Green Champions
From energy to agriculture, retail to tech — Green Champions tells the stories of real people building sustainable solutions across every industry.
Hosted by Dominique Hadad and Christy Cook, each episode provides that progress is already happening and environmental work takes many forms. New episodes every Tuesday.
Episodes
133 episodes
JR Diaz-Hernandez - The World's Too Big of a Place to Be Bored
JR Diaz-Hernandez goes by the initials of two men. The J is his great-grandfather. The R is Roberto, the grandfather who helped raise him through his first nine years. He is now the air quality and sustainability program manager at MORPC, prote...
Brandi Whetstone - Steal This Playbook for a Sustainable 2050
For some communities, the word "sustainability" itself is the hurdle, tangled up in politics and easy to dismiss before the real work even starts. Brandi Whetstone spends her days getting past that. As director of sustainability at the Mid-Ohio...
Brandi Whetstone - From a Toy-Factory Town to MORPC
Brandi Whetstone is the director of sustainability at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, or MORPC, where she has spent 16 years helping Central Ohio communities plan for a healthier, more livable future. The MORPC miniseries opens by tr...
Season 5 Wrap-Up - The Conversations That Stuck With Us
Season 5 closes the way the best conversations do, by looking back at who was in the room. This wrap-up gathers the guests, the surprises, and the moments that stuck, and it marks a first: the season that welcomed a new co-host to the show. Wha...
Josh Lloyd - What It Takes to Be the Number One Green Builder
Buildings carry carbon long before anyone turns on a light, locked into the steel and concrete it took to put them up. Josh Lloyd's job is to drive that number down. As Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction, the firm ranked the...
Josh Lloyd - The Architect Who Wanted the Rope to Pull, Not Push
Josh Lloyd is the Regional Sustainability Manager at Turner Construction, where he leads sustainability work across 10 offices in eight states. He came up through architecture, adopted LEED early enough to have watched it launch, and volunteere...
Mary Cropenbaker - Building a Green Program Any Business Can Join
Most people think a solid waste district exists to run the landfill. Mary Cropenbaker's job is the opposite: keep as much material out of it as possible. As the Assistant Solid Waste Manager at Hamilton County ReSource, she works with businesse...
Mary Cropenbaker - What Gambling Pigeons Taught Her About People
Mary Cropenbaker is the Assistant Solid Waste Manager at Hamilton County ReSource, the solid waste district for the Cincinnati region, where she helps businesses, schools, and communities cut what they send to the landfill. She piloted 513 Gree...
Vin Valentino - Building Washington's First Green Bank From Scratch
There is not enough public money in the world to fund the clean energy transition. That gap sits at the center of Vin Valentino's work, and his answer is the green bank, a purpose-driven financial institution built to stretch every public dolla...
Vin Valentino - From Bartending to Decarbonizing a Hospital
Vin Valentino is the Energy Economy Lead for the Washington State Department of Commerce, where he works to grow the state's clean energy economy through investment, policy strategy, and partnerships across government, industry, and communities...
RE-RELEASE: Francesca Cercelletta - Using iPhone Storytelling to Frame the Change
Francesca Cercelletta, creative director for ReGeneration Hub Friuli and graphic designer for Zegna, brings a unique blend of artistic vision and sustainability passion to NanoValbruna. As the organizer of "Frame The Change," a short film festi...
Jake Kheel - Secrets Behind the Caribbean's Most Innovative Resort
A resort that generates 25 tons of waste every single day has two choices: manage it badly or build something worth talking about. Jake Kheel, VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, chose the latter. He's back this week to get into the real w...
Jake Kheel - How a Generalist Found His Calling in the Dominican Republic
Jake Kheel is VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, one of the Caribbean's most recognized leaders in sustainable tourism. He's also a conservationist, author, and co-director of the award-winning documentary Death By a Thousand Cuts
Regina Harmon - Why 235 Million Tons of Food Goes to Waste While 47 Million Go Hungry
In 2023 alone, 235 million tons of food went uneaten or unsold in the United States. The number one item clogging landfills is not furniture, not plastic, not diapers. It is food. And 47 million Americans are food insecure at the same time. Reg...
Regina Harmon - Who is Running America's Largest Food Recovery Movement?
Regina Harmon is the CEO of Food Recovery Network, the largest student-led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the US. Before she was leading a national nonprofit, she was a kid in Maine with a cloth lunch bag, a working poor family, and...
Mason McNeill - Rerouting America's Food Waste, One Grocery Store at a Time
Most people don't think much about what happens to the food that doesn't get sold. Mason McNeill does. As Chief Commercial Officer at Denali, the nation's largest organics recycler, he's spent his career building the systems that catch that mat...
Mason McNeill - The Banker Who Bet on Waste
Mason McNeill is the Chief Commercial Officer at Denali, the nation's largest organics recycler. But before he was thinking about food waste and circular supply chains, he was a young investment banker in Little Rock, learning how to tell the s...
Elizabeth & Marissa - Community-Centered Strategy for a Changing World
Elizabeth Schuster and Marissa Ferrari are the co-founders of Sustainable Economies, a research-driven consulting firm working at the intersection of nature and community. They're back together on the podcast to share how they built a business ...
Marissa Ferrari - From Ms. Magazine to Mission-Driven Work
Marissa Ferrari is Partner and Creative Director at Sustainable Economies, where she works with mission-driven organizations at the intersection of nature and communities. Her winding path that took her from a childhood in rural Michigan to a c...
Elizabeth Schuster - From Peace Corps to Environmental Economist
Elizabeth Schuster is the founder of Sustainable Economies, a strategic planning, branding, and communications firm, and a partner in environmental economics. Her sustainability journey started from building forts in the New Hampshire woods to ...
RE-RELEASE: Joseph Klatt - Closing the Loop on Plastic Waste
Did you know that plastics are as different from each other as paper is from metal? Joseph Klatt, founder of Marble Plastics, dives into the complex world of polymer types and how they impact our efforts to recycle plastic waste.Joseph’s...
Angela Huffman - Fighting for the Future of the Family Farms
Angela Huffman is the President and co-founder of Farm Action, a nonpartisan, farmer-led watchdog that holds government and corporate power accountable in food and agriculture. She's back to talk about sustainability as it relates to agricultur...
Angela Huffman - Why Are Food Prices Rising While Farmers Struggle?
Angela Huffman is the co-founder and president of Farm Action, a watchdog organization working to dismantle corporate consolidation across the U.S. food supply chain. In this conversation, she unpacks how a handful of corporations came to shape...
Andrew Shakman - Building Leanpath and Changing Kitchen Culture
Up to a third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted, and up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions are tied to it. The opportunity to fix that sits largely inside professional kitchens, and most of them have no system for even measuring t...
Andrew Shakman - The Four-Layer Cake of Food Waste Prevention
Andrew Shakman is the CEO of Leanpath, a company on a mission to make food waste prevention everyday practice in professional kitchens worldwide. Before any of that, he was a child actor, a film school graduate, and a digital marketer selling C...
