CRRA2019

CEO

Nicole Tai is CEO of GreenLynx, a reclaimed building materials company based in Santa Rosa, CA. Nicole began working on building materials reuse in 1998, when reclaiming materials on jobs of her family’s commercial tenant improvement company. She has managed over 75 deconstruction and reuse logistics projects around the Bay Area and New York, totalling over 1.3 million residential, commercial and institutional square feet. Nicole’s concentration at GreenLynx includes increasing the market for reclaimed materials, promoting deconstruction and reuse, management, training, client development, and sustainability consulting. Nicole coordinates the Bay Area Deconstruction Workgroup and Chairs the Reuse Alliance Board.

Nicole will talk about her family business GreenLynx whose team has over 35 years of combined experience in the residential and commercial construction and deconstruction business. GreenLynx deconstructs Bay Area homes and salvages everything from fixtures, appliances, mechanical systems, finishes and lumber. GreenLynx also operates its own wood workshop to make custom furniture from reclaimed materials.  Materials they salvage currently have a readily available market, and Nicole will discuss how that market may grow and morph with upcoming deconstruction ordinances. Nicole will provide an overview of her work with the Bay Area Deconstruction Workgroup and report on initial data from the Reuse Alliance Deconstruction & Reuse Facility Survey.

Founder/CEO

Steffen Kuehr is Founder and CEO of Santa Rosa based TekTailor, Inc., a Benefit Corporation and certified Green Business dedicated to creating sustainable textile and apparel manufacturing jobs in Sonoma County. Under the consumer brand "Sonoma-USA" TekTailor partners with local businesses to help them identify valuable and reusable materials in their waste stream - like banners, billboards, used fire hose, overstock and scrap fabric etc. and diverts those materials from the landfill to their sewing facility, where they upcyle them into unique and meaningful new products.

Steffen will talk about his experience as contract cutting and sewing manufacturer and his efforts to make the local textile industry more sustainable while finding creative ways to deal with fabric and leather scrap, overstock fabrics as well as other materials that traditionally end up in the landfill - despite the fact that they still have a lot of life left, won't degrade for thousands of years and deserve to be reused or upcycled. Steffen will show concrete examples of partnerships with local businesses who he helped become more sustainable by rethinking their waste and waste stream and keeping thousands of pounds of materials out of local landfills while turning those materials into one-of-a-kind new products.