JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. I’m honored to have with us today Jeff Speck. He’s an author and city planner. Welcome to Green is Good, Jeff.
JEFF SPECK: Thanks for having me, John.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Jeff. About 13 years ago or so, you wrote the book Suburban Nation, which was called by The Wall Street Journal the bible of urbanists, and today we’re going to be talking about your new book, Walkable City. But before we get talking about Walkable City, I want you to share with our listeners the Jeff Speck journey. Talk a little bit about what brought you to this point. What were some of your epiphanies or some of your best inspirations to bring you to the point where you became a bestselling author of two very important books?
JEFF SPECK: Probably the most important part of my journey was what led to Suburban Nation, which I co-wrote with Andres Duany and with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the husband and wife team who founded the new urbanism movement. But I’m just someone who studied architecture and design for many years. I was an art history major. I was sure I was going to go to architecture school and eventually did, but I heard Andres give a talk in 1987 in Boston that completely changed my direction in design. I like to joke that I was being trained to design the bathrooms of the very rich, and I would have been very happy to do that. Andres gave a talk that he was barnstorming the country basically called Towns Vs. Sprawl, and that talk was the best story I had ever heard because it lifted the veils from my eyes in terms of I knew I liked certain kinds of places or loved certain kinds of place and hated others. Being in the Boston area, I knew I loved Cambridge and Boston and the little villages of Belmont and Lexington, and I hated the area out by the mall in Framingham and Woburn. I knew I liked certain places and was happy in certain places and disliked others, but I didn’t really understand why, and more importantly, I didn’t understand the different histories and processes and, frankly, rules that caused those two different places to be the way they are. What Andres taught me that I subsequently tried to teach a lot of other people by co-writing Suburban Nation, and now I’ve based my career on, is that actually we used to know how to design places very well, we did so almost instinctively, and then we threw all that away and replaced it by a new model of growth based on the presumption of universal automotive ownership that we call “sprawl,” that’s actually destructive to societies, destructive to our health, destructive to our economy. That’s a lesson that I think not too many people had learned by the ’80s, but now it’s a lesson I think that lies at the heart of this great influx we now see back into city centers.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about your new book, Walkable City, and how the green movement ties into walking. Are cities becoming now more walkable? I was just in DC last week, and I’m seeing now millennials moving back into the city. Is the suburban sprawl trend now moving in the opposite direction, and how does that tie into your new book?
JEFF SPECK: It is. I think the statistics are very clear. DC is one of a handful of cities that started a little bit early, and yes, these handfuls of cities are becoming much more walkable. The cities that everyone talks about these days, New York and Boston and DC and Chicago and San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, famously well-planned city — I would say the typical American city is also becoming more walkable, but very slowly and, perhaps, not very much. What happened in DC was that the leadership responded to what the citizens were asking for. A very interesting thing happened between 2005 and 2010, I believe. DC gained 15,000 residents and lost 15,000 vehicles. I like to joke that that was a bunch of Bush employees being replaced by a bunch of Obama employees. That’s probably unrelated, but the fact is that it experienced a little bit early what most American are experiencing now with this huge demographic event that’s now occurring, where most of the new households that are being formed in America are either millennial households or Boomer households, the millennials’ parents. In fact, 80% of the next 100 million households in this country will be childless, and these are households that have no real aspiration for the suburban dream. They don’t need a big house. They don’t want a big yard. They don’t care about schools, which is how the cities usually are lacking, because they’re either pre-kid or post-kid, and they want to have no reliance upon the automobile. They love having transit connections to things that they need to get to. The other really interesting statistic is that when I was a kid, one out of 12 19-year-olds had opted out of getting a driver’s license, and now one out of four 19-year-olds doesn’t have a driver’s license. So, the clear trend here is towards the sort of urban living that, frankly, these kids grew up on. The economist Chris Leinberger points out how while my generation grew up on The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island and that sort of thing, the millennial generation grew up on Friends and Seinfeld and Sex and the City, and their whole ethos is oriented around urban living. In fact, if you pole them, 77% of them say they want to live in America’s urban cores, so that’s where the action is, certainly.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so funny. What you also point out is millennials are all about urban living, but Boomers, or folks like and I that grew up on Gilligan’s Island, my wife and I live here in Manhattan in 600 square feet with no car, and it’s the best 600 square feet we’ve ever lived in in our whole life.
JEFF SPECK: That’s a mansion in Manhattan. My book is written more for the typical American city, Grand Rapids or Cedar Rapids, or a city that might be large but hasn’t been known for progressive planning, like Memphis or Oklahoma City, which is now quite progressive recently. In these cities, the Boomers will start moving downtown once their own kids make it feel safe for them. So, the kids are the urban pioneers. They’re what the real estate folks call the risk-oblivious, who are followed by the risk-aware, which we call developers, who are then followed by the risk-averse, which we used to define as dentists from New Jersey. These are all Andres Duany terms, but the point is that you see a trickle turn into a torrent once the Boomers see that their kids are living quite happily and safely in downtown cores.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: If you just joined us now, we are so delighted to have with us Jeff Speck. You can learn more about Jeff Speck at jeffspeck.com, and you can also buy his book Walkable City on Amazon.com where it has a 5-star rating and other fine bookstores in your area. You talk about, Jeff, in your book, location efficiency. Explain the nexus of location efficiency with the greater trend of sustainability.
JEFF SPECK: If you can allow me to harp on a favorite subject of mine, since this is the Green is Good show, I really feel that the sustainability argument in the U.S. has been misconstrued, and we have been arguing the wrong thing. I’m not speaking about your show, but just about the general discussion that one, particularly as an architect, hears. The house that I built in Washington, DC, on an abandoned lot has solar panels, it has a solar water heater, it has double insulation, it has dual-flush toilets, it has bamboo floors, a hardwood log burning in our German high-tech stove which supposedly contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than what we’re left alone to decompose in the forest. That’s what the brochure says. But all of these gizmos together contribute much less to my living green than the fact that it’s three blocks from a metro station in the heart of one of America’s urban cores. Location efficiency is the dominant impact that we have on our green footprint. It’s determined by that, as opposed to all of this stuff. The green argument we’ve been hearing, to paraphrase it and maybe exaggerate it a little bit, is what can I buy to add to what I already got to make my footprint lighter? We changed all our light bulbs to energy savers, and everyone should, but changing all your light bulbs to energy savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable neighborhood saves in a week. So, the real question is, what’s your quality of life? What’s your lifestyle? Is your lifestyle one in which you are bound to this 2,000-pound gas-spewing machine, or is it one in which you don’t rely on that? I should say that the electrical car argument, for me, and even alternatives to electrical cars that might even prove to be more green in the long run, is not really the right discussion because the principal impact that the automobiles had on us is to spread out. So, people who write about sustainability, like David Owen in Green Metropolis says yes, the car is our single greatest contributor, most Americans, to our footprint, but the biggest reason it is is because it causes us to spread out, to live larger on the land, to have these big garages that we then fill with junk that we need to buy to fill them up. This is getting a little more subtle, but the kind of enemy — and Robert Putnam charted this very well in the book Bowling Alone — but the kind of enemy and emptiness that comes from living in a disassociated suburban location causes this hole in our lives that we need to fill up with junk that we buy. So, there’s kind of a multiplier effect of why location inefficiency makes your footprint so much larger.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk about the electric car. Are you excited when you see Elon Musk with the Tesla, and now he’s going to democratize the Tesla in 2017 and come out with his new version, the $35-40,000 version? Is that exciting to you? And, then now move that part of the conversation into what we see Google is producing, as is others, the driverless car. Talk about how that interrelates with your idea of location efficiency. Is that a new version? And then throw on top of it, for a little icing on the cake, the whole Uber phenomenon. How do those three things fit in with your idea of location efficiency and sustainability in a city that operates much better and doesn’t contribute to suburban sprawl?
JEFF SPECK: I would reorder it. I’d do electric cars and Uber, then the Google car.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s do it.
JEFF SPECK: I want to own one of those Teslas. I think electric cars are ultimately probably a good thing, but I really do think it’s the right answer to the wrong question, which is how can cars be more efficient. Here’s some interesting data that’s in my book. In Sweden, they have the greatest public subsidies of green car purchasing, and so in Sweden more people bought green hybrid and full electric cars than anywhere else. When they did the math afterwards, they found out that the carbon output of the transportation sector, as a result, went up. The guy’s name was Firmin DeBrabander who was covering it, he became convinced that the reason was that people felt so guilt-free about driving, that they were just driving more and more and more. Frankly, it costs a ton less to drive an electric car than it does to drive a gas car. So, if you add up all of the hidden pollution in the making, the moving, the sourcing of electricity, a Nissan Leaf is about two-thirds as polluting as a Nissan Altima. It’s better, but it costs about one-fifth as much to drive. So, you add the lower cost to the fact that we’re feeling guilt-free, and you get a lot more driving. I’ve noticed, as you probably have, too, that the hybrid cars keep getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster. Now I’m always angry when I see a municipal hybrid-only parking space because you can park a 21-mile-per-gallon Yukon in there, but you can’t park a 40-mile-per-gallon conventional Ford Fiesta in it. People think there’s some hidden benefit to hybrid cars besides the better gas mileage, when, in fact, there’s a negative which is the disposal issues associated with the battery, and also remembering in much of America, an electric-powered car is a coal-powered car. That’s trading a hydrocarbon gasoline for a pure carbon, which is even worse. So, I have issues with that. I like Uber a lot. I think Uber just makes taxis a lot more efficient. I like UberX, where people are driving other people around. It’s the same phenomenon as Zipcar. Anything you can do in a sharing economy way that allows you to not own a car makes you drive less. Depending on who you talk to about Zipcar, every Zipcar, which is a car share, takes between 10 and 30 cars off the road. Zipcar is one of the dominant things that allowed me to get rid of my car when I moved to DC. It gave me that comfort, knowing that I could take weekend trips and knowing that I could go to the supermarket with it, that made a big difference. So, that’s great. But the driverless car, the Google car, really worries me because what that does is it makes it easier and cheaper for everyone to not live in a centralized way. It is the atomization of transit, and one of the greatest benefits ecologically of transit is that it causes us to live closer to each other, where there are all the efficiencies of the smaller footprint, the apartment vs. the house. I like to joke that a Google car is just a taxi with the driver out of work. Because of the absence of the driver, which is the biggest cost in taxis, if it drives down taxi using to such a degree that it becomes the standard way to get around, then it’s going to be the second great inducement of sprawl after the federal highway system, so I’m quite worried about that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. You know, we’re down to the last three minutes, unfortunately, Jeff. You are in so many ways an artist. You’re an author, you’re a city planner, and, of course, you’re an architect. And, so, I’m interested, and I bet our listeners are as well, what cities today are to you representing the best paradigm in terms of walkable cities? If you were boss for the day, which cities would you be most excited about redoing right now? We’re down to three minutes. Give us a short list of both.
JEFF SPECK: I’m not a registered architect. I like to joke that I spent seven years in postgraduate architectural education, and now what I do is stripe streets. I have a perfect one-yard pace, and I measure streets. When I go to cities, I restripe them. I’m going to say you asked two different questions. The great cities to go see what they’re doing are the atypical ones like Portland, San Francisco, DC, but then there’s some cities that I’m allowed to show other cities, and they actually take as real, like Chicago, with its new separated bike lanes, its buffered bike lanes, that it’s putting in, that are really worth a look. For me, the surprise is how typical cities that I’ve worked in, like Oklahoma City, like Lowell, Massachusetts, West Palm Beach, Florida, that these normal cities — although no city is really normal — but these not-so-exceptional cities are, as a large group now, beginning to circle the wagons around certain simple fixes that are making them much more walkable in the short run. Principally, those have to do with something we really haven’t talked about at all, which is the reallocation of asphalt, recognizing that many city streets have more lanes even than the traffic would demand, that the lanes are wider than they should be and are inducing speeding, and that they don’t have significant bike facilities, and really need buffered bike facilities, where you pull the parked cars off the curb, put the bike lane between the cars and the curb, that have made great impacts in New York City, Chicago, and other places. I think it’s really between the curbs that the great revolution is happening, and the greatest impact on quality of life can happen.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. That is just wonderful. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Jeff and all his great work and read his new book Walkable City, please to go jeffspeck.com, amazon.com, where it has a great 5-star rating, and other great bookstores in your area. Thank you, Jeff, for being an inspiring author and city planner. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JEFF SPECK: Thank you, John.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Kaylin Richardson. She’s a USA Olympic skier. She’s representing I Am Pro Snow today and also climaterealityproject.org. Welcome to Green is Good, Kaylin.
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: Thank you, John, for having me. I’m very excited to be here. Love radio; love talking to people like yourself.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, we love you because you’re our first Olympic athlete ever to come on Green is Good after 750 guests and five years. We’re honored to have you on today, so thank you today for your time, Kaylin.
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: Nice. Well, I’m so glad to be here, and hopefully I will be the first of many Olympic athletes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I hope so. Before we get talking about the important work you’re doing with I Am Pro Snow and the Climate Reality Project, I want you to share a little bit about the Kaylin Richardson journey. How did you even get to this point where you’re excited about helping the efforts and becoming part of the solution of climate change and the realities that we face right now of getting from off the barrel and into the energy-efficient mindset across the United States and the world?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: That’s so true. I think that with most people’s values, it stems way back from childhood. I grew up in Minneapolis and the chagrin of both my brothers. I wanted to do everything they were doing, so when they started racing, I followed suit. I made the U.S. Ski Team when I was 15 years old, and then raced the next 10 years internationally. Like you said, I had the honor and privilege to race in two Olympics. I have four national titles. But then in 2010 I retired, which you can’t see this in radio, but I’m putting up air quotes. “I retired,” which for Olympic athletes like myself that you’ve never heard of, that is just a euphemism for saying that I wanted to move on with my life, and I traded my race sports for powder boards and moved to Park City, Utah. Then, in addition to transitioning into a big mountain pro skier, shooting with filmers like Warren Miller and other different outfits, I’ve gotten to do some different things exploring the avenues of entertainment and broadcasting with The Weather Channel during the Sochi Games and NBC Sports and some other things. To take it back to when you asked when I really started getting involved, I have this very keen memory of when I was probably about seven, and I’d spit out gun in a grocery store parking lot, and my mom went, “What did you just do?” I was like, “I just spit out my gum.” It had been raining, and the gum had gone under the car in a puddle, and she made me get down on all fours and get absolutely filthy to get that gum. I remember that was the first lesson where my mom was like, “We don’t litter.” It was a learning moment, but from that age on, it’s just we have to take care of our world.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. How did the issue of climate change become important to you? When did you start seeing that is one of the major issues that your generation was going to be facing on this planet and your children’s generation, of course, are going to have to also inherit whatever change you get to make? When did that start coming into your mindset, and realize that you want to become part of the solution?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: I think that being a winner athlete and being part of the snow sports community, we’re the first group of people that I think have really been keyed into how dire of an issue this is with climate change, because it’s not just our livelihood, but it’s our chosen lifestyle. It’s an issue that affects us all. For those that are deniers and aren’t really taking the credence of all of this, it’s going to happen to them too, but I feel like with this community, it’s a group of people that this is something we love. I think that for any huge problem like this that almost seems insurmountable, you have to come together and it really has to come to the things that you really care about that are going to make a difference. The good thing about climate change is that it’s almost unanimously, all these scientists agree that climate change is happening, and they know what needs to be done. There are steps that have to be taken. I’m like, terrible diseases and poverty and all these other different terrible things that are going on in our world where a solution isn’t that cut and dry, this solution to me that I see is right in front of us. We have control to do something, and that just gets me so excited and so passionate, where I look at people that say, “It’s too big of a problem,” and I’m like, “It’s a big problem, but we have the tools and we have the technology to make huge differences.”
