Episode 129: Does Waste-to-Energy Have a Future in the US? (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Liz Bothwell: Hi everyone, welcome to Waste360's NothingWasted! Podcast. On every episode, we invite the most interesting people in waste recycling and organics to sit down with us and chat candidly about their thoughts, their work, this unique industry and so much more. Thanks for listening and enjoy this episode.

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[00:00:27] Liz: Hi everyone. My name is Liz Bothwell from Waste360. Please welcome Derek Veenhof, the Executive Vice President and COO of Covanta.

[00:00:36] Derek Veenhof: Hi, Liz.

[00:00:38] Liz: Hi, Derek. Welcome. I can't think of anyone else more qualified to talk about this important waste-to-energy topic than you, so thanks for joining us.

[00:00:47] Derek: My pleasure. It should be fun.

[00:00:50] Liz: Derek, let's set the stage with a big question. When you imagine a truly sustainable society, what comes to mind for you?

[00:00:57] Derek: I go to a couple of pillars that I think about. Really, to me, it starts at education, health, wellbeing as fundamental pillars for our society. I know we don't often talk about sustainability that way, we quite often talk about it in a three-piece. I like to make it a little bit more personal. Education, health, and wellbeing, to me, are the key drivers. Those are components for people to live good lives so I go there.

I know this topic is all about waste, waste-to-energy, and all the other things. You can jump down from there and start talking about climate change, global finite resources, sustainability at its whole, environmental impact meaning, and equitable work for people. There's a whole bunch of jumping-off places from those three pillars in my mind.

[00:02:05] Liz: What kind of concerns do you think are driving this big movement?

[00:02:11] Derek: I think we have a number of them. Certainly, the one first and foremost on a lot of people's minds right now is certainly climate change as a huge driver. I look back, I was very fortunate. I'm going to give away my age a little bit here, back in the '80s, when I was an undergrad up in Canada at a university up there, the University of Guelph, they had a really unique program around resources management. There weren't a lot of places that had a program like that.

It was very sustainability-focused before sustainability became a real buzzword. The whole program was designed around these concepts that we're going to talk about today, and have been for the last 10-15 years, I would say, dominating a lot of the public press. Certainly, from an environmental standpoint, what we need to do. I think that's one. I also think this is a global, finite resource and finite resources put a lot of pressure on a human population that has been growing.

We have to be smart about how we use those finite resources and how we get the most out of them. I think, to me, those are the two chief concerns. I think it all plays into the third part, which is all about people. At the end of the day, the three Ps, people, planet, productivity or profits, as they like to say, but the people component is huge and that has to tag in. We have to have an equitable distribution across the globe in a way that's meaningful. That's how you get back to the three pillars, education, health, wellbeing. I think those are, in my mind, the chief concerns.

[00:04:16] Liz: Definitely. I know you dug a little bit into climate change. Can you talk a little bit about IPPC's Assessment Report?

[00:04:24] Derek: On the surface, here's the gory news, the bad news, which is they're talking about anywhere from two and a half to three degrees Fahrenheit change in the Earth temperature over the next 20 years. Again, I'm going to go back in time, back into the '90s, this became more of a topic and people were like, "Well, is it real? Is this really happening? I'm not sure about the science behind it." We had a lot of outspoken people who were saying, "Yes, the science is real. Don't underestimate what could happen".

I think today, when we're looking at this issue, we're like, "Yes, the climate has changed." There are dramatic impacts of that even today, let alone with any kind of rise in global temperatures. We know that a good portion of the Earth's surface is ice and when it gets warmer, it melts. A huge proportion of the planet's population sits on the coast of some seasoned oceans. That doesn't bode well if we're not planning for our future and not working hard at slowing that train down as best we can. 

[00:05:52] Liz: Absolutely. I know it can be scary for everyone to hear this and see this. What do you think is being done currently?

[00:06:01] Derek: I think, certainly, it's getting a lot more attention over the last decade. I actually think the best example I can give you is what Covanta is going through right now. We have a transaction pending with a Swedish company called EQT. A financial institution that, for 30 years, they've been at the forefront of ESG investing. That's been a principal driver of how they look at their investments that they're making. They want to be at the forefront of change.

Their participation in Covanta, which is expected quite shortly, is one where they're saying, "Look, this is a platform where we can benefit society from an ESG standpoint. We think this is good, healthy science. We like what Covanta does. We want to do more of it and we want to be a leader in the environmental space." I think that's a sign that financial institutions now are looking at it through the lens of, "Where am I going to put my money?" The old adage, "Money talks".

