Interview with Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainability on Green Saving 1/2

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Conscious Design. I'm Ian Peterman, your host, author of the book Conscious Design. And I'm excited today to have Shel Horowitz, owner of Going Beyond Sustainability, where he helps businesses to profitably address our biggest problems today. And his— he's the author of his latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, plus 9 other books, as well as being a speaker. Great to have you here.

Pleasure to be with you, Ian.

Yeah, so you do a lot. There's a lot here. You work in a field of sustainability, right? That's a, that's a huge undertaking. So how did you, how did you arrive here? What, what got you on the path to figuring out how to help businesses be profitable and sustainable?

And the highlights of a 50-year journey.

Perfect.

I really started— I became an activist at age 12 in 1969, the first time I went to a Vietnam War protest and discovered that the Vietnam War was an undeclared war, which I hadn't known. And everything I thought I knew about the American social and governmental system came crashing down around me, and I started questioning everything. And just as I was kind of getting into that, along came the first Earth Day in April 1970. So I was an early convert with that, and environmentalism has been a part of what I do ever since. I helped to defeat my first nuclear power plant in, I think it was 1971. The utility didn't try very hard, and we won easily enough that I began to wonder if there was more to this issue than met the surface. All we were talking about was thermal pollution. I did kind of a deep dive on that as part of a college paper a couple of years later, and I discovered My project was the pros and cons of nuclear power. There aren't any pros. It was all negative. It was all horrible. So I got very deeply involved in the safe energy movement. This would be 1977. I participated in the big Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant occupation that really catalyzed the modern U.S. safe energy movement. And that movement didn't exist when went into the site, and by the time we were released from the National Guard armories where we were taken after our arrests— 1,414 of us, by the way— there was a national movement that was there because of our efforts. And to me, that showed me that you never really know whether you're having an impact at the time, but sometimes you find out later that you had an enormous impact. And that's been very important for me going forward. So let's jump ahead. I Did a lot of safe energy work. I produced my first book on why nuclear power was not a good idea. That was right after Three Mile Island. Then I went out to write a bunch of marketing books. In 2000, I will just do a little show and tell here. You should be able to see behind that barn a mountain. Are you seeing it?

Yep.

Yeah.

Okay.

Skinner State Park, also known as Mount Holyoke, and that mountain, which is obviously very close to where I live. The mountain immediately next to it, a developer said, oh, I'm going to put 40 big McMansions going all the way up to the ridgeline. Would have ruined the view from the top of this mountain where people come from all over the Northeast to see it, and would have had many very bad environmental effects here in this neighborhood. And while all the experts were going, oh, this is terrible, there's nothing we can do, we went out and started a movement to stop it and got enormous public support, enormous media attention. And boom, in 13 months flat, that product was— that project was not going to happen. And, um, I, I knew we would win. I always had the mindset that we would win. And I think that's some of why we did win, is because of that mindset, because we didn't just wring our hands and say, this is terrible and there's nothing we could do. But I was not prepared for the speed with which we won. I thought it would take us 5 years.

Right, they usually don't take that long. They usually take way longer to get any—

To do this basically in just over a year shocked even me. And As the dust settled after that enormously successful campaign, which used everything I knew about marketing and everything I knew about organizing, I started thinking, okay, well, I've taken a lot of marketing lessons into this campaign. What are the lessons from the organizing side that I can take out into the business world?

Hmm.

And so that was right around the time— so we won in 2000, and by 2001, 2002, the newspapers were full of stories about Enron and Martha Stewart and WorldCom and all these other huge business scandals.

Yeah, I remember them.

Looking at business ethics as a driver of success. I figure, what would happen if we tell people to do the right thing and make money at it? And so once I started looking at that, it was a very easy shift to incorporate environmental justice and eventually larger social change issues such as ending hunger and poverty, converting war into peace, the, um, under— undermining racism and other isms, and to really look at what is the world we want to create, how can business be a partner on the path of getting there, and how can business make money doing that. And so that— here it is 20 years later now. I just keep going deeper with it.

