Forests are vital for people everywhere. They cover about 4.14 billion hectares, roughly a third of the world’s land, and store 714 gigatons of carbon. They also support 80% of land-based biodiversity. However, we are losing 11 million hectares each year to deforestation, and the World Bank expects demand for forest-based products to rise by 400% by 2050. Many industries, from construction to textiles and automotive, are turning to wood fiber to replace fossil-based materials. Yet, a 2023 Circularity Gap Report found that over 90% of materials entering the global economy come from nature and end up in landfills. This approach is not sustainable. If we do not change how we use and reuse fiber, forests will be depleted faster than they can recover.
Today’s guest, Loa Dalgaard Worm, leads the Forest Stewardship Council’s Circularity Hub. This innovation team, launched in 2023, is updating a certification system that was originally designed for a linear economy 30 years ago. Her team is working to add circular business models, like take-back, repair, and leasing, to FSC’s chain-of-custody standard, which already includes 70,000 companies worldwide. They are also creating a framework to certify agricultural leftovers, such as wheat straw, rice husks, and coffee chaff, as alternative fibers for pulp-based products. This helps reduce the need for new forest fiber.
Loa’s boldest idea is a royalty system that would pay forest owners a small fee each time fiber from their forest is reused or recycled into a new product. Currently, forest owners are paid only once, when they harvest a tree, and do not receive ongoing rewards for protecting ecosystems, conserving biodiversity, or supporting communities. Companies buying recycled fiber would pay for verified origin data, which they increasingly need to meet the EU Deforestation Regulation and other international standards. The pieces for this plan are coming together. FSC already runs FSC Trace, a blockchain-based traceability platform, and works with World Forest ID on isotope testing that can identify a fiber’s origin within about 15 kilometers. They also partner with esri to improve earth observation capabilities.
“We used to be able to do this,” Loa says about circularity, pointing out that remembering old habits, not just inventing new ones, is key to sustainability. “Our parents knew how to repair things. My grandmother knew how to mend all of her clothes.” FSC’s circularity work is focused on rebuilding the systems needed to help us relearn how to reuse and repair on a large scale. Loa hopes to test the royalty system within two years and present it to FSC’s General Assembly for discussion by 2029. The big question is whether institutions and markets will move quickly enough to protect forests. To learn more about the FSC Circularity Hub, visit fsc.org/circularity or email the team at circularity@fsc.org.
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on 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 we’re going to talk forests, wood fiber, and the circular economy. The world’s forests cover about 4.14 billion hectares, which is about a third of all the land on Earth. And they store 714 gigatons of carbon, support 80% of land-based biodiversity, and supply materials for everything from buildings to delivery boxes. The World Bank projects a 400% increase in demand for forest-based products by 2050, driven by the shift away from fossil-based materials. And at the same time, the Circularity Gap Report shows that more than 90% of materials entering the global economy are still virgin. Even as we look to forests to replace plastics, steel, and concrete, we’re losing an additional 11 million hectares a year to deforestation.
The Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, is the best-known certification program for responsible forest management. FSC-certified forests now cover more than 171 million hectares in nearly 90 countries, and the system is unique because it gives equal say to environmental groups, social organizations like indigenous peoples and trade unions, as well as economic interests such as timber companies and retailers. For 30 years, FSC has focused on one main question: Where does this wood come from?
Today’s guest, Loa Dalgaard Worm, leads the Forest Stewardship Council’s Circularity Hub. This is a new innovation team launched in 2023 that explores what happens to timber after it leaves the forest, and how we can keep it in use longer to reduce pressure on our natural ecosystems. Loa has been with the FSC for over 18 years, working in both national and global roles. As director of FSC Denmark, she grew the group from 12 members to 140 companies and NGOs, and helped raise public awareness for FSC from almost unknown to 65% recognition amongst Danish consumers. She also played a big part in FSC’s digital transformation, and now she leads a team working on what may be FSC’s most ambitious project since it first started chain-of-custody certification—that is, redesigning a system made for a linear economy so that it works in a circular one. She also hosts the Forest for the Future podcast, which I urge you to check out. She talks with experts about topics like verifying the origin of fiber products and how the EU taxonomy affects green finance.
The Circularity Hub has published two papers with new proposals that are a first for FSC. One idea is a royalty system that would pay forest owners over time as the fibers from their forest are reused and recycled through many product life cycles. Companies would fund this by paying for verified origin data to meet ESG and regulatory needs. FSC also wants to certify reused and repaired forest products—not just recycled ones—using another new label. They’re also creating a voluntary set of tools to help companies determine if they’re using high-quality wood fiber for disposable packaging that might be better used in construction or furniture, amongst other things.
We’ll talk with Loa about how certification systems created 30 years ago for responsible extraction can change to support circular material flows, and how the royalty system’s financial model will track fibers through many product life cycles and across complex supply chains involved in the modern production environment. We’ll also look at how these proposals fit with new EU circular economy laws and delays to the EU Deforestation Regulation. Finally, we’ll discuss whether FSC can ensure fair access for forest owners in the Global South, or if it might end up mainly helping larger operations in the Nordic countries and North America.
You can learn more about the FSC Circularity Hub by visiting fsc.org/circularity. And if you’d like to contact the team, you can email them at circularity@fsc.org. So, can the world’s most trusted forest certification system become the foundation for a circular bioeconomy, and can it do it quickly enough to make a big difference? Let’s find out right after this quick commercial break.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:50
Welcome to the show, Loa. How you doing today?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 4:52
Thank you, and I’m doing really well. The sun is out for the first time in a very long time in a very frozen Nordic. I’m in Denmark, so it’s really cold here these days. And we can feel spring coming around the corner, good.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:07
We’re in the middle of our first snow here in Southern Oregon. So I envy you that you’ve already had winter and are about to exit. I think we’re entering it.
Let me start off with this question, kind of to set the stage. The Forest Stewardship Council was built 30 years ago for a linear economy. You wanted to track responsible extraction and use of wood fiber, and you have these consumer-facing labels on paper and other products that a lot of our listeners are familiar with. But what I wanted to know is, how is the organization and its membership changing as you enter the era of circular economies of wood fiber?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 5:38
I don’t really think that I would call it changing. I would more call it evolving. Actually, the mission of FSC is the same as it’s always been. We want to safeguard the forests of this world for the present and future generations. So as consumption increases and more and more of us are looking towards forests, we need to make sure that we can still keep that promise, and that means having to add new services to the FSC systems, new business models, new tools, so that we can ensure that fiber stays in use for longer, so that we can get to a stage where we are not over-utilizing our forests, but we have healthy ecosystems, and that the people that depend on forests are thriving too.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:23
Talk a little more about making fiber go longer. Each time we use or reuse fiber, it gets shorter and so less resilient and able to support the use. What does that look like in practice? Now, how are we reusing fiber, and where do you think we’re taking it?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 6:39
Well, there’s not one way, because reuse of fiber is going on in so many different industries. So it can be anything from the paper industry, where you would normally dissolve the pulp—so you would dissolve the paper, and then you would make it into this very wet mass that you can then add new wood fibers to, and then you can create new paper. And on average, you can do that 17 times in a row before the fiber becomes too short.
Essentially, in other areas, like in the construction sector, you could take the wood element just as it is and reuse it. So instead of recycling it and taking it through a whole manufacturing process, you could actually just reuse it as it is, especially if it’s part of a construction that has been isolated inside a construction. For example, you can easily just reuse it as it is, without making it shorter.
Then you have furniture. Furniture can have multiple lives and be repaired and refurbished and reused again. And we see that for high-quality furniture already. So it’s a question of getting more of those circular loops up and running, and then designing them so that we keep the products on as high a level of quality as we can for as long as possible. So essentially, actually setting up systems that avoid shortening the fiber. That’s what we’re after, so that we can use them for longer.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:05
What would a system that avoided shortening fibers consist of that we aren’t potentially using today?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 8:13
Well, in essence, it’s about what are the rules? Which kinds of fibers do we allow for which types of use? For example, if you have a single-use product that you know will only have a very short lifetime—that could be food wrapping, that will be contaminated by food and therefore you can’t reuse the fiber afterwards. It could be paper straws, those kinds of things where you know it can only have one life—it’s asking ourselves, what fibers are we using for that one life? What is the quality of that fiber? What is the amount of recycled content that we require in that product?
It’s those kinds of things that I think we will need to have both regulatory rules on—so legislation, essentially—but we will also need to have systems, both in terms of what do certification systems like FSC do, but also, what does industry do? What are the industry standards? How will we circulate fiber? So it’s very big and it’s very fluffy, but it’s those kind of things that we will need to start getting this more circular setup and running.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:22
You make an important point. This is not a clear, bright, linear explanation. It’s a fuzzy, circular system that we are seeking to evolve as we continue to become a more industrialized society. So let me ask you a question about how you’re talking with industry about this. Are you positioning circularity as a way to respond to and manage that 400% demand surge that we’re expecting over the next several decades, or is this a mechanism to, in their eyes, actually reduce total extraction?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 9:52
Oh, it’s not about reducing harvest. Actually, in reality, the hardcore reality of this is that there just will not be enough. We keep pretending that forests are this infinite resource that we can just go in and take as much out of as we want, but the reality is that we’re just using up forest resources far, far faster than the forest can actually regenerate and grow new trees. And with more and more industries pivoting towards forest-based fibers—in particular, that’s anything from the construction sector to the textile industries to even the car industry—all of them are looking towards forests because they have to replace their fossil fuel–based products. So we know that the demand is only going to go up. You’ve mentioned the number, the 400% increase. That’s the projection from the World Bank.
So we just need to be realistic about this and have ends meet, in essence, so that we don’t get to a point where we’re taking out trees so fast that the ecosystem can’t keep up. Because if we’re taking out trees from the forest faster than the ecosystem can keep up, that forest will be much more vulnerable to all of the climate-related events that it will also have to withstand. So the forest fires, the droughts, the beetle attacks, et cetera. If the ecosystem is weakened, it can’t withstand those other alternative threats that it’s going to be exposed to.
