Podcasts about sustainability manager

Wenn Du in Deinem Unternehmen die Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie verantwortest, dann mangelt es Dir gerade nicht an heißen Themen: Vom geopolitischen Druck aus den USA auf DEI und ESG Programme über Omnibus und den Clean Industrial Deal bis zu realen Klimarisiken für Produktionsstandorte - wo fängst Du als erstes an, um Dein Team und Unternehmen auf Kurs zu halten? In dieser Folge packt die Head of Corporate Sustainability der Merck Group aus. Pamela Fandel macht mit mir einmal den Rundumschlag zu allen Themen, die gerade jeden Sustainability Manager umtreiben dürften. Hole Dir einen exklusiven Praxiseinblick in einen prototypischen Hidden Champion aus Deutschland! ✅ Wie nutzen sie Nachhaltigkeitsdaten jetzt schon für Risikoanalysen? ✅ Wie positionieren sie sich als globales Unternehmen zum DEI-Rollback aus den USA? ✅ Wie gehen sie mit der Unsicherheit von Omnibus und dem Clean Industrial Deal um und warum halten sie am GRI Reporting fest? ✅ Welche Strukturen helfen ihr Themen wie Kreislaufwirtschaft umzusetzen? Eine super Folge für alle Unternehmenslenker*innen und Sustainability Manager, die sich fragen, wie ihre Peers die wichtigsten Herausforderungen angehen. SHOWNOTES & LINKS:

Send us a textIn this episode of Soul of Travel, Season 6: Women's Wisdom + Mindful Travel, presented by @journeywoman_original, Christine hosts a soulful mashup showcasing wisdom from the Women in Travel CIC community about the International Women in Travel and Tourism Forum (IWTTF).Women in Travel CIC is a UK-based, award-winning social enterprise dedicated to fostering inclusion in the travel and tourism industry, by connecting underserved, diverse female and non-binary talent to employers and enterprising opportunities.Christine shares clips from:· Christina Lawford of Diamond Air International· Zina Bencheikh, Managing Director EMEA Intrepid Travel· Sofya Muhrer Muromets, Sustainability Manager at Evaneos· Eljesa Saciri, General Manager at the Zetter Townhouse Marylebone· Chantal Potgieter, Themba TravelJoin Christine for this soulful mashup.

ING Sector Banker Dirk Mulder in gesprek met Laura Koedijk, Sustainability Manager bij Studio Anneloes. Studio Anneloes is opgericht met het idee om comfortabele kleding te creëren, die perfect aansluit bij de Nederlandse pasvorm. Ze zetten zich in voor de planeet en haar mensen, en proberen elke dag bewustere keuzes te maken. Benieuwd hoe? Luister dan deze podcast.

Es gibt ein Wort, dass gerade jeder Nachhaltigkeitsprofi hoch und runterbetet: Risikomanagement! Es ist DAS Argument, um auch bei schwindenden ESG-Berichtspflichten relevant zu bleiben. In dieser Folge diskutiere ich daher mit einem Risikoexperten und einem Policy-Experten die grundsätzlichen Fragen rund um das Management von Nachhaltigkeitsrisiken: 

✅ Welche Risiken überschätzen und welche unterschätzen wir als Profis oder als Gesellschaft in Bezug auf Nachhaltigkeit?
 ✅ Wie sind mit den aktuellen Policy-Entwicklungen rund um den Omnibus aufgestellt, um diesen Risiken zu begegnen? ✅ An welchen grundsätzlichen Fragen kommen wir nicht vorbei, wenn wir das Thema zu Ende denken? Jakob Thomä ist einer der führenden Experten für Nachhaltigkeit im Finanzsystem und langfristige Risiken. Philippe Diaz kennt sich bestens mit den Hintergründen zum Green Deal und der Entwicklung der Berichterstattungspflichten in Brüssel aus. Da beide aus unterschiedlichen Richtungen auf das Thema schauen, sind sie sich zwar nicht immer einig, liefern mir viel dichten Gesprächsstoff. Freue Dich als Entscheider*in oder Sustainability Manager auf eine anspruchsvolle Diskussion, die es sich lohnt bis zum Ende durchzuhören!

Tune in for the latest episode of Concrete Credentials with Karin Perrisinotto, Sustainability Manager at CalPortland. Learn more about the critical elements of effective sustainability communication and explore the importance of not only delivering the right message but also taking impactful actions and effectively sharing those efforts with your audience. 

Many people have an opinion about Nespresso becoming a Certified B Corporation. But very few have ever heard their side of the story. In this episode with Lucy Bai, Sustainability Manager for Nespresso US, we strive for a balance of genuine curiosity about the things Nespresso is doing well, and tough but fair questions about places where there is concern.View the show notes: https://go.lifteconomy.com/blog/nespresso-b-corpSupport the showWe want to hear from you! Please reach out at beyond@lifteocnomy.com with suggested topics and/or feedback about the show.

Pippa speaks about the 30-year history of the Two Oceans Aquariam. She speaks to Helen Lockhart – who is Conservation and Sustainability Manager, Msa Maseko, the Visitor Services Floor Manager and Bianca Engel, the Deputy Head of Ocean Campus at the Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation. Lunch with Pippa Hudson is CapeTalk’s mid-afternoon show. This 2-hour respite from hard news encourages the audience to take the time to explore, taste, read and reflect. The show - presented by former journalist, baker and water sports enthusiast Pippa Hudson - is unashamedly lifestyle driven. Popular features include a daily profile interview #OnTheCouch at 1:10pm. Consumer issues are in the spotlight every Wednesday while the team also unpacks all things related to health, wealth & the environment. Listen live – Lunch with Pippa Hudson is broadcast weekdays between 13:00 and 15:00 (SA Time) https://www.primediaplus.com/station/capetalk Find all the catch-up podcasts here https://www.primediaplus.com/capetalk/lunch-with-pippa-hudson/show-podcasts/lunch-with-pippa-hudson/ Subscribe to the CapeTalk daily and weekly newsletters https://www.primediaplus.com/competitions/newsletter-subscription/ Follow us on social media: CapeTalk on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CapeTalk   CapeTalk on TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@capetalk   CapeTalk on Instagram: www.instagram.com/capetalkza  CapeTalk on X: www.x.com/CapeTalk  CapeTalk on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@CapeTalk567  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Eigentlich hatte Wasser für mich immer nur eine Farbe - Blau. Aber wusstest Du, dass es auch grünes Wasser oder virtuelles Wasser gibt? Speziell letztere beiden sind in Bezug auf unsere Zukunft besonders relevant. In dieser Folge erklärt mir Autorin Carolin Stüdemann, wieviel höher der Footprint von Flaschenwasser im Vergleich zu Leitungswasser ist. Oder wie Mikroorganismen den Einsatz von Industriekühlwasser nachhaltiger machen könnten. Denn Deutschland gehört zu den Ländern mit dem größten Wasserverlust - eine Herausforderung, die für uns als Gesellschaft höchst zukunftsrelevant und für viele Unternehmen geschäftskritisch ist. Caro ist Geschäftsführerin von Viva con Agua, einer NPO, die sich für sicheren Zugang zu sauberem Trinkwasser und sanitärer Grundversorgung einsetzt. Offiziell ist ein Verein, inoffiziell eher ein beeindruckendes Impact-Phänomen und ein faszinierend umtriebiges Netzwerk. Viva con Agua schafft es auf einzigartige Weise Tausende Menschen zum ehrenamtlichen Einsatz zu mobilisieren. Ihren Ansatz dabei bezeichnen sie als 'All Profit' Prinzip. Was es damit auf sich hat und warum gerade die Verbindung von Kunst und Kultur für die Wirkung ihrer Arbeit sowohl in Deutschland als auch im globalen Süden so wichtig ist, erklärt mir Caro ebenfalls in dieser Folge. Links und erwähnte Ressourcen: Caros Buch 'Die Zukunft unseres Wassers' ist gerade erschienen - bestelle es am besten bei Buch 7, dem sozialen Buchhandel:

Welcome to Chatter with BNC, Business North Carolina's weekly podcast, serving up interviews with some of the Tar Heel State's most interesting people. Today's episode features an interview with Esther Moberly, the Sustainability Manager at Coca-Cola Consolidated. Esther has over 20 years of designing and implementing programs that significantly improve organizations' environmental impact. Ben Kinney talks to her about her career journey so far, their sustainability efforts at Coca-Cola in the communities, and more.

Welcome to Chatter with BNC, Business North Carolina's weekly podcast, serving up interviews with some of the Tar Heel State's most interesting people. Today's episode features an interview with Esther Moberly, the Sustainability Manager at Coca-Cola Consolidated. Esther has over 20 years of designing and implementing programs that significantly improve organizations' environmental impact. Ben Kinney talks to her about her career journey so far, their sustainability efforts at Coca-Cola in the communities, and more.

A seminar on Ireland's energy future will discuss how regulation and infrastructural challenges in energy are negatively impacting economic growth in Ireland. Taking place on Wednesday 2 April and hosted by Engineers Ireland's Energy, Environment, and Climate Action Division, The Merging Energy Landscape - A Pivotal Shift in Industry to Address the Carbon Budget Challenge Seminar, will also highlight the challenges businesses face to reduce emissions, the pressure on industry to meet targets, and the impact on the environment and economy if we fall short. Speakers at the seminar will include Ciara Ahern, senior lecturer of Building Engineering, TU Dublin and Peter Lantry, Managing Director, Ireland, Equinix a global data centre provider. According to Ciara Ahern: "The future of smart buildings lies in their ability to act as flexible demand assets within our evolving energy systems. Yet, there is still a significant gap between where we are and where we need to be. "This seminar will explore how emerging guidelines, scalable solutions, and digital infrastructure can enable buildings to participate in energy markets - reducing carbon emissions and enhancing grid resilience while facilitating greater penetration of renewable energy." Equinix owns 268 data centres globally, including four retail colocation facilities and 2 xScale facilities in Dublin. Peter Lantry will discuss the need for Ireland to address existing barriers to further digital investment if the country is to avoid missing crucial economic opportunities. "Ireland, especially Dublin, has successfully attracted digital services companies, including data centres, over the past 40 years. The challenge now is how to keep pace with other tech nations amid energy distribution and supply issues that have deterred data centre development, which impacts Ireland's economy." Additional speakers at the seminar will include Conor Minogue, Senior Executive at IBEC discussing the business case for meeting climate action targets, and Heidi Duffy, Operations Environmental and Sustainability Manager at Iarnród Éireann, sharing insights on the challenges and solutions to the transition to sustainable public transport. This event will take place in Engineers Ireland, 22 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. Tickets are available at www.engineersireland.ie or by following this link. See more stories here.

Stell Dir vor Deine Waschmaschine greift ein Kraftwerk an. Klingt kinoreif. Ist aber möglich und einer der vielen Gründe, warum gerade fast alle Unternehmen Cyber-Sicherheit in ihrem CSRD-Bericht als unternehmensspezifische Wesentlichkeit aufführen. Das hattest Du nicht auf dem Schirm? Dann ist es Zeit, diese Folge zu hören! Cyber-Spezialist Mirko erklärt mir, warum Nachhaltigkeit und Cyber-Security Hand in Hand gehen: Von der digitalen Produktobsoleszenz über Datensicherheit bis zum potenziellen Schaden für Leib und Leben, wenn zum Beispiel ein Krankenhaus gehakt wird. Wer angreifbar ist, riskiert viel für Menschen, Umwelt und das eigene Unternehmen. Das Problem: Sustainability Manager sind selten Cyber-Spezialisten. Und auch Geschäftsführer*innen in kleinen Mittelständlern unterschätzen die Risiken. CSRD-Experte Martin ordnet daher ein, wie die ESRS-Standards das Thema adressieren. Und warum ein gutes Risikomanagement gerade für kleinere Mittelständler zwar eine Herausforderung, aber unglaublich wichtig ist. Der CSRD-Prozess ist eine großartige Gelegenheit und führt einen unweigerlich dazu, sich mit unerwarteten, aber elementaren Risiken für das eigene Geschäftsmodell auseinanderzusetzen. Eine Folge mit vielen Aha-Momenten für beide Gäste und bestimmt auch Dich! Danach weißt Du: ✅ Wie sich Cyber-Sicherheit z.B. direkt auf den Produktlebenszyklus auswirkt. ✅ Warum das Thema beim Sustainability Managern landet. ✅ Wie Du Dein Unternehmen hierfür richtig aufstellst.

In the last few years, we've seen a big step-up from sports & entertainment venue leaders around the US to build reuse programs for arena and stadium concessions. Christy Briggs, Sustainability Manager for Lumen Field & the Seattle Seahawks and Mary McCarthy, VP of Sustainability for Levy Restaurants – hospitality provider to 350+ major venues – discuss some of the latest developments, next steps, and ongoing challenges when it comes to building a world of entertainment without the waste. Resources: Episode 159: A reuse playbook for stadiumsUpstream's Wash Hub MapGet involved:Join the Reuse Solutions NetworkSupport Upstream to make sure these stories continue to be heard and the reuse economy continues to grow — thank you!

