CHAPTER FOUR

WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL WHEN YOU CAN REPURPOSE IT?

Finding Real Value in Overlooked Places

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There is no such thing as “away.” When we throw anything away it must go somewhere.

—ANNIE LEONARD, SUSTAINABILITY ADVOCATE

I was having dinner with my husband, Nate, standing at our kitchen island, eating pizza out of the box. The TV news was on in the background and Nate was holding a slice, telling me about an exciting new partnership his company had with the grocery store chain Wegmans.

Nate is a natural storyteller and delights in sharing tidbits he thinks I’ll find amusing. He’ll say, “Did you see that such-and-such happened?!” Or, “Guess what I read!” He has a great memory for details and retains huge amounts of trivia. I have a notoriously bad memory for minor facts, and it’s nice to have a spouse to turn to when I need to know who said a famous quote or what song played in a specific episode of the nineties TV show Beverly Hills, 90210.

Nate is from Kentucky, and shortly after we married, we moved into an apartment in downtown Lexington as our home base. We were both traveling so much and so focused on building our businesses that we weren’t sure where we wanted to settle. We decided to just rent a one-bedroom and choose a permanent place later. We found an apartment in a three-story redbrick building—a converted factory with retail stores on the ground floor, and an amazing coffee shop called A Cup of Common Wealth. Our apartment had seriously high ceilings, granite countertops, and never quite enough light.

On that night in Lexington, Nate was telling me about a recycler his company had found that could take discarded Wegmans uniforms—the collared golf shirts and khaki pants that most grocery store employees wear—and turn them into beds for dogs and cats.

Nate founded and runs a technology company in the waste and recycling space called Rubicon Global. It focuses on using business solutions to solve the growing problem of trash. Rubicon links companies seeking trash removal to independent and local garbage haulers who work with composting operations, anaerobic digesters (which produce energy from waste), and creative recyclers like the one making pet beds. He named the company after the Rubicon river that Julius Caesar famously crossed. Even back then, in ancient Rome, Julius Caesar had to confront removal and recycling of food and human waste, and disposal of statues (by melting them down). Caesar turned to civil engineers for help creating a sewage system. Naturally, Nate found these historical facts fascinating.

Companies today are increasingly setting zero waste goals—basically eliminating trash sent to landfills or incinerators. Rubicon helps them meet these goals, while also making trash disposal more efficient and cost-effective. Rubicon also aims to reduce the number of trash trucks on the road by collecting only when a client really needs it. This is a very different philosophy and approach than that taken by the largest industry players in the United States, which tend to just dump everything into landfills, which they often own. Rubicon also points to one of myriad reasons Nate and I like each other so much; we’re both deeply interested in tackling social challenges through market-driven solutions.

GREAT RECYCLED, SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS

Many large and small companies are working to create products that protect the environment by reusing materials. Check these out:

Bloomerent.com: This company “recycles” flower centerpieces from weddings, corporate events, and other big affairs. You work with a florist affiliated with Bloomerent to create your centerpieces; after your event, the company resells your used flowers to someone nearby, and you get 10 percent back. Or, contact Bloomerent to see if there’s an event near you that will have centerpieces to recycle when you need them; a Bloomerent florist will customize the flowers for you and deliver them—saving you 40 to 60 percent off the retail price.

Decomposition Notebook: Need a new journal, a notebook for school, or just a place to make lists? Instead of your usual college-ruled notebook, check out Michael Roger’s “decomposition books,” cool notebooks with eighty pages of 100 percent post-consumer-waste paper, printed with college-ruled lines in soy ink. Each book has a different design—the ocean, the cosmos, or the rain forest. Available online, at Whole Foods, and at Target.

Green Toys: This California-based toy company makes colorful plastic fire engines, airplanes, tea sets, and toys from 100 percent recycled materials, including gallon milk jugs. All toys are made in the USA and surpass U.S. and international standards for no BPAs.

Grove Collaborative: Our friends at Grove have created an eco-friendly subscription service for the best household products on the market, like Seventh Generation, Method, and Mrs. Meyer’s cleaning products. The company focuses on recycled packaging and carbon offsets for shipping.

Old Saw Ventures: This network of barn dismantlers sells wood from abandoned barns to designers, builders, and individuals who are remodeling homes or commercial spaces. Many people love the look of reclaimed lumber and the increased strength and stability that come from the aging process. The wood often can be sawed into wider planks than newly harvested lumber. It’s a fabulous way to add character to a home without cutting down trees.

Patagonia: The company’s recycled polyester collection ranges from puffy jackets to backpacks. Aesthetically, you would never know that each piece contains fibers made from recycled soda bottles, manufacturing waste, or worn-out garments.

Reformation: This Los Angeles–based fashion-forward company manufactures sleek, chic, upscale women’s clothes in California with environmentally friendly Tencel and viscose, fabric scraps, and upcycled vintage clothing. There are stores in NYC, California, and Dallas so far. Online orders come with free shipping.

Scenery Bags: What happens to those elaborate sets created for Broadway shows? If you buy a Scenery Bag, they could wind up hanging from your arm. Jen Kahn, a stage manager for years, created Scenery Bags as a way to prevent beautiful backdrops from being dumped into the trash at a show’s end. Kahn collects discarded backdrops from set rental companies and theaters—including those that have housed popular musicals like Hairspray and Oklahoma!—and has them cut up and sewn into clutches. Bonus: Your bag comes with a label about the show it’s from. It’s an ideal gift for theater lovers (and a portion of proceeds goes to the Stage Doors program, which brings schoolkids to Broadway shows in New York City).

Teeki: This eco-conscious active wear line makes cute, super-long-lasting yoga pants, tank tops, and shorts from recycled plastic water bottles. The company is committed to ensuring that suppliers follow the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act. Available at yoga stores in California and Pennsylvania, and online.

