Greenwashing, fast fashion, private jets and the UN: Meet John Pabon for sustainability without the BS.

When it comes to environmentalism and sustainability there are a wide range of opinions and perspectives, but one person I have been very excited to talk to is John Pabon.

This chat did feel a bit like chatting to a mirror, but he has such an incredible way of explaining concepts that I only ever even voice in my own head.

John has spent two decades in the business of saving our Earth. After leaving his role at the United Nations, he travelled the world studying the impacts of sustainability first-hand in factories, on fields, and in Fortune 500s.

Now he is an author, consultant, and speaker, helping businesses and individuals make sense of sustainability.

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Transcript:

Brianne (intro): Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place.

Brianne: Welcome. Thank you so much for being with me. I'm very excited to talk to you because I've read The Great Greenwashing. I have just discovered your other couple of books. I'm going to go and read them shortly. First of all, for the benefit of everybody listening, who are you? What have you done? How did you get there?

John: Yeah, it's an interesting journey that I sort of don't think about too much. So thanks for asking. It's good to rehash a bit of history. I started my career actually at the UN, so working in the public policy space, and that was kind of always the goal. Actually backing up one step, I actually studied music in school and then realised that was never going to make me any money, so I got into political science. And then I ended up at the UN. So that's kind of how I started things. But as I was there for a few years, a lot of my mentors there said “Hey, if you want to move up in the organisation and actually make a big difference, you have to leave and then come back at the end of your career and get a little bit of experience.” I was straight out of grad school, so not a lot of professional experience under my belt and I fell into consulting, working with the likes of McKinsey and AC Nielsen, but then everything changed when I went on a little vacation to Shanghai. I went there, loved it, went back to New York where I was living at the time and it was the height of the global recession. Everybody was crying poor and they were. Life was really tough, but in China, life was not tough. The economy was not sinking like it was back in the US, so I thought, hey, let's move over there for a year and see how it goes. After a year, a year became two, became ten, but what I needed to figure out is how can I use all of this public sector experience that I had at the UN and even in my consulting work because I was even working with public sector clients in an extremely commercial city. Shanghai is like capitalism on steroids. So I fell into sustainability back probably when it was still called CSR. So really that mixture of the corporate private sector element of doing good plus the altruistic public sector stuff that I had been doing already and the rest is kind of history. I've stayed there ever since. Will I go back to the UN? Maybe. I mean, I still advise them, so I still have my foot, maybe a toe in the door, but yeah, we'll see if that ends up being my swan song at some point.

Brianne: Okay. This is certainly not where I wanted to ask this question, but I'm going to…How do you feel about the UN in light of, and I appreciate they are not an organisation that can take a great deal of action, and I don't know anywhere near as much about the history. I visited last year in New York and it was fascinating I learned a lot I didn't know but They are talking about of course the conflict in Palestine at the moment. They have made a lot of judgments and they don't appear to be able to hold anybody to anything How does that make you feel about them as an organisation?

John: The UN is a very frustrating organisation and I think a lot of that comes from not just for me, but but certainly the public looking from the outside in, a misunderstanding of what the UN is supposed to be doing. So the UN's role entirely, the whole point of the thing, is just to keep us out of international conflict. So if you look at it just from that perspective, they've done a really good job because we are in, even though it doesn't seem like it, we are in the most peaceful period in human history. Yeah, there's war. A lot of it is domestic conflict, which is not at all what the UN is supposed to get itself involved in. So if you look at something like Israel-Palestine, it's technically a domestic conflict even though we know it's not. So that's why the UN is kind of involved. But if we're going just by the rules of the charter, they shouldn't be getting involved at all. But if you look at it from that perspective, the UN has done a lot of work. But the UN has grown and become this thing that is – it has its tentacles in every bit of our lives, which was never the original intention. And that's good, but it's having a lot of value as, if we use corporate speak, that it probably was never intended to do. So it's way off its JD and it's getting underpaid for its work. Is it a perfect organisation? No. Would I like the world without a UN? No, that's kind of a scary thought. Should it be reformed? Absolutely. Can it be reformed? No. So it's a beast of its own bureaucracy. And it was made that way on purpose to keep everybody happy and to sort of keep an even keel on things. So it lives and breathes with its bureaucracy and that's the thing that I think ultimately will be its downfall. Hopefully not, but yeah.

Brianne: Yeah, it's the permanent seats on the Security Council. Again, I'm not in my depth. I'm out of my depth here totally, but it's the permanent seats on the Security Council that just seem fundamentally flawed. I get why they put them in place, but the world has moved on, right?

John: And they've been talking about reforming the Security Council since the Security Council was formed at the very beginning. From day one, they've been talking about why it was a bad idea to begin with. So this is not a new conversation and it will continue to be a conversation until the likes of the United States in particular decide to give up just a little bit of power.

Brianne: Might be waiting a while. Okay. Complicated subject. You have a lot of opinions. So I found you on TikTok and I watched all your videos. Fascinating. You and I think along very similar lines. You're just a lot more educated about it. How did you form these big opinions? Obviously, you spent a lot of time in the UN and then outside and you would have worked with a lot of organisations. McKinsey and co. would have been interesting. Where did you get these opinions and what are your, I guess, core beliefs about the way the world operates? That's a big question.

