Richlite now green, growing
DAN VOELPEL; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Descendants of the late Richlite Co. founder George Baum don’t know for sure how their Tacoma company started soaking paper in resin, stacking it 200 sheets high and compressing it into boards during the late 1950s.
“The way I heard it,” said vice president of operations Shawn O’Day, “a scientist, inventor guy named Ed Rich came up with it in research and development. And my grandfather started making it.
“I’m not sure, but there might have been some dispute over whether Ed Rich felt he got compensated fairly for inventing it.”
However it happened, Baum eventually stopped making his main product, plywood, and switched exclusively to the compressed paperboards in the 1960s. The Boeing Co. liked Richlite’s resiliency for toolmaking and carving into replica aircraft nose cones for wind tunnel tests.
And the Tideflats company has grown steadily in the same spot ever since.
Until December.
Like many companies in the building supply industry, “we got word in November from some of our customers that some issues were coming,” said Don Atkinson, vice president of sales and marketing. “Then December came and the Earth stopped on its axis.”
For the first time in Richlite’s history, company owners had to lay off workers. Fourteen of the company’s 25 lost their jobs.
“I’d never been through it before, and it killed me,” O’Day said.
Then something unexpected started happening in January. Orders for Richlite’s panels suddenly started growing – so much so that the company hit a sales record in April. And hired back all its laid off workers with their previous wages, health benefits and 401(k) contributions restored.
How did Richlite do it?
“Let’s just say our green initiative is working,” Atkinson said.
Despite the beginning of a painful recession last year, more consumers purchased green products in 2008 than in any previous year, according to a survey report issued in January by Boston Consulting Group.
That consumer demand – combined with government green policy initiatives – has fueled growth in the green building supply chain.
Two of Richlite’s products use 100 percent recycled paper. And the company opened a second production line that funnels heat from burning and capturing of resin emissions back into its paper dryer. The move cut heating costs by 80 percent.
The building industry has noticed. For example, Vulcan Real Estate, the company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, used Richlite’s green panels for the faade of its Alley24 retail and residential building in Seattle’s South Lake Union District. The building earned a LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
“It feels weird for us as a company to call ourselves green,” Atkinson confided. “It’s such a loose term now. It’s getting thrown around so much that people have lost a sense of what that means. … That’s not a bad thing, but there’s so many different descriptors of it and what it means. But for us, being in the green market has certainly helped.”
The green marketplace should only get better.
“Winning the hearts (and wallets) of green consumers is a wise move for producers and retailers,” according to the Boston Consulting Group’s report, “Capturing the Green Advantage for Consumer Companies.”
“But going green is not merely a tactic for a single product or a discrete process,” according to the report. “Rather companies should strategically employ what we call the four Ps of green advantage: green planning, which incorporates green targets and resources into corporate strategy; green processes, which allow companies to practice what they preach; green product offerings; and green promotion and messages.”
Richlite does all that. It tracks its carbon footprint – a measure of the impact its processes have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced.
Elaine Ott, Richlite’s general manager, chaired Tacoma’s Green Ribbon Climate Action Task Force.
“People get lost after 30 seconds when I start talking about our company’s sustainability,” Atkinson said. “But at least we’re going in the right direction by going green.”
I’m sure those rehired employees would thankfully agree.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com">
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
Richlite Co.
Founded: 1943 as Rainier Plywood
Ownership: Privately held by descendents of founder George Baum
Location: 624 E. 15th St., Tacoma
Employees: 25
2008 sales: Record $10 million
Product lines: residential countertops; skateboard ramps used by 90 percent of the professional and municipal market; backer boards for fiberglass boats; kitchen cutting boards marketed under the Epicurean brand; commercial food preparation surfaces; machinable raw materials for miscellaneous industrial markets
