The Future Of Plastics: Implementing Extended Producer Responsibility And Industry Transformation With Geoffrey Inch
Balancing cost, competition, and sustainability is a tightrope walk for any industry, especially through the rapidly evolving landscape of extended producer responsibility (EPR). In this episode, Geoffrey Inch, Head of Producer Services at Circular Action Alliance, shares his unique journey and insights on navigating this challenge. We delve into his career, from leading sustainability initiatives at a petrochemical company to his current role at CAA. Geoffrey opens up about influencing change, overcoming obstacles, and embracing a circular economy. Join us as we uncover Geoffrey's lessons learned from experiencing change and his invaluable advice for producers looking to thrive in a more sustainable world.
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The Future Of Plastics: Implementing Extended Producer Responsibility And Industry Transformation With Geoffrey Inch
In this episode, we discuss Balancing Cost, Competition, and Sustainability
I'm excited to host Geoff Inch. In this episode, we're going to get into the circular economy from the angle of extended producer responsibility and as well as producer responsibility organization. We have previous episodes that can tell you a little bit more about what those vocabulary terms mean, but we are excited to hear from Jeff because he has an expanded range of experience that led him to the role that he's in
Geoff, thank you for being here. Now, we know you joined Circular Action Alliance in July of 2023. Also, you were one of the very early employees, so an early team member. You joined with an over a decade of experience as a senior leader in strategy, business development, and sustainability within the plastics and recycling industry.
Previously, you were at Braskem, and there you created the first North American circular economy and sustainability team. I'm hoping we can get into that a little bit to learn more. You were instrumental in driving business strategy for plastics recycling, which included steering investments for recycling system improvements. That led to becoming a founding member of the Recycling Partnerships Polypropylene Recycling Coalition, which must have been a huge agent for change.
Your sustainability experience at Braskem also involved defining global circular economy goals and implementing the region's ESG or environmental social or society and governance roadmap, which included GHG or greenhouse gas in inventory measurement and lifecycle assessments, all critical when considering the total impact of the business on the environment. You and your wife are based in the Philadelphia region with your little girl who's quite cute and your bichon, Bodhi. Hope to hear a little more about them as well. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me. Yeah, that's the important stuff. My daughter's doing wonderful It’s wonderful to be here, Christine. We've known each other for a little while. I look forward to talking with you and walking through change and all things related to change, which is a really fun topic for me. I think it's been part of my life, career, professional experience from for many years now, which is really exciting.
Geoffrey Inch's Vision: Where Business Meets Sustainability
I’ve introduced you, but can you tell a little bit more about yourself and how you live with intention?
Starting professionally, being a part of the first producer responsibility organization in the US and building this team and this project has been really exciting. The concept of EPR in general, as you guys have gone through in your series, it's really this idea of business and industry really integrating with some of those sustainability goals.
That's what happened for me too when I started looking at my professional journey and I was doing some finance roles, engineering roles, strategy roles. I really love this idea of strategy and trying to figure out where the business was going to go. Not just let the external environment steer your business, but begin to figure out where things are headed and position yourself for that as a company and as a team and as an individual.
As I was looking all that, and we'll talk a bit more about some of the specifics of those areas that I worked in, but it was really cool to see how much sustainability played a role in the external environment coming from the plastics industry. Plastics is at the forefront of sustainability right now. How are we managing materials? How are we managing resources? How are we selecting efficient materials for all of the needs that we have as a society? It was a really interesting strategic question.
What I really thought about was raising my hand and saying, “Let's go figure that out. Let's figure out what this means for our company. Let's figure out what that means for our industry, for our materials, for our employees.” You can imagine even back several years ago when there began to be more pressure on plastics, people working in those companies, we were saying like, “Am I working at a good company? Is this what I want to be doing?”
I think we really looked at it like there's a lot to be proud of when you think about the sustainability aspects and what's being done to help improve those systems. We have to do more. How do we go do more and how do we do that with intention, to come back to your question, so that we're being very direct about that?
