In this episode, we interview the co-founder of The Good Goods, Zach Lawless. The Good Goods are a reusable wine bottle company that are tackling the biggest environmental impact of the industry: packaging. One new wine bottle puts 2.7 lbs of CO2 into the environment, so reuse is paramount to limiting our global emissions.

Zach talks us through his business model, how consumers are responding, and the challenges and opportunities in this pioneering space.

Will Richardson 0:05

Welcome to the Green Element podcast where we meet business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable, and in the process help you on your sustainability journey. I'm your host, Will Richardson. The concepts of reuse and reduction sit at the very top of the waste hierarchy. With me today is Zack lawless, the co-founder of The Good Goods, who has implemented these concepts in an industry, you'd least expect it - the wine industry! Reducing waste isn't just about waste, but also about reducing the carbon emissions from the raw materials, the manufacturing, the transport, and the disposal of the products. The Good Goods is a pioneering company offering a solution to the biggest cause of emissions in the wine industry. Single-use glass bottles. Welcome, Zach.

Zach Lawless 0:56

Thanks. Well, appreciate the introduction. I'm excited to be here with you today.

Will Richardson 1:01

Now, I've given our listeners a brief introduction, but can you tell us in your own words, what The Good Goods are all about?

Zach Lawless 1:08

Yeah, so Good Goods, we focus on building consumer-centric reuse programs for brands and retailers. And the reason I use consumer-centric is because we focus on really the consumer aspect of that, how do we get consumers to engage and return these products. And so what we believe is that that is the first part of building significant reuse models. And because no matter how efficient your logistics, or your or or cater sensitization is, you need to be able to get the products back if you want to have a successful reuse program. So we're really focused on that first leg of creating a great consumer experience figuring out how to get other producers and retailers to join the program. And we have dived into the wine industry to create this platform for the different producers and retailers in the industry.

Will Richardson 2:04

Are you finding there's good take-up in it?

Zach Lawless 2:06

Yeah, I think that we chose the wine industry for a number of reasons. One is that it could be easily adopted by the players who are in it currently. So wine obviously is already in durable, reusable packaging. And then secondly, there's a high level of standardization within the industry. So from that perspective, producers to move on to the platform pretty easily, without major changes compared to some industries that are trying to move over to reuse. For instance, I know that Haagen-Dazs, for instance, that I don't know if you've seen that famous stainless steel container, that's double-wall that they introduced into it into the Reuse Program. But I know that that took something like two years to be able to manufacture the packaging and get through a new production line and things like that, whereas wine can move really quickly. The other part about it. And the reason I think that we have had so much success in wine is that it's uniquely affected by climate change, right? The producers really feel the impact. And it's been one of those things, it's been really kind of almost definitely moving to go to a lot of conferences, talk about what we're doing and listen to these producers talk about climate change. A lot of them are sitting there saying people are telling me that climate change isn't affecting me as much as it is my grapes are different. And my grapes aren't lying to me, right? And so and in agriculture, the rural industry is greatly affected by this. Producers are really interested in making changes. And so we know that the glass bottle itself is it by reasoning basketball itself as the biggest impact you can make into the production of wine from the finished products. Carbon Footprint standpoint.

Will Richardson 3:47

That's interesting, slightly on a tangent, but what was it that compelled you to set up the Good Goods? Because your background is really interesting. I'm curious to know how you transition from being a university degree in mechanical engineering, and business finance to set up your own business and why?

Zach Lawless 4:04

And you alluded to the carbon footprint of the bottle being one of the highest parts of the wine, could you go into more detail with that?

Yeah, so anywhere between 30 and 50% of a finished wine bottle on the shelf. The carbon footprint comes from the wine bottle itself.

Wow, that's one hell of a statistic.

Right? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, people always forget that you have to keep a glass up to over 2000 degrees Celsius ordered melted, right. So whether you're recycling that bottle, or whether you're building a virgin bottle, the majority of that part of the carbon footprint is from actually heating it up. So recycling really doesn't make much of an impact and glass, which is a very interesting thing that people tend to forget. And also, you're talking about an agricultural product, that a lot of times has a very low footprint. So really, truly, the bottle itself is the main contributor to the footprint of wine, transportation itself is 13%. So the bottle is about twice that. And reuse offers an opportunity to really reduce the footprint of the bottle by about 65 to 75%. So if a producer is really truly interested in reducing their footprint, the number one thing they can do is actually reuse bottles. To to that number.

