Innovating for Sustainability with Michael Klepacz of Natural Materials Unlimited

Kim Allchurch Flick: Welcome everyone. I’m Kim Allchurch Flick. I am the founder of Mighty Measure, formerly Mighty Epiphyte Consulting, and my company is a B Corp, A People Plus Planet first verified and benefit corporations for good certified company. And I love to talk with founders and people who are interested in making the world a better place through their business and the way they live life.

Today we have Michael Klepacz of Natural Materials Unlimited and he, on the website, he also has a book you can download called Hemp, the Future of Sustainable Industry. And it’s such a wonderful time to be here with Michael, who I’ve known for a couple of years, never met in person because Michael is speaking to us from Poland.

So Michael, I would love to. Bring you in and say what interests do you have in, in speaking to people about what you do and your journey and your values to create your company? 

Michael Klepacz: It started a really long time ago. I used to be an aircraft mechanic. And what actually got me shifted into sustainability was my own health, so I blew out my back when I was 20 in the Air Force working on airplanes.

And I gained a bunch of weight because I wasn’t as active as I was when I was an aircraft mechanic. But I, but then I started eating really well. ’cause you get paid pretty decent in the Air Force and you don’t have to buy food when you’re young, the young one, you get food for free there.

And so I just changed my food choices and I got back into good shape and I ended up moving back home. I gained a bunch of weight and. I moved to Poland for a while, which is where I am now. And I lost a bunch of weight. Wow. I’m eating pretty much the same. What’s the deal? I’d never really traveled abroad before, and when I moved back home, I gained a bunch of weight.

Like this doesn’t make any sense. So I started looking into it and I have a background in project management from the Toyota Corporation. And so I started looking into why is my food making me fat? And then I fell down the rabbit hole of pesticides and herbicides and chemicals that are messing with our bodies and messing with the planet.

And then it just became like a longevity mission. But in order to do that, then things needed to be sustainable, right? So I’m one of these like non climate change sustainability people, to get that Pandora’s box open right away. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh goodness. 

Michael Klepacz: Yeah. Yeah, I know. Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Non climate change sustainability people.

Michael Klepacz: Yeah.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Can you define that for us a little bit more? 

Michael Klepacz: I think in general, people like to latch onto things that they mildly understand, which I refuse to do. Like I’m not a climate scientist. I almost became a geophysicist at one point, but that more had more to do with whether than whether or not a certain molecule does or does not belong in mass in our atmosphere.

And like I said earlier, I got into sustainability because of longevity. And climate change in general has become politicized and debatable. There are so many people saying it’s true. So many people saying it’s untrue. And I like to focus on things that I can measure and things that are very factual.

And I could just rattle off a billion of them. Acidification of the oceans, dead zones and Gulfs of Rivers, microplastics, 90 million tons of polyester clothing being not recycled and just put in dumps every year. Cancer clusters, there are just, I could talk for hours about all of these things that are not climate change, that if fixed would fix climate change, including increasing our longevity. So that’s, those are the things that I like to to focus on the real concrete stuff, not the politicized boogeyman. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s interesting you bring that up too. And there was a, I think it was February 14th, ’cause Valentine’s Day referenced a New York Times article about how recycling is really broken.

And one of the things they brought up in that is. Fast fashion ending up in landfills all around the world to the point where those countries are saying, no, we’re not your dumping ground anymore. Yeah. So it’s interesting you bring that up because recycling in this country is still a bit of a panacea in the minds of some.

But this article, it’s really complicated. This before it, it’s been like 20 years of not working well. And this article really brought that up where the holes are in recycling, but also where the hope might be and where the optimism can be as an industry really recognizes itself and changes.

But how we define things really matters. 

Michael Klepacz: When I first moved to Poland, they didn’t, well, Warsaw in general the Warsaw metro area, they did, they weren’t even, they didn’t even have a composting program. So actually their laws were made in such a way that technically you could get.

Food scraps from everybody in all of their condos. ’cause there’s no apartments here. Everyone has a condo, but there’s also hardly any houses here. Anyways. However, because of the way the law was written, if you were collecting the food scraps of a business person, they would have to issue a receipt for their food scraps.

And so finally some common sense things have changed and we have just like Spain and just like other developed European countries, we have a metal bin, a paper bin, a glass bin, a food bin. So 

Kim Allchurch Flick: it’s fascinating. I think another thing, a rabbit hole we could go down at some point in time is differences between countries and how countries respond to things.

So how with this journey you had through the Air Force and that background of everything, how did you journey into creating your company? And what have been the steps along the way? 

Michael Klepacz: That one is also like a bit of a strange story. So during this whole like eco-friendly rabbit hole that I went down, I ended up buying the website, StopMonsanto.org and like all this stuff.

And I was too chicken shit. Too scared to publish the website, but at least I owned the domain for a while. And I had quit smoking cigarettes and I’m sure that you know many people who’ve quit smoking after about month 11, they become pretty evangelical about everyone not smoking. So I was freshly into the evangelical stage and I was trying to get my dad to quit smoking.

And my buddy worked at a local head shop that family friend owned, and, I said, Joe, I said, my dad’s never gonna quit smoking if he’s not gonna. And because it is like before American cigarettes and like all this stuff how can we even make my dad like a healthier smoker, right? Because, like at the time it was all about longevity for me, quality of life.

