Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors presented by Atlantic Packaging

Google's Sustainability Mission With Robert Little

• Cory Connors • Season 6 • Episode 390

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In this episode, Cory Connors welcomes his longtime friend and sustainability leader Robert Little to discuss Google’s sustainability mission—particularly its global work in circularity, recycling accessibility, packaging innovation, and the role of AI in modern waste systems. Robert shares his nonlinear career path, the principles that shaped his sustainability mindset, and how Google is leveraging its massive product ecosystem to scale sustainability solutions for billions of users worldwide.

The conversation explores Google Maps’ recycling drop‑off locator, Google Trends as a tool for understanding consumer sustainability needs, Google’s plastic‑free packaging design journey, and innovations like CircularNet and Materra, X’s emerging AI‑powered materials identification technology.

Key Topics Discussed:

  • Robert’s Journey Into Sustainability
  • Robert’s Role at Google
  • Google’s Sustainability Mission & Circularity Goals
  • Packaging Innovation at Google
  • Google Maps Recycling Drop‑Off Search
  • AI & Machine Learning for Waste Systems
  • Materra (formerly “Project X”): Advanced Material Identification
  • Advice for Consumer Brands
  • A Call for Optimism & Sharing Good Sustainability Stories

Resources Mentioned:

Contact:

Connect with Robert Little on LinkedIn.

Closing Thoughts:

Cory and Robert emphasize the need for optimism, collaboration, and smarter infrastructure in global sustainability. Robert highlights the immense potential for AI, transparency, and ecosystem‑level innovation to keep materials “in play” and reduce reliance on new resource extraction.

They encourage listeners to stay curious, share good sustainability news, and use the tools available—many of them free—to design better packaging systems and reduce waste globally.

Thank you for tuning in to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors!


https://anewearthproject.com/collections/new-earth-approved

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/

I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap.