Rubicon finds revenue streams that can be generated through recycling, such as pet beds, and shares earnings with its clients. I love animals, and I could envision comfy pet beds made from old cotton clothing. I also admired the ingenuity of this solution. These kinds of repurposing projects are such a clear display of humankind’s creative potential. I’m a big believer in repurposing in general; I’ll store clothes for six months to send to my cousins, who I know will use them rather than throw them away. I see recycling as a way of democratizing raw materials and gaining more value from creativity. But I’ve gained a great deal more appreciation for the importance of recycling since meeting Nate—not only for the sake of the environment but also for lower-income communities here and abroad.

THE GLUT OF GARBAGE

I know that trash hauling may not sound fascinating, but the status quo of waste disposal is creating a growing environmental and social crisis. The U.S. waste industry has historically been dominated by three enormous companies that own trash trucks and landfills. They make an overwhelming majority of their profits in “tipping fees,” what they charge for dumping, or “tipping,” garbage into their landfills. They’re more like real estate companies in this regard, incentivized to maximize profits by routing all possible waste to their landfills.

Landfills are massive in-ground or aboveground containers that are some of the worst polluters in the country. There are different kinds of landfills for different materials, and they are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Still, as a whole, landfills are the third-largest producer of human-related methane emissions in the United States. Methane gas traps heat in the atmosphere even more than carbon dioxide does. Decomposing garbage also leaks toxins into the air, contributing to higher mortality rates in areas where landfills are built. We create at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day, globally, which is ten times more than we did a hundred years ago. Here in the United States, we each toss roughly the equivalent of our own body weight every month. Most of this ends up in landfills. Since most people don’t want to think too hard about their garbage, it’s been easy for these three major companies to dominate the space and refuse to innovate for decades.

The five hundred or so landfills in the United States are built in some of the poorest communities in our country, meaning they’re potentially harming people who are already struggling. Once a landfill goes in, other companies tend to be driven out. No one wants to build a housing development, shopping mall, or even a factory near a landfill. Nate sees the trash industry as the environmental justice issue of our time. As he says, “Basically, when a landfill comes to an area, everything else around it dies.” Housing prices plummeted by 50 percent after landfills were built in poor neighborhoods in Cleveland, outside Detroit, and in Milwaukee.

THE D-I-Y ZERO WASTE HOUSEHOLD

How can you create less waste at home? The EPA has established a “waste management hierarchy,” a preferred order of disposing garbage, to help you clean up your act. Here’s how the hierarchy works:

Best approach: Create less waste by buying less and using up all of what you have.

Second best: Reuse old containers, clothing, sheets, etc., in new ways.

Third best: Recycle what you can’t reuse. (How many plastic yogurt containers can one family store? Not many, it turns out.)

Fourth best: Use waste as fuel by sending discards to a waste-to-energy converter or responsibly burning your trash for heat or fuel.

If all else fails: Toss it in the trash.

The good news is that businesses are actually free to choose their own garbage hauler in most of the country (a fact that most of us don’t know). The technology also exists to recycle most of our trash. Europe, Asia, and Australia are way ahead of us in this regard. The EPA estimates that we bury billions in valuable materials every year. In 2014 alone, we tossed nearly $50 billion worth of recyclable materials globally. That doesn’t mean people are accidentally throwing out heirloom jewelry, but rather, there is monetary value in so much of what we toss. Old cardboard can be sold to countries like Thailand to make boxes, for example. Used aluminum can easily be recycled into new cans. Steel commands a high price as a building material. Food waste, which accounts for half the trash in the United States, can be turned into fuel, feed, and fertilizer.

As Nate was telling me about his Wegmans venture, I started thinking about To the Market and our supply-chain goals. While I’m super proud of the work of our ethical producers and our To the Market team, this conversation really challenged me to think about how our artisan partners could do more with discards. I’d spent so much time working to convince individuals and major corporations to source ethically, but I hadn’t given nearly as much thought to the raw materials our partners were using to make those products. How could we think strategically about making products from trash? Could we design deeper, stretch the boundaries of even the most mundane materials and our own vision for them?

Residents in the developing world are often plagued by excess trash and limited or nonexistent garbage removal. Turning trash into treasure would help with this problem and possibly become an important part of generating more economic opportunity. If I could help artisans expand the products they make from free or almost-free raw materials, I could help them create more with lower upfront costs, dramatically increasing their ability to scale up their businesses. Focusing more on recycling, or upcycling, as I like to think of it, at the artisan level suddenly seemed like a hugely important, under-realized opportunity.

I was just about to travel down to Haiti again, a country that to me exemplifies the art of making something out of nothing. As I’d seen on my first visit, many artisans use discarded products and seem to subsist on sheer resourcefulness and imagination. I’d been so inspired by the creativity and energy in Haiti. Now I was driven by a new question: Could we harness the skills of these artisans and our design eye to create totally new products from discards—items that could sell as luxury goods? Could we produce an entire line of accessories from discarded materials that a sophisticated shopper would choose instead of traditional, high-end gold or silver jewelry?

Long, dangling statement earrings were the most popular accessory for spring/summer 2017. None of our local partners were making them, and we hadn’t produced any in our To the Market Exclusives Collection, a missed opportunity for us that spring. The earring trend seemed certain to continue into fall. I suddenly had a vision of dangly earrings fashioned from discarded cow horn that would look sophisticated enough to go head-to-head with those made by well-known designers working with precious metals and expensive stones.

As I got ready for my second trip to Haiti, I started sketching a few designs for earrings. I’d gained a fair amount of firsthand knowledge about what our customers like at that point, and about the process of taking a design from concept to pattern to sample. I believed we could create some outstanding shapes with cow horn, if it could be pressed thin enough and cut precisely enough by the artisans at the cooperative Atelier Calla, which had impressed me so much on my first trip.

