Episodes

  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Shareholder Democracy and Causeway Impact Founders on Building Shareholder Influence

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Shareholder Democracy and Causeway Impact Founders on Building Shareholder Influence
    Jun 29 2026
    If you hold a 401(k), an IRA, or a single index fund, you own a sliver of hundreds of American companies, yet you almost certainly let someone else decide how those shares vote. Individual investors hold about 25% of all U.S. public equities, more than BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street combined, yet only about one in eight of them votes the shares they own; the rest of those ballots get cast by a handful of asset managers and the proxy advisory firms they rely on, deciding who sits on corporate boards, how executives are paid, and what a company owes its workers, its customers, and the climate. This week’s two guests want to put that voice back in owners’ hands. Gabriel Grant, co-founder of the nonprofit Shareholder Democracy, is building the machinery to let everyday investors delegate their proxy votes to a civil-society organization they already trust, such as a labor union, a faith community, an environmental group, choosing a representative once and changing it whenever they want. Doug Heske, CEO of Newday Impact Investing and its Causeway platform, comes at the same problem from the engagement side, channeling revenue from values-aligned portfolios into work with more than 50 mission-aligned nonprofit partners and connecting investors and donors to the causes — and companies — they care about. Grant is building the rights layer that gets a vote counted; Doug is building the engagement layer that turns it into a continuing conversation with management. Their conversation brings the challenge into focus.On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, learn how the proxy vote problem undercuts foundations whose endowments quietly vote against the shareholder proposals their own grantees are writing — one side of the house funds the change while the other votes it down, because the signal most managers are rewarded for is next year’s return. Coordinating millions of small owners across thousands of ballots was mechanically impossible for most of the last century, but the internet collapsed the cost of communication and AI is collapsing the cost of reading thousands of ballot items at once, which is what makes the idea newly buildable. Grant is quick to add that the vote is leverage, not the destination, because most of the value in corporate governance is created in dialogue with management. He is candid about the limits: one share, one vote will never be pure democracy. The thread the conversation dives into governance ideas pioneered by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, who built a global network by getting rival banks to share sensitive data around one shared purpose. Hock's “chaordic” thinking blends chaos, and offers a model that Grant and Doug believe is finally buildable for shareholders.To learn more about Shareholder Democracy and delegate your proxy votes — or, if you have a brokerage account, to try the pilot that auto-forwards your ballots to the new voting platform — visit shareholderdemocracy.org. To explore Newday Impact Investing and the Causeway platform for values-aligned investing and giving, visit causewayimpact.com.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Kendra MacDonald Steers to the Blue Economy at Canada's Ocean Supercluster

    Kendra MacDonald Steers to the Blue Economy at Canada's Ocean Supercluster
    Jun 22 2026
    The ocean produces about half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs roughly 30% of the carbon dioxide we emit, and takes up about 90% of the excess heat those emissions trap, according to the United Nations. It is the planet’s largest life-support system — and also its least-funded one. Of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the goal for life below water consistently draws the least money. Canada, which has the longest coastline in the world, is trying to flip that equation, and you can watch it happen close to real time.

    Our guest this week is Kendra MacDonald, CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, a national, industry-led effort to grow what’s come to be called the blue economy. Under her leadership, the Supercluster has grown into a community of roughly 1,000 members co-investing in more than 150 projects. She came to the role after 25 years at Deloitte, where she served as Chief Audit Executive, and she runs it from St. John’s, Newfoundland. The model is built on co-investment: at least two companies put money in, often alongside Indigenous communities, researchers, and global corporations, so no single player carries the risk alone. The projects range from graphene hull coatings that cut a ship’s fuel use to wave-powered desalination and the $4.4 million Membertou Electric Lobster Boat, billed as Canada’s first zero-emission commercial fishing vessel, led by the Membertou First Nation.

    Kendra’s thesis fits in seven words: you can go faster alone, but farther together. In our conversation, she’s candid about where that gets hard — most of these collaborations are small companies that don’t individually hold every capability, and the upfront work of sorting out who owns which piece of intellectual property is what separates the partnerships that succeed from the ones that stall. She’s just as candid about the catch: the Supercluster is funded by the Government of Canada to de-risk small Canadian firms, and when those firms succeed, they’re often acquired by international buyers — the value-capture problem at the heart of every public innovation program. That tension between strong science and thin capital, she says, keeps her up at night, and it points back to the blue-finance gap. It also shapes how she talks about aquaculture, which in 2022 surpassed wild capture as the world’s main source of farmed aquatic animals, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and is now the fastest-growing source of animal protein. Kendra rejects the idea that ocean health and productivity are in trade-off, arguing that a healthier ocean is more productive. And just before we recorded, the Trump administration reopened nearly half a million square miles of the Pacific to commercial fishing, the third such rollback in little more than a year. One model treats the ocean as a commons to protect and co-invest in; the other treats marine protection as an obstacle to clear. Kendra thinks the contrast opens a door for Canada to lead.

