Andrew Dempsey is the Director of Climate at REI, where he focuses on driving transformational change throughout the organization by leading the co-op’s climate, energy, and waste strategies. His work is centered on achieving impactful outcomes for REI’s business, employees, and broader community of members.

John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a Rockstar Impact podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click ‘Be a Guest’ to recommend someone today. 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 For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. 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 loops 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: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today Andrew Dempsey. He’s the director of climate for REI. Welcome Andrew to the IMPACT podcast.

Andrew Dempsey: Thanks for having me, John.

John: Hey Andrew, before we get talking about all the important impactful things you and your colleagues are doing it, REI, with regards to climate change and sustainability can we go into your story a little bit. Where’d you grow up and how’d you get on this journey?

Andrew: Sure. I grew up in Pasadena, California, down in Southern California. Moved around a couple times. Growing up I spent four years in Dallas, Texas and then returned back to California, but Northern California. Just a bit north of where you are. I was up in Modesto for a year. Did my undergrad at the University of Colorado. I studied architecture, environmental design. I was really interested in design at the intersection of the built environment, which is what drew me to the program. After graduating, I did work in that industry for a couple years at an architecture firm in San Francisco. While I liked a lot of aspects of the discipline, I could sort of tell that it wasn’t a profession I was dedicated enough to, to wnt to commit the years and additional years of schooling to go on and become a licensed professional. So I pivoted for a few years, I went back to Colorado. I had some adventures. I had some friends living in the mountains from school, and I did a fair amount of skiing and one season turned into a couple years and traveled for a bit and when I came back from all of that I tried to really figure out what were the elements of what I studied in architecture and environmental design that I really enjoyed, and how could I find a new filter or lens to have an outlet for those things that I liked about that discipline. I ended up going back to grad school and I studied civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. It’s at that time I was really able to look at sustainability a bit more holistically, again, mostly through the built environment lens. From there I went to work at Google for about seven years in the real estate department. I focused on sustainability intersection of the built environment. I was working on their design standards for office spaces and pursuit of productivity, experience human health. It was a great experience got to meet work with a lot of great partners at that gig. Then about six years ago my then girlfriend, now wife and I moved up to Seattle for just a new adventure and personal reasons. It’s at that time that I got this opportunity to come work with REI. It was a great opportunity for me to take the expertise and knowledge I’ve built around sustainability through, again, mostly the built environment lens. But really look at an entire industry. So the retail industry, product manufacturing and not only look at how are we operating our stores, how are we thinking about energy waste, et cetera. But look at impacts all the way up our value chain. Look at logistics, look at product manufacturing globally. And so the last six years have been a wonderful opportunity for me to learn about a new industry, look at sustainability more holistically, and build a team that’s really focused on our climate action. In a nutshell, that’s my journey from growing up to today.

John: Where did your love of both the environment and the outside, especially the outside environment but then also like backslash sustainability come in. Now, obviously Pasadena is a beautiful area to grow up in, and it’s actually a really beautiful community in terms of outside and inside. Or was it more your college experience that informed you because of course, university College, Boulder is just one of the prettiest places on this planet. Where did it all happen? Or was it a progression?

Andrew: No, that’s a great question. I’ve thought a lot about that actually. I’ll say every year in the summer, I’d go spend a week in the Sierra Nevada. My family for a couple generations now has had a small cabin up north of Yosemite. I’d go up there and spend a week every summer with my brother and with my cousins and it’s a place I’ve gone to every year since then, my entire life. It really planted these early seeds of, Hey, I like this feeling of being out in nature of connecting with a place and of witnessing the changes that take place in a certain environment year over year, season over season. I’d say that was the first spot where I really found a personal connection to the environment, to nature. Then certainly as an adult going to University of Colorado, actually went to a different school my freshman year and I transferred to CU Boulder my sophomore year. My brother had been going to school there, and I went to visit him and I thought this feels right. This is where I want to be. You’re right as an adult it really was in Boulder. Getting to spend that time in Colorado where I really understood that, that that was something that was important to me.

John: Now you’re at REI the director of climate for about six years or so now. About six years. As you and I know sustainability and roles such as chief impact officers or chief sustainability officers, or climate officers can be read very narrowly or broadly. How do you read it and what is your role encompass on a day-to-day, week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year basis over at REI?