I emailed drawings of two styles of dangly earrings to Atelier Calla. The studio’s founder and head designer, Christelle Paul, promised to have samples ready on my arrival. I couldn’t wait to see how they’d turn out.

FORGING BEAUTY FROM LIMITED MEANS

When I arrived in Haiti, I was reminded once again of why I consider it the queen of creative recycling. Artwork is everywhere, usually made from the humblest raw materials. I was walking into a hotel in Port-au-Prince, and I had to stop to snap a photo of a striking mosaic built into the sidewalk, two L shapes made from multicolored ceramic shards, bordered with metal and embedded in a square stone. It was a handmade version of the kind of grand entrance logo I’d seen at upmarket hotels. For the most part, Haitian businesses don’t have the resources to hire famous architects to design new buildings and fill them with high-end finishes like imported hardwood floors or marble facades. They wind up decorating with things they can make themselves. This leads to an exuberant kind of creativity. As the artist Henri Matisse put it, “Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.” It almost feels like the entire island is an art installation, or an artist’s playground. There are endless works-in-progress, and it feels very organic, the line between experimentation and completion never totally fixed.

HOW BIG COMPANIES ARE FOCUSING ON ZERO WASTE

Corporations around the world are focusing on decreasing their negative impact on the environment. Below are a few examples.

Hilton: Travel and tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and Hilton has made aggressive commitments to helping advance the United Nations’ 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, through its LightStay program. Since 2009, LightStay has helped reduce the chain’s energy use by 17 percent, waste by nearly 30 percent, water use by nearly 17 percent, and overall carbon output by nearly 23 percent across its hotels. (Yes, it is worth reusing that towel a second night rather than dropping it on the floor and getting a new one.) Hilton also launched the industry’s first soap-recycling program, and has recycled more than five million bars to date—that’s more than one million pounds of soap waste not sent to landfills. To the Market has collaborated several times with Hilton’s Travel with Purpose program and it’s been great to see firsthand the company’s efforts.

Microsoft: In November 2016, Microsoft became the first technology company to receive a Zero Waste Facility certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The company now prevents 90 percent of waste from heading to landfills at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where more than 44,000 employees work in 125 buildings across 500 acres.

Procter & Gamble: As of 2017, more than half of the locations of this Cincinnati-based consumer packaged goods giant send zero manufacturing waste to landfills. P&G also diverts office paper and food scraps from landfills through employee-led programs. (The company says such staff-led initiatives allowed its Costa Rica plant to go entirely zero waste.) These moves are part of P&G’s goal for all of its plants to send zero manufacturing waste to landfills by 2020.

Sierra Nevada: In 2013, Sierra Nevada’s Chico, California–based brewery was certified as a platinum-level Zero Waste Facility by the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council. The following year, Sierra Nevada diverted nearly 100 percent of its solid brewing waste away from landfills, in part by sending 150,000 pounds of spent malted barley and 4,000 pounds of spent hops a day to local cattle and dairy farms to use as feed. The brewery is also home to the first HotRot composting system in the United States. Installed in 2010, the system has transformed more than 5,000 tons of organic waste into compost.

Subaru: Subaru of Indiana Automotive hasn’t sent waste to local landfills in more than a decade, nor have two of Subaru’s manufacturing plants in Japan. Subaru reuses everything from auto part packaging to staff food scraps. The Indiana plant alone saves an estimated $1 to $2 million a year through its reduction and reuse programs. Subaru has the best profit margin in the automotive industry, showing the economic sense of reducing waste. Nearly 100 percent of the components of a Subaru vehicle can be recycled or reused.

Target: Target’s corporate social responsibility efforts include a pillar called planet, which focuses on climate, chemicals, water, sustainable operations, and sustainable products. In 2017 alone, Target diverted more than 70 percent of its retail waste away from landfills through reuse and recycling programs.

Toyota: A founding member of the U.S. Zero Waste Building Council and the winner of the EPA’s WasteWise Partner of the Year Award in 2016, Toyota reduced, reused, or recycled 96 percent of its nonregulated waste at its North American facilities in 2015, saving more than nine hundred million pounds of refuse from winding up in landfills. As of 2017, twenty-seven of the company’s North American facilities met the council’s definition of a zero waste site, including ten of its manufacturing plants.

One workshop I visited had a seating area of two low, handmade mosaic tables and matching red chairs; the walls were decorated with ten watercolor-on-paper images of men’s faces. It was a comfortable rest area put together with found materials and artwork made on the island, and it had a level of natural cool that is hard to re-create at a distant design studio.

I think of Haiti as the queen of recycling also because there’s no reliable trash service in the country. In the United States, we’re so accustomed to putting our garbage outside and having it disappear, as if by magic. But in Haiti, most people just burn their garbage, a far-from-ideal solution, not only because it can generate toxic fumes but also because not everything burns—such as plastic. The very properties that make plastic so useful, such as its durability and resistance to degradation, make it nearly impossible to destroy.

Because most Haitians don’t have access to clean tap water, they buy a lot of bottled water, and you see discarded plastic water bottles everywhere (a common sight in many low- and middle-income countries, actually). Empty plastic water bottles line the streets, along with soda bottles, chip bags, and plastic cups. Plastic floats in streams and peeks through the underbrush, where you see goats picking through it.

Globally, we’ve produced about 83 million metric tons of plastic, and less than 10 percent gets recycled. When plastic first became popular, after World War II, there wasn’t that much of it around. But we’ve reached a tipping point for plastic—we have too much and we know too much to continue tossing as usual. Nearly 80 percent of our world’s plastic production has wound up in landfills, or floating in oceans, or clogging creeks, or blowing in the wind in places like Haiti.

