Leading The Innovation In Packaging With Liz Helm
The packaging in our food and products may be a normal everyday thing, but it makes up tons of waste around the world. Liz Helm leads the charge in innovating circular alternatives to Styrofoam and single-use plastics as the sustainability manager at TemperPack. In this conversation with Christine Yeager, she explains how focusing on a niche can move the needle of sustainability much faster despite the many challenges along the way. Liz also discusses the right way to handle resistance within your team by being curious and the immense power of doing incremental yet consistent change. This discussion breaks down the necessary mindset and perseverance you need to successfully embed sustainability everywhere you go.
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Leading The Innovation In Packaging With Liz Helm
Welcome back to the show. I’m super excited to have this conversation with Liz Helm. This is the show where we talk about how to embrace the discomfort that comes with change. Liz is here from TemperPack. She leads the sustainability team at TemperPack, a packaging manufacturer dedicated to innovating circular alternatives to styrofoam, which we desperately need, and single-use plastics.
Liz graduated from the University of Virginia with degrees in Environmental Science and English before earning an MBA in Sustainable Innovation, which I did not know was a thing and love that it is, from the University of Vermont. At TemperPack, her work focuses on embedding sustainability into the company culture and strategy while also helping customers communicate the impact of moving away from conventional materials. We all know storytelling is so important when we’re trying to grow sustainable initiatives.
Liz Helm, Sustainability Manager At TemperPack
You’re based in Richmond, Virginia. You enjoy art museums and walking trails. You also write a newsletter, which is exciting, called The Impact Alphabet. You break down sustainability concepts, which is something that we try to do here to make sustainability more approachable. Thank you so much for being here and for your time. We’re super excited for this conversation. I’ve read your bio. Can you tell us more about who Liz is and how you live with intention?
Yeah, I would love to. Thanks for having me. Whenever I think about where I am and how I got here, I always see flashes of my backyard. I grew up in Northern Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley, in a neighborhood where it was walkable to downtown. We had a backyard. We had dogs. I was always outside. I was eating herbs from the herb garden. I was digging in the dirt. I was climbing trees. I had a younger sister. She’s five years younger than I am. We would tussle and go outside.
Being outside felt, at the time, like the most important place to be. I didn’t realize how impactful that would be on my career and my decisions. It would make me go to Wyoming when I was 22. It would make me go to Vermont when I was 25. It would make me come back home and want to keep pursuing the passion in Virginia later in my life. I always think of that backyard, how I grew up, and going outside as being probably the most impactful part of any decision I’ve made.
More seriously, when I was in college with that background in environmental science and English, that’s what I liked to do. I like to look at rocks. I like to be outside. I like to go to labs. I like to write. Those are my two places and two activities where I felt safe and challenged at the same time. I believed in my bones that the way that I was going to change the world was to write policy.
I was going to be Erin Brockovich. I was going to work for the EPA, and then I was going to work for an administration. I was going to write a policy that was going to prevent pollution. I was going to make laws that were unbreakable. That’s all you had to do. You had to write the law, and then the world was saved. I very quickly learned that’s not how it works.
When I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016, I had friends and colleagues who were in DC, working for the EPA, who very kindly said, “Liz, now is not the time that the EPA has a lot of funding for new jobs. Keep at it, but friend to friend, this is not the time to come and be a policymaker and write some bullish climate policies. Go do something else. Keep us in mind. We’ll see you in four years.”
I fled the East Coast and went to Wyoming. I worked on a ranch in hospitality. I opened a greenhouse. I built that with the greenhouse manager from the ground up of growing organic produce to support those kitchens. In the back of my head, it was like, “How do I get back into this? I’m making change right now locally, but how do I do this at scale? I need to be doing more. I need to be getting back to that level of making a change in the way that policy does.” I learned through that experience.
By finding, luckily and very gratefully, the sustainable innovation MBA program, I recognized that the transition from my obsession with policy is the answer to learning very quickly that business serves an important role in changing the world and combating climate change. That was a huge turning point for me of, “I don’t have to be setting the rules in order to make change. Businesses with budgets, agility, resources, and funding can get stuff done at a much faster pace and at much specific and niche points that don’t need to wait for our bureaucratic policy to come online.”
