How Cotopaxi is Tackling Climate Change and Poverty
Sustainability is at the very core of Cotopaxi. The company's legal designation allows it to prioritize people and planet, alongside profit.
In this episode of We Are Not Doomed, host Jonah Geil-Neufeld talks with Annie Agle, Vice President of Impact and Sustainability at Cotopaxi. Annie shares how the outdoor gear company is setting a new standard for sustainability, from their circular business model to their philanthropic efforts in global poverty alleviation. She dives into Cotopaxi’s unique approach to corporate responsibility and the environmental challenges facing the apparel industry, while offering insights into how businesses can be a force for good.
We also dive into Cotopaxi’s philanthropic efforts through the Cotopaxi Foundation, which tackles global poverty and health challenges by supporting impactful solutions like malaria prevention.
Annie offers a behind-the-scenes look at Cotopaxi’s annual Impact Report, where transparency and action go hand-in-hand. The conversation highlights the importance of collaboration, especially within the outdoor industry, and how companies like Cotopaxi, Patagonia, and REI are working together to reduce supply chain emissions. Annie also shares a personal story about how climate change has affected her health, showing that sustainability is not just about saving the planet but protecting human well-being.
Concepts Discussed:
Circular Business Model – A key concept discussed, focused on reducing environmental impact by reusing materials, promoting repairability, and minimizing waste.
Net Zero – Cotopaxi’s goal of becoming net zero by 2045, focusing on reducing carbon emissions.
Scope 3 Emissions – Emissions that come from supply chains and indirect activities, which make up the majority of Cotopaxi’s carbon footprint.
Clean Heat in Tier 2 – A focus of Cotopaxi's collaboration with the Outdoor Industry Association to reduce carbon emissions from fabric production (Tier 2 suppliers).
Public Benefit Corporation – Cotopaxi’s legal designation, allowing it to prioritize people and planet over profit.
PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) – Mentioned in the context of harmful chemicals found in fast fashion and their impacts on health.
Shein and Fast Fashion – Mentioned as part of the conversation on waste and unsustainable practices in the apparel industry.
Links:
Episode Transcript:
Annie Agle (00:00):
I am very grateful that I sit with a leadership team and a board team that understands that I care about showing receipts that the Impact Report is not a marketing piece. I care about really opening up our company to a pretty radical degree of scrutiny from the public.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:21):
Hello everyone, and welcome to We Are Not Doomed. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change. Every day We Are Not Doomed is produced by Puddle Creative. We're a full service podcast production agency. And I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer. I'm really excited for you guys to listen to this interview today with Annie Agle. She's the Vice President of Sustainability and Impact at Cotopaxi Cotopaxi. If you don't know who they are, is a certified B Corp. They're a sustainable outdoor brand and they have an amazing way that they give back that's built into the foundation of Cotopaxi. Annie has a wealth of insights into Cotopaxi story, what a circular business model means for the outdoor industry, strategies for reducing environmental impact on supply chains and how philanthropy is driving social change. I really hope you enjoy this interview with Annie. Give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. Without further ado, here's the interview. So Annie, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
Annie Agle (01:43):
Thanks for having me. It's a really big honor.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (01:46):
Yeah, we're so happy to have you with our, I'm very excited to chat about your role at cotopaxi, the impact report that you guys release every year, but has some great new stuff in it. But I wanted to start with your career journey. So you're the vice president of Impact and sustainability at cotopaxi. What drove you into this sustainability work? Was this something, how did you get interested in it? Just yeah, give us a little bit of the background.
Annie Agle (02:17):
Sure. I always appreciate being asked this question. I do think there are so many laudable people out in the professional world who want to get into this space, and the truth is that I'm 35, so when I first started my career, sustainability as a field really wasn't a field yet. So I always tell people, the honest answer is I sort of tripped and fell and aimed my fall in the direction of sustainability without knowing what that was called. I grew up in Park City, Utah and was really starting to see firsthand the impacts of climate change. We really saw a reduction in apex predators. We were starting to see mold on Aspen leaves that were starting to ruin our beautiful picturesque falls. We were starting to see shorter and shorter snow and ski seasons. Everything was getting too hot to rock climb during times I was used to being able to climb.
