Ecoish 01: Perk Eco - Creating Zero Waste Cafes with eco-friendly recycling systems for coffee cups

Hello listeners and welcome to the Eco-ish Podcast. I'm Tracy Lydiatt, sustainability expert and founder of Sustainable Living School, and your host today. The purpose of the Eco-ish Podcast is to illuminate the good work towards sustainability that companies are doing, honestly discuss trade-offs they might wrestle with, and for them to share their interesting stories to help listeners like you make informed choices. Eco-ish Podcast honors the imperfect journey towards creating an eco-friendly brand in an unsustainable world. Welcome to today's episode of Eco-ish Podcast. We are so pleased to have the powerhouse Jennifer Henry as our guest today. Jennifer is the founder of Perk Eco, a coffee shop-specific recycling service, and the executive director of the Society for Promoting Environmental Conservation, which is Canada's oldest environmental nonprofit organization. Jennifer has been proud to have led, built, and grown teams to divert over 8 million pounds of commercial waste from landfills since 2012, and she was recently named to the Clean 50 Environmental Leaders in Canada for 2023. PERC Eco is a specific recycling service that's focused on coffee shops. They will recycle coffee waste, picking up from any zip or postal code. Welcome to the Eco-ish podcast, Jen. I'm so excited to have you here. How are you doing today, and can you share with listeners where you're calling in from?

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. And yeah, I'm coming to you today from the unceded territories of the Katzie and Potlatch First Nation. Otherwise known as Maple Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the suburbs of Vancouver.

Wonderful. Thank you for your time today and to join us. And you, in your bio, you have diverted 8 million pounds, or is it kilos, of waste.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so part of that diversion, I know I am able to know a little bit about you, but I'm gonna pick at you a little and get you to share those details with us. So can you share in your own words how PERC Eco works, what it does, and potentially how it's contributed to that massive amount of waste that you've been able to divert through your work?

Mm-hmm, most definitely. So PERC Eco is, um, we kind of bill it as Canada's national cup recycling program, but we do take all coffee shop waste. So it's not just the single-use cups that we take for recycling, it's the pastry bags and the stir sticks and the tea bags and the clam shells and the Saran Wrap and the granola bar wrappers and the chip bags and the coffee bean bags. There's just so much waste that comes out of a coffee shop that really didn't, in most parts of Canada and the world, that don't have commercial recycling haulers willing to pick up that stuff and get it to the right processors, composters, recyclers, upcyclers. There are solutions for all of these waste streams that make sure that they don't end up in landfill. So that's our goal at Perkyco, is to make sure that every single coffee shop in Canada has access to a comprehensive recycling program that helps them divert 90% of their waste from landfill and waterways. And we've been able to do that. Our— while we don't— well, we're far from having every single coffee shop in Canada on board, which would be the ultimate goal. We don't. We have, you know, a really good devoted bunch of really grassroots green-minded coffee shops on board. We have the ability to serve them anywhere in Canada. Because of the way we've structured our collection system using carbon offset couriers. So it's couriers that are picking up our waste from the coffee shop, and because of that, we can serve it any zip or postal code and bring it back to our warehouse here in Vancouver in a carbon offset way.

Okay, there's so much to click in there and deep dive on. So thank you for that great intro. And before we get further in there, um, I would really like to start out first of all by asking, because you're the founder of this, I'd really like to hear in your own words what the driving factor was or the inspiration and spark to get going on Perkyco.

