Life Matters More

In this episode, Philippa talks to Ben Wynn, co-founder of Glad Climate, about why guilt and sacrifice will never be enough to drive climate action at scale, and how a prize-draw-funded nonprofit is trying to make atmospheric cleanup something ordinary people and ordinary businesses can actually participate in.

Ben spent more than two decades in the tech world building products, teams and marketing across early-stage startups and scale-ups in FinTech, transport and home services. A "midlife climate crisis" during lockdown left him asking a different kind of question: what is he actually working for? Glad Climate is his answer. It is a UK-based nonprofit on a mission to remove one billion tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and his argument runs the whole episode: climate change is not a communications problem, or an awareness problem. It is a human motivation and system design problem.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• The simple mechanics of Glad Climate: a membership-based prize draw where fees fund greenhouse gas removal, brand partners contribute prizes, and a Blue Peter totaliser-style season target unlocks a £10,000 cash prize when the community hits it
• The current season target of 250,000 kilograms, the roughly 65,000 kilograms already banked, and early-stage brand partners like Meaningful Planet and Naked Paper
• Why Ben believes most climate messaging today only speaks to activists and advocates and why the real work is reaching the "amenables", the big middle of the bell curve who care but aren't yet acting
• The three levers Ben says climate action must pull to move the middle: simple, convenient and motivation and the honest admission that convenience alone wasn't enough, which was Glad's own first big lesson
• Why humans flow like water, taking the path of least resistance and why the recycling bin only works because everyone else is already doing it
• Ben's "take, balance, give" framework for working lives, and his honest reflection that most of his career has sat in the "take" column
• The agency years when the stated purpose was to "flip in three years" and the moment Ben realised he was spending 12 to 15 hours a day making someone else rich
• The cathedral mindset: why Ben keeps coming back to the people who laid foundations knowing they would never see the spire, and why he thinks modern society has lost the long-term shared-purpose muscle it needs
• The honest trade-off: why Glad does not yet fund Ben's family, why he still works fractionally, and why he describes doing purposeful work as both a privilege and a choice
• How Glad Climate works for businesses: minutes to sign up, a benefit for employees, a credible line in a sustainability report and a very different scale of impact than persuading one person at a time
• Ben's advice to his younger self: earn as much as you can in a do-no-harm environment, and give as much as you can of your experience, energy and attention back

Key takeaway:

Ben's argument is that climate action will not scale on guilt, shame or sacrifice. It will scale when it becomes the easy, obvious, slightly rewarding thing to do the way putting the bin out became normal, not because every household cared about recycling, but because everyone else did it first. That requires three things: making participation simple, making it convenient, and giving people a positive reason to join. The job of today's climate community, in Ben's view, is to lay the foundations of a cathedral whose spire today's generation will not live to see and to make sure that laying each stone feels less like deprivation and more like showing up for something that actually matters.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa talks to Sarah Adams about why the sustainable investing conversation has been distorted by an all-or-nothing mindset, how genuine stewardship actually plays out inside the real estate market and the surprising ways companies and investors can work together to move sustainability initiatives forward.

Sarah Adams is co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer at Vert Asset Management, where she designs the firm's shareholder engagement programme and helps investors understand how environmental issues become financially material. Her career has spanned mainstream institutional investing at Dimensional Fund Advisors, environmental work with WWF and Forum for the Future, and academic study across UCL, SOAS and a recently completed MBA. 

