Packaging Made Sustainable & Carbon Neutral

Angie Ringler, founder, mentor, author, eco-warrior, and sustainable packaging expert. Her company is a carbon neutral business, using only plant-based ingredients, and is certified cruelty-free. Her business runs a plastic-free household cleaning and personal care products at WasteFreeProducts.com. Learn from her stories and experiences to help your business move to a more sustainable future. It's time.
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line |Episode 20 |Angie Ringler|
[Upbeat theme music plays]

Female Voice Over
[00:02] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. Here is your host, Taylor Martin.

Taylor Martin
[00:17] Welcome, everybody. I can’t wait to talk about this because I’ve been trying to find someone to talk on this topic, and that is sustainable packaging. A lot of small to medium-sized businesses don’t have the ability to just do what the big guys do and be able to manhandle suppliers and things of that nature, and get really good pricing. What do you do when you have a small to medium-sized business? I have found somebody that’s going to be able to do that. Angie, can you tell our listeners about you, your background, and how you got to be doing what you’re doing now, and how you help other small to medium-sized businesses package their stuff up in sustainable manners?

Angie Ringler
[00:53] Yes. Happy to share, Taylor. Thanks for having me on today. The journey has not been easy. I will start by saying when I first started, I was doing everything very traditionally. I do household cleaning and body products, and I only knew what to do like the big dogs did. When I first started doing laundry soap, and hand soap, and cleaning, and shampoos, and things, they were all liquid products packaged just like you see when you go to the cleaning aisle at the store, lots of plastic sprayers, plastic bottles. That’s all I knew.\

Fast forward about five years or so, I started asking myself, where are all the plastic bottles going? That’s when I really hit that fork in the road for myself because it didn’t feel an alignment with who I was trying to live every day. I am an eco girl, a hippie at heart, at home, and throwing all that wasteful plastic out into the world didn’t really align with me. I spent a few years trying to figure out, could I turn liquid products into something that didn’t have to be sold in a bottle or plastic? I’m happy to say that I did accomplish that, even though we’re not here really to talk about my accomplishments in changing my formulas into a paste form.

What we’re here to talk about is how I transitioned the packaging from plastic to cardboard that could easily be not only recycled, but it could be easily composted in somebody’s backyard. That is really important because we all don’t have access to compost facilities, which a lot of times when – you might get like a food packaging or refill package that it’ll say compostable on it, but that fine print will tell you, you need to take this to a composting facility. They just don’t have enough of those around the United States.

I was fortunate enough to make that switch in my formula to make it – so the people who are listening, this little bar that I’m holding in my hand is no bigger than a deck of playing cards. That bar can be dissolved to make one gallon of liquid hand soap. Therefore, you as a consumer can just keep refilling the pumpers, and the foamers, and all those dispensers that you already own at home that are intended to be reused hundreds of times. What have we been taught by these bigger companies is that when the soap is empty, you throw the whole container away, you go to the store, and you buy another container filled with just maybe six to eight ounces of hand soap.
By me actually switching my formula, I was able to reduce it down to a small cardboard box. That really changed the way that I could ship, and also allowed the consumer to get rid of the waste after they’re done using the product. Now, not everybody has that ability to get away from plastic all at once, but if you can start to look at the way that you’re shipping things and learning to find spaces that might be inspiration for you. For instance, when I first started doing this, when I realized I could ship my products in a small cardboard box and a small cardboard packaging, I then went out and bought cardboard boxes to ship those orders in. It took me a while to realize that that too was overkill. If you think about how sturdy a bar of soap is, why am I shipping it in a cardboard box? It can handle being thrown around by UPS. It can handle being thrown around by shippers.

Look around and be inspired by what your product is actually capable of doing and not just do what the industry has been showing us. Now, I’m happy to say that what I do is we take our bars, which are in that very small thin paper box, and I ship it into a paper envelope. We’ve got these padded paper envelopes that are again much easier to be recycled. They require a lesser of a footprint to make them, and again can be easily compostable.

