting-edge clean technology out into the marketplace. We have a majority of student finalists that are featuring this kind of technology in their pitches. Many of the competing students are working with entrepreneurial centers in their school or are taking multidisciplinary classes like professor Mike Marasco’s NUVention class at Northwestern University.

Crain’s: Can you give a flavor of the range of company or technology ideas that are represented by some of the applicants?

Ms. Francetic: We have a broad spectrum of technologies represented with strong showings from the energy-efficiency, smart-grid, renewable and transportation sectors.

Crain’s: What are some of the most unique business or technology ideas among the group?

Ms. Francetic: We were happy to see a cluster of biomass and biofuel technologies submitted this year. We have seven finalists like this (three student and four early-stage) showcasing new ways of deriving energy from waste and agriculture. This is different from last year, and we expect this trend to continue. This is a strong R&D sector for the Midwest.

When politics creates uncertainty in the renewable-energy sector, it’s often bad news for entrepreneurs and businesses trying to make a buck in those industries.

That’s the general reaction this week among Illinois business owners and executives running wind-energy companies in the wake of last week’s news that a federal wind-energy tax credit won’t be extended beyond the end of this year. Washington lawmakers dropped the tax-credit renewal from a larger payroll tax bill, and there are doubts the measure will get tacked on to any other larger bills before the November election. A bill dedicated solely to extending the wind tax energy credit isn’t likely either.

More than a dozen wind-energy firms are based in Chicago and the state has more than 150 companies engaged in some piece of the wind-energy pipeline.

If wind-energy extension was folded into the payroll tax bill, companies operating in that sector would have continued to receive 2.2 cents in income tax credits per kilowatt-hour of electricity they produced. Without the extension, customers will put orders for supplies on hold or cancel them, and fewer turbines will get installed in 2013, predicts Kevin Borgia, director of the Illinois Wind Energy Coalition, a group of wind farm developers, turbine manufacturers, businesses and landowners. The coalition is a project of Wind on the Wires, a Midwest nonprofit wind-power advocacy group.

Crain’s met with Mr. Borgia to learn more about what Illinois stakeholders are doing in response to the recent legislative setback.

Crain’s: What’s the potential impact for Illinois manufacturers in the wind-energy supply chain?

Mr. Borgia: It’s a disaster. For turbines to be placed in service in 2013, manufacturers need to take orders now. But because of the policy uncertainty, orders are drying up, and another slice of the U.S. manufacturing sector is laying off workers. And while it’s possible Congress will pass the credit by the end of 2012, the closer we get to the end of the year, the less chance we have for growth in the wind market for 2013. The bottom line is that every business wants certainty, but congressional stalemates on this and other issues ensure American businesses have no certainty, and this hurts our economy.

Kevin Borgia

Also, this on-again, off-again cycle drives up the overall costs of wind power. When a manufacturer has consistent orders and maintains a constant product output, it finds efficiencies that reduce cost. But the start-stop cycle of the wind PTC (production tax credit) hinders this reduction in cost. This prevents wind power from achieving cost parity with other energy sources, and paradoxically extends the time frame when the PTC is needed.

Crain’s: Are you optimistic that some other type of wind-energy tax incentive or rebate could pass through Congress before yearend?

Mr. Borgia: Several times in past years, Congress has passed a PTC extension with just days before its scheduled expiration. This ensures some projects are built in the following year, but growth is minimal because the uncertainty required developers to hesitate in their planning during the previous year. It’s possible Congress will do the same this year, after the election, but by then the damage will already be done: Projects will have been placed on the back burner and 2013 growth will be diminished.

Other energy sources do not have to manage this kind of uncertainty. Many incentives for oil and gas, coal and nuclear power have been in place for decades. These incentives are much larger than those provided to renewables, and their stability provides certainty that fosters growth in those sectors. Using temporary tax incentives for renewables politicizes the process and creates unnecessary economic instability.

