Oregon Business Team

This year’s Private 150 list points to some encouraging news about the state’s economy. 

Are Oregon businesses prepared for disaster? With quakes, tornados and floods in the headlines recently, we wanted to know the extent of preparedness. 

Technology is stretching the boundaries of ZGF Architects, the fourth-largest architecture firm in the country.

Every weekday morning for months, workers from the regional carpenters union have gathered in front of the Portland offices of S.D. Deacon behind a banner picturing a drywall contractor recently arrested on felony charges, with the statement “Used by S.D. Deacon — Why?”

The March Sendai tsunami and nuclear catastrophe have provided an Oregon bottled water company with an opportunity to enter the Japan market — and stay for the long haul.

Since the mid 1990s, thousands of Oregonians — families, retirees, young adults — have forsaken the suburbs in favor of inner-city living. Now a new group, suburban homebuilders, are also jumping on the urban housing bandwagon.

ZeaChem is investigating ways to help Portland General Electric “green up” its Boardman coal plant with a biomass coal replacement made from poplar wood. 

Kirkman Group president David Humphrey says he prides himself on the purity of the food supplements his company makes in Lake Oswego and sells globally. So it bothered him profoundly to have to recall several products in December 2009 after learning they were contaminated with antimony, a toxic chemical. 

A partnership between the Coquille Indian Tribe and Perpetua Power Source Technologies will bring a new assembly and production facility to tribal-owned property in North Bend. The plan, which has been in development for a year, will also allow Perpetua to expand the manufacturing capabilities of its renewable thermoelectric technology at Corvallis company headquarters. 

Residential real estate is still looking to hit bottom.