It’ll be great to see you over there, Eric.

I’d love to hear a little bit about some other inspiring projects or initiatives that you’ve come across recently that you believe are creating some excellent positive social change.

I can name a few. One of them is in Australia that I’m very excited about. You have a social enterprise down there called Social Traders, and Social Traders is doing cutting edge work that the rest of the world is watching, and that is in the area of government procurement. How is the government in Australia, the national government, and the regional and local governments, how are they spending the tax money and are they getting the most bang for the buck by going with social enterprises?

And so, Social Traders has come up with a simplified way to certify a true social enterprise, so that the government recognises what they’re good for, and giving them preferential treatment in the contracting process. I think that’s absolutely the future to grow our sector. We’re all watching the Social Traders right now.

I think that Zero Waste Scotland is a unique organisation because it is an organisation that is quasi-public and quasi-private. It fits between the Scottish Government and the private sector, the waste sector in Scotland, but it’s full of professionals that the government trusts, and the waste industry trusts. This way, this entity, Iain Gulland and his crew, can talk business with the business sector and it’s not BS. Everybody knows that it’s real business, and they can talk government policy with the government, and the government trusts them. I think the Zero Waste Scotland model is something we all need to watch and learn from.

I also like, out of Sri Lanka we’ve got an online platform called Good Market that Amanda Kiessell is running, and she’s gone global with this platform where we’re going to be able to network with each other; not just our services and products, but our local networking and communications as we grow our local movements.

And then, finally the one I just discovered is a Greek island one called the Cyclades Preservation Fund, and they’re looking at the islands, and Greek islands, and they’re starting to come together and share information around social enterprise development, getting plastics out of the Mediterranean. Doing some good work that way.

In fact, after Ethiopia I’m going to be pulling through the Greek Islands and doing a workshop on social enterprise and zero waste with the island.

Oh, fantastic.

There’s a lot of great work going on around the world.

There’s some great projects there. To finish off then, what inspiring books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I don’t read a lot of books anymore. I did a lot in the 70s and 80s, especially grad school, and there’s two classics that the younger people, entrepreneurs, I highly recommend, the one I always talk about. First, is a book by Paul Hawken called The Ecology of Commerce. I remember Paul said, back in the 90s, he said,

“we don’t have to save the Earth, it’s fine. We have to save business, because it’s business that’s killing the Earth.”

And so, The Ecology of Commerce is important.

Another book is called Small is Beautiful by an economist, Schumacher, out of England, and that was one of my bibles when I was younger.

And then two resources I want to mention really quickly; I’m coauthor on two reports that are still really powerful and they’re free online. The first one is called The Community Zero Waste Roadmap, and it’s a booklet that I wrote and it’s about 43 pages long. The other one is called Stop Trashing the Climate. It is still the best report on the link to climate change and zero waste issues. You can find that on the Institute for Local Self Reliance website.