Eco-friendly Packaging by EcoEnclose

Saloni Doshi, CEO and Chief Sustainability Geek of EcoEnclose — a company focused on sustainable and regenerative packaging. They go way beyond just simple recycled cardboard. Saloni has a rich background in all things sustainable and equitable. Listen in as she shares insider knowledge of the packaging industry and explains ways your company, large or small, can make a difference on how you package up your goods. www.EcoEnclose.com
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 31 | Saloni Doshi |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] Welcome, everyone. I have Saloni Doshi on today. She is the CEO and chief sustainability geek at EcoEnclose. I’m always happy to meet another fellow geek out there. Her company, as you can probably imagine, deals with sustainable packaging. They also work to guide their customers that are committed to positive change. As soon as I read that positive change element, I was like, okay, she’s totally in line with me because our company Design Positive works with brands that do positive change. I was really excited. I reached out to her to have this interview. One of the things about her company is that they focus on treating the planet with respect and preserving its beauty and natural resources to think about for future generations. That’s something we all should be doing, but they’re doing it. If you go to their website, you’ll see an enormous amount of options when it comes to packaging. That’s one of the exciting things from my perspective that I want to dig into today. Saloni, please tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got to be the CEO and this amazing sustainability geek that you are. 

Saloni Doshi
[01:25] When you’re the CEO, you can give yourself your own title. That’s why I chose that title. Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s really exciting to be here. I love what you’re doing. I’m excited for our chat. Yeah, so EcoEnclose, you described it very well. We focus on sustainable packaging for ecommerce brands that have put the planet core central to their mission. In terms of how I got started, I have a really random diverse background. I started my career in management consulting, working with Fortune 500 businesses and actually spent quite a few years at Teach For America working in a strategy capacity for them. I think that’s where I was like, okay, I have a real passion for justice and social justice and also environmental justice. Went to business school, and in business school, like this idea of social enterprise my eyes opened up to this idea that business and justice and impact can be intersectional. After business school, I ran a food business that was focused on food access and food deserts, which was like a really important – it is a really important topic. Ran a business for several years and then started – when I finished with that, I moved into sustainable agriculture and worked with farms to transition them from monocrop farming to more organic, more sustainable, regenerative farming practices and how do you do that in a profitable way because you do lose a lot of short-term profits to do so. That was a big part of my career.

At that point, after doing that for several years, my husband and I started thinking, okay, well, our long-term passion is to run a business that is impact-oriented. Along that time, we learned about EcoEnclose. At the time, it was like four people with one product line. It was for sale. It was a business that this wonderful woman who had started it was trying to sell. She was like, “This was sort of my passion project for me. I don’t want this to be a business long term.” She was in Colorado and we were living in – we’ve lived in Colorado for quite some time. We ended up acquiring it. It was, again, very small. We now have over 50 people. We’ve diversified and grown our product line tremendously. That was about seven years ago that we took it over and have, really, I think, grown it with this lens towards, okay, what could it look like for packaging to be truly circular and regenerative. We’re so far from that today, but what does that look like if we can get there in 10, 15 years and we really said, okay, that’s our entire business model is like let’s figure out what’s wrong with the packaging we even offer today. How do we keep making it better and better all in service to this ultimate vision of circularity and regenerative solutions? Then how do we work with amazing brands, small and large brands, to help them adopt our current packaging but also be partners with us in this innovation towards the future?

Taylor Martin
[04:00] Yeah, I just want to fill people in on the website, like what is there. They have paper mailers, cushioned mailers, rigid mailers, I’m going to go through the list, shipping boxes, of course, inner packaging, you know the packaging that goes inside of things that goes around stuff, and then retail packaging, protective packaging, carton sealing tape, so different types of tape and papers and stickers and labels. Then at the very end you have this Eco Geek algae t-shirt, which I didn’t see before so now I’m like, what is that? I’ve never even heard of an algae t-shirt. What is that?

Saloni Doshi
[04:35] Yeah, so it’s like one of my favorite stories at EcoEnclose. About five years ago, we ran into this guy named Scott Fullbright who started this concept called algae ink. It was like just a basic idea at the time where instead of – people were using algae to make fuel and things like that and then there were all these algae waste products. He was like, well, can we turn the algae cells into ink, he’s a scientist, of course, into pigments for inks. Most people don’t know that even sustainable ink today, the pigments are made with carbon. You basically burn fossil fuels and take the char and turn that into pigment for black pigment. He’s like, how do we replace that with algae cells? He invented this thing. He didn’t know how to commercialize it. We ran into each other and then we were like we’ll be your test kit case. We started experimenting, testing, printing our boxes with algae ink and it was successful. We then started printing all of our paper mailers with algae ink. Then we were like let’s screen-print and so we came up with this algae ink – it’s a 100% recycled t-shirt that’s printed with algae ink and it’s one of the first t-shirts ever that was printed with this algae screen-printing ink. Now, I mean, just in the last six months, Nike started printing with algae ink, Adidas. I mean, it’s just started to really take storm. It’s really clear that Living Ink and our partnership, Scott Fullbright started this company Living Ink, we have a very close partnership. Now it’s really opened the world’s eyes to the fact that ink has a long way to go to be net positive for the planet. What’s awesome about algae is that this algae ink is net sequestering. One bucket of algae ink, that we have many, many buckets in our warehouse, will sequester the same amount of carbon as the planting of four tress so it’s actually like a net benefit to the planet to use algae ink. It’s a really cool technology.

