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John: Welcome to another edition of the impact podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so honored to have with us today, Gaby Infante she’s the director of corporate ESG at T. Rowe Price. Welcome to the impact podcast, Gaby.

Gaby Infante: Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

John: Oh, that’s so nice. And Gaby, before we talk about all the impactful and important things that you’re doing at T. Rowe Price, can you share a little bit about your background and how you even got here?

Gaby: Sure. So it’s I guess I took the long way around of ending back in Maryland and I’ll explain why.

John: Okay.

Gaby: I’ve only been at T. Rowe Price for about 2 years. So I started in July of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. Before that I lived in New York. I was a financial analyst at S&P Global. But before that I was employed in a Multilateral Development Bank based in DC and I was actually residing in Maryland. So that’s why I say I took the long way around to end up living in Maryland yet again.

John: Oh, where did you grow up, Gaby?

Gaby: I was born in Mexico city, but I was raised by my grandparents in Southern California. So I have a bit of a mixed background. I’m very grateful for that. So I was exposed to two languages and two cultures at a very early age.

John: Also got your way through some very, very impressive universities. You’re a bear and a bulldog. Can you share a little bit about that?

Gaby: Yeah, that’s actually a really cute way to think about it. So I went to law school in the University of California, Berkeley. I was very fortunate to be able to focus my studies on energy, environmental and natural resource law. And Berkeley has a great program for that, by the way, I highly recommended. And then I was very lucky to have landed a job opportunity in DC. So that was the Multilateral Development back then that I was referencing as things evolved there, I spent about close to 9 years in that place. So in that capacity as an Environmental and Social Safeguard Specialist and Advisor my job eventually evolved and I ended up in the situation where I was supervising a large team. And so I thought, why don’t I go back to school and earn the academic credentials to support what I do in real life anyway, because I think that will give me even more strength when I go to negotiate budgets and just terms of agreements and so forth. And so I decided to go back to school and that’s when I pursued my MBA at Yale University. And again, I was very lucky to have found a program that really suited my interest and my needs at that time. And so I focused on sustainability the second year of the MBA, so great experiences, both of them again, I highly recommend them.

John: When you were growing up, was it sustainability when you were a young woman and thinking about what you wanted to do in your career and your path. Did you think about sustainability or were you thinking of banking or what was your goals as a teenager and then as a young lady in her early 20s? And how did sustainability become really your specialty and your desire of a career path to pursue?

Gaby: Great question. And again, long and winding road, I was always very passionate about the environment. So I knew I wanted to do something relating to the environment, environmental management, environmental impact, something in that vein. And so that’s why I went to law school and specialized in environmental law. However, we need to go back in time a bit and situate ourselves in this was 2010, right. So I graduated right around that time from law school. ESG was not what it is today. And so you have to think about the evolution of ESG in a way back then, even my own employer, I think had this hope that it would eventually go away that it was just a buzzword that would eventually go out of style or something like that.

John: Right.

Gaby: I think that 14 years later, or so 12 years later, we can safely say it’s become something very mainstream. So it kind of happened by accident, right. I knew that I wanted to do something environmentally focused, but I didn’t know that that’s what ESG would eventually become. It would grow, would become this umbrella that would also consider social issues and good governance of environmental and social issues. And that’s where you really come up with that acronym ESG.

John: Got it. Now, you’re the director of corporate ESG at T. Rowe Price, which is really one of the greatest and most iconic brands on this planet in terms of capital investments and things of that such had that role been already established prior to you, or is this a new role that they created and you came in 2020?

Gaby: Yeah, that’s another great question. So newly created role, which represents a lot of opportunities, but challenges at the same time. And so opportunity because I got to walk in and create something new, which I really love. I really find that that is the best way to really test one’s own abilities and to be able to branch out and partner with a lot of different business units and colleagues within the world that is T. Rowe, which is a very vast world. And more so when you think of the pandemic, right? So I’ve had two years of 100% remote work. And so on the one hand we have that, but to answer your question, newly created role. So being able to walk in, create something new, incredible opportunity at the same time, very challenging, not just because of the pandemic, but also making sure that I was capturing people’s interests and needs and really steering the company and the direction that senior leadership wants it to go.

John: That’s so fascinating. And like you said, I mean, you’re sort of like then you’re sort of become an entrepreneur in residence. So basically an entrepreneurial venture inside of a much larger venture, because you’re stepping into a place that there’s no footprints before you, that you’re going to be doing it all from scratch. So talk about your role there, like how you start this role that has been created for you, how narrow or wide do you start? I mean, that’s a fascinating, where’s your starting place and how do you even benchmark that?

Gaby: Yeah. So what I did was not unlike what you and I are doing right now. So I reached out to colleagues and started interviewing them because yes, on the one hand I did build things from scratch, but it’s also true that there was a really deep passion throughout T. Rowe. So people were taking on these environmental and social concerns kind of to the side of their desk, which really speaks to the passion at T. Rowe for ESG, because you already have a full-time job. And then you’re doing this kind of as a hobby, but you also recognize it’s important. So you take on this extra commitment. So that really spoke to me about the deep commitment and dedication at T. Rowe for ESG. So I started interviewing people, really getting a sense of where we were and where we needed to be. And for that, I did look externally look to where our peers were and how we could close the gaps with our peers. Really coming up with a system to benchmark our own corporate ESG footprint and see where we needed to go. And of course, involving senior leadership, every step of the way, like I said, to make sure that I was capturing the vision that they had for ESG. And it’s really interesting because this all kind of moved in parallel tracks with a sort of education process with everything ESG. There’s always that notion that things are very new to people and that’s why they tend to be scary. So how can you approach this from like a client friendly way? Because for me, all of my internal stakeholders in a way are clients. So introducing them to the world of ESG, without it being scary and also capturing the vision for the company,

John: I get doing these interviews over the last 15 years. I’ve really had such a lucky opportunity to interview so many wonderful directors of ESG or directors of sustainability or chief sustainability officers. Is it a friendly fraternity that you get then to access and there a fraternity of ESG leaders across the world that are willing to share best practices with you as you step into this brand new role to help accelerate your learning curve and get down to the work of doing the important work as to why you were hired?

Gaby: Yes, exactly. I mean this, like they say, right, it takes a Village. And so that means not just internally, but also externally I found talking to peers is a great way to have the sounding board of sorts to be able to come up with a common language for ESG, because at the end of the day, we all have the same goals and the same targets. And so it’s really about tailoring that unified vision to your own business and coming up with your own metrics and key performers indicators that make sense for you. But at the same time, it’s this common language for ESG.

John: It’s actually one common planet that we all get to share. So as you improve the planet with all the practices that you’re implementing at T. Rowe Price and as the same leaders in other huge organizations that are in similar positions, as you, as they do the same, we all benefit from all that, that great work anyway. So it makes sense that you’re one big friendly fraternity. That makes a lot of sense.

Gaby: Yes.

John: Talk about your work though, so our listeners and our viewers, and for those of you who just joined us, we’re so excited to have Gaby Infante with us today. She’s the director of corporate ESG at T. Rowe Price to find her at T. Rowe Price, you can go to www.troweprice.com and to find their sustainability report, go to troweprice.com/sustainability report. Gaby is part of what you do also a toggling between inside and outside work. What I mean by is, are you both influencing and directing the interior goals with regards to ESG and initiatives inside your own company in terms of getting to net zero and other important sustainability and ESG goals, but also helping the directors who are in charge of investing in T. Rowe Price in terms of guidance, in terms of their investment strategies and the portfolio companies that you guys invest in. Is it a bilateral process that you’re working on?

Gaby: That’s a really interesting question. And again, it leads me to a bit of history telling. So going back in time, T. Rowe price has had a team fully dedicated to responsible investing since 2017. And I did not join until 2020, right? So at some point of that sustainability journey, it’s coming to that realization that as a corporate entity, T. Rowe price needed to define its own views for environmental, social, and governance. And so that’s really where the role came in, the role that I’m occupying currently, that’s where the need for that role was recognized and then posted. And then, as I said, I was very lucky to be able to walk in and fill a newly created role specifically because T. Rowe went through that exercise internally and identified that gap. So while I do not influence that responsible investing team directly, it needs to be both teams need to be in close coordination, right. Because as we were talking about previously, there’s that common language for ESG. So we’re not going to find ourselves in a situation where we would recommend that investing companies do X, Y, and Z, and then not do those things ourselves as a corporate entity, right. So very close alignment and coordination. But my role as director of corporate ESG is focused mainly on providing things like strategic leadership, hands on coordination development, implementation of firm wide ESMG initiatives. And basically what that means is to embed sustainability in the firm’s operations, and then be able to communicate that progress to stakeholders and by stakeholders. I mean, both internal and external. So it’s kind of a feedback loop, I would say where…

John: Right, right.

Gaby: … those coordination and both teams would not do anything in contradiction to one another.

John: Larry Fink comes out about 18 months ago and says at BlackRock the biggest investment firm on the planet capital firm investment capital firm. And it says all of his portfolio companies are now going to have to not only act the right way in terms of ESG goals and put actions behind their words, but they’re also going to have to report on those as you just pointed out the reporting element and that trans radical transparency is critical. And he said, if you don’t report and don’t act the right way, you’re no longer going to be a portfolio company of this firm, similarly at T. Rowe Price, we talk about the word ESG, circular economy, sustainability becoming now no longer just ideas or buzzwords, but becoming long term trends. What does that mean at T. Rowe in terms of driving your sustainability goals as also a huge financial institution and what’s the ripple effect to other financial institutions as well beyond T. Rowe?

Gaby: Yeah. So another great question and super interesting to tackle. I feel like there was a lot to unpack there.

John: There was, but I know we’re in good hands and you’ll be able to unpack it.

Gaby: Right. So I think you need to remember that ESG tends to encompass a very broad swath of issues, right?

John: Right.

Gaby: From our own corporate carbon footprint. And what that means is when you think of our own tangible space, so the tangible footprint that we have, the buildings that we either own or lease or somehow operate. So there’s that, that’s a very tangible manifestation of ESG.

John: Right.

Gaby: Who thinks like labor practices and codes of ethics. So when you look at the SOVSG, I think that is where people kind of get a little confused because it’s a very broad range of issues, right. It’s everything from employee health and safety to human rights, to our own community impact to our philanthropic activities and so forth, right, among many others.

John: Right.

Gaby: How do all of these topics ultimately converge and to address your question? Well, they’re linked in the sense that the good management that you display for environmental and social topics and the extent to which you demonstrate that you have adequate governance of the ENS of the acronym influence your quote license to operate as a business. Right? So as we said, arguably today, ESG thankfully has become more mainstream than buzzword, but there’s also been a lot of valleys in this journey. So for sure there have been peaks, there have been positive and good moments, but it’s also been a bit of a challenge at points at some points , for example, getting our arms around something like Scope 3. Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, not to get too technical, but there is a lot of buzz, a lot of annoys, sorry around that.

John: Yeah.

Gaby: Currently because of the regulator here in the U.S. and so forth.

John: Sure.

Gaby: Just looking at key trends in our industry. So for sure, one of them is really getting our arms around Scope 3, which again, it means anything in your supply chain, any sustainability related initiative beyond your four walls, so to speak. So it’s anything from your commuter travel. So greenhouse gas emissions from commuter travel from your business travel, which was not relevant for the past 2 years, but people are traveling again. So it’s become relevant to solid waste practices to of course, for asset managers, that also means our investing activities. Right. And so that is really the crux of the matter and how we’re all trying to wrap our arms around this and how to do proper measurement and reporting of all of these great things. I really like the Bloomberg Mantra. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. [crosstalk] It’s for sure progress, not perfection, right. And we are still on this journey ourselves, but , those are some of the key trends that I’m seeing. So the whole net zero conversation, that’s in the background by 2050 or earlier social factors for sure have moved to the forefront during the pandemic, but also following the pandemic, just think of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There’s also a push for enhanced diversity equity and inclusion beyond the boardroom and workplace health and safety. Again, with the advent of the pandemic, I don’t think people really stop to think of a concept, as new as healthy buildings, for example, how does infrastructure actually influence your experience in the workplace? So a lot of great conversations going on at the same time. So never dull moment in ESG. And lastly, and I know I’ve kind of mentioned this throughout my response, but ESG data and framework integration, I’ve also seen, have become more mainstream and investors are demanding, reliable, consistent, and comparable ESG data. And that is so important because if you look around currently, we have this alphabet soup, so to speak of ESG frameworks. And so really what is the right way to talk about ESG? How do you define what is material for you in the ESG space? So those are just some of the key trends that I’m seeing.

John: Let’s talk about that, but let’s go back to what you said earlier takes a Village. When I was asking you about the fraternity of other chief sustainability officers or directors of ESG across the world, talk about your own company, how many give or take, how many employees does T. Rowe Price officially have?

Gaby: I believe it’s around 7000.

John: 7000. So let’s just take that as the rough number. So is part of what you’re doing. Also getting champions within your organization that can be part of your takes the Village Mantra to help champion different initiatives that you’re going to be laying out and initiating and implementing in the years to come. So that way you have sustainability and ESG and circular economy champions inside of T. Rowe Price to help you accomplish both the smaller goals that you set out. And then the much broader goals that you set out that are going to affect T. Rowe Price’s future for generations to come.

Gaby: Absolutely. I mean, there would be no other way to really accomplish that, that goal of embedding sustainability in our operations.

John: Right.

Gaby: When I arrived again, I know I’ve said this a couple of times already newly created role, but also discovering that there was deep passion and interest for all things sustainability. So like I said, people really taking on discrete tasks to the side of their desk, but really trying to bring that together into one cohesive narrative that we could report our progress on year over year. So developing these metrics, I think any solid ESG strategy needs to be grounded in metrics that are easily measurable, and that will allow you to track your progress year over year. So bringing kind of that good will into a strategy and also bringing that quantitative backbone to it became task number one and easier said than done because at the same time, I think something you will see in the ESG space is a tendency to be very reactive. I really want us to move to a proactive mindset, but it’s been incredibly challenging for some of the reasons I listed before is key trends.

John: Right.

Gaby: Because it’s a situation where there’s almost moving goalposts. So what looks good today might not look good enough tomorrow.

John: Right. No, you’re right. No, it’s absolutely the truth. But part of, like you say, keep saying, but it’s the truth because every one common truth that I’ve gotten out of every interview is that every chief sustainability officer or director of ESG that I’ve ever met or interviewed in these years, which is now almost 1500 of great people, is they all say it’s a journey. It’s never about perfection. And that’s the fun part, the openness to understanding that from the outset, because if we all make perfection, our goal and, and our benchmark, it’s just unattainable and we’re going to get frustrated and not even be excited to wake up and go lean into this whole journey anyway. I agree with you. It’s just about progress really. And let’s talk about your day to day though, now. So now you’re about a year into it. I’m sure you’ve been drinking from a fire hose the last 12 months over to [laugh]. So now how do you now start stratting both your short term, easy wins to get some traction, get some visibility, get some excitement going and some just low hanging fruit to borrow another metaphor, but then also some of your broader goals. How do you make a happy mix of short range, really easy with things to accomplish that, you’ll get everybody jazzed and then long arrange goals. And then how do you put those together and then put that forth now that you’ve been there about a year?

Gaby: Yeah. So I think not unlike other roles, I wake up with the clear idea of what I want to accomplish. And I very quickly realize that I won’t even get to that list until about 7:00 or 8:00 PM, right, because there’s a number of competing activities and priorities.

John: Right.

Gaby: That’s one thing for sure there’s always that challenge. I’m not going to say struggle ever. Let’s call these things challenges.

John: Yeah.

Gaby: To be able to balance ESG education internally. And so just dispelling a lot of myths around what is sustainability, what is ESG? I think if you were to ask someone in the 90s, what sustainability meant, they would somehow equate it to recycling. It’s become so much more than that, right?

John: Right.

Gaby: Again, you have to keep in mind that the goal of this role that I have is to embed sustainability in the firm’s operations, but it’s also embedding it in its corporate philosophy. So it has to be something that trickles from top to bottom. And how do we get there? Well, another myth that I am very actively looking to dispel every single day that I turn my computer on is for people to understand that something like ESG reporting is not an end in itself. And I say that because I think there’s a tendency to really stress a lot on the report. So your annual report, it sounds obvious, but it comes out once a year. So it’s not meant to be an end in itself really.

John: Right.

Gaby: It’s been really challenging to debunk that myth, right. So to really do away with that notion, it’s really about documenting progress and performance. So again, going back to progress, not perfection. So just keeping those two ideas in the back of your mind, and then adding a third, which is always being in alignment to what the investing team is doing. So we want alignment. We don’t want to have contradictory views of ESG that’s for sure. So again, looking to build this common language for ESG. And so with those 3 key kind of indicators in mind, things that I am actively working on and really pursuing to improve every single day. And for some of these examples that I will share with you, it’s been really a labor of love, right? For example, publishing our corporate annual report, our ESG corporate annual report deepening our alignment with internationally recognized disclosure framework. So as I said, it’s a bit of an alphabet soup, but we’ve been very intentional about vocally supporting three frameworks. And so I will mention two of them. One of them is the task force on climate related financial disclosure. So we’re really keen to improve our disclosures recommended by that framework, sorry. And another one are the UN sustainable development goals. So really deepening our alignment with those two frameworks. Another key priority for me, day to day work, and also, hand in hand with the whole ESG education component that I mentioned, because again, it takes a village I’m not going out there and accomplishing alignment with these major international frameworks on my own. This is really T. Rowe Price Group that needs to accomplish these very lofty goals. I am only steering and showing the way, but I’m not getting this done by myself by any stretch of the imagination. That said another one of my goals, and I’m really looking forward to accomplishing this is focusing on delivering best in class corporate ESG reporting. Again, this is not contradict what I said earlier. I know that reporting is not an end to itself, but it’s a really useful publication. It has a very broad audience. So it has people who potentially want to work at T. Rowe, NGOs, the press, investors, clients, even our own associates. How do you foster associate engagement with the work that I do? So this publication serves many purposes and that’s why I’m putting a lot of time and energy into it. It’s something that I’m very proud of since I joined T. Rowe really taking a closer look at how we report things out again, externally, but also internally.

John: Can I pause you right there?

Gaby: Sure.

John: You know something really important, we’ve talked during this discussion a lot about the pandemic’s effect and how that also sort of changes the algorithm again, as you take on this new challenge and opportunity at the same time. So part of the reporting and getting it out there both internally and externally is not only for employment attraction, but it’s also for employee retention, which has become a challenge across the world, actually. And what we’ve learned post pandemic is people just don’t want to work for a paycheck. They really are excited about working towards a greater mission and goal and making an impact and knowing that their company is making an impact and making the world a better place. So isn’t the importance of what you’re doing post pandemic even potentially greater value than it was 2 years ago, like you say?

Gaby: Yes. And I really love what you just said because it is so very irrelevant. There is more and more data each day on how those types of factors really influence a person’s choice to seek employment.

John: Right.

Gaby: In X and Y institution. So there’s more data around that and having that in mind and, coincidentally T. Rowe Price has 2 very exciting relocation project currently in the work. So one in Baltimore, another one in London, and there’s a really important sustainability thought process behind both of those projects, which is how do you implement environmental efficiency, health, and wellness goals for a physical structure? How does that influence your workforce? And also how do you develop that as a tool to attract talent, right?

John: Right.

Gaby: So very important. It’s as you said, after the pandemic, I think it has become even more important to think of these things holistically. So sure, you know we’ve always cared about efficiency and infrastructure, but how does this translate to a physical human being as well? And how do you get people excited about working with you?

John: Does leadership allow you and encourage you to weigh in as they now create these wonderful new physical structures for the future of your employees, are you asked to also weigh in and share best practices and your thoughts as to how to create that best of breed, best of class building for the work life balance that the new generation of employees are looking for.

Gaby: Yes. And I’m so lucky to be able to say yes to that question.

John: Right.

Gaby: Because again, you want people to feel excited about their workplace and you also want to influence their health and wellness.

John: Right.

Gaby: At the same time influence the environment. So it’s an overall, win-win now it’s true that there’s a cost to sustainability, right. So perhaps if we did not implement something like a green water reuse system at one of these new buildings, it’s true that these things cost. And if we did not implement it, the cost would be less. But at the end of the day, that’s only half true, right. Because there’s also a cost to doing nothing.

John: Right.

Gaby: You have to think about, well, upfront, yes, it’s an investment, but in the longer term, I’m going to save a lot of money in the water that I’m using. And I’m also lessening the load on the local sewage system. So there’s so many things to consider when you sit down and decide to participate in one of these projects, right. When you raise your hand and you say, I think there’s a strong sustainability angle to this. There are so many things to consider.

John: That’s so fascinating. I was a few weeks back, Gaby. I was actually in London with, at one of my new clients and the gentleman, we had a 1-hour meeting scheduled and it actually lasted 3, because he actually enjoyed taking me through the renovation of his building. And this was also for a financial institution and how they had renovated the building post-pandemic to be a building for the future in terms of lead certifications, in terms of amenities for the employees and for the guests and a whole litany of issues that I would not necessarily thought of, but it was all to create better employee engagement and attraction and retention. And as you say, the ROI on that sometimes is a soft ROI, but it can be very meaningful and impactful when you look at it over years.

Gaby: Yeah, absolutely. I could not agree more with you. And I think it’s also important to reiterate that we’re always evaluating opportunities to embed sustainability in the firm’s values, right. So this is a company that cares a lot about its associate population. And this is just one way that we manifest that care and that attention and how much we want our associates to enjoy the time that they spend in the office.

John: Really, if you had your way and leadership had their way at T. Rowe Price, the goal is truly to embed sustainability, ESG and circular economy thought processes and behaviors as part of your culture and DNA at T. Rowe Price.

Gaby: Correct.

John: That’s great.

Gaby: Yeah. And I’ll just add something there, a few years ago, you would’ve probably been skeptical to some of the things I’ve said in this regard, you would’ve probably said, well, you’re in asset management. Why are you even worried about what you do with solid waste at your offices? That’s something for a manufacturing company to think about. Well, the way that I respond to that type of comment is that stakeholder expectations have never been higher and just look at the state of the planet, right. It’s really incumbent on all of us to act and to set these very ambitious goals and to be responsible. So if you’re telling a story such as we are of growing, how do you grow sustainably? That’s really the crux of my work that you can demonstrate that you’re growing as a company and at the same time being responsible about the way that you expand.

John: A 100% for those who just joined us. We’re so honored to have with us today, Gaby Infante, she’s the director of corporate ESG at T. Rowe Price to find her and her great colleagues at T. Rowe Price go to www.troweprice.com to find their sustainability report, go to troweprice.com/sustainability report. Gaby, let’s talk about now, we’ve talked about a lot of the interior short term or longer term goals that you’re working on. Obviously not a compendium list, but some of them talk a little bit about now, the exterior, some of the sustainability thoughts, and goals that come into consideration when you are working with and weighing in with T. Rowe Prices investment strategies as well.

Gaby: Yes. So interesting question. I’ll just start with a backdrop that my team focuses on corporate ESG. However, it’s not in a vacuum, right. It needs to be in close alignment and collaboration with the responsible investing team, which predates my team.

John: Right.

Gaby: Just a footnote there for almost the 2 years that I’ve been at T. Rowe. I’ve been a team of one so small, but mighty just recently grew to 2. So I can speak to 100% growth.

John: Well, that’s right. I said, I mistakenly said earlier, 1 year you’ve been there. It’s like 2 years you’ve been drinking from the fire hose, but now you get to start the implementation and you’ve doubled your staff.

Gaby: Yes.

John: Doubled your staff. That’s okay. So that’s good. They allowing you to grow because they’ve realized they’ve put a lot on your plate. Let’s just say that.

Gaby: Thank you for allowing me to say that there’s obviously an important storytelling component to my role and there it is, right. So I was able to expand my team in 2 years.

John: That’s good. You got maybe 2 more years. They’ll allow you to bring on two more. You don’t know,

Gaby: It’s always looking for new opportunities to grow on a team and be more impactful.

John: That’s great.

Gaby: No, but seriously, to answer your question. ESG plays a key role within investments at T. Rowe Price.

John: Right.

Gaby: Also, I think it’s important to, for me to mention that ESG acronym doesn’t represent one investment style. It is used to represent the concept of considering environmental, social, and governance factors within the investment process. And so we currently offer 3 types of investment strategies, ESG integration, socially responsible investments. Sorry, and impact, and nearly all the assets we manage on behalf of clients utilize ESG integration about $95.4 billion is in socially responsible investment strategies, leaving numbers and data aside. We recently joined the net zero asset managers initiative. So very exciting to…

John: What does that mean? Tell me what that organization, what does that organization do and what does net zero really mean for our listeners and our viewers?

Gaby: What that initiative does, or what it’s looking to do is to support the goal of net zero. So zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner, and our net zero investment products will utilize the Paris align investment initiative, net zero investment framework, which is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s basically a framework designed to allow for the economy to transition to net zero. So bringing all carbon emissions down or greenhouse gas emissions to be precise down to zero what’s important. I mean, there’s a lot of things that are important there, but again, going back to something that I mentioned earlier in our conversation about Scope 3. So Scope 3, which is what you admit beyond your 4 walls, your proverbial 4 walls, which is quote unquote supply chain for an asset manager. That means your investment activity. So major step forward for us to have joined this pledge, committing to bring our mission in our investment activities down to zero by 2050 or sooner.

John: Got it. Understood. And I just want to say this I’m much, much older than you. So I see those kind of goals that I see 2050, and I can’t help, but think it just seems so far away. It’s 28 years from now. Do you feel hopeful that as a world, not T. Rowe Price, but as a world of great leaders like you, can we truncate that anyway? Can we get that number down from 2050 to 2040, or even lower? Because it just feels like the climate change has really happened in my lifetime, in every community that I travel to and live in. It just seems like the climate is definitely changed. I grew up in New York city. I live now in California and I have an office still in New York and in many other parts of the world and it climate change is here and it’s real and it’s no longer debatable. Can we get the net zero at zero goals down from 2050 or you really think that’s the timeline.

Gaby: I think we definitely should, whether we can, there’s a lot behind there.

John: Yeah.

Gaby: Right. Certainly the goal is to get there much sooner. And I’ll give you an example on the corporate side. So not to get too much into the weeds because I realize once I start with Scope 1, 2, 3, I lose people.

John: Oh, no.

Gaby: To think of our own direct carbon footprint. So what I was mentioning earlier as well about our own buildings. I do have a plan to reach these net zero goals from a corporate side sooner than 2050. So currently evaluating opportunities, just revamping environmental goals at that corporate level for us, I do see a path to get there before 2050. It definitely needs to be the global imperative, but like I said, there’s a lot behind being able to say that we can.

John: Right.

Gaby: As a global community do that, but we definitely should.

John: Got it.

Gaby: Yeah. I agree with you when you started asking me that question, I actually thought you were going to take a different direction because when I started socializing some of these plans I would get these types of responses. Like, “well, I’m not going to be here by then, so why should I care?”

John: Right. No, and it’s a legitimate question that people ask as you’re trying to build a team and a group of champions behind you.

Gaby: Yeah.

John: It’s hard to think that far out. So that’s why I always think about great people in your position. How do you come up with short term goals to get short term goals, to get people excited and long term goals as well? Like 2050 is. So that way there’s a happy balance of getting things done and checking them off the list and getting people so totally jazzed. But then of course you have the greater goals out there as well.

Gaby: Now, that’s so important to have those shorter term goals that people that are on your team are able to track their own progress and how they play a part in contributing to those corporate goals. Like I said, associate engagement is really key and again, it takes a Village to be successful.

John: But having almost a hundred billion in socially responsible investments, that’s a very, very impactful role that you guys get to play. That’s a very impactful role. So it’s great that it’s in the hands of you and your colleagues that you’re going to be making those decisions now and in the future, because that’s what I really think is going to change the planet and make the world a better place. More of that socially responsible investing.

Gaby: I agree.

John: Talk a little bit about the future. You know, this has been obviously an exciting and impactful 2 years for you as you’ve gotten your learning curve down. So now that the pandemic is starting to hopefully go from a pandemic to an endemic, what does that mean for you obviously working out of your home the last couple of years, as most of us have been around the world. Now, do you toggle between in the future between the office at home and then soon do you go on the road and what is going on the road mean for you in terms of seeing and meeting other people? And what’s those kind of goals look like for just you in how you’re growing your position and the goals that you’ve created at T. Rowe Price.

Gaby: Yeah. Another great question. And I’ll just start by reminding everyone that prior to relocating to Baltimore, I was in New York and I love New York for many different reasons, but among the top 3 was the walkability of the city.

John: Right.

Gaby: That is not something that I have in my current situation. And I really miss it for me. Driving again has become a practical, but also a philosophical problem. Quite honestly, I knew that it was going to be a big adjustment for me. And for sure it has been, so to answer your question, I’m still working from home, but I make it a point obviously to meet people whenever I can. So I will walk down to the office to meet people. I’m still, you know, I’m not a fan of driving,

John: Right. I’m with you, so funny, I grew up in New York, Gaby, and when I go back to New York, because we have an office there and I go take meetings or other things there. I track my steps every day. I have over 20,000 steps a day easily in New York. I struggle to do 10,000 steps where I live in California because it’s just a driving city and that’s sad. Like you said, I so miss the walkability of great cities like New York it’s once you get used to it, it’s hard to go any other way backwards.

