Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: A lot of them don't start with the waste aspect. It's not part of their expertise or their forte. Their sustainability folks usually know about GHG emissions or ehs, you know, health and safety compliance, or they know about water and energy conservation or green building. They know nothing about the waste piece of sustainability. So that's whenever they call me and they're like, we don't know where to start. I'm like, cool, I got you.
Here's what we're going to do. And I can outline a prescription for them based on what their goals are.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in northeast Wisconsin.
Hi, and welcome to the Roots to Fruits podcast. I am your host, Ken Kelly Williams. I'm joined by Stacy Savage, better known as the Texas trash talker whose path into zero waste didn't start with bins or metrics, but with people policy and the long, unglamorous work of community organizing.
Stacy grew up in southeast Texas under the brown, hazy skies of the oil and gas industry, where pollution wasn't abstract, it was in the air, the water, and the lived experience of communities that often didn't have the power to fight back.
She went on to spend more than two decades in the trenches of recycling and waste policy, helping pass statewide legislation in Texas that required free manufacturer takebacks, recycling for computers and televisions, and working at the local level to move ordinances forward.
One meeting, one. One coalition, one compromise at a time.
And along the way, she saw something that changed how you think about impact, how easily progress can be reversed before it ever has a chance to anchor.
That realization didn't push Stacy away from the work. It reshaped it.
In 2013, she founded Zero Waste Strategies, stepping into a different kind of influence, one that works alongside institutions and businesses to turn intention into practice and ideals into systems that can actually hold.
Stacy and I approach waste from different angles, but we meet in the same tension between what's necessary, what's possible, and what actually lasts.
Today we're going to talk about what it takes to keep building when the wind keeps blowing.
And with that, I welcome Stacy Savage to the show. Thank you, Stacy, for joining.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: Thanks, Kelly. Nice to be here.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: So I gave you a little intro. Maybe you should tell your side of the story, how you got to where you are, because I found when we first met, you gave me that story and I found it fascinating, so I'd love to start there. You, you give us your version of your background and how you got to where you Are and what you do today.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Yeah, you did a pretty good job.
Yeah, like you said, growing up into the brown hazy skies and the rotten egg smells of the Texas oil and gas industry where both my parents spent collective 80 years of their career working at oil refineries. My dad worked at Chevron for 45 years. My mom worked at Texaco Star Enterprise for 35, 40 years. So all my aunts, uncles, cousins, it's either working out a power plant or one of the chemical plants nearby. It's really one of the, it's really one of the most lucrative jobs that you can have in that area with long term stability and security, where you're going to be able to put your three kids through college and have a nice pension for retirement, that kind of thing. So, you know, that's, that industry has a total stranglehold in that area and the vast majority of the oil that is refined in that area actually doesn't stay in the US it gets shipped off to other countries.
So, you know, the, the workers in that, in that region, you know, are in a way unknowingly complicit with the pollution of the community. Of course we don't blame the workers. It's really upon the shoulders of local government who is not necessarily enforcing laws that are on the book statewide ep, statewide environmental laws and EPA standards as well.
So you also have to point the finger at the corporations that are doing everything that they can in order to skirt those laws and to get away with whatever they can in order to maybe lessen their responsibilities, externalize onto the public and to internalize the profits for their shareholders is really their, their charge as, as a company and as, as you know, the, the upper echelon, the C suite, that's, that's their charge is to make money for the shareholders. So it, you know, rings true that in that community there's a lot of, there's a mentality that you just keep your head down, don't rock the boat, don't question authority because you know what's on the line is your long term security and supporting your children.
So people are definitely willing to do the work and not question that authority in exchange for health and safety issues to usher under the general public, the general population, not just them. Pollution doesn't know any boundaries so well.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: And I've always joked the solution to pollution is dilution, right? If you dilute the air, dilute the water, you can get by with a lot.
So I mean really it's. Would you agree, it's safe to say that there's a very. A high focus from these large chemical companies to maintain compliance, yet balancing plausible deniability. I call it the little T rear arms. T Rex arms.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: And then that's one of the reasons they're clustered so close together, so they can point the finger at each other and say, oh, that wasn't my air release.
It's over there.
Same thing with landfills. You know, a lot of times landfills are positioned right next to each other in underserved communities. And that means that the community doesn't have the time, energy, effort, or money to fight them. But they're experiencing a lot of the downwind, downwind smells and odors, the vector issues.