All right, well, that's, that's an incredible journey to have. That's crazy to you at 12 have such a realization and then have Earth Day, the first Earth Day happen right after that. That is a combo that I— that is rare. Yeah.

And by then I was 13. There was also, I guess, one other factor is that I had experienced some direct instances of injustice that got me riled up. And because of those 2 events, that demonstration and then the Earth Day thing, I was in a framework where those slights to me, instead of my internalizing, like, I'm a terrible person or the world is a terrible I just thought, okay, well, this is something else that needs to change. And this is— it all fed into the larger narrative.

Right.

One kind of funny example is back then in New York City where I grew up, many of the movie theaters had adult sections and children's sections. And the day that I was charged the adult price and made to sit in the children's section was a huge slight to me. And like, well, you can't have it both ways. I started a one-person boycott of that movie theater that has continued for decades, never been back. Um, and but again, it was, it was one of the things that really kind of catalyzed my development into the person I grew up to be. Or maybe I haven't grown up yet. I don't know. I'm only 65.

All of us ever actually grow up. I think it's a constant to get there.

I want to be like my friend Frances Crow when I grow up. She died at 100. For her 100th birthday, She was asked what she wanted, and she said, I want 100 people with 100 signs for 100 causes marching through the streets of Northampton. So she got 300, and she couldn't wait around for the police escort, which was a little late in arriving. So she just told the person pushing her wheelchair to get the party started, and we took to the streets of Northampton. And the mayor of that city and our state senator ended up directing traffic because the police weren't there yet. And Frances couldn't be stopped. And she came actually, um, one of my immigration justice events. I'm part of a group that's done a lot of work on that, and we were doing a talkback that summer, a few months later. And the last time I saw her before she died was when she came to that event 2 weeks before she died. She was still an activist.

Wow, that's, that's very active. That's awesome. I, I hope that we can all do that. That would be great.

Yeah.

Well, so it sounds like, right, you have a lot of activism, you have a lot of realizing that there are things in this world that are not right, that there are things that need to be changed, there's things that can be improved. And then you started to synthesize that and, well, how does that apply to business, right? And a big thing Even today, companies that I talk to, startups I talk to, are convinced a lot of times that doing the right thing, right, being sustainable, being socially conscious, being nice to people is too expensive and nobody's willing to pay for it, or it's really hard to be profitable in that space. But it's just not, it's not true. It's absolutely becoming less and less true. I mean, there's definitely points where I could point to materials. It's like, yeah, yeah, your material cost is higher, of course. And but even now, like, those are— we're getting more and more materials. I had an interview with a company out of Mexico who's making leather out of cactus.

Oh, wow.

Basically, cactus takes nothing. They go to Mexico where it's basically a weed. So they found one of the most weed-like, commonly growing, takes very little irrigation, uh, you know, and it just grows and they process it into leather. And so that, that's when you look at the actual cost of it, right, versus, you know, in energy and water, it's actually less. It's way less. Yeah.

The marketer in me immediately says, okay, I don't know the name of this company, but have you thought about going after the vegan market? Vegans like to look cool and they don't wear leather.

They market it, they market it as vegan leather. They do. They do. Yeah. Desserto is their name. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's amazing. So then, and there's just one, right? There's just one that I've, I happen to have been connected to. And so with that—

I tell a lot of, a lot of success stories about companies that are doing the right thing. Uh, one that I love to tell is Greyston Bakery. Uh, in Yonkers, New York. You've probably eaten their stuff if you've ever had a Ben Jerry's pint that had brownies in it.

I do love Ben Jerry's brownies.

Okay, well, they're actually Greyston Bakery's brownies. Hard to say that word. And they have the best hiring policy I've ever run across, okay, for line jobs. I mean, obviously for executives they're going to do it differently, but I think they actually hire a lot of executives from line workers after they've been there a few years. But here's their job policy. It's like you say you want a job at Greyston, fine, put your name on this list. It'll probably be about 6 months, you'll get a call from us and we'll say, do you still want that job? It's yours if you want it. You're next on the list. And it doesn't matter if you're an ex-felon, ex-mental patient, ex-homeless, or I think even currently homeless. If you're next on the list, you get offered a job and you get offered the support you need to make that job work. So they are taking unemployable people and making them employable and employed. They are promoting self-worth in these people's identities. They are promoting a team-based effort in which who you are in community is more important than who you've been in isolation. And it's so successful financially that they are now being hired by other companies to teach them how to do this.

