Driving husband John to work in the 1980s at the Long Island insulation company he owned, Karen Grando would listen as he often ignored cellphone calls offering asbestos removal work. “He had mixed asbestos cement as a child, knew it was bad for you and really wasn’t interested in it,” she says.
But after leaving her Citicorp management job, Grando returned to school to gain an asbestos handler’s license and launched an environmental remediation services firm in 1987 to remove asbestos and other hazardous materials. After her husband became ill in 1998, she also began running his company.