All this week, EarthFirst.com will be counting down the world’s richest green entrepreneurs who have amassed fortunes ranging from the low millions to an incredible $3.4 billion mostly from doing good deeds for the planet.
We’re starting off the list with a few entrepreneurs for whom no actual numbers are available in terms of personal fortune, but who undoubtedly have very well padded bank accounts. These five guys are rich and getting richer, and their companies are worth staggering quantities of cash. They’re making the big bucks off their eco-friendly ventures, and we hope they’ll inspire all of you wannabe entrepreneurs out there to get out and do something for the environment – and make a truckload of money, too.
25. Neil Eckert, Climate Exchange
Neil Eckert is the CEO of Climate Exchange PLC, a leading provider of exchange-based carbon-emissions trading products. Climate Exchange PLC owns both the European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Exchange. Climate Exchange provides emissions reduction credits in Europe under the mandatory European Emissions Trading Scheme. Neil’s personal net worth hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s thought to be in the millions.
24. Ray Anderson, Interface Inc.
Ray Anderson has been called ‘the greenest chief executive in America’. Founder and CEO of Interface Inc., a carpet tile company, Anderson wasn’t always interested in environmental issues, but in the summer of 1994 he was asked to give a speech to Interface employees about the company’s approach to the environment. He told The New York Times, “I was running a company that was plundering the earth. I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail! It was a spear in the chest.’”
After that, Anderson set out to make Interface a sustainable operation, an effort that has saved the company more than $336 million since 1995. Today, the company makes more than $1.1 billion in annual sales, and Anderson has undoubtedly taken home a hefty portion of that.
23. Burt Shavitz, Burt’s Bees
Burt Shavitz could have been a hell of a lot richer than he is. Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of popular natural care products company Burt’s Bees, bought out the iconic beekeeper way back in the late ‘90s before Burt’s Bees hit it big for a low six-figure sum. Today, she enjoys a fortune of more than $300 million, while Burt’s got about $4 million to his name. He doesn’t seem to mind too much, though – the 72-year-old lives in the same rustic turkey coop he was shacking up in when he met Roxanne back in 1984, when he was selling honey out the back of his pickup truck.
Burt’s Bees was purchased by Clorox in November 2007 for nearly $1 billion.
22. Gary Hirshberg, Stonyfield Farms
Gary Hirshberg is chairman, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farms, an organic yogurt producer. Hirshberg has been interested in sustainability since he was a teenager, and studied ecology in college. He started Stonyfield Farms as an organic dairy farming school with partner Samuel Kaymen in 1983, and today the company pulls in more than $300 million in annual sales. Hirshberg is also author of the book ‘Stirring it Up: How to Make Money and Save the World’.
Hirshberg wrote in Newsweek, “At Stonyfield, we have factored the planet into all our decisions. We are a 100 percent organic manufacturer, which means we avoid the production and use of many tons of toxic chemicals. We were America’s first manufacturer to offset 100 percent of our carbon-dioxide emissions from our manufacturing facility. We’ve mapped our climate footprint (by figuring out just how much greenhouse gas we emit), installed the largest solar photovoltaic array in New Hampshire and converted our yogurt waste into bio-gas, avoiding the generation of truckloads of sludge.
These kinds of green improvements have not only reduced our company footprint on the planet, but have saved our company so many millions of dollars that I’ve come to think of them as the “First National Bank of Conservation.”
21. Bruce Khouri, Solar Integrated Technologies
Bruce Khouri, age 49, co-founded Solar Integrated Technologies in 2001 and made a personal fortune of $5 million by cashing in shares in the company. Khouri saw a market for solar panels long before most other entrepreneurs saw it as a viable revenue source, in the 1990s. He realized the value of sun-baked rooftop real estate, and says that 50 years from now, he expects that every sunny rooftop will be covered in solar panels.
Of his path to fortune, Khouri told Reuters, “It hasn’t been easy but we transformed an old-world roofing material into a renewable energy technology. It’s a miracle Solar Integrated is still here but a pioneer charging across the prairie is bound to get hit by a few arrows.”