Maybe that's one example of how I thought about that decision of getting involved in this space. It was just not looking back and having a great opportunity to build out and really bring resources from industry into the sustainability efforts that mattered. That was really a great connection for me bringing in some of my personal goals of trying to make the world a better place and be more environmentally conscious and resource efficient.
I got that opportunity to do that, and was able to do that at scale working with large companies and within our own company to do that. It was really great. That was a wonderful decision that I’ve made, just you never know how things are going to go, but when you make a decision, you end up here. It was pretty cool to see how it's all played out.
Building The First Circular Economy Team
That's great to hear about that shift to living with intention and working with intention. To build on that I'd like to hear a little bit more about starting the North American circular economy and sustainability team at a plastics company. We talk in a previous episode a little bit about the change curve and how there's different phases that people go through. I would imagine that there you had some adversaries, some advocates for that change. Can you talk a little bit about how you influenced such a big change at a company?
If you think about the fact that change is inevitable and that what's more important is your ability to adapt with it, you can really create that energy.
I think every company is going to be a little different in how you do that, any type of change at scale. I think one thing that's consistent is that, to your point, you've got some people that are going to jump in your early adopters. You've got your fast followers, and you've got people that you're continuing to convince over time that that's the right direction to go.
It's all about thinking through the reality of that. Change is something that, more than anything, it's really hard for people. In any walk of life, any company, any career, it can be hard for you to lose the way it is. It's like you're almost like losing something when you change. If you flip that a little bit and you think about the fact that change is inevitable and that what's more important is your ability to adapt with it, you can really create that energy.
At the time when I worked in the plastics industry at brass chem, we had an amazing leadership team that embraced that philosophy. It gave a lot of tailwinds to all the sustainability efforts that we were embarking on because there was also a lot of sustainability built into the business already. However, we really wanted to scale it up from small product lines to how do we do this across the entire industry and for an entire material. Some people will have completely different feelings about plastic.
Some people will see that there's value there. Some people will say we need to stop using it so much plastic. I think both are right. We do need to understand, from my perspective, how do we just be thoughtful about using the most efficient material for the environment at the right time, for the right application, and making sure that it's safe for people.
We really try to tell that whole story from start to finish to employees particularly who I just mentioned are reflecting on their contribution to the world. Part of our role was thinking through how can we actually really tell the story of the value that this organization that our industry provides but then really begin to make the change that's necessary, as great as plastic can be in some applications, for example, it's lowered fuel emissions in vehicles by lightweighting for a really long time. That's an amazing material for car bumpers, for example. Things like that are wonderful innovations, but we have a waste problem.
That waste problem doesn't go away without building the systems that are required to address that waste. Plastics is in the waste stream. It's a big part of it. The waste streams are not designed for plastics. When I say it's a big part of it, maybe not by weight or by volume, but definitely it's in your home. You interact with that material every day, so people are familiar with the material. At the time when we were looking at it as a company and me personally, we want to have systems in place to be able to deal with these materials just so that we're not being wasteful. That was my biggest concern. How can we create value for things that are used?
What's really interesting about that challenge from a manufacturer of a material is it's your customer's customer, sometimes a customer who's actually introducing these things to the market. We had to go work across the entire value chain to figure out where the interesting investment opportunities were, what the problems were, how we could continue to grow that. That's where we landed at places like the recycling partnership, where we're doing great work around infrastructure for polypropylene packaging, and we're able to jump into that project. That became really exciting.
Maybe a parting thought on this. The more that you can speak the language of everybody in that curve, some people are going to want to understand the sustainability benefits some people are going to want to understand the strategy and business case. Making sure that you have both can really help drive the change that you need because one without the other can get lost, the story can get lost. We really always tried to ground ourselves in this is a business decision and it provides a benefit. Those are the win-wins that you look for and you find, and it's really hard to resist that change at that point because it feels natural to move in that direction. I think when you find those, those are the really exciting ones to hold onto.
We talk about this a lot on this show. A lot of times, sustainability professionals are already bought in. They already have done a lot of the homework. They've gone down the rabbit holes, and so they're light years ahead in understanding the why from an environmental perspective. Yet they're talking to people within the company who aren't there yet, who are relying on them to be those subject matter experts.