John: No, no, no. It's a good one as well. I think I'll preface all this by saying I call myself a pragmatic altruist. So I approach the field of sustainability, doing good, helping people and the planet in a very realistic way.

Brianne: Which annoys a lot of people.

John: It annoys everybody that it does not think the same way as you and I think. So especially those in the activist community, I take such an issue with the people that are kind of the poster children of the movement because they're not very practical or strategic in a lot of ways with what they're doing. So I've approached things very much from a more pragmatic perspective, a realistic perspective, even to the point of working within the paradigm of capitalism. Oh, yeah, I know we're supposed to be doing something and that's fine. But you know what, until that brilliant economic mind figures out something else and gets everybody else on board, we've got to work with what we're given. And that's the unfortunate reality of our timeline, is this is where we are. So what do you do? You sit back and you complain, or you work inside the system and do something to make it as good as possible. Not perfect, because we will never be perfect, but better than what it was yesterday. So I think a lot of these opinions were actually formed as I lived and worked in the developing world. So the majority of my sustainability career, if not all of it, with the exception of the blip of living in Australia, now has been in the developing world. And sustainability there is a very different conversation than maybe what's happening in New York or London, where it's an academic exercise. There's a lot of sustainability accounting. I think a lot of them are now accountants. They're not actually sustainability professionals sitting in a high-rise. But in the developing world, you have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty. I've lived on palm oil plantations in Borneo. I have been in more factories in the middle of nowhere than I care to remember talking to people, getting involved in the work, being on the factory floor, these sort of things that most people in a high-rise in New York, they can't even comprehend in their head. That shaped my – I'll use a big sustainability term – theories of change. How we go about doing things, how we engage and create meaningful, positive direction. A lot of that is why I really do believe the private sector is the – of all the sectors that could do something, is the one that's really going to get us out of this mess. They got us into the mess, so it should be their responsibility to get us out. But because of the things I've seen happening directly with people, the impact on the environment, that's why I think that they're really the ones to do that. And you say that to an activist and they go, ah, you're a sellout. No, not really. I'm actually see what's happening behind the scenes. The thing I would love for these companies to be doing is talking about it more and having people be receptive to the message because there's so much that people can learn and that would actually encourage other companies and other actors, bad faith actors even, to start to do the right thing. We need more of that momentum.

Brianne: Spot on. It's like I'm talking to a mirror.

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John: We love this.

Brianne: Tell me about a palm oil plantation in Borneo. I would die to go to Borneo, but I put a palm oil free standard into Ethique which was very difficult as soon as I learned about the palm oil issues. And I appreciate it's very complicated, one of the most complicated supply chains in the world. What did you learn there?

John: So, I was working with an organisation called BSR who's sort of the McKinsey of the sustainability world, a massive consultancy and we had partnered with the ILO, the international – the UN system loves to use acronyms. We actually have a – at the UN, there's a book of the acronyms that you have to refer to because there's so many of them and that's – now I use acronyms and I slap myself every time I do. So, not the ILO, the International Labor Organisation. So, we were working on the Malaysian side of Borneo in the palm oil plantation because there was a lot of Indonesian migrant labor. So, we were making sure that the migrant labor was held to the right international standards. They were being paid right. They're being treated right. So, it was more on the social and human side of sustainability, not necessarily the environmental side. Palm oil plantations and environment, super problematic. But like you mentioned, the whole thing is hyper nuanced and there's so many different elements. So while I was there, I was working again on that more human and immigrant labor side of things.

Brianne: Yeah, I've heard there's a lot of, whether this is true, but indentured labour, farmers that attract where they are. I mean, we often paint people doing these crimes as evil people, but it's not true. They're a victim of their own circumstance. A good example, I mean, obviously I'm not a fan of trophy hunting, but I also understand and poachers to a degree why they exist in certain places around the world because if it's between that and not feeding your family, pretty sure everybody listening would pull the trigger, right? It's a horrendous choice they have to make. It's all very complicated, as you pointed out.

John: And that's these realities that a lot of people don't take into account when they look at this from a just black and white or flipping a switch. If it was as easy as flipping a switch, we would have been done a long time ago and you and I would be out of a job. But no, it's not. It's super nuanced and there are human considerations and transitional considerations. I was talking to somebody earlier this week that this is not a flip a switch, this is a transition. That's why we use language like transition because transitions evolve and they take a very long time. The work you and I are doing today, we're not going to see the end benefit of it because we're thinking centuries down the road, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes, but also kind of helps you to keep pushing the crap uphill.

Brianne: What's the saying that a brave man plants a tree, he knows you'll never sit under or something? Something like that.

John: I don't know.

Brianne: I think it's an old proverb that I've bastardised quite horrifically, but you get the gist. Okay, if we're talking about green washing, which is probably your, I guess your sort of focus at the moment. I've been watching your videos on the wedding, for example, which was, as you expected, a little bit confrontational on the points, but I thought it was spot on.

John: Even with my preface of “please don't come at me” it still happened.

Brianne: No, it's so bizarre to me that people will say this one tiny thing people do is good. And look, tiny is relative, right? But they ignore all of this horrific stuff they've done and this is not even even remotely offsetting this bit. It's not actually good We're still massively negative. It's very peculiar to me that people don't look at the whole picture sometimes So I'm forever talking about how paper is not a better alternative to plastic so many times.

