Replacing Polyester with Hemp & Linen: The Future of Eco Manufacturing

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn products into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today I'm excited to have Michael Kopacz. He's transforming ideas into eco-conscious realities with your company, Natural Materials. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to jump into this. You're a sustainability enthusiast like myself. Everybody loves a good origin story, so let's jump back in time a little bit to what got you into this space, um, going into materials and all that. What's your— how'd you get going?

Yeah, so we'd have to go back a while, right? So like, I'm in Poland right now, right? I'm from Ohio. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, blue-collar family, factory workers and, you know, public workers and stuff like that. We were always like a bunch of DIY people, you know, like the kind of folks who would find a broken-down boat on the side of the road and grab a motor from the junkyard for a couple hundred bucks and fix it up and then have a nice multi-thousand-dollar boat that you could resell or use. For the summer to go water skiing and stuff. I remember, you know, as a kid, we would, me and my dad would cut grass for gas money for the boat, you know?

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I've always kind of had like this, this way about me where I was like stubborn and kind of problem solution focused. Right. So I ended up becoming an aircraft mechanic, but I got injured on the job. And when I was kind of reevaluating my life, I realized how toxic it was. And while I was kind of getting prepared to go back into school, because it was a bunch of schooling to become an aircraft mechanic, but obviously I was gonna do a career change, so I was gonna do some university. I ended up moving to Poland again, where I'm at now, to teach English for $20 an hour. This was about 20 years ago. And while I was here eating the same kind of foods I ate in the States, I lost a bunch of weight. And then I moved back to the States Gained a bunch of weight. And so I got trained in project management pretty heavily when I was working for the Department of Defense. And so then I sort of put my project management hat on and started looking for efficiency problems in the food system. And that sort of kind of inevitably led me down to trying to invent new styles of greenhouses that were more efficient and less energy wasteful and just different methods of kind of quickly and easily, less energy intensive, more circularly growing food. And then I fell in love with this concept called permaculture and aquaponics and stuff like that for food, which I thought by now would take over the world. I thought everyone would be doing aquaponics by now, but whatever.

I know. Well, there was a pretty good rise in that. It seemed to get attention and then it just Just faded away, but it's I shared your thought. I thought it was a really cool technology. Like this, we should use this. This thing.

Yeah, yeah. I'm still on board with it. If I had a couple million dollars laying around to invest in it, I would absolutely start up a couple greenhouse systems. But yeah, one thing led to another, and after I did a program at UCLA, still trying to do the sustainability thing, I was really trying to do regenerative agriculture back then. I moved to Poland, started. Business university here. I was renting a farm. I needed more money for the farm, so I started something basically was just supposed to be a workshop gig. I'm like, I have extra buildings on the farm, so I'm going to start a company that makes eco-friendly stuff that I could sell to other permaculture people or whatever. And then imminent domain took the farm, then I still had the business, and then I just grew the business from there since— well, we officially started it in 2015, but started laying the groundwork in 2013. So I was like 28 and now I'm going to be 40. So it's been, yeah, 12 years pretty much.

That's awesome. That's a journey. And so now today, I know you, you do a lot of things around sustainability. You work in sustainable materials and all of that. Could you dive into what today, what do you do and how are you involved in, in making sustainability happen?

Yeah. So in general, I'm trying to get more into consulting, right? For the longest time, I've just sort of done stuff for myself, right? I invented my own production lines and had up to 50 employees at once producing products all at the same time. We do a lot of sewing, a lot of leather or non-leather working, a lot of paper-based stuff. So really anything that's organic cotton, linen, or hemp, Generally speaking, some kind of leather, faux or otherwise. I, I'm pretty picky on that though because it's mostly greenwashing. And then also tree-free paper stuff, so like traditional paper made from sun fibers or hemp or something. Um, but basically these days people approach me with a project and say, we want to make this sustainable. We want to make this better. We want to make this local. And then I'd kind of take them through a feasibility analysis and we look at what materials we could change out. Typically, we're looking for polyester replacements, if I'm being honest. It's most of what I do is figure out how to replace polyester with some sort of good plastic-free textile. And then we figure out if the market's going to handle that price and how much they can move it. So.

When you're— polyester should be replaced in most things. So when you go about replacing materials, what is the best material you've run across that can really replace polyester? Or does application vary a huge bunch? What's the best ones you've seen?