So he gives me like the best cigarette tubes, organic tobacco, this, that, and the other thing. And this wax string called hemp wick. And I’m like, what are we gonna do with this hemp wick? He’s you just, you’re supposed to light it and then you can light your cigarette or whatever with the hemp wick.

And I’m like, that’s dumb. My dad’s never gonna go for that. Anyway, that night I ended up inventing like a hemp dispenser to make it more convenient for my dad to use and. That’s the stepping stone that took me from sustainable agriculture and project management into inventing stuff and kind of becoming actually a business owner.

And so I had finished a program at UCLA for entrepreneurship. And that invention is what got me accepted to the program. A year later I got accepted to a business school in Poland and I started renting a farm here to do like organic agriculture while I was in business school here doing my bachelor’s and my master’s.

And then it became clear to me that I needed more money to get the farm off the ground and we had so many extra buildings. So I thought why not start a side hustle basically in one of the buildings and then the side hustle be, became the primary business.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Wow, that’s fascinating. And along the way what values were you creating this from and what did you learn and if anything changed, how have your values changed in this process?

Michael Klepacz: I would say my values haven’t changed at all. I said to myself so there’s this design philosophy called permaculture. So permaculture, the design philosophy, permanent culture or permanent agriculture, nobody can agree to what’s what? And Bill Molson’s dead. So he can’t say what it is. But anyhow so I was like, what if like the principles of permaculture and the principles of Burning Man had a baby. And it became a business. And so it turns out that all other people have these ideas and they usually become a B Corp.

And so that’s how, that’s honestly that was my thinking. Like Burning Man is very leave no trace, radical self inclusion and all this other stuff. And Permaculture is use everything, waste, nothing. I’m very much boiling down the two of them. So that’s how this country, that’s how this company was.

That was, those were the seeds if Permaculture and Burning Man had a baby that started a business. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. And what is, 

what have those seeds grown into? 

Michael Klepacz: So much random stuff. Literally random things. We we started off making hemp wick because I knew companies in America who wanted wax string and at the time, we had no idea when the US would legalize hemp again. Like we knew that everyone felt like it was inevitable, but no one knew where the tipping point was gonna be. Sure, who would’ve thought it’d be 2018? But in the meantime, there were lot, there’s lots of hemp in Europe. And so we grew the hemp, hemp grows all over Europe.

There’s spinning meals here still that survived that, that make great yarn and lots of beeswax. And so we started doing that. I landed a pretty good client and I just said to them I’ve been working in the hemp industry for a year, deeply within Europe. What else? What else would you want?

And I’m like, well, can you do a vegan friendly guitar strap? And I’m like, why not? I played guitar. I know what I loved and hated about a guitar strap. And that was basically what we did. I just went to the store and looked at other guitar straps to see what guitar straps looks like now.

Because I was 16 when I played guitar straps. I was, you know, 20, this was 10 years later maybe guitar straps had evolved. And then, so we did that project. And then it’s like, well, what else do you want? We ended up making, hemp silk robes for some ultimate fighter gig kind of thing.

Wow. Like one of those, like boxer robes. We’ve done like a lot of dog stuff, like obviously like rope chew toys and things like that. Because the yarns that we use for making the wax yarn for the hemp wick is very specific. And if it falls out of like calibration, you could say so.

The yarn is supposed to be 1.2 grams per meter, and if it’s 1.1 or 1.3, then we can’t really use it, especially if it’s less than that because then it’s like too thin or it’s too thick, it just doesn’t give the result that we want. So we just set it aside and then when we have enough of it, we spin it into rope and we use that rope to make rope leashes or chew toys.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, fantastic. So are those parameters for the hemp, is that for clothing or for ropes to hold weight? What are the parameters you spoke of? 

Michael Klepacz: The per the parameters have to do with the thickness. So like most people say oh yeah, give me a one millimeter yarn, or a two millimeter yarn, or something like that.

But this number that I mentioned is called Tex, TEX and it’s 1200 grams per kilometer. Yeah. So ours is 200 x sixt, which means. Six, 200 gram yarns, well threads spun together into a yarn. So little yarn lesson for kilometer. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I’m just imagining someone outside on a very straight road, which is rare in European countries and measuring a kilometer of rope.

But it’s fascinating. And in your search for the guitar strap and other things, what have you been replacing? What materials?

Michael Klepacz: Mostly polyester. Polyester. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s what I thought. 

Michael Klepacz: Yeah. Polyester. Polyester is our that’s our thing. I’m just like with the climate change thing, I’m not completely anti polyester.

I’m practical, my seatbelt’s made from polyester. And I hope that it continues to be for the foreseeable future until we can find something that’s better. Because I wouldn’t wanna wear a hemp seatbelt. I’ve had many vintage cars with original seat belts and they were made of polyester, and there’s a reason why.

But that being said, something like, handles for bags or exercising straps or leashes for dogs or dog collars or just, you can you name it. It doesn’t need to be made out of polyester. Like polyester is 5 cents a meter, and hemp is a dollar a meter, $2, a dollar 50 a meter, depending on width, like plastic.

It’s cheap, petroleum’s cheap, and the scale’s huge. If you looked at like the pie chart of global production of textiles, you would see polyester. That’s the big one. It’s like 75%. It’s probably less, but, and then you have cotton, so you have like polyester and other synthetics, and then you have cotton, and then you have a really, really super teeny tiny bit, which is ba fibers, which is hemp.