That's amazing.

Because the HR costs go like this. They just explode to the bottom. There's no cost involved in the process anymore. There's only the cost of the training and help that people need to succeed. And they're at this point, they've been doing this so long that they're really good at that. And that doesn't add a lot to their cost and doesn't nearly make up for the savings, those extra costs. And their slogan is, we don't hire people to bake brownies, we bake brownies. to hire people. And so that's one fabulous example. Another that I love is a company called d.light, lowercase, all letters, d-period, light, L-I-G-H-T. They do solar-powered LED lamps that replace typically kerosene. Ian, I don't know if you know anything about kerosene. Kerosene is nasty stuff. First, it's a fossil fuel, so it's polluting, and you have to dig it up.

Yeah.

And the mining and extraction and processing and all that is a huge environmental cost. It's also highly toxic. So the people using it, if they're in a poorly ventilated space, are poisoning themselves. It's highly flammable. So people actually die because they're using kerosene lamps. And so they replaced it with—

I didn't think anyone would use that anymore.

Well, in the United States, it's not common, but you go to someplace like Rwanda or Bangladesh, you're going to find that a lot of people, if they're not burning kerosene, they're burning cow dung. So this is a— you're looking at the world through a Western first-world lens, and this company is looking at a much wider lens.

Right.

So they work globally. They work all over Asia, Africa, I think South America also. And, you know, so what are they doing? They're— first of all, they're saying to the people who are buying these lamps, okay, you're paying $2 a month for kerosene, and that's 10% of your monthly income. What if we took the next 10 payments you're going to make and you buy a lamp with it? You get the lamp after the first payment. So you have the light, you have the benefits, you have the savings on kerosene. And then after 10 months, you own the thing free and clear. And all of a sudden, you are 10% richer at the end of the month. And all of a sudden, you are not breathing toxic fumes. You're not worried about setting your hut on fire. You are providing good light enough so that your children can get better grades on their homework and eventually better jobs. And so that you perhaps after your day in the fields, maybe you can start a little cottage craft industry where before you couldn't see well enough at night to do that. And lo and behold, you've created a ladder up out of poverty with this $20 lamp that's also much greener and is providing jobs to the people who are selling and servicing them, and et cetera, et cetera. So it's like many of the things I advocate, it's a multiple win. And that's one of the secrets, I think, in discovering where your jam is going to be, is you look for where is the multiple win? Where can I make great impact in the world and a great profit and help the local economy? And on and on and on it goes. One of my heroes, Amory Lovins, I profile him in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, talks about the the multifunctionality of one arch in his house that does 12 different things. So engineering this holistic way— and I'm not just talking about product engineering, I'm talking about engineering societies— you come away with much, much bigger results. Um, you start looking at things like biomimicry. I imagine you've had at least one person talking about biomimicry on this design podcast that you do.

Oh, I love it. I actually took classes in college specifically around I took all the ones that they had, which were like 3 at the time, cuz it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't super popular.

Uh, for those who, who missed Ian's previous podcasts on biomimicry, the idea is that Mother Nature is our chief engineer and we look to her for guidance because she has solved whatever the problem is. Uh, whether it's creating something in India that can survive 11 months of drought and 1 month of flooding in the monsoon, or whether it's creating a creature like the gecko that can walk on your ceiling and not fall down. Um, or whether it's—

Built a grabbing— we built a robotic grabbing arm based on gecko feet. Cool.