This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging Podcast with Corey Connors. I'm so excited to have my friend Robert Little on. He is the Sustainability Strategy Lead at G-Tech, which is a Google company. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you too, Corey. How you doing? So good. We've been trying to do this for a few years and you finally got the big G as you call them to approve this. I'm so thankful. It's good to see you, man. It's been a while. It's good to see you too. And boy, you before we start here, I just have to give you a big warm, thankful sort of shout out here. You've taken what many think is sort of like a niche sort of ivory tower topic. made it super accessible, relevant, which I think, you know, packaging and recycling is like the gateway drug for sustainability. So I think you've really done a good job sort of making this a big splash. So thanks for having me on your podcast. Thank you, sir. That means a lot. You and I have had the experience of going to several events together and get to know each other at Sustainable Packaging Coalition and different things. But you have a very impressive background, including your time at Yale, where you met my coworker Caroline Deloach, or I believe you were there at the same time. I don't know that whole story, but what sparked your focus on sustainability as a career? Well, that's a good sort of question. And I don't want to toot my own horn on the background here. know, life is a series of lily pads that you jump from one to the next. And it looks, it looks conjoined in retrospect, but it's hard to put it together at the very beginning. Yeah, let's see here. I guess I'll sort of start here and talk about my sort of like what's in my sort of resume and background. And then I want to get to the sort of the spark part. So yeah, as you mentioned, I lead sustainability strategy for a technical services team here at Google. I've had sort of a fun sustainability career where I went to school for environmental policy. I've taught high school English in sustainability. I've worked in civil engineering and water management sustainability. And I've also worked in CPG companies with their sustainable packaging as well. I wouldn't consider myself like some sort of, like it really sounds like this is like a green person sort of like upbringing, but I don't think I would categorize myself that way. I really do challenge that. And I always think that you know, everybody has their sort of sustainability story or the reason why they care about sustainability. They may not call it that though, right? Like, you know, everything that I'm wearing here is thrifted or from eBay. And it's not because I refuse to buy brand new things, but because I like to have interesting clothing and save a little bit of money on the side there. you know, in college, I worked at a bike shop and I did a lot of bike repair. not because I sold my car, but because, it's fun to be able to zip around campus and to be able to actually own being able to repair the things that you have bought. em Yeah, and in the sustainability world, they're specifically in packaging, waste management, recycling, right? This is one of these bipartisan sort of themes that just makes honest sense right here. Who hates saving money through resource efficiency, keeping resources above ground? and lowering the overall cost of material by not having to mine it every time you want to use it. I think it's something that you could say has sparked. Everybody has a great moment. I really don't though. I just am somebody who has those principles of cost saving, looking fun, and being autonomous. Well done. Well, you've done a great job with that. And I think you're you're leading a team that's making a huge impact in the world of sustainability. So it's great to have people like you in this industry that are leading teams that are making positive changes that we desperately need. I'd love to be compared to a gateway drug here at this podcast. That's the first for me. I'm going to clip that for sure. It means a lot to me. Thank you. Yes. I hope people enjoy the show as much as you and I do. Let's talk about your role there at Google. What's a day look like for you? What's your focus on a day's work? Boy, that's a great question. know, the tropists say no two days are the same, but really that is the case here. So my title is Sustainability Strategy Lead and what does it really mean to drive sustainability strategy at a company like Google? I'd say that zooming out, know, people are very familiar with Google's tools and products like search and maps and photos and YouTube, but they're not often, you know, familiar with the messaging or the message I should say, which is we've kind of got a mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And then within that, actually have a sustainability mission around circularity to maximize the finite reuse of resources across our operations and supply chains and enable others to do the same. And it's that last part that I care a lot about, right? Like, how do you take a company that has many billion user products in such great reach and actually either build sustainability solutions on that infrastructure to help push it out and help solve problems out in the world? Or how do you take these great products that are just so useful every day and how do you slap on sustainability features on top of that? So I'm sure we'll get into some of the specifics of, you know, which tools and products I've been working on. But what it means for me as a sustainability subject matter expert on the team here is really just getting to work with a bunch of really talented engineers and help build products from zero to one that help, you know, our users help solve their sustainability challenges. I'll note that, you know, when it comes to the world of sustainability and Google. Recycling is the number