Andrew: I look at my mandate, my team’s mandate and the other teams that encompass impact at REI look at our mandate as being pretty broad. I think that’s due in part to the unique structure and origin story of REI. We’re a cooperative we were founded in 1938 here in Seattle by Mary Anderson, and they got together with a group of friends who enjoyed mountain climbing and they couldn’t find quality equipment here in the US. So they got together and started purchasing equipment from Europe, specifically ice axes. So that’s why whenever you go into a REI retail location, if you look at the front doors, they’re ice axes and that’s an homage to the first product that REI is a cooperative, started importing in 1938. They formed as a cooperative because the purpose of the company is really first and foremost to serve its members. So that’s where a key differentiator comes in from, let’s say a publicly traded investor led or investor directed organization. We really exist to serve our members and so we look at what we’re doing, not just through an impact lens but really holistically across our business and across our employees, members and society. So the work that my team’s doing and that again, our broader impact organization is doing really hit what we call that quadruple bottom line. Those four groups that we are looking to influence to lead and to challenge frankly. Coming in a little bit closer to my role and title, specifically looking at our climate program it’s an enterprise wide program. Again, we’re looking at energy consumption all the way down in our stores and we’re looking at energy consumption all the way up our value chain over in Southeast Asia with our manufacturing partners, where we’re making products that have the REI logo on it. So we’re engaging the entire business but we’re also engaging all our employees and all of our members and frankly, society at certain levels. I do look at my remit pretty broad, even though within the team we have these very deep verticals with subject matter experts who are helping us drive that work.

John: To that point, first of all, for our listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with REI, and I love REI, my favorite store is the one when I had a place for many years in Santa Monica and I would just walk over to the REI store in Santa Monica, and I tell you what, I never got bored in there ever. It’s like a Barnes and Noble. You just want to keep going back.

Andrew: We’ve got outdoor toys. It’s great.

John: It’s awesome. And so for our listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with REI, let me just give you a little overview here. First of all, there websites, rei.com to learn about everything that they’re doing in the impact that we’re going to be talking about with Andrew today, please go to rei.com/impact impact. About three and a half billion dollars in revenue a year, 14,000 employees all here in the United States with over 190 stores now. So when you say you’re engaging your employees and the community at large, this is quite a large undertaking of the mandate. There’s a lot going on.

Andrew: I agree. I’ll throw in one more staff for you there, which is 25 million lifetime members. Since 1938 we’ve had 25 million people[crosstalk].

John: No. Do get to communicate with as much as a basis that makes sense for your communication purposes.

Andrew: That’s right.

John: That is quite a tribe as Seth Godin would call it, the tribe. Talk a little bit about specifics. With regards to your climate strategy, what you’ve laid out, and some of the points of progress along the way to the decarbonization of REI and as you say, much broader not only just the stores themselves, but backwards and forwards as well in terms of upstream and downstream.

Andrew: Sure, and I’ll go back in time here for a moment.

John: Sure.

Andrew: I’ll go back to 2006 when our then Sally Jewel, who went on to be secretary of the Interior and the Obama administration. She was our CEO She was a visionary and set some really long-term goals for Aria. This is back in 2006 and she was looking out to the year 2020. She set some goals around waste aversion around measuring our climate impact and our carbon emissions. It was around that time that we really started to formalize, Hey we need to be paying attention to the impact that we’re having as a corporation on the environment, on the changing climate. It was at that time that we started measuring certain components of our footprint and really started to take notice and think about the impact that we were having on the changing environment as an organization. Fast forward to around 2019 ish we did our first comprehensive scope one, two, and three carbon footprint exercise. Now that really baseline for us what is our impact across our entire value chain that really allowed us to baseline. Where do we need to go from here? How should we thinking about setting targets and progress that we want to make against that baseline?

John: Is that your overt decision when you came in with the proverbial blank page and needed a starting point?

Andrew: In part. But there were a lot of players in these discussions going all the way up to our CEO at the time, Eric Arts to Matt Thurston who was leading our sustainability team, to several other folks.

John: The organization was ready for this.

Andrew: Yes. I consider myself lucky to have come in at a time when we were ready to make this move and I got the opportunity to be a part of that, to setting that vision and designing that strategy. Which we came out with in 2020, which was aligned with science, which basically said, Hey, from 2019, which is our baseline looking out about a decade to 2030, we need a roughly half our emissions. Then you go another decade and we need a roughly half them again. The near term target we set by 2030 was to have those emissions. That’s been our North Star since that time. In 2023, we codified a formal science-based target with SPTI to do that for a 2030 short term target. And then we have a long-term target going all the way out to 2050 to be zero. But for the last few years, we’ve really been squarely focused on, hey, how do we decarbonize our entire value chain and cut that in half by the year 2030. So again, there’s a lot of work we’re self performing within the sustainability team to get after that, but the only way we achieve that is to engage lots of teams and divisions across the whole co-op across our whole organization to say, Hey, here’s kind of the slice of the pie. Here’s your world. We’re here to guide you and provide you with tools and knowledge and resources to get after it. But here are the different parts of our business that we really need to decarbonize, that we need to decouple from our growth as a business, from global logistics to store operations, again all the way up to product manufacturing.