Which linen nettle, Romy, Cecil jute, Canna. Those are the big ones. Yeah. And but that used to be the whole pie, like before the 1920s everything was ba fibers or cotton or wool or leather. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. 

Michael Klepacz: That’s it. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And that’s only a hundred years, so that, yeah. So that’s a big shift over a period of time.

Huge. And so how do you see the role you play in future shift?

Michael Klepacz: For a long time I really wanted to get, like into fashion, but I’m not a billionaire, right? And the, by fashion, I mean textile mail, like the Chinese in general, hemp started their millennia ago. They’ve never had it be illegal. They have billions of dollars invested in the textile space, and they’re not slowing down, for me it’s like all of these microplastics, like most of the microplastics are from clothing in our world, right? And like, all these microplastics are, because, it’s not being replaced by natural materials, and I want to be part of that movement.

We’re a small team of people, I don’t have major investors. We’re all self-funded, I had to take out a bank loan after COVID, I’m fighting the good fight as fast as I can, but I, yeah, I’ve always wanted to become basically like the vision was always like, I wanna be the apple of eco, like I wanna make and develop mm-hmm. And sell eco-friendly products that just, that just don’t make the world worse. Like it’s impossible to make something like completely plastic free, nobody would buy a dog collar. You would have to get people to just stop using dog leashes and dog collars and actually train your animals before you’re gonna make it completely sustainable. Like it’s impossible to make it completely nonsynthetic. Like you can have it 95% natural, but you’re still gonna have a plastic buckle people oil.

Why wouldn’t you wanna use a metal buckle then? Like instead of plastic, well pick your poison. They’re both in theory, not great, like metal’s, infinitely recyclable. But what about when you take your dog swimming in the ocean and the springs rust? You know what I mean? That doesn’t happen with plastic.

What about the fact that it weighs five times more than plastic? What about the fact that the plastic that you use is highly recyclable? So you just have to pick your battles. That’s where I’m at. I’m always just like, which battle do I wanna fight? Right now the battle is microplastics.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Thank you. And it sounds like there are a few caveats, but there are ways we as consumers can think. So what, for the audience listening, what are some tidbits or ideas or just a thought process where they could start to think about a future purchase and say, these are the considerations for me to switch to, like something that you’re creating or one of those materials you’re talking about.

How do we even remember to prompt ourselves to say, I could buy this item. 

How do I consider buying it made of something from your company or another company that’s doing the same thing? How do we start remembering to do that and then start to make it more of a new habit to consider replacing what we can with the materials?

Michael Klepacz: If you seek out the alternatives, they’re there. The difficulty is getting people to wanna fork it out. One of my most favorite, least favorite stories is what I call like the dollar difference. And I’ll just quickly explain the story.

‘Cause this could be maybe a mind shift person, it could shift someone who knows. So I often have brands come to me ’cause I’m a factory. I make stuff like I don’t do brands. I supply brands. Brands are branding and marketing and sales and all the things that I’m just, they’re not my superpower, inventing and problem solving, that’s my superpower. And so one of my clients brought me a job that said, Hey, we want to redo this pillow. So it’s like a meditation pillow full of buckwheat shells.

So it’s, 35 centimeters around about 15 centimeters tall. I apologize for the metrics everybody, but that’s how my brain works now.

And he shows it to me. I get one in person ’cause I refuse to work on anything until I physically see what they’re working with right now. I look them up on Amazon, I see their ratings. It’s not great. It’s like three and a half stars and I don’t wanna make something that’s gonna be less than four stars.

Like I want the goal’s of a five star product, if it’s not a five star, it’s not gonna sell. You know what I mean? And a four star is usually a four star. ’cause they’re mad about something that wasn’t my fault, and so it’s still a five star product, it’s just a four star experience, anyhow, so I said to him like, Hey, how much are you buying this for? And he said I’m buying it from China for $5 a piece. I said, okay, well here’s, it’s got a weak zipper. It’s got really thin outer liner and it, and the shells aren’t the best. What problems have you had? Well, I had one time we had returns because bugs were crawling out of the inside of the pillows.

Like they weren’t sanitized properly. 

Oh, okay. Sure. So you’re paying $5 a piece for like non-certified, non cleaned internal shells. And by the time, so your landing price the price that you actually paid by the time it’s in your warehouse is about $11. Am I right? And he’s like, yeah, 10 and a half.

Okay, fine. Because by the time you pay for import and tax and shipping and this and that, that’s just how it is. It’s the landing price. So I said, look, I said I can make this for you with a heavier zipper. Heavier fabric, linen on the outside, organic cotton on the inside, certified shell and will definitely be paying, playing, paying people like 10, $12 an hour to make it, which is good money in Poland.

And you know, what happened? He never called back? 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Why? 

Michael Klepacz: It was a dollar difference? I don’t know. 

Never called back. But that kind of stuff happens all the time. So the consumer, the young ones, right? So the young consumers, right? I’m 40, you have someone who’s 20, I have t-shirts and jeans and boots that are 20.

I’ll have this same leather jacket probably my entire life, you know what I mean? Like you just condition the leather every year. You take care of it, you have it forever, and so younger people, and I was in that boat too, like I’m the captain, planet generation.

You know what I mean? And just to bash climate change one more time. Imagine if every episode of Cabinet Planet was about the same thing. It wasn’t. It was. Every episode was about a different problem, so I’m trying to captain Planet this problem and so a broad variety of solutions need to come in.

