Episode 1, Game Changers and Transition makers: Plastic pollution

Anna-Marie:

Hello and welcome to ESG Matters at Ashurst. This is the first episode in our new series, Game Changers and Transition Makers, where we'll be speaking with individuals around the globe who are re-imagining business and taking action now on climate transition. Today, I am very excited to be joined by David Katz, Founder and Chairman at Plastic Bank, an internationally recognised solution to ocean plastic. David is one of the key peoples in finding solutions to stop plastic bottles reaching the ocean. He starred in award-winning documentaries, and he also has done his own Ted Talk. David, great to see you.

David:

Thank you. Great to be here, and thank you for creating the space.

Anna-Marie:

My pleasure. Certainly. Could you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your business, how you came up with it, and how you founded it? It's been going for quite a while now.

David:

It has. We were just celebrating our 10th year since the inception of the idea, was May the 9th, 2013, right before lunch. Who am I? I'm just a regular guy and just some dude out of Vancouver that had the courage to start that didn't need to have everything right to begin. We create stores where everything can be purchased using plastic garbage that would otherwise flow in the environment. It provides access to medical insurance and school tuition and cell phone minutes and access to clean water. Everything the world's emerging, I've always struggled to afford. Everything the world's emerging need to transcend poverty available using materials that would otherwise create harm.

Anna-Marie:

Really fascinating. You take something that's waste.

David:

It's not waste.

Anna-Marie:

Or something that people had no value for.

David:

Didn't see the value, didn't have the ability. I interject, because words actually are powerful in society and we have to use the right words, and we created the word of waste, and so here we are. I mean, if it was introduced as a renewable resource that when we created a collection ecosystem, we didn't have to produce more. We could just use what we already have and we would add small amounts as the population grew, there'd be different conversation. We wouldn't be having a conversation about how many whales and dolphins and fish and birds and life dies.

Anna-Marie:

Well, how it ends up in all of our cycles, not just the animals.

David:

All of us. Amen.

Anna-Marie:

You had this idea. You're sitting just before lunch thinking about it. It's a fair comment to have the courage to actually go from whatever you're doing on your daily basis to try this new thing entirely. Can you walk us through the steps you took to that? How did you get there?

David:

It's so much more simple than what you think. I'm asked that it's my most common question. People are like, "Well, but how did you do that?" They're looking for some step-by-step log. I know I did this and then that, and I launched this. The very first journey, the very first part of it, the communication I like to share with everyone, because what I'm really trying to do is create a space for others to join. To make it easy, to make it available so that people can say, "Oh, I can make change too. I am the change that I want to see in the world." I am touched by how many world-changing, life-changing, society-changing ideas died because the person who had the idea was afraid to fail. Who knows where we would be today? Who knows what other interactions with thing or people we would have if it wasn't for the ego mind not wanting to look bad?

I have this profound idea as plastic as money, where the world, the most impoverished could use it to transcend poverty. If we end poverty, we touch on all of the 17 United Nations sustainable development goals. In fact, we can't get to any of them unless we solve number one, which is poverty. You won't end hunger if you don't solve poverty. You won't increase education if you don't end poverty. There I am with this profound idea that we could do this, and oh my goodness, what a flood. All of the hair in the back of my neck, like, "Oh, there's something there. Oh, my goodness." Then it was flooded with an even louder voice of all of the ego.

The ego was like, "No, who are you? You're not going to be able, are you kidding? You're going to create some global supply chain of material. You're going to deal with the world's largest and most influential brands. You're going to create a consumer movement. You're going to create collection locations around the world in areas of poverty. What? Africa itself has 2000 languages. How? There's no way. Stop it. Tell someone else about this idea." I went, "Oh, okay. Hold on a second. Who do I know?" Everything else, and I was starting to follow my ego mind. Then I had a moment of pause. I had a very quiet moment. In the quiet moment, a voice emerged and the stillness of it, and it was just very calm and said, "No, David. You don't need to be the person that could do any of this.

