JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today the future leaders of the United States of America from the Girl Up organization, Rachel Wisthuff and Rebecca Ruvalcaba. Welcome to Green is Good.
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Hi, John, Thanks for having us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank for coming on today. Rachel, you’re the Girl Up grassroots associate in Washington DC for this amazing organization called Girl Up and Rebecca, you’re the southern California Girl Up Club President and for our listeners out there who want to follow along with what we’re talking about as we share the story of Girl Up, you can go to www.girlup.org. Rachel and Rebecca, before we get into talking about this truly amazing organization, Girl Up, can you please share your journeys first, what you were doing before you got involved and why you got involved with this great UN organization. Rachel, ,why don’t you go first?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Certainly, John. I discovered Girl Up actually when I was volunteering abroad. I was both teaching at a university and working with a local NGO on women’s and girl’s health issues and so I stumbled upon Girl Up and applied for an internship, really believing in the power of youth and their ability to make change and I stepped right into the role and started working with all of our amazing Girl Up youth supporter, including clubs, and then in June, I got hired on full time so I’ve been able to continue with this experience.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, Rebecca, how about you? How did you become the Southern California Girl Up Club President?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Well, actually, I got involved my freshman year of high school and my friend started the Girl Up Club at my local high school. I really wanted to get involved. I thought it was a great organization so I became a club member. I applied to be a VP last year, a Vice President, and this year, they decided to have me be a Co-President with my friend so now we’re the two Presidents of the club at my local high school.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great, and so why don’t we start with what’s going on and what is really Girl Up? So our listeners really get a great understanding and for our listeners out there again, it’s just a gorgeous and a really well done website. It’s www.girlup.org. Rachel, why don’t you start with what Girl Up is and what your mission is?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Girl Up is a innovative campaign and we were created by the United Nations Foundation about three years ago and our real mission is to address the needs of adolescent girls in developing countries, those hardest to reach girls, and to do this where we empower youth in the United States to raise awareness and raise funds for programs of the United Nations so that through their support, we are able to positively empower and impact the girls in the Global South.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay, and so when you say positively impact, there’s other young women like you and Rebecca that raise money here in the United States and then you give money or donate money to adolescents in need around the world?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Yes, yes, so all of the donations that we collect are actually funneled through UN agencies and programs that have tremendous expertise and cultural awareness within the four countries we operate in. Currently, Girl Up supports programs in Liberia, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Malawi, with hopefully more to come so that you know that all of your donations and support are going to the best possible programs.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great, and Rebecca, why don’t you share with our listeners how does this work? You raise money here in the United States and then you help these young ladies in these countries that Rachel just said. What does it mean, helping them, and what does that help look like and how far does the dollar go?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Well, Girl Up helps girls by girls here in the U.S. raising awareness and funds for United Nations programs that goes back and gives these girls the opportunities that they need to reach their full potential so you know, programs, they can go to help girls become educated, help them to be in a position to be a leader in their communities so the funds raised really go a long way for these girls. They change their life.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, let’s talk a little bit about most of the young women that you’re helping are young ladies that are not having opportunities that we’re so used to and somewhat take for granted here in America. Is that not correct? Such that some of them have been made child brides at very young ages or some of them aren’t given equal education opportunities like boys are given or like you’re given here in the United States and they’ve been typically marginalized in the countries that we’re talking about. Is that not correct?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Yes, that is correct.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, so the money that you’re getting to them through Girl Up is helping them get educated and break the shackles that they’ve been held back with historically?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Yeah, the funds, they go to help girls become educated, helps put them in positions to be leaders.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Rachel, what are these issues? Speak more specifically, better than I’m doing, actually. What are the issues that these young women are facing around the world that we don’t get to see via the media every day in America but they’re real problems, it’s really not right, and Girl Up is trying to remedy these problems with the great mission that you have right now?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Yeah, certainly I can speak to that. Often times, there are social and cultural norms within these communities that limit girls’ chances to be able to access education opportunities or to be able to speak freely about their health. Often times, girls don’t have safe spaces in which they can go and access a female mentor or leader in their community to really talk about the discrimination and the gender inequality they face. Girls are less likely to make the jump from primary to secondary school. The number one leading cause of death for girls in the developing world between the ages of 15 and 19 are complications due to pregnancy so statistics are out there that prove that girls face enormous challenges but that they’re not always heard in the media. You don’t often hear that a girl in some of these countries is forced to spend four to six hours a day just going to get water for their families and are often expected to help with household chores and take care of younger siblings, which prevents them from going to school and really advancing their career and advancing their education.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Rebecca, last year, Girl Up was involved with a movie that came out that really told the story that Rachel was just sharing with us about the young ladies across the world. Can you share a little bit about what that movie was and what it meant to you and the other young ladies involved with Girl Up?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Yes, of course. The movie that Girl Up was involved with last year was called Girls Like Me and it is a global movement for girls’ education. It features girls from developing countries that went through cultural problems and problems with their families but they got through all of that. They rose to the top and it really impacted my club after seeing the movie because it really opened our eyes to what girls face in developing countries and seeing it like first hand on the movie screen so it is a really amazing movie.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just so great. I know that Girl Up is part of the UN Foundation and there’s numerous organizations but one of the funding agents of the UN Foundation was Ted Turner and he has also taken on huge environmental issues and he’s made so many great and inspired so many people to make so many great changes here in the United States and around the world. Can you talk a little bit, Rachel, about how Girl Up is actually not only doing the great mission that you’re doing but also getting green along the way and inspiring your young women leaders to be green and to act environmentally?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Yes, yes. We’re very excited about this partnership so we decided girls have a tremendous potential to fundraise, to create donation drives, and what better way to raise money than to donate gently used electronics, everything from cell phones to tablets, to really bring money back to girls in the developing world? So, Girl Up was fortunate enough to partner with Electronic Recyclers International, or ERI, to create this system by which Girl Up clubs, which are girl supporters scattered throughout the U.S. and overseas, collect these cell phones, these tablets, to then turn in and then these electronic devices are cleaned. The data is wiped and they’re recycled and the money and proceeds come back to Girl Up so it’s a tremendous partnership.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, instead of Girl Up representatives doing bake sales or traditional fundraising methodologies, you’re saying give us your old cell phone or tablet. We’ll take care of a problem that you have anyway, where to get rid of that stuff responsibly, and we’ll turn it into a donation for Girl Up, which will then have a domino effect of helping young girls around the world become empowered?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Exactly. It’s a win-win. You’re saving the earth and you’re helping to support these girls so there really is no downside to this.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and how can our listeners find this program if they want to be involved or donate their old devices to help Girl Up’s mission?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Currently on our website, we have a link to the BuyBackTech website, which is GirlUp.BuyBackTech.com, and that website is extremely easy to use, All you do is you go on, you select what device you’d like to donate and from there, they’ll give you steps on how to mail it in and also we have a blog post up on our website that details the whole process so that you have a clear sense of what you’re doing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great. We’ve talked at the top of the show, Rebecca, that you are the President of the Southern California Girl Up Club. Can you explain to our listeners a little bit more what do Girl Up Clubs mean and how many clubs are there in the United States?
REBECCA RUVALCABA. Well, Girl Up Clubs are clubs that extend the mission of Girl Up within their local communities so the main goal for Girl Up Clubs are to just spread the word, fundraise for the UN programs, and advocate for change. There are Girl Up Clubs around the country and now there are even some internationally, around the world and I know in Southern California, we have around 40 clubs running and I’m not sure how much are in the United States. Rachel?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: We have nearly 450 worldwide, and it’s incredible to see the way they’ve taken off and they really support one another through regional coalitions so clubs in New York will get together, exchange ideas, and really build each other up so that you can do joint fundraisers, like the ERI recycling drive or bake sales, that sort of thing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What other fundraising methodologies does Girl Up use to do your great mission and your great work?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Girl Up actually has a lot of different fundraising mechanisms. One of the things that we like to take advantage of is that our youth supporters are constantly on their phones so we have partnered with a couple of apps to help raise funds for Girl Up, including Charity Miles, where you select Girl Up as your charity and then every time you run or walk, you’re donating through your miles, and then also, Donate a Photo, which every day you’ll upload a photo and one photo equals $1 and that dollar will go towards a girl’s education in Liberia and Rebecca, you have a lot more ideas to share.
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Yeah, so fundraisers that my club has done are we’ve done something with people at a bake sale at our school. We’ve partners with Threads of Hope online and we’ve sold bracelets handmade by girls in The Philippines and half of the profits made went back to Girl Up and half of it went towards helping families in The Philippines so that was a really great fundraiser. We’ve also done some restaurant fundraisers where 75% of the profit in the restaurant went toward Girl Up so those have been some of the fundraisers we’ve done.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Rachel and Rebecca, we’re going back to your going green campaign with ERI and BuyBackTech. What kind of electronics does Girl Up accept so that way they can get good donations that you can use to further your mission?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Some electronics that the BuyBackTech website does accept are iPods, smart phones, and tablets so the smart phones can be like a Samsung, iPhone, Blackberry and then the tablets are like the Amazon tablets, the iPads so it’s like if you want to upgrade to the new iPhone 5, then you could give us your old iPhone 4 and donate it and help a girl in need.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. And what’s the future look like? Rachel, you got involved recently with Girl Up in terms of the home office back in DC. What is the pipeline look like for Girl Up and what are some new initiatives that you’re working on with all the young leaders around the nation like Rebecca?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Yeah, I’m happy you asked, John. We are actually thrilled to be supporting a new piece of legislation that was introduced in the House of Representatives. It’s called the Girls Count Act of 2013 and it’s a bipartisan bill and what it really seeks to do is make sure that the State Department and the U.S. Aid Agency prioritize a registry system for girls in developing countries so often times, girls will not have birth certificates or records, which prevents them from being able to register for school, from getting a loan at a bank, from owning property or being able to vote, all of these fundamental parts of their lives are denied simply because there’s no piece of paper recording their birth so we are asking all of our Girl Up Clubs and supporters to contact their member of Congress to support this bill and we’re hoping it will be introduced in the Senate sometime next year. It’s really an exciting time in Girl Up’s history and we’re also just looking to expand globally. Each year, we’ll get increasingly more clubs in different countries around the world and being able to connect those clubs to each other so that Rebecca’s club in Southern California can talk with a Girl Up club in South Africa. That’s what we’re really looking to do because we want to make sure that that pathway of communication in supporting girls is really clear and ever present.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so great. Rebecca, how has this leadership role that you’ve taken with Girl Up and your involvement with Girl Up changed your life for the better? How has it made you more aware?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: It has really just made me more aware by opening my eyes and just showing me what girls face in developing countries. It made me feel like oh my goodness, girls are not going to school like here in the U.S. We have to go to school. It is like a priority so it makes me feel so great to know that I’m involved with Girl Up helping girls in need. It was really awesome when I first got involved.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great, and how long is this electronic takeback opportunity going to be out there? Is that an ongoing campaign for Girl Up, for our listeners out there to get online and get these electronics back to Girl Up?
RACHEL WISTHUFF: Yes, yes, we kind of rolled it out in November thinking in terms of Black Friday and Cyber Monday but that being said, we know that after the holidays, people will probably have new electronics and want to recycle their old ones so this campaign is going on for the foreseeable future so definitely feel free to donate.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great and we’re down to the last minute and a half. I’m going to ask for both of you to share this question. For other young ladies that want to get involved, give some advice. Why don’t you go first, Rebecca?
REBECCA RUVALCABA: Well, to get involved with Girl Up, you can just log on to GirlUp.org. Check out the website. It’s pretty awesome. You can contact Rachel or Julie up in DC. You can ask them if you want to make a Girl Up Club or your community. You can sign up and they’ll send you a starting up packet and it’ll be awesome. You’ll be like right on there. You’ll have a wonderful leadership opportunity to take hold of your club, collect members, collect funds so it’s great and participate every week in the club website and you’ll be on track.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. For our listeners out there, please go to www.girlup.org. Donate your electronics. Get money back to Girl Up and let them continue their amazing mission. Rachel Wisthuff and Rebecca Ruvalcaba, you are both amazing ambassadors for all the girls in the world and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and I’m so honored to have my friend, the co-founder of Peacefood Café, Peter Lu. He’s on with us today. Welcome to Green is Good, Peter.
PETER LU: Hey, John. How are you?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We are great today, Peter, and as this is such a special day for me personally because you are so important to my family’s life in New York City. We love your food. We love your restaurant. We love you and your partner, Eric, and we’re just so thankful that you’re here in the New York Metropolitan Area and sharing the good word of veganism and plant food based diets and so thank you for being on the show to share your story today.
PETER LU: Yeah, we love to share our story and we love you as our customers.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Peter, share a little bit about you and Eric and where you’ve come from and where you were on your journey historically, what you’ve done before leading up to this great restaurant chain that you’ve built here in Manhattan and then how you got to where you are today.
PETER LU: Okay so, we are both from Hong Kong and we’ve lived here in New York since the early ’80s, so it’s pushing maybe even over 30 years now, and we’ve been partners for 20 years. Eric used to be an antique dealer for 20 yearsm and he did have a degree in hospitality management, which was in the ’80s when he was going to college and me, I am in interior design. I have been in that profession for over 20 years, and we kind of like stumbled into this opening Peacefood in 2008, so kind of accidental, but you know, purposefully. We did that because if you remember the 2008 market crash, his antique business was dwindling down and you know, he finally closed shop and he spent a lot of time thinking what we should do in the next chapter of our life, and we thought and thought and at the time that we already became vegan. Eric became a vegetarian probably a little before I did, and I soon became a vegetarian afterwards in 2001 and then we had been vegetarian probably like six, seven years and then we turned vegan because we kind of like learned about the milk industry, how bad it was and how the animals were treated and eventually, they will be put to death as well so that doesn’t make any difference whether you’re eating meat or whether you’re eating eggs or milk. Actually, the farm animals that are in the milk industry, they probably go through a lot more suffering because they have to produce milk or they have to produce eggs and all that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Who brought you that information? Did you read a book? Now there’s famous books like The China Study and Forks Over Knives. Was it some friends who shared this information with you?
PETER LU: Actually, I stumbled into some podcasts. These podcasts also do some wonderful work with spreading the truth of veganism and you know, one of my heroes was Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, who owns CompassionateCook.com, who has been podcasting for almost five years and I kind of learned that from her podcast and I said to Eric, “You know, being vegetarian is just not quite enough. We have to live up to the truth,” and we decided to turn vegan and just swear off all the dairy products by 2007, so at the time of 2008, after he closed shop, (back to the story) we thought that doing a vegan restaurant is true to ourselves and it would kind of share the message of veganism to people so we looked around in New York City. It was our first restaurant. We had never had a restaurant before, ever. It was a brand new project and we looked and looked and looked and it was not a very easy thing to do because first, the market was not really- It was just after the 2008 bubble burst in the stock market and all that but we looked around. It wasn’t easy because first of all, it was our first business. Second of all, the landlord, when they hear that you’re opening a vegan restaurant, they hear that you probably won’t be making much money and why am I giving you the lease? So, anyway, it took us like a long time to find a space and the space which we have our first restaurant is on Amsterdam Avenue. Then it took probably another six months to put the restaurant together with very little money and it just started from there and Eric was like the soul of the restaurant at the time because I was still having my interior design job. I didn’t resign until we opened up the second restaurant.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh, so you opened up the restaurant back in 2009, and what was the response like for two new restaurateurs on this journey at the beginning of this whole vegan revolution? What was the response like for your neighborhood and for the surrounding area?
