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

So when you, when you work with companies, are there kind of any specific areas that you look at first? You know, if somebody is like, hey, I want to, I want to look at myself a little bit, like what are, what are like your top areas where you go, usually there's something to fix here?

Yeah. First of all, I will look at the sort of overall operations. If there's something that's obvious to me as a really non-technical person, often the technical people are too wired into what they're doing to notice.

Right.

So I will look and say, you know, what would happen if you did this instead? Then I will look at what are they marketing now? Who are they marketing it to? First question I often ask is, who else might we be marketing this to? And have you thought about taking this product and with a slight bit of repurposing and repackaging, maybe it would appeal to this other group over here. And there are so many examples of how companies have succeeded. I mean, Post-it notes, they were not designed for the way we use them now. They were designed for something totally different. Just Velcro was designed to be used in space, not necessarily for the 8-year-old kid who doesn't know how to tie their shoes.

Right. Yes.

So, new audiences, bringing yogurt or tofu into mainstream grocery stores. We take it for granted now, but we sure didn't in the '70s when I was a teenager.

Yeah.

So, that's one thing. And then, how could we modify this product, maybe, to make it, A, greener, B, to build in some social change components to address those things like hunger, poverty, racism, climate change, war? And it's also making those connections like, OK, you've probably noticed that green talk has gone way down since the war in Ukraine started.

Yes.

Whereas really, we need to up that chatter. We need to say, OK, this is what happens when the world is dependent on fossil fuel sources and governments in foreign lands that we don't control. Let's get off that treadmill. This is a great opportunity. Let's get Ukraine off that treadmill right now. Let's do some massive importations of solar and wind. Let's get their infrastructure up and running. without that Russian oil, and then Putin can go crawl back into his cave without having conquered the country. Instead, we're seeing some people really driving the discussion of, oh, we need to get rid of the environmental regulations, we need to encourage more oil production, all that stuff. And I say no, no, no. We missed an opportunity after the big hurricanes a few years ago. Puerto Rico was perfectly posed to become one of the first economies to be really completely alternative energy driven. Unfortunately, they're still using mostly diesel there. Some progress was made in the rebuild, but there could have been much, much more. We, as people who believe in this stuff and who have a background in marketing, need to figure out how to aggressively get these arguments in front of government officials. We've not been that great about that so far. But we also— the private sector can be our secret weapon because If we can get the business owners on our side and say, this is what we need to do to make money and survive in this economy. And it does happen. Even the US Department of Defense is actually very, very conscious about its energy spend and how to reduce it.

Oh, the Defense Department is very aware of rising water levels. They're actually one of the most aware of climate change in any government— section of our government. because they have projected out how much it's going to take to repair or maintain military bases as water level, just on an ocean water level rise, right? They've put the money into figuring out, well, what's the impact to them?

We should really harness that strategic resource as something that the corporate world can use going forward. They have done all these studies. My friend Michael Clare wrote a book about the US military and its very forward-thinking approach on climate change. I don't remember the name. All Hell Breaking Loose, maybe? Anyway, his name is Michael Clare, and the book came out at the end of 2019. It was one of the last events I went to before the pandemic, was one of his book launch readings. And, you know, again, the stuff is out there, and that's a resource that we are not tapping. is all the strategic thinking that has gone on in the centers of power in places well outside the corporate world.

Right.

So it's very individual. One of the issues with what I do is it doesn't scale well because each company is different, just like each site on the planet is going to be different. And the environmental solutions that work in that place in India that's got 11 months of arid and 1 month of flood are not going to be the same as those that will work here where I live, where we have steady rain and sun mixed all year round. And we're in a temperate climate, they're in subtropical, and on and on it goes. So this, in the same way, the solution for one company is not necessarily going to be the same solution as even another company in the same industry.

Well, I think, I think the, the, the common solution, right, and this is why I wrote a book on Conscious Design is that there is a thinking process that you can apply to it. And the actual application, like you said, yeah, what works in Saudi Arabia is not going to work in India, not going to work in the UK, and definitely not working in Canada. Like it's just, you can't make a one-size-fits-all to everywhere in the world, but there is design thinking that you can apply to how do you approach the problem? How do you think about it? And the other piece too, I think is really like you're saying, the marketing part of making people aware, because like I said, I have conversations with people that think it's still expensive, too expensive to be sustainable, right? It's, it's still getting it out there to make people even aware of all the options. And there's more and more. I mean, there's— We try to keep up on materials because that's what we work on, tangible products. So we try to, And I say try to because realistically I can't. It's not—

It's such a moving target, of course.