You don't need to be the person that could change the world. All you need to do right now is to choose to be on the very slow journey of becoming the person." You see? That was easy. That, I could make a choice over. Here I am right now with you, with everyone listening, because that moment, May the 9th, 2013, right before lunch, I had a beautiful, quiet, conscious voice that I listened to. I decided in that moment that someday somewhere, that's who I was going to be, and it didn't need to be who I was now. I think it's an important message that I want to share with everyone, because we truly need an army of people with an army of ideas doing all kinds of amazing things that just need the courage to start.

Anna-Marie:

Fascinating and really powerful. Because it's not something that people can't access. Everyone can access that if you choose to access it. Then what I also find fascinating is what avenue you took next. Some people would be listening and they would think, "Oh, okay. Well, David, go work for an NGO. Go be part of an international organisation." You said, "Let's reimagine how this works for people in a self-sufficient and business way."

David:

That's just exactly it. There's a distinction between, and I'm only going to answer NGO because the purpose of me being on this podcast is ultimately to provide a space for people to figure out their own path. Everyone is going to take their own path and people still look, but no, David, but how did you do it? You're going to have your own journey. I can tell you how, but if it's not fulfilling for you, your own self-actualized self, then at some point you will lose the way. You're going to have your own journey. Just begin, think, look. What would you do? How could you do it? Where could you go? Who could you tell?

Begin telling everybody. I think that's maybe the first step too. Tell everyone. Tell everyone that'll listen. I told everyone. I was with great people. I would look for the right thinkers and stuff and like, this is what I'm thinking about, and here we are today. Take this step or talk to this person or get the feedback from these people, or go and share it over here, or whatever it might be. That's the very next step. The first step is tell everyone.

Anna-Marie:

Stretching into your own networks to find their networks.

David:

Exactly. Have your ambition behind it. Have the purpose behind it. Have your becoming behind it and see inside of it in the vulnerability of your becoming, because it's a vulnerable journey because you're not yet the person. You have to understand that you're not. You've got to put down all of the attachments, all of the judgements, all of the resistance about self, knowing that you know nothing. You have to come from this no, nothing state, and you have to start telling everyone so that you can be open enough, vulnerable enough to know that you don't know it, and you're there in a learning journey. That's why it's so hard for people, because they're vulnerable, because they believe it'll mean something about themselves. They believe that it'll mean that they're not smart or not good enough or whatever it is. I don't want to tell anyone because they might affirm that I don't know anything. That's most people's worst fear.

Anna-Marie:

Interesting. I guess is part of that then changing your perception of success and failure as you look, or did you just say, look, I'm going to fail at lots of parts of this as I grow this business?

David:

No. There's no failing. There's learning. There's learning, learning, learning, learning, learning. Growing, becoming, becoming, becoming, becoming, becoming. The self-actualized soul in the becoming. The journey is the destination. I mean, what's success? It's just such a lost conversation today because most people will say, I have accolade, or I have a big beautiful house. That's not it. It's not in thing, doesn't live there at all. The journey is the destination, period. Now is what I have. The beauty of it, the unfolding moment, the consciousness, the infinite space of it all.

Anna-Marie:

You've gone through this, you've embraced this difficult journey. How are you seeing that received? Your business is operating in multiple countries.

David:

Yeah, we're a multinational organisation. We're in countries around the world. We're Southeast Asia, we're North Africa, we're Latin America. We have offices around the world, we're hundreds and hundreds of staff, we're in the tens of millions in revenue. We've built an organisation that I'm immensely proud of. I'm more excited that my children are immensely proud of me. We've done all kinds of stuff. We've learned millions of consumer-facing products daily, and yet we're just beginning and there's so much to do. We've gathered some amazing organisations together.

We're ultimately gathering a community of those organisations who want to stand on the right side of history. The world's most progressive organisations that in spite of profitability, are acting for the good of humanity anyhow. It's conscious capitalism. This has to be a for-profit model. You also communicated a moment ago this, you brought up NGO. I'm struck. I'm going to the United Nations Environmental Assembly for Plastics at the end of the month in Paris. For-profit business is not invited. What? Exactly. What do you mean it's not invited?