Her argument, running through the episode, is that sustainable investing has been asked to carry more expectations than any other corner of finance to be perfect, to solve everything, to be universally applicable, and to do it all without any impact on returns. That, she argues, is exactly what stops the conversation moving forward. Better isn't perfect, but better is worth having.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• The organic food analogy that runs through the episode: why sustainable investing has not yet made the shift from niche to normal, and why the "must be perfect or don't bother" mindset is standing in the way
• Why Sarah wants to change the question from "does sustainable investing hurt returns?" to "which fund, at what fee, with what tilt, doing what work?" the same nuance you'd expect anyone to bring to a value or quality fund
• Vert's focus on listed real estate (REITs) as an under-served corner of ESG investing, and why biodiversity in dense urban settings is a very different problem to biodiversity in a desert logistics park
• The data explosion of the last decade CDP, TCFD, ISSB, SFDR and Sarah's concern about the "checklist inflection point" where widespread adoption stops driving genuine change and starts getting passed to the newest hire
• What real engagement looks like at Vert as a small investor "way, way, way down" the shareholder register, and how deep real estate expertise gives them a different kind of edge to the biggest houses
• The surprising discovery that some corporate engagement teams actually ask investors to bring specific topics up so they can push those issues up the chain internally
• The SBTI real estate story: how the science-based targets bar became so tight that companies began dropping out entirely, and the follow-on conversations Sarah is now having about what verification model comes next
• The B Corp catering moment ("no one has ever asked me for organic before") and the landlord who quietly applied heat film to every window in the building after Sarah's team asked about theirs
• The role of regulation as the stick, philanthropy as the youthful funder, and capital markets as the place where good ideas are forced to sharpen their pencil
• Sarah's book recommendation, The Collective Edge, and the observation that runs through her working life there is no single wonder kid leading anything worth leading
• Sarah's hyphenated word for the future she's working towards: "pragmatic innovation"

Key takeaway:

Sarah's argument is that sustainable investing does not fail because of poor products or poor performance. It fails when it is asked to do everything at once, held to a standard of perfection no other corner of investing has to meet, and reduced to a monolithic yes-or-no question. The path forward is more nuance, better questions, and the willingness to have the messy middle-ground conversation. Ask more questions of your caterer, your landlord, your fund manager. It is free, it is powerful, and most of the time the person on the other end actually wants to answer.

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Disclaimer:

Approaches to sustainable investing vary, and not all investments will meet every definition of “sustainable” or “ESG”. Sustainable investing does not guarantee positive social or environmental outcomes or investment performance. Investments can fall as well as rise and suitability depend on your circumstances.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa talks to Vernon Dennis about why he has come to see governance and culture as the real reasons businesses succeed or fail, why ESG is not a separate compliance exercise, and what directors actually need to do to discharge their duties in a world where "non-financial" misconduct is anything but.

Vernon Dennis is a partner at Howard Kennedy Solicitors, where he leads the firm's business advisory practice and specialises in restructuring, insolvency and corporate turnaround. Over 35 years advising boards, creditors and businesses in financial distress, he has had a front row seat to what happens when governance succeeds and when it fails. His book, Directors' Duties, ESG and Sustainable Strategies, argues that ESG belongs at the heart of good governance, risk management and long-term business success - not on the periphery.

Most businesses that fail blame the outside world: Brexit, war, energy prices, unforeseen events. Vernon's argument, after three and a half decades of watching them fall over, is that the outside world is rarely the real cause. Underneath almost every failure sits a failure of governance and culture - the way decisions get made, the way rules line up with the vision and values, and the way businesses behave when they think no one is looking.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why Vernon came to ESG through insolvency rather than sustainability law, and what 35 years of restructuring taught him about the commonality beneath every business failure.
• The distinction between a business plan and a sustainable strategy, and why a real strategy should look more like a Haynes manual than a five-year projection.
• Section 172 of the Companies Act, and why the director's duty to promote the success of the company is already an ESG duty, whether directors realise it or not.
• Why culture is "like the wind" - visible only in its effects - and why misalignment between values, remuneration and behaviour is what really brings businesses down.
• Why for individuals ESG is about ethics, but for companies it is fundamentally about risk management.
• The rise of greenwashing and transition litigation, and why misleading disclosures are increasingly ending up in court.
• How directors get themselves into trouble: not through irrational decisions, but through decisions they simply never got around to considering.
• Why over-reliance on compliance and box-ticking is one of the most dangerous patterns Vernon sees in boardrooms.
• Materiality: identifying the "emerging strategic disruptive factors" for your business, and why every list looks different.
• The value of external experts and diversity of thought as a defence against boards marking their own homework.
• The Enron and Madoff pattern of "someone else will spot it", and why a real speak-up culture only works where trust is real.
• Vernon's own penny-drop moment: a client case where the incident itself was not the fatal blow - it was how the business responded that caused the reputational and financial damage.

