E113 - Emma Foster-Geering from Vivo Barefoot

Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Emma, thank you so much for joining the Green Element Podcast. You are the Director of Sustainability for Viva Barefoot. Could you possibly give us a bit of an understanding about your organization and what it is you do there, please?

Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be on, so thanks for having me. We've had a lovely chat already jumping in, so let's hope we don't miss bits off. But Yeah. So I've been with Vivobarefoot now for just over a year and a half, and I've been living in the UK for 7 years. I'm from Australia originally. So I joined Vivobarefoot to take them from shoe business with a green tinge to green tinge with a shoe business, if you understand what I mean. So yes, it did. Yeah. So they, they had the ethic and the mindset of sustainability in the heart from the very, very beginning. Um, they, they kind of originated out of another brand called Terraplana, which I think you said you were familiar with.

Yeah.

Um, and basically, um, our co-founders, Asher and Galahad Clark, are 7th generation Clark shoe business family legacy. And they just realized after all these years and years that the only shoe that's worth making is a barefoot shoe. And I won't go into all the science around why that is, but, you know, the kind of basic fundamental is that our foot was designed perfectly by nature to feel the ground, sense the ground, and basically kind of send sensory feeling around your body. And then over all these years, we've clamped our feet in, we've padded them up, you know, and we've put them in these uncomfortable footwear and we've changed the dynamic and we've ultimately made our foots and by proxy our bodies numb to nature, to our feeling exposure, and ultimately made ourselves unhealthy. So they just said by principle, they, you know, they won't make any other shoe now other than barefoot shoe. And out of that, Vivo Barefoot has basically grown. And you— it's a really unique dynamic where you don't get a customer at Vivo Barefoot, you get fanatics. Like, our community is extreme. And once you go barefoot, you quite literally never go back. It's a complete lifestyle change. And you don't know what you don't know until you start wearing barefoot footwear. So basically, they did that and already had that as their kind of USP. And then they built basically a business around it, understanding all the kind of deep environmental and social issues in the footwear industry, because that's obviously their bread and butter. So they're also very— well, not both of them. Galahad more so than Asher is very, very spiritual and very in touch with indigenous wisdom. And thinking around how to just kind of really just go back to basics with how we exist in this world. And so we do lots of things like, you know, Wim Hof ice bathing and, you know, cacao ceremonies and all those kinds of things. It's just a standard dynamic of the culture of our organization. And so, yeah, so that's kind of what the business has been. But what I kind of came on to do was to really legitimize that and to really kind of say, if this is what we're saying we are out to the world in terms of, you know, the buzzword sustainability, let's really make sure that is like really in the foundations of the structure, how we procure things, how we buy things, how we make things, how we sell things, how we do finance, how we govern the business, how we treat our employees, how we treat our customers, just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, like let's be best in class, and really set an example for how business can be not just less shit, but actually a net positive impact on our world, both from a people perspective and a planet perspective.

And you have a history in the fashion industry, don't you? So before this, so you're in a good place. They haven't just employed a sustainability person. They've actually employed someone that understands the industry because it is a complicated industry, isn't it? It's not someone like, I guess, someone like me who works in sustainability couldn't just walk into the fashion industry. There would be an awful lot for me to learn. Yeah.