Policy is important, and we can certainly talk about that later as a lever of change, but my eyes completely opened when I realized, “You’ve got money. You’ve got marketing. You’ve got smart people working for you. You’ve got a product that can do something different. You can make a lot of change without waiting for a big federal bill to sweep in and force everybody to make the change.” There’s a lot of opportunity for businesses to lead the way that the economy will come out while we’re waiting for regulation to catch up.
You can make a lot of change without waiting for a big federal bill to sweep in and force everybody to make change.
Even in front of regulation, right?
Correct.
If the businesses find the consumer and the long-term longevity of your business value, then the legislation doesn’t have to come.
Correct, or they might be in reaction to businesses making this change themselves. The regulation either may not need to exist or may be modeled after how businesses have set the precedent of what is important. To answer your question, maybe it’s not an intention, but maybe my ego of feeling like I needed to be part of something that was important, that was going to live beyond my time on Earth, and that was still going to help other kids who were playing outside. That should be a thing that kids do forever. That is what I’ve always tried to come back to. What was important to me when I was a kid? Where do I feel challenged and feel safe? Where can I learn something new? Corporate sustainability is the place for me in all those aspects.
The Work And Mission Of TemperPack
That’s awesome. I love that. For those that don’t know, can you share what TemperPack is?
I would love to. TemperPack was founded with the mission to replace polystyrene. Our founders were three engineers and business guys who wanted to replace specifically the styrofoam coolers where beer, meal kits, frozen food, pet food, and medicines are shipped in. They saw the growth of eCommerce shipments happening or exploding all over the world.
The only material at the time that worked, which was cheap and accessible, was styrofoam. That was extremely hazardous to the environment. It’s not safe for workers to make. They set out to replace that specific use case. The panels that line the box that ship something that needs to stay cold from A to B, what can we use besides styrofoam to make that better?
Everything that we make at TemperPack is designed to be recyclable or compostable and to protect any type of perishable shipments. Ten years later, we’re headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. We’ve got locations in Vegas and Holt, Michigan, to serve the whole North American market. We’re still focused on displacing styrofoam.
I would love to say we’re ten years in and styrofoam is gone, but there’s so much of that material in abundance everywhere. eCommerce and cold shipments are still growing with the convenience economy and eCommerce in general. There are so many single-use plastics out there that don’t need to be used or could be replaced with something that’s either plant-based, paper-based, fiber-based, or a better solution.
We’re not focused on primary packaging. We’re focused on that secondary transit packaging that you don’t notice as a consumer until it’s in your way, in your trash can, or breaks off and becomes litter and is annoying. It’s that packaging that is required but isn’t part of the product, necessarily. We’re all about the packaging to get it to you.
That’s great. I remember the first time I saw this packaging material. I was like, “This is brilliant. Finally.”
It’s fun to watch people interact with the packaging. I didn’t notice packaging at all, to be honest, until I started working at TemperPack. Now, that's all I can see. There are engineers and people who have spent hours designing your experience with that package, like the second you open the box, what you feel, what you smell, and what you touch. Everything about it has been carefully designed.
It’s so much fun to be on the upstream side of it to think of what it’s like to open a box with TemperPack packaging all the way through to you’ve put your meals in the freezer or you’re all excited to feed your dog this delicious fresh food, and you’ve got to deal with this box or this packaging. How can we reduce that burden, and how can we also reduce the burden on the planet and waste management systems?
It’s great. I worked at Coca-Cola for a long time. I started out working on the graphics for packaging. I worked with a lot of the packaging engineers. I remember this coworker, who was a packaging engineer. He’d been a packaging engineer for over a decade. He’s like, “My wife cut her finger on a blister pack.” He was so upset.
Once you start paying attention to packaging, it can start to influence how you think about the product and how you interact with certain products. I read a lot of labels. I feel something, hold something, and think about something a lot more than I used to before getting into the packaging world.
Once you start paying attention to packaging, it can influence how you think about the product you are interacting with.
