Draft:Amy Larkin

Amy Larkin is an American environmentalist, author, and social entrepreneur. As Solutions Director of Greenpeace USA, Larkin led the collaboration with the Consumer Goods Forum that directly led to the inclusion of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) into the Montreal Protocol and is anticipated to save 0.5C degrees of global warming.

Larkin's 2013 book, Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy examines the connections between the environmental and financial crises and from 2013-2015 was a regular contributor to The Guardian. The book’s seminal concepts are now embraced across economic theory. She served as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Climate Change from 2014-2016.

She is the Co-Founder and Director of PR3 | The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse. PR3 has developed the only global standards to provide the blueprint for the move away from single-use packaging, a huge contributor to both the plastic and climate crises.

PR3 | The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse
PR3 | The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse was founded in 2019 by Amy Larkin and Claudette Juska under the auspices of RESOLVE where Larkin has been a Strategic Partner for over a decade. Both women were working independently with NGOs and multinationals on plastic reduction strategies. The Pew Foundation’s peer-reviewed report, Breaking the Wave identified reuse as both the cheapest and most environmentally positive option for plastic packaging reduction. Larkin and Juska each understood that reuse is not a product, but rather a system. They got together and founded PR3 to create the standards to undergird this system with a seed grant from the Plastic Solutions Fund. The two also understood that before plastic, reuse was the norm. Any new reuse system and its standards had to rely on the learnings and benefit traditional reuse systems.

PR3 is developing a toolkit for the new reuses industry starting with global standards for reusable packaging systems under the newly ANSI-accredited standards development organization, RESOLVE. Standards are widely recognized as tools to promote safety, enable technology to advance and scale, and help businesses to succeed by ensuring customer confidence and identifying best practices.

Studies by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation show that switching from single-use to returnable packaging can significantly reduce GHG emissions by up to 70%, uses 70% less water, and results in a 90% reduction in waste. These benefits are seen in even modest reuse system modeling, but the impact of switching to returnable packaging system over single-use are greatest in scaled systems.

Reuse systems include the production of the reusable container, distribution to vendors, use and return by the customer, collection, washing and sanitization of the container and then redistribution of the container for further use. PR3 has draft standards for each of these points in the system: Collection points, Container design, Digital, Incentives, Container washing, inspection, and packing for distribution, Labeling, and Reverse Logistics. PR3 aims to create a set of standards ensure interoperability and environmental benefit while being mindful and inclusive of traditional systems of reuse already in place around the world.

As part of the ANSI-accredited process, these standards are currently under review by an international Panel representing multinational companies, reuse service providers, manufacturers, human health and toxics experts, resource recovery agents, waste management professionals, environmental justice activists and community advocates, environmental health specialists, and government representatives. The Standards are currently in bi-national development with Canada.

Early Work - Environment
Larkin served as the Director of Greenpeace Solutions from 2005-2012. In this role, Larkin led the partnership with the Consumer Goods Forum to eliminate hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from global refrigeration. In 2011, this collaboration, known as Refrigerants, Naturally, received the Roy Award from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government which honors innovative public-private partnerships.

Her 2013 book Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy joined Amazon's "Best Business and Leadership" and details the effects of the environmental crisis on the global economy. Larkin's clarity and illumination of the external costs of "business-as-usual" are now foundational to the discourse around corporate sustainability. Larkin proposed a three part guide for business which she calls "the Nature Means Business Framework."


 * 1) Pollution can no longer be free.
 * 2) All accounting and investments must consider long-term consequences.
 * 3) Government must support clean investments and disincentivize damaging investments.

Larkin was Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Climate Change from 2014 to 2016.

Early Work - Arts
In her early career, Amy Larkin was an arts producer at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, On The Boards in Seattle, and Fabrica, Benetton’s Communications Research Center in Italy. She also was a pioneer social entrepreneur, co-founding Message!Check Corp., the first company to include NGO logos and messages and donated $1 to the NGO for each check order. Message!Check donated over $10 million to its NGO partners and won the City of Seattle Small Business of the Year Award in 1989.

Publications & Speaking Engagements
Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy

Environmental Debt: Talks at Google

Why companies need to be held to account over their environmental debt

Seven lessons on sustainability from Star Trek

How West's throwaway culture destroys basic freedoms in China

Changing the world: what Motown, Apple have in common

Addicted to cars: why can't New York City break its bad transit habit?

Embrace the bad stuff: turning crisis into business opportunity

Power, love and money: lessons on gender roles from Shakespeare

The sharks and bees: what nature's patterns teach us about sourcing

Steroids and quarterly reports: short-term fixes can screw up the system