one search related sustainability action that we see on our platform. There's a great tool if you've never seen it before called trends.google.com. I want to say it's the URL where you can kind of put in any sort of search query and see, how popular is this thing here? You know, you can, I'm sure when the latest Taylor Swift album came out, there was a big spike around the world, but you can restrict it to certain geos and you can look at different time horizons and year over year recycling is one of the number top. Number one, sustainability search reactions that always peaks between Thanksgiving and New Year's when everybody has so much stuff and their trash bins are full and they say, hey, what do I do with this? People often come to Google to search for that sort of information. But you asked me about my role. What it really means is getting to work with engineers to help direct and build the sort of tools that will help solve these queries and make the world of sustainability a little more smooth. and specifically what that means is like working cross-functionally, like working with the maps team, the search team, the ads teams, all these different cross-functional folks and saying, Hey, where can we actually build these features together? And then within my own small team here, it's, Hey, how can we use our small talents or limited bandwidth, should say, and build stuff from the ground up? and my role as somebody who's connected to the industry well is to help make sure that whatever we're doing, we're not doing it in a vacuum. We're talking to the NGOs, we're talking to the businesses, we're looking at those user trends and making sure that we are building things in a really informed sort of way. I love what you were saying about how during that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas or, or, a different holiday, whatever you celebrate that time of year, people often have that thought of, wow, what do I do with all this stuff? And I think COVID was that for many, that realization of, Whoa, this is a lot of boxes or wow, that's a lot of things that I don't want to throw in the trash. And I want to actually make sure they're recycled. So I think there was some positive things that came out of that experience for lot of people of education. And a lot of people use Google for that. I know that for a fact because they will often ask me, what should I do? I'm a startup brand or I'm a startup company and I'm trying to be sustainable with my packaging. And I say, number one, go to the grocery store and see your product like, see things like your product that you're looking to make. If it is. Yeah. love to know your thoughts on that. And, you know, are there other tools on Google that will help us be more sustainable? That's a great question. I think you've stolen some of the thunder here. Yeah, I always say Google Trends is such a fun place to start because if I were to start a company or if I were somebody dropped into a company where I'm trying to optimize my packaging for sustainability, I think the trends is a really good sort of area to just explore what are people struggling with or what are people searching for here? So you can obviously throw in your product category, your specific product. and see sort of the related queries that folks have there. Again, this is just a public tool that you can go ahead and explore both for fun and then for sort of like, sort of informing which directions you want to take, right? Maybe I have something that is very difficult to open, right? I would probably start there rather than, know, this is great, but I don't know what to do with the cap, let's So, so trends is a fun place to sort of like just get your feet wet here. I think that on a more operational level, one of the things that we've done really well is that You know, we love to sort of like open source the things that we think are going to be valuable to the industry here. I know you've had Miguel, one of my colleagues on for the packaging team. And we've built a plastic free packaging design guide that I had the opportunity to be a part of. I think it was last year here. We had set a goal a few years back to have totally a hundred percent plastic free packaging by 2025. And I was really excited to see us hit that goal a little bit early. And then the question is, okay, what do you do with that journey? Like, this is not a simple thing, right? Especially the really, really nitty gritty parts of a package. I just got my first Pixel phone the other day actually, and I had the fun of actually doing the unboxing and actually taking off the recyclable sort of fibrous tape and things like that. And knowing that the entire box I could actually just put in my curbside bin and know that Yes, this thing will be recycled. It feels really good. Weirdly enough to turn off my brain and say, okay, I don't have to worry about that now as somebody who cares about recycling so much. em But yeah, so. guest to have on. So thank him again for me. He was, he's brilliant guy. Yeah. office. yeah, so in a serious sense, Miguel did a great job sharing just our journey, what we did, what was really difficult, what we could tackle first, second and third. And I think we've had a second edition of that come out as well. So just start there if you're looking to have something that's plastic free. don't think plastic is... the biggest enemy in the world here. But what we do want to have is something that we know for the many different recycling ecosystems that people are a part of globally that will have a much better chance of being recyclable and more circular. I think that, I mean, you asked about like what other Google tools can we use here? One of the big things that I work on is getting recycling information onto maps and search as one of those like bolt-on products that I was mentioning earlier. And then also some of the AI solutions that