JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Peter Sanchez. He’s the CEO, and I mean Chief Elf Officer, for Elf Boxes. You can check out Elf Boxes at www.elfboxes.com. Welcome to Green is Good, Peter Sanchez. PETER SANCHEZ: Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Peter, just like most great entrepreneurs and innovators that we get to have on Green is Good, there’s never a straight line from point A to point B to point Z one day. Can you share a little bit with our listeners before we get talking about your great brand, Elf Boxes? Can you share with our listeners the Peter Sanchez journey leading up to founding Elf Boxes? PETER SANCHEZ: Sure. I think the seed for Elf Boxes started with that old entrepreneurial thing about scratching your own itch so we moved a lot when I was a kid to New York, Connecticut, Florida, and then I moved to Illinois for law school and back to DC and moving was always a horrible, painful process and things get broken and you’re dealing with cardboard boxes. Where do you get them? What do you so when they’re done? And so that’s sort of where the seed started and then in college about 20 years ago, I had seen a friend of mine who was using and was using these plastic totes that would use in CVS or sometimes in supermarkets and they would store them behind the store and she would borrow them and use them for her moving and then return them because why would you need these plastic bins? And so that’s sort of where I got the idea that you could use them for moving and then I had seen this actually used for office moves. I work in an office. I’m an attorney during the day and sometimes, when people would move offices, I would see them using these plastic crates and so when I moved the last time I moved, I checked to see if this was a product available for consumers and it wasn’t and I thought, wow, this would be good for residential moves, not just office moves. Why isn’t this around? I had that thought but I didn’t do anything about it and then when I was thinking about setting up a company, my girlfriend works for an environmental nonprofit and so we had talked about starting a company and we wanted it to be something green and my dad, who lives in Florida and does custom cabinets, he’s getting a little old to keep doing construction so we wanted something that he can do so he had the warehouse and the truck and some reliable people so we thought hey, this would be a great idea to do where you can provide this service to deliver these plastic moving boxes, which can be used hundreds of times and are green, and deliver them to people, pick them up when they’re done. It’s very easy, very convenient. It’s much stronger than cardboard. These hold 100 pounds each and there’s no messing with tape or assembling them and they’re one size so you can stack them one right on top of another very quickly in a moving truck. You don’t have to play box Tetris or box Jenga so all the pieces sort of fit into place and then it took a while to get it going because I had to get the supplies. I had to get the website going and get the ducks lines up but it’s been really well received and everyone loves it and I’m really happy with the results. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What year did you start this again? PETER SANCHEZ: We started this last year. It’s been almost 12 months exactly. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, so you started a year ago, and let’s talk about it and for our listeners out there that want to follow along on your laptop, desktop or your iPad or other tablet, you can go to www.elfboxes.com. I’m on your site now. I love your site. It’s really green and blue, the colors of the earth. It’s very colorful. It’s also sort of it keeps you going because there’s movement on the site and everything else so share a little bit about what you’ve created here and your boxes. First of all, can these boxes be recycled? PETER SANCHEZ: Yes, they can so they can be used 2- to 400 times and when they start to approach the end of their useful life, they start cracking or whatever, they can be recycled and turned into more boxes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and are these made in the United States or are they made in China or how does this work? PETER SANCHEZ: Absolutely. They’re made in the U.S. There’s a company in Florida that manufactures these and a company in Virginia and we had looked at sourcing this because these are the same industrial boxes that are used by shippers at supermarkets and pharmacies and they buy these boxes in bulk and a lot of them get them from China and that’s not something that we wanted to do because we do believe in the green part of it and we wanted to keep it local and keep it green. I think it’s more important to stay true to your mission than to save a few bucks in the short run. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, they’re made here in America and so talk a little bit about other brands out there. We don’t have to go into any specifics, but there is a big reuse and recycling cardboard market nowadays. Do a compare and contrast about using recycled or reused cardboard boxes versus your green Elf Boxes. PETER SANCHEZ: Sure. Well, the most you can use a cardboard box is about two to three times and then it’s very weak because it gets crushed and you put tape on and tear it off so you get about two to three uses out of cardboard no matter what and as I said, these can be used up to 400 times so you’re getting a lot more use out of it, which makes it greener and also, the cardboard that you get is gonna come from cutting down trees, which lead to deforestation, and when it does come time to recycle, it takes a lot of energy to recycle cardboard and it takes 90% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it does to recycle a pound of cardboard so 90% less energy plus 400 uses versus three uses. This come out way in favor of using these products over cardboard. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, so these are made out of industrial-strength plastic? PETER SANCHEZ: Right. They’re industrial-strength plastic. They’re the same kind of totes that people use in industrial shipping, shipping stuff from one supermarket to the warehouse and back. They hold 100 pounds each. They have handles and attached lids so it makes it very easy to use. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, they don’t require tape or any of that kind of stuff? PETER SANCHEZ: Right, there’s no tape required. The lids are attached. They’re interlocking lids so you just flip it closed and it’s ready to go and they’re nestable. One fits inside the other so when they’re not in use, they don’t take up a lot of room and then when you do use them, you fill them up. Because they’re rigid, you can put your wine glasses in the box on the bottom and your kettle bells in the box on top and it won’t matter what order you put them in, which makes loading the truck a lot quicker. If you’re moving you don’t have to worry about these are fragile, they need to go in on top. You can just stack them one right after the other and the fact that they’re the same size, 27 by 17 by 12, then you can just stack them up like Lego bricks and you don’t have to play box Tetris or box Jenga and try to find something to fit in that little hole. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, easy to keep clean, I take it? PETER SANCHEZ: Yes, very easy to keep clean. After we get them back, we inspect them, take off the labels, clean them with an air compressor and a green cleaner so that they’re sanitized before they go out again. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, this is not only just for consumers, Peter, but these are also for businesses, I take it? PETER SANCHEZ: Yes, so this industry got started with the commercial office market and like I said, the reason I got into it was that no one was servicing the homeowners so we do like this as a residential product but we also do some small- and medium-sized office moves and that’s been very well received also. We’ve got about 15 video testimonials on our site from people that have used them for home or office moves and everyone seems to love it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’re very happy to have Peter Sanchez with us. He’s the CEO, and as he calls it, the Chief Elf Officer, of Elf Boxes. You can check out all the great things he’s doing to make the world a greener and better place at www.elfboxes.com. You know, I’m on your website right now and I would love you to share with our listeners a little bit about the opportunity here to use your boxes, Peter. If you don’t live in Florida and you want to use your great green moving boxes, where do we find the moving boxes in California or another state or another city? PETER SANCHEZ: Well, the good news is that this idea is catching on so it actually started on the West Coast and if you’re in a large city in the U.S. or Canada and you Google ‘plastic moving boxes’ and the name of your city, you should be able to find one. If you’re on my website, I actually have a link on the bottom that says ‘partners’ and there are a bunch of different box operators in other cities like California, New York, Illinois, Chicago, Texas, places like that, and if you’re in an area where we’re not because we’re only in Florida, you can check that link on our website and I’ll direct you to somebody who’s probably closer to you who can handle it and we’re not getting a kickback from any of these people. I just want people who move to use this product because I want them to move green and have a better moving experience. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re doing it all for the right reasons. I just clicked on it and all these partners came up and it’s really easy to use so for our listeners out there, it’s www.elfboxes.com and you click on the partners at the bottom and up they come. What I also love about your website- and we were talking about this off the air- but it’s something for our budding entrepreneurs and other ecopreneurs out there to hear that you’re doing, Peter, and it’s really unique and really important is I noticed the phone number on the website is your phone number and can you share a little bit about why you did that and why you do that? PETER SANCHEZ: Sure. It’s actually my cell phone and I’m a big fan of Tony Shea of Zappos and I’ve read his book where he talks about wowing people with customer service. One of things when I look at websites that I hate is when you need to talk to somebody and the contact info is hidden. You have to click around just to find a phone number to call because they don’t want to encourage people to call but I have the phone number on the top on the home page and every other page so that if somebody has a question, they can just pick up the phone and call me and any question they have, I can answer and I think this is a big part of this business is gonna be customer service and to get people to switch from something they know which isn’t as good, cardboard, to something more eco-friendly, we’re gonna have to make it as easy for them as possible so I’m more than willing to talk to anyone and that’s why I have the number on there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Peter, I think that is just awesome. You’re giving the customers the wow experience that Tony Shea has taught us all about at Zappos and I think that’s a great way to lead Elf Boxes to the next level. Talking about the next level, there are so many interesting great entrepreneur shows out there now, especially Shark Tank. Is this something that you’ve ever thought about? Would you ever go on Shark Tank or a show like that to pitch your concept to further grow it? PETER SANCHEZ: We’ve had that question from a lot of customers that say you should go on Shark Tank, this is a great idea, it should be on there, and we don’t have a desire to do that. We’d like to keep it family owned and operated so as I said, my dad does the deliveries. My nephew helps him and actually, if you look at the pictures, there’s a little picture of a baby in an elf hat in one of the boxes and that’s one of my other nephews. We’d like to keep it in the family. I do love Shark Tank and I did hear that another box operator in New York — I forget the name — has just auditioned for Shark Tank, so even though we’re not gonna be on it, we like the fact that somebody else is gonna go on it because the biggest obstacle to keep it from spreading is that people don’t know this exists so people find us when they’re searching for moving boxes but not necessarily Googling plastic moving boxes so if somebody goes on Shark Tank, which is one of the most watched shows on TV, with another plastic moving box company then if you’re in another city, you might say let me see if this is available in my area and then that’ll help spread the word and introduce the idea of green moving to people where they might not have known that green moving even exists and there are other green options besides the moving boxes. There’s definitely new innovation like the soy peanuts and the eco-friendly wrapping paper so I think the more green companies that get on shows like Shark Tank, the more it’ll help all of us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Are you gonna be offering those other green products that you just mentioned? PETER SANCHEZ: We are. We just got a sample batch of the green wrap. There’s a company in North Carolina called Giyami. I may be mispronouncing the name but they make wrapping paper from renewable resources and we’ve tried it out and we really like it so we’re gonna be adding that to our website soon. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, how much weight can each of these boxes hold? PETER SANCHEZ: The boxes are really strong. They can hold 100 pounds and you can stack them one on top of the other. Even though they hold 100 pounds, we do tell people to try to keep it to 50 pounds each because people don’t realize that when they load it up with books, it can hold 100 pounds, but it’s a lot harder to carry 100 pounds than you think, especially when there are stairs involved and stuff like that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, Peter, how does that compare to cardboard? PETER SANCHEZ: A cardboard box will hold about 25 to 35 pounds depending on if it’s a new box and single walled or double walled, so it actually holds anywhere from three to four times as much weight as a cardboard box. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, and what other advantages to your Elf Boxes have over cardboard if you were just doing a pitch right now and we were on an elevator together? PETER SANCHEZ: I think the biggest advantage is that we’ve heard from customers is that it’s delivered and picked up. People are very busy. They don’t have time to scrounge around looking for free boxes, which might not be as clean as they like, and buying boxes is expensive and you still have to go to Home Depot to get them so we deliver these to the home and pick them up when they’re done. As I said, they’re stronger than cardboard. You don’t have to mess with tape. You don’t have to put them together. They’re ready to go and they’re stackable so it loads the truck quickly and it keeps things from getting broken. That’s another feedback that we keep getting from customers. Several customer have told us this is the first time I’ve moved where nothing is broken and then they’re really happy about that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s your vision, Peter? I know your dad and your nephew work with you and that’s a wonderful thing to have a family-owned-and-run business down in Florida, but are you planning on, do you want to expand to other cities with Elf Boxes? PETER SANCHEZ: I’d like to expand it a little in Florida. Right now, we’re servicing Palm Beach County and a little bit of Broward, but I’d like to keep growing it and get down as far as Miami and serve that whole southeast part of Florida. I wouldn’t want to take it national and grow it and have it expand beyond where it’s just family and people we like and trust in the business. I think it’s a great model for somebody else if they want to franchise it, but that’s not why we got into it. We didn’t get into it to become incredibly rich and make a dent in the universe. We just want to help people with their move and operate a green business that leaves the world better than when we found it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s wonderful, because every entrepreneur’s vision is different and that’s a great vision and more power to you. We’re down to the last two minutes or so, Peter. Can you share a little bit about what were your biggest challenges starting this business and what are your final thoughts and pearls of wisdom you could leave for the young listeners around the United States and around the world that listen to Green is Good that are inspired by you and want to be the next Peter Sanchez innovator in the green and sustainability field? PETER SANCHEZ: Well, I think the biggest challenge to growing this has been public awareness about the product because everyone that’s used it loves it and they tell their friends about it but how do you get that critical mass when people don’t know this exists? So getting the word out is key and that’s where places like your radio show, I think, are helping the cause because getting the word out helps all these box operators and in terms of what somebody else can do to get involved in the green industry, I think that the best things you can do is just start. There are so many new green businesses that are starting now and green used to be this and now it’s mainstream and everybody wants to do good for the planet so there’s tons of businesses you can start on the green space and the best thing you can do is just get started. There’s always gonna be things popping up that you didn’t anticipate and you’re gonna learn along the way but you’re gonna learn a lot more by doing than you ever will by reading about it so I would say just start. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just great advice. Just start. I love it and for our listeners out there that want to just start moving green and moving more sustainably and supporting Peter’s great business model, you can go to www.elfboxes.com. Peter Sanchez, we thank you for coming on the show. We welcome you to come back on anytime you want to share the continued journey of Elf Boxes and we thank you for being a visionary ecopreneur. You are truly living proof that green is good. PETER SANCHEZ: Well, thanks for having me, John.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Jon Coleman. He’s the Fleet Sustainability and Technology Manager at Ford, and you can check out Ford at Ford.com. Welcome to Green is Good, Jon. JON COLEMAN: Hey, thanks for having me, John. I appreciate it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, we appreciate you coming on the show today to talk about all things green that’s going on and all things sustainability at the legendary iconic Ford brand. Before we get talking about all those things though, can you share a little bit about the Jon Coleman story leading up to joining Ford and what got you into sustainability to start with as a kid or as a young man? JON COLEMAN: Sure. I’d love to. I was brought up in a family where giving back to the community was something that was expected and something that was part of everyday life and as I went through school and all the way up through grade school and high school and as an exchange student, I saw opportunities everywhere to try and find ways to do more good rather than trying to do less bad, which is the philosophy that I try and work with so instead of trying to get to zero or looking at trying to reduce bad things that people are doing, I was taught that we ought to try and find better ways to do things so that helped shape everything that I’ve done in my life and when I joined Ford over 20 years ago, I looked at it as an opportunity to try and find out what I could do with the automotive industry from the inside so over the course of the last 20 years, I’ve had opportunities to work with Ford and the United Nations working with the Clinton Global Initiative and actually went back to school to get my doctorate looking at how large corporations make sustainable business decisions so with all of that background, it’s enabled me to work now in a capacity where not only am I helping Ford improve sustainability, but as a Fleet Sustainability and Technology Manager, I engage with all of the large fleets that we work with, whether it’s Enterprise Rent-a-Car or UPS or U-Haul, any company that operates a large number of vehicles and try and work with them to improve their sustainability and their environmental footprint as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love that, and I love your statement — doing more good, not doing less bad. I’ve never heard that before and I love it. I think it’s a great way to wake up every morning and to approach business and sustainability and I think that’s fantastic. You know Jon, we’re gonna get to talking about all the great things that are going on at Ford but I also wanted to chat with you a little bit about our great friends over at The Green Festival and your relationship with them. How long has Ford been part of The Green Festival and what was the impetus for you guys to get involved with them? JON COLEMAN: Well, we first engaged with The Green Festival back in 2010, and we really were interested in joining the community that The Green Festival had set up and the people who were operating The Green Festival were this no compromise activist group that were really critical over the last few years in helping Ford close a gap in customer perception about the reality of what we are doing as a company and their perception of Ford Motor Company and the auto industry in general as being dinosaurs, if you will, so working with The Green Festival and helping us engage at the grassroots level with the activist background that The Green Festival had enabled us to help bridge that gap and it gave us the opportunity really to let people know that it’s much more than what we’re doing with electric vehicles and much more than we’re doing with renewables. It really is a holistic approach at Ford Motor Company that has really been well articulated by our Executive Chairman, Bill Ford, the great grandson of Henry Ford, who was made sustainability a key part of Ford’s strategy for operating in the 21st century. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, so at The Green Festival, you have a test drive event. Talk a little bit about how does that look and feel and what kind of cars can consumer who come to The Green Festival see and what can they actually sit in and maybe even give a test drive to? JON COLEMAN: We have a wide portfolio of vehicles available at The Green Festival for test-driving. We have our hybrid vehicles, the C-Max and the Fusion. We have our plug-in hybrids, which are the C-Max Energi and the Fusion Energi. If customers are interested in an all-electric vehicle, we have the Focus Electric and for a lot of people for whom electric doesn’t make sense or the hybrid doesn’t make sense, we also have vehicles with our eco-boost engines, which are advanced gasoline turbocharged engines, which enable much better fuel economy without sacrificing performance, so we have all these different vehicles out there for people to actually see what we’re doing materially with our products along with the display that we have at The Green Festival that talks about all the other sustainability actions that Ford takes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is wonderful, and do you get to sit in it or test-drive it or how does that work? They’re all there but what’s the interaction with the consumer that come to The Green Festival test-drive the wonderful electrified Ford cars? JON COLEMAN: The interaction is driving it, sitting in it, whatever makes sense for the customer, whatever information. We have product experts out there who can answer technical details about the car or if you’re just interested in how the vehicle drives, how it accelerates, what it feels like to be in a car that can shift seamlessly from electric only to a gasoline engine, back and forth, all of those things are available, even the advanced park assist, which when you get back and you’re finished with the test-drive, the car will park itself. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh my gosh, this is great, so just another great reason for our listeners out there to come to the upcoming Green Festivals in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago to test -drive and to touch and to really get a great feel for your electric cars. Like you said, the C-Max Hybrid, the C-Max Energi, the Focus and the Escape, a great opportunity to really interact with these great vehicles. JON COLEMAN: Definitely. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, you mentioned Bill Ford, the great grandson of Henry Ford. What are the real guiding principles to Ford’s commitment to environmentally responsible manufacturing and just sustainability overall and how do they interrelate with a legacy brand like Ford, Jon, and all the technologies that are coming up in front of us every day? How do you mesh those and who’s driving that at Ford right now? JON COLEMAN: Meshing it is surprisingly easy in theory. In practice, obviously much, much harder, but when you look at the legacy of Ford Motor Company, when people think about Henry Ford, they think about innovation. They think about putting the world on wheels. They think about the moving assembly line and aspects that truly changed how the world functioned in the twentieth century and when Bill Ford became Chairman and CEO back in 1999, he issued a challenge to the company to find out what that would be in the 21st century so when you look back at the 20th century manufacturing, almost everyone who’s taken a history course and looked at the Industrial Revolution has seen a picture of the Rouge plant. It’s in almost every history book out there as a model of vertical integration in manufacturing and it was a plant where raw materials came in at one end. You had rubber, you had sand, you had cole, you had iron ore, things like that came in at one end and the other end, cars came out but when you look at it now, it’s not as much an example of the vertical integration as people look at it as what the environmental impacts of that type of production was so back in 2003, we’ve unveiled the new Rouge assembly plant, which was a retrofit that showed the world what 21st century manufacturing could be so it’s got a green roof. It’s got permeable parking lots. It has skylights to provide natural lighting in the workspace, all those types of things, so for manufacturing, we’re able to make that shift and we’re applying those same principles every new plant that we build. Whichever of those principles make the most sense, we’re applying. When we look at vehicles, obviously the Model T was the car that put the world on wheels and it was affordable for everyone and that’s one of the key aspects as we look at vehicles in the 21st century is we’re not interested necessarily in putting out the world’s most environmentally friendly car that cost quarter-of-a-million dollars. That’s not really what the blue oval stands for. The blue oval is about providing mobility to everybody and so the average wage earner can afford the type of mobility that is provided by a Ford vehicle so when we look at environmental solutions for vehicles, we’re looking for things that we can sell at what is currently prices the market will bear for these advanced technologies so we have a broad portfolio, everything from electric to natural gas to biodiesel and everything in between but when we look at making a meaningful impact, the eco-boost engine, which I talked about earlier is this advanced technology engine, we’ve sold millions of those compared to tens of thousands of electric vehicles and plug-in vehicles. Now, the plug-in vehicle is a fascinating technology, but given the choice of selling 10,000 plug-in vehicles or selling 2 million eco-boost vehicles, we realized that eco-boost was a solution in the near term to provide fuel savings of up to 20%. It’s like everyone walking to work on Fridays if you think about it for 2 million people rather than having 10,000 people that can plug in and are generating less emissions that way. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s a fascinating point, Jon. I never thought of it that way, that you get to not only be one of the greatest innovation companies in the world, but then you’re the democratizer of that innovation and you bring it to everybody. You make it affordable to everybody and that makes a lot of sense. You get to really change the world that way, like you said, and selling two million cars of a certain great type of electric car than 10,000 makes a lot of sense. For our listeners out there who have just joined, we got Jon Coleman. He’s the Fleet Sustainability and Technology Manager at Ford. You can check out all the green and sustainable things that Ford is doing at Ford.com and check out all of the great electric cars that Ford is producing for all the consumers out there in the United States at the Green Festival in Los Angeles September 12th through the 14th, Chicago October 24th through the 26th or San Francisco November 14th through the 16th. You can come and see Ford’s great cars there. You can take them for a test drive and you can ask all the questions you have. Come to the Green Festivals and check out all of Ford’s great lineup of green cars. Jon, going back to consumer demands, where is this going? Obviously, we’ve seen a huge rise in consumer demand for hybrid electric vehicles in previous years. Where do you see this going? Because you’ve been now at Ford for 20 years. You’ve got great visibility, not only backwards but now forwards. Where do you see this going in the years ahead? JON COLEMAN: Well, we see continued growth for hybrid vehicles and it’s not just the Ford Motor Company. It’s the whole industry. Hybrid vehicles used to be something that was unique, just kind of a random vehicle for tree huggers. It’s become mainstream to the point where we’re selling double the number of vehicles in the last couple of years than before and it’s starting to increase as a percentage of the total industry. It used to be that hybrids were only 1 or 2% of the industry and over the last year, we’ve seen that creep up to about 4% of the industry so obviously, that means 96% of the industry is still not hybrid, but it’s to the point now where if you drive a hybrid, people don’t think anything different about your identity than if you’re driving a pickup truck. It doesn’t have the same reference point to a lot of people as hybrids did when we introduced the Escape Hybrid 10 years ago. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve been reading recently that not only are your engines and all this hybrid technology being implemented in your cars, but also, from a sustainable holistic point of view, you’re making your cars and your vehicles out of more recycled materials. What does that mean with regards to Ford and can you share what kind of materials you’re using in the recycled material process to then implement into your new vehicle manufacturing? JON COLEMAN: I’d love to. We have a lot of recycled materials that we use in our vehicles and for a long time, they were in parts that the customer never saw, so we recycled plastic into battery casings and different components under the hood and a lot of the sound bustles and things that people don’t even realize are on their cars but we were able to reuse the plastics and recycle the materials for those types of things. Obviously, the metal in cars has been recycled for a while but the introduction of the new 2014 F150 being mostly aluminum, that will improve the recyclability of vehicles significantly, not because you can’t recycle galvanized steel, but recycling galvanized steel is a lot more difficult and deals with a lot more chemicals of concern, if you will, than aluminum so when we look at recycled materials, in the past, it’s been things that the customer didn’t see. Now we’re starting to put it in things that the customer does see like the sheet metal but also, in interior components like seat fabrics. We use a tremendous amount of recycled plastic that’s coming into seat fabrics and we’ve got projects that we’ve worked with different companies where we are putting the seat fabric in and then also, we look at renewable materials as well so we use soybean foam in our seat cushions and we recycle denim into our firewalls. There are all kinds of recycled and renewable materials that we have in our vehicles and we’re not stopping what we’re doing now. We’ve got things like we’re using dandelions to find a new type of rubber so that kind of white goo you’ve got on your hands when you were a kid and you were playing with dandelions, turns out we can use that to make rubber so every time we do that — we’re cultivating dandelion fields with Ohio State University so that we can provide rubber from plants instead of from petroleum so we look at things like that. There really are all types of things that we are working with a new group called the Bio Feedstock Alliance, which is companies like Heinz and Nestle that have waste from their food production operations that we’re looking to turn that waste into raw materials for our product so when you talk about renewable and recyclable, they’re starting to blend together a little bit because these renewable materials that are raw materials, raw feedstock, but waste from someone else can then be recycled as well so we’re trying to follow the same idea from Bill McDonough of cradle to cradle where there’s always someone using the waste product from one process as the feedstock for another. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is awesome, and like you said, some of it’s very overt and some of it, you never even see but it’s in there anyway, so Ford products are being made out of more renewable and recyclable materials. That’s just a great message. For our listeners out there that are interested in purchasing a Ford fuel-efficient vehicle, are there tax incentives, Jon, that exist both nationally and on a statewide basis? JON COLEMAN: We have incentives on almost all of our vehicles and there are also state and federal incentives. The best place to go is the Department of Energy has a website, afdc.energy.gov, and if you go to that website, it will provide all of the information on incentives, rebates, and it’s not just money on the hood. In a lot of places, if you buy a plug-in vehicle, you get HOV access or access into the high-speed lane so there are all types of incentives to try and get people to purchase hybrid vehicles, vehicles that run on natural gas, and like I said, we’d much rather rely on a third-party source to provide people that information and also, if you check with your local dealer, most of them know all the incentives that are available as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. We’re down to the last two minutes or so, Jon. Can you share just some of your favorite milestones of progress of innovation that has happened at Ford and then talk a little bit about the future? Take our listeners into the future of Ford vehicles. JON COLEMAN: One of the things that I’m most proud of at Ford Motor Company is what we’re doing with conserving water. We started looking at water as a sustainability issue almost 15 years ago. It was one of the first ideas that we’ve looked at when we looked at manufacturing in the 21st century and realized that water was not something that we should be putting a price on, that it was a truly scarce resource and it was more valuable than petroleum and with that type of mindset, we’ve managed to cut our water use by over 60% since 2000. That’s over 10 billion gallons a year, and we’re continuing, as I said, with every new plant we build and the types of paint we put on the vehicles, everything we look at with an eye to conserving water because living without petroleum would be annoying. Living without water is impossible, and it’s that same type of mindset that we’re looking for moving forward and trying to understand what are we doing with air quality. And, it’s not just carbon emissions. It’s all the other VOCs and all the other chemicals of concern. What are we doing with human rights? How are we making sure that everyone who is on the planet has an opportunity has an opportunity to be part of the formal economy and earn a living wage? What are we doing to ensure that they have clean water to drink? All of these things are interrelated and that’s the challenge for us moving forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you so much, Jon, and for our listeners out there that want to come test drive one of Ford’s great hybrid vehicles, come to The Green Festival in LA September 12th through the 14th, Chicago October 24th through the 26th and San Francisco November 14th through the 16th. Thank you, Jon Coleman. Go to Ford.com to learn more about all of Ford’s great hybrid vehicles. Jon, thank you for your inspiring sustainability work at Ford, which helps make the world a better place. You are truly living proof that green is good. JON COLEMAN: Thanks very much.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and we’ve got today Doctor Corinna Basler. She’s my friend, and she’s also the President of The Green Festivals. You can check out more of what’s going on with The Green Festivals at GreenFestivals.org. Welcome back to Green is Good, Corinna Basler. DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Thank you so much, John. I’m really honored and thrilled to be back on Green is Good radio, so thank you so much. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We are honored to have you on, and you’re doing so many great things and we’re gonna get to talking about all the exciting things that are happening with The Green Festivals, how well your spring festivals went, and what’s happening in the fall, but before we do that, for our listeners that didn’t have the opportunity to hear your first visit on Green is Good, can you please share with our listeners your journey and your fascinating story leading up to becoming the President of The Green Festivals, Corinna? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Sure, absolutely. Thank you once again, John. Well, I’m a very passionate vegan and I deeply care about our planet and about animals and about giving back to the community, so I honestly have to say that this is such a wonderful opportunity and also a life dream to give back to everything that really matters to me and that’s not just a job from nine to five. It’s truly a passion and I feel also deeply honored to have the opportunity to run the Green Festivals and to move them forward. My background, I grew up in East Germany many, many years ago and I always felt very connected to nature and animals and you know, like most people do, I started business management and basically took the typical culprit. I move through Mercedes-Benz and several other companies. I worked for them in New York and I did my Ph.D. in business science and I had the opportunity also to travel on business to over 90 countries, which allowed me to connect with many, many different cultures and to meet so many inspiring people who are willing to make a difference and I honestly have to say that that really inspired me and suddenly, there I was. There was this opportunity to get together with one of the leading sustainability trade show organizers to continue working with Green Festivals and basically, this is where I can really use my passion and also, I feel like giving back and doing good and promoting the sustainable lifestyle, that’s also a very good future business approach so I think that this is not just a trend. This is so important to protect our lives, to protect the next generation, and to save the planet so this is, in a nutshell, my little story. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s a great story, and we’re so thankful that you’re back on Green is Good and we’re also thankful that you’re now the President of the Green Festivals, so let’s start talking about the Green Festivals. Last time when you came on the show, we had the whole year in front of us and now, we’ve already had the spring shows. Can you talk a little bit about the highlights and the most exciting parts of the spring shows? What was your favorite parts of them and what can our listeners expect in the fall shows coming up? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Sure, absolutely, John. It’s actually pretty tough to select a couple of highlights because we had so many new and exciting things coming up from the spring shows, Green Festival 2014. The spring shows took place in New York and Washington, DC. For example, in New York, we launched the new Green Festivals Awards series for the first time ever, and I honestly have to say it was such a huge success. We had VegVoyagers voted to Green Festival’s New York brand award winner, promoting that traveling sustainably and responsibly as a priority for all our consumers and also the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food, they won the Green Festival Community Award. It’s a $5,000 grant and it was just wonderful to see all the support from the community for those local organizations and I have to say it was such a difficult choice and we had to support those great judges to help us to make the decisions. Also something very exciting was that we launched our first Green Festival Saves Lives campaign. We partnered up in Washington with the Washington, DC, Humane Society. What that means is we had the Adapt Force One truck on the floor plan, on the floor live where our Green Festival attendees were able to adopt homeless pets, cats and dogs, basically on site and I was so thrilled, John, to see that almost half of the animals found new homes and got adopted and that was wonderful but next to our Green Festival award series, of course, we had so many partners, sponsors, organizations, nonprofit partners, and exhibitors who promote the best in green and living a green lifestyle. It was just so wonderful to see. We had in New York and in DC over 250 exhibitors and we had so many attendees experiencing, tasting and trying and sampling everything that’s related to green from good food, from sustainable beer and wine, to green pets, green building, green media, everything that you could imagine to integrate to your everyday life. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so wonderful. So, upcoming in the fall in Los Angeles from September 12th through the 14th, and Chicago October 24th through the 26th, and San Francisco November 14th to the 16th are the Green Festivals, and for our listeners out there that want to learn more about these wonderful Green Festival events that you’re putting on, they can go to GreenFestivals.org. Share a little bit about what you expect to be happening at the LA, Chicago and San Francisco Green Festivals. DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Well, The Green Festival is America’s largest and longest-running green living and sustainability event, and at each event, in LA, in Chicago and in San Francisco, you will find a dynamic, vibrant marketplace and the widest selection of green products where people can shop, taste and enjoy eating vegetarian foods and learning how to live a healthier and sustainable lifestyle and we have so much to offer. We have a wonderful program put together with educational activities and also very inspirational speakers and celebrities so basically, Green Festival has something for everyone. For example, for families, what we offer is you can shop for eco-friendly children’s clothing and toys as well as natural organic and GMO-free foods, household supplies for the entire family so you can play green with eco-inspired arts and crafts activities and the kids come and have a wonderful time so we have live performances and activities for them and they will be just thrilled. For foodies, I have to admit that the food court is one of my favorites because the vegan/vegetarian food court is just amazing so you could enjoy healthy eating, cooking demos. You’ll find the latest on superfoods and eating for a sustainable lifestyle and also our beer and wine garden is growing bigger and bigger. We have some great brands joining us in vegan wine and beer and it’s really tasty and you can just come and have a wonderful time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: No kidding, so even vegan/vegetarian national and local brands are represented at each Green Festival? So, it’s local and national brands? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Absolutely, and it is very important for us that we embrace the local companies and that we provide them a very good opportunity to showcase their wonderful products and also to give them from a business perspective a nice market platform that the can grow and extend their business model, but we also have, as you already pointed out, very exciting national brands who showcase their product, so it’s a nice blend and it’s an interesting mix of local and national companies and brands. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, for our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Doctor Corinna Basler on. She’s the President of the Green Festivals and you can check out more about the Green Festivals at GreenFestivals.org. They’ve got three great festivals coming up in Los Angeles in September 12th through the 14th, Chicago October 24th through the 26th, and San Francisco November 14th through the 16th. Corinna, talk a little bit about if we had a retailer or a wholesaler who was with us today, what would you be saying to them in terms of why they should come and be at the Green Festival and why is the Green Festival the best platform for companies that want to highlight their products in the green space? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Absolutely, John. I’m delighted to point that out. Well, nowadays, in an area of growing environmental concern, consumers are way more selective about the brands they use and the companies they support so for more than a decade, Green Festival has been the largest platform for green companies connecting over a million consumers so as a marketing platform, Green Festival offers unique benefits and added values to our sponsors, partners and exhibitors and we have grown many benefits for retailers and wholesalers who can find new and innovative green products for their businesses so this is very, very important as we are adding that new business to the business element because we want to help our exhibitors to basically reach the next level and we also have wonderful specific events, networking and sales opportunities to basically increase our responsibility efforts and sustainability impacts. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. You have a very fascinating background. You’ve been involved with sustainability for many, many years and you’re very conscious and thoughtful about all these topics. Can you start talking a little bit about the green economy? What do you feel that’s going on right now. You’ve seen for the past 10 years or so. What do you feel that’s happening in the green economy and what trends or shifts are happening for the years ahead of us, Corinna? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Sure, John. Well, in the past, basically, living a green lifestyle was more considerate and very, let’s say in a casual way, very granola style and personally, I’m vegan as you are, and we’re both happy to hear that. That’s a trend but nowadays, it’s not just a trend anymore. This is really the future and it’s the future to really make a difference and everyone can make a difference. Difference doesn’t mean that you have to make a huge contribution, but every day everyone can make a choice for a healthier lifestyle and I deeply believe that we have reached a time that, again, it’s not just a trend. This is the future that everyone will contribute to help our planet, basically to survive and also, to provide a nice platform and just wonderful life for upcoming generations. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, I couldn’t agree with you more that even now, as we were discussing off the air, being a vegan might even feel a little bit crunchy and granola-y to people that we meet along the way. Do you feel that the Green Festivals and is it part of your mission that the Green Festivals are making green now more mainstream in terms of socializing it and democratizing it to the people of the United States and the world? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Absolutely. John, it’s not just about living vegan or vegetarian. That’s not what The Green Festival would like to do. We would just like to offer something for everyone in spring or in the fall in three days. We put together such a wonderful marketplace where everyone; vegan, non-vegan, non-vegetarian, meat lovers, can come and just taste and enjoy wonderful range and a variety of products and see that you do not have to sacrifice passion and joy for life because for me personally, it’s very important that things are tasty and enjoyable and you do not have to sacrifice anything and this is really what Green Festival is about. We have something for everyone, for every age and for every sector and category and that’s what’s so wonderful and thrilling about Green Festivals. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love that — something for everyone. That’s a great way of talking about The Green Festivals. Let’s give a little bit of shameless plugs to some of your great supporters and exhibitors. Can you share with our listeners who are some of your sponsors and supporters and upcoming exhibitors this fall so they can get a little taste of who they’re gonna see and who they’re gonna be exposed to at these great festivals coming up in Los Angeles in September, Chicago in October and San Francisco in November? DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Absolutely. Well, of course I would like to see more and more best practice from our green brand sponsors of the Green Festival but we are very happy and very, very proud to have one of the best global green brands. For example, the Ford Motor Company is ranked as the second greenest global brand and we’re so thrilled to have them as a long-term partner and sponsor so you can come to our show. You’ll have the opportunity to enjoy a Ford test-drive with their hybrid and all-electric cars and of course, this is free of charge for all of our attendees and visitors and this is one of our highlights and I personally know that many, many people just enjoy doing that and experiential marketing is so important nowadays that you cannot just see what’s going on but also experience and then make a personal decision and next to Ford, we have also Clif Bar as an established long-term sponsor. There’s a wonderful brand called Mojo, wonderful trail mixes and bars, which are so easy to adopt for your own personal lifestyle, and Daiya foods. They have really good vegan pizzas. They’re just adorable, and also Rudy’s Bakery is one of our partners, and we have Organic Spa Magazine, Sierra Club, Mother Jones. We have so many exhibitors also contributing; Vegan Warrior and Kitchen Crest and Two Moms in the Raw. It’s just the time is too short now to mention the variety of our partners and sponsors and, John, what’s really important is to see what large companies showcasing their green offering, but also small exhibitors like small startups and companies who would like to showcase their product and this diversity is so important to the Green Festival. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so nice. So, it’s big and small. It’s big, beautiful and amazing iconic brands like Ford and Clif Bar, and it’s smaller local companies and bakeries and food companies that are also innovating and are also well represented at The Green Festivals. DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: I would also like to highlight that Green is Good Radio is one of our new highlighted media partners for our fall shows in Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, John. This has been wonderful. Our whole team is just thrilled to partner with Green is Good Radio and to tighten our collaboration and to all the Green is Good listeners, we would like to offer a special promotion code. Go to our website, GreenFestival.org/tickets and you can enter a special code, GREENGOOD14, and it enables you to get the tickets for 50% off. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that is so generous of you, and I have to say to you, Corinna, we are equally honored to be partnering with the Green Festivals. We hope this is for this year and for many years to come because the Green Festivals are really the premiere festivals in the world when it comes to sustainability and green living events and for our listeners out there that want to learn more about the Green Festivals, go to GreenFestivals.org or please come to Los Angeles or Chicago or San Francisco. LA is September 12th through the 14th. Chicago is October 24th through the 26th and San Francisco November 14th through the 16th and come to one of these great Green Festivals. Thank you, Corinna, for being a visionary sustainability leader. You are truly living proof that green is good. DOCTOR CORINNA BASLER: Thank you so much, John. Thank you. I appreciate it.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Jaime Nack. She’s the founder of the Women in Green Forum, and also the President of Three Squares, Inc. Welcome to Green is Good, Jaime. JAIME NACK: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, we’re excited to have you on. You’ve got a lot to share with regards to the great work you’re doing at Women in Green Forum and also as the President of Three Squares, but before we get talking about your two great organizations, I want the listeners to hear about the Jaime Nack story and how did you even get to this position and what led up to this time where you’re running these two great organizations? JAIME NACK: It was not a straight path. I speak to a lot of college classes and try to give advice as best as I can, but I went to UCLA both undergrad and grad, studied public policy so my focus back then was how to impact the world around me through a policy but I knew that I didn’t want to work inside government. I wanted to somehow affect change from the outside and I started while I was in school with the City of Santa Monica here locally and was a program supervisor, ran a lot of programs. One happened to be an environmental program working with the bay and coastal cleanup day and so we grew over about five years our beach cleanup or environmental cleanup to be the largest one on the west coast and I really enjoyed it and I thought it was a great way to both engage with the community and have an impact and so I started focusing heavily on environmental. Shortly after I graduated with my masters, I joined another environmental consulting firm here in Santa Monica. We focused on education so I did a lot of work just to educate myself on everything about clean vehicles, electric vehicle transportation, infrastructure, worked with the ports, really love the idea of the trade component and how to reduce emissions from all of the different pieces of port related activities from trucks to planes and trains and ships and was having a great time but I felt like I was hitting a ceiling at the firm that I was at and in 2008, a really ripe economic time, I decided to go out and launch my own firm, Three Squares, Inc, and so I did that shortly thereafter. I left to serve as Director of Sustainability for the Democratic National Convention in Denver and that was the first time ever the DNC had an environmental initiative like this and actually hired a director for sustainability and so it was a great project, really put us on the map, and we’ve been having a successful ride on the environmental consulting side for the last six years and about five years ago, I decided that I wanted to see more women and that I would find a way to bring more women into the field and that’s when we decided to branch out and to curate this conference series, the Women in Green Forum. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just amazing and you’re a very humble person. Along the way during your journey, you also, in 2007, won the Young Global Leader Award by the World Economic Forum and in 2013, the Environmental Conservator of the Year Award given out by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce so you’ve had quite a journey there, Jaime. JAIME NACK: I have. I have to say the young global leader community is a really vibrant, really amazing community to be a part of. We meet annually once a year. Last year, it was in Myanmar. This year, it was in Mexico and the group consists of everyone from we have Chelsea Clinton. We have Will I Am. We have leaders from across the globe. You have to be under 40 when you’re nominated. It’s a very competitive process but it’s also served to be a great both networking group for me and also just I’ve made some of my best friends through this group as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know Jaime, for our listeners out there that want to follow along and see a lot of the great work Jaime’s working on, please go to www.womeningreenforum.com. I’m on your website now but before we get talking about Women in Green Forum, let’s talk a little bit about your environmental consulting business. You said it’s been really busy for the last six years. Where is it now? Obviously, in 2014, the world has changed so much from Inconvenient Truth and all the success that Al Gore had in terms of the visibility, in terms of Emmy Award, Academy Award, and all that kind of great stuff, Nobel Peace Prize. Where are we now with regards to the sustainability journey and how your environmental consulting business works and what’s your visibility on the next 10 years in front of us? JAIME NACK: Yeah, so I’m happy to report that I feel like we have a lot of work to do to get ahead but we’ve come a long, long way so we’ve served for a number of different companies almost as an outsource to a sustainability officer partly because five, 10 years ago, that title didn’t exist so major corporations didn’t have a person managing their sustainability efforts so it was either piecemeal or you couldn’t really find anything that talked about sustainability on their website. Now today, we have tons of conferences talking about sustainable brands and Newsweek lists their top greenest companies and so it’s really almost a race to the top and people want to showcase what they’re doing but a lot of companies don’t know how to take the first step so we’ve worked with them along the way and then in the last year or so, we really realized that there was a need to help these folks who were now taking on this role of sustainability officer, help them with this new big job ahead of them and so version 2.0 of Three Squares is we started developing out using technology a tool to help sustainability officers train and engage their employees in sustainability and so we launched a sister company called One Drop Interactive last year and that is an online employee engagement tool which educates, trains, engages employees so they’re part of this sustainability effort and part of both environmental savings and cost savings. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How is that working and who are your type of clients for One Drop Interactive? JAIME NACK: When we were building out the tool last year, we assembled a founders’ circle of chief sustainability officers from major Fortune 500 companies. They range from companies with employee bases of about 2 million all the way down to a thousand and they gave us feedback as we built out the tool and now we’re running pilots. Many of those companies then also here in LA, just because of our relationships. The City of LA is interested. Metro is interested so we really thought this would be something for corporations with large employees but when we started to talk with some of the folks we work with locally, cities and government agencies, they also have a need to educate their employees and part of it is there’s ISO 14,000 and 26,000, which are environmental management systems which demand that you have a process in place for continual education and continual improvement and so this allows them to align their people element with their strategies as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Very cool, so One Drop Interactive is a product that came out of Three Squares and you started the beta and you expect that to be adopted at a lot of the companies that you’re introducing it to because they all need a sustainability program in house to socialize their employees to all these type of regulations and ISOs and other things that are out there right now. JAIME NACK: Exactly. Yeah, and one of the things I’m sure many of your readers have seen something that’s been really popular in the news lately is the solar roadways Kickstarter campaign with the solar so what’s great about that is we have a partnership with a really cool film company called Focus Forward. It’s GE Focus Forward Films and they develop these really slick clean tech videos on new technologies and innovation and so with each One Drop Course; with energy, with water, with recycling, we have a quick focus forward film on a new innovation in that space that the employee can get excited about what the future holds so Solar Roadways is actually our film that’s featured in our energy course so it was really neat to see it pick up some mainstream support via that Kickstarter campaign. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and will One Drop be something that you think is gonna be picked up nationally or it’s something you feel that the beta is working also in international companies as well? JAIME NACK: Exactly, so a lot of our big corporates are multinational and also thankfully, through my network with the Young Global Leaders and the World Economic Forum, we know a lot of corporate sustainability officers from multinational corporations with headquarters abroad so we’ve launched the platform in English. I’m also reminded by our British colleagues that it’s American English but phase two is to roll it out in other languages with culturally sensitive content because as you know, if we have a recycling course here for the U.S., the content will be very different if we take that course to Argentina or to India, for example. Their recycling infrastructure is very different. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so cool. I’m on your One Drop website right now and it is so cool in terms of all — I’m looking at solar roadways. I’m looking at your 1.0 series and built in game mechanics and teen challenges. It’s fascinating what you’ve built here. This is really exciting stuff. JAIME NACK: Yeah, it’s great. The behavior change — I studied international economics as an undergrad, but behavioral economics, to me, is just a fascinating field and Harvard has really done some great work in this space about how to motivate people toward the behavior you want or toward the behavior that could have a greater public good so we’ve tried to bake in a lot of those nudge. Nudge is a popular blog or website about a book that was written by some Harvard professors but you can create little nudges that get people toward a behavior that can really have a lot of positive impact. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. So, now let’s move on and talk a little bit about the founding of Women in Green so go back to the epiphany. What was your real aha or epiphany moment for the founding of Women in Green Forum and when did that come about again and explain the whole impetus behind that launch. JAIME NACK: Sure. I remember it very vividly. On the Three Squares side, we produce a lot of sustainable events and environmental conferences and we were producing one that was a clean tech venture conference and about 800 attendees in Pasadena in 2009 and we were at the conference and one of the things that I noticed and my staff noticed is that as much as we try to separate names of folks, we know for the agenda that the people at these conferences end up being 99% male speakers and so I was there at the conference greeting one of the keynote speakers. His name was John Picard. He was one of the founding members of the U.S. Green Building Council. He’s a really well known environmentalist and architect and visionary and we were having a conversation and he was showing me photos of his daughter and talking about a trip that they had just taken where he was explaining to his daughter the importance of being educated about climate change and he said, “I really hope that my daughter grows up to have a career like yours in this space,” and then he said, “but when I look around at these conferences, it’s all men and they all look the same,” and I said, “I know. It’s something that we struggle with as well,” and he said, “You need to do something about this, Jaime. You need to create a space and you need to start to encourage more women to come into this field so they can see what a vibrant space it is,” and I said, “You know what, John, I agree and I’m gonna take on that challenge,” and so that was the conversation that started it all, John. He gave a keynote at the first Women in Green Forum that we had so we brought him back to speak at the first forum. He actually was at the next one as well. He was brought to tears. A lot of people in the audience were as well when he was telling that story because it was really something that was close to his heart and he was so happy to see that there were 500 women in the room supporting the concept year one as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Jaime Nack. She’s the Founder of Women in Green Forum and also the President of Three Square, Inc and to check out more of what Jaime’s up to, please go to www.womeningreenforum.com. So this year’s forum is called Design Your Impact. Explain what that means. JAIME NACK: Sure. Every year, we like to have a theme and we like to challenge our attendees and so this year, what we’re doing is we’re realizing that there are a lot of people who might not have sustainability in their title but they want to figure out a way to bring it into their work or to their home or to their community and so what we wanted to do was focus on how every person can design their own unique impact within their life and within their spheres of influence so a lot of speakers will be talking about how they’ve been able to work sustainability into their day to day so for instance, there will be a speaker from Honda who will talk about how their focus was on dealerships and the dealership experience but they were able to develop and design this whole program on how to green their dealerships and then they want to open source that and push it out to a larger audience so it’s great how if you have these ideas and bring these new ideas and bring these ideas to a more traditional space, especially I think because the market has opened up to that idea of sustainability and understand the benefit from environmental savings to cost savings, that you’re able to have a greater impact in your work, whether it has an environmental focus spelled out or not. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. The next conference is on August 26, this year, 2014, in Los Angeles. Is it for both men and women or just women only? JAIME NACK: Definitely, so it’s open to everyone, all ages, all career levels, men and women attend every year, so it’s a really great, vibrant, energetic audience. We’re also for the first time this year, we always like to have something new so we always have a clean vehicle ride and drive where guests can check out the newest models of clean vehicles but then we also are launching a wellness lounge this year so attendees will be able to walk through the wellness lounge and try out different products and samples and try out tasty treats from local sustainable chefs and so it’ll be a really great experience in addition to the content. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That sounds awesome. I’m getting excited just hearing about it so talk a little bit about who the speakers are besides the Honda person. Who else is coming to speak at this year’s Women in Green Forum? JAIME NACK: Sure, yeah. What was really interesting, I’d like to highlight one of our male speakers actually. Council member Mike Bonen from the City of Los Angeles, his office actually reached out to us and said that the council member was really interested in being a part of the event and supporting it so we’re excited that he’s going to be there to open up the day. Again, the event is open to men and women. We need the united front to help bring more diversity into this space. We also have a great partnership with Care2. Care2 also awards a Trailblazer Award to a leading woman in this space and so we can’t announce who that awardee will be yet but Care2 also helps us give out the Care2 Impact Award to the same awardee who we give out our Trailblazer Award to. In addition, Care2’s site is all about impact so Care2 is a petition site where they have about 25 million members and what they do is they help nonprofits and causes raise support and kind of create a ground flow of support around their initiative and so what we’re going to do is feature several just everyday people who created petitions around environmental causes and they were able to have a major impact by launching a petition on Care2, getting the signature, and affecting change that way so that’s something new this year. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m looking at your whole schedule. It’s fascinating and for our listeners out there, you gotta go. Men, women, if you can make it, go this great forum. This sounds like a great event and you gotta be there to see it in person and also, support Women in Green Forum. This is great stuff. Jaime, we’re down to the last couple minutes, unfortunately, and there’s a lot of listeners around the United States and around the world, young ecopreneurs, young students in waiting who want to be the next Jaime Nack. In the last minute and a half or so, give a couple pearls of wisdom on how to take the first step to getting a successful environmental career going or any blogs, books, or any inspiration that you could leave behind for our young listeners out there that want to become the next Jaime Nack. JAIME NACK: Okay, great, fantastic. I love engaging with youth and the first thing I would say is make sure you have a profile on LinkedIn and then make sure connect with me on LinkedIn. I always will accept someone, especially if you mention that you heard me on the radio show today. That’s fantastic. I’d be happy to connect with you on LinkedIn. Make sure that your profile is as professional as possible so a professional photo. If you’re young and you don’t have a lot of job experience to list, that’s okay. You’re just starting out. Go ahead and list your educational experience. This is also a great time to start interning or finding someone that has a job that you think you want and just see if you can schedule an informational phone call or coffee with them and really get to know people and start to build your network now. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is awesome. That’s great advice and Jaime, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I want you to feel free to come back on anytime you want and continue to do all the great work you’re doing and highlight Women in Green Forum and for our listeners out there that want to learn more, please go to www.womeningreenforum.com. Sign up, go if you can, and support all the great things that are going on right now in the sustainability world. Thank you, Jaime Nack, for being a visionary, an inspirational leader, a woman in green. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us Ken Fonville. He’s the owner of EcoSelect Furniture. Welcome to Green is Good, Ken. KEN FONVILLE: Thank you for having me on. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s great to have you on today, and before we get talking about your great company, EcoSelect Furniture, and your website, EcoSelectFurniture.com, please share the Ken Fonville story. You have a fascinating background in the furniture industry, Ken, and before you went into making eco-friendly furniture. You did a lot before and share with our listeners what you’re up to and what led up to you founding EcoSelect Furniture. KEN FONVILLE: Okay. I spent almost 40 years in the furniture industry, most of it with high-end, high-quality companies, some of which were family owned and some of which were corporate. As I approached my retirement years, I came to the belief that there was a real opportunity for a greener product if you only started with that as a basic premise as you developed your processes and product for the consumer. It came from a fundamental belief that having a good life and living a good life were not mutually exclusive goals so the decision to get involved in green furniture or eco-friendly upholstery primarily was also a function of that belief as well as the feeling that there was an opportunity to bring the manufacturing of upholstery especially back to the U.S. after most of the furniture industry has migrate to Asia so those two things were the primary drivers behind the decision to start EcoSelect Furniture. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, and for our listeners out there that want to follow along, I’m on your great website right now. Your website is www.ecoselectfurniture.com. It’s a beautiful website, has a lot of green on it and a lot of beautiful pieces of your eco-furniture and your beautiful upholstery so I suggest our listeners go to EcoSelectFurniture.com. Ken, what are the benefits of custom upholstery manufacturing and what you’re doing? Can you explain? You have such a great background in this stuff. Share a little bit about what are the benefits that first come with that kind of custom upholstery manufacturing. KEN FONVILLE: Well, custom upholstery manufacturing or customer upholstery for the consumer is that you can really tailor it to your own lifestyle and your own desires so we can address those unique requests though, things like someone who wants an especially firm seating or someone that wants a very soft seat, someone that needs a little higher seating level if they’re especially tall or especially short. We can accommodate that. We can also make most all of our chairs into reclining chairs. We can make virtually all of our sofas into sleep sofas so if someone needs the extra bedroom, as it were, so that we’re able to take these basic styles that are traditional and classic and then customize them to the particular wants and needs of our customers and to their personal style. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What are the costs involved with custom upholstery manufacturing versus buying something off the rack? Is it much more expensive than just going into the store and just buying something off the rack? KEN FONVILLE: There are some tradeoffs. We have to hire and use higher skilled manufacturing employees and workers. Our upholsterers, in man cases, are second and third generation craftsmen and they are very much steeped in a quality culture. Each piece is custom made to order so that it must take a little longer time and it’s probably not as efficient from a cost standpoint as making ten of the same kind or 500 of the same kind like some of the big manufacturers. It’s a little slower, so we ask our customers to wait a few weeks to get their upholstery rather than having it tomorrow, but we think those tradeoffs are more than offset by both the quality that we can provide as well as the ability to personalize it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Ken, since the name of your company is EcoSelect Furniture and you make eco-friendly furniture and especially, upholstery, can you share with our listeners, why are your furniture products and upholstery considered greener than just stuff that you could just go in and buy at a regular furniture store? Explain the differential greener elements. KEN FONVILLE: As I mentioned earlier, it was really starting with the premise that if you plan for green manufacturing from the beginning, there’s not a lot of additional cost to do it. For example, all of our frames are made from solid lumber. It’s hard wood lumber locally sourced in the mountains of North Carolina near our factory so that we don’t put any plywood in it, which as all the chemicals associated with plywood manufacturing. The springs we use are made from recycled steel. It was just a matter of finding the right source for it. The foam that’s used in our cushions is a soy blend foam. While it’s not a perfectly sustainable product, the fact that it has a soy oil component in addition to the petroleum based stuff means that it is a better product but it still has the performance, the durability, and the resilience that we think our customers need and then there’s something that you don’t typically think about making a product green but the fact that our frames and cushions are so high quality that the could be recovered so instead of sending your sofa to the landfill, you can put a new fabric on it or give it new leather. The leather in itself is a green product in the sense that it lasts many, many years. In fact, it can last a lifetime if well cared for so those are the primary things. The other thing, obviously, is that because of the California flame requirements, in the foam, we elected to buy the foam supplier that does not put those toxic chemicals so that that complete issue is not a function of our upholstery at all so that you get none of that toxic flame retardant chemicals in our upholstery. Plus, even our fabrics do not have any treatments to them like the slow repellent chemical. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. I mentioned your website, EcoSelectFurniture.com. You sell your products strictly online and you don’t have any retail stores. What was your business vision behind that decision-making? KEN FONVILLE: A couple of things; the primary one being that we believed, and still do believe, that we could provide a higher-quality product to the consumer for the same price as they would pay buying a lower-quality product in a retail store. We’ve tried to remove those distribution channels out of our selling equation, out of our business model so that we don’t have any risk. We don’t have any inventory. We don’t have a lot of personnel costs. We do minimal advertising so that we’ve taken the cost that we believe adds to the product value to the consumer, to our customer, and tried to remove them from the equation so that we could provide a higher-quality product for a regular price. We like to say we give you a designer quality or designer product for a regular price. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, and also, you have a lower carbon footprint by just selling online with no retail stores. You are greener just with regards to that because you don’t have any retail stores and have a bigger carbon footprint because of that. KEN FONVILLE: Absolutely and in fact, we try to reduce our carbon footprint across the board. Fortunately, all of our materials’ components are sourced locally near the factory and our furniture product and upholstery is delivered directly to the consumer via a home delivery shipping company so that it doesn’t go to a retail store and then is reshipped so that all of those things help reduce the carbon footprint of the complete business. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Ken, can you share with our listeners a little bit about the new California upholstery flammability regulations? KEN FONVILLE: Sure. Ever since the mid-1970s, California has required that all upholstery sold through retailers in state of California meets a very strict flammability requirements or fire-resistance requirement. For all of that time, there was an open flame test where actually, the fire was applied to the upholstery and it had to resist flaming up or burning for 10 minutes or so. I’ve forgotten the exact timeframe, but for a rather significant time. What wasn’t realized at that time was the toxicity of the chemicals that were required to beat that requirement, to make the foam and the upholstery flame resistant or fire resistant so as it was learned that the chemicals that were being added to the upholstery were actually worse for the environment, worse for the consumer because they off gas at home, and even worse for the firemen who are called to put out a home fire. If the upholstery is burning, it’s giving off all these toxic chemicals so they recently changed the regulation to go to a smolder test where a lighted cigarette is applied to the upholstery and the piece has to resist catching fire for some period of time but that has meant that all of the manufacturers have to retest all of their products to make sure they meet the new requirements. Plus, in many cases, they’re not quite sure how to meet the new requirements, whether a barrier coat is needed or whether some chemicals can be added or whether fabrics can be treated, plus the fact that the state has been sued by the chemical manufacturers so whether they can actually put the new regulation in place is up for debate and will probably take some time to get resolved and worked out. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I see. For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Ken Fonville with us today. He’s the owner and founder of EcoSelect Furniture. It’s www.ecoselectfurniture.com. You know, we talked about the fact that you’re only online so talk a little bit about how people — I’m on your beautiful website now, Ken. How do people interrelate? They can call or email you and make orders and then how does delivery happen and how long does delivery take? Is it longer than typical furniture going into a store and is it coast to coast in every ZIP code across the United States? How does your website interact with the consumer and how easy is it to order furniture and upholstery off of your website? KEN FONVILLE: Okay, well, that’s a lot of questions at one time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I know. Sorry. KEN FONVILLE: The consumer can browse through the website. We try to answer as many questions as we can. The customer can certainly call me. I spend a lot of time talking to consumers on the phone and answering questions, explaining what we do, trying to help them make the right decisions. Once a decision is made about which style they want and which pieces, they can either order online — there’s an order form on the website and their credit card payment would go through the secure server but we don’t ever see it and then the order is placed and what I do is send them an order acknowledgement that I ask them to confirm that we got everything exactly right since there are so many custom options to the pieces that we sell and then the order is put into the production cycle at the factory and it takes about eight weeks for us to produce a piece from the order entry day and then another couple of weeks or so to get it shipped to the consumer. Our shipping process is nationwide. We ship everywhere. In fact, we’ve sent pieces to Canada and a couple of pieces to Hawaii and once, we shipped to Alaska, though those are more difficult because of the packing required. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, of course. KEN FONVILLE: But for the typical customer in the U.S., we use a specialized white glove home delivery furniture carrier. They pick up pieces from our factory, pay another factory that delivers to our consumers, take it to their warehouse, which is about 75 miles away from us, and there they bundle up all of the products in a single truckload going to a single geographic area. The customer can track that process online through the shipping company and then when they have a truckload ready to go, they will call the customer to make a delivery appointment and then bring the pieces to the customer’s home, unwrap them, put them in place in the customer’s house and where she wants them, and then remove all the packing materials for recycling. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Ken, you’ve had a storied career in the furniture industry and now you are making eco friendly furniture with your great company and it’s really — is this a trend that you see other people like you, other veterans getting involved with making eco-friendly furniture and is there a furniture industry organization for green furniture? KEN FONVILLE: Well, there is. Number one, I do see some other companies embracing green trends. In some ways, I’m sorry to see it because it’s more competition for me but I’m pleased that the customer is offered more green alternatives and green furniture for their homes. There is an organization called The Sustainable Furniture Council that I’m not only a member of. I’ve been through their green leader training and I keep that certification up to date. They are very, very effective and they have a website as well where the consumers can learn more about sustainability and furniture and even get the names of the manufacturers and the retailers who support the Sustainable Industry Council and their practices. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, and with regards to trends, you’ve dealt with families now for decades, buying furniture and seeing what they want and what they really are excited about and what they’re not that excited about. Is this a trend that you see is here to stay with regards to people coming to you and really being interested in having toxic-free furniture, chemical-free furniture, in other words, eco- and green-friendly furniture? KEN FONVILLE: I think it’s a rapidly growing phenomenon. In fact, most of my customer contact on the telephone is explaining what we do and why we do it and because of their interest in finding someone who could give them toxic free furniture. People are very concerned about what they’re bringing into their homes what they’re exposing their children to. The studies are a little bit scary about the chemicals that wind up in children’s bodies as a result of chemicals that are around us all the time so having the upholstery, which, number one, is gonna stay in their home for many years, having that toxin-free becomes very important to people and I think it’s growing in importance as people become more aware of it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. You know, you recently participated in the Green Festival. Can you share some of your thoughts about your participation with the Green Festival, Ken? KEN FONVILLE: Sure. That was sort of a test for us. We had not done anything like that before in our advertising. We try to stay in many of the green advertising vehicles. The Green Festival is a show that goes around the country. There’s five locations, I think: New York, Washington, Chicago, LA and San Francisco. It’s a two- or three-day event where there are hundreds of vendors selling green products mostly for the home, but not totally and all kind of educational lectures and things about sustainability and how you can live a better life and what kind of products are green and some of the things that enable people or help them live greener lives. We had a little booth and talked to many, many customers. Obviously, people didn’t come to the Green Festival expecting to buy a sofa, but it was rewarding to be able to see people and talk with them and have them sit on our upholstery, which is one of the real drawbacks to selling online. We recognize it’s a real act of faith to make a 2- or $3,000 purchase of a product that you’ve never seen and certainly in the case of upholstery you’ve never sat in to make sure that it’s comfortable. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Ken, we’re down to the last minute. Any final thoughts or shameless plugs before we have to say goodbye today? KEN FONVILLE: Well, I encourage everyone to take a look at the website. I’m available most of the time on the phone and certainly I’m available by email and all of that contact information is on the website. I encourage people if they’re interested to request some swatches. We’ll send them small pieces of the fabric’s colors or the leather and on the swatch request form, there’s a place for questions so if you have something specific that you want to know about more, absolutely give me a call or drop me a note. I would be delighted to share my knowledge with you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you, Ken, so much. Your website is, for our listeners out there, EcoSelectFurniture.com. Thank you, Ken, for making toxic- and chemical-free upholstery and for creating eco-friendly furniture. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re so thankful to have with us today Felipe Moreno. He’s the Deputy Director of Phoenix Public Works. Welcome to Green is Good, Felipe. FELIPE MORENO: Thank you for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, this is really great and this is the first time we’ve ever had Phoenix represented on Green is Good, but before we get talking about all the great things in sustainability and waste aversion you’re doing in Phoenix, share a little bit about the Felipe Moreno story with our listeners. Talk a little bit about your journey leading up to you becoming Deputy Director. FELIPE MORENO: Sure. I started with the City of Phoenix over 14 years ago. I actually came in in the Human Services Department, so my background is actually more on the social work side working with youth and so I did that for about five to six years and then there was a great opportunity. Our City Manager at the time has a great intern program that allows you to really get exposure to public administration and the city government as a whole and so I was fortunate enough to apply and be accepted into that program and that really gave me a broad view of city management and it really gave me a passion for Phoenix and where I want to be and kind of grow my career and so out of that, I was able to do rotations in several departments and really learn from our top leaders. After that year was over, I was fortunate enough to land a position with the Public Works Department where I’ve been for the last seven years and progressively working in different areas within solid waste and in the last four months into my new assignment as Deputy Public Works Director over our field services, which is all of our solid waste collection and recycling collection, and aversion programs and so I’m very excited, very passionate about what we’re doing here, and I couldn’t ask for a better city and department to work in. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome, and we’re so grateful to have you on the show today and talking about all the good things you’re doing in Phoenix. For our listeners who want to follow along with all of Felipe and his colleagues’ great work in Phoenix, you can follow along on their website, www.phoenix.gov/publicworks. I’m on the website now. It is really a fun and practical website and I think it’s really well done and I think our listeners out there would find it to be very informational and things of that such. Let’s get right into it, Felipe. Let’s talk a little bit about the mayor and the city council and what they did last year in terms of setting an aggressive waste aversion goal. Talk a little bit about what the new standard is in Phoenix and what direction you’re headed in with regards to sustainability and waste diversion. FELIPE MORENO: Absolutely. We’re very fortunate to have a mayor, Greg Stanton, who is forward thinking in the way of sustainability and actually, in his 2013 State of the City address, he challenged the city, and when I say ‘the city’, it’s not just us as the organization but the city of Phoenix, to increase our waste diversion rate to 40% by the year 2020 and so that’s very aggressive because currently. Phoenix is at a 16% diversion rate, well below the national average. The national average is about 34%, and so we’re looking to exceed that average and get to a 40% diversion by 2020 and we’re really excited about that. That’s gonna be a lot of work ahead of us but we’re up for the challenge and that’s really looking at just rethinking how the city consumers and residents rethink their behaviors all the way to how we as a city in our solid waste operation have to overhaul ourselves to think differently and do things differently so we’re fortunate to have leadership from a strong mayor and our city manager and then all the way to our department. We’re all on the same page and up for the challenge. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, what is that initiative called again? FELIPE MORENO: The initiative is Reimagine Phoenix and so that’s kind of our umbrella initiative that we’ve launched to support Mayor Greg Stanton’s initiative or diversion goal and so Reimagine Phoenix is really looking at transforming trash into resources. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Nice. I like that, and so talk a little bit about Phoenix as it stands today. What is your current diversion goal as the sixth largest city and how did you choose 40%? Where are the metrics here? Where are you today? I know you mentioned it a little while ago, but how are you gonna get from A to Z and why is 40%, which is, of course, higher than other U.S. metropolitan cities, why was that goal the chosen goal? FELIPE MORENO: Well you know, like I mentioned, we’re at 16% and the national average being 34. It’s a little misleading with the national average because the one advantage some metropolitan cities have that we don’t is there’s a lot of mandates. Some cities are mandated to recycle. It’s the law. Or divert certain materials, where Phoenix, we’re 100% voluntary in our program and even with that, we enjoy a high participation rate but we can do a lot better, as you can see with our low diversion rate and so we want to go to 40% because we really want to challenge ourselves to not just be average; we want to be leaders in the industry. We’re very focused on becoming a leader for metropolitan cities in diversion. We want to be the go-to city where people come and say, ‘What are you doing? How are you getting there,’ and so we wanted to challenge ourselves not to just get to the national average, but exceed it and so 40% was a good number that we felt was achievable but aggressive and the way we’re gonna get there is really through three focus areas, one being reevaluating and rethinking our solid waste operations; putting new programs in place that help residents divert more waste, looking at how we operate within the city to divert our own waste better, and then the other piece is community outreach and communication, bringing more awareness to the public on diversion and the importance of diversion and that triple bottom line that you hear about sometimes of the economy side, the environmental side, and then just cost so we’re looking at really bringing awareness, doing the outreach, just engaging the public to be true partners with us in this process, and then the third area that we’re really focusing on is community partnerships and business partners, reaching out to the private haulers who are in the business that we are in as well as our corporate business partners out there in other municipalities looking at it from a regional approach too. We can’t do this alone. We realize that in the Public Works Department, if we were to overhaul our operation, it will only get us part of the way there. We really need to bring in Phoenix partners, businesses, school districts, everybody, to get on board, to see how they can change their business, their operation, how they can contribute to the diversion goal and really get creative and create some synergy amongst all of us to reach that 40%. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting. When you talk about communication, Felipe, obviously we live in a Facebook and Twitter world. What is your communication strategy? I assume it’s not as black and white as the old Mad Men days where you could buy some billboards or buy some radio or television time. How are you leveraging the new media also, social media platforms, and what does your communication strategy look like in terms of getting out new recycling opportunities and waste and diversion opportunities that you’re creating in the city of Phoenix? FELIPE MORENO: Yeah, that’s a great question. We have to stay current and I think the big areas that we’re looking to focus on with our community outreach is kind of a four-prong approach. The city is fortunate enough to own a lot of our own media so we have our website. We have newsletters. We have inserts that go out with the city municipal services bill, water and solid waste bills. We have list serves and then we do have social media component. We have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so we’re hot and heavy on making sure we’re maximizing our city owned media and staying up to time with the social media but then we’re also utilizing paid media so we still utilize the radio spots, the TV spots, billboards out there, things that are gonna bring awareness, Spanish media is very important to us and then not just looking at the multimedia approach but really making sure we emphasize our grassroots approach so we have over 50 environmental specialists that their role is kind of code compliance and enforcement out there and engagement with the community on solid waste, making sure they’re following the rules, making sure they’re answering their questions and so we’re really gonna encourage their existing staff to be out there interacting with the public every day and promoting this program, promoting this initiative, kind of educating the public on how we can achieve that goal of 40% by the year 2020 and then also just community events. Our mayor, Greg Stanton, has a lot of events out in the community. Our city council members have events in their districts. We tag on to those things whenever possible to have a presence there to reinforce the message. Our elected officials are very good at promoting that for us so making sure they’re educated on what we’re doing so that they can be our torchbearers out there with our constituents and so it’s just really a combination of that grassroots approach to make sure we’re just out there face to face with the public combine with our city owned and paid media, that’s also important to us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who have just joined us, we’ve got Felipe Moreno on with us. He’s the Deputy Director of the Phoenix Public Works Program and to learn more about what Felipe and his colleagues are doing in Phoenix, go to www.phoenix.gov/publicworks. I’m on your great website now and I’m on the recycling and diversion program area and you have so many things you guys are recycling there from Christmas trees to election signs, composting and green organics, household hazardous waste. You’re really making recycling and diversion a very, very landmark part of your new sustainability Reimagine Phoenix program, huh? FELIPE MORENO: Absolutely. You know, in a perfect world, I think where we want to head is to be out there collecting less garbage that we have to bury and more materials that we can repurpose and turn into resources and that’s really the focus of Reimagine Phoenix is not looking at trash and garbage as something that just goes away and needs to be buried but really looking at the multitude of possibilities of what we can do with that and turn it into resources that can be repurposed and reused and put back into the economy locally and so we would like to be less in the business of being the garbage man and more in the business of collecting things and turning them into something useful for the public. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. Felipe, you mentioned a couple minutes ago that one of the key elements of Reimagine Phoenix was to get involved and get businesses more involved with the success and with your new goals of 40% diversion by 2020. Talk a little bit about how does that look even and why did you choose to build relationships with businesses and help the initiative move forward? FELIPE MORENO: Right. You know, the importance of community partnership and business partners is critical to achieving our goal. Again, we could do everything possible within public works’ power to change programs and add new programs but we can’t do it alone and so we recognize that we really need to reach out to some experts in the field in the area of sustainability. Arizona State University is a big partner of ours. They have a school of sustainability and they’re the think tank to help us strategize and figure out new emerging technology, how we can stay cutting edge in the way of waste diversion, how we can take the theory and put it into practical application. They’re working with us closely to help us develop the programs that we’re trying to implement to kind of research and develop new emerging technology to help us get there and then we have other universities that just looking at how they do things on their own campuses, Grand Canyon University, for instance, is another one of our partners and they’re partnering in a different way in that they’re really looking at just how they become more sustainable as a campus, anywhere from how they purchase materials to how they use materials and how they repurpose things and so those are lots of students on those campuses. That’s a big impact in the city of Phoenix and then we also have our school districts that are looking to work with us to figure out how we can implement diversion programs just within all the schools. Paradise Valley School Districts is one of our new partners and working with them, we’re gonna reach over 30,000 students just on how to be better educated and practice good diversion practices within their schools and even at home and so we also have some major sports teams, the Diamondbacks, so we’re looking at really trying to bring awareness but also to help other people who have a large impacts and employ large amounts of people to figure out how they can do good on diverting their material and helping us achieve that goal together. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Felipe, talk a little bit about your current solid waste services that you offer today, your baseline and what you’re planning on rolling out, your new solid waste services that you’re planning on rolling out in July 2014 and how did they look differently and why did you choose new services and a new program to roll out this year? FELIPE MORENO: Absolutely. Currently, our baseline solid waste services are not unlike most cities in the country. We offer a regular garbage and recycling service. We’re fully automated, so it’s an automated truck that picks it up with the grippers and dumps it and puts it back down at the curb. It’s collected weekly and then we also offer quarterly bulk trash, which is uncontained, kind of your bulky items, your green waste, your couches, things like that. Quarterly residents can put that out to the curb and we have crews that come out with a tractor and a truck to pick that up and so we’re at a point now where that’s all well and good but that’s not gonna get us to a place of 40% and so we are rolling out two exciting new programs in July. One is a reduce and recycle program. We call it State R and R and that really allows residents the option to downsize their garbage container to a medium size container, which allows them to throw away less and recycle more and they’ll realize a $3 discount per month on their bill, that they were able to do that and so we’re excited about that. Sign up for that rolls out July 7, and that’ll just be collected just like the normal service. It’s just a smaller garbage container. The other program is our curbside green organics collection so we’re adding a third container for those who would like it and that really allows residents to throw away green waste so yard clippings, things around the house that are your landscaping material. Rather than put it out for bulk trash to be buried, they can put that in that tan container and out trucks will go by weekly and collect that as well and then all that gets diverted away from the landfill and it’s mulched and grinded and turned into compost. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and you expect these two programs to start making the dent in getting you from the 16 to the 40 and starting that rise immediately? FELIPE MORENO: Absolutely. It’s just the beginning. These are two programs we’re kicking off and again, we’re gonna continue to research and develop new emerging technologies and figure out ways to enhance that but we’re starting here at the very base service for our residents that they can take immediate advantage of and we can see some immediate diversion. A lot of what we bury though is organic. It’s green waste and it’s sad because that’s stuff that can be reused and turned into something valuable by way of compost. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Felipe, many cities now, we hear about food waste and composting becoming the new thing and something that’s getting done more and more across cities across America. Is that something Phoenix is focusing on and is food composting becoming more of your DNA and culture as well? FELIPE MORENO: We want to get there. At this point, with our green organics program, it’s pretty basic and so there are many types of food waste. ASU, as I mentioned, they’re working with us to help develop a good food waste program down the road and we’re gonna get there. That is definitely a part of our plan and that’s a big part of what we throw away as well so if we can get that food waste out of the landfill as well as the green organics, we’ll definitely be on the right track towards that 40% diversion goal. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We have a couple minutes left, Felipe, and I want you to touch on the Reimagine Phoenix initiative and some other opportunities in sustainability. What other things are you doing with regards to energy management and other things with regards to sustainability in the Reimagine Phoenix initiative? FELIPE MORENO: Well, under Reimagine Phoenix, we’re focused on a lot of our solid waste programs that but we do have in the public works department, we don’t just do solid waste. There’s another side, which is fleet and facilities management and they’re very aggressive with looking at making the city’s fleet alternative fuel, CNG, things like that, so getting off of the dependence on just regular gasoline and then also, we have some greenhouse gas emission goals as well as our buildings. We’re looking to make buildings LEED certified whenever possible, be very energy efficient, and solar, we’re doing solar projects around the city so solid waste is an important piece but it’s one piece of a bigger puzzle in the city and so everybody’s really forward thinking with the mayor, again being very focused on sustainability so he’s really challenged all our city departments and operations to think outside the box and do what we can to reach that goal. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well Felipe, with all the great things you’ve laid out today, I’m sure you’re gonna hit your goal of 40% diversion by 2020. I applaud all the great work you’re doing in the city of Phoenix with your colleagues and for our listeners out there that want to learn more about what Felipe and his colleagues are doing in the Phoenix Public Works Department, please go to www.phoenix.gov/publicworks. Thank you, Felipe, for being an innovative sustainability leader. You are truly living proof that green is good. FELIPE MORENO: Thank you.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Helena Molin Valdes. She’s from Paris, France. She’s the Head of the Secretariat of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short Lived Climate Pollutants. Welcome to Green is Good, Helena. HELENA MOLIN VALDES: Hi. Great to be with you today. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s wonderful, and thank you for taking the time across the world to come on our show today. We’re so honored to have you on and before we get talking about all the important work you’re doing at the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, Helena, I would love you to share your story and your biography first with our listeners and how you even came to this very important organization and the very important position you have as Head of the Secretariat. HELENA MOLIN VALDES: Well, my background is as an architect and urban planner or working in urban context. I’m originally from Sweden. I moved out from Sweden maybe 30 years ago, went to Latin America, worked for many, many years in different countries, and also, my long history has been in a field that is often referred to as disaster risk management, disaster risk reduction and resilience building of communities and in that context, I worked a lot with climate and extreme climate events and how to deal with these with practical solutions and also working on environmental issues and I worked a lot with different communities and different expert groups and scientists but also planners and city officials and government officials and that brought me close to where I’m working now, which is related to climate and clean air quality, something that is also causing many extreme events actually if you think about it and I’ve been here in Paris working on this particular project since July last year and I really, really like it because I can see that we can do a big impact in people’s lives. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get talking about all the important work at the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, can you please explain what it is, what kind of partnership it is, how many countries belong to it so our listeners fully understand how big this organization and how important this organization really is? HELENA MOLIN VALDES: Well, we are a coalition and it’s climate and clean air so we are really focusing our efforts on two big, big things that are very connected. One is air quality and clean air and the other is climate, including our efforts to curb global warming to diminish climate change so this is the focus of the coalition. It was started off only two years ago with six countries and the United Nations Environmental Program as a big concern of how to be able to work on these two issues in a combined effort focusing on action, on very practical things to do to reduce air pollution and at the same time improve climate and among the six countries that started this was of course, the United States with Hillary Clinton who took these very strong to her heart but also, Sweden, Canada, Mexico, Ghana, and Bangladesh and this was in February, 2012 and since then, we have grown to more than 90 partners. Countries, roughly half of them are. International organizations including many of the development banks, The World Bank, the International European Bank, etcetera, and also NGOs, non-governmental organizations, especially those concerned with clean air, climate, and also cities. We have the C40, for example, which is the combination of many mega cities in the world concerned with climate. We have other city networks that work with us as well and we have increasingly some NGOs as well that are working on these issues. Altogether, 90 partners, 91 to be exact, and half of them are countries. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You have a big organization and you have an important role to manage here so this is very important stuff. For our listeners who want to learn more about Helena and her colleagues’ great important work and what they’re doing and how to get involved, please go to www.unep.org/ccac. I’m on your site right now. It is a beautiful site and there’s a lot of information there and I want to get to it. Let’s talk a little bit about short-term climate pollutants. That’s not something I hear or read about a lot. What do you mean? When you say that and when you’re trying to tackle the problem of short-term climate pollutants, Helena, what do you mean by that? HELENA MOLIN VALDES: We started off a little bit in the context of climate change, which as you know, is a long term process caused mainly by carbon dioxide, which has hundreds of years in the atmosphere before the full impact of the global warming can be achieved. At the same there is many not so long lived, actually short lived, only for a few days, a few weeks, a few years in some occasions or a few decades, gases or air pollutants such as black carbon, for example, from cars, from vehicles, from diesel fumes. There is many different components there that are 1) toxic or harmful to health and at the same time, harmful to climate, warming the globe and these gases are quite a few but the ones that we have focused on are, as I mentioned, black carbon, which I mentioned. It’s black. It comes out of diesel and combustion, basically, not fully realized so there are many things that link to transportation, burning of wood and biomass, burning of agriculture, brick kilns. When you see these big black fumes coming out of any burning, that’s black carbon and that is very, very harmful to health but at the same time, it’s very climate forcing. It’s warming the atmosphere a lot and by improving some of these sources of the pollutants, you can have an immediate effect. That’s why we say short lived and near term because it’s immediate. You see the results within weeks, months, or years and so it’s black carbon. It’s something called methane that comes out of oil and gas production, leakage. It comes out of solid waste. It comes out of agriculture, manure, livestock, rice paddies, etcetera, and the third big gas that we are working on is the hydrofluorocarbons, which is HFCs, which is used for cooling and refrigeration and air conditioning, which is very, very potent greenhouse gas and because many, many countries and people around the world now are getting more access to (which they should) refrigeration and air conditioning, this is exponential in the future how this can be used so we’re working on finding alternatives and promoting the use of alternative gases to cooling that will not be harmful for the climate so these are the three big things we’re working on and that’s why it’s called short lived climate pollutants. It’s only living in the air for a short while from days to years to decades and it has an immediate improvement so basically, if you clean up your fleet of diesel fumes, within weeks you will have results in the air quality and you’ll be seeing it in your cities or where you live and this is, of course, something that’s mainly felt in an urban context where you have many people together and the production of these things coming together in a dense area. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We were talking at the top of the show how big your coalition is and, like you said, it’s 91 countries now and so many organizations and why have so many countries gotten involved so quickly and why has the growth been so fast in just a short couple of years? Is it because this is the most critical issue when it comes to climate and clean air and climate change, these short-term climate pollutants? What is your mindset with regards to why your organization has grown so fast with so many countries from around the world? HELENA MOLIN VALDES: Well, when we deal with climate change, this is important to stress. The most important thing to do that the whole world should be working on a carbon low economy, let’s say. We should really work on carbon dioxide to be eliminated or reduced because that’s the only way in the long run over hundreds of years in the future that we can reduce climate change and keep the temperature livable for human beings basically so we are all working towards that objective. As we know, it takes time and we are already in crunch time for the temperature to reach bearable limits and that’s why we have a big global community working on this and all the governments are discussing how to do this in a consistent way. However, in addition to working on this long-term CO₂ reductions starting now obviously, but results down the line, by working on not only this long lived and long term solutions, we can address the short lived ones, the immediate ones, with multiple benefits so we are here talking about climate, of course, and by reducing black carbon or methane or hydrofluorocarbons, indeed we can almost have the projected warming over the next few decades and that’s immense so if you talk about climate change and you’ll probably follow the many discussions around what actually happens, how long it will take, what kind of activities to do, but if you say that say that working on 10 or 20 different practical solutions, you can actually have the projected warming for the next decades and that’s what you’re doing by working on these short lived kind of pollutants, on methane, on black carbon. It’s soot actually and HFCs and that is very attractive. A few years ago, a big report came out from the organization that my secretariat is hosted by, which is the United Nations Environmental Program. They released a report which was done by many, many scientists from around the world and U.S. EPA has been very much in the forefront, among others, to do various studies on this. That said, by introducing 16 particular control measures or activities- for example, putting filters in diesel cars and improving low sulfur diesel, improving brick kilns and changing some of the kilns, using existing technology- up to 80% of all these emissions could disappear, could be eliminated and by taking these very practical measure, which are all doable, it’s all about existing technology, you would have not only, as I said, the climate benefits, but you would also have very strong health benefits; much less asthma, respiratory diseases of different nature, cardiovascular disease, cancer even, skin cancers and others, which are now also being more and more researched around and you can see the direct relationship between the air quality and what is called non-communicable diseases and premature death. Just recently, The World Health Organization released figure that tells us that almost 7 million people a year have premature death due to air pollution. It’s a huge amount of people and you have many studies in the U.S. that have looked at this health impact also so there is an increasing number of studies and research that makes the linkages to not only climate but also health and then also agriculture and crops. Many of the crops are hampered by essentially black carbon or ground level ozone, which comes from the release of these short lived gases like methane that I mentioned before so up to 50 million per year of basic crops like maize, wheat, etcetera, is being lost due to these pollutants because the process of the plant cannot fully develop because it’s hampered by the pollutants so you’re actually having a triple win. You work on reducing and improving air quality and you have happier people because it’s always nice to have fresh air to breathe. You have healthier people. You have better crops and air consistency in general. You have huge impact on global warming and the climate and at the same time, in many of these solutions that we are talking about, it also gives energy efficiency gains, which means that you save money. You save energy, which is something that we all are trying to achieve as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Well, Helena, there’s two big events coming up. In September, 2014, there’s the so-called climate summit coming up in New York and I’d love to understand how your organization, The Climate and Clean Air Coalition, is going to be involved there but also, on a bigger scale, back in your hometown in Paris, back in the city that you live now, let me just say, in 2015, there’s gonna be one of the major climate negotiation sessions where leaders from around the world are coming to and we know that that’s never worked out in the last three or four sessions, that we’ve gotten a lot of talk but not a lot of action. These next two events, what do they mean to you? What do they mean to the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and what do you expect to be the results and your role in these discussions and negotiations and what do you hope comes out of them? HELENA MOLIN VALDES: Well, in the meeting you mentioned in September in New York, it’s the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, who has called on Heads of States at the summit of the leaders of the world to come together to demonstrate not only the will, but also demonstrate what countries, companies, CEOs of companies and other civil society organizations are willing to commit to do in practical terms to reduce global warming and what we are going to do by September in our coalition, we are working on many of the initiatives that we engaged in and I can talk a little bit more about them in a while if you want. We are looking especially at three or four of those initiatives to bring to the summit with a big number of countries and companies behind committing to practical action and that we can actually calculate into a big emission reduction, which will help the climate while at the same time having all these other benefits I mentioned before and the areas that we will bring to the table is around green freight and you have in the U.S. something called the Smart Way Program, which is very, very innovative and functioning well. It’s something that we are working on expanding to the whole world and with many other countries and it’s really to work also with many other companies that do move goods around the world and how they can, through different measure in their supply chain and their logistic chain, really make it greener so green freight so we are going to bring that to the table and we are working on right now and this particular initiative is led by the United States, Canada, something called the International Council for — ICCT, can’t recall what it’s called now — ICCT, International Council on Clean Transportation, and also the organization that hosts our organization, which is UNEP, and we are working with many countries to create a global action plan where companies can trace national governments but also city officials and other civil society organizations have very clear goals in terms of achieving this green freight chain in a big, big scale, building on the green practices that already exist so that’s number one. Number two, we are working with oil and gas industry to sign up to a framework that we have developed together with big chunk of the industry to reduce methane leakage out of the production and more than 8% of the natural gas production actually is lost annually to venting and leakage and flaring and it’s lost, which means lost production and lost income, but it also means that there’s a big impact on climate. Almost 20% of all the methane in the world from human made methane emissions comes from this particular industry so working with the industry to reduce this leakage gives them, in theory, income back, but most importantly, it makes a big difference in the climate and then we’re also working on agriculture and facing down this HFC and the cooling chain so these are the initiatives. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Helena, we’re gonna have you back to talk about the success of the New York event and then we’ll have you back to talk about Paris and what’s going to be happening in Paris in 2015. We thank you for your time today and to learn more about what Helena’s doing with her colleagues at the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, please go to www.unep.org/ccac. Thank you, Helena, for being an inspiring leader on the critical issue of climate and clear air. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Major Darren Mudge. He’s a pastor, an administrator and a businessman running the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Welcome to Green is Good, Major Mudge. MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Thank you, John. It’s good to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, it’s good to have you on. We’re huge fans of The Salvation Army and all the important and good work that you’re doing there, but before we get talking about The Salvation Army and more particularly about the adult rehabilitation center programs, I want you to share, Major Mudge, your journey, your story, because it’s a fascinating one and I would love the listeners to learn all about your before we get talking about The Salvation Army. MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Well, I’ve had an interesting life journey and it began at the age of 13, when I became interested in The Salvation Army. I play a musical instrument and some friends learned that I play a musical instrument and invited me down to listen to The Salvation Army band and I was so enamored with it that I brought my trombone in and enjoyed the band and made The Salvation Army my church and since then, I’ve done some traveling playing with different Salvation Army bands here in the United States and became a Salvation Army Officer in the late ’80s. I decided that that was God’s call in my life and so I was trained to be a Salvation Army Officer and stationed in the New York area for 15 years before I went to South Africa and served with the Salvation Army over in South Africa for three years, returned from there, worked in York, Pennsylvania, for five years and now here in Springfield, running the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center so that in a nutshell is kind of my life since teenage years, since coming on to The Salvation Army. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and thank you for that great service, and I’ve learned so much about The Salvation Army over the years since I was a little boy in New York watching the Christmas collection. As an adult, I’ve learned so much about it and as you said, Salvation Army really is an amazing church and it’s just an amazing structure and we’re so appreciative. This is the first time we’ve ever had you on Green is Good and we’re so honored that you are representing The Salvation Army today on Green is Good so thank you for that. Thank you very much. MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Well, I’m honored to be here and any time I can talk about The Salvation Army, I’ll do it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great, and now getting into what you’re doing at The Salvation Army, you in particular are involved with the adult rehabilitation centers, the ARCs. Can you explain what the ARC really means at The Salvation Army and how long has The Salvation Army been operating adult rehabilitation centers? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: The Salvation Army has been operating adult rehab centers for over 100 years. It’s gonna be close to 120 at this point, and really, what it is, it’s a ministry to folks that don’t have anywhere else to go for drug and alcohol rehabilitation and we do a lot of counseling with them as well as working with them through their addiction and trying to get a hold of their addiction and getting them into recovery and becoming contributing members of society and so The Salvation Army started this so many years ago and the way we support it is through our thrift stores so any purchases that are made through our thrift stores go to support the ministry of rehabilitation and the ministry is free for those who need it and come in for it and part of what we call their work therapy is to help us to get those thrift stores stocked and clothes hung and get items on the shelves and that sort of thing so it’s really kind of an all-around program where a person will come in and receive counsel and receive support in overcoming their addiction and as a result, they give us support and help in moving things out to the stores and then that money comes back in to pay those expenses so it’s a wonderful ministry. We really enjoy it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Major Mudge, I’m on your website now and for our listeners out there that want to follow along and learn more about the important and great work The Salvation Army is up to or to donate to The Salvation Army, it’s www.satruck.org. It’s a beautiful website. There’s a lot going on here so as we look at this website, and you guys have created wonderful technology for a modern world that is so technology based and make it easy for people to donate, talk a little bit about the business side of running the adult rehabilitation centers. You just spoke about the spiritual and the people side and saving these lives and doing the great work that you’re doing but what’s the business side look like? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Well, the business side really is asking people to donate clothing and furniture and that sort of thing to The Salvation Army. We then send our trucks out to pick them up and bring them back here to our warehouse. They’re sorted. They’re gone through. They’re hung. Those things that aren’t fit to be sold, we recycle those and put those off into the recycling stream but the things that are able to be sold, we move those off into our stores. They’re sold in our stores and then that money comes back here to our center and supports the other work that we do and so for me, it’s a great business model because we’re relying on the public to support us and then in turn, we’re able to invest that money into folks that are less fortunate in the public arena and helping them to become contributing citizens and contributing members of society and so I like to say we’re not just recycling clothes and recycling furniture and recycling electronics but we’re recycling people as well. We’re trying to redeem lives and one of the illustrations I use is when you want to redeem a bottle, you take it in and you get some worth out of it and so we want to take these folks that really are struggling really, in many cases, don’t have a lot of self worth and saying to them you are worth it and we want to redeem your life and help you to become a good citizen and a good member of our society. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you recycle all these materials; the furniture and cars and electronics, and there’s a money making aspect to all of that. That money gets reinvested into your adult rehabilitation centers and therefore, then you’re able to recycle lives. MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: That’s right. That’s exactly how it works and it’s pretty ingenious. We are a nonprofit so we’re not in the business of making money. We’re in the business of making people whole. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, talk a little bit about, you know, Salvation Army is, of course, here in our great country in the United States but it was truly founded, I believe, in another country and can you share a little bit? Because I know you’ve traveled the world. How do the arcs work in other countries as well? Where did it start and where is it now around the world? Can you share some of your own personal experiences and what you’ve seen around the world? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Sure. The Salvation Army is in over 125 different countries right now and really, what happens is, and what happened here even in the United States when it came here, people were exposed to The Salvation Army in England where it started and then moved all over the world and kind of brought The Salvation Army with them and one of the main tenets of The Salvation Army is if there’s a need, we’re gonna try to meet it and so here in the United States, of course, we still have the need for alcohol and drug rehabilitation. We do that here. In South Africa, which I’m most familiar with, we do have a rehabilitation center there as well and they operate very similar to the model we have here where they have a thrift store that supports them and that sort of things but in other places in South Africa, we have a lot of orphanages for children with AIDS and that are suffering from HIV and that sort of thing. It depends upon the need of the country what we end up doing there. Many times, our entree to the country is the country approaches us and says can you help us with this issue that you have some experience with and we’ll go in and start helping with that issue and then lo and behold, our churches begin springing up and people begin seeking spiritual counsel and spiritual life through The Salvation Army as well so it was a grassroots organization from the beginning and continues to be so as people are moving out into different countries. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Culturally, Major Mudge, how different are the arcs around the world? Do you recycle different materials at different facilities around the world given the different societies and cultures you’re working with and then how similar are the centers also around the world so is there some differences that you’d like to point out but also, some baseline similarities also, which the church element, I’m sure, and the spiritual element is always the baseline but can you talk a little bit about similarities and differences? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Sure. One of the challenges we have in South Africa is the culture there is not necessarily really geared towards philanthropy and giving and so one of the major obstacles we had there in South Africa was trying to get people to understand the mindset of sharing with your neighbor and helping your neighbor out. That culture is very family oriented and so families help families out and so you rarely see people put into nursing homes and that sort of thing because they’re kept at home and they’re cared for by their families and so one of the struggles we had there was kind of getting people to understand if you can give us your old clothing, if you can give us your old furniture and your old electronics, we can then pass those on to other people and so that was a real education process for us there and a lot of it is so dependent upon the culture in the country and what people are used to as to what we can do and how we can help other people and getting other people to help other people, those who are more fortunate in some ways to help those who are less fortunate. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For those listeners who just joined us, we’re so honored to have with us today Major Darren Mudge. He’s the Pastor, Administrator, and businessman who runs The Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. To learn more about what Major Mudge and his colleagues are doing at The Salvation Army, please go to www.satruck.org. You could get involved. You could donate and also, you can just learn just so much more about The Salvation Army. Let’s get talking about the recycling element of the adult rehabilitation centers. How has that evolved over the years? You’ve had a fascinating journey with The Salvation Army for many, many decades now. How has recycling just even here in the United States evolved with regards to becoming a profit center for The Salvation Army’s great works that you do? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: As times have changed, we’ve been recycling clothes and been very green, as it were, for as long as we can remember. That’s something that we’ve done and helped people to do and seeing the value in. In recent decades, we’ve come to find that looking for more ways to recycle is gonna help our bottom line and help us financially, especially where in the past, we would literally bring old electronics and stuff that we could not sell and would not sell- it was broken and it couldn’t be repaired- we would take those to the landfill and that became a huge issue for us because we were seeing a lot of stuff going into the waste stream that really didn’t need to go there. There was value in it and we’ve found local companies that have come alongside and said to us, ‘Listen, we will be able to purchase some of your recycling materials and then that helps our bottom line and of course, helps the environment by putting those into a recycling stream rather than right into the waste stream. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, got it, and when it comes to recycling lives, how does the program work and do you cover both men and women? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: Many centers cover both men and women. About a third of our centers here in the eastern United States cover men and women and the program works by a person calling up and saying, ‘Listen, I have a problem. I’m an addict or I’m an alcoholic and I need some help,’ and many of them have gone through traditional treatment programs but out program is usually seven to nine months where a person comes in and lives with us and goes through what we call work therapy every day so they’re waking up at a certain hour, they’re given a work therapy assignment, whether that’s working in our warehouse or working on our trucks that go and pick up the things or working in the house doing housekeeping or doing cooking and that sort of thing . They do that every day for five days a week. They work 40 hours a week and that gets them into a routine, which many of them have not has in years and gets them to work on discipline and we work on character issues and spiritual counseling with them through our counseling staff and so as they’re working with other people, some things are coming up for them. We’re able to help them talk through it, some talk therapy and that sort of things where they’re able to share their feelings and share their experiences and many of them come into us and they’re feeling worthless. They’re feeling like they have no meaning in life and through our spiritual counseling, we’re able to say to them, ‘You have value. You can redeem your life. You can move yourself into a different way of life so you’re not dependent on drugs and alcohol,’ and so we find that at the end of seven to eight months, these folks are prepared to go back into the world and become contributing members of society and for me, it’s a redemption of lives. That really is the best part of the ministry. I enjoy the business. I enjoy the work that we do but seeing the changed lives where a person comes in and they can’t look you in the eye. They’re feeling so bad about themselves and what their addiction and alcoholism has done to their lives and all the loss in their lives and to see them stand up on their graduation day and say, ‘I’m ready to go back out into the world and I’ve reconciled some relationships and redeemed some relationships with my family and those who are close to me and they see now my worth and I see my worth and I’m ready to go back into society,’ that’s the most rewarding part of the work that we do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Major Mudge, is The Salvation Army the largest recycling life conservation company in the world that helps rehabilitate people as a nonprofit? Is there any organization that even comes close to this or is this the number one recycling life organization in the world? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: I hesitate to say that because I don’t know all of the other groups that are out there doing this sort of work, but I’d definitely say we’re one of the largest redemptive ministries for people that are drug and alcohol dependent. We have 70 people here in our house in Springfield and throughout the eastern United States, we have thousands of people that go through our programs every year. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I was honored years ago. I was asked to speak at one of your Oakland adult rehabilitation centers and they were giving me a tour after I made some comments and got to meet the residents at that point and they walked me into a room that looked like a church setting and I was sort of stunned and as I then continued my journey throughout the building, I said, “That was like a little mini church in there,” and I said, “Explain this to me,” and they said, “John, The Salvation Army is a church and that’s how we look at ourselves.” Major Mudge, is that church-like setting in many or most of the adult rehabilitation centers across the United States and across the world? MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: That church setting is in every Salvation Army adult rehabilitation center. That’s the focal point of what we’re doing. We’re trying to redeem lives spiritually as well as getting them off their addiction and off their alcoholism, that sort of thing. The spiritual aspect, for us, is very important. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Of course. It was so moving and it just changed my whole approach to understanding The Salvation Army because it’s one thing to see the beautiful red cans during the holidays and see the fundraising but then to see the church from the inside out was just really a wonderful experience. We have a few minutes left. Major Mudge, I want to give these two minutes to you. Talk a little bit about the major challenges that you face at work and what you do personally but also, share one or two of the greatest rewards that you’ve gotten in the whole journey that you’ve been on at The Salvation Army. MAJOR DARREN MUDGE: The major challenge we face today is really competition for recycling goods. We’re doing it from a nonprofit standpoint and relying on people’s generosity and goodness to give us the materials that we need to operate our system and operate the centers and there’s more and more competition out there, especially for clothing, and if you drive through your neighborhood, you will see different clothing boxes in many different areas and these really are kind of moving into The Salvation Army’s area and we’re running out of product to sell to then use that money to help people in the rehabilitation of their lives. The greatest reward for me, John, is literally to stand next to someone who’s graduating and to realize that the work that they have done on their lives and the work that we’ve been able to do with them has really changed their lives and changed their mindset and changed their understanding of who they are and changed their relationship with God and with other people and that, for me, is the most rewarding part of the ministry that I do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, it’s been unbelievably rewarding having you, Major Mudge, on Green is Good today. I’m so honored to have you on and for our listeners out there, to do more, to donate your clothes or other items that you have to help save lives, please donate to The Salvation Army, www.satruck.org. Major Mudge, thank you for your inspiring work in saving and sustaining people’s lives. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Doctor Kathryn Mengerink. She’s the Senior Attorney and Co-Director of the Ocean Program at the Environmental Law Institute. Welcome to Green is Good. DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: Thank you, John. It’s great to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Kathryn, you’re doing so many exciting things and we’re gonna be talking about the deep ocean today, a subject we’ve never covered on Green is Good before, but before we get talking about that, you have a fascinating background. First of all, you’re unbelievably educated. You have both your J.D. and your Ph.D., and your background is fascinating to me, and I would love you to share some of your journey and story with our listeners before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at the Environmental Law Institute with regards to the deep ocean. DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: Oh, sure. I started off my career, my journey through school, interested in science broadly and zoology in particular and became passionate about marine biology when I spent a bit of summer and spring in a marine station in Florida and that led me to come out to Scripps Institution of Oceanography and get my Ph.D. in marine biology and I spent about six years studying sea urchins of all things. I spent a lot of time on the water and in the water and became really interested in marine conservation so I switched gears again and moved on to get a degree in environmental law and was lucky enough to land at the environmental law institute where they gave me the opportunity to establish an ocean program and we’ve been at it now for about eight years and it’s focused on science-based decision making and how we can support good management. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s fascinating, and we have never covered the issue of deep ocean before. In the last years, it seems like we’re talking more and more about the ocean with regards to how polluted we’ve made it, what we could do to make it better, what some solutions are, and what’s going on today so it’s so timely and it’s so important and I’m so thankful for your coming on the show today to talk about what you know and your great work at the Environmental Law Institute and for our listeners that want to follow along as we interview Kathryn today, if you want to go and check out her website and everything that’s going on at the Environmental Law Institute, please join me now because I’m on it. It’s a beautiful website. It’s www.ELI.org. Kathryn, let’s get right into it. Deep ocean — I’ve never heard that terminology before. I’ve heard a lot of other things with regards to the ocean. What is the deep ocean and how big is it and what does it really mean? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: Sure, yeah. The deep ocean is, most scientists define it as an area below 200 meters in depth so think about a football field and that’s about 100 meters long so a couple hundred meters is two football fields below the surface. It’s also typically beyond the continental shelf so as you go under water, there’s the continental shelf, which is gradually getting deeper and deeper and then it drops off into the depths of the ocean. It is, in fact, the largest living space on earth because not only does the ocean itself make up 71% of the surface of the earth, but if you think about the ocean period, you’re talking about a three-dimensional living space so by far, the largest living space on earth and the average depth of our ocean is over 4,000 meters in depth, so most of the ocean is deep ocean. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, it’s the largest living space on earth, which already blows my mind in terms of vastness. Talk about what makes it so special then besides bigness. What are the key elements that you’re working on with regards to the deep ocean? What’s your focus and the Environmental Law Institute’s focus with regards to the needs of it and what we can do to make it a better place? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: Sure, yeah. There’s a lot of things that make the deep ocean special. It’s a place of extreme, so it’s extreme size, extreme depth, extreme pressure, extreme darkness, and extreme unknown so I can unpackage that a little bit for you and help you think about some of the aspects of the deep ocean that make it special. We’ve talked about size. If you think about depth, the deepest part of the deep ocean is almost seven miles deep so that’s the Marianas Trench and think about Mount Everest. Mount Everest could fit inside of the Marianas Trench in terms of the depth so it’s deeper than Mount Everest is high. You’re talking about incredibly deep ocean and as you get deeper, pressure gets extreme so think about swimming to the bottom of a pool. You can feel the pressure on your ears. Swimming to the bottom of a deep ocean, it would be like holding something like 50 jumbo jets on top of you. That’s the kind of pressure that you’re talking about when you get to the deep ocean. Because of that, it is extremely challenging for scientists to access and work in the deep ocean. It’s a high cost for the technology to work in the deep ocean and there’s certainly substantial dangers to working at depth so while we rarely and only twice have sent people down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, more typically, we send nets or remotely operated vehicles to go down and explore those deep depths but it makes it really challenging and so that’s another important aspect of what makes it special because this challenge means that we don’t know a lot about the deep ocean so there’s so much unknown. Some people have said that we know more about the moon than we know about the deep ocean. At the same time, the deep ocean is a really diverse place so it’s not a place where we have a single habitat. It’s not all one type of environment but there’s lots of different types of environments in the there have been amazing discoveries just in recent decades so we’re still learning really new things about the deep ocean and we like to think about these as the unknown unknowns and so what I mean by that is that 50 years ago, we didn’t know about hydrothermal vents and now we know that they are these amazing places where hot water is coming up into the ocean and you have these communities of crazy creatures that are living in these extreme environments and we have things like seamounts that are mountains under the water that have deep sea corals that are very different from shallow water corals that we see that host a variety of life so it’s a really special place. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Excuse my ignorance on this, but I know everything is interrelated and we’re all one big part of an ecosystem. What are the important issues regarding the deep ocean and uses of it and how does it interrelate with us above ground and how do you then tie the uses with our whole ecosystem together? What are you looking at on a regular basis and what are you trying to improve? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: Yeah, so we’re interested in understanding what makes the deep ocean special and how we can effectively manage it. I’ve been involved with a group called the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative that is an international collaboration of scientists, policymakers and others who are people from industry, people from academia who are focused on thinking about how to effectively manage this space and to utilize it in a way that supports our life on earth so there’s a lot of things that we already derive from the deep ocean. We have fisheries that are getting deeper. The more that we exploit shallow water environments, the deeper we look for other types of materials so some of these fisheries- for example, seamount fisheries- have received a lot of pressure from fishermen and the challenge with that is that many of the fish on seamounts are slow growing so they can be over 100 years old and take a long time to reach maturity so when they’re fished and depleted, it means it’s going to be a long time, potentially longer than human lifetimes, for such populations to recover. Other types of activities that we have in the deep ocean include oil and gas development and the existing deepest well is something like 2,800 meters in depth and that’s more than a mile and a half beneath the surface and while the footprint of oil and gas development is small, done correctly, the impacts are minor, deep water horizon is an example, the oil spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, is an example of what happens when something goes wrong or can go wrong at depth and that was a deep ocean oil spill. A lot of our focus has been on the impacts to what’s happened along the coastline. Animals that have been oiled like pelicans and sea turtles or habitat that’s been disrupted like sea grasses or marshlands but a big part of the impact was in the deep ocean and we know very little about what was there to begin with and how that impacted those resources. Other existing uses of this deep ocean are things like waste deposition so in Norway, for instance, they’re putting mine tailings that are taken from land into the deep ocean as an alternative to depositing the waste on land. In terms of future use then, people are thinking about things like carbon storage so how do we store carbon dioxide? Maybe we can inject it into the deep ocean or deep sea diving, which is a big issue that people are thinking about right now as regulations are being put in place and people are starting to look towards mining the deep ocean. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who have just joined us, we’ve got Doctor Kathryn Mengerink on with us today. She’s a Senior Attorney and Co-Director of the Ocean Program at the Environmental Law Institute. To learn more about all the great work she’s up to and her colleagues are up to, especially with regards to the deep ocean, please go to www.eli.org. I’m on the website now. It’s a beautiful website. There’s tons of information here. Let’s go back to impact. You know, you see all these specials now on television now, Kathryn, with regards to this sort of soupy plastic we’ve so hurt our ocean with, so impacted our ocean itself with. Is it safe to assume that this soupy, horrible, pollution mix of plastics that we’ve created in the ocean are now impacting also the deep ocean as well? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: They’re certainly present there, and in fact, as part of my job, I actually do some work with Scripps Institution of Oceanography with their Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation and we had a master’s student this spring, Meredith Epp, who has developed an app and the app is her deep sea marine debris app and she’s requesting that scientists and others who are operating in the deep sea help identify debris in the ocean while they’re doing other types of research. So often, you hear anecdotally stories from various scientists talking when they were trawling or doing research in an area of the deep ocean that they’ve seen different types of marine debris and in fact, there was a study recently done near the Monterey Bay area that focused on the deep sea and marine debris down there and evaluating the types of things that you find in the deep ocean so it’s certainly down there. We’ve certainly made our mark. I think there’s a question now about what kind of effect does that type of marine debris have on the deep ocean and, like other things, our knowledge about that is very limited. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What I keep understanding from you is that this is still an ongoing journey of studying the deep ocean and that you’re in the middle of it with your colleagues. With regards to studying it, that’s one thing. Who manages it though? It’s, you say, the largest place on the planet, and really, in terms of its vastness and bigness, under whose domain does it fall and who’s in charge of it? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: Yeah, so all nations actually have a role to play in managing the deep ocean, certainly all coastal nations and all nations involved with the law of the sea treaty. Deep ocean is both in national waters and in international waters so, for example, if you’re off the coast of California, you could be a couple miles out and beneath you is deep ocean so it can be that close to shore. In other places in the world, it’s much further, tens of miles off shore before you really start to see deep ocean but it is both an international and a national issue so each nation has a role to play in managing the deep ocean as well as international bodies. In terms of how then it’s managed, most nations, and in an international context, we manage things in a siloed way and what I mean by that is we manage specific activities on an agency-by-agency basis or on an institution by institution basis so if you’re looking at the United States, fisheries are managed by or in accordance with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Oil and gas leaking falls under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management so those things are separate and while there’s some interaction between different agencies, they’re really occurring in silos and that’s one of the big concerns from a management perspective is when we’re managing things on a one by one basis, we can really run into challenges because different decisions can affect things in different ways. In international waters, we see a similar situation. We have what’s called Regional Fishery Management Organizations and they manage the fish. We have the International Seabed Authority and it’s tasked with managing and leasing the deep seabed for deep sea minerals so in part, our challenge is how do we integrate management across these different sectors. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, if you were the boss for the day, like you could just wave your wand and make things better, what would you do to make the management more seamless and more comprehensive and get everybody on the same page? What would be your stroke of genius to pull this together? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: There’s a few different approaches to potentially integrate management. People have been looking into and actually have been implementing what’s called marine spatial planning. That’s essentially a forward looking process that is supposed to be across agencies to make a plan for how to utilize a particular place and base decision making then on sort of like a land use plan. If you live in a city, you may have a plan for how to develop that city. We can do the same thing in the context of the ocean if we work collaboratively to decide how we want to utilize that space and the rationale for that is the you could imagine that for one agency that’s managing fish, for instance, they may want to protect an area because they recognize it as an important nursery ground so they may say no fishing in that area because we think it’s an important nursery to establish and make sure that the fishery is sustainable. At the same time, there may be another decision by the energy agency to exploit that area for some sort of energy development so we want to avoid that kind of thing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right. That makes sense. Talk about mining in terms of deep ocean mining. We’re down to the last couple of minutes. Is that part of the future of the deep ocean and if it is, how do we do deep ocean mining without further degrading the deep ocean it destroying it or hurting it further? Is there a way to do it while being sensitive to the ecosystem of the deep ocean? DOCTOR KATHRYN MENGERINK: That’s a big challenge that we face so certainly people are interested in mining the deep ocean and we’ve increasingly seen interest in this so, for example, New Zealand, right now there’s a group that is interested in mining the Caltham Rocks Phosphate Site and have submitted and developed an environmental impact assessment for that area. In Papua New Guinea, there’s a company that’s already obtained a lease to mine on hydrothermal vents so there’s a lot of interest and efforts in that direction. There are right now in the international arena exploration leases so there’s companies out there looking at exploration and they’re now developing exploitation programs under the various agencies so that is up and coming. It’s an issue that is a very real issue that we have to address and in terms of the things that we think need to happen to address it, we need to put measures in place like protecting habitats, requiring appropriate environmental assessment, minimizing the impact to the region by avoiding special sites, by developing the right technology so that we’re not causing too much impact, but the big question and another important piece of it is to move with precaution and to be very precautious about how we move forward in the deep ocean because we have such little knowledge so we have to at the same time we are exploring the area and considering it for exploitation, we really need to focus on expanding our knowledge so we can make smart decisions. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome, and Kathryn, thank you for coming on the show today and sharing so much about the deep ocean that I never knew, I’m sure our listeners never knew. We’d like to have you back on to continue this story. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Kathryn and her colleagues’ great work, please go to the Environmental Law Institute’s website. It’s www.eli.org. I love the tagline; “Environmental Law Institute makes law work for people, places, and the planet.” Thank you, Kathryn, for being an inspiring sustainability deep ocean expert. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and I’m so honored to have my friend back on the show, Eva Radke. She’s the President and founder of Film Biz Recycling, and you can check out all the cool things Eva’s doing at FilmBizRecycling.org. Welcome back to Green is Good, Eva. EVA RADKE: Thank you for having me, John. I’ve missed you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh man, I miss you, too, but I’ve been following you and you’ve been blowing it up. You have been blowing it up in Brooklyn and I’m so excited and I’m so proud of what you’ve been doing. Before we get into all the cool things that you’ve been up to over the years and the awards that you’ve won, I want you to share though for our listeners that didn’t hear our first show together about five years ago now, I want you to share a little bit of the Eva Radke story, how you even came to this place and you started this amazing company, Film Biz Recycling. EVA RADKE: Okay, I’ll put it in a nutshell for you. So, I was in the film industry, mainly in the art department, for 15 years. I saw a lot of our props and wardrobe and stuff going into landfills. I knew that it was wrong. I knew that there were families that needed these items and I knew putting it into landfills was wrong, creating pollution and not on my watch so the first thing I did, I started an online group so we could share things virtually. Then I realized it also needed a place to go so we got a brick and mortar space. That’s when you and I first spoke. It was 2,100 feet up two flights of stairs. Five years later, we’re in 11,000 square feet and we have 11 employees and we’re diverting waste in 11 different cities using that platform that we used before. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Unbelievable, and I’m so proud of you and so excited for you, but there’s even some bigger news. This year, you won the EPA’s Environmental Media Award for Environmental Quality. What does this really mean for you, for your company, and for all the hard work you’ve put in over the years? EVA RADKE: It was the ultimate validation, I have to say. When you have no model, when no one has done this before, when you don’t have anyone to guide you in the right direction because it’s a new idea, you don’t know if you’re a fool or if you’re a genius or on the right track and so when the EPA reached out to this for their Environmental Quality Award, I was stunned and surprised and happy for the entire industry. Obviously, the EPA is going to recognize the efforts of reuse and redistribution and keeping things out of landfills as an industry as a whole, then yes, let’s keep going and it’s a great way to convince others in the industry that aren’t quite hip on what we’re doing yet that what we’re doing is legitimate and we’re actually making a difference. I have to say it’s my proudest moment. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s like one of the coolest websites on the planet. For our listeners out there who want to follow along like I am, it’s FilmBizRecycling.org so Eva, for our listeners out there that didn’t have the benefit of first learning what you were doing when you started your company, what are you doing actually? What is the business model and what are you doing every day? EVA RADKE: Okay, so our input into our warehouse is a very niche market. It’s only from film, television, theater, any sort of production where you like build a circus and you tear it down. We take all of our materials in, most of which goes to our charity partners. For instance, we have a women’s shelter that gets our towels and appliances and things that they need to run a house because they’re starting their lives over and they need these packages. Anything that is animal related goes to our shelters so we divide it all up. If we need to recycle it, we take it to the e-waste warehouse. If it’s clothing, we take it to a textile recycler that we’ve partnered with so we just make these strategic partnerships and take everything in, send it down the right chute, but to create revenue for ourselves and pay our rent, etcetera, etcetera, we also have an amazing shopping experience of 11,000 square feet in Brooklyn where you can come shop the props. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so when shows are done using clothing and props and furniture, they all go to you? EVA RADKE: We’re open to do that. We definitely don’t capture 100%. I wish that we did. I probably would need a bigger warehouse, but since 2008, we’ve collected over 500 tons and it’s about 10 tons a month now that comes in and at the end of the week, there’s only half-a-bag of landfill. It’s like tape and photographs and chip bags and that’s about it, so we find a good home whether it’s recycled, reused, redistributed for every single little bitty thing down to the last toothpick. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our New York listeners or our listeners in the New York metropolitan area that want to come to your warehouse, if they come to your warehouse, what’s the experience gonna be like? Give us the virtual tour of the store right now today on the show of the warehouse. What’s it gonna feel like and what can they buy or see in your warehouse today? EVA RADKE: Well, first of all, it’s a visual extravaganza. This all comes from film and television and from the art directors’ eye so it’s all really amazing. There’s like vintage furniture, trees painted bright orange. There’s flora everywhere. We have wonderful clothing straight from the 80s that we’re having a party for on Friday. We have artwork and we have vintage phones and media. We have everything from VHS to records and we have tape decks, lighting, carpeting, neon. Crème de la crème of the most beautiful and interesting, it’s here. I have heard more than 10 times that this is people’s happy place. This place is gorgeous. It’s interesting and fascinating and it’s a look into sort of the bowels of the film industry. What do we do with all this stuff? It’s unbelievable. I can’t wait for you to come in here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so cool. I’m coming this year and I’m coming this summer and I can’t wait to go for a tour and I’m just so excited because what you’re doing I think is so important for our important and it’s so important for all of us in terms of a sustainable economy and a sustainable world. I think it’s just so great and talk a little bit about you just had the Golden Dumpster Awards. What is that and what are they and who’s won the Golden Dumpster Awards? EVA RADKE: Well, we had our second annual Golden Dumpster Awards and I have to say this is the perfect fantasy of mine. It’s a little tongue in cheek. The entertainment loves to pat itself on the back but we recognize people, productions, and businesses for environmental achievements so for instance, Emily O’Brien of Earth Angel, who’s boots on the ground diverting the waste on films herself. She started this little company, an ecopreneur, and we recognize her because she is providing us with metrics, which is something we really need. Metrics are so important. We really recognize the PGA who out a fascinating report that proved over and over and over again that going green in film will save you green. They said no more excuses, producers. It’s not more expensive to go green, to be sustainable. Pulp Art Services, they produce a recycled product that replaced the PVC that Phoenix used so it was like 40,000 gallons of oil are now saved because of this recycled paper product. Then, Noble Lumber, which is our local lumber company in town, switched their lewon to only FSC-certified lewon, which is huge so when we see that our peers are doing these and making these strives, we have to recognize them and it’s a great excuse to get all of these green babes and babettes and dudes in the same room with a cocktail dress and a drink and celebrate and energize us to keep going and go on further. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Of all the stuff that you get out of just the New York studios and all the New York television and movies that’s being filmed or do you also get stuff from other parts of the country and other parts of the world? EVA RADKE: Just New York. If someone said, ‘I’m in LA and I want to give this to you,’ I would say, ‘Just give it to your local reuse,’ because the carbon to get it to me isn’t worth it. I don’t want that. I want it to be local. JOHN SHEGERIAN: But it’s just so amazing how big you’ve grown the business and it’s just New York based and it’s just so fascinating, from 2,700 feet to 11,000 square feet. That’s just a great story and all the awards and this year’s EPA Environmental Quality Awards is just amazing. Talk a little bit about this year’s upcoming in the fall the Eco Expo. What is that, and who’s gonna be there in the fall and what does that all mean? EVA RADKE: Well, this will be our fourth year of The Golden Dumpster and now we do the Eco Expo in November and that is just an industry-centric outreach and education evening out so last year was lumber and so this year, we’re gonna talk about fuel. We’re gonna talk about trucking. We’re gonna talk about biodiesel so we’re inviting the teamsters. We’re inviting the generator companies. There’s some that will never go bio, they say, and some that are trying really hard. They’re going B5 or B10 so we just want to have this conversation. We talk about idling. I’m actually gonna have a visual like here’s what a cubic ton of carbon looks like. It’s this size and every five minutes is this so we’re just gonna make it easy to understand why when we say stop idling, it isn’t because we’re bossy. It’s because it’s important. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Eva Radke. She’s the President and founder of Film Biz Recycling. To check out more of what she’s doing, it’s FilmBizRecycling.org. Eva, when I first met you, you only had a couple of employees. How many employees do you have now? EVA RADKE: We have 11 now, 11 wonderful, wonderful guys. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, now since you are the big boss, since you are the President and founder, talk a little bit about being an ecopreneur, a woman ecopreneur, a leader in sustainability. What’s your management style with your 11 employees as you grow and continue to scale your business? EVA RADKE: I would say that my management style is first of all, I’m gonna hire people who are genuinely good people who believe in what we’re doing because I think you can teach anybody everything and then what we do, once we do that and we get them trained, I give them a challenge, I give them creative freedom, and then I get out of their way with the knowledge that I still have veto power. I think that when you are satisfied with your work, you put more into it. I’m not a micromanager so I’m not really sure if my femininity plays into this but I like to feel like we’re a family and that we’re an organism and people’s lives are going to go into their work and their work is gonna go into their lives and if that’s seamless and it’s not painful and people can cry at their desk or have a bad day or need a day off or whatever it is, of course, because we’re all humans that work here and without that human element, you’re not going to have the greatest customer service. I want people happy. Their happiness is important to me and in fact, I remember there was someone who just wasn’t quite happy. I was like, ‘Well, we need to work on finding you another place to go that you will be happy,’ and I really feel that way. I guess I care a lot about who comes in here because their little pixie dust goes everywhere and it affects everybody. The way I see it is we’re a living organism and the health of it is up to me. I have to feed it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Because Green is Good now, we’re so lucky it’s played nationally on Clear Channel coast to coast and then it’s updated on iTunes around the world, there’s lots of young ecopreneurs that want to be the next Eva Radke. What’s your advice for them? Say you had them in a room today and you’re teaching them how to be a great president or CEO or leader of your organization. What’s your one or two pearls of wisdom that you would throw out to them and say do this, it’s gonna be good? EVA RADKE: I would say the first thing you’re gonna have to truly understand is there are going to be personal sacrifices. If you’re not willing to make those sacrifices, if you’re not willing to dip into your bank account, if you’re not willing to put your relationship on hold, if you’re not willing to take a chance, that just is what it’s going to take and you are going to have to be able to take a punch and get up the next day. There have been plenty of times where I look at myself in the mirror with tears in my eyes and say am I a fool? What have I done? What have I gotten myself into? And then the next day, there is something to celebrate so it’s just keep on doing it, believe in it, educate yourself, but also realize you have to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and people who believe in it. You don’t have employees. They’re all partners so I want to keep the strata of boss and employee as understanding that we all need each other. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s your strongest quality as a leader? EVA RADKE: I think that I’ve been through it and I’m human and that I’ve also been a really hard worker, that my standards are high but I’m also understanding, and I also feel like I can really judge people and see into people and know what their strengths are. I can pull their strengths out and use that. Whenever you have to replace somebody for when somebody goes back to school or whatnot, you’re gonna get a new person. Instead of trying to fit the job description to the person, have the person build their own job description so using their talents you’re gonna get the best of it and breathe a breath of fresh air into your mission. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Like I said, Eva, at the top of the show, when we first met, you were 2,700 feet. You’re now at 11. What’s the next step for Film Biz Recycling and if money was no object, what’s your dream project to take this organization to the next level? EVA RADKE: Well, I would love to be in Los Angeles, and I’d love to be in New Orleans. Those are some big hubs. I’d like to have a trucking fleet. If this is money no object question, boy, I could do that. I would like to be able to go to the set, pick them up. I would like to make it as easy for them as possible, take it back, deliver to our partner charities, to bring in more talent for development and outreach, to have monthly functions where we can really reach out to everybody in the film industry and empower them and tell them this is what kind of good we’re doing. It’s really having the ability to get the message out and to be in different cities and to franchise and to make it sort of a machine that every single person in the industry knows that no matter what project we’re working on, in the end, whether we’re winning an Oscar or a Rotten Tomato, my work is going to do some good. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Your work is always Oscar worthy. There’s no Rotten Tomatoes with you. What’s the next 10 years look like? How are you going to evolve this organization over the next 10 years? Do you really feel New Orleans and LA are in the cards and is it going to take five years? Is it gonna take two? What do you think are in the cards for you the next 10 years? EVA RADKE: You know, for instance, to get New Orleans and LA off the ground, there’s going to have to be a superstar in that city that wants to make that happen with us as a partner so it’s gonna take some money, honey, and I’ve got the time. Right now, NBC has recognized that we’re the easiest city to shoot green in just because Film Biz is here so I want someone to say hey, I want that for LA, or hey, I want that from New Orleans, and those guys over in New York know what they’re doing, let’s franchise this, so that’s where I kind of see this, city by city by city and also in the U.K. There’s so much going on there, too, so I would like to just connect the dots and string this all together so it’s a movement and a household name. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Eva, we’re down to the last couple of minutes here or so. I’m on your website, FilmBizRecycling.org. I love your website and what I love about it is on it, when you click the button to talk about your charity partners, it just explains all these amazing partners that you do so much good for. How did you come to choose all these wonderful charity partners? EVA RADKE: Sometimes it was proximity and whatever’s closest to us to keep the footprint smaller but for instance, Blissful Bedrooms, they redo bedrooms of severely disabled teens who never really leave their bedrooms too often so they make them super awesome and cool. We found each other on Craigslist. She was looking for paint and I was trying to give away paint. She came over and I saw what her mission was and she was just getting started and I said well, let’s be friends forever and so now, whenever they have a project, they raid our warehouse. They can have anything they want. Sometimes they approach us and sometimes we approach them and sometimes it’s a Google search. Sometimes it’s a meeting at a party. It just sort of all happens. We have these resources and we want to give them away. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so cool. You’re such a leader in the sustainability movement and what I call evolution or revolution. If you could be EPA Director for a day, what would you change in terms of environmental policy that exists today, Eva, out there? What would you wave your magic wand and get changed with regards to our environment? EVA RADKE: Oh my gosh, there’s so much. If it was EPA Director of the whole wide world, my first thought is let’s enough with the plastic. Enough with the Styrofoam. Enough. It’s choking us. It’s killing us. Let’s innovate our way out of plastic and Styrofoam unless it’s something that biodegrades and isn’t choking our oceans, thus ourselves. If I was in charge of policy for the film industry, I would say no more throwing things away that can be reused because there’s a social benefit added on top of the benefit of not creating pollution in a landfill and wasting that opportunity. You know, that’s my answer to that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. I love it, and Eva, we thank you for coming back on. We can’t wait to have you back on a third time as Green is Good. For our listeners out there, support Eva Radke’s business, www.filmbizrecycling.org or go to her warehouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Eva, thank you for being the inspiring leading lady in the film and television industries. You are truly living proof that green is good.