Taylor Martin
[06:16] Yeah, it’s a regenerative product.

Saloni Doshi
[06:18] Exactly, exactly.

Taylor Martin
[06:19] That is fantastic. I didn’t realize the whole back story there. That was impressive. I also have to say some of the history of your career, that’s also incredibly insightful, because if you have these many different angles, these different lenses of seeing the world through more sustainable means, it’s no wonder how successful EcoEnclose is because I think that lady who you bought it from, I can only imagine that she is extremely happy with everything that you’ve done building this business up to what it is today.

Saloni Doshi
[06:48] I hope so. I visited her the other day and she’s created this farm on her house and I’m actually a little jealous of her lovely life right now.

Taylor Martin
[06:56] Yeah, I think I would love to have a little farm like that in my backyard. Tell me a little bit about where you see packaging today from your perspective?

Saloni Doshi
[07:06] Yeah, great question. I’m going to focus on ecommerce packaging, but a lot of what I say is relevant for primary packaging as well or retail packaging. I always like to start out by, we have to use the word sustainable packaging because that’s what people use. There is no such thing as sustainable packaging today because a real definition of sustainability is that you’ve come up with a material that can actually exist forever, that it’s really net neutral or net positive for the planet. No packaging is that today so I would never pretend that ours is. As I look at the landscape of just general packaging, I’m always like people are trying, I guess, to do the right thing, but there is obviously far too much virgin content being used. There’s far too much packaging that’s designed without an eye towards, okay, can it be recycled at the end of life and how could we get it recycled at the highest levels at the end of life, but then you have this [07:57] world of people are trying to do better. In that space, I’ll say EcoEnclose is focused on this concept of circularity and regenerative principles. We have, therefore, created a framework that says, okay, we want to make sure that our packaging – or we think all packaging should have as much recycled content as humanly possible, as much postconsumer waste as humanly possible, and then we want it to be recyclable. We want it to be able to be reused where it makes ecological sense for reuse to take place. We want to factor carbon footprint in knowing that carbon footprint is – carbon emissions are only just one part of the equation that we should use to evaluate.

We really have not found a bioplastic that we feel very good about, but we know that a lot of people are going into the world of bioplastics so we have – we always say we tread carefully with bioplastics. We bring a lot of research to that. If we found one that met our criteria, we would be very excited to go for it. We tread very carefully with virgin paper as well because we know any time you are using virgin inputs, it’s going to be net detracting for the planet today. Again, we really focus on the recycled content. We also focus a lot on domestic ethical supply chain so we work with domestic plants largely. We audit the plants. We talk to the workers in the plants. People think about that in fashion but they oftentimes don’t think about that in packaging. How do we build transparency and ethics? Those are some of the tenants of how we have defined sustainable packaging. I think there’s some interesting trends going on in the world of sustainable packaging where people are making these knee-jerk reactions where they think a certain material is the silver bullet and it’s going to save us and all packaging should be made from it. I think in our research we’re like, that’s not the answer. The answer is not going to be this one perfect material because every material today has some upsides and some downsides. We try to evaluate those and then bring brands into the sense of this particular solution is actually net better so let’s go with it knowing that it’s still not perfect and start heading in the direction of circularity long term.

Taylor Martin
[09:56] Yeah, I think it depends on where we look. It’s like your algae chemist. He saw something, looked at something, and realized, this byproduct, can we do something with it? It’s just what can we do with it. The same thing goes for – like a previous podcast, we talked about mycelium a lot. It’d be great if the byproduct of mycelium, a waste product of mycelium, could be used to make packaging and then it’s biodegradable and goes right back into the earth, which is where it’s supposed to be to begin with. People talked about using stone as paper sourcing. You might be able to answer this question because I don’t know the answer to it. Whenever you use paper made out of stone, the “pulp”, if you will, from that stone paper, how does that mix with other tree pulp material?

Saloni Doshi
[10:47] Yeah, stone paper is such a great example of how do you analyze all this because we have avoided stone paper for that very reason. I think, first, you can already make paper out of renewable resources, so why would you start to use a nonrenewable resource, right? Stone, sand, all of those things are nonrenewable resources. There’s no reason that we should be using that to make paper when we can already make it out of something you can actually regrow. Then we have an entire recycling industry that’s designed pretty successfully actually to repulp fibers that come from trees, that come from hemp, that come from the gas, so why would you then put into the mix something that can’t be recycled with it? It’s one of those things that sounds good at the surface but isn’t long term.

Taylor Martin
[11:28] Yeah, I remember when I first heard about it 15, 20 years ago, I can’t remember, it was the first company that made it, and that was the question I asked and I never got an answer to. Now I have. Thank you. I have to ask you, I mean, I’m sure that clients, customers, brands, they come to you and they say, oh, we want to do all these wonderful things. Then I’m only thinking that you have to pull them back saying, well, here’s what’s reality. That’s maybe forward thinking. Do you run into that a lot?

