As a consultant at Bain & Company in the 1980s, John Mazzarino ’74 was eager to go into business for himself. Like a lot of would-be entrepreneurs, he and a partner began looking for companies they could acquire and turn around to sell at a profit. The impediment: “We could only afford to buy companies that were performing poorly financially,” Mazzarino says. The cheapest companies they could find had another issue as well: rampant environmental contamination. Environmental law was becoming more stringent, and many companies were behind the times with soil and water polluted by toxic chemicals.

“Many corporate folks were afraid of engaging with environmental problems,” Mazzarino says. “But we were young… We said, ‘Hey we can take that on.’” Mazzarino and his partner bought four companies, including a brick company and truck body manufacturing business in North Carolina. After they learned how to clean up the environmental mess that no one else wanted to touch and improved the companies’ financial performance, they found they could sell the now-clean companies for a hefty profit. That initial business ended up growing over the next 30 years to Cherokee Investment Partners, a private equity fund based in Raleigh that has profited investors while also doing good for the environment.

Mazzarino has business in his blood; his father ran a grocery store in western Massachusetts. When Mazzarino decided to attend Colgate, he became the first person in his family to go to college. “It was an incredible experience,” he says. As a math major, he was enamored with calculus, so after graduation, he went to MIT to study applied math. Once there, he transferred to MIT’s Sloan business school, from which he was recruited to Bain.

Cleaning up environmental contamination is easier than it sounds, Mazzarino insists. Cherokee focused largely on two types: petroleum hydrocarbons and industrial solvents, both of which are relatively benign compared to mercury or heavy metals. To clean the soil, they either dig it up and transport it to a landfill or, less expensively, treat it with microorganisms that eat up the toxins. “These bugs consume the contamination, and then they die and become part of the clean soil,” Mazzarino says. To clean groundwater, they install pumps that feed the water through a filter, “much like the aquarium you had when you were a kid.”

After their first deals, Mazzarino and his partner attracted the attention of Koch Industries, which lent them $50 million for more transactions. One of their biggest early purchases was buying all 150 Kmarts in Canada, many of which had been contaminated by their auto service centers. “We made a large multiple of our initial investment in nine months,” Mazzarino says. After that deal, they began raising their own private equity funds, starting with a $250 million fund in 1996 and rising to a $2 billion fund by 2010. Over the years, Cherokee has made investments in more than 500 properties in the United States, Canada, and Europe, as well as 200 companies focused on sustainability and environmental impact.

Even more recently, the firm has been pursuing a new business, building solar arrays atop contaminated landfills. Cherokee leases the land, providing revenue to the community, and sells the community members the clean energy — so it’s a win for both groups as well as the environment.

“Most business people have one objective: profitability,” Mazzarino says. “Of course we want to make money for our investors. But we also have another objective, which is cleaning the planet. We are excited to keep finding new ways to do that.”