I mean, I'm really biased for sure towards hemp and linen. I pick my battles, you know what I mean? You'll never hear me say, fall restraint system or a seatbelt needs to be made out of plant-based fibers, you know what I mean? But I think that there's a lot of use cases, you know? So we make webbing, right? Which is this— it's a woven belt, right? And webbing is used in lots of places. It's used for cargo straps, for tying stuff to your car, or belts for your pants, or a leash for your dog. That's all webbing. And so most of the webbing that we see is synthetic. But there are use cases, especially in the shipping industry, where synthetic webbing isn't needed. And shippers are getting a lot of flak for having what they call one-way webbing, whereas it's plastic webbing that's holding down pallets, gets put on a container ship, gets sent to some port, the straps get tossed when they get to the port of entry, and then it just goes to the landfill. Well, there's a movement now, and we're trying to fuel it, where in certain use cases where you have not a pallet that weighs a ton, but maybe a pallet of lightweight stuff that weighs a few hundred kilos, you can use natural linen or hemp straps to hold it down. And then if it does get tossed, it just biodegrades. So there's a lot of fun things like that. So the one-way webbing thing is a lot of fun. We've made yoga mats that that are completely plant-based with plant-based fiber insulation and linen on the top, organic cotton on the bottom so that you have a nice luxury top and a cheaper bottom. It just kind of depends. Imagination.

That's an interesting idea. That's cool. Yeah. What kind of foam? Because those, when you think about a yoga mat usually, right, it's just some open-cell or closed-cell foam. That's there. What did you find that was able to replace that and not just be foamed plastic?

I think at one point, not to name names, but it was a really fun conversation, Bentley called me because they were looking for some kind of plant-based foam. And I ended up passing them off to some people that I'd heard of in South Korea who was working on some high-tech plant-based foams. But for us, it was— we used what's basically called like an air-laid needle loom non-woven. It's typically used in the composite industry as a replacement for fiberglass, but it's completely plant-based, and you can make them pretty thick. Like, imagine for a moment, like, if you've ever seen like a coconut padding for like, uh, planting seedlings on or something, it has some cushion to it, you know what I mean? And so if you were to put that between 2 pieces of fabric and then sew them together in a proper way, you have a yoga mat that has some cushion and has some grip. It's not something that I would want to kneel on for 120 minutes straight without stopping, but I wouldn't want to have my face in a plastic PVC mat either.

Right. Yeah, trade-off. There's some interesting— I was just talking to somebody about seaweed materials. It's always— find it fascinating to talk to people like you that are playing with the materials and are just seeing where things are coming from. Because it's always like, every time I have a conversation like this, it's always something new. Like, hey, there's this material. Oh, there's a replacement over here. And there's so many. I don't know. I'd love your thoughts on this. But to me, it feels like in the last— like 10 years ago, it was a lot harder.

Yeah.

to get really good materials that were plant-based or renewable or even just really recyclable. And now it seems it's kind of an accelerated curve where now it's— I feel like every week or two I'm finding some new material never used before and it works well. There's actually a commercial viability to it.

Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. I think that like commercial viability is The number one, like, toughest thing, you know, it mostly comes from— I mean, especially like in sustainability, the company— and I'm going to be giving a speech about this for the Project Management Institute, but it's like no one wants to spend an extra dollar to produce a product when they could easily find a dollar or even $5 worth of savings. You know, like, let's just say you sell 20,000 units a year and it costs you an extra dollar a unit. You can easily find $20,000 to $50,000 worth of savings somewhere in your inefficient processes, you know what I mean? And make up for the premium material, you know. But the reality is now, especially in Europe, you know, as all this kind of climate change legislation, carbon neutral 2030, 2050, etc., etc., stuff happens.

The Green Deal is going through, right? That's the big thing right now.

People, you know, companies are going to get Penalized for their carbon footprint. And so right now it's happening to big companies, but it's also happening to little companies in their supply chain. You know what I mean? And so it's like you're going to get penalized. So it's like that $5 thing that you buy from China that by the time you import it costs you $10 is now going to cost you $12 or more. I'm just making up numbers and making it locally cost $12 or more. So it's like Maybe we should make stuff locally. You know, like, I'm like, I was anti-globalization before COVID before all the supply chains crumbled. You know what I mean? It's just gotta think glocally, right?

