Green Champions

Adam Morris & Dominique Hadad

5.0 (9)
SOCIETY & CULTURE
UPDATED WEEKLY

Conversations with real people sharing sustainability success stories. Green Champions is hosted by Dominique Hadad and Adam Morris. With new episodes released every Tuesday, Green Champions demystifies sustainability, addresses climate anxiety, and makes progress feel accessible.

2D AGO

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 passion for sustainability was sparked by an unlikely source - a college job collecting recycling by bicycle. This hands-on experience ignited his fascination with waste management, leading him to pursue environmental studies. Joseph's career took him from the Ohio EPA, where he developed an innovative business-to-business recycling platform, to the Netherlands, where he joined the open-source Precious Plastic community. There, he gained invaluable insights into small-scale plastic recycling and fostering a grassroots movement. His journey continued in Portugal, training communities worldwide to implement Precious Plastics' recycling technology. Driven by a desire to tackle the plastic crisis head-on, Joseph founded Marble Plastics, creating beautiful, durable goods from 100% recycled plastic sheets. Discover how this green champion transformed his passion into a mission to revolutionize plastic recycling. Episode in a glance - The plastic waste issue and its impact on the environment - Joseph's journey into plastics - Connecting businesses for waste recycling and reuse - The path to developing community at Precious Plastic - How different polymers and their impact on recycling - Marble Plastics and their sustainability work About Joseph Klatt Joseph Klatt is the founder of Marble Plastics, a company pioneering the creation of beautiful, durable products from 100% recycled plastic sheets. His passion for sustainability was ignited by a college job collecting recycling by bicycle, which led him to study environmental management. After developing a business-to-business recycling platform at the Ohio EPA, Joseph joined the open-source Precious Plastics community in the Netherlands, where he gained expertise in small-scale plastic recycling and fostering mission-driven movements. He then transitioned to Portugal, training communities worldwide to implement Precious Plastics' recycling technology. Driven by a desire to revolutionize plastic recycling and promote circularity, Joseph founded Marble Plastics to transform plastic waste into stunning furniture, countertops, and wall coverings, diverting materials from landfills while creating beautiful, eco-friendly products. Connect with Joseph Klatt, Precious Plastic, and Marble Plastics Precious Plastic → https://www.preciousplastic.com/ Marble Plastics → https://marbleplastics.com/ Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/marbleplastics/ Send us a message!

22 min
MAY 5

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 agricultural policy and family farms, and what it really takes to push for change in Washington. Angela is the sixth generation on her family's farm up in northwest Ohio. She's really seen firsthand how hard farmers work, how little control they often have over their success, and how corporate consolidation has quietly reshaped the food system over the last forty years. That's the story she carries with her into every letter to Congress, every rally, every petition. It's also what makes her so clear-eyed about the stakes: the average American farmer is around 60 years old, and unless something shifts, a lot of those farms, and a lot of those communities, won't make it to the next generation. Angela walks us through what Farm Action actually does day to day, from tracking shareholder reports and USDA data to running a consolidation data hub that maps every sector of agriculture. She unpacks why so many farmers are pushed into growing commodity crops like corn and soybeans, how contract growers raising chickens for companies like Tyson can be blackballed for simply speaking out, and the years-long fight to restore truth to the "Product of USA" label so consumers finally know where their beef is actually from. And she leaves us with something we can all do about it, whether that's signing up for a newsletter, calling your member of Congress, or voting with your food dollars at the farmers market down the street. Episode in a glance 00:10 Meet Angela Huffman & Farm Action01:29 Inside Farm Action's Watchdog Research07:38 What It's Really Like to Be a Farmer Today12:44 Tyson, Contracts & Retaliation Against Farmers15:23 The Product of USA Labeling Win20:35 How You Can Help Fix the Food System About Angela Huffman Angela Huffman is the co-founder and president of Farm Action, a national advocacy organization fighting corporate consolidation across the U.S. food and agriculture system. A sixth-generation Ohio farmer with a background in English and public policy from Ohio State, Angela has spent more than 15 years at the intersection of farming, communications, and federal policy, translating on-the-ground realities into pressure that moves lawmakers. Connect with Angela Huffman and her work with Farm Action Angela on LinkedIn → Angela Huffman Farm Action → farmaction.us Send us a message!

