Investing an initial $10m into the first plantations proved the commitment, the mission and the vision. Now, each plantation has a school, a clinic and access to clean water. As a way around this, they coloured their thumbs with blue ink from a Bic pen and took thumbprints until the employees had learnt to write.
HOSTAL ECOPLANETA HOW TO
Wiseman recalls how most of these workers, when it came to their first payday, didn’t know how to write their name. People say, ‘I can only make 5% because I’m saving the world’, but we say they’re just bad executers and not working hard enough.”ĮcoPlanet recruited a native workforce. “ We also don’t believe that you have to give up return to ‘do good’. Don’t get me wrong – we’re a capitalist company, we’re about profit. “ So to do that, we knew that we had to set certain benchmarks from an environmental and social perspective. Most bamboo is cultivated and harvested by thousands of smallholders, with little quality control or regulation on standards.
“ The problem was no one had ever done this commercially or on a large scale”, he explains on the seventh floor of London’s InterContinental Hotel. Tropical clumping bamboos tend to mass flower, and seed only every 60-100 years, so it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he couldn’t afford to overlook. This is true for many species, but with a clumping bamboo the 30-40 culms (or poles) stay contained within a 15 sq metre area – the size of a reasonable hotel room.Īnd the bamboo gods were clearly on Wiseman’s side, with the native Nicaraguan bamboo species, guadua aculeata, one of the best timber bamboo species in the world, flowering at the exact same time he was looking to enter the market. The misconception, Wiseman says, is that all bamboo is invasive and runs wild, out of control. Wiseman knew this location also provided attractive business advantages because it was very close to the US market, which not only reduced his carbon footprint but gave him a significant logistical and financial advantage over Asia-based industries.īamboo – a grass whose fibre has similar characteristics and uses to timber – could and should be planted on degraded land, so there is no conflict with land needed to produce food it regenerates biodiversity and counteracts poverty through long-term job creation it captures more carbon than any tree it helps improve the water table it prevents flooding and it provides a sustainable alternative fibre, mitigating climate change through reducing deforestation.ĮcoPlanet only grows bamboo that is native to and/or approved in the country it is operating in – and more specifically, it only grows specific tropical clumping bamboos. It is also home to vast swathes of degraded land caused by of deforestation. It instantly became his ‘timber’ of choice.Īfter assessing the potential to start commercial bamboo plantations in a number of countries, EcoPlanet Bamboo settled on Central America – in particular, Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the western hemisphere with over 50% of the population living on less than $2 a day, and where Wiseman had a long history of working. It didn’t take long for him to realise that bamboo represented an opportunity to not only make money, but create positive social and environmental impact.
Meanwhile, by the time he was 40, he had joined the likes of Walt Disney, Orson Welles and four US presidents in being named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Americans, receiving the TOYA award in 2006.ĮcoPlanet was born in 2010 during a visit to look at an investment in a bamboo project in Thailand, where the economics of bamboo showed clear evidence of its ability – if executed correctly – to be a true “ triple bottom line” opportunity. To date, it has helped fund over 500 homes across 45 countries. The latter continues to help orphaned and abandoned children in developing world communities, primarily through funding infrastructure costs of homes in connection with the local community or church.
He sold his stake in 1992, leaving California for the midwest to start his next venture.Īt 27, Wiseman founded and ran for 14 years the private equity-based financial services firm InvestLinc Group, as well as co-founding a foundation called World Orphans. In the space of just over six years, he had turned it into a $120m company, with manufacturing in 19 countries.
It really wasn’t about creating a solution to deforestation of natural forest for me it was about giving these poor people a job so their kids can have food in the table and go to school.”Īn entrepreneur from an early age, at 17-year-old Wiseman left his humble home in the south-east US (“ where Top Gear can’t go anymore”, he laughs, “ those are my people”) and three years later he co-founded his own global clothing company. I wanted to create jobs so they had hope. “ When we started EcoPlanet Bamboo, I didn’t say I wanted to go save the trees I wanted to go save the people.
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