Homes Green Homes
What started out as a failed real estate investment four years ago turned into a passion and an award-winning company, MyGreenBuildings, for Steve Ellis and his partner, Grant Castilow. Ellis, a former waste management consultant for Fortune 500s, purchased a tiny bungalow in Sarasota with the intention of remodeling and reselling; but the real estate market crashed, leaving him with an expensive albatross.

To find an edge in a flooded market, Ellis asked Castilow, his contractor, to redo the house as a beautiful example of the best in green building. The house, which was the first LEED certified remodel in Florida and earned the second-highest Florida Green Building Coalition rating in the state, quickly sold.

Since then the energetic pair have won multiple design and green awards for their projects, including a recent national award from Remodeler Magazine in the green remodeling category.
The company’s revenues have grown 150 percent since 2008, and staff now numbers eight, says Ellis—quite a feat considering the fallout in the local building industry. Ellis says the concept of MyGreenBuildings, their branding campaign and the processes that he and Castilow put in place to run the company have paid off.

And he stresses that their green homes are beautiful as well as efficient. “Our clients are not wearing Birkenstocks,” says Ellis, “and they don’t want haystack walls. We build high-performance luxury homes, and we’re saving jobs, reducing carbon, improving the health of our bays and decreasing the need for foreign oil. I’m living my dream job.”

A Taste for Green
Fredda and Craig Pohl have owned Nellie’s Deli, Market and Catering for 17 years. It’s been a popular restaurant with a big local fan base, but the couple always wanted to take the business green. It was cost-prohibitive to retrofit their longtime old location in a shopping center off Beneva, but when they decided to move to larger quarters at Fruitville and Beneva roads last October, they made every aspect of the building and their business eco-friendly.

They chose green products in construction and bought recycled materials at Sarasota Architectural Salvage. Their kitchen appliances are all Energy Star, the paint is soy based, and even the glue is nontoxic; their building is now eligible for LEED certification.

The Pohls also purchase food locally when possible, clean their produce with green wash, package take-out food in plastic made from corn and use plates made from sugarcane. Even the bamboo plates and cutlery the Pohls use at their catering jobs are environmentally gentle. The couple also worked with Julie Childers Henry, a local green business coach, to create a green mission statement and train their employees about their commitment to the environment and recycling.

Craig, Nellie’s chef, says there is an added cost to developing a menu and buying green, and that he has to be careful with pricing, “but people’s ears perk up when they understand what we’re doing; people have a higher global consciousness now.”

Rain Men
Skip VerMilyea and Jack Burden want people to understand their Sarasota’s Raindrops Cisterns does more than catch rainfall gushing from gutters during a storm. Raindrops Cisterns is really a water reuse system that redirects captured water to water lawns, flush toilets and be used for taking showers, washing dishes and drinking. These systems can supply up to 65 percent of a household’s needs, they say.

Burden started out in the garment production business in the Far East, then moved to Florida to work in real estate. VerMilyea operated an oil refinery in Pennsylvania before moving to Florida to run a gutter installation company; he eventually began to design his own cistern systems.

They met about a year ago and decided to partner. In the last year, they have designed, built and installed above- and below-ground cistern systems for homes, schools and restaurants throughout Florida, and their designs and strategies are being used as far away as Missouri and North Carolina, as well as in Sarasota County and local water management manuals and in educational materials for the statewide Plumbers and HVAC Contractors Association.

Revenues in 2009 were $250,000, exactly what they projected, and the partners say they believe next year they will see growth. “We’re dedicated to education, sustainability, policy work and creative design,” says Burden, “and we’re interested in being able to market products and services internationally and identify those markets. We are a start-up company, but we’re broadening our horizons quickly.”

Healthy Building
It would be hard to ignore the contribution David Sessions and Willis Smith Construction have made to green commercial construction in this region. This 38-year-old company opened its brand-new, green, 18,000-square-foot headquarters last year, winning accolades, awards and one of the few LEED Gold certifications in the state for its sustainability.

Sessions, the president of Willis Smith, was committed to showing that commercial construction can be green and affordable, and he corralled his 50 employees into brainstorming the green elements that were important to them, stressing that he wanted a healthy work environment
as well as a building that would consume less energy.

The new headquarters incorporated a rainwater harvesting system that has reduced the company’s potable water consumption by 80 percent, a solar roof that provides 30 percent of the building’s electricity, wood that has been certified socially responsible, low VOC paints,
energy-efficient windows, extensive recycling (including 60 percent of all the construction waste from the project) and Florida-friendly certified landscaping.

Sessions is so proud of the building that he invites anyone who is interested to take a tour so he can educate them about the possibilities. So far, more than 600 people have toured the building, which uses special signage to point out all the sustainable elements and their effects on employees and the local environment.

“We wanted to make a community statement,” he says.
“We wanted to be recognized as a leader in sustainability.”