A Slate truck at its design studio in Long Beach, California, on December 19, 2025. | Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
In May, Ferrari introduced its first entry into the electric vehicle market: the Luce. With an exterior like a Nissan Leaf, and an interior designed by the guy who designed the iPhone, it received a lot of hate. So, if Ferrari can’t make a cool EV, who can?
Enter the Slate truck. It’s a Jeff Bezos-backed, American-made compact truck with no bells, whistles, or even AC — the antithesis of the Tesla Cybertruck. It’s kind of cute. And it might just get more Americans to drive an electric car.
At a time when American manufacturers have fallen far behind countries like China in the automotive industry, companies are still trying to get Americans excited about electric.
Andrew Hawkins is a transportation editor at The Verge who has been following the EV industry in the US. He tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the problems stopping American drivers from fully adopting EVs and discusses whether this bare-bones truck can fix them.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
There’s another electric truck that we have to talk about.
Oh, yes, indeed. The Slate truck.
This to me represents the dichotomy in the EV market today, right? On the one hand, you’ve got your Ferrari Luce. That is a $640,000 car that no one you will ever meet will probably buy. And on the other hand, you’ve got this Slate Truck that is the most bare-bones two-seater that you could possibly imagine. There’s no radio, there’s no touchscreen, there’s no central screen inside the vehicle. There’s no paint. You even have to opt in to get power windows; otherwise, they will just give you the [window crank].
I love the idea of an electric truck that has manual roll-’em-down windows.
When I heard that, that blew my mind. This is a new startup. They’ve got a lot of investment cash from Jeff Bezos and some other people. This is their first vehicle. And the theory behind it is that we will make this thing as stripped-down as we possibly can. Take out all the bells and whistles. People can add a bunch of stuff. They could turn it into a small SUV by adding a back section to it if they want. They could add wrapping decals. You could personalize it and make it look however you want it to look. Or, you could just buy the bare-bones version.
The idea being that electric vehicles, as they stand today, are above the average cost of a new gas-powered vehicle. So, we need to bring this price down. How are we going to do that? Well, still the most expensive part about any electric vehicle is the battery. So, in order to have a good battery while still having a decent car, you need to take out everything else.
That’s how they’re saying that they’re going to sell this thing for under $30,000 when it eventually comes out at the end of this year.
So, unlike the [Ferrari] Luce, people responded well to this Slate truck. Why is it a truck? Why not a sedan?
Trucks are very popular in the US. They’re amongst the best-selling vehicles, typically. The Ford F-150, for example, was the best-selling vehicle in America for a long time.
But, this is America. We love our trucks. We love our big trucks. This is not a big truck. This is a small truck. And a lot of people have been saying trucks have gotten too big. They’re oversized behemoths out on the road that are dangerous to pedestrians that are out walking around. They don’t offer enough safety protections. And so, maybe we need to come back to more of a midsize or compact.
And then, obviously, gas prices are soaring. People are looking for something that’s a little bit more downsized in general. So, I think the truck prospect is an interesting one. Then again, trucks aren’t for everybody. If you want to turn this thing into a four-seater compact SUV, that’s something that will be an option to you, as well.
Okay, so this reason to make a little truck seems based on market research. People want a truck, and here’s a very different truck that we can offer them. What about this decision to literally strip away every single feature, including the paint, including the power windows, including the radio?
It’s a real risky bet from Slate. I think what they’re trying to say is that maybe cars have become too bloated, right? We’re starting to see a pullback from too many convenience features, especially in the car market with people feeling a lot of pressure on their pocketbooks and how expensive new cars have become. They’re looking for something that is a little bit more downmarket.
But also, I think it’s a reflection of where the expenses are in building a new car and a realization that you can’t just put out a car, especially an electric vehicle today, without some plan to make it profitable. One of the original mistakes of the auto industry, and especially the American auto industry, was that they could take a lot of their most popular cars, retrofit them to be electric, and that people would respond to them.
That was, I think, a pretty understandable bet from a lot of these companies. But, I don’t think they were really taking costs into effect for a lot of that. And what we ended up with was a lot of cars that were indistinguishable from their gas counterparts, but were 20 to 30 percent more expensive than those gas cars.
In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China.
China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore, I think is a very open question right now.
Do the people want EVs in this country yet, or do they still have range anxiety and a preference for the combustion engine? Does the war in Iran factor into how the people feel right now?
People vote with their pocketbooks, right? That’s where their preferences are today. And I think when electric vehicles were first gaining popularity, you heard a lot about charging anxiety. You heard a lot about range anxiety.
I think those are still considerations, but I feel, right now, the number one consideration for most people is, “I’m living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s costing me $80, $90 to fill up my F-150.” The used EV market right now is extremely attractive to a lot of people. You can get a very good electric vehicle for around $20,000. You take it home, you set up a home charger, you charge that thing overnight. You never have to go to a gas station again. That’s a pretty attractive proposition to a lot of people.
In South Africa, informal waste pickers recover between 80% and 90% of all plastic and paper that actually gets recycled. There are about 140,000 of these reclaimers, who walk through cities and landfills, pulling trolleys and selling what they collect to make a living. Each person can keep up to 24 tons of material out of landfills every year. Together, they saved municipalities R750 million (about $45 million) in landfill costs in just one year, yet they do this work without recognition, protection, or a formal role in the waste system.
Sifiso Gumbi began as a reclaimer at 19, collecting scrap metal in Soweto after school. After 15 years in the informal recycling economy, he founded Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise that believes the people already doing recycling work should be supported and equipped, not replaced. Urban Surfer creates essential tools like PPE and collection trolleys with personalized number plates, helping reclaimers become recognized workers in their neighborhoods. The organization also runs four recycling hubs where reclaimers can sort and bale their materials to sell at better prices, cutting out the middlemen who used to buy their collections for much less than market value.
Urban Surfer tracks everything with GPS-enabled trolleys and a live dashboard, and this approach has increased reclaimer incomes by up to 300%. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Sifiso talks about why dignity is key to better recycling rates, how aluminum can prices show what gets collected and what ends up in landfills, and what it would take to expand this model across South Africa and the continent.
Sifiso Gumbi, founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
One key idea keeps coming up in the conversation: reclaimers are like an R&D department that no one asks for advice. In South Africa, aluminum cans sell for 28 to 30 rand per kilogram, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that Sifiso says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, materials with lower value end up piling up in landfills, which are quickly filling up in Johannesburg and Gauteng.
Companies that want their packaging recovered can learn from the people who decide every day what is worth picking up. Data is also important. Urban Surfer tracks every kilogram by material type and price at its hubs. As carbon and plastic credits become more common, reclaimers will have verified, real-time records of the work they have already done. Sifiso is honest about the challenges: four hubs are not enough for Gauteng, and there are always limits on land and equipment funding.
But the bigger challenge is building trust between waste pickers and a public that still sees them as vagrants, and between the informal workforce and the policymakers and companies whose programs will only work if rebates actually reach the people doing the collecting. This conversation asks whether a truly circular economy can be built by supporting the people who are already making it happen.
To learn more about Urban Surfer and to explore partnership and sponsorship opportunities that equip reclaimers with trolleys, protective gear, and recycling hub infrastructure visit urbansurfer.co.za.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today. We’re going to talk about waste pickers.
The way most of us picture recycling is a municipal one — a truck, a sorting facility, a system run by a city or a company — but across much of the world, that’s not the right picture. In South Africa, the overwhelming majority of plastic and paper that actually gets recycled is recovered not by any formal program, but by informal waste reclaimers, an estimated 140,000 people who move through cities and landfills on foot, pulling trolleys, collecting and sorting recyclable material, and selling it to survive. Each one diverts as much as 24 tons of waste from the country’s landfills every year. Collectively, they’ve saved municipalities hundreds of millions of rand in landfill costs and built the backbone of a recycling economy, all without recognition, protection, or a place in the official system.
It is some of the most environmentally valuable work being done anywhere, and it’s performed by some of the most marginalized people in the country. Reclaimers face social stigma and frequent harassment, and they work in unsafe conditions, exposed to chemicals and traffic. And because they are unorganized, they are often exploited by the middlemen, who buy their materials for a fraction of what it’s worth. The environmental service they provide is quite literally free, and the people providing it are largely invisible to the public they serve.
Our guest today has spent 15 years trying to change that. Sifiso Gumbi is the founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise built on the simple conviction that the people already doing the work of recycling should be supported, equipped, and recognized, not replaced. Urban Surfer designs and provides the tools of the trade, starting with a collection trolley developed alongside reclaimers over two years and 50,000 kilometers of real-world use, and that’s complete with a personalized number plate that gives its owner a sense of belonging and a measure of public legitimacy. The organization runs sorting and baling camps that connect reclaimers to offtake agreements and producer responsibility rebates, cutting out the middlemen and raising what reclaimers actually earn. It offers training, protective equipment, and mental health support, and it tracks the whole operation through GPS-enabled trolleys and a live reporting dashboard, turning work that was once invisible into measurable, documented impact.
Running underneath all of this is a word that Sifiso returns to again and again in his speeches and writing: dignity. Urban Surfer’s mission is framed not first in tons diverted, but in belonging — the right of a reclaimer to be seen as an essential worker rather than a nuisance, with a special focus on women and youth, who make up much of this workforce. That framing has earned Sifiso recognition as South African Environmentalist of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year, a TEDx Johannesburg stage appearance, and the endorsement of city and provincial governments that now rely on his data to plan their own waste systems.
So, we’ll talk with Sifiso about what 15 years among reclaimers has taught him that no policy paper could, why he believes dignity and recognition are inseparable from recycling rates, and how a better trolley changes the way a person is treated on the street. We’ll also dig into how his camps and offtake deals reshape reclaimers’ income, why he built a data infrastructure into grassroots work, and how he persuades corporations to see reclaimers as partners rather than a line item. Then there’s the big argument that his work makes: that a genuinely circular economy has to be built on the people who already live in it, not by bypassing them.
To learn more about Urban Surfer, visit urbansurfer.co.za — Urban Surfer, all one word, no space, no dash. That’s urbansurfer.co.za. What would it take to see the people who already recycle most of a nation’s waste not as invisible labor, but as the foundation for the circular economy? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Sifiso. How are you doing today?
Sifiso Gumbi 4:36
I’m doing amazing. How are you, Mitch?
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:38
I am well. I am well. Now, you’re in Johannesburg, and you’ve spent 15 years working alongside informal waste reclaimers in South Africa. Can you take us back to that moment when you first realized that there was an opportunity and a need to organize informal recycling?
Sifiso Gumbi 4:53
I was 19 when I realized, because that’s when I was really starting out, you know, into the whole space as a waste reclaimer. And the one thing I realized was that I could actually grow within, you know, the industry, because I could just see all around me. Growing up — I come from Soweto — we used to have a massive challenge with illegal dumping sites, and on close examination of all the waste, you know, that was being dumped, it was actually waste that one could, you know, actually recycle. And what I then realized was that, you know, there will always be waste for as long as there are people, because for as long as there are people, there’ll always be consumption. And I just saw this as an opportunity that really guaranteed a career for me, because all I needed was, you know, access to the waste.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:41
You literally saw a greenfield opportunity in waste — that there was just so much of it lying around of value that it could be, if organized correctly, a lot more valuable to the waste reclaimer, and there’s sufficient profit for you to grow an organization.
Sifiso Gumbi 5:59
Absolutely, that’s what it was. I didn’t realize the many challenges I was going to come across as, you know, an informal reclaimer.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:07
For listeners who have never seen South Africa, can you explain the society in which a reclaimer works, and what a typical day looks like for one of them?
Sifiso Gumbi 6:16
So, a typical day for a reclaimer — they start their day very early. We do have a waste management system here in South Africa. Each metro has one, and each local municipality has one. So, how it works is that there’s a municipal bin truck that comes through on every business day to collect waste. The municipal bin truck will come and collect a bin, it gets tipped into a truck, which is a compactor truck, and that truck takes all of that waste to the landfill. So they usually come in the morning, so your typical waste picker has to get to the bin before the municipal truck gets there.
So a day in the life of a South African waste picker consists of waking up very early, so that you can get to people’s bins before the municipal truck gets there, you know, open those bins and literally go through such bins to recover recyclable waste material before the municipal bin truck gets there. And then from there you load it up in a makeshift trolley using bulk bags that, you know, are normally used for sugar, soy, maize, even manure. I think maybe you do use those bulk bags in America, but that’s what waste pickers use here in South Africa. So they use them as containers to load up all the collected recyclable material.
Then from there, the material is taken to informal waste sorting sites. You know, they don’t sort where they collect. So where they collect, they just collect everything and just tie it up into the bag, load it up on the trolley, pull the trolley to, you know, whatever informal setting they have — any piece of land that they find, they use for sorting. So there the sorting takes place: you know, the plastics are separated, the paper is separated, the metal is separated, aluminum is separated. And then once the material is separated and carefully segregated, it is then, once a week, sold off to the buyback centers or the neighboring recycling companies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:27
So does that produce a better-sorted load for the recycling off-takers, the organizations that buy the material? It sounds like it’s competing with the municipal system to do a better job of sorting.
Sifiso Gumbi 8:39
The municipal system is not concerned about the recovery of waste for recycling. The municipal system is mainly concerned with the recovery of waste for disposal, so that the waste is removed from, you know, people’s backyards and, you know, people’s bins. So that’s what it’s all about, you know. For the longest time — the City of Johannesburg, the City of Ekurhuleni, the City of Tshwane, I can think of all the major metros and all the local governments — we’ve relied heavily on the use of landfill space, which we are now running out of. So, the system was really simple: collect and dispose. Waste pickers are the only ones that are collecting for value, you know, and collecting with the intent of recycling, because that’s their livelihood. They actually make their money from the recycling. The municipality really doesn’t, and they didn’t really care about that, you know, because they make their money anyway.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:33
So, in a way, this is a self-organizing solution for recycling that was simply being ignored by government.
Sifiso Gumbi 9:39
Absolutely. It’s been around for more than 30 years, largely informal — I would say totally and absolutely informal. If you look at the current South African statistics, when it comes to recycling, the main contributors are waste pickers. The reason why we have a recycling rate at all is due to the efforts of, you know, informal waste pickers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:01
So these people do really, really important work, and your tagline is empowering people and transforming waste, but you talk a lot about dignity, not just recycling rates. Why is dignity at the center of how you think about this work?
Sifiso Gumbi 10:17
Because that’s where we have to start. Before we get to anything else, we need to first recognize waste pickers, not only as essential environmental custodians, but firstly as people. Dealing with waste reduces you to a level, especially in this country — and I think it may be the same thing in other countries — it reduces you to a state where people don’t even see you as a human being. They see you as a vagrant, they see you as the scum of the earth, because no one wants to, like — I mean, if you think about it, no one wants to deal with rubbish, no one wants to deal with waste, no one wants to handle all of that grimy stuff, you know. So when you do, instead of being recognized and applauded for, you know, such a huge sacrifice, one is usually seen as being of the same value as that waste you are dealing with.
So the first thing, you know, we try and advocate for is the humanization and dignity of reclaimers. And how do we do that? Firstly, it’s by kitting them out, or providing them with the correct PPE, so that they are presentable and they are more approachable and they are more visible and they’re more humanized. Because most waste pickers you come across, they deal with waste on a daily basis, so of course they won’t look as glamorous as someone who drives an Uber or someone who works at a restaurant or someone who works at a hotel or someone who works at a factory, you know. They’re waste pickers, they deal with waste, you know. So usually, you know, because they don’t earn even as much, you know, their clothing items are usually soiled, the way they look is usually dirty, because of the work that they do. You know, if you deal with a mechanic, a mechanic looks like a mechanic — he will be covered in oil. If you’re dealing with a waste picker, a waste picker will look like a waste picker, because he has to deal with waste on a daily basis, you know. And because of that image, you know, the public perception around waste pickers is really, really negative.
So we advocate for their dignity and recognition first, before anything else. We want people to understand the work that waste pickers do, we want people to understand that waste pickers are humans, we want people to understand that they’re doing an amazing job, not only for these communities that do not see them as people, but for the environment as a whole.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:30
What you’re describing is so important to understanding where the opportunity to raise up people lies in the circular economy. I’ve been involved in a little bit of this kind of work in South America, and the organization that I was consulting with paid a generous rate to trash pickers. They supported local programs that included decorating their trolleys, which gave them a real sense of pride that recognized their humanity, as you’re talking about. Tell us about how you work with a group of reclaimers to develop the trolleys that make their work easier.
Sifiso Gumbi 13:07
The first trolley that we developed was an amazing solution, and I’ll touch base on that as I expand into the whole picture that I’m going to paint for you. Most waste pickers use makeshift solutions. From the trolleys that they use — it’s all makeshift — to the PPE that they come across. They don’t have any PPE, you know, so if they find an apron that, you know, is protective gear, anything to use — from even a, we call them balaclavas here in South Africa, some people call them ski masks, you know — they wear those as protective wear. So it’s all very makeshift.
So we decided to engage them and understand, you know, what type of trolley they would, you know, like to have, and you know, what features it would have. And we realized that most of the reclaimers we were, you know, interviewing at the time were camping in open fields. And they did that because one would leave their respective township to go and try and, you know, make a living from recovering waste from the affluent neighborhoods like Sandton and Bryanston, you know, all these fancy suburbs, you know, that are away from the townships. That’s where they usually find the most waste. And because it’s so far from the township, they were now forced to, you know, camp in the open, you know, to store their recyclables, sort their recyclables, and then maybe sell their recyclables. So they couldn’t, after collecting, take their recyclables back to their townships, because the townships are like 30 kilometers away, or even more.
So, one of them said — I think several of them said — you know, if I could perhaps be able to sleep inside my trolley, that would be amazing. And so we designed a trolley that, firstly, could accommodate a bulk bag that was specifically designed to store recyclable material, you know, that could fit the trolley and carry as much as 300 kilograms onto the trolley. Secondly, we then came up with a solution to have a foldable tent that one can, you know, keep in a compartment on the trolley as they go out to collect on their daily activities, and then later on, one could be able to deploy that tent over the trolley, and they could have overnight shelter as they camped in whatever spaces they had found to store their recyclables in and camp. So when we started out, all of our trolleys had shelter — those temporary tents they could put up at night, impermeable to water, so they were protected whenever it was raining, and quite warm enough for winter.
But with that solution, what we found was that most of the reclaimers became really comfortable with that functionality in their trolleys, and they then ended up using those trolleys as mobile homes instead of using them for recycling. So what they would do is that they would park those trolleys, you know, with the tent fully set up, and then take their makeshift trolleys and go into the field to collect recyclables, which created a massive problem now for the municipality, because all of a sudden now you have all these, you know, temporary homes springing up all over the show, and we unfortunately had to cut that solution.
