Pennsylvania Companies Making A Difference

Hello and welcome to the first article of our new series, Sustainable Biz Spotlight! 

Sustainable businesses are some of the key drivers fighting climate change. They’re companies — generally small, local businesses — that leverage cutting-edge innovations to help out the environment. Whether they create clothes from recycled material or connect local job seekers to sustainable work, they’re all mission-driven, and their mission is to keep Earth clean. We think that’s pretty cool! 

We’re giving these local businesses in Pennsylvania a shoutout to kick things off. Keep doing what you’re doing!

These small Pennsylvania businesses are making a big difference:

• evolveEA, a multidisciplinary architecture firm that builds sustainable systems and solutions with design. evolveEA reimagines systems to connect people with more water and green space, and uses frameworks to improve the sustainability of existing buildings.

• WindStax®, based in Pittsburgh. They make the largest vertical wind turbines in the US!

• United By Blue. It’s an ethical clothing and coffee company and one of the local stores in Philadelphia. (There’s also a University City location!) They remove one pound of trash for every product sold. Per the website: “We design made-to-last products on a slow fashion timeline that are produced from sustainably-sourced, low impact materials and in factories that hold some of the highest certifications in social and environmental health.”

• Circle Compost. Another local store in Philadelphia, Circle is a woman-owned company born from a desire to prevent food scraps, leaves, and other organic discards from being landfilled. They provide people with a simple, localized alternative to throwing these organic materials away, doing food scrap pickups from Philly residents by bicycle trailer to avoid burning fossil fuels.

• Waste Oil Recyclers will recycle your used cooking oil to convert to biofuel. We highly recommend checking out this video about their business and the oil recycling process.

• You usually wouldn’t peg a web development firm as a sustainable business, but YIKES is, and it’s also a B corp. The YIKES office is located in a LEED Platinum certified building and is powered by 100% renewable electricity. YIKES recycles and composts office waste and prints promotional materials on recycled paper with soy ink.

• eCO2Dye, which strives to take the water out of the textile dyeing process.

• Windsor Barrel Works, which produces trash and recycling bins from post-consumer, recycled content.

• Revolution Recovery is a full-service hauling and recycling company for construction, industrial, bulk and specialty materials. They process and recycle a wide range of materials from residential and commercial projects to divert from landfills.