Earth Day Enterprising Ecologists

Green Creams

The Body Shop takes its creams and lotions from nature, but nature doesn't suffer. Anita Roddick, founder of the 14-year-old British cosmetic company, makes sure of that. She runs the manufacturing and retail firm (which has branches in 37 countries) as a paradigm of planet-friendly practices.

"The environmental movement has got to re-educate people," says Roddick, 47.

Body Shop's 300 products derive mainly from plants and are not tested on animals. They come in simple plastic bottles that can be taken back to any one of its 464 stores, most of them franchises, for a discount on the next purchase. The shops boast distinctive wood decoration, but endangered tropical hardwoods are banned. Store-window displays protest the slaughter of whales and the dumping of wastes in the North Sea, and leaflets urge customers to help save the ozone layer. Roddick insists that her stores use recycled paper for everything from stationery to toilet tissue.

She openly declares that following her social conscience comes before any responsibility to shareholders. But respecting the environment has proved no barrier to success. Last year Body Shop sales jumped nearly 60%, to $90 million, earning Roddick the title of Britain's Retailer of the Year.

Cash for Trash

A dilapidated garage in New York City's South Bronx would not be most people's idea of an office. But for Michael Schedler and his partners in Bronx 2000, a nonprofit development corporation, such an unlikely site became the first home eight years ago for a booming business: the R2B2 recycling plant.

"R2B2 started as a sexy way to get garbage off the streets," explains Schedler, 40, the plant's chief of operations. The trick was to pay people cash to bring in bottles, cans, newspapers and other trash. Soon, not only were the streets cleaner, but hundreds of the Bronx's disadvantaged residents had a steady source of income. Today R2B2 has 30 employees and buys about 35 tons of nearly 30 different recyclable materials daily. The plant bales, melts, grinds or otherwise processes the discarded items and then sells them to companies for turning into new products.

A New York State law requiring stores to pay refunds on returned bottles and cans has taken away some of R2B2's business, but the facility, which will earn . nearly $3 million in revenues this year, cannot begin to meet the demand for such materials as plastic and glass. Similar trash-taming plants have gone up in numerous cities, including Newark, Miami and Philadelphia.