PETER LU: It was great. It was a very slow start. It took at least a year to kind of like get out of the red on the business side, so we just kind of like put our hearts into it, especially Eric, because he was really running the restaurant at the time and he would do everything from buying the stuff, from hiring the people, working in the kitchen, running the kitchen and cooking some things or make the soup in the morning. He was like tireless basically for the first year and I just kind of supported him on the side. I was doing the book work and the administrative stuff.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re humble. A partnership is a partnership and everybody is doing an important role. You’re very humble. So is Eric, by the way. For our listeners out there, we’re so honored to have with us today the co-founder of Peacefood Café, Peter Lu, and to learn more about the amazing and delicious food that they serve, go to www.peacefoodcafe.com. How did you come up with the name? How did you and Eric come up with the name?
PETER LU: Oh, that was great. We had like this farm sanctuary, Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary up in Woodstock, and they always have this slogan on the T-shirts that peace begins on your plate so we were kind of like, ‘Wow, that sounds really true’. When you think about it, people are saying, ‘We want peace, we want peace,’ but we still keep eating all this meat, not in the sense of just to harm the animal but imagine all the animals going through this state of fear when they are being slaughtered and the kind of energy that was latched on the piece of meat that somebody is going to be eating. It’s not a very good thing. That kind of will affect your whole well being, I think, so we think that peace begins on your plate is a really good message so we kind of pair peace and food together. Food should be peaceful, so Peacefood and we kind of combine it together. We think that it should be one word. Food should be peaceful.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it, and that’s a beautiful statement, “Peace begins on your plate.” I never even heard that before. That’s so wonderful and for our listeners out there, I’m on Peter’s website now. Like I said earlier, the website is www.peacefoodcafe.com. My family goes to Peter’s an Eric’s restaurant all the time. He has now two restaurants and we’ll talk about that in a little while but for people who think veganism is just for granola eating kale eating hippies, this is the furthest thing from the truth. Peter and Eric have created food that is so mainstream and so delicious that there’s always a line out the door and there’s a bakery and every person I’ve ever brought to your restaurant loves everything they put in their mouth and they just can’t even tell the difference between your baked goods and any mainstream baked goods in terms of the sugar and the fats that are in typical baked goods. Your baked cookies, pies, and scones are world class.
PETER LU: Yeah, I have to thank you and I have to thank all the people who have worked with Peacefood, especially the bakery chefs that we have, and they are all actually vegan and they create these wonderful recipes. They probably veganize most of the memorable desserts or pastries that we have and the kind of ingredients that we use are very good ingredients and they’re not processed sugar or anything. We use very natural ingredients, such as maple syrup and agave and coconut meat and that type of thing and also on the food end, Eric is actually the creator of the menu. He actually created the menu based on the type of food that both of us liked and so it’s kind of a very diversified type of menu. It’s something that people can come in any time of the day and they can find something that they can have. It doesn’t really matter what time of the day it is so we want the place to be kind of home like that you can kind of just walk into Peacefood and feel like that you’re in somebody’s home or in somebody’s kitchen and you can kind of just open the refrigerator and grab something that you want, that kind of a feeling.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, you’ve succeeded because I know the first time I ever walked into Peacefood was after the hurricane last year hit and you were the first and only restaurant open in New York and we walked the streets and drove the streets and we came into the place and it was like being at home and everyone was happy and your staff was so loving. Of course, Eric greeted everybody as always and the food was amazing.
PETER LU: Yes, I remember Hurricane Sandy and we were slammed the whole week because downtown, they had electrical problems that anything below 14th Street was just completely out of electricity for like a week or something, so I think the migration of all the downtown people and other neighborhood people really made our restaurant very successful that week. We were like slammed from when we opened until the end of the night. I think we closed for one day and then Eric said, ‘We have to open, we have to open. There’s probably people out there looking for food and all that.’
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s true, and you guys did and it was just the best experience and let’s talk a little bit about, Peter, the ethical, health, and environmental issues that surround and are benefitted from veganism, Can you share with the listeners your view on these issues?
PETER LU: Oh yeah, sure. First of all, let’s talk about the environmental issues. We do a lot of things these days, like recycle, we conserve in water, and improve our transportation and all that but it’s really not quite enough but we’ve just forgotten something that is so simple to do , which is just to choose a vegan diet so basically, the vegan diet is something that can help us just because of the lifestyle industry creates a lot of waste.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: The whole meat industry and all those industries create all sorts of carbon footprint.
PETER LU: They’ve actually created a lot of the waste. It’s like 18% of the methane that came out. Basically, they were calculating in the equivalence of carbon dioxide and also, there’s poor waste management and the amount of manure that these farm animals excrete is far beyond our imagination and it leaks into our bodies of water and land and also, it’s very inefficient to grow crops to feed the farm animal and then in turn, the people will eat the meat of the farm animal. It’s just isn’t a very sustainable way to live so by choosing a vegan diet, we can skip all this and then the crops that grow can feed the hungry and then we don’t have to have so much land that are being deforested for additional more animal grazing and all that. All in all, it’s just very good for the environment.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Since 2009, have you seen a shift in consciousness in terms of both society and even just the local crowd that you serve? Are the lines getting longer and the crowd more diverse in your restaurant?
PETER LU: I think people are starting to open up about veganism. First of all, I must say that vegan diet is not a fad diet. It’s something that has already been there for years. It’s just people are so busy and they hear this message about veganism and they might not be able to spend the time and kind of think about it so our purpose to be there as a restaurant is to just kind of give them a reminder that these foods are really good for you and they’re delicious and it’s sort of like an incentive for them to go a little further to think about what veganism is all about. After we have open the uptown location for four years, actually four-and-a-half years, and we do feel that people are a lot more open to come into the restaurant and so they just like the food. It doesn’t really matter if it’s vegan or not. It’s good food and once they kind of break down that barrier, they will kind of look into what veganism is all about.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Peter, you and Eric are both very humble. The food is great. The lines are long. There’s a mixed crowd in there. This is businessmen, businesswomen, older people, younger people. I’ve seen rock stars in there. I’ve seen celebrities in there and it’s a very democratized location. Everyone is treated the same and loves the food just as much. We’re down to the last minute or so. Two things Peter: Talk a little bit about opening your second location, where that is, and then the future of Peacefood and then we’re going to have to sign off for today.
PETER LU: The second location is on 11th Street and East 11th Street between Broadway and University Place and actually, the reason why we actually didn’t pick that location but I have a little story to tell. Basically, I turned vegetarian on September 11th, 2001 and I was standing at that corner and I had a view of the World Trade Tower coming down. I turned vegetarian that day because I did not want to contribute to more suffering, to more loss of life, so there again, not just to the human but also to the animal so it’s sort of like we didn’t even know but when we looked for the second location, we just found it on the website and then we went over there and it was on East 11th Street. It’s a familiar spot so we didn’t even look at any other space and then we just kind of signed the lease. The second time was a lot easier because we already had some reputation with establishments. We got the space right away so under six, seven months of construction and then we opened the door in March of 2013, this year.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wonderful, and I know I’ve been there many times. I celebrated my 50th birthday there. For our listeners out there, you should go and enjoy Peter and Eric’s two great restaurants, Peacefood Café Uptown and Downtown now and it’s www.peacefoodcafe.com. Peace does begin on your plate. Peter Lu, you are a visionary leader in the vegan food revolution and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re so excited to have with us today Charlie Kawasaki. He’s the CEO and co-founder of BETTERY. Welcome to Green is Good, Charlie.
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Hey! Thanks, John. Thanks for having me on.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Charlie, before we get into talking about your great company, BETTERY, can you please share the Charlie Kawasaki story? How did you even get here as the co-founder and CEO of this great company? What was your journey leading up to this point?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Well, I’ve had a lifelong passion for developing new and innovative solutions to help people solve problems that really cause them a great deal of hassle and concern. I have about 35 years of experience in the high tech industry developing both hardware and software products in a variety of startups and my passion has always been in developing cool innovative products.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Cool. Speaking of cool innovative products, tell me about your company and what your company does and for our listeners out there that want to follow along, I’m on your beautiful and really well-done website right now and it’s www.betteryinc.com. Tell us about BETTERY. What is it and what solution were you providing? What void in the marketplace did you see?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Well, BETTERY has produced the first kiosk for responsible use and purchase of disposable batteries that really make it easy for users to step up to a sustainable battery product and make it really easy for them to use.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Awesome, and so explain how it works and what’s the real mission of BETTERY. What is the mission that everyone at the company knows?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Well, the way it works is it’s pretty of easy. It’s kind of like a Redbox kiosk, if you’re familiar with renting DVDs and instead of DVDs, it’s with household batteries, like double-A and triple-A batteries and the way you use it is you walk up to the BETTERY Swap Station at a convenient retailer and you can choose double-A or triple-A batteries to take home and you use them just like you normally would but instead of throwing them away in the trash when you’re done, you take them back to the BETTERY Swap Station, stick them in, and you exchange them for freshly charged batteries and the reason why we did this was a couple things: One is to help people save money on batteries but also, we had a big pile of batteries piling up at home in a Ziploc bag labeled “bad” and didn’t know what to do with them and we wanted to find an easier way to step up to a reusable product and not have to drive around town looking for a place to recycle our batteries.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay, you’re the co-founder. Who else co-founded with you? When you say, “we,” we came up with this idea, which is your a-ha moment, which is just so perfect for entrepreneurs like you, who are always trying to come up with new solutions? Who was the other founders with you?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: My co-founder is Bill Coleman out of San Jose, and he’s also had a lifelong passion for sustainable products. He and I have worked together on and off for the last 25 years in building different innovative technology products and so it was a great way for us to work together more on this new idea.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your website now, like I’ve just shared with our listeners. For our listeners out there, again, it’s BETTERYInc.com. First of all, the machine itself looks gorgeous. You have a great video on the landing page that shows how it works and everything. Where is this machine today? Is it in a lot of stores? Is it in a couple of test stores? How widespread is your machine getting out there?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: We have BETTERY Swap Stations around the Pacific Northwest right now at both Safeway and Whole Foods Markets locations. We also have them at the Portland State University Student Union building, and we’re in discussions with additional national retailers as well as large corporate campuses. We’re looking to put these Swap Stations in place for their employees.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is so great. So, now let’s step back and talk about the problem because for our listeners out there, batteries, just like electronic waste, which really they’re part of the electronic waste stream in many ways, have a lot of environmental problems with them when they come to the end of their usable life. Can you share the bad environmental problem that’s caused by batteries if they’re disposed of inappropriately and they’re not put into your ingenious machine?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Certainly. I was pretty surprised when I discovered just how many batteries we use in the U.S. each year. It’s about 2.5 billion batteries that end up in U.S. landfills every year and in addition to the hazards related to disposing of them improperly in our landfills, they also have a big environmental impact in just the making and the transporting of them in terms of their carbon footprint for a single use product. You can sort of think of it like a foam cup. You do all the manufacturing and the transport and they use it once and throw it away so we’re pleased that we have support from recyclers like King County’s Recycled Waste Division, that’s helping us get the word out, educating the public about getting these batteries out of the landfills and in addition to that, there’s a huge amount of raw material they manufacture, the manufacturing impact of batteries that are used and so what we do is we get to reuse our batteries up to 500 times so you take that environmental impact and you get to divide it by 500 for each use of our batteries.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so let’s step back here. I want to go back in time a little bit, Charlie. When did you come up with this concept?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: In about 2010, and I have a 13-year-old daughter who a few years ago, we were using a lot of batteries in our house, She would read books under her covers at night, fall asleep, and I’d get up in the morning and go, “Okay, there’s four more bucks down the drain,” and a bunch of batteries I have to throw out and at the same time, her babysitter introduced us to Redbox at home and looking at this Ziploc bag of batteries labeled “bad,” I put two and two together and came up with this idea that we could use the technology expertise of me and my partner, Bill, and build our Redbox-like solution that could solve these problems.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just so incredible, and when you were doing it and looking at the marketplace, you have a very storied career, unbelievably successful historically, but did you ever consider yourself a greenie or a treehugger prior to inventing this environmental solution that was desperately needed?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: I’ve always had a passion for reducing our country’s environmental impact. I’ve been involved in things like energy efficient buildings and interestingly, I’ve been a lifelong battery enthusiast. I’ve tried every new kind of battery that’s come out on the market and one of the things that really made this business go was the invention of a new chemistry of batteries that came out a few years ago that really made this type of battery a product that people could use, have a good experience with, and could deliver a good value to consumers.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. When you were writing your business plan with Bill, what did the competition look like and what does it look like today?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: We don’t have any competition for reusable swap stations in the market today, so we really have a first-mover advantage that we’re really pleased to have.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and when you went out and raised money for this, people were excited? People were not excited? What was that experience like? Because we have so many entrepreneurs that listen to this show. It’s always great to share the entrepreneurial journey with also the amazing solution you’ve created.
