Interview with Suzanne Hunt, Generate Upcycle | Biodigesters, Board Positions for Women & the Circular Economy

Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine McLean, Founder and CEO of Dylan Green. And today I have with me Suzanne Hunt. Suzanne is the VP of Policy at Generate Upcycle. Thank you for joining me, Suzanne.

Suzanne: My pleasure.

Catherine: And I believe that you’re up in New York today, up in wine country, one of my favorite products.

Suzanne: I’m based at my family’s farm and winery in the Finger Lakes.

Catherine: Yeah, I think it’s like food, wine, breathing. So can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your current role?

Suzanne: Sure. I’m Suzanne Hunt. I’m vice president for public policy at Generate Upcycle. I had previously been the director of policy for Generate Capital, and then we spun Upcycle out as one of Generate’s platform companies. I don’t know, gosh, time is maybe a year and a half ago. And then I co-own my family’s farm and winery. I run it with my husband and my parents.

Catherine: That’s super cool. I love that, because it also gives you a completely different point of view on all things environmental, I would assume.

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah, it’s also a farm that I grew up on and that’s been in the family for seven generations now. So, yeah, it just gives you a whole different timescale perspective on stewardship.

Catherine: Yeah, yeah, that’s a really good point. And I know you began your career with the Environmental Defense Fund and eventually worked for organizations like XPRIZE, Carbon War Room, and Generate. You’re also the co-owner, as you mentioned, of the Sustainable Vineyard.
Did you always know that you wanted to eventually focus on a circular economy?

Suzanne: I always wanted to work on environmental problems, and I knew from when I was little, little, little that I wanted to get a background in science and bring that into the policy world. I actually never wanted to work on waste, per se. I always wanted to figure out a way to prevent it in the first place. When I was going to college and grad school, environmental science usually meant figuring out how to deal with problems that people had already created versus developing solutions that don’t create problems in the first place. So, I guess in a way, I always intended to work on the circular economy and figuring out how we actually design systems like nature does, where there isn’t waste. So, yeah, I guess in a way I did.

Catherine: Can you talk a bit more about Generate Upcycle’s specific focus areas within the circular economy and just going in a little bit more depth on why you decided to focus on these areas in particular?

Suzanne: Sure. Maybe I should back up for anyone who’s not familiar with our parent company. Generate Capital was started about 10 years ago to basically help finance and build out the sustainable infrastructure needed for the energy transition and to address climate change. So, one of the many areas that they looked at, so in addition to renewable electricity and microgrids and EVs, they were looking at the waste sector and waste to value. One of the first areas they started really rolling their sleeves up and digging into because, again, they’re providing project finance, corporate finance. They’re not venture capital. They’re not financing early stage unproven technologies. They’re scaling up and building out mature technologies. And in the waste to value sector, organic waste recycling was one of those areas where there’s mature technologies, they’re built up, they’re scaled up all over Europe, Scandinavia, other parts of the world, parts of Canada, but just not in the United States for whatever reason. So, organic waste recycling and advanced wastewater technologies were seen as an important growth area where we could be helpful.

Catherine: Yeah. And we were talking a little bit before we started the interview just about the sort of jobs within our industry and a lot of the technology that people seem to gravitate towards, this not necessarily being one that people think about. And so, if you want to do a little sort of pitch or like why this space? I think it would be super helpful for anyone listening.

Suzanne: Yeah. I don’t want to go to a crowded space, right? I don’t want to elbow my way into a space where I’m not needed, right? I want to go to where help is needed and where a really diverse skill set is required. And taking organic waste and diverting it away from landfills where it’s going to rot and produce methane, which is a super potent greenhouse gas, and where we’re going to lose all of the nutrients in that waste forever to the landfill and actually recycling it, recapturing the nutrients, providing a climate friendly fertilizer, as opposed to the conventional fertilizers used today that are fossil fuel derived and terrible for the climate. And then also producing either renewable fuels or renewable heat and power, renewable baseload, essentially, or heat or a fossil gas replacement.

It’s a Swiss army knife kind of a solution that requires we have engineers on staff, we have all these folks that know how to build things and fix things and operate heavy machinery, we have legal experts, we have such a diverse team spread across four different countries and a bunch of different states. And it’s definitely not the shiny, glamorous part of clean tech. But there’s just like such a need for talent, there’s such an opportunity for growth, because it has been sort of one of these areas that people aren’t elbowing their way into. So I would say to people, anyone who’s interested in tackling some of the biggest issues facing humanity, looking at how we develop solutions that don’t lead to epic problems, and how we meet our needs and developing new products and materials so that we don’t end up with an even bigger floating garbage dump in the Pacific, I think the plastic patch is twice the size of Texas right now. I mean, it’s obscene. So we need top talent to figure out how we make much better products that actually become an ingredient for something else at the end of life, instead of going into a landfill or into the ocean. I think there’s been so much focus on renewable energy, which is critical. But some of these other kinds of adjacent sectors haven’t been kind of, they’ve been a bit underinvested in, and there’s just huge potential.

Catherine: Yeah, I totally agree. And you said before, some of the most important climate solutions relate to biology rather than technology. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? And also share about what makes you so excited when it comes to the circular economy?