Anna-Marie:

What? What do you mean it's not invited?

David:

What? You need to be an NGO? What? Are you kidding? That's the irony of it all.

Anna-Marie:

Do you know what? That's the crux of one of the biggest challenges within this sphere of trying to create a resilient and sustainable world. I keep finding that people are having conversations within their own subgroup when an actual fact, you need people across groups to be having conversations.

David:

Not soon. It's crazy. It's wrong.

Anna-Marie:

Everybody's got to get on the path.

David:

You need different thinking. Again, you've got to be vulnerable. You've got to open your soul. You got to be able to say, I don't know. I've got to be able to look. You need other opinions. Be able to look at self and go, "Oh, that I don't know yet. Oh, let's add that. What a different perspective." You see, I think that this challenge with this non-governmental organisation or charity, whatever we want to call it, to business, there's a fundamental where we both operate with a resource. We both start with a resource, and it's not scarce, it's abundant. We start with abundant resource, with cash, we'll call it. There's a perspective from the NGO that looks at it as being scarce.

They try to deplete it as slowly as possible while they make impact. Where an entrepreneur will look at that and go, "Oh, I'm going to multiply that as quickly as possible by making even more impact and self-perpetuate and not have to go back to the well." That's different than the NGO. That's why we're not going to find global solutions with NGOs because of the mindset. It's a thinking, and maybe it's not the thinking of the CEO, but the rest of the organisation thinks that way.

Anna-Marie:

Do you have a revenue problem or do you have a cost problem? You probably have a revenue problem.

David:

There's lots of that in that conversation. Again, that's also what I stand for. You see, these are things that I was learning in the process, the vulnerability of it, looking at things. Because how many people told me that I should be, "Oh, wow. Why are you a for-profit business? That's a dirty word." Well, no, it's not. Your interpretation of it, the meaning you place on it, your own, I don't know, traumas make you think that's the case, but it's not the way. In fact, we could certainly argue that it's biblical by nature as well, profit, money, generating, creating. It's a measurement of creation. It's a beautiful thing. Doing it at the expense of others for your own benefit, that's not maybe the most whole way to go about it.

With conscious capitalism or social capitalism or social entrepreneurship or whatever term you want to place on it, you can actually live in an abundant society where the more benefit you create for others, the more you share. Then when you're creating benefit for everyone, everyone wants you to win because their benefit becomes from you winning. It's amazing. Now you're building in a whole movement around you of everybody wanting everybody to win. That's available. It's not the public corporation that has to extract for the shareholder. That type of business has to change, that's for sure. Shareholder first at the expense of all others, that has to end.

Anna-Marie:

For others, people listening in, I think you've probably said it a little bit already, a systems thinking change that has to happen as you look at how businesses are interacting with people and people are interacting with businesses and how all of that's interacting with the planet.

David:

That's what I would touch on. I go back to, I like B Corp, I like the structure of B Corp for public company. Because right now, the fiduciary duty of the public company is shareholder return first. The duty of the CEO ultimately is to provide profit. It's not to provide good things for the world. In fact, if they did that, then they could be imprisoned if they act on behalf of the world first. It's possible. I mean, that's there. That is an actual mechanism for a CEO that would choose to do well in the world. Now, the B Corp provides the space to serve all of society.

Anna-Marie:

Well, and also maybe I think some of that conversation also is people not recognising the true costs of what they're doing. Profit in itself is not bad, but profit with half of the input costs missing is not true profit.

David:

No, it's not true profit.

Anna-Marie:

It's not resilient. It's not sustainable.

David:

Exactly.

Anna-Marie:

It's not how you're here in 25 years or 100 years.