Gaby: It is. And another reason I mentioned that is because again, to bring the relocation project back to the forefront, so really looking forward to our new headquarters in Baltimore opening in 2024, and yes, I will be walking to that building as well. It just illustrates that I’m really looking forward and I’m very happy to start seeing some of the initiatives I mentioned earlier. And a lot of that work that has been happening behind the scenes. I really excited about it being realized and start becoming tangible such as again, the relocation and just achieving lead platinum specifically for our new headquarters. So very excited about that. It would be our first lead platinum property. So I’m personally incredibly excited about that challenge.

John: With good reason. When is London, when is your new offices in London open?

Gaby: Those are set to open next year. So a bit earlier than the Baltimore project. Yes.

John: Got it.

Gaby: But just generally, when I think about the industry, so I have little doubt now in the continued importance of ESG and its mission. And as you and I have talked about during this hour, protecting air, our air, water, and land for ourselves and future generations is part of this mission. So really dispelling that skepticism of, well, 2050, that’s a long way ahead. Why should I care, et cetera, right. It’s really…

John: Right.

Gaby: It’s really a shared goal and a shared mission. So of course there will continue to be many obstacles ahead. I do not doubt that for one second, but I will continue relying on smart and strategic partnerships just as I have been doing these past 2 years at T. Rowe. So really going out and pitching my role throughout the organization, asking business partners who wanted to work with me on X or Y project. Yes, it was challenging. But I questioned, if I had walked into a situation with a full team, well staffed with a budget assigned to it, would I have had these opportunities to meet as many colleagues and to get people excited about ESG. I don’t think that would’ve been the situation. And so I’m actually happy that things happened the way they did.

John: Perfect. Any final thoughts before we sign off for today?

Gaby: Just making a positive difference that will be the true measure of our success. And again, I’m confident that we will succeed.

John: Oh, I’m confident you’re going to succeed too, Gaby. This is not the last time I’m going to have you on the impact visit. It’s going to be fun to have you on in the years to come to share all the success and the wins that you guys rack up. When does your new sustainability report come out? So our viewers and listeners can look forward to looking at it.

Gaby: Yeah, thanks for that question. So we’re expecting the release this fall. So either late August or early September.

John: Got it. And you mentioned at the top of the show, you were raised by your grandparents. Are they still alive?

Gaby: They are not actually my grandmother passed away during the pandemic. So that was also very hard.

John: I’m sorry to hear that because all I can say is this, I know there’s somewhere on this, in this great universe that we live in. And boy, you made them proud with what you did with them, raising you to end up a bear and a bulldog. And now the leader and the director ESG and corporate ESG at T. Rowe Price. What a journey, but boy, you did them proud for raising you. I’ll tell you that right now.

Gaby: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

John: It’s the truth. It’s the gosh on the truth and for our listeners and viewers, again, to find Gaby and her colleagues, please go to troweprice.com to find their important sustainability report, go to troweprice.com/sustainability report. Their new sustainability report comes out sometime this fall. Look for it. Gaby, we’re going to have you back on the impact podcast. Thank you. And all the leadership team from T. Rowe Price for making the world a better and greener place. We’re all so grateful for all the important work and impactful work that you do. And I can’t wait to have you back on to report on all the important things you’ve accomplished along the way.

Gaby: Thank you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I love talking to you.

John: This episode of the impact podcast has 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, the fine Closed Loop Partners. Please go to www.closelooppartners.com.

John Shegerian: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored today to have with us Alison Presley, who manages the Travelocity Travel for Good program and Travel for Good website. Welcome to Green is Good, Alison.

Alison Presley: Thanks for having me.

John: Our listeners are so used to us taking them around the world. We do interviews, literally, in every continent from Europe to South America to Asia, and now we finally have the woman who can take them to these wonderful and distant lands the green way.

Alison: That’s right.

John: Listen, Alison, share with us a little bit, first, the Alison Presley journey at Travelocity, which is one of the world’s great websites, especially for travel, and how you started there, why you started there, and how you evolved into this wonderful position managing Travelocity’s Travel for Good site. By the way, for our listeners out there, if you have your iPad, laptop, desktop open now, go to their website, Travelocity.com/travelforgood. Alison, talk about your journey.

Alison: Sure. It’s actually a pretty good story. A lot of companies these days have cause marketing programs. Some executive dreams it up in a cubicle somewhere, but our story is a little different. In 2006, a group of very passionate employees came to upper management and said, “Hey, we’re really passionate about what we do, and we think that we should be ensuring that all of the positive aspects of travel are highlighted while we decrease the negative aspects.” Their vision for that is what eventually became our Travel for Good program.

John: How long have you been there? You’ve been there since 2006, you said?

Alison: The program kicked off in 2006. I was not yet here, but many of the original people who founded it are still. For a long time, it was managed by passionate employees when they had a moment. Two years ago, they decided to make it a full-time position. That is when I began to campaign really hard because I’d been helping for a while with the program, and I really wanted to do it. Lucky for me, I did actually score the position, so I’ve been in this role about two years now. Travel for Good, just so you guys have a great overview of it, its mission statement has never changed from the very first day. It’s to make the world a better place, one trip at a time. It really focuses on two main things, and that’s green travel and voluntourism. Both of those kind of roll up into a sustainable travel single goal.

John: Wow. So, make the world a better place, one trip at a time.

Alison: That’s right.

John: I love that. Mike and I are on your site now. It’s absolutely gorgeous, but walk us through it because this is important for our listeners to hear. Green travel is here now, and it can be done and it can be done easily, right online, right in front of you. Mike’s got it up on his laptop. I’ve got it up in front of me on my iPad. This is easy stuff. Now, walk us through this Travelocity Travel for Good. What does the Green Guarantee mean? Just start there because it’s right on your cover page here. What does the Travelocity Green Guarantee mean?

Alison: Sure. Really, the biggest piece of our green travel program is the Green Hotel Directory. One of the easiest ways to bring your footprint down while traveling is to choose a green hotel instead of a non-green. We have a list of more than 2,900 green hotels around the world and growing, and it’s a very tricky thing because we really want to stand by that list and want to make sure that the right hotels are flagged and we’re recognizing the partners who are really out there making a true difference. We established something called the Green Guarantee, and this is just our attempt to say, “Hey, you guys help us stay honest. If you stay at a hotel and you feel like it’s not up to par, let us know. If we fact check behind you and we agree, we’re going to go ahead and give you a $50 future travel discount, and we’re going to plant a tree in your name in a national wildlife refuge.” That is our effort to make sure that our customers are engaged and that there’s a check and balance here because it is important to us that this list is flagging truly green partners.

MIKE BRADY: You know what’s really cool, Alison, is you vet the hotels first, initially, to become green partners and get the green recommendation, but there’s a continuing vetting process going on through customer engagement, which I think is really brilliant.

Alison: Thanks. We do take it very, very seriously. When we first kicked off the Green Hotel Directory a couple of years ago, at that time, there was no definition of what it means to be green. We were really scratching our heads and were saying, “How are we going to define this?” We actually became one of the founding members of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, and that’s a big group of non-profits and companies and the United Nations is onboard, and what we did is we sat down in a room and we said, “OK, let’s just hen this down.” They looked at more than 300 green hotel certification program criteria and decided let’s harmonize this into one global definition. So, that’s the definition we work off from today, and we accept certification programs that very closely align with that. We’re not judge and jury; we’re not out there certifying hotels. We don’t want that conflict of interest, but we are working with what I call the gold standard, the best of the best, certification programs, and they’re going on the ground to the hotels. They’re looking at their energy data, they’re looking at all the innovations and making sure that everything is in line. We’re very proud of that. It is a list that we stand by.

John: I’m looking at your list right here. You have so many certification partners. This is really well done, Earth Check, Green Key, Green Glove, Green Tourism. The list is comprehensive, so you really have laid out the case, been very transparent about who your certifying partners are. We’re on Green is Good today, and people really are yearning for this knowledge and for this information. Green travel, the term green travel, what does that mean to you, Alison? What does it mean at Travelocity and to your client base?

Alison: Sure. Green travel is so important. Tourism is one of the very first industries and it’s an important source of revenue all around the world. If it’s not developed sustainably, it can have a negative effect on the local people and environment. That’s why, for us, it’s a passion. It’s what makes Travelocity different in some ways. We really are passionate travelers ourselves, and we want to make sure that travel is done right. When you take a holistic view of sustainable tourism,, this can mean everything from green innovations to fair practices when hiring local people, just anything you can do to ensure that both the natural environment and local culture stay intact so we can all enjoy these destinations for years to come.

John: Interesting. Talk a little bit about one of the words that I see on your website, and I’m not clear what it means, but I want you to define it and share it with our listeners, is this interesting word called voluntourism. What does that mean?

Alison: That’s a great question, and it’s one of the big cornerstones of our program. We’re very proud of it. Voluntourism, or volunteer vacations, are kind of like a miniature Peace Corps experience. You, as a traveler, can go for just a week, or even up to three months, and you go and give back to the local community. Instead of just going and taking pictures, you go and you plug in and you donate your time. Often, they include room and board. They’re kind of a package deal. Many of these trips have an environmental focus. For instance, at Travelocity, we are a partner with Earth Watch Institute. This is a voluntourism organization where you can spend your time volunteering in South Africa to help save the endangered hyena population, or you can take a trip down the Amazon on a historic riverboat and monitor the pink dolphins. You name it, they’ve got it. You’re working side by side with really respected scientists on really important environmental research. It’s a once in a lifetime kind of trip, and it’s really life changing. Unfortunately, they can be a little expensive, so at Travelocity, we’re very proud of this. Since 2006, we’ve been giving away eight $5,000 vacation grants to deserving Americans. You can just hop on our site at Travelocity.com/travelforgood and learn more about that. Basically, you just enter and then if you’re chosen, you get this all expenses paid, incredible trip to the destination of your choice.

John: How many times a year do you give out that $5,000 grant?

Alison: There are two cycles for the contest. We give out four in the first cycle and four in the next cycle. The next cycle will open up July 1. We’re in the process right now of choosing our winners for the first cycle.

John: Perfect. Do they have to earn it or is it strictly lottery-based, or is there some sort of criteria where people have to write an essay or send a video or something like that?

Alison: Yes, it is merit-based. What we ask is that people make a video talking about how they’re already giving back in their local community, and which of our voluntourism trips inspires them. They upload it to our site. It’s very easy. And then the first round is you send it around to friends and family for voting. What we’re really looking for is the kind of person who’s a leader and is willing to talk about their passion to friends and family. From there, we’ll have our 25 finalists, and then a group of Travelocity judges will look at 25 finalists and assess them on passion, how much they’re already giving back right now, the quality of the video, and will choose our four outstanding volunteers.

John: Wow. For our listeners out there, if you’ve just joined us, we’re so excited today to have Alison Presley on, the manager of Travelocity’s Travel for Good website. If you want to travel green, go to Travelocity.com. You can look at Travel for Good at Travelocity.com/travelforgood. Alison, when you started two years ago, how many “green hotels” did you have in your directory then, and how many are you adding a month now? Is this really a trend now where the wind is at your back?

Alison: Yes, absolutely. It’s amazing how fast it’s growing. When I first came on, I think they had like 700 green hotels. Today, we’re at 2,900 and growing. I always say, I want to make sure we’re not just adding hotels to add them. We want to add the right ones. As travelers are demanding this when they travel, it’s becoming more and more popular. What’s really exciting is we’re seeing hotels at every price point that go green. I’ve got plenty of budget-friendly hotels all the way up to extreme luxury. You name it, you can find it. One of the coolest parts about shopping for green travel today is in the early days, you had to go to a special microsite. We have a microsite on our site. Absolutely visit it to learn more, but you can actually now find these hotels by doing a normal search on Travelocity.com. You, as an average consumer, maybe you’re just beginning to go green, buying a little organic cereal, thinking about your purchases a little bit more. When you do a normal hotel search for most major destinations around the world, in the search results, you will see very clearly marked all of your green options. You can even sort by green so you can price compare among the green options.

John: That is just so great. In the metrics of when your colleagues started dreaming this up in 2006 and putting some energy towards this and sensing a trend and then they brought you on a couple of years ago, and now you’ve continued to build this, when you’re looking at the metrics that were your goals, how are your goals being achieved at Travelocity? Are you happy with the traffic and the use of this? Is it far exceeding your original dreams and goals? How is this going?

Alison: Absolutely. We did it because we’re passionate about it, but the numbers are the kind of thing that make the CEO smile also. For us, not only is there a huge increase in choice from our hotel partners coming to us and saying, “Hey, we’ve gone green. Can you help us highlight this to our customers?” But also we’re now seeing some really interesting trends. For instance, we’ve recently learned that green hotels get better customer reviews than non-green hotels. On Travelocity, you can give a hotel a number of smiley faces if you liked it, and our green hotels get more smiley faces than our non-green hotels. That’s a really neat thing. Now, are they marking them green because they noticed the eco efforts? Maybe not, but I think a hotel that’s bothering to go green, they’re looking at that experience as a whole and taking more time to think about how the customer will feel, what they can do to make it a better experience. That’s really translating to our customers, so that’s a really neat thing. We’re also having huge success with our green hotel sales. We’re just now at the tail end of our annual Earth Month sale. Every April we have a big sale on green hotels, and it’s always incredible to watch those bookings pour in and see people getting passionate about going green and saving a little money. There’s no reason this needs to cost more.

John: So interesting. One of the common themes of our show, Alison, when we talk to CEOs or founders of these amazing brands, both small and large, is the word passion, which you’ve used consistently throughout our interview. One of the things I love, your passion for what you do definitely comes through to Mike and I and to our listeners. I’m on your great website, Travelocity.com, the Travel for Good section, and I clicked onto the employee passion. Talk a little bit about the employee passion at Travelocity and how you guys give back.

Alison: Absolutely. What’s so fun about this is I have a very personal story. Part of the reason I probably landed this job, I never actually asked them, but we at Travelocity, in addition to giving away eight voluntourism grants to consumers, we give away four every year to employees. Any global employee anywhere in the world can apply. My story is that I applied. It’s pretty competitive, and I did win. Before becoming the manager of the program, I took my own voluntourism trip and traveled to Peru and then worked in an orphanage for a week. It was a really important, life changing moment for me. That’s just a part of who we are at Travelocity. These grants are something that employees are very proud of. The winners are extremely impressive, people that we love to highlight internally and externally, and that’s a big part of the program, and it has always been since the very early days. Additionally, my employees volunteered their time to help me read or grade the consumer applications for these grants, so I had a huge fleet, I call them my Travel for Good people. There are 50 of them and they’re in offices all over the world, and they donate their time to me to help the program be even better.

John: It also says here that every year you guys host a global volunteer week called Give Time Together.

Alison: That’s right. It’s coming up just next week. Good timing. You have to keep in mind that we’re owned by Sabre Holdings, so there are 9,000 of us strong in every country, almost, in 54 countries. We take one week out of the year, and we, as a company, give time in all of our local communities. Here in San Francisco, we’re actually doing a big solar cell installation for a local public school. I’m very excited about that project. Offices all over the world will be doing similar kinds of things, from soup kitchens to outdoor trail work. It depends on the office.

John: It says here that your CEO says it’s his favorite time of the year. It’s his favorite week of the year, and that means right from the top down, this isn’t just a good talk at Travelocity; this is actually a DNA issue. It’s a good walk.

Alison: Exactly. Our CEO is Sam Gilliland, is so engaged in our program, and in fact, took his own volunteer vacation with his wife and kids. I think that’s such a strong statement because he doesn’t, obviously, have much time off, but he took last year and went down to Mexico and did a medical project. They made a big video about it, so that we internally could share it. It’s so exciting to see that go all the way to the top.

John: It’s great to hear that you guys have a great green culture there. Let’s go back to the travel options for our great listeners out there that are going to use Travelocity after they hear this show and they want to go green in their travels. Talk about the different spectrum, Alison, from dipping their toe in to being a little green their travel, or, as you guys call it, going green to the extreme.

Alison: Exactly. There’s actually a lot of little ways that you can go green on vacation. Maybe you’re not ready to book a green hotel, but you are willing to do a few things. Many of these will actually save you money. For instance, set your home to vacation mode before you leave. Put your lights on a timer or turn them off. Set your large appliances to vacation mode. Unplug all unneeded electronics. Pack a reusable water bottle. I hammer this one again and again. I do it personally. Once you make the switch and train yourself to do it, you’re going to save so much money on bottled water, and it’s so much better for the environment to not be filling up the landfills with these plastic bottles. Skip the car rental. In most destinations, you can figure out a way to take public transit or walk. There’s a way to make it around without getting a car. Eat local. That’s something simple we can all do. Don’t go to the big chains; dip in and see what the local offering is. And then also think a lot about your hotel room when you’re there. Even if it’s not a green hotel, there is still a way to green it yourself. Recycle when you can. Leave the lights and air conditioning off when you leave your room. Participate in the recycling program that the hotel offers. They’re just small things, but they add up in a big way.

John: We like that. We like small initiatives that can add up. Small action steps add up in a big way, and we can all work together and change the world. Speaking of changing the world together, again, I’m back on your great website, Travelocity.com/travelforgood, and I’ve clicked on now the button that says Massive Good. We love that here at Green is Good. You’re using that word good. Explain what massive good is.

Alison: Massive good is a really fun thing that we’ve participated in, and we still are supporting. It’s a micro-donation that you can make to the foundation, and just $2 can help save a child’s life. It goes to very important medication to fight tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. These three things, we have developed drugs that a child could grow up and live a normal life. Just $2 can make the difference, so we asked our customers, we ran ads in the confirmation e-mails saying, “Hey, if you have $2, if you have a moment, do something to give back to another culture around the world.”

John: Love it. I didn’t realize this, but through your efforts at Travel for Good, Alison, you guys also plant trees?

Alison: That’s right. We do have a carbon offset partner, and we’re very proud of who we’ve selected. It’s the Conservation Fund. We’re proud of them for a couple of reasons. One, they are based right here in the U.S., so we’re not sending this money away. What they do is they plant native trees in national wildlife refuges. What’s so cool about that is these are open to the public. This is a place where you can go and fish, you can have a picnic. You, as a traveler, can go and enjoy these trees. This is something we ask people to do when they’re flying. Flying is a tough piece for travel because, obviously, it’s very necessary, but on the other hand, there’s no such thing as a low-powered plane. I wish there were, but there’s not. So, until that day, this is something you can do to fight the carbon emissions and also make sure that your local national refuge is getting the support it needs.

John: Interesting. I see here on your website, again, Travelocity.com/travelforgood, you have a button that says, “Make it Earth Day every day. Click onto the window seat blog.” Explain to our listeners what your window seat blog is.

Alison: Sure. This is a really fun part of Travelocity, and it’s a great read for anyone, green or not. The window seat blog is the official travel blog of Travelocity, and I blog on there very regularly about Earth Day. This is a great way to keep up with what’s new and emerging. I’m, actually, just about to do a review. I’m so excited. I’m going on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon, and I got a solar cell charger for my phone because I actually read all my books on my phone. I’ve gone paper-free on books, so I needed a charger. Anything like that, any fun way you can go green on vacation, I blog about that on the window seat.

John: How about for our listeners out there that are hotels? We’ve had green hotels on. Actually, we had the managers of the greenest hotel in Paris on our show from Paris. They came on for the Hotel Gavarni. We know this is a growing trend. How about if there’s green hotels out there that want to now be part of your Green Hotel Directory? How do they contact you and become part of this great directory?

Alison: That’s a great question. Anyone can e-mail me anytime at [email protected]. I always love to hear from people, particularly hoteliers. Since we work directly with certification programs, they usually send us their list every month of not just who has been added, but also we try and get information out of them about how the hotels have fallen out of your program. Did they not stay up to standard? Because we do take it very seriously, and we will unflag a hotel, so that’s an important piece. For a hotel that’s entrusted and they want to reach out and find out maybe how to get certified, which certification program they’re working for, they can work with their Travelocity market manager, and they probably already know who that is, or they can e-mail me directly and I’m happy to help.

John: Alison, we’re down, unfortunately, to the last minute-and-a-half. Of course, we’re going to have you back on again to continue the great journey that Travelocity’s on here in the green space. Share with our listeners, as we have to sign off here, some words of wisdom from you. So many of our listeners want to be the next Alison Presley, or they want to create their own website that does green for good. Explain to them your journey and some words that you have for the people coming behind you.

Alison: Sure, absolutely. I would say if you’re looking to be in this space or you already are in this space, the big thing I think that we have done right, and has really helped strengthen our program, is we’ve brought green to the mainstream. There’s no time to wait for the dark green people to spread the message. It’s important to be hitting a broader audience. We haven’t gotten very bogged down in labeling. We’ve really stood by our list, but we’ve also made it easy to see at a glance, so that’s what I’m talking about when I say you can just do a normal shop on Travelocity, and you’ll see the green hotels right away. I think that’s something that everybody should be thinking about in the green space. How do I make this message compelling to someone who’s just thinking about going green?

John: That’s awesome. For our listeners out there, please go to Alison Presley’s great section on Travelocity’s website, Travelocity.com/travelforgood. Alison Presley, we’re so honored you came on. You’re always invited back. Mike and I learned a lot today. Our listeners learned a lot today. You’re a passionate leader of Travelocity’s Travel for Good, and truly living proof that green is good.

Alison: Thanks for having me on. It was my pleasure entirely.

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 and I’m so honored to have you with us today, Stephanie Dolmat. Welcome to The Impact Podcast, Stephanie.

Stephanie Dolmat: Thanks so much for having me, John.

John: Oh, it’s a real honor. Stephanie, you are the Senior Director of ESG at Robert Half. We’re gonna get talking about all the important things you’re doing over there but before we get to do that, talk a little bit about your background and how you even got here, and what inspired you along the way?

Stephanie: Yeah, great opening question. So I was really inspired from a young age. My mom took the time to teach my brother and I the names of flowers and of birds and of trees. I grew up thinking that that was, I think normal, but it’s something that I realized as I grew older, that I was actually fairly unique to be that connected with, and looking at the things in nature around you. So it wasn’t something that I really discovered that I wanted to do as a career until I visited my younger brother at the University of Vermont, finishing up his degree in environmental studies, and I attended a few of his classes. I said, I can’t believe you get to learn about this stuff. This is so cool. And he said, well, you know stuff, there’s some master’s programs in this, you should check it out. And the rest was history. I decided that I wanted to help organizations become more sustainable. I did that in the facilities realm, a real estate realm for quite a while, and operational sustainability. So all things, renewable energy, energy efficiency, human behavior change, which is, of course, an intriguing part of all of this. Then I actually worked, got invited to be on the team at Adobe to lead ESG. I didn’t really know what ESG was. And it’s really about the intersection of environmental sustainability, DEI, how companies are showing up as responsible companies protecting the data of their clients, and customers, all of the ways these things intersect, and it was really eye-opening to say, well, these, these are the ways, all of the ways that we can make an impact. So I started at Robert Half, a global talent solutions and business consulting firm about nine months ago in this role, and it has been a great ride. So I feel so lucky every day to get to do what I do.

John: So wonderful. Let’s step back for a second. What’s your brother’s name?

Stephanie: His name is Scott Franklin.

John: What did he do? Like what did he do with his environmental sciences background?

Stephanie: He was an organic farmer for many, for many years. Now he works actually helping to make the whiskey and beer industry more sustainable through their agricultural practices. So we both ended up going into sustainability, which I think is a great testament to our mom.

John: Yay, mom, and mom’s still alive?

Stephanie: Mom passed away, unfortunately, in 2015.

John: Okay, but that’s a great legacy, you get to carry on her love for the outdoors in the environment. What a great inspiration. Now, when you started doing ESG work on institutions and things that such when you got out of formal school, it really wasn’t a cool sector to be in sustainability and ESG hadn’t gotten the exposure that it’s gotten now, is that correct or not correct?

Stephanie: Absolutely. And this really came to life recently, when I was speaking with some master’s students who are in sustainability, and when I graduated from my master’s program over a decade ago, I had to think, how am I going to make a career in sustainability work? And now these students are coming to me asking how do we decide what area of sustainability to go into? And I love this change. I think it’s amazing,

John: Right. So you were really one of the beginnings you and your brother and others of your generation of pioneers to get educated in environmental sciences and sustainability and then to go apply it in the business world.

Stephanie: I think there are people who have been doing this for a long time, but in terms of having sustainability in the name of your career, that’s definitely new.

John: So let’s go back to the basics for our listeners and viewers. ESG, what does it really stand for and what does it mean to you, and how do you apply that at Robert Half?

Stephanie: Yeah, so ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. It’s a bit of an awkward acronym because it doesn’t really describe what you’re doing. I think prior names for this have really been corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, sustainability, and that larger sense of how you sustain a company over the long term. All of these are really different ways to describe how a corporation shows up as a responsible business to all of its stakeholders. So that can be employees, clients, investors, partners, communities where you live and work, or the planet. ESG just happens to be the current way that people are describing this notion of I think, ethics and how to make sure you have a license to operate that people trust you as a brand and that they know that you’re doing the right thing.

John: As a global talent solutions company, were you the first senior director of ESG there, or had that role been filled before you were stepping into somebody’s shoes?

Stephanie: This was the first iteration. There was someone who was doing some of the reporting beforehand, but this was really the… we’re building a program, a cohesive program. It’s not like ethics is new to Robert Half. Robert Half is coming up on 75 years old as a company and was founded on the principle of ethics first, which was really one of the draws to the company for me, just knowing that this wasn’t a new concept, maybe ESG as the moniker of it is a new thing. But it’s certainly something that is built into the company as they operate. So one of the first things we did was actually conduct our first formal materiality assessment, to understand what topics as a talent solutions firm as well as a business consulting firm, what in professional services is relevant to our business. Materiality assessments are not looking at just what impacts society might have on you, but also as a company, but also what impacts you can have on society. So obviously, some of the topics that are most important are centered around our people. Those are things like talent, attraction, retention, and development, are we making sure that our employees are engaged and watching out for their well-being, certainly building an inclusive work workplace, and having a diverse workforce, came out as really top priorities. But it’s also about how we’re keeping our data secure and private for our clients and candidates. And then how we’re establishing accountability for our actions, are we investing in our communities, focusing on supplier inclusion, and really finding ways to make a more sustainable impact. So those are really the areas that are key for Robert Half.

John: You come in nine months ago, and basically, it was a bowl of clay, you can really leave your mark on because there wasn’t a great roadmap before you after 75 years. This is your baby now.

Stephanie: I do have to say that ESG is fundamentally collaborative, and there are fantastic people who I get to work with every day.

John: You get to codify it, as you said, you got to create these materialities and strata things in terms of level of importance and things. So how many people get are part of that process? How does that process work?

Stephanie: Yeah, so a lot of what I would say makes ESG so fun, in terms of a career is that relationship building and influence because when you think about those different areas that I mentioned about our people, and about keeping data secure, and how we’re making a sustainable impact. Those are across all different areas of the business. There’s almost really no area of the business that doesn’t have some, some part of ESG in it. So we just released our first ESG report, which replaced a former corporate citizenship report, and this ESG report, we actually counted it up. It was over 200 people who collaborated on it, to provide all of the stories and data that are in there to really help tell our story. So I’m proud that, in only nine months, we’ve been able to really establish a collaborative process to take all of the different pieces and put them together.

John: So for our listeners and viewers, I just want to give a shout-out here. We’ve got Stephanie Dolmat with us. She’s the senior director of ESG. To find Stephanie and her great colleagues, you can go to roberthalf.com, To find her ESG report, which she just referenced, you can go to roberthalf.com/esg-report. Stephanie, now, it’s so much it sounds so fun because it’s almost like you’re on an entrepreneurial venture inside of a 75-year-old, very successful, very iconic brand, building out this ESG sector. How do you go about your day and how do you decide what the priorities are of the day, the week, the month, etc? Like you said, it can be very narrow, it can be very wide, how do you choose?

Stephanie: That’s one of the best things is that no two days are ever the same. This is a very dynamic space. As you mentioned, this has really grown in importance across all stakeholders, whether you’re talking about potential employees who want to join a company that’s known for doing the right thing, or you’re talking to clients who want to partner with brands that share the same values. It’s really just skyrocketed in importance. And so any given day might see me giving a presentation to senior leadership about how ESG might intersect with their work, helping to respond to some customer inquiries on sustainability at Robert Half, helping implement programs, coordinating, doing a carbon footprint across the enterprise and value chain. I can just tell you, it’s never boring.

John: So really, for a lot of our young listeners who are now studying Environmental Sciences, or sustainability or whatever it’s called that their university or high school or postgraduate studies ESG, and the reporting that you do to show substantively all the great work and the hard work that you’re doing in your organization is doing is employee retention, employee attraction, client retention, client attraction. All four?

Stephanie: There’s many drivers. I mean, when you think about all of the different audiences who want to want this information, you’re speaking with your employees, you’re speaking with potential future employees, you’re speaking with clients, investors who are a big piece of this, particularly at all companies basically, who are publicly traded are rated and ranked on how they’re doing. And investment decisions are made based on this information. So it’s wide-ranging in terms of the audience. And I think one of the things that really helps is just to know, not all information is created equal for all audiences. Your employees don’t necessarily want to know the exact same things as your investors. So just making sure you understand who your audience is.

John: Given that you’re in a fascinating role, both public-facing, but also internal facing, where do you draw your inspiration from? And who did you look to for paradigms to follow that you thought were doing great jobs with regards to their own ESG programs, in terms of ESG leaders and brands that we know out there?