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined, we’re honored today to have Kaylin Richardson with us. She’s the champion U.S. Olympic skier, and the project that she’s representing today, you can see it at www.climaterealityproject.org. I’m on the site now. It has so much great information. It’s a wonderful site. Before we get talking more about that, I’m not a skier, Kaylin, but I love watching and I appreciate watching great athletes like you, especially champion athletes that have taken it up nine notches. Have you, on the slopes, seen the impacts personally of climate change?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: I definitely have. If you think about my tenure on the World Cup, that was just seven years. That’s a teeny amount of time in the grand scheme of the world. I saw changes with my own eyes in the glaciers. We would go and train in early fall in Europe, and even just during the season, temperatures were rising. The last two years, because I’m a Helly Hansen athlete — that is an outerwear company that’s based out of Norway — the Warren Miller movies I’ve been able to film the last two winters in different parts of the fjords of Norway and in western Norway back two years ago, I was near this town called Olasen. It was raining in February, and you could see these Norwegians were just dumbfounded because they’re like, “This shouldn’t be happening.” Just this last March I was up above the Arctic Circle between the 68th and 69th parallels in a place called the Lofoten Islands. We get there, and the scenery is staggering. It’s absolutely amazingly beautiful. These huge mountains jutting out of the water. We get there, and of course, the people are like, “It’s so great to have you here. We’re so psyched to have Warren Miller come and film,” but then, of course, they’re like, “But this is the warmest and driest winter we’ve had in the last 200 years since we started recording temperatures.” That is not a coincidence. All these things coming together, people can’t continue to ignore it and just sort of be content in their apathy. Even going back to the late ’70s, the spring snow melts used to start two weeks earlier in Colorado, and that’s just over the last not even 40 years. The fact that snow melt starts two weeks earlier. All is connected with the polar ice caps, they’re melting. That’s going to increase the levels of the ocean. It’s all this big kind of mess, but it’s a mess that we can clean up.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re now a Climate Ambassador for the Climate Reality Project. I gave the website a couple minutes ago. I’m going to give it again, climaterealityproject.org, and also a Climate Ambassador for the I Am Pro Snow campaign. How did you get involved with that great organization?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: Well, back in early 2012, I just filmed with Warren Miller again, because of the partnership with them for the movie Flow State, and I heard that there were rumors that they were trying to do something together in a concerted effort to take pro skiers and snowboarders to start creating this group of activists to get the awareness out and to encourage people to get involved in this battle. Right away, I wrote an e-mail, and I said, “How can I get involved?” I remember back in 2006 when the documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out, and it really impacted me. I remember during his little talk, his slideshow, when Al Gore quotes Carl Sagan, he pointed out that if the earth were shrunk to the size of a basketball, the atmosphere we all depend on for our very survival would be thinner than a layer of varnish. I remember that quote and the delicateness of the atmosphere and the world that we live in. That really stuck with me. I remember when I heard about the Climate Reality Project, soon after 2006, I remember thinking, “That is a worthy cause.” When I found out that there was this perfect conduit for me to get involved and for me to use my own skillset to help with this plight, I jumped onboard immediately.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s really cool. The U.S. EPA has just recently released the Clean Power Plan, and you’re going to be doing some important work and testifying at the EPA hearings on the Clean Power Plan and the potential that this Power Plan has to make across the country of positive change. Can you explain to our listeners a little bit, Kaylin, about your upcoming testimony and what this really means? What does the Clean Power Plan really mean in laymen’s terms for the public at large?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: Yes. So, I actually already testified on the 29th of July in Denver, and it was also in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, that happened simultaneously. It was a really cool experience to be able to tell my story, through my eyes, what I’ve seen personally because I think that a lot of times people just think this is a government thing, this is a political thing, but it’s not a personal thing. The EPA Clean Power Plan is huge because it’s the largest single action that the U.S. has taken to address climate change. This is something I did not know before starting to work with Climate Reality Project, that while the EPA regulates many pollutants like mercury, sulfur, arsenic, cyanide, these things that you hear about as a kid that could kill you, of course those are regulated. I think that I just sort of thought that carbon pollution, since I’d known from being a little girl and taking science class when I was in elementary school, that it was bad for you. I thought that was regulated as well, but currently, right now, it’s not regulated in any kind of power plants. What also people don’t know is that 40% of all carbon pollution is responsible from power plants. So, if this Clean Power Plan can be enacted, that will take a huge bite out of the carbon pollution in our atmosphere. I just think that because the problem comes from the power sector, it’s something that has to be done, and will also kickstart a movement that we can be a leader and an example for the rest of the world because I think a lot of times these naysayers say, “Even if we do everything right in the U.S., because of places like China and India that don’t make this a priority, nothing will ever change.” What I say is that this gives us the power and know-how to show these other nations that it can be done, and sort of be an example because carbon pollution has been costing dollars and lives for far too long.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Unfortunately, there’s a lot of legacy interests that are heavily invested in the profitability of fossil fuel and other dirty sources that relate to the barrel, that want to maintain the status quo, so great people like you, that are out there in front, working with the Climate Reality Project, get to help hopefully change the paradigm. Talk a little bit about the health and economic benefits from the Clean Power Plan. What would it really mean for a cleaner and better America, and what kind of health and economic benefits could we have if this Clean Power Plan does get adopted here and get implemented?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: I think that it’s all about that connectedness that I’ve been kind of talking about because I don’t think that a lot of people understand that we keep trying to remedy the symptoms, not the force of all these problems. No one has to look very far. You just have to look around your own neighborhood. I’m lucky enough to live up in Park City in the mountains, but just down in Salt Lake City, 10 minutes from my home, there’s a terrible air pollution problem. I remember back in February 2013, I read an article in The New York Times that talked about how there’s this beautiful outdoor oasis that is Salt Lake City because the mountains are right at our disposal, but then it has some of the worst air pollution in the nation at times. A physician made this really compelling illustration. He said that if the 40,000 women in Utah who are pregnant at a certain time suddenly started smoking, that would be a genuine health emergency if all 40,000 of them were like, “OK, we’re going to start smoking a pack a day.” But then he went onto say our levels of air pollution in Salt Lake City are causing the exact same consequences as if all these women were smoking, but no genuine health emergency has been declared. So, it’s one of those things where it’s so arbitrary that it’s not becoming a bigger issue because, like you said, there are those special interest groups and the fossil fuel industry has so much money and can control so much, and as much I love our country and our government, there is corruption, and I think that the cool thing is that everyone’s voice is heard. We’re going to talk about that later, what people can do to be heard. Even asthma attacks are so prevalent, and all these hot days and heat stroke and the temperatures continue to increase. Then you even talk about the dirty weather, like Superstorm Sandy and tsunamis and all this that’s been happening over the last 10 years. People talk about apocalypse, and I just have to laugh. I’m like, “No, this is our doing.” These things will continue, but if they go unabated, it’s just going to become more prevalent. They’ve done a lot of research, and they say that if we were to adopt the Clean Power Plan, we would prevent 150,000 asthma attacks and 100 premature deaths annually by 2030. With the Clean Power Plan, the biggest estimated number and goal that they’re going for is to cut carbon emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. So, the great thing with this plan is it’s very flexible from state to state. Each different state is given different goals and what they need to cut because in each state, they get their power and their electricity from different means. If we could get 30% below that 2005 level, it would be such a huge deal. Also, expanding renewable energy will positively affect the economic climate as well; not just the actual climate, the economic climate, producing so many new jobs than the coal industry during this plan. The climate and health benefits are going to be worth an estimated $55-93 billion by 2030. So, if people like to think about numbers and the monetary gains, we need to start investing in this renewable energy and this new future because, ultimately, it’s going to have to happen anyway.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. One of the great things that we try to do on this show, Kaylin, is to talk about solutions because people really want to become part of the solution once they understand the problem. I was doing some reading on you before you came on the show, and one of things I love that you had said, which is a pet peeve of yours, is when people choose to have elective ignorance. We try to give people entrance points to become part of the solution here, and that’s why I’d love you to do next with the last five minutes or so. Can you share how our guests can become part of the positive change and get behind the Clean Power Plan, how they can support all the great work of the Climate Reality Project and what you’re doing at I Am Pro Snow? Can you share how people can now stand up and be heard?
KAYLIN RICHARDSON: Definitely. So, the Clean Power Plan rule is open for public comment until October 16th, so we have less than a month. We need to get as many comments as possible because that really holds a lot of weight. If they can see that people from every corner from the United States are united in this plan, that would speak volumes because, like I said before, the fossil fuel industry is going to fight hard to kill this rule before it takes effect. So, October 16th is a really important date. You can go to climaterealityproject.org, and they make it very easy. It’s an absolutely stunning site to behold, so it’s a very fun place to go visit and get informed, but also they make it very easy for you to fill something out very quickly. You don’t even have to make much of a statement other than, “This is something I believe it and something that needs to change.” Also, if people want to get involved, again, go to the website and there are so many different ways that you can. You can write op-eds or blogs to the local newspaper. But what it really comes down to is just encouraging people to talk about it. I think that a lot of times people don’t want to be the humdrum Debbie Downer at the dinner party by bringing this up and talking about it, but I think, like you said, a lot of times people just don’t know. They’re uninformed, and I think that our current media does a very good job of skewing different things, so that if you can get the information and have a little preparation going in these conversations because I, myself, have talked to some of my best friends, and they are completely uninformed. It doesn’t have to be combative at all. It can be fun, and you can talk about that this is something that can definitely change, and to be part of this at the forefront of this huge movement, is something cool. I think that it’s something that we can share together, and it really comes down to the three different things, your time, your dime, and voice. Your time just means going to the websites, filling out these letters to senators, these letters to the EPA showing that you care, maybe going to different public hearings or different speeches and giving your support. Also, there’s your dime. Whether it’s giving your money to organizations like Climate Reality Project or buying green. I think that a lot of times people think that, “Turning off my lights doesn’t make a difference,” or “Investing in a car that uses an alternate energy, whether it’s a Prius or a Leaf or whatever,” all those things add up. Also, I think it’s just a mentality, that if you make the effort to every day think of how you can change. I started riding my bike a bunch. If I’ve forgotten something at the grocery store, or if I had the time to ride my bike instead of drive my car, I’d do it. In the grand scheme of things, is that going to make a huge impact in 100 years? Probably not, but it’s my own choice, and it’s also me setting an example for others that a lot of small choices make a huge difference. Lastly, people using their voice, like I’ve been talking about this whole time. I think that people don’t understand that just them talking to a couple other people, it’s that ripple effect where, as you can see, it’s something I’m passionate about. It’s something that is so interesting and so solvable, that you can help. The thing is if just you yourself, even if you don’t talk to anyone else, if you go and you submit a comment to the EPA, that is becoming part of the collective, and that’s when big things happen.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome, and that’s so well-said. Thank you, Kaylin, for coming on today. What a great job. What a great ambassador you are. For our listeners out there that want to learn more and want to join this movement and want to become part of the great solution and support the Clean Power Plan, the new EPA plan, please go to www.climaterealityproject.org. Thank you, Kaylin, for being such an inspiring climate ambassador and champion athlete. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. I’m so excited to have on the show today Deborah Miller and Jonathan Miller. They’re the owners of Pisidia USA. I had the great pleasure of meeting them a couple of weeks back at an eco-event in Los Angeles. Welcome to Green is Good, Deborah and Jonathan.
JONATHAN MILLER: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be on here.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, you know, before we get talking about your great new products that you’re going to be selling and launching and you’re going to have on your website, pisidiausa.com, I want you to share first the Miller family story leading up to the founding of Pisidia USA, and share about how you guys came together, where you had been, and how you came together to found this great new brand. So, I’ll let you guys take it from here.
DEBORAH MILLER: OK. Thank you again for having us on, John. Anyway, our journey has been such an exciting one. We went over to visit Jonathan; he had graduated from Georgetown University and was over in Hong Kong. We went over to visit him, and what happened was we saw this great line of eco-friendly silicone handbags, and we went, “Oh, this an amazing product.” We researched it, we found out, we changed a few things, and we decided we’re bringing it over to the United States and the Caribbean. So, we brought it over here. Jonathan came aboard. We’re in partner with three of my other sons, which is an awesome opportunity for me, and so here we are launching it in the United States.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is awesome. I’m on the website now. It’s a beautiful website. It’s www.pisidiausa.com for our listeners out there. So, Jonathan, talk a little bit about Pisidia. Why does it stand out from other fashion brands?
JONATHAN MILLER: Yes, so, what’s so unique about Pisidia is when you actually get to feel the product and see what it’s like, it’s made of silicone, so other than being a sustainable product, the colors and all the bags are water-resistant. Another unique thing is that all of our products are nontoxic, so unlike rubber or plastic bags, there’s no toxins in them, which makes them nonharmful for you when you’re carrying them around you. On top of that, even though we have the eco-side, we’re also very stylish, and we took classic designs and punched them with color, and made them very trendy. This ultimately culminates to product that is not only green, but stylish, and it shows that you don’t have to compromise style to be eco-conscious.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, I’ve seen your bags in person at the event where I met you at, and not only are they amazingly vibrant and colorful, but they’re gorgeous to the touch, they’re gorgeous to the feel, and they’re visually just eye candy. They’re beautiful. They’re just really beautiful. So kudos to the both of you for creating something that’s not only sustainable, but just absolutely gorgeous. So, you’re starting the brand now. Where are you first launching the brand, both physically, and I’m on your website now. Are there online sales available as well?
JONATHAN MILLER: Yes, so we just launched January 8 in the U.S., and we’re based out of Palm Beach, Florida, and we took it as a very slow process the past seven months, where we’ve just been building a strong foundation of the brand by introducing and branding this new affordable luxury collection. I would say one of our goals the past seven months has been just to educate people about Pisidia USA, the material it’s made out of, and the foundation that we’re building to help others.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Deborah, you have your three sons in the business. Is this the first time you guys are doing a family business together, or have you had experience historically doing family businesses together? Is that why you wanted all the boys working with you on this?
DEBORAH MILLER: Well, we have been in business together. Some of them have been in college, so not all have been involved with different businesses that we’ve had, but, in fact, one of my sons isn’t in business with us. I have four sons. We had one prior to this that was consignment high-end furniture and design store, and that also with that and Pisidia, we decided that we are really leaning more to going green, that we really feel the importance of being eco-friendly and having an eco-vironment, and for me as a mom and a grandmom, I want to be able to pass this environment onto my children and my grandchildren.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I like it. So, how did you divide the duties of the company? Who has what position? You and Jonathan I met at this great event, and you both were out there making sure everyone saw the bags and touched them, and it was just really a wonderful evening. Who’s doing what every day, or is everybody doing a little bit of everything every day?
DEBORAH MILLER: Well, I tell you, I’m very blessed because each one of us has different gifts that we bring to the team, and we all work really well together. The boys are really close, but they each have their own strengths, and I’ll let Jonathan tell you about their strengths.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: OK.
JONATHAN MILLER: Yeah, I would say it’s definitely good each one of us has a unique set of skills, so we’re not stepping on each other’s toes. So, for myself, I do the majority of the marketing and sales. I helped launch a startup company in Washington, DC, when I was in school, so I have the experience of gaining traction and trying to build a brand. One of my brothers majored in finance and accounting, so he does a lot of the financial areas, which some of us aren’t as strong in. Then my other brother, Matt, he does a lot of the client relations and negotiation of sales and getting orders for the company.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. So, explain the launch. I saw some of your products a couple weeks back. I’m on the site now. First of all, for our listeners out there, again it’s www.pisidiausa.com. The photos you have on the site are just gorgeous, as the bags are in person. So, explain a couple things. How many different lines are you coming out with first? How many different shapes? How many different colors? Explain to our listeners again where they can buy the bags, whether online or where physically they can buy these bags.
JONATHAN MILLER: OK, so, we actually have 21 different styles, and those can be handbags, those can be clutches, and then we also have smaller accessory items, and then also laptop and tablet bags. We are actually reaching an exciting time right now because you can place pre-orders with us and be one of the first in the U.S. to actually have our bags. For those who place pre-orders will receive their items at the end of August once we begin delivering our inventory. And, so as you said, you can go onto our website, pisidiausa.com, to see our items, and then feel free to e-mail [email protected] to place your order. We will be able to respond to you and give you any information that you have and secure your order, so you can be actually the first one in your neighborhood to have Pisidia.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And will there be stores that are Pisidia branded, or you’ll be selling within other people’s stores in the United States?
