Weaving Voices

Episode 3

Reflections from an Industrial Ecologist

[00:00:00] Rebecca Burgess: A growing cacophony of warning bells have been ringing for over half a century, alerting us all to the feedback loops that human activity is generating for the Earth's biosphere, oceans, soils, and atmosphere. Joining that chorus today is many in the mainstream. The issues are understood even if denied by powerful interests.

[00:00:26] Rebecca Burgess: These individuals and institutions are well in the know about the conditions we find ourselves in on this planet. Systems level transformations are now very overdue. And yet here we are in 2022, still urging organizing and pushing for multiple course corrections. Why has it taken so long to do the obvious?

[00:00:57] Rebecca Burgess: This is weaving voices, a podcast [00:01:00] that stitches textile practice, economic philosophy, and climate science into a quilt of understanding. Designed to transform our thinking and actions, both as citizens and material, culture makers, and users. I'm Rebecca Burgess, your host of this Whetstone radio collective series, which aims to explore the nexus of modern day economic design and textile systems.

[00:01:25] Rebecca Burgess: In this episode, we dive into the history of corporate social responsibility and sustainability programs in their present form. While also exploring what else needs to happen to manifest change. Together with my guest industrial ecologist, professor Roland Geyer, we explore the research and analysis in his book, The Business of Less: The Role of Companies and Households on a Planet in Peril."

[00:01:52] Roland Geyer: I don't wanna say we lost 30 years but I personally, I wish I had had the bravery to of question that [00:02:00] earlier.

[00:02:01] Rebecca Burgess: For 18 years, he has worked as an industrial ecologist and a professor at the university of California, Santa Barbara's Bren school of environmental science and management, industrial ecology, as he explains it is a discipline that studies material and energy flows through the economy through production and consumption systems

[00:02:23] Rebecca Burgess: and then quantifies their environmental impact. Most importantly, it then looks for ways to reduce those environmental impacts. The historical framing of Geyer's book details work that occurred in the early 1990s through the United nations, which he notes had become very worried about humankind's trajectory.

[00:02:45] Rebecca Burgess: He writes that in their own words, the UN sought to help governments rethink economic development and find ways to halt the destruction of irreplaceable natural resources. Geyer says there was good reason for this alarm because the environment was [00:03:00] already considered in peril 30 years prior. From 1962 to 1992, the global GDP had tripled.

[00:03:10] Roland Geyer: I also picked that year, 1962, because it was 30 years before this momentous occasion of the earth summit in Rio de Janeiro. But also because it was important in its own right. Rachel Carson published her really important book, "Silent Spring," in 1962. And then I think the sixties, especially the late sixties then were the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

[00:03:41] Roland Geyer: And one of the things that happened sort of in parallel to our budding environmental consciousness is just that the global economy just kept growing so that whatever environmental impact was being created by the global economy just kept increasing [00:04:00] simply due to the increasing size in the global economy. And so I think by the early nineties, there was just no denying that the pressures on the environment were becoming really unsustainable and something had to be done.

[00:04:15] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says one thing that didn't happen was the questioning of continuing economic growth. He says he thinks that didn't enter the conversation because the idea of questioning it was considered undesirable and the perceived need of a steady state economy was entrenched. This idea of a steady state economy had 50 years of historic resonance. At the earth summit in Rio,

[00:04:40] Rebecca Burgess: he says key players were quickly deciding that economic growth was not gonna be on the table for discussion. So it became inevitable that the economy was going to continue on its established trajectory. 

[00:04:52] Roland Geyer: The way out of this conundrum, how to get off the non-sustainable path, but keep [00:05:00] growing economically is this idea of decoupling environmental impact from economic growth.

[00:05:06] Roland Geyer: So the short term of that is eco-efficiency. So just make the economy ever more eco-efficient. So reduce the environmental impact per unit output of every car produced, of every garment produced, of every dollar GDP produced. And that sort of became the project going forward out of the earth summit. 

[00:05:31] Rebecca Burgess: By the mid 1990s, he decided he wanted to pursue environmental sustainability as a career.

