Episodes

Season 5 closes the way the best conversations do, by looking back at who was in the room. This wrap-up gathers the guests, the surprises, and the moments that stuck, and it marks a first: the season that welcomed a new co-host to the show. What comes through is how often an interview stopped being an interview. The real turn is the moment a guest feels seen and the pressure drops away, and suddenly everyone is just talking. The season gets replayed through its people. Nancy Zavada of MeetGreen...

Buildings carry carbon long before anyone turns on a light, locked into the steel and concrete it took to put them up. Josh Lloyd's job is to drive that number down. As Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction, the firm ranked the number one green builder every year since 2008, he leads sustainability across 10 offices in eight states, on job sites where one decision about a concrete mix outweighs anything a person could do at home. That comparison is his favorite way to make the ...

Josh Lloyd is the Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction, where he leads sustainability work across 10 offices in eight states. He came up through architecture, adopted LEED early enough to have watched it launch, and volunteered the design and construction documents for the first LEED Platinum home in Ohio, a house built by high school students. The path there started with a dad who was always renovating something and a college fascination with using sunlight to heat a building....

Most people think a solid waste district exists to run the landfill. Mary Cropenbaker's job is the opposite: keep as much material out of it as possible. As the Assistant Solid Waste Manager at Hamilton County ReSource, she works with businesses, schools, and communities across the Cincinnati region to divert waste, and she does it without a single mandate to force anyone's hand. Her answer to that challenge is 513 Green, a free sustainability certification any business can earn. 513 Green st...

Mary Cropenbaker is the Assistant Solid Waste Manager at Hamilton County ReSource, the solid waste district for the Cincinnati region, where she helps businesses, schools, and communities cut what they send to the landfill. She piloted 513 Green, a free sustainability certification now used by dozens of local organizations. But her path into waste and sustainability started somewhere you would never guess: a psychology lab studying how pigeons gamble. Mary grew up along the Ohio River, hopping ...

There is not enough public money in the world to fund the clean energy transition. That gap sits at the center of Vin Valentino's work, and his answer is the green bank, a purpose-driven financial institution built to stretch every public dollar and pull private capital in behind it. As the Energy Economy Lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce, Vin helped stand up Washington's first green bank, capitalized at 25 million dollars in its first year. The build runs from one question i...

Vin Valentino is the Energy Economy Lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce, where he works to grow the state's clean energy economy through investment, policy strategy, and partnerships across government, industry, and communities. He holds an interdisciplinary degree in applied sustainability from Ohio State University, and his path has run from a craft brewery in Columbus, Ohio, to Stanford Health Care, to the City of Seattle. Before any of it, though, he was a kid from Dayton wh...

Francesca Cercelletta, creative director for ReGeneration Hub Friuli and graphic designer for Zegna, brings a unique blend of artistic vision and sustainability passion to NanoValbruna. As the organizer of "Frame The Change," a short film festival within the forum, she champions the power of visual storytelling in communicating complex environmental issues. Francesca shares her journey into the world of filmmaking, recounting how her participation in a workshop in Naples inspired her to bring a...

A resort that generates 25 tons of waste every single day has two choices: manage it badly or build something worth talking about. Jake Kheel, VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, chose the latter. He's back this week to get into the real work: composting at industrial scale, coral reef restoration, a hawk conservation project that now has 150 birds on property, and why climate change has stopped being a future problem for coastal communities and started being a right-now one. Jake breaks d...

Jake Kheel is VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, one of the Caribbean's most recognized leaders in sustainable tourism. He's also a conservationist, author, and co-director of the award-winning documentary Death By a Thousand Cuts. It started with a boarding school study abroad program Jake applied to on a whim. He had no idea his great-uncle Ted Kheel was one of the founders of Grupo Puntacana. But a phone call from his grandfather before the trip changed everything, and what began as ...

In 2023 alone, 235 million tons of food went uneaten or unsold in the United States. The number one item clogging landfills is not furniture, not plastic, not diapers. It is food. And 47 million Americans are food insecure at the same time. Regina Harmon, CEO of Food Recovery Network, returns to break down exactly how that happens, what her organization is doing about it, and how college students across 46 states are at the center of the solution. Food waste is not mainly a story about bad choi...

Regina Harmon is the CEO of Food Recovery Network, the largest student-led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the US. Before she was leading a national nonprofit, she was a kid in Maine with a cloth lunch bag, a working poor family, and a growing sense that the world was not set up fairly. Dominique and Christy sit down with Regina to hear how a life shaped by nature, identity, and literature quietly built the leader she is today. Regina Harmon grew up in Maine at a time when it was the...

