Green Eyewear Optical

Business through a sustainable lens

The thick countertop at Green Eyewear has the unmistakable luster of old wood, but customers who routinely comment on it might be surprised by its origin.

The planks come from a Hamilton factory that supplied munitions for the Canadian Army in both world wars. It was also home to Studebaker Canada’s assembly plant.

At some point during an expansion years ago, old-school industrial shipping crates were broken down and the inch-and-a-half thick, 12-inch wide boards were repurposed as flooring, explains Shane Palmer, co-owner with Amanda Palmer of the eyewear store at Hunter and Aylmer streets.

The last Studebaker made in Canada rolled out of the plant in 1966 but the aging factory building survived. Two years ago it was was torn down and a Grimsby demolition company ended up with the flooring.

Rob Bianco, a cabinet and furniture maker in Warsaw, acquired the wood. At the same time the Palmers were moving Green Eyewear from George St. to its current location. Bianco supplied them with some of that planking to fashion the countertop that became a focal point of the store.

The re-use triple play – packing crates to flooring to countertop – reflects the Palmers’ low-environmental-impact approach to everything about the business. The rest of the counter is barn board that was used as shelving in their former George St. store, barn board that Palmer bought from a farm in Keene a decade ago.

“I got a really good deal on it because a lot of it was rotten but the lady made me take it all,” he recalls. “She told me I could go back to the big city with nothing. I told her I was from Peterborough.”

Other sections of what had been barn board shelving were cut down and hung vertically on the new store walls. Instead of sitting on shelves, glasses are suspended on metal rods down the middle of the boards.

“We just try to re-use stuff, you know like old chairs . . . as much as we can.”

Two vintage red 1950s chairs in the store were made by Nightingale Corp. in Toronto, still a major Canadian furniture manufacturer.

But their main “green” focus is the products they sell. One supplier, Tipton Eyeworks, provides a line known as Vinylize Eyewear. The frames are made of recycled LP vinyl records and all the metal in them is also recycled. Another style of frames is fashioned from repurposed camera film. Film is made with cellulose acetate and has a base of plant fibres, not petroleum.

The Palmers have also made a commitment to local production. Many of their frames are designed by Paul Storace, founder of Alternative Eyewear and Plan B. Storace has lived in Millbrook for more than a decade and the edgy, internationally competitive eyewear company’s offices are in Ajax.

Storace hires his marketing expertise in Peterborough and subscribes to the “buy local” philosophy whenever possible, Palmer says, which helps Peterborough’s economy. His frames are not as environmentally friendly as the Vinylize line so Green Eyewear donates $2 to Peterborough GreenUP for every pair sold.

The Palmers met more than 20 years ago while both were at university in Ottawa. Ten years ago they decided to go into business for themselves and to do it in Peterborough, which they saw as a good place to raise a family.

In 2014 they moved the store from George St. to a new building developed by Ashburnham Realty. Part of the attraction was the building philosophy of the firm’s principals, Paul Bennett and Rob Fisher. “They probably build more environmentally focused than most people do for commercial buildings,” Palmer says.

The walls of the four-storey, mixed residential and commercial complex are constructed of foam blocks filled with poured concrete. The method, known as ICF, produces insulating factors in the R-19 range and makes the building nearly soundproof.

Now well-established commercially and settled into an environmentally friendly building, the Palmers’ vision of a unique “green” Eyewear business has come fully into focus.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, September 10, 2016.