15 - Scott Tew

 Featuring Scott Tew, founder of Trane Technologies’ Center for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability, we talk about growing up on a small farm, translating science into action, embedding sustainability into business strategy, and leading the company’s bold Gigaton Challenge. 

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn. Learn more about Trane Technologies.

Resources:

• Books:
  • Make Work Matter: How to Create Positive Change in Your Company and Meaning in Your Career by Nancy McGaw
  • Net Positive by Paul Polman
  • Navigating Sustainable Growth: A Roadmap for Boards and Corporate Leaders Perfect by Gib Hedstrom
• Others:
  • Gigaton Challenge
  • ESG Navigator

Terms Mentioned:

• Refrigerant
• Materiality Assessment
• Pareto Principle
• Electric Arc Furniture vs Traditional Furnaces

Transcript

[00:00:00] Aparna: Alright. Friends of the pod, today we are joined by Scott Tew, who has dedicated his career to sustainability and energy efficiency. He's currently the leader of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability at Trane Technologies and champion sustainability initiatives focused on moving to more efficient and climate friendly solutions.

He's a thought leader at the intersection of public policy, economic impacts, and value stream approaches to sustainability and this has led to outcomes such as Trane's comprehensive 2030, sustainability commitments and active participation in the Gigaton challenge. Scott is an alum of Livingston University where he studied environmental science and ecology, and when he is not working on making Trane the coolest HVAC company out there, he serves on the Advisory Council of the Corporate Eco Forum, the Board of the World Environment Center, and as the chair of the US Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Scott, we're so happy you're on the show. Thank you for joining us. 

[00:01:00] Scott T: Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:03] Aparna: We're so happy that we're getting to chat with you and talk through all things HVAC and honestly your career. So to start us off, we'd love to talk to you about how you got to where you are.

So from your time at Livingston to your time at Trane right now, can you walk us through how your career has shaken out so far? 

[00:01:20] Scott T: I will, thanks for the question and for this nice opportunity to share some of my background with your listeners. So thanks for having me. The hot take on my background working for a cool company now is that I started out as a business major thinking I should go into business because I really had no plans, uh, coming out of high school.

I thought business sounded okay. I didn't even know what that meant. When I took my very first business course, I thought there has to be something else. And I was really enjoying a science course. And so if life would have it, I quickly gravitated towards science. And I will say at the outset though, is I grew up on a small family farm, and if you know anything about farming, sort of the foundation of farming is, uh, no waste, uh, recycle, reuse. It's all the things that people who care about green and sustainability. We wouldn't have called it that on the farm, but it's all the practices that are inherent with sustainability. It was almost ingrained in me to think in ways that were to eliminate waste and to reduce waste and to find ways to continuously improve.

And so right out of college, I had a job with a large um, pharmaceutical company and they helped me to, to assess some toxins on the environment. So I was actually running real studies, real biology studies in the field, trying to determine the effects of some toxins in the environment.

What I learned from that was that I was, I got, I was pretty good at figuring out: What the complexities of the projects were and helping managers understand why we were being asked to do these things and what the outcomes would mean for the company. So it quickly really became a communications job.

Somebody that could translate the complexities of science and all of that into sort of business speak so that business managers could understand what was expected of them and what the options were for making decisions. And that led them to a public policy role with the same company. It took me to Europe, where with that company I was helping think through the impacts of environmental policy, and how the company would navigate environmental policy, how, how would the company would comply, what the permitting would be like. So I did that for several years, moved back to the US and was doing a lot of work in environmental policy across the Americas, when a friend of mine who was, at the time, working with the company that subsequently became Trane technologies called and said, look, I'm with the company that does cooling.

You probably know nothing about cooling, which I did not. But when you're cooling big buildings, when you're cooling vehicles, when you're cooling people inside structures, it requires something called a refrigerant, which is a greenhouse gas. And he said at the time, look, the company's looking for a new way to develop a strategy around reducing the impacts of refrigerants.

So why don't you come and help out? So I joined a very small team at the time to figure out how would we reduce the use of greenhouse gases and cooling. And that led to an almost 20 year career where it began as “can we reduce the impact of, uh, refrigerants and cooling?” and it morphed into what we now would call a sustainability role and leading the work of sustainability, which is much broader than just refrigerants, as you know, and all your listeners know.

It touches lots of things inside of a company in particular, especially a global company. And, uh, I've been doing that so long that that's how I know myself now. So it's all the, all the things that you mentioned in your opening. 

