Sustainability In Your Ear

• Luke Purdy, Wieden+Kennedy's Director of Sustainability, on Advertising's Power To Change

  Can the industry that taught the world to consume help us learn to consume more responsibly? Luke Purdy, Director of Sustainability at one of the world's leading creative agencies Wieden+Kennedy, is betting his career on it. After 13 years working on major accounts like Nike and Corona at one of the world's most influential creative agencies, Purdy did something unusual: he wrote his own job description and asked to become the agency's first sustainability director. Wieden+Kennedy gave him the job, and in 2023, the agency became the first global advertising network to achieve B Corp certification across all nine offices in seven countries. With brands spending over $700 billion annually on advertising worldwide, the messages agencies craft shape not just what people buy, but how they think about consumption itself.Luke discusses how he sold sustainability as a business value proposition rather than a compliance issue, why he reports to the CFO instead of the CMO, and how Wieden+Kennedy's carbon removal program for video productions is changing industry standards. He also tackles thorny questions about greenwashing that can guide which clients agencies should work with, arguing that guiding any company toward sustainability is better than refusing to engage.He shares lessons from helping transform Danish Oil and Natural Gas into Ørsted, one of the world's leading renewable energy companies, and explains why authentic storytelling beats green leaves and clichés every time. Can advertising agencies avoid greenwashing while still growing their clients' businesses? And what does it mean when sustainability becomes culture rather than just compliance?You can learn more about Wieden+Kennedy's sustainability work at wk.com.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

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• Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong On Reforesting 3 Billion Acres

  Most Silicon Valley CEOs who cash out their stock options start another tech company. Yishan Wong planted trees instead. After helping build PayPal, Facebook, and serving as Reddit's CEO, Wong concluded that humanity's biggest challenge wouldn't be solved with algorithms or network effects—it would be solved by restoring the planet's forests at an unprecedented scale. Mitch Ratcliffe sits down with Wong to discuss Terraformation, the company he founded in 2020 with an audacious mission: restore 3 billion acres of native forest worldwide—an area larger than the entire United States.Planting a trillion trees isn't just about seeds in the ground. It's about solving bottlenecks like funding gaps that leave 95% of qualified forestry teams without resources, seed shortages, lack of infrastructure and technology, gaps in tracking and verification. Terraformation built a support system that includes modular seed banks, solar-powered nurseries, open source forest management software, which is called Terraware and a seed to carbon forest accelerator that's modeled on tech startup accelerators. Since founding Terraformation, Wong has enabled the planting of over 4.7 million trees across 394 species, established 19 seed banks and 21 nurseries and created more than 798 jobs. "We made Terraware not because this is the most genius piece of technology that will change the world," Yishan explains. "We said, hey, let's just help forestry teams achieve certain basic necessary activities." Unlike commercial timber plantations that prioritize fast-growing monocultures, Terraformation focuses on biodiverse native forests. Native tree species can support an order of magnitude more life than non-native species because they've co-evolved over millions of years. "Trees are the anchor species for a forest ecosystem," he added. "What you're doing is you're growing trees as the anchor species so that all of the other life in that forest ecosystem comes back."Terraformation recently won the Keeling Curve Prize and the G20's RestorLife Award. The company also received recognition at the Global Sustainability Awards, winning SME Company of the Year. Yishan explains why a former Reddit CEO believes in low tech solutions that are the right approach to climate change, how Silicon Valley's lessons about scaling systems could apply to reforestation and what it takes to build an organization designed to be replicated rather than defended. You can learn more about the company at Terraformation.com.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

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• The Climate Action Network's Pre-COP30 Briefing with Rebecca Thissen

  Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the world's climate negotiators will gather in Belém, Brazil this November for COP 30, a summit many are calling a critical juncture for global climate action. After COP 29 in Baku ended with what developing nations called a woefully inadequate $300 billion annual commitment—far short of the $1.3 trillion economists say is needed—can multilateral climate negotiations still deliver the justice and transformation the climate crisis demands? And with 71% of climate finance currently provided as loans rather than grants, how is the debt crisis crushing developing countries' ability to invest in climate action?Rebecca Thissen, Global Advocacy Leader for Climate Action Network International, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to unpack what's really at stake in Belém. With a background in International Public Law and years in the trenches of climate justice advocacy, Thissen works at the intersection of finance, economics, and climate action to ensure money flows where it's needed most. She discusses the just transition work program, Brazil's controversial Tropical Forests Forever Facility, the International Court of Justice's groundbreaking ruling on climate obligations, and why only 10% of countries showed up with their nationally determined contributions. Climate Action Network represents nearly 2,000 organizations across 130 countries, making it the world's largest coalition working on climate change. You can follow their daily updates during COP 30 through their newsletter ECO at climatenetwork.org.Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe to receive transcripts by email.

