Going Green: Mark Klaiman Talks Pet Care – Pet Camp

This is at Pet Camp! We’re an overnight and daycare facility for dogs and cats. Being green, to me, means showing to the world that you can be a good business person and be a good environmental steward.
And I’m convinced you can do both. Basically, all our panels come down through here. We’ve got 252 panels on our roof. This remains the largestly privately financed solar power facility in San Francisco. Those are our 20-foot diameter ceiling fans. They move 68,000 cubic feet per minute of air and use 58 watts of power, so less than a light bulb.
So these are our outdoor play areas. They’re all covered in field turf, which of course is filled in with what’s called Nike grind which is a combination of sand and recycled sneaker bottoms. Our dog poop actually gets turned into electricity. We take our dog poop and our more traditional green waste and it goes to a biomass facility.
And it gets turned into methane gas that then gets turned into electricity. We are the only place in San Francisco actually allowed to compost our dog poop. I think the fact that we’re green is rewarding to our clients. People get behind you. It’s interesting, it’s exciting, and it’s the thing to do.
And then at a personal level, I have four little kids. And being green to me means that I’m going to leave them an environment worthy of them, as opposed to one that I have destroyed.