So for me, it’s just common sense. We have to get to a point where we are on a level of harvest that the forest can withstand, and we can only do that if we circulate fibers more and if we take better care of the things that we have. And the thing is, we used to be able to do this. If you look back to the ’30s, the ’20s, the ’40s, the ’50s, we knew how to repair things. Our parents knew how to do this. My grandmother knew how to mend all of her clothes. My father knew how to repair a broken radio or a bicycle or a light. And it’s an ability that we lost because of just an abundance of access to things. So we need to get back to being able to have those circular loops and being more respectful about the resources that we are getting, and that is both as individuals and as societies.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:13
That’s such an important point—that we know how to do this, that we’ve done it before, but we’ve been trained out of this. How do you see FSC—and you mentioned this earlier—coaching people on the effective ways of making fiber last longer? Is this going to be a big messaging undertaking? Is it better labeling? How do you describe that challenge?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 12:35
Everything at once? Yeah, it’s everything at once. It’s both how we communicate, how we position the value of forest products, how we position the value of a healthy ecosystem, how we reintroduce pride in repairing stuff and keeping things in loop. But it’s also a question of, what do we have in terms of our standards? How do our standards support companies and encourage companies in setting up circular business models? How do we guide companies to moving towards more products-as-a-service, where it’s not the actual product that you sell, but it’s the service that the product gives? How do we create tools that make that transition easier?
So it’s a lot of different elements that we have to provide, and it’s for a lot of different audiences. People often come to me and say, “Well, nobody’s asking for circularity, so therefore it’s not a thing. People don’t want FSC to work on circularity.” And then I say, “Well, they want us to safeguard ecosystems. They want us to support them in upcoming regulation on extended producer responsibility, for example. They want us to help them adhere to the waste directives that are coming out, not only in Europe, but also in Latin America and North America in some states of the US, and it’s also there in Canada. They want us to help them figure out how they’re going to handle the fact that they can’t get the same amount of raw materials that they used to be able to just buy from any of their suppliers that they wanted, because all of a sudden half of it is gone in a forest fire. They want us to take care of all of that, and all of that is very closely tied to circular economy.”
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:17
An important point too is that it’s going to get more expensive as resources are strained, and that seems to be the underlying driver. But then you get back to the question of, how do you certify reuse? And you’ve got—it’s no simple task. It requires a royalty system for forest owners, recognition of non-forest bio-based fibers blended with bio-based fibers, cascading use tools—you know, in other words, things to track that fiber through multiple uses. What’s the state of the technology? What of those things are on track to have an impact in the next half decade, for instance?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 14:53
Oh, many of them are. Some are, of course, much more doable than others. So for example, the lowest-hanging fruit for companies in FSC is to introduce circular business models into our chain-of-custody standard. That standard covers 70,000 companies around the globe already. So if we enable in that standard that they are able to do take-back, or they’re able to do repair and leasing, and we guide them and give them best practices as to how they can do that—well, that’s very easy and straightforward, and in fact, we’re doing that already. It’s in consultation right now, set to be implemented by the end of this year.
The other one that we’re also already working on is, what is the role of agricultural residues in FSC-certified products? So could we enable agricultural residues? Think wheat straw. Think rice husks—so the shells around rice. Think coffee chaff—from after you’re done with producing coffee, you have all the silver skin lying back. All of that is being used right now primarily for local energy production. What if all of that could actually replace virgin forest fibers in all of the pulp-based products? What if we could require that that was certified to a credible agricultural standard, and we could then give it a different value? That’s what we’re also building a framework for right now, and we’ll be piloting so that we could enable those products to have a longer life, while also reducing the requirement or the demand for virgin forest fiber, and therefore reducing pressure on forests. So those are some of the really low-hanging fruits.
Then, of course, the whole cascading principles, which is for a lot of people a tricky word—because what does that mean? In essence, it means, how do we make sure that fibers stay in as high a quality for as long as they can possibly be? It’s quite easy when you explain it as: if you think of a wooden log, how can you keep that wooden log in long, long timber beams for as long as possible before you break them down into smaller pieces of wood, then into wood chips, potentially, then into fiber pulp? Essentially, because once you’ve broken them down, you can’t put them back together.
That is a more tricky thing, because we don’t have rules in FSC right now about what we do on this. So essentially, you could, if you wanted, take a tree straight out of the forest and make it into wood chips and burn it for energy production. So one of the things that we’re looking into is, well, how can we create incentives so that isn’t the way that it’s done? How can we create tools that would enable companies to actually communicate to their supply chain which type of fibers that they want and which kind of quality, so that it matches the type of product that they’re creating—both in terms of what are the technical specifications of that product, like what is the strength of the fiber that they actually need in the product for that product to perform well, but also, what is the expected lifetime duration for that product? Because if it’s a very short-lived product, we shouldn’t be using very high-quality fibers to produce it. And then, of course, also, what would the role be of recycled fiber in those particular products? And should there be rules? Should there be incentives for increasing the use of recycled fiber in them? So all of these things are things we’re working on right now.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:26
Let me double-click on something that you were just talking about—this notion of the producer, the initial producer, benefiting over the course of many generations. And that royalty concept, I think, is really one of the most novel things that is called out in the papers you shared with me. It envisions a forest owner—a Weyerhaeuser or Boise Cascade, for instance—thinking of a tree as an annuity, to a degree. But then there’s this challenge of how you track it through the entire life cycle, which in my mind is a lot like some of the discussions we’re having about intellectual property in the age of AI. This stuff kind of has a tendency to disappear into the industrial economy and be forgotten. But this royalty system—how can that be implemented? And what’s the incentive for a company to pay the fee that creates the annuity for the original producer?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 19:22
So first and foremost, maybe we need to back up a second and explain what the royalty system is, because I’m assuming that the listener won’t actually know. So the royalty system is the most pie-in-the-sky concept that we have in the things that we’re working on. So this is my baby, my big dream. I don’t know whether we will ever be able to implement it, but I really want to get there.
So essentially, what the concept is, is that we are right now paying forest owners only for harvesting trees. But in reality, they’re taking care of so much more. When they’re managing their forest sustainably, they’re making sure that the ecosystem is healthy. They’re protecting biodiversity. They’re protecting wildlife. They’re taking care of a lot of social elements—for example, indigenous peoples’ rights as part of that forest management. But we don’t pay them for that. We don’t reward them for all of that work, all of what they’re doing that actually helps us fight climate change in quite a significant way.
So the whole concept is, if we imagine a world where fibers are circulating for more than one use, what would the incentive be for a forest owner to actually maintain their forest healthy, because we only pay them when they cut the tree? Well, what if we could pay them every single time that product—the fiber from their forest—goes through another use round, another recycled loop, or another reuse loop? What if they could get a small fee as a token for their continued protection of that forest ecosystem and the social safeguards? That is the big dream, the overarching concept.
You’re then asking, well, why would companies pay for that? Well, because companies are faced with increased legislative requirements, not just in the EU but globally. We see bioeconomy frameworks, we see extended producer responsibility. We see waste and resource management requirements. We see social compliance data being required from them. Green claims—which is, how are you promoting your products? We see requirements for product data and origin data as part of digital product passports. And on top of that, we see an increased amount of required data from impact investors and from sustainable finance.
So if you’re using a secondary product—something that has already been in use once—how would you know all of those core data points, unless you have some way to get access to them? So the whole theory is that these companies would be willing to pay a small fee for access to the origin data about that product. That could be data about the social compliance, pesticide use, chemical use, the origin, the status of the biodiversity where it originates from, et cetera. So that would be things that they would pay a small fee for into an automated system, and the fee that they pay then actually goes back to the forest owner as a payment for their continued protection of the forest.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:29
So in the long term, obviously the price of wood fiber is going to increase. It just does. But by paying this fee, we can reduce the pace at which the price rises—is that the basic mechanism that we’re talking about?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 22:46
No, I don’t think so. Not necessarily, no. It doesn’t actually have to do with the first use round. What it would be doing is that you introduce this fee, and it gives an additional value for the forest owner to safeguard the forest over time, but it also removes a very big data barrier for the company who pays the fee. And we’re not talking large fees here. The whole concept is that it should be very, very small, so it should still be worthwhile for the company buying access to the data to pay that fee. So it’s similar to the FSC fees that we have for certification today, which is also only a fraction of their annual turnover for the wood-based products.
So the fee should be small enough that you would pay for access, but when you aggregate that over all of the times that the forest has harvested, then it also becomes a significant sum for the forest owner. So that’s the whole concept—that’s not actually meddling with the price for the raw material in the first instance.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:53
Okay, we have opened—well, let’s call it an FSC-certified box—and there’s a lot inside. I think we’ve laid the foundation for the rest of the conversation, but folks, we’re going to take a quick commercial break and we’re going to be right back. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Loa Dalgaard Worm. She is Circularity Hub Lead for the Forest Stewardship Council. Loa, what we’re describing is FSC acting as a central data hub and a payment facilitator in this royalty environment that you’re describing. Basically, you become a platform company as well as a certification body. So the question I’m wrestling with is, how do you make sure the platform costs don’t ultimately consume the fees that are intended to become the royalty payments for forest owners?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 24:43
Well, the truth is that we are already, as FSC, on this trajectory of becoming a platform company. So we have a lot of the infrastructure already. We already run FSC Trace, which is a blockchain that can carry all of the data points that I was talking about before. We also already do earth observation and fiber testing. So we’re already collaborating with partners like World Forest ID, who is the leading entity in the field of doing fiber testing and forensic testing of where fibers come from. We already do work with Esri, who is an earth observation company.
So what we would need to build on top is the payment system and the automated systems. And as I have pointed out before, this is just a big dream. So I don’t know whether this will be a reality, whether we will succeed in the end. And I’m very much aware that we will need the right people around the table to help us build this elegantly so that we don’t see admin costs eating up the whole thing. Because for me, this is very important, but actually that is what I’m least worried about. It’s not that cost will eat it up.
I think actually one of the things that will be more tricky is getting forests around the world mapped with isotope testing in a grid that’s fine enough for us to tell where a product likely comes from in a second or a third loop. So let me explain that a bit.