I saw a truly Haitian-style response to the problem of discarded plastic. A creative entrepreneur had come up with a way to encourage people to reduce their use of plastic bags by designing super-cute cloth bags screen-printed with illustrations of animals affected by excess plastic. The animals look like they’re from a children’s book—simple, black-and-white line drawings filled with bright blocks of color. I first saw one of these bags hanging in the corner of the little store in the Marriott, Port-au-Prince. It was printed with a sleepy-looking octopus with long eyelashes and curvy tentacles, and the Creole phrase Sachè non mèsi! which translates loosely into “Bag? No thank you!” (Who needs a plastic bag when you have this cool cotton reusable one?)

On another bag, five pink-and-gray round-bellied pigs floated through the air, each hanging on to a colorful plastic bag overhead like a parachute. A third had a cow with a sweet smile chomping a red plastic bag, a half-dozen others floating in her stomach.

The bags were being sold by an artisan cooperative called 2nd Story Goods, which operates in the Haitian town of Jubilee. 2nd Story Goods is dedicated to helping artisans earn a living wage while strengthening their own community. I bought a handful of these bags to take home because I loved the designs and because they represented the inspired entrepreneurialism that I find so uplifting in Haiti.

Accompanying me on this trip to Haiti was one of my best friends, Rachel Faucett, a brilliant designer, owner of the family-friendly brand Handmade Charlotte, and an advisor to my company. Rachel wanted to design a collection for her label to be made in Haiti, with To the Market as the production coordinator. I was excited to have her join me because we always have a blast together, and it was great to have a partner on the island.

Rachel’s oldest daughter, Izzy, was also with us. Izzy was a rising senior in high school and wise beyond her years. She was acting as my photo assistant/intern. Izzy is a natural explorer, and she was fully engaged—asking questions at co-ops and leaning in to get a closer look at the products. Izzy had traveled before and had recently gone on a mission trip with her church to the Dominican Republic. But she’d never been to Haiti. Seeing Haiti through her eyes reminded me, once again, of just how far this nation is from the United States in terms of economic development, and how much tension the poverty can create.

PURGE THE PLASTIC (AND EXCESS PAPER) FROM YOUR ROUTINE

Help be the change toward less plastic on the planet by taking one of these steps, many of which can also save money.

Become a Bulk Buyer: It may be time-consuming to get started, but most cities have at least one grocery store or chain with bulk sections for nuts, grains, granola, candy, popcorn, etc. Go see what is available that you regularly purchase and commit to (a) switching to scooping out that product from the bulk bin and (b) keeping a plastic or glass container from a food product to fill with it. Once you get the hang of it, add another grocery item to your bulk list. Buying in bulk means less plastic containers used, and less money spent.

BYOB (Bring Your Own Bottle): Fill a reusable bottle with water rather than purchasing new ones, a step that helps save the planet and save you money, particularly at places with marked-up prices, like the airport. You can also bring your own mug to coffee shops or the office. (Some coffee shops will even give you a discount!)

Grab Your Bag: A growing number of grocery stores sell reusable shopping bags, many of which are made of eco-friendly materials. Stock up on a few of these, which usually retail for under ten dollars, to avoid accumulating a pile of plastic bags in the kitchen that eventually get thrown away. It can take one thousand years for a plastic bag to degrade. To the Market offers ethically made, affordable, reusable bags to consumers and retailers alike. If your local store doesn’t offer an alternative to plastic, buy one elsewhere, and encourage this addition.

Just Say No: Refuse all kinds of things you don’t actually need, such as layers of tissue paper a cashier might wrap around a new sweater you’re buying before putting it in the bag or paper versions of your bills (who wants those anyway?) that can now be sent electronically. When ordering takeout, you often wind up with an entire second bag of napkins, straws, and little packets of ketchup or soy sauce. Ask for your food without these additions, and use your own utensils and condiments at home instead. If you can stand it, skip the plastic straw.

We were traveling around in a big, airy van with a driver who was an expert at navigating Port-au-Prince’s winding, sporadically paved roads and a guide named James Samson from the Artisan Business Network. At one point, we sat parked in the van, shooting an iPhone video to upload to Facebook. A young man came up to the van and started making “I’m hungry” gestures, bringing his fingertips to his lips and staring into the window. I advised Izzy to ignore him, a suggestion I felt conflicted about making. But none of us can help everyone all the time, even in a place with so much need. We didn’t have food with us in the van, and we also needed to think about our own security.

This experience really brought to the forefront the complicated issue of how best to help. All of us seeking to make a difference in the developing world have to balance our good intentions with pragmatic approaches that actually work. This is particularly true in Haiti, where there has been a long tradition of aid efforts gone awry. It seemed like half the people on our plane ride down were missionaries, which is common on flights to Port-au-Prince. They came from churches and nonprofits alike. It’s awesome that so many people want to help, and it makes sense for churches specifically, since Haiti is the poorest country in our hemisphere and about 80 percent Christian. And yet, in some ways, the ongoing and complicated web of problems in Haiti has been further entangled by misguided efforts to intervene.

It’s very popular, for example, for American churches to donate a house, school, or church to a sister congregation. This is a great idea, especially considering that the earthquake leveled so many buildings. But too often, a U.S.-based group will raise funds for the building, hire a U.S.-based architect to design it, and then bring down its own members to do the construction. This approach fails to maximize the impact of the group’s efforts. If that same U.S. church had hired a Haitian architect and builders, it would have helped a group of Haitians expand their skills and earn an income—while still raising a new building for the community. That same U.S. church could have then further helped stimulate the Haitian economy by planning a trip to visit the new sister church, and asking every traveler to bring an empty suitcase to fill with Haitian-made goods bought on the island.