Sifiso Gumbi 16:30
So, what we now do is the trolleys that we roll out to reclaimers, they have personalized plates that have the waste picker’s nickname, you know, for relatability, and they also have a back panel that usually has a logo of, you know, whatever sponsor, you know, comes in to help us, you know, on a project that supports reclaimers. So what we found is that people really love the number plates and the look of the trolley, so it allows the public to get to know their neighborhood reclaimer without necessarily talking to them — because you see the trolley, it’s written “Sifiso,” then you’re like, oh, that guy is Sifiso, he’s been operating in my area the entire time. And then the other thing we have — we have GPS trackers fitted on each trolley, so as to track the movements of all the reclaimers. We are very big on data, so that we know where they are at any given time, and should there be any case in any neighborhood that they operate in, we are able to maybe, with authorities, share that. Okay, maybe at this point one of our reclaimers was there — perhaps ask him what happened there. So the reclaimers have become an added security feature, or like an intelligence network for civilians, you know, in that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:46
Could you also use that system to deploy people to where there is uncollected material?
Sifiso Gumbi 17:52
Absolutely, we can. As a matter of fact, we are getting requests, you know, from community associations to come and collect from them, so whenever they do, we just send through the nearest reclaimer.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:07
You have the sorting and baling camps — are these sort of ad hoc homes for these communities of mobile workers? Tell us about how that works, and particularly, how do you aggregate enough material that you can pay them a better rate than the middlemen who would have purchased this material before?
Sifiso Gumbi 18:25
So we have recycling hubs that we’ve set up with the idea and clear understanding that, you know, most of the reclaimers we support not only just need collection equipment and PPE, but they also need working facilities where they can store their material and sort it. So now, what we have added into those facilities is processing machinery, so that the reclaimers don’t only just sort the material, but they are able to have access to a baling machine, which then compacts their material. And once the material is compacted, they can sell it to the recyclers, the recycling companies, at a better price, because they are no longer selling loose material.
So one thing we also organize for the reclaimers is corporate collection sites where they can collect from and have more access to waste. So we try and give them as much access to collection volumes as possible, because the more waste they collect, the more money they make. But the challenge is that we are only sitting on four recycling hubs so far, and there are so many waste collectors in Gauteng alone, not even mentioning in the country, so we’ve barely scratched the surface. So these recycling hubs are a great need for many of the other, you know, waste collectors, and it’s a bit of a challenge right now for us to, like, get access to land. And even if we do get access to land, we’re in constant need to perhaps get a funder to help us buy equipment, to help us set up the structures on site, and to bring in all the other necessary infrastructure to make a recycling hub operational.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:07
I hear the beginning of an approach that would allow companies to partner with informal recyclers to collect even specialized materials, like e-waste, for instance, to create a local closed-loop system. But that also suggests that needs to happen everywhere. Do you see Urban Surfer as a model for an infrastructure to enable the circular economy globally?
Sifiso Gumbi 20:31
100%. So, the one thing that we’ve been able to crack on the ground is we have managed to become the bridge between the formal side of things and the informal side of things. So informal recycling people work as individuals — they are barely organized, they’re just concerned with their survival. So, how we’ve come in, we’ve now become the bridge between the private sector and the informal sector, we’ve become the bridge between the government and the reclaimers on the ground. So definitely, from what we have done in our own capacity, with a very small team and quite limited resources, I think our model is well proven and is well positioned to be the blueprint for replicating the same solution globally.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:22
This is a fascinating opportunity. I want to take a quick commercial break, and we’re going to come back to continue the conversation. Stay tuned, folks.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue the conversation with Sifiso Gumbi. He is the founder of Urban Surfer, which organizes informal recyclers in South Africa. Sifiso, the first time I became aware of informal trash pickers was actually in San Francisco, and it was common for older Asian women to pick bottles out of everybody’s trash before it was collected, just as you described earlier. But what I noticed is they all got on buses and then went to the most dangerous neighborhood in the city to sell their bottles, and I always wondered why nobody enabled them to drop it at an aggregation point where they would be able to collect sufficient volume to make a good profit on the material, while paying those women a fair rate for what they had collected. You’ve built this GPS-tracked trolley system, you’ve got live reporting — that’s a lot of technology for grassroots work. Following on the conversation we were having before the break, how do you see using technology, or technology’s ability to let us see into deep, complex problems, to organize a new recycling system?
Sifiso Gumbi 22:40
Listen, Mitch, we are living in a digital age, and I think the aggregation of data is quite essential, especially when you are dealing with projects like the ones we are involved in. Firstly, we saw it quite important for us to have a live data reporting system and also to fit GPS trackers on the trolleys of all the reclaimers that we support, because, one, if we are working with a project sponsor, we need to have a system that is able to measure the impact and the progress of each project that we have activated. It is important, one, to know how far waste pickers travel, where they collect, how frequently they collect from those neighborhoods. That, for one, gives us the pattern and actually gives us the general idea of, okay, which neighborhoods produce the most waste, because waste pickers only target the neighborhoods that produce the most waste, you know. So, for future reference, that data can help us maybe engage such communities more, and perhaps workshop them on how to better separate their waste, so that they help the reclaimers to collect more waste. Right.
Secondly, we record all the volumes that are brought in by our vast network of reclaimers. In all of our recycling hubs, we record the volumes of what recyclable materials they bring in — is it plastic, is it paper, and what quantity? And then, secondly, we record how much they’ve made from each recyclable item. So there’s a lot of, you know, solutions that have been brought in, like carbon credits, plastic credits, and because we already have all the data, we are in a position to bring those solutions in and have them as add-on incentives for reclaimers through the data that we collect from them — which includes the miles they cover, the volumes they recover — that can be packaged and perhaps accredited as a carbon credit that reclaimers can almost immediately start benefiting from, or it can also be credited as a plastic credit that waste pickers can start benefiting from, and which they should be benefiting from. They did the—
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:01
Work.
Sifiso Gumbi 25:02
They did the work, you know. So it was important for us to collect the data from the very beginning, so that when all of these solutions come to the fore, we already have all the data, and this is transparent data, this is real-time data. There’s absolutely no greenwashing, and these are accurate volumes. So, with that data, we are hoping maybe in the future to use it as leverage to have waste pickers benefit, you know, from all there is to benefit within the climate resilience and sustainability space.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:38
You’re describing a remarkably advanced view into the reverse logistics economy, and I can imagine reclaimers organizing to address what we would think of in Uber terms as surge opportunities — a major football match, for instance — you could send people in to collect particular sets of material, and you have almost unprecedented visibility into local material flows. Are you also thinking about using that data as the basis for providing research, both to government and to corporations, about where those materials might be for profitable recovery?
Sifiso Gumbi 26:16
Absolutely. I mean, if we’re really talking about closing the loop, the best people to talk to, as far as R&D is concerned — let’s say you have a new product on the market, and you are looking for the best packaging solution. For one, the packaging for your product — you must make sure that it can be easily recovered for recycling, and the best people to engage on that are the waste pickers themselves, because they’ll tell you that, okay, this I can definitely recover, and this is how much I will get from it. So, if I’m well incentivized on that, you’ll definitely get to see the circular economy activated with whatever packaging material you put out into the environment. But because currently no one is really engaging, you know, the main volume drivers on the ground, people are mainly concerned with certifications, ISO standards, and this and that. But if you take a closer look at what is currently being produced as packaging material for most of the items that we consume as households, it’s only a limited portion that actually circles back into production. The rest is piling up in our landfills. And why is that? Because there isn’t any incentive for the waste pickers to collect that, you know, as a recyclable material. There isn’t.
Now, in South Africa, the best material, or the hot material, like, right now, to collect as a waste picker is aluminum cans. Aluminum cans are collected so effectively and aggressively, it is difficult to find one on the ground, just as it is difficult for one to pick up $1 in today’s economy, like, on the floor, right. Why is that? It is largely driven by the incentive behind collecting just a kilogram of aluminum cans. Currently, in South Africa, you collect a kilogram of aluminum cans, you can get up to 28 rand, or even 30 rand a kilo. Now, if you have 30 rand, that is enough to buy you a bunny chow and even a Coke.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:23
What you’re describing is a world where we actually pay attention to the flow of materials, ultimately recognizing the value of the people who do that work. As you talked about earlier, the reclaimers face a lot of hardship — there’s the stigma of the job, the dirtiness of the job it’s associated with — but they’re harassed, a lot of them struggle with mental health issues because of the tensions of the work, and I found this in some of the philanthropic consulting I’ve done: people in many of these communities don’t trust outsiders. How do you help them work with these corporations in a way that they don’t feel like they potentially are going to be exploited?
Sifiso Gumbi 29:00
And that’s where we step in, you know. I get interviewed quite a lot. There’s a lot of media houses that want to come and interview, you know, reclaimers, you know, on site, but because they’ve been ridiculed and humiliated by the public so long, whenever someone comes and wants to stick a camera in their faces, it feels as if they are just parading them like freaks to the public, you know, because of the current stigma that is still active even today by the public. It is very difficult for them to trust anyone, and we have now established ourselves to a point where we are one of the main mouthpieces for them. And as much as I would like for them to open up a bit more, I think it will take more engagement on the ground — engagement by industry drivers, you know, CEOs, you know, ministers. We need to see more ministers visiting waste-picking camps. We need to see more CEOs engaging with waste pickers on the ground. They need to start feeling comfortable with the powers that be, even with the general public, you know, because they still aren’t, you know.
I still get a lot of, I still get a lot of hate, man. People say, “Hey, you need to make sure these people get out of the road, you need to get these people away. These people are vagrants, these people are dangerous.” You know, so we need a whole lot more engagement, we need a whole lot more interaction, you know, just with the public, with waste pickers, you know, at the heart of the discussions, at the heart of the engagement. I think we need to first get that right. We need a reconciliatory exercise: first reconcile the waste pickers with the public, and then reconcile the waste pickers with the policymakers, then reconcile the waste pickers with, you know, the relevant corporations that are interested in supporting their work. We need to get to that first before they can ease up to the idea of allowing anyone to come and be in the space and understand the work that they do.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:00
Looking at projections about the value of the circular part of the economy — the collection and reuse components — the projections are, even just in the United States alone, between $1.5 and $2.2 trillion a year in value. Globally, it’s probably two or three times that. If you organize this class of people and give them the economic power, do you see those ministers in particular, but also corporate leaders, as feeling threatened by the rise of that power? Is that something that you need to help them overcome?
Sifiso Gumbi 31:37
They shouldn’t be threatened at all, Mitch. They shouldn’t be threatened. I think it’s an exciting opportunity. I think even for, you know, the corporations — I mean, as it is right now, Coca-Cola can tell you how many cold drink bottles or cans they produce, but they can’t tell you how many cold drink bottles or cans they’ve actually recovered back. They can only tell you the kilograms that they’ve recovered back, right, but they can’t really tell you how many of what they’ve produced that they’ve actually recovered back. They don’t even report along those lines, you understand. But if they were to start supporting reclaimers, they will know exactly that. If I produced one bottle of cold drink, right, and from the factory it left and it went to one province in South Africa, and it was bought by a client, perhaps, in that province — what happened to that bottle after the client was done consuming the contents of that Coke bottle? They will know right to a T, and they would know that, hey, that bottle registered back into our factory.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:40
Well, and we’ve had conversations with GS1, which is the global nonprofit that runs the Universal Product Code system, and they have the ability now to track to unit level an individual can — we made it here, it was picked up here. Do you think that the reclaimers could scan every can that they picked up in order to get to that granularity of reporting that you’re describing?
Sifiso Gumbi 33:04
Absolutely, if they’re incentivized for it, definitely. Because, I mean, GS1 — I know about GS1 very well — but their technology, which is amazing, if you ask me, can only go so far. They are missing that element of including the people that are actually tasked, or appoint themselves, as the first responders to the waste.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:27
There’s a bigger idea in everything we’re talking about, and that’s that the people already doing this work should be built into a new system rather than replaced by it. Absolutely. How do you think about reclaimers as the foundation for the real circular economy? And this kind of goes back to the question I was asking about the threat that ministers might feel. They also represent, as they organize and become more prosperous, a new voting bloc — or is that exactly the voting bloc that people should be thinking about cultivating, because it represents the future of our economy?
Sifiso Gumbi 33:57
Mitch, there’s already more than 100,000 reclaimers — I could say half a million, just a ballpark figure — here in South Africa. South Africa has a high unemployment rate, especially amongst the youth and women, you know. And already there’s this massive opportunity in waste. There’s a massive opportunity in waste that, if formalized, could really present an opportunity for people to sustain themselves at a massive scale. Right, what does that do for a government? The government can start accumulating data that they can use for their reports whenever they meet at the next COP in Geneva. They can use that data to say, okay, we have empowered X amount of people, and they are collecting X amount of waste, and as far as our carbon objectives and our climate action objectives are concerned, this is where we are, and this is where we’re going. But currently, right now, it’s a top-down approach where people are just making estimations at the top. There isn’t any real work that is being done to support those on the ground who are actually doing the real work, you know.
So, it’s an opportunity for the ministers, it’s an opportunity for the business people, it’s an opportunity for everyone. I think there isn’t any threat. If anything, there’s a big opportunity — there’s a really positive story, you know, to be achieved from all this, and South Africa has an opportunity to become the leading country as far as that is concerned. And that can be used as a blueprint, you know, to get all the other developing countries within Africa to also steer their climate objectives, their carbon objectives, and also, you know, deal with their high unemployment rate. You know, it gives us an opportunity also to explore other technologies and explore what other recyclable material we can get — you know, what can we do with carbon waste, what can we do with this, what can we do with that. But all it needs is just a little bit of support for those on the ground, you know, understanding the foundation, you know, of those dynamics, and then from there, a lot will be achieved, Mitch, I promise.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:05
I am really struck, particularly, by the opportunity for youth and women to build the foundation for economic progress. We’ve had Georgie Badiel, the model, on several times, and she has run a program in Burkina Faso through the Georgie Badiel Foundation where women are trained to build local solar-powered water wells. But Georgie’s point is that once they have that income, that ability, and those skills, which they can sell in other contexts — so, you know, people in town need something fixed, now these women know how to do it — that drives local economies and women’s services, hairdressers, things like that. So you actually start laddering up the local opportunity. How do you see reclaiming as potentially a path out of poverty for a young person or a woman?
Sifiso Gumbi 36:50
Look, it was a path out of poverty for me, because I started in high school, Mitch. I was able to buy myself sneakers every now and then, you know, all due to the fact that I was, you know, I would say, ambitious enough to see that, okay, I could make a bit of money from collecting scrap metal, you know — and I bought my first smartphone from that. So, there’s a real opportunity for families to feed themselves. There’s a real opportunity for even varsity students to, you know, be able to support themselves while going through varsity. There’s an opportunity for one to even establish a career in this thing, because, you know, I’m here, you know, getting interviewed by you today because I walked the journey, you know. I established a career for myself within it, so you can even grow within recycling, because, you know, it’s not just recycling — there’s a broader activity even beyond that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:46
The economy extends into that population, the population contributes back to the economy. It’s a virtuous circle.
Sifiso Gumbi 37:53
Absolutely. It’s really an opportunity that is so untapped, and it’s just waiting for everyone to come to the party.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:06
Sifiso, when you’re standing in front of an audience, like when you presented at TEDx, what do you want people to take away? What’s the most important point that you would like them to understand about the opportunity that we’re talking about?
Sifiso Gumbi 38:18
What I really try and perhaps galvanize people around is to start caring about how we — or how you, as the public — affect the environment that we live in. You know, we live in a world where everyone is concerned about the materialistic value of everything. No one is really concerned about the material once they’ve had their way with it, or once they’ve used it, you know — out of sight, out of mind. You buy the bar of chocolate today, open it up, eat it, you throw away the wrapper. What memory do you keep? How sweet the chocolate was, how delicious it was. But no one ever pays any attention to what happens to the wrapper, because once you’ve put it in the bin, it’s out of sight, out of mind. Right now, there is a group of people that are actually concerned with what happens to that wrapper — that chocolate wrapper that you toss in the bin — because that wrapper is their livelihood. That’s their salary, that’s their bread.
What I want people to see is that those people are not vagrants, those people are not animals — those people are actually essential. I always equate their value to that of bees, because without bees there’s no pollination, without pollination there’s no plants, and with no plants, we all die. Without waste pickers there’s no recycling — yeah, in South Africa, you know, it’s a fact. Without waste pickers there’s no recycling, and without recycling, then all the landfills would have been filled up by now. Joburg is running out of landfill space. Gauteng, as a whole, is running out of landfill space. South Africa, as a whole, is in trouble, you know, with landfill space, and the only people that are delaying the crisis are waste pickers. So, what I always try and get people to see is that, hey, those people matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:13
Dignity for a set of critical workers whose work is not currently recognized, but such an important mission. What’s next for Urban Surfer, and how can people find out more about the program and support the work?
Sifiso Gumbi 40:27
We are trying to get as much support to replicate, you know, the model nationally. We want to touch as many lives as we can, we want to support as many reclaimers as we can, equip as many reclaimers as we can. So, as far as the mission goes, what we’re largely focused on right now is just expanding nationally within the next few years, and perhaps, you know, throughout Africa, to also start supporting the other reclaimers, even outside of our borders.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:59
Can people simply send financial support to help you accelerate the project?
Sifiso Gumbi 41:04
You know, that is actually something we’ve never thought about, like GoFundMe. We’ve never had, like, a donation wallet. We always, like — maybe whenever we find a project, we identify a group of reclaimers that need to be supported. What we would do then is we draft the proposal, and then we’d approach maybe corporate SA, or perhaps government, or perhaps public benefit organizations, or PBOs, or NPOs to say, hey, can you come in and support us? We’ve never really thought about how we can perhaps get the public involved as far as donating to the cause, you know. So, maybe that’s something worth considering.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:39
I certainly think your site is packed with insight that people would be happy to support, and so I encourage you to think about that. But Sifiso, this has been an absolutely inspiring conversation. I thank you for your time.
Sifiso Gumbi 41:52
Thank you for providing the platform, Mitch, and for helping us, you know, crystallize, you know, the message and get it out there to the masses. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity. Thank you, Mitch.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:11
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Sifiso Gumbi. He is the founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, the Johannesburg-based social enterprise that equips, organizes, and advocates for the informal waste reclaimers who recover most of that country’s recyclable material. And you can learn more about Sifiso’s work at urbansurfer.co.za. It’s a great site — check it out. There’s a lot of fascinating stories.