Most people are not reusing a cardboard box that comes to their home. If they’re thinking outside the box and trying to utilize that box that came from a big box store or another company that maybe had a multitude of products in it, those things can be used in your garden. Not everybody’s got a yard to put them in. For instance, when we get an abundance of boxes that we cannot reuse as a shipping box in our business, then those boxes we end up using as ground cover in our yard to keep the weed control down.

Sometimes you have to think beyond what’s already happening and thinking of ways to use them. From a business owner perspective, reusing those things has increased my bottom line because I am now not buying brand-new cardboard boxes. If you think about how many times you’ve probably seen a FedEx truck, a UPS truck, an Amazon truck drive through your neighborhood, there’s a good chance your neighbors have a ton of cardboard boxes they don’t know what to do with either, and they are just breaking them down, probably ending up in their recycling bin, which most likely are not getting recycled. I can tell you from personal experience, my city, I’m here in Central Florida, my city, I just found out, lost their recycling contract. I don’t know the details behind it, but what I can tell you is there’s no more recycling happening in my community.

Even though us as residents are throwing all that stuff into a recycling bin, different from our trash bin, and rolling both those bins to the road for the trash to pick up, they are not being recycled. We have to remember that those things are going on behind the curtain too that we might think we’re doing a good thing. If the rules aren’t in place to support the actions that we’re doing, then those items are not ending up anywhere but the landfill. It’s nice that we can take control over how many times that box gets reused.

Let me also share with you that, while we’re talking about packaging, I’m always thinking about ways to reduce the packaging in our product. What I realized is very few stores today require a product to be in a box. Now, a box might help it set better on a store shelf to display it better for the consumer to see. It might help that store to be able to line them up better and have some inventory control when they see that they’re out. For the most part in my business, we sell to a lot of refill stores, zero waste stores, natural health food stores, who have a lot more flexibility in the packaging that they require on their store shelves.

Now, whether you can do this at Publix, or Walmart, or those kind of places, I don’t know the answer to. My guess is they are moving towards that direction. Right now, I can tell you that a phone call to your wholesaler, a phone call to a store that you want to have your products in to ask them if they are willing to think outside the box, all puns intended, that they might be very open to your options and they’re just not familiarized with it until you bring it to the forefront. What I’ve done recently is I’ve looked at even getting away from this very small cardboard box, or I should call it a paper box that my products are packaged in, and we’re going to more of a paper wrapper. It’s cutting down on the packaging that my products are requiring. It’s using even a thinner paper because paperboard is a little bit thicker than the paper that you would feed into your printer, and I’m able to order less boxes.

From a business owner perspective, and I know all these business owners can relate that when you’ve got to order product boxes, there are usually very high minimums. I mean, I’m fortunate to have a box printer whose minimums are about 250, but that’s per die cut. I’m paying about $150 per die for that particular box cut. Even if you want to change your box size or go into a little bit different size product, you’re going to have to absorb that initial die fee right upfront even before you order those minimum of 250 boxes. By going to more of a paper wrapper, which my products can really handle, they’re tough, I am now able to just order as I need.

If I’m looking to make an adjustment to the label – what if I get another certification that I want my consumers to be aware of? I can easily add that certification or usage information update to a paper wrapper because maybe I’m only printing per purchase order amount. If I order 1,000 bars of something, I don’t have to order 1,000 wrappers. I could order one page at a time, but ideally, I’m probably going to be ordering a couple of dozen at a time. It’s easy for my local printer.

I have a guide here who does printing for surveyors and stuff. He’s got easy equipment that can handle easy cutting and using bigger sheets of paper, so we’re actually able to get more up on one page instead of just printing an 8.5 by 11 page. Ideally, any business owner can get started today by doing something like that and printing off a few sheets from the printer that you’ve got in your office, especially if it’s a laser jet and it prints very beautifully and very clearly. That’s a quick way to reduce your cost and the waste that’s happening from your product.