We have a waste problem. That waste problem doesn't go away without building the systems that are required to address that waste.
To your point, being able to straddle both the environmental reason and the sometimes tapping into that personal passion tied to that and being able to speak the language of the CFO or the supply chain leaders who you're really relying on to execute in on in scale the work that you're trying to do is so critical to success.
I think probably one of the most important elements of continued movement and sustainability over time is making sure that it's also conscious of cost and conscious of competition, but it's making a real impact. I think finding that balance and making sure that that can continue to drive the right programs forward is going to be really key. Change management involves getting a good number of people on board. It doesn't always have to be everybody, but it needs to be that critical mass of people shifting the way they're doing things. That's going to require a little bit of adaptability in how you approach these programs.
I also love that you brought up a little bit around the positive and negative story of plastic. It has a big target on its back for many reasons, but to your point, there are some very valuable use cases. You and I were talking about this report that I saw from Clemson University about a lifecycle analysis of your salad. The reality is you have less waste of produce if you put it in a bag and protect it with some nitrogen. You also have this plastic bag that you're buying from the marketplace and then throwing away. There's this constant level of trade-off that comes into play from a sustainability angle and argument and perspective when you're trying to push forward for these changes.
Setting the boundaries on these analyses as wide as possible will help us see the big picture of what is sustainable. I think what's really interesting is we're going through a moment where we're viewing these externalities in a new way as part of the product, as part of the packaging. That's creating a whole new view of how a company looks at what they put onto the market. It hasn't traditionally been something that they were responsible for.
When you come to EPR, we're talking about extending the responsibility of those producers. That is a really interesting way of looking at the downstream impacts and bringing those externalities and those additional costs and environmental impacts into decisions that are made by companies upstream. At the core, that's one of the most amazing values I think of these types of programs like EPR that are beginning to create that conversation and create the systems that actually drive the change in that direction.
EPR Unveiled: Understanding Producer Responsibility
On that note, perfect segue, and we didn't actually plan that, folks, shifting to Circular Action Alliance or CAA and one of my favorite things about the title Circular Action Alliance is that it has the word action in it is that producers have to get ready for this. They have to figure out, learn about the legislation, understand what it means for their business, plan for it, and then comply and take the steps. In this context of producer readiness, I’ve mentioned it on the show, but if you can just say what a producer is, who is a producer, and then what are some obstacles and successes that you've seen in readying producers for this legislation?
We talked about EPR, who is the P in EPR? Producer can get a little bit confusing if you think of the traditional use of the word, which points you to a manufacturer of an item. In this case, a producer who is responsible is not always the manufacturer. Often case, they are the brand. In our current economic system, the brand owners are not always the manufacturing entity.
Through the definition of producer, they become the obligated producer who is responsible for participating in the EPR programs and financing those systems. It's different in every state. We would encourage you to check out CAA website for more details because I won't go into the detail of each unique state here. We've got some resources available for people to learn about that.
In some new states that's actually continuing to be defined. We're working through those definitions as it continues to evolve EPR in the US. Talking about readiness, we started with change. This is change. This is something brand new for industry, and it's brand new for companies and then people in companies that are responsible for this.
Large companies may have compliance departments. They'll have legal departments, they have people that are very capable of meeting regulatory requirements, but EPR for paper and packaging is a bit different, and it just has not been done in the US yet. I think some companies that operate internationally have probably experienced these programs before. They would likely be at a different level of readiness if they're talking internally with their colleagues.
For companies that are participating for the first time, their first step is reaching out and registering with CAA, trying to understand the basics of these programs, which we help provide information on, but also figuring out who does that? Who in your company is going to actually do the registration? Who's going to raise their hand and take this on? There are also external consultants that will support a lot of companies.
I think that is an industry right now that's critical in making sure our producers are ready. We encourage a lot of work across the entire industry from different people helping to support our producers. In terms of obstacles, I guess where I was going initially was change. The first obstacle of change is getting to an acceptance that the change is happening.