(03:09):
So I think there was a great passion and awareness for me having spent time in the outdoors and really wanting to do something about that if I could. I started in college with an internship that was actually looking at women's rights issues in the Middle East and trying to advance women's issues during the Afghanistan and Iraq interventions, which was a rude awakening to world affairs. I came out of the development sector after being in that space in a really involved way for four years, working on some really challenging issues. But one of the things that we were researching as an organization was the role that drought was playing in the ISIS kind of entrance onto the world stage. And one of the clever things that ISIS did was they grabbed all of the natural water aquifers in the Syrian basin where they were operating, and suddenly they were controlling the vast majority of the fresh water to really important regional hubs.
(04:14):
And I was starting to see how various terrorist organizations were actually starting to weaponize climate change to their advantage. And for me, it started to really hit home the importance of climate and really looking at this nexus between human affairs and climate issues. And I really started wanting to do something much more at the intersection of climate. And so I was able to work my way into an impact investing firm, really starting to look at climate and social issues as part of screening processes, working with nonprofits around social impact bonds, trying to combine big finance pieces with big social pieces. And then from there transitioned entirely into corporate consulting for sustainability and corporate social responsibility. And around six years ago, I got a call from this guy named Davis Smith who had founded this company Cotopaxi in Utah, and I'd been in New York for 10 years at that point, and I really wanted to be back home in Utah, having closer access to the mountains and to my family. And I was ready to be in-house. I was pretty world wary at that point. I'd had a bizarre and kind of quicksodic tour to get in-house to a sustainability role. Now that path I think is much more established and direct, but it was really lovely being in-house and working with leadership who actually cared was a breath of fresh air.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (05:40):
So yeah. Let's talk about Cotopaxi maybe just for the audience that maybe doesn't know too much about what Cotopaxi is as an outdoor apparel brand, give the 10,000 foot view.
Annie Agle (05:56):
Sure. So Cotopaxi was funded in 2014 as a vehicle to work on eradicating extreme poverty in accordance with the sustainable development goals, was founded by two remarkable individuals, Davis Smith and Stefan Jacob. And they really saw a niche in creating a sustainably designed outdoor products that were facilitating people getting into the outdoors and into adventure travel opportunities as a means of really experiencing the world and living a more meaningful life. And through those sales, which are tied to our foundation, really helping in a meaningful way to contribute to reducing economic wealth disparity, which is a huge issue. So that's what the company is about. And we're a public benefit corporation, which I think a legal corporation status for companies is actually really important. I think most people don't realize that most companies actually don't even have the moral leeway to prioritize people in planet above profit. That's just not in the bylaws of a regular C corporation or LLC. So I think it's really important that companies who are values-based be public benefit corporations so that they can truly have the legal leeway to prioritize the right things. And we're also a certified B corporation, which I think is probably the most meaningful holistic certification a business can undergo to ensure that it's having a net positive impact on lighter society.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (07:32):
Yeah, wow, that's so interesting. Especially the co-founders. They didn't go about, it wasn't like, let's start an apparel brand. It was like, let's start something that's going to impact the sustainable development goals and what avenues we have through that. So yeah, let's dive into all the different things around sustainability and this impact report. I guess just at the beginning maybe is do you want to talk about the 2023 impact reporting, sort of the highlights? And then I'm sure I'll have a bunch of follow-up questions.
Annie Agle (08:13):
Yeah, sure. I always like to start with just kind of explaining our approach to reporting because I think it's a very overwhelming topic and I think that a lot of today's consumers have a fair degree of mistrust around corporations and for good reasons, right? I'm not trying to talk today's consumers out of mistrust. At the same time, I think reporting has increasingly been treated as an end in and of itself as opposed to a means to an end. But I think that reporting needs to go beyond itself. It needs to be about identifying the next thing that you need to be working on. And so while I always love talking about the things that we're doing while in can share in a report, there's also so much we haven't gotten to yet. And if you're a legitimate sustainability officer, the list of things you haven't gotten to yet is the list that you ground your professional practice in and reporting for us.
