John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us for the first time Todd Brady. He’s the Global Environmental Director for the iconic and great brand, Intel Corporation. Welcome to Green is Good, Todd.

Todd Brady: Thanks, John. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John: Before we get talking about sustainability and technology and all the great things that makes Intel an eco-leader, we’d like you to share with our listeners, Todd, the Todd Brady story leading up to your position at Intel and what sustainability means to you.

Todd: For me, the whole sustainability journey started probably 25 years ago, back when I was in engineering school back in college. I was a chemical engineer at the time, focusing on traditional engineering things. I remember I took an air pollution course, and I was fascinated by the interplay between science, technology, community issues, political issues and how they all came together. From there, I decided this is what I want to do for a living. I had a couple of different jobs before I joined Intel. Upon joining Intel, my career really started as a traditional environmental engineer, working with the company to figure out how we could reduce our emissions, how we could be a better corporate citizen. It’s been fascinating to me over these 25 years to see sustainability evolve from only focusing on, 20 years ago, what are our emissions, what our impacts, to today, what are the opportunities? Not only what’s going on inside of Intel, but what’s happening with our supply chain? What do our customers want? What does the general public care about? I think, really exciting, how can we use our products to solve some of the biggest sustainability challenges that are out there today?

John: Speaking of that, I was reading all about you and one of your quotes had to deal with emissions from manufacturing and the solution. Can you share that with our listeners, your take on emissions versus solutions and how IT is basically in the nexus of that solution-based model?

Todd: Yeah, absolutely. We call it our footprint versus our handprint, our footprint being this is the environmental impact we have on the world. At Intel, we’re the world’s largest semiconductor company. We’ve got big manufacturing plants all around the world. We use water, we have emissions, we generate waste, etc. We’re constantly working on how can we reduce that impact. If we look at our carbon footprint and the carbon footprint of the entire IT industry, it turns out that collectively, as an IT industry, we represent about 2-3 percent of the world’s carbon footprint, if you will. Now, turn that around and look at what we call our handprint. What can we do with our technology to help address and solve these sustainability challenges? We’re 2-3 percent of the carbon footprint. We believe you can use IT to make the world more efficient, address that other 97-98 percent, whether that’s through smart buildings, smart infrastructure, more efficient ways of doing commerce. Look around you at all the different ways IT is used today and the ways that we can use it in the future. I think there’s a real opportunity here for us to use that technology to address climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, and the things that we’re struggling with today.

John: Today, we’re going to be talking about not only Intel and why Intel is an eco-leader, but the convergence of sustainability and technology, which you just discussed with us and just shared with our listeners. Before we get into that, can you share with our listeners again your role? Obviously, you’re the Global Environmental Director. What does that mean, and what are you most proud of when it comes to Intel’s sustainability initiatives that you’re leading now?

Todd: As I mentioned, we’re the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. A primary part of my role, if you look at our environmental footprint, what can we do to reduce it? We have initiatives around making our facilities more energy-efficient, using less water, recycling our waste, etc. In addition, we focus on our supply chain. What can we do to work with our suppliers? We have tens of thousands of suppliers around the globe. How can we work with them to make their products and processes more efficient? We partner with our customers. How can we build a product that’s more energy-efficient, that has less of an environmental impact? Each of those computers that you purchase year after year, how can we make those more energy-efficient? Intel has a key role in doing that. My role at the company is to help direct and set that vision for the company, and then drive those initiatives to make that a success.

John: Gotcha. That makes a ton of sense. Todd, 10 years ago, before there were people like you who were the Global Environmental Directors of iconic brands like Intel, or before we had the title of Chief Sustainability Officer, people always used to say in 2002, “We can’t be green; it’s more expensive.” But from a business standpoint, now that we’re here in 2015, what are some of the benefits of being a more sustainable company, and is it also green for your bottom line by being more sustainable?

Todd: That’s something that I believe in strongly, not just working at Intel, but even in my personal life as I make decisions about being green. Does it make sense financially as well? Those are the initiatives we want to drive. I’ll give you an example. Since 2007-2008, we’ve set up an energy conservation fund where we said we’re going to dedicate energy each year to do projects, but only those projects that have a positive ROI for the company. We thought, initially we’ll spend a few million dollars here and there, but we’ll quickly run out of ideas. Fast-forward today, last year we spent over $30 million on energy conservation projects. These were projects that were identified by our engineers around the globe, things we could do to be more efficient. We funded those projects. We’ve spent over $100 million over this timeframe. That’s reduced our use of electricity, our use of natural gas, those kinds of things, which in turn has reduced our emissions, but we’ve also saved over $200 million. For every dollar invested, we’ve gotten $2 out of making those investments. There’s a clear link between efficiency, being more efficient, being green and making good business sense. The two come together.

John: For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Todd Brady. He’s the Global Environmental Director of Intel. To learn more about all the great and green things that Intel is doing, you can go to www.intel.com. Todd, for the sixth consecutive year, Intel has been recognized by the EPA as the largest voluntary purchaser of green power in the United States. Where is Intel headed as it relates to renewable energy in the future?

Todd: This is an area where we’re going to continue to invest. As you said, we are the largest voluntary purchaser of green power in the U.S. It’s a significant amount of power; it’s over 3 billion kilowatts of power. To put that in perspective, that’s a big number, but it doesn’t mean a lot by itself. That’s the equivalent of the electricity consumption of about 300,000 homes. To put it in terms of cars and emissions, that would be like taking almost 2 million cars off the road each year. It’s a significant commitment we made as a company to support green energy, and we’ve done that because we firmly believe that that’s the future, and by making that investment, we are hoping to spur additional investment into green energy and development of green energy. In addition, we’ve installed 18 or so solar installations across the U.S., where we’ve installed solar power generation onsite. Not only do we want to buy the green energy, but where we can, we want to invest and have that directly at the locations in which we operate.

John: Green power is going to continue to play a big role in the future of Intel. Let’s now break it down a little bit further. Let’s talk about operations. How do you approach sustainability with regards to Intel in a bifurcated way? You have your operations, and then you have all your campuses and facilities across the world. How do you approach sustainability and environmental impact in both of those different settings and get buy-in and create champions within Intel to get further buy-in and make this a cultural and DNA issue at Intel?

Todd: You’re absolutely correct. In fact, I’ll rattle off a few different numbers and things that we’ve accomplished. That would not be possible without having all of the individuals which we do at Intel engage and energize, bringing forward solutions and opportunities. One of the keys in driving any sustainability program at a company, at an organization, in a community, is to get that engagement at the grassroots level. We’ve done a few different things. One of the things that I find fascinating, we started it five or six years ago, is a sustainability in action grant program. We created a program whereby we said to our employees around the world, “If you have an idea around sustainability that you would like to do either at Intel or in your local community, bring it forward and we’re going to have a process whereby we select and fund these projects.” Each year, I’m blown away by the ideas that our employees bring forward, and then we fund them centrally. We had some engineers in our Folsom, California, campus make beehives onsite to make honey, and in turn, that honey is used in our local cafeterias. They had read about the issues with bees and pollination and the fact that there was colony collapse with bees, and they said, “Hey, we want to help there. We can do this right onsite,” and they did. They sent me a bottle of the honey. It was phenomenal. We’ve had an attorney who said, “Hey, could we use some of our emissions off of our factories to grow algae, which then could be turned into a biofuel?” Again, this came from an attorney, a legal person at Intel. He did a pilot project with the local university, where we demonstrated that we could do that, that it was feasible. We had engineers in Israel who worked with the local school, obviously a very desert region, to set up a rainwater capture program for literally tens of thousands dollars, a very small amount, and here they created a rainwater capture program that meets the irrigation needs for that school. I’m always fascinated by the ideas that come forward, the innovation that people have to solve sustainability challenges, wherever they may be.

John: Just like Intel is one of the greatest and most innovative technology companies in the world, you’ve taken sustainability and made it an innovation project at Intel, where people can come to you with all sorts of left field ideas and innovate in sustainability, and if it makes sense, you’re giving them the latitude to get these things done.

Todd: Absolutely. Again, it’s unleashing that creativity in individuals. We have a follow-up where we also have an awards program. We recognize individuals who step out of their comfort zone and do this. We have dedicated environmental sustainability professionals around the globe, and their job day in and day out is to work in this area. There’s a few hundred of those individuals out of 100,000-pplus company. How do we engage all of those other individuals? This is one program in which we do so. We also have a social media site. We started this up a few years ago, where people can exchange ideas. It started out by some of my staff seeding questions and what could we potentially do out to the employee base. It’s now totally run by employees, where someone will post, in California for example, in the drought situation, many individuals are ripping out their lawns and replacing it with the desert landscaping, low-water landscaping. Employees will post, “Hey, has anybody done this?” Then another employee will respond, “Yes, I recently did it. Here’s how I did it. Here’s what it looks like. Here’s before and after pictures. Here was my budget. Here’s some tips on how to do it.” It’s really been a phenomenal resource for people to connect, to share ideas, to get engaged, and it’s now one of our largest employee forums where people go and share ideas at Intel.

John: Excuse my ignorance on this issue, Todd, but how many employees does Intel have across the world?

Todd: Over 100,000. I think it’s about 108,000 today.

John: So you and your team have made sustainability a DNA and cultural opportunity, really, at Intel across the planet with all of your employees, where they’ve now become ambassadors and evangelists for sustainability, and of course, that converges with, as you said, technology.

Todd: Absolutely. As always, it’s a work in progress, but it’s a phenomenal opportunity. I’ll share one other thing that we’ve done, and that is the past five years, we’ve linked our employees’ bonus, and by the way, I’m here as a spokesperson. There are thousands of people behind the scenes. Our CEO is a phenomenal supporter of this program, and five years ago, he said, “Hey, let’s begin linking employee compensation to how we’re doing on sustainability topics.” This is compensation for all employees. We all get bonuses at the end of the year. We have a number of targets we’re trying to hit as a company, and having one of those targets associated with sustainability has also raised the awareness within the company and helped build that culture of sustainability is important and something I care about. It’s something that important to me.

John: Todd, I don’t want to leave this fact out. Intel is a technology leader in the world, and you are obviously from this discussion now, our listeners know, you are one of the great eco-leaders in the world as a company. I’m on your website. Again, for our listeners out there, to learn more about all the amazing things Intel is up to, both from a technological perspective, but also sustainability perspective, please go to www.intel.com. I’m on your website now. We’ve talked about operations, we’ve talked about your campuses and facilities, and your employees. Let’s go back to the products. Can you talk about the actions you’ve taken as a company to reduce the environmental impact of your products, such as what I’m looking at right now, your design for the environment principles that you’ve employed at Intel?

Todd: Yeah, absolutely. We look at our products. Probably the biggest impact of our products on the environment is the energy that our products use of the consumer or whoever is using them. You think about your computer, the data center, all the infrastructure behind the IT, and the energy being consumed. It’s an order of magnitude larger than any energy that we consume manufacturing those products. As a result, we’ve had a long focus on making our products more energy-efficient. Year over year, we follow what we call Moore’s Law, which is every couple of years we introduce new chips that have twice the number of transistors as the previous generation on the same area of silicon. That allows you to either have more computing power or it allows you to make the product more energy-efficient and everywhere in between. As a result, today’s computers, today’s data centers are much more efficient than they were even just 3-4 years ago, such that your computer can last all day on a single battery charge. Your data center server today, you could replace nine or ten servers from five years ago. A server today, you could replace it and get energy savings as well as have computational compute power replacing one server for 10 servers just a few years ago. That’s what we can do to directly make our products more energy-efficient. Then, how can you use those products to go solve sustainability challenges? There, we’ve got a number of different initiatives underway. We’ve got an innovative product where we’re using Intel technology to measure air quality and do so at a very inexpensive way. A typical air quality monitor that’s out there that the EPA or someone might use runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’ve created small air monitors based on Intel technology that cost thousands of dollars. We’re working with various cities around the world to use these air qualities to monitor the air quality of the given air-shed for a city. In fact, after we’re done here, I’m going to go look at a project we’re doing in Arizona to work with a local farmer to use Intel technology to automate the watering of her fields to make the use of water much more efficient.

John: Wow. Intel is powering the future of sustainability.

Todd: It’s something that we think there’s an opportunity there. We want to look at all the various opportunities to do so.

John: Thank you, Todd, for your time today. We’re going to have you back and continue the discussion about sustainability and technology and why Intel is an eco-leader. For our listeners out there, to learn more about Intel, please go to www.intel.com. Thank you, Todd, for being an inspiring sustainability superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian. We’re so excited and honored to have with us today, Chris Couchman. He’s the head of content at Readly. You can find Readly at readly.com. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Chris.

Chris Couchman: Hey, John. How are you doing? Nice to be here.

John: Well, it’s nice to have you with us. It looks like the sun is coming into your room. The sun coming into my room. We’re having this. We feel like we’re in one room together, actually, but we’re on different parts of the planet. You’re sitting in a beautiful spot in Ireland and I’m sitting in Fresno, California today.

Chris: Yeah, it’s lovely here. I think this must be the few weeks of sun we actually get in Ireland. I was saying it’s lovely and warm here but our warm is probably your normal. So, it’s all good.

John: Yeah. Well, it sounds wonderful. Ireland is one of these places. I’ve been around the world many times in my business and personal life. I’ve never been to Ireland, and when I see the sun shining on your face, I just remind myself, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go and visit.

Chris: You’re more than welcome. You’re more than welcome. We love people to come over here. I mean, I’ve only been here a month. I moved out of London and came here, brought the family, and we’ve been welcomed with open arms, as much as we’re allowed in COVID times [inaudible].

John: Right.

Chris: Yeah. It’s a beautiful corner of the world.

John: That’s so wonderful. Chris, before we get talking about all the really important and interesting things you and your colleagues are doing at Readly, talk a little bit about your background. How do you even get here? Where were you raised? What was your education and your family life that led to you becoming a very important part of Readly?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I was born just outside London. I was there for 30 odd[?] years like I say until we moved over to Ireland a month ago. In my education, well,[?] I did a film TV and radio production degree down in Canterbury in England. Simply because I had no idea on what I wanted to do and it sounded like something that I would be vaguely interested in. It was three years. I have no idea what I did but I had great fun doing it. I came out with an expensive piece of paper and still no idea what I wanted to do. To be honest, my dad was in publishing. He was a sort of one of these old one company guys. He was with the company for 42, 43 years before he retired. Actually, they had a job available. To be honest with you, when I came out and at the time, it’s[?] all I wanted to do is work and run a pub and buy pubs and that was what I wanted to do, but I needed money and I didn’t have any.

John: Right.

Chris: The publishing was the thing that my dad had always done and I thought, well, the company has been good to him. Maybe they’ll be good to me. I went over there and I was there for nearly five years and I’ve worked with an amazing group of guys in their production department. Effectively, print and paper buying and scheduling and all that sort of stuff for a whole mass of magazines. A company called IPC Media at the time. They were then bought they became Time and now they’re actually owned by Future. I worked with them. I mean, it was a brilliant group of guys, all sort of been there for 30, 40 years, taught me loads about the industry. Everything I know from the magazine and the publishing industry, I can trace all the way back to those guys because they’ve been in it forever.

John: Right.

Chris: I’ve heard many old war stories from their heydays in the ’70s, in the ’80s, in the ’90s. They kept telling me I’d missed the best of it and all the rest of it. But I’m sure I could tell some of my guys that they’ve missed the best of it 10 years ago, you know?

John: Right. Right, right.

Chris: I learned loads from those guys. But eventually, something came along that I thought might be a little bit better and I moved away from the magazine industry and I went into the newspaper industry. So, I went to work for News International which is now News UK.

John: Right.

Chris: I went to work for the Times of London, the Sunday Times and The Sun[?] newspapers and all their magazines that were a part of it and spend a lot of time again, sort of print and paper buying and scheduling the newspapers and working on promos and that kind of stuff. Again, learned loads about the newspaper industry from people who have been in it forever.

John: Wow.

Chris: I think that was amazing things that we don’t have so much with COVID and working from home.

John: Right.

Chris: I was[?] sitting in the offices and just learning from people who’ve have been in the industry for so many years. But I think you learn a lot from not being in conversations, from actually, just overhearing the stuff going on and you [inaudible] [crosstalk] so much up I think it was–

John: Right.

Chris: That was really how I kind of learned my craft as it were and where I learned my love for publishing. From being in the magazine side of it, and then in the newspaper side of things. Then actually, I was very lucky I had the opportunity to move to a small publisher in North London and I ran a production department there and an art department. Again, it was brilliant and I worked with a really young team and it was really exciting. We’re having meetings in the pub at lunchtime and it was brilliant and then, you know. But that’s actually where I found Readly.

John: Oh.

Chris: In that little publisher in North London. A guy came and actually pitched Readly to me at the time and I sat through the presentation and I thought, well, this sounds great. This is something that seems like the future and how things are moving on and at kind of thing and I thought, well, yeah, all right, so I put the magazines I was looking after at the time. I put those on to Readly and I managed those for about a year. And then after that year, actually, a job ad came up for Readly, and they were looking for an Operations Manager at the time, to come in and look after some publishers in the UK and Ireland. I just called the guy who came and pitched to me a year ago and I’ve just phoned him up and said, “I’ve got no digital experience. All my experience is in print and paper. Is there any way that you think I might be good for this role?” We interviewed and I found out that just because I had no digital experience, necessarily a little bit, but I had transferable skills and I had negotiation that I was used to.

John: Sure[?].

Chris: I just generally love talking to people which [crosstalk] kind of help in my job.

John: Right.

Chris: Luckily enough, got that job, moved over to Readly, moved over to the dark side, which is what they used to, you know, the guys that I used to work with, the dark side of digital rather than the golden print products that the publishers are so used to. I’ve been with Readly for three and a half years.

John: Wow.

Chris: I absolutely love it here. I get to look after– My role now as Head of Content, I look after all of our publishers in our English language market. So, the US, the UK, Australia, with some in India, and then also the Nordics. Then Sweden and places like that, which is where the company was founded back in 2013. I spent all my days talking to publishers and sorting stuff out. Yeah, it’s great here.

John: But it’s so interesting. First of all, you’ve gone into the digital media side of, really, your father’s industry. So, really, there’s [crosstalk] a generational transfer of knowledge and information as well.

Chris: Yeah.

John: Plus you got great experience from all these legendary lions, legacy lions[?] [crosstalk] of the industry both on the print side, magazine side, and then the newspaper side, and then you got pitched.

Chris: Yeah.

John: How was that original pitch when he pitched you to put your pubs on to Readly? What was that elevator pitch like? I love to hear that.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, he just came in and he said, “Look, you guys aren’t doing anything digital. The stuff that you are doing isn’t really generating you any revenue or readership, and we’ve got this amazing product called Readly. It’s an all-you-can-read product.” He said it’s, you know, at the time he pitched it, it’s a bit like Spotify and a bit like Netflix, but for magazines. Because at the time, we were pretty much a solely magazine product. We’ve now introduced newspapers to it as well. He just said, “If you put the titles onto the platform, then we’ll bring you additional readership and we’ll bring you additional revenue.” Honestly, I was slightly skeptical at the time because I was print through and through and [crosstalk] didn’t really understand the benefits.

John: Right.

Chris: The more I looked at it and the more I thought about it, and I was shown lots of stuff about how the different audience would come across and it wasn’t going to take away from my print subscribers, it will just going to bring me new audience, and also with the brilliant thing about Readly is, we were struggling to get our publications outside of the UK.

John: Right.

Chris: Because it’s expensive to distribute whereas [crosstalk] on Readly, you put it on Readly, it’s available in over 50 different markets.

John: Right.

Chris: So, we could do whatever we wanted.

John: It sounded like it’s almost too good to be true. So, you were thinking to yourself, “What’s the catch here?” Like [inaudible] [crosstalk]

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I completely [crosstalk] understand it.

John: Like what’s the catch?

Chris: Yeah, what’s the catch? I couldn’t really get my purely print brain at the time [crosstalk] [inaudible] the Readly product.

John: Right.

Chris: I had to be sort of told a little bit about it and it works for me because now, I’m on the other side of the fence.

John: Well, now you’re him. You’re him.

Chris: I’m the guy. Yeah, I’m the guy pitching the products to publishers now and my account managers, I’m having to teach them how to do it.

John: Right.

Chris: I get publishers to come to me and go, “Yeah, yeah. But what’s the catch? Why? Why would I do it? How much is it going to cost me?”

John: Right.

Chris: That was one of the things I– you know, how much does it cost me to join Readly? Nothing. It’s free. If you’re a publisher, it doesn’t cost you anything to put your titles[?] on Readly.

John: It’s almost like you said, it’s like a Spotify or Netflix and that the content’s created once anyway and the publisher now gets a new chance on a new platform to monetize and get new eyeballs[?] and monetize that content over and over again for no extra cost. No extra SG&A[?]. Amazing.

Chris: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.

John: Amazing.

