AI For Impact: Scaling Circular Economy And Sustainable Supply Chains With Sushma Kittali-Weidner
Sustainable supply chains aren’t just the future—they’re the foundation of smarter, more responsible business. In this episode, Christine Yeager sits down with Sushma Kittali-Weidner, VP of Products at Rheaply and a former software engineer turned circularity champion, to explore how AI, digital infrastructure, and intentional design can scale sustainability. From overcoming pilot paralysis and EPR compliance to the role of asset traceability and second-life procurement, this conversation dives deep into the tech, tactics, and team alignment needed to make circular economy principles a living, breathing part of enterprise strategy. Sushma brings clarity to the intersection of automation, AI, and environmental impact—with a toolkit that spans from digital twins to regenerative agriculture.
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AI For Impact: Scaling Circular Economy And Sustainable Supply Chains With Sushma Kittali-Weidner
I’m super excited to dive into a conversation with Sushma Kittali-Weidner. We are going to talk about sustainable supply chains and AI. Sushma is a product and strategy leader, building technology to drive systems change and sustainability in the circular economy. She has over twenty years of experience in enterprise software, manufacturing, and climate tech. She has led product innovation at Rheaply and iPoint-systems, bridging compliance, supply chains, and circular operations. Her work helps organizations not only meet evolving regulations and resource constraints, but also embrace transformation as a strategic advantage, which we love talking about change here.
Sushma works at the intersection of digital infrastructure and circular economy systems, designing tools that enable more regenerative, transparent, and resilient operations. She brings both systems thinking and deep empathy to her work, which we also love here at Change Cycle. We talk a lot about empathy and recognizing your audience, and helping teams move from resistance to resilience. Based in Ann Arbor, she draws inspiration from industrial complexity, as well as natural ecosystems. Thank you so much for being here. We’re excited for this conversation. All of our interviews start off with this. I read your bio, now can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you live with intention?
First of all, thank you, Christine, for having me on your show. I’m very excited for this conversation. A little bit about myself. By education, I’m a software engineer. I remember getting out of college and wondering what I was going to apply this to. One of my first tasks was to build some reports for air emissions and wastewater for environmental engineers, and I found my purpose there. My journey has been in that space of environment, health, safety, product compliance, sustainability, and most recently, the circular economy.
I’m a technologist and strategist at heart. I always approach my work from how I amplify the work of others. That’s how I see myself creating impact. It’s by building tools and solutions to let the experts do what they do best, and how we can scale their work and their expertise. That’s how I approached my career. Living with intention for me has always been around aligning with long-term impact. The work that I’m doing, whether it is on a personal level or a professional level, how is it contributing to the positive environmental and social impact?
I’ve spent a lot of my time on the industrial side of sustainability, working with a lot of manufacturers throughout my career. I have been drawn to the regenerative side of sustainability and the circular economy. I’m spending a lot of time lately learning from nature. I learned about biomimicry at one of the circularity conferences that I went to, and that made me very curious. I have also been curious about food systems and the nutrition of the food that we consume.
I have two boys. Thinking about your family and what you’re feeding them has piqued my curiosity there. Learning from nature, exploring concepts like permaculture, and rethinking how technology is supporting people in making climate-positive decisions and choices. I’m always asking myself, where can my skills remove friction, unlock value, and help people make climate-positive decisions without having to spend that cognitive burden for themselves? How to build resilient systems is something that I spent a lot of time thinking about.
I also have two boys and had a conversation about nutrition and how my son cannot eat cereal all day. I can very much relate to that concept. At the same time, working at Coca-Cola, we talked a lot about the resilience of the supply chain, especially when it comes to certain crops and how that can be so detrimental to your business if you lose access to one of your key ingredients.
Can you share about the work you’ve led at Rheaply with AI? You shared in our preparation that technology must serve clarity and purpose, not just novelty. That’s something that a lot of people see you with AI. Is it just new and exciting? What is the true purpose of it? Can you elaborate on this and how you applied this at Rheaply?
