Navigating The Challenges Of Textile Circularity With Marisa Adler
Textiles compose a huge chunk of global waste, and they usually end up in the dumpster and are never recycled. Christine Yeager discusses what it takes to improve textile circularity with Marisa Adler, Senior Consultant at Resource Recycling Systems (RRS). She explains how to navigate the ever-increasing challenges and limitations of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and create more recovery pathways for textile reuse, recycling, and repurposing. Marisa also highlights the complex pathways of textiles in secondhand and international trade, as well as the rising tensions between financial responsibilities and environmental goals. Find out how the government, the corporate world, and even your very own home can join forces in vastly improving textile circularity.
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Navigating The Challenges Of Textile Circularity With Marisa Adler
Welcome back to the show. I am super excited to be joined by Marisa Adler. As someone who has been responsible for designing and operating textile waste and circularity programs across public agency and producer-driven systems, Marissa has worked at the point where policy ambition collides with on-the-ground reality, from New York City's sanitation system to national textile stewardship efforts. Her career sits squarely at one of the most uncomfortable truths in the circular economy.
Textiles are a fast-growing waste stream with weak data. They also have a fragmented infrastructure, and the infrastructure will be changing as EPR enters the picture. Over the last six months, we worked together, and I have learned so much from her, not just how deep her understanding of the textile infrastructure flows, policy mechanics, and system failures runs, but also how rare it is to see someone combine that technical rigor with being authoritative, decisive, kind, and genuinely relatable.
She is often the smartest person in the room when I am around, yet she leads conversations in a way that builds confidence, treats partners with respect, and makes hard discussions feel productive instead of defensive. She is here to help us learn about how to change systems and how to do it with grace, and talk through some of the tough challenges and trade-offs that come with textiles. Welcome back to the show. I am here with Marissa. Thank you so much for being here. We like to start all of our interviews with this first question of how do you live with intention?
I feel like I am a very intentional person. I am super conscientious, and I am very aware of the environment around me and the nuances of the people around me, the mood in the room, and all those things, very detail-oriented. The way I live with intention is by trying to live in the moment, by trying to become harmonious with whatever time and space that I am in, so that I feel like I am actually experiencing life. Even though my brain tends to want to jump to the future or jump to the past, I have to very actively try to remember to bring myself back to the present.
I get that for sure. Always jumping to the future.
It is so hard not to. You’re constantly worried about what is coming tomorrow. What do I need to be prepared for? We really do forget to just breathe and enjoy.
Making The Leap To Independent Consulting
On that note, breathing and enjoying and living in the present, on this show, we have had a couple of examples of people who have opted in to change, which takes courage and also a little bit of that conscientiousness that you are talking about, being very aware of what needs to change in your life and how you are going to do that. You did just that when you left the perceived safety of a firm for independent consulting. Can you share a little bit about what gave you the confidence to make that leap and what it revealed about you, especially something that you did not expect?
For a lot of my life, I have lived in a safety zone, and I am finally at an age in life where I need to just have a lot more trust and confidence in myself and not be scared or worried about making a mistake. I am realizing that there is no right or wrong choice in life. Life is what you make it. That gave me the confidence to step out of that comfort zone of being salaried and being a full-time employee of a consulting firm and branching out on my own a little bit.
It does certainly help that I am still connected to RRS, and I still do work through RRS, Resource Recycling Systems. They are a consulting firm that I have been with for about ten years. I have gotten to a point where I have been able to blend the best of both of those worlds. There is still a little bit of that fallback safety and the networks and the connections and the work through RRS, but also branching out and trying something new and not really knowing what tomorrow is going to bring, not knowing if I am going to bring in a paycheck, if I am going to have clients.
It is interesting to evolve with that and just let it sit and try to be comfortable with that uncertainty. It is exciting. At the same time, I feel like the textile circularity space is also in this new, exciting, growing, and uncertain space. I am just molding with the industry and this specific topic within it. If that makes any sense at all.
It does. Let us unpack the textile waste stream. What is textile recycling? Just think of it as a vocabulary check for our audience.
There are a lot of different components of the municipal solid waste stream, and textiles are one of those. It is thought of as its own category within the broader waste stream. Textiles are the clothes you wear, the blankets that you use at home. A lot of the consumer-facing home textiles and apparel. It can also include some institutional textiles like uniforms and things like that.
