se, endeavouring to achieve its mission of reducing the number of people without access to a toilet and adequate sanitation from 2.4 billion worldwide to zero, whilst treading on the environment as lightly as possible. The brand, which was founded by Griffiths, Danny Alexander and Jehan Ratnatunga, has donated 50 per cent of its profits since launching in 2012, helping over 400,000 people worldwide gain access to toilets and adequate sanitation in the developing world.  Inside Retail: Let’s start with the why. What progress has Who Gives A Crap made towards its mission since being founded in 2012? Simon Griffiths: Why we exist is the sanitation problem, but how we get there is by trying to tread as lightly as we can. By continuing to invest in alternative substrates like bamboo and recycled materials, which had relatively flat growth in all the markets they were in before we came along. We’ve been able to push the uptake of sustainable substrates and leave trees in the ground – which we think is fundamentally important to improving the world. We’ve got a long way to go. We’re proud we’ve been able to donate over $13 million towards achieving our mission through the 50 per cent profit model, but that’s a small splash in the bucket to change the trajectory of global access to sanitation.  IR: What does achieving the Who Gives A Crap goal look like? SG: To make that possible, you have to be the same size as Kimberly Clark, doing many tens of billions of dollars of revenue a year. And take the donations from the several millions of dollars up into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, or even the billions of dollars to put a significant dent in that problem. That’s the goal and how we’re going about it from a sustainability point of view. Then focusing on how we can continue to optimise all the other parts of our business. IR: How does Who Gives A Crap approach continually improving its operations to become more sustainable? SG:  There’s been a lot of trial by error — curiosity, inquisitiveness, running the numbers and checking what we call picking up the rocks to see what’s under them. IR: What trade secrets are you sharing in a bid to “uncrap” the planet? SG: You have to pick up all the rocks and see what’s under there. Now and again, you’ll find a worm that you’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, let’s see what this worm does.’ What happens next is that curiosity. This is important when you’re running any business, particularly when you’re trying to successfully do it in a way that’s more positive for the world.  It’s the backbone of how we do it. IR: What changes have you made to the business, from first picking up the rocks? SG: We’ve been on a real journey with this. Initially, we started with one Asian manufacturing based out of China, and over time we’ve looked at the environmental footprint of that. There were a lot of benefits in moving our production facilities closer to our customers, particularly in the UK and the US. We’ve onshored part of our manufacturing into the US and part of our manufacturing in the UK and we’re continuing the process of how to optimise that over time. Australia’s more challenging because the sector is much smaller, and we weren’t able to find a solution where we could have local raw material going into our product.  Because the country is so sparsely populated, sending products on a truck from the East Coast of Australia to the West Coast of Australia, is the equivalent of sending something about 40,000 kilometres on a ship. In that instance, it’s much much better to be shipping product into Western Australia from overseas than it is to be trucking it from the East Coast, around the country. That’s how we’ve looked at it.  The summary on Australia is we’re still trying to find the optimal solution.  We don’t want to put a ‘made in Australia’ stamp on a product and let consumers believe it’s better for the environment when our carbon footprint would be bigger than what it is, manufacturing the way we are today. IR: How are companies diminishing consumer trust with unsubstantiated claims and getting away with it? In some cases unintentionally greenwashing consumers by not “picking up the rocks.” SG: I can give you two clear examples, in the UK there’s a consumer watchdog called Which?. They recently tested bamboo products in the marketplace for bamboo content and found that 60 per cent of the brands they tested didn’t have 100 per cent bamboo in them, which was the claim being made. In one instance there was 4 per cent bamboo inside a product that claimed to be 100 per cent bamboo. Now consumers have less trust in the bamboo category, a problem that could’ve easily been overcome if companies were engaging in what we call surveillance testing – running their own testing at least every quarter, which is what we do. We don’t just rely on FSC certifications and agreements that we have in place with our producers. Another, more pervasive is that a product ‘made in Australia’ is perceived or implied to be more sustainable. It’s important to ask with ‘made in Australia’ products — where is the material coming from? And is there a doubling up of the transport footprint?  Some companies aren’t transparent about that. They don’t want customers to know what their supply chain looks like. That starts to make it much more opaque to understand the broader implications of that purchase. IR: Why are you not just welcoming, but encouraging competitors to copy what you do at Who Gives A Crap? SG: Greenwashing is common and unfortunately there isn’t great legislation or regulation to prevent it. We’re seeing some unsubstantiated claims going out into the market, negatively impacting consumer trust. We want people to know when they see a claim they can rely on it being true and correct. It helps the whole sector to get stronger and better over time.  A report by Canstar Blue last year found that more than half of consumers had come across false or misleading claims relating to sustainability. We’ve been sharpening our blade on being a sustainability-led company for many years now and have built up a lot of knowledge. That’s the rationale for it. The bigger picture is we want to make the world a better place. And we can do that in the categories we play in — toilet paper, kitchen towels, tissues and sponges. There are many categories we’re not going to get into ourselves. We’d love to see other people, entrepreneurs and companies, making those categories better for the planet, ideally through making them more sustainable. IR: What impact do you perceive the upcoming Senate inquiry into greenwashing will have on retail? SG: It’ll be positive. Hopefully, much tighter control on what can be said to reduce the potential for greenwashing will come out of it. There are a lot of challenges to this, because often what a consumer thinks is best for the environment, isn’t what science says.  Science can tell a slightly different story to perhaps what is ultimately the right choice, there’s a lot of nuance to it. A great example of this is what’s often considered the gold standard for measuring part of a product’s sustainability, with a lifecycle assessment (LCA).  That’s cradle to grave, from its production to when it’s disposed of. If you run an LCA on a shopping bag, it will tell you every time that a shopping bag would be better off being plastic than paper. The LCA, unfortunately, ignores that plastic will live on in the environment for 1000-odd years versus a paper bag that could be recycled and used again. IR: How is Who Gives A Crap changing operations? SG: We’ve now got electric vehicles delivering in parts of Melbourne and Sydney, and are working on how to roll that out further. In the UK 20 per cent of our orders are delivered with electric vehicles. We’re looking at how to expand this to the rest of the country and constantly thinking about improvements we can make to do better over time. Using achieving net zero emissions by 2030 as the target we’re shooting for.  Prioritising exploring where we can continue to reduce and optimise our carbon footprint, before thinking about how to effectively offset the rest.