John: Oh, a hundred percent. And as a white passing guy with an American accent like I have it's really really hard to get points across without people going grrr…Which I get.

Brianne: Yeah, that would be frustrating. There is a total lack of understanding the grey and the nuance in the sustainability conversation, but that's fun. We enjoy that. What is greenwashing? Pretty sure we all know what it is, but what is your take on it?

John: So greenwashing is essentially when corporations, but also any actor in general, including individuals, wrap themselves in the language of sustainability, being green, being good for the planet or good for people, when the reality probably isn't nearly as altruistic. We see this a lot with corporations, obviously, especially from the marketing perspective of saying, “hey, we're doing great things for the planet” but they're doing that to cover up a lot of bad behaviour or to sell a product, so it's not genuine. There's lots of different kinds of greenwashing. Some of it is intentional, and I think that's the bad stuff I'm trying to suss out. Some of it's accidental, right? A company may overstate a claim or they may unintentionally do something that they didn't realise was greenwashing. It's not good, but we can fix that. It's the more nefarious sort of built into the marketing mix evil companies like the ones we all know and despise that continue to do this expecting consumers to just say, oh yeah, you must be a good company and then buy something from them.

Brianne: Yeah. A good example would be tree planting.

John: Oh, God. Yeah.

Brianne: What are some other examples? I say tree planting, but there's lots of things that are perhaps a little bit more nefarious to use your word.

John: Some of my favourite, I was going to say favourite examples, and they're not actually favourite, they're just nice examples to tell people, are the ones that have kind of been built into our consumer behaviour that we don't even realise are greenwashing anymore. And the best example of this is hanging up your towels at a hotel. That is one of the original examples of greenwashing because hotels use massive amounts of water and resources, whether it's building or just operating, and of course, there's tourism, which complicates things, too. But their solution—this is way back in the 60s when they thought this stuff up—is, oh, if you hang up your towel, we're going to save the planet. That's not true. Keep hanging up your towels, everybody listening, please do, because it's good to save water. But the idea was not to save the planet. It was to save on the water bills at the hotels. So that's an example of greenwashing that has now become just common practice. Another one, and probably my favorite one, is the use of the carbon footprint calculator, which a lot of people really stake their entire lives on. Like, oh, my carbon footprint is small or mine is big. Activists love to use this stuff and the calculators. But what a lot of people don't know is the carbon footprint calculator is a pretty new thing. It was actually developed in around 2000-2001 by, wait for it, Ogilvy and British Petroleum for their sustainability report because they realized nobody was reading the thing, so they created this great PR exercise to not hold BP accountable for their emissions. No, no, no, no, no. To make consumers feel bad about theirs. So if I look at my carbon footprint, for example, and I'm sure yours is probably pretty similar, we probably have a pretty high carbon footprint. And that's not because we don't care. That's because we're traveling around the world to make things better, but we don't get a credit for that. So these are real evil greenwashing things that have embedded into our psyche and so far as into the poster children of the environmental movement now using this stuff, not realising, oh my gosh, we're actually falling prey to, was it Ogilvy? I think it was Ogilvy. Or Edelman, it's one of the bad ones. A scam that they created.

Brianne: Yeah, I remember finding that out, I don't know whenever it was. And being slightly flabbergasted, but also at the same time, yeah, that's actually part of the course with these guys, isn't it? It's recycling. Correct. Recycling is your responsibility. Not the people who make it. No, no, no. It's not their fault at all. It's your fault for not washing your stupid lids.

John: That's another one, recycling is, and again, I don't want people to stop recycling because I think that's been such a massive educational consumer behavioural change that is a great thing and it's been one of the big successes much like the ozone layer, it's been a big success in the sustainability world. But if you separate your cans and your paper and your trash and think you've saved the world, you're sadly mistaken. In the US, and this pretty much tracks for all countries, household recycling makes up about 9, maybe 10% of all waste. The other 90% comes from corporations. So the pressure needs to be on them to fix their waste, their design, their circularity, and how they're dealing with all this stuff, not on the consumer.

Brianne: It's exactly the point. Yes, it's not the consumer's fault. That's the problem with having this conversation, to say, yeah, recycling sucks. I have no faith in the system. It's the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. It's not just an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. It's a two-wheeled ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. But at the same time, I also don't want to say to people, don't do it, because, you know, it's better than the alternative, but it's also kind of like a gateway training device. Like with Ethique shampoo, so the shampoo bars I used to sell, people said, oh, well, I started using a shampoo bar, and then I started doing this. We started calling them gateway bars because they give you an insight into how perhaps making these little steps isn't as arduous. But at the end of the day, whilst those are important, you need to be moving business as we clearly agree. What are some red flags? Everyone has seen that. Pop this little thing on your hotel and we won't change your sheets for you. We won't wash your towels as you were saying. Those are obvious to me. It is clear it is not obvious to most people because it's a money-saving thing. How do people see through this? Is the answer to become a cynic? It's pretty grim.