Suzanne: Yeah, I think a lot of my colleagues, and I love them all dearly. But when I talk about the cleantech community,, there is so much talent and incredible entrepreneurs and inventors and geniuses. I think the majority of folks are really focused on tech solutions, whether it’s software, whether it’s hardware, whether it’s, or it’s innovation in finance, a lot our generates one of generates founders, Jigar Shah, and kind of the infrastructure as a service and all the innovation around how you finance these things, that that’s sort of been the focus. And then we get into a whole community of colleagues working on policy innovation. But I feel like it’s a much smaller community of us that are looking at ecology, biology, biomimicry, how you actually look at and utilize all of nature’s toolkit, essentially, right? We have billions of years of evolution that have figured out how to solve just about every problem you could ever have, whether it’s adhering one substance to another underwater, whether it’s some physical problems, some kind of chemistry, like there’s so many solutions that are already there that we just haven’t figured out how to harness.

And so like, anaerobic digesters are basically giant steel stomachs that use microbes to break down waste a lot faster than you would normally be able to and capture all of the gases that would have been released to the atmosphere, and then repurpose them. And so it’s a combination of technology and steel and all of that kind of infrastructure, and then like understanding the microbes and utilizing them. So yeah, I just think, I just think that biology is sort of under-emphasized and under-appreciated as we approach all of these different systems problems that we have.

Catherine; Yeah, yeah. I would totally agree with you. I mean, it’s definitely something that’s not talked about enough. I want to discuss a little bit of the sort of recent projects that you’ve worked on that generate up cycles, sort of the most recent projects you’ve worked on, or maybe something that you’re super proud of that you’ve been involved with.

Suzanne: So as the policy geek on staff, I tend to work in coalitions of colleagues and trying to get laws passed and state, working on making the implementation of policies more effective. So some of my proudest moments were working with a whole host of different collaborators and colleagues in New York and getting food waste diversion legislation passed and things like that, where or years ago, getting helping get, working with coalitions of groups to get New York’s climate law passed. And then a lot of the work we do is like really just small behind the scenes, like incremental every day keeping your eye on a whole bunch of different balls to make sure that the needs of the folks that are out on the ground operating infrastructure are translated to the policymakers who normally don’t have access to that information or those folks. And so making sure that they, the way that a law is conceived of and the way that it is actually received and implemented and the intention of the policy lineup, which they never do initially. So you always have to do a ton of iterative work to make sure that the system’s working the way it was intended.

Catherine: What are some of the top policy challenges that you’re facing in this space?

Suzanne: Oy. Now we need some wine.

Catherine: You read my mind. I could really have a podcast. It’s like the Green Light with Catherine and a glass of vino. We should call it vino verde, like green wine.

Suzanne: There you go. There we go. A new podcast. No, you’ll definitely get more entertaining content out of me the more wine we speak. So the top policy challenges depend on which geography we’re talking about. If we’re just talking, if we’re talking US versus Canada versus the UK, I mean, right now, I think it’s kind of zooming out at the 30,000 foot view it’s really a very volatile kind of political environment, which means that there’s going to be new governments coming in and potentially changing policy directions pretty dramatically. So that’s concerning because the number one thing as I’m sure a lot of clean tech leaders tell you that we need is predictability. We need stability. We need it when you’re raising huge sums of money from teacher pensions funds and people whose money you really want to take very good care of. Yeah. And you’re trying to build large infrastructure that requires huge amounts of capital.
You need to know that your market isn’t going to disappear and the rug isn’t going to be pulled out from under you in five years or 10 years. You need to have this kind of consistent policy regulatory environment. So I would say sort of just the volatility in our political and policy environment is probably the big meta challenge.

And then kind of at the ground level, one of the biggest challenges I see is that there’s a lot of passion in the conversation about climate solutions. We don’t have enough practitioners, and this is a challenge I would lay out there for cleantech business leaders. We don’t have enough practitioners building relationships with activists and advocates to help them understand what we’re up against when we’re trying to build up the solutions.

And then I would also, I would challenge the activist community to go out and do an internship at a clean tech company, go out and do a sabbatical at a solar company and understand what it’s like to try and develop a solar project. And then bring that back to your advocacy because I think it’s challenging when, because the idea of something and then the implementation are always very different. And I think we just need more understanding within the advocacy community and then the clean tech deployment community.

There’s not enough relationships, there’s not enough dialogue. And then that translates into the policy environment where often these communities are not on the same page and we’re working at cross purposes. So I would also challenge the clean tech community to do a better job of community engagement and engagement with all of these different stakeholder groups.
So I think there’s work to be done all the way around.

Catherine: So I believe you’re a part of several boards, including Bayer and Cornell Agritech. How did you come to be on these boards? And do you have any advice for women looking to join boards who may not feel fully prepared? This is probably one of the number one questions I get from women is how they’re able to find board positions and what they need to do if they’re actually able to secure one.

Suzanne: You know, I was thinking about this question. I’ve never sought a board position before, so I’m maybe not the best person to ask. I did quite a bit of writing many years ago. And when you publish something, you get asked to speak about it. And then you, so I guess like I got quite a bit of visibility at one point in my career through kind of thought leadership through writing. That was a different time. So I guess now in today’s kind of social media environment and kind of business climate, I would just say do the work, work really hard. Like just be, be someone who’s got a lot of substance and then people will seek out your counsel. I don’t think there’s any real strategy other than being a good colleague. Like I love women supporting women. If this is for women, networking with other women, forming women’s circles. And then I always, always want to try to make sure that the boards I’m on have a balance of women and that the women are making sure that things are well balanced, I guess. So I network with others, with other awesome rock stars in your industry and do the work and be a rock star and people will invite you onto a board.

Catherine: Great. Well, thank you so much, Suzanne, for talking to us today. And hopefully this encourages some people to, to get involved in, in your space.