With all the AI buzz in the market, we knew we wanted to experiment with it, find ways to apply it, and build with it, but it had to always go back to the user and the use case. Technology must serve clarity and purpose, meaning it should reduce friction. It shouldn’t create more friction. It should help people make better, faster, and more mindful decisions and not overwhelm them with complexities. Anything that you introduce, whether it is leveraging AI or any other, like blockchain, Web3, and many other technologies that are out there, if it is introducing more friction, in particular users' workplace, especially when you think about sustainability and circular economy, there is already enough barriers from a mindset perspective. You don’t want to introduce any more under the guise of technology.
Technology must serve clarity and purpose, meaning it should reduce friction, not create more.
It’s being mindful of what features or functions are truly helping the end user in their everyday work. How does that reduce their cognitive burden or ease their decision-making process, and so on? We built features to auto-populate certain pieces of information so they didn’t have to manually do that. Again, it’s thinking in terms of how to help them do what they do best and make time for their expertise, and take away the mundane aspects of their activities, like populating data or how can we help them with decision making with predictive reuse recommendations, or helping them make decisions by providing impact estimations.
It’s using AI and data to provide necessary information that is actionable in the end, which helps unlock actions. Many times, you find there are all these technologies that we have, and the users are presented with. They are spending time running between systems and less time taking meaningful actions. My approach has been to help unlock and accelerate the decision-making to take actions and reduce the mundane repetitive type of work for the users.
An AI is helping you do this because it can predict the answers based on the data that you’ve shared. How is AI playing into that?
One of the things at Rheaply is that we helped with circular operations for the real estate and workplace groups. Think of all the assets within a particular organization. There could be a surplus of them. We help organizations bring visibility into the things that they’ve already purchased and find ways to help them extend the life of what they’ve already purchased. One of our customers said there are about ground landfills within these organizations because they are storage locations filled with many assets that nobody has any idea of. Some are good, some are unusable, and some could be used by someone else in the community. How do you bring visibility?
There’s a lot of on the ground work that needs to happen to create a digital twin of these to start the traceability work, and determining what the said object is or said asset is, and information about it, so that someone else can make a decision on whether they can use it or not, or provide a recommendation like, “This appears to be in good, bad, or okay quality,” or letting somebody else within the organization know that these assets are available for some other project that they might be working on.
It’s bringing visibility and connecting different parts of a large corporation to be aware of what’s available within their organization. Eventually, if they don’t have a need for it, could that be then distributed outside of their organization, either by selling or donations for community impacts? That’s where we build some automation for populating the information, which is very time-consuming.
We also built some automation to help estimate the carbon avoidance impact and the waste diversion based on the weight of the products to understand that this volume of products can create this level of impact improvements, as well as finding the next home or helping find that next home for the said asset. Circular economies and sustainability are also a lot about extending the life of what has already been produced. There have been so many resources that have been invested in producing that thing. That’s how we approached it.
Circularity and sustainability are largely about extending the life of what has already been produced.
At Coca-Cola, one of the projects I worked on was product transfer data, but there was a sister project for equipment master data. Coke might own it, but it was living at a bottler, for example. The way Coke’s system works is they own the liquid, and then the bottlers put the liquid inside a bottle and can and put CO2 in it, and then they sell the bottle and can. They want the cold drink equipment to house bottles and cans. Some of the equipment was owned by Coke, and some of the equipment was owned by the bottlers.
To your point, there’s a lot of carbon footprint that’s wrapped up into equipment, largely because it’s plugged into a carbon-intensive grid. They were almost all Energy Stars, so they were as energy efficient as they could be, but they were still energy-intensive. It’s finding and evaluating the status of all these, because a lot of the bottlers would like to refurbish them, which is great, but then you don’t necessarily have that track and traceability because it’s happening not through the system and the technology. I can see the value and application of that, and how challenging a system for a company that has been around for a long time, how hard it would be to bring all of these data sources together and use AI to educate itself in that way.
Industrial equipment and industrial automation space, repair, and maintenance have always been part of that world, but there’s still a lot of opportunity for refurbishing products. It may be finding secondary markets for products. They might be willing to accept something a little substandard compared to the cutting edge or whatever that someone with higher funding is willing to accept. There are opportunities like that because there are smaller markets that might be willing to take one or two versions of old products for their purpose. Finding those new homes could be very helpful in extending the life of what’s already been produced.
Building on that, can you share how you’ve been able to influence a large enterprise to adopt second-life products in circular options? What strategies did you need to implement to help facilitate such a change at large companies?