Leaders in Conversation is the podcast in which leaders share their leadership story, weaving together the threads of their life; the people, places and experiences that have shaped their values, beliefs, passion and purpose to encourage and inspire you to be even more confident and courageous in your leadership.ABOUT THIS EPISODEToday's guest is Jason Webber Senior Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Sustainability Manager Football Association Wales (FAW). I had the joy of meeting Jason at the Diversity and Inclusion Global Forum in 2024 where Lucy Kidd and I were exhibiting our Collaboration Equation™.Jason and I had a conversation about leadership, about football and collaboration which led me to inviting him to be a podcast guest on Leaders in Conversation with Anni Townend.In our conversation Jason offers valuable insights into:Creating a welcoming, safe and inclusive environmentDiversity/Representation at all levels especially in senior leadership.Education & AwarenessTaking meaningful action and sustainable progress.Jason's Three Key Encouragements to Leaders Lead by example, be authentic and be an ally.Listen to people's lived experiences and proactively educate yourself.Take action and make a difference to someone's life.Contact and to connect with Jason:LinkedIn - Webber T Jason Website - jasontwebber.myportfolio.comInstagram - @jasontwebber X - WebberTJason To listen to other Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend go to my website, www.annitownend.comA big thank you to SHMOGUS Media for the wonderful production and marketing of the podcast.To contact me Anni Townend do email me on anni@annitownend.com visit my website www.annitownend.com, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. About JASONJason is an expert and leader in Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Sustainability currently working at the Football Association of Wales (FAW) as a Senior Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Sustainability Manager.He has been integral in advancing the FAW's EDI and Sustainability Programmes towards being a global leader in sport and has extensive experience as an educator, public speaker and advisor to a wide range of stakeholders for more than a decade.He is passionate about sharing his knowledge and experience with others and is committed to making football and society a better place for everyone.

Jane Firth is the Sustainability Manager at Vegetarian Express. A B Corp with a Shopify B2B eCommerce store selling the largest range of plant-based ingredients for foodservice in the UK. Trusted by thousands of chefs and caterers, they have been in business since 1987 and sell over 1,200 products. They now do £23million in sales each year, of which £1.2million is transactions via eCommerce and other online ordering platforms. Hit PLAY to hear:

In this bonus episode, we share a LIVE conversation from the 2024 Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Philadelphia.Cherise is joined by Kendra Martz, Senior Product & Sustainability Manager at Construction Specialties. Kendra explains how their diverse specialty products and the reshaping of corporate strategies around a unified materials framework drive their sustainability initiatives and support ongoing innovation.If you enjoy this episode, visit arcat.com/podcast for more. If you're a frequent listener of Detailed, you might enjoy similar content at Gābl Media. Mentioned in this episode:ARCAT Detailed on Youtube

Du brauchst eine große Portion Motivation in diesen harten Zeiten? Bitte sehr: Höre, wie wir die größten CO2-Senken der Welt aktivieren können. Und wie Nachhaltigkeit zu einer Bewegung wird! Und das in einer Umweltschutz-Story, die - kein Scherz - auf Tinder ihren Ausgang nahm. Als Nachhaligkeitsprofi erwartet Dich in dieser Folge wichtiges Wissen darüber, warum Moore für unsere Klimaziele so entscheidend sind. Wie sie in Deine Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie passen. Und wie Alex und Annie Cornelsen erfolgreich ein Startup gegründet haben, dass genau dieses Problem angeht: Mission to Marsh. Alex erzählt mir, warum er dafür seinen Marketing-Job hinschmiss und sich mit dem "Patagonia-Playbook" auch als Quereinsteiger in so ein komplexes Thema wie Nature-Based Solutions und Biodiversität eingearbeitet hat. Und er verrät, wie man ein Startup baut, das Tausende Menschen für ein Nerd-Thema begeistert und dank des richtigen Geschäftsmodelles Unternehmen einbindet - ganz ohne Compliance-Zwang. Eine superspannende Folge, die zeigt, dass jeder etwas für die Nachhaltigkeitsziele bewegen kann, wenn man es richtig angeht. Und zum Schluss gibts sogar noch ein konkretes Job-Angebot von Alex!

Germany has long been an innovator in truck manufacturing and is leading the way on the next generation of electric drive solutions. Though still in its early stage, logistics is shifting gears, and registration figures for electric trucks in Germany are twice as high as the EU average. From 2021 to 2023, the number of e-powered vehicles on German roads almost doubled. But what still needs to change for e-trucks to become the industry standard, and when will the shift likely be complete? To get some answers, we talk to a German trucking company and one of the world largest manufacturers of heavy transport vehicles. Our guests: Kristiane Schmidt is Sustainability Manager at Contargo and an enthusiast for the development of sustainable solutions in the logistics sector. With a Master of Science in Physics and an MBA in Sustainability Management, she combines scientific precision with practical commitment. At Contargo, she relies on facts and empathetic communication to actively and sensitively drive change. Andreas Ritter has been working in container logistics for over ten years and has in-depth specialist knowledge and practical experience in this field. He is particularly interested in the optimization of processes and the further development of hinterland logistics. As Terminal Manager of the Hof site and a member of the Transport and Mobility Committee of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Upper Franconia Bayreuth and the Hof Chamber of Industry and Commerce committee, he is actively involved in shaping the future of the industry. Nils Heine has been working in various functions in the automotive sector for over 30 years. Since the launch of the new MAN TG3 series in February 2020, he has been responsible for sales at MAN as well as for zero-emission truck projects and their market launch in Europe. He demonstrates that the switch to zero-emission driving is not only exciting, but also necessary, with his personal drive - he rides his bike to work 90% of the time.

Paul and Sara welcome Josh Spencer, EV & Sustainability Manager at Ford and Slater. Josh shares his journey from truck mechanic to EV champion, discussing how the electric HGV market is evolving with costs dropping and capabilities improving. He offers insights into the Zero Emission Haulage and Infrastructure Demonstrator (ZEHID) project delivering 300+ electric trucks to UK roads this year. Josh Spencer https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-s-16b0246b Ford & Slater https://www.fordandslater.co.uk

Das Gerangel um die EU Omnibusregulierung wirft für Nachhaltigkeitssverantwortliche große Fragezeichen auf und droht bisherige Nachhaltigkeitstrategien über den Haufen zu werfen. In dieser Folge gibt es daher einen ungeschönten Blick in die Umsetzung der CSRD-Berichtspflichten. Und zwar mit einem Profi, der offen aus dem Maschinenraum berichtet. Was hat die EU verbockt? Wo liegen die echten Schmerzen der großen und kleinen Unternehmen? Und warum fallen deutschen Mittelständlern dann doch regelmäßig die Kinnladen runter, wenn sie erst mal durch die Doppelte Wesentlichkeits- und Klimarisikoanalyse durch sind? Anja Schröder ist seit über drei Jahrzehnten Expertin für Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation und steckt seit drei Jahren als Beraterin tief in der Umsetzung der CSRD-Berichtspflichten für Mittelständler. Sie erklärt mir, warum es elementar ist in dem lauten Getöse Mythen und Klientel-PR von berechtigter Kritik unterscheiden zu können. Und sie ordnet die größten Mythen ein:

Ob spät dran oder bereits lange in Arbeit - der CSRD-Bericht stellt die meisten Unternehmen vor enorme Herausforderungen. Was Du auf jeden Fall vermeiden willst, ist dass Dein Wirtschaftsprüfer am Ende den Daumen senkt. Stimme Dich also am besten schon lange vor der doppelten Wesentlichkeitsanalyse (DWA) mit einem WP ab und setze den Berichtsprozess sauber auf. Dabei ist offene Kommunikation das A und O, um Reibungen, Widerstände und unnötige Kosten zu vermeiden. Denn sowohl für die Unternehmen als auch die Wirtschaftsprüfer (WP) ist die CSRD Neuland. In dieser Folge hörst Du daher beide Perspektiven: die einer Sustainability Managerin eines großen deutschen Mittelständlers mitten im CSRD-Berichtsprozess. Und einer Wirtschaftsprüferin, die vor allem mit KMUs zusammenarbeitet. Zudem lasse ich einige kritische Fragen einfließen, die ich vorher in der GEWINNE ZUKUNFT Community gesammelt habe. Nach dieser Folge weißt Du: ✅ Wann genau ein Wirtschaftsprüfer an Bord kommen sollte. ✅ Für welche Fragen und Schritte eine Nachhaltigkeitsberatung oder ein Wirtschaftsprüfer besser (und günstiger!) ist. ✅ Das 1X1 rund um die Prüfung des CSRD-Berichts wie z.B. begrenzte und hinreichende Prüfungssicherheit. Freue Dich auf eine Folge mit Annemarie Hillebrand, Sustainability Managerin bei der ebm-pabst Gruppe. Mit knapp 14.000 Mitarbeitenden und 2,4 Milliarden Umsatz kein kleines Unternehmen. Anne koordiniert hier u.a. den Berichtsprozess. Trotz eines MBA mit Nachhaltigkeitsfokus war der CSRD-Bericht für sie noch mal "ein zweites Studium in Eigenregie".

  With an extensive background in sustainable architecture, Allison Bernett worked to reverse climate change and improve quality of life through innovative design. Allison Bernett pursued a diverse career spanning architecture, sustainable design, and biology, reflecting her belief that the most effective solutions to the climate crisis emerge from integrating the natural and built environments.   Her expertise includes regenerative design, design for manufacturing and assembly, whole life carbon analysis, building performance simulation, and health and wellness strategies. As the founder of Vireo Design & Strategy, she leveraged this expertise to develop climate-positive solutions for her clients.    Previously, Allison worked as the Sustainability Manager at the modular housing company Assembly OSM, where she guided designs through Passive House and WELL compliance. She also contributed to pioneering sustainability projects and research at Terrapin Bright Green, such as Factory as a Forest. Allison is a published author on early design building simulation and a Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC). She holds a bachelor's degree in architecture and biology from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.Arch degree from Cornell University.   Through design and technology informed by the natural world, She believes that we can and must transform the built environment to support ecosystems, reverse climate change, and foster thriving communities.   Show Highlights   Advocated for Passive House design at Assembly OSM Developed ecological performance metrics for factories to integrate biological principles into factory design, enhancing sustainability and ecological impact. Allison started Vireo Design & Strategy to focus on diverse projects aimed at achieving a climate-positive future.  Focuses on driving towards a climate positive future by going beyond net-zero to regenerative design, Emphasizes the importance of Passive House principles Highlights the significance of WELL certification for creating healthful spaces Stresses the need to consider both energy/carbon and human factors in design "Be open to new opportunities that may not seem like a perfect fit with your plan... especially in the sustainable design field. It's evolving so fast, so rapidly. There are new jobs and new roles and new specialties and needs coming out every year."   Show Resource and Information Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES   GBES is excited our membership community is growing. Consider joining our membership community as members are given access to some of the guests on the podcasts that you can ask project questions. If you are preparing for an exam, there will be more assurance that you will pass your next exam, you will be given cliff notes if you are a member, and so much more. Go to to learn more about the 4 different levels of access to this one-of-a-kind career-advancing green building community!   If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on .  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the !   Copyright © 2025 GBES

About the Guest(s):Jennifer Jablonski: Jennifer is a Business Development Manager at Graphic Packaging, focusing on the Boardio product. With a background at Graphic Packaging prior to AR Packaging's acquisition, Jennifer is pivotal in expanding Boardio/s market presence and sustainability initiatives.Max Goodman: Max is the Senior Product Manager for Boardio at Graphic Packaging. He has been instrumental in the product's evolution, witnessing its development from AR Packaging's era into its current iteration under Graphic Packaging.Alex Werne: Alex serves as the Sustainability Manager for the Boardio product at Graphic Packaging. Based in Lund, Sweden, his duties center around developing and advocating for the sustainability credentials of Boardio, aligning with broader organizational goals.* Specright eBook - How to define sustainable packaging strategies!* Gartner Report* Packaging Pros eBook* Home Page* Book a demo with SpecrightMeyers has some incredible sustainable packaging options!* Get the 2023 Sustainability Report* Meyers Packaging EPR eBook - it is FREE!!New sponsor is Label King! Check them out at www.thelabelking.comBook a demo with Trayak (LCA's on demand!)SmartSolve has water soluble label and paper materials. Learn more!The Scrapp App is going to revolutionize home and corporate recycling. Download for your device today!Episode Summary:In this insightful episode, host Adam Peek dives into the innovative world of sustainable packaging with a panel of experts from Graphic Packaging. The conversation unfurls the journey of Boardio, a revolutionary packaging solution that blends functionality with sustainability. Jennifer Jablonski, Max Goodman, and Alex Werne share in-depth details on how Boardio emerged from AR Packaging's legacy product, the Sika Can, evolving into an innovative solution that balances environmental concerns with consumer needs.The episode is rich with discussions on Boardio's form and functionality, including its manufacturing and logistical efficiencies, which result in a significant reduction in carbon emissions. Topical sustainability challenges, such as EPR laws and the intricacies of material recycling, are also unpacked. The guests share plans for expanding Bordeaux's presence in the North American market, highlighting potential partnerships with industries looking for eco-friendly packaging solutions. The podcast not only introduces Bordeaux's attributes but also presents actionable insights into the future of sustainable packaging.Key Takeaways:* Boardio is a pioneering product combining sustainability with efficient packaging solutions, rooted in AR Packaging's legacy design, the Sika Can.* The unique flat-packed manufacturing process drastically reduces transportation-related carbon footprints compared to traditional pre-made can solutions.* Boardio is curbside-recyclable, featuring 90% paperboard and 10% other materials necessary for product protection without impacting recyclability.* Expanding co-packing networks will enable Boardio to enter various product categories, including coffee, powdered goods, and supplements, offering brands a sustainable edge.* A holistic approach to packaging sustainability is essential, integrating product protection, carbon footprint considerations, and ease of recyclability.Notable Quotes:* "Boardio is not like a miracle product. We still need like a barrier to protect the product."* "One of the biggest benefits of the Boardio pack is that it is delivered in flat… the efficiency gains compared to any pre-erected packaging is significant."* "With the Boardio pack, we're printing and cutting everything in our facilities, delivering that in flat, then it is assembled in our machinery right before it is being filled."* "The packaging itself often doesn't contribute that much if you look at the whole product to the footprint."* "We really want to see the Boardio package succeed and expand to new markets and new areas. And also beyond North America and Europe, take Boardio globally."Resources:* Graphic Packaging* AR Packaging Heritage* Canada-based partners: Club Coffee and Mother Parkers* Co-packers: JJM Packaging in New Jersey and Combined Technologies Inc. in IndianaFor more about the innovative sector of sustainable packaging and further dynamic discussions, tune into the full episode and stay connected for upcoming episodes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.packagingisawesome.com