[00:04:46] Kiersten: Thank you for the backstory. I think it's also proven really valuable for our listeners to hear the different titles that people have had throughout their career.

So could you share just a couple, you know, what were you called when you were doing all that cool work? 

[00:05:09] Scott T: My first one was called an Environmental Science Associate. The very first one out of college, and then led to a field manager, I think it was a field, uh, project manager. The third one was the, around the communications role, so it was an environmental communications manager. And then that led to an environmental policy leader in Europe. And I came back and I led, uh, global public affairs and environmental impact for the company across the Americas.

And now of course, I'm the sustainability leader. So you mentioned my title at the beginning. It's actually even more recently than now. It's now the head of sustainability strategy and the leader of the center that you mentioned at the beginning here. So it's certainly changed over the years.

[00:05:43] Aparna: I appreciate you walking us through that, and congrats on the recent title change. That's exciting to hear. So Trane is a company that's famously known for energy efficiency. That is a cool HVAC company, right? Y'all are at the forefront of a lot of the innovations that we've seen in the industry, and something that we talk about on this podcast is how you don't have to work for a company that's in sustainability to have a green job. 

We actually think that every job can be a green job if you make it that way. Thinking about Trane, it seems like that's something that y'all embody in your operations. So wanted to lob it back to you, Scott. Can you talk us through how Trane has really worked to embed sustainability into every aspect of its business, its strategy, and how this has created a sustainable platform For everyone to stand on top of? 

[00:06:33] Scott T: Look, this is one of my favorite things to talk about because, when I moved into this role 15 years ago now, I was actually asked to set up a way for sustainability to be integrated in the company. At the time, 15 years ago, the only news about sustainability using that term was, uh, in the negative almost.

There were a few companies that had made some green claims that were not true, and they were being sued. And so there were some business news about how companies were making claims that, that were not able to substantiate. And so 15 years ago I was asked to figure out if sustainability, in fact can add value to a company? If it can was the hypothesis, then wouldn't it need to be integrated in how we do business and to keep it from being some sideshow?

And so that was the challenge from the beginning. Now, this was way back before there were frameworks. There were no rule definitions. People didn't know how to figure out what the priorities were. We were really grasping for some things. And early on, I was given this. Moment to figure out how would you integrate it.

And really the way you integrate it is you figure out how a business runs. Now whether we're talking small, medium, or large business, there are always processes within a business no matter what you're doing or making. It could be a service business consulting firm, could be a manufacturing firm like Trane Technologies where we're making things.

There's a way that that company does what it does. So there's an existing process. The magic happens when you can intersect sustainable thinking, sustainability principles into that existing process. That's how you fundamentally make a change in how people do their work. In a company like Trane, for instance, we make things, so we have engineers, some 30 plus thousand mechanical engineers that design and redesign, and work through how the machines work, and they have processes that they use for those designs and redesigns. And so we worked hard on the product development process. We want to intersect sustainability thinking there. So we have checklists and tools. We have training for those engineers to understand what those tools are.

But the value is in figuring out what is the material that was used as an example. Why did we specify virgin copper? Could we use recycled copper? So what we're trying to do there is to challenge all the decisions within a process for a better outcome. If you think of it that way, if you can successfully do that, whether we're talking an HR professional, whether we're talking, somebody in finance or maybe talking people that work in sales at the, at the field level, we're talking to customers.

If you can actually begin to help each person within a function or within a business line, understand that their particular personal actions make a difference, and even if they think it's small. If you think about it this way, I like to think of it this way, uh, one small step by one person. I mean, it doesn't seem like a big deal.

50,000 people taking a step. That's a long way. I don't know how many steps you get in every day. I struggle to get 10,000, but, you know, 50,000 steps in a day is a, that's a really nice walk. You know, that's a long piece of journey there. And so I love the concept of every person in every company.

Seeing the importance of their single step. And we've worked really hard at Trane to help all of our people understand that no matter where you are in the company, we're counting on you to take your step for us. 

[00:09:57] Aparna: Everyone's running a half marathon every day, Scott. They're, they're definitely putting the steps.

Exactly. 

[00:10:02] Scott T: That's right. 

[00:10:03] Aparna: I'm wondering too, was it hard to get that buy-in from the get go? 'Cause that was your mission statement? Integrate sustainability, but did you have leadership support? Was it hard to talk to people, mechanical engineers, just the day-to-day folks about how to integrate this?

