With Eco-Friendly Building Supplies, Green Depot Thrives in the Construction Rebound

Sarah Beatty was pregnant with her first child when she learned toxic mold might be spreading beneath the floorboards of her newly renovated Manhattan apartment. Although the scare turned out to be a false alarm, the former MTV marketing executive became concerned about health risks posed by materials in her home. Because her husband, Mark Buller, had decades of experience selling construction supplies, Beatty had wrongly assumed he’d be able to tell which ones were potentially harmful. “We truly didn’t know what was in a lot of stuff, and we didn’t know how to find out,” says Buller, who co-founded national distributor Marjam Supply with his brother in 1979.

Beatty, now 47, saw an opportunity her husband had missed: a chain specializing in green construction materials, from nontoxic paint to formaldehyde-free insulation. “An Inconvenient Truth was out. There was all this excitement in the air” about reducing carbon footprints and exposure to chemicals, says Beatty. Yet when people asked contractors to build them a green home, she says, they didn’t know what to use or where to get it. “The distribution part of the supply chain wasn’t there,” she says.