LANDIS CONSTRUCTION CORPORATION

Bio

Russ Clark's journey to lessen people's impact on the planet began at the age of six when he would fill his red wagon with litter from the neighborhood and haul it home. Today he is helping people in the DC Metro area to green up their homes by becoming part of the Landis Construction Corporation. He is working to ramp up their green building program and will be managing their new Green Home Service Division. Here is a summary of the path Russ followed in-between then and now...

Russ' involvement in design and construction started in the early 1980's as part-time work on weekends and during summer and winter breaks when in high school and college. He has renovated, restored or worked on many homes since then, but 1995 saw the convergence of his commitment to environmental protection and his interest in home renovation and restoration with the advent of the green building movement.

He completed two full-scale renovations on his own homes. The latter effort involved rebuilding the whole house from the inside out while preserving historical features and creating one of the region's first houses to become a model of energy and resource efficiency.

By 1995, Russ co-founded the local non-profit, GreenHOME (www.greenhome.org) which was the first organization in the DC area to bring together people interested in building "green". GreenHOME volunteers designed and built two low-income green homes to showcase the potential of building green affordably. The organization then began focusing on helping other organizations incorporate green designs and materials into their building programs-and this collaborative effort continues to this day. The organization recently played a pivotal role in developing the DC green building legislation that was passed in 2006.

And that's not all! A parallel track kept Russ occupied for over ten years trying to start up a salvaged and surplus building material retail warehouse that would support the development of a building deconstruction industry and divert usable building materials from the landfill back to construction usage. It was only after the fourteenth attempt that his efforts paid off when an alliance with Sustainable Community Initiatives led to the development and launch of Community Forklift (www.communityforklift.com). (Please donate and buy salvaged, surplus and new/green building materials from this local resource!)

Among other professional environmental endeavors in the private sector and NGO world, Russ spent over seven years at the US EPA where he co-designed and helped launch the government's Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program (www.epa.gov/epp). This project took Russ deeply into Greening of the Government activities at the request of the White House's Federal Environmental Executive and equally deep into the life-cycles of many of the products commonly used by federal agencies such as cleaning products, office supplies, and electronics.

Prior to moving to DC, Russ co-designed and implemented the University of Vermont's first full-scale recycling and co-composting program while pursuing a degree in environmental economics (www.uvm.edu/~recycle). The recycling and composting program remains a national model to this day.