Chris: Publishers are creating all this amazing content and they have been churning this stuff out for years and years and years. We are simply another way of distributing that amazing content to a different set of eyeballs, that may not go to the newsstands and buy that product but they are really, subscribers. We’re getting people, you know, we’ve done customer surveys that show that we’ve got over 95% of people are discovering new magazines on the platform. So, just because you joined Readly for a specific set of titles, you will discover plenty of other stuff that’s on there.

John: Right.

Chris: If you’re a Forbes reader or a Rolling Stone reader, but you’re also interested in woodwork, you may never have bought a woodworking magazine, but we’ve got Popular Woodworking on the platform so you can go and you can start reading it. So, you can really delve into your interests and kind of read around a lot of different titles and also internationally. It works amazingly for people that perhaps live in the US, but they’re from the UK like myself, and they want to read local newspapers, The Guardian or the Express and we have that ability for people to read international content.

John: When they first pitched you and you put your pubs upon it, back then, how many publications were then on the platform? And now, take us to today, 2021. How many were on [inaudible]?

Chris: Yeah, I think when I joined, we were 1500, 2000 publications, something like that. Today, five and a half thousand publications are on the platform. We’ve got five and a half thousand publications, just over 150,000 issues because we don’t just keep the new issues on the platform. We also keep the back catalog.

John: Oh, wow.

Chris: So, if you really are interested in airplanes, or model railways, for example, or simply, recipes for food, you can delve into the back catalog so you can start reading stuff that might be four, five, six years old, but it’s evergreen content. These publishers have had this stuff stuck on their desktops on CDs, floppy disks, back in the day and they’ve never been using it. So, we have the ability to that archive and give it to a customer who will continually enjoy that content. I mean, their data and the stats that we’ve got show that over 20% of people reading on Readly are back issue content anyway. So, we know people are going back and they’re interested in that side of things.

John: If you’ve just joined us, we’ve got Chris Couchman with us. He’s the Head of Content for Readly. To find Chris and his colleagues, and to check out Readly and their app, go to www.readly.com. Readly, readly.com. I’m on your site right now, Chris. It’s a beautiful site.

Chris: Thank you.[?]

John: Now, I’ve never used[?] it. I’ve never used it yet. For me, as a consumer who loves to read, how much does this cost?

Chris: Yeah, so in the States, it’s $9.99. So, $9.99 a month, and for that, you get to read as much or as little as you like. It’s totally up to you and like I said, it’s over 5000 titles, international and domestic content that are on there, and that’s the product. It’s as simple as that.

John: I mean, it sounds credible.

Chris: Sign off[?] the way you go. Yeah.

John: It sounds incredible for [inaudible] [crosstalk]

Chris: Thank you very much.

John: No. I mean, there’s no way I’m not going to do this and give it out as gifts to my family because I mean, this is like the gift of knowledge and the ability to read and see all these topics and all these subject matters. I mean, you spend– Now, you go to a magazine stand, you buy one, maybe two periodicals and you’re already in for over ten bucks there. Just there.

Chris: Yeah, completely and we also have the– we have a sharing functionality on there as well. So, if you take out your subscription for $9.99, you get the ability to use it across five devices so you can share it with the wife. You can share it with the kids [crosstalk] because we’ve got children’s content on there.

John: Wow.

Chris: We’ve got comics and kid’s magazines so they can read that while you’re reading Rolling Stone or the wife might be reading US Weekly or something like that.

John: That’s so great.

Chris: So, we [inaudible] something for everyone on there, really.

John: There’s even like you said, you’ve made it friend and family-friendly, for a lack of better term.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The idea here is that everyone can read it. We’re a for a Swedish-owned company, the Swedes are very much into family orientation, and bringing it together, and they’re exactly what Readly is. It’s something for everyone. We’ve got parental controls on there as well. So, if you are worried about the kids seeing content that perhaps you don’t want them to see, stick parental controls on there. No problem at all. So they can go and they can read without any worries.

John: So, tell me. Chris, what am I missing here? A, you’re democratizing knowledge, which is so much value to that and I’m so grateful that you’re doing that.

Chris: Yeah.

John: B, you’re also not only democratizing knowledge, but you’re also making it more available to more people than I’ve ever seen before. C, this has to be amazing for the environment because now, we’re not also always tossing out our old newspaper, magazine, or worried about how to recycle it appropriately. This removes that whole issue of recycling all the paper that’s involved in the historical legacy publishing industry. Am I missing something?

Chris: No, no. The sustainability thing is, this is exactly what our users tell us. Twenty-five percent of people that use Readly say it’s one of the major benefits and the major reasons that they’re with us. It’s the sustainability and not having stacks of old magazines that you end up throwing out every month. You don’t have that with us. We did a survey recently and out of that, we came out that we are, in emissions compared to print, 76% better off. Now, having said that, the industry as a whole is making huge waves to become more sustainable, to become more eco-friendly, which is absolutely the right thing to do from the digital side of it, the print side of it. Everyone is– we’re all moving that way and as Readly grows and we continue to grow very rapidly at the moment, our responsibility grows[?] to do more of that. So yes, we are a digital platform so we don’t have the print and the paper side of it, but we understand that it’s not just us in the industry that is helping towards the eco and cutting the emissions. The paper industry is doing huge things. They’re planting loads and loads of trees. They’re using recycled pulp. Printers are always looking at being more eco-friendly and how they go about using the machinery and publishers themselves have been focused on sustainability for a long time now.

John: Right.

Chris: They’re always looking for making the right choices on their print and paper, recycling their old copies that come off the newsstands that don’t get bought. An example is, all the plastic subscription packaging that we used to get, that especially, here in the UK, publishers are moving away from plastic and onto paper wrapping because it’s more eco-friendly.

John: Hundred percent.

Chris: I think as an industry we’re doing great things towards it and it’s– we’re a part of it. Absolutely.

John: Correct.

Chris: We are referring[?] the ability that if you read on digital, you’re not necessarily buying the print product, but at the same time, the guys who are still going to the newsstands are still buying the print stuff, the publishers are doing it too.

John: Unlike you, I mean, this is not– like you said, my comments were as a just as an amazing alternative [inaudible] [crosstalk] tremendously sustainable.

Chris: Yeah.

John: Publishers are my friends. I grew up in that industry, somewhat similar to how you grew up. My dad was in the color separations industry so I got to deal with the advertisers and publishers, my whole childhood and teenage years, and in 20s. And so, to me, this is not to vilify them, it’s just to say, “No, no[?]. Just another great way to access information and is also a great upside to the environment with your product as well and your service as well.

Chris: Yeah, definitely. We are providing all of that knowledge at your fingertips when you want it, how you want to get it, and like I say, we’re another distribution who are putting out [crosstalk] true information that’s justified in publications that people trust.

John: Right.

Chris: There’s so much fake news flying around at the moment and all this rubbish out there.

John: Yeah.

Chris: This stuff’s been put together and verified and then pulled together and put out as a product. So, why not put that good stuff out there in front of people for them to read it? And if it’s more sustainable and eco-friendly, perfect.

John: How much competition do you have in this space?

Chris: Yes. We do have competition like everywhere else. We have various competitors around the world and small ones in different markets. Some of the big ones that you’ve probably heard of are the likes of Apple News+. You can’t run away from Apple being in your market. You have to see them as a competitor. Then there are other companies that are around there. There’s Zinio and there’s Magzter and those kinds of guys. So, there is some competition out there but we’re all doing something slightly different in a slightly different way. Apple, for example, their News+ service is very article-based, very mobile friendly. Whereas Readly, we’re slightly more full product. Read the magazine and the newspaper exactly as how the publishers want you to read it.

We have the articles, we have the ability for you to read them in a mobile-optimized format. But we do kind of focus on the look how beautiful these products are that the art directors and the teams have spent so much love and care putting together. This is the product, they pulled it together. But if you want to read it in a broken-down way because you want to find something you want to eat for dinner tonight, then you can absolutely just go find that recipe rather than dig through the whole magazine for it.

John: How fast is your subscriber base growing and where are the biggest areas of growth in the world now? Which continents are you seeing the fastest growth on your subscriber base?

Chris: Yeah. The subscriber base is– if you’d ask me this question before September last year, I would have had to give you a politician answer because we weren’t allowed to share numbers but we’ve just become a publicly listed company. So, the numbers are out there now.

John: Oh, I don’t even know that. Okay. Sorry.

Chris: No, no. It’s absolutely fine. The Q1 report went out and we’re just under 400,000 subscribers.

John: Wow.

Chris: We grew in the last quarter by 37%.

John: Wow.

Chris: We’re growing. We’re growing rapidly. Our biggest markets, the three largest markets, that we have a role[?] in Europe currently. So, it’s Germany, UK, and Sweden, because they’re the markets that we’ve been in the longest, to be honest with you. But we’re seeing great growth across all of our markets internationally. The US, Australia, [inaudible] the Netherlands, all across the world where we’re growing and we’re at speed, which is great because it means we can get more people reading, which I think, is super important.

John: Well, like you just said, you’re big back in your home base, which you always have to win the home. The home team always has to win to start with.

Chris: Yeah.

John: But your global addressable market in the US, Asia, and South America have to be massive. I mean, 400,000 sounds like the tip of the iceberg for where you’re really going to take this.

Chris: Oh, absolutely. We’ve got big ambitions and big plans and [crosstalk] we’re in the market and we’re out there and we’re starting to make lots of noise.

John: Great.

Chris: Coming to talking to guys like you, hopefully, it’s going to help us move from that one position and add a few more zeros [inaudible] [crosstalk] that would be very nice.

John: [inaudible] Chris, before we went on the air, we were talking about your recent move from London to Ireland, it sounds just spectacular and wonderful. What you’ve seen in your three and a half years at Readly, how have the reading habits of your subscribers and of the world changed because of COVID? What do you know or what have you seen and learned during this period?

Chris: Yeah, the change is massive. I think the world effectively turned upside down almost overnight and we’ve spent 18 months in and out lockdowns with restrictions and not being able to go into work. As you say, the whole working from home thing has allowed a lot of us to get out of the cities and get out of the rat race and go and do what we want. We see that in Readly in their reading habits. We regularly check what people are reading and kind of how they’re reading it because that’s what we’re interested in. They are the kind of things we can pass on to our publishers and over COVID, what we really saw is that people are spending a lot more time going into their interests. People are very interested in very specific niche categories, and we have all of that available. We have 37 categories on Readly that you can dig into.

Some of the things that we saw, that people are spending a lot more time at home. So, as you can imagine a lot of stuff came out of that. The craft and DIY category, for example, went up by 128%. Home and renovation category up by 84%. Gardening up by 81. I can go on but we can see all of the stuff where people are at home and they’re wanting to do a little bit more because perhaps they got a little bit more free time, they’re not having to spend so much time commuting in and out of work and [crosstalk] [inaudible] more time to spend in their own houses, and their own gardens, and do a bit more.

John: Right.

Chris: But then, like I said, their niche interests and specialties and the biggest one that we saw actually is hobbies and collecting. The hobbies and collecting category went up by 156% in the quarter and that’s a huge thing that we just saw[?] almost overnight. People suddenly went– they’ve got load more time to read. I’ve got loads more time to sit down and get back to the stuff I actually love doing and I want to read a little bit more about it. And people who are– who’ve got hobbies and people who are interested in collecting baseball cards or things like that for example, we’ve got loads of that content available on the platform and people are spending more time in it. Along with that sort of line, of people having more time, we saw the likes of puzzles, and crosswords, and Sudoku puzzles, and all that kind of stuff picked up as well just under 80% of that category came up. We’re seeing people have got a lot more time in COVID. People aren’t spending so much time running around frantically trying to get kids to football or soccer practice I suppose as you’d[?] say. We’re not going out so much anymore. We can’t spend so much time in restaurants and then in bars [crosstalk] and things.

John: Right.

Chris: We’re getting back to basics. We’re looking after the home, looking after the garden, and looking after ourselves a little bit more as well, I think.

John: That’s so fascinating. So, out of this tragic worldwide crisis, that we’ve all–

Chris: Yeah.

John: Hopefully, we’re getting to the other side. There are real rays of sunshine because you’re saying that people have gone back to the basics and have simplified their life and reading is now a bigger part of their life than it was pre-COVID.

Chris: That’s exactly it. Yeah.

John: Great.

John: We’ve had the whole world kind of go to park[?] and we’ve all been affected. Nobody’s not been affected by this. I think it’s really given us time to reflect and think back and go, “Well, what do I really want to do? Do I want to carry on in exactly the way that I have been doing it or do I want to move my interest a little bit? Do I want to do a bit more of this that I actually enjoy as opposed to spending so much time on stuff that perhaps I wasn’t enjoying a lot? I’m a perfect example. I was living in London and doing the rat race and spending an hour and a half commuting to work. Either way, three hours of my day was wasted on public transport. Now I’ve moved to a beautiful little corner of the world in Ireland. I had my home office and I played[?] around and walk down to it every day. I’m going to enjoy commuting back to London and seeing some of our clients and that will be great in London, but I’m enjoying being here with family.

John: You’re a young man and that you have a young family and you get to actually have a real life.

Chris: Yes. Exactly. I mentioned the family, I’ve got three-month-old daughter so I can bring her up in fresh air as opposed to whatever London air is.

John: Right.

Chris: We can enjoy what’s around us and spend a little bit more time together rather than focusing so much on all the other stuff.

John: Just imagine. Just imagine our predecessors, who for 40 years, whether you’re in New York or London or any other great city, which has, as you and I both know, and I grew up in New York City, has so many wonderful benefits to it.

Chris: Oh God, yes.

John: But it does become a rat race when you do 40 years times three hours a day. Think about all the hours you could have spent or would have spent traveling, commuting as opposed to with your wife, with your children, your daughter right now, and hopefully, other children in the future. For anybody to now be simplifying their life and having more chance to read and pursue their interests and actually have a real life, it just sounds– sounds like there are some good changes and good opportunities that are coming out of the post-COVID world.

Chris: [inaudible]

John: So, that’s great. That’s great.

Chris: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s fast-forwarded change that I think was all becoming.

John: Yes.

Chris: Not just in our personal lives [crosstalk] but also I think in the publishing industry and for everyone else, we sort of realized that this was coming anyway.

John: Right.

Chris: We’ve just sped it up by 10 years.

John: Right.

Chris: People have realized that we need to go onto digital platforms because people aren’t necessarily going to be going out as much in doing it. They’re going to spend a little bit more time at home with their families and that’s all coming around. I think really, we knew this was coming, but it’s come a lot quicker than I think we [crosstalk] [inaudible] expected.

John: The same thing Zoom boom and when it happened, it just happened faster.

Chris: Just happened faster and look at us now we’re all Zoom pros, right?

John: Right. We’re all– This has become the new normal, which is fine too.

Chris: Completely. Yeah, absolutely. I am looking forward to going out and see [inaudible] clients face-to-face [crosstalk] getting back to a little bit of normality.

John: Yes.

Chris: But for now Zoom’s fine and [crosstalk] we get to speak to more people more regularly I think.

John: Right. That’s true.

Chris: Which is one good thing.

John: You mentioned them[?] for facts and the figures a little while ago on hobbies and collectibles. Obviously, you have a great back-end analytical system, and sharing analytics with your publishers must be an important part of your business model. Explain how that works and why that’s an important part of your business model.

Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s one of the main reasons and main things that we give to our publishers. We have a huge amount of data that sits now back-end and we’ve got a brilliant analytics tool for our publishers to use. We’re sitting on over 35 billion data points [inaudible] and all of that is available to our publishers. We share the information because we want our publishers to use it to create better products to go after the audience that they need and that they want. We allow publishers to see who’s reading. We give them demographics. None of this Big Brother[?] stuff. We’re not going to tell you exactly who they are. We can tell you kind of the type of reader that is reading. We can tell people where people are reading. We can tell them what countries they’re from, their whereabouts, and what state they’re in for example, so that people can start tailoring the content a little bit and then most importantly, how people are reading. So, this is data that we never used to be able to really get. I remember when I working back in publishers and on the print side of things that you sit in meetings and you’d have arguments with art directors and editors because they all knew best. They all knew what had to be on the front cover and what taglines worked and what ones didn’t. What Readly gives you and the analytics data gives you is to ignore those arguments. To really kind of delve in and to prove the concept so the art editor can sit down and go, “Well, here’s Readly’s data to show that I was right.” The editor can sit down and go, “Well here’s Readly data. with his dreams data. Well, I was right on this cover line.” Over the years that we’ve been running, we’ve seen publishers and we worked with publishers to change their magazines and to change their content to words[?] how their audience read and to how their audience wants to read.

We’ve had food titles for example that have been not using the right type of recipes on front covers. But as soon as they changed it, because we can show you what articles and what recipes people are reading, they put those on the front cover and the reader’s numbers go up because we can tell you what people are interested in. We were working with a car magazine, for example, and they kept putting brilliant car reviews right at the back of the magazine. After a classified section where they were selling cars. Problem is, is you’re always going to lose people as they go through a magazine. People are going to get bored or they find what they want and they leave.

So, by the time they get to the classified section they go, “Magazine probably over now. I’m not really interested in buying a new car necessarily so I’m going to come out of it.” So, what we did is we told them this and we showed them all the data that sits behind it and they move those reviews in front of the classified section, and now it’s one of the best reads areas in their magazine. So, we’ve got all of this data that we can go through and we can show people how to use it and why they should be using it to better the products that they’re already creating. We’ve got newspapers for example, in Sweden, that are using our data to tell them how long people are reading certain sections. So they were creating, for example, of four-page, soccer section.

Whereas actually, they could see that people were only reading the first two pages, and then they were just dropping off. So, why are they creating a four-page football or soccer section when they create two pages of it? And then they save themselves those two pages in print and in distribution as well. It goes full circle. It’s not just about the magazines on the digital platforms. It’s about enhancing the products in their print as well. It’s about making the publishers more aware of the audience.

John: If I got this right, it’s a great information tool. You get to inform your publishers, more and more publishers are happier clients and publishers.

Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

John: They create content that’s even more viable and more interesting for your readers. So, therefore, the reader’s readership goes up, readers are happier. You bring on new subscribers, publishers are happy because it’s a bigger platform for them to get more readers with. So, it’s one big loop you created with the duality of pushing information over to your publishers, but also creating a better and bigger content platform for your readership groups. Oh, wow. I mean, what a [inaudible] [crosstalk].

Chris: That’s exactly the idea. Yeah, we push money obviously back to the publishers as well. We work on a rev-share model with our publishers. So, when somebody reads that content, they get paid for it, which is obviously super important because they need this money to continue to create brilliant content that they are putting out there. So yeah, you’re right, it goes full circle, and that’s what we’re here for. So, happy publishers, happy clients, happy me as well.

John: Do future of magazines and newspapers, what– given that you’re both an expert in newspapers and magazines because you worked in those industries, your father worked in that industry, and then you also now are a digital expert because you have all this history now working with Readly, and now for Readly has as an executive, where’s does this all going to go? How does this all shake out in the months and years ahead, Chris?

Chris: Yeah, if I had a crystal ball, I’d be worth a lot more than I am I think. But and [crosstalk] expert’s a big word.

John: You’re still young. Don’t worry. The crystal ball’s [inaudible] [crosstalk]

Chris: Yeah, expert’s a big word but I’ll take it. It’s fine.

John: Yeah.

Chris: I’ll take it. Yeah, the future is very different. If you’d ask my dad, what he thought, it would be very different. My granddad was in newspapers as well. So, [crosstalk] he would’ve told you something different.

John: Wow.

Chris: For me, the future of magazines and the future of newspapers, there is a shift towards digital.

John: Okay.

Chris: We can see it. It’s been coming. It’s already happening. We can see that there is a shift towards direct subscriptions, to digital subscriptions, to all-you-can-read products like Readly. We’ve already seen it in the music industry with Spotify and with Apple Music. We’ve seen it in the film and the TV industry with Netflix and Amazon Prime, and Disney+ and all of those guys, there is a serious shift for the whole media industry towards digital and away from the physical product. Having said that, I’ve been told since the day I got into the publishing industry, print is dead. It’s something that’s always running around in my head people have always said, friends told to me when I first got in, “Why are you working in the publishing industry? Print’s dead. It’s never going to– Print’s not going to die, right? Print’s going nowhere.

John: Right.

Chris: We will always have printed products completely have printed products. We always are going to want beautiful coffee table magazines. People will always read newspapers. I’m not even sure if I should say it but I still read a physical newspaper every day.

John: That’s wonderful.

Chris: I’ve got Readly. I’ve got the same newspapers.

John: Right. You could say that.

Chris: I like the feel and the touch and I’m one of these weird guys that smell new books and [inaudible].

John: That was in your genes. I mean, your grandfather, your father, I mean, this is your DNA, Chris. Come on now.

Chris: That’s it. I’m not allowed to deviate from it. But print’s not going anywhere.

John: Right.

Chris: But it will slow down. It will slow down and it will slowly get to a point where digital overtakes I think. Publishers are all kind of already expecting it. We can see that their content marketing strategies, for example, are widening. People are offering exclusive content on platforms like podcasts. I think social media has a serious part to play in the marketing of these products as well. We can already see publishers using things like YouTube to create videos around the magazine content to drive people to printed products and printed subscriptions. So, absolutely, we’re going in a digital direction and I do think that the all you can read platform and, of course, I would say this, but I think we’re driving towards that as a media industry as a whole. That people want the ability to go into one place and find not just what they were looking for, but also to be given ideas about other things that they might be interested in, or being able to really dig in and find more than just one title, or one article that they want. They want to be able to go in and find a whole [inaudible] stuff.