Breaking Down Life Cycle Assessment/Analysis
On this show, similar to your newsletter, we try to break down some complicated concepts. One of the ones we want to talk about with you later is LCA. Can you explain what an LCA is and what all goes into it?
Absolutely.
What does the acronym stand for?
Thank you. Let’s break down LCA. It is the Life Cycle Assessment. It’s also called Life Cycle Analysis, but Assessment is typically the term that I see more often. In a Life Cycle Assessment, you are assessing the environmental impacts of a product throughout its life. That’s from raw material extraction all the way to the manufacturing site, where it gets processed. It gets sent to a distributor, it gets folded up, and then it’ll get shipped somewhere else and get shipped to the consumer. What did that consumer do with it? I’m speaking specifically about packaging here because that’s my world. The LCAs that I’ve built are around our products.
For our products, we’re looking at raw material extraction, manufacturing process, the use of that process, and then what happens to it at the end of its life. There are frameworks out there that allow us to compare LCAs to LCAs. There are strict rules and guidelines. The best LCA reports are critically reviewed to avoid greenwashing and any other type of fluffy assumptions that you would put in there. It’s a calculator. You’re putting everything that you know about this product into the calculator and looking at the results to find ways to reduce that environmental impact.
That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for breaking all the components down. We’ll dive into the next question, but then I want to come back to LCAs. We’ve talked about in other episodes that there are some trade-offs that come with looking at an LCA compared to some of the stuff that might seem intuitive from a sustainability perspective. That plays into probably what you’ve been doing at TemperPack. Can you share about influencing change at TemperPack, specifically in your efforts around scope 1 and 2 emissions? Clarify for the audience how the LCAs tie into the scope 1 and 2 emissions work.
I was not the first person to talk about emissions at TemperPack when I joined a few years ago. It’s a company based on eliminating plastics. It’s a company very aware of climate change. The team before me had started tracking scope 1 and 2, which are the fuel used on site and your purchased energy. It’s relatively simple for us because we have three facilities. I’m only looking at energy at three facilities.
Our scopes 1 and 2 have been tracked since 2020. When I joined in 2022, we had a little bit of data. My goal, at that point, was to change the way that we gather that data to be higher quality. The biggest change that we’ve made at TemperPack is taking that data and saying, “These are our emissions. Now what do we do? Where can we allocate these emissions to our actual manufacturing processes in order to find ways to increase energy efficiency and reduce costs?”
For manufacturing sites, it was easier to make the sustainability case because it does come with a cost benefit of reducing the overhead of spending money on electricity for our foam extruders or our paper machine wrappers. The project summary is taking your scope 1 and 2 emissions, looking at them not just from what they are, but what they are telling us, and then finding ways to reduce the outcome of our manufacturing activities.
To be transparent, we aren’t doing this alone. I lead the team. We are a team of two. We’ve worked with a partner called Rappel to help us dig into the engineering of our manufacturing processes to figure out where there are leaks in an air compressor, inefficient uses of energy, or maybe the machine is running. Can we put a timer on it for downtime? Those are examples of things that we’ve looked at from an energy consumption standpoint that will align with our efficiency and manufacturing KPIs.
As a manufacturer, you want to be as efficient as you can with taking resources and turning them into product. This was a new journey for us, looking at it from an emissions side. Where can we reduce our energy consumption and increase efficiency? What else do we need to do in order to make up for the carbon emissions that we can’t reduce on-site? We’re in the middle of that journey. We’re excited to see where that will go and what our actions will be in 2026. It’s been a very technical process to dig into what we do every day and what that means for our environmental footprint. Did you want me to tie that back into the LCA of the product?
Yeah. Can you give an example?
The most impactful part of the scope 1 and 2 emissions, like the highest part of those emissions, is our electricity purchase. The electricity purchase is our highest contributor to our scope 1 and 2 by far. Yeah. We are extruding bio-based foam. We are converting paper. We’re moving stuff around. We’re shipping millions of panels every week to our customers. We’ve got a lot going on. The electricity is our biggest environmental burden of these three facilities.