But either way, so they’re mad about it, but it’s like they don’t wanna spend a dollar more for the organic cotton version or the linen version, or the whatever version. Everybody just wants to buy from Temu or Ali Express or whatever. It’s just for the people who have tight wallets, what you gotta do sometimes, like prices are going up, people are price sensitive.

So that’s a rough one. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And we’re speaking in the end of 2025, so that has become increasingly variable in, in some countries as well. 

Michael Klepacz: Sure. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That, it’s fascinating to think about it because every, everybody has a pain point in terms of price and there is a statistic that I quote a lot when I’m speaking with people.

It comes from Nielsen and they’ve done a lot of studies, but the main one was, I think it was 2014, it said that two thirds of consumers globally, and I’m paraphrasing, are willing to pay more for products and services when they know a company has good values or a company is sustainable. And that’s more the word they used.

And then in a more recent study, they studied just millennials, and that percentage for the same characteristics is 73%. So that’s where my optimism lies. Yeah. That’s my, where my optimism lies, is that people are looking, they’re seeking and they’re willing to pay more. So something can be at the same price that might even increase the percentage of people, but that are willing to pay more.

And the big difficulty is how do we make the connection for the consumer to the supplier that the values are there. And 

Michael Klepacz: yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And that’s one of the important things as well. And then you touch on something where it’s the dollar difference. So for some of those people, they might maybe be willing to pay more, but there’s always an upward limit to pay more.

They may be willing to pay 25 cents more, but would they pay $2 more? And because every, everyone has their parameters for personal reasons and their life experience, right? So it’s super interesting to think about that. And yet, how do you let B2B, B2C, business to business, business to consumer people a, know that your company is out there, your products are out there.

And find out what are they willing, what are they willing to pay? 

Michael Klepacz: I mean for me, I do a lot of market in general. So let’s just say a company comes to me and they say, we want you to make this. What I’ll usually do first is I will go online ’cause I have to, I’m in Poland, and Poland is its own special little bubble.

So you gotta go online and you gotta use VPNs and you gotta use private browsers and all this other stuff so that you get like fresh data, not biased location data. And. You say, okay, let’s see the high, mid and low tier products within this niche, right? Let’s see who the best manufacturers are.

Let’s see who the worst manufacturers are. Maybe I’ll buy two or three of the worst stuff. Maybe I’ll buy one or two of the best stuff. We’ll bring it in. We will pick it apart. We’ll look at it and we’ll imagine to ourselves, okay, if, let’s just say our goal is we think the consumer based on what’s available would be willing to pay $50 for this due dad.

And if we can produce this gizmo for $10 or less, it’s fine. So that’s usually like a it’s a times five. Like physical goods, usually like electronics and other things are different margins and I’m not familiar with those markets. But yeah, for the most part, if you are buying something for 50 bucks, it probably costs around $10 worth of materials and labor to produce for the most part.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Okay. 

Michael Klepacz: Unless of course it’s super inflated, like a Louis Vuitton bag or whatever,

Kim Allchurch Flick: yeah. And before you mentioned that something made of polyester might be 25 cents or something you make of hemp is a yeah. So material costs come into play here too. And what are you finding with those other materials from the cotton and some of those other ones?

Where can you find reasonable materials? 

Michael Klepacz: Go to, you can go to, for example, you can go to Joanne Fabrics, not like I’m plugging Joanne Fabrics, but just to get an idea, right? And you can, if you ever buy a Hobby lobby or Joanne fabrics, like even if you don’t eat it, just go in one day just to poke around and you can see the price differences.

So there, they’re talking about the price per yard, right? In general, when I’m buying, it’s linear meters, not square meters, right? Or square yards or whatever. So I’m gonna assume that that’s also true in America. I don’t actually know if they’re doing linear yards or not. So basically what that means is the loom, the weaving machine that made that fabric is only so wide, right?

It’s not infinitely wide and it’s not super narrow. And so at a narrow point you have webbing and that, and then the wider you get it somewhere becomes, it turns from webbing into fabric. And so if you look and you say, okay, well per linear yard, this is a dollar, this is $2, this is $5, this is $10, this is $20.

And it’s the same thing with natural materials, right? So you might have, and I’m just going to say a number, some polyester fabric is a as a dollar, but then you also have some crazy like high-end sports fabrics that are super technological or whatever, and they’re as expensive as linen or more.

And then you have, your price for wool, right? So like, when you’re talking about wool for knitting, you’re talking about kilos. So you’re not really talking about yards. You’re talking about weight. So weight, yeah. Like a beanie might be 110 grams and you know that you’re gonna be spending, 30 euros for Marino wool, or 25 euros, or 20 euros for regular wool, or 15 euros for, 

I don’t know, 

22 euros for hemp, or cotton is 10, or some polyester is five.

I’m just throwing out numbers. Some of them are real, some of them are not. I’m not sure what the synthetic numbers are ’cause I don’t pay attention. But yeah it’s, it’s all over the place, right? And you go to someone, I just. Shameless plugged hemp beanie naturally died.

With acorns. It’s what makes black like something like this, like I said, 110 grams I did not mean, this is just you’re at my home desk, so I have prototypes everywhere. But like a polyester hat, like you can go on to you can go on to Alibaba and look up a polyester beanie.

