The late, renowned scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall reminds us that we all have an impact on the world, but it’s up to us to choose if our impact is positive or negative. Goodall said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Let’s cooperate for the health of our planet and those who call Earth home.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

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Can the industry that taught the world to consume help us learn to consume more responsibly? Luke Purdy, Director of Sustainability at one of the world’s leading creative agencies, Wieden+Kennedy, is betting his career on it. After 13 years working on major accounts like Nike and Corona at one of the world’s most influential creative agencies, Purdy did something unusual: he wrote his own job description and asked to become the agency’s first sustainability director. Wieden+Kennedy gave him the job, and in 2023, the agency became the first global advertising network to achieve B Corp certification across all nine offices in seven countries. With brands spending over $700 billion annually on advertising worldwide, the messages agencies craft shape not just what people buy, but how they think about consumption itself.

Luke discusses how he sold sustainability as a business value proposition rather than a compliance issue, why he reports to the CFO instead of the CMO, and how Wieden+Kennedy’s carbon removal program for video productions is changing industry standards. He also tackles thorny questions about greenwashing that can guide which clients agencies should work with, arguing that guiding any company toward sustainability is better than refusing to engage. He shares lessons from helping transform Danish Oil and Natural Gas into Ørsted, one of the world’s leading renewable energy companies, and explains why authentic storytelling beats green leaves and clichés every time. Can advertising agencies avoid greenwashing while still growing their clients’ businesses? And what does it mean when sustainability becomes culture rather than just compliance?

You can learn more about Wieden+Kennedy’s sustainability work at wk.com.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on November 10, 2025.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:10

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability in Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today, and it’s one I particularly enjoy — talking to a young person. Well, actually, two of them, making a positive impact.

Textile waste has become one of the most stubborn problems in the American waste stream. Americans throw away roughly 17 million tons of clothing every year, and a great majority of it ends up buried in landfills, where natural fibers slowly decompose and release methane — a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Over a century, as things break down in a landfill, clothing is uniquely wasteful, because so much of what gets discarded is still perfectly usable, and it’s simply been outgrown, or it’s gone out of style, or fallen out of someone’s rotation.

And the environmental cost we pay is paid twice: once when a still-good garment is thrown away, and again when a brand-new one is manufactured to replace it, consuming water, energy, and raw materials in the process. And nowhere is that double cost more visible than with children’s school uniforms. Kids outgrow them on a predictable annual cycle, long before the clothing wears out. And for families on a tight budget, replacing a uniform every year is a recurring expense that arrives whether the household can afford it or not.

The result is a steady stream of good clothing headed for the trash and a parallel stream of families struggling to pay for its replacement — two problems that, looked at the right way, turn out to be each other’s solution. And our guests today saw that connection when they were still in middle school.

Ethan and Desmond Hua are the founders of HOPE — H-O-P-E — the HOPE Uniforms Program. HOPE stands for Help Our Planet Earth, a student-led nonprofit that they launched in 2020 in San Mateo, California. The idea was simple: collect gently used school uniforms that families had outgrown and redistribute them for free to families who need them.

What began in a single elementary school run out of the family garage has grown into an operation serving 10 schools across three districts, and to date, HOPE has kept more than 14,000 uniforms out of landfills, redistributed over 12,000 of them back to families, and served more than 1,400 households, saving those families an estimated $141,000 in clothing costs along the way.

The spark, as Ethan has said, was a single moment: a classmate came to school in shorts on a cold day because he couldn’t afford another pair of pants to last until laundry day. And from that, Ethan and Desmond built something with real operational sophistication — an online request system with a live inventory tracker, and a website in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese to reach every corner of his multilingual community. They’ve since secured a donation of 2,000 brand-new uniforms from Costco, and their work has earned Ethan a 2025 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, a Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award, and coverage on national television.

So we’re going to talk with Ethan and Desmond about what started it all, why reuse is one of the most underrated tools in the sustainability toolkit, and the environmental case for keeping a garment whole and in circulation rather than recycling or replacing it. We’ll dig into how they built a real logistics operation as teenagers and why they made the program multilingual from the start, as well as how they designed it so that asking for help feels routine rather than uncomfortable. And we’ll look ahead at what’s next for HOPE, and what they’d tell any listener sitting on an idea but waiting for money, permission, or someone else to go first.