Let’s start with the fact that reframes our perspective on recycling, because we look at this from an advanced recycling — even though it needs a lot of work — perspective here in the United States. Between 80% and 90% of South Africa’s post-consumer plastic and paper that actually gets recycled is recovered by informal waste pickers, and that’s according to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Sifiso put it plainly: the municipal system collects waste simply to dispose of it, and reclaimers collect it for the value, and that value is passed on to the rest of society in the form of materials that stay in circulation. The country has a recycling rate at all because more than 100,000 people decided, one trolley at a time, that other people’s bins were their livelihood. Now, it’s not a glamorous job, but neither was recycling when it started in the United States, and frankly, it probably isn’t considered that glamorous by most people today. South Africa’s system was self-organized over 30 years while the government ignored the issue, and Sifiso’s 15 years inside it began at age 19, when scrap metal collected after school bought him his first smartphone.
Material recovery is driven by incentives, and the proof is lying on the ground — or rather, it isn’t, as Sifiso said. Aluminum cans fetch 28 to 30 rand per kilogram in South Africa right now, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that he says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a $1 bill on the sidewalk. Materials with weak incentives pile up in landfills, and Johannesburg and Gauteng are running out of space. The lesson is simple: if you’re a company that doesn’t want to bury its customers in waste, when you’re designing your packaging to be recovered, ask the waste pickers what they’ll bend down for, and what picking it up must pay for them to be attracted to do so. They are the R&D department that nobody consults. And meanwhile, brands chase certifications without constructing the reverse logistics infrastructure that makes a recyclability claim legitimate. There’s so many things labeled as recyclable, but you have to have a system nearby you in order for it to be collected and processed. As extended producer responsibility programs expand, the incentive structures at the street level will determine whether those policies result in more material recovery or just more paperwork.
Next, let’s talk about that data layer that Sifiso talked about. Urban Surfer fitted GPS trackers to its trolleys, and they log every kilogram by material type and price across all of its recycling hubs. Sifiso built that infrastructure before carbon credits and plastic credits arrived on the market, and that means when those instruments mature, reclaimers hold verified, real-time records of work that they’ve already performed. As he said, we can have a recycling system with no greenwashing, based on actual transparent data that everybody could see. That’s the same verification standard that my recent guest, Martin Johnston of EarthRating.ai, argued that sustainability reporting lacks, and here it’s being built from the ground up by the people with the most to gain from that information being believed. The unit-level vision could go even further. A beverage company today can report kilograms recovered — it’s referred to generally as mass balance reporting — but it can’t tell you how many of its own bottles, or which bottles, actually came back. Reclaimers scanning what they collect as they collect it could close that reporting gap, but they need to be paid for that data, and it’s not expensive.
And the last and most important idea is that dignity is a design requirement, not a slogan, when building a circular economy.
Mitch Ratcliffe 46:12
Urban Surfer trolleys carry personalized number plates with each reclaimer’s nickname, so a neighborhood comes to know them as workers rather than strangers to fear. And the hard limits that Sifiso points out are trust and scale. Integration of last-mile services — or, in the circular context, the first mile of that return journey that packaging takes — requires a reconciliation of the public, policymakers, and recycling workers, and it’s time to unlock these opportunities to collect and keep materials in use, as well as pay a fair rate, to keep our world cleaner than it currently is. A circular economy can be built on the people who already live it, and that’s the argument that Urban Surfer makes with data, trolleys, and baling machines. So, we’ll be watching whether that model can be replicated nationally and across Africa, and whether EPR rebates and plastic credits actually reach the hands doing the collecting. Stay tuned.
If this conversation changed how you’ll think the next time that you toss a wrapper, share it with someone else who needs to meet the people on the other side of the bin. And you can help the show, too, with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or any of the podcast host sites. You folks are the amplifiers who spread more ideas to create less waste, and our archive of more than 550 episodes is waiting on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate you helping spread the word.
I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
What if the solution to the retail industry’s $890 billion returns crisis wasn’t better logistics, but better logic? Disney Petit, founder and CEO of Liquidonate, is proving that the most sustainable return skips the trip back to a warehouse and goes directly to a community in need. Americans returned nearly 17% of all retail purchases last year, generating 2.6 million tons of landfill waste and 16 million tons of CO2 emissions. Each return costs retailers between $25 and $35 to process, yet 52% of consumers admit to participating in return fraud at least once. Petit witnessed this broken system firsthand as employee number 15 at Postmates, where she built the customer service team and created Civic Labs, the company’s social responsibility arm. Her food security product Bento, which allowed people without smartphones to access free food via text message, won Time Magazine’s 2021 Invention of the Year Award. Now Liquidonate has earned recognition as one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2025.
Disney Petit, founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Liquidonate integrates directly with retailers’ existing warehouse and return management systems. When a product comes back and can’t be resold—open box, slightly damaged, or simply unwanted—the platform automatically matches it with a local nonprofit or school that needs it. “It’s the same reverse logistics workflow they already use,” Petit explains. “It’s just redirected toward community good instead of going to the landfill.” The platform handles everything: shipping labels, pickup coordination, and tax documentation so retailers can write off donations. Retailers recover logistics costs through tax benefits while communities receive quality products, and millions of pounds of goods stay out of landfills.
To date, retailers using Liquidonate have diverted over 12 million items from landfills, working with more than 4,000 nonprofits across the country. Liquidonate also tackles return fraud by eliminating “keep it” returns, when customers claim they want to return something but are told to keep the item and still receive a refund. “One hundred percent of the time we’re producing a shipping label for a nonprofit who wants that product,” Petit says. “We completely eliminate that keep-it return option, so we eliminate the returns fraud option.” With $900 billion worth of inventory potentially available for redirection, Petit approaches the business through the lens of environmental justice, building a for-profit company designed to prove that doing good and doing well aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re interdependent.
Mika Abdalla and Jake Short are speaking out about an uncomfortable moment.
Days after the Off Campus star and Disney Channel alum announced that they called off their engagement, the pair...
An entrance to a construction area of Freedom 250's Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on May 28, 2026. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
President Donald Trump has big plans for America’s 250th birthday celebration, which gets underway this month. Some are anodyne: a state fair on the National Mall, for example, and what will reportedly be a record-breaking fireworks display.
Others, though, are focused a little bit more on Trump than America: There will also be a UFC cage match on the South Lawn of the White House (on the president’s birthday), and a planned “Freedom 250” concert has already morphed into a full-blown Trump rally. And the whole thing is being presided over by not one but two groups: America250, Congress’s decade-old initiative to celebrate the country, and Freedom 250, which is the Trump administration’s very own.
So, should Americans still be excited about the big party? Today, Explained asked Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith, who explains how America’s bisesquicentennial party got so political. He also talks with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the dueling groups behind the celebrations, how the Freedom 250 concert fell apart, and what else is planned for the anniversary.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What do you think President Trump is trying to say with this celebration?
I think President Trump is trying to celebrate America as he sees it, which is not totally separate from celebrating himself.
Do you believe that what President Trump is up to is justified?
Most Americans think it’s a good idea to celebrate big national anniversaries.
There’s a congressional body called the Semi-Sesquicentennial Commission. It’s been around for years, preparing to put up flags at football games, and have a ball drop in Times Square, and do cheerfully generic celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary. The Trump administration thought that was kind of sleepy and didn’t have the kind of flair for spectacle that Donald Trump likes. They wanted more glam, and more fireworks, and more cage matches on the White House lawn.
When I was talking to people at these two rival semi-sesquicentennial committees, they are mostly staffed by people who were trying hard, at least for a while, to get along and not have the 250th birthday of America descend into the partisan mayhem that every other thing in America descends into.
Are they competitive now? Are they still working together?
They’ve always been competitive and eyeing each other with a bit of mutual disdain. Because the Republicans control Congress, and because Trump basically controls the Republican Party, two-thirds of the money Congress allocated went to the White House branch, not to the congressional branch.
The congressional bipartisan [committee] got $50 million to play with and raised a bunch of outside money, and so they were kind of grudgingly satisfied. In fact, there had been a plan to explore darker elements of America’s past, which, when Trump won, they dropped, because the White House doesn’t like doing that.
Much has been made of the concert series. Can you talk us through where that all began and where we are right now?
There was an idea that came out of the White House-led arm that I think is kind of a fun idea: a Great American State Fair, to have the spirit of state fairs — which are, in fact, genuinely delightful American institutions — on the Mall in Washington. And as part of that, there would be big concerts with beloved artists.
Artists in general, most of them have learned lessons about staying away from politics. [And] Donald Trump is very unpopular right now, which I think has made it particularly hard for him to get any mainstream, popular artists to appear. So what they wound up with was a lineup of lesser artists of the ’90s and the early 2000s: C+C Music Factory: Young MC of the great hit “Bust A Move;” and Vanilla Ice.
I’m a child of the ’80s. I would’ve enjoyed this, but it was kind of an embarrassing lineup to begin with. And then when Young MC realized that he had been, in his view, snookered into doing the pro-Trump version rather than the bipartisan version, he dropped out.
Usually, when you book an artist for something like this, you don’t see this happen, because everybody signs the contract — they realize what they’re signing onto. But these guys are also sensitive to social media and, apparently, did not want any kind of association with the White House or Donald Trump.
And so, only Vanilla Ice is left.
What else is planned? There’s the UFC fight drawing a lot of attention. Any of the initial state fair elements preserved? Do we get a big Ferris wheel?
There will be carnival elements. I’m not sure if there’re going to be giant pigs and cows, but that’s always a fun state fair feature. But mostly, there’s just going to be Donald Trump.
I mean, it’s the most classic cycle of American politics: Trump says, “I want to put on a big bipartisan spectacle,” and it leans a little more partisan than Democrats and these artists are comfortable with, and they drop out, and Trump says, “Well, fine. I’m just going to turn this into a hyper-partisan rally for myself.” Democrats say, “Well, you were always going to do that anyway.” And he says, “No, you forced me into it.” And it’s kind of worse than doing nothing in the end, if the goals were bringing Americans together to celebrate the birthday.
I do think the White House detects an opportunity to accuse Democrats of not being patriotic enough and of selling out America’s birthday celebration. And I think some Democrats are mildly worried that the party will be somehow cast as unpatriotic. But as this thing continues to spiral, I think most Americans likely will just see it as the latest Washington hyper-partisan antics.
This could have been fun, let’s be honest.
I mean, it could still be fun. You don’t know until you go.
It could still be fun. Are you going to go?
If I can, yeah. I live up in New York, so I’ll have to make the trip down.
I’m already predicting — and I could be wrong — that the partisan nature of it will make it less fun than it could have been if we had all agreed to get along.
Maybe less fun for you, more fun for others. It’s actually one of the features of Trump rallies that I think his opponents miss is that they’re very fun for the people who go.
That’s a very good point. So I was going to ask whether Donald Trump actually cares about the people attending, and I think what I’m hearing you say is if they’re his supporters, yeah, he does care that they have a good time.
Yeah, I think he wants to throw a big party for his supporters and not for the “haters and losers.”
What do we know about the fireworks?
Trump loves spectacle. He’s talking about building a massive triumphal arch, although honestly, I’m not sure which triumph it intends to commemorate. If he’s going to have a firework show, it’ll be the biggest firework show in history. Hide your dogs.
$850 billion. That’s what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn’t look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it.
Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter Inc. and columnist for WhatTheyThink.com, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
The fix isn’t a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What’s missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object. When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That’s what circularity looks like when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one. Follow Don’s work at WhatTheyThink.com and on X at @DCarli.
Hello — good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s take another look at the topic of e-commerce returns and how to reduce them by tuning the economy for less waste. We’re going to start with making what you see online look like what you receive on your doorstep.
Now here’s a number that should stop you in your tracks the next time you shop online: $850 billion. That’s how much retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026. And here’s another number: 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste generated by those returns in a single year — roughly the same as burying 10,500 fully loaded Boeing 747s in the ground. That’s a lot of waste.
Now you might assume that most of these returns are about fit — pants that don’t fit, shoes that pinch. But 22% of consumers report returning items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles categories, where fit isn’t the issue, that percentage climbs even higher. A sofa that passes every quality specification still gets returned because it clashes with the throw pillow that also passed every specification — when they don’t look alike in the home, both can end up in a landfill, because repackaging costs more than recovery.
Today’s conversation is about why that happens and what we can do about it. My guest today is Don Carli. Don’s a good friend and the founder of the consulting firm NEMA Hunter Incorporated. Two of Don’s recent articles on the site What They Think got me thinking about how an apparently esoteric discussion of color calibration and spectral profiles actually represents something much larger — the fine-tuning we can do to the 20th-century industrial system that was never designed to connect digital promises to physical reality.
Don is also a Senior Research Fellow with the nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communication, where he has directed programs on corporate responsibility, sustainability, advertising, marketing, and enterprise communication. He’s also a member of the board of advisors for the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design and a member of the Institute for Supply Management.
So here’s why this matters beyond the print and packaging industry, where Don has spent most of his career. The 20th century built industrial systems optimized for mass production: make a lot, ship it out, and hope people keep it. These systems created enormous efficiencies on the one hand, but they also created enormous waste — often hidden in the seams between suppliers, brands, and retailers, where no single stakeholder owns enough of the problem to force a solution. In fact, it really means nobody lost enough money to care.
What Don’s work reveals is that we now have the technical architecture to fine-tune these legacy systems — not replace them, but recalibrate them. The standards exist. The measurement hardware exists. The digital rendering pipelines exist. What’s missing is the coordination: getting brands, retailers, and others to share data they currently hold separately, and to recognize that the costs they’re each absorbing individually are symptoms of the same system failure — a failure of color calibration.
And this is what sustainability can look like in practice: not moonshot reinventions, but the patient technical work of closing gaps between digital and physical, between specification and reality, and between what we promise customers and what we deliver. If we get this right, we can reduce waste, cut costs, and rebuild trust with consumers who’ve learned to expect that what they see online isn’t quite what they’re going to get.
You can follow Don’s work on X. His handle is @DCarli — that’s spelled D-C-A-R-L-I, all one word, no space, no dash.
So can we calibrate what we see online with what we experience when we open a package, reducing the need to return a purchase? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:29
Welcome to the show, Don. How are you doing today?
Don Carli 4:31
Fantastic, Mitch. I’m really glad to be here with you today and looking forward to the conversation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:37
Always great to talk with you, Don. This came up in our discussions over the past couple of months, and then I read the article and wanted to follow up. To start off, can you walk us through a typical scenario? A customer orders a navy sectional and a matching throw pillow from different suppliers. They appear to be the same color — they both pass all the quality specifications we’ve talked about — but under the living room lights, the consumer finds they clash. What happened between the approved image and her disappointment? Where did the system break down?
Don Carli 5:15
We’ve all had this experience at some point in our lives. In part, it’s because of the nature of human perception. We would like to think that color is a constant thing, but color is an interaction of multiple variables.
One variable is the light source — specifically, the distribution of wavelengths in that light. As you know, the visible spectrum is a small part of all the radiation there is. There’s ultraviolet light you can’t see, there’s infrared light you can’t see, and then there’s all the colors in between — the ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — the colors we’re familiar with. Every light source has a different distribution of those energies.
Second, the material an object is made of has its own capacity to absorb different wavelengths, and that can vary. So you have variation in the energies emitted by the light source, variation in the energies absorbed and reflected by the object, and then there’s the viewer. Our visual system takes up a big part of our brain — it’s not just our eyes, but our eyes have a lot to do with it. Some of us are colorblind, for example, and in other cases, color is simply not a constant thing.
I worked with the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers for many years — he wrote the book The Interaction of Color. He used to say, ‘When you put one color next to another color, you get a third color for free,’ because those two colors interact with each other.
To put it simply: you put on a pair of socks and a pair of pants in your bedroom under incandescent light. The pants are brown, the socks are brown. You go out into the daylight. The pants look green. The socks are still brown. What happened? The light changed. Because daylight has more energy at one end of the spectrum, it reflects more blue light, making the brown look greener.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:56
That’s really interesting to think about — how we’ve moved from an era of commerce where, say, items in the Sears catalog were originally sketched, versus photographed. As we introduced greater verisimilitude in our catalogs, or on Amazon —
Don Carli 8:17
We set expectations differently. Exactly.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:20
So how should we think about the expectations we’re setting — both as sellers of things and as consumers? How should we be thinking about this?
Don Carli 8:30
In part, most of this is simply not taught. Most students in grade school, high school, or even university are not given any exposure to the psychology of human perception. There’s a physiological and psychological basis to all of this, and we just don’t know about it.
The problem has always existed. What’s happened with e-commerce — and with sophisticated computer graphic rendering of objects that don’t yet exist in the real world but look real — is that we’re setting expectations. On my screen I see this couch. It looks brown. The pillows look brown. So I expect that when they arrive, they’re both going to look brown.
Unfortunately, the lighting in homes now is no longer even incandescent. LEDs have really unusual spectral curves — they can be the problem. If I had been able to see what those items were going to look like under the lighting in my home, I might be less disappointed. I’d say, ‘Oh, wait — they don’t match.’ But in developing the systems for e-commerce, the companies that develop software for rendering — the tools designers use to develop the rendering of images for websites and monitors — simply don’t take these things into consideration.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:10
Our economy was massified in the 20th century but it’s moving toward personalization in the 21st century. And what you’re describing — what you named in the article — is metamerism.
Don Carli 10:21
It’s not my term. It’s metamerism — or ‘metamerism,’ yes. That’s fine.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:27
This phenomenon, combined with changing lighting technology and the changing nature of our homes — which can allow more or less light in, and offer a variable lighting palette —
Don Carli 10:37
A variable lighting palette, yeah.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:38
— suggests that the palette will always be changing. So how do we create consistent expectations among consumers when we’re trying to communicate what we offer?
Don Carli 10:57
Well, standards help to begin with. We do not have a set of coordinated standards today that allow the designer to anticipate the observer’s environment and lighting conditions for a given product. Second, we don’t have standards in place to communicate between what the designer intends and what the manufacturer produces — because it is possible to create pigments and dyes that do not exhibit metamerism. Really.
It’s been standard practice in some industries where it matters. If you go to an informed paint company and say, ‘I want a non-metameric match of this swatch,’ they would use a device called a spectrophotometer, which measures the absorption curve of the pigments employed — so that under any lighting condition, the appearance doesn’t change, because the curves have been matched.
But I can create a match that only looks correct under one light source, which is typically what happens when people revert to either a monitor — which only has three emitters: red, green, and blue — or printing, where typically you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If you want to truly match, you have to match the curve.