John: I don't want anybody to become a cynic. I mean, those of us in the space are probably really cynical, but we try not to be as much as possible for anybody who thinks we're terrible. No, no, no. We try our best to be realistic optimists. So I think I want to say that consumers are smarter than maybe we believe them to be and certainly a lot smarter than corporations believe them to be. I think if something smells fishy, it probably is. I don't think that's cynical. I think that's just operating in reality today. If you go to the shops and you are looking at the back of a pack and reading it and something seems off, there's too much jargon, too many numbers, things just aren't adding up and it doesn't feel right in your gut, trust that instinct and maybe buy something else because nine times out of ten, your gut's going to be right. When we look at greenwashing, especially marketing speak type greenwashing, it's not slick. It's pretty blatant what's happening. I'll use a fancy market research term, semiotics, which is the use of colours and symbols to denote meaning. So you look at a pack and it has green splashed all over it and you go, oh, come on, guys, you can't be a green oil company, right? So things that just don't add up in your head.

Brianne: Yeah, BP's logo is my fave.

John: Yes. I mean, just trust the gut, I think, is step one. If it's too cheap to be real, like we think a lot about fast fashion and how could something actually cost $2? It can't because someone's paying that somewhere. So no, that cannot be sustainable. That can't be green. So trust the instincts, I think, is the first major step. Now, with that said, what we're seeing happening is because consumers are getting smarter, marketing teams are investing a whole lot more into really getting into sort of the crazy, how the brain works, how we manipulate people it's getting really dicey. Luckily, that's a small percentage of companies They just refuse to play ball and refuse to get on board with when everybody else is doing the majority of companies are actually genuinely trying to do the right thing which through the research for the book, I'm very happy to report. Hopefully it continues to go that way and the old dinosaurs die out. I've really believed that if I had a crystal ball and I could look 15 years into the future. All choices when you go to the store are going to be decent choices. You won't have to do the research like we have to do today or pay more like we have to do today. I don't want to do that stuff and I know nobody else wants to do it either. But again, this amazing timeline we're on, it's the reality. But 15 years down the road, all the companies that aren't playing ball don't want to do the right thing…Capitalism will take care of them, one of the silver linings of the system we have.

Brianne: I keep saying, I do business speaking events, I can say, you know, if you're not on board now and you're not taking advantage of being effectively a first mover, you're gonna have to in a few years time. And if you haven't, say in a decade's time, you won't exist. I don't know if I truly believe it though. So I like that you call yourself a realistic optimist because you give me a little bit of hope.

John: And it's not gonna be every industry, right? There will always be those that are way behind and those that cannot, there are some industries that cannot be sustainable unless they close their doors or entirely change their models. Fast fashion fits underneath that. Oil and gas, travel… there's some of what I call in the book the unsustainable. So you have fossil fuels, mining, defence and tobacco. They can never be sustainable until they change their entire business model and do something different. So we already know with them that they're a necessary evil for the current time being because we can't do without petrochemicals. It's the reality of today's world, but they also can't get away with calling themselves a green company. For everybody listening to remember that it's not greenwashing until you're being lied to. If an oil and gas company wants to keep doing what they're doing, fine. I don't take issue with it until they start to say that they're good for the planet because then that's not right.

Brianne: Yeah, yeah. It's the actively campaigning against alternatives, which is utterly enraging. But who are these you think are doing a good job? I almost point to Unilever here. Some of the things they've done more recently, I'm slightly on the fence about, but I do think they're trying to make some good changes and turning a ship that big is bloody difficult, right? Who else do you think is doing a good job?

John: Unilever is a good example. And I'm assuming you're referring to their announcement a few months ago, rolling back a lot of their sustainability commitments.

Brianne: Realism is important.

John: Well, and that's exactly what's going on. So I chair a group called the Asia Sustainability Leaders Council. It's a part of the conference board for anybody in the US would know it. It's not as well known here in this region. But we met a few, I want to say about a month ago, and a big part of the conversation was around the Unilever announcement. And is sustainability losing steam? Is that a canary in the coal mine of what's going on? And what we realized, and essentially, sorry, this is a group of chief sustainability officers from multinational companies operating in Asia Pacific. The realization was, we're not losing steam, we're better aligning with reality. So we're getting away from the marketing and greenwashing of all these ambitions that were never realistic to begin with. And we're actually now, and Unilever fits well under this, realigning with what's possible. And one of my old colleagues from BSR, she sort of joked in a LinkedIn post and said, why would we have ever believed that a company that makes laundry detergent and soap could have saved the world? Makes sense that they're realigning a little bit. So that's why Unilever, but it's true. It's a transition period right now to be based more in reality. But to your question, I think one of my favourite examples that I love to say because it aggravates people to no end is Walmart. Walmart is doing amazing things. And in the US, they are Satan incarnate. And yes, they are. They're bad. They're not perfect. Like I said, there's no such thing as a perfect company. But when you look at what they're doing, especially in China, in their factories, it's jaw dropping. So they have created a program and I worked with as a consultant to them way back when, not paid by them anymore. So I worked with them to create a program that would essentially upskill female workers in their 60-plus factories in China. Things like personal health and wellness, safety, physical safety, certainly on-the-job stuff as well but not as important, communication skills, financial literacy, all these sorts of things that most people, especially at the bottom of the pyramid, don't – I can't believe I said that - bottom of the pyramid is a terrible phrase that is embedded in sustainability language… those that are not as economically well-off as others, they would never get this sort of stuff in school. So we went in, we trained the trainer approach and so an exponential number of women went through this program to the point that I think after the end of the three-year program, the formal part of it where we were involved, half a million women went through. If you really look at that exponentially and how many women will have taught other women and spoken to them, we're talking millions of people have gone through this program. That is massive and the massive kind of scale that only the private sector with its resources can actually do. Again, is Walmart perfect? No, they're a terrible company, but at least there's a bit of a shining light on that part of it. And I think that is so fascinating. And when I talked in the beginning about companies just being more communicative about the things that they're doing, the good stuff, to encourage others to participate and to join along, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Not the, even though it's important, not paying old people to say ‘hi’ and greet people at the stores in Alabama. Deal with that too, but look at the big picture. Very few companies can do things like that. But if Walmart was to go out and say, ‘hey, we did this amazing thing’ and not have activists rip it apart by looking at all the other whataboutism, maybe you would get other companies that are bad to say, hey, that's a good idea, we can do that too.