Taylor Martin
[11:09] I see a lot of Etsy businesses online or TikTok. I’m a huge TikTok consumer where they’re printing things off on their own printer at their home and package something, then the camera pans and there’s a wall of packaged products over there that they’ve been working on for all day, or two days, or something like that. You covered a lot of ground there. I want to go back to the beginning because one of the things that you started talking about that I found extremely interesting is that you actually just – before you even got to packaging, you were thinking, how can I distribute my product itself? To me, that’s a great question to ask.
In my business, I always say the questions are what we want most because it’s the question that gets us to the destination. If you are saying to yourself, how better can I package, or how better can I create my product to be more sustainable, to be easier to package, to transport, to travel? We talk about plastic containers full of liquid. The amount of weight that’s in there, why does it need to travel that far on a plane? Because you got one-gallon bottle, but that’s just one person. They’re shipping tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of those things, and all that carbon weight on shipping that thing when you can just do like you’re doing, like a solid little bar soap, throw it in one gallon at home, and I fill it up with my water. That’s pretty easy to understand.

I love how the fact that you did take time to think about that. Just even if you can’t as a business owner, at least you tried and you thought about it. You could do some research online to find out. Maybe you do tweak things a little bit. All the things that you’ve just talked about, my business mind is always going, savings, savings, savings. You’re cutting out things and you’re increasing your margins. I’m thinking margin increase, margin increase. This is great, this is great. Even just in terms of where you’re going to put 1,000 or 10,000 boxes that need to be used, you’re going to have manufacturing. You’re going to have a warehouse space. Then you got to have some place to put those things. If you had 1,000, 2,000 sheets of paper, that’s totally different. Boxes take up space.

Angie Ringler
[13:32] Big time.

Taylor Martin
[13:33] A lot of great nuggets in there for increasing profit margins. What about how hard was it to find – because I know there’s a lot of different types of packaging materials. How hard was it to source different suppliers?

Angie Ringler
[13:50] Initially, I thought it was pretty easy because you do a Google search of box printers, let’s say, and tons of them come up. I reached out to a few of them, got some fairly decent prices, what I thought was good. A funny experience was the first one that I’ve used who represented that they were a US-based box printer – and these are boxes for my products. These aren’t the shipping cardboard boxes I’m referring to, my small product boxes that need to be [inaudible] with my information. I placed the order, so happy to get it, ordered, I don’t know, like 1,000 boxes, really excited. It arrives with a packing slip from Kazakhstan. I was like, what? Because this company represented that they were a US-based company.

What I have since found out through lots of diligent asking of questions is that many of these companies will set up an office in the US. They will say that it is a US-based company because technically, they have an office here. What they do sometimes, they will ship. They will take the order in the US, send it to their printing facility overseas somewhere. They will print them, ship them to their facility in the US, and then ship it to you so it appears to be coming like it was in the US. The carbon footprint of all that shipping was just mind-blowing once I found out what was happening.
Now, fortunately, that company didn’t send it to their facility first. They sent it directly to me from Kazakhstan. I don’t know how long I would have worked with that company not knowing what was really going on. The term greenwashing, it applies to not just the products like shampoo, and laundry, and stuff like that. It applies to so many things in our supply chain. We think we’re asking the right questions. I thought I was being diligent and yet I was still duped. Even as a knowledgeable consumer, I felt I was going in with a lot of good questions. Yes, it pays to ask questions, but it almost pays to also reach out to business owners who are doing the same thing you are and just ask them what’s going on.

I know if anybody called me, and when they do call me, I am happy to take that time and share my experiences, whether it’d be this exact experience or any number of scenarios that I think, wow, I wish I would have done that a little bit differently. We always – or I shouldn’t say we. I even tend to think, wow, that person probably doesn’t have time for me, or, they’re going to think that my question is stupid. I have all these self-doubts that start to come up that stop me from making those phone calls.
I have slowly begun to get over that because I realized the value of mentorship. Mentorship can sometimes come in one question. It doesn’t have to be this relationship that we develop and we cultivate over years. Imagine if a business owner called me and I shared just that one tidbit of information about getting my boxes all the way from halfway around the world, and then I could have said to them, just call Your Box Solutions. They print right here in the United States. It’s who I found after lots of due diligence, and I can save them lots of bumps in that road.