Saloni Doshi
[11:58] Oh, I wish I ran into that more, to be honest. We serve – 

Taylor Martin
[12:01] Oh, okay, then tell me.

Saloni Doshi
[12:03] Yeah, we serve – we’ll probably work with 30,000 clients, like customers or companies, in the next 12 months. I would say the vast majority of those are one-to-two-person small side hustle sometimes, really small companies that may be shipping out 10 to 20 orders a month. Then a couple thousand of them are enterprise brands, household name brands. What I will say is that that small Etsy shop that is maybe selling jewelry that they make in their basement, they are the ones that want to do everything at the cutting edge. They’re like, “You’ve got algae? Give it to me. You’ve got a new adhesive? Give it to me.” They really can, I think, afford to take some of the risks. They’re customer-based. They’re so intimately involved with them. I think we have a really cool business model because we can push out innovations that these, again, one-to-two-person shops that sustainability is their middle name, they want to do this stuff, they can bring all that stuff to market. Then we’ll turn around and we’ll talk to household name brands. I won’t throw anybody under the bus, but like – and they’re just really treading carefully. Because you think about how much bureaucracy and budgeting and there are so many things, they have to consider in their operations so they tend to tread a little bit more carefully. I like our business model because we’ve got this innovative pool of people that’s going to bring all the cool stuff to market. After they approve it for six months or a year, then all of a sudden, you’ve got a name brand that’s like, “Yeah, okay, I guess we’ll try algae ink. It’s working.” That hybrid has worked well for us.

Taylor Martin
[13:27] You have that proof of use from the Etsy people and then you can go in there and say, “Here’s the proof in the pudding. This works. It’s a viable solution. Let’s get into it.” That’s awesome. What are some other things that clients are coming to you and needing your guidance on?

Saloni Doshi
[13:44] Yeah, there’s this one really interesting problem we’re facing today is that everyone is moving from plastic to paper, not everyone, but a lot of people are trying to eliminate plastic and then they’re like, oh, well, paper doesn’t work as well. Paper is not water resistant. It’s not puncture resistant. Then they tend to start, unfortunately, thinking, well, then I have to use virgin paper. Then we get into the issues with them like, well, if you’re going to use virgin paper, particularly if you don’t know where it’s coming from, you might be doing far more damage to the planet cutting down an old growth tree to make your single-use package than you would have with the plastic that you’re using to begin with. We start to navigate these questions with them of, okay, well, if you think you need the strength of virgin paper, should you even make this leap to begin with, and then we start saying, okay, well, what are some alternatives? There is this movement of bringing what they call next gen fibers, which is agricultural waste products, turning that into virgin paper fibers. We’re starting to help them like are some of these new technologies, can they come in and replace your need for virgin paper, keep you in this curbside recyclable, naturally biodegradable solution, but make sure that you’re not cutting down a very critical tropical forest to make your single-use packaging? That’s, I would say, one of the most prevalent questions that we’re working deeply with some big brands to figure out because it's a hard – it's really hard.

Taylor Martin
[15:04] Yeah, I can see that being something that a lot of people want and try to understand. I can only imagine with these new technologies always coming out that it actually creates pressure from you of what to accept and what not to accept. Like we talked about with the stone paper coming in, you’re like, yes, but no thank you. Is there a lot of navigating that has to be going on? Because I know there’s a lot of people trying to create solutions in this space but what works and what doesn’t work?

Saloni Doshi
[15:31] Yeah, it’s probably my favorite part of the job, Taylor. Thanks for asking. It’s so fun, right?

Taylor Martin
[15:35] Wow, really?

Saloni Doshi
[15:36] Yeah, I would say there’s two parts to how we innovate our products. One is we look at a product and we’re like, okay, well, it’s only 80% postconsumer waste today. How do we get it to 100%? We have our own innovation pipeline that’s like how do we make our products better. Then the other part is fielding this world of new technologies that exist that all the materials that are getting developed and putting that through our framework and figuring out which ones are going to move us closer. It’s incredibly fun, but we have to sometimes make some hard decisions. I’ll give you an example just to show you what I mean there. Anybody who is listening who is in the fashion world knows that one of the biggest problems we’re trying to solve is the polybag. It’s like a single-use clear plastic bag that all the factories put the apparel in when they ship it from China or Asia. One of the solutions people are considering is this dissolvable plastic that’s made with EVOH. We looked into it because we’re like, oh, that sounds great. It’s clear. It does a lot of the functional needs of plastic but it’s dissolvable. Our research has then shown, okay, well, it’s made with virgin fossil fuels and actually waste water treatments are really, really hoping that the world doesn’t go in this direction because the treatment facilities don’t know how to handle, wouldn’t know how to handle this volume of new not healthy materials in their waste water stream. We decided to pull back and say this isn’t the right solution for us. It’s led to some hard conversations with the manufacturers of those technologies and the brands that really want to embrace it and see it as a silver bullet. We want to tread carefully because it’s like you want to embrace every new idea that’s trying to solve problems but you also want to be very critical, I guess, at what you decide to promote and put into market.

Taylor Martin
[17:14] Is there a lot of frustration that that creates that they say I really want this and you’re telling me I can’t have it but then you tell them the reason why?

