Entrepreneur of the Year 2025: How Aaron Joe built Salish Soils into a circular-economy powerhouse on the Sunshine Coast

Aaron Joe’s entrepreneurial journey can be traced back to 2009, when the Sunshine Coast Regional District warned that its landfill was nearing capacity. Joe, who grew up there and is a member of the shíshálh Nation, was inspired by the call to action: he saw it as an opportunity to build a facility that could turn those materials into something useful.

He founded Salish Soils, a 10-acre facility in Sechelt dedicated to collecting and processing waste. As Joe explains, it “basically grinds everything up” and mixes it into products like soil, compost and mulch. The company offers collection services as well.

The company’s mission is rooted in Joe’s firsthand memories of what large-scale land clearing can do to  communities. “We have one of the largest gravel mines on the B.C. coast, right on our reserve in Sechelt,” he says. He remembers seeing hundreds of acres of land get cleared, and all those materials windrowed and burned. “I could see that it was impacting people’s health, their lungs. It was impacting the whole community.”

Today, with 36 full-time employees on board, Salish Soils works with municipalities across the region to help manage waste from homes and businesses. It handles close to 30 municipal contracts, including with the Sunshine Coast Regional District, the Town of Gibsons and the City of Powell River.

“The aha moment with Salish Soils was the first time that I was able to transform waste into something that was saleable,” says Joe. He remembers piloting a German technology called the GORE cover system (which the company still uses) that mixed fish scraps and ground green waste together. “It just was so inspiring to be able to see that waste turn into soil,” he recalls.

In 2022, Salish Soils secured a $2.5 million investment from Raven Indigenous Capital Partners to improve efficiencies and expand operations. That same year, Joe started developing a seven-acre community farm near Sechelt Hospital.

Swiya Farms partners with Vancouver Coastal Health to provide fresh produce for patient care and delivers boxes to Elders and the local food bank. For Joe, the nonprofit farm demonstrates the transformative power of land restoration, regenerative agriculture and Indigenous traditions. In a community surrounded by water and dependent on imports, he feels it’s especially important to show how local businesses can help close the loop.

“As Indigenous development corps are doing more and more developments within the greater B.C. area, we see an opportunity to be a leader in managing waste,” Joe says, citing the Squamish Nation’s Sen’áḵw development plans as an example. “That waste’s got to go somewhere. It’s got to be managed. Hopefully it’s not getting buried. It always affects Indigenous territories. If it’s being buried or burned, it’s affecting us.”

Your proudest moment in business?

Seeing young people from our Nation take pride in our company.

After work, we can find you… 

On my farm.