It starts with finding champions within the organization who can help and who can relate to the mission that you are trying to achieve. It starts with raising awareness within an organization. Many times, these types of options are not even considered because of the possibility. People are unaware that such a possibility exists. It’s finding those champions within these large organizations who are change agents, because it’s a lot of change management and building trust within the organization.
With many companies that I have worked with, you usually have these small pockets of innovative thinkers and change agents. How do you help them and empower them with the necessary information, whether it’s on the sustainability side of the storytelling, but also on the return on investment and the economic side of the storytelling, so that they can help identify other champions. It’s all about buy-in as well within the organization.
It starts with trust, finding those champions, and using data to tell the story. Showcasing the possibility of what’s possible with scale is also part of the storytelling, and being empathetic to the friction that they might encounter, and not going in with a utopian worldview without understanding the ground reality.
Again, approaching with empathy, trying to understand what is happening now, what is working, what’s not working, and where the opportunities are, coupled with sustainable storytelling, as well as economic storytelling. Those are strategies that have helped. Also, bringing champions together from different organizations so they can learn from each other. I benefited quite a lot, both at Rheaply and iPoint, from bringing like-minded individuals from different organizations together as a customer advisory board or even more like an industry roundtable.
Facilitating that helps them learn from each other. It also builds trust and gives hope that it is doable and achievable. There’s a little bit of the belief system that strengthens, like it’s an idea, versus, “Somebody has tried it.” Even if it’s at the smallest pilot level, that gives you some level of comfort to say, “I can try it as well.” Leveraging those types of strategies has been helpful. Most importantly, it’s nudging all the organizations to think about sustainability in the circular economy and circular operations at the beginning of their life, whether that is at procurement or when a project is being planned, or when a product is being designed.
Designing for sustainability at a product level has come a long way, as I’ve seen in my career and focus on sustainability. Applying that thinking to all your projects, like, “What is the reuse potential?” Planning and designing for reuse or repurpose, and beginning with the end in mind. We talk about that a lot, but we don’t apply that when it comes to asset management. If you procure an asset, how long do you expect to use it? What do you plan to do with it when you no longer have a need for it? We’re not thinking of it from the end of life. There have been a lot of regulations that have come into effect from an end-of-life perspective, but not so much from an end of use thinking.
Designing for the environment, designing for sustainability at a product level, has come a long way.
Think of it from, when I’m done using something, what can happen with it? Where should it go? Could it go somewhere else in my organization? Could it go somewhere else outside my organization? Shifting again from waste management, which has been the lens for the circular economy and recycling. Those are good things. I’m not trying to say that those are bad, but they can evolve. We could go a step further to say, “When I plan my project or when I design my project, can I set some circular goals?”
“Start small. Ten percent of my project can be reused products, whether it’s from my organization or somewhere else.” Those types of small goals were how these large organizations excel. “Let’s run an experiment and see if we could do 10% and see what happens.” Be curious about it. That doesn’t introduce a huge amount of risk to whatever the initiative is, but it allows you to still experiment within that larger context.
Those are some strategies that we leverage. That requires a deep understanding of what’s happening now, looking at the value chain and how a particular project is deployed, and where those opportunities are to introduce these experiments. That’s a low-risk way of testing something before you say, “Let’s then increase it a little bit more.”
Can you expand a little on building trust? Do you see building trust coming once you convince a champion to let you do this small 10%? I loved your idea of bringing champions together. What do you see as the best way to build trust?
It starts with empathy. Understand where they are coming from and meet, whether the champion or non-champion, where they are at, and acknowledge and address their concerns. If you take a dismissive approach towards their concerns, then you’re not going to get buy-in. You need to acknowledge and even find ways to address it, or at least, cover how that might not, or even say, “Let’s measure your concern.” That gives credibility to say, “We’re acknowledging your concern. I’m introducing something to let’s first understand how big this concern is, then we can figure out what to do about that concern.”
That goes a long way in building that relationship and that trust. “I’m hearing you out and I’m hearing your concerns.” You cannot do it all the way across the board. You have to figure out where your focus point is and work around that, because I think of trust in concentric circles. You build your small level of trust with whatever experiment and delivering value, then you expand it to the next bigger group.