It really goes back to my upbringing, uh, in Maple Ridge, BC. Um, and this comes full circle in a really weird and kind of poetic way to my work at SPEC, um, Society Promoting Environmental Conservation. Growing up in Maple Ridge, I was able to use this really comprehensive curbside recycling program my whole life, right from the time I was in kindergarten. We had educators coming in from our recycling program, from Ridge Meadows Recycling Society, into our classrooms telling us what goes into the bins, uh, that go out into the curbside and where it goes after that. It was just entrenched in my childhood growing up that if you can put it in your blue bin, it goes there. You rinse it out and it was part of my childhood to rinse out all the materials, put it on the curb, or take them to the depot. Um, it was just entrenched in me from a very early age. I didn't know at that point in time that the Ridge Meadows Recycling Society back then was a project of BEC. Oh no way! Yeah, and so I grew up with this amazing comprehensive kerb tide program, just taking for granted that, thinking that everybody had access to something like this. This is just the way it was done in Canada, you know, North America. You kind of grow up in this culture and go, oh well, this is the way everybody does it. I didn't realize until I started working in the hair salon industry, there's no solutions for a lot of this waste. Just because you have access to this curbside via a very, you know, a great curbside program run by a nonprofit doesn't mean that the commercial haulers will do the same thing. The more I— through, as an adult, the more I, the more I worked, the more industries that I worked in, the more I realized that all this commercial weight is going to landfill, uh, because the commercial recycling haulers, they really only want the high-value material. They want the aluminum, they want the good cardboard, paper, the stuff that they can bale and sell, right? Like, it's a commodity. Those things are commodities. They want that stuff. They don't want the difficult-to-manage stuff. They don't want aluminum foil covered in cardboard packaging. They don't want, you know, a waste stream that I helped innovate for before Purkika, which is cannabis waste. They don't want cannabis, you know, covered plastic, problem waste stream. And so there's all of these waste streams, you know, that you think of airline, dentists, hair salons, medical. There's so many waste streams that end up going to landfill because they're not served by a comprehensive residential curbside program, even though there are processors for those materials. Right. So there's just this missing link there between the people generating the waste and the processors that want the waste, with no one to get it to them. That's what Perkyco is, is that missing link for the coffee shop industry. Each industry needs its own willing partner to fill that gap. So helped design the solution for the hair salon industry, the cannabis industry and with moving on to coffee now.

Wow, thank you for sharing. I had no idea that it was your founder inspiration was actually linked back to a childhood experience that is linked to SPEC, which in the intro we shared is the Society for Promoting Environmental Conservation that you are the executive director for and is actually one of Canada's oldest environmental nonprofits. That is really full circle as you shared. I feel like really, you know, we should take a pause and give kudos to SPEC and their ongoing focus on education. What really stood out to your share— of your share to me is just the importance of education and the flip side of that. I feel like a lot of municipalities, you know, that we work with under the SPEC umbrella, is that it's wishful thinking, you know, like they put— I know there's a term for it, maybe you remember, I always forget, but it's like people throw things in their blue bins hoping and wishing that like, oh, maybe though somebody at the other end will recycle this. So it brings up a really good point about wish cycling.

That's it.

Wish cycling, uh, is a problem on the other side of the blue bin. So Great to hear your story. I think that highlights a huge success and how blue bin recycling can be successful when coupled with educational programs. You know, earlier when you were talking about what PERC Eco does, it really highlighted to me how, how comprehensive the waste story is when you just want to go to the café and have a simple experience or share, you know, a warm beverage with a friend, or you have a business meeting, for example, it's— the cafes have become such a commonplace for people to do business, to study, to socialize. And you think it's a simple thing, but really all of the things that you listed are part of that experience. And so I'm really excited to hear that you're transferring your knowledge from the hair salon industry and cannabis now into cafes. And so a few of the questions I have swirling around in my mind right now is, for example, if there's café listeners, café owners or operators that are listening right now, what does it entail? Like, what does that look like to them to engage Perk Eco? Is it expensive? How do you get paid?

How—

what kinds of changes would they potentially need to make to their operations to embed you?