New printers being used for digital textiles actually have 10 channels, and it is possible to use pigments across those channels to make the absorption curve of the material non-metameric — or at least less metameric. We’re waiting for standards to come together, and that will only happen, I believe, if the brands suffering the greatest economic loss from this mismatch problem take action to put the requirements in their purchase orders and to support pilots that address that 22% of returns due to color perception that you described.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:27
You do point out that IKEA, Amazon, Wayfair, and others have funded the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group to ensure that products look consistent across different apps and websites. So they want consistency when rendered on a digital screen, but they’re apparently okay with the fact they don’t look the same when they arrive?
Don Carli 13:54
Yes, I like the disconnect. It’s interesting. First of all, it would require collaboration across industry — across groups that don’t typically talk to each other. I don’t think it’s willful. I think it’s more like, ‘Wow, they just haven’t gotten around to that.’ Nobody fully realized how much was at stake. And the potential for a connection between the two standards that do exist is actually very good and straightforward, because they’re both extensible standards.
What’s needed — as I said — is for the businesses that are right now losing approximately $850 billion a year due to returns to ask: How much of that is attributable to consumers who’ve been given permission by e-commerce companies to say, ‘Something doesn’t look right, so I want to return it’? We’ve made it easy to return things.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:09
The customer was always right.
Don Carli 15:11
That’s correct. And it’s going to be hard to put that one back in the bottle. So now we have to ask: out of the $850 billion — which is just the retail cost of the goods, not the cost of reverse logistics, not the cost of reprocessing, not the disposal of that returned product to landfill or incineration — if you take it all together, it’s probably $1.25 trillion, maybe even $1.5 trillion. And if you said, ‘Okay, but how much of that is because somebody said the colors don’t match?’ — even being very conservative, say 10% — that’s still enough money to justify addressing the root cause of the problem.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:00
$150 to $200 billion….
Don Carli 16:03
Just rounding error, right? So you could say to companies like Adobe — that develop the software for rendering objects that are going to be manufactured — take IKEA as an example. IKEA doesn’t fill its catalogs, whether online or physical (though there’s no longer a physical catalog), with actual photography. Those are computer-generated images. They look real, but they don’t exist in the physical world when rendered. Very often, the product isn’t manufactured until after you’ve bought it — you bought it on the basis of a computer graphic rendering that looks photorealistic. It’s called Physically Based Rendering.
So if those systems were specifying color with the manufacturing process in mind — which is very often digital textiles printing — they could choose their colors to be less subject to metamerism, or even to specifically eliminate metamerism. They could also provide the ability to predict: run the model through a set of tests to see, ‘Is this design going to be subject to metamerism?’ And carry that logic forward to the manufacturer. They’d have to put that in their purchase orders. They’d have to bridge two standards — one called glTF, the other called ICC Max.
The point is, the consumer doesn’t need to know any of this. The consumer needs to understand that it’s possible to make things match under different lighting conditions — or at least to have less divergence from their expectations under different lighting conditions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:58
I agree that the consumer should be able to expect that. What I hear is that so far, the pain hasn’t been great enough. But we’re also at a point where simply reducing the waste would be worthwhile on its own, with other benefits as well —
Don Carli 18:10
Oh, absolutely. But the financial ones alone —
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:15
The financial ones are enough? Yes. And then all the environmental and social costs of returns on top of that. But let’s talk about how to actually hack toward a solution. Is it possible now — or over the course of the next decade, say — for me to have a phone app that I use in my home? I sample the light in the morning, I sample the light at noon, I sample it at sundown, and in the evening — sometimes with external light, sometimes with just internal. I could say, ‘This is my light profile. Give me things that will look like what I expect.’
Don Carli 19:00
That’s a great question. The question is: would the average consumer go to that extent? Probably not. But the retailer could do what amounts to a survey of the whole home that the products are going to go into. If it’s a major purchase — a couch, carpets, a new home — you could model the interior of that house very easily.
Technologies like Matterport, for example, can scan the interior of a house and give you a virtual view of what it looks like — they use it in real estate all the time. So that’s possible. And it’s also possible to model different lighting scenarios: you say, ‘I’m going to put in LED lighting with variable color temperature, so during the day I may look at it under one light, and at night it’s going to be warmer.’ You can factor in where natural light comes in through windows across the year.
But that may be overkill for most consumers. It might be appropriate for businesses — especially places where the harmony of floor coverings, wall coverings, and furnishing objects matters. Still, it shouldn’t be necessary for the average consumer.
Phones are increasingly gaining the ability to sense color in a spectral sense. I think within three years, that capability should be standard in most phones as a matter of course, and more specialized devices will be available for around $100 if you want them. But I think it’s really incumbent on the retailer and the brands — not on the consumer — to meet expectations first and foremost. And I think an increasing number of consumers who care about environmental and social costs are going to put that expectation on the retailer and the brand: model the environment, predict the degree to which the products being manufactured are subject to metamerism. Those variables can be measured and controlled in design and manufacturing so that the in-home or in-store environment is less subject to lighting variation affecting the perception of color match.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:55
So I think this is a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break, because we’ve set the stage — and the lighting — to talk about what’s going to come next. Let’s figure out the hack. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:13
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with my friend Don Carli. He’s founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York City.
Don, so we understand the variability of light, the variability of settings, the combination of colors — all of these affect our perception of color. And we talked about the fact that phones will have increasing photographic analysis capabilities, so they can sense the full spectrum, not just what we see but the entire range of light affecting our perception. But as you say, it really is incumbent upon the retailer to have a solution that makes something look like my expectation when it arrives at my home. Is this a suggestion that the future of retail is more personalized — that there may be personal shoppers who come to your home early in a brand relationship and do a scan, or who give you the tool? Maybe they send it to you and you return it after completing your color profile. Are we at the beginning of really tuning the economy to deliver exactly what we want so that waste can be reduced?
Don Carli 23:29
I think there are examples of it already in place. There’s a very interesting company that grew out of a team of Navy SEALs and special operations people who had to model environments they were going to enter — and they couldn’t do that using big, complex systems. They needed a hack. They were able to take imagery from various sources and build a 3D model reconstruction of a building so they could plan their approach. One of them left and started a company called Hover.
This isn’t a commercial for Hover, but it’s an interesting case. Hover solved a problem for people who wanted to remodel the exterior of their homes. You could take your phone, take six to eight photos of your house from the exterior, send those photos to Hover, and they would create a 3D reconstruction of your home. Then they worked with manufacturers of siding, roofing, and windows, and allowed the builder to generate not only an estimate of what it would cost to put new siding and windows on your house, but a rendering of what it would look like. The precedent is there: the consumer had the device, nobody had to go out to do an estimate, the contractor loved it because they didn’t have to send anyone to measure — all done accurately using cell phone imagery.
Matterport is another company that makes a device for interiors and does the same thing. And there are small sensors that a retailer could send you that measure color temperature of light — but I don’t think that will be strictly necessary.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:31
Nor necessarily environmentally responsible, to send out loads of sensors.
Don Carli 25:34
Exactly. So for the retailer, like Radio Shack, if it’s an in-store environment, that’s one thing — they do have the ability to simulate different lighting conditions in-store. Think of it like going to an audio shop —
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:54
You can’t do that anymore, but okay.
Don Carli 25:56
Just imagine going to buy a stereo, or to an audiophile shop —
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:03
We’re showing our age, knowing what that is.
Don Carli 26:05
They bring you into a listening room. The point is, it’s constructed for the purpose of evaluating what something is likely to sound like in your home. I think we can do the same thing in-store with variable lighting.
But online is becoming e-commerce where items are never in a store. You order from a computer-rendered image on your screen, and after your order is placed, the item is manufactured. That’s the link that has to be established: the link between the creator of the design for the object and the supply chain instructions provided to the manufacturer, so that the objects are not subject to metamerism — so they are less subject to variation in the lighting conditions in your home. It is a matter of giving the correct instructions about the materials to be used, and specifying how they’re to be measured by the manufacturer. The brands that design the couch, the pillow, the carpet, the curtain, the flooring — they should own the equipment to do the measurement and support the linkage of the standards that communicate how to maintain color consistency across different lighting and viewing conditions, so the consumer isn’t disappointed.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:41
This brings me to another concept you introduced, which is the appearance bill of materials — which is in many ways similar to the digital product passports we’ve talked about on the show a number of times, which describe a product’s components and potentially how to recycle it. But this color profile — what would be involved in making that happen at scale? What would it look like to make that a common practice for a furniture retailer, for instance?
Don Carli 28:10
Think of recipes. The way a fabric is produced is changing because of digital printing. We used to make fabric in large quantities using dyes — extremely polluting, very complex — or with high-volume screen printing using fixed screens. Increasingly, fabric printing is achieved digitally, where you can print just one yard or 10 yards of a material using any palette of pigments, matched not just to look correct under one lighting condition, but to look consistent under any lighting condition.
The example of metamerism is: if I have two objects that are supposed to match, and under one lighting condition they do match, but under another they don’t — that is metameric. It changes. But if I blend, or use the right pigment recipe on a given substrate material, they will match regardless of the lighting condition. The pillow matches the couch, the wall covering matches the floor covering.
To do that, you have recipes. I’m going to use this combination of inks, and I have to measure them with a spectrophotometer. The specifier has to tell the manufacturer what the material characteristics are. It’s the same as saying, ‘Use butter, sugar, and flour’ — but not all butter, sugar, and flour are the same. Or like architects who say, ‘Use concrete, aluminum, steel, and wood’ — but what’s the actual recipe for the steel, the concrete, the wood? We have to be more specific at the design and manufacturing stages.
It is kind of like a digital product passport. The standard for glTF, which is used for Physically Based Rendering on monitors, is consistent for rendering on screens — but it doesn’t extend to the world of physical objects, inks, and substrates.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:59
So that’s the link. Thank you. You’ve also pointed out that the GMI certification — which Target, Home Depot, and CVS began to require, and which describes packaging — was broadly accepted once those brands introduced it. Would color matching with the guarantee that it will look like what you saw when you receive it be a significant differentiator — a value-added differentiator — that would set a brand apart if they embraced and practiced it consistently?
Don Carli 31:34
Why not? We know that consumers are disappointed enough to go through the return process — and it’s not simple. It’s an annoyance. You’re putting people out of their way. They want their couch, they want their cushions, they want their floor covering. They don’t want to go through what it takes. It’s going to be another two weeks, and I’ve got to document all of this, and I have a party this Friday — we’re getting married, whatever it is.
So I think the demand is there. And what GMI established reflects something I believe has been true in manufacturing as long as I’ve known it: manufacturers are going to do what their customers call them to do. If the requirement in the purchase order is that you must adopt this standard or use this material, you don’t argue — if you want the work, you do it. But if you leave innovation in materials to manufacturers and expect them to market and sell it, that’s not their strength. They’re not marketers.
On the other hand, retailers and brands are marketers — and ultimately, the cost is not just economic but environmental and social. That’s where I think today’s consumers, if made aware, will be able to apply enough incentive to brands to build those linkages, use those standards to minimize the cost of returns and the environmental impact of returns, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:30
So the cost of these returns — which we’ve estimated in the $1.3 to $1.5 trillion range — who actually ends up paying that? Would solving this problem represent a tangible reduction in costs for consumers overall?
Don Carli 33:47
It is costing consumers in the end. Let’s say a retailer bought the product for 25% of the retail price. So the thing sold for $100 but cost them $25. When they say they lost $850 billion, they’re estimating that at the full retail price — but it only cost them $25.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:19
Of course, because that gives them an advantage in taxes — but if —
Don Carli 34:23
If in fact they’re losing 25% of their sales to returns, that’s still going to factor into what they mark things up to recover those costs. It does impact the cost to consumers in the end. And then there are the real costs associated with reverse logistics — shipping it back from you to the distribution center — and then that has to be reprocessed: someone has to inventory it now that it’s been returned, inspect it to see if it’s viable for resale, find a resale partner. Or, as some retailers now do, they simply keep them in huge containers labeled as ‘lot number four’ and have people bid on them sight unseen — unpack those, find the few things in the box that were worth something, and discard the rest.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:33
So the consumer today expects greater and greater personalization, as you’ve described. On-demand manufacturing is a potentially scalable solution that’s beginning to emerge. But if we don’t master this metameric strategy, returns may actually increase — because the expectation is even greater that it should look exactly like it did when I ordered it.
Don Carli 35:59
Yeah. Appearance mismatch is not the greatest reason for returns — but it’s a substantial percentage.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:12
My point is to think systemically, rather than just about this particular issue. Is this the right time for us to move toward on-demand manufacturing — particularly now that we want to reduce imports? And if we do that, who should convene the effort to create consistent perception of color and quality for that next generation of a much less wasteful economy?
Don Carli 36:43
I think it ultimately falls to the brands and the retailers, as well as the technology providers for rendering — for the design and rendering of the objects — because circularity and circular thinking is a systems design challenge. You want to design the problem out of existence, rather than trying to cope with it downstream.
There’s no question that the greatest potential leverage is through a better design process that anticipates these downstream factors that lead to returns — whatever they are, whether it’s appearance, fit, or any other reason why people return things. The ability to predict through true digital twins of the object is one key element. You need the NVIDIAs of the world, the Adobes, the Hewlett-Packards, and the instrument manufacturers who can measure color and surface characteristics — the things that allow you to define the recipe for making the object, as well as the recipe for rendering it on screen.
Those are the key stakeholders: the brands using those tools, the companies providing those tools, and the standards bodies that help to encode them in open, extensible standards that allow businesses to communicate one-to-many, instead of being locked into proprietary one-to-one communication chains.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:26
If a brand is listening, what should their first diagnostic step be? Where’s the right place to begin?
Don Carli 38:36
The first step, of course, is to have a breakdown of the reasons for returns. If they want to address appearance mismatch, they need to know what percentage of their returns are reported by consumers as: ‘The product I received didn’t meet my expectations in appearance compared to what I saw on my screen or in the store.’ They need to know first: is this a problem big enough to make a business case for addressing it?
In most cases, I think they’ll find that if it’s 10%, 15%, or 20% of returns, that’s material. And if they looked at it not just economically but in terms of environmental and social impact — triple bottom line, if you will — I think they can make a business case for why they should seek out a group of like-minded brands to address the root cause through standards and paid pilot programs with manufacturers: to establish and prove that a workflow is possible, practical, and delivers results that reduce cost in a material way, reduce environmental impact in a measurable way, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:15
You do a lot of product research and market research. Are brands thinking about this?
Don Carli 40:21
Not enough. Not enough. I believe brands like IKEA do take it quite seriously — and maybe that’s one of the luxuries of being a privately owned entity. So I think we can look to brands like IKEA for leadership. They’ve exhibited that in the past and can continue. But one brand can’t solve this. This is a bigger problem than any one brand can handle.
I think the path forward is really through a coalition of brands that work together and share the costs, the risks, and the benefits of connecting these existing standards — to the benefit of not just current consumers, but consumers going forward. And I think it will reduce the impact on the environment, help make better use of our manufacturing capacity and digital technology, and support onshoring more of our production. That’s an important way to minimize risk — not just the risk of returns, but supply chain risk as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:39
What you’re describing is an optimized system that we don’t currently have. I know we’ve only scratched the surface of the color perception problem here, Don. Thank you for helping me understand it. How can folks follow what you’re working on?
Don Carli 41:53
I write on this topic in an industry publication called WhatTheyThink.com. And there is an active discussion taking place within the Khronos Group, 3D Commerce, and related standards bodies about this general concept of Physically Based Rendering. In the printing world, there’s another group called the International Color Consortium — ICC.org — that has been looking at the problem from a manufacturing perspective: how do you manage appearance, not just color but appearance overall, because it’s not only the color of a thing that can differ, sometimes it’s the surface characteristics or texture. These standards take both into consideration.
I think some preliminary discussions are starting to emerge — whether in Reddit or in these two groups, which are open — that are beginning to look at how these things connect.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:59
There’s a saying that an airplane is a set of standards in flight. What we’re talking about here is the setting of a standard set of expectations about how our economy should work efficiently. I hope folks take to heart what we talked about today. I want to thank you for your time, Don; this was a fascinating conversation.
Don Carli 43:19
I think it can have a profound impact on the amount of waste that goes to landfill, and I think it will also improve the ability to satisfy increasingly conscious consumers along the way. Thank you, Mitch. Take care.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:49
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Don Carli, founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York. Don’s commentary on color perception, metamerism, and the gaps in our digital-to-physical rendering pipeline appears regularly at WhatTheyThink.com — all one word, no space, no dash — and you can follow him on X at @DCarli, that’s D-C-A-R-L-I.
This conversation started with a sofa and a throw pillow that refused to match, and it ended somewhere much larger. The $850 billion in annual e-commerce returns we discussed — growing toward $1.25 to $1.5 trillion when you add reverse logistics and disposal costs — is what happens when a 20th-century industrial system tries to serve 21st-century expectations without changing its underlying architecture. The system was designed to produce at scale and absorb returns as a cost of doing business. The consumer was always right. The platform made returns frictionless. And what got lost in the middle — in landfills, in incinerators, and in the carbon cost of reverse logistics — was invisible to the balance sheet and to the customer who clicked ‘return.’ In other words, we engineered a system to overwhelm people with choice so that they would inevitably buy, but at the cost of tremendous waste.
So Don isn’t just describing a color problem. It’s a calibration problem — and calibration is a systems problem. You heard about all the parts of the solution that are available already. What doesn’t exist is a coordination layer: the shared commitment by brands and retailers to making a product and the recipe for showing it on screen speak the same language, so that it represents things accurately across a variety of different lighting settings.
The transition Don is pointing toward is from mass manufacturing to what we might call calibrated manufacturing — production designed not just to meet a specification, but to meet the specific expectations of one person. Personalized manufacturing. The on-demand, digital-first model that’s already emerging will only work if the variety of perceptions we experience is accounted for from the start. If we move to on-demand without solving the metamerism problem, Don warned, returns will increase, not decrease. We will have built a faster, more responsive system for disappointing people.
The circular economy framing that anchors so much of this podcast is usually applied to materials — keep them in use, close the loop on plastics, design products for disassembly and reuse. But Don’s argument adds a dimension we don’t talk about enough: design for reduced returns is design for circularity too. The waste reduction potential is real, and it needs to happen upstream — at the design and specification stage — before a single unit of the product actually ships.
This is what tuning the economy looks like in practice: not a moonshot reinvention of everything, but the patient technical work of closing the gaps — the many gaps between what we promise and what we deliver as businesses. The leverage points are well defined. Brands and retailers that own product specifications need to bridge the color standards challenge in their purchase orders. And consumers who are already demanding more and returning more can apply market pressure too, especially the growing segment of people for whom systems thinking and environmental impact are part of how they evaluate a brand. But we have to communicate that to the brand and to the policymakers around that market in order to drive systemic change.