Brianne: Yes. I wrote an article about this for Stuff the other day about, they call it greenhushing now, but I really don't think we need a fricking new word for everything. But as soon as you say someone's done something good, everybody points to something else. And I do get it. I do get how important it is to hold people and corporations accountable for things. But also, again, as I said, it's a hard thing. It's a very hard thing to do to try and change the trajectory, the direction of a ship that big. And they should be congratulated for that. And that's an awesome initiative. I mean, I'm still not going to shop at Walmart, obviously.

John: Of course.

Brianne: But that's a really cool thing to start talking about. And as they start to move more needles, then brilliant.

John: No, absolutely. And greenhushing, it's a big deal here in Australia right now, and it's on everybody's lips. And when I finished the book, which would have been a year and a half-ish ago, greenhushing had just started to make its way into conversations. I thought, oh, just like you just said, oh my God, another stupid term that we don't need to create. But I've come to realise it's super insidious, and actually it's really bad and I wish I would have been able to include it in the book because all of these companies are trying to – not all, a lot – are trying to be out and loud and proud about the amazing things that they're doing, which is exactly what they should be doing. But legal teams are getting in the way because they're saying, ‘Eh, we don't want to have anybody pick our stuff apart or accuse us of this or that or the whataboutism that's going on.’ So, they're stopping meaningful progress. And that is a byproduct of especially activists and the media picking apart claims and doing the whataboutism instead of giving credit where credit is due and understanding that there is no such thing as a perfect corporation. If you pull a string long and hard enough, you'll find something. You don't even have to pull it that long. You'll find something wrong with the corporation. So the more we allow those that are on the more fringes of the movement to attack corporations, the less likely these corporations are to communicate what they're doing, but certainly to invest any money in doing them in the first place. It's already hard to get companies to invest in doing the right thing. So if you scare them off with everything else on their list of to-dos, especially in today's world, they'll just forget about sustainability altogether.

Brianne: It's genuinely maddening. Almost as maddening as climate change denial in general, but let's not go there.

John: I think I just had an aneurysm.

Brianne: Yeah. Talking about fast fashion, I'm going back to that because I talk about fast fashion a bit and I constantly get the comments, oh, but I can't afford anything else. I get that, but I find it really gross that people think their desire to have a new dress for the weekend trumps someone else's desire to live in a less than horrific environment. How do you say that without being super offensive and everybody mad at you?

John: I don't know if I say a lot without being super offensive, honestly. I try my best.

Brianne: I don't find you... I find you very pragmatic, but I can understand why some people do.

John: So I always talk, because I do talk about this a bit, especially on TikTok, and it's the same thing. The same sort of comments come up every now and again, or I can't afford it, or a company doesn't make clothes in my size, I don't know where to find it and all these sort of things which are fine for a lot of people, they're excuses, but it's fine. But I always tell people that if you cannot realistically afford something other than shopping at an H&M, for example, that is okay. It's okay. Make up for it in another part of your life. You don't have to do everything. There's no such thing as a perfect environmentalist. So pick the area that you're going to positively contribute to. It may not be in how you spend your money. It may not be economically because you're not at a place to be able to do that, especially in trying economic times like these. So do something else. Give to your local community by volunteering your time or adopt a dog, whatever it is. But find that passion point and then feel okay with that. But when it comes to things like fast fashion, I encourage people that are in the right economic space to be able to do so, to think about it from the lens of quality over quantity. Especially in economic times like these, if you invest in something that is, yeah, going to cost you a little bit more at the outset, it's going to last you a lot longer than something from an H&M or a Zara that's going to fall apart in two months and you have to buy the things again. That's the way the whole fast fashion industry works, is things are meant to, what do they call it in tech, planned obsolescence, fall apart in a few months so that you have to buy things again. And a lot of the people that talk about “I can't afford it,” you'll see them doing hauls of clothes. So obviously you can afford it, you're just making an excuse for yourself. So don't do that because exactly like you said, your desire for more faster now does not trump the desire of somebody to live a fulfilling life somewhere else in the world because, as I mentioned earlier, just because you got it for two bucks doesn't mean somebody's not paying for it somewhere. And if people knew the horrific conditions that a lot of these clothes are made in, I think they would think twice about actually purchasing from these places. Or maybe they wouldn't, which is even a more dire thing to think about, actually. Would they actually change their behaviour? Ooh.

