SPILL THE (GREEN) TEA: How to talk about sustainability without getting called out

Katie Treggiden, Malin Cunningham
  • 4.9 (9)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Semimonthly

Making Design Circular is evolving. With a new name, a new remit, and a new co-host, this next chapter is all about one of the most urgent conversations in business today: how to talk about sustainability with honesty, nuance, and confidence. Katie Treggiden is joined by Malin Cunningham, founder of B Corp-certified B2B thought leadership consultancy Hattrick, to launch Spill the Green Tea – a podcast exploring how brands can communicate their environmental efforts without tipping into greenwashing… or disappearing into greenhushing. In a world saturated with content, polished claims, and call-outs, the real differentiator is authenticity. Together, Katie and Malin unpack how to share imperfect eco-efforts with clarity and credibility, so your sustainability story builds trust instead of backlash. Expect thoughtful conversations, practical insights, and honest reflections on what it really takes to speak up responsibly in today’s climate-aware marketplace. If you care about communicating sustainability in a way that stands up to scrutiny and still stands out, subscribe now and be the first to tune in to Spill the Green Tea PS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

  1. 1d ago

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Tim Christophersen

    A forester by training, Tim left a secure UN career for the private sector in 2022, drawn by Salesforce's reach into 200,000-plus customers, including 60,000 NGOs, and the chance to shape how businesses think about biodiversity, water and climate strategy from the inside. He's also the author of Generation Restoration: How to Fix Our Relationship Crisis with Mother Nature. From a single, disarming admission the conversation opens into what it actually means to rebuild a relationship with nature, and why the language we use to talk about that relationship might matter as much as the science behind it. In this episode, we cover: “It's not the cow, it's the how” — livestock grazed well restores soil biodiversity and landscapes at scale, and it's factory farming, not meat itself, that's the problem.How ecological literacy starts with three questions and answering them is how people rebuild a felt, not just intellectual, sense of being part of nature rather than separate from it.The “we are nature” dictionary fight — why the Enlightenment-era idea that only humans have the divine spark is the philosophical root of ecological destruction.What a nature-positive strategy actually means in practiceRehabilitating carbon credits — how reducing and investing go together rather than being a trade-off, and that inaction, not offsetting, is now the biggest collective risk companies face.Conditional optimism as a disciplineMore from Tim timchristophersen.comGeneration Restoration by Tim ChristophersenTim Christophersen | LinkedInResources mentioned: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall KimmererEat More Trees DocumentaryKiss the Ground &  GroundswellRoots So Deep (you can see the devil down there) — 4-part documentary on adaptive grazingRewilding the World Podcast with Ben GoldsmithRestor — Tom Crowther's “Google Maps for nature restoration” platformAcción Andina — indigenous-led restoration of high Andean cloud forestsSymbiosis Coalition — Salesforce, Google, Meta, Microsoft and others' joint nature-based carbon removal commitmentTaskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)We Are Nature campaign — the dictionary-definition campaign Tim referencesCarbon Literacy ProjectCopenhagen Cloudburst Management Plan — the “sponge city” case study discussed More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Tim Christophersen

  2. Aug 26

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Ankita Dwivedi

    Katie opens by admitting she finds herself saying "it depends" a lot when people ask which of two options is more sustainable and that conundrum is exactly what Firstplanit was built to address. What follows is a conversation about products as systems, why radical transparency sells, and why sustainability comms may need more complexity, not less. In this episode, we cover: Products as systems, not just shapes — Design has historically treated materials as secondary to form, Firstplanit's approach reverses that, modelling a product as a system of performance, environmental, social and health data so non-technical decision-makers can act on it quickly.  Why radical transparency sells — Rather than leading only with strengths, Ankita encourages brands to state clearly what a product does better, by how much, and what it doesn't achieve and why. That combination is what builds buyer trust, because it shows the work has actually been done.  The unintended consequences of single-issue decision-making — Drawing a parallel with medicine, Ankita warns against narrowing sustainability down to one metric (like carbon) the way we once did with cost: it just becomes another number and misses whatever wasn't measured.  Confidence comes from process, not outcome — Because innovation is inherently risky, Ankita argues real confidence comes from being able to communicate your methodology and the steps you're taking not from waiting for a guaranteed positive result before you speak.  Complexity needs a story, not just data — Data alone is dry; Ankita's structure for a second conversation pairs a short, connecting headline with a rich mission and impact story ready for when someone wants to go deeper, including benchmarks and cross-category comparisons.  Sustainability needs a future-facing narrative — Ankita pushes back on sustainability being framed as nostalgic or vernacular, pointing to concepts like biomimicry as proof that framing progress as forward-looking innovation, not virtue signalling, brings more people on board. More from Ankita www.firstplanit.com Linked: @ankitadwivedi Resources mentioned: UK Green Building Council Wild Spaces The Rest Is Politics hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart  Hysteria hosted by Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco Between The Covers hosted by writer David Naimon with writer, poet and translator Eleni Sikelianos How giffgaff built sustainability and responsibility into its media planning Giffgaff Responsible Marketing Manifesto More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Ankita Dwivedi

