Who's Saving the Planet?

Tim Hade is the COO and Co-Founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions. He founded Scale Microgrid Solutions to build distributed energy systems for businesses and electric vehicle transit fleets throughout the country. Before joining the cleantech industry, Tim served on Active Duty as an officer in the United States Air Force. His time in the military taught him how to achieve an objective, but when he became a civilian he found it virtually impossible to get the government to do anything about climate change.

Tim believes that the public sector is broken when it comes to climate change. He stresses we need to hold our leaders accountable for the dire future we are leaving to our children while also getting to work and taking matters into our own hands to create change.

The fashion industry is incredibly wasteful. Of the 100 billion garments manufactured in the world every year over 50 billion end up in landfill within 12 months.

Inspired by Iceland, where beauty and sustainability go hand in hand, Katla.com is an eco-friendly fashion brand built on the core values of respect for people, animals and the environment. KATLA is pioneering a regenerative fashion business model and recognizes that the needs of the world today demand that we strive further and put in more than we take out. It is not enough to simply limit our impact on the environment; rather, we need to also put our efforts into regeneration. Katla has a range of items made of seaweed blends that have been sustainably harvested in Iceland in the area surrounding Sleepy Islands.

Listeners of Who's Saving the Planet can get an exclusive $100 Credit by entering the code planet100 at checkout.

Seaweed regeneration is a key tool to solving the climate crisis as seaweed is an effective tool for carbon sequestration. More than land forest, seaweed is in fact up to 20x more effective at carbon sequestration. KATLA has set up an experimental hatchery in the Sleepy Islands for the development of best practices for seaweed cultivation in Iceland.

Katla works with leading fabric suppliers to develop vegan fabrics with minimal environmental impact. Katla uses small production runs and on-demand manufacturing to minimize wasted inventory. 

Katla is pioneering advances in Web 3 including the delivery of NFTs directly through clothing. Katla recently launched a series of NFTs, the Wonderful Beings, in collaboration with Icelandic artist Hendrikka Waage. A portion of the sales will go towards ocean regeneration.

Aslaug Magnusdottir, Founder & CEO Katla

Aslaug Magnusdottir is the Founder and CEO of Katla, a DTC, sustainable fashion brand that applies zero waste manufacturing practices. Aslaug is the Co-Founder and former CEO of luxury e-commerce site Moda Operandi. Previously, she launched TSM Capital, a retail and fashion investment company she co-founded with industry legend Marvin Traub. She served as a senior executive at Gilt Groupe, overseeing merchandising. Previously, Magnusdottir served as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Co and as a corporate attorney at Deloitte. A Fulbright Scholar, Magnusdottir holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an LL.M from Duke University School of Law and an undergraduate degree in Law from the University of Iceland. She is a Forbes contributor on sustainable fashion.

Website: www.katla.com

Instagram: @katlaforce

Aslaug Magnusdottir

Listener $100 credit is code planet100 for use at check out at www.katla.com

It all started with a pizza box.

Jack Bruner, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Neutral Club, is a reformed consultant, some of our favorite people here at WSTP. After cutting his teeth building vast and complex solutions for the corporate 100's of the world, he wanted to create a company that imbued his values, not just got the job done. Thus was born Carbon Neutral Club, the one-stop solution for building a workplace culture which revolves around education about and action toward a more sustainable future.

When you’re faced with a giant systemic machine that looks like it’s really never going to change, adopting some sort of nihilistic view isn’t uncommon.

Brooke Bowlin’s giant machine is the Fast Fashion industry, which (for the record) creates more carbon emissions than the global shipping and aviation industries combined.

What makes Brooke’s situation unique is that despite facing down this giant for the last four years, she hasn’t succumbed to some doomsday-style climate nihilism.And that’s what makes her so uncommon.

Brooke Bowlin is a ray of sunshine when she enters a room. Or at least when she logs onto a zoom call. 

-She’s an artist, entrepreneur, content creator and sustainable fast fashion advocate. 

-In the past, she was the owner of Thrift 251, a thrift store aimed at reducing clothing waste. 

-Today, she is the voice of “Secondhand Sustainability,” a popular cross-platform media project for conscious fashion. It currently has over 18K+ followers on instagram, and she’s even planning a podcast for it.

Over the past three years, Brooke has cultivated a strong following of young adults eager to change the usually wasteful model that is the modern fashion industry. 