So, to learn more, visit hopeuniformsprogram.com. That’s all one word, no space, no dash — hopeuniformsprogram.com. And if you’re a teen making a difference for the planet, check out the Barron Prize at barronprize.org. Again, all one word, no space, no dash — barronprize.org — to learn how to enter your work for recognition by the Gloria Barron Prize program.

Can a teenager with a garage, a good idea, and a little persistence really make a dent in two of our most intractable problems at once — textile waste and the cost of raising a family? Let’s find out, right after this.

Mitch Ratcliffe 4:30

Welcome to the show, Ethan and Desmond. Hey, introduce yourselves so people can recognize the difference.

Ethan Hua 4:42

Hi, I’m Ethan. I just graduated as a senior.

Desmond Hua 4:46

My name is Desmond, and I just finished my freshman year at Aragon High School.

Ethan Hua 4:51

And we’re the co-founders of the HOPE Uniforms Program, HOPE standing for Help Our Planet Earth.

Mitch Ratcliffe 4:56

You guys have done some amazing work already, and I just want to start off by — tell me about how this started. You saw a classmate come to school in shorts, and it was a cold day, and he was wearing them because they couldn’t afford a pair of pants until laundry day. What went through your mind, and how did you come to the conclusion, “I can solve that problem”?

Desmond Hua 5:13

Well, I guess what went through our minds was that when we were in elementary school, when we saw our friends, we realized that we outgrow so much clothes ourselves when we grew up, and we wondered, what do we do with them when we outgrow them? So when we went — how do…

Ethan Hua 5:27

…they go?

Desmond Hua 5:28

Yeah, like to—

Ethan Hua 5:29

Narnia. Like, some place.

Desmond Hua 5:33

Yeah. So when we went home, we talked to our parents, and we asked them, where does our clothes go? And they said we used to just throw them away, don’t usually have a better purpose. So me and my brother wanted to give them a new life, something to reuse those uniforms, and so we actually founded HOPE around five years ago.

Ethan Hua 5:54

One of the biggest travesties that we saw in these uniforms is that they’re very reusable, they’re gently used, there’s nothing wrong with them, and it’s a shame that, with this little time that we spent with the uniform, they’re going thrown away — when they’re able to be perfectly used and given a second life. In fact, we tell that these uniforms not only have a second life in them, but a third life and a fourth life as well, and because of that, it just seemed like a shame to be tossed away after one single use.

Mitch Ratcliffe 6:23

You picked the name “Help Our Planet Earth,” but this program obviously does something else. It helps families just as much as the planet. Which did you really feel like was the right focus at the time you launched?

Desmond Hua 6:34

I think the main focus at first was our community, because we, you know, grew up in the elementary school. But then at the same time our mission was also helping the earth, because this cause not only impacted the community, but also took out over 40 tons of textile waste from the landfills — 40 metric tons of textile waste, or 30, 30 metric tons of textile waste out of the landfills. So we wanted to cover both aspects while we’re doing HOPE.

Ethan Hua 7:06

So yes — when we first addressed this problem, the community, it was based on a problem that we experienced, that we witnessed from peers. However, we did act, because we’re Scouts, and we’ve been part of the Scouting program since kindergarten, so we have a lot of sustainability virtues instilled in us, like Leave No Trace principles, and we thought that there’s something we can give back to the environment.

Mitch Ratcliffe 7:33

Clothing reuse, thrift shopping, is a big deal these days. Is clothing reuse gaining traction? Is it becoming cool to say these clothes are being reused? Or is that still a point of resistance in people who you might give a uniform to?

Ethan Hua 7:48

I think that there’s, in the youth, there’s a little disparity, but I guess between the youth and the more grown-up adults. We live — me and Desmond live — 10 minutes away from San Francisco, and some people don’t know this, but San Francisco is one of the thrifting capitals of the nation, and because of that, it’s very trendy. I thrift. A lot of kids love thrifting as a hobby; it’s something fun to do on the weekends, so there’s nothing wrong with thrifting. However, there are certain stigmas surrounding getting used clothes, and it’s understandable.

However, to combat that, what we do is, once we get our donations from the community, we process them, we check them for any rips, stains, tears, make sure they’re gently used. We want these families to have — we want these uniforms to have — many, many lives, not just one life or two. We’re in for the long, the long sustainable impact, long-term impact. Because of that, we check them, and what we pride ourselves in is ensuring that our families are repeat customers.