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: We’ve received great enthusiasm about this business in part because it’s a dual-mission business. We’re out to build a great business and build a company the size and stature of the Redbox business, but we also have a sustainability mission and there’s a large group of enthusiasts and investors in the country that really get excited about being able to have an impact on the environment while making a great business.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, the combination of profit and higher purpose is sort of the one-two punch nowadays, huh?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: It certainly is.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you start in 2010. You’re now finishing three, three-and-a-half years of running this company and growing it. Are you where you want to be right now and what is it looking like? What was the first pitch like when you went into a Whole Foods or to a Safeway? What was their response when you showed this to them?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: They really liked it because they had a lot of customers looking for battery recycling, looking for ways to use batteries in a sustainable method, so we’ve had a great deal of interest from the retailers and the grocery stores in the nation. As a matter of fact, we are quite a bit further ahead with that than we expected at this point.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How about the shopper? When you gauge the user’s experience, how has that been from what you predicted in the beginning when you were developing the machine and how have you evolved your invention for the consumer experience?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: So, it’s exactly as we expected and consumers really thank us. They’re like, ‘Hey, this is great! This is a great idea. I was looking for a way to do something different than the bag of batteries that I have at home,’ so we get a lot of consumers that say, ‘Hey, thank you so much for doing this. This is great,’ and the one thing that was new and interesting for us that we didn’t expect is that we also have a great deal of interest in recycling the alkaline batteries that people have at home already so you can also take your old alkaline batteries and put them in our machine and we recycle them responsibly.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and so now that you’re in the Pacific Northwest and on the western part of the United States, what do you see in the next months and years ahead in terms of your machine getting out there even more? What does it look like to you?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Our goal is definitely to be as convenient as a Redbox and that means being within a very short distance from your home to make it convenient and to do that, we need to be nationwide and so it’s our goal to have a national rollout in that same kind of key authenticity as you might see in a Redbox or in a Coinstar.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, right now, how many employees do you have?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: We have five right now, so we’ve done this on a very slim budget, so we’re really pleased with how much we’ve accomplished so far.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: A lot you’ve accomplished with five people. That’s what it looks like to me, right?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Yeah, absolutely. We have a great team.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Now, is this machine also applicable for other countries? Are you going to take this international?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: As a small country, we certainly have interest in that and there are countries overseas that have interest in this but we’re taking things one step at a time.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How about when it comes to the battery companies? When you went in or when they’ve seen this, how has been our discussions with the battery companies themselves? Are they thrilled about this? Are they really intrigued by your new invention?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: This is a new offering that we haven’t had a lot of discussions with the major brands that you might be familiar with. The companies that make our reusable technology, of course, are very excited about it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Your daughter, the one who was 13 back then and was your inspiration for the machine, what does she think about what you’re doing?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Oh, she loves it. Our household is now the BETTERY household. She’s a big enthusiast.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: She’s got the cool dad now. My dad’s part of the green revolution. My dad’s in the sustainability revolution. He’s the cool dad.
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: That’s true, but at 13, you can imagine that dads can only be so cool.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I gotcha on that one. For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Charlie Kawasaki with us. He’s the CEO and co-founder of BETTERY, and BETTERY is a battery recycling kiosk that you can find in local grocery stores in the Pacific Northwest now, coming to a store near you eventually, but to go learn more about it — it’s www.betteryinc.com. You know, Charlie, we’ve got about five minutes left, and part of the show is not only to explain the great things that our wonderful guests have created or invented or done, but it’s also to inspire the next generation behind us to follow suit and to even do more with what we’re passing on to them. Share a little bit about your experience. As I said earlier, you have a storied history of success and lots of companies that you’ve been involved with and led and done really well with. Share some of the thoughts that you have for the next generation behind us who want to become part of the sustainability revolution or who want to be the next Charlie Kawasaki and invent something where there’s a great need.
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Well, the thing that really drives me other than solving the problems that people have, getting the kinds of consumer responses that we’re getting, which make me wake up in the morning every day charged up to go and continue to build the business and grow the business and make things available nationwide is that it does have the environmental benefit. It’s doubly motivating and doubly fun to wake up in the morning and think hey, I’m doing something that I really believe in. I’m doing something that’s important, that can make an impact and if you’re going to put your 24-by-seven into it and put your life and all of your effort into something, it’s really important to have that kind of motivation and that kind of belief that what you’re doing can really make an impact.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Do you feel that you’ll never go back? In terms of your life mission, you’re never going to work for companies anymore? You’re only going to work for companies that you’ve created and are involved with?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: That’s certainly the goal, and I’m having a great time both inventing things and working with a great team, so I certainly don’t have any interest in doing anything else.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Is raising money hard nowadays if you’re a young entrepreneur with another great idea? This is amazing, really truly, and I’m just in awe of this whole BETTERY concept you’ve created and how it’s working so well. Is it hard to raise money to get the prototypes and to get some traction?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: It certainly is. We, as a company, ticked off a space that had quite a bit of risk, everything from product development risk to getting interest from national retailers to building a supply chain, all those pieces are quite intensive and these days, investors want to see businesses with the lowest possible risk profile so this was definitely a big challenge for us and fundraising certainly has been very time consuming.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so interesting, Charlie. Years ago, you and Bill would have to be in a garage together. Now, he gets to be in San Jose and you get to be in Portland and you still get to be co-founders and partners of a very ingenious and important new product, so geography isn’t critical to the success of a venture. Is that true?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: We definitely opted for finding people on our team that have the best experience and the most relevant experience in the industry and at the sacrifice of geographic convenience, but with today’s technologies, online video teleconferencing and things like that and file sharing, we’ve certainly been able to be very effective with our team spread all over the country, actually, so that’s worked really well for us. There are some times when we get together in person as well, though.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last minute-and-a-half or so, but for the next generation, what’s your thoughts now? The thought process around education has changed so much, Charlie. With your daughter, is college important, grad school important or is it more important, real life experience? What do you share with the youth of America and the youth of the world right now?
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Oh, education is absolutely paramount today. It’s a very competitive marketplace for people to find really great jobs and while real-world experience is extremely important, I don’t envy kids having to go through to the job market today and having to find employment so I would definitely still very cognizant of equipping their students with real-world experience as they come through the university systems, so it’s kind of the best of both.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: When you’re back on Green is Good, where is BETTERY going to be? We’re down to the last 30 seconds.
CHARLIE KAWASAKI: Oh, we’re going to be all over the place with lots of kiosks in many cities across the country.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it! I love the confidence and we wish you all the best. Charlie Kawasaki, you are a visionary sustainability leader and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us Ro Kumar. He’s the co-founder of Brush with Bamboo. Welcome to Green is Good, Ro.
RO KUMAR: Thank you. Thank you for having me, John.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh, we’re thrilled to have you on and you’re doing such wonderful work and we’re going to get to that story of Brush with Bamboo but before that, I want to hear and our listeners want to hear the Ro Kumar story. How did you get here? How did you become an ecopreneur sustainability superstar? Talk about your journey as a young man and growing up and then having an epiphany and idea and going into business for yourself.
RO KUMAR: A lot of it has to do with my family and where I came from. I was born to Indian immigrants who came to the United States in 1970 and my family is all farmers so when they came to Southern California originally and they bought out first suburban house, which is near Clermont in Southern California, they started planting stuff. I grew up in a cookie cutter suburban housing development in a little miniature Indian farm and growing up, I would always have fresh delicious organic food even before organic became like a word and it wasn’t until I went to college at UC – Berkeley that I really realized what I had grown up with. I grew up on an organic farm and I was fed natural food and this is how I grew up and when I went to college, the juxtaposition of the organic natural lifestyle that I grew up with, compared with the conventional factory farming and all that, I really started learning about the gift that I had been given growing up and that is what really inspired my journey into sustainability because I feel that my roots and where I came from really affected and really showed me how natural products, natural food is really the healthiest and the best way and it’s also a traditional way. The majority of the world is still eating this way and is still living this way and I really want to preserve that and cultivate that here and I feel like that’s my family’s legacy to me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Your family was just doing this thing but you really were raised the way everybody is going now, organic and that was a lucky break but that influenced you and you continued on that path.
RO KUMAR: Yeah, and ever since I went to college and my brother also went to college, we kind of told our parents, ‘Look, what you guys are doing is great,’ and we ended up converting our house more and more into even the front yard is gone now. It’s all a vegetable garden. There’s fruit trees everywhere. We really are embracing creating a homestead where even the suburbs can be sustainable. This is where I came from and coming from the background, I guess it’s not too surprising that I decided to go into sustainable business.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk a little bit about that. You started this wonderful company. For our listeners out there that want to look at what Ro created and co-founded, I’m on your site right now. It is simply gorgeous. It’s www.brushwithbamboo.com. How did you and your co-founder come up with this idea for bamboo toothbrushes?
RO KUMAR: Yeah, I had that sustainable background from my family and there was a time when I was done with college and I was in a time of my life where I wanted to start something, do something, and we happened to be watching a lot of documentaries at my house around that time and I remember I think we were watching this documentary called Plastic Planet and the maker of the documentary, he dropped a fact that really stood out to me and it was that every piece of plastic every created still exists and that really stood out to me and then he talked about all the harms that results from the use of plastic, how every human has plastic in their bloodstream, has BPA in their bloodstream and it was that night that I went to go brush my teeth and I was like wait a second, I’m putting this in my mouth and initially I just was like okay, I’m brushing with plastic and I never thought I would create a toothbrush company but as I started thinking about it more and more and my co-founder at the time was applying to dental school and he was a friend of mine from UC – Berkeley and we also coincidentally had some friends involved in the bamboo industry making bamboo textiles and bamboo clothing and stuff like that and it just kind of came together. I felt like it was almost meant to be. Everything kind of came together, We had my friend who was going to be a dentist and my friend who was really involved in the bamboo industry and we just came up with this idea.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, how many years ago was that?
RO KUMAR: That was about two-and-a-half years ago that we had the idea and the actual bamboo toothbrush hit the market about a year-and-a-half ago, so it took us about a year to actually come up with it and develop it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Which isn’t long for entrepreneurs. You did a good job. You dreamed it up, you visioned it, and you got it launched so let’s talk a little bit about the problem and the solution. You started talking about plastic and the problems with plastic and the epiphany that you had while you were watching the movie. What’s the problem? For our listeners out there, why shouldn’t they be using plastic toothbrushes and why did you choose bamboo as the replacement?
RO KUMAR: Yeah. If you just think about it, the facts really speak for themselves. On average use, we use four toothbrushes per year. We use a toothbrush for three months and we dispose of it and if you just extrapolate that to all of America is doing that and most of Europe and now increasingly more of India and Asia and China, they’re all brushing with plastic. It adds up to about 4.7 billion plastic toothbrushes used every year worldwide and each of those toothbrushes has plastic bristles, plastic handles, plastic packaging and they last for about a thousand years each so it’s 4.7 billion pieces of plastic that are accumulating every year because we treat this as a disposable one time use type of thing but it’s really not. It’s going to exist in the world for a millennium and what really popped up to me is that if you think about the first plastic toothbrush was invented by the Dupont Company in 1938 and the first prototype they invented still has about 900 years before it fully bio degrades so we’re dealing with a problem of accumulation and wherever you see plastic waste in this world, you will find plastic toothbrush waste as well.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, how did you choose bamboo as the right replacement for plastic?
RO KUMAR: We did look into a lot of wooden toothbrushes in the beginning but the issue with wood is that you keep your toothbrush in the moist bathroom environment where things are wet and things tend to mold so that’s the problem with a lot of wooden. There are some wooden toothbrushes out there but I find that in the moist bathroom environment, it tends to create mold on moist bathroom surfaces and that’s the genius of bamboo. Bamboo is a miracle plant in many ways and that’s why it’s so popular in the sustainable business environment is that unlike wood, bamboo is naturally anti-fungal, naturally antibacterial, and it defends itself much better against mold in the bathroom and as long as you keep our toothbrush fairly dry, it can’t be soaking in water or anything like that, but it does not mold in the bathroom.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about your toothbrush. How is the business going? How has it been received? I want people to buy your toothbrush because you make a compelling story. We shouldn’t be using plastic toothbrushes anymore so where can people find your great toothbrush? By the way, I use your toothbrush. I bought it somewhere and I love your toothbrush so for our listeners out there, it’s a great toothbrush, it works wonderfully, and you feel better using it. Where can our listeners buy your toothbrush?
RO KUMAR: We’re available in about 200 retail locations in the U.S., and we’re concentrated primarily on the West Coast, mostly in little health food stores and eco stores and stuff like that. The largest chains we’re in are there’s Nugget Market and Mother’s Market but we’re not in Whole Foods yet or anything like that but 200 retail locations. It’s really spread out all over the place but what I will tell your listeners is that we offer the same price as most of our retailers online at BrushwithBamboo.com and we do offer free shipping nationwide, to Hawaii, to Alaska, anywhere in the United States, free shipping and if you order it online at BrushwithBamboo.com, you’ll get your toothbrush in two to three days, free shipping and on top of that, John, we don’t use any plastic in our shipping process. The toothbrushes are shipped in paper packages with paper tape so we try to keep in line with our mission in everything we do.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so great, and once people are done using your toothbrush, are there other creative ways to reuse your product or recycle your great toothbrush?
RO KUMAR: Yeah, and this is something we thought about really early on is that well, you could throw this toothbrush and even the recycling is recycled paper. The wrapper is compostable. You could throw everything in your green waste bin but we did think about this early on is that we have a perfectly good high quality piece of bamboo so we started thinking about ways that we could creatively use this handle. You could use it as a seedling marker. You could write ‘tomato’ on it and put it in a seedling pot. We’ve had people sending us images of them using their old toothbrush handles to put their hair up or create structures or paint mixers, different little art projects for kids and the bamboo handles are kind of like popsicle sticks but a little sturdier and you can just reuse them however you need.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, your handles are biodegradable and the bristles, which are really soft, by the way, are BPA-free.
RO KUMAR: That was one of the issues with the bristles is that we tried to create a biodegradable bristle. Initially, we used a bamboo blend in our bristles but the issue is that currently, to get a real biodegradable bristle, you’d have to use animal hair like boar’s hair or badger hair and there are a couple issues with that is that first of all, it’s really hard and damaging to the gums. It’s recommended that if you use animal bristles, you should brush only a few times a week and we didn’t want to use animal products so we didn’t want to get something that we couldn’t guarantee was sourced humanely so the bristle, we’re using the highest grade of nylon available, which is called Nylon Six and it does biodegrade in about a year after you dispose it and we also are certifying that BPA-free. The entire product is also certified free of no toxic chemicals, no BPA in the whole product and we certified that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners just joining us, we’ve got Ro Kumar on. He’s the co-founder of Brush with Bamboo. Go to their website, BrushwithBamboo.com. You can order his great products. Besides speaking of toothbrushes, you have more than just toothbrushes. I’m on you site now and you have other products. Share with our listeners out there what else do you have that they can enjoy sustainably?
RO KUMAR: One other thing we thought of last year was we just got to thinking about drinking straws, other daily use products that people use every day and we thought about drinking straws. It’s so irritating to me when people give them away willy-nilly because these things last for centuries and it’s not really disposable. They exist for centuries and we use one billion plastic straws per day. It’s a massive plastic waste stream, one billion per day, so we created a bamboo drinking straw, so it’s actually a variety of bamboo that grows very thin at maturity and we are cutting them into 10 inch pieces and it works perfectly great as a bamboo drinking straw. You can reuse them and the packaging that we put them in, in keeping in line with our mission, is also fully biodegradable. They come in a bag made with plant starch and a recycled paper tag and the entire product off the shelf could technically go in your green waste bin. It’s all biodegradable.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Talk a little bit about your vision and your goals now. You’ve got the business launched, you’re in about 200 stores, you’re selling online. What’s your goal. Where are you going with Brush with Bamboo in the future and what’s your real long term goals here, Ro?
