Dan Esty’s former New Haven environmental consulting firm relaunched as a Washington D.C. company on Thursday. Esty departed a year ago to become commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection.
Former Esty Environmental Partners — now Viridis Strategy Group — says it will rely on Esty’s previous business model of helping corporations and other clients realize the business savings of promoting environmental sustainability at their facilities. Viridis’ other offices are in Boston, New York and Sydney, Australia.
Canadian angel lead investor John McCall MacBain, chairman of the European Climate Foundation, is backing the reorganized company. McCall MacBain’s other investments include a Liberian company generating biomass electricity; a U.S. tea company; and an African equity firm.
Esty’s office did not immediately return a phone call Thursday for comment.
Esty started the original environmental consulting group while he was working at Yale University in 2006, and partnered with and George Favaloro and Amy Longsworth to co-found the company.
Once Esty concluded his involvement with the company last year, Longsworth and Favaloro decided to carry on without him.
They also brought on other environmental business experts such as Steve Ramsey, former vice president for environment at Fairfield conglomerate General Electric; Andrew Winston, the co-author of Esty’s book Green to Gold about the business sense of sustainability; and David Lubin, co-founder of Massachusetts sustainability consultant Palladium Group. The company employs more than a dozen people.
While Viridis will stick with Esty’s framework, the firm relaunched with a set of packaged solutions aimed at helping companies’ sustainability managers meet their goals.
One of these includes its “breakthrough acceleration” solution, which speeds the sustainability innovation process. This product was deployed at Ohio cleaner product manufacturer Procter & Gamble to help the company achieve its renewable energy goals.