Taylor Martin
[17:29] Crazy scenario here. We have the same problem in our field. We have web design companies or designers, freelancers, always reaching out to us to work with. I always look to see where they’re located. We’re a virtual company. We can work with people from all over the world. If you’re going to be communicating in a country, you need to live it and be in the country. They say, “We’re in Virginia.” I was like, “Okay, great. Where’s your office? How many people do you have in your company?” They’ll say, “We got 55 people. We can be an extension for your web development services, whatever.” Then I dig a little further, and then I find out that four people are in Virginia and the rest of the 50 something are in India.

I have no problem with that scenario, but for our business needs, we are always trying to make sure that things are stateside, and the money is staying in the states, and those people that are communicating for our clients are understanding our culture in which we’re communicating. Every component of everything we do is part of a design element when it gets to the final product. I found that to be very interesting about the packaging in Kazakhstan. That’s just nuts. What about when you actually get to the process where you get to shipping? What do you do with offsetting carbon footprints or buying credits, things like that? What have you done in that area?

Angie Ringler
[18:52] That’s a good question because there are a lot of aspects of my business. I have no control over the supply chain of it, and I don’t – unless I’m there from the fields to the processing, to the packaging, to the shipping, I really don’t know what’s happening in those aspects. Early on, I purchased carbon offset credits for my business. It was much easier, much more affordable than I ever expected. I guess in my head, I worked up this thought that, oh, it must be a lot of money if I’m going to cover my whole business because they want to know all the computers that you’re using, all the locations that you use. Where do you drive? I thought, oh man, that sounds out of my budget at the moment.

I made the phone call. I talked to them. Most of these carbon offset credit companies these days have a little calculator. You can go right to their website, do an initial calculation. It almost gives you like an estimate of what it would cost. Sometimes it can be just a couple $100 to really offset the carbon in the areas that you don’t have any control over. That’s really powerful. If we all did that little bit, imagine all the projects that could be funded that are making a difference that us as business owners, we’re focused on our business. There are companies out there who are focused on the projects to help offset the carbon that’s happening in our world that we don’t even know about.

Taylor Martin
[20:23] When doing something like what you’re talking about and you find a company that can do these offset credits, are they always advertising badges, or logos, or some sort of item that you can then use in your marketing materials?

Angie Ringler
[20:37] They do. There’s definitely an icon that you can use on your packaging to convey to the consumer that you are working diligently to fill that space in your business, which to me is important when I see other businesses doing it. My biggest issue with the company that I’m using now is that there’s no way for a consumer to go and search me on their platform. In other words, if the consumer really wanted to verify that my icon or that logo on my box is legitimate, they have to contact me and I have to send them a copy of my certificate, which I feel is a little bit antiquated these days.

Last year, I did reach out to the company and ask them if they had some plan to put a database on their website because it would be great to be able to search companies based on those guidelines that you’re looking for. Now, there are more marketplaces showing up like that. Hello Tara is a website that I know that is developing a marketplace that you can filter the products that you want to look for. If you want to buy a product that is carbon-neutral, or is plastic-free, or vegan, you can actually use those filters within their website, and it just pulls up the companies that are doing that.

I think that those kind of platforms are important, and I wish that the company that I was buying my carbon offset credits had that ability on their website so that it would encourage consumers to buy from companies like me who is trying to really make a difference and cutting down on the waste that’s happening.