Stephanie: In grad school, I was lucky enough to have Lynn Scarlet as a professor. She was in the Obama administration, in the Department of the Interior. And one of the most interesting things that she said, that I’ve taken with me through my career is that she said, when we have these things like policy and regulation intersecting with science intersecting with how we actually act in this world, what is really needed in sustainability. And I think that this translates across that wider sense of sustainability and ESG is we need translators, we need people who can speak, who can see things from each of these different angles and lenses and translate to someone who may not be from that field, but can understand the implications, and how we might respond to those implications and address them. And I think that that sense of being a translator is something that I hold dear to me quite frequently because at any given point, you can be talking across any one of those different audiences. And if you can’t translate what you’re saying into something that the person sitting across from you will understand, and you won’t be able to influence and see the kind of change that you want to be. So I think, being a change agent can be hard work. And what I know is that I have just met so many people in this field who are hugely passionate about what they do. We support each other all the time. It’s not really competitive, I would say, or at least my experience has been. We all really help each other out, because we’re all facing a lot of the same challenges.

John: It’s fascinating you said that. I’ve never met anyone who said, I’m the Senior Director of ESG, or I’m the chief sustainability officer, there’s nobody with a really big one. And like you said, it’s not a zero-sum game, because it truly… pollution as we know, air pollution or water pollution is a cross-border thing. If there’s a nuclear meltdown in Japan, we feel it on the west coast, the United States. Similarly, in Europe, we feel it on the east coast. So it’s got the fact that it’s such a collaborative industry, and is also a great point that you make. What’s the most fun for you, though, out of all of this? I mean, there’s so much impact that you get to make every day and every year. In this new role, what are you having the most fun doing?

Stephanie: I mean, I think like you are, I’m a natural relationship builder. So I’ve just loved building relationships with the fantastic people who work across our company, and then across this industry or other partners we may have, I think there’s so much that we can accomplish together. It’s not like it’s all wins, of course, but I think I really enjoy celebrating both the small and the big wins. When we’re talking about every single company is, of course, navigating this world and how we have adjusted to the pandemic reality. And I think providing flexible work options for all employees, bringing in new benefits to on mental health, which has been so much at the forefront, and I’m glad it’s finally at the forefront of businesses and enterprises all across, like, these things are all helping us move towards a more just and equal world. And it can be, I think, one of the biggest things for me has been learning patience, is that you want to see all of this change happen at once. And that’s just not how it goes. So I’m very big into celebrating the small wins as well because even if it can sometimes feel incremental, it’s still helping build the world that I know so many people want to see. And so let’s celebrate that because every single win is moving things forward. That’s what I have fun with.

John: Oh, that sounds awesome. You mentioned earlier the issue of cybersecurity. It’s been argued before, and I’ve heard, that really smart people give lectures that ESG should actually be called ESG. See, because without cybersecurity and protecting, the goodwill and your clients and the assets of your company, it wouldn’t be a sustainable venture, just from the outset. So, talk a little bit about what was your exposure to cybersecurity before this, this this role that you have and how much have you learned about cybersecurity and the importance of it, it during the last nine months?

Stephanie: Well, first of all, my manager and SVP, who is our Chief Privacy Officer, and is responsible for it is gonna love you for saying that.

John: Well, it’s the truth though. People don’t think of it that way but it’s God’s honest truth.

Stephanie: I think so obviously, people who are in ESG can’t be experts in everything. So I used to have someone I worked with say you got to know a mile wide and an inch deep. So I am no cybersecurity expert. I did recently read a book by Nicole Pearl Roth, who’s a reporter for the New York Times called, This Is How They Told Me The World Ends. If you want a real-life thriller about cybersecurity, I can highly recommend it. It’s, it’s a bit of an intensive read. But I think cybersecurity is really just something that is a part of business now and knowing that it is part of something that businesses who deal with data, which is pretty much every business at this point, want to do the right thing by their clients and candidates and employees with highly personal information. So, this is definitely an area of focus for Robert Half both on the privacy and cybersecurity side. Building that trust or maintaining that trust with our clients and candidates is absolutely paramount. So, a lot of effort and focus goes into it and it’s definitely one of our most material topics in ESG. So I won’t claim that I’m an expert and I do know that it’s telling our story and how we tell it and what are the controls and procedures and processes that we’ve put in place from governance and operational perspective to make sure that we’re keeping people’s data secure and confidential.

John: Great point. You’re on the job for nine months now, you just published this new report, the ESG report again, for our listeners and viewers who want to find Robert Half’s new ESG report, you can go to roberthalf.com/esg-report. How hard is it getting buy-in and how do you go about getting buy-in? Obviously, you’re a great communicator and obviously, you enjoy what you do. Is it hard getting buy-in from the employee side, and get everybody involved and excited about the ESG journey now?

Stephanie: I do think you have to like people in order to crack the code sometimes because everyone comes to this from a different perspective. There is a lot of energy and passion around this, particularly on the employee side. And I love that there are so many advocates for this within the business because you can always find people who are willing to pitch in and help and people who have a particular passion or ideas that can help contribute. I think what I’ve found over my career is that sometimes you just have to find what makes people tick, some people really enjoy the competitive aspect of it. So if you show them what a peer is doing, and I want to do that, some people don’t respond to that. And some people are more interested in the accomplishment of being able to say, hey, here’s what we did and this is how this changed things. And so I think it’s really just trying to understand what different people’s motivations are, and seeing how you can work together. I think buy-in from the top is incredibly important. I’ve also seen a lot of groundswell from different organizations. And so I think when you have those two things hand in hand, which I’m lucky to have here at Robert Half is both buy-in from both the top and everyone else, it really makes for a lot of possibilities for achievement,

John: You have your finger on the pulse in so many ways of shifts that are happening post-pandemic, is work at home here to stay in your view, or a hybrid model, or where do you see that balance being struck? When it comes to, as you said, at the top of the show, great word, flexibility with employees, where is the happy balance, going to sort of end up being the new better normal?

Stephanie: Yeah, I’ve been really I think it’s great what Robert Half is doing, because not only is this for our own employees, but we’re placing people across the globe. And really helping understand what’s going to work for our clients, as well as for us has made a lot of shifts in how we operate as a business. So, that flexibility, I think, understanding what your client’s needs are, right? So it may not be all about employee choice, but it’s going to be flexibility and understanding what is going to work for someone’s particular situation that I think, is a very reasonable and human way to deal with the future of work, right? Because it’s not going to be the same for everyone. Some people are going to want or and or need to go into the office and work and for other people. It can be done largely remotely. So I think the flexibility approach, the employee choice, looking at hybrid models, all of that has been done very thoughtfully at Robert Half. I think, companies who are taking a bit more of a heavy-handed approach, we know that employees at those companies are going to be looking for new jobs.

John: Interesting. ESG seems to be, Stephanie, from what I see here to stay and the circular the shift from the linear to strictly economy as a general racial trend that also seems to be growing and is going to actually happen. The US has seemed to be a slow adopter historically, comparatively speaking to Europe, and to other parts of Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, which were maybe forced two generations ago to get involved with sustainability and circular economy type behavior, because of their size whereas America, we’re big, just dig another landfill, throw out stuff. But now with universities, like you went through and got the focus on environmental sciences and how to become a chief sustainability officer or the Senior Director of ESG. Talk a little bit about the coming demand for executives in this space. What’s some advice you could give to our younger listeners, because we have listeners that are in high school and college, and we track our listeners, and they’re all around the world? What’s some of the advice that you wish someone had given you, as they begin their journeys in this really, really fascinating and fast-growing field?

Stephanie: Good question. I think we’re living in times where there really seems to be an urgent need to focus on these big societal issues, like diversity, equity, inclusion, like sustainability. I’m so encouraged about the number of people who are looking for jobs that have this purpose who are looking to make a difference for the positive. And that is really helping companies see what part they can play in these big shifts that I think are taking place. It’s not easy work, it’s definitely necessary work towards contributing, having a healthy planet and people who can thrive no matter where they are. So, if you’re looking to get into the ESG space, something that has helped me is really to develop those skills in influencing and relationship building. I mentioned previously, that no one in ESG can really be an expert across all of these areas, right? It’s just so broad and diverse, in terms of the number of topics, but if you get experience in some kind of background whether it’s HR or legal or sustainability or whatever it is, undoubtedly, there is already some sort of ESG component in that. So I think, understanding how whatever skills you may already have, that help you build that kind of influence and relationship building or problem-solving, kind of aspects that you don’t have to necessarily be an expert in anything, in everything across ESG. Know one part of it really well and you ou can translate those skills across the breadth of it. And one other thing I think that I would add, is that in particularly in the east side of ESG, there are some very tangible skills that companies are looking for, I would say an entry-level position if you know specifically how to do a carbon footprint. That class that I took at UCSB, Bren School, was the class that launched me into my career because I knew how to do a greenhouse gas inventory. That was an incredibly important skill. I would say, people who know how to do lifecycle analyses of products, people who know who understand I would say the science behind what’s going on in carbon accounting, that is an incredibly useful skill that would translate so please do take your classes, younger listeners and these things. They are very needed skills.

John: Definitely. How about you personally? How green are you or how sustainable are you through your own house in your own life? How far does it go in terms of the car or energy on your roof or that kind of stuff?

Stephanie: One of the most impactful actions that I have taken, and I think everyone can take up because we do it three times a day is what you put on your plate. So I’ve actually been eating plant-based since 2013. And I love how varied and delicious meals are when I eat plants. I did have to be quite thoughtful. I essentially had to relearn how to stock my pantry. What to cook but I have to tell you, it is taken my partner and I to some fantastic places that we never would have found. Otherwise, if you don’t seek it out and there honestly has never been a better time to be plant-based on the proliferation of ingredients that you can find, if you have a craving and of course mine is sometimes hamburgers, right? Well, let me tell you, there are so many options for that now these days. So that’s what I think is one of the biggest things I’ve done to really transition. It’s both for my own health, it’s for the animals, it’s for the planet. I do it for all the reasons and I never expect perfection from anyone. But I do say that I am most proud of the fact that a lot of my friends say, Stephanie if you cooked for me, I would go vegan.

John: That’s awesome. That is really wonderful. Well, you’re talking to somebody who’s been a vegetarian since I’m 17 and I’m 59 now. I’ve been plant-based myself since about 2012 or ’13. And I’ll tell you a funny story. So back in 2011, a friend of mine, Seth Goldman, who was on the show, early days, he was the co-founder of honesty. He was now getting involved with another company says, hey, I want you to have a CEO one, we got to get a little visibility. So he goes, I know you enjoy being a vegetarian, vegan, or whatever, John, and this is all about that. So I said, fine. So I bring him on the show. He does a great job. He was the CEO of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown. We know what happened to Ethan now and how that… but you’re so right. I remember being a vegetarian when I was 17. My parents thought I was a Martian. There was nothing to eat, but now when you go into any store, Whole Foods, or anywhere else, the options are limitless. You can have anything plant they see almost one and never miss a thing.

Stephanie: And you know, my dog loves kale stems, we put kale in just about everything and that’s his favorite snack. I don’t know how we lucked out with that.

John: You know, but it’s so funny you say that. So many people, Stephanie, think that being plant-based is an all-or-nothing proposition. Let’s just tell people to start with one meal a day, just go plant-based one meal a day, you don’t have to be a vegan 100% of the time. Your life will improve just even one meal a day.

Stephanie: Yeah, or if you think about what you’re using in your coffee or tea, can you find something that you like that is different than dairy? My favorite is ripple half and half. It went off the markets during the pandemic for a few months, and I just about cried.

John: I love them. I think ripples are great.

Stephanie: It’s back, and I could not recommend it more. I don’t work for ripple or anything. I just love it.

John: That is just so wonderful. Stephanie, it’s exciting. I want to have you back because nine months is still the beginning of your journey and as we learned about sustainability throughout both of our own journeys, it’s ongoing. There’s no finish line. There’s always more to do and there’s always more you can do. For those who want to find Stephanie and her colleagues at Robert Half, please go to www.roberthalf.com. To find their new ESG report, please go to www.roberthalf.com/esg-report. Stephanie Dolmat, you’re making the world a better and greener place. I’m so thankful for you joining us today on The Impact Podcast and you’re always welcome back here.

Stephanie: I hope too. Thanks, 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. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John Shegerian: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by The Marketing Masters. The Marketing Masters is a boutique marketing agency offering website development and digital marketing services to small and medium businesses across America. For more information on how they can help you grow your business online, please visit themarketingmasters.com.

John: Hi, this is John Shegerian. I never could have imagined when we started, the Green is Good Radio Show back in 2006, that it would grow into a big podcast called The Green is Good Podcast, and now we’ve evolved that podcast to the Impact Podcast, which is more inclusive and more diverse than ever before. But we did look back recently at some of our timeless Green is Good interviews and decided to share some of them with you now. So enjoy one of our great Green is Good episodes from our archives. And next week, I’ll be back with a fresh and new episode of the Impact podcast. Thanks again for listening. I’m grateful to all of you. This is John Shegerian.

Announcer: Welcome to Green is Good raising awareness of each individual’s impact on the environment and helping to create a more beautiful and sustainable world. Now here’s John Shegerian, Chairman and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome to Green is Good. Mike, it’s great being in studio with you today.

Mike Brady: Hard to believe that another week has come and gone. And here we are all set to empower, entertain, inform, and travel a little bit today.

John: Well, we’re traveling a lot, actually, Mike, we’re going to be going now after commercial to Paris, France again, but via Spain. I’m not going to give any more of this out. People got to come on back now to Green is Good.

Announcer: If a little Green is Good, more is even better. Now back to Green is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good. And today we have a first, we have Xavier Moraga on the phone with us, we’re speaking to him, he’s in Spain today, but he’s going to be talking about his amazing hotel, the Gavarni Hotel in Paris, and what he’s done to make that a more sustainable and green property. Welcome to Green is Good, Xavier Moraga.

Xavier Moraga: Yeah, hello to everyone.

John: Xavier, tell us, tell our listeners. You took over this amazing property. You were appointed manager in 2002, and you’ve been running this hotel and now you’ve taken it to a new and green level. What gave you your passion during your education and your professional life for the environment? Where did that come from?

Xavier: Oh, well I’ve always loved nature as far as I can remember. Nature, animals, traveling, discovering other cultures. That’s really, since I’m young. When other kids would be reading comic books, I was reading atlases. I guess I had the luck to be born in a family where everyone loves reading and thus I just learned to love books and practically anything about nature. Well, that’s really, I guess since I’m reading, I’ve always been reading nature, animals, books, and I just grew until now. Recently, I’ve been able to travel a lot and I just deciding that I had to do something for my work and not only for myself. And that’s how it started.

John: Did your parents, did they make you recycle? Were they green people when you were growing up or was the conditions… How did that come?

Xavier: No. Well, I guess at that time that would be really pioneers I would say.

John: Right.

Xavier: Because, we’re talking about like 30 plus years ago, 35 years ago.

John: Right.

Xavier: No, well, of course, there were like small things. Yes, like tips. They would never let me light every place, like every room I was always telling me, “Switch off the light when you go out of the room, don’t let the water run and so on.

John: Okay.

Xavier: That’s small things, but yeah, that type of things, they were always telling me. But there’s not nothing really in particular, it’s just, I guess, my passion for nature, for animals, for traveling and what I’ve discovered recently, I would say about perhaps 10 to 15 years ago where everyone not only me, but everyone has been able to see that all these damages that have been done to the planet.

John: Right. In 2002, you had your design company and you had a great education behind you and then you were appointed manager of the hotel Gavarni in Paris in 2002. What made you start taking a legacy, beautiful legacy property… Mike has the property up in front of him online right now for all of our listeners who want to see Xavier’s beautiful hotel. You could go to www.gavarni.com. What made you take it into the new future, take a beautiful legacy property and take it into the future by getting it certified to go green?

Xavier: Well again, it’s my passion for traveling. In 2006, I had a chance to travel for two months along the Silk Road in Central Asia and China and Tibet. I have to say it’s something to hear something on radio, for example, or watch it on TV. When you see an oil spill, when you see any damage done to the planet, and it’s completely something different to watch it with your eyes in front of you as in just in front of you. During this trip, particularly, I’ve been shocked to see all the damages. If I have to give only a few examples, in Central Asia, there is a sea, the Aral Sea, that used to be one of the largest seas in the planet, and that is actually quickly disappearing. It’s just like perhaps 10% of it is remaining. That’s because they’re using all the water for the cotton industry. I’ve seen that in, even the most remote places I visited in Himalaya, for example, the bad sides of, I would say technology new world, Western world or civilization have changed completely the culture of the people living there. It’s sad when you see that Tibetans are totally forgetting their culture and their history and turning to something like they could be French, or they could be American. Nobody will see the difference. They just flow to the big cities and try to get a TV, a computer, and so on. I don’t have anything against TVs and computers, but if they forget everything about their past and their culture, then I think the planet and us, we are losing something. All of these different things that I’ve seen and that I’ve experienced have really shocked me at the point that when I came back to work, I said, well, look, you are doing all that work at home, but you’re going to have to do something at work too, because you have the possibilities of doing it. I just decided one day, I would say, when I woke up, I said, well, let’s try to do something. I just started, in a few words, I just started with kind of like a chart, with all the products, all the procedures that make a hotel, looked carefully at what we could change to help protect the environment so it’s simple things like change the bulbs for CFL or LED. That’s also installing flow reducing valves in all the faucets and the showers. That’s putting motion sensors, eco-friendly detergents, organic food, waste sorting. I mean, it’s really a lot of things. It’s just starting like that actually, little by little, and it took us about two years to reach a point where we thought that it would be nice for us to have an independent confirmation of all we did. Because we could say that our hotel was the most beautiful and the greenest on the planet, but if no label was, independent label was there to confirm then it’s as if we didn’t do anything.

John: Right. And how many hotels in Paris are certified green and then why did you choose the European Ecolabel?

Xavier: As of today, there are seven hotels that are certified green in Paris. Well, I must say not certified green because there are different green labels, but certified with the European Ecolabel. There are seven and among the seven, six are Best Western Hotel, so the chain, and we are still the first and the only independent one as of today. Just to give you an idea, there are 66 hotels in France which I guess it’s 46 independents and about 20 Best Westerns.

John: Wow.

Xavier: In Paris, seven all in all, and we are the first and only independent one.

John: Right.

Xavier: If you want to know about, a little more about European Ecolabel and why we chose this one, actually there are a lot of green labels. Actually, it is perhaps a problem because, I have to say that, some are good, some are not and some are just like nationwide, like French ones or German ones or American ones. I think that it is good for a label to be seen everywhere and to have the same meaning. That is the reason, one of the reasons we chose the European Ecolabel, because it was the same in all the countries of the European Union. Another thing that this made us decide for the European Ecolabel is that the criteria are quite strict. They’re sensible and they are encompassing all that makes a hotel, a hotel, meaning they’re really talking about detergents, they’re talking about energy, water consumption, waste sorting, staff training, client’s awareness, food and beverage suppliers. I mean, really everything that makes a hotel a hotel, everything is in the, all the criteria are there. And the last thing, very important thing that made us choose that one is that because the label attribution is not permanent, but you have to go for it after, year after year, meaning that a year or year and a half, depending on how they are, because sometimes they’re overwhelmed with the demand. But every year you’re supposed to get, again, the label, you don’t have it permanently.

Mike: Well, Xavier, I find it interesting that the genesis of your epiphany and wanting to change your hotel came from the result of your travels, especially on the Silk Road. As you mentioned, seeing the ecological damage done in Tibet, and then also the Aral Sea. When I think about travel as broadening someone’s horizon, one of the most incredible destinations any traveler on the planet can hope to reach is your own beautiful city of Paris. Now, when people, and I have been to Paris, I was fortunate enough to go there and it is truly just one of the world’s most beautiful cities. I also thought, okay, if your genesis, and your epiphany happened while you were traveling, with so many people coming to Paris, there is a golden opportunity for you. This is a perfect nexus, when you took care of your hotel. My question is this, the hotel Gavarni is a rather small hotel, very elegant with 21 rooms and 4 suites. Did the fact that you had a property of that size, make it more manageable for you to be very aggressive in your ecological efforts?

Xavier: Yes, I guess, if you have a hotel of say 300 rooms it’s quite different than if you have 25. But I also have to say that for me, it’s really a commitment. It’s something I have in mind, and actually the whole team, I’m not the only one who is going for it. It’s a team work and every person of the team is really committed to make it green. I guess, that even though it’s more difficult, if you have 300 rooms, as long as the team is really green minded, and as long as the chart and, and the procedures are well done, I believe it’s not that different. Perhaps it looks more difficult because it takes more time. But, the things that make a hotel are still the same. We still have suppliers, we still have energy consumption, the water consumption, we still have waste. We still have detergents and so on. It’s just a different size, but a different scale. But the work is the same. We’re actually, we just bought a new property a few months ago and we are starting to make it green. I have to say that it took us about two years to reach the point where we thought, we had done quite a good job with Gavarni and it only took us four months for the second property. The experience also changed the way and the time you’re looking at to make a hotel green. If you want an example, another example, talking about chain hotels or larger hotels. Many Best Western Hotels in France have been awarded European Ecolabel. That’s because in the chain, there is a team that has been brought up to help every manager of every hotel that wishes to make it green, get the European Ecolabel. That’s something a larger hotel, whether it’s a chain or not could do. That’s also something that we cannot do, because if you have 25 rooms, you can easily understand that you have perhaps 10 or 12 people working there. But while if you have 300 rooms, you perhaps have 50 people working. So it’s easier to give one or two persons a task to change a lot of things while in a smaller hotel everyone has its own task and that’s already a big task. I don’t think we have to talk about easy or not easy. It’s just a matter of time and procedure. But, perhaps, because as I said, a while ago only seven hotels in Paris have been awarded a European Ecolabel. Perhaps the tasks seem too big for many hotels, because it is a commitment. The European Ecolabel cannot be done for, I mean it cannot be given to people who are just in the green fashion.

Mike: Right.

Xavier: It’s really a commitment. You have to be really committed to that.

John: Xavier, for our listeners that are just joining us now, we’re on the line in Spain with Xavier Moraga, and he’s talking about his great passion for green and what he’s been doing in Paris with his two properties, the hotel Gavarni and the Trocadero. The hotel Gavarni, if you’d like to see it and one day travel there, it’s a beautiful property in Paris. You can look it up at www.gavarni.com. So for our listeners that one day want to come to your property, what can, give two or three things that truly set it apart in terms of sustainability, things that they can expect to find in your hotel that they wouldn’t find in typical hotels that made you get the European Ecolabel.

Xavier: As I said, the European Ecolabel really encompass everything.

John: Right.

Xavier: It’s difficult to pick up a few things. I have to say something that perhaps would seem weird but, a lot of the things we’ve been doing and we are still doing, and we plan to do are something that are quite only common sense.

John: Okay.

Xavier: For example, when we talk about water consumption you can imagine a lot of things like flow reducing valve, but you can also just imagine how you can make the clients aware about their consumption. How you can teach the staff to look, to watch out for the leaks. Sometimes a toilet that leaks for that it looks very like small drops or faucet but at the end of the day, it can be a 100 or 150 liters of water that has been lost. If you multiply that by the number of rooms and the number of days in a year, that’s really a big number, and it’s a lot of different, small things that make a difference. It’s not only like if you talk about energy, you don’t only consider solar panels. That’s something that seems obvious, but it’s also a lot of different things in a smaller scale. I would say like motion sensors, like instead of having switch, you just have motion sensors that would detect someone passing and would switch on and switch off the light after 30 seconds. You have the bulbs that are all CFL or LED but not only changing the bulbs, for me, being green is not changing the bulbs for me being green is rethinking how you light up the room. Many occasions, you do not need so much light in a room. That’s also something I want to say. It’s like when you have a car and you want to be green, the question is not that you going to take a greener car. The green question is, do you need a car, or at least, do you need a car every day? Perhaps you can rent one, perhaps you can share one. That’s the real question for me. And as many occasion, the answers are not important and expensive works and investments, but rather small things that would be everyday work like when you have, what do you have at home actually. If I have to give again small examples, if we’re talking about water, the small things that we added in every faucet, the flow, reducing valves and every shower that cost about say $3 per valve.

John: Right.

Xavier: It’s saving 50% of water.

John: Wow.

Xavier: That’s nothing, absolutely nothing, $3.

John: Right.

Xavier: There are a lot of things like that. If I have to give tips, I would say just rethink how your home works and you’ll see quickly that there are lot of things that seems normal, but at the time not. If you want another example, now computers are everywhere in rooms, and homes. Many computers, many TVs are not switched off properly, but just put it in standby mode. But standby mode is very energy eaters, very big energy eaters, and that should never be done. It should be always switched off completely. And that’s a big save. Believe me, we’re not talking about a few dollars, but we’re talking about thousands and thousands of dollars if you think of the consumption of a company or larger city.

John: Xavier, your travel has been, gives you tremendous insight and visibility into the state of affairs of the sustainability movement not only in France, but around the world. Can you just share for a minute or so with our listeners, what is France’s state of environmental affairs versus Spain and the other countries you visited to and spend a lot of time in?

Xavier: What I can say about France is that as in, I guess, most of the world, if not all the world, we’ve all heard about climate changes, we’ve all heard about damages done to the planet, who in the planet actually has never heard or read anything about it. It’s difficult. Sometimes, even myself, I feel that it looks like a green washing. I have to say that, as green as I can be, sometimes I’m bored to hear or see always things that talking about climate changes. Why, not because they’re talking about climate changes, but the way they’re talking about it. If I give you an example about climate changes. When you can watch on TV a few experts talking about the number of degrees or the inches of water, the sea level that would raise in the future 20 or 40 years. I don’t think it’s of any interest for the normal people. Well, if you tell them that at home, if they do this or that small things, like I was talking about, about water or energy, that’s something that really it’s like a hit, really you get started and you say, wow, that’s a lot of money because when you’re talking about saving energy, saving water you are talking about your bill. I have to say that if you read the number, the figures, and you say, well, that’s $500 at the end of the year. Well, it’s not that I am really green, but I have to do it because it works.

John: Right.

Xavier: Most of the time ecology and economy are really completely they are the same. So in France, I have to say, people are really green because they are green-washed. They are green, now we have to go further one step, and talk about everyday things and not only about the concepts or larger things like, wow, how many degrees, how many inches and so on. I’m happy because I see with my two girls, they are 9 and 11…

John: Right.

Xavier: …that the younger generation is much more green minded, but very practically, I mean, really in everyday life. And they’re the first to tell me, “Papa, you didn’t switch off the light or Papa, you’re letting the water run while you’re brushing your teeth. You shouldn’t do that, like, that’s a lot of water,” These small things. So if I have to compare, I can say that Northern European countries are very much green because they are green from their younger age. And that’s part of them. It’s really part of them. It’s every day for them. France is rather a founding country for the Europe. And it’s more like you have to teach the people.

John: Got you.

Xavier: That makes a big difference. If you want my opinion on other countries, I have to say that I’ve traveled to Africa recently and to Southern America also. Many occasion I’ve heard people thinking that poorer countries would have a population that wouldn’t be really that green, because there are other important things to think about like food and lodging. And actually, it’s not true. I’ve met many many people who are very poor and yet are very green conscious because, and it’s easy to understand when you go and see why, because they are the first who suffer from the climate changes.

John: Got it.

Xavier: They are green more than I can be.

John: Wow. Well…

Xavier: If you look at the richer countries, you look from US, Canada, Europe, and so on, there are most of them are temperate climate.

John: Right.

Xavier: While poorer countries are rather extreme climate. So they are the first to be hit by the climate changes. And they are the first to be green.

John: That makes so much sense. Well, listen, unfortunately we’re out of time today because your travels and your experience and your knowledge is amazing, but we’re so thankful that you came on. For our listeners out there, please go to Xavier’s wonderful website for his hotel, www.gavarni.com and go visit a hotel Gavarni when you’re in Paris and see what a real European Ecolabel hotel is about, or his sister property, the Trocadero. Xavier Moraga, you are a hotel and hospitality, ecopreneur and visionary, and truly living proof that Green is Good.

Xavier: Thank you. If I may say one last word is that, if people are interested in, not only visiting Paris, but about anything that is green in the City of Light and around we also have a blog and it’s simple it’s greenhotelparis.com, www.greenhotelparis.com. That’s a blog about anything green in Paris and around.

John: Perfect.

Announcer: If a little Green is Good, more is even better. Now back to Green is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good. Mike wasn’t Xavier Moraga really amazing?

Mike: Boy, he was so continental, so elegant and so green.

John: Well, now we’re going to keep it green and we’re going to keep it in the states. In fact, we’re going to go online. We’re going to go over to Yahoo up in Northern California with Christina Page right after this commercial. So come on back to Green is Good.

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Announcer: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good and we’re so honored today to have Christina Page on the phone with us. Christina is the Director of Climate and Energy Strategy for Yahoo, where she’s responsible for driving the company’s corporate environmental strategy, and I should really make that plural, strategies. Welcome to Green is Good, Christina Page.

Christina Page: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John: Christina, Newsweek just published their list of green US businesses and Yahoo was listed at number 9. That is just a heck of a accomplishment. What is so green about Yahoo?