  Mike Bahr is the Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction Company. Mike is responsible for helping clients achieve their sustainability goals by implementing efforts in embodied carbon, material selection, hybrid & electric equipment, and other sustainability initiatives.    Mike is a leader in embodied carbon and understands the challenges that need to be overcome in sustainability, piloting efforts to track across all A-stages of a building's lifecycle including best practices for A4 emissions. Mike has led sustainability implementation on over 4,000,000 sf of certified green building space, covered LEED, WELL and Living Building Challenge programs. Mike is also a member of the Market Leadership Advisory Board for USGBC Iowa.   Prior to his full-time sustainability role, Mike worked as a project manager and engineer across diverse projects including health care, high-rise, multi-family, historical renovation, adaptive reuse & tenant improvement. These past experiences provide Mike with valuable knowledge of the challenges and opportunities the construction industry has ahead as it continues to push towards a more sustainable, just future. “Buildings are ubiquitous, supporting virtually every business, supply chain, economic need, and positive social outcome globally. However, buildings are responsible for nearly 50% of global GHG emissions, a significant amount of landfill waste, and can lead to negative health outcomes for individuals when poorly designed and operated.”   Mike works to improve social, economic, and environmental conditions through delivering more sustainable buildings and real estate, at every stage of the lifecycle. He has contributed to positive outcomes on nearly 5 million square feet of 3rd party certified buildings spanning the LEED, WELL, and Living Building Challenge programs.    Additional efforts have included construction equipment electrified, low-carbon materials, and circularity initiatives. He has achieved this through supply chain partnership, internal consensus building, and industry collaboration.   Show Highlights   Future trends in biodiversity and the circular economy. Recycling and embodied carbon while emphasizing client-driven initiatives.  Turner's Approach to Sustainability Focuses on adapting national sustainability programs to local markets. Challenges in sustainability practices can differ significantly based on regional infrastructure and policies. Emphasis on client-driven sustainability approaches. On-site energy and fuel use for ESG program. Pushing for electric construction equipment to reduce emissions and air pollution. Implementing biodiversity assessments can lead to more sustainable design practices. Promoting the use of native species and habitats in project planning. Explore circular economy principles in building materials and processes.   "Go out and find your people...USGBC chapters, Carbon Leadership Forum, the networks...Just kind of find those people, get to know each other, work together. This is fulfilling work, but it is challenging and there are a lot of obstacles."- Mike Bahr      Show Resource and Information Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES   GBES is excited our membership community is growing. Consider joining our membership community as members are given access to some of the guests on the podcasts that you can ask project questions. If you are preparing for an exam, there will be more assurance that you will pass your next exam, you will be given cliff notes if you are a member, and so much more. Go to to learn more about the 4 different levels of access to this one-of-a-kind career-advancing green building community!   If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on .  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the !   Copyright © 2025 GBES

In this episode, Poonam Sinha, Sustainability Manager at Intertek Assuris, breaks down the concept of materiality—what it means, its role in aligning key issues with sustainability goals, and its importance in credible sustainability reporting. Whether you're new to sustainability or enhancing your strategy, materiality is essential for trustworthy progress and assurance.  Tune in now to learn more! Follow us on- Intertek's Assurance In Action || Twitter || LinkedIn.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints works to be a good steward of the earth — believing that caring for the earth is a sacred responsibility entrusted to all of God’s children. Therefore, the Church makes an effort to prioritize environmental sustainability in many ways around the world, from increasing energy efficiency to conserving water and reducing waste. Church News reporter Mary Richards hosts this episode of the Church News podcast, interviewing Jenica Sedgwick, the Church’s sustainability manager who operates under the direction of the Presiding Bishopric. They discuss the importance of integrating environmental stewardship into Church operations as well as in individual daily lives.  The Church News Podcast is a weekly podcast that invites listeners to make a journey of connection with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across the globe. Host Jon Ryan Jensen, editor of The Church News, shares a unique view of the stories, events, and people who form this international faith. With each episode, listeners are asked to embark on a journey to learn from one another and ponder, “What do I know now?” because of the experience. Produced by KellieAnn Halvorsen.

Allison Berg is sustainability manager for DS Smith North America, where she manages the delivery of the company's Now & Next Sustainability Strategy, which focuses on closing the sustainability loop through better design, protecting natural resources by making the most of every fiber, reducing waste and pollution through circular solutions and equipping people to lead the transition to a circular economy. Allison is passionate about bringing positive change to communities who are underserved and are directly impacted by climate change. Allison Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Circularity and circular design metrics DS Smith's nature focus area and biodiversity targets Bundling low ROI projects like water with higher ROI projects for leadership buy-in Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals Allison's Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give to other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?  Get your hands on as much as possible. Sustainability is such an evolving large field ranging from reporting and regulations, carbon water waste projects, circularity, community engagement, safety, biodiversity, etc. The more that you can get your hands on, the better. My role at DS Smith, managing our sustainability strategy specifically for North America, has allowed me to get my hands on a lot of different topics that maybe you wouldn't if you're in a company that's a bit more siloed. If you have the opportunity to do something random, like you're focused on water and someone says, "do you want to pick this community piece up?" Go ahead. If you're open to it, you might as well try. Especially in the job markets, they're really looking for multifaceted people that could do a lot of different varieties of things. That'll put you one step ahead if you're doing all sorts of different things.  What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?  Scope 3, because it's such an evolving field that everybody is currently trying to sort through, us included. It'll be really interesting to see that legislation as well. I know the SEC and scope 3 conversation was around recently and didn't really happen here in the US, but it's happening in Europe, so it's only a matter of time before that'll make its way over here. That, and I would say 2030 sustainability goals. I'm really looking forward to when 2029, 2030 comes around. All these companies have these big 2030 goals. Are they going to hit them? And if they don't, what are the consequences that we're going to see from these companies if they do not hit their established targets? I'm definitely looking forward to the next six years or so. It should be interesting.  What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read?  I do a lot of different nonfiction reading at work between reports and standards and regulations and so on, so I'm typically a fiction reader. However, I highly recommend sustainability professionals if they haven't really done so already, to watch An Inconvenient Truth, which is the documentary by Al Gore back in 2006. That documentary in particular is what inspired me to do what I do now. I was hooked the second I watched it. It was really inspiring the way Al Gore presents, he's an amazing presenter. I highly recommend watching that. I know he's done an updated Inconvenient Truth in the last couple of years as well that's more with the times, but I highly recommend it for those who have not seen it yet.  What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?  Recently I joined the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, the ISSP. They have a lot of interesting resources as well as a new certification called the SEA and the SEP, the Sustainability Excellence Associate and Professional. They have a lot of interesting tools. I would also say relevant industry associations. For example, for me being in the pulp and paper industry, our main trade association, the American Forest and Paper Association, they have a large sustainability component as part of what they do. I assume other relevant industry associations will also have some sustainability component as everybody, including trade associations, have some sort of sustainability goals at this point. Those could be interesting resources as well.  Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at DS Smith?  I am on LinkedIn, Alison Berg, PMP if you'd like to find me. To learn more about DS Smith specifically, dssmith.com/sustainability is where you can find some updates on how we're doing on our sustainability strategy.

It may be a new year, but in this STtalks episode we revisit the tremendous progress and success STgenetics® EcoFeed® suite has made over the past year. With us to discuss the sustainability suite is Livestock Research and Sustainability Manager, Jocelyn Johnson. From the vision and evolution of EcoFeed®, we dive into adaptation of the technology, communication of the EcoFeed® benefits and how this suite can go on to improve farm profitability and ultimately reduce environmental impacts. 00:00 Introduction to STtalks and Ecofeed® Suite00:36 The Vision and Evolution of Ecofeed®01:14 Challenges and Adoption of Ecofeed®08:54 Consumer and Industry Impact 18:32 Future Prospects and Carbon Credits26:46 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Lisen Wirén is a sustainable business leader with over 15 years of industry experience. Her extensive background includes tackling labour migration and human rights issues in South East Asia and advancing sustainability in product design and working with social entrepreneurship. Her leadership led IKEA to win the most sustainable retailer award and a nomination for Wirén for the prestigious Sustainability Manager of the Year award in the Netherlands. Key to her approach is the seamless integration of sustainability into every function and team to reach the set organizational goals. She is based in Helsingborg, Sweden. Pia Heidenmark Cook is a Senior Advisor with Teneo, working with the ESG and Sustainability team to advise clients on how to develop and operationalise sustainability strategies and the implications for reputation strategies. Prior to Teneo, Pia was the Chief Sustainability Officer for IKEA, where she led the development and implementation of the IKEA People and Planet Positive strategy. Her cross-functional team worked closely with the business on developing circular business models (including take back offers, leasing and second hand), launching new sustainable offers (such as selling solar panels across 14 markets) and helping customers to live more sustainable and healthier lives. During this time, IKEA ranked in the top three most sustainable brands and managed to decouple carbon dioxide emissions from its commercial growth across the value chain. Pia and Lisen Join Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Their co-authored book, Embedding Sustainability First steps for companies getting started with sustainability, including engaging stakeholders Tips for incorporating sustainability into each employee's day to day job and tying these actions to sustainability objectives Advice and recommendations for sustainability professionals Pia and Lisen's Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?  Pia: I would start by saying understanding that sustainability and working with sustainability is as much about technical competence to understand the topic and all its facets as it is about change management and understanding how to work with people and change management.  Lisen: This field has become very much about reporting and that's something Pia and I have discussed quite a lot and of course that's very important and that's something that is driving sustainability and is also a wake up call for many businesses. But I would also encourage sustainability managers to try not to get too stuck in that, but to involve other relevant functions to support with the reporting so that they can still keep a strategic focus and lead the sustainability agenda. What we see is that the sustainability leader, manager, CSO, should be orchestrating the change, um, rather than getting too stuck in reporting. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? That  Pia: That it's becoming more and more mainstream. We're still not doing enough, but most people just know that it's here to stay, it's something we need to deal with. There's  levels of how deep the integration is and how far they come, but people are not questioning that the long-term direction is that companies need to deal with social and environmental issues to stay in business and be relevant.  Lisen: One of the persons that we interview is a designer and she talks about that 80% of the climate footprint sits in the design stage. For me that really triggers something for me to think about the real opportunity that sits within circularity. When designers and product developers and architects and so on, when they are opening up their eyes for the possibilities of circularity and getting excited about the creativity and innovation that that requires, I think there's unlimited possibilities.  What is one book you'd recommend sustainability professionals read?  Pia: I would say a mix of books that paint a picture of 'why' to more CSO handbooks. Books that are more hands-on, painting the picture of the environmental challenges or the social challenges so you build that knowledge, to those where where you get practical, concrete examples from others that have done the work. I think it's a lot about recognizing different situations and learning from them to get tools to keep doing the change journey yourself. I would also recommend one of the many books by Berne Brown about leadership and personal leadership and being your authentic self.  Lisen: I would go for a more action oriented solution-focused book, and that one is called Exponential Climate Solutions by Rebecka Carlsson. She's a Swedish author and she started at Singularity University and focused on different solutions that can have an exponential development. That's a very interesting, practical hands-on book with loads of examples.  What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?  Pia: Talking to people, meeting people, listening to people. Maybe not a lot of newsletters, of course to stay updated, but really the dialogue when you listen and talk to people and learn from them.  Lisen: To compliment that answer, one of the advices or suggestions that we give in the last part of the book is actually to sometimes look at what you need for yourself to keep on going, since this is not a sprint, but it's rather a marathon. You need to be able to last long as a leader, and one tool to do so can also be to sometimes zoom out from negative news and practice basically a news detox, trying to focus on the long-term positive improvements that are happening and that might not be an phone alert. Balance the negative news with some positive long-term development.  Where can our listeners go to learn more about both of you and your book? Embeddingsustainability.com or our LinkedIn pages.  

Los invitamos a escuchar este nuevo episodio que realizamos junto a Clara Sofia Gomez, Sustainability Manager de GeoPark y ex Directora de Estrategia en KPMG Colombia. Aquí Clara nos cuenta sobre su larga y variada trayectoria profesional que ha abarcado multiples industrias y disciplinas, desde la economía en el sector público hasta finanzas en WWF y KPMG. Su trabajo de alto impacto a través de los años la ha forjado en una líder excepcional en el campo de la estrategia y sostenibilidad.