24 min
APR 28

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 what ends up on America's dinner plates, and what it will take to shift that power back toward farmers, workers, and consumers. Two hundred years ago, Angela's family put down roots on a patch of land in northwest Ohio. Six generations later, she's still there, raising Katahdin sheep between trips to Washington, D.C., where she splits her time lobbying for the very kind of family farm she grew up visiting. Her path wasn't a straight line. It wound through a year teaching English in Japan, where a convenience-store sandwich quietly exposed how broken American food had become. It passed through a volunteer stint gathering signatures for an Ohio animal welfare ballot measure, and a slow-dawning realization that the farmers she loved were getting squeezed, not by the weather, but by the market itself. That realization became Farm Action. With co-founder Joe, Angela built an organization that treats research as the foundation and communication as the lever. The work starts by uncovering how corporate power distorts the food system, then translating it into language the public and policymakers can actually act on. When egg prices spiked during the avian flu, her team dug in and showed that the largest producers had zero outbreaks yet were posting record profits. The narrative shifted. Prices came down. Episode in a glance 1:32 Meet Angela Huffman, sixth-generation Ohio farmer with roots 200 years deep2:05 Life on the farm raising Katahdin sheep while balancing policy work3:36 From farm kid to policy advocate: realizing farmers needed a stronger voice4:47 Discovering a different food system in Japan17:03 Co-founding Farm Action: taking on corporate consolidation in agriculture19:14 Volunteering on the 2010 Ohio farm animal welfare ballot About Angela Huffman Angela Huffman is the co-founder and president of Farm Action, a national advocacy organization fighting corporate consolidation across the U.S. food and agriculture system. A sixth-generation Ohio farmer with a background in English and public policy from Ohio State, Angela has spent more than 15 years at the intersection of farming, communications, and federal policy, translating on-the-ground realities into pressure that moves lawmakers. Connect with Angela Huffman and her work with Farm Action Angela on LinkedIn → Angela Huffman Farm Action → farmaction.us Send us a message!

25 min
APR 21

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 the problem. That is exactly what Andrew Shakman in Leanpath was built to change. Andrew's reframe for kitchens is simple and a little uncomfortable: they are factories. High volume, high complexity, constantly changing menus, and almost none of the process improvement thinking that transformed manufacturing over the last century. No Six Sigma. No statistical process control. Just skilled people running on experience and a deep, quiet anxiety about running out of food. That anxiety, Andrew explains, is where most waste actually comes from. Not negligence, not carelessness, but a system designed to use waste as a buffer against risk. Once you see it that way, the problem starts to look solvable. Leanpath's approach is to make the invisible visible. A camera above a bin, a scale underneath it, and suddenly a kitchen knows not just that food is being wasted, but what, how much, and why. Andrew walks through twenty years of that evolution, from rudimentary touchscreens and USB sticks in 2004 to AI-powered tracking today. He also makes a case that doesn't get made often enough: that frontline kitchen workers are among the most underestimated climate actors in the world. They already understand the value of food. What Leanpath gives them is the data to act on it, and the evidence that their daily choices add up to something impactful. Episode in a glance 00:36 Why a Third of All Food Never Gets Eaten 02:09 The Management Science Kitchens Are Missing 04:51 What Leanpath Actually Does Inside a Kitchen 11:32 Touchless Tracking Without Thoughtless Wasting 17:48 Why There Are No Bad Actors in Food Waste About Andrew Shakman Andrew Shakman is the co-founder and CEO of Leanpath, the global leader in food waste prevention technology for foodservice operations. With a background spanning theater, film producing, and early internet digital marketing, Andrew brings a distinctly human-centered lens to one of the most consequential environmental challenges of our time. Under his leadership, Leanpath has grown into an enterprise platform used in over 50 countries, helping some of the world's largest food service and hospitality organizations measure, understand, and dramatically reduce the food they waste. Connect with Andrew Shakman and his work Andrew Shakman on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-shakman-3861/Leanpath → leanpath.comSend us a message!