Yeah, the global supply chain, it's an interesting thing. And there's things that just don't— you can't have without a global supply chain. But it also doesn't mean that everything should be shipped to 15 countries per before you get it. And I think that's where even just looking at it, because I see sustainability and efficiency as really two halves, two faces of the same coin, is if you actually look at a global supply chain, you might need it because the raw material comes from a certain place on the planet. You're limited. It only comes from there. But if you ship stuff 10, 15, 20 times, Yeah, it may seem cheap on paper at the time, but it is not efficient. It is not actually efficient. There's still resources being wasted. And I've worked with companies just in nearshoring or in simplifying their supply chain where something bounces around 10 or more times, and then you look at it and go, it doesn't actually have to. And in the end, if you limit it, you can end up saving resources and add as carbon tracking becomes more and more prevalent, shipping it 15 times is a really big negative on that balance sheet. And so more and more companies are realizing, oh, maybe we should look at efficiency and make that a priority, not just a dollar efficiency, but actual efficiency, resource efficiency.

Right, right, right. Yeah, well, that's how I got into sustainability, right? Because I've always been I used to just call myself lazy, but a psychologist called it— I mean, not to me directly, but I heard of it— calls the trait industrious, right? So it's like industrious is the reason why we have machines instead of doing everything by hand, you know what I mean? Because the machine's easier. You just— like, I have spent literal months of my life doing nothing but sitting in a silent room thinking about machines and thinking about processes, you know what I mean? Like, just to— Save time. You know, it's like everybody who works for me knows that like I will sit there with a stopwatch and try to shave half a second because like doing something wastefully half a second, 5,000 times a day, 240 workdays a year is crazy amount of time.

Yeah, it adds up and it's, it is those little things and we don't always, not everybody sits there with timer and goes, hey. Right.

But they look at their cost of goods sold and say, oh, we can't pay 50 cents more a unit for this local thing because it's 50 cents. 50 whole cents. You know, it's like, it's very tangible, the cost of the materials to make the thing versus, yeah, this sitting here with a stopwatch, you know. Hire me to, to stand by your, uh, production line with a stopwatch and I will save you money. You know, I'll work for free and you can give me 10% of your savings.

Yeah, well, I find that it's interesting because it's efficiency. There's So many ways to look at efficiency and there's so many different resources, right? There's time and there's money and we really focus on those. You'll have those 2 camps, but there's other things that you can be efficient at. It's the resources. As a company, typically you only track the amount of time if you are paying an hourly person. You don't look at the time and maybe you look at days in terms of shipping something, but you don't look at How long does it take to make the product you just designed? How long does it take to each step outside of you? Because you're just like, oh, well, it's just my internal, I can easily track it. And those efficiencies outside really impact your core efficiency. If it's because it's resources you're losing, you're losing resources, you're not being sustainable. And I think what's helping people start to look at that finally is some of these supply chain transparency things that are happening. We're getting legislation. Some companies are starting to just do it on their own because they know it's coming. They're just starting to go. And I once, you know, there's— I've heard some very interesting things in that of some bigger companies when they've done that and they realize they have suppliers they didn't even know about because there's like 10 layers deep Under one or the sub-sub-subcontractor way down somewhere, and they didn't know. They weren't thinking about it. And so now that people are actually going through that process and thinking about what is your actual supply chain, if you actually start to look at it from raw material all the way through end of life, there's a lot of people involved in every supply chain. And there's a lot of inefficiency that could be saved.

Right, right, right. Yeah, there's so many. So a recent story that kind of came up in my life was Play-Doh, right? It's oil, flour, salt. It's— I mean, the recipe itself is actually like secret or whatever, but like, you know, modeling dough in general, there's generic versions all over the place. And so, you know, I was in the grocery store and I look at this modeling dough and it says made in China. Where Poland's pretty famous for salt, generally speaking, and we have a ton of canola oil and flour, right? Because it's here. And so it's like if that grocery store who sells many, many, many full container loads a year of salt and flour and oil, etc., used its own supply chain to help negotiate their buying power towards a local company to help them secure how many ever full container loads of material to have all the resources to make the modeling dough here? Like, come on. So it's like you could buy it in China and ship it over here, and then you have to go through all those crazy tests. They're all expensive and stuff. Or you can just skip all that, help your, you know, producer with their supply chain. I do that stuff all the time. Like, There's lots of people who get in contact with me. They're like, hey, we don't want you to make stuff for us, but we know you work with so-and-so. Can you negotiate for us? I'm like, yeah, sure, no problem. And then I just take a tax off of it. Like, I don't mind doing some middleman stuff. It is what it is. But yeah, there's so many, so many things we could do better. There's so much low-hanging fruit. It's like, where do you want to start?

