have something big on their hands — something big and something ahead of its time. That fateful beer McCombs, 52, began his career in construction. On a home construction job in 1991, he couldn’t find the architectural columns the project called for. Always keen on a challenge, he decided to make them himself. The experience of handcrafting and detailing architectural designs proved so appealing to McCombs’ artistic nature that he and Cindy — recognizing the huge demand for these building products — launched Realm of Design, a family-run business that today employs his three children and other relatives. During the first decade of operation, they had a decent go of it, operating in four states (Nevada, California, Arizona and Oregon) and maintaining a staff of 56. But with the crash of the housing industry, sales plummeted. “You watch all the businesses around you go out of business. And you go, ‘Wow, I don’t want to get hung up in that.’ So, you try to outsmart the situation,” McCombs says. GreenStone was the patriarch’s way to survive the economic crisis. “I thought, if I had a greener product, I would be more successful, and I would help clean up this problem, and who knows what I would learn in the process, right?” The couple has their kids to thank for such green-mindedness. “Awareness wasn’t really something that we knew growing up,” Cindy says. “Then our kids were in school, and they’re like, ‘We need to recycle this and we need to cut this plastic up because we don’t want it to get stuck around a duck’s neck.’” Another factor: Beer? Yes. One night in the late ’90s, McCombs was drinking a beer on the Strip when it occurred to him that Vegas has a unique abundance of glass waste: 30 million tons annually of relatively clean glass. Keeping in mind that glass is made from sand, which is used in cement, McCombs got to thinking — and then got to experimenting and researching. He traveled to Rome to study the Colosseum, which was made with volcanic ash; he went to Montana to visit the Missoula Federal Credit Union, the first building in the world to structurally employ fly ash and recycled glass in lieu of traditional cement. And he solved problems. For example, crushed glass, when used as an aggregate in traditional Portland cement, causes a chemical process known as alkali-silica reaction, which leads to micro-cracking within the cement and makes it structurally unsound. But McCombs discovered that various ingredients
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