Generally, when we are talking about textiles and textile waste from a circularity perspective, the major concern is with the bulk of it, which is clothing and home textiles, shoes, and backpacks. Definitions change based on where you go and the context that you are working within. Even just from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, they may have slightly different definitions of textile.
There is a general understanding of what a textile is. Does carpet count? Is that a textile? Some of them are made out of textile fabrics, but they are generally handled separately in the waste stream. Generally and broadly speaking, textiles are exactly what you just described, but there can be different nuances. I know you understand.
Moments Of Discomfort That Led To Self-Advocacy
Of course, because if it were straightforward and easy, that would be boring. You brought up a really great point in your answer before, around something that we talk a lot about in the show, which is confronting the discomfort that comes with change and sitting in that and allowing that to be a part of the journey and the evolution. Discomfort. What is a moment when change hit you hard, and what did it force you to confront about control, trust, and self-advocacy?
As I have gone through my professional life so far, which has been about twenty years, I have learned a lot about human nature. I have learned a lot about business. I have learned a lot about how people operate in a world of capitalism and competition. There has certainly, like I am sure everybody experiences, been my fair share of surprises, challenges, disappointments, and witnessing behaviors that I do not really want to be surrounding myself with.
I really am someone who values trust and transparency and cooperation, collaboration. Unfortunately, not everybody is like that. I have experienced a few situations that have hit me hard. You could call it a change because it has forced a change. There was a change that was made whether I wanted it to happen or not, for reasons that sometimes will always be mysterious. You have to roll with the punches. You've got to go with life.
You really do come out on the other side a little bit wiser, a little bit tougher, and a little bit more self-confident because one of the lessons I learned is that if you do not advocate for yourself, nobody will. There is also a very fine line between advocating for yourself and still remaining humble and being able to acknowledge that you are still on a learning curve, and I am on my growth journey, and I do not have all the answers. It is also one of those tough positions to be in where you are trying to really boost yourself up, but at the same time, trying to also recognize that you have some humility and recognize that nobody has all the answers.
If you do not advocate for yourself, nobody will. But there is also a very fine line between advocating for yourself and being humble.
That is something I have been experiencing as well, this balance of having confidence with, to your point, first of all, nobody can know everything about EPR or textile waste or packaging waste or any of it. There is too much to know, and it is changing every day, the capabilities and the realities of the infrastructure. Yet I have had some experiences where, because I’m generally trying to partner and collaborate, it is almost like, "Am I selling myself short a little bit?" When I should be, "Look, I do not have all the answers, but I am the best person to talk about these topics." That comes with a value that you need to recognize.
You were talking about how nobody knows everything about EPR, extended producer responsibility. It is so true. One topic I just have such trouble wrapping my head around is advanced recycling or chemical recycling. I have read about it and I have studied it. I have talked to so many people. I spent a lot of time trying to really understand it.
Every time I turn around, I read something new, and I have to try to put it in context and make sense of it. Somebody will ask me to explain something very simple about it, and I cannot. That is totally an example. Extended producer responsibility is something that is new and evolving. Nobody has all the answers on that, and nobody knows what it is going to look like, at least for textiles.
Why Textile Waste Does Not Fit Neatly Into Existing Circular Systems
Advanced recycling and chemical recycling. There are just so many forms of it. There are so many layers to it. That is a really great example of something that is constantly evolving. Thank you for the reminder about self-advocacy. What makes textile waste fundamentally harder and/or different from other waste streams? Why does it not fit neatly into our existing circular systems?
We collect in our generic, typical municipal waste system trash, and we collect recyclables. When we say recyclables, we mean our metal, glass, plastic, paper, cardboard, and curbside recyclables, mostly packaging. Textiles do not generally have a pathway through municipal systems like your regular community recycling service for diversion.
Usually, opportunities to divert textiles through reuse, recycling, or repurposing happen outside of the utility that the government provides or that your taxpayer dollars fund. You could throw away your textiles in the trash, and it would get picked up by your hauler or your service provider.
If you are looking to push those textiles into a recovery pathway, citizens have to go out and find their own way to do that. There has been the development over the last several decades, a hundred years, of a parallel system that operates outside the municipal sector. Those are your thrift stores, your charities, your collection bins.