JONATHAN MILLER: So, currently, we are in 21 boutiques and spas across the U.S. and Caribbean right now, and those range from across all over the U.S. Our goal is to continue to get into high-end department stores, cruise lines, and resorts, such as Nieman Marcus, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton, to just name a few, as we continue to grow. You’ll be able to purchase on our website as well, but as we’re finalizing the last portions of our e-commerce back-end, we’re going to be taking them through e-mail currently, and then once that’s finalized, you can go on our website and order there as well.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. So, talk a little about at the top of the show, you mentioned that the bags are made out of silicone. Can you and Deborah discuss why is silicon such a good component to make your great bags out of, and why is it a more sustainable product than other things that you can make bags out of?
JONATHAN MILLER: Of course. You know, John, I love when people ask me that question because it’s so invigorating to talk about for me. I think in today’s society of excess and destructive use of just about everything, there’s a need for a silver lining or a gold standard in sustainable practice. We’re committed to making Pisidia USA more and more sustainable every day. This can be seen by our selection of only materials that are biodegradable and environmentally friendly in production, as well as creating a product that is manufactured and assembled that ensures maximized utility for decades. So, our hope is to minimize overconsumption by providing a product that will accompany their owner forever, and combatting the mass consumerism behavior that kind of overruns and outdoes its products.
DEBORAH MILLER: And I can speak from experience. I have carried mine in a downpour, and the water just runs right off of it. A friend that I was with had a leather handbag, and it is spotted to this day. It goes from the beach, wipe it down, to night, to out to dinner, so it’s a bag that can be used all day long or switch to a different style for the evening.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: No kidding. Has silicone been used before in these kinds of bags, or is this a real new application of silicone now?
JONATHAN MILLER: This is becoming a new application, so we’re the first silicone collection, and we have the patent for the hand-stitched material that we incorporate in our designs. What’s so unique about it is we have been getting to know the process so well and fixing all the critiques that have been made and making sure the products are not only high-quality, but durable and will last forever. So that’s why the time we’ve been putting into making the product not only better for its consumers, but better how it’s produced and just make sure that what we are promoting is a brand we stand behind and one that we know will not only last for our lifetime, but can be handed down into another lifetime.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Deborah, how’s the reception been? When you’ve gone to events and you’ve shown off the bags, like the event that we met at a couple weeks ago at Fred Siegel’s in Los Angeles, how’s the reception been by both men and women to your products? Are people responding and leaning into the whole message that green is good?
DEBORAH MILLER: Everybody is. I tell you, I can be out at the airport, at the grocery store, or wherever, and people comment on my bag because it look different, and then when they touch it, like you know, it’s soft; it’s not hard like a rubber. Then when I go into detail and tell people that it’s eco-friendly, that it’s from a sustainable product, they get more intrigued because they realize, “Wow, I can have style and fashion, and still be eco-conscious.” One thing that’s been great is men love it because we have a men’s line that really can be men or women, and we’ve got men carrying our laptop bags and our tablet bags, and we have a weekender that is great, that men and women all love. It’s small enough that you can put stuff in just for a weekend, but it’s durable enough. That one is trimmed a little bit with leather too.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. So, both men and women are really liking it, and they’re responding to the whole mantra that green is good and to have a bag not made out of leather, but made out of silicone, that’s virtually sustainable for decades to come. They really appreciate that sales point.
DEBORAH MILLER: They do. I think it’s an eye-opener to people that are not eco-friendly or they don’t really think about it, when the realize, “Wow, I can be. This is something I can do for the environment.” I think it wakes them up a little bit.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Are the boys, Jonathan and his brothers and yourself, Deborah, are you partners in this venture, or do you have other partners as well?
DEBORAH MILLER: Right now we’re a family-run business, and it’s just us at Pisidia USA.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jonathan, what’s the goal, though? Is it going to stay that way, or are you going to take on private equity or venture capital money, and you’re going to grow it much bigger much faster? What’s your real vision on this?
JONATHAN MILLER: You know, our goal is to obviously grow as fast as possible, and so we’re definitely open to bringing on other partners who can help with building our foundation and stick with our core meaning, and building a business the right way. We’re definitely open to bringing on other partners that we know have the same philosophy as us, and see the potential of building not only just a fashion brand, but building a lifestyle. We are definitely open and encourage anybody to talk with us and help us achieve the dream of growing this brand.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jonathan and Deborah, when you look at other brands out there that have succeeded, both as lifestyle brands, both in sustainability and just in cultural acceptance, social acceptance, where does Pisidia fit in, and what is your role model brand that you’ve said, “Wow, if we can do with our brand like they did with theirs?” Do you have some sort of hero brand or role model brand that you’re emulating? It doesn’t have to be in handbags, per se, but it’s had success both on the green side and also the adoption side.
DEBORAH MILLER: For me, there’s a lot of fashion lines, handbag lines, that I think have done a great job over years and years and years of branding their product, but I really haven’t found anything – and I’m thinking just in the fashion line – that is eco-conscious and stylish.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Jonathan, how about you? Do you have any favorite brands out there that you’d like to follow some of it and blueprint what they’ve done? It doesn’t have to be fashion; it could be food, it could be anything else where it was a new paradigm, but it’s also had a green touch to it, and it’s had great adoption.
JONATHAN MILLER: I would say there are many brands that I admire who have a green philosophy, and one thing, just me being a car person, I would say I really enjoy seeing the innovations that car companies such as Tesla are really making with their products. The uniqueness that they can create a car with having less of a footprint and just also having their own imaging that they know that they’re different, but they can still produce things the right way. They’re creating a new model now which is a more affordable model, and having that kind of mindset that, with overconsumption of cars and gasoline, they actually have the mindset of creating a car that will run more efficiently and on less gas. I would say one of that is what jumps out to me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last two minutes, unfortunately, but I’d like you both to share your final thoughts on why people should buy and wear Pisidia products.
JONATHAN MILLER: I’ll start with this one. As we discussed, Pisidia is stylish, it’s fun, and it makes a statement. It makes a statement that you support a company and product that puts others first and respects the environment. So, Pisidia’s changing the way people should look at fashion. We have styles and colors for everyone, and when you realize just how unique Pisidia is and roads that we’re trying to make to create a sustainable product, it shows that life is a blessing and you should not have to worry about destroying the environment or things around you, but just enjoy it.
DEBORAH MILLER: One thing, we’re also building a strong foundation with Pisidia USA, is we want to give back. With the sale of each handbag, we give back a portion to cancer research. We’ve been blessed to team up with various charities for cancer, as well as the Sugar Ray Leonard Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Not only are we working with the environment, but we’re also working to make a strong foundation to help others.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. So, it’s safe to say for our listeners out there, buy a Pisidia bag, not only being green, but there’s more bottom lines to not only the environment, but also to helping to find a cure for cancer.
DEBORAH MILLER: Exactly, and we team up with other charities as well as each portion of each handbag goes to cancer research. This is what we believe is business with a purpose.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, thank you both for coming on the show today, both Deborah and Jonathan, and we’re going to have you back and be telling the further success story of Pisidia USA. For our listeners out there that want to look at these gorgeous bags – and like I said, I saw them in person. These bags are just unbelievably gorgeous and amazing. Please go to www.pisidiausa.com. Thank you, Deborah and Jonathan, for being inspiring eco-preneurs. You are both living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. Today we’ve got Christine Bader with us. She’s an author, and she just authored The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil. Welcome to Green is Good, Christine.
CHRISTINE BADER: Thank you, John. Thank you for having me on.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So excited to have you on, and before we get talking about your new book, and again your book is The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil, I want you to talk a little bit about the Christine Bader story and your journey leading up to writing the book.
CHRISTINE BADER: You bet. So, I grew up right here in New York City and after college, I did a couple of different non-profit government jobs, but I realized that this world of business seemed to be really important. It seemed to have a lot of influence over the situations that I was reacting to in these other jobs, so I decided, “You know, I should go to business school and really learn how business works,” because I was just interested in the way that the world works, John. So, I went there, and then had the opportunity to join BP, and this was in 2000. I started business school in the fall of 1998, and John Brown came to speak on campus. At the time he was the CEO of BP, and not long before he had become the first head of a major energy company to acknowledge that climate change is real and urge action. This is a big deal for somebody running a big energy company in 1998. So, I saw what everybody else saw at the time, which was, “Hey, this seems to be a different kind of oil man trying to create a different kind of energy company.” So, I joined, and I had an amazing nine-year run with the company, which starts to lead into why I wrote the book. I worked in Indonesia and in China and then in BP headquarters, working with colleagues around the world, and I ended up developing this niche, this expertise, on the social side of sustainability. I know on your show you talk a lot about the environmental side, but I really developed a niche looking at the social side, so looking at the human rights and community impacts of some of BP’s biggest projects in the developing world.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. And so, when did you decide exactly, when was your epiphany moment to write the book, and how long did it take you?
CHRISTINE BADER: Yeah, well, I left BP in 2008, but again, I had such a great run with the company. I worked on these projects that were in really sensitive environments, so I worked on a gas project that was at the eastern tip of Indonesia, in a place that was really environmentally and socially sensitive. I worked on a BP joint venture in China, and what I ended up doing there was consulting with local communities, partnering with human rights groups, because everybody in the company seemed to understanding, everybody who I worked with, seemed to understand that getting those issues right and really investing in sustainability, however you want to define it for the long haul, was really good for the business. So, I left BP in 2008 to work on this United Nations initiative to prevent and address human rights abuses linked to business, but I had such a good run at BP that I was feeling so nostalgic for my time in corporate in life after a couple of years of working on this UN project. Then, of course, on April 20, 2010, the Deep Water Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men, and, as we all know, wreaking economic and environmental havoc around the Gulf and beyond. And then, John, as you and everybody else saw, this very different BP emerged in the aftermath of that. It was one that was callous and it was reckless, and it didn’t resemble the BP that I saw and I knew so well, that I had loved for nine years. So, it really started off as this personal attempt to reconcile these two BPs, and really try to understand, “Wait a second. What did I do there for nine years?” I started talking to friends and peers doing similar work in other companies, particularly where things had gone wrong; so, friends who work in apparel companies like the Gap, after any number of the tragedies in Bangladesh, for example. And I realized that there is this global invisible army of people like me working deep inside big companies; not the PR stuff. These people are far from the cameras. We all face so many common challenges and themes, and that’s when I realized there’s a book here. This story needs to be told because I also got really frustrated with the public conversation after every corporate disaster, which seemed to be, “Oh, great, another greedy, evil company full of greedy, evil people, we need to regulate them.” Regulation is really important, but it’s clearly not the whole answer, so that’s what really compelled me to write the book.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. For our listeners out there that just joined, we’ve got Christine Bader today on the show with us. She’s an author, and she just authored The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil. You can learn more about Christine Bader and her great book at christinebader.com, or buy her book at your favorite bookstore, including amazon.com. Christine, so you interviewed about three dozen people for The Corporate Idealist, three dozen other corporate idealists. What were the common themes and threads that you started to weave out this and hear consistently from these 36 other folks that you interviewed over time?
CHRISTINE BADER: Yeah, John, there were a few that were really interesting, and they did echo my own experience. Now, as I’ve been going around in the companies also talking about the book and sharing these themes, they do seem to resonate, so I seem to have hit on a few good ones. One of them is that no one gets rewarded for what doesn’t happen. A lot of corporate safety or ethics work, or even a lot of the sustainability work, is about mitigating risk. It’s about preventing bad things from happening, but it’s really hard to reward for that. So, one supply chain manager who I talked to from a big multi-national told me how angry she was when one of her company’s internal awards, which are really prestigious in a big company, went to one of her colleagues who managed a big safety disaster. She was like, “Seriously? I’ve prevented, like, 20 of those.” There was no reward for that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. No reward. Cleaning up a big mess, there’s a reward, but preventing 20 of them, no reward. Unbelievable. That’s great. That’s awesome.
CHRISTINE BADER: So, that was one. Another theme was that very few executives, particularly as they get more senior in a big company, ever bear witness to the impacts of their decisions on the people and on communities at the tippy-toes of their supply chain.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Living in the bubble.
CHRISTINE BADER: Exactly. Living in the corporate bubble in the headquarters. So, for example, the International Labor Standards team at Disney was able to arrange for Disney’s CFO to go visit factories in China where Disney branded products are made. They did it like they do every visit, random selection of factories, unannounced audits, and they saw some good factories, but they also saw some that were not so nice. You can bet that that trip has helped that team continue to make sure that they had executive-level support for their work.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk a little bit about that with your own experiences. As you shared at the top of the show, you spent time working in China. What is the paradox between responsible business there, compared to the U.S. or other parts of the world?
CHRISTINE BADER: Well, I’ll illustrate it with a story, John. When I first got to China, my first week there, I sat in on a meeting. This is a 50/50 joint venture between BP and Sinopec, one of China’s state energy companies. We were going to be building a big chemicals plant that was going to use a construction workforce of migrant workers that would peak at about 15,000 men. A lot of people, a big project. So, my first week there, we’re sitting in this room, going through the latest estimates for the cost and the timeline for the project. We’re going down the spreadsheet, and the whole thing hadn’t yet been translated into English. Some of it was still in Mandarin. We get to this line in the spreadsheet, and there’s a number 8. My BP colleague said, “What’s that number? What’s the 8?” The label was still in Mandarin. One of the Sinopec managers said, “That’s the projected number of fatalities.” My colleague said, “I’m sorry, what?” And he said, “Yeah, on a project this big, this many man hours, a two-year construction period, we’d expect about eight fatalities.” My colleague said, “The target is not eight; the target is zero.” The Sinopec manager looked kind of befuddled, and he said, “That’s not realistic.” John, at first, I was horrified, of course. But then I realized he’s right. I mean, given their track record, given the track record of big projects like that in China, you’d expect about eight fatalities. So this is what I was stepping into, of how do you even start to shift that conversation, to change expectations of what is realistic, and what is essential.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Fascinating. Wow.
CHRISTINE BADER: So, we managed to not kill anybody during the construction period. Amazing, but you can imagine the sorts of conversations I had to have about, again, the shifting expectations and what buttons do you push to try to get somebody to see we have to do something differently? So, I barreled in there going, “And we are going to protect the human rights of our workers and our communities.” That didn’t work very well. It kind of fell flat. Then I tried, “Well, these are the standards that BP uses around the world, and so we have to use them here.” They were like, “That’s arrogant.” And so, finally, John, I had to shut up for a while, and just listen to how people talked about their work, what motivated them, what they were worried about, what they got paid to do, what they were measured on. So, finally, when I came back and said, “OK, I understand that you guys want this to be a world-class model project. If that’s the case, these are the standards for working hours, for dormitories, that world-class model projects use. So that’s what we need to use here.” And they were like, “Oh, OK. Why didn’t you say so?” I mean, I’m being a little bit flippant, but you get the point, right? Another theme that emerged loud and clear was the importance of not evangelizing, and of listening. John, those of us who are in sustainability, there’s a tendency to get a little bit preachy, and we say, “If only everybody could just see the world the way that we do.” Right? One of the people who I interviewed for the book, Dave Stangis, who’s at Campbell Soup, he said, “You know, we’ve realized that that just doesn’t work anymore.”
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Who’s been on the show, by the way.
CHRISTINE BADER: Yes. He’s great, right?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: He’s awesome. Dave’s great.
CHRISTINE BADER: Yeah, he’s great. And so he recounts a story that’s in the book of when he first got to Campbell’s, and the CEO is really keen to announce some big, bold sustainability targets, and he said, “Let’s come up them now and I’ll announce them, and then you go tell everybody how to implement them.” Dave was like, “Please don’t do that. They’re going to hate me, and it’s not going to work. So give me some time to sit with each of the department heads, and just understand what are they paid to do, what are they measured on, what are they worried about, what do they need help with, and then we can frame how what we want to get done supports their work.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I also want to go back to your China story. I guess there were no awards given for getting the fatality goal from eight to zero, and ended up at zero. There were no rewards at the end.
