Rad Company Showcase
Your weekly installment of inspiring companies making meaningful impact.
You may, or may not, know that I’m one of the founders of a company/social enterprise/cooperative that I’m unabashedly proud of. If you’re not hip to it, Rust Belt Riders was started back in 2014 by myself and friend-turned-business-partner, Michael Robinson. After years of refining, and multiple business incubators, we have our elevator pitch: “Rust Belt Riders works with businesses, organizations, and individuals to provide them with a clean, timely, and community-benefiting alternative to landfills for their food waste. Our mission is to feed people, not landfills.” If you’re in the Cleveland-area, sign up for our services! Rust Belt Riders helped to divert over 4 million pounds of food waste from going to landfills in 2021 and today we are capturing and diverting around a quarter-million pounds every month. These climate-essential services parlayed into creating Tilth Soil - a line of certified organic planting media that have, at their core, the compost we create from our services. When applied and managed correctly, these soils can help capture carbon, support local food production, and relocalize our food system.
Tilth is where I spend most of my waking hours. We formally launched in 2018 and, as of this past year, Tilth brings in more revenue than any other department within Rust Belt.
It’s a lot of work to build any organization, and it's even harder to build a purpose-driven, impact-first one. Often, doing the right thing is the more costly and more time-consuming thing, but shortcuts are how we got into this mess in the first place, right? Each Wednesday, I plan to showcase a handful of organizations I look up to for one reason or another; their impact which we will continually define and redefine together. Here are a few of the companies that I am presently obsessed with.
Aclima
Air Quality
I first heard about this company on Twitter as an innovative female-founded climate-tech company and it naturally sparked my interest in a big way. We need new lenses to better understand the impacts of the climate crisis, and one of the clearest ways we can understand its impact is by looking at localized air quality. Alcima tricks out vehicles with a slew of air monitoring sensors to better visualize and understand the intersection between public health, air quality, and climate change. This data can (and does) help communities, companies, and governments adapt public spaces and business practices to both reduce emissions and improve air quality at the block-by-block level.
BlocPower
HVAC
Founded by Donnel Baird, this company is currently the company I am most obsessed with. I first learned about Donnel on How I Built This only to later learn that he is also an Echoing Green fellow. A kindred spirit taking on the nearly impossible task of getting people to get excited about the world’s least sexy things. I try to get people stoked on food waste while Donnel “turns houses into Teslas” by repositioning HVAC as a necessary climate adaptation that centers environmental justice, and provides benefits that are at once cost-saving, climate-improving, job-creating, and data-driven.
Carbon Collective
FinTech
I think about money a lot; perhaps an unhealthy amount. I think about it with a scarcity mindset that (I think) is fairly common. It’s a thing I’m trying to unlearn, but it’s nonetheless there and one way I have quieted those voices in my head is to better understand how money works, in all of its imperfections. One area where money is working against our best interest is in our 401k’s and retirement accounts. Often, and unbeknownst to a lot of us, your 401k is being invested in the very industries that all but ensure the destruction of the planet. Enter Carbon Collective, a financial tool offered to individuals and social enterprises that want to ensure they are at once divesting from climate change accelerating industries while investing in those companies and solutions that pass their rigorous screening process. ESG’s are not the Alpha and Omega here, far from it, and I think that’s why I’m captivated by their work.
Green Wave
Oceans / Regenerative Ag
Say hello to the second Echoing Green fellow-founded organization on this list! Have you ever wondered how we can change our food system for good? I spend lots of time thinking about this, but it wasn’t until I encountered Green Wave that my attention and interest turned toward the oceans. I always thought of the oceans as polluted, overfished, and increasingly filled with plastic. It is all of those things, but for Bren Smith and his team, it was an untapped landscape ripe with opportunity for carbon capture, natural habitat restoration, and dreams of a new commodity crop to join the ranks of corn, wheat, and soy: kelp. Using vertical ocean farming Green Wave grows kelp which sequesters carbon, supports marine life, and can be co-cultivated along the likes of oysters and muscles, which are filter feeders. The collective impact of these efforts produces a regenerative ocean vegetable, provides seaside climate resilience, and climate-positive value-added products.
Seed Commons
Investing & Lending
find your local Seed Commons Chapter in the map above then promptly support them!
If Carbon Collective takes Wall Street in a more human direction, the Seed Commons takes lending to damn-near utopic places. It’s a “community wealth cooperative” focused on non-extractive loan funds that provide power to cooperative businesses in marginalized communities. If things like “Non-Extractive Finance” and “Non-Extractive Finance Terms” are new to you, you’re not alone. Seed Commons is recentering people, and recognizing that it was extractive practices that helped to create the climate crisis, labor exploitation, and the destruction of our communities in the first place. By building this model they are offering a pre-figurative vision for what banking, peer-to-peer lending, and economic solidarity can and should look like in the midst of a multitude of crises. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! They have a growing network of over 25 local peer members and have made over 100 loans totaling $15.2 million.
Let me know
Who and what are the organizations you love and admire? What organizations or businesses give you envy? Let me know in the comments below.
Love this! Great work Dan 🌟