So we get all our uniforms from families all across the community — we get them from families who no longer need to use their uniforms — so we receive them through donation bins in each of our partner schools’ offices. We drop them off in these wooden bins that we’ve built, and then once we take these uniforms back, we process them, we do the check, as I said. And on our website, a family would request, okay, I need three articles of size-medium white polo tops. And our website is multilingual, because we serve a very diverse customer base across the community, across the Bay Area.

And on these websites we see, okay, this family at so-and-so school needs this amount of uniforms at this size. Let’s go check our inventory — a spreadsheet of all the uniforms we have in our inventory. Currently, we have roughly 2,000; it’s all sitting in our garage. And then we refill this order, we put it in the bag, we drop it off to the school, and these families would receive them. And, say, it’s probably six months down the line, hopefully: they wear the uniforms, they take good care of them, and they outgrow them, and at this point they’re back at stage one. The family goes, “Hey, at least out of four, I have these uniforms that they’ve outgrown — what do I do with them?” And they send it back to us.

So because of that, we want to make sure these uniforms are kept very nice, they’ve been spot-checked, so the families are happy with their services and they will reuse us in the future, thereby forming an eco-friendly cycle — a long-term sustainability impact.

Mitch Ratcliffe 10:31

So, by getting them involved in the return process too, you’re also reinforcing the value of reuse, and that makes it feel more normal to them to get what would, in earlier generations, be described as hand-me-downs. Does that activation of their concern about the planet play a big part in that messaging?

Ethan Hua 10:49

We try to include that message — we do include that messaging in all our announcements. That’s one of our main selling points. However, it’s hard to beat the word “free” when it comes to advertising to the community, especially when it’s across different cultures or languages — Spanish, Chinese, and English. It’s a lot more direct to say, hey, we have free uniforms that are reused through our program, and it’s a really cool benefit that we prevent them from going to landfills. One of our most proud statistics, actually — Des, you might want to share the statistics. Yeah, okay. So the reason why I’m sharing this with you is that, since inception, we have diverted roughly 14,900 garments from landfills and given back out to the community roughly 12,700 uniforms. Desmond, do you want to share our most proud statistics that sprung up from that?

Desmond Hua 11:45

So I think we’ve roughly also helped around 1,400 families, and we’ve also saved families around $140,000 through uniforms, so they don’t have to keep buying uniforms over and over as they grow up. Also, the methane equivalent to carbon emissions is around 3,000 kilograms, and, as I said, the 30 metric tons is saved from the landfills through HOPE’s Uniform Program, and those are some of our proudest statistics.

Ethan Hua 12:16

When we — so this is our message to the community — when we usually talk about HOPE, we mention the 30 to 30,000 methane-equivalent carbon emissions avoided from landfill diversion. So when uniforms reach landfills, what someone might ask is, why are they so harmful to the atmosphere? The answer to that question is that when they sit in these landfills, over time they decompose — first goes the cotton, then go the poly fibers, the plastics — and throughout the years it takes for a uniform garment to decompose, it releases harmful greenhouse gases, such as methane. Especially methane: methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide to our atmosphere, and throughout these many years it just releases more and more of these gases, and it builds up, adding to the greenhouse effect, warming up our planet.

Mitch Ratcliffe 13:08

Both of you have articulated a number of benefits and a number of the concerns that people should be aware of. You mentioned that “free” is the driving force in a lot of this — the messaging, and the reuse generally. When you think about how your generation is growing up in a world where it’s very difficult to be unaware of the environmental consequences of our life, are we beginning to see a change in their relationship with materials like clothing that you see as promising for a more sustainable economy?

Desmond Hua 13:42

I feel like I would say so, because — I think not just here, but around the world — there’s many ways people are trying to find ways to reuse, recycle, and, right, there’s like new methods, and, I guess, new technology now that we’re able to access, to find ways to reduce carbon emissions and make things more eco-friendly.

Ethan Hua 14:07

Just to specify your question — are you asking, is the next generation more willing to reuse?