So it's, you know, industry likes to blame their competitor, but they like to cluster around each other.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: It actually reminds me of, and I can say this, I think definitively because it was presented by a chocolate company who was explaining the history of chocolate. So there was a point that how bad the conditions for cocoa farming was, that big chocolate brands, I don't need to name them, tried to step up work with Congress. They basically created a way to further plausible deniability from them by creating commodities where all the chocolate, all the cocoa beans get dumped into a big pile.
So if anything happens in that pile, you create that plausible deniability of the chain of command or the chain of custody from them. So what they did is they actually used real pressure to create a system that allows them to get by with it even more so than they did before.
And I see a lot of that. It's always about what's the easiest way for me to continue to operate. And partly because we built these systems to be extractive. We take, we extract, we adulterate, we ship. And anything that happens along the way is. Is what it is.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: It's collateral damage.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Collateral damage.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah. So that's. That's, you know, where I started out. And I went to University of Texas at Arlington. So that's near the Dallas area. And way back in 1999, I picked up and moved to Austin. And so I set down my roots. I've been in this area since then and lived in Austin for 20 years. Now I'm a little bit further east in a more rural community, and. But whenever I got to Austin, I.
I started waiting tables. So I was slinging fajitas and margaritas at a Mexican restaurant for a good nine years, and one of the managers said, hey, we want you to be, you know, on. Come onto our management team. I was like, oh, no, this is, you Know, that's, that's not the move that I want to make there. There's something far bigger out there for me. So I just started to doing a little search and literally took me three hours to do a quick search. And I. I looked on the back of the Austin Chronicle, which is the weekly circular down here, and it on the back, the very back in the middle, smack dab in the middle, big bold letters, tiny little ad, but big letters, and it said, get paid to fight the man.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: And I said, oh, yeah, but wait, who is the man? I was totally uneducated about politics. We did not have those dinner conversations. It was not something, you know, around the dinner table.
We broached as subjects. We didn't talk about social justice. We didn't talk about voting. We didn't talk about volunteering in our community. We didn't talk about really anything of substance whenever it comes to how do you be a human on this planet in the United States, you know, So I was totally uneducated politically and, you know, even on environmental issues as well.
I just knew I needed to do something bigger with my career and that I wanted to have a stronger impact. So I answered that ad. I went in the next day or so, and it happened to be a door to door grassroots community organizing campaign for an environmental nonprofit statewide here in Texas.
So I was thrust into talking to people door to door on the front porch.
Tens of thousands of people a year I would talk to.
Good thing I waited tables because that's where I got my gift of gab. And I was able to connect with people on really any subject while I was waiting tables and being a bartender in the customer service and food and beverage service industry. You picked that up really quick.
And so it served me well at the door.
And so I was, you know, generating thousands of dollars weekly, monthly for this organization because that's what we would ask for at the door. Sign this petition, back it with the financial donation, because nonprofit citizen funded, right? And then write a letter to your lawmaker. So that's really our three pronged approach that gave us the political power to demonstrate the outcry from the citizenry to our public lawmakers. So maybe we had a.
One of the local campaigns that we were working on was the city of Austin bag ban. And it was how to ban checkout bags, plastic and paper checkout bags, and getting people to bring their own bags to the while they're out shopping and running their errands. And it, it passed.
We got the city council to Pass that. It was a seven year battle.
And so that was, you know, some of the local type policies that we were working on. But the statewide policies is really where we made a huge impact because we were able to go door to door all across Williamson county, just north of Austin, and that's where Dell Technologies is located and situated.
So we were knocking on Dell employee doors and we were talking to, I talked personally back then to their CFO at their door and it was like, this is what we're doing. We need Dell to start leading in Texas and taking back their old electronics for free. Responsible recycling.
And you know, I got laughed at. Were they supportive initially? I mean, we, we were, you know, we were laughed at. And, and people were calling each other, like, these people are coming around, they're crazy. Like, no, it's, it's something that needs to be done because these electronics are highly toxic. They're full of lead, mercury and arsenic, and they don't belong in publicly funded or even privately funded landfills.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: So, yeah, that would be back where we were basically dumping it in China, right?
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Yeah, we were doing a lot of dumping in China and a lot of it was ending up illegally dumped on the side of rural roads, dry creek beds, you know, their city cleanups, county cleanups would. A lot of tax dollars went to footing the bill for corporate cleanup whenever people had no more use for their obsolete or broken electronics. And it was becoming a huge issue, not only that these companies were using prison labor. They are not protected under OSHA standards like you and me. They're using prison labor, getting, you know, paying $2 a day per inmate, taking real jobs away from the recycling community on the outside where people could have been making a decent living wage. And so that was another issue that we, we brought up is why are you using prison labor?