My team and I, we cannot keep up. We find new ones all the time. Yeah. And we know that we're missing something. Like, there's no, there's no way we're, we're understanding and knowing every single material that's coming out that is sustainable, that is making a positive, that's really doing a great job of replacing, you know, petroleum-based materials and other things like that.

So it's I've got a one-word response, um, to the people who say it's too expensive, it's too hard to go green. Can you name the largest retailer in the United States that has stores, physical stores, as their basis of operations?

I'll say Walmart.

You are right. Now Walmart is about the stereotypical example of the profit-driven company, non-tree huggers. Everything they do is bottom-line oriented. Walmart is so amazingly green. People don't know this, but the reason that Walmart is so amazingly green is because they are making and saving a shit ton of money. I mean, oh my gosh. They actually sell— the last time I checked, and the statistic is some years old, I might have to go and update it— but the last time I looked, Walmart actually sold more organic food Wow. And they're selling it to people who ain't never going to go in a Whole Foods in their lives. People who see Whole Foods as elitist and not about them and selling to granola kids and not relevant. And also as very, very expensive. And they're certainly correct on that. So Walmart comes in and sells organic food to your working-class truck drivers and janitors and bus drivers and people like that. And they sell it to them for half or two-thirds of the price that they pay in Whole Foods. And they're making enormous amounts of money doing it. And what they have saved by looking at their own energy consumption is enough to run a small country. It's just— and they're really, they're extremely good at logistics. So, they monitor all this stuff right down to the penny. And it's phenomenal. They had a CEO, Lee Scott, maybe about 10 years ago, who initiated a lot of this stuff. I think they've probably backslid a little since he stepped down. But you cannot make a better business case for that than Walmart, a company that my lefty friends are always protesting against their greedy profit-driven operations. Walmart has chosen to go green because it's a way of contributing to those profits.

Yeah.

And they don't talk about it much, but other people talk about them. I mean, I don't shop at Walmart, but I certainly brag on them in Venues like this.

Yeah, it— yeah, they're— it's kind of interesting, right? Because they're— they don't market themselves in any way as being sustainable. You know, that, that's just not how they market. But it is. I think I didn't know it was, it was that much. I— but I did read, I think it was something that they were one of the biggest— yeah, because by location that they've replaced all their light bulbs.

Yeah.

LED. And that was like a huge— when it happened, it like created a news wave, but then people all forgot that they did it because they just in one month or whatever, just like, here, we're— all locations are swapping. Done.

Years ago, I wrote up a cost analysis for one of my newsletters about switching to LEDs in a high roof building like a supermarket. And I said, if you are replacing just 50 bulbs a year at Walnut Mart, of course, would be replacing a far larger number. It came out, and this was back when LED lights were like $10 apiece. Now they're a dollar and they last forever. I mean, I changed over to LEDs in my kitchen when we redid it in 2013. I don't think I've had to change a light bulb in there since then. So that's 9 years.

Yeah, it's been 9, 10 years. I haven't changed mine either.

And I said the real money in this is, and again, it's looking at those lifecycle costs, those whole process costs, is not the light bulb for $10. The real cost is the guy who's making $50 an hour to go out and bring the cherry picker up and, and raise the boom up to the ceiling and get up on the platform and change the light bulb. And for every light bulb that you're changing, if it takes him, let's say, 20 minutes to do the whole process, that's a third of an hour. So right there, you've paid for the cost of the light bulb, even when it was $10 and not $1. So now, of course, so now that it's a dollar and they're buying it wholesale, so they're probably paying 37 cents a light bulb or something like that. You know, it's unbelievably cheap, and they save a gazillion hours of labor. They save wear and tear on their, their forklifts and their cherry-picking trucks, and it's just a total win. And that would work for somebody who owns a sports stadium, any kind of building with a high roof, any kind of building where you can't just get on a stepladder to change the light bulb.

Right.

But you have to look systemically to see this.

Yeah, well, and that's a great point. I hadn't thought about the fact that those are so high up. You have— you can't just use a ladder, right? You're not pulling out— there's no ladder.

Ladders around, right?

Right. So those are— and that's huge. And that's something that's like— I keep— I've seen, you know, there's buildings that I walk by that still have giant fluorescent tubes. And I just know, I know from experience, those are not exactly the most efficient lighting possible. And it's just kind of crazy how much non-LED lighting—

Yeah.