[00:05:37] Rebecca Burgess: By then he says the narrative of the relationship between business and the environment had completely changed. In a way he says it took almost until five years ago before he realized how momentous that was in terms of what happened back then. 

[00:05:53] Roland Geyer: In the eighties, environmental protection was very much defined by conflict, conflict [00:06:00] between environmentalists and environmental regulators,

[00:06:04] Roland Geyer: and business and industry. And it was sort of considered almost like a zero sum gain. So if business wins, then the environmentalists and the regulators lose or the other way around and out of the earth summit, and in the run up to it, suddenly the narrative completely changed and we got this other sort of paradigm change that is now called win-win.

[00:06:30] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer points to a one page article written by Michael Porter, whom he describes as a very influential professor from Harvard business school. In the piece published in scientific American in 1991, Porter said the conflict between environmental protection and economic competitiveness is a false dichotomy.

[00:06:50] Roland Geyer: He basically says like, no, we can have our cake and eat it so we can pursue growth. We can pursue profit [00:07:00] maximization and have environmental sustainability altogether. There is no conflict there and the way we are going to do it was through eco-efficiency. So we were just going to reduce progressively the environmental impact

[00:07:17] Roland Geyer: of our production system per unit output. And that would allow us to keep growing and at the same time, bring environmental impact down to some sustainable level, whatever that would be. And these two narratives were so powerful that when I did my PhD, and then I spent some time at a business school as a researcher, these were like axioms that you did not question.

[00:07:46] Roland Geyer: It was very powerful and in a way, took me until I decided to write this book to publicly break with that corporate sustainability gospel and say like, no, I don't believe them. 

[00:07:58] Rebecca Burgess: In the beginning of Geyers book, [00:08:00] he notes that for every dollar of GDP produced the environmental impact decreased. For every dollar racked up in our gross domestic product, the amount of CO2 that went into the atmosphere decreased on a measurable level because there wasn't a certain amount of efficiency that we were gaining. But he mentions that moving forward from 1992 to 2019, global CO2 emissions went from 22 to 36 billion metric tons per year, and the global economy doubled in size.

[00:08:30] Rebecca Burgess: So what did the environmental movement miss in the last 30 years? 

[00:08:35] Roland Geyer: I put a significant amount of blame at this point to the belief of eco-efficiency that eco-efficiency would help solve that climate change problem. Just like all the other problems. And what happened in the 30 years since 1992, is that yes, the carbon intensity went down by a very modest, I think it's [00:09:00] 25% or something like that.

[00:09:02] Roland Geyer: But at the same time, there were some valient efforts to decrease the carbon intensity of GDP or national production or corporate output. The global economy doubled more than doubled, and that of course, wipes out any efficiency gain. And as a result, we didn't even manage to keep carbon emission steady, but they actually grew by over 60%.

[00:09:30] Roland Geyer: In those 30 years of win-win and eco-efficiency, and that's why we are in this terrible climate change fix that we are in now.

[00:09:39] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says it's time to be honest and say that eco-efficiency as a lone solution was a dismal failure. In a way he says he thinks eco-efficiency is not seeing the forest through the trees.

[00:09:52] Rebecca Burgess: It's such a small focused perspective that companies get very excited about. They get excited about bringing the carbon footprint or the [00:10:00] water footprint of their products down, but at the same time, they're growing by five or 10% year over year. These hard earned gains in eco-efficiency get wiped out pretty instantly just by the growth model.

[00:10:15] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer is also very clear that there's value in how efficient a material is in terms of its net impact, but it cannot counteract the effects of growth. And that's just what the math shows us. He says the lesson obviously is not that we shouldn't be efficient. It means that just focusing on efficiency is nowhere near enough.

[00:10:36] Rebecca Burgess: The other way that Geyer helped the reader understand this was through the use of describing material consumption, materials such as cement and metals. He pointed out that there were more efficient materials that we could choose from from the cadre of those available. He says, when you look at the data over the entire 20th century, everything's growing steadily.

[00:10:57] Rebecca Burgess: And unfortunately the earth summit didn't [00:11:00] change that. We just kept increasing material output and material use. We actually doubled or tripled annual production of materials like steel, aluminum, cement plastic, just since the earth summit. 

