Podcasts about true zero waste

Christine Riley Miller is Director of Sustainability at Samsonite where she is launching the first-ever global sustainability strategy and program across nine brands. With more than 10 years’ experience mitigating risk and improving footprint from cradle to grave across retail, consumer goods, and food sectors, she is an issues expert in packaging, energy, animal welfare, and sustainable supply chains. Previously Christine led the sustainability team and the Corporate Foundation for eight years at Dunkin Brands Inc. Prior to Dunkin’ Brands, Christine developed integrated campaigns and strategies for communicating environmental sustainability at Cone Communications. She previously managed the CSR Initiative at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. Christine has a graduate certificate in Leadership for Change from Boston College and a BS in Sociology from Brigham Young University. She currently resides in Boston and spends her free time training for half marathons and pursuing her love of interior design. Christine joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: Process of developing a new sustainability strategy  Communicating sustainability through the product Product take back programs and circularity  Approach to addressing climate risks and opportunities Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Christine's Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? The one piece of advice that I would say that I've found to be so helpful is rely heavily on internal stakeholder engagement. I've always in my career been either a sole practitioner as I am here at Tumi and Samsonite, or you know, I've had a very small team and you really need to get your colleagues engaged in the work. So, anything that you can do to include your colleagues as part of the development of the strategy, you know, understanding what your issues are, developing the goals and right now we're in the process of determining how we're going to collect and report data to demonstrate progress against those goals. Now, I have to send out a significant amount of you know, surveys with lots of questions and ask them to spend time to provide me with a lot of information. And so I'm following that same process that I used for the materiality assessment and for the strategy development and the goal setting to also do to the data collection. And they all have been part of that process from the beginning, they're already bought into the goals that we're setting and they feel really committed and invested in ensuring that we can report against those goals in a meaningful way, and that they're getting credit for the great work that they're doing. So involving your colleagues in any way that you can, at every step of the process is going to enable you to be so much more successful. I am not an advocate of setting a strategy and then handing it off to people and saying, go do this when they've not had any hand in helping you develop a process, that's actually gonna work for them because if it doesn't work for your colleagues, it's never gonna work for you. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I am most excited about the growth in circularity and zero waste. So, you know, we are a consumer goods company. Consumers are always going to buy products. We hope that they always support and buy Tumi products, but at the same time, you know, we want to make sure that we're increasing the circularity of those products, whether we're partnering with other organizations to utilize materials and waste that they have access to that they can't use, whether we're looking at how to minimize the waste within our own manufacturing facilities, working with suppliers to minimize that waste. And then thinking about how do we use materials like the recycled PET so that we are helping to eliminate waste within the existing waste stream and repurposing it. I think that's one of the most exciting conversations that we're having here at Tumi is thinking about how do we design for circularity. How do we use recycled materials and recyclable materials in our products? I love it. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? So the book that I would recommend is not a sustainability book per se, but it is one of my favorite books and I think inspired me to get into the work that I do. And that is the, it's a classic Walden by Henry David Thoreau and in full transparency I did work with the Walden Woods Project and I have lived in the Boston area, very close to Walden, and it is one of my very favorite places in the world. And I think that, you know, it has a lot of valuable messages that really resonate with the work that sustainability professionals do, but it often reminds me everyone should have their Walden. Everyone should have the place that they go, where they can reconnect with what's most important to who they are and what they do. We're quickly losing those places. We're quickly losing the beautiful places of this world. And I think, you know, it's the work that we do, to me, the work that we're really committed to is how do we protect and preserve those places for travelers of today and tomorrow so they can go find their own Walden. Then they can go to a beautiful beach in Bali and it's not covered with plastic bottles, but rather they're carrying a bag that helped divert those plastic bottles from that scene. And so, you know, it really does inspire me to continue to do the work that I do so that everyone can have their own beautiful place like Walden. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? So I referenced it earlier and I am a big proponent of the materiality assessment. And it's perhaps because, you know, in the work that I've done, I've often come into organizations as the first director of sustainability and I think it's a great tool. One to ensure that we're not talking to ourselves about the issues that are important to us, you know, it enables you to really identify what's most important to your business what's really going to have the most impact. It helps me learn about the organization and the industry as well. If I'm new to that organization and industry, it gives me an excuse to talk to my colleagues and to educate them about sustainability and say, hey, this is the first step you're going to be part of this journey that we're on to develop our sustainability strategy. I'm here to ask you to tell me what you think is most important to our business. And so it also, as you evaluate and revisit the materiality over time, it enables you to really determine what's most important to your business so that you can use your resources wisely. I mean, all of us especially right now, but in particular in sustainability are often resource constrained, whether that's budget or time. And there can be so much noise in the sustainability space that it allows you to really say, these are the issues that we're going to focus on. We're going to focus on, you know, product innovation, we're going to focus on driving supply chain, we're going to focus on carbon action, we're going to focus on people and yeah, there's a lot of other important stuff out there, but this is what we're going to focus on right now. So, I really love the materiality assessment. And finally, Christine, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Samsonite and Tumi? Sure. So you can learn more about all the great work that Tumi is doing in this space and you know, the merge Alpha Bravo and devote collections that we're launching. The Tumi difference page of the Tumi website and then you can read our annual sustainability report, which thank you for doing that. You've referenced it a couple of times, and that's on the investor relations page of the Samsonite website. I am on LinkedIn. You can find me there. It's my full name Christine Riley Miller. Christine Miller is fairly common. So you might find a bunch of them, but Christine Riley Miller. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Ellen Jackowski drives HP’s Sustainable Impact strategy and programs that focus on the planet, people and the communities that HP serves. Ellen also oversees efforts to align and integrate these programs with HP’s Personal Systems, Imaging and Printing, and 3D Printing business groups to ensure that sustainability is at the core of HP’s business results. Previously, Ellen was a management consultant focusing on strategy projects for Fortune 500 companies. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from Northwestern University and is a faculty member of the The Prince of Wales’s Business & Sustainability Programme at the University of Cambridge. Ellen join Sustainable Nation to discuss: History of sustainability at HP HP’s response to COVID-19 and social injustice Approach to ambitious goal setting and addressing climate risk Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Ellen's Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I mean, I think more and more, you know, it's always easy to find reasons. Why you can't do something, you know, the things that we are trying to solve in this space, they're unprecedented. It's incredibly hard work. So, you need to be bold and take risksand not be afraid of those risks. The way that I think we've been the most successful in being able to be bold and do things that I don't think we would have normally, otherwise continuing to reinvent, for example, our supply chain in Haiti and create one of the world's first, most scalable ocean bound, plastics, supply chains, you know, for 60 million bottles in one respect that number is really tiny, but in another respect, think it's more than almost any other company has been able to use so far. The way we've been able to do that is taking a big risk, but with some strong partners. Goes back to what we talked about earlier in terms of collaboration and not being able to do things alonefinding strong partners who have the energy and the spirit to take big risks with you. And sometimes you'll just be tremendously surprised at at the outcome. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think right now in this moment, you know, when we're looking at how the world is reacting to COVID and the pandemic and to the racial justice issues, this is our moment, right? This is the moment where the call to action is so strong and we need to step up to the responsibility and the opportunity to be drivers of this change. So I think anybody in a role similar to mine right now, you know, this role is more important than ever before. So I'm excited at the opportunity that I think, you know, society understands it's feeling the pressures of climate change. It's feeling the pressures of so many of these other global issues, you know, together. So I'm excited about this moment and doors opening and I think we all just need to be ready to bring innovation, to bring energy to bring progress for the next generation. What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read? So this isn't a sustainability book, but it's something that has inspired me and I've been thinking about a lot. Educated by Tara Westover. As I think about the role of education and how powerful it is how, you know, science continues to shiftthe research that we know about, things like plastic and its effects on the human body things like some of the science around climate change and new data that we're continuing to get,he role of education I think, is more important than ever. We've been as part of our community pillar of our sustainable impact strategy, we've set a goal to enable better learning outcomes for a hundred million people by 2025 and that's because we understand as a company, how powerful and important education is. We see it as a human right, and access to technology is more important than ever. It can be a great equalizer and we want to be part of that solution. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I would go back to our partners are incredible resources and tools. There are a lot of things that we know at HP, you know, about our business, about our carbon footprint, but there are a lot of things we don't know andyou know, working with some of the incredible partners that we have, and we're constantly looking for new ones. I think those are some of my favorite resources to be able to pick up the phone or send an email, ask for help and be able to get it. And finally, Ellen, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at HP? Well, they can find our sustainability report as well as lots of other information about our programs at hp.com/sustainableimpact. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Kevin Wilhelm is the author of "How to Talk to the Other Side" and CEO of Sustainable Business Consulting and is one of the world’s pre-eminent business consultants and speakers in the field of sustainability. Kevin brings over 20 years of experience working with 165+ businesses ranging across 37 different industries including clients such as New York Life, Expedia, IAC, Nordstrom, REI, Alaska Airlines, The Seattle Sounders, North Face, Tommy Bahama, the Northwest Seaport Alliance. He has spoken hundreds of times, taught 13 different business courses on sustainability and is the author of three acclaimed books in this field including: Return on Sustainability: How Business Can Increase Profitability & Address Climate Change in an Uncertain Economy Making Sustainability Stick: The Blueprint for Successful Sustainability Implementation Sustainable Jobs: The Complete Guide to Landing Your Dream Green Job. Kevin joins the Sustainable Nation to discuss: Kevin’s new book – How to Talk to the "Other Side": Finding Common Ground in the Time of Coronavirus, Recession and Climate Change specifically about the power of listening, engaging in a difficult conversation, polarization of climate change, and the power of allyship Evolution of sustainability consulting over the last 16 years Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders  Kevin's Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Well, I would say anything you can do right now, especially over the next 18 months or two years, where, when you are trying to talk about sustainability, if you can get some training in how to make the business case, how to, show the financial benefit of, you know, whether it's cost savings or enhanced revenues that you might bring in by using sustainability. It's really important to have that because as we head into another period of economic uncertainty in the fall, and certainly into Q1 next year, if you want to jump into the profession, it's great to have all the skills to do the work, but if you can also have the skills and speak the language of business, you're going to be a little bit more successful. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think the reality that things that seemed impossible in February now are just taken from the norm. I think that the change in mindset on the idea of working from home on the idea of needing travel to business meetings, needing to, you know, go to actual conferences in person, as opposed to speaking by video, I think it really fills me with a lot of excitement because I think it breaks down a lot of the norms which were in the offices. And I think it might lead to further innovation on other great challenges that we need to address. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? So Josh, can I plug my own two books or do I need to throw another one? I would say that if, if you're trying to make that business case, one book that, you know, was put together with about 65 different other thought leaders kind of on sustainability about how to actually implement sustainability, it's called Making Sustainability Stick. I will shamelessly plug my new book. It's called How to Talk to the Other Side, which is about finding common ground in a time of coronavirus, recession and climate change. And really the reason why I wrote this last book and I'd recommend it to your listeners is that people know what we need to do. You know, people know it just like with the masks and dealing with the pandemic, people know what they need to do, but emotion overtakes reason. And it's the same thing as trying to get people to take action on issues like climate change. They know we need to take action, but they just, for some reason don't. And so my book breaks down kind of the why behind it, and then how to actually engage people on a more personal and human level on an issue rather than trying to hit them over the head with science and facts. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Gosh, that's a great question, Josh. Well, I'd say, certainly check out this podcast, and follow it on the news. But I would say a lot of the resources I go to are, you know, sustainable brands, environmental leader, triple pundit, and using those, you know, not only bookmarking them, but make sure that the newsletters are coming to your office. You don't have to search for it and they're hitting your inbox. And then as far as tools, I think that, one of the most important ones for any audience listener to understand is how you really, especially as we lean back into climate and as we come out of the pandemic is how to do a greenhouse gas inventory. So if you can go to the World Resources Institute or the WBCSB, just get familiar with, you know, what is a carbon footprint, how to do it, because it'll take away some of the mystery to you. And if you're able to kind of understand that you'll be able to take a greater step towards helping organizations take action on climate change, which is what we all need to do not only after the pandemic, but we can even start doing right now. And finally Kevin where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work, and maybe find your new book? Yeah, thanks, Josh. You can go to learn more about my company and myself you can go to our website, which is sustainablebizconsulting.com. There you'll also find resources on, you know, in blogs and other things that you can follow as a listener. And then to find my book it's available on Amazon. So you can either search by my name, Kevin Wilhelm or How to Talk to the Other Side in books. And I will just put the, you know, you gotta get the tagline on it, which is about finding common ground and the time of coronavirus, because there are some other books that are out there called how to talk to the other side. And it's about how to talk to people in the afterlife and things like that. And don't buy those books. When I was searching for my title it didn't pop up. And then a few of them were published like that. And I was like, oh, maybe I should've changed the title, but I'm not talking to people in the afterlife. That's for sure. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Mark Lewis has more than 20 years’ experience as a financial analyst covering energy and environmental markets. He joins from Carbon Tracker, an award-winning think tank, where he was Head of Research. Previously, he was MD and Head of European Utilities Research at Barclays, Chief Energy Economist at Kepler Cheuvreux, and MD and Head of Carbon Research at Deutsche Bank. He was also a member of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures from May 2016 to May 2018. Prior to his career in banking, Mark was an academic at the University of London at Royal Holloway College. Mark has an MA in German from King’s College London, an MPhil in Latin American Studies from Cambridge University and a BA in Spanish & German from Sheffield University. Mark joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: Process of integrating ESG metrics into portfolio evaluation Importance of weighting E, S, and G differently for each sector Current status of the TCFD and its evolvement Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Mark's final five question responses: What is one piece of advice you'd give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Never give up. I think in fact, you know, one thing I say a lot these days is every single day gets easier to make the case because the economics have changed fundamentally in the last five years. I feel now as if we're pushing on an open door, that door was only very slightly ajar 15 years ago. And we've had to do a lot of pushing over the last 15 years, but it's really opening up now and we just need more people to join in and keep pushing and keep developing. I'm much more optimistic than I was 10 years ago that we can build a better world. It's not to say it's guaranteed, but it's in our hands. The technology is there. We need policy makers to develop and for that we need as much enthusiasm and human energy as possible to keep pressing forward. So never give up and keep pushing. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I mean, for me personally it's just the tremendous possibilities that are opening up with energy storage and also hydrogen is back on the agenda because I think, you know, renewables can only get you so far if you don't have a way of storing, solar and wind energy. And I think the good news is we're starting to see breakthroughs in the cost of storage. Europe has just launched a very big incentive program for hydrogen as well, which can be used both as a source of storage and as an energy source in its own. Right. So to me, that's the next phase of the energy revolution is really being able to combine storage with wind and solar energy, so that we can decarbonize the global energy system completely within the next three, hopefully three, maybe four decades. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? Yeah, sorry again, to focus on the energy side, this is, you know, showing my own bias, but a really great book, relatively recent, I guess it is three or four years old now, is the Marginal Cost of Society by Jeremy Rifkin. I think that's a fantastic read. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Well there are so many, on the energy side there's a lot of publicly available data from the International Energy Agency and from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). World resources Institute is an unending source of knowledge and insight. I think WRI is just a fantastic, fantastic tool. So those would be three that spring to mind that I regularly look at. Carbon Tracker. I've gotta give a shout out to Carbon Tracker. You know, I spent nine months there in 2018 as the head of research. It's the most fantastic think tank on climate change and aligning financial markets with the challenge of achieving the Paris agreement. Mark, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work? Well, you know, we have a website, the BNP Paribas Asset Management website. And, you know, if I may indulge your listeners, you know, I can be contacted on LinkedIn. I post regularly about my work and about interesting trends that I'm seeing and you can follow me on Twitter @MCL1965. About Sustridge: Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

An environmental scientist with over a decade of experience in sustainable manufacturing and design, Saskia is head of sustainability at Rothy’s, a global lifestyle brand best known for creating stylish, comfortable shoes from recycled plastic water bottles. At Rothy’s, Saskia develops strategies to minimize the environmental impact that Rothy’s supply chain has on the environment, advancing Rothy’s sustainable innovations in materials, production and fulfillment and more. Prior to joining Rothy’s, Saskia worked as senior director of sustainability at Method, a brand renowned for their clean, sustainable, and effective cleaning products. At Method, Saskia implemented sustainability initiatives on the ground for the European business and at Method’s LEED-Platinum soap factory in Chicago. Saskia joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: - Circularity and ocean plastic sourcing  - How to communicate sustainability value of products - Importance of industry collaboration - Mission driven company culture and employee retainment  - Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Saskia's final five question responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I think that this would depend on where in their journey they are. For students, I would recommend taking some hard science classes and by hard science, I mean, kind of chemistry, and that will really serve you well in this emerging world of sustainability. I think that within corporations, within a lot of the emerging opportunities for sustainability, the science driven aspects of sustainability will be the most enduring. The reason for that is it's important to be grounded in facts in data. And that will allow sustainability kind of clear out a lot of the trendiness and the noise. So I think it's important to be kind of rooted in science. And then another thing that I found to be just true and I think will continue to be true in this landscape of sustainability careers is there are going to be so many different opportunities. Everything from local government, private companies, product companies, nonprofits. And for me, at least it was a process of elimination. I worked in some small nonprofits and learned a ton when I was there, but didn't necessarily feel that it was exactly the best fit for my talents and what was needed from that organization. So it was a kind of winnowing into what I really, really feel passionate and comfortable with today. So I would say like, don't assume that within sustainability, that you're going to land at the company, that's going to be your forever company. There is this kind of understanding that your own skills will kind of be refined and that each of the opportunities that you have, even if it's nonprofit going to government will still serve you in this larger landscape of sustainability. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I touched on it a bit before, but I think that I'm seeing a lot of momentum around this collision among these different, what were considered separate movements and the idea that we could just be looking at environmental justice and biodiversity and that those would be separate somehow. I think intersectionality and this awareness that all of these different pieces have to be happening at the same time and that they overlap and they're benefiting each other in a really clear way. We're starting to see a lot more awareness of that, even just like the awareness from COVID that the spread of disease is likely from some of the biodiversity loss and that climate change will continue to exacerbate that is all kind of coming out right now. So this will only serve us to all be aligned and to hopefully move quicker in the same direction. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? That's a tough one. And it's mostly because this is a hard book to read, but one of my favorite books came out pretty recently is an Uninhabitable Earth. Have you read it? I have not read that one yet. I've heard the recommendation though. Haven't gotten to it yet. It's by David Wallace Wells. And I say it's a hard one because it's about the effects of climate change that we can anticipate over the next few decades. And it's a very real view of what that will be like. It doesn't kind of sugarcoat it. And I think some people have critiqued it for not being a solutions oriented as it can be, but I think it's important for sustainability professionals to read it because it really grounds us in the challenge that we have ahead. And for me, it was motivating because knowing what this potential future could be, how can I double down on my efforts in order to mitigate it? What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Well, a few kind of different organizations that I look to a lot of Project Drawdown is a great organization that has pretty creatively looked at all the different options that we have around mitigating climate change and quantify them both in, in terms of how, you know, how much gigatons they can pull out of greenhouse gases, but also what are the financial benefits of that? And it doesn't just look at the electricity grid it also looks at kind of these social mitigation that we can do so I love them as a resource and I think the model that they've created is really creative. I also have worked quite a bit with a think tank called Forum for the Future, and they are really futurists. They think about what these possible futures could be and how businesses can better be equipped to adapt and respond to those features. So I think that they work in the world of sustainability, but they do it in a really creative way and I just love working in partnering with them. And then, because I am a scientist, I read a lot of different journals. I read nature science journal of industrial ecology and think being rooted in the latest sciences is really important too. And finally Saskia, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work being done at Rothy's? Check out the Rothy's blog and our website. So we do quite a bit of new information, either product launches and talking about some of the materials we're using, I'll be writing on our blog and sharing some of our new initiatives around sustainability. So would encourage people to bookmark that and keep returning to that and sign up for our email list to get updates. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

With more than 20 years experience, Scott Paul has held senior positions at many of the world's leading environmental organizations including Greenpeace. He is an experienced leader within the global sustainability community. His career has been devoted to forest protection and mitigating the effects of climate change. Paul has successfully impacted policy change on both local and international levels and has led some of the most innovative environmental campaigns of the two last decades. Scott Paul joins Sustainable Nation to discuss:  Sustainability movement within the guitar industry Ebony project and vertical integration  Challenges of FSC certification in the music industry  Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Scott's final five question responses:  What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? It all depends on your company. What you're making, what resources you're using. Are you a retailer? Are you a manufacturer? You have to look at your footprint to understand to be able to answer this question, but there is a nonprofit organization. There are multiple nonprofit organizations that are working on issues that your company is involved with. And I'm not necessarily talking about former formal partnerships and eco labels necessarily. That's not a bad thing, but you know, get to know the advocacy community over coffee to understand the issues more profoundly that your company is stepping on. And then the other thing I would just say is be a mentor in terms of, you know, there's probably some 20 year old working for your company who came out of some environmental studies program and maybe they're not as well rounded and, you know, may say some foolish things sometimes, but their perspective is insanely important. And if you can't communicate with a 20 year old and understand, you know, convince them that what you're doing is the right thing and listen to them about what they think is important then you're not going to be able to communicate on behalf of your company, to the marketplace. If you're not able to connect with somebody of a different age, a different race, a different gender. So mentor somebody. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think transparency, the increased societal expectation that I have a right to know what took place to bring this product to market. And honestly, a lot of companies would like to deliver that information, but they've evolved over decades that they can't necessarily, but they need to start figuring it out. So I think the increased expectation of transparency is going to drive a lot of good stuff. What one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? So I knew you were gonna ask this question and I'm going to cheat a little bit. There's two books that had a big influence on me I'm going to flag. And then I'll give the recommendation for me because I deal with wood. This guy, David Fairchild wrote an autobiography The World Was My Garden. He wrote it in 1930s, but this guy traveled the world finding plants on behalf of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to bring back to the U.S. and my understanding of natives and exotics, natural resources was turned upside down, reading that book. I also like it's another older book, I think from the eighties, the making of a conservative environmentalist. It was a Reagan appointee to the great lakes commission and Canada that made me think. But if you're doing policy there's a book by a guy named John McCormick Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement. It's a bit of a textbook, but it was written before the 1992 Earth Summit. So it's not almost anything you read is influenced by the Earth Summit and the UN institutions that were created as a result. This was an awesome book written before that, that if you're interested in policy and want to know why these institutions were formed and why people had positions that they took John McCormick's Reclaiming Paradise is pretty awesome. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Honestly, I'm just going to restate the other answer is, you know, the, the mentor find a 20 year old or in my case, I go home and talk to my kids who are not even 20 yet, but they are tuned in. I'm not taking everything they say as gospel, but I do need to understand what's driving them and where they're coming from. And my mind is constantly evolving when I'm getting inside the head of these impassioned recent graduates of environmental studies programs. It's like, if I can't communicate with them, if I can't use that resource, then I'm failing. And finally where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the sustainability work being led at Taylor? At the risk of plugging myself, the only place I can think of is my LinkedIn page. It has got a thing with all my blogs. I think it's called all the blogs that fit to print. You know, I bastardized the New York Times famous saying. That links all my blogs since I've been at Taylor and that pretty much covers the suite of initiatives that Taylor is looking into. Or just call me, people just call me. I'll always answer the phone. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Shannon Bergstrom is a LEED-accredited, TRUE waste advisor. She currently works at RTS, a tech-driven waste and recycling management company, as a sustainability operations manager. Shannon consults with clients across the hotel industry on sustainable waste practices. Shannon joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: Strategies for implementing zero waste management Engaging with suppliers to reduce waste Addressing organic waste streams TRUE Zero Waste Advisor certification program Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Shannon's Final Five Questions: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Yeah, think it's really important as a sustainability professional to work for company where you really believe in the value and the vision of the company whatever that may be. For me, it was finding solutions for removing waste and kind of cleaning up the oceans from plastic waste. I think my company RTS as a company is really committed to finding solutions in order to reduce waste and clean up our planet and make our planet a better place. So that was really important for me. I would suggest anybody who's looking to get into the sustainability field, find something that you're really passionate about, whether that's waste or whether that's fashion or you know, buildings and energy find something that you love and get behind a company that's committed to, to being more sustainable in whatever field it is. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm really excited right now that sustainability has become as big of a topic as it has. I think probably, you know, five, 10 years ago, it's not something that a lot of businesses were focusing on or really cared about or really even understood. I think now it's just being pushed as part of legislation and consumers are really demanding more sustainable products or sustainable practices and it shows and, you know, in what they're choosing to purchase or where they're choosing to shop. So I think businesses are really reacting to that. And I think that's incredible, because I think they have so much power in changing the game and making our world a better place, a more sustainable place. It's through actions of consumers, like, you know, you and me. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? One book? I read Omnivore's dilemma. When I was in college, I think it was really valuable to kind of understand how where your food is coming from. It kind of inspired me to become a vegetarian just learning about the meat industry and how it kind of impacts the environment in a negative way. And that kind of shaped some of my habits so I would definitely recommend that one. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Favorite resources and tools? One of the big ones I would say that is not so exciting, but the EPA WARM model is something that we use. I think a lot of professionals in the waste industry use this as kind of a tool for waste reporting. It's kind of like an industry standard as to the weights of different material streams to help kind of create diversion reports for some of our clients. So definitely check out the WARM model as one of them. I guess just one more is just look at a B Corp that you know of that are in your markets and try and shop with those B Corps and support them. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work being done at RTS? So definitely we started working on as a team, as a sustainability team, working on podcasts, webinars and blog posts covering a wide range of sustainability topics that you can find through our website, rts.com and go to our resources page. And there, you can find our on demand webinars and blog posts. Definitely take a look at what you're interested in and stay informed. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification. 