Yeah, I think that's a good point too about like companies that have the— they're kind of buying the ingredients in a way of product or even part of it. And there's I've had some conversations with other more— it seems like more and more store brands, smaller ones, like big ones in the US, like Kroger and Walmart. They've all had their own product lines for a long time, right? They do it. But more and more smaller of those companies are starting to look at, okay, well, we're already selling this stuff. We're importing from somewhere. Could we internalize it? Could we cut out all the middle people, use our Walmart buying power, but it's still buying power. Make it internally and have our own brand. Have a reason for people to— otherwise you're competing on price and there's only so, so much you can go down and only so thin your margins can go before you lose, right? I mean, that's the battle that Walmart and companies like that can easily just sink everybody in an area because they can win at that game. But if you have your own brand and you leverage the brand that people like, make your own products and to have your own product lines and cut out all the middlemen in a supply chain, then you can be kind of price competitive and you'll have better profit margins. And so I like that strategy because you already have, especially you already have the supply chain in place and things like that. It's just a little bit of change on your end and now you have a far more sustainable, you're not shipping things as far, you're You can use more local resources. It becomes a little bit of a different approach to it.

Right, right, right. Yeah. So I work a lot with mills, you know, and all of them know that if they're doing something weird, that they should call me and ask if I want some, just like for whatever, you know, because like in textiles, for example, like, so a lot of startups will call me and they'll say, hey, As an example, I wanna make 100 t-shirts. And I'm like, no, you're not gonna make 100 t-shirts. You have to make like 5,000 t-shirts. You know what I mean? Because it's like, you want 5 different colors, you want 5 different sizes to have one of every shirt that's 25, 5 times 5, you know? And that's just to have one of each, you know? And you don't even know if people are gonna like your shape. You don't know if people are gonna like the feel of the fabric. You know what I mean? Like, I have this shirt in like 50 different colors. You know what I mean? Because I like the way it fits. I like the way it feels. I always buy it when it's on sale. I'm that guy now.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on conscious design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. I feel like that happens. You find, especially because clothing is so personal, like once you find something you like, you'll buy it until they don't make it anymore and then you'll wish that they did.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. And the thing is too, that's fun about that is since I'm in manufacturing and textiles and stuff, I've taken like a pair of shorts that I've blown the crotch out of or something like that and I've taken it to my friends who do jeans and cargo shorts and whatever and I'm like, hey, Here's my fabric out of hemp or something, you know, rebuild these shorts for me, you know. And then of course you pay them whatever, like $100 or something, and then you have a one-of-a-kind pair of shorts that are modeled after your favorite cut, you know. And I've done that a bunch. But, but yeah, yeah, so you, you piggyback off of the mills because like their minimum per color is like 1,000 meters, you know. And so if they're gonna do something weird that they might like, okay, hey guys, you're doing 1,000 meters, but call me up and maybe you could do 1,200 meters, you know what I mean? Because like, I don't want to buy 500. I don't have clients who want to buy 500, but like, they would be interested in making something with 200 meters, you know what I mean? And so like, then that helps everybody because like, I get a little bit of a pricing discount for piggybacking on their order. Everybody's a little happy, you know?

Yeah, there's so many of that, especially when you get into short runs and prototypes. Efficiency usually just falls out the door and price just skyrockets, right? That's, that's kind of the model. But I think there's a lot of opportunity, like what you mentioned, of being able to— like a perfect solution for this, but maybe there's a solution in there to allow people to pool together, right? You're pooling together to be able to produce products that are maybe closer to the right— it makes it easier for the manufacturer to handle, which makes it more efficient, it reduces the cost of it. Because that's one of the big, you know, those working with any clothing brands, right? Getting off the ground is always super expensive because you have to buy X number of each size. And if you want, like you said, 5, 5 colors, 5 sizes, 25. And now you have somebody that goes, yeah, we want 100 of each. Right now you're at 2,500 pieces just as your first order minimum. Right. And then it just goes up from there and you never know what's going to sell. And it's so, so risky to do that. It's rough. It's rough. And so finding a solution to that would be very helpful, make it more— working with you, being able to make it so you can do these shorter runs and test out stuff. Because that's how we— especially like you said, right, the material. We don't know how people are going to react to a new material. Great, you got this new perfect sustainable fabric. Does anybody like it? Is the feel there? How do we test that without—

Yeah.

making a million units and throwing them away because that undoes all the sustainability we just tried to build in.

