Who and What is Greenish?

Sit back and relax, we’ve got a story to tell you about serendipity.

Adam and Sean are two old friends who met at the University of Ottawa back in the year 2000, when the future was bright and Sean thought Adam was a British exchange student. Greenish was conceived 19 years later, while Sean was working a mundane government job forming waste management policy – a job ill-suited to his ‘not-shy’ personality - and Adam approached Sean about waste reduction because he was genuinely interested in it.

The timing was serendipitous - Adam was looking to leave his all-consuming job to create his own entrepreneurial opportunities, and Sean was about to move into the world of stay-at-home parenting, and was seeking a new opportunity that would offer him the flexibility to pay attention to his children, which is apparently a good thing to do.

You can learn more about Sean and Adam below. But we totally get it if you have something better to do.

The goal that we share, above everything else, is to do something positive with Greenish. Of course, we’re in business, and mortgages don’t pay themselves, so, yeah, we want to earn an income, but we want to do something that will both help people and make a bit of a difference in the world at the same time. (Cue the eye rolls - we get it - but this is a rare serious moment).

Greenish Sustainability, Inc. (our fancy legal name) focuses on helping our customers achieve their waste reduction and sustainability goals – we believe waste is waste, regardless of what bin you put it in, and we want to encourage reusing as much as possible. With a realistic and approachable one-step-at-a-time mindset, we believe we can help anyone manage waste more sustainably.

Breaking news: we’re not perfect.

Shocking, we know… but we figured it would be best to be honest here. We both still drive gas cars. We live in houses that are firmly planted on grid. We sometimes recycle rather than reusing. We don’t do everything fully sustainably. But, we’re taking steps in a more sustainable direction as much as we can, and we’re getting better every day. But it’ll be in stages just like everyone else.

More about us: we’re not going to preach at you, and we’re not going to tell you that you’re doing something wrong - we’re not that type. We want to be approachable for everyone, including both the converted and the skeptics. Besides, we’ve got learning to do, too. We’re all in this together, and if we can all make a few changes, we’ll make this a way more sustainable place to live. Since, like, we don’t have anywhere else, this is probably a good idea.

We’re based in Gravenhurst, Muskoka (Adam), and Toronto (Sean), so we can offer the best of both worlds, but we’re available to work with you, wherever you are.

Thanks for visiting us… we’re excited to go green…ish… with you, one step at a time.

Sean 101

Sean was born and raised in the Ottawa Valley, enduring countless hours in the family woodlot listening to stories of the bad old days when there was no goddamn plastic garbage...as his father sipped coffee from a 500ml peanut butter jar that served as a questionable thermos and a visceral reminder of the challenge of reconciling modern capitalism with the ethos of zero waste needed for true sustainability. 

Sean began his career in waste management in 2006 with the Toronto Catholic District School Board, where he helped design waste reduction programming for facilities staff, teaching staff, and students. Sean has also worked for a number of regional and municipal governments implementing, monitoring and continuously improving waste reduction programs.

In recent years, Sean has acted as a strong advocate for a waste reduction focus in municipal and provincial waste policies. Sean has a unique lens on food waste reduction, informed by his broad experience as a full season organic farming intern as well as from leading a variety of food waste characterization studies. Sean is also an active and committed volunteer currently serving as a director for two local charities and on his local school council. 

Sean believes in working toward a system that holds producers of waste responsible for managing the waste they introduce to our communities. While he will continue to advocate for improvements to regulation and government policies to move us towards zero waste, he believes in the huge potential for waste reduction by businesses, community groups, and individuals who try their best every day to make good environmental choices.

Sean resides with his family in Toronto and is thrilled to be the “actual expert” and “decidedly more professional one” on the Greenish team.

Adam 101

Like many people, Adam was born. Years later, he realized that his childhood dream of being a professional athlete was completely unrealistic due to a number of important factors, including a complete and utter lack of talent at virtually any athletic endeavour.

Thus, he set about on a quest to find a career path that would serve as a silver medal to his unfulfilled athletic dreams, a quest that he remains on to this day. Adam graduated from the University of Ottawa with an Honours degree in History, which is perfect, because there are constantly history factories opening up looking for people with the skill set that a history degree provides.

In his last year at Ottawa U, however, he took a job as the Equipment Manager for the school's varsity hockey program, which led to a fortunate bounce to a ten-year career working for Hockey Canada in Calgary. In that role, he managed men's national teams at various tournaments and events across Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Despite the awesome experiences that Hockey Canada offered, the lure back to Ontario was strong, and Adam moved back in 2016. He began working for beer, eventually becoming the Sales Manager for the Sawdust City Brewing Company. While the craft beer industry is a great one, full of wonderful humans, Adam is too… headstrong (is that the right word? Probably lots to choose from here…) to work for someone else forever, and he longed to be his own boss. This is what brings us to Greenish.

Sustainability and Waste Management are new fields for Adam, but he thinks he can figure it out, since he’s really excited about it, it’s important, and nobody is born knowing this stuff anyway. He looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid that grew up and got old, lives in Gravenhurst, is a proud Lumber King, has several projects on the go, loves his daughter Mattie Lane more than anything, and believes strongly in career paths that don’t make any sense at all.