Check Out IndoTeak — Beautiful and Green Products from Indonesia
Attending the Opportunity Green conference in Los Angeles yesterday gave me the opportunity to meet some terrific people and get aquainted with some incredible business concepts. Check out IndoTeak, a company that turns out wonderful, attractive, super high-quality products made from reclaimed teak.
When many of the old large buildings in Indonesia are razed or renovated each year, IndoTeak employees are there to deconstruct them and salvage the old teak. Every bit – and I mean every splinter (there is literally zero waste) — is reprocessed with eco-friendly glue into one of dozens of different types of products. The very top quality goes into high-end furniture, but the vast majority into any of different types of beautiful flooring. Even little bits of wood wind up in the flooring’s lower layers.
Now of course anyone could do something like this with a cost structure from hell, and wind up selling the flooring at some ridiculously exorbitant price. But most of this stuff is $9 – $10 a square foot! IndoTeak employs 500 semi-skilled people, and pays them three times what they have been making if they were working in the fields. Good things all around.
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