John: I love it. For our listeners and for our readers to find Readly and to download it, I’m going to download it today and I’m going to start using it on my iPad. I love reading on my iPad. Go to www.readly.com. I highly suggest for my listeners and viewers to download this wonderful app. Invest in yourself, invest in your friends and your family, give the gift of knowledge. It’s such a great tool to be able to share this and I’m just so honored to be able to have you on the show today, Chris, to share your journey to share the Readly story. I can’t wait to have you back so we can continue learning about how you’re growing around the world. I just want to thank you and your colleagues Chris, for not only making the world a better place but a smarter place as well. Thank you for joining us today on the Impact Podcast.

Chris: No, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having us and thanks for listening to me ramble on about the industry.

John: This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Todd Camp. He’s the Senior Director of Corporate Social Responsibility and Community Relations from the iconic and great Hershey company. Welcome to Green is Good, Todd Camp.

Todd Camp: Thank you, John. I’m happy to be here.

John: Hey, Todd. This is your first turn at Green is Good and, of course, Hershey’s first turn here, but before we get talking about all the wonderful and amazing and important things you’re doing at the Hershey company, can you please share with our listeners the Todd Camp journey leading up to this point and this great position you have at the Hershey company?

Todd: Absolutely, so I’ve been in this role about three years and prior to that, my background is actually in engineering, so I spent about 17 years in various engineering capacities from working directly in manufacturing plants to working in corporate with our various manufacturing facilities and either quality or efficiency improvements and that’s really what led me to and attracted me to this role. At the time when they were recruiting for this position, they wanted someone with a bit more of a technical background to drive more metrics and more of a process mindset to our corporate responsibility efforts and the stars aligned and I was pretty fortunate to land this position, like I said, about three years ago now.

John: First of all, there’s nobody that I know, including myself and my family, that when they hear the Hershey company or eat your great products, it’s such a great feeling because it’s comfort food. It’s comfort sweets and I love your motto, ‘Share goodness’. That is one of the best mottoes I’ve ever heard and brand missions I’ve ever heard from a company and since we’ve been doing the show. It’s just one of my favorites and it really sticks out. Todd, I was looking at your latest CSR report. Can you share some of the highlights with our listeners? And for our listeners who want to follow along as we’re on, I’m on your website right now. It’s one of the best websites I’ve ever seen. It’s www.thehersheycompany.com. Go on to the sustainability section. Click on to that button and follow along here as Todd walks us through his latest CSR report and all the great highlights that are happening at the Hershey Company.

Todd: Yes, we certainly encourage folks to visit that URL and to learn a lot more about the Hershey Company than just what we have in our report but in terms of highlights, we’re really excited to share some of the progress we’ve made over the last five years in a few areas in particular, certainly cocoa sustainability is one we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve nearly doubled our commitment to source certified cocoa. We committed to 10% and came in at 18%. Palm oil is another area that we’ve taken a leadership role. We achieved our commitment to source 100% sustainable palm oil a year ahead of schedule and then we upped our commitment to source 100% sustainable and traceable palm oil by the end of this year, which is pretty remarkable in terms of the palm industry. In terms of the environment, we achieved four of our 2015 environmental goals at least two years ahead of schedule and if we use 2009 as our baseline here, we’ve reduced our water use by 72%, our waste by 38%, our greenhouse gas emissions by 22%, and we achieved zero waste to landfill status at six of our manufacturing plants and five other facilities. We also talk a little bit about our commitment to giving back to communities including nearly $9.5 million in cash and products donations and about 200,000 volunteer hours just in 2013 alone.

John: Wait a second. Let’s step back and walk through some of this. So you’re ahead of some of the goals that you set in 2011. You’re ahead of schedule. How did you rally the troops? How did you make this so important at the Hershey Company that everyone got behind the initiatives that you guys created and the goals and you overachieved and are actually ahead of schedule? How did you create that culture and that DNA at Hershey Company?

Todd: We attacked it on a couple of different fronts. We felt we had set some pretty aggressive goals back in 2011 so we had a lot of work to do so we first garnered our senior leadership support, which was extremely important in giving us the leeway and flexibility to make some investments in technology that allowed us to really drive down our environmental footprint and in a lot of cases, we relaxed our criteria for capital investment paybacks knowing that some of the investments we made in environmental technology were typically justifiable from a financial perspective. Our senior leaders relaxed that criteria and allowed us to have a longer payback period because they felt so strongly that these were the right things to do as a company. We also leveraged the creativity of our employees and we’re pretty fortunate at Hershey that if you give our employees a goal, they figure out a way to make it happen so we gave them the leeway to be creative and come up with new and unique approaches and that really all came together and was owned by various business branches and our various employees and they were a part of the process from the very start. That’s really what helped us accelerate the efforts we had set forth and we did all that during a time of growth, both from volume and sales growth, so we were growing in one sense and reducing in another, while maintaining the quality and consistency of our products that people have come to expect and that we view as the most important thing that we have.

John: So, right from the top down, you’re saying everyone got behind this and that’s why you’re ahead of schedule and that’s why sustainability and the environment have taken on a large position at the Hershey Company and everyone’s winning then?

Todd: Absolutely. Sustainability at Hershey is really integrated into our business and it’s not a stand alone department. We only have a handful of folks that work in CSR directly and we rely on our employees around the world to help us guide and inform our efforts and really drive progress because it’s really part of our corporate culture from the very beginning so it’s something that our employees view as just the way that we approach business every day.

John: That’s so great. For our listeners that just joined us, we’re honored to have Todd Camp with us. He’s the Corporate and Social Responsibility and Community Relations Director at the Hershey Company. It’s thehersheycompany.com. I’m on their website right now. It is visually one of the most gorgeous websites I’ve ever been on and it reads so well because I clicked on the good business button and all the stories here that tie back to your CSR report and they’re all there so I know we can’t get to all of them today but for our listeners out there, I urge you to go on the site and look at all these amazing stories when it comes to sustainable cocoa and palm oil and everything that you’re doing. One of these has to do with zero waste and that’s a big issue now. One of the stories here I’m looking at says 97% of your facilities sends zero waste to landfill. Explain these numbers and what the whole zero waste to landfill goal is at the Hershey Company.

Todd: Absolutely. This is one of our shining stars, John, so today, 97% of our U.S. production occurs at zero waste to landfills facilities, like you mentioned, meaning that those facilities send no waste to landfill, quite simply and we really attacked waste through a systematic process. First, obviously we identified the various waste streams at each facility. We then drove down that waste as far as we possibly could to eliminate it all together. We implemented various projects to reduce waste and also to increase recycling and then with that remaining waste, there’s always going to be that remaining bit of waste, we found ways to either convert it to energy on site or work with local waste to energy facilities to ensure that we weren’t sending that waste to landfill, that if we weren’t reducing it or recycling it, it was turned back into energy to power either our facilities or someone else’s so we are pretty proud of this fact. Our employees are extremely proud. This is a real sense of pride for our employees in the facilities and we’ve actually spurred a healthy competition between our employees at multiple facilities to achieve that status and once they get it, they are keenly aware of that and they have made the process changes to maintain it and are vigorous in terms of protecting that status, to make sure they’re doing the right things for the environment and the plant itself.

John: You know the old adage, Todd, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ so since you’ve achieved so many of your important goals with regards to the environment and sustainability at the Hershey Company, share with our listeners what’s next. How are you guys going to keep raising the bar there?

Todd: Well, we’re not satisfied. We’ve made tremendous progress and we acknowledge that. However, we feel like we can still do more and what we’ve done is essentially, reset the clock and our new baseline here is the end of 2013. That basically starts the clock at zero and we set new goals and fairly aggressive goals across the board with a target year of 2017 so working with our technical folks and our senior leaders, we’ve really set what we feel are incremental and fairly aggressive goals to continue to drive down our environmental footprint across the board.

John: I love it and for our listeners out there again, we’ve got Todd Camp with us. He’s the head of Corporate Social Responsibility from the Hershey Company and on their website, thehersheycompany.com. I’m also looking at this wonderful fact under the better stories. We’ve helped increase cocoa farmers’ income by 70% over the past three years. That’s amazing. Share a little bit more. Go a little deeper. Since cocoa’s so much of an essential ingredient in chocolate and in your products at the Hershey Company, share a little bit more about the cocoa story.

Todd: Absolutely. This is probably over the past few years the area we’ve spent the most attention on and energy around and really, cocoa is a pretty complex commodity. It’s mostly grown in West Africa. Seventy percent of it is grown in West Africa in fairly remote parts of Ghana and the Ivory Coast and a few other countries. We’ve really relied on technology and leveraged that to basically provide cocoa farmers and their families with education to help drive increases in their yields and ultimately, their income and it’s just basic agricultural techniques, basic weather information, crop disease information, just basic information that they didn’t have access to before, which now that they do, are showing to have dramatic results and we just finished a three year impact study. Actually world education and international nonprofit finished a three-year impact study and found that, like you said, farmers in the cocoa link program, which is the one program we have that leverages mobile technology to get information to farmers. Those farmers increase their yield by 46% and their incomes by 70, like you mentioned, so we’re really leveraging technology to change the game for folks that are a vital piece of our supply chain and an important partner for us.

John: That’s wonderful. I see in your CSR report also there’s a very interesting project called, ‘Project Peanut Butter’ and all I know is if I worked at the Hershey Company, I’d want to be part of Project Peanut Butter. What does that mean and what does it mean with regards to the aim to save lives in Africa? Explain to our listeners please, Todd, Project Peanut Butter.

Todd: Absolutely. This is a project we’re really excited about and Project Peanut Butter is actually a nonprofit that’s been in existence for several years and they’ve been producing what are called ready-to-use therapeutic foods. They provide to malnourished kids in some pretty rural parts of the world and we decided to partner with Project Peanut Butter and fund the construction of a factory in Ghana to manufacture this ready-to-use therapeutic food for malnourished kids in Ghana itself and that facility is scheduled to open later this summer and will provide access to basically this nutritionally enhanced peanut butter to between 20 and 30 thousand kids per year. We really view this as an important project for our future but this was a purely philanthropic effort from the start but one that we feel is extremely important to continue our commitment to the well being of children, particularly those in need so this is a totally different approach that we’ve taken and we feel like it has a lot of potential to grow in the future and we have a lot of plans that we’re looking at to extend this project going forward. For now, we’re really excited to have this project almost cross the finish line that we really have these malnourished kids that need it most.

John: What an important project. As you show on your website, there’s over 70,000 malnourished kids in rural Ghana and for you to be able to help a huge portion of these children every year with this great project, Project Peanut Butter, that just speaks volumes for the Hershey Company. That’s just awesome. I’m on your website and for our listeners out there, it’s thehersheycompany.com. It’s a great website and one of the best I’ve ever been on. I clicked on the good business button and I see a lot of pictures of your employees that are doing community activities and I’ll share a couple here that I’m looking at right now. Children’s Miracle Network is one of them and the United Way Campaign Fund that you guys raise money for. Can you share some of the employee engagement that happens at the Hershey Company, both domestically and worldwide with your employees and all the great work that you’re doing as a company?

Todd: Absolutely and you just mentioned our two primary employee campaigns, Children’s Miracle Network, which we’ve supported for 25 years and raised over $4 million for sick and injured children and United Way, which we’ve supported for really more than 50 years and last year alone raised almost $3 million for various nonprofits across the globe but really, our employees are the engine that drives our CSR efforts. Since the very beginning of our company, we’ve been committed to giving back to our communities and making a difference in the places where we live and work and we encourage our employees to engage in their local communities as well. They get several paid days off to volunteer each year and last year, we launched our first ever week of service, which we called, ‘Good to Give Back Week’ and that was a focus week of volunteerism and our employees were out in force in teams really making a difference in the places they call home. This year, we’re expanding this program to make it even bigger and more impactful and really at the heart of it we believe that engaged employees are happier. They’re more productive and we really strive to make our employees our CSR ambassadors and this is just one way that we do that. The employees love it and they get excited about it. They come with new ideas every year so it’s really at the heart of our efforts and something that is extremely important to what we do.

John: We’re down to the last three minutes unfortunately, Todd, but I do want to mention for our listeners out there that don’t remember the genesis of the Hershey Company, it was founded by a great man named Milton Hershey and back at the early part of the century, 1918 or so, he committed his fortune to education and here we are in 2014 and education is still the future of America. That’s how ahead of his time she was. Can you share a little bit in the last two minutes or so all the great work that you’ve built upon and the great people at the company have built upon in terms of Milton Hershey’s legacy to education?

Todd: Absolutely and you’re exactly right on those dates. In 1918, he gave away $60 million, which is giving away a lot of money today obviously and that was about 30 years before he passed away so it was kind of unique in that regard but basically that was set aside solely to fund a school for underserved children. Today that’s one of the largest K through twelve schools, with about 2,000 kids coming from severe poverty or severe social risk and they’re also our largest shareholders so we have a pretty unique connection with one of the largest schools for underserved kids in the world. That’s not all. We’ve extended that commitment to really focus on education globally so wherever we have operations or groups of employees, we seek out partners and programs that support, particularly, underserved kids and the vehicle with which we do that is usually through education so that is something that again our employees understand this unique connection we have with education and they’re very excited to be involved with it in their local communities and we’ve literally donated millions of dollars every year to support educational programs for kids because we feel so strongly about that. It is our future, like you mentioned, and it’s been part of our very legacy and DNA at the company and it’s something we will extend for many, many years.

John: That is just so great and Todd, thank you for coming on today. For our listeners out there, to learn more about all the wonderful and important things that the Hershey Company is doing, please go to www.thehersheycompany.com. Click on to any of the buttons I was talking about, good business, and enjoy their CSR report and enjoy their products and know when you’re enjoying them how much goodness they do for the whole world. Thank you Todd, for sharing all the sustainability goodness at the Hershey Company today. You are truly living proof that green is good.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian. This is a very special edition of the Impact. We’ve got with us today Anna Mercado Clark. She’s a partner at Phillips Lytle. She’s a data security and privacy expert and also a general cybersecurity expert. I’ve been on panels with her before and today she joins us on the Impact podcast. Welcome, Anna.

Anna Mercado Clark: Thank you very much, John. I’m happy to be here and I’m always happy to talk to you.

John: Well, the feeling’s very mutual. Anna, before we get talking about all the important work that you do and the topic that you cover, which are really huge trends in our world today, in terms of cybersecurity and data security and privacy, can you give a little bit of the Anna Mercado Clark backstory? How did you even get here? How did you end up in New York with this very important practice that you’re doing right now at Phillips Lytle?

Anna: Sure. I actually grew up in the Philippines. I moved to the United States when I was 11. I went to law school in New York. My first job out of law school was as a criminal prosecutor at the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, where I prosecuted everything from misdemeanors to attempted murders. Then, I joined a civil litigation firm. I got recruited to my current firm where I was a commercial litigator. I ended up getting into data because I was involved with volumes of data. Initially, my involvement in data was in E-discovery. Because I was so familiar with my clients’ data systems and data, anytime they had a data question they came to me. So, I ended up learning the practice area and joining the data security and privacy practice team of the law firm. Now, I lead the team.

John: Did you have any idea back then that cybersecurity would become such a huge industry when you were contemplating this evolution in your career?

Anna: Not in that particular sense. I knew some lawyers at my law firm already had assisted in data breaches. But for me, I just knew that data was the future, right? As things were becoming more automated, companies were storing more and more data. I knew we had to manage that somehow and that the issues were going to proliferate as we continued to amass more and more information. But I did not think along with the terms of data security or cybersecurity necessarily back then.

John: Got it. For our listeners and viewers out there, to find Anna, I just want to give this shout-out right now. You can go to www.phillipslytle.com. It’s is where you can find Anna. Anna, let’s get right into it. Talk about where we are today. It seems as though when you read the stats… When you’re growing up, you hear those famous words “crime doesn’t pay”. But when it comes to cybercrime, it seems as though that’s turned on its head. In 2015, $3 trillion was gotten by the bad guys. 5 years later in 2020, $6 trillion. What’s going on here and what should our listeners and viewers, whether it’s protecting their own family or whether it’s protecting the ecosystems and businesses that they represent, what should be top of mind for them? What should they be thinking about that they’re not thinking about today?

Anna: That’s a very good question. I think when we think about cybersecurity, initially, when we started thinking about scams through emails, you used to get the Nigerian prince email or I won the lottery email and give me some money and I’ll give you a windfall later on. The cybercriminals have gotten so much more sophisticated since then. I think that’s what’s so scary now. A lot of the data breaches and cyber incidents that we’ve dealt with, particularly during the pandemic, have evolved around large multimillion-dollar transactions involving wire transfers, where the bad actors or the cybercriminals are infiltrating email systems. I think for people who are looking to protect themselves and their family members, I wouldn’t worry so much about the latest in gadgets, the latest in software. Ultimately, systems are as strong as their weakest link so use your common sense. Think about whether something sounds right. If you don’t feel right about it, if it doesn’t sound right, then don’t move forward with it.

Think about how you can confirm transactions, particularly if it involves large amounts of money. Because once the money is in the wrong hands, it’s very difficult to get that back. We work with law enforcement officers quite regularly to try to get money back, where they’ve been wired to the wrong accounts or fraudulent accounts. It’s very difficult, once it’s out, to get it back. The best defense is really not to find yourself in that position to begin with, which really means staying vigilant, using your common sense. If something doesn’t sound right, talk to your friends. Look at the FBI website, actually, because they frequently put out alerts on what the most common scams are and validate transactions. To the extent of online accounts, make sure that you’re implementing dual-factor authentication. What that means is, in addition to your password, the account will ask you for an additional second layer of confirmation of your identity, whether it’s a thing on your cell phone or an app that you’ve previously validated, to make sure that you’re who you say you are and it’s not some person trying to get access to your account without authorization.

John: Got it. When I got into this industry, the whole big about data protection was centered around paper shredding and companies like Iron Mountain, Shred-It and HIPAA, Starbucks. But in May of 2018, Anna, GDPR happened. We felt a sea change in this whole world of data protection, privacy, awareness around it, media attention. There are all sorts of new laws that have come out. GDPR then has come to America and now states, such as California, Nevada, Maine, and New York, have already passed their own data privacy laws. You would know better than me, but when I’ve talked to other experts that are like you and on the level that you are, they tell me every state in this nation within the next 12 to 24 months will have their own law. What’s going on with all these rules and guardrails now? How is that changing the landscape and what should we be thinking about? Because the rules and laws around GDPR and associated data privacy laws are fast-changing and the noose is tightening in terms of what kind of penalties can be meted up by these regulatory bodies.

Anna: You’re absolutely right. The interesting part is, even before the GDPR went into effect, there was already a similar directive as opposed to a regulation. The difference is, as a directive, European countries had to do something extra in order to implement that in their own countries. The implementation looked wildly different around Europe. So, what the regulation really sought to do was to try to make that implementation much more uniform and to strengthen the protections that were offered by the directive. The additional thing that made it different from the directive and the reason that it became such a big news item around the world is it sought to have extraterritorial reach. What that means is, even though you’re a company that’s not located in an economic area, where the GDPR is in effect, you would find yourself subject to the law if you meet the threshold requirements of article 3. So, companies that are solely located in the United States who were only doing business in the United States might find themselves, either based on their third party arrangements, their vendors, their marketing activities, might have been the ambit of the GDPR.

I think you’re absolutely right. A lot of companies really sought to change their compliance programs to comply with the GDPR, as opposed to having a hodgepodge compliance program that sought to comply with different regional regulatory requirements. Because for some companies, it’s just easier and most efficient and economical to have one program. Now, that’s much easier for other jurisdictions, so then pass more stringent requirements, because companies were already doing what they needed to do to comply with the GDPR. The hurdles that were there initially, in the US, in other countries, were not there in the same way because companies were more willing to do the things that their laws now would require. I think I agree with that assessment. It’s going to be toward more stringent regulation of personal data. Even as I say that, though, I think what’s interesting is each state law has its own nuance. The definition of personal information, for example, can be wildly different. The definition of a data breach can be very different. What is required in terms of data protection measures can also be very different. Even though the trend is towards greater protection, I think what that looks like on a regional basis is still going to look very different from one another. I think what we have to look out for is what the federal government is going to do on that front. Because unlike other areas of the law, there are a lot of companies, including tech companies, that are clamoring for a uniform federal law that governs this space. Because it would be much easier for them to comply than it would hodgepodge patchwork of regulations from the different states. Not to mention on top of the state laws, you also have industry-specific laws that you have to comply with.

John: Right. What do you think? The GDPR came over during another presidency, a new president has now been elected, what’s going to happen on the federal side? Are they going to get some version of federal legislation done on this that it’s going to give people some sort of guidelines that they can look to? Or what do you think is going to shake out and how long is that going to take on a federal level?