CHRISTINE BADER: Actually, John, it’s funny that you say that because the project did end up getting some awards for their sustainability performance later, so I actually, now that you asked the question, we did get rewarded in the end. As you know, in China, that’s really important.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s really important. That’s awesome.
CHRISTINE BADER: So, that’s really good. I’ll just share with you one more theme, if I may. To me, it was really the kicker; it was really what helped me reconcile my time at BP, and that was the theme of incrementalism, recognizing that those of us that were doing the real sustainability work inside big companies, like not the making sure we’re turning our lights off or recycling, I mean, that stuff is important, but the stuff that I’m talking about are the thorniest issues at the heart of globalization. These aren’t going to change overnight, and no one person or team, or even company, can fix them. And so, it was recognizing that, and knowing that sure, I did not manage to transform the whole of BP, but I know I made a difference to those communities around that project I worked on in Indonesia, and to those tens of thousands of migrant workers and the communities living around that project in China, and that’s not bad. It’s not good enough, but it’s not bad. So, just one more story for you. A former Gap employee who I interviewed told me about visiting suppliers in India. At the end of a long day, the guy showing him around said, “I want to take you to one more that’s not on the your list. It supplies the domestic market.” They walked into this residential high-rise, walked up a few stories, walked into this room, and he said it was filthy. There was a kid working one of the machines. I asked him, “How did you feel when you saw that?” And he said, “Well, I have to say, obviously, it was horrible, but it was one of the moments when I felt like all of this work that the brands are doing is actually making a difference, because if the factories that the Gap sources from today looked like that 20 years ago, then we have made progress.”
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. That makes sense. It’s about evolution. I mean, sustainability is a journey; it’s just not a beginning and an end, so there is an evolution. For folks that understand that, I think that’s great. You know, we’re down, unfortunately, to the last four minutes or so. I want you to give us an update. How, so far, is your book being received, and what do you think is the future of corporate social responsibility and sustainability? Where we are here in 2014, obviously we’re way past the tipping point. Obviously, the climate deniers can go yell in the corner all they want, but it’s here, real and now. Where are we going now? How is your book being received in this kind of environment, as you travel and get to share your story, and the stories contained in your book with others?
CHRISTINE BADER: The reaction to the book has been amazing, John, I have to say. It’s been really heartening. First of all, the people who do this work, whether they’re working in or with big companies, or even against big companies sometimes, people have said, “Christine, thank you so much for writing this. I finally have a book to give to my mother so she understand what I do.”
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great.
CHRISTINE BADER: So, what higher compliment is there than that, right? But maybe, on a more substantive level, particularly in companies, people saying, “Christine, thank you so much for writing this book. I finally have something to give to my production people or my lawyers or my investor relations or market people, so they understand that I’m not just about cutting checks to our favorite charities.” So, what’s been interesting is that the book — I mean, I’m glad people are buying it for their moms, and that’s awesome — but also that it’s being used strategically inside companies for people to give it to their CEO or their general counsel or whatever so say, “Look, this is really important,” if they don’t already get it. So, then that transitions into your next question, which is what’s next. I think there are a few dimensions of what’s next. First of all, I think people are getting that integration is really key.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: What do you mean by integration?
CHRISTINE BADER: I mean that you can’t have the sustainability team sitting off in the corner, writing their checks and engaging with NGOs, but they’re totally divorced from the core business of the company, which happens.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: The culture and the DNA. Got it.
CHRISTINE BADER: Yes. So, it’s integration and embedding. The second dimension, which I think you play an important role in by having all these people talk about what sustainability means to them, is definition. Because I think that when you get a lot of the eye rolling and skepticism about sustainability and corporate social responsibility, it’s because nobody knows what we’re talking about. It can mean anything from recycling or sending employees out in matching t-shirts to paint a wall or plant a tree to supply chain management and some of the stuff that I was doing about big oil and gas and mining projects, so one trend that I think everybody should keep an eye on in this space is the emergence of human rights as a framework for how we talk about corporate responsibilities because there is a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a list of 30 rights and freedoms. Granted, you read it, and it doesn’t really read like a business manual, so there’s a little bit of translation that needs to take place, and that’s part of that UN initiative that I was talking about. There is no Universal Declaration of Sustainability, and I think that’s our next frontier.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, we’re going to have you back to talk about the evolution of your book and probably your journeys, sharing your stories with everyone across America, and hopefully they can listen more on Green is Good and hear the story across the world. Christine Bader, The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil, christinebader.com. Buy the book at your favorite bookstore or amazon.com. Thank you, Christine, for being a corporate idealist and sustainability superstar. 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 Will Burger. He’s the Marketing Director of Hope Foods. Welcome to Green is Good, Will.
WILL BURGER: Thank you. I’m excited to be on it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get talking about your great brand, Hope Foods, Will, can you share a little bit about the Will Burger story, the journey leading up to becoming the Marketing Director of Hope Foods? What even led you here, and what made you want to be in the organic and the green industry?
WILL BURGER: Yeah, well, I actually studied business at the University of Colorado years ago, and I took a little detour in my life. I decided I was going to go work with kids. So, I worked with kids for 10 years a youth pastor. That was a fun and a lot of work. Then I went from there and I had a group of friends that I was really close to, and they were all working for Hope Foods, and I was just really loving what they were doing over there. Boulder is just a hub of the natural food industry, so you can’t live anywhere close to Boulder and not catch the bug, so to speak, and I was just loving what these guys were doing. Hope had started this farmers’ market, and so I decided to jump on that team. It’s a really community-focused company, and we started working together and never looked back. It helps when you really love the products and you love what you do day in and day out. I’ve eaten our hummus every single day for a snack, so maybe that’s why I got into it, because I get to eat good food now.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, that’s awesome. I’m so glad you came on the show to talk about all the great things you’re doing at Hope Foods today. Let’s talk a little bit about it. Hope Foods is an important company with regards to the organic food explosion and movement, so to speak. Give a little bit about the Hope Food story. Talk a little bit about their history. How old are they? What’s their journey been like? Where have they been, where are they today, and where do you hope — no pun intended — where they’re going? Share a little bit about the Hope Foods story first.
WILL BURGER: Yeah, so, like I said, in early 2011, Hope got founded near Boulder, and started with just some friends going to the farmers’ market and they started actually as Hope Hummus. So, from the beginning, it was saying, “Hey, you know, we’re not going to ever compromise on food quality,” so from the very beginning we were organic. We were not GMO. Gluten-free is a big one. You know, vegan. That was a big part at the very beginning, when they were laying out who Hope was going to be and the future, they started down that road. From then on out, year after year, we’ve experienced 300% growth. We got into all the Whole Foods, and we’ve really gone across the nation now, which has been really exciting. It’s kind of like being on a rocket ship, you know, and be a part of something. It really has become a movement. Hope started there. This is really interesting. One of the things that, from the very beginning, because we were organic, we didn’t want to use preservatives and all those things that people use in their products, and we also didn’t want to heat treat or pasteurize our product either. So, that became kind of a conundrum. When you become a national company and you have to distribute from Colorado coast to cast, we were trying to figure out how do you achieve that food safety kill step without heating your product or pasteurizing? Everyone does it, but it really just kills the nutrient value and the taste profile. So, maybe about 18 months ago, we decided to pursue this high-pressure processing technology, which has been really exciting. Hope is the only installation in Colorado currently with HPP and a lot of cold-pressed juices are doing that. Basically, we take our product and we pressurize it to 87,000 psi, which is like six times the base of the ocean. What happens under that pressure is our product keeps all the nutrient value, but all the harmful bacteria is removed. So, it’s really been revolutionary for us, and it has allowed us to experience the growth without ever compromising on any of our nutrients, any of our taste profile, or anything like that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Hope Foods, please go to www.hopefoods.com. I’m on the site now. It’s a beautiful website, lots of great information. As you kicked the show off, you were talking about how it’s vegan, it’s organic, it’s non-GMO. Let’s talk a little bit about organic. What is the impact of organic, and what does organic really mean, Will, to Hope Foods and to the industry as a whole?
WILL BURGER: Yeah, that’s a great question. This is something that we’re talking about internally. We’re having these conversations all the time. At a base level, organic means to get that organic seal that you see on the food in the grocery store, you have to have between 95-100% pure organic ingredients that have been certified by the USDA. But other than that, I think a lot of people don’t really know the background of what organic means and what it takes to get to an organic certification. The obvious one that I think a lot of people do know have to do with the use of pesticides or synthetic fertilizers and stuff like that, or organics can’t include GMOs, and that’s another thing that’s a part of organic certification. But that’s maybe the direct health benefit of an organic product, but it’s really also about creating sustainable systems at the food production level and at the growing level and in the agricultural systems, and so part of being organic means that you’re promoting ecological balance and the biodiversity of these systems, at the farming level, really, and so the USDA will go back and make sure all along the way that those challenges are being met. That’s really the second big part of why organic is important, not just because of what you’re putting in your body.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Is it automatically, once you’re organic, you’re non-GMO, or is that a fallacy?
WILL BURGER: No, the difference is GMOs are prohibited from certified organic products, but when they look for GMOs, as opposed to the non-GMO project, they require multiple levels of mandatory testing for the product, and so that would be in sampling techniques, given traceability and quality control measures that the non-GMO projects goes into that the USDA organic seal does not. At a core level, all organic products cannot contain genetically modified organisms.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get talking more about organic farming and other good things, I’m on your website right now and I’m getting hungry right here, Will. I’ve had your products before. Explain to our listeners the three or four core products that you have. You have hummus, you have lentils, and you have chocolate. Give our listeners a little flavor now on the air, without them having to taste them, but make them really excited to taste them, those three products that Hope Foods puts out right now.
WILL BURGER: Absolutely. Well, so, like I said, Hope Hummus was our core brand, and from the very beginning, we decided we were going to do something that had never been done before, and that is we did a spicy avocado hummus. We put avocado into the hummus, and that’s part of the reason why we can’t heat our product. It was really a blessing in disguise, and I don’t think we realized that at first, and then we realized you can’t process avocado into that good avocado taste that you like, and so that’s where the HQT thing came in, but that one really took us to the next level. People were loving it. Then we started to do things like Sriracha. We’re winning all kinds of awards for that right now. We make our own organic Sriracha, one of the only organic Srirachas out there on the market, actually. So, Thai coconut curry — it’s just our unique flavors have been a part of who we are and the DNA of our company from the beginning. It’s not just the typical ones that you’ll see at any grocery store from any major hummus company. The other one is lentils, and a lot of people know about lentils, but lentils are a staple food item for a majority of the world, actually, and people eat lentils. It’s really been slow to come to the United States. We started to do a lentil dip, and lentils are the original superfood. That’s kind of been a big selling point, for people love lentils, and we have four flavors of lentils. We do spicy ones with the habanero, and we have some garlic and some curry. Then the last one is kind of our game changer, and that’s our chocolate spreads. We make these chocolate spreads with chickpeas or garbanzo beans. People will go, “Is that a chocolate hummus?” It’s not a chocolate hummus. It’s just a chocolate spread that uses beans, actually, as a base. Some people think that’s weird. It’s unbelievable. Everywhere we go, people are like, “No way. I didn’t know that it could have this kind of flavor profile and still have this low fat and low sugar.” So, when people are asking me how to eat it, usually I just say just eat it out of the cup. That’s really how it ends up happening.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m telling you, I’m looking at it right now on your website. For our listeners out there that want to look at these great products, the hummus, the lentils, and the chocolate, please go to www.hopefoods.com. I’m looking at it right now, and I want to eat it right out of the tub, so I’m so glad you said that. I don’t feel so bad now. Oh my gosh. This is great. For our listeners out there that just tuned in, we’re so honored and excited to have with us Will Burger today. He’s the Marketing Director of Hope Foods. Again, to learn more about Hope Foods and support their great products, go to www.hopefoods.com. Go to Whole Foods and buy their product. I’m going there after the show and buying some of this coconut spread and eating it right out of the tub. Let’s go back and talk about organic farming, Will, a little bit. What’s your take and what’s your great company’s take on organic farming and the world? We know we are outgrowing our food supply in the world. Is organic farming one of the great solutions to be better situated to feed our growing population in the world?
WILL BURGER: Yeah, absolutely. I think something that, back to what I was saying earlier, organic is more than just the health of the product being put into your body. It’s actually about creating sustainable systems on a large scale, and as we know, so much of this world has been designated agricultural to feed that population, and so when you have these organic systems operating, they’re creating better soil quality and the water retention and the nutritional value of the products coming out of the organic systems. Compost is a really big thing, which is less expense because you’re reusing things that can be reused. A lot of people don’t know this, but it expands the number of crops that are grown on the land. So, let’s say, if there’s a hard year for one crop, people aren’t going hungry because you’re able to produce another crop, and these mass production agricultural systems sometimes, the whole swath of land won’t be used for a certain season or whatever. So, really, the one word that I really want to say is sustainability. When you talk about what’s going to create systems that feed people all over the world, it is sustainable agricultural systems, and that’s what, at the core, what organic does.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Does organic overall cost more? Everyone always worries about sustainability costing more. They don’t understand why that comes out of it. Does organic food as a whole, or organic farming, always cost more, or is that a fallacy right now that’s going away?
WILL BURGER: Well, we’re hoping that it’s going away over time, but it does. Organic products, when you walk into the grocery store as of now, do cost more. That’s because it’s not easy, and when it is based on sustainability, the Earth’s natural systems are incredibly unpredictable, and I think that part of mass ag, what they’ve been trying to do, is to really eliminate that unpredictability, but really what’s happening is you’re creating these systems like I talked about before that are harmful. So, yeah, it does cost more. In order to get the certification, companies like ours do have to really want it and desire it, and that’s where we’re hoping that it’s going to be really consumer-driven here when people demand these products. That’s when you’re going to start to see, when your demand goes up, companies will rise and meet that challenge, like ours, that are passionate about this. When I got in this industry, I started to realize that people really do care. We’re a part of that, and everyone that works for this company lives and breathes this stuff because it’s important to us. So, we’re willing to go that extra mile in order to provide that product. It does cost more at base level in order to get the certification.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: But, Will, America has seen, when you walk into a Whole Foods or into an Erewhon or any other good health food store across the United States, the stores are packed now. So, people are understanding the return on investment to just themselves, their bodies, their health, their general well being, and their family’s, is incredible. For paying a little bit more, for eating organic food, the ROI is just incredible.
WILL BURGER: Right. Absolutely.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Listen. We have about four minutes left. I want to talk a little bit about how we can get more of our listeners out there to taste your amazing spreads and your great food. Talk a little bit about the exposure you’ve had at the green festivals so far, and where you’re going to be, so where our listeners can come to these green festivals and meet the Hope Foods team, and taste your great spreads. Share a little bit about your great experience with the green festivals so far.
WILL BURGER: Yeah, we got to be a part of the Green Fest in Washington, DC, back around May-June, and it was just a blast in general. The people that show up to those are just great, great people. They were really energized by our products, which of course energizes us even more, and we get to interact with tons of people, hands out tons of samples of our products. That was a lot of fun for us to be there and just to get to be part of other companies that are like-minded to us, that was a lot of fun. Then we went and we signed up to be a part of the one in San Francisco coming up, and that’s in November, I believe.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: November 14, 15 and 16, so all or listeners can come to the one in San Francisco. Will they be able to meet you, Will?
WILL BURGER: Yep. They’ll be able to meet me. I’ll be at that booth handing out our hummus, our lentil dips, and our chocolate spread.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And we can eat it right out of the tub if we come there. We could eat it right out of the little tasting tubs that you give us?
WILL BURGER: Of course.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. Hey, we got about two minutes left. I want you to be able to share with our listeners where Hope Foods is going, what your goal is. You’ve been growing 300% the last couple years. Where are you going to take this now, and where’s the next evolution with regards to Hope Foods?