Yeah, there's a group called Geckskin that was based out of UMass that did a lot of really cool biomimicry research on the gecko. So it's, it's a whole way, a different way of looking at the world, a much more holistic way and a much more successful way, because you're not fighting against the forces of nature. You know, the reality is Gaia will be fine. Mother Nature is going to survive whatever we throw at it, but it might not survive in a form that is conducive to human life. Whatever adaptations the planet is going to make, they're not going to be so concerned about this one species here that's causing the problem in the first place. So it's in our own self-interest to solve that problem before Gaia gets really pissy with us and throws us out.

Yeah, well, I would say more because Storms are increasing, global temperature is increasing. It's— we need to, we need to adjust what we're doing quicker than we are and hope that it doesn't keep going.

And we have the skills and knowledge. That's the frustrating thing is we know how to do this stuff already. I just talked about a couple of examples. There's thousands more examples, great success stories of people reinventing the way they do things. Interface carpet is another wonderful This was founded by a man named Ray Anderson in the '50s. He died several years ago, but in his last, I'd say, 20 years, he got converted to the green gospel, if you will, and he made Interface an extremely sustainable company. They, among other things, some of their tiles are made with raw materials that are collected from the ocean as used and fish trapping nets. And fish-killing nets, nylon nets. They're recapturing these from the oceans, reducing ocean waste, and turning them floor tile. They also pioneered the modular tile where if you have a high-traffic area where people are wearing out the tiles, you take those 3 or 4 tiles that are in that row and you pull them out, you put in new ones, and you don't have to pull up the whole floor like you do with a conventional rug.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah, so he spent a lot of time and energy in his last years working with other businesses to show them what's possible, and it's all low-hanging hanging fruit. I mean, that's the thing we talked earlier about. This stuff is too expensive is people's belief. And the reality is it's often, if not cheaper, at least as cheap as the conventional way. And more and more it's cheaper because the energy costs you save, the waste disposal costs you save by repurposing your waste into somebody else's raw ingredient, the improvement in morale when people see that their work is getting done faster and more easily, productivity goes up.

It's everywhere.

you look, there's low-hanging fruit to pluck. And many companies now have at least looked at the energy piece, but that's only the first piece. I work with a guy actually who saves people on their waste disposal costs, and he gets paid a commission of the savings. So like, why wouldn't a company go to him if it's only going to cost them a portion of the money they're saving and nothing upfront? What do they have to lose? If they don't like what he does, they reject his recommendations. If his recommendations don't work, they don't have to pay him. So, um, I, I've not heard of any company yet that wasn't ultimately very happy to pay his bill, because if they save $500,000 and they pay him $50,000, they're fine with it.

Right. Well, and it, it's so— like you said, there's so many low-hanging fruit, and it's something that It's when you actually look at the real cost, and I've had this conversation before, what's the real cost of a material? And when you look at, you know, making new plastics, for example, well, there's, there's all the cost of pulling up the petroleum from the ground, right? You got to pull it up, you got to move it around, then you have all the processing. And when you look at it, even if, even if you have a highly recyclable plastic that you use 10 times, It's just not that great. It's not— it ultimately isn't there. And there's a lot of materials that are, you know, basically oil subsidized. They're not— you're not actually paying the real cost because we—

Because the government subsidizes the oil industry, which in turn undermines the— not undermines, undergirds the plastics industry. There's some very interesting stuff going around with plant-based plastics. I'm not entirely sure that that's the whole solution, but there's also great stuff going on with things like using alternative materials such as bamboo. The nice thing about bamboo is you don't have to kill the tree to use it. You just trim it back and it grows really fast, and it's considered a problem plant in some areas, so why not harness it? And And it's, it's, it's the, the, I don't own many bamboo products, but I've got a couple of cutting boards and some other things and they're really nice to work with. They feel good in your hands.

Yeah. Bamboo's a great option. And ever since the US made it so that you could legally grow hemp for industrial purposes, that, that plant has amazing uses. I'm, I'm working, working with a startup, Odin Materials, that we're We're working on making lumber out of it.