[00:11:15] Roland Geyer: That's for me is one of those moments where I look at the data and think, what are we doing?

[00:11:20] Roland Geyer: The earth summit, as you said, was this moment of pause and thinking, rethinking, as they said, economic development, destruction of irreplaceable, natural resources, pollution. And one of the responses to that call to arms was to double load triple annual material output. And yes, it is true that production was getting somewhat more efficient.

[00:11:48] Roland Geyer: Aluminum, all of these materials, probably the carbon intensity went down somewhat, but we didn't have carbon intensity. And even if we had doubling annual output [00:12:00] would mean that basically we were just running without moving. 

[00:12:05] Rebecca Burgess: He says it's like running on a treadmill that keeps accelerating and we just can't keep up

[00:12:10] Rebecca Burgess: despite all the sustainability efforts. Not all of it is done in good faith. 

[00:12:15] Roland Geyer: That's what brought me to that point where I just say, we need to get off the treadmill, take a breather and say like, this is nonsense. This is crazy. What we're doing here. We need to really rethink this. 

[00:12:30] Rebecca Burgess: I wanted to understand more about the Porter hypothesis and what it is in terms of those who study the history of the intersection of business and the environment.

[00:12:39] Rebecca Burgess: How important was it at the time. And what did it state? Geyer described the modern environmental movement in Western countries dating to the late sixties, early seventies with the formation of the environmental protection agency, the first earth summit, most of the environmental NGOs were all founded at this time.

[00:12:59] Rebecca Burgess: [00:13:00] Environmentalism was about conflict. It was a fight against ruthless or at least mindless business and industry that either didn't care or didn't know about all the environmental cost of industrial and business activity and the relentless growth thereof. It was very much a zero sum game mindset. Either I win and you lose or it's the other way around.

[00:13:22] Roland Geyer: The Porter hypothesis was this pivotal moment where someone who is like, sort of at the apex of the business world, he's a strategy professor. So that's like the most admired discipline in business schools and he was at Harvard business schools. So that's the most admired business schools.

[00:13:42] Roland Geyer: So this person suddenly publicly said, you know what? There is no conflict. There doesn't have to be a conflict. We can be friends and there is no contradiction. And I think it was just the promise of [00:14:00] some of that being true was just such an incredible relief, probably for everyone who was tired in the trenches. 

[00:14:08] Rebecca Burgess: At the same time, he says there was another sort of paradigm that really gained traction, that of pollution prevention, which was this idea that it would be great if pollution was prevented or reduced in the first place instead of complicated and costly pollution control.

[00:14:24] Rebecca Burgess: It was argued that it would be much smarter and Geyer knows of some instances in which it truly did offer cost savings. There was some data, some empirical evidence that there can be a win-win with looking for pollution prevention opportunities that may reduce pollution and also save cost to your operation.

[00:14:43] Rebecca Burgess: There was some evidence, but Porter later went as far in an article to basically say pollution is just resource in efficiency. And he basically said let's just design pollution out of business and industry. At that point, Geyer says some people started to [00:15:00] think that sounds too good to be true. And as it turned out, it was. I'm interested in life cycle assessment or what we know as LCA and inquired as to how Geyer started off engaging with them.

[00:15:13] Rebecca Burgess: And if he had anything to say about where they hit a home run and where we have to be careful in their use. He says LCAs are at least half of his career and he's passionate about the topic, but jokes that he doesn't want to be the Michael Porter of LCAs, which basically would mean that he says they solve everything, which he knows that they don't.

[00:15:34] Roland Geyer: The famous person with the hammer, where every problem turns into a nail, just because I have a hammer. So I think in order to truly harness the value of something you really need to appreciate and know the limitations also, I think otherwise it could just be the panacea, which it isn't. LCA started also in the early seventies so it's another product of the modern environmental movement.[00:16:00] 

[00:16:00] Rebecca Burgess: We did notice at some point with alarm that LCAs are essentially an eco-efficiency measure. They look at the environmental impact per unit of something, whether it be a pair of shoes, a ton of steel, or the life cycle of a car. It does take that eco-efficiency perspective and it does not tell us about the total environmental impact.