Taylor Martin
[22:12] Oh, man, I agree. I think it’s always about the consumer. They’re right. They’re the ones that are buying. They’re voting with their dollars. I think we’re going to see more and more of that as time continues because people are realizing that circular economy, it’s not like a nice-to-have thing. It’s a must-have thing. We are not taking care of this planet well enough for our children’s children. I know that I saw on your website that you do some white labeling. Can business people reach out to you and use some of your services to package their products there? How does that work?

Angie Ringler
[22:51] Yes. I’m very happy to say that we are offering white label services to other businesses because now we have our own warehouse in Mount Dora, Florida, Central Florida. Now that I can control all the shipping aspects, we can not only inventory the products, but then we can also wrap them with their own branding that basically, anybody can start off by having their own brand, selling zero waste products, knowing that they’re pushing natural ingredients, and really have little to no startup. This is where we’re able to help each other as business owners because if we’re not supporting each other, then who else is going to help support us?

I figure if somebody out there is saying, look, I want to be able to have a business, but I wanted to have these really good pillars to stand on because I care about others and I care about the planet, then let me pave that smooth road for them. They don’t have to go through all the years of formulation I did. They don’t have to go through all the research I did to find the right packaging and the minimalist. I’ve already got the certification. We’re leaping bunny certified. We are Green America certified.
Let me allow them to use all the legwork I did, but put their own name on it so that they can build that rapport and trust with their customer base. Because the more products they sell, that means the more bottles that are not ending up in the landfill. If that’s our ultimate goal, if we’re putting planet above all of those things, then we all win. If we’re going to stay in our own lane and be like, oh, living that lack mentality and say there’s just not enough business out there for all of us, so I’m going to hoard my knowledge, we are not going to come out as winners.

Let me give you a perfect example of that that just happened yesterday, Taylor. I love using dental tablets instead of toothpaste tubes. Are you familiar with a dental tablet?

Taylor Martin
[25:00] I am, yup.

Angie Ringler
[25:02] Okay. They’re a little tablet. You crunch it up in your mouth, and your saliva, and water. It breaks it down into toothpaste, and then you brush. No tubes to get rid of because those toothpaste tubes are not recyclable unless you’re looking at TerraCycle, which is a very specific recycling program. I am always looking for different dental tablets that I like or different flavors. I got a box in the mail yesterday from a new company that I tried. They sell them in a tin, in an aluminum tin, which is great. I will mention why I think aluminum is good in a minute, but they send them in an aluminum tin in a little paper cardboard box that would set up on a store shelf. That was also placed in a small 2x2 cardboard shipping box, which I thought total overkill.
These people could be sending it in an envelope, cutting down on their expenses, cutting down on the waste because now I’ve got this cardboard box. It’s my duty, I feel it’s my duty at least as a fellow business owner to call them up and to share with them what I’ve learned in my experience, and maybe they will find value in that. If they don’t, maybe they’ve done their own research and they’ve had bad experiences with the envelopes. I don’t know. It’s not up to me to pre-judge what they’ve already done. It’s up to me to share my experience. If they find value and can increase their profit margin, and reduce the consumer waste, then that’s a good thing for me to take those few minutes and either formulate an email or make a phone call.

Let me just mention about why I think aluminum is a good option for packaging. Even though recycling is on this down slide and we’re having a big issue, and I already mentioned we’re not even recycling in my area anymore. What I do know through my many conversations with my – I have a contact who’s big in the recycling world, is that cardboard and aluminum are the two items that recyclers are incentivized to do something with. If you have an option to put your product in either one of those two things, it has the most chance of actually getting recycled or ending up as something else instead of just being tossed into the landfill.

Taylor Martin
[27:33] I know that aluminum and cardboard paper, any type of paper material is highly recyclable. It’s so easy to recycle. Almost any recycling center can do those two basic things. I always think about like when you mention tin, I think in my mind, oh, it’s a nice little beautiful tin. I think there’s also an area where people can improve their products by thinking about ways when we package our product, when it’s done and it’s at the end of their cycle, could they reuse it into something else? Like when you buy a candle in a glass container, can I use that glass to drink water out of, or whatever, beverages?