I mean, look, when they were advertising for the role, there was a really amazing, high-caliber list of people that were applying for the job. As you can imagine, they've done some awesome stuff in sustainability. Without even really trying, and I am slightly left of center. My my background's actually in engineering, and I grew up in a world in Australia pre sustainability even being on the educational curriculum. You know, I was the kind of classic kid that got in trouble for just being irritated that the David Attenborough documentaries we were watching in class weren't depicting what I was seeing in nature just outside in my eyes. You know, I was growing up in an area where oil spills. Were regular, plastic pollution was getting worse. Consumerism is a really big problem in Australia and the way that we waste and dispose and we live well beyond our means is a huge problem. So I really despise being taught a rhetoric around geography and ultimately anthropology that wasn't connecting with the real world. So I studied engineering to kind of really understand how we got to the place that we got to in the way that we consume and build and develop. And then kind of later found out that this kind of growing area was called sustainability. I mean, in the past, it's obviously been known as ethics or responsibility or even marketing. And I started to get my fingers more heavily into it. And I worked for about, I guess, about 6 years in the mining and fossil fuel construction industry. Really working with like the chevrons and the shells of the world to what I thought was protect the environment, ironically ended up being facilitating approvals and projects that were destroying the environment under a label. You know, I won't go down that rabbit hole. And they came back to try and do a PhD to think like surely there has to be a better way. And after my first year of the PhD, got picked up to work at Burberry, the luxury fashion house. In London, had no idea who they were, had to find out who they were. But I thought the opportunity to kind of influence potentially millions of lives by shifting one of the most prominent consumer-facing brands was too good to pass up. And I then started to get really in the depths of the supply chain with Burberry and really down to like leather tanneries and chemical processing and right, right, right down the tiers. And then moved over and worked for Primark for nearly 4 years doing the same thing again. So I've been really privileged and also burdened to see the worst side of this industry around the world. So Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, Italy, Portugal, you name it, wherever we make stuff, I've been there. I've seen the dirty underbelly. And that's both a kind of heavy burden to carry and The kind of onus is on me to make sure that I'm educating people that can't do that, that can't get there and see that, what the reality is behind the things that they buy.

And it still goes on, doesn't it?

Oh, 100%. 100%. Worse now than ever because no one's going out to visit them because of COVID Okay.

All right. And this is a This is quite a big question, and I'm not sure if you'll be able to answer it. How do we tackle that? I mean, what do we do? Have you got ideas?

I mean, it's a great question, and I think if I knew the answer, I'd probably be working for the UN by now. Or maybe I wouldn't be, I'm not sure. But look, for me, there's multiple answers to that, right? And I think that my own pathway to assisting in the answer to towards that is to really break down the barriers of inauthenticity that these corporations put up. So I think you can't really address what you don't know. And we really only know such a small minutia of what these organizations do and who the real bad guys are. I mean, the bad guys aren't out there being Coca-Cola. Let me put it that way. I mean, you can blame Coca-Cola for however many atrocities you want to, but There's so many faceless, nameless, unbelievably powerful organizations that sit behind the reality of our life. I won't go down a kind of philosophical rabbit hole, but in the fashion industry specifically, I think that consumer power has grown so much in the last few years.

Mm-hmm.

And this kind of want and demand for more sustainable options and more sustainable business has been very powerful and ultimately, I think, very successful. And I think that even at Primark where I'm not the best advocate of what they do do, but I can say that they do do some things extremely well. And we used to get written letters about plastic use and they would make it onto the CEO's desk. You would really, really I'd be blown away by how much a letter or an email or a tweet or Instagram comment can actually make an influence on organizations. The more people keep adding to that, the more it then gets taken seriously and change happens.

So that's one takeaway for us is to write those letters or to tweet.

They matter. They really do matter. And I think that we've waited for far too long for regulation to take force in this industry. And it just isn't going to happen. There's lots of reasons why it's not going to happen, but that the regulations around fashion brands that ultimately are allowed to push 95% of their impact into this supply chain that they don't own, it's not catching up anytime soon. So we need to make sure that the brands know their responsibility and take it seriously.

And so what does Viva Barefoot do that's different?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think the really big thing is that the ethic is different. So from the very get-go, we haven't tried to retrofit sustainability or sustainable products or whatever into the business. From the very start, it was, does this need to exist in the world? Yes, no. If it does, What is the best way to do it? And then what solutions aren't there right now? Let's go find them. So, and then, so I just think with nature and the reconnection of nature, both from the health aspect, from a Barefoot product, but also, you know, from, from the environmental and the social responsibilities, it wasn't a mindset shift. You know, I, like many people who probably listen to this podcast, spent so much time and energy Just trying to get businesses that I work for to give a fuck. But I didn't have to do that with Vivo Barefoot. The care factor and the want and the desire and the culture was already there. So our limits to what we can achieve aren't withholden by having to go through that. Hey, I'm going to— I know you mentioned earlier, you know, why are we still arguing about whether climate change is real? You know, we don't have to go through that at Vivo Barefoot. I don't have to come up with businesses to convince them that there's a payoff to invest in sustainability. Like, none of that is, you know, I'm a director of sustainability, I sit on a board of a company and I have no ROI. So, you know, how do I have a budget in a business that is only $40 million on a good year? You know, so.