John: How’s it been? Please, my assumption would be your 14,000 employees given the work that they have chosen to do in their life to pay the bills in their household, that they would be super interested in sustainability and climate change issues, given that most of the people who come in to your wonderful stores are looking to enjoy the outside with the materials and the goods and services that you sell inside of your stores. So is that a right assumption that your 14,000 are generally more interested than just a cross section of the population?

Andrew: I would say, yes. Our employees are writ large, but especially our retail employees are incredibly passionate about this work. They’re the beating heart of a lot of the impact work that we do. They’re in the stores engaging with our customers and members, and they’re able to talk about work we’re doing on climate work, we’re doing on waste. Another program that I lead in my corner of the team is our waste diversion program. We’re looking to divert 90% or more of our operational waste from landfill. Our retail employees are at the bleeding edge of accomplishing that work.

John: How is that going? Talk a bit a little bit about the progress because that is 90%. Please tell me if this is a true statistic. Once you get to 90 plus percent, you are in the zero waste category.

Andrew: Industry really defines 90% or more as zero waste. We use that term as still our aspiration. We want to be clear though, we’re not too an empirical zero waste yet. We’ll have some exciting news to announce here in our impact report the first week of May, but we’re on the threshold of achieving that target. To our knowledge, we’d be the first large three and a half billion plus dollar US retailer to do that. Again, it’s our retail employees that have really led the charge and our employees across our distribution centers and work we’ve done across our offices. But it’s been a goal that’s been years in the making. We have a lot of plastic, we have a lot of packaging, and we have a long tail of other products from fuel canisters to bike tubes that come into our stores. Our employees have to really touch and feel and engage that waste every day. They truly are at the front lines and it’s something that because you are touching and feeling it feels more tangible, let’s say, sometimes than talking about carbon emissions or metric tons[?] carbon. It’s right in front of you. We’ve done a lot of great work in that space and have done a lot of really interesting, exciting initiatives from back hauling plastic from our stores and working with Treks to turn that into plastic decking. Is just one example of something that’s really innovative we’ve done on that front. Again, all kudos to our employees for really helping drive that work.

John: Does the 90 plus percent aspirational go back to your CEO back in 2006. So it’s been 19 years in the making to get here.

Andrew: That’s right. At the time we set a goal around 2020 to be zero waste, which we didn’t have a definition for, nor did industry. It took us another five years to really define, well what do we mean by that? But yes.

John: Still.

Andrew: She really set that vision back in 2006 and we’re really excited to be on the precipice of achieving it here in 2025.

John: Let’s just be honest, 2006 is OG type of stuff in terms of sustainability.
No one was setting even any goals back then. It was a much more of a rarity to have a sustainability, a chief sustainability officer or director of climate. So she was very forward thinking by even starting that conversation.

Andrew: We’ve been really fortunate to have a long line of really visionary leaders at REI and Sally Jewel at the time, I think was several steps ahead of where other corporates were in thinking about this topic. So really lucky. I think that’s a good lesson here. Oftentimes it just takes a visionary leader putting out an aspiration into the future, even if you don’t know how you’re going to get there. Sometimes that’s the catalyst, that’s the linchpin that you need.

John: That’s awesome. Besides waste talk a little bit about climate and sustainability with regards to the work that you and your colleagues do. Since you laid out the goals and say about six years ago and a roadmap, how are you progressing both on your sustainability goals and your climate goals during your tenure the last six years?