Christina: Thank you. We’re really honored to be in the top 10 US green businesses according to Newsweek. I think what that really reflects is the fact that we’ve got an environmental strategy that is really aligned with our values and goals as a company. It’s very much part of our DNA. It really focuses on three things. Number one, we really walk the talk as much as we possibly can and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve on that. One of those is the way we design our data centers. That’s really where our big impact is as a company. We consume electricity as part of our data centers. That helps us to serve our 600 million users. We’re looking for ways to make those as efficient as possible both in terms of our design and how we run them every day, use as efficiently as possible both water and electricity in running those things. The second thing is we’ve got great resources in terms of our properties and the ways that we reach out to our 600 million users. Yahoo! Green is the number one green content website on the web right now. It’s a tremendous opportunity there to educate and inspire Yahoo customers everyday about how to be greener in their own lives. There’s also lots of green information you can find on Yahoo Shine. It’s a site for women. Yahoo News, which people go to every single day, and Yahoo Autos. We had a great piece a while back about comparing the energy efficiency of different car models so great resources and great green content to be found on virtually everywhere on Yahoo properties.

John: Christina, I want to step back a little bit. You got your Environmental Studies degree from Brown and then your master’s Environmental Management from Yale, which by the way has been well represented on this show with lots of your colleagues and others who have graduated from Yale, who have gone on to create great green companies, and written books, and all sorts of other things, but how long ago did you come to Yahoo?

Christina: I came to Yahoo three years ago. I’m constantly impressed and inspired by my colleagues from Yale. One of the great things about having a job in sustainable business is the people you get to work with everyday. I came here from Rocky Mountain Institute which is a energy efficiency think and do tank located in the Rocky Mountains. It was founded by a guy named Amory Lovins, who is an energy efficiency guru. Yahoo kind of made me an offer I knew it would be dumb to turn down. They were really saying, “Hey, we need to figure out a climate change strategy, a corporate sustainability strategy for the company.” When I had the opportunity to do that and apply a lot of the ideas that Rocky Mountain Institute engages in and talks about it was just a fantastic opportunity here. I moved to the Bay Area. The first thing I did was on a plane down to Brazil actually to look at a project that we we’re investing in around alternative energy down there and it’s been a pretty wild ride ever since.

John: Well, when we’ve had people in similar positions like you have from earlier this month, we had the guy on, Dave Stangis, who runs a corporate sustainability for Campbell Soup and we’ve had the gentleman who runs it for Coors Miller, and they all tell us that, “This is really not a race. This is not about a finish line, it’s a continuous process.” I want to step back and talk about like you said, one of your greatest opportunities was the green data center. Talk a little bit about how you came upon that and how you’ve invested so much into making it a greener and a more sustainable opportunity for Yahoo.

Christina: Sure. I think that’s a great example of Yahoo walking its talk. We see an opportunity to both save money and be greener by making data centers a lot more efficient. In September, we opened, there’s a groundbreaking and the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a data center up in Lockport, New York. It’s a brand new data center. It was recognized by the Department of Energy earlier this year, with a 9.9 million dollar Green IT award, from the Department of Energy. Basically, what this building does is it cools our servers a lot more efficiently. It uses a lot less water, and a lot less electricity to cool the servers. The inspiration for that design, we’ve got incredibly smart engineers here, that I’m really honored to work with, came from a couple of friends. One, it came from a design for a chicken coop. If you look at a large-scale chicken coop, you’ve got a lot of chickens in there, you need to keep them cool. It’s a long, narrow, tall building with vents in them. It’s designed to channel the air as efficiently as possible to keep the building cool. The other inspiration, one of the engineers who designed this, it’s a patent-pending design, is the building is in upstate New York, he’s wandering around there. We chose New York partially because of the clean hydro power they have in upstate New York and also the climate was really good for this design that we had in mind. If you look at the older buildings up there, these industrial buildings that were designed pre-air conditioning, basically, before we started moving air around by brute force. These are these long tall buildings. A lot of times, they’re kind of sitting crooked on the land. They’re not set to align with the roads perfectly, they’re on sort of an angle. What they’re doing is taking advantage of prevailing wind conditions. They are really looking at the micro-climate. They’re built to maximize the use of free air and free cooling. Basically in this data center, this chicken coop data center, about 99% of the time, the vast majority of the year, we’re keeping our servers cool just by kind of opening the windows. We’ve got a filter in place to take care of it, but basically, the free air outside is taking care of those servers. What that means is we got a data center that’s 40% more efficient than the industry standard. We’re using 95% less water. It was cheaper to build in the first place because we’re not installing these big expensive chillers, and it was faster to build. We built it in six months from dirt. In terms of the overall savings, in terms of electricity that you see from this data center, versus a conventional data center, so the equivalent electricity savings that you would take to power is about 1.1 million laptops…

John: Wow.

Christina: …and the amount of water we save annually is about the same that flows over Niagara Falls, which is right nearby, in about two minutes.

John: Wow.

Christina: More than enough water to provide subsistence drinking water for about 200,000 people over the course of the year.

John: Wow. So now, did you learn this also from any of your friendly competitors or did you start this whole project from scratch? And if some of your friendly competitors are out there listening right now, is this an industry, and are you in a position where you and other chief sustainability officer-type folks are trading best practices?

Christina: Yeah, we were just actually at an event here in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is just a great place for this kind of innovation because people recognize that innovation and clean tech is really the next revolution. There’s an event called the Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit, which is this great event. I presented about this design there last Thursday. It’s a great opportunity for the exchange of ideas. It’s such a great time and the challenges are really, really big as you know. But the opportunities are really big as well. I think we’re seeing a lot of exchange of ideas, a lot of [inaudible] the learning curve on the stuff really rapidly. It’s a really fruitful time for all of us, I think.

John: Okay, so the data centers are green and saving millions of dollars and lots of energy and doing what they’re supposed to do. How about in the offices? I’ve been to your wonderful offices and you’ve got a beautiful landmark, campus, and other buildings of course. So what is Yahoo doing in the offices itself to be a greener company?

Christina: Yeah, again, the real estate workforce team here, the facilities folks are just tremendously wonderful folks to work with and we’ve got, throughout the buildings, we’ve got lots of green components that, not only save us money, but also help to make a really good work environment for our employees. So, among other things, we’ve got a green screen, a touchscreen, it’s this real-time energy monitoring device. When you walk through the lobby, you can see how much electricity, your building on our campus, there’s several buildings, is consuming. You can see it on a floor-by-floor level, you can see what it was doing yesterday, whether it’s up or down. You can also translate that into, not only kilowatt-hours, a unit of electricity measurement, you can see how much that is in laptops or light bulbs or carbon. That’s been a great educational tool for us. We’ve got a tremendous employee commuting program. I live in San Francisco, it’s 40 miles to the north.

John: Wow.

Christina: This morning I got up and I got onto a shuttle. It’s a great big bus, very comfortable, it’s got free Wi-Fi in it, which took me down to work, as opposed to me having to get into my car by myself and fight traffic all the way down. It’s a productive, much more relaxing way to get down here. We’ve got an award-winning commute program. For folks who aren’t on the shuttle route, there’s a 25%, there’s subsidy for taking public transportation. We’ve got a great carpool matching system as well. It’s very integrated and the intent is, not just to reduce carbon impact but also reduce the impact on our employees. Because driving by yourself can be really stressful on the environment and on you.

John: Is the shuttle just a Yahoo shuttle or is that a sort of a collaborative among other brands also in the Valley?

Christina: That specifically is a Yahoo shuttle, but we also have ways of encouraging folks to use Caltrain and BART and various systems there as well.

John: Let’s go back to the green team. How many folks are on your green team?

Christina: We’ve got, it’s sort of a movement entirely. We’ve got employees in 17 offices around the world. I think last time I checked, it’s roughly about 300 employees. But the number has been growing because people really recognize this is a great way to get involved. The folks who I work with really make it a lot of fun.

John: Your green team then is tasked with giving, suggesting, making suggestions back to you, which then all of you as a collaborative start culling through them and seeing which ones are viable and which ones can be implemented and things of that such. Is that how the green team works? Because other brands listen to this and also other entrepreneurs listen to this. It’s always fascinating to see how a great company like yours, Yahoo, and by the way, for those who’ve just joined us, we are with Christina Page now who’s the director of climate and energy strategy for Yahoo, the great brand Yahoo, which is the number one green website online, Yahoo! Green and greenyahoo.com. Chris, go again. How does that collaborative work? Because it’s fascinating to us. Jim Gowen from Verizon also has a, quote, unqote, a green team that’s filtering back hundreds, if not thousands, of suggestions to him on a regular basis. How does yours operate?

Christina: Part of that is them coming up with great ideas. The other part of it is engaging and inspiring their colleagues on a daily basis. We had a program called Chuck the Paper Cup which is a recurring thing. We consume as you might expect a lot of coffee here at Yahoo. That leads to a lot of cups so part of what we’ve done that the green team has engaged in is, encouraging people to use a ceramic cup, use a reusable mug. There have been a variety of creative ways they’ve done that. There’s a great sculpture that one of our employees did a couple of years ago saying, “This is how many cups we generate globally over the course of 15 minutes.” She built these little domes out of used cups that she planted out around the lawn for Earth Day. We have a fast lane for people who have a reusable mug that they can get in to jump to the front of the queue and get their coffee faster, which is great if you’re late for a nine o’clock meeting. We give away with, we have periodic mug giveaways which are really popular. For Earth Days, again, we had a sort of a little bit of scavenger hunt. We just planted the mugs in different places around the campus. And that’s something that’s a case of a little bit helps, and it’s a great touch point for all employees in terms of a starting point. We’ve got a great green speaker series. We had someone just the other week come down and talk about sustainable seafood. We had Adam Werbach from Saatchi & Saatchi, who is a leader in the green movement, come down and spoke to us about a year ago. That’s something that’s a great opportunity to inspire and educate as well.

John: What’s near and dear to my heart is recycling. So I want you to brag a little bit about your unbelievable recycling program. I want our listeners to get inspired here because recycling is something that’s simple that all of us can do wherever we are, big business, little business, at home, or whatever. Speak a little bit about what you just did, what you’re doing with regards to your recycling, great recycling program?

Christina:Right. About every month, we keep about 85,000 pounds of material out of the landfill…

John: Wow.

Christina: …by reducing and recycling everything from water, to cardboard, to computers here on campus. We also have, for food waste, we partner with Bon Appetite who does our catering here on campus. We’ve got a composter. It’s basically a food dehydrator that the food waste goes into. That’s a great way again, to keep materials out of the landfill. That’s right here on campus and we send the waste off. We send the byproduct of that, the compost off to a nearby farm. In addition to that, a little further upstream, Bon Appetite, which is our caterer, makes sure to provide a lot of sustainable seafood and a lot of vegetarian options. There’s great signage around the cafeteria telling people about the impact of food, and where it comes from, when it’s locally sourced. They’re a great partner in terms of feeding people really delicious healthy food and also highlighting ways in which it’s environmentally conscious.

John: And for those listeners out there that have their iPad or their laptop or in front of their desktop right now, or if they’ve lived on another planet for a while and haven’t seen Yahoo’s amazing green website, it’s green.yahoo.com. It is the number one green web property in the world. I want to talk a bit about that, Chris. You’ve been talking about all the internal stuff you’ve done and obviously, you talk a great talk but you also walk a great walk. It’s become DNA, part of the DNA at Yahoo, thanks in large part to you over the last three years. But talk about your opportunity to our listeners and the world out there that you serve on your green.yahoo.com. What does that opportunity look like, and how do you inspire and message to your client base on a regular basis?

Christina: Sure. Absolutely. Yahoo! Green is a great site that’s a product of Yahoo for Good, which is part of our corporate social responsibility initiative. My partner in Green, Aaron Carlson and our blogger Laurie Ponch are doing fantastic things with that site. If you take just a random walk around the site today, the things you really see are opportunities to educate, inspire, and delight. It ranges from things like 10 famous trees around the world, so you have these beautiful pictures of trees from around different corners of the globe that really tap into people’s interest and connection with the natural world. So there’s that sort of, wow, inspirational moment. Right next to it is a piece about plumbing mistakes to avoid. How do you save money by not sticking things down the drain that don’t belong there. Don’t pour grease down it. Don’t leave your hoses connected during the winter. Things that by doing it, you’re doing several things, you’re saving water, you’re saving yourself money by avoiding costly plumbing visits and it’s convenient, meaning, it’s simple it’s easy. That’s where the education part of things comes in as well. Then there’s a piece on, sort of a throwback to the Yahoo compute coop, the chicken coop design for our data centers. There’s a description of how you build a chicken coop in your backyard. Lots of things there that are both opportunities to educate oneself in really practical, really positive ways, but also notes of inspiration. Because what the Yahoo for Good team has really found at this site is, people respond to positive messaging. They’re not so much interested in what celebrities are doing. That doesn’t seem to be something that’s really a key touch point for folks, but they are interested in educating themselves. They are interested in fun facts and inspirational messages about nature and they’re interested in having practical ways that they can not only save money but also do good for the planet.

Mike: Well, on the phone with us right now is Christina Page, and she’s the director of climate and energy strategies for Yahoo. We’re on your website right now, the Yahoo! Green website, Chris, and this is just so much fun like you’re talking about. There are inspirational messages and practical things too. In fact, we’re looking right now, did a little bit of a deep dive, looking at something that will bring a smile to John’s face, Reinventing the Pizza Box. This is amazing. We had talked to someone early on in the very opening stages of our get-togethers here with Green is Good about a year or so ago. It is really amazing there is a great video on just simple things that people can do. Whoever thought about a pizza box using it as a serving tray? This is just one of the fascinating things that you’ll find on green.yahoo.com.

John: And Mike, when you look at their mission statement here on Yahoo! Green, really what they love doing is helping millions of people take easy steps to change the world and make the world a better place and that’s what we do here at Green is Good. Christina, we’re huge fans of what you’re doing, and anyway we could help effectuate change, we believe in that. Like you said, forget the celebrity part, just simple steps can effectuate large change if done by lots of people.

Christina: Absolutely. That’s the message we try to send to our employees, that’s certainly what our data center engineers do every day that they help us to be more efficient. That’s the message we’re trying to communicate to our users as well.

John: Chris, let’s have a little fun here. Three years you’ve been there and you’re doing honestly, amazing work. Mike and I are just blown away and I’m sure our listeners who are listening today are also. But where are you? Are you in the top of the second inning, the bottom of the fifth here? What does the future look like for the sustainability programs at Yahoo and what do you have in your crystal ball to still implement there in the years to come?

Christina: I think there’s always new opportunities. That’s a great thing about this job. We’ve got tremendous challenges. Scientists are saying, “We need to reduce carbon emissions 80% against current levels by 2050, at least, in terms of climate change.” There are always challenges that we’re up against but there are also opportunities. There’s opportunity for greater efficiency. I think you’re going to see great things in terms of greater efficiency around water. That’s something that people are increasingly concerned and aware about. Yahoo for Good is doing great stuff with Yahoo! Green. You can see greater levels of interactivity on the site, green content across even more of our properties. We’re really looking forward to the future in this. You’re going to see more of the same but also some really creative responses to things, continuing to tap into our employees in creative ways around the world. We’ve got a great team that we’re growing in Europe, so, all sorts of stuff. The great thing about this job is it’s continually evolving both the challenges and the opportunities. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen next.

John: Your position really didn’t exist at so many, across corporate America, especially at publicly-traded companies, years ago and we have, five, six years ago it didn’t really exist, and we have lots of young listeners from colleges across America that email us or contact us and they want to know, “How can I be the next Christina Page?” We’re down to the last two minutes. Do you have some pearls of wisdom to share with the next generation coming up behind you on how to prepare to help not only change the world but get ready for their careers?

Christina: Absolutely. I’ve been in this business for 20 years. I’m going to date myself. I don’t think there’s ever been as fruitful a time to get involved with sustainable business, hence the sustainability movement. There are just so many different ways that you can get involved. Let’s say the number one thing is, do what you’re good and passionate about in terms of process. Figure out what you’re interested in studying and learning about because odds are good there’s going to be an opportunity in the green movement, in the sustainability movement that’s compatible with that. If you’re an engineer, tremendous opportunities. My data center guys would love to hire you if you develop expertise in energy efficiency, water efficiency, sourcing cleaner sources of energy. If your passion is communication, there’s obviously great opportunities in terms of generating content for sites like Yahoo! Green or working to craft a corporate sustainability strategy and the messaging around that. I think start with what are you personally passionate about and how can you plug that in and serve sustainability. Also I think, find somebody who has a job that you think you’d really like and talk to them about it, ask them how they got there. It’s such a quickly evolving field that really looking at someone and talking to them about how they got there, is a really great thing to focus on as well. Go to as many events as you possibly can. We’re spoiled here in the Bay area because it’s just such a hub of clean tech innovation. I could go to an event, pretty much any day of the week. But you can also get on the web and look around, find things, talk to people. Read as much as you can about the things that you’re passionate about. And that will all, I’m sure, lead you in an interesting direction. This is, for better or for worse, the problems that we have, the challenges that we have are not going away but what it also offers is amazing opportunities in terms of careers for helping to solve those problems in genius creative ways.

John: Well, that’s well said, and I hope our young listeners out there took some good notes there because that’s great advice. For our listeners here, Christina is doing amazing things at Yahoo. Go to their site yahoo.com. Obviously, the great legendary website, yahoo.com. But, for those who also want to learn more about what Christina spoke about, it’s green.yahoo.com. It’s the number one green website online. Christina, Mike and I are just so thankful and honored that you came to our show today. You’re an amazing and proven inspirational leader and truly living proof that green is good.

Announcer: This program will be available for downloading in a couple of days from our station’s website. Keyword, podcast. Thanks for listening and join us again next week at the same time for another edition of Green Is Good.

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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 it’s 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 and I’m so honored to have you with us today, Tonie Hansen. She’s the senior director of corporate responsibility for NVIDIA. Welcome to the Impact podcast, Tonie.

Tonie Hansen: Thanks John, really excited to be here.

John: For our listeners and viewers, just to find NVIDIA, you can go to www.nvidia.com. I have your website up Tonie, and we’re going to be talking about some of the things on your website and other things I’ve learned and that you’ve learned along the way as well. But before we get talking about NVIDIA, talk a little bit about Tonie Hansen. How did you even get here, Tonie? Tell our listeners and viewers a little bit about your journey.

Tonie: Yeah, I’m happy too. It wasn’t a straightforward journey. I think this is my third career iteration. I started in the hospitality and special events field, so that was kind of my focus in college, marketing business but with that specialty in mind. Right before I got into Tech, I was working in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts and doing client events and holiday parties, and medical conferences. And then I realized that in that career you’ve got this executive at the top and then you’ve got all these other people kind of competing for that one spot and just didn’t feel like opportunities to me and I thought maybe it’s a good time to go back to school. When I was in business school, I dove in kind of feet first into the tech world. I was relatively a latecomer compared to some folks in the tech space. For me, getting that hardcore indoctrination in the first year of business school was incredible. I signed up through the MBA internship program to go work at a tech company. From there, I just kind of jumped off. That was career number two. Getting to work for companies in Boston, in California, being able to help brands who were just starting to come online. These are some of the earlier days of the internet. Help them understand how to connect with their customers online, how to engage with them, how to get them to buy something, and I used to do contests were a big thing in the early days. We had all those crazy tools that we all kind of roll our eyes at now, but that was all fun unexplored, interesting territory back then. I was able to work with startups and a couple of big companies to convince those brands to work with us either to use our technology or come to our site and build those relationships that they wanted with their customers. That was wonderful for eight years. It was glamorous. Got to go all over the world and do cool stuff with the latest technology but it’s just started feeling a little hollow for me. I think because my personal life was becoming a lot more volunteer-focused. I was doing a lot more in the environmental space. This was a few years before the beginning of the Iraq War and I was kind of protesting, and my friends were starting to notice this change in me and I decided that I wanted to work and do something kind of more meaningful in the space. I was out to dinner with a couple of girlfriends one night. One of them had worked for a start-up. That was very successful. She did quite well, she started to go work for nonprofits to do development for them. And she said I go to these big companies in Silicon Valley to ask them for millions of dollars. There are people inside those companies that give millions of dollars away to charities for a living. So that would be the most amazing job in the world. And our friend Michelle said, “Oh my God, my husband Scott is hiring for that job at NVIDIA.” And so, boom, a few weeks later. Being able to come in and build from scratch always loved being able to solve a lot of problems that come up in the environmental and social space, have worked on the first iteration of the company’s climate program, and have worked on our internal and external diversity programs. Now, I do a lot of external reporting around all this work to investors and customers. It’s just been a progression of many different things over the past few years. But to help build the program has just been such a great honor.

John: You joined NVIDIA about 2000 and…

Tonie: Two thousand six.

John: In 2006. I know NVIDIA is a global leader in artificial intelligence in hardware and software and that you take on some of the world’s hardest problems. But how does that mean, practically speaking in terms of how you deploy these hardware and software technologies and what kind of problems are hard that you guys are solving for a layman like me?

Tonie: The idea of solving hard problems is core to our culture. It helps us focus as a company on where we can be profitable but also where we can have a significant societal impact. And those things have always gone hand in hand for us as a company. When we look at hard problems, we first identify the problem. It’s often something in the social sphere of medicine and general science. Those are two areas where we apply this process frequently. And then, we determine how hard the problem is. Because if it isn’t a hard problem, someone else’s likely already solving it, or they’re going to solve it and that would have diminished business value for us. And then we ask, do we have unique capabilities to solve it? This is fundamentally a technology question, as a technology company. And is it something that incredibly powerful accelerated computing technology is well suited for? Can we contribute meaningfully to the solving of that problem? And if we can’t get a resounding yes for all three of those things it’s likely not going to be a strong area of focus for us. When we look at things like some of these intractable societal problems that are out there medicine and disease are a big one that comes to mind. Science is always looking for ways to prevent, identify, and treat diseases. And until the application of accelerating computing, the technology was often the limiter of how much progress you could make. And to tackle these problems, you need to study them. You’ve got to assess massive amounts of data often in disparate data sets in combination with each other. And you don’t want to wait weeks, months, or years to get the results. And so, our technology is uniquely suited to take massive amounts of data in these areas. Accelerate these scientific processes that kind of underlying them, an example of that would be drug discovery. Whether you’re evaluating, whether certain molecules of a drug will connect with proteins or genes in the body and when you apply accelerated computing to that process, that not only speeds it up dramatically, but it happens more quickly. But it speeds up the number of targets that you can identify. Climate change is a perfect example of another intractable issue where we believe that our technology can have an impact. Understanding the changing climate means evaluating the past and making predictions. You need data to do this. And powerful ways to compute that data so that you can show how past behaviors or patterns will impact future results. The area of the climate is becoming a growing focus for NVIDIA.

John: That’s so exciting. I want to go back to climate in the second, Tonie. But when you brought up the medical issue, I happen to be lucky enough to be in the room in Armenia in October of 2019, when the CEO of a company that I never heard of before named Moderna was talking about the application of AI to pharmaceutical and drug manufacturing world. And what he was saying was brilliant. But being a non-medical person I said, I wonder if this is going to have any real-life applications. Of course, fast forward six months later, when he broke the code of the pandemic and Covid-19 using AI, I realized he was really impressive when he was speaking back in October of 2019. I saw personally his vision and heard his vision and then, saw it in action. It’s just so fascinating. Let’s go back to climate. What are some of the applications of some of your great and important technologies when it comes to AI in hardware and software that you’re using to help like you said fix or solve the historically intractable problem of climate change?

Tonie: We have seen some incredible instances where accelerated computing technology is having an impact across the entire cycle of climate change. Climate research to carbon reduction technologies to mitigating the impacts of carbon and adapting to climate change, which is working to restore ecosystems that have been impacted by extreme weather events for example. So again, all intractable problems with a technology solution and for climate, it is the case for many other areas of focus. We like to put our technology into the hands of people who deeply understand the science behind those areas so that they can drive innovation here. We consider ourselves the enablers of that innovation. In that research space, where it’s necessary to look at data from the past and understand what’s in store for us in the future, the acceleration that we’ve seen here has been the application of AI. Climate scientists are using NVIDIA’s accelerated computing technology to model climate scenarios and predict weather patterns. By applying AI to that, they can now actually model weather forecasting 4 to 5 magnitude faster than by traditional methods. And so, when you think about that speed, getting that data into the hands of people more quickly so they can make decisions that ultimately on the weather side of things save lives, that’s a huge impact there. In the area of reduction, the goal is never to generate a ton of CO2. And examples of this are companies in the renewable energy space and companies that are using NVIDIA technology to build more efficient wind turbines. To physically design them to be more aerodynamic and generate more wind energy by using our technology and computational fluid dynamics to do that. And other companies are using AI at the edge of these wind turbine farms to monitor the farms. And to ensure that the turbines are operating 24/7 and that they’re being properly maintained. On the mitigation front, which is a real burgeoning area, NVIDIA scientists have worked with leading institutions to use AI to model optimal sites for carbon sequestration. After you’ve captured that carbon out of the atmosphere, you want to store it away someplace. And you need to know when you’re storing it in that medium, how quickly can you do that? And how efficiently can you do that? AI can help you understand what’s going on underneath the ground and how to get that carbon stored in the most efficient way possible. And then that last phase the adaptation side of things is about ecosystems, biodiversity, and building resiliency. One of the areas where we have seen incredible innovation is from startups. We have a start-up network called the Inception Network. We’ve got 10,000 plus startups using our technology, where we provide training in marketing, resources, and exposure to them. And we support numerous companies and Inception that are using AI across all aspects of climate. Can I give you a few examples because they’re incredibly cool?

John: A hundred percent, I love that. And just for our listeners and viewers who you’ve just joined us. We’re so excited and honored to have you with us, Tonie Hansen. She’s a senior director of corporate responsibility for NVIDIA. You can find NVIDIA at www.nvidia.com. And also, I want to mention, Tonie, that your annual corporate, and social responsibility reports coming out this month in June. And we’re going to talk about that in a little while. Tell us some specific examples of some of these great applications. They’re going to help make our world a better and more sustainable place.

Tonie: Absolutely. Specifically, in the startup world. In “Conservation”, there’s a company in Kenya, they have created an AI-powered camera trap that can identify wild animals, vehicles, and civilians in a scenario. They can send alerts of poaching threats to on-duty wildlife rangers. As we know, poaching is a huge issue. You don’t often have the resources in countries in “Conservation Parks” to monitor these cameras. But being able to use AI to do that is a really powerful way to protect some of those animals that are really at risk. The same startup has another initiative. Talk about another species at risk. Talking about bees. This company has an initiative that monitors bee colonies. And they do that with a range of sensors. So they’re capturing acoustic data, vibrations, temperature, and humidity within the beehives. Again, with disparate data sources and massive amounts of data, what can you predict from all of those different things in play? And so, this platform that the company in Kenya has created can help beekeepers monitor their colonies’ health and they can fend off threats from bacteria or viruses from an animal, or even humans. Oceans are an incredible opportunity for us to look at things like carbon sinks. And so there’s a start-up in Germany that’s monitoring the ocean floors. They’re monitoring surrounding coastal ecosystems so they can find natural carbon sinks and this will help scientists understand how we can better leverage those sinks for storing even more carbon. There are a million examples, John. We could spend the entire podcast just talking about startups using AI in this space across the entire phase. It’s thrilling to everyday kind of learn about new companies that are using our technology to tackle some of these problems.

John: As you said, now we were intractable historically, but their paramount issues in terms of, if we want to be a surviving planet in the centuries to come. If they’re not solved now, we’re almost set at a breakpoint.

Tonie: Absolutely. The number of animals that we’ll lose, they need to get the carbon currently generated, the emissions in the air, out of the air, and stored away somewhere. These are huge critical big things that can have a tremendous impact. It seems so many people apply themselves to it with a technology solution, which we have course love just makes us proud as a company.

John: Tonie, you’ve been there now at NVIDIA for 16 or so years. You’ve seen an evolution in not only the company but also in your important role. So, one role is that you’d be the charitable foundation at NVIDIA. And that’s sort of or you did or something that was part of your role.

Tonie: Yeah, I helped to build that program from scratch. And I like to say that it’s in the hands of an incredibly capable colleague of mine right now. And actually, she’s doing amazing things.

John: To me that’s outward-facing. Now, talk about the inward. And when a company like yours is solving such hard problems or working on hard problems, culturally, in my experience, it creates an atmosphere in a culture that goes way beyond a paycheck. That the employees get excited because the mission is almost as important, if not more important than just a paycheck. We all need paychecks to pay the bills and keep our lights on and pay for gas, of course, and food, but your mission is unbelievably important and fascinating. Talk a little bit about how you get to attract and retain employees because of all the great work that you do and part of that deals with the messaging that you do on the important work that NVIDIA is up to.

Tonie: Yeah, I appreciate you bringing up the people piece because I’ve talked a ton about technology but technology is nothing without the people behind it. And so, NVIDIA, we talked about wanting to be a place where people can come and do their life’s work. Where people who want to work on hard problems go because they fundamentally believe that technology can change the world and it can make progress with many of these intractable things that we’ve been talking about. The list of people who come from is just incredible unique areas are huge. I’ll give you a few examples, we have on our team within the company a former cardiothoracic surgeon who’s now the head of medical AI. We have climate scientists who worked in the public sector, who just got to deeply appreciate and were so passionate about the power of our technology to help climate scientists come inside so that they could direct us on a path of helping climate scientists specifically, with our technology and making that available externally. We have Academy Award winners who have joined the company, who have used our technology, and who have won those awards for using our technology in the film and entertainment space. We have employees who won their very first Academy Award as an employee of the company using the technology in the film and entertainment space. Yeah, it’s incredible

.