Key takeaway:

Vernon's argument is that there is no such thing as "non-financial" misconduct. Anything that touches culture, values, employees, suppliers, customers or the environment will eventually touch the balance sheet - through litigation, reputational damage or lost trust. The way to protect against this is not more compliance policies sitting in a folder. It is a sustainable strategy genuinely embedded in the board's decision-making, subject to regular audit and review, and honest about the emerging factors that could take the business down. Get advice early, bring in outside challenge, ask what a reasonable director would have done, and treat culture as the default your business falls back on when things get hard.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa talks to Steve Watters about what it really means for a financial planning business to be a force for good, why excluding the worst offenders from a portfolio isn't enough on its own, and how stewardship and engagement can change the conversation between investors and the companies they own.

Steve Watters is Head of Impact at Paradigm Norton. Trained as an engineer, he spent much of his early career in international development and charitable work in East Africa, Palestine and Israel, before joining Paradigm Norton in 2018 as the firm was preparing to become a B Corp and transition to employee ownership. He now leads on impact across the business, sits on the Investment Committee, and has been recognised as Sustainable Finance Leader of the Year at the Global Good Awards. Paradigm Norton has also recently been awarded the King's Award for Sustainable Development.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• What a Head of Impact actually does, and why the role spans operations, suppliers, governance, people, clients and investments rather than sitting neatly in one corner of the business.
• Why Steve joined Paradigm Norton at the moment it was becoming a B Corp and moving to employee ownership, and what those two structural changes have unlocked.
• The "underwear drawer" reality of going through a B Corp assessment, and how Paradigm Norton's recertification in 2023 saw its score jump from 85 to 148, recognised as the biggest improvement of any UK company that year.
• Why the carbon footprint of advice given to clients dwarfs the footprint of running an office, and what that realisation triggered.
• The design of Paradigm Norton's responsible portfolio (PNr), built to match traditional returns while using ESG screening alongside active stewardship and engagement.
• The shift from responsible investing as a niche, opt-in choice to becoming the firm's default portfolio, with more than 60 percent of clients now invested this way.
• The academic case for engagement over exclusion: why simply screening out bad companies has limited evidence of driving change, and why taking the majority of companies through a transition matters more.
• The football analogy of "playing at home": why a market full of patient, long-term, engaged investors raises the chances of companies making better long-term decisions.
• The honest acknowledgement that stewardship is the best lever available to investors, but it is not a panacea on its own - policy change and other actors are needed too.
• The framework Paradigm Norton uses to assess asset managers, including team expertise, fund methodology, AGM voting records and the case studies of real engagements with companies.
• The intentional portfolio (PNi), built with Tribe Impact Capital, for clients who want to go further and invest in companies whose revenues are aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• The upcoming Bristol screening of the National Emergency Briefing film featuring Chris Packham, why Paradigm Norton is hosting it, and the kind of conversations it hopes to open up with the wider business community.

Key takeaway:

Steve's argument is that the financial system is one of the most powerful enablers (or disablers) of the change we need to see, and that financial planning firms may have far more agency than they often admit. Real impact doesn't come from a single label or a marketing line. It comes from rewiring the business itself, asking harder questions of the funds you use, taking clients on the journey with you, and accepting that this is a starting point rather than a destination. Honesty is the throughline: refusing to overclaim, sitting with the discomfort of the hard questions, and being willing to keep asking what else can be done.

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Disclaimer:

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

PNr portfolios adopt a diversified, cost-efficient approach aimed at maximising risk-adjusted returns. As a secondary consideration, the portfolios prioritise selecting fund managers who effectively engage with underlying companies on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters. Most underlying funds also incorporate ESG factors and exclusions into the fund construction. PNr portfolios are not designed to achieve specific sustainability outcomes and should not be viewed as “sustainable” investments.