Also, there's a company called Hempcrete that makes hemp-based concrete that is way better than the conventional concrete. And as far as plastics go, why the heck aren't we mining the landfills? Why aren't we mining the Pacific Garbage Gyre? Rather than going out and making new oil wells to make virgin raw materials for this, why don't we use what we have? Nature uses stuff over and over and over again. And the designers like John Todd that really understand this and who build step-by-step, massively complicated, Rube Goldberg-esque 27 steps to get from where they start in the cycle to back to where they start in the cycle. Like, he was involved with a project called the Intervale that I talk about in the book, where there's a beer brewery And then they have spent grain waste that is used to, I think, raise a tilapia crop. And then there's greens in there, and it just keeps cycling and cycling, cycling. Everything that they're done with becomes an input for the next process.

Yeah.

And you have this series of integrated businesses that are cheaper to run and better for the earth and usually more profitable. And if their marketers are good, then they understand how to really tap into what they're doing as a marketing benefit. Not all companies figure that out easily.

No.

There's one— I forget where you're based, but here in the Northeast US, there's a paper company called Markel. They do household paper products, toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, stuff like that. They switched to recycling, to recycled paper for their products. I'll let you guess the year. It's a while ago. 90. 1950.

Wow.

I was minus 6. Wow. But they didn't tell anybody. They didn't tell anybody until somewhere in the early 2000s when somebody figured out that there might actually be a marketing benefit to say, hey, we went recycled before you were born and we're still recycled. I got to tour their plant when So it was a lot of fun to see New York City junk mail being turned into toilet paper.

That's amazing. That's so crazy. I'm— and there's— I've heard other examples of that where there's, you know, it's, it's more of out of necessity or because it was cheaper. Somebody said, oh, why don't we reuse this? Why don't we use this waste from over here and combine it with waste? And it was— it's just kind of a thought process, right? And no, Not everyone thinks about that being special, or, you know, it shouldn't even be special, right? I mean, it should be, it should be common.

It should be, but a lot of people don't know. That's one of the things I do in my consulting is I look at a company and say, okay, this is what you're doing over here. This is how you could repurpose this product. This is maybe what you could do with the leftovers. And to just go in with a more A, systemic, and B, yes, we can approach.

Right.

I do think mindset has a lot to do with this. When we saved that mountain, it was all about mindset. It was all about not giving in to the terrible, nothing we can do, and saying, of course we're going to win. We just don't know which of the 30 or so strategies we're using right now is going to be the right one. And maybe they were in combination because the one that did win it for us would not have happened without the massive media outreach that I was mostly in charge of. Right. And, uh, was not a strategy I could have ever predicted and was not something I even knew about until right before the deal closed. It was something our, our legal committee was working on. They just kept saying, trust us, we're going to win this one and we can't tell you how yet. And, uh, what, what happened actually is that a philanthropist read about us in the local press, heard us on the local radio stations, got inspired to go buy the land and make a present of it to the state. I mean, we were already going to win anyway. At the time that that happened, the project had gone from 40 to 32 houses down all the way to 12. The developer just kept scaling back in the hope of neutralizing the opposition. If he had gotten to 2 at the bottom, I would have said, okay, that's appropriate for the site, I'm withdrawing my, my opposition. But before that, this other thing came up and he lost the ability to get that land. Wow.

That's, that's awesome. That's amazing. And mindset is so important too. Like, I've, I've talked to a few people on this podcast specifically about mindset and how you approach and, you know, things like your emotional IQ thing. You know, it's, it's not just, you know, the paper company, for example, they've been doing something great for 50 years, but If nobody knows about it and you don't know how to share it or communicate it in the right way, it's hard to get support.

Yeah, they actually went bankrupt then, and it was the turnaround CEO they brought in to save the company after the bankruptcy who said, let's turn this thing we've been doing for, at the time, 50 years into an asset. And then they became the biggest, I think the biggest recycled paper household paper products company in the country, even though they're a regional company, unlike, say, Seventh Generation, which is national.

Right. Well, I mean, if you've been doing it for so long, you have everything in place. It's already— there's nothing— you don't have to do any extra work to just keep, keep doing it. You just got to promote it properly.