Still have because it's cheaper.

Yeah. And the fluorescent lights were put in as an energy-saving measure because they were way more efficient than the incandescent bulbs, but they were also horrible to work under. They were not a good quality light. The LED now, the light's really good. It's comfortable to be under it. It's, uh, it's, it's really very pleasant.

Yeah. And that, and that's something I've talked to a couple architects on this, like the whole design, because when you, when you swap out, right, energy, it could be more energy efficient, but incandescent bulbs were nicer to work under. They're nicer to, to live under. So there's also like the social kind of human impact of the lighting, right? It's, it's now, and with LEDs now there's, you know, different, there's warmer colors. It's not just the flickering. Bright strobe lights.

I think they actually feel a little bit better because they don't go up and down as much as incandescent lights.

Right.

You know, when the person in the next office starts some large piece of equipment, you don't see your light shrink down by 50% and then pop back on.

Right. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. It was crazy.

Yeah. But, you know, for me as a marketer, it's also important to tell people stories in a way that makes people want to do business with them.

Right.

And that's another thing that many good companies that are doing good things are very poor at. It's kind of amazing to me. Um, and I always talk about the 3 different kinds of people you can market green and social change products and services to. And they're the deep greens like me, you know, where I, I make my decisions to a large degree on the environmental and social calculus What I'm buying and where I'm buying it and from whom and how I'm going to use it and whether I need it at all or can get something on Buy Nothing or can share one with somebody who already has it and all these things going into that calculus. Then there are the lazy greens, people like my mother-in-law. I stayed at her house in New York when I went to tour the Markal plant, and when she found out what I was doing there, she's like, in her Queens accent, I always buy Marquel because it's recycled. Now, she is a lazy green. She doesn't always buy it because it's recycled. She always buys it because it's not only recycled, but it's next to the Scott and the other brands on the shelf in the supermarket she's already in. She's not going to go out of her way for it, but if it's right in front of her, oh boy, they're recycled. And, uh, I, I told that story to Marquel when I got there. They sent her a big tote bag full of their stuff as a thank you.

I love it.

And then there are the non-greens or even the green hostiles. And you can win them over, but you can't win them over by saying, buy me because I'm green. They hate that argument. They're ready to come out there with you and chop you down. But this toilet paper is as soft as it is because we use recycled paper that's already nice and soft. Or this Hempcrete is so durable and so— and breathes so much better because it's made with natural hemp instead of whatever it is they used to make traditional concrete. I don't even know what that is. Um, you know, you stress in this case the benefits of the feature, and then you explain that the feature is because it's green. And eventually you get to move some of those people from the hostile to the non-green, from the non-green to the lazy green. And maybe even eventually they get so into it that they start shopping at food co-ops and growing their vegetables organically, and they move into the deep green. Now, that may take a while, but I'm a believer in the power of personal change, and I'm a believer in the power of each one of us to make changes that influence the world. The trick is that that change works much, much more effectively when we combine our efforts with others. And that's why on the activist side, I'm still an activist.

Right. Well, it's— I just did an interview with someone talking about Talking about that, and that people— one of the things that seems to be shifting now is the idea that people can make a difference with their own actions. Because for a long time, it was kind of a, well, I'm just one person in a, you know, huge sea of massive things. Like, I can't change oil industry by myself, and there's— it's not even next door, right? And so there seems to be a bigger shift now. And even in companies that are starting up, people are realizing that they can actually make a difference. And, you know, that, that when we all act together, we can make things happen pretty quickly.

And Yeah.

I use the— us shutting down basically the world economy in a matter of weeks with COVID Like, that's it. That was a large concerted effort that took most of our entire world population to agree on something and follow at the same time in sync. Like, that didn't— it didn't just happen because one person said so. Like, that's, that's not how it worked.

And it made a huge difference.

I think it broke people a little bit and made people realize, oh, wait a minute, we can't— look what, look what we did. What else can we do now?

