20 YEARS
Kim Caron
Executive Mat Service Gets a Green Thumbs Up
By Rennay Craats with Photos by Michael Cudjoe Photography Ltd.
W
hen Kim Caron started Executive Mat Service in 1996, he was a one-man proprietorship offering a mat rental service to local businesses. Today the business is much more than just mats. It has grown to around 100 employees across branches in Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton and Regina, is one of the largest independent mat companies in North America, and provides high-quality customizable mats and consumable products. On top of that, Caron is leading the charge toward zero waste for himself and his clients through his Green Thumb Initiative. From early on, Caron was an innovator with an environmental consciousness. When a client asked him to wash their cloth towels soiled with printers’ inks and hazardous solvents, Caron discovered it was illegal to send the used water into the sewer system. “There was an opportunity there,” says Caron, founder and president of Executive Mat. “I decided to adopt some technology that would extract the hazardous solvents before I washed the towels.” He created a system to separate the hazardous solvents from the towels, which left him with cloths ready for standard laundering and barrels of hydrocarbon.
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