[00:10:18] Scott T: One of my early learnings was never asked the question of, what do you think we should be doing? Because what you end up with after about a week or two of that is you, is a thousand ideas and every idea is a great one. Somebody wants to talk about how we should reduce waste. Somebody says we should reduce energy.

Someone says we should recycle something. Somebody says we should change packaging, you, as you can imagine asking that question, generating a lot of ideas. The good news is, to your point, I was asked to figure out how to integrate it, and so we had to find a way to make sense of all these great ideas.

So if all the ideas were good, we have to find a way to say, what are we going to do this month? This year? And so we used a tool in the early days. We were one of the first companies to use it. Now it's very commonly used by almost all companies. It's called a materiality assessment, where we go through all of the various possibilities of opportunities for improvements as well as sort of the risk.

And you figure out what's the biggest opportunity to work on if you had to choose just one. And then if you had to choose just two, what's the two? If you had to choose three and you sort of pareto it all out. Throw it out and you end up with a handful of things that are high priority items. And that's where we ended up.

Number one for the Trane technologies was reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And as I mentioned at the early part of this podcast, I mentioned greenhouse gases are important to the company. One, because they are part of our solution. We're a very odd company, meaning that we use greenhouse gases as refrigerants in our solutions.

We also commit to reducing them at the same time. It's a sort of a strange paradox. It is our number one most material issue though. And so when everyone was clear on what our big material issue was. That helps people, that helps rally people and helps people understand what we're focused on. So if that becomes your North Star, then you figure out the plans that are needed to begin reducing the impact.

[00:12:13] Kiersten: That's fantastic. One of the things you mentioned was you “pareto it out.” So I do wanna define for listeners just what the Pareto principle is if they're not familiar. The Pareto principle's mathematical principle that essentially says, most of your impact is concentrated into 20%, so it's a little bit inverse.

The other 80% has about 20% of the impact. So I think when Scott was saying they pareto it out, they look at this list of solutions and they're asking themselves what's gonna have the biggest impact? So if you have, for instance, one product that's creating 70% of your emissions, targeting that product and making improvements, there is going to have the biggest impact.

And then you can trickle down to things that have relatively less impact. Great use of a term. Do love the Pareto principle. Wanted to make sure everybody was familiar with it before we move. 

[00:13:01] Scott T: Thank you for defining it. 

[00:13:03] Kiersten: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think our next question for you is, are there any misconceptions about sustainability in your industry that you'd like to address? 

[00:13:13] Scott T: It's not just my industry, it's everywhere. Some people believe that it's a, uh, nice to have, which that one bothers me the most. I'm in a couple of camps in sustainability, and I probably should just say this at the outset. 

Number one is I absolutely believe that you can value, and measure the value of sustainability. If I didn't believe both of those things, I know I would not be doing what I'm doing today. If I thought this were just some sideshow, some nice to have, some, uh, cherry on the top, I would not be interested in spending my life and career doing it. I firmly believe that sustainability done well can be measured, it can be valued, and it can also be communicated in a way that's powerful. I think most of us, many people, many companies miss out on one of those three. Maybe, they don't know how to communicate it with inside their own four walls really well, or they can't communicate it externally well.

Some struggle with the whole, how do we even value this? I mean, where's the ROI and the return on investment? And then the other is, we don't know how to measure it. We can't measure it. I think all three of those are poor excuses, from lazy people. But that's my view. So I just think that this area has evolved so much in the past 15 years. We've had some great companies, small, medium, and large, do really wonderful things. So I find myself sometimes really confused when the question keeps coming up about what are the myths of sustainability. My answer is almost always the same, but you know, you can certainly Google other things, myths on sustainability, you'll, you'll find some of the things that I mentioned, but there are others out there too. But those are the big ones for me. 

Um, there are others about the people that do sustainability or that work in sustainability or they care about the environmental impacts b eyond all other elements and considerations, I don't think either of those things are true. I do care about the environment, but I don't care about the environment  more than I care about. A lot of other elements that I work on of the people are always important, the how things happen is really important.

Sort of the methods, how things are measured are important, communicated. I already said some of these things, but yeah, you hit on something really important to me here. I, I wanna bust all the myths out there for your listeners and for anyone else who bumps into me. 

[00:15:25] Kiersten: Oh, I would love to revamp MythBusters, but just have it be sustainability stuff.

Wouldn't that be a good show? 