Even the donation of goods can be a less-than-ideal intervention. Donations of emergency medicine and food during famine are critical, of course. But sending used consumer products that could easily be bought on-island undercuts the local economy. It would be more helpful to raise funds to buy sporting equipment, say, or shoes, from local sellers, ideally on an ongoing basis, which would provide consistent income for these merchants.

I would never criticize the spirit to serve others, and as a person so guided by my faith myself, I absolutely understand the call of these faith-based efforts. They’re so important, and these missionaries and aid workers have the purest of intentions. But we all need to think hard about the how of giving and the ongoing impact.

TURNING TRASH INTO TREASURE AT PAPILLON

On our third day in Haiti, we went to Papillon, the artisan cooperative focused on orphan prevention that I’d visited on my first trip to the country. We’ve probably all read about how children in group homes often don’t get enough human touch, and another popular service-related activity is visiting orphanages to hold babies as a way to help. It’s a noble desire, but many of the orphans in Haiti have living parents who have given them up due to crippling poverty—a root cause that Papillon works to address.

Papillon primarily employs parents who have had serious economic hardship, and might send their children to a group home due to an inability to feed and house them, and ongoing messaging in Haiti suggesting that living in an orphanage with regular meals is better than staying home and going hungry. Some of these parents were never taught to read or write. Others have been deported from the United States, where they lived most of their lives, and have no family, connections, or jobs in Haiti. Papillon offers invaluable hope and job training to these parents and their families, and teaches them skills to create accessories, bags, and housewares from an amazing array of discarded items—oil drums, cardboard boxes, Haitian clay, pretty much anything they can find. Buying from Papillon is a way to support existing family units.

Papillon is an impressive operation, and it’s grown hugely since it started ten years ago. It occupies an old limestone mansion, the walls painted in bright Caribbean colors. When we visited, artisans were at work in the open-air workshops throughout the house and on the grounds. There was a great, buzzy vibe. Some people were drilling down into their work. Others were chatting over the radio, which played a seemingly random mix of the 1990s and 2000s, with contemporary American Christian music thrown in. The atmosphere reminded me of a co-working space, maybe a Caribbean WeWork with the sun streaming in through the open roofs (and the occasional rain shower).

Papillon is a popular stop for mission groups, and visitors are often around. There’s also a new childcare center for children of employees, and I heard the occasional sound of a child calling out or a couple of kids laughing. There are rooms for computer classes and language and literacy development. There’s also a store selling handmade goods from Papillon and from other Haitian designers, a way to support the work taking place around the island. I saw sweet-looking stuffed animals, useful makeup pouches, and upcycled cardboard jewelry.

The last time I visited Papillon, I’d been particularly struck by the beads that some of the artisans were rolling from cardboard soda cases. It seemed amazing that the beads came from trash—old boxes that most of us toss without a thought—and I’d sent photos of the work to General Mills, explaining that the bright colors of cereal boxes would create a particularly interesting aesthetic. I added that ordering jewelry made from these beads would let them display their commitment to recycling in a creative way. General Mills makes popular cereals including Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, and (my personal favorite) Honey Nut Cheerios. General Mills has more than one hundred food brands, sold in more than one hundred countries, and offers eight natural and organic lines. The company has become a leader in sustainable practices, and sits high on Newsweek’s green rankings.

General Mills loved the ingenuity of the idea, and the results. The company ultimately ordered two hundred bracelets and two hundred necklaces strung from cereal box beads to give as gifts to parenting bloggers and social media influencers for Mother’s Day 2017. This was thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, a pretty big order for this co-op, and for us. The order had employed twenty-five people at Papillon, from the cutters to the rollers to the shippers, generating a living wage (which is three times the minimum wage in Haiti), and giving them access to Papillon’s medical and social benefits.

Back in the United States, the upcycled jewelry had really gotten influencers talking. I love collaborating with companies on great products for gifting and marketing. They make such a compelling story, and sometimes the social media influencers include a mention of To the Market in their posts. Most large companies today are looking for influencer gifts in addition to doing more traditional advertising. Influencer campaigns allow for social media personalities to post and share personal stories about their experience with the brand. For example, a parenting blogger likely wouldn’t be compelled to share a photo captioned: “Here I am, eating cereal!” But if she receives a great gift with a good story, she can write: “Look what General Mills sent me! It’s made from cereal boxes in Haiti. Thank you, General Mills, for supporting parents!”

I’m also a big fan of products like the cereal box bead bracelets because they create such surprise and delight when people learn about their origin. Upcycling in general can be a good reminder to value what we have—not only our objects but also our experiences and relationships. Repurposing sheds light on our existing good fortune. I see it as a way to honor ourselves, our past, the products we’ve already bought, and the decisions we’ve already made.

I’m always looking for ways to “upcycle” To the Market’s existing relationships, and to build on the connections and successful partnerships we’ve already initiated. Too often in business, we think that to expand our client base or to invigorate a program, team, or line, we need to do something totally new, start from scratch, trash the old ways and innovate. But this “always new” mentality can mean overlooking what we’ve already invested in, and missing out on the value readily available to us in our existing product lines, people, or skill sets. This time, on my second visit to Papillon, I noticed a worker in a bright red Papillon T-shirt and chin-length dreadlocks sitting at a table, smiling as he folded cardboard strips into narrow ribbons. He then rolled the ribbons into disks that he shaped into butterflies and stars that could be hung like ornaments. Perhaps General Mills would want to do a holiday marketing campaign with cereal box ornaments? I snapped some photos and made a mental note to pitch the team there again.

ORPHANHOOD IN HAITI:
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PROBLEM

Papillon was started by Shelley Jean, an American woman who wanted to adopt a child and flew down to Haiti in 2007 with the intention of doing so. During that week-long trip to Haiti, she found herself rocked by the realization that there were thousands of kids in often-derelict orphanages who had living parents.