They might be 50 cents or a dollar, and of course by the time you get it, it’s $2, $3, whatever. And yeah, you might have to buy 3000 of ’em to get it at a dollar, sure. But something like this, which is 10 times the price, and it’s like, well, I really wanted to buy something for a dollar and sell it for 20, and then you make $19, or you could buy something for 10 and sell it for 40, and then you’re making $30.

But then someone’s less apt or less whatever. There’s less people who are willing to buy like a $40 linen beanie or a wool beanie than they are to buy some unbreathable, super sweaty, gross polyester hat. Yeah.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh I understand. What are you seeing in terms of shifts in people’s mindsets though? And I’m, I think I heard a couple of things about I think it was Billie Eilish in her tours and selling swag, and how she and her mother were very much considering what’s eco-friendly, what’s sustainable, and not going down the road of selling polyester based cheap swag t-shirts.

And so that seems like a mindset shift that one person can shift a whole lot of other people’s thinking. Through fandom and through following. What does it take to have some of those mind shifts and have somebody else thinking, I really want that hemp beanie. I’m willing to pay $10 for it versus the,

I think 

the one for a dollar.

Michael Klepacz: I think that’s a good example. Like we we, I often like the hemp beanies are a great thing for, let’s just say stoner bands, so if you’re like a stoner jam band or whatever, and you have a merch table, I often work in the cannabis space, and so you can go into any dispensary in any state, anywhere in the world and in general, they’re probably gonna have some swag.

They’re gonna have a beanie, they’re gonna have a hat, they’re gonna have a t-shirt and a hundred percent chance. Not a hundred percent chance ’cause people like me exist, but a ve a small chance that there actually something there that’s made of hemp. Like they’re selling pro cannabis t-shirts made of cotton.

They’re selling pro cannabis t-shirts made of polyester, and it’s really hypocritical. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, that’s so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so interesting. It also sounds like the, your consumer base B2B or B2C, it could be really broad too, and if people really thought about it, they could have the products you’re talking about as an option.

Michael Klepacz: Yeah, and the thing is too is that like this huge price difference is totally all about scale. You know what I mean? Sure. Like at one point in history, like there were something like 2 million acres of hemp being grown, and if there were still 2 million acres of hemp. The yarns and the fabrics made of hemp would not be $20 a yard, $25 a kilo because there’d be scale.

So it’s just like you just have to vote with your wallet and once you can get it there, it’s like there, there are investors who are like, we want to invest into hemp. But, and like it’s an emerging market, I should say. It’s a re-emerging market, right? Yes. It’s a market that’s regrowing, the hemp industry here used was almost dead.

Like at one point when I moved here, there was like 2000 acres of hemp left in Poland and now it’s bounced. It started to bounce back up. But like we are nowhere near our global maximum of hemp production again. And when you look at things like , the Horizon grants from the European Union, like any of these grant systems that are really about sustainability and stuff, or I have just tons of books.

Like I, I bought this book about sustainable fashion and I saw it online. I just wanted it, I needed to have it. And I was so excited to see what this person was gonna talk about. And like hemp was mentioned once, like bass fibers in general I’m more of a bass fiber person these days than a hemp person.

Like it really depends on where you are. Like the closer to the equator you are, the less you should be growing hemp. There’s a sweet spot for hemp. And there’s other bass fibers that are available for different climates. But either way, like this is cellulose, at the end of the day, as boring as it is, paper cellulose clothing is cellulose.

All of our microplastics were synthetic replacements for cellulose. And so we need to be able to produce as much good cellulose, real cellulose as possible, and there’s a lot of interest in keeping things the way they are. Like that’s how cannabis became illegal in the first place was paper barons who owned forests and newspapers.

Imagine being the guy who owned the forest and the newspapers and the paper mill. So you own the forest, the paper mill, and the company that needed the paper all at the same time. And then hemp is threatening you, therefore cannabis is bad. And that’s not even a conspiracy.

That’s historical fact. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. 

Michael Klepacz: Read about it in my book that you can download for free. 

I don’t really talk about it in there, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: But it’s true. And we’ve seen that with other things like. When cars started emerging and being affordable for families.

The tire industry and the vehicle industry fought the railroads because there could have been more mass transportation via rail and they said no and Right. That’s some historical fact as well. It’s really interesting to think about, but you also queued up a word which I want to quiz you about a little bit in terms of definition and that word is sustainable and sustainability.

And we talked about one of my experiences where there were some volunteers at at a place where I went to, and they were talking about sustainable palm oil, and they b and Sweeten had been given the information to, to talk with people. And as I talked about it, I said, well, what does that mean? To you.

And they said, well, Palm is something that grows. So you cut it, it’s like grass, it grows back so you don’t have to cut it down and replant it. And I said, yep. And where is it from? And usually from like Malaysian, Borneo, other areas like this. And he said, so what was cut down for the palm to be planted?

And it turns out they, they didn’t know. But when we think about it, many, many, many hectares of forest habitat. So when that happens, what does the world word sustainability mean? And 

Michael Klepacz: Right. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s something if we can hit on some kind of a common narrative and definition, because sustainability, especially in the B Corps world, is a word that has.

Been bantered so much that the actual definition is somewhat dubious and sometimes we don’t know what other people are saying. So if palm oil is sustainable Yeah. But still has a negative impact on the planet how do we talk about what might have a positive impact on the planet, still be a product and Right.

