The Role Of Personal Responsibility In A Circular Economy With John Hite
Where does personal responsibility end and the need for systemic change begin? That's the captivating question guest John Hite and host Christine Yeager dive into, unpacking the push-and-pull between individual accountability and the demand for broader societal shifts. This isn't your typical "recycle more, use less" lecture; instead, it's a dynamic exploration of how our daily choices ripple outwards, intersecting with the complexities of sustainability and the circular economy. Learn from John's insights on navigating this tricky terrain, from the power of individual action to the necessity of holding organizations and governments accountable. It's a call to think bigger, challenging us to redefine "responsibility" in a world grappling with environmental and social change.
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The Role Of Personal Responsibility In A Circular Economy With John Hite
Christine and John discussed the circular economy, with John reflecting on the role of personal and systemic responsibility in environmental issues. They considered the importance of recycling, reuse, and sustainable choices, as well as the need to balance personal freedom with systemic change.
Welcome to the Change Cycle. We're going to confront the discomfort that comes with personal, professional, and societal change, largely focused on the circular economy, but we may expand beyond that. Thank you, John, for joining us. I’m super excited to jump in and talk to you. First, I want to introduce you a little bit. I know you're an environmentalist at heart, and you found your environmental work focusing on policy, which is centered around driving individual and institutional change and practices through law, which is a super effective way, as we know, in the sustainability space.
Your specific area has been focused on waste and recycling, which is where we met, working on extended producer responsibility and the first producer responsibility organization selected in the US at Circular Action Alliance. For our audience, we will discuss a little bit about those things because I know there's a lot of vocabulary here. Some exciting groundbreaking stuff and establishing this new organization that is now fully formed and off to the races.
I know you've spent a lot of time, both paid and unpaid, thinking about and engaging with the many complex questions that arise from our efforts to achieve sustainability. I'm hoping we can dive a little bit more into that, including personal sustainability, and then how you can continue to show up and do the work when confronted with the challenges that come with change.
I know you're currently taking some time to breathe and reflect on your work so far, figure out what's next in your journey as you evolve, and how, in general, we can involve our global system toward greater sustainability, which is the topic and reason why I'm excited to talk to you. I want to start with your opportunity. I've given a little bit of your background, but I'd like to hear a little bit from you about yourself and how you live with intention.
Defining The Focus: John's Work And EPR
I want to start by saying, Christine, thank you so much for having me on. It's delightful to get to join you and chat through all of these topics. I feel like we spent a lot of time talking about great technical details about waste and recycling. It's lovely to get to zoom out a little bit and talk about the space we're in and environmentalism and sustainability and what that means, what it looks like, and then what it looks like for us personally. You gave a great little background bio on my background. It’s been doing waste and recycling work and sustainability for about close to a decade now.
Came out of college, out of undergrad, feeling like I wanted to do something in the world to help work on problems. I'd done a lot of social work before and then started learning about the environment and learning about climate change and starting to feel like we cannot have a functioning society if we don't have a livable environment. Working on both the social aspect of how we live with the resources and in the world with each other and then on what resources.
How we use them sustainably started to become central to me. I've spent 7 or 8 years now doing policy work largely focused on EPR for packaging, which we can get into for anybody out there who doesn't necessarily know what the acronym soup of the circular economy space means. Worked on a number of laws throughout the Northeast. I was working on advocacy, trying to help get laws passed.
Most recently, you and I were working together on building the compliance organization that's going to help companies comply with extended producer responsibility laws. I feel like I've gotten an interesting flavor of what all of these questions generally about policy, but specifically about waste and recycling look like from the outside perspective, from the advocacy perspective with an eye towards a goal of what you want to see get done. How do you push to try and make that happen through law? I spent a bit of time working with the Connecticut state government.
What does that look like? What do those relationships and stakeholder management look like from a government perspective? Finally, most recently, from a private sector compliance perspective, what does it look like for all of the companies that have to react to and make changes based on these requirements? That's more on the professional.