Mike Wakeland serves as the CEO of DialogueDirect, a leader of face to face fundraising acquisition in North America.  His focus is building strong partnerships with charity clients, while improving quality metrics within the industry. Mike and his team believe quality and quantity can be obtained with the right partnerships and coaching. Mike hopes to create an environment of sharing ideas and strategies to ensure sustainable growth.  His commitment to the B Corp community’s values has driven DialogueDirect to align with the movement as the first B Corp Certified face to face company in the United States. Mike joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: B Corp certification process and lessons learned Talent retention and recruitment after achieving B Corp status Importance of mission driven business Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Mike’s Final Five Questions Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other mission-driven or B Corp business leaders? I would say the one piece of advice is your team will rally behind you because it's the right thing to do. It is a big lift. The lift is necessary to complete the assessment. It will take time, it will take resources, it will show some kinks in your armor. However, those are the exact reason why you'd want to do it. Those are the opportunities to realign the culture, realign the vision, and ultimately game plan for the business for the next generation. What are you most excited about right now in the world of business? Well, obviously the last four to six weeks have been interesting to say the least, but I'm still very optimistic. I'm positive. They are different times as of today. However, the situation we're all facing has actually provided a lot of us time to reflect personally, professionally, and ultimately give us an opportunity to plan for the future and reevaluate who we are and what our business priorities are. I'm really motivated to see the next generation bring the change in the world and to really reach out and take care of one another in a time of need, but more importantly focusing more on the impact we're making on this planet every single day, rather than just a paycheck we look forward to on Friday. I think there aren't many other companies to look at to really understand what that next generation of leaders looks like then Dialogue Direct. These are the people that we run into on the streets that are getting us to sign up for fundraising to support important nonprofits. These are passionate, dedicated people. I mean, it's not easy to walk up to a stranger and try to talk to them or, try to sell them on donating and these people are incredibly committed. A great group of people you guys have their at Dialogue Direct in a good, I think, glimpse into the generation that will be making some big changes in the coming years. Mike, what is one book you would recommend business leaders or B Corp leaders read? I'm actually in my office today looking at a whole stack of them. I've really been big into the Simon Sineck. I'm a big fan of his. I had the opportunity to see him speak a few times on a stage, but more importantly, I've had the opportunity to read his books, Start With Why. The one I'd recommend today would be The Infinite Game. It's something that I've shared with many people that I come into contact and back to my initial point, it's that we never really crossed the finish line. There's always more to do. The infinite game has really made the biggest impact on me that I would recommend to others. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Well, Zoom has obviously been very important recently. With that said the best resources we have are our people. As you mentioned, and thank you for your kind words, they're passionate, they're remarkable human beings. They're committed to our mission, which is changing the way America gives every single day. Our recent partnership we've developed is with an organization called Verb. It's a online development software learning platform. Our focus is professional personal growth from soft skills to leadership, to managerial skills. We understand that effective leaders know that it's not just about themselves, but it's about the future generation. So that's a resource that we've really committed ourselves to and put a lot of time and effort into. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work being done at Dialogue Direct? Yeah. Thanks Josh. Dialoguedirect.com is our website or you can go to bcorporation.net and look for our profile or coming to a city near you. Hopefully you have the opportunity to meet one of our passionate Dialoguers so they have the opportunity to help explain a critical mission or an organization they're passionate about and you have the opportunity to jump on board and join the movement. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Joseph Brinkley, who holds a degree in Economics from Virginia Commonwealth University, was working for the Federal Reserve in Richmond, Virginia when he realized he would rather get his hands dirty than work in an office. He went back to school, the second time attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Horticulture in 2003. Following graduation, Joseph worked with a number of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms while complementing his education with workshops at Virginia’s Josephine Porter Institute, an internationally acclaimed educational facility that advances education and research in Biodynamics. “I was enjoying learning the details of farming land, including best practices for compost and soil management—and gaining insight to anything that contributed to the overall health of the farm,” Joseph remarks. Today, Joseph’s contributions and expertise, including his extensive knowledge of Biodynamic preparations, contribute to ongoing excellence at Bonterra. Joseph Brinkley join Sustainable Nation to discuss: Differences between organic biodynamic and regenerative farming  The path to organic farming and practices you can incorporate now Biochar trial at Bonterra  Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Joesph’s Final Five Questions Responses What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability leaders that might help them in their careers? I really think crossing over industries we can learn a lot. Sometimes we get kind of siloed within our own industry and so whatever the industry you're within, I think it's really important to kind of take a step back and look into other industries to see how are they solving their problems that that could certainly be applied within our own. What would you say you're most excited about right now in the world of sustainability or sustainable agriculture? I really think it's exciting all of these initiatives that you see from all over. I'm part of this group that we're going to educate and make lawmakers aware of the climate and farming and such. There's some big players there, General Mills. McDonald's is there, right? You see Levi's, I mean, you see some really huge players in the food and textile world really coming behind regenerative agriculture, and then just seeing consumers, so pumped up and excited and just demanding it. I think that's really showing some positive progress. Joseph, how about one book that you would recommend other sustainability leaders read? I'm still on Man or Matter. I think I've got to go back to the same one. If you haven't read it, I'm going to say it again, Man or Matter. That's the one. Excellent. And who writes that? It's Ernst Lehrs. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I really think talking to others, seeing what others do and then kind of looking into the other worlds of agriculture. Sometimes we get kind of so stuck, you know, we're in this great nation and we are, but we can look to other nations, to other continents to see there's a lot to be learned from more pastoral ways. And then just on different approaches to farming, to animal husbandry, to how we treat the land for the long-term success. And finally, Joseph, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work at Bonterra? I would say go to the website: bonterra.com About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Rob Threlkeld is Global Manager of Sustainable Energy, Supply and Reliability for General Motors, leading the company’s energy procurement efforts including the commitment to meet the electricity needs of its global operations with 100% renewable energy by 2050. Threlkeld is responsible for leading the team that supports GM energy procurement and regulatory efforts including negotiating power purchase agreements, natural gas, green tariffs and engineering onsite renewable solutions for GM facilities across the globe, including opportunities associated with battery storage, behind-the-meter applications and EV integration. Threlkeld is a board member of the Renewable Energy Buyer’s Association. He is also involved in the American Wind Energy Association and Solar Energy Industries Association, two energy groups advancing the use of these renewable forms of energy. He serves as industry advisor to the School of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. He is a member of the Association of Energy Engineers, the Engineering Society of Detroit and the Solar Power International Education Council. Energy Manager Today has recognized Threlkeld as one of 50 top energy managers for driving GM and the energy management industry forward. Threlkeld began his career at GM in 2000 as a manager of powerhouse and wastewater treatment plant operations. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Purdue University. He is a registered Certified Hazardous Material Manager, Certified Energy Manager and Business Energy Professional. Rob joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: Setting 100% renewable energy goal and developing a four prong strategy - energy efficiency, sourcing renewables, zero emissions, and policy and scale - to work towards it Partnering with utilities to advance renewable energy procurement and green tariffs Importance of joining and engaging with trade organizations - SEIA, REBA, AWEA Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Rob's Final Five Questions Responses: 1. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? My one advice is, I call it, you know, the three P's. You have the people, planet, profit. Profit is the passion, perseverance and pragmatic view that you need to have. It's really that passion to drive the industry is a huge proponent or huge reason why I do what I do today. You got to have passion in order to really work both internally as well as externally communicate the efforts that we're doing as a company and as an individual. 2. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability, renewable energy, whatever it might be? It's a continued scale. I mean, you've seen the transformation of the industry over the past 10 years, the price declines, but it's also the ability to integrate battery storage into addressing the intermittency of the renewables. So that really is what's going to allow the scaling of renewables beyond to what it is today. 3. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? Ooh, that's a good one. I have read so many books. Let me come back to that one. 4. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Could be anything from websites, associations, technology, or software programs. Yeah, it really comes down to, I think REBA and I use a lot of news organizations, just keeping up with the various thread of what's happening on a day to day basis. You know, what's the next transformational change that's occurred? One of the things I read today was a French utility is actually looking at battery storage to forego having to do transmission upgrades, which can be both timely and take amounts of time to do as well as costly and thinking about addressing transmission congestion that renewables bring to the grid. So I think it's that readily accessible information that you can get from the internet itself and then thinking about how does that holistically impact what we're trying to do as a company and in the industry from a scaling standpoint. 5. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at GM? You can go to GMsustainability.com to be able to look at all GM's sustainability efforts. There's some good components that you can see what GM is doing and the efforts of renewables on there as well. You can also go to my LinkedIn site. You can kind of get some of the latest information on the things that I'm looking at and working and doing as well. As I said, you can go to the internet and there's some good information of tidbits that we've put out there as a company. We've got GM's blueprint for renewables that you can find that kind of summarizes our holistic strategy towards our renewable procurement efforts and our scaling efforts. That would be a great places to go to find some information about myself as well as GM. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Yalmaz Siddiqui is the Vice President of Corporate Sustainability at MGM Resorts International.  He started this role in May 2016 and is responsible for leading a range of environmental sustainability initiatives for the company, including green conventions, food waste reduction, waste management, sustainable sourcing and employee engagement. He is also developing an advanced sustainability strategy framework for MGM Resorts, including metrics and goals, project accountability and roles, and reporting strategy. Yalmaz has a Masters in Environment & Development from the University of Cambridge in England, and a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University in Canada. Yalmaz joins Sustainable Nation to discuss: Size and scale of impact of MGM Resorts Sustainable purchasing Food waste reduction and overall waste management strategies Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Yalmaz's Final Five Questions: 1. What is one piece of advice you'd give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Well, I'd say first, don't get stuck in false dichotomies and don't let others force you into false dichotomies around sustainability is always more expensive or sustainability means less luxury. Find proof that that is not true because it's not always true. In fact, it's often not true and persuade others using the help in persuading them by showing them politely that their predisposition might might be wrong. I'd also say pilot and scale new initiatives. Don't try and go comprehensive and too ambitious, too quick. 2. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think this function has really matured and corporate America and corporate world in general is really interested in the value this functional area brings to the brands and to our companies more broadly. I think the excitement comes from maybe the emergence of this function as a very real and important thing that matters to major customers matters to employees and increasingly matters to investors. So it's the sort of arrival is a real thing in the corporate world that makes me excited. 3. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? So I read a lot and there's a lot of books that I could recommend, but I'm going recommend two, if that's okay. Number one is Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's not about environmental sustainability, it's not about corporate purpose, it's about how you influence others. It's got a whole series of lessons that have been extremely useful in my career because ultimately people in these roles or we in our roles have influenced, but we have no authority and so how do you learn from the best thinkers on influence? That's number one. The second would be Resonate by Nancy Duarte. Nancy Duarte's got a consultancy. It was the world's first and still foremost PowerPoint consultancy. She advises on how to craft great PowerPoints. Her message is that PowerPoint is the business world's communications tool, but no one knows how to use it or very few people know how to use it. If you read Resonate, you'll learn how to use it much more effectively than dense bullet points that no one wants to read or that you read when presenting. So read, Resonate and you will resonate more. 4. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I think HBR, Harvard Business Review, reading that magazine, reading Fast Company. I'm a member of GreenBiz Executive Network, being part of that and Sustainable Brands. Then thematically on food, I really like to focus on ReFED. In terms of materials, love Ellen MacArthur Foundation's work. Associations, I'll certainly advocate SPLC (Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council) as one. SPLC, Sustainable Brands, and GreenBiz those are my go to’s. 5. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the sustainability work at MGM? Well, I'm the only Yalmaz Siddiqui on LinkedIn. I believe it makes it easy. And then MGMresorts.com/CSR. You can read all about our programs around focusing on what matters, embracing humanity and protecting the planet. About Sustridge  Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in a TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Bruno Sarda is the President of CDP North America. He works to grow the organization and increase environmental disclosure and action among companies and local governments, as well as manages the North American team and operations. Previously he served as Chief Sustainability Officer for NRG, a leading integrated power company, and has also worked at Dell and Charles Schwab. Bruno is a faculty member and Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University. Bruno Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Corporate climate action and ESG investing momentum  Sustainability leadership in a post coronavirus world Coronavirus potential to increase company commitments to climate resiliency  Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Bruno's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Make friends with your CFO. Too many sustainability people seem afraid to spend too much time with their CFO, but I think the more you do that, the more successful you'll be. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? The rapid growth in organizations setting science based targets especially and net zero commitments. That's definitely be quickly becoming the norm and that's very encouraging. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? I really liked The Big Pivot by Andrew Winston. It's maybe three or four years old now, but I think he really structured and architected the book in a really interesting way. It's very approachable, it's actionable and it's still very relevant. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? One of the tools I really like is the weekly digest that the Corporate Eco Forum puts out every Monday morning. It's a great curated list of what's happening in the world of sustainability, on the corporate side, policy and key pieces of new research or new reports. It's free to anyone. You can go sign up at the Corporate Eco Forum website. For those who are interested in what's happening in the field of sustainability careers, I think Ed Carly puts out a really interesting kind of weekly curated list of what the key roles are out there. It's always interesting to see who's hiring for what, what they're naming the roles and where they're trying to staff those roles in different organizations. For those out in the job market, it's a great list. But even if you're like me, not in the job market, that's just really interesting to see where some of the energy is around role creation. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work at CDP? You can go to www.cdp.net. We have lots of resources there on our website. If you want to find me, best place probably is LinkedIn. I'm not hard to find on LinkedIn. I'm not nearly as active maybe on Twitter as I used to be. I just find it's kind of become a bit crowded and toxic. I find LinkedIn a more useful place and anybody who wants to reach out, feel free to find me on LinkedIn. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Erin works to drive positive change across industries by leading WWF’s packaging and material science program.  Through her efforts, she works with business and industry to help them make informed, sustainable material choices for their products and packaging. Her work focuses on the major commodities that go into packaging, which come in many different forms and materials, and how to integrate sustainability into the decisions and trade-offs that must be evaluated across a product’s lifecycle. Erin works with companies to strategically address their packaging work streams by focusing on developing transparency in the supply chain for the major packaging materials and pursuing strategies that reduce the environmental impact of these materials through responsible sourcing. Prior to joining WWF, Erin worked at Hewlett Packard for 10 years as a packaging engineer responsible for the design and implementation of laser jet printer and media packaging.  Erin Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The importance and urgency of eliminating plastic in our environment WWF’s global No Plastic in Nature strategy ReSource: Plastic – WWF’s activation hub to help companies turn plastic commitments into meaningful/measurable action Fixing a broken waste management system: what can companies, governments and consumers do? NextGenCup Challenge and other innovative ideas needed to solve for our plastic crisis Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Erin's Final Questions Highlight: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I would say that collaboration is going to be the key to us solving these big global complex issues. Often, in the sustainability space, we get really concerned about our piece of the work. My sandbox. This is mine. That's not productive and it's not going to help us get to where we want to go. I think that the most successful people I see today in this space are the ones who are building the bridges, not burning them. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm excited that I feel like we have turned a page from where I had to spend time talking people into the value of sustainability for businesses into a desire to continue to raise the level of ambition. It's becoming the cost of doing business and now they are thinking about how to go behind that to do something to give back. That is exciting because the level of innovation and opportunity when the leadership in those organizations is at that point is really powerful. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? There are so many great organizations out there that teach me a lot of stuff. In the sustainability space you often have an area where you specialize and then you have to depend on all these other smart people to help you to learn about those things you don't know, enough so that you can valuable in that larger context. I spent a lot of time on websites of other organizations that I respect, learning about some of the programs that they're doing and how I could build a bridge between their work. I spent a lot of time on Ocean Conservancy and they have great resources. The Recycling Partnership is really specializing in increasing recycling in cities. They know a lot of data and wonky information about what people put in their bins and how to increase getting more bins and more collection in cities. I've been learning a lot about investment both in technologies and in different types of infrastructure from the Closed Loop Partners. On the global stage, I'm learning a lot more about how policy and legislation can drive some change that we need to see through other organizations who are doing great work like World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation. So, I spend a lot of time looking at what other powerful organizations are doing and try to build off of it. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at WWF? There is an experts page at the WWF website. There's also a lot going on at panda.org, which is our website. It talks about all the programmatic work that World Wildlife Fund US is doing, not just on plastic material science, but also on species preservation, ecosystem preservation, freshwater and oceans, the forest and of course the complex food and climate systems that interact with all of those things, including plastics. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Jennifer Motles is the Director of Social Impact & Sustainability at Philip Morris International. Jennifer is an International and Human Rights lawyer. She is helping to advance PMI's transformation goal of becoming a smoke-free company, with an emphasis on stakeholder engagement and social impact. Previously, Jennifer worked for international organizations including UNCITRAL, UNODC, UNCTAD/ITC, and as Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Officer at the United Nations and other international organizations. Jennifer holds a JD degree from Universidad de Chile; an LLM from University of California, Berkeley; as well as specialized diplomas in women’s rights, sustainable finance, corporate social responsibility, risk communications, and political affairs from IHEID, Harvard Business School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Stanford University. Jennifer Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: PMI’s business transformation towards a smoke-free future Inclusion: achieving substantial and tangible change through collaboration, not exclusion PMI’s impact across the value chain / future targets: AWS Certification (water stewardship), Agricultural Labor Practices (ALP) program, CDP, carbon neutrality factory targets Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Jennifer's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I would say patience. I think that in the sustainability field you're working towards the long term and sometimes results are not visible immediately. The fact that positive change is not immediately perceivable, doesn't mean that you're not doing the right thing. You just need to wait a little bit. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I am very excited about the role of the investor community and how savvy they are becoming in better understanding their role in driving change in companies and what ESG really means. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? I just started reading the book by Joseph Stiglitz, Measuring What Counts. It's about the global movement for wellbeing, and basically, he goes on to developing new metrics that go beyond GDP. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Podcasts like this are a very, very useful tool. I think that opportunities to have conversations like at a sustainability conference, sustainability magazines and sustainability podcasts are always very much appreciated. Where can people go to learn more about you and the sustainability work at Philip Morris? You can learn more about our company's sustainability strategy and transformation at pmi.com/sustainability and you can find all the resources there. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Jeff Wooster is the global sustainability director for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics. In this role, he collaborates with the entire value chain to promote and improve the sustainability value of plastic packaging. He is the past president of AMERIPEN, and is on the Board of Directors for GreenBlue. He serves on the steering team for the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Alliance signature initiative on marine debris and as Co-Chair of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Roadmap to Curb Ocean Waste (ROW) initiative. Additionally, Wooster serves as chair for American Chemistry Council’s Plastics Division Packaging Team and is a member of the Flexible Packaging Association’s Sustainability Task Force. Jeff Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Moving beyond the circular economy The future of plastics demanding radical collaboration The importance of  affordable solutions Dow's 2025 sustainability goals Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Jeff's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I would look at how sustainability interacts with business. If you work in a company and you want to work on sustainability, you don't have to work for the sustainability function to do that. You can work in R&D, you can work in Manufacturing, you can work in Supply Chain, you can work in Marketing and you can work in Accounts Payable. Any of those jobs have opportunities for people to apply sustainability principles to their work. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? The thing I'm most excited about is that people are really committed to sustainability for the long term. It's not a fad. It's something that people are trying to think very holistically about and make sure that they do the right things for the best longterm benefit for people and the planet. What is one book you'd recommend sustainability professionals read? I'd love to recommend Patrick Moore's book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout. Not just because he quit working for Greenpeace and started working on other things, but because he has lots of examples in that book of how sometimes things aren't as they seem. Sometimes we have to think in more detail and with a bit more complexity about the sustainability issues that we face. We can't just scratch the surface for five seconds and assume that we have the answer. We really need to dig into the details and make sure that we understand things on a deeper level. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I really like the websites of a number of our partners. So, The Sustainable Packaging Coalition has a website how2recycle.info, and it talks about various recycling programs and their label. ameripen.org has a number of useful publications on packaging. There's a great one on the value of packaging that we created early in the organization, but it's still applicable today. The Recycling Partnership has a great website. Keep America Beautiful. Ocean Conservancy. I could go on and on, but lots of great organizations have lots of good material available. People can also go to the Dowpackaging.com website and get some information on what Dow is doing. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at Dow? If you Google my name Jeff Wooster, you'll find some videos and things that I've made, but if you go to Dowpackaging.com, you'll be redirected to one of the pages that talks about some of the activities that we're doing around sustainability. And of course, you can go to the websites of those partners that I've mentioned and see the activities that we're supporting there as well. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