If you think about forest-based products, the easy ones are like the chairs, the tables, where it’s solid wood, and those you could just slap a barcode on, and once they’re being reused, you can scan that barcode, and it’s not that difficult to figure out where it was from. But if you have a mixed-fiber product, or if you have a pulp-based product, that means that you have reduced the fiber into being very, very short pulp segments. If you then need to figure out in the second or third loop which forest actually delivered pulp into this product, you will need to do fiber testing to figure out where it came from, and you could do that through what is called isotope testing.
Every living thing on this planet, even plants and animals, have isotopes in them. We also have them as human beings. And the beauty of isotopes is that roughly every 15 kilometers they shift slightly, which means that if you have enough samples from around the globe, that sort of creates a grid of what an isotope looks like in every single 15-kilometer grid of the globe. Then if you do a test of a product, of a fiber batch, then you can tell what isotope shows up there, and where it belongs on the globe.
And for me, getting that fine grid of the reference samples—that’s the real challenge. That’s where we will really need to roll up our sleeves, because there’s nothing even close to it. And the beauty of it is that if we manage to create that grid, we could not only implement the royalty system, we could also make that grid available for all of the competent authorities—the authorities around the globe—to help combat illegal logging, because all of a sudden you could see where forest products are coming from, and therefore whether they are from an illegally logged area.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:01
There’s a lot of benefits in this. Are these technologies proven only in the lab, or are any of them in use in the field now?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 28:09
No, they’re already being used and have been used for quite a while. So I mentioned World Forest ID. They’re the leading entity in this. FSC helped institute them, I think five or six years back. But even before then, these technologies were being used very widely. So big companies use them to test whether the products that they’re buying, especially from some regions in the world, are actually from where they’re said to be, and that they’re actually containing the type of forest-based fiber that they’re set to contain. So for example: Is it the species that I’m thinking that I’m buying that I’m actually buying?
Then authorities are also using it for law enforcement around the world already. So that could be from the American Lacey Act, which has a lot of different wood species that you cannot import into the US. It could also be the Australian ban, which is also a ban on specific species that cannot be used in Australia. And then there’s the European Timber Regulation, which requires that you know what type of species is in your products before you place it on the EU market, and they’re already using them in their everyday operations.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:16
That’s really good to hear. We have the technologies. It’s organizing the information, as you’ve described, that’s the key. You know, I visited the United States Forest Service Forest Products Lab last year, and one of the things that they were showing us was compressed wood products made from a lot of scrap. I can imagine the kind of tracking you’re talking about for early in the multiple-reuse life cycle being pretty easy to identify, but when things get mixed up, like the fibers in paper—will this also be applicable?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 29:47
Yeah, see, and that’s the tricky part, right? So the easy part will be for us to start out with the solid wood products, and the benefit of doing that is it would also benefit the forests of the Global South, where we really need this system up and running as fast as we can to safeguard those forests from deforestation, because a lot of those fibers end up in solid wood products.
For the fiber products that you talk about—so paper or compressed wood and fiberboard, et cetera—it’s more difficult. What we are contemplating there is, well, what if it isn’t this exact forest that we can track back to, but it’s this region, it’s this approximate area? Because we can tell that. It’s just that for paper products, it might be a thousand forests. But what if we could create a system where the fee that you get is proportional to the likelihood that part of the product was delivered from part of your forest, essentially? So that it becomes more of a credit system or a mass balance system in the end—which, and maybe we would need a combination of both—so that there’s still a better, bigger benefit for the ones who have solid wood products. But that’s a lot of the stuff that we have to figure out. Like I said, it’s early stages. We’re still in dreamland for this one.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:05
It is, but that probabilistic analysis that you’re describing is what we’re working towards with quantum computing as a processing platform for this kind of information. It’s interesting to think about whether or not we’ve already been inventing the solutions to the problems we have and just haven’t found the applications for those solutions yet. You’re describing one that I hadn’t thought of before.
Loa Dalgaard Worm 31:26
I hadn’t thought of quantum computing in this context either, but it’s really interesting.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:32
One of the assumptions that I hear in the conversation and in the papers that I read is that transparency requirements are going to continue to get more stringent. But the current regulatory momentum in Brussels may shift, and obviously in Washington, it already has. How robust do you see the business case for these solutions if the regulatory tailwind stalls?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 31:54
Well, there’s a very—perhaps a subtle but a very important—detail about the deregulation that’s happening right now. Because it is true that we’re seeing deregulation happening and seeing a lot of legislation being changed or pulled back or adapted. But what we’re seeing being adapted through deregulation is very much focused on what we can call the “do good” regulation—so the ambitious regulations that are pushing the world in a more sustainable direction. That is very unfortunate. They’re being impacted big time right now and being dismantled in many different regions, many different countries of the world.
But at the same time, we have a geopolitical situation which means that every single region of this world wants to become resource resilient. They want to be self-reliant, both in terms of their financial stability and in terms of their trade, but also in terms of their access to raw material and the continued ability to produce the goods that are needed in a given region. That creates a very strong push for circular business models. So that could be recycling, that could be reuse, it could be looped material, raw material handling, so you have to use products again and again. And we’re seeing more and more legislation coming up pushing for reuse.
But when you reuse the product or fiber the second time, you still need to know that it’s safe. You need to know that it’s not from illegal sources. You need to know that it hasn’t contributed to human rights violations, and you need to know which kind of pesticides and chemicals were used in it. And those are the legislations that we are actually seeing being firmed up right now and implemented faster right now, instead of being removed. So the whole transparency rollback actually isn’t happening for these types of more circular loops.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:46
You point out in the papers I read, too, that there’s at least a dozen EU regulations or global standards that the royalty system could actually support and streamline compliance reporting for. And that, of course, is what a lot of companies are looking for—greater efficiency in that kind of reporting. But there are stalled regulations as well, like the EU Deforestation Regulation, which would require you track the wood coming into the continent. Practically speaking, what are the specific reporting burdens that you can help reduce by adding this data to the circular economy information flow that we’re trying to build?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 34:23
So the whole beauty of what we’re trying to do here, both with the royalty system but also with the circular economy module that we’re looking into—with the FSC, we have an EUDR add-on module which is called the regulatory module. And the beauty is that a lot of data points that companies need for adherence to these legislations—and it’s not just European ones. I gave European examples. It could also be the new Brazilian Circular Act. It could be the Mexican new legislation that was just enforced here in January—a lot of the data points that they’re asking for are data points which we’re already monitoring.
We already have audits in every single forest, in every single factory that is working with FSC. But what we don’t have is a system for connecting those data points with the product that is then again tied to an origin. So in other words, we don’t have a fiber test which can already prove—or, it’s not that we have the fiber test, but it’s not a systemic part of our system—that can prove automatically that this piece of timber came from that forest and has been exposed to these chemicals or to these pesticides, et cetera. And here is the audit report that shows how the workers were fairly paid or safe, and that no indigenous peoples were harmed and that they gave consent to their land management.
So that’s the piece that we’re missing—that we need to have that system. And if we have that system for the first use case, which is what we are implementing with FSC Trace and with the regulatory module, we really are very close to being able to also use that system for multiple use cycles. Which means that the admin burden for the companies is actually relatively low, because a lot of the data points are things that they’re already giving to us as part of their annual audit. We just have to use it better and put it to more uses than we’re doing today.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:27
We’re building a very complex network. And obviously you and I are speaking halfway around the world, but in the Global North. And as I think about what you’re saying—how do we ensure that we don’t create a mechanism that primarily benefits the well-resourced forest operations in the Global North? I mean, will you have a subsidy or a low-cost onboarding solution for organizations and communities in the Global South to help them participate in this economic opportunity?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 36:54
So this is one of the key focus areas of FSC as such, and something that’s really close to our hearts—how do we constantly have alternative ways so that we don’t add a burden for the Global South, and that we give them access, and that we have something that’s attractive all around the globe, not just in the more digitally driven Global North?
The reality is that right now, most fibers actually don’t travel continents. And in the future, with the geopolitical situation, I don’t think that they will travel continents more than they do today. So there are some things that FSC won’t be able to fix. In terms of Global South–Global North, we need to have stronger legislation and stronger enforcement, especially in the Global South, to safeguard the ecosystems there even more.
But what we can do as FSC is we can make systems that automate as much of the data requirements and data gathering as we can, and that do not add on additional data elements—like the ones I was talking about before—that we need to utilize what we’re actually already out there gathering. And then I think we need to really think about the fact that we have boots on the ground every single year as part of our audits. How do we utilize those boots elegantly? How much of the data could an auditor actually contribute as part of the audit, instead of asking the forest owner or the company in the Global South to do it, unless their systems already do it?
Because let’s not stigmatize and say that everyone in the Global South is not using computers and doesn’t have elegant systems. Some of them are more advanced than we are. But for the ones that are small, the ones that are community-driven, the ones that are much more analog—and where this is difficult—well, what is the role of the auditor who’s there anyway to help ensure that that information gets on the systems that it needs to get on?
Then, of course, a lot of it is also about making it mobile-first. Because while they might not have fancy LIDAR systems and earth observations and integration with harvesting machines, et cetera, like we see in the Global North, all of them have cell phones. So how can we make sure that the cell phone, the smartphone in their hand, can be actually utilized to access the very same systems in an elegant way that does not require a lot of additional time, but gives them access to the benefits?
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:28
You’re correct. There are a lot of communities in the Global South that leapfrog the hard-wired infrastructure that the North built first, and therefore are ahead of us in a lot of ways. But could I have a couple more questions on that? They require an impressionistic answer. And the first is, can you describe a program that would support an indigenous community working to care for their forest and its biodiversity? How would that potentially be enabled by the system that you’re building?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 39:57
Well, in many senses, the indigenous communities are already doing what we’re asking for. They’re safeguarding 80% of the remaining biodiversity that we have on this globe, regardless of the fact that they’re only 10% of the population. So they are already taking care of the ecosystems in a way that all of the rest of us are not doing.