Anna: That’s a question I asked my colleagues in Washington, DC quite frequently as you can imagine. There have been a lot of different efforts to try to get a federal legislation in place. One is the level of sophistication on the issues is not uniform among lawmakers. That’s something we have to address. The other is we have the pandemic and other more pressing economic issues that are taking precedence. I don’t expect a significant step to be taken in this direction in the next year or two. So, I would have to see how the economy recovers during that time for tackling this issue. What we’re seeing instead, though, is various different federal agencies putting out their own guidance in lieu of or in the current absence of a federal law. They’re putting out their own guidance about what they expect and what they recommend. Some of these government agencies have regulatory powers. It will be for the next few years. There are a lot more federal agencies putting out guidance and until we get a law in place. But I don’t anticipate federal law coming into effect anytime soon.

John: For our viewers and listeners who just joined us, we’re honored to have with us today Anna Mercado Clark. She’s a partner at Phillips Lytle. To find Anna and her great colleagues, go to www.phillipslytle.com. Anna, give us a day in the life of your professional life. How do things work? Does your phone ring and a fortune 100 or 200 company call you and they say, “We just had a breach. We think we’re going to be on the cover of the WSJ or NYT. We need help.” or are people calling you, saying, “Listen, I just read about those people. I just heard about Colonial Pipeline. I just heard about Sony, or some other big brand. Can you help us prepare so this doesn’t happen to us? Help us become more resilient. Help us become more defensive so we don’t end up on the cover of the NYT or WSJ or Bloomberg or something like that.”? What’s a day in your professional life look like?

Anna: I think what’s so great about this practice is no 2 days are alike. I’m sure you’re not surprised at that answer. You’re very familiar with this practice area. I think companies and organizations, because I work with not for profits as well and high net worth individuals, it really varies, right? There are some who are more advanced in their data protection mindset. Those are the people who will come to us and say, “We really need to prepare. We just heard about this and we saw this in the news and we want to beef up our policies. We want to do a test of our data protection policies and systems, and let’s talk.” More often than not, the way that we end up… because they have an issue that’s already happening, a data incident. In the legal profession, we don’t like to call anything a data breach, John, until we absolutely have to, because it’s a term of art. For those listeners out there who might suffer a data incident, beware of using that term because we don’t want you admitting to something under the law.

John: Good point. That’s great advice right there. Perfect.

Anna: That’s sometimes how we’ll get the call. We’ll get a call and say, “I need somebody to talk to.” Usually, that’s after hours, on holidays, during the weekends, because that’s when these attackers’ activities are increased. Or sometimes because of our close relationship with law enforcement, law enforcement would reach out to us and say, “Hey, this is happening. There are many companies that are suffering from this attack. Clients might be impacted. Let’s talk.” Then we might be the ones telling our clients, “Hey, this issue is happening. Let’s talk about whether or not this impacts you.” Sometimes because of our other work with a client, we know their data systems. We have colleagues in DC, as I mentioned earlier, and colleagues in law enforcement. When we get the news, and we get them fairly quickly, we might reach out to the client and say, “Hey, I know you use a software. There’s an issue.” Sometimes we know the issue before our client even knows the issue, which can be a real advantage. For us, our strategy is to not wait for the client to come to us with a problem. Our strategy is to try to anticipate problems for our clients and give them the best business-focused legal advice that we can, given the facts that we know.

John: Talk a little bit about cyber-insurance. Obviously, it’s a growing field. A lot of people are buying it. My friends in the cyber-insurance industry tell me it’s like the Gold Rush. They’re selling more cyber-insurance policies than ever before. But when the bad guys seem to be winning, the cybercriminals go from 3 trillion in ’15 to 6 trillion in 2020 in terms of ill-gotten gains, is it an insurable industry, and how are the insurers going to continue to figure out how to work with those they’re ensuring so they don’t have losses every year in terms of cyber-insurance that they’re selling? How is that interrelate and where are you in that ecosystem in terms of advisement?

Anna: Yeah, that’s a great question. When people started thinking about cyber-insurance at the outset, insurance companies didn’t know how to price these policies, right? It’s very unlike other insurance policies that are on the market. In our experience, the insurance issues don’t [inaudible] that they do and other general commercial coverage. The question is never how much is covered, right? Usually, in commercial situations, a lot of the dispute centers around, “How much is the insurance willing to kick in?” The interesting thing about cyber-insurance is the issue is usually whether or not your event is even covered. We tell our clients all the time, “You really should seek legal counsel. Don’t just rely on your broker when you’re selecting your coverage.” I don’t say that just because I’m a lawyer. You can hire some other lawyer. It doesn’t have to be me. The reason I say that is because you might be confident you have a $10 million policy or a $100 million policy. But then, when you really look at the policy, you might realize it doesn’t cover the thing organization is most at risk for. For example, if you are a manufacturer, there are many policies that might not cover those losses if you suffer a data breach that does not allow you to generate your widgets or whatever items that is that you’re producing. There are many policies that don’t cover wire fraud transfers because the rationale from the insurance perspective is the transfer, right?

These are situations where you were tricked into authorizing the transfer to a fraudulent account. You have to really think about your risks, both in your industry and your own company based on your business practices, and select the insurance policy that covers that, as opposed to just selecting an insurance policy that’s willing to give you the most cover. The other thing is we’re seeing a change. There have been sea changes in the insurance industry in this field in the last few years. The latest sea change now is as a result of the pandemic because COVID has really encouraged a lot of cybercriminals. They have a lot of time on their hands. A lot of people are at home, meaning they’re more vulnerable. A lot of companies shifted to remote infrastructure to do it, even though they didn’t have the time to train their employees. There have been a lot more claims. I think insurance companies are still struggling to determine how to price these insurance policies properly, what should be covered, what should not be covered. That’s a kind of continuous process for them. I don’t think we’ve settled yet on what that’s going to-

John: I want to go back to the work-at-home phenomena that happened because of COVID, Anna. But let’s take on the insurance for one more question. I know every company is idiosyncratic to itself. But in terms of your macro advisement, do you, as a general principle, advise your clients to maintain and keep a cyber-insurance policy?

Anna: 100%. In the old days, you’ll see some cases tackling this. Many companies did not have cybersecurity insurance. What they would do is try to make a claim on their general commercial policy, their property policy, their criminal policy. Insurance companies were resistant to that. There were some successes in getting coverage under those policies, but now, the language in those policies prevents a future successful claim under those policies. So, a 100%. I cannot stress this enough. Any company, no matter how big or small, should have cybersecurity insurance. The average cost of a data breach the last time I looked was in the millions of dollars. There is an increased cost of that in the United States. It’s much more costly to manage a data breach and that’s partly because you have the expense of your initial response team, which can include your law firm, your legal counsel, your PR team, your forensic investigator. It might even include your own employees addressing the immediate needs so that you can get back to the day-to-day business. Then, on top of that, you might have to retain additional third parties to sift through the data that might have been compromised to determine whether or not you have a data breach notice obligation. Then on top of that, you have the cost of sending out notices. There have been instances where companies have gone bankrupt because of the cost of having to provide the notices. It can easily add up. So, it’s best to have insurance coverage.

John: Anna, go back to them now. COVID has created this work-at-home phenomenon. Maybe it was going to happen anyway, but because of COVID, just like the Zoom boom, it happened faster and society has changed forever. The business has changed forever. How we do business, how we work has changed forever. I was on a call this morning with a very large organization that was talking to us about potentially being a client. They said they had over 100,000 plus people working from home. Here’s the challenge they said they were up against. Everyone went home somewhere in mid-March of 2020. When they’re working in the cocoon of the office, they had guidelines. Their CTO or Chief Information Security Officer put nice guardrails around everybody to protect them from themselves, protect them from other employees, protect them from the outside world in terms of bad actors. They go home quickly and then have to get business hardware at home. They have their personal hardware at home, and what they told us this morning was they found out there’s been a lot of cross-contamination in terms of information of business that ended up on personal hardware and hard drives and personal information on business equipment because things blend together when you’re working from home without all the guidelines that you have from the safety of an office. How can corporations or how can even just regular good citizens of this country protect themselves from even just benignly creating a potential data incident at their company or for their family because of all this cross-contamination? What’s going on in that sector, and how do you work with companies? Because COVID changed the world, and that created a whole new level of issues.

Anna: Yeah, I know. I agree completely. And I think any organization has to take a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to make sure that you’re continuously educating your employees. I’ve mentioned this before. I am a fan. I’m a big proponent of logical advancements to shore up your data security, but it’s not 100% reliable. At the end of the day, when you look at the biggest data incidents, data breaches that have occurred, oftentimes people are the culprit. They click something they weren’t supposed to, they responded to an email they weren’t supposed to, they provided their credentials somebody shouldn’t have, and there is nothing, no matter how sophisticated, that system is never going to 100% guard against that. So, I think the first thing you have to do is make sure that you’re communicating regularly with your employees, even though they’re working remotely, and that you’re communicating with them, not just about their day to day responsibilities but about the importance of making sure that they are complying with the company policies even remotely. Perhaps some companies even do tests on their employees. The tests are not intended to make people feel bad, that they don’t know something. It’s really intended to alert them that even though they’re smart, even though they’re sophisticated, they can still fall prey to these attacks that we’re seeing.

There are also various technological solutions. Some companies are opting to provide their own hardware to employees, particularly the ones that are handling particularly sensitive information. There are also a lot of companies that are employing virtual desktops. So, you can’t access information and export information outside of that virtual desktop, and some are using VPNs, Virtual Private Networks. Citrix is a good example of that kind of setup, where you have to provide your credentials. And again, dual-factor authentication is trusted enough. It’s actually a requirement in some laws depending on what states you’re in or what industry you’re in, but you should always have a whole host of issues, I’d say 80-90% of issues that we’ve been seeing lately. Because even if your password is compromised, if the bad actor doesn’t have your cell phone or whatever device you’re using for the dual-factor authentication, then they won’t have access to your account. So, there are a variety of different approaches, but I think the most important is training.

John: Without giving away any trade secret, obviously, are you constantly amazed and shocked when new clients walk in the door and they tell you, again, without malice, how lacks they are in this area and how vulnerable their corporation is, until you start coaching them on how to really start protecting themselves? Are you still constantly re-amazed at that level of benign neglect as well?

Anna: Yeah. It’s so interesting because I find that the level of sophistication of the client in business does not necessarily become part[?] with their level of sophistication on these issues. There are organizations out there, who were wildly successful and who have a great a reputation and were excellent at everything else, but we find, especially depending on the industry, there are organizations who don’t necessarily think they’re a target, who don’t think that they need to worry about this, because they’re not an Equifax, they’re not a consumer-facing company. And that’s the wrong approach. They’re attacking construction companies, manufacturing companies, companies that are part of the supply chain for our energy [inaudible], think governments. Traditionally, organizations that would not think they’re a target are increasingly becoming a target. So, in this industry, the question is not if, it’s when.

The other thing is, there are a lot of clients, officers of companies, for example, management personnel, who think I’m so smart, I’m so sophisticated, I’m not going to fall for this. I tell them all the time, “Don’t feel bad if something happens and you do something that you’re not supposed to do because…”, which is why I think education is always so important because the threats change constantly. And so, all we can do is try to keep up as much as we can with it and make sure that people are armed with the tools they need in order to protect themselves. And when something happens, the other important piece is making sure they know who to report it to and what to do. Because that’s the worst part, right? We have companies who do testing. They’ve got a malicious email, and only 5 people reported it. The fact that only 5 people reported it is a bigger problem than the fact that 30 people click on the bad email, because then it really compromises the organization’s ability to protect itself against the repercussions of that bad action.

John: Right. And we’ll talk a little bit about the future. Take out your crystal ball. You’re a young woman. You’re obviously one of the leaders in your field. Talk about this decade ahead. If cybersecurity and the trend of cybersecurity was a baseball game, are we in the bottom of the fifth or the top of the second inning in terms of the evolution of data security and privacy and how that whole world is going to evolve in the next 10 years ahead of us?

Anna: I just say I love that analogy because I’m a huge Mets fan, and I hope I don’t offend listeners. “Let’s go Mets. This is our year.” We say that every year, but I truly believe this is our season, and not just because Jacob deGrom is such an amazing pitcher. Should we talk about that instead? It’s interesting because I think despite the many changes and the developments in this industry, I truly believe it’s still in its nature. When you look at who’s in the space, for example, there are some of us who have been in this space for many years, but most people are only really starting to think about these issues, to think about data security and there are still so many technological advancements that are happening in this space, both in terms of trying to protect data, but also every time there’s a new technological development we have to adapt. Now, what do we do? Zoom, for example, was not a way of life before the pandemic. Now, we have Zoom. There have been a lot of modifications to Zoom as you can see that has happened even just since the beginning of the pandemic. And so, I think we’re just warming up. We haven’t even begun the ballgame yet.

John: Got it. I love it. That’s awesome. I want to switch from your expertise, your profession on data security and privacy, but talk a little bit about your journey personally. Historically, Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers was a guy’s world. You’re a woman that’s broken into that industry, let’s talk a little bit about that. And then, let’s take it one step further. You’re also a woman of color and ethnic, and an immigrant. What level of difficulty on those 2 issues have you found in terms of breaking into the boys club, breaking into business, and shattering the glass ceilings? I’m always fascinated by that journey. We have so many young women around the world that watch the show, listen to the podcast. I’d love you to share your experiences in busting through.

Anna: So, that’s a great question. I love that you asked that. And I hope that me wearing my traditional wear today did not…

John: Talk about that. As my friends would say in the Philippines, “Ganda, ganda.” Beautiful.

Anna: I appreciate that. Nicely done. And so, this is actually a traditional Filipiniana top from the Philippines. As part of my conscious desire to bring diversity into conversations that I’m a part of, I’ve started to substitute wearing suits oftentimes when I’m on panels, when I’m speaking publicly. I got a TV interview wearing my traditional wear. And at first, I thought it might put people off. But interestingly, I’ve had such a great response. People are curious about it, and it’s been such a great way to start a conversation about diversity, about where I’m from, about where other people that I’m speaking to were from. It makes them feel more comfortable to share their own stories.

And so, as far as my own story goes, as I mentioned earlier, I moved here when I was 11. It was a tough transition. I was bullied when I was in grammar school when I first moved. Because of that and because of the lack of representation, at least for me, I didn’t have a lot of people who already occupied the position that I’m in now in my own circle, I am more conscious of being that for other people, being that resource. And so, I started teaching at Fordham a few years ago, a Fundamental Lawyer in Skills Class where I teach aspiring lawyers about the soft skills that you need to be a lawyer: client reviews, negotiations with adversaries. And then, I was also asked by the law school to develop a data security and privacy course for compliance professionals, and it’s been such a great experience. I co-teach that with my friend, Professor Ken Rashbaum, who is also a partner at a different law firm, and we’ve had such an interesting time talking to different people about their own compliance experiences. And these are people who work for a fortune 50 to 100 companies. So, we learn as much from them as they learn from us. But the reason I teach is because I want to make sure that there are people who look like me who are in these spaces. And I also am cognizant, even though I don’t want to necessarily be or I don’t think I deserve to be representative of a whole group of people, I recognize that sometimes when people meet me, whatever their impression of me is, will be applied to people who come after me who might look like me. And so, because of that, I always want to be the most prepared person in the room. I always want to be the person who is trying to solve problems and bridge any gaps that there might be among the other people in that room.

John: I have a theory on that. What makes this country great, and you and I both can relate, is that we’re an immigration nation. You’re sitting in the hotbed of it, right in the middle of New York City. Is that our immigrant DNA or is that more of a mother and father thing that your mom and dad instill education on you and always to be the most prepared person in the room? Or was it just our immigrant DNA that we come to this country really with nothing? All of us have similar journeys, and that it’s on us to make the most of this opportunity, and the only way to do that is through education and preparedness. How much is nature? How much is nurture?

Anna: I’ve never thought of it in those terms before. You’re making me think about these issues in a new way, which I really like. I think it’s a combination. My mom and my dad were very hard working. My father was a physician. My mom was a nurse. And so, I have always been hard working. Both of them came to the United States for additional medical training and ended up staying here in varying lengths of time. And so, I think that’s part of it. They always valued education. In the Philippines, there is also a cultural expectation that, at least in my generation, you would want to go to school, you’d want to advance your education. And then, when I came here, I think, how do you set yourself apart? I was humble enough to know. I’m not going to be the genius in the room, and I think most people will not be that person. There are very few people who truly occupy that space. But what I wanted to be was do the best that I can. And I found, actually, that I can do better than a person who is smarter than me by being more prepared, and that’s something that was within my control. I couldn’t control what was naturally given to me or my natural talents. What I could control was how hard I worked for my clients in whatever space I occupied, which is why that’s something that I’ve always, and even in my firm, instill in our younger associates or newer associates, is that I’d rather have you be the most prepared person in the room rather than the smartest. Because the smartest person is not necessarily going to do the best job.

John: That’s really so true. In terms of your Filipina background, your Philippine background, you’re also the founder or co-founder of the Philippine Bar Association?

Anna: Right. The Filipino American Lawyer Association of New York.

John: Talk about that.

Anna: There are 2 of us who knew each other socially and just thought we should formalize this organization, and it coincided with our attendance at a National Bar Association Conference in DC. There were some other Filipino lawyers there from around the country who were coalescing to form a national organization. I’m actually also on the board of the National Filipino American Lawyers Association. And so, around the same time we thought New York is a hotbed of legal issues and legal talent, we should also form our organization, which we have and we have also established, with the cooperation of the National Organization, a scholarship for law students. We do a lot of work with the community but also we host a lot of events and panels touching on various legal issues that are at the forefront of-

John: So, mom and dad, are they still alive?

Anna: So, my father actually passed away when I was in college, and my mom is still alive. She’s a retired nurse. I was actually the black sheep of the family for a while because I majored in biology and the expectation was that I was going to go to med school.

John: That’s what I was just going to ask you. You ended up in law. They were from medicine. So, how did that all work?

Anna: I think some of my relatives still don’t know I’m a lawyer. They might think I’m still in a-

John: So, mom lives in the United States or mom lives back in the Philippines?

Anna: United States. She was actually the reason we ended up coming here. She’s one of the nurses recruited in the 80s or the early 90s because of the shortage of nurses in the United States. She wasn’t looking to move here. She just accompanied a friend to apply for a job, and they asked her to come. And my father had practiced medicine here years before, and moved back to the Philippines. It was supposed to be a temporary adventure for my mom, but then she decided it made sense to bring us over. I’m glad she did.

John: How many children were in your family?

Anna: I have 2 younger siblings, and I also have siblings on my dad’s side who are older. My older siblings are in the medical profession while my younger siblings are in — one is in tech as well and the other one is a director of professional development and recruitment for a charter school system. So, an education.

John: And so, you have one son.

Anna: I do.

John: So, let’s talk about that. If you were to refer to yourself, a tiger mom or…

Anna: As much as I don’t want to, other people tell me I am.

John: Okay. All right.

Anna: I’m sure people say I am. I’m sure my son thinks I am. So, I leave it with that. I don’t self-identify.

John: Okay. Got it. If you were to dream for your son today, what you would love him to become? What goes through your mind and your husband’s mind right now in terms of what you want your son to become?

Anna: It’s interesting because my younger self would have said the usual doctor, lawyer, engineer. And my husband would say whatever he wants to be. So, I think somewhere in the middle is probably where I land now, which is I want him to be a productive member of society. I want to make sure that he is self-sufficient and independent, because I’m not going to be around forever. But I also want him to maintain an intellectual curiosity. So, I think whatever job will give him those things is what I would like him to be.

John: So wonderful. That’s great. Anna, I want to give you the final word. You’ve been more than generous with your time, with your thoughts, with your brilliant expertise or professional skills when it comes to data security and privacy. Any final thoughts for our listeners who are looking to better protect both their families and the organizations they’re with in a very cyber-centric world where the cybercriminals are on the cover of the newspapers and the news every day?

Anna: Yeah. I think for me, the bottom line is don’t be afraid of technology, because you are going to be faced with technology in various aspects of your daily life. It’s better to try to learn it. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. And then, also, use your common sense. Just because you’re in the digital world, it doesn’t mean that that world operates that much differently than real life. Trust your instincts. You know when something doesn’t feel right. You know when you shouldn’t be giving your information to people. And by the way, the default should be, don’t give your information to anybody, over the phone, over email. Banks and other entities are not going to ask you for that information in almost every instance. And if you’re in doubt, use the contact information you have with the various organizations you have a relationship with to find out if the request for information is legitimate. Then, use the [inaudible] provided to you to provide that information.

John: She’s Anna Mercado Clark, a partner, in charge of data security, privacy, and other cybersecurity-related issues at Phillips Lytle. You can find her at www.phillipslytle.com. Anna, thank you for the generosity of your time. Thank you for making the world, not only a better place but a safer place. Thank you for inspiring the next generation of young potential lawyers and professionals, especially women and young ladies who are going to break through glass ceilings like you did, and not be just the smartest person but probably the most prepared person. Thank you for being on the Impact today. I’m so honored and humbled that you joined us.