Mitch Ratcliffe 14:13

More willing to reuse, but also, to what Desmond was just saying — are we also seeing a generation grow up that recognizes they have tools to do things with material that we weren’t able to do before? When I was growing up, there was a garbage can and there was nothing else. Now there’s a recycling bin too. How do you imagine the world will be configured to support what your generation recognizes it needs to do with regard to reuse, with creating a circular economy?

Ethan Hua 14:42

I think, of course, we’re a lot more well-equipped to deal with the climate crisis, and, more importantly, a lot of people are a lot more aware. For example, we know a lot about the textile world because we run a uniform organization. But one thing that we’ve noticed has taken on in the industry is that a lot more fabrics have been developed to become more eco-friendly, such as hemp. Hemp is a little coarse of a fabric, so… very comfortable, but it’s all plant-based. Well, it’s a lot more plant-based than just microfibers and plastics, and it’s very durable as well, and it seems like that could be a possible trend, and something that the textile industry is going towards in the future. So, trends like that — just seeing things like that — it’s very encouraging to see that there are good people concerned about our future and thinking of keeping that in mind.

Mitch Ratcliffe 15:48

So, you’ve run this out of your family’s garage, as you said, but you’ve also built an inventory management system. Tell us about how you learned to run an operation like this, because that’s another key to unlocking the potential your generation has to make a really massive difference in the way the economy runs.

Desmond Hua 16:06

I think, in the beginning, in order to talk to families and reach out to families, we actually had to do a really slow system where we just had to email back and forth. We realized, you know, if we want the operation to grow or to improve, it would require a much more mechanical process. So I think we started to use a spreadsheet, taking everything that came in, managing how much of each uniform we have, roughly, and what we’re giving out. So, like, we have a spreadsheet of our entire inventory, and even when we do orders to give out to families, we keep track of everything we give out. So I think, in order for us to have a mechanical process and to know what we have and how much we can help the families, and remove gas emissions — that’s how the spreadsheet would really help, because it just keeps everything in track.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:11

So, how do you deliver the uniform once you have that need identified? Is it — you hand it to them, or do they pick it up?

Desmond Hua 17:21

So we actually drop it off at their school’s front office, and they can just pick it up at the school.

Ethan Hua 17:29

We send them an announcement to come pick it up, as well as the school does, to their emails.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:33

So, is it getting easier with the new tools — the vibe-coding tools and things like that — for you to start to solve some of these problems? Have you explored them?

Ethan Hua 17:42

Oh, yeah. We have automation. We have, like, automated emails to the families that, yes, your order is in queue, it’s coming up, we’re working on it, and we have ways to let them know that, yeah, your order is ready for pickup. And social media is a very great tool for that — we use Instagram. Follow us on our HOPE Uniforms Program Instagram. It’s a very good way to let families know en masse. And one thing that I’d like to add to Desmond’s point: in our journey of collecting uniform orders from families, originally in 2020 when we started this program, we were doing it by email — literally one-on-one email chains, so we’re managing 50 email chains at once, which was very logistically challenging. On top of that, we’re receiving emails not even in English — we’re in Chinese, in Vietnamese, in Spanish — so, using Google Translate, it was just a lot of steps to take to get to the final product of getting the uniforms to the family.

Desmond Hua 18:47

Yeah.

Ethan Hua 18:47

And because of that, we set up this multilingual website to help us address the multilingual, cultural diversity in our community, which was very helpful.

Mitch Ratcliffe 18:57

I guess the question I want to get to before we take a quick commercial break is: do you think the satisfaction that both of you are expressing about the impact you’re having — as well as the satisfaction people have in participating in the program — is the catalyst for jump-starting thousands of local programs to solve thousands of different problems across the country? Like keeping uniforms in circulation, but potentially collecting a lot of other things for reuse?

Ethan Hua 19:23

Is it worth it? Is that your question?

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:24

Is this the kind of thing that can inspire people to solve local problems? Do you have a template here for a solution to jump-starting the circular economy in the many small places it needs to happen?

Ethan Hua 19:38

I think it matters — or, I think true sustainability is very hard to reach. When I hear the word “sustainability” nowadays, I think of words like gourmet and adventure. What do I mean by that? So, if you look at the Merriam-Webster definition of adventure, you see it connotes risk-taking and danger, yet when you go on adventure travel, it’s rarely ever dangerous. And for gourmet — if you eat a gourmet burger at a restaurant, sometimes it’s not even that tasty, yet it’s still labeled as gourmet. Same thing with sustainability. When you hear the word “sustainability” — sustainability buildings, for example — yes, they might be carbon-neutral, yet the process to get these net-carbon-zero buildings, it’s not sustainable, like all the building practices; it takes a lot of energy and resources to get that building to energy perfection, as you could say.