What we have in FSC is we really have an embedded adherence to the concept of free, prior, and informed consent, which is actually a human right, but we’re one of the few entities actually enforcing it—making sure that indigenous people are not only informed about what is going on on their land, but that they’re done so in advance, before something happens on their land, and that they give consent and also have the right to withdraw that consent.
Well, what if these systems could also make sure that we capitalize what they’re already doing on the ground? The way that they are protecting the biodiversity—what if we could get more of the data and the impact and learn from them, and take some of that learning and use it in other forest areas around the world, which is something that we’re not totally bad at doing? So what if we could learn from some of the data elements that they have, and that they have the exact same access as the rest of the forest owners, the rest of the stewards, to some of the fees that are being paid back? It won’t be a silver bullet, but at least we could give some more payment for the protection of ecosystems that they’re already stewarding on behalf of essentially the globe.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:44
That’s a very forthright answer. I appreciate it. It is such a challenge to integrate the kinds of indigenous understanding of the environment that we lost because we have treated the environment as something separate from us—that these indigenous communities continue to preserve. You’ve been very generous with your time and your thinking. One last question: How would you describe a fully circular fiber economy changing global supply chains, and when do you think that becomes common?
Loa Dalgaard Worm 42:16
Well, it really depends on what we mean. Because fully circular global supply chains can come in many shapes and forms.
Okay, well, if you’re asking about the royalty system, which I know is one of the things that you’re really interested in—I do hope that we have something to pilot within the next two years and can make it into a more mature concept at our next General Assembly in FSC in three years, for debate. Because FSC is a membership-driven organization, so everything has to go to debate there before we implement at scale.
But the royalty system isn’t the only thing that can push for this shift towards circular supply chains. It’s just a small fraction of what we’re doing. So if you’re asking more broadly about the way that the world uses fibers and how we view fibers, I think if we had this conversation in five years, we would have a fundamentally different perspective on fiber use, fiber value, and how we so easily throw things out right now. I think in five years, that will be fundamentally different, both from organizations but also from consumers.
I think that global supply chains will be forced to look much more locally when they’re focusing on fiber sourcing. And they have to really both use more local fibers and look very carefully into redistributing and enabling closed-loop systems, because geopolitics is just pushing very rapidly in that direction. So it’s going much faster than anybody was expecting.
So I think if we look ahead just within a year, we will start seeing these circular business models having an uptake in FSC. If we look five years ahead, hopefully all of our different initiatives that I’ve been talking about today are either in pilot mode or implementation mode, so that we can become an enabler for a circular economy. And for me personally, that is the end goal. We have to enable a circular economy so we can reduce pressure on forests, so forests can help us fight climate change, and we have a realistic chance of having a climate that we as human beings can survive in.
Mitch Ratcliffe 44:42
Loa, I hope that all of that is something that comes to pass. Thank you for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation.
Loa Dalgaard Worm 44:48
Well, you’re most welcome.
Mitch Ratcliffe 44:56
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Loa Dalgaard Worm, who is the leader of the Circularity Hub at the Forest Stewardship Council. Her team is taking on the biggest expansion of the FSC mission since the chain-of-custody certification program it started 30 years ago. And to find out more about the Circularity Hub, you can visit fsc.org/circularity, or contact the team by email at circularity@fsc.org.
We heard one thing clearly in this conversation, something that’s reiterated by many of our guests: data can help us plan and transform the economy. We can see into the complexity that we’ve created around ourselves and, to a degree, are being carried away by. The future of materials, forests, and the circular economy depends on data platforms that can help manage information about everything that we produce and use, and that—at least until now—we throw away.
The economics of forest fiber won’t work under the current linear system, and the cost is rising. You can see it everywhere. For example, the Trump administration recently announced plans to open old-growth forests in Oregon to logging. We are literally preparing to mow down the last reserves of biodiversity in the United States. This is insanity.
Loa is right. We act as if forests are endless resources, but we’re taking fiber much faster than forests can recover. Weakened ecosystems cannot withstand the fires, droughts, and beetle outbreaks that are being made worse by climate change every year. This outdated way of thinking from past centuries is leading us toward disaster. We have to face this reality in our supply chains. If industries don’t start reusing, repairing, and recirculating fiber, they will run out of the material that they hope will replace plastics. The sad truth is that if the green transition doesn’t face up to this problem, the forest loss will actually accelerate, because we haven’t changed the basic economic models behind reuse.
Loa’s idea for a royalty system is one of the most creative approaches that I’ve seen in certification design. Right now, forest owners are paid only once, and that’s when they cut down a tree. The royalty idea would give them a small payment each time fiber from their forest is reused, whether as solid wood in construction, repaired furniture, or as paper that’s recycled many times. Loa called this her “pie-in-the-sky” idea. But tracking technology is advancing fast. FSC already uses a blockchain-based system called FSC Trace, works with the World Forest ID program to use isotope testing that can pinpoint a fiber’s origin to within about 15 kilometers, and partners with Esri to improve earth observation systems so we can predict forestry outcomes instead of just reacting to what happens.
For solid wood, tracking through several uses is fairly simple. The real shift is moving from just enforcing rules and catching illegal timber—which is always going to be needed—to actually rewarding the ongoing care that keeps forests healthy. FSC needs to make sure that incentives reach the Global South too, or the circular economy could end up mainly helping large forestry companies in the North.
Because of geopolitics, fiber sourcing is shifting toward local and regional supplies. Countries are putting up walls, so most fiber will stay within continents. FSC can support inclusion for indigenous peoples by automating data collection to avoid creating extra work for local communities, using existing auditors to gather information that small or community-run forests can’t easily digitize, and by creating mobile tools that work on smartphones. Indigenous peoples already care for 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, and they don’t need lessons in circular forest management, because they’ve practiced it for dozens of generations. But the royalty system Loa is developing could finally pay those communities for their stewardship, instead of treating it as a free benefit to the global economy—which corporate finance so loves to overlook.
So here’s what I want you to leave with after this conversation. Loa said something that I think we all know but too often ignore due to the industrial way of thinking: we once knew how to live in a circular way without sending so much waste to landfill every year. Our grandparents fixed clothes. They repaired radios. They kept things in use. FSC’s circularity work aims to rebuild the systems we need to relearn reuse and repair.
The question is whether FSC’s royalty system will move from idea to pilot within Loa’s two-year goal. That will show whether or not certification organizations can adapt quickly enough to help create a circular bioeconomy, instead of just recording the failure of the old, wasteful system. The ambition is there, the tools are ready, and the real question is whether institutions and markets will act fast enough for the forests.
So stay tuned. We’re going to have more discussions about this, especially about the solutions that can make a difference on Sustainability In Your Ear. And I hope you’ll take a moment to check out our archive of more than 540 episodes, because there’s something here. We’re in our sixth season, and I guarantee you that there’s an interview you’re going to want to share with one of your friends. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, family, and co-workers. They can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you 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 let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: The Forest Stewardship Councils’ Path to a Circular Bio-based Future with Loa Dalgaard Worm appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-the-forest-stewardship-councils-path-to-a-circular-bio-based-future-with-loa-dalgaard-worm/
It always strikes us as amusing how many DIY projects you see online that seem to require more time and more money than it would take to simply buy the thing they’re trying to DIY in the first place. Are we missing the point?
We think that doing things ourselves and taking back the power to create instead of simply consuming is absolutely vital to the green movement. But if you don’t already have the materials and spend a lot of money purchasing craft supplies, does it really make sense to DIY?
These eight projects are true do-it-yourself masterpieces. One-of-a-kind outdoor projects you can make for almost nothing, with supplies you most likely already have or can easily pick up second hand for a song. Roll up your sleeves and let’s get started!
1. Teapot/Teacup Bird Feeder
Do you have one of Grandma’s old tea sets lying around that doesn’t quite fit into the sleek modern aesthetic you’ve been cultivating? Put it to great use by feeding the birds in your area — in style.
Thrift stores are always awash in old china, so if you don’t already have the old tea set, consider going wild and spending a few bucks for this DIY delight. You’ll find blogger Dinah Wulf’s instructions for the teacup bird feeder at DIY Inspired.
Safety note: Use sturdy twine or cord — not chain — to hang the feeder. Birds can catch their toes in chain links, which causes serious injury. The National Audubon Society also recommends cleaning seed feeders every two weeks (more often in hot, humid weather) by scrubbing with soap and water and soaking in a 50-50 vinegar-water solution to prevent the spread of avian disease.
2. Gardening Tool Storage
What on earth do you do with those rusty-as-heck, old-school garden rakes hanging around your garage? Well, if you’re any sort of DIY genius, you press them into service as a gardening tool holder.
The original inspiration for this project came from Beth Logan at Artstuff Ltd., whose blog has since gone offline. For a current walkthrough, see the Repurposed Rake Tool Rack tutorial at DIY n Crafts (project #14 in their roundup of 25 ways to reuse old garden tools). The concept is embarrassingly simple — remove the rake handle, mount the head tines-out on a fence or garage wall, and use the tines themselves as hooks for trowels, gloves, and pruners — but eye-catching enough to make you look like a DIY pro.
3. Bottle Tree
Do you like wine? No, I mean do you really like wine? Do you want a reason to drink more of it? And does your garden need a cute border? This sustainable, upcycled garden border may be just the project for you. You might have to expand your drinking list to include bottles of various shapes, sizes, and colors — but variety is the spice of life.
When friends ask how you managed to collect so many bottles, just laugh gaily and then distract them with your dainty teacup bird feeder. The bottle tree tradition itself runs deep — Mississippi garden writer Felder Rushing traces the practice back through African American Southern folk art and, by his own research, as far as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. See his bottle tree gallery and history for inspiration, or jump straight to his how-to guide for building one out of a cedar snag, rebar, or just about anything else.
4. Colorful Outdoor “Tiles”
If your backyard isn’t perfectly landscaped and manicured, with an impeccably tiled “outdoor living space,” don’t despair. You can use up all those half-empty paint cans and create a Pinterest-worthy colorful backdrop for evenings spent clustered around a fire or barbecue.
