Trinkaus was a Western student majoring in Latin American studies at the time. The speech he heard that afternoon led him to make the connection between consumer choices and social issues, he said. He now owns the organic food stores Terra Organica and Bargainica on North State Street in Bellingham.
“I’m the only person I know of who got into organics because of farmworkers, because of social issues,” Trinkaus said.
Environmental companies such as Terra Organica have grown in number as environmental and social awareness has increased. Many consumers understand that their purchases not only support a
company but also the practices of that company. From designing “green” homes to buying hybrid cars and organic produce, some people make purchases with the health of the planet in mind.
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| Top: The staff of Terra Organica and Bargainica, from left to right: Trinkaus, Marley Simmons-Abril, Courtney Laws, Melissa Heron and Becca Lann. Photo by Isabel Poulson.
Above: Halley Manion was the owner of Fare Thee Well Foods, an organic company that made non-wheat baking mixes, snack bars and cereals. Photo by Khale Wallitner. |
Trinkaus started Terra Organica not as a store but as an organic cafe in 1996. He abandoned the cafe because of high overhead, making it the sixth failed attempt at an organic restaurant in the same location. He then started Terra Organica, the grocery store, which has been in operation for more than eight years. He added Bargainica, the discount portion of the store, after the space next door became available.
“There’s been times when we’ve really struggled to make it. I had to think of ways that I could reinvent myself and do something different,” Trinkaus said.
Trinkaus has seen many companies go out of business, he said. Many of Bargainica’s discount products come from bankrupt companies and discontinued organic product lines. Some of these companies have merged with non-organic companies, such as Cascadian Farm merging with General Mills Inc.
“On the one hand, the integrity of the product goes down. On the other hand, these products make it into mainstream grocery stores and into people’s hands who never would have bought it,” Trinkaus said.
Small companies in general have a more difficult time than large businesses. Regulations and subsidies work in favor of large business, making it difficult for small businesses to stay competitive. Taxes,
insurance, permits and other operating costs can keep small businesses from effectively competing against large conglomerates. Environmental companies balance these challenges with trying to maintain the integrity of their product and practices.
“It’s challenging to run an environmentally friendly business because everything you do is going to cost you more money. A non-environmentally friendly business is just going to throw their fluorescent lights in the garbage, and they’ve got mercury in them. You need to recycle them. But the public doesn’t know that. The public doesn’t know if you use recycled paper or not. Of course it makes it harder to compete,” Trinkaus said.
Terra Organica is almost entirely organic, Trinkaus said. He said he is proud to carry products from companies with high integrity. But at the same time, he understands that he has a business to run.
“I think being in business, you never lose sight of the bottom line because if you do for a second, you’d go out of business,” Trinkaus said. “The natural-food business is a highly competitive market. There’s hundreds and hundreds of companies making thousands of products all competing for shelf space.”
Terra Organica’s shelves once were home to a line of organic products named Fare Thee Well Foods. Halley Manion started Fare Thee Well Foods not because she wanted to get rich but because of her belief in the importance of organic foods, she said. Manion measured the success of the company by the satisfaction of her customers rather than company profits, which often were just enough to pay the bills. Fare Thee Well Foods made organic, non-wheat baking mixes, snack bars and cereals.
Fare Thee Well foods was never large. Typically run by only three employees, it managed to distribute its products all over the country. Manion filed bankruptcy two years ago because the company simply wasn’t making enough to survive.
The bottom line of our survival is the soil,” said Manion. “If we don’t take care of it, we’re gone.”
Perhaps Manion’s bottom line was just too different from the bottom line her competitors embraced.
But it is not just food-related companies that are trying to minimize humankind’s footprint on Earth. Renewable energies, organic clothing, energy-efficient buildings and ecotourism are taking advantage of the “green” market.
Environmental-cleanup companies represent another sector of the environmental market. Klean Earth Environmental Company, founded in 1992, treated toxic heavy metals in soil with technology that surrounds ions in silica.
“Silica does not degrade in the environment, so it was the perfect medium to use,” said Jim Roma, the former executive vice president of KEECO. “People had been trying to use it for fifty years, but nobody had actually figured out how to make it work ... To make silica from a solid into a liquid, surround the particle, and then turn it back into a solid in seconds was a really novel process.”
KEECO, started in Lynnwood, developed its technology and built its company from the ground up
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| Jim Roma was the executive vice president of Klean Earth Environmental Company, which marketed a technology to treat soil and water contaminated with toxic heavy metals. Photo by Jamie Clark. |
possible business opportunity as well as an opportunity to help the environment, he said.
“I think it’s becoming more and more understood now that water is the future. If we don’t figure out how to solve our contaminated water issues, then we can’t go forward. As mankind, we’ve got to resolve that,” Roma said.
KEECO’s technology also was effective at treating radioactive wastewater. KEECO’s META-LOCK treatment process cleaned radioactive waste such as depleted uranium to below detectable levels.
“This technology promises a new and more effective method of heavy metal remediation than alternative remediation techniques,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., wrote in a letter endorsing the
company. “For this reason, I believe KEECO could play a role in achieving our cleanup goals at Hanford and other contaminated government sites.”
But large corporations dominate the market for nuclear cleanup, so penetrating that market — even if one might have superior technology — is difficult, Roma said.
“We felt like we were the perfect technology at the perfect time to address those issues,” Roma said. “And we were. Getting over that big hump is the difficult part. So many good ideas and technologies never make it because they can’t get past that big hurdle of getting financed and being brought to the market.”
KEECO filed bankruptcy in 2003 and is in the process of transferring the technology over to a company named Ten-X.
In a capitalist economy, bankruptcies and business failures are a given. The question is whether some companies lose sight of the competitive market because of environmentally motivated views.
“There’s definitely a disadvantage of buying into the whole green thing. You certainly run a risk by doing that,” said Dean Fearing, director of the RE Store in Bellingham.
The RE Store is a nonprofit business that sells salvaged building materials to recover as much material as possible from the waste stream. Simply keeping its head above water can be a daunting task.
“We’ve had our bad years. Last year we had such a bad year that if we continued to operate that way, we wouldn’t have survived,” Fearing said, referring to the company’s discontinued deconstruction service. “When you’re competing against places like Wal-Mart, it’s tougher. You really don’t stand a chance competing against them.”
Light Green Advisors, a Seattle-based investment consultant firm, looks to invest in companies with favorable environmental
records. Its philosophy is that companies with the best
environmental records better sustain shareholder value long term. According to this philosophy, striving for sustainability likely will be a better business practice than those that attempt to maximize
short-term profit.
Companies such as Terra Organica, Fare Thee Well Foods, KEECO and the RE Store are battling to make it easier for industry and nature to work together.
“It’s a trend in that it’s catching on more and more, but
I don’t see an end in sight. There’s a lot of room for us to expand,” Fearing said.
Roma has a similar outlook.
“I do see growth in this field,” Roma said. “I wouldn’t say that I see a downward trend. You really have to do it by your bootstraps, and you really have to be determined, a little bit lucky and persevere through everything.”
Trinkaus also sees growth in the environmental sector.
“I think it’s inevitable that the organic industry will continue to grow at the rapid pace that it has been,” Trinkaus said. “There’s an impression that organic and natural products are very expensive and only hippies eat it — or only Volvo-driving, soccer-mom liberals eat it. I think in the long run it needs to be marketed to the mainstream. The things that we are selling are as wholesome and American and mainstream as what anybody else is selling.”