RO KUMAR: Yeah, for us, looking at the whole market, there’s 4.7 billion plastic toothbrushes used every year. There’s a billion plastic straws used every day. We want more and more of that huge number, which we’re only hitting a fraction of right now, to convert to the sustainable alternative, to convert to bamboo, and we really want to pour our resources as a company going forward into, I just want to create the best products possible because more than marketing, more than anything else, I think that by creating the best product possible, more and more people will support our mission so for example, one thing we want to do going forward is to start sourcing FSC Certified bamboo, meaning right now, we use bamboo that I know is sustainably farmed. It is farmed bamboo. It’s not old growth bamboo but I want to get that certified and to get that certified costs thousands of dollars but it’s something that I want to do to further put that trust with our customers and with people that support our company. We’re also looking into bamboo sources. Right now, our bamboo comes from Asia and we’re looking at bamboo sources in Hawaii and Alabama and really looking at what kind of stuff can we do with that domestically grown bamboo and we really just want to improve our products, really stay true to sustainably and convert more of that market away from the non biodegradable petroleum based materials that we’re using and convert it into sustainable products that will over time, degrade back into the earth and not end up in the stomachs of birds or anything like that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know Ro, we’re down to the last three minutes but I didn’t ask you earlier. Do you have a lot of competition in this space? Because I don’t see it out there I bought your toothbrush without even ever having met you and I love it. Is there a lot of competition right now?
RO KUMAR: Not really, John. There is not a lot of competition in this space and for that reason, we feel like the sky’s the limit and the potential market is huge and when I use the word market, I’m hesitant to say we’re capturing the market here but it’s like voting in an election. The more people that vote for a sustainable material by purchasing it with their dollars, we are actually changing global consumption patterns and we’re changing the patterns of material usage and we can really shift entire industries by voting against plastic so that’s what I try to tell my customers and try to tell people when I talk about the toothbrush is that when you purchase products like these or any other products from companies that are committed to biodegradability, you’re voting against plastic pollution and that’s what the important part about products like these. We’re changing through voting with our dollars.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last minute. Two questions, Ro: (a)Where do people go to learn more about our horrible plastic right now in the world and (b) a few last pearls of wisdom from you to the young entrepreneurs that are listening that want to be the nest Ro Kumar.
RO KUMAR: Sure, John. Definitely, there are some really good resources out there for learning about the plastic pollution crisis. The first I’ll give is MyPlasticFreeLife.com and this is a blog run by Beth Terry, who is one of the nation’s leading plastic activists and she’s really supported our mission and Beth Terry endorsed us as her favorite toothbrush so that’s the level of scrutiny that we put this product through is that she looked at all our paperwork, all our testing and she’s a really strong consumer advocate and she supports us and I would also recommend to some of your listeners definitely watch some of these documentaries out there. There’s Plastic Planet and there’s also Bag It, as in plastic bags. These are great resources to learn about the situation and for any entrepreneurs out there, I would just say just follow your passion. It’s all about making things happen that you want to see happen and to your listeners, ‘green is good radio’. That’s the coupon code for 10% off any of our products, all lower case, greenisgoodradio, one word.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re the best. For our listeners out there, go support Ro Kumar and his great work at Brush with Bamboo. It’s www.brushwithbamboo.com. Ro Kumar, you are a sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have today Paulette Frank. She’s the Vice President of Sustainability for Johnson & Johnson family of consumer companies. Welcome to Green is Good, Paulette.
PAULETTE FRANK: Oh, thank you. It’s so nice to be here with you today. Thank you so much for that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so nice to have you and it’s so nice to have Johnson & Johnson in the house and to talk about all the great things you’re doing over there with that great and iconic brand but before we get to talking about Johnson & Johnson & all the great things you’re doing over there, Paulette, the listeners want to know the Paulette Frank story. How did you even come to this position of Vice President of Sustainability at Johnson & Johnson? Share your journey a little bit.
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. Well, I’m a Jersey Shore girl. I grew up at the Jersey Shore with a love for the outdoors and the beach and the ocean and my father was a professional fisherman so he made his livelihood off of the ocean and I learned at a very early age that nature can be very kind, particularly if we take good care of her, so it’s just inspired a love and an appreciation for nature at a very early age. I decided to go into the field after doing some graduate studies in environmental policy at Yale and came to work at Johnson & Johnson 17 years ago and have been thrilled with the opportunity to apply what I love, my passion for the environment and sustainability at a company that really gives me the ability to make a difference.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is amazing and when did you evolve into sustainability? You’ve been there 17 years. When was the sustainability evolution happening at Johnson & Johnson where you moved into that leadership role there?
PAULETTE FRANK: You know, in appreciation for the social and environmental goodwill that we can do in the world has always been part of the company culture. I think it’s kind of taken on different names over the years, even way back when we didn’t even call it sustainability at all, but when I started in the company, it was environmental responsibility function in the organization, which then grew to have more of this social dimension, starting with the employee health and safety and then community outreach and it just sort of grew into this more holistic view of sustainability, which really does bring together both the social, the environmental, and the economic pieces of the business. I’ve been in my current role, which is very broadly base din sustainability, as I just described to you, for about four years in the consumer group.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, you have a new campaign there called Care to Recycle and for our listeners out there that want to follow and see the great work you’ve created and your team has created, I’m on the website now. I was already familiar with it when you launched it and I’ve just fallen in love with it but I’m on it right now and for our listeners to follow along, it’s www.caretorecycle.com. Share a little bit about how this came to being, the vision for it, and what is about really, Paulette?
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. Well, we look at sustainability across the entire life cycle of our products so that includes from the decisions we make around formulations, around designing the product to how we manufacture the product, how we deliver the product, and it also involved how consumer use and ultimately the end of life of the product after it’s used and that kind of took us into this phase of recycling in general and we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into what we knew about recycling. There’s been a bit of research on consumers’ habits when it comes to recycling and most consumers, it’s a very familiar topic. It’s something that is part of our day to day lives and most consumers report that they are fairly good recyclers but we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that and we decided to sponsor a research study to ask some more specific questions about recycling habits and in particular, how do those habits change depending on where you are in your home and where you might be generating recyclable items and we had a hunch going into this study that perhaps, in the bathroom or rooms that might be a little further away from that recycling bin, that perhaps the recycling rates weren’t as high as they might be in other parts of the house like the kitchen, where the recycling bin might be more accessible and the research results confirmed our hunch, that in fact, even though seven out of 10 Americans report that they are consistent recyclers, when you dig a little deeper, only one in five report that they are consistently recycling items from the bathroom and 40% of the respondents indicated they were recycling nothing from the bathroom and this is the room in the house where our products tend to be used or at least stored and it presented us with an opportunity to deliver a message that was very needed and could be very helpful to help consumers of our products and other products that might be in the bathroom be better recyclers of those items.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That makes sense. So, then talk a little bit about then reaching your constituents and clients. How did you come up with the name Care to Recycle and how did the website evolve and I’m on the website and again, for our listeners, it’s CaretoRecycle.com. It’s literally not only visually beautiful but it’s chock full of information and a lot of accessibility to where you can recycle. It’s got great partners, Recycle Bank, Earth 911, Keep America Beautiful, so many great partners here. What a great collaboration but how did that come to be in terms of the name and then choosing a platform like this website and then getting that platform out to others and we’ll talk about some of the platforms you chose to get it out but talk about the name that you came up with, Care to Recycle, and the website creation.
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. Well, I think the name was pretty obvious. Caring is at the heart of everything we do at Johnson & Johnson. We wanted to be very deliberate that the act of recycling is an act of caring for our planet so the name came to us pretty easily. In terms of the content that we decided was going to be important to have on our website like this, we looked to the research again and digging a little deeper into that one in five people are consistently recycling, the reasons why people reported that they weren’t recycling as consistently in the bathroom were two main reasons. Twenty-two percent said that they just hadn’t thought about it, that it wasn’t top of mind, and then 20% reported that they didn’t know what items were recyclable in the bathroom so that’s why we look at Care to Recycle as first a gentle reminder that in fact, there are items in your bathroom that can be recycled so to make it more top of mind for people, and then the second main aspect of the website is information; tips and tools, there’s a recycling locator that you can use. If your local municipality doesn’t accept something for recycling, you can use the recycling locator to find another that might accept that item for recycling so we wanted the website to be helpful . We wanted it to give people the information that they needed to be more informed about recycling in their home and particularly in their bathroom.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, and when did you launch the website?
PAULETTE FRANK: We launched the website earlier this month, first week in October, we launched the website and I can also explain that the reason we selected Tumblr as the platform for the website was very deliberate because at the heart of the campaign’s success is getting this very simple message about a relatively simple act that we can all do. The key to success is getting that message in front of a lot of people because when a lot of people take that simple act, then the impact is big and that’s the goal. The goal is to have a big significant impact on recycling in the bathroom so that we can actually have a benefit to the planet so Tumblr is very unique in that it’s just highly shareable content. You can share every piece of content on there is an individual post that is shareable in and of itself so you can choose to share the video if you want to send that gentle reminder to your friends and family. If you want to share specific tips, you can send that. If you want to share the recycling locator that I mentioned, you can share that so the elements of the website are highly shareable and the audience that’s engaged in Tumblr, they share and they’re very, very likely to share content so that was the main reason why we selected Tumblr to get the message to a very broad audience.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What elements of the campaign are you really excited about? Because I’m on the site now and there are some great tips here for teaching kids to recycle. What are some elements of the campaign that are meant to engage and get people participating?
PAULETTE FRANK: Personally, I love the video and I could be a little biased because the talent in that video is actually the children of our employees and one of them is mine so I’m a little biased on the video, which I think is really meant to be that gentle reminder. It’s meant to hopefully connect with people on an emotional level and encourage recycling but that said, the tips and the tools are meant to be very simple, very straightforward and one of the most exciting pieces of feedback that we’ve received on the tips and tools are notes from people who lead Cub Scout dens or people who are on their PTA Green Committee and they are taking this content and bringing it into the schoolroom. They’re bringing it to the Cub Scout meetings and they’re using it to work with the children. That, to me, is a really nice indicator of success.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Sure is. Let’s talk about Johnson & Johnson though now, and for our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Paulette Frank on with us today. She’s the Vice President of Sustainability for Johnson & Johnson family of companies and we’re talking about their newest and specific campaign around sustainability and recycling. It’s Care to Recycle and you can beautifully see it at CaretoRecycle.com. Let’s talk about your products specifically, bathroom items that can be recycled. What do you produce that can be recycled that we’re not typically thinking of, like you said from your survey, and what should people be doing with them?
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. Well, we have bottles that are in number one, which is PET plastic. We have bottles that are in number two plastic, which is HDPE. Really, all you need to remember is the number one and the number two, so those shampoo bottles, those cleansing bottles, those body wash bottles, if you turn them over and there’s a one or a two on the bottom, they’re recyclable. Now, the caps are generally made of a different material. They’re generally made of number five plastic and those are usually recyclable as well but you should definitely check with your local municipality on number five plastic and we do suggest that you take the caps off, because they are a different type of plastic, when you’re recycling them.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, got it, got it and what are the other bathroom recycling tips that are on this website and that you want our listeners to really try to leverage and engage in after they listen to the show and after they go to your website?
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. Well, the first tip is to turn it over. Turn over the bottle and look for that number one or number two plastic. The other tip is to remove the cap. That’s helpful in the recycling stream to have that separated. The other tip is to rinse. You probably want to get every drop of that product out anyway and so you put a little water in there and you rinse that bottle out and get every drop of product out. That’s also very, very helpful and I think those are the main tips that we encourage people to think about. Turn it over, check it out. If there’s a one or a two, it’s recyclable. Remove that cap and rinse out the bottle if you can.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, with regards to the website, I’m on it now and we were just talking about, I love this line that you have on the website in terms of our babies will inherit our planet. Please recycle in the bathroom. About 50% of the world’s population is under 27 years old and it seems like, Paulette, that that generation, your children’s generation, my children’s generation and grandchildren’s generation, are really on fire for sustainability. They get it. They want to be part of it. They want to be part of the solution. Talk a little bit about the website and you also just give tips, for instance. I’m here and there’s just some very common sense approaches that you give kids to recycle and I’m looking at this list that you have, litter in the park, how to encourage kids, what to do, and what not to do so in terms of picking up trash in a park or beach or making recycling bins or telling them bedtime stories that have an environmental message. This is great stuff. You have four partners. I’ve mentioned them before and these are great organizations: Recyclebank, Earth 911, Keep America Beautiful, Small Steps, Big Winds. Three out of those four have been on this show and we’re so thankful that you’re on this show today. How did you collaborate with them? Why did you choose them and how did this wonderful collaboration come together?
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. Let me also just quickly go back to your point about children. I personally completely agree that children are all over sustainability in general and recycling is probably one of the most fun things they like to focus on and I personally think it’s because they love to jump at the opportunity to turn the tables on parents and point out things that we can be doing better and I know my kids enjoy that in our house for sure so getting back to the partners, we’ve actually had partnerships with these partners for quite a while and given we have a particular focus on waste and recycling. The fact that these partners share that common interest made a lot of sense for us to have partnerships with them in the first place. They also have access to a lot of information and a lot of expertise that we don’t necessarily have so that’s another thing that we look for in our partners, that they can bring something to the table that makes us smarter about our approach and they also have their own audience so they also help to extend our reach and they can reach people that we necessarily can’t so it’s a combination of the expertise and the smarts that they bring to the relationship as well as the reach of getting the message to a broader audience.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting. So, now this campaign, which is, let’s just say this is a micro of the macro of what you do every day as the Vice President of Sustainability at the Johnson & Johnson family of consumer companies. Talk about how this campaign ties back to your macro goals with regards to sustainability and in terms of caring about your clients and constituents and about the world that we all live in. How does that work?
PAULETTE FRANK: Sure. As a consumer product company, consumer engagement is one of the levers that we can pull to advance sustainability. Our products touch millions and millions of people every day and for me, that’s a million opportunities to deliver a sustainability message to someone and to inform them and help them to make better choices and better decisions that ultimately have a positive impact on the planet. There’s obviously a lot that we’re working on with respect to our products and our supply chains and there’s also a lot that our consumers can help us to make an even bigger impact on so this space and this campaign just represents a really exciting first step into this space of engaging our consumers in a dialogue on sustainability that we hope will grow and evolve over time.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, the interesting thing and what I’ve learned from this show over the last four or five years, Paulette, is that when big companies, iconic brands like yours, move in this direction and push sustainability forward, it really gets to move the needle in a very, very relevant way so my question to you is as I’m on your site now and I’m looking at just some of the facts and figures that you have more than 275 operating companies in 60 countries employing approximately 120,000 people, talk a little bit about sustainability as a whole because when people talk about people, planet, and profits, how does that work? How do you engage with all those employees? How do you then push it both internally, now this is the external push, Care to Recycle, which is wonderful, engaging your constituents. How internally do you champion sustainability as such a broad and far reaching company? How does some of that work? We’re down to the last three minutes. Just share some of the highlights with our listeners just so they understand that the journey is never ending and that it can be big and small together.