So, yep, yep, yep, that's true. You know, like I said, I'm a big hemp advocate, but like I've only felt one shirt that was blended with hemp. It's like a shirt, for example, like we're both like, you have a button-down which is a— which is a woven, and then you're wearing a t-shirt underneath which is a knit, right? So like the t-shirt is a jersey knit. And so like, if you look close enough, it's just chains of little threads, you know? And like, that's what gives it the stretchiness. Whereas like a woven only stretches diagonally. It doesn't stretch side to side or up or down. And so yeah, they blend in China, 55/45 blend with cotton of hemp. But I've only felt like one company that like I would sleep in that shirt. You know what I mean? 'Cause like, I'm not one of these, like, I guess I'm kind of a textile geek now, but it's like I told one of my friends once. She's like, oh, I want this shirt. And I'm like, no, you don't. She's like, just sell it to me, you want it. I'm like, I will give it to you, go home, walk around braless, and you will want to pay me to take it back. Like, you won't like it anymore. It's just going to itch the shit out of you, you know? So the blends aren't there yet for me, but there's a local guy here who's blending hemp with some kind of lyca cell and feels great. I don't really know how I feel about it completely, but at least the Lycocells that come out of Europe are very closed-cycled. I haven't really seen any studies or whatever that make me think to myself like, oh, I'm slowly poisoning myself for wearing this. But, you know.

Okay. That's still a polymer-based—

It's basically you dissolve, you dissolve cellulose in some chemistry and then you extract a thread out of it. It's—

Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's like rayon from the 1930s but evolved.

Right. So is that something that you can use like wood pulp then to place?

Yeah, yeah, that's what lyocell is.

Okay.

Yeah, so like, like anything that you've ever seen, like bamboo, like if you've seen bamboo fabric, like it's not made from smashed up bamboo that somehow magically got woven together. It's— they dissolve bamboo and chemicals in the extract threads out of it. I've seen it made from— I've seen so many weird versions. I've seen it made from milk. I've seen it made from different kinds of flowers, oranges, like lots of different weird stuff, especially in paper. Paper— I've seen grape paper, apple paper, orange paper, obviously hemp paper and linen paper and cotton paper. And paper cellulose is a fun thing, right?

So, so it's really just different Whatever you can extract cellulose out of, that potentially could become a fiber and then they—

Exactly.

Weave it in.

Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, at the end of the day, I'm in the sustainable cellulose game.

Right. Is it when you do that with that process, is that something that you can— like, what's the end of life of it? Is it something you— does it biodegrade?

Can you They claim that it does. I mean, to be clear, in my productions, I only use organic cotton, linen, and hemp. If somebody, you know, wants some blended funny thing, you know, it's— we— so we don't do a lot of— we do knits, we do the webbing, and we do other stuff. But if it— like, we don't do t-shirts, we don't do like pants that have stretchiness to them or anything, because you basically need like a special machine to kind of pre-stretch the stretching thing and then sewing it together just right so that when it is relaxed, it looks right. And it takes a lot of expertise and stuff. So I always just pass people on to my friends and, you know, I'm like, I just kind of stick in my own. We're basically like, yeah, we're like a sustainable— if I looked at sale by sale, we're essentially like a sustainable promotional product company. Instead of doing the bamboo pens or whatever, companies come to us for higher-end bags and tree-free paper notebook/calendars and things like that. So that's essentially also what we do a lot of.

Now, with those materials, if you can do bags, does that mean you can get— do you see these materials as being good for Backpacks and things like getting into those kind of more like a technical material almost where it's not really for clothing necessarily, but other soft goods. I think I've seen some shoe tops maybe even of hemp. Is that, does that kind of fall into that?

Yeah, so there's, I can't remember the name of it. There's a hemp brand floating around. I see it a lot on social media a lot. They made their own shoe and then they made their own backpack. And so it's like, if— I'm not sure, there's a line somewhere between thread and yarn and yarn and rope and rope and cable, but there's also a line somewhere between fabric and canvas. And then somewhere in the middle is what they call duck cloth. And duck cloth is like a really super thick, heavy cotton canvas that typically was used for outdoor wear that you can oil or wax. And have a— like, if you've ever seen like an old-school waxed fabric jacket, it was like the kind of jacket that like wrinkled in a funny way, but you could blow dry it and it would go back to normal. Like, it almost kind of had like this leathery, velvety feel to it, but it was just cotton and wax. And so we were waxing a lot of fabric for a while. We also wax a lot of yarn. I do a lot of stuff for the stoner industry as well.

Yeah, those are— things used to be waxed. I'm thinking of like, or like early 1900s, like winter gear and things like that. It would have been more, more wax.

You can think of like the stereotypical like sea captain with the yellow jacket and the yellow hat.

Oh yeah, okay, okay.

