sustainable-business
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Joel Makower Found His Beat Before Business Found the Climate
He began with a paper newsletter, built a digital clearinghouse before the web had a business model, and spent three decades asking companies whether their green promises could survive contact with the balance sheet.
Marco Pimentel Is Building a Bigger Surface Area for Luck
A failed coupon startup opened the door to Redbrick. Now the Victoria operator is applying the same appetite for experiments to climate tech, independent journalism and a more durable kind of growth.
Benjamin Cook
Benjamin Cook is the founder, CEO and board chairman of Zirconia Inc., a Tukwila, Washington advanced-materials company building water-borne ceramic coatings that chemically bond to concrete and steel at room temperature - effectively turning aging infrastructure into something close to liquid granite. A self-described green technologist with three decades of cleantech ventures behind him, Cook trades on a single conviction: the cheapest and greenest building is the one you never have to tear down. Before Zirconia he founded GeoTree Technologies, an underground-pipe restoration firm sold for a 5x investor return, and earlier still he traded a planned career in pediatric medicine for a life spent removing toxins from the built environment.