As UT Arlington's first Chief Sustainability Officer, Meghna works collaboratively to foster partnerships among academic, research, and operational departments at UT Arlington. She leads institutional sustainability efforts in support of the UT Arlington 2020 Strategic Plan- Bold Solutions | Global Impact that is enabling a sustainable megacity that centers on four themes: health and the human condition, sustainable urban communities, global environmental impact and data-driven discovery. She also works to address opportunities to promote sustainability in several areas energy efficiency, resource conservation, waste management, transportation, education, outreach, community engagement, supporting and encouraging student initiatives, and implementing an interdisciplinary and sustainability-focused curriculum. She also teaches courses related to Sustainability to graduate and undergraduate students at UTA. She has spearheaded launching a Regional Center of Expertise for Education in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in North Texas, a program of the United Nations University, and the Institute for Sustainability and Global Impact at UT Arlington.  Meghna Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: How academic/educational institutions can work towards advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals Approaches to engaging with youth and students to educate and create awareness about sustainability Importance of food sustainability programs and initiatives Examples of public-private partnerships with UT Arlington Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Meghna's Final Five Question Responses What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I believe that sustainability is a word of the young generation because they are going to live in this world. What we do now matters to them, so I realized that in order to communicate with the students on campus, or other sustainability folks, you really have to be true to yourself. That authenticity in communicating your vision and values is important in showing these people that you really do care and are not doing this just because it's your job. Sometimes I think that blending those values with the unique goals and ambitions that you have, and even qualities like empathy, can be very motivating to others. I believe that leadership for a sustainability professional should live at the intersection of that spark and your values. You have to be true to yourself and you have to believe in what you're doing to make that connection with others. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? Probably the UN SDG's are something that I'm really excited about because they were adopted in 2015 and the last four years I have seen how people are passionate. Of course, it has its own challenges and disadvantages and there's always something to criticize. But I do believe that they offer this global framework for people to pursue their sustainability goals. They give guidance in terms of the indicators on the goals the United Nations have put forward. It could be your small office, your small campus, small city or even on a regional scale. I feel they are amazing and I think everybody should start adapting them and using them for their sustainability initiatives and program because they have such global implications. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? I don't know how much time you have to read, but I don't get to read much. But I listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm an avid podcast listener and one of my favorites is called How I Built This. The host talks to these founders of amazing companies on how the company came about. A couple of months ago, I listened to this podcast by Alice Waters who, in 1960, went to France and learned all about food sustainability and how healthy food choices affect you personally and professionally. She came back to Berkely and started this amazing restaurant. Her story resonates with me because I focus on food sustainability and give it a lot of importance. Listening to her story about her struggles of launching a restaurant in Berkeley in 1971 where she was using locally sourced, organically grown food to come up with the restaurant menu options was just amazing. I would highly recommend listening to that podcast on NPR. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I go to the AASHE website a lot. All universities that are AASHE members have access to the portal. So every time you are trying to implement a project or have some information that you want to share, or you need some information to help out with whatever it is you're doing, I always go to the AASHE portal to check out the information that others have shared. I really like the SDG Explorer, which is a tool for implementing SDG's in operations. I think on campus you do have to interact with students in a language that they understand, so a lot of newsletters, social media and trying to engage with them on a personal level. Those tools have been very useful to me. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work you're leading at UTA. We have a very good, robust website at: uta.edu/sustainability. We post all the information on all our projects. People can go there or they can email me at mtare@uta.edu. They can follow me on Twitter at @meghnatare. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Samantha is currently the Sustainability Consultant at HealthPartners, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and has been an integral part of the nationally recognized Sustainability program for over four years. In this role, she works to identify opportunities to strengthen the triple bottom line: people, prosperity, and planet. Such opportunities include, reducing waste, efficient energy management, environmentally preferred purchasing, and employee engagement. Samantha is responsible for implementing and managing sustainability programming across the HealthPartners family of care which includes 8 hospitals, over 70 clinics, and more than 26,000 employees. Samantha Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: What hospitals are doing to address sustainability Climate change, human health impacts and the health care industry's role in this dynamic Leading an organization's first GHG emissions inventory The Minnesota Sustainable Growth Coalition Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Samantha's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I would say to be patient yet persistent. I think sustainability work, at least my experience, has been most successful when you bring a lot of different stakeholders with different perspectives together to really collaborate on how to solve these issues. That takes a lot of time, so patience and then also persistence. Sometimes the first time you suggest a project or an idea and might get shot down, but don't give up on it if it's something that you really know will have a big impact or something that you really believe in. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? The way that it brings people together. Going back to the Minnesota Sustainable Growth Coalition, getting businesses which may traditionally be seen as competitors all in the same room together, talking about environmental stewardship in sustainability and troubleshooting and sharing stories and barriers so we can all learn from each other. This is something that's really unique to this area. ROI and shareholders are always a part of the conversation, but also there's that recognition and understanding that the work that we're doing is greater than ourselves and our businesses and really is is the right thing to do. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? I think for those people who are interested then in learning more about sustainable health care, Kathy Gerwig, she is currently the vice president of environmental stewardship for Kaiser Permanente. She wrote a book called Green Health Care and really has been a trailblazer in the healthcare sustainability world. I think it gives a good overview on the issues healthcare is facing today and the initiatives and projects that the healthcare industry could work on to help improve the health of their communities. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? So we're members of an organization called Practice Green Health. They're the national premier health care sustainability organization. This is where I go every time I run into a question or an issue or a barrier. They have a website with a ton of great resources. They also have amazing knowledgeable staff that are there to help. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work being done at Health Partners? We have a public website at healthpartners.com and search for sustainability. There's a great summary there of all the work we're doing and our future goals. For my work personally, people can check out my LinkedIn page. I'm active on LinkedIn. I love to share updates about things we've got going on here at Health Partners and also some initiatives going on outside of work. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Frank has spent over 27 years working with residuals management and composting both in operations management as well as sales and marketing. In 1993, he started North Carolina’s first source separated organics composting facility. As past principal of Akkadia Consulting, Frank provided professional consulting services on projects of animal waste management, biosolids management, coal ash residuals, composting of industrial residuals, product development and marketing. He has facilitated the turnkey start-up of award winning composting facilities, taking them from concept to feasibility to operational, overseeing permitting, equipment selection, hiring and training of personnel, as well as the development and execution of the product marketing plan. Frank also managed the Novozymes’ Nature’s GREEN-RELEAF™ composting facility from 2003-2015. In 2014, Frank was the recipient of the Hi Kellogg Award for displaying outstanding service to the US composting industry over a period of many years. He has a BS in Plant and Soil Sciences from West Virginia University. Frank Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The work of the US Composting Council The state of composting in the US Roadblocks and challenges to composting Getting composting started in your community Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Frank's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Build on your knowledge base. Each job should get you the next job. In your first job, you should learn and network to your second job, third job and so on. Go to seminars and conferences based on your job or your topic of interest. When you go there, find a mentor. I've found a lot of mentors over the course of my career. I really didn't know a lot about composting. I did a lot of reading and networking/talking to mentors. Once you become fluid in your subject topic, book speaking engagements and get certified in your subject area. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? The millennials and the young professionals. We have a young professionals group at the US Composting Council. I just think that they're interested in making our world more sustainable. I'm impressed by their passion and their drive. I'm also excited about how big brand companies are really starting to embrace sustainability at the corporate level and also within their products. I'm seeing more and more of the big brand names worry about their packaging and their processes. A lot of that has to do obviously with shareholders and those kinds of issues. I think we're getting there. It's a slow turn, but we're getting there. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? The one that really impressed me the most is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken in 2008. If you go back and read that book, he's predicting stuff in 2008 that's happening now. I've read Cradle to Cradle and Upcycle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. I'm now reading Drawdown, which is coauthored by Paul Hawken and Katharine Wilkinson. Katharine will be our keynote speaker at our conference in Charleston in January. What are some of your favorite resources or tools it really help you in your work? There's a group called the American Society of Association of Executives, or ASAE. They're a great resource for me because I don't have a lot of experience managing associations, so I use them a lot. They've got a great resource and reference area to go to. We just got a new association management system called Your Membership. That's exciting because it has a learning management system in there. It helps us manage our information a lot easier. Google docs, Google sheets and we use Basecamp a lot for external resources as well as working with our committees. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work? I'm on LinkedIn so please link in to me. The Composting Council's website is www.compostingcouncil.org. Our foundation is www.compostfoundation.org. If you're interested in our conference it's www.compostconference.com. If you go to our website, we have YouTube. We're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, and we're on LinkedIn, both the foundation as well as the council. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, sustainability reporting, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Joel Makower is chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group Inc., producer of GreenBiz.com, and lead author of the annual State of Green Business report. A veteran journalist with more than 40 years' experience, he also hosts GreenBiz's annual GreenBiz Forums, the global event series VERGE, and other events. Joel is author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, The New Grand Strategy: Restoring America's Prosperity, Security, and Sustainability in the 21st Century (St. Martin's Press). Joel Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The evolution of GreenBiz and becoming a top resource for sustainability professionals Current state and momentum around the circular economy The ESG investing movement pushing corporate sustainability forward Excitement around carbon capture, carbon storage and working towards carbon positive Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights What are you seeing out there in regards to the circular economy? Do you envision us ever getting to a true circular economy? I know one of your annual events is Circularity. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the discussions that have been going on at that conference and your thoughts in general on what you're seeing in the circular economy movement. I've been in this field for a long time and I've seen a lot of frameworks, ideas, concepts and other things come to the fore. Most of them fade back into the proverbial woodwork. Circular economy is different. It's the first of these frameworks that I've ever seen that really requires a company to engage its entire value chain, as opposed to something like energy efficiency, renewable energy or waste reduction and things that may involve some partners, but you can largely do that by yourself. This is something where you have to rethink how materials are designed, where the materials come from, where it's made, how it's made, how it's sold into the marketplace and the relationship with the customer because it may no longer be a buy and sell relationship, it may be something else. We have to consider what the ongoing post-market relationship is, because instead of just a few years of a service contract there may be a 10 or even 20 year subscription kind of relationship in some cases. We have to consider how you get stuff back and what happens to it. How do you extract the materials? Can you repair and refurbish it? Is it produced into something new and what is the market for that? How does the money change hands? It is really complicated. I've never seen anything come to the fore this quickly and attract the nature of excitement and companies. Just look at the companies Loop has with Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, Mars, Clorox, Coca-Cola and a bunch of smaller brands. They have evolved UPS in the program and a resource management company. It's a big system and it's admittedly just getting going in various locations including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and an area in France. It's just really happened this summer, so it's going to be a while before we really have a sense of this, probably at least the end of the year. But it's a really interesting experiment and it's one of many. It's just really extraordinary what's going on out there. So, we launched a conference this year called Circularity. There really hadn't been a comprehensive, multi-day circular economy event in North America. There'd been a few smaller ones, but none that really brought together the entire value chain from the polymer companies like Dow, DuPont, BASF and others all the way through the brands and the collection and recovery companies. We didn't know how many people to expect. It was a launch events, so we kind of stuck our finger in the air and said, "Well, 500 people would be great." We had to shut down registration at 850 because the fire marshal basically told us we had to. Aside from the numbers, it was really quite a mood there because you had all these people from some of the world's biggest brands loking around the room and saying, "Wow, I had no idea that there were so many of us." That was a special moment and we think that we're onto something, so we'll be doing this annually. The next one's in May in Atlanta next year. Loop requires a change from the consumer. Consumers have to play a role in this. Do you think consumers are ready to change the way that they purchase and they consume to help work towards a circular economy? Well, it's an open question and a good one. I started this part of my career with the consumer facing piece, and back in 1989 there was the first study of consumers in the US about their interest and willingness about making greener choices in the marketplace by an organization called the Michael Peters Group. It had some very large percentage, 78% or 92%, of people who said that they would gladly make the green choice and some very high percentage of those would pay a small premium for the privilege of doing so. Of course, if we look at our grocery carts and everything else, they haven't changed all that much. They do these surveys all the time now and the numbers aren't all that different. So, there's this big disconnect between what consumers say they want to do and what they actually do. For it to succeed, green has to equal better. Better can be defined in lots of different ways - cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate, higher quality, better for my family, better for my community, better for my image, recyclable, locally sourced and any number of things. I's going to depend on whether you're talking about cosmetics, a computer or a car, but so many of these products have not been better. They have been harder to find, more expensive or didn't work as well from brands you didn't recognize. I think that's the big question. How much are consumers willing to try new things? Will it be seen as better? Will it be more convenient? Will it be more affordable? Will it be higher quality? Will it be something that makes them feel good? People change all the time and how we do things, but it has to be better. That's the real thing. People say they want a change, but when it comes down to actually making those changes, not so much. So that's the open question. Will Loop be better? Will a subscription model for something that we used to buy for clothing be better? It will be for people who could afford it and for some higher end fashion, but it won't be for the people who shop at, let's say, Old Navy, because those things are just too inexpensive to put it into a circular model. So, we're going to see a lot of different things, a thousand flowers blooming, and some of them are going to take and some of them are going to wither and die. I think that's where we're at and, and the ultimate answer your question is it depends on the product, the offering, how well it's available and all kinds of other things. It's going to vary depending on product category to product category. We may see some big changes in some and some huge resistance in others. GreenBiz has also done a great job in talking about how the investment community is getting engaged in sustainability and is helping to push the sustainability movement forward. For many years, the discussion was that investing in sustainability and battling climate change was going to be too hard on the economy and it was going to be too costly. It was going to slow growth. Now we're hearing the complete opposite. We're hearing that if we don't address climate change, it's going to have catastrophic impacts on our economy. The exciting thing is a lot of this is coming from the investment community. Talk to us about this change in dynamic that you're seeing and how this is really moving things forward. Yeah, the conversation has flipped in a certain way from "What is business doing to impact the climate?" To "How is the climate going to impact business?" That's a very different conversation from corporate responsibility to risk, plain and simple. Risk can come in a lot of different forms from, from reputational and financial risk to right to operate risk. If you are a heavy water user in a water stressed area, you may not be welcome there, for example. There's business continuity risks, the ability to have reliable supply chains. All of this gets factored in by climate change and so this has become a factor for investors because they are naturally concerned about risk. That's where they live. There's a framework introduced in Europe a couple of years ago with the lovely acronym, TCFD. It stands for the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosure. Basically, it's a framework on how companies can report to investors the impacts to them, to their company, their operations, their supply chains, their customers and their employees in a climate constrained world looking out any number of years at different levels of degrees of global warming. Investors are interested in that and taking a look at that. In Europe and in Asia, that's becoming required to be listed on some stock exchanges. It's not being required so much here in the United States, but as is often the case here in the US, regulations are coming more from the market than from the government. So, if you look at the big institutional investors, the BlackRocks, the Vanguards, the State Streets, the CalPERS and other big pension funds organizations, they are now leaning into what's called ESG environmental, social and governance metrics. These have been around for a long time, basically metrics of how companies track their impacts. But these have been around and not that interesting to mainstream investors, but suddenly it is. So, now these things which had been sitting off in the margins are now sitting in the middle of Wall Street, which is sort of changing the game. One of the other things we launched this year in addition to our Circularity Conference, is something within our GreenBiz conference that we hold every February in Phoenix, called the the Green Fin Summit, looking at green finance issues. This is an event within an event with about a hundred people, invitation only getting the ecosystem in the room to discuss some big challenges. In this case, the big challenge is how do we align the information that companies are reporting with the information that investors need to make risk-based asset allocation decisions? That turns out to be not so simple, because for all the companies that are reporting, it's not the necessarily the accessible comparable information that investors need to look at a company and determine how well they are poised to survive and thrive in a climate constrained world. So, this is just getting going, but it's a really fascinating area. The question is, following the money, will that really drive change at a much faster scale, scope and speed? And I think it can. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Learn about things beyond sustainability. In some ways, sustainability is too important to be left to sustainability professionals. So, learn finance, learn marketing, learn supply chain, learn, procurement and learn HR. Learn any number of other disciplines and bring your sustainability instincts and knowledge to that. That's how change happens. The sustainability department in way too many companies is a little bit of a ghetto where it's around compliance, it's around doing well by doing good, but it's not seen as strategic to companies. So, the more you can learn about other things and embed that into sustainability work or embed sustainability into that other work, I think the bigger impact you can have. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? Well, everything. But I think we've been talking about some of it - the circular economy, the green finance piece of it, the carbon draw down. Those are three big ones. I think some of these are the newest emerging and potentially most impactful things going on out there. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? That's an unfair question because I've written a bunch of books on sustainability. The question is do I talk about Cradle to Cradle or some of the other iconic books out there, or do I talk about The New Grand Strategy? This is a book I coauthored a couple of years ago that talks about an economic plan for America, born at the Pentagon, that embeds sustainability as a national strategic imperative. It's a different version of what some now call the Green New Deal, but it's a really bipartisan and it's not a Washington program. It's really bottom up since we're not looking to Washington for leadership in the United States, it's really going to happen at the city and state level. I still think that that's a really interesting topic of how do we look at the economy and look at sustainability and figure out how sustainability can leverage economic opportunities at all parts of the economic scale. What are some of your favorite resources or tools it really help you in your work? I just love being out there and talking to companies and real people doing real things. GreenBiz and other resources are great. I read Bloomberg, I read the Guardian, mainstream media is starting to cover this more and more and I always am fascinated by that to see how they do it. The answer often is not very well. But there's no substitute for getting out there and doing informational interviews, meeting people for lunch, going to conferences, networking events and just learning what people are doing and how they're grappling, how they're succeeding, what's not going well, what they wish they could be doing more of. I think that's fascinating and the best way to learn. Every company, depending on its size, sector, geography, competitive landscape, culture of innovation and a number of other factors, does this differently and needs to do it differently. So, it's not something where there's a six part program or a 12-step or any other program that you can check into, although there are some best practices. You learn from other people. That's what I find most effective. There is a really high percentage of people in this field who are just great people with the spirit of generosity, spirit of caring, who obviously care about the planet and they're doing God's work. They tend to be a just really enjoyable people to hang out with. Where can people go to learn more by you and the work of GreenBiz? Well you can go to greenbiz.com. You can also check out my personal site and makower.com to see some of the other things that I've been up to. GreenBiz is a great resource we have five weekly newsletters, a different one each workday. Mine comes out every Monday, called Green Buzz which looks at the profession of sustainability and what's going on in that. There's also one on energy, one on the circular economy, one on this verge in technology and one on transportation and mobility issues. They're all different written by different people. They're all pretty good and it's all free. You can find all that on GreenBiz. There's also a number of other webcasts, webinars and other resources that we have. And of course, if you can make it to one of our three big events every year, we'd love to see everybody there. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Bill Reed is an internationally recognized planning consultant, design process facilitator, lecturer, and author in sustainability and regeneration. He is a principal of Regenesis, Inc. – a regenerative design, living systems integrator, and education organization. His work centers on creating the framework for and managing an integrative, whole and living system design process. This work is known as Regenerative Development. It is a meta-discipline that unifies the pattern understanding practices of Ecological Design, Biophilia, and Organizational Psychology into a design process that lifts building and community planning into full integration and co-evolution with living systems. The objective: to improve the overall quality of the physical, social and spiritual life of our living places and therefore the planet. Bill Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Using regenerative design principles in business and the built environment How permaculture informs regenerative development Healing the earth in 18 months Moving beyond sustainability to regenerative development Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights: Tell us a little bit about the process at Regenesis. You talk a lot about "place" and the "story of place." Tell us what that means and why this is so important when you're leading this type of regenerative work. Yeah, it's the foundation. By place we mean everything in that place: human consciousness, worms, habitat, geology, business, infrastructure and you name it. All of those aspects of life are in what we call "place." So, we don't separate people from place, for instance. They're part of it. And we don't separate nature from place. It's not about placemaking, it's about place as a living organism. Our philosophy is that every place we live in is a unique living organism on the planet and is evolutionary in its own particular, unique way. Unless we understand this, then what gives us the right to build there? We have found that once we work in congruence and in harmony with place, actually ecosystems and social systems recover their health, become dynamically stable and evolutionary all at the same time. The shift that we see when we work with that level of wholeness is profound. I learned so much just chatting with some of your colleagues during the work that we did and just learning how the geography and the history of a certain place, and understanding that that's really what created the culture that's in that place today. It's amazing how crucial it is to understand this to be able to address the specific sustainability issues that place might be facing. Yes. You can't escape mother nature, it just surfaces. You might ask, "So what? What does having that understanding do for us?" If nothing else, it awakens us to fall in love. I like to say that we're dating nature when we do this and it helps a community actually understand, honor and love what and who this place is. It's also a much different motivator than feeling guilty or feeling that we should do something. Although fear is a great motivator too of course, but hopefully we have that impulse of care and mutual reciprocity behind it. You've been talking about this need to transition from sustainability to regenerative development for quite some time. We're now seeing it become more of a topic in corporations, in universities, in communities that are starting to use that language of moving beyond sustainability. How do you think this transition is coming along? What are you seeing in this movement overall? I am seeing some incredible work being done in the regenerative agricultural field. I think it's more easy to understand because people can regenerate. They can see that the soil can be regenerated. But there's a nuance here. Regeneration is not restoration. Restoration is part of regeneration, but regeneration is the ability to do it again. It isn't doing it the first time. So, to regenerate soil or regenerate an ecosystem is not about doing it once. The Re is really important. It's the capability to keep engaging as systems change and as life evolves. So the "Re" is important here. It's rebirth. It's birth, life, death, rebirth cycles. So, how do we learn to understand our role in the system? Farmers typically are closely engaged with their soil, so to some degree they're doing regenerative work if they're paying attention. But about 90% of the world doesn't live on farms anymore. And they're the ones with the votes. They're the ones that are making decisions. How do we build that understanding in a population that basically thinks food comes in plastic wrapped containers. What is one piece of advice you'd give sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Number one, work with deep integration. Co-create with community, design team and owners. Once you start working with integration, the question becomes where do you stop integrating? That means that we actually have to start getting into how life works. So, if we're sustaining life then we better understand how life works as best we can. So, the recommendation is understand how to be an ecologist. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability or regenerative development? I think a lot of us are somewhat depressed about the state of the world and how little we've done. But when even three to five years ago, people were not very receptive to this concept, so many people are opening their minds and hearts now to realize that we have to do something differently. So, I don't know if I'm excited about anything in the world of sustainability, I'm excited about the world that people are realizing fundamentally that we have to work in a different way. It's that Greek definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I think finally people are realizing we need to change the paradigms out of which we're working. So that's exciting. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? He speaks a lot about what we believe in. His name is Charles Eisenstein and his new book is called: Climate, a New Story. I'm kind of tired of reading about climate, but he changes the dimensions on that. I recommend that. I'm reading it now and enjoying it a lot. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? We are collaborative learners. We are learning this as we're teaching it to people. There is no answer book for this work. So, I highly recommend the Regenerative Practitioner Course. I highly recommend reading Carol Sanford's books, because I think both of them talk about this work in a unique way. The resources are really these living system frameworks and you can read about them. Yeah, it sounds so self aggrandizing. I apologize for that, but I just don't know the other resources for these things. JG Bennett's work is a source for these systemic frameworks. They open up a different world and so I'll leave it at that. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work you're doing at Regenesis? Our website is regenesisgroup.com and you can also access our education site, which we just changed the name to Institute for Regeneration. My email address is: reed@regenesisgroup.com. If anybody is really interested, we do have articles on the website. I have more that I can send people. I'm always happy to send stuff out. I'm happy to respond to anybody if they're interested in exploring more. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Timothy J. Mohin is the Chief Executive of GRI, developer of the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting standards. A veteran in the field of corporate sustainability reporting, Tim is responsible for driving GRI's mission to empower decisions that create social, environmental and economic benefits for everyone.   Prior to his appointment as Chief Executive, Tim was Senior Director of Corporate Responsibility for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). He is also a former Chairman of the Board for the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and former member of the Conflict Free Sourcing Initiative’s steering committee.  