PAULETTE FRANK: That’s absolutely right. Our employees in engaging with our employees, and I would say engagement in general, whether it’s employees or external stakeholders, is really the next frontier for sustainability in my opinion. IT’s how we’re going to get the scale that we need to make the impact that we need to make on the issues. In a lot of ways, our employees are the first audience that we test things with, like Care to Recycle, for example, and Care to Recycle is as much internally alive as it is on the Care to Recycle website. We have been having recycling campaigns inside our company for the past couple of years where twice a year, we encourage our employees to bring in used electronics, gently used clothes, toys, and books that we then donate to local charities so the spirit of recycling and reusing things so that they don’t ultimately end up in a landfill where they serve no one any good, this is the spirit that we’ve been cultivating internally with our employees for the past few years and it’s also why we had a lot of confidence that the message was going to resonate broadly in the external environment.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, and I’m even on your site here. You get to touch so many elements of sustainability. I’m just looking at your first LEED Gold-certified research laboratory so you get to build green. I’m sure you have all sorts of fascinating opportunities at Johnson & Johnson with regards to energy and water and I’m sure it’s just fascinating.
PAULETTE FRANK: Not to throw another website out there but a lot of our work in sustainability we share with people on our HealthyEssentials.com website. It’s our website where people can learn about our brands and our products and there’s also tips and tools around health and wellness on that website as well as a whole section called Our Caring, where you’ll see a variety of stories and a variety of ways that we are bringing sustainability to life through our business.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, it’s HealthyEssentials.com?
PAULETTE FRANK: Yes, and it’s the Our Caring section.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you for that, and, Paulette, we’re down to the last minute or so. There’s a lot of young ladies around the world that want to be the next Paulette Frank. Just give them a couple of things to grab onto and a couple of your pearls of wisdom, how to make that journey or start it.
PAULETTE FRANK: I would say follow your passion, first and foremost, and I would also say having passion for this work is incredibly important but also having passion for the organization that you are doing this work through and with is also critically important. Finding that fit not only with your passion but who you are as a person and how you choose to lead in this space is also critically important. I have been fortunate to have found both and I think that’s a recipe for success if you can get it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you for your time today. For our listeners out there to find out more about all the great work that Johnson & Johnson is doing, it’s CaretoRecycle.com or HealthyEssentials.com. Paulette Frank, you are a sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re so excited to have back on the show Danielle Nierenberg. She’s the co-founder of Food Tank. Welcome back to Green is Good, Danielle.
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Thank you so much.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Danielle, you’re doing such important work at Food Tank and we were so thrilled to have you on the first time but we’re going to continue the conversation today but before we get to talking about the journey you’re on at Food Tank and all the great work you do there, for the listeners who didn’t have the opportunity to hear the first show, please just share the Danielle Nierenberg story first and how you even came to this position and how you co-founded this great and amazing organization.
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Thank you. You know, Food Tank is really based on a lot of the work that I have the opportunity to do in the developing world. I spent about two years on the ground visiting more than 35 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and I had this great opportunity to talk to hundreds of farmers’ groups and women’s groups, researchers, scientists, policy makers, students and academic journalists and others who are really working on the ground and you know, I had this great opportunity again to really share their stories of hope and success and what we try to do with Food Tank is really shine a spotlight on those stories and show eaters and policy makers and the donor communities what’s really working on the ground and what has a lot of potential to be replicated and scaled up.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, so you co-founded Food Tank with a friend of yours, or was it just another person you met along the way, or who’d you found Food Tank with?
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Our co-founder is Ellen Gustafson, and she and I would keep running into each other at different times because we were often the only sort of youngish people on panels with a lot of old stalwarts of the food and ag and development communities and we really wanted to create something new and exciting and put a fresh perspective on these issues.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, I’m on your website now. It is just gorgeous. I’m a huge fan and I’m signed up to your newsletter, which I get all the time and for our listeners who want to follow along as we chat today, it’s www.foodtank.org so take us through this, Danielle. What are the most important issues today in food and agriculture?
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: You know, we’re highlighting a couple of different core areas. One for us is food waste. We had an event last month in New York City that really highlighted the importance of preventing food loss and food waste. About 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted each year. We’re also working on cultivating the next generation of farmers and putting our focus on reuse. One of the things that I’m most excited about that we’re doing right now is focusing on the International Year of Family Farming. That will be launched in 2014 and what we’ve been doing is really building up and working with the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization to collaborate on this project and again, it really highlights the importance of family farming around the world, not just for food and nutrition security but for income generation, for social stability, and for really protecting biodiversity in our natural resources.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Two things: Explain a little bit further family farming. What does that mean and how does that tie to International Family Farming Year? How can we, your listeners and people who are fans of what you’re doing, help out and learn more about family farming?
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Absolutely. Family farmers, the definition is very loose but we’re classifying them as the 500 million farmers around the world who are generally farming on two hectares of land or less so it’s about five acres. These 500 million folks are feeding the world. Their contributions feed about two billion people or contribute to the livelihood of two billion people worldwide and they’re often ignored. A lot of the investment, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, is not in smallholder farms. It’s in some of the new technologies that governments and development agencies think will be the silver bullets for ending poverty and hunger. Unfortunately again, agricultural investments in the smallholder have diminished and it’s only been since 2007 and 2008, when the food and financial crisis began, that we started paying attention to smallholder farmers again so this International Year of Family Farming is designated by the United Nations. Every year, they pick a special topic to focus on. This year, it was quinoa. The year before, it was cooperatives so International Year of Family Farming is just an opportunity for us all to recognize the importance of family farming. In the United States, we know that family farms have decreased since the 1980s. The average age of farmers in the United States is about 57 years old and farms have gotten bigger here and families have often been pushed off their farms because of poor weather or poor economic returns. Last year, the drought that hit the United States really put a lot of smaller and medium scale and some larger farms out of business in the United States because the farms couldn’t cope and what we’re trying to emphasize is that by focusing on family farms and recognizing the contributions they make, we can really do a lot to make sure that they get the investments they need.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk some more about doing a lot. I love that. What can consumers do when they learn more from your great organization, Food Tank? And for our listeners out there, we’ve got Danielle Nierenberg back on the show. She’s the co-founder of Food Tank and it’s FoodTank.org. What can consumers do to become part of the solution?
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Well, one of the biggest steps we can make is just really recognizing that our food comes from not only farms but from people and really putting a human face to the food that we eat, whether you’re able to shop from a farmers market in your community or a farm stand that you see on the side of the road or ask your supermarket where your food is coming from, just creating more awareness, educating your self and whenever you can, contributing to the local economy. Those farmers are part of your community and the more that you can support them, the better. We also need to not only vote with our forks, but we also need to vote with our votes and really make sure that we’re voting policy makers into office who are concerned about agriculture and concerned about maintaining family farms in the United States. Our country was built on farming and we really need to recognize that it’s an important part of our history and it’s an important part of improving our health and our own livelihood.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, Food Tank is helping right now move the mission forward for International Family Farming Year but let’s go back to what our first interview covered more, Danielle. What’s the macro? Talk a little bit about Food Tank’s mission and what other goals and initiatives you’re working on right now to help move the needle and change the world every day.
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: You know, Food Tank’s mission is really to create a better food system and we do this by highlighting an researching economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable way of alleviating hunger, obesity, and poverty throughout the world and we’re convening individuals and organizations and research and data to really make this food system better and to push these initiatives forward. If you look at what’s going on in the world, we have about one billion people who are hungry. We have 1.5 billion people who are obese. Two billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. Seventy percent of global water use is used in agriculture. We’re losing natural resources at an astonishing rate and we’re obviously not doing something right. The food system is broken. We’re good at filling people up but we’re not actually good at nourishing them and so with our efforts in highlighting these stories of hope and success, we’re able to show what’s working in the world and really help push the conversation forward and really highlight how the communities aren’t always investing in the right things and that they need to.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your site now, of course, and like I shared with our listeners, FoodTank.org. You have partners. You have volunteers. Are you looking for more corporate partners and are you looking for more volunteers to join your mission?
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: You know, we’re not really looking for corporate partners in the sense that we want their funding but we’re looking for really highlighting what businesses are doing. I think a lot of folks in the sustainable agriculture community have really ignored the roles that business can play. There are so many great small and medium and larger businesses and corporations that are trying to do the right things and some of them are doing it well and some aren’t so we really want to highlight how the private sector can make a big dent in creating a better food system and in terms of volunteers, we’re looking for folks who have a variety of skills, whether they’re interested in helping write for our website or contributing to our resource database, which right now, has about 1,200 entrees and we really hope to create a central clearinghouse for the best information on agrocoelogical practices that are available on the web and really bring them together so that whether you’re a farmer or a consumer or a policy maker or a donor, you can come to our site and really find the information that you need.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, and of course, you have over 100,000 subscribers to your newsletter, which I’m one of them, and so people can sign up for that. They could also donate on your website and they can get a lot of information. I’m on there right now. There’s a lot of young ladies in this world, Danielle. Our show broadcasts nationally and it gets uploaded to iTunes and it goes around the world and we’ve got about three minutes left. Can you share backwards, you’re very young still but there’s a lot of young women that are in their teens struggling because they want to really do something meaningful when they’re making their college choice or graduate school choice and they want to not just go work for a big company or go into a profession that they’re really not that interested in but has good money. They want to change the world. Share some of your thoughts on that kind of journey, the journey you’ve taken, so that other young women can follow your lead and become the next Danielle Nierenberg.
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Oh, gosh. You know, I think everyone has to make their own choices and I remember telling my parents I’d made up my major in undergrad and it was environmental policy and government and they were excited for me but years later, my mom said, ‘We wondered how you were going to make money with that,’ and so it’s hard to make the choices that you feel passionate about in the world, especially with our economy the way we are about money and I think what’s exciting at this particular point in time is that the food system really provides so much opportunity for folks, whether you want to be a researcher or a writer like I am or someone who is into baking artisanal bread or if you want to be a farmer. Now is the time. There is so much interest and so much passion around these issues and one of the things that we’ve tried to emphasize is that agriculture can only be the solution, whether you’re talking about unrest in the developing world or employment in the United States or climate change, agriculture can really provide a lot of solutions to these problems and so I think that’s so exciting and I really encourage people in their teens or twenties to follow what you believe in. If you’re doing what you love, the money will follow.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s such good advice and I really believe and I have a daughter and I tell my daughter and I tell other young women that work for our company or our associated companies that I think we’re really moving into the generation of women and there’s very few glass ceilings left, very soon possibly going to be a woman President of the United States. There are women leaders around the world now. Not many glass ceilings left and I think women are going to be the leaders in some many ways, including sustainability and agriculture. You’re one of them and we’re so thankful for your time again today. For our listeners out there to learn more about all the great work Danielle and her co-founder have done and are doing every day, please go to www.foodtank.org and see that work and Danielle Nierenberg, we’re so proud to have you back on. You’re always welcome to come back on Green is Good. You’re a sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.
DANIELLE NIERENBERG: Thank you so much.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re truly honored to have John Bradburn on with us. He’s the Manager of Waste Reduction Efforts at the wonderful and iconic and worldwide brand, General Motors. Welcome to Green is Good, John Bradburn.
JOHN BRADBURN: Hi, John. Great to be with you and hi, everybody out there.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s great to have you on, John, and I want to get to GM and all the important work you’re doing there but before we get there, give us the John Bradbury story first. Give us your journey and how you even came to this place at GM and to the important relevant work that you’re doing there.
JOHN BRADBURN: Okay. Well, it’s really about finding your niche and ever since I was a young boy, I loved the outdoors. My family is very outdoor oriented family, from my dad and my grandfather. They hunted and fished and they camped and really spent all of their recreational time outdoors so I developed a great love for the environment that way, just in awe of the wonderful foliage and the fall here in Michigan, the animals, the streams, the clarity of the water, the trout, the amazing colors that some of these birds and fish would have. I would look at for instance, Wood Duck, and just see the sheening of feathers and then pheasants and that sort of thing and it was just an amazing type of thing to see.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk a little bit about did you dream to grow up and do something with regards to the environment or did you have an epiphany along the way or how did this all happen? Because you’ve been at GM for many years. When did you evolve into sustainability and environmental work?
JOHN BRADBURN: Yeah. I think it’s about capturing opportunities but also, creating opportunities. In other words, when you have a particular job and you’re doing the job function, whether you’re being at home doing your work at home or in your office or in my situation, an industrial setting, you tend to gravitate towards things that interest you as well so you do your job. You look at other things and see things that interest you and work towards those. Management sees those things and they then will typically work you into those scenarios so the job that I have today didn’t exist and it was kind of molded and shaped due to some of the successes we had at GM over the years.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so nice,k and so now, you’re the Manager of Waste Reduction Efforts and so for our listeners out there, I’m on my iPad as we’re chatting here today, John, and I’m on your website called GMBeyondNow.com. It’s basically telling the GM environmental story and again, it’s GMBeyondNow.com for our listeners who want to follow along as we chat here. Can you share a little bit about your passion, specifically to reducing, reusing, and recycling in creative unique ways and how you’ve brought that to GM and engaged that amazing legacy brand into this whole new Sustainability Revolution?
JOHN BRADBURN: It’s really about visioning things in a different way so in other words, if you see something and you see it in its originally intended purpose and it is used for that purpose, once it’s done, what else can it become? That’s the challenge and in doing so, a lot of times maybe it needs a slight alteration or you may need to tweak something along the lines but you can typically create something else from that and in many ways, that also can be considered reuse and it also stems back from a time when I was young and being interested in understanding how things were made, how things were put together. I didn’t spend a lot of time reading when I was young. I spent time thinking about things and observing. I think that’s an important trait for young kids to be able to have time to do so for the parents, please consider that. Let the kids be creative and in doing so, as they evolve into adults, they’ll hopefully carry those traits on and learn more and do more.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: At GM, what do some of your specific efforts include? What are some of the higher visible sustainable things that you’re doing include that you can share with our listeners so they can start understanding how you’re taking the legacy paradigm and you’re shifting it?
JOHN BRADBURN: Well, out of all of our byproducts or in industry terms, some people call them waste. We don’t call them waste. They’re resources and they’re resources that are out of place. We look at those and we try to manage them in a better way continually. We have an umbrella program we call our Landfill-Free Program. We have about 107 operations around the world, of which don’t send any waste to those landfills and in doing so, they have to reuse it or recycle it. They have to find creative ways to become landfill free. It’s common and consistent around the world an I monitor it and even once we’re landfill free, we’re going to continually improve upon that so that’s kind of our signature program but it’s not the finish line. We want to continually improve.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: A hundred and seven operations around the world are landfill free. That’s incredible. When you say something is landfill free, how much waste is avoided then from going to the landfill that historically was sent to the landfill?