Because it's cheap and, and the, the health standards aren't, aren't enforced. It's not there.
So yeah, we worked on that campaign for many years. It took us three legislative cycles. And don't forget, in Texas, we have one legislative cycle every other year on odd numbered years in the over five months.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Make sure everybody hears this.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Right?
[00:14:23] Speaker B: So the legislative cycle is every other.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Year for a state the size of Texas, 30 million people, one legislative session every other year on odd numbered years only.
So we got, we got one coming up in 27, and they only last from January to May. So it's five months and it's a total feeding frenzy. So it took us three legislative sessions to get the bill advanced to a point that we could get it on the floor for a House and Senate or a House hearing, you know, several votes and that kind of thing. And over to the House and they do their thing. And it arrived on the governor's desk. Back then it was Governor Perry in 2007, and we got 100% legislative approval from every. All 181 districts in the state. 150 in the House, 31 in the Senate. And so it was 100% approval rate. Why? Because Dell's the biggest employer in Central Texas. Who wants to go up against that? So if Dell is advocating for, yes, we want our materials back, yes, we can put them back into our production cycle and we can save taxpayers money. It's great PR for them. And all these other companies are going to have to follow suit.
Then they were, they were positioned themselves as spearheading the entire issue.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Do you.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: And then we repeat. What's that?
[00:15:52] Speaker B: I was going to say, do you think they did it out of the doing the right thing, or was there an incentive for them to do it, whether it be pr, economic like. So if Dell decided they weren't supportive, do you think it would have passed?
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Yes, because we were getting.
We were getting letters from voting constituents and paying members. We had over 50,000 members in Texas at that time. So we had quite a nice citizen lobby. And I do think that, that it would have passed it probably. I mean, when we're talking about environmental legislation in the state of Texas, you know, we don't have much of a track record whenever it comes to good environmental legislation. So.
But I think it would have passed because we've been putting so much pressure on the lawmakers themselves. And we were getting city municipal resolutions and county government resolutions. So what we were doing is taking it from the citizenry and the citizens put pressure on their city government. The city government's in the county, put pressure on the county governments, and then those county governments put pressure on the state lawmakers. And so we worked it up the chain. And then Dell came in and was like, yeah, we're going to help you draft the bill, lobby for the bill, and we're going to be there whenever that vote comes comes down.
So, you know, we had been pressuring the lawmakers for over 10 years, and then we had started pressuring Dell for about seven. So they, they were feeling it. And, you know, it. It was, it was an uphill battle. It was a long, drawn out battle, but we won and we got 100% approval rate, and that catapulted us into winning TV recycling legislation four years down the road. Governor Perry signed that into law as well in 2011, where we worked with Panasonic and Thompson television companies, and we got a 90% passage rate. Only 12 no votes in the House, six no votes in the Senate.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's great.
So I'm really curious to hear from you on the experience of going door to door and talking to real people in their homes about issues, because I hear a lot. There's just, and I'm not saying this is wrong. I feel like it's a statement out of not fully understanding the complexity of the actual problem. We spend a lot of time chasing solutions to symptoms of problems, not actually the problem.
So I hear education, we need better education. I'm not going to say we don't, but remember, education starts when you're a child.
Re education is what happens when you're an adult.
So when you're going door to door and explaining this, what's the resonance factor? Do people be just immediate, like, absolutely, I support this, or to take convention, like, what's the, what can you share with us from just going door to door and helping people understand things like ecology, environmental impact, waste?
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Sure. You know, we, we had that very specific goal and all of our messaging was targeted to that, that goal. And you know, anytime you knock on a door, it's going to be 50, 50. That's either a yes or a no. And if it's a no and they tell you right from the bat, you're like, thank you very much for your time and you move on. You let that roll right off your back. You don't let them affect you because the next door is going to be your yes.
And so there's, there's this mantra in the door to door organ. And granted, this was back in 2003-2012, like we started. The closest thing to social media was picking up the phone and calling somebody for a petition signature or a donation or somebody getting somebody to write their, their lawmakers, you know, with a, a templated letter.
And so, you know, 2003, 2004, 5. This is right whenever, right before smartphone phones were coming out and social media, you know, we didn't have those digital campaigns where we could organize more thoroughly, more effectively en masse. But this was a lot more intimate and it was getting to know people. I would go back into the same communities every single year and I could watch their kids grow up.
There was one community here in Austin and then another one, I think in the Midland area where we Would, you know, we would go back to the same communities and you know, maybe they were home, maybe they weren't that year. I don't know. We were only in the field five hours.