(09:09):
For me, and I am very grateful that I sit with a leadership team and a board team that understands that I care about showing receipts that the impact report is not a marketing piece. Very few people are going to read through all 65 pages of that, and there is a PDF that we create in a newsletter that's more digestible. But man, I care about showing receipts. I care about really opening up our company to a pretty radical degree of scrutiny from the public. And so the report really looks at everything that we deem as material and we align with a global reporting initiative GRI, which uses this framework based on what's called double materiality, which this is one of these many terms in the sustainability sector that is far too jargony. But what it means is that when you choose what to report on, what you're deeming important considers not just what's material to the financial performance of your company, that's single materiality, but what's material to society and planet? So an example for the apparel space, our industry just inherently has complex supply chains that are exposed to human rights risks.
(10:24):
It's just part of doing this. And I could get into all of the reasons why that is and why it's actually so hard to combat and why moving things to America doesn't work and isn't actually more sustainable and things are really complicated around that. But it is a really unacceptable feature of our industry, and a lot of companies just choose not to report on that because they deem it not material, but of course it's material. Of course, that's something you need to be reporting on in our industry. And so that's kind of the ethos behind our reporting. And I'd say the big sections for us include governance, which we really talk about things like the diversity of our leadership, how our leadership team functions, how all of our executive bonuses are tied to impact measures, not just financial performance measures. So we get into that. We also get into people and inclusion efforts and really measuring that out. We talk about climate and our reduction strategy, provide a really big in depth view into all three scopes of our business. So things we have direct control over, the footprints associated with making our products and the energy usage and our supply chain, everything like that. And then we really get into our philanthropic overview from our foundation, which is it's kind of the heart and soul of our company is really the Cotopaxi Foundation. And then really also talking about supply chain issues. So it's pretty exhaustive. I nerd out on it.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (11:56):
That's great. The things that are in the future that you're working on that you haven't necessarily checked off the list yet are really the things that you care about. And one of them seem to be this circular business model. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Annie Agle (12:11):
Sure. I think circularity is one of those buzzwords that is on the tip of everyone's tongues, particularly in the sustainability space, but is still poorly defined and there is no one functional definition for circularity, but it's really the concept of how do we use less to make more, and how do we keep what we make in circulation longer? So it's all about reducing the inputs that go into something and really ensuring that what you make can be sold and resold and unmade and remade into something new. And so it's a huge opportunity area in terms of being able to address some of the social and environmental impacts of the apparel and fashion sector, which is a pretty significant contribution to over all greenhouse gas, but particularly is one of the most water intensive industries in the world, and also is responsible for some of the largest volumes of non-food waste in terms of landfill. So there's a lot of ruin this practices and overproduction, and we're starting to see the rise of instant fashion. So companies like Sheen are putting out more products in 10 days than even h and m does in a year, which is bonkers to think about
(13:38):
And only last two wash cycles before they start to disintegrate on your body quite literally. So I think that there's a lot of issues with the apparel sector, and circularity presents this ideal of saying, Hey, we need to do this way differently than we've been doing this in our sector. And so what it really means at Cotopaxi is really thinking about our entire business model and really moving away from sale of new items to using waste whenever possible to design our products using dead stock instead of virgin inputs, looking at sustainable materials, everything from recycled fibers, but also looking at regenerative fibers, cradle to cradle fibers, really looking at innovative ways of moving in a direction with our materials and our preferred materials list. And then also really radically leading into our science-based target reductions and thinking about how circularity pays into that. And then we have a pretty robust repairs program we're always working on. I mean, I will say the outdoor industry, which I would include our company in designs for durability. Obviously if you're using one of our travel packs, one of our outdoor gear items, it's meant to hold up under hard conditions under a lot of wear and tear, which I think is a good general requirement for all products to have,
(15:06):
Is to think about that durability and repairability piece. Obviously a lot of the fast fashion companies and the hyper fast fashion companies are thinking about textile recycling, but the efficacy of some of that and the environmental intensity of some of that really hasn't been worked out yet. And so we're really leaning into repair and commerce. So we also have a pretty robust commerce program where people can trade in coax gear, resell it, and then we offer that as an option to customers in lieu of a purchase of a new product. And we're really working on trying to replace sales of new items with commerce, increasing that percentage over time so that not only are we just selling used things, we're really starting to sell less new things. And then we have our first upcycled collection made from existing Cotopaxi products coming up.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (16:01):
Yeah, that's so cool. I feel like it also, you said that the circular business model is a buzzword right now. There's also a lot going on right now in the computer space, like laptop space, about right to repair. And I feel like this kind of ties into that too, of how can we make sure that companies are making things that have the ability to either repair them with the company or someone else, but also upcycle or resell them. So that's really cool.