B2B Energy Speaks Back – Episode 158: A Journey Through Time in Energy Management with David Fairbrother In Episode 158 of B2B Energy Speaks Back, we sit down with David Fairbrother, a retired Energy and Sustainability Manager who was at the forefront of energy management 30 years ago during his time at Landsec, one of the UK's leading real estate companies. David shares invaluable insights into the evolution of energy management, reflecting on the challenges, innovations, and strategies that shaped his career. From pioneering sustainability practices to navigating the early days of energy efficiency in commercial property management, this episode provides a deep dive into how far the industry has come and where it's headed. Join host Paul Webb as he explores David's inspiring journey, discussing the lessons learned, the projects that left a lasting impact, and the importance of looking back to drive future advancements in energy management. This is a must-listen episode for energy professionals, sustainability advocates, and anyone passionate about the history and future of managing our planet's resources. Tune in and be inspired by the wisdom of a true industry veteran.

The rise of plant-based foods has been fuelled by the global push for sustainability and healthier diets. But with ongoing debates about taste, texture, and the ultra-processed food narrative, how is the industry adapting to meet consumer expectations? In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at Food Matters Live in October 2024, our expert panel explores the innovations, challenges, and opportunities shaping sustainable nutrition today. Check out our Events Calendar From the development of mycoprotein as a sustainable protein source, to tackling ingredient innovation, flavour, and nutritional profiles, there are plenty of exciting opportunities and challenges ahead. Our panel unpacks the role of alternative proteins, the potential of locally sourced ingredients, and the evolving consumer mindset around sustainable nutrition, from plant-based and beyond. Guests: Dr Hannah Theobald, Head of Nutrition, Marlow Foods Anthony Warner, Freelance Development Chef Zoe Hill, Registered Associate Nutritionist, British Nutrition Foundation Joanne Lunn, Partner and Senior Ethics and Sustainability Manager, Waitrose

This week on the AHRMM Subject Matter Expert Podcast, recorded live at the AHRMM24 Conference in Columbus, OH, host Justin Poulin welcomes Kai Peters, Supplier Diversity and Sustainability Manager at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Kai shares her passion for promoting social equity and environmental sustainability by locally sourcing products and services from diverse suppliers that serve the community. She also dishes on her most memorable career mistake and the lessons she's learned along the way. Tune in for Kai's unique perspective on merging supplier diversity and sustainability in healthcare supply chain! #PowerSupply #AHRMM #Podcast #HealthcareSupplyChain #SocialEquity #HealthcareSustainability

Welcome to the AHRMM24 Podcast, recording live throughout the conference in Columbus, OH. I am your host Justin Poulin, and joining me today is… Guest: Kai Peters, Supplier Diversity and Sustainability Manager at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Outline: - Introduction - What are you most passionate about? * The intersection of social equity and environmental sustainability through sourcing products and services locally from diverse owned organizations in the communities you serve. - Can you share a funny or memorable mistake you've made in your career, and what you learned from it? - What is your favorite book or movie?

