Environmental Lubricants Manufacturing, Inc. (ELM) was formed in 2000 with the sole purpose of commercializing soybean oil-based lubricants and greases created at the University of Northern Iowa’s National Ag-Based Lubricants Center (UNI-NABL). It was founded jointly by Lou Honary, then professor and founding director of UNI-NABL with the University of Northern Iowa Research Foundation as minority owner. The company began manufacturing operations in Plainfield, Iowa. Within six years, ELM’s sales rose to $5.4 million. A major portion of ELM sales was in the rail curve grease area through distributorship by Portec Rail products Company, currently LB Foster Rail Products. In 2007, Inc. Magazine featured ELM’s greases and rated ELM 470th of 500 of the fastest growing private companies in the U.S. A fire during grease manufacturing process in 2007, led to invention of a revolutionary manufacturing process, co-invented by Honary that uses microwaves for manufacturing grease process thus eliminating the fire hazards that caused the interruption in 2007. This new technology was featured in a History Channel’s Modern Marvels segment in 2012. Importantly, this process allows ELM to meet and exceed the performance of petroleum greases and match their price while being biobased and biodegradable. ELM now offers biobased lubricants through well-established distributors and petroleum lubricants manufacturing, and its microwave manufacturing processing worldwide with the goals of 1) expanding the use of environment-friendly lubricants worldwide; and 2) help to reduce worldwide process energy