John: That’s awesome.

Tonie: And we’ve got hundreds of researchers working on building this energy-efficient technology that I would love to talk to you more about, that is enabling customers to use a lot less carbon. And there are 20,000 plus unique stories of people who were drawn here because again, of their fundamental belief in the technology. And to be part of that in a way that they can most their contribution.

John: And those 20,000 employees are mostly based in the United States or are they dispersed around the world?

Tonie: All around the world. I can’t even remember the number of offices that we have. I think it’s on our website. I feel there are 60 offices in multiple countries throughout every major region in the world. It is a truly global kind of mindset and belief system within the company around that solving hard problems and coming here to do that work.

John: Tonie, I’m going to date myself a little bit with regards to this analogy I’m going to draw, but I know your annual corporate responsibility report is coming out this month. And so, I can imagine for you it’s sort of Sophie’s Choice on what you would like to highlight from that report. To tease our listeners and viewers about what to expect, can you share just some of your favorite stories that you highlighted and that is going to be shown in this annual report that’s coming out?

Tonie: Sure. I do get the Sophie’s Choice reference, but you might need to explain it to some other folks just in case because I’m probably closer to your age than you might think of them. This is the 12th year of our report and every year we relish the opportunity to tell that story of how the people in the technology together kind of make that difference. And you got a sneak peek at some of that today. We talked about the energy efficiency of our products. And the story I told around the energy savings if everyone switch to our technology. As well as, how our technology is being used in all those different phases of climate change. That’s a super important focus for us. Another highlight is trustworthy AI. So, AI is just an incredible tool, and recognizing that technology can have a profound impact on people in the world. We have done work internally to enable transparency and trust in our AI development. And so, specifically around, how we design and deploy data sets and models and other tools. We want to tell that story because it’s important to be transparent around that area and we’ve done a lot of work in that space since our last report went out. We’re not just responsible for the technology itself, but there’s also a feeling that we need to ensure that people all over the world had an opportunity to benefit from it and develop with it. We tell the story of our AI nations team, which is forging relationships with emerging and established countries. And helping to bring AI to those countries, as well as our emerging chapters team, which brings education and support to countries whose communities are traditionally underrepresented in tech. And they’ve just done some incredibly impactful work in accelerating the use of our technology throughout Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and many regions throughout the world. I just want to make a final note on providing opportunities to traditionally underrepresented communities. That forms the heart of our responsibilities around the company that we build from a people perspective. This year in the report, we’re putting more effort into really emphasizing how diversity and inclusion actions are embedded across the entire company. Because you can’t have this one person that directs all that efforts. People need to feel it. It needs to be part of their everyday management. How we bring people into the company, how we support those people, how we promote them, and how we develop them. That can’t just be a separate group that’s doing that. We talked a lot about that integration story. I was fortunate enough to work on our DNI programs in their super early days. It’s just heartening for me to see how big the team has become. To see that we have a multi-year plan. We’re working on the plan and our initial feedback from these very consistent pulse surveys that we do with employees indicates that they feel included. They feel supported, they feel that they belong. And that NVIDIA is the place where they want to come and do their life’s work.

John: Wow. And that report will be coming out in June of 2022?

Tonie: That’s right.

John: And people could find that on the corporate social responsibility area on your website. Is that not correct?

Tonie: Absolutely, can’t miss it.

John: Yeah, quickly, since climate change is affecting all of us wherever you sit on this wonderful planet. Go back a little bit and let’s talk about obviously, we mentioned earlier, we discussed that one of the applications of your tremendous AI and robotics technology in both software and hardware is in the climate space. Talk a little bit about more specifically, the applications, and then, what goes into the technologies themselves, so our listeners and viewers can more understand and unpack the climate space applications that you have.

Tonie: I talked before about putting technology in the hands of scientists. But that usually means that we’re providing algorithms or applications or software development kits that either we or our partners create. But we felt that the way that we could accelerate climate science is to build and host a supercomputer that would be dedicated to climate science. And so, late last year, we announced Earth 2 and it is going to host a digital twin of the Earth. If your listeners aren’t familiar with digital twins, they are physically accurate simulations of particular scenarios. I will give you a super easy one. You’re an automotive manufacturer, you have an assembly line, and there’s robotics on the assembly line. There’s people power on the assembly line and you want to get those cars assembled and out as fast as possible because that means more revenue for you. Well, to figure out the best processes on the assembly floor, you’d have to spend probably hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars reworking everything and then seeing if it worked. But if you could digitally create a physically accurate simulation of your assembly floor and work. And replicate the people power and the robotics power you could do scenarios all day to figure out how you could save time, in this particular case. But from what we’re talking about, we’re talking about a physically accurate simulation of planet Earth. And the goal is that scientists can perform ultra-high resolution climate modeling of how cities and regions are going to be impacted at a hyper-local level by climate change. And be able to visually show local and global governments the risk that they’re at. And the goal with Earth 2 is to spur more urgency in reacting and coming up with mitigation and adaptation solutions to what a particular city or region is facing. Earth 2, we’ll see some definite progress on that next year. I just gave an example of how we’re deploying our technology to tackle climate change, but it’s also really important to mention how we’re building the computing technology and that’s with an eye toward energy efficiency. We aim to make every generation of GPUs faster and more energy-efficient than its predecessor. Our current architecture in use is up to 20 times faster for artificial intelligence workloads than our previous generation and compared to CPU technology, which is how AI has traditionally gotten done. NVIDIA’s technology is up to 20 times more energy-efficient for AI workloads than CPUs. I talked earlier about the greenest watt of energy being the one that you never have to generate. When you’re using our accelerated computing technology to perform a task, whether it’s a climate-related or financial scenario or genomic analysis, it’s the X-factor and more energy-efficient than traditional computing technology that still exists in data centers today. And we looked at the energy savings that would be realized if we were able to switch all of those CPU-only servers running AI worldwide to NVIDIA systems. We estimated that the world could save nearly twelve trillion watt-hours of energy a year. And that’s equivalent to the energy requirements of nearly 1.7 million homes in the United States. It was significant savings. So think about how AI is growing. AI training and deployment take place in data centers. There’s going to be an exponential increase in data centers and if they’re powered using more energy-efficient technology, you’ve got an exponentially positive impact on the environment, as well. So I’ll just wrap up. Sorry.

John: It’s fascinating, Tonie. What you’re saying, from a cultural and DNA perspective, NVIDIA is not only helping solve as you say, some of the most intractable and hard problems of the planet using climate change is a great platform for this discussion. But you’re also, yourselves working sustainably to make sure that you’re also not helping to further degrade or liquidate this precious planet that we live on. That you’re doing everything in the most sustainable way possible inside your operations, facilities, and technologies, as well.

Tonie: Yeah.

John: It’s awesome. Go ahead. You’re going to wrap up with something. I’m sorry.

Tonie: Yeah, I just really wanted to talk about our operations. Our offices and data centers. Data centers are a huge part of that. We eat our dog food, so to speak. We’re heavy users of our technology. We do our research on it and we also run cloud-based businesses. And our data centers have become a test bed for us to be constantly improving server energy efficiency and deploying new cooling techniques. And so, all of those things that we learn, we can pass on to our customers who are buying our technology for their data centers. And so, again, passing on that goodness to our customers so that they can feel good about lowering their footprint and their climate impact when they’re needing to do this heavy computing work.

John: Tonie, Earth 2 sounds so fascinating, and never even heard of it before. And I’m now more fascinated by that. Then almost anything else that I’m hearing about in the climate space out in the rest of the world. So, tell me a little bit about when you start to think we’re going to start to see results from the modeling that you’re doing. And then, is that mean you’re going to see if the South Pole melts at this rate then the water table will go up in New York or San Diego at this rate? And is that the kind of measurements and modeling that Earth 2 is going to be up to?

Tonie: Those are some of the elements that will be able to be worked on in this digital twin, this replica environment. Modeling some of those arctic scenarios. I love the idea of being able to use this as a tool for school children. I mean, why limit creativity to just climate scientists. And I think that the goal of Earth 2 is if can make it easier for countries, cities, towns, and the government and the citizens behind those areas to see, what is happening to their cities? What is happening to their region? Because it’s too dry. Because the coastline is going to start encroaching on their part. What creativity can be spurred from that? And so, it is quite as kind of could be used as a global conversation tool.

John: We can do modeling that will help the original planet Earth avoid catastrophic results in the future and maybe make the adjustments that are necessary that we might not about wise made. Isn’t that the macro principle there?

Tonie: Yeah, that is absolutely the goal. I think you nailed that properly. A couple of the points that I would make around some of the forces that were kind of dealing with today. They call it climate simulations. And they look at these kilometer resolutions, how close can you get to what’s happening up in the sky or from up in the sky down to the Earth level. And so, the resolution that the technology will be able to bring, to model some of these changes could help with understanding the global water cycle. How is water moving from the ocean, sea, ice, land surface, and groundwater through the atmosphere and clouds? And changes in this whole system lead to instant intensifying storms and droughts. That’s just kind of one of the tons of examples of how applying science that is being done today but could be done at an X-factor resolution better. Some of the impacts that it can help us understand around storms and droughts and the danger, the ultimate risk that we’re going to be in 10, 20, X number of years from now because this is not something that’s going to go away anytime soon.

John: It’s satisfying to say that Earth 2 is going to make Earth 1 a more sustainable and better place, and it’s going to help us avoid some catastrophic results that we potentially going to walk ourselves into if we don’t take better care of the Earth 1.

Tonie: I think that you should come and join our PR team. Our Earth 2 PR team.

John: I’m already a fan. Wait for a second, I just want to go back to something. There is something out there called a kilometer because if there is one, I need one for my house. We’ll see where we are every day so I know how to adjust with my family and what’s going on. Anyway, Tonie, you’ve been amazing. And for our listeners and viewers out there to learn much more about what NVIDIA is doing and to see and read their new corporate social responsibility report that’s coming out in June 2022, please go to www.nvidia.com. Tonie Hansen, I am so thankful for your time today. Thank you for making the impacts that you make both at NVIDIA and for making the world a better place.

Tonie: Thanks, John. Great to meet you and thanks for letting me share.

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 Loops 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: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy. It 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: All right. This is John Shegerian. I never could have imagined when we started the Green is Good Radio Show back in 2006, that it would grow into a big podcast called The Green is Good podcast. And now we’ve evolved that podcast to the Impact podcast which is more inclusive and more diverse than ever before. But we did look back recently at some of our timeless Green is Good interviews and decided to share some of them with you now. So enjoy one of our great Green is Good episodes from our archives and next week, I’ll be back with a fresh and new episode of the Impact podcast. Thanks again for listening. I’m grateful to all of you. This is John Shegerian.

Announcer: Welcome to Green is Good, raising awareness of each individual’s impact on the environment and helping to create a more beautiful and sustainable world. Now, here’s John Shegerian, Chairman and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International, and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome to Green is Good. Mike, it’s so great to be in studio with you today.

Mike Brady: Hard to believe another week has come and gone John, but this really is the high point of my week as I know it is yours. Because for the next hour we’re going to get together, have some fun, and have a few moments of “oh wow” discovery and, well, together we’ll get to entertain, empower, and inform our audience and do what we can to make the world a little bit greener place.

John: Well, you remember last week when we had the UK edition of Green is Good, it was both of our shows came right out of the UK?

Mike: Sure do. In fact, I just got over my jet-lag a couple of days ago.

John: Well, today, I think Linda Ramos who’s so kind enough to book all of our shows, I think Linda is creating these geographic specific shows because today is our New York edition of Green is Good.

Mike: All right, so what have we got in part one?

John: Part one, we have our great friends from the NRDC. Courtney Hamilton is so kind to bring us all of the great thought leaders from the NRDC all the time. I’ve said this to Courtney before, I think they have the deepest green bench in the industry and I think that’s going to be proven again here today. Because we have Paul McRandal on, who is going to be talking about their new Great Green online tool called smartercities.org. I think our listeners are going to really enjoy this. This is a very important topic and a very important tool. So everybody should come on back after our sponsors to Green is Good.

Announcer: If a little Green is Good, more is even better. Now, back to Green is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good. Today, we’re so excited to have Paul McRandal on from my hometown of New York City, New York. Paul is the editor of the NRDC Simple Steps, and Smarter Cities website. Paul, welcome to Green is Good.

Paul McRandal: Well, thank you for having me.

John: We’re so excited. Mike and I have been so lucky and blessed to have so many amazing thought leaders and visionaries on from the NRDC. We’re just thankful to have just another great person, Paul. You’re on today to talk about something really amazing, something we touched on months back with Wendy Gordon and you’re here to talk about smartercities.org. Tell our listeners today how it’s evolved and where the project and where your website is right now.

Paul: Well, right now, we’ve just released a report on energy and we looked at what cities across the country were doing to help conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprints. It’s both an efficiency point of view and a way of looking at how they’re paying for green energy. We have launched this as a new project and we are going to take every three months a new report on and look at things like transportation, look at water usage in cities, look at green building and smart growth, and all this sort of thing so that we want to give a full rounded picture of what cities across the country are doing to green their environmental profile. This will take about three years but we hope to really be able to highlight a lot of stories and tell about what are the best things the cities are doing.

John: Paul, we have so many questions to ask you today. But here is a question. The NRDC is just an amazing organization and we’re just huge fans of it here at Green is Good. So many of your, as I said, thought leaders and writers, and visionaries have been on our show already. How do sausages get made, though? How did you guys come up with this great idea? How did that really happen, our listeners and Mike and I want to know that?

Paul: Okay. Well, where it all started was about 2005. We were looking at, and we were depressed, by the situation it hasn’t changed much, the fact that the federal government has really abdicated any responsibility for dealing with global warming. But at that time, Seattle’s mayor Greg Nickels came up with the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement and he has now managed to get over 1000 mayors across the country to sign up for that. It seemed like cities were where the action was. Cities were where environmental change was happening in the US. We wanted, given that the federal story was a little bit depressing, to say the least, we wanted to get out there and show what cities are doing and what their residents and citizens should get behind and encourage and learn from so that cities that perhaps may not have gotten on board yet, could pick up from these other places.

John: Great, so how do you define then a smarter city and how do you rate these cities?

Paul: Well, what we call smarter cities are cities that are using their environmental resources and also the people who live there in a, essentially a smarter fashion. They’re not polluting their air, they’re not polluting their water, they’re getting their people also to help out in this and are learning from them. We are excited that places like Reno, Nevada, which has a green summit annually and invites all the residents of Reno to come in and provide ideas and talk about the coming year’s environmental initiatives and programs. That’s a broad idea of what a smarter city is. Then what we do, is we go and find for a particular sustainability factor, what we call, and in this case it was energy conservation and production. We look at what is the best data available, what are the best reports showing across the country how cities maybe are producing energy or the carbon footprints of cities. There are several reports we looked at in this case. Then when we can’t get enough information from those reports, we send out surveys to every city in the country that has a population of 50,000 or more. That’s 655 cities in total. We want to be as inclusive as we can. We go back to the cities, again and again, to encourage them to fill out the survey to help them with whatever we can so we can get as much information as possible.

John: Well, so now you are launching this great website. Again, for our listeners out there in front of your laptop, computer, iPad, it’s smartercities, cities.org. Go to that site, it’s amazing. Mike, you’ve got the site up in front of you now.

Mike: It’s really cool. John, there’s a list of all of the cities that are already being tracked. It kind of shows what the matrix are and why these cities are the cities to watch. It’s really cool and I would like to encourage our listeners to hit this site and then find out what you can do to get whatever city you happen to be listening in, listed as one of America’s smartest cities.

John: Thank you, Mike. That’s a great point. Paul, how did you come up with the first 22 then? Why 22 and how can you grow that over there? What’s your vision at the NRDC to take it out? How big can it go? Can 22 eventually become 655 or what’s the goal?

Paul: Well, that’s what we would like. We would like to even go to smaller cities if we could. It’s really a question of manpower.

John: Right.

Paul: But the thing is that we set a series of thresholds. We said if cities have reduced their energy consumption per capita, below a certain amount, if cities have a target for their energy reductions, if they reached a certain set of thresholds, then they became smarter cities. We didn’t rank them against each other we just asked that they meet these standards.

John: Got you.

Paul: We didn’t get the top 10 cities. We got 22, of which there were different numbers in different size categories.

Mike: Paul, let me ask you. Just looking through your site, I kind of sense a recurring pattern here. It seems like part of the impetus for these cities to even begin their own energy audits, etc, and finding out ways of becoming more efficient as a municipal government, when it comes to energy and wastewater treatment, etc, there is an economic side to that. Am I picking up a pattern here?

Paul: Well, that’s obviously very important. We are in pretty austere times too. Cities are trying to find money wherever they can and ideally without having to lay off more employees so they are reducing hours than doing anything. But saving energy is a prime way to do this. Many of them find that their buildings are inefficient, that there are simple changes they can make to their heating and cooling systems, that they can change the lighting and make, put it in LEDs and streetlights and so on. All of these end up being big money savers. Those allow cities to provide the programs that the citizens need and keep the city in good repair.

John: I’ve been on your site, Mike’s on it now it’s wonderful. I mean, we’re so excited to be able to talk to our listeners and share this with them. Talk a little bit about the first 22. First of all, explain how come there are so many cities from Texas how did that happen? What do you think is in the water down there?

Paul: Well, Texas is interesting. It’s a pretty unique state. One of the reasons why is because it owns its own power grid. That allows the state to make decisions that no other state really has the power to do, so to speak. Among these, they have made wind power a priority. They generate twice as much wind power as the next highest state, which would be Iowa. The amount of wind power that Texas generates accounts for more than 30% of all the wind energy created in the US. What they have chosen to do is, back in 1999, they mandated the state put out 2000 megawatts from renewable energy sources by last year. Then in 2005, with wind farms coming online, they increased that mandate up to 6000 megawatts by 2015. At that state level, you had a big push in El Paso, Austin, Dallas, in Texas these are the cities that are all on our list. They’ve all benefited from these mandates but they’ve also made strides on their own that are quite impressive.

John: Interesting. Before you got back the questionnaires and as this was evolving internally at the NRDC, and you were, I’m sure, guessing to yourself which cities were going to be the superstars to start this whole process and which maybe we are going to be the laggers. What cities really surprise you both on both sides, especially on the good side? Because we love focusing on good here. What were the good surprises?

Paul: Well, I have to say El Paso is one. I really didn’t know that it had made the kinds of moves that it has done. When you think of the top green cities, you think of these West Coast cities.

John: Yeah, of course.

Paul: El Paso just doesn’t have that reputation. But, in fact, it’s been working on putting a 20-megawatt solar power plant, to begin construction this year. It has a new mission to limit its energy use to 70% of its 2008 levels by 2014. It’s setting these targets and it’s working towards them in a very concrete fashion. That’s actually made it pass a lot of our thresholds and really stand out. El Paso is a story that we’d like to mention.

Reno, as I mentioned before, is another interesting city, both for its green summit and the research that it encourages there. Even on city hall, they’re doing tests of different types of windmills to see which are most efficient windmills. They’re looking at the city’s geothermal energy, because as Senator Harry Reid has said, “The city is sitting on what could be the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy.” In a fairly conservative state like Nevada, Reno is really making strides.

Mike: Well, it’s really interesting too, Paul, just looking and again, I’m getting this information from your wonderful site. I want to give it again, a shout out to smartercities.org, which is really cool. Talking about El Paso, they’re sitting in the middle of a desert and most of us in the Central Valley can understand what water shortage is like. But they’ve increased their annual supply of water by about 25% because of a desalination plant that was created to treat the existing brackish water that is there. Now with only about less than 9% or 9 inches of annual rainfall, this is a really important thing and another important step that is proving why El Paso, Texas is one of the smarter cities in America.

Paul: Yeah, that’s water supply and handling waters and drought are going to be a really important issue. NRDC also just released a report showing that, by 2050, global warming is going to have a serious impact on the water supplies of counties across the US. Many of them will be facing much more dire conditions if we do nothing. These issues are very much tied together. We have to get our energy conservation and our carbon emissions under control. Because it will have effects that will attack our food supply and it will impact our water supply across the country.

John: I know with regards to your definition of smarter, part of the definition is efficiency, sustainability, equability, and livability. Besides carbon footprint and wind and all those which that’s tied to, what about other programs that were unique that really inspired you and you are able now to highlight on this great website and inspire other city managers and mayors across America to maybe potentially implement these type of unique programs?

Paul: Well, yeah, there are a couple we’ve already mentioned. But I’d just like to mention one, a small town, which actually is not in our list, it’s too small.

John: Okay.

Paul: We published a piece on them at Ellensburg, Washington, which is a small, high prairie community in Washington state. They are the first city in the US to have a community solar project in which the residents funded the creation of a set of solar PV generators that feed into the grid. Those residents each get back a small amount of money for the investment they put in. This saved them from having to put power PV cells on their rooftops and have the hassle of installation there and instead concentrated on one area. That was kind of a a neat thing that even small communities can do.

John: Interesting. On the site, our listeners always email Mike and myself and they ask us how can they get involved. What’s the door or the window for them to step through to become part of the solution in this green revolution? Talk a little bit about some of the features on your website in terms of citizen reporting and city wiki’s and things like that. Explain how our listeners can now become integrated and part of the conversation on what you’re doing with smartercities.org?

Paul: Thank you for mentioning those tools. Yeah, the city wiki is an area that we set up to allow anybody who wants to tell us their story about their city to just put up information and to encourage responses from their committee members and others. We then would be happy to draw from that information, report on these, and then follow these stories up. We’re really interested in getting people involved in there. We’ve got, in fact, a 14-year-old girl who has been working with us on a school garden program and she wants to get others encouraged through the city wiki. That’s one way to do it.

We have consumer reporter stories, I’m sorry, citizen reporter stories and there we are encouraging citizens, again, to send stories to us that we would vet and work on and post. That’s a little more of an edited version of this. But it’s another area where we like to encourage people. But I’d also like to mention that for each of the cities, we provide tool kits.

John: Okay.

Paul: Those tool kits are links to programs where anybody can get more information about the real nitty-gritty of what the city is doing. They can see laws passed. They can see the details of initiatives and programs and their bench-marking and so on. That kind of information is the kind of thing cities need when they are trying to implement a new program. A citizen who wants to recommend that a city take up a community solar project can point to Ellensburg and can point to the specific pages and can bring that information with them to city council meetings.

John: So the essence of what’s going on here is you are democratizing the spreading of best practices among the cities and also encouraging the denizens of these cities, if they see something, to say something and report it back up to your website which then gets to have visibility to all.

Paul: Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it. That’s really what we are doing, highlighting stories and trying to get the city administrators and the citizens excited, involved, and talking to each other across state boundaries and city lines.

John: That is so wonderful and amazing. What we loved, Mike and I love to highlight solutions here and simple steps to not make this so daunting for both citizens and also the leader’s of cities. Can you share some of the simpler things that good and green cities are doing now already and that other cities can start doing immediately to start making them a smarter city?

Paul: Sure. Really, the most important thing, which is also a simple thing to do, is to set targets. Once you set efficiency targets, then you can find ways to work towards it. But you have to come up with a firm target to say, we will reduce our energy consumption or we will reduce our water consumption by X number of kilowatt-hours by 2010, by 2015, by 2020. You have a plan in place. Then you can start looking at the tools that are available to do that and thinking creatively about those tools. Among those tools are things as simple as installing LED bulbs in city signs. Some cities will do things like buying green energy, renewable energy certificates, which are wind energy that’s generated elsewhere. You simply buy certificates to encourage that wind energy to be created. It doesn’t involve the setup of a wind power plant or other green energy site, but at least it’s supporting that kind of move. That’s probably the simplest, least effort action you can take.

John: You’re saying then the most important thing to do is to begin the process by setting targets.

Paul: Yes, the targets really are the essential element here. Because if you don’t set targets and you don’t track your progress towards making those, then you really are just buying technology and implementing technology without a plan.

Mike: Okay, and the two important numbers when you set that target is a percentage or a number of what you’re going to reduce by what percent and by when. You need both of those, right?

Paul: You need both of those. Yeah, and you need the tracking, who’s going to keep track of this information.

John: Basically, what’s measurable is manageable and there’s no way to create a smarter city if you don’t start with measurable, therefore manageable goals.

Paul: That’s right. Yeah.

John: Got it. Let’s sort of morph the conversation then towards some of what’s going on in Washington and how that ties back to the cities. The whole issue of reinventing our economy with the green collar workforce. How does smarter cities have a role in the whole economy with regards to creating greening of jobs, greening of companies, and also the new green collar and emerging green collar workforce?

Paul: Well, one city that we’d like to point out in this as an example here is Oakland. Because they are dealing both with greening, creating green-collar jobs at a higher level, but also with creating entry-level green jobs for the poorer members of the community. They want to bring everybody with them into this green economy. They’ve created a green jobs core. They just graduated their first class of 40 back in 2009. They’re sending these skilled workers into jobs, doing retrofitting, weatherization, and so on. A number of cities like Portland too are getting stimulus funds from Washington and putting that to work weatherizing homes. A lot of cities have very poorly insulated homes that are leaking energy right out the windows and out the doors. If you get those homes sealed up properly, properly insulated, they will save a lot of energy that will save the owners a lot of money. It will save the city both the cost of having to get a new power plant, as the population grows and the emissions, both carbon and also, of course, we’re talking about pollution in terms of smog that affects people’s health. These weatherization jobs, require people on the ground to do it. You’re talking about five people working at every house, you get 500 houses or more. That’s a fair number of jobs that can be created.

John: Paul, unfortunately, we’re down to the last two minutes or so. Again, Mike and I and Green is Good are huge fans of the NRDC and all the great work you’re doing. Can you leave our listeners with some pearls of green wisdom on how they can become part of the solution, and not only with Smarter Cities but with the NRDC and other great organizations out there? What are some of the ideas that you can share with them right now as we say goodbye with our listeners on how they can become involved with the green revolution?

Paul: Well, what we like to do is to give people simple behavioral changes that they can make. Simple changes they can do on a daily basis. We encourage people to act up politically and to speak up to their congress people. But at the same time, we want people to just make the changes like taking the bus to work, riding a bicycle to work. We want them to buy food from the local farmers markets when they can to support local farms, which is not just a matter of promoting small farms but also is keeping the land preserved from being taken over by your residential housing units and so on that then pollute the waterways more. It’s a matter of taking some local actions like those and coupling them with this political activity. You can donate obviously to environmental organizations that support causes that you think are important. You can visit nrdc.org and others and find ways to donate. But you don’t just have to feel that your task is just giving up money to let others do things. You should step forward, speak up at your city council meetings, be in touch with your mayor, be in touch with your city council members. Let them know what’s important to you. At that grassroots level, the cities are a good spot to act on. You know your voice is more easily heard.

John: I love it. That is so great and well put. We’re so thankful for your time today. From New York City, New York, Paul McRandal. Please, for all our listeners out there, look at all the great things the NRDC is doing at nrdc.org. Also, look at the great website Paul and Wendy work on at smartercities.org This is just, smartercities.org is just another great and amazing visionary tool created by the NRDC. Paul McRandle, you are truly living proof that Green is Good.

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Announcer: If a little Green is Good, more is even better. Now, back to Green is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good, Mike, wasn’t Paul McRandle great? Smarter Cities, what a great concept, what a great website.

Mike: Well, you know, I was just thinking, John, while we were listening, especially with a lot of our listeners that I know like to check out the websites that we are surfing when we’re talking to our guests. I know a lot of our listeners, I can just imagine, are looking and thinking, boy, we could do this in our city. I want to get this kind of information. Maybe we could do this for the desalinization plant or maybe some solar activity going on that we could really save our city government, and ourselves as taxpayers, an awful lot of money.

John: And remember what Paul said, the citizens of these cities, of all cities, across America, big and small, can go on smartercities.org and have your voice heard. So do it. Get involved, become part of the solution. That’s our message to our listeners today.

Mike: And we all want to live in smarter cities and how about when we travel?

John: When we travel, we all want to stay in smarter hotels, and we’re so lucky today to have Gina Edner as our next guest. She’s the Associate Director of Environmental Sustainability for Starwood Hotels. Mike, I’m going to confess something. Starwood is not an advertiser on the show, but it’s my favorite brand to travel with. And I am a member of spg.com, which is their affinity program. And I stay in Starwood Hotels, not only around the United States, but around the world, and they are doing a tremendous job.

Mike: Well, a lot of people may not know the members or the brands of Starwood. So what would those be, John? I know Sheraton, Westin?

John: Yeah. Le Méridien, the W, the St. Regis brand, and their new Element brand, which is their green trailblazing brand.

Mike: Okay. And by the way, Gina, our next guest, had a major role in the new brand.

John: Yeah. She’s going to rock it. And I want all our listeners to come on back for some hospitality, inspiration and some green travel tips at Green is Good.

Announcer: If a little Green is Good, more is even better. Now, back to Green is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green is Good. And we’re so excited today to have Gina Edner on from New York City, New York, my hometown. Gina is the Associate Director of Environmental Sustainability for Starwood Hotels, my favorite brand of hotels. And let me just give a disclaimer. They are not an advertiser. We have no economic interest in Starwood, but we love their brand. Welcome to Green is Good, Gina Edner.

Gina Edner: Thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m so excited to share with you what we’ve done at Starwood and why we think this is such an important issue. We really have about a 1000 hotels now in a 100 countries. Realizing this creates real opportunities to influence everyday choices across the globe for our guests and associates.