So with that and with such a wide remit coming into a business, what was the first things that you did When you've got so much to be able to do, what did you do first?

Yeah, so Galahad, who's our CEO, and I agreed a 3-year contract. So for the first year, I spend all my time with product and sourcing. The second year, which I'm in now, I sit within the finance and human resources people part of the business. And then the third year will be with marketing and commercial. So in theory, I will be successful if I make myself redundant. I brought 3 people with me. So I had a team of 5 in sustainability last year. They've all gone into separate functions across the business now. And they no longer report to me. I've got a new couple of people. I think I'm going to be about 4 or 5 people in the sustainability team. Now, I'm building the functions and building legacy and then putting processes in place, and then I basically get out. And it's a kind of mixture of the best of what we had in terms of standards and initiatives, in terms of sustainability, and also how can we create new things and how can we kind of make those things come to life? So, We, we definitely have looked to guidance like the OECD due diligence best practice framework, like B Corp, like ETI's base code for human rights, like the SAC's materials index, although I have lots of problems with that, but there's still good stuff in it. So we've taken out of it the Higg Index, ZDHC's chemical standards, all of these types of things. But We probably only ever take about 10 or 20% of each of those things that we think are worthy of kind of going forward in the future in this industry. And that also a small business is capable of taking on. You can't have really rigorous audit procedures being someone who's 1/3 the size of your supplier. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. So, and then basically, we're now at a point, I'm about halfway through, where we're supercharging everyone individually to be their own kind of sustainability leaders. So we're working with Regenerative Leadership Consultants, Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins, really closely on embedding regenerative thinking into the mindsets of everyone in every function. We take 6 people down at a time and we put them in the forest and we do all this stuff, kind of getting them to kind of think big picture and really feel empowered and enabled. And yeah, that's kind of, you know, we're just about to release our first integrated annual report. where, you know, for a business our size, only 69 employees, it's completely unheard of. But we have worked really closely with John Elkington to bring that to life. By really closely, I mean, not really closely, but definitely read his books inside out. We had him on our podcast a few weeks ago. But yeah, does that answer your question?

Yeah, it does. It does. I mean, it just shows how complicated it is really, and what it is that you can do. And I think the fact that you have the way that your contract has been designed, where you are actually working in stages across the whole business, just shows that complexity that exists.

I mean, I wish more people could do it. It makes so much more sense for people to be constantly shifting and learning and moving and changing. And I think we just have so much less irritation around salary increases and promotions and bored, give me more work. Like all of that conventional corporate rubbish will go out the door as soon as you allow people to just, you know, move around the business and, you know, get rid of those silos and just everyone can use their skills in whatever way they can in an organization to make it an ecosystem that's functioning and cross-collaborating and pollinating. and moving. I think there's a few businesses like that now. Spotify, I think, is one of them, ironically. And I just think that they're like the model of the future, honestly.

Yeah, it's funny, we've just taken on someone, and one of the questions I got asked was, I would like to have a description, job description. And I was like, I don't think we've got one. I don't think anyone has one. You kind of just get on and like you say, just do it. You've got a job title, but that's I call myself a consultant. When I go to thingies, conferences and stuff, or if I'm speaking at different places, I just have consultant on there because I don't really know what to call myself.

Yeah.

Definitely not putting managing director. That kind of sends the heebie-jeebies through me. I absolutely hate that. And it goes back to actually, if you're all on the same page and you're all trying to deliver the same thing, then it doesn't really matter what you do because you're all going to help each other, aren't you?

