Local companies are booming as green efforts take hold

The color of the 21st century is undeniably green. It seems every business, government, marketing strategy and product line includes an eco-friendly component, from new cars to building codes to cat litter.

As Virginia and the rest of the nation today celebrate the 39th anniversary of Earth Day, an economic wave is rolling across the commonwealth awash in the same hue - green-collar jobs.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has made green jobs a priority, as has President Barack Obama, as a way of encouraging new businesses and technologies that both help the environment and spur employment.

John Esson, who runs the Green Careers Center in Hampton and launched one of the first Web sites in the country dedicated to green jobs on Earth Day in 1995, described recent interest in the field as "phenomenal."

"The last 15 months have just been unreal," Esson said. He traced the boom to an unspoken acceptance amid industries that sustainability and clean energy will undoubtedly shape the future.

Green job fairs in recent months have been packed with two main groups, Esson said: young people looking for careers that benefit the environment, and laid-off workers and middle-aged professionals seeking something stable yet satisfying.

In December, Kaine unveiled his "Renew Virginia" campaign, with green-job creation at its core. The Democrat assembled a task force of energy executives, university scientists and government leaders to craft policies and incentives to accelerate budding enterprises.

Secretary of Commerce and Trade Patrick O. Gottschalk is chairing the task force. In an interview, he said a marketing plan "is pretty much in place" that identifies certain arenas as good fits for Virginia.

They include: solar-power manufacturing, biodiesel production, wind-energy generation, biomass and ethanol development, and nuclear energy.

Like the federal government, Virginia does not yet keep statistics on green jobs. Nor is there an accepted definition of what a green job is. Thus, tracking trends - or even defining them - is difficult.

What is certain, however, is that a small but growing employment base has taken off statewide, including in Hampton Roads. Locally, this green wave involves a broad spectrum of trades and labor, from architects to contractors, government employees to union workers.

Many in the emerging economy complain that Virginia's politicians have not caught on yet, that they continue to cling to fossil-fuel energy supplies and old ways of thinking.

They point out how the General Assembly this year blocked most alternative-energy legislation, including many bills endorsed by Kaine that, when compared to what other states are pursuing, seem fairly tame.

Some of these entrepreneurs complain that bank loans and tax incentives remain scarce. And several chuckle, in a kind of gallows humor, at how they have had to risk their financial fortunes to develop green products and services.

Here are but a few faces in the new, greening job market in Hampton Roads:

At first blush, Dennis Talton seems totally out of place.

Talton is an unabashed environmentalist, a green architect with a scruffy beard, a knit tie and a poster of John Lennon with the word "Imagine" hanging on his office wall - inside a secured Navy complex in Norfolk.

His title is "sustainable development program manager," and he works at the "Naval Facilities Engineering Command," or NAVFAC Atlantic, in military parlance.

Translation: "I'm the guy who helps to design and builds green buildings for the Navy," Talton said. He also aids the Marine Corps, Army and Air Force, too.

He recalled "one of the scariest moments of my career" when, three years ago, he stood before a roomful of Marines and instructed them on how to become environmentalists - buy low-impact lights, conserve water, rely on natural sunlight, stuff like that.

"I wasn't sure I was going to survive the meeting," he said with a chuckle. "But you know what? You go out today to Camp Pendleton and Camp Lejeune" - two Marine Corps hubs - "and those guys are all over this green stuff. They get it!"

Pushed by government mandates and executive orders, the Pentagon is going green. And Talton, 57, is playing a big role in taking the military there.

The Navy has 10 buildings nationwide certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as environmentally advanced - a label also known as LEED-certified. Six of those structures are in Hampton Roads, and Talton has had a hand in all of them, each completed within the past five years.

One of his favorites is a new child development center at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, a LEED-certified building with all kinds of green amenities.

There also are two hangars at Norfolk Naval Station with LEED status - "an industrial facility can be high-performing as well," Talton said - a green barracks at Yorktown Naval Weapons Station and two LEED support buildings at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base.

And more are on the way, he said - new Navy structures as well as renovated buildings.

The key moment in this green shift, Talton said, can be traced to Executive Order 13423. Handed down in 2007, it requires new federal construction to be "sustainable."

"After that," Talton said, "we made a business decision that our projects, starting in 2009, would be LEED-registered and -certified."

These days, he said, an academic background in green architecture and green buildings are "definitely advantages" to government job-seekers.

After graduating from Virginia Tech in the early 1970s, Talton joined a private architecture firm and hoped to spread solar technology across Virginia.

Instead, he said, "I starved."

He took a job with the government and about 10 years ago was asked to head the Navy's sustainable design program.

On second blush, Talton seems totally in the right place.

Mike Perry remembers the jokes and snickers when, in 2000, he and his wife mortgaged their lives to start a company, Building Logics, focused on a single product: "green" roofs.

These are roofs with solid, traditional bases. But on top are layers of waterproof liners, soil, drought-resilient plants and grasses. Basically, lawns over your head.

"Everybody laughed at us," Perry recalled recently at his Virginia Beach office. "They'd say, 'How are you going to get a lawn mower up on the roof?' or 'Are you going to put sheep up there, too?' We heard it all."

Now, nine years later, Perry is a seasoned pro in a burgeoning field, his opinions and expertise sought out across the country. At his office, he flips through a thick portfolio of roof projects completed locally, across Virginia, elsewhere in the country, and overseas.

See the photographs: A sprawling green roof atop a sewage treatment plant owned by the Hampton Roads Sanitation District. A full-blown garden, complete with outdoor furniture and a little pond, on a condo complex in Northern Virginia.

A young family, stretched out and smiling, as they lay atop a dense, grassy roof on their Virginia Beach home. A historic brick building in Roanoke, its corners dripping with plants - a green roof that won a national architectural award.