    To learn more about the Ocean Supercluster, visit oceansupercluster.ca. MacDonald writes about ocean-economy investment on her Substack, Saltwater Signals, and she’s easy to find on LinkedIn.
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    44 mins
  • Ethan and Desmond Hua Build HOPE for School Uniform Reuse

    Ethan and Desmond Hua Build HOPE for School Uniform Reuse
    Jun 8 2026
    Most school uniforms are retired while they are still perfectly wearable. Children cycle through them on a predictable annual schedule as they grow, which sends a steady stream of usable clothing toward the landfill at the same moment families on tight budgets are paying to replace what their kids have grown out of. The waste side of that equation is substantial: the EPA estimates Americans generated about 17 million tons of textiles in 2018, and roughly 11.3 million tons of it was landfilled. Ethan and Desmond Hua, brothers from San Mateo, California, looked at textile waste and the cost of raising a family and saw a single solvable loop. In 2020, while they were still in middle school, they founded the HOPE Uniforms Program — HOPE stands for Help Our Planet Earth — a student-led nonprofit that collects gently used school uniforms families have outgrown and redistributes them, free, to families who need them. What began in one elementary school, run out of the family garage, now serves about 10 schools across three districts. By the brothers' count, HOPE has kept more than 14,000 uniforms out of landfills, redistributed over 12,000 of them, and served more than 1,400 households, saving those families an estimated $141,000. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Ethan and Desmond discuss why reuse sits a rung above recycling, how two teenagers built a multilingual logistics operation with a live inventory system, and what it took to talk Costco into donating 2,000 new uniforms. Ethan's work has earned him a 2025 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes and a Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award.The environmental case rests on a point that's easy to miss: the highest-value thing you can do with a garment is keep it whole and in use. What makes HOPE worth attention is the operations as much as the intent. The brothers engineered the return step directly into the model: families request uniforms through a website available in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese; the uniforms are returned when kids outgrow them; and Ethan and Desmond spot-check and reissue them. That return loop, paired with a deliberate decision to treat families as repeat customers who deserve a dependable service, is what converts a one-time donation into a repeating cycle. The approach is also honest about scale — a garage operation in San Mateo County will not move the national textile-waste numbers on its own. The brothers' wager is replication; Ethan's dream is HOPE in another garage, and then another, and the model is plain enough for a motivated student in another district to copy. Whether thousands of small local loops can add up to a circular economy is the open question this conversation puts on the table.To find out more about HOPE — and to donate uniforms, request them, or start a program in your own community — visit hopeuniformsprogram.com and follow the program on Instagram, @hopeuniformsprogram. If you know a teen making a difference for the planet, the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes recognizes young changemakers each year. And to find reuse, donation, and recycling options for textiles near you, search the Earth911 recycling directory.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    44 mins
  • The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science

    The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science
    Jun 1 2026
    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 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.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    52 mins
  • SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work

    SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work
    May 25 2026
    Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, according to The Recycling Partnership. Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three decades — too contaminated for most processors, too light for most economics. But more than 30 years ago, Trex Company, then a small operation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to build its supply chain around exactly this material. By the end of 2024, Trex had upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film into composite decking and had become one of the largest plastic film recyclers in North America. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Amy Fernandez, Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer, and Zachary Lauer, Chief Operations Officer at Trex, discuss how the company designs an entire manufacturing process around feedstock variability, why Trex indexed its 2024 sustainability report to IFRS standards before any US regulator required it, and what has to happen for old Trex decks to become new Trex decks.

    Most manufacturers spend their engineering effort narrowing input tolerances. Trex went the other direction. Zach described thousands of recipes the production lines can run through, swapping between cleaner stretch film one day and heavily contaminated industrial trimmings the next. Artificial intelligence reads each feedstock stream in real time and adjusts extrusion temperatures and line speeds to keep the finished board within specification. In 2024, the company sourced over 1 billion pounds of reclaimed PE film and wood scrap, including 377 million pounds of waste plastic, through a national collection network of more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and hundreds of school and community partners enrolled in its NexTrex program. The company is also preparing for the first generation of Trex decks, which are reaching replacement age, and its manufacturing lines can reabsorb the company's own boards. The recycling bottleneck is contractors pulling up old decks who don't want to sort screws from boards. Underneath all of it is a point worth lingering on: Trex's poly feedstock isn't priced off a barrel of crude, which means in a period of reshoring, tariff volatility, and oil-market disruption, recycled supply chains are structurally more stable than virgin ones, not less.

    To find out more about Trex and its sustainability work, visit trex.com. The 2024 Sustainability Report is available on the company's investor relations site.
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    50 mins
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating's Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable

    Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating's Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable
    May 18 2026
    A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai, thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rating, drawn from roughly 100 public data points, that measures whether what a company says about its environmental and social performance is consistent with what its audited filings and regulatory disclosures actually show. The premise borrows directly from consumer credit scoring: a FICO score doesn't tell a lender whether you're a good person, only whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Martin explains how EarthRating's "accelerated impact engine" gathers verified data instead of relying on questionnaires, and why the small and mid-sized businesses now caught up in the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK's Procurement Act 2023 need an affordable way to prove their credentials.

    Most sustainability frameworks rely on self-reported questionnaires; EarthRating pulls data from audited annual reports, regulatory filings, press coverage, and marketing materials, then cross-checks them against each other to surface contradictions before they become a regulatory or reputational problem. A near-term emissions target that appears in a press release but not in the audited annual report is exactly the kind of credibility gap the platform is designed to flag. Importantly, EarthRating isn't measuring environmental impact — it's measuring whether a company's story is internally consistent and externally verifiable. That sidesteps the impossible problem of reducing carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable question: are the claims true? That speed and accessibility comes with real caveats, and Martin and I dig into them. A credibility score isn't an impact score: a small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to electric mowers could rate higher than a multinational with aspirational but unverified net-zero pledges. That's the right calibration for measuring trust, but it isn't the same as measuring environmental performance. EarthRating also exists at "Google 1.0," in Martin's own words — a launch-stage platform with a proprietary methodology that hasn't yet been externally audited. Global standards aren't willed into existence; they're earned through adoption. The underlying problem EarthRating is trying to solve — making credible sustainability measurement accessible to the businesses that have been priced out of it — is a real one, and worth watching.

    To find out more about EarthRating, visit EarthRating.ai.
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    41 mins
  • Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging

    Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging
    May 11 2026
    Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won't try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.[

    Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical's Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada's Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald's extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can't find another bag in the store that's labeled the same way.

    The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California's SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.
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    46 mins