I mean, I used to think so. I worked for Primark, who's one of the smaller companies of Associated British Foods, who's one of the biggest companies you've never heard of in the world. And they own basically every single kind of food and commodity-based product that comes out of the UK and a lot of the rest of the world. They're ultimately owners of Selfridges and Fortnum& Mason, all that kind of stuff. And Primark, although a big cash cow for them, is ultimately just one of their portfolio. And I used to get really angry that they didn't have some kind of strategy coming from headquarters that said, in 3 or 5 or 10 years' time, we want to be this, we want to know this, we want you to do this or meet this. And that they left it to buyers in Primark to take responsibility for what they're doing to the planet and whether or not— we did calculations that showed that Primark probably had at best 5 years left to exist on the cotton volumes that they were requiring from the planet. And we could never seem to get that into their heads because they're buyers and they just jerk react to trends. So they're not They're not ever thinking in the future in order to plan what they do on their day job. So I used to get very, very frustrated that ABF wasn't giving that strategy. And then I thought about it and I thought, actually, you know, they don't have a sustainability tinge, but what they do do well is say, ABF is about X, our values are X, Y, and Z, and that's all we do. The rest of it's up to you. And ultimately, I guess it made them very successful. And I think Vevo, in a completely different context, does that, where they have a mission, they have values, but how you get to that utopian vision is really fluid. And it's up to the people that know really where they can go and where the limits are and how to enable actors to come on that journey with them.

Yeah.

There's a really good book that's just been released that actually talks a lot about this as well. It's by Yanis Varoufakis, but very, very interesting book.

Okay, well, we'll put that link on the podcast notes at the end of it. From a shoemaking, you've got vegan shoes and you've got non-vegan shoes, meat shoes, I guess. I don't know. What are non-vegan shoes called? Shoes.

That's who you're asking, I guess.

But how do you— could you talk us through that? I mean, there's such complexity with that and the carbon emissions. And I know you asked me to talk about carbon emissions within the fashion industry, so I'm kind of bringing that in at the same time.

Cool. So I think to start off, to answer kind of the big picture for both of them, basically the fashion industry has a chronic problem with misuse and misrepresentation of data. So I said earlier on in the podcast that the reality of the amount of people that actually get to go to those lower tiers in a supply chain is extremely low. And so the footwear industry is even worse than apparel because on a standard shoe product, you can have up to 100, 120 different components. So if you think each of those components in a shoe have their own supply chains, and in a typical supply chain, you probably have between 5 or 10 different factories. So you'd have a finished product factory where they kind of do the last stitching or packaging, whatever. You'd have warehouses, you would have material mills, you'd have washing units, you'd have dyeing units, you'd have chemical treatment facilities, you know, you name it, there's, there's lots of different factories in that supply chain. So to get— I mean, this is going to get quite technical, I think, for some listeners, but I'm sure you're with me. And a lot of the people that are interested in this specifically, to get primary data, to be able to say, yes, this factory uses this, this energy from this grid. Because in India, you'll find a lot of the energy use is actually solar because they're just so far apart. But they don't have a way to connect to the grid. So it's renewable before, before you've even started. Whereas in China, you're coal-based. So what you're using from the grid is extremely important here. Because if you say this t-shirt has this carbon footprint, how can you possibly compare a t-shirt that's made in India from solar energy to a t-shirt made in China from coal energy? on the same, this t-shirt equals X, this cotton t-shirt equals X. So I mean, if you start there, and then you extrapolate all the different factories that are all using different energy from different grids and using different machinery, different processes, so they all have different energy footprints. And then you, and then you just have this like crazy generalization of such a few amount of test points, because so few lifecycle analyses have been done in this industry. to come to conclusions that then get used to say this shoe or this t-shirt is carbon negative or some crap like that. And all the data is mostly taken from secondary sources. So some poor PhD or master's student has gone and found whatever data they can find to come to a conclusion about the footprint of a shoe or a material. And that just keeps getting quoted and re-quoted and re-quoted and re-quoted to the point where no one even knows the truth anymore. And I, and I think that the development has been great, but we don't have enough people questioning the validity of what the statements are that are being made by brands and therefore by proxy being believed by consumers, you know, you and I, everyone else that buys these products. So to answer your question around vegan, Vegan leather, it's one of those things where for lots of reasons, we have 2 different kind of camps of vegan people. So you've got the vegan people that just like love animals and don't wanna see animals being harmed, right? So we already know we need to cater for them because they just aren't going to interact with the animal world regardless of whether or not it's better for the planet. Then you've got the other side of the vegan community, which genuinely believes from data that is a lot true but misrepresented, that meat is the devil for the planet. And therefore leather by proxy is the devil for the planet. Now Vivo Barefoot's got a very strong policy on this. We absolutely are against intensive agriculture. So that side of the thing we don't deal with. We only use wild hide leather now, 100% wild hide leather, which is basically grown in small communities, cooperative-run initiatives in Thailand and Ethiopia, where a shepherd or a farmer will only have 4 or 5 cattle that will be roaming around in the forest type thing. But people come to us and say, how can you possibly sell leather anymore? It's actually to the point where almost every single Instagram post we make, regardless of what it's about, will have so many comments that are saying, how can you possibly call yourself sustainable while you're still selling leather? And this kind of misunderstanding of A, the word sustainability, but then B, vegan equals better for the planet, is extremely frustrating. And it's such a sensitive conversation to have. And I get death threats all the time.