Pop a few coats of paint on cement tiles and you have a one-of-a-kind flooring solution. If you rent, the same effect could be achieved on a more temporary basis by letting the kids go wild with sidewalk chalk and create a mosaic masterpiece. Check out Elsie’s Painted Patio Tiles at A Beautiful Mess for the back story on this DIY idea. (Heads up: the original author noted she had to touch up the paint each spring in Missouri winters — a porch and patio floor enamel will hold up better than wall paint.)
5. Home Sweet Gnome
Okay, this one might be the least practical idea of the bunch, but that may be why I love it oh so much. If you have a stump in your backyard and you’re not willing or able to pay the truly insane amount it costs to have it ground down and removed, how about making it into a little gnome home? This is the perfect outdoor project if you have small children in your life.
Construct the trappings of a little house — door, windows, winding garden path — from found objects or natural materials, and affix them to the stump. Bonus points if you don’t tell the kids about this particular DIY project and allow them to simply stumble upon it one day in the garden. My mind would have been blown if I had come across one of these as a seven-year-old. For a step-by-step build, see this Gnome Tree Stump Home tutorial on Instructables.
Safety note: Don’t use an angle grinder to gouge windows or doors into a stump. Use a chisel and mallet for shallow detail work, or attach decorative pieces (driftwood, bark, polymer clay) to the outside instead.
6. Mosaic Stepping Stones from Broken China
Every household eventually accumulates a small graveyard of chipped mugs, a single survivor from a four-piece dinner set, or a beloved teapot with a hairline crack. Rather than tossing them — broken ceramics generally aren’t accepted in curbside recycling — embed them in concrete stepping stones for a garden path that’s genuinely one of a kind.
This pairs beautifully with the teacup project above: any teacups that don’t make it past Project #1 (you will break a few) can come back as paving. The DIY mosaic stepping stones tutorial at Gardening.org walks through the full process — breaking ceramics safely inside a drop cloth, sizing pieces to half-inch to one-inch fragments, pressing them into wet concrete, and sealing the surface so sharp edges don’t cause injury underfoot. Basic mold options include an old cake pan, a plastic plant saucer, or a purpose-built stepping stone form from a craft store.
Safety note: Wear safety glasses and heavy gloves when breaking ceramics. Once cured, run a finger over the surface to check for protruding edges and file or sand any down before placing the stone where bare feet might land.
7. Vertical Pallet Herb Garden
Shipping pallets are one of the world’s most abundant near-free materials. Small businesses, garden centers, and feed stores often have stacks of them out back, and asking politely beats the alternative of seeing them landfilled. Mounted vertically against a sunny wall or fence, a pallet becomes a stacked planter that holds enough herbs to keep a kitchen in basil, thyme, parsley, and chives all season.
Grit Magazine published a clear how-to for a vertical pallet planter — line the back and sides with landscape fabric or heavy plastic to hold soil, fill through the slats, and plant each gap as its own row. The gaps act as natural divisions, so different herbs don’t fight for the same root space.
Safety note: Use only heat-treated pallets for anything edible. Look for the IPPC stamp with the letters HT (heat treated) and avoid any stamped MB (methyl bromide — a fumigant restricted under the Montreal Protocol). Unstamped pallets are unknowns; skip them for food crops. The same heat-treated pallets are fine for ornamental flowers either way.
8. Punched Tin Can Lanterns
Steel food cans — soup, tomato, coffee — are one of the most recyclable materials on Earth, but the recycling-then-buying-something-decorative loop has plenty of slack in it. With nothing more than a hammer, a few nails of varying sizes, and the freezer, an empty can becomes an outdoor lantern that throws constellation patterns across a patio at dusk.
HGTV’s tin can lantern tutorial covers the trick that makes this project work: fill the can with water and freeze it solid before punching, so the ice supports the can wall and prevents denting. Sketch your pattern on paper, tape it to the frozen can, punch through with a nail at each marked dot, and let the ice thaw. Drop in a battery tealight (much safer outdoors than a real flame) and group them along a walkway or down the center of an outdoor table.
The Point of All This
None of these projects requires you to buy more than a tube of waterproof adhesive, a bag of concrete, or maybe a stepping stone mold. The materials — chipped china, leftover wine bottles, empty cans, a forgotten pallet, an old rake — are already in your house or someone else’s. That’s the point. The greenest project is the one that uses what already exists, and the best part is that yours will look like nobody else’s.
Editor’s Note: This article, originally authored by Madeleine Somerville on June 17, 2015, was updated with corrected links and new ideas in May 2026.
The post Outdoor Projects You Can DIY for Almost Nothing appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/diy/outdoor-projects-you-can-diy-for-almost-nothing/
More than half the world’s population—4.4 billion people—live in cities today. That number is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. Our guest, Nadina Galle, is a trailblazing ecological engineer and author of The Nature of Our Cities. She is an ecological engineer who studies the intersection of nature and technology in urban environments. Nadina developed the concept of an Internet of Nature (IoN) that uses tools like artificial intelligence, automation, and sensors to support and enhance ecosystems within cities. Nadina’s book offers a transformative perspective on how urban spaces can be reimagined in the face of climate change and sprawling development. She shares the inspiring story of the Groene Loper project in Maastricht, Netherlands, where soil sensors were deployed to monitor tree health. The results were remarkable, with trees supported by this technology growing up to three times larger than those without it. This is a powerful example of how technology can not only protect trees but also transform urban spaces into healthier, greener environments.
From fire and the wheel to the reinforced concrete frames that define modern buildings, we are surrounded by technology. We tend to forget that technology emerged in response to nature — too often, we treated nature as the enemy, the chaos to be contained instead of recognizing that nature’s cycles and changes are the harmony we need to join to sustain society. The loss of any semblance of natural patterns, which ultimately leads to the depletion of the resources necessary for life, has inevitably led to the collapse of previous major civilizations. Modern society has more runway than previous societies because we have created a global economy, but that risks an even greater fall for our species when the ecological underpinnings of our prosperity collapse. The Nature of Our Cities, is a powerful, straightforward, and emotionally resonant book to help you think through your role and choices in the restoration of nature. You can find it on Amazon or Powell’s Books.
- Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.
- Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube.
Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired in December 2024.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Author Nadina Galle on The Nature of Our Cities appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/earth911-podcast-nadina-galle-on-the-nature-of-our-cities/
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on 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.
Americans throw away roughly 100 billion plastic bags a year, and most curbside programs won’t take a single one of them. Plastic film, those bags, the pallet wrap in the back of the stores, the bubble mailers, the dry cleaner sleeves, the overwrap on a case of bottled water — all of this has been the recycling industry’s white whale for decades. It jams machinery at materials recovery facilities, contaminates other waste streams, and ends up in landfills and oceans, and increasingly that plastic, especially microplastic, ends up in human tissue.
Meanwhile, the lumber industry sends sawdust to landfills by the truckload, and old orchards full of dying trees become a disposal problem for farmers. Two waste streams nobody wants, generated at industrial scale with very few takers. But more than 30 years ago, a small company in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia looked at both of those streams and saw raw material. Today, that company has upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film and sourced over a billion pounds of waste wood in 2024 alone, and as a consequence, they’ve built one of the largest plastic film recycling operations in North America, all in service of making something as ordinary as backyard decking.
The deck happens to last about 25 to 50 years, requiring no staining, no sealing, and competes head to head with pressure-treated lumber on a price and performance basis. The sustainability story isn’t a marketing layer on top of the product, it is the product. And we’re talking about Trex, Trex decking.
Our guests today run two of the most consequential functions inside Trex. Amy Fernandez is Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary, and Chief Sustainability Officer at Trex Company Incorporated, the world’s largest manufacturer of wood-alternative composite decking and railing. She holds the unusual combination of legal and sustainability oversight at a moment when these two domains are converging fast, with the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, California’s climate disclosure laws, and the SEC’s evolving stance all reshaping what public companies must say about their environmental performance. In 2024, Trex indexed its sustainability report to the IFRS standards before being required to, which tells you something about how Amy thinks about the relationship between disclosure, governance, and competitive position.
She’ll be joined today by Zachary Lauer, who is Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Trex, where he oversees manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, and research and development. His teams run plants in Virginia and Nevada, and they’re bringing a major new facility online in Little Rock, Arkansas, having built the operational machinery that turns approximately 95% recycled and reclaimed content into a product that has to perform outdoors for half a century. The R&D side of his portfolio is where Trex has cracked feedstock streams that other recyclers can’t process, including industrial film trimmings, end-of-life packaging from food and chemical manufacturers, and dunnage returns from distribution partners. All this work happens at the intersection of material science, logistics, and the unglamorous reality that recycled inputs don’t behave like virgin ones. It’s more expensive sometimes to recycle this stuff.
We’ll talk with Amy and Zach about how Trex actually makes its products, where the materials come from, and what it has taken to build a national feedstock network through the NexTrex program, a collection program spanning more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and nearly 1,000 schools and community organizations. We’ll dig into a harder question, too: why Trex’s absolute emissions rose alongside production growth in 2024, and what the company is doing about end-of-life recycling of Trex boards now that the first generation is reaching replacement age, and what other manufacturers can learn from a company that is building a recycling infrastructure before there’s a market to feed it.
To learn more about Trex and its sustainability work, visit trex.com. So, circularity is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Trex was practicing it before the word existed. Let’s find out what three decades of doing that work has taught Amy Fernandez and Zach Lauer, right after this.
Welcome to the show, Amy Fernandez and Zachary Lauer. How are you doing today?
Zachary Lauer 4:54
Doing great.
Amy Fernandez 4:55
Great, great. Thank you, Mitch.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:57
Well, thank you for joining me. And Trex does such interesting work. I mean, you were demonstrating what circularity means before the word had any cultural traction. I know you weren’t there at the beginning, but was this framed internally as an environmental project or as a sourcing strategy? Just the recognition that there was this massive volume of feedstock there that could be used.