I would say on the personal in terms of intentional, one of the themes that, for me, crosses both the professional and the personal is an orientation towards learning. I feel like, at some level, I've stumbled my way into the EPR space, and it happens to take off at the right time. For that, I feel grateful that I've been able to be part of this evolving space that is so much at the center of the circular economy.
I think having that attitude of learning, of curiosity, of wanting to step out in the world and say, “What is going on here? How do these systems work together? How do these different stakeholders react, whether that's legislators in the legislature? What do their constituents care about? What do the others in their community care about? If it's from a business perspective, what do businesses react to? What do they care about? What do employees care about versus those in leadership?” All of those things have been key.
Personally, lately, I've been trying to live in the present. This past year for me personally, there were a lot of big changes, both professional and personal. I think I've tried to commit in the past year to being present, feeling what feels right to do next, not trying to overanalyze something to death, and figuring out exactly what is the best way to forward. That's supported by lots of walks, lots of meditation, and lots of time to breathe. I feel fortunate that I've found time to do some of that in the past 4 or 5 months, especially.
I love that. That is so great. It's tough to live in the present. I love that's your focus and then the learning, which I think dovetails nicely into my next question. Sustainability I feel like I make the stroke all the time. There's a lot of homework that comes with sustainability. There's so much information out there. There are a lot of things that seem to conflict. There are a lot of acronyms out there.
Depending on the direction and your understanding, you may have no idea what people are talking about when they say certain three letters that go together. On that note, can you maybe define for our audience what is the circular economy to you? A quick definition of EPR, or Extended Producer Responsibility. That way we can clear that and then we can talk about it as if people know what we're talking about when we go further.
Circular Economy And Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
I would say, it’s good to start with definitions. There is so much information out there and there are so many different perspectives as well as lots of different folks who are bringing their own personal and professional perspectives to the space, layering their own definitions on top. I would say that these are my own views of the circular economy and EPR and how they fit together into a larger narrative of how we go about using the resources around us. I think generally the circular economy is asking a set of questions about the resources that are in the natural world and how we are using those as a society.
Are we overusing them? Are we underusing them? Specifically, we're looking largely at what sustainable long-term use of natural resources means. I think the circular economy is a bubble up, if you will, from what used to be the primary focus in the waste and recycling space, which was preventing disposal by increasing recycling. I think circular economy takes that a little bit broader and says, “It's all well and good to try and prevent landfill disposal or waste energy disposal. It's all well and good to try and increase recycling.”
Ultimately, this is all about the natural resources around us and how we use those sustainably. I think two things have been informative for me, when I close my eyes, I think about the circular economy. One is the butterfly diagram that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has developed. If folks who are reading haven't seen that before, I would encourage you to go take a quick peek at that diagram. I think they do a beautiful job of demonstrating all of the different facets and elements of what the circular economy means in terms of the different hierarchies of the Rs, if you will, reuse, refuse, recycle, refurbish.
How do all of those link back to the material resources that we're using in our economy, how do we bring them back through and around to make sure that we human beings are conscious of our impact on the world and our use of resources? I've also found an inspiring book by a scientific researcher and economist from the UK, Kate Raworth. She wrote a book called Doughnut Economics. It's been informative to me in terms of thinking about this larger set of questions about how we live sustainably in the world.
That is very central to the circular economy. Her book also touches on other areas such as climate change and energy use and what sustainability looks large scale. She has this concept of the doughnut, where outside of the outer rings of the doughnut, we want to be conscious of not exceeding the capacity of our surroundings, of the environment in terms of what we are consuming. Inside, making sure that we're conscious of what is the minimum. What do we need in order as human beings to live a dignified and thriving life?
We can't really have a functioning society if we don't have a livable environment.
That idea of living within the doughnut is making sure that we aren't overusing, and also making sure that everyone has what they need. I like that image in terms of thinking about not just the strict environmental components, but also the social components of understanding distribution and who has what and who needs what. In terms of extended producer responsibility, I'd say EPR is a bit of an evolutionary shift in our waste management policy and our waste management ethos, if you will, I'd say in the US in particular. EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility, it's not a new policy in other parts of the world.
