John Edel

Founder and Executive Director, The Plant and Owner, Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center

John Edel is both an eco and social entrepreneur.  His most recent endeavor, The Plant, is a project combining adaptive industrial reuse and aquaponics to create the nation’s only net-zero vertical farm.  Located in a former meatpacking facility in Chicago’s historic Stockyards, The Plant will be powered entirely by the waste of neighboring businesses.

John also is the owner and developer of the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, a green business incubator in the Stockyards Industrial Corridor.  As General Contractor, Edel took the facility from a burnt-out shell to 100% occupancy while using a mixture of waste-stream recycled materials and leading edge technology to make the building exceptionally energy efficient and pleasantly non-toxic.  The renovation was assisted by a core group of volunteers and by bartering with suppliers, tenants and scrappers.  The building’s green roof is a photo of Edel’s daughter Zoe rendered in 9,600 sedum plants, each of which is a pixel in her image.

In previous careers, Edel taught computer graphics, designed sets for broadcast television, art directed video games and worked as a chef on private railroad cars.  He has a lifelong dream of combining industrial preservation, agriculture and job creation in a sustainable fashion.