Mm-hmm. So there's a number of things. Um, well, first of all, we make it really simple to sign up. They can do it on our website. Okay. www.perc.eco. Um, just go to the participate page, put in your postal code, it'll give you a price, and you can subscribe. It's a monthly subscription. You get a ship— yeah, it's super easy. You get a shipping— we ship out an empty shipping container. It's like a kind of like a big rectangle hockey bag. It sits in a laundry bag frame, like one of those wire frames that you see laundry bags hanging in. Um, the perk eco bag just sits nicely in that frame, and you fill it with coffee cups or bean bags or pastry bags or shirts. We do have a list of materials that we accept on our website as well. So once they're signed up, they get an empty bag. It comes all flat packed, nice and compact. Act, and they get as many as they want. They can subscribe to 1 per month or 10 per month, however many bags you think they will fill. Okay. And we ship them out and then they fill them up. They come with a prepaid UPS Carbon Offset shipping label on there. So then when the coffee shop is ready for a pickup, when they've filled it up, all their recycling's in there, they're ready for it to go, they just go onto our website and in the chat box they type, hey, Coffee shop, you know, Coffee Shop A over here, we need to pick up. We dispatch UPS. UPS comes same day or next day and puts it away and brings it back to our warehouse here in Vancouver where we hand sort all the material. We weigh everything that comes into our warehouse so that we can send a waste diversion report over to each coffee shop at the end of the year saying you've diverted 2,300 pounds of waste from landfills. They can use that to apply for environmental awards or just, just display to their customers or post on social media. It's a little pride point so that they can say, hey, look, you know what we've done, we've done with your help, and we are conscious, we are making sure that we're diverting waste. So it gives them green cred, if you will, in a really kind of auditable way. So in, in order for how to fund it, we teach coffee shops how to put in a 25-cent eco fee on each single-use cup that they sell. That generates new revenue into the coffee shop. For the City of Vancouver coffee shops, they already know that to be an eco fee that's in place and mandatory. For everywhere else in Canada, it is not mandatory. It is voluntary. You can put that 25-cent eco fee on each single-use cup full, and that acts as an incentive for the customer to bring in their travel mug. Or choose a ceramic mug. If they choose a ceramic mug or bring in a travel mug, then they don't pay the fee. So really, we're kind of incentivizing ourselves out of business here. We really want everybody to choose a, a reusable container, but in reality, even with the 25-cent cup fee in place, less than 5% of people will choose a reusable option.

Holy smokes.

Yeah. We have a problem, worldwide problem with coffee cups. 58 billion coffee cups go to landfill every single year worldwide.

B with a billion with a B.

Yeah, B, billion with a B. So even if, you know, like the way I look at it is this problem is so big, even if we cut it by 90%, We still have a huge customer base. We still have a lot of cups to get custody of. We want the cups. We, we want to have custody of them so that we can ensure they are upcycled or recycled and don't go to landfill. So back to that 25-cent fee. That is how we ensure that the coffee shop owner is never out of pocket for our program. They use that new revenue to pay our subscription. Which they're always in control of. So they can subscribe to one bag per month for— the prices range anywhere from $98 for a bag which holds 1,200 cups if they're stacked properly, up to, you know, anywhere up to around $150, $160 per bag in really remote areas where the shipping is expensive. Okay. In that cost range, that 25-cent fee will cover all of your recycling, and you'll have some leftover at the end of the month after you pay your FERC ECO bill. And that remainder is for you to then turn around as the business owner and go, hey, I have a little bit of extra here that I can spend on some more green initiatives. So I can, you know, make sure that I'm You know, purchasing Energy Star appliances or organic coffee, all of those little things as a business owner that you can do that are greener, they all cost just that little bit more. This is that little green slush fund that you can use to just go, yeah, that's where I'm going to spend that. I'm going to be greener elsewhere in my business. So, uh, so it takes it from being not just a recycling program really makes it more of a, of a whole coffee shop sustainability program. The customers, generally speaking, they understand that cup fee. They've seen it elsewhere. They've heard of it as regulatory, you know, mandatory elsewhere. And so it's not something that's brand new to them. They don't— we don't really ever get feedback saying like What do you think you're doing? 5-cent fee. They know that choosing the single-use cup is not the right choice.

Yeah.

And they know that that's what they're paying for it. They can see also we provide our coffee cups with a cup stacker instead of a bin, which is like— the bin creates a huge problem.

Oh, completely.

Yeah, a recycling bin in a coffee shop You've probably looked into one before or like passed by one and been like, whoa, it's chaos. I think it's chaos. There's like gum and tea bags and K-Cups and bags.

I've seen like baby diapers in there and like dog poo and like, you know, totally killing the whole purpose of it. Yeah.