After Chris' report this week, Will and Ben are joined by Nuffield scholar Ruth Grice, who works on her family's dairy farm in Leicestershire as well as being the Farm Liaison and Sustainability Manager for Long Clawson Dairy, along with Rachael Madeley-Davies, Head of Environment Technical at AHDB to discuss how dairy farmers & environmental organisations can work together to achieve sustainable food security & combat climate change. With her Nuffield Scholarship and previous role within the Wildlife Trust, Ruth offers a unique perspective on the topic including how their environmental priorities on farm sit with what she has learned during her Scholarship from both farmers & environmental organisations in other countries. Ruth & Rachael discuss the role that Levy Boards play in connecting all the different elements, right through to the consumer. With the fundamental outcome being that of collaboration & creation of positive messaging between farmers, land managers, conservationists and the general public to ultimately achieve the same goal.Please note: The information provided during this podcast has been prepared for general informational purposes only and does not constitute advice. The information must not be relied upon for any purpose and no representation or warranty is given as to its accuracy, completeness or otherwise. Any reference to other organisations, businesses or products during the podcast are not endorsements or recommendations of Dairy Consulting Ltd or its affiliated companies. The views of the presenter are personal and may not be the views of Dairy Consulting Ltd. The contents of this podcast are the copyright of Dairy Consulting Ltd.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast. Special Clips from our previous guests:Understanding Sustainability Reporting https://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/polly-bucklandPolly Buckland sat on the client side in a marketing manager role at BMW (UK) Ltd before co-founding The Typeface Group in 2010. She's an ideas person, blending creativity and commercial awareness to get the best outcomes for our clients.The Typeface Group is a B Corp Communications Agency + Design Studio based in North Hampshire. Their mission is to counteract digital chatter by championing authentic and strategic communication. Team TFG work with brilliant minds in business to extract, optimise and amplify their expertise, cutting through content clutter and stimulating saleswhile reducing digital waste at all costs.  The Typeface Group have been B Corp certified since October 2021 and is currently going through recertification. Digital Sustainability and the Elephant in the Room https://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/james-hobbsJames Hobbs is a people-focused technologist with over 15 years experience working in a range of senior software engineering roles with a particular focus on digital sustainability.He is Head of Technology at creative technology studio, aer studios, leading the technology team delivering outstanding work for clients including Dogs Trust, BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and many others. Prior to joining aer studios, James was Head of Engineering at digital agency Great State, where he led a multi-award-winning software engineering team working with clients including the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Honda Europe, the Scouts, and others.He also has many years experience building and running high-traffic, global e-commerce systems while working at Dyson, where he headed up the global digital technical team. Making Holkham the UK's most pioneering and sustainable rural estatehttps://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/lucy-downing-and-sue-penlingtonLucy Downing - Head of Marketing and Sue Penlington - Sustainability Manager at Holkham Estates.  Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. Paul Marden: When consumers are asked if they care about buying environmentally and ethically sustainable products, they overwhelmingly answer yes. A recent study by Nielsen IQ found that 78% of us consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them. And while attractions have been great at a wide range of initiatives to improve their sustainability, this year's Visitor Attraction Website Survey will show that as a sector, we're lagging behind on digital sustainability. Paul Marden: So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about the learning journey I've been on personally, along with my colleagues at Rubber Cheese, to understand digital sustainability and how to affect real change. Paul Marden: I'll talk about what I've learned from hosting this podcast and how we've started to make real changes to our processes and our client sites to make them more sustainable. Welcome to Skip the queue. I'm your host, Paul Marden. Paul Marden: Back in April, I spoke to Polly Buckland from The Typeface Group about the importance of sustainability reporting. Polly Buckland: There's buckets of research out there as to the relationship between consumer behaviour and sustainability. So McKinsey did a study. “60% of customers actively prioritise purchasing from sustainable businesses.” Capgemini, “77% of customers buy from and remain loyal to brands that show their social responsibility.” I could literally keep quoting stats as to why businesses should take their sustainability goals very seriously and the communication of their sustainability initiatives very seriously, because it's becoming clearer. There was another stat about primarily women making the decisions based on sustainability of a business, and Millennials and Gen Z being sort of high up the list of people that are taking sustainability creds into consideration when they're making a purchase. So, I mean, it's a barrel load of stats that suggest if you don't have your eye on sustainability reporting and communicating your sustainability goals, you perhaps should have. Paul Marden: Of course, many attractions have been blazing a trail on the subject of sustainability for years. Going back in the archives of Skip the Queue to 2021, Kelly spoke to Lucy Downing, the Head of Marketing, and Sue Penlington, the Sustainability Manager for the Holkham Estate. First, let's hear from Kelly and Lucy. Kelly Molson: Lucy, I wondered if you could just give us an overview of Holkham Estates for our listeners that might not be aware of you or visited there themselves. Lucy Downing: So if you sort of picture it, most of the time when you think about stately homes, you picture a stately home with a garden. At Holkham, we are very much a landscape with a stately home. So 25,000 acres. We have a national nature reserve. A beach, b eautiful beach. It's been in Shakespeare in love. If you know the final scenes of Gwyneth Paltrow walking across the sands, that's Holkham, a bsolutely stunning. We're a farm, but at the centre of that, we've also got our 18th century palladian style mansion and that's home to Lord Lady Leicester and their family. They live in the halls. It's a lived in family home. But then we also have all of our visitor facing businesses. Lucy Downing: So we've got the hall, our Holkham stories experience, which is an attraction museum telling us all history and the now and the future of Holkham. Lucy Downing: We've got a high ropes course, cycle hire, boat hire, normally a really buzzing events calendar. We have accommodations. We've got Victoria Inn, which is near the beach. We've also got Pine Woods, which is a holiday park with caravans and lodgers. We have our self catering lodges, which within the park. And then we've got farming, conservation, gamekeeping, land and properties. We've got nearly 300 properties on the estate that are tenanted. A lot of those people work for Holkham, or if not, they work in the local community. We've got forestry and then we've also officiated and it's won lovely awards for the best place to work in the UK. It's a stunning landscape that surrounds it and we've got. I don't know if you've heard of her, but Monica Binnedo, which is global jewellery brand, she's based at Longlands at the offices. Lucy Downing: She decided a few years back to base her whole business there. She got all of her shops around the world, but that's where her business is. And I think she's ahead of the times, ahead of this year. She sort of knew how wonderful it would be to be working, I suppose, and not in a city centre, so I hope that gives you a flavour. But, yeah, I think it's 25,000 acres of beauty, landscapes with a house in the middle and lots of wildlife. Kelly Molson: I mean, it really is one of the most beautiful places and that stretch of the world holds a really special place in our hearts. It's somewhere that we visit very frequently and it's stunningly beautiful. Paul Marden: Later in that episode, Sue shared her insights on their sustainability strategies. Sue Penlington: So we've got three main themes. One is pioneering environmental gain I, which is all about connecting ecosystems and biodiversity and habitats. One is champion low carbon living, which is all about carbon emissions, our impact on construction and housing, our leisure operations. That sort of thing, and farming. And then the last one is the one that we always talk about. Tread lightly, stamp out waste. So that's all about recycling, reducing single use plastics and that sort of thing. So those three themes are what we're running with for 2021. We've got three goals, which are quite ambitious as well. And for me, I just see 2021 as that year of change where we'll make an impact. So we've done quite a lot of talking, and rightly so, and we want to take our visitors on that journey and really start to chip away at those goals. Paul Marden:  Now, let's talk a little bit about the fears around talking about sustainability. I think one of the things that is getting in the way of an open discourse around digital sustainability is fear. We're afraid of being judged by our actions and our intentions. In a recent survey by Unilever of social media influencers, 38% were afraid to openly discuss sustainability for fear of being accused of greenwashing. Again, let's hear from Polly, which is. Polly Buckland: Why, again, that storytelling part of the impact reporting is really important for me, because I will say we are not perfect. These are the things that we know we need to work on, but these are the things we've done better. And that's what I really like. The BCorp BIA assessment and their framework is because it takes you across five categories of measurement, and no one's perfect in any of them, but what it does do is it provides a framework for you to better. Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely. Polly Buckland: And measure yourself against. Yeah, I think if. I think the messaging behind your sustainability is really important. If you're professing to be perfect and you're not, you will get stung, because I think people can see through that. But if you are showing that you're trying to better, I don't think many people could argue with that. Paul Marden: Now, let's rewind a little and talk about my interest in digital sustainability. When I spoke to James Hobbs of the aer studios about digital sustainability back in July, we talked about my ignorance. So my background was at British Airways and I was there for ten years. It really wasn't that hard to spot the fact that environmentally, that we have a challenging problem, because when you stood on the end of Heathrow Runway, you can see what's coming out the back end of a 747 as it takes off. But I don't think I ever quite understood the impact of what I do now and how that's contributing more to CO2 emissions than what I was doing previously, which, yeah, I just don't think there's an awareness of that more broadly. James Hobbs: No, yeah, I'd agree. And it's complicated. Paul Marden: In what way? James Hobbs: I guess it's complicated to quantify the carbon impact of the type of work that we do in the digital industry because I guess there's what we're shipping to end users, which is one thing, but most modern websites and applications and stuff are built on a big tower of cloud services providers and all of their equipment has to be manufactured which has a carbon impact and rare earth metals need to be mined out of the grid. All of that stuff. Theres a big supply chain backing all this stuff and we can influence some of that directly, but a large chunk of it, we cant. So it makes choosing your suppliers quite important. Paul Marden: But in a presentation by my friend Andy Eva-Dale, now CTO of the agency Tangent, he opened my eyes to the impact that the digital sector has on the environment. The Internet consumes 1021 terawatt hours of electricity per year. That's more than the entire United Kingdom. Globally, the average webpage consumes approximately 0.8 grammes of CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that's 102 kilos of CO2 per year. And as we'll see in a bit, the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey shows this year that the websites in our sector are anything but average. But let's talk about my learning journey. I've used this podcast as a way to learn about the sector and to drill down into sustainability itself. My interviews with Polly and James taught me a lot. It's one of the real benefits of running a podcast. Paul Marden: I can sit and ask people questions that in real life they may not want to talk about. Beginning from absolute first principles. Following the advice from James in the podcast, I've gone and studied the online materials published by the Green Software foundation, including their green software practitioners certificate. Some of that is quite technical, but a lot of what's in there is a real interest to a lot of people. Now let's talk a little bit about what I've learned along that journey. In an interesting conversation with Andy Povey the other day, he talked about people's innate reaction to digital sustainability and that for many people, the move to digital feels sustainable. I'm not printing things out anymore, so it must be sustainable. Of course, all that computation and networking has a massive global impact on greenhouse gas emissions, so not every website is sustainable. Paul Marden: In another conversation I had recently, someone said to me, why does all of this digital sustainability stuff matter? If I host my site on a green hosting server, there's no harmful emissions from the server. But that's only one part of a complex web. The power needed to connect up all the servers in the world and to all of the endpoint devices is immense. Of course, the carbon emitted to generate power varies country by country as well as by time. And that's not really in our control. But we can definitely control the impact our website has on all of that infrastructure. As the web page is in flight over the Internet to somebody's mobile device, the power it uses and consequently the carbon emitted along the way is therefore something that's definitely in our control. Paul Marden: The other source of learning for us this year has been the sustainability elements of the rubber cheese survey of visitor attraction websites. We made sustainability a core theme of this year's survey and we found some really interesting things. 80% of attractions in our survey have got some sort of sustainability policy, which is an amazing achievement and sets a benchmark for the sector. Also, a number of attractions are taking active steps to improve the sustainability of their website. But we found that this isn't necessarily being done in a framework of measuring and monitoring the sustainability of their website. So the changes that people are making could be making improvements to the sustainability of their site, but at worst, some of the techniques being used could actually harm the performance and sustainability of the website. Paul Marden: The thing is, if you're not testing and measuring, you can't ever know whether the changes that you're making are effective. The Green Business Bureau talk about how benchmarks provide a reference point to assess trends and measure progress and baseline global data. They say, "Companies have begun measuring sustainability performance, which allows them to make continuous assessments, evaluate where they lie on the sustainability agenda and make data driven decisions and policies. Measuring sustainability requires proper selection of key sustainability metrics and a means of making effective process improvements. These measures provide real time data and much needed quantitative basis for organisations to strategise and mitigate environmental and social and economic risks." I'll come back to making process improvements later, but for now let's just stick with measures. Back to James Hobbs, who talked about the ways in which you can measure the CO2 emissions on our website. James Hobbs: There are some tools out there that you can use to help you quantify the carbon impact of what you've got out there in the wild now. So the big one that most people talk about is websitecarbon.com, which is the website carbon calculator that was built by, I think a combination of an agency and some other organisations come up with an algorithm, it's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because every single website app is slightly different and so on, and as a consistent benchmark for where you are and a starting point for improvement. Tools like that are really good. Ecograder is another one. Those offer non technical routes to using them. Paul Marden: Now, both of these websites use similar technologies and methodologies to understand the CO2 emissions of a website. But the survey shows more than half of attractions have never tested the CO2 emissions of their site. This got me thinking. If it's that easy to test the sustainability of a single webpage and you can run them on any website, but most attractions aren't doing it, then what can we as Rubber Cheese do to help? So in this year's survey, we've run the largest audit of visitor attraction sustainability scores that we're aware of. So working with our lovely podcast producer Wenalyn, who also supports me with the survey, firstly, I run a proof of concept gathering and comparing data for a small number of attractions in our database this year. Paul Marden: Once we began to better understand the data, Wenalyn went and ran this against all of the sites that were in our database. With this, we hope to support the sector with a benchmark of webpage sustainability that can be used by anyone in the sector. And what this has shown us is that 58% of attraction websites are rated f by Website Carbon. That's 8% worse than the general population of all websites. But the sobering thing for me as an agency owner is that the sites that we build were in that 58%. The work that we've been doing recently isn't good enough from a sustainability perspective. So this triggered a number of projects internally for us to improve the sustainability posture of the sites that we design and build. Paul Marden: So I'm going to dig into one of those sites and the journey we've been on to remediate the sustainability of their site, because I think it can give a really nice understanding of the journey that you have to go on, the changes that you can make, and what the impact of those changes could be. Now, we started by benchmarking the scores for the site in question from Website Carbon and Ecograder. And this site was a grade F and marked 51 out of 100 by Ecograder. From there, we drove our improvements off of the feedback that Ecograder gave us. We worked as a team to estimate the work involved in the feedback from Ecograder to identify the tasks with the lowest estimated effort and the highest potential impact. Paul Marden: Essentially going for the quick wins, we implemented a number of really simple measures, we implemented lazy loading of images. This is making the browser only download images when they're just about to show on screen. If you don't lazy load an image on a page, then when the webpage opens, the browser will go and grab the image, calculate the size, and redraw the webpage with that image in it, even though the image is off screen. If the user then clicks something in the top part of the screen, maybe in the top navigation, and they never scroll down, they will never see that image. So all that network traffic that was used, all the computation in the browser to be able to figure out the size and paint the screen, was completely wasted because the user never got to see the image. Paul Marden: So by lazy loading, it means that if a person doesn't scroll all the way down the page, then an image near the bottom of the page will never get loaded. And it's an incredibly simple code change that you can write in now. This used to be something that you had to write custom code to implement, but most browsers now support lazy loading, so it should be really easy for people to implement that. Paul Marden: Another thing that we did was to correctly size images. We found that, but with best rule in the world, our editors were uploading images that were very high resolution, very big images, even though on screen we might only show a thumbnail. By resizing the images inside WordPress, we've made it easy for our editors to upload whatever size image that they like. But we only share the smaller image when somebody views the webpage, again, cutting down network traffic as a result of that. One other thing that we made a change on was to make the website serve more modern image formats. Paul Marden: Again, we used a WordPress package to do this, called imagify, and it means that our editors can upload images using the file formats that they're familiar with, like JPEG, GIF and PNG, but that we convert them to more modern formats like WebP inside WordPress. And that has better compression, making the images smaller without any discernible loss of quality, and making the whole webpage smaller, lighter, faster as a result of it, which has the impact of reducing the CO2 emissions that are needed to be able to use that webpage just as a guide. We measure everything that we do in the business in terms of the time it takes us to do things. So we're real sticklers for time tracking, but it was really important in this project for sustainability to work out what the differences were that were making. Paul Marden: So these changes, those three that I just outlined there cost us about a day and a half of development effort and much of that was done by one of our junior developers. So it wasn't hugely complex work that was done by an expensive, experienced developer. But in return for those changes, that one and a half days of effort, we've seen an improvement in rating by website carbon from F  to B and on eco grader from 54 out of 100 to 83 out of 100. This puts the site well into the realm of better than most websites on the Internet and better than 84% of attractions in this year's survey. Is it enough? No, of course not. We can do more and in fact, there are still technical improvements that we can make that don't impinge at all on the user's experience. Paul Marden: We can and we will make more changes to move the site from B to A or even to A+. But there's no doubt that following the old 80-20 rule, these marginal gains will be progressively harder and more costly to achieve. And there may be changes that are needed that will impinge on the user experience. Some things you cannot improve from a sustainability perspective without changing what the user is going to experience. If you've got an auto playing video on your website that consumes bandwidth, it generates network traffic. You cannot remove that video without removing the video entirely and changing it to be something that isn't autoplay but plays w hen a button presses that will have an impact on the user experience. Not everyone will click that button. Paul Marden: Not everyone will watch that video and say not everyone will necessarily have the same feeling about the attraction that they got when there was an autoplay video in place. But there are undoubtedly lots of things that can be done that don't impact the user experience of the site. One of the changes that we still haven't made, which is a little bit more effort, it's a little bit more complexity, and adds a little bit of costs to the hosting of the website is the introduction of a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Here's James Hobbs again from aer. James Hobbs: From a technical angle, I think one of the most impactful things you can do, beyond making sure that your code is optimised and is running at the right times, at the right place, is simply to consider using a content delivery network. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with a content delivery network, a CDN is something that all of us have interacted with at one point or another, probably without realising. In the traditional way of serving or having a website, you've got some service somewhere in a data centre somewhere. When someone types your website address in, it goes and fetches that information from the web server and back comes a web page in the simplest sense. James Hobbs: Now, if your website servers live in Amsterdam and your users on the west coast of America, that's a big old trip for that information to come back and forth, and it's got to go through lots of different hops, uses up lots of energy. A Content Delivery Network is basically lots and lots of servers dotted all over the planet in all of the major cities and things like that can keep a copy of your website. So that if someone from the West Coast of America says, "Oh, I'm really interested in looking at this w ebsite.", types the address in, they get the copy from a server that might be 10,20, 50 miles away from them, instead of several thousand across an ocean. James Hobbs: So it loads quicker for the user, which is great from a user experience, SEO, but it's also great from an energy point of view, because it's coming from somewhere nearby and it's not having to bounce around the planet. That's one thing that you could do that will make a massive and immediate impact commercially and from a sustainability point of view. Paul Marden: So there's another example of something that you can do that has very little impact on the experience of the website. In fact, it massively improves the user experience of the website, takes relatively little effort, but offers a huge improvement. Those are all things that we've done to one individual website. Let's talk a little bit about how we bake that into our process. In a 2022 article in the Harvard Business Review about how sustainability efforts fall apart, they recommend embedding sustainability by design into every process and trade off decision making. I found that language really interesting. It's similar to the language used widely in technology and security that was popularised during the launch of the EU General Data Protection Legislation, which talks a lot about having a security by design approach. Paul Marden: So taking this idea of designing sustainability into every process and trading off the decision making, we've incorporated it into our sales proposal, writing, designing and testing processes. Our people responsible for selling need to bake sustainability into the contract. We want to hold ourselves and our clients accountable for the sometimes difficult decisions around meeting a sustainability target. So we'll discuss that target at the beginning of the project and then hold ourselves to that throughout the design and build process, thereby not needing to do all the remediations that we've just done on the other website, because it's typically much easier, quicker, cheaper for us to implement a lot of those things. The first time through the project, as opposed to as a remediation at the end. We've also baked sustainability testing into our process. Paul Marden: No site goes live without having been tested by both website carbon and eco grader to make sure that the site meets the criteria that we set out at the beginning of the work. So we've thought a lot about how we can improve what we do and we've started to go back and remediate over some of the work that we've done more recently to make improvements. But my learning journey hasn't been entirely smooth. There are challenges that I've hit along the way. I think there's a few interesting challenges that are to be expected as you're going about learning things that I wanted to share. For example, we've done work to remediate the scores of one of our sites and been super excited with the impact score. Paul Marden: I mean, went from bottom of the Fs to A+, only to deploy those changes into production and it didn't move the dial at all on the production website. And that was heartbreaking. Once we looked into that in more detail, thinking that we've done loads of changes, move the dial such a dramatic amount, only to launch it into the wild and it barely touched things. What we realised that in the test environment that we used, we had password protection in place and the website carbon and Ecograder were testing the password screen, not the actual homepage underneath it. So there was a lesson learned for us. The other area where we've made lots of learnings is during the survey when we created our sustainability benchmark. We've seen test results so good that they can't be explained. We've seen somebody hitting 100 on Ecograder. Paul Marden: We've also seen scores that were contradictory on Ecograder and Website Carbon, and also scores that have dropped dramatically. When we first tested in August and did a validation test checked last week, we're still working our way through these wrinkles and I think some of it is because we're looking at many hundreds of websites rather than trying to learn by testing and improving just one site. But beyond the kind of technical challenges, there remain some things that I simply don't understand. And my mission going forward is to fill those gaps. Firstly, while both Ecograder and Website Carbon use the same underlying principles and tools to calculate CO2 emissions, they often can and do give different results. Paul Marden: Not just in the fact that one is A+, a F score and the other is out of 100, but that the basic page sizing in kilobytes and consequently the CO2 can and often is different depending on which tool you look at. And I don't understand why that is, and I need to look into that. And I'm sure we'll come back to the podcast and talk more about that once I do understand it better. But the other problem is that I'm struggling with the size of the problem and the size of the prize. There's no doubt in my mind that making these improvements is the morally right thing to do, and commercially it's right as well, because it improves your outcomes on the website as well as the sustainability. Paul Marden: I'm just struggling with the business case, because if I had an unlimited budget, I do make every change in business that improves the sustainability posture of the business. But most marketers, most people that listen to this podcast don't have an infinite budget. They have a very finite budget, and so they have to put their budget to work where it's going to have the most impact. And what's the return on investment of spending 5k on improving the website versus changing light bulbs to leds, or moving away from gas powered water heaters in the outside toilets by the penguins? It's really difficult at the moment for me to be able to understand where this is the right and sensible investment of sustainability funding within an organisation. So I've shared my learning journey over the year. What about you? What can you do next? Paul Marden: For one last thought, let's head back to the conversation between Kelly and Lucy and Sue from Holkham. Kelly Molson: Are there any advice that you could share with our listeners in terms of how they start or begin to look at sustainability? Lucy Downing: Interesting. I was chatting with Lord Leicester yesterday about the subject and were sort of agreeing that I think you definitely need to know where you are, particularly as a business. You know where you are, because then you can set your goals in a realistic fashion. And I think the one thing to remember is that it has to be realistic, because you need to set goals that you can financially deliver, because if they're not financially viable, then you're not going to be here as a business to deliver them. And what we're also finding and talking to other businesses that actually quite a lot of the sustainability gains that you can make are actually in financial ones too, because you probably cut down on some of your resources that you're using, you'll think better, you'll work smarter. Lucy Downing: So it's just, I think that's something to definitely remember, that it has to be sustainable in all ways, socially, financially and environmentally. That's definitely some key advice. And I think be authentic. There's a lot of talk around greenwashing. Don't be guilty of thinking, wow, this is something we really should do and we're going to do it and just talk about it. It has to be authentic. So really think about where you can make the biggest changes environmentally for sustainability and focus on those and just make sure. Yeah, it's like us really. We're saying we're launching our sustainability strategy, but actually for the past ten years, we've now we've got 100 acre solar farm, we've got anaerobic digester, we heat the hall and all of our businesses with woodchip, so we've got our biomass boilers. Lucy Downing: So we've been doing it for quite a long time without telling anyone. But what we're now doing is saying, actually, that's not even enough, we need to up it further. So, yeah, that's the thing. I think it just has to be authentic and realistic. Sue Penlington: Yeah. And from my point of view, I'm a bit of a doer do and not a talker, so don't get bogged down. It could be absolutely overwhelming. And I think when I was first approached by my boss here, I was just like, wow. Because it isn't just rubbish, it's every single business. Sue Penlington: It's huge. But from my point of view, small differences can make a really big impact and keep chipping away at it because solutions are out there. There's loads of people doing really cool things. And, you know, every night I'm on Google looking up something else or going down another rabbit hole because I've seen something on Twitter. So for me, every day is a school day. But, yeah, get stuck in and collaborate with other like minded people. You know, nowadays you're not considered swampy because you're talking about sustainability. Sue Penlington: Well, you know, it's totally on brand, isn't it? And let's not reinvent the wheel. If we can learn from other people, then let's do that. I mean, go for it. Literally, every single individual can make a difference. Kelly Molson: Oh, Sue, that's. Yeah, you've just got me right there, sue. And I think what you said about collaborating and learning from people, that has been something that's so key this year. People are so willing to share their plans, they're so willing to share what they're doing and how they're doing things. Especially within this sector, there's always somebody that's doing or, you know, a couple of steps ahead of you that you can learn from. And people are so willing to kind of give up that advice and their time at the moment as well. So definitely that's a key one for me. Ask people. Ask people for help. Ask people how to do things. Paul Marden: I'd like to thank everyone that contributed to this episode, including Kelly, Lucy and Sue at Holkham, Polly at TFG and James at aer. Thanks to everyone that's helped me with this journey in the last year, the lovely clients we've talked to, the survey respondents, and my team at Rubber Cheese, Steve, Ben, Tom, Sinead, Wenalyn, and Oz, who've all worked really hard to benchmark the sector and to make continuous improvements to our client's sustainability. As you know, we're really experimenting with the podcast format at the moment, and if you like this or any of the other changes, I'd love to hear. And if you don't, then tough, go make your own podcast. Only joking. I'd love to hear. If you think we can make improvements, you can find me on X, @paulmarden and also on LinkedIn. Paul Marden: If you're at VAC this week, the Visitor Attraction Conference, then I'll be there with Oz and Andy. So come and say hi to us and I'll see you again in a couple of weeks time. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