Most people don't think much about what happens to the food that doesn't get sold. Mason McNeill does. As Chief Commercial Officer at Denali, the nation's largest organics recycler, he's spent his career building the systems that catch that material before it hits a landfill and put it back to work. Denali runs routes to grocery stores and food producers across all of the lower 48, collecting food waste and organic residuals and routing them to recycling facilities where they become compost, ...

Mason McNeill is the Chief Commercial Officer at Denali, the nation's largest organics recycler. But before he was thinking about food waste and circular supply chains, he was a young investment banker in Little Rock, learning how to tell the story of businesses that had spent decades building something worth believing in. Mason grew up in the Arkansas River Valley and showed up to college knowing he wanted to study business. What he didn't plan on was picking up a history major along the way...

Elizabeth Schuster and Marissa Ferrari are the co-founders of Sustainable Economies, a research-driven consulting firm working at the intersection of nature and community. They're back together on the podcast to share how they built a business from a single lunch conversation, why strategy and storytelling are stronger when they're developed side by side, and what it actually looks like to help conservation nonprofits find their footing in an uncertain world. Elizabeth brought a decade of indep...

Marissa Ferrari is Partner and Creative Director at Sustainable Economies, where she works with mission-driven organizations at the intersection of nature and communities. Her winding path that took her from a childhood in rural Michigan to a career in brand strategy and communications, and what she's learned about creativity, storytelling, and finding your way when the road doesn't run straight. Marissa grew up in a small town in southwestern Michigan, spending her childhood building tree fort...

Elizabeth Schuster is the founder of Sustainable Economies, a strategic planning, branding, and communications firm, and a partner in environmental economics. Her sustainability journey started from building forts in the New Hampshire woods to transforming a struggling Peace Corps assignment into a certified organic coffee co-op in Honduras. She grew up on 17 acres in New Hampshire, where early years of backpacking and time in nature laid the foundation for a lifelong commitment to the environm...

Did you know that plastics are as different from each other as paper is from metal? Joseph Klatt, founder of Marble Plastics, dives into the complex world of polymer types and how they impact our efforts to recycle plastic waste. Joseph’s passion for sustainability was sparked by an unlikely source - a college job collecting recycling by bicycle. This hands-on experience ignited his fascination with waste management, leading him to pursue environmental studies. Joseph's career took him from the...

Angela Huffman is the President and co-founder of Farm Action, a nonpartisan, farmer-led watchdog that holds government and corporate power accountable in food and agriculture. She's back to talk about sustainability as it relates to agricultural policy and family farms, and what it really takes to push for change in Washington. Angela is the sixth generation on her family's farm up in northwest Ohio. She's really seen firsthand how hard farmers work, how little control they often have over the...

Angela Huffman is the co-founder and president of Farm Action, a watchdog organization working to dismantle corporate consolidation across the U.S. food supply chain. In this conversation, she unpacks how a handful of corporations came to shape what ends up on America's dinner plates, and what it will take to shift that power back toward farmers, workers, and consumers. Two hundred years ago, Angela's family put down roots on a patch of land in northwest Ohio. Six generations later, she's still...

Up to a third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted, and up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions are tied to it. The opportunity to fix that sits largely inside professional kitchens, and most of them have no system for even measuring the problem. That is exactly what Andrew Shakman in Leanpath was built to change. Andrew's reframe for kitchens is simple and a little uncomfortable: they are factories. High volume, high complexity, constantly changing menus, and almost none of the proces...

Andrew Shakman is the CEO of Leanpath, a company on a mission to make food waste prevention everyday practice in professional kitchens worldwide. Before any of that, he was a child actor, a film school graduate, and a digital marketer selling Cap'n Crunch on the early internet. Andrew Shakman did not set out to work in sustainability. He set out to tell stories that mattered. What drew him, from early childhood through film school and into his career, was a hunger for meaning and a fascination ...

Nancy Zavada returns for part two of her Green Champions conversation, this time pulling back the curtain on the actual work behind sustainable events. As president of MeetGreen, Nancy has saved clients $7.8 million in sustainability-driven decisions and cut $2.5 million in aisle carpet alone from a single event last year. This episode is a masterclass in making the business case for doing things better. On a cross-country flight, she ordered tea in economy and got a styrofoam cup, a plastic st...

Nancy Zavada is the founder and president of MeetGreen, a sustainable event agency that has spent over 30 years helping organizations design and deliver events that are both environmentally responsible and genuinely exceptional. Nancy grew up on the Oregon Coast, where recycling wasn't a trend but a way of life. She never set out to start a company. She was simply an event planner who noticed something she couldn't unsee: a single five-day conference for 2,500 people would generate 31,000 styro...