So we did all of this testing really early on in 2019 before we launched. We put bins in coffee shops and we were like, okay, hold up. Nope, we're not taking that. Wrapped up, and UPS is not going to want to ship that either. It's just— that's smelly. It's just bad. Baristas aren't going to want to stick their hands in there and separate it. No one wants to deal with this. So we created a tri-tube system. So it's 3 stainless steel tubes. We have wall-mounted, a floor stand, and a countertop version of our cup stacker. 3 stainless steel tubes. You pour out your excess liquid into one tube, stack your cup in another tube, stack your lid and the other two.

Amazing.

Yeah, it's super clean, it's super tidy, it's super compact. At the end of the day, the barista removes the stainless steel tube from the mount, tips it into the Perk Eco shipping container, wipes it down, and puts it back on. Okay. We make it, we make it as easy as possible for the coffee shops to have like really clean, mess-free separation that is funded by an eco fee. It's not coming out of their Oh my gosh, this is—

I have like, my brain is literally exploding right now. I have so many things to like, I want to touch on. Um, the first one is so such an obvious thing. A, I have been guilty of getting to a rushed meeting and going, oh my gosh, I forgot my own reusable cup. So I just want to say for listeners out there, this is super non-judgmental part of the podcast of like, everybody does it and why I think it's important to have services like Purkiko. And then the other thing that really came to mind when you were speaking is many cafes offer you a discount. So like, for example, if you bring your own cup, they take 10 cents off or 20 cents off, which they justify as, you know, you're helping them save the cost of the lid and the container and the the sleeve so that you don't burn yourself. And I really, what I really love about what you shared is just almost like the other side of that coin, which is if you choose to come to the cafe and for example, maybe you're unprepared, like I have been in other cases, or maybe you're just don't have that awareness yet that you could bring a travel mug. The cafe is asking you for a nominal fee to cover the recycling of that. Which I know in my case, if the cafe was there and I was asked to pay that because I forgot my mug, I'd be like, oh, thank God you have an ex— you have a solution. I'd be happy to pay into it. And then the other thing that came to my mind is tell us, um, how unrecyclable coffee cups actually are, because I don't know how many times people that may be listening, myself included, might have taken their cup home, rinsed it out, and put it in the blue bin. And what I'm hearing from you is that that is not a viable solution for recycling coffee cups.

It is and it isn't.

Okay, tell me more.

Very few select areas, recyc— cups are accepted in blue bins, curbside. It's so uncommon. It's really not widespread at all here in Maple Ridge and in most of the Lower Mainland and in other select parts of BC. You can put your cup into the curbside bin and it will be recycled, but it doesn't happen in the rest of Canada and the rest of North America. It's not, it's not a desirable material. It's a difficult to manage material. It's lined. It's what they call it poly-coated paper. And so you can see if you take, if you pick up a coffee cup and you try and tear it, it's paper stuck onto a very thin layer with an adhesive of plastic. Okay. That poly coat, that poly coat in the middle, that of the traditional, you know, white paper cup, Solo cup if you will. They, they, it's so adhered, the polycoat is so adhered to the paper. That paper is long-chain paper. It is desirable. Recyclers want it. It's beautiful, beautiful paper. It's high quality, but it's stuck to this polycoat that's just waste. There's no way to recycle that polycoat. Okay, so it's— and so because of that, um, the recyclers— there are large, um, paper pulping plants that will accept bales of polycoated paper, or some poly— good paper mixed in a little bit into a bale of other types of paper for processing, and they will recycle the whole thing. They have to remove polycoated paper first though, it's a contaminant. So there's a process to do that. You can do it at home in your kitchen with some citric acid and boiling water and some scissors. But, uh, and just to get an example, if you really want to see— you're really into this and you want to see yourself, hey, could this stuff actually be separated? It can be. You can do it at home in your kitchen. But, um, of course, the, the large processors that do this, uh, they do exist. There are 5 of them across North America. They will process this stuff, but you have to get it to them in a clean manner. They don't— if you go into that coffee shop that has a bin and you pick up the recycling bag that has all of these recyclables in it, the diaper that you were talking about and the candy gum and everything, what happens to that bag is that the barista goes, okay, they told me to put this in the recycling bin. So they do. They might have used their better judgment and go, okay, this is full of trash, and they'll put it in the garbage. Or they might go, well, my boss says put this in the recycling bin, and they will. When it gets to— when it goes into the truck, it's mixed in with all the other recyclables and potentially contaminating all the other clean recyclables. If it gets to the facility, the material separation facility, hits the MRF and is identified as contaminated, which is— it will be because it's so gross. It has a giant puddle of coffee in the bottom, generally speaking. Yeah, it'll be landfill. Oh, they're not going to run that through their facility. They pull out every single bag that is more than 25% contaminated, and coffee shop waste is highly contaminated. So even though they put the bin out, the barista goes, yes, let's get it to the recycling. Recycling truck drives it to the facility The facility is like, nope, rejected, right? So something's got to change along the way there, and it begins with the consumer that has that cup in their hand half full of coffee. How do we get that cup recycled? It is recyclable. We know there are 5 processing mills in North America that want that cup. They want the paper from it. It's, it's a matter of getting it to them in the way that they want it. And so that's what we do. Um, it takes a little bit of behavior change from every, you know, everyone along the chain of custody of that cup to get it to them in the way that they go, yeah, I'm gonna recycle that.