28 min
APR 14

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 Cap'n Crunch on the early internet. Andrew Shakman did not set out to work in sustainability. He set out to tell stories that mattered. What drew him, from early childhood through film school and into his career, was a hunger for meaning and a fascination with how things work. His father was a preventive medicine pioneer writing about food and health in the 1970s, long before the medical world caught up. It took Andrew ten years of running Leanpath to realize he had followed the same instinct into a different field. That kind of slow, earned self-awareness runs all through his story. What makes Andrew's background so interesting is how little of it looks deliberate from the outside. Theater in college. An MFA in film producing. One of the first digital marketing agencies on the early internet, where he happened to land food and beverage clients. Each chapter looks like a detour until Andrew connects the dots himself, and suddenly the whole thing makes sense. By the time he stumbled into food waste, he had already spent years learning how to build things, how to bring people along, and how to make a complex problem feel urgent to someone who has never thought about it before. He calls it baking a four-layer cake: get people to care about food waste, convince them prevention beats composting, show them measurement is the path to prevention, then make the case for automation. Most conversations never made it past the first layer. It turned out those were exactly the skills that problem needed. Episode at a Glance 00:54 Why Storytelling Is the Most Powerful Tool for Change 03:27 The "Prevention" seed: Growing up in a mission-driven home 05:02 From Film School to the Early Internet 07:17 How Food Brands Changed Everything 12:53 The Four-Layer Cake of Food Waste Analogy 19:18 Leadership lessons learned from training "problem horses" About Andrew Shakman Andrew Shakman is the co-founder and CEO of Leanpath, the global leader in food waste prevention technology for foodservice operations. With a background spanning theater, film producing, and early internet digital marketing, Andrew brings a distinctly human-centered lens to one of the most consequential environmental challenges of our time. Under his leadership, Leanpath has grown into an enterprise platform used in over 50 countries, helping some of the world's largest food service and hospitality organizations measure, understand, and dramatically reduce the food they waste. Connect with Andrew Shakman and his work Andrew Shakman on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-shakman-3861/Leanpath → leanpath.comSend us a message!

23 min
APR 8

Nancy Zavada - Designing Events That Leave an Impression, Not a Footprint

Nancy Zavada returns for part two of her Green Champions conversation, this time pulling back the curtain on the actual work behind sustainable events. As president of MeetGreen, Nancy has saved clients $7.8 million in sustainability-driven decisions and cut $2.5 million in aisle carpet alone from a single event last year. This episode is a masterclass in making the business case for doing things better. On a cross-country flight, she ordered tea in economy and got a styrofoam cup, a plastic stir stick, and a sugar packet. On the way back, upgraded to first class, the same tea arrived in a china cup with a silver spoon and a sugar cube. That airline wasn't trying to be sustainable. They were trying to be elegant. Nancy's point is that we've somehow convinced ourselves that sustainability means sacrifice, when the most refined, considered experiences have always been the most efficient. The practical strategies Nancy shares in this episode are the kind that stick. The Clean Plate Club, which turns food waste reduction into a community game at multi-day conferences. The stone-in-a-jar voting system that replaced conference swag with charitable giving. The carbon uncalculator MeetGreen built during COVID to show clients exactly how much emissions they avoided by going virtual. And the emerging Hub and Spoke event model that she believes is the next major shift in how organizations gather. Each idea is grounded in the same philosophy: reduce first, always. Then measure, share the data, and let the numbers do the talking. Episode in a glance 02:08 The internal focus group: Balancing logistics with sustainability 04:54 Rebranding Green: Why first class is the ultimate sustainability model 06:46 The Clean Plate Club: Gamifying food waste at scale 14:00 The $7.8M Business Case: Saving money through intentional reduction 23:44 The Hub and Spoke: Why the future of gathering is regional About Nancy Zavada Nancy Zavada is the Founder and President of MeetGreen, a firm dedicated to providing sustainable event management and consulting for some of the world's most recognizable brands. With over three decades of experience, Nancy is a recognized leader in the industry, helping organizations reduce their environmental footprint while maintaining high-quality attendee experiences. She is an Oregon native, a lifelong environmentalist, and a passionate mentor to the next generation of green event professionals. Connect with Nancy Zavada and her work Email → nancy@meetgreen.comLinkedIn → Nancy ZavadaCompany Website → MeetGreenSend us a message!