The Chicago Marathon is one of six World Major Marathons, and this year will host around 50,000 runners from around the world, not to mention the spectators, vendors, and volunteers. So, is it possible for an event of this magnitude to be sustainable? On this episode, Casey and Sara chat with Cat Morris, the Sustainability Manager at Chicago Event Management, overseeing the Chicago Marathon. Hear about how the Chicago Marathon became certified as an Evergreen Inspire event through the Council for Responsible Sport, how waste, from water cups to gel packets, is being diverted from landfills, and how runners and spectators can get involved!   Sara will be running the 2024 Chicago Marathon as part of Team Fox, raising funds for the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. If you'd like to donate to support the Foundation's work to find a cure for Parkinson's, you can donate through Sara's fundraising page here: https://give.michaeljfox.org/fundraiser/5270913   Resources for this episode:  Chicago Marathon Sustainability Community Impact through Compost: Chicago Distance Series Instagram: Tina Muir, Chicago Marathon Sustainability Ambassador Instagram: Chicago Marathon Know Before You Go: Sustainability  

Globally, there are more than 40 sustainability standards in the wine sector. How do these, and the organisations behind them actually drive positive change on sustainability along the value chain? Where do they work well, and where are the gaps to fill? Moreover, what can be done to ensure that they are as effective as possible? In this webinar we deep dive into the role of sustainability standards in shaping the future of the wine industry. We bring together leaders from standards organisations, retailers, and producers to explore how these standards influence operations from vineyard to market. We examine the practical challenges and benefits of adopting sustainability standards, with a focus on ensuring they are accessible and impactful for all stakeholders, including smaller producers. Key discussion topics include: How sustainability standards drive best practices in vineyards, wineries, and supply chains. The challenge of inclusivity: ensuring smaller growers are not left behind. How standards are used by growers, and how they decide which ones to use How sustainability standards influence purchasing decisions and shape the market. What do consumers think? How standards affect their buying choices. We also provide an exclusive preview of SWR's upcoming benchmarking pilot results and discuss how our benchmarking process addresses the growing complexity of sustainability standards in wine. Speakers: Will Drayton, Director Technical Viticulture, Sustainability & Research, Treasury Wine Estates (USA) Linda Johansson, Sustainability Manager, Systembolaget (Sweden) Kate Venugopal, International Marketing Sustainability Specialist, Wine Institute (USA) Moderator: Dr. Peter Stanbury, Research Director, Sustainable Wine Roundtable If you have any questions with regards to SWR's sustainability standards benchmarking, please contact Dr. Peter Stanbury (Research Director) or Delaney Sheridan (Operations Manager).  

Karen and Cath are joined by three water-saving experts to discuss their fascinating research on water usage during showers. Their guests being: Dr James Daly, Sustainability Manager at the University of Bristol; Ian Walker, Professor of Environmental Psychology at Bristol; and Dr Pablo Pereia Doel, Water Literacy and Sustainable Water Programme Lead at the University of Surrey. Together, they discuss the findings from their study that monitored over 86,000 individual showering events and which suggests that higher water pressure can significantly reduce water usage.      Get in touch with the show with any of your questions or comments: podcast@ccwater.org.uk   Timestamps    0:00 - Introductions + an everything shower?! 5:05 - What is the research and what inspired it? 7:00 - How was the research conducted? 10:20 - The experiment in the halls of residence and the data recorded + how the sensors work 12:45 - The behavioural disconnect that happens whilst showering 15:52 - The advantage of using a timer when measuring 20:05 - How can the results from the research be used? 21:15 - The impact of having low flow pressure 22:40 - The level of pressure that impacts shower length 24:50 - Future plans and implementations for the research 27:10 - Being able to tease out social influences within the shower use 31:10 - Personal water use of the guests 32:08 - Final thoughts and farewell Show notes High shower pressure can help people save water, study suggests | Water | The Guardian OSF Preprints | Beyond the water flow rate: Water pressure and smart timers impact shower efficiency

https://www.metsagroup.com/metsaboard/https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-pajka/How is Metsa Board more sustainable than other materials? Why is the material selection so important to the sustainability of your packaging? What are they doing to improve even further? Check out our sponsor Orora Packaging Solutions https://ororapackagingsolutions.com/ https://specright.com/?utm_campaign=2024%20Influencers&utm_source=cory%20connors&utm_content=home%20page https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap. This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

EcoFeed® from STgenetics® is a Finalist for Innovation in Climate Action at the 2024 International Dairy Federation (IDF) Dairy Innovation Awards! In this STtalks discussion, Jocelyn Johnson, STgenetics® Livestock Research and Sustainability Manager, joins us to share about this outstanding accomplishment, where the vision of Ecofeed® has taken us and the true impact this technology can have on the agricultural industry as a whole.

Ready to discover how luxury travel can coexist with environmental stewardship? Join us as we sit down with Juan Marambio, Sustainability Manager, and Romina Da Pieve, Deputy Conservation Manager from Explora. These two passionate experts pull back the curtain on how Explora is driving conservation efforts across some of the world's most pristine natural reserves. From the unique ecosystems of Puritama to the breathtaking landscapes of Patagonia's Torres del Paine, you'll learn about the groundbreaking initiatives that are safeguarding these environments for future generations.Ever wondered how a workforce of 800 people can make a difference in small communities? Juan and Romina reveal Explora's hands-on conservation programs, from international staff working as park rangers to educational outreach for local youth on Easter Island. You'll hear about the Terevaka Archaeological Outreach program, designed to instill environmental stewardship in the next generation, and the impactful roles high-profile guests play in inspiring broader environmental responsibility. This episode sheds light on how comprehensive and inclusive community engagement can lead to sustainable tourism and lasting conservation.Travelers, get ready to rethink luxury! We wrap up with a deep dive into sustainable practices in luxury travel. Discover how Explora harmonizes luxury and comfort with environmental responsibility, focusing on sustainable water usage, reducing carbon footprints, and preserving biodiversity. Juan and Romina share insights on transitioning to green energy, moving towards a zero-waste company, and the thoughtful construction of lodges that blend seamlessly with their natural surroundings. This episode will leave you inspired and informed on how purposeful travel can significantly contribute to conservation and sustainability efforts.B Tourism websiteB Tourism podcast series info Exodus Adventure Travels; Rochelle Turner, Head of SustainabilityBrooke Hansen: University of South Florida & Dr. Alan Fyall University of Central FloridaLegacy Vacation Resorts: Madison DaumExplora; Juan Marambio, Sustainability Manager and Romina Da Pieve, Deputy Manager of Conservation Research Dirigo Collective Website

Can your travel adventures actually contribute to a better world? Discover in this eye-opening episode as we sit down with Rochelle Turner, head of sustainability at Exodus Travel Adventures, to uncover the delicate balance between exploration and environmental stewardship. Rochelle shares her personal and professional journey in advocating for sustainable tourism, offering actionable insights on how travelers can significantly minimize their carbon footprints while still savoring global wonders. We delve into the impact of aviation, the allure of distant destinations, and practical steps to ensure your travels are as green as they are unforgettable.Travel isn't just about ticking off bucket list destinations—it's about making a meaningful difference. We explore how responsible tourism can uplift local communities through fair wages, local produce, and clean environments. Rochelle discusses the interconnected nature of sustainability and the holistic approaches needed to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. With actionable tips for planning nature-positive tours, reducing plastic waste, and supporting protected areas, this conversation is a must for anyone looking to enrich their travel experiences while respecting the planet.Our mission doesn't stop at eliminating plastic waste by 2023. Despite setbacks from the COVID-19 pandemic, Rochelle shares inspiring efforts to provide clean drinking water without plastic and the importance of community collaboration. From innovative projects like creating eco-bricks in Indonesia to combating over-tourism by choosing responsible travel companies, this episode is packed with insights on how to travel mindfully. Join us and be a part of the movement to enjoy the privilege of travel while upholding our collective responsibility to the world. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and spread the word about responsible living!B Tourism websiteB Tourism podcast series info Exodus Adventure Travels; Rochelle Turner, Head of SustainabilityBrooke Hansen: University of South Florida & Dr. Alan Fyall University of Central FloridaLegacy Vacation Resorts: Madison DaumExplora; Juan Marambio, Sustainability Manager and Romina Da Pieve, Deputy Manager of Conservation Research WWF carbon footprint calculatorLearn more about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Responsibly Different™'s SDG podcastCitizen science reportsExodus travel foundationWhat's a carbon handprint vs footprintDirigo Collective Website

Ever wondered how a vacation resort could change the world? Join us as we sit down with Madison Daum, the dynamic Sustainability and Social Purpose Manager at Legacy Vacation Resorts (LVR), who shares the remarkable transformation of LVR under the visionary leadership of founder Jared Meyers. Discover how credible certifications like B Corp and 1% for the Planet have become the bedrock of their mission, impacting both the company culture and environmental footprint positively. Madison reveals the geographical reach of LVR's resorts across Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and New Jersey, and the meaningful changes these certifications have sparked in the hospitality industry.Hear about Madison's inspiring journey into sustainability, starting from her academic pursuits to her impactful roles at companies like Amavida Coffee and now LVR. We delve into the synergistic efforts between LVR, Florida for Good, and B Tourism in advocating for responsible travel and community support. Learn how the hospitality industry can be a powerful educator for sustainable practices, from simple acts like reusing towels to bigger initiatives supporting local economies. Tune in to uncover the potential for ethical travel advisory services to foster mindful tourism, all while aiming to instill more responsible travel habits across the globe.Podcast episode: Impactful Decisions with Jared Meyers of Legacy Vacation Resorts B Tourism websiteB Tourism podcast series info Exodus Adventure Travels; Rochelle Turner, Head of SustainabilityBrooke Hansen: University of South Florida & Dr. Alan Fyall University of Central FloridaLegacy Vacation Resorts: Madison DaumExplora; Juan Marambio, Sustainability Manager and Romina Da Pieve, Deputy Manager of Conservation Research Amavida coffeeSistema B Business for good lab in Florida link to learn moreB Impact Clinic in New Hampshire to learn more We are neutral B Corp video from LVRB AcademicsDirigo Collective Website