Annie Agle (16:31):
Yeah, I mean, I love movements like that, and I think it speaks volumes to today's customer citizen that there are movements like that which are really helpful for companies like ours. Frankly, Cotopaxi is doing battle every day with some of these sharks like tamu and Sheen, and it can be hard to move in that direction from a business standpoint in today's economy where social advertising is pretty expensive, and if you're trying to do all this responsibly as a company, it can be challenging. It's definitely challenging, and we really want to be the case study that shows that it's financially viable as well. So customers putting pressure on corporations across different avenues I think is incredibly important and it's validating for companies like us.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (17:20):
Yeah. Another thing I wanted to ask you about, which is also very buzzworthy net zero. So one of your goals is becoming net zero by 2045. So what are the different ways that you're kind of charging towards that goal?
Annie Agle (17:38):
Yeah, I'd say we're doing a few things. We already have a carbon intensity score of less than 1%. Your carbon intensity score is your carbon footprint divided by your revenue. So basically it's the number of emissions that you produce for dollar of revenue. And so a huge goal of mine throughout the growth of cotopaxi, because we have been in hypergrowth since I've been here, is to maintain that percentage. So a huge part of that is what's called avoided emissions, which there's a new framework for that that we're investing in. And I call that out just because it is a newer framework, but there is a framework for that. And I do think it's important for companies who are in the newer phase, chances are you're going to be thinking about avoided emissions, hopefully not just reductions, because if you're growing, you don't just want your emissions to go up and then to go down.
(18:29):
You really want to keep them as low as possible so that you can decouple as effectively as you can through your growth. And then in terms of the reductions, because of course every company, like every person has a footprint associated with them, there are a few big bucket items that we're working on in terms of reductions. The biggest one for us, and many others, lie in scope three, not uncommon for the apparel industry, 97% of our carbon footprint and emissions come from Scope three. So things that are relating to things like shipping supply chain, the manufacturing of our products, and the things that go into our products and the energy use of our supply chain partners. And so a huge big bucket item that we're working on in collaboration. And I think that collaboration is absolutely crucial to realizing reductions. We will never get to net zero as a society if companies only work within their four walls.
(19:29):
It's just not going to happen for so many reasons. It's not effective for climate and it's not effective on bottom lines. And so we work really actively through the Outdoor Industry Association, which I think is the best industry association ever. I wish all business associations were as functional and as ethically minded as they are, but they have two collaborations that we're very much a member of and are trying to play a leadership role in along with other companies like Patagonia and RAI. But one is around establishing clean heat in tier two. So actually the biggest source of our emissions when you get really, really zoomed in is actually in tier two. So for some apparel company, the biggest emissions come from raw materials. So growing the cotton, harvesting the cotton, for us, it's really in the fabric production space. If you're in the outdoor space, actually, unfortunately, you need to work with synthetic based materials, which are plastics based, but there are ways of actually really reducing the carbon intensity and water intensity and chemical intensity of those.