Yeah, I did a book proposal. I never got to write the book because I didn't want to self-publish this one and nobody else wanted it called Leveraging the Great Pivot. It was about making that transformation deeper and going into the world we want to live in, as opposed to the world we had to live in in an emergency because the world we were in stopped working very suddenly. The point of whether an individual can make a difference, let's take a few examples. Okay, let's start with a 16-year-old autistic kid named Greta Thunberg, you know, who stood in front of the Swedish Parliament by herself for a really long time, and then all of a sudden sparked a national youth climate movement, international youth climate movement that went global very quickly. And who knew? And I have my issues with some of Greta's positions. She's much more pessimistic than I am, and much more like, oh, we can't actually change this, it's too late. And I think we still have time, although we've putzed around on it for 20 years and we should have been using that time much more efficiently than we have to actually solve the problems. But we're still not at the end of the world yet. And I think Greta thinks we are. But, you know, nobody could say she didn't make a difference. She was 11 when she became an advocate for girls' education in Pakistan. I think she was 15 when she was shot and almost killed. And 19, maybe, when she won the Nobel Peace Prize. That sounds right.

Yeah.

So between people like that and people like my friend Frances at the other end of the lifespan, the 100-year-old activist I talked about earlier, and she's not the only one I know in that age group who does stuff like that. You know, we have— the lucky ones of us have 10 decades to make a difference.

Right.

And we can always make a difference. So people like Lois Gibbs in upstate New York near Niagara Falls, she started a national movement around toxic wastes because her area, Love Canal, was heavily polluted. Nobody— I'm sure people told her, oh, you can't do this, you can't change City Hall, you can't fight the big corporations. She just said, well, to hell with it, I'm just gonna go out and do it anyway. You see, okay, there, there was a man who was serving a life sentence in prison who became the leader of a free South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Could anybody have predicted in the early '60s when he had just been sent to rot the rest of his life behind bars that he was going to become an internationally respected leader who was going to change the idea of what is possible in areas where you have had deep, deep racial conflict? I mean, nobody would have predicted it.

Only he predicted it.

I don't think he could have predicted it because he needed to find some other pieces of what made his brain tick as he aged. And, and he had plenty of time to reflect and think about it. Um, but, you know, he could have come out of that experience really angry, embittered, ready to pick up guns and, uh, conduct mass executions of the people who had abused not just him but his entire people for decades. And instead, he came out with this light-filled concept of truth and reconciliation.

Right.

So, all of us world changers are ultimately ordinary people. I mean, I'm a guy sitting here in a farmhouse in rural Massachusetts, and I saved that mount. I did it with a lot of help. You know, I didn't do it alone, but I was the one who said, no, you're not going to do that over there.

Right.

Yeah. And someone had to do it, and it was me. And I was not in a leadership role, but, you know, I was part of that Seabrook occupation. I had no idea. I reflected on this actually 40 years after. I wrote a series of 5 blog posts on the Seabrook occupation and how we changed things, and how, among other things, when Three Mile Island happened 2 years later, We actually heard about it. There were several other very scary nuclear near misses, accidents that did not actually take out a huge chunk of the land the way Chernobyl— yeah, Chernobyl did. And we didn't hear about them. You have to be a nuclear researcher to know about Browns Ferry, Alabama, or Enrico Fermi in Michigan, or Windscale in Britain. Nobody heard about them. But after Three Mile Island, the media— after, sorry, Seabrook, the media started paying attention. And when Three Mile Island happened, and then Chernobyl, and then Fukushima, the world got told.

Right.

So we had no idea when we were being arrested that day that we were going to change the entire way that the world related to nuclear power. We just knew that this was an evil thing and we had to do our best to try to make it people aware and to try to stop it. Ironically, that plant did go online. It may have been the last nuclear power plant to go online in the United States. So we lost the battle, but we won the war.

Right. Well, that's—

Um, you just went mute.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

There's so much that people can do.

I'm sorry, I lost your sound again. You mentioned that that microphone might be funky. It might be time to try the other one.

Yep. Can you hear me now?

Yeah.

Okay, perfect. Yep, switching— switched it now. Um, so there, there's a lot here, right? That I think the overarching conversation really is, you know, you can do something sustainable. It's possible and it's profitable. And even as an individual, there's things that you can do. And, and I, I think it's really important that we, we help to banish that idea of, I can't do anything, I can't make a sustainable And profitable business that can't make a difference at all. And it's great, you've been, you've been doing this for a long time consulting with companies, and, you know, looking forward, you seem more of an optimist than Greta. So, Yeah. And I am too. I think that it's— we're not at the end of the rope. We have time. I think it will get worse before it gets better. And those, those projections are, are pretty accurate, it would seem. But I think we can still make the shifts like you're talking about. And yeah, actually—

The shift to sustainable isn't enough. I prefer the word regenerative. Sustainable is keeping things where they are, keeping them from getting worse. Regenerative is making them better. So the optimist in me says, well, for the same effort, why don't we be regenerative instead of sustainable?