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• Buckstop's Alexander Olesen Digs Into Urban Mining

  Every solar array, battery system, and EV charger installed over the past decade will eventually need to be decommissioned. Yet there's no unifying system to handle that flow of materials—no operating system for the reverse supply chain that the circular economy depends on. While Americans recycle 97% of vehicles, we recycle less than 20% of electronics, leaving valuable critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and gold to languish in warehouses or end up in landfills. The electronics embedded in our built environment represent the richest mining scene on Earth, yet we treat these refined materials as waste rather than the valuable resources they are. Meet Alexander Olesen, co-founder and CEO of Buckstop, an urban mining company launched in early 2025 to build what he calls "the intelligence layer for the circular economy." He previously founded Babylon Micro Farms, which develops distributed vertical farming systems, and he returns to Sustainability In Your Ear to share his new mission: creating a sustainable end-of-use solution for every electronic device on Earth.Buckstop took just three months to deploy its "algorithmic assay," a method of deconstructing finished goods into their raw materials and critical minerals at scale, something that wasn't possible to do efficiently before the advent of AI. The result: asset owners can now see the granular value of their deployed electronics in unprecedented detail. The scrap value of electronics typically yields only 1-5% recovery, but resale value can reach 20-30%. For Fortune 500 companies with billions in fixed assets, that circularity delta represents enormous value currently being destroyed.Olesen's approach draws directly from his decade-long experience as an OEM manufacturing vertical farming equipment with 1,200 unique components. "Why is there no comprehensive end-of-life solution for technology assets?" he asked. Every hardware entrepreneur he knew in renewables, robotics, and distributed systems faced the same problem. Buckstop's model draws inspiration from an unlikely source: Kelley Blue Book. "Kelley Blue Book was the data stream that formalized the aftermarket for vehicles," Olesen notes. Before that standardization, people would leave cars rusting by the roadside. Today, the automotive industry is the most circular industry on the planet. Olesen believes the same transformation is possible for the electronics industry. The platform currently focuses on renewable energy infrastructure—solar panels, batteries, inverters—but Buckstop's long-term vision extends to one day tracking all electronic assets. As Olesen puts it: "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." That measurement is where circularity begins.You can learn more about Buckstop and access the beta assessment tool at buckstop.com.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

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• Sustainability In Your Ear: Culligan CEO Scott Clawson Maps The Future Of Water

  Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe to receive transcripts.Turn on any faucet in America, and chances are the water meets federal safety standards. Yet Americans buy 50 billion single-use plastic water bottles annually—enough to circle the Earth 200 times if laid end to end. The bottles take 450 years to decompose, and recent research found that a single liter of bottled water can shed up to 240,000 pieces of microplastic that we ultimately consume. Meanwhile, 37% of global drinking water remains contaminated, with PFAS "forever chemicals" and lead appearing even in neighboring homes on the same street. Meet Scott Clawson, Chairman and CEO of Culligan International, the nearly 90-year-old company that's become the global leader in water services by making filtered water more accessible than single-use plastic. Under Clawson's leadership, Culligan serves 170 million people worldwide, and the company's filtration systems have helped avoid the use of 45 billion plastic bottles annually. The company has set ambitious targets: achieving net positive water impact by 2050 and cutting scope one and two emissions intensity by 40% before 2035. After completing WAVE water stewardship verification, Culligan discovered that even testing filtration equipment was wasteful, leading the company to develop dry-testing methods that eliminate water waste before machines reach consumers. The company has electrified 25% of its fleet and donated 9 million liters of water to communities in need in 2024 alone. Clawson's approach to sustainability isn't just operational—it's personal.A decade ago, while vacationing in the Bahamas, he encountered a beach covered in plastic waste. "That's when my inner balance was sparked to make sure we do more than just use our planet to make money, but let's use our planet to help it be a better place to live," he recalls. As water scarcity intensifies globally, Clawson believes the consumer holds the power: "Every time you pick something up off the shelf, you are voting. You're sending a signal to a company." His message is clear—test your water, understand what's in it, and invest in point-of-use filtration rather than contributing to the plastic crisis.You can learn more about Culligan International at culliganinternational.com.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunescFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

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