Crain’s: Are there any developments at the state level that are making it attractive for business owners or entrepreneurs to pursue wind-energy opportunities in Illinois despite what’s happening in Washington?

Mr. Borgia: Well, the big incentive is at the federal level, but Illinois (like most states) has a renewable energy standard, which requires utilities in the state to buy a percentage of renewable power. The cost of implementing this law will rise if the PTC expires. But by design, costs of the RES are capped for ratepayers, so the cost will only increase to a certain point. Once the cost cap has been reached, utilities are allowed to stop buying renewables. So without the PTC, Illinois utilities will buy much less renewable power, and this reduces opportunities for businesses involved in the wind sector.

Crain’s: What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who are on the sidelines deciding whether they should venture into the wind-energy sector?

Mr. Borgia: Be patient but aware. Congress has extended the PTC at the last minute several times, and hopefully will make the right decision again this year. The best thing you can do is get involved and make it clear to your representatives in Congress that the wind PTC helps your business and fosters growth in today’s tough economy.

To read more, check out this Feb. 16 report from Crain’s. A snippet:

The wind-power industry employs about 1,500 directly in Illinois, plus another 3,800 among local suppliers, according to a Navigant Consulting Inc. study for the American Wind Energy Association. The study predicts a drop to about 800 direct jobs and 1,100 supplier jobs by next year if the tax credit expires.

The Glencoe house

Nate Kipnis isn’t the sort of architect who builds eco-friendly houses for the sake of bragging about the latest green bells and whistles he’s added.

In fact, he makes a bigger deal about employing ancient energy-efficient design techniques, such as slanting roofs and overhangs and positioning windows to maximize a home’s access to the sun’s passive energy. Mr. Kipnis, 50, principal of Kipnis Architecture & Planning in Evanston, sometimes persuades clients not to adopt some systems, such as geothermal. He argues they’re not always worth the upfront investment.

Nate Kipnis

So at first blush, it may have surprised some to learn he was getting accolades late last month for designing only the second new home in Illinois that was awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Platinum certification, the highest level possible. (The first one is on Chicago’s North Side.) But the home, on a corner lot in Glencoe, received that designation because of the extensive green features adopted, both tried and true, as well as newer technologies. They included a green roof, natural daylight, radiant floor heating, LED recessed lighting, a compact plumbing core design and passive whole-house ventilation. (LEED is short for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.)

Mr. Kipnis is involved in many green initiatives in Evanston beyond his primary craft of designing and building eco-friendly homes.

He’s one of the founders of Citizens’ Greener Evanston (which was originally the Network for Evanston’s Future), and he came up with the idea for the Evanston Offshore Wind Farm in 2007. The 200-megawatt project calls for 40 turbines that would be located seven to nine miles east of Northwestern University on Lake Michigan. The initiative is popular among many Evanston residents who want to be less reliant on fossil fuels, but it has its opponents, too.

Regardless of local opinions, progress is stalled in part because of developments in Washington. The federal Production Tax Credit for wind, which would have been instrumental in helping finance the offshore endeavor, is set to expire at yearend, and efforts to extend it face an uncertain future in Congress.

In the wake of his Glencoe project’s LEED recognition, Crain’s met with Mr. Kipnis to learn more about the home and other green efforts he’s pursuing.

Crain’s: You’ve been building green homes for a long time. Was it important for you to finally design one that was awarded LEED Platinum certification?

Mr. Kipnis: I studied architecture with an environmental concentration in the 1980’s, so I’ve been hardwired forever to design green homes. I don’t typically design the super-expensive homes, and it takes money to do a LEED home; extra dollars have to be spent on certification and other things.

Inside the Glencoe house

In this case, the client was pushing for it. He had seen the Al Gore movie (“An Inconvenient Truth”), and it blew his mind. He came to me and said he wanted to do a LEED home. He didn’t want to just say he had a green home. We built him a house that was priced at the Glencoe market rate, but we didn’t give him a crazy home theater or over-the-top cabinets, even though he got a really nice kitchen.