You talked about phases of almost the grief cycle at time. There's a lot of different stages that people go through when change happens. I think our producers have been extremely diligent at learning what they've needed to learn, but they've had questions, they've bargained, they've tried to understand, is this going to grow? Is it going to stay the same size? There's a lot of questions.
We're trying to help them navigate just what the responsibilities are for the programs that we're implementing. Once we move to a space of acceptance, this is really just about readying your company and readying your company means learning, incorporating that learning into business process and building something repeatable that you can operate to do what you need to do to be compliant with EPR.
When you work with CAA, you're going to register with us, you're going to sign agreements with us, you're going to report your supply data to us, and then we're going to take care of financing and building the system to meet the regulatory requirements. We are going to be calling to action producers to give us some of those inputs. That's the part that really producers need to work on from a readiness perspective.
Can you accurately staff build process and provide supply reports to CAA to be able to deliver on your EPR compliance obligations? We've gone through a lot of preparation work on Oregon and Colorado and be beginning the process with California and Minnesota, which all four of the states is working in. We've seen a lot of companies come from an initial very limited understanding to delivering a report that's on time. We just need to go through that process, and every company's going to go through that process.
That's the change. When you get to the end and you look back, you're like, “Look how much we've learned. Look how good we've gotten at this.” It's that bumpy period where you're learning for the first time. We've been trying to be very understanding of that, provide a lot of information and to really help people through that process as much as possible.
Navigating EPR's Change: From Shock To Acceptance
The four stages we talked about in a previous episode is shock and denial, frustration and anger, and then moving into acceptance and exploration, and then commitment and integration. What you're describing is you've now seen thousands of producers effectively go through this cycle in very compressed timelines to meet the Oregon March 31st deadline. You'll see that again for the next deadline. Hopefully, it's a bit smoother with the ones that already complied.
Yeah. That's actually a great part about, like, what we're building in the US here with CAA. It's a lot of the same companies. We're not starting over with a whole new set of hundreds and thousands of companies in Colorado that we've never worked with. It's really a consistent set of companies. They've begun to build those processes. Now it's about going through the first Colorado report, going through the first California report. There'll be those nuances, but you're right, the change management has already mostly occurred.
That's exciting to see. We've gotten through that tough part of change management. I think companies are dialed in on what they need to do. Of course, some people are still learning and working with us on their questions, which will never cease. I really have been excited by the engagement with the producer community to deliver just outstanding engagement and results in our initial process with CAA. That's been awesome to see. I think the commitment from industry to comply with these laws is very clear.
We're going through a moment where we're viewing these externalities in a new way as part of the product, as part of the packaging.
Advice For Sustainability Pros: Driving Change Within Your Company
As a waste nerd, I think the forest through the trees is the excitement that comes after this first very uncomfortable round of compliance. You can start to see the opportunity that this could become for your business. With that context and with the context of the producer readiness steps, what advice might you have for a sustainability professional who's trying to convince their company to take the right actions and move beyond the shock and denial phase?
I think that role has gone through so many different realities in the last decade, too. If you were involved 10 years ago, it was different than 5 years ago and it's definitely a little different now. That role is so important because I think very few parts of a company get to think forward far enough to make those decisions. That can be just being blunt about that. That can be frustrating for somebody who's trying to deliver short-term results, which is just their job at the company. First, it's about just understanding that, understanding that in a sustainability role and of the resistance that you're facing, it's not often personal. It's just a result of what people are assigned to do.
Breaking through that means how do you begin to speak that language. Are there quick wins that you can get that could affect short-term results? We talked about always making sure there's data driven and business cases behind some of the sustainability aspects. Now with EPR, there's a compliance element to that. I think there's a really interesting way of engaging the compliance part of the business. That can trickle down into operations more naturally when companies have a requirement to comply.
Now, when you start to think about the opportunities even beyond compliance, because EPR has this structure too where you can pay fees for your compliance, but then you have the opportunity for potential bonuses under eco-modulation in the future, and the ability to stand out in the crowd of your industry, of your material, of your company, of your pure companies, that's where those opportunities can really be.