What does sustainability mean there? And so what are your thoughts on sustainability and sustainable? 

Michael Klepacz: I’m pretty black and white about it. So I rattled some feathers. So last year I gave a speech for the Project Management Institute and I rattled a bunch of feathers talking about this exact topic.

So sustainability has a lot of different definitions to a lot of different people. But for me I believe in this idea that we’re on a finite planet. And that this biosphere has this ability to regenerate. And that is because of the seasons and the water cycles and the nitrogen cycles and all this other stuff.

But if we are extracting soil and trees and plants and oil and whatever faster, then it can regenerate, then we are unsustainable. And so if you look at I don’t remember the name of the project, but there’s basically, there’s a project that talks about it. It ranks every country in planets.

And how many planets we would need if everybody lived like that country. And like the bottom on the rung is like Yemen. And the top of the rung is like the Saudi Arabia or UAE or something like that. And somewhere in the middle is the United States where if everybody in the whole world, ’cause because that’s the goal right now, right?

Like the goal of quote unquote developing countries and all this and that is to not be developing or to not be a third world or whatever. And to have all the stuff and to consume all the things. And that’s the point. If everybody lived like Americans, we would need six planets. You know what I mean?

And so like when I read Michael Pollan’s article talking about 10 calories of energy goes into producing one calorie of food that’s not sustainable. You know what I mean? And people think that we’re just gonna invent our way through some scientific miracle into using. Into being able to still use 600% of our planet’s resources, basically.

And so I’m always just asking myself very plainly, does this lead to 0.99999 and it’s worth of resources, which is less than a hundred percent or not black and white. That’s it. That’s sustainability. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s fascinating. 

Michael Klepacz: Super simple. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s fascinating. 

Michael Klepacz: It’s that easy. It’s really freaking hard.

It makes people very angry. But that’s it. It either uses more than one plant’s worth of resources a year and contributes to it, or it doesn’t, or, there are so many I’m gonna get on a high horse now. There are so much low hanging fruit that we can do as a society. So we are smart, we know how to do nature better than nature.

You know what I mean? Compost teas and natural fertilizers and just all this other stuff. You know what I mean? I think one of the most radical things you can do is have a garden.

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that. 

Michael Klepacz: There’s, it’s, it are things that we could be doing tomorrow just if I were king of the world, and I could just wave a magic wand and snap my fingers and a couple of things were changed, it would be a different place because it doesn’t have to be worse.

Everyone’s oh, you just want us to go live in mud huts and loincloths or whatever. It’s by the way, cob houses, sand, clay and grass are awesome houses. There are people who pay a ton of money for artisans to come and build them a cob house.

So, yeah, that’s a mud hut. It’s just a fancy mansion, and it’s like in Poland, we still have thatched roofs. I have a buddy with thatched roofs and it’s pretty crazy to look at,

Kim Allchurch Flick: they’re very thick. It’s, it is incredible. Oh yeah. 

Michael Klepacz: They’re wild. They’re wild. But it’s like the house, the houses that are made of natural stuff are so cozy when they’re made.

Right, and so that’s, to get back to my point, is that we can do nature better than nature. And I don’t know if it’s a real phrase or not, but don’t they say that you can’t fight nature. Isn’t that a thing? You can’t fight nature. So then why the hell do we still try? Like why can’t we just finally start trying to enhance nature?

If you think about it, like there’s no such thing as perpetual energy, but gravity and sunshine and nature is as damn close as we can get to it. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And it reminds me of a book. Robin Wall Kimer, who is a, she’s our First Nations author, has written several things, but her premise comes down to don’t extract, be reciprocal.

And we can live as one planet in parity because if what we take, we also give back. So we don’t need 1.2 to 2.5 to six planets. 

Per person lifestyle

and that wisdom, that goes back, it, it’s current in her books that goes back hundreds of years to how people lived. And so I thought it started thinking because it hadn’t occurred to me.

What about the laws of. Don’t extract, just don’t do it. And and in a conversation about, we’re remodeling a kitchen and I was trying to find the most eco-friendly countertop, and this has taken like weeks worth of research to do. And somebody said why don’t you just go with the most equal friendly thing there is granite?

And I said, no, because it’s extractive. Because I had learned from Robin ER’s book, what is the price you pay to extract something? And often when we extract, we don’t put things back. When somebody’s mining, sure. They don’t go back and fill the holes necessarily. So it’s interesting how it, it’s a thought process at a time.

And sometimes it’s just a word like extraction that can, it sent me down a new thought process to think how do I consider, and if something’s extractive, would I do it or not? And it. It’s intriguing that we also have minds that can start to think along those ways as well. If we train ourselves.

The other thing we’re trying to do in our household is reduce plastic. I would love to get it to zero with food, unless you grow yourself or go to a farmer’s markets, it’s almost impossible to get to zero. But there are ways to make decisions. So that is, packaging is a big part of a decision and instead of wanting a thing, I look at a category and say, I’m only gonna buy a thing if it’s not wrapped in plastic.

Or if the packaging is not good. And it’s a process of elimination that now it’s more like a treasure hunt. It’s not that I want the thing so much, it’s that I want something that will suffice, that is also considerate in terms of. I have been able to reduce, and this is me also being optimistic because of people like you who are innovators, finding ways to do something differently that works.

Laundry and cleaning that’s plant-based and the packaging is zero. Plastic has taken that category of life, laundry and cleaning to zero plastic so we can do it. And the parody of price was actually pretty interesting. It did. It has not cost a lot more to do that. So I think what that word sustainable is.