Yeah. And I feel like too, you know, I want to just give you like a huge kudos to you and your team because it sparks to mind the quality and, um, the quality outcomes of good design. And so it's the same action that you're asking consumers to do. And really what comes to mind too in this, in this scenario is we've all been to a Starbucks or maybe a Whole Foods, for example, and they have the color-coded bins. And exactly what you're talking about happens. You look in the bin and you're like, oh, is this the right one? And then Often there's confusion because there is trash in there and the process— everybody has good intentions, but the process breaks down at some point in time because of the quality of the sorting experience. And what I really wanna highlight is the good work that you've done in figuring out what kind of a design change plugs perfectly into the behavior. It's your— I hear you saying that consumers are super willing to sort their coffee cups. We know that people are willing to take the time to look in what bins they go and that you've just happened to create a better design system that matches with the end result needed for those cups to actually be recycled. Amazing.

Thanks.

I think that is just incredible. And I'm like upset now why not all Starbucks and Whole Foods and, you know, what other big coffee chains are there in Canada? Why don't they have this in their shops? Because of the— obviously the smaller shops, it's easier to implement. Maybe they have smaller staff, but also, you know, I really want to hear those bigger companies going, we recognize that we have quite a large contribution to the volume of cups being wasted and could we do it better? Like, let's start asking ourselves these questions. What are we doing wrong and could we do it better?

Yeah, yeah. Honey, you talk about those chains and, and we speak to them, we talk to their managers, we go in, uh, we're calling on a lot of them. Um, and the reasons for not coming on board that we hear, we're addressing them one by one, but they're kind of similar. We hear, oh, the cups leave, the cups don't come back to our facility, they leave with customer. Okay, like, okay, great, but you still have Saran Wrap that you're peeling off your sandwiches, you still have your coffee bean bag, you still have, um, you know, Tetra Pak, you still have, um, all of this back-of-house waste. We accept all that as well. If you don't— whatever you don't have solutions for, chances are want it. And so, you know, that's one of the things that we kind of hear from them sometimes about why they aren't on board the program. However, the main thing that we hear is just, ah, we're kind of still, you know, getting back after COVID. We're like getting back to normal. They all— so many coffee shops don't want to say no to recycling. They don't want to sound like a jerk. No, go away, never come back, don't talk to us. So they always kind of say, you know, oh, come back when, you know, we're low on staff right now, or, you know, we're just recovering from COVID we haven't, you know, we just got our seating area back in, or we're trying to, we're trying to do compostable cups, or there's so many things, everybody's making little efforts, and I'm really grateful for that. And so we're kind of constantly talking to them and reaching out to them and trying to get meetings with the right people at these coffee shop chains to just let them know how comprehensive our program is and how they can use it and flex it to fit whatever the heck it is that they want to recycle. Chances are we have a solution for it, and we'll show you how to fund it. If you don't want to use the eco fee option— some of them don't, some of them want to fund it out of their back pocket— that's fine. So yeah, we're, we're really flexible, we're really collaborative. We're just hell-bent on getting our hands on this waste. Um, it's, it's, it's just our, like, our, like, laser focus. Um, and so getting the coffee shops to realize that, um, it's easy, we make it simple, we've done all the work for you, just put your barriers aside and just do it. Because we can't keep filling our landfills. No, there's only so much space. Um, and landfills create methane. Methane is far more potent than CO2 in creating climate change problems. All of the climate change events we see today— I mean, you and I both know this, this is a very— as from an environmentalist standpoint, seeing where climate change is today, it feels like we have lost the battle. Mm-hmm. Um, I hate feeling that way. I've been fighting this battle for 22 years, and I hate feeling like all of these climate events are here. People's homes and businesses are washing away and closing. Um, people's roads to their communities are washing away. Communities are burning down. You did not pass enough. Us and all of us did not do our job fast enough or good enough. So it's like for us to be calling out to coffee shops and say, hey, recycle, it feels like I'm not doing— it feels like I'm not doing enough. It feels like we're too late. It's too little, too late. But at the same point in time, I recognize that we cannot keep filling our landfills. We just can't, especially with materials that have value. Cups have paper in there that is long-chain paper. They are recyclable. The plastic, it's precious. This is a finite resource. There's only so much of it. We can't keep pulling out of the ground and shoving it back in. Yes, I totally agree. Keep it in circulation so that we don't have to keep pulling more out of the ground. Let's just not put it back in. Let's just keep the stuff we have in circulation as long as possible. The solutions exist, the processors exist, they want this material, we have to get it to them. So it's, it's, we've tried to put all the pieces together and now we're just talking to all of the stakeholders in the coffee shops and being like, come on already, it's time.

