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JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Laura Bucko. She’s the Vice President and Director of Communications for the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. Welcome to Green is Good, Laura. LAURA BUCKO: Thanks so much for having me, John. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get talking about all the great things you’re doing at the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, can you share please the Laura Bucko story and journey leading up to your position at the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce? LAURA BUCKO: Sure, I’m happy to. I’ve been with the Manhattan Chamber for 10 years and started with them as an Office Manager and after two promotions, I’m now Vice President and Director of Communications. Before then, I was in the job I moved to New York for was I worked at a literary agency called Harold Ober Associates, where I represented authors and worked to get them published. Previously, I got my education at Smith College, where I majored in English and have a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, worked a few years as a teacher and then moved to New York. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Awesome, and so thank you for being with us today and for our listeners that want to follow along online while listening to the show, it’s www.manhattancc.org. What does the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, the MCC, do and what’s your role there, Laura? How does it interrelate with businesses in New York City and in Manhattan? LAURA BUCKO: We’re a chamber of commerce and function much as other chambers do. We’re a 501(c)6 membership organization. We advocate for, connect, and educate the small business community of Manhattan and we also work in conjunction with other borough chambers, Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island but we’re all separate organizations. I’m the VP and Director of Communications. That means I work with our sponsors and our membership and I work on overall strategic programming and ways to engage the members. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re on Green is Good today for a reason, because there is a nexus between green and sustainability and the MCC and its business members. Can you share a little bit about where green and sustainability intersects with the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and its members? LAURA BUCKO: Sure, happy to. Back in 2008, we were starting to see a bigger influx of members who worked on energy efficiency and recycling and organic products and organic food and we started to see that maybe we should put these members together and start talking so I launched a green business committee, ended up being very popular for the chamber. We started out with 10 members in a room and have up to 250 members and it was also a time when green and sustainability were being talked a lot about in the city. Mayor Bloomberg had very strong initiatives in that regard. There was Plan 2030, which was plans for New York City and how to make it more sustainable over time and how to plan for climate change and changes in population growth and other plans in the city. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. Since 2008, how many members have joined the green business committee of the MCC? LAURA BUCKO: I have about 250 on my list and those are made up of members who are green businesses as well as those who are just regular businesses trying to have better sustainability practices that they can share with their employees. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that is amazing. How does it function within the MCC? Do you have separate Green Business Committee events and functions and how do they interrelate differently than the regular members? LAURA BUCKO: We sure do have a lot of different programming for the Green Business Committee. We have quarterly events where we have members get up and talk about their business and what their business is and other people can ask questions. We also have several different subcommittees and this is the only chamber committee that has subcommittees as well as its general committee and the subcommittees include, we have Green Finance, which is a group that talks about usually retrofits for buildings and how to finance these changes and updates. We also have a Green Design and Construction Group that’s been hosting tours of LEED certified spaces and we also have a Green Energy Group that meets to discuss regulations and different business opportunities around that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, green is taking on a huge life of its own and role at the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce? LAURA BUCKO: Well, it certainly has. It’s a whole industry unto itself and there are a lot of members that saw that early on and are very passionate about it and it has been a very important sector for the chamber. JOHN SHEGERIAN: No kidding! What kind of showcase events can you share with our listeners that the Green Business Committee has had? LAURA BUCKO: Not only do we do general networking events and small committee events. We’ve also had some larger events. A few years back, we did a Greener New York conference that was hosted by Con Edison and it was organized by our partner at Action Environmental, which is a major waste removal and recycling company. We also had a green film festival that was a lot of fun to organize and it was focused around issues around food. We showed clips from the films Food Inc, Fresh, Flow, and Gasland and then we had a panel discussion about organic food and the local food movement. Then finally we had a clean transportation summit that focused on electric cars, car sharing, bike sharing, and waterways and that was organized by our member, Tom Gwendeni of E3 Think. Now, he’s just won a bike sharing contract for Hoboken so now we look forward to seeing his work there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that’s great. You said Action and some of the other members so this is touching every other industry like you said and there’s Green Financial. There’s green in the waste and recycling industry so for our listeners on the island of Manhattan, can everyone have a role? If they want to green their business or they already are doing things that are in the sustainability space, everyone can become a member? LAURA BUCKO: Oh, absolutely. Everyone can become a member of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce as long as they’re interested in doing business in Manhattan and anyone can take part in this committee as long as they’re interested in learning more about green and sustainability and it definitely touches on every industry. We see it most in design and construction; and around energy related but for instance, there’s a whole initiative to green restaurants and so we have one member who’s a specialist on that and helps members to save energy as well as composting and other ways in which they can become greener and more sustainable. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there who just joined us, we’ve got Laura Bucko on. She’s the Vice President and Director of Communications at the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and to follow along and see the work she’s doing there, you could go to www.manhattancc.org. What are some of the other organizations that you partner with? LAURA BUCKO: We partner with many organizations, not just for the Green Committee, but throughout the chamber but some of the ones we’ve partnered with the Green Committee are New York Energy Week. That’s actually coming up. Wall Street Green Summit, Columbia Business Global Alumni Club, Green Festival Conference. That’s been held at the Javits before, but I believe it was just at Pier 92. Earth Day New York, the Go Green Conference, the Better Business Bureau for their CSR events, and we also partnered recently with the Taiwan Green Cleantech Delegation and Conference. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, so you give your members a lot of opportunity to interrelate in a much bigger platform than just here in Manhattan by giving them these opportunities at all these different conferences. LAURA BUCKO: Absolutely. Green is a global issue and we have delegations come in from other countries. They want to hear about our green practices, how they can adopt them in their countries so there’s opportunity for international business in the green and sustainability field. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. I’m on your website right now and your green section is just so chock full of information on the Green Committee resources. It’s just amazing. How much does it cost to join the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce as just a member and then to join the Green Business Committee? LAURA BUCKO: So, it’s just $125 a year to become a member and that’s for an individual as well as for a sole proprietor. It doesn’t cost anything to join the committee. However, if a member wants to be identified on our website as a green business member, then that’s an additional $100 to be listed in that area of the website and see that additional visibility. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s wonderful. You have so much content here with regards to recycling and waste management, green cleaning, food sourcing, energy efficiency, these are just to name a couple so you cover so many different sectors. It’s actually very impressive. My gosh! LAURA BUCKO: That was put together by some of our experts on sustainability throughout the chamber so definitely some people in the know. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. I see you give an award for Green Business of the Year every year so can you talk about some of the recent winners in most recent years? LAURA BUCKO: Sure. We give this as part of our annual business awards breakfast, so we give about 10 different awards and one of the awards is green business of the year. Our most recent one was EcoLogic Solutions, which is green cleaning products and the President is a man named Anselm Doering, who was with us from the start of our Green Committee. Some of our other recent winners have been Action Carting Environmental Services, a recycling company, Boost Organics, which is a health food restaurant and it’s 100% organic, ABC Carpet, which has a really thorough sustainability program, and Green Apple Cleaners, which is a green dry cleaner. They only use water and CO2 in their dry cleaning. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that is just amazing. Again, what’s more important than the clothes we wear in terms of our intimacy with being green and being sustainable and having our dry cleaning done without chemicals and being done in a sustainable way? What an important service that the dry cleaning service you just mentioned can give to the people on the island of Manhattan. LAURA BUCKO: And, he has such a terrific story. It’s led by a man named David Kisner and he is a survivor of testicular cancer and he decided to put this company together when his wife was pregnant and he was getting treated for cancer and he really wanted to make sure that their home environment was as green and chemical-free as possible so we were very impressed with what he did with his business. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that is impressive. How many locations does he have in Manhattan? LAURA BUCKO: I’m not sure. I want to say it’s about six or seven. I’d have to check. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, it was a great business success story and the community has responded accordingly. LAURA BUCKO: Absolutely. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just great. That’s a great story actually. What are some of the other committees? I know you mentioned them a little while ago. Besides the Green Business Committee, which I love talking about because we are on Green is Good, what are some of MCC’s other committees that members can take part in and participate in? LAURO BUCKO: Just to give an overview because committees are such an important part of the chamber. We have a Global Business Committee, Women’s Business, LGBT Business, Young Professionals, Tech and Innovation, Healthcare, Entrepreneurs and Professional Development Committees and then we also have business referral groups that are one person per industry to help members to get referrals and to grow their business. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. So, if you and I met today for the first time and you’re pitching me on joining MCC, what are the business benefits, whether you’re a green business or just a regular widget manufacturer here in the great island of Manhattan? Why should an individual or organization belong to the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce? LAURA BUCKO: I will have to say that MCC is the greatest deal in town. You get so much for your money and it is really a way for individuals to market and grow their business and that’s what most of our members are joining for so you can grow your business by attending our networking meetings, participating in a committee, volunteering at MCC events and helping to man our tables at expos. You can meet potential clients, potential partners, and grow your whole base of contacts. We also work to educate the businesses about legislation that might affect them and also about current business trends that they need to know. In addition, we provide benefits such as discounts at Office Depot and UPS and other companies so services that you need to run your business and mostly, connecting our members is what it’s all about. We put people together so that they can talk and do business and help grow their business in the meantime. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. And when did the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce actually start? LAURA BUCKO: In 1920. It was actually the Yorkville Chamber of Commerce on the Upper East Side and grew into the Upper East Chamber and in 1994, became the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce so we’ve only recently taken on that platform and when our President, Nancy Plaguer, took on the Manhattan Chamber, it was 200 members and now we’ve grown to 1,000 members and now we say we have 10,000 members and subscribers overall when we do our outreach in the community. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How many members do you have today? LAURA BUCKO: Ten-thousand members and subscribers are on our outreach list. Every time we send out an email, it goes to 10,000 people, so we have a very wide outreach in the community. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How often are you messaging to them? Is it once a month? Once a week? How often do you send out a message to your list? LAURA BUCKO: Several times a week. Some members think we message them a little too much because we just always have so much information to share and want to give our members every opportunity possible. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s just wonderful — 10,000 members! That’s incredible. What’s in the future? You’ve been around since 1920. You’ve been the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce since 1994. What does the next two or three years look like for the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce? LAURA BUCKO: We’re going to be continuing to grow our platform with the chamber and we’re taking on more advocacy issues. Recently, we took on the Paid Sick Days Initiative and although in the end it did not go the Chamber’s way, it did help to get our voice out into the community. We’re also taking on the horse carriage issue in New York City and we are for keeping the horse carriages as they are, small businesses in the city. We are always involved in many different initiatives. We have a World Trade Week going on right now in May. We also have Marketing Week going on in June. We have a very special kickoff event for marketing week, Meet the Founders of the Online Fashion Revolution, with the founders of Gilt Groupe, Birchbox, Bopple Bar, and Rate the Runway so there’s really innovative companies. We also have two new series that we’re doing. We’re doing our Innovation Showcase, where we’re doing a section on biotech. That’s actually next week and we just launched our new executive series. We did a section last week called Grand Review that was very well attended and then of course, in November, we always have out big business awards breakfast that we’re just taking nominations for so we really hope people will come to our website, take a look at that, and nominate some great businesses in New York City. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s fantastic. We’ve got about three minutes left and I just want to go back now and talk a little bit more about the Green Business Committee so for our listeners out there, how do we get more people to join the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce Green Business Committee? You talked a little bit about the benefits of becoming a member of just the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. Now let’s interrelate that with green. What’s the real pitch? If you and I were on an elevator today, Laura, what’s your elevator pitch to say hey John, you’ve got to also join and be involved with the Green Business Committee and want to make the planet a better place? LAURA BUCKO: Sure, so if you’re a business that’s interested in green sustainability, you should join the chamber and start coming to some of our green events and our subcommittee meetings. You will meet some of the most interesting passionate people who are just doing fantastic work and have such interesting stories and it’s a great way to see how green sustainability is so important to business overall and to all of our business planning. I think it’s essential for everyone but especially for businesses who care about this particular issue. I think you’ll meet a whole group of like minded people who you did not even realize were out there and I can’t talk passionately enough about how wonderful this group is and the great contacts and resources you will meet there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Because of you, I’m going to now join the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and the Green Business Committee. LAURA BUCKO: Oh, I hope you do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We are going to and we’ll have a lot of your members on Green is Good then because they deserve to be on our show and we look forward to joining and we look forward to having you back on, Laura, to tell more of the great stories that you’re getting to platform and share at the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and with your Green Business Committee. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Laura’s great work and the great work of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce or to join the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce or the Green Business Committee, it’s www.manhattancc.org. Thank you, Laura, for being an inspiring green business ambassador. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Leslie Durso. She’s a vegan chef and a healthy living expert. Welcome to Green is Good, Leslie. LESLIE DURSO: Hi. How are you guys? JOHN SHEGERIAN: We are great today and we’re so glad to have you on to share all the great things you’re doing to help vegan-ize the world and make it a healthier more sustainable place to live and it’s just great to have you. You have an interesting background and journey. I’d like you to share that before we get talking about all the things you’re doing today. Talk a little bit about your background, Leslie, and where you’ve been leading up to becoming a vegan chef and healthy living expert. LESLIE DURSO: Sure, I would love to. My journey started early, a lot earlier than most people’s. Meat was something that I never really acquired a taste for and I grew up in a very large Italian family with a lot of food and a lot of meat and our whole lives just revolved around the dinner table and when I was about eight years old, I found out what a vegetarian was and I said, ‘That’s what I am,’ and my family said, ‘What? Who is this kid in this Italian part of our family? You’re going to stop eating meat?’ and they thought it was a phase I was going through. It was a really big deal but they finally after years and years accepted my decision and it was later in life that I decided to cut out all animal products. I basically just stopped eating all of them and I was like, okay now I’m a vegan and it was a very easy journey for me. I always thought it was sort of meant to be and then getting into the food world, obviously I had the same stuff for food at a young age because my mom, after making Italian spaghetti, made the sauce and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for me. She just wasn’t quite sure what to make and it got me in the kitchen with my mom and my grandmother and my great grandmother figuring out foods, figuring out vegetables, how to make them without meat and how to make something meat eaters would like them as well and that’s something that was really important for them so all my food had to taste really good to everyone, not just people that are obsessed with vegetables as I am. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wait a second now. First of all, for our listeners, we’re so excited to have Leslie Durso on. She’s a vegan chef and a healthy living expert and if you want to follow along on your tablet or iPad or laptop while you listen to this edition of Green is Good, you can go to www.lesliedurso.com. I’m on your website right now. First of all, beautiful website, really fun. Let’s step back. You’re an Italian girl, so you’ve got cooking and food in your DNA, so it’s not hard to believe that you fell in love with cooking. It’s your cultural ethnic history so now mom and grandma and you and you’re getting now into the whole cooking thing and cooking vegan. A lot of our listeners send me emails when we have vegan experts on and stuff like that and everyone has this mountain of veganism that they think and they think it’s so hard to climb. Can you share a little bit about the vegan cooking experience and that it’s not that hard once you get into it? LESLIE DURSO: Absolutely. It’s really not that hard and this is what I always tell people too. There’s only about 12 mainstream different kinds of meat on the market. There are over 25,000 edible plants on the earth. There’s so much to do with vegetables and my style of food is very approachable. I call it a whole foods style of cooking. I’m only using whole real foods. I try to use as little processed foods as possible and that means not using a lot of fake meats and cheeses so when people sit down for a meal and they’re cooking my recipes, they recognize the ingredients in it and they’re like, ‘Hey, that’s all stuff I can get at my local grocery store,’ no matter where you live in the country so it’s a little bit more approachable. That’s really how it had to be for me growing up as a kid in the family that I did. Everything had to be very approachable for my family or they weren’t going to eat it and so I learned how to make really simple vegetables very tasty. It doesn’t mean you have to cut out eating your favorite foods. You can vegan-ize just about anything out there and still make it taste filling and you’ll feel better. People start getting feeling good and they just want to eat healthier all the time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right, right. And, you were in Hollywood. You had a successful television career, correct? LESLIE DURSO: I did, but I was on a couple shows for a long time and then I used to host an environmental science show with Bill Nye the Science Guy. I used to do that so long ago and when that show ended, I really decided- Bill was actually really instrumental in this as well- it helped me find my passion in education and how I wanted to educate the world and make it a little better and he said, ‘You have to do it with food,’ because I had started bringing food to set and telling everybody about what I do and how I eat and he was like, ‘This is a message that you need to share with the rest of the world’. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, for a while, you were a private chef to Hollywood people and other folks in New York and Hollywood? LESLIE DURSO: Yeah, absolutely. I’m one of the greatest ones out there for meat eaters and vegans. I assist a lot of meat eating celebrities that are just looking to get healthier. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha, so a lot of the people who have started vegan restaurants started off as private chefs. What’s the next evolution for you? Are you going to take your Hollywood experience and evolve that into a vegan cooking show or what’s your vision and goal to really bring vegan food and a healthy lifestyle to people out there on a scale basis, on a bigger basis? LESLIE DURSO: TV is something that will probably always be part of my life. I love the medium. I love being able to communicate with people that way. I have a recurring little segment that I do on the Hallmark Channel’s Home and Family. I’m kind of on the road to being a vegan judge for Food Network. I’ve gotten to judge Cupcake Wars, which was super fun. I felt like I was eating 32 cupcakes in one day. I thought I would die but yeah, I could definitely see my career going back into that line but I’ve also got a ton of other projects that I’m working on. My first book is about to launch, which you’ll be able to find more information on my website when that does. I’m working on a little restaurant project. I’m working on a little food line project so there’s a lot going on in my life and a lot more than I’m going to be able to share in the upcoming months. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What do you enjoy the most though, which part of it? Do you enjoy being in front of the camera cooking or judging or do you want to open Durso’s Vegan Restaurant in Venice or Santa Monica? What gets you out of bed in the morning? LESLIE DURSO: You know, what really gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that I’m helping people become healthier and happier because whether you make my recipes every single day or if you make my recipes once a month, you’re cutting down your intake of bad foods in your life and you’re increasing your good food intake and that’s really what it’s about for me. I love helping people on their journey no matter where they are in getting healthier and when I say getting healthy, it’s not necessarily always about being 100% vegan. That’s not an option for a lot of people in their lives. It’s really about cutting back on the processed foods, cutting back on fat, and replacing that with fresh vegetables whenever they can. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Leslie Durso on. She’s a vegan chef and she’s a healthy living expert and you can check out more of the great work she’s doing at www.lesliedurso.com. So when people go to your website, can they hire you to coach them in healthy living? Do they hire you to do private parties and cook for them or what are the services that people can engage with you on from your website? LESLIE DURSO: Yes, yes and yes. I love being accessible to people. I travel around the country constantly and I’m always giving talks and seminars. I teach at Whole Foods monthly. I’m doing all the green festivals this year so go to greenfestival.org if you want to find out those dates and for me, I love being able to reach out and be available to everyone. You can hire me on my website. You can email me and you can do in person cooking classes but I also do virtual cooking classes and seminars and consultations where you just jump on Skype and you bring your computer into the kitchen and we can talk about all the things you want to talk about. JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is wonderful so you make vegan living easy. LESLIE DURSO: If it’s hard, no one’s going to want to do it. If you make it easy, everybody is going to want to do it and not only do I always make it easy. I make it yummy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re in the middle of spring right now. Can you inspire some of our listeners with what are some of your favorite spring recipes that will get people socialized to the great vegan cooking that you share with your lucky, lucky partners and lucky colleagues and lucky clients? LESLIE DURSO: Spring is actually a great time to experiment with fruits and vegetables. There’s so much beautiful stuff out there. I was just at the farmer’s market the other day and they’ve got fresh peas already and I love fresh peas so I’ve got a bunch of those and a bunch of asparagus and I’m making a fresh pea and asparagus risotto, which sounds pretty normal to the everyday Joe and that’s really what my food is about. It’s just highlighting the beautiful produce that’s out there. There’s so much beautiful fresh food out there. The strawberries in California right now are to die for. They’re so sweet. They’re like candy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: A lot of people say that it’s better to be paleo than vegan or one thing rather than the other. Why vegan? Is there science behind being a vegan over a meat eater? How do you pitch that to people that are interest in being and feeling better? LESLIE DURSO: Absolutely. You’re vegan. You know the difference but vegan for me is what feels good to have in my body. You really have to find your own personal balance and what makes your body work and feel good but medically, veganism is proven to lower cholesterol. It’s proven to help fight cancer. It’s proven to lower your risk of diabetes. It’s proven to lower your risk of heart disease. It’s unbelievable how many people that I work with that are going into veganism strictly for health purposes so the animal thing and everything else doesn’t really matter to them. They just want to get off all of the prescription drugs that they’re taking. A lot of the idea is helping people in that respect we’ve seen incredible results and I’m not a doctor and this has all been under a doctor’s supervision but you lose the need for drugs in your life just by removing animal protein and replacing it in your diet. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Interesting. What changes do you see afoot in the vegan movement with regard to fast food, with regards to available food that people can buy, and other changes that you see in terms of right where we are today and where we’re going in the future? LESLIE DURSO: I think it’s a very, very exciting time to be vegan and part of this movement. I think we’ve kind of gone from that oh gosh, that’s like that hippy crazy thing that freaks people out in the country to everyone pulling strings. Jay Z and Beyoncé are going vegan. That kind of brings it to a whole other level. My website sort of exploded with people looking for information. It’s so great that now it’s a mainstream healthy thing you can do and there’s more available now than there ever had been on the food front and the new information front. With the internet and television, it’s acceptable and that gets me very excited and I really hope that in the future I do a restaurant and feel like I help so many vegans have menu items at mainstream restaurants and I would love someday to see every restaurant in America with vegan options and gluten-free options. There’s so many people out there that have allergies or just want to be healthier that day and why shouldn’t your restaurant provide that healthy option for them? JOHN SHEGERIAN: What I’ve seen also, Leslie, you’re so right, in LA and New York, the growth of the restaurants that are sprouting up, such as Veggie Grill and Cinnamon Snail and Pete’s Food and Gracias Madre and The Candle Chain and Sage, it just seems like there’s tons of great options out there now for people, including, which is really cool, Chipotle now has the sofritas, which is totally vegan. LESLIE DURSO: I love, love, love seeing that and anytime you sit in a restaurant and come with a bunch of people that have more restricted diets and everyone can sit and eat from the same table, people can be really excited and I’m just so happy to be part of this movement and I love seeing all these restaurants pop up and I know there are so many big plans. You walk into a Veggie Grill in Los Angeles and it’s packed and that’s so exciting to see and you know it’s not all vegan people eating there. It’s anybody wanting to get healthy. Like I said, that’s a very exciting thing for me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s also cool about you Leslie, is not only are you on the cutting edge in terms of what real science said, veganism and healthy living is really the best way to feel good about yourself, have a better life, and potentially live longer and live better, but you’ve also merged that with your social media skills so you won Angeleno Magazine’s Social Media Entrepreneurial Game Changer this year. What does that mean and how does that help you further get out your message, the great message that you’re trying to continue to spread? LESLIE DURSO: You know, I love social media because it’s a way to directly interact with people all over the world and winning that just made me realize even more how exciting veganism is in food culture right now. I was the first vegan chef to be part of a food and wine event on the beach a couple years ago and that just shows me that it’s becoming so much more mainstream to have veganism out there and to have veganism a part of your events. I went to an event that was catered by another vegan chef in Los Angeles and the event had nothing to do with veganism and the people running it were not vegan. They just wanted to do it because they thought it would be cool. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Cool, cool. What is your favorite social media platform? What are you on the most? LESLIE DURSO: I am always on Instagram. I love Instagram. It’s a great platform. I love the visual style of it. I love how fast you can connect with people and it’s just a little snippet of, Okay here’s what’s happening in my life right this second, go. That’s a big one for me. I love Instagram and all of my social media is all Leslie Durso — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, everything, Pinterest — everything is Leslie Durso. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, you make it very easy and logical, once people know who you are, it’s easy then to find you on any of the platforms that you’re communicating on. LESLIE DURSO: It’s easy to find me and unfortunately, I’m not creative enough to come up with a really cool little name for myself. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Leslie Durso suits you fine. Unfortunately, we’re down to the last two minutes and I’m going to leave this up to you in terms of shameless plugs and everything else. What’s up next for you? What’s the future? Where will we be able to see you, besides Instagram, in the future? Where on television? What restaurant in LA? What’s going on for the coming year for Leslie Durso? LESLIE DURSO: Well, there’s a lot going on. Like I said, make sure you’re subscribed and checking my website regularly because my e book is about to drop and then I’ve got cooking classes at Whole Foods in Los Angeles monthly. I’ve got green festivals all over the country. I might be in development for a restaurant right about now so keep your eyes open and ears listening and you’ll hear some details on when and where that is launching and I’m constantly delivering free information on my site so just keep checking that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Any pearls of wisdom? Because we have a lot of young women out there in high school and in college that listen to this show around the world actually that want to become a woman ecopreneur. LESLIE DURSO: Hello, all of you beautiful women entrepreneurs. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Any one or two pearls of wisdom to make it easy for them to make the leap and jump to be a woman ecopreneur? LESLIE DURSO: Keep going. Really believe in what you’re doing. Find a passion, something that you’re really, really excited about and just keep going. I’ve heard no so many times in my life. I’ve heard so many times in my career somebody trying to change who I was and saying you should do this but that’s not who I am so really sticking to who you are and having a strong belief system and just going for it 100% all the time is the best advice that I could give. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you, Leslie, for being on Green is Good today, and thank you for going for it, for 100% all the time. For our listeners out there, please use Leslie’s services. Learn more about her and continue to go to her website, www.lesliedurso.com. Thank you, Leslie, for being a sustainability superstar and vegan evangelist. 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 Todd Camp. He’s the Senior Director of Corporate Social Responsibility and Community Relations from the iconic and great Hershey company. Welcome to Green is Good, Todd Camp. TODD CAMP: Thank you, John. I’m happy to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Todd. This is your first turn at Green is Good and, of course, Hershey’s first turn here, but before we get talking about all the wonderful and amazing and important things you’re doing at the Hershey company, can you please share with our listeners the Todd Camp journey leading up to this point and this great position you have at the Hershey company? TODD CAMP: Absolutely, so I’ve been in this role about three years and prior to that, my background is actually in engineering, so I spent about 17 years in various engineering capacities from working directly in manufacturing plants to working in corporate with our various manufacturing facilities and either quality or efficiency improvements and that’s really what led me to and attracted me to this role. At the time when they were recruiting for this position, they wanted someone with a bit more of a technical background to drive more metrics and more of a process mindset to our corporate responsibility efforts and the stars aligned and I was pretty fortunate to land this position, like I said, about three years ago now. JOHN SHEGERIAN: First of all, there’s nobody that I know, including myself and my family, that when they hear the Hershey company or eat your great products, it’s such a great feeling because it’s comfort food. It’s comfort sweets and I love your motto, ‘Share goodness’. That is one of the best mottoes I’ve ever heard and brand missions I’ve ever heard from a company and since we’ve been doing the show. It’s just one of my favorites and it really sticks out. Todd, I was looking at your latest CSR report. Can you share some of the highlights with our listeners? And for our listeners who want to follow along as we’re on, I’m on your website right now. It’s one of the best websites I’ve ever seen. It’s www.thehersheycompany.com. Go on to the sustainability section. Click on to that button and follow along here as Todd walks us through his latest CSR report and all the great highlights that are happening at the Hershey Company. TODD CAMP: Yes, we certainly encourage folks to visit that URL and to learn a lot more about the Hershey Company than just what we have in our report but in terms of highlights, we’re really excited to share some of the progress we’ve made over the last five years in a few areas in particular, certainly cocoa sustainability is one we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve nearly doubled our commitment to source certified cocoa. We committed to 10% and came in at 18%. Palm oil is another area that we’ve taken a leadership role. We achieved our commitment to source 100% sustainable palm oil a year ahead of schedule and then we upped our commitment to source 100% sustainable and traceable palm oil by the end of this year, which is pretty remarkable in terms of the palm industry. In terms of the environment, we achieved four of our 2015 environmental goals at least two years ahead of schedule and if we use 2009 as our baseline here, we’ve reduced our water use by 72%, our waste by 38%, our greenhouse gas emissions by 22%, and we achieved zero waste to landfill status at six of our manufacturing plants and five other facilities. We also talk a little bit about our commitment to giving back to communities including nearly $9.5 million in cash and products donations and about 200,000 volunteer hours just in 2013 alone. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wait a second. Let’s step back and walk through some of this. So you’re ahead of some of the goals that you set in 2011. You’re ahead of schedule. How did you rally the troops? How did you make this so important at the Hershey Company that everyone got behind the initiatives that you guys created and the goals and you overachieved and are actually ahead of schedule? How did you create that culture and that DNA at Hershey Company? TODD CAMP: We attacked it on a couple of different fronts. We felt we had set some pretty aggressive goals back in 2011 so we had a lot of work to do so we first garnered our senior leadership support, which was extremely important in giving us the leeway and flexibility to make some investments in technology that allowed us to really drive down our environmental footprint and in a lot of cases, we relaxed our criteria for capital investment paybacks knowing that some of the investments we made in environmental technology were typically justifiable from a financial perspective. Our senior leaders relaxed that criteria and allowed us to have a longer payback period because they felt so strongly that these were the right things to do as a company. We also leveraged the creativity of our employees and we’re pretty fortunate at Hershey that if you give our employees a goal, they figure out a way to make it happen so we gave them the leeway to be creative and come up with new and unique approaches and that really all came together and was owned by various business branches and our various employees and they were a part of the process from the very start. That’s really what helped us accelerate the efforts we had set forth and we did all that during a time of growth, both from volume and sales growth, so we were growing in one sense and reducing in another, while maintaining the quality and consistency of our products that people have come to expect and that we view as the most important thing that we have. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, right from the top down, you’re saying everyone got behind this and that’s why you’re ahead of schedule and that’s why sustainability and the environment have taken on a large position at the Hershey Company and everyone’s winning then? TODD CAMP: Absolutely. Sustainability at Hershey is really integrated into our business and it’s not a stand alone department. We only have a handful of folks that work in CSR directly and we rely on our employees around the world to help us guide and inform our efforts and really drive progress because it’s really part of our corporate culture from the very beginning so it’s something that our employees view as just the way that we approach business every day. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so great. For our listeners that just joined us, we’re honored to have Todd Camp with us. He’s the Corporate and Social Responsibility and Community Relations Director at the Hershey Company. It’s thehersheycompany.com. I’m on their website right now. It is visually one of the most gorgeous websites I’ve ever been on and it reads so well because I clicked on the good business button and all the stories here that tie back to your CSR report and they’re all there so I know we can’t get to all of them today but for our listeners out there, I urge you to go on the site and look at all these amazing stories when it comes to sustainable cocoa and palm oil and everything that you’re doing. One of these has to do with zero waste and that’s a big issue now. One of the stories here I’m looking at says 97% of your facilities sends zero waste to landfill. Explain these numbers and what the whole zero waste to landfill goal is at the Hershey Company. TODD CAMP: Absolutely. This is one of our shining stars, John, so today, 97% of our U.S. production occurs at zero waste to landfills facilities, like you mentioned, meaning that those facilities send no waste to landfill, quite simply and we really attacked waste through a systematic process. First, obviously we identified the various waste streams at each facility. We then drove down that waste as far as we possibly could to eliminate it all together. We implemented various projects to reduce waste and also to increase recycling and then with that remaining waste, there’s always going to be that remaining bit of waste, we found ways to either convert it to energy on site or work with local waste to energy facilities to ensure that we weren’t sending that waste to landfill, that if we weren’t reducing it or recycling it, it was turned back into energy to power either our facilities or someone else’s so we are pretty proud of this fact. Our employees are extremely proud. This is a real sense of pride for our employees in the facilities and we’ve actually spurred a healthy competition between our employees at multiple facilities to achieve that status and once they get it, they are keenly aware of that and they have made the process changes to maintain it and are vigorous in terms of protecting that status, to make sure they’re doing the right things for the environment and the plant itself. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know the old adage, Todd, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ so since you’ve achieved so many of your important goals with regards to the environment and sustainability at the Hershey Company, share with our listeners what’s next. How are you guys going to keep raising the bar there? TODD CAMP: Well, we’re not satisfied. We’ve made tremendous progress and we acknowledge that. However, we feel like we can still do more and what we’ve done is essentially, reset the clock and our new baseline here is the end of 2013. That basically starts the clock at zero and we set new goals and fairly aggressive goals across the board with a target year of 2017 so working with our technical folks and our senior leaders, we’ve really set what we feel are incremental and fairly aggressive goals to continue to drive down our environmental footprint across the board. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it and for our listeners out there again, we’ve got Todd Camp with us. He’s the head of Corporate Social Responsibility from the Hershey Company and on their website, thehersheycompany.com. I’m also looking at this wonderful fact under the better stories. We’ve helped increase cocoa farmers’ income by 70% over the past three years. That’s amazing. Share a little bit more. Go a little deeper. Since cocoa’s so much of an essential ingredient in chocolate and in your products at the Hershey Company, share a little bit more about the cocoa story. TODD CAMP: Absolutely. This is probably over the past few years the area we’ve spent the most attention on and energy around and really, cocoa is a pretty complex commodity. It’s mostly grown in West Africa. Seventy percent of it is grown in West Africa in fairly remote parts of Ghana and the Ivory Coast and a few other countries. We’ve really relied on technology and leveraged that to basically provide cocoa farmers and their families with education to help drive increases in their yields and ultimately, their income and it’s just basic agricultural techniques, basic weather information, crop disease information, just basic information that they didn’t have access to before, which now that they do, are showing to have dramatic results and we just finished a three year impact study. Actually world education and international nonprofit finished a three-year impact study and found that, like you said, farmers in the cocoa link program, which is the one program we have that leverages mobile technology to get information to farmers. Those farmers increase their yield by 46% and their incomes by 70, like you mentioned, so we’re really leveraging technology to change the game for folks that are a vital piece of our supply chain and an important partner for us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s wonderful. I see in your CSR report also there’s a very interesting project called, ‘Project Peanut Butter’ and all I know is if I worked at the Hershey Company, I’d want to be part of Project Peanut Butter. What does that mean and what does it mean with regards to the aim to save lives in Africa? Explain to our listeners please, Todd, Project Peanut Butter. TODD CAMP: Absolutely. This is a project we’re really excited about and Project Peanut Butter is actually a nonprofit that’s been in existence for several years and they’ve been producing what are called ready-to-use therapeutic foods. They provide to malnourished kids in some pretty rural parts of the world and we decided to partner with Project Peanut Butter and fund the construction of a factory in Ghana to manufacture this ready-to-use therapeutic food for malnourished kids in Ghana itself and that facility is scheduled to open later this summer and will provide access to basically this nutritionally enhanced peanut butter to between 20 and 30 thousand kids per year. We really view this as an important project for our future but this was a purely philanthropic effort from the start but one that we feel is extremely important to continue our commitment to the well being of children, particularly those in need so this is a totally different approach that we’ve taken and we feel like it has a lot of potential to grow in the future and we have a lot of plans that we’re looking at to extend this project going forward. For now, we’re really excited to have this project almost cross the finish line that we really have these malnourished kids that need it most. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What an important project. As you show on your website, there’s over 70,000 malnourished kids in rural Ghana and for you to be able to help a huge portion of these children every year with this great project, Project Peanut Butter, that just speaks volumes for the Hershey Company. That’s just awesome. I’m on your website and for our listeners out there, it’s thehersheycompany.com. It’s a great website and one of the best I’ve ever been on. I clicked on the good business button and I see a lot of pictures of your employees that are doing community activities and I’ll share a couple here that I’m looking at right now. Children’s Miracle Network is one of them and the United Way Campaign Fund that you guys raise money for. Can you share some of the employee engagement that happens at the Hershey Company, both domestically and worldwide with your employees and all the great work that you’re doing as a company? TODD CAMP: Absolutely and you just mentioned our two primary employee campaigns, Children’s Miracle Network, which we’ve supported for 25 years and raised over $4 million for sick and injured children and United Way, which we’ve supported for really more than 50 years and last year alone raised almost $3 million for various nonprofits across the globe but really, our employees are the engine that drives our CSR efforts. Since the very beginning of our company, we’ve been committed to giving back to our communities and making a difference in the places where we live and work and we encourage our employees to engage in their local communities as well. They get several paid days off to volunteer each year and last year, we launched our first ever week of service, which we called, ‘Good to Give Back Week’ and that was a focus week of volunteerism and our employees were out in force in teams really making a difference in the places they call home. This year, we’re expanding this program to make it even bigger and more impactful and really at the heart of it we believe that engaged employees are happier. They’re more productive and we really strive to make our employees our CSR ambassadors and this is just one way that we do that. The employees love it and they get excited about it. They come with new ideas every year so it’s really at the heart of our efforts and something that is extremely important to what we do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last three minutes unfortunately, Todd, but I do want to mention for our listeners out there that don’t remember the genesis of the Hershey Company, it was founded by a great man named Milton Hershey and back at the early part of the century, 1918 or so, he committed his fortune to education and here we are in 2014 and education is still the future of America. That’s how ahead of his time she was. Can you share a little bit in the last two minutes or so all the great work that you’ve built upon and the great people at the company have built upon in terms of Milton Hershey’s legacy to education? TODD CAMP: Absolutely and you’re exactly right on those dates. In 1918, he gave away $60 million, which is giving away a lot of money today obviously and that was about 30 years before he passed away so it was kind of unique in that regard but basically that was set aside solely to fund a school for underserved children. Today that’s one of the largest K through twelve schools, with about 2,000 kids coming from severe poverty or severe social risk and they’re also our largest shareholders so we have a pretty unique connection with one of the largest schools for underserved kids in the world. That’s not all. We’ve extended that commitment to really focus on education globally so wherever we have operations or groups of employees, we seek out partners and programs that support, particularly, underserved kids and the vehicle with which we do that is usually through education so that is something that again our employees understand this unique connection we have with education and they’re very excited to be involved with it in their local communities and we’ve literally donated millions of dollars every year to support educational programs for kids because we feel so strongly about that. It is our future, like you mentioned, and it’s been part of our very legacy and DNA at the company and it’s something we will extend for many, many years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is just so great and Todd, thank you for coming on today. For our listeners out there, to learn more about all the wonderful and important things that the Hershey Company is doing, please go to www.thehersheycompany.com. Click on to any of the buttons I was talking about, good business, and enjoy their CSR report and enjoy their products and know when you’re enjoying them how much goodness they do for the whole world. Thank you Todd, for sharing all the sustainability goodness at the Hershey Company today. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so excited to have with us today Tina Larsson. She’s the CEO of the FolSon Group. Welcome to Green is Good, Tina. TINA LARSSON: Hi. How are you? JOHN SHEGERIAN: Great. Welcome and thank you for coming on today. Your business is very fascinating and I want you to explain to our listeners what you do but before we do that, Tina, your background is also very, very fascinating. Please share the Tina Larsson story. How did you even get here? What is your day job really and how did you come up with the great idea of creating the FolSon Group? TINA LARSSON: Thank you, John. I have 17 years of Wall Street experience. I’m a financial analyst by profession. I have been doing that for many, many years and in doing that, we own our own co-op and we said if our co-op is increasing maintenance every single year, then we need to analyze that and that’s kind of how the whole thing came about so three years ago, our maintenance price had increased since 55% since we bought our apartment so we decided we needed to take a closer look and how did we do that? We needed to get involved with the board so my husband became a member of a board and I was then elected, conveniently, to be on a finance committee and my husband’s background is also in finance. He has over 20 years, 25 years I think, in finance and one thing led to another and before we knew it, looking at our own building, we had saved 400 and we were actually very surprised. We did not think that this was going to be even possible. We had saved the building $400,000. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. TINA LARSSON: So, a year ago, when we had saved $400,000, we told people. Of course, that was kind of exciting, right? We told people our findings and they jokingly said, ‘You should come and be on the board of my building.’ As we know, that can’t be because we can’t be on the board of other buildings but that was like a year ago so a year ago, we started thinking about how do we make this happen and we tried to figure that out. We couldn’t really figure it out at first but then speaking to people in the industry and speaking to industry associations, we were under the impression that there was a need for our services so earlier this year, we formed a company and now we provide our services. It’s complete business audits for co-ops and condos and we do that on a consulting basis. We couldn’t be on the board so we are consultants and we don’t charge a fee. We share their savings. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay so let’s go back. The name of the company that you formed earlier this year is called The FolSon Group. TINA LARSSON: That’s correct. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And I’m online right now and if our listeners have their laptop or iPad or other tablet in front of them and want to follow along as we talk today with Tina Larsson, who’s the Founder and CEO of the FolSon Group, you can go to www.thefolsongroup.com. I’m on your site right now so now, let’s explain to our audience what you do at the FolSon Group. TINA LARSSON: We help co-ops and condos, the managing agents or the managers of buildings. We help them reduce their cost by smarter spending or savings. We do all aspects of the building so it’s our understanding that there are other companies doing pockets of what we do so there are, for instance, utility auditors. They look at the utilities. We look at every single aspect of the operation. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s give our audience an example. You said utilities is one so the energy in the building is one. What are some of the other segments that you’re examining when you go in to do a building audit? TINA LARSSON: We would look at every single vendor so for instance, there are a few phone lines in a building in most cases, depending on the size and the structure of course, and there’s one phone line for each elevator, for instance. There’s a chance that those phone lines are not bundled or that they are not actually set up on one bill as opposed to many different bills so very often, they are not paying the lowest rate. That’s a very small saving. In our building, it was $2,800 a year, not a big savings but on five phone lines, it’s substantial. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s a lot. Right, right, right. TINA LARSSON: So that’s a very small line item and that doesn’t add up to a lot of money but if you go through every single vendor, then it adds up. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Such as also, how about water? Is water another one? TINA LARSSON: Water is another one. Actually, depending on when the building was built, many buildings still have five or three gallon tanks for their toilets and there are great reductions to be had when it comes to that. We are in New York. In New York, there are subsidies for buying new toilets and actually, that’s what I want to get back to. The largest savings to be had in any building, in our opinion, especially for the older buildings, is to green the buildings. Greening buildings, whether that comes through your electric, your water, or your heating system, that’s where the bulk of the money and bulk of the savings are to be had. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow so coming in as the outside auditor specialists, the FolSon Group could then, after you audit everything, and do an ROI and everything, then you can then make a proposal to green the building. TINA LARSSON: That’s correct so one of the places where you can green a building is that you can provide– We don’t do it ourselves. We have vendors that we work with so improving or red refitting all of your electric, all of your light fixtures, provides tremendous savings. First of all, there are Nyserda incentives, green incentives, there’s subsidies and then when it comes to the water, there’s some other subsidies so there’s subsidies for implementing these programs. Once they’re installed, they provide immediate savings and typically is less than a four year payback period for any installation of these greening or however you want to call it. You and I are saying greening and a lot of people are saying greening but it’s really just making the building more efficient. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah, good sustainability decisions. Let’s go back so this is so interesting. You have a financial background so obviously you understand numbers and investments and so this ties back to what you’re really good at so you came up with this as a form of function and need in your own building and nobody else has created this kind of service in the city of New York or other cities or why is your service then different than others? TINA LARSSON: It is our understanding that nobody else is doing this, yes, and it’s very surprising to us and why our service is different is because we are doing all aspects of the entire building. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Not just one. TINA LARSSON: Yes, so the companies that improve the fuel use in the building, they do that specific thing and we do the entire building. That’s just a big difference and I don’t know of anybody who would look at something as little as five phone lines. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So you said your own building that you and your husband live in, you saved them $400,000 annually? TINA LARSSON: No, last year, we had saved for the first two years with the board $400,000. Today, year number three, we have saved $728,000. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh my gosh! TINA LARSSON: Yes. The yearly cash flow in our building has increased, as of today, by $250,000 per year. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, that’s a lot of money. That’s 20,000 a month back in your cash flow. That’s incredible! So it’s your vision to take this to the other co-ops and condos in the greater New York area. TINA LARSSON: That’s correct. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So why only co-ops and condos? Explain your vision there. Is there a reason to limit it to that? Why not office buildings also? Explain your vision on co-ops and condos and that target. TINA LARSSON: We have focused on residential and the reason for that, office buildings or rental buildings, for that matter, they have one interest party so the company that owns the building runs the building. There’s one interested party. If they are the investors themselves, we are just assuming, we might be wrong, that they’re running it as the owners and they want the profits so there’s one goal and one interested party. In co-ops and condos, there are three interested parties. There are the owners. There’s the board and then there’s the managing agent so with three interested parties in any organization, no matter what the organization, whether it’s the government, it’s very possible that we would be able to help rental buildings, office buildings as well but we think that their mode is different and their interest is different so therefore, we think that co-ops and condos are most likely to benefit the most from our expertise. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Interesting so what you’re really doing, as you well point out, is you’re consolidating the interests of the building getting everybody on the same page and therefore saving them money then. TINA LARSSON: That’s correct. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Tina Larsson on. She’s the CEO of the FolSon Group. If you want to learn more about the FolSon Group and all the great jobs they’re doing in terms of greening and making our co-ops and condos in New York City more sustainable, go to www.thefolsongroup.com. Tina, you mentioned earlier the toilets issue, how you can green a building and that’s one of the improvements. Share with our listeners what are some of the other items that can be done in their building, that you can do with your organization and the vendors that you have working with you to make green improvements to make their co-op or condo more sustainable. TINA LARSSON: Upgrading your light fixtures in your public areas. Very often, you walk down to the basement or you walk to your laundry room and the light is on 24 hours a day. You bring in one of the light fixture specialists and they will evaluate your entire building and they will tell you how much you can save by replacing the current light fixtures. There’s, of course, an upfront cost for this. Typically, the payback period for the savings that you have, and it’s immediate savings, you can start this project and within six weeks, it could be done so six weeks later, you can have a lower electric bill. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You being a financial expert, you’re able then to before they even do one thing in terms of the upfront cost, explain to them the proposition and the ROI and the ROI, the Return on Investment, is always much greater than the original investment. TINA LARSSON: Yes, absolutely. Within four years, you should have your money back, your initial cost back, and then everything after that is pure savings and we have actually seen where the estimate was a four year payback period but you’ve really covered your cost in two years. This is with the Con Edison Incentives and Nyserda Incentives, etcetera. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What’s another thing besides toilets and lights? Give us one more thing. TINA LARSSON: Okay, your heating system. There’s actually a new law in New York City where you have to get off oil. You can’t use oil anymore and there’s a place out so right now, I think that the year 2022 is the last year that you can use oil number six as your heating source so you have to convert to a better alternative, whether that’s natural gas, whether that’s biofuels, whether that’s solar, whether that’s anything else but oil number six. Oil number six is the bad oil and that’s the one that provides most pollution. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right so Tina, we’re down to about four minutes. Explain how this works. Do you know approximately how many co-ops and condos there are in the greater New York area? TINA LARSSON: I believe that there are 6,000 buildings. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay so there’s 6,000 buildings that should be using your great services that when you explain to them and they hear you Green is Good, how you’re saving $250,000 for your building that you originally greened and made more sustainable, why would they ever say no and how are you marketing to these buildings now and to these boards? Because to me, this seems like an amazing and easy sale for your great services, for the FolSon Group. TINA LARSSON: Yeah, I mean they should all hire us because there’s no downside. If they don’t save anything, we don’t charge anything so there’s no reason for them not to hire us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s get to that. That’s a fascinating proposition. How is The FolSon Group compensate? Because you said you don’t charge anything unless they save money. Explain your compensation. TINA LARSSON: We charge nothing until they save. We’ll take a look at the building. We will make proposals and then proposal by proposal, we’ll help them implement these proposals and once they save, we share those savings. We share those savings for two years so year number three, the savings they keep themselves. We do not share after two years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So for all the boards out there, the co-op and condo boards in the greater New York region, hiring The FolSon Group so audit their building and show them the ROI on all the changes that you’d like to make is a risk free proposition. TINA LARSSON: That’s correct. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, I don’t know. To me, that is just one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard in terms of business opportunities, business propositions, and for all our listeners here on Clear Channel, on the iHeart Radio network and the greater New York area, please share this information with your board. We’re down to two minutes. Talk a little bit about how you’re going to market this beyond Green is Good and all the great work you’re doing and already the successful proposition that you and your husband have from your own building. How are you going to go about marketing this and what’s your future with the FolSon Group and what’s your plan? TINA LARSSON: Well, right now, we have just been trying to word of mouth kind of reaching out to people so we met someone who met someone who had to introduce us to Solar One. We’re going to be on an experts panel with Solar One and the community board number six tomorrow speaking together with Solar One, who is a new sort of outreach company and we will be speaking on how to green or introduction to green for co-ops and condos for community board number six. That’s one way. We have been invited to a few different events where we’ll be speaking and for now, we haven’t really thought of a big marketing plan but that will probably come eventually, when we have a few buildings. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And if people go to your website, there’s your phone number and your email address there so they can contact you, right? TINA LARSSON: Absolutely. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Good, and for our listeners out there who want to green their buildings and should green their buildings or want to get your board involved, go to www.thefolsongroup.com. Tina Larsson, you have an amazing business proposition and I wish you continued success. I want to have you back on to talk about all the buildings you’re greening in New York as your business evolves so thank you, Tina, for making our co-ops and condos more sustainable in New York City and a better place to live. You are truly living proof that green is good. TINA LARSSON: Thank you, John.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. I’m John Shegerian, your host, and today, I’ve got Joe Pickard on the line. He’s the Chief Economist and Director of Commodities from ISRI, the great Institute of Scrap and Recycling. Welcome to Green is Good, Joe. JOE PICKARD: John, thanks for having me, great to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Happy to have you and before we get talking about all the great work you’re doing at ISRI, can you share first the Joe Pickard story? Talk about how you even got to this position. JOE PICKARD: Sure so I’ve been with ISRI about three-and-a-half years now. I’ve always been interested in recycling. I’m an economist by training and a lot of the focus of my graduate studies was on international trade and commodities so fresh out of graduate school I got a job as a research analyst for a consulting firm in the Washington, DC, area and that was focused mostly on agricultural commodities but a lot of the work that you do in terms of commodities analysis is transferrable to different commodity groups so right after working for the consulting firm in the DC area, we actually moved overseas to Lisbon, Portugal where I was the economist for the International Copper Study Group in Lisbon. I was there for about four years and a lot of the focus on my research there was not just on primary copper but on copper scrap, scrap recycling statistics globally in terms of how much copper gets melted at refineries and smelters for reuse and then the opportunity to move to ISRI came along, which was a fantastic opportunity for me in terms of broadening the scope of commodities that it covered but I really got to delve into recycling a little bit more, which has always been a personal interest of mine. Prior to graduate school, I did a stint briefly at the environment program at the Pew Charitable Trust so it’s sustainable development, recycling, the environment, and how it relates to the larger economy has always been an interest of mine. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Joe, the Institute of Scrap and Recycling Industry has been around a long time. Give us some scope. How big is the U.S. scrap recycling industry and what’s its economic impact? You’ve got a fascinating position, not only at ISRI but in terms of, as you just shared, your background as an economist and also a commodity expert. You’re at a very fascinating crossroads in terms of your knowledge and also on the platform that the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries has given you so how big is the entire industry in terms of its economic impact? JOE PICKARD: Yeah, well thanks for that and maybe just by way of background, I can give you a little bit more of what we do here on the economics and commodities side and how that fits into the big picture because it is a big industry and a growing industry. Its annual factor is about $90 billion, with a B, each year. The industry in the U.S. alone processes about 135 million metric tons annually. What we do here at ISRI from the economic side is we try to keep our members informed about what’s going on with the economy and what’s going on in commodity markets, which have such a big impact on the bottom line of the scrap recycling businesses but we also try to spread the word to external audiences about all the great benefits associated with the scrap recycling industry because it is an extremely innovative industry, as you know, John. It’s large. As I said, it’s about $90 billion per year. If you look at just the number of jobs that the industry creates, We had a study commissioned last year that showed we had about 138,000 people directly employed by the scrap recycling industry. If you look a little bit further, including the jobs that are supported by suppliers and other jobs indirectly supported by the industry, that number increases to over 460,000 jobs that are supported by the scrap recycling industry alone in the U.S. so it’s an extremely innovative industry with a large economic impact. It also has great environmental impact, as you know, using recycled goods has tremendous benefit not just for the economy but for the environment as well. If you look at particular commodities like aluminum, for example, the energy savings using recycled material versus prime can be 90% or more so it’s great for the economy and it’s great for the environment as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Joe, you mentioned aluminum. What are the other key scrap commodities that are processed out of the scrap recycling industry? JOE PICKARD: Sure and just to go back quickly, ISRI members are going to process everything along the commodity chain, not just metals including ferrous and nonferrous metals, but also paper, plastics, electronics, rubber and tire, and ISRI represents about 1,700 member companies and 21 chapters across the country but we also have a growing number of international members as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And it’s the largest organization of its kind in the world, correct? JOE PICKARD: That’s correct, yeah, and so some of the biggest commodities that our members process, by volume, include ferrous, which is iron and metal. That’s typically around 75 million metric tons any given year recovered. Paper is also a very big commodity by volume. That’s upwards of 50 million tons per year but we’re also processing copper and aluminum and all of the nonferrous metals. We’re processing electronic scrap. Figures from the ITC show that annually we’re processing over 4 million metric tons of electronic scrap alone here in the U.S., in addition to tire and rubber, textiles, and basically the whole list of recyclable commodities. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. If our listeners just joined us, we’ve got Joe Pickard on. He’s the Chief Economist and Director of Commodities at ISRI. If you want to follow along, I’m on their site right now. It’s a wonderful site. It’s www.ISRI.org. Truth in advertising, also my company, Electronic Recyclers International, has been and is a proud member of ISRI, so I just want to get that out there as well. Joe, one of the biggest things on the news every day, whether you watch Bloomberg, CNBC or any other great news agency around the world, is the commodity prices. Since you’re an economist and also a commodity expert, share with our audience what are the factors that help determine scrap prices? JOE PICKARD: Sure, and for most of the scrap commodities, the scrap prices are going to be following what goes on with the primary prices, so for example on copper, copper scrap prices very closely track refined copper prices and just as a disclaimer, I can’t talk about what prices are going to do in the future but I can certainly talk about what some of the determinants are of pricing so it’s important to note, I think, that the scrap prices tend to follow the primary prices so it’s not that the scrap industry is really setting the prices. We tend to be price takers because the prices for a lot of these commodities are set elsewhere. Basically, it’s a function of supply and demand, to be certain. We’ve seen a big commodity boom through 2008, prior to the recession and we’ve seen supply try to catch up to that increase in demand and a big part of the demand picture has been China to be sure. They’re a huge consumer of commodities. As they expand their infrastructure, as they promote urbanization of their population, there’s been a real need to invest in infrastructure and build things, roads, the whole nine yards, in China and with that spending come an increased demand for commodities to make the bridges, to make the copper wiring, to make that expansion possible so on copper alone, I’ll stick with that example, China’s going to account for about 40% of global consumption so as China goes, so go a lot of the commodities. Also, some of the determinants on the pricing certainly we’ve seen investment flows coming in and out of commodities and that can certainly have an impact, especially in the short term, on where commodity prices go and as I indicated, scrap prices tend to indicate that. It’s a balance between supply and demand. We’ve seen some commodities move into market surpluses as production has caught up with demand and that has had its weight on pricing for a number of different commodities. We’ve seen sharp increases in production in China, for example. China’s expected to produce about 800 million tons of steel this year, which is just a remarkable amount of steel, and as markets move into surplus conditions where supply outstrips demand, that tends to weigh on prices. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Joe, you mentioned China and everyone hears about China a lot in terms of consumption. Where, besides China, is most of the scrap processed in the U.S. consumed? If it’s going to China, as you say 40% of it, where is the rest going and how much is staying domestically speaking, even though we’ve lost so many. I believe the number is 70,000 manufacturing facilities have closed down since the year 2000 in the United States. Is there still some domestic consumption of our scrap? JOE PICKARD: Yeah, absolutely and I think that we’ve seen a number of factors that are going to help out U.S. manufacturing, making manufacturing in the U.S. more competitive. Certainly, we’ve got an advantage in terms of energy availability, with the boom of oil and gas production here in the U.S. That’s creating efficiencies here that make it a competitive place. As we’ve seen labor costs escalate overseas, that makes U.S. labor markets relatively more competitive as well so I think manufacturing has been a tough ride in the last couple of decades. That’s true but we’re seeing some real advantages come through and so most of the scrap, actually, that gets processed here in the United States stays in the United States. It’s about two-thirds, one-third, two-thirds of the scrap overall gets processed and consumed here and then about a third of it, we’re going to ship overseas. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha and of that third, China is the biggest consumer? JOE PICKARD: China is the biggest consumer, yeah, so of that third, about a third of that, which would be 10% of the total, goes to China but it varies a little bit by commodity actually. Most people when they hear that, they would expect that China would be our largest overseas consumer of steel, ferrous scrap, but that’s not true. Actually, Turkey tends to be the biggest overseas consumer of ferrous scrap but for most other commodities, it’s true. On copper, for example, over 80% of our copper scrap exports go to China. Most of the paper and plastic scrap exports go to China as well. On the electronic scrap, the figure from the ITC study show that China actually isn’t the most important overseas market but it’s in the top five. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Interesting. When it comes to global demand for the U.S. scrap industry, are the other BRIC nations involved, such as Brazil, Russia, and India, besides China or is this mostly a China story now and will it evolve to be a bigger and broader story in years to come? JOE PICKARD: I think that’s right. I think the BRIC nations are going to become increasingly important outside of China. Right now, we’re not shipping a whole lot to Russia or Brazil but I think as the Brazilian economy, especially, grows, and most experts are expecting Brazilian growth to pick up, that’s probably going to lead to increased demand for scrap. India certainly is an important overseas market for us as well. Our NAFTA partners are also big consumers of U.S. scrap. We send a lot to Canada and to Mexico but we’re sending our scrap all around the world to about 160 countries worldwide so China certainly has an important role to play in that but it’s really a global marketplace. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Earlier, you mentioned energy and I don’t know if our listeners actually understand that nexus between recycling metals and scrap and the massive energy savings that’s involved. Can you walk us through, starting with aluminum again, Joe, the huge energy savings when you recycle the commodities that your great organization, ISRI, covers in terms of the scrap and recycling industry? Show how recycling is not only good in terms of creating jobs and boosting the economy here in the United States and beyond but it also creates a massive energy savings as opposed to mining all these metals from virgin ore below the ground, which is also limited and is also risky. JOE PICKARD: Absolutely, yeah, so if you think about producing virgin materials, like aluminum, they’re extremely energy intensive. To get that ore out of the ground, then to process it, to smelt it, to refine it takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially for aluminum but for the other commodities as well and with that comes emissions, of course. It comes with other environmental costs so the environmental benefits of using recycled materials really are quite large, especially in terms of the energy savings so as I indicated before, that could be over 90% for aluminum but if you look at the other commodities, like plastic, that could be up to 87% energy savings, around 90% for copper. For paper, it’s over two-thirds. It’s 68% energy savings and for steel it’s about 56% less energy required to produce new steel from recycled materials as opposed to producing it from virgin ore or new steel production so it’s a tremendous amount of energy savings and environmental benefit for using the recycled materials and for the metals in particular, they can be recycled over and over again so it’s literally an infinite number of times that copper and the other metals can be reused and recycled. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s such a great story. It’s a story that doesn’t get that much cover so I’m so glad you covered that, the great energy story to recycling our scrap and recycling all our commodities. Joe, we got about three minutes left. Can you cover two key questions, the evolution of the scrap industry over the last decade or so? Can you share a little bit what big changes that have occurred? And also, before we end today, I want you to give a little visibility on the future of the global scrap marketplace going forward. JOE PICKARD: Sure, so it really has been an amazing evolution for the industry over time. When you think a century ago, it was essentially peddlers going from door to door and trying to collect and sell household goods or farm equipment. Today, the recycling industry is extremely capital intensive. Scrapyards today, it’s a vital part of the manufacturing chain and increasingly capital intensive, by which I mean we’re using machinery and equipment to process the scrap. If you look at just the number of shredders in the United States alone, in the 1970s, we were at 160 shredders nationwide and today, that number is over 350 shredders operating today so it’s a much more capital intensive industry. As I’ve touched on before, it’s certainly a global industry today. We’re looking at over 200 million metric tons of scrap that’s typically being exported around the world on any given year so in addition to China, it’s really become a global marketplace. If we look at the industry within the U.S., we’ve seen it become an increasingly competitive marketplace. It’s highly competitive, which means that our industry members really need to evolve over time. We just need some industry innovation and consolidation and I think, looking forward, a lot of people are expecting probably some additional consolidation within the industry just because it has become such a competitive marketplace, which has put some pressure on profit margins within the industry and I think a lot of folks are expecting that integration and consolidation to continue and I think on the global marketplace, I don’t expect that to change. I think there are a variety of opinions on whether China will remain the biggest consumer of commodities as growth starts to slow there on the import side but I think China is not going away anytime soon. It’s going to continue to play a really important part in the global commodity marketplace and for scrap commodities in particular. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so great, and Joe, please feel free to come back at any time. We’d love to hear more about this and for our listeners out there who want to learn more about the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, please go to www.ISRI.org. It’s a great organization. Learn more about it if you want. I urge you to join ISRI. I’m a member. My company has been a member for years and we get a lot out of it and ISRI is going to continue to play an important role in the domestic and global scrap recycling industry for many years to come. Thank you, Joe, for being a sustainability scrap superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and we’re so honored to have back with us again Linda Demmler. She’s the Vice President of IBM Global Financing and Global Asset Recovery Services of North America, the great and iconic IBM brand. Welcome to Green is Good again, Linda. LINDA DEMLER: Great, thank you John. I am so excited to be back on your show. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m so happy to have you back on and for our listeners that didn’t have the opportunity to hear the great work that you’re doing at IBM the last time you were on the show, before we start talking about what you’re doing, talk a little bit about Linda Demmler. Give a little bit of your story and you journey leading up to IBM and the important position that you have here today. LINDA DEMLER: Sure. I’d be happy to. Thanks, John. In my current position, I’m responsible for global asset recovery services and at IBM and this has really been a journey for me. I started with IBM in the northeast region and I have worked in our leasing operations, our leasing company, for the majority of my career in a variety of different roles, whether it’s been strategic alliances or channel development or business development but I keep coming back to this asset recovery business because it’s just an interesting and fascinating business to me in terms of its ability to have real impact on the world around us. I live now in Annapolis, Maryland. I’m married. I have a 10-year-old daughter, Reese, and so as we look at the world around us and we want to be strong professionally in furthering the agenda of our corporations, we also want to be good stewards of the environment that we’re operating and the communities that we’re operating within so it’s been nice that this IBM journey has afforded me the opportunity to work on something as valuable as asset recovery and sustainability that really improves the way companies operate as well as the way IBM impacts the environment and communities in which we operate. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we go into the nitty gritty of our discussion, for our listeners out there that want to follow along online, IBM has one of the greatest websites out there and to follow along on what we’re going to be talking about with Linda today, you can go to IBM.com/financing. There’s so much great information here on sustainability and all the great work IBM is doing with regards to asset recovery services and sustainability. Your role has of recent times changed a little bit. Can you share the difference in your roles now in charge of North America versus worldwide? LINDA DEMLER: Yeah, absolutely. So it certainly has been an exciting and dynamic year. It’s interesting. There’s been so much that’s been new. Previously, I was running worldwide sales within global asset recovery services. I spent my life on a plane visiting all the countries and geographies around the world, meeting with clients, meeting with business partners, meeting with other IBMers on how we can further the sustainability agenda and really leverage best practices as a singular unit around the globe. About a year ago, I took this position responsible for North America and it’s been very interesting in that there is so much new in working directly with companies and getting down to the next level of working with them and driving companies’ own agendas, whether it is an IT transformation or a business transformation or their own sustainability initiatives but honestly, the world’s become so accessible that one of the things that I’ve found is that there are as many similarities as there are differences and I find most often working with the North American companies that no matter what we’re doing, there tend to be global implications to what their current needs or their current initiatives are, more than ever before so for instance, many U.S. companies have non-U.S. operations and even the smallest of partnerships could have a global footprint impact and I’m always approaching the new engagements anticipating that there will be a global impact and that’s really helpful for me as an IBM organization, given that we have this global footprint and that this critical mass of IT assets from our leasing portfolio. That gives us great insight and experiences that resonate in a variety of different situations. We’re used to working with businesses small and large, the smallest businesses to Fortune 100, but doing that across 40 different countries really gives us a breadth of perspective that in American companies, gives us a lot of flexibility and a lot of adaptability for the way the world is changing for everyone and how we need to recreate and reinvent our business models going forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting so of course hindsight in life, Linda, is always 20/20 but now that you look back a little bit of recent years and your position change, are you happy with the sequence that your career followed? Because are you better in your current role in charge of North America because of your previous global worldwide experiences? LINDA DEMLER: I absolutely think so. I think having that diversity of experience and meeting with employees and clients and partners from around the world and seeing all the variety of business models that are out there really gave me the ability to look at problems, look at solutions, look at new ideas from many different perspectives as opposed to having just one view of the world so it has been very enriching to me professionally and I would say personally as well. I still mentor a number of women from different countries around the world and bringing those experiences to me as a person makes me a more enriched person and you can’t help but be changed by those relationships. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great. In our first interview, we talked about three principal market advantages that you have at IBM that you offer in the global asset recovery services division and those were sustainability, affordability, and trusted advisor and I’ve thought about that a lot more and that resonated with my listeners. I got a lot of feedback on that. Can you take a deeper dive into those three principles that set you apart from everyone else. Talk a little bit about the genesis of those three and how they continue to drive your differentiating sales proposition forward at IBM. LINDA DEMLER: You know, John, this was a real turning point for GARS when we focused on– We had been creating value through asset recovery solutions for over 30 years and we had so many best practices. They had been replicated around the world. We have eight patents for our unique and innovative remanufacturing and demanufacturing operations. I’m not going to say we became complacent but we certainly thought we know what’s going on. Over the last 10 years alone, we processed nearly a billion pounds through these operations so a few years ago, we really challenged ourselves to say we can do more, we can do faster, but how do we do better? What is it that really makes us different as an organization, as individuals, why do we show up at work in the morning? Why do we do what we do? Why do clients want to do business with us? What do we do that clients value? And so we created these small teams around the world to take pulse of local clients and marketplaces and honestly, we walked in with kind of a bias that we assumed we’d have to create these regionally based themes that resonated with clients locally and it was really fascinating. It’s not what we found at all. Of course, there’s local customs, there’s legal restrictions, there’s lots of business practices that are unique as you go to each city around the globe but at the core, what we’ve found is that clients value us because of the robust investments and IBM’s unwavering commitment we’ve made to environmental leadership, sustainability and they work with us because we don’t focus on selling just what’s in our warehouses but they want to work with us because we listen to their challenges and we work with them to develop real solutions to their problems, whatever those solutions might be. Sometimes there’s many client conversations I’m involved in. I don’t get a sale out of them but I get a customer and I get a customer that we will partner over many years in the future because I show up as a trusted advisor, not as a solutions seller and my team prides themselves on being innovative experts to really drive the pain points out of the customer business model, not just sell what we have on our truck and what we create that the clients value through that process is real affordability, not just low cost. I’m not just going to walk in with the lowest priced hardware or services but really focusing on what is it that we can do to accelerate a customer’s critical transformation end to end, acquiring solutions, getting them implemented, using them, getting rid of them. Sometimes disposing is the hardest thing and all of this comes down to affordably reducing the time cost and risk of customers’ transformation and affordability, for me, is all about realizing and truly recognizing with the client that time is money and the higher the risk, the more exposure clients have to costs increasing when things go wrong and so what was eye-opening was that these three themes of sustainability leadership and showing up as a trusted advisor not just there to sell something and really looking at the end to end transformation and how can we improve the affordability of that transformation, whether it’s reducing risks or reducing costs or reducing time and it was eye-opening that this was the same in every region, every geography, every client. Clients want to work with trusted advisors that enable them to affordably accelerate their transformation and link their corporate agendas and their execution to sustainability stewardship. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s the recipe for success at IBM. LINDA DEMLER: It’s been really fun. I think it’s really energized the team that while we like what we did, we’re all very passionate about it, you can tell we enjoy what we do but for us, what really crystallized it was the impact it could have on improving clients’ businesses and moving the agenda forward on a smarter planet was really energizing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there that just joined us, we’ve got Linda Demmler back on Green is Good today. She’s the Vice President of IBM Global Financing and Global Asset Recovery Services of North America and to learn more about what she’s doing at IBM, it’s IBM.com/financing. Linda, I don’t want to gloss over it but I do want you to touch upon the wow numbers. You just touched on it a little while ago. Give the last x amount of years. You said a billion something? And give the annual number that you recycle in the cars division at IBM. LINDA DEMLER: Right, so I did mention, over the last ten years, we passed about a billion pounds of material through our remanufacturing/demanufacturing division around the world and I’m a visual person so for me, this is equivalent to 1,000 Airbus 300s. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh my gosh! LINDA DEMLER: If you look at 2013 alone, we processed more than 800,000 units of IT equipment and what we very much focus on, our unique value that we try to bring to the sustainability environment is we pride ourselves on our high percent of reuse versus solely recycling, 800,000 units of IT that we processed in 2013, more than 91% of it was reused and resold with the remainder being dismantled parts, going into recovery of precious metals, and if you take just the laptops we processed last year, it would be nearly the height of Mount Everest. JOHN SHEGERIAN: But let’s be honest, all of this is just appropriate and great sustainability practices, 91% being reused and resold and the other part going to end of life practices being commoditized. Everything’s staying out of the landfill then and everything is being disposed of appropriately so that’s all great sustainability practices and so kudos to IBM, kept that all out of the environment LINDA DEMLER: It’s also good business for customers because it frees up the capital for the customers to spend on their core business requirements, whether they’re focused on investing in innovation or growth or transformation so we do, the tens of thousands of assets that we receive back each week, we do remanufacture them and we remanufacture them according to original manufacturing standards and the way we drive such high reuse standards is we custom configure them for reuse and resale and so by focusing heavily on this reuse versus just pure recycling objective, we are able to help customers enable and drive forward their transformation because they’re either extending the life of the assets within their enterprise or they’re acquiring repurposed assets that allow them to extend the life of what they have in their footprint already while they’re making the big investments and transformations that are really going to drive their business forward, cloud, analytics, mobile, all that initiative that is bringing strategic importance to their business and really displacing huge number of assets in the process. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Linda, what we love to do on this show, as you already know, is give solutions so we have about four minutes left. For our listeners out there that are COOs or CEOs of companies, our listeners out there that are CTOs or other operations managers that make decisions with regards to recycling and new equipment and new technology, what are they supposed to be thinking about? What do you want them thinking about in terms of making decisions when need to refresh their equipment and such? What are some of the paying points? What are some of the things that you want to be top of mind? LINDA DEMLER: I think the untapped potential for companies out there is as companies are driving huge investments in these new promising initiatives, like Cloud and big data and mobility, are hugely disruptive and will move their businesses forward but it is displacing a large number of assets that can and should be reused and can return value to offset some of the cost and risk and time of those transformations they’re investing in so the key thing to think about is having a strategic asset management initiative in place that allows companies to extract the value out of the assets being displaced and working with a trusted advisor so that they don’t incur incremental risks or incremental costs as they go through that displacement and dispose of those assets. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And that’s really what you are then. You’re the plug and play for COOs and CEOs and other company leaders across the world and people become then that trusted advisor who then takes those assets and gets them repurposed in a safe, both environmental and data protection way, correct? LINDA DEMLER: Correct. Absolutely. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, got it, got it. What should they be aware of though? Down to two minutes here. What should they not be doing? What are some of the absolute worst decisions someone in a decision making role can make right now when getting rid of their electronic assets? LINDA DEMLER: There’s a few considerations. Being cognizant of your own environmental stewardship plan, making sure that companies you’re partnering with are following the same policies and practices and methodologies that you have, that companies that you’re partnering with are keeping up with the complex ever-changing environmental regulations and that there truly are environmental management systems and I’d be remiss if when you’re working with companies, you’re working with companies who are not focused on reusing versus solely recycling because the reuse is where we really contribute to the sustainability of the environment and reduce the manufacture of incremental new assets because we have fully appropriate and fully capable new assets ready to go. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And reuse is one of the greatest and most legitimate forms of recycling. Shameless plug. We’re down to the last minute or so. If you want our audience members to have one big take away about your thoughts about IBM’s Global Financing Global Asset Recovery Services, GARS business unit, what would it be? LINDA DEMLER: I have to say I’m very proud of IBM’s longstanding history of environmental leadership and through those initiatives, we truly are making the world smarter and a better place and we’d be happy to work with companies small and large to help put in place an asset management and disposition strategy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You are making the world a better place. Thank you, Linda, for being a visionary 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 Kerri Stenson and Cindy Goldberg. They’re the co-founders of Urban Market Bags. Welcome to Green is Good, Kerri and Cindy. KERRI AND CINDY: Thank you so much, John. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so great to have you both here, to have women entrepreneurs on the show doing great things. Before we get talking about your great brand, Urban Market Bags, please share the fascinating story behind Kerri Stenson and Cindy Goldberg, how you met, how you made a business, what other things you’re doing together, share the journey together before we even get into to talking about Urban Market Bags. KERRI STENSON: Great. Well, we met through our kids at a school in Woodside, California and we immediately discovered that we have so many synergies and very community minded, tons of volunteering for the school, and what we’ve discovered is that when we work together, we can move mountains and have a lot of fun doing it so after volunteering and running all sorts of things through the school for a good nine, ten years, we’ve started a local magazine, a food magazine that’s all about sustainable living and eating locally and healthily and that’s called, “Edible Silicon Valley” and through that, our love for our friendship and working together has really sprung the impetus for Urban Market Bags, which has just been truly a joy and a pleasure. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it and how long ago did you start Urban Market Bags? KERRI STENSON: We started Urban Market Bags really about a month ago but the idea came up in October. We started thinking about colors for the bags, designs for the bags, Cindy did the whole website, we did all the legal work on our own and we’ve just been kind of getting it going. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Okay so give the epiphany. You ladies are obviously inspiring. You’re innovative, creative, you’ve got massive amounts of energy. You were already doing a business together, “Edible Silicon Valley” magazine. Why Urban Market Bags? What was the aha moment for both of you when you were together that made you create this as your next venture? KERRI STENSON: Well, we love to have fun and we love to live smart and be fashionable and this product allows for all of that and we just want to kind of share the love with the whole world actually. CINDY GOLDBERG: Especially now that there are about 119 plastic bag ordinances around the United States, it’s a life opportunity for people to experience reusable shopping bags that are high quality and really good looking and cool. Some of them out there aren’t so cool. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I agree with you, by the way, on the not so cool stuff so I love it. CINDY GOLDBERG: That was our inspiration was to help people look good while doing good. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your beautiful website right now and for our listeners out there that want to follow along or want to buy some of Kerri and Cindy’s beautiful looking bags, it’s www.urbanmarketbags.com and it’s a fun site. There’s so many cute photos on it and cute sayings. It draws you in. It’s fun to be on the site. I was all over it last night during the pre-show prep and I’m looking at a shot right now and the colors are just really engaging so kudos to both of you for making such a beautiful and fun website. Let’s talk about the Urban Market Bags and how are you getting the word out there? Are you going to stores in the Woodside area where you live and are they going to be carrying the bags or is this going to be only through social media and your website? What’s your vision of how to socialize your brand with everyone you want to purchase it? KERRI STENSON: Our original thinking is we’re lucky enough to have our website platform on NetSuite and we basically decided that we were going to really push online in the beginning. We have a wonderful person working with us on marketing and social media and so we’ve been just kind of slowly getting the word out and we’ve had retailers contact us so for us, the sky’s the limit. We wanted to build our back end to be as robust as possible and now it’s just kind of get out there and go for it. CINDY GOLDBERG: Right. We’ve designed it in a way that it can be completely scalable so the sky’s the limit for us. We’ve hooked up with a warehouse that’s all automated so that our entire system can scale to the moon and back without having to rewrite a bunch of logic so we designed it from the ground up to be a large company that can support lots of products. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And is the vision to get really big in terms of getting this into different store chains and having them get rid of some of the less fun looking or visually exciting or even quality related bags that they have and getting your bags into those kind of stores or is it just for the general public at large and its really more B to C? What’s your vision, both B to B and B to C or one or the other? KERRI STENSON: Our vision is really both. This is really a solution to sustainable living. People are starting to clue in about bringing their own bags to the store but it’s not always easy when they’re so bulky and they’re stuck in the trunk and so we created this system to make it easy and fun and frankly, stylish, for people to bring their own bags and we have a strategy to co-brand with big stores and really get the bags out there so that everybody is using them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about what makes your system smart and also the convenient pack that comes into it. Talk a little bit about design and the convenience of your bag and the smart system that you’ve created. CINDY GOLDBERG: Urban Market Bags is all about the design. To sum it up, most important feature is the fact that they come in a drawstring pack, six or three to a pack, and they fit in the cup holder of your car. That’s the most important thing. We were observing the problems that people were having and their reluctance to use reusable bags. That was the primary complaint so this solves that problem. We wanted to design is so that it’s in your face and you don’t forget your bags. They’re not in the trunk of the car. They’re not floating around somewhere under the back seat. They’re right there in front of you and you won’t forget them again. We’ve been living with these now for a while, Kerri and I have, and our families and I can guarantee you that it’s a whole different way of life when you have these sitting right there in front of you and men like them too for that exact reason. They fit in the cup holder. They don’t carry a handbag and so they’re right there, front and center. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And they’re made out of 100% Supplex nylon. What is that and how friendly is that to keep clean and to keep tidy? KERRI STENSON: We chose Supplex nylon as a fabric that is extremely durable yet has a sleek feel to it and it comes in beautiful colors and while it does eventually biodegrade over time, the point of these bags is that they are truly reusable. You can wash them. Stains come out. Sticky food comes out and they just live on and on and on. CINDY GOLDBERG: That was one of the other problems that Kerri and I and our families observed with the other reusable bags, the big flat bottomed bags. You can’t wash them so I’m glad you brought up that point, John, because so many checkers at different grocery stores tell us they love these bags because they’re always looking good. We can throw them in the washing machine, the dryer, a million times and they still look amazing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is awesome. Both of you have mentioned design. Who’s the designer here? How did you design such a bag that’s so cool looking and so functional but also so compact and convenient? KERRI STENSON: This was just an idea that I came up with kind of years ago and it was for this exact reason, to kind of make it easier to bring your own bags. What could you do? And the idea came to myself and a mutual friend of mine of gosh, what about the cup holder of your car? You can’t even put the car in park or drive without knowing that they’re there and the actual bags were designed to kind of mimic a plastic bag. In the olden days, baggers used to like to put the bag on those two little things that stuck out while they loaded it and so that’s really how the initial design came out. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha and for our listeners who just joined us, we’ve got Kerri Stenson and Cindy Goldberg with us today. They’re the Co-Founders of Urban Market Bags. To buy these wonderful bags and to check out what they’re doing, it’s www.urbanmarketbags.com. What’s the feedback been? If I was to guess, you two both have a huge boatload of friends in the community at large up in the area that you live in so I’m sure you’ve shared these bags with friends and family members. What’s the feedback you’ve gotten before you even went to market on these bags? CINDY GOLDBERG: The feedback has been overwhelming for Urban Market Bags. It’s funny because our customers are actually our best ambassadors. We’ve put a couple of the testimonials on the website but we have so many that have been coming in but the funny thing that we’ve been laughing so much about is that we’ve been receiving photos just emailed to our [email protected] email addresses and it’s photos of all the bags full in the trunk of someone’s car, all the beautiful colors lined up, or in the front seat and the funniest thing is that the vast majority of these photos recently have been from men so men are so excited about these bags and I honestly think that, like Kerri said earlier, it makes it very easy to use these bags. It’s not a pain. You don’t have to try to carry all these ridiculous cumbersome bags so people love them and they’re so excited to tell us about it and, in addition, what we’ve also noticed is that the minute somebody orders a set and they use them for a little bit, they are back on our website and they’re ordering more for their families, for their friends. We’ve had people order 20 sets already just to sent them as Christmas gifts in the future so people are very excited. Kerry, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong. I have not heard one person ever make a criticism about the design, about the color, about the bags, never. KERRI STENSON: No, it’s more like alleluia. CINDY GOLDBERG: Exactly, like thank you! JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on the site now and I see two groups of bags and I want you to explain this to our listeners. One says rural, one says metro. They’re beautiful palettes of colors and I don’t want to muck it up by saying something wrong so explain the choices of colors under the rural heading and the choices of colors under the metro because they’re both beautiful palettes. Explain to our listeners out there that don’t have the website up the color choice you’ve made and how many colors these wonderful bags come in. KERRI STENSON: So there are, as you mentioned, two color sets and there are also two versions so there is a six pack and a three pack and we were really inspires, frankly by the word urban and we were just thinking gosh, this is great for city living but it’s also great for more rural living and we were inspired by nature and also, like I said, urban living so we came up with metro, kind of thinking of New York. CINDY GOLDBERG: We love New York, guys! KERRI STENSON: We love New York so we sat down one night and we had a nice glass of wine and we just spent hours and hours and hours with the pantone color guides, just getting inspiration and it really came to being and people are absolutely loving the colors and particularly how they go together. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wonderful. So people can choose either the rural or the metro and then they order those all together in one order? KERRI STENSON: That’s right. There are six different colors in the six pack and three different colors in the three packs. CINDY GOLDBERG: And we’re excited about our next step, maybe in a few months. We’re going to be coming out with more and more colors in the future so stay tuned and keep your eyes on that website. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Speaking of that website, I’ve now switched over and I’ve gone to another website while we’re talking, which is your other business venture, “Edible Silicon Valley”. Eat, drink, read, think. Now wait a second. You ladies are just like the sustainable twins here or something like that. This is amazing! One business wasn’t enough? You’re doing two businesses. This is a beautiful website and you’re doing beautiful things here in terms of what you’re talking about, farmer’s markets and organic foods and this is just another inspiring and innovative website and with tons of great information. Talk a little bit about how do you split your days? You have families. You’ve got Urban Market Bags. You’ve got “Edible Silicon Valley”. Did you ladies figure out how to have 40 hours in the day? What’s going on? KERRI STENSON: I’ll tell you how we do it. We have a little phrase that we say to each other all the time. It’s ‘Get er done’. CINDY GOLDBERG: We just don’t give ourselves the option. By the way, thank you for such a lovely thought about both of our websites but we are just so inspired by the things around us locally. We’re so fortunate to live in an area where we have all of our farmer’s markets and our local farming and our fantastic wineries and restaurants. Kerri is Editor and Publisher of “Edible” and I’m doing the website for her but when we took on Urban Market Bags in addition, we did have to divide out time somewhat but they’re so well integrated, they really do kind of both lend themselves to our mindset that Kerri and I both agree with and that is to live your life the best way you can and feel good about what you’re doing. Urban Market Bags really does help with that lifestyle and so it’s a perfect combination and it’s been fun, a lot of the crossover between the two companies so we do divide and conquer and yes, we have a bunch of children between us and all of our volunteer work as well but we get er done. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. That’s really the essence of a great partnership, to see two already successful brands that you both have done together. We’ve got unfortunately only about three and a half minutes left. Talk a little bit about what’s on your plate developing other sustainable products. What’s coming down in the future for Kerri Stenson and Cindy Goldberg? KERRI STENSON: World domination! JOHN SHEGERIAN: I feel that coming for sure! KERRI STENSON: Right now, we’re really focused on this product because it’s so fabulous and we would love to see it get into the hands of all Americans and people all across the world. We do have some very special ideas brewing. CINDY GOLDBERG: Top secret! KERRI STENSON: We have plans to really create a whole sustainable line of Urban products. CINDY GOLDBERG: We really feel strongly about incorporating sustainable products into people’s lifestyles and it’s just not for crunchy people anymore. It’s for everybody and so what we’re doing is we’re providing a way for everybody to look like they want to look and kind of be fashionable at the same time so that you don’t have to kind of make a choice. Do I want to be green or do I still want to look good? You can do both. JOHN SHEGERIAN: The cool part is, I don’t have to tell this to you ladies but you’ve captured two trends here, two megatrends. One, the flight back to cities, the urban megatrend of people going back to the cities and really the redevelopment of our cities across America and the renewal of our cities across America. Two, sustainability. Both are here to stay. Both are growing wildly and I love the brand name, Urban Market, so I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of things you can do with that. We’re down to the last minute or so. Tips on living more sustainably, go. KERRI STENSON: Well, buy Urban Market Bags. It’s a very easy way to make a huge impact on the environment. CINDY GOLDBERG: And that’s Kerri’s and my philosophy too. Sometimes the smallest changes can have a huge impact. This is a very small change that you can make in your lifestyle that really does make a difference. Twenty billion bags in the state of California are used a year but not anymore and so it’s an easy way to make a huge change. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well that’s great and I really do want to have you ladies back on to talk about all the other new products you’re going to be releasing and the continued successful journey of “Edible Silicon Valley” and Urban Market Bags and to buy Urban Market Bags and to enjoy their great new product, please go to www.urbanmarketbags.com. Kerri Stenson, Cindy Goldberg, thank you for inspiring everyone to live a more sustainable life and thanks for both being living proof that Green is Good. CINDY GOLDBERG: Thanks, John. KERRI STENSON: Thank you so much.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Dory Kurowski. She’s the Founder of MyConscienceMyChoice.com. Welcome to Green is Good. DORY KUROWSKI: Hi John. It’s a pleasure to speak with you this morning. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Dory. Before we get into talking about your great organization and My Conscience, My Choice, can you please share the Dory Kurowski story leading up to founding this great organization and how you even got to this place in life. DORY KUROWSKI: Sure. Well, I’ve always been an advocate of animals and a member of many animal-related organizations like National Anti-Vivisection Society, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, Harm Sanctuary, the Humane Society, etcetera, land preservation organizations and eco organizations, but after some personal events that I experienced, like the passing of my Bernese Mountain Dog and the birth of my son, which was very significant, I became even more involved with helping animals and leading a more eco-friendly lifestyle. I also became more nutritionally conscious as well so I set out on a quest to revamp my own lifestyle and I wound up becoming a resource for many others in my family, other friends of mine as well and what wound up happening was I wound up keeping a database of all my preferred choices that I switched to, all the new products that I bought, the wonderful brands that I discovered, and I incorporated my former background, copywriting and editing when I was in the communications world, and I was constantly writing press releases and that’s kind of how My Conscience, My Choice was born and I was able to write about these fabulous products that I discovered and that people should know about. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And when did you start My Conscience, My Choice? DORY KUROWSKI: I started it initially in 2011 and the website was launched in 2012. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wonderful, and speaking of the website, I’m on it right now. It’s a beautiful website. For our listeners who want to follow along and look at the website while we have a nice chat today with Dory, please go to www.myconsciencemychoice.com. I’m on the website. It’s a beautiful website. Let’s talk a little bit about what your website does, what your organization does, and why you do it. We know about the why but how does it actually work? DORY KUROWSKI: Yeah. Well, the whole My Conscience, My Choice brand consists of a website and an app that’s in development, both of which serve as simple resources to find and purchases leading, cruelty-free, eco-friendly, and natural product alternatives and those alternatives should be purchased in lieu of commonly purchased products that the average person might pick up out of convenience so the mission of the project, which really is the first of its kind that I know of, is to provide a tool to help the average person transition his or her lifestyle to a more sustainable one and the goal is to provide information so that they are able to select and purchase better products and also to funnel the revenue to support the pioneering brands that are providing these sustainable products. There’s so many brands out there that people don’t know about. They might be under the radar because they’re just starting out or they’re just getting a cruelty free certification and I’m trying to bring these brands to the forefront so the average person can know about them and use them so the website and apps that are in development offer the information that’s very easy to reference, quick bullet points, why you should switch to the product so that you can switch from purchasing more familiar brands that you might be used to purchasing leading eco friendly, cruelty free, and all natural brands and products. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah, and it’s a beautiful website so when you started it, how many brands did you have on the website then and how many has it evolved to and how do you choose the brands? DORY KUROWSKI: Yeah, that’s a really great question because there are so many fabulous brands but there’s also so many brands that make false claims as well and that’s kind of how My Conscience, My Choice comes in is it kind of helps to cut through the clutter of false claims, brainwashing or core product performance, you know you buy a product, you test it, and you might not enjoy it. It might not perform like you’re used to, so that’s kind of the mission of the site is to do all that legwork, so someone who’s busy doesn’t have to do it even though you might care about switching to a better product, and I think initially, and the database is continuously growing and it’ll be featured in the app when the app is ready, I think right now there’s about 80 or so posts because I was posting one alternative per week. Now it’s one every other week that’s featured out on the site so every time you go on the site, every other week, there’s a new product alternative but there’s so many more that are still pending to be released. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How do you decide? This is an interesting social study and science project in so many ways. What are your standards that you use to recommend these products and how do you decide which ones to use and are you testing them on yourself or friends or other organizations, the third party certifying bodies you’re relying on? How does that work? DORY KUROWSKI: The goal is really to kind of look at the gold standards first and to pick from a smaller pool of products that are available and fortunately, there are so many now that are certified in certain ways. For example, I’ll look at companies that are certified as cruelty free from the most reputable organizations such as the CCIC, which is the Coalition for Consumer Information in Cosmetics. They have the leaping bunny logo, which is gold standard for cruelty free products. We also look at products that are certified as cruelty free by PETA and then we also look at B certified corporations, which practice very rigorous environmental standards and are extremely responsible in how they produce and manufacture their items in their day to day operations, companies that are Natural Product Association certified and so forth so that’s kind of where we look from but there are also so many new products that haven’t gone through that process yet so in that case, we’ll make phone calls to the company, find out more information, really kind of vet everything before making a recommendation. Then of course, yes, I do personally try out the products myself. I have others try them as well. I do look at plenty of reviews and get personal feedback. It’s obviously so important. None of the recommendations are compensated. I have no relationships to any of the companies or brands recommended and that’s really important obviously so yeah, we look at, in terms of natural products, all organic or naturally derived. We also look at the EWG product database if necessary, if there’s some ingredients that are unknown, recyclable packaging, but it always starts with a narrow pool of brands if that’s available. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your website and the amount of brands that you’re carrying just already is just wonderful. Again, for our listeners out there that just joined us, we have Dory Kurowski on with us today and she’s the founder of My Conscience, My Choice and please look at this great website. It’s www.myconsciencemychoice.com. I’m on it right now and there’s so many amazing products in every category. How many want to get on? Are people now sending you products and asking for a place? DORY KUROWSKI: Yes, yes, and it’s difficult. It’s a good question and it’s good to talk about. What do you do to honor all of these pioneering brands that maybe the product might not perform as well but they’re doing well and they might have other products in development. There is a section on the site called, ‘Companies with a Conscience’. Those are companies that are producing cruelty free products, eco friendly products, natural products. Maybe their specific product has not been recommended to purchase in lieu of another product yet but their efforts are noble. They might be coming out with something shortly and they should definitely be recognized. The brand should be recognized for consumers so we have that section, ‘Companies with a Conscience’. A lot of the companies that are recommended on the site are already Companies with a Conscience but yeah, there’s tons of companies that approach me that say, ‘How can I get on your site?’ and that’s like a first avenue to get on the site is becoming a Company with a Conscience. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Earlier in the show, you referenced how you changed your whole lifestyle in terms of the products you used and even your diet. How did your diet change? DORY KUROWSKI: It’s funny you should ask. I did stop eating meat, of course and I’m actually just currently on an anti-candida diet so my diet is very restricted and everything I eat has to be really scrutinized but yes, the first thing was to stop eating meat, dairy, and try to find alternatives there and there’s so many, especially in the area of cheese, fabulous alternatives. This week, we just recommended Treeline tree nut cheese, which is an amazing spread that is tangy and creamy just like something you would be used to and people can’t tell the difference whether you eat dairy or not. Everyone seems to love the spread and there’s so many products like that that are just easy to transition to that people should know about that are better for their health and better for the environment, better for animals, it’s a win-win for everyone. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Dory, people ask me what are some of the oncoming mega trends and big opportunities as young people who are graduating with their M.B.A. or their law degree or just with their general degree and I just tell them, ‘You want to be a billionaire, get involved with the vegan food movement,’ and it’s just going to explode so anything plant based is just going to be huge and I think it’s wonderful that you’re carrying cheese like that. I think that’s just another great part of your story and the great collection of brands that you’ve put together DORY KUROWSKI: Thank you. I completely agree with you. Look at where Bill Gates’ money is going right now and tons of other very prominent investors. I think Hampton Creek Foods just got a huge investment. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Beyond Meat, which is backed by Bill Gates and Biz Stone, they were on the show a couple weeks ago, and they rocked the house. It’s just a great story and it’s just going to continue to grow so talking about mega trends, you mentioned earlier in the show your app. You’re making an app and mobile is the mega trend and people are moving from desktop, not only to laptop but they’re moving to mobile so is your app in development and when do you think that’s going to be released? DORY KUROWSKI: Yes, the app is in development. It’s come very far. We have a prototype right now. Considerable investment has already been made in the app to get to the prototype stage so there’s not too much technical work left but because there’s so many alternatives to put in, more than even what’s on the website, we’ve said early next year that the app will hopefully be released and the goal of the app is really, like you said, that’s really where it’s at, to have a mobile easy to use reference for the person while they’re shopping or whatever, while they’re home. They want to look at a different alternative. They found something in their pantry and they realize it has a bad ingredient in it, just to have at your fingertips 24/7 a resource to make a product switch, order another product online, what have you. That’s the goal of the app. The way it works, you simply scan the barcode of a product and it will feed back what we think is the leading substitute to purchase instead of that product. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Gotcha. That’s awesome and you talked about considerable investment being made in the app. Talk a little bit about that. Now your website’s up and going. It’s obviously successful. People are sending you products. You’re featuring all sorts of neat and cool stuff. Talk about partners and investors. How do you take it to the next step and what’s your vision here? DORY KUROWSKI: Ironically, I’m actually meeting with investors tonight so we’re always looking to meet investors. There’s features of the app that we’d love to refine. The feature right now, as I mentioned, you scan a product and the best alternative will be fed back to you to purchase. You can purchase it through the app but you will need to do that in Safari so you would have a different user interface where you can have the e-commerce right within the app would be one feature we’d be looking to upgrade. Another feature would be to have some kind of Foursquare feature so for the brick and mortar retailers that are recommended in the area, they could kind of pop up when you were walking around and you wanted to purchase another product in lieu of the one you scanned and you could see which retailers were closest to you. This would be really neat for an urban environment to be able to say hey, let me exit this store and go into the next one and I’ll pick it up there if it’s not at the store that you’re currently at so those are kind of things that we’re looking to upgrade the app on. Right now, there are partners of My Conscience, My Choice. We have affiliates, like Vegan Cuts based in Canada and a growing number of other companies, retailers that we will be working with on the app going forward, and other pioneering brands so that’s great and eventually, I’d like to actually form an advisory board as well. That’s under discussion to help with the endorsement of the products being recommended. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What it seems like is every time I walk through the aisles of Whole Foods and all of the other natural food product stores and things of that nature, it seems like there’s more conscience driven products coming out than ever before. What’s your plan for keeping up with all of the volume of the new products coming out and integrating them appropriately into our website when needed and necessary? DORY KUROWSKI: It’s a great problem to have but we’re having all of these wonderful brands coming at the forefront. Like you said, when you go to Whole Foods, it’s dizzying. It’s maddening because there are so many brands. I think it’s probably inevitable that some products might be missed but that’s going to be the beauty of the app. There’s going to be a feature on the app that will link with Facebook and the community of users that will be able to use the app can provide feedback about the recommended products to endorse it or even recommend another product is kind of where the app is going. They’re going to have a springboard for recommendations that many people will agree with. There will be the open door there for stimulating conversation about other brands that other products as a resource. The people will be a resource to help purchase different products as well so that’s kind of another feature of the app so we’re very confident in the recommendations but just seeing the switch as everything comes out. There’s so many new brands evolving and developing. I just saw something the other day about a chest rub. Instead of Vick’s, we recommended something put out by honest companies and that happens. We will update if we find we like the product better, we will definitely update it on the app, on the website but we will really value the recommendations by the people as well and all the feedback that we get. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. Your app also then becomes a great democratizing tool. DORY KUROWSKI: Exactly. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last two minutes, unfortunately. Shameless plugs. You mentioned the cheese spread a couple minutes ago. What other shameless plugs do you want to give for great products that people should know about vis-à-vis Green is Good? DORY KUROWSKI: Oh gosh, well, in terms of household cleaners, there’s a fabulous product called Karmalades Household Scrubbing Souffle, which if anybody’s ever cleaned an oven, it’s a very unpleasant experience when using toxic cleaners. This is a nontoxic almost like a cream that is slightly abrasive. You can use it on various surfaces. That’s a wonderful nontoxic biodegradable cleaner. Another one that was recommended and I like a lot is Quinn Popcorn. Quinn Popcorn has revolutionized the microwave popping popcorn industry by developing a bag that contains no chemical impurities. It’s compostable, recyclable, the corn obviously has no GMO. There’s a really short list of ingredients, no preservatives, hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, pressed oils, fabulous product and just for the upcoming summer season, fabulous product, another one, the organic insect repellent by Tick Tock Naturals. It’s a insect repellent that’s DEET-free, completely organic. You can use it on children, babies, pets, and it’s completely cruelty-free, all organic ingredients with a recyclable and reusable aluminum container and it repels mosquitoes, gnats, and fruit flies. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it and I can’t wait until your app comes out and you get to come back on the show and talk about your amazing app. Thank you, Dory, for democratizing the power of choice that consumers possess. You are truly living proof that green is good.

Dave Savage JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so excited to have with us today Dave Savage. He’s the Consumer Relations Manager at Daiya Foods. Welcome to Green is Good, Dave Savage. DAVE SAVAGE: Hey. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey Dave. We’re so happy to have you on. We’ve never had you on before and we love your brand, Daiya Foods, and for our listeners out there who want to follow along while we’re having this wonderful chat this morning with Dave, it’s www.daiyafoods.com. I’m on the site right now. It’s a beautiful site. It’s actually making me hungry. Dave, before we get into talking about your wonderful brand, talk a little bit about the brand of Dave Savage. How’d you end up at Daiya Foods? And talk a little bit about your journey leading up to this position. DAVE SAVAGE: I spent about 25 years in hospitality service really enjoying the connecting with customers and I worked for larger brands, smaller brands, really enjoyed that part of the journey but about five years ago, I started getting really health conscious like a lot of people and started living on the west coast, started exploring different options for myself so I eliminated some dairy and I got rid of some other things and that’s when I discovered Daiya. I was a consumer before I joined the company and I thought, ‘This stuff is amazing,’ and I asked I think a lot of the questions that people ask me now, ‘How can this not have dairy? How can this not have these other things and taste so good?’ and so then I was on the website and a job opening came up and I started and I loved it from day one. It was just one of those really, really good fits. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect and here you are. DAVE SAVAGE: Yeah, and I think I probably enjoy it more now than I did even when I started. I get to know people better and we have an amazing team, very dedicated research and development people, people who are in QA and people who package our food. there’s just a real sense of mission and dedication and also a lot of fun. We get to sample a lot of food so we get to eat lots of pizza and cheesecake and different foods for the day. It’s a good gig. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m already envious of your job. As our listeners know, I’m a full-on vegan. I love your products. Of course, before I brought you on the air, I asked you off the air how to say the name of your product so for our listeners out there, of course it’s spelled Daiya, daiyafoods.com, but I asked you was it Daiya, was it Daiya? Of course, you said, ‘It’s happy Daiya’. It’s have a happy Daiya at Daiya Foods, but how’d you guys come up with the name? Where did this name come from? DAVE SAVAGE: It’s a little bit of a play on words. We wanted to have something that sounded close enough to dairy that wasn’t actually dairy and then we stumbled upon Daiya, which really does reflect the values of the company because it means loving kindness and compassion and if you got to know the owners of the company, you would see that’s like a perfect fit for these guys. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. And when and how did Daiya start? DAVE SAVAGE: It started with Greg and Andre, who are truly amazing guys. That’s probably one of the perks of working here is working closely with them. They are hardcore foodies. They love food. They’re both vegans. They’re very, very funny and deeply committed to the company and so they started out, they were good friends for a long time. They both played music together and they were good friends for about 20 years and both of them were vegans so they wanted to find a cheese alternative that would actually have some taste and stretch and bubble and do all the good stuff that Daiya does so they went on a bit of a journey, two years, lots of frustration, lots of mistakes and definitely meltdowns and catastrophes, as they will tell you and the stories are really, really fun. They’re both good raconteurs. They are great to listen to. And then they stumbled on the formula that was just right, that would hold its form and would melt and bubble and they brought it to Expo West, which is a natural food expo in Anaheim. We go every year since 2009 and that’s the very first time they did make a product way, way, way in the basement of the auditorium, which is a big, big space and it was a huge hit. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And that was 2009? Wow. DAVE SAVAGE: Which I love hearing because we’ve gone from a table top, maybe like an eight foot, ten foot table, and we now have a 40-foot booth. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome. There’s nothing more fun for me than to have people like you on, Dave, and share the entrepreneurial fits and starts and crashes and burns. This is what makes America great and talk about a mega trend. If veganism and clean eating isn’t a mega trend, there is no mega trend. DAVE SAVAGE: These aren’t little trendy things like trends come and go. This is a movement. This is something we really focus on. This is not going to go out of style in two years or five years. It’s not going to be oh yeah, I remember acai berry. This is really meeting a big need for a lot of people. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your website now. First of all, I’m getting super hungry and for our listeners out there, I eat the Daiya products all the time. I eat out a lot and I’m on the run a lot and just delicious products on every level. Let’s talk about a little bit about though the beginning, the beginning of why and I would love you as the Consumer Relations Manager and chief evangelist to share with our listeners, why Daiya over regular cheese? DAVE SAVAGE: That is a great question. We get that a lot. A lot of people right now just cannot consume dairy. That’s one of the major markets right now because they just cannot tolerate it and there’s different levels of tolerance, from people who have a very strong reaction, to people who just feel mildly uncomfortable, and so we were looking for something that was dairy-free, but we also are soy-free and gluten-free, so it really fits into a lot of different others. But, this stuff just tastes really good, and happens to be dairy-free, soy-free, gluten-free. So, it’s not a compromise. It’s not like if I have to have it on my pizza, I’ll have this. This stuff is amazing. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So many people, including myself, are really dairy intolerant but it’s even so much healthier than dairy, even if you can tolerate dairy. It’s bad for your health compared to the great Daiya products. DAVE SAVAGE: Absolutely, and we find now with more nutritionists and dieticians, what they’re seeking out is plant based diets. That’s what they’re saying over and over and we always look for key words. Is it this? Is it this? And the ringer is always is it plant based and we say it’s a vegan product and they’re like, ‘This is a vegan product?’ so I think there’s a lot of misnomers of what is a vegan diet because it’s almost like this tastes really good and I’m enjoying it. We had a guy in Boston last year, which is the story I like to tell everybody. It’s him and his wife and three kids and he’s eating the product and he says, ‘This is really good. Hun, we should get this at home,’ and she’s like, ‘We already do,’ and so he didn’t know he was eating dairy free for about a year. Just the look on his face was classic. I loved it and the look on her face was more like oh my gosh. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love this, and so I’m on your site now and for our listeners out there who just joined us, we’ve got Dave Savage. He’s the Consumer Relations Manager for Daiya Foods. It’s www.daiyafoods.com. Cream cheese spreads, slices of cheese, shreds of cheese, pizzas, where do people who are listening to this show around Canada, around the United States, and around the world find your great products? DAVE SAVAGE: We are fortunate enough to be in 12,000 grocers. We’ve been really embraced by both the natural food markets and the really traditional, like Safeway, they have really hopped on board because it’s a big trend so we are in Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, Publix, and our website, there’s a store locator, which is very convenient and user friendly. You can just type in your zip code. It’ll tell you a basic idea of where all of our products are available and if you want something very specific, like just the cream cheese, you can narrow the search engine down and just find that and it’ll tell you exactly how many miles it is, address, and phone number. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. How many different cheese do you guys make? DAVE SAVAGE: We have a great line right now. We three types of shredded cheese. We have cheddar, mozzarella, and pepper jack, which is wildly popular. We have block cheese and we have slices for a grilled cheese sandwich. The slices are great hot or cold and we have a really nice line of frozen pizzas. We have four flavors. They are just ready to bake, 11 minutes in the oven and you’re good to go. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh man, that is so good. I’m on your site now and you have a whole recipes section. Talk a little bit about this and talk a little bit about the funness of your job and being able to taste the new and exciting products that you have in development on a regular basis because I’m on your site and I’m looking at some amazing looking products right here. DAVE SAVAGE: I wish we could film our Research and Development team in action because these guys are in a league of their own. They’re just elite. They are fun but they are deep foodies and we will taste on particular product. Before we launched pizza, we had pizza almost every day. What is the crust like? What is the cheese like? What is the sauce like? This tastes like this. What does this taste like? And so we would do what we call sensories and we each have to just blind taste test stuff. It’s very in-depth so we do sample our food every day and we taste it to see what is the consumer experiencing and I will tell you they are pushed hard to have something that is rich and delicious. Like we did the cream cheese. Plain cream cheese converts beautifully into a no bake cheesecake, which we’ve brought to a few shows with us, and it’s blowing the doors off. People are like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to buy this in stores readymade,’ so we love doing that. We love sampling stuff but it’s always with the consumer in mind. Would my kid enjoy this? Would I bring this home? Would I serve this to my friends at home? And I do a lot. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m looking at your website and your recipe section. Consumer and people who love your brand can actually post their own pictures and their recipes. I’m looking at a mac and cheese and I’m looking at a vegan lasagna and I want to be up at your offices right now and be trying some of this. This is great stuff. This is actually user based. DAVE SAVAGE: This is the great thing with our brand. I’ve worked with a ton of high end brands. I have yet to meet a brand that people are so passionate about. They’re sharing their kids’ pictures. Weekly we get pictures that people send of their kid having the mac and cheese for the first time or the grilled cheese for the first time and that is what just spurs the team on to develop more because we’re seeing these great kids enjoying mac and cheese for the first time or pizza for the first time but people will send in recipes. They send in suggestions. They sent in pictures of this is the new display in our store so really the customers are on fire so we really just have to follow behind them because they’re on fire. They’re blazing the trail so we’re kind of following behind and it’s like hey try this. We’re very lucky. We’re not trying to arm twist anybody. We don’t do deep discounts or anything to get people to try it because people are calling us every day with, ‘Where can I find this? I can’t find this in my store. I’ve talked to my grocery manager,’ so that’s really a blessing to have consumers who are so committed. JOHN SHEGERIAN: They become your greatest ambassadors and evangelists. DAVE SAVAGE. They are. We could send a SWAT team of salesmen out and it would be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great,’ but you talk to a mom who’s got a story, boom, you’re done because it’s a third party. They just love hearing from them. We had a little girl, one of my favorite stories. There are a lot of stories but her dad wouldn’t buy her Daiya because they thought it was too expensive and it’s not really good quality so we sent her coupons. We sent her a whole bunch of coupons and she tried it and converted her dad. Her dad was like, ‘Oh gosh, we need to be buying this all the time,’ and I think that was my very first letter I got that was written in pencil. This was the best day in the world. I read this kids letter and it was –This is a whole generation coming behind us. They’re not converting to vegans. They’re starting out very young. JOHN SHEGERIAN: This is so interesting. It’s so fascinating because you’re really the new happy brand of our generation. Years ago, I remember when Ben and Jerry’s first came out. They were selling happiness in a cup and you’re doing the same with a whole new generation because now, people get to enjoy your brand on so many different products and make all sorts of new creations out of it but it’s healthy for them. They’re not diminishing their body or the environment by enjoying your brand. That’s awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about pizza because people are passionate about your pizza. Is your Daiya mozzarella really food on the pizza? Does it melt really nice? I’m from New York, Dave. Are we going to have a good pizza with your cheese on it? DAVE SAVAGE: My friend, you’re going to have a great pizza with our cheese on it. It melts very well and bubbles up nicely and I think with other products, not to ever bash another brand, it melts but then it kind of dissolves into this mass of something so this actually stays in form, melts really nicely, bubbles up, and has a little bit of brownness on it and that’s a traditional cheese. It just has a little bit of golden brown on the top and you know it’s done. We encourage people to get our pizzas and try it. Everyone’s got their personal favorite. Mine’s the roasted veggie. I have it a couple times a week. It’s amazing and a lot of people bring home our cheese lover’s pizza and they and they add on their own toppings and they bring in lots of suggestions. They send pictures in. It’s a really great pizza and it’s convenient. JOHN SHEGERIAN: The GMO issues is heating up more and more. Talk a little bit about your brand and GMO. DAVE SAVAGE: Our products have always been non GMO. We’re in the very final stages now of being certified. It’s a long process but to be qualified for the process, everything in your plant and everybody you buy from has to be certified and have certificates of non GMO. I can tell you when you are talking to consumers, that is a big touch point because at one point, it was organic. Is everything organic? And most of our product is organic but getting the certification is really tough to do but the non GMO, people love so we’re really proud of that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Are all your products gluten-free? DAVE SAVAGE: All of our products are gluten-free. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Unbelievable, so now we’re down to the last three minutes or so, Dave. Let’s look forward. It’s amazing what you guys have accomplished in five short years, I mean literally, 12,000 retail stores, restaurants that I eat at that use your product, and like I said, I’m a huge fan. I eat your product every day but talk a little bit about where you guys are taking the company next. DAVE SAVAGE: Right now we have about three new products ready to launch in 2015 and some of them are at different stages but definitely, we’ll have new products launched at Expo West. I can’t tell you exactly what products they are. One of the key things we do get asked a lot to do is to sort of co-join with other companies, like we’re going to put your mozzarella on our products and they want to do that. We’re really focusing now on developing our own product and our own brand so we have a new category ready to launch in 2015 at Expo West and so it’s a lot of work. We have a ton of R&D staff working overtime trying to perfect it because taking it from a small recipe into a larger scale where you’re selling hundreds of thousands of units is a big challenge so people can expect in 2025 to see some new products, some new packaging, pretty much the same look, it’s just for that next generation. I will say I tried the new product that we’re launching in 2015 and I will probably be the first one in the store buying it because it’s phenomenal. That’s all I can say. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’ve given the big teaser. Go back to something you just said. We’re down to a couple minutes here, last minute and a half or so, but are there other brands that actually incorporate your product into their brand and make a product that you can talk about? DAVE SAVAGE: Conoco Pizza is a big pizza chain in Canada so we’ll be working with them and Amy’s has always been a big fan. Amy’s has used our product for a long time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it and Amy’s is a wonderful brand. I love Amy’s also. That’s wonderful so new products coming out, more distribution, and is your product already available around the world or is it North America-centric right now? DAVE SAVAGE: We are just closing a deal on Australia and probably not too early to say we are looking at the UK for either later this year or beginning of next year. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So it is going to be going around the world? Because Green is Good not only goes to North America but after it gets on our great partners at Clear Channel and iHeart, it goes around the world on the iTunes network and we have listeners all around the world so we get emails all the time. Is this product being sold here in Shanghai or is it being sold in Dubai? So I just wanted to know so eventually, you’re going to make your way around the world, I take it, Dave? DAVE SAVAGE: Definitely, but Australia is definitely the first. The ink is dry on that deal. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wonderful. Well, I want you to come back on when these new products come out so we can talk about them and we can sample them in the studio maybe and be chatting about them at the same time and again, I want to encourage our listeners to learn about how to be healthier, how to eat healthier, and how not to even give up any of the quality because the Daiya cheese is just amazing, the cheese and all the products they create. I’m a big fan. I’m a vegan and I’m going to tell you right now, it’s the best out there. It’s www.daiyafoods.com. thank you, Dave and Daiya Foods, for your commitment to kind living and your compassion for people and planet. You are truly living proof that green is good.

Mary Alice Kurtz JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored to have with us today Mary Alice Kurtz. She’s the Sustainability Program Manager from GM. Yes, the iconic brand, General Motors, is in the house again for the third time at Green is Good. Welcome, Mary Alice, to Green is Good. MARY ALICE KURTZ: Thank you so much. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, before we talk about all the important work you’re doing at General Motors, Mary Alice, can you talk a little bit about the Mary Alice Kurtz story. Share your journey leading up to the Sustainability Program Manager at General Motors. MARY ALICE KURTZ: I gotta tell you I was extremely fortunate to have a father that worked for Chevrolet for 37 years downtown Detroit, so I kind of grew up in the car business, and it’s a passion that’s hard to shake so after now 30 years for me, I just was very fortunate to have parents and siblings that were very engaged, very enthused about engineering and continuing our education. So, I was very lucky to have a great supportive family and my coworkers and all of my mentors and leaders have been great at General Motors. They’re very strong in giving you a lot of cross training and mentoring within our program so I just consider myself very fortunate. I’ve got great leaders and I love what I’m doing so I think all of that support externally has really helped me get to where I am now. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so nice because there’s so many young people around the country and the world that listen to this show and it’s so important for the parents out there to understand how big they are to their kids to inspire them in terms of what their paths are going to be and what their choices are going to be so I thank you for sharing that and it’s so great that you’re here today talking about education and General Motors because education is really one of the pillars of our future of this country and environmental education couldn’t be more important at the crossroads we’re at right now so let’s talk a little bit about your great brand that you get to work at, General Motors, and the celebration right now of your watershed or your education program. Share with our listeners what this means and what’s been going on at General Motors in terms of education. MARY ALICE KURTZ: General Motors has developed this education program that we call “Green” and it’s a program that’s really meant to work using our internal environmental employees to help mentor the local community on how we can all have an impact on our local watersheds. This program has really been a great collaborative between our non profit and a partner, Earth Force, our local schools, like I said before, our local watershed groups, and we have those partnerships in over 26 communities across North America. Each year we have literally hundreds of GM employees that want to mentor and be a part of this program. They provide their expertise in environmental and the teachers bring the education aspect and the students, of course, bring all this enthusiasm. The important key here is really to help them understand the environments, how much we can impact them. We try to help them sharpen their problem solving skills by really getting them hands on, getting them down in the river, have them looking at the bugs, testing the water. This year, we’ll have over 9,000 students that’ll be mentored across the U.S. and Canada. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s step back a second. Before it was cool to be green, before it was cool to talk about sustainability and to talk about climate change or anything that has to do with the environment, GM was doing this for the last 25 years? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Oh yeah. Yes, believe it or not, this environmental group is very passionate and the facilities have been very engaged — when I say the facilities, both our non- and manufacturing facilities — in making sure that our impact is offset by our activities. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Twenty-five years ago, how did this program start? Like I said, before it was cool, hip, before it was media-centric to be doing these kinds of things, how did the program start internally? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Officially, in 1984, there were a group of high school students in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They were wanting to investigate water quality due to some illnesses that were occurring in their community. Their teacher, who was actually Doctor William Staff out of U of M, helped them. He actually was part of our first Earth Day in 1970 so he was really the founder of environmental education so we worked together with him way back then and developed this program called Green. GM became both a financial supporter but also we provided volunteers that actually were able to contribute now to this program year over year and again, we keep coming back to this message but it’s really that collaboration between the schools, the community, the manufacturer, and the employees in the area with everyone getting engaged. That’s what continues to allow the program to grow to get stronger by having all of these different types of expertise involved. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great, and so you said 9,000 students participating this year. MARY ALICE KURTZ: Absolutely. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And is that K through 12? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Yes, the program is very easy to implement at all ages and that’s another important part of the program. Kids can get involved very early. They look forward to as they get older more and more programs they can get involved in. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great. Talk about the impact. What would you say is the direct impact of this program? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Well, there’s many areas of impact. There’s impact to the community and their own watersheds. There’s impact in the schools and the enthusiasm in the children, getting them to understand more about their environment and how much of an impact they can have and there’s impact in our manufacturing operations. We have commitments to driving environmental quality, whether it’s through energy consumption reduction, water usage reduction, reducing our emissions. We have commitments in our manufacturing and nonmanufacturing groups to drive, to watch, to monitor, and to do everything we can do protect our environment. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. That’s so great. Let’s look at the flipside of all this though, the value of Green to the educators. Share the value points of the Green program to the educators themselves. How does the program benefit their curriculum and the teaching of environmental sciences and sustainability sciences? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Well, the teachers are really excited about this program because it gives them tools and a way to increase the student’s awareness and excitement about it by getting hands on. These are real life stories. These are getting in there and holding a crayfish and slipping on the mud as they’re reaching into the river so they love the interactive part of it. In fact, our program and the important part of monitoring and getting results is that we have a huge percentage of students that report. Over 80 percent of students that were involved in the program say that they have a better understanding of the issues and I gotta tell you nearly every educator we worked with has either recommended this program to other schools or to other educators. It’s a huge impact. Another thing is we get to connect with, as environmental engineers, we get to mentor so the teachers love to have us come back in, explain to them how much fun we’re having. Engineers don’t just work on trains or aren’t just sitting in a laboratory. We also get out in the environment. We have fun. We’re motivated. We’re passionate about helping our environment so they love those aspects that they can show their students. There’s more to being an engineer than maybe they hear about on TV or through school. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. For our listeners that just joined us, we’ve got Mary Alice Kurtz on. She’s the Sustainability Programs Manager from General Motors and we’re talking about her Green Watershed Education program today and for those who want to learn more about all the great work GM does with regards to sustainability and the environment, go to www.gm.com/environment. Let’s talk about the employees now. For 25 years, there has to be an inside buzz at GM about this program or the people who volunteer. Talk a little bit about the intrinsic benefit that comes to employees who volunteer to participate in these events. What’s the feedback that you get from the employees and the buzz that it creates just internally in your own company? MARY ALICE KURTZ: It really gives a sense to the employees that they’re engaged, that they’re helping. They’re doing more than our internal work in the manufacturing community. We’ve got employees from over 42 sites right now that are involved and it really provides a sense of accomplishment when they’re able to share their knowledge, their expertise on conservation and getting the kids involved in these stem subjects and then also encouraging them to get involved in their local community activities. We’ve matched over 142,000 students with over 3,000 employees over the past 25 years to get in the water, to test the water, to get involved in these programs that they can have a direct impact. The employees get really excited about that they also can get people excited about their careers. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. You know, when I started the show, Mary Alice, five years ago or so, people would always say, ‘John, green is good but does green cost more money?’ and now as the conversation has migrated towards sustainability actually saves dollars. Sustainability actually makes a company money and actually makes it more valuable and endearing and stickier to its constituents and its clients. Talk a little bit about the sheer business case of sustainability and good environmental practices at GM. What’s the business case? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Well, the GM Green program just continues year over year to benefit GM as well as the environment, of course, in the community that they do this in but it’s led to future recruitment of GM employees. We actually have employees, I saw one today bringing her children through our Earth Day that was a part of GM Green when she went to elementary school and she absolutely attributes her career and her engagement with the environment to this Green program. It can even help sell cars, seriously. When we do these evaluations with the participants, we’ve had comments from people that said the reason they bought a GM car was because of the commitment they saw that GM had to helping schools and their environment. I’ve personally taken Camaros and fun vehicles to the schools when I’ve done mentoring activities and the kids go crazy. The first thing they say is, ‘I’m going to get a Camaro when I grow up,’ so it’s really good, not only for the communities, like we said, but it does help with brand awareness and it helps bring kids back and it is great for employee enthusiasm. The employees love it. The kids love it. The students love it. It’s really a win-win. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And it goes back to what you said at the top of the show. Collaboration is really the win-win. The community loves it. Educators love it and so everyone’s winning with regards to your Green Education program. MARY ALICE KURTZ: Absolutely, so all of those partners keep us accountable. They keep looking for it. They keep wanting us to come back and that’s a big key to getting a lot of people engaged in the program. JOHN SHEGERIAN: In terms of your broader sustainability strategy, talk a little bit about the fit because you have a big puzzle you’re managing at all times and I get that and our listeners get that. You’ve got a great brand. It’s on iconic and legendary brand. How does this program fit into your broader sustainability strategy? MARY ALICE KURTZ: Well, we have several commitments around sustainability topics. Like I mentioned earlier, energy, water, outreach, renewable, but one of those commitments is to conserving water as part of our operations and we’ve got some pretty good results as part of those programs. Between 2005 and 2010, we’ve actually been able to reduce our water use. We measure it as water use per vehicle. We’ve been able to reduce that by 32 percent and our additional commitment by 2020 is to drive even another 15 percent of water use per vehicle in the manufacturing of that vehicle down and really attributing the employee dedication to community outreach really furthers that impact by protecting water and teaching children how critical freshwater is to our future. Not only does General Motors recognize how important it is to our own environmental stewardship but by working with the communities, we’re really giving them the ability to mentor our next generation of leaders. They appreciate civic engagement. We’re preserving our natural resources and getting people excited and passionate about doing what they can in their communities and hoping that that grows into their future careers. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Mary Alice, for our listeners’ sake, give me the wow numbers. You said before this thing started and now we’re here in 2014. Nine thousand kids are participating this year. What’s the first year’s participation? Does anyone have those numbers? Give me the wow, like we’ve grown this from this in ‘84 to this in 2014. What’s the growth look like? MARY ALICE KURTZ: It’s been phenomenal and it just keeps growing and growing. We do have records of that and we actually see that we have impacted over 142,000 students in the US and we have just this year started to grow into Canada so it’s going to be even more than that and that engaged over 3,000 employees. JOHN SHEGERIAN: When you’re with other sustainability managers, program managers in different brands and in different industries and people say, ‘What’s the key to your success? What’s the key to your environmental outreach program?’ what’s your version of the secret sauce at GM in terms of long term environmental outreach? MARY ALICE KURTZ: I think something that’s incredibly important is to every year, look at what’s driving that success. We’ve developed best practices around this program every year so you have to constantly change. The environment changes. The business environment changes so what’s very critical is to have all these partners but also to be very flexible and we’ve learned that over the past 25 years, to be flexible with those changes and to constantly recognize best practices, what works, what’s successful, that’s a very important part but first, like we talked about, is collaboration but first like our non profit partner, Earth Force. We also work with over 20 community organizations across the nation. We build these programs with the communities and all we do is provide the central coordination. We provide that. We provide resources. We empower each of our facilities to provide resources to work with their communities and that, along with the facility staff, along with the relationships they build locally, we’ve been able to grow these programs across the city. Other schools have picked this up but empowerment of each of those partners is really a key aspect. Second of all, this isn’t an initiative that you can throw money at. We do provide some financial support and contribution but it’s really up to the people that get engaged, help develop it, implement the program on an ongoing basis. The GM Green success really requires a lot of commitment, community engagement, and really a lot of effort from everybody that’s involved but I gotta tell you that hasn’t been hard. It’s fun, it’s exciting, and you can really see the impact. And then the third thing is it really, as you mentioned, it really does have to have good business sense in order to have staying power within the corporation. The employee aspect, the ability to drive our facilities to be more efficient are all benefits on top of the impact we can have positively on our environment and our wildlife. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Mary Alice, what’s next for Green? You’ve got 30 years behind you now approximately. What’s next? MARY ALICE KURTZ: We’re pretty excited about getting to expand into Canada. We’ve also been working with some of our partners in the other regions, in Europe, in Brazil, and in China and we’re looking forward to expanding these programs globally. We’ve got a lot of new people in our organization now that we’re excited to get those mentors also engaged so we want to grow within our company because of that workplace enthusiasm that it generates and again, like I mentioned, it’s long term an exciting way for General Motors to get involved, again to increase our brand awareness but at the same time, have a great positive impact on the environment and our employees so we’re looking forward to growth globally and internally with our employees. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s great and we’re going to want to hear more about that growth and we’re going to have you guys back on again, Mary Alice so again, thank you for coming on today and sharing the great story about the Green program and the watershed education program called Green that you’re doing at General Motors and it’s been so successful for 30 years. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about everything sustainable that General Motors and everything in the environment and the positive effects that it’s having, go to www.gm.com/environment. Thank you, Mary Alice, for being a sustainability and green superstar. You are truly living proof that green is good.