John: You are so right, Gina, because when I started traveling for Electronic Recyclers International, a recycling company, it was about five years ago when I realized I had a lot of travel ahead of me, and Westin had just about then changed their policy to be the first hotel to go smoke-free. And I then said I’m going to become a Westin person. I signed up for your spg.com as soon as I learned about it. And spg.com to me has become, and is the greatest affinity program right now in the world. But I want to learn more about besides the no smoking, how this whole process evolved, how you joined Starwood, and how this whole greening of the Starwood Hotel brands, all of your great brands, has evolved over the years. So please share you know what’s the motivation besides no smoking, how this whole process evolved?

Gina: Sure. For us this probably started about three or four years ago after we had the no-smoking policy. We actually started getting a lot more requests from our corporate customers that we are going way beyond no-smoking. And they were asking tough questions. They were asking us things like, do you have a policy around environmental sustainability? Do you recycle? Do you have high-efficiency lighting in your hotels? Do you have green meeting services? Well, realizing it’s starting to really influence their purchasing decisions and who they’re going to stay with and who they’re giving a business to.

We had that and then we also had owner developers approaching us. We actually, Starwood doesn’t own a lot of hotels. We have mostly, we manage and franchise so, we have a lot of owner developers that were asking us how would they build one of our hotels a little bit more sustainable. Some of them had to comply with emerging local regulations. Some of them are just interested in building or operating more efficiently and they wanted to know how they’re going to do that with one of our brands.

John: Got you. Go on.

Gina: Yeah. And then we also had hotels that were existing hotels having such a big portfolio. They’re already doing a lot, but they really were looking for more guidance from us to do even more and more resources to do this.

John: So you started seeing by listening to your clients what the problems were, and what some of their concerns were. How do you then take all that information and start narrowing it down and prioritizing? How do you set tangible goals that can be achieved and start creating the process of making Starwood the greatest sustainability hotel chain in the world?

Gina: That’s a great question. We actually started by conducting a field survey. We were trying to see, what are the initiatives that our hotels are already doing. And we learned quickly there’s a lot going on in the hotels. However, we didn’t really have consistency on what was happening. What we did is we captured proven practices, what was happening in the hotels, and then we also identified areas where we might need to increase our efforts a little bit. And taking those, we developed a policy. We developed a global program and we kind of went on our way. We did set some more tangible goals.

We obviously operate hotels around the world, and they use water, they use energy, and they produce waste every day. And we do also source a lot of products for these hotels. That is an obvious goal for us. We want to reduce the impact. We should reduce the impact of our practices on the environment.

John: Right.

Gina: Then, another one really is, we are in the business of customer service.

John: Sure.

Gina: What we do best is providing a great guest experience. Some of our guests expect to stay in environmentally conscious hotels when they’re traveling and what we want to do is provide products and services that meet those needs. They want to be able to stay green, so let’s let them stay in a greener hotel.

John: Got it.

Gina: Yeah, that’s kind of how we focus our efforts. And then just recently, we announced actual reduction goals. So we are pledging to reduce our energy by 30% and our water by 20% by the year 2020. A little aggressive, but we do think we can do it so, we’re pretty excited about that.

John: Okay. I want to learn, though, give us a little taste of the process how you’re going to achieve those goals. But also, how about waste? How much of the waste will you be reducing by 2020? Do you have a goal there also?

Gina: We haven’t set an official goal…

John: Okay.

Gina: …for waste yet.

John: Right.

Gina: But we’re working on it. So one of the things that has been a challenge for us is to get actual waste numbers from our hotels.

John: Got you.

Gina: In order to set a goal, we have to have a baseline. A lot of the waste haulers have not been providing us traditionally with good numbers. Something we’re focusing on and we’ll hopefully have something in the next 12 months.

John: Great. And to that issue, though, I have to say in some of your hotel rooms that I stay in. There’s actually already a blue recycling bin. You actually use a recycling waste bin in some of the hotels. So I know you’re already moving in that direction.

Gina: Yes, we definitely have initiatives that address minimizing waste. We have providing recycling bins in guest rooms and public areas. We are trying to source more sustainable products that don’t have so much packaging, maybe compost when it’s available. So we’ll have quite a few initiatives that address minimizing our waste, we just haven’t set an official goal.

John: Gina, let’s go back to energy and water then. Those are great, big goals, and we applaud you for that. Share with our listeners what’s a little bit of the process of how you’re going to go about achieving the 30% waste the energy reduction by 2020, and 20% water reduction by 2020 in your great hotel chain.

Gina: It’s actually a combination of what we’re going to do there some low-hanging fruit, there’s operational practices. Makeing sure we turn off the lights. We put the set points of thermostats back at what they should be when a guest leaves. We change out the light bulbs, incandescent light bulbs, to put in more high compact fluorescent or LED lights. We started putting in faucet aerators. Most guests don’t even know if you have a faucet aerator in because most guests don’t. Nobody really turns the faucet all the way up because all that happens is it splashes you.

John: Right.

Gina: Things like that. But then also just making sure that when we irrigate at our properties, we don’t spray half the sidewalk or we over spray so much that there are huge puddles. It’s really simple things that we are starting with. And then we’re looking at kind of where we need to invest some capital. There are some great innovative technology out there. We do need to invest capital. So that will be our next step. And there is also just innovative solutions that we’re starting to play with that are out there, whether or not that’s renewable energy systems or that’s an energy management system that we can install in our guest rooms. It’s a kind of combination approach for us to get to that 2020 goal.

John: Got you. Gina, the green revolution has become a very fascinating trend and opportunity both here in the United States and around the world. A lot of revolutions start from the ground up. But what Mike and I have learned on this show, are great brands like yours and Walmart and other amazing international brands when great brands make decisions to go green, to go sustainable, it really moves the needle. What’s fascinating to Mike and I, and I want our listeners to learn this from you, is the issue of communication with over 1000 properties in about 100 countries and 145,000 employees or so, how do you get buy-in, How do you get to communicate this sustainability message and your goals to your associates and colleagues around the world so you get everybody on board and you get them bought in to this process?

Gina: I would love to say that everybody’s just so bought into the environmental realm, some of us. However, a lot of it starts with making the business case. There is definitely significant operational savings when you implement green operation initiatives.

John: Yeah.

Gina: Since we don’t own so many hotels, the majority are managed and franchised hotels. So any savings that we do incur for making these changes goes directly back to the ownership group. That’s a pretty winning argument when you think about it, especially when you don’t have to invest so much upfront. Yeah.

Mike: You’ve highly incentivized the local ownership then?

Gina: Yes, we do. And we even beyond just making the business case, we are trying to incentivize by providing other incentives or recognition within Starwood in general. That could be marketing funds, that could be awards and recognition programs. So we’re really trying to incentivize. It’s a little bit of a stick approach, but mostly, the carrot of the carrot and stick approach seems to be a lot more successful for us.

John: Interesting. So now, what’s the flip side of that? How do you engage your guests then in this process, so not only are they excited because they are guests in your hotels and you are in the service industry, but that they also participate and start changing their behavior that they maybe even learned in your hotels?

Gina: That’s actually interesting. Our guests, as long as we make it easy for them to participate, they want to do it. But that means we do need to provide the recycling bins in a guest room or in a public area.

John: Sure.

Gina: If you’re finishing your soda can, you don’t want to go hunting down a recycling bin, you want to be able to find one pretty quickly.

John: Right.

Gina: We are providing preferred parking for hybrid and fuel-efficient cars. But most important is why we’re doing all these initiatives, we still make sure we provide a great guest experience.

John: Right.

Gina: If you’re staying in one of our hotels, you don’t want to stand in a shower that is water efficient, but you can’t get the shampoo out of your hair.

John: Right.

Gina: Then you have a bad guest experience and you might not come back.

John: Fascinating. So you balance both the great guests’ experience that you are used to giving with your new sustainability initiatives.

Gina: Yes, absolutely. And the reality is that our guests want to feel pampered and they want to feel taken care of, and they want to stay in a great hotel while they’re staying with us.

John: Sure. Let’s switch and talk a little bit about one of your true babies, the new Element Hotel brand that Starwood created to be a sustainable brand. Explain your involvement with it. What’s the entire story behind it? And why, when I was online the other day, and again, this is not an advertisement, because Starwood is not an advertiser of Green is Good. Why has it become so successful? I saw the other day when they were rating new hotel chains, it got the highest rating, a four-star rating. Explain the genesis and where you’ve come with that great new hotel chain?

Gina: Absolutely right. The Element is a great example of balancing the interests of the guests with environmental consciousness. We actually call Element our eco-chic brand. It’s the first brand for us that really embraces a comprehensive green program, from the way we built it to the way we operate it. Interestingly enough, a lot of the things that we do, you probably won’t notice necessarily, and that’s really on purpose. So, we built it with much more environmentally friendly products, making sure we have just like a content in it and also, that it doesn’t smell or off-gas so much. For example, everybody kind of knows when you paint your house, or you buy a new car, you have that smell, the chemical smell, which is actually materials that are off-gassing over time.

John: Yeah.

Gina: Sometimes they give you headaches.

John: Oh, yeah.

Gina: When you walk into a newly built Element, you don’t have that smell. It’s not there. And we’ll make sure it also doesn’t come into there. So we have a green cleaning program that makes sure there’s not more chemicals introduced that’s much, much more environmentally friendly. And then the amazing thing that you can’t really measure is, with Element, we tried to have a really positive effect experience for our guests, but also associate.

One of the things we did is we introduced a lot of daylight. So literally anywhere in the hotel that you might be regularly occupying, you have a lot of access to daylight. And our guests as well as our associates really love that. They want to be connected to the environment to the nature outside, maybe just want to see what the weather is like. And the interesting part about that is, while making them feel good, it also reduces our energy costs because with more daylight you don’t have as much need for other lighting so it does save the energy as well.

John: That’s a win.

Gina: I just love that kind of stuff.

John: That’s a win for the hotel. It’s a win for the client. It’s a win for the environment. That’s a triple win.

Gina: You’re absolutely correct. And you mentioned already, Element has been coming rated so highly. It’s amazing even within the Starwood network, we have guest satisfaction index so we kind of look at how all the hotels are doing. Element has the highest one of all of our brands. This is a flex sort of brand. There’s not like a lot of restaurants. You don’t have a spa. It’s limited services that you get while you’re staying at the Element. Great services, however, it’s not a full service brand. But nonetheless, it’s so well-received. It’s just amazing. We definitely did it right.

John: Wait. Let’s stop there, Gina. I want our listeners to understand this and Mike, I want you to hear this. Gina is very humble. She was the lead designer on the Element brand.

Mike: Wow.

John: And the Element brand has really become Starwood’s green trailblazing brand. And in fact, their first hotel, which was built in Lexington, Massachusetts, won the Gold Leaf Construction Award in December 2008. So Gina, this is truly your baby and you were designing all these things that you say that are now part of the Element of elements. You were really there putting these pieces together.

Gina: Yes, I was and very dear and close to my heart. I like to go back as much as I can, and I do. It’s a fantastic hotel to stay in. I mean, there’s many hotels we have in the Boston area, I usually choose to stay at the Element.

John: How many elements are there now? The first was built in Lexington. How many exists now?

Gina: We have about seven hotels currently open. There’s a few more under construction. So we have one in Houston, I believe. I actually think it’s the number one hotel in Houston rated on Tripadvisor, funny enough. We have a hotel in Denver, Colorado and in Summerlin, Las Vegas. Kind of across the continental US at this point.

John: Got it. So what have you learned from Element that you’ve been able to then leverage that information and knowledge into your entire portfolio? What was learned in the process and learned since the launch in terms of what really excites the guests and what they are enjoying that you’ve then been able to take across your entire portfolio?

Gina: From Element, we really did gather a lot of good information. Most of all that we could build a greener brand and more sustainable brand that our guests really love. I mean, that is fantastic.

John: Right.

Gina: There were things that we implemented, like dual flush toilets. We were a little nervous about dual flush toilets in the guestrooms, but they work. It worked fine. Sustainable material choices that we’ve made during the construction. The green cleaning program we have now implemented in all of our hotels. So there’s many, many items that we have already implemented and are leveraging across the entire portfolio. But then, we are even continuing. Element’s kind of a space is our little innovative lab. We’re trying out new things. So we’re trying out an energy management system right now with Element and that seems to be very promising. So we’re starting to kind of look at other brands where we might be applying that also.

Mike: Yeah. Gina, we had had someone on from Roto-Rooter.

John: Rot-Rooter, yeah.

Mike: Several shows back, they were talking about the home edition of the dual flush system. Now, that’s kind of a novel concept for a lot of people. What is the feedback been from your guests on the dual flush? Do they comment on that?

Gina: It was interesting. We actually haven’t had a lot of comments on it, to be honest. Because it is a transient person that stays in the room, we talked about how do we educate the guests.

Mike: Right.

Gina: What do we say which button to push? Number one or number two? I mean, it’s an interesting concept. And we were a little nervous because we don’t want this toilet to clog, especially in the hospitality. But we have not had any problems. The toilets are performing just as well. Our guests seem to get it. The water savings are proven for us so it’s one of those things we were nervous about, but it really has worked.

Mike: And you’ve already noticed a water savings at the property?

Gina: Yes, we really have. We went back late last year after the property had been open for about a year and we looked at all the utility bills because there’s always a difference between building green and then actual performance of a building. But the Element, Lexington at least, has been performing the way that we were expecting so that’s a great success for us.

John: How about when… Element is growing. It’s been a massive success and now you’re leveraging that information into your other brands. Give us a little visibility. We’re down to the last few minutes or so. Give us a little visibility on what’s on tap for Starwood’s green future. What’s about to happen?

Gina: We feel like a lot of the lower hanging fruit, we have tried to at least put into our program. So it’s being implemented currently. Now we’re really looking at what’s the next-gen initiatives for us. We may require a little bit more capital, but they usually have a pretty good return on investment story behind them.

John: Right.

Gina: We’re looking at our hotels. There are a lot of hotels that already trying out innovative solutions. Those are really like real-life examples for us. We can see what the environmental benefit is. We can see what the economic benefit is. So we’re really looking at leveraging from our hotels the proven practices, and then we’re piloting some other solutions as we are being approached by vendors we’re trying them out, seeing what’s next. Can we push the envelope even a little bit further? Some of our hotels are installing electric car charging stations right now, or they are installing wind turbines on the roof. There’s a lot of new things that are coming. They are becoming much more feasible, especially with the increased cost of energy. So we’re hoping to kind of take that to the next level and really start innovating because that’s one of the things we do best is innovation.

John: Got you.

Gina: Really doing that for us will be probably, and then engaging the guests more and educating. Education is a huge part, educating the guests, educating our associates, and the community.

John: Well, Gina, we have a lot of listeners around the world, and we get emails all the time after they hear a great and wonderful and inspiring guests like you. A lot of people that email us are in college or in grad school, and they want to be the next Gina Edner. As we close our show today, do you have some pearls of wisdom for our listeners out there who want to be the next Gina Edner? How they can get involved with the green revolution like you are leading it?

Gina: I think one of the things I do is I listen a lot. There’s are a lot of great stories out there. My background is not in environmental sustainability. I come from architecture and design.

John: Okay.

Gina: I listen to all the innovative stories that are out there, what is happening. And I’m very passionate. Passion gets you pretty far. If you’re passionate about it and if you want to learn, because it’s such an emerging field, you can definitely make that your focus area. So I believe that’s really the key to this. It’s an emerging discipline. Listen, learn as much as you can, and be passionate about it.

Mike: Well, Gina, we are so thankful for your time today. You were tremendously informational and inspirational. You’ve proven to us that Starwood is truly the hospitality innovator and we’re so proud to have you on because Starwood is the green trailblazer in the hospitality industry. I know this personally. I’ve spent over 100 nights this year already in Starwood Hotels around the world, and you guys are just doing a tremendous job. I want our listeners who have gotten excited about this show to please go to look at Starwood’s great website starwoodhotels.com, or one of the greatest affinity programs in the world, spg.com. Gina Edner, we are so thankful for your time today. You are truly living proof that Green is Good.

Gina: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Announcer: This program will be available for downloading in a couple of days from our station’s website, keyword podcast. Thanks for listening and join us again next week at the same time for another edition of Green is Good.

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: This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by the Marketing Masters. The Marketing Masters is a boutique marketing agency offering website development and digital marketing services to small and medium businesses across America. For more information on how they can help you grow your business online, please visit the marketingmasters.com.

John: Hi, this is John Shegerian. I never could have imagined when we started the Green Is Good radio show back in 2006 that it would grow into a big podcast called the Green is Good podcast, and now, we’ve evolved that podcast to the Impact podcast, which is more inclusive and more diverse than ever before. We did look back recently at some of our timeless Green Is Good interviews and decided to share some of them with you now. So, enjoy one of our great Green Is Good episodes from our archives. Next week, I’ll be back with a fresh and new episode of the Impact podcast. Thanks again for listening. I’m grateful to all of you. This is John Shegerian.

Presenter: Welcome to Green is Good. Raising awareness of each individual’s impact on the environment and helping to create a more beautiful and sustainable world. Now, here’s John Shegerian, Chairman and CEO of Electronic Recyclers International, and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome to Green Is Good, and Mike, it’s so great to see you again here in studio.

Mike Brady: Here we are. We’ve got another hour, and I wish we had more time to entertain, inform and empower our listeners about what we can do collectively in individuals to make the world a greener place.

John: Well, it’s so nice to see you Mike today. You greeted me at the front door here at Clear Channel studios in Fresno, California. You had a big smile on your face and extra spring on your step, and that just sets the total great mood for what we… We’re going to have just an amazing show today.

Mike: All right, what do we got for part 1?

John: Well, the part 1, we have Jennie Nigrosh calling in from Los Angeles, California, and she and her husband, Rick, have created The Green Garmento, which are garment bags, so we can get rid of using plastic bags, dry cleaners and in hotels and stuff like that. She’s going to show us, Mike, how really one small idea that fills a major void, how they could change the world and how we could all become part of the solution and change the world. I think our listeners have to come on back and hear Jennie Nigrosh on Green Is Good.

Presenter: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green Is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green Is Good. We’re so excited today to have Jennie Nigrosh on from The Green Garmento. Jennie, your bio, it will take me all of our whole twenty-two minutes to read. I’m going to talk a little bit about it, but first, I want to just say Mike and I want to give you a big warm welcome to Green Is Good.

Jennie Nigrosh: Thank you. Thank you for having me, you guys.

John: Now, Jennie, your bio, I mean, there’s so many things in your bio and your business that I love. First of all, you have, you grew up with recycling in your DNA and blood. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that?

Jennie: I did. It’s funny, I call myself sort of eco adjacent. I just started since childhood without even really thinking about it. My dad owned a cardboard recycling factory in New Hampshire.

John: Wow.

Jennie: We lived in Massachusetts and we’d have to recycle all of our newspapers so that he could bring them to the pulper at his plant every Monday. He would send the kids out. I had 3 brothers and 3 sisters, and at any given time, there’s at least five of us at home when the others weren’t in jail. I’m just kidding. I’m not really kidding. He would send us out to the neighbor’s house and make us gather their newspapers, and we would just recycle from a very early age. I think people probably thought we were freaks, but it stayed with us and it just resonated that not to be so wasteful about things. There’s a place to put things, and not everything that ends up in the garbage stays there. So, that’s how I learned. My dad, actually, he always drove a diesel car which was really out of the ordinary because he wanted to promote alternative energy. He even actually invested in a company that said they could turn cow poop into oil. So, you win some, you lose some, I guess.

John: Well, Jennie, you and your husband, Rick, have created this wonderful brand, The Green Garmento. For our listeners out there that have their iPads open or their laptops or they’re in front of their computer at home listening to the show right now, it’s an amazing website. You can order these bags from the website. Mike, you’ve got it up in front of you, thegreengarmento.com.

Mike: I sure do, John, and really, if there’s anything, any questions that you have, they will be answered. This is a really good site. Jennie, kudos to your webmaster. It’s probably you. You or Rick or in tandem, but it’s very easy to navigate. Just one thing that you need to know, if you run a dry cleaning business, there’s a special section just for you, okay? There’s one for consumers but also for dry cleaners, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about some of the money that you can save by doing the green thing running a dry cleaning business, but you really do need to check the site. Again, it’s thegreengarmento.com.

John: Jennie, we were talking a little bit off air. This issue is so close to my personal heart and that I grew up working for Saul Jacobson at [inaudible] cleaners. He gave me my first job, and my job was sweeping the floors and bagging the clothing. As we all grew up and realized how bad those bags truly are for the environment. We love what you are doing and we have the product here. Thanks to your graciousness in our studio. For all our listeners out there, this product, this Green Garmento bag rocks. So, thank you very much for the gifts.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about… I have your wonderful little fold-out brochure here. It is so well done.

Jennie: Thank you.

John: Why don’t we talk about the 4 functions of the Green Garmento? Start right at square one.

Jennie: Okay. Well, the bag, it’s simple, but it has a lot of really cool utilities. The reason why it has 4 functions is we wanted to make it really easy for the consumer to use but also for dry cleaners so that it would be easy for them to implement into their system. When the person takes the bag home, they can hang it upside down. There’s a little loop at the bottom, so it becomes a hanging hamper. We have a lot of people. They’re still[?] at city dwellers. They don’t have room for hampers and stuff, so you can hang it right over a hook on the door. Then you put your dry cleaning in that end when it’s ready to go to the cleaner. It also works as a standard hamper. You can put the bag over a hamper frame. You use the drawstring at the bottom and you pull it tight. So, it’s a nice, secure bag over a hamper frame. You put your dry cleaning in, you take the bag out or take it off the hook when you’re ready to go to the cleaner, you pull the drawstring. Then it has a full length strap on the back that’s got like triple reinforcements, and you can carry the bag like a duffel bag, looks like a yoga bag. They’re pretty stylish looking. My dream is to see them on every street in America someday. People toting these lovely bags.

John: They will be.

Jennie: Thank you. Then when you bring them to the dry cleaner, you leave your clothes in the bag and you just ask that your clothes be returned naked, meaning without any plastic. Then the bag, when it’s turned right side up, it magically morphs into a garment bag. So, you’ve got this great big garment bag with 5 and a quarter inch gussets on each side and a little window for your ID ticket and a full side zipper. We’ve really made it so the dry cleaners can have 2 ways to bag your clothes and really nice solid hanger holes. They don’t have to use the twist ties and the shoulder covers. Everything just goes right in that bag protected and secure, and you’re ready to go home.

John: This is just amazing. Like I said, I love this bag. I’m going to be getting more. I’m going to be giving them out at our company. This is just so functional, and it feels a tremendous void. There’s no reason for us to be using the historical legacy plastic bags that we all grew up with. This is the future.

Jennie: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.

John: Dry cleaners now, are they welcoming this? I didn’t make up this word, but I loved it when I was reading the New York Times about you a couple of weeks back, I love this word. This bag with the 4 functions is truly greenvenient.

Jennie: One of our dry cleaners made that up actually.

John: I saw that.

Jennie: Yeah, that’s the dry cleaner that we use, and I think that’s an awesome word, too. We were nervous in the beginning, to be honest. We really didn’t know how it was going to be received because dry cleaners, first of all, is they’re multi-generational. They’re often third generation [inaudible]. Stores and businesses, they have a way and a system of doing things, and this is all new to them. So, we were tentative at first, and that’s why we launched the bag specifically to the dry cleaning industry. This was not a consumer-driven bag to begin with because we knew there was a fair amount of education that would go along both on our end to learn the dry cleaning business and for the dry cleaners to learn this is an alternative for them.

John: When you and Rick started, pounding the streets, we have so many ecopreneurs and entrepreneurs and budding entrepreneurs that listen to the show, how did that original knocking on the door and cold calling go? What took you over the top? What was your convincing proposition?

Jennie: What a great question. Do you know what’s funny? We’ve not made one cold call in two years. We launched it to the industry at a dry-cleaning convention. We brought our prototype. First, we did focus groups and we would bring prototypes around with fabric options and all this kind of stuff. Then we learned from dry cleaners what they thought. Then when we had what we thought was a really good finished product but not perfect, we called it a prototype, we launched it at a dry cleaning convention. It was awesome. We thought it would be the lone people in the corner. Two Jews and a bunch of bags is really how it looked like, but actually, they were super cool and we we got quite an education from them. Then immediately, we were like, “Okay, you need to do this with the zipper. You need to do this with the fabric. Let’s do this. Can you put my name here?”

John: Wow.

Jennie: “How can we do this?”

John: How cool.

Jennie: It was so awesome. Really, some of them would bring us to other dry cleaners and say, “Check out what they’re doing. This is going to change the face of what we’re doing.” That was our aha moment, I think, when we really realized in this show that this was something they’ve been waiting for. Other companies had tried to launch like in the early 90s, someone tried to do it. I think that you have to learn from your customer what the needs are in order to make it really a viable product.

John: That is so well said. They helped you evolve the product.

Jennie: Oh, they’re helping me today. Yeah, they’re helping us. In fact, we have a new product that we’re going to be launching soon. My husband, we just got the prototype in the mail today, and he marched right down to our dry cleaner and said, “Tell us what to do. What do you think?” This is what we have. There’s no way we could do this. We could never fly blind.

John: Well, I got news for you. I marched the bag today with my dry cleaning, which is a daily event, over to my local dry cleaner here in Fresno. They said, “If this is what you want, this is what you get.”

Jennie: Awesome.

John: It was so well received. I know for all our listeners out there, all who buy this, your dry cleaner, as Jennie just proved and I just proved this morning myself, will embrace it. I should have started with this though. You’re providing a tremendous solution, Jennie. You and Rick have created this wonderful company. Again, for our listeners out there, thegreengarmento.com is where you can buy these bags. Let’s talk a little bit, without getting too dire here, the problem. Why should people be eliminating the use of dry cleaning plastic, and what are the negative effects of all this plastic just looming out there in the world?

Jennie: Well, we all know that plastic can be detrimental. It clogs landfills and waterways. It kills marine and wildlife. This is something that we’ve been battling with because of the grocery tote that we’ve been learning about for a long time. So, we did some numbers on our own. We did some estimations using government eco-calculators and averaging plastic bag, dry cleaning bag usages. An average order of a dry cleaning bag is 8 pieces[?].

John: Wow.

Jennie: We did some calculations. Actually, I’m going to say Rick did. I’m actually asleep at the wheel when it comes to numbers, but it’s about 300 million pounds of plastic just in the United States are dumped into landfills and that go into waterways and stuff.

John: That is so ridiculous.

Jennie: You don’t really have to be a genius to understand that this is bad because I’m the one that’s not the genius. I was like, “Oh, that’s not a good number. I think we can change that.” That really is the impetus of how this all really came about.

John: Yeah, but I mean, obviously and I’ve seen this in my own life with my wife, and obviously, you and Rick are a great balance. He’s got one part of your company covered and you’ve got another, and that’s great. You need both to make a successful business.

Jennie: Right, and I’m prettier, which is…

John: Well, I have the picture here and it looks like-

Mike: And more modest.

Jennie: It’s only because my door is closed, if he’s not on the phone.

John: “Who’s calling? Oh, you don’t even want to talk to these people. Don’t worry. I got this one, honey.”

Jennie: Yeah, I got it.

John: Okay, let’s go back. Now, the industry, the core industry, the dry cleaning industry has embraced and helped you evolve this wonderful product. What are the other industries now that you… Give us a little visibility and what other industries are you looking at where you can take this great idea and great product.

Jennie: Well, we were at a hotel trade show. We do a lot of stuff with hospitality and we met actually a gentleman from a large- he’s a distributor for the advertising Specialty Group. He’s actually a supplier and so he supplies to all the different distributors. We were talking about branded bags and we do a lot of branded bags with logos and we’ll do special bags and custom bags. It’s called Peerless Umbrella. They are a huge supplier of ours and they’ve done bags for Mercedes-Benz and HTC and I think Blackberry. They’ve just done a lot with branded people trying to send a green message that also don’t want to just give another tchotchke like another useless, whatever item that you don’t need, or this one actually does good. That’s a really cool industry for us. Then like I said, hospitality, you can find us in various- Four Seasons, Hyatt, Fairmont State[?]. They use them for two things, employee services because as you know, most employees, you have to do your dry cleaning and especially in the hospitality industry where it’s very buttoned up and you got to get dressed every day. The employees use the reusable bags so they can eliminate plastic internally and then they use them as an in-room amenity like a gift for the guest. If the guest wants to use the bag, well, if they need to do dry cleaning, great, they get to use it. If they want to take them home, then they either will get them for free or pay for them. It helps the hotels carry on their green messaging far beyond the hotel room. Again, they’re giving their client that they can actually use something like their guests can take them out on the plane, or it’s a travel bag. It’s a cool gift from the hotels as well. Then because we’re in Los Angeles, we do a lot of things in the entertainment industry. A lot of costume shops and stuff and wardrobe and stylists are starting to work with us. We’ve done some bags for like The Daily Show of Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. We’ve done Ugly Betty, like some really fun productions that want to really green their productions because there’s so many wardrobe and all that stuff that they have the plastic. So, this is just another way for them to help green the production.

John: Well, in fact, it’s so funny you said that. Last week, we had on our show Gina Edner who’s the head of Westin Hotels.

Jennie: Oh, cool.

John: The head of sustainability. We will now pop her a little email and tell her that you were just recently a guest and share with her your story. She was wonderful. She really, really loves what she’s doing in Starwood and Westin are way ahead on this with regards to the hotel chain. That’s such a great, great other opportunity. That is just an amazing opportunity.