There will be financial bonuses, malices that will be different materials that can be reviewed for their contribution to EPR fees. I think there's a lot of ways that just learning how the EPR system works and what that means for packaging materials, substrates formats, can really help up the knowledge of sustainability professionals to get into the business conversations within their companies.
I think it's going to really be the successful people in this space especially when things can be a little bit more challenging, they're going to be able to speak that balanced language of seeing the vision, but also understanding how the company operates and getting things done within that context, and knowing that it's one step forward every day. We all have a vision of we want what we want the world to be maybe 10, 20 years from now, but that doesn't happen overnight. That's one step every day. If you're making those steps happen, that's an exciting thing, and that is change and it adds up. That can be something to remind all of us about when
That's a great reminder. People in the industry of sustainability talk about this fatigue of like, “Is the boulder too heavy? Is the hill too steep?” You're right. It's a great reminder that these little steps are still in service of the bigger vision. What you were saying made me think about this idea that when you do these reports, now you have the data to show where the opportunities are based on the fees of your skus.
Now you can start to more easily paint to the financial picture of the impact and then where the opportunity to make incremental quick wins could be, so when you get past the hurdle of completing the reporting, now becomes the opportunity to decipher and think through it from a strategics perspective of it.
I think that data is going to be so useful for companies as they're moving forward as well. Yeah, dual purpose, not just for CAA and compliance, you also get the benefit of having it for your own decision making, which is great. I agree.
Embracing EPR's Future: Opportunity And Shaping Industry Change
Is there a specific message you'd like to put out there for producers? If they're out there reading, anything specific you really want to hammer home? I think we can close with our final question.
We all have a vision of what we want the world to be 10, 20 years from now, but that doesn't happen overnight. That's one step every day.
I do often say this in front of producers, but it's, it's honestly this balance of we want you to be compliant. CAA is here for you to be compliant, and so you don't have to worry about this. It's a call to action for that. That has requirements. There are things you have to do, and we're going to clearly articulate those expectations. We're going to help you along that path. At the same time, it’s thank you because producers wake up every day. Companies wake up every day and they make decisions. The decision to engage with this program, the decision to engage with CAA and to put the effort in is what it takes.
We know it's changed, we know it's hard. I think it's understanding that our organization has a lot of people who've operated in industry. We know the challenges, and we're open to hearing how to help companies move from early on the maturity curve up to where this becomes second nature to operate in these EPR systems.
I'm not sure you asked for multiple, but one last thing is this is just an exciting opportunity. I know that there's fees associated with it, but being a part of the system is really exciting for companies to be able to understand it better, have the data begin to see the change. I think there's just a really interesting way of viewing this shift in policy as an opportunity for companies to just continue to get better, stay more connected with their consumers and really migrate their packaging into the future. I think there's this awesome opportunity as we build these out. Knowing that the beginning is a startup and it's can be bumpy, I really do see the vision of the opportunity that these EPR programs can bring.
Why embrace the change that comes with EPR?
This is maybe a little bit of CAA's philosophy, too. The change is here. It's happening. It's happening whether we want it to happen or not. CAA is here to implement EPR laws. When a law is passed, CAA applies to be the pro and works on behalf of producers to implement. That change is happening, so organizationally, that's how CAA fits in. Personally, I just think of why embrace that it's happening anyway. You embrace it because the choice is like to be a part of it and shape it or to sit back and let it happen to you. My choice is to be a part of it and shape it. I just think that's the way I like to operate.
I think it's exciting, number one. It creates a lot of fun decision making in spaces that are new frontiers. That is something that helps get me out of bed in the morning and make things interesting. I think it's leading to the future that we want to see overall. Whereas the alternative is just to get frustrated that it's changing and you don't want it to. I think that's a probably less inspiring place to live in.
For me, personally, I just want to be a part of shaping that. I think that all the sustainability professionals out there that are working in this space may have some flavor of that in their desire and their passion because it takes an energy. It takes a different gear to deal with that uncertainty and to keep pushing that boulder up the hill, as you said, Christine.