That electricity is directly linked to our LCA. I’m taking that number, the kilowatt hours used on an annual basis, and plugging that into our LCA as part of that lifecycle. That is the electricity used to make our product. When you can reduce that number, you should expect to see a reduced environmental impact calculated in your LCA. It’s going to be exciting for us to save money when we can find projects that can realize savings. It’ll be exciting to see our operational footprint emissions go down. It’ll be exciting to see the emissions of our product go down when we have those reduced energy numbers going into our LCA.
The Right Way To Handle And Navigate Resistance
Even though it’s coming from a third party, when you’re bringing these efficiency ideas to a manufacturing facility, do you experience any pushback or any resistance to the change?
I wouldn’t categorize it as resistance or pushback, but we needed to make sure that we were scheduling these types of projects in line with production expectations. I was bringing this project to the team before we started getting buy-in from our COO, which was essential. It would be completely unfair and unsustainable for me to bring a project and say, “We have to shut down for five days and look at our equipment.” That wasn’t going to be feasible for us. It’s not what I want us to do.
We make our impact by displacing styrofoam. Getting our product out and in the hands of customers and using it out in the real world is important. What I didn’t want to do was impact our regular operations. We were looking for a partner and trying to figure out what this would look like for us. We’ve got a small team. We’re making a lot of products. We’re trying to be as efficient as possible. We’re only ten years old. We’re still growing quickly. That was a pretty important part of presenting this change and working through this project, which will present a lot of change opportunities.
The inflection of change that we’re going to look at is, “We’ve analyzed these scope two emissions. We got this list of recommendations from our partner that can reduce our emissions. How do we now change our process to reflect those opportunities?” That is the part that will likely be more challenging than just assessing where the opportunities are, but embedding those changes into our process.
As a company that was born in innovation, every year, we’re looking for ways to improve our product or refine our marketing strategy. It’s not new to TemperPack to change, but it has to be met with, “Does this make sense for the team? Does it make sense for our customers?” It has to fit with everything else. Our engineers didn’t blink when I said, “What if we consider doing this instead of this? What if we change this process a little bit?” They’re unfazed, to be honest. They do this all the time. They’re constantly looking for improvement opportunities. It has to align and not prohibit our growth and our mission, which is to get these materials out into the world.
That’s good guidance. Even when you’re opting in to change yourself, you can find resistance in yourself, or I do. To your point, if somebody’s open to change, they’re going to be open to change within reason, and making sure that you’re still considering those points of view, those incentives, and those process impacts when even if they’re what I’ve been calling an advocate for the change that you’re driving.
It’s getting curious about what is behind that resistance. There are a couple of projects that I thought were a great idea, not even specific to TemperPack, but in life, where I would present an idea and it would immediately face resistance. I was getting curious about why and what’s causing that resistance. Maybe there’s a 3rd or 4th layer back there that you can change before you get to where you want to go. Maybe that change that you envision is a little bit different than what happens in reality. Typically, digging into the reason behind that resistance is where I’ve been successful.
Embedding Sustainability Beyond The Team
At TemperPack, sustainability is already ingrained in the mission and vision of the organization, and yet you are still making changes to embed sustainability even deeper across from a wholesale standpoint. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe a little bit about the biggest challenges associated with embedding sustainability beyond the sustainability team?
Yes. This is probably my favorite part of the job because it will never end. This work of embedding sustainability will never feel complete. It’s a little uncomfortable, but it is the reality. There will always be opportunities to stick sustainability in places where it may not be obvious to that team that a sustainability decision or consideration should belong there.
I talk about TemperPack and the products that we have. The mission was very product-focused. The opportunity I saw a couple of years ago is that we’ve got a strong sustainability story for our products. We know the certifications that we have. We know the chemistry of it. We know the end of life. We’ve got this LCA data. Our products are stellar. What about what we’re doing? Beyond what we make, what about how we make it? That is part of the story. That connection has been a lot of the work that I’ve been doing the past couple of years of, “Our products are good. What about us? How can we make TemperPack better? How can we make TemperPack more sustainable?”