And so if I got to see them, great. You know, if not, I go talk to their neighbors. So it was a lot more intimate experience that I think created stronger bonds in the community.
And you know, I think this day and age, it's, it's a lot harder to, to get people to do the door to door work that's, that's necessary because so many people are so used to organizing online and you know, maybe they don't want to be bothered at home. The, the phone banking has, has increased exponentially because people are on their phones 24 7. So, you know, we've got those online petitions now and people can donate online and they can write long, you know, letters to their lawmakers online. So, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the funding that we were raising were going to door to door organizer paychecks and keeping us out in the field, keeping people engaged in those communities and delivering their public outcry in a collective form so that we could go to a lawmaker's office at the Capitol and say, we actually have 8,000 members of our organization in your district alone. What are you going to do about this? And they're like, whoa. Because they know that we're going to report back to them what they said and people make their decisions based on the things that they support.
And if they're supporting our organization at the time, then they're going to get a report back from us and that might make them change how they vote.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: You actually may have gotten one of the last of our generation experience really talking to people in the community in that fashion.
Because, you know, I've been doing some writing lately where I try to remind us that we're living in incoherence. Yet biologically we're driven for coherence, for connection, the physics of belonging to. So we really want to work with people in our community. We want to be a part of something greater than ourselves. We want to take care of all these things.
But we've almost privatized what connection means. So now we're connecting in a disconnected way.
And I feel like a lot of that, that true dexterity of how people feel and what they're feeling right now may, may be lost. So that's really what I was rooting for is like, is there a genuine sentiment within the average human being who owns a home in Texas that they do care about these heavy metals in their waterways and microplastics in their soil and in their bodies and in their babies.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. And like I said, pollution doesn't know any boundaries. And so it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you stand on politically or what your religious status is, you know, what your socioeconomic status is. The mercury is still in your water.
And so that's, that was really kind of one of our push, because mercury is part of those electronics and to keep that out of landfills, because landfills leak and they're. A lot of times they're on top of our water table. Yep.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: And at least in America, we try to make them not leak. In a lot of third world countries, they're just. The technology isn't there. They're open air. They're burning this stuff. And it's. That's unfortunate.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: China, Nigeria, those are the, the big, you know, electronic waste acceptors.
And they burn, they open, they do open pit burning.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Even in the Caribbean, you'll see highly toxic. It's, it's. Yeah. So I don't think the average person is really. But. And we don't want to scare anybody, but we do want to talk about complexity. And I think that that's, that's at the root of this, is that I think all of us are no different than, you know, your family growing up with the brown skies, the oil and gas industry, enjoying the lifestyle you're able to afford and the hours you're able to work to provide for your family. So you don't really say much because you have that.
But also knowing that you're complicit into a bigger problem. But that problem is so widespread, it's easy to say, well, what do I do about it? I'm just one person.
And I feel like that's where we have to stop.
I guess just that overwhelm, letting it persist, because at the inside of that, there's a truth that this is all going to continue to accumulate until we do something about it, until we truly make circularity, circular, it's going to continue to build up. And I think that's why you pivoted right into where you're at today.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Well, you know, that feeling so alone and I'm only one person. What can I do? That's why the community organizing was so important, because we're looking at you dead in the eye and saying, you're joining one of 50,000 Texans of our organization that gives us the political power to march on the Capitol and to talk to your lawmakers directly on your behalf, because we know you can't make it there.
So that people were like, wow, you can really do that? Absolutely.
Sign here, go get your checkbook or your credit card and write a letter to your lawmaker, and we'll deliver it by hand for you at their office.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: But you also know firsthand how easily all the. So I think the card house analogy works. You can tell me, but it is like building a card house, knowing that one flick, one gust of wind or breath will blow it down, that you get something to that third time every other year window, one person can wipe it out.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: And let me tell you, no matter.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: What you do, it's so fragile.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: And let me tell you what that looks like in real time, because I experienced it when I mentioned the single use bag ordinance, the bag ban in Austin. And we were one of 11 other communities across Texas. Galveston, South Padre Island, Brownsville, even Fort Stockton, way out in West Texas, they all had bag legislation at the local level.
And then once the petroleum and industry, the chemical council, the convenience store lobby, they all lobbied the Texas State Supreme Court.