Because they would take their canvas and they would soak it in linseed oil, and as linseed Oxidizes, it yellows. So, okay, it's like a real thing, historical real thing.

I did not know that. I didn't look at that. Interesting. So when you're doing stuff like that, is there still like a useful— because I feel obviously we've gotten away from that from like outdoor gear, but is there still— are there areas where that could still be applicable, where maybe an oiled or waxed fabric that would be better than what we use now?

I mean, I would say in most cases it's fine. Like, it was these— ever since the 1930s, you know, these chemical-based things have become marketed and trendy. But I often wonder to myself, like, okay, if we were to leap forward with sustainability and we were to start tomorrow doing everything as sustainable as possible, where you know, uh, PFAS chemicals are gone and that's not what our raincoats are made out of anymore, but we're just walking around with a waxed fabric trench coat or something like a high-end, whatever, $300 raincoat that's made of natural materials and waxed that is so good in quality and build that it lasts you the rest of your life. That's the kind of stuff I want to see again, you know, but that's not a fast fashion thing.

So. I mean, there's more and more— the idea of slow fashion is getting pushed. There's more, obviously more smaller companies are doing that than big ones right now. But yeah, I love— I think there's a balance between that. I was just doing a live event earlier this week for fashion and talking about conscious design and how do you design for this stuff? How do you create sustainability?

Yeah.

From the beginning. And we like to— I feel like there's always just going to be this range of, yeah, there's going to be things that need to be disposable, and we need to figure out how to make that as sustainable as possible.

Right.

But it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be all fast fashion or all slow. Like there's range, there's things that we need to start actually categorizing things properly and going, hey, this, You're only going to use this for 3 weeks. Like, okay, how do we make it last for 3 weeks while you use it and then goes away? And then there's other stuff you're like, no, this should last 100 years. Like, this should be the coat that you just pass down. Like, this should survive you. And it's got to be that quality. It's got to do that. And allowing— and I feel like there's a lot of times when I talk to people or I c-panels and stuff, when we talk about sustainability, there's like really hard stance camps of like, oh, biodegrade everything, make everything last forever. They all agree like, oh, maybe probably no plastics and all this, like how do we avoid all that? But they still like segment off into these groups. And I sit staunchly on the outside of all that and go, these are all great options, we need all of them. But like, let's look at the application. Let's make sustainability fit the actual application. And to me, it makes it easier when you—

Right.

When you do that rather than like, how do we make everything biodegradable? Like, well, not— have you met metal? Like, it doesn't really biodegrade in a timeframe you're comfortable with. That's a really long time. That's not— we don't consider that biodegradable. Like, how do we think through those things and make it Actually fit that application.

Yeah, I would like to see in the future, right, like the future that we're creating. So like especially right now in Europe, you see straws made out of different things. Like you can see straws made out of noodle straws, glass straws, metal straws, whatever. And metal is kind of cheap and it's very formable, malleable if you will. You know, you can inject it kind of You can at the very least, you know, put it in some kind of mold and pour it, maybe not inject it, but I would like to see, you know, more things made out of just metal, you know. And it would be cool if somehow, like, if we can all agree that a USB-C is the same shape or the outlets in our house are the same shape, then perhaps we can agree to, I don't know, for every kind of consumer good in this category. Like, for example, every tin can, whether they're actually made out of tin or not— so like all the soup cans, 100% will always be made from the same alloy no matter what, you know what I mean? Or like all the pop tops for glass jars will always be made out of the same alloy no matter what. Just like some really good standardization type stuff that To me are like obvious, you know. I would like to see other stuff made like instead of whatever, some stupid— like I kind of look at like, uh, like the Fallout game. It has like— it's got like this kind of—

I played that.

Retro-futuristic sort of vibe, but like a lot of stuff is made out of metal, you know. Like imagine your TV remote made out of brushed aluminum or something, something super recyclable, you You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, okay, cool.

It costs a dollar more a unit, but it's super recyclable. You know?

