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JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and I’m John Shegerian and I’ve got today with me my friend, William Shutkin. He’s the President and CEO of the Presidio Graduate School. Welcome to Green is Good, William. WILLIAM SHUTKIN: Thanks so much, John. It’s a pleasure to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so great to have you on. Not only are you my friend, you’re a fellow New Yorker and also you’re doing amazing and great work at the Presidio, which I’ve also been part of in a very little way. I’m so glad to be able to share with our listeners today and highlight all the amazing and wonderful directions you’re taking the Presidio Graduate School. Before we get talking, though, about the Presidio, can we share a little bit your story, William, and journey leading up to this great position that you have there? WILLIAM SHUTKIN: Of course, John. Thanks so much for that great introduction. Part of my story is being one of the few people on the planet, John, who knows that you have a harness racing history, so I’m very proud of that fact. Speaking of which, the harness racing that you did as a younger man in New York City was part of the reason I do what I do. I grew up largely in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut, but with lots of family in New York City. Growing up in the seventies and eighties largely in metro New York was to experience around places like the Yonkers Raceway and Belmont, among other places. The dramatic transition in both landscapes and social-scapes that was going on several decades ago, and that was essentially from beautiful, pristine, suburban neighborhoods to blighted and distressed urban neighborhoods. That transition sort of shocked me and caused me to think not only about environmental conditions, how can we make sure that everybody has access to healthy and vital outdoors, but also social conditions. Why is it that some communities were just so far behind and living in such distress in a place like America? So that really set me off on a career where I’ve tried to join the best of environmental protection strategies with a real call for social justice and social equity. I’ve done that as a lawyer, as a social entrepreneur and as an academic. As you noted, I now run, and have for the past several years, one of the world’s leading graduate management schools for sustainability, where issues of the sort that I’ve cared about my whole life and my whole career are front and center, and they’re what we teach in the classroom and they’re the kind of jobs and careers that our students seem to pursue. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I just want to share with our listeners one quote about you, and then we’re going to get on and talk about the Presidio. A gentleman named David Brower described you as “an environmental visionary creating solutions to today’s problems with a passion that would make both John Muir and Martin Luther King equally proud.” I’m lucky to have you as a friend. I’m very lucky to be part of the adjunct teaching group of professionals that you are so gracious enough to invite into the Presidio to share our experiences with your students. William, I’m just so thankful you are joining us today at Green is Good to share all the amazing things you’re doing at the Presidio Graduate School. WILLIAM SHUTKIN: Thanks, John. I appreciate that. Of course, John Muir and Martin Luther King are two heroes of mine, and indeed, to me represent two sides of the same coin, which is the coin of the promise of American society, not just a society of opportunity and prosperity for all, but environmental quality for all. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that want to learn more about the Presidio Graduate School, please go to www.presidio.edu. William, now that you’ve done so many interesting things in your life and had a fascinating journey and you’re at the Presidio Graduate School, when you look back and look forward from where we are today in 2015, what social or environmental challenges do you think are most pressing now that we can sort of address? WILLIAM SHUTKIN: Looking back, having done this work for about 25 years, roughly a quarter of a century, as a professional, as a lawyer and an adult, I have to say I’m extremely excited and really bullish on where we’re going. The dramatic shifts and changes in attitude and behavior for the better, notwithstanding all of the crises and the problems that exist, are extremely exciting and give me great cause for optimism. When I started my career in the early nineties and was called a social entrepreneur, almost nobody knew what that term meant, including me. But now, we’ve got an entire generation seemingly committed to pursuing careers in social enterprise and in for-benefit business, among so many other areas that really didn’t even exist, at least in name, a short decade or two ago. A lot of evolution has taken place at a fairly rapid pace, and that makes me excited. Looking forward, we need more of the same. The planet is only getting more crowded, there’s over 7 billion of us today on it, and it’s projected that by the half century, it will be over 9 billion. The questions of how they’re going to live, where they’re going to live, the quality of their lives, whether in America or anywhere else on the planet, these are central questions of our time and demand continuous innovation and creativity. These are precisely the sorts of questions and the sorts of skills that we talk about at Presidio Graduate School. We believe that present day and future leaders will have to be increasingly creative and really curious about the strategic direction of their enterprises as we move forward in this century. That means moving beyond the assumptions of past and even current business practice. That is to say, assuming that resources are limited, assuming that there’s a fundamental difference between a producer and a consumer in an age when increasingly consumers are able to produce, thanks to technology and the like, assuming that one needs to own everything versus share or rent it, all sorts of new ways of thinking about enterprise are emerging and taking center stage. These are precisely the kinds of approaches and strategies that we talk about at Presidio and that we believe will comprise future business success. JOHN SHEGERIAN: William, with a lot of the cries out there now, there’s a whole movement, an anti-higher education movement. Can you give the flip side of that right now? Why is higher education today more relevant than ever, and why is Presidio so different than other higher education schools in the United States right now, maybe around the world, frankly? WILLIAM SHUTKIN: Sure. Look, higher education, like every other industry, is being disrupted for all sorts of reasons, many of them very good and important. The great recession really caused us to think in this country and everywhere else about the value, the return on the investment, of education at all levels, given the price of education in this country, especially, and the availability of good paying jobs upon graduating, whether from an undergraduate institution or graduate institution. The great recession caused us all to think about the true return on investment, not just financial, but otherwise, from education. In addition, the globalization of education, the fact that there’s now so many more programs to choose from around the globe and students who are traveling to and from to attend institutions have caused us to think differently about the customer, who we’re serving, and how we’re serving them. Finally, technology, the availability of online education and the mix of bricks and mortar and virtual education. All of these things have really created a rich sort of stew for rethinking, reconceiving what it is we’re doing. What makes Presidio, I think, different and so well positioned for taking advantage, if you will, of these changes, is that for the last 13 years, and we were just founded in 2003, we have been sort of ahead of the curve. We were the first in our particular niche to combine online and onsite education in a hybrid delivery model. Our students are in classrooms, but only one weekend a month, and then they are engaging online. We think that we’ve got the best of both in terms of a 21st century model. Next, we looked at the management curriculum taught at places like Harvard Business School and Wharton and Kellogg, the top 10 brands, if you will, and we took that same management curriculum and said, “What does this curriculum really need to be relevant for the 21st century and beyond?” What we were talking about earlier in this conversation, limited resources, the sharing economy, etc. We integrated the management curriculum taught at more traditional programs across the board with sustainability principles and frameworks and practices, so whether our students are learning about accounting or finance, strategies or marketing, they’re learning about those functions and disciplines from the perspective, through the lens, of sustainability, which we think is the cornerstone, and will be the cornerstone, of all business, as we go forward. Finally, we’re doing this work and this education in, really, the epicenter, the heart, the hub, of sustainability, which is the San Francisco Bay Area. This, we think, is a great advantage of us because people, not only around the country but around the world, want to be here and want to be in this dense and dynamic mix of entrepreneurs and investors, public policy innovators who are doing all sorts of things here in the Bay Area and in California generally, that folks in most other places simply don’t have access to. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Our listeners, if you’ve just joined us now, we’ve got William Shutkin on with us. He’s the President and CEO of Presidio Graduate School. To learn more about the Presidio Graduate School, please go to www.presidio.edu. Sustainability, now, has taken on a whole new meaning, compared to 15 years ago, where there were very few, if any at all, Chief Sustainability Officers and things of that such in corporate America. How does, now, sustainable businesses have an advantage over conventional businesses that have still not even come along with regards to the sustainability revolution in the United States, William? WILLIAM SHUTKIN: You’re so right, John. These positions, the Chief Sustainability Officer in, say, a Fortune 100 company, or the Sustainability Director of a city like yours, New York or San Francisco, or for that matter, Tokyo or Madrid, these are new categories of management and leadership positions that didn’t exist 15 years ago, that not only exist now in abundance, and I think are really required of a competitive company or government agency, but eventually, of course, these positions themselves will morph into something more generic. That is to say that every CEO, every leader of any enterprise, we believe, will be required to know, to learn, the kinds of skills and knowledge that we teach at Presidio. We’re very confident that this is the way, this is the trend. Where we stand today is that essentially these positions and companies that have embraced sustainability as a strategic advantage are now increasingly able to make the case to operate in a sustainable way is to operate with a competitive advantage. For example, on the energy side, we know that there are so many savings throughout the supply chain, and indeed, in a company’s own facilities, from looking critically at the way a company uses energy across the board and to look for opportunities to save money. Not only is going green with energy the right thing to do, we believe, for the planet and for people, but it turns out it’s a more profitable strategy, and now we’re actually seeing that and we’re able to make that case very clearly and simply. Secondly, sustainability we see increasingly as a marketing advantage for companies. The millennial generation, the rising generation of consumers here and abroad, want to know increasingly the companies whose products and services they’re purchasing take seriously these kinds of values, whether that’s engaging stakeholders more meaningfully in the activity of the business or investing in employees and in environmental protection programs, these sorts of values are increasingly valued in the marketplace by consumers who have plenty of choices and are increasingly voting with those wallets. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. I’m on your website now. Again, for our listeners, it’s www.presidio.edu. What I love is I love this description of the Presidio. Presidio is producing a new kind of leader for a new kind of world. What does that mean to you, William, and what should that mean to our listeners who are thinking about going to graduate school and now considering the Presidio school? WILLIAM SHUTKIN: We think the kind of leader that we’re producing, and that’s fundamentally what we’re about, is producing leaders, producing folks who are comfortable in their own skin and comfortable with the idea of bringing others along, of making change and of steering change. For us, that leader is not your father’s or grandfather’s leader, and indeed, it was gender, right? For us, the leader increasingly is a woman, so we’re one of the few management schools where women every year outnumber men historically. Our ratio is 57 percent to 43 ptercen women to men at Presidio Graduate School. We know the workforce is becoming increasingly diverse and, certainly from a gender perspective, women are on the rise. We ourselves are sort of out front. Women and female leadership, number one. Number two, we’re all about leaders who care more than just about the financial success of their companies, but understand that financial viability, financial success, is essential for a long-term viable enterprise. Our leaders are much more interesting and creative than simply focusing and obsessing with one bottom line. They believe that we’ve got to be doing more and creating more value than simply financial return on investment. That’s a social and environmental return. How are the employees of the enterprise, the customers and all of the other stakeholders who care about what we do as an enterprise, how are they benefitting and how can we measure that benefit? Then, of course, environmental return. How are we not only protecting, but restoring, natural resources, as we develop services and products to meet needs, both present and future? Our leaders are just more expansive in their thinking. We think they’re more creative, and ultimately, more responsible and evolved when it comes to the purpose of enterprise, and frankly, the purpose of their leadership. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m sorry. We’re down to the last minute or so. Give a shameless plug. Where does Presidio rank in terms of graduate schools in the world? I want our listeners to hear that directly from you. You’re a humble guy. WILLIAM SHUTKIN: Not only do we think, but others think, that we’re the number one program of our kind in the world, not just the United States, but in the world. We’ve consistently been ranked number one or in the very top tier of management programs around the world. There was a recent review of 108 programs around the world, and we showed up number one. We’re confident in our position, but it’s really not about rankings for us, it’s about knowing that what we’re doing, the hard work of producing the kinds of leaders and placing them in great jobs, like Facebook and Salesforce and Cisco and in great big cities around the world, that that kind of work that we’re doing is important work, it’s meaningful work, and we’re prepared to continue to do it as best as we can and innovating along the way. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re going to have you back to continue the great story of the Presidio. William Shutkin, the President and CEO. For our listeners that want to go to the Presidio Graduate School or learn more, go to www.presidio.edu. Thank you, William, for your inspirational leadership at the Presidio Graduate School. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Joy Lehman. She’s the Global Sustainability Manager for the Hertz Corporation. Welcome to Green is Good, Joy. JOY LEHMAN: Thanks. Happy to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Joy, before we get talking about all the cool things you’re doing in terms of global sustainability at Hertz, why don’t you first share with our listeners the Joy Lehman story? How did you even get to this point, where you became the Global Sustainability Manager? What was your journey leading up to this new role that you have here? JOY LEHMAN: Well, it’s interesting. My journey actually started probably when I was about 10 years old. I was the weird kid from Kansas who wanted to be a vegetarian and thankfully, my parents, with all their generosity, let me go with it, thinking it was going to be a phase. Very long phase that still continues to today, but that really got me interested in learning more about the environment and the different health benefits and really shaped my education and where I wanted to go in my career. When I went to university, I studied life sciences, environmental science, and then moved to New York City. Innately, I was just a city girl that started out in Kansas. I worked a couple years in the city, more in the pharmaceutical realm, but then decided I really wanted to make the shift towards sustainability, and did my graduate work in sustainability in Australia. On top of being the weird vegetarian kid, I’m also a big traveler. So, when I decided to take a couple years off to go to grad school, I couldn’t think of a better place to do it than Australia. Being a rather unique environment, they were a little bit more progressive a few years ago around sustainability, so they had some great programs to choose from. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so interesting. It’s so funny you say that. We have a lot of guests from around the world on this show. We’ve never had a guest from Australia, and I was going to ask you, are they very forward thinking and progressive when it comes to sustainability? That’s so interesting to learn that they are. JOY LEHMAN: Yeah. It’s a weird climate there. They don’t have a lot of water. How they’re positioned in the world and what they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis has really pushed both individuals and from a policy perspective to really manage their natural resources. It’s created a different sort of culture, when you actually are concerned about are we going to have drinking water every day? JOHN SHEGERIAN: That does change your mindset. For our listeners out there that want to check out all the great things Joy’s doing in terms of global sustainability, you can go to www.hertz.com. I’m on their website right now, Joy. You’ve been at Hertz now three plus years. Can you explain what is your role? Every company is so culturally and DNA different when it comes to sustainability and global sustainability. What is your exact role and mission in terms of Global Sustainability Manager at Hertz? JOY LEHMAN: I have a really fun job, at least in my mind. What I do on a day-to-day basis is I develop a sustainability strategy to really help our organization embed sustainability best practices, environmental performance, efficiency, cost savings, all those great things tied to sustainability across our global operations and our fleet. That really enables me to work with every department. I’m definitely kind of a one-stop shop. If you need to find someone at Hertz, I probably know them because we work in every aspect of our business, to really try and move the needle forward in sustainability. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so interesting. With regards to that, what are some of your current sustainability initiatives? Give our listeners a little example of some of the initiatives you’ve thought of and you’re starting to implement throughout the Hertz platforms. JOY LEHMAN: Hertz takes a holistic approach to sustainability. We looked at our operations and said, “Where can we create the most amount of impact, both from a sustainability perspective, but also from a business perspective?” We’ve got two sides of the coin for us. One, we have a lot of buildings and rental locations, so we have aggressively pursued greening all of our buildings, especially around new construction and using LEED certification, that’s a green building certification, for our large construction projects. Then using those best practices across all of our smaller construction practices. We also are investing in solar production, so many of our larger facilities generate solar energy. And then just kind of the general operational best practices around waste reduction, recycling everything from used oil to bottles and cans, to IT equipment. I think one of the more interesting things we implemented last year was a waterless car wash solution. We obviously have quite a few cars in our fleet, and we and our customers want them shiny and clean. So, that does use quite a bit of water. Our automated car washes recycle about 80% of the water, but in our smaller locations where we have a bit more time, we use a waterless solution, which basically is just a small amount of spray that we spray on, and then it’s wiped down and it’s completely green, nontoxic. So, it’s a great solution that’s very effective for our business bottom line, but it also is saving basically millions of gallons of water a year by moving towards this. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. I’m on your website, and I’m actually right now looking. For our listeners out here, it’s hertz.com. It’s simple. I’m on your living journey sustainability document, and it is fascinating here, some of the things that you guys are working on. I’m going to just throw some things out there. In terms of paper saving, you’re saving paper with regards to recycling. In terms of kilowatts saved, in terms of energy, in terms of recycling in your headquarters. So, this is something that’s really been adopted from a cultural DNA standpoint at Hertz. Greening and sustainability is really right throughout the whole organization from top to bottom. JOY LEHMAN: Yes, it is, and it really needs to be, to be effective. I feel very fortunate to have a very engaged senior management team that sees the value in sustainability and always looks for opportunities to cross that over into other areas of our business. In an organization that’s as large as Hertz, that’s global, we have over 40,000 employees, it’s really important that they all understand where they play a role and what sustainability means to them in their day to day jobs. So, that’s why we really try and communicate the successes we’ve had, but also where there’s opportunity at the individual basis. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Joy, Hertz is a great, great, great rental car company, and you have a lot of competition out there. How do you stack up against not only your direct competition, but even some of the smaller players out there with regards to your sustainability initiatives? Is this something that the whole industry has adopted, or is Hertz leading with regards to sustainability versus your competitors as well? JOY LEHMAN: I would like to say that Hertz is definitely leading the charge in a lot of areas, but sustainability is definitely an area of focus for many of the larger players in the rental industry. I think some of the differentiators for Hertz around sustainability, it really goes down to what’s our product? What are we here to do for our customers and as a corporate organization? That’s to provide mobility solutions. So, where we’re different from our competitors, it’s almost 80% of our fleet gets better than 20 miles per gallon highway, so we have a very fuel-efficient fleet. That’s significantly higher by percentage than our competitors. We really actively try to provide alternative fuel vehicles, high fuel efficiency vehicles, and use innovation and technology to provide mobility solutions for both our leisure customers and also our corporate customers so they have greener travel options. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How about the electric car movement and revolution now? How does that fit in with Hertz’s offering? Is that going to continue to grow? JOY LEHMAN: I think it will continue to grow. A few years ago, there was a lot of hype around electric vehicles, and I think there was a lot of interest in it, and we thought it would be a high area of growth. In certain areas of the U.S. and internationally that’s been true, like around California, so we’ve definitely focused the majority of our EV fleet growth around there. But it’s a longer-term strategy, which is something we will continue to grow and expand, but it’s where we see demand for the most part. But I would say companies like Tesla have done an amazing job of really changing the perceptions around what an electric vehicle is, and making it kind of sexy and cool, and people actually have a bit more interest in it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: With regards to oil recycling, it says on your website that Hertz recycles a lot of the oil that is used in your vehicles. Can you explain how that happens? Is that also another growing trend, recycling more the products that are put out of your cars? JOY LEHMAN: Yes, absolutely. It’s something that we’ve been doing for a while and will continue to grow. Basically, having a fleet of over 500,000 cars, we deal with a lot of automotive waste. It’s our objective to have all of that be recycled and disposed of in the most environmentally sound way possible. All the oil, cleaning solvents, oil filters, and the like are recycled by one national vendor, and they collect all of that. It’s actually then used and refined to create new oil, so it’s an ongoing cycle that, then, we use some of that oil in our vehicles. It’s fantastic, some of the innovative technologies that have really enabled sustainability best practices to move forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, we’re honored to have with us today Joy Lehman. She’s the Global Sustainability Manager for the Hertz Corporation. You can check out all of her and Hertz’s great work at www.hertz.com. Joy, talk a little bit about the future. You’re now, no pun intended, driving the bus and you’re the head of global sustainability at Hertz. Where are you taking it now? Where is the puck going, not just where the puck is today? Where are you driving your company with regards to sustainability? Give us a little glimpse of the future. JOY LEHMAN: For us, I think we’ve done a great job of looking at our operations and making sure that we have sustainability embedded there, but our next big move will be to increase the sustainability offerings around mobility. So, that’s looking at 24/7 access to fuel efficient vehicles that are readily accessible to communities around the world in very short distance and looking to see where we can increase alternative fuel vehicle access, like hybrids and electric vehicles. When you think about a company like Hertz, we rent millions of transactions. Each of those transactions is essentially a test drive for some vehicle, so we’re helping millions of individuals form an opinion about a car. By providing access to the most fuel efficient and innovative vehicles, whether they’re hybrids or electric vehicles, we’re helping to break down those consumer barriers that may exist around preconceived ideas about green cars are slow, they’re not very cool looking. By actually getting people to drive them through a rental experience, we hope to really move the needle towards if people are looking to purchase those cars, they might consider a vehicle they hadn’t previously because they had an experience with Hertz. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. With regards to tires, Hertz is the only car company that has a zero landfill policy with regards to recycling tires? JOY LEHMAN: Yes. That’s something we’re very proud of, to make sure that none of our tires end up in the landfill. Where they do end up is on the roads. New construction for roads typically use recycled tires, but also in playgrounds. The kind of squishy equipment that you’re jumping around on, those quite possibly could be a Hertz car tire. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Joy, since you’re the Global Sustainability Manager, can you share with our listeners a little bit of the cultural differences with regards to sustainability? Hertz is an international brand. You get to travel the world and green Hertz around the world. Talk a little bit about the cultural differences between countries, and the acceptability or adoption of sustainability when it comes to the United States versus Europe versus Asia and other parts of the world where Hertz is at, and how that affects your decision-making and you driving policy and change. JOY LEHMAN: You’re absolutely right. Each country and region of the world has a little bit different perspective on what sustainability is, so we try and factor that into how we prioritize our different programs. Even looking at fleet choices, so if you look at Europe, diesel is readily accepted and the majority of individuals and businesses drive those cars. From a diesel vehicle perspective, they have much higher fuel economy. In the U.S., that’s a little bit harder sell because we’re not quite as accustomed to diesel vehicles. So, we look at those fleet choices, what makes most sense. In the U.S., hybrids are a fantastic choice. In Europe, we focus more on the diesels and moving more into the electric vehicle space. I mentioned Australia being a water-conscious country, so that’s an initiative looking at how we can conserve water and those more pivotal climate change issues that rise up in countries that are actually having to deal with those issues on a more tactical level, and trying to integrate that into our planning. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. How do you trade best practices in terms of underneath you, do you have many other sustainability managers across departments and across countries that are constantly brainstorming and sharing new or better practices that they’re learning out in the field and then bringing back to the group, so future sustainability initiatives can be driven from what the team is learning in the field? JOY LEHMAN: We do. We’ve got a great group, the sustainability task force, that I lead and it engages basically with every department. We have international colleagues also involved. We meet, depending on which group we’re meeting with, on a weekly or a monthly basis to look at the programs we have in place and how we can improve them, what needs to change, and really brainstorm those interesting and creative ideas to engage our employees, but also to move the needle forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Joy, we’re down to the last two-and-a-half minutes or so. What has been your experience and what does the data show about how engaged your clients are with regards to sustainability? How important is it to them that you continue to make this an important initiative, culturally and from a DNA perspective of Hertz, and continue to message how green and sustainable Hertz is? How important is that to your client base? JOY LEHMAN: That’s a great question because we’re obviously driven by what our consumer needs are. I would say especially in our corporate and business traveler, there is a very high interest on programs that can help drive greener business travel. So, we work with them directly to create programs that can both reduce their carbon emissions per mile, their fuel consumption, and increase their utilization of alternative fuel vehicles that help their employees get that first-hand experience that I discussed in those different vehicles. Especially our larger customers that have hundreds of thousands of employees renting with us, they’re all experiencing that, and we’ve been able to make some pretty good outcomes, 15-16% reduction in carbon in some cases per mile. That then equates to fantastic fuel saving for our customers, so on both sides we’re both very happy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Final words, Joy. What are some of your hopes for the future of a green car rental industry? What’s on your mind? JOY LEHMAN: If I had the blue sky, what I would love to see is basically a lower no-emissions vehicle available to anyone within a five-minute walk, and they could access that vehicle at any time. That really enables mobility for travelers around the world to get where they need to go and create the least amount of impact in the process. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. For our listeners out there who want to lease or rent one of Hertz’s great cars, please go to www.hertz.com and learn more of Joy’s great work and her colleagues’ great work with regards to sustainability. It’s hertz.com. Thank you, Joy, for being an inspiring sustainability superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored today to have with us Alan Tratner. He’s the Chairman of the Environmental Education Group. Welcome to Green is Good, Alan. ALAN TRATNER: Thank you, John. It’s my pleasure to be with you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Alan, before we get talking about all the great projects that you have going on within the Environmental Education Group, I’d love you to join the Alan Tratner story because you have a fascinating story and journey leading up to all your important environmental initiatives that you’re involved with. Can you share your story and how you got to where you are today? ALAN TRATNER: Thank you. Absolutely. It’s funny. I was a kid growing up in the sixties. I was born in Detroit, and General Motors had this contest about designing the car of the future. The winner got a $5,000 scholarship to go to college. That’s laughable now, but whatever. You designed the car of the future, and you built it. You had to hand build it, cutting it, and all that stuff. I won their attention a couple of times, to the point that as an 11-year-old, they put me at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, where they were designing the World’s Fair, refrigerators, and cars of every kind, when General Motors was the number one corporation on the planet, of course. That caused me to be thinking about inventing and entrepreneurship and all the things I was kind of excited about in my art and scholastic and science background. We moved to California. When we moved to California, I had no idea how bad smog was in the sixties, before the laws and emission controls and all that stuff. We couldn’t go to school some days, and it just changed my whole direction of understanding what I should be doing, personally, and maybe helping others with inventing and entrepreneurship and green space and creating what we now call the green economy or environmental entrepreneurship or eco-inventing. So, I went down that direction because of circumstances and the way the world works, I landed with this brand new upstart magazine called Environmental Quality Magazine. They had been funded by Bankers Trust. We were out there on the cutting edge. Right in 1969, in Santa Barbara, the world famous or infamous oil spill happened, and that catalyzed what they call the modern environmental movement, with the birds coated with oil and the beaches closed and how bad things were. I remember in Time Magazine the big stories about how bad we were polluting the planet. So it really stung home with me that I should be going in a different direction and try to help the world with the inventing side and entrepreneurial side, instead of just going crazy industrially, without any concern for the planet. So, luckily, I had a lot of politicians and Hollywood celebrities being out here that got behind me, and I was involved in the founding, proudly, of the original Earth Day with Dennis Hayes from Environmental Action, Senator Gaylord Nelson, and we kind of helped that whole thing get birthed and how it spread the world and annually celebrated. Then I went to the United Nations conference, the first ever on the human environment, in Stockholm, Sweden, and did a presentation and got connected to other countries and other people. We went on a different tangent, John. You could hug the whales and hug the trees and save the whales and do whatever you wanted to, and everybody started to do that, but I wanted to do something that was related to inventing a better future. So, we created the Green2Gold Incubator. It was early on before incubators were really talked about or accelerators. You’re talking about the beginning of the 1970s, and that’s what we started to do, was to invent and create ideas and help people around the world do things that would be new technology, renewable energy, sustainability before it was talked about, green products of every kind and ilk. The only thing we didn’t want to practice was just two areas, medical quackery and weapons of mass destruction. You can go elsewhere for that. But we basically can invent and entrepreneur and incubate ideas in this whole field, and we ended up, thanks to all the stuff I was doing, being on Oprah, Good Morning America and CNN. Oprah told 20 million Americans if you have a great idea, call Alan, put my phone number up there, and forever changed my whole life and our organization’s. Then we traveled around the world, did some 4,500 workshops, Moscow, Russia, to Stanford, and continue to do so to date. Now we have five major project elements within the Environmental Education Group that are related to sustainability, environmental entrepreneurship, technology, renewable energy, the global scale, incredible attention that we get, and we’re making quite a big difference. We even have a chain of Angel Investor, an unconventional funding resource, to our incubator. We’ve been doing the annual Clean Businesses Investment Summit out here in California at UCSB, where we’re housed. In my background, I ended up with like 15 patents. Everyone teases me that if I wasn’t helping thousands of others, I’d probably have 100 patents right now in renewable energy and transportation and things that I care about. So, it’s been quite a ride. Plus, the U.S. Small Business Administration made a contract with us to run a small business development center on the SCORE counselor, Service Corps of Retired Executives, for the USSBA. And we pioneered some very important things. For a long time, during the 1970s and 1980s, I ended up being the Editor-in-Chief of the Solar Energy Society, was the Executive Director of the Geothermal Energy Association and owned the Geothermal Energy magazines and annual directory. We were immersed in all kinds of renewable energy and energy favors and environmental things that we did, but the culmination of that was the 1990s, when we launched, with some producers in Hollywood that were quite famous, they got some backers, and they created Eco Expo. We were pioneers in this area, and the Green Business Conference, which I ran. For kids, we had the Young Eco Inventors contest and Young Eco Entrepreneurs with the major corporations helping us and sponsoring us. At one point, 14,000 kids showed up with ideas of how to help the future. And, the Popular Science magazine, win a trip to Hollywood and $1,000 with your great idea. We were doing spectacular things, getting coverage everywhere in the media, and making a big difference, and we did that for a long, long time, the entire decade of the 1990s. I’m very proud of that. At one point, we were getting 50,000 people showing up, had hundreds of exhibits, and concerts and celebrities. Alan Alda, Jr., which everybody knows, he used to be my partner to give out awards for the young kids with their eco-inventions. That’s now matured to something we call Super STEM, a whole new, profound evolution of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math this country’s really hurting for, but we threw in sustainability and invention and environment and entrepreneurship and things like that, to make it holistic in a way that the planet will benefit and kids will benefit. That’s a snapshot of what we do, and then you and I have both been inducted, proudly, into the International Green Industry’s Hall of Fame, recognizing us as pioneers for what we’re doing. I’m very proud to be in your company and on your radio show. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so nice. That’s an amazing journey you’ve had, and all the great, important work that you’re doing. For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Alan Tratner. He’s the Chairman of the Environmental Education Group. To learn more about Alan’s great work and to see just one of his great websites, you can go to www.green2gold.org. Alan, can you share now, unpack the Environmental Education Group and all the great projects that you have ongoing there, and how does that create opportunities for inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs to really, then, take a step into the green economy? ALAN TRATNER: Perfect. Well, essentially, everything that we’ve done, that we’ve incorporated, we have this thing called Tech Brews, which is a mega mixer of green networking that we developed over 11 years. It’s part and parcel to the incubator. Everything is kind of like an adjunct to the central Green2Gold incubator. Even the Super STEM concept would be a feeder for youth to get involved. How do you take a great idea rattling around your noggin and take it to the world marketplace? How do you commercialize it? What are the commercial pathways? Most people don’t understand that there are multiple pathways to take a great idea to the marketplace. You yourself formed a company that has an entrepreneurial effort that is in recycling and a terrific success. How do you do that? How do you enter that? We even have now taken that to the whole thing of on planet, off planet, this whole thing of private space enterprise, greening the supply chain, the industry, making a difference, and encouraging private space enterprise for inventors, innovators, small businesses, entrepreneurs, students. That’s the California Space Enterprise Center, a $250 million that we’re building that will incorporate the Super STEM Center and have our incubator and a space enterprise campus, for green tech, renewable energy, and space enterprise. We even have something called the Evolving Mother that is a spin-off of the incubator to help mothers that want to be sustainable, green entrepreneurs and work at home or maybe out of the home, but we’re helping their children’s and family’s life. So, incredible stuff that we put together in all these years, the Inventors Workshop, the Small Business Entrepreneurship Center. Along the way, the funniest thing that happened and why we got even more attention from the media, is that if you remember, maybe your listeners won’t be that old, there was the first original Arab oil boycott, the embargo, that hit America very hard in the early seventies, with the gas lines and millions of people were lined up and couldn’t get gas, and the country was in crisis. That day that that happened, when that was put into place by OPEC, the NBC television network was trying to get somebody from the government, the Department of Energy, or it used the be the Energy Research Agency or whatever it was before the Department of Energy, or somebody from the energy industry, oil, gas, anybody, to come on the air and talk about alternatives, and they couldn’t find anybody. The producer at NBC remembered hearing me do lectures on Earth Day and Environmental Quality magazine as I traveled around the country with a slide slip that said about alternative energy resources, everything from biomass to geothermal to solar to wind to hydro power, everything that we can muster. I put together the show “Alternatives to Oil and Gas and Fossil Fuels.” So, they threw me on the air on NBC, and overnight it was a sensation. Farmers started calling us, media calling us, and Pepperdine University, the Dean called up and said, “I want to hire you and make you Professor of Environment and Energy. Create the courses.” They hadn’t even known what those courses were about environment and energy. Teach it to teachers, teach it to students, and get going. And they did. It was a pretty marvelous thing. In that, I learned how we could teach entrepreneurship and inventing in the incubator, as well as actually doing the enterprise incubation. In the resources that I was referring to earlier about having a great green idea and what you do with it, those steps include having evaluation at the beginning and looking at intellectual property, patents, copyrights, trademarks, domain names, and trade secrets, and then owning those and going to the next step of whether you want to be an entrepreneur. You have the passion and the ability and the wherewithal to do it, to form a company, raise capital. Or do you want to line up all the ducks and go after the pathway of licensing an idea and receiving a reward from royalties or user’s fees from someone else who takes the entrepreneurial risk? Or, nowadays, you can actually auction, if you own intellectual property. And then there’s these things called co-ventures that we’ve been putting together that used to be called strategic alliances. Many pathways that people can have this option, and this is what we teach and do at the incubator at Green2Gold and all the other programs that support it. It’s education, and it’s real world hands-on experience of avoiding the obstacles. I think the most important thing for your listeners to know is what is the power of this word, incubation? They’ve done a study across the United States that people that do a startup enterprise in all fields, not just green, if they, in the first to third year, if people do that on their own, and America is the most entrepreneurial country still in the world. One in ten Americans starts a small business, but as many as 90% of them fail during the first to third year from lack of capital, management, resources, what to do avoiding obstacles, all the reasons that those dreams go down the toilet. But basically, in incubation, it’s the opposite. It’s now approaching a 90% success rate, which is similar to having a franchise. We just buy it, and everything is done for you, marketing, supplying. It’s hard to fail. You know your hand is held. We do mentorship, tutoring, and counseling. One of the great things we do is virtual incubation. In fact, maybe more than two-thirds of all the people we have as members around the world, 100,000 and growing, are virtually incubated, where we’ve made people successful and never even met them. We discuss things on the phone, e-mail, and postal mail, whatever, so it’s pretty interesting. Although, traveling around the world, as I mentioned, John, I’ve been in 40 different countries, where we’re actually talking to them and establishing the Green2Gold sustainable economic engine driver as an entity for various countries. So, we’re proud of what we’re doing. We can take people right from the beginning of the idea, sketched on a piece of toilet paper or a napkin, all the way up to being a commercial success and post-success. What do you do when you want to exit? What do you do when you want to retire from the venture you’ve created or you idea? And that’s what we do in the Green2Gold incubator. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Alan, we’ve got about five minutes left. One of the things I know you do is you show people and entrepreneurs with ideas how to raise money. Show me the money. How do people raise money if they’ve got, they think, a good idea? Also, what role does government have with regards to scaling an idea and getting an idea born? ALAN TRATNER: Well, it does begin with this system. When I do lectures and workshops around the planet, I have this slide. It is this proven system that we’ve had over 42 years that we put together that kind of gets you surrounded or leapfrogging obstacles. It’s a system and a sequence of lining up intellectual property resources, technology, the advisors, all that kind of stuff. Then that’s the appealing matrix that attracts money. We have a special template that is only available to our members that have gone through this process that is the most proven template for getting equity-based money, or even going to banks or debt money or unconventional funding resources. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you give them all the tools to succeed. ALAN TRATNER: All the tools, and it’s a mechanism that, if they adhere to it and they do the business plan properly based on the presentation and the pitch, they can normally succeed with our help. There’s no guarantees in life, but it works. The funniest thing is for many years, when I was part of an angel group that got founded, very innovative entrepreneurial, and we watched the boot camps mature, where the actual investors with the money would tell you what they want to see and how to do it and how to ask them. We learned from that, and that’s part of the way we attract money to be magnetic to our great ideas. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last three minutes, Alan. What are some of your favorite ventures and inventions that have been coming out of Green2Gold the last two or three years that you can share with our listeners? ALAN TRATNER: OK. Mine or my members’? JOHN SHEGERIAN: Whatever. It’s your show. ALAN TRATNER: That’s a challenge. We have a remarkable water technology. I’ve seen everything. We have a water purification technology that, of all things, was based on gold mining, someone wanting to mine for gold but ended up mining a different kind of gold, and that was the purification of water. It’s an incredible technology in the droughts and what may be happening with climate change and environmental pollution. This is a remarkable breakthrough that could cause the purification of water virtually everywhere. Even desalinization at one-third of the cost that it is now, with no environmental degradation. It’s almost a self-powered machine once it gets going. So, one of those technologies we’re very proud of. It’s already had a prototype and it’s got investment and intellectual property. We’re moving that along. We’ve had a remarkable series of wind turbines that are highly efficient, better than anything on the planet, in their efficiencies and their economies, that we’ve been promoting and putting together in the incubator. We’ve had consumer products and baby products and pet toy products that are all green and sustainable and made out of bioplastics and materials that we’re very proud of. The transportation vehicles, electric motorcycles and scooters and new kinds of bicycles. We try to make everything sustainable from the beginning, the cradle-to-cradle concept. So, those are the kinds of remarkable things. Solar technology that is a real big step up, capturing solar energy so more and more people can use that for electricity or water heating or space heating or air conditioning. So many answers. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Alan, we’re down to the last minute. I’d love you to do a shameless plug because I want all the listeners who want to get their idea born to come to Green2Gold, shameless plug for you. Go right ahead. ALAN TRATNER: Shameless not; it’s proud. Come to Green2Gold, taking your ideas that are green and making them gold, green2gold.org. Famous nonprofit, 42 years. We’re here to help people. By the way, John, we want everyone to know that we don’t take equity. We’re a nonprofit exempt organization, so we’re not involved. We’re helping everybody with mixed tech incubation. Green2gold.org. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Green2gold.org. That’s Alan Tratner. He’s the Chairman of the Environmental Education Group. Thank you, Alan, for being a visionary and inspiring sustainability leader. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to the Global Green edition of Green is Good Radio. We’re here today with Walker Wells. He’s the Vice President of Programs and the Director of Green Urbanism at Global Green. This is the 12th annual Global Green pre-Oscar party. We’re honored to be here today, and we’re honored to have with us Walker Wells. Welcome to Green is Good, Walker. WALKER WELLS: Thank you. Happy to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Walker, this green urbanism thing, I want to understand that more. We talked a little bit before with Les McCabe about it. Can you start fleshing it out for our listeners and our viewers to explain what green urbanism means, not only here in L.A., but on a national and potentially international basis? WALKER WELLS: Sure. The idea is that we can take the beneficial qualities of the environment and environmentalism, the green part, and we can connect it to all the great things about cities, dynamism, the diversity, the creativity that happens in cities and connect them. We can actually end up with the result that is less impactful on the environment and more dynamic as a place to live and work. What this would mean is it would be looking at a city and really at neighborhoods and identify ways that we can reintroduce nature, or really natural or ecological processes, and in the process we can connect or reconnect people to nature and actually heighten or augment the human experience in cities and make our cities more beautiful, but also more dynamic by bringing in this natural ecological component. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Walker, talk a little bit about your background leading up to this position. How did you become an expert in this, and why is this such an important topic now versus other environmental topics that are ongoing right now? WALKER WELLS: In terms of how one becomes an expert, this is a field that doesn’t necessarily exist, or maybe a better way to say it is this is a field that is constantly evolving. There was no way to go study about it and then do it. You sort of invented as you go along. I think all of us are a little bit self-taught. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Since it’s such a new topic, talk a little bit about why it’s so important, though, in terms of you’re here in L.A. with Global Green’s headquarters, and how this can be the messaging center for green urbanism, not only across America, but even potentially globally speaking. WALKER WELLS: Global Green established itself in L.A. on purpose because the basic idea was let’s go someplace difficult, a place that’s not historically been associated with the environment. It’s associated with smog and sprawl and bad development. The idea was that if we can identify solutions that can work here, then they can be transferred and replicated in other places that have similar patterns of development. That would be through much of the southwest, but we also see rapidly urbanizing parts of China, India, that are following what you could say is a not responsible pattern of development, auto-based, sprawling, resource intensive. The idea was to say let’s look at how L.A. can be retrofitted, let’s demonstrate the possible here, and then the goal is to make the possible commonplace. Then you can say here’s a solution that actually is economically vital, environmentally responsible, socially engaging. Then it could actually be demonstrated to work here, then again it could be moved to other parts of the country and the world. Our strategy here is we’re working in some selected neighborhoods, often places that have suffered a lack of investment over time. We’re working with community-based development organizations, nonprofit developers, to build these hubs of sustainable activity in East L.A., in South L.A., up in parts of Hollywood, then to cultivate that and nurture that and start to create a network of this activity and expand that in the city, but then share that with our fellow travelers nationally as they’re doing related types of community development and community revitalization. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Walker, how is your message of green urbanism and bringing it to the streets, how is that being received here in the city of Los Angeles? WALKER WELLS: So far, so good. I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm about this idea of green urbanism. I think it’s exciting, because it lets you look at things from a slightly different vantage point. Instead of a vantage point of disinvestment or environmental degradation and looking for problems and maybe just trying to get back to zero, this idea of green urbanism is to look for opportunities, look for assets, and then to say how do we make things better? We don’t want to just remediate back to a benign point. We’re actually looking for benefits, again, to people and to the environment. I think it’s inspiring because you get a different frame to view cities and environmental activism from. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Walker, let’s talk a little bit about politics. We have a very activist mayor here in terms of environmental policies and his green credentials, Eric Garcetti. A lot of people are telling me now that Washington is really stuck in the mud. Nothing great is happening in Washington, and all the real action for progressive environmental policies are happening in the cities. Is this really one of the exciting parts of your opportunity and your job here at Global Green and your new push for green urbanism? WALKER WELLS: Yes, very much so. There is this narrative that things are locked up in Washington, so we need to look at cities. The real history is that innovation has always come from cities, and it’s always come from neighborhoods. Cities are inherently a place where you get people and ideas mixed up, bouncing into each other, and this is how innovation gets bred. I run into somebody, I’m an urban planner, you’re interested in media, maybe you have some other background. We go wait a minute, our two backgrounds can fit together and we can create something new. I actually feel that right now, politically, the opportunity is in cities, but I also feel like you demonstrate the possible in a city by working at the neighborhood level. I think most of us as people will say sure I’m from LA or I’m from wherever, but you really identify with your home and the neighborhood that your home operates within. What’s exciting is to try to bring this work to a point where you can get people engaged because then they can take action on their own or in their informal groups, and they don’t have to wait for government. Our city is doing phenomenal things, but we don’t have to wait for the city of L.A. to launch a program. You can get together with your neighbors and clean up the alleys, plant trees, collectively buy solar power, bring in people to provide fresh food, all of those things can happen bottom-up. I think we need the bottom-up, we need the top-down, and that’s how we can realize this idea of green urbanism. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love what you’re saying about bottom-up. We have listeners and viewers around the world on Green is Good. Walker, talk a little bit about that activism. How do we activate our listeners and viewers around the world if they want to participate and they love what you’re talking about and it resonates with them, how can our listeners and viewers get involved? WALKER WELLS: To be honest, I think probably the best way is to go out and share your ideas with your neighbors. It sounds old fashioned and folksy, but I’m not the person to say go to social media and throw it out there into the social media landscape. I’d say that you learn a few things in life, and one of the hardest things is to just know when to ask for help or know when to share an idea. I think a lot of us have phenomenal ideas about how the place we live could be better. We think about these things all the time. We go home and talk to our kids or our spouses and say I don’t know why they don’t do this. I don’t know why there’s a stop sign on that street or why that lot isn’t cleaned up. How come nobody puts this kind of land use in here? Often the question is what are you waiting for? A lot of us have some sort of social group that we’re connected to, our kids’ soccer league, a church, some other affinity group, where often people would be happy to go out and do something together on a Saturday morning. The reality is that gets the attention of the politicians because they respond to a constituency. If somebody says, “Do you know that these 25 people showed up and did that thing on Saturday, Councilmember?” The councilmember is like, “Oh my God, something is happening that I don’t know about. I better go talk to those people.” Then you have an opening. You could have a conversation about expanding, getting citywide support. I really do feel it takes some individual initiative and the action of a small group. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Get involved is your message. WALKER WELLS: Get involved, but really take initiative and take action. JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is your event tonight. It’s a wonderful event, pre-Oscars Global Green, the 20th anniversary and also launching Global Green 2.0. Last words. Anything you want to also share with our listeners and viewers around the world? WALKER WELLS: I’ll just say that we at Global Green are excited about this event, but excited about Global Green 2.0. We have 20 years under our belt of figuring out how to engage in the environment at this point in the history of environmentalism, and we’ve also had 20 years of track record of doing projects, successfully testing things out. I truly feel that we’re in this moment where we can synthesize all that and become much more effective and give a lot greater guidance and direction and inspiration across this whole spectrum, from the people in Washington, international even, down to the individual on the street. I think we can be much more pointed to say here’s a good way to expend your energy and your effort and your enthusiasm to bring together this idea of environment and city and green urbanism as we go forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We thank you for your time tonight. We wish you a great event, and we wish you continued success for Global Green 2.0 and everything you’re doing at green urbanism and as the Vice President of Programs at Global Green. WALKER WELLS: Thank you so much.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re at the pre-Oscar party at Global Green’s 12th annual pre-Oscar party. We’re here with the Executive Director of Global Green, Les McCabe. Les, tell us what’s so special about tonight’s big event. LES MCCABE: I think the important thing about tonight’s event is it’s the only one of its kind. Literally, as you can see, we’re stepping on a green carpet right now, which is symbolic of the fact that Global Green is about green urbanism, it’s about resiliency, and it’s about sending a message in what is important in this part of town, which is Hollywood, the entertainment industry, about how important the environment is. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Tonight, also, there’s going to be a focus now on Global Green 2.0. Can we talk a little bit about that? LES MCCABE: Sure. Global Green has been around 20 years since its founding by Mikhail Gorbachev and Diane Meyer Simon. They’ve done some amazing work in the U.S. and abroad in a whole variety of areas. When we realized that we wanted to plan for the next 20 years, we sat down to form a strategic plan that would focus primarily on two key areas. The first key area, John, is green urbanism, which is a pretty big umbrella. It includes anything in an urban area, and that’s really driven by the fact that, as you know, 80 percent of the population in the U.S. lives in an urban area now. Globally in 2015, it will be 80 percent. The other piece of it is resiliency and response to climate change. With 40 percent of the U.S. population living in coastal areas, and as we witnessed with Katrina and Sandy, the effects of climate change, we’re really committed to responding to that. So there’s two key areas, green urbanism and climate change and resiliency. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Les, this is your first Global Green event as the Executive Director. Share your thoughts a little bit about what you did before you joined Global Green, and now, how’s the first beginning of your tenure gone? LES MCCABE: It’s been interesting and exciting at the same time. Before I came here, I worked for an international program called Semester at Sea, and I had the chance to literally travel the globe, nine times around the world, to so many places from India to South Africa to Vietnam to China, and really be able to witness firsthand the impact of pollution and climate change in other countries abroad and really see the devastation that was caused and how that impacted the lives of people living there. But after 25 years, I was ready to make a move, a career change. My family is from the West Coast, born and raised in California. I was living back East. I got a little bit tired of the snow – talking about climate change – and was contacted about this position. The two things that appealed to me, John, was number one the word global, and number two green. So I really felt I could build upon my international experience and the environmental pieces that I learned along the way, in addition to my early education in higher ed, and make it a perfect fit. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Going back to what you talked about earlier about green urbanism, and for the next 20 years Global Green 2.0, share a little bit about L.A. and green urbanism and how that interrelation really makes a lot of sense. LES MCCABE: Absolutely. It’s the second biggest city in the United States. It’s an important place to focus our time and energy. We’re based here for a reason, and while we have offices in New Orleans and D.C. and San Francisco and New York, the opportunity to do good work in L.A., which is very progressive, has a very progressive mayor, and a citizenship that knows that if we don’t start making changes, that the lifestyle of the citizens of L.A. county becomes very challenged by traffic, by pollution, by the cost of living, a whole host of things. We’re involved in several projects in L.A. and Little Tokyo and Koreatown, in consultation with developers for housing that’s affordable, that’s green, and that can really change neighborhoods and really serve as a catalyst for change that can emanate from those projects. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. We’re right now on this beautiful green carpet, where many of your celebrities and also sponsors are going to be walking in just a couple minutes. Can you give us a little preview of tonight? Who’s going to be here tonight? Why does it make it real special, and how is this kind of messaging so important because Hollywood really does set the trends and the tastes for the rest of the world? LES MCCABE: Right. With people from Orlando Bloom to stars of television series and everyone in between, I think by coming tonight, they really send the message that while this week is about the Academy Awards and it’s an important week for Hollywood, that by being at this particular event on our green carpet, they can send the signal to not just the people watching the awards, but they can send the signal to the population around the world that being a celebrity, being in the entertainment industry, and being green is an important message to send to people, and to join them in a cause, so to speak. We have Common performing tonight, who, as you know, is an Academy Award nominee with John Legend, he’s a Grammy nominee. I think when we were approaching different people to perform, we really were looking for individuals like Common that are committed to the environment, that really want to present themselves to an event like this to signify their support of change in the environment and otherwise. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Les, I see a car about 25 feet from us, and this is a city of cars. Talk a little bit about that car and who some of your sponsors are and why it’s important, in a city of cars, that you have a car sponsor who’s going to be talking in a little bit about green cars. LES MCCABE: Absolutely. GM’s new Chevy Volt is our primary sponsor tonight. We’re really proud to have them as sponsors. They’ve been sponsors for prior years. The Volt is a great vehicle. It’s an all-electric car. You’re starting to see more and more of them on the road. This is the next generation of Volts, and the fact that GM gets behind this event as a major supporter and brings the vehicle here, I think is symbolic to the people that are walking the green carpet, the people that are attending the concert, that these vehicles exist in an affordable way, and that driving them does make a difference, not just from an economical standpoint, but also from the standpoint of leaving a small to nothing footprint, unlike regular fossil fuel vehicles. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So from celebrities to green electric cars, here in L.A. pre-Oscar, this party has it all. LES MCCABE: I think it does. This is the 12th time we’ve done this party, and we look forward to doing 12 more plus. It really does stand out, I think, amongst all the other Oscar parties this week. We’re very proud of it. We’re proud of our sponsors, we’re proud of the celebrities that support us in this, and of all the media that comes to learn more about Global Green and 2.0 in our next 20 years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Les, it’s such an honor to meet you tonight and to interview you. I wish you all the luck in your new position, and I wish you all the luck tonight to have just a smashing event. LES MCCABE: Thanks, John. It’s great talking to you, and thanks for being here tonight. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you. This is another edition of Green is Good Radio. We’re here tonight with Les McCabe, pre-Oscar party, Global Green.

OHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re here at the Global Green pre-Oscar party. It’s their 12th annual pre-Oscar party, 20th anniversary for Global Green. We’re here with Dave Barthmuss. He’s the Group Manager of Communications of General Motors, GM, the iconic brand that we all know and love around the world. Welcome to Green is Good, Dave. DAVE BARTHMUSS: Thanks very much, and welcome to the Volt lair here, with the new 2016 Volt. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We are in the Volt lair, and the Volt is right behind us here. But before we get talking about the Volt, talk a little bit about Dave Barthmuss. Talk a little bit about your history, Dave, how you got to this position, and your own interest and excitement around environmental and green topics. DAVE BARTHMUSS: It’s really been a long, strange trip. I’ve been with GM for about 20 years. I’ve spent time in Atlanta and Chicago. My job before coming to California was supporting the Chief Environmental Officer, so I learned a lot of things about doing things the right way, doing things the green way. We went to Sweden to get the World Water Prize during World Water Week. I went to the World Sustainability Summit in Johannesburg, so really learned a lot about what being green and doing the right thing from a sustainability standpoint really means. Last year, I took the plunge into solar. My wife owns a Volt, and what we do is we power that baby up with the sun, and we do everything that we can to be as independent as possible. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re based here in California. DAVE BARTHMUSS: I am. One of my first assignments in California was to help explain why we ended production and marketing of the EV1 when they first moved me out here, so that was a tough job. Nobody is happier about having this 2016 Volt here behind me than I am today. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Los Angeles, the City of Angels, is known to also be a city of cars. Let’s talk a little bit about why it’s so important for you to be involved with Global Green and messaging this beautiful 2016 Volt at this unbelievable event with all these celebrities and other people here tonight. DAVE BARTHMUSS: When you think about the environment, when you think about green, when you think about excitement in Los Angeles, it’s Academy Awards, it’s Global Green, it’s sustainability, and it’s electric cars. So combining all of those things together in one place is the perfect place for us to be. It started here six years ago with a prototype Chevrolet Volt. Every year we’ve had some different sort of plug-in story. We had our Cadillac ELR here last year. We brought the Spark EV out before that. Here we are with number four in our plug-in lineup for Chevrolet and Cadillac, the 2016 Chevy Volt. It’s the perfect place for us to be because if we want to really make it in the automotive industry, California is the place to do it. It’s the nation’s largest car market. It’s a trendsetter. What happens here usually travels east, so if you can’t get it right in California, it probably isn’t going to work. That’s really the lesson that we have learned going all the way back to the mid-90s with the EV1 and the importance of having a car that is great looking, performs well, and is very efficient. That’s what the Volt is all about. JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is just a beautiful car. Can you share with our viewers and listeners around the world all the great particulars on why this electric car is a car that everyone can enjoy driving in? DAVE BARTHMUSS: You start off by driving electrically. There isn’t anything better than driving an electric car because of the instant torque. You step on that accelerator, it’s in torque, you throw your head back, and you are gone. People don’t realize that about an electric car. They think it’s got to be this little small golf cart, but nothing could be further from the truth. What the Volt does is combine that great battery technology with a range extender. If you have a 50-mile daily commute, you could all be on battery and not have to visit a gas station. You can plug this into a household outlet in your garage, charge overnight, or if you have a 240-volt charger, you could charge even less than that. This completely doesn’t have any range anxiety with it, so you don’t have to worry about going from point A to point B running out of juice because that range extender kicks in when the battery runs out. It runs a flywheel, creates more electricity and you go for hundreds of miles. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So no range anxiety. That was the problem years ago with the beginning of electric cars, but this has now overcome that. DAVE BARTHMUSS: It really has. When I drove my EV1, I would go maybe 40-50 miles because I didn’t want to get stranded. But this has that backup generator. It basically creates electricity onboard. It uses gasoline, but it uses it to create electricity. We go 10,000 miles a year on our Volt. My wife has had it for a year-and-a-half. We haven’t cracked our third tank of gas yet. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Three tanks of gas in 10,000 miles. That’s just incredible. Is this 2016 model already available to our viewers and listeners yet? When will it become available? DAVE BARTHMUSS: It will be available later this summer at Chevy showrooms, so stay tuned. There will be plenty available for sure. JOHN SHEGERIAN: GM has been a frequent guest on Green is Good. GM is focused so much on being environmentally on the right side of things and also doing things the right way, not only just in the cars you’ve built, but in the factories that you manufacture these cars in, how your DNA and culture is green. Can you share a little bit more about all the green things going on at GM right now? Just give our listeners just a little taste. DAVE BARTHMUSS: You can’t just build a car and not worry about how you build it, so we really have focused on our manufacturing facilities to make sure that they use less energy, they put out zero waste. We have dozens of manufacturing facilities that are zero-waste landfill facilities. When you take a trashcan out to your curb tomorrow, you’ve already put out more trash than some of our plants do in an entire year. It’s a very long story, going all the way back to the sixties. It makes good business sense. If you reduce energy use, if you reduce waste, that’s more money into your bottom line. Being green is not just about being a good corporate citizen; it really helps the bottom line from a profitability standpoint. In today’s competitive world, you have to watch every dollar, every dime, and saving on those energy costs is very, very important for us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Dave, the fallacy that existed 7-8 years ago, that being green was more expensive than not, you’re really saying at GM, you guys have made it not only part of your culture and your DNA, but you’ve proven again that being green can actually save money and make the company more money. DAVE BARTHMUSS: That’s exactly right. We wouldn’t be doing these things if it didn’t help our bottom line. We went through a reorganization a couple of years ago. We can’t afford to do that again. It’s just common sense. If you are using less energy to produce a product, you’re going to make more profit on that product. That’s the bottom line for us. It combines being a good corporate citizen with also improving the bottom line. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Tell me a little bit about tonight. Tonight is the 20th anniversary of Global Green, 12th pre-Oscar party. You’ve got this gorgeous car that’s coming out, this 2016 Volt that’s coming out at the end of the summer. Why tonight are you the lead sponsor and is this so important to your ongoing involvement with Global Green? What does this mean for the future of GM? DAVE BARTHMUSS: Global Green really sets the standard within Hollywood when it comes to thinking about environmental issues. It used to be that stars were arriving at these Oscar parties in vehicles other than ours. It’s great now that we have assumed the place on the green carpet, and you see celebrities arriving at places like this in their Chevy Volt, or like last year in a Cadillac ELR or a Spark EV. We’ve also announced the fact that we’re going to build a new all-electric vehicle based on the Chevy Bolt concept. It will be priced at about $30,000 and have at least a 200-mile range. That could be the vehicle we’re going to be showing off at the next Global Green pre-Oscar party. I don’t know. But it’s very important for us to have a place here, to have a role here, be seen as good partners, because Global Green’s advocacy for electric vehicle technology has really helped us become the number one selling plug-in in the country and certainly here in California. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s good business to be here and it’s great messaging to do this together in tandem. You foresee that staying for future events just like you’ve done previous events with Global Green. DAVE BARTHMUSS: As long as we have cars with plugs in them or run on things other than gasoline or we’re doing something to help improve communities or to clean emissions in the air, Global Green is the right partner with us to be associated with, for sure. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Dave, I’ll give you the last word. Again, thank you for being such a great loyal sponsor, but the last word is yours. DAVE BARTHMUSS: The only word I would have is I would encourage folks to go out to a Chevrolet dealership, take a test drive in a Chevy Volt. If that’s not the car for you, maybe that Spark EV is the car for you. If that’s not the car for you, maybe a Chevy Cruze is the car for you. If you want a Cadillac car that does the same thing, we’ve got an ELR. Stay tuned. We’ve got four vehicles with plugs in them. We’ve got technologies that will meet every kind of need. We’re very, very happy to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Dave Barthmuss, thank you for being with us. GM, again, on Green is Good Radio. If you want any type of electric vehicle, as Dave said, they’ve got something for you. This gorgeous 2016 is coming soon to a Chevy dealership near you later this summer.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. Today we’re so excited to have with us Todd Larsen. He’s the Corporate Responsibility Division Director of Green America. Welcome to Green is Good, Todd Larsen. TODD LARSEN: Hey, thank you for having me as a guest. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Todd, before we get talking about all the great, important work you’re doing at Green America, I’d love you to share a little bit about your journey prior to getting this great position at Green America. TODD LARSEN: Sure, I’d be happy to. I’ve done a lot of different things in my life. Before I was working at Green America, I actually got a master’s degree in political science, which has helped me through all of my jobs. But then after that, I actually worked in the domestic violence field for several years, doing fundraising and media and helping to run organizations that work to end domestic violence. And then after that, I actually worked for a Ralph Nader organization, where I documented the ways that large corporations rip off consumers, and how consumers can fight back. We did a lot of media around that, around credit card abuses, utility billing abuses, medical billing abuses, all kinds of things to raise public awareness about that and how people fight back. And then after that, I was looking for something where I thought I could really help build a green economy in the United States, help businesses that are green, help consumers go green, and I found Green America, which is this amazing organization. At the time, it was called Co-Op America. They were doing exactly what I wanted to do in life, which was to do really positive things around building a green economy, while also encouraging large corporations to be more responsible at the same time. So, I’ve been with Green America now for 15 years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. How long have you been in this position as Corporate Responsibility Division Director? TODD LARSEN: About seven years. Before that, I was a Managing Director. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Good for you. For our listeners who want to follow along and learn more about Todd’s great organization, Green America, go to greenamerica.org. It’s full of great information. You can become part of the network. You can become a member. It’s just a wonderful and great organization. Todd, can you share a little bit about the mission of Green America, and how it operates before we get talking about some specific other issues around greening this whole great world that we live in? TODD LARSEN: Sure. The mission of Green America is to create a green economy. For us, that means one that’s both socially responsible and environmentally sustainable. So, it’s always the two things twined together. I think what’s unique about Green America is that we work with consumers, businesses, and investors, so really everybody who’s putting money into the marketplace. We’re trying to work with them to make their money greener, to make their investments more sustainable, change the way they’re doing their purchases, change the way businesses run their companies. It’s the full range of activities across the economy that we’re involved in. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just great. I’m on your beautiful website now, and there’s so much information here. It is truly remarkable all the work that you’re doing. We love being solution-based on this show. We love when great guests like you frame problems, and then also offer solutions, but then also offer solutions for our listeners on how to become part of the solution and how to take action. With that, Todd, in all your experience there, 15 years and the visibility that you have on where the green revolution and the sustainability revolution is going, can you share some of the higher impact actions consumers can take to improve environmental sustainability and social justice and what’s going out there right now? TODD LARSEN: I think one of the easiest things that any consumer can do is to change the foods that we eat. Obviously, we have to buy groceries on a regular basis or go out to eat on a regular basis, and every day you have the opportunity to shift the way that you’re purchasing food in a way that actually benefits the planet and benefits you at the same time. For example, Americans tend to eat a lot of meat. We’re one of the highest meat-based diets in the world. What happens is if you eat a ton of meat, as many Americans do, you’re actually creating a lot of climate change. I think most people don’t realize that a meat-based diet is kind of equivalent to driving an SUV. If you switched from mostly eating meat to mostly eating things made of vegetables, you’re actually going from driving an SUV down to driving a Prius as a car. It’s about the equivalent shift. Obviously, it’s a lot easier to move your diet than it is to sell your care and buy another car. So, it’s something that anyone can do. You don’t have to completely change your diet; you just have to start shifting your diet a little bit more in the direction of vegetables and lower impact foods. At the same time, you’re going to be helping your health because a vegetable-based diet is actually the healthiest diet for people to eat. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. I’m a vegan, so I get a pass on that one. At least I’m not driving an SUV today. I like that. That’s great. I’m on your website, and I’m not going to give out any brands or anything, but you do a great job of advocating change at big companies, companies that are still using GMOs, companies that should be using more organic products. Can you share a little bit about your thoughts on greenwashing, and what should consumers be on the lookout for when it comes to big company greenwashing? TODD LARSEN: Well, a lot of times you go to the supermarket, and all over the package, you’ll see that this product is natural. The word natural means absolutely nothing. It has no legal meaning, really, whatsoever. There have been some lawsuits against companies who really abuse the world natural when they’re talking about chemicals and GMOs in their products. It just doesn’t mean much. You can sneak all kinds of things in to a product, even though it has the word natural on the box. So, people should look at the actual ingredients of a product and see are these wholesome ingredients that I recognize before they buy a product and actually consume it. Also, there are a number of certifications out there that are all over products, and some of them don’t mean anything. For example, in the paper products industry, there’s an industry-sponsored certificated called SFI. When you see that on a package, you might think, “Oh, wow, this has been certified.” But really, SFI is not that meaningful. It doesn’t really protect forests. The certification you want to look for as you’re buying paper stuff is FSC, which is a nonprofit certification that’s pretty rigorous. You sometimes see things like eco and green. In packaging, you’ll see companies marketing themselves as either eco or green. Again, those words don’t really mean much. A lot of times you’ll see companies in the dirtiest of industries trying to portray themselves as clean. You’ll see all kinds of things about clean coal out there, or how natural gas is the clean fuel. Really, these things aren’t clean, obviously. They’re fossil fuels. They’re actually dirty, and it’s really misleading people into thinking that we can have fossil fuels and a clean environment at the same time, when the only way to really clean up the environment and energy is to move to renewables. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, in other words, clean coal is a huge oxymoron, and natural does not mean organic or non-GMO. People should not read “natural” and think that this is good for them. TODD LARSEN: Yeah, you’ve got to look for the USDA Organic label, and for non-GMO, you have to look for a third party certified non-GMO label, such as the non-GMO products certification that you can see on packaging now. Those are the only ways you can make sure that you’re not eating GMOs and that you’re getting organics. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Talk about what home consumers, our listeners, everyone lives somewhere, whether it’s an apartment, a condo, their own home. What changes can our listeners, wherever they are in the United States or around the world, can they do to save energy and cut costs? TODD LARSEN: No matter where you live, there are certain things that people don’t realize how much energy they’re using. For example, a lot of apartments that I’ve lived in are very leaky. The landlord hasn’t really sealed around the windows and doors. You can ask the landlord to do that, of course, but even if they don’t do it, caulk is a relatively inexpensive solution to that. You’d be surprised how much more comfortable your dwelling is going to be, as well as you’re going to save money on your energy bills. Washing your clothes. If you do them in cold water and then air-dry them, you actually save a fair amount of money, and it’s obviously much, much better for the environment. And then your thermostat, too. No matter where you live, you can in the summer put your thermostat at a higher temperature, particularly when you’re not going to be in your home. In the winter, you can put it down a little bit lower, particularly at night when you’re sleeping, you can put it into the low 60s. You’ll save a lot of money, and you’ll also be helping the planet that way too. So, there are different things that people can do no matter where they live. Also people around the country, increasingly as you’re paying for your electricity, you have the choice of buying from an energy provider that’s 100% renewable. There are several of them out there, and that makes a big difference because you’re really helping to support the construction of things like wind farms and solar, and not supporting coal, natural gas, and nuclear. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who just joined, we’ve got Todd Larsen on with us today. He’s the Corporate Responsibility Division Director for Green America. To learn more about the great work that Green America is doing or donate or become a member, go to www.greenamerica.org. Todd, let’s go back and talk about Green America for a little bit. Let’s talk about your work in terms of certifications, the publications you put out, and how people can become a member of just get involved. Can you share with our listeners out there that want to get more involved with Green America how to get either certified or how to become a member or other ways to engage with Green America? TODD LARSEN: We do have two different kinds of members of Green America. One are our business members, and we have over 3,000 of those. Those business members actually go through a certification process with Green America to make sure that they’re truly green businesses. Those truly green businesses, then, we promote to the public through our National Green Pages, our Green Pages online. So, businesses that really have a green mission and are doing everything they can to be socially and environmentally responsible can join Green America that way. Individuals can take part with us, too. We have over 190,000 individuals across the country who are active with Green America. People can become members and they’re supporting our work and they’re also receiving our publications and learning more information from us about how to be active in the green economy. Then we have a number of people who are e-activists with us as well, and a lot of them take our petitions that go to companies to encourage them to be more responsible and get more information from us as well. Those petitions really make a big difference. I think people wonder, “Does it help for me to click onto some petition that goes to a company or to Congress?” And the answer is actually yes. In the last day, we sent 23,000 petitions to the Apple Corporation, encouraging them to remove toxins from the supply chain and protect workers who are being exposed to chemicals like benzene and X-10 hexane. Just yesterday, Apple agreed to ban those chemicals in the final assembly of their products and to really limit exposures down the supply chain. They need to do more. There are more chemicals that are out there in the manufacturing process, and they need to make sure that they’re rigorously tracking those and reducing exposure to those, and substituting safe chemicals for harmful chemicals whenever possible. But this is an important first step for Apple, and it’s really because so many people wrote to the company and said, “I’m really concerned about this.” JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, your petition process really does work, and people’s vote and people’s engagement with your organization really does create and effectuate major change, like this major development. TODD LARSEN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve seen it over and over again. We’ve gotten magazines, like National Geographic, to commit to printing on recycled paper when they weren’t doing so, we’ve seen giant utilities agree not to build coal-fired power plants because of public concern about that, we’ve seen companies like General Mills removing GMOs from products like Cheerios. It’s really because of all the people who join with us and use their voice with those companies, whether they’re taking our petition, going onto a company’s Facebook page and commenting there, calling the company. People do a variety of things with us, all of which are very effective and very helpful. So, people really should feel like, “Yeah, my voice does matter.” JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great. You said Apple could do more, but we could all do more, so that’s a major leap for them to take that first step, and that’s going to probably create major great waves in the manufacturing industry of electronics. TODD LARSEN: I think so. There is a lot of pressure, as you probably know, on Samsung as well, and there’s been a lot of exposure about the fact that they’ve been using chemicals in their factory that are causing severe diseases in factory workers, both in Korea and China. Also recently, it was disclosed that they were using child labor in one of their supplier factories. So, Samsung has a lot of issues as well, and so do all the other electronics manufacturers, many of whom do a significant amount of work in China. With Apple making this move and Apple being such a leader in the industry, it really does put pressure on the other companies to also make moves in this direction. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Apple, again, is proving they’re a leader, and it’s hopefully going to effectuate positive change throughout the supply chain of all the OEMs around the world. We applaud Apple’s great step in the right direction. Good for them, and good for you and all the great work you’re doing at Green America and the people who worked with you on that petition. We’ve got about five minutes, Todd. How can people use their investments to create a better, greener world? TODD LARSEN: Sure. There are a lot of things you can do with your investments, and a lot of people don’t realize. A lot of people buy green products, they buy organic, they buy nontoxic things, but then with their investments, they just put their money in whatever bank or whatever mutual fund, and they don’t realize that those investments are essentially your money voice acting in the world as well. If you have your money with a large bank, like a megabank, those are the institutions, obviously, that nearly tanked the U.S. economy, and we had to bail them all out. But in addition to that, they’re also the institutions that use their dollars to lobby for legislation that’s anti-consumer or to prevent any kind of regulation of their institutions that they don’t want to see, which is not in our interest as consumers. So, you can definitely make a lot of noise with your dollars as well, and you can have a voice there by moving your money out of the megabanks and putting it into local community development financial institutions. Those are the banks and credit unions in your community that invest into your local community. They support local businesses, create jobs, they lend to homeowners in a responsible way to help them own a home rather than put them into risky mortgages. They’re the kind of institutions you should support with your money, and they’re all over the country. We have a project called Break Up With Your Megabank. The website is breakupwithyourmegabank.org. It has a ton of information about how you can move your money from megabanks into those smaller banks and credit unions that are doing the right thing. Also, you can move your investments out of fossil fuels. We’re part of a coalition of organizations that are encouraging people to divest from fossil fuels, and our role is really to help individuals move their money. There’s a growing number of mutual funds, exchange traded funds, brokers, advisors, others, all kinds of professionals out there that can help you take the fossil fuels out of your investment portfolio. It’s getting easier for consumers to do that as well, and we really encourage people to do that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s interesting. In terms of the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, how can people find the greenest products and services, and what Good Housekeeping seal of approval should they look for with regards to green products and services? TODD LARSEN: Well, Green America has the Green Pages. We’ve carefully screened all those businesses. Also, there are companies, increasingly, who are registered in states as B-Corps. This means they’re a benefit corporation, so they have a mission as part of their charter to actually create social benefit in the world. That is a great thing because those companies are saying that this is built into the DNA of the company. Even if we get acquired, this has to stay as part of the company. So, one of the things that’s happened is that a lot of successful green businesses as they grow, they get bought up. Then they lose their social mission somewhat, or there’s a risk that they’ll lose their social mission, or they try to attract more capital to grow, and that dilutes their social mission. The whole idea of a B-Corp is, obviously, that that won’t happen, that these companies are going to remain socially committed corporations. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Last question. We have about a minute-and-a-half left. Talk about renewables, Todd. What is the future of renewables in this country? You’ve mentioned fossil fuels, and we’ve got to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels as soon as we can. Do the renewables have a great future in terms of being alternative energy sources in this country? TODD LARSEN: Absolutely. I think most people don’t realize how fast renewables already are growing in the United States. We’re seeing tremendous growth of solar, for example. Solar is on track to be probably the major source of electric energy in this country within the next 20-30 years. Also, we’re seeing tremendous growth in wind, energy efficiency measures are exploding across the country as well, so we’re on a positive pathway. But there are still risks to solar, wind, and energy efficiency that we need to address. For one thing, Congress has not been authorizing the extension of tax credits and incentives that have helped fuel that tremendous growth, and those are in danger of not being renewed. So, Green America itself, actually, has legislation called Clean Energy Victory bonds that people can support, and that would be treasury bonds where all the money goes to support incentive programs for clean energy and energy efficiency in the United States. That would really drive the market even faster in the U.S. And then the other thing that people have to look out for is states that have renewable portfolio standards, which have driven the increase of renewables in those states, those are under attack across the country. People are fighting back locally. It’s exciting to see people defending their renewable portfolio standards, looking for a clean energy future in their state, but those are under assault by the fossil fuel industry as well. So, we need to be vigilant. We need to protect the growing clean energy industry, and I think it will develop into our major energy source in the next 20 years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect. Todd, thank you for being our great guest today. To learn more about Green America or become a member or get certified or just donate to their great organization, go to www.greenamerica.org. Todd, thank you for helping our listeners green their lives and our world. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and today we’ve got my good friend and long-time friend, Debbie Levin. She’s the President of the Environmental Media Association. Welcome back to Green is Good, Debbie. DEBBIE LEVIN: Thank you, John. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Debbie, you are not only my long-time friend, but even better than that, you’re my very good friend. When we started this little show on one station in Fresno, California, and no one wanted to come on, I called you one day and before I even got the whole pitch out, you said, “Done. Put me on whenever you want.” You came on, and you helped launch the whole show. Here we are now years later, and you’re back on the show, but we even have a little bit of a fun announcement towards the end of the show today, how we’re going to be teaming up together and co-hosting a special Hollywood EMA version of Green is Good at the end of March. We’re going to talk about that later, but thank you for helping me launch the show, and thank you for always being such a great friend and being such a great partner with EMA. You’re just the best. DEBBIE LEVIN: You are the best as well. It’s been so amazing to be able to be on this journey with you and your incredible company. You are a corporate board member, so we can’t forget about that, that John sits on our EMA corporate board. Just being part of the growth and the awareness of the green movement together has been so exciting to do this with you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s been a journey. I’ll tell you that. It’s been the fastest 10 years of my life, our friendship and what we’ve seen together and what we’ve done together. I want to talk about some of the more important things, but before we even get into EMA and the journey on EMA together with my company, with what you’re doing with EMA, and just the brilliant work you’ve done and how you’ve evolved that organization, talk a little bit about Debbie Levin and the Debbie Levin story and how you even got involved. It’s such a great story, how you got involved with EMA and you being brought in and how you’ve grown it since your beginnings at EMA. DEBBIE LEVIN: It’s a weird story, because this is not how people normally come in and run a company. It’s a good time, too, because I’ve been running the organization for 15 years now. I’m a mom. I’m a grandmother now, which is crazy, but I was a mom and I had done some work in the entertainment industry and TV development, which is nothing like non-profit development. TV development means you read scripts. Non-profit development means you raise money, really a different business. I was like a TV person, kind of, but mostly I was a mom to two children. I was invited to a luncheon, which was the 9th annual Environmental Media Awards. To put it into perspective, we’re going to be celebrating our 25th annual Environmental Media Awards this year. It was the 9th annual Environmental Media Awards, and it was a little luncheon at the Beverly Hilton hotel during the day. It was OK, a couple hundred people there. I was a guest. I knew nothing about the organization, and to be really honest, I knew nothing about the environment. I sat there and I started listening to the mission, and then I found out that Norman Lear, who was a pioneer of television and incredible shows like All in the Family and Maud and Good Times and all these amazing shows that I watched as a kid, where he brought social messaging into comedy for the first time – I found out that Norman had founded the organization, and I thought this is like the most important person in the entertainment industry. Why aren’t there 9 million people here? Why isn’t this a huge organization? This is the most important message I’ve ever heard in my life. Somehow if it was a cartoon, a lightning bolt would have struck me or something. I started asking literally a million questions to the person sitting next to me, who I had no idea was the board chair. Why aren’t you guys doing this, and why aren’t you guys doing that? This guy looked at me and he said, “Hey, can you go to lunch with me tomorrow?” I’m like, “OK.” Literally, he asked me to come and run the organization. I had no idea what I was doing. I walked into an office and, honestly, no one was there. There was no assistant, and what he neglected to tell me was that they had this amazing organization with an incredible board, and there comes a time sometimes when no one’s really running something and they don’t know what to do. That was the time. They didn’t care. Here’s this curious person. Let her run it. What happened was I kind of had a few months or so to have the 10th Annual Environmental Media Awards, and it was either going to work or not. I honestly have no idea, but I figured it out. We had our 10th Annual Awards at the end of the year, and we honored Pierce Brosnan, who was 007 at that time. Honestly, I have no idea how I did it. It kind of worked and I kind of figured it out, and it was kind of amazing. I think the main thing was that I recognized that if this movement was going to work, we needed to reach the young demographic, and it needed to be young and cool and resonate with the business community and reach pop culture. Our message was always our mission, was always to be the role model for environmental and sustainable lifestyle, and that’s what we had to do. It was really life changing for me because I was able to be a great role model for my kids, first and foremost, and do something that I loved and that I still love. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Sometimes when you overthink something, it just never turns out, but when you act on your gut and you act on your heart, look at how this thing has turned out. Talk a little bit about how you’ve grown EMA in all these years, from those humble beginnings and that immediate “yes” at the next day lunch to where it is today. Share a little bit about that journey, Debbie, because I’ve seen the last 10 years of it, and I’m blown away about who you’re involved with and how you’ve become a force yourself in Hollywood, in terms of sustainability and thought leadership. Share a little bit of how you’ve grown it since those humble beginnings. DEBBIE LEVIN: What we did have with the organization was amazing founding families, and I ran with that. Our founders were Cindy and Alan Horn. Alan runs Disney, and he ran Warner Brothers for 13 years and now he runs Disney. Norman Lear is amazing and so his wife. We built the board so that we have the head of every studio, network, so I’m a phone call away from everybody. I then thought, what we really need is we really need the young actors. So I created a Young Hollywood board because I felt that was really important. We started to build boards with all of the young talent, so that they would feel engaged and started working with them on PSAs and different programs. They get really excited about that. We also started a parent board more recently because everybody keeps having babies. We thought, OK, we’ll move them over to a parent board and start having salons and their other missions. The other thing that we did that I think was really important is our corporate relationships are really, really important. I was fortunate enough to meet Toyota early on, and I met Toyota at the very, very beginning of 2001, when they were ready to launch the Prius. We formed a relationship, and we actually are celebrating our 15th anniversary together. We launched the Prius with Toyota. We got all the celebrities to buy Priuses. We worked with the paparazzi to take pictures of them in their cars. We got the talent to arrive at award shows in them, and we really tried to make the car sexy and the go-to vehicle to be in and really shifted the way people thought about hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles. Because of that relationship, we were written up in tons of business magazines. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I want to pause you right there because I’m going to speak from two places, A) a personal experience for our listeners to hear. A) You were the one that convinced me to also get involved with Toyota, so we bought all Camry hybrids back in 2007 on your suggestion for all of our salespeople. We said, “Go drive up and down California’s roads, and go land business.” Those hybrids are still on the road in 2015, all with over 250,000 miles. That’s thanks to you. I also remember, and I have the quote here in front of me, when Fortune magazine called EMA “a secret weapon for Toyota Lexus,” and they gave credit to EMA and to you as singlehandedly responsible for getting the droves of celebrities into Toyota hybrids. That’s a quote about you and EMA. DEBBIE LEVIN: It’s been pretty great. I have to say, I have such a huge respect for what the business world and what corporations like yourself and like Electronic Recyclers can do, and Toyota and all the different companies. I believe that the power is with consumers in changing the way the environment looks. People make choices every day. People buy stuff every day, and that’s the power that we have. Legislation is amazing, but it takes a long time. People make these decisions with their choices in what they purchase. We’ve been really strong advocates for supporting corporations that have sustainability in their corporate structure, in not only their corporate culture, but in their products as well and what they do. By aligning ourselves with them, I think that we can literally change the world. That’s with the way social media is at this point. We use our celebrities to tweet and to use all their different ways of communication to support those corporations. We actually started a corporate advisory board, which you sit on, to keep all of our corporate relationships on a cohesive board and engaged with EMA and part of our community. That’s another thing that I started about seven years ago because what we want to do is we want to keep all of our relationships as something that we really, really respect and cherish at EMA. Whether it is our young celebrities or our corporate executives, everybody is part of that same incredibly passionate EMA community. Everybody has a really, really strong voice in what we do and who we are, and everybody works together. I think the combination of all of that makes us so unique. Again, it was not something that I think that I had a business plan for; it all came very naturally because this is what we were doing. It all made so much sense, and it all shifted people’s lifestyle. It’s just kind of like when we get our celebrities, they get really excited, they become more engaged, and then they bring their friends in. So many of our celebrity board members are friends of friends of friends. They change their entire lifestyle. They start eating organically, they start buying different kinds of food, their whole way of life has been informed by their involvement with our organization. Because of that, they bring in their relationships and they tend to only buy from our sponsors’ products. It’s amazing. We have an incredible organic mattress company, Naturepedic, who’s one of our sponsors. Everyone has a Naturepedic bed, and they’re amazing. It’s incredible. Or earth-friendly cleaning products, everybody is using earth-friendly cleaning products because we just talk about it and they want to try these things because we have vetted it. They trust us. It’s kind of like this amazing club to belong to. Another thing that we’ve done, and this happened in 2003, is that we started the EMA green seal. We’re founded by messaging and the idea was to put environmental messaging into content, but what we weren’t doing was paying attention to the actual physical production. That’s something that you and I have been working on for a long time, in terms of e-waste. What happened was I actually went to the set of one of Hollywood’s greenest celebrities to visit and to actually bring them stuff for on-camera, like recycling bins and canvas bags and stuff for an on-camera set. I’m looking around, and I’m realizing that nothing is even being recycled on their set backstage. I’m thinking, these people would die in their own homes if this is what was going on. I’m looking at a trash can with a script and a banana peel and water bottles, and no one’s even noticing this. So I go home and I called Ed Begley and I called Daryl Hannah and I called all my friends and our board members, and I’m like, “OK, guys, this is the most embarrassing thing ever, and we need to do something about this. We have to create something that’s going to take care of the sets.” So we all got together. We had, I think, a network head and some producers and a whole little committee. This was in 2003, and we came up with 10 easy things that the studio wouldn’t yell at us about, that wouldn’t cost them money, that would make a set greener. It’s now turned into the EMA green seal, and there are sustainability departments at every studio and criteria that they’re given before they go into production. There’s 150 points that people have to make in order to get it, and we’ve given away over 500 EMA green seals to this day. We’ve also greened the Grammys and the Emmys and the SAG Awards, and all that happened because of an embarrassing set. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, we’ve got Debbie Levin on with us. She’s the President of the Environmental Media Association. You can learn more about all the great things they’re doing at the Environmental Media Association at www.ema-online.org. Debbie, we have a lot of things to talk about. We have a few minutes left here. Talk about a few of your most exciting initiatives for 2015 coming up, and then let’s talk about Hollywood taping coming up at the end of this March and what we’re going to be doing there. EMA and Green is Good get together to do a little Hollywood sit-down together, you and me both co-hosting Green is Good. DEBBIE LEVIN: That is the most exciting thing that’s happening. I’m really excited about it, because my friends are going to sit and we’re all going to hang out, and we’re going to talk about what we do. This is our 25th anniversary of the EMA awards, so that’s going to happen in October-November of this year. That’s going to be really big. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I also want to mention, you’ve talked about transformative brands and how you brought Toyota in. I also wanted to mention the great brand that you brought in as another transformative brand, Tiffany is one of your supporters. DEBBIE LEVIN: Yes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Do you want to share a little bit about them? DEBBIE LEVIN: They’ve been with us for over 15 years as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And they’ve been really helpful to you, right? DEBBIE LEVIN: They’ve been really helpful. First of all, they do all of our gorgeous, gorgeous awards that we have for the EMA awards. They’re Tiffany awards, which is kind of amazing. All of their diamonds are no conflict, and they have an incredible sustainability mandate on a corporate level that I think that people don’t really realize. We were able to give them a corporate responsibility award five years ago, and that was great for us because people don’t know this about them. They just think they’re Tiffany; it’s like the little blue box. It’s amazing. But they also do incredible environmental work. It’s really been wonderful for us to be able to share that with everybody. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So what are we doing together? Talk a little bit about Green is Good and EMA have partnered up to go Hollywood together. You and I are co-hosting a show. We’re going to have four shows we’re going to be taping with 12 guests. Talk a little bit about that before we sign off today. DEBBIE LEVIN: I think we’re going to bring in some of my celebrity friends who have so much to talk about. All of our celebrity board members are so authentic and so passionate and so smart. They’re really excited about coming on and sharing what they really care about with you and with us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s going to be great. I’m so honored we’re going to be co-hosting together. You and I are going to be co-hosting Green is Good goes EMA, goes Hollywood together at the end of March. Those shows will air and also be heard on Clear Channel and also online. We’re going to be videoing those shows, so you and I will be here together some time in April with all those four shows. It’s going to be so exciting, Debbie. Again, Debbie Levin, she’s the President of the Environmental Media Association. She’s coming on to co-host Green is Good with me. Check out more of the Environmental Media Association’s great work at www.ema-online.org. Thank you, Debbie Levin, for being an inspirational thought leader in Hollywood in sustainability. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and I’m so honored and excited to have Larsen Jay on with us today. He’s the founder and CEO of Random Acts of Flowers. Welcome to Green is Good, Larsen. LARSEN JAY: Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here. I appreciate the opportunity. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Larsen, I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time. I heard an interview with you a while back, and I was just so inspired and so moved by your story. Before we get talking about Random Acts of Flowers, which is such a great organization, and for our listeners out there, check out more of Larsen’s great work at randomactsofflowers.org. Larsen, please tell a little bit of your story first of how you took some personal hardships and made it into this amazing mission and journey that you’re on now. LARSEN JAY: Absolutely. The year was 2007, and ironically, this was a year where I went up in British Columbia skiing, I went to the Everest base camp hiking, and went to all these places where you should get broken and battered or come back with some sort of injury. I was a film and television producer for 15+ years, and came back just fine. For some reason, on an early Sunday morning, July 29, 2007, I was doing a do-it-yourself project and fixing a roof on a workshop that I owned, up and down the ladder, and tools, and tarps, and just kind of doing my thing. For some reason, on the 14th or 15th time down the ladder, I stepped on the top and the bottom collapsed out from underneath me, and I fell about a story-and-a-half face down on the concrete and ended up in a really, really bad spot, to the point where I probably shouldn’t be here with you today. I fell about a story-and-a-half and broke my left arm, left wrist, right wrist, right elbow, right femur, nose, 10 skull fractures, and pretty much the only reason I’m here is I hit the ladder and not the concrete, otherwise it would have been a whole lot worse. Two seconds and a really freak accident changed everything. I was rushed to the University of Tennessee level 1 medical trauma center and right into surgery. Two days in the ICU, 10 days on the trauma floor, 10 days in intensive rehab, and about three-and-a-half months in a wheelchair, followed by 11 surgeries to date and counting. It really put me back together, very much parts and pieces and pins and rods and screws. I’m alive, I’m upright, and it’s a good start. That’s where it all began. That was summer of 2007. When I was in the hospital, the idea sort of spawned from the fact that when I was there during my early days of recovery and what was the hardest week of my life, I got overwhelmed with support from people, locally, regionally, nationally, even internationally, as word spread about the accident. That support came in the way of flowers. I had never been given flowers before. Most guys are never given flowers or sent flowers. It just made a big impact on me. It changed the environment of the room. It took what was a bleak and dark and pretty sterile environment, and turned it into a lush, green, joy of jungle and happiness and celebration of life, and really shifted my mental state from woe is me and how is this going to change my life to recovery and looking forward. It was a huge outpouring of support that really came in and helped me in those first crucial days. By the end of the first week, I got a little stir crazy. I don’t sit for a real long time very well, and I had to convince my family and the nurses to get me into a wheelchair and get me out of my room. After that took quite a while, we went outside my room and we left what was this amazing room of happiness and flowers and brightness, and we entered stark, sterile, industrial hospitalization, which is what you find everywhere. We saw room after room after room, how many rooms had no plants, no flowers, no visitors – just lifeless. It was such a huge contrast that, quite simply, it sparked an idea and I said, “Let’s go back and take all the cards off my flowers.” We loaded up my wheelchair. We didn’t ask permission. We didn’t see if it was OK. We didn’t follow protocol. We just did it. It was the right thing to do, and room after room, it made a huge, profound effect on people that were unknowingly going to get this little visitor that rolled in with some flowers. That’s how it all began. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just amazing. That is one of my favorite stories we’ve ever had on Green is Good. It’s just such a great story. How did you, then, decide to take that and make it into something bigger, such as Random Acts of Flowers? LARSEN JAY: I spent a long time in a wheelchair. I spent a long time by myself, so I kept thinking about those interactions with patients. A lot of times I asked people, “When is the last time an absolute complete stranger did something nice for you, when it wasn’t around the holidays, when they weren’t trying to sell you something, preach to you, change your mind, or ask you to do something else?” It doesn’t happen very often. I remembered those first few interactions. The very first room we ever went into that day was a woman who was in full headgear traction, wired to the gills, and she had a look without exaggeration of I’m done. Pull the plug, those desperate eyes you never want to see in somebody. We gave her a big bouquet of flowers, and she went from smiling to crying in two seconds. We fundamentally shifted her entire mental state from desperation to happiness. I kept remembering those interactions with the patients. At the end of the day, it came down to somebody must be doing this. This is a no-brainer. So I actually sought out somebody locally and said who can I support or be involved in? I couldn’t find anything locally, couldn’t find anything regionally, couldn’t find anything nationally. I found a few stories of people who had done this individually. I didn’t invent sliced bread. People have been repurposing flowers forever, like churches sometimes takes their flowers to their constituents, or maybe a wedding florist might do something for the nursing home down the street, but I couldn’t find anything that was a bigger organized process. I think as part of my healing process, it was an opportunity for me to do something to take this idea, and it was six months later that I came up with a half clever name, a bad logo, and sketched out a few ideas, and sat down with my family and several of the people who had sent me flowers. I said, “I’ve got an idea. Would you help?” They all said, “Great, let’s go for it.” Just like that first day, when we didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it, we just did it, we just started it. We didn’t spend a lot of time planning it out and theorizing and doing lots of meetings. We just sort of started it and said let’s see what happens We knew it was the right thing to do. A year to the date of the accident, my wife and I wrote a check and incorporated our paperwork and started the charity and reached out to the hospital that saved my life and helped me get better and said, “Hey, we’d like to do something for the other patients.” They said, “Come on.” We just started, and that’s how it all began. We didn’t really think about it ever being what it is today. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting, how great leaders, great visionaries, inspirational folks like you said you didn’t ask for permission, you just started. You just acted. That’s just great. That’s how great things come about sometimes. LARSEN JAY: I think when it’s right and it’s true and your intentions are right and true and your focus is on someone else, the rest is logistics. You’ll figure that out. Instead of trying to figure out how are we going to do the most good for the most people right off the bat, we said let’s just start and see it in action. It just took off. We had a company. We had other professions. We started this thing with 199 donations, most of which were under $100. We started, ironically, out of the warehouse that I fell off of because I owned it. I figured might as well use it, and we just started putting people together and saying let’s go try it out. Quite honestly, I think that we thought we might do this for a few years, pass it onto somebody else or another non-profit, or do it for a few years and that would be enough. But here we are, almost seven years later, and we’ve delivered over 60,000 floral bouquets and we’re now in cities across the country and growing. My wife and I have abandoned our careers and taken this on as our full-time endeavors. We had no idea where, but it’s really turned out to be quite an amazing journey so far. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank God you both have taken on this full career. Over 62,000 bouquets delivered. I’m reading some other great stats. 73,000 vases recycled nationwide, how many people you serve. Random Acts of Flowers serves an average of 2,350 people per month. That’s amazing, the lives that you touch every month. LARSEN JAY: Yeah, and it’s growing so fast. I would say of those 62,000+ people that we’ve impacted, half of that is in the last couple of years. It’s just really taken hold, and then there’s so many different touch points with our green initiative. Tens of thousands of pounds of green composting waste, all that kind of stuff. The program goes on and on and on, but at its core, we’re a mental health charity. We are focused on changing that person’s life and that healthcare facility for just that little second in time. We’re not trying to cure cancer, we’re not trying to build a building, we’re not trying to cure homelessness or change social policy. At its core, as goofy as it sounds, we’re taking garbage and turning it into a grin. We’re trying to make the world a little better place with somebody else’s trash, which sounds bizarre, but it works really well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You are. You really are. You are making the world a better place. I just love the name of your company. Again, for our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Larsen Jay. He’s the founder and CEO of Random Acts of Flowers. To check them out, to support them, to jump in and help his great organization, it’s randomactsofflowers.org. I love the logo and the tagline, recycling flowers, delivering smiles. Come on, this is just amazing. We have so much to cover, though, and I want to make sure we get to a lot of this. The vision for Random Acts of Flowers, you’re now seven years into it, you’re touching all these lives every month. Talk a little bit about the vision now for you and your wife. Where can you take this, and what’s your vision for the next seven years? LARSEN JAY: We’re doing far beyond what we ever thought. The goal, ultimately, is how do we have a Random Acts of Flowers or a similar organization in every city across the country, maybe beyond into the world? The formula is pretty basic. You have an endless supply of flowers being thrown away every single day in every community across the country, and of course across the world. You have an endless supply of volunteers who really, really want to help their community and make it a better place and impact people, and you have an endless supply of people in healthcare facilities who could just use a boost of mental health and a pick-me-up, and really nobody doing it on the scale that we are. We’re this great opportunity to be a great catalyst in all of those parties involved. It’s a unique situation. A lot of times in business, people talk about the white space or the blue ocean of how do you find a new niche or how do you find a new opportunity. At Random Acts of Flowers, we complement and don’t compete against the floral industry. We serve a new part of healthcare that really is quite ignored, the mental side of healing, and we don’t compete with any other non-profit organization in our services, so it’s one of these half by design, half stumbled into, this great little white space where we can operate and impact a lot of people that hasn’t been done before in a really effective way. The great thing about Random Acts of Flowers, there’s lots of things that I love, but one of the core parts of our mission is that we never charge for our services. We’re all privately funded. We don’t seek any public funding at all. It’s all donations, grants, corporate support, foundations, things like that. For somebody who has a wedding, a funeral, a special event, a Christmas party, or even a grocery store or wholesaler, literally all they have to do is say, “Yes, you can have my flowers.” Tell us where and when, we do all the work, we do all the logistics, we do all the pick-up. We never charge the healthcare facilities. It’s not based on money, politics, religion, social cause. I think that that gets to the root of our mission and our core as an organization. The giving of flowers is a universal gesture that cuts across all races, all religions, all income levels, demographics, disabilities, you name it. In 60,000+ deliveries, we have delivered to every walk of life you can imagine, every type of person you’d never imagine, and the end result is always the same. It’s a big smile and an opportunity to just be appreciative that somebody cared about them. That’s what healthcare should be, is something that affects everybody the same way and has an impact for a really simple way to pull it off. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Larsen, not only do you recycle the vases and the bouquets, but you do so much other green things. Can you just give a little bit of the laundry list of how green your great organization really is, that contributes to the sustainability and the greenness of every community that you do your great work? LARSEN JAY: Yeah, we do our best to be as green as possible and be as sustainable as possible. When we get our donations, we break down every bit of the flowers we get, down to its core materials. We never just take a centerpiece and give it to a patient. We want to make sure all the flowers have maximum life, and we also want to reuse and try to use every part and piece. Behind every arrangement is stems, wire, foam, cardboard, and this and all that kind of stuff, and we break it all down and we reuse as much as possible. If we can’t reuse it, then we try to recycle it. We know it’s coming back anyway, so we use it, send it back out, it comes back, and we do lots of little things. All of our green waste is composted in a local community garden or a landscaping company where it gets mixed in and turned back into mulch or other landscaping for different uses. We try to get our vase drives going, where every time we go to a hospital, we pick up more vases than we came with a lot of times. Those go in and out of the system. When you think about the footprint, just take one city for example, Knoxville, where we started this, Knoxville, Tennessee. They’re serving over 1,000 people a month, so we have to process 1,200-1,300 vases every month just to keep up, and we do. That’s pretty indicative of all of our branches. Whether it’s the vase, whether it’s the flowers, whether it’s the parts and pieces, we do everything we can to reuse and recycle and upcycle, which is taking something that otherwise goes in the dumpster and doing something good with it. We’re trying to get better at that every day and every week with different recycling initiatives, whether it’s the plastics or the metals all the way to the basics, which takes flowers and reuse and repurpose them, give them another chance. I think the giving of flowers, the using of flowers, also comes with a purpose. You give flowers for love, celebration, happiness, remembrance. We’re just simply giving them a second life and giving them a second life on behalf of someone else. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Larsen, I’m on your great website. Again, for our listeners out there, it’s randomactsofflowers.org. I see now you have branches in Chicago, Silicon Valley, Pinellas, Florida, Greenville, Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee. How can you open more branches? What’s your vision to opening more branches, and how can our listeners get involved? Because we’re going to have listeners who will want get involved. How can our listeners join your great mission to help make the world a better place? LARSEN JAY: I think the first thing they can do is, of course, support us nationally as we continue to grow. The formula and our program, it’s pretty much everywhere. What it comes down to is local leadership and strong financial support to get it going. I think most people that are involved with charities focus on the mission and they don’t often know how much goes into making a successful mission on the business side. Really, as we strategically grow, we’re looking at places that, obviously, have a lot of healthcare facilities and people to serve, have a lot of flowers, of course, but have a lot of local leadership that can help raise enough money to get it off the ground and then keep it going. It’s not terribly expensive, but it does require some staff and some space and some delivery vans and things like that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. What’s next for you and your wife? When you guys are mapping out this year, what’s next for Random Acts of Flowers? LARSEN JAY: Right now, we open our Silicon Valley branch in California in April, and that’s underway right now. That will have an official launch this spring, which will be great to be on the West Coast and bring our program. Then, we’re going to focus on Indianapolis in the fall, which is already in the works. Then, we’ve got several conversations with other cities around the country that are already in development in places like West Palm Beach and Salt Lake City and Cincinnati. We’re trying to grow organically in a way that makes sense without getting too big too fast. We spend a lot of time focusing on keeping it simple, keeping it focused, keeping it effective, and not trying to conquer the whole world. I think as we grow, it’s about having enough internal resources on a national level to make sure we have everything in the right direction and also finding great leaders around the country who say, “You know what? This ought to be in my town,” and reaching out and saying hi. After that, I don’t know. We had no clue we’d be doing this five or seven years ago, and we’re not really planning too much down the road. We just stay focused one day at a time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You took a tragedy and you made it a triumph. We’re so honored to have you on, Larsen. You’re doing just amazing stuff with your wife. We thank you for being the founder and CEO of Random Acts of Flowers. For our listeners out there, please get involved. Please help support Random Acts of Flowers in whatever way is appropriate for you. It’s randomactsofflowers.org. Thank you, Larsen, for being a recycling rock star. You are truly living proof that green is good. LARSEN JAY: Thank you. I appreciate it.