And the Chief justice signed an order that voided every single one of our local bag bans.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: Don't they call that the ban on bans? Yep, yep. Ohio. I'm in Ohio. Ohio did the same.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: And so local control, to save local infrastructure, to save local money, to support local taxpayers, to support local jobs, all of that was wiped out by the state. So it was massive overreach whenever. The state of Texas always complains about epa, federal overreach on environmental issues and controlling industry.
But the local citizenry in these 11 communities stood up and said, no more. We don't want your bags. They're clogging up our waterways, our infrastructure. Our cows are eating them, thinking that they're food. The wildlife, you know, sea turtles, we've all seen those terrible images and, you know, birds and whales ending up with all these plastic bags in their stomachs. So, you know, we put our foot down and said, no more. And then the state said, well, too bad.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: So I'm gonna maybe pivot a little bit just cause this. This really is the heart of something I want to cover. Which is why companies seem so stuck in decision making.
Because it's not that capitalism won't go in a new path. They need reassurance. There's money to be made in a guaranteed way.
So no one's turned waste management into that per se. And I think part of it is, you know, we hear a Lot of calling for federal harmonization, for a federal standard that everybody can operate by. We don't have that. I'm not sure if there's a claimant event that could be big enough to create the Office of Sustainability like we created the Department of homeland security after 9, 11.
But until that happens, I don't, I think we're always going to be dealing with 50 states own interpretation of what's right.
So there's a law I think was passed in 1979 called the RICROL, the Resource Conservation and Recovery act, which basically says waste is the 50 states problem.
And I feel like until we can turn waste into a feedstock into. So I don't know if it's blockchain or AI or what, but I feel like that's part of what's keeping us from moving forward. And the other is just I see so many companies that I do believe their DNA, their corporate C suite DNA believes this, it's the right thing.
But they're stuck because everyone's like, well, why isn't anybody, they'll see an opportunity to do something right, but nobody else is doing it. So they almost let the fact that nobody else is doing it reinforce the fear for why they're not doing it. So no matter what you go down, if you pinch down to what's preventing the decision or creating a bad decision, it's always based on some form of fear because we've evaporated trust so broadly in these community supply chains that no one trusts anybody anymore. So in, in your experiences, I mean, I, I, I'm sure you see, see remnants of exactly the same thing, which I'm assuming is kind of why you got frustrated and, and made the pivot into, into what you do today.
Because there you make a bigger impact because you're dealing with companies that actually want to do these things. You're not trying to do all of them at the same time.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Right. And you know, from my experience, going company by company is really the best way and targeting the biggest that have the most footprint. You know, we went after Dell.
That's pretty big. Panasonic was like, okay.
So, yeah, you know, I was driving home from my job and you know, one day and just sitting at a stoplight and my entire world changed. I had a epiphany. Some kind of bolt of lightning shot through me and stiffened my spine. I sat straight up and I was like, oh my gosh, Stacy, you need to start a business.
You know, the lawmakers, you know, the city council, the county commissioners in the area you know, the haulers of the waste recycling and composting facilities in the area, you know, all these heavy hitters in the environmental nonprofit movement. Why aren't you the hub for zero waste resources? And so that's exactly what I did. The very next day I went down to the county Courthouse, dropped my $17 and I got my DBA and I had no idea what I was doing.
But you know, immediately I was like, okay, here's, you know, drawn out my business plan and no funding whatsoever. Everything was bootstrapped. I took part time jobs just to make ends meet. If I wasn't, if I didn't have any traction. And you know, finally, you know, I got my first contract with Nestle Purina. That just kind of fell into my lap up in St. Louis. They're, you know, the pet food manufacturing brand and you know, they wanted to have a zero waste facility. So I was like, absolutely, we'll do it. I hung up the phone and I was like, oh shit, what am I going to do?
I don't know what I'm doing. So I, I called some of my friends in the industry, some of my mentors, and on paper I was leading the project. But behind the scenes I was getting a whirlwind of information and how to do building or site assessment correctly. Doing the waste audit, all those things that, where we're digging in people's trash for six, eight hours, figuring out what the composition of the waste stream looks like, um, and where all the contaminants are coming from, and then doing employee education, that kind of thing, training. Uh, so I, I was getting a major education on the back end and seeing how it's, it's supposed to be done by some of my mentors and I was so grateful that they came onto that contract with me and, and kind of supported me in my, my first big opportunity as a business owner.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: So is there like a certification program for that today? Just knowing how much there's several.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: We are true certified. So that stands for total resource use and efficiency and that's through the U.S. green Building Council. So if you're familiar with LEED for energy, water and green building concepts and conservation, then this is kind of the sister program.