The next question is how do you view the materials in general, but what is your, what gives you optimism for adoption To reach more people and have them go through the thought process to say, I’m gonna support Michael’s company. I’m gonna try and shift things one at a time. Whether it’s cleaning supplies, food, apparel, house housewares.

What are some things that I don’t know, slowly encourage people to shift to what you’re doing. 

Michael Klepacz: People usually, so there’s a lot of co cognitive dissonance, like people just wanna stay focused on what they know, what they love, people wanna be comfortable or whatever.

This is a silly example and it doesn’t really answer your question, but it’s just like, do you know how crazy everyone’s going to think even with your crowd, that I make my own deodorant. I’ve been making my own deodorant for like 15 years, and everybody could make their own deodorant and it works better.

I was on a vacation and I ran out of deodorant. I planned poorly and I ran out and I had to buy the commercial stuff. And my wife said to me, you smell terrible today. And I was like, yeah, it’s this store-bought deodorant , it’s garbage. And and so she was like I always thought you were weird ’cause you made your own deodorant.

It just works better, you know what I mean? Smelling bad is just bacteria, and deodorant generally prevents the bacteria from growing. And it’s like, there’s little silly things like that. We, people don’t even make their own soap anymore. You know what I mean? And I don’t know, I just I just wanna see people do something small to do anything.

Go to a farmer’s market, make some soap, do something, right? It’s I often think if there were some EMP or some massive solar flare or whatever, there’s no more YouTube, just everyone’s , everyone born after my, not everybody of course, but people born after the 1980s or just.

Gonna be in a tough spot, like all the only digitals, the digital generation’s gonna be really screwed. You have to at some point take responsibility for your existence and want to somehow relieve the pressure that you’re putting on the planet. I know a ton of people who are super smart, who are like, well, I’m just not gonna have kids because I don’t want to add to the problem.

And I’m like, but you’re the kind of person who needs to be having kids. Like people who think like you should be having kids, not people who think the opposite, having six, no offense to people who have six 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And the future of good brains and innovators and people who are learning and thinking along those ways.

I, I love that. And I think that is part of it, and I love. Seeing people that have kids and bringing them up to play in dirt and to have wonder about birds and to look at a tree. Yeah. And see how magnificent it is. Things of that nature. 

Michael Klepacz: Yeah. I was teaching my daughter how to identify buckeye trees.

So Buckeye trees and horse chestnuts are nearly identical except for the little bud the terminal leaf bud on the end of their branch during, once the leaves fall off, unless, you know, oh, I have to look for a smooth light gray bark. And these leaf buds you’re not gonna know that it’s a horse chestnut, but I talked, but she wanted to find the little Buckeyes, and she’s like, daddy, where can I find the Buckeyes? I’m like, just look for the trees that are this color. There are many trees that are that color, but that narrows it down. And then when you walk up to it, look at the branch and then look down and you’ll find them.

And speaking of not being extractive. Like you try, I’m such a girl dad now, but you try telling a five-year-old girl not to pick every flower. I try. I’m like, you’re not allowed to pick the last flower. Those flowers have worked really hard to grow and they still need to, have food for the bees.

So they still need to make seeds. So there’s flowers next year, like you can take one flower of each color. That’s it. And if there’s only two left, you’re not allowed to have it. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s so sweet. That’s so sweet. I know. And what kind of clothing is she wearing? What are the materials that her clothes are made of?

Michael Klepacz: She wears a lot of, we’re like you for seasons. So she wears a lot of wool. A lot of wool.

She also wears, cotton and linen, but she does not wear synthetics. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah.

Michael Klepacz: The only synthetics she has because I can’t say, do not, ’cause I would be lying, would be like pajamas that the grandparents in America bought her or whatever.

Because wearing polyester pajamas to bed is normal in America, and then you like sweat in it. And there’s studies that talk about what happens when you wear synthetics and it just leeches chemicals back into your skin and all that stuff. And we wonder people are saying things like, well, our testosterone’s down and our sperm con’s down and this is down.

And like the generation that was just born has a life’s expectancy less than ours. Why is that? How is it with all of these magical medicines and everything? Well, we’re just making our own more and more toxic. Because we want stuff. So our desire for stuff outweighs our desire to have a good, long life.

Like the thing that should make people really angry that can makes me angry is like our meat suits hashtag Supernatural. That’s where I got the word supernaturals TV show. I love that show. They called it meat suits. Anyway so these meat suits could, in theory, live to be 120 and could you imagine like walking around like a 70-year-old or an 80-year-old does at 110?

Do you know what I mean? Look at Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke is like 99, a hundred and i’m happy he’s still around, but I wouldn’t wanna be stuck at that meat suit, and but just imagine that, imagine being how Dick Van Dyke is now at 119, that’s 20 years later.

You know what I mean? And we can’t because we’ve created this world that’s killing us slowly. It’s a soft kill. We have all of these chemicals, mostly, it’s mostly chemicals, and it’s all chemicals that, I mean, prior to the 1930s, we had mercury and other crazy things that we would do that would poison us, that we didn’t know about.

But we’re still poisoning ourselves, thanks a lot indeed. Dow Chemicals and Bayer, indeed, Monsanto and everybody for the Forever Chemicals. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love this conversation. I wanna end it up on optimism and a little story. 

