The conservation of Cape Foulweather Headland on the Oregon coast, an initiative supported by the Biden-Harris administration through NOAA. © Shutterstock

Richard Spinrad is a pivotal figure spanning politics and academia in the US. As Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the veteran oceanographer has the demanding task of guiding policy around maritime sustainability. Michael Marshall speaks with him about challenges and opportunities

“An environmental intelligence agency” is how Richard “Rick” Spinrad describes it. He is referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US government agency (of which he is Administrator) that has responsibility for the oceans. The NOAA produces data and predictions around climate, atmospheric conditions, ocean health and protection for fisheries and marine animals – “environmental intelligence” that helps fuel sustainable economic development. One of the biggest challenges that Spinrad and NOAA face is helping to improve the way the oceans are managed so that marine resources are used sustainably. Spinrad’s goal is to maximise NOAA’s impact by ensuring its environmental intelligence reaches those who need it most, so they can respond to the challenge.

Spinrad has spent more than 40 years studying the ocean. He obtained a PhD in 1982 from Oregon State University, his early research tracking how light behaves as it travels deeper into the sea and encounters clouds of drifting sediment. Subsequently, he moved between academia and government. He held roles at universities including Oregon State and was NOAA Chief Scientist under President Obama. On Earth Day 2021, President Biden nominated Spinrad as Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator of NOAA, putting him in charge of the agency.

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Spinrad arrived at NOAA at a time when public awareness of the environmental crisis, including threats to the oceans, had become greater than ever before. “We are seeing much savvier consumers,” he says. “There’s an increased change in consumer behaviour around being green and trying to figure out products that are not doing harm to the environment.”

Dr Richard Spinrad, Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator. Courtesy of NOAA

Alongside the shift in consumer behaviour is the intensifying political pressure to solve environmental problems. “There is a generational push right now,” says Spinrad. “The youth of the world are much better organised and much more active, in a very constructive manner, than I have ever seen in my career.” Activists including Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate have driven climate change to the top of the agenda, pressuring governments to act.

On top of this, the impacts of climate change are increasingly evident. “What’s happening in the world is accelerating,” says Spinrad. “Whereas 10, 20 years ago, people tended to talk about what’s going to happen at the end of the century, now we’re starting to see impacts that are imminent and affecting market values and people’s attitudes today.”

In the United States, the result has been two landmark pieces of legislation passed by the Biden-Harris Administration: 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). NOAA has key roles to play in implementing both. The BIL, formally the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is a sweeping statute providing $1.2 trillion funding, $550 billion of which is new. The aim is to improve infrastructure in projects related to highways, railways, broadband access, clean water and electricity grids. The IRA is similarly ambitious. One focus is to support and boost domestic clean-energy production. Alongside such priorities, IRA provides much of the funding to support BIL programmes.

NOAAS Thomas Jefferson, an ocean survey vessel, at work. Courtesy of NOAA

Between them, BIL and IRA are providing more than $6 billion for NOAA. This will primarily support three initiatives: better climate data, preparing coastal communities for climate change and better stewardship of fisheries. Ongoing projects include the restoration of coral reefs at Maui Nui in Hawai’i, constructing a living shoreline on Ossabaw Island in Georgia and the conservation of Cape Foulweather Headland on the Oregon coast.

It is a big advance, but Spinrad emphasises that it is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. “We are already seeing roughly a 10:1 proposal pressure,” he says. “The demand far exceeds the supply with respect to resourcing.” That means the money to support ocean conservation can’t just come from the government: it also has to come from the private sector.

“There is an investment opportunity,” says Spinrad. To encourage that, in July 2022 Spinrad hired Sarah Kapnick as NOAA’s new Chief Scientist. Kapnick has a background in climate science: she has studied the impacts of climate change on snowfall, the North American monsoon and tropical cyclones. She also has extensive experience of economics and finance: she has been an investment-banking analyst for Goldman Sachs, and her previous role was Managing Director at JP Morgan, with responsibility for climate and sustainability strategy for asset and wealth management.