TRU is the sister program to lead and it focuses just on waste reduction, reuse, those kinds of things. And it is globally accepted that 90% waste reduction from landfills and incinerators is the goal for, of zero waste or higher. If we, if we can do more than that, great.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: But 90% minimum I've had several what I would call like a mid tier brand, like you know, an independent, like a recipe from a grandmother, whatever. They've started a food brand, organic, but you know, in that 20, 30, 40 million range is a pretty common area. And I've had them multiple times, single plant, where they make the food, they package it, they do everything. They're asking me to come in and sustainableize their operation, which is basically do what you do. I'm like, I think I can give you some ideas. Like that's not what I do. But I've always thought, man, there's such a, a need for that because these are brand, these are founders that really want to do the right thing and they, they're looking for the resources to get to do the right thing.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: So yeah, and we talk about, you know, how fear kind of keeps businesses stuck and they don't want to stick their neck on the line and be the first one to the punch. But I tell you what, public pressure is a huge motivator.
Especially when you've got highly rebellious Gen X and you've got your millennials and you've got your Gen zers and you know, Gen Alpha is even more feral than Gen Z, I tell you what. So, you know, whenever you've got these four generations coming up that are putting pressure on these hundred year old companies that are just fine with status quo, then that's when the fear strikes. Then they're like, oh, we need to change some things around here. And a lot of them don't start with the waste aspect. It's not part of their expertise or their forte. Their sustainability folks usually know about GHG emissions or ehs, you know, health and safety compliance, or they know about water and energy conservation or green building. They know nothing about the waste piece of sustainability. So that's whenever they call me and they're like, we don't know where to start. And I'm like, cool, I got you.
Here's what we're going to do. And I can outline a prescription for them based on what their goals are. And so the fear sometimes is the motivator.
Well, not sometimes, a lot of times is the motivator for them to kick it into high gear because their competitors are passing them up and they don't want that. They want to maintain their market share, they want to keep their, their shareholders and investors happy as well.
But now with social media we have, you know, the power is in the consumer's hand, it always has been. But I don't think people realize that until the social Media campaigns have been starting. Whenever we can expose the bad practices and the greenwashing, this company says they're doing one thing, but they're doing something totally different.
Or XYZ is reflected in their annual sustainability report. Where did it go? That kind of thing, where we can hold them accountable, call them out on the carpet and, you know, hold their feet to the fire to.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: I mean every, everybody would, everybody would act. If they could do it from their phone and from their sofa, they would absolutely act because.
But you mentioned something really cool about that generation. What I find so refreshing in a way about those younger generations is their zero inhibition to break groupthink. They will ask you the hardest questions without even a second thought.
So I, that's, that's an alchemy that large brands that have been hiding behind plausible deniability, greenwashing is going to come, come to roost, right?
[00:37:21] Speaker A: And they're the next boon in economic vitality. They're the next job holders, you know, and, and the, the, the boomer and silent generation are, are getting older where we're going to see, you know, more people retiring and more of these other generations taking a foothold in those companies and starting to change things internally as well. So it's, it, the change is going to come whether these companies like it or not, because it's going to come from their internal leadership, the people that they're hiring and those people that they're hiring, the next generation are going to be much more firm, right? About standards and operating procedures and dumping on other countries.
Deforestation, child labor, all of those things that, that we abhor but are still happening. And so, you know, whether they like it or not, these changes are coming.
It's just, if you wait, it's just going to cost you a lot more.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: And I wonder, I never thought about this, but I'm just curious what your intuition is because I never, I've never thought about until this moment.
If, if brands understand what they're dealing with and the power of these younger generations, so do the oil and gas and plastics companies. They, they, they know. So it almost.
Because what we're seeing with EPRS and SB54 in California basically trying to detonate any progress in compostability. And look, let's be honest. Compostable material science for packaging is the only one that addresses human and system entropy.
Earth has got to take it back. It's like spreading glitter every day and wondering why it's so damn hard to pick up the pieces.
But it almost. Maybe that's intentional because They've. They're fearing what this generation's power is. And if you start to galvanize extractive practices at the right level, it becomes harder to undo.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Right. And it gets harder to run away from the consequences as well.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Because you're locking arms with the problem.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And. And why would you want your brand to be synonymous with that problem? When we were taking on the. The bag ban here in Austin, that my old house that I had in South Austin had a couple of h e b grocery store bags flipped in in my tree. And one of them, I called Wendy and. But it was like, heb, Heb. H e b. H e b All day, every day. And I was like, why would you. You know, HEB was one of the, you know, one of the companies, and it's a huge grocery store all across the state that ranked number one or number two nationally as a grocery store.
