Behind the Green

“Just buying from micro businesses and artisans, I think there is a unique environmental story in sustainability in that people know how to repair things. If people are learning skills and crafts and honing them and getting better, that improves our collective capacity to keep things out of landfills...The personal connection that people experience from buying art and crafts makes the world a litt...

“Different brands are in different parts of their journey. For a lot of brands, resale makes a ton of sense because there’s a ton of waste. And the brands that are further along in their sustainability journey are tapping into their waste to continue to build these new closets through repair and resale. However, there’s still a lot of work to be done. How do you match action to the goals? And what...

“We have all been wishcyclers where we’ve seen the nice recycle logo on a package and say ‘Alright I think it’s recyclable. I don’t see the number on it but I’ll throw it in the recycle bin and hopefully it goes somewhere.’ Unfortunately, a lot of the times just because it has the recyclable logo doesn’t even mean that it will eventually be recycled…being able to inform and educate and empower the...

“By slowing down this fast carbon, we are giving our society some time—buying us some time to ween ourselves off of our fossil fuels…the ways that our every day lives would change, if we can’t start doing this at scale, could be truly detrimental for our future.” About Elizabeth Bridges Elizabeth is a co-founder of the OurCarbon brand and works as the Director of Design Research for Bioforcetech,...

“E-waste in general, there’s a lot of confusion around what to do with e-waste. People aren’t sure how to dispose of it—gray bin, blue bin, other bin? There’s a lot of education needed here because the infrastructure is there with organizations. Consumers just don’t know what to do with them.” About Mary Curtiss Mary is the Director of Sustainability at HP and has years of experience in the Sustai...

“We need to start engineering endings not just letting them drift into a floppy experience that burdens the consumer and also society in terms of having to put up with overwhelming amounts of waste. This is about getting purposeful about the end of the consumer lifecycle…One of the first things you can do at your business is ask “how does our product or project end?” and you’ll absolutely paralyze...

“If you look at cost and lifecycle analysis together, it then becomes a really significant piece of work to then be able to fully understand the impact that every single component has from the packaging manufacturer, to the product manufacturer, to a CPG, to a retailer and to a consumer. That whole journey becomes really complex but we have seen the transition with products… We expect a level of p...

"The consumer understands more and they’re more invested than ever before. There’s maturity in the conversation, in the solutions and all around the pressure and accountability for brands to do the right thing. It’s coming from all angles and there’s so much work to be done… But the impact you make as a brand helps you connect with your customer. You shouldn’t just connect over the products y...

“We always get asked ‘Have you taken into account the return shipping with the empty package?’ Yes, we look at the sustainability holistically using a lifecycle assessment. And one of the key things to think about is that so much of the impact—from CO2 impact and resource use—comes from the manufacturing. So when you’re talking about a reusable package, you’re manufacturing just one versus 100-200...

“By 2015, when Mara had come to visit me on maternity leave, she literally sat down with tears welling in her eyes and was like, ‘We no longer can continue operating this way. Something has to change.’ She was feeling this weight, I think lead by the idea of leaving this amount of stuff and knowing the impacts of this industry and leaving it on the weight of our children. So, she said to me, ‘we h...

“That led to this idea of how can we not only use more sustainable packaging but utilize packaging with a strong background in technology. We really started looking at if we could use this package over and over again then we could also solve other problems in supply chains which is answering this question we hear all of the time of “where is my package?” And this is deep rooted going beyond that o...

"The interesting thing is that it's actually a new take on the old economy because we always used to reuse everything. That was the economy for most of human civilization. It was waste-not-want-not. It was use it up. Make it last and reuse it as much as possible until you have something that you can't reuse anymore. That is how human civilizations have operated since really the dawn o...

"About half of 300 million tons of plastic is single-use so it will be used for minutes maybe and then it might be on the planet for hundreds of years well beyond our time. That figure of 150 million tons is really hard to wrap your head around, but it is about as much as the weight of all of the humans on the planet...clearly this is a huge problem and we really need to be reducing this astr...

"The practicalities of returns are extremely important. It's important to make sure the reason someone is returning is clear. The second point is making it as convenient as possible. And in our case, I like to think about a parent holding a baby in one hand and then making sure the returns process is easy enough to do with one hand. If it's not, then it isn't easy enough." About UpChoose -- UpChoo...

"A circular economy represents the idea that in order to support the growing population of humans, as well as maintain some sort of natural integrity on earth, we need to completely remake the global economy in a number of ways. This could be wasting less and keeping products and materials in circulation longer or regenerating natural systems, and preferably all of the above. In general, it really...

"There are some core components of every EPR policy that we've seen popping up to date. One especially is that there are rules around the materials that can and can't be used. It's this idea of not just having to figure out the end of life, but you're thinking further upstream when you're designing your product and packaging and thinking about your materials preemptively." Find LimeLoop online at:...

"The fulfillment process is fairly straight forward. It’s reason built on top of reason built on top of reason and then you have to prepare yourself for the endless variables that come along in the business of shipping… However, it’s been very surprising that so much has changed in e-commerce over the last 15, 20, 25 years, but we’re very much doing fulfillment how we’ve done it 25 years ago. That...

"I think, actually, it's OK to make big purchases and have returns. I actually think it's better to make larger, batched purchases along with larger batched returns than to be doing it one-off all of the time. If you're constantly buying two and returning one, that's really bad in terms of the environmental impact you have. But, if you're buying 10 and returning five, the cost of that and the over...

Chantal Emmanuel, LimeLoop's Co-Founder and CTO, recently participated in SPC Advance in Atlanta where she spoke with experts in all areas of packaging, shipping and logistics. In this episode, we dig into what she heard, what she learned and what she thinks this means for both consumers and retailers in the years to come.

"At EON we believe every product will have an ID so that means your fast fashion and your luxury. That means your t-shirt that you wear a few times or your jacket, and the reason for that is the ID serves different purposes for different types of products and also has different functionality."   DISCLAIMER: Natasha and Chantal have been mutually following each other since 2018, sharing in eac...

“We live in a system that promotes disposability and waste so I don’t think that it’s fair to put individual guilt on people for trying to function in that system.” In this episode of Behind the Green, CEO and co-founder of Plaine Products, Lindsey McCoy talks reuse and the circular economy with host Chantal Emmanuel.

On this episode of Behind the Green, Co-founder and CTO, Chantal Emmanuel sits down with Gordon Seabury, CEO of Toad&Co, to discuss sustainability as a holistic business model - one Toad&Co's been operating under for 25 years - from operations to manufacturing to company culture and beyond.

What if shipping could change the world? LimeLoop believes it will. Behind the Green host, Christina Oliver, chats with LimeLoop's co-founder and CTO, Chantal Emmanuel about how LimeLoop plans to do just that, and how technology is just the right tool to get us there. Listen to the full episode now! And stay tuned for more Behind the Green.

Amazing conversation with Ali El Idrissi, Founder and CEO of UpChoose. We cover everything from new ways of thinking about retail and consumption, impact investing, the future of sustainability, and building a brand and business that puts the customer first.   For more information... www.upchoose.com  www.thelimeloop.com

In the first episode of Behind the Green, a podcast by LimeLoop, I sit down with LimeLoop Co-Founder & CEO, Ashley Etling. Just in time for the holiday shipping rush, we discuss outdated logistics systems, changing consumer behavior, and a world without single-use packaging. For more information, check out www.thelimeloop.com