[00:15:31] Scott T: Perfect. Let's do it. 

with the t-shirts. Yeah. 

[00:15:33] Kiersten: Okay, great. Yeah, we'll just, uh, we'll reach out to any networks out there if you're listening. I know. Yeah. Uh, we're ready to go to tv. 

[00:15:41] Scott T: Let's go. 

[00:15:42] Aparna: The branding is writing itself. I love this.

So with the outlook that you're talking about and these truths that you believe in, which we share them with you on the show, we definitely believe that this is measurable. It's something that you can have a tangible impact from. It’s something that one can and should communicate out. Do you have any mentors or folks that influence this opinion?

[00:16:05] Scott T: I have a lot of mentors, people I work with, people I really respect. I can name a few. You know, Andrew Winston, who's a great, um, thinker, uh, author of the book Net Positive, I think is great in a lot of ways. His mentorship has really taught me about the importance of challenging norms and having courage to do something different.

But there are, there are some others. I would say, uh, Marian Chertow, who is the mother of industrial ecology. The term I think was actually, she came up with the term and that's really this concept of: Maybe there should be no waste streams, maybe all waste streams could be an input, a raw material input for something else.

And if that's your mindset, it's sort of the thrifting mindset. You know, it's sort of how your discarded clothing can be thrifted by someone else and become really happy, make their life and improve their quality of life. Marian thinks that's the same thing though about waste streams that that companies may have and figuring out like a puzzle what, where that waste could actually be turned into a raw material input somewhere else.

And so this idea of circular thinking I think is wonderful. There are so many others who over the years were great mentors. Al Shamley, a former, a boss of mine who was a really wise individual who liked to just turn ideas upside down and think about things from a different angle, which I think is also the secret behind a lot of sustainability successes, which is to step back sometimes and to figure out is there another way of doing this?

Is there a better way? Is there a way that has more, less steps, less waste? Whether we're talking waste of time, waste of energy, waste of resources. Those things are fascinating to me. And so people that love curiosity puzzles, these things are always indicators that you'll be a really good sustainability leader, because I think sustainability is really about figuring out the solution of a puzzle.

[00:18:02] Aparna: That's a really nice way to put it. Best way to put all the pieces to have a complete board. A tiny anecdote about an upcoming episode that we will have is a good friend of mine named Ingrid, who lives in Norway and works for a Norwegian water or wastewater and just waste management company. And we were chatting a couple days ago about how that company's been able to set up the largest, essentially secondhand store, with items that have been attempted to be tossed in landfill by Norwegian consumers. So if I tried to throw away an old t-shirt or something, they would not accept it and say, have you heard of our little secondhand store in my layman's terms? And encourage the person to go there, drop off the item, and they've essentially created one of the largest areas for exchange in the Nordic.

[00:18:51] Scott T: I love that. So sort of the Thrifted marketplace. 

[00:18:55] Aparna: Exactly. Yeah. For things from textiles to household goods, and they're starting up their construction materials department right now. But yeah, what you said exactly right. I think what some other countries are really starting to implement, and it's been really cool to see the success.

[00:19:10] Scott T: Mm-hmm. I like that. 

[00:19:12] Kiersten: And, and speaking of successes and implementations and things rolling out in other countries, we did wanna ask you, are there any emerging trends or innovations that excite you, in Trane’s industry and in your line of work? 

[00:19:25] Scott T: Circularity. I think it's the untapped next, uh, opportunity for almost all companies.

We've been talking about the concepts of circularity for a long time. We've mentioned a couple already, like reusing, reusing things, but there are many. There are many pillars, if you will, concentric circles of circularity. And most companies, when I say companies, I mean like manufacturing firms that do things like Trane does, like make things.

I think we've just scratched the surface on circularity and there's so many great opportunities. Now, just think about the available recycled materials that we have in the global economy that are. They've still not found a good home. And we use a lot of metals within Trane technologies. We use a lot of steel, copper, aluminum, and these industries have been waiting for some indicators from the market to say, from a company like Trane Technologies to say we would like to have a better steel, a steel that's made differently, a steel that's made maybe on electric furnaces using renewable energy as opposed to doing it the old way.

We've sort of sent up that flag and we've said we would love to talk to the steel companies that can provide that. These please step forward. And so that's been happening. We call it “first movers”. I think it's so important to be a first mover. First movers begin to turn a ship in a vast economy. They're the ones that say, “There may be money to be made by doing things differently, and we're willing to talk to you about that and maybe place an order.” and as you can imagine, the more you do that, the more companies place those orders and you create a marketplace that may not have existed. You certainly begin to increase the availability of these better materials.

