It’s Easy Being Green in Blue Ridge
Published Mar 23, 2009
Highland Craftsmen Inc. in Spruce Pine uses tree bark previously discarded as logging waste to make a line of ecologically friendly shingle products, says co-founder Chris McCurry.
Green is growing along the Blue Ridge Mountains. Just ask Matt Siegel, director of the Western North Carolina Green Building Council.
It took more than three years for the council to certify its first 100 “green” homes under North Carolina’s HealthyBuilt Homes program. It took just 10 months for the total to cross 200.
“There’s more and more interest in green building every day throughout the region,” Siegel says.
The region’s status as an alternative-energy hub was confirmed with the November 2008 announcement that Vanir Energy LLC had acquired Appalachian Solar Energy and made its headquarters in Fletcher.
Vanir, a subsidiary of Vanir Group of Cos., develops and installs solar thermal systems. Its first project will be a solar thermal installation at Fletcher Business Park, a 900,000-square-foot facility where the company is headquartered, part of $14 million in solar installations the company plans in North Carolina.
Vanir Energy will own and operate the systems it installs, allowing customers to convert without capital expenditures.
Western North Carolina’s growing cluster of green companies reflects the type of people attracted to the region, says Erika Schneider, outreach coordinator for Sundance Power Systems Inc. in Asheville, which offers customers solar, hydro and wind-energy systems. “The mountains have always drawn people who feel a deep respect for the environment,” she says.
The region is also home to FLS Energy in Black Mountain, which provided solar panels for the first Platinum LEED-certified hotel in the United States, the Proximity in Greensboro.
One of the region’s most-established green companies has achieved a national following by going back to the way things used to be.
Highland Craftsmen Inc. has revived an age-old North Carolina technique of using tree bark to produce shingles – an approach that had fallen from memory since the first half of the 20th century.
Inspired by old buildings still clad with the timber shingle roofs, builder Marty McCurry put his engineering smarts to use to revive the craft and bring it to modern building codes.
Highland’s Bark House shingles use bark from yellow poplars that was previously thrown away as logging waste, says Chris McCurry, who is Marty’s wife and company co-founder.
The result created a new local industry – the poplar bark is sometimes now worth more than the tree’s lumber – that uses the bark’s natural resilience to the elements.
The shingles’ handsome aesthetics and green appeal have made them a favorite of tastemakers across the country, including at New York’s Parsons School of Design, which used the bark shingles on its Greenwich Village campus.
The bark can only be procured about four months of the year, Chris McCurry says, meaning the company’s work force swings from about 80 in the summer to 20 in the winter.
“Its simplicity is its genius,” Chris McCurry says. “No paint, no stains, no sealers ever. It lasts up to 80 years.”
Story by Sam Scott
Photo by Ian Curcio
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