Archives: Episodes

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Robert Von Goeben. He’s the President and Chief Creative Officer of Green Toys. Welcome to Green is Good, Robert. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: Hey, John, how are you doing? JOHN SHEGERIAN: We are great today, and we thank you for coming on the show. Before we get talking about your great company, Green Toys — and for our listeners out there, they can find it at greentoys.com — we want you to share a little bit about your journey because you have a very special journey leading up to the founding of Green Toys, and I want you to share with our listeners your history and story leading up, and all the cool things you’ve done historically in your past. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: Yeah, you know, Green Toys is a combination of a long personal journey that I call the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I’m a factory kid from upstate New York, a very small family, 900-square-foot house, six people in the house, and I landed in California after college in the mid-’80s, literally with $20 in my pocket. What my parents brought with me is a good Midwest German work ethic. The only thing I had going for me is I worked harder than anybody else. When I worked through the ’80s and ’90s in Los Angeles, I worked with a number of entertainment companies, including Geffen Records, I worked for David Geffen, MCA, Universal, in the creative side. What I learned was the creativity and the person that take the blank piece of paper and solves a problem starting from scratch is where the value in society is created. So, I’ve been through a number of careers. I started the online division at a major record company, David Geffen’s company. I was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley through the dot-com era, which was an amazing adventure in and of itself. Got out, made a little bit of money, wanted to do something fun, stumbled into the toy industry because it was just something that was right for the times for me personally. I created the design firm in the early 2000s to be able to create electronic toys. Then something fantastic happened. My wife and I were having dinner, and we were talking about the toys we were creating and wanted to create, and she said to me, “You know, you should do toys that have a positive impact on the environment. Nobody does that.” Now we talk about eco toys and it’s a huge category. Green Toys has grown, and I’ll tell you in a second about how Green Toys has grown, but it was that one suggestion over dinner, and the light bulb hit. I said, “You know, you’re right.” The products that are on the market are wonderful products, a lot of them are very good for kids, but none of them really take into consideration the environment, both in how they’re manufactured and what happens to them after a kid grows out of them. So, it was from that little suggestion that I contacted my partner, Laurie Hyman, her and I went to USC Business School together 20 years ago. She has three little kids, and I said, “We have to do this, not just for ourselves, but this is something we could leave as our legacy.” JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. This is awesome. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: We started Green Toys literally in a Silicon Valley garage. I mean, you talk about Silicon Valley garages, we were one. JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is the great garage story. You are the garage story over and over again. This is awesome. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: Yeah. We are literally the garage story, and what we said early on, and this was probably the key to what we said, which is the way we’re going to make positive change in the world is through a commercial venture where we’re marrying products that people really want in their life wrapped around all the goodness of environmental sustainability and protection of natural resources. With the combination of those two things, it started us with toys that parents want. We’re going to make super high-quality basic toys, trucks, tea sets, blocks, things like that, and we’re going to make them in California from 100% recycled plastic. As it turns out now, fast-forward seven years, what we’ve done is we’ve created a company that makes kids’ toys from 100% recycled milk jugs. These are literally the milk jugs that people throw in their recycle bin. There’s a huge supply chain. We’re in that supply chain, and we grab that plastic, fresh, clean plastic, all food grade plastic, and we make our toys out of just recycled milk jugs. It started from the little garage startup. We now export U.S.-made toys to over 90 countries, and we sell to over 3,000 retailers here in the U.S., so it’s one of those things where it just grew exponentially. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Now this is a seven-year-old company. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: That’s correct, yes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, I’m on your site now. It’s a beautiful website, just so much information, so many cool toys. It’s www.greentoys.com. So, let’s evolve the story a little bit. So, you went from the garage, which I know you’re not in anymore. Where are you located? Where are you and your partner now? How do your offices look and your production look now, becoming a very big and scalable business? ROBERT VON GOEBEN: Now we’re located in Sausalito, California, which is just north of San Francisco, right over the Golden Gate Bridge. Again, any time I have a bad day, all I have to do is drive home, and I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge every single day. That’s important because the beauty of the San Francisco Bay area is the thing that continually drives us to say we’re doing something good for the environment. So, what’s happened over the last seven years is that we’ve had a large number of really good retailers from Pottery Barn, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Costco, Cost Plus, that really embrace this brand and said, “This is the product we should be offering to our consumers.” From there, what’s happened now is we manufacture here in California. We have now started working with a second manufacturer here in California, and we now have a third manufacturer in Chicago to be able to service the East Coast of the United States, so we have three manufacturers up and running. We are now looking at millions and millions of toys. As a matter of fact, we just had a milestone, which is we crossed our 20 millionth milk jug that has been recycled in the making of Green Toys. 20 million milk jugs. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s unpack that a little bit. What was happening to these milk jugs prior to you using them and putting them in new toys? ROBERT VON GOEBEN: Right. When you think about it, we all throw our stuff in the recycle bin and it just disappears someplace basically, right? So, there are five things that get recycled. There’s paper, aluminum, glass, water bottles, which is a very different kind of plastic called PET plastic, and milk jugs, which is high-density polyethylene, number 2 plastics. If you look on the bottom, it’s got the number 2. It’s one of the safest, cleanest plastics around, and what it was was this little gem that people were either making piping and garbage cans and things like that out of. The thing about it though is it’s notoriously hard to work with from a manufacturing standpoint. That’s where we brought Silicon Valley technology to bear, because you understand that this stuff is usually made into a milk jug, it isn’t made into a toy or some kind of hard injection molded plastic item. That’s what we bring to bear is technology and Silicon Valley technology, to be able to use recycled plastic, which is a real challenge because it doesn’t operate like regular plastic. That’s the thing that we were able to do, so it was used in many industrial applications, but it’s ideal for toys because it’s very clean, it comes from a food grade source, but most importantly, John, what it does is for parents and children, it closes the loop. You tell kids, “Recycle,” and they think, “Why do I recycle?” When you show them a product made from recycled milk jugs, you can say, “Here’s why you do it.” It just closes the loop in their education on recycling. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I gotcha. So, that was your secret sauce. You broke the code on the milk jugs, and that’s what you’re using as your feedstock to make these great toys. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: That’s exactly right. Breaks the code is the right word because there’s a very specific manufacturing process to be able to make a dump truck. One thing that’s interesting when you look at green toys products, you will notice there’s no paint, there’s no glue, there’s no screws, there’s no metal axle on the truck. Our products are 100% recycled plastic. When you’re done with it, you could throw it in the recycle bin, and it could be recycled again. JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is great. Talk a little bit about passing that threshold of the 20 millionth milk jug being recycled. How does that affect and continue to reinspire your employees, and how does that affect them? What’s the feedback you’re getting from your customers, Robert? ROBERT VON GOEBEN: Well, one thing to understand, and this goes back to the conversation about the way to make social change is you make a very viable commercial product. First and foremost, ours has to be really good toys, regardless of the message of the environment. For instance, we sell a big dump truck that is really sturdy and kids love. If that, sitting on its own, is not a good product, the rest of it is for naught. It just doesn’t matter. You have to have a good product. First and foremost, when people take our bath toys, our boats, our blocks, our trucks, and we have a line of vehicles, they say, “These are really great products.” Then when you tell them on top of it that it’s made in the United States and it’s made sustainably, they just freak out. So, it doesn’t matter what your message is. It’s like healthy food, right? Healthy food, it’s great when it’s good for you, but first and foremost it’s got to taste good. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, we’ve got Robert Von Goeben with us today. He’s the President and Chief Creative Officer of Green Toys. To learn more about Green Toys or buy their great products, you go to www.greentoys.com. So now, Robert, now you just passed the 20 millionth milk jug recycled. What now? I mean, you grew this company. Literally, you opened this company in the face of a recession in 2007, the most difficult time to start a company. Now it’s 2014, and you’ve created this diamond of a company that’s doing work that people appreciate. What’s next? ROBERT VON GOEBEN: There are two things that are happening next. One is further expansion overseas, which is a possibility also of manufacturing overseas. People always say, “Would you manufacture in China?” We would consider manufacturing in China to sell to China. There is a strategy that we would take what we have in the United States, pick it up, and drop it in, say, Europe, where you would grab the recycled material that is available in Europe for the European market. It’s almost reversed globalization, if you will. JOHN SHEGERIAN: But it’s also very intuitive. It makes sense to replicate your paradigm that works so well here locally in those other countries. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: That’s right. When you think about not only the toy industry, but the traditional consumer products industry, you search the globe, you find the cheapest place to manufacture, you send all your raw material there, and then you ship it out all the way around the world. That’s just an old model. The idea is you go where it’s best to manufacture your product, where your raw materials are, get it really close, then what you do is you manufacture your product there, so there is a strategy. Second strategy for Green Toys is recycled milk jugs is one great raw ingredient for our products. I’m jumping on a plane in a week all across the Midwest of the United States. There is a variety of other materials that are being repurposed and reclaimed in sustainable ways out there, and what we’re doing is we’re staying at the edge of the curve, and looking at the real pioneers and the producers that are saying, “We have new materials from new sources of recycled products that you might able to now use in your toys.” So, very soon, in the next year to two years, what you’ll start to see is green toys that have recycled milk jugs, but have other recycled components in them as well, which allows us to offer a wider variety of products. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just so wonderful. You bring up a great point about how you would grow internationally, both in Europe and China, you’d follow the very successful paradigm you’ve created here in the United States. Talk a little bit about that supply chain. Talk a little bit about why it saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and ensures better worker safety for the factory and the environment at large. That way, I want our listeners to understand you’ve created really a triple bottom line. Not only are you and your partner very successful entrepreneurs, or let me say eco-preneurs, which is always the key to sustainability. You’re making money, which means your company is going to be sustainable, but you’re creating a product that the consumers at large want and you’re doing something that’s also very gentle on the environment and also very gentle on the employees. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: That’s right. We made a point of starting our company in California for a couple of different reasons. California, as a community, has some of the strictest environmental and worker safety laws in the world. We knew that if we manufactured here and could make our business work, that we’d be a successful company. Essentially, as opposed to a lot of companies which search through Asia for the easiest and least expensive place to manufacture, we went to the hardest and most expensive place to manufacture, California, to start. We said we can do it here. When I walk to our factories — by the way, our factories are a half hour drive from my house — when we go to our factories and I walk the floor, which we do on a regular basis, we know that the workers here are being watched over by an enormous regulatory umbrella, some say heavy regulatory umbrella, but quite frankly, that’s our competitive advantage because we can make it work here. That’s true nowadays for a lot of the United States. Our main market right now is the United States, and when you think about toys coming from Asia — we did the math once — is that when you manufacture toys overseas and you bring them to the warehouse, it’s normally 10,000 miles from the factory to the warehouse. I mean, think of the transportation costs, think of the carbon emissions. Our manufacturing facility is 10 miles from our warehouse, so what happens is when you make your supply chain super tight, not only can you keep quality high because everything happens in real time, but what it allows you to do is it allows you to bring all that transportation out of the supply chain, saving a lot of energy and quantifiably reducing greenhouse gases. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, we’re talking Robert Von Goeben. Robert, what is the most popular toy? I’m on your website, and it’s a beautiful website. It’s greentoys.com. I’m looking at the airplanes, the build-a-bouquet, the dump truck. What are the hot sellers? What’s hot right now? ROBERT VON GOEBEN: What’s hot right now, interestingly enough, are bath toys. We have a tug boat, a submarine, we have a ferry boat where little cars go on, and what’s interesting is bath time is not only fun time for the kids, but it’s relaxing time for the parents because the kids are in the bathtub, they’re having fun, they’re getting clean. It’s almost become a family ritual, if you will. So, we sell lots of different toys in lots of different categories, but I highlight that just because it’s one of those areas where we can combine an incredible amount of fun, a really good use of plastic in toys because it’s waterproof and when it gets some soap scum on it or something, our toys you can throw right in the dishwasher. So, we do really, really well with bath toys, but then also vehicles. We sell dump trucks, and we literally have a recycling truck and things like that. It’s the tried and true, really basic open play, kids can use their imagination. That’s what’s really driving our business. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m looking at the recycling truck right now. It’s two shades of green. It’s really cute. I think I’m going to have to get that one. That’s a winner right there. I like that. ROBERT VON GOEBEN: I’ll tell you one of the trends that I think we’ve been lucky enough to go into, which is you and I had a childhood that — I’m 52 years old. I had a childhood, a Leave It to Beaver type of childhood, where I got on my bike and I rode around the neighborhood, and we had this childhood. Nowadays, many kids don’t have that kind of childhood because society has really just changed. So, there is really a feeling among parents, it’s almost a nostalgic feeling among parents, that they want their kids to have a real childhood. You know, we have apps and TV and all these things that come in, but there’s really a need among millennial parents that are just saying, “I want my kid to be a real kid with a real childhood.” So, that’s what’s driving them to Green Toys, but in addition to all the eco message, these are just real toys. I mean, our toys have no batteries. We don’t use electricity. We don’t even use screws. It’s just regular, good old fashioned toys, and that is what millennial parents nowadays are really looking for for their kids, real toys for real kids. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love that. Real toys for real kids. Robert, we’re down to 60 seconds. What is going to happen with your company? What’s your dream, and what’s you and your partner’s dream for the next five years? When you come on Green is Good five years from now, what are you going to be telling us? ROBERT VON GOEBEN: I think that the most popular toys in the United States, are Mattel, Hasbro, Lego, and Green Toys. At this point, our mission is scale. Our mission is to be able to take what we do and affect every family in America, and be able to really bring that to everyone because we think everyone can benefit from the things we’re bringing there. So, five years from now, if I come back on, I want to be able to say the largest toy companies are Mattel, Hasbro, Lego, and Green Toys. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s going to happen. Real toys for real kids. Go to greentoys.com. Buy them today. Thank you, Robert, for being a visionary and innovative entrepreneur. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. Today we’re so excited to have with us Denley Fowlke. He’s the co-founder and owner of Sun Warrior. Welcome to Green is Good, Denley. DENLEY FOWLKE: John, how are you? JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m great. Thank you so much, and thanks for coming on our show. Like I told you off the air, our family are big fans of Sun Warrior, and we’ve used your product for years, so thank you for coming on and sharing the Sun Warrior story with our listeners. Before we get talking about your great company, Sun Warrior, I want you to tell the Denley Fowlke story. Talk a little bit about your journey growing up and leading up to the founding of Sun Warrior, and what your story is a little bit. DENLEY FOWLKE: OK. I guess it starts off when I was just a kid, a young kid. My folks had fruit stands, a small fruit market. I grew up in that, and as I got older, the fruit stand grew. They started selling other things. You’ve heard the saying “You are what you eat.” Back then, I was a Twinkie, I was a Coke, and I was a puff of smoke. I got sick early in life. I developed asthma, bronchitis, and all those things. My mother read a book by Ann Wigmore; I’m sure you’ve heard of Ann Wigmore, the wheatgrass juice lady. Back in the ’60s, she read this book about growing wheatgrass juice, so my mother grew wheatgrass juice for me. She made me drink it. I couldn’t believe I was drinking it, but something happened to me. I felt better. After I drank the first drink of that, I’m going, “Wow, it’s like euphoric.” I linked that what I put in my mouth had something to do with how I felt. It changed my life, in a way. Then I grew up and got married and we started having kids, and we had twin daughters, baby twins, and they were sick right off the bat. Because I had health problems, they had health problems, so the nut doesn’t fall too far from the tree. They had diarrhea; they threw up all the time, as babies do, and icing on the cake they had respiratory infection a lot. So, what do you do when you have a little tiny baby sick? You take them to the doctor and they put them on antibiotics, they get better, and about a month later, they’d be sick again. We got in a cycle, about every month we’d have them back to the doctor to get them over this respiratory croup, cough, pneumonia type of stuff. It got to be like three weeks between doctor visits, and then every two weeks between doctor visits. The time was shorter and shorter all the time between doctor visits, and it got to the point where if they were not on medication, they were sick. They had to be on antibiotics all the time, and that’s when the light turned on for us. We’re going, “Wow, maybe there’s something wrong with our babies.” They were getting worse and worse, and we felt like they were dying. So, we took them to the specialist, and he tested our babies, and he goes, “Wow, your girls have cystic fibrosis.” We were shocked, obviously. We knew a little bit about cystic fibrosis. My sister had a baby die from CF a few years prior to that, so we were a little bit concerned, you might say. We didn’t know what to do, and I was still in the produce business back then. I met an older gentleman, I made friends with him, and I told him. I shared what my dilemma was. I didn’t know what to do about it because the doctors wanted our babies to be on higher medication. They said, “That’s the first thing we need to do, put them on more meds.” Einstein has a saying that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over again and expect different results. To me, it made zero sense, putting our babies on more medication. They were getting worse. They were dying. They weren’t getting better. It just made no sense. They said our babies would never live past their late teens, never have children, never have a life, really. They would have to live in a bubble, so we obviously didn’t know what to do. This older gentleman, I told him our situation. He says, “I have someone I want you to meet.” He took us up to lady north of Salt Lake, and she sat us down, she looked at us, she looked at our babies. She says, “If you kids will do what I tell you to do, I’m going to make you a promise. I promise you that you will never have your babies back to the doctor or the hospital ever again if you do what I tell you to do.” We’re going, “Well, that sounds good. What do we do?” She goes, “Well, don’t you know? Your after lies in nature.” She basically put us on a fresh raw fruits and vegetable diet. When she told me our after lies in nature, it took me right back to my wheatgrass juice days with my mother, and how much better it made me. We bought in on it, and we felt like we had no other way to go. And so it changed our lives. We turned on a dime. From that moment on, John, we became the neighborhood weirdos, and we still wear that name proudly. We’re still weird, but now it’s kind of the chic thing to do, and it changed our lives and it put us on the path. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How many years ago was that, Denley? DENLEY FOWLKE: John, it was about 36 years ago. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so your daughters are older women now. DENLEY FOWLKE: Yes. They didn’t keep the doctor’s prediction. They’re 37 years old now, and they each have seven kids. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You have 14 grandchildren, Denley? DENLEY FOWLKE: No, I have 21. I have a couple other kids. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh my gosh. You have 21 grandchildren, but the twins have 14 among them. DENLEY FOWLKE: They do, and if we would have lost those kids, just think of what would have been such a tragedy, a loss in our family. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh my gosh. What a story. Wait a second. So, your daughters grew up to be healthy, vibrant women because of the new diet, and are they still eating and living that way? Are you and your wife still eating and living that way all these years? DENLEY FOWLKE: Jen and I, we live that way. A lot of our diet is raw. We’re pretty well for the most part vegan most of the time, and it has changed our lives. Our girls, they married guys, and of course they’re regular guys, but they still have to watch what they eat. Their kids are healthy, and they’re doing well. They have the basics. We taught them the foundation of health. You teach them the principle, and then they govern themselves. That’s our philosophy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s such a great, heartwarming, and wonderful inspirational story. Let’s talk about your great brand. For our listeners that just joined, we’ve got Denley Fowlke on. He’s the co-founder and owner of Sun Warrior. To learn more about his great and amazing and important products, please go to www.sunwarrior.com. So, when did you start Sun Warrior? Now I know why you started it, but when did you get it started and how did you get it started? DENLEY FOWLKE: Well, we started it about seven or eight years ago, I guess. I met a guy down in the raw foods festival in Sedona, Arizona, I think probably about eight years ago now. This guy is a big guy. He’s a bodybuilder, and he’s sitting there, and he goes, “Hey, I think you skinny little raw fooders are protein-deficient. You run around here like a bunch of ittie bitties.” I’m going, “I beg your pardon? I eat my raw foods. I have everything I need, thank you very much.” I went and had my protein amino acid profile checked, and yeah, he was right. I was missing some amino acids. He’s a bodybuilder, and his name is Nick Stern. He’s my partner now. He goes, “Hey, let’s start a company. I want to start a company that has a good-for-you protein, something that’s going to be raw, it’s going to be vegan, and it’s going to be good for you.” The other stuff he had been taking, the whey protein and the soy and all that other stuff, he said, “Man, it’s killing me. My joints are breaking down, I get gas and bloating, and I just want a good, healthy something for me.” It took us about a year to really come up with our protein that tasted good. We knew it had to taste good and still have the living components of a good, healthy, nutritional food, so that’s what happened. We took off from there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, talk about the great products. I’m on your website now, and again for our listeners it’s sunwarrior.com. I’m on your products page. Share with our listeners these great products and why they’re superior to anything else that’s out there. DENLEY FOWLKE: So, we started off with protein, and that was our flagship. Our first protein was sprouted fermented raw rice protein, and it was unique because it tasted good and people did so well with it. It did, it took off. Then, after that, we got thinking, and we realized that bodybuilders taught us that it’s good to cycle from one protein to another. So, we came out with another amazing protein, and it’s our Warrior Blend. It’s pea, hemp, and cranberry protein. Gosh, it’s smooth, it tastes good, and it took off, and it’s actually taken over. Our Warrior Blend tastes good and it blends up smooth. Anyway, as a protein, it took off. Then we got to working on other products because we want to have it all. We next came out with greens. We have a green product that’s amazing, John. We grow up here in the mountains of Utah in this volcanic rich soil, that’s so mineral rich that the greens pull all these minerals into the plant, into the blade of the grass. What’s unique about our greens is a large portion of our greens is the juice powder, and the juice powder is much more nutrient-dense than just grinding up the grass into powder. We’ve had ours tested, and we’re at the top of the chart for chlorophyll in our greens and superoxide dismutase — it’s an anti-aging factor and good for the immune system — in our greens. It’s really, really high in nutrients. We recently added one thing. It’s moringa leaf. I’m sure you’re familiar with moringa leaf powder, which is an amazing thing by itself. So, we have moringa with it, too. They’re organic and they’re raw and nutrient dense. We dry them at about 80 or 90 degrees. They’re still raw. Then we have probiotics with them, too, because probiotics and friendly bacteria in the gut is so important and helps digest the greens. We don’t get enough greens as a society. If you’re green inside, you’re clean inside. They truly are amazing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk about these products. These greens, peppermint and ormus greens natural. I’m looking on your site right now. How do people take them and how many times a day, and what are the benefits they’re going to get from these kinds of products? DENLEY FOWLKE: OK. Good question. What I personally do — everybody does it different — but before I even get up and go exercise at the gym, I get a big tablespoonful of greens and put them with pure water, and I blend them up, and I put our liquid minerals with our greens, which makes it really alkaline, gives you energy, and alkalizes your body and mineralizes your body. Then I have greens at night before I go to bed with minerals again, because you’re so mineralized, it helps you sleep at night. It’s a natural source of vitamins and minerals. They’re so rich. It helps your friendly bacteria grow. Friendly bacteria has to be nourished too, so all the minerals that I take nourish the friendly bacteria and helps it to grow. After my workout, then it’s time for my muscles to uptake protein. We’re ready to go. Our protein absorbs and assimilates so well. It’s really changed my life, giving me a complete amino acid profile into my diet. We have to have protein for our skin, our hair, and our fingernails, along with the minerals, and hormones and enzymes. With our greens and our minerals, we’re approaching just about everything the body needs. Then we came up with some other things. We feel like our nutrition should come from plants, so same with our minerals. Our belief is our minerals should come from plants, not like the Great Salt Lake or the ocean. Plants is the best source of minerals, and so our Liquid Light has our minerals and it has folic acid naturally occurring in it. Folic acid delivers all nutrients into the cells. It’s a transporter of nutrients, so we’re taking our minerals with our greens. It delivers all of that into the cells. If you take vitamins, which we have a raw vitamin, I take raw vitamins with our Liquid Light, and it goes right into the cells, cellular delivery. Unless we get cellular delivery, we’re wasting our money, really. It just goes right on down the system and right on down to the alligator farm, so we want to absorb and assimilate all those things. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Denley, we’re down to about four minutes. Where can our listeners buy your products? I’m on your site. It looks like they can buy it on your site, but can they find it in retail stores, or is it only from your site and they have to go to sunwarrior.com? How does this work? DENLEY FOWLKE: We are in most of the Whole Foods. I don’t think we’re in the Florida region yet, but most Whole Foods, Vitamin Shoppe countrywide, and we are in a lot of the smaller health food stores. We’re in quite a few thousand stores now, so we’re pretty easy to find. If you can’t find, we have a store finder or locator on our website, or you can order it from our website easy, sunwarrior.com. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, it’s either on the website or in Whole Foods or other great local natural food stores close to wherever our listeners are. DENLEY FOWLKE: Yeah, Vitamin Shoppe. We’re getting into some of the GNCs, and we are expanding. We’re just getting into Wegmans in the Northeast, and smaller chains around the country. We’re pretty easy to find. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Denley, we’re down to about three minutes or so. Two question: A) talk about what’s this activated barley and why is that so important, and B) what are your users coming back and telling you? At the top of the show, you gave an amazing story about your wonderful daughters who went on to have great lives and 14 grandchildren between them now. Talk a little bit about what the people who are using your great Sun Warrior products, how are they coming back, and what are they sharing with you in terms of how it’s changed their lives? DENLEY FOWLKE: OK. The activated barley is a sprouted barley seed fully fermented. It’s raw, and it’s loaded with beta-glucans, so it’s a good pre-workout and good post-workout, and it levels blood sugar. If you have low blood sugar, you’re tired, activated barley levels and brings it up. Or, if you have high blood sugar, it brings it down, so it levels your blood sugar. It’s dynamite. It’s a health food. It really is. It’s really good for your blood sugar. People that use our products — we have testimonials all the time, kind of like changing lives, and it really is. People from all walks use our products. We have athletes, we have soccer moms. My grandkids drink that stuff up like crazy, and I think that’s why they’re so healthy. We have Immune Shield, which is our silver product with our folic acid. It really works. We never had to take our kids back to the doctor again, and that’s what we’re saying. We have everything that the body needs, and you don’t have to go to the doctor for every little thing. I don’t think it’s good for you. I mean, there are cases when you need to, but I’m saying why not do it the natural way? The body recognizes natural nutrients. We have people talk about their hair and how it’s all changed, and their skin has improved, and their hair, skin, and nails. I can’t keep up with my fingernails; I have to clip them all the time now. It’s life changing, and people with low blood sugar and low energy, you know the difference when you take something that’s natural and good for you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so great, and we’re so appreciative of you, Denley, for you coming on today’s show. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Sun Warrior or buy their great products, you can go to www.sunwarrior.com or other great food stores in your area, such as Whole Foods, Vitamin Shoppe, and others. Thank you, Denley, for being a sustainability leader and an inspiring eco-preneur. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so excited to have with us today our friend, Elizabeth Grossman. She’s been on Green is Good before. She’s a freelance journalist and writer. Welcome back to Green is Good, Elizabeth. ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: Thanks so much for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, listen. You’re a great friend of the show. You came on years ago when we were just starting off, and we’re so thrilled to have you back on because you’re such an important thought leader, doing great work. Last time you came on, we talked about High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health, a very important book. Before we get talking about some of the more current events of today, Elizabeth, can you share with our listeners some of your history? Because you are a prolific writer, both as a freelance journalist and as an author, and I want you to share with our listeners out there all the great stuff you’ve been doing previously to all the current work you’re doing. ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: OK. Well, let me see how I can sum this up. I live here in Portland, Oregon, which happens to sit on the banks of the Willamette River, which is just a couple of blocks from my house. Back around 2002-2003, I was doing some research into water quality in the Willamette River, and discovered that at that point, the majority of the toxic waste that was going from industry into the river, and this was all legal and permitted — it’s the kind of thing that industry can, with local and EPA permits, discard — was coming from high-tech manufacturing one way or another, from semiconductors and from silicone waste from manufacturing. I, like everybody else who learned this information, was really surprised that this information age industry, that the impression was that it was going to move us away from all sorts of natural resource extraction and big environmental impacts, was indeed having a huge environmental impact. So, I started looking around and trying to learn more about the story, and that led me to write High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health, which looks at the environmental and health impacts of the entire life cycle of high-tech electronics, from raw materials to manufacturing to what happens when these devices are used, and then a big part of the story is what happens when these devices are no longer useful and they get discarded or put into recycling. It was working on that book that introduced me to the huge issue and universe of synthetic chemicals that go into making almost everything that surrounds us on a daily basis these days, and I got absolutely fascinated by what I was learning from scientists about how these chemicals came to be made, how they behave in the environment, and their health effects. I ended up writing not only a lot of articles about the things such as what I’ve been doing an awful lot of for the past 10 years, but I also ended up writing my last book about these kind of chemicals issues, and it was called Chasing Molecules. A big of that story that I looked into was trying to figure out how we go about solving these problems, and that led me to learn about the work of a lot of people in the field of what’s called green chemistry, scientists who are trying to design new materials, new chemicals, that are safe for human health and the environment throughout their life cycles, so you don’t have to worry about whether these things are going to have adverse impacts on the environment or on human health while they’re being used or are in products. That’s a lot of what I’ve been looking at in my work in articles and also in books. One of the things that I learned while working on doing research about all of these chemicals is that the vast majority of these synthetic materials that we’ve been using for almost 100 years now come from petroleum, from oil and gas, and they are part of this big petrochemical enterprise that has really been the engine of so much industry and manufacturing materials, almost since the beginning of the 20th century. So, in a lot of ways, climate change is really closely linked to all of these stories about materials and all of the things that these materials make possible. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Climate change is in the news almost every day now, Elizabeth, but one of the things that’s also becoming a very hot topic in cities across America goes to the issue of composting and also our food supply. Food is also a hot topic with regards to sustainability. Can you talk about the convergence of climate change and the impact it has on our food supply, and what our listeners should be thinking about when sourcing their own food for their family and for their friends and loved ones? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: I will give that a try. I’m always a little hesitant to say this is what you should do, because the answers are never quite that easy. I also think one of the reasons food has become such a focus or one of the reasons that I have been finding it so interesting to write about food and agriculture, is because it affects us all directly. Everybody eats food. We all cook for our families. We all share food with friends. It’s something we look forward to. It’s really direct, and when something external starts to affect our food, it really matters to us. It’s something that people can really relate to. It means something to us on a daily basis, and you can’t say, “I don’t care if that food is safe. I don’t care if it’s not there.” It’s very immediate. One of the things that has already started to happen with climate change-related extreme weather events, the heat that’s exacerbating the drought in California, for example, odd shifts in seasons or torrential rains that are starting to impact successful harvest, is that what we’re going to start seeing, and what we’re already seeing and what’s happening in California right now is a big example, is that some things that have always been grown in certain places may not be available. Whether this happens over the long-term or the short-term, we don’t know yet, but this is something people are keeping an eye on. That’s kind of what’s happening, and there are lots more details, but that’s kind of the big picture of what people are watching as we have hotter seasons, these torrential rains, changes in when things flower and when frost comes, that’s all going to affect what’s growing. It’s already starting to affect what’s growing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we have Elizabeth Grossman. She’s a thought leader, journalist, author, book writer. To learn more about Elizabeth and her amazing and important work, it’s elizabethgrossman.com/Elizabeth_grossman/home.html. Elizabeth, when you put the two words together, food security, what does that mean for our listeners? What should they be keen to learn about when it comes to their own food security and this nation’s food security? How is climate change impacting that right now? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: Well, right now, things are starting to change, so that farmers, ranchers, people who raise dairy cattle, are starting to look really carefully at how changes in weather, how extreme weather events, are starting to affect their harvest. These things may not happen dramatically all at once, but again, as I was mentioning, California is a really good example. The heat is exacerbating the drought. The lack of water is causing some farmers to decide not to even try to plant certain crops, and what this may mean is that we may see spikes in prices for certain produce. You may not find melons from California in a market where you might have a year or two ago, so these kind of short-term shortages may happen over the long term. Scientists are really concerned if we don’t make big changes in how we grow things or where we grow things, that in the next 20-30 years we could start to see some really big shortages. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you’re saying everything is being affected; not only the crops, but meat and dairy production and everything is being affected. ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: It is, and again, we’re not going to necessarily see dramatic changes immediately, but these are things people are keeping a really close eye on as the temperatures warm up, and we have to think differently about water use and about how we grow things on availability of water and temperature and things like that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You framed the problem, and what we love talking about, especially with great thought leaders like you on the show, are solutions. What has the response been? What has industry response been by farmers and other harvesters of both seafood and also just farming products and meat and dairy and produce? What are some of the business opportunities that exist because of climate change that people can jump in and become part of the sustainability revolution and help push back on these effects and create solutions that can then benefit all of our listeners out there, not only in the United States, but around the world? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: I think, again, it’s sort of early in the solution piece, but I think one of the things that I’ve been learning that people are starting to do is to think about sourcing. It’s a little bit tricky to quantify really quickly, but one of the things that people are starting to ask more about is where you buy your food from, and ask questions about the benefits of buying things that are grown in ways that are more sustainable or making food choices that have a lower carbon footprint. There are a whole bunch of interesting little carbon footprint calculators out there that will give you an idea of whether or not a food choice is going to have a bigger greenhouse gas impact. A lot of people are suggesting that eating some things that are lower on the food chain, or that require less intensive energy and water input to grow, will eventually help lessen the environmental burden of what we eat. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Are you referring to, then, people becoming vegetarians or vegans, in terms of going to plant-based diets versus meat-based diets and things of that such? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: Well, I don’t think anybody is saying you must become a vegetarian or vegan, but to maybe think a little more carefully about whether having so many meals based on beef is the best choice. These are hard questions for people to ask. These are hard solutions to ask people to take on personally, but I think a lot of people who are making the food buying choices are already starting to make some shifts in where they’re sourcing food. I’m just at the beginning of some of this research, but I understand that the retailers, the people who buy food that we then buy in the store, are already starting to make some choices that may help accommodate some of these changes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Elizabeth, has transparency become one of the key landmarks of good food sourcing now, and understanding backwards where the food came from? I understand there’s even some fish markets in the Pacific Northwest where you can buy fish and learn not only where did the fish come from in the world, but what boat it was on, when it was caught. Is transparency becoming one of the real key landmarks of buying food and buying it right? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: I think for a lot of people, it is, and I’m really lucky I live here in the Pacific Northwest, so I am really close to a lot of my food sources. That’s why I hesitate to say this is what you should do, because what works if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere on the West Coast and close to California, Washington, Oregon, where so much produce is grown, you may have some options that you don’t have if you live somewhere else in the country. When it comes to seafood, we’re completely spoiled. Yes, I can go to my local supermarket and find out where the fish comes from, and sometimes I can even find out the name of the person who caught the fish. I do think that transparency and a sense of understanding where your food came from and where it was grown does really help people think about these issues of sustainability and how the food was grown, because once you’re connected to it in some way, it helps make those kind of choices and think about it for the long-term. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last four minutes or so, Elizabeth. What other things can you share with our listeners out there, both our listeners who want to become part of the solution, and our listeners who obviously are consumers? How do they go about their day-to-day life now with regards to thinking about food security, but not over-worrying about it, but also helping change to happen in terms of our political structure in the United States and other opportunities in terms of voting with their pocketbook? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: That is a very, very big question. One of the things I was thinking about was what we can all do. I’m a journalist; I’m not an activist and I don’t make political recommendations and such, but one of the things that I think about a lot, and it goes from the high-tech trash side of things to the food side of things, are what are the things you can do every day that are actually really, really simple, but help shift the burden? One of the big problems in terms of the whole climate change scenario is greenhouse gas emissions, what comes out of our tailpipes. As we all saw a couple of years ago when gas prices got so terribly high, and this is a consideration for people who live in places where driving is a daily habit rather than a big city like New York, where most people walk or take public transportation, is think about driving less. Think about being more efficient in your daily errand habits or your weekly errand habits, so that you end up emitting less greenhouse gases. If you have the opportunity to shop once in a while at a farmers’ market, where you can buy things locally and you can help support the people who are growing things closer to where you live, do that. It’s fun. It doesn’t have to be more expensive. It might be a little bit more expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Think about making some of those choices so that you don’t have to get in your car and you can do something that’s more local that ends up being an energy-conserving event. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great advice for our listeners out there. That’s wonderful. I appreciate it. We’re down to the last two minutes or so. Talk a little bit about High Tech Trash. How did that go? We were just talking last about the launch of the book. How did that turn out? Were you happy with the results you got and the feedback you got once it became more popular out there after you got it published? ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: I’ve been absolutely astonished at how that book has continued to sell. People just keep on buying it, so in terms of the book, I’ve been absolutely delighted about it. In terms of the problem, however, I have to say it’s rather distressing that despite all of the great strides forward we’ve made in this country with making electronics recycling so much easier than it was when I wrote the book — I mean it was kind of a mystery; almost nobody knew how to do it or where to take your stuff — but now it’s a whole lot easier. But internationally, this problem still persists, and I wish we could figure out how we could stop exporting high-tech trash, as it is, overseas, and I really wish we could get even better than we are now at making sure that everything gets properly reused or recycled. On the one hand, a huge amount of progress is made, and on the other, a lot more for us to do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yep, you’re right, a lot more for us to do. Thank you, Elizabeth, for coming back on Green is Good. You’re a great friend of the show, and we so appreciate all the important work that you’re doing. For our listeners out there, to learn more about Elizabeth and her great work, go to www.elizabethgrossman.com/elizabeth_grossman/home.html. For our listeners also that want to buy Chasing Molecules or High Tech Trash, go to amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com or a fine bookstore close to you. Thank you, Elizabeth, for being an inspiring environmental thought leader and evangelist. You are truly living proof that green is good. ELIZABETH GROSSMAN: Thank you so much.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Stefanie Spear. She’s the CEO and Founder of EcoWatch. To learn more about EcoWatch, you can go to ecowatch.com. Welcome to Green is Good, Stefanie Spear. STEFANIE SPEAR: Thanks so much for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Stefanie, as we were talking about off the air before we started this conversation, I am a huge fan of EcoWatch, and I’m so thankful you came on to share your story with our listeners today. STEFANIE SPEAR: Well, thanks. I, of course, always love hearing about huge fans of EcoWatch. We work really hard every day, so I’m glad that you enjoy the content we publish each day. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, it’s important content. Before we get talking about your great website and the content you’re putting out every day on ecowatch.com, I want you to share with our listeners first your fascinating journey, the Stefanie Spear story, before you even came to starting EcoWatch, then we’ll get into talking about your great business and what you’re doing over at EcoWatch. STEFANIE SPEAR: OK. My journey really started when I was a college student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. I was not raised by hippie parents on an organic farm, so I came from a pretty traditional childhood, and really wasn’t conscious of my impact on the Earth. As a college student at such a progressive college, I started looking around and it was really solid waste issues that initially got engaged on environmental issues. The student union at the University of Wisconsin is just an incredible place. It’s on a lake. There’s Lake Mendota and Lake Minona, and just a beautiful place, but I always saw the garbage cans overflowing, and just felt like if I’m on such a progressive campus where people are more conscious, then it really triggered a consciousness level in myself. I really felt like if I can have that, so can everyone else. Why aren’t more people conscious of their impact on the Earth? So, I decided it was due to lack of education, and all we’d have to do is educate more people, and we’d have that tipping point where we have more people conscious than not. I was in a class, and they wanted you to create a pretend company that would help with marketing ideas, and so instead of doing something pretend, I decided to launch an actual company and I launched a newsletter that would educate students on environmental issues, primarily focused on solid waste at first. What I quickly realized as I launched the first issue and people started to get copies and were interested in what I was doing is that there are a lot more environmental issues than just solid waste. People started wanting me to promote issues about the watershed project they were working on and energy issues. This is well before — I’m going to give away my age here — but well before sustainability, that word wasn’t even around, and a lot of other issues, and climate change wasn’t a top environmental issue. I got the bug of publishing environmental news. That was 25 years ago, and just continued on with that mission and that passion all these years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just wonderful. What year did you start EcoWatch? STEFANIE SPEAR: Well, I published an environmental newspaper 10 years in Cleveland, took a five-year hiatus when I had my kids, and then I launched EcoWatch a little more than eight years ago. It was to educate and motivate Ohioans to become aware of environmental issues, get engaged in helping create environmental policy, and just a personal consciousness level on their own, to adapt sustainable practices in their everyday life. So, I launched EcoWatch. It was a newspaper, and I had printed 80,000 copies and distributed the newspaper in 2,200 locations, movie theaters, laundromats, doctor offices, coffee shops. The idea was always to reach a broad audience with these environmental issues, people who wouldn’t otherwise be privy to this information, and mostly because, truth be told, when I took my hiatus to have my kids, I really believed that the mainstream media would have taken over what I was doing, and that you’d see the metro section and you’d see environment, and they would realize that they had to educate people on these issues. That didn’t happen, so I launched EcoWatch and kept filling that niche of providing that kind of education. The paper did well, but it was very clear to me about four years ago that I needed to hop online. Far from an early adopter in the online space, but I knew that to continue what I was doing, I needed to do that, plus I had always wanted to reach a more national and global audience, but as a newspaper, there’s more challenges than just hopping online. So, I took EcoWatch online three years ago this fall. I did that with a big event on the shore of the Cuyahoga River with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I launched the online news site in partnership with his non-profit, Water Keeper Alliance, and it’s been a pretty intense road transitioning from print to online. A huge learning curve, but I’ve come a long way, and we’re growing rapidly, so it’s very exciting. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, to learn more about EcoWatch and to sign up for its great newsletter, which I get every day, it’s ecowatch.com. So, now that you’ve put it online, if you were to put in a sentence or two, the mission of your company, Stefanie, what’s the mission of EcoWatch and ecowatch.com? STEFANIE SPEAR: It’s to educate and motivate people to care about human health and the environment. We work really hard to promote the work of the people who roll their sleeves up every day to protect our water, protect our air, make sure we have access to healthy food, so that’s what we’re doing. In doing that, we’re promoting the work of 1,000 grassroots environmental organizations worldwide. Our fracking page is renowned, as well as our climate change page, but also our renewables page. We’re also about the solutions that can turn these issues around. We’re really active with making sure our finger is on the pulse of all the news, and that we’re putting out what we consider the most important environmental issues, be it showing what the problems are or celebrating the solutions. That’s what we do day in and day out. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’ve got to just share this with you. Here’s a shameless plug. I read EcoWatch every time it comes into my inbox, and I always find unbelievable articles, so you’re producing such a high-quality newsletter and website. How do you do that? How do you go get so many great people and writers and organizations to bring such high-quality content together and deliver it to the public at large on a regular basis? STEFANIE SPEAR: Well, in two words, hard work. It doesn’t come easy, but it’s all about creating an efficient and effective streamlined day-to-day process. I’m very business-minded, even though I also am a big advocate of environmental issues, so it’s really about just the efficiency and the effectiveness of how the process works each day. Then it’s all about our partnerships. We have incredible partnerships with other media sites, with organizations, with events. We’ve worked really hard at building those type of networks, and we still are doing them every day. We’re extremely fortunate to have an incredible cast and crew for our insights writers. They’re all incredibly renowned people who are working hard every day to really create the shift that we need to get more people educated on these issues, so we do have some incredible, insightful writers that provide us content regularly, and we’re constantly bringing in new, exciting people. I brought on just last night Dr. David Guggenheim, who is renowned in his work with oceans and coral reefs. He runs a program in Cuba. He’s just remarkable. So we bring in these very high-level people, but at the end of the day, it’s about scouring RSS feeds and making sure that our finger is on the pulse of everything going on. At the end of the day, we’re a true news site. Though I launched EcoWatch as a non-profit a little more than a year-and-a-half ago, I took EcoWatch for profit out with partners in New York. Our main office is located in Cleveland. We also have a New York City office. I did that because I knew we needed to grow quickly in this online news media marketplace, and one of my goals has always been to reach a broad audience. I’m not going to work this hard each day and only preach to the choir, and we’ve worked really hard to bring on the right staff and move forward so that we can reach the millions of people that we’re reaching each month. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who’ve just joined us, we’re so excited to have Stefanie Spear on with us today. She’s the CEO and founder of EcoWatch. To learn more about EcoWatch or sign up for their newsletter, it’s www.ecowatch.com. Stefanie, talk a little bit about what you’ve learned in this process. Talk a little bit about the University vertical and millennials, and where are we going in terms of our next generation? Folks like you and me are the sustainability immigrants. Our children are the real sustainability natives, and they’re going to take this to a whole another level. Share a little bit about your insight and vision as to the university vertical and millennials and the intersection of where they’re going to take this whole movement next. STEFANIE SPEAR: Couldn’t agree with you more. The future lies with the work of the millennials. I’ve had some incredible interns from different colleges this summer. We need to impress upon the younger generation the importance of preserving our resources, our commons. One of the main reasons that I did a shift in business model was I realized when I went online, unlike the newspaper where I could distribute in Laundromats and know I was reaching a broad audience, once we went online I realized that our readership grew significantly overnight and as it continually grew, that we were reaching what we coined the darkest of the dark green people, who are already engaged and already connected, which is fantastic. We still service those readers and love them, but we wanted to bring in what we call all shades of green, so we started implementing additional content in. It’s gone really well, but I woke up one day, and I’m like, “OK, so we’ve run our content, brought in our readership, but where are the millennials?” and I realized that the younger generation that’s so active and so keyed into the realization that we have to act now, they just didn’t attract them as much. So we launched a vertical called University, and we’re now featuring content from students all over the world. It’s really exciting. Though it’s already launched, we know this fall when the students are back in town, it’s really going to ignite. Now we have university partners — Duke University, the Nicholas School for the Environment was the first to sign on, and you can go to our partner page under University and see our other partners. We just know that there’s really no venue out there for the voice of these students, and so EcoWatch is that. We’re really excited. In September, Connor Kennedy, who’s with us in Cuba diving the gardens of the queen, and he’s going to be at Harvard this fall, and he’s one of our students providing great content, but it’s open to everyone, especially our partnering schools. All the professors are encouraging these students to make content. But at the end of the day, it’s their planet, and they need to make sure that we’re being conscious of usage of our resources. Actually we’re just about to take live a post. It’s an Insights post by Michael Bruin. He is Executive Director Sierra Club, and they just launched a new website, and our headline is going to be I believe, “Students Demand Clean Energy.” So, the whole movement going on on college campuses with the divestment movement, divest from fossil fuels, and now this new campaign launched via the Sierra Club and the Sierra Club student organization, that’s the next step. Divest from fossil fuels, demand clean energy. So, there’s so much energy going on among these students, and we’re so excited to be the venue that’s getting their voice out. Any students who are listening, be sure to hop on ecowatch.com, get your college to join us as a partner. We also have a very exciting EcoWatcher internship program. It’s a virtual internship for students this fall just to really rally people around these issues, get more students, getting our daily blast so that they’re getting educated on the most important issues of the day. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. I’m on your partners page now, and I see already Duke, like you said, and Boise State and Ball State, but this is open. For all the students out there and all the college administrators out there, you want 500 colleges as partners. Perfect. That’s a call to action if I’ve ever heard one, so students, get on ecowatch.com, e-mail whatever the e-mail address is on there, and join up and get your school joined up. This is a great platform for you, and I see here not only Michael Bruin, but you’ve got David Suzuki’s article, Gary Wockner’s article. I mean, what a great platform for students to get the word out and get their voices heard. STEFANIE SPEAR: Yeah. Our goal, like I said, is to reach all shades of green, people who are just beginning to connect the dots between human health and the environment. We’re really engaged with the health and wellness community. Keystone XL is a big issue that hit mainstream media, but what if there’s someone who just cares about their own house, but reads about why you should eat avocados every day, and they come on the site, and they’re reading that because that is what engaged them, but all of a sudden they see an article on the Keystone XL. They’ve heard about it on mainstream media, they click on that article. All of a sudden now they’re engaged in the issue. They’re getting the facts about the problem with an export pipeline. So, that’s really our goal. We’re well over a million hits a month and growing rapidly. We believe it’s this educational tool for people that are really going to create that shift. We have to get to the tipping point where we have more people on the planet who care about the future of the health and people and the planet than not. We’re not there yet, and unfortunately sometimes it seems to take a tragic event to get more people conscious, but we’re hoping that through education, that before all these huge travesties happen, we can get the right environmental policies in place, get more individuals adopting sustainable practices in their everyday life, and really get people to care. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Stefanie, we’re down to the last two-and-a-half minutes or so. What news stories are the most recurring on your site? What are the hot, hot topics right now in sustainability? STEFANIE SPEAR: Certainly climate change has been one. D.C. just had historic rainfall, I believe, yesterday. Detroit had flooding like they’ve never seen. California is in a historic drought. The Colorado River basin, huge problems with the ground water and the aquifers, and Hawaii just got hit, which was historic. This recurring theme and glaciers melting. Michael Mann, who’s also one of our insightful writers, did an incredible piece. He just was “on vacation” in Glacier National Park. He couldn’t even be on vacation because all he could think about was how the glaciers are gone. So, certainly climate change, not just the impact on the environment, but also the impact on the economy. We really have to wake up here. My favorite story, the positive renewable energy stories about communities in India who have never had power and all of a sudden, thanks to work with Greenpeace International, they now have their own solar system. They not only have electricity for the first time, but they own the system. That’s just awesome, what’s going on. In Beijing, China they are doing a war on coal. So, just really the fossil fuels and energy and renewable energy, I’d say that’s a constant recurring theme. Anything is possible, and we could transition to cleaner renewable energy, but we on a federal level don’t even have an energy policy. We don’t have a renewable portfolio standard to lead the way. Environmental policy is extremely important, but we take one step forward and ten steps back. We really have to wake up, we have to get money out of politics. Campaign finance reform is a huge issue. Our politicians are owned by corporations. That’s a big problem. So, that’s also a recurring theme, these elections. We just have to educate more people, share content in addition to signing up for a daily blast, be sure you’re sharing your content with your friends, your family, your neighbors. Let’s get more people educated about what’s the most important issues impacting life. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you, Stefanie. For our listeners out there, go to ecowatch.com. Sign up, read ecowatch.com every day. Thank you, Stefanie, for being an inspiring eco-preneur and educating and motivating people to care about human health and the environment every day with your great website, ecowatch.com. You, Stefanie, are truly living proof that green is good. STEFANIE SPEAR: Thanks.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. Today we’re so excited to have with us Roland Bleinroth. He’s the CEO and President of Messe Stuttgart. Welcome to Green is Good, Roland. ROLAND BLEINROTH: Yes, hello, John. Glad to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Roland. You’re doing so many great things with the Green Festivals, and we’re proud media partners with the Green Festivals. Before we get talking about all the great things Messe Stuttgart’s doing both in Europe and the United States, I’d love you to share a little bit about your own history, how you became the President at Messe Stuttgart, and why it’s doing so well in Europe, and why you’re doing what you’re doing in the United States. ROLAND BLEINROTH: Well, actually I think that would be a very, very long answer. I’ll keep it brief and short. I’ve got a bit of an unusual biography background here. I was originally born in Bonn in Germany, but even in school I spent some time overseas in Switzerland and later on in Pakistan, Islamabad actually — quite well known today, I used to have to explain where I lived — because my father was in diplomatic service at the time, so I spent some time overseas in school, and continued doing that in college, which I spent in Germany and in the States, in Pennsylvania, actually, in part. So quite an international background to begin with. That kind of continued on in my career after college, which started with a large automotive company in Germany. Then I moved onto the States and was stationed for 10 years in Atlanta, Georgia as the President of a trade show company, so I was producing trade shows in North America at that time. That was before I came CEO of Messe Stuttgart, which is based in Stuttgart, Germany again. It is an international trade show organizer. We actually run about 60 shows annually in Germany as well as in quite a few other places around the world. Our latest addition, which we’re very happy and proud to be able to add to the portfolio, is the Green Festivals in the U.S., which has an exact complementary show in Stuttgart as well. We do the exact same format here. We’ve done so for a couple of years, and it’s quite successful here, and we see it coming on strong in the U.S. as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. For our listeners out there who want to learn more about the Green Festivals and want to come attend, this fall there are festivals in Los Angeles on September 12, 13 and 14, Chicago October 24, 25, 26, and in San Francisco November 14, 15 and 16. Go to greenfestivals.org to learn more about the Green Festivals and come to these shows. They’re really great. Before we get talking about what’s going on in the United States, share a little bit, Roland, about Messe Stuttgart and the success of the Green Festivals in Germany. What time of year do you have those festivals and how big are they over in Germany already? ROLAND BLEINROTH: In Germany we started doing these kinds of shows quite a long time ago. It really became more significant in 2007, when we really focused on the food sector and created a new show format just for that particular element. Right now, we’re doing eight separate shows that are run concurrently, and that actually makes up our Green Festival here in Stuttgart. We kind of call them the spring shows. They are in spring. They are annually in mid-April, but there are actually eight individual show topics ranging from, of course, food, which is the core topic to be addressed, but also includes fair trade, green finance, fair finance, of course home energy conservation, home building, sustainability in that. Immobility is a topic which concentrates on new sustainable mobility solutions, that is cars, but not only, there are also car-sharing models and innovative new engine types, of course electric power being the predominant one right now. It even includes something like yoga, which philosophically has a little bit of a link, too, so this yoga expo was the eighth one that we added to the portfolio. The Green Festivals that are in the U.S. also do cover all those topics under one header. Germany, because the shows evolved individually, we actually have eight different topics, eight different shows that are marketed individually. In the U.S. it’s all under Green Festivals. It still covers all those sectors. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Roland, talk a little bit about your thought process in terms of the motivations taking your success in Germany in Europe and around the world, frankly, and then bringing the Green Festivals to the United States and taking over the Green Festivals and putting your stamp and your fingerprints all over it and then scaling it. How did that go? Talk a little bit about your motivations and decision making there. ROLAND BLEINROTH: As a trade show organizer, just in general, you always have to be cognizant of where’s the market going? Where are the markets? We are serving markets with a mirror image of what’s going on out there, so you always have to be on your toes and discover, find, identify new market trends and hopefully be able to create a show to serve that market. With the green industry, sustainability, that is definitely a market that is up-and-coming. Quite frankly, in Europe, particularly in Germany, we tend to be a little bit faster in this particular topic, not on all. But in this particular one, we certainly are — recycling, sustainability, the green movement, also in the political arena, is quite ahead of where it is in North America, and much more established, and has already taken the next turn to be coming mainstream and has done so quite a few years ago. So, we needed to address this topic, and when we do that with any topic, for that matter, it is always an international aspect. There is always an international component to any trade show because the small and medium-sized companies these days will look international sooner or later, usually sooner. When we do that, we also look at where is my next international market that would be interesting for my customer base? Therefore, we were very happy to find the opportunity in the U.S. to become involved with the Green Festival, which had already been established in the U.S. It’s actually been online for 13 years as of now. We only became involved last year, and we’re very happy and proud to be able to add some new energy, some new ideas and formats to it now to take it to the next level. That next level is really what we see happening in the U.S. It’s happening in society, and therefore we’re very confident that the shows will continue to be very successful too, because they serve an increasing market, they serve a need. The consumer as well as the trade customer needs this information platform, needs the marketing platform, more so now than ever before. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s really fascinating. You’re an expert with regards to consumer trade shows. You’ve been doing it most of your professional life. Can you explain how trading consumer shows can make a positive contribution to the green movement? ROLAND BLEINROTH: Let’s start on the consumer side. The consumer show serves as an information platform. It allows consumers to discover new trends, new products, new ideas, get information on a topic that they’re already interested in. Typically, if you’re frank about it, a person will only come to a consumer show if he’s somewhat interested in the topic. So, yes, if you have a certain inclination here towards the green movement, you will find a universe of new ideas, of experts to mingle with, of similar programs to learn from the industry leaders, and, most exciting maybe, products on the show floor that you never knew were out there, but that are totally fascinating and that you might want to get your hands on, not only during the show, but also after the show. So, the consumer side of the trade show business serves as the information platform. It creates demand by allowing people to discover products. The typical trade-only show, of course, provides a trade platform for manufacturers and retailers to again exchange information and to find sourcing models and to really create the offering to serve the consumers’ needs. Both go hand in hand, and therefore even the consumer show always has a trade component, and many trade shows have a consumer component, so we’re really kind of evolving to hybrid shows where both is the case, and that’s the same with Green Festivals. We’re very encouraged to see more B2B, more business-to-business attendees coming, more retailers coming to find out what the offerings are to discover new suppliers, new products that will be enticing to the customers. Of course, the more the consumers know about that, the more they will ask for it, and that’s where you create momentum and safe, sustaining movement. That’s what’s really happening in the U.S. right now, and we’re very excited to be able to make a small contribution towards getting this wheel rolling, and it’s on a roll. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who just joined us, we’ve got Roland Bleinroth. He’s the President of Messe Stuttgart. He’s on with us today talking about the Green Festivals coming to the United States and which events are happening this fall in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and San Francisco. Go to greenfestivals.org and learn more about all the events coming to the United States this fall. Roland, talk a little bit about Germany and Europe vs. the U.S. You mentioned it earlier, and you were so right, and you were very kind in your comments, but Europe and Germany, especially, are way ahead of the United States when it comes to sustainability and the sustainability revolution and now evolution. Talk a little bit about since you’ve been educated and spent a lot of time in the United States and also now live back in your home country of Germany and in Europe as a whole, you have a lot of experience. Talk a little bit about your thoughts with regards to are you encouraged about the pace that green awareness is happening in the U.S., or are you somewhat frustrated, now that you are really the President of a very large movement and have a large business entity here in the United States yourself? ROLAND BLEINROTH: Well, actually, I’m very encouraged by the pace of the movement. The pace has been picked up in the movement in the U.S. and North America, for that matter, right now. It’s really moving forward and amazing things are happening at a much faster pace than we would have anticipated a couple years ago. Why is that? For the same reasons that it happened in Germany and Europe. For change to really happen, there’s got to be a need. There’s got to be maybe even a certain amount of pain to get people out of their comfort zone and get them to start thinking about having to make a change. One such pain factor is energy prices. Gas prices in North America have certainly taken hikes I would have thought were unbelievable. When I was living in Atlanta starting in 1996, gas prices were somewhere around 70¢. Can you remember that? 70¢ a gallon? We’re not seeing that anymore; not anything close to it. The same was the case in Germany a long time ago. That was actually why things happened earlier in Germany, because there was more need. Same with recycling. We are very densely populated in Germany compared to the U.S., so there is much more need to think about landfills. There isn’t the luxury to just add a new landfill when waste becomes a problem, so people started thinking about recycling, about sustainability, about the environment, about their energy costs, much, much earlier, and therefore the movement here became stronger quicker. But that is happening in the U.S. too now, so I’m not advocating high gas prices, but sometimes that has a good effect, yes? It has been a catalyst to get people to think about energy and sustainable energy forms. It has added a little bit of an input, maybe, to the fact that people are thinking about their products and sustainable products and how they were manufactured, under what conditions, with how much energy and maybe with fair labor or not. All these things do go hand-in-hand, and once you start opening that box, it is not only about your food. It is not only about what food choices you make; it’s about your whole life philosophy because you’re going to have to start thinking about your life philosophy. When you do that, chances are you will make some changes. When even a few people make changes, they vote with their dollars, and that does not go unnoticed. It will create change in the economy, and we’re seeing it happening. We’re seeing it happening very, very quickly. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s a great point. You have a wish list, as the President of Messe Stuttgart, with regards to the Green Festivals, and you have a vision of where you’re going to take it. With regards to your wish list, who do you want to see join the Green Festival and showcase their great products and their great services in the coming months and years ahead? ROLAND BLEINROTH: We already have an amazing group of exhibitors out there, and it is truly inspiring. Just walk the show floor and discover suppliers, companies, products that you had never even thought about, that you hadn’t even imagined would be out there. Fascinating. It is truly an educational and entertaining aspect just to be out there on the show floor and see what’s happening. But those are typically startups, smaller, medium-sized companies, which is great to support these companies because that’s where innovation and change is being born. But to go mainstream, on my wish list, top of the wish list is we need to get the message to the large corporations, to the Fortune 500 guys. That’s where the real change will be made, in the sense of making a bigger impact quicker. When a large corporation discovers that it needs to think for its own good about its own ways of going about business about it, manufacturing processes, a lot of things are happening very quickly. One example here is Ford, who’s been our key sponsor at Green Festivals for quite some time now. Ford, of course, maybe not being the type of company that immediately comes to mind when you think about the green economy, but yes, Ford has thought about their business model and has started to reinvent it, which is quite a feat with a huge company the size of Ford, but it starts with research and development. It is truly encouraging to see how a lot of their focus on new products is now focused on green, on sustainability, on recycling, starting at the very beginning, starting with research and developing, starting with the new models that they are going to be bringing out onto the market, already have in some instances. Those are all created with a new mindset. Those are truly new vehicles, not only in the sense of new shape, form, and engine, but in the way they’re manufactured and the products that are being used in that process. Truly inspiring, and if Ford can do it and be successful with it, and they are, lots of other large cap companies can do it, and that’s when you really start seeing things going mainstream and really making a huge impact. That would be on my wish list, to see more of the large cap companies starting to go this route and starting to think about green being good for business because that is really the true message. It is a good business model. It’s not something somebody needs to preach and appeal to the bad conscience of consumers. It’s good. It’s good for the consumer, it’s good for the individual, and it’s good for business. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Roland, we have two minutes left, and we’re going to go from the opportunity of big business changing the world and changing the sustainability model to now people. We have a lot of listeners around the world that are constantly inundated with climate change is coming, we’re all doomed, and things are so bad. Can you share your thoughts and vision as to how consumers can make choices and become part of the solution, and they can actually get involved and actually make a huge difference? ROLAND BLEINROTH: Well, actually, I can make it really short. Become aware of what you’re doing, and care about what you are doing in every aspect of your life. That’s all it takes. If you really make that conscious decision to be aware and to care, then other good things will almost happen automatically. Yes, people should not underestimate the impact that they have by setting an example to others. I discovered it for myself when I became a vegetarian not too long ago, but it has inspired a lot of people that would have never dreamed of going that route also. It also has an impact where you spend your dollars, as I mentioned earlier. Even if a small percentage of people make conscious decisions, they have much more of a proportional impact on society and on the economy. It makes a difference. So, awareness. It’s all about creating awareness, and that creates care. And when we have awareness and care, we have a better world. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s a perfect way to end today’s show. Roland, for our listeners to get more awareness and learn more about all the great green products and services that are out there in this world, we’re asking our listeners to come out to the Green Festivals or go to greenfestivals.org. Learn more about the Green Festivals coming up this fall in Los Angeles September 12, 13 and 14, in Chicago October 24, 25 and 26, and in San Francisco November 14, 15 and 16. Greenfestivals.org. Roland, thank you for being a visionary and an inspiring leader in the sustainability and green movement in Europe and the U.S. and beyond. You are truly living proof that green is good. ROLAND BLEINROTH: Thank you, John. Appreciate it.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited and honored to have with us today Lisa Curtis. She’s the founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli Foods. Welcome to Green is Good, Lisa. LISA CURTIS: Thank you. Thanks for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Lisa, before we get talking about your great new food company and your new products, I want you to share a little bit about your fascinating and wonderful journey leading up to the founding of Kuli Kuli, all the cool and great things and important things you’ve done in your young life. LISA CURTIS: Yeah. So, I’ve done quite a few different things. It hasn’t been a straight journey. I’ve just been trying out a lot of different things, trying to figure out where I can best make an impact. So, I worked in the White House for a little bit when President Obama first got elected. I worked for the United Nations Environment Program, and then decided I wanted to join the Peace Corps. So, I joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer in Niger, West Africa, and that was where I first heard of moringa. I was in a rural village without much fruits or vegetables, and was actually starting to feel a little malnourished myself, and people in my village told me that I should start eating moringa. I did a little research, and realized that moringa is one of the most nutritious plants in the world, more nutritious than kale, and it grows naturally in a lot of countries that suffer from malnutrition. So, I started eating it. I started feeling better and started thinking to myself that we need more people to be eating this and more people should know about it, especially there is an opportunity to sell this product in the U.S. and support farmers over there to increase incomes and help them earn a sustainable livelihood from moringa. So, that’s when I came back to the U.S. and stated Kuli Kuli out of that vision. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What I love about your story — I read your history — and you know my core business is in the recycling business. I love that at 12 years old, that was the first time in the green industry, you wrote an essay about recycling and won a local contest. So, your fate was already set at 12, wasn’t it, Lisa? LISA CURTIS: Yeah, pretty much. I’ve been an eco-child for quite a while. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just so wonderful. Before we even get talking about moringa — and for our listeners out there that want to follow along on Lisa’s beautiful and one of the greenest websites I have ever been on in my life, you got to go to kulikulifoods.com. I’m on the website right now, and we’re going to talk about moringa in a minute, but talk a little bit about that whole interaction. You found the moringa while you were in the Peace Corps, and now you decide to put it into a product. So, let’s go into the moringa. It’s better than kale. Kale is one of the greatest superfoods on the planet. Talk a little bit now about how moringa even trumps kale, and why it’s really one of the new superfoods that we all have to learn about. LISA CURTIS: Yeah. So, moringa, like I said, is one of the most nutritious plants. It’s from a tree and it’s the leaves that more nutritious than kale. One of the really exciting things about it is that it’s a complete protein, meaning it has all your essential amino acids, similar to the protein found in quinoa, and then also in meat proteins. But it’s pretty kale for a plant to have that. It also has really high amounts of calcium, iron, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C. So, it’s kind of like a multivitamin in a leaf, but it’s delicious. We’re the first company to sell it in a food product in the U.S. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. When you started taking this when you were back in the Peace Corps, how did it make you feel in terms of what were the health benefits that you started feeling personally, and then when you started sharing with friends and relatives, what was the difference it made in their health? LISA CURTIS: It’s amazing. For me, I was just feeling really tired all the time, and so I started eating it and it rejuvenated me, really. It gave me a lot more energy, and I think I had been lacking a lot of vitamins, which is one thing you’re in the developing world, but as we’ve grown, have heard stories from people all over the U.S. who bought our moringa products and have been using them, and have said that it’s helped them in lots of different ways. There haven’t been a ton of human trials with moringa, but there’s just some that are starting to come out on rats, that are showing that moringa is cardio-protective, so it’s good for your health, that it can be cancer preventative, so it’s all emerging research, but all the signs are pointing that this is a really good thing for people to be eating. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your website now, and I’m reading the gram per gram nutrition in moringa. Two times the protein of yogurt, four times the Vitamin A of carrots, four times the calcium of milk, three times the potassium of bananas, three times the Vitamin B of kale, and seven times the Vitamin C of oranges. Talk about a superfood. Holy Toledo. LISA CURTIS: Yeah. Sometimes we don’t even like using the word superfood because I think it’s overused and people have gotten sick of that, but this is truly a miraculous plant. I think anyone who’s worked with moringa or studied moringa often will talk to researchers at Johns Hopkins, and will say, “We don’t know why more Americans aren’t eating this. This is an amazing food.” JOHN SHEGERIAN: As a new entrepreneur, Lisa, why, when you think about this and think about what you’ve just embarked on as now the founder and CEO and eco-preneur of Kuli Kuli Foods, why do you think other people haven’t put into foods before, like why are you the first? LISA CURTIS: I think one of the big things has been that there’s not an established supply chain for moringa. I’ve been working on this for three years, and most of that, up until December, was actually when we hit stores in the U.S., so those first two years were really just kind of establishing a supply chain, working on getting the moringa here, making sure it was really high-quality, testing everything. It’s been a lot of work to get to where we are now. I think for a lot of people, that’s a big endeavor, particularly if you haven’t heard of moringa if you don’t really have any kind of connection to people who are growing it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you found this moringa, and now how did you decide to do what you did with it? I mean, you could have put it in a lot of different products. Why did you decide the Kuli Kuli bars that I see here online, the black cherry, the crunchy almond, the dark chocolate, and the moringa powder? Did you talk to food people? Did you study trends in food and where the whole health and the whole rise and explosion of veganism and vegetarianism is going? What were you thinking about when you came up with these products, and who did you work with to create these products? LISA CURTIS: Yeah. That’s a great question. So, my co-founder’s name is Valerie Popelka, and she’s been doing consumer packaged good consulting for five years, so her whole job is to work with General Mills or Hershey or those big companies come up with a new product, do all the research, and test it out in a certain market, and then from there get consumer feedback, and then General Mills will launch it nationally. So, that’s really the process that we followed, doing a lot of research. In the bar market, there’s a lot of people in it, but is also growing. It’s a huge market. It’s about $4 billion a year, growing at 9% annually, and it’s a really easy market to enter. For us, we thought this is fast turnover. We can get quick market feedback. We wanted something that fit well with the nutrition of moringa and people look for nutrition in bars, so that’s where we started. Then the powder actually, we just launched a couple of months ago, and it’s been incredible. Our online sales of the powder has been outperforming our bars by far, so now we’re working on launching the powder into retail. I think there’s a lot of demand for that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What can people do with the powder? How will they consume the powder? LISA CURTIS: Yeah. So, I love putting it in my morning smoothie. I really like making green smoothies, so you can add it in with banana, or you can even put some kale in, or all sorts of ideas there. I’ve also made moringa pesto. It’s really good. It has a light green flavor, so it works well in a lot of savory dishes. It just adds a ton of nutrients to whatever you’re eating. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just wonderful. Right now, where can our listeners buy your great moringa powder or the black cherry, crunchy almond, or dark chocolate bars? Where are they being sold, or is it all online on your great website, www.kulikulifoods.com? LISA CURTIS: Yeah. So, kulikulifoods.com for sure, you can get everything there. We’re also sold in Whole Foods in Northern California, and in Fred Meyers in the Northwest. We’ve got a bunch of other smaller natural food grocery stores across the West Coast, so we’re a small company growing quickly, and hope to be over in New York and down in Southern California pretty soon, but for now the best option is to purchase everything online, or if you’re near a store, check out our store locator page, and you can find the closest store in NorCal or the Northwest. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, I’ve got Lisa Curtis on with us. She’s the founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli Foods. You can look at all their great products at kulikulifoods.com. Lisa, you have created a fascinating business model here, though. You’re not only selling a revolutionary great new plant-based product that’s so healthy for us, but there’s also benefits to the planet. Can you explain how your business model, by buying your products, really does other great things for the planet as well? LISA CURTIS: Yeah. Definitely. We are definitely at our core a mission-driven socially and environmentally conscious business, so we work with nonprofits in West Africa. We source from Ghana and Niger, work with nonprofits there to plant these moringa trees. We’ve planted about 60,000 trees, and that’s just in the past eight months. We work with the nonprofits to do a lot of nutritional education on the ground, really helping people to use moringa locally, making sure they understand what the benefits are and how to incorporate it into their diet, and then selling it to us. We pay above market wages, so we’re going to be Fair Trade Certified by the end of the year, basically meaning that we’re paying a really sustainable living wage for these women. JOHN SHEGERIAN: When people support your company and eat this great product, which is only going to benefit them personally as well, they’re also doing a greater good in terms of the environment and also in terms of world entrepreneurship and other types of benefits that the domino effect is massive in what you’ve created here at Kuli Kuli Foods. LISA CURTIS: Yeah, exactly. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What else are you dreaming about? What other products can you put this moringa into and that you think would get adopted by the new generation of vegans and entrepreneurs and athletes that are trying to get more nutritious food in a better and more accessible way? What other things are you dreaming of? LISA CURTIS: So many things. We’ve got lots of dreams. We haven’t done all the market research yet, but a couple different areas we’re interested in just getting more into the snack market, of on-the-go superfood clusters, as opposed to chips, something a lot healthier, provides a lot more energy. Then, at some point, we’d love to get into the drink market as well, and having little energy boosters of moringa and maybe a little bit of guayusa or mate, or like another interesting kind of caffeine superfood. I think it would be much tastier than wheatgrass, and probably a lot more delicious, and give you a good boost of energy. So, lots of products in the pipeline, but for now, we’re pretty excited about just getting our bars and our powder out there more. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What entrepreneurs learn, the hard lesson, is to execute on visions, we need capital. You took a unique approach to raising capital to get your vision and dream off of the ground. Can you talk a little bit about how you took money in to get Kuli Kuli Foods off the ground, and where you are now in terms of your fundraising, in terms of growing your brand and your company? LISA CURTIS: Yeah. So, we took a very unique approach. We launched last June in 2013 with a crowdfunding campaign. We were one of the highest food campaigns on Indiegogo. We raised $53,000 from 800 people. It was really exciting. So, that launched us, gave us the capital we needed to do a bigger manufacturing run and start hitting stores. Then a couple months ago, we did a crowdfunding equity campaign, where people were actually investing money in our company. We raised $350,000. We still have a little bit more room. We’re talking to a few last investors who might come in on this round, so if you’re interested in that, definitely shoot me an email at [email protected]. We’re really excited about this whole movement of democratized capital and raising capital from the crowd and from people who are your customers and your supporters and want to see you move forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great. So, you raised $53,000 in your first campaign, and now you’ve raised already $350,000 in your last campaign, and you’re raising a little bit more? LISA CURTIS: Yeah, so we can go up to $500,000. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What increments are you raising that second half of the money in? Is it in $50 increments, $5,000 increments? How are you raising that, and what platform is that again, Lisa? LISA CURTIS: So, the campaigns have closed on the platform, but we can still take some on the side. The platform is called Agfunder. If you go to agfunder.com, you can check out our campaign. It’s an investment, so it’s a little bit of a bigger deal, so the minimum is $15,000. So, it’s not like everybody is throwing in $5 like it was for Indiegogo, but I think for people who are in a place where they can make investments and are interested in startups, it’s a pretty reasonable amount. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Yeah, that is. Now, we’re down to the last four minutes or so. Now that you’ve gone from being a climate activist, really – which you still really are in many ways; you don’t change from being a great climate activist, but now you’re really a food eco-preneur as well – what advice would you give to other people who are listening to you around the world that want to wake up every morning and feel like they’re really changing the world for the better by being on the commercial side of business, by being an eco-preneur entrepreneur? What advice and pearls of wisdom can you share with them so you could bring more people along on this journey with you? LISA CURTIS: I would say figure out what you’re passionate about, and then just start small. For us, we started in farmers’ markets, just selling there, and that was really where we tested out is this a viable business idea? I think before you get overwhelmed with starting the whole business and doing all these millions of things, start small and figure out if this idea you have is something that the market is interested and ready for. If it’s something you want to pursue, as long as you don’t get too overwhelmed at first and just start going and making it happen, you’d be surprised at how far you can get. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s wonderful advice. With regards to taking your history in climate and nonprofits and government in the White House to business, what were you expecting that hasn’t happened, and what were you not expecting as an entrepreneur that you’ve been faced with? Share some of the unexpected challenges and the unexpected rewards that have bestowed you in this new role. LISA CURTIS: I think the thing that I did not expect is just the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship, where one minute you’re on the top of the world. A couple weeks ago, we were on a morning show on national television; it was amazing. And then the next week our moringa shipment of our powders, we had all these customers waiting, it was delayed by two weeks. So, we had to send out e-mails telling all these customers I’m so sorry, but it’s not going to get there for a couple of weeks. So, it’s a really high, and the highs are so great. It’s yours, and you feel it, but you also feel the lows. I think that’s something that I really didn’t know until I got into it, what that would feel like. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last minute. How big can this be? What’s your vision today? Obviously, it changes over time, we all change, businesses evolve. How big are you going to get Kuli Kuli Foods you feel? LISA CURTIS: Well, I mean, the market for superfoods in the U.S. is a $30-billion market. We love our superfoods. So, I think the sky is really the limit here. We’d love to start with moringa and a whole line of products there, and then find some other unique African superfoods and start getting those in the hands of U.S. consumers, and really use the market as a catalyst to improve people’s lives in places in the developing world. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just wonderful. That’s a great mission. For our listeners out there that want to buy Lisa’s great food, the Kuli Kuli bars or the moringa powder, please go to www.kulikulifoods.com. It’s a great story. The moringa powder is a new superfood that people should be looking for and look for Lisa’s products, the Kuli Kuli bars or the moringa powder, at your local Whole Foods as she expands her brand across America. Thank you, Lisa, for being an inspiring sustainability activist and visionary food eco-preneur. 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 Darren Crouch. He’s the co-founder and President of Passages International. Welcome to Green is Good, Darren. DARREN CROUCH: Thank you very much. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Darren. Before we get talking about all the important and cool things you’re doing at Passages International, I’d love you to share the Darren Crouch story. Tell us a little bit about the journey leading up to co-founding and becoming the President of Passages International. DARREN CROUCH: Sure. Well, I was born in the northwest of rainy England, and shortly thereafter moved to the Caribbean for a few years with my parents when I was one or two. But I spent most of my formative years in southern Africa. I lived in Botswana for nine years and Lesotho for three years and Swaziland for a couple of years, and back in the ’70s and the ’80s that area was pretty much third world, and so we were used to power outages, water shortages. Although parts of that area are very rich in minerals and raw materials, water was always an issue, particularly in Botswana. That really stuck with me growing up, to really be conscious of our resources and conserve as much as we could. When I graduated high school, I moved back to England in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and went to college there. From college, did an externship here in New Mexico, where I met my wife. My wife’s family are second-generation funeral directors, so that is where the connection, and that was the introduction to me of the funeral industry back in the late ’90s. That’s my story in a nutshell. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s a great story. For our listeners out there that want to follow along and see all the great things Darren is doing at Passages International, please go on his website, as I am right now. It’s passagesinternational.com. Darren, we’re going to be talking about greening the funeral industry and making your last decision a green one. Can you please start from square one, though, with us and our listeners, and share what does today in 2014 a green funeral look like? DARREN CROUCH: Well, I think just like everything else, there are many shades of green, but typically, when you talk about a green funeral, it generally will not involve embalming, which is basically removing the fluids of your body and replacing them with formaldehyde. It will not involve a traditional casket, i.e. metal or wood. It will not involve a concrete vault, which usually is placed in the ground around the casket to protect it. It will not involve a traditional granite headstone, that type of thing. It’s a much more sustainable way primarily of being buried, and the idea, obviously, is that your idea is not preserved, rather it goes back into the environment and helps sustain life for the future. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting. Give a little of history, Darren, because I don’t know much about this at all. What was being done 200 years ago in our country? Was that how people were buried then, and embalming is something that has evolved over time, and now we’re going to go back and do it the way it was sustainably 200 years ago? Explain a little bit the history of funerals and how people were buried 200-250 years ago in the United States and other places in the world, and how embalming took over, and now you’re taking us back to a simpler and more sustainable way of making our final decisions really green and sustainable ones. DARREN CROUCH: Sure. I mean, I think like many parts of the world, a couple hundred years ago, there was no embalming. A body was buried in the ground sometimes, in a simple box sometimes, just directly in the ground, and the body returned to the Earth. I think where embalming really became popular and became more of the norm was during the Civil War, when soldiers from the North would be killed in the battlefields in the South, and there was really no way to get them home. In those days, I think it was like ice in railcars, and that obviously was not a very good way to do it, when you’re taking an individual thousands of miles. The process came about during the Civil War and became pretty common then. I think after the Civil War, it just became more or less the norm. I mean, embalming goes back to Egyptian times, obviously, but in most parts of the world, it certainly is not the norm. That’s the case to this day. And so what we’re saying is there has to be a simpler, more sustainable way to do this, and a more meaningful way, in many cases, to return our loved ones to the Earth. We don’t need to be preserving people’s bodies. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting. You started Passages International back in 1999 or so. 15 years in business, although it’s relatively short in many ways, it’s still a long time to be evolving a business, and especially since the sustainability revolution has taken off and has so much velocity now, the intersection of your business thriving and the green revolution now in overdrive, what have you seen in terms of the greening and the acceptance and the adoption of what you’re trying to accomplish? How has that evolved? Explain the last 15 years a little bit for our listeners. DARREN CROUCH: Well, I guess a couple of comments. One is that most people experience a death every seven years, luckily. We don’t want to be dealing with it very often, right? But because people deal with this so infrequently, they’re not exposed to a lot of the trends and what’s going on. For example, if you go to the grocery store, you’re going to notice all the organic produce or all the sustainable products that are now available. But when you go to a funeral once every seven years — and that’s when most people go when a death occurs to a funeral home — you’re not exposed to very much information. Our company has grown significantly and grows every year, but I think one of the things that has held us back a little bit is the fact that people know they can go to the Toyota dealership and buy a Toyota Prius. They know they can go the grocery store and buy organic produce. They know they can buy carbon offsets when they fly on an airplane. But they don’t know when a loved one suddenly dies, that they can make decisions that will green that process. It doesn’t have to be no embalming, wrapping the body in a shroud in a hand-dug grave in a field. That would sort of be the greenest extreme. There are many shades of green. People can make many decisions that will make the process much greener and more sustainable, and often are less expensive. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We love giving solutions to our listeners out there. Can you share some of the shades of green and examples of how our listeners can green their funeral or their loved one’s funeral, now that you’ve created and produced and that your great company, Passages International, is promoting? DARREN CROUCH: Sure. I think the first thing to do is when a death occurs, most people are going to go to a funeral home. They’re professionals; they deal with this all the time. They can provide a lot of guidance and a lot of the merchandise that you’re going to need to accomplish some of these things. But I think the first decision to decide on is do you want to be buried or do you want to be cremated? Depending on which road you go down, there are different decisions you can make to green that process. Obviously, we talked a little bit about a green funeral or a green burial in terms of burying the actual body in the ground without embalming, using a wicker casket or a shroud vs. some of the other things we discussed earlier. But there’s also cremation. Cremation is debate about how green the process itself is, in terms of the burning of fossil fuels to cremate the body, the release of mercury into the environment, and so there are some issues there. But once the body has been cremated, there are certainly decisions that can be made to green the process. For example, when people think of cremation, they think of scattering and they think of ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Forty percent of people that get cremated want to scatter, and a large percentage of those people want to do it in or over water, so a lot of people will charter boats or go out on their boat or go to the beach, and they’ll scatter. We provide a lot of products that will allow you to do that without the cremated remains blowing in your face or blowing over everyone who’s there. Because often when you’re at the beach, as you know, or on a boat, it’s going to be windy. So, we have a lot of products that are designed to be placed into the water and will biodegrade either quickly or naturally over time, depending on the product that you select. You go back to the process of cremation itself, in parts of Europe where crematories are often owned and operated by city councils, they use the excess heat that is generated from the cremation process to melt snow on sidewalks, to heat public pools. So, when you start looking at it like that, you can say, “OK, yes, they’re burning fossil fuels, but they’re using that energy to heat pools and melt snow.” There’s always tradeoffs, right? I mean, really, if we get right down to it and we talk about green funerals, the only thing that will be truly green in the funeral realm would be if somebody walked out into the woods, they fell down dead, and we left them there. But that’s not practical, right? If we go and we drive out there in a vehicle and pick him up, somebody can make the argument that you burned fossil fuels to go out there and get him. If we refrigerate that body from the time they died until the family has gotten together three days later, then that’s burning fossil fuels. So, we use the greener. What we’re trying to say is there are greener options that you can select, and if you want to just do a very light shade of green, for example, select a willow casket and be buried in the cemetery plot that you bought 15 years ago next to your husband. That’s greener than burying you in a stainless steel metal casket or a hardwood casket. It may not be green enough to some people. It may be too green for other people. What we’re trying to say is we’re not going to judge you based on how green you’re going to be. If you make any decision moving towards being greener, that’s a step in the right direction. If everyone did it, it would make a huge impact. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Darren Crouch with us today. He’s the co-founder and President of Passages International. You can check out all of his great work and the work and the service that they’re doing at www.passagesinternational.com. I’m on your website now, Darren, and you guys have everything, eco-friendly caskets, biodegradable urns, scattering tubes, keepsakes and remembrances that are green, and stationery. Talk a little bit about the sustainability revolution and also the buy local revolution. Are some of your clients or potential clients also asking for not only more sustainable products for their final decisions, but also locally-produced and grown products? DARREN CROUCH: People are definitely looking for sustainability. All the products we create are made from sustainable materials. We don’t cut down trees. Any product that we import, we try to import nested, so that the carbon footprint is really small. For example, we have multiple sizes of our wicker casket, so we might have two adult sizes. The smaller one nests inside the big one. We may also have three or four children’s sizes, and those go inside there. So, when you calculate the actual carbon footprint, it’s very, very small. We do also appreciate that there are going to be some people that are not interested in that, so we do produce some products locally. The shell urn that we produce is made from recycled paper, and the paper itself we get from a company that makes paper plates and paper cups, so it’s food grade non-toxic paper. If you can imagine, when they stamp out all those circles to make the cups and the plates, we take that scrap paper, we blend it up, and we mold it in a mold, the shape of the shell, and we paint it and we do everything that we need to do to it to make it work in the water. That’s a product that we source the paper from Wisconsin and then we produce it 100% here in New Mexico, so we’re all conscious of that. Wherever we can, we’re always looking for local. I guess for some of your listeners, local is relative. People think 2.6 million people die every year. That’s really a relatively small market. It’s not practical to create caskets and urns in every single little hamlet or town across the country. Some of these towns have 10 deaths a year. I mean, unless we would go back to the old days, where the cabinetmaker was the guy who made the caskets. Death is sort of a serious business. There are not many people out there that have the stomach to deal with some of the things that a funeral director has to deal with. You look at the industry, and there are some people that want to do this on their own, and that’s certainly possible, but for the vast majority of the general public, they’re not going to want to handle a deceased body, so that’s where you’d leave it up to professionals. You’d communicate to the professionals or the funeral directors exactly what services and products you want, and they’ll give you guidance based on what the local regulations are, the condition the body is in. There are millions of different variables. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Darren, the issue when our guests come on and we continue the journey of sustainability is cost and ROI vs. the legacy brands and the legacy costs. Is greening our caskets and urns more costly than historical prices of urns and caskets, or is it reasonably priced and acceptable for everybody nowadays and adoptable by everybody? DARREN CROUCH: Well, I think if you were to ask 100 people what they would expect to pay for an urn or a casket and then tell them what they would have to pay for an eco-friendly casket or a biodegradable urn, they would be surprised. I think, generally speaking, the majority of the products that we sell, if you were to walk into a funeral home, they’re going to be on the lower end of the price spectrum, mid to low end. You might go to a funeral home and you might see urns — when I say urns, I’m talking about wood, metal, marble, what you’d consider a traditional urn — you’re going to see urns from $100-$150 to up to $1,000 or more. When you look at a lot of the products that we sell, some of them are going to retail for under $100 and you probably will not find one for over $400 or $500, so they’re on the lower end of the spectrum. The same thing is true of caskets. If you go to a funeral home and look at the casket prices, you’re going to see metal caskets for $1,000 to $6,000 or $7,000. Our wicker and bamboo caskets are going to sell probably for $1,500 to $2,000. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. For our listeners out there that want to simplify their funeral and green it, if they’re hearing this show or reading about this show and your great new company — this is the first time it’s ever been on Green is Good — Passages International, and this is the first time they’re being even inspired by and educated by the opportunities and possibilities out there. How do they now get your products and services if they’re living in an area that doesn’t typically have these kind of things at the funeral homes? Do they contact you directly, or do they ask the funeral director in their area to contact you to get some of your great products and services? DARREN CROUCH: Yeah. I mean, I think the first step is to think about what they would want for their funeral, and discuss it with their families. The second step would be to contact their local funeral home. I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they don’t communicate their wishes to their family. A really good way to get what you want is to prearrange it. You would do that through the funeral home. So, you go to the funeral home, you tell them what you want, you tell them you want a Passages casket or a biodegradable urn or whatever it is you want. You explain the services, how you’d like to see your funeral service or memorial service be conducted, where you’d want it conducted. Do you want it at the church, do you want it at the funeral home, or do you want it at the yacht club? You tell the funeral director what you want, and it’s going to be their job to make it happen. In terms of actually getting product from us, we’re a wholesale company and we sell only to funeral homes. So, my advice for families is look on our website, see what you want, and go to the funeral home and ask for it by name. That’s probably the best way to do it. Funeral homes have our number. If they don’t, it’s very easy to look up on our website, and they can contact us and order it for the family. The beauty of that is that when, for example, if a family is buying an urn, the funeral director will put the cremation remains into the urn for the family, and it will all be ready, vs. someone in a family having to do that themselves. That will be all be part of the service that the funeral home will provide. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. That’s great. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Darren’s great work and his great company, Passages International, or to green your funeral or to have a more sustainable end, please go to www.passagesinternational.com. It’s a great website, tons of information, and we can all make the world a better place. Thank you, Darren, for inspiring us all to make our last decision a green one. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We are so honored to have with us today Raphael Sbarge. He’s an actor and also the founder of Green Wish. Welcome to Green is Good, Raphael. RAPHAEL SBARGE: Hey there. Nice to be here. Thanks so much for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so great to have you. You’ve created this wonderful organization called Green Wish, and we’re going to talk about that in a little while. But before we get talking about how and why you created Green Wish, I want you to talk a little bit about your story. What inspired you, how you even got to this point as an actor, to become an activist as well? Share a little bit about your biography, Raphael. RAPHAEL SBARGE: Thanks, John. I’ve been an actor for a very long time. I started when I was 5 years old on Sesame Street. I lived on the Lower East Side of New York and they were looking for kids to be on this new PBS show. My parents are both in the business; my mother is a costumer designer and my dad tried to write, and I was around it a lot, and I just sort of seemed to find my community, I guess, very young. I was working and studying, and I’ve been very, very blessed with a career, being able to keep working. It is a tough business, as we all know, so being able to find work as an actor regularly, there’s not a day that I’m not grateful about it. That’s kind of that trajectory. I’m working now on a show called Once Upon a Time for ABC, I play Jiminy Cricket, and I’ve got a new show called Murder in the First with Steven Bochco, which is with a wonderful cast: Taye Diggs, Kathleen Robertson, James Cromwell, Richard Schiff, Tom Felton from Harry Potter. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re staying busy. RAPHAEL SBARGE: Yeah. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. RAPHAEL SBARGE: Things are good. But in terms of my trajectory to start with, I’m a dad, and probably that’s the thing that keeps me busiest and the thing I’m most passionate about. With the birth of my daughter, I found that moment when you first are introduced to your child, it’s sort of a remarkable, magic moment, where you feel sort of connected to everything at one time, and the sheer almost sci-fi nature of suddenly there’s one other person there, and here’s your baby, and they hand it to you, and you look around, and the world is both small and large in that moment. I think, as a young parent, a feeling of looking at the world and realizing how this little person who’s now going been entrusted to you needs to be cared for, and somehow it’s your job to do so. I guess, in looking around and trying to figure out what can be done to try and make this world a little bit better place for Gracie and Django, who’s my son who followed, what I began to try and do is try to figure out a way to at least try and preserve some of what was here, and hopefully leave a greener planet for them when they’re having children and their grandchildren, etc. I mean, Green Wish is essentially a nonprofit that raises money for other nonprofits. If you are like me, and you read the newspaper and hear the news, and we hear about declining bee populations and chemicals in our food and climate change and El Niños, and on and on and on. It’s very easy to sort of get, I believe, to a place where you feel almost apathetic, sort of shut down, because it all just seems so overwhelming. How do you possibly make any kind of dent in this enormous morass of bad news in a way? What Green Wish attempts to do is answer that question in its own way by creating a chapter that is essentially an umbrella of giving that’s community based. So, what we’ve done is we’ve created a way in which we can actually give people in cities, who are passionate about this, share these same concerns, want to give back, don’t know what they can do, the ability to start their own chapter of Green Wish. In so doing, what they get to do is, with very little money, start a chapter, get free banking, access to our EIN number, all the designs and websites and everything, in other words, all the assets to start a nonprofit. Then, what they get to do is go into their community and pick smaller nonprofits that are really doing good work in the community. For example, in Los Angeles, we have six different nonprofits that support earth, air, water and sustainable education. All those nonprofits are doing shovel-ready, really important work right here in Los Angeles. We now have chapters that have opened in Kansas, Missouri, Denver, St. Louis, one’s opening in Massachusetts, and in each case, there’s someone who has felt passionate and really wants to give back. Again, I’m responding to the fact that there’s so much need out there. This is a way to give, not just to one, but to multiple, and, of course, under a green umbrella that is, in this case, community-based green projects. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s always interesting, Raphael, is how people come up with their model. So, you started Green Wish in 2008 or so, is that correct? RAPHAEL SBARGE: Yes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: OK. You grew up in New York, you’re in LA on the West Coast now, you have lots of opportunities. You see a lot of things. You have great visibility into a lot of things that are going on, creatively and otherwise, because of the industry that you’re in. What was your spirit and your vision when you created Green Wish? Why this, and why then? Give a little bit of that. I know your children were an inspiration; a lot of our guests say that. I am one of those people that constantly say that in terms of leaving a better planet behind for our kids than we inherited. But explain the model of Green Wish and how you came up with it. It’s fascinating and wonderful, but how did you actually dream that up? RAPHAEL SBARGE: Yeah. Thank you. If you look around, and you say, “Hey, I want to give back, I want to do something,” again, I just think that there’s so many places that we can get diverted to. What happened was this. Ed Begley, Jr. is a friend of mine and Rachelle Carson Begley, and I approached them and said, “What do you think?” Ed loved this idea. He loved the idea because, of course, again, you’re helping multiple groups as opposed to just one, and he loved the idea that being community-based giving, so that when you give money, that it doesn’t go to some shiny building in downtown London. You know that it’s going right back into your community. Ed loved that. Ed then said that he was excited enough about the idea to come on and be the face of Green Wish, he and Rachelle, as well as also be on the board. So, what we’re trying to do, I guess the proverbial give someone a fishing rod as opposed to a fish. I have found that when you are in sort of an action of trying to make a difference, it gives you untold personal dividends in terms of the feeling and the spirit of, “OK, I may have had a tough day, but today I made a little bit of a difference. I gave back. Maybe in a small way, I helped someone along the way or helped a group along the way,” and it’s amazing how much it gives back to you. As far as actually how I got there, obviously, as you said, my children are a huge driving force, but in addition to that, I don’t know that I ever considered myself an activist, but I certainly was always the fellow that I gardened, I composted, I recycled, I’ve always had a thing for trees. I feel like those have spoken to my sensitivities, and this seemed like the right way to go. Ed has said, when he’s been asked about Green Wish, we’re not saying to not write the check if you can to those organizations that you feel strongly about. We want you to, and we encourage you to. All we’re trying to do is making it as easy as possible, so that if you don’t have $50 over time, you get an envelope with a polar bear on it. You can contribute to Green Wish and know that that money is going right back into the community. We keep our overhead for Green Wish very low, so that the money goes really very directly and simply to these groups. You know, again, interestingly, when we first started Green Wish, when we went and called some of the groups that the Board helped identify, when I spoke to the Executive Directors at these organizations, in some cases they literally burst into tears, and they said, “Oh my God, you have no idea how much we need this money and how grateful we are that you can do this.” Any nonprofit will tell you that they spend 50-60-70% of their energy raising money. That’s what they do. So, that means that their purpose, their intended goal, is at times greatly diminished by their drive to be able to somehow raise money. So, by us being able to provide a passive form of income to them, we’re able to essentially support their goals and actually help them make a difference. It’s still somewhat unique to have a nonprofit that actually supports other nonprofits. Again, Ed loved this idea, and I’m so grateful that he’s a part of what we’re trying to do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that are just joining us, we’re honored to have with us today actor Raphael Sbarge. He is the founder of Green Wish. You can check out all of his great work and Ed Begley’s great work at www.greenwish.com. I’m on your site right now, and there’s lot of interesting things here, Raphael. Can you talk a little bit about the media that you’re producing with Green Wish? What does that mean, and since you already are in “the industry” and you are an actor, how are you leveraging your knowledge, your industry, to help get the word of Green Wish out there? RAPHAEL SBARGE: Yeah. Thank you. That’s a great question. Obviously, because I’ve been an actor for over four decades, I’ve seen a lot, and I have a lot of friends. I also, in this case, have been interested, particularly with the emergence and the explosion of social media, etc. as to how we actually get the word out. I do believe that there’s a hunger and a desire to try and find ways to make a difference. We received a grant from California Contemporary Art, a wonderful organization in Los Angeles, and with the benefit of our board member is a scientist and a climatologist named Jess Adkins, we produced a short film called Is There Hope for Planet Earth? which was particularly designed for, essentially, school-aged children, really smart sixth graders, I should say, and adults. It is designed very specifically with the help of Caltech in Los Angeles and Pasadena, a world-renowned organization, obviously university. They worked with us with Jess Adkins to really talk about climate change and what it was from a scientific point-of-view, such that we understand that it’s a polarized red state-blue state conversation most of the time in our media in the United States and elsewhere, but very much so here. My hope in trying to do this is trying to explain climate change from a scientist’s point of view, really clear since. Jess is a very engaging man who is also a father, and was able to talk about the clear science. It’s a ten-minute film. We released it for Earth Day. I’m very proud of it. Caltech came out and supported it hugely, and it’s now basically sent out over all its networks worldwide. Caltech has I think 32 Nobel Laureates at last count. They were very excited about what we were able to do as well. We’re in discussions to do more media like that with Caltech. In addition to that, I worked with Ed Begley and Rachelle, who are building, as you may know, a platinum LEED-certified home, and we produced essentially a series that got sold to an online network called Evox Television, which was really all about the building of this home. It’s called On Begley Street, which you can online either at Evox Television at evoxtelevision.com or also just On Begley Street, which we also have a website, you can find it there. It’s nine or ten episodes that really fun and have kind of the hallmark humor that Ed and Rachelle are known for, as well as it being a really interesting journey. That was also produced in association with Green Wish. That was a for-profit venture, but proceeds from the venture went to Green Wish, which was fantastic. I’m also working with another woman whose name is Jenna DeAngeles, who’s essentially a maker or crafter, which is a huge, huge, huge world unto itself, particularly people who are interested in upcycling and recycling and taking things and making other things that are beautiful. She’s an astonishing talent, and she has also partnered with us and proceeds from her shows are also going to Green Wish. I direct and produce those. You can find those currently both at Evox and also on YouTube. She’s got over 3 million views, and quite an audience worldwide. Again, Green Wish has been both encouraged and supported. Green Wish is essentially, ultimately, an idea, which is let’s try and find a way to make a difference. Let’s find a way to give back. Let’s try and find a way to make the world a little bit better and to not do this piecemeal, but really community-based, and really with a vision of green. We know that we’re facing urgent and dire circumstances. We know that there’s a tremendous need out there, and I fear sometimes that people get to apathy. They get to, “It’s just terrible. Why even try? We’re all going to hell in a hand basket.” Hopefully, by proclaiming your green wish, and actually having a vision of that, you can connect to something that is both hopeful and also really powerful, I believe, as we really help designing people to change minds and change the way they think. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Raphael, I love it. We’re down to the last three minutes, unfortunately, and I want you to share now that you’ve been doing this for years, since 2008, Green Wish — and for our listeners out there, again it’s www.greenwish.com. It’s a great website. What is the best way for our listeners to get involved, to help you open up chapters in cities, and really make a difference? RAPHAEL SBARGE: Thank you for that question. You know, I was excited to come on to speak to you, John, and to your listeners, specifically to say that if people are interested and would like to find out more about starting a chapter, there’s not a chapter in New York at this point. It’s my hometown. I look forward to that chapter, for sure. But there are chapters opening up around the country, and there are more that I haven’t even spoken about that are in early discussions. We are very interested in hearing from you if you’re so inclined and want to find out more, you can e-mail us at [email protected] and let us know what you might be up for. Essentially, with about three or five of your friends, and I think about $300-$500 at most, you can actually start a Green Wish chapter. There’s an enormous amount of support to make that happen for you. I encourage people to reach out if they feel so inclined. If they wish to just make a donation, you can make a donation online, of course, and that goes to all our various programs, our educational program, and the program that really helps support these new chapters. But again, I’m very grateful to be able to reach out to your listeners and let them know that these kinds of things are available to them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s not expensive and it’s not hard to set up a Green Wish chapter. RAPHAEL SBARGE: Yeah, it’s not. If you wanted to set up a nonprofit on your own, I can tell you it’s a complicated maze, and that in and of itself is sometimes a deterrent to people trying to do something. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible. We’ve tried to give you the keys and let you run with it. That’s been very exciting. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect. Well, thank you, Raphael, for coming on today, and for our listeners out there, to set up your own Green Wish chapter or to donate to this great organization, just go to www.greenwish.com. You could set up your own Green Wish and make a difference. Thank you, Raphael, for being a sustainability superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so honored to have with us this afternoon Keya Chatterjee. She’s from the World Wildlife Fund. She’s the Director of Renewable Energy and Footprint Outreach. Welcome to Green is Good, Keya. KEYA CHATTERJEE: Thank you so much for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re so honored to have you today. Before we get talking about renewable energy and everything that’s happening at the World Wildlife Organization, we want you to first talk about the Keya Chatterjee story. You have a fascinating backstory and journey leading up to your position at World Wildlife Fund. Can you share that with our listeners first? KEYA CHATTERJEE: Sure. I started working on sustainability issues coming from a science background, which a lot of people actually do. I worked at NASA originally, and it was actually when I was working at NASA in 2002 when I started my shift to working much more specifically on climate change. It was because in 2002 I was looking at Arctic sea ice data that was taken from remote sensing, from satellites from space, and the sea ice data was alarming. It was far less sea ice than we were expecting to see. What’s even more alarming is that now, if you look at a chart that shows Arctic sea ice over time, you can’t even see that big decline in 2002 because it’s declined so much more since then that that point that shocks me into changing my career is actually just part of the noise in the chart now, because there’s been these huge other declines. I actually got kind of scared into getting more into conservation and advocacy from the science community, and I worked at USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development as a climate change specialist for a little while, but jumped pretty quickly into advocacy when I realized how much needed to be done in such a short period of time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Now you’re at the World Wildlife Fund. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about your great organization, they can go to www.worldwildlife.org. I’m on the site now. It is one of the most visually gorgeous sites I’ve ever been on in my life. It’s just a beautiful site. So, people, to support more of their great work, please just go to worldwildlife.org. Keya, talk a little bit about why the World Wildlife Organization and Fund is focusing, though, on renewable energy. Explain that nexus for us. KEYA CHATTERJEE: Fundamentally tackling climate change is all about transitioning to renewable energy and stopping deforestation. So, we’ve been working on renewable energy around the world for a long time because of our work on climate change. Now, of course, there’s also all of these direct impacts of fossil fuels on the places that we care a lot about, and so, for example, drilling in the Arctic. Well, that wouldn’t need to happen if we had solar panels on our home and electric cars plugged into the solar panels. So, part of what we want to do is make sure that we are not needing to drill in the oldest national park in Africa, Virunga National Park, in some of the most biodiverse places in the Arctic that we’re trying to preserve. We want to give people another option, and, in fact, to protect our planet, we have to take advantage of this other option, which is right in front of us right now. All the pieces are in place. It’s affordable, the technology is there, we just have to grasp it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. When I was reading about you before we ever did this show, Keya, I read one of your things that you said before historically. “We’re in control of our fate here.” So, you’re a true believer that the solutions are there if our listeners and all of us just work together to be part of the solution, we can make change here. KEYA CHATTERJEE: Absolutely, and we’re already seeing that this change is happening. So, a big part of our work in the Renewable It’s Doable campaign has been busting myths about solar, for example. We’re totally in control of our fate because we can choose to use these clean energy sources, and if people started to understand how much cheaper they were and how simple it is to use cleaner sources of energy, then more people do it. We see that time and time again, so there’s actually a part of our website at worldwildlife.org/solar where people can get a quote for solar themselves. We’ve also tried to work with large institutions to help them look at how they can help their own communities go solar, so we’re working right now with the city of Chicago, really amazing uptake. We started with a goal of having 750 people sign up to get solar on their homes. We busted through that, and so now we’ve reset another goal of 1,000 people. What we’ve seen time and time again, when people actually go and get a quote and realize how affordable it is, and think through, then, how unaffordable it is for us as a planet to deal with the consequences of dirty energy, people take that step. So, it’s really exciting to be able to put that information into people’s hands. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Keya, in terms of solar right now, the cost of solar has come down dramatically in the last five or six years. Our listenership is both national and international. In how many states can homeowners get solar for no money down now? KEYA CHATTERJEE: So, there are 16 states where you can get solar without putting any money down and have immediate savings thereafter. The reason that’s possible — it sounds so crazy to people — is because one, the cost of the actual panels themselves has come down dramatically, so 80% off in five years is a really big discount. So, I always say to people, if you walked into the Gap and a T-shirt you really wanted was 80% off, you’d probably buy it at that point, even if you were kind of on the fence before. The prices have come down a lot. The other reason that it’s possible is because the industry has just become more mature, and so they’re able to take advantage of the scale that they have. For examples, there are companies that will put solar on your roof for free. They’ll then take any federal incentives, any state incentives, since they own the panels, and they sell you the electricity, and because once the solar panels are there, the electricity is free. The sunbeams are coming down from the sun no matter what. No one can charge you for that, and so the electricity is free. So, they do charge you for the electricity when they own the panels, but they charge you less than you were paying your utility, and they’re getting that electricity for free, and they’re able to make a profit by squeezing out that initial cost that they’re saving by taking incentives, and then earning money from you as you pay your bill over time. So, it’s a really great business model for people who don’t have any upfront money to put down into solar. You still save money immediately, and you get to be a part of saving the planet. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Just like there’s still some climate deniers out there, and all the science, as we know, Keya, points to climate change is here and it’s actually accelerating faster than anyone predicted even as short as 10 years ago, there’s still some people that say solar is not good. When you’re talking to people or you’re working with people, how do you counteract that argument? KEYA CHATTERJEE: Well, I think that there are definitely vested interests out there who want us to believe that these technologies are not ripe and not ready, and I think that all it takes for people to understand that that’s not the case is to look around and see who’s using solar. The military is using solar in huge numbers. There are communities around this country that have enormous installations. There’s the community Lancaster, California, that has a Republican mayor, that is the solar capital of the U.S. They have solar on every home going in. This is not something that is limited to states that people perceive as sunny, either. The world’s capital for solar is Germany. Some of the leading states for solar in the U.S. are in New England. The Cincinnati Zoo has the largest solar parking facility, which is a great use for solar, of course, because nobody wants to sit in a hot car, and so it shades their cars and at the same time it makes all the electricity that the zoo needs. If you look around and see how many institutions and individuals, and even people you know, probably, have solar on their homes or are using it in some way, then you realize solar has gone way beyond the solar-powered calculator. It’s something that can power our homes and our businesses and our society now, obviously in combination with other renewable technologies like wind and geothermal. But the great thing about solar is it’s super tangible and something that individuals can do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’re so honored to have with us today Keya Chatterjee. She’s the Director of Renewable Energy at the World Wildlife Fund. You can check out more of her great work and the World Wildlife’s great work at www.worldwildlife.org. Keya, you just spoke a little about other options, other than solar. Can you talk about some other renewables, and how are they getting socialized now and adopted by both businesses and people across America and across the world? KEYA CHATTERJEE: Sure. So, in 2010, we put out a report called the Energy Report, where we talked about 100% renewable energy future globally, and it was definitely cutting-edge at the time. People thought, “Is that really possible?” But in the last few years, we’ve seen such a dramatic uptake of renewable energy around the world, that more and more projects are merging, showing that this is indeed possible, not only in the U.S., but in countries all around the world. That’s partly because of the advances that have been made also in wind energy. The nice thing about solar and wind is that they work really well together. Solar is generating a lot of energy during the day. It’s usually windiest at night. A lot of the storage problems that you want, so of course, it’s sunny during the day, it’s very windy at night, you want to be able to store that electricity. One of the great things that’s happening right now is that the cost of storage of electricity is coming down, which means that you can have many, many more renewables. A lot of the reason that the cost of storage is coming down is, honestly, because of electric car batteries. There’s companies like Tesla that are making their patents available to everybody, so that everybody can be part of the clean energy revolution. The fact that they’re manufacturing all these car batteries is simply driving down the cost of batteries, and it’s one of these things that people don’t often think about, but storage is the key to getting to 100% renewable electricity. We’re just four or five years out from having storage at the scale that will allow us to get to that future that we want. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. For our listeners out there that aren’t familiar with it, the World Wildlife Organization, can you share a little bit of some of the recent successes you’ve had with the Renewable It’s Doable campaign, so our listeners understand more of the great work you’re doing at World Wildlife? KEYA CHATTERJEE: Sure. All over the country, we have bus shelter ads and billboards that are all about just normal everyday people using solar. That was a big part of what we wanted to do. There’s actually one that has a picture of me in it, looking into my fridge, and it says, “The sun runs your fridge.” That’s a big part of what we’ve done. I mentioned Chicago; that’s one of our big successes where we have those bus shelter ads and billboards in Chicago, and they are the underpinnings of a program encouraging Chicagoans to explore solar for their homes, and the interest levels have just exceeded our wildest expectations in terms of individuals taking up solar, and it’s been through partnerships with cities like the city of Chicago, through institutions like the Catholic Church, that we’ve been able to have a lot of uptake of residential solar. We’ve also had a lot of big wins just working with cities as a whole on their renewable electricity. Community choice aggregation is this policy that allows cities to take control of their power sources, and even if the state or federal government isn’t acting on climate change, the city can say, “We want to act on climate change. We want renewable electricity.” And, so we’ve had cities like Cincinnati in Ohio, Cleveland, Ohio, we’ve had whole counties in California, Sonoma County, really take this up and say, “You know what? Our communities have a different set of priorities from the federal government, and we want renewable energy and we want it now,” and they’re able to use policies to get renewable electricity for their citizens once they vote for that. So, we’re seeing that starting to increase in New Jersey quite a bit, where there is a law that already allows it, and a law just actually passed the State Legislature in New York as well, allowing pilots for community aggregation in Westchester County. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so interesting, Keya, because it seems as though so many people are frustrated with the political gridlock that exists today in Washington, DC. The constant drumbeat and constant theme that I keep hearing over and over again is that all the actions are happening, all the great innovations and change, is really happening at a city or municipal level nowadays. When young millennials want to now become active in politics, they’re not dreaming anymore of Congress or Senate, as much as they’re dreaming about local politics or becoming a mayor of their local city or municipality. So this trend absolutely intersects with your community choice aggregation, and that you’re saying that the real action and activities is happening at a city and local level now with regards to the adoption of solar and other renewable energies. Is that something that you’re seeing as well with regards to the macro-gridlock that exists in DC, and the real activity and the real change happening on a city and local level? KEYA CHATTERJEE: Absolutely. I think that grassroots movements in general are gaining power right now, and so that includes grassroots mobilization, like the People’s Climate March that’s in New York City on September 21, and it also includes masses of cities moving together, and not always even realizing what each other are doing, but at the local level, realizing wow, we’re on the frontlines of dealing with climate change. We as communities have to face the impacts, whether it’s Sandy or Katrina or Derecho in DC, cities have to face those impacts. Mayors don’t have the luxury of being able to say, “The politics don’t make it OK for me to deal with this.” They have to deal with it, which means that they have the ability to take action, since they usually have much more political support for action. I also find that cities tend to be more innovative in tackling problems, and so that combination of really being on the frontlines and being more innovative has resulted in some incredible action at the local level all around this country. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Keya, we’re down to the last couple of minutes or so, and before we give some more solutions for our listeners, I also want to say this. I know that you have children. You have one son, is that correct? KEYA CHATTERJEE: I do, yeah. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. And I’ve read about you that you, like all of us, we become newly inspired by our children and motivated. You said one of the reasons that you made a turn in your career and you’re so focused on renewables and joined the World Wildlife is because you want to leave a better planet than you found and you were given to your son, as you evolved as a professional and as also a mom. I know you write; you’re a regular contributor on mothering.com on climate change. Can you talk a little bit about climate change, motherhood, and what you write about on mothering.com? KEYA CHATTERJEE: Yeah. So, when I was pregnant with my son in 2010, I had this moment where I was reading a paper about sea level rise and ocean acidification and heat waves, and there were all these projections for 2050. It really affected me in a different way because these mid-century projections, as we usually say, were all of a sudden like, “Oh my God, I’m going to have a child that’s 40 when this stuff is unrolling,” and I just thought to myself that I made this choice to bring my son into the world, and it’s really incumbent on me to make sure that he is safe and protected. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. KEYA CHATTERJEE: And, I think that as a parent, you are obviously protecting some of the most vulnerable people in society, and that’s really what inspires me to be out there marching, to be out there making changes in our home, and I wrote that book The Zero Footprint Baby and write on mothering.com as you mentioned. All of that is to reach out to other parents and help people tap into that source of inspiration that lets them get out and march, that lets them get out and vote on climate issues, that lets them really tap into that source of energy and inspiration. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, you are an inspiration, Keya, and we thank you for joining us today on Green is Good. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Keya’s great work and the World Wildlife Fund, please go to www.worldwildlife.org. Thank you, Keya, for being an inspiring clean energy evangelist and renewing our faith in renewables. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Dave Pasin. He’s the President of TBF Environmental Technology. Welcome to Green is Good, Dave. DAVE PASIN: Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to speaking with you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Dave, we’re going to be talking about a very important topic today that we have not covered enough on Green is Good, solvents in our world, and what TBF Environmental Technology is doing to help us get rid of solvents and the solvent problem in our household and in our businesses. But before we get to talking about what TBF Environmental Technology is doing, Dave, I want you to first talk a little bit about the Dave Pasin journey and story. How did you get to this point, involved with TBF doing this important work, and what were some of your inspirations and epiphanies along the way? DAVE PASIN: Well, thanks for asking. Actually, it’s somewhat convoluted, if you really want to know. I actually got a graduate degree in Psychology from the University of Victoria, and then went to the University of Toronto and lived in Toronto for a while. I couldn’t stand the weather in the East, and came back home to the West Coast. What happened was I was working for the city at the time, and it’s a good job and has lots of benefits, but I didn’t see myself as a big-time city worker for the rest of my life. I wanted to do something else. So, I was working out one day, and one of the fellows I was working out with, a friend of mine from the city, was joking around and said, “Maybe I’ll just start my own company.” My dad had been an entrepreneur and had developed over the years a very, very large construction, plaster and stucco company. So, I had sort of grown up with the attitude of being an entrepreneur, and he suggested, “There’s a paint company for sale in a suburb of Vancouver.” Paint, to me, came in a can. I didn’t know anything about it then. What the heck? So, I went and looked at it, and after what was minimal due diligence at the time, my brother and I bought it together and we owned it for about 18 years. I’m proud to say that from the time I bought it to the time we sold it, we overhauled the product line. It only made two or three products at the time. Over the course of time, I realized that things needed to change, and I remember from my time in Toronto, listening to the news that rivers would catch on fire in Akron and Lake Erie was incredibly polluted and fish were dying and things were incredibly toxic, things had to change. I had a friend, a roommate, actually, in Toronto, who worked for Environment Canada, and the St. Clair River at that time, somebody had dumped some kind of glycol into the river, and it had formed a giant blob at the bottom of the river that they actually had to vacuum up at the time. I thought that was horrible. So, I thought over time, this has to change. We have to leave the planet a lot better than how you found it. So, we were the first to develop, for example, waterborne oil-based paints for use in architectural coatings, so it was water-based paints you could wash up with warm water and soap. We were the first to do that in North America. We were the first to develop water-based fire retardants for use in roofing. Now it’s become all the rage, but we’re talking in the late ’90s, a chemist and I developed a unique coating to reflect heat and infrared from your house, so you paint the underside of your deck or the top of your roof or the deck underneath with this coating, and it would help increase your R-value below it, so it decreased the amount of heat or cold entering into the space. I’ve always been at the forefront, or tried to be at the forefront, or ahead of the curve, in terms of thinking about new products and safer products that would improve the health of people and the environment. So, that’s how it started. Then, a few years ago, I sold the company and started a company that distributed green solids for use in parts cleaning, so for use in cleaning aircraft or railroad trains, planes, automobiles, trucks, you name it. That’s how that started, and out of that, I was at a trade show, and a customer asked me, “Do you have a replacement for a product called methyl ethyl ketone?” which is very toxic. It emits a lot of smog. It helps create smog into the atmosphere, and we didn’t at the time. We were presenting a couple other planets that were based on biosolids that didn’t meet the need, so we spent about two-and-a-half years, and I worked with a very brilliant chemist who I hired, who’s a graduate student, and we developed our first product which was Ecosol 1, which was turning out to be a very effective alternative for methyl ethyl ketone. Out of that, when I was contacting people who I knew in the paint industry — that’s where we started — they asked do we have alternatives for things like xylene and acetone and hexane, and toxic materials like that. So, out of one product have grown three so far, and we’re working on some more, including a replacement for hexane and methylene chloride, which is a common paint stripper, which nobody has been able to do, and we’re getting there. But that’s the idea. So, the idea is about the use of safe solvents, whether it be in paints, coatings, inks, the oil and gas industry, whatever the case may be. So, the idea is to not only improve the environment, but help improve the safety of the worker, the end user, the person who’s using the product and what it’s contained in. That’s really been my focus over the last 20 years, whether it’s been in the paint industry or the solvent industry. In that time, I went back and got a master’s degree in counseling and marriage and family therapy and adolescent psychopathology just for fun. So, I’ve been a busy person. It’s sort of an eclectic group, that you go to school for things that you don’t actually do in real life. It’s a long, circuitous route that’s brought me here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: But, life is a journey. It’s just like sustainability, so that’s why it’s fascinating. You and I were chatting a little bit off the air, Dave, and that’s why our show, Green is Good, has become one of the great platforms for brilliant people like you who are making real changes in the world with regards to sustainability and our environment, so that’s why it’s an honor and a privilege to have great people like you on the show. But we have a short period today, and I want to get a lot of the story out, so I want us to go back to a little bit of step one, and do a little bit of Solvents 101 for our listeners because you have a wealth of information. For our listeners out there again, we’re honored to have today Dave Pasin on with us. He is the President and the genius behind TBF Environmental. Please go on the website. I’m on the website right now. It is chock-full of lots of information. It’s tbfenvironmental.com. Dave, what are solvents? Let’s just do Solvents 101 to start with. What are solvents, and where do we use solvents right now? Where can our listeners find them? DAVE PASIN: This is funny. It’s an interesting question because people don’t realize they use solvents every day, many times a day. The most common solvent people use is water. A solvent is basically something that will dissolve another material, so it can be a liquid or a solid or a gas, for that matter, but will dissolve another material. Water dissolves dirt, grease, oil. You use dish soap, hair soap, or the soap that you use when you’re showering or washing, those are all solvents. In fact, solvents are amazing because nobody realizes what they’re used in. Whether it’s for men or women in hair products all contain solvents, their perfume is a solvent, their cologne is a solvent. Every piece or article of clothing that they have is probably coming in contact with solvents, their shoes, their socks, their automobile, obviously, where they work. So, solvents are everywhere, and we use them many times a day when we don’t even realize it. So, solvents are an interesting concept because nobody thinks about it. They fly under the radar. To give you an idea, the largest industry in the world is the chemical industry, which is well over a trillion dollars a year in sales. The largest part of the chemical industry are solvents, which is about $400 billion a year, one of the largest industries in the world. When you think of solvents, most people think of something nasty that you use with paint, but they’re actually pervasive and they’re everywhere. That’s really what a solvent is and what they do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, talk a little bit about products that contain VOCs. We all hear about this VOC. What is a VOC in laymen’s terms, and what products do we use in our households today that are just sort of ubiquitous for our households, but are potentially bad and containing VOC? DAVE PASIN: Sure. VOCs are carbon-based chemicals that evaporate easily at room temperature. While most people can smell high levels of VOCs, other VOCs really have no odor, so odor doesn’t indicate the risk for ventilation from a group of chemicals. Common VOCs include acetone, so for women, nail polish remover, benzenes are used things like air fresheners, ethylene glycol, which is an antifreeze but it’s also used in foods, formaldehyde which used as a preservative in a variety of different foods and leather products and a variety of different things, again it’s a preservative. In fact, it’s even used to preserve bodies in the mortuary. Methylene chloride, which is a common paint stripper, is used in a variety of different applications. Perchlorethylene, which is being phased out now, but is a common dry-cleaning fluid. Toluene and xylene are both used in a variety of different applications, everything from making gloves to tanning leather to paints and coatings to inks to contact cement, for example, things like that. So, those are the types of VOCs. Where you see them in your house is in carpets and adhesives, so you know when you put in a new carpet, that smell? That’s a VOC that’s incredibly toxic. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Also, you said air fresheners, I heard you say earlier? DAVE PASIN: Oh yeah, air fresheners, vinyl floors, varnishes, upholstery and fabrics in the upholstery, solvents, caulking, paints, a variety of different applications like that. In the home, this is really kind of shocking, because you’ll see it used in air fresheners, air cleaners, and the worst part is air cleaners produce ozone. Cleaning and disinfecting chemicals — I’d like to discuss this because it’s an interesting topic, and some people may not have heard of this, but a lot of antibacterial soaps, whether it be dish soap, and you’ll see some big-name dish soaps that talk about how wonderful they are for the environment, in fact contain a product called triclosan. Triclosan is a chlorinated product that actually is used to slow the growth of bacteria or fungi or mildew, but one of the problems is that is has serious endocrine effects, developmental and reproductive toxicity effects. Chronic toxicity can lead to, in some cases, carcinogenicity. It can be a carcinogen, can cause cancer. So, those are the kind of things that we’re washing our hands with, or washing other parts of our body or cleaning our dishes with. It’s going into the environment, so it’s going down into the drains, it’s going into our bodies, and we’re involved with that every day. It’s something people need to be aware of. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s harmful for people and the environment. DAVE PASIN: Absolutely, but it’s a common thing if you look at dish soaps, if you look at hand soaps that are antibacterial. Some use Epsom salt, which is a natural product. However, the vast majority use a product called triclosan, and I’ve been on this hobbyhorse for a while about how dangerous it is. In fact, we won’t use any product containing it in our home because I know what it does. But it’s a very common thing. You see almost all of them on television that’s advertised, if you look at the content label, you’ll see phosphates in it, which make it all sudsy. But you’ll also see triclosan, which is the antibacterial product, which is actually a toxin to humans. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who just joined us, we have Dave Pasin on with us. He’s the President of TBF Environmental Technology. You can check out more about what Dave does at tbfenvironmental.com. We’re talking about, and Dave is an expert on, solvents in our world, how VOCs in solvents can be harmful for us if they’re used the wrong way, and how his company makes environmentally friendly solvents for a greener earth. You’re talking about different smells that we all have become very used to, or different products we’ve become used to. Is even a new car smell in a new car, is that a VOC? DAVE PASIN: Yes, it is, very much so. Everybody loves the new car smell, but that’s a huge VOC. It’s the off-gassing of the plastics or other synthetics used in the vehicle. Typically, it will contain different types of solvent to make those products. So, you can have that sweet smell, which can be ethylene glycol, or you can have a more acrid smell, which could be some of the xylene, it could be the methyl ethyl ketones again a sweeter smell. So, you have a variety of different odors within your car. A new car smell can actually be quite toxic. It relates to your home as well because people put plug-in fresheners into their home, or spray their home with air fresheners, and those are VOCs. So, not only are they contributing to ozone formation and lessening of air quality within their home, but they’re actually dangerous to your health. So, those are the kind of things that we need to be afraid of or be aware of. For example, the plug-in ones and some of the aerosols are often made from benzene. Benzene is a known carcinogen, but it evaporates very quickly into the atmosphere, and it can carry a variety of different things. So, you’ll smell a nice potpourri scent in your house. What you’re actually smelling is the potpourri scent carried by the benzene. You have to be very, very careful about those kinds of things. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, on a net basis, we’ll just say that VOCs, for the most part, are bad for us, bad for us personally, and bad for the environment. Our goal should be to reduce the VOCs both in our house and our workplace. That would be good for us personally and our families, our friends, our businesses, and for the environment at large. DAVE PASIN: Absolutely. Just to give you an idea of the effects of VOCs, they can cause eye, nose, or throat irritation, it causes headaches, nausea, and vomiting, dizziness, and they’re particularly brutal on asthmatics. I happen to be asthmatic. When I get into an environment that’s very polluted — for example, I’ve been to China, I’ve been to some major cities where the air quality is very low — I suffer from very serious asthmatic effects. I have trouble breathing, that kind of thing. I have to use my puffer and that kind of stuff, as millions of others do. So, what’s also interesting is when you’re exposed to long-term or chronic effects of VOCs, it’s been linked to cancer, liver damage, kidney damage, central nervous system damage. So, those are the kind of things that you need to be aware of. What I wanted to point out, which is interesting, I know that I’m a great believer in progressive legislation. I think progressive legislation leads to a better environment. We’re seeing that now with improvement of air quality in major cities over the ’80s. You can actually track this. There was actually a report on the news a little while ago. I read about it. You can actually track the improvement in the air quality in a city to a lessening of medical issues that are reported, either emergency rooms or doctors, such as asthma, birth defects, increased birth weight — a child weighs more because it’s healthier — in terms of cancers, in terms of irritations, skin issues, that kind of thing. Those are the kind of things you can actually trace to improvements in air quality and lessening of VOCs in the environment. Those are traced across the United States and Canada, so the air quality improves, so does quality of life, so does health. Those are critical things, and I don’t think that a lot of companies that pollute at will is good for the long-term benefit of A) the company and B) more importantly, the environment and the individuals that have to live in those environments. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Now that you’ve set this whole thing up with regards to VOCs and we’ve had a good discussion about solvents, I want to really now talk about your great company, TBF. I want you to explain to our listeners why are the solvents that you create considered green, and how does that make us have a better environment? Get a little bit into, so we understand, ZemaSol, Ecosol and Tergisol, some of your great new products that are already getting used throughout the United States and North America. So, we have about five minutes left. If you could share with our listeners about what TBF does, and how it’s making the world a better and greener place. DAVE PASIN: Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity. What TBF’s goal is is to provide safe solvents. So, what our goal was was to produce, for example, Ecosol, which is a replacement for use of methyl ethyl ketone and in some cases acetone. It works great as a paint cleaner. It doesn’t irritate your skin, and it’s a very, very low-VOC — in fact, its class is exempt because it’s comprised of exempt materials. So, it’s designed for industrial use as a solvent for use in paints, coatings, inks, adhesives, in the oil and gas industry. Out of that, as I mentioned previously, we developed a variety of other products that we felt there was a need for as an alternative for use in the workplace. We’re finding more and more companies want to be responsible and do the right thing and reduce the amount of pollutants and VOCs that they put into their products. Most people think of paints, for example, but it’s used in inks. When you open a can of a solvent-based glue, those all have solvents in them, like contact cement or your perfume, for example, or it could be cologne or it could be even some of the medications that you take which are synthesized in chemicals. Those are the kind of things that we’re trying to improve. The other product we have is a new product called ZemaSol. ZemaSol is a replacement for xylene and in some cases toluene. It’s a VOC-exempt material. It’s comprised of VOC-exempt materials. The toxicity level is approximately double to triple what its alternatives may be, which would be xylene or toluene. It’s designed again to improve air quality, so it has far less odor, and it’s a lot safer. As I say to people, with any of our solvents, if you drink them, you’re going to get sick, and if you’re stupid enough to drink them, you’ll just get very, very sick, but you won’t die, unlike some of the other materials. Our products are very low toxicity, so they’re not linked to cancer, respiratory issues, irritation of the eyes, nose, or throat, that kind of thing. They’re designed to be very safe for the worker, improve the quality of environment for the worker and for the end user, the person who ends up using the product. The other thing that we’re very proud of, with Tergisol for example, which is a replacement for acetone for use in precision cleaning, like cleaning aircrafts, for example, or motors or whatever the case may be, again is designed to have a low odor. It’s designed to have a good solvency, but it’s designed to improve the overall environment, so as it dries or evaporates into the environment, it won’t contribute to smog. Those are the critical components, so it’s a lot safer to use in a variety of different ways. They’re designed for different purposes, but they’re designed to maximize the safety of the worker, maximize the safety of the environment, and, in fact, can minimize the contribution to pollution that may be affected by other materials which it’s contained in. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Dave, we have about a minute-and-a-half left, and I want you to give any final thoughts to our audience on your great products. For our listeners out there, you can go to Dave’s website, and he has podcasts on each of these products, and you can do a deeper dive on all of these great products, but go on. You have the last word here, Dave, before we’ve got to say goodbye. DAVE PASIN: I appreciate that. Thank you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Sure. DAVE PASIN: I guess what I’m asking people is read the label. When you go to your paint store, ask if this product contains ZemaSol or Turgisol or Ecosol, one of the TBF products, which are known to be safe. Find out. Do some research before you buy something. If not, write the paint company or phone the company, whoever manufactures the product you’re using, and ask why aren’t you using a safer solvent. I want something safer for my kids, for myself, for my family, that kind of thing. I think it’s a critical component people need to look at. When you do that, you’ll find that you create a better environment within your household and within your community. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great advice, perfect advice. Well, Dave, thank you so much for coming on Green is Good. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Dave’s great products, go to tbfenvironmental.com. Thank you, Dave, for being an inspiring entrepreneur and sustainability superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good. DAVE PASIN: Thank you.