You don’t really know it’s a green house until you start to learn about it. The more you learn, the better the story gets. We’ve had about 1,000 people go through the home during several open houses we’ve been asked to have (by the U.S. Green Building Council to promote more green homes and LEED certification).

Crain’s: Why have there been so few LEED constructions for new homes in Illinois?

Mr. Kipnis: That’s a great question. I’m not sure about this. The USGBC publishes lists of how many homes have been LEED-certified at different levels in various states.

States such as California, Texas, Hawaii, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Washington and Colorado have a tremendous amount of LEED homes, and have most of the Platinum level ones. It might be that Chicago is a “mature” city and as such there are fewer new homes built here than out West. I’m not sure about that, but it might be true.

Crain’s: I know you’re keen on getting the offshore wind farm approved. How much energy can it potentially generate for Evanston residents and businesses?

Mr. Kipnis: The power production depends to a very large degree on the actual wind speed out at the turbine locations. We feel that it is very likely that the wind speed will be on average around 17-18 mph, and possibly more. Wind power goes to the cube of wind speed, so a little increase in wind speed is a very large increase in power.

At 18 mph, the 40 turbines would produce about 15.8 gigawatts of power, which would offset about 59,000 homes. Evanston, for reference, has about 30,000 homes. The CO2 reduction would be equal to about 490,000 tons of CO2. This is 350 percent of the Evanston Climate Action Plan target. The numbers at 20 mph wind are way higher.

Crain’s: Are you hopeful the offshore wind farm will eventually get built near Evanston?

Mr. Kipnis: Yes, but it will probably be built many years down the line. In the meantime, two members of the CGE’s renewable-energy task force met with (Illinois) Rep. Robyn Gabel and then (Illinois) Sen. Jeff Schoenberg. They crafted bills that would establish a board made up of representatives from various interest groups to lay out how an offshore wind farm would be permitted and the steps that would be involved.

The bills went through and the governor signed it, which established the Illinois State Lake Michigan Offshore Wind Energy Advisory Board. The board is currently moving towards finishing their work, probably in the next month or so.

It would be great if we could make our own energy and create our own jobs here to support the project. If that federal tax credit is cut, it will kill so many jobs, and all because of the politics of climate change. We can’t keep using limited fossil fuels. We continue to use it at our own peril.

Crain’s: What other environmental efforts are you and CGE working on?

Mr. Kipnis: Our group is working on a community aggregation initiative to lower electricity rates in Evanston. Power is deregulated in Illinois so you can use any provider you want. When you get a community together, you can negotiate the best rates, and you can choose the source of your power. About 22 communities in Illinois have already done this. Oak Park went 100 percent green power and residents there have been saving close to 25 percent on energy costs.

The Evanston initiative is on the March 20 ballot. If it passes, it will authorize the city to move forward with negotiations and we could have it up and running by the summer. We’d love to have 100 percent green power, but no matter what, this will help Evanston lower its carbon dioxide footprint. We won’t know the actual dollar savings until we go and lock in rates in the market.

We’re getting a website up now to make sure everyone is educated. Our goal is to get the highest percentage of people in Evanston to be in favor of this community aggregation initiative — please tell me who would prefer more expensive, dirty power? If we can have a mandate here, it puts some emphasis behind other things we want to work on and it will give us great momentum.

Green Delete Inc. picked a pretty good time to hang out its shingle. The Chicago-based firm, which has been open a year, helps other companies erase data on computer hard drives and servers before they get rid of the equipment.

In January, Illinois joined at least 30 other states in enacting stringent new rules on the disposal of electronic equipment. Companies also must erase data on disposed computer hard drives to ensure privacy protection or face tough fines.

That means many more computers are likely to be recycled and reused instead of being hauled to landfills. And the law is intended to ensure private information isn’t passed along and shared with outside parties. Software programs that wipe out data on hard drives aren’t foolproof: Anyone with basic data-retrieval skills can extract information from a hard drive that has been scrubbed with one of those programs, warns Marilyn Slavin, Green Delete’s founder and CEO.