I think it's wonderful to see the community that's really built around EPR. Everybody, working for pros, working within companies, working with consultants, working on the regulatory side, the whole ecosystem is just bringing a lot of really wonderful energy and capability to this space. That's been really exciting to see as well.
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I like how you started and ended with changes here, and it's much better to be a part of it than to resist it. It's so true. You're not the first one to talk about how change is constant and it's happening. Why not lean in and shape it? I love the idea of but of taking the reins of the change that's coming to you.
Thank you for sharing your journey and shifting from the plastics industry for-profit to Circular Action Alliance where you can really lean in and drive this incredible and uncomfortable change related to the circular economy. Taking all the knowledge that you learned at in building a new team related to this topic, and then applying it to an industry-wide shift that's powered by legislation. The more you learn about sustainability, the more you learn how effective that is a tool in this space.
Thank you for sharing that example. I really loved how you talked about how change can be seen as losing something but it's better to and more important to think of it as a way and an opportunity to adapt. Getting back to that vision and the idea of like what you're trying to drive, that can be a place to anchor against.
It's also, to your point, a mindset shift of loss versus adaptation and taking the reins and powering through and leading which is just a much more inspiring, as you said, way to think about it. I also really appreciate that you brought up this trade off aspect of plastic, that yes, there is a waste problem with plastic, and yet there's a lot of material benefits that we've seen as a society and a carbon footprint trade off aspect as well.
We talk a lot at Coke about this glass versus plastic aspect, too. If we had a fully renewable grid and transportation, maybe there would be less of that trade-off. Still, it's there. Thinking through it is not about demonizing the material but, in fact, leaning into the solution that can come from legislation like extended producer responsibility to actually build the infrastructure to support this material.
Also, you gave a great reminder around thinking about across the value chain that your role in your company, you can't just think about just your customers. You've got to think about all those externalities and all of those players and the impact that this is having down and up the chain. When you think about that and weave that into your plan or your conversation or your selling point you can more easily move your stakeholders down the curve into acceptance.
Finally, one of my favorite things I say on this episode is that I love retrospectives, which is super nerdy. I love that you brought up realizing the quick wins, accepting the quick wins, celebrating the quick wins, because it's so critical when you're trying to continue to learn and move forward, but accepting, here's what we did actually achieve.
We didn't achieve everything, maybe, but honing in on what we did achieve and what we can achieve now becomes a really powerful tool to move people through. Thank you so much. This was such a great conversation. I did not script you, but it felt like you were really reiterating a ton of the points I'm trying to make on this show. Thank you so much for being here and for your time.
Thank you. Thank you for all you've done for EPR Circular Economy and for having me. I really appreciate it. It was awesome being here.
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Tune into our next episode of Change Cycle, where I break down why recycling rates are stagnating, where infrastructure is failing, and how extended producer responsibility can flip the script. From Maryland to Colorado to California, we'll dive into what real solutions look like and why the future of recycling must be built around equity, investment, and accountability.
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About Geoff Inch
Geoffrey Inch joined CAA in July of 2023 as the head of producer services with more than a decade of experience as a senior leader in strategy, business development, and sustainability within the plastics and recycling industries. Prior to CAA, he was at GreenDot, where he led commercial partnerships, business case development, marketing & communications, and sustainability initiatives. At Braskem, Geoffrey created the first North American circular economy & sustainability team and was instrumental in driving business strategy for plastics recycling, which included steering investments for recycling system improvements as a founding member of The Recycling Partnership's Polypropylene Recycling Coalition, business development for a portfolio of recycled and biobased plastics, and legislative advocacy through various trade associations.
His sustainability experience at Braskem also involved defining global circular economy goals and implementing the region's ESG roadmap, which included GHG inventory measurement, life cycle assessments, and sustainability certifications. He holds an MBA in Strategic Management from Villanova University and a BSE in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan. Geoffrey, his wife Samantha, their daughter Chloe, and their bichon Bodhi are based in the greater Philadelphia region