And since we're looking at the carbon footprint of it, then, are you taking into consideration bringing the bottle back to the store or location point, and then that's upward transportation back to the producer. And then I'm assuming the cleaning of it. And then the downward transportation as well. What what does that carbon footprint look like compared to the original one?

Yeah, so I apologize, it probably should have at the beginning, when I introduce the business just talked about kind of how the program works so people can understand. I give you the high level that we do activations for retailers and producers. But how it really works is that the front end of is supply chain stays pretty much the same, and that producer will fill in a reusable bottle, they will then sell to the distributor, there's through distributor will sell to a retailer, the retailer will sell to a customer, everything at this point is the same. Now that customers will bring back that bottle, they will scan it in through a QR code that's on the bottle to get credit that is attached to their number, the thing that's important is that credit can be used towards anything in the store. So it entices the retail owners to work with us. And then that the retailer will set up a threshold of the amount of bottles that they are willing to hold before it gets picked up. We know exactly how many bottles are there because they get scanned in. So once they hit that threshold, a pickup, it's set up, those balls get picked up and taken back to a facility to hold inventory until they reach the right thresholds. And then they hit then they go get sanitized, washed and resold to producers. And so how does that affect the carbon footprint? Like I said, the majority of that carbon footprint is from the production of the bottle itself washing compared to creating a virgin bottle is a 95% less carbon-intensive process. Then then you talk about how do I move those bottles around, right? And so for the majority of that, you're either picking up bottles and moving to the landfill, you're picking up bottles and moving them over to a warehouse. And then it basically comes on how dense a network of producers and users of those balls can you get before going across the country. But we do know from our carbon analysis is that I could actually pick up that bottle, get shipped from California over to New York. We could ship it to a washing facility back in California and ship back over to a producer in New York. I'd still use less carbon than we cost to make that model.

That's brilliant. Wow. It just yeah, it just highlights the, I mean, forget about the business model the, the, you know, the environmental model of it, and what you're doing.

Yeah, you alluded to the beginning, but reuse is really the holy grail for sustainability. And, and we tend, we're least in the US we're bogged down by decades of legislation trying to promote incentives, trying to promote recycling, and recycling after 50 years, it's still really failing us a lot of different aspects, and it hasn't really been thought about in the material aspect of what makes sense for what type of products. And so yeah, the, our goal is to help push reuse and make it a more common and engaging product feature.

And you're quite heavily reliant on tech within this process, aren't you?

Yeah, we really do. I mean, it's kind of cliche at this point. It's like everybody is a tech company. But we, we really are taking technical approach. We're trying to try to modernize the milkman, right? These systems, everything had been in place before, we're not recreating the wheel and trying to recreate reuse, but we are trying to bring it into the 21st century, there's a lot of things that we can do using tech to make that a better experience. For instance, you are returning that that bottle that you just purchased, and you're you scan into your phone, you get their credit stored on you, we're going to text you and let you know that you have those credits, we're also gonna allow you to opt in to learn more about the products that you have. And one of the interesting things is about 65% of consumers engaged to opt-in to learn more about the products that they're purchasing, right. And then most of the time, we're letting them know about what kind of sustainable practices the vineyard using, why this whole program should be meaningful to them. We can take through a consumer journey that has been really reserved to direct to consumer customers, but we can bring that into the retail experience through what we're doing. And I think that makes it enticing to producers, but it also makes it enticing to kind of the modern consumer who's really interested in learning about the products, then they realize they're not just buying what's inside that packaging, they're actually buying kind of the ethos of that brand as well, too. And so we're able to do that, we're able to get feedback from the customers so that we can help provide brands with feedback on the products and even potentially help provide customers with purchasing decisions. So the like everything in the modern economy, data is a big play of what we're doing. And same with just the tech in general in order to make sure that those things run smoothly and the consumer experiences is great as can be.

What I absolutely love about your business is how simple it is, and how successful it is. Probably partly driven by the simplicity of it, you haven't come in and completely changed an industry, you've actually come in and then pretty much enhanced that industry and just made it more sustainable. Very simply. And that simplicity is probably what is driving that change.