The Europeans have had policies like EPR in place since the early ‘90s. The Canadians jumped on board in the mid-'90s into the early 2000s. There are EPR laws across the world, from Japan and South Korea all the way to Chile and Israel. There's a lot of uptake of this policy. Generally speaking, it's interested in the idea of responsibility. Who is ultimately responsible for funding and managing the end-of-life of products and materials? Traditionally, in the US, that's been the role of municipal government or concerned citizens.
Recycling kicked off in the ‘60s and ‘70s as part of the growing environmental ethos and Earth Day. Some people would bike down the street with a trailer and they would pick up recyclables from the willing. As that morphed and evolved into a more formalized recycling system, municipalities took on a lot of that cost and management. Extended producer responsibility tries to flip that on its head and say, “Hold on a minute. It's not only citizens and municipalities that are involved in waste-making, companies are also making things and putting them out in the world. When those things reach their end of life, they have to be managed.”
There are costs there. There are also design considerations that the companies have more control over than those of us who are going to a grocery store and choosing between a plastic versus a paper option. Extended Producer Responsibility and specifically here, Christine and I worked on packaging, but EPR covers a whole host of different materials. It's been applied to electronics, mattresses, textiles, and lots of different materials.
These same principles cross over. The idea is to shift those costs and, in some instances, the actual management of the end-of-life back to producers. The companies that are putting either the product or the package on the market with the idea that there's a more stable funding source. If municipalities wind up constrained by their taxes in terms of what they're able to manage, you open up an additional funding source. Also, by placing that responsibility back on companies, you're providing a strong financial incentive for these companies to be thinking through what they're making, and what they're placing on the market.
Whether it's recyclable, whether it has recycled content, how durable, how long-term, especially in the electronics space. Are these products meant to be refurbished, meant to be redesigned, or are they designed to be disposable after a year or a year and a half of use? EPR helps start to shift and change that whole set of dynamics, which is why I think it's such a fundamental shift from a policy perspective, but also a management perspective when we think about how we go about building and developing a circular economy. It has that big philosophical shift in it.
Reflecting On The Journey: Lessons In Humility And Sustainability
I'm going to come back to EPR in more detail, but I want to take a little shift because I'd like to start with some personal changes that you've been experiencing recently. I think what's interesting is you made the bold choice to push some change on yourself, which not everybody is willing to do. For our audience, John and I were working together and then he made the bold choice to take a break and do many things. One of them is hiking the El Camino de Santiago. Did I say it correctly?
Spot on.
Thank you. Some of you may have heard it as the El Camino de Compostello, which John taught me, which my brother should have also taught me probably when I was in my 20s and I forgot, but that it means seashells. It's this trail through Spain where you're on this pilgrimage. Generally, the point is that you took this opportunity to be both within nature and a new culture and immerse yourself and take some room to breathe and be a little present as you said. I'd like to ask a couple of questions. One, how did you come to this decision to put some change upon yourself? How did you make this choice that “I'm going to go do something radical like this.?” What was the biggest thing you learned from imposing this change on yourself?
It was a big decision to take that time and make that choice. I think a couple of factors this past year played into it. One of them is personal. I had some big personal changes that shifted my life and led me to do a lot of thinking about the moment I was in, who I am, how I'm meeting the world, and what the world needs at this moment. I think that dovetailed as well with a 7, 8, or 9-year cycle that I felt was coming to an end in terms of what I've dubbed my eco-warrior phase.
Coming out of undergrad, heading into environmentalism with this strong feeling that we're going to go out there and we're going to shove as hard as we can and we're going to fix it all and then the world will be better and it's going to be okay. I gave it my best go, but believe it or not, we didn't solve all the problems. There's still a lot of it out there.
7 or 8 years I know are shocking.
It's felt like my own personal growth of learning about how complex the world is and learning about how complex these problems are. Learning about what a right-sized idea of the change that you as an individual can have in the world looks like. There's been a fairly heavy dose of humility along with that process of challenging my own ego, challenging my own understanding of what personal agency I have in the world and what I have to give to the world that is within the bounds of reality.