What if tourism could be the key to solving global challenges like climate change and over-tourism? Join us as Brittany sits down with Brooke Hansen from the University of South Florida and Dr. Alan Fyall from the University of Central Florida to explore the revolutionary potential of responsible tourism. They tackle pressing issues like improving employee wages, adapting working hours, and making travel more accessible for everyone, all while aiming to create a more equitable and inclusive industry. Learn how responsible tourism isn't just about preserving the environment but also enhancing social well-being.Brooke and Alan emphasize the importance of a collaborative approach in shifting from destination marketing to destination management and stewardship. Hear about the impactful initiatives at the University of South Florida where students work on hands-on projects to educate local businesses on sustainable practices. Discover how innovative marketing strategies can inspire quicker behavioral changes in travelers, highlighting real-world examples, such as the challenges faced during Miami's spring break.Additionally, the episode delves into the evolving practices in hotel housekeeping and the intersections between sustainability, human trafficking, and accessible travel. With discussions on the inspiring Embu River Camp in Kenya and the influence of organizations like Intrepid Travel and B Corps, the conversation underscores the role of education in fostering responsible tourism. Brooke and Alan paint an optimistic picture of the future, showing how the next generation, armed with innovation and sustainable practices, can drive meaningful change in the tourism industry.Florida green lodging certification programB Tourism websiteB Tourism podcast series info Exodus Adventure Travels; Rochelle Turner, Head of SustainabilityBrooke Hansen: University of South Florida & Dr. Alan Fyall University of Central Florida Legacy Vacation Resorts: Madison DaumExplora; Juan Marambio, Sustainability Manager and Romina Da Pieve, Deputy Manager of Conservation Research Dirigo Collective Website

In today's episode, Andreas discusses the importance of ESG in the venture capital industry with our four guests:Henry Philipson, Director of Marketing and Communications at BeringeaAshley Brown, Sustainability Manager at AtomicoAntonia Whitecourt, Director at SeedcampGrace Savage, ESG Lead at Molten VenturesWe are talking about ESG in VC because ESG_VC recently published an analysis of ESG data collected from 587 startups backed by leading VC firms, including Atomico, Molten Ventures, Bringea, and Seedcamp. ESG_VC is a global network of more than 300 VC firms enabling start-ups to tackle ESG.Join us while diving into the value of ESG for startups, how VCs are working with founders to drive forward the sustainability agenda, and what the future of European ESG looks like. We also address the buzz surrounding ESG, emphasizing the need to focus on building well-governed and responsible businesses.Go to eu.vc for our core learnings and the full video interview