are hot and rising here. I helped put together a open source computer vision, machine learning algorithm called circular net. That's live on GitHub for recyclers or even just folks who want to take this sort of pre-trained model. I have a different application to take off the shelf and hit the ground running and being able to understand, identifying where is this material ending up? If you are a, you know, I could imagine if you are a a packager and you want to partner with the material recovery facility that that doesn't have that sort of level of analytics. Like this is great. Now there's a free tool that you can actually lift and shift on. You can, you know, deploy this with a GoPro or some low cost hardware here and actually see what's flowing through a system and make sure like, yeah, this thing is actually going where I want it to go. I think that's a good, start there. Any follow ups? Yeah. So I was really excited to learn from you just a few weeks ago when we met in advance of this podcast about how Google maps had a locator system for recycling drop-offs for different materials. I didn't know that. And I think that is so I use Google maps every day, like period. And I'm all around the world, as you know, and it's just, it's my favorite, favorite tool to, to to not be lost. So thank you and your team for creating that. But I didn't know that it also had such sustainability advantages because a lot of people like me want to go to the store and drop off their soft plastics or their PET thermoforms or the things that are not curbside recyclable where they live. So I'd love to know more about that tool and kind of how that came to be. And did it just have a need and you guys came up with the solution or? Tell me more. Great. Yeah, the Genesis is sort of a fun story here where basically we've been working with the world's largest brands and advertisers. And, you know, when Google builds something, we try to not build it just for one specific niche thing, but we try to help everybody with it. the, the, the, the sort of core driving force behind this was we want to have more consumers recycle more and recycle right. And we want to make something that would be globally applicable. The recycling partnership puts out great reports for the U S here. You know, the state of curbside recycling in 2020, and they had one last year in the 2024, which I really, really appreciated. Illuminates the fact that we have like 9,000 different recycling guideline communities here in the US. Just think about what we have globally. What if you don't have recycling guidelines here? So when we were looking at like, okay, where do we sort of focus? We thought, hey, let's focus on where we know there is discrete infrastructure where people are actually managing drop off locations. And we can actually map specific categories to those drop off locations. Another really big, you know, important fact, a bunch of the numbers, I'm sure, but is that ah You know here, you can definitely Google it. But you know, like, why are recycling rates for packaging low around the world here, or certainly here in the US here, one of the number one reasons is just access, right? Like, not everybody has access to a curbside bin, not everybody has access to a free curbside bin, or is part of their municipal service here. There's actually a lot of the country and a lot of the world that has just drop off infrastructure. um So when we built this sort of like bolt-on solution, we looked on addressing basically that sort of part of the market here, both like things that are actually curbside recyclable, if you have it, metal cans, glass bottles, plastic bottles, things like that, but also like the things that are really hard to recycle, right? The things that you actually don't wanna put into your black bin, your trash bin, nor do you want to put them accidentally, I'd say, in the recycling bin, right? We wanna keep our film plastics separate or our... household hazardous waste or electronics or light bulbs or ink cartridges, things like that. um And battery, 100 % exactly batteries. We want to make sure that those definitely go to drop off as a safe disposal sort of method. em I think the other sort of fun thing, just so like, where did we nest this tool here? Google has, if you're a business owner, they have what you call different business attributes. And this is something that it makes Google Maps really useful, right? Where is, what's the address? What are the store hours? you know, very specific things to like, does this offer wheelchair accessibility? Does this, you know, does this have vegan options, things like that. And we thought, we could just add recycling infrastructure into this sort of like pre-drilled hole, if you will. And the good news about that is like, you know, the fun part about working at a company like Google is that you get to flip the light switch on globally and have everything, you know, everywhere all at once sort of turn on here. So it's been really fun to do that, to watch that feature grow. to have folks actually utilize that and actually find the right place to bring their material so they have a much better chance of being responsibly recycled instead of either contaminating a blue bin or much worse, creating a fire or a hazardous sort of situation. I love that. It's such a big opportunity to make such a large impact on the world. I think the last number I heard was 50 million US households don't have access to curbside recycling. And that's how many people live in a household. I think the average is two and a third or something like that. That's a lot of people. That's very sad to me that they don't have access. This tool will be incredibly valuable and will continue to be helpful for the community here in the US and beyond, like you've said. So thank you for that. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's a really important point that, you know, me in a city, I forget like, you know, I've got an uncle who lives a few hours away in central California and he takes everything, trash and recyclables, has to truck them out and so this is a fun tool I can say, yay, you can find the right place to bring your things. anywho. Hopefully, hopefully there's some standardization that comes with extended producer responsibility laws nationally and globally eventually. I mean, we, are companies and countries that, that, that know how to do it well. Why don't we replicate those things? That's my thought. Yeah, no, I mean, like the fun sidebar there is I had the opportunity to go travel to British Columbia this past summer with a group of legislators to honestly just see how in British Columbia EPR is done. have many more categories of materials under EPR legislation. I got to go meet with Canadian policymakers and I'd love just seeing how matter of fact in the of like, yeah, of course we bring our paints and hazardous waste to the risk. Like, why would you not do that? You know, like to have it be like the standard operating procedure rather than this very big Herculean effort. And I think what they, what I saw and observed is making categories under EPR really, really informed, really convenient, just integrated into the way that we live our lives and not this onerous sort of extra task is something that I really admired. My favorite moment of this trip was talking to I guess I can't name who they were, but a policymaker. And we were asking sort of sort of how, you know, how do you manage, or like how do brands manage and how do like the companies that producing this manage their materials? They always kick and scream when we sort of like try to propose this sort of stuff. And the policymaker and Ken was like, I don't care, they'll figure it out. You know, like that's their problem. But they figured out how to put it on the market. They'll figure out how to take it back and recycle it, which is a fun... Yeah, a fun story there. Well, that leads right into my next question. I was kind of hoping for some wisdom from you. What should consumer brands be focusing on with their packaging? Other than like Google's paperization of their packaging, which was incredible. Miguel shared that story really well. What do you, like if a brand came to you and said, Robert, what do we do? Help us out. That's a good question. I don't claim to be a packaging engineer, but it's something that I do have sort of a curiosity for. think the zooming out and like taking a step back, I think it was Tom Zachy's book, The Role of Packaging in 2019 or 20. He put this book out where he kind of crowd sourced a bunch of chapters written by packages from different companies. Holland's a really, really important narrative, which is know, what is the role of packaging? Well, to get your stuff from point A to point B. That's a given, right? We kind of forget about that. And then for many years, it was, okay, we want to get it from point A to point B and make it, you know, really fun to look at it really appetizing or sell the thing that's inside of it. Great, fine. And then we brought in some sustainability, right? We said, hey, we want to have your package be super, you know, durable, interesting and lightweight, which is great, right? I want to have packaging that is really easy to transport in, minimizes the environmental footprint of bringing it from point A to point B. And it's only very recently, right, that we've gotten to this component where it's like, and I want it to be circular as well. You know, I do not envy the folks on the packaging team that are like, wait a minute, which one is it? Which one do I have to optimize for at any given time? So I just want to acknowledge that sort of first here. Because what I want to answer is, you know, of course somebody who cares about circularity and keeping resources in use, I do want to see much more. ambitious sort of packaging or even the lack thereof. There's a great case study that we put out with with Lush where we had dematerialized packaging. I think it was a great study where we had like bath bombs that didn't even have packaging, right? You could go to the store and just pick up the thing and use your phone to lend and say, Hey, what is this? How do I use this? I don't actually need the plastic wrap around this here. So the need for packaging itself is the first question I would ask. Of course, the second one I would ask is like, okay, how might we put this out here in a more responsible way? For some categories, that means having a packaging that is, you know, totally reusable, um keeps kept in the system here. I think obviously I spoke a lot to deciding for recyclability. I think that is just the bare minimum honest sort of choice there. I think a really tough thing and something that you brought up with EPR. And so for years, this wasn't part of the conversation of, if I'm putting packaging out into the ecosystem, I don't have to be responsible for bringing it back here. And as a result, the folks or the industrial components that were responsible for managing an end of life were heavily under-invested with the tasks that they had at hand. And it was then, again, us as consumers to invest in our municipal recycling systems, or maybe they would have to go ahead and raise capital. But as a result, we're left with very old, outdated infrastructure that is not kept up with the rapid evolutions by contrast of packaging that we see every year. So I, know, selfishly would love to see more investment in the recycling ecosystem because I think that's what we all want here from a sustainability standpoint. And then of course, like, so what? So you have something that is recyclable, right? If that's where you're going. and you've invested in the system. I think the last sort of component there is really figuring out from the design component, how do I take