That's going to look different for everyone but I was starting to feel like I was spinning my wheels a lot and finding myself feeling, I hate to use the B word, but feeling fairly burnt out, feeling like I needed to take a moment to take a deep breath and reassess, and do some deep thinking. I need to do some deep soul work to be able to come back to this sustainability and environmental work that I love so much. Do it from a more personally sustainable standpoint where I could feel like I could show up and do the work that needed to be done on a long-term basis.
That idea of personal sustainability is one that I've heard from lots of the old-guard environmentalists who talk about it being a marathon, not a sprint. I was sprinting. I felt a need to take a moment and reassess what being able to run the marathon looks like. Maybe too on the note, I decided to go walk at a very regulated pace for 5 1/2 or 6 weeks in Spain.
I went with my parents, which was a special experience to get to walk with them there in their late 60s and grappling with their own questions about how much longer they're going to be able to do something like a six-week walk through Spain. To be able to take that time and go and walk with them and spend so much time together was difficult at times, I'll be honest. Also rewarding and special. I think what I led with was that idea of intentionality, those lessons of being present.
The Camino helped me spend every day in the same rhythm out in the world, walking, to be honest, not in front of a screen, which helped a lot as well. I feel my feet on the ground and feel myself in the world and feel myself present and trust that things that need to happen next will happen next and get to practice. I had a lot of conversations with friends on the Camino about the process of practicing that daily rhythm. The Camino lets you do in a microcosm on a daily basis these very basic, simple routines and put them into practice.
I want to spend at least twenty minutes as I'm walking in the present as I possibly can. If you go out today and you do it and it doesn't go super well and you only spend five minutes and then you realize that it's an hour later and your brain has been running, you have tomorrow and you can go out and you can try it again. You have the day after and you can go out and try it again. To have that controlled space to get to focus on being present. It helped me start to do that processing and open up to myself what I want to do. What brings me joy? How do I process and ingest 8 or 9 years of trying to shove the stone up the hill of this sustainability work to find what it feels like, what do I want to work on next?
Practicing Presence: Finding Rhythm And Trust
You said the humbleness of understanding that it's complicated, that this is hard. I always say I have learned, I guess, similarly over the years. If it were easy, somebody would have done it already. It's been my mantra because there are a lot of people out there who have been trying to solve a lot of these issues for years. You meet people in the sustainability space who have been there for decades. There are not many of them.
They always would tell me it's a joke that I see these job descriptions that say we need ten years of sustainability experience. There are not that many people out there who have 10 years, 15 years, or 20 years of sustainability experience. I love that. It is humbling. I also feel like there's always someone else who knows more about a particular topic than you do. Yet there's also somebody who always knows less.
It becomes this sort of once you get past it, it can be a little intimidating to join the sustainability party because maybe you don't have that background. Once you get past that, it's everybody's doing what you're talking about. It's trying hard to push this boulder up the hill together and feel like you've made a change, which I can see why that can feel a little heavy. Anyway, thank you for sharing that. That's great.
I also like the idea of personal sustainability. I thought when you said that at first, you meant me and my choices and my actions related to sustainability. If you meant that I need to make sure that my mind and my body are in the actions that I'm taking are sustainable for my own life, that's beautiful. You're right. You need to give that space. Do you think now that you've are, I know you're planning to go back, but in the interim, what are some things that you're maybe going to do to help support your own personal sustainability?
It works on both levels. I do think that there is an important place for personal sustainable action, having a garden, trying to bike instead of driving, making more sustainable choices about what you're buying or not buying, and fixing things as opposed to buying something new. All of these are good practices that ladder up to larger change. I also feel like they make me feel good. I feel better doing more things that are more environmentally sustainable at the same time that I'm also trying to practice that personal sustainability.
At this moment, I am in this weird interim period, where I did the walk in September and October. We were not, unfortunately, able to finish the full Camino. We had to come back about a week and a half early due to a minor family situation. The moment we made that decision to come back as a little family unit, I said, “I have to go back. I got to do this again.” I'm going to do it again. I'm to walk the whole thing again. It feels like this is a delightful little bookend to this period that I'm in, where
I'm still involved in the space. I've been doing some contract consulting work. I'm trying to make sure that I'm tied into the circular economy generally and EPR in particular. I've been trying to take a moment to fill my own cup. I've been focusing on spending time with friends and reconnecting with folks that I haven't seen in a while or connected with in a while, finding some real daily balance.