WILL BURGER: Right. Yeah, well, the truth is, from the beginning, we have decided that our goal is that more and more people across this country and as far as we will take it, can eat good food. That’s what our goal is, to bring this to the masses. So, we want to be everywhere that food is, and that’s our goal. I don’t think it’s impossible. I think forever we’re trying to say that organic food is not a niche item, that actually everyone deserves to eat this quality of food, and organic and gluten-free, vegan, all those things are important to us, and the non-GMO stuff has really resonated with us, and we know it’s going to resonate with other people. So, we want to bring it to as many people as are willing to eat it. We hope that you’ll find it in every supermarket in this country. That’s our goal.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Shameless plug: What supermarkets now are carrying your great products right now?
WILL BURGER: Well, across the country, Whole Foods all over the place, and any kind of independent natural food store, you’re going to find it usually in there. We’re hoping to push into — in our region, we’re growing out a lot of the conventionals, the Krogers and the Safeways and stuff like that. I mean, the sky’s the limit, and that’s what we’re really excited about, options coming down in the next year if we really expand our production capacity.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s wonderful.
WILL BURGER: Yep. We’re definitely resonating with an audience, and that’s exciting.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. Will, we’re going to have you back on the show to continue to tell the Hope Foods story. For our listeners out there, to learn more about Hope Foods, please go to www.hopefoods.com or go to the great stores like Whole Foods that Will has said, and other great supermarkets, and buy and enjoy their great products, or come meet Will November 14, 15 and 16 in San Francisco at the Green Festivals. Take a picture with Will. Get a taste of his great hummus, his lentils, or his chocolate. Eat Hope Foods, help save the world. Thank you, Will, for being a hopeful and sustainability champion. You are truly living proof that green is good.
WILL BURGER: Thank you.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Bob Keefe. He’s the Executive Director of Environmental Entrepreneurs. Welcome to Green is Good, Bob Keefe.
BOB KEEFE: John, thank you for having me. It’s wonderful to be on your show.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, you know, Bob, this is your first turn at Green is Good, so I’d love for you first, before we get talking about Environmental Entrepreneurs, your great organization, I’d like for you to share a little bit about your background and journey, the Bob Keefe journey, before becoming the Executive Director of Environmental Entrepreneurs.
BOB KEEFE: Sure, the Bob Keefe journey. It’s been an interesting one. So, I spent about 20 years as a journalist before joining Environmental Entrepreneurs about three years ago. I covered business and technology news, and then later politics and chronicled everything from the dot-com boom and bust in San Francisco to climate change in the Arctic to covering the White House and Congress in Washington. I always have had an interest and a fascination and profound respect for entrepreneurs, and the power of the business community to effect change. I grew up in a small business in North Carolina. When I saw the opportunity to make some change with Environmental Entrepreneurs that’s good for both the economy and the environment, I jumped at the chance.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. So, let’s talk a little bit about Environmental Entrepreneurs. For our listeners out there that are not familiar with it, you can learn a lot more about the Environmental Entrepreneurs organization at www.e2.org. Give us a little bit of background. Who is the Environmental Entrepreneurs? Where has it been as an organization? Where is today? What are some of your goals now that you’ve taken over as the Executive Director?
BOB KEEFE: Sure. So, E2 was founded about 15 years ago. We’ve got more than 850 members around the country now that work or do business in about 49 states. Our members have collectively founded or funded about 1,700 companies, created 500,000 jobs, and collectively manage and invest somewhere north of $100 billion in private and venture equity fund. Our members have one thing in common. They range from CEOs of large clean-tech companies to mom-and-pop solar installation companies in the middle of Iowa, but they have one thing in common: They care about both the economy and the environment. We are an advocacy group. We got our start in California working on what then was the nation’s first clean cars legislation, and our founders, Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer, fought a really good fight to get those clean car standards approved here in California. What they learned was that the business voice could be a very important tool in environmental advocacy.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Sure, and you’re based in Washington now, so now the organization is not just California-centric; it’s a national organization.
BOB KEEFE: That’s exactly right. We do a lot of work on federal policies ranging from renewable energy policies, like the production tax credit for wind, for instance, we’re working real hard on that, and also defending renewable portfolio standards in the states. We work on other issues ranging from cleaning up oceans to stopping overfishing, so we cover the gamut and we like to think that we make a difference.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You have a clean energy job announcements program, and I think you have a website that’s www.cleanenergyworksforus.org. Can you share a little bit about what that’s about, more particularly, how our listeners can engage? What is the state of the nation right now with regards to clean energy jobs today? Where are we in 2014?
BOB KEEFE: Sure. Well, thank you for that, John. We started cleanenergyworksforus.org about two years ago, and we did it because this was in the midst of the Solyndra Solar debacle, if you will, and there were folks in Congress that were saying that clean energy jobs were a bunch of fairy dust and make-believe rainbows. We started looking around and said, “You know what? Actually, that’s not really the case. We have clean energy jobs being announced all around America every day and every week of the year.” So, we started tracking those job announcements, and we put together the website. Every quarter, we release our findings of clean energy job announcements from around the country. What we found, in a nutshell, is that there have been about 185,000 clean energy jobs announced over the past couple years. That number is still growing, albeit at a slower pace, in the past six months or so, in part because of some bad policy action in Washington and in the states. We are very hopeful that we can turn those policies around, and in fact, are really hopeful that the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan will do a lot to spur growth in clean energy.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk a little bit. What is the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan, and what is your goal as the Executive Director of Environmental Entrepreneurs to help influence better policy coming into place so we create our new economy here and add further fuel to the new economy, the clean energy economy, here in the United States?
BOB KEEFE: Sure, John. So, you know, our goal at Environmental Entrepreneurs, and my goal is to push for smart policies again that can lead to economic growth, smart environmental policies. Let me give you some examples of that. For instance, in the States, states that have renewable portfolio standards that require utilities to get a portion of their electricity from renewables, wind, solar, biomass, etc. These are the states that have seen the greatest clean energy job growth in the country historically. Those are states like California, like New York, like other parts of New England, Boston and the Massachusetts and New England area. We know that these policies work. The Clean Power Plan that was announced by the EPA about a month ago could be probably the biggest economic catalyst in clean energy jobs that perhaps we’ve ever seen. Here’s why. The policy requires states to come up with a plan to reduce their carbon emissions by 30% through the year 2030. There’s basically three ways we see that you can do that. Number one, you make the power plants that you already have more efficient. That creates jobs and drives economic growth. Number two; you make your buildings, your offices, your schools, your homes more energy efficient — better windows, better lighting, etc. That creates jobs and drive economic growth. The third way is to replace some of the dirty energy we’re getting from fossil fuels, from carbon, from coal-based power plants, and you replace that with clean renewable energy. Guess what? That creates jobs and drives economic growth. So, we think that the Clean Power Plan is a real catalyst that will help the economy in addition to, of course, help the environment.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How do we go from the EPA coming out with their Clean Power Plan to ensuring that this is truly seen as good guidance and that states and other leadership across the United States implements it and actually pushes it forward? Where’s your role with regards to driving that change?
BOB KEEFE: So, John, my role is — look, I mean, I spent 20 years telling stories about companies. The best thing I think we can do is get companies that are already making a difference in clean energy in front of the lawmakers, and let them tell their stories. We just got back from Iowa, and Iowa might not come to mind at first when you think about clean energy, but guess what? Iowa’s getting about 28% of its energy from wind right now. Over the next couple years, it’s going to get about 40% of its energy from wind, and we have a number of members and friends now in Iowa that, when we talked to them — these are farmers, these are wind industry contractors, these are solar installers — when you talk to those folks and you realize it’s because Iowa had one of the first renewable portfolio standards in the country that they’ve seen this growth, it’s a good story to tell. So, when we take businesspeople like that, and we put them in front of lawmakers and just let them tell their stories about how their companies have grown because of smart environmental policies, it’s a very telling and effective story.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah, no kidding. For our listeners who just joined us, we’re so excited and honored to have with us Bob Keefe. He’s the Executive Director of Environmental Entrepreneurs. To learn more about Environmental Entrepreneurs, please go to www.e2.org or to learn more about clean energy jobs, please go to cleanenergyworksforus.org. Let’s talk a little bit about, though, what you just said, the Iowa story, The Clean Power Plan. What other states besides the usual suspects, as we were just discussing earlier — California and some of the East Coast states, New Hampshire, Massachusetts. What other states in the middle of this country can the Clean Power Plan benefit or already you’re seeing change in that could be great storytelling to effectuate more change in this country?
BOB KEEFE: So, I think the most important states for this, John, are the states, as you mentioned, in the middle of the country. Iowa is a great example of what other states can do if they implement strong state plans that are based on the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan. The way this will roll out is over the next two years, states will have to develop their own implementation plans that are based on their economic makeup, their power sources, etc. because, for instance, the economy and the power supplies in Georgia are going to be different than in California, as we all know. In the middle of the country, you have a lot of energy that’s being generated right now by coal-fired power plants, and if that energy can be replaced with clean renewable energy under this plan — remember that states have to reduce their carbon emissions by 30%. If those states can replace some of that dirty energy with clean renewable energy — wind, solar, etc. — like places like Iowa have already done, it could make a huge difference. Power plants right now produce about 40% of the carbon pollution that is produced by our country.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Bob, though, change is difficult. There are big interests; there are big legacy fossil fuel interests that want to maintain the status quo, that don’t want change to happen. There are people, as you and I well know, that are still denying the science that climate change is actually happening.
BOB KEEFE: That’s right.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, how do we overcome as a country, as a business community, as a thought leadership community, those who say the EPA plan will hurt the economy, not help it? Why is that a bunch of hooey?
BOB KEEFE: Look. As you mentioned, any time you do something, especially as large as transitioning the energy supplies of your country, it’s not an easy fix, of course. While it is important to recognize that coal and oil have done so much to drive economic growth in our country over the years, it’s also very important to recognize that we can do better. We have the technology now to do better. I wasn’t around back then, but I’m betting that in the whale oil days, the whale oil industry was saying coal is bad. And when coal was running everything, the oil guys were saying coal is bad and it’s going to doom our economy. The fact of the matter is these are smart environmental policies, and throughout history, time and time again, when we’ve had smart policies, whether it’s cleaning up sulfur and other pollutants from power plants, the industry has said this is going to kill the industry. It hasn’t happened. When we said we need to clean up the emissions from cars, the car industry said this is going to ruin the industry, ruin the economy. That didn’t happen. What did happen is we got cleaner power plants already, we’ve got cars like hybrids, we’ve got cars like plug-ins. These policies drive innovation. They drive economic growth, and in doing so, they create jobs. A clean power plant is no different.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. Part of the thing we do on this show, Bob, is we like to give our listeners solutions, things that they can do themselves to help effectuate change and become part of the solution, instead of staying or becoming or remaining part of the problem. What are your suggestions for our listeners out there to help support these good policies that are coming up, these new technologies, solar, wind, hydrotechnologies, and other things that are going to help wean us off the legacy barrel of oil paradigm and get us into the new clean green economy? What do you suggest for our listeners out there to do to be involved and be part of the change, the positive change?
BOB KEEFE: Sure. Well, I would suggest and hope and be grateful for your listeners to get involved. You can do that in many ways. The Clean Power Plan right now, the EPA is starting field hearings on this beginning on July 28, and they’re holding field hearings in four cities around America, in Denver, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and in another city that I can’t remember right now. But certainly folks can turn out to those and voice their opinions because guess what? If people that care about clean energy, that care about the environment, that care about the economy, don’t come out and raise their voices, as you mentioned, the well-paid lobbyists and others of the dirty energy industry that don’t want change will certainly be there to fill that void. You can raise your voices that way. You can raise your voices in public comments to the EPA in support of this plan. It’s really important to raise your voices in the states, because again, it’s the states that have to implement these plans, and it’s the governors of these states that have to implement these plans ultimately. If those governors hear from businesspeople who say, “This is something we actually want, this is something that can actually help our economy while helping our environment, this is something that can create jobs in our communities,” then that’s going to make a huge difference. I would hope and be grateful for your listeners to do that on their own, or they can join us at e2.org and help support our efforts to do this in the states and in Washington.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Bob, we’re down to the last two-and-a-half minutes or so. We have a lot of listeners throughout the United States and around the world who are coming out of college or coming out of grad school and want to be the next Elon Musk. They want to be the next clean green entrepreneur that gets to change the world, either creating the next solar city or the next Tesla or the next vegan food company, for that matter. What are your suggestions, given that you have an interesting platform and visibility, both in Washington and throughout the states? What are some words of wisdom for the up-and-comers who want to be the next environmental entrepreneurs?
BOB KEEFE: I would suggest that the field is wide open, John, especially around clean energy. As I mentioned, my background has been as a business journalist all over the country, and I’m old enough to have covered the early days of the Internet. I covered the computer industry back when they weren’t iPads and handheld phones, but big things you stuck on your desk. To watch the transition of the technology industry over the years, I see a lot of parallels in the clean energy business right now. There are people, including some in the computer industry, that said, “Who the heck is going to need a computer at their home?” There are people who say, “Why the heck should we change our power system when we’ve already got electricity that turns on our lights?” There’s a transformation taking place in our energy supplies. It’s a good transformation. It’s good for the economy, it’s good for the environment, and it’s good for young entrepreneurs who are looking for the next big thing.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. So, it’s wide open out there, and it’s theirs for the taking. If they want to roll up their sleeves and go change the world, it’s all out there for them.
BOB KEEFE: Absolutely. And what’s driving that change, again, is good policies, and we’re moving in the right direction in this country, fortunately and finally, and addressing climate change. This Clean Power Plan from the EPA is a huge next step, and it will do a lot to create a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. We’re so thankful for you being in the position as Executive Director of E2, Environmental Entrepreneurs, to help also foster that change both on a policy point of view and also on a business point of view, and that’s really wonderful, Bob. Thank you for coming on Green is Good today. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Bob’s great organization, Environmental Entrepreneurs, please go to www.e2.org or to learn more about clean energy jobs and the opportunities out there, go to www.cleanenergyworksforus.org. Thank you, Bob, for your visionary and inspiring leadership at E2. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have today Congressman Paul Tonko. It’s the first time we’ve ever had a U.S. Congressman on Green is Good. Welcome today to our show, Green is Good, Congressman Tonko.
PAUL TONKO: Thank you, John. It’s great to join you and your listeners and to speak to a very important topic, and to know that the dialogue is being shared on an international scale. So, good for you, and thank you for promoting sustainability and what our very thoughtful response is in policy format, so I’m flattered to join you and your listeners.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, it’s an honor to have you on today. Before we get talking about these important issues, Congressman, can you please share a little bit about your journey and history before becoming a member of the U.S. Congress?
PAUL TONKO: Well, it’s interesting. I’m trained as an engineer. I have a degree from Clarkson University in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and I enjoyed that engineering work, but in the midst of that, I decided to run for office at my county government level simply because of the strength that I felt that the government plays in good policy outcomes that grow jobs and address our quality of life. I always had a keyed interest in politics, and I thought, “Well, get it out of your system and while you’re working as an engineer, run for office in a part-time position,” which was my service at the county legislative end. I was inspired by that. I saw where you needed to go to the state government in Albany, New York. I represent a district in Upstate New York, in the capital region of New York, and I figured to get some things done, it became very clear that you had to partner with state or federal government to really make the changes that were warranted. There, I got to interact with state legislators and said, “Wow, this is incredible how you can impact policy that will effect change in people’s lives, that will outlive you.” And so I got the bus, so to speak, and decided to run for State Assembly, and eventually I won a seat. In 1983, I entered the New York State Assembly, and served there for just shy of 25 years, my last 15 of which were as Energy Chair. I left the legislative body to serve in Governor Spitzer’s administration as the President and CEO of NYSERDA, which is the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and did everything from manage the funds for a renewable portfolio, push innovation, develop public-private partnerships, where NYSERDA as a public entity was partnered with the private sector sources, and we had that government infusion to bring about innovation and alternative technologies and the like. Then, while I was serving as President and CEO of NYSERDA, a seat in Congress looked doable, and after a long thought — I looked through every lens that I could. I have always made my decisions in this work environment to figure out where I could do the most good, and the good that needed to be done, I believe, was in establishing a comprehensive energy plan for the country. So, that spoke most forcefully to me. I ran for a seat in 2008, and now I’m serving in my third term in the House of Representatives, and have now been placed on Energy and Commerce as a Committee assignment, which really put a nice working plan together that utilizes my strength and speaks to the strength and the needs of the capital region of New York, which is one of the hottest beds of job growth in the green collar sector. That investment has proven itself very valuable. Also, with that assignment, I’m also Co-Chair of SEEC in the House of Representatives, which is a Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. As co-Chair with Gerry Connolly of Virginia and my colleague from New York from Long Island, Steve Israel, we’re able to bring in guests, foster dialogue that establishes public policy initiatives, and hopefully grow our greenness in energy policy and jobs and kindness to the environment in the process.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. You deserve those leadership positions right now because you have all this great history, so you can really implement all the things you’ve learned and all the things you’ve done for all these years on a very, very high-platform level now, which is great for this country and great for the environment and this world, so we’re so thankful.
