Archives: Episodes

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and we’re so honored to have with us today, Adam Minter, he’s the author of Junkyard Planet, welcome to Green is Good, Adam! ADAM MINTER: So glad to be here, thanks for having me on! JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey Adam, your book junkyard planet, which I’ve read, and I’m a big fan of yours already, we’re so thrilled to have you on, you know, your book is just lighting up the world right now, you were just on the other night on the show Vice, I saw you on Vice, I’ve given your book to many friends and colleagues, everyone seems to love it. It’s an important topic. It’s a growing issue around the world. But before we get into talking about your book, Junkyard Planet, can you share a little bit about your journey your story Adam because it’s fascinating how you even came to become one of the most important thought leaders of our team on this topic, how you grew up and how you got to this place to start with. ADAM MINTER: Sure, sure I’m happy to. The short of it is I’m a junkyard kid. I’m a 4th generation scrap recycler if you will from Minneapolis. My great grandfather came from Russia, Russian-Jewish immigrant, wanting to be a vivillon believe it or not, a song and dance man, he made a couple mistakes along the way. One, he got off the boat in Galveston, Texas, there wasn’t a lot of options so he did what a lot of people do when they can’t do anything else and he started scrapping in Galveston in the early 20th century. Scrapping for rags, eventually made his way up to Minneapolis and founded the business that became several businesses but one of which I grew up in, working closely with my grandmother and my father. So I really have scrap in the blood, and I’m genetically related to the industry. And I grew up in the industry getting to know its ways of thinking and getting to know the people and characters in it and in my mid twenties I was still working in it but I was starting to get restless. Like a lot of family businesses there was some conflict there. It came to be time for me to leave. And one of the things that I had wanted to do in college and I didn’t do because I went into the business was be a writer. And so I did what a lot of people think about doing and sort of held my breath and jumped and became a freelancer. That eventually took me to China. I was working as a freelancer in Minneapolis. But I got the opportunity to go to China to freelance a couple of assignments. And I thought I might as well go now. Because if I don’t, I never will. And I got to China and one of the assignments I had was to take a look, this was 2002, take a look at what was going on with recycling in China. Kent Kiser the editor of Scrap Magazine, which is ISRI’s magazine, said you know we’ve got a lot of members doing business in China now. And none of us know why. They knew there was demand, but they didn’t know what was going on. So with a few contacts I went and I started poking around Chinese scrap yards. And that quickly became a beat. It was a great time to be doing it because that was when the exports from the US to China were really growing. And I developed it into my own beat. I was the only person over here reporting on that. And after a few years it came to be time to write a book. So, that’s the short sort of edited version of the story. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, and so let’s jump into it then. And for our listeners out there, Adam has written Junkyard Planet. It’s available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and all great bookstores around the world. Also you can look at Adam’s website which I’m on right now: ShanghaiScrap.com, ShanghaiScrap.com, it’s a wonderful website. I’m on it, look at it and learn even more. But read his book, Junkyard Planet. Adam, talk a little bit about what you share with us in the book. And like I said, I read the book end of November early December after a friend and a colleague shared the book with me. You talk about globalized recycling. What does that mean to you, and what should it mean to our listeners. ADAM MINTER: Sure. Well I think a lot of people when they hear the words “China” and “recycling” they get some very specific ideas and I think images in their mind. You might think of sort of Chinese farmers squatting over surfboards that are on fire and that kind of thing. And there is some truth to that but it’s a far more complicated story. And for me the story of globalized recycling in a way is just the backside of the story of globalized manufacturing. As we all know the recycling industry is, in effect, a raw materials industry when we get down to it. If we’re just looking at it as business. It competes with the stuff that’s dug out of the ground or cut down in forests or drilled for from oil platforms. And so, when we think about manufacturing say in China, or Malaysia, or Japan or Korea. All of these various manufacturing apparatuses, these factories they need raw materials to make these products that they send back to the US or send all over Asia. So for me globalized recycling is really the industry that supplies that to them. I mean, depending on what the material is, for example in China, half of China’s copper supply comes from scrap copper. Now, try to make them guess that 50 percent of its copper that comes from scrap, they’re in big trouble and so are we. Everything that we want to buy, everything from copper pots, to iPads, to the wiring from our homes is all that more expensive. It’s not available at all. So its really supplying that stuff that gets supplied back to all of us. It’s a manufacturing industry. And that to me is what globalized recycling really means. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And then you’ve also created the term “circulatory economy” is that what it also means in terms of globalized recycling, going in one circle, pulling out the scrap of the copper, then going back into new airplanes, and new hospitals, and new infrastructure to build the Chinese, or India, or other economies that are now emerging around the world? ADAM MINTER: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that to me is one of the most fascinating aspects of covering this industry from China all of those years, was really seeing how China, which in many cases especially on the east coast, is very resource poor. So what China did and it was sort of a conscious decision in certain places to do this: they said look, we’ve got a great port but we don’t have any iron, or we don’t have any copper. So where can we get it. So they went and they looked first of all at the United States. Because the United States only uses about 60 percent about what it tosses in the proverbial recycling bin. The other 40 percent has got to go somewhere. Some of it will go to the landfill. But the rest of it is going to be exported. So China, they made this conscious decision. They said hey, instead of spending all the money and time opening up copper mines, let’s bring that stuff in. And that’s another meaning of globalized recycling. Because what the Chinese did is they said hey, it’s not getting recycled in the United States, we can do it. And we can not only recycle it, but we can build our own economy on it. And that’s a very, very important, and kind of overlooked story. We got into that a little bit the other nice on Vice. Of course it’s a much deeper story than what you can do in a 15 minute television segment. So, it’s very very important. JOHN SHEGERIAN: One of my favorite stories in your great book, Junkyard Planet, is the story from China. And I can’t pronounce the province or the city’s name appropriately. Shijiao? But the recycling Christmas Tree Light story. Share with our listeners the story of recycling Christmas tree lights in China. Versus countries like the United States and how we fall down, and how they really have accomplished this task and how they make it look in China. ADAM MINTER: Sure, that’s a great question. It’s a really fun story. The town you are thinking of is a town called Shijiao. It’s in Guangdong Province which is where a lot of scrap actually flows. Guangdong is probably the number one scrap import province in China. Let me explain how I got to this. I started traveling US scrap yards when I was doing this book and I started seeing Christmas tree lights in US scrap yards. And to me this is fascinating it’s a neat antidote to tell in the book, I wanted to know first of all why this stuff is being exported and not recycled in the United States. And the answer sort of dub tails what I was just talking about. American recyclers because Americans throw away so much, the US recyclers have the choice to get the good stuff. So if you’re a wire recycler, it could be Christmas trees or power lines whatever it is, in the United States a recycler only wants to recycle metal or wire that is about 80 percent copper. Anything less than that, it’s not worth it to them and it gets exported. Well Christmas tree lights are on average about 28 percent copper, and then there’s plastic, and glass, and a little brass in there so that stuff goes to China. Because China has such strong demand they’ll take that stuff that’s going to require more to extract from. So when I looking for how this is recycled I ended up down in Guangdong. In northern Guangdong Province in this place called Shijiao. And I got down there thinking I was going to see one recycling factory which specializes in this. Which is true. The factory I went to see imports about 2 million pounds of American Christmas tree lights per year. The thing that astounded me was that it was only one of, they said, 10 or 11 factories that do similar volume. So think about that. Conservatively estimated this is a small town in China that recycles approximately 20 million pounds of American Christmas tree lights per year. They’ve been doing it for years. And what’s interesting about it is that they used to do it in the way that we sort of associate with low tech Chinese recycling. Which is very efficient, you take a can of gas, and a lighter, and you set that pile of Christmas tree lights on fire. And you get smoke, and then when the smoke’s gone, you’ve got copper. Funny thing that’s happened on the way to globalization, and that’s Chinese people started buying cars and the price of oil started going up. So all of a sudden there was an incentive to start recovering that insulation. That’s interesting. So what they did, and what your listeners who know a little about the recycling industry, they’ll know about shredding wire and using various means once you shredded the wire you can use various mechanical or liquid means to separate the insulation from the copper. It’s a little bit like canning for gold, really. The insulation’s light, the copper’s heavy, one flows in one direction, the other flows in another. The neat thing is when you recycle wire in the United States there’s no market for it. Americans don’t like recycled insulation. So if you go to a company, a big American wire recycler, they are going to take that shredded insulation that’s recovered when you recycle wire in the United States, and it’s going to go to a landfill or an incinerator. But in China, they’re actually recycling it. And the factory that I described in the piece, in Junkyard Planet is actually in the first chapter, they actually take that insulation and they sell it to a factory that makes it into slipper soles. And that’s a reuse that simply wouldn’t happen in the United States. Why doesn’t it happen in China, well there’s two reasons. One there’s just huge demand for low cost plastic. The second reason is a little more difficult, and that is mixed insulation isn’t’ real high quality plastic. So, you can’t really sell that in the United States because American manufacturers are very quality conscious and they want to know precisely what they’re getting. For better or worse Chinese manufacturers aren’t as quality conscious and so they’ll take that mixed plastic and say, well we can make something from it. So it’s one of the messages of the book, you know we all like to recycle but it’s not always so black and white or black and green. There’s always a little bit of a grey area there about how you feel about these things. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so true and what a great story and how you show the difference between China and the United States. I just thought after I read that chapter I was hooked and I just went right through the whole book it was amazing. For our listeners who just joined us now we’ve got Adam Minter on, he’s the author of Junkyard Planet the new book which is available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, I’ve read it, I loved it, I also recommend it to all of my listeners out there. He also has a wonderful blog, www.ShanghaiScrap.com. It’s really interesting and remember Adam has DNA in the scrap industry. So when he’s writing, he’s writing from really someone who has huge generations of experience, and he gets to see the other side because he lives over in Asia. You touch on so many other issues of recycling. But scrap metal is really to me the major platform that you cover. Can you talk a little bit about why? Why scrap metal why is that such a platform of topic with all its subsectors? ADAM MINTER: Yeah. Well I mean part of it was just an authorial choice, when I was thinking about how to write this book there was a moment there thought well, I should a chapter on paper and a chapter on cardboard and a chapter on Styrofoam, but that’s just going to get unwieldy you know. So the way you’ve got to do it is you’ve got to pick one thing and really follow it because in a certain sense, the way that metal is recycled the way that paper is recycled the way that plastics are recycled, they all have sort of the same demands and the same issues come into play. Obviously there are going to be differences. But I wanted to show the globalization of this industry and you can do it that way. So, there were two other factors at play. One metal, especially non ferrous metal is something that I know very well. Two, by weight, probably the most recycled product on the planet, most people don’t think about this, is the American automobile. You know from reading the book I talk a lot about automobile scraps. It’s hugely important. And then the third reason was, I really felt I needed to address this issue of e-scrap, e-waste, that so many people think about these days, is they’re not thinking about their home recycling bin but they’re thinking about recycling. In the e-scrap issue it touches on plastics, it touches on a lot of issues but ultimately to me it bears the closest relationship to the non-ferrous metal recycling industry so for all those reasons I decided you know, we’re just going to stick very closely to metals in this book and as you know there’s a chapter that concerns itself directly with plastics and I do address paper a couple times. But those are the reasons I wanted to stay with metals. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And then, since we’re going to stay with metals, talk a little bit about the car scrap business. And talk a little bit about recycling cars in the United States vs. China and India. And give again, show the paradoxes and differentials of recycling cars in all those three different countries and how you’ve relayed it out in your book. ADAM MINTER: Right. Well, I thought, first of all for me, I thought I knew something about car recycling until I started digging into archives and looking at the history of them. And one of the most fascinating things about it is if you look at records from environmental agencies that we have believe it or not in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, what were the big issues they were dealing with? For many of them, the number one issue on their agenda, the number one environmental problem in the United States at that point, was what to do with abandoned automobiles. Because they simply couldn’t be recycled. The price of labor in the United States had gone up too much. And the steel mills didn’t want cars coming in that had copper in them because that weakens the steel, so what was happening we have estimates that by the late 1960s there were as many as 40 million US automobiles abandoned throughout the United States countryside. I believe it was New York City alone in 1969 or 70, 20,000 cars were abandoned on the streets of New York City. Nobody knew what to do with these things. To me it’s a little bit parallel a little bit to the e-waste problem. What was eventually devised was the automobile shredder. The idea was pulverize the car and then magnets and other technologies to separate things out. And that’s how we do it now, and it’s relayed in the book. In 2008 if you talked to industry professionals who are involved in automobile recycling, they will tell you that it was only in 2008 that they feel that they feel that the backlog of American automobiles that were out in the countryside abandoned and everything else finally got cleared up and we were current. That’s amazing to me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is amazing. ADAM MINTER: Anyway, it’s just incredible. But if you go back further, if you go back to the 20s and 30s, there weren’t enough cars in the United States. And the price of labor was cheap enough where people could really take these things apart by hand and recycle the individual components and reuse them much more. It’s what World War II, after World War II went the price of labor went up and Americans got rich and simply didn’t want to recycle as much. And that’s somewhat the parallel of what’s going on in developing countries. If you go to Cuba or Mexico, you’ll see a lot more cars on the road that are older—why—because the price of labor is still cheap enough there there’s an incentive for people to repair these things. Now if you go to China, China’s in a very interesting position right now. Because China is the world’s number one car consumer right now. They buy more cars than the United States even. And that I believe happened in 2009. So, they haven’t started throwing away cars yet at the volumes at the United States does yet, but they will. Their cars are going to go through the same cycle. But what’s interesting, is when Chinese cars wear out at this point, they’re not being recycled. What happens to them is they start moving west into poor provinces where they’ll be repaired and refurbished. Much like you’d see in a Cuba or a Mexico or an India. Once they’re done in the western provenances they start moving south. And there’s this fascinating, massive trade of used cars now moving out of China into India and into Africa if you can believe that. This poses a problem for the automobile recyclers in China because starting about 4 years ago the automobile recyclers said we’re going to make a lot of money here shredding Chinese automobiles. So you had Chinese recyclers spend tens of millions of dollars in some cases, building US and EU style automobile shredding operations. And those shredding operations, these are giant shredders, are completely underutilized maybe they’ll run two to three days a week now. Because all of those cars that they were planning on, they didn’t think that those cars could just easily move into India and Africa. So it’s a very very interesting and, unsettled, I don’t mean unsettling, but unsettled, it’s a good, green, story in a way. The Chinese people are too practical. They don’t want to see their cars shredded they want to see them reused. That’s not a green thing that they’re doing, it’s green in the sense that it’s dollars obviously there’s always more money in selling something for reuse than recycling. So that’s what’s going on it’s absolutely fascinating. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is fascinating and you know Adam we’re just about out of time for today but we’re going to have you back and for our listeners out there, I want you to read Adam’s book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade, it’s chock full of the kind stories he just told today with regards to car recycling in China vs. the United States, Christmas tree recycling in China vs. the United States and everything that’s going on in regards to globalized recycling, and what he calls the circular economy. Adam, it’s an honor to have you on. So our listeners should please to go to Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com and other fine bookstores to find Junkyard Planet, ShanghaiScrap.com. Adam Minter, thank you for your brilliant book, your thought leadership on the important issue of recycling, and you are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and we’re welcoming back for a return visit, Andrew Winston he’s just written a new book, The Big Pivot, if you remember he wrote Green To Gold, welcome back to Green is Good, Andrew Winston. ANDREW WINSTON: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey thank you for being back and for our listeners who didn’t hear the last show when you were on years ago, and I’m so humbled Andrew because you helped make Green is Good one of the most listened shows out there, you were one of my first guests and I’m so glad you came back. Share a little bit about your journey leading up to becoming one of the great sustainability and green thought leaders in the world. ANDREW WINSTON: Thanks those are your words not mine. But I appreciate that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m allowed to say that. ANDREW WINSTON: I spent the first half of my career in traditional business roles. I was in consulting at Boston Consulting Group right out of college and then was in media companies and then went through the dot com crash and was trying to find myself after that part of my career and wanted to connect my business knowledge and training with some passion and some values that I had. And I cared about environment in a really broad sense, not really in the tree hugger way, frankly, but in a practical sense of kind of resources, and how do we operate on this planet and are we able to provide enough for people being prosperous on the planet and I just kind of had a sense back in 2000, 2001 that things weren’t going right and I started reading some great books at the time, the cannon of kind of green, and sustainability and just decided I needed to shift what I was doing. And went back to school and got a degree in environmental management, and I already had an MBA, and I kind of put those two together, and started working with a professor there, Dan Esty, and we wrote Green To Gold, which came out in ’06, and that kind of kicked off my career in this field. I spent a few years researching and writing that book and talking to companies all over the world, and trying to understand what green business meant. And I’ve spent the last 8 years continuing that quest. To try to understand how can companies make sustainability part of their business and why should they, and I think the case for it has only gotten more compelling, and that’s kind of the reason for my work now. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Andrew, again like I said, I was so humbled when you came on years ago when I first started this show, maybe it was 4 and a half, 5 years ago to talk about Green to Gold and for our listeners out there who haven’t read it yet again, again Green to Gold is one of the must reads for sustainability, anything you’re interested in with regards to sustainability, and of course its available at Amazon and all the great bookstores around the world. But now you’ve written The Big Pivot, and I’m so excited for you to share with our listeners, what does this, you’ve evolved, the world has evolved, the sustainability revolution has evolved, what is the big pivot, and who exactly needs to be pivoting at this point? ANDREW WINSTON: Yeah it’s a good question in some sense, everybody needs to be pivoting that’s really the point, and I think, Green to Gold, I’m sure everybody listening will go pick it up if that haven’t at already, but Green to Gold is fundamentally the story of why green is good for business. And how you can save money, and innovate, and drive revenues and build your brand, and all the kind of basic business case for what people call sustainability. The Big Pivot is really a kind of leap from there, and takes a much, I think, harder stance about how fast we need to go, and where we need to head. Because I think what’s happened in the last few years is the facts on the ground have gotten more stark, and just this week there’s the new report out from the Intergovernmental panel on climate change, and my take on the problems that we face, the big challenges, are so large that the world needs to change in a very fundamental way, and I think business can lead that change. In the book I kind of narrow down the big forces coming to bear on society and business to a few, and so the subtitle of the book is about how we do business in a hotter, scarcer, more open world. And so it’s about those three things, hotter, the climate is changing, making more extreme weather, and forcing change on how we live our lives. Scarcer is about resources, about the price of commodities, and the price of everything that goes into our economy and how it’s basically, continued to rise for the last 10, 15 years and will probably continue to rise. And then transparency is just this incredible move towards openness, and knowledge, and data, about everything going on in our lives, and in companies, value chains. What happens in a supply chain, or a factory, or across the world, is now kind of open to public scrutiny. So those are kind of the pressures. Those combined tell me we need a very big pivot. We can kind of talk about what that means. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, the other night I was watching one of the rising common shows out there it’s actually new, Vice. And they had the whole climate change issue, and how the velocity of climate change is, we’re actually ahead of schedule, and it’s picking up. And you talk about resource scarcity, both in commodities, and just in stuff like water. So, Andrew, help me, and the listeners understand, who has the onus here, where is the burden, is it governmental, is it business, is it intergovernmental and business, where do you posit that in your book, The Big Pivot? ANDREW WINSTON: Yeah, well look, my work is on the private sector. That’s always been where I focus. But I think there’s kind of a rational, kind of practical, kind of logic to that. Which is, society is basically, government, business, private sector, and citizens. There’s kind of this three legged stool. Everybody needs to change, in pretty fundamental ways. But, I think I’m not going out on a limb to say the government, at least in the US is kind of broken, at the federal level, we can’t get much done or passed, that means it’s hard for global negotiations to go anywhere on things like climate change or price on carbon, and I think consumers, we care but we’re busy. Right? Our lives are busy, and we’re shown for 40, 45 years of Earth days and all these missions to make us do 50 things that save the Earth that, we’ll do things if they’re easy or they’re cheaper? We have a lot going on right? We’re trying to raise our kids and lead our lives, and it’s kind of hard to know what the right choice is all the time. I really believe it comes down to business, as the sector with tremendous power and resources. The fortune 200, the 200 biggest countries in the world are about 30 percent of the global economy. Just those 200, let alone the biggest 1,000 companies. And they have tremendous political power, that’s not a surprise. And they decide, in a way, what products are made, and the innovations that drive how we live our lives. So I put the onus on business, because I think we have the resources, and skills, and talent to do it. And we have the technologies that can help us get there. And there is a much cleaner, much greener, world, with energy that’s vastly lower in carbon that’s mostly renewable energy. And with products that are very low in toxicity or nontoxic that we recycle and reuse and bring back into the kind of cycle of products development and use materials over and over again. There a couple of kind of key basic ideas of what a sustainable world actually looks like, and I think business is already on the path to building that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What I love about your writing, and I’ve read Green to Gold, is that you give so many real life examples. So talk a little bit about what you mean about businesses stepping up to the challenges of resource scarcity, climate change, and how they can innovate and continue to innovate to help us out of the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into, and lead us to a more sustainable planet. What do you put in The Big Pivot about this issue? ANDREW WINSTON: Right, well The Big Pivot is fundamentally—I lay out 10 key strategies that I think are basically required. About how business needs to operate. The question I’m trying to answer in the book is if you believe these problems are as deep as they are, and as fast moving as they are, what does that mean for what a business needs to look like. Not necessarily what capitalism as a whole system needs to look like, but what business need to look like within that to help bring about the changes within our system. And I lay it out in a few kind of big buckets, and the first is about the kind of vision and the direction and the way companies see the future, and that breaks down into things like fighting short term pressure. All the pressure from Wall-Street and from investors on quarterly performance. And so companies have to kind of proactively push back on that. And talk about the medium and longer term and talk about the things they need to do that take some investment and some thinking. And that’s all kind of innovation it’s not even just necessarily sustainable innovation, just the ability to invest in our future. And it also means companies need to set goals differently. Set them based on science, based on how fast we need to move. And we are seeing a lot of companies do that. You know, there’s a growing number of big companies that are investing a tremendous amount in renewable energy, that are moving their business to 100% renewables. Ikea is one retailer I love that is on its way to 100% renewables. Apple is actually almost at 100% renewables for all data centers and offices. Wal-Mart doesn’t have a huge percentage of renewables, but is the largest buyer of renewables in the country because it’s so big. They have solar on I think 1,300 stores. And all of this is good for their business, it’s actually lowering their cost. This isn’t some huge expense. And there’s a handful of other really big companies that have set their goals kind of at that level. At that’s let’s be 100% renewable by 2020 or 2025, or let’s cut carbon by 30 percent in the next 5 years. This is the kind of motion we need to see. And that drives tremendous change in all of the industries that support that. It drives the costs down of solar and technologies that improve fleet efficiency in trucks or store efficiency with lighting because these companies are creating big markets for these new technologies. And that helps all of us. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And that helps all of us. For our listeners out there who just joined us today we are so honored to have back on the show Andrew Winston. Please look at his website www.AndrewWinston.com. His two books, Green To Gold, and now The Big Pivot, available on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and finer bookstores around the United States and of course we have listeners around the world. Buy them, read them, open your heart, open your mind, we all have to be part of the solution. Andrew, let’s go a little bit about—it’s one world, and we all have to be part of the solution obviously. So you talk about shareholders that are clamoring for really short term gains, short term benefits. Dividends to the stocks that they invest in. You’re saying that they should be encouraging leaders of big corporations to think longer term, because ultimately it will benefit them as citizens of the United States and citizens of the world that we live in. Talk a little bit about other public perceptions. You mentioned some great brands, iconic brands, let me see—Ikea, Apple, Wal-Mart, and so many others you’ve written about. When you’re studying, when you’re learning, when you’re understanding, the state of the human condition, do people really care? Does the man or woman on the street really care if companies are focused on sustainability? Or do they just want to have their good tasting Big Mac? Or a great tasting coffee at Starbucks? Do they really if these companies are getting more sustainable or not? ANDREW WINSTON: Well now we’re getting philosophical I suppose. I think the data on that is somewhat mixed. But I think in some ways, nothing’s changed in 40 years. I think the percentage of people who really buy their products and think hard about green in every choice and will pay more for green, because in recent history that has been the case for some products. It seems like you have to pay more at times. That percentage is kind of single digits and has been for a long time. But what has changed I think kind of profoundly is the group of people that want the products they buy to be responsibly made. To be obviously non toxic and safe for them and their family. But responsibly made in that the people who made it throughout the value chain were paid a living wage. That they know there weren’t horrible working conditions. That the carbon footprint is low. I think that percentage of people who want those things so long they don’t have to pay anymore, all else equal. Same kind of quality, same price. They want to know that that’s better. That’s growing to like everybody. The percentages in surveys show that is 40, 50, 60 percent of people kind of growing all the time. And I think especially among millennial and kind of the next generation, the very new moms today and new parents and kids coming out of school, they just have a deeper understanding that there is a global crisis on some of these issues, and that we need to change our behaviors. I do think we are seeing that, but let’s be honest, people don’t want to spend more if they don’t have to. I think it’s sometimes the discussion of what do you mean by more. If you pay more for a LED light bulb up front, you’re saving money over time. So it actually isn’t more. If you pay more for organic food, potentially, that might be better for you and your community. And that has benefits that aren’t easily measured. I think we have to think kind of broader about value. And I talk about that in the book for companies, thinking much broader about what is value, and what are we getting out of an investment. And I think that’s true for us as a consumer as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And I agree with you about the millennials. I have a 27 year old daughter and a 21 year old son and they couldn’t agree more with what you just said. They are very concerned with what they’re eating, what they’re drinking, how they’re living, and with regards to the brands that they associate with, and with regards to the millennials of course, Andrew, we happen to be the digital immigrants, you and I, but for the millennials, they’re the natives now. The digital natives. So share how you explain and layout in The Big Pivot the issue of social media and what that’s done to corporate transparency and how is that affecting the sustainability movement? ANDREW WINSTON: Yeah, I think it truly is both, I guess for good and bad from a company perspective. I think I’m an early digital native, I’d like to think that. I’m Gen X. I’d like to believe that I was little when Pon came out and the first data but, yes, I agree I watched my kids, and last night my 10 year old was on a Google Hangout with friends, and I realized I don’t even know how to do that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well you’re younger than me so that’s right. I’m the immigrant and you’re going to be—we’ll give you that. I’m going to give you that one. ANDREW WINSTON: I’m an early immigrant. Anyways, I think that the transparency pressure is both, what I lay out in the book when I said earlier there’s hotter, scarcer, most open, there’s kind of a huge opportunity along with each of those. With hotter there’s clean tech. With scarcer there’s kind of the move to innovate and these markets in the developing world, and then in transparency you’ve also got all the open innovation opportunities. This ability to ask people, your customers, your consumers, your employees for help thinking about big issues. And you’ve got you know, crowd funding, we just had a movie come out, Veronica Mars, and I mentioned in the book that was completely crowd sourced right. It was on Kickstarter. And you’ve got the ability for people to come together and innovate together, create pools of pressure on companies to make change happen. Like change.org. There’s some great examples of even like a group of 4th graders getting together and pushing Crayola to develop a recycling program for their markers. They just didn’t have them. And 9 year olds wrote in and said “hey, we really like your markers but we can’t recycle them.” And my point kind of tongue in cheek is that companies need to figure out these issues before a 9 year old does right. And this allows them to kind of listen. Social media allows you to listen. Twitter allows you to listen. And say what are the issues we’re not thinking of? Along our value change that create footprint issues that create sustainability problems? And then, let’s talk to people about how we can solve them together. JOHN SHEGERIAN: The climate economy is potentially weeding out powerful corporations. What do you mean by that, and whose going to have the toughest time adapting? We’ve got about 3 minutes left but I want you to share your thoughts on that important issue. ANDREW WINSTON: Well look, we’ve got to be honest with ourselves. We’re talking about a massive transition I think fairly quickly away from carbon. Unless there’s some surprising technology advance and carbon sequestration or placing carbon in other products or something. Coal is in trouble. I think everybody knows that. I’ve talked to utility and energy executives and CEOs, and I think they know coal is going away. Natural gas is a huge debate in this country. Whether it is a bridge in some way but it has to be much cleaner. It burns much cleaner than coal, but right now there’s leaks in the process. There’s the fracking concerns about water and about just use of land. It has to be done in a much better way I think for it to be a good bridge. But we’re going to see change. And I know that sounds cold, but we have change in industries all the time. And there are early leaders in technology that disappeared. Like Lain Computer and there were horse and buggies once. And there was electric typewriters. I grew up in an IBM family. IBM made the transition from typewriters to computers but some didn’t. There’s going to be changes and the opportunity from this, to every other sector, that relies on energy and that is going to drastically cut energy use and cut fossil fuel use. That just saves tremendous money and provides amazing resilience for businesses if they have their own power, they don’t need to worry if a grid goes down or if a hurricane rolls through, or if there’s a huge spike in energy prices. And that’s why you’re seeing some companies get it and move to renewables as quickly as they can. So think about all of the business that is built around that. We’re talking about multi trillion dollar industries in energy building, transportation, consumer products, finance, that are all going to shift. And that means amazing opportunities for those that make the shift. But there will be sectors or groups that don’t come along for the ride. And we have to figure out what does that mean for those people in our society and how do we help them. But we can’t stop that progress. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it, got it, and for our listeners out there again, please buy Green to Gold, The Big Pivot, Big Pivot is Andrew Winston’s new book, radical practical strategies for a hotter, scarcer, more open world. These books will truly, truly, change your thinking. Open your heart, open your mind. And help us all, become part of the sustainability solution. Andrew Winston thanks for coming back on Green is Good for our listeners out there, www.AndrewWinston.com. Andrew, thank you for being a wonderful sustainability evangelist and ambassador. You are truly 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 Dr. Corinna Basler. She is the president of The Green Festivals and you can look at them at GreenFestivals.org. Welcome to Green Is Good, Corinna Basler! DR. CORINNA BASLER: Hi John! JOHN SHEGERIAN: It’s so great to have you on today you’re doing so many amazing things at the green festivals. But before we get into talking about what you’re doing and what The Green Festivals is about, can you share a little bit of your fascinating journey leading up to your taking over this organization and running it? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Sure. John, first of all thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk with you today, this has been an exciting journey actually. I have been a vegetarian for 20 years, and a vegan for 10 years. And when I was young, when I was 14 years old, I always felt very passionate about animals, especially about farming animals. And I just felt that it’s not right to eat them. So I just made the decision to not have them on the plate anymore, which felt quite unusual, because where I’m from, East Germany, meat was always a big deal basically. So I just decided that this is the right thing for me and I felt very good about it. And that’s where my passion started. So then I studied and I had the chance at a very young age to go to New York to run the New York marathon and this is when I basically fell in love with the big apple. And I always wanted to come back and listen and study and work here in the United States. And in the meantime I had to go back I had to study in Germany and finish my education there. And I also felt very passionate about experiencing other cultures. So, I had a fun drive to go to Asia I stayed at some Buddhist monasteries and I feel this is all kind of connected, that we are all connected; we all have a responsibility for ourselves, but also for other creatures, for the planet, for all the resources. And we cannot just live from one day to the other; we should also be very responsible for the next generation. And, I also felt very strongly about that. I wanted to make a difference; I wanted to make a difference in the bigger picture. Because, deciding not to eat meat is basically an individual decision, but trying to empower people, and trying to make a contribution to a better world. This was always my dream, and now, 20 years later, I have the opportunity now to join Green Festival, we’re America’s largest green living and sustainability event. And I have a great vision to grow, to make things green, to make sure that everyone here in America knows about the Green Festival, and is aware of what the Green Festival can offer and what a great marketplace it is. Here, you can find all the products and brands you need for a green lifestyle. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Corinna, you know, we love having unbelievably successful people like you on this show because not only do you talk the talk but you walk the walk. Talk a little bit about the Green Festival. You’re the president of the Green Festival, for our listeners out there that want to follow along while we talk here and visit this today, you can go to greenfestivals.org — greenfestivals.org – I’m on your site right now, what’s the mission and the vision of the Green Festival and what are you really trying to accomplish? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes. As I mentioned, we are America’s largest and longest running sustainability event. We are hosting events, Green Festivals in New York City, upcoming now, April 26th and 27th. And in Washington DC, end of May, and also in the fall, in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. And at each event you’ll find a very dynamic marketplace with the widest selection of green products and services and we want to make sure that people come and enjoy each other. And that they come and interact, that they enjoy our great vegan vegetarian organic foods. We have an exciting program where you can learn about sustainability. We have a great collection of speakers. So just come and have a great vegan vegetarian day. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And how many years have you been running this now Corinna? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Actually, I just started. I just started with that opportunity a couple months ago. For me personally, it’s quite new. However, the vision and the mission and the values that are behind the Green Festival, that’s basically what I’m keeping in my heart for two decades. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So you have festivals all around the country, and your goal is to bring people in and socialize them to all the great things that are going on in terms of green lifestyle, vegan eating, vegetarian eating, and how to be more sustainable throughout their lives, everything that they do. DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes, absolutely, we would like to inspire and empower consumers, but also communities and green businesses, who would like to play, list, and work green. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And what kind of people, what kind of companies come and do exhibitions at your shows? DR. CORINNA BASLER: John, actually we do have all kinds of companies. Basically the Green Festival, we are covering all categories. From good food, to business and technology, for example, we have solar energy companies. Clean transportation. We have sports and motor companies, who are sponsoring our events, once again, and they are showing up with their green transportation line, and we are very happy about that. We have Older, the car sharing company that is partnering with us this year, we have ZipCar, and we also have a very strong presence of yoga and lifestyle brands, body care, nutrition, health, body works, and also travel, adventure, we basically cover it all because we want to make sure that we present a marketplace where you can find everything for your green life. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so interesting and I’m on your site right now and again for our listeners it’s www.greenfestivals.org. You also have amazing group of—I’m just looking at the New York one coming up at the end of April—you have an amazing group of speakers. Talk a little about the thought leaders and the speakers that you have coming to your festivals. DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes, we have, for example, we have Amy Goodman, from Democracy Now, I mean she’s just amazing. I have heard her speaking last year at the Green Festival and people have tears in their eyes. They were so touched and moved, she’s really bringing very important issues on the table and we’re all having a discussion. And this is very important for the Green Festival that we’re not just offering what’s important to a sustainable lifestyle but we also address social justice issues and awareness and how to be more conscious about your environment and about your life. This year in New York we also have Dan Harris, he’s one of the top best seller authors in New York and all over the United States. And he’s from ABC Nightline and we are very very happy to have him at the Green Festival. And we also have Rona Berg, the editor in chief of Organic Spa Magazine, I met her last week at our New York lounge party, and just was amazing. She’s such a terrific person and she’s also living exactly what the Green Festival stands for. And we have many many other speakers joining the Green Festival. And we actually have a nice selection of different stages so it’s not just one stage. We offer a family and fun stage, we have a beer and wine garden also, want to make sure that people have fun, enjoy each other, we have a yoga pavilion, we have, altogether we have 6 stages, and of course we have all the wonderful presenters from the exhibitors presenting their green brands. And you can come, you can taste, you can shop, you can try, and just have a good time. And actually we do present a special poet for the green is good radio listeners. So if you go to our website, greenfestivals.org/ticket and if you enter the code greengood14, again that’s greengood14, and you get 50% off if you come to our show if you come to our show for New York or DC. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. That is so kind of you for you to offer that to our listeners. And for our listeners that who tuned in we’re so honored to have with us today Dr. Corinna Basler. She is the president of the Green Festivals and again it is www.greenfestivals.org. For our listeners out there, go on this amazing website which I’m on right now, I mean, you have festivals, New York, Washington, LA, Chicago, and it sounds like, how you’re describing it, there’s something for everyone. You don’t have to be into yoga, but everyone’s into food, and everyone wants to eat better. And if you’re not into being a vegan, then there’s many thought leaders that you can listen and enrich your experience in terms of opening your mind to different things that are going on into this world in living more sustainability. So there is something for everyone, at your Green Festivals is this the way you look at it? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes, absolutely. Because, we have so many events in the country, very focused and very specialized, and it’s all our mission basically to combine all of those different options and categories. Because we want to make sure that we touch everyone’s life. We believe that everyone has a responsibility now to work, play, and to live green. This is why we would like to combine all of the auxiliaries, combine the brand, the services, the spirit, the program, and we want to be positive. We want to make sure that people see that it can be fun and it’s a great way to live a sustainable life and just feel good about it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I see on your website that you have something called the Green Festival Brand Award, can you explain what is that about, and how do brands get nominated, and what kind of brands have historically been winners of this wonderful award? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes. Thank you very much for pointing that out. Actually, this year, this is the first time ever, that the Green Festival is introducing the first annual Green Festival Brand Award, which celebrates companies or brands who are transforming the way we live with innovative solutions. So all paying Green Festival exhibitors can be nominated, we have the Green Festival website, and anyone, really anyone, can go on the website and vote their favorite green brand which is exhibiting at the Green Festival. So just go online at GreenFestivals.org/Awards and just select your favorite brand. And while doing that every voter is qualified to win our super green shopper price. Because we believe it’s not just about brands, we believe those brands they live because of our great consumers. So you have a chance to win this wonderful price, which is a gift basket filled with all the good stuff from our festival. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What is then the Green Festival Community Award? Because I see under the awards category you have all these wonderful categories, I want to learn about all of them. The Green Festival Community Award what is that about? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes. We actually have two awards. The first is the Green Festival Brand Award. The second one is the Green Festival Community Award, because, we would like to give back to communities. We don’t want to just celebrate the brands and the people who vote for it. We would like to engage communities, and we’re giving away a 5,000 dollar grand to a deserving regional non-profit community, which comes up with a great project which is sustainability focused in the area. So, if you are a non-profit if you have a great project, please go online, apply, and you have a chance to receive a 5,000 grant. We will select the 5 best projects, and they come to our festival. They can exhibit and showcase their project, then the attendees, and our judges, they will vote for the best project. And we are really very excited about it. Because we want to engage everyone, including the local communities and give back to them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And last, but not least, what’s the super Green shopper prize? And how people, how do our listeners and other people coming to your wonderful festivals participate with the Super Green Shopper Prize? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes. The Super Green Prize is customized and tailored for all the people, for the fans who go online and vote for the Green Festival Brand Award. This is a nice incentive, you go to the website, you select your favorite brand, and then you have the chance to win this wonderful, great gift basket. Which is an awesome selection, with all the goods from all exhibitors. You will love it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So let’s just talk for a little bit we have about 4 or 5 minutes left, how does the Great Festival, and what’s your vision on, how does the Green Festival help companies go greener? DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes. Of course there are so many companies out there who would like to be sustainable, they would like to be green, they are not 100 percent there yet. We do not want to punish them and turn them down, on the contrary. We would like to encourage them to continue to extend their green portfolio and their green offering. So, when, if a company is interested in partnering with the Green Festival, they can only show up with their established green offering. It has to be vegan/vegetarian, and it has to be a very strong green offering. So for instance, the Green Festival, we are trying to become a 0 waste event, we are nearly there, and again we would like to encourage those companies to keep moving forward, and going along the way to become more green. Because we have a large crowd, for San Francisco we have nearly 30,000 attendees. For New York, we expect nearly 20,000 attendees and this is a great marketplace for companies to also see with their green offering, they are basically sitting in the right place in the market. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, talk a little bit about that Corinna, we’ve got about 3 minutes left. I have no problem with you giving shameless plugs to some of the great sponsors of the Great Festivals, because I want to encourage other companies to sponsor your great festivals. Who is already sponsoring, and, I want their brands to be associated with your great brand. Give a couple of plugs for those great brands who are already sponsoring. DR. CORINNA BASLER: Yes. Thank you very much. For example, this year we have Rudy’s Bakery, Rudy’s Bakery is a purely vegan bakery, and their contribution was a product which is food, and they’re one of our big sponsor. However, our biggest supporter is Ford Motor Company, Ford has partnered with the Green Festival for a long time. Ford is a great example because thinking about Ford the first time, you wouldn’t necessarily think about a green offering, however, together with the Green Festival, Ford was able to extend their green portfolio. And you have the chance to come to the festival, and come have a test drive with Ford’s all electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids and eco-boost technology cars. So this is very exciting. And another good company is Cliff Bar. Cliff Bar is one of our biggest sponsors, and they are extending, they’re growing, they’re heavily owned and they’re living the same values that the Green Festival stands for. So we’re very happy about Cliff Bar. And Cliff Bar is offering the Cliff Bar bag delays so you can come with your bike, ride your bike to the festival, and come in for free at the Green Festival. It’s all very exciting. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What you just did is so perfect Corinna because you just laid out a smaller brand that’s growing. I know Rudy’s Bakery and their products are delicious so I’m so glad to hear that they’re sponsoring and they deserve this plug. And they’re a small and growing business. Then a medium size business that of course is already an iconic brand in the United States for people who are health conscious is Cliff Bars. And then of course, one of the greatest iconic brands around the world, Ford motor company, who by the way has already been on this show numerous times, and we know all the great things they’re doing. And I’m so excited to hear they’re sponsoring you as well. So, what a great example, cross section of sponsors. Smaller, medium, and really, larger. And it’s so great to hear what you’re doing. And for our listeners one more time, get involved, and go to Corinna’s great festivals. The Green Festivals, you can go to www.greenfestivals.org, they’re in New York City in April, Washington the end of May and June, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Dr. Corinna Basler, thank you for your passion and commitment to creating a more sustainable planet. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good. We’re so excited to have Shaun Stenshol on with us today. He’s the founder and president of Bio-Beetle Eco-Rental Cars. Welcome to Green is Good, Shaun. SHAUN STENSHOL: Great, thanks for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You know, Shaun, you have a great background and you’ve been very green ever before you founded this great eco rental car company, Bio-Beetle but share a little bit of your life and your journey leading up to Bio-Beetle Eco-Rental Cars. SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, you know, I was in Kansas City. That’s my home. That’s where my family lived back in the early nineties and I was actually managing a convenience store and the Gulf War was happening at the time. This was ninety, ninety-one and I just felt like I wasn’t doing quite the right thing so I ended up quitting that job and it happened that Greenpeace had an office in Kansas City at the time and they had an ad in the paper for a job so I was curious what Greenpeace was doing in Kansas City since there’s no whales to save in Kansas City so I went there and I started working for Greenpeace and that’s where my environmental life began and my activism. I focused on stopping nuclear weapons testing in the Nevada desert and I was opposed to nuclear power and focusing on renewable energy, solar, wind, things like that and I was really focused on that and then I learned about biodiesel. One of my friends at the Greenpeace office turned me on to this story about these five women who drove across country in a diesel van and made their own biodiesel as they went along, which was just amazing. They drove three thousand miles across the country just stopping at restaurants. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Unbelievable. SHAUN STENSHOL: Then I worked in Austin, Texas, working for Greenpeace there, doing other forms of activism for about six years before I moved to Maui and I moved to Maui and I just was really fortunate because like, the month before I moved to Maui, a local company started where they started making biodiesel out of the used cooking oil from the local restaurants so I thought, you know, ‘I’m in Maui and there’s a lot of tourists that come to Maui,’ so I thought it would be interesting to rent diesel cars to the tourists that come into Maui. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And also, you were involved in the recycling business too, right? SHAUN STENSHOL: Yea, well when I moved here, I didn’t intend to necessarily live here when I came here but if I decided to stay, I’d stay and I ended up looking for a job and there was a local recycling company that was looking for people and got that job and Maui Recycling Service is the name of that company and several years later, I ended up buying that company from the two owners and you know, because obviously that goes hand-in-hand with everything I’ve been working on and then we started running our diesel trucks on biodiesel with that company as well. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Perfect. And then you started Bio-Beetle Eco Rental Cars. SHAUN STENSHOL: Yeah, my partner, Pam, who moved here in 2002, I bought a car before she had moved here with the idea of starting Bio-Beetle. I bought a used 2000 Volkswagen Beetle Diesel and I just bought it because I just saw it at the dealership. It was available and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to buy it and I’ll just figure out how to start the company from there,’ and we ended up starting the company with one car, believe it or not, and we actually had a local rental car company here manage the cars for us until we grew to be big enough to manage our own cars. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So now, I’m on your website. For our listeners out there, we’ve got Shaun Stenshol on the phone. He’s the Founder and President of Bio-Beetle Eco Rental Cars and it’s www.Bio-Beetle.com. I’m on your website. This is great. I gotta mention this. Shaun’s in Maui in Hawaii so this great company is in Hawaii. Unfortunately, there’s not a Bio-Beetle today all across the United States of America but this is in Maui so if you’re going there, I would definitely look up Bio-Beetle.com and Bio-Beetle Rental Cars. Talk a little bit about what’s so different about your company as opposed to the big names that we all grew up with, you know, Avis and Hertz and all those great companies. SHAUN STENSHOL: Our focus is being the greenest rental car company on the planet. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And what does that mean? Share with our listeners what that means to you. SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, from the cars perspective, you know, cars are not green by their nature and so my purpose in starting the business was to take an existing business and make it green, as green as you can so with Bio-Beetle, we have the biodiesel cars, which run on biodiesel, which is used cooking oil, which is collected from local restaurants. Also, we don’t use chemicals. We use natural cleaners when we clean our cars, things as simple as vinegar and water. We offer to our renters when they come in, we have coolers and reusable shopping bags, things that they can borrow so that they don’t feel like they have to buy something that they’re just going to toss away when they leave Maui. Things like that. And from a service perspective, it’s a lot more personal because it’s me and my partner, Pam, who deal with all of our renters and we pick them up at the airport, we drop them off at the airport and they’re not waiting in line like they would with one of the big rental car companies. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s nice. And how many cars do you have right now in service? SHAUN STENSHOL: Sixteen. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And what kind of cars are there compared to- you know, some people might have a larger family. Some people might want a two door or a four door. What kind of cars do you have to offer the people that want to be in Maui and be green while they go around the island? SHAUN STENSHOL: We started with the biodiesel cars so we have Volkswagen Beetles and Volkswagen Jettas. We also have a Jeep Liberty so that’s our biodiesel line and then back in around 2009, we decided that we wanted to offer the Toyota Prius, since it’s the most fuel-efficient car sold in the U.S. and then in 2011, all of a sudden, there’s electric cars that became available. We got a Nissan Leaf and in 2012 we added the Chevy Volt. We want to add the greenest cars that become available. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is so amazing. And what do people ask for the most? What’s the hot car now? What do people want to drive? SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, people who contact us, most of them want the biodiesel cars. They want the Jetta. The Jetta’s a great rental car because it’s a four door Sedan, it has a large trunk so it’s really accommodating. Some people, though, want a smaller car so the beetle works really well for them. The Jeep is a little bit bigger, four wheel drive, much better clearance on the roads. It just depends on what their individual needs are but the Jetta seems to be the most popular one we have. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Shaun, is this a new paradigm that you could roll out if you want to different cities across America? Are there other Shaun Stenshols across America that are doing eco green car rental one-offs? Is this a major trend that you start seeing or is this something you could literally brand and say, ‘I’m going to go do this in L.A. I’m going to go do this in Kauai. I’m going to go do this all across the United States’? SHAUN STENSHOL: It definitely has potential. We’re the only ones who rent biodiesel cars, for example, and some of the other big rental car companies are renting the electric cars and the Priuses but it’s hard to book those cars with those companies for some reason so I think there definitely is the opportunity to grow. We have tried renting cars in other areas but managing rental cars in L.A. from Maui- We did that for two years. It was a little challenging so we stopped doing it but our goal is to expand and other people certainly could cut off of the same thing because it is unique, especially the biodiesel cars. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Talk about biodiesel fuel. Is it hard to find? If I rent one of your biodiesel cars in Maui, where do I fill up? Is it tough to find biodiesel? How does that work? SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, there’s two biodiesel stations in Maui, one around the corner from our office in Kahului, which is central Maui, and one on the far west side of the island in Lahaina and the real advantage of our biodiesel cars is, for example, from the biodiesel station in Kahului, the furthest you can drive from the biodiesel station is maybe sixty-five miles. Our cars get well over four hundred miles on a tank of fuel. It’s not an issue. Electric cars present different issues from a range but, you know, we’ve found that a lot of people are concerned about the biodiesel cars because of range but we have to tell them that it’s just not an issue at all because the cars are really fuel efficient. That’s a side benefit of diesel cars is that they’re a lot more fuel efficient than a gasoline car. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How about the cars that you charge? If I rent one of your charge cars, where do I charge it on the island of Maui? Is that a hard thing to find places to plug in to? SHAUN STENSHOL: To a degree, depends where you’re going but a lot of the hotels and shopping centers have charging stations. There’s also a Japanese group that’s installing fast chargers for the Nissan Leaf here on Maui. That’s not fully installed yet, but that’s happening and a lot of our renters for the electric cars, if they’re staying at a place that has an outlet, the electric cars actually come with their own chargers that can do a standard outlet so if they charge overnight, they generally have a full charge when they wake up in the morning. JOHN SHEGERIAN: The shopping malls or the hotels or this new Japanese company, is there a charge to charging your cars? SHAUN STENSHOL: For most cases, no. It’s free to charge at most charges. There’s some that charge small fees, like they might charge a dollar fifty an hour or two dollars an hour or something like that but the fast chargers are all free right now and there will be a small charge for them in the future but that’s another side benefit of the electric cars is that, if you do it right, you can actually drive them for free. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Help me through this with regards to electricity. If electricity is made from fossil fuels, are we really saving that much if we’ve got to create electricity to charge the electric cars? What’s the cost-benefit analysis or is that just silly old thinking that I’m bringing up? SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, it depends where you’re located. Maui has two large wind farms and a lot of solar electricity installed around the island and every week that passes, there’s more solar being installed so over time, electric cars become greener just because the grid is becoming greener. But the other thing is, even if they are charges just with fossil fuel electricity, they’re still more efficient because electric motors are super efficient and the electric grid itself is a lot more efficient than, say, a gasoline car engine by itself. Right? That makes sense so overall, even without the renewable energy it makes more sense but, like I said, over time, not just on Maui but everywhere, is becoming greener just because of all the renewable energy being installed, solar and wind. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Speaking of greener, we’ve got about four minutes left. You also own Maui Recycling. Is that the leading recycling company on the island of Maui? SHAUN STENSHOL: We’re the biggest recycling company on Maui. There’s a few other haulers but the other haulers, their main business is trash so we do a small amount of trash but the vast majority of our business is recycling. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How do you have the time? You’re running now a growing rental car company, up to sixteen cars. You own the largest recycling company on the island. I mean, my gosh! If someone deserves Sustainability of the Century Award, it’s you and how do you have the time to run both? SHAUN STENSHOL: It’s busy. You know, yeah, so I do what I can. JOHN SHEGERIAN: In regards to your growing Eco Rental Car Bio-Beetle- and for our listeners out there it’s www.Bio-Beetle.com – sixteen cars doesn’t get cheap. Are you raising money to grow this or are you just doing it organically from the profits you make? How is that working? SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, to date, we’ve done it organically. We’ve had some individuals who really like what we’re doing and they’ll give us lower interest loans than what we could get from, say, a bank but that’s really how we’ve operated ever since we began. We haven’t brought investors in yet and that’s something that could happen but yeah, we’re just kind of seeing where it goes. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Two minutes left. What’s the future of Bio-Beetle? What’s your goal? What’s your dreams? What do you want to do with it? SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, we want to have cars on all four main islands, Kauai, Oahu, the big island, and Maui, of course, and possibly expand to the West Coast, at least. There’s certain cities on the west coast that would be a great fit for Bio-Beetle and then we just keep offering the most fuel efficient greenest cars that become available, whatever they might be. It could be hydrogen cars, who knows? The potential is enormous and I think that people like us who are committed to the environment first, we really have an opportunity because other companies, that’s just not their focus. Their focus is profit for the shareholders and obviously, we need to make money too to be successful but that gives us an edge that we’ll always have that focus on the greenest cars. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Any last thoughts? There’s a lot of young entrepreneurs out there, not only in the United States, but around the world because this show now gets broadcast everywhere. You’ve done this now from Greenpeace to Maui Recycling to Bio-Beetle Eco Rental Cars. You’re a serial sustainability superstar. Any final thoughts for the young people that want to be the next Shaun Stenshol? SHAUN STENSHOL: Well, they’ve got to follow their passion. In your life, ideally you want to do things that you enjoy doing and my advice is that most corporate business in the world is not focused on sustainability and so that means there’s enormous potential for people to say, ‘Here’s a business’. It could be any kind of business. They could say, ‘I want a biodiesel tow truck company’ or something like that. Just pick a business that is something you would like to do and make it green. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. That’s great. SHAUN STENSHOL: Just put everything you’ve got into it and make it work. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Your heart and soul. Well, obviously, you’ve made it work. Shaun, thank you for your time today. To learn more about Shaun or Bio-Beetle Rental Cars or rent his cars when you go to Maui, go to www.Bio-Beetle.com. Shaun Stenshol, you are a sustainability superstar. Thank you for your leadership for Bio-Beetle Rental Cars and Maui Recycling and you are truly living proof that green is good. SHAUN STENSHOL: Thank you.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and we’re honored to have with us today Michael Sund. He’s the Vice President of Communications and Investor Relations for Maxwell Technologies. Welcome to Green is Good, Michael. MICHAEL SUND: Thank you. Glad to be with you. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Before we get to talking about your employer, Maxwell Technologies, let’s talk about Michael Sund. What was your journey in your life like prior to joining Maxwell Technologies and what led you to joining them? MICHAEL SUND: Well, I began my career as a journalist. I studied journalism in college and began in the newspaper business and later gravitated to the world of corporate communications, I guess you could say. I’ve been on the agency side and on the corporate side for more than thirty years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Got it. How many years ago did you join Maxwell? MICHAEL SUND: I’m just about to celebrate my fifteenth anniversary with Maxwell. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. So obviously it was a good marriage and a good choice. MICHAEL SUND: It’s been a great experience to be involved with Maxwell. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, let’s talk about Maxwell. Before I ever started studying them because I knew you were going to be our great guest on today’s show, I didn’t hear much about them. Can you share the Maxwell Technologies story and who they are and what they’re doing and why they’re helping to make the world a more sustainable and greener and better place? MICHAEL SUND: Well Maxwell’s primary business is in producing energy storage and power delivery solutions based on a relatively novel technology called, ‘ultracapacitors’. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hmm. And can you explain what an ultracapacitor is? Because I’ve never heard of one. I’m sorry. MICHAEL SUND: You’re in the majority in that regard. We use batteries as a reference because everyone’s familiar with batteries and they’ve been around for a hundred and fifty years. Ultracapacitors are, in some ways, battery-like but they have some distinct differences from batteries so let me explain a little bit. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Sure. MICHAEL SUND: Ultracapacitors charge and discharge in as little as fractions of a second. Much faster than a battery. And they use an electrostatic energy storage mechanism as opposed to a chemical reaction, which is what makes batteries operate. That creates some differences in the way they perform so rapid charge and discharge, very long life because there’s no chemical reaction, therefore no chemicals to deplete so as you know, batteries have a finite life and need to be replaced. Ultracapacitors, in many applications, will last the life of the application, don’t need to be replaced and because they don’t rely on a chemical reaction, they work normally at very high and very low temperatures. Everyone knows batteries tend to struggle when it gets cold, for instance, starting a vehicle in the morning. On the other side of it, batteries have very high energy density, meaning they store a lot of energy, a big reservoir of energy. Ultracapacitors store much less energy but in many ways they compliment ultracapacitors because they charge and discharge very rapidly, operate normally over a wide temperature range, whereas batteries have this large reservoir of energy for sustained energy output from minutes to hours. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hmm, got it. So the benefits of the ultracapacitor and why people want and need to use them and the return on investment, how does that work? Can you help share the analysis of benefits and then the return on investments in their applications? MICHAEL SUND: Yes, well if you think about the primary application for our product today, number one is in braking energy recuperation in hybrid transit vehicles so if you think about stopping a vehicle- let’s say a transit bus that stops- every time it does that, if it’s a hybrid vehicle, it has an electric motor and instead of using friction to bring that vehicle to a stop, the software signals the electric motor to run backwards and it stops the vehicle with resistance and while it’s running backwards, an electric motor is a generator and you have an efficient storage system. You can convert kinetic energy, the energy of motion, into stored electric energy that can be reused for propulsion and that would reduce fuel consumption because that recaptured energy actually takes the place of the fuel that normally would be propelling the vehicle. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Ah ok. And so you’re saying in many applications, an ultracapacitor is working in tandem with a battery? MICHAEL SUND: That’s correct, yes. A battery is a great reservoir of energy but you can imagine in a braking system it only takes five or ten seconds to stop a vehicle and, as we all know, charging a battery in five or ten seconds doesn’t really store much energy in that period of time, whereas an ultracapacitor can fully charge in the few seconds that it takes to stop a vehicle. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I gotcha, I gotcha. So has this whole green revolution and the evolution of us driving now hybrid cars and green cars- has that been a boom for Maxwell Technologies? MICHAEL SUND: Yes, it’s been a great opportunity for us so the number one consumer of our product is in hybrid transit buses in China, where air quality is a big issue. Everywhere in the world reducing fossil fuel consumption is a strong impetus. The ultracapacitor’s ability to capture energy that would otherwise be wasted in a friction based braking sometimes and reuse that energy is beneficial to the environment in the form of reduced emissions and of course, in payback, as you talked about, in reduced fuel consumption. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow but Maxwell’s been around for forty-five years. What was the ultracapacitor being used for before this hybrid revolution and evolution toward hybrid vehicles? What was your core competency in terms of use and applications years ago? MICHAEL SUND: Well, ultracapacitors have only really been a mainstream commercial product for the past fifteen years or so JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh okay. MICHAEL SUND: Maxwell’s main business prior to that was as contract research and development in a laboratory, operating under government contracts and so forth and one of the initiatives during that time, when Maxwell was essentially an R and D company, was in developing this infant energy storage technology called ultracapacitors. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Ah, got it. And by the way, for our listeners out there, we’ve got Michael Sund with us. He’s the Vice President of Communications and Investor Relations for Maxwell Technologies and if you want to follow along as we have our chat today here at Green is Good, you can go to www.Maxwell.com. It’s a beautiful website. I’m on it now. There’s a ton of great information on everything that Michael’s discussing with us and all the great applications that Maxwell is doing to green the world and make the world a better place. So ultracaps was part of the R and D work of Maxwell and has now become one of the lynch pins of this whole hybrid revolution. MICHAEL SUND: Yes, that’s correct. We’re becoming more familiar now with so-called stop-start idle elimination technology, which is a- we’re not talking about electric propulsion of cars. We’re talking about saving fuel by turning off the internal combustion engine when it otherwise would be idling such as at a red light or in stop-and-go traffic and that constant restarting- you can imagine during a commute, you might have many, many opportunities to turn off the engine and that requires a restart each time- so in the auto industry, the first application for ultracapacitors was in providing cranking power to continuously restart a vehicle and allow it to save fuel and reduce emissions. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And so you said one of your big clients is the hybrid bus companies in China. Where are else are ultracaps being applied in the United States and around the world? MICHAEL SUND: Well, our first automotive customer is the French auto maker, PSA. They make pijou and citroen automobiles in Europe and our products are in more than a million pijou and citroen cars today, again, helping them to restart and save fuel. The largest bus maker in the world, based in China, is called Yutong so they are the single largest consumer of our ultracapacitor products. We’re also providing ultracapacitors to wind turbine manufacturers globally. Our first customer was a German company called Enercon and we also service large Chinese wind turbine producers such as Gold Wind so those are some of the largest consumers of our product today. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And explain the connection with wind and grid energy storage. Is there a connection with solar and wind and what you do with ultracapacitors? MICHAEL SUND: Yes, there is and let me explain first our long time association with wind energy began with something called, ‘the blade pitch mechanism’ of a wind turbine and simply, that means that these wind turbines can damage themselves if the wind blows too hard and so they need to be able to pitch the blade of that wind turbine into a neutral position. When wind velocity is too high, ultracapacitors are used to deliver a burst of high energy to accomplish that alteration, the blade pitch. As we look to the future, renewables such as wind and solar are inherently variable. A cloud passes over a solar array. Wind velocity fluctuates. And ultracapacitors can be used to smooth the output from a renewable source into the grid, which likes steady input and has difficulty providing reliable service to you and me if the inputs fluctuate too much. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Is your ultracapacitors already at work due to the California Renewables Mandate? MICHAEL SUND: Well, we last year, received a grant from the California Energy Commission to develop a demonstration project putting ultracapacitors together with a solar array to, again, improve the consistency of the solar array’s output into a micro grid on the University of California’s San Diego campus. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And if that works, then that’s a paradigm that can be replicated if that works? MICHAEL SUND: Yes, well, as you know, California has mandated that a third of our energy consumption here must come from renewable sources by 2020 and that’s a significant challenge for the grid, again, to manage consistent output with variable input with a high percentage of total energy production coming from renewables and we’ve already seen this in Germany and other places in Europe where renewables count for a very large proportion of energy generation and so the management challenges that come with that present a real great opportunity for ultracapacitors. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How big is the ultracapacitor world? Is Maxwell the leading brand in the world for ultracapacitors or are there fifty competitors of yours now? How does that work in terms of your competition? MICHAEL SUND: I would say we are a leading producer. In certain categories I would say we would be the leading producer in transportation. Looking at the grid, we are the leader. We have some Asian competition in applications in things like consumer electronics, where Maxwell doesn’t focus its product development efforts but the whole business is fairly new compared to batteries, the main energy storage technology and so I’d say the total worldwide market is certainly less than half a billion dollars today, whereas the battery industry is tens of billions or perhaps a hundred billion dollars. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. But the ultracapacitor market is growing, I take it? MICHAEL SUND: Growing very rapidly. Maxwell, with its ultracapacitor business, has seen compound annual growth in ultracapacitor sales approaching 40% year after year for the past five or six years. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. So does any U.S. car company use your ultracapacitors? You said the French company does. Does any of the U.S. car companies use it yet? MICHAEL SUND: None are in production but we are engaged in development activity with auto manufacturers and with tier one suppliers to auto makers globally and so I would say that we are very optimistic that we will be able to talk about applications with U.S. autos in the not-too-distant future. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I know you work with education facilities, SoiTec and UCSD. Share a little bit about what else you’re doing there. Was that the grid energy storage program or is there other things you’re doing also? MICHAEL SUND: Well, SoiTec is a leading producer of solar arrays. They use a particular form of technology called, ‘concentrating focal voltaic’ and so SoiTec has installed solar arrays at University of California – San Diego, which is striving to become energy self-sufficient, if you will, or more self-sufficient so making those solar arrays more efficient and consistent with UCSD’s micro grid is a role for ultracapacitors and we will be working with SoiTec on a larger installation in the California desert as we move forward with this California Energy Commission sponsored program that I described earlier. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to the last minute or so. What’s the biggest potential that you see and the leadership at Maxwell Technologies sees to grow your market share and to grow your sales in the coming years? MICHAEL SUND: Well, the biggest consumer of energy worldwide is transportation and so making transportation more efficient, recapturing braking energy and helping to reduce consumption of fossil fuels and then the whole realm of energy generation, as we’ve talked about, so the transportation and the grid offer limitless opportunities for our products. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Thank you, Michael, for joining us today. For our listeners out there that want to learn more about Maxwell Technologies, go to www.Maxwell.com. Thank you, Michael Sund for your wonderful energy and sustainability work at Maxwell Technologies. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good. I’m so honored to have with me today Meea Kang. She’s the co-founder and president of Domus Development. Welcome to Green is Good, Meea! MEEA KANG: Thank you! It’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Meea, you’ve done such wonderful work at Domus Development and we’re so honored to have you but before we start talking about the great company you co-founded and that you’re the president of, please talk about the Meea Kang story and how you got the journey leading up to Domus and how you even got there. MEEA KANG: Well, it’s definitely one of those roads that had a lot of twists and turns along the way. I started out in the Midwest. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My father immigrated to The States to get his higher degree in education. He was a Ph.D. and a professor at the University of Illinois for many years in Champaign-Urbana and moved there, the Midwest, spent a lot of formative years there looking at a lot of the world as being pretty flat in terms of corn fields and soybean fields and got a lot of extreme weather conditions and it was a fun place to grow up but kind of hard to understand the rest of the world from that perspective. But we moved from there to the east coast and I lived in Connecticut during my high school years. My father taught at Yale and exposed to a lot of things there and then went off to college, Cornell University, where I focused on studying fine arts and really explored the world in a very creative way, very out-of-the-box thinking and did things like teach myself how to weld and made large-scale steel sculptures, taught in the School of Architecture as sort of a T.A. became really interested in the built environment. From there travelled and did Rome for about a year, Taipei, Taiwan for about another year, really just exploring the world and seeing a lot of different ways people are living and the kinds of densities that we see in especially some of the Asian cities. Came back a little bit refreshed and worked in Los Angeles in the interior design business, where I actually had clients that were somewhat Hollywood stars in their own rights and realized that that wasn’t really my fit and I went back to architecture school to study, really, how architecture can help to solve some of the human conditions, like housing and sustainability and it opened my eyes to really how you can reach a triple bottom line with building the right kinds of buildings for folks and that really led me to architecture and development. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How long ago did you start this company? MEEA KANG: Ten years ago. Actually, 11 now. Let’s say 11 years. It was 2003 when I started. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Eleven years ago. So now, 11 years into it, when you started it and you said, ‘I’m just going to put one foot in front of the other and start Domus Development,’ has it become what you wanted? Has it exceeded your expectations or are you on track for the dreams and the visions that you originally had 11 years ago? MEEA KANG: I have to say I’m very blessed. I feel very blessed. We’ve worked really hard. It really is turning into the company of my dreams in terms of being able to really get out there and take on extremely complex problems and find solutions that really were brought on through a collective action. It was really through a lot of work with community members and defining goals and finding solutions through that process and then not letting anything stop us so we’ve reached challenges like zoning and outdated building codes and we’ve had to go in there and modernize entire regulatory systems. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, for our listeners that want to follow along and see the great work that Domus Development had done and is doing, you can go to www.DOMUSD.com. So you’re 11 years — overnight success in 11 years? That’s really what’s happened here. I get it. You know, I’m on your website and it’s a beautiful website. I’ve already studied it, but now I’m on it while we’re doing this interview and there’s so many great things you’ve accomplished already and so many things you’re doing. I want to talk a little about one of things you’re doing with your website and it’s a word that I’m not familiar with. You’ve done infill development projects. Can you explain what these types of projects are versus the standard let’s-go-build-a-building-in-a-hole ideal that we see here in New York City, where I live and I work and I see in big cities? What does an infill development project mean and why are you guys so good at it? MEEA KANG: Well, the term, ‘infill development’ really means on under-utilized land within existing cities and towns and so, frankly, it’s the opposite of sprawl, which is really building on land that may have been open space or former agricultural land and really, especially in the state of California, infill development is really critical to accommodating growth and redesigning our cities to become more environmentally friendly and socially sustainable. And so it really means rather than taking productive farm land out of commission to build more far-flung subdivisions, we really look to rebuilding our cities in existing urbanized areas and you go in there- you know, in any urbanized area, there are vast tracts of neglected and under-utilized land. Often times, they might have contamination on them because they were former industrial uses but they really do have the potential to be transformed and catalyze an entire new resurgence in existing communities. I mean, we see it- we’ve called it, ‘white flight’ in the sixties, where folks really turned their backs on their cities and they continued to kind of build new track homes further and further away outside of our cities and we find that that development pattern is really not sustainable. Not only do people travel long distances to commute to their jobs, but the cities and the small towns are really hampered with needing to support the infrastructures of those suburban areas that are based on densities that might be ten units to the acre. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And so basically, you’re a real estate recycler. You’re recycling products that have been in use before and need to be repurposed again but instead of going out on the hinterlands and building anew out on the farmlands, you’re just redeveloping our cities. MEEA KANG: That’s how I feel. I feel very lucky and fortunate. Sometimes I call it, “reweaving our cities.” JOHN SHEGERIAN: I love it. MEEA KANG: And sometimes, there’s a lot of emotional around neighborhoods, especially with people who have seen the transitions over the years and often times when I come into a community, there’s a lot of emotions that run high in terms of, you know, there are a number of neighbors. Infill is not easy. Primarily, you’ve got to deal with your neighbors. You’ve got to hear your neighbors, you’ve got to work with you neighbors, and you’ve got to bring about a type of change that not only works for you as a developer from a bottom line but can also bring benefit to the community and I think neighbors want to see that and they do expect that development infill areas are taken to a higher level of standard. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And you’re also straddling the legacy that they’ve seen but also the new generation that wants new and bright and shiny and stuff like that so you’re also on that straddle as well. MEEA KANG: Absolutely. And what’s interesting about California- California’s population is estimated to grow by over five hundred thousand people a year. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. MEEA KANG: And so by 2020, the state predicts that over forty-five million people will be living in California. And at that point and you know, even now, with that many people calling California home, it’s beyond imperative to use our resources more efficiently and improve our quality of life and we can do this by building more compact neighborhoods. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And your firm does infill developments in all sorts of settings; suburban, urban, rural, but does infill actually always have to mean high density, or squeezing the last inch out of that space, or can it be a varied type of infill and recycled resource? MEEA KANG: You know, in my opinion, infill is a very- and densities- really are catered to the existing areas so if you’re in an urban area where most of your buildings are ten stories, twelve stories, say San Francisco where you can do tall towers, you’re looking at big densities. You’re looking at a hundred units to the acre or even beyond, two hundred units to the acre, especially in Manhattan but, of course, that one size doesn’t fit all so in smaller cities, there’s usually a zoning that exists on various sites. Infill often will increase the zoning that’s there but only by, say twenty percent, thirty percent maybe, at the most. So you can see projects- we did a project in a rural community, up in a Lake Tahoe community and it was three thousand people so small town, unincorporated part of the county and the densities there were seven units to the acre and they were very small parcels, one hundred long by about twenty deep, twenty wide, and the maximum number of units you could build on these sites was two units to the acre. We were able to work with everybody to increase those densities from seven units to the acre up to thirty units to the acre. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Good for you! MEEA KANG: And that was an example of how we can work in a rural setting but as far as stories on the building, because we’re building smaller units, because apartments tend to be smaller footprints, you could actually work a lot within the form of a building to fit the topography of the area, to fit the typological sort of vernacular of the area so we built these in maximum three story buildings and they were very much in keeping with the look of the area and it added actually a little bit more dimension and character to the neighborhoods. But by doing so, we dispersed the density amongst the community. We did what we’d call a, ‘scattered sites development,’ and we went from about twenty-six to thirty units to the acre, which is vastly the densest they have ever been approved in this region. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we’ve got Meea Kang on with us this morning and she is from Domus Development. She’s the co-founder and president and it’s www.DOMUSD.com. Meea, what is the term, ‘brownfield’? I know what that means but for our listeners. You’re an expert at brownfield site redevelopment. Why is that a challenge and what is a brownfield site to start with? MEEA KANG: Well John, you more than anyone know, when companies have waste- back when there were no regulations, most companies just dumped that waste either into the groundwater or into the rivers or into the land so brownfields are often abandoned, closed, or underutilized industrial commercial facilities and often, these brownfields are located, say in an abandoned factory town or in a former industrial area where, of course, changes happened. Regulations happened and business may have shuttered but what they leave behind is a footprint of, you know, frankly a lot of really nasty contaminants that somebody needs to come and clean up and often times, the business may no longer be in business, they won’t have the resources to clean these sites so sometimes they’re called, ‘orphan sites,’ where either the city- in many cases, redevelopment agencies- would come in and find funding, say from the EPA to get enough money to do the type of analysis on the site to determine what the contaminant levels are and come up with a lot of different scenarios of how they’re going to remediate, in other words take out- all of those contaminants and bring that land back to a buildable state. According to the EPA, there over a half million brownfield sites in the U.S. today and that really only counts the ones that have been studied and documented so the EPA believes that the actually number of brownfields is vastly more than that and they’re difficult. There’s a lot of risk. A lot of times, your consultants can only determine the levels of pollutants based on whatever they’ve dug up and often times what happens is, once you get in the ground with your plan, you find that the levels are frankly much greater than anyone had studied or anticipated and so you need to have great resources and the ability to take it from beginning to end and actually clean it all the way up an it often requires getting another certification from your local regulatory agencies to confirm that no further action is needed on these sites. So it’s expensive and it’s difficult but often we find, especially as our cities have grown, that these brownfield locations, these former industrial areas, are right either in the middle of a growing new community or revitalizing community or they’re really on the edges of what actually needs to change in order to sort of really bring the community together. So they’re critical pieces to the equation of infill development and sustainable communities going forward. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Meea, you’re an expert. Domus is an expert at cleaning up these challenging locations and you don’t learn that stuff in architecture school so what gives you the eye, the sense, the gut to say, ‘This one’s a good one. We can take this ugly duckling and make it into a diamond’? MEEA KANG: Well, I definitely do a lot of due diligence. I will work with excellent consultants. I’ll read a lot of reports. I’ll really study up on the situation and the solutions that we need to undertake and frankly, it’s plan, plan, plan, and then plan for failure so you really have contingencies and a lot of plan Bs in the event the plan A doesn’t work. So it’s a matter of just making sure you’ve got a mitigation strategy that can work and then frankly, part of it is that you make sure you’ve done all your homework and you’re going to hold your breath and you’re going to jump in and then you’re just going to go for it and solve problems. And I think often times, we often work with a great team, a development team and city partners and we’re all in it together so it really does help in terms of analyzing and underwriting and because I work with often institutional money, we have a lot of attorneys looking at everything and a lot of people vetting and double-checking what we’ve assumed and so really, I think all those checks do help the process in making sure we have the adequate resources to address these problems. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m on your website now and, again, I’ve read about your recent national award and congratulations on winning this national award from the EPA for Smart Growth Achievement from the La Valentina built project in Sacramento. So there was seventy-seven applicants across thirty-one states. You’re group was chosen. Domus was chosen to win this. Talk a little bit about why. How come you stood above and beyond all these other applicants across this great country? How did you win this? Why did you win this? And why does your company continue to achieve and overachiever and hit levels of greatness that others are just missing? MEEA KANG: Well, thank you. I’m still surprised and honored all at the same time. It certainly is a great honor to be recognized by the US EPA, especially because we took on this site that was frankly, a bit of an ignored site for twenty years. The site was about one point two acres and it was just on the sort of gateway into downtown Sacramento. The main thoroughfare that this building faces is a former highway. It’s called one sixty and this is how the highway kind of slows down as it goes into the city. The traffic pattern on this road is about fifteen thousand cars a day commuting into work as well as light rail and it’s a one-way street and it drives everybody into town and so people are passing at speeds of probably thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an hour. The people are just kind of going from point A to point B and for a long time, this area was industrial and these sites were auto body repair shops and people just ignored it, partly because the area had had a long history of crime. And there is a large homeless population that resides near the river. This is the path from the river to connect people to social services. Often what people will see and what people think about is, frankly, homeless people and loitering and whatnot so it’s been a challenge fight over the years and one that didn’t necessarily rise the level of importance from a city’s perspective. It was always just, ‘Oh yeah, let’s try to get something done’. So in a way it was sort of a sleeper that we were able to take this very small site, one point two acres, complete brownfield, and turn it into a mixed use COD community that’s really taken the city of Sacramento and the project to a national level so it’s really a great honor. The site, being that it was incredibly challenging, really led us to find and seek solutions that were out-of-the-box. The existing zoning on the site allowed us to build, at a maximum, thirty-five apartments and at a maximum height level of three stories and we felt that that was just not enough. Those were just some of the challenges we had to face. The brownfield remediation, just building in general, and we thought to seek higher zoning densities and so we were able, on our station building, which is the mixed use four-story building, we were able to be approved at seventy-eight units to the acre. And we built a four-story building and ground floor retail and apartments ranging from studios, one bedrooms, and three bedrooms as well as one-to-one parking but when we started, the city wanted a hundred and sixty-five parking spaces. We had all these rules and regulations that really did not permit the kind of development we wanted to do so frankly, our vision was, quote, end quote, “illegal”. It was not permissible so what we had to do is completely change the zoning to permit this site and what that meant was about sixteen different variances in special permits. We had to be out there every single time. At any point, someone could try to throw a stone at us and try to bring the entire project down. We could have been sued at any point in the game, especially during the entitlement phase when you’re trying to get a project approved, and it was really wrought with a lot of challenges but we were able to overcome and get our community to support it because, for so many years, they were tired of the crime. They were tired of the fact that there was no investment in this area. We were able to get this approved. We were able to get financing during the height of the Great Recession. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. MEEA KANG: Thank you. Financing was difficult but we managed to pull it together. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It was non-existent, let’s be honest. Difficult? You’re being humble, oh my gosh! MEEA KANG: And at the same time, we knew everything was going to be difficult so we just kept adding challenges to your plate and one of the challenges we took on — so we have two components. It’s La Valentina Station, which is our four-story building, and then we have Valentina North, which are eighteen town homes that are basically stacked town homes over flats and we were able to work with the utility company, SMUD; Sacramento Municipal Utility District. They gave us a grant so near net-zero energy apartments in all of Sacramento, which means that we can generate as much electricity by solar panels on the roof for, not only the common area uses like your outdoor lights and the building, but also for the interior and for the residence uses. One of our residences told me that before she moved to La Valentina, her energy bill was about a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. She pays five dollars a month. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And this is a great point. We’re down to the last couple of minutes or so, but this is a great stepping point. So, I know you do so much great work. You recycle communities, you recycle pieces of land, brownfield and infills but you’re also working, you’re very analogue. You’re very nose-to-nose with your long list of people who want to come and live in your great communities and your great projects. Talk a little bit about reducing footprint. I mean, you just talked about this lady who went from a hundred and twenty-five and she lives in your property and she’s paying five now. For our listeners out there, what are two or three things people can do to reduce their carbon footprint? MEEA KANG: Absolutely get out of your car and start moving! You know, if you have a nearby grocery store or some errand that you can run without getting in your car, take that route. Take the options that are non fossil fuel driven. I mean, it will dramatically start to change the way we commute, the way we move, and ultimately, not only , save money from not having to go to the gas station all the time. We’re going to have better air quality. We’re going to be healthier people because we’re moving around and you know, I think if we’re going to do one thing- you know, you’re not going to put solar panels on your roof. You’re not going to compost because you live in an apartment- try not driving every day. In our development at La Valentina, forty percent of our residences does not use their car on a regular basis. They will either walk, take transit, or ride their bike. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great advice. We’re down to the last minute or so. What project is coming up that you want to give a shout-out to that Domus has in development right now? What are in the works? MEEA KANG: Well, we’re excited to start construction on a new senior TOD, which means Transit Oriented Development, here in Sacramento. We’re hoping to break ground later this summer. It’s called Curtis Park Courts and what’s exciting is we’re actually building higher density senior housing in a former brownfield that has been remediated and it is within five minutes of the local community college so it’s going to bring access to seniors to a variety of educational experiences as well as to a new retail shop that’s opening and it’s in a very desirable area in downtown Sacramento and we’re excited to see that project move forward. We’re also doing a lot right now with community clinics and trying to integrate community clinics with affordable housing to reach a greater range of availability in affordable housing and we’re also looking at doing several veteran’s projects in areas that really need some revitalization at the same time that are home to where a lot of vets are moving to so we’re excited about the different things we’re working on. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Now, for all of our listeners out there that want to learn more about Meea Kang and Domus Development, go to www.DomusD.com. Meea Kang, thank you for being an inspirational leader in sustainable real estate development. You are truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored and so excited to have with us today, Lauren Sullivan. She’s the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Reverb. Welcome to Green is Good, Lauren. LAUREN SULLIVAN: Hello there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Lauren, before we get talking about the great work you’re doing at Reverb, can you please share a little bit about the journey? I want our listeners and I want myself to hear about life prior to Reverb. LAUREN SULLIVAN: Well, the quick story is that I was born and raised in Maine, up here in the northeast and basically grew up in a very kind of rural environment and I think that was sort of the beginning. The seeds were planted for my connection to the natural world just by way of growing up in a rural setting and then went to Tuft University outside of Boston, where I met my husband, who I co-founded Reverb with and after Tuft, I did this wacky wonderful graduate school program called the Audubon Expedition Institute and it’s a field school for the Audubon Society that is through Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I traveled on a bus with other students and professors and studied environmental issues, cultural issues, where they intersect, and then lived outside for about a year and a half, camping all over the country so that experience really solidified my pledge to myself to work on behalf of the natural world and the environment and then after grad school I moved to San Francisco to work for the Rainforest Action Network and did their campaigning for indigenous communities in Colombia and South America against oil interests in their ancestral homeland so did that for a couple of years and then moved east to New York City, where I lived in Brooklyn and worked for Partnerships for National Parks, where I did community organizing around parks, gardens, and green spaces on behalf of some of the citizens of Brooklyn and got to work with really terrific people there and during that time, sort of weaved into the Reverb story, my husband, who’s a musician with a band called Guster, was lamenting the fact that they were leaving this effluence of plastic bottles and diesel fumes behind them at every tour stop and I was really curious about kind of bringing that piece to light and then also, bringing the opportunity to nonprofits. I interacted with so many terrific nonprofits that I wanted to kind of shine a light all the great work that they were doing and give them sort of a megaphone and so Reverb was born from that and personally, it was also born from the fact that I love pop culture myself and I love music. I love film, all of that, and I’m also a hippy at heart so those two things didn’t necessarily go together. I would be ridiculed by all friends from all walks of life about enjoying concerts and pop music and I would also be ribbed for heading into the back country for weeks at a time so Reverb sort of brought together those two pieces and using the music platform, we were able to share with music fans the work of those nonprofits that are out there. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners out there, I’m on your website right now and for our listeners who want to follow along on their mobile device or on their laptop or on their desktop right now, it’s reverb.org. I’m on your website. It’s gorgeous and there’s so much information here. Please share with our listeners first. Lay the platform out. What is Reverb and what do you guys do? LAUREN SULLIVAN: Sure. We are a nonprofit, again, based in Maine, and we work within two realms. We work within the music industry and the environmental nonprofit world and what we do is behind the scenes backstage, we will quote, end quote, “green up a tour,” and so that means that we may set up recycling bins. We may connect local farmers to the catering company to offer local organic food, get rid of plastic water bottles and provide the band and crew with reusable water bottles and coffee mugs, source biodiesel at every stop along a tour so that a tour can be using less petroleum diesel. We’re doing those sorts of things behind the scenes and then in the front of house, where the fans are in an amphitheater, we will often times set up what we call an eco-village and that means we bring together local nonprofits to share information about what they’re doing in that backyard so they can plug in to what’s happening in their community and get activated, get educated, have fun and it adds a new dynamic to the concert experience and often times what we’re doing is drawing from the artists that we’re working with, drawing from them and their passion and sharing that with their fans so it really is connected to what the artist is interested in and what their kind of passion place is around environmentalism. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s step back. In 2004, when you created this with your husband, was this paradigm even existing or is this a brand new paradigm intersecting nonprofits and sustainability with music artists? LAUREN SULLIVAN: Yeah, I’d definitely say we’re earlier adopters for sure but really the people I can point to are Bonnie Raitt and her manager, Kathy Kane. They were the folks that, when I was at the Rainforest Action Network out in San Francisco, Bonnie Raitt did a lot of work on behalf of our old growth forest campaign when I was at RAN and I just took note of the fact that adding her celebrity voice to that campaign really elevated what was happening and took it to another level, introduced it to a whole other demographic of folks. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Give us a mix. Who were your artists last year that you partnered with? Who are the artists this year that you’re partnering with? LAUREN SULLIVAN: Last year, we worked with a diversity of folks; Maroon Five, Dave Matthews Band, .fun, Barenaked Ladies, Ben Fold Five, Guster, John Mayer, Phish, Jack Johnson, Brandi Carlile, Gregory Allen Isakov, all sorts of folks. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Do you have to travel when this happens? Do you have a group that travels with them? How do you make this all reality both back of the house and front of the house? LAUREN SULLIVAN: Sure, yeah. The reality is this is a lot of logistics so what we do is we have our home office here in Portland, Maine and we connect with an artist and their management and find out what they’re interested in doing. They may approach us. We may connect with them by way of other folks in the industry. We talk about what they’re interested in and create a program, create a budget, figure out how to fund it, how to make it happened, and then what we’ll often do on a larger tour, kind of a bigger scope project, is we will send out a tour coordinator on the tour so they’ll be just like your guitar tech or your drum tech, your lighting guy. They’ll sleep on the tour bus with folks from the crew and they’ll roll along from stop to stop and they’ll roll out every morning, set up the catering area with bio-compostable products, meet with the farmers, do a walkthrough of the venue to set up the eco village, meet with the volunteers and the nonprofits, connect with fans at the show over the course of the evening, and then pack it all up and do it all again the next day. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. Then I’m on your website. For our listeners out there that want to go to the website, it’s reverb.org, and then you have a massive list of nonprofits. How do you choose which nonprofits get plugged into which shows and how do you vet out these nonprofits to start with? This is a massive undertaking that you’ve done here, Lauren. LAUREN SULLIVAN: This is. We have an incredible team here that coordinates all the logistics and really, on the nonprofit front, it’s about folks that come to us saying, ‘Hey, I heard you’re coming to town and that you’re working with this artist. Can we come out and table at your show? There is an important campaign coming up and we’d like to be out there.’ We work with someone like that or often times, and less so now because we already have so many relationships with nonprofits, but in the past, it used to be, okay we’re heading to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Let’s get online. Let’s bust out our rolodex to see who we can connect with. Who’s already out there? Who’s doing the good work? What are the campaigns? Then , first and foremost, our relationship with the artist, kind of the artist as client, it’s really about what their passion is. If they’re interested in tree planting and urban gardening, we’ll seek out groups that have that thematic thrust so that’s really how we do it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Getting prepped for this show this morning, I was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s shows fro Australia, the live taped shows and he was mentioning at the end of the show that he was working with a nonprofit in Australia that collected food at the end and gave out food to people who were having trouble getting by. Is this a similar type of thing that you would do for a show here in terms of working with an artist and finding their soft spot in their heart and the community that had needs and matching up needs with the artist’s heart? Is that how it works? LAUREN SULLIVAN: Yeah, I mean it really is. For instance, we’ve worked with Jason Mraz and I used the example before but he was very passionate about tree planting and urban trees and sustainability and so what we’ve been doing more and more now is connecting these issue areas to service projects. Along the course of his tour, we had some marquee service projects where Jason came out and different volunteers came out and folks from the community and a local tree organization would come out and do the tree work that needed to be done, planting trees, fertilizing them, just working on all those pieces so it’s been great. The Dave Matthews Band folks have come out and done some great urban gardening and then compost bin construction and then we just recently finished up a couple of service projects, one with Maroon Five in L.A., working with this organization called Freehab and we helped them put together this eco sustainable suite for kids that are coming out of rehabilitation and are kind of starting a new life and then we also worked with a band called Fruition in a space for at-risk youth and it’s a music space as well, where they offer music classes so we went in and did a bunch of cleaning, got some instruments donated and so it’s something that we’re trying to do more and more of because you and I and I think a lot of your listeners know that sustainability and the word green, some people have been kind of oversaturated by the word, ‘green’ and so for us, we want to stay as innovative as we can and kind of be reinventing ourselves to connect with people’s lives and make sustainability connect with people and connect with their hearts and become meaningful again and so we’re really feeling like the most powerful way to do that is through these service projects where we leave a legacy where we’re doing something hands on, working side by side with the artist, and it’s just a really gratifying experience for everyone so we’re excited to do more of that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we’ve got Lauren Sullivan with us today. She’s the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Reverb and to check out what Reverb does, it’s fascinating and it’s important, it’s www.reverb.org. I’m on your site and just all the things that you touch and you interrelate with regards to these artists in terms of waste reduction, travel, backstage, front stage, catering, lodging, carbon footprint reduction, it’s amazing but let’s talk about the fans for a second. What is your secret sauce for engaging fans and the millennials out there and those that are older than the millennials like me? How do you engage the fans to get involved and to take action and to be part of the solution? LAUREN SULLIVAN: I think, first and foremost, it’s really about that any fan that is there is there because they want to see their favorite artist perform that night. It’s about that feeling. It’s about that connection with the artist so really, what we do is kind of highlight that relationship and really use that relationship in the best of ways to say, ‘Hey, did you know that Dave Matthews and the entire band are really passionate about farming and sustainable agriculture? And hey, you can donate five bucks and get a basil seed pack and then that money actually goes to a local food pantry to help them purchase a community agriculture share to get farm fresh food to families that are dealing with food insecurity in your community,’ so through the Dave Matthews Band and through some of our other programs, last year alone we helped bring in and get donations from fans over 84,000 dollars that were going towards CSA farm donations to community food banks. Also bringing in money and helping support local farms by way of getting those farmers to source food and then bring food to the caterers, over 100,000 dollars in local farm food so it’s really about that connection to the artist and engaging them in fun ways. We’ve got multimedia displays and different actions that people can take, photo booths, contests and prizes that folks can win so it’s really an exciting environment and what we aim to do is to not preach, not be up on our soapbox, but just have a dialogue with folks. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Lauren, prior to going on the air, you and I were talking about your Campus Consciousness Tour, talking about engaging fans and doing fun things. What is that about? Explain to our listeners what the Campus Consciousness Tour will do. LAUREN SULLIVAN: Sure. The Campus Consciousness Tour, basically the way you describe it is half music tour, half environmental campaign and so we go on to college campuses across the country with one artist so this upcoming tour, we’re heading to with a band called Capital Cities. They’re terrific and so actually what happens on a tour is that we connect with environmental groups and sustainability groups and nonprofit groups on campus that are making change in their campus community. We’ll connect with them. We’ll often have a national sponsor that will come on board to help fund the programming that we’re doing and we’ll also bring some daytime activities to life, depending on the artist, so it’s really kind of a dynamic all day event on campus where we work the students and shine a light on what’s happening on campus, bring some new issues to the table, and then have a fun village experience at night with a concert on campus. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How many campuses will you be touching this year? LAUREN SULLIVAN: Well, this spring at least, we’ll probably be doing about a dozen. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow, that’s awesome. LAUREN SULLIVAN: It’s something that we’re really excited about and it keeps kind of growing and shifting and changing each year and we just feel grateful to do it and honestly be a part of the dialogue that’s happening on campuses. College students are where it’s at in terms of learning and they’re really at the forefront of what’s happening in the sustainability movement so we learn a lot from them. JOHN SHEGERIAN: They’ll be taking the torch from us in continuing the journey so it’s so great that you get to work with them and interrelate with them. I think that’s so amazing. You know, we’ve got about five minutes left and there’s so much I want to get to but you know, as you talked about at the top of the show, Lauren, you’ve been, for lack of a better term, a greenie and a treehugger and someone who’s been doing great things from the heart long before it was cool to be green, cool to be sustainable and so you’ve seen the evolution of the revolution. Where are we at now? You started Reverb in ‘04. How has the dialogue changed since when you started working with these great nonprofits prior to even founding Reverb in 2014. What have you seen and where do you feel the whole revolution is going here, the Sustainability Revolution, that is? LAUREN SULLIVAN: It’s been a sea change. It’s just been massive. We started out kind of getting our feet underneath us in 2003 and then launched our first Reverb tour in 2004 and so you know, this is our tenth year in action and honestly, it’s been a dramatic shift. I mean, folks didn’t know what ‘green’ meant or sustainability, climate change and all these terms were very new to all of us. I do think it’s one of those things where it was kind of a marginalized movement even ten years ago so it was more of a kid sitting with a cardboard sign and it’s kind of wild and the flaky nonprofits and all that kind of reputational stuff that we had to kind of rally against initially and we went to the artist and said there are these great groups doing this great work and initially, we had to run interference and help the nonprofits get their message out and help the musicians and all of their fans to see that this is some incredibly worthy stuff. That wasn’t too difficult because a lot of musicians are activists in rock star clothing so lucky for us that that’s the case but now what we’re seeing is that it’s fully integrated into everyone’s everyday life. Sustainability is key. Climate change and the concerns about that are on everyone’s mind and so now I think, as I mentioned before, I think the real challenge for all of us as a movement is the innovation piece. How can we talk about these things in a different way? How can we make them connect to us and to our everyday, to our own communities? It’s exciting. JOHN SHEGERIAN: It is exciting. We’re down to the last two minutes or so. Talk a little bit about this upcoming year. Besides this Campus Consciousness Tour, what are you going to be doing? And talk about the future, the next couple years of Reverb. What’s you and your husband’s dream? What’s going to go and how are you going to stay relevant and innovative? Because you’re on top of it, way on top of it. Where is this thing going to go? LAUREN SULLIVAN: This year, we’ve got a lot of great tours coming up that I can talk about. We’re definitely in conversations with lots of folks in terms of the Capital Cities Campus Consciousness Tour rolling out. In the next few weeks, we’re also working with the Dave Matthews Band again. They’ve been wonderful allies in this whole movement and we’re working again with Jack Johnson and then we have a few other tours in the hopper that we’re also talking about but until they’re totally locked down, I will hesitate to say them but some just terrific artists and we feel grateful and lucky that we’re able to work with people like Jack Johnson and the Dave Matthews Band again and again because they really are the prow of the ship and this movement. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s awesome, and where is Reverb going to be? When I have you back on the show a year or two from now, where are you guys going to be? LAUREN SULLIVAN: I think for us, we’re always talking about being a mom and pop nonprofit, literally and figuratively. We don’t want to be the biggest. We want to be the best at what we do and for us it’s about continuing to kind of dig deep into what can we do within the space that we’re working in. This is our, we use the term, spirit influence in the nonprofit world and the music world and how can we dig deep? Working with more venues, I think, will be on the docket and more radio stations, working with more labels, working with hotel peeps around the music industry and travel, so I think there’s so many things to be done within this space that can have an affect, to use our name to reverberate out and have an impact but the service project piece is huge for us and I really do see us growing that more and more. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Thank you and thank you, Lauren, for your time today, for listeners that want to get involved and want to be a part of the solution and be a part of Reverb, check out their great work at www.reverb.org. Thank you, Lauren Sullivan. You’re a sustainability rock star and truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good and we have with us today, our friend, Eric Harris. He’s the Associate Counsel and Director of Government and International Affairs at ISRI. Welcome to Green is Good, Eric. ERIC HARRIS: Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re so happy to have you here today and before we get into all the great work that’s going on at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, I want to share a little bit about your story. I want you to share you journey leading up to 2005, when you joined industry and stuff like that. I know you’re highly educated and super bright, like I’m telling the audience now. Eric’s a longtime friend of mine since 2005 and ERI, we are proud members of the great organization ISRI so Eric, share a little bit what led up to this. Were you always thinking of this? When you were in law school and other things you were doing or is this something that just came along the way in your journey? ERIC HARRIS: You know, it’s quite interesting, John. My story really begins back in Austin, Texas. Oddly enough, I was a radio, television, and film undergrad, an aspiring filmmaker of all things and I also have a desire to go out and run trails and enjoying the outdoors and noticing some of the smog and air pollution around the Austin area, I started to get more and more interested in environmental issues. One thing led to the next and I found myself up in law school at the University of Montana, which is a fantastic program, a lot of hands on stuff, a great environmental program, and did a lot of good work there and found myself with the opportunity to come out to D.C. and work for Senator Max Baucus, who’s one of the great senators from the state and the country, and at the same time, I found myself at George Washington University studying international environmental law, which, in some ways, led me to ISRI because, as you know, most of the material that is processed and handled to some extent moves in a transboundary way across nation states and so you quickly find yourself into international issues and some of the environmental issues to go with it and that’s kind of how I ended up at ISRI. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So interesting. So you really got a huge breadth of experience, both personal and educationally speaking and that makes a lot of sense and you’ve been doing a whole lot of work and I’ve had the opportunity to work with you since approximately 2005 and for our listeners out there, way before it was cool to be green and way before it was cool to be sustainable or the Sustainability Revolution actually landed in America let’s just say, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries has been doing so much great work and has so many great members that are truly doing the real recycling in this country, just so people know and it goes back to everything from scrap recycling to car recycling and now it’s evolved to one of the hotter topics, one of the faster growing waste streams in the world, electronics recycling, and I think today, Eric, you’ve spearheaded that leadership and that advocacy and I think today we’re going to chat. Besides all the great work ISRI is doing, we’re going to talk about all the great work ISRI is doing and you’re doing in the electronic recycling industry topics. Can you give us just as a platform the state of the nation of the industry as well? How is it going with regards to US electronics recycling and the evolution of that whole industry that you’re a huge advocate and really helping manage that whole process? ERIC HARRIS: Well, you’re right. It is very interesting. This is a very unique time to be in this industry. Certainly for yourself and the folks that got in early this comes as no surprise but this industry, the electronics side of the recycling industry, is really still the fastest growing segment. ISRI members have been recycling these metals, non ferrous metals, copper and aluminum, for decades. It’s been for over a hundred years in this country a very long established proud tradition. It really is an honor to represent you folks and all the members out there that really understand how you take these recycled materials, add value to them, and bring them back into the economy, providing a tremendous benefit, not only to the environment but helping supplement those raw materials out there that helps us make all the stuff we need, plastic and everything else. What we have seen on the electronics side is a market over the last ten years that has seen growth, if not tremendous growth. There’s been a number of reports. As with any industry that’s budding or growing, you’re going to have some growing pains. You’re going to see some consolidation and see some technology change and there are going to be some winners and losers in the marketplace and we’ve seen all that and we’re going to likely see more of it but the bottom line is for electronics recycling, certainly the United States and to some extent, globally we’re seeing a market that is maturing and headed in the right direction. We are seeing jobs created in almost every state across the country in a dramatic way. We’re processing higher volumes and getting greater returns on the back end, those commodity grades, and returning good, functional equipment back into the domestic and international market and we’re processing more material. We’ve seen growth in all those areas. Employment, value of the market has actually increased, and volume of material has increased so we’ve really come a long way and certainly have more things to do but so far, so good. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And you’ve also been one of the great leaders on the third party certification movement. Share with our listeners the importance of third party certification and what your organization has done on that issue, Eric. ERIC HARRIS: Well, I appreciate that and certainly it’s been a multi-stakeholder driven issue and just to dot the history, in 2005, during President Bush’s administration, the EPA gathered all of us together and said, ‘Look, we’d like to put together a set of operational standards that improves, not only environmental conditions, but protects worker health and safety, not only in the United States, but anywhere where used electronics are being processed,’ and from that humble beginning, we have established a number of standards in the marketplace but that particular standard, the R2 standard, came on line in 2009. We had our first facility certified, which is an independent third party audited certification, which basically says you have to demonstrate that what you say you’re doing, you’re actually doing so bring an auditor out and demonstrate that. Then you can hold yourself out in the marketplace accordingly but since 2009, I believe the R2 standard in and of itself has over 510 facilities, in a number of different countries, not just in the United States, but growing outside of the United States, so a tremendous accomplishment, not only for the EPA and their public/private partnership, but also everyone in the market who has embraced a need and certification has now really become a cost of doing business. In this market space, you really need to get certified if you’re going to be a serious player. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we’re so excited and honored to have my friend on today. His name is Eric Harris. He’s the Director of Government and International Affairs at ISRI. To learn more about the great organization, ISRI, or to join ISRI, please go to www.ISRI.org and to be certified or learn about becoming certified, go to www.certifymerecycling.org. Eric you talked about your educational history, international environmental law and a masters. Why is the international market so important to electronic waste recycling, the industry itself, the certification process that you mentioned, and the evolution of where we are going, as you say, the travel of and the international commerce of the commodities? Share a little bit about your visibility and your thoughts on the international markets and how they matter. ERIC HARRIS: This very well could be the most interesting, at least to some of us, aspect of this whole market in that the premise is that people around the world, not just in the developed countries, they want better lives. They want the gadgets and the stuffs that improve our lives, whether it be cellphones or laptops or televisions or just bridging that digital divide, folks in these countries want those same luxuries and those same benefits and so what we’re seeing around the world, almost without exception, is that these electronic products are reaching their end of life in these markets and so solely relying on good companies in the United States and Canada and so forth is really not going to be good enough to really address the growing demand for responsible recycling outside of these developed countries and so couple that with the fact that this particular market is really about moving material and John, you know this better than anyone. You have to go out and collect the material. You have to bring it into your facility. You have to process it, handle it responsibly, but then on the back end where you make your money back, you need to sell those products and make those commodities, not only to domestic markets, but throughout the world, wherever that demand is and so inherently, there is a transboundary aspect to this business. How this material flows, not only state to state, but also internationally from one country to the next, becomes very important and so we have a lot of interested folks making sure that this material is handled responsibly and let’s be quite honest, as these formal economies develop, there is an informal sector out there that is not always doing it the way we want them to do it and so there is a tremendous opportunity for companies like yours and organizations like ISRI to share our industry know-how to say we know the growing pains you’re going through and these are the operational issues that you really can navigate around and improve your environmental conditions and protect, again, your workers’ health and safety so the idea of moving certifications around the world and making sure that every facility that wants to get into this market adheres to those same quality assurances is really a big opportunity. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Eric, let’s talk about the Basel Convention. For our listeners out there that don’t fully understand it, can you articulate what that really means? Should you, as companies, really care about the Basel Convention with regards to electronic waste recycling? ERIC HARRIS: Right. Well, the Basel Convention is an international environmental agreement, a treaty among nation states that really governs the transboundary movement of hazardous waste and other waste and their disposal so these are the laws that nation states adhere to when they want to move hazardous materials outside of their country. Historically, the Convention was really established to really address really hazardous bad stuff, toxic solvents and sludges moving into places they really shouldn’t have been moved and so the Convention was really put in place to deter some of those movements, very similar to or mirrored after the U.S. Resource Conservation Recovery Act, or RCRA so now what we find is the Convention is growing and maturing and moving into other streams. It has really gravitated toward learning how to handle or manage some of the used electronic products that may ripen into hazardous waste and as such, how we move that material now runs right up against this international treaty and so indeed, if you’re a company that’s moving material, either in the United States or China or South America, you’re going to need to understand what those laws are but perhaps most importantly, John, is it’s not a one-size-fits-all. You have to know what you’re shipping, for what purpose, and to what country and so there are differentiations between that material flow. There’s a difference between sending a functional product back into the marketplace as a reusable good and sending a shipment of steel or copper material reintroduced. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Great point. So there’s a lot that goes into the thought process of now moving things around the world with regards to electronics, used electronics and also the commodity byproducts of those electronics. ERIC HARRIS: That’s right and you know, one of the more interesting debates going on right now at the Basel Convention is to what extent the Convention should apply to warranted goods or materials that are under product recalls or moving for diagnostic testing so if you have a cellphone or a laptop that’s under warrantee and it breaks and you’re sending it back to the manufacturer, should that be governed as hazardous waste? Many say it should. Many other countries say, ‘Wait a minute. That’s kind of beyond the scope of the Convention,’ and now if you look beyond consumer electronics or IT products and you look at anything with a circuit board in it, it’s really in the scope of what we’re talking about so you’re looking at medical equipment, aeronautics, automobiles. Think of all the cars and electronics so really this debate will really set the platform for how we move these types of materials as we move forward. Very important stuff. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’ve got about four minutes left. I want you to share with our listeners your opinion your thoughts on there’s been a large amount of recent reports, Eric, International Data Corporation, U.S. International Trade Commission, the UN MIT study, and also, even last week there was a Senate hearing. Can you make some sense and sensibility of the statistics that are coming out and how our listeners should be handling it if they’re a government entity, a corporate entity, or if they’re just a regular person on the street that’s worried about dealing with their electronics and also protecting their data? What do the recent studies show and what should people, organizations, and government entities be thinking about, now and in the future, with regards to the appropriate disposal of electronic waste? ERIC HARRIS: I think the reports that you mentioned are really showing that the arc of change is headed in the right direction and the most important of those three reports is the U.S. International Trade Commission Report. This is a report that was commissioned by the USTR, the U.S. Trade Ambassador, Ron Kirk, to take a look at what was actually happening to user electronics in the United States. Did we have a mass exodus of material moving into places we didn’t want or is there a different story? And what this reports says, really irrefutably, is that the market really has changed and to the credit of companies like yourselves and others, we’ve really come a long way and over 90 percent of the material is actually being processed right here domestically in the United States. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And creating thousands of jobs in the process. ERIC HARRIS: Over 45,000 jobs across the country and then some. It’s becoming even more so what does that mean for the average consumer who wants to do the right thing? You need to make sure that your electronics end up at a facility that can handle it responsibly and there’s no better way to have at least the initial assurance than working with a Certified Electronics Recycler, a company that has gone through one of these certifications like the R2 program and said, ‘Look, we want to hold ourselves out operationally, that we’re one of the good guys and we’ve been audited to it,’ and that’s an assurance to the market that folks can feel comfortable sending their material to. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. We’re down to the last minute and a half. ISRI. Give a shameless plug for ISRI and what ISRI is doing and what role does ISRI have in this marketplace. ERIC HARRIS: ISRI is the trade association for the scrap recycling industry, not just electronics, but ferrous, non ferrous, plastics, glass, tar, and rubbers. We hold ourselves out and we’re proud to say we are the voice of the recycling industry and our top priority is really to promote and protect this market and to help you all, the companies, the members that we represent -It is a member-led organization- to really get out of the way and make sure that you all have the tools in the marketplace to help you do what you do best and that is take this material and process it and return it to the market and try to help the, not only domestic, but the global economy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well said and well put, and Eric, thank you so much for your time today and ISRI is the voice of the recycling industry and has been long before the Sustainability Revolution landed on the shores of America. ISRI has been one of the legacy voices of the recycling industry and we’re proud members and we’re so proud to have you on our show today. For our listeners out there that want to join ISRI or find out more about it, please go to www.ISRI.org and if you want to get certified or learn more about the certification process, go to www.certifymerecycling.org. Eric Harris, you are a recycling and sustainability superstar and truly living proof that green is good.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to another edition of Green is Good and we’re so honored to have with us today Del Sroufe. He’s the author of the amazing and famous book, Forks Over Knives and the new book, Better Than Vegan. Welcome to Green is Good, Del. DEL SROUFE: Hi. How are you today? JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re great. We’re great. We’re so thankful for you to come on today and before we get into talking about your new book, Better Than Vegan and of course the great work you’re doing at Wellness Forum Foods, Del, share a little bit about Del Sroufe’s journey and how you got here and what led to this platform that you’re working in now. DEL SROUFE: Sure. You know, it’s interesting. When people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, I never thought I’d end up being a chef, let alone a vegan chef. I’ve been cooking since I was a kid though. I started cooking when I was eight years old but I cooked the standard American diet, leading to a lifetime of bad eating habits and yo-yo dieting. I actually was attending business school at Ohio State University and dropped out to go work for this little vegan restaurant, looking for management experience and for something to do and I ended up being there eight and a half years. In that eight and a half years, I not only became vegan but decided to open up my own vegan bakery and in 1997, I opened a vegan bakery, became vegan myself, of course, and then proceeded to work myself crazy and not only to work myself crazy but to gain over two hundred pounds eating a diet that was vegan, yes, but unhealthy too and full of processed foods and white flour and sugar and oil and all of that so that led me to eventually get to the point of where I weighed 475 pounds and at 475 pounds, life is really hard. I eventually closed my business because I was just tired and I started a personal chef service, a vegan personal chef service here in Columbus and I delivered meals to clients around town and eventually, I got to the place where I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired and I came to the Wellness Forum. I had been making products for them since 1999 and I came to the Wellness Forum and said I need some help and I started on our program. I took our ten hour class on health and wellness and proceeded to change my way of eating and my way of thinking about food. I’ve lost well over 200 pounds and am well on my way to losing the last 50 pounds and getting myself in shape. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is a very inspiring story and really a good one and that brings up a really important point that’s not spoken enough. Talk a little bit about eating vegan doesn’t really always have to mean eating healthy. Explain that push-pull with regards to veganism and sometimes the false hope that it gives people if they’re not watching all the other markers in their life. DEL SROUFE: What you have to realize is that the marketing machine that is processed foods has taken hold of the vegan world too so we can eat vegan sausage and we can eat vegan burgers and we can eat vegan ice cream and potato chips and beer is vegan, one of my favorite foods, and all that. And there are high fat plant foods that are healthy but in excess quantities, they’re not healthy. So you know, it’s easy to fall into that trap and a lot of people do, changing out their healthy or unhealthy eating habits for unhealthy vegan eating habits and that’s what happens far too often and that’s what happened to me. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Interesting. Talk a little bit about, there’s a lot of people out there moving towards veganism. I see it every day. I’m a vegan. My family, my wife and children, are vegans. Talk a little bit about the science behind, why make the change to whole foods and a plant based diet nowadays? DEL SROUFE: Well, if you look at the amazing that T. Cohen Campbell did in the China study and the research that’s been going on and on, and not only him, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Dr. Neal Barnard, even our own Dr. Pam Popper that we have here at the Wellness Forum, we are seeing that people are falling off of the medical wheel and seeing that the medical wheel isn’t working for them. It’s not curing them. All it’s doing is managing their diseases and you get sick and tired of that when you see that over and over again, this is just kind of an obvious choice because one: it’s based on sounds science, the sound science of eating well. People, when you look at them in Forks Over Knives are looking at the science in that movie and it’s like oh my god, it’s right here in front of me. It’s kind of an easy choice for some people. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You are the author or co-author of Forks Over Knives, right? DEL SROUFE: The cookbook, yeah. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Yeah, and that’s one of the great vegan cookbooks out there so for our listeners out there who haven’t had the opportunity yet, please watch the movie and get the cookbook. I’ve given that cookbook out to more people and more people have said that that book has helped them transition and it’s their favorite book I’ve given them so my hat’s off to you and I’m so honored to have you on today, Del, because I didn’t know you were the co author but thank you for that book. That book is so important. I mean, so important. DEL SROUFE: It’s a great book and I think it really shows people that you can not only eat healthy but eat well. I love good food and I think that I try to show that in my cookbooks and my recipes and I think people are responding to that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: What are you seeing? I know your friends and partners with Doctor Pam Popper, who has been on this show now twice. What are some of the benefits of eating a plant based diet? What can our listeners expect to happen as they transition their lifestyle and their diet over? What happens to a person? DEL SROUFE: Whether you are overweight or not, one of the things I think people see first is weight loss, getting rid of the excess body fat, which is a great thing because body fat is a precursor to all kinds of diseases. You see more energy. That’s an easy one. You stop counting calories and managing this little wheel of dieting. You focus on a dietary pattern of eating starchy foods and beans and grains and vegetables and fresh fruits and staying away from high fat foods and all those and then other than that, you just eat well. It’s not about starvation and it’s not about deprivation. It’s about eating and to eat to fuel the body. You gain energy and you quit managing disease. That’s a big one. I don’t go to the doctor once a month to check my blood pressure. I reduce my risk for all of these diseases. It’s too powerful to ignore and I’ve seen it in this business. I’ve been with the Wellness Forum. I’ve seen people walk in the door sick and diseased and walk out with their health back and just being so happy to be living their life again. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we’re honored to have Del Sroufe with us today. He is the author of Forks Over Knives and his new book, Better Than Vegan. You can find Del at wellnessforumfoods.com. Del, talk a little bit about your new book, Better Than Vegan. I’m on your website now. I’m looking at the book and to you, what does the title mean, Better Than Vegan? DEL SROUFE: It goes back to the fact that you can eat a vegan diet and still not be healthy if you’re eating a lot of processed foods. I learned that the hard way. There’s nothing easy about weighing 475 pounds and there’s nothing easy about getting rid of that. I still work hard at weight loss to this day and it’s something I have to work at every day so Better Than Vegan is simply the fact that if you eat the right diet, the minimally processed food, foods that are low in fat and low in protein, devoid of animal protein and animal foods, if you eat the right diet, then it is better than vegan. It’s really going to help you achieve optimal health so what it gave me was the ability to share with people, especially vegans because we’re seeing a lot of sick vegans coming into our practice. We’re seeing a lot of vegans who are seeing some of the same diseases, overweight, diabetic, etcetera, that the main stream is suffering and they’re confused by it so that’s kind of why I wrote the book and just to be able to tell my story and say that, look, it is possible to achieve health, to achieve a lifestyle that is vibrant and happy and eating the right foods is one way to do that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And Del, for our listeners out there, they can buy your book on your website or, of course, on Amazon.com or other fine book stores around the United States. DEL SROUFE: Yep. That’s correct. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And you’re based in Columbus, Ohio. Is that correct? DEL SROUFE: Yes. That is correct. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So if people want to taste your delicious food, is there a place they can go? DEL SROUFE: Yeah. We have a deli case full of foods that we prepare every day so you can walk in nine a.m. to nine p.m. Monday through Friday and pick up some lunch or dinner to take home. We deliver and we ship. We’ve shipped some of our foods frozen across the country from time to time. If you’re in town, stop by and let us feed you some lunch. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Like I said earlier, Del can be found at wellnessforumfoods.com. Del, let’s talk a little bit about perception and reality when it comes to meat and deli. What’s bad in them and why should they be taken out of your diet? DEL SROUFE: Well you know, talking about perception, we are told every day that protein is essential to our bodies and that animal protein is key and that we have to drink three eight ounce glasses of dairy every day. We’re told that by people who supposedly have our best interests in hand and some of them do. There are many well-meaning people out there who have been told the same thing and taught the same thing. The problem is it’s just not true so when you start looking at the science and you start looking at what really goes on, we know that meat and dairy promote disease. When you get your animal consumption, and this is from the China study, when your animal consumption goes up above a certain percentage point, then you increase your risk for all those degenerative diseases that we talk about. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I haven’t had the honor yet of enjoying your delicious food and I’m going to because I go through Columbus quite often but my experience with vegan restaurants across America, both when it comes to the regular foods that they create and also the wonderful desserts they create, you’re missing nothing. You’re a chef. You can create vegan food that has so much taste in it that the people are missing nothing with no meat and no dairy in it. Is that not correct? DEL SROUFE: Yeah, the misperception that vegan food is like eating tree bark is just that. It’s a misperception. The simple fact is that I eat really good food. I love really good food. I have all my life. I come from a family of really good cooks and flavors is key for us and our foods. It’s just that flavor and healthy foods can go hand in hand and do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Del, the issue that you so caringly shared at the top of the show of eating too much of even a good thing and gaining weight and now being on the other side of that, losing 200 hundred pounds successfully and continuing to monitor that and continuing to lose, can you share some of your greatest hits and tips with listeners? What got you ahead of the curve instead of behind the curve. Even though you do know the science and you have the ability in your talent and your DNA to create great food, how did you get ahead of it instead of behind it now? DEL SROUFE: A couple of things that I do differently now than I did before, before, eating was just something that when I was hungry, I grabbed what was in front of me. Now I really plan my life out to eat well. In other words, I schedule my eating. I know what I’m going to eat at the next meal so there’s no surprises. In other words, when you get caught out in public and you’re hungry, there aren’t a lot of choices for you so you better have a plan in mind so I schedule my eating and I eat six meals a day and then I sanitize my kitchen so you can’t walk in to my kitchen and find potato chips or beer or oil or sugar or any of those processed foods that are bad for me. I don’t even have flour, whole wheat or white flour, in my kitchen because I’m a baker by trade and I can easily throw together the pancakes and the cookies and all of those unhealthy things so sanitizing your kitchen, stocking your kitchen full of healthy foods. When you have healthy foods in front of you, you’re more likely to make healthier choices. Get plenty of rest. Tired people make not so great choices. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Got it. Those are some great tips. DEL SROUFE: Those are some good ones. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How about exercise? Where does exercise play a role and fun, fun time for Del, fun time for all of us? Where does that play a role in this nutritional vegan journey? DEL SROUFE: If you had asked me seven years ago about exercise, I’ve exercised off and on all my life. I used to love riding my bike. I’d ride my bike 150 miles a week through trails and do a 30 mile bike ride, all of those things. I was just never very consistent with it. Six years ago, when I was weighing 475 pounds and we talked about exercise, to me it was just pain and discomfort. There was no joy or happiness surrounding that but we started off with where I was and did what I was able to do. I now work out with a trainer four days a week plus I exercise on my own and I’ve picked up one of my favorite things I’m doing right now, fitness boxing. I’m learning how to box. I don’t ever really want to hit another human being but the amount of energy that you spend on boxing and the strength training that goes behind that and all those things make exercise fun so finding something that you like to do is important but it’s also important to make sure you’re getting that heart rate up, keeping it up there for about sixty minutes, and then doing plenty of good stretching as well as some strength training. All of those things come in to play and you have to have all of them to achieve optimal health. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That is great. You know, Del, I’m on your great website, wellnessforumfoods.com. Also, you teach cooking classes. Can you share a little bit about what that’s about and how has that movement grown? How has that practice of yours grown? Are more and more people coming to you and saying, ‘Please show me how to cook healthy foods’? DEL SROUFE: Yeah, I think the big thing that people realize is once they learn the science, then they have to put it into practice so that’s what our business teaches. It helps people put it into practice and our cooking classes are just one extension of that so learning to put some recipes into your collection that are healthy, again, it goes along with that whole planning thing of having something ready and available to go so if you don’t know what to cook, most likely, you’re going to fall back on the old bad habits so our cooking classes are fun. We do one or two a month and they do a variety of different themes. We do everything from soups, stir fries, pasta dishes, etcetera. We’re doing a whole grain bread making class, coming up here one day soon and I think people enjoy them because for them, it’s fun to have the light bulb go on, to see that they can do this and it actually tastes good. They’re growing well. More and more people are signing up for our classes. Sometimes I do a wine and dine and I’m going to hear about this but sometimes I bring a bottle of wine and we’ll do a four course meal. A bottle of wine is a treat. It’s not an everyday thing but it’s a treat and we do a meal surrounding that and those are very popular. We’ve had 50 or 60 people show up for this and not everybody brings wine but some people do. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And for our listeners out there, there are vegan alcohols and vegan wines to enjoy for special events. DEL SROUFE: And let me just say it’s really important to distinguish between this isn’t about deprivation, again. Every now and then, I have a piece of chocolate cake. I actually decided not to have cake for my birthday this year because I just didn’t want to go that route but every now and then, you have a piece of cake but it’s not something that you have every day or even once a week. It’s a special treat. It’s a special occasion kind of thing, the same thing with wine or any other kind of treat like that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’m with you on that. We’re down to the last three minutes or so and I just want to ask a couple more questions. Fact or fiction? Cooking vegan is more expensive than just cooking regular processed food. DEL SROUFE: No, processed foods are more expensive by far and the more that you do for yourself, the less expensive your food bill. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And more difficult or easier? When you’re coming up with your recipes, when you’re showing your recipes, is it more difficult to cook vegan style mac and cheese? DEL SROUFE: Not at all. When you see my recipes, you’ll see a little bit. Lasagna’s always going to be a complicated thing to put together but you’ll see a stir fry that can take ten or fifteen minutes to do. It can be very easy. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We’re down to two minutes. Share a simple recipe for a nutritionally rich meal right now, just to give them a little taste of Del Sroufe. DEL SROUFE: One of my favorite recipes from the cookbook is a smoky black bean bisque and it’s a really easy recipe to do it’s onions and garlic and it’s canned adobe chilies and pepper sauce so it’s black beans and salt and a couple of other things that I can’t think of off the top of my head and you cook your onions and you cook your garlic. You don’t use oil. Add water when you need to keep them from sticking but you may not need to and when those are done, you add your chipotles and you add your beans and your broth and then let that cook and then you puree that and I’ll tell you what I love about this. Season it with salt and pepper as you will. I love this soup. It’s a great soup but sometimes I’ll just pour it over a baked potato. It’s full of flavor. It’s a smoky rich flavor and it’s delicious and easy so I actually have some in my freezer so when I just want it for entertaining or for something like that, it’s one that I go to so it’s a good one. Another thing that I have, I make hummus a lot because hummus is a five minute meal and I do five different hummuses in my cookbook just for variety, made with things like fava beans or spinach artichoke or basil and sundried tomatoes and things like that and it’s a five minute meal. I put them in a wrap with some salad greens and off I go. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow and like you said, hummus is so versatile in so many ways. How about a quick cookie or a quick dessert? What’s a quick fix for people for a special event? DEL SROUFE: Slice some bananas and put them in your freezer in a good freezer bag and then pull out two ripe bananas and put them in your food processor with a little bit of almond milk and a pinch of Stevia and maybe some vanilla and you have an instant ice cream. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Oh my gosh. I’m getting hungry already. DEL SROUFE: That’s a good one. JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s a great one. Well listen, for our listeners out there that want to have more recipes and learn how to be better than vegan, please buy Del’s new book, Better Than Vegan. You could go buy it on his website, wellnessforumfoods.com or, of course, at Amazon.com or other fine bookstores around the United States or around the world. Del, a couple other things. I just want to thank you for all the great work you’re doing. I want to thank you for Forks Over Knives and thank you for showing us a better way to eat and take of ourselves and the planet and Del Sroufe, you are truly living proof that Green is Good. DEL SROUFE: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and it’s an honor to have Ethan Brown with us today. He’s the founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, and Ethan, this is your first time on Green is Good, so welcome to our show. ETHAN BROWN: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Hey, Ethan, before we get into talking about your great company, Beyond Meat, and for our listeners out there who want to follow along and see his amazing website, it’s www.beyondmeat.com. Ethan, tell us a little bit about your story, your journey up to the point of starting Beyond Meat and growing up and what were some of your influences and inspirations that led to the founding of this great company? ETHAN BROWN: Sure. Great question and it’s interesting for me. It really goes back to a time when I was quite young, probably not even ten years old, where I had a lot of experiences during that time with agricultural animals. I was living in the city but my dad had a hobby farm that turned into a business, where he had about 100 head of Holstein cattle and we would spend weekends and summers out in the countryside there and it really made an impression on me because I was both interacting with the animals there in my house, we had dogs and all sorts of pets, and interacting with the animals at the farm and I had trouble, like a lot of children do, distinguishing why is this one animal treated like a production unit and the other is given every privilege known to man and so that just sort of stuck with me. It just kind of sat with me and as I grew up, I got into clean tech for reasons related to climate change. I was very passionate about climate change coming out of school and I worked for a long time for a fuel cell company, one of the great companies, Ballard Power Systems, and enjoyed that a lot and just was really glad to be of service in that area. I had this calling that kept coming back to me around if I could do something about livestock, I could satisfy a lot of different social issues that I care about. I could address them. I could help to address them and so that sort of kept coming back to me throughout my career and so the pieces starting falling together as I learned more about animal protein and what’s required to put three ounces of steak or chicken at the center of your plate. Looking ultimately at the climate change implications, the human health implications, the natural resource implications in terms of water, energy, and land, and ultimately the animal welfare and I said, okay, all of these things can be addressed by creating a plant based meat so I said, you know what. I was at an entrepreneurial age. I started investing in restaurants that were doing really interesting stuff with plant based proteins and ultimately said, ‘I’m going to create a technology that can take plant based protein and realign it so that it mimics the fiber structure of animal protein,’ and that’s really how I started the company. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. That’s just incredible and for our listeners out there who already have heard many of our shows, they know I’m a vegan, my family’s a vegan, and Ethan, what you’re doing is just great stuff and gives me great hope about our future and right now. Talk a little bit about what your company does now. I’m on your website. It’s a beautiful website. I’ve signed up for your newsletter while we were on the show. Share a little bit about what you’re doing and for our listeners out there, again, it’s www.beyondmeat.com. What does Beyond Meat do and what’s your mission? ETHAN BROWN: I can start by revisiting the four pillars or we call them, ‘the four horsemen,’ of change within the company and why people work here. If you look at kind of a human health aspect of all of this and the relationship between particularly processed meat and heart disease, cancer, diabetes, when you look at climate and you say 51 percent of greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to livestock. It’s more than half of the problem. Then you look at resources. Here in California we just had a lot of rain but previous to that we were having a very bad drought, where federal water allocations were almost nothing to farmers here so there’s a tremendous draw on the resource base from livestock and of course, you go into the animal oil for question, 66 billion animals a year being processed for food and more and more people are uncomfortable with that, particularly with the advent of the internet and YouTube and people having the ability to see inside what’s actually happening in these large agricultural systems that are nothing like the family farm and what people thought was being produced in the manner that they were produced. All of those things motivate people to be here. What we’ve been able to do is say okay, we like meat. Meat tastes good but we’re going to need to figure out a way to get meat from plants and that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’re not providing something that is sort of like meat, that is tofu-like. We’ve said our goal is to perfectly replicate animal protein with constituent parts that are derived from the plant kingdom and luckily they’re all there so protein is available in, obviously, a huge number of feedstocks in the plant kingdom. Lipids, they’re available out there in the plant kingdom as well. Obviously water is abundant everywhere in the plant kingdom so you have all of these attributes that you can draw from and then you can run them through a very simple process, that took us a long time to develop and the Midwest and Missouri even longer than us, that heats, cools, and applies pressure to these proteins so they are realigned in a way that actually truly mimics the fibrous texture of meat and so our argument is simply we’re not creating a substitute. We’re creating meat and it just happens to be from proteins, from lipids, from water, from choice minerals, and from carbohydrates that come from the plant kingdom as opposed to the animal kingdom. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow and so what are some of the products you have now and what are some in your pipeline to be coming in the future? ETHAN BROWN: The product that we’re most excited about right now is our new product, which is actually a beef product and it’s completely from pea protein. Peas were commercialized at a large scale, primarily around their fiber content but obviously there’s protein in peas so we work with suppliers that have extracted that protein and we take the protein and run it through our process and at the end of the day, you have a beef crumble. It’s like a ground beef that is made 100 percent from pea protein so it has gram for gram the same protein as beef but it has no saturated fat, no trans-fat, and no cholesterol. It’s a fantastic product so we worked with Alton Brown, the celebrity chef, and he had a really interesting response. He said that this may not reduce his steak consumption but for everything else where he uses ground beef, he can use our product and so that was exciting to hear and we’re seeing that in the market now, which launched in February. The pull off the shelf has been terrific. There are two main offerings we have. We have that beef offering and then we have a chicken product and the thing we focused on with the chicken was making sure that it had that long fibrous structure that’s so familiar to people with chicken, so that when it pulls across the teeth, it’s as if you’re tearing muscle or animal meat so that’s really been the innovation we’re trying to bring to the market. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And what’s coming beyond that? What’s some of the things on your visible deck that you’re going to be bringing to market in the coming years? ETHAN BROWN: So here’s what’s exciting. If you’re going to say we know that we can take these constituent parts from the plant kingdom and create meat with them, why not create something that’s better than meat, not because of what it lacks, not because it just doesn’t have cholesterol, saturated fat, or trans fat, but because of what it has? So we’re working on a special project that will be released, hopefully, this summer, we were just talking to our R and D team about it this morning, that will have as much iron as steak, as much omega 3s as salmon, and will have antioxidants for muscle recovery, etcetera and so the idea is let’s go ahead and create products that have attributes that normal animal proteins have simply because they’re not starting at the beginning and saying, ‘How can I optimize this for human health?’ JOHN SHEGERIAN: That’s so exciting. I know once this show airs and once I start telling people and once I start telling people about our show, here’s the question that I want our listeners to hear your answer to because we have listeners in the United States and around the world, Ethan: Where can they start buying your great products? ETHAN BROWN: That’s something else that I’m very excited about and I want to just say a note about Whole Foods. We wouldn’t be here without them and we have customers there that are coming out of the conventional space that are very important but we have to go back to the beginning of the company and this is something I feel strongly about because coming out of industries where large suppliers would try to squeeze you for everything you’ve got, Whole Foods was a helping hand up in every case. At the time when we were starting the company, we were living on our farm. They came out to tour the facility. Every time I had a revelation about this project that I felt was worth sharing with them, I was willing to bring it to them and they would give me feedback. We were constantly engaged with them. They came out to the University and worked with us there so they really have been an outstanding partner so it’s available at Whole Foods to be able to browse. It’s available come May in the Safeway network so available throughout Safeway. It’s available through Amazon Fresh right now and in September or something, I’m really excited about that it will be in Target. Our request to progressive retailers is to not sell meat and meat alternatives but to provide a section of the supermarket that sells protein and so consumers can pick from animal based proteins or they can pick from plant based proteins and as we start to further develop the supply chain for plant based protein, it’s my hope and our vision that we’ll be able to source protein from a large variety of plants so we’re looking at things like lupin. We’re looking at camelina. We’re looking at mustard seed, all of these different feed stocks that are available in the plant kingdom that you can get protein from. It hasn’t been developed yet because there hasn’t been a model where you’re taking protein directly from the plant and providing it to consumers at the center of the plate at any mass scale. JOHN SHEGERIAN: For our listeners that just joined us, we’re so honored to have Ethan Brown with us on the phone today. He’s the Founder and CEO of Beyond Meat. For our listeners that want to learn more about Beyond Meat, it’s www.beyondmeat.com. Also, on the website, there is a finder so if you want to just type in your zip code to find the closest location, as Ethan mentioned, Whole Foods, Safeway, Amazon, Target, Sprouts, who carry his product on the website. Let’s talk about the plants that are your feedstock. Aren’t there literally dozens, if not hundreds of plants, that are yet unexplored, that continue to be great feedstock for you in the coming months and years ahead? ETHAN BROWN: That’s what is so interesting. There are so many potential resources for us in the plant kingdom that we can pull from and we’re just getting started. Really, what we’re using right now are products or feedstock streams that have been developed for other reasons. Like I mentioned before, peas, it was really the starch that people were after and then there was this derivative protein but once you start to say, ‘Okay well how can I go ahead and start to source directly?’ you start to look at so many different potential feedstocks and I think that’s what’s so exciting for American agriculture and global agriculture. If you can take pastures and turn them into fields of protein where the amount of money that the farmer can get per field is dramatically increased, that’s a win-win for everybody. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right, right, right, unbelievable. We talked about the stores that are carrying it now or are going to be carrying it sometime this year, they’re going to start taking it online. Are there any restaurants yet that are starting to use it or is that coming also in the near future? ETHAN BROWN: There are some. Tropical Smoothie throughout the southeast and the mid-Atlantic does carry it and we are in discussion with a few major convenience store and fast food chains because I think that’s a great application. At the end of the day, as you know, the stuff in the chicken we don’t get basically is white stuff. It’s the chicken breast and it’s a mix and it’s quite unattractive when you look at what it is so if we can provide that white stuff and make it a healthier version, why not do that? And then ultimately, as we get scale, because we’re more efficient than animal agriculture, the vision is to then underprice meat as we achieve some scale. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Let’s talk about scale and tie that back to the issue of celebrity investors. You have some great names that have backed you, that have believed in your vision and your dream, Bill Gates being one. Who are some of the others? And then explain why they invested in you and what you’re doing. ETHAN BROWN: It’s something that I just have to pinch myself over and it’s an absolute blessing and I think knowing your background, you start to feel like it’s something bigger than yourself when those people get involved and it’s a pretty amazing feeling but with Bill Gates, for him, we’ve had the opportunity to sit down twice now and it’s the opportunity to transform the protein sector and make low cost protein available throughout the world. He’s committed to sustainable development throughout the world and health throughout the world. This was exciting for him and then with Biz Stone and Ed Williams, the Founders of Twitter, I can’t say enough about how committed they are to the company. The week that Twitter went public, you’d think that would just be something where that’s all they’re focused on, I was getting emails about particular stores in San Francisco that had maybe a stock out or something of that nature so they are super involved in the company. It’s a passion for them. They care so much about plant based protein and sustainability so it was a real passion play for them in terms of the investment. We have Seth Goldman, who’s the Founder of Honest Tea very actively involved and he’s just been super, super helpful in helping us to navigate the retail space, more concrete capital, Humane Society has invested. There’s just been amazing support at the board level and it’s pretty neat. Kleiner Perkins was the first organization to invest in the company outside of friends and family and they took a big risk. They’re the company behind Google and Amazon and others. this is a very unusual investment for them. They stuck their neck out and I hope we’ve made them happy that they’ve done it. JOHN SHEGERIAN: People will ask me, are you still taking investors or is that for another day, the next round of investment? ETHAN BROWN: We are. We have a small round that we’re doing now that will help with the expansion and for us, the biggest challenges are really cultural. The science, we know we can get there. We just brought in a guy that spent four years at Harvard Medical School working on cancer. The reason that we have him is because we’re interested in working with protein expression and interaction and he has some expertise there. We know we can get the science. It’s the culture. How do we share with people that plant based protein is, in fact, every bit as good for you as animal protein and, in fact, better because of what’s missing? For that, you have to spend on marketing and I look at, with much envy, the Got Milk campaign and what they did to revitalize the dairy industry and I think that’s really necessary for the plant based protein industry. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Interesting. There was one of the interviews or some reading somewhere along the way Gates or Biz Stone had said one of the reasons, not only do they believe tremendously in you personally and your vision and Beyond Meat, but the scale-ability of all this is so unbelievable because think about what they’ve done with Microsoft and with Twitter. they just know that this is the next horse to bet on so I’m betting on you, that you’re going to be able to socialize and get through the veil and get people comfortable with getting through that. It makes a lot of sense. We’re down to the last minute and a half, unfortunately. Talk a little bit about some of the fun events that you’re going to be doing this year and other things that are on track for this year because we’re going to have you back anyway so just give us a little vision on the rest of this year, Ethan. ETHAN BROWN: Sure so we have a really fun weekend planned at the largest international food show in the country at Expo West, where we’re going to be publicly courting a large food chain, a fast food store, and I can’t exactly explained how we’re going to be doing that because it’s a surprise but it’s going to be really exciting and we’ll have some press coming in to cover that. We have a food truck that’s going to be touring to provide samples to people and that’s really what we’re about this year is getting the product in people’s mouths. That’s the most important thing for us because it removes all skepticism and concern once people taste it and enjoy the texture so it’s really around those campaigns. You’re going to see us out in the stores, providing samples to people. You’re going to see us in the street with our food truck and you’ll see us continuing to work with media to get the message out there that plant based protein is here, it’s in the form of meat, and it’s something that’s healthy and enjoyable. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Well, on that, we’re going to leave it for today’s show and again, we’re humbled and honored to have you on today, Ethan, and for our listeners out there that want to learn more about Beyond Meat and where they can try it and taste it and enjoy this great and amazing product, it’s www.beyondmeat.com. Ethan, first of all, I just want to say personally thank you for making the world a better place and second, on behalf of all of our listeners, thank you for leading the world beyond meat. You are beyond inspiring and truly living proof that green is good.