And so we've been doing this now for about thirty years. We've learned a lot of lessons, but I think the lessons will play really well in circularity and, uh, you know, the rethinking of refurbished components or parts, for instance, we've done so little of that over the years. I mean, we essentially just put our units inside buildings and they run for like 20 years and at times you have to replace some parts and we just bring a new part.

And the old part gets recycled into metal, but could it be refurbished and then resold to someone that needed the part? And that's the piece that we are investigating now, and I'm really excited about it because I get really excited about areas that have just been sitting there idle, sort of ripe for somebody to say, “This could be a great opportunity. Let's try this and see if we can develop a new way to do things, as well as make some money and at the same time, lower our negative environmental impact” so it kind of checks all the boxes. So I'm really excited about this area. Okay. 

[00:22:09] Kiersten: Lowering the embodied carbon through refurbishing is a really interesting concept.

I also wanted to ask you, because we did recently have a waste expert on the pod and she mentioned take back programs for technologies like laptops and things like that through companies like Dell. So just Trane, have any, or are you guys working on in the future? Any sort of take back programs for that equipment after its useful life has expired?

[00:22:35] Scott T: That's part of this circularity work that I mentioned. So underneath it, and we don't have long enough for me to talk about all the things underneath that large umbrella of circularity, but one is product take back, and right now we have a, what we call remanufacturing program, and we remanufactured some of the components of our systems.

We take them back, we refurbish them, we put them back into systems. But currently we don't have a, what you would call a product takeback. Now we sort of farm out somebody taking apart old equipment so that we can put in new ones. But in the future, I think, like you were just mentioning, a product takeback program will be much more robust.

We'll be able to think through all the elements of it, but we've been remanufacturing products now for more than two decades. We didn't call it circularity, which is why we sort of built a big umbrella. Now we've got a lot of things under it, some of the things we've been doing, and then there will be some new things going forward.

That's really exciting as well.

[00:23:28] Aparna: Glad to hear that's something on the horizon, and we will definitely have to connect offline to hear about all the umbrella pieces. My curiosity is peaked. So switching gears a little bit right now, we wanted to talk about the Gigaton challenge that Trane is an active participant in. So wanted to ask for the listeners, if you could define what the Gigaton challenge is and share some unique ways that corporations are moving towards a greener future through it from your experience. 

[00:23:55] Scott T: Yeah. Yeah, thanks for the question. The Gigaton challenge remains the largest single company commitment globally for reducing the impact or the emissions from when products are being used by customers.

So we're five years into this grand scheme of reducing by 1 billion metric tons of emissions, carbon emissions, the impact of our products as our customers use them. So this commitment forced us to rethink how customers use our products; rethink the design of the products. There are several levers that can help us.

We have to make the products more efficient. We have to use better refrigerants in the products, and we have to make sure that those products are the smartest in the market when we put them in a building. They have to come with all kinds of, as we would call it, bells and whistles because they have to perform at a different level so that the emissions, when our customers are using those products, are much less than they would've been, before the Gigaton commitment. It's really changed how we engage our people. It's changed our innovation, it's changed our relationships with customers. 

We have many customers who have made commitments around reducing their own emissions, and you can't decarbonize buildings or the built environment without thinking about how to reduce the issues with our heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. So the HVAC, as we call it.

It represents roughly 15% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, believe it or not, mainly because the electricity use of a cooling system is really high and there is also things like refrigerants in those systems, and so what we have to do is to make them much more efficient. Using better refrigerants and then they need to be really smart. And I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg on the smart side of these systems because the company, for instance, about a year ago, we've now integrated a company called Brainbox in our offerings.

And using AI, we're able to supplement our control systems. We've had controls for buildings for many years. Things that control the cooling systems in buildings. It is the largest single electricity use of most all buildings, and so can do a lot of small things in buildings but you have to address the issues with air conditioning. Whether it's your home, your apartment, your condo, the building you work in, or the building at your university.

Doesn't matter what we're talking about, the HVAC system is going to be the largest consuming electricity piece of that building that has to be addressed. But until now the systems were not as smart as they should be, but those days are almost behind us. We're integrating AI so that the, the systems themselves can begin even diagnosing their issues, sending their own communications out to the company, to the service tech to say, “here's what's wrong with me. Bring this part.” and if you want, that system can automatically order the part and it can deliver it, and it's ready for you to have it installed. So it's sort of self diagnosing its issues and there are times it can even self-heal. It can correct its own design so that it moves itself back to its original design, which of course is typically always the most efficient. 