PNi portfolios take a more targeted sustainability approach, seeking closer alignment with defined environmental and/or social outcomes, and which are predominantly defined by UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Definitions of ethical investing vary, and incorporating ESG or sustainability factors does not guarantee positive outcomes or investment performance. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you originally invested. The suitability of any investment will depend on your individual circumstances.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Our FCA Register number is 455083.

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa talks to Peter Smith about how a football club becomes a force for environmental change, why operations and sustainability are inseparable, and why honesty matters more than perfection on the road to net zero.

Peter Smith is Head of Change and Sustainability at Bristol Sport, the organisation behind Bristol City Football Club, the Bristol Bears Rugby Club and Ashton Gate Stadium. He has spent 17 years with the club, moving from match-day work into stadium development and ultimately  leading its sustainability initiative, Project Whitebeam. Under his leadership, Ashton Gate has signed the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework and won multiple awards for environmental innovation.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• How a single "sustainable" coffee cup that nobody knew how to dispose of revealed that the club's good intentions weren't joined up, and how that moment gave birth to Project Whitebeam.
• Why Peter believes there may be no such thing as a single "sustainability expert", and how he broke the topic into five key impact areas: climate change, waste, water, biodiversity and air quality.
• What sustainability looked like during the £45 million redevelopment of Ashton Gate, from a large rooftop solar array and a building management system to sensor lighting and low-flow taps.
• Why the club set bold targets, 50 percent emissions reduction by 2030 and net zero by 2040, before it even knew what its carbon footprint was, and why setting the destination came before knowing the route.
• The "road to hell is paved with good intentions" trap of performative sustainability, and why Peter insists on genuine-impact actions over low-value gestures.
• How fan travel became the club's biggest single impact area, with shuttle buses, free cycle repair workshops, additional train services and cycle usage reportedly quadrupling in recent years.
• The co-benefits of action: unsold pies and pasties going to a homeless shelter, warm clothing collected for people sleeping rough, and a food charity diverting meals from landfill over a five-year period.
• Why Peter manages this as a change-management challenge, devolving responsibility through task forces at each club and asking every department to wear its "green goggles".
• What the EFL Green Club accreditation involves, why Bristol Sport was the first non-Forest Green Rovers club to achieve it, and how the tiered bronze-silver-gold system now helps every club climb the ladder.
• Why Peter argues sports organisations have both a responsibility and an opportunity to lead on climate, given the unique passion and community they bring together.
• His advice to smaller clubs with fewer resources: just get started, find your own thing, and remember that perfection is the enemy of the good.

Key takeaway:

Peter's argument is that sustainability and operations cannot be separated: operations cause the impact, so they must also deliver the solution. Bristol Sport's progress came not from waiting for a perfect plan but from a bias towards action, supported by leadership willing to be bold and a culture of devolved ownership. Honesty is the throughline, refusing to claim the club is "saving the planet" while acknowledging its impact is still too high. The practical message for any organisation is simple: get one building block in place, find the wins that also save money, and never let sustainability take away from what people love.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa talks to Anne Johnstone about why heat has been overlooked for decades, what it actually takes to move buildings off gas, and why energy security is as much about storage and infrastructure as it is about generation.