I feel like I neglected my own physical well-being for a while, given that so much of this work is on the computer and I'm sitting at my computer for 7 or 9 hours a day on calls, typing away. I've loved having the time to go on long walks with my dad and his dog, or I recently got into kickboxing, weirdly enough. I've been doing some kickboxing, which has felt good. Having the time to focus on my body or this physical thing that I'm in has felt good too.
I get it. It's hard. I moved to Colorado in March or July of 2023 and started paying more attention to my body. Started allowing myself to accept that I had been neglecting it more than I thought and so started to unearth things. Along that way, I have been reminded that healing is a journey. You don't all of a sudden get a new routine and then everything is better.
There are a lot of setbacks along the way and your body readjusts and you have to adjust along with it, not to hit home the change point, but change is constant. This is great. I do want to shift back a little bit to the circular economy. Thinking about what you learned and experienced recently in this being present, understanding the complexity, and trusting that you need a bit of repetition and space to learn and evolve. Thinking about that, If you shift that to the circular economy, what do you think needs to change for there to truly be a circular economy?
The Complexity Of Change: Personal Vs. Systemic
A very big question. There are a lot of people in the circular economy space who say often there's no silver bullet, there's no single solution. It's a whole host of solutions. I think if I'm being honest, one of the things that I've been reflecting on quite a lot recently comes back to that personal versus the system. EPR, coming from the advocacy space and coming from the general thought space about who is responsible for what, this concept of the personal versus the systemic comes up a lot.
By placing that responsibility back on companies, you're providing a really strong financial incentive for them to be thinking through what they're making and what they're placing on the market.
The ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, I wasn't alive then, but as I understand it, there was a view that government had a role and government needed to shift and change, but also individuals had the primary role. It was about behavior change. It was about individuals saying, “I'm going to choose to recycle. I'm going to choose to refurbish this old piece of furniture instead of throwing it out and getting something new.”
I think that, in large part came out of the grit and determination of the 30s and The Great Depression and forced thrift and forced or compelled local reuse-mindedness, if you will. Consumption is a necessary prerequisite for the ongoing making of money, which is important and makes the world go round. Also, I can get a little bit carried away. I think this whole EPR conversation starts to open up and ask bigger questions about who is ultimately responsible for the problems that we have in front of us.
Is it a matter of you and me and all of these other individuals in their towns making choices to do the right thing? Do the companies that are financially bringing home the bacon from this whole set of economic interchange, do they have some role to play? We started to see that through ESG and corporate social and corporate environmental responsibility measures. Those are largely voluntary. ESG is getting into the regulated space a bit.
EPR can be voluntary, but often, EPR is a set of laws. Those laws start to place specific requirements on companies saying, “No, we are going to shift this responsibility to a different entity in the supply chain.” Consumers are part of the supply chain, but I would say consumers, relatively speaking, have power in some ways. In some ways are very powerful and in other ways are probably the least powerful in terms of some of these design questions and sourcing questions and things of that nature.
All of this brings me to a point where I think EPR is playing an important role in helping flood a ton of finance into recycling, into reuse, into these other measures that are going to help bring about the conditions for you and me, and everybody else in states that have EPR for packaging at least to make more sustainable choices. I think that's great. One of the areas that goes in my mind a little bit unquestioned or under-questioned in the EPR space is the issue of consumption.
Back to Kate Raworth's doughnut economics, what is the amount of consumption that leads to a good life versus what is the amount of consumption that potentially is excessive? This gets into sticky, complicated areas because we live in a liberal society where you should be able to make your own choices about what you consume. That shouldn't be dictated through a law. That shouldn't be dictated through some punitive measure that's placed on you.
