Printer-friendly version Email story link

Nonprofit puts businesses in the green

Zero Waste Alliance shows clients ways to save the planet and money

By Liz Crain

The Portland Tribune, Mar 27, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

JIM CLARK / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

Carpenter Gene Roberts tears out a closet at Bradley-Angle House, a women’s emergency center getting a green remodel with help from the Zero Waste Alliance.

ADVERTISEMENTS

In Portland, you’re hard-pressed to find an area that the locally based nonprofit Zero Waste Alliance hasn’t had a green impact on, and its influence nationwide continues to grow.

The ZWA is an eight-year-old program, spun off from the International Sustainable Development Foundation, also based in Portland. It works to help businesses and organizations implement initiatives focused on industrial ecology and sustainable business practices.

The executive director and founder, Larry Chalfan, is an Oregon State University engineering graduate who spent 30 years in the semiconductor industry before getting the green bug. He says his environmental standards have evolved drastically in the past decade.

“In the beginning, we often couldn’t find contractors who understood the issues we were working with,” Chalfan says. “We were looking for replacement chemicals – chemicals that would be less toxic and harmful to the environment in the long run. At the same time, we were quite aware of the impact on the bottom line. With one of our first clients our proposed green changes translated into savings of $60,000 a year.”

But soon Chalfan realized that he and his associates hadn’t looked at the big picture. The replacement chemical they chose was less harmful in output, but in terms of its extraction and processing it had grave environmental implications.

“These days we do our best to assess from every angle possible,” he says.

Beer waste needs a use

In 2001, ZWA partnered with the Portland Development Commission for the Sustainable Business Assistance Program, to work with businesses and organizations in Portland’s urban renewal areas ripe for environmental improvements.

One of the first companies to take advantage of the ZWA/PDC Sustainable Business Assistance Program was Widmer Bros. Brewing. The issue at hand: a hefty liquid waste stream from its brew-rinse solution that was environmentally questionable and incurring huge costs.

Widmer Bros. didn’t want to just figure out how to dispose of it – it wanted to come up with a way to reuse it.

“The current figure is that 15 to 20 percent of everything that we extract and use is thrown away – never to be used again,” Chalfan says. “There are countless cases now in which landfills are being mined for resources. And there will be more of that in future. We’re all about changing the equation – helping businesses realize that waste is really just another name for resource.”

After an initial assessment ZWA joined forces with the Food Innovation Center, a joint venture of OSU and the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

The FIC took samples of the yeast-rich water and experimented with potential products. The center used it to make everything from bagels and pizza sauce to beer batter for onion rings.

In the end, Widmer decided that it wasn’t practical to develop an entirely new product, which would require a large investment for additional staff and equipment. The company instead decided to move ahead with the portion of ZWA’s proposal that outlined another use for the yeast water: metered cattle feed for livestock.