Some of the obstacles that I face are that a lot of these projects feel like tiny wins that will not materialize until they happen over and over again. For example, we’ve included sustainability considerations. Specifically, we’ve included the impact on our scope 1 and 2 emissions as part of our CapEx process. When we go through a new CapEx project, one of the questions in this formal process is, “Is this going to increase our scope 1 and 2?” We might have simplified it to energy consumption. We’re like, “Will this change our waste rates? Will this contribute to more waste or less waste? How will this impact the waste that’s coming out of our buildings?”
Those two questions alone, not every CapEx project is going to be relevant to it, but having them as part of the discussion is something that we are proud of. It is part of an official discussion every single time. Every single time, we’re thinking about energy and waste. Putting that on a spreadsheet and being like, “There it is,” it’s not going to feel like change until it happens over and over again. A year and a half later, it’s part of the discussion when talking about CapEx expenses. It makes the approval process important. When it does impact our emissions or when that project does reduce waste, it is a huge win.
Something that I bring back to our engineers is, like, “This is a big deal. You’re helping beyond the project and the problem that you were trying to solve, which might be for a specific engineering or manufacturing process problem.” We’ve hit 2 targets with this 1 project, but it doesn’t feel like a big decarbonization project, our scope 1 and 2 project. They are little actions where you’re putting it in your supplier code of conduct and bringing up these questions internally. It takes a while for it to bleed in and become the norm.
It’s like a culture change. I always joke that you have to have the sexy stuff and the unsexy stuff. Putting it on there, the constant reminder, you’re not going to get headlines off of that, but it does force rigor. It forces the culture of thinking harder about every change you’re making in your business. If it drives something up, then it’s something you need to account for. If it drives something down, then you can celebrate it. I love that.
The first place I started with embedding sustainability was by adding sustainability-specific questions to our employee engagement survey. The questions are simple, like, “Do you align with our mission? Do you feel like you have the power in your role to contribute to our mission? Do you feel like you have the autonomy to drive change and reduce our impact?” Questions like that have shown us a lot where we need to step up. It shows that even though you work in HR, you are directly tied to sustainability. Even though you work in accounting, you’re directly tied to sustainability.
We have a lot of folks who come to TemperPack because of our mission. They’re in their day-to-day jobs, whatever they’re doing. Making that connection is as important as recruiting them. One of the biggest outcomes of a tiny change was getting that feedback and feeling like, “Are we letting employees down by not connecting enough to sustainability? Are there opportunities somewhere else? There might be a disconnect there.” It was a tiny change. We added two questions to the biannual employee engagement survey. It was not a huge project or a huge lift. It didn’t feel like a big thing at the time, but the feedback that we got was huge and is setting us up for the next couple of years.
Simplifying Sustainability Concepts Through Writing
That’s great. I’m going to shift gears a little bit. We talk a little bit in this show about opting into change, which you’ve already given a couple of examples of, like moving out to Wyoming, which sounds like a dream to me. You have launched this A to Z newsletter. Can you talk a little bit about how that came to be? What was the driver for it?
Do you remember that at the beginning, you asked how I lived with intention? This is one of those examples. I’m realizing that I missed writing, and I missed talking about sustainability on a very colloquial level. I hear from friends, colleagues, strangers, or somebody I meet in line at the grocery store, “That’s so cool. I wish I could work in sustainability,” or, “That’s important to me. I wish I could XYZ.” I am constantly thinking, “You can, you do, and you are. Surprise. You are part of this.”
I was hearing from some previous colleagues, “I don’t know what ESG means? What is that? You know that. I don’t know that.” There’s no lack of curiosity. There’s a barrier of knowledge. It’s a gap that I saw I could fill. It is a creative outlet, selfishly for me, to write a couple of hundred words and put them on LinkedIn. I’m not a big graphics person, so the headers aren’t very visually appealing, but it’s been a good exercise for me to get back to the basics. Why am I doing this? Why do I care? Where can I use my skills to fill in those gaps that I’m hearing from people who are educated, in tune, concerned, and don’t know where to go?