Jennie: Thank you.

John: I had my green bag in my hand this morning. Mike has his blue one right here now while we’re doing the show. He’s been playing-

Mike: I’ve been playing with it. It’s fun.

Jennie: That doesn’t sound right.

John: I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll tell you what, really, Jennie, it is more fun to play with than plastic.

Jennie: That is true.

John: It really is.

Jennie: And it’s safer, so you aren’t going to suffocate in that bag.

John: Exactamundo. It feels really nice in our hands. If you don’t mind me asking, what is this made out of, and what was the thought process into what you made the bags out of?

Jennie: Well, that’s a great question. The bags are made out of nonwoven polypropylene, which is a mouthful. It’s the same fabric that you find in the reusable tote bags like from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. It’s that kind of fabric. Ours is thicker, so it feels a little bit, maybe more substantial and it’s a cool fabric, actually. It’s made from… It’s eco-friendly in so much that it is totally recyclable. People might say well, it’s not green because it’s still not a real natural fiber, but that’s a great question because it’s made from the byproduct of oil. Once oil is already refined, they have this stuff that would be garbage, basically, that I think years ago, we actually talked to some people at Dow Chemical to tell us how they created this fabric. They took the byproduct of oil and they turned it into a resin which then turns into a pellet so you can colorize them. Then it becomes the [inaudible] material. So, it would be hypocritical of me to say, “Be fantastic, don’t use plastic.” That’s why our tagline is be fantastic, use less plastic.

Mike: Less plastic. Right.

Jennie: Because truly, it is sort of a plastic itself, but it’s reusable so that you’re eliminating all the single use.

John: As a business venture, obviously, your vision’s amazing, Jennie, and you and Rick truly can change the world together with this product. As a business venture, though, and a sustainable business venture, Mike and I always talk about people, the planet and the prophets, and there’s no shame in talking about that. So, without giving away numbers or anything, what are the goals as a business venture, a sustainable business venture that you and Rick have made for The Green Garmento?

Jennie: Our goals are constantly evolving. In the beginning, our goals were like, “Let’s just get people to like us. Let’s see if they dig the bag and we’ll sell a few.” It literally started, we had some bags in our garage and our distribution center was our dining room table. We’ve now moved into our third warehouse and we have distribution in different parts of the country as well. We now work with dry cleaning distributors all over the country, and you can find us in probably over 400 dry cleaners and in the United States and then we’re in probably eleven different countries right now.

John: Eleven different countries. It’s amazing.

Jennie: We’re not conquering these countries in any way, but we have distributors and presence in those countries. Yeah.

John: Well, Jennie, good news, people like you.

Jennie: I hope so. Thanks.

John: Given that when we talked about you growing up with your dad’s recycling business and this is truly in your DNA, as you and Rick living in Los Angeles metropolitan area and you though spread your wings, now, have created an international company, do you guys see yourselves as greenies?

Jennie: I never really did. At the end of the day, we’re business people, I think, and we’re great marketers. If I could cut myself on the back there a little bit. I certainly don’t know. I still don’t really know how to compost stuff and I haven’t gone there yet, if I have to admit to that, but I think that what we’re doing… I think everybody has their own way of being a greenie. Like I said before, I’m more like eco adjacent. I’m very cognizant of what I do in my own personal life and what I can do to have a lower carbon footprint. If people ask me advice, I’m certainly going to give it to them, but I don’t… The last thing we want to be is watchdogs. I think that’s one thing that’s really helped us with dry cleaners, is they have enough people breathing down their neck. We just want to help them in our own little way, eliminate plastic, be a little more green on there. So, in that way, I guess we’re greenies but not in the big scope of things.

Mike: Well, I was just reading your Blogmento, which is the… You are a marketer through and through, but you make the case that dry cleaners really have so many multiple benefits. Using The Green Garmento bags, not the least of which is increasing customer loyalty.

Jennie: Yeah. When we first started, there are articles in all the trades that were in for all the dry cleaning industry, and one of the biggest issues that they have is to create and improve customer loyalty. These bags, they have their name on it. First of all, the name of the dry cleaner. It’s something that’s going to keep bringing you back to that dry cleaner.

John: Right.

Jennie: Also, the fact that it’s just a nice service to give to your customers and let them know that I can’t afford the $200,000 to switch to an all wet cleaning company. Those are very expensive things for dry cleaners to switch to, but here’s what they can do in the meantime, and they still want your business. One thing that we’re really adamant about, we get calls and emails all day long. My dry cleaner, they aren’t offering these bags, and I don’t know if they’re going to do it yet. Should I go to another cleaner because people buy them from us? I said, “No, the last thing we want to do is take this away from your neighborhood cleaner. Just ask them to use the bags, and if they have questions on how to implement it, have them call us.” We have a mentor program where we have other dry cleaners that will teach the dry cleaners that don’t know how to do it. We have Korean speaking. We’ve got Spanish speaking. We really try to make it so that no one’s losing customers and they’re actually gaining customers.

John: Perfect. Everybody wins then.

Jennie: That’s what we’re hoping.

John: Hey, listen, Jennie, unfortunately, we’re down to the last 2 minutes or so. Two things I want to talk about. I want our listeners again to go to your great website, thegreengarmento.com, but on that website is a free bag offer. Can you explain a little bit about how that works? Then also tell us, any final thoughts as an ecopreneur and as a very successful one and one that’s about to scale their business across the world? Leave some pearls of wisdom for our listeners behind.

Jennie: In 2 minutes?

John: Yeah.

Jennie: Oh, I’ve never said anything in 2 minutes. Okay. Our free bag offer is anybody who they click on the offer, if they email us the name of their dry cleaner who doesn’t participate in the program now, send us their contact information and we will send you back a coupon code to get a free bag.

John: Wow.

Jennie: We do ask that you pay for shipping, but we’re happy to give you that coupon code. We also have a like page on Facebook now and Twitter. If you follow us, there are coupon codes for free bags there as well.

John: That is just awesome. So, give us a little bit of pearls of wisdom that you and Rick have picked up along the way and your final vision on where this is going to go.

Jennie: Well, I am not big on pitching just our business. I’m more about, I would like everyone to understand our mission. If you’re not ready to spend $10 on a bag, which is understandable, at least ask your dry cleaner to cut down on the plastic and get your clothes naked. Then when you’re ready to spend the $10, we’re here for you. It’s really just we all can do our part whether it’s growing our business or just doing something to make the earth a little bit better. We can all work together and do that.

John: Well, Jennie, you’re just amazing. Mike and I are just sitting here and have enjoyed every second of this as I’m sure our listeners have also. For our listeners, again, to buy Jennie and Rick’s great bags, go to thegreengarmento.com. Right there, you can buy their bags and use them. It’s very reasonably priced, and your tagline is just amazing, be fantastic, use less plastic. We should all learn from that. Again, Jennie, we’re going to have you back one day to talk about where things have gone since today. You are just really an amazing ecopreneur, a wonderful visionary and truly living proof that green is good.

Jennie: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Presenter: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green Is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green Is Good. All I could say about the first half of our show today, Mike, is wow.

Mike: I just can’t wait to go home and do laundry and then take a bunch of dry cleaning in with this new Green Garmento bag. That’s very cool.

John: You got your Green Garmento bag now. Mike and I have to tell you, again, all our listeners, go on their website. This bag rocks. It’s so reasonably priced. I brought it in this morning. My dry cleaner said they welcomed it there, thegreengarmento.com. You can buy your bag and you could start becoming part of the solution, and that’s what this whole show is about.

Mike: Yeah, we’re solution-based. I mean, let’s face it. There’s enough doom and gloom. There are some scary stuff to look at, but that can either paralyze you, or you can start looking at what can you do. Rather than eat the entire elephant, can you grab a fork and take one bite. Everybody taking one bite, there’s a lot less elephant.

John: Speaking of elephant or the second half of our show, again, is just going to rock. It’s our Southern California edition. Jennie was in LA and Derek Sabori who’s a director of sustainability over at Volcom’s over in San Diego today at a conference, but he’s so generous enough to take his time and join join us today. Mike, here’s a guy that not only talks an amazing talk but he walks the walk as does his great brand, Volcom. I just want all our listeners to come on back and hear Derek Sabori at Green Is Good.

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Presenter: If a little green is good, more is even better. Now, back to Green Is Good with John Shegerian and Mike Brady.

John: Welcome back to Green Is Good. We’re so excited today to have on the second half of our show Derek Sabori, who’s Volcom’s director of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Derek is in San Diego today. He’s on business and he’s taken time out of his amazing busy schedule to join us at Green Is Good. Welcome. Mike and I welcome you to Green Is Good today, Derek.

Derek Sabori: Thank you, John. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be with you guys.

John: Hey, you’re one of the real green rock stars out there in the business world, and we’re just thankful and honored to have you on today and your great company, which our listeners can go look at the website, volcom.com. Tell us a little bit in your role as a director of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Derek, for our listeners out there, is one of those great people who have worked his way up from answering the phones there to this big position. People always ask us, “How can I become the next Derek?” Hey, there’s no substitute for hard work, and he’s earned it in fourteen years. Derek, what do you do there now that you’re in this very important and influential role? What does that mean over there at Volcom?

Derek: Well, it means a few things. We’ve been building a program for the last few years, and it contains a few different initiatives that we started. One is our v.co-logical series of product, which is our product line that is aimed at being more sustainable, less impactful, more eco-friendly. If I can put that in quotes.

John: Sure.

Derek: There’s that part of the line and that’s where we use organic cottons and recycled polyesters, try[?] some hemps[?]. It’s an area where we can kind of test things out to try to push the rest of our line into that direction. The idea is that that’s a little capsule. It’s an idea place where we can nurture things, test things, find reliable processes and materials and roll them out to the rest of the line. We’ve also got our give back series, which is a part of the line where we will donate proceeds back to different nonprofit organizations. We’re working with TACA, which is Talk About Curing Autism, the Boys and Girls Club. We’ve got a few other things lined up in the upcoming seasons. We have a program which we call a new future program, which is really getting the employees and our workforce to consider and challenge themselves with what they want the new future to look like. What does it look like to them? How do we get there? What choices can we make today that are going to lead us in that direction? It’s kind of wrapping all those things together, making it one big department. For our v.co-logical series, we’re also a 1% for the planet member. That means 1% of those sales goes through that organization, but we were able to donate a nice pull of money at the end of the year to different environmental causes that we’ve teamed up with and we’ve partnered up with. This whole program allows us to give back to the community and the environment and make sure that our company and our people are excited to be there and that they’re feeling good about what we’re doing at the end of the day.

John: You guys know we talk a good talk obviously, but this is really part of Volcom’s DNA. You walk a great walk. There’s so many things that you just hit upon that most companies would really aspire to get involved with in terms of sustainability. You guys have already launched and are doing these different initiatives.

Derek: Yeah. We are, and there’s something we’ve been working on them for a while. There’s still a lot of work to do, and that’s definitely one thing we haven’t done yet. We haven’t really staked our flag in the ground and said, “Hey, there we go. We’re done.” I think you and I, we both know that this is a journey that has no finish line. There is no end to this.

John: That’s right.

Derek: It’s something that we’re always pursuing. We’re continuing to get better. We’re educating ourselves constantly and challenging ourselves, and it’s always a part of the conversation. We’re definitely far from perfect, but I feel really proud of the strides we’ve made. I think just the fact that I’ve been nominated to this position as a dedicated position for how long I’ve been there and what I know and especially in our industry, I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve been able to do this. I’m proud to tell people what my position there at the company is.

John: I mean, just amazing. I love that. Mike, I love what he just said. It’s not only a process, but there is no finish line.

Mike: That’s exactly… As you’re mentioning that, while I’m reading a part of the blog on the volcom.com site and its sustainability in the supply chain, and it’s amazing. There are no coincidences, but just as you’re saying that, I’m reading the quote of the day. There is no finish line in the game of sustainability.

John: Love that. That’s great. Seriously, we’re going to use that. That’s great. That is awesome. Tell us a little bit about, when great people like you take over these positions, there are 2 challenges that Mike and I keep hearing about. A is the challenge, how do you have buy-in from the top, and B, how do you then communicate that message and get buy-in from your employees? Can you explain a little bit about that process on both sides? How does that work?

Derek: Yeah, definitely. I’m glad you touched on that because I actually have a name for that. I’ve coined a phrase for that. It’s called the grilled cheese effect. The grilled cheese effect is that…

John: That is great.

Derek: …it takes from both places. It’s got to come down from the top. There’s got to be support there, and you’ve got to instill that excitement and that support from the bottom up, from the people as well. I mean, it takes both of those sides of that toast to get grilled for that cheese in the middle to really melt. It’s kind of corny, but I really think it’s true. You’re not going to have that good sandwich until both sides are really hot on this topic and really pursuing it. I think we’re fortunate there. It comes from the top. We’ve got a good vision at the top and we’ve got a lot of people that are always willing to help and support. Even though this department consists of one, we’ve got our v.co-logical society which is a group of employees that are on the poles[?] ready to help. I think between those two, it is a tough road to bridge that gap sometimes. As long as you stay positive, get people rallied[?] and keep people excited, let them know that there’s something there and that we’re working towards a greater good, I think everybody buys in pretty quickly.

John: Okay. So, a great vision without implementation is a bunch of nothing. How do you take that great vision that you have obviously and all the wonderful initiatives and get both the top people and also your wonderful employees? How do you do that? Do you have access to everybody, or do you have to work through different channels at the company? Or how does that line of communicators[?] because other big leaders that Mike and I have had on the show, one of the biggest challenges they constantly tell us is messaging and getting the clear message and then getting the buy-in. It’s like a two-step. How does that work at your company?

Derek: Well, I think it’s persistence, and it starts at grassroots. I mean, if it doesn’t come, if there’s not one single person at the very top that’s saying, “Hey, this is a company initiative,” it’s going to take some grassroots work, and that’s really what we did. We had people that were passionate about this that were influenced by other leaders in sustainability. We did not stop. We did not give up. Once we started talking this talk, we were committed. We started from the ground up, we were doing newsletters and we were doing small events. A lot of times, it just took maybe me going out to a small little trade show and representing the brand and almost getting approval but not necessarily getting complete… I don’t know. I didn’t have the whole cut, the mass marketing behind me. Before I knew it, I would show up and I would come back and report, “Hey, I was just at a little green expo with the line. Hey, I just went and did a little talk at the community college on sustainability. Hey, I’ve done this.” Petty soon, the momentum starts to build. I started sending out newsletters. I started getting people involved and asking them if they could come to different events or come to these talks or hear certain things. Then people started to expect these newsletters, and you almost couldn’t help ignore it. Even my boss, the president of the company, he just realized, and we just said, “Hey, there’s something here. There’s a good buzz within the company. This is something that we need to pursue and continue charging with.”

John: Which brings me to the next point. Of course, we’ve given your great website out, volcom.com, but also talk a little bit about the adjunct website, volcom.comnewfuture. How does that tie into communication, internal communications and external communications at the company?

Derek: Well, it’s a new, I guess, theory. That’s a phrase we’ve used for a long time. What we did is we just adopted that as a philosophy, as an umbrella for all these things that we’re doing, whether it’s our give back program, whether it’s our v.co-logical series, whether what’s going on with 1%, the different partner organizations that we’re working with, or just a place where people can get information on maybe what’s going on in the sustainability community, what kind of things that we’re doing. It’s meant now to be a central place where people can go to learn about how we see the new future developing. It’s a relatively new blog, but we’re starting to put things up there every day. That’s becoming our main communication portal to really get our message out and just share the journey with anybody who’s willing to follow along.

John: Speaking of the journey, it’s one thing to have a great vision and have buy-in and actually be doing all these things. As you go external and obviously, you’re in the business of commerce, you’re in the business of manufacturing and then selling your great products, how was your sustainability initiatives received by your retailers? The people who have to now promote and sell your great products over at Volcom? How does that work?

Derek: You know what? We get a lot of good feedback, and I think people are definitely open to it. There’s little movements going on, and we’ve actually seen some of our key retailers in the area really start to push that, their stores in that direction. Some such as a shop called Hobie[?], they’re creating, they’re dedicating stores to a completely kind of a green store, where they’re just focusing on caring brands who are offering these v.co-logical type products. They see that there’s a need for it. It’s something that they’re believing in and they’re trying to pass on to their customers. They’re definitely excited about it. Is our end customer always asking for it? I think the verdict’s still out on that. I think they’re conscious and aware of it. I also think that it’s a responsibility that we have as a manufacturer and a brand and I think our retailers are starting to see that as well. The more that we can push this out there and support it, I think the more momentum it’s going to gain.

John: Well, you’re using your great and important platform, your commerce platform as also a form of sustainability education to your consumers.

Derek: Absolutely. I think we have such a powerful voice with young kids, young adults, and it feels really good to be able to launch big programs and tell them, “Hey, this is a really great brand that I know you guys love, but guess what, we’re doing something really good for the community and the environment.” We’ve got a program right now called Give Jeans A Chance where a kid can go into any of their local surfer skate shop. I think we’ve got over 400 participating shops. They can donate a pair of jeans in there. We’re doing a Jean drive. Our goal is to raise 10,000 pairs of jeans for the National Coalition for the Homeless and distribute those jeans out. It’s our second year doing it, but distribute those out to local shelters and homeless folks who can really use those jeans.

John: Wow. That is so nice.

Derek: To be able to align our brand with something like that, we’re now not only a kid is identifying with a brand that’s cool because we’ve got great athletes and a great program, but it’s cool now to let them know. It’s like, “Hey, it’s cool to also give back and do something right in your community.”

John: It’s so nice. You’re so right, Derek. Mike and I have been now doing this show now close to eighteen months. We get to interview so many thought leaders and visionaries like you that represent not only what you believe in but also what your great brand believes in. What we’re seeing is exactly what you just said. People are tired in this country of being lectured to, “Hey, don’t do this or don’t do that.” Everyone wants to know how they could become part of the solution, and just that, what you just said, that whole Jean give back and recycling of those jeans and showing how the circle closes is such a tangible act, where people then can feel part of the solution.

Derek: Yep. I agree.

John: It’s wonderful. Talk a little bit more also about other events that you do. I know part of your initiatives include beach cleanups and other recycling and bulk water. Talk a little bit about more public events that are part of your business marketing strategy. How does that interrelate with your brand and also your sustainability initiatives?

Derek: Well, we’ve got a few different programs. Like I said, this is the second year doing the Give Jeans A Chance program.

John: Sure.

Derek: We did the same with our boardshorts. We did the Recycle Your Boardshorts program where we also collected boardshorts during the summer and gave those to different organizations in need. We did a film project last year which was called LEAF, which is called Leaders of Environmental Action Films, where we challenged high school students in our area to submit 30 or 60 second short films based on any environmental topic that they wanted. We got some amazing work back from these kids. We do free contests for the kids. We do surf skate and snowboard contests all throughout the country and even internationally. These are free contests where the kids can come and have fun and compete. Then we hold a grand prize contest at the middle of the year each year. We do beach cleanups. We get the team involved and we try to keep everybody educated and up on what’s going on. We’ve got a big coastal community cleanup down here in Newport Beach. It’s coming up in September that we’re a big part of. So, we’re always trying to wherever we can just stay in the loop and get people committed to giving back and being involved.

John: What’s Volcom’s zero-waste aspirations? Explain what that really means for your company and what you’re trying to do with that.

Derek: Well, that one’s an aspiration for sure because I know that’s a tough one, but that’s definitely on my agenda. The idea of zero waste, I think, is twofold because one, I was at a sustainability conference once and it made such good sense that somebody said, “Hey, everything that you throw away in business is something that you’ve paid for. There’s no reason anything should be [inaudible] in that trash can. If there is, you better go look in there and find out exactly what you’re throwing away and understand it because that’s money that you spent.” At the same time, waste is bad for the environment, too. We’re tapping into resources that are not being utilized, that are not creating value for us. The idea of becoming a zero-waste company somewhat of the long term here is to be more efficient. Make sure we’re not… Make sure we’re minimizing the amount of waste that’s going into the landfills, into the waste stream and if it can’t be recycled, then it’s a matter of making sure that our business is running as efficiently as possible to maximize our expenses.

John: Besides volcom.comnewfuture and also Facebook, how can people continue to have a dialogue and be involved by watching how you’re evolving your sustainability initiatives? How do you have a give and take with your customer base and potential customer base? How does that look like in a modern world of social media, Derek?

Derek: You know what, I think trying to stay involved and being out there. Lucky enough, I get asked to sit on different panels and be part of… We might have a trade organizational green boot camp. I’ve been able to sit on different panels for that and tell people about the journey that we’ve been on. I’ll go to schools and wherever I can, I’m always… For example, being here, just being somewhere where I can share my passion for this and my excitement and get people really aspiring to, “Hey, you know what, if Derek can do it, I really want to do it in our company, too.” I think this is something that we can run with. So, wherever I get the opportunity or the chance or someone asked me to, I’ll be there and I’ll talk to tell our story and show our product and get involved. I get to go to schools, too. I go to schools, and it’s a great way to reach out to people.

John: That’s a perfect segue into our next topic. Mike and I know. We’ve read all about you. We’ve talked to you off air before. We read all about your wonderful company. This isn’t just a paycheck for you. This has really become a passion and part of your DNA. You’ve now recently authored Lu And The Earth Bug Crew Zap The Energy Spikes. A book!

Derek: That’s right.

John: This is just an eco action, adventure book. Tell us a little bit about what made you do this and explain the thought process of how you came up with the idea, why you did it and how is it going?

Derek: Well, it’s a fun book, and I really needed… When I had kids, as my kids were… We read constantly, and I was always looking for a way to portray this idea of sustainability to a 5-year-old. I was finding[?] that the books that talked about it seriously were a little too text bookish and the ones that were talking about it lightly were a little too maybe silly. Also, I wanted something that could identify with my own life and my own lifestyle. I thought I had a niche where I could reach out to kids and parents and get them and challenge them to talk about some of these ideas of the simple ones, reducing, reusing, recycling. The characters are the Earth bugs and they’re set of characters who surf, they skate, they’re in a rock band. We say it’s never been so cool to be so good because they’re doing all things fun. They’re outdoors. They eat organically. Each of them has a specialty. One studies biofuels and renewable energy. Another ones’ focus is on saving and protecting the outdoors. Together, their job is to battle the Un-Greens. They battle the litterbugs, the water hogs, the oil slicks, the energy spikes, and it’s just a fun way for kids to personify these things that we’re always talking about. That’s how the book came about from us picking up trash one day on a walk.

John: Wow.

Derek: We knew that we’re battling these litterbugs. We just said, “Man, hey, if we’re going to battle litterbugs, who can we be? Hey, let’s be the Earth bugs.” It just sort of stems from there.

John: When did you write the book?

Derek: It came out last year, last January, so it’s been out for a year and a half now.

John: Great.

Derek: It was sort of a family endeavor, and we’ve had a good response to it. I take it to school and I do assemblies for the kids, and the kids go nuts on it because I put[?] it up on the big projector and I make it a lesson. I don’t just read the book. Each of these, we stop and talk about. “Hey, what is solar energy? Where else can you get energy from? What does it mean to recycle? Here’s a reusable bag. Which is better, this crumpled up plastic bag or this reusable bag? How about my reusable water bottle?” I get them all excited and hyped up on the idea of living a more sustainable lifestyle.

Mike: Derek, I’m on the Lu and the Earth Bug Crew site right now. If you’re following along at home listening to this show on your iPad or your PC, go ahead and check out earthbugcrew.com, and it is really something. If you’ve got kids that are listening with you right now, they’re going to want to explore this website. It is very attractive, very easy to navigate. Kids are going to love it. I think parents will get it right away.

Derek: That’s my hope. It really is meant to… I guess it’s funny because I get great testimonials from parents. I get 2 testimonials. The first one is, “Oh my gosh, thank you, my kids are turning off lights like crazy and they’re calling us out for everything. This is so great.” About a week or two later, parents call back and say, “Okay, actually, now, my kids have taken it to the extreme and they won’t back off.” It’s funny.

John: You first get the love letters and then they become a little tougher after that.

Derek: That’s right.

John: Where can our listeners buy the book? I mean, where is it available? That’s important. We want our listeners to buy this book and share it with their children.

Derek: It’s available on Amazon. It’s available there on my website too at earthbugcrew.com. You can click right there, and it’s a secure website. You just go and you can buy it right there. We’ll ship it out. We’re a mom-and-pop shop. We do all the order fulfillment and we’re in a few scattered stores here throughout Southern California as well. One of the local surf shops, Surfside Sports in Costa Mesa, they were an early one to support it. They’ve got it in their store. So, a couple little specialty stores here and there that Hobie store carries it, but mostly, the easiest way is going to be online through either Amazon or the earthbugcrew.com website.

John: Got you. So, let’s go back to Volcom again as we’re down to the last 2 minutes or so, Derek. You’re just amazing. Why don’t you share with us and our listeners, what should they be on the lookout for as they go and shop and school’s back in? What can they be doing to help support your CSR initiatives and the whole sustainability movement that’s ongoing right now?

Derek: Well, the big one, which I’ll just have to say again because it’s in the stores right now, is that Give Jeans A Chance campaign.

John: Great.

Derek: They go into the stores. They’re going to see these big recycled boxes. They’ve got all the art and the message on there. On our website, we’ve got great videos with all of our sponsored athletes promoting it, but almost[?] any store that carries Volcom, they’re going to go in there, they can see that. They can also look for our give back logo, which is we’ve got a big program right now in Hawaii supporting the Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii. We’ve got more product coming out every few months here with the give back logo. Look for that give back logo. Look for our v.co-logical logo because it’s a product that’s really made with the idea of being a more sustainable company in mind. Those dollars go straight back to the 1% for the planet program where we’re giving back to different environmental organizations throughout the country.

John: Wow. For all listeners out there, again, the websites, volcom.com, or you can also go to their other website with a backslash and new future behind it. You can also find them on Facebook and you can also, of course, buy Derek’s wonderful book Lu and the Earth Bug Crew ZAP the Energy Spikes on amazon.com and on his wonderful website, earthbugcrew.com. Derek Sabori, you’re not only informational, you’re tremendously inspiring and you are truly living proof that green is good.

Derek: Thank you, John. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It’s been great to talk to you, guys. Thanks to you too, Mike.

Presenter: This program will be available for downloading in a couple of days from our station’s website. Keyword podcast. Thanks for listening and join us again next week at the same for another edition of Green Is Good.

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: 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. This is a very special edition. We’ve got with us today, the founder, and CEO of Verkada, Filip Kaliszan. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Filip.

Filip Kaliszan: Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. And yeah, excited to be on the air, and share the story with everyone.

John: I just have to give the truth in advertising, even their own, I don’t take any advertisers on the Impact Podcast. I do want to say this upfront. We are a client of yours and a very happy client of yours. And that’s why I’m so honored to have you on the show today because I really want others to hear about your great products and services so they can also enjoy the benefits of these. But before we get to that, I want to just say, I would love our audience to get to learn a little bit about you. Where did your journey even start, Filip? And how did you get here to be such a serial entrepreneur and a unique visionary that you are?

Filip: Sure. Well, I’ll give you the short story of Filip, if you will. It starts back in Eastern Europe. Actually, I grew up in Poland. So that’s my origins. My parents were fortunate. They move jobs and lived as expats in Paris for a number of years. So that’s where I learned English. I went to an American High School in Paris.

John: Wow.

Filip: So that was my first exposure to being international. And then from there, I came to the US and I came to Stanford to study computer science and it was actually remarkably. I’d never been to the US before coming to Stanford. And it was kind of an amazing place to end up and land and be surrounded by technology and builders of technology. As a kid, I always knew I love technology. I love computers. Maybe it was a lot about gaming, but then it evolved into sort of the more creative part of my brain and, you know, building things, developing things. And I think, Stanford really fueled that passion of mine and surrounded me with peers who are probably better than me at computer science and that was great because they inspired me. But, I sort of rallied my friends and I think from the beginning of my journey there, I always love building things. I think, what drives me intrinsically is, if you can create something out of nothing and then have people like yourself, like happy customers benefiting from the things that I get to build. Man, that’s like the best feeling in the world, right? So that’s what I live for. My journey started with, actually, the first start-up that I started at Stanford as a student. So I built, you know, so we were students. This is like back in 2007, 2008. I’m at Stanford in Silicon Valley and in my mind it’s like the most modern high-end part of the world, yet, the way you chose classes at school was out of a book, like, literally, as a student in 2006-2007 at Stanford, you’d get this book of every quarter and you’d flip through pages and pages and pages, and you’d have to make a decision about one out of thousands of classes that you were going to sign up for. And man, like as a student knows, well, in the era of Google and Facebook, and everything else going on that ought to be better. And so, that was my first start-up. I built with some of my classmates a tool for students to discover classes, build their academic plans, and really be able to realize the most out of their undergraduate and graduate educations. And that was, I think the first time I built a product that was massively used by a lot of people and I think I discovered that passion for building right there.

John: So you digitized what was it typical analog book, a coursebook and you digitize the process and therefore, modernize the whole system.