Anna: Thank you so much for having me, John. And thank you for covering topics that are near and dear to my heart, and I think are not covered nearly enough when these issues are discussed.

John: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, customer experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good and we’re so honored to have with us today Oliver Campbell. He’s the Director of Procurement for Packaging and Packaging Engineering at the iconic and legendary Dell brand. Welcome to Green is Good, Oliver Campbell.

Oliver Campbell: Hey, thanks, John. Appreciate it.

John: Hey, Oliver. You know, this is your first time on Green is Good, and we’re so thankful for you coming on today, but before we get into talking all the great green things you’re doing at Dell, can you share first the Oliver Campbell journey and story leading up to your involvement at Dell and what you’re actually doing over there?

Oliver: You know, I really just grew up as a small town kid in a small farming community in the Finger Lakes of rural upstate New York and like most kids, although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, that farm benefit would later prove to be a huge benefit for me. When we started developing Dell’s first revolutionary and sustainable packaging ideas, I borrowed a lot from agriculture and I went back to that farm experience I had and that really, I think, led in some significant ways to our bamboo and mushroom and wheat straw packaging. After I graduated from high school, I attended Cornell University where I majored in agricultural and biological engineering, had a lot of mechanical engineering thrown in as well and I think that really reflected my background from being from a small rural community and interested in high tech as well and Cornell, I think, provided a really solid engineering and critical thinking foundation that prepared me well for career progression to companies like Ford Motor Company, Heat and Semi Conductor, and then on to Dell and I think the widely different experiences I had in these different industries helped me to see how solutions in one industry could be applied in another and that ability, I think, to link ideas and technologies has really been a large basis for my success in innovation and sustainability and the other overlay on that as well I think would be the ability to relate to customers and team members so I think the combination of that innovation and customer focus has really been a differentiator for me.

John: How long have you been at Dell, Oliver?

Oliver: I’ve been at Dell for about 15 years.

John: Wow. Okay, got it, got it, got it. That is great and we’re so thankful for you coming on today so for our listeners out there that want to follow along as Oliver shares some of the great and green initiatives that Dell and Oliver’s team are doing over at Dell, you can go to www.dell.com/packaging. I’m on your site now. It is, first of all, visually gorgeous and chock full of information and so for our listeners out there, I encourage you to go on while you’re listening to the show or after the show and learn more about all of Dell’s great initiatives. Oliver, we’re going to be talking about packaging today. Talk a little bit about how the packaging fits in, the initiatives in packaging, into your overall macro-sustainability efforts at Dell.

Oliver: It’s a key component and our macro strategy is our Legacy is Good program and it focuses on three major areas; It focuses on the environment, people and communities and the notion here, and it’s a really simple one, I honor Michael Dell for it, is by 2020, Dell wants to help leave the world a little bit better place than we found it. That’s really the guiding idea and to that end, we have various initiatives in these three segments; environment, people, and community and packaging plays a key role in the environment and our packaging goal for 2020 is called Zero Waste Packaging 2020 and it’s quite simple. By 2020, all packaging will be either recyclable or compostable as well as sustainably forced, that simple, so we’re about almost 60% of the way towards that target. We still have a bit of work to do, but that’s what we’re trying to do.

John: That’s so interesting and like I shared with our listeners, I’m on your website right now and I’ve read something on the website that says your 3 C strategy. Can you share with our listeners your 3 C strategy that you’ve initiated at Dell, Oliver?

Oliver: Sure. We started the 3 Cs program about five years ago, and it stands for cube, content, and curb and the program arose from talking and speaking to our customers about what they deemed important around packaging and they were quite clear what they valued was they wanted smaller packaging so that was the cube so we set out to reduce the size of our packaging over a three year period by 10%, which we did. We wanted sustainable content, not virgin, if you will, and so we increased the amount of sustainable content by about 40% over that same time period and I’d say most importantly was customers wanted to feel connected around recycling. They didn’t want to feel like they were contributing to the environmental problems that we had and so that’s where we really focused on utilizing curbside recyclability so we looked at local solutions for recycling packaging and so those are the three Cs; cube, content, and curb, and that was really a very, very successful program for us and that was the genesis for our next program, for our Zero Waste Packaging 2020.

John: Got it. So, it seems like you’re constantly innovating there and you’re constantly driving strategic innovation, Oliver. Can you share what has been your most strategic innovations with regards to packaging at Dell to date?

Oliver: I’d say it’s probably our mushroom packaging. A very, very close second is the air carbon, which we just announced last week, but the mushroom packaging was very much something that was very different. When I told my team here that we would be working on mushroom-based packaging, they really looked at me like I was crazy.

John: Well, explain this. I want our listeners to understand when you’re talking about bamboo, mushroom, and wheat straw packaging what exactly you mean because this sounds to me truly, not only innovative, but revolutionary really.

Oliver: It is, and we started it off with bamboo and when we put together our 3 Cs Program, we had a section in there that was really from the engineering perspective to look at natural types of fibers, and so we started asking questions and I think this is something for your listeners who are interested in innovation. The most important thing you can do is to ask questions and it doesn’t hurt if they’re a little bit off the wall but we started asking questions around hey, what’s the world’s fastest growing plant? Why can’t we use that as a fiber? It turns out it’s bamboo and as we started to investigate it, you look at the tencel strength, how strong bamboo is. It really turned out to be a perfect material to package many of our high-tech products and so at one point, I think around two years ago, we packaged nearly 70% of our notebook computers in bamboo packaging and so the process was we’d harvest the bamboo. It’s done very sustainably. It was far away from panda habitats. That was actually something we checked out. I didn’t want to be the bad guy.

John: That makes sense.

Oliver: And, we pulped it. We got it at a lower cost than what our current packaging and that was a win for us but being in high technology, you never can really rest too long and so we were always concerned that there would be new materials come up that would maybe supplant the ones that we had and that’s actually turned out to be the case. I think in bamboo, we’re a bit of a victim of our own success where others in the marketplace like bamboo and it actually drove the cost up but we had other technologies in place that helped us continue to lower cost, such our leek straw packaging and that really arose again from asking the question of, and this was a bit different, of hey, do we really need a tree for the common cardboard box? And that question came about because it takes about 15 years to grow a tree and out cardboard boxes in our supply chain have a life cycle of about eight weeks so that’s like eight weeks to 800 weeks. That’s like a hundred-to-one ratio and that always seemed really strange to us and so leek, in many countries, is a twice-a-year crop. You can interweave that with other straws and now those ratios start, instead of being a hundred to one, now they get to be about two to three to one so we believe that’s more sustainable and it costs less as well and so that’s a bit how these technologies came to be. It was asking some off the wall questions and the mushroom one, maybe because it’s foodie Austin here, we were at lunch one day and somebody was talking about, ‘Hey, I wonder if you could eat your packaging, what would that be like?’

John: My gosh, so were you the first OEM, Oliver, to use this type of revolutionary packaging and the bamboo, mushroom and the wheat straw?

Oliver: We were the first in the high-tech industry for all three of those. I’d say for packaging, definitely, bamboo across a broad range of industries, wheat straw, we were number one and mushroom packaging, I think there were a couple furniture companies ahead of us but that’s definitely the first in high tech.

John: For our listeners out there who just joined us, we’ve got Oliver Campbell on with us today. He’s Dell’s Director of Procurement for Packaging and Packaging Engineering and if you want to see all the great work he and his colleagues are doing at Dell, you can go to www.dell.com/packaging. Oliver, last week’s announcement about air carbon negative packaging, I would love you to explain what that all means to our listeners today.

Oliver: That was a bit of bio-magic. That might be the best way to describe it but the process works like this: We actually capture carbon. We can take carbon out of the air or you can intercept carbon at farms and landfills, refineries, before it escapes into the atmosphere. That’s probably a little bit more efficient. That’s what our supplier, Nulite, does with it and then we treat it with a specially engineered enzyme and that enzyme starts to react with the carbon and based on how you tweak that enzyme, you can develop certain types of polymer chains, meaning plastics, and so this is really cool because you can take an enzyme as a basic building block in mother nature and so you can take mother nature to help make materials that we need in our modern lifestyles using what were formally or what are, really, pollutants, which are CO2, so that’s why I say it’s a bit of biomagic and it is carbon negative. That’s been validated by our supplier and they have had outside auditors, True Cost and the NSF, validate their process as well so we hope to be doing something to help alleviate all the environmental challenges that we have with it.

John: That is so great; so really, what I’m understanding now from this discussion with you today, Oliver, is that there’s constant imagining and reimagining and constant innovation going on at Dell with regards to, not only your macro-sustainability goals, but with your packaging standards and how you’re constantly innovating and re-innovating your packaging there. Can you share with our listeners how that works, you and your team always going back to the drawing board and sort of pushing the limits of innovation, number one, and also share with our listeners, because we have so many young entrepreneurs that either are creating new brands or working entrepreneurially at their companies and trying to be innovators like you are and your team is, Oliver. Is this more expensive, this constant innovation with regards to sustainability and explain that interrelationship of cost, cost benefits, and how does that work at Dell and how does Dell benefit from what your strategic innovations have been?

Oliver: Okay. I guess I’ll start at the top around the innovation. I think that the one thing we really do well is structure programs such as the 3 Cs and now we have the Zero Waste 2020 so that gives us kind of a technological arc, if you will, and underneath that, we have very specific areas that we focus on. Now, we’re also very good, and I think this is the fun part, and I think you really need to make innovation fun, is around asking questions. I actually shared earlier some of the question. You know, what if you could eat your packaging? What’s the fastest growing plant? We’ll use that. The ability to ask these types of questions is very, very important because without that, I don’t think you get this linking of big ideas and cross technologies and the big kind of aha moments. The second thing we do is we’re not afraid to go out to other people. Traditionally in the fall, we have open innovation sessions, where we have our suppliers and others come in and there’s somewhat of a loose structure but they come in and talk to us about things that they’re working on, what they think we should be working on, and new technologies. To kind of help set the tone for that innovation session, and this may sound a little crazy, but we do require people that come in to show an inspirational video and it’s like two or three minutes in duration. They can pull it off YouTube or the internet. They don’t need to really make it themselves but it’s amazing how that starts to set the tone and we award prizes for Most Innovative, Best Dell Invention, and Most Inspirational but it starts the conversation going around innovation, sustainability, and packaging. The other question I get is does sustainability cost more? When I do conferences, I’ll ask the room, ‘Who thinks sustainability costs more?’ and like half the room raises their hand and, ‘Who thinks it costs less?’ and the other half raises their hand and it’s like a beer commercial almost, you know?

John: Less filling, tastes great.

Oliver: Yeah, and I think sustainability done right, and Dell I think has proven this, it costs less. As we move from technology curve to technology curve, when it’s done correctly, you’ll not only get a better technology. You’ll get it at a lower cost and Michael Dell has been very, very clear on this that he wants cost parity or better yet, less and so nearly every instance, we’ve been at a cost reduction. One or two cases, I think we’ve been a parity.

John: Oliver, we’re down to the last minute, unfortunately. Can you share with our listeners as we sign off here, what’s the best part of your job? Because obviously, you’re doing such amazing things and Dell is doing so many great things with regards to greening and innovation. What’s your favorite part of your job?

Oliver: I think the favorite part of my job is the people I get to meet. People are interested in sustainability. They’re asking questions about how they can contribute and there’s a lot of areas. This is packaging. Sustainable packaging is a great industry to be in. There’s a lot of change, a lot of opportunity, and I’d encourage any younger listeners in middle school, high school, college, if you have dreams about trying to make a difference, check out sustainability and I think you would be surprised with what you can do.

John: Wow, thank you, Oliver. We want to have you back to talk more about everything Dell’s doing in the green space. For our listeners out there to learn more, go to www.dell.com/packaging. Oliver Campbell, thank you for being an inspirational visionary sustainability leader. You are truly living proof that green is good.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Trajectory Energy Partners. Trajectory Energy Partners brings together landowners, electricity users and communities to develop solar energy projects with strong, local support. For more information on how trajectory is leading the solar revolution, please visit trajectoryenergy.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian. I’m so honored to have with us today, from Geneva, Switzerland, Brendan Edgerton. Brendan, welcome to the Impact Podcast.

Brendan Edgerton: Thank you very much, John. Happy to be here.

John: Brendan, you’re an American. We’re going to get talking about that in a second. This is the first time. I’ve taped podcasts all around the world on Impact and on Green is Good, when it was called Green is Good. We’ve never done one from Geneva. You’re breaking ground again here.

Brendan: Well, yeah, appreciate the opportunity here.

John: All right. You are the director of the Circular Economy at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, WBCSD. Before we get talking about all that other fancy stuff and all the important work you’re doing there with your colleagues, give us the Brendan Edgerton backstory. How’d you end up in Geneva? How’d you end up doing the important work that you’re doing? Where’d you grow up? What really informed you, as you grew up, to want to do this great work?

Brendan: It’s a fun question. I’m originally from Los Angeles, California. Not too far from where you are right now, but a die-hard UCLA Bruins fan, Dodgers, Lakers, all the way through and went to college at UC Santa Cruz, the northern part of town there. Actually, that’s the place that changed the trajectory for where I was going. I took a contemporary architecture class, the spring quarter of freshman year.

There was 1 class on sustainable development, the whole course, and in that course, it felt like everything became clear that all of a sudden has blown away by this fact that we are living in a built environment that’s in contradiction with nature. Here’s an idea of going back to, in many ways, what we had before materials were incredibly inexpensive and very accessible and there’s building and harmonization with nature in the sustainability concepts and saying, let’s think about it from the very beginning of design and embedded into the whole construction process and how we use buildings.

That compelled me to create my own major and study ecological design focused after sustainable architecture and work with an architect, Bunlow[?] Partners while I was up there in Santa Cruz. It was a fantastic opportunity. I learned a lot about architecture. I think, ultimately, what I learned is that it wasn’t for me, but I was very passionate about green building, went into green building consulting. I did a lot of LEED certification, new projects, residential schools. It was fascinating. It was a great experience there with Green Dinosaur in Los Angeles.

About 2011, about ten years ago, I came across the concept of industrial ecology, industrial symbiosis, Circular Economy. I said I need to go to school to study this and I need to pick a place where I can do both the business side and the environmental side. Wind up going to Yale tremendous program and industrial ecology. Their business, their school management and a fantastic joint degree program where you could do both within 3 years and so it was a great opportunity.

I learned a lot and was planning on getting the Circular Economy after WBCSD. At that time, not many positions around in that, around 2015. There was 1 position that popped up, what was then called Safe and Sustainable. Materials with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development here in Geneva. That was the only position I applied to outside of the US.

On graduation day, got the call from the CEO here that I would have the offer to move out 3 months later after the permit was approved. After the summer, 5 days after getting married in Palm Springs, my wife and I flew out here. We’ve been in Geneva ever since. It’s been five and a half years working in Circular Economy.

John: Good for you. Your wife is a Californian also?

Brendan: Yep, also Los Angeles, born and raised.

John: That’s so fascinating. Does she work or is she a stay-at-home wife and mom and everything else?

Brendan: She’s been working up until our second was born last year. He was born the week before the COVID lockdown here in Geneva. At that point, she decided to give all her energy to the 2 kids here at home and is just now getting back into the workforce now that things are starting to clear up again.

John: Yeah, so interesting, Brendan. I taped an episode last night with a good friend of mine, long time friend named Rob Kaplan. Similar to you, he grew up on the east coast and him and his wife lived in Brooklyn and they moved to Singapore. Again, almost like you, almost all the way across the world, couldn’t be more different than Los Angeles, Geneva. Singapore and Brooklyn are different. Your generation with wives and children or moving to different locations to make the most impact but also to change the world and you’re not afraid to move and go to different societies and cultures. It’s so fascinating to see the parallels.

I didn’t think about it till you were just telling that whole story. Rob did the same thing and that didn’t happen in my generation, but your generation seems to be doing that. It’s fascinating.

Brendan: Yeah. [inaudible] Rob. Rob, we cross paths quite often. I think there’s something to the fact that it seems like the world is much more accessible to us. Just Internet and everything that’s come from that, that moving to Geneva sounds just about as exotic as you move in LA to New York and probably less frightening.

John: It’s so interesting.

Brendan: Yeah. It’s a different perspective, certainly.

John: Good for you. Talk a little bit about… Again, so people could find the WBCSD.org, but today, we’re also be going to be talking about other things, obviously. So, cep2030.org. Explain the Circular Electronics Partnership and what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re running over there in Geneva right now.

Brendan: Absolutely. Yeah. It actually started a little bit over a year ago where WBCSD with some other key organizations like the World Economic Forum, ITU, Responsible Business Alliance, Global electronic Sustainability Initiative and others, forgive me for not remembering all. Let’s bring our member companies together because what we do right now is we see e-waste as the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. This is not showing any slack signs of slowing down.

What we need is to get the industry to align behind a common vision for circular electronics and a roadmap for how it’ll achieve it. By bringing our companies together… Over the course of 2020, we brought together more than thirty companies with more than eighty professionals from those companies and the organization’s mention to develop this vision and roadmap. The idea is we need to have a common direction. We need to have a shared game plan of how we’re going to achieve that and understand, coming out of that roadmap, these forty actions that need to be taken through 2030 in order for the industry to achieve circularity.

As we started getting to the end of completing the roadmap process through 2020, all of which, this is all virtual. We had many conversations, meetings, discussions, virtual as everyone did [inaudible].

John: Wow.

Brendan: It would be a shame for this initiative to cease to exist after the publication of these 2 documents. There was a real opportunity for us to continue this community and build on top of it. We did just that. On March 18th, we published those 2 documents, the vision and the roadmap, both of which are available at cep2030.org. Then we kicked off with 6 projects and announced CEP as a standalone independent initiative. It’s hosted by WBCSD, however, still a collaboration between the 6 organizations.

Today, we have twenty member companies that are part of CEP. Very happy to have ERI as a significant player in the conversation involved in it. We’re getting started on even more initiatives right now. It’s an exciting time. It’s an incredibly important initiative and topic and it’s been a lot of fun to be part of it.

John: Let me ask you this. This is a related question to your point. You said e-waste is the fastest-growing solid-waste stream in the world. Brendan, explain this to me, your generation and I believe this, great thinkers and doers like Ron Gonen just wrote a book called The Waste-Free World. The theses basically is from 2020 to 2030, we’re going to see a generational shift from a linear to circular economy. Is it true, then is it fair to say… If we both agree that that’s going to happen and the world seems to be starting to agree that that shift is coming, then attacking the e-waste issue is paramount because if e-waste is the fastest-growing solid-waste stream in the world and we’re going to be moving the linear to circular economy, we got to hit the fastest-growing solid-waste stream to begin that process and work our way down. Is that not the right way to think about this?

Brendan: I certainly don’t think it’s a wrong way to think about it.

John: Okay.

Brendan: I would say it is a very important way stream. There’s multiple reasons for that. One is just the inherent value that’s embedded within these products[?].

John: Right.

Brendan: It is a very different conversation than the plastics one where their challenges that there really isn’t much value. In fact, you can even say there’s a negative value in trying to go after this material and turn it into something else. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do anything about that problem, but this makes a stronger or something like e-waste.

The other angle to it is that when e-waste is handled improperly at end of life, it can be a real hazard to people and to the environment. That’s something that we certainly want to avoid is make sure that these products, these materials, these components are properly handled and [inaudible] life safely and responsibly. Looking at all this together, it is definitely one of the most important waste streams to go after.

John: You bring up the plastic issue. We brought up Rob Kaplan, a common friend of both of ours, and he’s attacking that down in Southeast Asia. The post-consumer plastic waste problem, very important to attack, like you said, but very different from the e-waste plastic. Unfortunately, they’ve been bundled together and the e-waste plastic is seen as a boogeyman, but I’m here to tell you, the size of our company, one of the larger brands in North America, we do forty to sixty truckloads of shredded clean plastic every month and it’s a hundred percent recyclable.

Separating those issues, I think, is very, very important to understand. Like you said, everything that comes out of the e-waste stream is fully recyclable it could go back to beneficial reuse, which is a great part of the story that doesn’t get told enough.

Brendan: Absolutely. No, it’s very easy to throw plastic into one conversation. We don’t talk about all the different applications of plastics, from buildings automotive, electronics like you mentioned. The first thing that comes to mind typically is around packaging in single-use plastics.

John: Right.

Brendan: There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on that. However, it’s a very different conversation and [inaudible] to circularity compared to electronics and built environment and automotive. It is important to think about these in different contexts. WBCSD, as an organization, we work with two hundred of the biggest companies in the world. Many of those B2B conversations are relatively straightforward and easy in terms of breaking those conversations apart. The companies get it. They know the value of moving towards circularity within packaging and then a separate conversation moving towards circularity in these more durable products.

It’s having that clear conversation with the everyday consumer and [inaudible] them a program to engage with and to close the loop on their products. That’s a little more difficult.