Textile Circularity: If you are looking to push those textiles into a recovery pathway, citizens have to go out and find their own way to do that.
More recently, we have online resale and those things. It is really happening outside of the municipal sector. Although sometimes there will be municipalities that partner with service providers to offer their residents a way to divert textiles through local programs, they are not as common as regular recycling.
Does that make it fundamentally harder, do you think, or just different?
It is different. The average American's access to diverting textiles is high. Their access to diverting reusable, good-condition textiles is high. Access to recycling low-value textiles is still a muscle that we need to develop a lot more. In the United States and globally, we do not have a lot of capabilities in the industry to recycle textiles back into a new textile. We were just talking about there’s mechanical recycling and chemical recycling.
Mechanical recycling has been around for many decades. There is some good industry capacity available internationally for that, but it is very highly specific to pure cotton or pure wool. Anytime you have blends, or anytime you have the synthetics, which is the majority of our textiles these days, it is harder and harder to rely on mechanical mechanisms for that.
We need to start developing the infrastructure and the pathways to channel those multi-fiber textiles and the synthetic textiles into recycling pathways, as long as they are not reusable first. We have to follow the waste hierarchy. Reuse, and then repurposing, and recycling. It is harder because it is a brand-new end market. It is a brand-new system that has to be developed. It is hard to scale brand-new systems, especially when it falls outside the municipal sector.
You do not have the tax base to fund it. Even if it were within the municipal sector, agency budgets are so tight that they cannot just invest in a new recycling facility that costs $350 million. They cannot just roll out a new service to their citizens that has a third source-separated stream at curbside. There are a lot of challenges with developing it, but it also offers a lot of opportunities.
You brought up two things that I do not want to skip over. First, really quick, I’ll just say that mechanical recycling, you can think of it like you're using a machine to break something up and bring it back together and recycle it into another material, same material but new use. Chemical recycling, you can think of it as using chemicals to break down the material almost down to the building blocks of the monomer or polymer itself, depending on how it is done.
Creating Options For Recovery Pathway And Waste Hierarchy
I once heard this person talk eloquently about it, like unzipping the polymer down to its building blocks and then re-zipping it back together. We can have a whole other show about the trade-offs of chemical recycling and advanced recycling. Nonetheless, those are fundamentally how it works for those of you who do not know. you brought up something really interesting that I want to talk a little bit more about around the recovery pathway and waste hierarchy. Those are things that we have to talk about all the time.
What I want to highlight is that in the sustainability space, thinking differently about how we talk about some of these challenges and framing it up as a recovery pathway, like something that needs to be a new path of how we're recovering this material and processing it and turning it back into something else, is beautiful language that you just naturally used. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what you see as some of the options around recovery pathways and the waste hierarchy in general.
They are eloquent words, right? When you think about circularity and waste, there actually are a lot of very beautiful concepts that are spread throughout and become just second-nature industry speak. Reuse, first and foremost. If you can reuse it among family and friends or reuse it locally, always the best choice. We do have a very vibrant international secondhand clothing trade, which provides a lot of economic benefits to everyone involved in the trade and a lot of environmental benefits by keeping clothing, other textiles, and apparel in use that otherwise would not find a home in the United States.
There are a lot of options for reusing textiles, first and foremost. Keeps the product in its original form, so the least amount of energy is required to repurpose it or recycle it. That is the highest and best use to keep it in its original state and form for its original intended purpose. That potentially or theoretically also would offset the need to produce its parallel item new, although that is not always the way it works out. Repurposing would be next when we're talking about textiles.
The best way to repurpose or recycle textiles is to maintain their original state and form for their original intended purpose.
One of the main repurposing pathways for textiles is the reclaimed wiping cloth. This is a very old industry, one of the oldest industries in the textile management sector. This is where you take absorbent textiles that are not suitable for reuse, and you take off all the hard parts, metals, buttons, and zippers. You sort it by the type of textile it is, like whether it is t-shirt quality or terry cloth quality. You could sort them by color, and then cut them up into industrial wiping cloths.
Those industrial wiping cloths go through quality assurance checks, and they are very tightly specified. They are resold globally to massive industries like the automotive industry, the oil and gas industry, and the hospitality industry. They are the backbone of a lot of those industries' cleaning needs. It goes completely unrecognized. Most people, even a lot of the experts in the field that I talk to in textile circularity, do not realize that the industry exists.