Yeah, and that's, that's something that— there's a company called Epic Provisions that they, they grow meat products. And you'd think, oh, you can't, you can't possibly have a meat product. They're actually carbon negative or carbon neutral because they do regenerative farming. They do— they take land that nobody wants and nobody can grow on, and they turn it into pasture, and they raise animals And grow everything all in a correct ecosystem. They don't, they don't plaster down all kinds of pesticides and stuff there. They're 100% natural there, and they are able to produce, you know, meat products without all of the footprint that other places do. And so that's, that's just one example. There's, there's so much you can do, especially with land use. That is regenerative, that makes— I've seen— I forget the farming technique, but they basically start to reclaim desert that has aired out, and there's ways to irrigate it and bring back vegetation in places that have lost it because it got used up.

And you start by planting plants that are very, very drought tolerant, that don't need a huge amount of water.

Right.

And then as those start to infill and deposit their carbon, um, into the soil, and you, you really see in— it's amazing within, you know, we have to think of these things in geologic time, and yet in a decade you can completely reclaim a landscape. I'm actually reading a book now called Paradise Lot, which is about creating a permaculture farm in a one 10th of an acre lot in a very urban, very underprivileged community not far from here. And I have visited this place. It's amazing. You sit under a pawpaw tree eating the fruit that you just collected, looking at this amazing garden that it's everywhere you look there are plants except for a couple of pathways they've kept clear to get to the plants. And it's incredibly exciting. Even an organic farmer I know once told me, oh, if you don't have 10 acres, don't even bother farming. And here's this guy doing 1/10 of an acre, so 1/100 of my organic farming friends' minimum, and doing very well with it. And making it into an educational product as well, you know, having the local kids who are largely Puerto Rican American coming in to experience this and to discover things that they can grow in their yards. And it's really propagating out. from this one tiny little parcel. And now he's done some books and he's done, you know, some speaking, and it's just wonderful to watch that. And I found this totally by accident because a friend of my younger child happened to be renting from him and invited us to a party.

Nice, that's awesome. Yeah, I learned about permaculture from my wife because she has some friends that are huge into. That's what, what they do. And it's amazing. It's amazing what you can do with it. Uh, and yeah, as small— it's not about the size of your land. It's how you— it's really how you grow. And there's— it's a whole— it's a whole science. We have a whole episode talking about just permaculture.

So to reclaim, to reclaim soil that is severely damaged, you know, you can do that in a decade. And, and to reclaim soil that's In reasonably good shape, it's only a year or two, and then you have just something much richer growing organically.

Right.

And growing, you know, there are other expansions on organic such as biodynamic, and there's, there's many, many different ways to do this. Uh, my— the bit you saw before that I live on a working dairy farm. My neighbors switched a couple of years ago to no-till, and their old plows are sitting there rusting, and they are They use a system that just pokes holes in the ground but doesn't actually till it, uh, to put in for the hay and the corn. And yeah, again, this is a non-organic, uh, commercial dairy business, and they saw the economics there were working to do that, even though they had spent probably a fairly pretty penny on those plows not all that long before.

Right. Well, that's, that's amazing. And that, that just goes to prove the point of, you know, There are better options and they do make more money at the same time.

I'm really good at helping companies figure that out. And that's, it's really kind of exciting to do that, just to see the profit opportunities that they've missed in what they're doing anyway, or what they can tweak in very small ways to make a much bigger impact. And that impact on the world can be through profitable products and services and not just through their philanthropy. Philanthropy is good, but philanthropy gets cut when you get economic squeezes.

Right. Yes, yes, it does.

Profitable innovations that happen to make the world better don't get cut. They survive the bad times.

Right. Well, this has been— this has been a really great conversation, and I think it's a great point, you know, coming back to what, what you're doing. And for Anybody that's wanting to get a hold of you, work with you, get more profitable with their existing business, where are best places to find, find you and get a hold of you?

Well, the first place to go is goingbeyondsustainability.com. And actually, if you go to that website and then put in /freebies, I have a number of gifts for your listeners. And one of those gifts is that the normal 15-minute free consultation I would give gets expanded to 30 minutes.

Oh, perfect.