Once that starts happening, I think that that is certainly the pathway that more and more of these environmental sectors is going to be exposed to. Certainly, I think that that's good for the general population.

[00:07:33] Liz: Absolutely. I'm sure you're seeing this as well in everyone from the small businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 companies.

[00:07:41] Derek: Yes, we are. We've been growing our entire environmental platform. We have a business called Environmental Solutions that has been for the last, I would say, 15 years, catering very much to the manufacturing sector on how to reduce waste to landfill, how to get the maximum impact from a benefit standpoint. In the US that's been a big driver to part of our growth. What these companies who are looking through the lens of, "How do I make my end products as sustainable as possible?" One way to do that is, "How do I eliminate waste? How do I best use my resources?"

That's been a key driver for us here. When you think about what else is being done, you have all these different items that whether you're on social media or following the waste industry, we have folks who are passionate about zero-waste. We have people who are passionate about zero-waste to landfill. We have people that are passionate about net-zero carbon.

If you talked about those three things 20 or 25 years ago, when I really entered the space as a working human being, those really weren't tossed around that much. There's an acceleration of thought. I think that over the next 10 to 15 years, I'm hoping that that continues to accelerate. I think those are all good and things that we should be pushing on.

[00:09:22] Liz: Definitely. Are you seeing it in municipalities o are they little bit behind?

[00:09:28] Derek: I think it's a mixed bag. We have some very forward-thinking municipalities. We have a client base that goes back sometime. Covanta, the waste-to-energy infrastructure that we run here in the US is generally somewhere around 30 years in age. Those municipalities made a choice at that time to try to move up the waste hierarchy and make more decisions locally about how they handle waste. Kudos to that group of folks who were very forward-thinking and made those investments.

I think as more and more people realize climate change is real and we've got really hard decisions to make, that folks are really going to look at the waste sector and say, "What can we do differently than we do today?" In the US we have anywhere, depending on what you read, 250 million to 300 million tons of solid waste that's being managed and the bulk of it's going to landfill. There's a lot of opportunity to do things differently, I think, in the US and I think everybody in the waste sector would agree. There's big opportunity in that space.

[00:10:43] Liz: Definitely. Are you looking to Europe and Asia for inspiration or you think we all should?

[00:10:50] Derek: I think there's always something to be learned from somewhere else. Just like people can learn from what we're doing here. I look at Europe and Asia as densely populated communities where there's limited landmass, which is a little bit different than the US. The US is blessed with a wealth of geography but these folks are pressured. They're pressured on the resource pool and they need to make some decisions about how best to utilize the resources that they have available.

They might not have ubiquitous oil and gas, which we seem to have here in North America. They might not have landmasses that they can afford to put solid waste into a landfill and just let it sit. I think that they're driving forward. In fact, in my conversations with one of our key vendors that is helping us construct plants in the UK right now, it's really interesting how they look at the waste sector. In North America, we look at it and we talk about our business as being an offset against landfilling from a carbon cycle, life cycle perspective, over a twenty-year timeframe.

They don't even talk about landfilling as a comparative. They're talking about how they take waste-to-energy and other components of the waste system and driving that to net-zero without that landfill offset that we talk about here. I think, in many ways, they're further along in their thought process around the adoption of technology here.

[00:12:40] Liz: Everything you're saying makes sense, business sense, and sense from a socioeconomic position. Why do you think there's hesitancy and what are some of the challenges that we're dealing with in really bringing waste-to-energy to the US in a bigger way?

[00:12:57] Derek: There's this thing called perception. We see it, certainly, when we talked about the pandemic over the last year and a half. As a society, we're struggling with the different aspects revolving around the pandemic, whether it be masking, vaccination. Perception really matters. I think a lot of perception around what Covanta does, the waste-to-energy-- and you can call it incineration. It doesn't matter to me. I think a lot of the perception is really old.

I think a lot of data points from a pre-modern-day waste-to-energy plants or incinerators keeps being dragged up to the forefront and people saying, "Those emissions are horrible." The reality is, modern waste-to-energy plants, the technology in them is very protective of humanity health and the environment. Let's really get at the science. I think that that can be hard because sometimes in the science gobbledygook there's a lot of technical jargon that people aren't exposed to.