Saloni Doshi
[17:22] We typically will say, “You’re not going to get that from EcoEnclose.” You can obviously go get it. I think I’ve been really impressed. The brands that we work with, big and small, they just want to figure this out. Some of them will go to use that material anyway. Maybe they’ve got the marketing team or other people on their team are like, “I don’t care. We have to use this anyway.” The folks that we get to work with, even if they decide to go in a direction that is against where we’re deciding to go, I think we can navigate the conversations in a collaborative way and maybe they still use us for their recycled paper mailers but they’re like, “We’re going to go in this direction,” but then when we come up with something very cool that does meet our framework, I call them back. I’m like, “I think you should try X because it’s going to still work for you and it’s going to be better for the planet.”

Taylor Martin
[18:05] This is like the hard part that always comes into play. Back 20 years ago, it was always cost. Everything sustainable was expensive, more expensive. Why am I going to spend 15%, 10%, 5%, even 2% more in cost for this more sustainable whatever? In the packaging space, do you see – I’m really concerned with these big brands because they move lots of money and lots of material, do you see these big brands having – when conversations come up, is money as weighed as heavy as it once was or do you – is the carbon footprint equal to that or more so? Where does that fall in terms of a general sense from your perspective?

Saloni Doshi
[18:46] Oh, my God, I wish it was better. Yeah, great question. This is, again, why I love our business model because those smaller companies that I was describing, like if you’re maybe a $1 million or lower company, you’re not cost cutting. You’re like I just want a great solution that’s going to build my brand. The fact that we serve so many of those allows us to bring to market things that start out at a higher cost. It’s a great question. I would say, first off, the recycled stuff is probably either now on par or about 20% more expensive than – that’s like a gross generalization, but that’s what we tend to see. A lot of that is because – it’s not because of anything except for the fact that if only 10% of the market wants the recycled stuff, then I can only have so much buy-in power with the extruder of that plastic or the pulper of that paper. It’s not even the cost. It’s just the economies of scale are just so much better for a lot of virgin material. What we try to say to folks is, okay, well, if you come on for this ride, maybe you have a 5% to 10% to 15% premium for a little while, but as we build this market, it’s going to net out to be even. Recycled paper is an interesting, prior to COVID, it was actually always cheaper to do recycled paper. Now that’s not so much. In terms of brands’ appetite, it so varies. We’re in the middle of – I mean, to me, we’ve been in – ecommerce companies have been struggling financially for the last six months, like we’ve been dealing with the COVID come down. Cost has become more of a factor in the conversation this year than it was last year. We just try to – sometimes we’ll down gauge. Sometimes we’ll say, okay, you don’t need 11-point paper, you need 8, so you could use a thinner paper so you could still meet your cost without sacrificing. We’re trying to work with folks to get them into their budgetary constraints that are very current without losing sight of their sustainability goals.

Taylor Martin
[20:40] Yeah, when it comes to recycled material, glass and paper are the two, and aluminum, those are three really highly recyclable items. If I’m not mistaken, aluminum and paper are ones that I believe have subsidies that incentivize the recycling centers to make sure they recycle as much of that as possible. In terms of the product stream out there, I’m hoping that you’re able to repurpose a lot of these cardboard boxes I see in recycling bins every day. Is that right?

Saloni Doshi
[21:14] Yeah, I mean, we always say our packaging, we aim to make our packaging out of packaging. The stream is more readily available on the paper side. All of our poly products, like our poly mailers, 50% of that input comes from basically milk jugs, like HTPE, and then 50% comes from post-industrial waste. That’s what we’re really focused on is how do you turn packaging back into itself. Aluminum is a great story because it’s endlessly recyclable. Paper can get recycled four to seven times and then plastic two to three times. I don’t know if you’re following all the EPR, the extended producer responsibility legislation that’s bubbling up around the country, but we are in Colorado and we were strong advocates and we just passed it. In June, they just passed extended producer responsibility, which is – the hope is that it’s going to make the recycling supply chain and recycled content availability in Colorado like much richer and increase recycling rates to 50% here by 2025.

Taylor Martin
[22:09] We’re going to geek out here for a little bit more. We’re going to get into little detail here about pulp, paper pulp. When you said paper pulp can only be recycled so many times, what do you do when you get – because I know it’s a mixture. You’re getting boxes out there and those things are being ground down at a pulp. You’re making new packaging out of it. How do you know when that pulp shouldn’t go into the mixture is what I’m saying?

Saloni Doshi
[22:34] Yeah, well, thankfully it’s not my job. It’s the pulper’s job but they’re very good at. I think, I’m on the board of Eco-Cycle which is our local waste management provider in Boulder and they run the county MRF, which is the recycling center. You can see that even at the MRF level when you think about your blue bin, they’re sorting it with that knowledge already. They know that corrugate, like cardboard corrugate boxes, are in one stream, like your cereal boxes will be in another stream, and then like low, low-grade paper will be in another stream. They’re presorting it. Then it goes in and then different pulpers have different presorting to even separate those out so then you’ll have a cleaner high-quality stream. Basically, what they know is they’re trying to build the best blend they possibly can to get the highest content recycled fibers. What ends up happening is when you have lower grade fibers, you could blend it into virgin so it’s not 100% recycled, maybe it’s 20% recycled, or you start to turn it into lower grade products, like toilet paper and paper towels, which can’t be recycled. At some point, you’re turning it into a product that’s not going to get recycled. I will also say there’s companies [23:46] is a great example of a company, it’s a pulper mill that has really investing in technology to de-ink and de-adhesive the fiber so that they can be better and better with each iteration. Because the goal is can we get paper repulping technology so it could be recycled ten times, that would be the ideal. They’re a really cool company that’s focused on that.