And I adore HEB and I've got one, like two miles from my house. But on the policy front, they were pretty resistant to the bag ban because they've got so many people that come to their stores that are from out of town. They're not prepared to follow Austin's laws. They come into town and they don't know about Austin's laws. You've got all these music festivals and, you know, camping and, you know, film festivals, and people are just not prepared. So they were saying, we need emergency stash, essentially.
And. And so, you know, it always brings me back to that. That time where I could see h e b fighting the bag band issue, yet Wendy is still in my tree with their logo on it. Every day I have to look at it. I was like, that's ironic.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: We're addicted to convenience. And it's like taking cell phones away from us today, when we didn't know what one was, it didn't matter. So it's like, I get the addiction, but I'm. I'll never be convinced that we can't do it in a more environmentally responsible way.
To me, it starts with, I'm not against recycling. I'm against fossil plastics. Because once you extract them from the earth, you know, fossil hydrocarbons are cellulose after millions of years of heat and pressure, so they don't interact with the natural world anymore. So once you extract it out and form it into a physical part that's meant to stay that way.
Microplastics is. Was predictable. AI would have predicted what we're dealing with in microplastics 50 years ago.
And here we are and we want to use the lack of hard science as uncertainty to continue to do what we're doing when in the end it has to change and it's going to be increasingly local. So I love anybody who understands that local community level and how powerful that is when you start to build it out and let it expand out. But it really starts at the community level, which we're quickly losing the dexterity to the local level for the reasons we just talked about.
[00:42:32] Speaker A: And we're kind of coming full circle now. If you think about it. People are starting to kick themselves off their own cell phones. They are getting flip phones, right? They are, they're not using the streaming services anymore. They're not using social media. They're going to coffee shops, they're having conversations, they're going to paint classes, art classes, ceramics classes, they're picking up hobbies, you know, that, that normally they wouldn't do because they're so involved on their own phones or in the, the social media world. And they are starting to unplug mentally and physically from the hype and they're starting to understand that the, the algorithm or what's curated just for them on their social media feed is not the full story a lot of times. And you know, they're, they're just starting to reject the, the digital age or the, the digital bog that they've felt like they've been in for, for a while. And they're starting to look up and look out, go outdoors and find joy.
[00:43:41] Speaker B: I've been noticing that same trend and, and, and even down to there's no stats on this, but man, there's a large number of local communities. I wouldn't even say local governments, just local communities starting compost.
Community compost growing. It just seems like there's a real coherence building at the local level and.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: And people are starting to build out food forests as well with, you know, fruit trees and vegetable plants and all kinds of stuff where people can just come in and it's free to, free to take.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: Yeah, we're seeing it here in Ohio too. And Ohio is not much different than Texas in the environmental positions.
We're not as progressive as other states, but yeah, we're seeing it here, those types of local programs and communities.
The Dayton Food bank is one I absolutely love because they started what they're doing today because they had roughly 200,000 shortfall, food shortfall in their county. And it started as that coherence was what drove it. Now they're doing some really amazing things from education Compost, growing food. Really cool. Any last thoughts to share? We covered quite a bit of ground.
Maybe one more plug for your business. I believe your husband now also does this with you. So you guys are a team. So how do people reach you? What's, what's a typical type of client that, that you're looking for and hopefully you'll get some contacts from the show.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: We work with corporations, so Dell is one of our clients actually at and T Apple, Nestle, those are some of our corporate clients. We also work with small and mid sized businesses as well. We can, you know, zero waste is a scalable opportunity. It's a scalable concept as, as a business operational concept. And so we can look at your internal operations and we can prescribe or customize a certain plan for you to get you where you need to be.
And then you know, we work with municipalities. So city of Austin is actually one of our clients too. A lot of this has come full circle for us through my activism days and years and now being a business owner and having those same nemesis being my, my clients.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: You tagline the, the, the Texas trash talker.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: Yeah, and we'll stop at nothing.
And so we work with municipal governments. We just did a municipal waste characterization study for the city of Springfield, Missouri where we sorted 10,000 pounds of materials over the course of five days into 41 categories with eight subcontractors.
So it was a whirlwind of, you know, picking and deciphering what was supposed to go where, what could have been recycled, what could have been recovered and composted, what could have been reused, those kinds of metrics that we were gathering. So we can do work with city governments, county governments on that front as well as policy oriented issues. Also doing stakeholder meetings and driving policy development as well. And you know, we do employee education so we can do online or on site as well. And the true zero waste facility certification also. So those are some of our services. We also have online training courses for managers and executives who own small and mid sized businesses that may not have the money for a consultant like myself or a full time sustainability person on staff.