Brianne: I don't think they would. I really – and this sounds awful, and it's not that I'm saying people are bad. It's just because when you're so far removed from something, you stop thinking about it. We know these things. It's like the meat conversation. People understand what goes on for you to have, I don't know, some kind of meat product, you know, like a sausage on your plate, right? We know this, but we don't equate it with what we're doing. Most, okay, not most, but a lot of people saw, oh my God, what's that very famous fast fashion movie called? Completely forgotten it. Whatever it is. The movie that sort of sparked the fast fashion movement, right? People listening will hopefully know what I'm talking about. But it started conversations, but it didn't really move the needle. I mean, she ends growing at a rate that is genuinely terrifying. It's something stupid, like one in every eight planes is full of their stuff. They are changing and breaking the international price industry. It's bonkers.

John: Well, to your original question of sort of how I approach this, my theories of change and all that, and I remember I mentioned that a lot of that was shaped and formed by being in the developing world. And that's because in the developing world, everybody knows somebody that works in a factory. A lot of – most people have been to a factory. They see what the conditions are, whether they're good, bad, or in between. So there's a bit of a more direct connection with that. And like you mentioned, people that – especially in the West, are so far removed from how our stuff is made that it doesn't even compute in their heads. It doesn't matter that something is $2 and I get it next day. It's just no piecing things together. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but no, there's a massive amount of education that has to happen. And I don't know what that looks like. Is it dragging everybody from New York to China to make them look at a factory to see how things are made? And I should actually back up a step and say factory conditions in China are pretty amazing. So these ideas that people are working in sweatshops, it doesn't exist in China. It exists elsewhere, but not China.

Brianne: Like Bangladesh?

John: So, yes, particularly Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Tunisia as well, and Madagascar. So these are sort of the places where a lot of those slave-type conditions still exist because the markets are relatively new when it comes to production, so the regulations haven't caught up yet. But places that are more sort of central to global production and supply chains, China, Japan, Korea, Northern Asia, Thailand, and parts of Malaysia are much better because regulation has caught up to where it needs to be.

Brianne: I do find it really peculiar and I mean, let's be honest, racism at the end of the day, where people are like, oh, it's made in China, ew. Wow, totally unnecessary and outdated and wrong. 100%. I don't understand why people still think that. The government's done a massive campaign to try to change that, but I think, I mean, politics now play into it and, you know, if it's not Russia that’s the enemy, then China's the enemy because, eh, communism. Yeah. Even though people couldn't define communism if they had a gun to their head.

Brianne: I get called communist all the time on social media. I find it as a badge of honour. It's fine. It's baffling.

John: The number of times I get said I'm a tankie and I work for the Chinese Communist Party just because I live there and I say they actually do good things. I'd be rich if I actually did get paid.

Brianne: Oh, I can imagine. What do you think about celebrity ambassadors? I know Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't do this so much anymore, but I find it interesting because I noticed you wrote a blog on this. Do you think they help or hinder?

John: Can they do both? It's one of those weird things, yeah. I mean, they sort of do both because… actually when I was writing the book I thought you know focus on corporations talk about your experience and be done and as I'm peeling back the layers of the onion I'm going oh my god, of course, it's sporting organisations its international organisations like the UN and of course, it's celebrities… of course it's the celebrity greenwashing. I totally forgot about them. So the book got bigger and bigger and bigger. But I do talk about celebrities and the awful things that they do and how they're so duplicitous with telling us to do one thing and then doing something entirely different. And private jets will always come up in the conversation of why celebrities are bad because private jets are terrible. But they, you know, I hope this doesn't ruin your podcast…Taylor Swift is the worst of the worst. Now the Swifties are going to come after you.

Brianne: Oh no, look, I've talked about Taylor Swift before. I really enjoy the comments.

John: Oh God, yeah. Talk about brainwashed people. So she is the epitome of a hyper-polluting celebrity that, you know, people joke and you see the memes about her taking her jet to go get the mail, and I don't think that's far off. And you have the Kardashians and a lot of other celebrities doing the same thing. My issue with them is if they're going to use their private jet, if they're going to be highly polluting? Are they, like I talked about with individuals, offsetting that somehow? Because I get the need for a private jet from a security perspective, sure, but are you doing other things? I think Angelina Jolie is a great example, and I know her and her family are problematic, but I think she's done a huge amount to sort of...

Brianne: Are they? Let’s come back to that.

John: Yeah, John Voight, her dad, is a hyper-conservative MAGA sort of guy.

Brianne: What?

John: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Brianne: Okay, I... All right, okay. So she's trying to make up for that nonsense. Right.

John: Yeah, I think that's kind of what it is. Yeah, it's more inter-familial things, yeah. But she is a good example of somebody who's done good things. George Clooney is a good example. Leo is a good example. I think there was, was it last year the survey was done and people looked to him as being the world's most important climate ambassador, more so than Greta. So that's interesting that people look to them for that, but that's fine. But it's the bad ones that could be doing so much more. And I'll use Taylor Swift again as an example. And it doesn't matter if it's environmentalism, a good cause, women's rights, whatever it is, the platform that she has to elicit positive change is more than most people could ever imagine. So use that platform. And then maybe people wouldn't attack you for your private jet use because you're doing a good thing. On the other hand, I mean, the Kardashians, God bless them because they've given me so much material for social media and for writing, but awful people like you can do something so much better instead of partnering with what was a boohoo boho that fast fashion company and thinking you made a difference. I don't know if that comes out of ignorance. Like I talked about with greenwashing, we can fix ignorance or if it's blatant money grab, that's probably what it is. And a terrible PR team, that's absolutely what it is.

Brianne: But you can't be that ignorant in today's day and age.

