Episode 5: Show Notes.

Today’s guest hails from Europe, where the concept of a circular economy has been gaining traction for a lot longer than it has in Australia, his current place of residence. Elmar Kert’s sustainability journey began while he was at business school, where he wrote a thesis on overconsumption. When he finished studying he founded two start ups; one which recycled sails into Macbook sleeves, and the other which focused on reclaiming materials from buildings which were to be demolished. He continued to pursue his passion for reducing environmental degradation when he moved to Sydney by becoming the Head of Global Operations at Dresden Vision, where he developed an innovative approach to make stylish glasses out of recycled plastic. In today’s episode you’ll hear about the 6 years that Elmar spent developing innovative methods of producing affordable eyewear that uplifts local industries and causes less harm to the planet. While Elmar acknowledges that we still have a long way to go, he is hopeful that through a major collaborative effort, we will be able to solve one of humanity’s biggest crises.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Hear about what Elmar’s sustainability journey has looked like.
• Elmar shares how he ended up working at Dresden Vision, and his experience at the company.
• Waste problems in the eyewear industry, and how Dresden is working to change this.
• Conservative thinking that Elmar had to push back against with his innovative ideas.
• Some of the challenges of working with new materials in the eyewear space.
• Benefits of keeping industry and supply chains local.
• Creating custom pieces; a double edged sword.
• Quality control as an important part of Dreden’s process.
• The milestone which Dresden achieved last year.
• Enormous potential in the plastic recycling industry.
• Elmar’s current educational pursuit, and how he feels about his future.
• Comparing sustainability practices in Australia and Europe.
• The many different moving parts which need to be addressed in order to solve the climate crisis.

Quotable Quotes:

“At Dresden we had this random bunch of people that had no idea about the industry or what we were doing, but that was also the beautiful thing because we were blank pages, so we really got to reinvent how we did things.” — Elmar Kert [0:08:00]

“It was really about democratising the frame and making it accessible to anyone.” — Elmar Kert [0:10:58]

“The potential is huge. Not just the potential to clean up the environment and do the right thing and go with the movement of circularity that is really lifting off around the world, but also from a business point of view. There is a lot of monetary value in those materials .” — Elmar Kert [0:24:55]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Elmar Kert on LinkedIn
Dresden Vision
Elmar Kert Email
Circulist

Host Nick Gonios
Producer Jim Lounsbury