that material and bring it back into my next life or my next package? I do love looking at papers at easy example rate. We have much higher recycling rates there. And it's because the actual mechanical process there is a little bit more simple perhaps than when we get down to the molecular level chemical recycling or the cost associated with glass and things like that and heating up to high temperatures. So, ah it's a very long-winded answer. But I'm saying the classic one is it depends here. But I just like to have those conversations as upstream as you possibly can. And again, citing trends like where from the consumer angle are people frustrated or where are they seeing something by contrast, catching fire and it's actually really exciting from a sustainability standpoint. I totally agree. was awesome to go to a renovated Murph in Boston. They had just spent $22 million updating their Murph with the latest and greatest in AI sortation materials. It was incredible to watch the system work with very few employees. And I think that's important because the act of having to pull trash out all day long is very difficult and can be dangerous too. So this is a job where automation makes a lot of sense and it's exciting to see that with the right technology and with this where AI is really making a great impact in my opinion is not in silly movies. It's in things like this where uh we're actually using the tech to see what's in front of uh the camera and sort. And it's just, it's amazing to see. So So we're going bit a break. So going bit break. So we're break. So to bit Yeah, I mean, you definitely spotted, of course, my Google personal sort of interests here. I think the two things I would say are the technology is rapidly growing and innovating. And that's just great, right? From a cost perspective, the better that we can innovate, the more granular data that we can gather specifically when it comes to the recycling ecosystem is just awesome. I think that this is historically an industry that It can be very dangerous. can be very thin margined. And it's an industry that there's not a lot of transparency. And like, do you blame folks in this industry? No, like it's a tough industry and it's underfunded here. So flipping that the role of data that we're getting from different sensors and the role of artificial intelligence to help identify is bringing a new level of visibility to an industry that we just haven't had before. And think that's really exciting. think specifically, this is the right time for it with the tailwind of EPR here. We're seeing, you know, I can't speak for every single program here, but at a very high level, what we want to see is that, you know, I have faith that whatever we're putting in our recycling bins or whatever we're dropping off for recycling is moving through the system and making it to an end market and ultimately becoming a new product or a valuable material or serving some sort of good purpose. And I think that the way that many EPR programs are stipulating, okay, these are the specific categories that have to reach a certain specific recycling rate. How do you measure that? Great, we have these sort of sensors and these new AI tools to actually help do that measurement and that reporting and that sorting, right? That's like the sort of like a watershed moment for this industry, which I think is just, it's really fun and really exciting. That and you know, when you start bringing visibility and transparency to an otherwise, you know, opaque industry. I think it's great from the consumer engagement angle as well. I think that the recycling industry has had a lot of tough press, honestly. And yeah, I'm frustrated too. It's tough when you don't have faith that something, you're going out of your way, you're doing a good action, that you know that the of like the end fate will be what you're desiring and whatnot. So the more transparency that we have there, I think it helps the actual industry out. It helps the consumer trust. And ultimately it helps our sustainability story of keeping things in use, which is the more important part. A lot of energy in the, in the industry has been put towards making recycling look bad for some reason. And I just don't understand that mindset. A lot of gotcha journalism and things like that where, yeah, it's a, it's a clickable story. And yeah, I understand that, but let's be positive. I'd love to talk about project X if we can, or your, your project at X, I should say. their sortation project. Can we talk about that yet? Is that public? it's always a, it's always a, I'll keep my lips tight here. but no, we, it's, it's a really exciting moment because we're, we're, finally moving out of stealth mode into something that is actually really exciting to talk about here. yeah, I mean, first on your foot, on your foot now beforehand, like it is to, think like, you know, the, the, bad news sells. I don't like that. If you see me on LinkedIn, I don't have many social media platforms, but I love telling the good stories here. And I'm really hoping to build much more, hope and optimism for the, the good news here. and to kind of flip that narrative here. You can't just do that out of thin air, right? You have to actually show the metrics and the technology and the success behind that. And that's exactly what their new public name is Matera is doing here at X the Moonshot Factory. At a really high level, gosh, mean, like when you look at the different technologies in the waste management industry right now, again, it's this watershed moment of this boom of AI and sensing and transparency and identification and then ultimately sorting in service of making sure that more recyclable material goes to the recycling sort of folks and then things that cannot do not contaminate. What's interesting about Matera or like maybe I can just talk about the industry as a whole here is like historically