Coming back from my tangent here, you have reuse, then you have that repurposing. Repurposing can also include upcycling and some of the more niche solutions. Of course, repair falls in there. I usually lump repair in with reuse because you're really repairing it for reuse. Reuse and repair, repurposing is primarily the wiping cloth industry, and then recycling. The recycling would hopefully target anything that is non-reusable, lower value, the blends, the synthetics, that thing.
Are We Shipping Out Too Much Internationally?
Super helpful. You mentioned the international markets. There is some criticism around us shipping too much overseas. Do you think that people can feel good that if they are taking their stuff to a thrift store and it is not showing up on the shelves, but it is showing up in international markets, that it is actually being reused, or I guess it is probably a mixture of the two? Is it actually a reused market or not?
We could go into a long discussion about this, but one of the things I will say is that there is a very legitimate secondhand clothing trade. There is a lot of disagreement over waste figures. One of the things that this industry is crucially missing is reliable data. Data that has been collected using sound methodological scientific approaches, that has been corroborated, that has been peer-reviewed, and replicated. It could be because it is really hard to get to this data.
As I said, these systems sit outside government operations. A lot of it is privately held independent data. There are very few reporting requirements around tonnage and disclosure of buyers. There is a lot of business-sensitive data in there. It is not a data stream that has been readily available. Once you get into the end markets, it is sometimes hard to track where all the materials are going. Textiles take a convoluted pathway to their final destinations.
When you're talking about the secondhand trade. The average American will donate a bag of clothing to their local thrift store. The thrift store will pick through it and sell whatever it can sell. Anything that they did not feel was good enough to put on their sales floor, or that did not sell on their sales floor, will usually get baled and sold by the pound to a broker. That broker will broker a transaction of that material to a sorter-grader who's usually located in some international sorting and grading hub. Pakistan, UAE, Guatemala. Those are all big international sorting and grading hubs.
Those sorters and graders will sort and grade into hundreds of different categories, reuse categories, rag like the reclaimed wiping cloth, and recycle categories. They'll pull out anything contaminated or that has no end market that has to be disposed of. They will curate these very tailored bales that go to specific importing customers in different end markets across the world. A lot of that is Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia.
Once imported, those importers will break open that bale and sell loads to different wholesalers. Those wholesalers will break it apart more and sell to retailers. Every end market has a slightly different hierarchy, and they have slightly different terminology and names for all the different intermediaries. Ultimately, it trickles down to an end market somewhere. There have been reports of waste, high percentages of waste.
We've seen documentaries and images in the news in places like Ghana and the Atacama Desert in Chile of illegal dumping of textiles. While there are absolutely issues that need to be addressed, I do not think the secondhand clothing trade is necessarily to blame for all of those issues. I also think that some of those issues have been unfairly transposed on the industry at large as a generalization when, in fact, the mechanisms of each of those markets are so different, and the reasons for waste generation are different. Ultimately, it is a business transaction.
If an importer is buying bales, they're not going to pay for trash. They cannot then turn around and sell it. There are entire GDPs that rely on this trade, and hundreds of thousands of livelihoods that really depend on this trade. It is a really complicated issue, and we just do not have the objective data to really understand it, but we're starting to get there. There are a lot more traceability studies happening. There is a lot more end-market research on the ground.
Researchers are going into all these end markets, interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people to understand what the situation is. You also have to remember that some of these end markets are in the Global South, and they have highly underdeveloped waste management infrastructure already. A lot of those dumps are just municipal dumps, not necessarily fed only by the waste of some of those secondhand clothing markets. A lot of things are mixed in there.
Biggest Friction In Improving Textile Circularity
That was very informative and really helpful to unpack. It really hits home this idea of trade-offs and that trade-offs are inevitable, especially with systemic change. You've talked a little bit about it, but can you share with us what you think is maybe one of the biggest frictions you are seeing in textile circularity?
If you bring it back home and you focus the conversation here in the United States, which is where I do most of my work, and you are talking to brands, retailers, startups, technology innovators, and all these other folks, I think what it really comes down to is a lot of the frustrations I hear are just around the economics of building a new system and the financial incentives.
