Town Haul Rewind: Eric Hudson, CEO of Preserve

Born out of the want to influence households to live more sustainably, Preserve products are flying off shelves and into homes.

In this Town Haul Rewind, host Amy Koonin Taylor is joined by Preserve CEO Eric Hudson to talk about all things impact: supply chain, community involvement, and COVID-19. With toothbrushes and razors made from potential ocean waste and a recycle back program, Gimme 5, Preserve is an eco-friendly differentiator in the everyday product space.

On how the Preserve team conceptualizes products:

ERIC HUDSON: “The product ideas really come from how we can create something in everybody’s everyday life that can think about materials, think about systems differently, and really ultimately try to impact and reduce the impact of that product in its use and in its disposal and in its creation. So we look at someone’s life and say, “Where are the things that you’re using that are either in your house or out in the world that are single use that can be made more sustainably?” And hopefully that everyone has a need for. For instance, a toothbrush, something that we hope everybody uses every day, or potentially cutlery out in the world, either in takeaways or at a cafeteria, that many, many people or almost everyone in the world reaches a cafeteria out in their life, whether that’s at a fast food restaurant or a retail cafe or at a university or a corporate cafeteria. So we look for those products that everyone has access to, everyone has a need for, and that also are items that we can introduce new systems around sustainability, potentially around reuse, or sourcing recycled materials, and providing a take-back program for when people are done with that product.”

On the Preserve Ocean Plastic Initiative (POPi) product line:

ERIC HUDSON: “We love the POPi program. It’s been in existence since we started in 2018. And in essence, we looked at the ocean health, plastic waste, plastic pollution problem and we said, how can Preserve help? We researched it for a year prior to launch. So it really started in 2017 and realized that Preserve is more geared for prevention versus remediation, sort of two big buckets of how do you stop the plastic pollution problem. Another big bucket is upstream redesign and that certainly needs to happen. And I think a lot of companies are doing that, but as it relates to prevention, we are taking steps with partners to stop the flow of plastics into the ocean. And what’s termed ocean bound plastics is basically one of the key feeders of plastics into the ocean. Other key feeders are that one of the tankers has a spill of a pallet of plastic products. That’s another place, but the primary feed of plastic into the ocean is coming through rivers and coastal communities where plastics are blowing around and finding their way through a river or straight into the ocean from the beach.”

On being net zero by 2030:

ERIC HUDSON: “What this commitment means is, in our business, we are committing to having zero carbon footprint, zero carbon emissions, in our operations throughout our entire supply chain and feed to the market and throughout all of our products’ production. The key difference between climate neutral and net zero I’ll explain in a second, but right now Preserve has already accomplished carbon neutrality, and has been climate neutral certified by an organization called Climate Neutral. So what that simply means is we have looked at all the emissions in 2020, for which we have all of our records, and we have bought carbon credits for every CO2 emission that’s happened in the production and delivery of our products to bring us down to carbon neutrality, or basically compensating for any carbon that we’ve admitted by buying a carbon credit.”

On the one item he doesn’t leave the house without:

ERIC HUDSON: “A reusable water bottle!”

Amy Koonin Taylor is Marketing Content and Media Manager at Rubicon. To stay ahead of Rubicon’s announcements of new partnerships and collaborations around the world, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, or contact us today.