And likewise, in the real world, achieving true sustainability is very, very hard, and clothing is one of these things that we noticed could have a cyclical life cycle, and being able to be reused for these many, many life cycles. Again, we’re long-term impact; it’s something that you could reuse many times, not just one or two. So, yes, I think that we are jump-starting and inspiring a lot of grassroots efforts in achieving these reuse programs. Not everything can be reused, though. However, the idea, and getting it into people’s minds, is, I think, the biggest, most important part.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:16

And then we’ll start to solve problems. So, this is a great conversation. I want to take a quick commercial break. Folks, we’re going to be right back to continue the conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:28

Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. Let’s continue the discussion with Ethan and Desmond Hua, who created Help Our Planet Earth, or HOPE — a clothing reuse program that helps teens in need while reducing the volume of textile waste headed for landfill. And Ethan was a 2025 winner of the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes. Ethan, what has that recognition — as well as the Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award that you won — done for the program? Are you getting more attention now?

Ethan Hua 21:55

Yes, we are getting more attention. The biggest thing this exposure has helped us with is that it gives us credibility to talk to new schools, and then it’s just really helpful, because when we first started this program, we started with one school — me and Desmond’s elementary school — and we started by announcing it just to the couple of families at our school, saying that we have this program available, it’d be pretty cool for the environment and for other families, if you could help out. And now, instead, with this exposure to the Gloria Barron Prize and Samaritan House, and our interviews on ABC, NBC — it just helps us a lot, because schools were like, okay, these guys are legit, they’re really in the business of helping the community, they’ll do their job, and they’ve been verified by all these organizations. And because of that, it’s all the easier to spread and make a bigger impact on the community.

Mitch Ratcliffe 22:55

So, how big can this get before you outgrow your garage, and your parents say, “Look, that’s just too many uniforms”?

Ethan Hua 23:02

Well, I would say — I’m not exactly sure about the limit, that’s a good question. Yeah, it’s certainly going to reach a limit, and I think the beauty about HOPE is that anyone can do it. Yes, me and Desmond, we do have backgrounds in scouting, and we have strong sustainability virtues, however, that does not make us that unique, and students like us could take on the program. And in the long term, what I think would be great is if we could spread HOPE to other districts — like, other districts beyond what we can manage — and we’ll have HOPE in another garage.

Desmond Hua 23:47

Yeah.

Ethan Hua 23:48

And then maybe another one. And I think that is what makes HOPE — I think that is the biggest impact that HOPE could have: it’s not, of course, only the environmental impact of diverting uniforms from landfills and saving them from decomposing into the atmosphere, but it’s also putting the idea in other kids’ minds that they could do something as well. And I see a lot of kids in the Bay Area having a lot of reuse programs, like saving food waste, or other service projects in parks. I think that’s very, very powerful — just the fact that you’re doing it, and you’re telling other people about it. It puts the idea in kids’ minds, saying, I could do something like that as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe 24:29

Well, you’re also creating new communities by connecting different lingual groups — you do English, Spanish, Mandarin on the site right now. As you think about the various communities you serve and the reuse challenges that are emerging all around you — the Bay Area being a hotspot for a variety of new trends in the world — how would you use a multilingual website and other services to help people understand what they could do together to solve some of our environmental problems?

Ethan Hua 25:00

So what we like to do is fully contextualize the problem. It’s very important for families to understand that this is an issue, in order for them to fully appreciate their usage of our services. Going back to our number-one most serious statistic — the 30 metric tons of carbon emissions prevented through uniform reuse — we tell families this. We need to fully explain what goes behind that 30 metric tons. So that 30 metric tons represents the 12,700 uniforms that we’ve given back to the community; this represents all the carbon that would have gone into making 12,700 uniforms, but was saved because they used one that was pre-existing. So this carbon waste includes — when we try to calculate a rough estimate — all the carbon used through all the land that it takes to grow the cotton for these uniforms, all the water that was used to grow the cotton, all the pesticides, all the chemical dyes used to dye the uniforms, the energy that goes into making it in the factory, and all the car emissions that are emitted through that, the transportation costs to the store. It’s a long laundry list of all the things that go into making a uniform. Although it’s a lot of carbon going into a uniform, just a rough estimate, it adds up — it does make a really sizable difference when you add up all the 12,000 uniforms. And it’s important to tell the families that, because if they don’t understand what it means to reuse the uniform, then they won’t understand the true impact of their actions, and I want them to appreciate it.