JOHN BRADBURN: Well, every year on average, we recycle or reuse about 2.5 million tons of material. Now, just to give a bit of a perspective, if you took that material and put it into the back end of Chevrolet Silverado pickups, parked them end to end, the line creative from those pickups would wrap around the world at the equator every year so that’s how much material we manage. It’s certainly a significant amount. We leverage volumes. We share best practices. We mentor other companies but we also learn from other companies. We’re members of consortiums and that sort of thing so it’s really a matter of sharing and learning so we all improve together.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay, so a lot of people, John, in your position or at other companies, not specifically to even the automobile industry, just other large companies, have pushed back from sustainability because they’re worried that it costs money or it’s going to overwhelm them from their core business model. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of being environmental and sustainable and how they financially benefit GM and all the efforts that you’re doing in terms of your automobile core business?
JOHN BRADBURN: Absolutely. All good sustainability projects have benefits and they need and they do have financial benefits as well. The amount of material I mentioned that we generate, our byproducts, generate a significant amount of financial value. We average plus or minus, around a billion dollars a year revenue from those various commodities and those commodities are again, continually managed so that we can even gain more revenue but I say that but our ultimate goal, our long-term goal, is to generate zero revenue and the reason for that is because we would consume the materials within the process. That’s the goal so that all of our inputs or products that we use in our processes are utilized in that process. Therefore, we become more efficient.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, like a closed-loop urban mining system inside of GM of keeping that waste out of the landfill but finding a new home for those resources within your own automobiles.
JOHN BRADBURN: Exactly. We want to be as efficient as possible because really, to be sustainable is about being efficient. If you look at our history in this country, it’s really built upon efficiency improvements. If you look at what an engineer does, regardless of what engineering discipline they’re in, it’s about efficiency and an environmental engineer like I am, that’s our goal as well. How do we do something and make it be as good or better with less? And that is the ultimate goal.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got John Bradburn on. He’s the Manager of Waste Reduction Efforts at General Motors. You can look at a lot of the great work that John is doing at General Motors at GmBeyondNow.com. John, I’m on your site right now and I’m looking at some fascinating information and I want you to share with our listeners some creative examples of recycling and reusing that you’ve spearheaded at General Motors.
JOHN BRADBURN: Okay. I’d be happy to, John. There’s been a few that we’ve done. One in particular is our Coat Project, we call it, and what we did was we got with some suppliers and created a small team of people and reached out to a young lady in Detroit named Veronica Scott who was making coats for the homeless in Detroit and other cities and the coats were made by women who were formerly homeless so it’s an amazing model. It’s an amazing example of entrepreneurship but also societal outreach so we had a fabric type material that’s a sound absorption material we put in our doors and it has some cutout pieces for door handles and things so if you can imagine a doughnut hole type scenario with this material that generates some scrap, and manufacturing scraps are a reality today of manufacturing to a certain extent, we worked with a supplier who then created a long rolled fabric from that product and we donated that to Veronica and the plan to make coats so basically, what we did was we took car parts and we created a fabric from that that now are used for coats serving people who have certain challenges in our communities so what it does is it creates a recycling opportunity, also, an opportunity to do outreach as well as community commitment and it touches upon several sustainability factors and that’s what we try to do at GM is to not just recycle, not just reuse materials, but to benefit other areas in need as well and that’s an example and there are more.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m looking at some of the photos on the site of Veronica Scott’s empowerment plan and what you’re doing with them and that is just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful work and like I said to our listeners out there, it’s GMBeyondNow.com. It’s really got a lot of information here. Part of what we do on the show also, John, is to empower our listeners to get more involved because for the most part, once our listeners understand that there’s more that we can all do, they want then to be part of the solution rather than to be part of the problem. What are some tips that you’ve learned in your journey both personally and professionally that you can share back with our listeners at large?
JOHN BRADBURN: Okay. First off, share your ideas and mentor others but I would suggest that we listen to our elders. We listen to people who have been there. If we look at our history and understand some of the things that have been done along the lines of reuse and recycling and really being efficient with certain things, we’ll see that our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents all did things that may have been lost in generations that succeeded them but were really fantastic ideas, whether they be at home in reusing our coffee grounds in garden bedding or flower bedding or me, I’m a fishermen, we use our worm bedding. I take our aluminum cans that aren’t returnable and I smash them down and I turn that aluminum in and that buys my fishing license for the years. There’s just many things. I took an old pressure treated deck that somebody had tore out and I asked him for the boards, I flipped them over and the bottom side, which isn’t exposed to the elements is in really good shape and I made a deck from it. I took old wood pallets that had deck boards on them that were thin and I cut them up and I made shingles from them and put them on a woodshed and they’re holding up fantastically and they look as well as the cedar shakes that you buy for $100 a square in the store. There’s just many things. Try to use your imagination so listen to the elderly. Try to use the things that they’ve done over the years, from rewashing Ziploc bags to oh my, there’s just the canning, the gardening, all those sort of things were all about sustainability, helping others, working with wildlife, creating your own little ecosystem in your homes but do it with an imagination. Really, our imaginations are our limiting factor and putting those green dots together that is these ideas so that you end up with a good program in your business or your home.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For the business owners out there that are afraid to take the first step in sustainability, share some ways for them to get on the path and to have them understand that it’s really a journey. It’s not a beginning and an end and that it’s really worth their time economically and otherwise to get on the journey.
JOHN BRADBURN: Yeah well , first I think that all business owners are actually doing some forms of sustainability. They may not recognize it as such yet but if you look at managing your material inputs in a good way and your outputs in a good way so that you save money or actually make money, that’s sustainable as well because to be a sustainable company, obviously you have to have a good economic condition as well as community. Community is very, very important in what you’re doing in a business, especially if you have the local business. Outreach is very important and your customers will see that but also, those who you reach to can very well become your customers in the future and make your community much stronger so again, look at what you’re doing today. Recognize that a lot of what you’re doing is sustainable as well and then set some goals. Set goals even if they’re simple but goals with continual improvement so every year you reassess them. For instance, you may say well, let’s reduce our amount of materials to a landfill by 10% this year, just things like that. Create a little bit of a game, a challenge. It can be fun. Maybe create a little bit of a challenge to the household or to your business work group to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to have a little game to see who can come up with the best reuse idea amongst our product line,’ things like that. It really can be fun and challenging and really, employee enthusiasm will benefit as well.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know John, we’re down to the last four minutes or so and again, I’m looking at your website and we touched on a lot of issues today, especially the landfill free facility concept, but there’s so many things that GM is doing to make a better world for all of us in terms of greener vehicles, energy efficiency, resource preservation. If you may indulge me, can you share with our listeners just a little tip of the iceberg on those? And then I want to finish the show with something. I’m on your website and I just read something so fascinating, the message to the youth. You’ve already said earlier to listen to your elders. Here’s a fact that I just read on your website. Half of the earth’s population is made up of young people under the age of 27 so the real opportunity is with our young listeners who are listening to you, John. They want to be the next John Bradburn and they want to change the world every day when they wake up. Can you share some thoughts with regards to GM, John Bradburn, and the youth out there and what they can do as we move forward?
JOHN BRADBURN: Absolutely. We do a lot of work with youth. In fact, I was a Boy Scout leader for many years and many of our projects relate to the youth, such as our duck boxes that we make with the Chevy Volt battery chargers, duck boxes, bat houses, bluebird houses, we have over 500 of those houses out throughout North America now and most of them were made by kids with us and with our help so that ties us to the Chevy Volt and the many other vehicle lines that we have that get great mileage and our electric vehicles are doing very well so I would say to the youth set your goals as well. Keep in mind that as you go through school, it’s about getting good grade, It’s about the math, and the science and the technologies, that sort of thing but it’s also about observation and figuring out things on your own, how to do better. My laboratory is my barn. Your laboratory can be your clubhouse or your garage, that sort of thing. Your laboratory can be your room where you can do some experiments, as long as they’re safe. Make sure mom and dad work with that too but at any rate, that’s what helped me kind of figure things out as a young boy, understanding how things worked, so it’s really about our very cherished populations of our youth as well as our elderly learning from each other.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Love it. Down to the last minute and a half. What gets you out of bed in terms of GM and what’s the future hold for sustainability in the next year or two? What are you working on?
JOHN BRADBURN: Oh my. I’ve got a lot of projects in the oven right now. GM has been very good to me over the years and many of us in allowing us to work these various angles that may not even exist today. Sustainability is such a good area to get involved in because it’s so vast. It’s difficult to know all the various angles of it and that’ primarily because most of them don’t even exist today. It will be someday a term that is somewhat taken for granted because people will do it anyway. They won’t think of these things. Down the road, it will just be done.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And we thank you for getting all the work done you’ve done so far and what you’re going to do in the future, For our listeners out there again, to see John’s great work at GM, it’s GMBeyondNow.com. John Bradburn, you are a sustainability visionary and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have Amy Malick on. She’s the Deputy Commissioner of Sustainability in Chicago, the great city of Chicago. Welcome to Green is Good, Amy.
AMY MALICK: It’s a pleasure to be here.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Amy, before we get into talking about all the great work you’re doing in Chicago and especially with regards to sustainability in aviation, can you first share the Amy Malick story and how you even got here?
AMY MALICK: Sure. I’ll try and keep it brief but in any case, my interest has actually always been in sustainability. I studied urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle, which, as you can imagine, is kind of a hotbed for sustainability, and it’s actually been something I’m very interested in. Most of my history was actually in more of the urban transit and urban sustainability realm. I don’t actually have too much of an aviation background before joining the department about three years ago and I have to say I was a little bit nervous when I joined the airport because it’s just not a background that I’ve held and I figured there must be some sort of secret language of aviation that I certainly wasn’t tuned into but in any case, when I joined with this role, I learned that airports are very much like cities and certainly there’s all kinds of different lessons that we can learn from airports to help with resources. We certainly use lots and lots of energy. We generate lots of waste. We manage many, many people so it’s kind of like our citizens of O’Hare and Midway, the folks that work there and the passengers that we serve, so I’ve been able to bring a lot of stuff that I’ve learned in the city planning and urban planning realm to the airports and vice versa, learned lots and lots about how we can manage our resources in the urban context simply by working at the airport.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re so thankful for your time today because this our first deep dive into aviation sustainability and for our listeners out there, I’m on one of your wonderful website. I’m on www.flychicago.com. I then went on the O’Hare section and I clicked sustainability, so for our listeners that want to follow along on their iPad or on their tablet or whatever device that they’ve got in front of them, that’s where I would go right now, but Amy, give us a sort of macro overview of Chicago’s airports in terms of passengers, flights, aviation, sustainability, and how they all start to interact in terms of how many people you’re serving and how many flights do you have to deal with on a regular basis?
AMY MALICK: Sure, yeah. As you can imagine, O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the world. We’re the second busiest in the world and we had about 67 million passengers in 2012. We provide service to 200 domestic and international destinations and we also have a major center for air cargo shipments between FedEx and the USPS and other cargo carriers around the world with more than 1.2 million tons of cargo handled in 2012, so it’s certainly a huge hub in terms of aviation and then on the Southwest side of Chicago, we also have Midway International Airport, which some of your listeners may know if they’ve ever flown on Southwest because most of the flights coming in and out of Midway are Southwest Airlines flights, so that airport, while we consider it to be the busiest square mile in aviation, it’s just a really dense little airport but we serve more than 19.5 million passengers last year, so it’s growing very, very quickly. It’s Southwest’s number-one market so we are experiencing lots of growth and on top of all that, we’re also managing the $8-billion O’Hare Modernization Program, which is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in the country and that program has presented a huge opportunity for us to establish ourselves as a leader in terms of sustainability because we are essentially rebuilding the airport. We’re expanding it. We’re moving lots and lots of earthwork. We’re building new facilities and it is just a huge opportunity for us to approach green construction in a totally new and innovative way that has never been done in aviation and that’s really where we established ourselves as a leader.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s go back a couple steps. When was the epiphany of the leadership at the Chicago Department of Aviation when folks started getting around a table and saying, ‘Let’s focus more on sustainability’? Was that recent times?
AMY MALICK: That was actually about 10 years ago, when we announced the O’Hare Modernization Program that I just described and again, if we didn’t incorporate sustainability in the very beginning in that, we would have really missed the boat. We knew that it was going to be something that would establish our legacy and our leaders at the time, our former mayor and then our current commissioner, Rosemarie Andolino, really had gotten together and decided that this was a huge priority for the city so that was about 10 years ago and actually, prior to that, we had some other initiatives that were certainly green and sustainable in nature but it was not until that time that we really, really hit it hard.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: On a macro level, what can an airport do, because we have listeners and city leaders from all around the country and actually around the world that listen to this show, what can an airport do to be more environmentally responsible?
AMY MALICK: I guess what I would first say is that aviation in general probably doesn’t have the reputation as being the greenest in the world really. People are really concerned about emissions coming from aircraft and things along those lines. I will say that airport operators, such as the Department of Aviation, don’t actually fly the aircraft so that is a little bit outside of our wheelhouse but in any case, we do operate these massive facilities, so between the 7,200 acres at O’Hare and the square mile at Midway that are 24/7 mission-critical facilities that are basically always going, always running. We have lots and lots of lights that are always on. We use lots and lots of water and generate solid waste and then with the O’Hare Modernization Program, we’re generating lots and lots of construction and demolition waste as well as the resources that go into powering the construction equipment so all those things have an environmental impact that we have control over so that’s been our focus, is to reduce the environmental impact of all those things that go into running an airport on a daily basis.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who just joined us, we’ve got Amy Malick on. She’s the Deputy Commissioner of Sustainability from Chicago’s Department of Aviation. Amy, give our listeners a couple examples of what’s unique in terms of your sustainability initiatives at your two great airports, Midway and O’Hare?
AMY MALICK: I mentioned earlier our focus on green construction practices at O’Hare and starting in 2003, as I mentioned, we developed guidelines, which are now being used by airports all around the world called The Sustainable Airport Manual and your listeners are probably familiar with the LEED green building system that the U.S. Green Building Council developed for green building construction and we decided to build our own sort of parallel rating system for airport construction because our context is quite different. We’re building runways and air traffic control towers, and things like that that are very aviation focused that LEED did not necessarily apply to so we developed our own green rating system very specific to airports and now it essentially that everything that goes on on a daily basis, whether it’s designing runways to operating our restaurant inside of the terminal facility so that’s one unique thing that we are quite well known for. We’ve got airports all over the world that are using that for a framework for their own sustainability practices so that’s one of the starting points that we used and I mentioned air traffic control towers. We developed the very first LEED certified air traffic control tower at O’Hare, which was completed in 2008, and one thing that’s very unique about that, which is also somewhat unique to Chicago, is that it has a green roof on it and Chicago is, as some of your listeners may know, known as the capital of green roofs so we just love them here. It’s something that we’ve focused on for many, many years, They’ve got all kinds of wonderful environmental benefits and we have 14 of them that we promote between O’Hare and Midway, the largest square footage of green roofs at airports around the world, so we love those and we love to tap their benefits and we’ve been able to convince folks that may not have been very interested in that type of technology that it’s actually a really good thing, not only from an environmental standpoint but from a building operations standpoint as well.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Amy, you mentioned you’re 10 years into it as an organization and sustainability is a journey and we all know that and understand that now. It’s not an end all be all and it’s never over, frankly, so you mentioned all these opportunities really, lights, water, food waste, the green roofs you’re doing. Are you touching all of them or what gets you out of bed in the morning? What’s now on the frontier? What’s next to do?