Don’s closing thought is what stays with me: when we actually tune the system to deliver what people want and expect, we can stop producing waste that nobody intended and nobody wants. That’s not just good business. That’s what a circular economy looks like in practice when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one — the place where, right now, billions of pounds of material quietly disappear into the ground.
We’ll continue to explore this — we’ll probably have Don back to talk more — and in the meantime, I hope you take a look at our archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, folks, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’re going to want to share with a friend or member of your family. And by the way, writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
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The ocean provides half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs 30% of our carbon emissions, and helps control the planet’s climate. By 2030, it’s expected to support a $3.2 trillion Blue Economy. Yet 70% of proven ocean solutions, such as coastal resilience, coral restoration, and marine pollution cleanup, never move past the pilot stage. These projects often win awards and get media attention, but then stall because funding systems don’t connect working ideas with the cities, ports, and coastal areas that need them. Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy, co-founder and ocean lead at Okhtapus, wants to change that. Okhtapus, named with the Persian word for the octopus, uses a model that links what Stewart calls “the three hearts” of successful projects: innovators with proven solutions, cities and ports ready to use them, and funders looking for solid projects.
Stewart Sarkozy-Benoczy, Cofounder and Ocean Lead at Okhtapus.org, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
The first Okhtapus Global Replicator will launch in 2026. It will bring groups of proven innovators to work on important projects in specific places, such as a single port city like Barcelona, where Okhtapus already has strong partnerships, or a group of Caribbean islands facing similar problems. The aim is to have enough successful projects that funders stop asking “where are the deals?” and start saying “we’ve got enough.” The platform focuses on late-stage startups and scale-ups, not early-stage ideas. Stewart calls these the “Goldilocks zone”—solutions that are proven enough to copy but still need funding and partners to grow. By combining several solutions for different locations, Okhtapus can offer investors portfolios that fit their needs and make a real difference in cities, ports, and island nations.
Stewart has spent 20 years working where climate resilience and policy meet. He was part of President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, led policy and investments at the Resilient Cities Network, and is now Managing Director of the World Ocean Council. “Ten years from now, if this is done fast enough,” Stewart said, “we should have pushed hard enough on the funders and the system to change it. What we don’t know is whether we’ll get to the solution status fast enough for some of these tipping points.”
To find out more about Okhtapus, visit okhtapus.org.
About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.
Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn’t carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all “processed,” and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We’re not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.
To learn more about IFT’s work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about food. Food is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, and the climate is now responsible for a growing share of what happens to our food. Food systems face dramatic challenges. Droughts are reshaping olive country in the Mediterranean. Warming oceans are increasing the frequency of shellfish pathogen outbreaks. Hurricanes are taking out manufacturing facilities. Sea level rise may flood key ports where food flows, and fluctuating precipitation is driving mycotoxin contamination in crops. And that’s only a partial list.
The food system must feed 8 billion people while the conditions it was designed for are unwinding underneath it. Meanwhile, the public conversation about food and climate gets stuck at the two ends of the chain: agriculture on one side, consumer choice on the other. But our guest today wants us to pay attention to what happens in between—the processing, packaging, distribution, and storage that turn a fall harvest into something you can eat in February. That middle segment is where a quarter century of food science meets the climate problem, and where most of the practical levers actually live.
Brendan Niemira is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a Chicago-based scientific association that has served as the voice of the global food science community since 1939. Its 200,000-member network spans academia, government, and industry. He stepped into this role on December 1, 2025, after more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, where he led a team of more than 30 scientists, engineers, and students developing tools to kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish.
Brendan’s specialty is non-thermal food safety systems that use cold plasma, high-intensity monochromatic light, irradiation, and pulsed light treatments to disinfect food without cooking it. He’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds patents on the technology, and the 2024 citation rankings place him in the top 0.01% of food scientists worldwide.
Brendan joins IFT at a moment when food science is being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, climate pressure on supply chains, food safety, and resource efficiency is intensifying—the subject of IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap for circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, food waste valorization, and emerging technologies like cellular agriculture and precision fermentation—that is, growing food in vats.
On the other side, the public and political conversation about food is fixated on ultra-processed food, and the MAHA Commission—the Make America Healthy Again Commission—frames processing itself as the central problem rather than part of the solution. IFT has been one of the loudest scientific voices arguing for definitions grounded in nutritional quality rather than processing intensity. That’s a position that’s both scientifically defensible and complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes much of the food industry.
So we’re going to talk with Brendan about what the climate case for a redesign of the food system is, what IFT’s recent white paper does and doesn’t quantify, and where precision fermentation and cellular agriculture actually stand in 2026. We’ll also look into why food safety remains under-researched within climate science, and how IFT is navigating the MAHA debate. To learn more about IFT’s work, visit ift.org; the white paper we’ll be discussing is available there as well.
The climate fight runs through the food we eat, but most of the action is happening in the part of the supply chain that nobody sees. So let’s find out what Brendan Niemira sees right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Brendan. How are you doing today?
Brendan Niemira (4:46)
I’m doing great, Mitch. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe (4:49)
I’m well. It’s a beautiful morning here in Southern Oregon, and I’m excited about this conversation. You spent 25 years at the USDA. What does the food system look like from this new vantage point at IFT? How’s it different from the perspective at the lab bench?
Brendan Niemira (4:59)
Well, first let me say that I really enjoyed being a scientist for the USDA. There were a lot of great scientists working at the USDA, and I was absolutely proud to be one of them. Even with the recent losses, there are great scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts in different areas of the federal research continuum. The research done in those labs remains a crucial part of the overall science landscape for the US.
My work as a food microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service was focused on food safety and advanced food processing technologies—again, to improve food safety and extend shelf life. Now, as the Chief Science and Technology Officer for IFT, I get to engage with all of the technical areas of food science: microbiology, chemistry, sensory science, sustainability, food laws, and regulations. I also get to engage in the larger space around advocacy and science communication. I get to work with colleagues across the whole food system—all the way from primary producers like farmers and ranchers, to processors, product developers, all the way to nutritionists and retailers. So I get a much bigger-picture view.
Mitch Ratcliffe (5:56)
When you think of it from that perspective—from the industry side—what do you think the key issues we need to consider as a nation are in our food system as it stands today?
Brendan Niemira (6:08)
Food has to be safe, healthy, and wholesome, but it also has to be available, it has to be sustainable, and it has to be the kind of food that people will want to eat. It doesn’t matter if you produce something that’s super healthy and even super affordable; if it doesn’t meet the cultural needs of what people want to eat, if it doesn’t meet their expectations for how it looks, how it tastes, how it performs in their lifestyle, then it’s going to stay on the shelves, and all that science that you did to produce this product is not going to be any good, because it’s not going to provide any nutritional benefit to people.
Mitch Ratcliffe (6:43)
IFT draws a sharp line between food processing—what you do to the ingredients—and food formulation, which is the ingredient list itself. Why does that distinction matter, and why has the public conversation lost that distinction?
Brendan Niemira (6:56)
Well, we draw that distinction because if you take either one of those aspects alone—just the ingredient list, or just the ingredient processing—neither one is going to give you a complete indication of the healthfulness or the nutrient value of the food. If you use either one just as a simple shorthand—you say, well, there’s a certain thing on the list of ingredients, or a certain thing was done to that stuff—you miss the mark. You’re going to have to take both of them into account to look at the total healthfulness of the food.
Part of the issue with the public conversation is that, frankly, it’s a little bit more straightforward to give short, simple messages about which foods are healthy and which foods are not. Look for this ingredient, or look for that processing step, and it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The fact that it’s simple is true, even if those short, simple messages don’t give a complete or, frankly, a fully accurate picture. Food is more complicated than that, and complicated stories are harder to tell.
Mitch Ratcliffe (7:53)
Our dialogue is, let’s just say, relatively simplistic right now. Are we diverging from the real issues we need to be exploring as a nation when we talk about the MAHA concerns?
Brendan Niemira (8:05)
Science communication tries to make complex issues of science and nutrition, nutritional availability—even getting to things like cultural tolerance, cultural acceptability, economics, and all that sort of stuff—it tries to make these very complex issues understandable. Not everybody is a nutritionist; not everybody is an economist. People just want to be able to get food that they want to feed their family. They want it to be safe, they want it to be healthy, they want to be able to afford it, they want to be able to provide for their family, and they want to be able to enjoy it.
Food is about more than just nutrition. Food is about culture, food is about satisfaction, food is about joy. Those are things that simple stories can speak to, but the science behind this can be very complicated. So it’s the job of us here at IFT, and the job, really, of all science communicators, to take these complicated issues and present accurate, factual, complicated science information in a way that people can understand, and that they can use to make decisions on.
Mitch Ratcliffe (9:08)
Having written about technology and sustainability and a variety of things over the years, I find that one of the challenges is that experts resort to their jargon, partly because it’s shorthand—it makes it easier to say something to somebody else—but it relies on an understanding of that jargon. Are we at an inflection point? I hate to put it this way, but is Bobby Kennedy simplifying this conversation in an important way?
Brendan Niemira (9:36)
This is why science communication is a distinct discipline. You can be a terrific microbiologist or chemist or toxicologist or nutritionist or economist, but if you’re not able to communicate to people outside of your discipline, then you run the risk of miscommunication, where you’re trying to say something but you’re just not communicating accurately. And unfortunately, you also set up a situation where people can take what you say in your good-faith effort to explain it properly, take a word here or a sentence or a phrase, and things get misunderstood or taken out of context. When people draw conclusions from material that is misinterpreted, then base decisions on that, or policies based on that, you can get to a point where the science is over here, the communication is in the middle, it gets a little bit muddled, and then policies arising from that are based on something not directly related to what the science is actually telling you.
That’s why we try to support good science communication and try to give people tools to communicate the science. At IFT we bring a lot of different scientists together in different disciplines, and we try to give them the tools to make sure that people are understanding their science and connecting on it appropriately.
Mitch Ratcliffe (10:56)
I think that’s a really important point: that we need to create full access to the conversation, so people who want to dig in further can go further and learn more, in order to deepen their understanding of the decisions they face, either as a consumer or as a policymaker. I’ll just give a quick shout-out to ift.org. We have lots and lots of information—some of which is intended for scientists, technicians, food scientists, and food technologists, and is very jargon-heavy—but we have a lot of information that is intended for the general public to consume, and that is intended for decision-makers in industry, academia, and government.
A moment ago, you talked about the food system needing to be sustainable. A recent meta-analysis found that processing, packaging, transport, and retail steps in the food process account for just a modest share of the overall greenhouse gas footprint of our food system—farm production and distribution account for most of the rest. If most of food’s climate damage is upstream, how big a sustainability lever can processing innovation actually be? Can we really lower the overall impact of our food?
Brendan Niemira (12:03)
Well, you’re absolutely right, a lot of the impact is on primary production, and that’s why people are also working on reducing the carbon footprint, water usage, and overall sustainability impact at the primary production stage: farms, ranches, fisheries. If you go talk to groups like the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Meat Science Association—all those folks—they are working hard. They’re doing all of that science to develop and implement ways to improve sustainability in terms of carbon footprint, water-use efficiency, land-use programs, wildlife setbacks, insect refugia, and a host of other approaches.
Now, IFT does food. We do food processing, food science, food technology. So we are in the center part of that continuum, but we are actively working with those other scientific organizations to support the work that falls under those sectors, the overall food system, and to improve what we can do in processing, packaging, transport, retail, and so on.
Mitch, I would say this is one of those cases where we can’t allow ourselves to be tripped up by the false thinking that if we can’t do everything, then we shouldn’t do anything. Our Sustainable Food Systems interest group is an active and vibrant part of all the food science that we support. There’s a lot of communication between what they are doing and what other efforts are underway in other societies and other parts of it.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:26)
Absolutely—we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress. We have to take important steps.
Brendan Niemira (13:31)
Here at IFT, we’re doing what we can, and we are supporting the other people that are working in their areas as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:37)
When I read the white paper that I mentioned in the introduction, there was not a lot of quantified environmental data, but it seems to me that what you’re saying is that that’s an area we really need to dig into now. How do we do that?
Brendan Niemira (13:50)
It’s by talking to people who are on the ground doing that work. I would not sit back here as somebody who focuses on food production and food science and go talk to a soil scientist and tell them what to do, or what they should be doing, or what I think is most important in their area. When we’re all focused on the same overall goal of improving sustainability and reducing the impact of how we grow, how we harvest, how we process, how we ship, and how we consume our foods, then we need to listen to each other. There are people who have expertise in lots of different areas.
Our food is complicated. People think, well, there’s an apple on the shelf, or there’s some hamburger in the cooler. Food is complicated—it really truly is. And all of the different people that are contributing in all the different ways, all up and down across the food system, the food continuum—we need to draw on their expertise and get together to solve problems that will work across the entire system. If one person working on just one part of it rolls out a solution and says, ‘Yep, I’ve done my thing, and all the rest of you should change to do what I want,’ then that may not be a usable solution, because it breaks other parts of the system. There has to be a holistic approach.
Mitch Ratcliffe (15:04)
As you say that, I realize how hard it is just to get food from my garden at the beginning of the season onto a plate at the end of the year.
Brendan Niemira (15:12)
Yeah, and that’s encompassing. There are different people who grow different products, different commodities, different regions. You grow different kinds of tomatoes in different parts of the country, and there are different ways of growing food. Even on a very, very small scale, it gets to be very complicated. You have to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge, a lot of different kinds of infrastructure, a lot of different kinds of expertise and equipment, and so on. Plus, you have to comply with different regulations, different laws controlling different sorts of commodities in different parts of the country at different times of the year. All of this knowledge has to come together and be brought to bear on the problem.
Mitch Ratcliffe (15:50)
Again, it’s a huge storytelling problem, but we have to look at this as a system rather than a bunch of separate parts that don’t necessarily interact with everything else.
Brendan Niemira (15:58)
Absolutely, absolutely. It’s all one. That’s why we talk about the food system and the food continuum, because going right from primary production through all the various stages of getting food to you, and then on the back side, taking food waste—say, away from restaurants at their point of sale, point of service, point of consumption—some of those aspects of where the food goes, and what kind of advantages we can gain from paying attention to where those nutrients are ending up.
Mitch Ratcliffe (16:26)
One of the other—and probably the most shocking—parts of the white paper that I read was how our dietary recommendations are being undercut by climate change. For instance, the Mediterranean diet is recommended; it consists of olives, olive oil, tree nuts. But those come from regions that are warming 20% faster than the rest of the globe. How should we think about US dietary guidelines in terms of how climate stress is going to change the availability of food over the course of the next decades?
Brendan Niemira (16:58)
I think it starts with a clear-eyed understanding of what it takes to grow, deliver, and consume food. If you’re saying, well, I’m going to lean into one kind of a diet or another—whether it’s the Mediterranean diet or other specialty diets, either recommended by your doctor, by a nutritionist, or recommended by your own cultural or societal predilections—where does that food come from? Is it grown locally? Is it shipped far away? Does it come from other parts of the country? Does it come from other countries?
And then you have to understand: this is what food costs—not just the money, but in terms of the carbon you’re using to produce the food, the water, the land use. Once you have that accurate information and you have an accurate understanding of what goes into producing the food, then you can start to make some other decisions about the health and nutritional benefits of the food that you’re consuming, or one aspect of it, and then you can make other decisions about the other sustainability parts of how you’re getting your food and how you’re eating it.
Mitch Ratcliffe (18:07)
You mentioned the cuts we’ve seen in federal research recently. As a microbiologist, where do you think federal climate-health research should be focused at this point?
Brendan Niemira (18:17)
My specific work with food microbiology was in food safety, and so I was always very concerned with understanding the risks for human pathogens on foods. Despite the best efforts of food producers, you still do have instances where you have E. coli, salmonella, or listeria on one commodity or another. The way that you respond to that—there’s a sort of three-legged stool of responding to a food safety problem from a microbiology and food safety standpoint.
You can prevent these harmful organisms from being on your food commodity in the first place—that’s called exclusion. That’s where you do water quality monitoring, you do land-use history analysis, you do exclusion activities to make sure that the bad bacteria or viruses or parasites don’t get on the food in the first place.
Then you have containment, which is a monitoring system. That’s where you do continuous testing of foods being produced at the point of production, point of packaging, when they’re in shipping. Sometimes you pull samples, you hold them back a little bit, you test to make sure there are no pathogens on them, and then if you find any, that’s when you do the recalls and the trace-back analysis. Our Global Food Traceability Center at IFT is working very hard to develop protocols so that if we have a problem, we know where it came from, we can trace that back, we can isolate it, and we can contain it.
Then the third leg of the stool is eradication—that is to say, you apply techniques and technologies that will eradicate potential organisms. In one big way, we heat. If you’ve got ground beef, you can cook that ground beef, and you apply a thermal process that kills any potential E. coli or anything that might be on it. Now, heat is one technique, but you can’t apply that to lettuce. That doesn’t really work, which is why my research—and other people’s research—is working on other kinds of processing technologies that you can apply to more sensitive foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, berries, melons, other sorts of more sensitive products. Different kinds of novel sanitizers in the organic space, non-thermal processing technologies, other sorts of interventions that will kill the organism so they can’t cause any harm. So you’ve got exclusion, containment, and eradication, and all these different efforts working together. Those are the kinds of research that you’re going to do to have a good food safety impact.
Mitch Ratcliffe (20:56)
Well, because exclusion is getting harder—because of the rising temperatures globally encouraging the growth of more pathogens, or at least the propagation of more pathogens—it sounds like that’s raising the bar for containment and recall.
Brendan Niemira (21:09)
Yeah. If you find yourself in a situation where one of those things is not an option, or you’re not able to do it as well as you were before, then you lean into the other two. If effective technologies for eradication don’t exist, well, that’s where you need to put some research dollars in to create them.
I’ll give you an example. Years and years ago, we had lots and lots of outbreaks on sprouts. Sprouts were the cause of continuous outbreaks again and again, and research was put into place to find: how can we eliminate E. coli and salmonella on sprouts so they can be as safe, healthy, and wholesome as they can possibly be? But just because we were working on eradication steps does not mean we were ignoring the other two. There were things like seed certification processes to make sure the seed coming into these sprouting facilities is as healthy as it can be. There were containment efforts—let’s do better trace-back analysis, let’s do better testing, so that we know what’s on there, so we can act when we find it.
So it’s not a case of, ‘Well, we’re just going to work on one and ignore the other two.’ You’ve got to have an understanding of what the problem is. You can address all the different aspects of science at once. I would say this is one of the issues that happens when you start to see cuts in science: then you have to start making some hard decisions—well, we’re going to dial back on one and we’re going to keep our remaining resources and put them into one of the others. Maybe you’re leaving yourself in a situation where two years from now or five years from now, you might say to yourself, ‘Darn, I really wish we’d been working on that.’