Funny you mentioned TV remotes. I— we visited Norway a few months ago, and I was at a sustainability conference and know some people. But the place— we were there for a little while because of all the events and rented a little Airbnb. And we noticed when we went in, it was a nice place to stay and everything, but it wasn't like Oh, this is like a millionaire man. It wasn't something crazy. But if we looked at it, it had Samsung TV and the remote was like, had a little solar panel on the back, chargeable battery, metal case. It's a Samsung. I have the same TV that was in that house. Mine came with the cheapest plastic remote you can imagine. And it's not terrible brand new, but it's slowly falling apart. Like just that difference between what got delivered there and what's available. Like it wasn't an election box, like pick your remote, have $20 extra, have this rechargeable solar-powered metal body nice remote. You just like, here's the one you get, that's it. And I totally would have spent an extra $15, $20, like give me the nice remote. Like this is, I don't have to do batteries in it. I don't have to pop it open every Now and then, like it's, cause that's what broke it is popping it on and off to replace the batteries. Now it just slides open itself. Like it just, I would have paid $20 extra. Just let me have the nice, I'm already spending a few hundred bucks. I'll spend it. Just let me have the nice, better option here. And so that was, it's funny you mentioned TV remotes cause it's, they're there and that it's there. It's not always an option.

Yeah.

But it should be like they, it's, they've done it. It's, it's there.

It's funny what like different cultures, you know, accept or don't accept. You know, it was like, I remember when I first moved to Poland, so like back in 2008, and I had a Snickers and like it tasted like a Snickers from when I was a kid, like before like the high fructose corn syrup and the cheapening of the, you know what I mean? And it's like, And what's funny is like you buy it for the same price here as you would in the States, but the ingredients label is completely different. It's like the margin in the States is so much higher. Well, it's not really that simple, right? Because wages and land and distribution and all that stuff adds up, you know, Big Mac Index, blah, blah, blah. But it's like if they can make super nice, healthier things in McDonald's here and it's just a poor excuse in America, come on.

Yeah, it's— I always find it interesting when people post up like the ingredient list of 2 different products and things like that between Europe and the US. It'll be like, here's the Cheerios here and here's the Cheerios in Europe. I don't know, it gets a quarter of the list of ingredients. And from like, for me, when I look at that, I go, you're having to source more things from more places. A lot of times when I've worked on projects, we've spent a significant amount of time trying to reduce components, reduce the amount of— why would you add— if you don't need to have 42 things in it and you can do it with 10, do it with 10. Skip all that because that's a supply chain. Every supply chain is a link and every link has its own risks. So when you have a long list of risk, It's bad. That's not— it's one of those few— the food industry somehow doesn't look at that supply chain as a risk really. Whereas other products, I've worked at companies, I worked at HP and they were, well, if you can do this in one part, why would you not do it in one part? Skip that one piece. We want the shortest BOM possible, your bill of materials, because we only want to order from the fewest number of companies. Because if they go down, our whole product line goes down. So why would you open yourself up to that risk? And I mean, they do it in Europe, so we know we can. It's not impossible.

It's not perfect though either. My favorite— so every once in a while I get a chance to teach sustainability as a guest lecturer at a university here, and I always bring the same presentation, and it has a slide in it of a fruit cup being sold in the UK and laser etched on the side of it, it says pears grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand. Pears that grow in England. You know what I mean? Like I knew, so like when I was younger and really getting into sustainability around 2010, I was in Southern California because I lived in the Inland Empire for years and I'm in the grocery store and what do I see but oranges from Peru? In Southern California, to what? To save a nickel a pound? You know what I mean? Like, in Southern California, you have South American oranges. Are you kidding me?

Right. They grow there. It's like, even you could get them from Mexico too. Like, they grow there. It's not— it's, it's so close.

It's so— Yeah, it's just the things that we've done to ourselves, because whatever we do to the world, we're doing to ourselves. What we've done to ourselves to save a nickel. Is it worth it?

Only if you're only looking at financial. If you ignore everything else, then yeah, but you have to ignore everything else in order to, in order to arrive at that particular answer.

Right.

Which is how we're here. Like, that's right.

Right, right. Well, I got, I got harassed by my friends in business school, right? So like, I started school late. I was 27 when I started my bachelor's. Right? I was a working professional from 16 through 24, managed hundreds of people between then, and decided that in order to be a better business owner, business school would help me.

I was wrong.

So I'm there, and these, you know, younger people, kids if you will, who have super rich parents or whatever, because I went to a pretty exclusive university here, they're just basically Constantly trying to poke holes in my business model. They're like, "Why would you make guitar straps from premium material when you could make guitar straps that only cost you? Like you could just import Chinese guitar straps for 50 cents apiece, but you're here in Poland making guitar straps that cost you between four and eight dollars to make depending on the design." And I'm like, "Yeah, but my guitar straps don't resell for eight dollars; they resell for fifty to a hundred." You know.

