March 4, 2018 – On the Road Again
This week, The Mike Nowak Show with Peggy Malecki finds itself at the Greater Chicago Home + Remodeling Show sponsored by Life Storage. on its final day at the Schaumburg Convention Center, 1551 Thoreau Dr. N, Adventure Hall, Schaumburg, IL 60173. Usually, I bring what I call my “radio station in a box” to an event that we’re covering. However, I’m pleased to say that this morning the engineering and set up is being done by the engineering crew at 1590 WCGO, which lets me off the hook. So take it away, Dennis “Sonar” Greene and Kevin Burgess!
There are a lot of guests on today’s show, so let’s do a rundown, in chronological order.
– We start with show organizer Jessica Boweak, who says that the Greater Chicago Home + Remodeling Show wants you to “explore remodeling, kitchen & baths, basements, painting, flooring, gutters, roofing, windows, doors” and more. There are workshops and experts for home projects, including “helpful tips, innovative products and fantastic deals in remodeling, home improvement, design and spring outdoor projects.” She’ll give us an overview of the day’s activities.
– Next up is Jim Slama, a man who runs his own annual event, the Good Food EXPO. Actually, it used to be called the Good Food Festival & Conference, but it underwent a bit of rebranding for 2018. The Good Food EXPO is presented under the auspices of Family Farmed, an organization that Slama founded just after the turn of the century. They self-describe themselves as
a non-profit organization committed to expanding the production, marketing and distribution of locally grown and responsibly produced food, in order to enhance the social, economic, and environmental health of our communities.
In 2004, Slama hit upon the idea of a one-day Local Organic Trade Show. Over the years, that show, along with the good food movement, has grown exponentially, into “a nationally significant event that connects industry farm and food produces with trade buyers, wholesalers, retailers, investors and introduces them to consumers.”
While there is a pre-conference farmer training session on Thursday, March 22, the bulk of the festivities are on Friday and Saturday, March 23 & 24. The Friday Good Food Trade Show: Production, Policy & Industry Exchange focuses on key business and policy issues affecting the Good Food market. Peggy and I will be there to stream live interviews on Facebook as we talk to the policy movers and shakers, including experts on regenerative agriculture and the winners of the Good Food Business of the Year and Beginning Farmer of the Year.
Saturday is the Good Food Festival, featuring the delightful chaos of the vendors at the Good Food Commons, in addition to seminars, workshops, chef demonstrations and more. And, again, you will find Peggy and me there, so stop by and say hello.
Early voting begins in earnest tomorrow, March 5, for the March 20th primary elections. While many folks are probably ready to say “uncle” because of the onslaught of commercials for the high profile races, there’s one that has had a surprising–and somewhat disappointing–lack of publicity. Briefly, Timothy Bradford, a commissioner for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, died suddenly on December 1, 2017.
His death came just at the deadline for filing paperwork for the March primary, which means that no candidate was able to qualify to be on the ballot. Thus, the primary ballot will say “No candidate.” But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be any candidates.
As Ted Slowick writes at the Daily Southtown,
Cook County Clerk David Orr’s office lists seven candidates running as write-ins to fill the Bradford vacancy on the MWRD board. Six are Democrats: Frank Avila, Karen Bond, Joe Cook, M. Cameron “Cam” Davis, Simon Gordon and Sharon Waller. Geoffrey Cubbage is a Green Party candidate.
Bradford’s death creates something unexpected for a plum post on the MWRD board: an actual contest.
Yes, but getting that plum post requires one of the candidates to get enough write-in votes to qualify for the general election in the fall. According to a post on SuburbanChicagoland.com,
the ballot line will allow winning write-in candidates from the primary to appear on the November general election ballot for the MWRD Board seat left vacant by the death of sitting Commissioner Timothy Bradford—but only if they meet the minimum number of write-ins mandated by Illinois election law.
That number, based on the number of signatures candidates would have had to submit in a normal filing, is 1,720 votes for Green Party write-in candidates and 8,075 votes for Democrat Party candidates. The Republican Party did not file a write-in candidate for the primary election.
Complicating the quest for the minimum number of votes, the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners has refused to count write-in votes for write-in candidates who did not register separately with their office, even though the Cook County Clerk’s office is the election authority that oversees the MWRD election, and with whom regular MWRD Board candidates file their nomination papers.