Well, I feel like you've just defined what the circular economy means as far as a coffee cup, which is incredible. And my hope in having you on the podcast is that, A, it raises the awareness of the challenges, and that also potentially it will motivate listeners who are coffee and café folks that could go and ask questions. We're certainly not bashing any of these companies, which is the whole purpose of the eco-ish name for the podcast, which is we're all learning to do what we can do in our context. And so many of the reasons that you shared are valid and that why they're challenged by it. And also it's just also up to us as consumers to keep asking those questions like, hey, I'm curious, have you heard of this company in PERC Eco and what they do? And certainly from, we know from the, the power of this in the government's eyes of how consumers and You know, civilians asking the government questions creates change. So I'm certainly positive that it will also create change in these systems when customers go and ask these questions. So I'd like to put that out there as like an encouragement to listeners to, you know, go and ask questions and see what your local cafe is doing. And likely they don't know that PerkEco exists. And wants their waste, and that might be a welcome thing to hear from them. And as far as the climate change conversation, I, I hear you so deeply, and I really empathize with your passion and the, the feeling of not, uh, feeling like you're working fast enough. Um, I've felt that way myself for a really long time. I finished my master's in 2008, and part of that was reading the very first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. And it's terrifying to see what I read in that report actually happen. Like, the words have come to life off that page. And this— I also feel that way. I feel like I'm not working hard enough or fast enough on solutions many times. And one thing that gives me a lot of hope is that there are millions of people out there like yourself and myself that are passionate about these issues. Certainly climate change is only one, but it's a very acute pressing issue right now with sustainability, and there's a lot of people doing this work, and that's the one thing that gives me hope that we can change our trajectory towards a sustainable society and one that's in balance with nature. And that certainly doesn't negate the negative impacts that our communities are facing right now. So I really want to say thank you for bringing that forward and say that you're not alone. I feel really similarly. Yeah. Um, like, okay. Getting a little teary and like a little heavy. It's hard to talk about sustainability and not go down the, like, I think I need a drink now rabbit hole. One of the questions I always ask in the podcast is about trade-offs. And I use, um, the example of a cookie company that creates a really holistic, organic, fair trade ingredients, like every possible thing you could pack into, say, like a granola bar. But a trade-off they might face is that the wrapper, the cheapest wrapper, is the most damaging for the environment, whereas the biodegradable one is, you know, 8 times the price and essentially would price their product out of being on retail shelves. That's an example of a trade-off. I'm curious if Park Eco has tackled any trade-offs and what solutions you might have uncovered.