Anne Johnstone is ESG Director at Vital Energi, a company delivering low-carbon heat at scale through heat networks, large heat pumps and long-term energy infrastructure. She has spent more than two decades working across sustainability, the built environment and energy. Anne grew up in a former coal mining community in North Lanarkshire, and that experience shapes her conviction that the move to net zero must also be a just transition: one that creates opportunity rather than resentment.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why heat accounts for almost half of the UK's carbon emissions, and why a 50-year-old habit of burning gas through 85 percent of buildings has made it almost invisible until energy bills tripled.
• What decarbonising heat actually looks like on the ground: individual heat pumps, district heat networks pulling warmth from rivers, sewers, data centres and waste heat, and why hydrogen has no realistic role in domestic heating.
• Why heat networks have stalled in the UK despite being mature, proven technology, from regulatory blockers and the missing utility status only granted this year, to the four-to-one price gap between electricity and gas that the wholesale market still ties together.
• The Queens Quay project in Scotland, where two river source heat pumps draw enough warmth from the Clyde even at three degrees in winter to heat an entire connected community.
• Why "the pipes don't care where the heat comes from": once district heat infrastructure is in the ground, the heat source can be swapped and upgraded over a 60-year lifespan, which is why the priority is getting pipes in now.
• Why energy security is not the same as drilling more North Sea oil and gas: the basin is in decline, gas is sold on a global market regardless of where it is extracted, our offshore storage at Rough has been run down, and the UK is already a net importer.
• The 1.5 billion pounds paid last year in curtailment payments to wind farms told to switch off because the grid cannot move their electricity, and how thermal stores can absorb that wasted renewable energy as heat for days or weeks.
• Why a just transition matters: growing up watching the miners' strikes hollow out her village taught Anne that promises of "new jobs will replace these" are not enough, and that skilled pathways and apprenticeships are the only honest answer.
• What Vital Energi is doing about the skills gap, with 30 apprentices in its largest intake yet and 15 percent of the workforce on a learn-and-earn pathway, plus the Powering Futures schools programme now in 125 Scottish schools.
• The one thing Anne wants every business leader setting net zero targets to understand: you cannot reach them without thinking about heat, and the closer you get to your target year, the more expensive it becomes to leave it in the too-difficult box.

Key takeaway

Anne's argument is that the UK has spent years debating generation while ignoring the half of emissions that come from heating buildings. The technology to decarbonise heat already exists, is proven across Denmark and the Netherlands, and is delivering 70 to 80 percent emissions reductions in working UK projects. The blockers are regulatory, financial and behavioural, not technical. The risk now is not that we fail to decarbonise heat, but that we rush it, scale it badly, and create a new wave of fuel poverty in the process. The practical action for every listener is small but real: find out whether you are in a heat network zone, and start asking the questions that make local projects viable.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa Hann talks to Eileen about what it takes to build a luxury fashion business where dignity, sustainability and profitability reinforce one another, why the concept of a brand is too limiting for what she is creating, and what other industries can learn from rebuilding a supply chain around the people inside it.

Eileen Akbaraly is the founder and CEO of Made for a Woman, a luxury fashion social enterprise based in Madagascar working with handwoven raffia. Half Italian, half Indian and raised in Madagascar, she trained in fashion only to find an industry obsessed with making more money rather than making better lives. After graduating she went to work in the slums of Phnom Penh, then returned home to build something different.

Six years on, Made for a Woman works with over 1,000 artisans, predominantly single mothers, gender-based violence survivors, disabled individuals and women from disadvantaged backgrounds. The company collaborates with major luxury houses, runs childcare facilities and is building a primary school, mental health centre and shelter on site. Eileen was awarded Gold for Individual Changemaker of the Year at the Global Good Awards.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why CSR cannot be bolted on later: how Eileen built her supplier relationships, certifications and company culture around impact from the foundation, so doing the right thing is structural rather than heroic
• The SHAPE model and how Made for a Woman measures social stability, health, autonomy, professional development and economic empowerment as core KPIs alongside production
• Why happier artisans produce better work, why the company is hiring a "happy manager", and how investing in wellbeing pays back in product quality and delivery
• The tension between handmade luxury and a fast-paced industry, and why even certified, B Corp, Fair Trade companies are still operating inside a system Eileen believes is fundamentally unsustainable
• Why she rejects the idea of being just a brand and is building a "living system" instead, with traceable supply chains, blockchain digital product passports, and a replication model now launching in Brazil
• How values get tested in practice: turning down well-connected collaborators and lower pricing that would have unlocked faster growth, because they did not fit the long-term vision
• Why the antidote to consumerism is community, why consumers need a real relationship with the people behind the products they buy, and what changes when that separation disappears