From what I’ve learned, the chances of anybody getting enough write-in votes is slim. What happens at that point? I don’t know. And considering that the MWRD plays an important role in monitoring water quality for the 883.5 square miles of Cook County, Illinois and, by extension, the surrounding region, it is a significant position that needs to be filled.
One of the candidates listed above has been racking up a number of endorsements, including from U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, MWRD Commissioner Debra Shore, MWRD Commissioner Josina Morita and more. In fact, it was Debra Shore, who has appeared on this program numerous times, who alerted me to the candidacy of Cam Davis. He was also recently endorsed by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Cam Davis was President & CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, where he started the Adopt-a-Beach® program with 10,000 volunteers around the region. This led to him serving as President Barack Obama’s “Great Lakes Czar” from 2009 to 2017. He has certainly been a champion of clean water for decades. And he joins us on today’s show to talk about the unusual election and his role in it.
– We start the second hour with a visit from Kenneth Gallt of Foliage Design Systems of Chicago, which is exhibiting at the Greater Home + Remodeling Show. Gallt started the business in 1984 and he is
a licensed Landscape Architect with a degree in Landscape Architecture and Horticulture from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York., and a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Before starting Foliage Design Systems, Gallt worked for 10 years as the chief landscape architect and construction manager of Church Landscape, building landscapes in Oak Brook and Schaumburg, Illinois, and for the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Gallt served the landscape industry for 16 years, becoming President of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association in 1989 and was honored by the Oak Brook Chamber of Commerce and Industry as “The Small Business Person of the Year.”
– What if I told you that cigarette butts could be recycled? How about CDs? Or old mattresses? Or the bane of many of our lives–VHS cassettes? You can start with this post to see what I’m talking about. That’s a link from the website for a company called TerraCycle.
I really don’t have time to go into the whole story at length but Terracycle started with a 19 year old named Tom Szaky, who, in 2001, was a student at Princeton. He became obsessed by the idea of eliminating food waste by creating vermicompost. For listeners to this show, that not exactly unusual. However, this story includes a million dollar investment that was turned down; TerraCycle Plant Food making its way into places like Home Depot and Walmart; the move to a headquarters that gets repainted with graffiti every few weeks; the expansion to repurposing drink pouches, yogurt cups and energy bar wrappers; upcycling plastic bags into tote bags; the company expanding to Brazil, Canada, the UK, Norway, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and television; diverting 2.5 billion pieces of waste from landfills and donating more $6 million donated to schools and charities; and, well, here we are today:
TerraCycle is the world’s leader in the collection and repurposing of complex waste streams, ranging from used cigarette butts to coffee capsules to ocean plastic to oral and beauty care products and packaging. The waste is collected through manufacturer-funded programs that are free to the public, as well as Zero Waste Boxes that are purchased by end users for recycling from homes, offices, factories and public spaces. The collected waste is converted into a variety of raw materials that are sold to manufacturers that produce new products. Each year, across 21 countries, TerraCycle collects and repurposes billions of pieces of waste, donating millions of dollars to schools and charities in the process.
Yow. And now, the company has acquired Chicago-based Air Cycle Corporation, a leader in universal waste recycling that provides solutions for mercury-containing fluorescent bulbs, battery, ballast and electronic waste disposal. And on the heels of that, the company just became qualified by the SEC for a $25 million Regulation A capital raise offering any category of investor the opportunity become a shareholder.
Amazing. Speaking of amazing, Tom Szaky himself joins us on the phone this morning to talk about how he isn’t just talking about saving the planet, he’s doing it, and how you can invest in that same mission.
Back in December, we welcomed Beth Vercolio-Osmund , who I had just discovered was throwing her hat in the ring for a seat in the Illinois 16th Congressional District. If her name sounds vaguely familiar to listeners of the show, it’s because her husband, Jody Osmund, was on the program just a few weeks ago to talk about the slow food movement.
He and Beth run Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm in Ottawa, Illinois and over the years I have interviewed them a number of times.
Since that show, I learned that she is one of four Democrats running in the Democratic primary. She has been included in several articles, in Chicago Tribune, the Windy City Times, and the News-Tribune.
It’s a pleasure to have her back this morning to review the progress of the campaign a little more than two weeks out from the Illinois primary.