[00:16:22] Rebecca Burgess: It just tells us about the environmental impact of one unit of whatever we are studying in order to compare apples and apples. There's this big effort in defining what are equivalent product systems. 

[00:16:35] Roland Geyer: LCA would say, wow, you can't compare a hybrid SUV with a regular compact car because they aren't equivalent in terms of comfort functionality, trunk space, passenger space,

[00:16:53] Roland Geyer: and that's why we're not allowed to compare them. I find that very restricting because I think household decisions [00:17:00] don't really work like that. So we're not always saying like, okay, I'm going to get a compact SUV of that class. And now I'm going to just look at everything that is equivalent in that class. I think we are making decisions across even like product categories where we say, okay, now I have money.

[00:17:22] Roland Geyer: Should I get a haircut or go to the restaurant, get a massage, or should I buy this gadget or a piece of apparel? So that's why it's called discretionary income. Cuz we can spend it on whatever we want. So this sort of narrow way of comparing things I think is limiting. 

[00:17:39] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says when it comes to packaging, for example, it's typically comparing equivalent kinds of packaging for something and it ends up very often to just be about comparing different types of materials.

[00:17:51] Rebecca Burgess: The one option that will always win out is no packaging. Simply not making a purchase or not choosing something physical is left [00:18:00] out in LCAs. But in our daily lives, that could be a consideration. We could choose to buy something with no packaging or a business could choose to see whether it can drastically reduce or even eliminate its packaging.

[00:18:13] Rebecca Burgess: These kinds of things he says are where life cycle assessments really reach their limit. 

[00:18:19] Roland Geyer: Everyone now accepts that renewable energy has a minimal carbon footprint compared to fossil based energy, typically electricity. And that is thanks to the countless LCAs that were done, inventorying the greenhouse gas emissions of different types of electricity generation.

[00:18:41] Roland Geyer: And so I think it's a wonderful example of where we can say, well, LCA really just answered that question and now we know it and there's really no one who sort of questions that anymore. 

[00:18:52] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says the important thing is not just to increase renewable energy capacity. The goal is to wean ourselves off [00:19:00] of fossil fuels.

[00:19:01] Rebecca Burgess: He says he's a little bit worried that in some parts of the energy debate, there's far too much emphasis on increasing renewable rather than tactically decreasing the use of fossil fuel. He says it's not the same thing. It's really important that we're using LCA results and using these insights to keep our eye on the ball.

[00:19:22] Rebecca Burgess: The end goal is not just to have more renewables. The other thing with lifecycle assessment he says is that it doesn't measure everything. 

[00:19:30] Roland Geyer: One classic example is the struggle that lifecycle assessment has with organic production systems, because some of the benefits of organic production systems like soil health and microbial communities in soil or ecosystem health, those are things that LCA is not good at measuring.

[00:19:53] Roland Geyer: So it's very much focused on how efficient is your production system. And that means that [00:20:00] typically production systems, agricultural production systems have really high yield, tend to look really good and then systems that are more extensive that don't maybe have the same yield, but have other benefits like ecosystem health.

[00:20:16] Roland Geyer: They don't look so good because LCA doesn't really know how to quantify ecosystem health, very well. Plastic is the same thing. Plastic is now considered and rightly so as a pollutant in its own, right? Plastic's now everywhere. The environment it's accumulating, cuz it doesn't biodegrade, but lifecycle assessment does not know how to quantify the environmental impact of plastic in the environment.

[00:20:45] Rebecca Burgess: This describes the challenges we face in trying to support agriculturally produced fibers in quote unquote sustainability conversations. The fact of this moment is that soil health isn't measured in an LCA framework. [00:21:00] It's difficult to measure. In addition, recycled polyester nor Virgin polyester take into account the emissions for oil or gas extraction, nor the use phase emissions that include microfiber plastic lint moving into soil, human bodies and Marine ecosystems.