Brooke's Book Recs: -

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine Wilkinson

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler  (mentioned)

Consumed by Aja Barber

Follow her on Instagram: @Secondhand.Sustainability

Her Website Nuance Required

And Newsletter: Nuance Required Newsletter

Riddle me this: What if all of our clothes were made from seaweed? 

This week we sit down with two phenomenal women who are changing the fashion industry from the inside out. Keel Labs was founded by fashion industry alumni Tessa Callaghan and Aleksandra Gosiewski. They’re two business partners who met at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and founded Keel Labs to create ocean based solutions, including their flagship product which is a kelp based yarn. 

Here's a breakdown of some of the highlights:

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:03:34) - United By Zero

(00:04:09) - Interview

(00:05:05) - What is Keel Labs?

(00:13:44) - Changing existing systems to be plant-based

(00:20:24) - Market challenges for seaweed-derived yarns

(00:26:52) - Changing systems from the inside the fashion industry

(00:42:34) - Dealing with doubts about how much you’re helping

(00:44:33) - Advice to your younger self

(00:50:11) - Credits

And, we'd love to thank our sponsor, and our adored sister organization, United by Zero!

Let’s say you’re a big company. You’ve been making all these commitments recently at press conferences to get “carbon neutral”.” it’s been great for publicity, but now you’re worried because you have to actually follow through on them. You look through your contacts and you’re coming up short. Who do you call? Who can help your company actually go carbon-neutral?

Julia is also the founder of Moonshot Snacks, the world’s first climate-friendly, truly carbon neutral snack brand. She’s a start-up entrepreneur, mother and a fantastic optimist who believes that everyone can do something today to fight climate change.

—--

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

[00:03:33] - How do you raise children when you own a company?

[00:08:47] - What is PlanetFWD?

[00:09:58] - How did PlanetFWD start?

[00:11:14] - Creating Moonshot: the world’s first climate-friendly snack brand

[00:17:12] - How do you get big companies to change?

[00:24:21] - The Cartographer’s Paradox

[00:28:21] - What can we do to save the planet?

[00:33:24] - If you could go back to the beginning, what would you change?

[00:37:16] - Credits

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Our host, Lex, also runs an eco-friendly fashion company called United By Zero. You can find out more about it at www.unitedbyzero.com.

Every brand worth their sustainable (or marketing...) salt is claiming a path to carbon neutrality, the bridge between the marking claims and the climate realities is being built in real time. This week we sit down with the hyper-successful startup Patch, Brennan Spellacy, to unpack how they are building the tools necessary to make corporate climate neutrality a reality. 

Patch was founded in 2020 but has already raised over $80 million in venture funding from blue chip firms like Andreessen Horowitz. They serve companies in two main ways: understanding what drives carbon emissions in the company, and building a plan to offset that carbon through internal reductions and when appropriate buying carbon offsets. 

Prior to becoming the President and Chief Strategy Officer of Arrival, Avinash Rugoobur, led General Motor's billion dollar acquisition of autonomous driving company Cruise. Understanding frontier technology in the world of automotive advancement is squarely in his wheelhouse, which is why it created quite a stir when he left Cruise in 2020 for the startup electric bus company, Arrival. 

Since he joined, they've been on a roller coaster of valuations and product launches. In 2021 Arrival went public through a SPAC, listing at a $13 billion valuation. Today the valuation is less than down 97%, to under $300 million. But, where there's a will there's a way, and Avinash is in it for the long term. We touch on the future of the electric vehicle industry, the need for innovation on a scale to equal the threat of climate change, and not the least, what working in a chocolate factor can teach you about running an billion dollar car manufacturer. 

Note: This interview was recorded in May of 2022. 

As with most things magically, Joro was once an excel spreadsheet. Sanchali Pal was concerned with her personal carbon footprint when she was in undergrad at Princeton, so did as anyone would: she started tabulating the specific carbon weights of all of her choices on what became a massive excel sheet. After Harvard Business School, Ms. Pal was ready to turn this hobby into a force for empowering every consumer with better information about- and the means to offset- their personal consumption choices.

Joro was founded in 2019 backed by one of (if not the) world's most preeminent venture capital firms, Sequoia. The app connects with a consumer's credit card to track and analyze spending habits, proving automated insight into what our most carbon intensive activities are, how to curb those habits, and opportunities to offset the carbon we consume in our daily lives. 

More broadly, Sanchali's mission goes to the heart of consumer behavior, and human nature. How can we make it so simple to save our planet, that not doing so is actually less convenient?