David:

It's not long-term profit anyhow. Short-term thinking, that's the part of the challenge as well. There's all kinds of different things, but that's ego, mind attachment. I need money now. Like, most people live in the sense of salvation of the future. In the future then I'll have a new car. Or I'll pay off my mortgage, then I'll be happy. Or they live in their sense of identity. This is who I am. I'm identified as a rich person or whatever it is. They don't live presently. They don't live in the very moment of consciousness. They're making decisions in a place that don't exist. They don't have all the costs associated. They don't understand. Lots of this could certainly appear esoteric, but this is all the truth.

Anna-Marie:

Your story is an interesting one because it brings it down to, these are big thoughts, but then what is it you actually are doing? What you're doing is creating a business where people can use something that you didn't think of before to get what they need in an environment that actually is quite circular and quite helpful.

David:

Then there's so much more inside of what we do. I expressed that thinking, but plastic banks or bank branches, what we're really building is this monetary standard. It's a standard around the exchange of material resources that provides benefit as cash would. Consider yourself living in poverty. You've got no shoes. Your children don't have clothes, they're not in school. You have no power to come out of it, and yet you're incredibly resourceful because if you're not, you will die and the family die if you're not resourceful. You're resourceful, you're smart. You might not have an education, but you're smart.
You can figure things out and you can work hard and all the rest of it. How are you going to transcend that? Well, what I'm living into the world of it all is that the more frequently you just collect your own material. If you're consistent in collecting the material that you encounter, you don't have to go through the streets to go and gather. You can, of course. You can even make more doing that. If you just collect and return the material you encounter on a weekly basis with high quality, you earn credit inclusion. We can substantiate a credit worthiness. We know we can rely on you because every week for the last year or so, this is what you've been doing.

We know how much you bring in. At the press of a button, you can borrow money. That low interest rate, so that you can transcend your own part. You don't even need to apply. You press a button. Because we know that you're worthy, we know you come back to this location every week. We know what the quality of interaction is. We know that you actually invited other people into a different life as well. You invited people into change. Your stand for other people, you're very consistent and reliable. Now you can press a button. Now maybe it's a small business or whatever it might be, of which you also then just consistently return your material and you repay the loan with plastic.

Anna-Marie:

Interesting. The whole credit analysis is so interesting. Because we look at that on a macro level through things like sustainable finance. How do we incorporate different criteria into credit worthiness that previously hadn't? How do we incorporate GHG emissions and how companies are dealing with that? That's at this big micro level for big finance. You've taken it all the way into the crux of credit worthiness. Is this person going to be able to be responsible for their credit?

David:

We can see them from the work of Muhammad Yunus and Grameen, that they are.

Anna-Marie:

Default rates on those kinds of loans. You would kill for them in the commercial world and in the big institutional world.

David:

Exactly. Providing microfinance. Because of the delivery, it's very expensive. The African continent is approaching 40% interest rates. It's loan sharking. You see, this is an abundant mindset. It's like, "Oh, my goodness. Abundance for everyone." What occurs when there's abundance for everyone? Every household, every family, every mother, every father, everyone now has access to change their lives. They don't have to beg for it, ask for it, go to a loan shark for it. No, they're like this beautiful, dignified human. Then what else is available from a business model? What could we distribute through that, maybe? Maybe once we've really established this beautiful chain of souls, we can give them businesses.

Here's a business that you could launch where you are that will help affect your population. Maybe it's agriculture, maybe it's seed distribution, maybe it's prawn farming, which is very easy as well around the world. Who knows? How can I bring in more diversified protein sources into communities through a hole in the ground in prawn larva? Like what? Now you've got food to sell. It's so much that you could earn your way into changing society. It's remarkable. I mean, it's just so much deeper, and we're not just like, we talk about we're a collection ecosystem, a supply chain for plastic, but it's so much more.

Anna-Marie:

What are your plans?