Andrew: We’ve been making good progress. We have been reducing our footprint year over year, the last few years, and we’ve been reducing it against 2019, our baseline. So two years ago was the first year we could really definitively say, Hey, we started to decouple our growth as a business from our emissions. So 23 our revenue was higher than 2019, but our carbon emissions were lower. And we’ll see that trend continue here in 24 when we come out with our impact report. So that’s a great trend. We have momentum. We need to continue to build upon that momentum. We need action now, we need to continue to make progress over perfection and that’s something we’re very focused on. But we’ve seen really good progress in sort of our total emissions coming down. I’ll say as well we’ve seen really great progress just in the partnerships we’ve stood up and the collaboration that we’ve been able to stand up as a part of our work. Our climate strategy is really based upon cooperation. We like to use the term cooperative action as a co-op. It’s probably pretty on the nose, but we look to collaborate with others. We want the solutions we’re coming up with to be able to scale. We want others to be able to come along with us sort of follow in our wake. Within that mindset we look for solutions that are moving with speed and with scale. Because time is of the essence here and we really need to identify that short list of solutions that can be implemented quickly and that are scalable beyond our four walls to really a global perspective and a global platform. One other body of work I wanted to mention as a retailer, we obviously make our in-house brand co-op brands, but we sell a thousand plus brands within our stores. So big names that you might think of, north Face, Patagonia, but a really long list of much smaller outdoor brands. One resource that we’ve had for years now is called our Product impact standards. Those are a list of requirements and aspirations that we ask our brands to adhere to as they’re doing their work, as they’re running their business. These are things like setting climate targets and taking action against those targets. These are things like thinking about the products and the materials and the impact of the materials that are going into the products that we’re selling. And a whole long sort of guide of aspirations and requirements again, that our brands must adhere to be able to be sold in an REI. So I’ll just offer that as an example. We sell products, products have the biggest impact and we’re doing what we can within our business to decarbonize those. But we’re also asking all the other businesses and all the other brands that we work with to do the same via that resource.

John: That’s fascinating. Is that more and more a common practice in the retail industry?

Andrew: I think so, yes, definitely that brands are looking to hold their suppliers and their partners to some of the same aspirations and standards that they adhere to within their business. I think we’ve certainly seen other examples of that.

John: You used the word in a very gentle way, ask, how big is the department underneath colleagues that you have that have to manage that ask and how black and white or gray is the ask?

Andrew: Well, our team manages that standard. But then we work with all of our buyers and merchandising partners who are out there working with the brands that we retail to make sure we have those products in stock to sell online in our stores. We assess sort of the brand’s performance against these standards every year and we get a scorecard. What we can do is give that scorecard to our buyers, to our merchandising partners and arm them with that information when they go have a discussion with the brands to say, Hey, [crosstalk]

John: Really smart’s

Andrew: Here’s areas where you’re outperforming and doing well. Here’s a few areas where we’d like to see you do a little bit better, and we have ideas and resources that can help you along that journey. So it’s really to help facilitate a conversation. We’re far more about carrots than sticks here. Our brand as well participates in that. We would [inaudible] REI co-op brands accountable to those standards.

John: Well, but you’re leading by example and you’re creating an inspirational set of guidelines that you then also commercialize by allowing your buyers to be involved with it too. Which again goes totally disavows all the wrong information that was put out about 20 years ago about sustainability. Sustainability when done correctly actually is great for the bottom line and not the opposite, but that’s the journey of sustainability from the original thought process about it to how you’re executing it now.

Andrew: Ultimately, we want a better product. We want a more durable product, we want a higher performing product. We’re all after similar outcomes, whether you’re looking at it through a business perspective or a sustainability perspective.

John: You see your collaborations both upstream and downstream. It’s with your, like you said, the product manufacturers that are making these great products that are sold in all your wonderful stores, but it’s also your downstream on the diversion side too. It’s partnerships and collaborations with both up and downstream partners.

Andrew: That’s right. That’s one of the reasons a few years ago we formally stood up a line of business called Resupply. Which is our used gear business. So we have these garage sales for years. Every store where we’d sell returned items gear that we couldn’t sell for whatever reason, we would sell through these garage sales. We really formalized that into a line of business called resupply. So that we can keep product and use longer. Because the most sustainable thing you can do is to keep using product to, if you’re going to go get the newest thing then pass along your gently used backpack or tent down to the next person. If it’s been damaged, can we repair it? Yes, we do really look at sort of the full circle of product usage and recyclability. Certainly this notion of circularity is something that the industry has really embraced over the last few years, and we embrace it as well.

John: Well, that makes total sense. Because as you and I know generationally speaking, we’re going from the legacy, go and throw economy, the linear economy now to the circular economy. That’s a trend that’s not going to not go away. It’s only going to grow and reuse is one of the most viable forms of recycling and circularity. Sounds like a brilliant program. I’m sure it’s been met with great results.

Andrew: It’s been really successful. It’s not only a way to keep gear and product in use longer, but it’s a way to invite a broader set of customers and folks interested in REI into the outdoor space. So it’s a win-win across the board.

