A greener industry

Landscaping: the original green industry. If you need a marketing slogan to promote your company’s eco-conscious ideals, steal that one.

“There are lots of industries that claim to be green, but we’ve been taking care of the environment for a long time,” says Dean DeSantis, president, DeSantis Landscapes, Salem, Ore.

But are we communicating the benefits of a healthy, managed landscape to our customers? Probably not.

“Everyone says they are interested in green and they want the service providers they hire to be green, but in a lot of cases, customers don’t know what green means,” says Jim McCutcheon, president, High Grove Partners, Smyrna, Ga., and chairman of PLANET’s Crystal Ball Committee, which produced a report last year called Green Industry ECOnomics.

Explaining sustainable landscape practices to customers is the first step. “Being knowledgeable, understanding what’s going on (in sustainability) and guiding our customers is going to raise our value level with customer,” McCutcheon says.

One way to brush up on green industry sustainability initiatives is to review the principles outlined in the Sustainable Sites Initiative. Its goal: to create voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices.

McCutcheon suggests reading the guiding principles of the initiative and culling ideas from the document that could represent service opportunities. For instance, High Grove Partners has organized a storm water management program to address stricter enforcement of municipal water quality laws. Property management clients are getting citations, and now they can turn to High Grove for help.

Before you dive into a new service, take time to assess where your company stands in the spectrum of “green.” McCutcheon suggests focusing on the two buckets of sustainability: products and services; and internal operations.

“I think we can use our resources more wisely, protect our environment better and make good business decisions,” McCutcheon says.

This month, Lawn & Landscape spoke to three firms to learn how they approach sustainability.

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Innovation the green way

During an annual planning meeting seven years ago, the DeSantis Landscapes team was lobbing ideas around the conference room. A facilitator asked each person at the table to describe his or her passion. “As we went around the room, it became clear that each of us had a passion for the environment and sustainability,” says Dean DeSantis, president of the Salem, Ore.-based firm.

The facilitator blew his whistle. “Why aren’t you doing something about this?” he asked the group.

Good question, DeSantis thought. Before long, the company hatched its EarthSense organic lawn care program and began scrutinizing its business practices. “That led us to ask the question: Where do we have the most impact on the environment as a company?” DeSantis relates. “One of the big things we found was fuel.”

So five years ago, DeSantis found a biodiesel vendor, brought two 500-gallon tanks on site and began filling equipment and trucks with this cleaner fuel. The change required some adjustments – mainly changing filters more often since biodiesel works as a sort of cleansing agent and can push the “gunk” on the inside of equipment into filters. And DeSantis pays slightly more for this fuel: $3 per gallon rather than the $2.79 going rate for regular diesel. But customers recognize the company’s eco-conscious effort.  

“They call us because they’re heard we’re green, or they see our bumper stickers that say we have biodiesel in our trucks,” DeSantis says.

Clients can choose among three levels of EarthSense services – a no-pesticides platinum program; a silver level with some spot treatments; and bronze with more chemical intervention. “People love the idea of being green and no pesticides, yet we have several clients who then come to the realization that they also don’t want any weeds,” DeSantis says, adding that green never promises weed-free. “So we find out where clients are comfortable and how far they want us to go with (our green program).”

Regardless of the service clients choose, they benefit from DeSantis Landscapes internal green initiatives – the use of biodiesel fuel, the bioswale on the company’s property that filters storm water and the solar panels on its building that cut energy bills.

And while clients can certainly choose organic or so-called “natural” services from other firms, DeSantis Landscapes has established a leadership position in this niche by constantly innovating and offering customers interesting alternatives. One of those is compost tea. The company has a 100-gallon brewer and can customize batches for clients’ properties depending on soil needs. “Everyone can say, ‘We are using less pesticides,’” DeSantis says. “Something has to be unique.”

That’s why DeSantis is talking to customers about rain water harvesting: ways to capture run-off and redirect this water so it can be used for irrigation. He suggests rain gardens for homeowners and talks to commercial clients about bioswales. Marketing collateral that outlines these services helps customers understand what’s new in green.

A big part of selling green services is educating the customer base and community outreach. DeSantis has also found that partnering with like-minded businesses – even in different industries – can result in effective marketing campaigns. For instance, DeSantis Landscapes services a chain of burger restaurants that sell waste oil from making French fries and other menu items to biodiesel companies. “We use that waste oil to help fuel our trucks,” DeSantis says.

So DeSantis and the restaurant are telling the public about their good work. And clients in the Portland market listen. “People here are very interested in sustainability and green products and services,” he says, noting that about 80 percent of customer calls inquire about the Earth Sense program.

Meanwhile, DeSantis also fields inquiries from job seekers all over the country who want to work for his environmentally conscious firm. So he gets the pick of the crop.

What’s next for DeSantis? The company is assembling its many sustainable “pieces” into a comprehensive plan by using a Sustainability Planning and Reporting Kit (SPARK). This tool will help the company synthesize its current efforts and set goals for the coming years.

“One of our goals is to continue being perceived as the sustainable landscape leader,” he says. “And that requires innovation and constantly educating ourselves and continuing to improve.” 

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Systemizing sustainability

Freedom Lawns U.S.A. was founded on the concept of providing clients “freedom from harsh chemicals and freedom of time,” says president Mark Tamn, who has worked in the industry for 35 years at national firms. “I’ve seen companies come and go, and I’ve seen different ways of performing lawn care. I saw the chemical part of (the job), and I knew we needed to do something different.”