Yeah, it's funny. I mean, one of the simplicity, I think is based around our ethos of consumer experience, right, the more complex anything gets, the more difficult is for people to participate. So we really do, it is a complex problem of sustainability, right. And it is a complex business that we're trying to get into. But in the consumer world, and to everybody else who's participating, it needs to feel as simple as possible. And I think that in general, that's kind of one of the biggest problems that the environmental movement faces is that it is such a big and overwhelming problem. But one of the things I think people love about what we're doing is that you don't really need to know the intricacies of carbon or climate change, you don't really need to know how to live a zero waste lifestyle to participate with us. We kind of give you that that entryway to be a part of the movement to do something that is small and easy at first get rewarded for doing it. And maybe what we hope is that that that serves to lead to other major changes. We saw that with, especially our machines that we put into office spaces sometimes are we heard one of our clients come back to us and say it's the water cooler for sustainability because some of the people in office really know or care about sustainability that much. But when they were talking to people about the lunch they just had they wouldn't say like "I had this great salad". They were like, "oh, I had this like really cool salad in this jar that I got to return". And all of a sudden this person who didn't have a chance to or would never have been in that sustainability conversation before. Now they had a voice. They've done something small, but it's giving it's like giving them a part to play,

And you've talked about going into other industries. Have you started looking at other industries? Or is that still in the kind of planning stage?

You know, we actually have reached out to a lot by people in other industries. I mean, we've had a lot of fun conversations, but, at the moment, we're solely focused on wine. Like I said, it's the first part that we there's the first ball that we think we need to get rolling. And, and yeah, so it's just wine at the moment. We have big visions, but we're making sure that we stay focused in the moment.

And, um, you talked about the fact that it's, it's actually a different bottle is that because the label is etched into the glass, so it's, it's already made for that particular bottle, because I guess I was originally thinking that it was a glass bottle with the paper label, and then it would just be washed, everything would come off, and then you put the paper label back on again. But I'm thinking that that's not the case.

But that is the case. So the major change of being able to make a bottle actually reusable, is making an adhesive so that the label will come off, right? That's the hardest part of the standardization process.

Oh, wow. Okay, yeah.

And so really what the first step we do for producers to join our platform isn't even to get them into a standardized bottle, it is really to work with them, say like, Hey, let's create a program that works for you. The first thing that you need to promise us to do is to start using the right adhesives and including our QR code. So that's step one for getting the process, then they have to agree to either let their bottles be resold to other producers or to agree to repurchase their bottles. So we'll actually work with the standard of their existing bottles, making sure that they're using the right adhesives and the right QR codes. And then we have our own standardized bottles that we move people to based on a kind of what they're using ahead of time. So it's we allow them to come into the program pretty easily. Just like I said, the main issue is making sure that people use the right pieces.

This is gonna sound like a really dumb question. Does it matter what color glass you use?

No, it doesn't matter what color bass you use it so we can we can clean things.

Okay, I didn't know if that was on, you know how black plastic is actually really hard to recycle because machines don't, they can't see the plastic. And I wondered if there was, I don't know, something in that within the cleaning.

So you can push the problem into different areas, right. So like glass, black, black, plastic is hard to recycle, because you're trying to make other colors out of it. And the same thing with if I was to get a bright yellow bottle that somebody wanted to put into the program, we need to find a secondary source for it. And if it's something that is so different from the market or so unique to that producer, then then it might be possible for us to find a secondary market. Yeah.

Because you're moving things around. It's been fascinating talking to you. What are your future plans for the Good Goods?

So we are really just now starting to expand, we've got about 13 wines on the platform right now we're hoping to be closer to 20 by the end of the year. We're at about 30 retailers in the New York metro area right now we're going to be at 100 by the end of the year and 600. By the end of next year. We have some big producers in the pipeline that are they're jumping on board. And we're expanding outside of New York by the end of the year into California. So we're going to take a coast to coast inward approach to expansion. And, and yeah, so our goal is to help get as many people on board in reusable bottles as possible. So if anyone is interested in enjoying the program, make sure you go to our website. The Contact Us forms will ask you to fill out a form based on if you're a producer, retailer, distributor. Any one of those can get involved in any way. So yeah, if anybody's interested, just reach out on that form, and we'll get them set up with the program.

Brilliant, Zach, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, and I just love your business. It's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Thank you. I appreciate it. It's been fun to be on the show. I appreciate you having me on and letting me chat about it.

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