It creates network effects after a certain point, but you’re not trying to boil the ocean, all at once. In large organizations, we have to realize everything needs to go through their process, and we have to find ways to work with what their process is and not expect them to change their process overnight. That again requires empathy.
In large organizations, everything needs to go through its process. We must find ways to work with their processes and not expect overnight change, which requires empathy.
You talked about designing for circularity. From your experience with many different organizations like Google, what has been the most challenging aspect of designing for circularity? You did a good job of already talking about this, but I would like to expand on this idea of thinking about it across the value chain.
The biggest challenge is fragmentation because large organizations have many silos. Let’s take the example of real estate, procurement, sustainability, and ideas. They’re interacting with each other for scope, scheduled budget, like typical project thinking. You want to materialize something, whether it’s taking a product to market or building a new building, or whatever your subjective is. Interactions between these different departments or parts of the organization are around scope, schedule, and budget.
The biggest challenge is fragmentation, as large organizations have many silos.
Can the sustainability lens or the circularity lens be something that can be added to those interactions as well? When you scope something out, keep that sustainable and circular initiative in mind so that it can be part of the scoping exercise, and how does it fit into the schedule? It naturally becomes part of every operational activity rather than “I need to generate some sustainability report or I need to do some specific impact assessment. Now, I’m going to go get all of this information.” We’ve always talked about project management principles, the triangle, or the scope schedule. I’m always wondering, “Can you make it a square and add one more?”
It’s also like, is part of your budget’s success metrics a percentage of savings that comes from reuse?
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in large organizations just to procure workplace assets to run their business. This is not to produce the products that they’re selling or whatever. This is just a whole business. Even 1% of that comes from reuse. That could make such an impact. One of the statistics, at least from a workplace resources perspective, 80% of workplace resources end up in landfills. How can that be reversed? Could it shift the other way to where only 20% end up in landfills, and 80% get reused, rehomed, or repurposed?
It’s addressing the fragmentation that you see in a large organization. I was working with a furniture manufacturer. Their sustainability team members spent a lot of time educating design engineers and other functional engineers about what this concept is. Going back to if those folks are already thinking, because from my work at iPoint, quality, material selection, costs, and procurement time, the thing is that you want all those things, but they’ve never been trained to think about sustainability.
The younger generation, or the ones who have chosen sustainability as a minor or an additional elective, are thinking about it, but for the majority of these design engineers, that is not at their forefront. Every decision that they make is still optimized for the other things that we talked about. This is only introduced when a sustainability analyst or somebody steps in and says, “We are looking at addressing this particular product to make it more sustainable or make it more circular.” There’s a lot of opportunity in project managers and designers like the people who are at the beginning of the life cycle of a said project or a product, if those folks become more aware and start just thinking about it. There are small opportunities that create huge impacts that they are simply unaware of.
I think about different people, but there are certain people. In fact, the data says this. If you look at consumer data about the Boomer generation, they are generally more willing to recycle the good home because it was ingrained for so long at a certain point. On the flip side, the younger generation is studying sustainability, but they’ve lost faith in recycling, and not to say that is wrong. The point I’m making is that even my father-in-law, you see him, and he’s always reusing his water bottle. He was a dam engineer.
I don’t know how structurally supportive it is to reuse certain materials when dealing with something like a dam. There’s a lot of structural integrity that’s to come with that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use that material in another way. It can be a social thing that you do all the time, as you’re constantly reusing. As I said, they reuse water bottles. They’re from Maine originally and fluff. Have you ever heard of fluff? I hadn’t heard of it.
It’s like a marshmallow, but it’s more like a liquid. They reuse these fluff cans for everything. Everything in their house is stored in a fluff can. It’s like this social thing that people bring into their home, but then when you take it out, how do I apply it at scale in my business, and break down the procurement, like decision-making process, to think about reuse? It can be very challenging when you start to think of it, or it can be overwhelming to think about it at that systemic level.
One experiment one bold champion took was, “What if we don’t buy any furniture this quarter? Nothing new for any project. Let’s find ways to use what’s already there and let’s see what happens.” How many people are going to come knocking on my door? You can buy it, but through an approval or an exception. It was more of a “What would happen?” type of experiment for some period of time. It was very interesting to see that because that decision was made, and said, “You cannot buy anything new. If you need it, you need to go get permission.” That automatically unlocked so many decisions within that whole planning and execution. There were very few knocks on the door, apparently, to buy something that new. These are interesting experiments.