Filip: Yeah, exactly. We made it very easy for students to pick classes, compare notes with friends, and like, “Hey, which professor is best at teaching which class?” and so on and so forth. Set of fun elements to it, but it became ubiquitous at Stanford. And then we got that company over to I think, 30 or 40 top universities in the US and then, we sold that company to Chegg which you may know in the education space where I was for the next couple of years. I often talk about Chegg as this awesome business school in real-life experience, right? I studied computer science. I learned how to build things. By a mix of hard work and luck, I guess I got acquired and got into Chegg. And for the next four years, I helped scale that company from 80 people to close to 1,000. We went public and that was my- I called the MBA in real life and I’m thoroughly grateful to the leadership team there for teaching me how business works, right? I mean, it was like my real first exposure and I think that’s what gave me a lot of the background and the excitement to do something again later on which is what led to Verkada ultimately.

John: So wait a second. What’s so interesting Filip is you went to one of the greatest universities on the whole planet and so many people think that once you go to Stanford or Harvard, you should know what all. But what you point out is something really important that a lot of entrepreneurs don’t think about. The real-life experience that you got to apply as a build resume maker after you got out of Stanford both at CourseRank and at Chegg was invaluable to your journey, you’re saying.

Filip: Yeah, absolutely. I think, honestly, one of the most valuable things you learn at a place like Stanford is I think, the humility. You get exposure to so many people who are just so smart. They’re the smartest people from the best schools in the best places in the world and that really gives you perspective and it definitely did for me. I was just so ecstatic to work with those people and build something together. And then, you take that academic background, and then you have to combine it with real-world experience, right? And I think nothing matches that. You start building something. You get it to the users. You get it to the customers. You listen to the stories. The Chegg, we used to travel around the country to meet students at different universities. Really understand their situations to get their mindset. And that’s how you get that experience to really understand the intricacies of the products you want to build. I think through that experience, I realized that what I’m passionate about is building and delivering that product experience that at the end of the day, resonates with customers.

John: You know, I don’t want to glance over another important point you made. You’re a first-generation Polish immigrant and I’m a third-generation Armenian immigrant. My experience growing up in New York City and now living on the west coast. Filip, tell me what you think about this. Immigrants make great entrepreneurs because our DNA is comprised of a lot of flexibility and resilience and the ability to adapt to the changes that are happening in the marketplace. Do you feel that immigrants have almost a leg up in the terms of the world of Entrepreneurship because of their resilience and their fortitude to adjust to the conditions they’re in?

Filip: Yeah, maybe. I mean, look, I think in my own journey, the international upbringing definitely fostered that feeling of resilience that you’re describing. I think the other thing that I would say certainly is true for me and I think true for many immigrants, you know, I’m curious what you think but for me coming to America, the American dream is very much alive. I’m like, I’m coming here, it’s a big market. I want to make an impact. They want to do awesome things. I love the fact that in America, you can be 22 and build a company that thousands of people, thousands of students at the time were using. The idea that someone could buy a group of students and that I could be having an important role in a company that won’t went on to go public. I mean, man, that doesn’t happen anywhere in the world and I think Silicon Valley is super special and I am eternally grateful for being here and having that experience.

John: That’s Interesting.

Filip: I mean, that’s part of that whole dream.

John: Yeah, it is. It’s fun when you get to hear it through somebody else’s eyes because it’s constantly re-inspiring. It’s constantly re-inspiring.

Filip: Absolutely.

John: So talk a little bit about, you know, now, you’re finished with Chegg. You’ve had now really true success stories under your belt both for CourseRank and Chegg now. Even though they’re intertwined in their two success stories. You’re still very young. Where did the vision? Where was the “Aha! moment” to create for Verkada? And for our listeners and viewers out there, I’ve got it up on my website, on my browser. I want others to be able to check it out. Please go and check out Verkada at www.verkada V-E-R-K-A-D-A verkada.com. Where did that Aha moment come from?

Filip: Yeah. I think kind of going back to the earlier part of my story. I think at that point after Chegg and my career, I had realized that I’m a builder and what drives me is building products and specifically, working with technology. I think there was like a big requirement for me. I think when folks start companies, they often think about, “Hey, what’s the market? How big can this thing get?” And I think for me and my co-founders, there are two components to it. One certainly was kind of how impactful and important this idea can be in the world. But the second which was I think just coming from my personal experience and maybe my personal bias was “Hey, I know myself, and I know that I’m going to do best if I work on products that I love to interact with every day.” And so that was the drive to start something that’s truly a “technology company,” right? With meaningful software, meaningful hardware, innovation, and that journey that led up to Verkada really spend months before, right? So, following the decision to start something again, I started pulling sort of the folks I’ve worked with before together and we gave ourselves a big chunk of time to really flesh out and land on the idea that we would ultimately build, which became Verkada. And I think in retrospect, perhaps, one of the best things that we’ve done. We didn’t jump on the first idea. We took and we gave ourselves a year and it took us about, I want to say 7 months of the year where we were day in and day out working on different ideas and we would commit to them, right? We would take an idea. We would prototype it. We talk to investors, we talk to customers and we had many ideas which you know, we went through that cycle and we said, “Actually, that one’s not great because of the reason XYZ.” And ultimately through that process, we landed on video security as a market. I’ll tell you why that was exciting?

John: Yeah.

Filip: Video security, when we looked at it in 2016, we get excited about it because my co-founders and I have been exposed to physical security cameras in the enterprise context. And the realization we had was that a lot of the products are used to protect schools, protect airports, protect hospitals. Those tools were far behind or they felt like they were hard far behind from the software perspective from some of the consumer products that all of us are used to, right? I’m sure you’ve had a nest camera ring or another product at home. And all of those are awesome, right?

John: Right.

Filip: Great. And I was super excited about those products and I’m like, “Wait a minute. Why aren’t the things at the airports and the hospitals where the security is that much more important? Why aren’t those products equally innovative or equally evolved if you will?” And that was the genesis of the idea for Verkada and very quickly, we started working on early product prototypes and showing those to customers. And they validated this assumption. The customers very quickly told us, “Wow, Filip. If you can actually deliver on what you’re saying, we want to place orders. We want to try it. We want to get betas.” And that really gave us the momentum on this particular idea to commit, to incorporate, to start the company, start hiring, and really chase this idea of building a modern cloud video security product.

John: Filip, that’s fascinating. You did something, you know, I had never heard of it being reverse engineers like that. You chose your people first and that was the most important part of the process. That was one very important pillar of your process and then you concurrently went down the road with numerous ideas and then chose the best idea on the group’s best thinking, which, typically, there’s a singular or dual or triple entrepreneur group that gets together. They come up with the idea and then they choose the group you see to have done that reverse but still come out with an amazing idea and vision.

Filip: Yeah, I think I was lucky I had a group of folks that I’ve worked with before and I met Hans, one of my co-founders actually in this process of exploration of ideas. As co-founders, we all get along extremely well, and I think that’s one of the core ingredients of a start-up on its journey. I’m sure you know that the journey is always ups and downs, successes and failures, and the resilience of the team, the persistence in executing against the goals, especially in the early days, that’s a critical factor in getting the thing off the ground.

John: That is so true. People sometimes don’t understand that the people sometimes is more important than actually which business enterprise you choose because the people, if they’re all good and work well together and have the right chemistry, they can make it through any battle together. But if the people don’t really have the right chemistry, even a great idea will never get realized.

Filip: Yep.

John: So that’s fascinating. Okay. So you chose security. Let’s catch up with the business enterprise world to what has become a very successful home market. So when did you have something ready to launch and when did you launch the first iteration of what you had created?

Filip: Yeah. We started the company in the summer of 2016 and it took us about a year, maybe 14 months from the day of starting the company to launching our first product, which was our first two cameras into the market. And that, by the way, was a sort of an incredible experience in itself, right? I’ve done software products before. Hans, one of my co-founders has done hardware products before in addition to software, and I was just amazed by how quickly you could iterate and move on hardware execution. So that in itself was awesome learning for me, but about 14 months after starting the company when we launched our MVP. Our first minimal viable product that we started selling to customers or our first camera. And that then drove the kind of adoption and reception in the marketplace and made us realize that “Hey, we’re actually onto something, right?” Once you get off the phone with a number of customers and they’re nodding and they’re happy and they’re smiling as you’re showing them the features, you’re like, “Okay, good.” Like we’ve done something right here and that’s when the real work starts, right? And by the way, 2018 was our first year of sales and our first full year of sales. And I remember that year, we made a plan of execution of how much we would sell and it was tremendous. We sold, I think, 6x of what we have planned, which sounds amazing right on the outside and from an investor perspective, amazing. Internally, that meant producing six times more hardware and scaling the software platform, six times faster than we had planned. It was just a tremendous amount of work, but it’s certainly got us off on the right momentum, on the right pace, and validated [inaudible]

John: That’s a good problem to have.

Filip: For sure, good problem but none of the last, like, it’s quite a challenging beginning to the company’s journey. I think the other thing that I’ll point out, as you know today, I think folks look at Verkada and was like, “Hey, what you’re doing makes sense, Filip. It’s obvious buildings need this.” When we started at the beginning of 2016, folks look at this like, “Why are you building cameras?” Like kind of, you know, not the market that I know the most about. Everyone in 2016 was talking about, self-driving cars and AI, and VR, and I feel go do that. I’m glad we persisted in our initial idea and actually built out this business.

John: I just want to ask you a question between 2016 and 2018, you and Hans, and your team already we’re successful human beings. As success goes, you already had two big wins under your belt, Hans as well and your teammates as well. You’re all, of course, with the tremendous education behind you. So you have great resumes, and great success stories. How hard was it for you to raise the money to make Verkada a reality? Is too hard even with the track record, or is it much easier?

Filip: No. You’d be surprised, it was quite challenging. I think, our thought initially was like,”Yeah, we’ve done companies before maybe this will be a cakewalk to raise the seed run.” And by the way, the markets were very active. But I think, as I said earlier, initially folks talk to us and they looked at it and they’re like, “Why are you building cameras again?” The idea didn’t really resonate.

John: Right.

Filip: And the market wasn’t one that investors were familiar with and I think the fact that we decided to develop a solution as our first product, which was combining hardware and software, which we felt was critical to delivering this awesome customer experience by the way. That fact of building the hardware made the business seem much more risky, right? And so, I would say in the first year of the company, it was a lot of sweat to get investors into the company. In fact, the first money into the company came from the founders. And in the first 12 months, we definitely had a moment where I was pulling out my own checkbook and writing checks to make payroll and it was a stressful first year, but once we started selling the product, that story changed quite a bit. The market reception and the fact that customers were talking on our behalf, was really the big shift in how investors perceived this market and our company.

John: When you pull out your own checkbook to make payroll, that means as all other great entrepreneurs, you’re all in. You are all in.

Filip: We were all in. Yeah. We wanted to make this work and it was [inaudible] at one point but I’m glad we produced and made it through.

John: So you raise the capital. You do 2018 and you do 6x of what your forecasts and projections were. So, explain a little bit to our audience that having had the benefit of using your great products and services yet, how did you differentiate yourself from what was the traditional legacy enterprise cameras and security systems compared to what you’ve created and where you’re going with this?

Filip: Sure. I’ll tell you both the answer that we had in 2016, the original, and then where it’s evolved to be in words. How’s that, right? Because they’re quite different.

John: Right.

Filip: So, where the story started was, “Hey, let’s build a cloud-managed enterprise security camera for companies that have hundreds or thousands of cameras deployed, right? So, if you think about your home use case, maybe you have a ring or a nest cam or something like that.

John: That’s right.

Filip: You know, most folks are familiar with it. Typically, in a home environment, you might have 1 to 5 cameras. I think the average in a consumer world is like 2 or 3 cameras. That’s very different in the enterprise, right? And that was like, one of the first things we had to design for which we realized that many of our customers would have hundreds or thousands of cameras at disparate geographical locations, often with limited internet connectivity. Think of a warehouse in Rural Arizona, they might be protecting goods in that warehouse. They might have 40, 50 cameras, and it might be running on an ADSL connection, right? So we had to design the product with that in mind and that’s where the technical architecture and design of our system came from requirements like those and conversations of these customers. And so, really what we developed at the beginning, in 2016, was a modern cloud-based security camera that you plug in and it just works. It’s like the iPhone of cameras. That’s how we fought about it.

John: Wow.

Filip: We got it. It works and meets your needs and it doesn’t matter if your internet connection is crappy. It doesn’t matter if you have 50 or 100 or 1000 of those cameras. It should just do what the users expect and importantly, it’s an all-in-one package, right? So it removes the burden from the customer of integrating with other products, kind of combining different systems and we guarantee that it works well, right? And if something is off, call our team. We’ll be there, we’ll help you fix it. We’ll navigate the issue. So that was the approach at the start of the company.

John: Right.

Filip: You know, I alluded to that. That vision has evolved. I would say we’re very much like a product-vision-driven company, right? We’re all excited about what we’re building and that vision, 2 or 3 years into the journey evolved from. Verkada is just a camera company actually, we want to build the operating system that all commercial buildings and physical space run on. And what does that mean concretely? What is an operating system for physical space? To us, that’s the sum of different devices, and adjacent verticals working seamlessly together. So, we started with cameras. We then build access control. So, think of every building where you badge in and out and kind of control door locks and access to those buildings. We then build sensors, initially for vape detection and then for air quality monitoring, which we can talk more about that [inaudible].

John: We’ll talk about that. Yes.

Filip: We kind of kept expanding and the theory behind the company is that really over the next decade. And by the way, we have a very long view of this company. We want to build this to be a long-lasting sustainable company over the next decade. We plan to invest in many of these adjacencies with a philosophy of building the number one excellent product in each of those categories. And with the dream that one day, if we have many products across these different categories, they work seamlessly together and so now you have a unified way of managing your building and that we think of is that operating system of the building of the future. So that’s what we’re building towards today, but happy to kind of dive in.

John: So, for instance, from the building manager of a big building in Downtown, New York City.

Filip: Yeah.

John: I have a report of dashboard in front of me up on my laptop or my tablet and that dashboard will tell me everything I need to know. What’s going on in that building in terms of air quality, security, visual security, and other types of security. One dashboard and it’s all there for me in one dashboard.

Filip: Yeah, that’s correct.

John: Wow.

Filip: You can do that in all locations or you can do that remotely, right? So if you’re kind of security person managing many sites, or maybe you’re on a campus and you’re walking around, you just take out your phone and you can see everything that’s on the web right there on your phone and kind of access the different devices whether that’s cameras or access control or anything else. Yeah. In one place.

John: For our listeners and viewers who just join us. We’ve got Filip Kaliszan with us right now. He’s the founder and CEO of Verkada. You can find Verkada and their great products at www. V-E-R-K-A-D-A.com. verkada.com.

Filip, you’ve been in this now for 6 short years, but 6 short years can feel a lot longer when you’re an entrepreneur, obviously, but relatively speaking, 6 years is a tight timeline. How many employees have you grown to? And how many cities and countries do you now cover? Forget the cities. How many countries are you now in?

Filip: Yeah, so we’re international, we’re a global product and we’re growing that presence very quickly now. We started in the US and obviously, targeting the domestic market initially realm[?]. It’s the easiest way to go that’s where we started but our product is relevant globally and I think actually, one of the key advantages of Verkada, just as you can think of a single pane of glass for all of your locations within the US. You can think of a single pane of glass for multinational companies dealing with these challenges across different countries. So we’re very actively, working on expanding globally the business. Today, the core of our team is in the US, so our engineering team is based in San Mateo, California. That’s where most of the development effort happens on the product. We have sales teams across the US. We actually have 4 offices in the US. So, about 1,000 people.

John: Wow.

Filip: 600 in San Mateo. We have a Salt Lake City and an Austin office. We kick those off. I want to say, 18 months ago with like three or four folks, and they’re both up to like, 100 people now. And we just opened Tampa in Florida, and Scottsdale outside of Phoenix in Arizona. So we’re super excited to have a presence across the United States and that gives us access directly to the customers because so much of it is about building that lasting relationship and building that trust with the customer. And so really having people in the region and being able to talk to those customers, visit those customers, understand how they’re using our products. It makes a big difference to us. Internationally our presence is today and in London, we have an office for kind of all of the AMIA Market and then we also started working on our Australia present and with an office in Sydney. So yeah, we’re expanding and we see global expansion as a huge opportunity.

John: So exciting. Let’s shift now the conversation to the customers and communities you operated. Obviously, I said at the top of the show and for our listeners who just join us or our viewers who just join us. You know, ERI is a large E-Waste Recycling, and Hardware Data Destruction Company. So, hardware data protection and the site on everything we’re touching is very upmost critical nature. So, we are not only a customer of Verkada, but we’re a very happy customer and we continue to buy and use your services and it’s improved our company massively. Talk a little bit about the other customers and communities you serve. So our clients, our listeners, and viewers can get a real view of the multiple uses of your products and services.

Filip: Sure. Yes. Maybe I’ll start with the beauty of our product suite and as we design it. The same products we build are relevant across many verticals and many different categories of customers, right? Whether it had to be, I don’t know, industrial or food production or maybe medical healthcare or education, right? So we have a very broad range of customers that use our products in different settings. And I think, what’s common is that customers are drawn to our solution with the ease of experience, with the ease of use of our products. It makes navigating the challenges of physical security, much easier for them. So that’s maybe overarching. We can kind of zero in on any given of those segments and happy to give you examples of how folks use, and better use the product. But you know, I’ll give you like an anecdote may be from, you know, we get stories from customers all the time.

John: Yeah.

Filip: Of course, these are security incidents, so I can never name the customer. [crosstalk] I don’t want to disclose that but we’re happy to share a story.

John: Of course.

Filip: For example, we have customers that are, you know, Retail Bank locations and I’ll give you kind of a camera story where I really was excited about the impact on the situation that our product had, right? So we had a bank that deployed our cameras and as a user, you’ll know that with the Verkada camera product, it’s very easy to share access to a camera. So, there’s something bad was going on on one of your sites, you could text a link to someone else and they can securely pull up the camera feed. So we had one of these situations where actually, an armed robber came into a bank that was equipped with Verkada and help people posted, which is obviously a very serious, very bad situation to be in. And what was remarkable was that, during that incident, that bank was able to share access to the video with the police force that was on-site, which is just kind of unheard-of, right? Like typically, video security is something that you use after the fact, right? Like things that may happen and then you evaluate what happened and maybe you use it for insurance or whatever. And so that was one of the first times where like, “wow” I was so excited because our technology was used in real-time by the First Responders on the ground that made their jobs easier. It kept people safe and gladly that situation was resolved without any casualties any injuries, which was obviously, great to hear. So that’s one class of–

John: So, let’s parse that out. So, instead of a de facto use, which is historically the way the video feeds are used for. Like you said, law enforcement purposes, insurance purposes. This was a real-time use where they actually help resolve the issue and potentially help prevent a catastrophic result.

Filip: Absolutely.

John: Wow.

Filip: And I can give you like maybe a less scary but a different class of use case, right? A lot of schools are our customers. They deploy the products, cameras, but also access control. Also, vape detection, which we should talk about to protect their students. And again, historically, folks would only use video security after the fact when something goes wrong, but now because it’s so easy and so accessible, they’re able to mitigate situations in real-time. We had a school where the school was going into lockdown because ammunition bullets were found in the school parking lot, right? And as you imagine, that’s like a terrifying situation and police get dispatched and so on and so forth. In that particular situation, it was very lucky the school administrators were able to use our cameras to find that. It actually was a completely innocuous situation. A parent was dropping off their kid, and some crate fell off their truck and it happened like there’s no bad intent, right?

John: Right.

Filip: So they were able to track it back to the person, call them, confirm and what could have been a long lockdown period was kind of quickly diffused. And that’s exactly the kind of story that we want to hear, right? We want to kind of proactively help, folks keep their tenants, keep their students safe.

John: Fantastic[?] I assume healthcare services, law enforcement, and financial services are all heavily now starting to become users of your hardware and software. Is that true?

Filip: They are. They are and I think those use cases obviously, vary vastly by customer. But yeah, we’re getting a lot of adoption across the…

John: I want to take a real-life example. Again, I don’t want you to give away any trade secrets or message anything to competitors. But what’s fascinating recently, I’m a native New Yorker and of course, once you’re a native New Yorker that city stays with you and is part of your heart and soul forever. And so recently, they’ve been some very, very tragic situations in the subway systems in New York. I heard the mayor come out. Well, I’m very excited about a change in leadership there and he came out and did a press conference about two weeks ago after the last shooting that happened in the subway system and he said, “Listen, I’m trying to be as proactive as I can be. I’ve sent my deputies out to conferences to learn about all the technologies that now can be installed in subway systems to prevent and detect people who have firearms or live ammunition with them, to prevent these kinds of horrific tragic circumstances from happening again.” Is that where you then step into the bridge and say, “We’re part of that solution. We can be part of that solution.” Is that part of the future of Verkada solving those kinds of municipality and city crises and helping them avoid these kinds of tragedies in the future?

Filip: Yeah. I mean, look, certainly, we’re building towards being able to solve and hopefully prevent issues like that. I will caveat it by saying, it’s a very hard problem, right?

John: Absolutely.

Filip: You’re talking about folks who might be walking with concealed weapons in their jacket. There’s physical limits to what camera people, in particular, can do and so I always ground our customers in that reality, right? The camera is a tool, but cameras have limits too, right? I think our job was as a vendor and a manufacturer and the customers’ job who’s implementing these products is really to find that intersection where that technology can drive the most value and do what’s best to kind of protect folks in a responsible fashion, right? I think I couldn’t tell you that, “Hey, one day, a camera will detect every gun.” Why? Because well, cameras don’t see through clothes, right?

John: Right.

Filip: You know, very trivial example but certainly there’s lots that can be done ranging from sensors to cameras, to other technology. Obviously, with access control, we’re working a lot with customers on building evacuation plans, and lockdown plans. You know, if a shooter is present on-premises, how do you navigate that situation in real-time, in the heat of the moment. That’s the sort of thing where we think we can actually really drive meaningful outcomes. And that’s what we’re working.

John: I love what you said earlier that your product and services can actually help resolve situations while they’re happening in real-time, instead of just becoming a historical overview of what happened. It could actually create better results because it’s real-time. It’s a real-time tool, which I just think is truly amazing. Now, let’s go talk about what we just lived through together, Filip, with the rest of the world, COVID. How did COVID help you galvanize some of your thinking and help you create some new products or services that can be even more useful for your present clients and potential clients?

Filip: Yeah. I think the big thing with COVID when it happened two years ago, initially, we didn’t know what would happen in the market and our approach was like, man, offices are shutting down but I think we had assumed the world is not going to all shutdown. Therefore, the market is going to continue to exist therefore, we should continue building products and executing and you know, certainly, there is an aspect of our technology that can be helpful in kind of COVID tracking, contact tracing that kind of thing. But I would say that generally speaking, we haven’t overly shifted the company strategy as a result of COVID. And I think, unlike many industries, COVID was neither a headwind nor a tailwind to us, right? We were sort of agnostic. We continue executing I think, you know, the vision of what we’re doing on the product side. I think some of it is applicable to COVID and pandemic situations. A lot of it is applicable to other aspects of physical safety. I think in retrospect, looking back at it, I think we’ve just stayed level-headed and continued to execute our vision and that’s kind of how we navigated the crisis.

John: You mentioned earlier about the environmental systems that are now sensors, that are now built into many of your systems with regards to air quality, but also potentially vaping. Can you explain how that evolves your technology even more and gives us more opportunities as users and clients of what you’ve created?

Filip: Yeah. That’s actually a really cool story. We were early in our day’s building cameras and many schools were customers and the schools, many of them were loving the product because of this usability and so they started talking to us about this problem they had with kids, you know, kind of under vaping, pandemic smoking and bathrooms and whatnot. And they’re like, “Hey, Filip. Hey, Verkada. How can we solve this problem?” And folks would come up with crazy ideas like, maybe we can put a camera without a lens and we’ve just a microphone and I’m like how are you going to listen to someone smoking? That’s not going to work. That’s not going to happen. And so that’s really what prompted us to kind of think about the problem space was this vaping pandemic in schools. We happen to have someone on our engineering team who was knowledgeable in the space of air quality sensing. And so, we started prototyping initially. It was like almost an internal hackathon project if you will, where we were prototyping, combining different sensors that detect different particular matter in the air to see if we could differentiate what is a vaping incident from a person cleaning the bathroom and using a spray that emits kind of a lot of odor or other things going on, right? And so we build these devices initially, kind of in a very quick way and we realized that actually, we have a pretty good shot at detecting someone vaping and signaling that to the school. And that was the beginning of that journey with that product category. So we kind of put together a more formal program, started beta testing it with schools and I think, it panned out in two ways for us, right? I think, initially, the schools were very much about, “Hey, we want to deploy this so that when someone is vaping we can catch them in the act and stop them and make sure that they’re not doing that.” That was the initial assumption and you know, the product has done some of that. What we’ve also seen in the deployments with the schools though is that they use it as a tool to measure progress on fighting the vaping pandemic, right? So schools will deploy these devices across campus in their bathrooms, in their locker rooms, in their hallways. And in addition to that, not just thanks to the product but thanks to the programs that they’re putting in place. The education that the educators are doing on the subject of vaping. They’re doing the work to teach kids why it’s a bad idea to vape and then they’re using our devices to measure the results and impact of that work, right? They’re seeing through trends from the Verkada vape sensor or quality sensor that over time, there is a trend of decline in the amount of cases of students smoking on campus and that’s obviously good. I mean, we, as a team is super excited about this particular product line. It’s not the most massive part of our business, but it’s just so good to see that one of our products is helping particularly students, particularly young folks not go down this path of an unhealthy lifestyle.

John: Two questions. Is that how your clients received it? Are you finding more and more clients are deploying that product for their use and finding success with it? Number one.

Filip: Yeah, absolutely. I think what we’ve seen as we started with the school use case and we’ve seen a lot of schools adopt that product. And then what we quickly learned and realize, which was a nice surprise is that many other industries began using the same product for slightly different applications, right? So for example, in food safety, we had a lot of applications where the air quality and cleanliness in rooms where you’re handling food products have to meet a certain standard and we’re able to log that quality, record it, make it easily accessible and alert when something goes off, right? If we detect that the particulate matter in the air is too high, we can send an alert, we can create a workflow, and help the customer mitigate that. We’ve also seen applications in cold storage like refrigeration. Oftentimes, it’s trivial things like, man, how many cases we have where the customer installs this thing and they realize that all the problems result from someone leaving a door not fully shot to a walk-in refrigerator. And that’s actually some of the magic you get when you combine multiple products on the platform, right? You have a Verkada camera watching your cold storage room along with one of our air quality sensors. The alert goes off. Hey, the temperature and humidity are above a normal threshold. What’s going on? Oh, I look at my camera. Oh, you know, Joe who badge in left the door propped open, great. I know exactly how to mitigate that problem. Ultimately, I think that’s a preview of the magic that we hope to deliver across all of these different product categories [inaudible] companies.

John: Right. And that led to my second question in that, what you did is once you’ve found the air quality in a vaping application, you’re now taking that vertical of air quality and you’re going into other sub-vertical.

Filip: Yeah.

John: That’s wonderful.

Filip: Yeah, absolutely. Folks are now thinking about air quality and air cleanliness in many different ways, right?

John: Absolutely.

Filip: What percentage of air is fresher in a building, right? In the context of the pandemic, that was a kind of a big discussion. So we’re experimenting and I would say, we always evolve our products with user feedback. So we’re listening to those stories and certainly, there’s more exciting stuff that the world will see coming from us.

John: Well, you know, Filip. Speaking of more exciting stuff, talk a little bit about the future. What’s next? I mean you’ve already started, you know, this is now your third venture in many ways and you have two peak successes. And now, where are you on this journey? If this was a baseball game, if Verkada was a baseball game, are you in the bottom of the second inning? Top of the fifth? Where are you?

Filip: We’re just getting started.

John: Wow.

Filip: I mean that’s the hardest part to really convey to people and actually, if you ask any of our employees, I feel like every onboarding, every all hands, I remind people that it’s just a beginning of the journey. I’ll give you a data point on that, right? If you look at it, we’re a private company. We’re 6 years into our journey. We’re in a massive market. The market for physical security products, and building infrastructure, it’s over a hundred billion dollars market. Today, we’re a fraction, a tiny fraction of the market. There’s tons of room to grow and as I mentioned, we’re still only a private company. If you look historically across technology companies who’ve gone public and look at the data, I think, I may have to double-check, but I believe the stat is that most of those companies generate the most compounding value in year 7 after the IPO and so I have to keep reminding folks. It’s a yes, we’re a thousand people and yes, we have offices around the world, but to me, it really feels like it’s the beginning of a bigger journey. And I think, importantly, everyone on our team, our co-founders, everyone we hire, we kind of proactively tell this to people, “We’re here to build a lasting business that is important in the world.” That’s the dream. The dream is not to build a quick company, flip it, and kind of move on with life. Really, we want to make a product experience that changes customers’ lives for the better and a business that last generations. And I think that’s a huge, huge challenge and few companies succeed at doing that, but we like that. It’s an audacious ambitious goal and certainly, we’re going to try as hard as we can to chase that.

John: Well, my money’s on you, Filip because you’ve done it before and I know you’re going to do it again here, and I wish you’d. I want you to come back on impact to share the continued journey in the future. For our listeners, and viewers out there to find Filip and his colleagues and to buy his great cameras or get his great software combined. Like we have at ERI which was transformative for us. Please go to www.verkada.com. V-E-R-K-A-D-A .com Filip, Thank you for creating for Verkada. Thank you for making the world a better and safer place. We’re really grateful to you and thank you for joining us today on the Impact Podcast.

Filip: Thanks so much for having me and yeah, thank you everyone for listening. This was awesome.

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. The 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