Is the sort of day one, it's sort of like the day you drive your car off of the car lot. It's the best day because everything in the car is brand new. And so what you always wanna get to is to get it back to that original design. And so we now have systems that they can really begin to bring themselves back to the original design.

We're really excited about the possibilities there. So all of these things are captured in the Gigaton Challenge, and as you can tell, I could talk all day about the challenge because of what that commitment has meant to the company. But also to, how these systems how they operate when we put them with customers.

And really, I think, it's changed an industry. We have a saying inside of Trane, and the saying is that: “One company can change an industry and one industry can change the world.” And so if you think about it, what we've been trying to do is to figure out how can something like a gigaton commitment, change the entire industry to think differently about these solutions, these systems.

And then if we could do that because of the impact on the emissions of the Earth. This one industry could actually be a really big, important mover and positive impact on emissions globally. 

[00:28:11] Kiersten: Oh man. I feel like we might need a part two because I also am very excited about it. 

[00:28:15] Scott T: I'm sorry about that.

[00:28:17] Kiersten: Everything you're saying, and I think we could also get into some of the cool stuff around Smart Grid integration and distributed energy storage.

[00:28:24] Scott T: Did you say cool stuff? Everything we do is cool stuff. 

[00:28:26] Kiersten:All of it. So Cool. I love it. I think we're on the precipice of so many interesting tangents.

But to keep us on track for, you know, a regular length episode, I will pivot and ask you. What is some advice that you would give to someone starting out in this space who is interested in working in similar fields? I know you rattled off 10 great titles, you know, that you had before, the one you have now.

So I am just curious, any advice for someone that is certainly not yet at your level, but interested in getting into the industries that you've worked in? 

[00:28:59] Scott T: There's a lot of great groups out there. There are a lot of non-governmental organizations that do great work. Internships there, volunteering there.

It could be a very local one in your community. I volunteer with one on land conservation myself. 

There are every age group and every background volunteers with that organization. And what we're trying to do is conserve green spaces in a local community. You can get in there, build a network and/or find out if that's your thing.

Some people want to move towards the social side of sustainability, the social impact side. Also great organizations doing that both at a local, national, global level. And I really encourage people first to figure out where your passion is and go where your passion is. 

You use the word sustainability curious. If you are curious, then start there first. Where's your, where's your possible passion? Something you could personally be interested in. And then I think the rest of the story may write itself. So that's number one. 

Number two, is that there are some great books out there! One of my favorites, recent ones, by Nancy McGaw called, “Making Work Matter,” and it's really about, how no matter what company or what you do, what your job is, no matter how low or how high, no matter the type company you're in, there is a way to rethink your job, your day to day and connect it to some greater purpose. If you can't do that, then what are you doing?

I mean, there has to be a way, you don't have to be a sustainability professional. It doesn't have to be in your title for you to make your work matter and to do better no matter what you're doing. It could be a forklift driver in a warehouse. There are some ways to do that differently so that, it also can be better for the environment than other ways that it may be being done.

So, I mean, I think there are ways to connect all these dots. I think no matter someone's level of experience or their interest, we need everyone to do their part and figure out what their part is. Maybe that's the first piece. Figure out what your part is and so that's what should be on your mind.

[00:30:55] Aparna: That's excellent. Full circle moment with every job can be green if you think it's outside the box with you. Just ask questions and get curious about it. 

[00:31:03] Scott T: I mean, a few years ago to that point, we got really serious about, if every job at our company at Trained Technologies can have an impact, should we ask employees to put it in their annual objectives?

So we developed sort of a cheat list for everyone, sort of a dropdown list on a platform that when you were doing your annual objectives, we ask every employee include at least one that's related to sustainability and our commitments. And so there's a list that drops down you can choose from those.

It's things like volunteering in the community around something, you know, recycle something. It could be anything like that. There's a lot of lists, but there's also things you could come up with on your own, or you and your manager could decide something you could work on this year. In the end though, now we're four years into this.

Every employee in the company at every level. It's the only single requirement for your annual objectives. Some people have two objectives, some people have six. I personally have four. Every person in the company, at least one of their objectives is focused on their personal actions related to our commitments.