So we have online training for kickstarting your zero waste programs. So we can be reached at Zero Waste Thought.
And that's the number 0w a s t e.org and our phone number here in Austin is 512-693-7677.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: Fantastic. So question for you because I've seen pieces of this and I'm just curious if this is something that you guys would get involved in that a lot of municipalities may want to do organics collection and recovery, but it's always that mixed dreams, like, how do you keep it so. So feel like Organixx programs is a. Is something that's more desired than being implemented because of the challenges. Is that something that. That you guys have ever gotten involved in coordinating and understanding?
[00:48:34] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, part of our contract work with the city of Austin recycling department was to help the.
Help the businesses that were now affected by the recycling ordinance that have food permits, they were affected by the organics portion of the ordinance. So not only did they have to recycle, they have to divert their organics either through reduction and reuse, legal food donations, working with farmers and ranchers to feed livestock, or to set up composting systems.
And so our goal was to. And we. The charge the city gave us was to go out and help those businesses comply.
A lot of that sprung forward or after. After that was when the city started issuing an ordinance for curbside composting for the residential and eventually the com. The apartment complexes here in the local area. And so, at least in Austin, we're one of the very few cities that has a composting ordinance for residential and multifamily apartments.
But also on top of that, businesses have to do their part as well. So we see this expanding to smaller communities mainly when they understand that organics. And we're not. We're not talking about the organics aisle in your grocery store. Organics, anything that is, you know, kind of living that can break down and into the. The soils. Right. So think about wood turned into paper towels, that kind of thing. You know, your. Your eggshells and food scraps and that kind of thing, yard trimmings.
So once local governments are understanding that we're talking food waste, and food waste is about 40%, 30 to 40% of the entire waste stream here in the U.S.
then they get to understand that they could be diverting quite a bit and save landfill space and methane gas emissions, since that rotting food is emitting the carbon dioxide and the methane gas releases at those landfills as well. So they're starting to get the fact that a lot of this could be diverted if they just had the programs in place.
And so they're really looking for composting companies to come into those local areas and to provide the capacity to have an entire city be able to divert their organics to a composting processor there on site.
So it's a big boulder to move.
And a lot of times we don't even recycle. Right. Just yet. We're still so confused on what recycling even is supposed to be, what it's supposed to look like, how clean it's supposed to be.
Some communities take glass, some don't. You have to know your local laws and regulations. You have to understand what the facility in your local area actually accepts, you know, for recycling. And yeah, you know, a lot of people do it wrong. And it's because there's so much confusion out there. And, and every community is totally different.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: So it's so the, the amount of what they call wish cycling, where you put things in. Right. To me, that's a positive sign that people care or they wouldn't even go through that effort. So let's give them a way to participate that does make sense.
Right.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: But you know, collectively that that's what turns the.
That's what turns the materials into a contaminated stream. Because if we're not doing it right up front at the source, where the bin is at the home, then everyone else in the block, if they do the same thing, that entire load is contaminated. It's going straight to landfill. Because it doesn't make sense for the local recycling processor to have to pick through all the trash just to find the valuable recyclables that are going to be contaminated with dog poop bags and baby diapers and food waste anyway.
And so they just.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: These plastics, look, it's not recycling. It's really not the right word. It's repurposing because you can't. It's not aluminum or glass. There's only so many times you can reprocess these plastics before they're landfill anyway. Or microplastics, Right?
[00:53:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Then they fracture in the sunlight and, you know, it becomes part of our bodies. It's in our blood. It's in the placenta of newborns, it's in our brains.
It's everywhere. It's on. And it's on top of mountains.
Yeah.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: Literally in the ice of the North Pole.
[00:53:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:35] Speaker B: They found it. It's crazy.
Well, it's been a great time meeting you, Stacy. I think the work that you've done, and I love your story, I love how you started at the ground level and you understand community building because when collapse happens, what. What emerges from the other side starts at community.
So just having that in your DNA, I applaud you. I love your tagline of being the Texas trash talker. I love it. Because until we start looking at this not as waste, but as feedstock, something, we just have to think differently. So we're going to keep fighting our good fight, and we're going to end the show the way I always end it.
Bond soft, build strong. Until next time, I'm Kelly Williams, your host of Roots to Fruits podcast.
Thanks for tuning in to Roots to Fruits. If this conversation resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to grow with us. Let's build something lasting together.