I found at Coke, too, that there were a lot of passionate people about sustainability, and they didn’t know how to participate in it. They wanted to. They saw ways, but they didn’t see how to bring those ideas to life. Sustainability, this profession, can have this air that’s confusing. It’s like, “Most of the people traditionally have been in science and have PhDs. How can I possibly make an impact?”
It is confusing. It is true that things don’t always align and that there are trade-offs. It’s not always easy to make the right sustainable choice, but, at the end of the day, it’s something that we all need to be able to talk about more comfortably and unpack together. It shouldn’t feel like it’s us versus them. I love that.
There’s a lot of content out there about what you need to be doing, what you need to be eating, and what’s going on in the White House and the climate. This is something very simple that you can read on your lunch break or your coffee break. If you’re curious, pick an article. You don’t have to read it every week. I felt like we needed something that was light and approachable. Selfishly, it gets my creative juices going before I start digging into hard projects at work. It’s a little bit of a selfish project and a little bit of a project born from the need for something like this.
I get that. I love giving myself homework. It’s like the dumbest thing about me, but I love it. I’m like, “If I give myself homework, then I’ll dig in. I used to raise my hand for stretch assignments at work all the time so that I could do extra projects and learn something new. If I didn’t have something tied to it or I didn’t have that accountability, then I wouldn’t prioritize the time for it.
A future fun project that I’ve been thinking about would be a climate book club or a feedback loop like that, where we pick a book a month, whether it’s Drawdown or something like that. We read it and talk about it. I miss being in school, too, so I am constantly looking for ways to learn and talk to other people about what they’re reading. That could be a project for next summer.
Women in Sustainability in Colorado has a climate book club, but it’s virtual. You could join. I read a bunch of books that way. I’m the same thing. I needed that accountability. I started a leadership book club for that same reason. You’re reading these books that sometimes are dry, and you’re like, “I don’t know if I can make it through.” Having that accountability has helped. I’ll send you that info.
The Huge Impact Of Incremental Change
I have two more questions. As an active participant in the circular economy, can you tell us a little bit about this idea of making incremental change in the service of the whole? Sometimes, it can feel a little overwhelming, like, “How am I going to be able to make an impact?” You gave some good examples of very small changes, but if you can talk a little bit more about it in the context of the circular economy, that would be great.
I’ll give 2 examples, 1 personal and 1 that we’ve been working on at TemperPack and are going to continue to work throughout the existence of the company. Change is change. Personally, the biggest thrill I’ve found in participating in the circular economy is finding a local refill shop. This is not groundbreaking. I’m not the first person to do this.
It is the experience of taking a marinara jar or whatever I have at home, taking it to the shop, filling it with laundry detergent or dishwasher tablets, and getting the goods there. It is so calming and very satisfying. I can’t articulate why it feels so good not to buy whatever brand from whatever big store, but I have in the back of my head everything that I know from work about plastic packaging, everything that I know from work about chemicals, lingering chemicals, and lingering plastics. I realized that I have to start doing one small thing.
I started with, “I’m going to get dishwasher tablets.” Maybe it feels a little bit out of the way. Maybe it feels a little bit out of sync at first, but go get dishwasher tablets. I’m getting dishwasher tablets and laundry detergent there. I’m getting dishwasher detergents, laundry powder, hand soap, and dish soap. Since this store has been supported, they’re expanding into dry goods like lentils, pasta, oils, and vinegars. It’s been an exciting tiny participation in the circular economy.
I’ve found a lot of folks locally that are in the same mind, from meeting people at the grocery store, meeting people here and there, practicing talking to strangers after COVID, and working remotely. There are people out there who are aligned. Participating in the circular economy is the best way to find them. A lot of times, it may look like under consumption, but when you go to fulfill that need, where can I fulfill that need in a way that still allows me to participate in this? Going to that local refill shop has been, honestly, a sense of joy in participating in the local Richmond refill shop. That’s the personal journey.
You can find people out there who are aligned with and participating in the circular economy even in the world of consumption.