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:45)
Do you think that the private sector can step into the gap that has opened? Or are we really at a point where we need to seriously reconsider our federal funding for food science research?
Brendan Niemira (22:55)
Private funding—corporate funding—has always been a huge part of food science research. Companies fund their own research, and then there’s funding through grants and consortia funding larger works. Industry funds provide grants for academic researchers, and academic research is a huge part of this. Government research is a huge part of this. And in a time when you’re looking at research funding that is cut or under threat, one of the unwanted outcomes is that there’s research that’s not being done.
Some of our advocacy priorities at IFT include seeing that we want food science research—including food microbiology, food safety, food toxicology, whether it’s chemical toxicology, chemical safety issues, or biological safety issues. We want to see that funding. We’d like to see it increase, honestly, but at least we’d like to see it not cut. Because you can’t have good data without good science, and you can’t make good decisions without good data. So, if you want to be able to make good decisions and develop good policies, you need good data, and for that, you need good science.
Mitch Ratcliffe (24:10)
We certainly have had a foundation of solid data in the United States for the past 50 years. I think we’ve got a great sense of the problems that we need to talk about. Let’s take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to come right back and talk more with Brendan.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to the conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a 200,000-member network focused on food production and safety.
Brendan, let’s talk about bugs. The paper discusses a Costa Rican study where they’re taking a variety of food waste to farm edible insects. What’s the realistic potential for adoption of food made of insect protein in the United States, and is there a path even to regulatory approval for that in this day and age?
Brendan Niemira (25:07)
Okay, here’s the thing. I actually just wrote a book chapter on edible insects and digging into all the ins and outs of this, so I happen to have a lot of this fresh in my mind. There are only a very small number of animals that we can take things that humans can’t eat—like cellulose—and convert. Humans can’t eat grass; humans can’t digest grass or the cellulosic material. Historically, the way that we have made cellulose into something that we can eat is to feed it to an animal and then eat the animal. Right now we do that with cows and other ruminants.
But you can do that with crickets. Crickets have some advantages over cows: they use a lot less space, they have a shorter generation time, so you can be more responsive to market changes, they use less water, they use less energy, and so on. But then at the end of the day, you have this insect protein, and what’s the realistic prospect for that?
I would say that, because of the cultural nature of Western society, Western society does not have a cultural heritage of entomophagy—eating bugs. That’s the Greek word for it. There are other parts of the world that do have a cultural heritage of this, and so they have lower cultural barriers to having insect proteins as part of the diet, either as just edible insects—as a commodity, where you look down and say, hey, here’s a cinnamon-crunch-flavored cricket. These are products that are on the market.
Mitch Ratcliffe (26:44)
I’ve tried these. They’re not the worst thing in the world, but they’re also not something that most people would pop in their mouth at a movie theater.
Brendan Niemira (26:50)
Well, certainly not in the US, and not in most Western societies that derive their cultural heritage from Europe. So if you’re not going to have these things that are identifiable as an insect, could you have insect protein powder as part of an insect supplement? I think these things are still in the market. I’ve tried it. I’ve got insect powder, and—you know, put my money where my mouth is—I’ve made brownies and cookies with cricket powder. They taste like brownies and cookies. It was okay.
As a large-scale process, I think you have to start with the cultural issue and the consumer issue, because if you’re going to make a product that—let’s generalize—very few people want to buy, it’s a very, very niche product. Then you are going to have that process remain a niche process, and so the overall impact on large issues of sustainability, or carbon usage, or moving away from conventional animal sources or plant sources of protein, is going to be kind of limited.
Where you might see much more of a penetration, however, is in taking these insect protein sources and using them as feeds for aquaculture. Right now, fish are not really able to digest soybean meal very well, so you can’t raise fish the same way that you raise cows and chickens. They’re trying to work to breed new kinds of trout, let’s say, that are better able to use soybean meals so you can get some of those economies of scale. But if you can lean into insect protein production, you essentially use the insect farms almost as a kind of bioreactor to turn cellulose—indigestible cellulose—into a digestible form of protein that can then be processed through aquaculture or chicken farms, conventional animal agriculture, that then would go into the human food supply.
I think it is still kind of a long way away, at least in the United States, from a time when insect proteins are going to be a significant or a major part of our daily diet. The FDA rules on insect proteins and edible insects, right now, are that they have to be safe and wholesome. They have to be tested for human pathogens, and so on. These insects have to be in a production facility that is dedicated to that production—they cannot be wild caught. So you can’t just go out into your local meadow and swing a net and start collecting crickets. They have to—
Mitch Ratcliffe (29:30)
They might be contaminated with pesticides.
Brendan Niemira (29:33)
Pesticides, who knows—there might be other pathogens on them, there might be fungi on them, there might be potentially heavy metal contamination. So these have to be grown in a dedicated production facility. The FDA is certainly on the ball in terms of having an understanding of the potential risks for some of these things, and they have put rules in place to make sure that if insects are produced as human food, they adhere to safety rules and regulations.
Mitch Ratcliffe (29:58)
The metaphor of the insect as a bioreactor with legs makes a lot of sense to me. But precision fermentation using bioreactors is another one of the paper’s big bets, and I’ve personally been involved in trying to raise some funding to create dairy proteins using acetate fermentation, which would reduce the need for concentrated animal feeding operations, so dairy’s environmental impact could be drastically reduced. Can you explain how precision fermentation works for our listeners?
Brendan Niemira (30:30)
Sure, absolutely. Precision fermentation is a really fascinating area of research right now. The work that we’re doing with whole genome sequencing and proteomics and metabolomics has just led to opening a whole new chapter in what we’re doing with fermentation.
What is precision fermentation, versus conventional fermentation? People have been fermenting foods for thousands of years, relying on yeast and bacteria to process raw ingredients and turn them into edible foods—everything from beer to bread to kimchi. Those microorganisms only ate certain things, and from a metabolic standpoint, they only produced certain things. They were useful because they were able to break down cellulose and hemicellulose into digestible sugars for humans. They’re able to take food which was not edible or provided very little nutritive value, into things that do provide nutritive value for us when we consume them.
But because it was gathering wild strains—and even after you get into the Louis Pasteur days of breeding new strains of yeast to make better beer—it was still kind of old-school breeding to get better fermentation cultures. Now, thanks to modern food science, we can really dig into the cellular, molecular microbial ecology. I mentioned whole genome sequencing, microbial community metabolomics, and so on. We can specify what metabolite or nutrient we want to produce, and we can design a multi-species microbial ecology that will produce it, and we can do that based on specific inputs.
Bacteria in the wild almost never live alone. You never have one species of bacteria; you have multiple species of bacteria all working together in conjunction with other kinds of fungi, and so on, to produce lots of different kinds of metabolites. Now we have a much greater understanding of that multi-species microbial economy.
The way I like to think of it is, if you imagine Little House on the Prairie, and you’ve got families—settlers—going out into this wide-open space, and you’ve got 50 families in some state, they establish a town, and that town behaves in a certain way. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if you introduce one person that comes in and opens up a church, and now the behavior of the town changes. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if one person comes into town and opens up a casino. If you have a church and a casino, even though they represent only very minor components of the overall population, they create this incredibly complex interaction—metabolomics, consumption, behavior. You get complex inputs, complex outputs.
Up till the last 10 years, a lot of this stuff has just been so complicated, such a black box. We have a good understanding now—a much clearer understanding. So we can take side-stream products from food processing, we can take waste-stream products from food waste, and we can lean into precision fermentation, design communities of microbes, give them the feedstocks that we want, and we can get valuable nutrients out the other side.
Mitch Ratcliffe (33:48)
What can we make?
Brendan Niemira (33:50)
Well, if you want to make lactic acid, you want to make certain kinds of vitamins, you want to make certain kinds of proteins, you want to do conversions of things. There are a lot of things that are useful in the food industry. You can make surfactants, you can make flocculants. Flocculants are stuff that, if you’ve got a bunch of solids suspended in material, you add a flocculant, and it causes everything to clump together and drop out, so you get clean water out the other side.
Mitch Ratcliffe (34:19)
So, to put a finer point on it, we can make both food materials and materials that help us process a variety of things, including our waste.
Brendan Niemira (34:29)
Correct. Absolutely. Flocculants are used very extensively in wastewater production, where you’ve got a lot of suspended organic matter, or you’ve got a lot of other suspended material. You add in some flocculants, all that stuff clumps up, and it drops out, and that really simplifies the process of filtration and cleaning the water, so you can get clean water back into the environment.
From a food standpoint—stepping away from the wastewater stuff—let’s say that you’re producing beer, you’re producing wine, you’re producing yogurt, you’re producing some other kind of liquid product. You might add one of these ingredients to cause oil droplets to remain suspended, or to cause sediments to drop out, or to give you better colors, or to give you different kinds of nutrients, or different kinds of vitamin production. All of these things can be the result of precision fermentation, because we have that understanding of what the microbes are doing, what they’re eating, and what they’re producing.
There’s a lot of research that’s going into this right now to work out those molecular details, those metabolomics details, and the position is to scale it up and then put it through its paces. Let’s get that cost engineering analysis. Let’s scale it up; see what’s it going to cost, where the weak points are, where we need to improve. So that you can then feed into developing a business case around it, selling your product, and working on consumer acceptance to get stuff out in the real world.
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:51)
Going back to simplification: what we’re talking about is that we have been farming as a species now for 25,000 years with macro-level cattle and products. Where we are moving now is micro-scale relationships with nature that allow us to produce our food and other forms of materials and supplies.
Brendan Niemira (36:14)
Right. So in conventional agriculture, let’s be generous—there are 50 species of animals that we use in animal agriculture, and these animals are used to take things that we can’t eat and turn them into things that we can eat or things that we want to eat. You’ve got cows, you’ve got chickens, you’ve got hogs, you’ve got goats, sheep, and so on. But it’s a relatively short list.
If you’re going from conventional vertebrate animals to insects, there are thousands and thousands of species of insects, only a small handful of which have really been looked at for optimization. Each one is capable of metabolizing different sorts of things, they live in different kinds of communities. And when you then go to the microbial world, you’ve got millions of kinds of organisms that you can use, and if you look at the different kinds of microbial community combinations, the numbers scale incredibly—like trillions of different kinds of combinations of microbial communities that you can create and cultivate and use in these bioreactor kind of environments, each of which eats different things and produces different things.
The goal is always to produce food and nutrients and food processing materials that are safe, healthy, wholesome, available, and sustainable. When you start to lift your eyes up to the skies and see all the possibilities out there, it really becomes—I don’t want to say magical, because I’m a scientist—but it becomes amazing to think about all the things that we could do if we were able to lean into the kind of science that would allow us to take advantage of all these different things.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:02)
It is magical in the sense that Arthur C. Clarke meant it: any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic until it becomes normalized.
Brendan Niemira (38:11)
Just imagine that you had some kind of a tank and you put in garbage and you get out gumdrops. Wow, that’s magic. Well, okay, obviously we’re oversimplifying, because there are all the various steps involved in that. But at IFT, what we’re trying to do is bring together all of the different food scientists and food technologists who have the knowledge that will allow us to do some of those things—to increase the food supply, make it safer, make it more wholesome, make it more available, and do it in a way that people can access and that they can have knowledge and confidence in using.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:50)
Another topic in the paper was cultivated meats, and this is something that we’ve had folks on the show talking about several times. In 2013, a burger grown in the lab cost about $300,000, and it’s under $40 today. We’re talking about meat that is coming out of a lab, not something processed to appear like meat. Where’s that technology realistically today? Because that number is 10 years old.
Brendan Niemira (39:16)
It’s getting better. I don’t recall exactly what the latest numbers on that are—whether it’s gone down to $20 or $15 or where it is—but this is one of the big areas of technology that people are looking at. Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted this back in 1955, but actually, I believe it was Winston Churchill who predicted this. I’m trying to remember the quote, but he said something like, someday we’re going to be able to raise chicken legs without having to raise a whole chicken.
Are we there yet? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but there’s been a lot of work that’s been done on this. Cellular agriculture, now, to create meat cells, whether they’re from pork or beef or chicken or fish, to grow these out so that they look, taste, perform, and smell like—I’m not saying like the real thing, because they are the real thing, and this is ultimately what it is, but like conventional, traditional things that everybody is used to.
Part of the work that’s gone into it has been to show that, yeah, you can do this—you can produce these, and they look like a burger, tastes like a burger. But can you do it in a way that’s going to allow you to make that available to people, so that it’s not just a very, very billionaire niche novelty product? That’s part of the challenge, but I think that’s part of the challenge with any kind of food technology innovation.
Mitch, you start in the lab, and you begin with saying, well, is this even possible? And once you’ve demonstrated that it’s possible, then you start to develop that out, and you say, well, how do we lean into some of the engineering stuff to make it realistic, and realism falls in—what people will be willing to buy, from a cultural acceptability standpoint, from their expectation of what food is, how much it’s going to cost, how available it’s going to be, and what are the inputs necessary to create it? That’ll dictate a lot of the overall feel and the overall landscape in which these new products are going to operate.
Mitch Ratcliffe (41:36)
It’s a data problem to a very great degree, and one of the areas the paper goes into in depth is how AI-driven supply chain modeling and various forms of traceability can perform as climate adaptation tools. Where are those technologies actually deployed today at commercial scale that you might be aware of? And do you have any evidence that they’re actually reducing emissions, reducing the overall impact of our food system on the planet?
Brendan Niemira (42:00)
A lot of the AI tools—I can tell you what the AI tools are doing now, and probably by the time this show airs, they might have changed.
Mitch Ratcliffe (42:09)
Obsolescence is an hourly thing today.
Brendan Niemira (42:12)
AI tools are moving so fast. But AI is one of those areas where, if you want to know how much something costs, or how much water you’re using to produce it, or how much of an impact you’re having—being able to go into the data and ask sophisticated questions of complicated datasets is one of the things that AI is very, very good at. It does it quickly, so you can get to: what are the trends, what are the key points, what are the key pain points, where do we need to lean in and do more research and do better, so that we can get a better outcome on the back side.
Mitch Ratcliffe (42:48)
So we’re just beginning in that process, along with the leaps that we’re taking in various forms of fermentation and cellular agriculture. Can you paint a picture of where you think the food system should be in 10 years in order for us to start to transition through the climate era?
Brendan Niemira (43:06)
The food system should be more holistic. That, I think, is one of the things that will make a big difference in terms of our overall ability to respond to issues of sustainability. It encompasses everything that falls under that. Right now there are disparate areas of science and disparate areas of scientific inquiry that are a little bit isolated.
I like to make the joke: if you’ve got an apple on the tree and you’ve got a bacteria on that apple, it’s a plant pathology problem. But as soon as the apple falls from the tree—well, now it’s a food microbiology problem. You need to get the plant pathologist and the food microbiologist talking to each other so they have an understanding of the continuum. I think if we’re going to respond to these large, complicated problems, then we need to have a greater connection between different areas and different scientific disciplines, so that we can adopt and create that holistic approach.
Mitch Ratcliffe (44:04)
Well, IFT is doing a lot of work to articulate that. You mentioned ift.org earlier. How do people follow your work? What do you recommend they do to keep track and keep at the cutting edge, so they understand these things as they evolve?
Brendan Niemira (44:19)
Well, you can join IFT. That’s an easy one. If you go to ift.org, there’s membership information right there. We’re a great group of folks, very active and very involved in all kinds of different areas of food science and food technology. We make a big effort to publicize what we’re trying to do, the science that’s done, the research that we connect. When we have all the different areas—people working within the field of food science come to the meeting and they connect with us—academia, industry, and government members of IFT—when we connect them all together, we publish, like the white papers we’re talking about right now. We do press releases, we do commentary on different things, we engage in media responses, all kinds of stuff. Some of this is kind of hot-button issue of the day, and other times we comment on larger scientific issues—big landscape issues that are going to affect us now and tomorrow, and over the next 20 years.
Mitch Ratcliffe (45:24)
Well, Brendan, thanks. This has been an eye-opening conversation, really interesting.
Brendan Niemira (45:27)
Well, Mitch, I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I really appreciate your having me on the show.
Mitch Ratcliffe (45:34)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, the Chicago-based scientific society that has connected food scientists across academia, government, and industry since 1939. You can learn more about IFT’s work and read that new white paper we discussed, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, at ift.org.
Most of the climate fight in food is happening in the middle of the supply chain, where the public has almost no visibility, and the policy debate keeps looking somewhere else. Brendan described a three-legged stool for food safety—exclusion, containment, and eradication—noting that as the planet warms, exclusion gets harder. That’s because pathogens can travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to. That single observation reframes food safety as climate adaptation work. And it lands at exactly the moment when federal research capacity at agencies like the USDA Agricultural Research Service is being thinned out. Roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, and the people best positioned to redesign safety and efficiency at the processing, packaging, and distribution layers of our food system are being asked to do more with less.
The first idea worth elevating from our conversation is the distinction that IFT keeps insisting on between food processing and food formulation. In other words, the question of what we should do to the ingredients, instead of what’s included in the ingredient list, is critical to the sustainability and health outcomes of what we eat. Brendan is right that the thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach we see in federal decisions these days may drive engagement, but it confuses policy.
The MAHA Commission’s framing treats processing intensity as the problem, and that collapses a category that includes both deep-fried snack cakes and shelf-stable beans, both ultra-formulated soda and pasteurized milk, into grossly simplified yes-no, us-versus-them choices. That’s not what we need right now.
The climate consequences matter. Many of the technologies that extend shelf life, cut food waste, and reduce cold-chain energy demand involve processing. If we regulate processing, treating it as a proxy for harm, we hobble some of the most useful tools we have for cutting the system’s environmental footprint and improving its safety. IFT’s response—to define nutritional quality by what the food does in the body, not by how it was made—is scientifically defensible. It is also, as Brendan acknowledged in his own way, complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes the companies whose products would be reclassified under any new rule.
The second idea I want to dig into for a moment is microbial agriculture as a structural shift in what farming means. Farming in 50 years will be as unrecognizable to us as today’s agricultural system would be to a farmer plucked from 1890, when 43% of Americans worked on farms. Humans had domesticated perhaps 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, and Brendan’s point is that precision fermentation, built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics, opens up access to trillions of possible microbial community combinations. Precision fermentation can take side streams and waste streams from existing food processing and convert them into all sorts of things—dairy proteins, food ingredients, even in water treatment systems.
That’s a circular bioeconomy story, and one that all of you who’ve been listening for years are aware of. It aligns with the case made by my recent guest, Jasper Steinhausen, that sustainability should be a profitability lever, not just a cost center. We have the opportunity to invent entire new industries here, folks.