Key takeaway

Made for a Woman is a working argument that luxury and human flourishing are not opposites. The fashion industry has spent decades treating the people in the supply chain as invisible, then spending millions on marketing to sell the resulting products as dreams. Eileen's case, built from inside one of the world's biggest manufacturing hubs rather than from a boardroom in Europe, is that the dream is fake and the real value lives upstream, in the artisans, raw materials and communities that make the work possible. The shift is not just a better factory. It is a different definition of what luxury means and who it is for.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this episode, Philippa Hann talks to Kate and Emma about what it takes to spot something that feels wrong inside your own industry and actually do something about it, why a clearance solution turned out to be a community story, and what other sectors can learn from how PropUp Project has reframed waste as a resource.

Kate Allan and Emma Chaplin are TV producers turned co-founders of PropUp Project, a non-profit social enterprise that rehomes, resells and recycles leftover sets, props and costumes from the TV and film industry. After years of watching the same waste cycle on every job, they used the pause of COVID to test an idea, and PropUp Project has been running ever since.

In just over four years, PropUp has redistributed more than 31,000 items to over 200 schools, charities, community groups and reuse projects nationwide, works with major broadcasters including ITV, and was recently recognised with Gold for Start-up Enterprise of the Year at the Global Good Awards.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why the freelance structure of TV and film, where one person is left to handle clearance with little time or budget, has made waste the default for decades, and how the streaming explosion has made the volume dramatically worse
• What it takes to make the right thing also the easy thing for producers: a one-stop service that handles the recce, inventory, redistribution, logistics and impact report so teams do not have to think about it
• Why local-first redistribution works: the proof-of-concept storage unit in Somers Town that was full of items needed by community groups within a one-mile radius, and why this shaped the whole model
• The stories that come out of clearance jobs, from prison-set mattresses going to early years nursery soft play, to branded hi-vis jackets becoming upcycled laptop bags, to a giant Last Supper painting taking pride of place in a local church at Easter
• Why behavioural change in any industry needs three things together: people who care setting an example, top-down policies that make the wrong thing more expensive, and awards that celebrate the good stories
• How running PropUp has changed the way Kate and Emma shop, parent and see the people around them, and why the team's deepest message is that this work is not about stuff, it is about community
• The two-step advice they give anyone who keeps having the same conversation about something wrong in their industry: trust that if you have seen it, others have too, and find one person to start with before doubt sets in
• Why the impact reports matter as much as the clearance itself, and what it means when items become a lifeline rather than a donation for families in furniture poverty

Key takeaway

PropUp Project shows how the right business model can turn a structural waste problem into a community one. The challenge was that the freelance pace, shrinking budgets and habit of putting a line in the budget for a skip made the right thing harder than the easy thing. Kate and Emma's argument, shaped by years inside the industry rather than outside it, is that change happens when you take the friction away, redistribute locally, and show people where their stuff ended up. The schools, theatres, refugee charities and community groups receiving these items are not waiting for the industry to be perfect. 

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

In this special episode, our Head of Impact, Steve Watters, talks to Adam and Louise to explore what it actually takes to shift behaviour inside complex, time-poor institutions, what businesses can learn from schools, and why better design is usually more powerful than louder messaging.

Adam Flint is Education Manager at Keep Britain Tidy, overseeing the delivery of EcoSchools in England. He spent 14 years at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester designing learning experiences and then led MADE, Manchester's cultural education partnership. 

Louise Robson-Turner is a Project Manager in Keep Britain Tidy's EcoSchools team, joining the Count Your Carbon project shortly after launch. 