Zachary Lauer 5:16
It was initially an environmental initiative by our founder, Roger Wittenberg. You know, he was bothered by the fact that there was no way to recycle or reuse his bread bags, and he wanted to formulate a product of value from that. He went through a couple of iterations and partnered with some other people, and they decided to turn it into composite decking and market it that way. Ever since that, it’s been part of our DNA, and we were always looking to extract value out of waste streams, you know, that aren’t currently used, and we continue to develop the next generation of materials out there that we can extract value from and create a great product from.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:09
These days — just last week, a couple of weeks ago, we talked with the CEO of Emerald Packaging, who’s also looking for recycled PE to use in their products. There’s competition for this feedstock now. How has that changed the way that Trex organizes its efforts to collect and bring this to the three different locations you manufacture the decking?
Zachary Lauer 6:30
So, you know, with opportunities and growth in this space, one of the things that has developed over time, over the last 10 to 15 years, is the growth in the availability of recycled polyethylene films from distributors. Right, as Amazon grows and direct shipments to homes grow, the materials that are used continue to expand. So that’s opened up markets for increased stretch film and those types of materials. But as those markets grow, we often go deeper and deeper into the stream, more contaminated into the stream, to go after material streams that most people can’t deal with or process.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:17
Well, one of the benefits of this kind of recycling is that you don’t have a lot of health-quality, you know, food-contact kinds of restrictions, and so forth with the plastic. You mentioned contamination. Just how contaminated can the loads be for Trex in order to make a viable product?
Zachary Lauer 7:36
We grade our materials on a scale of 5 to 15% contamination. We can go deeper than that. The contamination that we typically find in our streams are metals, non-ferrous metals, other forms of plastic, polypropylene, polystyrene, and those types of material, paper, cardboard. And so we’re able to design processes that can accommodate those and process those materials. Out-sorting is still critical to the long-term viability.
Amy Fernandez 8:10
Oh, yes. And we can go more contaminated depending on what that contamination is. So if it’s paper, we can handle more of that. If it’s metal, it’s a bit harder to handle. So the type of contamination also matters in terms of, you know, at what level we can accept that contaminated poly.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:31
Amy, the 2024 sustainability report describes the program as a win-win for both business and society at large. As we all know, we live in a time where that’s a contested idea — that sustainability is a good thing for the economy. What’s the most concrete way that you explain or demonstrate that the business case and the environmental case are genuinely the same for Trex, that this is an inseparable configuration?
Amy Fernandez 8:58
Yeah, you know, a really good example was our last earnings call. And during that call, you might have heard our CFO started talking about the price of PVC and virgin materials and the volatility associated because of their connection to oil. So that’s one very recent concrete example of the fact that, because our material is this poly that we recycle, we’re not as exposed to that volatility that you might get from those virgin streams. And so that is truly one of those competitive advantages that we have — that we recycle this material, and we can make a beautiful, well-performing product out of it. That is the business case. So you see it through these little examples.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:51
So in an era of reshoring, you’re actually in a position to be even more competitively advantaged.
Amy Fernandez 9:56
Yes.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:58
Amy, you stepped into the CSO role while also serving as Chief Legal Officer, and that’s a combination that’s becoming more common as sustainability disclosure is shifting from voluntary to regulated. How has all of the upheaval in the regulatory environment that we live in changed Trex’s approach over the past year or two in terms of what you report and what you tell customers?
Amy Fernandez 10:19
Trex has always been a highly ethical company, and so we do what’s right. And if you’re founded in doing the right thing, you’re not as subject to these whims of, you know, what’s happening either politically or, you know, with changes with government regulations, things like that. And so because we’re grounded in this reality of, we’re not going to go out there and start talking about targets that we don’t think are achievable — so when it was, you know, common to start saying “by 2030” or “by 2050” or whatever dates companies were out there saying “we’re going to get to this target” without actually having a plan to get there, Trex would never do that.
And so one of the things that you would see is that we get asked questions: “Why don’t you have targets?” And it’s because our target is to continuously keep improving from a very solid base that we have, but we’re not going to put an unrealistic number out there just to try to get points. So the regulatory changes don’t affect us as much when we start from that just basic ethical “do the right thing, disclose important information that we think our investors, our communities, others want to see, want to know that is true and not misleading in any way.”
Mitch Ratcliffe 11:39
From a marketing perspective, saying that you live by a higher standard is pretty effective. Do you think it’s necessary to be a lawyer to be a chief sustainability officer these days?
Amy Fernandez 11:49
No, not at all. And actually, I think the only reason that we did decide to put it this way — yes, of course, I do have the regulatory mindset, but I also have a passion for this, right? I mean, I joined this company because it is something that is important for me personally. And so the chief sustainability officer could have lived in other places and just been informed by legal the way that I inform other functions in this company. But I basically raised my hand for it and said, I think it lives well here, and I have a passion for it.
Zachary Lauer 12:22
It resided in other areas in our business as well, right, under other people that have that same passion.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:29
So, Zach, what happens between the time when a plastic bag is dropped at one of the 10,000 grocery stores that collect bags and a finished Trex board leaving the factory? Can you walk us through that process?
Zachary Lauer 12:40
Yeah, you’ve kind of highlighted the ends of that value chain, right? From the pickup to the actual product that goes to the customer. We actually have over 15,000 collection points across this country that come back to centralized collection points, and then actually make their way to our recycling facilities, where the cleaner films are put directly into our production lines, and the more contaminated films go into a reprocessing operation that turns it back into a pellet.
But the most challenging engineering point for us in this entire value chain is actually at the extrusion production line, and managing variation in the streams. We call it recipes, and we have a rolodex of thousands of recipes that can be used in the production process. I liken it to a cooking analogy. Today we’re baking with wheat flour, and tomorrow we might be baking with almond flour.
And so we’ve used a lot of technology to help us — machine intelligence, artificial intelligence — to help us manage those recipes. And not only does it help us manage the streams coming into the production lines, those raw materials, but then it modifies the process parameters, the cooking temperatures, and the speeds in order to process those streams. So that’s where the complexity is for us.
Amy Fernandez 14:14
We design our own equipment. And I mean, we don’t — you can’t just buy this equipment from equipment manufacturers. So being able to design and set up this equipment to be able to process this changing raw material stream continues to be one of our areas of excellence.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:35
That’s fascinating. The idea that if you had a different kind of fiber, for instance, coming in — you brought in a chipped orchard as a source — that you’d have a different recipe, but you’re producing a product that is consistent in its standards and specifications. That’s, I mean, Zach, that’s got to be very complicated. You mentioned AI. Was this possible before AI, or slower before AI?
Zachary Lauer 14:57
No, we still did it, but we had to program a lot more, right, and program the intelligence on the line a lot more. It’s just becoming more rapid as we can read those streams and read the variation in line. It just makes that reaction quicker and faster for us on those production lines to do that. But no matter what our recipe is for the day, to your point, Mitch, it comes out a consistent product at the end.
And it just shows that we design our product around variability. Whereas most people focus on reducing variation in their raw material streams, we’ve designed our whole manufacturing process around being flexible and adapting to material streams — not only the ones we use today, but the ones we’ll use in the future.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:51
The other area where you’ve got that kind of volatility is in the volume of recycled polyethylene that you’re bringing in. You had a big year in 2022; it went down by almost 100 million — excuse me, 100 million pounds — the next year, and then recovered, not quite back to the 2022 range, in ’24. What’s behind that volatility? Is it competition for feedstock? The fact that retailer collection participation changes? The contamination rates?
Zachary Lauer 16:20
A lot of things go into it. But what I tell people is, don’t equate our collection volume to our consumption volume. You know, one of the unique challenges about being a recycler is the fact that it’s a winner-take-all market. When you pick up an account, maybe a large grocery store, it’s like picking up the trash — you have to be there and you have to collect it regularly. Service is key. So there could be times when there is more availability or more collection in a period, and you have to accept it.
So how we manage that volatility, or, you know, the changes that can occur from year to year or season to season, is we do a very good job of long-term demand and supply planning in this space, and combining that with our space planning, and then we kind of layer in anticipated regulatory, market, and consumer preference changes into that. And so there could be a period where we see maybe a deficit or a surplus, and we will go in and consume that and store it for a future period, or there just could be a surge in a particular market where there’s the availability and you just have to be willing to take it. And that’s difficult to absorb — those huge swings like you mentioned — into your supply chain without having a plan.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:55
You just said “as a recycler,” but should we be thinking about this in general as simply part of the manufacturing process — going back to onshoring and keeping more materials in country and reusing them across a wider variety of production streams? How does Trex think about organizing the wider material flow rather than recycling programs in the United States? What have you learned that we should be applying as a nation?
Zachary Lauer 18:23
You know, I think you have to be intentional if you’re going to enter into a stream where you’re going to recycle or pull materials out there. We’ve focused our effort on North America, right? And we do take collection from other areas, but it’s rare. And we adapt our collection based on changing preferences. So, Mitch, what I mean by that is, you know, one year we could be doing a lot of store collection or distribution collection, but then all of a sudden in a region of the country, regulation changes, or things change, and we go more to the recyclers for our material.
We continuously monitor and adapt to the changes that we see there, because our desire is to keep our supply chains as close to our factories as possible. We bear the cost of the freight, right? And we bear the entire cost of the supply chain. We develop the supply chain, and so we’re continuously looking at ways to optimize that and keep our costs manageable.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:34
As you say, you’ve built this vast alternative collection system — 10,000 retail drop-off locations, you’ve got 84 grassroots community partners, there’s 936 schools that were involved as of 2024. What strategies did you have to develop in terms of communicating to the public what they should put in those bins at stores so that you get a clean load? And does that actually impact the quality of the materials you receive?
Zachary Lauer 20:02
It does. From our foundation, education has been key, right? So this has been a marketing and supply chain integrated strategy from the very beginning. And so we utilize things like our NexTrex program to educate students, to educate communities, and motivate them to recycle and incentivize them to recycle. But we’ve also at the same time incentivized our value chain or our supply chain to collect and be a part of it.
And some of that education is based on teaching people what can be used and how it can be used, and to let them know it’s actually being turned into a product that they can later consume and use. But we also come alongside other businesses to support their environmental sustainability goals as well. Most of our partners want to do the right thing too, and sometimes it only takes a little bit of incentive to get them to participate in this program that we have.