Lange Twins has implemented individual regenerative practices but now they are asking, what would happen if they stacked them? Kendra Altnow, Sustainability Manager at Lange Twins Family Winery & Vineyards and a 5th generation Lange shares Project Terra. The goals are to increase biodiversity, build and enrich the soil and improve watershed through shifting farming practices, restoration and conservation. They are accomplishing this through grazing livestock, establishing permeant ground cover, reducing tillage, improving native habitat, and reducing reliance on herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. Resources:         REGISTER | June 12, 2024 : Regenerative Agriculture in a Production Vineyard 2.0 Tailgate 121: Regenerative Agriculture (Rebroadcast) BIFS Field Day Cover Cropping and Livestock Grazing for Regenerative Agriculture Blue Point Conservation Science California Department of Farming and Agriculture Center for Land Based Learning Community Alliance with Family Farmers Hedgerow Farms Kendra Altnow Kendra Altnow – Instagram Lange Twins Vineyards Hosts Cover Crop and Livestock Grazing Field Day Lange Twins Lange Twins Winery and Vineyard – Instagram Natural Resource Conservation Service Paicines Ranch Xerces Society Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript Craig Macmillan  0:00  Our guest today is Kendra Altnow she is sustainability manager at Lange Twins family winery and vineyards and she's a fifth generation. Lange. Welcome to the program.   Kendra Altnow  0:09  Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.   Craig Macmillan  0:11  We want to have you on because you folks there at length twins have been doing some really innovative things around regenerative agriculture. And through a project you're calling project Tara, what is project Tara? What's that all about?   Kendra Altnow  0:25  Well, we kind of have two different definitions, I would say a project Terra one is the concise purpose of project Terra is to increase biodiversity building, enrich the soil and improve our watershed through shifting our farming principles and practices, restoration and conservation, all while building the next generation of land stewards. That's what I like to say is the on paper definition of project Terra. But project Terra means something a little bit different to me, it's our vision coming to life. Like many of us, the health of the planet is a top of mind. And a few years ago, I really wanted to see what we could do as a family to contribute to being part of the very complex solution equally as important passing our land to the next generation healthier than it was passed to us. So I really just started reading and I learned that there are lots of changes that we can make. But we have a unique access to something that a lot of other people don't have. And that's our land. And really, I see that our land gives us the greatest opportunity for change. So we started just digging into what those practices look like. And regenerative farming really was something interesting and something very obtainable for us to do.   Craig Macmillan  1:41  What are some of those practices? Because from what I understand from doing research with what you're up to you, you did certain things 10 years ago, and then you brought in some other elements, and then you tried some other elements. Now you're kind of trying to bring them all together, if I understand correctly, what are some of those elements?   Kendra Altnow  1:55  Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I like to say when people come out and come to the farm for tour, that we've been practicing everything in different vineyards, but not necessarily taking those practicing and what regenerative agriculture calls stacking them. So the components of those are reduction of off farm inputs, livestock integration, maintaining permanent ground cover, conservation or reduction in tillage, creation of habitat, which is one of my favorites, and reducing our reliance on herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. So those were all practices that we have been doing. But we said, hey, can we take those and put them together in one pilot vineyard. And that's really the core of what Project Terra is. And for us, it's not just about doing it on that pilot vineyard, but is building the framework to be able to scale it to the other vineyards within our families holdings.   Craig Macmillan  2:56  You mentioned you were excited about this particular area. And I think it's an interesting one, too. And that's habitat.   Kendra Altnow  3:00  Yes, that's my wheelhouse. I love it.   Craig Macmillan  3:02  Yeah. So tell me about that. How does that play into this project?   Kendra Altnow  3:05  Gosh, it's a huge portion. Biodiversity is really a big element of what we need to do here as farmers in general. When my grandfather was farming, he did edge to edge farming. And that really is you didn't see anything green in those vineyards whatsoever. When my dad and uncle came back in 1974, the ranch that they grew up on really looked different the wildlife that they had enjoyed seen. It wasn't there anymore. But the reason why it wasn't there was because the habitat was gone. Without that biodiversity, there was a shift in the ecosystem. And so with that, is this new recognition that we're approaching ag at that system's level, where we're seeing the farm, not just between the rows or from edge to edge, but everything inclusive.   Craig Macmillan  3:52   So how do you do that? If you like, did you take landlords in production? And then set it aside for habitat? Or did you identify areas that could be habitat and then restored them in some fashion? How did you how did you approach that?   Kendra Altnow  4:05  Yeah, and that's, you know, something we've been doing for a long time is habitat restoration, primarily riparian restoration, our family is here on the Mokelumne river. So that's our watershed, and we have unfarmable areas. But we also have areas that were planted that we have taken out of production just because the quality coming off the vineyard wasn't meeting the standards of the winery. So we we kind of have a multiple approach. Over the years, it was just what we could get done. Recently, we worked with point blue conservation science and we have a conservation plan. And that conservation plan takes a look at all of our land that we farm as a whole and has helped us identify areas where we can make improvements that's not only within the vineyards itself by creating maybe filter strips or wildlife corridors, but also where We have maybe a vernal pool area, and what we can do there. So really enhance what is already happening. So it's a little bit of everything I guess is we've, we've had help. But we also just noticed, oh, that area over there isn't great. Let's put a pollinator habitat in.   Craig Macmillan  5:16  And you've been doing as long as you believe that there is some improvements and some stability from increasing the biodiversity on the land.   Kendra Altnow  5:24  Let me take a step back. Biodiversity has definitely increased here on our farm, just the other day, we saw two Bob Cats hanging out on the bridge by our house, that is nothing I saw in my childhood. So I can definitely tell you that there has been a shift because there are animals and birds that we haven't seen that are coming back to our area, those animals and birds are what we see. And so can you imagine what we can't see? So what we're making the impact on? Who knows, right? I don't I'm not out there every day with a microscope looking. But by these bigger animals being here, I have to say that the other ones are here, too.   Craig Macmillan  6:04  And do you think that leads to a more stable? agro ecosystem?   Kendra Altnow  6:08  Absolutely. 100%   Craig Macmillan  6:10  100%, you had mentioned also things around fungicide, insecticide herbicide reduction. How does that play into what kind of practices and how does that play into the stability of the project overall?   Kendra Altnow  6:20  we just finished reading a book. And there's a lot to be said about soil health, right. And that's a big topic, especially in ag these days, I think that we're a lot better than we have been. That's what sustainability is all about, right? Is continuous improvement, really digging into the health of the soil makes us recognize that maybe there's more we can do. From my perspective, having biodiversity above ground and below ground is only going to help us not just in our vineyard and the production of the wine grapes, but also as a whole for everything around it. I'm not sure if that answered your question. Sometimes my brain goes off in tangents.   Craig Macmillan  6:57  No, I think I think it's the right idea, I think what you're getting at is by looking at things as being integrated, looking at from a system standpoint, where everything affects everything else changes that make over here, make changes over here. And those can be beneficial changes, they don't have to be negative changes, necessarily.   Kendra Altnow  7:12  And I think also, it's such a long term result, right. So it takes a very long time, for us to see the true benefits of what we're doing today. I always say, Gosh, I wish we would have started this, you know, 10 years ago, because then I would feel better about what we're doing. Now you have to have patience. And I think that's been the biggest learning for us or for myself in particular, is that you're not going to change your soil structure or your soil health or anything that has to do with the environment, it takes time. And it takes that dedication. And it's not always the easiest path forward either. So you really have to sit back and realize following that vineyard, for a certain period of time might seem against what we would typically do. But in the long run, it's going to benefit what we're doing, if you understand what I'm saying,   Craig Macmillan  8:09  Yeah, I do I do I change this to soil health improvements. And so structured water holding capacity and things like that. Those do take a long, long, long, long time. But you have to do it if you're gonna get there, you know, and I think what a lot of folks are finding out from the interviews that I'm doing, you know, you may go like, Oh, my God, you know, it's gonna take 10 years, well, 10 years can fly by in terms of like a region, you know, just do it stick to it part of that cover cropping. So you folks have been doing cover cropping for a long time. And I'm guessing that the decisions that you've made in terms of what to plant, where to plant it, maybe even how to plant it, how to terminate it, and probably evolved over time. Can you tell me a little bit about your cover cropping, philosophy management, how that's changed over time?   Kendra Altnow  8:51  So my very simple philosophy is the soil is better served covered period, I believe that not only in our own homes, at home, in our backyards, and our front yards, but also within the vineyard. So that's an aside from how we make our decisions on what cover crops we plant. When it comes to cover crops. I'm sure you know this, they're super complex, there's so many different species out there. And they all are very specific on what you're trying to do for typically the health of your of your land or your soil. So what we always look at first, is the vigor of the vine because we want to ensure that we're not taking away from the growth of the vine and then regional erosion. So those would be like the two starting points for us. And then from there, we combined with the soil type, if we're going to be grazing or not grazing and then the ecological benefits so it's kind of a stacking just in decision making. And then the way we choose what vineyards it goes into, we we across the board, try to get it out. Timing is a big thing for us in all of our Lange Twins family vineyards, except in the vineyards that the mower can't fit down the rows. So it's a very operational decision on that, that side.   Craig Macmillan  10:10  What are some of the variables that you've been trying to manipulate? And what were some of the plant choices that you made to achieve those goals?   Kendra Altnow  10:19  Erosion control is probably our biggest number one cover crop choice that we do or a multiplex this species type, that's something that I would have to ask Chris and Charlie, or even Maria, on our team, they handled the decisions of that. But I'm involved in more of why. So I'm sitting here looking out my window at one of our vineyards, and we have a runoff issue. And so we made, you know, a very spot decision to plant a an erosion control mix, just because it's not planted right now. And we saw two years ago, or, actually, it wasn't two years ago was last winter, it was just gosh, the amount of soil going into the soil was absurd. So what can we do about it? So a lot of it is knowing your land as well, and making the decisions that way?   Craig Macmillan  11:07  So you're using different things in different places. So for some areas, it's all about erosion. Other places, it's about probably water management,   Kendra Altnow  11:14  Or, you know, your nitrogen fixing is a big decision making as well, depending on the vineyards.   Craig Macmillan  11:22  Oh,that reminds me, so I hadn't thought of before, have you been doing any, like pre post testing or control treatment kind of testing, as you do these things   Kendra Altnow  11:30  For cover crops?   Craig Macmillan  11:32  For cover crops or anything else.   Kendra Altnow  11:34  We do a lot. I mean, we do a lot of soil testing, is what we've started doing. And we do that not only just from a short term reason of seeing what's happening right now. But in these areas where we are doing no sustainable ag versus regenerative AG, we have started long term analysis so we can see what really is going to be happening in the vineyard long term with the decisions that we're making today. And does it make sense. So does it make sense for us to do it? Well, maybe it's not making a huge impact on that level, but it will be financially. So there are a lot of tracking that we are doing, because we need to make sure that it makes sense from a sustainability point of view.   Craig Macmillan  12:21  What do you been finding out?   Kendra Altnow  12:22  That's a great question. I It depends. I mean, it really depends on where, and it also depends on what and that's what's so tricky about farming. There isn't a playbook. Right. So what is working on one vineyard isn't necessarily working on another, for example, we have a vermicompost trial going on right now. And it's interesting, we've set it up. And we've done all of the analysis. And what we found is that different phases of the growth of the vineyard, the vermicompost, made a difference. But at the end of the growing season, everything caught up. So it's going to be interesting to see this year, what happens because is there going to be a true difference year after year. And then we'll add in do we add vermicompost again, so what we're trialing right now, which is really fun, is taking our pumice from the winery and feeding it to red worms to see if we can then reapply it out in the vineyards. What we don't know about that is if what is in the vermicompost by the worms, eating our promise is something that is going to benefit the vineyard. So benefit is in the sense of we're closing the loop on our promise, but it may not actually have any value to the soil in the vines themselves over a traditional form of compost feeding. Worms are really fun.   Craig Macmillan  13:45  I'm just gonna ask about that. So you're making worm compost on site?   Kendra Altnow  13:48  No, we're not. So there's a neighbor of ours, my cousin in law found I went out to visit him and I asked him if he would be interested in trial doing a trial with us. And he said, Sure, so we're taking pumice over to him from the winery during crush, and then he is running the trial for us. If it is something that becomes viable for us to do then we would transition it and start it on our own.   Craig Macmillan  14:15  Which reminds me of something else. You are working with a number of collaborators, you're not doing this in a vacuum and we'll transition into grazing was part of that but like what are some of the collaborators here you have your your neighbor, you're obviously working with probably other agencies or other other companies or their specialists who was part of the team here outside of Lange Twins.   Kendra Altnow  14:36  Oh, so many when I started in this role, going back a little bit is I you know, I didn't go to school for farming or winemaking and or sustainability for that matter. And so I took a lot of learning, calling and asking questions. Honestly, some of the organizations I reached out to first I was Point blue conservation science I hopped on, you know, the internet and I started just Googling people and seeing who would be interested in coming out and giving me a hand, they have been awesome because they really have introduced me not only to a whole host of other individuals within the that side of the world. So I would say the habitat side of the world, they did our holistic conservation plan for us. That really is what I would say is my strategic plan on that side of my role. From there, I work with the Center for land based learning their  SLEWS program, in particular, the kids from that program come out, and they actually implement some of our projects for us. And that's great, because that really is helping that next generation of land stewards in my mind, hopefully, some of them will come back and want to do this and do it in a fashion that is smart for both themselves and for the environment. NRCS Of course, Xerces, East Bay Mud, calf Valley grazing, hedgerow farms, Megan Phillips, Kelly Melville, you name it, I have like talked to all of them. And really, they have all been instrumental in us putting this together and moving it forward.   Craig Macmillan  16:22  I think it's an excellent transition into grazing.   Kendra Altnow  16:26  Yes, that's fine. I love graze   Craig Macmillan  16:28  you love it. Okay, cool. Well, here we go. If I understood correctly, from some things that I read, you folks are looking at moving into year round grazing. Can you tell me a little bit about the evolution, how it started, how you kind of got into it and how you got to where you're at now and kind of where you see yourself going in the future? Because it sounds like you actually are moving you're not done yet is what it kind of sounds like to me if I understood.   Kendra Altnow  16:51  We're just getting started. Grazing came to us through Charlie's sStar, there were sheep grazing and alfalfa field next to his home vineyard. And he offered the grazer to come into his vineyard for feed. And he said, guys, they did a great job. What do you think? And so we trialed it on 100 acres, and it was great. They came in, they did their job, it was the winter pass, and good to go. We loved what they did. We learned a little bit. And then the following year, it was ramped up big time. So we had a contract raiser come in. And we had probably 2000 to 3000 sheep everywhere, literally everywhere. And that winter was really raining. So it was difficult to get them into the vineyard. Some of them were flooded out. And it was just a challenge all around. And then when the rubber hit the road in the springtime, they got a better contract and left. So we didn't necessarily truth be told, have the best experience the second year. And it was logistically the main reason why. So the third year, we wanted to approach it a little differently. And I was at a young farmers and ranchers dinner and was approached and said, Hey, I had know someone that would love to do vineyard grazing. So great. So we sat down and talked. And what we realized is that what was going to work best for us is for them to be a true extension of our team. So not someone that's just going to come in and then move on to someone else, but someone that is going to be dedicated to working with us, because that is what we found was most important is that we're working together. So I see Valley grazing and Ross Mulrooney as not a separate from length twins, but he is part of length twins in the sense of being our sheep herder, right. So he's the guy, the boots on the ground, moving the sheep, the health of the sheep. And we're just helping direct them in that. And that honestly, if I could give anyone advice, and I know this can't happen for everyone based on size, or lots of other complexities, that has been a saving grace for us, because it's just, he, he knows what we're working towards. And we know what his needs are as well.   Craig Macmillan  19:14  You're working collaboratively. He has needs the sheep have needs you have needs can we find a way to have those things meet that makes a better outcome leads to a better outcome. Without question, yes, it sounds like you started with kind of the traditional, hey, let's get some animals, let's turn them loose. They're gonna go run around and do their thing. Oh, they're done. Now they leave. My experience with grazing is that it can get much more complex than that, and can lead to some even better outcomes when the management becomes a little bit more intensive, which it sounds like you're kind of moving towards is that right?   Kendra Altnow  19:52  Right. I mean for us, our goal is to have four passes a year with the sheep so it's It's a tool for sure. That's how we see this. It's a practice that we're going to implement within the vineyard. That's no different than mowing or herbicide spray, for example. So for us, the number one reason why we started it, there's lots of factors but was for that biodiversity in the soil and the soil microbiome, we know that animals do make a difference. So that was a really big factor. The second factor is back to the herbicides, if we can cut down on that, that's also going to help that soil microbiome third is the fossil fuels. Right. So by employing the sheep in the vineyards and integrating them in, we are cutting on fossil fuel use by all of the tractor passes that we're not doing anymore, etc. Sure, at first, it was like, Yay, winter weed control. This is awesome. But then you start scratching your head and peeling back the layers, you recognize that there's lots of other benefits of having animal integration. I mean, I sometimes they were just going back before my grandfather, right? They had animal integration, they actually had dual crops within their vineyards. And so it's like, we're going back to what we knew our ancestors. And we're applying it today, but in a modern way, with changes, of course, because we're not homesteaders.   Craig Macmillan  21:27  So we're talking, you said four passes. So what, what's the timing? What's the timing of the other grazing passes.   Kendra Altnow  21:34  So the first grazing pass for us starts post harvest. So three weeks after the vineyard has been harvested, we can move in the sheep. And really, this is to clean up weeds, vegetative debris, and the leaves. The second pass is the cover crop and weed management on our rotation. Typically, what ends up happening is why when they're done with the first pass, they're going to go start kind of all over again, right. And so now they're going to the cover crop and weed management. And that is what really this time of the year is. So they're out there mowing the cover crop, or they're really happy sheep, because they have tons of feed and getting the berms, we always focus on the berms. That's really important for us, especially if we're if we're not using any herbicides, it's really important for us to pay attention to the berms. The third pass is cover crop and weed management again, and this is kind of when we have the blind canopy management happening suckering chute hygiene and leaf removal. So it's in that spring where springtime, where there they can get in, they're not going to do a lot of damage, and they're still going to do good. And then the last pass is summer, so forth passes time or weed control. We are using these only and our trellis systems that are high wire. And so the Sheep can't really do that damage, because they can't reach up into the canopy and make a huge impact.   Craig Macmillan  22:57  And that was something that I mean, you you folks may have some experience with this. Maybe too early still, you know, the trend has been towards shorter and shorter, lower, lower trellising for a long time. And it's always been Oh, wine quality is better when the trellis is lower. And then we have these systems here where you will Yeah, but if I train a little bit higher, a little these other benefits that I can get is your winemaking staff getting feedback at this point. Are you seeing anything in terms of the cultural differences between the more traditional trellis and a higher wire trellis.   Kendra Altnow  23:26  I can give you a very specific example. We have single vineyard wines. And on our single vineyard wines, they keep all the lots separate. And we have an older cab vineyard. And then we have a high wire cab vineyard that is a little bit younger. The older one is California sprawl, it was planted in Gosh 1980s. It's our winemakers favorite vineyard. And along comes our River Ranch vineyard. And it's high wire and it is mechanically pruned and it is grazed and very different than what they 38 is. And I'll tell you what, they love that River Ranch cap and made it as a single vineyard wine. And so that to me goes to show that it can work both ways.   Craig Macmillan  24:09  It can work both ways. This is so fascinating. We could just go on forever. But is there one thing regarding kind of your experiences with all of this, all of this integrative stuff, is there one thing that you tell our listeners that you would recommend to them? As far as this goes this area?   Kendra Altnow  24:25  Oh man, I have so many recommendations. That could be like a whole thing on its own.   Craig Macmillan  24:32  You're gonna write a book?   Kendra Altnow  24:34  Probably. So my one recommendation is every little bit helps. And I truly believe that and that is something that you can do not only within your vineyard or your business, but you can do that at home. So my passion came from my family, because we have been farming sustainably in a really big way. However, my practices at home for example, I really got ignited because I saw a picture of all the plastic in the ocean and I had a heart attack. And I knew at that point, I couldn't use plastic bags anymore, for example. And that's a true story. I think that even though everyone around me might not have changed that practice, I know that that little bit does help. Right. So I think that is really important. I think the other important thing, when you're talking about farming, is the mindset shift. Farmers have been farming and doing things the same way for years and years and years. And it really takes forward thinking or openness to be able to change the way you're doing something. Because it's harder, it's harder, not only to train your team, that it's going to be done differently. But now you're using another tool, or introducing something different that hasn't been done before. So there's a learning curve. And when you have 100 million things going on, that one new thing feels like 100 billion pounds. And I think that it's really important that you have a cheerleader, which that's what I am, is the cheerleader to say, Hey, I think that this is really interesting. Do you think that we can implement not all of it at once, but do you think we can handle parts of it. And even that one small step is going to get us to where we want to go. And I would come in very different from, say, Erin and Phillip, my brother and cousin, they've been entrenched in farming for years, I kind of have this outsider's perspective where I don't necessarily know all of the logistical nightmare that might happen. Or I don't know all of the little idiosyncrasies that happen. All I see is this awesome opportunity. And then they bring me back to reality. And then we meet in the middle, and then we implement something. But I think if it was someone that didn't have that, like, I think we could do this, it wouldn't come to the forefront, because we're just so tasked on what we're already doing, and making sure that we're getting it done, that doesn't really give us time to do anything different. And I think that to me, has been the biggest learning. And maybe that the tidbit that I could give others is that be be that cheerleader or somehow find yourself to be that cheerleader for yourself, because it really will make a difference.   Craig Macmillan  27:41  I think that's great. I mean, every every little bit counts and being a cheerleader. Yeah. Sharing your excitement and your successes. I think it's huge.   Kendra Altnow  27:50  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's funny, Craig, between you and I, or if you want to put this out there I you know, I don't have a science background. I don't have a farming background. I don't have anything like that type of background. My background is sociology. And for for me, I just know that we can do better. And we have an opportunity to make positive change. And so I come in with they always call me rainbows and sunshine. Because that's that's like, really, for me, that's what it's about right is, is how can we make a difference, and I dried down I5. And I'm like holy smokes, we are the size of a gnat when it comes to farming in this world. And how to like I sit there and think, wow, I am I'm working hard to make change on my tiny little farm. Just think if we could get this farmer who has 30,000 acres to also make that change. And I think that's where it's at is it's got to start. I see. I mean, we're not small in the sense of tiny, tiny. We're midsize but gosh, there's some big farmers out there. And so sometimes it's like, Am I really making a difference? Like this is on 450 acres right now we could expand it. We're planning on scaling it up. Yeah. Okay, let's forget about those 30,000 acre farmers and that we're only a tiny bit to this very complex issue or complexity that's happening out there. Sure. Yes, let's do this. Because ultimately, it's going to be better for the next generation because they're going to be out there hopefully farming too.   Craig Macmillan  29:25  Yeah. And technology and innovation has its ways of being transmitted. Yes. And being adopted. More broadly. It takes time. And it also takes different systems. It takes different systems and that's one of the things that's intriguing is we've seen things that like you said that we tried things in the past and then we moved away for various reasons. And then you say hey, wait, there's benefits. Let's go back and try this again. Or people say Well, that isn't gonna work on my system because my system is so different. Within time goes by and there's proof of concept and then it well maybe this would work and we see changes all the time being out there as a leader Kendra, I think is part of the part of the solution and you're doing that.   Kendra Altnow  29:59  And I think honestly like what we can do for our farm, and this is what makes regenerative and we could go into that as a whole nother one podcast. But I look at sustainability and regenerative, which is so great about sustainability in my mind is it's not one size fits all, you're making the decisions for your farm based on what you can do in the best possible way. So someone might still fully believe in full tilling and that's all good and great. I'm not judging you, but they might be excellent in water conservation. And we have a lot of room to grow in that right so I like that's what I think is so awesome about farming is that there is no one single way of doing things and there is no right or wrong, but I always believe that there is room for improvement.   Craig Macmillan  30:52  Exactly. Where can people find out more about you?   Kendra Altnow  30:56  Well, Langetwins.com will have information about the family winery and the vineyards and laying twins on Instagram has tidbits about sustainability and if you really want to see all of my lovely day to day posts you can follow me at Kendra underscore Jean nine you get a little bit of sustainability and a lot of benefit family animals.   Craig Macmillan  31:22  That's fantastic. So our guest today has been Kendra Altnow she is sustainability manager at length twins family winery and vineyards and she's a fifth generation Lang. Thanks for being on the podcast has been a really fun conversation. Thanks Kendra.   Kendra Altnow  31:35  Gosh, I hope so you're welcome.   Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

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