The third idea is one that we return to most often, and that’s holism—thinking in systems. The climate problem doesn’t respect the disciplinary boundaries that scientists observe every day. The IFT white paper’s call for AI-enabled supply chain modeling sits right at the center of this argument. That’s not because AI is magic, but because the food system data we rely on is fragmented across many actors who don’t currently talk to each other, and pulling that data into a coherent picture is the kind of work that modern LLMs are actually good at.
The critical issue here is that federal research cuts don’t just slow individual programs—they erode the connective tissue between disciplines, and the connective tissue is where climate adaptation has to happen. Innovation is the product of diverse solutions being combined in new ways, and the most unexpected connections often yield the greatest impact. So we need more cross-disciplinary discussion, not less.
The food system is being asked to feed 8 billion people under conditions that it wasn’t designed for, with less federal science capacity, a public conversation that mistakes processing for poison, and a set of emerging technologies that are scientifically ready but culturally challenging—as our discussion about insect protein showed.
So here’s the headline to remember from my conversation with Brendan Niemira: IFT is making the case that food science is climate science, and we’re going to be watching how that argument lands as the MAHA debate continues, and as the 2026 dietary guidelines evolve. Hopefully they won’t mutate too much.
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Thanks, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
Most business leaders believe sustainability costs money. They’re wrong. The proof is sitting right under their noses, bleeding out quietly as waste, excess heat, and byproducts every day the factory runs. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product. In a sector where resource costs account for more than 50% of total operating expenses — compared to less than 25% for salaries — that’s not a compliance problem or a branding challenge. It’s a structural, strategic failure that most business leaders have never been trained to see. Jasper Steinhausen spent two decades watching that failure play out across more than 100 companies in the Nordic countries. He came to sustainability not from the environmental side, but from marketing, where the core lesson was that people act on what they care about, not on what you think they should care about. When he started connecting the dots between resource-flow analysis and business strategy, the conversation changed. Leaders who tuned out every sustainability pitch suddenly leaned in when the frame was cost reduction, supply chain resilience, and competitive advantage. The “green” problem turned out to be a business problem in disguise — and a solvable one. That reframing is in his book, Making Sustainability Profitable: A Leader’s Guide to Growing a Thriving Business That Makes the World a Better Place. A free digital copy of the book is available at freebook.scoreapp.com — Jasper recommends starting with Chapter Three.
Jasper Steinhausen, Founder and CEO of Business With Impact and author of Making Sustainability Profitable, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
The argument Jasper makes is structural. Today’s business leaders have been trained rigorously in managing time and money, but almost never in managing material flows, even though materials dwarf payroll in the cost structure of most manufacturing companies. The result is a generation of leaders who are leaving more than half their cost base strategically unmanaged. The narrative problem compounds the structural one. When every leader wakes up believing sustainability is a cost, a constraint, and a compromise, they never get to the question of whether it might be something else. Jasper’s idea, which he posts about on LinkedIn and tests with clients ranging from small manufacturers to government advisory roles, is that the narrative is the first hurdle. The mental transformation has to precede the business transformation. Companies that clear that hurdle and start treating sustainability as an innovation platform consistently find themselves with a layer of competitive advantage their rivals haven’t even thought to open. Our conversation also covers the greenwashing trap, and how to avoid it by going around it entirely. The problem with leading on sustainability as a marketing message, Jasper argues, is that it inverts the logic. The job isn’t to convince customers to care about the planet. It’s to identify the problem they’re already trying to solve and deliver a better solution. Once that happens to be more sustainable because sustainability, done right, produces better outcomes. “Impact follows perceived value,” he says. A water company with a genuinely pure, chemical-free source doesn’t lead with environmental stewardship. It leads with safer drinking water for your kids. The sustainability isn’t hidden — it’s structural. It’s why the product delivers what it promises. Communicating it means doing what you say, saying what you do, and backing every claim with data and a visible roadmap. That’s not a compromise. That’s the only version of sustainability communication that survives contact with a skeptical market.
You can learn more about Jasper’s work at bwimpact.com and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.
Today we’re going to talk about sustainable business — making it sustainable, making it profitable; in other words, making it a business. Many people still believe that sustainability is just a cost center: a compliance hassle, a PR move, or something that hurts profits. This belief has kept many companies from joining the green transition. Instead, they’re waiting for rules to change or for others to show how it works. But the data tells a different story, and according to our guest today, when manufacturers in Denmark account for all their inputs, more than 20% of raw materials they purchase never reach a finished product. Instead, they bleed out as waste, excess heat, and other byproducts. That’s not just an environmental problem — that’s money leaving through a hole in the floor. And it points to something deeper: sustainability, when done right, isn’t a cost to be managed. It’s a source of competitive advantage that most business leaders have not yet learned to see.
So I’m joined today by Jasper Steinhausen, founder and CEO of Business With Impact, and the author of the book Making Sustainability Profitable. Jasper is a longtime circular economy business consultant to businesses in the Nordic countries. Over the past two decades, he’s worked with over 100 companies and has served as an advisor to the Danish government’s Green Transition Fund. He’s developed a framework — the Impact Blueprint — that guides business leaders through five key actions connecting sustainability with growth, resilience, and profit. Companies that use it have reported their best financial results ever.
So let’s talk with Jasper about common mistakes small and medium-sized companies make when starting with sustainability, how circular economy thinking is really about using resources better and making more profit, and how companies that go beyond compliance can stand out from the competition. We’ll also try to get into some tougher questions: Why isn’t the business case catching on faster? How do you tell real sustainability from greenwashing? And can businesses move quickly enough to meet what science says is needed?
To learn more about Jasper’s work, you can visit bwimpact.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. You can find his book Making Sustainability Profitable on Amazon or at your local bookseller. If sustainability is truly a profit driver hiding in plain sight, why do so many business leaders still see it as a burden, and what would it take to change that? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 2:58
Welcome to the show, Jasper. How are you doing today?
Jasper Steinhausen 3:01
Thank you, Mitch. I’m doing really, really well. Looking forward to having this conversation with you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:06
Well, thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. You know, like myself, you’ve been working for 20 years or so at the intersection of sustainability and business strategy. I’m wondering — was there a moment, or maybe a specific client, that made the bell ring for you, that these two things are intimately connected?
Jasper Steinhausen 3:23
Well, for me, the problem is that most people tend to focus on only one problem at a time, right? We tend to isolate problems, especially those we don’t quite understand. And that’s not just a sustainability thing — that’s just how our brains work. But the reality is that sustainability integrates into so many areas in a business, as you probably realize yourself.
And I’ve always been looking at the positive side of things, looking for the opportunity. At some point, back in the mid-2000s or so, I was very much into climate. This was heading up towards COP 15 in Copenhagen, so climate was the thing — also for me. I started looking at climate as the opportunity to innovate and to rethink, and thereby to solve more than one problem at the same time, because there was lots of stuff that needed fixing.
My experience from working in marketing right after I left university was that the more I talked to people about what they care about, the more they listened. So I started connecting the dots: what are the types of problems they do care about? Because a lot of people don’t necessarily care enough about sustainability — it’s not their top priority. So I started to look at it this way: What if I get curious, try to understand what your top priority is, and then figure out how climate — or sustainability, or whatever your slice of this pie is — intersects with that problem? And then speak to solving that problem in a way that also has impact. Basically turning sustainability into the toolbox and using it to solve the problems people actually care about.
And things started moving more easily. Conversations were more interesting to people. From there, I’ve just been refining that process for — yeah, 20-plus years.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:32
Well, as you say, there are a lot of problems, and the range of challenges a business or policymaker faces today is growing constantly. What do you find the primary motivation is — is it profitability, or is it a combination of financial sustainability and a genuine desire to do better? Where does the motive lie these days?
Jasper Steinhausen 5:56
Well, it depends. Usually I just start by asking people: What are your top priorities right now? What do you really want to succeed with? Not necessarily in sustainability, but where’s your head on the line — what have you promised the board, or your senior leadership, or whoever I’m speaking to in the organization? So rather than having a conversation around sustainability, I find it more interesting to have a conversation about what we really want to achieve.
But I do find that many leaders feel a fairly significant pain around the gap between the values they live by in their private life — the choices they make about food, cars, travel, housing, what they buy, what they choose to repair — and their professional life. In their private life, they make conscious, deliberate choices that factor in sustainability. Then they go to work for eight or nine hours a day, and there they just can’t connect the dots. So they’re basically living a split, unable to live up to their values in their professional life — which is a big part of your life. And that’s painful.
So for some there is an underlying personal pain point, but it always comes back to: I’m being measured on delivering business results. And if you’re not in a company that’s advanced and mature in sustainability — where it’s an integrated part of the brand — well, then it’s a distant second to cutting costs, increasing sales, and attracting talent. So to come back to your question: the short answer is that it’s the business side for the vast majority, but a lot of them have a personal drive underneath. They just can’t connect the two, so they don’t even try. When I help them do that, it becomes a real personal relief as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:30
So what would you say is the most common objection you hear when you make the argument to, say, a room full of CEOs that sustainability can be profitable? Is there a common myth you can dispel right off the bat?
Jasper Steinhausen 8:42
Yeah, I guess they don’t say this, but I’m pretty sure they think it — “BS, this can’t be true” — though they’re polite people and don’t say it to my face. But the thing is, I’ve asked people on every continent, and I get the same response: sustainability is a problem, it’s expensive, it’s hard for business, and you have to compromise in so many ways. That seems to be the decisive narrative globally on what sustainability is.
The reality is that sustainability delivers competitiveness. It drives down cost. It drives innovation. It fuels engagement — and engagement equals productivity, less sick leave, attracting talent, more innovation. And combine all those, as you advance further and further, it also starts to lead to increased customer loyalty, because you make better solutions and find people and companies who see that alignment. There is so much business value to be gained, and people just don’t get that.
When we make what I call a mental transformation — before we’re capable of doing a business transformation — it’s kind of like all of a sudden thinking: well, what have I been thinking for all these years? You can read more about this process in Making Sustainability Profitable.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:31
Well, you’re describing the recognition of a series of connections that constitute the system in which the business does its work — whatever that work might be. And one of the things that was interesting, and why I wanted to talk with you, is that you frame this all initially as a waste issue. I was surprised by the Danish manufacturing results you reported — that 20% of raw materials never make it into the product or service. For business leaders who haven’t thought about it that way, how does framing sustainability primarily as a resource-efficiency problem change the conversation? Does it make it easier to take that first step?
Jasper Steinhausen 11:08
Well, it’s a really good question. In general, it shifts things quite a lot. The thing is that business leaders don’t really know how to deal with resource flow strategically, and there’s a reason for that. From around the early 1950s to the early 1970s — what’s often referred to as the golden age of capitalism — there was a notion of seemingly endless abundance in energy and materials, and prices just kept falling. So it became less of a strategic issue and more like a cost of operations, something to hand down the chain to the head of manufacturing or wherever it sits today. In leadership literature, it gradually disappeared as a strategic topic, meaning that today’s leaders have never really been trained to strategically look at the flow of resources. They focus mainly on the flow of time and the flow of money.
So through no fault of their own — because nobody ever taught them, it was never part of their education or their portfolio — now this massive area has been ignored. I once had an opportunity to dig into Danish national statistical data — about ten years ago, though I’m quite sure the picture is the same today, perhaps even more significant. Less than 25% of costs go to salary. A bit more than 50% is tied to resources. If you combine these two things — it’s kind of mind-blowing. More than 50% of all costs are not part of leadership’s strategic focus. Let’s leave that for listeners to chew on, because that’s insane when you look at it like that. But it kind of just disappeared.
So when I come in and help rewire this connection — have them look at where the resource flows are — it becomes quite easy to see that there are things really going wrong in how we produce today. When I look at a company or a value chain, I basically see money bleeding out all over the place. If I’m asking how we can increase competitiveness and reduce cost, the first thing I’d say is: well, why don’t we start by stopping some of these holes? And the response is: “Oh, yeah, okay — I hadn’t thought about that.” Because that’s just how things run. Procurement procures, manufacturing produces, sales sells, everybody’s busy, the cost structure is baked into the price, and that’s it. Just intercept a bit and show them what it really is, and it’s kind of “holy moly.” And then you can start doing things.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:39
Well, you’re describing what happens when suddenly the water is off and you recognize you’ve been counting on it without thinking about it for a long time. Each organization within the entity is in its own silo, focused on its own thing. So how do you move from being reactive to being proactive about sustainability? What does the sweet spot look like in practice?
Jasper Steinhausen 14:58
Yeah, well, I guess you could say that things move a little more easily once you align strategy and offering, and you and your team are working toward something bigger than yourselves. As some of your listeners probably know, we understand quite a lot about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And we know that when we contribute to something beyond ourselves — something bigger — it feels really good.
So if you’re in a company that’s not just about profit, but also a profitable way to be part of making the world a better place — in whatever area fits that company — we can all see that a lot of things in this world are out of balance and moving in the wrong direction, whether that’s climate change, biodiversity, plastics, the amount of chemicals, or something in the social space. Whatever is your flavor, that’s up to you. And the second you can see: “Now I’m part of a team or a culture or movement that’s actually taking some real steps” — and you’re leveraging the full power of a business to do it — it becomes this massively leveraged change. You make better products because you use sustainability as an innovation platform. You put customers’ problems at the center, so you come up with solutions that are better for clients and better for the planet. Your team becomes more engaged, stays longer, works harder. And that’s why they beat the competition. It’s simply a better way of doing business.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:15
Well, you see yourself within a larger system and a bigger context, and that allows you to find greater motivation as well as more opportunities for innovation. Can you share the principles of the Impact Blueprint — the five steps a leader listening right now on their commute can identify and potentially apply when they get to the office?
Jasper Steinhausen 17:39
Sure. There are five steps: mindset, mission, mapping out a course to move toward it, actually doing stuff, and then going out and talking about it. You can read through all of them in depth in Making Sustainability Profitable — and I’d be happy to gift your listeners a digital copy. Check the show notes for a link to download a free copy.
The mindset step is a lot of what we’ve already been talking about: shifting out of “it’s bad, costly, and a compromise” and into the opportunity space. Don’t start with “what environmental problems should I solve?” Start with “what business problem am I most focused on solving?” and then look at that through the lens of sustainability or resource flow. How does that intersect with the problem? Don’t go in thinking it’s more costly — it’s an innovation game. Find ways to make better solutions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:11
Great. We’ll include a link in the show notes.
Jasper Steinhausen 19:15
Perfect. Just read Chapter Three — that’s about a 20-minute read and you’ll be all good to go.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:23
Chapter Three. Check it out.
Jasper Steinhausen 19:23
Check it out. The mission step is figuring out why we’re all doing this. What’s the bigger thing? Where do we want to go with this? Say you’re a smaller company, or founder-led, or owner-operated — where do I really want to go with this? What’s important to me? And making sure that matches with the business. You can look at a SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — and then match that with what’s personally important to you. Kind of like legacy thinking: what would you like to be known for? Is it children? Is it animals? Is it climate change? And then make sure those match, so you don’t choose an impact area you have no ability to actually move.
I’ve worked with clients who really wanted to do something on climate, but had a business with a very insignificant direct climate impact, or where the impact was tied into a supply chain where they had zero ability to influence anything, because they were a small company with giant suppliers on the other side of the world. So you need to match those things so you actually choose something that gives you a real chance of working on sustainability in a way that also improves your business.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:56
And those two — mindset and mission — are a great place to anchor the rest of the conversation. What is the minimum viable move in terms of its ability to catalyze the passion you’re talking about for making the world a better place, while balancing the day-to-day challenge of covering payroll at the end of the month? Is there some initial investment or activity that takes you out of your comfort zone — where the silos stop you in your tracks?
Jasper Steinhausen 21:41
Well, you’re very right that getting out of the comfort zone is part of it. I find that the absolute majority of leaders don’t know how to lead sustainability — they see it as this separate thing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:54
And I would argue that they may not even know how to lead.
Jasper Steinhausen 22:00
Point taken — yes, duly noted. And especially for smaller businesses. A lot of founders or engineers who suddenly have 20 people on their hands are struggling just to keep everything going. Some even dream about going back to being in the weeds doing the actual work rather than all this leadership stuff. So, yeah.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:28
The lone innovator is often where a lot of us begin this journey.
Jasper Steinhausen 22:32
Exactly — true. But what I would say is that there’s a lot you can do that doesn’t require big, long-horizon investments. The story about sustainability is very often that it’s about investing for the long view or future-proofing. But what I sometimes refer to as the “brilliant basics” — not a phrase coined by me, but still very valid — is to look at your company and see what you’re going to keep doing for a very long time. You’re going to keep taking raw materials, running them through process A, B, and C, and turning out a product for your customers. And your customers will keep wanting good quality, reliability, and the best possible price. OK — so here is something you can invest in, because it’s going to be ongoing. Are you doing it the right way?
And again, back to the resource flow and waste issue: you are not doing it the right way if you’ve never really looked at it. Unless you’re a very high-volume, low-margin Walmart-type operation that scrutinizes every penny — or you’ve been on the brink of bankruptcy — odds are good you’ve never really looked hard at this. When the Ukraine war broke out four years ago, what we saw here in Europe was a massive, near-overnight increase in energy prices. All of a sudden, companies saw a doubling or more of their energy costs, and for many, that was lethal. All hands on deck.
And within weeks, so many things were changed — none of which required big new investments. It was just smarter practice: let’s produce at night when energy is cheaper; maybe we don’t need the temperature at 98 degrees — maybe 92 is fine. All these things that were never looked at, because it wasn’t on the radar. You can do a lot of that. The minimum viable move is really just getting the basics right.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:41
So you’re describing that moment of crisis when the reframing is almost automatic — because you don’t have control anymore. This is also a great place to take a quick commercial break, folks, because the wheels have been clipped off the plane. Will we land it? We’ll find out right after a quick commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:08
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my discussion with Jasper Steinhausen, author of Making Sustainability Profitable and founder and CEO of Business With Impact. So Jasper, one of the testimonials I read about your work is that in a single coaching session, you reframed an entire business through your questions. What do those questions look like when you sit down with somebody who says, “I know I need to do something — I think it might be sustainability.” How do you drill in to find out what they can actually do?
Jasper Steinhausen 26:41
Well, I can walk you back to that specific session, because I think it’s a story that underpins quite well what we’ve been talking about. So it’s a company that sells a water product of really, really high standard, and the founder is passionate about sustainability — but they were struggling a bit with getting traction in the marketplace and getting people to support it, whether that was investors, partners, or whatever. She was clearly more passionate about the sustainability part than a lot of the peers around her that she was trying to persuade.