PAUL TONKO: Yeah, well, I thank you, John, for your kind comments. I will tell you too that serving in the State Legislature in New York and dealing with the energy issues, I was there, I was Energy Chair while we transitioned into a deregulated environment, which was done through an administrative fiat, rather than through the legislative branch. So, our goal was to publicly inform people and hold forums. If you’re going to bypass the legislature, let’s at least get the message out to the general public. Also, with the environment in New York, you have some of the highest rates in the continental United States, and you have some of the lowest. You have different energy needs, so it was a good trading ground with great diversity in terms of how people created their energy supplies, how they utilized them, and what their rate structure looked like, so it was a good learning tank.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah. Hey, you know, Congressman, there are so many interesting and important issues for us to cover today, and unfortunately we have limited time, but I do want to get to some. So, just to start off, in terms of utilities now – our listeners and everyone out there want to be green, it seems like, and want to learn more, but it’s all very personal. They want to save money, but also do right by the environment. So, let’s talk a little bit about utilities and their efforts to promote energy efficiency, the consumers of the world out there, and their effort to want to save money for their household and stuff, precious resources. How does that interrelate, and where are we going in terms of utilities’ goals and consumers’ goals, and how do they merge and we make a better future for ourselves?
PAUL TONKO: Right. Well, you know, it’s an interesting era of transition, and that transitioning is driven by change. Sometimes it’s a very difficult approach to promote change; people resist it, including the utilities structure. I don’t say that in a condemning way; it’s just that traditions get established, and people have a routine that has been worked out, and, let’s face it, people are in that business to at least maintain their financial structure. What we need to do, I believe, is to address in very sound format the tariff and rate design of how energy consumers are affected and impacted. Some of the low-hanging fruit, as it’s called, has been dealt with in energy efficiency formats by utilities, but there are grand things that we can do that will require policy changes that take us into greater use of renewables, greater use of energy alternatives, and that allow us to also transition the workforce. The transformation that’s coming needs to work hand-in-hand with the workforce. You don’t want to put people out of work, but if training and retraining are essential as we move into this nuance of change in utility environment, then let’s do it. There’s no denying that the interconnectedness now for energy consumers, where we’re wheeling electrons from region to region, from a monopoly region. The monopoly region now has grown even beyond region-to-region; it’s state-to-state, if not nation-to-nation. Like in New York, we can import energy supplies from Hydro Quebec or from Canadian sources, and so all of that needs to be reflected in tariff and rate-making so that you’re not functioning off of antiquated statute, laws that were established decades ago, but rather upgrading and updating so that it reflects the nuances of today. If you’re going to have large wind farms or solar farms that are commercial-sized, that needs to be reflected in rate-making, and there has to be a transitioning that incorporates our thinking on energy policy and consumer impact with that of economic vitality and environment. A lot of times, these discussions are done in a vacuum. It’s important for us to look at the globalness of it all. What are the policy formats impacted in general, from energy to environment to economic development to education and training and retraining of the workforce? So, it has to be done in a broad sense, and it has to express the nuances of the day. If we’re going to grow more intensity for our renewable supplies, let’s do it in context with the utilities, and let’s do it in context with rate-making and design formats that are amended to reflect the world of today.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: How do we get people to both, like you say, legacy industries and also just consumers at large, to think — going back to what you said — legacy industry, old paradigm, is a barrel of oil. How do we make energy efficiency, as you have said before, our new fuel of choice? How do we get everyone thinking that way, but allow the utilities to continue to make a profit — that’s what they’re in business for — but allow us all to take advantage of all these great new technologies such as the Nest technology? Of course, we have no advertising on this show, so we’re not promoting any one in particular, but I’m just using that as an example for consumer awareness with regards to energy savings in homes and all sorts of great things like that. How do you see that happening, and how is the evolution? If you were in charge today of America as a whole, and you could wave your hand and since you’ve had broad experiences in terms of energy efficiency, this isn’t your first day up to bat, how do you make this now start happening? It seems like climate change is evolving and the velocity is moving faster than ever, maybe even faster than scientists had predicted 10 years ago. What do we do to effectuate this change now, and not upset the whole apple cart?
PAUL TONKO: Well, certainly, we come to grips with a sense of urgency because many would suggest that we have already lost a major opportunity here. The carbon emission, the methane emission issue that challenges all of us, needs to be addressed with a sense of urgency. You also are transitioning utilities into a different sort of role, where they facilitate energy services, where they move into this arena where they’re providing choices for consumers, where they can manage their rates by hour of use. If you’re requiring your energy supply in peak load timeframes, that has to be reflected. So, there’s metering that can be done, there’s management of services by the utility, and, let’s face it, they’re getting into a new business. They’re going to show people how they can best manage those supplies, how they can be efficient. There need to be incentives in that. There needs to be a financial structure that reflects that, so there’s soundness in the utility format and the utility structure, and at the same time benefits and savings, environmentally and financially, for society, for consumers. I think there’s a way to do that, but it has to be somewhat statutorily guided, and it also has to be done with sound discussion at the table, where all perspectives are sharing in the dialogue, and where we acknowledge that status quo simply doesn’t cut it.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners who just joined us, we’re honored to have with us today U.S. Congressman Paul Tonko. To learn more about Congressman Paul Tonko, please go to tonko.house.gov. Congressman, you are a member of our esteemed U.S. Congress, and listen. We have to keep positive about where we are as a great country and things of that such. What are the odds, in your mind, of the U.S. Congress coming together for the greater good and tackling the issue of climate change in the next five years?
PAUL TONKO: Well, the next five years are tough to predict because where the meter goes on political philosophy is anybody’s guess. Right now, where I sit on Energy and Commerce, I don’t see the aggressiveness of moving forward with that sense of urgency of which I spoke. There’s also a number of people who simply deny; they defy this whole science and concept of global warming and climate change. They’re in denial. As I’ve said, you can bury your head in the sand. When water washes the sand away, you’ll discover that the time had been passed where you should have done something. Burying your head in the sand is not going to be the answer. Somehow we need to convince people, where 97% of the science community agrees that there’s a man-made contribution to the carbon emission issue, and that is not just life going on without man-made impact to the negative. We need to turn around our negative behavior, and we have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel dependency, and we have to build these concepts that are interacting with the environment in a benign fashion, and enabling us also to embrace research and innovation where you get into new formats that are a much stronger response to clean air and environmental-friendly outcomes. I think that can be done. I’m truly a believer that we can do that. You know what? When you do that, John, you’re also creating jobs while you’re cleaning up the environment, and you’re providing today’s choices to energy consumers. That’s a great win-win scenario that ought not be rejected, ought to be underpinned with soundness of discussion so that we get to the policy formats that we need. But if you’re going to come to the table in denial and vigorously dig in your heels on that denial with recalcitrance, we’re going to get nowhere.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. Move from the congressional legislative branch to the executive branch. The White House has their Climate Action Plan. How do you think that will impact the United States and where we’re going?
PAUL TONKO: Well, I think it impacts our system here in Washington. There are those that bemoan the fact that we’re doing this through an administrative fiat. Well, if you don’t like that, do your job. Come to the table and discuss, converse, so that we can get things done. When we bypass our responsibilities, we can’t have it both ways and complain about an executive order taking hold. There is that sense of urgency of which we’ve spoken, and the Congress needs to act. If they don’t, the President will take initiative, and I really do believe, as a force in the global community, as we do this, we will get partners. We will get allies for carbon emission reduction at the table. You’ll begin to see an international response that will put the pieces of the puzzle together that will eventually have us worldwide a community engaged in carbon emission reduction. Someone has to start this, and I believe that our resources are best used when we can create jobs and clean the environment at the same time, and create a new day for environmental purposes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last two minutes or so, Congressman. Talk a little bit about your feelings about solar, wind and hydro technologies, and how they’re evolving as alternative solutions to the barrel, and where we’re going to be going in the years coming up with regards to those technologies.
PAUL TONKO: Well, you know, I introduced a thought, a concept, in legislative format, that said we should end the subsidies to our oil-based industry, our fossil-based partners, and transition those funds, make them fungible for the renewable and alternative technology innovation agenda. That was responded to by the industry saying to remove those subsidies would be un-American. Well, you know, I got a chuckle with that. It’s not un-American; it’s the right thing to do. So, there are many people who now support creating a more level playing field for our renewable partners. We have subsidized oil through the centuries. It is our fuel of choice in many ways, going back a century ago, and now we have learned lessons. Not, again, condemning, pointing a finger of blame at anyone. Look, we can build an industry here, and we’ve seen that it’s working. When you put research into this, you get even greater opportunity. I think what really is the lynchpin here, John, what will really be the tipping point, is getting that storage possibility, the battery, as that key lynchpin in the equation. Once you can take the incremental nature of renewables and provide predictability and stability for utilities and a ripple effect into the stability for consumers, then you got there. Now you’ve got that criticism that some would make, “Well, it’s not reliable if it’s not sunny or if it’s a calm day and not windy,” that is all placed aside once you come up with battery development. So, we need to put a prime focus on research and development of advanced battery technology, and then we will go forward and provide tax incentives, tax credits, investment tax credits, that speak to the soundness of that industry.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, thank you again for coming on today, Congressman Paul Tonko. It’s been an honor to have you on. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about the great work Congressman Tonko is doing, please go to tonko.house.gov. Thank you, Congressman Tonko, for being a sustainability champion and inspiring public servant.
PAUL TONKO: My pleasure to join you.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: 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 Ryan Engelhart and Finian Makepeace, the co-founders of Kiss the Ground. Welcome to Green is Good, Ryan and Finian.
RYLAND AND FINIAN: Thank you for having us.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, this is an honor. We’ve never talked about the subject. You have a wonderful, beautiful website that I’m on right now called TheSoilStory.com and I urge our listeners to go to TheSoilStory.com and learn more about all the great work you’re doing, but before we get talking about Kiss the Ground and all the wonderful information on TheSoilStory.com, I want you first to share a little bit about both of your own personal stories and journeys leading up to the formation of Kiss the Ground.
RYLAND ENGELHART: Yeah, so my name is Ryland Engelhart and besides the co-founder of Kiss the Ground, I’m also one of the co-owners and creators of Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre, which is a vegan organic chain of restaurants started in the Bay Area about 10 years ago and now we’re here in Los Angeles, and yeah, it’s really been a phenomenon in shifting consciousness around food and about using the workplace to cultivate positivity, transformation and consciousness and you know, it’s a family business. My father and stepmom created Café Gratitude 10 years ago in The Bay Area, and I’ve been working within that organization for the last 10 years and really, inside the business is really one that demonstrates sustainability. I’ve always been a lover of nature, a lover of the earth, and a lover of people, and really how can my life be of greatest service to people and the planet and kind of where I came across this revelation around soil was I was in New Zealand about two years ago and I came across at a healthy living conference, there was a guy by the name of Graham State speaking on a panel, “Can Human Beings Sustain Themselves on Planet Earth?” and I’ve heard a lot of environmentalists talk before and it’s often times kind of boring and overwhelming and you kind of feel like there’s just nothing to do about the problems at hand and what was unique about this experience was Graham State really made this beautiful connection, connected the dots between how soil health connects to plant health, which connects to animal and human health, which connects to planetary health. Very simplistic idea that I never knew, which was, I knew that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was one of the things causing global warming but I didn’t really get that what became revealed was that two-thirds of the carbon in the atmosphere that’s human generated actually came from the loss of soil. The carbon actually came from the degradation of soil because of agriculture and when I learned that, it was like wow, two-thirds came from the soil and then the beautiful turnaround was that farming and agriculture, being that it’s been one of the most destructive systems on the planet actually has the potentiality of becoming the greatest turnaround process, that regenerative agriculture could actually turn the tides and sequester and it is the quickest way to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere back into the soil, and so just seeing that potentiality and feeling that opportunity in my heart, I was moved and compelled to start sharing this idea and hence, Kiss the Ground was born.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Finian, how about you?
FINIAN MAKEPEACE: My name is Finian Makepeace. I’m a very passionate person and I’ve been involved with a lot of organizations and activist groups throughout my whole life and have always just been doing what I can do to spread messages of how powerful people are and what we can do to make a difference individually and collectively. I am an artist as a profession in a group with my brother, Kiran Makepeace, right now. We’re actually on America’s Got Talent if anyone wants to check us out this season, but yeah, I’m a musician. I’ve been for the past 15 years and I do a lot of touring around and that kind of stuff, and, like I said, I’ve been very heavily involved with some organizations and done some green things as well as social justice issues for pretty much my whole life and the unique that happens with this organization, Ryland kind of invited me to join where we had the first event. The speaker that he’s referring to came when he was in Los Angeles and we set up an event for him to speak at and it was really a unique experience because for one of the first times in terms of issues that I’ve been working on, this was something that was so massive in terms of its scale of what it means for the world but it was also ultimately all positively driven things and a lot of the organizations I’ve been a part of have been a don’t do this, less of this, less of this, and this whole organization, the amazing thing about it that Ryland shared is that once we learned and really the deeper you go and the more you learn the science and the more you get into it, the more true it becomes about how our agriculture, unbeknownst, like Ryland said, to most of us, including ourselves, we have been shrinking our soil so much so that we’ve taken huge amounts of carbon out of it and that carbon has gone directly into the atmosphere and spilling into the oceans as well, but the great thing was that we have a solution, which is rebuilding it, and that’s where regenerative agriculture as opposed to a conventional industrial agriculture, which is taking and stripping and removing, there are scientific ways to rebuild this soil, which, like Ryland said, is the fastest way to not only sequester carbon, but to rebuild this layer of soil that holds huge amounts of water and saves during times of drought, for California especially, saves enormous amounts of water when you transform the soil and regrow it. It’s a living organism. It really is full of life and we’ve taken the life out of it so I learned this piece of information and it really blew my mind because it was something that I couldn’t shake and since the moment, since the day, we basically watched him present his ideas and he, along with a few others of us, went back to Ryland’s house and pretty much that same night, we kind of committed to doing all we can to spread this message and what we found soon, and was actually within that night, is we are in Los Angeles, which is kind of the media capital of the world, and our responsibility here, therefore, is to use our faculty of being in Los Angeles, which is to get messages across to the world through media and other forms and so that’s what we took on. We really took on that our organization — there’s so many of the scientific groups and other groups that are championing this and doing the research and doing the development behind it but our greatest good we can do is spread this message to the world and that’s what we’ve been working on and dedicating to and so that’s how Kiss the Ground was started.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, for our listeners out there that want to follow along as we speak today with Ryland and with Finian, you should go to www.thesoilstory.com. It’s a beautiful, very informative website, so in short guys, what is the mission of Kiss the Ground? And, then explain your programming and the steps that you’re taking to achieve your mission and your goals.