(20:38):
And so that's a huge effort of ours and really working with our shared fabric providers to help them transition to clean heat processes to really reduce their water inputs. And so that's one big collaboration we're working on with a variety of different outdoor brands that I'm really excited to see the impacts of that in the next two to three years. That's definitely going to be a massive reducer for us. The other thing we're working on across our industry and across our cut, so factories in tier one is financing them along with a group of other outdoor brands to assist them financially and in terms of scientific research to transition to meaningful renewables supported by battery. So that's a huge one. We've taken our second largest tier one supplier from standard coal to photovoltaic that realized pretty massive reductions for us and massive reductions for that supplier. I feel really strongly about it, both in terms of efficacy from a reduction standpoint, but also from a climate justice standpoint. I think it's important that western brands, frankly pay up to help reduce the impacts that they're creating due to demand.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (21:55):
Wow. Yeah, there's so many things in that, but I think one of them that is just really great that you mentioned is the industry association. Just that the outdoor industry, of course, cares about this so much, partially because you are dependent on us having a nice clean world to live in, for people to go out hiking and adventuring and things like that. So it's also an existential threat in terms of people need that world in order for you to have a backpack and a coat to go out there and do things in. Yeah. I've talked to a couple guests about just how climate change has affected your life today. Do you feel like you have a story there or?
Annie Agle (22:52):
I think the big one, for me that's an untapped area of understanding is understanding the risk to human health from climate change. I actually, at 25 was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that's pretty significant. It makes life pretty challenging for me in a lot of ways. And it's an environmental genetic shift that almost certainly happened from too much heat exposure
(23:19):
And things like finding a cube sized, a three by three cube sized bit of plastic throughout human bodies and the impacts of that having it in our bloodstream, they're finding in baby's bloodstreams fetus bloodstreams now and recently a South Korea and scientific research agency tested sheen products for harmful chemicals, and they found upwards of 250 times what they were supposed to find in terms of PFAS, which are these horrible endocrine disrupting chemicals. So they in fact impact fertility, they can relate to cancer, they can mess up childhood development, all kinds of things they found lead in a children's necklace. I mean, just these kinds of things that we don't even know what's going into many of the products we're wearing. And for me and others, I guarantee you have been negatively impact and are being negatively impact from a health standpoint by sustainability related topics. And so I think my thing is not just talking about climate, but really trying to get people in a non-partisan way to understand the sustainability, that core definition of it, which is actually protecting the ability of today's generations to meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
(24:49):
In no way in that definition for sustainability is even the word environment mentioned. It's not even there.
(24:55):
It's really about intergenerational prosperity for our species and having a healthy degree of self-interest, but also being able to relate this back to you, to your family health and understanding that this is a critical body of work. And for anyone wanting to get into this space to my advice is whatever your area of vertical is, don't try to shift from that to sustainability, be in your role. And even if your role right now is as a citizen of our country, just think about that. Think about your everyday choices as a consumer and thinking about the impacts of your purchases on yourself from a sustainability standpoint. I'm not even asking you to think about the environment. I'm asking you to look after yourself and to think about sustainability as something that is actually crucial for your long-term prosperity and health. So I think that that's something that sits with me and that I really try to convey to folks, but also in a more self-interested way beyond just the environment. I think about a lot, I think about human health and the impacts of sustainability topics on human health all the time.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (26:03):
Thank you for sharing that personal story too, because tying it back to family health is, you're right, especially in a country like ours that's so politically divided, and even the word climate change is like, you can't say that in some circles, but tying it back to something like family health and personal health is a great way to go.
Annie Agle (26:26):
And I mean, I think it's an opportunity area. I mean, I think everyone is so quick to get on their soap box and come to this debate with a huge degree of self-righteousness. But I think really stepping back and understanding that America, any other country, has been a lot of traumatic events. It's been a really rough couple of decades for everybody. And frankly, the way the climate change debate was foisted on the public. There was a lot of inaccuracies, a lot of kind of loose, vague predictions were made that were not grounded in science. A lot of the data sets that are being used in America are still very incomplete to the ones that European or international scientists are using. There's a few exceptions, and Stanford and Google are getting there, but there's a lot of issues with how the science was interpreted here and how it was delivered to the public.
