By P.J. Heller Nine decades after “Grandpa Sol” started his business by repurposing wood waste materials, his legacy lives on. “We’re doing the same thing 90 years later that grandpa did in the ’30s,” says his grandson, Rusty Rexius. Grandpa Sol’s business – Rexius Fuel Service – initially involved going to Oregon sawmills to collect sawdust, which would normally be …
By Dr. Brian E. Jackson Once upon a time growers could call their growing media supplier(s) and have product ordered, shipped, and delivered within days. It is no mystery to anyone today that “those days” are gone, at least for the foreseeable future. The global growing media industry, like so many others in horticulture, has experienced unprecedented product demand which …
By P.J. Heller Jim Weber has come a long way since he was a 19-year-old running a lawn service business out of the garage at his parents’ home. Today, some 38 years later, Weber is owner and president of Ohio Mulch, one of the largest mulch manufacturing companies in Ohio. The company, headquartered on a 56-acre site in Columbus, has …
By Keith Barker Beau Gibney, CEO/COO at Green Vision Materials (GVM) based out of Newbury, Ohio, near Cleveland, began in the mulch and soil products business after starting his own landscaping company right out of high school, in the early nineties. Through that decade, he aggressively grew his business and found he was generating a huge amount of green waste.“I …
By Robert L. LaGasseExecutive Director Mulch & Soil Council “Do you want your children to grow up to be truck drivers?” That was the question posed by Philip Byrd, then president of the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and Bulldog Trucking, when he spoke to members of the Mulch & Soil Council about the issue of a looming truck driver shortage. …
By P.J. Heller A new $8 million composting facility — designed to speed up the composting process by as much as 50 percent or more from its two existing sites — is being planned by Orange County Waste & Recycling to help meet California’s mandate to divert organic waste from landfills in order to reduce greenhouse gases. When completed, expected …
By P.J. Heller Wildfires. Earthquakes. Famine. Drought. As if life isn’t complicated enough with those and other challenges, along comes the latest concern: jumping worms. Jumping worms? Although the wriggly creatures have been around for decades in the United States, researchers are paying renewed attention to jumping worms (Amynthas spp.) as their population has exploded and spread and the effects …