“They’d come to the orphanage to visit their children,” she says. “I had this total paradigm shift—it suddenly wasn’t about me wanting to adopt, but about these poor mothers who couldn’t afford to feed their children and wound up giving them away. I was already a mother of two and I could not imagine being in a place where I would give my children away because I couldn’t feed them.”

Jean went home and created a nonprofit called the Apparent Project to help Haitian parents build job skills and also life skills such as financial literacy. Nine months later, she and her family moved to Haiti to get it going on the ground there. Jean spent a year living as a house parent in an orphanage and learning Creole. “I was thinking maybe I’d help two or three mothers,” Jean says. Instead, through a series of stops and starts, she wound up creating Papillon.

UNICEF estimates that there were nearly 500,000 orphans in Haiti as of 2012—this in a country of about ten million people. Haiti also has kids living on the street, and others who work as house helpers. Called “restavek,” these child house servants are essentially slaves. The United Nations and other groups consider the restavek to be victims of child trafficking. Various organizations are involved in trying to stop this practice, including the United Nations, Partners In Health, and the U.S. Department of State. Nonprofits such as Restavek Freedom are also trying to tackle this unique Haitian challenge.

Jean sees the problem of orphanhood in Haiti as having gotten worse over the years. Some Haitians have been lured into giving up their children for cash, sometimes to people who have set up absolutely inadequate facilities for childcare. There have been some truly heartbreaking accounts of what can happen to a child living in one of these places. We also now know the psychological damage that can happen when one child in a family is sent to a group home, even a good one, while his siblings remain with their parents. Most of the kids in these orphanages don’t get adopted.

You can help reverse this trend by purchasing products made by parents through Papillon or another similar group. “It shouldn’t be easier to check your child into an orphanage than it is to get a job,” says Jean.

You can also support malnutrition clinics for children, maternity care and midwifery facilities, and skills-training centers for parents. Or cover a child’s tuition or contribute money to a school. (But do your research and make sure it’s a good school.)

As Jean puts it, “If you want to help, it’s really important to take the time to really look and listen before jumping in and trying to do. We don’t know the nuances of these different cultures, and there’s a reason behind everything they do. Coming from a non-poverty mind-set, we need to work to understand the reasons before trying to change behavior.”

The next day, we headed to Atelier Calla, where I could finally see how the earrings I’d designed came out. Christelle Paul had relocated her workshop to a new spot because the old neighborhood had become too dangerous. The new place, still in Port-au-Prince, was surrounded by a concrete wall (of course) and accessed through a metal gate.

We parked out front and walked through the gate to find a small, intimate indoor/outdoor studio and office, with samples all around. There were about five men working with horn that day, which is really labor intensive, and they sat with their heads down, focused on what they were doing. I could hear hammering coming from somewhere else in the courtyard, as well as sanding and sawing. About four dozen cow horns sat in a pile on the ground, black and dusty. Paul had gotten the horns from local butchers and people who travel around the island to collect them. The horns were short and curved, hollow at one end and tapering to a closed point at the other.

We watched a man with short, slightly graying hair soften the horns. He sat on a low, ladder-backed cane chair in front of a copper cookstove filled with charcoal briquettes. He was wearing khaki shorts and a tank top, and he rested one arm on his knee while stirring two horns around in the coals with a big wooden stick. It looked like he was making horn stew, or maybe blackening horn sausages. At one point, he removed the heated horns from the fire and immediately placed them in a metal press sitting near his feet. He spun a wheel to drop a top plate, flattening the horns. He quickly tossed two more horns on the coals. It was amazing to see just how much work it took for this rough material to be transformed into sheets thin enough to cut.

In another spot, a couple of men were sawing boards of reddish, warm-hued obeche wood into smaller pieces, then wrapping them in pairs with twine. The men wore dust masks, and one sat on a wrought-iron patio chair, its white paint chipping. The chairs looked like what you’d expect to find in the courtyard of a fancy hotel. They were similar, in fact, to the chairs on the slate-floored, bougainvillea-lined patio at the Hotel Montana, where we were staying again.

I noticed a new product that Paul had lying on a table outside—brooches with intricate beading work. This beading was done by another group, Paul said. I asked if she could make some adjustments to the design for our clients. She agreed to make samples and to drop them off at our hotel before we left.

HOP ON OVER TO HAITI FOR AN “EMPOWERMENT TOUR”

A beautiful, underappreciated country with a community-oriented spirit, Haiti feels much farther away than it is. As Callie Himsl, an American who works at Papillon, puts it, “It feels more like Africa than the Caribbean.” For your next tropical vacation, instead of lying on the beach for a week, consider a seven-day “empowerment tour” organized by Papillon. The trip is super fun, safe, and can be life-changing.

You’ll join a half-dozen other travelers to start your trip with a day at Papillon. You’ll learn to make beaded bracelets in the morning, have lunch at the café, then throw clay on the wheel in the afternoon. You also can talk to the artisans about their lives, which, as Himsl says, lets you move past the image you may have of “flies on babies and trash on the streets.” You meet real mothers and fathers, and establish personal connections.

During the week, you’ll visit the Haiti Design Co-op, another artisan-based social enterprise, see the metal market in Croix-des-Bouquets, tour a few other successful co-ops, and spend a day at the beach.

Papillon organizes the entire thing, including meals, transportation, and lodging. You stay at a guesthouse or with a family, usually an employee of Papillon. “Living with someone lets you talk about your day,” says Himsl, who often hosts visitors in her home. “You can sit on the balcony at night, and work through the emotions. Any time you travel to the third world there’s a lot of emotions.