Taylor Martin
[24:08] Wow, that’s a great explanation. I have never seen or heard of one that good. That’s great.

Saloni Doshi
[24:12] Total geek out, though.

Taylor Martin
[24:15] That was totally geek out moment because I know probably everyone listening to this probably don’t care, except maybe those few packaging people that are listening in. I want to shift gears a little bit. I want to talk about the people side of your business. Going back and forth on emails, we talked about how you manage your team. You talked earlier about how you instill an exciting culture of togetherness and empowerment. Can you speak to that?

Saloni Doshi
[24:35] I can, yeah. You’re playing it back to me and I’m like, oh, that’s a little bit maybe too aggressive because I think it’s true, but I’d guess my team should be the one on this call saying whether or not that’s true.

Taylor Martin
[24:48] Call them up.

Saloni Doshi
[24:50] Yeah, I think we have a great culture. It has not always been great. I think through some of the hardest times of COVID, everybody was exhausted. I don’t know. This is an interesting time, too. We’re all feeling the economic pinch as households and as a business. I think there’s probably feeling some of that. I would just say one of the things I’m very excited about EcoEnclose is that we actually manufacture and fulfill in the same exact facility where our office folks work. I actually sit in the warehouse. I manage the warehouse. My husband, who also runs the business, he manages the front of house, like the administrative workers. I think one of the things that we’ve done is there is no separation between us. Every morning at 9:45, every single person in the building goes outside for a morning meeting. Every day, a new person on the team, like rotating calendar, leads the meeting with a quote or a story, share some wins, challenges, call somebody out. Then we’d go through some company updates and stuff like that. We’ve got weekly team meetings, we call the eco ally sessions, where we help teach everybody in the building things about sustainability or packaging or our customers. We have a weekly – or a monthly sprint, a strategic sprint of things we want to accomplish every month. Then once a month, Kyle and I, my husband and I, we stand up in front of the whole team and we’re like here’s what we’ve got done, here’s what we missed, here’s what our revenue is.

We really are very transparent with our team in that way. It’s a really cool environment for people to have that much connection and access. I know that it’s strong because most people will say that they hang out with at least one person at work on their weekends outside of work. Most people, that’s their friend group. They’ve made their friend group here. I think other things, for anybody listening who has any access to a warehousing manufacturing community that they have to manage, one of the things I think we’ve really done is making sure people know they have access to Kyle and I and then being incredibly flexible. The last couple of years have been really hard for folks. When somebody has to work noon to 9 one day instead of their usually 7 a.m. shift, we’re totally fine with that. Because Kyle and I have three kids, we understand that the needs of life are just so challenging so whatever we can do to give people the flexibility they need to come in and do good work that they can but know that they have lives to live outside of work so I think there’s – we treat people like adults with flexibility which has also really helped.

Taylor Martin
[27:13] To me, that sounds like an exciting culture. I like the transparency aspect always so that’s a huge bonus, but also those events where you’re getting them engaged and part of the solutions and part of the successes. To be quite honest, how can you work at a place that is doing so much good in the space of packaging and not be excited about being part of that team that is pushing that forward? I think a lot of people get a lot of enjoyment out of that.

Saloni Doshi
[27:46] I’m going to just say one other thing on this topic because I think for anybody who’s running a business out there, I think a lot of people start businesses or think they want to run businesses for some entrepreneurial dream. I’ll say seven years in, watching my team at every stage, like from the person fulfilling orders to our lead salesperson, watching them grow and helping them develop has been both the most rewarding part of the job, but also I come from a background for several years in social justice. I look at that as like that’s where I can have an impact. So and so in the warehouse, I’m going to help you get from whatever to train you to make double this amount of money. I can have that impact directly to these people that are coming into my building every day. That’s what makes me excited sometimes, even more so sometimes than the companies I work with and the environmental. It’s like I get to impact these awesome people and make their lives better.

Taylor Martin
[28:38] That’s great. The lives we touch and how we touch them I think is a remarkable accomplishment that you can’t put a dollar amount on. When you help other people and they help you get to where you want to go, it’s a win-win-win. What about let’s focus on the future, future of sustainability, future of products. We did touch on it earlier, but from your lens, what do you see in terms of – you’ve been in sustainable space for so long. I know that you have ideas of like it’d be really great if this, or if that, or I heard about this, I heard about that. Tell us some of those way out there sci-fi ones that hopefully are to be coming to our doorstep someday soon.