"It's definitely gone more mainstream," Perry said. "It started in Portland and Seattle as kind of a tree-hugger thing, but now the East Coast is driving the industry - more population centers, more need."

Green roofs can cost almost twice as much initially as regular roofs. But they reduce enough heating and cooling costs that they pay for themselves within several years, Perry said.

They also hold and use rainwater as an asset. With traditional roofs, rain is a villain, rushing off buildings and becoming hot, dirty storm water that often pollutes nearby streams or rivers. Storm water runoff today is the No. 1 pollution source afflicting the Chesapeake Bay.

Perry, 51, is an engineer by trade. He got interested in green roofs after seeing them in Europe. He borrowed a few European techniques in starting his business, including the use of sedum, a tough and velvety plant.

Sedums are especially resistant to drought and frost, and they bloom into pretty shades of white, red, purple and yellow.

The economic crisis has not been kind to Perry, even as interest in green building has climbed. Some customers have canceled orders, he said, mostly because of higher costs.

But Perry remains confident. He expects to hire more employees and expand his business as more and more government mandates requiring greater energy efficiency and retained green space take hold.

"There is so much opportunity in this industry," he said. "It's only going to get bigger."

Todd Heare got tired of cleaning up environmental messes and watching industrial jobs disappear along with the toxic residues at each site.

So the former Army Ranger and chemical expert decided to do something about it. He bought a small contaminated piece of property in Chesapeake, cleaned it up through a program with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, and started a company there, Retriever Recycling.

These days, he works out of a double-wide trailer at the back of the property, off Bainbridge Boulevard, where he collects restaurant grease, canola oil and fatty wastes that will be converted to biodiesel elsewhere.

There is no company sign on the trailer, though Heare has big plans to become a hub for would-be biodiesel entrepreneurs like himself.

"There's not a lot of money in it now," Heare said at his cramped office, where a giant poster of Jeff Gordon and beakers filled with odd-colored liquids adorn the walls. "But the potential is there to make a huge difference. This is where this country is headed, after all."

Heare, 34, has two major partners - J & J Enterprises, which collects grease from military facilities around Hampton Roads; and Red Birch Energy, which runs a small biodiesel refinery in Bassett, near Martinsville.

The refinery opened in August, and the governor toured the plant two weeks ago, to celebrate more green technology and green jobs in Virginia.

Red Birch can generate about 2.5 million gallons per year. Perhaps more important, it also illustrates how to solve a big obstacle for alternative fuels: lack of infrastructure.

Experts have pondered the high cost of replicating gasoline pipelines and delivery trucks to support new, cleaner fuels. At Red Birch, the refinery is located next door to a gas station, where the biofuel is sold to truckers, farmers and anybody else who stops in.

Heare's big idea is to build refinery kits in Chesapeake - they are not that big or sophisticated - and deliver them to entrepreneurs across the South who buy them.

This way, he has a finger in a hundred biodiesel operations and provides people who want to burn biofuels in their vehicles with more places to fill up.

He imagines a countryside dotted with mini-refineries near pump stations.

Heare is frenetic as he talks and walks, a salesman on a mission. Asked what the industry needs most to take off, he stopped dead in his tracks.

"Funds," he said. "This is a capital-intensive process - drums, trucks, containers - and it's so new that no one wants to lend any money."

Asked if the federal stimulus package will help, he smiled.

"Man, I sure hope so."

When the governor unveiled the details of his green-jobs initiative earlier this year, he wanted to do so at a symbolic and exemplary place.

Kaine chose Solar Services in Virginia Beach to make his announcement. The company, located in a business park near Lynnhaven Mall, has been designing, building and maintaining solar-energy systems since 1986.

Richard Good, 55, is the president of Solar Services and has become a leading - if sometimes frustrated - advocate for alternative energy in Virginia.

A former chief engineer in the merchant marine, Good was born in England and raised in South Africa, and he has traveled the world, borrowing ideas and lessons about clean energy at each stop.

"In Greece, everyone has a solar water-heating system. I mean, you can't walk down the street and not see one," Good said recently at his office, which, of course, is solar-powered.

"And look at Germany," he continued. "They get about as much sunlight as Montana. Yet they are one of the most advanced countries for solar energy in the world. And why? Because they made it government policy to pursue solar energy and do it well. We, unfortunately, have not."

His message is simple: The sun is free and produces no pollution. So let's stop the political squabbling and get on with exploiting this enormous, clean resource.

"The American solar industry is still very small; we're sort of emerging from the cave, so to speak," he said.

But its potential is huge, Good added - for creating manufacturing jobs, for expanding the use of solar panels on homes and businesses, for relying less on dirty, foreign energy.

"I compare our position to just before computer technology took over Silicon Valley," he said. "And now look out there - it's exploded; there are computer jobs everywhere in Silicon Valley. That can and should happen with solar."

One of his "pet peeves," as he described several of them, is a persistent and contradictory image in Virginia of solar panels.

Some community associations, for example, still ban solar systems within their subdivisions because "some people think they're ugly, or might reflect the sun, or whatever," Good said.

He recalled how one home-owner in Northern Virginia asked him to come install a system after all his neighbors had gone to work and to be finished before they would be home - for fear of starting a neighborhood row.

Good has tried to get state lawmakers to do something about such bans, to little avail.

Still, business is booming, he said. His desk on this day was covered with pink order forms, and staff interrupted him several times to help smooth out a problem.

One saleswoman popped her head in and asked, "Do we have anyone who can take care of this today, Richard?"

"No, 'fraid not," he answered.

"It's like this all day," Good said, returning to the conversation. "Imagine if this industry really took off."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com