So Tamn applied this philosophy to a business plan and Freedom Lawns was born – and soon after in 2001, so was a fertilizer product he developed and registered in North and South Carolina.

The product is organically fortified and formulated specifically for southeast lawns. There are four different analyses for the region’s warm season grasses to suit various properties’ needs. Aside from the fertilizer, Tamn is testing a natural mole repellent that is a botanical product and a natural insect repellent.

When selecting other products for the company’s lawn care services, Tamn scrutinizes labels and practices common sense. He pores over research provided by universities and decides which products fit his business model. The core of that is Integrated Pest Management.

“We have thorough training of employees to make sure they understand these products and when to use them,” he says.

“It’s not only what you use – it’s what you don’t use,” he adds.

Because Tamn wants technicians to take their time in the field, properly identify weed and disease problems, then choose an appropriate product, the company does not pay its workers commission.

“It’s human nature to work as quickly as you can to get to the next job because, at the end of the week, the more you do the more profit there is for you,” he says of commission-based pay structures. “We want employees to spend time on the lawns so they can make sound judgment on when to use pesticides and when not to use them.”

This use-sparingly technique is what differentiates Freedom Lawns U.S.A. from competitors, Tamn says. “The majority of our clients are trying to be more green,” he says, citing demand for the services. “But they have to realize their lawn may not be that cookie-cutter, weed-free patch of grass. Most are OK with that.”

Setting reasonable customer expectations is a big part of the job. Technicians educate customers about what to expect of Freedom Lawns’ services – and that’s not a golf course look.

What clients can expect is a safe lawn that is virtually weed-free. And they can also expect to spend some time maintaining that lawn to get the best results. “We don’t do mowing or irrigation, so we have to educate homeowner on the proper ways to do that and what is required of them,” Tamn says.

Tamn worries that other companies are making promises that aren’t realistic of green lawn care, or calling themselves “green” but not walking the talk. “That will dilute the meaning of being environmentally conscious,” he says. In fact, in many industries, this “greenwashing” is already happening. “People really have to do some due diligence.”

And as a green industry leader in providing organic services, education becomes just as important as caring for the lawn. Tamn emphasizes his company’s complete “system” for sustainability. “It starts at the top,” he says of leadership. “It includes employees and works down to the end products you are using.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Learning and adopting green practices
Richard Heller accidentally completed his first sustainable landscape project in 1996. It was a green roof a landscape architect asked him to build. “The architect said, ‘Let’s put up a stone retaining wall, add some waterproofing mat between the roof and plants, and we’ll plant right here,’” Heller recalls of the (at the time) radical concept. Now, roof gardens are about 10 percent of his business.

“I knew it was something different, but once I found out how eco-friendly it was…,” Heller says, adding that he wrote his college thesis on alternative technology and realized this project fell under that heading. “I got real excited about that, and we pursued it aggressively.”

At the time, Greener by Design was servicing interiorscape clients, as well. But as Heller began to rewrite his business philosophies with a green slant, he eventually dropped that niche and began exclusively marketing landscape design/build services to his New York City clients.

Heller gradually stepped into sustainability, beginning with soil testing and simply putting the right plant in the right place. It’s basic stuff, but no one else was really doing it in his market, he says. His suburban clients are curious about why his technicians pull soil plugs from their properties.

That’s why customized marketing pieces are a key part of getting new customers to understand the Greener by Design way. “When we go to pitch a client, we tell them we are the only full-service we know of in this area of New York that are using corn gluten, testing the soil and using compost tea,” he says.

None of this is new technology. “I have nothing original going on here,” Heller says.

But what Heller does have is a desire to learn from other companies and apply their green practices to his own business. “Through our affiliation with the Professional Landcare Network and our networking with other companies across the country, we are always finding out about sustainable innovations that we can take little pieces of and apply to our company,” Heller says.

For example, Dean DeSantis of Salem, Oregon’s DeSantis Landscapes has been brewing compost tea to amend lawns for years. Now, Heller makes his own formula and will only sell spot weed treatment to clients if they agree to a healthy dose of the mixture each year. “We believe if you are selective and only spray where weeds are, when we come back with the compost tea, that will help restore the damage,” he says.

Not every effort works. Heller tried operating his suburban landscape business with electric mowers, blowers and edgers, but he couldn’t be competitive using that equipment. So he fuels up commercial mowers like everyone else, but strikes a green balance by doing all he can to make business operations efficient so he doesn’t waste gas.

“Besides farming, we are the only industry that engages in a practice to sequester carbon,” he points out. “A well-maintained lawn sequesters five times more carbon than ornamental grass, even with a dirty polluting lawnmower.”

For Heller, operating a sustainable company means striking a balance between doing good and doing well. He finds out what green services customers are willing to pay for, and he looks for ways in his business to improve efficiencies and run a lean operation.

For instance, Heller can service two or three city crews from one truck. The truck drops off materials at various sites the night before those jobs, and crews show up on site the next day via public transportation. (This is only natural for the New York City natives.)  

“We take the philosophy that we’re saving the planet one property at a time,” Heller says, emphasizing that every effort counts. As Heller and his team continue to learn, they apply more green practices to the business. “We’re looking now at becoming a zero-waste organization, which is the goal of lean manufacturing,” he says.

Heller emphasizes that sustainability requires a commitment to learning – and doing. “We are always trying to figure out what is the next step and how we can do things better,” he says.
 

The author is a frequent contributor to Lawn & Landscape.