FINIAN MAKEPEACE: The general mission that we have is to primarily, the first thing to do is without knowledge — knowledge is power — without knowledge of some sort on this level, there won’t be an ability for change to happen so with that in mind, we’re looking at a situation. Like I said, I’ve felt like I had my ear to the ground for most of my life on so many of the key environmental issues, researching and learning as much as I can, but this one somehow escaped us. We kind of refer to it as the iceberg effect of under our feet, there is this thing that’s been going on. We’ve been walking on the earth. We’ve been looking at the stars and learning about the galaxies and all that but we had done very little of learning about the soil that is right underneath us and there’s so much to know and there’s so little that has been shared and so the primary thing is to share very simplistically. Why we call it The Soil Story and why it’s called TheSoilStory.com, the website, is that we are dedicated to sharing with people on a mass scale. We are currently making an animated video that’s about three to four minutes long that a 5-year-old to a 7-year-old can really understand and digest the concepts that this soil has a story and what’s happened to it, where it’s been shrunken and degraded and how it can be rebuilt. It’s a beautiful story and so that’s the number one thing we are dedicated to doing is sharing that story and then on top of that is our general big mission is to change agriculture or industrial conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture and there are many farmers who are taking these practices on because it’s not just organic farming, which is awesome. Organic farming is great but regenerative agriculture or regenerative farming, and some people call it regenerative organic farming or organic regenerative farming, the difference is it’s not a list of don’ts. It’s a list of things you can do to regrow and enliven your soil, which has so many benefits, so the primary goal is to get the message out through a video. We’re working with Bobby Bailey, the creator of “Kony 2012,” which is one of the most viral videos in history at this point, and he’s working with us on this video of the soil story. We’re getting that out and then the big mission is, like I said, to transform agriculture to regenerative agriculture so that, like Ryland mentioned earlier, the same industry that- We’re not angry at farmers or anybody really. It just happened along the way that we’ve discovered things that helped us with the green ability for food to produce more but over time, it’s cost us where we’re at today and the same industry that was the most destructive industry can be the industry that reverses it so it’s kind of an amazing story in that sense, that the same industry that destroyed so much is the same industry that can be the same industry with a few tweaks that can actually save the day in some semblance of the word and so the big, big mission is converting agriculture to regenerative agriculture and there’s so much power in that.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we are so honored to have with us today Ryland Engelhart and Finian Makepeace, and they have a wonderful company called Kiss the Ground and you can check out all the important work they’re doing right now to saving the soil at www.thesoilstory.com. Ryland, who has been some of the strongest supporters of your work and Finian’s work and who are some of the people working against you as you try to get out there and get your mission and get your programming achieved?
RYLAND ENGELHART: You know, as Finian said, the mission really is to inspire, inform and educate a culture that would understand the importance of shifting from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture and so really, one of the missions is inspiring a young generation of farmers. Farmers, for most of our history, have been highly overworked and underpaid for being the ones that feed humanity and the opportunity that we have right now to be able to rebrand and recontextualize that farmer’s role not only is the one who is producing us nourishment that we can feed our families and communities, but they actually now have the role of building soil, which our mission is to communicate and get the collective understanding that that’s the most important activism on the planet right now is to sequester carbon and the quickest way to do that is through building soil and so as the platform of Café Gratitude, which has become kind of a health food positivity phenomenon in Los Angeles, and really all around the world there have been restaurants that have taken aspects of our menu and our mission all around the world and really the way that we kind of spin it and just said Café Gratitude is gonna be this really positive, community-oriented, loving, vegan, organic restaurant and we’re gonna ask funny questions like, what are you grateful for? Because we’ve taken such a stand for that, I feel like being here in Los Angeles, that culture has been adopted and started to integrate, whereas maybe three years ago, cynicism and negativity was so in. It’s so much more common to diminish things and now, I feel like there’s more of a positivity that is naturally ingrained in culture and I feel like we’ve been an advocate for that to happen and somebody by the name of Jason Mraz, a pretty amazing musician, he’s been traveling around. Actually, one of his last tours was called the Gratitude Café Tour and he actually took our whole ethos and philosophy and took it on the road. Actually, Finian toured with him as one of his musicians as well and he’s actually one our complete advocates and supporters of Café Gratitude but also, regenerative agriculture. He got to meet Graham and see his presentation and he’s actually written a song called “Back to the Earth” where it’s all about inviting a new generation of people to step up to the plate and seeing the importance of the role of the farmer in modern day society because if you look, one of our issues and one of the things that we’re faced with is that the average age of the farmer today is 65 years old and they’re pretty much stuck in their ways so we really need a complete new generation of farmers who are lovers of the earth or people who actually, their sensibility is they want to kiss the ground. They want their life to be meaningful and to take care of the next generations to come and they see that agriculture and growing food can actually be a complete embodiment of that mission and so the advocating thing within what we’re up against, it really is —
JOHN SHEGERIAN: The status quo. You’re up against the status quo.
RYLAND ENGELHART: Yeah, we’re up against long-term built-in systems that don’t want to change, but what we believe is that things like, for instance, Graham State has had some massive success stories where he led his four day certificate course where he communicates this presentation that we saw and the head of the Woolworth Corporation was there and overnight he called basically all his heads of stores and said, ‘We need to change what we’re doing,’ and basically, he’s been over the last, I think, five years, he’s been having Graham train all the growers that have been growing for these 300 stores in South Africa and now South Africa has become kind of a hub for regenerative agriculture. It’s one of the most progressive agricultural zones in the world and Graham has kind of pioneered that. Another win is that the Dole Corporation — this is not yet public. He’s been working with —
FINIAN MAKEPEACE: Are we allowed to share this yet or is this —
RYLAND ENGELHART: I don’t know. I may have just put the cat out.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Don’t worry about it.
RYLAND ENGELHART: What’s that? Yeah.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Don’t worry. We can take that out. Don’t even sweat it.
FINIAN MAKEPEACE: I don’t think it’s not public. I think it’s okay. I think it’s all right.
RYLAND ENGELHART: Anyway, so huge agricultural company that has made their money off of basically chemical agriculture are seeing that basically, human beings are waking up that healthy food means healthy body and what we want to make the connection with that healthy food needs to come from healthy soil and when we have the mass consciousness getting that they want their soil to be healthy and make healthy food and the people are organic and green, the fact that this radio show even exists is a testament to people want to know about how to live healthy, happy lives and this is such a literally a baseline level information that it’s so simple. What we eat comes from the soil and the toxicity of the soil is dead, what our food is gonna be is gonna be toxic and dead and chemical laden and so once there’s a critical mass that gets the importance of this and starts saying we want to make sure that our food is grown by regenerative farmers, that is so powerful. That’s the reason Walmart going to Dole and saying, ‘Look, we need more organic food. We need food that tells people that we’re thinking about the future,’ is the very reason Dole went to find out who is the leader in the regenerative agriculture moment and Dole found Graham and now Graham is consulting and guiding them in making that transition.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, we’re gonna have you guys back on to continue the journey of Kiss the Ground. For our listeners out there that want to support Kiss the Ground, go to www.thesoilstory.com. Thank you, Ryland and Finian, for inspiring an agricultural revolution with Kiss the Ground. You both 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 Carol Sanford. She’s the CEO of the Essence Alignment Company. Welcome to Green is Good, Carol.
CAROL SANFORD: Well, thank you so much for inviting me.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Carol, before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at Essence Alignment Company and your website, CarolSanford.com, I want you to share please the Carol Sanford story. What does your journey and story look like leading up to the founding of your company and the great work you do today?
CAROL SANFORD: There are probably three key points. The first one was I was raised in the panhandle of Texas in a very, very racist community and family and even as a child, it didn’t make sense to me. I got in lots of trouble as a result, but I think part of me decided I was gonna change that part of the world as I grew up and then there was a set of challenges to go through, but I finally met in my early 30s the team that had founded the Procter & Gamble systems that are still some of the most copied systems and most studied systems in the world and I spent years learning how it was that they changed the idea of people are to be used like the machines to understanding the science of human motivation and human transformation. That allowed me to eventually create my own company and I think probably the first time it all really, really came together was about 20 years ago when I got to work in South Africa the two years before the elections for the new Republic of South Africa, and a couple years afterwards, I was able to be a part of teams that received awards from Mandela for changing not only the social systems, but the ecological systems using a corporation, which was Colgate-Palmolive, and watch the lives of people who lived in townships, watch them be able to take on and lead change, and it lifted me in a way that I could see things I’d never seen and I’ve been applying it everywhere I can touch.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And you’ve written two great books that are award winning, The Responsible Entrepreneur and The Responsible Business, and for our listeners out there, you can buy them either on her website, CarolSanford.com, or at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or other fine bookstores around the world. Carol, talk a little bit about green and your business and the changes you’re seeing in green and what are you doing with regards to green and green business today?
CAROL SANFORD: So, this might sound really weird, but I don’t talk about green. What I talk about is how to think and one of the big changes that I see going on right now is that it’s coming back — now, that’s gonna sound strange — back into people’s thinking and 40 years ago when I started this work, people naturally thought about that they’re a part of a natural system that humans aren’t separated from, they aren’t even responsible for, they are the system, and I’m seeing that come back around and one of the ways it’s really showing up is that the entrepreneurs who are inside of large corporations who are able to engage and share, like Google, like DuPont, like Intel, those folks are beginning to have people who are not only authorized, but encouraged as a part of a business to really take on what it means for their business, the whole way, not a separate program, to really make things work and so for me, it’s always been about how do you be whole as a person. That’s the reason I use the word responsibility. It’s like my grandmother said to me when I was a kid, “Don’t you ever think about anybody else?” and you don’t when you’re a kid. That’s what I teach business.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, so responsibility is one of the keywords that you keep driving home. Talk a little bit about what’s going on with companies now and board of directors. What motivates them to change, if anything, nowadays?
CAROL SANFORD: Well, I’m seeing some really great things happening there. I want people to feel hopeful about this. Chad Holliday, when he was President, CEO, and Chairman of the DuPont Corporation, I knew him and worked with him from the time he was a maintenance manager in their Nashville, Tennessee, operation. He had an idea, which luckily, I got to be an exciting part of, which is putting together task forces for every major business unit within the company. They were people from outside the company. We had priests from Mexico. We had mothers who were coming out of South America and they were given free reign into every part of the business to then write a report which they submitted to the board of directors. Now, these reports were not necessarily everybody having to agree but they were intelligent people who were asked to look at the effect of DuPont’s decisions and DuPont’s actions on communities and on the planet. Now, because these were not advocacy documents, they were education documents, and there was no recrimination — we worked to make sure they were written in a way they were just sharing information personally — the board began to move and it allowed Chad to be able to be one of the three creators of the UN Global Compact so that businesses were doing this on a global scale, reporting what they do without condemnation. It was amazing to me to see how much authority the board of directors at DuPont because of this education process that wasn’t an advocacy process.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, our friend, Jeffrey Hollander, who’s been on the show now many times, and he’s the co-founder of Seventh Generation, he talked about his work with you. He said it made him a better value-based leader. Can you explain what that means to our listeners and what you try to do with regards to your great work?
CAROL SANFORD: Yeah. I love Jeffrey. He’s one of my favorite all-time people, not just client. So, what that really means to make someone a better values leader, is actually to connect them with Essence. Essence is an idea that seems a little strange but when Jeffrey was born, he was born unique and distinctive as each of us are but we lose track of that over life. We become socialized. We start to try and do what others think we should do so I took him back to who he is at his core, what make him really distinctive, and a couple of things were true for him, which was he had since he was a kid pointed out systemic dissonance so you say you’re gonna do one thing and you do something else. He could take that to the level of the company and so for him, it was really staying true to this part of him and so it’s even in some ways, the highest value. It’s to be true to our highest self. We then did that with every customer. We did it with the business. We did it with everybody who worked in the company. We looked at how you align these uniquenesses with a place to make a difference so every employee and also, we worked with contractors and suppliers, were able to look at what can we uniquely bring to the market, to that customer’s life, to earth, to the community we live in? That in itself is a fundamental change, which is different than most of the methods we use, which is make a list of values which are outside of us and try to live up to them so that’s part of what Jeffrey’s talking about. There was one other thing, which is I work with creating global imparities, which are statement of what is whole and complete and true when a system is working well so what is, I call it a life shed instead of a watershed because watershed is our water. Life lives there and how does a life shed work when it’s healthy? And, then you work toward that rather than trying to figure out what your mission is to improve something so those two things are things that Jeffrey has carried with him and made a major difference.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: The key word in your two book titles, Responsible Entrepreneur and Responsible Business, is the word “responsible” and “responsibility.” How do you define responsibility, Carol?
CAROL SANFORD: For me, it is understanding you are a part of a system and that there is a reciprocity, which has to be maintained. It’s the ability to see and intentionally decide to create beneficial effects for the system which you’re a part of so if certain living forms, like if the fish decided it was all about it and the water and it tried to figure out how to extract all it needed of its nutrients for itself, then we wouldn’t have healthy water streams. Same thing for the elk along the bank. What they have to understand is they are interdependent with the water, with all of the other critters that come there and live there, the biota that come to that soil and water. It’s the understanding of that dynamic relationship and knowing that you are a part of it and can make a difference beneficially.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, what examples can you give of businesses that are responsibly by your own definition?
CAROL SANFORD: Well, everyone is on their way to there so that’s a lot of what I wrote the book about but what of the greatest stories that I love was someone in Colgate in South Africa who said, “I want to help build a country while we rebuild a great company,” so we went in and the apartheid era was, of course, it’s certainly not still at an end but it was starting to become blatantly obvious that that was not a whole way to relate to people and so Stamios committed to growing the company and to do it in a way that the townships became healthier, everybody who worked in the company became healthier, and supported every employee and the major thing that he did initially was the constitution in South Africa required that the top management, of which there were like 3,000 employees in the South African operation, at the top of that were all white managers and the constitution required that the top ranks within five years begin to reflect the racial mix, which of course, was 95 to 97% black. We within six months reversed that and Stamios said because the black Africans had not been able to go to school had nothing to do with how intelligent they were so the responsibility there was seeing that the company could not thrive without the communities thriving and the nation thriving. As a result, they got awards but they also grew their revenue 30% a year, which during that era was unheard of. They had no strikes, which was unheard of in that era, and they brought a company from one that he was actually sent there to see if they should close it down for safety and financial reasons to one that reversed the oral health of the children in Sorrento and Alexandria with the support of employees who lived there but worked in Colgate. That, to me, is a phenomenal example of what it means to see yourself as part of a system and know that you only thrive when it does.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, we can be responsible and we can be profitable if we’re running companies, you’re saying?
CAROL SANFORD: Well, actually, you will be. It’s really weird. We’ve gotten this funny dichotomy as though profits were separate from doing good and you know in your own life if you personally decided that you were gonna profit the experience of everybody else you know and everyone you touch, you would not have a job very long. You wouldn’t have friends very long. We now have so much evidence of McKenzie, Arthur Anderson, MIT, all of these people studied and reported and said the question is answered. Profitability is responsibility. There are people who can extractively do it for some periods of time but you can’t do that forever and you will eventually be taken down so if you want a long term viable job, company, and place of respect and profitability, you will do it in a way you understand you’re part of a system. That’s what I teach people how to do, see that the customers lives are in the same system you’re in. The earth’s life and its ability to do well is in the same system you’re in and so you work in way that you’re not asking profitability or whether you get to have enough to keep going; you understand that as the whole gets healthier and works better, then you will do better, too.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we have Carol Sanford. She’s the CEO of Essence Alignment Company. You can check out more about what Carol is doing and you can hire her at www.carolsanford.com. Also, you can buy her books, Responsible Entrepreneur and The Responsible Business on her website or on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com or other fine bookstores around the world. Talk about responsibility and green. What is the most important thing we have to do to make responsible and green in our companies come together?