Mitch Ratcliffe 26:48

Well, so that’s really what I’m getting at. Are there other areas where you can see being able to tell that story in a variety of languages, rather than just in English, which shuts out a lot of people, that we could start to activate within many communities a lot of different circular cycles? Not just uniforms, but maybe school supplies that go unused, and so forth. Have you thought about what else HOPE could eventually manage within the circular economy?

Desmond Hua 27:16

Definitely, I think so. Actually, recently I’ve been trying to expand to some schools in San Jose. They actually do especially have a need for uniforms, and seeing that, I think it’s definitely a school that would appreciate getting free uniforms. And seeing that, I think if we showed them the true meaning of what we’re trying to aim for — which is helping, or helping Planet Earth — I think the families would be more willing to, first of all, help with the eco cycle, which is donating back to HOPE, where we can, and then we can give back to them. So it’s like a process. So, but yes, there’s definitely schools around here that would appreciate HOPE.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:06

Now, Ethan, you’ve said that meaningful change doesn’t take a lot of resources or institutional backing — just an idea and the willingness to act. For someone who’s listening, who has an idea but assumes that they need a lot of money or some permission to get started, what would you tell them?

Ethan Hua 28:23

I remember when me and Desmond started, we were very, very scared talking to adults in that moment, but deep down, we knew what we were doing was good. It was good for the community. It was going to be a benefit for the community and the environment. We didn’t have any doubt about that. Our biggest fear was that, right now, we’re just going to say the wrong thing and embarrass ourselves, but deep down we knew that it was an ultimate good — there’s no way that it couldn’t be an ultimate good for the community. And I think most people do understand: if they’re trying to launch an initiative, and it truly is a net benefit for the community, I think people deep down know what’s good, and I would say, keep pushing on that feeling.

Mitch Ratcliffe 29:21

If a student wanted to start something like HOPE in their own district, where would you point them, so they could take a first step? What did you learn that allowed you to confidently pursue that vision you just described?

Ethan Hua 29:35

It’s like — you want to foster your idea in an environment where you know it will succeed. At first, you always want to start strong, you always want to start in a community where you understand your community 100%. So we started ours in our elementary school. We knew the principal, we spoke Chinese — it was a Chinese-immersion school — so we knew that we could address this community. And I want everyone to address their own community at first. Help your community first, make sure it survives — sorry, let me say, make sure it survives, make sure it grows — until you can expand to other areas that you know can be helped.

Mitch Ratcliffe 30:21

Knowing a community is something that a lot of brands wish they could do, and you managed to get Costco to give you 2,000 new uniforms. How did that relationship emerge, and is that potentially a pointer to the new relationships you could build in order to take HOPE to the next level?

Desmond Hua 30:40

Well, what we did with Costco is, both of us actually reached out to the CEO, Ron Vachris, and we asked him if, in our local Costco area, they had any extra uniforms they could possibly donate to us.

Mitch Ratcliffe 30:57

Wait — so you sent an email to the CEO of Costco?

Desmond Hua 31:00

So what we did is, we actually reached out to Ron Vachris, the CEO of Costco, and we told him that we had such a low supply of uniforms at that time, and for—

Ethan Hua 31:11

—the back-to-school season. Yeah, our most popular demand season is back-to-school.

Desmond Hua 31:16

Yeah, so we reached out to him asking if he had any extra uniforms he could possibly donate to HOPE’s Uniform Program, and he actually responded saying yes, he does have surplus inventory. And so—

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:31

—I think that’s a nervy move, but boy, congratulations.

Desmond Hua 31:35

Thank you. Yeah, both of us. Yeah.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:37

That says a lot about the potential for an initiative like yours to make a difference in the world.

Desmond Hua 31:44

Yes, that actually does show — when you try to reach out, and when you have a good cause, whether it’s in the community or in the world, I think reaching out to people who could help you is definitely a thing that — it’s like an opportunity for you to expand and to improve the initiative, or your passion.