Amy Fernandez 21:09
And Zach, why don’t you add also a little bit about the logistics piece of this, because — so you talked about marketing and supply chain, but part of the supply chain was the logistics with the trailers and how we track them, and time them, and send them out at appropriate, you know, to basically maximize our efficiency in getting the materials.
Zachary Lauer 21:30
Yeah. So we also help our supply chain collect this material. We provide those that are willing to collect with balers to bale this, so that we’re efficient in hauling materials back. We also are very good at calculating what collection will be like in certain areas, and where to leave trailers, and where to incentivize them to backhaul to certain locations.
Right, the grocery stores, for example, they’re backhauling anyway to their warehouses — corrugate, all these other materials — so we take advantage of that backhaul to get to their distribution centers, and then collect from those points where they can fill a trailer within a couple of days. And we manage that entire network of trailers and supply chain, and we ensure that they’re weighed out before they hit the road, so that we’re optimizing the cost of bringing those materials in as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:36
Does that mean that you generally collect this material at a lower rate than most of the industry could possibly achieve at this point?
Zachary Lauer 22:43
That’s correct. Because we’re getting it directly from the source versus maybe through a waste collector or a municipal recycling facility where it’s already been handled a couple of times, and the cost could be higher.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:59
Amy, it doesn’t sound like it, but I want to ask about this — do the partners also come to you asking about getting credit for this, ESG credit, carbon credits, and so forth? Are you starting to hear that kind of conversation about how we can create further incentives within the collection economy?
Amy Fernandez 23:17
So we’re not starting to hear that yet, unless it’s come through Zach’s team. But as far as I know, we’re not hearing that. We are, though, starting to explore, for example, those companies that do want to say that their plastic is recyclable, because, as you know, all these regulations are coming out around that. If they want to put, for example, the NexTrex logo on there, and can assure that we’re picking it up. If we pick it up, it gets to our manufacturing site. So people that have put those trackers and things like, “Is my bag actually going to get where it’s supposed to go?” — we find them, they get to us. And so that’s part of it, is to support their recycling claims. We’re starting to get some questions and conversations about that.
Zachary Lauer 24:04
The other incentive too, Mitch, is for a lot of these individuals: they have their own goals, and one of those is to minimize what goes to the landfill. And so they’re also incentivized to not throw it away, and so we can help in that process too — we can help meet that need.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:25
I know neither of you is in the marketing organization, but when people encounter a Trex deck, do you want them to think about the fact that it’s recycled? Do you want them to identify with the circular process?
Zachary Lauer 24:36
We do, and it is meaningful to the consumer. You know, if you were to have asked that question when I just joined Trex — and I’ve only been here 10 years — that, you know, that may have been, you know, it was still in the top 10 of the consumer preference, but it was around eight or nine. That continued to climb up the ladder, and it is in the top five of what the consumer is looking for when they’re looking for a product.
It’s a luxury product that lasts an extremely long time, and they can feel good about the product that they’re purchasing when they do it. And Trex obviously leads in this space with our recycled content on our decking products.
Amy Fernandez 25:27
We still start with performance and aesthetics, but sustainability is right there, right along with it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:35
I have to admit, I do stand on my deck and think about the fact it’s recycled. This is a great place to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to be right back to continue this conversation. Stay tuned.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re talking with two of Trex Company’s leadership team: Amy Fernandez, she’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief Legal Officer, and I’m forgetting one other at Trex, and Zachary Lauer, who’s Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer. We’re talking about how Trex has built one of the largest recycling systems in the United States to source materials for its composite decking products.
Amy, Trex in 2024 decided to embrace the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, which were not mandated by the federal government as a requirement. What drove that choice? Why are you getting ahead of the game?
Amy Fernandez 26:30
There’s a big difference between complying when you’re required to comply and adopting best practices proactively. And in looking at the IFRS disclosure standards, it is a best practice. It’s benchmarking using globally consistent frameworks. It’s, you know, well recognized. It is a good-faith process that shows rigor. And so we’re not going to wait for a US regulation to force us to do something when, again, like I mentioned before, it’s just the right thing to do, and it’s a good framework, because it’s recognized globally. So although we are a US company, we do still have, you know, investors, customers, and others globally that are connected with Trex, so we want to be able to reach them.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:23
Did taking that higher road require more work? Were there things about your business that the IFRS framework forced you to confront and address that you wouldn’t have otherwise? And this obviously would be of interest to other companies that are thinking about whether or not to pursue them.
Amy Fernandez 27:42
Well, we are looking at some of the gaps in there, right? So our scope three, for example, we’re working on that now, and we’re going to get limited assurance from some auditors just to start. That’s something that isn’t required yet in the US, but under IFRS it is a best practice. So we’re starting to work on that now, because that is one of our gaps with alignment to that framework.
And then the other piece of this too is the rigor around any financial planning related to sustainability risk. So by doing that benchmarking, we were able to identify where we have maybe some best-practices gaps — not regulatory gaps, of course, because we’ve already talked about, this isn’t required — but best practices. And what do we want to start doing, and what might be helpful for everybody that’s looking at Trex, right? Our employees, our prospective applicants, our investors and our communities. So that is part of what we’re finding from this exercise.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:43
I also noted that Trex’s scope one and two emissions — you mentioned scope three a moment ago — have risen about 17%, partly due to greater volume and partly due to greater energy use. As you grow as a business — and this is one of those challenges that I think the sustainably-minded confront, which is, these companies are going to produce more carbon but less carbon relative to other alternatives — how do you talk to investors and within the organization itself about that rising net impact, and how do you rationalize that given your desire to reduce environmental impact?
Amy Fernandez 29:25
Yeah. You hit the nail on the head, right? When we bring on more production lines — so we did bring more on in ’24 than what we had in ’23, which accounted for a big portion of that increase that you saw in ’24. And then we also, by adding Little Rock, the Little Rock plant into the network — although we don’t have production there, we’re still using energy while we’re, you know, bringing it up. And so you’re absolutely right that because we are running more, that is going to require more energy.
But we’re trying to improve our efficiency of what we’re using. We’re also looking at our network and the grids and the energy available across Nevada, Arkansas, and Virginia, because they’re not all the same. So we’re going to start looking at where we can optimize that as an entire network. And, you know, just be working on that equipment that we talked about earlier that we design ourselves — what else can we put in there in order to reduce the energy use there?
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:28
Zach, what are the carbon intensity goals? I know you don’t necessarily state public goals, but how do you work toward reducing carbon intensity as a continuous improvement operation?
Zachary Lauer 30:39
So we’re always looking at how we’re manufacturing, and throughout the entire supply chain how we’re — I mentioned before, are we getting the maximum weight per load that we’re hauling? And on a per-pound basis of raw materials, we will actually, Mitch, fine or reduce the cost of what we’ll pay if the loads aren’t maximized and optimized.
But when we look at our manufacturing, we want it to be the lowest possible consumption of energy, because energy is expensive, right? And we want to be as efficient with that equipment as possible. Technology is going to continue to help us get there with that. But also, we drive our facilities off of manufacturing efficiencies, and our goal every year is to keep on getting faster, better, and higher, so that content per pound, that content per linear foot — because it is better and better every year. And that’s a focus for us.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:41
When you enter a new location like the Little Rock plant that you’ve launched, which is purportedly — I haven’t seen the results yet, but supposed to drive 7.4 million kilowatt-hours in annual energy savings and reduce the use of water through a closed-loop recycling system — how do you decide what efficiency investments are going to pay back fast enough to justify the initial investment?
Zachary Lauer 32:05
Well, you know, not everything we do has a great — you know, our goal is for everything we do to have a great return on invested capital, but there are some things that you do just because it’s the right thing to do. One of those areas that’s difficult to get tremendous payback on is water, right? Water is generally still relatively inexpensive in this country. Now, we all know that water is becoming more and more of a challenge.
But a lot of what we do is not just motivated by the return on invested capital, it’s that we’re motivated by doing the right thing. Our employees live in the communities that we operate in. They take a lot of pride. A lot of people come to work for Trex for what we’re doing. Our brand equity is enhanced by what we do and how we go about doing it — not just what, but how we go about doing it.
And our employee brand matters in the communities that we’re in, because labor is extremely competitive in this nation. And somebody that goes to work and feels the impact of what they’re doing is valuable to the community as well — is important to us, and helps us recruit. We have a lot of people that apply to Trex merely because we do things responsibly, we do recycle. So it doesn’t only matter to our consumers, it matters to our employees as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:35
Does the board have a set of “we do the right things” heuristics that they apply to some of these decisions, when you come and say, “Well, we need to do this, and it’s going to be more expensive”? How do they, as a group, create a systematic approach to making the right decision?
Zachary Lauer 33:50
We’re looking at it on an enterprise level, Mitch, where we’re looking at that return on invested capital at an enterprise level. And we will more than offset with our efficiency projects and our cost savings projects and those items on capital that allow us to do these types of things. And so we, for lack of a better term, try to overachieve in some areas to make sure that we can cover our bases in other areas.
Amy Fernandez 34:22
And our nominating and corporate governance committee is the one that gets a sustainability report every quarter. So every meeting we’re reporting on these metrics. Some of these metrics being very important — like our 95% recycled and reclaimed content in our composite decking — maintaining that is something that we report to them every quarter. We also report to them what we just talked about, our energy use, so there’s various metrics that we’re reporting to them.
And so it’s not only just that board-level oversight of our capital, it’s also the nominating and corporate governance committee oversight of our sustainability targets. So you’ve got two lenses looking at it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:04
Do you tie executive compensation to success on those metrics as well?
Amy Fernandez 35:08
We do not. We do not. Our executive compensation — it’s in our proxy statement, but no, there is not a modifier or a target for that. No, it’s overall company performance.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:22
One of the changes that I noticed recently is that between 2022 and 2024, the NexTrex program recovered six times as much material as it did just two years before. What drove that growth, and where do you see a ceiling, potentially, in what NexTrex can deliver?
Zachary Lauer 35:42
Yeah. So when it comes to the NexTrex program, in 2025 we collected over 4 million. In 2026 we’re on trend to get pretty close to 6 million. You know, as we continue to expand the opportunity to rural communities and other avenues to capture this material, it’s just part of our supply chain. As you mentioned before, as competition enters in the space, we’re already moving into the future on different collection points and then different materials.