We used to do that back in the day and just not so much anymore, but I feel like that is another way to look at things more sustainably so that people can reuse their product. Then if you have a little bit of branding on there that – it’s all glass but your logo is in the glass itself or something and they’re reusing it for flowers or vase. Your logo is out there in their household living in front of their eyes all day long. I don’t know. I sometimes think about that as a marketing opportunity that is not being used.

Angie Ringler
[28:44] Yes, and that’s a good point. I wrote a book called Going Plastic Free Room by Room. In my book, I have a chapter about reusing things. I actually did a deep dive in my search on the web, and I was amazed at what people were doing by just reusing some packaging. For instance, there were women who have – you know those little – I’m sure you don’t use one, but there’s these makeup compacts that have mirrors in them.

Taylor Martin
[29:12] Sure.

Angie Ringler
[29:12] They’ve been around forever. This woman actually collected because she loved the makeup and didn’t want to get away from using it even though she knew it was wasteful. She took out all the mirrors from the containers, and she ended up making this beautiful collage of mini mirrors and placed them on her wall, and it was gorgeous. It looked like something you would spend hundreds of dollars in a store. I just thought those creative people are out there and it doesn’t take much as a user of a product to say, okay, here, I’ve got this great glass jar. What could I do with it? I’m not that super creative person, so I have to be inspired, and we’ve got the web at our fingertips for so much inspiration.

Taylor Martin
[29:55] You could print something literally on the inside of the box, the printing box. Hello. Welcome. Thank you for buying our product. By the way, this glass jar can be reused for this, this, and have a little bullet item of things and show some pictures with flowers in them, or people drinking out of them, making a cocktail or something.

Angie Ringler
[30:12] Even better, Taylor, today is that the pandemic has made us all used to using QR codes. Even my 75-year-old mom, she knows how to use a QR code. Two years ago, she didn’t even know what it was. We’ve got this ability. Slap a sticker on your box. Maybe not pre-print your QR code. It might be more cost on – but certainly, you could do it on your product boxes if it’s not even on your shipping boxes. That would be a direct link to somebody to go to your website and look at all the options of things that you’ve thought about, or links to people’s creative pages that could provide them with some inspiration. Not only that, it gets them back to your website, which is not a bad thing either.

Taylor Martin
[30:52] Yeah, right. I just did a newsletter on QR codes and how far they’ve come. When I did my research, they really came a long way. They’re in all different colors, and now they’re different shapes and sizes. They’re not just that perfect square with all the little mini squares within it. You can do a lot of different things and you can mold them into your brand by using your brand colors as long as you have enough high contrast ratio. You can even have a QR code with your logo inside of it possibly, depending on how your logo is designed, because the QR codes are designed to be – I don’t know how many times redundant, just in case the viewer doesn’t catch the angle just right. That’s why when you look at it, it just automatically gets it. It’s because it’s written in there so many times with the software that if you put your logo right in the middle, or you just take out the center section and make it all white, it’s still going to find you. It’s still going to find the URL that you programmed into it.

Angie Ringler
[31:53] Let me share something real quick on the QR code that I just learned. There’s a company who I’m getting ready to work with in Tampa, Florida. They have developed a QR code system that is almost like a Linktree. When you click on – like you’re on social media and you click to somebody’s Linktree, and it opens up a page that gives you all these buttons of options to – you could go to their website, look at their blog, look at their sale, whatever it is. They now have a QR code that does that. It’ll take you to a page of information where you can upload videos, you can upload the content right there, images and everything. Instead of just having to go to one location, it gives them the options right off the bat.

The bonus to this is chain stores are starting to catch on to this technology. There are several chain grocery stores that are working with this company in Tampa and actually providing that QR code right on the shelf label where the price is underneath your product. Now, the consumer – because we want that information when we’re about to make a purchase in a store. We want to know, how does it compare? What are the ingredients? How do I really use this thing?