Mm.

Honestly, I've had DMs that say, Your name is mud in the vegan community, you know, rah rah. And it's really, really personal. And I think, aren't we on the same team? Like, I ultimately love animals and I want to protect and restore their communities and make sure that they're looked after in a really, you know, really amazing way. But I still think that animal agriculture in a regenerative way is part of the solution and enabling that and saying a leather product that is grown in this ethically, you know, responsibly managed way actually enables us to have a product that means we don't use any fossil fuels. It doesn't have any nasty chemicals on it. And it has a longer life because we know that leather is still the best material for shoes. And ultimately gives you flexibility and gives you that really natural barefoot feeling. You know, we feel really strongly that we're going to stick by ourselves on that one. And we know that 99% of brands cave and just go, right, well, you know what, We'll just pay a ton of money to the Leaping Bunny or PETA organizations and get that certificate and just use plastic and toxic chemicals. And we just aren't going to do that. We're just not going to cave. We feel really strongly about that one.

And that, I think, highlights such an important issue on just knowledge and understanding. And trying to— because how is the average consumer meant to understand what it is that they should be doing? I mean, let's face it, we get told that we shouldn't use plastic bags, but yet there's more energy that goes into making the paper bag that can only be used once. We've had that conversation earlier on before the podcast, and it'd be great to carry that on, but that's not— where I want to go now. But it's just, we are told so many conflicting things and there is no area that we can go to or there is no source of, right, well, that's it. And I think that's kind of what it is, isn't it? There is no silver bullet. It's just, where can we go? And the fact that you talked about having your cows are in a smaller community in areas of the world that it's regenerative and it's good. Now, obviously, a company like Primark couldn't do that because they sell too much and therefore one size doesn't fit all. And what I'm trying to say is that, I mean, will Vivo Barefoot become too big at one point where you have to start to change the way you do things? Would you become vegan? What's— And I guess I'm not asking you to answer that, but I just— it's confusing.

I think that's a really, really good point because it comes back to the true definition of the word sustainable, right? I mean, sustainability isn't just all about having a material that's slightly less impact on, you know, has slightly less GHG emissions than the, you know, Joe Blow next door. I think it's about the fact that you have to temper growth with the, you know, the ability, the resources, the limits of the planet. And if we can't grow and scale how we do business, which by the way, by no stretch of the imagination is perfect, and we're very, very honest about that, then we can't grow and we just can't do that. We'll have to shift and change. And we're already starting to go into ways now to grow what is effectively a very passionate community of customers in non-product-based ways. So we've moved into education, and online experiences and offline experiences. So, we've now started to open up. We've gone into partnership with Wild Human where we're opening bushcraft, survival, nature reconnection activities. And we're going to just expand that. We're really starting to look down what we call the platform revolution mode, which is basically where you start thinking about Uberization of what it is that you sell. So, how can we sell these Barefoot products so that they're always in life in one sense, their material and their resource and their value is always kind of circulating around. So Revivo, which is our, you know, the world's first e-commerce platform for refurbished and recycled footwear, Barefoot footwear, that's the start of that. But then we're going to keep going down membership subscription, you know, biodegradability pathways, all those kinds of things are just going to get bigger and bigger. But I think I want to come back to even the fact that, you know, you say there's no magic pill to the customer, but we're also not doing enough encouraging the customer to just keep asking questions. And for me, if I was a kind of average person just wanting to do the right thing, buying clothing and footwear for myself and my family, the one thing I'd always be looking for is literally what I can see with my eyes. So if you're believing some text that a brand has put on a social media post or a website, I just wouldn't do that. I would be looking for authentic conversations, authentic video, authentic just stories from the supply chain of the individuals that are making these things. Fashion Revolution is doing a really amazing job of that. I'd be looking for all the amazing organizations out there like Good On You that are doing ranking. They know, they know what brands are actually doing really well and which ones aren't, and they rank the brands. So you can go to those places, you can set— you can say, right, this is important to me, or this is important to me. How can I make my choice? And I think there are lots of avenues and tools to use.