“Our hope is that people will come down with an empty suitcase or two and fill it up with things they buy on their trip. Then go back and tell people how beautiful these places are!”

It was great to witness all this activity, but I was most eager to see the samples of the cow horn earrings. Would they have the high-end look I’d envisioned? Could we translate horn into something finished and fashion forward?

We stepped into Paul’s tiny, makeshift office, decorated with samples of brands ranging from Donna Karan to local Haitian designers. She handed me a paper bag containing two pairs of each of the four styles I’d requested. I spread them out on my palm. They looked even better than I could have imagined. She hadn’t made major changes to the design, but she’d tweaked my concepts to make the most of the material. One pair of drop earrings had three oval disks in three different colors of horn—gray, cream, and tan. The proportions were perfect, and I loved her choice of colors and how each of the ovals had a slightly different shape. Her artisans had managed to press the horns thin enough to be lightweight, cut them with very precise, clean edges, and sand them into an amazing glass-like sheen. They’d connected the disks with fat gold rings that elevated the aesthetic and made the earrings look more expensive, and chosen high-end posts of surgical steel.

These earrings were exactly what I’d hoped to see made after my conversation with Nate. They could easily fit in at a Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, or Bloomingdale’s, yet they were made from discarded cow horn that started as a dusty remain on a floor in Haiti. It was amazing to see such humble raw materials transformed through creativity (and muscle power) into objects of such beauty.

Paul talked a little about her journey into artisanship. She’d been a banker in Haiti, it turned out, before becoming a designer. But she’d always had a creative side. She was attracted to the horn material and started experimenting with it. People responded to her designs, leading her to eventually open a workshop.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that she was a self-taught designer who hadn’t planned to work with artisans. Everywhere I’ve gone on this journey to start my company, I’ve met truly amazing, inspiring people, most of whom stumbled into the sector. Many people, including myself, never imagined that they would be designing or selling products. Some people entered the artisan industry as a way to improve lives. Others, like Paul, were drawn by the materials and the process. It’s an industry filled with people of very mixed education and experience, which makes it fascinating and also challenging. A lot of people, including myself, have to figure it out as they go along.

After Atelier Calla, we continued on to Croix-des-Bouquets, the town known for its metalwork. We picked up some samples of holiday ornaments made from upcycled oil drums that we’d ordered. They looked incredible, the steel cut into a holiday shape and hand-embossed with a raised pattern. We’d ordered doves, angels, fir trees, snowflakes, snowmen, and intricate crosses. We’d asked the artisans to apply a matte white paint on some, and gold leaf on others. They looked like ceramic pieces. It was another example of pushing the design and the material further than one would think possible.

Metal, which is so clearly useful, is still dumped into landfills at an alarming rate. In one of the many workshops that line the main drag of Croix-des-Bouquets, we saw artisans sitting on the ground in shorts and T-shirts, pounding steel with hammers, turning oil drums into wall art. It looked like back-breaking work. So many of the products we enjoy are extremely labor intensive, something this visit really drove home once again.

On our way to the airport, we had a little extra time, and I asked our guide, Samson, to show us another cooperative in Port-au-Prince. He suggested a local soap maker, which sounded exciting—my company wasn’t yet carrying soap. We arrived at the workshop and found what looked like an abandoned building with expensive equipment sitting dormant. No one was working. It was like a hollowed-out version of the vibrant workshops I’d toured earlier. It was eerie, like seeing the shadow of a project. Someone had bought professional equipment, including the expensive metal vats needed for soap production. There’d been some real investment, but also obviously a disconnect somewhere that led to the business floundering.

There was one woman present who showed us around. The co-op had manufactured soap for a few local hotels, she told me, but had received no orders in the past six months. This was the first time I’d visited a workshop associated with the Artisan Business Network that didn’t operate consistently.

We stopped in a room to look at samples. Perhaps the problem was the packaging, I thought. Unattractive Saran wrap–like plastic was stretched over each bar of soap, affixed with a poorly printed sticker. Or maybe the pricing was the problem; the soap was listed at a price far above the market rate for similar goods.

I walked back and forth in the sample room, picking up different designs and scents, turning them over, smelling them, trying to figure out if there was any “in” for us, any way we might work with this cooperative. But there was too much uncertainty for me to place an order. It was incredibly frustrating and sad to see so much effort gone to waste. I asked Samson what the women do when they’re not making soap, and he said they sit at home.

The soap factory highlighted how vulnerable all these groups are—the moms and dads at Papillon, Paul’s Atelier Calla, the men hammering metal in Croix-des-Bouquets. They’re subject to the effectiveness of their leadership, to their ability to get their products seen, and to the whims of ever-changing consumer habits. They have to depend on their own good health and hardiness and consistent application. The entire country is fragile, despite all the color and industriousness and laughter I’d seen.

We left the factory and headed to the airport. That empty, hollow feeling lingered with me. It felt like a moment of reckoning. The fact is, my vision of using economic approaches to address social problems isn’t guaranteed to help all the people involved either. We want to believe we have the perfect solution, and that while other approaches didn’t work, ours will. But there’s no guarantee that any of these projects will necessarily succeed. The private sector isn’t a surefire solution to solving the chaos caused by poverty, environmental degradation, war, lack of education, or lack of respect for women and human life in general. Whatever approach we take, we must give serious and ongoing thought to the real sustainability of our vision.

The soap factory visit also highlighted the critical role of people like Sarah Lance, Nathalie Tancrede, and Christelle Paul, social-purpose visionaries who have committed their lives to leading these groups and working with them on a day-to-day basis. They’re “middlewomen” of a sort, a word that can have negative connotations. But these middlewomen working on the ground with ethical producers—particularly artisans—are so important. They’re the ones who communicate between very different worlds, balancing the demands of first-world commerce with the needs and challenges of those living in poverty and uncertainty. These people bridge many divides as they work to help create and sustain employment. I see them as translators of human potential. It’s such a critical job, requiring real dynamism, perseverance, and vision. Leaving Haiti, I felt honored, once again, to have met so many of these heroes, and to see the success stories they’ve helped write.