[00:21:19] Rebecca Burgess: The current LCA model does not include those pollutants and their transport through the biosphere or oceans. Even though Geyer has done some work in that space, we've yet to see the industries develop and manage comparative data to absorb these emissions facts. It's created a bit of a challenge to be able to help companies understand how to involve themselves in soil health.

[00:21:43] Rebecca Burgess: There are of course, many very interested companies and they are engaging regardless, but then they go back to that framework that they rely on to measure sustainability and their decisions are not being backed up by industry facing frameworks because the frameworks [00:22:00] are based on LCAs as they stand. So we have some stunted and truncated movement right now in the textile industry because of what LCA doesn't and does measure. We're in need of a conversation in our system of an expanded framework. I think people are intuitively able to hold this information, but it would be extremely helpful if they had a framework to support them institutionally. And currently that is not there and does not exist. 

[00:22:29] Roland Geyer: One of the main tenants of lifecycle assessment is actually to a look at the entire life cycle of a product.

[00:22:38] Roland Geyer: So you avoid burden shifting between different life cycle stages, right? To just shift from production to the use phase or the use phase to the end of life stage, but then equally importantly, to use vaguely called a comprehensive set of environmental impact indicators. And the reason for that is so that we [00:23:00] avoid environmental burden shifting from one environmental concern to another environmental concern.

[00:23:06] Roland Geyer: So it's explicitly part of the LCA framework, but then they are just important environmental concerns that LCA currently is not able to quantify in a sound robust way. And those are things like ecosystem health biodiversity impacts big efforts, but it's just really difficult to do that. And the LCA framework just really sort of is pushed to its limit.

[00:23:36] Roland Geyer: If our wastewater goes to wastewater treatment plant, initially some people said, well, what a relief? Because it turns out that up to 95% of those microfibers end up in the bio solids, the sewage sludge, rather than the affluent, but of course the bios solids need to go somewhere. And if they are being applied on land, then all we've done is we've diverted micro [00:24:00] fibers from, from water bodies to lands.

[00:24:03] Roland Geyer: We know even less about the short term and long term effects of those microfibers. So that's where you really kind of reach the limits. 

[00:24:14] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer writes in his book about the unintended environmental consequences of the win-win paradigm. He writes in other words, let's not require that opportunities for true environmental improvement are also going to reduce costs.

[00:24:31] Rebecca Burgess: This is an important message for the textile industry. 

[00:24:36] Roland Geyer: Another really unfortunate consequence or corollary of the Porter hypothesis basically saying is like win-win is real and it's pervasive. I think it was even then taken further to the point where every environmental action should be win-win. So [00:25:00] that basically there's another really important voice

[00:25:04] Roland Geyer: again, the Harvard business school strategy professor Forest Reinhardt, who kind of took that even further and basically said, well, maybe not everything is win-win, but managers should only make environmental decisions and investments for the same reason they make any other investment, to expect positive returns.

[00:25:24] Roland Geyer: So he basically, while he admitted that maybe not everything is win-win, I think he made this fatal sort of next step saying, if it's not a win-win, we shouldn't even go there. That was another sort of statement that I just, over the decades I kept chafing against until I finally said, like, you know what? I just really don't agree with that. 

[00:25:47] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says, first of all, economic savings create their own environmental impacts because they basically liberate money that will then be spent otherwise. It's not that money has gone away, it's just going to be spent on [00:26:00] something else. That's the sort of famous rebound effect.

[00:26:04] Rebecca Burgess: If we buy a more fuel efficient car, for example, we save money on fuel, but we will spend the money on something else. So it's critically important he says that we spend this on something and we think about our spending carefully. If the company keeps the money, for instance, it will go to the shareholders and they will spend it.

[00:26:23] Rebecca Burgess: If it gets reinvested in a company that money would typically be used to grow that company. This is how economic savings produce their own environmental undoing. Geyer says he's at the point where he feels we should value environmental benefit and not demand that it also somehow save money, in addition to being an environmental benefit. He recalls one of his PhD students saying at some point that an environmental activity that's only being done because it's an economic win is not really an environmental activity because it basically would've been done anyway.