It doesn’t cost very much. In fact, they save you money.
That starts to showcase cost savings for the said organization. That’s similar to how the whole let’s experiment with buying second-life products for our projects. It started with setting that goal at the beginning of the project, to say, let’s attempt 50% coming from second-life and see what happens. If you can’t meet it, that’s where there’s a little bit of like, what if you don’t hit the 50%? Is this project a failure now, or is it simply a benchmarking exercise to see what is possible?
Don’t frame it as a success or failure criteria, but more of let’s explore and see what feels possible. Set a moonshot, but then you learn something from that process. That’s how we found success with the customers that I have worked with who have taken that experimental iterative approach to things. If I don’t know something, it feels like a big black box. You’ve heard of agile methodologies when you’re building tech. How do you bring that problem solution framing into sustainability and circularity, and take that iterative approach, so that things are moving and you’re not stuck in a pilot paralysis mode as well?
You mentioned diverting from landfills. There were a couple of comments. One, there’s an ordinance in the City of Boulder. Whenever you tear down a building, there’s a certain percentage of whatever is torn down that has to be diverted from landfill. Boulder is unique. Not everybody can be Boulder, but it does force this new market of secondhand cabinets, countertops, and refrigerators. The City of Boulder has invested in building a place for that to go so that people can come and get it.
Also, my parents started a nonprofit organization a long time ago. I was trying to see where the status of it is, but it’s called Technology for All. It was in the ‘90s. My dad worked for a big data corporation, and they were buying new computers every couple of years, and these computers were going to the landfill. There are all these children who don’t have access to computers. They started this nonprofit where they would take the computers, refurbish them, wipe the hard drive, and do all the things, and then donate them to churches and set up these, at the time, local area networks, but you don’t need them anymore.
I do remember LAN and learning about it. If you think about local area networks, not just for information exchange like the early days of the internet, but think of local area networks for material exchange. I worked on a white paper with the National Institute of Standards and Technology about industrial symbiosis and how proximity can have such a huge impact on the type of material that is exchanged and circulated to build those tight networks. I love that. I’m going to borrow that if I may. The concept of local area network for supply chains, not just for the internet, the early days of what was the internet.
I think about this all the time. Sustainability solutions need to be hyperlocal in action but macro in scale because you meet these people. They’re doing some incredible stuff, and you can replicate it in other ways.
That’s the other thing about the circular economy. You need the digital infrastructure to track and trace and understand the volumes and what’s moving where the material flows. There is a pretty heavy dependency on the physical infrastructure and logistics, to your point about how to leverage empty trucks.
The restaurant folks are already strapped for resources. They don’t have enough resources. They are barely making ends meet. You don’t want to introduce a big, elaborate process for them by creating some policy, because then they will not adopt, then there is this resentment. Even if they want to do good, now the emotion is not like, “I feel good. I’m helping with something. I got to do this. This sucks. I don’t have the energy to do it. I don’t have the people to do it.” That’s where you create systems that don’t introduce more friction but instead reduce friction. It’s a hard problem to solve. We didn’t quite get through it. It was a couple of months of study that we did to understand the material flows of glass in the natural area.
We identified these are the bottlenecks or points of friction. If we were to address these things, whether through policy or through logistics or whatever, waste management, then that could unlock the flow of that waste material to the tile manufacturer. You need to think of that for different types of materials. It is achievable. You just have to bring a different viewpoint to it.
For sure. I do want to get to traceability. You mentioned it a minute ago. How do you see advancements and supply chain traceability playing a role in EPR compliance for producers? I have this theory. I mentioned to you this concept, like in EPR in particular, there’s a challenge with producers understanding how much they sell into a particular state. I guess it’s not a theory so much as a reflection. When I was doing master data at Coca-Cola, supply chain traceability was a challenge then. It seems like supply chain traceability is a challenge, and here’s another way in which this is a challenge.