We talk about it in an engineering mindset or a scientific mindset and not everybody's going to get on that train. We've got to find ways to correct the perception, let people into the plants and get people exposed to it. One of the great things that I'm really proud of our team here at Covanta, that we've been doing over the last couple of years, is we're publicizing our emissions data. We have continuous emissions monitoring at the plants.

For years the public didn't have exposure to that. It was like, "We'll take their word for it. The regulatory agencies are watching them." They would have to go to the regulatory agencies and go get the data. Now we're publishing it online. That data is available. We're trying to be transparent. The whole purpose is to let people see and let them ask questions. We want to have an educated consumer and we don't want to run and hide behind, "We have regulatory requirements and we're not really willing to share the data." That's not where we're at today.

[00:15:23] Liz: I think that's great. I think it will help others to be more open as well, because a lot of us have great stories to tell. There's nothing to hide.

[00:15:32] Derek: No. We have to embrace science. As Covanta or anybody in the waste-to-energy business, we're so reliant on science and technology. We've got to embrace it. We've got to bring it forward. That's how we're going to move our industry and that's how we're going to move industry in general. We've got to push on science and make sure what we're doing is factual, correct, and debate it.

[00:15:56] Liz: How about pricing, Derek? Is that another big challenge?

[00:16:00] Derek: For sure. I already hit on the luxury we have here in North America, which is we have what I would call artificially cheap energy. That comes in multiple forms, not just one. We have oil, gas, and hydro, abundant forms of energy that we can consume here. On the other side of our spectrum, we have waste disposal. Those two are key components of our revenue base in waste-to-energy and the US has had cheap disposal as well.

In the '80s, we went away from every municipality, had what they called the dump. The modern sanitary landfill that was more regionally based and you received the economies of scale. I think that created a perception, and perhaps a reality too in some ways, that that was cheap and always available. I don't think that that's true. I think today where we're at from that standpoint is, sanitary landfills that are close to population centers are rapidly filling. In the Northeast of the United States, that's particularly true.

There hasn't been very many new landfills at all over the last 20-25 years. In fact, the ones that are there have had expansions, but eventually, that's going to run out. I think that that's been treated as a very cheap mode of getting rid of waste, "Out of sight, out of mind." The reality is the next place for that to go is a lot further away and the cost structure is going to change. I think there's a lot of risks to that. That much further away, too.

We saw with Hurricane Ida over the last few weeks the ramifications of what happens when your disposal network becomes that much more dispersed and further away from the action. I can tell you that in the Northeast of the US, where we suffered a lot and, tragically, also suffered some deaths from Hurricane Ida. Our hearts go out to those people and their families. Waste right now, every transfer station, everybody's waiting on the same transportation equipment to return so that they can load. There's more materials to move. That's going to be a real struggle for us on a go-forward basis, if our answer as a society is, "Let's just move it more remotely." To me, that's not the answer.

[00:19:01] Liz: Is Covanta working on solutions for things like that?

[00:19:06] Derek: I hope we are because that means it's all a part of our business growth. I'm sure our future investor is also on board with that. We're positioning to grow our business domestically, as well as globally. I think most people know, as a publicly-traded company, we've talked about our growth domestically. Which has been principally around environmental solutions, offering manufacturers and other folks, a way to avoid putting material into landfill.

In the UK, we've been building brand new plants, state-of-the-art technology. These plants are fantastic. I look forward to the day to be pouring new concrete in the US to be bringing some of that technology back here. The other aspect of our business that I'm really excited about-- Well, there are a number and I'm sure we'll get into it. But I think on the ash recovery and metal recovery standpoint. There's a lot of room for us to grow in that space with the asset base that we already have domestically.

[00:20:17] Liz: Great. What else comes next? Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing with this new administration and anything else you think we, as an industry, should be prepared for in the future?

[00:20:30] Derek: I think the waste industry in general, we have to be prepared for policy change. Just like we ultimately needed, and still need, a national energy policy in my belief. There needs to be a framework around our waste management decision-making. We talk about the waste hierarchy but policy needs to really embrace that in a firmer way than it has. It's one thing to talk about, but I think policy has to really direct people and say, "Look, we're really after the top of that chain. Zero is good, great, but how do we get there? How do we get reuse?" That's a whole design component around goods that are consumed, how do we do a better job of designing so that it can get into reuse aspects and recycling? Then, at the endpoint, it's this balance between what I would call thermal treatment, that's what we do, and the landfill. I don't think we're ever going to get away from landfilling. I think that that's a piece of the cornerstone, you've got to have it, but you don't have to put all this processable waste into the landfill either.

