Moonshots & Slingshots: Business Case for Sustainability | Trent Romer & Lisa Foster | TEDxBoston

Bag Your Old Business Model: How Plastic Bag Reform Provides a New Model for Profitability and Sustainability An anti-plastic bag activist and a third-generation plastic manufacturer team up to present plastic bag reform as model for change to empower impact at scale. Lisa D. Foster began advocating for reusable bags in 2005 as a purpose-driven entrepreneur. Her early efforts set in motion a wave of consumer sentiment in favor of reusable bags, igniting a decade of government action and the adoption of reusable bags as a primary shopping choice for 60% of Americas. Trent Romer was running a plastic bag manufacturing company in 2017 that had been in the family for three generations when he realized that consumer sentiment against plastic was an existential business threat. He decided the best way forward was to bring plastic manufacturing into the circular economy and update his business to meet the challenges ahead. Lisa and Trent both figured out how to align their business interests with sustainability to make a positive impact for their stakeholders and the environment, and both found extraordinary results from that formula. Their different stories of moving entrenched stakeholders in a sustainable direction reveal a common mindset and blueprint for actions that make a difference. After two decades of co-owning a custom manufacturing business, Trent Romer joined LongueVue Capital as an operating partner focused on sustainability.

Trent’s sustainability journey includes environmental outreach efforts, conferences, hands-on implementation and educational experiences through Harvard University, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Training Corps and Yale University.

These collective experiences led Trent to writing his first book called Finding Sustainability released by John Hunt Publishing in June 2021.
Trent graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in economics. He went on to study at the University at Albany to get a master’s in education and then a master’s in business administration.

He is currently consulting companies to help them start and/or further develop their ESG program. He is writing a second book on sustainability to be published in 2023.

Lisa D. Foster, Ph. D., ACC is a business coach whose mission is to help managers become better leaders by using emotional intelligence to create the conditions for high performance. In 2005, she founded 1 Bag at a Time, Inc., a first-to-market reusable grocery bag company. A former high-school English teacher, she became a pioneer in the fight against single-use plastic and a top supplier of reusable bags in the US. She sold her business in 2017. As a coach, she shares her expertise in leadership and emotional intelligence with her clients and inspires others to make a difference in their communities and organizations. In addition to coaching, Lisa speaks, leads workshops, and writes about emotional intelligence, leadership, and storytelling. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx