Vol. XVI No. 4
July / August 2022
Serving Soil, Mulch, Compost & Wood Pellet Producers www.SoilandMulchProducerNews.com
NEWS
Green Vision Materials: A Model For Success in the Mulch & Soil Business By Keith Barker
B
eau 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 was looking for avenues to manage our wood waste, leaves and other green waste and I ran into somebody that rented a horizontal grinder, at a time when they were only just becoming popular in the industry,” Gibney explains. “We processed our own material, and we learned quick that because of the cost of renting the machine and the limited volume we had, it was not profitable.” Gibney started networking with other landscapers, who began bringing them their green waste. Once they got material volumes up, they purchased a well-used tub grinder. “That’s kind of what put us on the map,” he says. “When we started Green Vision Materials in 2000, we had one facility and we were pushing maybe 15,000 yards of product annually. We were the only ones in our area grinding material and what we found was that the landscapers that were dumping debris with us were also now interested in purchasing mulch products. It became a great revolving door.”
Today, GVM’s main location is a Class-4 facility [green waste only] which sits on five-acres and includes a 7,200 square foot building. They have two other locations. One is a Class-3 bulk facility in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where GVM creates soils, blends, and compost, including animal manure compost. Their third facility is their packaging operation, another Class-4 facility, located in Wickliffe, Ohio, where colored mulches are produced, packaged and distributed. Main sources of incoming materials include municipal organics, via contracts with nearby cities and townships, and from local landscapers and homeowners. By far, their largest volume of incoming material is wood waste. “We get a lot of tree waste, from tree removals and pruning work,” Gibney explains. “Second to that would be leaf collection. Most of the municipalities near us offer curbside leaf collection in the fall and we get upwards of 75,000 cubic yards of leaves annually.” GVM’s primary customer base has always been local, with customers in the Cleveland and Northeast Ohio area, mostly within about one hundred miles, with bulk products generally being sold to customers within about a 25-mile radius. He says overall, their retail big box store business is their largest market, with local landscapers being the second, and then residential retail. Between the year 2000 to the year 2010, Green Vision Materials built their bulk mulch business significantly, selling just two products to local
landscapers, garden centers and homeowners – a double-ground and a triple-ground mulch. Between 2008 and 2010, GVM also started to get into soil products. “The big jump for us was in about 2010 when we had an opportunity to buy a packaging plant, and we got into the mulch and soil products packaging business,” Gibney says. “Our packaging plant in Wickliffe, Ohio is a fully automated line, which has now been operating for over a decade, and on average, outputs about 1.8 million bags of product yearly.” Since 2010, their mulch products business, all inclusive, went from about 15,000 yards to about 200,000 yards per year and is continuing to grow. He says a key factor in this growth has been their strategy of working with companies that bid on and ultimately secure contracts with big box stores. “We positioned ourselves as a copackager where we produce the product, which then goes into bags branded for companies and sold big box stores.” Today, they also produce a wide range of products including planting mix, bio-retention and basin mixes, as well as various composts, including animal manure and pure leaf humus mixes. “We’ll do blends of any of those products. We have customers that will, for one reason or another need a specific blend of materials, so we will custom blend those for them.” Gibney continues, “We’re seeing very good Continued on page 3