We've got to attack that issue and be progressive about it. We have state-of-the-art MRFs that we're building. That's fantastic. Others in the industry have been doing that. We have composting and anaerobic digestion. 30% of the waste stream is organic, let's get at it. I think we want to embrace it. We want to embrace that policy and go after it firmly. I think thermal has a place in there too. I think we need to be supported in a way that levelizes the playing field and recognizes the benefits of what we bring to the table.

[00:22:23] Liz: Definitely. You've spoken a little bit about what's on the horizon for Covanta and the WTE industry in general. Can you talk about what this could actually mean with enhanced revenue streams? You touched on ash a little bit, but can you get into that a little bit?

[00:22:38] Derek: Yes. Let me put it in a way that I haven't put it into for anybody before. We have a 20-ton load of municipal solid waste heading down the road, going to its end destination. I'll put it to you in a different way. There's about 20 barrels of oil equivalents in that truck. Imagine that there's 20 barrels of oil, imagine that there's $400 to $500 worth of metals entrapped in that waste. Then imagine that there's two to three tons of aggregate.

Now, an advanced society would look at that and say, "What? Where am I going? I'm going to a landfill and I'm going to go bury that? I'm going to go bury 20 barrels of oil? I'm going to bury $400 to $500 worth of metals, ferrous and non-ferrous metals?" All those things we're extracting out of the Earth so it makes no sense to turn around and put it back in that format. Because there's all kinds of costs associated with that. I think that the possibilities-- and look, over the last 10 years much has changed.

We've had a very cheap energy environment on the US side with the advent of shell gas. It's forcing us to think differently. If we think about emissions, for instance, if you think about emissions, the bulk of the emissions that any community have, it's from transportation. We're going to end up electrifying the bulk of the transportation system. We see it today. If you would've told me that in my neighborhood there would be five or six electric cars in a one-block radius of where I live 10 years ago, I would have chuckled. I would have said, "There's no way," but that's what's happening.

The transportation network is going to get electrified. That's a big opportunity for us because we produce electrons. We can also produce hydrogen, so there's a whole industry and heavy equipment industry that can use hydrogen versus fossil to change its net emission profile. That's an exciting place for us to go to attack a much bigger problem than just what's coming out of our stack. It's a bigger proportion of what any community is facing from an environmental standpoint, so that's pretty exciting.

I talked about ash. We've been doing a lot of R&D for the last decade on ash. I think where we're at today is that 50% of that ash is very much reusable in one way, shape or form as an aggregate or as a higher use. Then, within that ash itself, we've been recovering ferrous and non-ferrous metals for a long, long time, but there is a lot more material that we weren't getting.

When I was talking about, "Hey, there's $400 to $500 with metals in that truckload of waste going down the highway" the reality is that's very, very true based on what we see and not significant for us.

Those are a couple areas. We have the emission standpoint from the stack. There's a lot of research around carbon capture and storage and carbon capture and use. I think that that's further away, but we have science people that are working hard at it. I have no doubt we're going to come up with solutions there that that can make a difference. I also think, just generally speaking, the emissions we've shown over time, we can drive emissions lower. Our goal as a company has been, "Let's attack that. Let's keep doing that." That's just good solid business for us. That remains an opportunity. The more we get after that stuff, the more people are going to be accepting of what we do.

[00:26:51] Liz: Absolutely. I love that you're putting the business first here, because there are so many questions that people have in consideration. How do you answer when people wonder how much are renewables worth? What's the holistic path forward for that to flourish?

[00:27:08] Derek: Yes, those are difficult questions. I don't have fully all those answers. Let me just give you a snippet of a study that University of Buffalo did on the impact of our Niagara Falls waste-to-energy plan. It's roughly 800,000 tons a year of waste-to-energy plant. That's a major steam host to a bunch of industry around it, and also a destination for some of New York City's residentially collected waste. Their study showed a spinoff effect from that asset that was three to four times what our tipping fees were.

So if you said, "Hey, the waste industry on average, or that plant on average was $50 to $60 a ton." Just do the math. Three to four times on an economic spinoff effect? Those are substantial numbers that are meaningful when you talk about a circular economy. If you take that and just move it around the geography and say, "This is what we can bring to the table and it's waste-renewable." Well, there are different people who are proponents of that and there are people who are dead-set against it.