I don’t think the supply chain traceability challenge has been fully solved. Drawing from some of my time at iPoint, we did help with life cycle assessments. You have a lot of information until the time a product is produced. With EPR regulation, it’s the use phase. What happens after production, and where does it go? One other interesting thing that we learned about is the retail folks or the distributors. From a technological advancement perspective, there’s a lot of opportunity for the distributors because that’s where the black box starts to appear.
The producer sells to the retailer or the distributor. If it’s an electronic product and if you want a warranty or whatever, then you can go in and register, but not everybody registers it. Something that I’ve been studying a little bit myself as well is there is the financial traceability of how things changed hands and what was ultimately sold and what it was sold for. There’s that financial information. Can something like that help with an EPR requirement?
It’s bringing visibility into what happens after the setting, because a lot of life cycle assessments are all until the point where something is produced. It’s up the supply chain until the production and maybe from the producer to the first buyer, the first point of sale, but after that, it’s like a black box. That’s where the value chain is thinking because then it changes hands from distributor to maybe other distributors, then eventually, to the end consumer or to the customer. In the B2B world, it can go to businesses. There are purchase orders and information that you can pull from.
Trying to work on circular operations for large corporations, we try to look at the POs and find the digital record of the said item. Even those are sometimes purchased in bulk, so that granularity is lost. How do you leverage that use phase? That’s the big problem that needs to be solved for EPR. I think now there are ten states.
Let’s run through it. Colorado, California, Oregon, Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington have passed it and signed it.
There are others that are in discussion. At the state level requirements, there’s that, and there’s the design requirements coming out of Europe, where the focus is on textiles, furniture, electronics, battery, and so on.
There are seven packaging EPRs to be specific. Other EPRs exist for other materials. There’s a textile EPR in California.
It starts to become very nuanced. It’s hard for a producer to keep track of what these regulations are, how they are evolving, and what applies. Because they don’t know what is happening beyond the distributor, that’s where traceability becomes very important. For high-value assets, there are now smart QR codes and ways to digitally track things. There are a lot of advancements in traceability of shipping containers or logistical equipment that move around, or even boxes. Down to the particular product or asset, that’s where the information is lost, so digital products pass for material tracking. There’s that integration between suppliers, distributors, and the OEMs.
I made a mistake on my own side. We normally don’t do acronyms. There is a show episode that talks about extended producer responsibility or EPR, but we exposed that everybody knew what it was. It means extended producer responsibility, and it’s about shifting the funding mechanism of recycling from municipalities to producers or the people who make and sell the products. What is OEM?
Original Equipment Manufacturers.
Thank you.
It’s a very heavy industry side, but then producers could be like Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is a producer in that sense. Depending on whether you’re dealing with fast-moving consumer goods like FMCG, EPR applies to a lot of the fast-moving consumer goods. EPR applies to certain other types of producers. Original equipment manufacturers, like Apple is an OEM, for instance, and so is Ford. There are different types of regulations that apply to different types of producers in the end, depending on what you’re producing and where you’re selling into.
Traceability is a big challenge. Traceability helps unlock a lot of things because once you have information about how your products are being used, that information is also beneficial to the producer to understand their customers better. There are many benefits to traceability beyond sustainability. This is another interesting thing from a marketing perspective. I don’t know if you’re aware of these data rooms, wherein a lot of the producers already know about consumer behavior.
They know about me. I live in Ann Arbor. They might also know my name, what my buying behavior is, and what I buy at Whole Foods versus at a local grocery. They have that information. If that is possible to understand the buying behavior, then bridging the gap is possible. I am optimistic in that sense that you can do that for finance, marketing, and buying behavior. You can also do that for sustainability and circularity. Leveraging what existing systems are already there and maybe how to expand on them might be one strategy, or introducing a new system that focuses only on this, but without creating friction for the users or the players in the space. Distributor space is an area where a big unlock is necessary to support EPR.
Thank you. I’m going to merge the last two questions because we’ve gone over time. This has been an incredible discussion. For you, what’s next, and why embrace change?
Change is inevitable, in my opinion. It’s happening everywhere, whether we acknowledge it or not. It’s happening at the microscopic level and at the cosmic level, if you will, and in organizations and ecosystems. The question is, do we want to wait to be disrupted, or do we design the transformation that causes disruption? I think of change from those perspectives. As I mentioned, I am very curious about learning more about the regenerative side of the circular economy and nature systems from a cultural and so on.