It has started to raise a lot of questions about my own life, what makes me feel good, and what makes others in conversation when I am with friends and family, what makes them feel good. We're reaching this moment where we're starting to ask a lot of questions about the limits of consumption to make us personally feel good. Ideally, it starts feeding back into these circular economy conversations where EPR is going to help us recycle more, reuse more, set up better systems, and have more circular systems, whether that's at scale reuse programs that are funded not just by somebody who wants to join their local co-op through their local coffee shop, but to be able to go to the grocery store and genuinely reusable containers in a system that feels intuitive and makes a lot more sense.
Also, to start questioning what do I need to buy? What level of convenience do I need to make myself feel good, feel whole? I do worry that the consumptive model can start to feel a bit like an addictive cycle where, in the short term, you get that dopamine hit from hitting one-day shipping on Amazon and having that package show up at your door. The next day, that hole might still be there. It's very easy to keep clicking that button, thinking that's what's going to bring you that fulfillment. I would say, for myself, I don't know if that necessarily brings me the fulfillment that I feel like I want in my life.
I was in New Orleans recently for the family-friendly Mardi Gras. I brought my whole family, and that does exist, by the way, John. In case you didn't think it did, there are some family-friendly parades there in New Orleans. This friend of mine who lives there, her aunt was there. My friend said that she's like, “We were at this parade and everybody is reaching for all these things. All of a sudden I wanted everything that was coming off of this float. I didn't know I wanted it until I was standing next to everybody else. Yes, we need it.”
That perfectly describes a situation. All of a sudden, I was like, “I need that hat. I need that bead.” It's describing what you're talking about. There's this infection that happens with consumption, and it becomes a big barrier to asking yourself the tough question, do I need this? If I wait a day or two, will I still want that thing? Is there something else I can do to fulfill that need? That is maybe more draws on less resources. That's great.
It starts to come back to questions of culture. To dovetail back to the policy discussion and environmental policy, it had me thinking about some of the limits of policy. Can state or federal government policy shift culture? Is culture something that needs to shift through spontaneous decision-making by lots of individuals?
That has also brought me in an interesting way right the way back around to personal responsibility. If my own personal habits and behaviors can be an inspiration for others. Rather than getting excited about all of this stuff coming off of the Mardi Gras flow, can I inspire others through my behavior to ask some of these similar questions? I still love a one-day Amazon order. It's a journey that we're all on.
Rebuilding a new culture feels to me like something that maybe informs and is informed by policymaking but also sits outside of policymaking. There isn't necessarily a neat and tidy way to say, “Here's the law that's going to limit how much you can buy.” Also, to me, it starts to get a little scary as well. I don't know if that's necessarily workable or what we want. It's how do we shift that culture? How do we get buy-in from people into different ways of living?
On that note, I think the cultural shift needs to happen, and there are a lot of aspects to that. On the flip side, if EPR is only a piece of the puzzle, it can become a bit of fuel to a nay-sayer who says, “EPR is only a piece of the puzzle. How much impact is this going to have?” Imagine you're a sustainability professional and you're trying to influence your company, your peers, or your leadership that EPR is important and still needs to be solved for, even if it is only a piece of the puzzle. What advice would you give to influence that shift in mindset?
EPR is absolutely going to help us recycle more, reuse more, and set up and have better circular systems.
Industry Perspectives: Engaging Companies In EPR
Can I ask a clarifying question? There's the view from a company's perspective of EPR as a policy that a company wants to buy into versus EPR as a policy that companies in some instances have to comply with. Maybe it's less of a clarifying question to you and more of a distinction between the different views that a company could have of this particular policy. I think from a company perspective, five states have EPR for packaging.
There is a set of compliance steps that companies need to take in those five states. There are financial penalties and ramifications of not taking those steps to be in compliance. That's like one whole part of the conversation. There is this other part about, I would say, I guess, cultural values buy into EPR as this critical piece of the circular economy, and leading companies that want to maximize their sustainability and help drive the conversation forward can adopt it and find themselves at a point of supporting EPR for packaging.
I don't mean to naysayer EPR for packaging. The whole consumption conversation to me feels like the next step beyond EPR for packaging of like what are these other elements of bringing about a circular economy that EPR might not be able to solve? The problem EPR is good at solving is how we manage the stuff that we have right now. The US is producing hundreds of thousands of millions of tons of recyclable material, theoretically recyclable.
