Syosset company gives back for greener future
Ralph Bianculli and his son Ralph Bianculli Jr. sit with the green products at their Syosset-based Paradigm Group. (April 15, 2011) Credit: Uli Seit
To celebrate Earth Day this Friday, Syosset-based Paradigm Group will introduce an e-commerce page -- emerald
brand.com -- and donate 10 percent of the profits for the whole week, derived from that site, to the nonprofit organization Conservatree.
Ralph Bianculli Sr., chief executive of the company he founded in 1998, said he does not know how much that might amount to, but knows that it must be done. Bianculli, 51, is a businessman, not a scientist (although he can sound like one) and he was only 10 when Earth Day was first started in 1970. He has another reason altogether for being a green advocate.
His son John Paul Bianculli, 16, suffers severe seizures, the result, Bianculli suspects, of by-products in a hepatitis B shot that John Paul got when he was 3 months old.
"That gave me an interest in natural substances," Bianculli said. He started a company in Queens that was bought by Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific, one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of tissue. Bianculli, working in product-development at Georgia-Pacific, decided to leave and start his own company 13 years ago. Paradigm Group's Emerald Brand products -- tissue paper, cups, plates, facial tissue and napkins -- are all made with environmentally friendly processes.
About 10 percent of Paradigm Group's paper products are made from bagasse, the fibrous matter that remains after sugarcanes in China and Taiwan are crushed to extract their juice. Ten percent of the company's products are made from cornstarch, and the majority are made from recycled paper. Paradigm has about 35 employees. Bianculli declines to discuss the company's annual revenues.
Emerald Group paper products are in all 300 Duane Reade drugstores in the United States, under the Apartment Five label. But the major thrust to Bianculli and his 22-year-old son, Ralph Bianculli Jr., the company's director of sales, is keeping green going.
"Every person in this country uses up six trees a year," Bianculli Sr. said. "This works," he said of his environmentally friendly products. "Why would you ever want to cut down another tree?"
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