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to another edition of Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Chuck Carr. He’s the Vice President of Member Services of ISRI, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Welcome to Green is Good, Chuck Carr. CHUCK CARR: Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Chuck, before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at ISRI and everything that’s going on at ISRI right now, including your upcoming annual conference in Vancouver, I’d love you to share the Chuck Carr story, the Chuck Carr journey, prior to ISRI and then all the great work you’ve been doing at ISRI. CHUCK CARR: Thank you very much for that opportunity, although I don’t think that will take very long. I’m one of those folks who stumbled into the green industries with the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries about 12 years ago. Prior to coming to work for ISRI, I had been a press secretary on Capitol Hill, I’d done corporate communications for a great company down in South Carolina, I even did some public relations and political consulting. But I was a reevaluating my life a few years ago, I started looking for other opportunities, and I saw this recycling organization that was looking for a Communications Director. I have to admit, at the time, all I knew about recycling was getting your bin to the street on Friday, so it was quite a learning curve to come into a trade association that represents an industry that is made up of the for-profit professional recyclers. For those of you who’ve never had the opportunity to visit either an electronics recycling dismantler, or even better yet, a large metal scrapyard, it’s just awesome. You look up and you’re amazed at the equipment that’s used in these places. The first time I walked into a scrapyard and saw the machine that recycled automobiles, you put a car up in one end of it and 20 second later it comes out the other end in pieces the size of your fist, and as magical as that is, that’s really where the magic begins. It then separates all the components out into commodity grade specific materials, copper and aluminum and ferrous metals and plastics, to the point there’s very, very little waste left. Even as we speak, there’s technologies being developed to reduce that even further. So, it’s just a fascinating industry, where I feel like I can not only use what few skills I have but also do a little bit of good for the world. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Chuck, you’re the Vice President of Member Services. How big is your membership approximately back in the envelope, and where are your members? Are they located just in the United States or around the world? CHUCK CARR: Great question. ISRI currently has a bit more than 1,600 member companies located primarily in North America, but with associate membership in 30 or 40 countries around the world. Again, we’re talking about the for-profit recycling industry in just about every commodity you can imagine. Our members handle metals, they handle plastics, they handle electronics, they handle glass, tires and rubber, textiles, really across the gamut in any place where we can turn materials into commodity grade materials that can then go back in the manufacturing process. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. For your members every year, you have an annual ISRI convention and exposition, which I’ve been honored to come to for the last five or six years, and this year on April 21 to the 25, you have your annual convention in Vancouver, British Columbia. Can you share with our listeners what’s the purpose of your annual convention? CHUCK CARR: Sure. That’s something that has evolved over the years, along with this industry and recycling itself. The current iteration of ISRI’s convention and exposition is the largest single meeting of professional recyclers anywhere in the world. The show has grown over the last 10 or 12 years from about 2,000 attendees to a high a couple years ago of nearly 8,000 attendees. We’ve seen the exposition grow in size from about 90,000 square feet to over 360,000 square feet. To put that into perspective, you’ve seen it grow from the size of an average small department store into a trade show that is made up of four or five average-sized Walmarts. It is just completely filled with vendors of equipment and services for the recycling industry, of software manufacturers, of consultants, and the whole thing is ringed with this amazing, huge, large equipment of cranes and material handlers, bailers and other large equipment that’s used in the industry. It’s totally fascinating to see. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Who typically attends? Is this, again, just your North American members, or is this where East meets West and the world literally comes together under one roof for these four or five days? CHUCK CARR: The show is becoming more and more international every year. That’s absolutely a terrific question. In recent years, we’ve had as many as 60 countries represented among those that come to the convention. It’s typically the workers, the managers, the CEOs and owners, again, in the recycling industry that you can sort of see the whole entire show segmented to those that are brokers and traders of material, those who operate the equipment in a scrapyard or a recycling plant, those who are more interested in the finance side of the industry, and those that are in the operations side. Having the opportunity to bring these folks together for networking opportunities, for education opportunities, just has become a must-attend event for the recycling industry and the world over recent years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners in the United States and around the world that want to learn more about this great event or register for it, please go to ISRI’s website, isri.org. They have a beautiful page there where you can go on, you can register, you can learn more about everything Chuck’s talking about, and you can then come to Vancouver on April 21st to the 25th and see for yourself all the great things that are going on there. Green is Good will be there too, and we’re honored to be there this year, interviewing a lot of your great sponsors and guests and interviewing a lot of people enjoying the activities there. Chuck, for our listeners, give a little visual description, sort of a virtual reality tour, of an exhibit hall for our listeners out there who haven’t been yet, but are thinking about coming to your upcoming convention and exhibition. What does an exhibit hall look like, if they’re going to be walking around? CHUCK CARR: It’s just an amazing opportunity to see nearly everything that’s involved in the recycling industry, be it equipment, be it people, be it services and consulting opportunities from within the recycling industry. Again, as you walk into this enormous space, you’re immediately taken by the number of booths that are there. We actually have over 500 booth spaces that are being managed by something close to 250 companies this year. The opportunity to see your colleagues, to see those who work in the industry there that will just totally fill the aisles, as they seek out services within these booths and network with one another. For those who have never been to an ISRI event, we also are very proudly one of those few conventions that feeds and waters you regularly. Lunch is served in the exhibit hall. We want you to spend time with the exhibitors. We want you to make sure you have every opportunity to meet with the sponsors, and I think that’s one of the reasons why this show is so well supported by our exhibitors as well as by our attendees, is that we try and make sure that the show is a positive experience for everybody that comes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Chuck, you chose Vancouver this year. Your colleagues and yourself chose Vancouver, which is an absolutely gorgeous city. I’m so glad you chose it, but talk a little bit about the thought process in choosing Vancouver over any other great city that you could have this wonderful convention in. CHUCK CARR: We’re really, really fortunate that we were able to get into this facility. The convention center in Vancouver, in fact, is the building that was used as the media center during the 2000 winter Olympic games that were held in and around Vancouver. It is a LEED platinum building. It has a green roof that’s absolutely amazing to see. It’s certainly one of the most modern convention facilities that you’re going to find anywhere in North America. No doubt, that was part of the reason why we saw some attraction to Vancouver, but more than that, Vancouver itself is proud of the fact that it’s really the symbolic gateway to the Pacific Rim. It’s proud of its heritage that includes everything from First Nations peoples indigenous to that part of North America to an extremely large population that comes from Asia, as well as European roots that are there as well. That sort of international flavor is what helped us choose Vancouver as well. If you want to get into more specifics, when you have a show that has this kind of equipment that this show has, there’s specifics with regards to not only space size but floor loads that limit us to only a certain number of cities. There are some cities out there that I’m sure many people assume are great convention facilities that just can’t hold this very heavy show. We’re very lucky that Vancouver can, and it’s such a wonderful building. This is our first opportunity to go outside the United States, granted only about 90 miles outside the United States. It’s been a bit different to plan an event slightly across the border, but nevertheless, I think the opportunities that are there are just going to be phenomenal. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Chuck Carr on. He’s the Vice President of Member Services of ISRI. ISRI is the Institute of Scrap and Recycling Industries that’s having a big convention on April 21-25 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To learn more about this convention and to actually register for it, please go to its great website. It’s isri.org. I’m on the website now. It’s chockfull of information in terms of the schedule, the registration, the hotels, the sponsors and exhibitors, isri.org. Chuck, talk a little bit about for those of our listeners that have been to your previous conventions, what are some things that you’re really excited about that might be new this year that we haven’t seen before? CHUCK CARR: In addition to a facility that just can’t be beat and a view that’s beyond description when you look over the harbor of Vancouver, we’re also trying to improve the quality and the value of the education experience that you receive at an ISRI convention. Every year, we put on anywhere from 70 to 100 workshops and spotlights and other training programs. In trying to schedule these programs, we hear every year from people who are frustrated that they’re not able to get to everything they’d like to do over the course of the four days that we’re there. So we’re trying to do a couple of things in restructuring our programming this year. A lot of our programs are going to be designed into commodity-specific modules, so that if you are an electronics recycler, rather than having electronics-specific programming running throughout the entire three days of workshops, we’ll do nearly all of that in one of the three days, which then gives you the opportunity to spend more time either in the exhibit hall or attending another commodity module, or perhaps even more of the very important non-commodity-specific business and economic sessions that we provide every year. That’s really the largest change you’re going to see from any other year, is the way we’re structuring the workshops. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Typically, your speaker list is just unbelievable. You always get the best speakers and the most timely and relevant speakers. Who are some of your speakers this year that you’re excited about? CHUCK CARR: I’m frankly excited about them all, and I’m glad you pointed out that we do try and get the best speakers we possibly can. Those who are in the industry can tell you that if you want to track the market conditions of the commodities markets, if you’re wanting to find out what the analysts are saying, you’ll find those analysts at ISRI events. Typically, there are three key events every year within the ISRI calendar that people don’t miss, and that’s our commodities roundtable program in Chicago in September, what’s known as the Mid-America Consumers Night, which is in St. Louis and just occurred a couple weeks ago here in February, and then the ISRI convention, where we have a lot of spotlight programs for every major commodity, including copper, aluminum, ferrous metals, stainless steel, lead, electronics, paper, tires and rubber, to give people an indication of what analysts are saying in the marketplace today and to the extent that those analysts can foresee the future, they’d like to know what’s on tap. The two larger programs that we have every year, we have an opening and closing general session. Those sessions have always had speakers that were usually out of the headlines that you’ve seen in the news. This year, we’re actually doing one that I bet everyone has heard of and one that you may not have heard of. Our opening session this year is going to be a gentleman by the name of Stan Slap, and I have to be honest that when I first heard his name, I thought, “Shoot me sails.” As it turns out, he’s a businessman, he’s an entrepreneur, he’s a motivational speaker, and a thinker who thinks through issues that I think matter, particularly to small businesses and businesses like you find within our recycling industry. He’s going to do a program called Tough Times, Tough People. We’re going to talk about how when you’re in economic slowdowns, when you’re in times that are in some way challenging, you don’t just blame the times and move forward. You have to be prepared to handle those times, to make sure that you not only get through them, but that you improve within them to be better on the other side. It’s a program that anybody, any company, that is seeking to get through what can be a little bit tough time today, should certainly hear, and I’m hoping that most of our attendees will join us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. Who’s the big keynote? CHUCK CARR: The final speaker is going to be former Defense Secretary, Bob Gates, who served as Defense Secretary both under George W. Bush and under President Barack Obama. Therefore, he’s going to offer a bipartisan perspective that I think our folks are eager to hear at this point. We chose him this year because of his ability to give us perspectives on world events. He has been there throughout most of the happenings in the Middle East of the past couple decades. I think his perspectives on what’s going on with ISIS and ISIL will be very important. I think he has perspectives on how we now deal with countries like Russia, like China, will be of interest to everyone as well. He is typical of the type of speaker that ISRI brings into an event like this. We’ve had every President since Ronald Reagan as speaker. We’ve had nearly every Secretary of State, including last year’s Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. We try and draw speakers that are from both parties, but more importantly, we try and draw speakers that will bring an interesting perspective to those of us in the industry that need to have our ear to the world, as opposed to just our local neighborhood. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That makes so much sense, and that makes the program so much richer, that that’s the approach that you and your colleagues and leadership take at ISRI. That’s why your conferences are so valuable to everybody. It’s not just from one perspective or another. You’re the head of Member Services, Chuck. Can you talk a little bit about the business of doing business at an ISRI event? Talk a little bit about not only going to Vancouver and loving the place you’re having it in and seeing all these great educational opportunities and exhibitors, but is there a business to business opportunity at your ISRI conventions? CHUCK CARR: John, every year, we poll our attendees to find out what it is about an ISRI convention that brings them there year over year. What is it that brings 15-20 percent new attendees every year, and 80-85 percent repeat attendees every year to an ISRI convention? Without fail, every year, the number one choice is the networking opportunities. I mentioned at the top of the show that week in Vancouver will be the largest single gathering of professional recyclers anywhere in the world this year. If you want the opportunity to meet with your colleagues in your state or your colleagues across the world or your colleagues in Vietnam or China or Brazil or Mexico or Canada, this is the place to be that week. Our program is designed specifically for that, to try and help everyone recognize that an industry that used to just deal with its own certain region is now dealing on a global level. What happens in China matters to what happens in Pittsburgh. It’s truly important that we all get that perspective and that’s offered at an ISRI convention. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you, Chuck, and thank you for your time today. We can all get that perspective, as Chuck says, by coming to the next ISRI convention April 21-25 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. You can learn more about the convention and sign up and register for it at ISRI’s website, isri.org. Chuck Carr, the Vice President of Member Services for ISRI, thank you, Chuck, for being a scrap and recycling superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good.