Us as a business owner, we’re very limited by how much of that information we can get on the box that the consumer will read while they’re shopping compared next to half a dozen other products that might fit their need. Having that leg up to be able to allow the buyer to scan that QR code right on site and give them all of those – you’re answering their questions in advance, I think is going to be very powerful. I’m going to actually invest in one QR code to get started that will show people the education part of my product because my products are a little bit different. Just like everybody, we’ve all got certain questions that people consistently ask us about our products. If we can answer those right off the bat, we have a much better chance of those people actually making the purchase.

Taylor Martin
[34:00] Yeah. On your products, you could have the basic idea of what it is and what you’ve done to create this product and offer it to them. If you want to learn more, instead of clicking, you just snap your little camera, and you hit that QR code, and you can have an endless amount of information. Again, I’ve talked about this on previous podcasts, but it’s about building that customer business relationship. It’s about building the relationship and rapport with them so that they feel more connected to you, and they align with you, and they become more interested in what you’re doing, and how you got to be where you are, and they can tend. Once they get into that sort of relationship with you, then they tell their friends, or they tell their family members, or community, or neighbors, and whomever. I just feel like that is a perfect example. Everybody’s got a smartphone these days to snap a QR code.

Angie Ringler
[34:51] Exactly.

Taylor Martin
[34:51] I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Thank you so much for connecting with me and being here on today’s show. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about in terms of the future of packaging, or any ways some of our listeners can follow you or reach out to you for some of those white labeling services?

Angie Ringler
[35:09] Yes, there is something I would like to share because I recently learned about a company. They’re outside the United States and they are making packaging, even boxes, and bags, and things that is made from stone. I am just learning about it. My friend who’s deep into the recycling industry has connected me with them. I am waiting on some samples to arrive because I’m very curious to know what are these next advances in packaging. It’s just an indicator of, that’s what’s going on in the world. There are constantly being innovations and advances that we need to be sharing with each other. I wouldn’t have known about it if my friend Tara had not shared that with me. Now, I’m getting to share it with other people who might say, “Look, I’ve got a liquid product I want to get away from bottles. Could the stone packaging be my answer?” Maybe it can be.

Taylor Martin
[36:03] I don’t know about that, but I can tell you one thing about paper. I know a lot about paper. It all comes down to the fibers. I’ve seen paper made out of basically everything. I’ve seen they made out a stone 15, 20 years ago. The problem with it was like, can you recycle this with other papers? That was a big question I never got a full answer to because the paper, when you recycle paper again and again and again, it starts to break down those fibers. I’m making my index and my thumb make smaller and smaller and smaller measurements to answer here.

Once the fibers get so small, then they can’t bind to each other. Then it just becomes something you would just upcycle into punk compost or something like that. If anyone is coming up with a different idea with stone materials and they can make it wonderful, and circular, and sustainable because we do have quite a bit of rocks in this planet, right?

Angie Ringler
[37:00] Quite a bit.

Taylor Martin
[37:02] I think that’s great instead of cutting down trees, which are something that we need a hell of a lot more of on this planet. That was really cool. How can our listeners follow you or reach out to you for your white labeling services?

Angie Ringler
[37:14] Yes. Please contact me directly. Obviously, if they want to just contact me right away, I always give out my cellphone number. It’s area code 954-439-0310. You could email me at angie@wastefreeproducts.com. We’re on social media at Waste Free Products as well, Facebook and Instagram. I always feel like it’s good for business owners to connect directly, so I’d encourage them to just text me or call me and let’s start that conversation and see what solutions I can provide for them right away.

Taylor Martin
[37:51] Angie Ringler, thank you again for being on today’s podcast. Thank you for sharing all the knowledge that you have with us today.

Angie Ringler
[37:58] I really appreciate you inviting me today, and thanks again. Have a beautiful afternoon.

Taylor Martin
[38:03] Over and out, everybody.

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[38:05] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today's podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever provider you're logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.

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