John: Your background is fascinating, and what you’re doing is so important. You’re a young guy, you have a big vision here, you’re sitting in an important position and you have brought together some fascinating organizations in Geneva. We were honored to join, honored, trust me, on [inaudible] the word. What’s your goal? As you see the second half of 2021, as we’re starting to come out of this COVID tragic, pandemic period, what’s your goals for the second half of 2021 and then beyond 2020 and beyond, Brendan?

Brendan. Yeah. Well, I think, right now, the top of everyone’s mind outside of COVID, as we come out of that, is climate change. We were talking about this just before…

John: Right.

Brendan: What we thought was years or maybe even decades down the road is in our face today. At WBCSD and personally, I see the Circular Economy as a critical element of climate change mitigation that we will not achieve the Paris target without moving towards a more circular economy. We will not reverse the tide on nature loss without moving towards a more circular economy. I want to see that conversation of circularity in Glasgow in the COP process. I want to see that more with the nature, COP 15 that was supposed to be in China this year. That needs to be a part of the conversation there as well.

Then I think, probably looking a little bit beyond the next 6 to 12 months, we need to start looking at how we can make these business models work at a mechanical level. What I mean by that is the accounting system, as we have it today, is built for linear economy. Whether you [inaudible] about depreciation, residual value and how that’s calculated, a lot of this reinforces why we take, make and waste. It’s going to be looking at those systems with a magnifying glass and going into detail and understanding, how can we change the existing system so that businesses are incentivized to be more circular instead of being linear?

John: That’s so fascinating. For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Brendan Edgerton. He’s a director of Circular Economy for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. You could find him and his great colleagues at www.wbcsd.org or also, please go to cep2030.org. Brendan, talk a little bit about the WBS- I mean, WBCSD. What is the World Business Council for Sustainable Development for those who don’t know?

Brendan: Yes. WBCSD, it’s a global CEO-led organization of over two hundred companies working together to accelerate to sustainable transition. Our mission is to make more sustainable business more successful. Our vision is 9 billion people living well within the means of the planet by 2050.

We work with our two hundred members around 6 different system transformations or programs as we offer them. That’s on cities and mobility, climate and energy, food and nature, people redefining value and then Circular Economy, which is the program that I receive. With our [inaudible] producing standards, guidelines, tools, advocacy, platforms and new insights to help them accelerate their transition to sustainability even faster.

Yeah, 1 great example of this is the Circular Transition Indicators which we published the first version last year, second version of it, this year. This is a methodology that companies can use to measure their circular performance from a product or material level all the way up to the company level. The idea is to not just understand your circular performance for performance sake but to understand what are the risks and opportunities to the business as a result. We’re thrilled with the amount of uptake we’re seeing with it, and it is purely business driven by business and for business.

John: For our listeners and viewers out there that want to participate and somehow help you continue your mission and journey and execute your vision, how can people, organizations, CEOs or other leaders, sustainability directors join in your efforts?

Brendan: Yeah, great question. I think you plugged the URL, wbcsd.org. There’s a lot of information on that website. I would say take a look at those 6 system transformations that I mentioned. Which ones of those fit in with your company’s sustainability objectives, your materiality assessment and reach out to us. All of our contact information is on the website for the team members involved.

We want the broader business community to reach out to us. We want to work with the private sector to drive that system transformation. Everything we do is by and for our members, but most of it is actually public. We want to bring in the companies to help us build that content and move faster. That’s the best place to start.

John: Going back to the Circular Electronics Partnership. You have twenty now members or so. What’s your goal within the next eighteen months? How many members do you want to have as you evolve that organization and that partnership?

Brendan: Yeah. With CEP, I think now, we have a great core group of companies that are represented across the value chain. We’d be thrilled to have more members, but that’s not our objective right now. We want to get to, as I mentioned, those 6 projects that we have. We’re getting started on aligning and harmonizing how companies talk about and qualify circular electronics products and services. [inaudible] harmonization that we can tie into the eco-labels and make sure there’s harmonization there. We can really drive some scale.

On the other hand, looking at other projects, how can we make the Basel Convention a bit more efficient and doing that through the digitalization of the Prior Informed Consent procedure? A lot of these technical subjects that can be a challenge for some companies. At the same time, we have an opportunity through this platform to create change and plug into some of these key stakeholders[?].

We’re fully focused on the projects now. As you mentioned, we’d be happy to have more members and invite everyone to check out cep2030.org to learn more about the vision, the roadmap and the organization. Yeah, we’re very excited to be in the middle of these projects now.

John: Because of the beauty of technology and also the pandemic truncating the adoption of Zoom in these meetings, you and I get to do this fun interview and feel like we’re in the same room. Will there become a point in time, post-COVID, that your organization will have in-person events as well and think tanks that will be happening in person for face-to-face meetings as well?

Brendan: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think it’s going to go to the same scale that we probably all had before.

John: Right.

Brendan: Their value and getting together, especially in establishing a community like what we have in CEP. It would have been fantastic to get everyone together in March or April for that first meeting and be able to dig into some of those challenging something or the other.

John: Right.

Brendan: We are hopeful and we do expect that in, hopefully, not too distant future, we’ll have a chance to do that again. That maybe once or twice a year. We may even select different places globally to hold that meeting, but it is going to be important for the ongoing success and effectiveness of CEP that we do have a chance to get together.

John: Brendan, on two personal notes, now that you’re a father and obviously a husband as well, raising children in Geneva, as opposed to Europe, bringing your wife’s upbringing here in the United States, what are some of the interesting positives and benefits that both of you were thinking about as you now are starting to raise young children in a very international community and a worldwide hub but very different in many ways from the United States?

Brendan: Yeah. Now, there’s a lot to that. It’s a very good question. Well, one of the first things that come to mind is the health care system. It’s not cheap here like the US. It’s not inexpensive there either. However, you get what you pay for here. There’s excellent care. My wife, after delivering both children, was really staying in a five-star hotel for about 5 nights before she was allowed to go home. I think she had lobster after delivering our first child, Darren. It’s these types of things that you don’t come into this expecting, but you look, it’s available, you’re out here.

Similarly, the preschool system out here is very [inaudible]. Not everything is perfect at the same token. We miss about being home. Obviously, you can’t go into any Dodger games or Laker games. I find myself watching the championship series last year, getting up at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. to watch a game. You miss that, watch those games. At some point, you just have to do it. Yeah, there’s been a lot of positives about living out here, and it certainly opened both of our minds. It’s pretty wild to see our three-year-old speaking French, Spanish and English with equal capability. Here I am just knowing English.

John: I’m like you. All I know is English. What an advantage your children are going to have to be able to fluently speak, be bilingual or trilingual or even more than that. That to me is such a benefit and such a great background you get to give them in a foundation.

Brendan: Yeah, it’s very neat and it’s certainly a privilege to be out here. We’re soaking in everything we can.

John: Put back on your Circular Economy lens. Growing up in America and with again, your wife growing up here and then now, seeing the Circular Economy, how little we participated it during your youth and of course, my youth and even my children’s youth. Now, how generational was it already in place, in Europe, in Switzerland when you got there? What’s the compare and contrast with your Circular Economy lens on?

Brendan: I think to be honest, the biggest difference comes from the cultural differences in Europe. A lot of this type of stuff is driven by government and regulations by the European commission. They have a progressive agenda, aggressive at the same time, but it’s also what we need. Obviously, in the US, it’s very different. The government doesn’t have such a strong hand in these types of agendas. Businesses often looked at as taking some responsibility for driving things for themselves. That certainly plays a big role into why Circular Economy is so much more familiar over here.

Result businesses are doing much more. They’re trying to stay ahead of that bar that’s constantly being raised. The circular conversation is happening in the US, and we’ve seen over the past 3 years or so, it’s picking up steam. However, it’s going to be up to the private sector to drive most of that change. With pressure from investors, pressure from customers and even pressure from employees wanting to see their companies do more, hopefully, we see a little bit more of a level playing field over in the US compared to what we have here in Europe.

John: With the 6 initiatives that you launched this past spring, how long have you given yourself and your team has given itself to execute on those 6 top initiatives?

Brendan: Yeah, well, I think we’ll look at it this way. The first 6 initiatives and those are responding all to that roadmap where I mentioned those forty different [inaudible] that need to take. We have a while to go. We have ways to go. What that also means is we need to make progress on these 6 items. I think on a quarterly basis, we’re checking in with partners to see how the progress of those different projects are going. I think, after one year, we’ll have an honest assessment of what have we accomplished so far, where are we with respect to that roadmap and the forty actions that we outlined there, what do we need to tackle next?

Part of that last conversation is, who else do we need to work with? We have, as I mentioned, a great core group of companies, fantastic group of partners, but it may take working with others and though I suspect it will take working with partners in order to get through the rest of the roadmap. I would say there’s quarterly reflection points, but a year from March 18, 2021, we’ll want to take a look back on what we’ve done, where we’re at and assess things moving forward.

John: We’re going to have you back on to continue your shared journey of what’s going on at your great organization. For our listeners and viewers, Brendan. They want to find you, you go to www.cep2030.org, cep 2030.org. Brendan Edgerton, the director of Circular Economy, you’re making the world a better place, you’re making huge impacts. I’m grateful for you, and thank you for all you do for the world at large. Thanks again.

Brendan: Thank you very much, John. I really appreciate it.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, livestreams and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have today with us on the line Kim Jeffery, the President and CEO of Nestle Waters of North America. Welcome to Green is Good, Kim Jeffery.

Kim Jeffery: Thank you very much.

John: You know, Kim, you are truly, in the best of senses, a green leader from way back when, and you have a fascinating biography and what you’ve done, in terms of your leadership of Nestle Waters of North America and everything you’ve done in the green space, can you share a little bit, before we get going to talk more specifically about Nestle Waters North America, can you share your journey? How did you even come to this place, and what have been some of your inspirations and your landmark things that you’ve done along the way?

Kim: Well, John, I was recruited to this company 33 years ago, and it was very, very small then. We had 30 employees, about $20 million in revenue. We were established in the U.S. just to market and distribute the Perrier brand, and we were hired by a group of folks in France that really were the fathers of the bottled water industry in France, wanting to establish a market for their products in the United States. In 1980, we purchased our first domestic brand. It was the Poland Spring brand, which was essentially bankrupt at the time up in Maine, and we bought another small business in California, the Cal Soda Mineralized Company, at approximately the same time. You know, we were very young guys running the company. We believed there would be a market for bottled water in the future. We believed that it would be domestically-driven, not from the imported brands, and so we started acquiring what I call these landmark spring brands that had real heritage to them, that people may have forgotten a little bit about, but were big brands. Four of the six brands we own are over 100 years old, and the category was about $250 million annually when I started; it’s probably closer to $11 billion today, and it’s come a very long way. The things we’ve done over the years have really been largely responsible for the evolution of that category, and it really began with owning the heritage brands, Poland Spring, Deer Park, Arrowhead from California, Ozarka. All four of these brands are over 100 years old, and they really formed the foundation of what we’ve been able to do over the years.

John: You’re a very humble guy because I also wanted to share with our listeners, you also won the Beverage Forum Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, you sit on the Boards of Keep America Beautiful and also the American Beverage Association, and also you’ve created a long partnership and way before it was cool to be green, with the Nature Conservancy, so you’ve really been into this space of green and the sustainability evolution and the green revolution long before, Kim, it was cool to do so.

Kim: Well, you know, certainly before we had a lot of pressure on us, but, you know, it goes back to the first business we bought, Poland Spring. That business came with kind of a broken down old factory, about 30 employees and 450 acres of watershed land that protected the spring, and you realize from the very first day that the future success of that business is totally dependent on managing the resource for quality and sustainability. We became environmental stewards the day we bought that business, and of course it’s expanded now to where we own 14,000 acres of land, all watershed land, protecting our spring sites around the country, and we manage that land for sustainable harvesting the spring water with a team of 10 geologists, so it’s really in our DNA to think from an environmental standpoint first. As time has gone by and society’s expectations of all of us have grown, I’ve grown along with it, and have branched out into some other areas of interest that have to do with sustainable management of our resources.

John: For our listeners out there, I just want to direct them to your amazing website because Mike and I are on it now with our laptop and our iPad. For our listeners, if you have your laptop, iPad, or any other type of device where you can view, go online, please go to Kim’s amazing website, nestlewatersnorthamerica.com. It’s just full of tremendous information about all the great brands they have under their umbrella and also everything they’re doing with regards to sustainability. Kim, talk a little bit about what does sustainability mean to Nestle Waters North America? Like you said, it was an evolution when you started the process. How have you evolved over the years with regards to the different directions you’ve taken, sustainability, with regards to all your amazing brands?

Kim: Well, I think the first thing you think about is what’s inside your own four walls that you’re capable of controlling and making better. Where it might begin with the fact that we own 400 acres of watershed land in Maine, it then grew into thinking holistically about all the things that we do. I would define the journey this way. We, in 2002, built our first LEED-certified manufacturing facility. We now have 10 facilities that are LEED-certified, and nine of them are either silver or gold. When we first built our first certified plant in 2002, they didn’t even have classifications of silver and gold. We now have 3.7 million square feet of LEED-certified space under management. The mapping of our carbon footprint, the recycling of all the natural resources in our plants, so that we can use them again. We’ve learned a lot about how to reduce our impacts. One great example would be over the last six years or so, we’ve reduced the weight of our packaging by 40%. When we mapped our carbon footprint for the first time, we realized that 50% of our carbon footprint is in the bottle. We make all of our own packaging, so we lightweight our packaging by 40%, and it’s 50% of your carbon footprint, you get a real 20% absolute reduction in your total carbon. We’ve learned these things over the years, and it just kind of feeds on itself. You start recycling in your facilities, you build LEED-certified manufacturing plants, you reduce your carbon footprint. Interestingly, though, at the end of the day, you come to a place, “Look, there’s still more things we can do in our own manufacturing facilities.” We’ve got 28 plants in North America, but for the last few years I’ve been thinking beyond our own four walls to what happens after we sell our product, and where does this material go, and how do we get it back and use it again. It’s an evolutionary process, where you never run out of things to do, and you keep expanding the universe of things that you see are opportunities.

John: One of the things, also, in terms of milestones that you’ve hit recently, I understand with regards to electronic waste called e-waste in the industry, what has your great brand done with regards to e-waste?

Kim: Well, you know, we have a great culture here, and sometimes without me even knowing it, things happen because we’re all kind of on the same page here. Our head of our information technology, Dave Colville, got us certified as an E-Steward Certified recycler, which ensures that we handle all of our e-waste in an environmentally responsible way, for items from laptops to cell phones, printers, servers, keyboards, even mice. E-Steward certification also provides standards for the proper disposal of all this stuff, so it ensures a commitment to global social accountability standards. We’re planning a companywide policy of reducing even the resources we use, from paper to energy. We just moved to a new headquarters a year ago. We centralized printers, reduced printers in the building. We’ve managed to have a 40% reduction in our use of paper this last year, just based on doing some simple things when we moved our headquarters.

John: That’s so interesting. You know, Kim, I’m 48 years old, and I’ve grown up watching the advent of the bottled water industry and the evolution of it, and we all enjoy drinking all the great brands that you have. Whether you own them or whether you distribute them, you’re clearly the leader, Nestle Waters North America. Talk a little bit about the controversy that goes on a little bit with regards to tap water, the bottled water industry. How do you come out, in terms of handling the critics, when they start talking about tap water versus water? You’ve done not only a brilliant job handling the critics, but you’ve shown at the top of the show you’ve grown your amazing brand, and now you have so many brands underneath your umbrella. How does that all work out?

Kim: Well, it’s interesting. Five years ago, we were considered the antidote for obesity in America, and then all of a sudden, one day, a switch flipped, and somebody said, “Who, you’ve got a bottle. What’s happening with that bottle? You shouldn’t have a bottle. Tap water doesn’t have to have a bottle. Tap water is just as good.” Our attitude on this is we’re agnostic on water. We believe people should be drinking more of it. The fact is some people have tried to pit us against tap water as a competitor, but I can give you the statistics on this. Per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks 10 years ago was 54 gallons per capita. Think about that for a minute. Every man, woman, and child consuming 54 gallons of carbonated soft drinks a year. Today it’s 44 gallons. Over that 10-year period, our per capita consumption has gone from 16 gallons of bottled water to 24 gallons of bottled water. That’s almost a one-for-one conversion from carbonated soft drinks to bottled water, which proves that our competitor is not tap water. People may be drinking more tap water, but they’re drinking a lot more bottled water and they’re drinking less carbonated soft drinks. So, you know, our attitude is with 50% of adults going to be obese by 2030, we represent a real option for people to have. If you want to drink tap water, that’s fine, but why shouldn’t people have the opportunity to drink bottled water also? The other thing I would say is that 70% of what we drink as Americans comes in packaging, either Tetra Pak or cans or glass bottles or plastic. Bottled water has by far the lightest carbon footprint of any packaged beverage. When I see people saying, “We shouldn’t be drinking bottled water, but we have Gatorade that’s in a container three times as heavy as one of ours and uses three gallons of water to make a gallon of product,” I don’t get it. What we try to do is take the high road on this stuff. People are going to make their own decisions what they want to drink, but they should know this. Bottled water has the lightest carbon footprint of any packaged beverage in America.

John: That’s so great. That is such an important message. What also was fascinating was the one-to-one conversion from carbonated to water. That is such an important piece of information, and I’m so glad you brought that up. For our listeners out there, if you’ve just tuned in to Green is Good, we’re so honored to have the boss himself, the President and CEO, Kim Jeffery of Nestle Waters North America. You can go look at their great website, nestlewatersnorthamerica.com. Kim, talk a little bit about obviously, over your leadership period at Nestle Waters and 33 years there, sustainability has grown to be part of the culture. Talk a little bit about what you’re doing with regards to recycling and recycling in public spaces in the United States.

Kim: Well, first of all, we set a very aggressive goal for ourselves as part of our first citizenship report. We set goals for ourselves on various aspects of sustainability, and recycling has to be one of them because we do produce a lot of packaging each year. We know that only 30% of beverage containers are being recycled today, and it’s an issue. So we set a goal of recycling 60% of beverage containers by 2018. We put a big goal and a big target for ourselves out there. Frankly, as I started to redo that target and look at where we were and what we could feasibly do ourselves, I realized that we couldn’t get there unless we rethink recycling, not just for beverage containers, but that we think recycling across the country for lots of streams of material. We lack the infrastructure to collect more than 30% of our bottles today, and beverage containers only represent about 50% of the PET packaging that’s out there. We have a huge job on our hands. We don’t have federal money. Not one nickel of the stimulus package was earmarked for recycling infrastructure in America three years ago, so we have this real societal issue of getting this material back and being able to use it again. We don’t have federal money, we don’t have state money, we don’t have local money, and I’m a little bit alone in this, but I’ve come to the conclusion that people like myself have to get involved and take responsibility for the close consumer handling of these materials by helping to build the infrastructure through something I call extended producer responsibility, which means that people like me would actually be responsible for being part of the solution to get this material back. It would require all of us to pay into a fund that can be used to build recycling infrastructure. It would be a small fee that we’d probably put onto the end of our product that would be earmarked for infrastructure. We want to use recycled content in our products. We’re using it in two of our brands today. We’re going to be using it in more, but the reality is that there’s not enough recycled content PET out there, and what’s out there is expensive, and it’s expensive because we have more demand for it today than we have ability to get this material back. I see a big green opportunity for jobs, for reusing this material, but we have to begin at the beginning, and that is we have to build a system that allows us to get this material back across the country.

John: What would that look like, and how does your vision of EPR compare against our already existing bottle bills in 11 states right now?

Kim: I would never say that bottle bills don’t work. They do work, but they only work for beverage containers. Let’s just think about high-density polyethylene containers as another plastic material. Every detergent bottle is high-density polyethylene. Every gallon milk container is high-density polyethylene. Some of our household products are high-density polyethylene. Only 30% of those are being returned today, and you can’t just tack them onto a bottle bill because the take back mechanism in these bottle bills is the grocery retailer. He’s not going to be taking back printed paper, which we need to get back. He’s not going to be taking back every mayonnaise bottle that’s made of PET. He’s not going to be taking Tide’s laundry detergent back, so my view is that for beverage containers, we need a totally built out away from home recycling infrastructure. Today we only have public space recycling availability in 13% of the United States locations that could have recycling containers in them. In curbside recycling, only 50% of Americans really have access to good curbside recycling, and 50% of those people don’t use it regularly, which means we have an infrastructure problem and an education problem. We need robust curbside recycling in all of our residential areas in the United States, all of our commercial areas, and we need away from home recycling infrastructure in those places where people are consuming beverages and other foods on the go. Bottle bills are great for getting soft drink containers back, but they’re not good for getting anything else back. I was in Toronto last January, and 20 years ago, they started recycling three streams of material. Today they’re up to 30 streams of material that have value, that create a municipal recycling system that basically has zero waste. It’s all being used again. A bottle bill can’t do that for you, so we think of extended producer responsibility as being a better bottle bill, and covering more materials. That’s what I’m advocating for. If you’ve got a bottle bill today, fine, keep it. But to me, that’s not a 21st century recycling solution. Bottle bills are really put in place to reduce litter. It was before we were even thinking about using this material again to make a bottle out of it. I’m going to build a recycled PET facility in the Northeast next year that will turn 80 million pounds of beverage bottles back into virgin resin to be beverage bottles again. I think that’s what we should be doing.