We hit them all along the way. I'm really, really proud to say that partially, partially because of the time and space the pandemic gave us, uh, like we kind of had to pivot, um, because coffee shops were closed, right? Perky Goat launched in April of 2020. Oh no. As coffee shops were closing.

Oh my gosh.

I was like, oh, give me a break. Come on. I'm already hurting right now. So that was an interesting time, but it kind of made us pivot and go back to the drawing board and solve some of the things that we were like, we wish we had a better way. One of the things was the shipping boxes. So in, in the other verticals that I've worked in, in hairdressing and cannabis, shipping that waste, we used single-use boxes. Okay. Uh, so we would, you know, the, the, they, they would fill up the boxes with the waste and ship it to us, and then we'd recycle the box at the end of its life unless it was reusable, which generally wasn't, and we're, you know, printing these really nice boxes and, you know, then just recycling them after one use. And yes, there were a lot of waste in there, which was great, but, um, so we really wanted to— I'm looking to see if I have one— um, we really wanted to create a reusable solution. So we created the shipping bag, the shipping container. You can see them on our website. They're this big tall black bag. And they were made by a company called Returnity, and Returnity makes reusable packaging for companies like Rent the Dress. Lots of other companies are using them. But so basically they make this shipping container that's, you know, our specifications where it has to be waterproof, has to pack down really small for the outbound ship, and it has to come— has to be able to hold a lot of material coming back and not be heavy. It needs to have us be able— for us to be able to put an inbound and outbound shipping label on there. So there are all these specs we have. We're like, we basically want it to function as a box but not be a box, a single-use box. And we accomplished it. We test them out, we're successfully using them. And this is where what was going to be one of those trade-offs single-use box turned into an incredible opportunity to have tremendous impact. UPS, which is who we use for our courier, basically when we started using these boxes or these, these bags, said to us, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. That's not a box. Anything that's not boxed, we have an upcharge because it requires special handling. So they were slapping a $19 fee on us for every single container that, that we were shipping. And I was like, nope, you guys are supposed to be the sustainable courier. Yeah, no, we are. I'm like, but you're telling me I have to pay more to use reusable packaging? And they're like, wow, yeah, you're right, um, that's not great. But they still continue to charge me the fee. So I just took— I just was really— I was like a little, I don't know, like a mosquito in their side, just like bugging them for a year, being like, don't do this, don't do— you have to stop doing this. Hello, over here. Like, don't— you know, trying to make some change over here. And eventually I got through to the right person. Uh, the VP of Sustainability and Communications of Yes Global, uh, started listening to me, and she was like, you're right, this needs to change. I'm going to put a task force in place to make sure that UPS will accept reusable packaging worldwide, but it's going to take a lot of change in our factories. They have conveyor belts that if it's, if it's not a box, if it's a something that has flaps or, you know, a little bit of give, it can get caught where the conveyor belts meet. And she's like, we need to solve this. So because Kurokiko kept complaining about this and and saying, you guys have to incentivize reusable packaging, then, you know, rather than penalizing people who, who are trying to, you know, make positive change. Yeah, listen, the task that I work— I'm working with the task force now to, to test out a new type of package that is UPS approved, um, that won't aggravate their conveyor belt system, but is reusable. And so that was like a really big win for us. And it was born of trying to solve one of those trade-offs. Wow.

I think you just fully landed the plane so well on that question. And I got chills when you said that you finally got through to the VP of sustainability and that she listened. That's so incredible, Jen. I really applaud you for your persistence and perseverance. And it just goes to show that when you do have the right intentions and you don't give in a little bit too easily and finally find the right person, that's incredible. Incredible to hear that it's creating like a global change and you're just a startup in quotations, and, um, one that obviously launched at horrible timing. And also, I think kudos to your persistence and patience in continuing to just hold the vision and work through those COVID delays. So congratulations, that's really exciting. And, you know, from a broader systems perspective, one of the things that we often say in sustainability is that the problem is the solution, and that you've created this systems change within a global courier because of that. That's a huge— that's a huge win.