I think that's it. And what you just said was what's important to me. And that's what makes it slightly more complicated, is what's important to me is actually possibly not so important to you.

Yeah.

And you as a brand have to deal with both of us.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think that's again why it's so important that Vivobarefoot has such a good staunch resolution to stay true to their own ethics, because it's a little bit like If it doesn't work for you, then go and buy from a Nike or go and buy from an Adidas because we're not going to try and cater to every single customer. We see ourselves as being at the upper echelons of knowing that there is a better way to do business in this world and really staying true to fact that we can see with our eye, that we can feel with our hands, and making sure that nature and reconnection is always at the crux of everything that we do. If you want to believe that and you want to come on that journey, then Vivo Barefoot is by far and away the place for you and you'll be looked after. But if it's not, then like, that's fine also. We're not gonna— our mission isn't to take over the world. That's not, that's not what we're here to do.

So, you know, you're talking about transparency. You're talking about, um, that's— I mean, that's it in a nutshell. You're talking about transparency, which is Still fairly rare, even in this current climate, and with businesses and organizations.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it's an ongoing issue. I think authenticity, although I have to say, like, the growing online social media, at-home, do-it-yourself jobbies is helping make what we see and hear and consume slightly more authentic than ever before, which is quite positive, I think.

Oh, that's good. That's good to hear. Yeah, because FMCG has actually not fared too badly, have they, through this pandemic?

Yeah. I mean, look, Primark's bricks and mortar, so they probably have done, all things relative, but they're so cash rich that it probably doesn't really matter that much. And I don't know if you heard, but they kind of refused to pay rent as well. So luxuries of the rich and powerful. So for example, there's a really cool sustainable fashion campaigner. I'm not going to remember her name now. I'm really sorry. I'll come back to you later. I'll put it in the notes. Oh, Venetia Falconer. And she has got involved in that TikTok world. It's so not for me, but I know it's viral at the moment. And she did this thing when ASOS said they were going circular about a month ago where she was saying, basically, why is this bullshit? And she did this little kind of TikTok thing where she said, less than 1% of their range is actually recyclable, you know, and kind of pointed out the facts. And that engaged this whole other community just to kind of say, you know, I know that you can't go away and do the research, but I can let you know that don't buy into the hype that this organization or this brand has given you because it's not what it seems. So.

But I don't think people do. When we recruit, and we've been recruiting quite a bit over the last 6 months, and one of the questions we ask is, what environmental campaign have you seen in the last year that you're most impressed with? And another question, unimpressed with? And I'm not going to mention the company. I guess I could.

Oops.

But I don't know if I'm allowed to. But there was a company that said that they could bring back clothes into the shop and they had this whole sustainability thing around it. I would say that 70% of these graduates that are educated on sustainability because they want to be sustainability consultants were saying, What a load of bollocks, rubbish. That is just, that's not right. We know that they are literally just talking. And so you just think, wow, does that company realize that actually they're almost making it worse for themselves by doing what they're doing? Because the people that know, and actually I brought it up in a few of the interviews and asked them why they thought it. They are, you know, they're 22 years old. They are the market, the target market. And if the target market are going, rubbish, that's not true, they've really got to start to look at their sustainability agenda.