I think that says a lot. It says a lot about our people. It also says a lot about the company in terms of how serious we are about this fact that every person has a role to play and we're really, we're really counting on everyone. 

[00:32:18] Aparna: That is phenomenal buy-in, and just incredible that the company is supporting this mission that the employees all want to participate in as well.

Yeah, so it's a very hopeful thing to hear for the future of all corporations. I bet some of them could be like, read sustainability books, like get more into the weeds on X topic. Oh, that's fun. The gears are warning Scott. 

[00:32:39] Scott T: Good. Good. 

[00:32:41] Kiersten: If you ever need a list of sustainability books, we can probably help furnish that for you.

[00:32:47] Scott T: I'll probably have most of them on a bookshelf. 

[00:32:49] Aparna: Mm-hmm. That's fair. Leads us in nicely. So you mentioned a couple books so far, the Net Positive Book and the one by Nancy McGaw. So wondering if there are other, maybe books, documentaries, resources in general that you'd recommend if folks wanna be involved in this sustainability shift?

[00:33:07] Scott T: I mean, there's so many. I hate to even..hmm, get into it. I mean, Gib Hedstrom has a new book that just came out that your listeners could, just search for his name. And I have really followed Gib and his work for many years now, and Gib invented something, a tool that is known as ESG Navigator.

And it is one of the best tools out there. Many companies use it. You can use it at any size company, actually. It doesn't have to be a company, an NGO could use it, and it helps you think through this concept of what is good, what's better, what's best. If good is these actions and we could just take a topic, let's take a topic like, reducing waste. What's good? What's better? and what's best? 

You understand the concept and so what it does so quickly for you, because a lot of this is so complicated, people don't know where to get started or even have to evaluate what should I do first versus what do I do second?

How do I know if this is good enough versus whether I'm making a difference and this tool actually helps describe that in a way that you can do it fast and it's really intuitive. It's not some complicated matrix that takes days and days. I love it. I'm a huge fan, as you can tell. I'm a fan of Gib because he does such good work of, breaking down these complicated concepts into bite-sized pieces, and looking forward to whatever Gib comes up with next. So I always point people towards navigator.

[00:34:33] Kiersten: Excellent. We have such a long list of books to read. We'll add this on there and look up ESG navigator. We'll try to link everything in the show notes. So, for listeners those will be available for you. To close this interview, like we said, so many other things we'd love to ask you, but maybe in the future we'll have you come back on.

But for today: What legacy do you hope to leave behind through your work? 

[00:34:59] Scott T: Legacy is a great question. And I love this idea. Actually I think sustainability's about legacy, sustainability is about positive change, meaningful change and that's what I've been really working towards.

For me, it's more about fundamental change. Like can you change how something happens for the positive? And I believe that sustainability's all about that. And my day-to-day work, if you followed me around, you would think, oh my God, there's a lot of meetings, there's a lot of phone calls.

They're aimed though in the greater moment at trying to help change things for the positive. We were talking earlier about circularity and that one's not fully baked yet. We're still building the recipe. We believe we have a lot of the ingredients. Now we have to figure out how to put it together, stir it up, and then we have to figure out how long to bake it.

And, uh, you know, I love that part. I love this figuring out. What the ingredients should be, and once you've done it though, you can look back and go, that was really meaningful. That changed how people thought about this issue. That changed how we will do this in the future. That's legacy. Legacy is helping people understand that, changing something, tweaking something, it leads to improvement.

People never wanna go back from an improvement, right? None of us wanna go back to the horse and buggy days. It's a nice concept, but none of us are going to trade in our vehicles for the horse and buggy days. And I feel the same thing about electric vehicles. I was an early adopter with electric vehicles and I don't wanna go backwards now.

And so legacy is about taking all the negative trade offs away on things and helping people focus on all the positive upside of things. 

[00:36:42] Aparna: I love that. Moving us into the future. One small tweak at a time, one small, exactly. Set point adjustment at a time, if you will. 

[00:36:49] Scott T: Yes, that's right. 

[00:36:50] Aparna: We're all about puns if you hadn't picked that up. 

[00:36:52] Scott T: I love it. 

[00:36:53] Aparna: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Scott. This has been a really lovely episode, and it's been great to get to know you better, understand more of your work and really hear about your life experiences. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this with us and the listeners.

[00:37:07] Scott T: I've been very delighted to be here with you. Thanks for all you're doing.