Some of it currently is recycled material every year that has to go somewhere. Currently, a lot of it is going to landfills. A lot of it is not going back into the circular economy. It's not going back into manufacturing new goods and new packaging. EPR, as a policy tool, is good at saying to that system and that flow of materials.
We're going to inject a lot of capital into new technology, new infrastructure. We're going to help lift the responsibility or the sole responsibility for managing all of this material at its end of life from municipalities who are constrained in terms of the financial resources they can bring to bear. We're going to hopefully start to feed more and more money into new systems and new ways of circulating packaging through the economy or circulating products.
You can start rethinking the whole concept of packaging. Packaging is a material that has a use to deliver something to the consumer. I love seeing all of the new innovations, like laundry detergent now where rather than shipping a whole bunch of water, companies are making these tiny little pieces of material that come in a little cardboard box and you throw one and it's not paper. I should know exactly what it is. Maybe you do. The detergent was dehydrated down.
It's like a sleeve or something.
That lets you rethink your entire product delivery system, which is brilliant. I think EPR opens up a space to drive and incentivize more of that type of thinking, which to me is the exciting stuff at the heart of a policy like EPR is what can we maybe not even think up that might be incentivized when companies need to take on and have ownership over their materials. What EPR isn't great at managing, although some of the programs like California's, for instance, are trying to beta test some of this, is the fact that there's an ever-increasing amount of packaging that's winding up on the market.
Ideally, if we're shifting towards more reuse and refill, that's helping pull away from the single-use packaging stream and reducing the amount of material that winds up needing to get recycled. There's some real tension there between the reduction side of reduce, reuse, recycle, and the ongoing need for companies to have higher and higher quarterly shareholder returns to their shareholders. EPR can help deal with some of that, but it cannot deal with all of it, which brings me back to these questions of culture and individual action and consumption.
Exploring Responsibility: Individual Choices Vs. Corporate Influence
That's great. Well said. Can you share a little bit about when you have influenced change and what was the hardest thing about that?
Change at what level?
The point of this show is to think about personal change, but also to expand on the idea that it's not a personal responsibility all the time. Yes, we need to personally think about our own consumption and personally make the choices that we can to drive a less impact on the environment and an improved impact on society.
At the end of the day, it's a hierarchy of responsibility. We need to change the hearts and minds of, in my opinion, the CFOs of the companies to figure out how to invest back into the company in a responsible way. You and I have talked about this before, like the way that B Corps do this is by identifying that there's more than just a shareholder, or more than just shareholders as a stakeholder, that you need to both benefit the environment or society alongside the growth of your company.
By doing that, companies play a different role in societal shifts because they are effectively investing back into this. This question comes from a place of how do you influence a group of people, preferably decision makers? Have you been able to influence change at an organizational level or a group of people level? Even in general, things that you've done to help bring people along on your understanding of an EPR or policy or something.
Well said. To some extent, I've tried to have this orientation of a learner of being somebody who's out to learn and understand about these complex systems and how they all work together. In some ways, I feel like I've been changed by the work that I've been doing. My own personal work has been not being closed off to all of the complexities of the reality that's coming at us and trying to wrestle with it in an honest way with all this complexity.
What does that mean for me personally? What does it mean for the world? What does it mean for all of us? In some sense, I feel like I've been reactive on a personal level rather than a change agent if you will. I do think I can point to one set of changes that I feel like I've personally been involved in in the past, let's say this 8 or 9-year period, I think it was starting out doing advocacy and working to help drive a narrative shift in how we talk about waste, how we talk about recycling, how we talk about material use, and how does that informed government decision-making, how has it informed the legislative space, how does it inform the set of values that especially legislators are making decisions on?
Ultimately, policymaking is about codifying a set of values in a law that then shapes the world. Being able to be part of that larger conversation about, “How should we manage all this material? What is the best way to manage it? What can we glean from conversations about values that then can inform policy?” Seeing that come through this push in the US towards EPR for packaging and having conversations with legislators, understanding the different stakeholders, understanding what they care about and what they don't care about. Sometimes, more importantly, what they don't care about.