Previously, Tim founded and led Apple’s Supplier Responsibility program. He also led Intel’s environmental and sustainability functions. Tim started his career with the US government. With the Environmental Protection Agency, he led the development of the toxics provisions of the Clean Air Act Amendments. Later, Tim was senior legislative staff for the Chairman of Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Tim Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Testifying for mandated ESG reporting in the US Evolving GRI standards and framework to meet new demands Developing a new GRI standard to disclose corporate taxation Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights: Can you talk to us a little bit about the importance of ESG initiatives to a company's bottom line and how you think we can best communicate this to those that don't get it? Yeah, it's a great question. We are viewing this from a global perspective and there's many, many examples where undisclosed material risks have led to some pretty negative effects on companies. But the bigger picture that we're seeing is that ESG information, so-called sustainability information, has moved from a niche, let's face it, reputational issue into the very mainstream of global commerce where analysts, investors, asset owners are demanding this information and rely on this information to make decisions. So, GRI has responded to that by becoming the international standard setter, but we need to do more. We need to have better consistency, better compatibility and better quality. Let's face it, a lot of these reports are a hundred pages or more and they have a lot of pretty pictures and they're somewhat marketing oriented. The disclosures now need to be much more professional and that is the change that we're trying to push forward and that's the change that we're seeing in legislation, not just in the US but across the world. Investors are clearly picking up on this. They're understanding that these companies with demonstrated commitments to sustainability and transparency are outperforming others. Obviously we're seeing a huge rise in ESG and socially responsible investing. What has that recent interest and growth in ESG and socially responsible investing meant for GRI and the reporting world? Last year we had the CEO of the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, say that within the next five years, all investors will measure a company's impact on society, government and the environment to determine its worth. It's a pretty incredible statement that received a lot of attention in the investment community and the sustainability world. Well, it certainly brought us a lot of attention because as you know, most companies that are reporting are using GRI to report. Currently, we're looking at data that shows that of the top 250 companies by revenue, 93% are reporting sustainability information and 75% of those are using GRI. The numbers in the top 5,000 also show that 75% are reporting and 63% are using GRI. So, we are converging around a global standard and I think that's very important. It brings us a lot of attention and puts a lot of pressure on us as well. But I think one really important difference to point out as we mainstream from a niche reputational paradigm into one that's much more in the center of global commerce, is this area of materiality. Some actors in the field are really focused on financial materiality, but frankly, if the issues are financially material, they should be disclosed anyway in the regular financial disclosures. The fact is, when you come to ESG information, it's very difficult to make a financial materiality case for many of these issues and so you have to apply a different test. You have to look at not only what is the effect on the company in the near term, but what is the company's effect on the environment in the longterm. That's what the GRI materiality test brings to the table and I think it's very important that test be maintained as these mandates start to come online. On the topic of evolving the GRI standards, you're now addressing the issue of corporate taxation as a sustainability issue. GRI is now developing the first global standard for disclosures of the taxes companies pay in the various countries where they operate. Can you tell us a little bit about why GRI is going down this path and where you're at with that? It's really exciting because this is our first new standard in many years. We have 33 topic specific standards in the economic, environmental and social space. This one is obviously in the economic space. So, why would we prioritize this one? Well, it turns out that having appropriate payments to governments, tax payments to governments, is fundamental to government's ability to provide sustainability services to their people. If industry is not paying their fair share, if they're hiding their resources in tax havens for example, then the whole system starts to crumble. So, we have been told by many different stakeholders that this is a high priority issue and that there's millions, billions and trillions of dollars, euros and pounds that have been hidden from taxes, and it's time to expose that. Specifically embedded in the standard is country by country reporting, which is absolutely central. Most industries would argue we already have to report this, which is true within a certain country, but multinationals don't have to report across their business globally. So, that's the innovation here. We got 85 different submissions when it went to public comment and they were all positive. 43% of them were from investors. So, even investors who you might imagine going the other way are very much supportive of new standard. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I actually wrote an entire book about this. It's called Changing Business from the Inside Out. So, of the 270 plus pages, what I would pick out as this: lead from wherever you stand. A lot of people in many organizations can feel that they don't have a lot of decision making power, but they have a lot of passion for the topic. What I talk about in the book is there are many ways to express that passion to help move your organization in a sustainable direction. You don't have to be in the sustainability department to express those views in your professional life. So, lead from wherever your standing. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? You know, it's that mainstreaming movement that we talked about earlier. When I started this, I mentioned sustainability hadn't been invented, and then when it became invented it was kind of a niche play of, let's say, altruistic people. And now it's really personally and professionally satisfying to see something that I've dedicated my career to become mainstream. Now it's being talked about by global commerce actors, by the chair of the Bank of England, by Larry Fink and by others in the business world. I find that to be incredibly satisfying and hugely important to our future. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? Well, my book of course, Changing Business from the Inside Out. But also, there is a book that I really thought was inspirational. It's called How Will You Measure Your Life, by Clayton Christianson. Clayton Christiansen is the author of The Innovator's Dilemma which is a classic in the business book genre, but he also has lived his life in a way to bring a lot of extra value to the world that is not all about just making money. He wrote it all down in a book called, How Will You Measure Your Life. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? There's many I can choose from, but for me the GRI standards are incredibly helpful. Why are they helpful? Because everybody likes to talk about sustainability, but very few people can define with specificity what it means. I'm not just making this up, I say this in my book, if you really want to know what sustainability means start with the GRI standards, because it will lead you through how to conduct a materiality assessment and then each and every specific topic that's under that broad rubric of sustainability is defined. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at GRI? So I do have a website, timmohin.com. That carries all of my latest social media postings as well as my articles and press reports. That would probably be the best way to follow me, personally. Of course, there's the GRI website and the GRI newsletter, which are also really good resources for your listeners. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Julia Person is the Corporate Sustainability Manager with Craft Brew Alliance, headquartered in Portland, Oregon and a leader in brewing, branding and bringing to market world class American craft beers such as from Widmer Brothers Brewing and Kona Brewing Co. Julia Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Craft Brew Alliance's recent sustainability report and incorporating SASB framework into their reporting process CBA's work to understand GHG emissions in product packaging Sustainable design of the new Kona Brewing Company brewery Managing sustainability messaging throughout multiple different brands Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Julia's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? What I learned early on in my career, which is more relevant today even than ever, is that sustainability is a business necessity for all different types of businesses. It's just the state of the world right now. So, if you really understand the business case of sustainability and how it really can work hand in hand with business to making you more competitive, more profitable, and it's not an extra cost to the business, then I think that really would help someone out in their career to affect change and really align with those business needs. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think we're seeing that the technology is really out there. It's really caught up with what we want to do. So, it's a matter of really scaling that up and making it happen. I mentioned our water recovery and it's incredible to me that we're able to make our own clean water as a business that's cleaner than water we're being delivered. It's actually clean enough for us to make beer out of. I don't think we're there yet as a society, but I think we will be one day soon and I'm excited to see that. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. It's about the dust bowl so it's looking back, but that was one of the biggest human caused environmental disasters of recent times. So, I feel like we have a lot to learn from those historical events when we're facing current challenges. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? In our industry, we have the trade group called the Brewers Association and they have some incredible tools around sustainability. They have manuals around water and energy. A really valuable tool is they're benchmarking efforts where they're collecting data from breweries across the country of all different sizes around our energy and water use and CO2. It's valuable to be able to benchmark and see what's best in class and where's the gap. I really find that one of the most valuable tools out there. Where can people go to learn more about you and the workup CBA? The best place to go is craftbrew.com. You can click over to our About section to find our new sustainability report. It's interactive as well. So, as you're reading through that, you can click on links and find videos that pop up and so forth. So, hopefully some of you folks can check that out. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

John Marler is Vice President of Energy and Environment at AEG, the world’s leading sports and live entertainment company. In this role, John oversees AEG’s corporate environmental sustainability program, AEG 1EARTH, and AEG Energy Services, AEG’s corporate energy management program. John came to AEG from Southern California Edison where he focused on renewable and alternative energy contracts and smart grid research and development. Before joining Edison, John practiced law for four years as an attorney in New York State, focusing on commercial litigation and business transactions. John also serves on the board of directors of GRID Alternatives Greater Los Angeles. John Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Leading sustainability in the events and entertainment industry Engaging employees across the company in sustainability Updating AEG's GHG goals in response to the latest IPCC Report AEG's 2019 Sustainability Report Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights: AEG has two different area to focus on around sustainability - the buildings that are owned and operated by AEG, and then managing events that are not in your venues. Is there a different approach to these two different operations within the business? For us, it's three different scenarios. We have wholly owned and operated properties, which can be events or buildings. Then we have situations where we are a tenant in a building, which presents some different operating constraints and opportunities. Then we also have events in buildings where we are operating the premises on behalf of the client. All those scenarios have different opportunities and it really comes down to the particulars of the site and the relationship with the property to really drive a lot of the work. One example might be our Mary Moore Park Concert Series up in Seattle. That's owned by the local Parks and Recreation Authority. They provide a lot of the infrastructure and services so we work with what they're providing, whereas if we go into a site that we own and control, we have the direct relationship with some of those services and maybe approach it a little bit different. Anything advice or recommendations you can share on how to engage employees across the company in sustainability? I think the first thing is you have to build relationships. We spend a lot of time setting up quarterly calls. We have at least one call a quarter with all of our sites and I go through different operational issues, updates and talking about problems. It's really about recognizing that everyone in the company has a day job, and while we're all subject to the company's policies and procedures, not everyone is a subject matter expert in sustainability. Not everyone has that as the main focus of the job. So, it's trying to build relationships and understand what people's opportunities and constraints are and then helping them be successful within their own context. That takes a little bit longer. Sometimes it can take years to build productive longterm relationships, but ultimately I think that's a lot more successful. I don't think it's successful if you just come up with a list of requirements or demands and just blast those out in an email. That's not going to work very well. So we really try to build those relationships, understand things through the lens of our internal clients and then work with them on whatever initiative that they can push forward. Sometimes there's not much that can be done on energy efficiency, because maybe we don't own the building or any of the infrastructure, but maybe we have more leeway to do something around waste and recycling. So, it's really about building relationships and looking at things from other people's perspective and then trying to fit in what yo can. I see that AEG's 2019 sustainability report is out. I noticed a big drop in greenhouse gas emissions and that you've developed some new greenhouse gas emissions goals. Can you talk about AEG's work around reducing emissions and what led you to develop these new goals? I would say the IPCC report that came out in October of last year really drove that. Starting around 2015 we realized that the goals that we had on the books at that time weren't really future proof. They made sense when we set them in the 2010 time period, but the company had grown so fast and diversified so fast that we needed to do something different. In 2016, we announced that we adopted science based targets and basically moved from an intensity based goal to an absolute goal on the theory that the planet doesn't care how much emissions per unit of production that you do if your carbon footprint, in aggregate, is bigger than it was in the past. So, we felt it's the right thing to do to set an absolute target manage towards that. That was kind of the foundation, and then last year when the IPCC report came out, that was very eye opening and very concerning. Basically, the message for all of us is you've got less than 12 years now to essentially cut carbon emissions in half, and then achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Those are pretty daunting challenges and we decided that we need to incorporate this. So, we did some scenario analysis and realized that, for us, it meant having a more aggressive target - moving from a 3.2% reduction per year to a 4% reduction. This was more aggressive, but I wouldn't say it was so much more aggressive that it seemed like it would be impossible. Everything then started falling in line from that. Once we did the scenario planning and looked at the goals, one thing that our management always pointed out was that once we adopted our absolute goal they said they weren't seeing progress year to year. We're not getting worse, but we're not really getting better. We kind of explained that when you have a growing company, you can make improvements with efficiencies and sort of reduce your emissions, but if you have organic business growth you basically offset that. So, those conversations along with the new goal led to us getting some additional resources to procure additional renewable energy certificates to offset our scope two emissions that come from our consumption of grid electricity. That's why you see that pretty marketed decrease in our emissions from 2017 to 2018, because once we adopted the more serious target and we got that message that was being sent from the IPCC, we thought now's the time that we have to take a little bit more drastic action. There's maybe some historic discomfort around using Renewable Energy Certificates (REC's) and offsets to achieve our goals, but I think after talking through that internally we got more comfortable with it. What is one piece of advice you'd give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? The sustainability stuff is the easy part, right? Kindergarteners know, reduce, reuse, recycle. The trick is, how do you work within your organization to make those things happen? That's all about knowing your organization and being able to influence and guide people to take better actions. So, I would say forget all the book stuff and just really work on influencing and working with your people and to be successful. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? Number one is the rapid decrease in energy prices. I'm also very excited about energy storage which is really blowing up. The other thing I'm really excited about is what we are seeing with plastic. This plastic thing for us started in 2018. Like others in this industry, it started with a picture of the turtle with the star in its nose, and almost overnight, you just got a lot of momentum and concern around single use plastics. I feel like that elevation where it's on the front pages of major newspapers is hugely helpful. Having people understand that it's not only an environmental crisis but it's a personal health crisis. A news article came out this week that said each of us consume like 80,000 pieces of microplastic a day or something like that. I think now that people understand that it's affecting them directly and it's not just this abstract global sea level rise problem, it makes getting people's attention and engagement on these issues easier. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? So, you're probably not going to like this answer, but my response would be if you have time to read books, you're not working hard enough. We've got 12 years on carbon emissions and this plastic stuff is everywhere. You don't need to read a book, just get to work. Work with people and move the ball forward. 12 years from now and we're all carbon neutral and there's no plastics we can all hang out and read books, but I honestly don't have the time for it. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I subscribe to so many different emails I couldn't really even name a lot of them. I would say you can find good resources like NGOs, United Nations, EPA, Cal Recycle. You can just Google 10 minutes and you can find a lot of stuff. What I like to do is just sign up to the organization's newsletter to get constant feeds in my email with articles on energy storage, renewable energy, the waste and recycling business, the trucking business and things like that. Just having that constant data stream that I can kind of skim through is really helpful. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work that you're doing at AEG? So you referenced our sustainability report. I think that's a great place to start. It's on our website aegworldwide.com. We have also stepped up our efforts to be more active on Twitter. We have our AEG1Earth@aegworldwide.com email address. Always happy to get feedback, advice, suggestions, complaints etc. at that email address. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Paul Dickinson founded CDP in 2000 with an ambition of creating a global economic system that operates within sustainable environmental boundaries and prevents dangerous climate change. CDP represents over 650 investors with assets of over $80 trillion, and it uses this authority combined with the buying power of over 110 large corporations with annual purchases of over $2.5 trillion, to persuade over 7,000 large companies to report on their greenhouse gas emissions as well as strategy on climate change, water use and the drivers of deforestation. CDP makes most of this data available to the public and service providers like Bloomberg, MSCI and many others. In addition, over 600 large cities and 100 states and regions with aggregate over 1 billion inhabitants report annually on their environmental performance through CDP, which is a charitable organisation operating in 80 counties from nine offices around the world. Paul Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The corporate sustainability movement and the trends we are seeing in GHG emission reporting How CDP has integrated new frameworks such as TCFD and science based targets into the CDP reporting program The evolution of CDP and what the future may hold Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights: CDP, the largest climate change focused data collection and assessment program, really has changed the game on corporate emission reporting and municipality emission reporting. Can you give us a little overview of the state of greenhouse gas emission reporting right now? Are we seeing increases in the numbers that are reporting or decreases? Are we seeing more transparency or more ambitious goals? Just give us a high level overview. Sure. I'll just step a little bit into the way we collect data because it's part of the story. We collect data by representing investors, a very large group of investors - 650 investors with around $90 trillion. So, companies are reporting to their investors through us, or they're reporting to their customers through us, because we have a big supply chain business. The reason I mentioned that is because one of the things that's happening in reporting is it's getting bigger and bigger and more and more normal. At CDP, we're in our 15th annual year of global reporting from corporations. So, one of the trends is you have a big increase in reporting and it's been supported very much by Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, who together chaired the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), which was also set up in response to an invitation from the Financial Stability Board representing the G20 central banks and regulators. So, the TCFD has provided improved guidance on how companies should report on climate change. CDP redesigned itself completely around TCFD so that thousands of companies are now reporting on TCFD through the CDP platform. You asked me if emissions are going up. They were kind of plateauing and then unfortunately we had some radical changes in government. The previous US administration was really working hard to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and was being quite successful. The Trump administration has gone in a crazy opposite direction. After the Paris Agreement of 2015, which was very much a creation of the United States and global diplomacy, the Trump administration has indicated it intends to pull out of the Paris agreement, although it won't actually be able to unless they win a second term. So, we've definitely had some setbacks from some crazy removal of regulation, which is allowing greenhouse gas emissions to rise again. My 19 years working full time climate change has taught me that you get these crazy setbacks often when industries that are suffering want to lobby a bit, but we get over it and then we get back on track because we have no choice. You can't argue with the science. You mentioned the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and how more investors want to know the climate related risks of the companies they invest in. Can you talk a little bit more about how CDP is incorporating that into your program and other aspects of TCFD like climate scenario analysis? It might be helpful for our listeners to understand the difference between CDP and a lot of other things that are out there. We really respect TCFD and we think it's great. TCFD is guidance for how a company should report on climate related risks, presumably through the annual report. You have organizations like the GRI who provide guidance for how you should report on various issues through your annual report or your sustainability report. SASB provides guidance on how you should report in your annual report or sustainability report, and how you should evaluate performance. We have a subsidiary called CDSB which is committed to advancing and aligning the global mainstream corporate reporting model to equate natural capital with financial capital. So, there's a lot of guidance out there about how you should report. The difference with CDP is that we are a specific reporting platform. We run large scale information technology in multiple languages globally. So, we run a kind of parallel mechanism to the annual report or the CSR report. If you think about it, a big US corporation like Microsoft will have to report to the SEC on its financial results. Or, A big German company like BMW will have to report to the German government on its financial results. Or, a big Japanese company like Toyota will have to report to the Japanese government on its financial results. CDP provides the same thing as those different governments, but a single global platform where corporations, and as you observed also some 600 cities and 100 states and regions, report annually on their environmental performance into our databases. That data then goes out to the Bloomberg Network, MSEI and various other places. So, what we did with TCFD is we took the guidance of TCFD and we turned that into the specific questions we ask corporations. There are hundreds and hundreds of companies that have adopted TCFD and are putting that advice into their annual reports. But thousands of companies are answering the specific TCFD questions into the CDP databases and then we make that available to the market. Another trend of course are science based targets. The IPCC latest reports say the objective should be to limit the global warming to one and a half degrees above pre-industrial and companies now or are adopting the science based targets for their operations and doing what's necessary to help meet that that global goal. Is CDP also incorporating science based targets or maybe giving the higher letter grades to companies or organizations that are using these science based targets? You have it exactly right. That's exactly what we're doing. First of all, we absolutely love science based targets and CDP strategy is very much designed around the massive implementation of science based targets. We are very proud members of a broader consortium, including WRI and many other NGOs developing ever improving methodology for setting science based targets. For those who don't know what science based targets mean, it's like the end of incrementalism. In the early parts of my career at CDP, big companies with huge emissions would say, "Oh, we're recycling our paper." Well there's nothing wrong with recycling your paper, but if you've got 10 or 15 million tons of CO2 coming out of your operations, that's a much bigger issue. Science based targets mean that you can be confident that the company is reducing its emissions in line with what is required to keep us below 2 degrees, and in due course, changing that trajectory to make sure we stay below one and a half degrees. I just also want to mention that, yes it's true, CDP scoring reflects improved scoring for compliance with the science based targets. But interestingly, we've been working with the French government and others on something called ACT, which means Assessing the low-Carbon Transition. Really, you've got two methodologies to think about: 1) the methodology the company needs to follow to deliver on its science based targets and 2) the methodology the investor needs to use to evaluate how well the company is complying with that objective. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Authority is taken and not given. We in the sustainability community are on the winning side of a very long and protracted argument. Stay close to marketing. Recognize that you can add value margin and market share by using sustainability marketing. Also, give orders in your organization politely, effectively and seductively. Achieve the necessary outcome, but recognize that it is not enough to say you're doing your best. You have to actually succeed in doing what is necessary. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm excited by the public demonstration of passion and enthusiasm for sustainability. I'm going to answer your question by sticking to my core passion. Before I actually got involved in climate change 20 years ago, I was kind of involved in the early days of the information and communications technology revolution. I do in fact delight in fiber optic cable and the capabilities of video telephones. When are we going to have a broadband video telephone with eye contact. We're still a long way away from getting that. Where I'm going with this long rambling answer is the concept of dematerialization. We need to dematerialize economic growth and information and communication technology can help us do it. What we need is our big friends in Google, AT&T, Apple, Microsoft, Sony to recognize that they are part of the solution, not part of the problem. The future is going to be moving electrons and not assets. What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read? I would strongly recommend you read the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer. It's a New York Times investigation into the manipulation of public debate on sustainability by certain private companies. It helps frame the level of the problem of why the public is not always so receptive as you might expect to putting money behind their own survival. It gives an indication of what to avoid in terms of sustainability bad instead of sustainability good. It's just a forensic political analysis which will help people to understand aspects of contemporary politics, which they might otherwise find difficult to understand. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Well, the number one has got to be CDP website. Please go to cdp.net. That's a great resource where you can see what thousands of companies are doing. I would also encourage people to check out another UK based NGO called ShareAction: https://shareaction.org/. Beyond that, there's so many different ways to answer the question. Have a think about tuning into a new podcast called Outrage and Optimism, which I've had the privilege to launch with my colleagues. We have our first interview with David Attenborough, who's got a new series on Netflix. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work at CDP? cdp.net. Please also have a look ShareAction, this other NGO that I mentioned in the UK. If you're in the UK, download GIKI, which is the company that I'm the director of which I'm very, very fond of. Have a look at Influence Map, which is an NGO I'm involved with. Have a look at the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland where I convene events. But at the end of all of that, my primary job where I work 80% of the week is at CDP. I would really welcome anyone listening to this podcast to go to cdp.net. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Tom Szaky is founder and CEO of TerraCycle Inc., a leader in eco-capitalism and upcycling. In 2001, Tom left Princeton University as a freshman to launch a worm-poop-based fertilizer company. In 2007, the company expanded to start collecting difficult-to-recycle consumer packaging. Today the company collects more than 50 different waste streams in 20 countries. Born in Budapest, Hungary, his family emigrated to Holland and then to Toronto. In TerraCycle’s quest to make sustainability accessible, they created Loop—a never-before-seen venture to combat single-use waste. For the first time ever, consumers can receive their favorite products from trusted brands in durable, reusable packaging. By creating this circular, durable model, we’ve closed the Loop on e-commerce shopping. Tom Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The evolution of TerraCycle from a vermicompost company to a global leader in circular economy innovation The development and launch of Loop Engaging some of the world's largest consumer brands and retailers in the Loop program Challenges to overcome for a truly circular economy Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights: I know a lot of our listeners have heard about the new program that's being launched called Loop, led by TerraCycle and a number of corporations that you've partnered with. Can you just give us a little overview of what Loop is and how that came about? You can find out more at loopstore.com. Loop is an engine. The simplification of it, it's like trying to bring the milkman back in a very modern way where you're packaging isn't a disposable single use, but it's a durable multi-use, and it's something that the manufacturer will take back. Loop came about a few years ago when we were debating whether recycling and making things from recycled materials is the solution to waste. We realized that recycling is critically important and we need to do it. We need to do in a big way. But it's solving waste at the symptom level, not at the root cause. So, while it is important to do that, we also need to in parallel come up with ideas that can help shut off the idea of waste all together. That's really how Loop was born. We took a big journey to think about, "What is the root cause of waste?" We landed on the practice of using something once. Then the question became, "Why are we so addicted to using something once?" We understood that it was because of its unparalleled convenience and affordability, which is why disposability really won in everything from clothing to consumer products to almost everything. So, Loop had a thesis question. The question to answer was, "How do we solve for the unintended consequences of disposability, which is the waste crisis, but also a decrease in the quality of packaging and the performance of packaging while maintaining the virtues of disposability, which is affordability and convenience?" The big breakthrough came in simply asking the question, "Why do we want to own things that we don't really want to own the moment they're empty?" Do we want to own our coffee cup the moment we finished drinking our coffee? Do we want to own the candy wrapper at the moment there's no candy left to eat? With Loop, which just launched two weeks ago in Paris and then a week ago in the northeast of the US, we're working with most of the world's biggest manufacturers to create durable, multi-use versions of their products, from your Tide laundry detergent to your Tropicana orange juice and so on. Those products then become available through major retailers in the US like Walgreens, Kroger and Tesco in Europe and many others that we'll be announcing throughout the coming months, With purchasing through the loop program, they may not be paying for packaging, but of course there's the distribution aspect that might add some costs. Is there a higher cost for similar products or a lower cost? What is the difference in cost look like? So, it's yes and no. As I mentioned at the beginning Loop is an engine. It's an engine for brands to create durable versions of their products. That's pretty intuitive. Now, the apples to apples comparison from a cost point of view is that in a normal shampoo bottle, in the price of your shampoo is the entire plastic bottle. As a consumer, you pay for 100% of it as a cost of good. In Loop, what you pay for is the depreciation of your durable bottle plus the cost of cleaning. In some cases that's more and in some cases it's less. Obviously with volume it gets closer to the latter than the former. That's on the product. On the distribution side, Loop is an engine for retailers. So, today in the United States, Walgreens and Kroger are our founding retail partners and they have started the model with what's called the standalone Loop model, where basically they promote Loop on their websites and send traffic to loopstore.com where we act as the retailer. It's called standalone because it stands alone from the retailer's operations. Here there is a little bit more distribution cost because we have to ship all the packaging to you and then of course pick it up so that it can be cleaned and then sent for refill. This is still about 75% better for the environment because you avoid the entire waste management system and having to create products from scratch, but there is a little bit more distribution costs. Now, the key for scale up and to avoid those costs is to move to what we call the integrated models. We will be moving there with Carrefour which is a major French retailer from mid September to mid October, where they start doing what retailers do, which is buy the products and distribute them. They even do the pickups of the dirties through their own fleet, which means no new trucks on the road. We then do what no one does today, which is pick up the dirties, sort them, store them, clean them and then provide them back to the manufacturing companies. Here you're actually avoiding transportation and then when it starts moving in-store, the consumer is really the one picking up the full packages and then returning the empties to the store. So, the lesson here is we're really trying with Loop to not do anything anyone does today and instead leverage what people are already good at. We let vendors do what they're good at, which is making product, getting them to a distribution center and marketing them, and have retailers do what they're really good at, which is take it from a distribution center and get it into a consumer's hand at a great price. Then, we do what we're good at, which is effectively managing that platform as well doing the waste management function, but instead of recycling it would be cleaning. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I think that I would recommend framing whatever activity that you're going to bring to your company in the lens of the person paying the bill. Not In sustainability, because it's almost never sustainability, but framing it in the way the person who is funding it will understand and appreciate. Then, show them that they can win in their normal KPIs through sustainability, and not doing it just because it's the right thing to do. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? Well, I'm excited for companies being open to completely new ideas and new ways of thinking and really challenging foundational business models. I think we're at a time where there's more reception to that than I've ever seen in the past decade and a half. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I think a really important thing to think about is how to collaborate and how do you motivate, not just your organization, but competitors and other stakeholders. I think that's one of the biggest sort of functions sustainability folks need to be very good at and making sure that the outcome is not just discussion but action. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're doing at TerraCycle and Loop? If they're interested in TerraCycle, which is all about the collection and recycling of hard to recycle materials and the integration of those materials back in the consumer products, you can visit TerraCycle.com. If you're interested in Loop, which is a division of TerraCycle, which is all about reuse, then you'd visit loopstore.com. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Elizabeth Sturcken leads the work of the Supply Chain EDF + Business team. She works to leverage the power of the marketplace to make every product safer, healthier and better for the environment. She has been at EDF for over 20 years and has led our team of people working with retail and consumer product companies to create broad environmental change in areas including climate change, agriculture, green freight, toxics in products, waste and renewable energy. She leads EDF's work with Walmart and has done so for the past 10 years. She led corporate partnerships with other major companies such as FedEx, to develop the next generation delivery vehicle and UPS, to create more sustainable overnight shipping packaging. Elizabeth’s team includes three people based in Bentonville, AR, three in Washington, DC, two in San Francisco, and one in Raleigh, NC, and one in New York. Elizabeth Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The Supply Chain Solutions Center  EDF's involvement in the development of Walmart's Project Gigaton program and what was learned Importance of science based targets and corporate engagement in climate policy Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Highlights from the Interview: The Supply Chain Solutions Center. Tell us a little bit about this tool, how it came about, some features and how this is going to help people as they work sustainability through their supply chain. Let me tell you a story from my work years ago. Work that I'm really proud of. I led a partnership with Fedex to come up with our next generation vehicle which was a phenomenally successful bit of work. We really created a new vehicle in the medium duty truck marketplace and it's ended up rippling through that marketplace. I think we did it faster then the market would do on its own. But at the end of it, despite how successful it was, I just had this realization that this is not fast enough. This is not cutting it. It took six years to do that project and as successful as it was, and as wonderful as it was, the planet can't wait that long. We just need to be doing a lot more scaling of the work and doing it a lot faster. At EDF we collectively came to that realization. Well, EDF created the Supply Chain Solutions Center as an answer to this problem of how to engage many companies on sustainability and help them along this journey. The idea is to make sustainability as easy as using Netflix or Spotify. What we're doing with this Supply Chain Solutions Center is we have beginner, intermediate and expert resources, all sorts of different case studies, templates for building sustainability plans and then also opportunities for connecting with NGO experts. This all covers at this six different areas: agriculture, energy, chemicals, waste, forest and freight. Anybody could create a free profile by going to supplychain.edf.org. We created the Supply Chain Solution Center out of a need that we heard from supply chain professionals and we tried to gather up all of our years of experience in working with companies. We surveyed sustainability professionals ranging from people who are doing the work in the trenches to directors and C-suite executives at leading consumer package good companies and asked them what they need. Their top challenge with implementing sustainable supply chains was finding credible resources quickly that they could use or send to their suppliers. It's just an ongoing challenging need. One factoid that I found both hopeful and alarming is that 50% of Fortune 500 companies have at least one climate or clean energy goal according to calculations by WWF, but only 5% have goals on the scale science says is needed. So, everybody on this journey needs more help. Just as Netflix doesn't offer just movies from one studio or Spotify doesn't just promote one record label, the Supply Chain Solutions Center is meant to gather resources from many different parts. Over ten NGOs are contributing resources to the site and it's just a real product of collaboration. EDF has birthed this baby, but everyone is helping to make it thrive. The NGOs that have contributed resources are Business for Social Responsibility, the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council, Sustainable Packaging Coalition, Further with Food, Conservation International, Field to Market, The Sustainability Consortium, CDP, ReFED, Greenbiz group and Shelton Group. So, it's a phenomenal collection of resources all together in one place and done in a way that people can get at the content that they really need. Tell us about what you are seeing with companies setting sustainability targets in their supply chain and how your tool can help companies with this? The one thing that will differentiate companies that is the make or break thing in achieving sustainability is a public goal. That is so critical. If I had to urge companies to do one thing, I would say try and set an aggressive yet achievable sustainability target. Because what we've known really in companies for years is setting clear goals makes you drive towards them. You have to have goals that are appropriate. You want them to be achievable but you want them to stretch you. The other critical piece, given that we're talking about our planet and a healthy planet, is they need to be in line with what the science tells us is needed, and not just on climate but on chemicals of concern, water use and all sorts of different issues. So, really trying to follow the science and use the best available science is critical. I think the Science Based Target Initiative is a great resource and many companies are starting to do that. That's really what's needed. Now, that doesn't mean that if a company isn't at that point, they shouldn't set some goals. Set some goals, get going, get your feet wet, use the Supply Chain Solution Center and try to figure out what you can do. You can tailor the content for the beginning of your journey and you'll get what you need in order to figure appropriate goal setting. If you're further along, you want to try and set more aggressive goals, you want to do a materiality assessment and figure out what are the key issues that you need to focus on. The resources are there in the Supply Chain Solutions Center. I will emphasize to let data be your guide. Find out where your big hotspots are in your supply chain and in your operations. I think that that's one thing that I've learned over and over again from my work with companies, and most recently in our partnership with Walmart. We worked with Walmart to set the first supply chain carbon reduction goal in 2010. We all thought thought it would be a little easier than it turned out to be. They had just come off of exceeding their goal to sell a hundred million CFL light bulbs and then thought there's a lot of opportunity in the supply chain for greenhouse gas reduction. Yes there is, but the truth is that achieving the reductions is a lot harder than than you expect it to be. It definitely takes hard work, but I think our real breakthrough came when we started using data to look across their supply chain for all their different product categories. For example, we figured out fertilizer was a really big hot spot given how much food they sell and given how greenhouse gas intensive fertilizer is. So, the light bulbs went off and we realized this is a huge area of opportunity for us and for Walmart to engage it's food and ag suppliers who produce all the food that they sell. So, having science based targets, having rigorous goals and using data to figure out where to focus is important. Focus on the big boulders first and let the pebbles come later. I think that part is really critical. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Ask for help. I know that lots of nonprofits and NGOs like EDF want to help. We work with a number of other really excellent NGOs like WWF, TNC and groups that also focus on specific issue areas. They want to help so don't be afraid to admit that you need help and work together. What are you most excited about? Right now in the world of sustainability? The most exciting project I've led here is our work with Walmart on Project Gigaton. I guess I'm feeling like the most exciting thing that I'm seeing is it feels like people are really becoming aware that we need to act and I'm very hopeful and inspired by companies that continue to step up. I mentioned Walmart and Project Gigaton. Target just set their are science based goal and they committed to engaging their supply chain to set science based targets themselves. These are companies, along with Mcdonald's, who are just really leading and they're really big powerful companies that are setting the bar high. It's also important to make the point that right now sustainability leadership requires policy engagement by companies, and that's an area where very few companies are leading right now. The reality is that we will not get to where we need to go with just voluntary corporate action. We need policy to bring up the floor and create change and bring every company along. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? I recommend a brand new book that I just got. It was written by Bob Langert who ran sustainability at Mcdonald's for years. It's called The Battle to Do Good and it's excellent. I heard that you interviewed Bob for this podcast so I'm putting a plug in for folks to listen to that podcast. Bob worked at Mcdonald's for over 25 years and he was the person that EDF partnered with when we together created the model of corporate NGO partnerships. It really takes you through the journey of one person's attempt to change a whole company and who he partnered with and how he did it. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I guess I'd give a shout out to Greenbiz because I feel like they have been around forever and they are the go to resource. You read Joel's newsletter every Monday morning and it just hits the mark and it's really interesting. I highly recommend Greenbiz. One thing that I feel is important to highlight is what I'm seeing with my team, and that is that we're living in times that are really stressful. We're hearing a report every other week about climate catastrophe. There are horrible floodings in the Midwest. I live in San Francisco and we couldn't go outside and breathe the air two years in a row because the wildfires were so bad because of climate change. It can be really overwhelming, especially when you feel like things are going backwards in the country. I really believe that taking care of yourself and doing what you need to do to maintain your sense of balance and perspective is so critical because we can't fight this fight if we can't bring our whole selves to work and fight. So, take your vacation time, go read a really good fun, fluffy novel or whatever. I honestly think that that is as critical as a tool or support for people doing sustainability work is just take care of yourself. Go do that yoga retreat and exercise. We've got to be our best selves in doing this really important work. Where can people go to learn more about you, your work at EDF and where can they find the Supply Chain Solutions Tool? Our blog has lots of tips and our take on the corporate sustainability news of the day. You can check it out at business.EDF.org\blog. I'm on LinkedIn and my Twitter handle is @ESturckenurken. The Supply Chain Solutions Center is at: supplychain.edf.org. Please go and visit, use its resources and let us know what you think. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Kumar is the Chief Sustainability and Resilience Officer for the City of Evanston, IL and serves in multiple leadership capacities within the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) including as a co-chair for the People of Color Support Initiative and on the USDN Planning and Advisory Committee. Kumar’s work centers around stakeholder collaboration including: community advocacy groups, strategic partners, other units of government, elected officials, and various city departments, all to make Evanston a climate-ready and carbon neutral community. In 2018, Kumar was named to the 2018 GreenBiz “30 Under 30” global list of 30 young leaders in sustainable business who demonstrate “the world-changing promise of sustainability in their everyday work.”  Kumar Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Engaging people of all ages on local climate issues The importance of spaces for people of color and how they relate to progress on racial equity within sustainability Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) People of Color Support Initiative Evanston's Climate Action and Resilience Plan Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Interview Highlights: Sustainability and resilience were both built into your climate action and resilience plan. Talk to us a little bit about the development of this plan, what that process looks like and the challenges of now prioritizing your actions around this plan. Now is the right time for us to be talking about that. We're certainly at the point at which the plan has been approved and we're moving quickly into implementation. If we backtrack a little bit, back in 2017, when the federal administration indicated their intent to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, we already had numerous commitments around climate action and resilience at the local level. That process of pulling out of the Paris agreement actually kicked us into gear. The mayor called on the community to develop a 17-member working group of residents to work alongside city staff to develop a plan. The climate action group had their first meeting in November of 2017 and had their last meeting in November of 2018, so they took 12 months, meeting and breaking out into task forces, to develop the entirety of the plan. So, this plan was written by community members in consultation with city staff. We didn't hire consultants to develop the plan and it wasn't a plan that city staff developed and then asked community members for feedback. It was written by and then edited and advised on by city staff and other community partners. As we now look at implementation a lot of the responsibility has been turned back on the city and some of our major partners. So, the process that we're going through right now has two pieces to it. One piece is looking at our administrative responsibilities or things that city staff and municipality can focus on. So, thinking about where we purchase our energy from for a municipal standpoint, what we're doing with our fleet, how we're evaluating a critical infrastructure for vulnerability etc. But then also within we had dozens of policy changes that were recommended and advised upon. So, the other part of this process is figuring out how we move forward many of those policy changes, understanding that some of them are pretty complex. For example, thinking about the way in which we transition our buildings to be net zero emissions or net zero energy. In Evanston, 80% of our community wide greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. So, although we are a suburb, we have very strong public transportation options in the city. That leads to, thankfully, a smaller proportion of our emissions being transportation related. But as a very built out community, we have to look at our building sector very intentionally about how we're not only going to transition to low and no carbon fuels, but also reducing that energy consumption. Evanston is a member of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) and it looks like you serve in a few different ways within that organization. One of them is serving as the co-chair for the People of Color Support Initiative. Tell us a little bit about that initiative and the importance of integrating social issues and racial equity issues within your city's sustainability program. I'm glad you brought up USDN. Evanston has been a USDN member for quite a few years now. I've had the privilege of being a member and the representative for the city for the past two years since I've been in this role. That organization has been crucial to my professional development, but also to ensuring that Evanston as a community has access to resources, technical expertise, funding opportunities and really innovative practices from around the nation. I'm indebted and grateful for the members in that network and the staff. The initiative that you mentioned is a really important one within professional spaces, particularly within professional environmental spaces. Oftentimes and historically, those spaces have been predominantly and overwhelmingly white. As the climate justice movements and the environmental justice movements become a bit more mainstream, I think it is really crucial that not only are we thinking about the way in which those communities are impacted, but also the people that are working in those spaces and what their experience is. Often times, those staff people, whether they be working for a city or for a corporation or for community organization, are still working in predominantly white spaces. I think that one of the benefits of a network like USDN is that when members decide that there is a need for additional training or additional support, whether it be small cities joining together and saying, "Hey, you know what, we need an affinity group to work on issues that are specific to small cities in small departments because we don't have million dollar budgets and dozens of staff." USDN is really able to respond to that and help facilitate and create those spaces. In particular, the Members of Color Peer Support Initiative is incredibly important for a number of reasons. One is just to provide a space so that people of color within that network are able to connect and support each other in their lived experience of the person of color within the field. But additionally, it provides a value to USDN because it's also creating a space in which USDN has a group of people to be able to ask for feedback and support on how the network as a whole is serving their memberships and their members of color. So, I think those things are incredibly important. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? The advice that I've gotten that has felt the most useful isn't sustainability related at all. It's just to take care of yourself. To heal, to give yourself time to rest and just to recognize that your needs are valid and important. This work can feel exhausting as a lot of socially minded work can. It seems like we continue to get waves of terrible news and projections that are going in directions that we don't want to see. So, it's not just about avoiding burnout, but it's about being able to be the person that you want to be and not allowing your position or your work at that one particular time to define you. It's really important that we continue to be able to contribute and feel like that contribution is helpful and healthy for us. I'm gonna cheat a little bit and use an Audrey Lorde quote, which I'm sure many of the listeners are familiar with. She says,"Caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation and that is an act of political warfare." Oftentimes when we think about things as big and challenging is climate change, it's easy to forget how important it is to take care of ourselves. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? There's a bunch of things but I will be brief. I'd say the youth climate strikes are really inspiring and exciting. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the conversations around the Green New Deal go at the federal level. I think it's exciting to have federal policy being talked about in that way. It's also really exciting that there are over 200 communities around the country that have made formal commitments to 100% clean energy by 2035, if not sooner. Those are all things that give me hope and are exciting. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? One that I am working my way through right now that I find really insightful is called The Environment and the People in American Cities from the 1600's to the 1900's by Dr. Dorceta Taylor. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I'd say the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, first and foremost. There's a Chicago based network called Environmentalists of Color or EOC, which I had been involved in and found as a really valuable and supportive space. There's a blog called Fake Equity, which always has really relevant topics around thinking and being reflective around the type of work you're doing. It's not just sustainability related, but it's really insightful. I'm not a huge Instagram person, but I have started following a few folks. One of them is Go Green Save Green, which provides really helpful and appealing and informative infographics for consumer tips and products on things like reusables and avoiding plastics. The green 2.0 report by Dr. Dorceta Taylor. There's another podcast out about social entrepreneurship, which I've been listening to recently and it's by a dear friend, Judy Lee. It's called Money Mission and Me, and it's intended to be a resource for anyone interested in how startups can be a force for good. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work at the city of Evanston? Our Twitter handle is @GreenEvanson. My personal Twitter handle is at @MrKumarj. You can also find some information on Linkedin. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Erin gives voice to Interface’s conscience, ensuring that strategy and goals are in sync with its aggressive sustainability vision established more than 20 years ago. Today, Interface has evolved its thinking to go beyond doing less harm to creating positive impacts, not just for Interface and the flooring industry, but for the world at large. Erin led the company to unveil a new mission in 2016 – Climate Take Back, tackling the single biggest threat facing humanity: global climate change. This mission is focused on creating a path for Interface and others to reverse global warming, not just reduce carbon emissions. As CSO, Erin leads a global team that provides technical assistance and support to this audacious goal and the company’s global business, addressing sustainability at all levels – from operations and management, to employees and customers, and in policy forums. Erin and her team also develop industry-leading approaches to measurement, driving transparency and innovation in the field of sustainability, while also capturing successes as the company nears its Mission Zero targets in 2020. Erin Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Interface's Climate Take Back program and aligning corporate sustainability programs with what the world needs What stakeholders are expecting from a 20-plus year leader in sustainability Net Positive and moving beyond traditional corporate sustainability and CSR Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Highlights: How are expectations shifting for what it means to be a company leading in sustainability? In a good way, I think a lot of our stakeholders are expecting, not just Interface but other companies, to raise their level of ambition. I think it comes on 25 years of dialogue about what sustainable business is, reducing impact, companies making incremental steps and some really good progress, but then the rest of us observing that the planet isn't really in a much better place. So, we're hearing, whether it's potential employees, current employees or customers, that ambitions need to be higher and that there's an expectation that companies should be solving larger sustainability challenges than just their own. A great place to see this playing out is in the Globe Scan Sustainability Leaders Survey that gets published annually. It asks people in universities, people in business, people in NGO organizations what they expect of businesses. You can see that the expectation is getting higher in terms of businesses having more aggressive approaches, but we also see that anecdotally. We had a new CEO come to Interface in 2016 and one of the first things we did was have a conversation with him about not just where we were on achieving the goals Ray Anderson set 25 years ago, but also our future ambition. We surveyed all of our employees at Interface, and even that exercise let us know that our own employees within the business had much bigger ambitions for where Interface needed to go. So, building on that, we've been able to really accelerate our ambition and in 2017 issue a new challenge and a new mission for the business. But I think it's something every business needs to be looking at. What is our current approach to sustainability? What are we really trying to solve and isn't ambitious enough? It's great that we are starting to see movement from leaders like yourselves where incremental reductions in energy, water and emissions just aren't enough anymore. We need to do more. More companies are using those words like "positive," "carbon positive," "regenerative" and actually using business as a force for good, as the B Corp world would say. So, what does this mean for your business and new approaches within Interface? I think what it really meant for us, first, was setting a bold next step. Really putting out the next mission for the company and getting away from the traditional CSR or sustainable business language of just framing that mission within the context of your business. So, not just saying that Interface wants to be carbon neutral, which by the way we achieved in 2018 for all of the products in the whole business, but actually framing the mission in terms of the problem we wanted to solve. In 2016, Interface publicly said the next mission for Interface and the business is reversing global warming. We wanted to get out of that whole language of CSR commitments, incremental change and carbon neutral business. We wanted to align the mission of our business with the problem that needs to get solved in the world. I think it's a really important shift in language and in thinking. So we said that in 2016, the next step in sustainability is reversing global warming. We call it the Climate Take Back and we're going to get the business really focused on how we do this. Obviously, the first question that comes after that is, "How's a 5,000 person, billion dollar business actually going to reverse global warming?" I think the answer is, we're going to do what we can do in our business to sequester more carbon than we emit and to make products that do the same whether they end up getting called carbon negative or carbon positive or climate positive or any of the new labels out there. The ambition will be to first do it in our business. This is a huge global challenge. So, what else do we need to do as part of that business strategy to achieve the mission of reversing global warming? We have to double down on engaging every one of our employees to do something in their personal lives. The third part of it is we have to influence everyone else, not just our supply chain, not just our immediate customer base, but we really have to influence other companies to raise their level of ambition and shift their corporate targets from a reduction, or net zero, to reversing global warming. So, if we really want to live into this kind of bold commitment we've made for ourselves, this shift to positive, it actually means doing a lot more to influence other companies. I think that's one of the big lessons. In the last 20 years, sustainability has been focused on businesses just reducing the impacts of their immediate operations and their supply chains, right? But how many of us have really deeply invested in saying we want every employee to start taking real action at home? Or, we want every single customer we interact with to have a deeper understanding of what they can do to reverse global warming. So, it's a huge ambition that we've put on ourselves, but I think directionally, it's where not just Interface needs to go, but the rest of the business world does as well. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Think about developing your skills as being an advocate. I think a lot of people think about getting a science background or getting a business background, and I have found over my like 15 plus year career in sustainable business, that you end up becoming the biggest advocate for sustainability in your business. So, the ability to make effective arguments, having a communication style that's pretty clear and direct and being able to find a way to harness your passion in a way that persuades senior leaders in the business, customers and other people in the business to really follow you, is really important. So, think about what it is that you can do to develop yourself into a really effective advocate. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm super excited to see how companies are applying this idea of net positive and whether it's pilot projects like our Networks Project, whether it's work that Unilever is doing, there's just some really exciting examples of how businesses are raising their level of ambition and trying it out through really innovative partnerships that are having amazing impacts in the world. What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read? There's so many. I think one of my favorite books is Ishmael, which was written by Daniel Quinn. It's not a new book. It's been out for at least 25 years. It's a really good one about resetting your mindset about how we think about business and the natural world as being quite separate, or even how we think about humans and the natural world as being quite separate. It's a really good read. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Some days I wished that I had had the benefit of being able to go through some of the really cool programs that exist right now for people to develop degrees or areas of focus in sustainable business. So for example, Arizona State University has some amazing programs now for undergraduates to get degrees in sustainability. There are also really great emerging MBA programs. The University of Vermont has a really innovative program that I serve on the advisory board of that's called SIMBA and it's a sustainable intra-preneurship MBA. I secretly wish that I were of the age now where I could participate in that because I think those are some of the best tools around. In terms of tools or how do to get the best, most energizing sense of where we're going, I do attend business conferences like Sustainable Brands and gatherings like that because I find that that's a really great place to stay connected to what's emerging and what's happening. One other thing we do here at Interface is we maintain this environmental advisory board that we internally call the Eco Dream Team. Outside, we call it our environmental advisory board. Spending time with those people like Paul Hawkin and Janine Benyus is incredibly valuable. They are kind of a continual source of innovative ideas and inspiration. If you don't have an eco advisory board, finding ways to interact with some of these leading lights in the movement and finding a way to interact with those guys is always a great way to kind of get inspired and be challenged and think about what's beyond your immediate focus. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work being done at Interface? They can go to the Interface website: www.Interface.com. You can read all about Climate Take Back and what we're doing to achieve that mission. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Green Sports Alliance Summit will be June 19-20 at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia Dune Ives Dune Ives is the executive director of award-winning Lonely Whale, where she designs and leads initiatives that address environmental degradation and species decline. Through her leadership, Lonely Whale has received global recognition as one of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, Huffington Post’s Top Ten Movers and Shakers in Environmental Sustainability, the P4G 2018 Circular Economy Award sponsored by the Danish Government; and more. Prior to Lonely Whale, Dune designed and oversaw Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Philanthropy, co-founded the Green Sports Alliance, and was among the first individuals trained by the Honorable Al Gore to deliver his presentation on global warming. One of the exciting initiatives at Lonely Whale is Next Wave Plastics. This is an initiative to get companies to use ocean bound plastics within their products. Can you tell us about this and what you're learning, or any successes that you're seeing in this program? Next Wave Plastics is an initiative that was co-created by Dell Technologies and Lonely Whale. It came out of a request that Adrian Grenier made as he was serving as Dell's first social good advocate. He asked if Dell could help him address, and help all of us, really address the growing plastic pollution crisis. What Dell discovered that they could do is source plastic that was once bound for the ocean, meaning it's within 50 kilometers of any waterways, and they it into their packaging. It was so inspiring for them as a company. Michael Dell himself got very engaged. The employees were very excited. Dell then asked us to engage other companies. So, we launched Next Wave Plastics in December, 2017 with eight companies with the intent of developing a collaborative where companies are working directly with each other. Competitors now are sitting across the table from each other, working with each other within industry and cross industry, to build infrastructure in parts of the world where the issue is the most acute. They then integrate the materials permanently into their products, thereby creating a fully circular economy. It's been very exciting to see. We had HP and IKEA join the list of companies in 2018, and we now have more companies coming on board over the course of the next six months. We see this as being one of those important actions being taken today by companies that are having a real impact. So, this year they're sourcing material and they're preventing it from going in the water. It's very exciting to see these companies take a strong leadership role. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Be Curious. Don't think that you know all the answers and don't think you understand the questions that are being asked. Curiosity is what is going to allow us to find the solutions that don't currently exist to the problems that we're facing. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? There are two things. Number one, even amidst all of the bad news I don't see people giving up. I see people really rolling their sleeves up and digging in to these issues and wanting to just keep fighting the good fight and winning. I also see corporations turning the tide and that to me is really exciting. I think they're pushing themselves harder. I think they're not standing for what they've done in the past and they're really leading this discussion, which is what we need for them to do. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? Years ago I had the fortune of spending about a week on vacation, which is very unusual for anybody these days. I took the book Guns, Germs, and Steel with me on vacation. I'm bringing this up because it was one of the most influential books for me. Just really looking back over time in the history of our species, how we have migrated, how we have evolved, why we've done certain things. It was a very important book for me at the time to really recognize that I am but one small moment in time and there is history to learn from and there are patterns we need to start seeing and incorporate in how we build the vision of our future. There's one lesson learned from that book that I will share with your audience that I just think is hilarious and we have a lot to learn from it. Zebras were never domesticated because when they bite, they don't let go. And I think that's brilliant. Why are some things so difficult to change? It's because we have built in mechanisms to prevent the change that we don't want to have happen from happening. Change is hard for the zebra. The zebra has figured out how to never become domesticated. So how do we take that lesson and how do we apply it to the sustainability work that we do, especially when we're facing attractable change. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I spend a lot of time observing how my child interacts with the environment and noticing what he notices. As adults, I think we feel like we know all the answers and we're not always as observant because we've become accustomed to our environment. I like to spend time with people who look at the world differently and at Lonely Whale we actually spend a lot of time thinking about the non able-bodied community. Those who have physical or cognitive impediments. I think we need to start spending more time talking with those who can't interact the way that we've designed things and then I think we'll start learning more. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work of your wonderful organizations? Lonely Whale is at lonelywhale.org and Green Sports Alliance is greensportsalliance.org. You're going to get a ton of information if you sign up for our newsletters. Follow us on Instagram at Lonely Whale. Come to the Green Sports Alliance Summit. It is going to be really exciting and it's really gonna pave the way for a lot of exciting, very thoughtful and thought provoking conversations about the wave of the future. Roger McClendon Roger McClendon is the Executive Director of the Green Sports Alliance. In his role, he leads the Alliance of international sports and stadium executives, as well as sustainability experts, to use sports as a vehicle to promote healthy, sustainability communities throughout the world. Prior to joining the Alliance, Roger was the first-ever Chief Sustainability Officer for Yum! Brands, whose holdings include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC restaurants. He also led the development of Blueline, a sustainable design guide for restaurants built on the LEED certification program. Blueline was a global standard implemented in approximately 5,000 Yum! Brand restaurants globally. Due to his efforts, Yum! Was named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index in 2017 and 2018, as well as one of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens by Corporate Responsibility Magazine. You're relatively new to the position. Can give us a quick overview of what's going on with the Green Sports Alliance right now and maybe what you envisioned for the organization in the future? I've been with the Organization for a good four months now and I always say I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. This organization has been engaged with sustainability and sports for over nine years. We'll be coming up on our 10th year anniversary next year. Coming from west coast to east coast, I've heard varying stories about the inception of the Green Sports Alliance, but have to give kudos to Scott Jenkins, who's our chair of our board, and folks like Alan Hershkowitz and Paul Allen who put a lot of funding in early behind it and the impetus of bringing sports teams together to really stand for social and environmental progress. The west coast development, from the Sounders to the Portland Trailblazers to the Seattle Mariners, all those folks got together and decided that they wanted to take a position and push the environmental sustainability agenda. They saw this as regional and then they saw this as a national opportunity and it was formed. There's another story about the Philadelphia Eagles and the owning family asking an issue about deforestation and where their paper goods products came from. I think that's where Alan Hershkowitz and the folks that were leading the organization back then were able to break through and get them interested in supporting a sustainability position. So since then, the group has formed into the Green Sports Alliance, which is an international organization where we have representation in Japan, Europe and are growing the brand beyond the North American borders. It's a group of about 500-600 sports teams and venues, from the NFL, NBA, USTA, PGA. I don't want to leave anybody out, but there's a lot of influential sports leagues, teams and venues such as AEG and Staples Center. The folks that own those venues are all part of our membership-based organization. We take that seriously on our stewardship and what we need to do to set our strategy and our goals around this movement of sustainability. I like to break it up into three phases. Phase 1 is the sustainability 1.0 platform where you have engagement of your operations and your brand, league or stadium owner and you can really improve your operations from a triple bottom line perspective - people, profitability and planet. Phase 2, or the sustainability 2.0, has to do with engaging your fan base, your employees as well as the community. That's a little bit tougher and that happens to be where you spend a lot of time perhaps doing some campaigns and things like tree planting, understanding how you engage fans to participate in recycling efforts and things they can do beyond just the stadium itself. We're still in varying stages with different groups to make that happen. There's a lot of work left to be done there. The third phase, or sustainability 3.0, is defining what's next, but it's in the area of youth engagement, leveraging the Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations and getting cities and communities to really help with clean energy and help make a bigger impact on what we're trying to do as a society. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Continue to be bold and brave and set targets. Tehn, build a coalition and always keep the triple bottom line in mind as you're presenting. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? The international growth of the Green Sports Alliance. We just signed the United Nations Sports for Climate Action Change and we've just got so much support behind us. It's a commitment to some principles but what it really means is that we can galvanize everyone around it and really get to driving action around it. Now that we've got that under our belt, we see a lot more people like the NBA, the Yankees, USTA and others I'm sure it will be joining us as we move forward. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? Green to Gold is a classic and Food Foolish talks about waste and how much waste we have with the food supply. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I've engaged with World Wildlife Fund. WWF has always been a great partner and they've always had great resources globally. I think very highly of them as well as NRDC. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work of the Green Sports Alliance? You can go to our website at greensportsalliance.org. You can actually come to the summit, which is going to be June 19th and 20th in Philadelphia at Lincoln Financial Field. You can go to our website and sign up. We've got a great forum that we're going to have. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Aaron Schreiber-Stainthorp is the Sustainability Manager at Jackson Family Wines (JFW). In his role at JFW, Aaron focuses on implementing systems that drive transformational change with an emphasis on carbon emissions, energy efficiency, renewable energy, water conservation, zero waste and employee engagement.  Using a data driven approach to identifying opportunities and guide decision making, Aaron has worked to make sustainability synonymous with innovation and continuous improvement.   In addition to his work at JFW, Aaron also runs a small consulting firm, Sustainability Squared, which focuses on embedding sustainability in the food and beverage industry.  Aaron is also a board member with the Center for Climate Protection, focused on speed and scale GHG policy solutions in California.  Aaron has spent 5 years working in the wine industry, and previously led sustainability efforts at Francis Ford Coppola winery resulting in their 2017 Sustainable Winemaking Leadership Award from the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance.  Prior to working in wine, Aaron managed energy efficiency education programs at the Alliance to Save Energy.  Aaron Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Importance of Science Based Targets The International Wineries for Climate Action working group led by Jackson Family Wines and Torres Family winery The challenges behind tracking accurate waste data across multiple sites Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Highlights: Jackson Family Wines is looking at Science Based Targets. Give us your thoughts on the importance of Science Based Targets and why they're important to Jackson family wines. Historically, it's been impressive to see the momentum that private sector has taken towards sustainability efforts and making pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Science Based Targets and the Science Based Target Initiative brings a new rigor to that focus by actually saying, "Here's the math to quantify for your company with your emissions profile and what you need to do to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius." Some of the guidance on that is actually going to be coming out later this month, because previously it had been guidance for how to keep warming below two degrees Celsius. But it's been exciting to have that level of rigor to an emissions reduction target to get things in line with the Paris Accord and what nations across the world are trying to do. This also gives us a common language to use when we're talking to other partners. Now when we're talking to our suppliers, when they say they have science based targets, that actually means that they've really addressed their emissions and come up with a reduction plan that is actually based on something. It's also very exciting because, earlier this year, Jackson Family Wines formalized a partnership with the Torres Family and created a working group called International Wineries for Climate Action. Members who join that working group are wineries that commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2045 - across Scope 1, 2 and 3. So, I think Science Based Targets have been really exciting for me because we're now able to see how businesses and the private sector can really lead the way on creative solutions to greenhouse gas emissions. It also lets us have a conversation with other leaders in this space who also want to demonstrate that they're taking this seriously and accounting for their company's contribution to climate change. Tell us about this process of trying to track waste data across multiple locations and what you've found helpful in this process. When we talk about zero waste, I find this to be a exciting area. One of the challenging places to start with zero waste is actually getting good data. Different sites have different haulers, they have different waste streams, different dumpsters etc.. But a lot of times if a site does not have a roll off container, typically they're getting a waste hauler to pick up their waste, but nobody's actually measuring the weight and they're not quantifying the volume of waste that's leaving the site. So, when we talk about zero waste, we are aiming to zero, but the technical definition that we hold ourselves to is making sure that all sites are achieving a 90% waste diversion rate from the landfill and incineration. That means 90% of our waste by weight is either getting recycled or composted. One of the solutions that we've done to really address that data challenge is that we've found someone who's willing to be the wastes czar for each one of our sites. We empower this person to really own solutions to managing waste at that site. That waste czar then helps us do monthly reporting on the volume of waste that is leaving that site in the different waste streams - typically landfill, compost and recycling. With that we've now been able to get monthly data for all of our sites. With that monthly data we can start to look for insights, identify patterns and figure out ways that we can improve. People also know now that they're being held accountable. So, if we see a change in their monthly recycling, we say, "What's going on? Is there a way we can help?" After we've found waste czars to really lead the effort at each site, we then worked on employee engagement. So, waste is one of those things that everybody very visibly sees what they're contributing to every day, so everybody really is able to understand their contribution to that. It's been really exciting to talk to the employees about solutions and have them see themselves as an important part in making changes in both their daily practices, our procurement and how we go about operating our facilities. Some of the ways that we've engaged on zero waste that I think are kind of fun is we've actually done zero waste of wine tastings. With zero waste wine tastings, we had Recycling Rosé, Composting Cabernet and Zero Waste Zin. It was an opportunity for employees to come together and really talk about strategies to reduce waste and how zero waste ties back to our core business. One of the things that's interesting is because we grow grapes, any organic matter that we compost then comes back to our vineyards as high quality soil. So, we see a direct connection between making sure that we're composting as many organics as possible and producing the highest quality compost, because that compost ultimately goes back to the vineyard and helps improve soil health and wine quality. Working across so many different sites, we've had to rely a lot on partnerships. We work directly with our waste haulers and a lot of our waste haulers have actually led zero waste trainings at our different sites. So, it is a challenging task to take on just because there's a lot of moving pieces, but it's also been exciting because as people have helped out doing waste audits, doing waste reporting and coming up with solutions, we've been able to see this great engagement and we've been able to achieve a 98% waste diversion at our wineries. So we're very proud of that and we're hoping to build on that momentum as we roll that out across our offices and make sure all of our tasting rooms are also zero waste. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I would say dive deep, find a niche and own it. I think being able to specialize in one area means that you're able to have a bigger impact in that one area and once you gain that expertise, it's easy to broaden out and focus on other topics as well. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm very excited about Science Based Targets, carbon farming and using transparency and collaboration to unlock new opportunities. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? I've heard many people reference on this podcast, and I would be remiss if I did not, and that's Paul Hawkins Drawdown. Within sustainability I find it helpful to read anything that expands my thinking and understanding of the world in a new way. This past year, Yuval Noah Harari has given me a number of new insights into the world with his books Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21st century. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I actually list Excel at the top of my list and that is because I think for a lot of problems that I'm looking to understand, being able to quantify them is really helpful. While not everything can be quantified, being able to present data in that format makes it easier for me to have conversations with people. A lot of times when I'm looking at a new issue, being able to really represent the opportunity and also the current challenge in Excel helps highlight to people where our next step take place to figure out a solution. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work at Jackson family wines? We regularly share progress on our sustainability journey at jacksonfamilywines.com and if anyone wants to connect with me directly or see some of the work that I do outside of Jackson Family Wines, please check out my website at sustysquared.com. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Mayor Jorge O. Elorza appointed Leah Bamberger as the Director of Sustainability in April 2015. Leah brings a wealth of experience in municipal sustainability efforts. She previously managed the City of Boston’s citywide sustainability initiative, Greenovate Boston. In this role, she worked on policy and community engagement and led the development of the City’s 2014 Climate Action Plan. Prior to this position, Leah served as a consultant to a variety of local and regional governments and nonprofits in the northeast, supporting their climate and sustainability planning work. The Sustainability Director’s responsibilities include identifying opportunities to reduce the City’s energy costs, working with community groups, residents, and businesses to implement the City’s first comprehensive sustainability action plan, transitioning residents to the Recycle Together program, and other projects. Leah Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Providence's climate neutral goal and approach to renewable energy and energy efficiency Development of Providence's Climate Justice Plan The importance of stakeholder engagement in moving communities towards sustainability and social equity Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Leah Bamberger on Developing the city's Climate Justice Plan: Tell us about creating Providence's Climate Justice Plan, what that's all about and what you hope that that does for the city. We started this process about a year ago, we have this ambitious goal and we are very eager to focus on the intersection of environmental justice and climate resilience in this effort. It was good timing because we had also recently wrapped up a process where we were looking at our Sustainable Providence Plan and it was painfully obvious that equity was not a part of that plan. That plan covered a lot and built a really good groundwork for this work, but it didn't really dive into the equity issue. So, back in 2016 we started a process with a group of frontline community members, communities of color that have been disproportionately burdened and continue to be burdened by environmental injustices. We wanted to bring equity into our work and we wanted the people who are most impacted to be leading that work. That's a big part of doing this equity work and that's something that I learned. I had the opportunity to attend trainings and workshops to really understand and think about how I need to do my work differently. Oftentimes we get our credentials, we learn a practice and then we become experts and we start to disregard, or not give credit to, the lived experiences of the people that we are doing this work for. We created this racial and environmental justice committee to really inform the office of sustainability in terms of how we should be bringing equity into this work. We partnered with frontline communities of Providence to tell us how we can and should be addressing racial equity and sustainability. They did a lot of deep work in the community to get feedback and input and created a very robust document called the Just Providence Framework. It's a set of principles and recommendations of how the office of sustainability and local government can be addressing equity. That framework is being used now to develop this Climate Justice Plan. Tell us about this different approach to stakeholder engagement and how that affects the plan. The actions and the work that I see in the results of this plan versus many other climate action plans, is that it's been so fascinating to see how different this plan is because our process was so different. Typically in a stakeholder engagement process, you're getting input and it's a lot of the usual suspects at the table. As a result, those recommendations tend to serve and benefit the people that helped create the plan. Because ours was done so differently, it actually looks a lot different and the strategies and actions coming out of that are very different than what you would generally see in a typical climate action plan. That process I think is so important. What we're working towards, and we are by no means there, is a more collaborative governance structure where it's not government making decisions for people, but it's people making decisions with government as a mechanism to execute what the community needs. It's almost like a total flip of how we generally think about how government engages and is in relationship with community. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Sarah has worked in the hospitality and tourism industry throughout her career and has a Masters in Tourism Management where she developed a keen interest in sustainable tourism. Following 4 years working for the South Australian Tourism in online marketing management and project management roles, she undertook training via the Climate Leadership Corps, lead by Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States.   After completing this training Sarah moved to Siem Reap, Cambodia where she worked primarily with the NGO sector and responsible tourism practices, during which time Plastic Free Cambodia was formed. Specialising in consulting to businesses and delivering educational workshops on the topic of plastic reduction and other environmental issues. Sarah now also consults to other countries around Southeast Asia thanks to the knowledge she has derived from her experiences and growing knowledge of climate change and plastic pollution issues in the region.   Sarah Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Strategies for plastic reduction and elimination programs in communities and in businesses Why small actions can have a big impact Waste and recycling problems and solutions in Southeast Asia Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Sarah's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Find a good support network. That would definitely be my advice. Find a good support network so that you've got someone to go through the ups and downs with. It can be challenging, can be very rewarding and it's definitely good to have a good crew of people around or even just one business partner that can support you through that. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think it's the connection with people across the world, that people are really coming together. We're coming together and it's a very uniting thing to work on this. Also, being able to see the changes. When we work with a group of people and you see them light up with this new information and determination to do something. We're building a really strong network and it's across borders and quite phenomenal. I definitely think that's probably the most exciting part for me right now. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? Resolution by Russell Brand. There were some really good takeaways in there for me. He asked a few questions such as if every business decision you made, you ask yourself, "Does this hurt someone? Does this hurt the environment." I thought that was really cool and a good approach. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I actually would have to say podcasts. I normally start my day going to the gym and having a bit of a run and listening to a podcast. The gems of information that I've been getting have just really spurred me on for the day. There's some really inspiring stuff going on in the podcast world. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at Plastic Free Cambodia. They can go to plasticfreecambodia.com. There are a bunch of resources on the website and we're also on Facebook and Instagram with the same name. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Heather Paulsen Consulting (HPC) works with mission-driven businesses to create an economy (and a world) that works better for all of us: owners, employees, suppliers, customers, our communities and the environment. We provide practical strategies for clients to create positive impact through their daily operations, taking care of the environment and stakeholders while also improving the bottom line. HPC specializes in B Corp and Zero Waste certifications, sustainability-related strategic planning and facilitation. Heather Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Trends in the business world including collaboration and coopetition The benefits of B Corp certification What the B Impact Assessment teaches businesses Top resaons companies decide to pursue B Corp certification Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Heather's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? First thing I would say is to just do it. I hear a lot that people are tentative about making that transition from whatever they're doing to working in the sustainability realm, or even within their current roles in their current companies. I met with a company a while back and as I was describing to them what the B Corp certification is all about, they just stared at me in silence after I was done talking and they said, "This is who we are outside of work. This is how we live our everyday lives. It never occurred to us to bring these values into the workplace and clearly we should." They just couldn't believe that it hadn't yet happened. So, I think that everybody can be a sustainability professional, whether it's making a career change and just having a consulting company, or staying within their existing role in their existing company and bringing those sustainability issues forward within those companies. Just do it. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? There are two things. One is the shift from the focus on sustainability to regenerative development. The idea that sustaining what we have isn't enough and we have to shift towards a more regenerative approach. The second thing that I'm really excited about, that I touched on before, is the hope and the inspiration that comes from seeing so many businesses doing their unique piece of the puzzle to solve these issues. The more we're in communication about those things, the more we can see how our own piece fits into that mosaic of the whole. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? Well, I'm going to have to say there's two. One recent read is The Regenerative Business by Carol Sanford. She masterfully points out why so many of our best practices that we see in business today are actually undermining to the agency and to the creativity of our employees. She describes this in some detail and then offers alternatives to those toxic business practices. She offers a framework and an approach to build businesses that bring the whole person to work so that people can be creatively engaged, and it makes for a much more resilient, productive company. The next book is the second edition of the B Corp Handbook by Ryan Honeyman and Tiffany Jana. I'm super excited about this because it's a great resource for any company that is thinking about taking that B Corp journey. It highlights hundreds of companies, why they did it and what they're getting out of it. It also gives you a really great best practices guide or being a business for good. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? My growing network is my favorite tool actually, if you can call awesome human beings a tool. I think I mentioned before that I am not naturally an extroverted person, yet through this work of being in the B Corp world I have discovered that pretty much everybody that I've met at the B Corp Champions Retreat, for example, is awesome. Everybody's got these great tools, skills, talents and perspectives to bring. So, my network is my favorite thing to tap into when I'm facing a challenge. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading? I do have a website: hpaulsenconsulting.com. I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Jennifer Woofter is the founder and president of Strategic Sustainability Consulting (SSC). In this role she draws upon more than a decade of experience in the fields of organizational sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and socially responsible investing. She has worked with more than 50 clients on projects including Green Auditing, Sustainability Planning, Carbon Footprint Analysis, Stakeholder Engagement, Training and Facilitation, and Sustainability Reporting. She currently manages the SSC Consultant Network, an association of more than 650 professionals with expertise in virtually every area of sustainability. Jennifer Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Key trends in corporate sustainability The ESG and responsible investment movement The evolution of the sustainability consulting industry. The importance of quality data. Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders. Jennifer's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Stop being a generalist and get more specific. There's thousands of people out there trying to sell their sustainability skills and if you're not specialized, you're too easy to overlook. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? The focus on metrics and outcomes is incredibly interesting and I feel like it's changing every single day. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? I would actually recommend that you just read the newspaper every day. I think that understanding what is happening in the world is probably more important in terms of being a good sustainability consultant than relying on a single book. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I'm a big advocate of podcasts and simple web reading. I probably spend 45 minutes to an hour every day reading up on e-newsletters from industry groups like Greenbiz.com. Environmental Leader is a great website. I really like to have a broad understanding of what news is coming out, what people are talking about, what they're not talking about, who's doing it, who's leading and who's following. I feel like you have to keep up with all of that information every single day. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work? I would suggest you start with my company website which is sustainabilityconsulting.com. I'm also always delighted to connect with people on LinkedIn. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Kim Holmes is Vice President of Sustainability for the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS). The sustainability team provides support for all sustainability and recycling related work undertaken by the councils and committees at PLASTICS.  The association is committed to maximizing the recovery of all plastics, both post-industrial and post-consumer, across all product categories. PLASTICS has developed a truly collaborative, supply chain approach to identifying new end markets that will create demand pull through for recycled plastics.  During her time at PLASTICS, Kim has worked to develop the Zero Net Waste recognition program, sustainability benchmarking for the industry, and a number of innovative recovery demonstration projects.  Kim Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: Addressing the ocean plastic crisis Designing plastic products and packaging for the circular economy Sustainability of plastics as a material Changing recovery dynamics in the United States Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Kim's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Stay optimistic. Particularly working on plastics recovery issues on a daily basis, sometimes these challenges that we face can seem very overwhelming but it's the progress we make even on a daily basis, whether it's small or whether you have big gains that day, it all adds up. Keep fighting the good fight. I would also emphasize the power of collaboration. Don't be afraid to seek partnerships with unlikely allies. We have gotten so much farther in our work over the past few years because of collaboration and information sharing. So, look for those unlikely allies and stay optimistic. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm about to go to GrenBiz here in the next week and then Sustainable Brands later in the year. I'm excited about all of the different opportunities that people are working on. I think we have a lot of new opportunities with clean energy, which has huge impacts on the direction of our climate and climate change. Building and construction, and looking at how these opportunities relate throughout society and the improvements that they can make on society. I can't put my finger on one thing. I'm looking forward to hearing about all of these sustainability opportunities coming up at these events. I would say the positive impact that we can have on society regardless of what you're working on. That's what gets me excited. What is one book you'd recommend sustainability leaders read? I always come back to a book that I read early on in my career called Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An intro to community based social marketing. This is what my Deb McKenzie Moore and William Smith and it's all about how you can drive sustainable change by eliminating barriers. When you eliminate those barriers, you create new systems and ultimately create new social and cultural norms. I always come back to that book because I think we are learning that you can't just tell people that something is the right thing to do. You have to create meaning behind it to really reinforce it and have it become incorporated into their daily lives and their behaviors. So, I think that book really laid the foundation for that concept and I would refer anyone to check that one out. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? I would say my greatest resource is the professional network that I have built. Being in a trade association that has hundreds of members, we have a very vast and wide professional network of people. So, while it's not a single resource, I would encourage everyone to work at building out their professional network. There's not a single challenge or question that comes up that I can't pick up the phone and call someone and get the answer to. So, I don't necessarily have to be an expert, but because of that network that I can tap into the answers are easier to obtain. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work of the Plastics Industry Association? I would check out our website: plasticsindustry.org. I am on Twitter @kholmesrecycles. You can always email me if you have plastics questions: kholmes@plasticsindustry.org. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

Nancy Mancilla is recognized is the CEO and Co-Founder of ISOS Group, a GRI and CDP Certified Training Partner. In this capacity, Nancy has orchestrated 100+ Certified Trainings and assisted some of the world's biggest brands through the complicated sustainability reporting process. Prior to starting ISOS, Nancy assisted Winrock International in developing their sustainability services and led numerous micro-economic development projects related biodiversity, agronomics and renewable energy. She also developed an innovative technique to analyze the sustainability of Winrock’s hydro-electric projects in the Republic of Georgia as opposed to Russian energy sources. Previous positions included the Little Rock City Mayor’s Sustainability Commission, Arkansas Clean Cities Coalition and the Arkansas Biofuels Alliance. Nancy Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The appetite for ESG disclosure ESG data quality and rigor The future of sustainability reporting Engaging stakeholders in sustainability reports Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Nancy's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Schedule out your own personal sustainability because it could be an easy burnout field. That's probably my first and foremost recommendation. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm excited to see the light bulb go off in the CEO's heads. We're seeing that frequently and across our client base now. That's exciting because when that happens, we know that we've done our job well and we know that the market's moving in the right direction. We know that humanity is moving in the right direction. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? I have a lot right now because I'm also teaching for a few universities. Strangely enough, it's not necessarily sustainability-driven. It's a series on building business models, and that's The Business Model Navigator Set. There's one on value proposition, there's a business model generator and then the original business model navigator. So, I would highly recommend those because it's a very easy read and quick resource that helps bridge the gap between sustainability being a nice-to-have to something that's operationalized. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? Google docs is a great one. Our team loves working within Google docs, and with our clients we can quickly add notes and work on things together in the same system even though we're in different parts of the world. It really expedites our work. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at ISOS Group? You can go to our website: www.isosgroup.com or sign on to our newsletter. I know everyone's tired with newsletters so we're trying to up the ante on that and do more short videos and tutorials and things, so they're becoming fun. Just give us a call or reach out via email. We're always interested to share knowledge and to just talk shop with people. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

In the five years since USGBC has launched Education USGBC, they have been committed to continuous improvement. Along the way, USGBC has expanded to over 700 courses, diversified the topics and types of education content available, launched curated playlists and created knowledge-based badges to recognize deeper expertise. USGBC has also begun hosting the annual Green Schools Conference and Expo, taking place April 8-10 2019 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Green Schools Conference & Expo is the only national event to bring together all the players involved in making green schools a reality: people who lead, operate, build and teach in U.S. schools.Two days of programming offer inspiring keynote speakers, informative workshops and breakout sessions and the chance to network with colleagues from across the country. In 2019, GSCE will be hosted in partnership with IMPACT, a regional sustainability conference. In this episode of Sustainable Nation we chat with three leaders from the education programs at USGBC to speak about their commitment to education, educating and preparing the next generation of sustainability leaders and the upcoming Green Schools Conference and Expo. Our guests include: Anisa Hemming - Director of the Center for Green Schools Jenny Wiedower - K-12 Education Manager Jaime Van Mourik - Vice President of Education Solutions Anisa Heming You have an upcoming conference, the Green Schools Conference and Expo coming up April 8th in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Tell us a little bit about that conference and what can attendees expect to learn? Yeah, we love this conference. This is my favorite time of the year. It is a really nice size and a great group of people who really care about better schools for our kids. We're really excited about the programming this year too. USGBC has worked on the conference since it was first launched back in 2010. We took it over fully a few years ago and work alongside the people who founded the conference, which is the Green Schools National Network. USGBC has a lot of expertise in running high quality events and making sure that the right voices are at the table and we have great content for people to hear from. So, we run the conference and make sure that it runs smoothly, has great keynotes and great content for people to enjoy. Can you tell us what you're learning or any lessons learned from the work that you're doing with these sustainability change makers in the schools? We have learned a lot. The US Green Building Council was founded 25 years ago to work mostly with companies, and then in 2007 we released LEED for schools, which was one of our first experiences doing work with elementary and secondary schools. By the time 2010 rolls around we decided to launch the Center for Green Schools because we realized very quickly, in working with LEED for schools, that the K through 12 schools market just makes decisions very differently and the incentives for change are very different. Everything about working with schools is different. So, we have learned quite lot over the last number of years. One of the things we've found in the last eight years or so is that there is a core of staff at school systems who are being assigned work related to sustainability. So, in some cases these are sustainability directors or sustainability coordinators, sometimes they are energy managers, sometimes they're called resource conservation officers. There is this really cool group of change makers that work on a system level at school districts and we have found a lot of success in working with that group, making sure they have the professional development they need to do that work well and best practice sharing among that group. So, it's a very powerful group of people to make change at the system level within their schools. We're learning a lot about the different ways that change happens at schools and school systems. It can really come from anywhere, which is just constantly surprising. All it takes to make a change at a school or school district is to have a few very passionate voices who have the right information and the right research behind the work and are effective at making the case for sustainability action. That can be students, it can be teachers or it can be parents. So, when someone asks me about the path for change at a school or school system, there's really not one path. There's so many and our job at the Center for Green Schools is to equip those passionate people with what they need, because we know that anyone with the right information and the right passion can actually tip the needle at some of our schools and school systems. Are you seeing signs of progress overall in the green school movement? Yeah, absolutely. We've seen a lot of progress in the willingness for school districts to push sustainability further. A lot of your listeners will probably have heard of a school in their area that's thinking about net zero energy. There are dozens of those schools around the country and that is just something that would not have been a conversation even five years ago with most schools. We're actually seeing many schools take chance seriously and the most innovative schools are actually thinking about how to take this even further. They are looking at at zero carbon and water resources - using only what we're able to capture. There's actually many more schools now that are looking at those goals that we would have seen as maybe stretch goals a couple of years ago, and looking at them much more seriously now. So, that is very exciting for me to see. I'm also seeing a lot of progress because of that group I mentioned earlier of sustainability directors at school systems. We can actually measure the growth of sustainability over the last number of years because we do a lot of work to try to find those people to connect them to this professional development network of sustainability directors at school systems. That network has grown by 20% each of the last two years at least. So, we can also see that more districts and systems are hiring someone or assigning someone to work on sustainability issues. That can be in the facilities department or often they bridge the facilities department and the academic departments at a district. Jenny Wiedower We're seeing this huge movement around sustainability in higher education and all these universities that are creating programs and embedding sustainability into their curriculum. So, it's great that we're really working to expose these students to sustainability before that in high school and middle school and even elementary school. Yeah, a really exciting part of my work is thinking about how we are both impacting the experience of school occupants, learners, teachers, professionals today and how we're inspiring and informing students about the possibilities that await them as they enter into their next phase after they graduate from high school. Every green activity within a school is an opportunity for students to think about how they might get excited and resolve to incorporate sustainability in their life, both at school and beyond. Any trends you're seeing about students around sustainability careers? Are students interested in high school or middle school? Is there engagement around students pursuing those sustainability careers? Yeah, absolutely. We like to talk about the concept of sustainability natives. We think that kids understand concepts that we unfortunately sometimes teach out of them. So, not being wasteful and appreciating time outdoors. Even at the youngest age, when thinking about careers is not really something that elementary students are or should be thinking about, there's a real opportunity to help teachers keep that core sustainability thinking present in students' minds. That could be taking advantage of outdoor classrooms, talking about concepts of scarcity and abundance, thinking about how to be more mindful and present and really weaving sustainability as a topic across all subjects. We tend to think of sustainability as being aligned with science, especially as we get into the upper grades, but for our youngest learners sustainability can show up in art projects or writing assignments. It's a great way to take, for instance, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and try to apply those in learning across all subjects. As these younger learners move into middle school, that's where career topics begin to show up. Many of the STEM skills, science, technology, engineering and math, are introduced around middle school and that's also where we see science and thinking about what scientists and engineers do. The practices that they incorporate into their jobs show up in the next generation science standards. So, as they're learning the skills and practices of professionals, it's a great opportunity to make them aware of the green aspects of so many of the professions out there. It's also a really wonderful time to show them careers and positions that are held by people who look like them or sound like them or come from places that are familiar to students. I recently saw a new book that was published about women in STEM careers. That middle school time frame also is when many students have the opportunity to opt into career technical education programs. When they're in sixth or seventh grade, they might be choosing which high school they will move into in ninth grade and making sure that guidance counselors are equipped with information about green jobs and how sustainability can be incorporated across a number of professions is really important and something that we at the US Green Building Council are focusing on. And then of course, as we move into the high school, students have a lot of opportunities to explore green jobs. Beginning in middle school and all up through high school is a really great time for teachers and schools to be connecting with local professionals. Bringing them into the classroom, having them work with students on projects, or maybe just coming in for a career day are all great ideas. Jaime Van Mourik In general, why is education so important for the overall movement of sustainability and green building? So one of the most fundamental drivers of transformation, both on a personal level and on a market scale, is education. No matter who you are or how you learn best, longterm success is built on continuous learning and growth. So, we know that it's critical to build the pipeline of future green building professionals and citizens of this world who understand that the built environment affects their daily lives. An organization like USGBC needs to advance the knowledge of our current professionals in the marketplace so that we start to see changes happen in the way that we design, construct and operate buildings and infrastructure. So again, education, I really see as that catalyst for change and it's such a critical component to the work we're doing to drive this green building movement. How do you work to getting your resources into the curriculum in middle schools, high schools or even higher education. What does that process look like of incorporating your educational resources into curriculum? So our vision at USGBC is to support all stages of a learner's life. It really begins with very young children, all the way through the college preparatory years and postsecondary education, and then of course, being able to provide advanced education for professionals. We work in a variety of modes. We first need to understand the audience that we're trying to serve and what the goals of the audience is, and then of course the best style of learning, whether that be in-person or through online platforms. So, each day as we're working across all these different ages and education levels to provide the different solutions, what we want to be able to do is connect the knowledge on sustainable topics to real action, because it's through this action that the change is in fact going to take place. For our youngest learners, the K12 audience, our goal is to build a foundation of knowledge and skills and behaviors that are going to set up these young people for decades of success, contributing to building sustainable communities, developing relevant careers and having fulfilling futures. To be able to support learners in this stage, we offer an online learning platform called Learning Lab and we have a green classroom professional certificate, which helps to train K12 teachers on the concepts of green building and sustainability. These all together help these educators bring sustainability into the classroom in ways that have a real lasting impact on the students. When we shift to our postsecondary learners, students in college, our goal is to help prepare them for 21st century careers. So, at this stage of learning, we offer programs and products that help them better define their personal vision and their aspirations and show them a realistic path toward the achievement of their goals. What we've done is really tried to help enhance the curriculum that's being developed and to push innovation in educational practice. We offer high quality education content, curricular toolkits for instructors, professional credential exam resources and an experiential learning course. All that help equip faculty who are looking to bring sustainability concepts to life in the classroom. So again, it's really trying to push on innovation in academia and different methods of teaching and learning and being able to take advantage of the built environment as that laboratory. What are some of the key skills that USGBC finds important for the 21st century marketplace? What's USGBC's role in developing these skills? We continue to hear from industry that young professionals and recent graduates lack the core professional skills, or as I like to say, professional competencies. These are highly needed in the workplace. This is across the board, regardless of whether the organization has a focus on sustainability. When we look at the 21st century workplace, the competencies that employers are looking for are skills and communication, the ability to work with a multidisciplinary team, the ability to manage projects and to understand decision making processes, to be able to apply your knowledge and demonstrate your competency and of course problem solve and critically think about solutions needed to drive change in the marketplace. All of that is what needs to happen within creating a sustainable built environment. It's interesting, there's been a lot of articles about this idea of entering the fourth industrial revolution, meaning now we're finding technology taking over the work and really profound ways that we never imagined. The reality is that the majority of jobs that children and young people hold over the course of their lifetime don't currently exist. So, when we look at how to educate and train the next generation, we need to cultivate the skills and abilities that are human and what artificial intelligence won't be able to replace. Much of this is housed in our right brain. So what does that mean for education? Well, we need to be introducing more innovative teaching practices such as experiential learning and project based work that allows students to have hands on experience and thus cultivate those professional competencies I mentioned. The built environment is such a rich laboratory for learning and when you consider the challenges we face on this planet, this becomes a really ripe playground for education. Quite frankly, we need to start thinking and working in a completely different manner to solve the problems of climate change and to create communities that are both healthy and resilient for all residents of this planet. Learn more about the Green Schools Conference and Expo: http://greenschoolsconference.org/  About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Alan is a "semi-retired” consultant in Packaging and Sustainability and has recently re-activated his connection with PAC The Packaging Consortium as their PACNEXT US and Food Waste Director. Alan also has 20 years experience with Procter & Gamble in Package Development & Design and was the Corporate leader for their global Packaging Sustainability program.  He has been a  board member of PAC, of the National Zero Waste Council (NZWC) and of Green Blue and served on the the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) executive committee.  Alan Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The new packaging take back program, Loop Importance of life cycle analysis in packaging sustainability The circular economy movement and business's role The business benefits of designing more sustainable packaging Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Alan's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Two pieces of advice. First and foremost, if this is something that you are passionate about, then follow your passion and don't give up. There is a huge network of people and organizations out there who share your passion and want to make a difference. So, follow your passion. Secondly, be patient, because as I said, this is a journey and it's a long journey and it's going to frustrate you. So be patient, but know that you're making progress and celebrate that progress. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm excited about the fact that there's so much activation out there to get going on this journey and to take bigger interventions. I loved the fact that this sort of program, like Loop was getting center stage in Davos. You had Tom Zacky, the head of Terracycle, on stage with company CEO's talking about Loop. That's crazy. That would never have happened a few years ago. So, I'm excited about that and I'm excited about the ongoing discussion around the new plastics economy and this focus on keeping plastics out of the environment and in the economy. These are the sorts of activation steps and momentum that I think we need that's going to help us make the sort of progress that we'd love to see in the next five, ten to fifteen years. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? Yeah, this is an interesting one because things are changing so fast that sometimes you struggle to think what's relevant. But I'll go for an old one, because it was something that really helped me a lot in terms of understanding the challenges out there across the value chain. And it is very simply titled Integrated Solid Waste Management. It was written by several of my Proctor and Gamble colleagues about 15 years or so ago. It's just kind of an encyclopedia all to do with solid waste management. It's a little bit out of date now, but it's just a great resource. A second book that's just come out, and I like this because it's a collection of industry leaders talking the sustainability journey, and it's called The Future of Packaging From Linear to Circular. It's edited by Tom Zacky of Terracycle and I think that's a great read because it's today and it's relevant. It's just industry leaders sharing their stories and approaches and thinking on what it's going to take to get to the circular economy with packaging. So those are the two books I would recommend. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? This is another good question and it had me scratching my head for a while and then I thought the more my network has grown in the world of packaging and sustainability, the greater the resources available to me. So, my favorite resources are my network and all of the stuff that they share and send to me. They share websites, they share media links, the latest news reports and I find this phenomenal. I welcome it, and I'll be honest with you, my struggle is to keep up with just the wealth of great information that this network sends to me and then sorting through it. One of the nice things now back with PAC is that we have a monthly letter and our challenge is to sort through and come up with two or three links every month that are relevant to packaging. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading? Well, right now, the best place to go is to the the Packaging Consortium's website and that is www.pac.ca. That tells you everything about PAC and the organization that goes all the way back to 1952. So, it's a long standing organization that is focused on promoting the packaging industry. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Rhonda Sherman has been an extension waste management specialist with North Carolina State University since 1993. She is the founder and director of the Composting Learning Lab (CL2), which has 26 types of vermicomposting and composting bins. She gives about 40 presentations annually and has authored over 65 publications on these topics. Her new book is The Worm Farmer’s Handbook: Mid- to Large-Scale Vermicomposting for Farms, Businesses, Municipalities, Schools, and Institutions.  Rhonda Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The importance of vermicomposting to address organic waste issues The benefits of vermicomposting over traditional composting How sustainability leaders can implement vermicomposting within their organizations Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Rhonda's Final Five Question Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? You can see from my career that I never intended to work for with worms, but I left myself open to possibilities and was always looking ahead to what wasn't being addressed. I became wildly successful with it. I was not expecting that. I tell people I accidentally became world famous. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I'm so excited that people are finally paying attention to it, you know? I was writing about food waste recycling a long time ago, like in the 90's, and other people just were not paying attention to food waste. So, now I'm thrilled that they finally are. So many different organizations are trying to reduce, reuse, recycle food waste. So, that's very exciting and I'm thrilled that so many schools have garden and that it's part of the curriculum, raising food and preparing it and eating it. And since you always end up with food waste in a garden or in the kitchen, hopefully they're doing some composting or vermicomposting onsite. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? Obviously my new book, The Worm Farmer's handbook. I also have another book called Vermiculture Technology and that's a 600 page book on scientific aspects of vermicomposting. And also, this is an old book, but it's very important - The Population Bomb. I read that when I was in school back in the 70's or 80's. This planet can't sustain an ever increasing population. So, I think we really need to be conscious of that. What are some of your favorite resources or tools it really helped you in your work? My scientific colleagues. I really want people to know about Google Scholar. I mentioned it earlier, but Google Scholar is where you'll find scientific articles. I just think it's really for people to read websites that end in .edu or .gov, because they're really good resources that are normally unbiased and research based, and that's so important. So, you just really have to be careful what you read on the Internet as most people know. On a lot of the worm farming business websites, it's not always accurate information, so you really have to be careful. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work? My website is composting.ces.ncsu.edu. I'm on Facebook, NC state's Vermiculture Composting Recycling Program. I'm on Twitter (Rhonda Sherman) and LinkedIn (Rhonda Sherman) and email - sherman@ncsu.edu. My website is a great source of information. There's so much info on there. It'll take you a couple of days to get through it all. I also have videos and podcasts and all sorts of ways to access the information. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.  