AMY MALICK: Yeah, I think for me, the future is really in the long term goals that we are trying to reach and there’s a lot of climate science that’s out there in terms of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that we need to reduce in order to maintain a sustainable planet and so that’s the kind of thing that certainly motivates me but also, there’s a lot of very exciting and sort of smaller impact strategies that we’re implementing at O’Hare and Midway that excite me very much and that I know that our traveling public absolutely loves and I’ll just mention a couple of those right now, just to keep it innovative because changing light bulbs is really not that exciting to a lot of people so we try and do some innovative things that provide educational opportunities to our passengers. For instance, we have the first aeroponic garden in one of our terminals that supplies fresh locally grown produce to our concessionaires so that’s a great kind of educational opportunity to help people understand the benefits of local food. We also operate the first airport apiary, which is basically a bee colony, at O’Hare and that apiary, which has 50 beehives, is tended by ex offenders in Chicago that are part of an organization that are working to provide work for development and job training opportunities for folks who truly, truly need them and so they’re able to harvest that honey and generate a skincare line that they sell at Whole Foods.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s that skincare? I want to give a little shout-out here because this is very unique. Not only are you doing something sustainable, this is important, and recycling, but you’re also recycling lives.
AMY MALICK: Yeah, that’s exactly right so we think about all this in terms of people, planet, and profit, the triple.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, what’s the name of that product that you’re selling at Whole Foods?
AMY MALICK: It is called Bee Love, and it’s something that our airport concessionaires also sell and it’s a great gift that anyone who travels through our airport can pick up as a reminder of the exciting sustainability opportunities that are out there.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wonderful, wonderful. Keep going.
AMY MALICK: A little fun tidbit: Earlier this year, we actually hired a herd of goats and sheep and burrows and llamas to help us with our landscaping around the edges of the airport and so those grazing services really helped us to reduce the use of gas powered equipment as well as remove some vegetation in areas that would otherwise attract birds and other wildlife, which are not compatible with our planes, as you probably know, so that’s just a fun and very educational opportunity that the traveling public has just enjoyed greatly and we do take sustainability incredibly seriously and the very, very hard stuff that takes many years to implement is complimented nicely by some of these lighter and media friendly and really fun initiatives, like our apiary and our grazing animals.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is amazing. I never thought when we started discussing the great work you’re doing over in Chicago and the Aviation Department that we would be talking about beehives or goats. A couple things: What can other airports learn from what you’ve done in Chicago and where you’re going with what you’re doing in terms of sustainability?
AMY MALICK: Well, first I’ll say that we have a wonderful network of airport sustainability leaders around the world that are part of what we call the Airports Going Green Movement and it’s something that we founded six years ago with a conference that we hosted in Chicago every year called Airports Going Green and this really brings together my peers from all around the world to share their stories about what they’re doing in their wonderful cities around airports and aviation and so we learn from each other a lot and we try not to ever reinvent the wheel, although all of us like to be the first at something, but we certainly learn from each other. I’ve got peers all around the world that are doing really exciting things that I learn from every day so I think again, the focus on daily operations because again, we do touch every single facet of the environment in our day to day operations at airports so ensuring that you’re really understanding what all of those opportunities look like and every airport is different but at the same time, we do touch lots and lots of different stakeholders, whether it’s our concessionaires, our airlines, our custodial staff, our rental car partners, things like that, all of which have these amazing opportunities to reduce their environmental impact and I think for me, if there’s one lesson learned, it’s really that engaging all those stakeholders in the dialogue is absolutely critical because our purview is limited in scope to some degree but if you start looking at all of these stakeholders that operate at airports, from airlines to rental car agencies to concessionaires, it’s like peeling an onion. There’s just endless opportunities and then it also starts to get up to corporate culture within these large corporations that we work with, airline companies and things along those lines, that are doing amazing things at the corporate level so we can start to have some really, really big impacts when we look at it that way.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: When the leaders of aviation come to your conference, Airports Going Green, and for our listeners out there to learn more about that, it’s AirportsGoingGreen.org, do you get competitive? Besides sharing best practices, do you say, ‘Wow they’re doing this over at this airport. We’re going to do that next.’ Are you always not only sharing but also, are you a little bit all competitive together?
AMY MALICK: Absolutely. A little friendly competition never hurt anyone. We look to one-up each other a little bit but at the same time, it’s been incredibly friendly. We love to have each other’s accomplishments in general. It’s just a really, really friendly network of peers but yes, we look to be the first at everything, as do a lot of our peers.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We talked about bees and goats and green roofs. We’re down to the last two minutes or so. Give our listeners just a little bit of visibility on what you’re looking towards in the next couple of years that are totally out of the box that are going to continue to move the needle with regards to sustainability.
AMY MALICK: Well, first we’re trying to establish a couple of major, major developments that are very sustainability focused that would be a first for Chicago and for our region, although a lot of airports have done things like this so I won’t say that it’s completely outside of the box but one for instance, would be to develop a 50-acre solar development at O’Hare, which would supply a lot of green energy to the airports so other airports have done this so certainly, as I mentioned, wouldn’t be the first but it would be a first for the Chicago area and would be a first for us in terms of being able to generate renewable energy at the airport so that’s something I mention, sort of the hard stuff. This is definitely one of those hard projects that doesn’t happen overnight so it’s something that we’ve been working on for a little while now that we’re really, really excited about and similarly, I did mention earlier that for our O’Hare Modernization Program, which is a huge opportunity with regards to construction and demolition waste, we’ve been able to recycle about 98% of our construction and demolition waste on the O’Hare Modernization Program, which is a great, great success for us but we do have a long ways to go as it relates to our sort of daily operations and the waste that’s generated at our terminal facilities. We’re working on a strategy to become a zero-waste airport and we have quite a ways to go to reach that goal but we are working on a development that will allow us to recover a very, very high percentage of our waste. I’ll say that about 40% of our waste is organic, so it’s food or soiled paper, things like that, that could be composted and so we recently established the nation’s most aggressive green concessions policy, that will require 100% compostable disposable packaging, things like that, so that we can toss less that way so those are the things we have going.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Amy, thank you so much and for our listeners out there, it’s www.flychicago.com. Amy Malick, you are a sustainability aviation superstar and truly living proof that green is good.
AMY MALICK: Thank you.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and today we’re so honored to have with us Brenda Pulley. She’s the Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful. Welcome to Green is Good, Brenda.
BRENDA PULLEY: Hi, John. How are you?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m great, and we’re so thankful you’re on the show with us today and this is Keep America Beautiful’s first appearance on Green is Good, so thank you for coming on and sharing the Keep America Beautiful story today.
BRENDA PULLEY: Thank you. We’re delighted to be part of your show.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get into talking about all the great things you’re doing over at Keep America Beautiful, Brenda, can you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, how you even came here and what brought you to Keep America Beautiful?
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. I started my career working for the U.S. House of Representatives and there I worked for a member of Congress named Ike Skelton and had the opportunity in working with him, who was Chair of the Energy and Environment Small Business Committee to start address recycling, waste reduction, hazard waste, energies that were prevalent at that time in America and how to address those and how businesses could better address the proper handling of waste recycling and materials. From there, I worked for a couple different trade associations but all very much related in recycling so one was the National Association of Chemical Recyclers and so a couple different trade associations in that and then I joined an aluminum company called Novelis, again with energy and environmental issues very relevant to the business, particularly the recycling of aluminum, and then, as you can see sort of throughout my career, there were recycling and environmental type issues and really during that journey found that there’s a real opportunity to work with individuals, not just businesses, but also individuals and encouraging them in the importance of recycling and the benefit it has economically to not only the US, but frankly globally.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You joined Keep America Beautiful back in around 2010 or so?
BRENDA PULLEY: I did.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. We’re so thankful you’re here. You have an amazing history in doing everything sustainable and green, so can you share a little bit about Keep America Beautiful today? First of all, I know you’ve recently launched, and I’m on your website and for our listeners who want to follow along, Keep America Beautiful has a great website. It’s www.kab.org. You launched the I Want to be Recycled campaign. Can you talk a little bit about that?
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. It’s very consistent with Keep America Beautiful’s mission, just so you know, so we are celebrating our 60th anniversary of Keep America Beautiful. We started frankly with litter and trying to prevent litter back in the ’50s and one of our first PSA campaigns that people will remember was an anti-litter campaign. It’s our first partnership with the Ad Council, so this new partnership has a lot of the opportunity to launch a new public service ad campaign and it is very much around recycling of materials.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Keep America Beautiful and recycling. Talk a little bit about that keyword, recycling. Why recycling? Why now?
BRENDA PULLEY: It is, as you know, I know you operate globally, that businesses, leaders around the globe are looking differently at resources. They’re looking at the global population, the growing demand on resources, and even individuals are looking to rethink and reconsider the value of resources that we’ve been putting in the waste stream and so how do we not be as wasteful but in fact, keep those resources in our economy in reusing them?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s important for our listeners to understand and for those who have just joined us, we’ve got Brenda Pulley on from Keep America Beautiful. It’s KAB.org. You have a lot of resources at Keep America Beautiful and I know before you launched your campaign, you did some research about recycling. Can you share with our listeners what did you learn about recycling in this research and in your homework prior to this launch?
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. A lot of thought, a lot of work, a lot of research was put into it so that we had the right messages for that campaign and one of the key things that we found in the various interviews and focus groups that we did was people really do not want to be wasteful but they need to be (a) encouraged to recycle with the right message, which I’ll get to, and also need to have recycling information, John, and I know you know how important this is but they need to have readily accessible recycling information on what, when, and where to recycle so the first one is what’s the right message of people? And they felt like it was a burden to recycle but one thing that we discovered was when they realized they could be empowered to make something not be wasted but in fact, give it a new life, it has an afterlife, keep it in that economy, they were really inspired so it went from an obligation, literally, the recycling kind of concept, to an inspiration to recycle when they realized they had that power and that was reassuring them of what materials could become.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting; so what you’re saying, Brenda, is you’ve got to encourage people to recycle and then you have to make it easy and accessible.
BRENDA PULLEY: You really do so it’s (a) that convenience of recycling so having that bin, whether it’s at home or at work or out and about or at the school, having those bins readily available, having the information on what, where, how, but then the other thing is that underlying that we’re always encouraging people and reassuring them of what things can become so whether it is that the beverage bottle now can become a pair of jeans, a shampoo bottle that can become a park bench or the juice bottle, I should say, can become a park bench, those kinds of things, from can to can, they need to be reassured of that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so good. You know, now that you’ve launched a campaign, what are you learning? What’s coming back to you as you watch the campaign evolve? What are you learning from the consumers as you start the whole interaction and rollout and scaling of the campaign?
BRENDA PULLEY: Well, it’s still relatively early in the campaign so we’ve really are working with our partners, the Ad Council, and its media partners, and we’re working with our partners, so KAB affiliates, all our recycling partners in many cities and counties across the country, so working to get it really activated but I will tell you it is great when you show the ad to people and see their response to it. We’re getting really good feedback about the ad and it’s clicking and it’s really registering or resonating, I should say, with people about what materials can become.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, and that’s so interesting and for our listeners out there again, I’m on your website, on Keep America’s Website and it’s www.kab.org and I know this is a new campaign and I’ve been a huge fan and follower of your work for a long time and I remember that initial campaign. I’m old enough to remember the initial campaign that you had and grew up with that on television. I know you’ve recently launched other campaigns so besides I Want to be Recycled, you’ve launched Recycling at Work. Can you share a little bit about that? Because we all go to work every day and this is another great platform you’ve put out there so please explain to our listeners what that means.
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. When you look at EPA data, we know that up to 40, 45% of municipal solid waste is actually generated in workplace settings so what we decided to do last year as part of America Recycles day and frankly, partnering with our Alcoa Foundation was look where there are opportunities that we can help make a difference and so it just seemed to be one of those opportunities when you think about recycling at work and particularly, many larger businesses have started to look, as part of their sustainability platform, to put in recycling. A lot of folks have doing it in manufacturing for a lot of reasons, for economic reasons, etcetera but frankly, in the workplace setting, particularly office type workplace settings, we found there was not enough recycling that was offered, particularly in small and medium, and so this program is really designed to make it very easy for any size business. There’s the 10-step action plan for any size business to look at, do waste characterization, identify locations on their office settings to put recycling bins, and then not only do we offer easy steps on how to do that. One of the key things that we want to do to set ourselves apart is really identify opportunities to engage and inform employees on how to recycle because at the end of the day, you want to engage individuals in the workplace so that they will recycle. We are hopeful and actually will be studying if there is a spillover effect and it influences more recycling in the home but we’re looking to organize activities on how to hold an America Recycles Day event in a workplace setting or how to hold an Earth Day event on the workplace setting and we’ll be sharing those activities with our pledge partners and one benefit that we’re looking to provide more there’s exclusive offers with a couple recycling bin providers that once you become a pledge partner, you get 15% reduction on office-type recycling bins so that’s the array of benefits and resources that we’re providing. We know there’s much more, particularly when it comes to recognition and then reporting on those successes, reporting on the amount of material that is recycled, or frankly, sort of phase two that we’re looking at.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting, and for our listeners out there, what’s so eye opening about what you do, Brenda, is I’m on your website now and I’m looking at some of your featured videos. You have chapters all around the country so it’s just not Keep America Beautiful and you have one office in DC running a national program. You have chapters such as Keep Las Vegas Beautiful and Keep Atlanta Beautiful, and I know you have Keep California Beautiful. You have amazing chapters across the country that are always great ambassadors for the work that you do and are continuing to engage and get more people involved with all the great recycling programs you have across America. How many chapters do you have now?