[00:26:58] Rebecca Burgess: So what's so environmental [00:27:00] about it. Geyer says he's thought about this over and over and realizes that the student was right. And this has very much changed his thinking. 

[00:27:09] Roland Geyer: I do think we need to, as a society and individuals, we should, as quickly as we can kind of rethink this, we've been kind of told this win-win gospel now for 30 years, it's kind of ingrained.

[00:27:23] Roland Geyer: And also this idea that we are sort of utility maximizers and individuals and there's companies, all we do is profit maximizing. I don't think it has to be that way. I consider them more like self-fulfilling prophecies that we've been telling each other now for 50 or 30 years. And I think it's possible to undo them and say that a beautiful product

[00:27:48] Roland Geyer: does not have an undue impact on the natural environment is going to cost more. And so it should, because it's part of its beauty. It's part of why we [00:28:00] like it. And I think that's sort of a narrative that I want to foster and at least be one of the people that sort of changes the narrative from oh, recycling

[00:28:09] Roland Geyer: isn't isn't cheap enough. We need to bring the cost of recycling down. I'd rather want to say no, that just means that virgin materials are too expensive. So we , we need to sort of flip the narrative on its head there. 

[00:28:23] Rebecca Burgess: As Geyer mentioned, a pair of shoes could have a net green effect, the shoe costs more, but that's because there's been an investment in a more sustainably harvested rubber, or perhaps a biodegrading fiber that's been used for the covering of the foot.

[00:28:37] Rebecca Burgess: He added that this could mean that the shareholder eventually does have less but that's not necessarily a problem because some of the discretionary income that comes from these profit margins has a risk of nullifying itself. The investment and the core good, there's value right there. It's not like companies are actually having to dig that far into their pockets.

[00:28:59] Rebecca Burgess: They've [00:29:00] just been expecting to have bigger gains. In a typical system, in a supply network, a farmer might receive four to 5% of the overall value of a good. And companies are often more comfortable taking approximately 75% of the value of a good that they sell. So really when we think about providing more investment in the supply network and paying more for the good, when it comes to the raw material providers, it's not impossible.

[00:29:29] Rebecca Burgess: It's actually not that big of a stretch. We have seen though, in these conversations that there can be some mental and psychological roadblock. He mentions at this point, everyone loves a bargain so much. Everyone loves to save money, but he thinks we've reached the point of pathology. 

[00:29:49] Roland Geyer: To some extent I got into the field I am in now because I'm not anti product.

[00:29:56] Roland Geyer: I love beautiful things. [00:30:00] Just like I love nature. The ultimate beautiful things. Actually, my mother was a tailor and she actually comes from a family of tailors. So I just really kind of know what goes into making a garment. And it's so much work when you then go into a retail store and you can buy a man's jacket for less than a hundred dollars or for $50.

[00:30:26] Roland Geyer: And I know how many hours my, my mother would take in order to. To make something like that. I think that can't be right. I would love to know that everyone in the supply chain, everyone that touched the product that I wear, let's say apparel was treated fairly and felt good about being involved in making this product.

[00:30:50] Roland Geyer: And the same with nature. 

[00:30:53] Rebecca Burgess: One thing that possibly makes it harder is that we are so removed from where our products come from, where the materials come from and [00:31:00] how they're being made. He says that's due to these current global supply chains. I would agree with Geyers assessment, disconnect drives exploitation.

[00:31:12] Rebecca Burgess: I wanted to know his thoughts on labor and how he sees an investment in labor as a way of getting us towards net green to bring the emissions down. He says this was a connection that evolved while he was writing the book and he's tremendously excited about it and is hoping to follow up with lots of rigorous research to bolster his intuition.

[00:31:32] Roland Geyer: One thing that we all dry in greening products is to sort of swap out impactful production inputs with lower impact production inputs. Take the brown material, take it out, put the green material in. And then we find out that there isn't really such a thing as a completely green material or using renewable energy in instead of fossil energy, which certainly is the right thing to do.

[00:31:58] Roland Geyer: But then one thing struck [00:32:00] me is that in my field, no one talks about labor. And the reason no one talks about labor in my field is because labor has no environmental impacts. It's just people's time and skill. And that's why at an LCA, we just leave it out. 