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:05

Ethan, you’ve just graduated from high school. What’s next for you?

Ethan Hua 32:10

So, in the fall, I’ll be attending Wharton at UPenn. And I think, if there’s one thing I’d like people to know about me, it’s that I enjoy addressing unmet needs in the community with self-sustaining solutions. With HOPE, I’ve done that; and in my work at the San Mateo–Foster City School District, I built a repository of Eagle Scout projects in order to create an outlet for schools to get their service projects out to the community, and to help other scouts like us find their Eagle Scout projects. By the way, an Eagle Scout project is the final step a scout can take in their scouting journey to achieve the rank of Eagle, which is the highest rank.

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:55

Desmond, what are your plans? I mean, you’ve got a couple more years of high school, but what are you thinking about doing?

Desmond Hua 33:00

Well, first of all, for HOPE, I think my mission is to keep expanding HOPE into further areas — even though I may not be as familiar with the communities, I want to reach out to as many people and families as I’m able to help, beyond the San Mateo–Foster City School District. I guess outside of HOPE, I would also love to continue Boy Scouts as the senior patrol leader this year. The senior patrol leader is basically — it’s like a CEO; not CEO, club president — yeah, the highest rank.

Ethan Hua

I’m very proud of Desmond.

Desmond Hua

Yeah, yeah. So I think — he’s been a senior patrol leader, and I’m going to be one this year, so being in that position, leading younger scouts and showing them the right path, I think that’s going to be a really fun experience. That’s what I’m looking forward to this year, too.

Mitch Ratcliffe 33:52

So, Ethan, you’re going to business school, and based on what both of you are saying, leadership is really that instigator of the change that you want to see in the world. Is business the primary lever that you see as our opportunity for change?

Ethan Hua 34:07

Yes. In fact, I think that business is going to be the discipline that helps push the world to be more sustainable. If you think about it, all too often the careers that attack the climate crisis are very siloed — for example, politicians in their chambers, engineers in their labs, or lawmakers in their courts — but all too often these disciplines are not very interconnected and working together in unity to address these issues. And I think that business is something that — its profit is what connects all these efforts together. It’s what pushes people to attempt to create a greener world: financial incentives. Okay, let me give you an example: the solar panel industry. Families would be less incentivized to purchase a solar panel for their home if they didn’t understand that it would save them money in the long term. Because they understand that solar panels will save them money on their electricity bills, they’re like, okay, not only does it save me money, but it’s also a lot greener for the planet. So because people have that — it’s an example of the power of financial incentives to motivate people to join sustainable causes. I think that’s why that cause and effect is what interests me in pursuing business.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:31

Do you see that as the pursuit of vast wealth, or distributed prosperity?

Ethan Hua 35:38

Distributed prosperity. I think that financial incentives are what’s going to push sustainable efforts, and that’s kind of how HOPE is founded upon, too — free uniforms for families who then don’t have to go out and spend roughly $100 a year per child, with the added benefit that it saves landfill waste.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:02

So obviously there’s a lot of opportunity in front of you, and for HOPE. What are you thinking about growing into, and where can people find out how to donate, or to request uniforms, or maybe just make a contribution to help make this bigger?

Desmond Hua 36:18

I think just helping out HOPE in general. First of all, donating to HOPE is a really big thing. Contacting HOPE — of course, we have a multilingual website, so visiting that, we have all the info on where to donate, where to request. But I think also what we’re trying to aim for is expanding into bigger schools, where we reach out with HOPE, with our mission, to help out families that, like you said, need uniforms, so they don’t have to spend that $100 to $200 every single year.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:57

So, Ethan, how can people track what you all are doing and get involved?

Ethan Hua 37:01

Follow our Instagram, @hopeuniformsprogram. Stay on our website; we update our statistics there. You can find out a lot more about how we started this, where we are, and why we do what we do, on our website. We provide it so that families across the community, no matter what language they speak, can understand us — understand our story, understand our passion, our mission.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:27

Congratulations, gentlemen, to both of you, for an immense good that you have brought into the world. And I wish you both the greatest success in the future. And Ethan, enjoy Wharton.