I’m also very curious about critical minerals and batteries. There is still a lot to be learned about battery recycling. The first generation of batteries is coming to the end of use. Those are two things that I’m very curious about and exploring solutions for. Also, identifying what is the right problem at this point in time. It’s a big problem to solve. What is the place to start is something that I’m very curious about. Change is scary, but it can also be a deeply creative process.
That’s where I’m thinking. If you’re familiar with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s butterfly diagram, on the right-hand side is the industrial side of things. That’s where I’ve spent a lot of my career. I have learned a lot, but there's still a lot more to learn. On the left-hand side is the regenerative side. It is something that I’m learning a lot about now, so more to come.
That’s great. Exciting. Thank you so much for your time. I’m going to do a little recap for everybody. I love that we started out with amplifying the work of others and thinking about it in that way. That’s what I’m trying to do here, also in the show. In general, I feel like strong leaders lift others while they climb. I appreciate you reiterating that point.
Also, you talked about systems thinking across industry and collaboration, and using that as a way to rethink how to approach sustainability. Breaking out of your silos and thinking across industry can unlock some opportunity areas that you may not see otherwise. You also talked about AI going back to the user and the use case, and this design thinking methodology of thinking about how the end users are going to use something, and avoiding introducing friction, and how powerful that can be in driving change and successful adoption.
You talked about finding champions and change agents. You took that a step further by talking about bringing those change agents together to learn from each other. Either maybe create an advisory board, but also think about them as telling their story for you, how do you use them to build trust in the solution, because it’s not coming from your mouth. It’s coming from the mouth of someone who’s done it.
In the beginning, I loved it. You reiterated multiple times, beginning with circularity at the beginning, but then you also pushed us to think beyond products and into asset management. As you were talking, I was thinking about it from an accounting standpoint. You think about depreciation and depreciation. There it goes, off the books, and you forget about it. That inherently, as a structural mentality, forces you to not think about the end of use, and what can be true, and you just write it off.
There’s potential value at the end there and how you extract some of that value by thinking further and beyond waste management, and more about waste diversion and circularity. You brought up the great statistic that 80% of workplace resources end up in landfills, which is something I did not know. That’s an incredible opportunity area. I immediately thought about workplaces donating to schools, and schools also expanding on what could go beyond that, like Habitat for Humanity. I can imagine there being a lot of areas where we could reuse workplace resources.
Finally, we talked about local area networks for material exchange. You and I are going to start championing that as a new tech term for everybody to use. This is so much fun. I learned a ton. Thank you so much for your time. Are there any last words?
That’s been incredible and very thoughtful questions on your end as well. I enjoy the work that you’re doing and bringing more change agents together as part of your Change Cycle. I love the name. Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
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Tune in to our next episode where we dive into how to navigate the turbulence you may be experiencing in the sustainability sector. If you’re working in sustainability, you may already be feeling the job market shifting and fast. In the past months, major layoffs have hit the sustainability sector. ESG priorities are shifting, and big names and big institutions have dramatically downsized or downgraded their sustainability departments.
In this episode, we interview a career coach about how to navigate career transitions or how to bolster up your career now, how to do the homework to clearly map out your path, how to slow down now to regain focus and future-proof your impact, how to use physical reminders to stay on track amidst uncertainty, and then how to be confident even when you’re facing rejection. Tune in if you’re facing change or just want strategies to bounce back with clarity and purpose.
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About Sushma Kittali-Weidner
Sushma Kittali-Weidner is a product and strategy leader building technology to drive systems change in sustainability and the circular economy. With 20 years of experience in enterprise software, manufacturing, and climatetech, she has led product innovation at Rheaply and iPoint Systems—bridging compliance, supply chains, and circular operations. Her work helps organizations not only meet evolving regulations and resource constraints, but embrace transformation as a strategic advantage.
Sushma works at the intersection of digital infrastructure and circular economy systems, designing tools that enable more regenerative, transparent, and resilient operations. She brings both systems thinking and deep empathy to her work, helping teams move from resistance to resilience. Based in Ann Arbor, she draws inspiration from industrial complexity as well as natural ecosystems.