But the reality is 60% of waste is biogenic. That means it's from nature. The other 30 to 40% is anthro, manmade. Humankind made. In Europe that biogenic piece is definitely classified as a higher value. That energy is more meaningful and it's rewarded in the marketplace for that. We're seeing that here now. We're seeing more and more of that. Our renewable energy credits in the markets where we have a good size position. The value of those are increasing. Why? Because other entities are recognizing the value of what we do.

[00:29:18] Liz: That's great. I always love when I read articles from you or you and I chat, and you really say the investment is worth it, that you will see the payoff. I love that you and Covanta are living that.

[00:29:32] Derek: It's not necessarily always easy as you know. I think everybody in the waste industry has a lot of similar issues so it doesn't matter what you operate. As an industry, we've got to attack best foot forward. Say what's really possible, what can be done and we can't always just say, "No." We've got to say, "Okay, we've got an EJ concern. Environmental justice concern." We can't turn our back on that. We've got to look at that and say, "What can we do to change and embrace so that there's a more equitable distribution of managing what we as humans produce?" We produce waste. Economic activity produces waste, just living produces waste. That needs a home, so we've got to figure it out.

[00:30:26] Liz: Definitely. I know we've covered a lot today, Derek and I want to get to questions, but first, what do you feel really are the most important takeaways that we've talked about today?

[00:30:38] Derek: I think my passionate plea everybody is don't dismiss waste to energy. I think a lot of folks in the US have said, "Well, that's expensive. I need a cheaper for--" Expensive really depends on how much you can get out of it. If I've got a waste energy plant that can last 60 years or longer, is it really expensive from a lifecycle basis? No, not really. How about the spinoff economic impacts of that? Is that expensive? No, not really. We've got to think a lot longer and that's, and I realize that, at times I'm a shortsighted as anybody, but on this environmental standpoint, we've got to be thinking long-term because it really, really matters from a generational standpoint. These decisions today are going to impact others, 30, 40, 100 years from now.

That's probably my biggest item. I think from a policy standpoint, we as an industry, we've got to embrace that hierarchy, and push, and it can't be, "Just let's make as much money as possible." It's got to be like, "How do we do this in the right fashion, and still satisfy our shareholder investors and be a progressive society at the same time?" Those are difficult balances, I recognize that, but we all have hard decisions to make, and we've got to go do them.

[00:32:07] Liz: Right. Well, this has been amazing. Let me jump to some questions because quite a few are coming in and I know you can share your knowledge here too.

[00:32:16] Derek: I hope there's no hard ones.

[00:32:17] Liz: Let's test this. Okay, try this one. What do you believe would be the best method to convert waste to energy?

[00:32:28] Derek: Well, I think the best method today is really direct steam sales. When we thermally treat waste, when we combust waste, it's in a boiler, so we're heating water, making steam, and the most efficient use of that steam is direct use into a nearby industry, or thermal grid. That's the most efficient, you have the least amount of energy losses, and [unintelligible 00:33:01] you go.

In a perfect world, I'd love to see more of that, but not all of our plants are situated to like an [unintelligible 00:33:11]plant, which has a lot of industry around it. That's a perfect setup. Our Indianapolis plant, that's a perfect setup. But not every plant is set up like that. We have plants that are in densely urban environments, and there's no natural steam host other than individual homes. By the way, our Dublin Plan, ultimately, we're going to have a steam offtake that that will provide hot water to nearby at a residential. That's pretty cool, but if we're going to go to an electron, how do I get that electron into the community that is right there?

I think that that's something that we've missed, because we've entered into these long-term PPA, Power Purchase Agreements that were available at one time, it goes into the grid, and it loses the spectrum of being local. People become dispassionate about it and they're like, "Oh, I don't really see a benefit of that. All the produce energy, where is it?" I would much rather have that energy flowing into the municipality that I'm working with than taking the bulk of the waste from in a form of circular economy just on that scale. That would be fantastic.

[00:34:26] Liz: Here's a good one. If you were leading the entire charge, what would you suggest as the first step to kickstart efforts in the US, and then the second step?