we haven't had the kind of sensory technology to be able to see what we want to do here. And what I mean by that is, you know, me as a human eye or a lot of the even NIR sort of sorters that we have. They are only able to see a certain level of material and they're only able to see certain pigments and whatnot. And I'm using C as a relative term to solve, know, wavelengths and light and things like that. But what Matera does is actually bring sort of a new sensory modality here to actually, you could think of it as almost like seeing a new level of what's in a package, right? Let's see the actual molecular composition of a package and what does that actually unlock? Well, for one thing, it's not just like, we're not just showcasing, know, okay, I can see a plastic bottle here, but I can say, okay, this is a specific PET bottle with an HDPE cap, and I see some PVC contaminant on there. So it actually gets a much more sort of holistic picture uh there. I think for hard, harder to recycle, I don't want to even call it that because I feel like that's a rude term here. But for different materials that have historically had lower recycling rates here, one of the difficult components is like, being able to identify the very specific sort of blends of the material here. So if you can actually do that and measure it, Matera, which is the project from X can help do that here. And that's really important when you're optimizing feedstock for specific use cases. I don't want to get too deep into it, but what I'm excited about here specifically is back to this conversation of EPR, right? Like this is great from a like a profitability standpoint, right? We're otherwise landfilling, you know. millions and billions of dollars of otherwise recyclable material to landfill. And now we can actually identify and start bringing them to the right end pathways. And in the same time, we're going to be able to use this sort of technology to help broaden the sort of sphere of what we can identify for extend to produce responsibility and showcase the good story of like being able to sort this and being able to bring it to the right end markets. um I direct you definitely to X the moonshot factories website The the website title used to be circularly moonshot. I think my terror is on there Like out in the open now, so I would yeah, definitely encourage you to take a look fun YouTube videos there It's incredible that EPR is going to encourage that technology by collecting funds to pay for it. And then it's, it's going to also encourage that technology because brands are going to be required to use a certain amount of post-consumer recycled material. So all of a sudden the demand for this material is going to spike. hope if, if, if everything goes as planned and everything works as we hope it will. So I think this, this is where your Matera equipment and technology is going to just be so valuable. Right. Let's, let's paint a brighter future here. Right? Like, what do you want to see? You want to see a world where, you know, the resources are flowing through our mechanical technosphere, like they do in nature, right? where it's easy to actually have the right sort of like decomposition and regeneration pathways. And we're not stifling them and part of that is really just understanding what's going where how can I get these materials in the right place? And then how ideally from an economic standpoint because it always boils down to that Can you can you actually bend that cost curve and say like hey because this? Material that I'm having is being used over and over and over again It's gonna be less expensive than having to bring it from the ground up and do the whole refining remanufacturing all that kind of stuff I really appreciate what you said about keeping it above ground. And my friend Russell likes to say, keep those molecules in play. And uh he's a scientist. He's brilliant like you, but he just says, you know, these things that, that makes sense to him. I'm like, okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. So yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you, sir, for being on really appreciate your wisdom and your thoughts. Any last words for the audience before we close this out? That's a great question. think that first, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Again, I just can't thank you enough for taking this narrative and making it popular, tangible, interesting, and accessible. Again, when it comes to sustainability, everybody has something that they do in service of sustainability. It may not be branded that way. It may be for saving money. It may be for having a fun new style or things like that. But I think that you're doing a really good job helping. sort of craft those narratives and bring that awareness to everyone. And I think from a zooming way out perspective, I think that we in the sustainability industry or we in the industry where we're trying to combat a lot of like tricky news and whatnot, it is really tempting to say, well, this isn't working, so it's broken, so I don't wanna invest in it. Or like, how is that ever gonna work? It's gonna cost too much money here. And I think that if I were to ask the audience to flip that a little bit more here, I would love to have more people share the good work that's being done. There's so much of it if you look for it. There's so much of it across different sort of like use cases. And I think that, know, something from a positive psychology perspective that I've adopted is the more good news you're sharing, the better you feel. ah give it a shot is what I'd say. I totally agree with that. Yes. I'm tired of the woe is me stuff. Let's, let's be positive. Let's the, let's fix it. Yeah. let's fix it. Let's light a candle, right? Let's not curse the darkness. Great. Thank you, Corey. Take care.

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Cory Connors

Host