“Science has shown how important healthy oceans are,” says Kapnick. “We know that disruption to the oceans has knock-on effects for society, including business. It affects ports, it affects supply chains. As a result, investors are increasingly interested in trying to figure out how to invest in these things.” The scale of investment needed to protect the oceans requires “an all-hands-on-deck approach,” adds Kapnick. “In financial terms, there are different layers of financing to achieve all these goals.”

Dr Sarah Kapnick

It will sometimes require blended finance, in which governments, the private sector and philanthropists come together.

Philanthropists are stepping up. “We are seeing some extraordinary developments,” says Spinrad, referring to “major players” who are getting into ocean conservation. Some, such as Julie Packard, daughter of one of the founders of Hewlett Packard, have supported ocean sustainability initiatives for decades. Others, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are more recent entrants. In 2020 Bezos founded the Bezos Earth Fund, which will spend $10 billion on protected areas by 2030. In July 2022 it announced $50 million of awards for marine conservation. This included $30 million to create a network of marine-protected areas off the coasts of Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Panama – linking biological hotspots over an area of 500,000 square kilometres.

Perhaps the most dramatic recent example of environmental philanthropy was the decision by Yvon Chouinard, founder of outdoor-clothing company Patagonia, to give away the company. In 2022, Chouinard announced that Patagonia would radically change its structure. It will continue to operate as a for-profit company, but its profits will go to a unique trust and non-profit organisation that will support environmental efforts, including ocean conservation. “Chouinard’s action with Patagonia would, I suspect, result in a lot of people opening their eyes to the vast proportions of what is needed for climate action,” says Spinrad.

The restoration of coral reefs in Maui Nui, Hawai’i, an initiative supported by the Biden- Harris Administration through NOAA. © Renee Capozzola

The challenge for NOAA, as Spinrad sees it, is to get more people and companies involved in ocean sustainability – and that, he says, means working with organisations whose priorities are, on the face of it, different to one another. “The burden, if you will, is on the scientific community to get out more,” says Spinrad. NOAA has started a series of engagements and partnerships with diverse groups including the public-health community, the medical community, real-estate companies and the insurance industry. “We are learning to communicate in their terms, rather than trying to force them to speak in ours,” he says.

For example, earlier in 2023 NOAA announced a project to help support the climate needs of insurance companies. In partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF), NOAA will create the Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC), focused on modelling catastrophic impacts and risk assessment of climate change. The idea is to create decision-making tools for the insurance industry, enabling them to factor in risks from climate change, such as sea-level rise and increasingly intense tropical storms, when making financial decisions. NOAA is also conducting research to predict how sea-level rise will impact housing markets.

Such tools will help enable insurance companies to avoid investing in companies and infrastructure set to be threatened by climate change, or at least to charge higher premiums, thereby discouraging the building of non- resilient infrastructure. Working with such a varied group of players represents an ongoing challenge for NOAA. “We have more homework to do to understand how to better communicate these issues,” says Spinrad.

Read more: Enric Sala on working to protect vital areas of the ocean

“One of our pillars is maintaining scientific integrity and having people trust us,” says Kapnick. “We don’t tell you exactly what you have to do; we provide the facts that allow the decision-makers to make those decisions.” At a time when climate change and other environmental issues are reshaping the world in which we all live, being able to forecast, based on scientific evidence, is crucial. “At NOAA, prediction is at the heart of what we do,” says Spinrad. After that, it’s up to us all.

Find out more: noaa.gov

This article first appeared in the Deutsche Bank Supplement of the Autumn/Winter 2023/2024 issue of LUX magazine

YKK’s NATULON® Mechanically Recycled Zip is made with recycled yarn and post-consumer plastic bottles

The amount of zips produced by YKK each year far outstrips the number of people currently on Earth. So how can a company mass producing and growing at such scale stay true to values of circularity and sustainability? LUX speaks to Jim Reed, CEO of YKK America, about why he believes cost and speed need not be barriers to a sustainable business

LUX: Can you explain the cycle of goodness and how it relates to the YKK philosophy?
Jim Reed: The cycle of goodness – meaning that no one prospers without rendering benefit to others – was developed by our founder, Tadao Yoshida. One of his inspirations was Andrew Carnegie, a late 19th century early 20th century steel tycoon, who had a philosophy about a business’ obligation to society. As a young man, Tadao Yoshida got hold of a translated copy of Andrew Carnegie’s biography. He was inspired by Andrew Carnegie’s words and he decided that was the philosophy that should drive us. He was always entrepreneurial, but it wasn’t about how wealthy he could get, it was about how he could help. He wanted to contribute to society.