Michael Klepacz: And I’m so angry, Kim. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I know I went to Costa Rica for the first time in, gosh, about 30 years.

And I didn’t realize the last time I was there that it had been deforested mostly for agriculture and industry. Down to about 25% of rainforest in a country that, except for the beach, it’s usually close to 99% of rainforest. If no humans were there and was just there staying in ecological only, and more than one person who didn’t know each other said that in the areas where we were staying, there’s such a move to regenerate agriculture and we stayed an ecolog that was growing their own food, with small exception for some organic, or emphasis on organic that they bought from a neighboring farm.

The cows were there and both places where we stayed had been pasture.

Now forest on several hectares growing their own food and to a person, they said that Costa Rica is now at 50%. So in that short period of time, like three decades before, they have regenerated from 20, less than 25% forest to 50.

They also said there is still one of their biggest crops to export is pineapple. The people that fed us and grew their own pineapple and they also had small batch coffee and cocoa, but they grew everything else, they said they would never eat the commercial pineapple because of the pesticides. But they would eat the organic and how much differently it tastes. And the optimism part is a how quickly things rebound from less than 25% forest, which is 75 plus percent deforestation to. 50 in just a few short years. It’s like one early adult lifetime to make that difference, to have people be cognizant about it, to see what regenerative ag is one of the other things I’m really optimistic about.

And that means biodiversity. It means understanding soil. There’s a ranch, Carmen Ranch in the Willows, Oregon, who a woman is trying to really restore tall grass prairie, and she understands what hoofed animals do and earn the first regenerative ranching certificate all on a hundred percent grass fed beef.

And the thing is, we can choose to eat the beef or not. She sells beef, but yet knowing what she’s doing is really doing some climate change. So these are the things that make me optimistic are the innovators like you and the people who understand how things work. And that’s a pivotal point, I think is.

We’ve gotta understand the how and why, and if we don’t know, at least learning along the way, and going back to the Robin Wal Kimer discussion about how to not extract and how to give back and how to be reciprocal so we can eat, but we can also feed the planet . So what are your thoughts about that?

And then tell me if you could have anyone living or dead to dinner to have a continuing discussion, who would it be? 

Michael Klepacz: Okay. Yeah, I would love to see, I would love to see us reciprocal more. I imagine one of these days I’m going to be involved in a real estate project where I get to do some consulting.

I’d like to put my consulting hat and we’re going to design a whole condo. That doesn’t use drinking water to flush the toilet. ’cause that’s pretty insane. Like I on my LinkedIn, anyone can follow me on LinkedIn. I have crazy Wednesdays where I always rant about just a sentence or two of crazy things.

And so yeah, using our drinking water to flush our own shit is pretty crazy, especially when we all have roofs and the surface area of those roofs is definitely big enough to handle the amount of toilet water volume that we need. It just makes sense. Or like what if every apartment had a chute for their food, instead of being ground up and putting back under the water or whatever.

Like what if all of our cooking gas came from the biogas created from our building? You know what I mean? We generate so much weight, do you know the phrase, too poor to have a pot to piss in or piss pour? You would say, you know what they, you know where that comes from? Yes. Okay. Since most people don’t, back in the day before we invented the system to produce ammonia that we have now, which is nitrogen for agriculture. You used to sell your piss, so everyone had a pot to piss in, and you would sell it for agriculture. And so if you were too poor to have a pot to piss in, you didn’t even have enough money to buy the bucket to piss in it to sell your own urine.

True story. Anyway. George Washington, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: your dinner companion, what would the conversation be? 

Michael Klepacz: Yeah I wanna talk to George Washington about hemp because there’s a lot of people who talk about the founding fathers and their love of hemp. I wanna know how true it is. There’s just, there’s so many like anecdotal things like, oh, it was they made it mandatory to grow hemp and all the founding fathers had there’s like a story there’s a book called The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Hare.

It’s all about hemp and cannabis. And he says in the book that apparently back in the day when Thomas Jefferson, was the ambassador to France, he hired mercenaries from Turkey to invade China to steal hemp seeds. And that, because it used to be punishable by death to export hemp seeds from China because that was their military industrial complex thing.

Like you grew the hemp fiber for the sails and the rope and the clothing, and then the woody bits you burned for gunpowder, and so the hemp was really important for them. And so apparently there was some. Spy stuff, espionage stuff going on with America and China to steal their genetics to start the hemp industry here.

And I just wanna know how true it’s, I wanna, I would love to have that conversation. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah. That’s fascinating considering that companies like Monsanto have strict rules and patent processes on their seeds and they control 

Michael Klepacz: it’s genetic pollution and it should be labeled as terrorism. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes.

On that note , first of all, I love our conversations and I see how I would actually love to have you back to continue it because we’re talking about a large topic and details about it. Thank you in summary for some of the steps that you’ve helped provide to how we can rethink things, a purchase at a time or a thought process at a time and to make things better.

And everyone listening, thank you so much. And what we’ll put in the show notes is the website, which is Natural Materials Unlimited is the company, NaturalMaterials.eu, is the website and you can download Hemp The Future of Sustainable Industry.

And that is fascinating. I’ve read that and we appreciate it very much. This is Kim Allchurch Flick of Mighty Measure saying Goodbye, and we appreciate you. 

Michael Klepacz: Thank you very much. Buy it nice or buy it twice.