That's so rejuvenating to hear. Honestly, I'm so glad to hear that. I don't have a ton of friends and family in this country, and I get a bit mucked up sometimes into thinking that the youth I see out on the streets of Slough correlate with the rest of the dynamics. So it's quite nice actually to hear you say that. I'm really glad you brought it up actually, because one of the things that I get asked a lot is how do I kind of wake up every day and do what I do, being not always everyone's cup of tea. And I think that, you know, one of the big things for me is I don't go for quantity of feedback. I go for quality. And last week it was announced that Boohoo, who, as I'm sure you're aware, you know, fast fashion, just everything unsustainable you could ever imagine in the world. They have hired a responsibility director. And the responsibility director is the commercial buying head from Primark. I worked with him. And he's the kind of guy that Honestly, couldn't have given a crap about anything unless it's going to make him money. I get that to a certain degree, but when it then comes at the loss of authenticity and you're hoodwinking effectively millions of people around the world by convincing them that something is sustainable, but it's not—that's where the line is drawn for me. And he used to kind of you know deny all the meeting minutes and and kind of never turn up when we tried to talk to him and really wasn't interested, right? So. This person is now taking up space from someone else in a role that really could see that organization turn around. He now has no background or skills in sustainability and is sitting in a spot that we created for him. And that just makes me so mad. And I put it on my LinkedIn last week, and I can't tell you, I probably get like 10 messages a day from people being like, Thank you so much for saying that. I'm so glad that you said it. And I just like, I love that I'm able to do that. I mean, I have no shackles working at Vivo and I'm so unbelievably grateful for that. But I have been in organizations in the past where I really haven't been able to speak. I've been, you know, under contract to keep my mouth shut about what I see and what I say. And the reputation fear is so immense that I wouldn't even be allowed to go and speak on a panel at a conference. if I wanted to. And it's just so nice to feel like I'm in the minority of people who can actually say that's bullshit and enable people to feel empowered by that. So that's why I wake up every day, I think. Not that you asked.

Brilliant. No, but it's good to know. It's good to know. And I think that's actually really good. I think we are I mean, the fact that I won't tell, say, the company name H&M that comes up all the time is actually really bad. And I can't help it that that's what people are thinking. And I don't know, it's just a sad state of affairs.

I guess it's a bit like, what don't we know? Right. As well. And I think You got to be conscious of that. Is there more to this than meets the eye? But if they then fess up and give you the information, great. That's the point, right? Hold them accountable.

Yeah. And that's what I would like. And I was actually thinking about emailing them all the responses so that they could see what is actually going on. And the fact that you said that they do actually read the letters, I'm actually going to. It was on the to-do list for one of the new people that started was to go through them all. And obviously it would be anonymized, but it would then mean that they would actually see the feedback from their consumers.

Yeah, I mean, give it to me too. I'll jump on LinkedIn and give it a repost as well.

Brilliant. It's been brilliant talking to you. Really interesting. I've just got one last thing to talk about that's actually not really about fashion, but it was a conversation that we had at the beginning and we were talking about plastics and we had a scientist on about 2 weeks ago talking about the benefits of plastics. And I actually think I should probably reword that. It's not necessarily the benefits, but that saying no to plastic isn't necessarily the only thing. So if you see a plastic bottle on a beach, it's not Coca-Cola's fault. It is the person that left it on the beach's fault. So don't go after Coca-Cola for making the plastic. And I can see your face. This is audio only. Brilliant. And I think going back and listening to that podcast could actually be really interesting.

Yeah.

But you brought up that actually when you make a plastic bottle, there's a lot of chemicals that come out of that process. And this is why it's really interesting to talk to you about it because of your engineering background as well. And so you actually understand, you're not talking about it because, as you've pointed out, a few of these issues are so heartfelt and empathetic and they're driven by emotions. And actually emotions shouldn't be driving arguments and decisions. You should be driven by facts and knowledge. Yeah. Oh my God, how much longer can I go on for?