Ethan Hua 37:38

Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:46

Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Ethan and Desmond Hua. They are brothers who founded the HOPE Uniforms Program. HOPE is short for Help Our Planet Earth, and that’s a student-led nonprofit that collects gently used school uniforms and redistributes them free to families who need them. You can learn more about their work at hopeuniformsprogram.com. That’s all one word, no space, no dash — hopeuniformsprogram.com.

And if you know a teenager doing this kind of work, the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes is something you should point out to them. Ethan was recognized by the program last year, and you can learn more about the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes at barronprize.org. Again, all one word, no space, no dash — barronprize.org, and Barron has two R’s.

The circular economy won’t be built only in boardrooms and at pilot plants; it will also grow from the grassroots, in garages like the one we’ve heard about today. That happens when people recognize human needs and take steps to address them. Ethan and Desmond started HOPE in 2020 while they were still in middle school, after a classmate showed up in shorts on a cold day. That’s a failure of material flows, in the same sense as when a species within an ecosystem struggles because something further up or down the food chain is disrupted.

Ethan kept returning to the idea that the highest-value thing you can do with a uniform is keep it whole and keep it in use, flowing through the economy. Keep the garment in circulation, and you can avoid a variety of environmental impacts, including the water used to grow the cotton, the pesticides, the oil drilled to create the synthetic textiles, the dyes, the factory energy, and the freight emissions produced simply by transporting a uniform to the store. We’ve trained a generation to feel good about the recycling bin, but reuse sits a rung above recycling, and textiles are only the clearest case for it. Americans throw away something like 17 million tons of clothing every year, most of it still wearable.

HOPE’s answer to that isn’t a new material or a chemical process; it’s a reverse-logistics system — a community solution based on a phone number and a website — that keeps uniforms in use. And you’ll note that HOPE is building a closed loop, not a one-way consumption model. That’s an important shift. Families request uniforms through the website; the uniforms come back when kids outgrow them; and the brothers spot-check and then reissue them for another use.

Ethan and Desmond built in the return mechanism, and that’s important. It’s a blocker that many big players are running into. Think back a couple of weeks ago to my conversation with Amy Fernandez and Zach Lauer of Trex, the synthetic decking company. They struggle to recapture material because contractors don’t want to separate old Trex decking from the sprues and connectors used to make the deck in the first place. HOPE started by making returns routine and building a solution for getting the material back, and then communicating about the services in three languages, so that no family is shut out. They also refuse to treat what they’re doing as charity, focusing on raising the service experience for families, which is the basis for long-term engagement and long-term behavior change.

Ethan said his goal is distributed prosperity, and that echoes the idea shared by many of our guests, that sustainability can be a profitability lever rather than a cost center, even while creating social benefits. Ethan’s pitch is that HOPE is replicable — a model that other communities can use. As he said, anyone can do it, and the dream is HOPE in another garage, and then another. And I think Desmond’s comment that the biggest impact isn’t the uniforms diverted, it’s putting the idea in another kid’s head that they could do this too — that’s an important point. We can spread this virally. We’re building the systems for the next generation, not the last.

When I was growing up, there was a garbage can, and nothing else — no recycling bin, no curbside pickup. The recycling system that we know today, the one that we take for granted, didn’t exist even within living memory. It’s going to be built again by another generation, piece by piece, by people who start small and local and don’t wait for permission to do so. And, of course, we have to acknowledge this: the scale of challenges and adverse environmental impacts faced by this generation is daunting. But every system we now treat as permanent was once somebody’s improbable idea, run out of a garage, a church, a basement, or a classroom.

What Ethan and Desmond have proven at the scale of San Mateo County is that circular economies are waiting for people willing to do the unglamorous work of moving material back to where it’s needed. Ethan heads off to Wharton this fall with a thesis already tested in the field: the belief that business is a lever for prosperity. And that’s the important point. We’ll be watching where they take HOPE, and who copies them.

And if this conversation gave you something to think about, please share it with a young person in your life who’s sitting on a great idea. You folks are the amplifiers to spread more ideas and create less waste, and I hope you’ll take a moment to share one of the more than 550 episodes in our archive to help others get up to speed on recycling, circularity, and sustainable business. Please point your friends, family, coworkers, and the people you meet on the street to Sustainability in Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer, and if you take a moment to leave a rating or review, that will go a long way toward helping others find the show.

Thanks for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability in Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and, of course, let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

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