John: If you’re a listener, if you who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Andrew Dempsey with us today. He’s the director of climate for REI. To find Andrew and his colleagues on all the important impacts they’re making, please go to www.rei.com/impact. It’ll also be in the show notes, so you don’t have to write it down. Andrew, there’s not a day that we could turn on the news and not hear about the boom that AI and robotics are going to bring both our personal lives and our professional lives. How much is AI and robotics going to play a role at REI now and in the future as you continue to drive all these wonderful and important issues and impact sustainability and climate change
at REI?

Andrew: Well, I’d say certainly within our own four walls, our technology and IT partners are assessing and looking at the intersection of AI with the retail industry broadly. What I’ll say from an industry perspective, I won’t claim that that our team internally has our hands on the dials of AI technology necessarily, although I think everyone’s starting to use it more and more in their day to day. I think about the impact of AI from a sustainability or climate perspective a bit more broadly. I think there’s tremendous promise out there whether we’re looking at enhancing grid infrastructure, bringing online new forms of clean energy and really just looking at solving problems of climate and broader environmental problems more broadly. I think AI holds tremendous promise there. The flip side to that is we know that it uses a lot of energy. It uses a lot of electricity. I think we have to be really cautious and pragmatic as we see AI grow to ensure that we’re feeling as much of that growth as possible with clean and renewable energy. The hope is that AI itself can solve some of those problems. And you get a little bit of a virtuous cycle there. But I think that’s top of mind is that industry is growing so rapidly. We need to be mindful of the types of energy that are going into AI in those data centers and potentially the impacts that that electricity, water consumption, et cetera, is having on the communities where those data centers are going. That’s something we’re thinking about. But I think broadly, my hope is that AI can really help to solve some big problems that we’ve been trying to tackle within the climate industry more broadly.

John: Well, you said something earlier, Andrew, I find that so many of your wonderful members of your fraternity that I get to interview on this show, talk about all the time, the need for speed. We can’t do this stuff fast enough to decarbonize and cool down this planet. Talk a little bit about and this is an apolitical show, but talk a little bit about thriving industry or wonderful brands like yours that are driving this important and impactful change with regards to climate and waste aversion sustainability. But then also the role of politics. Do we need a better harmonization of politics with industry, or is really industry going to transcend politics, no matter who the person is sitting in our state governor’s office or our federal offices and things like such? Are companies going to continue to drive this sustainability revolution that we’re living through right now and this massive shift from the linear economy to the circular economy?

Andrew: I think corporates, I think companies broadly have a huge and important role to play in leadership, particularly as it comes to climate and climate action. You mentioned speed. One of the tactics, one of the attributes that corporates can embrace is moving quickly. We have agency to understand what our customers want, what values we’re looking to? To sort of infuse into the actions we’re taking. Basically, what I’m saying is we have agency to set our own course and to set our own strategy. We have dollars, we have budgets set aside for this work that we can flow into solutions that are new and innovative and we can move quickly to do that. I think sometimes corporates can move a little bit faster than the public space can move in deploying those dollars and taking on a little bit more risk and accepting a higher probability potentially of failure. But then being able to learn from that failure and parlaying it into the next action or tactic that we do. So certainly I think the public space, I think the nonprofit space, I think the academic space, the research space more broadly, everyone’s playing a role here but I do think corporates play a really unique role given the passion that, for REI specifically that our customers and members have for this work and our mandate to go out there and make a difference. We can really move and influence people in a way that I think other types of organizations, other types of sectors can’t necessarily do. Last thing I’ll say is we are seeing more and more regulation come down the pike as it relates to climate, particularly to state level. And we’re seeing that globally in the UN, EU[?], some other places. I think broadly that’s a net positive and sort of raising the baseline of what [crosstalk] and organizations need to do. But there still needs to be a space for that voluntary leadership where you’re looking several years out, you’re doing some horizon scanning and really understanding what needs to come next and what role can we play as a corporate to go test some things and learn from them and then spread what we’re learning. I think corporates play a really unique role here in being able to move quickly and drive impact you.

John: You mentioned earlier you have 25 million members since the inception of your company. How’s the conversation been going with them with regards to sustainability and are they leaning in and cheering you on with all the great work you and your colleagues are doing in climate and sustainability at REI?