And that's— I'm very reasonably priced for the kind of consulting I do. For small businesses, it's only $195 an hour, but that gives you half an hour for free. So that's often enough time to at least figure out kind of an operating strategy that'll help you move on the road. And of course, I can help you move down that road much more specifically. Either myself or the experts that I work with who have the skills in areas where I don't, such as the waste control guy I mentioned earlier who gets paid only on a percentage of what he saves people. So that's the best way. My phone number is 413-586-2388. That is a landline. I don't give my cell number out without a good reason.

Same.

Um, uh, prefer that you call between 8 AM and 10 PM Eastern, uh, US Eastern time. And, um, my email is S-H-E-L, my first name, S-H-E-L, shell@greenandprofitable.com. And I would love to hear from people, and especially those who think that they might be able to do more with what they're already doing in this area of making a difference on hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change, racism, othering, all the rest of it. And the exciting thing is, is that people feel so good about themselves when they change their businesses to do that. So the 2 major audiences that I think should be interested in what I do are, number one, if you have a kind of traditional business and you'd like to incorporate more social and environmental good into it, Or if you're already doing an environmental social good business, but you haven't quite figured out the business part of it, which is true of a lot of, you know, people. Oh, I've got this great idea. And for every Ben and Jerry who come in without any experience whatsoever and managed to succeed, there are millions of carcasses along the side of the road where people really didn't know what they were doing and got in over their heads and couldn't make it work. So I try to help people avoid that and instead create a profitable business from the get-go that is really grounded in the environmental and social improvements.

Perfect. Well, yeah, those, those people need the most help because they have, they have the good, good ideas to help, actually help people, and need to be profitable so they can keep doing that. Because nobody— it's really hard to help people if you're broke and alone. So that, that, that's definitely an area to focus on. So, well, I just—

if I could spend like another 30 seconds.

Absolutely.

Of giving a demonstration of how this worked. I had an interviewer like you ask me one time, well, okay, this sounds well and good. What would you do for a pizza shop owner? And I started sketching out without any forethought. I had no idea he was going to ask me this. I had never thought about the question before. Well, okay, so pizza shops are really slow on Mondays and Tuesdays. And here's this high school around the corner from the pizza shop, and maybe they've got a lot of kids who are kind of economically marginalized and don't have good career paths ahead of them. Why not hire some of those kids to, A, grow organic tomatoes, B, learn how to make good pizzas, and C, market these to their peers in the high school saying Monday's pizza day, we'll take your orders on Friday, we'll bring the slices in on Monday. And the shop owner wins because He or she has a revenue stream on that dead day. The kids win because they get training and skills that they can use on their resumes and in their careers later. The other kids benefit because they're getting a healthy, nutritious, and yummy pizza alternative to the school lunches, which, as we all survived them somehow, but I don't know anybody who really takes great joy in eating a cafeteria lunch. So you've got a lot of winners with this.

Right.

And really no losers except maybe the revenues for the ongoing lunch program in the cafeteria, but maybe it inspires them to make their menu more interesting and more— and maybe even bring in some student helpers and on and on it goes and you keep spiraling it up.

Maybe they end up hiring the pizza shop and the kids at the pizza shop.

Perfect.

Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah, there's— and there's so many— there's so many things like that, right? It just takes It takes thinking outside the box a little bit and going, how do you make, how do you make it more efficient? And usually more efficient is actually more sustainable. So that's, that's the reality is, right, is efficiency and sustainable actually are like best friends walking down a road. You can't be inefficient and sustainable. Well, I guess you could if you really tried. If you really tried, you could be unsustainable. Uh, and, and mix them up. But otherwise, they really go hand in hand.

But this is the kind of thing— process I, I take people through when they decide to work with me, is that there's always stuff they haven't thought about, and there's often stuff that I haven't thought about, but when they tell me their situation, it just pops into my mind. I'm, I, I am blessed with that ability to just make those connections very quickly and explore them.

Perfect. Well, this is, this is great. I hope that you are able to help many more companies figure out how to be green and profitable. It's a huge, huge thing. It's why we do the design work that I do. It's all in the aim of we need more sustainable products, we need more sustainable companies, we need— and they need to be profitable. We all have to— they need to make money so they can keep doing the good things.

Profitability is a form of sustainability. Without that, you're not sustainable.

No, you're, you're a closed business and nobody, nobody wins. Nobody wins with that. So perfect. Well, thank you so much for, for being on here and I really appreciate your time.

It's been a pleasure, Ian. Thank you.