[00:32:17] Rebecca Burgess: He says it might be a value if we design labor back into the supply chain. By doing this, we can start to de industrialize and de commodify certain aspects of the economy.

[00:32:28] Rebecca Burgess: And by doing so improve the environmental footprint. 

[00:32:32] Roland Geyer: If it's agricultural production, slow it down and have more time to actually look after the soil and the ecosystems. You could just add more labor in the supply chain or the other thing, and that's how my connection with the apparel industry sort of got reinforced,

[00:32:52] Roland Geyer: you could pay people living wages. And that sounds kind of, well, obviously, but I had to learn the hard [00:33:00] way that this is not happening in the apparel supply chain. That so many people that make our clothes, they don't earn what would be deemed living wage even in their countries. It would have incredible environmental benefits because what it means is that all households, including me, would suddenly have to pay more for products that basically were too cheap until now.

[00:33:29] Roland Geyer: And that money would no longer be available for drive more or a weekend flight. Basically, however way I buy a gadget that maybe has been labeled green, even that makes me feel good. So, I suddenly realized that by paying people better or by increasing the labor content in the supply chains, I could actually have real significant environmental outcomes.

[00:33:58] Rebecca Burgess: It's all preliminary, but [00:34:00] he's very excited about the research. I think of the value that the farmers, weavers, knitters, and cut and sew community bring to the table. They are the producers and clothing does not exist without them, but they receive the lowest wages, sometimes by orders of magnitude when compared to the CEOs or the white collar workers that sell product in Western communities. By raising wages in the supply network and paying more for raw commodities,

[00:34:29] Rebecca Burgess: it would make sense that you could then slow the use of discretionary income in these companies for business flights and the purchasing of more electronics and green gadgets. The total sum effect on society of higher costs for clothing is that you'd have to invest more on it. And you would have less to spend on that which Western culture tends to spend its discretionary income on plane flights, tourism, electronics, cars.

[00:34:58] Roland Geyer: One question at this [00:35:00] point I typically always get in a conversation is like, okay, how is that going to happen? And I gotta be honest, I'm not sure. I haven't completely worked that out. The agents of change could be government minimum wages and so on. Their households, of course, that really could be agents of change.

[00:35:24] Roland Geyer: And to be honest, I think that the vast majority of people would be horrified if they really, really knew what happens in the supply chains and how workers are treated, it's made too easy for us to ignore. And then companies, I now wonder whether one of the most powerful environmental movements might be the fair labor movement, fair labor, and living wages movement.

[00:35:54] Rebecca Burgess: The international labor movement is critical. It is so important to raise wages simultaneously [00:36:00] across the countries that produce the lion's share of our clothing, including such countries as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Myanmar, and workforce communities in Los Angeles for example, where 45,000 garment workers live and work.

[00:36:14] Rebecca Burgess: And yet we must understand that big old school industry groups were recently not in favor of the workers in Los Angeles moving from the piece rate to minimum wage. To note, the piece rate is what suppresses wages and it's what the garment workers were fighting against. They needed a minimum wage. They ended up receiving that in very monumental legislation, known as SB 62, which we will talk about in a future episode.

[00:36:44] Rebecca Burgess: But the argument against this was that the industry will just move, which is what it's been doing the whole time. We also need to continue to push governments to invest in rural economic development. We need decentralized manufacturing [00:37:00] placed adjacent to raw material production. Yes, there is an efficiency to all of this.

[00:37:05] Rebecca Burgess: And also this provides an opportunity for farmers, ranchers, and all manner of growers at the base of the supply chain to become equity partners in the milling systems. We know that California is the largest, extra long staple cotton producer in the world. And we have the highest volume of wool production in the United States.

