The following piece was originally sourced from the article “Greening Brownfields,” published on Kellogg’s News & Events page.
Fresh Coast Capital, a team of students from The Kellogg School of Management’s Part-Time Program, won the Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge thanks to their plan to turn depressed industrial sites in the former steel town of Gary, Indiana into profitable and environmentally sustainable tree farms.
The team’s plan is to plant farms of hybrid poplars on currently vacant brownfields— former industrial sites that are often contaminated with low concentrations of waste or pollution. The poplars not only help remove certain contaminants from the soil but also offer a profitable product to lumber yards and biomass facilities.
Nicole Chavas ’15, Laura Brenner Kimes ’15, Nathen Holub ’14 and April Mendez ’16 came together in Professor David Chen’s course on impact investing, where Chavas offered brownfields as a social issue the group could tackle. The decision to enter the Morgan Stanley contest came after they realized they were onto a solution.
“In order to have the most impact and still make a profit, that was a really, really compelling model,” Kimes said. “It allowed a 10, 20, 30-year solution for places like the city of Gary, which gives them something to do while they’re rebuilding the community.”
As part-time students, members of the team worked full-time jobs and held responsibilities outside of Kellogg. Less free time means that the extensive research and work the challenge required (including more than 30 interviews with industry experts) had to be done whenever and wherever it could be fit in.
“I think the answer is a lot of lunch meetings about biomass,” Kimes said.