YKK is used by hundreds of major clothing companies including The North Face, Patagonia, Levi’s and Nike

LUX: Your president, Hiroaki Ōtani, said the company’s immediate vision is for ‘better products at a lower cost and greater speed, more sustainably’. How do you plan to chase growth while also racing towards carbon neutrality?
JR: President Ōtani is talking about getting the right materials for the right products to the right customer at the right time. If you think about those concepts, you’re not overproducing. We’re producing over 10 billion zippers in a year, but our objective is that, at the end of the day, every zipper has a perfect spot and nothing gets wasted. On top of that, he talks about better products, lower cost, greater speed, and more sustainability. If we can be more efficient, and some of the obstacles to sustainability – cost – can be reduced, then a sustainable product can match the price of the less sustainable cheaper product and you can match that substitution more easily.

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President Ōtani reorganised our company in a number of different ways five years ago. He created what we call the Technology Innovation Centre. He took all the smartest people in our company and put them in the Technology Innovation Centre, where they were working on pure research, not product development. Innovation and technology have always been an important part of YKK, and particularly now with climate change issues and sustainability, we all need to be making significant changes.

Beyond zips, YKK produces a variety of other products such as snaps, buttons, buckles, and textiles for apparel and industrial use

LUX: How far is the company’s adoption of renewables impacting carbon emissions?
JR: We’re doing very well in that area. We reported at the end of the last fiscal year that we had reduced scope 1 and scope 2 CO2 emissions by almost 47% against our base year. What’s even more significant is that we’re not talking about CO2 emissions per zipper – we’re actually growing our production. Even though our production is increasing, we know our CO2 emissions have to be reduced, and we were able to reduce them significantly. Our 2018 level of CO2 emissions is our base level, by 2030 we’ll cut that in half, and by 2050 we’ll be carbon neutral. Around the world we’re looking at about 32 facilities which are currently using 100% renewable electricity, and very actively working to change the others. That can be a challenge because every facility has a different footprint and has a different source of electricity. But we are continuing to try to find a variety of different mechanisms to employ this.

LUX: What are the pillars for sustainable strategies for textiles packaging and waste management?
JR: For textiles, the main thing is to switch over to recycled thread. We call that NATULON. YKK had been offering to use recycled thread for over 20 years, and we’ve probably had the product for 25 years. Now, the market desires it, and so now we are able to switch over to 100% recycled textile. 26% of our products last year were using it, and that’s going to grow rapidly. We hope that will get up to 41% by next year. We’re working on a complete switchover.

YKK produces more than 3 million kilometers of zips every year

When we talk about waste management, you think about inputs coming into the factory and products coming out, and waste as a by-product of that. You put that waste back into your process. The objective is to get inputs coming into your factory and the only thing that comes out is the product. ECO-DYE technology uses CO2 instead of water to colour the zipper tape. That removes water from the process, which removes the need to take dye out of the water. We also have something called AcroPlating. If you get rid of the need to apply the bad chemicals, then you don’t have to worry about managing the waste on the back end.

Read more: Salomon CEO Franco Fogliato on environmental responsibility in business

LUX: Can you tell us about the partnership between YKK and the Monitor for Circular Fashion? Do you think it could lead to systemic change within the fashion industry?
JR: These partnerships are really important because, just like the UN statement on climate change or the Sustainable Development Goals or the Fashion Charter, all of these statements and actions can really scope the objective to solve the problem. It gives us all targets, and then when we join the Charter, we make promises that we have to stand by. Those are extremely important, because we all need to be speaking the same language and talking about the same objectives. With those statements, the fashion industry can declare to the people of the world that we’re moving in an environmentally-friendly direction and can get the support of their customers, which gives us the inspiration to innovate into that change. Once those goals are clear, then industry can innovate towards it and solve the problem just like we’ve been able to solve any problem when we’re focused on it.

All images courtesy of YKK

Find out more: www.ykkfastening.com/sustainability