[00:37:26] Rebecca Burgess: We could be putting natural fiber value addition systems in proximity to the actual places where it's produced. It would mean a lot for rural economic development, but it also means putting those manufacturing centers in higher wage places with tight environmental regulation. But you can see how this all fits together. To decentralize the system, to take responsibility for our value addition systems in our own home communities means that we also must be simultaneously fighting for an international labor movement.[00:38:00] 

[00:38:00] Rebecca Burgess: We can't compete if parts of the world are being exploited. The tide needs to rise all boats in the Harbor. This is how we build solidarity. Farmers, Bangladeshi cut and sew community members, and wearers who care. Now back to manufacturing; this is where I think our government could be of assistance. We have longstanding financial instruments called CDFIs that will help take higher risk positions in businesses.

[00:38:31] Rebecca Burgess: We could very much use that kind of financial infrastructure to help us rebuild and decentralize manufacturing. Simultaneously, we need to start leveling the playing field on the price of fiber. It's no accident that 60% of what we're wearing is plastic because plastic is not something we're paying the true cost for.

[00:38:50] Rebecca Burgess: If the price point went up on polyester, acrylic and recycled P E T because we ended up committing to internalizing the true cost of fossil fuel [00:39:00] extraction and the true cost of microfiber plastic emissions, this kind of lever would help support the socioeconomic position of natural fiber producing communities.

[00:39:11] Rebecca Burgess: And there are likely a multiplicity of additional ways to level these playing fields. It ultimately comes down to investing more in people, more in the people behind the more ecological materials, the ecological material becomes ecological because of labor. He says he thinks there's a lot of evidence for that. 

[00:39:33] Roland Geyer: One of the other areas I do a lot of work in is reuse and recycling.

[00:39:38] Roland Geyer: You know what now is called the circular economy and absolutely what we find over and over. One of the reasons a reuse or recycling activities are lower impact than their equivalent primary production activities is that they are more labor intensive. And as we just said, labor has no environmental impact. [00:40:00] And then it becomes really ironic that some in the circular economy

[00:40:04] Roland Geyer: space then basically say, oh, recycling and reuse are still too expensive compared to the primary production activities. So that means we need to bring the cost down, which means we need to automate these processes. And you could make the exact opposite argument. You could say, no, those are the benefits and coming with those labor benefits and employment benefits.

[00:40:34] Roland Geyer: So what that means is that we need to increase the cost of primary production. And what it would do is just internalize the environmental and social cost that we've been externalizing for too long now and sort of undo some of that damage. 

[00:40:56] Rebecca Burgess: We need eco-efficiency and we need to address growth, [00:41:00] not one without the other.

[00:41:02] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says he's relieved to see that the growth debate is back. As long as the economic system is based on making and selling stuff solely, he does say we're in a terrible fix. If we start placing value on each other's time and skills, he thinks it would open up a lot more opportunity for solving our biggest problem.

[00:41:23] Rebecca Burgess: Geyer says, sometimes people push him very hard on how he's going to manifest all these great ideas. His response; at some point, you have to say that if humankind is dead set on self destruction, no one's gonna stop us. Geyer's personal transformation and career arc has so much to offer to the businesses that we run,

[00:41:45] Rebecca Burgess: the industries we work within and the policies we write and vote. As we move to rapidly Institute the changes that will provide essential solutions that we've needed to address at a global level for a very long time, [00:42:00] we know now that the economic architecture obviously needs a total redo, and it is a great moment to have an exposure to the kind of risk taking that Geyer has placed himself into. To hear from someone who has been at the forefront of eco-efficiency, LCA development,

[00:42:19] Rebecca Burgess: and an academic who was shaped by the Porter hypothesis, to hear him stop, pause, and acknowledge that we cannot solve climate change unless we take on the growth model. It's been a refreshing conversation and perspective. Please join me for the next Weaving Voices episode as we continue to consider solutions and explore possibilities.

[00:42:53] Rebecca Burgess: This episode is made possible because of all the people who work behind the scenes on it. I'd like to thank my [00:43:00] producer, Jennifer O'Neill, audio editor, Bethany Sands, and intern, Maha Sanad. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone head of podcasts, Celine Glasier, sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, music director, Catherine Yang, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Shabnam Ferdowsi, and sound intern, Simon Lavendar.

[00:43:26] Rebecca Burgess: The cover art by Whetstone art director, Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast at WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast video content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at WhetstoneMagazine.com.