(27:20):
And so actually having a degree of compassion for folks who are like, I don't believe in this, and relating it back and being like, well, you can check pollution numbers. That's really important for human health, just like you're saying with the percentage of carcinogens in the air, we're breathing pretty much all over our country in the world and the impacts on human health that it's an encouragement that I always give to people in the sustainability space is like when they're coming up against friction, don't respond with self-righteousness or with a sense that better tap into issues that mean something to everybody. And chances are you can talk about those things and try to find ways of saying sustainability is more than just saving polar bears. I care about the polar bears, and I think everyone should care about the polar bears, apex. Predators are important, but maybe shift the conversation to try to meet people with where they're at, And human health or health and the health of the family is such a grounding topic. To start this conversation around sustainability,
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (28:27):
One thing that I wanted to maybe tease out was the foundation and the giving that you all do, as you said kind of the heart and soul of the company and the report. Are there any stories from that that maybe we could highlight? I know you do a lot of, it looks like you do a lot of work, not just in the US, but in Ecuador, specifically in South America.
Annie Agle (28:52):
Yeah. I'd say rather than talking about individual stories, I'm like the worst in marketing, which I know people want the human stories, but the one I'm going to give is broadly around the foundation. I think that corporate social responsibility and corporate philanthropy are really seen as window dressings, and I get that. I think that corporations first and foremost need to think about taking responsibility for the negative impacts that they're having on society, which for me is sustainability. But I do think that meaningful corporate philanthropy is critical for the development and achievement of the sustainable goals. And I'd say our approach to the foundation is really leveraging modern economics and scientific theories to make very effective and vetted investments into organizations that have proven methodologies for solving things. So I always just try to send the message of trust-based, long-term philanthropy based on good methodology, and I guarantee you will see the impacts of that. And I think too, I mean, one of the bets that we've placed is you wouldn't think malaria prevention as a poverty prevention mechanism, but malaria is one of the leading causes of family bankruptcy. It's one of the leading causes of misd education. It's a massive issue. It's really hard and expensive to treat, and it's extremely easy to contract, but it's also extremely easy to prevent.
(30:22):
And so for five to $10, you can invest in an insecticide treated bed net, which prevents malaria extremely effectively, and that is shown to be one of the most effective poverty avoiding measures you can take. And so we wouldn't have known that without looking at studies. It doesn't seem like an intuitive investment to make as a corporation looking at poverty, you're like, well, bed nets, that's a health thing. That's not a poverty thing. But really being able to reference studies like that allows you to place really effective bets. And we know we've probably saved families tens of millions of dollars by helping them prevent malaria. It's a really interesting connection with that, and that's kind of an example.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (31:10):
Oh, that's so cool. When you get out of the bed in the morning, what makes you feel hopeful for the future? Obviously, there are a lot of things that we need to do as a society to move forward, but yeah, what makes you stay optimistic?
Annie Agle (31:28):
My team, the character of the people I get to work with at Cotopaxi helps me bring my whole heart to work every day. And if I do go to bed with a bruised heart at night man, it's inflated by the morning because the people I get to work with, it's hard to prioritize things bigger than yourself every day. Sometimes you just have to dig in and be with yourself and where you're at. But the people I work with consider sustainability every bit as much as I do, and I think if I'm feeling a little bit of despair, I only just have to look to Charlie who runs our foundation to my incredible manager, grace, to pick up on the enthusiasm and just constant determination to move the needle, and I'd never had that before coming to Cotopaxi. The extent to which our team is unified by ethics and wanting to do good is truly incredible.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:27):
Wow.
Annie Agle (32:27):
So yeah, that's what helped my cup.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:29):
That's awesome. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for all the work that you do, and that Kodak, he does, but for the time, thanks so much, Annie.
Annie Agle (32:41):
Thank you for having me. This was a great conversation. I really appreciate it.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:48):
Thanks to Annie gel for being on the podcast with us and talking about Cotopaxi. If you want to learn more about Cotopaxi, you can go to cotopaxi.com. That's C-O-T-O-P-A-X I.com. They also publish their 2023 impact report there, and I'm sure they'll be posting the 2024 impact report there as well when it's ready. But it's a great way to look into their efforts in detail. If you want to find a transcript from this episode, show notes, links head over to We Are Not doomed.com. You can find us and give us a follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app that you like to use. Until next time, thank you so much for listening. Have a great week.