25 min
MAR 31

Nancy Zavada - The Accidental Founder Who Changed the Events Industry

Nancy Zavada is the founder and president of MeetGreen, a sustainable event agency that has spent over 30 years helping organizations design and deliver events that are both environmentally responsible and genuinely exceptional. Nancy grew up on the Oregon Coast, where recycling wasn't a trend but a way of life. She never set out to start a company. She was simply an event planner who noticed something she couldn't unsee: a single five-day conference for 2,500 people would generate 31,000 styrofoam cups destined straight for the landfill. That moment didn't just bother her. It moved her. She made one different ordering decision, told everyone about it, and never looked back. That's the kind of founder Nancy is. Not the type chasing product market fit, but the type whose values simply outgrew the room she was in. What followed was 32 years of building MeetGreen into a firm that serves clients from 300-person workshops to 60,000-person global conferences across Singapore, Brazil, Denmark, and beyond. Nancy shares the practical wisdom behind her approach: find the champion in every room, lead with education, and always make the business case. She also offers a beautifully simple piece of advice for young sustainability professionals: don't try to take on the world. Pick one thing. Get really good at it. Then pick the next one. Episode in a glance 00:10 Meet the Woman Who's Been Greening Events Since Before It Was a Thing 03:16 31,000 Styrofoam Cups in One Week: The Moment That Started It All 06:03 Before It Was Called Sustainability: Pioneering Green Meetings in 1994 08:57 Still an Accidental Founder After 32 Years: The MeetGreen Origin Story 13:13 How COVID Forced the Events Industry to Finally Catch Up 16:15 Pick One Thing, Get Really Good at It, Then Pick the Next One About Nancy Zavada Nancy Zavada is the Founder and President of MeetGreen, a firm dedicated to providing sustainable event management and consulting for some of the world's most recognizable brands. With over three decades of experience, Nancy is a recognized leader in the industry, helping organizations reduce their environmental footprint while maintaining high-quality attendee experiences. She is an Oregon native, a lifelong environmentalist, and a passionate mentor to the next generation of green event professionals. Connect with Nancy Zavada and her work Email → nancy@meetgreen.comLinkedIn → Nancy ZavadaCompany Website → MeetGreenSend us a message!

22 min
MAR 24

Karimah Hudda - What if Trade was Actually Fair?

Karimah Hudda, founder of Illumine Earth, returns for part two of her conversation with Dominique and Christy. After exploring her roots, Karimah dives into her "champion story." From the mountains of Indonesia to the boardrooms of global giants, she shares the tactical moves and mindset shifts required to rebalance power in global supply chains and lead with purpose. Karimah recounts a powerful story from Aceh, Indonesia, where a simple shift in strategic planning allowed 100 farmers to fundamentally change their relationship with exporters. It’s a vivid reminder that real impact isn’t about doing the work for people, it’s about providing the tools for them to unleash their own potential. Karimah challenges the idea that systems change has to be slow and complicated, offering a refreshing mantra for anyone trying to make a difference: simplify, believe in people, and stay messy. The conversation also tackles the corporate "survival guide" for sustainability leaders. Karimah breaks down her signature framework for driving change without burning out. She explains why you must learn the "language of the business" (because the business won't learn yours) and how to balance personal, enterprise, and industry leadership. Episode in a glance 04:56 From guerrilla warriors to expert coffee negotiators 08:28 Karimah's mantra: Simplify, believe in people, and stay messy 16:47 The challenge of passing the torch in long-term work 19:51 The 3 Pillars: Personal, Enterprise, and Industry leadership 22:38 Unlearning burnout: Why sustainability leaders must "flourish" About Karimah Hudda Karimah Hudda is the founder of Illumine Earth, a consultancy focused on helping leaders navigate complexity and drive systems change. With over 20 years of experience, she has led sustainability initiatives for global brands, non-profits, and community-based organizations. Karimah is a passionate advocate for equity and has lived, worked, and traveled in nearly 50 countries, bringing a truly global perspective to the fight for a more sustainable and just world. Connect with Karimah Hudda and her work Website → illumine.earth LinkedIn → Karimah Hudda Send us a message!

21 min

5

out of 5

9 Ratings

Conversations with real people sharing sustainability success stories. Green Champions is hosted by Dominique Hadad and Adam Morris. With new episodes released every Tuesday, Green Champions demystifies sustainability, addresses climate anxiety, and makes progress feel accessible.

Creator

Adam Morris & Dominique Hadad
Years Active

2024 - 2026
Episodes

113
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2026 Green Champions
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