How sustainability and circularity goals can be at odds with the very real, much shorter-timeframe financial responsibilities that a CFO has or that a CEO has to his shareholders. That fiduciary responsibility is to keep turning a profit and stay in business. Brands and retailers and anyone else who has to keep the business alive still have hard choices to make.
That's also where regulation helps come in and level the playing field because if it forces everybody to do something a certain way, then you do not have someone who has a competitive advantage or disadvantage over another. After all, one actor decided to invest more heavily in sustainability decisions when another one just decided to chase the bottom dollar. It’s very much following that the dollar will tell you a lot about how solutions can come to fruition and the way to get solutions.
What I am hearing is this reality that there needs to be a responsible end market. There needs to be an emphasis on the word market. You talked about sorting the bales. A bale is just basically a square of material. We talk about that in the packaging space. The general person thinks, "No, it is contamination because I didn't wash my yogurt cup enough." I am like, "No, that's fine." You should do that.
It really matters that you are not putting the wrong type of material into the wrong place because that's the type of contamination that degrades the quality of a bale. That is not even an option currently in many cases, from a textile perspective upstream. They are not really able to sort it that easily. I know some technologies out there allow for sorting, but it is not at scale yet. Those sorters are having to sort by material type and then, therefore, create quality bales.
You need a market for those bales. Right now, the markets that you are talking about that exist are for reuse or high-quality reusable materials that do not need a lot of repair. My new favorite industry is the reclaimed wiping cloths. After that, all I have really been able to find is putting stuff into cushions. It is just all scrap, downgraded. It is not really recycled in a meaningful, reusable, shirt-to-shirt way. There are a lot of pilots out there, but a lot of stuff needs to get scaled up. To reiterate your point, that friction then becomes the economics of the marketplace for that material.
Who's the first mover? Who is going to invest? Who is going to take it? You also have to share the risk. It is hard to get a bunch of people at different points along that recovery value chain to all hook arms and decide to jump in it together and share the financial risk. People do not understand the scale of what we are talking about and why it can become such a barrier when you start to think about the finances. Think about the average thrift store.
They could be sending a 40-foot tractor-trailer load of unsold textiles that they need to find homes for because they could not sell them in their stores every day or every other day. That is just one thrift store. It is a river. If you ever talk to Goodwill, they say that it is a river. It never stops coming. We have to keep the product moving. We cannot just stockpile it. We can save it for next season. We cannot hope that if it stays out long enough, somebody will buy it.
They have to keep moving the product. When you think about the amount of feedstock that eventually has to find a home, either in the reuse market or the recycling market, it is a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built if you are talking about the recycling end market. If you want to build more domestic capacity for reuse, that is a lot of material.
If there is a very much of a chicken-or-egg situation going on when you are talking about, "Who's going to pay for it?" I do not want to invest in it unless I know the end market and the offtake is there, and the price point is there. The buyers are like, "I am not going to pay more than I can afford if I've got virgin material a lot less expensive."
It just boils down to that economic question of where are we going to get the financing to build a facility, and how are we going to balance out that supply-demand ratio so that the whole system works. When it reaches scale, the costs will equalize, and you will reach an equilibrium, and the overall cost of the system will come down, but that is at scale, and we're nowhere near that yet for textile recycling.
Addressing The Blind Spots In Textile Circularity
On that note, around scale and the fact that there is a lot of infrastructure globally, the reality is that a lot of the legislation comes in locally. What blind spots do you see, and do you see us ignoring these global consequences when we're so myopically focused on our one-state-by-one-state sort of waste diversion programs?
When it comes to textiles, I do think that we need to think more carefully about the idiom that processing locally is always better than shipping materials, because somebody still has to do the research and understand the true benefits versus costs of our globalized secondhand clothing trade. I do think that also, especially with textiles, it very quickly becomes a geopolitical conversation, not just a waste management conversation.
Talking about trade, you are talking about tariffs, you are talking about other countries' reliance on that income, you are talking about livelihoods, you are talking about China's interests. This actually comes into play heavily. That is something else that I really learned a lot about through studying global trade. There are a lot of unintended consequences that could be realized if the right folks are not pulled into the policymaking conversations.