John: Will that be the first of its type?

Kim: No, there are many of them around the country today, but there’s not enough of them. As I said earlier, we’re interested in using recycled content. I think the best way to show that we’re serious about extended producer responsibility and getting this material back is to be involved in the manufacturing of recycling PET bottles into virgin resin again.

John: So the whole cradle-to-cradle concept is what you do?

Kim: Exactly. Cradle-to-cradle. The real meaning of cradle-to-cradle. This material, when it’s turned into a polymer, can be used forever. We should not be throwing this material away. And besides that, it’s worth 47 cents a pound on today’s open market.

John: Wow. Just for our listeners, what’s so amazing about what you’ve done with the company, Kim, is the brands that you actually have under your umbrella. I just want to throw a couple names out there – Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ice Mountain, Ozarka, Poland Springs. Then you also represent Acqua Panna, Perrier, San Pellegrino. These are the landmark iconic brands of the bottled water industry.

Kim: Well, the company actually owns San Pellegrino, Perrier, and Acqua Panna, and then we have another brand called Nestle Pure Life, which is now the largest brand in the United States, so we end up with about a 40% share of the packaged water business. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that we started out at zero.

John: It’s really such a great story. Now you’ve been there, and you’ve done such a tremendous job in your stewardship of the brand and all the brands tucked underneath the Nestle Waters North America Brand. Kim, what does the future look like? What does the future look like, both for Nestle Waters North America and also for the bottled water industry? Is there going to be continual erosion of the carbonated beverage industry with the continuing growth of the bottled water industry? Where do you want to take the future?

Kim: Well, Nestle bought this company 20 years ago, and I came along with the acquisition. They asked me to stay, which I have done for the last 20 years. They bought this company because it’s in the sweet spot of health and wellness. It’s arguably the product that Nestle sells with the most relevance in the health and wellness area, so the believe in the category long-term. I very much believe in the category long-term. We still consume way too many calories from sweetened beverages today in our society. There’s definitely a move to consume less. We’re in the middle of that switch that consumers are making today, and so I’m very bullish on the category long-term in the United States. I just believe that per capita consumption of the bottled water category could very well in the next 25 years be where soft drinks are today, and they could be where we are today.

John: Wow. Kim, there are a lot of people that listen to this show, a lot of young people, graduate students, college students, teenagers, and they listen on the iTunes network or wherever they are. That’s the fun part of the world now in terms of the democratization of information. They’re going to listen to you and get inspired, and they’re going to want to know how can they be the next Kim Jeffery. Looking backwards now from where you sit, what’s your message to the youth, not only in America, because we have listeners from Shanghai to Dubai and Mumbai because we track our listeners on the Apple network after it airs on the Clear Channel network. What’s your advice looking backward to the next generation of leadership, both in the green and also with regards to business?

Kim: Well, my career path is a little bit unusual because I started out working at Kraft Foods for four years, and then I worked at Pepsi-Cola for four years, and I joined this company intentionally because it was small and entrepreneurial. It was a great place for me to be. Then in 1992, Nestle purchased the company, and all of a sudden I was being purchased by the largest food company in the world and being asked to stay and work there. I’ve got two things to say. First is that I’m here at Nestle for 20 years because I believe in the culture and the values of the company. They’re very honest, honorable, good people to work for trying to do the right thing. Big companies oftentimes get maligned for perceived things that they don’t do. I can tell you from sitting on the inside, this is a great company. The second thing is that I believe people have to find a passion for what they want to do. I’ve had kids come and tell me they want to make a lot of money. I think that’s totally the wrong attitude. I think if you have passion and commitment and really work hard at something you love, chances are you’re going to get very good at it and probably get rich along the way. But you have to start with what you’re thinking about the end being in mind, and I think you get huge amounts of capacity out of people if they like what they’re doing and they like who they’re doing it for. So I think this whole notion of passion, commitment, trust in the people that you work with and for is critical in having a successful business career.

John: You know, Kim, that is so well put, and I just want to say from Mike and I and from all our listeners, we truly need more leaders like you, not only here in the United States, but around the world. The world would be a better place. You’re doing such great things, and it was just such an honor to have you on Green is Good today. You’re a visionary leader and a sustainability champion, and truly living proof that green is good.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated I.T. and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIDirect.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today. AJ Fuentes. Twombly. AJ, welcome to the Impact Podcast.

AJ Fuentes Twombly: Thank you John it’s very nice to be here.

John: Hey, you know, the timeliness of your joining us today is so important. We’re going to get into that in a little while and we were introduced by our great mutual friend, Kate Vizzini. We both have a great relationship with and adore. And you and I had a chance to catch up last week and it was so interesting. Your backstory, your accomplishments, and your career is so fascinating. And so important, for so many reasons. I wanted to share your story with our audience today before we get into all that though, share a little bit of where you grew up, where you got educated and how you even ended up where you are today.

AJ: So thank you again. I grew up in Miami, the daughter of Cuban refugees and I left for college when I was 17. I went up to Connecticut. And, you know, I think, when I think back on my childhood and these sort of impactful things that really made a difference. And so what I ended up pursuing, I think about being part of a refugee community, even though I was born in the United States, my parents came as children. My grandparents talked about it. It was sort of a constant in my life.

I didn’t even speak English until I was 5. And everybody talked about Cuba and what that had done to them and what life in a foreign country was like. And so I grew up really passionate about refugee issues. You know, my parents and I talked about it all the time. I started an Amnesty International chapter at my high school. I went ahead and did it again at my college and it really was about trying to pay it forward. I know a lot of people helped my family come here. And I was fortunate enough to be born in the United States because a lot of people who didn’t know us helped. And that’s always sort of been a fundamental part of how I’ve approached life.

John: You know, being a child of immigrants. And having that immigrant DNA, there’s something about it. And I think there’s almost a revival of a discussion. I was listening to the co-founder of Modernity. He happens to be Syrian and Armenian and he was talking about how him being an immigrant has informed him as an entrepreneur and literally been his guiding light. Because he feels immigrants and people with immigrant DNA have a natural DNA resiliency to them that maybe others don’t have. Does that also ring true with your own career in your own path and journey as well?

AJ: I think, you know, I think a lot of people can have that resiliency. I think, what perhaps is different for first-generation folks, is you have a perspective that others may not have. To me, you know, the idea that our constant state of living in a democracy. Our state of freedom is permanent has never rung true, right? To me, it has always been engaging in the act of work of what a democracy is and it’s been thinking about how do we preserve this country that we love? How do we preserve our way of life? How do we help others? And, you know, for me, as I told you before, that has been defined by service.

John: Hmm. That’s awesome. So you grew up in Miami, a child of immigrants, but with a great understanding and love for this democracy. Where’d you go to college? And how did you start thinking about your career when you were in college?

AJ: So I went to Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, which to this day is probably the greatest culture shock I ever experienced in my life. I moved from Miami to Hartford and I was not prepared. Didn’t know what fleece was? Never you know…

John: Was there something you learned about Trinity that guided you there? What brought you to Connecticut from Miami?

AJ: My parents said early on that they wanted me to leave. They were perfectly happy with me, coming back to Miami after college, but they wanted me to have the experience of going away to school and, you know, encourage that. And so I was looking for a liberal arts college. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to major in. I knew I wanted to go work for the government at some point. And Trinity was one of a handful of colleges that I applied, you know, applied to and went to visit and the rest is history.

John: So you realize the whole country wasn’t like Miami. Let’s just say that.

AJ: Yeah, quite different.

John: Right? And so, what did you major in? And what did you start thinking about given that you had this passion for paying it forward? For fullness about, you know, where you’re from and what your roots were and service. How do you start thinking about, then the next step in your, in your life?

AJ: Yeah, I majored in English and Creative Writing with a minor in French. And then I had this honors concentration in what was called the City’sPprogram. So it was this sort of urban studies project. And so I spent a lot of time talking about, you know, local communities. I took a bunch of classes around history and international relations, But ultimately decided I really wanted to learn how to write and communicate and so I focused on that. And you like I said, even before, I had finished elementary school that I wanted to go work for DC. And I can talk about sort of when I made that decision, but I wanted to go work in DC for the government. And I sort of planned for that from the get-go, in college, not totally clear where I was going to go. But ultimately as you know, decided to apply to the CIA in early 2001.

John: And so you were immediately accepted? I don’t know how it works with the CIA. How does it work when you apply to work for the CIA? Are you allowed to even talk about that let’s just start there?

AJ: Well, I’ll say it’s a very long process and I had been in the application process for almost a year. A little shy of a year when September 11th happens, and of course, you know, at that point was eager to serve in any way that I could and ended up getting a call, you know, a few weeks later saying I passed and could start.

John: Wow, so off you went, you go to, is there training once you are asked or called? Do you have to go through some form of training somewhere?

AJ: Proper training, right.

John: Okay. And so then, then you’re sent out, is it called Tours of Duty like the military? What is it called when you’re sent somewhere?

AJ: So it’s a PCS Tour and you go out for you know, a designated number of years. And at the time war zone, tours were a year. So again, as I share with you, my second tour was in Afghanistan and I did three undercover tours with the agency before I left.

John: And that’s what brought us together. The timeliness of your experiences in Afghanistan. And you wrote this wonderful article that was posted up on CNBC. I don’t know about 10 days ago that I read, Kate sent it to me. I just love the article, share a little bit about your experiences both in Afghanistan and why you were compelled to write the article that you did so eloquently about 10 days ago or so? And the importance of, getting your voice out there. Given that you’re not a politician, and you were a percipient witness to actually what was going on in Afghanistan during your tour.

AJ: Yeah. Thank you. So, Afghanistan has a very special place in my heart. I will fully disclose I was petrified when I knew I was going to a war zone. Did not at any point envision in my childhood or anyone else trying to figure out like I’m going to go serve I’m going to go do this. It was a really relatively peaceful time in U.S. History and I did not see that one coming. When I arrived in Afghanistan what I found was a country that, you know, was in many ways, you’re filled with incredibly welcoming people. People who believed in the work that the United States government was doing on all fronts, right? So it went from military to state to folks working with other branches of the US government. To amazing nonprofits, NGOs, and it was not just the U.S. but obviously, the International Community.

And I have countless stories of just incredible interactions with Afghans who wanted to make the country a better place. And I think this has been a very complicated and painful few weeks for I think all of us who served there because I think everybody understands the war needed to end. It is the longest war in U.S. history. We’ve been there for 20 years. I think what has been incredibly hard for so many of us to watch is the fact that the Taliban came back. And that so many of our friends and allies who helped us were stuck there, are stuck there. It is an incredible country with incredibly resilient people.

John: A couple of things. Being much older than you and I have a daughter that’s closer to your age obviously than I am. When you became a member of the CIA, got that job, and going to start your career in service. I’m sure your parents were extraordinarily proud of you. But when you have to call them and tell them that you were going to Afghanistan are you even allowed to say that to them? How was that interaction? I just want to go back to that first.

AJ: Yeah, it was really hard. So I am an only child and they really struggled for the year that I was there. And, you know, I think about my parents. I think about the parents of all the people who served, again, regardless of what capacity they were there, but I know it was an incredibly difficult year for them and all the other parents who send children over there.

John: I know from speaking with you before and reading a lot of your history while you were there. There were actually as many stories that you have. But you were in a car that was attacked or was a victim of a bombing incident or something of that nature?

AJ: I was not, no. I was there for an attack that was outside of our compound. Lucky enough that, you know, I was inside a building, obviously heard the blast. We had to shelter in place. And you know, again was…

John: Got it. I heard something last week that rang true and it’s so sad that it rang true. Someone said to me, “If you don’t watch the news, you’re uninformed.” But now a lot of people feel and this person was sharing their feelings with me, that if they watch the news, they feel misinformed. And so why I was so excited for many reasons to have you on is, you wrote this beautiful piece that I read three or four times. I reread it again last night. America has a chance to salvage something from the Afghanistan disaster. And you and I talked a little bit offline last week about the comparisons of how we messily…if that’s a good word. Maybe not, left Saigon, which I lived through as a child. I know you spent some time in Vietnam as well. I’ve been back there. How do you draw comparisons between the mess that we left behind in Vietnam and how we exited now Afghanistan? And talk about the importance of the article that you wrote and what you wanted people to learn from your own experiences.

AJ: I mean, it’s a really tough question because it is such an emotional topic for me. I think why I wanted to write the story or the piece. Why I wanted to talk about it is, you know multifaceted. I think number one. Many of us believed in the promises that the United States makes. We believed in what work we were doing regardless again of what branch of the military or US Government you were in or whether you are a Frontline civilian. And I think with Afghanistan in particular, especially after the September 11th attacks.

A lot of support existed for us to go to eradicate Al-Qaeda to try and bring a different lifestyle. We can sort of unpack on whether or not that was the right decision separately. Right? And certainly, whether we should have been in Afghanistan for a long as we were. But the reality is, we were there for 20 years. We invested trillions of dollars in the war. We invested countless human lives in the war. Thousands of Afghans were lost, military members, Frontline civilians lost. And so the hardest part, I think and I’ll speak for myself on this one, for me to come to terms with is that the Trump Administration chose to negotiate with the Taliban at that point, not including the Afghan government. And even contemplated bringing members of the Taliban to Camp David.

I cannot fathom a situation in the early days of the war where anybody would have even thought that that conversation would ever happen. Or that certainly any White House Administration regardless of whether they were Democrat or Republican would even contemplate such a decision. And so when that choice was made, when the agreement was made for the U.S. to pull out, I distinctly remember having a sort of sinking feeling. Not because I didn’t believe as so many people did and do, that it was time for us to end the war. It was time for us to help the Afghans manage more independently what was going on, grow the country and rebuild.

But because I could not wrap my head around the fact that we were negotiating with the Taliban. And so fast forward to the decisions made by the Biden Administration and the deadline to evacuate Afghanistan was extended. But the way in which this was done, I think has been incredibly painful for so many people to watch. We are leaving, you know, a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. The people who we fought 20 years ago are back in power. I do not believe that they will uphold human rights. In fact, we know that already it’s being reported in the press and so many of our allies and family members have been left behind.

Again, I don’t want to underestimate the incredible efforts that were made over the last few weeks to evacuate. I think, the last number I heard was over a hundred thousand Afghan, right? That is incredible. There was an incredible network beyond what was happening in the official U.S. Government channels. There was an incredible network of volunteers, which comprised of military, former military, former civilian government employees, NGO workers, Nonprofit workers. It was a whole group of people who just cared and wanted to keep our promises. But the reality is we couldn’t get everybody else out. The president acknowledged that. And that’s very hard to…

John: Basically, the president for better for worse. He basically followed Trump’s blueprint. Whatever the deal that was negotiated, he executed for better or for worse. And so why I love, why I do this show is to have amazing people like you on because not only do you have a life of service which we’re going to get into many of the other hats that you wear now, but going back to this specific issue AJ. Where do we go from here and how do we salvage where we are? For better or for worse. Instead of hoping for what could have been. How do we deal with what is the reality today and try to make the most of a bad situation?

AJ: Yeah, I think figuring out where folks want to dedicate their time and how they want to help is probably step number one. You are exactly right. We have evacuated, we have officially terminated our military presence. And so working first of all, with organizations that are helping continue to evacuate Afghans out of the country and then helping once they arrive, I think, is a great step. And I would also add that working with any organizations that are helping veterans of the wars is another great step. The numbers are staggering as far as mental health and how challenging that has been especially over the last few weeks for people who served in Afghanistan.

When you look at statistics of veterans who have committed suicide since 2001. The last number I read was over a hundred and fourteen thousand veterans have died by suicide. And the suicide rate for veterans is now outpacing the rate for civilians, which is a shift. It used to be backward rate, civilian suicides outpaced military numbers. And by the way, these are just numbers of people who served in the military. This does not include all the civilians outside of the military who are either serving in the US government or were there as Frontline civilians.

John: What can our listeners, viewers, people who read this interview, what can they do? General citizens of the United States that want to offer help more than just wishing people well, what can they do financially? Or with their time or their service? What is doable right now? Where we are right now?

AJ: Yeah, I would say Evacuate Our Allies is a great resource. It’s a combination of nonprofits that have come together including Truman and they are working on a number of resources that will help Afghans both who are there and who are relocating. So people can figure out if there are ways that they can either, donate time, donate home, help with, you know, arrivals and that kind of stuff or they can donate money. So it’s the money is also really, really helpful and then as far as veterans are concerned, there’s so many great resources.

You know a couple of the ones that come to mind are the Veterans Crisis Line, Project Refit, and Greenleaf initiative. The last one is for Frontline Civilians. So again, if listeners go to those websites, they can get more information and certainly can make donations as well.

John: You did three tours with the CIA. You’re no longer in the CIA. Right now, let’s talk about the other hats that you wear with your varied and many. You’re a defense council member at the Truman National Security Project. What is the Truman National Security Project? Without giving away obviously, anything that puts anybody in danger just so our listeners can understand. What is being done over there?

AJ: Yeah. So Truman is a wonderful organization. It is a coalition of both current and former members of government, nonprofit organizations, you know, civilian-military all of it. And the focus is really to speak on National Security initiatives. So Truman as a whole does just endless amounts of great work and I would encourage listeners to go to the website. I’m deeply impressed by the work that they have organized over the last few weeks. To help with the evacuation efforts out of Afghanistan. And you know they again have great resources for anybody who’s interested and many listeners who might want to apply for membership. It’s another great opportunity to get involved.

John: If we were in an elevator and I asked you what the Truman National Security Project was. Is it a think tank or is it actually thinking and action as well?

AJ: It’s thinking and action.

John: Okay.

AJ: So it is a non-profit.

John: Got it.

AJ: They work to create all sorts of initiatives, you know, they have a really active presence on social media. A lot of the members will write op-eds, will go and speak on topics that are really important to all of us. And again the focus is to work with the administration to work with corporations. Civilians, anybody who might be interested so that we can talk about Progressive values that we believe are important, to bring to the forefront.

John: Now, your full-time job is you’re Director of Sales at visit.org. Tell our listeners a little bit about what visit.org is and what you do there as Director of Sales.

AJ: Yeah. It’s a wonderful certified B Corporation, and our mission is to kill grenade efforts with nonprofits and social ventures. And pair them with corporate partners who want to bring volunteering opportunities to their employees. So we work with some massive and some really small corporations as well and help them partner with these nonprofits and social ventures globally. And they can do either volunteering efforts. You know, some of them are skill-based. Some of them are just learning, you know, new projects, but it’s incredibly rewarding to see people doing great things around the world.

John: Besides being a Defense Council member over at the Truman National Security Project and the Director of Sales at visit.org. You also teach at my alma mater, Why don’t you talk a little bit about what you’re doing over there at Stern over at NYU.

AJ: So part-time gig, which is fun. Taught…

John: I don’t know where you get the time in the part-time, but that’s amazing.

AJ: I managed to teach a class this past spring. So, first time teaching at NYU to undergraduates. And the course was focused on their sustainability requirements was a required course for freshmen, and we really talked about all sorts of things that are relevant. So everything from climate change to, you know, how to do great things in the world. So, business with a conscience is probably the best way I can describe it.

John: You’re teaching the next generation of impact leaders, impact entrepreneurs, and service members, huh?

AJ: We hope, right?

John: So were you recruited for that, or is that something that just was on your heart and mind. That part of your service ecosystem was, not only do you want to do the great important work, you’re doing on visit.org. And also at the Truman National Security Project, but you wanted to even further your service by giving back. So were you recruited or did you apply for that?

AJ: So it was a professor who had been one of my professors in business school. And he found out there were openings and said, “You should apply. I think this might be a great fit.” And it’s a course that really focuses on, above everything, Communications. So it’s teaching all of these students how to talk about these issues. But, you know, was fascinating, because we had all these great speakers come in once a week, to these, plenary sessions and talk about things like recycling. And the importance of social justice. The importance of minimum wage in the United States. How restaurant workers are paid, it was fascinating.

John: Let me just say this. If I was 18 again, I would be taking that course, but believe me. There were no courses like that when I was there.

AJ: I wish we had courses, like this when I was in undergrad.

John: Right. You got your MBA at UNC, right?

AJ: Correct,

John: Okay. Got it. So, Trinity to UNC. So, and now at NYU, so that’s…AJ, talk a little bit about, we’re nine days away or so from the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Talk a little bit about your experiences and how 9/11 personally impacted you. And some thoughts as we come upon the 20th anniversary of that tragic date.

AJ: Yeah, I think I shared with you when we spoke earlier. I was working for Senator Lieberman at the time.

John: Right.

AJ: And you know, it is a day that I think obviously none of us who were alive for It can forget. I would say fundamentally impacted the course I think of so many people in my generation. As I mentioned, I was already sort of in the pipeline and applying but when that day happened and we ran from the hill and everybody was trying to get to safety and I obviously was in DC. So watching the Pentagon burn as a group of us were driving back home. I think it changed the expectation. For those of us who were recent college graduates. I’d been out of college a year.