On the packaging side at TemperPack, we often hear a narrative, like, “We don’t want compostable because compostable packaging infrastructure doesn’t exist yet,” or, “Nothing gets composted. It goes into the landfill.” There’s so much need for, “What’s the best solution?” and not, “What’s a better solution than where I am today?” If you are in EPS, a lot of companies are saying, “We want to get rid of EPS. We want to go to the top-of-the-line solution.”
Expanded Polystyrene.
Thank you. EPS is Expanded Polystyrene. Thank you for catching my acronyms. If you’re in Expanded Polystyrene and you’re looking for a change, the instinct or whatever’s driving that change is often looking for the best solution out there. It’s going to solve all of your problems. It’s going to meet every single need. It’s going to have the best end-of-life solution.
Not just TemperPack, but many other sustainable packaging providers out there are seeing there are trade-offs, or that what you’re getting is part of the evolution of packaging. You’re getting the best option that we have that may look a little bit different in a couple of years, and it may be different from a couple of years ago. It’s interesting to watch a market that is so tied to Expanded Polystyrene, which has been around for decades and has been accessible for decades. It always performs. It is lightweight. It does exactly what it does. It wins in every single category, and it hasn’t changed at all for decades.
You have a solution from a company like TemperPack that performs thermally. It does everything functionally that you need it to do, but it is going to continue to change to get better. That feels a little bit scary to some companies that are like, “Why would we change? EPS is good. We’re good. We’ve been using it for decades.” That fear can feel scary.
A lot of times, we want something that’s better, but our consumers don’t have compostable infrastructure. The reality is that compostable infrastructure, a lot of the time, is in response to the increase in compostable products, compostable material, or a cultural change where folks are saying, “We want a composting service.” There is a pull and push of getting that type of waste system up and running.
Our mantra is we would love for X company to be part of that. You choosing a compostable packaging or you choosing a recyclable packaging is part of that movement, and you will support the opening of infrastructure in place to create that circular economy. We’re not going to wake up one day and have a circular economy where everything is recycled, everything is composted, and all the materials coming in are completely circular. It is going to be a slow, clunky, and often uncomfortable change.
We have to get to a tipping point where it makes sense to build that infrastructure. That can feel very uncomfortable when we’re used to a material that, by all means, in service is, “It goes through a landfill. That’s not my problem.” It’s making small increments towards the circular economy. What is good in 2025 might be completely different than what is the best option in 2030, but making that step gap to the best solution is critical.
Recognizing Your Power To Create Change
That’s great. Final question. Why embrace change?
Beyond my selfish ego of trying to control everything and trying to participate in change, I was lucky enough to hear Molly Kawahata speak at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition in 2024. She presented that part of the definition of hope is having this autonomy and acknowledgement that you have the power to change it. You recognize that there’s a better alternative and that you have the power to change. The second part of the definition of hope is where the juice of the squeeze is. You recognize that something’s better, and you have the power to change. If you embrace change, you are lighting up that hope. That’s where I see that balance going.
If you were averse to change and were like, “Nothing’s ever going to change,” you’re almost robbing yourself of hope if you imagined a better opportunity. The change doesn’t even matter, but acknowledging that you have the power to make that change is completely part of hope and completely part of being human.
There are a lot of philosophies out there on change management. I’m not a change management expert. I’ve studied the curve of change and the resistance to change. All of a sudden, you get to that tipping point, and everything’s good. Change is happening constantly. It’s the joy of participating in the change that you are driving. That’s very exciting and fulfilling to me.
Episode Wrap-Up And Takeaways
Thank you. That should be the advertisement for my show. This was a great conversation. We got a lot of strong nuggets that I want to reiterate. One of the things that you said that I thought was interesting was that you talked about how you were making a local change in Wyoming and how you wanted to be a part of scaling. You then shifted to this concept of how businesses can make a niche change that is scalable. Reiterating that point is something good to remember.
If you are in the sustainability space and you’re trying to make change, it can feel daunting. It can feel hard to push a heavy boulder up a steep hill. To your point, if you can get specific and you can scale that specificity, it can move the needle faster. You also reiterated the scope 1 and 2 project. Something that ties into this idea is what you and your company can control, taking that on first, and going back internally. You’re already making a very niche change externally, but what can you, as TemperPack, control? What can you and the readers’ companies control? It is putting the mirror back on yourself and trying to think through that, and then how you can scale it.