I'll try and keep it simple. I mean, I think the starting point is that I truly believe that anything that we have made in the lab that didn't come out of the ground or we picked off a tree or was available to us from nature is something we should never have brought into the world. Like just, that's probably my starting point is, and the way, and if you understand the way that plastics are made, both from the kind of derivative of oil, which is something we should have never started pulling out of the ground in the first place, to the types of hazardous chemicals that are allowed to be used in the making of that. And I'm sorry we didn't get more into chemicals because that's definitely an area of expertise for me. in terms of talking about how a lot of people think that they're regulated, but actually the regulation isn't anywhere near good enough. It hasn't caught up to all the new types of hazardous chemicals that can be made in the labs. And it's really, really hard to demonstrate cause and effect in chemicals. So in a coat, for example, that uses a perfluorinated chemical to get water repellency, That particular chemical and its kind of 60 types of analytes at the moment, still growing, it's not regulated because you can't show that you as a human being have got cancer from wearing that coat. So the cause and effect for that particular chemical is so hard to prove, even though there's lots of lawsuits going on in the US at the moment between DuPont and individual people that are suffering, that you can't put regulation on it. So unless you're a brand that said, I'm going to outlaw that in my supply chain, which in itself is a whole other, is it even possible? It's still used all the time. And what we put on our bodies and what we feel, what we put on our feet, what we eat, what we have our food in, it leaches into what we eat and our body and our bloodstreams and our systems. And I could literally scare the shit out of people that listen to this podcast around The hundreds and thousands of things that just enter our body on a daily basis from things we just think are safe and aren't. But that's the industry that's responsible for this. The industry and Coca-Cola knows, they are aware of the science, that they know what the oil industry, fossil fuel industry is doing to our planet. And they know that that industry is working on corrupt agreements with governments that are existing because they are reliant on those organizations. We know that, right? The facts are immense on that one. I've worked in it. I know that that's a thing. If you're a teeny, teeny, teeny, bubby regulatory body with like a couple of really passionate environmental scientists working for the government in West Australia, who do you think is going to win in a battle of, I want to build this project on this island? The couple of people working for the government or the ginormous fossil fuel organization that sits in Houston, Texas? owns more money than we could have ever imagined we'd print in this lifetime. So I think the power dynamics of that conversation are insane. And the only way that you can overcome that political side of it is by not buying into the fossil fuel industry. And then when you get down to plastics, whether or not it's more environmentally friendly to actually have a plastic, which is a single material you can keep in the loop and you can recycle, I think it's the same with everything we talked about before, where it's really dependent on project by project, supply chain by supply chain, whether or not it's going to be better or worse. We know in Australia it's had massive issues with the fact that everyone thought we were recycling when we were putting things in recycling bins, but actually it's all being shipped off to Indonesia and just being kept in landfills or being burnt for toxic waste. So I think the system and the architecture and the infrastructure hasn't been set up properly for the reality of what we could achieve with plastics to be real. I think the sub-part of that is that we already have far more than enough on this planet to keep fueling us forever. So Coca-Cola should really, at this point in time, be well past the point where every single bottle is 100% PET.

Yeah.

Like, the fact that it's taken them so long is a commercial thing. It's not, it's not a technical capability. It's them knowing that they still have years left of the majority of consumers not giving a fuck and the regulation not being there for the incentive from a commercial perspective for them to change. And then suddenly you get really excited when they install some kind of like bubbler, you know, I'm sorry, you don't call them bubblers in this country, like a water fountain where Coke comes out of it or something. Like Asda at the moment has just done a kind of plastic-free packaging spaghetti kind of seeds shop thing and, oh yeah, wow, this is amazing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. These organizations are huge. They have so much money and so much resource. Let's not give them a tick for pathetic little projects, pilot projects. H&M, again, they've just been in the news this last week because they've put one machine in a store that can in effect take a jumper and make a jumper again from it. And we've literally had their head of sustainability come out and say, we're not rolling this out. It's just a kind of You know, we're just showing people what we can do. Come on, that is not good enough. Like, we just don't have time. Let's stop talking about carbon for 2 seconds and think about resources, biodiversity, water use, pollution. Like, there's so many other parts of climate change that are getting no airwaves because everyone can't stop talking about carbon.

Yes.

You know, you can visibly see it's quite infuriating.

I can, I can. And on that note, I think looking at the time, I could carry on. To be honest with you, I could carry on talking to you for hours. You are a wealth of knowledge, and it's really refreshing to see such passion coming from you that drives such knowledge. And it's just brilliant. I mean, you can see why Vevo Barefoot are doing what they're doing from listening to you. And it's, um, yeah, so thank you so much for being a part of their journey and helping us understand more about your industry. So thank you.

Thank you very much. Very, very kind.

Today we had Emma Foster-Gearing, Director of Sustainability for Viva Barefoot. Emma has seen the darkest sides of the fashion industry and experience the consequences of the misconceptions that surround the world of sustainability. She is a brilliant and smart woman, and we need more people like her to drive this world in the right direction. Thanks all of you for listening. If you want to reach us, please find us on Green Elements on LinkedIn and Twitter. We hope you can join us next week to listen to another story of how sustainability is changing our world.