I'll just add think that's something that we will see how it unfolds. At least in the packaging space, I do like that the concept of responsible end market does not require that every aspect of it exists in the dirt inside the state where the EPR exists. There is room and flexibility for funding for things outside of that state's borders. To your point, it is impossible to build an infrastructure in each state for all of the materials that need to be processed.
Honestly, we live in a globalized production society anyway. The textile and apparel supply chain is highly fragmented and highly global. In a sense, especially when you start talking about where recycling facilities should be sited, no matter where you put it, materials are going to have to cross borders anyway, and be shipped internationally anyway, because a different part of that manufacturing process happens literally across the world.
Regardless of where you place it, raw materials will inevitably cross borders and be shipped internationally anyway.
Practical Tips For Stepping Into Or Leading Uncomfortable Change
Last question, because our audience is always grateful for practical tips that they can really take forward in their day-to-day. What are some, a couple, three to five, whatever you want to give, practical tips that you would give to someone stepping into or leading an uncomfortable change?
I mentioned this earlier. There is no right or wrong answer, but decisiveness is important. You cannot sit there and wait for every last bit of information to make a perfect decision. You have to be comfortable making imperfect decisions in times of change because you're never going to be in a situation where the answer just magically presents itself. You have to have that confidence to make that decision. Change always has consequences. You have to be comfortable with that and be comfortable with the fact that there is always going to be discomfort among somebody somewhere.
Humans, by nature, are habitual. We like routine. We fear change just at a very fundamental evolutionary, biological place. We do not love surprise and change. Also, the obvious is that the only constant is change. Change is always going to be there, and you're always going to have to deal with it. I would just encourage people not let change pummel them and to stand up, be there, have a voice, be at the table, and maybe try to influence how change happens.
Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
Thank you for that. This is such a super informative conversation, but I also got a lot of really good philosophical nuggets. I just want to recap a couple of things that I heard. One is a really good reminder around confidence and self-advocacy. Do not let the unknown, the things that you do not know, get in the way of standing up and showcasing what you've accomplished and what you're able to accomplish.
That is a really good reminder, especially for sustainability professionals, because it can feel like a heavy boulder, a steep hill, an impossible task. We've made a lot of progress in the last twenty years. A lot has changed. Even five years ago, when I was working at Coca-Cola, EPR seemed so far away. Having that confidence and self-advocacy for what you bring to the table and the willingness to sit in the uncertainty, being comfortable with uncertainty, like you talked about evolving and branching out.
Change will always be there. You have to deal with it and not let it plummet you.
To your point earlier, no right or wrong answer, but having decisiveness. Not just acknowledging that there is uncertainty but making that next step of being comfortable with that uncertainty, I think, is a really good reminder and call to action for everybody, which ties into the idea of having humble growth. Even though you need to be confident, you also need to recognize that you may not have all the answers, but you know enough to make a decision and to move forward.
I will not hit this too hard again, but I am going to start thinking more about this concept of recovery pathways and how we can think about different innovative recovery pathways for waste. Finally, you brought this up a couple of times, and this is something that I think shows up a lot with circularity. I really love this idea because something that came up at the Sustainable Brands Conference was data around Republicans versus Democrats or climate activists versus non-climate activists.
The data really showed that there are actually a lot more similarities than differences around this idea of wanting to save our planet in the right way. The definition of right way is different sometimes, but also many times, what the data was saying is that it is about how you talk about it. If you're talking about generations from now, it is hard for people to anchor onto what that even means, who are those people?
If you're talking about going back to the way things used to be, you talked about old solutions, but you also talked about the fact that we need new infrastructure and we need things to scale. There is a way to make these old solutions, to learn from these old solutions, to continue to have them be successful solutions, and learn from them and evolve them. Talking about it in that way could resonate with a broader audience as well. Thank you for that reminder. This was a great conversation.
Thanks so much, Christine. I really appreciate you having me on.
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About Marisa Adler
Marisa Adler is a textile waste and circularity expert with a background in public policy, recycling systems, and textile stewardship. Her work is grounded in data-driven analysis and long-term systems change. She previously led textile circularity work at Resource Recycling Systems and managed waste reduction and policy initiatives for the New York City Department of Sanitation. Marisa has served in leadership and advisory roles with the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association and the New York State Association for Reduction, Reuse and Recycling .She holds degrees in natural resource management and conservation.