[00:34:36] Derek: Okay. Well, I did mention policy. I think you need an overarching guidestone that legislators, leaders, embrace. You have to have the right policy framework, and at that point, I think it becomes- I really love what the university of Buffalo did on that economic study. I think for people to really get after what the true impact of what we do, if we could do that in every low locality and calculate the spin-off effects with a great amount of accuracy. I think people start getting a lot more comfortable about building waste energy plants as a piece of their overall waste management infrastructure. It doesn't need to be the everything of it. I think those are a couple of components.

[00:35:35] Liz: Those are great. Here's one, well, actually two questions, and you talked a lot about perception and these really addressed that. One is, environmental justice advocates who argue against the UTE, can you tell us about these misconceptions and how they could be addressed?

[00:35:52] Derek: Well, the only way you can address them is to get into dialogue. We've had some pretty good dialogue with certain folks who have been against what we do, thermal treatment, but they really don't offer up an alternative that is a stronger way of dealing with waste because we embrace the hierarchy. Zero waste. Reduce reuse. Let's go. That's all good. We're not going to fight you, we want that. In fact, we'd probably want to participate in more of that, but I think dialogue and science and some of it is we keep retreading old data and saying, "This is gospel", and the reality is we're in dialogue with community leaders all the time.

We're trying to get some of these folks to sit down with us and have a real dialogue at a plant, see what we have, talk to employees, talk about their concerns and we'll tell them ours, but the only way to come out of this is real dialogue and not just point fingers. I'm proud of what our positioning has been in this area. I think we've had some very thoughtful leaders at Covanta over the years. We were one of the first companies to come out with an EJ policy. I mean, nobody talked about an EJ policy back in the late 2000. We had one.

We're not running from the issue by any stretch of the imagination, and at times I get mad about this, because we want the dialogue and we want to work to make it better, but don't say we're the worst thing, because at one to 3% of an emission profile within a geography we're far from being the only contributor. Let's get at it.

[00:37:44] Liz: Absolutely. I think what you're saying makes absolute sense, and it leads into our next question. A lot of people in our Q&A here and across the industry are concerned about EJ, but I mean, to your point, if you bring the community together and in addition it creates opportunities, you're creating jobs and other benefits. Can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:38:06] Derek: Although there's no question, that goes to the study that I talked about before the spinoff effects. Look, I think what our industry offers it's very technical jobs for folks. These are good-paying jobs. If you're a control room operator at Covanta, or shift supervisor, or any one of the other jobs at the plant, you're running technology and these are skilled positions, and I'm happy to offer upskill positions to local communities. We want our employment to be local. The more local it can be, fantastic.

I mean, I think just this week we came out with a sponsorship of HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We want to get the diversity, and we're in urban zones. A lot of it, our populations that don't look like me, a 55-year-old, white male. We want to diversify our worker population base, and we want to support that. Again, we've got to find ways to get into the communities and to attract more local people into what we do. I think we probably, as an industry, could have done a better job. I'm talking about waste to energy, but I'm also talking about the waste management industry as a whole. Because I've been in plenty of parts of the Northeast where there's an aggregation of our activities as a whole, and it has an impact.

[00:39:48] Liz: It definitely has an impact and communication is key, and you've said that. Do you think communication and education are part of overcoming this negative perception of ways to energy in our industry?

[00:40:01] Derek: I think as a society, we can not speak about science. If we're just going to go to rhetoric or emotion without having a appropriate balance of science, I don't think that that's a healthy spot for anybody. This is not a flat earth society. We've got to embrace science and look to it to help us drive the other aspects of our decision tree. If we don't do that, it doesn't matter what you do, I think you'll end up in a bad spot. That's medical, you name it. We can go down the list.

[00:40:46] Liz: Absolutely. Well, Derek, this has been amazing. That's it for questions. That's all we have time for, even though we have quite a few more. Maybe you and I can talk offline about those and share those in another way with folks.

[00:41:00] Derek: Great. I really appreciate the opportunity, Liz. Thank you very much.

[00:41:04] Liz: A big thanks to you, Derek. It's such a thoughtful discussion and much more to come from that. Thanks everyone for your time and for listening and for your questions. Derek gave us a lot to think about, so looking forward to continuing the conversation. Bye everyone. Thanks again, and see you all soon.

[00:41:22] Derek: Thank you.

[00:41:23] Liz: Thank you for listening. It would mean the world if you would take a moment to rate or review this podcast, and if you share it with us on one of our social networks, we are giving out some fun Nothing Wasted podcast swag. Just tag us, and see what you get. Thanks so much.

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