John: I don't know. I think people are. I always think about the whole, you know, people, people read in a year eight reading level.

Brianne: They'd have advisors because it's Courtney Kardashian.

John: Then you look at corporations too. And there's boards of directors and levels of C-suite and managers. And still, they make stupid comments and put out stupid ads. So as an individual with a few PR sycophants, I don't know, maybe they're just a bunch of yes people. All of that to say, do better.

Brianne: Yeah, the Kardashians are annoyed for it.

John: They're the end of Western civilisation. When the history books look back on this, if there's still a lot to write history about, they will pinpoint keeping up with the Kardashians as the beginning of the end.

Brianne: That's the mark.

John: That's the mark right there.

Brianne: I think your answer ultimately, you're right, they do good and bad. They raise awareness, but they do some good stuff. And it is interesting, Taylor Swift is the most famous person on earth, I suppose, right, at this present moment. So people say, you tacky because she's a woman. It's nothing to do with that. It's to do with the fact that she does have so much power and she doesn't speak for those she kind of angles that she kind of does. So I love that she brings happiness to so many people.

John: Absolutely. And I don't like her music, but yes, she brings happiness to people and they enjoy it and that's fine. We all have our own little things we like. But how they use their platform and as well, the same with greenwashing in general, are they saying they're good people when they're not? That's problematic. We shouldn't expect celebrities, we shouldn't expect the 1% to be good people. If they want to be good people, great. Added value, added bonus, awesome. Do the right thing. Say you're doing the right thing and actually back it up with actions. But if they don't want to, fine, but just don't pretend like you're a good person. I think maybe with the Kardashians, that's actually probably a little feather in their cap is they don't really pretend to be good people.

Brianne: No, that's very true. They are who they are and they don't have a facade. Well, they do have a facade of some kind, but different ones. So yeah, that's fair.

John: Lots of plastic.

Brianne: Yes. Yeah. Okay. What do you think about B Corp? I have big feelings about B Corp, none of them particularly positive.

John: So, B Corp is interesting. For anybody who doesn't know, B Corp is a certification organisation to help primarily package good companies, certify as being ethical or sustainable, et cetera, et cetera. And I work with clients to help them get their B Corp certifications. It is an arduous process, not for the faint of heart. And companies approach it for lots of different reasons. Smaller companies do it because it is a great way to make sure their operations are in order, they're doing the right thing, and it's great for valuation as well. And to justify the means, that's totally fine. It helps to sell products, especially Australia and New Zealand, I think, is B Corp's largest single market around the world. Last I checked, there are more companies in queue to be B Corp certified in Australia and New Zealand than companies globally that have ever been certified. So it is a massive market for them. And if I walk up and down some of the high streets here in Melbourne, every company is B Corp certified. So that's good and bad, because that means it's sort of reaching a saturation point. So it has its positives, it has its drawbacks. The big drawbacks about B Corp is that it has, in a lot of ways, sold out to a lot of major multinational corporations that can't really be truly sustainable. Danone, Nespresso is a great example with the little capsule pods of coffee that are the antithesis to being green, but somehow that's B Corp certified. Now, B Corp has made a lot of good moves over the last, let's say, six months to rectify a bit of their PR problems. So there was a major French PR company that had their B Corp license stripped from them for working with a fossil fuel company. That happened in the last month. So B Corps is trying to make up for stuff, but to your question, super problematic organisation. I would still tell people that if you see the B Corps certification, which is a B, black and white B inside a circle on a package, you can kind of trust that that's a better product than the ones that don't have it. But there's a lot of probably internal ‘come to Jesus’ moments that need to happen in the organisation to keep it going well into the future because from a PR and positioning perspective, it does look super greenwash-y. Internally, I don't think that's what they're trying to do because they are actually trying to help companies be much better, but somebody made some really bad decisions somewhere along the line that is entirely ruining the brand.

Brianne: Yeah, I think you’re dead right. I think they really have the best intentions, and I think they started out well. So, Ethique was one of New Zealand's first, I don't know, back in 2015, introduced to it by a single-use plastics company, ironically. But I loved it because it was this pinnacle of achievement, right? So you hit your 80 points or above and I got very competitive about it and then you were a company that was good for the world, right? And that's the important distinction, not better. Now they're about those that are on their way to trying to do a little bit more good. And that, for me, is the disconnect, right? They are not B Corps. They might be on their way to being a B Corps, but maybe a way to remedy this is to create a scale within. I don't know. I'm not a certification specialist, obviously, but for me, a B Corps for someone, I can buy the product without thinking about it. How is that possibly known? Or Unilever, right? And that's, I think I'm one of the most disillusioned people I know about it because I held it in such high regard back in 2015. I was a baby CEO and I didn't know how to put in place all these policies and procedures and things that made sure that our supply chain was good. I just went and visited these people. This assessment helped me make it real. And then to find out they certify some of these people, or some of these companies rather, and I'm pretty disillusioned about it. But I do know they are trying to change the certification assessment so that you can't get away with being perfect in governance and rubbish in the environment and therefore skating over the 80 mark. So I think you're right. I think they are having some battles internally and hoping to turn the boat around a little bit. But I think they were trying to do a good thing.

