Speaker: Amy Larkin, Co-Founder/Director, PR3: The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse
How (and why) are you taking action on climate change solutions in, for, and with your community?
Amy Larkin: I co-founded PR3, the Global Alliance to Advance Reuse, to help design the unthrowaway world. We are succeeding. PR3 along with a panel of 80+ diverse representatives from across the spectrum, multinationals, informal waste workers, health, science, and social justice advocates, small reuse entrepreneurs are all designing the standards that will undergird the burgeoning reuse industry. We see that most investors and companies want to replace plastic with other single use materials. That's because the external costs and damages of the single use economy are paid by others. Cities pay for waste management, fishing and tourism industries. Bear the costs of degraded oceans. Families, insurers, governments pay the health care costs by extraction, and manufacturing and plastic packaging contributes to climate change and its catastrophic costs. System change takes time and hard work. It is tilling frozen soil. For 6 years, PR3 and our partners are diligently, tenaciously, and rigorously working on creating the new systems that are needed if we are to experience a future of bounty and beauty. Surely that is worth the effort.
Describe a moment when you felt the real-world impact of your work in climate solutions.
Amy Larkin: In a campaign of radical collaboration, while I was director of Greenpeace Solutions, we collaborated with 400 multinationals in the consumer goods industry and asked them all to eliminate HFCs from their cooling systems. And to our absolute surprise they said yes. And so out of this, it led directly to the inclusion of HFCs into the Montreal Protocol, which is anticipated to save half a degree of global warming. Our work at PR3 is also based on radical collaboration. And we believe that moving away from the single use economy will have an equally profound effect. On climate change and by environmental degradation.
Who or what inspires/inspired you to care about climate change and climate solutions?
Amy Larkin: 30 years ago while I was working at Greenpeace, a meteorologist explained climate change to us. I lost my mind. I hold art and nature sacred and obviously climate change destroys both of them as well as everything and everyone we love. I dedicated the rest of my life to fighting climate change, and here I am doing that.