  3. Aug 12

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Pauline Robson

    After almost 20 years in the industry, she stepped away from that role to study for an MSc in Sustainability and Behaviour Change, wanting to understand what actually motivates people to change. She also sits on the Anti-Greenwash Charter's Advisory Council, alongside its founder Charlie Martin, a previous guest on the podcast.  In this episode, we cover: Being the only sustainability person in the room and why that gap between the responsibility to drive change and the actual power to enact it is such a common thread across the profession.  Sustainability is stuck in reporting and compliance, not innovation, missing a huge opportunity by treating sustainability as a risk to manage rather than a driver of new thinking.  How the fear of falling foul of green claims regulation, a polarised political climate, consumer backlash, and a media agenda now dominated by AI are all pushing even well-intentioned companies into silence.  The "spiral of silence" - when companies stop talking about progress, it normalises inaction, lets other businesses off the hook, and leaves a vacuum for anti-net-zero narratives to fill.  Learning the hard way why internal comms means balancing three languages at once: the language of the business, the technical language of sustainability and a genuinely human register A powerful episode reminding us that progress, however imperfect, communicated honestly, is what builds the trust that silence never can. More from Pauline LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauline-robson/ The Anti-Greenwash Charter Resources mentioned: There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke Accidental Gods Podcast, hosted by Manda Scott Screw This... Let's Try Something Else Podcast Positive News YearCompass Vestre / The Plus Tony's Chocolonely: Impact Report Bump into Brum, Possible The quote about partying, grieving, and activism during the HIV/AIDS epidemic that Katie mentioned comes from author and activist Dan Savage: “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Pauline Robson

  4. Jul 29

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Paul Randle

    In this episode, Malin is joined by Paul Randle, who spent thirty years watching marketing — the most powerful behaviour-change tool ever invented — point in entirely the wrong direction, a realisation that first hit him and his now co-author Alexis Eyre as fellow marketers on a Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership course, sitting through session after session feeling, as Paul puts it, like they had devil's horns growing out of their foreheads. So he decided to do something about it: he co-founded the Sustainable Marketing Compass, which received 750,000 views in its first 24 hours on LinkedIn and is now embedded in programmes at Cambridge University Institute for Sustainability Leadership, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the IPA. He co-authored two books with Alexis: Sustainable Marketing — The Industry's Role in a Sustainable Future, winner of the American Marketing Association's Leonard L. Berry Book Award, and Competitive Sustainability — Driving Change with Value, which asks the most powerful question in business right now — why wouldn't we?  Paul joins Malin to unpack why sustainability's old opening line stopped working, and what he and Alexis built to replace it. In this episode, we cover: Why you don't have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough How The Ladder of Good swaps vague utopianism for six practical rungs because most sustainability visions are either a doom narrative or a Garden-of-Eden fantasy and neither gives a business a route map to actually get there.  How to communicate change by exciting people about the future rather than shaming them about the present, an energy Paul thinks the sustainability community has never matched.  Why reputation now has to hold up across the whole stakeholder chain, not just the brand story How the nine Rs are built as shared doorways for the boardroom, not activist slogans Why self-awareness is the chapter nobody expects to find in a sustainability book and how showing up determines whether stakeholders actually hear your business case or dismiss it as "sustainability sentimentality” A great episode to remind us that real progress is won by finding the doorway where sustainability and business already want the same thing. More from Paul: LinkedIn: @paulmrandle Website: Sustainable Marketing Compass Resources mentioned: Books Sustainable Marketing: The Industry's Role in a Sustainable Future by Paul Randle and Alexis Eyre Competitive Sustainability: Driving Change with Value by Alexis Eyre and Paul Randle Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee Godstorm by Solitaire Townsend Capitalism in the Anthropocene by John Bellamy Foster Podcasts Essential Guide to Writing a Novel with James Thayer Examples of Sustainable Comms Tony's Open Chain - its bean-to-bar traceability  Paul Polman’s Net Positive work at Unilever The Bristol Pound How to build a circular economy for EV batteries The Relationship Aid — Specsavers' Valentine's Day hearing-aid campaign More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill the (Green) Tea with Paul Randle