Together, they were central to developing Count Your Carbon, the first free full-scope carbon calculator built specifically for schools, aligned to the global greenhouse gas protocol and designed to support action, not just reporting. The tool recently won gold for Game-Changing Innovation of the Year at the Global Good Awards.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• What 14 years of designing learning at the Science Museum Group taught Adam about how behaviour actually changes, and why incremental, relatable encounters with ideas matter more than big announcements
• Why the Department for Education's 2022 requirement for schools to have climate action plans and sustainability leads created a gap that no existing tool was filling, and how Count Your Carbon was built to fill it
• Finding a proportionate effective approach - why Count Your Carbon asks for enough data to produce a confident footprint estimate but not so much that it becomes an unreasonable burden, and what 18 months of development with dozens of school collaborators revealed about that balance
• What the national benchmarking data across the English schools estate actually showed: student and staff commuting combined as one of the biggest emission areas, food as a major factor in primary schools, and energy as the third most significant category
• Why many schools focus heavily on waste and recycling but those actions have a relatively small impact on their carbon footprint compared to food choices and travel, and what full-scope measurement makes visible
• How the tool was designed to feel like an empowerment tool rather than a compliance exercise, and why the framing centres on tracking progress rather than measuring how well or badly a school is doing
• Why over 5,000 schools have registered since launch, what is driving that uptake, and what the data from two full academic years will start to reveal about long-term impact

Key takeaway

Count Your Carbon is an example of how to solve using a suitable approach and tool to estimate carbon emissions.  The challenge was never whether schools cared. It was that the tools available were either too simple, too expensive, or built for businesses. 

Adam and Louise's argument, shaped by backgrounds in arts and cultural education rather than sustainability consultancy, is that behaviour change starts with removing friction and building confidence, not simply raising awareness. The schools using the tool are not waiting for permission or perfection. They are starting where they can, measuring what they can see, and building from there. That is the only sequence that works.

This podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.

Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 455083. 

Registered in England. Reg No 4220937, VAT Reg. No 918550904.

Louisa Ziane is the co-founder and COO of Toast Brewing, the UK's first B Corp brewery, known for making beer from surplus bread that would otherwise go to waste. She trained as a management accountant, started her career at the Financial Conduct Authority, and then spent several years at the Carbon Trust working on carbon measurement and climate change mitigation with corporates and governments including the Mexican government. That background shapes everything about how Toast approaches sustainability: with rigour, honesty about trade-offs, and a clear-eyed view of where the impact actually sits.

In this special episode hosted by our Head of Impact, Steve Watters, he and Louisa explore what it really looks like to build a commercially credible business around a genuine environmental problem, and what responsible leadership means when the easy answers keep turning out to be wrong.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• How a skip full of crusts outside a sandwich factory and a meeting with a Brussels brewer gave birth to Toast, and why bread made sense as both a symbol of food waste and a genuinely valuable brewing ingredient
• What Louisa learned at the Carbon Trust that most CSR teams were still struggling to act on in 2008, and why the business case for emissions reduction was harder to make than it should have been
• Where the carbon footprint of beer actually sits, and why the answer is not the boiler, it is the barley and the packaging, with Toast's own measurements showing glass bottles running almost double the footprint of a can of the same beer
• The ownership structure Toast designed from day one, including 100% of distributable profits going to charity, the Equity for Good model they built to bring in investors without compromising that, and what Heineken's strategic involvement actually means for scaling the model
• Why Toast tried carbon offsetting, what made them stop, and how to think about the difference between genuine nature investment and buying a stamp for the pack
• The trade-off between bicycle couriers and operational reality, and why a combination of complexity, logistics failures, and the pressure COVID placed on a reduced team finally ended it
• What net zero actually requires versus what carbon neutral allows, and why the legislation on environmental claims has driven a wave of green hushing that Louisa thinks is misreading the public mood
• The Companion ingredients business still in R&D, the Jason Sourdough collaboration currently in Waitrose, and what it would mean if the work with Heineken reaches the scale it is aiming for
• Why over 80% of people care about climate and nature issues but most of them think they are in the minority, and what that means for businesses deciding how loudly to speak

Key takeaway

Toast was set up out of a charity, not as an act of generosity. That distinction matters. The ownership structure, the profit commitment, the offsetting decision, the switch from bottles to cans: every one of those choices was shaped by founding principles established before the business scaled. Louisa's argument is that sustainability done well is about designing the system, not retrofitting the story. If you want to change the world, she says, you have to throw a better party than those destroying it. Toast has been trying to do exactly that since the beginning.

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