FROM BONEYARD TO BESTSELLER

I returned home, eager to include the four different styles of cow horn earrings in our fall/winter 2017 collection. They quickly became bestsellers. We ended up having to do several rush reorders to keep up with the demand, which Paul was able to turn around quickly and consistently. Customers were ordering them from our site and even writing to ask when they’d arrive.

At one point, the sister of my friend Maggie saw someone wearing the horn earrings and asked where she could get them. She didn’t realize that they were created by my company. I was thrilled to hear about this request. The earrings were selling themselves, proof that recycled materials can compete on the merits of their own design.

Later that year, I had the chance to meet Chris Wilkes, who runs Hearst’s new entrepreneurship program, called HearstLab. Hearst Communications is a leading tastemaker that publishes major titles including Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Esquire, House Beautiful, and O, The Oprah Magazine. I explained our mission and vision to Wilkes. He got excited about the possibility of having To the Market do holiday gifts for the friends and mentors of the entrepreneurship program.

Wilkes connected me to Judith Bookbinder, Hearst’s vice president of creative communications. Bookbinder is a “super creative,” responsible for making many of the corporation’s design decisions. She has been in the design and fashion world for decades, and has exquisite taste. I wore a pair of the cow horn earrings to our meeting in New York, and she loved them. I also showed her the little upcycled cow horn bowls in our catalog. She decided that the cow horn bowls would be perfect gifts for the entrepreneurship lab to give. Here was a top influencer of a major media powerhouse choosing recycled products to give under the Hearst brand. This model of social change does work, especially with people like Christelle Paul running professional operations, executing sophisticated designs, and bringing a unique skill set to the products.

I had set myself the challenge to design deeper, and I’d succeeded. Nate would love this story.

RECYCLE YOUR TRASH TRADITIONS AT WORK

No one wants more trash in landfills (except maybe landfill owners), but figuring out how to recycle or compost can take some effort. Fortunately, there are many ways to get involved with reducing trash at the office.

Use a Good Trash Hauler: Look at the logos on the trash trucks outside your building, or check your city’s website to see who’s hauling your garbage. Then investigate the company to see if it recycles. If not, look for an alternative hauler in your area that does (or contact a third party like Rubicon for suggestions). If you’re a tenant in a large office building, make a case to the management about the importance of environmentally friendly waste removal, and suggest specific alternatives.

Go Green on Office Supplies: Replace plastic cups in the kitchen with reusable mugs—a great chance to add the company logo. Choose recycled paper products for printing, mailing, and shipping; New Leaf Paper is a leader in sustainable paper printing products. Order custom products made of recycled or organic materials and fabrics.

Put the Pause on Printing Waste: Default to double-sided printing for all in-office communications, use the backside of old printouts for draft documents and notes, and skip printing out emails.

Invite Customers to Contribute: Follow other fashion leaders. If you work at or own a retail store, put a receptacle by the door for empty containers of products you sell. The bath and body company Kiehl’s, for example, has recycling bins for empty Kiehl’s plastic bottles, cardboard packaging, and caps at all their U.S. stores. Customers get a point for every returned item; ten points earns a free, travel-size product. Kiehl’s sends the material to TerraCycle, which makes cute accessories from hard-to-recycle materials, including coffee capsules, Capri Sun and chip bags, ink pens, and billboards. You can create an account with TerraCycle to participate in their free recycling programs. H&M recycles and donates used clothing from any brand; the company estimates that up to 95 percent of clothing that gets tossed could be recycled or even reworn. Men’s Wearhouse donates gently used suits to men transitioning to self-sufficiency. Most Nike and Converse stores accept old athletic shoes too worn-out to be donated and ships them off, along with factory scraps, to be transformed into Nike Grind, a material used to create athletic tracks and playground surfaces. Eileen Fisher accepts worn-out clothing at its stores, which it resells or recycles. (Old jeans make cute new pouches.) Austin-based, award-winning Tèo gelato takes back its plastic containers (licked clean) and gives customers a free gelato for their effort.

Join the Zero Waste Movement: Check out the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council’s resource section and ask your company to join.

Party with Purpose: The benefit corporation Preserve makes colorful, compostable straws, paper and plastic plates, and cutlery. Save leftover cake in the 100 percent recycled plastic food storage containers. Online store Geese and Ganders carries wooden utensils as an alternative to plastics as a part of its curated party supplies assortment.

Spearhead a Recycling Program at Your Office: Figure out what can be recycled in your zip code by looking online, then make it easy for fellow employees to follow along by putting out labeled bins. Recycle Across America offers inexpensive universal recycling signage—basically traffic signs for trash—that you may have seen at Bank of America, Macy’s, or Whole Foods.

Think Partnership: Atlanta’s football team, the Falcons, recently did an amazing partnership with Novelis, the world’s largest aluminum recycler, and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to collect empty aluminum cans from fans attending games at the stadium. The money earned from recycling and reselling the aluminum helped fund a Habitat for Humanity house near the stadium.

Tone Down Your Toner Waste: American businesses toss about one million toner cartridges every single day, a half billion ending up in landfills every year. It takes a single cartridge up to one thousand years to biodegrade. Many manufacturers now participate in office-based toner-cartridge recycling; your office can follow suit. Work at home? OfficeMax and Office Depot will take back empty toner cartridges from any manufacturer, bought at any store. Everycartridge.com provides a consumer-focused list of manufacturers’ return programs.