BRENDA PULLEY: We have over 600 of what we call affiliates and over 1,000 partners that are affiliates and recycling partners and others that frankly are, as you just indicated, embedded in communities across the country and that really gets to the core of Keep America’s mission, John. It’s about engaging individuals to be part of their community and working with others and to help improve the public spaces in that community, so whether it’s picking up litter, converting a vacant lot, planting trees, planting gardens, or instilling more waste reduction and recycling activities. That is what we do and again, as I said, it’s about being part of that community and engaging individuals to be part of that community and to take greater pride in that community.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners just joining us, we’ve got Brenda Pulley. She’s the Senior Vice President of Recycling for Keep America Beautiful. It’s www.kab.org. I’m going to take us in a different direction now, Brenda. Recycling is so important but as you know, and as I’ve learned just in recent years, it’s a fascinating social study in terms of demographics, as to who’s really into it and who’s really not and I know what’s near and dear to your heart and where a lot of your focus has been in recent times at KAB has been in America’s youth and the colleges and the young people that are on fire for The Sustainability Revolution and for recycling. Can you share how you’ve created these unique programs across America to engage America’s youth and what you’ve learned from that whole process?
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. As you indicate, we’ve done some research, some national surveys, those kinds of things and there’s that 60, 65% of individuals across the country that we call the sometimes or the sporadic recyclers that all of our programs are really designed to target to help them become the everyday recycler, whether they’re passionate or not. We want it just to become second nature for them to do and clearly audiences that come top of mind are that K through 12 when children are young and very open to these kinds of messages and really sharing with them the importance of recycling and working to help make it a habit that they’ll just grow up with and frankly, be ambassadors for others to recycle, whether it’s their parents or their neighbors, that kind of thing, so we have a K through 12. It’s kind of based on behavioral change, some of those different attributes that you can employ and that is recycling competition. We have a fun friendly competition that’s designed (it’s a four week) to really engage and activate students to recycle more in the school and during that process, the idea is there’s some teaching moments to make that happen and sometimes, teaching very related to recycling but sometimes, teaching to show that recycling has economic contributions or some scientific learnings but that is really one of our key programs. We augment that with some activities and lesson plans and other programs that we have but the core is called Recycle Bowl and it is really designed to engage students to recycle more and again, fun friendly way to do it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, don’t you also have college competitions every year, also with regards to recycling?
BRENDA PULLEY: We do. In fact, we model a lot of the Recycle Bowl off that program so we partner with what’s called RecycleMania and their Board of Directors and really work with them to grow that program. It’s been about 15-plus years but I know it’s a great program. In fact, I was just with one of the two individuals from Ohio, actually from two different schools by the way, who came up with the idea. They wanted to create a little competition and it’s grown from two schools 15 years ago to over 600 colleges and universities today that participate. That’s an eight-week program but it’s really designed not just to do just benchmarking for all those recycling coordinators on campus, but exactly like Recycle Bowl, it’s really designed to engage both staff and the faculty but particularly the students in recycling and the importance of recycling.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know Brenda, I know Keep America Beautiful continues to do their great and important work, not only because people across America donate to your wonderful organization, but there are large corporations that are great supporters that continue to ensure that we’re going to have a better environment in the years ahead and I know there’s great companies, like Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Snapple Group, and others that are supporting the great people at Keep America Beautiful. We have about three minutes left. Can you share how their support equates into more action, more activity, more convenience and accessibility to recycling and what that means for your organization?
BRENDA PULLEY: Absolutely. These are companies that truly have sustainability as part of their core operations and it’s an honor to be able to partner with them to help design programs that can truly help make a difference and so the leadership of Alcoa Foundation, Unilever, Waste Management, Nestle Water North America, and Keiser Bush, American Chemistry Council, those are just a few of the partners we work with, Coca-Cola as well, to really identify opportunities for working in public-private partnerships and actually partnering with government. Over 50% of our affiliates are either part of government, housing government, work with government, so we really are about creating public-private partnerships to help make an improved community.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What does that mean in terms of extra bins or more bins around America so people have more accessibility to drop off their, as you said, bottles or cans or whatever they want to recycle?
BRENDA PULLEY: Sure. We know there are studies that 60 or 70% of the public have access to curbside recycling but it’s a whole different story of how many participate but curbside has made incredible progress, 1970s I think there were no curbside programs. Now, EPA estimates there are 9,000 curbside programs. Can we do more to encourage households to recycle more? Absolutely, but when it comes to public space recycling, as we talked earlier about office or at school, we know there are just not enough recycling bins, that convenience factor out there, so we do partner with groups like Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Dr. Pepper, Snapple, and Pepsi to really work and this is a big effort, right? We know that there are about 10% of where there need to be public space recycling bins that are out there and it’s about getting the right bins, putting them in the right places, making sure the signage is right so that people in that split second decision when they’re on the go can have that recycling bin there and make sure they recycle something versus putting it in the trash, big program, lots of effort, looking at best practices. We have a best practice manual, the top 10 tips on our website so I encourage people if they have an interest in that to go there but there is much opportunity in this space to improve recycling on the go.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s just a perfect way to wrap it up and for our listeners out there that want to do more or want to donate to Keep America Beautiful to make it work or want to learn how they could recycle more in their own community, there’s three websites I want to put out to you. It’s KAB.org. It’s also AmericaRecyclesDay.org or IWanttobeRecycled.org, all great websites, all important, and it gives us all access to the great work that Keep America Beautiful is doing. Brenda Pulley, you are helping to keep America beautiful and truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so honored to have Roy Johnson with us today. He’s the CEO of EcoFactor. Welcome to Green is Good, Roy Johnson.
ROY JOHNSON: Thanks. It’s my pleasure to be here.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Roy, like everybody else, you have a storied history, a lot of success in your rearview mirror. Before we get into talking about this wonderful company that you’re the CEO of, EcoFactor, talk a little bit about the Roy Johnson journey and how you got there and some of the other great wins you’ve had in your past.
ROY JOHNSON: Sure. I’d be happy to. When I came out of school, I went to work for a company called ThreeCom that was very successful in the computer and networking industry for a long time, ended up staying there for 13 years. I lived in Australia for three years. I lived in Hong Kong for three years and stayed there right up until the middle of the dotcom boom and then left ThreeCom and went to a startup called Two Wire that make a very good home networking product that is sort of connected to what we’re doing now at EcoFactor from a technology standpoint a little bit. That company went on to great success and is widely used across the country. Then I was CEO of a company called Red Line Network, which was acquired for a nice sum by Juniper. Then I spent four years in the solar industry, which was great fun. I learned a lot and we built up a great solar company, as you may know. The good news on solar is that the prices are very low so people can install solar. The bad news is that it’s hard to make money for the manufacturer so I moved on from that and landed at EcoFactor about two years ago and it’s been all up in the ride since then.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s wonderful, and for our listeners out there who want to not only listen to Roy and what he’s doing at EcoFactor, but want to watch and look, I’m on his website right now. It’s actually a great website and for those who want to look at it, it’s www.ecofactor.com. Talk a little bit about EcoFactor. Why would this be the next part of the evolution of the Roy Johnson story going from solar into energy efficiency? Why did you see that as the next step?
ROY JOHNSON: Right, so when I made the decision to move into the energy sector seven years ago now, it was partly because it’s interesting business opportunities. There’s a lot of disruption going on in the energy industry and certainly, my last company, CaliSolar, was a part of that in the solar industry with a completely different approach to making solar but the thing I love about EcoFactor is, energy efficiency is by far the most cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas and energy consumption overall because if we can all reduce our usage of electricity and gas and so forth, it makes a huge difference and it’s much cheaper to deploy a solution like ours than it is to build another power plant or to build another power array or another wind farm so that’s one of the things that I really like about this is that it’s very cost effective from a societal standpoint. It’s very competitive. It’s software based so what we do is we put a communicating thermostat into a home and there are lots of wireless thermostats available in the world and we work with a variety of different ones and once we get it in the home, we [use] clever software that works out in the cloud that analyzes the usage patterns of the consumer, the way the house heats and cools and our software will control the thermostat in a much more efficient way than the consumer ever could or a thermostat by itself could because we have so much more computing power that we can bring to the problem.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’ve got a lot of homeowners that are listening to this show across the United States right now. Let’s bring it home to them, no pun intended. What would that mean? What kind of thermostat should they be buying and how do they tie into your great service or as they say in Silicon Valley, get the ROI for their investment?
ROY JOHNSON: The way that we go to market, we don’t actually have something that would go directly to consumers. We work through other larger companies to get this into the hands of consumers and these are companies that have existing relationships with consumers and regular contact with them so for example, our biggest rollout so far is actually with Comcast. Comcast has a new service offering that’s been around for about a year called Xfinity Home. Xfinity Home is home security, home automation, and home energy management. We are the energy management part of that. There’s other companies that provide the security and so on and so anyone who lives in Comcast territory, which is about 40% of the country, can go to Comcast and say, ‘I want to sign up for Xfinity Home,’ and they have a variety of different offerings available and then they’ll get the EcoFactor service and then once that’s installed, not only will they have this great home security offering and so on, but they’ll also have this ability to have their thermostats managed on a much more automated basis and the idea is that the consumer doesn’t really need to do anything any different. When we first install, we ask a few basic questions about lifestyle. Roughly, how warm do you like it in the day, in the night, in the summer, in the winter? Who is home during the day? And then we build a schedule for them and we manage the system for them so they really don’t have to think about it and they can give us some input into how efficient they want to be and then our system will conform to that so that’s sort of the user experience. For other customers that live in certain parts of the country where we have programs, we also have programs with utility so if you happen to live in Nevada for example, the utility in Nevada, which is called Nevada Energy, has a program where anybody can sign up. In their case, they actually get a free thermostat and it’s provided by the utility on a subsidized basis and then they go from there so it’s a really simple structure and we’re working on rolling this out into other geographies as well.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you’re the CEO of EcoFactor. When you came on, how much has the company grown since you’ve been the CEO?
ROY JOHNSON: We’ve grown from zero. When I joined, we had really zero customers two years ago, and now we’re in the tens of thousands of homes and so it’s moving along very, very quickly. It’s growing very rapidly. One of the things that works in our favor on this is that there’s much greater awareness of energy use around the country and people are more aware of what’s going on. They’re paying attention to their energy bill. They’re really trying to make sure that they’re being efficient, partly because they want to save money and partly because they want the remote control. One of the nice things about our solution is you get remote control on your thermostat so if you want to adjust the temperature up or down, you can without getting off the couch, just like a TV remote. I’m old enough to remember when TVs didn’t all have remote controls and so you actually had to get up to change the channel and we were essentially providing the same type of capability for the thermostat.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your website and again, for our listeners out there to see Roy’s really great company and website too, it’s www.ecofactor.com. Is this also controllable vis à vis our Android or our iPhones, too?
ROY JOHNSON: Exactly, so the way that I generally control my system in my house is I use my iPhone and I find that to be the quickest and easiest thing but there’s a web interface you can get to from your computer or Android and that really does make it simple and quick for people and we find that one people get used to it, they really don’t bother going and pushing the buttons on the thermostat anymore because it’s just easier and quicker. Most people always have their phone in their pocket.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I was at a conference about a year ago or so, Roy, and again, there was a very, very smart venture capitalist from Silicon Valley sitting next to me and I asked hi what was his investment strategy from then on and from the foreseeable future and I asked him ‘Are you going to be doing more wind or more solar?’ and he said no and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘John, the smart money is going into energy efficiency,’ and obviously, Roy, you’ve had so much success in your past and obviously, you’re part of that smart money. Talk a little bit about the need for energy efficiency. Is it true that in terms of the worldwide production of energy, we’re wasting right now about 50% of the energy we produce and really this is going to be one of the greatest megatrends in the next foreseeable decades ahead, energy efficiency and doing exactly what you’re doing right now?
ROY JOHNSON: The big gain of energy efficiency is that you can get benefits with really very little money spent and without making sort of lifestyle tradeoffs. That’s really the goal so if you think about automobiles, which is a little bit outside of our segment, but automobiles, if the fuel economy standard is increased, which it has been over the last few years, and the U.S. still has one of the lower fuel economy standards. China has a higher fuel economy standard than the United States does. Most of Europe has higher fuel economy standards than we do and they meet them and so the technology clearly exists. Part of the challenge is that we prefer to drive great big SUVs and things like that than lower our average fuel economy but if you could increase the average vehicle fleet from 20 miles per gallon to 40 miles per gallon, everybody gets to drive just as far as they always did. They just use half as much fuel and the same idea applies on your heating and cooling or on your lighting or all the other parts of the energy mix that a consumer has, is that if you can be more efficient with the way that you use energy, then you’re much better off so swapping out incandescent light bulbs for CSLs and LED light bulbs make a huge difference. Refrigerators are five times more efficient than they were 30 or 40 years ago and all of that is technology that’s readily available and the great thing about refrigerators for example, is that nobody has to do anything. When their old refrigerator dies, they buy a new one and that one will automatically be much more efficient than the old one because the industry requirements have gotten so much tighter than they used to be so it’s a big, big one and not to say that we shouldn’t continue to construct solar and wind and other alternatives to fossil fuels, but using less energy without making major compromises is really the right way to go.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last couple minutes or so, Roy. Talk about the huge trend in big data, which always seems to be growing because of our ability to gather it more and to digest it. How does that tie into improved efficiencies with utilities and homeowners, which is then again, your sweet spot and where you’re going with your great brand?
ROY JOHNSON: Big data is a very important technology around Silicon Valley and around the world so it’s used in systems like what Google has. Their whole search engines and all the stuff that they do was really one of the first examples of the power of big data and our ability to take data and analyze it and work through it. What we do is pull enormous amounts of data back from thermostats about how quickly does the house warm up? How quickly does it cool off? How does it behave? And embedded in that big data is really useful information about the way to optimize it and the idea of big data is taking huge amounts of data and sifting through it and figuring out insight that you can get from that data and so the people that we have, we have a group of three people that we call our ‘quants’, they’re the quantitate people that really design the whole big data system. All of them are physicists. They’re not regular software engineers. They come from the particle physics world and they’re incredible data guys and they’ve done a wonderful job of building a system now that allows us to get an insight in what’s going on at home.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s the future? We’ve got a minute left. What’s your goal? Obviously, Roy, you’ve done well. You’ve scaled companies before. You really know what you’re doing with regards to leading companies as a CEO. When you go to bed at night, EcoFactor, how many million households, two three years from now, are going to be signed up to this great service?
ROY JOHNSON: Our target market is North America, and there’s about 140 million households in North America and so if we could get to even 5% of those houses, we’d become a very large company and we’d save enormous amounts of energy and we’d save people an awful lot of money so I think that’s really where we’re headed and we expect that this will continue to ramp up over the years so whether we do it or somebody else does it, people will end up with communicating thermostats in their home. They will end up with these kinds of systems because it’s so much better than what they have today.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. For our listeners out there that want to be part of this new trend of energy efficiency and really help do something good for the planet but also do something good for your own pocketbook, you can go to Roy’s great website and company. It’s www.ecofactor.com. Learn more about what’s going on with regards to energy efficiency and leverage this because, as Roy pointed out earlier, it’s easy to use. You can do it right off your iPhone or your Android and it benefits your family and it benefits the earth at large. Roy Johnson, you are a visionary sustainability leader and truly living proof that green is good.
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