Let's dig into that. How do you find out what they don't care about on a large enough scale to shift your message?
Honestly, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of revealed behavior. I think that has been one of my biggest lessons in this space. I had taught a class last winter on environmental policy to a bunch of college students. This was one of the things that we talked a lot about, stated versus revealed behavior or stated preference versus revealed behavior. This comes from economics and studying economics, and there are a lot of conversations in the economic space about a consumer.
I might be willing to respond one way on a survey, but then when they walk into the store, they behave a different way. That's their revealed preferences, the things that they do in the store. I think in the advocacy space and the legislative space. Generally, in the chain in the sustainability and environmental policymaking space, that question of revealed behavior says a lot. For me, this is especially been important when working with the private sector. However, it's also important to work with the advocacy and governmental sectors as well.
Everybody's always trying to position themselves. Everybody is always trying to have their perspective and say what needs to be said. Make sure that everybody knows that they're saying the right things. They're doing the right things. They're acting in a responsible way. When the rubber hits the road and there's a legislative decision that's on the table, you start seeing where these different stakeholders are, what they care about, and what they may say they care about versus what they don't act on. For me, it's been helpful, that concept of ook for what they do, not for what they say.
That's great. That's super insightful. We could talk about this for hours, but I think I'm going to land on my last question, which is why embrace change?
Change As A Constant: Navigating Complexity
I have to say you already said what I might give is my answer, which is change is a constant. We're always dealing with change. I think for me and this whole journey I've been on of my own understanding and my own growth and learning about the complexities of the world and how I as an individual interact with and navigate my way through all of those complexities.
I feel like my thinking for a while was end-point focused, that we need to get there. When we get there, wherever there is, the environment will be fixed. We'll be at 1.5 degrees Celsius. We'll be in the circular economy. It will be perfectly circular. Everything will be fine. We can all waltz off into the sunset to whatever. That started to break apart, that utopian thinking of we need to arrive at this point. I think part of that is also that personal sustainability of recognizing that change is constant. Change will always be happening.
We are always moving towards and trying to bring about a just world, which necessitates change because we can all agree. I would hope at least that the world is in many ways currently unjust both to the environment and to people. In that sense, change is going to be a constant change and is always going to be unfolding. The question for me is how do I fit into that and how do I fit into it in a way that feels sustainable and feels good and feels like it is genuinely moving things forward and along as opposed to back, whatever that winds up meaning.
Thank you so much, John. This was such a fun conversation. I enjoyed hearing your perspective. You have a wealth of knowledge in this space, too. I cannot wait to see what you do when you come back from your second tour on the El Camino de Santiago, and what else you learn from that choice to impose change on yourself.
I thought it was great hearing your perspective on doughnut economics. I'd not heard about that. I am going to take note of that and look into that a bit more. I love that as being a little bit of a guiding light on me and my own choices. That was super great, and I enjoyed talking about that. This personal versus systemic that you talked about, like personal change versus systemic change and your role in both and how you have to balance those two and the complexity that comes with balancing those two and the complexity that comes with driving systemic change was great to hear about. I think I am jealous. I wish I could go hiking with you. I loved the idea of trusting that things will work out for you in the day and in the year and moving forward. Thank you so much for all your insights. I enjoyed all that we talked about.
Thanks so much, Christine. This was lovely.
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About John Hite
John Hite is an environmentalist at heart who has found his environmental work focusing on policy - changing individual and institutional behavior and practices through law. His specific area of focus has been waste and recycling, which recently has centered on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging laws. John’s most recent deep endeavor was working to build the US’s compliance organization for business compliance with EPR for packaging laws. That organization - Circular Action Alliance - is now off the ground and working to ensure companies placing packaging on the market in the 5 US states are in compliance.
As an environmentalist, John has spent a lot of both his paid and unpaid time thinking about and engaging with the many complex questions that arise from our efforts to achieve sustainability, including our personal sustainability to ensure that we can continue showing up to do the work.
John is currently taking some time to breath deep, reflect on the work so far, and discern what comes next in the journey to evolve our global system towards greater sustainability.