But the thing is, she had really, really clear water — one of the few sources that could actually claim it was not contaminated with any man-made substances: no plastics, no chemicals, no PFAS, nothing. So I thought: what if we reframe this not as “a sustainable source” but as “better for your health”? How many people walk around caring about what they eat and drink? How many are worried about chemicals in their bodies or in their children? If this was the truly safe source of drinking water, what would that look like compared to pitching it as “the sustainable drinking water”? And she was like —
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:31
However — does that get them away from sustainability as a focus of the company? How do you avoid repositioning defocusing the mission?
Jasper Steinhausen 28:46
Well, the thing is that in order to deliver on that promise, she had to maintain exactly those sustainability standards. I was just reframing from selling the “green” solution to selling the value that comes out of doing that work.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:03
Back to what I was asking about. So is leading with sustainability the wrong way to think about this, generally?
Jasper Steinhausen 29:12
It depends on your target market. So if you’re targeting people like you and me, it’s probably a good idea to lead with sustainability, because when I’m looking for something, my starting point is: where can I find anyone who’s done something remotely interesting in terms of sustainability? But the majority of people don’t start there. So if it’s green versus better, I’ll almost always go with better. What’s the better outcome that comes out of it?
In the water story, the pitch is cleaner and safer drinking water — P.S., it also happens to be sustainable. And that’s why she would not bottle it in plastic, obviously, because micro-plastics would migrate in and destroy the quality of the product. So it has to be in glass bottles — but you’re still not devaluing your mission. You’re just reframing the value. And basically it goes like this: impact follows perceived value. The job is to figure out what your ideal client perceives as valuable right now, and then show how your sustainable practice supports that. How do my choices become a reason for you to feel more confident in the product — because it helps you with the problem you know you have? And I know that, at the same time, it’s also good for climate or for whatever else. But that’s the icing on the cake.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:05
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that basing your product positioning on your own preference can be very challenging, because your preference and values may not map to the market’s. In this case, people are thirsty. They want good, clean, healthy water. Some of them — maybe not even most of them — want it delivered sustainably. Is it really important to lead with sustainability in any way, shape, or form? Or is that a subterranean activity? The thinking should be: let’s do this sustainably — but we don’t necessarily need to pitch that upfront. Let your quality speak first: you’re going to drink good, clean water; it won’t harm your kids; and, by the way, we’re going to be able to continue doing this without having destroyed nature.
Jasper Steinhausen 31:57
Yeah, I would probably go with something like that — but it depends on the room. Say I’m pitching this at Patagonia’s annual leadership assembly. Well, it’s probably a good idea to start by saying this is an amazing, sustainable product. They’re exactly the right audience for that. So it’s audience first — it’s page two of any book on selling.
So if people are on their commute back to the workplace thinking “what do I do?” — it’s just business. Sales is sales. Marketing is marketing. Innovation is innovation. What you can see is that sustainability is just an extra layer in the toolbox — and it’s one you probably haven’t utilized, and one that most of your competitors have never even thought about. That’s why you can beat the competition: by starting to utilize a layer in the toolbox nobody else is looking at, to develop better solutions, better business, lower costs, and more innovation.
And once you’ve done that, there’s a completely separate discussion: how much do you want to flag this externally? That comes back to who your target market is. Some you want to flag it a lot. Others — maybe not. “I’m trying to sell this to the White House right now, okay, I probably shouldn’t lead with sustainability. Let’s save that for later.” But if I’m selling to Patagonia, I probably want to flag it quite a lot. That’s a different discussion. You use the toolbox to make the better solution, and then you make a choice about whether and how much to flag it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:02
Well, in a lot of ways, what you’re doing is going around the greenwashing problem by actually focusing on why you’re making the decision. Greenwashing is a credibility killer in this space. If you were to go to Patagonia and say “we’re sustainable,” and it turns out you’re generating vast amounts of PFAS you’re dumping into the local water supply — you’re done with that audience. How do you recommend companies communicate sustainability in an authentic way, without making exaggerated claims? Because often, at the beginning of the process, they’re talking about their long-term goal rather than how they’re actually performing today. How do you begin that reveal in a way that lets people see you’re making progress, but without overpromising?
Jasper Steinhausen 34:51
Yes. If I should put this in really plain English: do what you say, say what you do, and be able to back it up with data. End of story. You could add: please don’t lie. In Europe, there’s regulation against this — it’s tied into marketing law. So making false claims is just breaking the law, the same as trying to sell liquor to minors.
But the key thing is: always be specific. Stay away from the generics — “I’m sustainable,” “I’m green,” whatever. No. We have done this specific thing. The problem is that when sustainability is pursued mainly as a branding exercise, because companies still believe it’s costly for business and the only return is PR — they try to push the envelope as far as possible. And that’s where all the greenwashing problems come from.
Whereas, if you go about it the way we’ve been discussing, the approach is: What are the three to five biggest business problems we have? What are the three to five biggest problems our clients have? Go to work on those. If you solve one of a customer’s biggest priorities, you don’t go out and say “this is amazing for climate.” You go out and say “we just fixed your problem — and, by the way, it’s also better for the climate.” See Chapter 3 of Making Sustainability Profitable for a full walk-through of this approach.
So there are three things to try to get at least a dash of in your communications. First, the mission — the bigger picture, the roadmap, the plan, whatever you call it. Show that this isn’t a standalone thing; it’s one in a series, and here’s what you plan to do next year and the year after. Then spend the majority of your time on the actual results: we have removed X, optimized Y, extended product life by Z. And be able to back it with data. In Europe, you need trusted third parties to verify the data. I’m not sure about the regulations on your end —
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:02
— here, we don’t have regulations anymore. Makes it easier, doesn’t it? Ha. You made reference earlier to potentially selling to our White House — which I’d argue is a fool’s gambit, because you’ll get stabbed in the back. But sorry, folks — it’s true. Do you see, in this environment of political pushback against sustainability, that the green transition is actually taking deeper hold — not just in Europe, but in business everywhere — because of the underlying resource-cost crisis you’ve been talking about? If we don’t find ways to reuse and reduce the cost of virgin material extraction, prices will just keep going up. Are we on the path to a greener, more environmentally responsible economy, or is it more talk than action?
Jasper Steinhausen 39:06
Well, that’s a really good question. There’s a long-form answer and a short form. Which one do you want?
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:13
Let’s go short — we’ve been talking for a while, and the commute for our listener is probably getting close to an end.
Jasper Steinhausen 39:19
I think we are nowhere near realizing the potential, simply because way too few people have the right understanding of what this is all about. There’s a great misconception we’ve referred to a couple of times, and that’s really what’s holding us back. It’s what makes politicians pass the wrong type of laws and legislation; it’s what makes decision-makers pull back again. It’s somewhere between tragic and hilarious — because in the name of cutting costs and increasing competitiveness, we’re ignoring one of the most powerful levers available to do exactly that. This is probably one of the biggest opportunities to increase competitiveness in our time, rivaled only by AI. And yet, because we don’t understand it, we’re removing focus from it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:20
That’s a really important point — and it goes all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. You’re in your silo, focused on your particular challenge. If you just look up a little and see the synergistic opportunities in thinking across silos — first to reduce waste overall, and potentially even to begin regenerating nature by putting raw material back into it — that can be transformative.
One problem a lot of businesses have is that they think of the circular economy only as waste management or recycling. How do you talk about that with your clients? How do you make the case for a full life-cycle approach versus “I took care of my part of the job, I hope somebody else does theirs”?
Jasper Steinhausen 41:15
Well, basically — if they’re not ready to talk circularity, I don’t talk circularity. I might get there eventually, but I use different words. If the reason for taking materials back is to get cheaper or less risky raw materials — because right now they’re sourcing everything from the other end of the world, and we’ve all learned that international supply chains are far more fragile than we thought, what with wars and conflicts and all of that — then perhaps the smarter move is to start sourcing from more regional waste streams. OK, well, then maybe we’re talking about de-risking the supply chain, or cutting cost through access to cheaper raw materials. Whatever it is, I try to listen, tune in, and translate.
I’ve trained myself to speak the language of the CFO, CEO, CTO, head of manufacturing, and sales — whatever the role, I can probably find my way into it. The goal is to make sure they feel they’re on their own turf. In reality, I’m just getting them to use my tools — they’re just not necessarily aware of it. And if they are ready to talk circularity, great — we can go as deep as you like. But for most, that’s not the case.
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:09
Well, you’re hitting on the opportunity of the times, really — the era of code-switching, being able to move from one dialogue to another while maintaining continuity. That’s the authenticity piece, the non-greenwashing part we were discussing a moment ago. If this business case is so compelling, why isn’t every company doing it? What’s the real barrier — is it knowledge, lack of incentives, the need for a new culture, or the need to connect with a bigger culture than your organization? How would you encapsulate that for a business leader who asks?
Jasper Steinhausen 43:49
Well, my analysis is that the single biggest — or perhaps the first — hurdle to get over is changing the narrative. When every business leader wakes up every morning thinking “this is bad for business, this is costly, and it’s going to restrict me and force me to compromise” — and then sits down and thinks “OK, I’m trying to cut costs, trying to find new creative ways to expand into new territory” — they immediately think: “I’m probably not going to use this tool, because I know it’s more costly. It restrains me, and I’m trying to create maneuvering space.” When they think that’s what sustainability is, it never fits the purpose.
The reality is, it fits the purpose extremely well. But nobody knows why — which is also why I spend so much time pushing this narrative by posting six days a week on LinkedIn and being lucky enough to be invited onto programs like this. We need this change in narrative, because otherwise people never even get started. They never get to ask the questions. They never open their eyes to realize: “Huh, that’s strange — maybe we should have a look at this.”
Mitch Ratcliffe 45:19
And it’s because, in a lot of ways, we tell ourselves the same old stories — both because they’re comfortable and because you don’t have to explain them to anyone. As you think about the transition we need to make, what’s that one factor you would urge a business leader to consider as they think about the story of their business — is it the missed opportunity to do the world-improving work they want? Is it missed profitability? Or something else?
Jasper Steinhausen 45:51
Well, in the world of today — where competition is as fierce as it’s ever been for most — I would probably lead with the business side. Just: stop wasting money all the time. Stop that. So you could start by simply looking at what percentage of your overall cost is tied to resources, and how much of what you buy is turning into waste.
Waste is the most expensive and idiotic thing we can create. First, you pay good money to get raw materials. Then you pay people and equipment to work on them. You also pay for marketing, advertising, and sales. And by the time you’re nearly done, some of all of this is lost — and then you pay somebody to come and take it away. It’s lose, lose, lose, lose all the way through. And it’s also bad for the world.
So if we could just eliminate some of that, you’ll save money in procurement. You’ll save money in wasted time, salary, machinery, energy — all of it. And you’ll do a really, really good thing for the planet. And you can turn that into part of your story as well — your people will love you for it, and your clients potentially will too, depending on how you position it. It could turn a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose into a win, win, win, win. Or you could stay where you are and just be damned ineffective. It’s up to you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 47:41
I almost don’t know how to follow that last line — because that is the “I’m just going to stick to my guns” approach I hear from so many business leaders: “I don’t have time for that.” But when you open your thinking to new options, almost invariably, any business can recover. How can folks keep up with your thinking? Where can they see you? Posting on LinkedIn every day?
Jasper Steinhausen 48:03
Yeah, it’s fairly simple, because there’s only one person called Jasper Steinhausen. So if you find me on LinkedIn, I’d really love to have you following and engaging with my content. Hopefully there will be something that inspires you. And, as I said, I’ll be happy to gift you a copy of the book — check the show notes for a link to download a free copy. Start with Chapter Three, as we talked about.
Mitch Ratcliffe 48:29
Well, thank you, Jasper, for your time today. It’s really been a great conversation. I appreciate it.
Jasper Steinhausen 48:34
Likewise, likewise. And thank you for doing all of this. Thank you.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 48:43
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Jasper Steinhausen — sorry about mispronouncing his name earlier, by the way. He’s founder and CEO of Business With Impact and the author of Making Sustainability Profitable. You can learn more about his work at bwimpact.com — all one word, no space, no dash. And you can download a free digital copy of his book at freebook.scoreapp.com. When you do, check out Chapter Three first.
Jasper’s reframing of sustainability as a resource-efficiency problem hiding in plain sight is an effective tool for sustainability advocates in any organization. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product — instead, they bleed out as waste, excess heat, and byproducts. And by the way, you can also be wasting electricity excessively or burning too much coal. Don’t do that. That’s money leaving through a hole in the floor, not to mention an environmental impact too long ignored by business.
But as Jasper points out, this isn’t a failure of character on the part of business leaders. It’s a failure of training and culture. Ever since capitalism began, it has ignored the importance of resource costs. Sure, people talk about it — but when you actually look at it, we waste so much it’s insane. Today’s leaders have been schooled in managing time and money, but almost never in managing material flows, even though resource costs dwarf payrolls and account for more than 50% of the total cost in the average manufacturing company.
The second takeaway I urge you to think about is Jasper’s argument that the single biggest barrier to a green transition isn’t regulation, capital, or technology — it’s a narrative problem. In other words, we have to tell the story that becomes behaviors, repeated over and over to become culture. When every business leader wakes up believing sustainability is a cost, a constraint, and a compromise, their mental calculation about its value is over before it begins. Jasper’s bet is that once companies make the mental transformation — recognizing waste reduction, supply-chain resilience, and innovation capacity as the actual deliverables of a sustainable practice — the business case becomes self-evident. The companies that crack this beat the competition simply by using a layer of the strategic toolbox other companies never bother to open.
Finally, there’s the idea that runs counter to much sustainability advocacy: leading with sustainability as a primary value in your marketing is often the wrong move. Jasper’s principle that “impact follows perceived value” makes the job of the sustainable business clear — it isn’t to convince the market to care about the planet; it’s to identify the problem the customer is already trying to solve, and then bring a sustainable practice to bear on that problem in a way that makes the solution visibly better. That water company with the purest, chemical-free source doesn’t lead with environmental stewardship — it leads with safer drinking water for your kids. Sustainability is structural: it goes deeper than product messaging to why the product delivers what it promises. But it’s best positioned as a consequence of quality, not a call to conscience. Yes, it works with some consumers — like myself, who really pay attention — but for most people, we need to lead with quality. And that distinction matters, especially now, because greenwashing remains one of the fastest ways to destroy trust with an audience that cares most about the environment.
Jasper’s suggestion that you should do what you say, say what you do, and back it with data summarizes the challenge for any sustainability effort — whether it’s an internal initiative or the basis for a major product launch. Communicate specific results, not general claims, which we see far too often from companies pitching stories to Earth911. Anchor your results in a visible roadmap, so that your progress today can be seen as the first accomplishment on your road to a more sustainable world — not just the first in a long series of promises not yet kept.
So here’s the tension worth sitting with. Jasper’s model depends on business leaders choosing to look up from their siloed priorities long enough to see the resource flows bleeding money all around them. The global narrative that sustainability is a burden rather than a tool is nowhere near being corrected. It’s still driving policy decisions, investment decisions, and competitive strategy in the wrong direction. The irony is almost painful: in the name of cutting costs and increasing competitiveness, companies are ignoring one of the most powerful levers available to do exactly that — reducing resource costs by eliminating waste.
The window to act is open — wide open — and people are screaming for us to do better. The question is whether enough leaders will decide to stop leaving money and a livable planet on the cutting-room floor. We’ll keep talking with the leaders who do see the light and use it to illuminate the waste we can no longer afford — as a species, as a society, and as an economy.
I hope you’ll also take a look at our archive of more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’ll want to share. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, family, co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we’ll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
Meyer is a travel writer and blogger. In 2019, he became the first person to visit all of the National Park Service sites in a single journey — over 400 in total. The full list includes national monuments, battlefields, and rivers — and the 63 national parks that most of us think of when we plan our summer trips.
Now, with ultra-high gas prices, park staffing shortages, and funding cuts to the NPS, Meyer has some guidance for how to enjoy the outdoors responsibly this summer. He told Today, Explained that Americans should start with exploring their own backyard this summer — and think outside the box.
Meyer talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the hidden outdoor gems in each region of the US and what his number one spot in the country is. Hint: It’s not one of the heavy hitters.
Below are some of Meyer’s favorites, divided by region and edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
The Northwest
One of my favorites in the northwest is the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument [in Oregon]. There’s a unit called the Painted Hills Unit, which has these incredible red stripes that cut through the earth. And whether you live in Seattle or Portland, you can access it within a day’s drive and you’re not going to have any of the crowds that you’ll experience at Mount Rainier or at Olympic [National Park]. It’s just one of the most otherworldly places I’ve seen up there.
The Southwest
For the Southwest, I would not go to Saguaro National Park. If you go a few more hours away to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the cactuses are way cooler looking.
There are way more epic hikes. There are way more epic vistas and views. It’s on the border with Mexico. If it’s between just Saguaro or Organ Pipe, I would go to Organ Pipe.
The Southeast
If you are in the Southeast, I would skip the crowds of the Everglades and hop a short flight over to the Virgin Islands, where there is an island off the island of St. Croix, which is called Buck Island Reef National Monument.
It’s a natural turtle nesting ground that you can actually snorkel underwater down a trail that the Park Service has made. It’s incredible. It’s not going to be crowded because most people, when they go to the Virgin Islands, go to Virgin Islands National Park, which is the majority of the island of St. John. And so St. Croix is like the forgotten kid, [which] is amazing. You just have to take a little boat over there.
The Midwest
Through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, there is a 72-mile river corridor called the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, and it is a federally protected riverfront that is full of places to fish and hike and run and see amazing wildlife. And it’s one that I actually go to on a daily run every day.
The Northeast
Acadia is a really popular one, but really close to there and far from the crowds is the end of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which starts in Georgia and runs all the way up to the center of Maine. You don’t have to do the whole thing, but in just one day you could go hike the final few miles to the center of Maine and you can actually see people finishing their months-long trek.
It’s this super cool experience just as a day tripper to get to meet these folks, to talk to them. You get to the top of this mountain, and you get to witness people complete a historic National Park Service trail and feel just a little bit of that for yourself.
His all-time favorite
My favorite National Park Service site in the whole system is in Utah. And when I wrote a blog ranking all of Utah’s Park Service sites, I got a lot of flack because my number one was not Zion, it was not Bryce, it was not Arches. It was Dinosaur National Monument.
Because it’s a national monument and not a national park, most people haven’t heard of this site. If tomorrow Congress upgraded it to Dinosaur National Park, it would get millions of visitors. But that’s just because most people think America’s park system is only the 63 parks. They don’t realize that it’s over 400 sites.
Dinosaur National Monument only gets 7 percent as many visitors as nearby Rocky Mountain National Park or Zion National Park, but I think it’s the best that the entire National Park Service system has to offer, all in one less-visited site where you, for example, can touch a dinosaur bone if you would like.
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