John: And I think your point is super interesting around is there has to be a distinction because B Corp still in their branding is these are good for the planet companies. Maybe they do want to encourage companies to be better and yes I think there's a role for that for all of us to be encouraging. That's great but don't give them that certification. Maybe give them something else or help them through the process. I think you're spot-on with that and I think about there's one company I worked with to get their B Corp certification. They're a brand consultancy work out of Shanghai. The certification process, I kid you not, we started it in 2018. They just got certified two months ago. That long. So four, five, six years to get certified to go through the whole process, all because they worked with a company that sells breast milk substitutes. And so to be able to get around that because apparently breast milk substitutes and the marketing around them is unethical. So just because they happen to work with that client once, they had to, you know, the process got drug out for so long. But then you look at Nestle or Unilever and Nespresso getting certified without a problem and you go, okay, massive disconnect here, guys. Maybe B Corp needs to go through a B Corp certification itself to get its house in order.

Brianne: Maybe you should suggest that.

John: I'm sure they will look really highly on that, yeah.

Brianne: Yeah, that’d go down really well. Who is your sustainability hero? It's a really light, but also probably quite difficult question to ask, aren't I? Is there such a thing?

John: I have never been asked that. Wow. It's not Greta, I'll tell you that. It's easier to say who it's not than who it is. Oh, gosh. I don't have an answer. I mean, some of the people that we know, like the Jane Goodalls of the world, the ones that were really early on in the battle for a better planet, I think probably come to mind. But that's the thing is these people are so well-known and ingrained in our psyche today and just the reality of life that you don't even think about them that way. And I think that's important because what we're trying our best to do is make sustainability not a fringe thing that sticks out on its own. It's just the way we live. So I think the Jane Goodall's, the David Attenborough's of the world, the fact that they are just part of society is maybe an example of a success that we've had.

Brianne: Yeah, that's a nice way of looking at it. You've written a bunch of books. Give us the blurb, the rundown, or all of them because I'm going to have someone to give away.

John: Oh, love that. So, the most recent is The Great Greenwashing: How Brands, Governments, and Influencers Are Lying to You. We talked a bit about it today. It goes through what greenwashing is, but a lot of just really fascinating stories of how greenwashing is happening. Organisations, companies, people that aren't greenwashing as well and the good things that they're doing so it's not just all negative. So that's the most recent book.

Brianne: Enriching and Great Read.

John: Oh, thank you. Sustainability for the Rest of Us: Your No…. can I curse?

Brianne: Absolutely.

…Your No Bullshit Five-Point Plan for Saving the Planet. It was my first book, so that is a very practical guide going back to this idea of pragmatic realism. Five big things people can do to really make a difference and this isn't, you know, specific things that I'm telling you to do. I don't dictate to people what they should and shouldn't do, but more behaviour psychological switches. So things like not being a dick to people like vegans tend to be, or not being an ivory tower about being a sustainable person, or really just thinking more pragmatically about how you approach stuff. So that's that book. And I've just come up with my idea that I'm still pitching into my publisher. Hopefully they say yes for my third book, which I don't know what I'm thinking writing a third book, but here we go. If I put it out into the world, it'll happen.

Brianne: That would be my next question, so this is great.

John: So this new book, and this has been sussed out only because of the Ambani wedding and the success of this series on TikTok. That's my market research. It's going to be called Eat the Rich, exploring the mostly unethical behaviour of the 1%. This is the first time I've said it publicly. That's my next book. I would expect it to be out in about a year. There you go.

Brianne: That's very cool. And I think it will be very popular.

John: Absolutely. And that relates to sustainability because I do talk about celebrities. We talked about them today, but they show up in the Greenwashing book. I just didn't suss it out and parse it out as much. So this book will look at the 1% around this idea of their contributions to society, so ethics, environmentalism, and just being awful people in general.

Brianne: I think that'll shatter some images people have of people. I think we've got them really well.

John: If I don't get a lawsuit, I will not have done my job.

Brianne: Oh! I got a couple of cease and desists for doing another article a couple of years ago now from whoever makes Kinder – I  can’t remember their company name – from one of our local chocolate companies for saying they weren't ethical. I had all of the facts and all of the proof and they were like ‘no, we don't like this. We're going to have a tantrum about it.’ My favourite last question for everybody. If you were global supreme overlord, and you could snap your fingers and enact something, what would be the first thing you would do to make the world a better place?

John: That's a good first date question. Not that I'm dating anymore.

Brianne: It is. That's true.

John: I think that… and we'll stay within my little space of the universe. I would encourage people to just really – see, I'm doing what Mel Robbins would tell me absolutely not to do is hemming and hawing and then thinking this is a ridiculous answer. I'm going to go with my gut. So I would tell people to find their passion point, even though that sounds really wanky, and I think that would solve so many different problems. I think people are trying, especially people that care, try to do too much and they just end up burnt out and that's not what we want. So find your passion point, stick to it and be confident in the knowledge that there are billions of other people that are trying to do the right thing. So when I am supreme overlord, I will snap my fingers like Thanos and make that happen.

Brianne: Nice. Well, I'm starting a bit of a campaign to elect myself. I'm not sure you elect a supreme overlord, but I would be really good at it. I would ban raisins though, because they are foul and should be illegal. There's a few little things. That probably wouldn't be the first thing I'd do. It might be second or third, you know, priorities. Thank you.

John: No, thank you.

Brianne (outro): And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous. But sustainability at its heart is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.

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