Saloni Doshi
[29:19] I guess we touched on a couple but I’m going to bring them back a little bit. I think one of those, well, okay, the first would be how do we get endless recycling for all of our materials and how do we allow the recycling supply chain in this country to work really well, which is to me, like everything that can get recycled is getting recycled and then the technology exists to clean it and repurpose it back into packaging or back into what it was originally. That’s one part of a future that I’m very excited about where we don’t need to produce so much waste, where only 10% of what we go through has to be landfill and most of it can just endlessly get recycled back into itself. That’s one part of the future. I spend a lot of my outside of work advocacy time and my board commitments are really focused on that passion of mine. Then what I think a lot of people are thinking are what new materials are going to displace plastic and other things. I look a lot at, we talked about next gen fibers, and I have a lot of hesitation that we can’t keep making all of this paper from trees. We’re destroying the planet from all of the trees we’re cutting down, even FSC certification is not going to save us because there’s not enough FSC-certified trees in the world to produce all the paper. I’m super excited about these next gen fibers that are agricultural waste of hemp and wheat straw and how do you turn that into paper as well as some interesting perennial crops, like miscanthus and switchgrass are interesting inputs into paper. How do we – I always say how do we diversify the fiber basket for paper so we don’t have to rely just on recycled content and trees, that there’s this diversified beautiful mix of fibers that can go into our paper stream. Then I think about plastic and I just think it’s obviously not going anywhere in many ways, like the functionality of plastic.

Taylor Martin
[31:05] Literally, literally it’s not going anywhere.

Saloni Doshi
[31:08] Literally not going anywhere. We spent a lot of time understanding what’s interesting in the bioplastics space. I’m super excited about what people are doing. There’s a company called Sway that’s trying to build kelp-based bioplastic, which is an interesting input, much more interesting. I’m not that interested in corn plastic at all or frankly even sugar cane plastic, but kelp is interesting. Folks are turning food waste into PHA, which is a type of plastic. It’s like how do we get more and more creative about the inputs into bioplastics, such that we’re using waste products or carbon fixing products there as well. Then reusable, we haven’t really gotten into this. We launched our first reusable mailer line this year. That is going to be in a really important part of our future of packaging in general where people like almost go back to our roots of durable materials that could be reused over and over again and can we bring that into ecommerce. There’s a lot of economic and environmental considerations with reusable in ecommerce. It doesn’t often make sense, frankly, because of the carbon footprint of shipping it back and forth, but where it makes sense, it’s such an obvious solution. I do think in 15 years it’s going to be a standard part, like maybe 30% of our shipments will be done in reusable packaging. I always say there’s not a silver bullet to this problem, but I’m rattling off various variables that I think will come together to be part of the future of truly circular packaging.

Taylor Martin
[32:38] What are we talking about here when we’re talking about reusable packaging? What material is it?

Saloni Doshi
[32:43] Yeah, great question. It’s basically just look at a mailer, think about the structure of a mailer, but instead of it being made out of paper or plastic, it’s made out of – ours are made out of 100% recycled polypropylene or polyester. Then they’re durable. They’re thick. They have a zipper. They’ve got snaps so that you can right size it. An example of one of our first companies using it is a company called Modern Ritual. They are sending at-home skin cancer screening tests. They’ll send their customer this test in our reusable mailer. The customer has to take – do their scraping and do their test and then they send back something that Modern Ritual will actually do the testing on. That business model – and there’s like a lot of – Rent the Runway, like subscription business models where somebody is sending you something and almost all of the time you have to send something back to them. That’s an example where using a reusable mailer that can be shipped out 50 plus times makes just perfect sense. Those are the types of companies we’re currently working with. Over time though we’ve got a bunch of brands that don’t have these returns baked into their model that want to figure out how to make things reusable as well so we’re also working on more of a network model to support those types of examples.

Taylor Martin
[34:00] I love that. I mean, I could even have like – whenever I get a certain odd-shaped box in the mail from something I ordered, I’ll stick it aside and put it in the closet and collapse it because I know I’m going to need – if I have them at all different sizes, I know I’m going to have what I need whenever I need it. I’ve got my own little box incorporated company in my closet.

Saloni Doshi
[34:19] Exactly, I always think what if you just found a warehouse, like what if I just said, hey, everybody, bring all your boxes to us, because we ship out so many orders every day. I could just use your boxes to ship out orders. People would probably love that. Is there even – you don’t have to be so sophisticated, I think. When people just start talking to each other and collaborating, there’s so many ways that your boxes could be put to commercial use that you would love. If communities just got together and talked through it, we would have a lot of solutions.

Taylor Martin
[34:48] Yeah, I’d hate to add another bin to outside my front yard because I have a trash receptible, which I like to call a landfill receptible, and then I have my two recycling bins, and then I have my composting one. I could add a fifth one for boxes that are – I mean, actually, to be quite honest, I could probably just take one of my recycling bins and just put the boxes that could be – yeah, because I put a lot in there and every time I do I’m just like, oh, pain, it’s painful to do that.

Saloni Doshi
[35:18] Yeah, and corrugate is so big. I mean, it just takes up so much room.

Taylor Martin
[35:21] You touched on something about reusable and things like that in the future. I keep thinking about there’s a big, big company out there that ships a lot of things to a lot of people. There’s a lot of waste of space in a lot of the packages that I get from them. I keep thinking like, wouldn’t it be great if there was a machine where they could just put all the items that need to go in this box, like put it in the middle, hit a button, and then it scans it, and then it just creates the box around that item like right then and there. I’m totally sci-fi-ing here, like the material, the cardboard, has a glue on it that doesn’t stick to anything except itself so that it would just go. It wouldn’t touch or destroy anything on the inside but you wouldn’t have to have excess paper or those air bubbles or something like that. I see that as more of like a hardware solution but I don’t know.

