Greg Herrigel

As a Brigham Young University (BYU) student living off campus in Provo, Ryan Smith went to recycle his trash, only to find no bin in sight. Digging deeper, he realized the problem was much bigger: most apartment complexes across the country offered no recycling options for their tenants.

Bob and Carmen Garver faced a problem familiar to many Maine business owners. As they prepared to move their coffee company into a larger building, they wanted to install solar panels, but they were not sure how the math would add up. Given Maine’s northern latitude, heavy snowfall, and short winter days, the couple worried an investment in solar energy might cost more than it returned, according to a U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit case study on the project. They did not guess.

Keith Clark worked at John Deere Dubuque Works, the heavy equipment plant north of town, before he started building clamps in his own garage around 1974. Roughly two decades later, he moved production into a building at the city’s North End, and Dubuque Clamp Works has operated there ever since. The clamps are the kind of thing most people never think about, yet every woodworker owns one. Wooden handscrews do work that no metal clamp can.