  5. Jul 15

    What good sustainability comms looks like

    In this episode, Katie and Malin record from the middle of the UK's second heatwave of the summer, with climate change dominating their feeds. Rather than add to the noise, they set out to do the opposite: share the good news stories they've gathered, proof that sustainability comms are being done well in plenty of places. From the green economy overtaking healthcare in market value, to furniture passports, tap water with a conscience, and a climate campaign borrowing its swagger from an unlikely source, this is Katie and Malin's antidote to doom-scrolling. In this episode, we cover: The green economy is too big to call niche — new figures show it's now worth $10 trillion and would be the third-largest sector in the world if counted on its own, directly contradicting the assumption that sustainability is either expensive or marginal. Second-hand is coming for the built environment — a Vinted-style matchmaking platform for reclaimed construction materials, spotted at Futurebuild, points to specifiers getting the same resale infrastructure that's already transformed how people buy clothes. Message layering, done properly — Deadgood's furniture passports give specifiers a simple traffic-light headline with full substantiation available underneath for anyone who wants it, a textbook example of Katie's Credible Comms Framework in action. The tell that separates real commitment from performance — a Danish water brand that tells customers to choose tap water over its own product if they can, and why what's served at industry events says as much about a brand's values as its official comms. Craving company, not protecting an edge — from a chocolate brand publicly celebrating the rival that beat it to the top of an impact ranking, to a lighting company happy to see its idea copied, genuine progress looks like inviting others in rather than guarding a competitive advantage. Serious doesn't have to mean solemn — a climate campaign that borrowed the look of "Make America Great Again" to put science back in the spotlight shows that playfulness and rigour can sit in the same sentence. Resources Mentioned London Stock Exchange Group — Green Economy Mark Report Futurebuild — the annual built environment sustainability conference and showcase Madaster — the circular real estate and materials platform behind "Madaster Match," the Vinted-style marketplace for reclaimed construction products Deadgood — the furniture brand behind the furniture passports Design Conformity — the sustainability certification and back-end partner behind Deadgood's furniture passports Dekiln and Johnson Tiles — the Manchester-born non-fired tile technology partnering with Stoke-on-Trent's Johnson Tiles to bring low-carbon tiles to market Postevand — the Danish B Corp tap water brand in plant-based cartons We Don't Have Time, and its Make Science Great Again campaign — Ingmar Rentzhog's campaign putting science at the centre of climate communication Positive News — referenced as a source of good-news stories to counterbalance heavy news cycles Check out the photos we mentioned here More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    What good sustainability comms looks like

  6. Jul 1

    Spill The (Green) Tea with Ingmar Rentzhog

    This episode digs into why Ingmar thinks the comms and marketing industry is the most under-recruited force in the climate movement and what he wants them to do about it. In this episode, we cover: Why the current climate narrative is failing and what it would take to fix it — Ingmar argues there's a gap between the polite sustainability crowd and the radical protesters, and that gap is exactly where humour, provocation and smart communications could live Why greenwashing discourse may be doing more harm than good — the climate movement, Ingmar argues, has a habit of attacking the companies that are trying while ignoring those that do nothing. We make a case for "calling in" rather than calling out and for redirecting criticism towards the companies staying silent beneath the radar Why W Social exists and what's different about it — with AI flooding existing platforms with disinformation and US-owned social media becoming increasingly unreliable, Ingmar and his team are building a European alternative that requires verified human identity to join More from Ingmar We Don't Have Time — Ingmar's global media platform for climate action; the world's largest of its kind W Social — the new European social media platform for verified humans; public beta launched June 17th Make Science Great Again — We Don't Have Time's campaign reclaiming the red cap and the slogan for science Resources mentioned: National Emergency Briefing — the UK initiative that briefed over 1,200 MPs, business and civic leaders on climate and nature science in November 2025; community screenings are ongoing across the UK via The People's Emergency Briefing film Berkana Institute Two Loops Model — the systems change model Katie references to explain how connectors and bridge-builders make impact even when it can't be measured in gallons of water; developed by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze Patagonia Work in Progress Report 2025 More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill The (Green) Tea with Ingmar Rentzhog