Saloni Doshi
[36:16] Taylor, that actually already exists.

Taylor Martin
[36:19] Oh, boy.

Saloni Doshi
[36:20] There’s a company called – there’s two. There’s a company called Box On Demand and Packsize that have that where you like, if you’re a fulfilment center, you would put your stuff in on a conveyor and it goes in a conveyor and it builds a box around this thing. It doesn’t work for our business because our shipments are very big because people are buying a lot of packaging, but it’s a really – you’re right. I don’t know why some of the aforementioned company is not using it, but one thing I didn’t say, which you think about the aforementioned company, like at some point, we’re going to start drone delivering. At that point, do you even need packaging? That’ll be like, for EcoEnclose, an interesting existential crisis that we have to figure out, but at some point, maybe we have a delivery system that really doesn’t need ecommerce packaging where it’s like, you need a shirt…

Taylor Martin
[37:02] Reusable bags.

Saloni Doshi
[37:03] Exactly, and then it just comes back in.

Taylor Martin
[37:05] Yeah, put everything in a bag, it just picks it up out of the bag, and then you can actually – you can even have the bag set up so that it opens up half the bag, everything falls out, and then it goes back up and you don’t have to do anything. Your products are just there on the lawn or the door or whatever.

Saloni Doshi
[37:21] That’s The Jetsons. We’re all waiting for it.

Taylor Martin
[37:24] There’s one packaging thing that I was just speaking to back on forth on my dog food company. I order dog food to send to my highly allergic dog behind me here. When they send it, they have dry ice in it. It’s a cardboard square box, and inside, it has dry ice. Most of the time, everything is really frozen, but it’s been so hot this summer that sometimes it was a little dicey, but I kept thinking with all this plastic, I hated taking the items out and then putting them – taking the dry ice out and then the plastic has to go in the trash, they’re not – I can’t spend my time driving across town to take it to that one recycling center that will recycle that plastic. I just keep thinking cardboard and dry ice, they’re not like normal ice, dry ice. I keep thinking if they just had like a pizza box in the bottom with holes in it around the perimeter and the sides and then in the center there wasn’t any and that’s where you have a little door or something and you stick the dry ice in more of a cube fashion so it lasts longer. Then you just put one in the bottom, put all the dog food in and then put one at the top and then you have – I’ve seen some companies that use a paper, it’s like a corrugated foam paper is what it looks like, around everything. Then everything you’re using is paper. I mean, literally, I could take everything except the dog food and put it in the recycling bin. It's all paper pulp because the dry ice would evaporate and go away.

Saloni Doshi
[38:51] I love it. I don’t know enough about dry ice to know if paper and dry ice would work well together, but I have a feeling they would. I would just say it would be cool if you shipped it back to them in your solution. Could you invent it and then send it back? I think any company that you want to purchase from should be open to your feedback and that’s how you might make your choices of what brand you want to work with. The more we flex our muscles with those types of ideas, and like I said, sending them back or – we don’t do cold chain, but if we did, if it was a product that we would sell, like calling us even and saying, “Here’s an idea. Would this work? Would you want to try this?” Just get your ideas out there because there’s enough folks trying to do cool things and then they could test it and functionally after right after 100 shipments we’d know if that works just as well if not better than the plastic bag solution. It’s really cool.

Taylor Martin
[39:42] I have to say that the company did say we’re going to take your idea back to our team and they’re going to review your idea. Hopefully that does happen but I just think ultimately and one thing it’d probably do, I don’t know, it might even save them money because even their packaging that goes around all the food, it’s this foam material that dissolves in water but then that’s covered by a biodegradable plastic, I think. It’s just a little bit more, I think the paper mesh solution that I’ve seen that’s insulated, it’s like two walls of a thick kraft paper and in the middle of those two walls is this foamy stretchy stuff of just shredded paper.

Saloni Doshi
[40:26] Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve actually talked to the folks that I think manufacture what you’re talking about. I think it’s cool. This idea right now you’re getting a box where you’ve got to do one thing with the box, something else with the plastic bag, something else the middle, so this idea that the whole box needs to just have the same end of life and so that’s what – you’re designing for recyclability and you’re a packaging designer at heart. I can tell.

Taylor Martin
[40:49] Yes, you nailed it. That’s exactly what I would like, just to be able to put the box, put the food in the refrigerator, take the box, and just stick in the recycling bin, done, it’s over.

Saloni Doshi
[40:57] Exactly.

Taylor Martin
[40:58] Okay, we’ve covered a lot ground today, but one of the things I’m really interested in is what are some golden nuggets that you can give to listeners out there, because I’m sure people, that if they saw the title of this podcast and they clicked on it to listen, what are some things that you can give them, actions they can take to make their choices for sustainable packaging make it better?

