Jeff Baker turned his company upside down to become sustainable and socially responsible. So why did he keep it a secret for so long?

Jeffrey Baker’s company does not look like a green business. To get to his Image 4 offices, you inch delicately past ditches dug for a mile down Candia Road, swerving away from jackhammers and excavation rigs doing interminable construction in this developing section of Manchester, N.H. From the outside, the company’s one-story brick building screams 1970s industrial not 21st century sustainability. Inside, a chaos of trade show exhibits greets you.

This is “sustainability central?” Perhaps.

Image 4 manufactures trade show exhibits and what Baker calls “branded environments” the banners, signs, displays, even the furniture that companies use to announce themselves to the world. Increasingly, Baker and his 15 employees have taken some innovative steps to make Image 4′s practices more eco-friendly, including using non-toxic inks on 100-percent recycled fabric, reclaimed metal, egg-based varnish, non-volatile paints and other green materials. Only recently, though, has Image 4 mentioned its environmentally progressive operations, spotlighting them on its Web site and in a series of eco-friendly direct mail postcards to customers.

Previously, though, Baker quietly went about transforming this traditional manufacturing company into an environmentally conscious thought leader; since his efforts started, the company has grown far beyond the 46-year-old Baker’s boldest imaginings. By 2009, Baker expects Image 4 to double its revenues while expanding its profit margins. That growth, Baker believes, is coming as a direct result of the 20-year-old company’s commitment to sustainability, a commitment Image 4 has worked hard to honor even while laboring in what may possibly be the most toxic and wasteful sector of the marketing industry.

He is, in some ways, a paradox. In an age when it seems that only two kinds of companies get serious press for being green mammoth businesses whose initiatives, however controversial, can make a big impact, and tiny, sexy startups that sell green products and are eco-friendly at birth Image 4 is among the vast number of businesses with 500 workers or fewer that are making serious green inroads. He has overcome the same daunting obstacles that discourage many of his peers from reducing their environmental footprint, including lack of time, a dearth of information and little money, as well as entrenched behavior on the part of employees, customers and suppliers.

Here’s how he did it.

Humble Beginnings

Baker started at the company as an employee. Then, in 1989, with a partner he scraped together enough cash to buy out the owner. At that point, the company was essentially a photo lab, and it was no different from the rest of the industry using caustic chemicals to process photographic materials, postprocessing heavy metals and using extraordinary amounts of power and water.

All that photo-processing equipment also generated thousands of BTUs of heat. Baker seized on the idea of heating the company’s building with that wasted warmth. It wasn’t “to be green,” Baker says. “It was because I was cheap.” He finally figured out how to do it, and since then, the company has spent almost nothing warming an 8,500-square-foot building in snowy New Hampshire. For Baker, successfully engineering a “heatless building” was the beginning of questioning the assumption that waste, inefficiency and pollution were simply the cost of doing business.

In the trade show business, you can’t buy green products off the shelf. Vinyl technically, polyvinyl chloride, or PVC is ubiquitous because it’s cheap, strong, flexible and lightweight. But “when burned, the PVC releases dioxin fumes, which are a known carcinogen,” says Andrea Atkinson, general manager of NEXUS Green Building Resource Center, a Boston-based educational facility for green builders.