It's a great feeling. I was just going— I was just trying to get them to, you know, stop charging me $19 each time. But really, I Yeah, I couldn't help but keep going with it. And the end result, it was— I was like, I, I like yelled in my office. I was like, you know, it's one of those moments where you're like, I wish someone was here to celebrate with me, but here I am working from home alone because it's COVID.

Well, I'm so glad because now you have witnesses all around the world listening to this podcast and watching on YouTube and celebrate with you, and I just think you're absolutely incredible and so grateful that I get to work with you in other roles in our lives. Um, for listeners who don't know, I wear another hat in my professional life. I'm the managing director of the Textile Lab for Circularity, which is a project within the Society for the Promotion of Environmental Conservation that Jen is the executive director of. So we get to work together on a daily basis, which I'm also so grateful for. So my last question to you, Jen, and you kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier, is if you could paint a picture or wave a magic wand and have your ideal outcome for perk eco occur, what would that look like for you?

Coffee cups banned from landfill.

Okay, why do you say that?

So I witnessed in 2013, I witnessed a very, very big and impactful shift in, uh, Vancouver, in, in Metro Vancouver. They banned organics from landfill, and all of a sudden that forced all this innovation. It forced composters to scale up. Like, they knew there was going to be all this organic waste organic waste coming. All of the waste haulers, they had to all of a sudden figure out a way to haul organic waste from commercial businesses and households to the composters. That one bit of regulation has been so powerful in creating just all of these innovators to, to facilitate that, that, that new regulation. It has been incredibly impactful in terms of not just the volume of the waste going to Metro Vancouver's landfill. It has— I wish I had the numbers right in front of me. It's, it's, it's huge, the amount of waste reduction that that one regulation empowered. So not only is our organic spent from landfill, but they're being composted, which brings them again. Circularity. It's like we're, we're taking it from the earth and putting it back to the earth where it belongs, and we're reusing it again. Yeah, I was working in waste management in 2013 at the time that that happened, and I saw the business community kind of jump. They kind of all just went like, oh, I have to do this. I don't have— I don't— I no longer have the ability or the luxury of sending my organic material to landfill. I have to compost it. Okay, better just figure it out. And they did, and all the innovators around them helped. If that were to happen with coffee cups right now, anywhere, in any municipality, in any province, in any, you know, federally, municipally, name the scale, if it were to happen, PERC Eco would be the simplest, easiest, and most affordable solution or all coffee shops to be able to go, oh, hey, guess I gotta get on board with this.

Oh, that's a wonderful answer. I think you and I and others that think about waste are a little bit of a different kind of folk. Not a lot of people think about where their waste goes. Their thought process kind of stops at like, oh, look, the garbage truck is coming to get my stuff today. And, you know, no harm, no foul. Just maybe not part of your life, whereas waste ends up— it's a really huge part of our lives professionally, and we think about it a lot. And so when you think about waste, what is— and you think about what the ultimate outcome of it is, is that it's getting buried underground. It doesn't break down because of the structure of landfills. You know, there's a whole science behind this that I'm sure many people are aware of. Some folks might not be. It creates methane. Like, it just— it's the part of the equation that is the part that many people don't think about, but it's also the part that is so crazy powerful for driving change back up the whole process and back up the whole system of how that coffee cup ends up at the landfill. So I agree. I think that's a wonderful vision. Let's hold that vision and call in some solutions.

I'm all for it.

Can't do this alone. We can't do it in isolation. So I'm— thank you for putting that out there and let's hope solutions like that emerge soon.

Exactly. Yeah.

Well, with that, I, um, and just again, I'm so thankful and grateful for your time It's been super illuminating talking to you. I thought I knew what Perk Eco was about, and I've learned even just that much more. And I'm so glad that you exist. And could you please tell listeners again how to find you? And I will also put all that in the show notes as well.

Yeah. So my personal email or my work email is Jen, J-E-N, at perk. Perk.eco. That's perk.eco. Jen@perk.eco. Um, website is perk.eco and, um, we're on social as well. You can find us there. It's all linked on our website.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. And thank you to all the listeners. This has been a really illuminating podcast and I'm super excited to follow your progress and I'm wishing you a wonderful rest of your day.

Thanks so much, Tracy. It's been fun.

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