Kunal Merchant is Managing Director of Lotus Advisory. In this capacity, Kunal provides strategic advisory, project management, public affairs, and communications support to a select portfolio of clients in sports, technology, real estate, politics, and philanthropy. Kunal previously served as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for the Sacramento Kings, where he oversaw several strategic, political, media and community initiatives. He managed the Kings delegation to the 2014 NBA Global Games series in China, formulated the team’s “Greenprint” sustainability agenda, and developed the acclaimed Sacramento First labor and community benefits package for the Golden 1 Center. In his previous role as Executive Director of Think BIG Sacramento, Kunal served as Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s chief advisor in efforts to develop a public private finance plan for a new downtown arena, win NBA approval to keep the Kings in Sacramento, and facilitate sale of the franchise to a new ownership group. Kunal Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The work of the Green Sports Alliance Engaging fans in sustainability through sports Communicating the business value of sustainability Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Kunal's Final Five Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? Think big and think broadly. So, I get approached all the time by people who have a real passion for green, for sustainability and they want to make it the centerpiece of their jobs. And there are increasingly jobs out there in the marketplace that are these explicit jobs around sustainability, about the environment. But I remind them, you're talking to somebody who used to work for a basketball team, that ended up having a really big sustainability piece of his job. There is an opportunity in all sorts of jobs to focus on sustainability. You just have to be creative enough to pursue it. So, look at those sustainability jobs as traditional categories, but also challenge yourself to see about ways where you could pull sustainability into other jobs and make it a piece of the puzzle as well. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? As an American, I feel like we are at our best when our backs are against the wall, and you see that play out throughout history. I think finally you're seeing a level of attention to the crisis around climate change and around these issues, and I'm really excited about the level of ambition I'm seeing at a more local level. Obviously, some of these big issues are only going to get solved at a federal or even international level, but state governments, local public policy makers and some of these new governors in Colorado and California are what I'm really excited about. And then, just everyday citizens organizing around elements of this that they are inspired by, and the technological tools and the media tools we have today, you can do so much more than you used to. I'm just so excited about this bottom up approach I'm seeing because we can't afford to wait around for the people at the top if they're not getting it. That really gets me really excited and I want to do everything I can to help support that. What is one book you would recommend sustainability leaders read? So, I'm sure there's all sorts of cool books at the cool kids' table in sustainability, but I got to say, there's an old classic that I still have, which you probably remember Josh, it's called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. This is a book I read when I was probably eight or nine years old growing up in Colorado. Of course it's a little corny and it's and it's certainly small scale, but I think there's a power of messaging and communication in there. When I was a kid, I read this book and it gave me these incredibly tactical, practical things I could do to do my part. Whoever you are and wherever you are in the green space, we have to explain this issue the right way. We're failing right now. The community at large does not understand what's at stake and it's on us to fix that. So, I think that's a great book. I look at every now and then just to remind myself that you can get lost in all of the jargon and the technical pieces of this and the data and all that, but you have to connect with people. That was a book that connected with me as an eight year old kid and really affected my whole view on the world. We need to be doing more things like that. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? The obvious one is just the Green Sports Alliance network. I would say that even if I wasn't on the board, because a lot of the work I'm doing on sustainability is tied to sports. But I think even if you're not in sports, I would check out the website, greensportsalliance.org. Check out a lot of these resources and playbooks that they've come up with because they're transferable to other industries. We may have customized them specific to sports teams and leagues, but in terms of trying to tell a story to consumers, tell a story to businesses, and what to prioritize and how to organize it, we've spent a lot of time thinking about that. I pull those tools all the time to help me in my work. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work? I would recommend going into my website, lotusadvisory.com or just shoot me an email at kunal@lotusadvisory.com. About Sustridge Sustridge is a sustainability consulting firm providing consulting in sustainability strategy development, GHG emissions calculating and management, zero waste planning and guidance in TRUE Zero Waste, B Corp, LEED and Carbon Neutral certification.

This TRUE Zero Waste presentation was conducted in Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel on December 7th, 2018. The presentation talks about the benefits of zero waste for organizations, walks you through the various aspects of TRUE Zero Waste certification program, discusses the requirements for becoming TRUE Zero Waste certified and insights from the first TRUE Zero Waste certified business facility in Las Vegas, Coco Taps. Speakers include: Josh Prigge (Sustridge), Coco Vinny (Coco Taps) and Stephanie Barger (USGBC).

As director of market transformation & development for the TRUE Zero Waste certification, Stephanie Barger is responsible for the growth and development of the TRUE program. Barger helped launch TRUE, which is owned and administered by Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI) in 2017. GBCI is the premier organization independently recognizing excellence in green business industry performance and practice globally and administers all LEED green building certifications. TRUE was acquired by GBCI in 2016 and was previously known as U.S. Zero Waste Business Council, which Barger formed in January 2012. Barger has been dedicated to meeting the growing need for educational resources, peer-to-peer networking and third-party certification for businesses across the nation related to waste reduction and zero waste. She brings over 25 years of experience in environmental stewardship, employee training, management consulting and business development. Prior to forming the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council, Barger spent 15 years leading Earth Resource Foundation (ERF), a dynamic high school environmental leadership program. ERF’s campaigns included curbing plastic pollution through zero waste, promoting native plant restoration, advocating for smoke-free beaches and improving watershed management. In 2009, ERF was awarded a Federal Stimulus Grant (the California Green Jobs Program in Orange County) to provide training for at-risk youth in zero waste and career development. Stephanie Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss: The TRUE Zero Waste certification and its value for sustainability professionals The zero waste movement in the United States The TRUE Advisor program Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders Stephanie's Final Five Responses: What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers? I think having a really great team around you - so energy experts, water experts, etc. And then knowing what you don't know and having a go-to organization or go-to person. Google is a great thing. There's lots of resources out there. Really building that team, and that can be nonprofits and other industry professionals. What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability? I think the shift that our consumers and our businesses are getting the simple things, like this wave of eliminating straws. We worked for many, many years to ban styrofoam and ban plastic bags and it seems like with the straws, people are getting it. We just don't need that. It's a little thing, but it's a big thing, and with that there is enthusiasm, especially from businesses. With the commodities market, with politics, with deregulation, there are a lot of things that are taking sustainability backwards. But our businesses believe in it and they see the power of it. They have 20 year goals. So, the cycles of politics don't really affect them and they just keep moving forward. I appreciate that with businesses, the leadership and the longterm goals that they're setting. What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? The Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawkens. Basically, anything by Paul Hawkens, even his first books. But The Blessed Unrest really talks about that we're not alone. There are millions and billions of people that are working on these sustainability issues, whether it's in their home that they don't even talk about or in their local community. So, it just inspires me that we're all in this together. What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work? So as I mentioned, the EPA, they have their Warm Model and WasteWise. It's really fun to go in and enter your data and they give you great graphics or facts - like how many trees are you saving, how many car trips etc. I think the very simple thing of doing a zero waste in your home. So, taking your zero waste audit, taking our TRUE zero waste rating system, and doing it in your own home. There is power in that to see the challenges and the opportunities that exist Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at TRUE? Our website is: www.true.gbci.org. Or you can go to the US Green Building Council main website at www.usgbc.org. You can see all the different certifications and all the resources that are available. And a huge resource is attending Green Build in Chicago. There's over 20,000 professionals that attend Green Build and it's just this amazing resource of energy and knowledge and networking. More information on Stephanie Barger and TRUE: https://true.gbci.org/ More information on Josh Prigge and Sustridge: https://www.sustridge.com/

We are turning the tables on this episode of Sustainable Nation, and the podcast interviewer is becoming the interviewee. Josh Prigge was recently interviewed for an episode the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast, so with permission, we republished the interview for Sustainable Nation. Josh Prigge is a sustainability practitioner, college professor, published author, and public speaker with nearly a decade of experience managing sustainability programs and initiatives for large organizations. Josh is the current CEO of sustainability consulting firm, Sustridge, and has also worked as Director of Regenerative Development at Fetzer Vineyards and Sustainability Coordinator at Hawaii Pacific University. Complete Transcript: Our guest today is Josh Prigge. He is the founder and CEO of Sustridge, which is a sustainability consulting firm. Now, you've had a very long and intriguing career in the area of sustainability. Would you agree with that? Yeah, it's taken me a few exciting and different kinds of places with some different types of organizations. It's been great. How did you get involved in this area in the first place? So, I'm from Minnesota originally and my undergraduate degree was actually physical education, so sports was always my passion. So, I was teaching and coaching back in Minnesota right out of college and I just started to become more and more aware of environmental issues like climate change and started paying more attention to these important global issues. After a while, that just became much more of a passion to me than teaching and coaching was. So, I decided I should go back to school and study sustainability and rededicate my career to sustainability. This was back in about 2007, and I was looking for graduate programs across the US and there were only a few at the time. Now they're popping up everywhere - green MBA programs and masters in sustainability. But back then there were a few and one of them was at Hawaii Pacific University. They had a master of arts in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development. And so being born and raised in Minnesota, I thought moving to Hawaii sounded kind of good, so I packed up everything and drove to California, shipped my car and jumped on a plane. I studied in this fantastic program for two years, learning all about sustainability and was fortunate enough to get hired as soon as I graduated as that university's first sustainability coordinator. So I managed sustainability for the university for just under four years. I also served as the president of the Sustainability Association of Hawaii while I was out there as well. So I got a lot of great experience in Hawaii, which is just a hotbed for renewable energy and sustainability. So really great experience out there. And then the university was going through a number of layoffs, and I was fortunate enough not to get let go, but I figured it was probably a good time to start looking elsewhere and taking the next step in my career. So I looked throughout Hawaii and the mainland United States looking for the best sustainability job. I came across the job at Fetzer Vineyards up in northern California, a wine company in Mendocino County. I was hired on as their director of sustainability, and the title then changed from sustainability to regenerative development. I got a lot of great experience in the wine industry. Fetzer Vineyards is a wine company with about 10 brands, including Bonterra, which is the number one organically farmed wine in the US. It's a company that really has been leading the industry in sustainability for a long time. So, I got a lot of great experience starting a new sustainability program from scratch at Hawaii Pacific University, and then on the other end of the spectrum at Fetzer, I got the opportunity to take a very evolved sustainability program to the next level. I had worked at Fetzer for about four years and then realized I have all this experience and knowledge and I could make a greater impact in the world working with multiple organizations instead of just one. So, I left in 2017 to start my own sustainability consulting business. Now I'm working with all sorts of different businesses on greenhouse gas emissions calculating, greenhouse gas planning, zero waste planning, zero waste certification, B Corp certification and all things sustainability. Let's go back to Hawaii and then talk a little bit more about Fetzer in detail, because those are both pretty special kind of situations as far as this topic goes. One of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with is that for a lot of folks, the word "sustainability" doesn't mean anything. It's too nebulous and too soft. They want to know where the recycled rubber meets the recycled road somehow. So, in Hawaii for instance, it is a self-contained ecosystem in a lot of ways, obviously there's a lot of stuff that's brought to the island, but as an entity it's isolated. What were the kinds of things that you implemented and what were your goals when you were there, both at university and also as part of the island wide sustainability program? At the university, like I mentioned, I was the first sustainability employee. So, I was tasked with really trying to create a culture of sustainability and embed sustainability into the culture of the university. It started with a lot of tracking and reporting. I had to create a sustainability metrics system to track all of our metrics - our waste, water. energy, supply chain and really all of our sustainability related impacts. That's really the first step is to really track everything so you can baseline your organization, benchmark yourself against your peers and understand where your biggest impacts lie and where the biggest opportunities might be. After baselining everything and benchmarking, I led a sustainability report. So, we put out a sustainability report for the university back in 2012 and used the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education reporting framework. They have a reporting system that is specifically for universities. So, corporations have the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) for sustainability reporting, and universities have this AASHE STARS program. So, I took the university through that process. The first year or so was tracking, baselining and reporting. Then we did a big greenhouse gas emissions report. I led a greenhouse gas inventory of the entire university. So, what are all of the emissions associated with all of the vehicles that are used on campus, all of the energy in the buildings, natural gas, propane, employee travel - all the emissions associated with that. Beginning a new program, that's really what it's all about. It's figuring out where you're at and where are your opportunities for improvement. The after that reporting and tracking, we started looking at some big energy projects and we did some led retrofit projects and looking into renewable energy systems for the campus. We restructured the waste by doing a large waste audit of one of the campuses to reduce the amount of waste pickups and maximize recycling and landfill diversion. So, a lot of really fun projects. It's a lot of fun starting a new program from scratch. Island wide, as the president of the Sustainability Association of Hawaii, that was a nonprofit focused on businesses. So, we were specifically focused on a moving sustainability through the business sector in Hawaii. So what we'll do is have workshops, bring our members out and provide free workshops and educate them on the benefits of a commitment to sustainability, what kind of opportunities are there, the cost savings and really tried to introduce the business community to the B Corp movement. B Corp was relatively new back then and there were only a couple of B Corps in Hawaii at the time. So, B Corp is kind of the highest standard for social and environmental responsibility in business. A company goes through a large assessment and answers a couple of hundred questions on all aspects of their business - from their environmental impacts to how well they pay employees, what kind of benefits they offer, what kind of community impacts do they have, what do their supply chain impacts look like. It's a really comprehensive program and if you get a certain score, 80 or higher on your assessment, you can become a certified B Corp. So, we focused on that and that's kind of where I really learned about B Corp. I brought that with me to Fetzer. So when I got hired at Fetzer, that was one of the first things that I looked into - going through the B Corp assessment. We got Fetzer to become a certified B Corp in 2015 - one of only a few wine companies in the world that have achieved that. I think that the B Corp movement is continuing to grow, I think there's now over 2,500 B Corps around the world in about 55 to 60 different countries. Patagonia's a B Corp, Ben and Jerry's, a number of a large well-known companies that are really doing a lot of good things. But as consumers look to continue to purchase from companies that share their values and share their beliefs, I think this movement of B Corp and these sustainability certifications are going to become more and more important. So, that would be the motivation for a company to go down that road to try to draw this next generation. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's definitely one of them and there are so many others. Attracting new customers, attracting a new demographic that really care about those things is definitely one important thing, as well as building brand loyalty with those existing customers. But outside of that, I think there's so many other benefits, one being just using that certification framework to not only certify but to use that as continual improvement. So, that really just provides a roadmap for your business to continually improve year after year going through that assessment. Another benefit with B Corp is just joining that community. B Corp's love to support other B Corp's. So, at Fetzer when we became a B Corp, we offered a discount to other B Corps out there who are purchasing wine for the corporate events. B Corps love to support each other and they also like to work with each other in creative ways. Ben and Jerry's is a B Corp and also a New Belgium Brewing Company is a B Corp. They actually partnered on a new beer, which was an ice cream flavored beer. So, they had Ben and Jerry's logo and New Belgium's logo on the bottle and on the packaging as a partnership, and that was to bring attention to the B Corp movement and to businesses making powerful impacts in the world and making the world a better place. So there's a lot of great benefits in that world beyond just attracting new customers, but also really being a roadmap for improvement as well as joining those new communities. Let's talk about Fetzer a little bit because there's a backstory around sustainability before you got there, as you know. The Fetzer family and the company had a commitment to sustainable farming and minimal footprint from the day they decided to crush their first grape, and that goes back decades. They had a very deep commitment to these ideas right from the get go, and that was an era when there were not certifications. Tell me about how these ideas around sustainability get transformed into a culture and become second nature within an organization. I think that top down support is key. So you mentioned the Fetzer owners, they were all about. That's about as good as an example as you can possibly have as far as embedding sustainability into the DNA, into the culture of a company - an owner who founds the company with the idea that sustainability is key to its success. So that's the ultimate example, but for companies that are implementing a new strategy around sustainability and want to embed it, there's a number of things that will help. Again, the top down support is key, so having support from the CEO and the C-suite, and having verbal commitments from them so that everybody understands the importance. But it's also important to go from the ground up as well. So, having employees lead sustainability programs and initiatives. At Fetzer we had what was called the Re3 team, which is a sustainability team at the company that is made up of employees from all different departments of the organization. This is key in any business who wants to move sustainability forward - having that interdepartmental team to work together to break down silos within the organization so that all departments of the business are working together to identify opportunities around sustainability and also to engage employees. That employee engagement piece is really important. Getting them active and getting them involved in sustainability is key. And then another important thing is to identify the quick wins and build momentum. So, where's your low hanging fruit? A lot of times companies that are just getting started, there's a lot of energy opportunities. So, energy efficiency, renewable energy, these types of projects have really good payback and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They're just kind of win-wins all around. Getting those quick wins early, communicating them to your employees and to your stakeholders and showing that initial success of your new sustainability program can really help build that momentum and get employees engaged and get stakeholders excited. So, I think top down support, as well as engaging and activating employees and identifying and working on those quick wins to build momentum are important. And then setting ambitious goals as well and being very clear about communicating your progress towards those goals and communicating in your success along the way, I think are really important in building that culture throughout your organization. You had mentioned earlier the first thing that you did at the university was to start collecting metrics. That's the idea that you have to measure to manage. How do you identify or prioritize where you put your efforts? What does that actually look like? Identifying those metrics and understanding where your key material impacts are is what really helps you prioritize. In the wine industry you use a lot of water. That's a big key material impact of your business operation, so that will be a priority in your sustainability program. But also of course, you want to look at return on investment. So, what type of projects are going to have a good payback and are not just important to reduce environmental impacts, but what are also projects that also include good financial payback and also social impacts? So, if you can find those projects that really impact those three different areas financial, environmental and social and have positive benefits for all those areas, you're really hitting on all three. Those are going to be the ones you want to prioritize. If you can identify some of those strong financial payback programs early, you can almost create a revolving fund which can be used specifically for sustainability. If you're just getting started and you have all your metrics, you're looking at your energy, your water, your waste, your greenhouse gas emissions, maybe some of the water projects cost a little bit more and have a lower financial payback. What you could do is focus on those quick paybacks, like the energy projects. So, you look for those projects that will have a good payback and then use those savings from your energy project to fund those slower paying back projects in water or in waste or in emissions or in those other areas. It's just working with your finance department, your operations team and understanding what's important to the business, what's going to have the most impact and then just being smart around strategizing about short term and long term. How can we fund these projects in the short term and how can we fund these larger projects that might take longer to pay back in the future with some of those previous savings? And you had mentioned the idea of a culture, gaining momentum, you get people to buy in, you take down silos and we start to build. What about resistance to that? Give an example where you had a really brilliant idea, a really great plan, but you couldn't overcome the barriers because of the beliefs of some of the people involved. I've been really fortunate to be working with two great organizations, specifically at Fetzer who was just so supportive of my work, supporting me and encouraging me to really help take the company to the next level. There wasn't a lot of pushback there. Obviously, there's tradeoffs and things like that. I think the important thing for people in those other types of organizations, where it might be harder to get projects supported, is having the business case laid out so it's not just a sustainability practice that's going to be good for the environment, but what are the other positive benefits of it? What are the other business benefits? And so being able to use that language in promoting your sustainability projects, the business language. What are the business benefits, the financial, creating resiliency in our business and building towards long-term success and long-term health. Thinking about the bigger picture. But also, getting stakeholder support. At the university for example, if I had a project, a big project that I wanted to pursue, I wouldn't just put that project down on paper and write a proposal and take it to my supervisor. I would go to faculty and go to students and go to other staff, and build support so that when I brought that project forward, it was clear that that the university community is in support of this project. I think you can do that in business as well. Speak with your colleagues at work and find out how these projects will benefit their departments and their aspects of the business, and build that support before bringing the project forward. Tell us a little bit about your current work. Now you have a sustainability consulting firm. So, clients are coming to you because they've identified sustainability is an area in which they want to improve, there are elements that they would like to adopt, and they are coming to you for help. Can you talk to us a little bit about the motivations and the initial contacts with clients when they come to you? It's a pretty diverse bunch of folks that I'm working with. I'm working with one pretty large wine company right now on their greenhouse gas emissions inventory. They have dozens of locations, they have wineries and vineyards all over California and Oregon, very large operations and a very complex inventory. So, what I'm doing is calculating all of their 2017 greenhouse gas emissions, all their vehicle fleets, all of the emissions in their vineyards from the fertilizer they use, the soil emissions, the winemaking emissions and the vehicles and airplanes. So, that project that I started basically right when I started my new consulting business was from a previous relationship. I worked with a large tax and accounting firm in the bay area called Sensiba San Filippo, and they just became a certified B Corp. So, I was working with them for about six months through the B Corp certification process and they just became the first tax accounting firm in California to become a certified B Corp and they're doing a lot of great work throughout the bay area, a lot of great community work, employee volunteering and pro bono work with nonprofits. They are just a really great company. I'm working with organizations on helping them create their corporate sustainability strategy and working with some businesses on TRUE Zero Waste certification. There's a large apparel company that has a large distribution facility where they distribute their products, and I'm helping them go through TRUE zero waste certification. I'm also working with some local governments in southern California on a composting education and awareness program for their community. So, it's really a lot of different stuff. I have a podcast as well - the Sustainable Nation podcast. We're really just trying to share information from other sustainability professionals around the world. But yeah, some companies are looking to implement new sustainability programs and others are just looking for specific areas of help, like how to help them with their emissions or help them with their B Corp certification or a TRUE Zero Waste certification. It's been a lot of fun just helping all of these different types of businesses make positive impacts in the world. You said that to make change, you need to be able to speak that language of business and you need to be able to speak the language of accounting. What I'm hearing in the last couple of examples you've given us, it sounds like there are a lot of businesses that are coming forward and putting a lot of effort into their sustainability efforts for more ethics-based reasons. It's the right thing to do as much as anything else. Do you agree that's the case, that that's part of it? Yeah, I think so. I think businesses are becoming more aware of these environmental crises that we're facing and are starting to understand what the future might look like if we don't change the way we operate. But then again, I think they're all hearing from consumers, especially this younger generation of millennials and younger folks who will soon have the largest purchasing power and in the history of the world. These are folks that are trending more and more that they're looking to purchase from sustainable companies. So, businesses are understanding the long term importance of being a sustainable company. In the world of social media and transparency, I think they're also understanding that not doing the right thing could really destroy value pretty quickly. So it's becoming almost just the new status quo. If you're going to do business, you have to do things the right way or in the long run, you really face a lot more risks than if you don't. I think you're right. I think we've had a lot of examples in the past twenty years of companies who were not doing things the right way. They were fine for a long time and then there was a fall, if you will. You were talking about doing the things that we need to do to turn things around and this is a really extreme question, but I really want to hear what you have to say about it. Is it too late? I was working in sustainability education and that was talking to a grower, and he did all these fantastic things. I said, "How do you feel you're doing? How do you feel about making progress and do you feel very good about it? You're doing so much stuff." He said, "No. It's way too late. The generation of my granddaughter is going to inherit hell on earth. We've lost it already." I think there are folks that share that view. Do you have a more hopeful message for our listeners? It's really easy to take either side of that argument of saying, "Yeah, it's too late. We can't save the planet." But I also think it's easy to be optimistic when you see all the amazing things that are happening around the world. I personally don't think it's too late. I'm one of the optimists. I'm really connected and plugged into all these amazing things that are happening, and I see the momentum building. This new movement that we're seeing is exciting. I had mentioned my title at Fetzer changed from director of sustainability to director of regenerative development. That was because of a new strategy that I helped implement at the company, which was moving beyond sustainable to be restorative and regenerative as a company. Let's not just try to minimize our negative impacts and be less bad, but let's actually try to eliminate those negative impacts and focus on creating positive impacts. So instead of being less bad, we're being more good. So, it's not just how can we minimize impacts, but how can we actually make the world a better place. That's a movement that is growing. i might've been one of the first with the titles of regenerative rather than sustainability, but I think there's a few more now. There is also the Net Positive Project, which is a coalition of businesses led by Forum for the Future, BSR in SHINE. This is a number of companies that are recognizing this idea of regenerative and net positive as the next step in corporate responsibility. So, moving beyond sustainable from actually reducing our emissions 50 percent, reducing water 50 percent, to how can we go beyond that to actually reduce emissions one hundred percent, or actually be water positive and send more water into our water tables than we take out, or carbon positive - sequester more carbon than we emit as a company. So, these are things that people are focusing on now and I think the regenerative agriculture movement, which is growing, is extremely exciting. The studies show that if all agricultural areas where to implement regenerative practices, we would actually reduce the carbon in our atmosphere. We could drawn down CO2 in the atmosphere. We would actually be sequestering more carbon in our soil than we emit as a society globally. So, regenerative agriculture is a very exciting development. I see all these great things that are happening, the increases in renewable energy around the world, the agriculture movement, the zero waste movement, the B Corp movement and I'm definitely optimistic about the future.