Instead of $5 for the—

Exactly. Like, it's a guitar strap you can have forever if you take care of it. You know, it's a guitar strap that gets better over time. It gets softer, gets nicer. You can wash it. It doesn't cut into your neck. You know what I mean? Like, it's just— it's not that cheap Chinese shit stuff. I don't know if you say shit on the show.

Yeah, we do so much of that, right? We look at the price and we go, oh, well, it's cheaper. And then we conveniently forget that, like, you know, good Star Trap, guitar trap example, like, now it's cutting into your neck. It's gonna last 3 weeks. It's gonna fray. It's gonna fall apart. You're gonna wash it once and it will fall apart in the washer because it can't handle being washed.

Exactly.

And now, like, well, how many of these? And if you actually do the math, right? Yes, it's $5. We'll just say, right? And yours is, yours is $100. Well, how many of those straps are you gonna go through?

Right.

There's a point where it's more expensive to have the disposable item than just to buy a well-built one.

Right.

And so it's, you know, you even have to, when you look at the money side of things, you kind of have to like put on blinders typically in order to go, it makes financial sense. Yes. For the next 10 minutes, it makes sense. Just don't look past 10 minutes and then you'll be fine. But if you actually look at the long term, it starts to be, well, why would I buy that? It's not— I'm gonna lose out in the end.

Yeah, yeah, it's not—

it's just not worth it.

For sure. My dad used to say, still does of course, buy it nice or buy it twice.

You know, it's true. That's a great way to put it. For sure.

I mean, for us, like, we were all mechanics, right? And so it's like, Would you rather have that knockoff stuff from Harbor Freight or a Snap-on with a lifetime warranty? And I can tell you, as a person who spent tens of thousands of dollars on tools, I'd rather have the Snap-on.

Well, yeah, if it breaks, you can't do anything now. You're stuck until you get a new, a new cheap one. So it's a different way of cost analysis when you look at things, look at things like that.

Yep, yep, yep. Well, I tell people who work in the facility, like, this is a good example. Young guys might not always have their thinking caps on when they're working in a factory, you know? And I go upstairs one day, and you've seen like these Swiffer mops, so they like fold down this way, you put the fabric on, you open it up, and you can mop with it. So he's trying to mop the floor with that. For me, that's good for like cleaning the bathroom or something like that, but it's not like a proper American-style mop. mop and bucket, you know, which I ended up buying, of course, after this. But I'm standing there watching him, and the mechanism that holds the mop flat had broken. So every time he rinses it out, he's got to finagle the mop back in place just to mop some more. And I'm like, I said to him, like, listen, you need to stop mopping right now. Go do something constructive. I will order a proper, like, mop and bucket set because you can't actually buy that What I consider a proper mop and bucket in Poland, like you just can't. You know, like I had to buy it from Amazon, like with like the big handle and like squishy water. Like I just I had to buy it from Amazon for like an American style, you know distributor. But anyways, I just told him like listen, words to live by: I cannot expect you to outperform your worst tool.

Well, and if you look at it. Right. You might save, you buy the $5 mop instead of the $50 one, but how much labor are you going to spend because it takes 3 times as long every time somebody mops because it's not a great product? Like, that's, if you add up that time cost, now I was like, well, how much— the wages you're going to spend far outweigh just buying the right tool.

Oh yeah, 100%. 100%. That's exactly why I spent, you know, $200 on a mop set instead of $10 because of how much everything for me is measured in man hours. Everything is measured in man hours.

Yeah. Which is a different— and most people don't use that as their metric. They use the money side.

Sure. Well, most people haven't been through like project management in the Department of Defense either.

That is true. That is true. I think it's so important to look at that because that's like we were talking earlier, resources management. It's not just— if you look at these other— there's other ways to really get a better idea of things.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, this has been— I feel like we could go on forever, but this has been really fun chatting with you about all this stuff. Really quick, as we wrap up here, for anybody that wants to connect with you, work with you, What's the best? I know you're on social and web and everything, but what would be the preferred way for somebody to reach out and connect?

Yeah, so my personal website, which is not so much of a blog yet, but this episode will go there, is just myname.com, michaelklepacz.com, or the company website is naturalmaterials.eu. And yeah, there's many ways to get in contact with me. I'm very Googleable. I'm active on all the social platforms except Twitter or X. I have a username, I just can't get into it. But yeah, I'm happy to talk to anybody anytime about business, sustainability projects or otherwise. It's fascinating to me.

Perfect. Well, we'll make sure for everyone listening, we'll have some links in there for you. And Michael, this has been a pleasure. I really appreciate you hopping on and taking some time out of your day to chat about sustainability.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Ian.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.