And where we see — just this grassroots reference that you’re talking to — non-grocery, non-distribution, non-traditional space, this could get to 20 million pounds or greater for us over the next 10 years.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:33
As extended producer responsibility laws come into effect in various states, does that represent competition for the material, or could Trex even become part of the producer responsibility organization solution to collection and processing of materials within the state?
Amy Fernandez 36:49
Yeah, I mean, we’re in conversations with some of those folks about what they think they might be doing in the states that are starting to implement some of these, or, you know, discussing implementing some of this legislation. But we haven’t really seen that we’re going to have significant impact at all to Trex. There’s just, you know, given where we source our materials from, we’re not really seeing competition resulting from that legislation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:18
How do you see the NexTrex model continuing to evolve? Do you want to expand geographically, or is there potential for collecting other materials?
Zachary Lauer 37:18
Yes, I mean, we’re continuously working on the next-gen and the gen-after-that materials. We have a very extensive materials program here to evolve that. But we will continue to reach out to rural communities and those communities that aren’t served as strongly with collection points, and continue to expand those collection efforts nationally.
There’s probably only five to six states that we don’t even have a grassroots collection point in — we’re almost nationally covered in every state with these. And we set targets every year for this team to grow those programs. We have specific people that are dedicated to establishing these programs in underserved collection areas, and they have aggressive targets, and they’re passionate people.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:25
Let me ask about the other side of the recycling equation here, which is, with many of the earliest Trex decks coming to the end of their expected life, reaching replacement age, what do you have to do in terms of policy partnerships and pricing to create a closed-loop solution to recycle those materials as well, so that old Trex decks become new Trex decks?
Amy Fernandez 38:49
So we have the manufacturing capability to reuse our material, so that isn’t the hurdle. The hurdle is at that collection stage. And when you have a contractor that is replacing a deck, they don’t want to sort, so they want to just have everything in there. And right now that is the hurdle — it’s the sorting piece of it, because we can recycle our own decking, but we can’t take — we talked about metal earlier, right? That’s something that we’re not going to be able to use. So that’s where the challenge is.
And what we’ve done is we’ve partnered with, for example, one of our distributors. We partnered with them to bring back truckloads of material back for recycling. So we’re trying to work with our distribution network. We do merchandising, and so for those, we’re able to get that back from our merchandising vendor to send scrap back to us. And then we’re also able to implement some communication around — if there is a big job, let’s start trying to get that product back to Trex so that we can recycle it.
That being said, anecdotally, I hear from friends that have had their first-gen Trex deck, and it is still looking beautiful. So although the warranties are 25 to 50 years, you know, we don’t —
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:15
It could go longer.
Amy Fernandez 40:16
It could go much longer. And so it’s a matter of, you know, starting to see, well, how can we start to put in place a program for when these do start to get replaced or age out?
Zachary Lauer 40:28
But we would use our network to do that reverse collection, right? The network that distributed would be the means to recollect it back.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:39
That makes complete sense. For years, Earth911 has worked with Owens Corning on driving collection of shingles, but it’s interesting because shingle collection has spikes — extreme weather events, hurricanes, and so forth. And so they focus on communities and regions that are subject to disaster. It gives them the opportunity to get people to sort at a time when there’s a vast volume of material. Have you analyzed opportunities for that kind of optimized, focused geographic collection? Maybe a little ticky-tacky question, but I’d be curious.
Amy Fernandez 41:17
I hadn’t thought of it, and now that you mention it, I will.
Zachary Lauer 41:20
We’ve typically looked at our partners in the value chain for that versus external, you know, for those opportunities. So, and taking advantage of those backhauls and those types of situations, we already have trucks delivering. Can we have trucks collecting? The other thing — as we talked about the rural communities too, we’ve looked at offering the opportunity at those rural collection sites to take back product as well, because we already have trucks and trailers there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:49
If you were speaking with a manufacturer in another category, say textiles or electronics or other kinds of building materials, and they asked you what the single most important thing Trex got right early on, what would you tell them?
Zachary Lauer 42:04
We designed the manufacturing process, and we designed the supply chain to support it, from the very onset. And we had the mindset from the very onset that the variation was going to be there — figure it out. And through the decades we have refined the ability to do that. So we always had that end in mind: no matter what, we were going to figure out a way to do this. And we specifically designed our manufacturing processes and our collection processes to support that end-to-end supply chain to do that.
And the other thing that’s unique, and what I would recommend, is we’ve never depended on a middle partner or middle player in this chain. So as our collection may change over time, as our material streams change, I don’t have to go find somebody that can do that for me, right? I’m just modifying what I do today to a different material stream.
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:08
Are there moves you made that you wouldn’t recommend that others copy, because maybe it worked only because of where Trex was at the time? Are there ways to get into a blind alley and get stuck there?
Zachary Lauer 43:19
I really can’t think of any. You know, regardless, we’ve always tried to locate our facilities close to our raw material streams that allow us to maintain our 95% recycled content of materials in our decking. And so we specifically saw where we locate our plants to optimize that feed of material.
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:50
Well, Amy and Zach, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can folks keep up with what Trex is doing?
Amy Fernandez 43:57
We’ll be publishing our sustainability report as usual, probably sometime in that July timeframe, so be on the lookout for that next one. Our website — NexTrex is on our website as well, so those are probably the best places.
Zachary Lauer 44:10
Yeah. I mean, our website, and especially the NexTrex link there, has, you know, great videos and just great learning for people, and social media, right, is powerful too, for our NexTrex and our branding. So those are all platforms that we utilize to inform and educate, so that people can participate in the value chain and participate in this endeavor.
Amy Fernandez 44:36
Yep. So trex.com, Why Trex? The first link under that is sustainability.
Mitch Ratcliffe 44:41
Well, we will point folks to that. This has been a fascinating conversation, and really so impressive — what Trex has accomplished. Thanks so much for your time today.
Amy Fernandez 44:50
Thank you, Mitch. It’s our pleasure.
Zachary Lauer 44:52
Thank you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 44:53
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Amy Fernandez, Chief Legal Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer, and Zach Lauer, Chief Operations Officer at Trex Company, the largest manufacturer of wood-alternative composite decking in the world. And you can learn more about Trex and NexTrex collection programs at trex.com — that’s T-R-E-X, folks, trex.com.
You know, for the second time in less than a month, we’ve spoken with a company whose leaders chose to do the right thing regarding their environmental impact, and as a result, built a successful business from it. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, explained how they use recycled polyethylene in food packaging just a couple of weeks ago. But Trex got there in 1996, before “circular economy” was a phrase that anyone used in a boardroom, or, well, almost anywhere outside of a small cadre of design and architectural thinkers. Three decades later, it’s upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of plastic film and runs roughly 95% recycled and reclaimed content into its products. And I think, most impressively, operates one of the largest plastic film recycling operations in North America.
The sustainability work and the business are the same thing. It’s not a different choice to become sustainable — it’s part of the underlying philosophy of the company, and that’s the headline here. The structural insight is that Trex designed its manufacturing processes around variations in feedstocks, instead of trying to standardize and therefore eliminate the use of most of the material that they would receive. Zach described a rolodex of thousands of recipes that the production lines run through, swapping feedstocks the way that a baker swaps wheat flour for almond flour, for instance. And machine intelligence is making it easier to read the stream in real time and adjust temperatures and speeds on the line.
Most manufacturers spend their time narrowing input tolerances, but Trex developed tolerance for inputs that nobody else wanted and made it profitable. That’s a different theory of operations, and it explains why the company can go deeper into contaminated film streams — the dunnage returns that we heard about, the industrial trimmings, the bubble mailers that went to landfill before. Other recyclers walk away from this stuff, but Trex embraces and uses it. The lesson for any building products, textile, maybe electronics manufacturer thinking about recycled content is that variability is the design constraint. Solve for that first, or the supply chain will keep breaking on you.
Trex’s poly feedstock isn’t priced off a barrel of crude, which means in a period of reshoring, tariff uncertainty, and due to the war in Iran, oil-price swings, the recycled-content company holds a competitive advantage the virgin-material companies cannot match. And this is the version of the climate story that doesn’t get told often enough: recycled supply chains can be more stable than virgin ones in a volatile economy, not less.
So it’s refreshing to hear Trex acknowledge that the loop isn’t closed yet. The first generation of Trex decks is reaching replacement age — though I have to admit that my deck is looking pretty good at almost 20 years old — and the manufacturing side can reabsorb this material, but the recycling bottleneck is contractors pulling up those old decks who don’t want to sort the screws from the boards. And Amy named this directly. That’s the kind of candor that builds trust with the audience, and it points to the next phase in the circular economy work that requires leaping into the messy human logistics of deconstruction, sorting incentives, and reverse-haul economics.
Trex’s instinct to use its existing distribution backhauls is the right one, and it’s the model that other durable-goods manufacturers will need to copy if extended producer responsibility laws keep expanding state by state.
Two interviews this month with companies that chose the harder path early and now hold more defensible market positions. That isn’t a coincidence. It’s a leading indicator of which businesses get to keep operating in the climate economy that’s arriving right now. We’ll keep tracking the manufacturers building the infrastructure before the regulations force them to, because they’re the ones writing the playbook that everyone else will be reading in five years.
So stay tuned, folks. And hey, if today’s conversation gave you something to think about, share this episode with someone in your life who’s wondering whether sustainability and business strategy can actually be the same thing. And it turns out, in some companies, they already are. Folks, you’re the amplifiers — to spread more ideas to create less waste. And there are more than 550 episodes in our archive waiting for you on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, and other purveyors of podcast goodness, whatever you prefer.
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.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Trex Makes Circularity Work appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-trex-makes-circularity-work/
The real cost of 1 tonne of CO2: Translating carbon into hectares
China Briefing 28 May 2026: Deadly rains | China pushes back | Examining China’s carbon intensity metric
How Utility Companies and States Shaped America’s Clean Energy Transition
-
Climate Change10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy7 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases11 months ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测