  7. Jun 17

    Spill The (Green) Tea with Charlie Martin

    Charlie's work is driven by a mission to promote honest communication, responsible leadership, and greater accountability in business. In this episode, Katie and Malin dig into the mechanics of trust, the cost of what you don't say, and why sustainability comms might be the most powerful trust-building tool a business has, if only more of them were brave enough to use it. In this episode, we cover: Why signing up to an anti-greenwash commitment feels like putting a target on your back — in the current climate of greenhushing, organisations worry that making a public commitment to responsible comms only invites closer scrutiny; Charlie argues that's exactly the point, and that showing leadership requires a degree of courage that the best actors are already demonstrating. Trust as a strategic asset, not a soft value — research into the FTSE 350 suggests as much as 28% of brand value is linked to trust signals, and yet most organisations have no formal strategy for building or measuring it; Charlie makes the case that sustainability comms is one of the most effective levers available, yet it's routinely abandoned out of fear. Why the 'where we can improve' section has to come first — one of the core requirements of the Anti-Greenwash Charter is that organisations publish a Green Claims Policy that leads with what they're not doing yet; putting the gap-acknowledgement at the front. What truMRK actually does and what it's trying to become — the verification service analyses sustainability reports across three dimensions (claim substantiation, use of language, and context), produces a scored Transparency Report, and optionally awards a verified badge If trust is built by consistently doing what you say you'll do and evidencing it over time, then sustainability comms isn't a risk to be managed; it's the infrastructure through which trust gets built. More from Charlie: The Anti-Greenwash Charter truMRK Connect with Charlie on LinkedIn Resources mentioned: Asket Impact Report Strategic Sustainability by John Pabon The Responsible Edge Podcast The CMA Green Claims Code Naked Paper Patagonia More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill The (Green) Tea with Charlie Martin

  8. Jun 3

    Spill The (Green) Tea with Dean Connell

    One of seven original designers at WeWork who helped create the coworking product that transformed the industry, Dean went on to lead design teams across New York, London, Shanghai and Tokyo, delivering more than 3 million square feet of workspace. That front-row seat to commercial real estate's endemic waste problem sent him in a new direction: in 2024, he completed the Circular Economy Masterclass at the University of Exeter Business School and launched his 'Circular by Design' furniture collection — a direct challenge to the throwaway culture he'd watched up close for two decades. But it's not the furniture that brings Dean to Spill the Green Tea. It's something he said on a panel at the Surface Design Show earlier this year that stopped Katie in their tracks: environmentalism needs a new narrative. In this episode, they dig into exactly what that means and what it looks like in practice. In this episode, we cover: Why ignorance might be our most environmentally unfriendly habit and why acknowledging what we don't know is not a weakness but the starting point for genuine progress The difference between spreading opinions about sustainability and doing the actual work within your unique sphere of influence, and why focusing on where you can have the most disproportionate impact matters more than sweating every detail Why the current environmental narrative is failing — when the language of fighting, saving, and activism only resonates with a narrow slice of society, the conversation stays small; true progress means communicating in ways that work for everyone, not just those with the luxury of caring How Dean helped redirect $98 million worth of furniture away from landfill by building a business case, not an activist campaign, and speaking the language of the boardroom How Dean's furniture collection makes circularity invisible to the consumer but baked into every material and production decision None of us can save the planet single-handedly but if we each play our part within our sphere of influence, that adds up to something far greater than all of us spreading ourselves too thin. Resources mentioned: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder  Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy by Jonathan Chapman Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown AI News & Strategy Daily with Nate B. Jones Work in Progress by Dean Connell  The Ellen MacArthur Foundation Butterfly Diagram More from Dean Website: https://iamdc.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdeanconnell More from Katie Green, Not Greenwashed: Get the clarity and confidence you need to talk about your eco-efforts without the fear of greenwashing.Follow Katie on Instagram @katietreggiden.1More from Malin Greenwashing 101: Green or Greenwashed? Essential insights for sales and marketing professionals to make sense of sustainability and avoid falling into greenwashing's trap.Follow Malin on LinkedIn @malin-cunninghamPS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

    Spill The (Green) Tea with Dean Connell
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Making Design Circular is evolving. With a new name, a new remit, and a new co-host, this next chapter is all about one of the most urgent conversations in business today: how to talk about sustainability with honesty, nuance, and confidence. Katie Treggiden is joined by Malin Cunningham, founder of B Corp-certified B2B thought leadership consultancy Hattrick, to launch Spill the Green Tea – a podcast exploring how brands can communicate their environmental efforts without tipping into greenwashing… or disappearing into greenhushing. In a world saturated with content, polished claims, and call-outs, the real differentiator is authenticity. Together, Katie and Malin unpack how to share imperfect eco-efforts with clarity and credibility, so your sustainability story builds trust instead of backlash. Expect thoughtful conversations, practical insights, and honest reflections on what it really takes to speak up responsibly in today’s climate-aware marketplace. If you care about communicating sustainability in a way that stands up to scrutiny and still stands out, subscribe now and be the first to tune in to Spill the Green Tea PS Looking for Brackish? That has a new home at https://brackishbykatietreggiden.substack.com/t/podcast

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