You also talked about being curious behind the resistance, which is such a good reminder. If you don’t know why they’re pushing back, it’s generally not personal. I always say that people are not out to get you, generally, especially in a professional setting. If you can be curious behind that resistance and start to unpack it, figure it out, and then break down some of those barriers for those various stakeholders, it can help you move the needle forward.
Embedding sustainability everywhere and never being complete in this process can feel a little daunting as well, but it’s also very true. If it were fixed already, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. This constant seeking out continuous improvement is a good philosophy to keep in mind. There’s also the tactical example of considering the production expectations when you’re trying to make a change in a manufacturing setting.
We used to always say at Coke, “Trucks are going to roll whether or not I show up in the building. As long as I’m not screwing up trucks rolling, the revenue can happen for the business, and we will grow.” To your point, the manufacturing lines need to run. You do need to find opportunities to capitalize on. If they already have a planned downtime, maybe you can use that. Thinking through the growth driver of the organization and how to not stop that but still drive your initiative forward is a good lesson for our audience.
Learning From Your Most Challenging Moments
You also talked about the refill shop. There’s a refill shop in Colorado called JOY FILL, which exactly captures what you’re saying. It’s this idea of joy in participating in something daily or more routine in the circular economy. You’re finding those ways, even if it’s, “When in doubt, throw it out.” Don’t wishcycle. That’s my thing for people. My friends are always asking me, “Can I recycle this?” I’m like, “No, you cannot. Don’t screw up the bale. We need a good bale.” Thank you for all of your nuggets and for this lovely conversation. I appreciate your time. Are there any last words?
It’s interesting hearing all of those points back, especially the small-scale versus big-scale impact. That juxtaposition is so interesting because both are important. The point that you echoed back, I was like, “Yeah.” It’s interesting that the point of frustration in Wyoming when I felt like I wasn’t doing enough was pretty freaking impactful in that community of 2,000 people. A tiny town in Saratoga, Wyoming, having access to fresh produce is a pretty big deal.
I don’t know if that was my 22-year-old brain being like, “What am I doing growing lettuce in the planes?” I think of that time with a lot of mixed emotions because I was 22 or 23, living by myself in a barn near a greenhouse with my Border Collie. It would snow six feet, and I had to shovel us out. The power would go down, and it’d be fighting with the wind and going over to the greenhouse to make sure that the lights would come on to grow the tomatoes. When I think about that time, I’m like, “What was I doing out there?”
My final note would be to lean into those experiences that are challenging because they’re typical. I’m quoting my parents. I’m sure somewhere along the way, that is where you learn, and that is where you grow your skin to go and do something bigger. I would not be able to maneuver the change that I’m trying to make without having experienced all the crazy stuff that happened out in that greenhouse in Wyoming.
Lean into your most challenging experiences. It is where you learn and grow your skin. Go and do something bigger.
Thinking about that now, I was frustrated, feeling like, “I’m not doing enough,” when it was pretty important at the time. What I was doing was setting me up for getting told no all the time later in my life in a corporate setting. I’m like, “I mixed soil for eight hours today. I can do anything.” That is a pretty big lesson that I’ve taken for granted, which you’ve reflected back at me. It felt small, but it was important. Those moments are more important than you realize to set you up for doing something bigger.
That's the perfect way to end. Thank you.
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About Liz Helm
Liz Helm leads the Sustainability team at TemperPack, a packaging manufacturer dedicated to innovating circular alternatives to Styrofoam and single-use plastics. She graduated from the University of Virginia with degrees in Environmental Science and English before earning her MBA in Sustainable Innovation from the University of Vermont. At TemperPack, her work focuses on embedding sustainability into company culture and strategy, while also helping customers communicate the impact of moving away from conventional materials. Based in Richmond, Virginia, Liz enjoys art museums and walking trails, and she also writes The Impact Alphabet, a newsletter that breaks down sustainability concepts from A to Z.