Saloni Doshi
[41:20] Yeah, I’m going to speak to the audience as consumers I guess in this. I think the first is find ways to not use packaging. That seems so obvious but going to zero waste stores and bringing your coffee mug to the Starbucks instead of using theirs. I just think this needs to become common practice for us as a society. The more we do that, the more we become hyper sensitive to the packaging that we do interact with. I think that’s one. I think the second is let’s flex our dollars, our purchasing dollars. If you’re in the store, right now brands think that they have to go with a virgin white carton that’s beautifully branded instead of that kraft carton that is unbleached and probably 100% recycled or hopefully 100% recycled. It’s like let’s flex our dollars and show companies that we don’t care about that jazzy branding. We’re not going to play that game. We are going to select based on recycled content and recyclability and authenticity of messaging and information. The more we can do that in how we purchase, and Taylor, like the message you sent to the dog food company, let’s call these brands and tell them and demand what we need from them and actually say to them, “If you don’t do this, I will stop purchasing from you and I will go to this other brand that’s making better choices.” It’s a lot to ask a consumer. We’re all so busy, but I think that’s a really powerful place that we can play.

I think everybody is reading about it, but local advocacy, it’s been really cool to see what’s happening in Colorado to support a more circular economy. That’s all happened because of local folks on the ground that are going door to door and saying you should support this bill and call your local representatives. That stuff works. I think recent months have shown us it’s probably not going to happen – actually, we had some really exciting news this week so there are some things happening at the federal level but the work is going to happen at the state and local level as well. We’ve got to fight for that. Then any brands that are listening, I would just say I think this is the future. I think people can do this in a way that is net positive to the planet, or net better for the planet, I would say, and working towards net positive, but I think brands can do it in a way and market it and message it in a way that is actually significantly better for your bottom line. If you choose the 100% recycled corrugate, even though it isn’t so slick and beautiful as the shiny, digitally printed, there’s a way that you can share that information with your customer and your customer will want to work with you even more and for even longer because you shared those messages. Get creative in how can you adopt sustainability in a way that actually supports and increases your bottom line instead of being just a cost strain.

Taylor Martin
[44:05] You hit the nail in the head for me because marketing messaging, which is what we do, that is one of the things that started my business 15 years ago is the company was actually called Vox Verde back then, the green voice, because we were really focused on sustainability. We were hitting the market way too early for people to be accepting of that, but nowadays, it’s not so. People do want to do that. They want to tell their story. This is why we’re choosing this. This is why we’re using these materials. This is why we’re producing it here and there and maybe two different places because it’s a big planet and the packaging they use and all those things. I think that’s great and it circles back to an earlier conversation we had on another podcast about using QR codes. If you don’t have enough space in your packaging, you can have a little QR code saying listen to our story. They click it, they go there, and it could just be a page of text with a few photos, something that can have them understand what they’re about to, as I like to say, vote with their dollars for.

Saloni Doshi
[45:02] Exactly, exactly.

Taylor Martin
[45:04] I love how you broke this down for consumers. Do we even need packaging? That is a great thing to ask yourself. I think that goes for a lot of different things, not just packaging. Do I need to buy this? Do I need whatever? Then investing in brands, choosing with your dollars, voting for your dollars with brands that are following more sustainable means and helping them out. I have been later in my years and I know when I look at products on the shelves and I see somebody who is a lot more sustainable than another, I will wholeheartedly invest in their product and try it out. Sometimes I’ll do it and I’ll find problems with it and I’ll email them. I’m sure there are some brands out there that have got some emails from me, but then contacting the brand, just like I mentioned, that’s a great – that’s another great element. Then for the brand people out there, the companies that come to you and ask for guidance, what are some other things that you could relay to them in terms of getting them to feel more comfortable reaching out to someone like yourself?

Saloni Doshi
[46:08] Yeah, hopefully they just reach out, because part of, I would say, 80% of the work that I do, that our customer experience team does, that our sales team does, that Kyle does, is just consult, dialogue, brainstorm with brands. That is what we’re here for. Yes, we sell packaging, but that’s beside the point almost. It’s just about consulting with and connecting with brands and navigating these complex decisions together. My email address is Saloni, that’s my first name, S-A-L-O-N-I @ecoenclose.com, email me at any time. Our general email is hello@ecoenclose.com, just get in touch. We just love chatting with anybody who wants to do better in this space.

Taylor Martin
[46:47] Amen, are there any other things that you guys are doing online in terms of a newsletter or social media or any other ways people can follow you and see what you guys are doing?

Saloni Doshi
[46:57] Yeah, we’ve got Instagram and TikTok, EcoEnclose is our handle on both of those fronts. Then we have a newsletter that goes out once a week. It’s a mixture of information about our products and usually has like one or two fairly in-depth articles that go into some sustainability topic in detail. If you’re on our website and you go to the [47:15] you can see a place to sign up for our newsletter if you’d be interested in that. I find that we get a lot of feedback from people who don’t even care about packaging like the newsletter because they just feel like they learn some tidbits about sustainability every week.

Taylor Martin
[47:27] Excellent, Saloni Doshi, thank you so much for being on today’s show. I really enjoyed this conversation immensely. I wish you guys all the best.

Saloni Doshi
[47:35] Yeah, Taylor, thanks for having me here. This is great. Thank you very much.

Taylor Martin
[47:39] Over and out, everybody. 

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[00:47:41] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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