The expectation of the world we were going to be adults in. Of the type of work, we were going to do, certainly, it set me on a path to serve in Afghanistan a few years later. I think it would have been a very different career and a very different, you know, ten years after that and certainly thereafter had it not happened.

John: Given that we have a 9/11 anniversary coming up. We just got out of Afghanistan. What do you think is the right path for us as a country as a democracy? As we know, we have so many challenges facing us here on our own shores. Social challenges, healthcare challenges, immigration challenges still. I can’t believe that we’re still talking about Roe versus Wade in and modern times. It’s shocking to me to wake up to that kind of news. Frankly. Are we going to continue to be the world’s peacekeeper outside of our shores? Or is Afghanistan the beginning, and maybe the end of an era that we’re going to be more domestically focused with regards to our democracy? And not so much more outwardly focused anymore?

AJ: I can’t answer what the future looks like from a U.S. government policy. I can share my opinion on…

John: I’d love your opinion.

AJ: What I think are fundamental issues that we need to face at home? You know, I would start with climate change. We’re certainly not addressing it. In the course of the last couple of weeks the U.S. has already faced two hurricanes, climate is changing. I grew up in Miami. I was almost 14 years old before I ever lived through a hurricane. This is now a yearly experience.

John: Right?

AJ: In Florida, but you know, all the way up to Maine. We had the first hurricane go up the East Coast just a few weeks ago. I think that’s a fundamental issue that we need to address. I think it’s very hard for the United States to go overseas and preach on democracy when we have, you know, fundamentalist elements within our country. Working actively to kind of work against our democracy, right? We have significant issues around racial justice. It’s incredible how many people came out last summer in support of the BLM movement, but the reality is that should have been happening for years. And the other horrible and tragic reality is that there are still folks in the United States, many in the community that I grew up in, who believe that BLM is a violent terrorist organization and it’s simply untrue.

John: Right.

AJ: You have to fight for humans justice. Anyone who believes that there is not a problem with race in the United States I fundamentally believe is just not paying attention. So I think we need to address that. I think we need to address issues like what appears to be more and more minority rule on domestic policies, right? The law that just passed in Texas, two days ago is struggling for all of us. Right? And we’re still arguing about masks and we’re still arguing about sending kids to school without masks. This is just basic science, right? Masks will help you and the amount of disinformation that is out there is really troubling. And I think we need to spend some time working on these issues at home.

My hope is that people can come together on a bipartisan front, you know, I’ll share when I was on The Hill in 2001. I was part of committee staff and my offices are right across from the Republicans offices of the Republican member of that same staff. And we used to go out to lunch together. We were friends, we would talk.

John: Why?

AJ: Both Senators would communicate and have conversations. That’s really troubling and I think, you know, I’ll stop here because I could go on forever on this. But I think, you know, the attack on The Capitol on Januaruy 6th, for me is a really troubling moment in U.S. history. I think that to see Washington D.C. under attack by people who believed the propaganda and to continue, sadly to believe that this election was stolen is deeply problematic.

John: Our democracy was potentially hanging by a thread on January 6th.

AJ: Correct.

John: Given that I’m a grandchild of immigrants from Armenia and you’re a child of immigrants from Cuba, talk a little bit about Cuba. It seemed like so much progress was being made, but during the Trump Administration, everything got turned upside down. I have friends from Cuba that are Cuban immigrants and they’re just dear friends of mine. And for years I’ve been dying to go there. If I went there today. What would I see? And what’s the future hold for the evolution of Cuba, and it getting back on track towards a better tomorrow?

AJ: Yeah, I will start by saying I’ve actually never set foot on the island. My family left. My mother’s family left in the 60s. My father’s family left in the 70s, and my four grandparents and my great-grandmother, sadly all died without ever returning. I can’t speak about what the conditions are like on the ground. All I can say is, you know, it was incredibly inspiring to see a lot of the protests that were happening in July. It brings a ton of hope. I think often about what it must have been like for my grandparents to leave. I also know that there is a ton of strikes in the Exile community in Miami. There’s I think a lot of folks who have different opinions on how best to handle the situation. Some people strongly believed in the Embargo. Some people were really upset over, you know, President Obama’s efforts to open up relations and I think it’s in many ways a quagmire that we’re not going to solve.

Again, I can share my own opinion that I don’t think the Embargo worked.

John: Right.

AJ: I personally would love to be able to have the opportunity to travel there.

John: Right.

AJ: I want to see democracy in Cuba.

John: Well, you’re very young. So I know you’re going to get there. I didn’t get to Armenia till I was 56 years old. So don’t worry you’ll beat me there. You’ll beat my record in terms of getting to the Homeland I’m sure. But it’ll be a wonderful day to get down there. I’m sure when you do make it there one day. You know AJ. You’re doing so many great things. What, you know, you’re teaching at Stern. You’re the Director of Sales at visit.org. You are a Defense Council member at Truman, but you’re so young. And you also have this fascinating experience. Three tours with the CIA, you know, people like you are working to all ages.

Now. I mean, Warren Buffett just turned 92. Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington. Everyone’s in their 60s, 70s and 80s, and 90s and just working along. So, you have so much blue sky in front of you. Where do you envision your future life given your passion for service? And also all the great history and knowledge you already have in your bank account? Where are you going to go with this?

AJ: Well, I would say, yeah, there’s a lot of people doing a lot of really great work. I want to make sure that where I can help I do so. It’s as I said earlier, for me, it is very personal. I want to pay it forward. I grew up being told as a child that, you know, a lot of people had helped us get here and people helped us leave Cuba.

John: Right.

AJ: Helped my family and so, I would say, primarily I want to make sure that I can help where I can, right? And so if I have some knowledge that I can share, if I can put people in touch with resources, if I can help on any of, you know, our multitude of domestic challenges, I want to do so.

John: That’s awesome. And for our listeners, and our viewers, and our readers, who want to follow you AJ. They could find you on Twitter at A-J-F-T-W-O-M-B-L-Y. A-J-F-T-W-O-M-B-L-Y. Also for our listeners and viewers, who haven’t had a chance to read your great CNBC piece. We’re going to post it on this episode. It’s titled “America Has A Chance To Salvage Something From The Afghanistan Disaster.” I encourage all of our viewers and listeners to read that piece. It really moves me. I thought it was so well done as I shared with you already.

AJ I first want to thank you for your service to this great country. Your bravery, your service, your courage. Secondarily, I want to just say God bless you and thank you for all you’re doing on visit.org, at Truman, and at Stern. And I want to say, thanks for making all the impacts on the next generation of impact entrepreneurs, over at Stern and all the great work you’re doing. I know you’re going to do great things in the future. So you’re going to always be invited back to share what you’re up to you on the Impact Podcast. Thank you again for your time today.

AJ: Thank you so much for having me, John.

John: This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed-loop Partners. Closed-loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed-loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity. Bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. The fine Closed-loop Partners. Please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have today Paulette Frank. She’s the Vice President of Sustainability for Johnson & Johnson family of consumer companies. Welcome to Green is Good, Paulette.

Paulette Frank: Oh, thank you. It’s so nice to be here with you today. Thank you so much for that.

John: It’s so nice to have you and it’s so nice to have Johnson & Johnson in the house and to talk about all the great things you’re doing over there with that great and iconic brand but before we get to talking about Johnson & Johnson & all the great things you’re doing over there, Paulette, the listeners want to know the Paulette Frank story. How did you even come to this position of Vice President of Sustainability at Johnson & Johnson? Share your journey a little bit.

Paulette: Sure. Well, I’m a Jersey Shore girl. I grew up at the Jersey Shore with a love for the outdoors and the beach and the ocean and my father was a professional fisherman so he made his livelihood off of the ocean and I learned at a very early age that nature can be very kind, particularly if we take good care of her, so it’s just inspired a love and an appreciation for nature at a very early age. I decided to go into the field after doing some graduate studies in environmental policy at Yale and came to work at Johnson & Johnson 17 years ago and have been thrilled with the opportunity to apply what I love, my passion for the environment and sustainability at a company that really gives me the ability to make a difference.

John: That is amazing and when did you evolve into sustainability? You’ve been there 17 years. When was the sustainability evolution happening at Johnson & Johnson where you moved into that leadership role there?

Paulette: You know, in appreciation for the social and environmental goodwill that we can do in the world has always been part of the company culture. I think it’s kind of taken on different names over the years, even way back when we didn’t even call it sustainability at all, but when I started in the company, it was environmental responsibility function in the organization, which then grew to have more of this social dimension, starting with the employee health and safety and then community outreach and it just sort of grew into this more holistic view of sustainability, which really does bring together both the social, the environmental, and the economic pieces of the business. I’ve been in my current role, which is very broadly base din sustainability, as I just described to you, for about four years in the consumer group.

John: And, you have a new campaign there called Care to Recycle and for our listeners out there that want to follow and see the great work you’ve created and your team has created, I’m on the website now. I was already familiar with it when you launched it and I’ve just fallen in love with it but I’m on it right now and for our listeners to follow along, it’s www.caretorecycle.com. Share a little bit about how this came to being, the vision for it, and what is about really, Paulette?

Paulette: Sure. Well, we look at sustainability across the entire life cycle of our products so that includes from the decisions we make around formulations, around designing the product to how we manufacture the product, how we deliver the product, and it also involved how consumer use and ultimately the end of life of the product after it’s used and that kind of took us into this phase of recycling in general and we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into what we knew about recycling. There’s been a bit of research on consumers’ habits when it comes to recycling and most consumers, it’s a very familiar topic. It’s something that is part of our day to day lives and most consumers report that they are fairly good recyclers but we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that and we decided to sponsor a research study to ask some more specific questions about recycling habits and in particular, how do those habits change depending on where you are in your home and where you might be generating recyclable items and we had a hunch going into this study that perhaps, in the bathroom or rooms that might be a little further away from that recycling bin, that perhaps the recycling rates weren’t as high as they might be in other parts of the house like the kitchen, where the recycling bin might be more accessible and the research results confirmed our hunch, that in fact, even though seven out of 10 Americans report that they are consistent recyclers, when you dig a little deeper, only one in five report that they are consistently recycling items from the bathroom and 40% of the respondents indicated they were recycling nothing from the bathroom and this is the room in the house where our products tend to be used or at least stored and it presented us with an opportunity to deliver a message that was very needed and could be very helpful to help consumers of our products and other products that might be in the bathroom be better recyclers of those items.

John: That makes sense. So, then talk a little bit about then reaching your constituents and clients. How did you come up with the name Care to Recycle and how did the website evolve and I’m on the website and again, for our listeners, it’s CaretoRecycle.com. It’s literally not only visually beautiful but it’s chock full of information and a lot of accessibility to where you can recycle. It’s got great partners, Recycle Bank, Earth 911, Keep America Beautiful, so many great partners here. What a great collaboration but how did that come to be in terms of the name and then choosing a platform like this website and then getting that platform out to others and we’ll talk about some of the platforms you chose to get it out but talk about the name that you came up with, Care to Recycle, and the website creation.

Paulette: Sure. Well, I think the name was pretty obvious. Caring is at the heart of everything we do at Johnson & Johnson. We wanted to be very deliberate that the act of recycling is an act of caring for our planet so the name came to us pretty easily. In terms of the content that we decided was going to be important to have on our website like this, we looked to the research again and digging a little deeper into that one in five people are consistently recycling, the reasons why people reported that they weren’t recycling as consistently in the bathroom were two main reasons. Twenty-two percent said that they just hadn’t thought about it, that it wasn’t top of mind, and then 20% reported that they didn’t know what items were recyclable in the bathroom so that’s why we look at Care to Recycle as first a gentle reminder that in fact, there are items in your bathroom that can be recycled so to make it more top of mind for people, and then the second main aspect of the website is information; tips and tools, there’s a recycling locator that you can use. If your local municipality doesn’t accept something for recycling, you can use the recycling locator to find another that might accept that item for recycling so we wanted the website to be helpful . We wanted it to give people the information that they needed to be more informed about recycling in their home and particularly in their bathroom.

John: Got it, and when did you launch the website?

Paulette: We launched the website earlier this month, first week in October, we launched the website and I can also explain that the reason we selected Tumblr as the platform for the website was very deliberate because at the heart of the campaign’s success is getting this very simple message about a relatively simple act that we can all do. The key to success is getting that message in front of a lot of people because when a lot of people take that simple act, then the impact is big and that’s the goal. The goal is to have a big significant impact on recycling in the bathroom so that we can actually have a benefit to the planet so Tumblr is very unique in that it’s just highly shareable content. You can share every piece of content on there is an individual post that is shareable in and of itself so you can choose to share the video if you want to send that gentle reminder to your friends and family. If you want to share specific tips, you can send that. If you want to share the recycling locator that I mentioned, you can share that so the elements of the website are highly shareable and the audience that’s engaged in Tumblr, they share and they’re very, very likely to share content so that was the main reason why we selected Tumblr to get the message to a very broad audience.

John: What elements of the campaign are you really excited about? Because I’m on the site now and there are some great tips here for teaching kids to recycle. What are some elements of the campaign that are meant to engage and get people participating?

Paulette: Personally, I love the video and I could be a little biased because the talent in that video is actually the children of our employees and one of them is mine so I’m a little biased on the video, which I think is really meant to be that gentle reminder. It’s meant to hopefully connect with people on an emotional level and encourage recycling but that said, the tips and the tools are meant to be very simple, very straightforward and one of the most exciting pieces of feedback that we’ve received on the tips and tools are notes from people who lead Cub Scout dens or people who are on their PTA Green Committee and they are taking this content and bringing it into the schoolroom. They’re bringing it to the Cub Scout meetings and they’re using it to work with the children. That, to me, is a really nice indicator of success.

John: Sure is. Let’s talk about Johnson & Johnson though now, and for our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Paulette Frank on with us today. She’s the Vice President of Sustainability for Johnson & Johnson family of companies and we’re talking about their newest and specific campaign around sustainability and recycling. It’s Care to Recycle and you can beautifully see it at CaretoRecycle.com. Let’s talk about your products specifically, bathroom items that can be recycled. What do you produce that can be recycled that we’re not typically thinking of, like you said from your survey, and what should people be doing with them?

Paulette: Sure. Well, we have bottles that are in number one, which is PET plastic. We have bottles that are in number two plastic, which is HDPE. Really, all you need to remember is the number one and the number two, so those shampoo bottles, those cleansing bottles, those body wash bottles, if you turn them over and there’s a one or a two on the bottom, they’re recyclable. Now, the caps are generally made of a different material. They’re generally made of number five plastic and those are usually recyclable as well but you should definitely check with your local municipality on number five plastic and we do suggest that you take the caps off, because they are a different type of plastic, when you’re recycling them.

John: Got it, got it, got it and what are the other bathroom recycling tips that are on this website and that you want our listeners to really try to leverage and engage in after they listen to the show and after they go to your website?

Paulette: Sure. Well, the first tip is to turn it over. Turn over the bottle and look for that number one or number two plastic. The other tip is to remove the cap. That’s helpful in the recycling stream to have that separated. The other tip is to rinse. You probably want to get every drop of that product out anyway and so you put a little water in there and you rinse that bottle out and get every drop of product out. That’s also very, very helpful and I think those are the main tips that we encourage people to think about. Turn it over, check it out. If there’s a one or a two, it’s recyclable. Remove that cap and rinse out the bottle if you can.

John: And, with regards to the website, I’m on it now and we were just talking about, I love this line that you have on the website in terms of our babies will inherit our planet. Please recycle in the bathroom. About 50% of the world’s population is under 27 years old and it seems like, Paulette, that that generation, your children’s generation, my children’s generation and grandchildren’s generation, are really on fire for sustainability. They get it. They want to be part of it. They want to be part of the solution. Talk a little bit about the website and you also just give tips, for instance. I’m here and there’s just some very common sense approaches that you give kids to recycle and I’m looking at this list that you have, litter in the park, how to encourage kids, what to do, and what not to do so in terms of picking up trash in a park or beach or making recycling bins or telling them bedtime stories that have an environmental message. This is great stuff. You have four partners. I’ve mentioned them before and these are great organizations: Recyclebank, Earth 911, Keep America Beautiful, Small Steps, Big Winds. Three out of those four have been on this show and we’re so thankful that you’re on this show today. How did you collaborate with them? Why did you choose them and how did this wonderful collaboration come together?

Paulette: Sure. Let me also just quickly go back to your point about children. I personally completely agree that children are all over sustainability in general and recycling is probably one of the most fun things they like to focus on and I personally think it’s because they love to jump at the opportunity to turn the tables on parents and point out things that we can be doing better and I know my kids enjoy that in our house for sure so getting back to the partners, we’ve actually had partnerships with these partners for quite a while and given we have a particular focus on waste and recycling. The fact that these partners share that common interest made a lot of sense for us to have partnerships with them in the first place. They also have access to a lot of information and a lot of expertise that we don’t necessarily have so that’s another thing that we look for in our partners, that they can bring something to the table that makes us smarter about our approach and they also have their own audience so they also help to extend our reach and they can reach people that we necessarily can’t so it’s a combination of the expertise and the smarts that they bring to the relationship as well as the reach of getting the message to a broader audience.

John: That’s so interesting. So, now this campaign, which is, let’s just say this is a micro of the macro of what you do every day as the Vice President of Sustainability at the Johnson & Johnson family of consumer companies. Talk about how this campaign ties back to your macro goals with regards to sustainability and in terms of caring about your clients and constituents and about the world that we all live in. How does that work?

Paulette: Sure. As a consumer product company, consumer engagement is one of the levers that we can pull to advance sustainability. Our products touch millions and millions of people every day and for me, that’s a million opportunities to deliver a sustainability message to someone and to inform them and help them to make better choices and better decisions that ultimately have a positive impact on the planet. There’s obviously a lot that we’re working on with respect to our products and our supply chains and there’s also a lot that our consumers can help us to make an even bigger impact on so this space and this campaign just represents a really exciting first step into this space of engaging our consumers in a dialogue on sustainability that we hope will grow and evolve over time.

John: Well, the interesting thing and what I’ve learned from this show over the last four or five years, Paulette, is that when big companies, iconic brands like yours, move in this direction and push sustainability forward, it really gets to move the needle in a very, very relevant way so my question to you is as I’m on your site now and I’m looking at just some of the facts and figures that you have more than 275 operating companies in 60 countries employing approximately 120,000 people, talk a little bit about sustainability as a whole because when people talk about people, planet, and profits, how does that work? How do you engage with all those employees? How do you then push it both internally, now this is the external push, Care to Recycle, which is wonderful, engaging your constituents. How internally do you champion sustainability as such a broad and far reaching company? How does some of that work? We’re down to the last three minutes. Just share some of the highlights with our listeners just so they understand that the journey is never ending and that it can be big and small together.

Paulette: That’s absolutely right. Our employees in engaging with our employees, and I would say engagement in general, whether it’s employees or external stakeholders, is really the next frontier for sustainability in my opinion. IT’s how we’re going to get the scale that we need to make the impact that we need to make on the issues. In a lot of ways, our employees are the first audience that we test things with, like Care to Recycle, for example, and Care to Recycle is as much internally alive as it is on the Care to Recycle website. We have been having recycling campaigns inside our company for the past couple of years where twice a year, we encourage our employees to bring in used electronics, gently used clothes, toys, and books that we then donate to local charities so the spirit of recycling and reusing things so that they don’t ultimately end up in a landfill where they serve no one any good, this is the spirit that we’ve been cultivating internally with our employees for the past few years and it’s also why we had a lot of confidence that the message was going to resonate broadly in the external environment.

John: Gotcha, and I’m even on your site here. You get to touch so many elements of sustainability. I’m just looking at your first LEED Gold-certified research laboratory so you get to build green. I’m sure you have all sorts of fascinating opportunities at Johnson & Johnson with regards to energy and water and I’m sure it’s just fascinating.

Paulette: Not to throw another website out there but a lot of our work in sustainability we share with people on our HealthyEssentials.com website. It’s our website where people can learn about our brands and our products and there’s also tips and tools around health and wellness on that website as well as a whole section called Our Caring, where you’ll see a variety of stories and a variety of ways that we are bringing sustainability to life through our business.

John: So, it’s HealthyEssentials.com?

Paulette: Yes, and it’s the Our Caring section.

John: Thank you for that, and, Paulette, we’re down to the last minute or so. There’s a lot of young ladies around the world that want to be the next Paulette Frank. Just give them a couple of things to grab onto and a couple of your pearls of wisdom, how to make that journey or start it.

Paulette: I would say follow your passion, first and foremost, and I would also say having passion for this work is incredibly important but also having passion for the organization that you are doing this work through and with is also critically important. Finding that fit not only with your passion but who you are as a person and how you choose to lead in this space is also critically important. I have been fortunate to have found both and I think that’s a recipe for success if you can get it.

John: Thank you for your time today. For our listeners out there to find out more about all the great work that Johnson & Johnson is doing, it’s CaretoRecycle.com or HealthyEssentials.com. Paulette Frank, you are a sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.