Andrew: Absolutely. We get the pleasure of hearing from our members quite often. Our members are really passionate about the work that we’re doing in the space. Again, that passion goes all the way back to our founding and even going back into the seventies where we really started to first formalize stewardship opportunities and gatherings where members and employees could come together and go out and do service work in the communities and in the local environment. So, fast forward 50 years our membership base is still really passionate and involved in this work. I think going back to our work on waste diversion, that’s a place where we hear a lot from our members and packaging is something that we’re continuing to make progress on. Again, going back to the analogy I gave with our employees earlier where waste is really something you can touch and feel and it feels tangible, that’s the same with with our customers and with our members when they’re getting product from us. They can see that packaging. A few years ago with our private label brand, we stopped using plastic poly bags to ship our product. We now use what’s called the roll time method. Where we just roll up the product and tie it with a compostable rafa tie. For most of the apparel that we’re shipping now, there’s no plastic. Our customers and members notice that. Of course they’re encouraging us to do more and we’re continuing to do more and looking at what’s next there. But yes they definitely remain passionate about this topic.

John: Andrew, what I always find when I get to meet great people like you that are doing important work that you’re doing is, so your impact report is coming out in May. Talk about what you’re most excited about it? But someone like you I know is already looking forward to all the great evolutionary changes you can make for next year’s impact report. So what gets you most excited about what’s about to be announced in the new impact report? But what also is getting you and your team really excited with regards to what’s next for your climate program at REI for next year’s report?

Andrew: That’s a great question. Well, I hinted that on the zero waste front, on our 90% diversion front, we’re going to have an exciting announcement there. So I’m really excited to announce our performance against that target when our impact report comes out. I’ll say as well, I’ll shift over to energy here for a second because at the root cause of most of our missions you come back to energy. So we’re doing a ton of work up and down our entire value chain to source and find new partnerships on the renewable energy front. So we’ve got two folks on my team that are fully devoted to doing renewable energy work. We just inked a really exciting new clean energy deal, long-term deal here in the first quarter this year that we haven’t announced publicly yet. But we will be talking about more later this year, and it’ll certainly be a highlight for our 25 impact report. It’s a renewable energy deal that we’ve done in partnership with another organization that looks well out into the future and brings online a lot of new to the world renewable energy. So we’re excited about that one. That’s here in the US. I’ll say one project I’ll highlight from the report that’s about to come out here in May. That looks back on 24. We continue to do some really interesting work on the renewable energy front, up our value chain. So there’s an organization called Power Trust that we’ve engaged with who is working with energy developers primarily in Southeast Asia, so think Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, et cetera, to bring online new renewable energy in those countries. We have forward purchase agreements to purchase those wrecks. But then we work with our suppliers who are manufacturing product in those countries to retire those wrecks on their behalf. So it’s a way that we’re working with our suppliers over there to connect to them with new forms of renewable energy. That’s one sort of for backward looking proof point, and then one forward proof point[crosstalk]

John: What gets you inspired? Obviously, you have all the great colleagues in your industry. The other sustainability officers and impact and climate officers. But do you lean to them? Do you look to other retailers or do you look at anomalies outside of just industry related information and you get inspired otherwise?

Andrew: Well, I think we look a lot of places to get inspired. One of the things I love about working in this discipline is it’s incredibly dynamic. So what was the best practice or what was the new innovation six months ago is no longer. We’ve moved on to the next thing. I love just reading about, yes, what other corporates are doing, again, I mentioned collaboration. We have open lines to a ton of leading organizations in the space, and there’s a lot of exchange of ideas through industry organizations or just through more bilateral partnerships that we’ve stood up with other orgs. I try to spend time every week just reading about what’s going on in the RD space and understanding what’s next in the electrification space or what’s next in decarbonized transportation or project manufacturing. I think there’s some really exciting things going on in the material innovation space. We brought on board a couple years ago a director of material research and innovation over from Nike, and he’s doing really exciting work with our in-house brand to look at the materials that we’re using to design our products. I try to absorb all of this information from our team as well. We’ve got a team of over 10 sustainability practitioners who are also scanning the horizon and looking to next and coming up with great ideas. So it’s really an all of the above approach for how we’re thinking about what comes next.

John: Well, whatever comes next that you want to talk about again on our show, you’re always welcome back here, Andrew. You’re just doing amazing work. I want to tell our listeners again to find Andrew and all of his colleagues who are doing this important work in climate and also impact. Please go to www.rei.com/impact. Andrew, thanks for not only spending 45 minutes with us today on the Impact Podcast, but more importantly I’m really grateful to you and all your colleagues at REI for all the work you’re doing in climate sustainability impact and way beyond. Thanks so much again for your time today.

Andrew: Thanks for having me, John. This was great.

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