CAROL SANFORD: I think it’s an education process because right now, you tend to have officers who are responsible for green and corporate responsibility and then you have leadership who is responsible for strategy marketing, etc. This fragmentation of organizational structure and particularly the way we take on doing business makes it really difficult to accelerate the idea of responsibility, so I suggest that corporate responsibility officers or corporate citizenship or whoever those are become educators to the organization but not responsible for the delivery of those things. If we don’t have the CEO, all the executives, all the senior leadership seeing it as their responsibility to be whole, seeing it as part of their bottom line, then what we’ve got is a separate report and you doing people then increasingly, the businesses, seeking to prove that they’re doing good by donating money, by having reports that show that they’re doing less harm, but they aren’t really improving like we did in South Africa. They aren’t really improving the community and the ecology of what’s going on and so getting this fragmentation out would help and one of the best ways to do that is to start and have everything unified around the customer’s life so everybody’s mind goes from inside and what my internal responsibility is to externally and we’re all aligned and reconciling every conflict or confusion or difference to what will it do to improve the customer’s life? That’s how Apple works. They say what’s going to happen to the kids in the dorm? What happens to the people who are working in a business? And everything was designed backwards for, they call it user interface, but what it really means is how do you make their lives better?
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk a little bit about CSR as we know it today or corporate citizenship officers and sustainability officers. Are they making a difference now in corporate America or is that just window dressing for Wall Street?
CAROL SANFORD: It depends on who you’re talking about. There are certainly some places where it is, if not window dressing, it certainly is ineffectual. There are some companies where the people who are in those roles are having entrepreneurial spirit and they’re actually out working with officers and business unit leaders with a profit and law, a P and L, responsibility. Where they’re doing that and helping them understand how they have the whole of their business work on it, they’re starting to make a difference, but I think that right now, as I said earlier, I think that the very idea- The reason I don’t talk about corporate responsibility or corporate citizenship is to me, that is a natural part of the leader of the organization and as long as we’re still having it separated out, people at the top feel like it’s their job. That’s the reason I think it’s more of a problem where the intentions are not good and I hear people talking a lot about making it part of strategy but still it’s counted as a separate strategic thrust so until it is embedded in how people think, they ask the question every time they’re making a decision; How does this advance global imparities, making something healthy? How does it advance society? How does it advance democracy? And, that’s a part of how they make every decision, not a separate defined arena of responsibility.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last three minutes or so, Carol. Let’s talk a little bit about the importance of education. Two big trends that I see right now in the United States is the proliferation and growth of the M.B.A. student and the feeling that if someone gets an M.B.A., then they’re set. I also see the growth of entrepreneurship, both entrepreneurship being taught in higher education and also people wanting to become entrepreneurs. Talk a little bit about that. Is the growth and the proliferation of all the M.B.A. students good for our economy, good for our business, and is the entrepreneurship and the growth of entrepreneurship in the United States something that’s learnable or is that just something that’s in someone’s DNA and people are born entrepreneurs?
CAROL SANFORD: See, I think everyone is born with personal agency. Personal agency is what is at the heart of entrepreneurship. It means I feel moved all the time to speak my mind and you see it in children. Of course, we socialize it out of them. The whole idea of going back and getting an entrepreneurial degree or an M.B.A. or almost any degree is in some ways should be trying to wake that up. I don’t see that happening, but I do know that anyone who takes it on has to do the personal development work to reawaken their will and connect with something they care about, which is what we tend to associate with entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurs don’t all move toward this responsibility idea. It’s the reason I wrote the book, to show there’s different kinds of entrepreneurship and until you understand what the nature of those are, then you may be learning old fashioned traditional tools applied to entrepreneurship and most M.B.A. programs are based on really traditional how you get rich, so I don’t know. I’m not real excited about what I see going on in most. I do think there are a few that are moving to a more systems view and I have hope.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: For the M.B.A.s, are you hopeful about all the M.B.A.s graduating? Is this good for business and good for where we’re going as a country or not so much?
CAROL SANFORD: Not so much. I tell people that you will be better off usually if you study some other program and then study business, like you study anything from philosophy to psychology to English literature and read all the classics because what you’ll come in with is a more holistic mind and I know there’s a trend going against that saying go specialize. Don’t do liberal arts colleges, but when I look at people who have a morality, have an ethic, who think in a broader way, they usually have been studying history and literature and psychology and philosophy so I don’t know. I teach in M.B.A. programs and I’m usually kind of a lone voice, so not so much.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Well, Carol, thank you for coming on Green is Good today. For those of you who want to learn more about Carol or maybe even buy her books, go to CarolSanford.com. You can also hire her to work with your company or speak at your events. Thank you, Carol, for being an inspiring responsibility expert. You are truly living proof that green is good.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. We’re so excited to have with us today Laura Weiss. She’s the owner and founder of GO Box and you can check them out at GOBoxPDX.com. Welcome to Green is Good, Laura.
LAURA WEISS: Thank you.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Laura, before we get talking about your unique company and products, I would love you please to share with our listeners the Laura Weiss story. Give a little bit about your story and journey leading up to being the founder of Go Box.
LAURA WEISS: Well, let’s see. It’s been about three years since I launched GO Box, but I actually have spent most of my career doing environmental policy and advocacy for nonprofit and government organizations. I actually grew up in New Jersey, but I now make my home in Portland and I have always loved the food carts, but being an environmentally minded person, I hated using all those disposable containers and so when I had the idea for GO Box, it all sort of lined up and I decided to launch it and it’s actually the first time I’ve ever owned a business, so I’ve been learning quite a bit about running a business, but it’s been really fun.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you went from public work and public advocacy to basically private business?
LAURA WEISS: I did. I have, like I said, a background in environmental policy and advocacy but I also got my M.B.A. in sustainable business from the Cambridge Graduate Institute back in 2006, and at that point, I knew that I wanted to do something a little bit different and I knew I wanted to try working in the private sector since I had worked both nonprofit and public sectors with the idea, of course, that there’s more and more interest in sustainable business and business doing good in the world and that was sort of what led me into the idea of running a business, and of course, GO Box is a very mission-driven business.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, you’re doing all this work for 25 years in environmental sustainability, so you get to see a lot of things and trends come and go and media outrage come and go. What was your epiphany, or your aha moment, to make you want to found GO Box?
LAURA WEISS: Well, I would say, like I said, I have always been someone who very much dislikes using something once and throwing it away. We live in a very throwaway society and people don’t necessarily pay attention to all the things that we use in our daily lives and where they came from and how much energy and resources it took to get those products to us and then, of course, the process of throwing them away and I remember learning a long time ago when I was very young that there is no such thing as “away” because it all goes somewhere. It may go away from our sight, but it’s never going away so it all sort of lined up to be something that was consistent with my values and my interest and it also made sense to me because Portland is a very environmentally minded city and we are also very well known for our food carts and I know that there are lots of folks who love the food carts but they don’t love those disposable clamshells. We don’t get our food in a disposable container because we love the disposable container. It’s just the only option. We want our food and we take it back to our office or our park or wherever, and this gives people another option.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, the truth is in every city now, the food truck has taken off; in Manhattan, Los Angeles and all across America besides Portland, so your solution might be really coast to coast very shortly. Let’s talk about GO Box. For our listeners out there that want to follow along as we have this wonderful discussion and they want to see your product, they can go to GOBoxPDX.com. I’m on your website right now. It’s very colorful. It’s very informative. Just explain to our listeners out there though. Give us the basic premise. What is GO Box?
LAURA WEISS: Absolutely. So, GO Box is a service providing reusable takeout containers to the food carts and their customers, and I’ll say actually that we offering it to other takeout places that aren’t food carts as well and we can talk about that, so what happens is if somebody wants to use GO Box, they sign up or subscribe to GO Box. They pay just $18 for the whole year. They get in the mail a hard plastic reusable clamshell and when they’re done, they return it to a nearby drop site in exchange for a little GO Box token that’s a rectangular plastic piece that fits in your wallet — recycled plastic, of course — and you keep that in your wallet until you’re ready for your next meal in a GO Box. Then you hand that to the vendor. That’s their signal to give you your next meal in a GO Box and then you do it all over again and then we pick up the used containers. We have them washed in a commercial kitchen and then we return them clean to the vendors and then we do that all by bicycle.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is amazing. Now, you started this business in Portland, where you live now?
LAURA WEISS: I did.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, is this only right now ongoing in Portland?
LAURA WEISS: Almost, but not quite. We have actually expanded just a little bit right now on the West Coast, so there is a GO Box Sacramento, and what I did was I decided that it made sense to license GO Box to folks in other cities, so GO Box Sacramento is up and running and they just started this year. And, then there is a colleague of mine in San Francisco who is planning to launch GO Box San Francisco later this year at some point. He’s in the process of kind of putting together a pilot to kind of get the kinks worked out because, of course, every market’s a little bit different and every city is different and it’s a very local kind of business, so that’s very exciting. And, I’m in conversations with folks in other cities and I would love to talk to folks in places all over the country because this model can definitely be replicated. I’ve learned a lot by doing it here that I think can be valuable to folks in other places. I’ll also just mention that although we started with food carts and food carts are a great option, it also works for any downtown core where there’s a lot of takeout places. That’s really where GO Box works the best.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Sure. So, this will be coming to New York City in the near future? It just has to be.
LAURA WEISS: I hope so.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about it. Let’s deconstruct it as a business; so let’s talk about how you did it though. How did you invent the GO Box itself and what is it made out of? Let’s start there and then I’ll want to talk about then the value chain from there, so go ahead. How did you invent this GO Box and what is it made out of?
LAURA WEISS: Well, the good news is for me was I didn’t have to invent the GO Box. I actually in my work history spent a little bit of time working for a large foodservice company and what I learned when I was there was that there already is reusable containers that are made by another company and they’re made by a company out of Houston, Texas, and they were made originally for this very market, this foodservice market, so for example, at colleges and universities, they use these same boxes to try and reduce disposable containers on campuses, but what had not been done was to use them in this kind of setting where I’m using them, so I simply purchased these containers from this company. So, they’re hard plastic. They are made of #5 polypropylene BPA-free plastic. They are shaped and sized just like a regular takeout container would be, and I have three sizes that I use here in Portland and they’re dishwasher-safe. They can be put in the microwave if you’re okay microwaving plastic. That’s a whole nother conversation, but they’re technically microwave-safe and they can be used over and over again. The manufacturer says they can be used about 500 times per container, which is great, and then if I take them out of service, I do recycle them.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, and so now you’re in Portland, which is already a sustainably minded city. You yourself have 25 years of environmentalism and sustainability under your belt, so now as a new entrepreneur — because this is always the fun part, Laura — as a new entrepreneur, you started connecting the dots. You knew about this wonderful plastic food container, but how did you come up with the methodology? How did you connect the dots and you said I’m gonna create a token, I’m gonna present this to the fast-food vendors, and who did you approach first? Which vendors did you approach? Did you approach restaurants themselves, like you said, small restaurants that were doing lots of takeout in downtown areas, high volume, or did you approach the food trucks first and how did that go? How did those first conversations really go?
LAURA WEISS: Yeah, I also started doing a pilot, and it’s always good to try out something like this because it was a new idea. It hadn’t been done before, and so I did start with food carts. That was the idea was to focus on the downtown food carts. We have well over 100 food carts just in downtown Portland. There’s 500 around the city, but I was just focused on the downtown core and I approached three of them that I had always been a customer of, so they knew my face and then I told them about this crazy idea I had and they were willing to give it a try and then of course, I reached out to my networks of people looking for customers to kind of pilot it. And, then the drop-box part, that was an interesting process because in the beginning, I had this idea that there would be this kind of reverse vending machine that would take back your container and spit out a token and I spent some time and money trying to develop that and then realized that that was really not a good idea for a whole number of reasons, but what I came up with instead was a much, I think, better idea, which is I approached some local businesses and we set up these nice-looking bamboo drop boxes lined with nylon bags where people could return their containers and a business like a health club or a gym or a bike shop could hand out the tokens to the individual subscribers to return their box, and then we added to that. After launching, we realized we had an opportunity to help businesses and buildings in downtown Portland be greener by offering them their own private drop box, and so now we have nearly 30 companies or buildings that have their own private drop box for their employees or tenants, and so it’s super convenient for people who work there to be able to return their container and then we pick up the used containers and take them to be washed.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s keep walking the entrepreneur journey, so how many food carts today have signed up for the drop box?
LAURA WEISS: Yeah. Today we have about 75 vendors that are offering GO Box. Most of them are food carts, but like I said, we have a number of takeout restaurants in downtown, salad bars and other places where people go to get takeout food that are brick-and-mortar restaurants or brick-and-mortar takeout places. We’re approaching 2,000 subscribers that signed up to use GO Box, and we have eliminated the use of about 50,000 disposable containers since launch.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Just to date?
LAURA WEISS: Yes.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. For our listeners that just joined us, we’ve got Laura Weiss on. She’s the owner and founder and the ecopreneur behind GO Box. You can check out more of what Laura’s doing or sign up for GO Box or get your restaurant or food cart involved at GOBoxPDX.com. So, now is the moment of truth, Laura. If you and I are walking into a meeting together and we’re competing against each other and you’ve got this wonderful product, GO Box, that’s revolutionizing how people take out their food, enjoy it, and don’t create extra waste, but I own the #1 compostable container company. When you’re pitching the product versus mine to the next food cart or food vendor, why GO Box instead of a compostable container?
LAURA WEISS: That’s an excellent question. Here in Portland, the city banned Styrofoam about 20 years ago, so there’s a lot of vendors that are using compostable containers and the most interesting thing about that is that here in Portland, come next year, the city and the county and the whole area is going to be prohibiting compostable containers in the compost, so this whole idea that compostable containers are good for the environment is, I think, slowly but surely starting to have some issues and the reason, from talking to folks at the city, what’s happening is that from all of this compostable serviceware that’s going into compost, it’s kind of overwhelming the system and the compost facilities are not designed to really deal with them the way they need to be dealt with in terms of the amount of time they take to compost. And, so in addition, the idea behind compost is to create something to put back in the soil that adds value to the soil and most of this compostable serviceware really doesn’t add very much nutritive value to the soil and so it’s getting to the point where these composting facilities are saying there’s a little too much of this material and it’s not working in our systems and it’s not helping and then — go ahead.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: No, you go ahead. This is fascinating. I’ve never heard this.
LAURA WEISS: In addition to that, it turns out that even despite that, most compostable serviceware ends up in the trash because a lot of places people don’t have the ability to compost these things and when the compostable serviceware ends up in the trash, the question is what is the environmental benefit of that? Because again, looking upstream at what it takes to create those compostable containers, it takes a lot of energy and resources and they’re still single use, and so this is the idea that reuse is better than single use, even if the single use is compostable and so using something over and over again is gonna be better for the environment in general as long as it gets used a certain number of times. Now, of course it takes resources and energy to create the GO Boxes. In fact, the manufacturer did a life cycle assessment of it and said that after 25 to 35 uses, the amount of energy and carbon footprint of these GO Boxes is less than that many Styrofoam containers, so it can get complicated pretty quick, but again, the bottom line is I would argue that reuse is better than single use.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s fascinating, and we’re down, unfortunately, to the last three minutes or so, but you know, as an entrepreneur now, Laura, you’ve got now in front of you with compostable containers now going to be outlawed soon, and soon the consumer is going to be educating that it shouldn’t be going back to composting and just food should be going into composting, not the containers, the GO Box is gonna be the go-to box, so help me understand this. In terms of your long-term goals, almost every restaurant, food cart, food truck, fast-food place that has containers in America, this is a massive opportunity for your business venture.
LAURA WEISS: Well, I sure hope so. I will add that, yes, you’re right. It is great that food is being composted and I do hope that we can compost more in this country and yeah, I would love to see the GO Box model replicated all over the country because it’ll help reduce all that waste and I think that consumers from New York to San Francisco are gonna be interested in this idea and this option when they get their food to go. The trick for us is just managing all the systems and the back-end work that goes into the business itself, but we’re hoping we can expand all over the United States and beyond if possible. It takes some time. It’s still a small business, but there’s lots of opportunity for sure.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Lots of opportunity and also lots of diversion that can be done from these wasteful containers just going into the waste stream.
LAURA WEISS: Yep.
JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well Lauren, we thank you so much for coming on today. For our listeners out there who want to contact Laura and sign up for GO Box or license the GO Box from her and create a franchise in their city, you can go to www.goboxpdx.com. Thank you, Laura, for being an inspiring environmental sustainability leader and ecopreneur. You are truly living proof that green is good.
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