Green Delete is the first U.S. company that’s certified by the National Association for Information Destruction to perform onsite data eradication for clients. Green Delete ensures that any information it cleans out from computers and servers is gone for good.

An added bonus: Once a hard drive is completely sanitized, it can be resold.

Ms. Slavin, 48, has worked in the information technology industry for 25 years, spending most of that time selling and implementing Microsoft solutions for large corporations. For about 15 years at Microsoft, she worked often with Greg Reuter, another Green Delete co-founder and its chief technology officer.

She declined to provide revenues but said the company is projecting 30 percent sales growth in its second fiscal year, beginning this month. Some of that expansion is likely to come from new partnerships with national electronics outfits that recycle computers and resell them. In addition, Green Delete is partnering with IT consulting firms to help companies ensure their data is secure and private.

The company so far is working with eight large-scale customers, including a few national financial services entities and two universities.

Green Delete has 10 trained technicians on staff and has access to at least 20 more such specialists when demand grows for its services. The company is already garnering interest overseas, especially in London, where even stricter laws mandate data scrubbing from hard drives before companies can unload their IT equipment, she says.

If you think data eradication isn’t much of a problem, consider the headline on a news story published in PC Pro Magazine in December 2010: “NASA Sells Off PCs with Secret Shuttle Data”. Apparently, the Office of the Inspector General found that some very smart folks at NASA had neglected to properly erase potentially classified data from close to a dozen computers used in the Space Shuttle program before they were sold to local second-hand computer shops in the Cape Kennedy area.

(For an even more recent — and nearby — example, check out this headline from ChicagoBusiness.com this week: “Tablet snafu: Motorola says not all data wiped from refurbished devices.”)

Crain’s met with Ms. Slavin recently to learn more about how Green Delete helps clients avoid the same kind of mishap.

Crain’s: How did you get the idea for this company?

Ms. Slavin: At Microsoft, we worked on rolling out large solutions to global companies, but I didn’t know what they were doing with all this old equipment. We started to see that most of them didn’t have a plan, or the plan was to throw them to a recycler and hope for the best.

Slavin

In some cases, companies did software swiping, which takes it down to the operating level, but anyone with an IT background can get to this data, so it’s not really secure. When I go to privacy conferences, the experts there say this type of data breach is a problem and that data can be stolen. We saw a problem and decided to solve it.

Crain’s: What’s so unique about your data eradication services that companies couldn’t do on their own?

Ms. Slavin: Our biggest selling point is that we can do it a lot faster than other services. We do it onsite, so it’s done before the equipment leaves the company. We bring their equipment in another room, we pull out the hard drive and can do 30 to 60 computers at a time. It happens off the network so there’s no interruption in the operation of the business.

Companies are now realizing they have to budget for data eradication, but chief security officers are seeing they can get a return on investment for data eradication because they can resell their hard drives in a secondary market and get about a third of their costs back.

Crain’s: What else do you offer companies aside from cleaning out their data?

Ms. Slavin: We have asset management services that help companies save lots of money, too. For example, we can pull the licensing keys off the hard drives when we’re doing the eradication so they can be saved and reused in other hard drives. A licensing key comes with every piece of software, which enables anyone to download that software once again in a new system. We’ve saved companies $10,000 to $15,000 just by doing that.

Crain’s: What’s the green connection to the services you provide?

Ms. Slavin: Our service doesn’t break the hard drive and it can be reused, while others shred the hard drive. We hook companies up with the recyclers and we only work with certified e-Stewards recyclers because we know they’re recycling responsibly.

We also educate companies about why they should consider donating or selling their hard drives once our work is done. There’s lots of harmful chemicals in hard drives if they’re opened and you don’t want them in landfills because they might leach into the water supply. That’s one of the reasons all these states have anti-dumping laws.