David:

World domination. We talked about this. We have to keep growing. Ultimately, we continue to want to create a model that is exponential. Call that licencing. I don't know what to call it, but it's an exponential model that allows anyone else in the world to implement. That's what we want to do. We want to create the software platform for everyone. On a bigger scale, the way we're really driving the company today is to work in those nations that have created law around the extended producer responsibilities. That in those areas, we provide a software platform for a nation state that allows them to administer an EPR programme that results with economic development for the population.

Anna-Marie:

Interesting. That question of what you're doing in your supply chain is only going to get more and more relevant. Rules coming out of the EU at the moment are very focused on what what's happening.

David:

More and more. Become more and more stringent. We're trying to race ahead to create that platform that allows any producer, the clarity into the population as well, give them the ability to also share in the beauty that we create and the lives that we change so that they can be inspired about as well. Plus, within the blockchain, creating all of the authenticity, traceability, transparency, so they can see that the actual whatever, however you want to term their financial responsibility, is actually being administered appropriately, kept out of corruption. All of the beautiful things you see, it's abundant mindset. We try to work with the truth. That's the opportunity. Then as a result of that, the entire population benefits because now there's credit worthiness, inclusion, other entrepreneurial opportunities, all of it. Amazing. Plus, a clean country. Amazing.

Anna-Marie:

It's fascinating, because it's an on the ground, locally-led solution to something. You always hear, "Oh, I can't figure out where my plastic goes to. I can't get it back." I have to pay people for it and all of this. It turns that on the head and says, "Okay, this is why." In fact, this is the information we can sell you to help you in your process.

David:

Benefit, where do I give benefit for you? This is the thing. It's like, I look at how can I have you win? When it's win, win, win, win, win, win, win, it's a beautiful thing. Everyone wins. The collector wins. The consumer wins. The brand wins. The country wins. The environment wins. We win. The consumer wins. Even the plastic wins. It becomes new again. Everything wins.

Anna-Marie:

David, if you could provide listeners with one actionable takeaway, it's very interesting, because in some ways this is really like an entrepreneurial mindset. When you hear people talk to entrepreneurs, when you have entrepreneurs talk about how they've started things, they say, "I looked for the friction. I looked for something I thought wasn't going well, and I seized on that and came up with an idea to do it better." I don't know if you agree with that kind of mindset, but what do you think? One takeaway.

David:

Amen to that. That's gospel in the end. The obstacle and the path is the path. A beautiful book by Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way, and that truly is. Whatever you see as the obstacle, that obstacle is there for you and your path lies in the solving of that. In the looking of that. Whatever the obstacle is there for you, it's in your becoming. It's not even the solution or the solving of the problem, but who you become as you solve the problem. Back to the opening conversation here, I could choose to become the person who could change the world. That is readily available in seeing the obstacle as the way. Look for them. Whatever you don't want to do, that's what you need to do. That's the path, it's there. It's showing you.

Anna-Marie:

Having the grit to keep going with it.

David:

You go figure it out.

Anna-Marie:

Fascinating.

David:

Good.

Anna-Marie:

Well, David, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for all the insights of how you got onto your way and where your way is going and how others can think about their own empowerment.

David:

Thank you. We need everyone. The whole world needs to show up right now. This is about us. It's about us. We're an us company, and I don't know how to express it. It's not about Plastic Bank. That's not the us I'm talking about. I'm talking about us. You, me, every listener, us. It's us. It's up to us. You want change? It's up to us. We're not waiting for government or corporation. That's not going to do it. Us, join us. Join others. Find others who want to make change. Us. That's all there is.

Anna-Marie:

Brilliant. Thanks so much.

David:

Thank you.

Anna-Marie:

Thank you for listening. We hope you found our new series, Game Changers and Transition Makers Worthwhile. To learn more about the issues we've just covered, please visit ashurst.com/podcasts. This series follows on from our 30 for Net Zero 30 series, where we spoke with 30 leaders around the globe on actions to take now to deliver on 2030 goals. Make sure you don't miss any of our future episodes by subscribing via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please feel free to leave a rating or review. In the meantime, thanks again for listening, and goodbye for now.