"The unlikely journey from pollution to pineapples...”

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi everyone, welcome to the Nonprofit Diaries, where we share the stories that don't make the newsletter. I'm your host, Kimberly Bottom, and our guest this week has a story that's going to inspire you to follow your heart. And it's also going to make you appreciate how those different twists and turns in your journey lead you to exactly where you are meant to be. So Kevin is the co-founder of a relatively new nonprofit, but he is not new to mission-driven work. His conservation efforts have led to meaningful change for the beautiful Guatemalan rivers and coastline and the people who call that home. So he was actually the very first country manager in Guatemala representing Four Ocean, which, for those of you that don't know, is an organization that employs full-time captains and cleanup crews to remove trash from the world's waterways. So after that successful endeavor, Kevin was not done with conservation. Instead, he saw a unique opportunity to turn waste into wearables. So please welcome co-founder and vice president of Keena and Cacao, Kevin Coolow. Kevin. Of course, I appreciate you. Um I think our mutual um acquaintance, Tasha, tagged me in your post that was explaining the nonprofit that you just launched again. It's uh not new new, but the the tax designation, right? The officialness of it is all is all new. And it was such a cool story. Like even just the title of this episode, right? Which is, you know, your journey from pollution to pineapples. Gotta gotta hear about that, right? So I know it didn't start in Guatemala. You actually grew up in Iowa, right? So tell us a bit about that journey.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Sure, sure. I would imagine this journey started back in 2015. I started traveling internationally, started experiencing different cultures. Um, I wouldn't travel I wouldn't travel for the five-star inclusive. I wanted to experience the culture. So I would stay in the middle of towns, be forced to be uncomfortable. Well, I mean being comfortable while being uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

So not knowing maybe the language or the um, yeah, the way that people kind of move about their life. It's it's such a yeah, it's such a great way to travel. You and me share that in common for sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Exactly. And lucky for me, in 2017, I was in Iowa and a Guatemalan happened to be visiting Des Moines, Iowa, visiting a sister that lives in a farm outside of Des Moines. I happened to meet her two weeks, the last two weeks she was in Iowa. And we just happened to, you know, meet and go on a few dates, kept in contact. I was working in real estate and finance in Des Moines at the time. And as I was traveling back and forth to mainly Southeast Asia and coming back to the U.S., I was just being more unhappy the with the way I was living at the time. I was meeting people that were, you know, had less than me and were so happy, and I would go back to the US and be so miserable. Not because I was coming back from a trip. It's just, I don't know, something in something over there just stuck in me. And I knew that my time was winding down in the US. And meeting this Guatemalan, you know, we kept in contact. I ended up quitting my job in March, sold everything, and I was going to move to Thailand with to be with my buddies. And I remember Daniela saying, Come visit me in Guatemala, I'll show you around. So I contacted her and I said, Hey, I'm moving to Thailand, but I'm gonna come to Guatemala and visit you. So I arrived in Guatemala, two suitcases and two laptop bags, and pretty much never left.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

We got married.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Right. Yeah. Sorry, guys. I met a beautiful woman and we got married eight months after I came to Guatemala in June of 2018, and we got married February of 2019.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Outside of a beautiful woman meeting in Guatemala, you also fell in love with Guatemala as it is beautiful, but you did share with me that there was a moment where you noticed something wasn't quite right. You went to get some perspective on that, and it really kind of shook you. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Exactly. So during my time of living in Guatemala, a little over a year, I noticed a common theme of traveling around Guatemala, and it was the lack of twist uh waste management. Everywhere I went, the place was beautiful, but it was just there was trash everywhere. And everyone was just, you know, turning the other way. And especially living in Puerto Barrios on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala, I noticed waves of trash coming ashore. And I asked my wife at the time, I'm like, has anyone ever came to come solve this issue or is the government involved in any way? And she said, no, but it's a dream of ours. And I really took it upon myself to be become a solution, become part of the solution. Uh, and I didn't know how I was going to do that, but I started talking with community leaders, the mayor of Puerto Barrios, uh, planting little seeds, saying, Hey, I'm gonna bring a company to Guatemala to help, you know, solve this issue. What needs to happen on your guys' ends, you know, to help support that? And that happened around March, April of 2019. And the elections were coming up in June of 2019. So we helped support the mayor win, get re-elected. And that next day, well, that happened on a Sunday elections. That next day on Monday in June of 2019, I happened to write Four Ocean a Facebook message stating, hey, I'm an American living in Puerto Barrios. There's this problem. We already have uh, you know, local approval from, you know, the mayor. I've already had conversations, you know, to help support a visit if you guys are interested or expanding operations in Guatemala. What needs to happen? Tuesdays later, I was on a phone call for over an hour and a half with one of their executives from Florida.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

And telling them about my story of how did I end up in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, and you know what I was seeing. And within a month, they came to visit for three days. Two executives from Fore Ocean came to visit, and we showed them around Guatemala City with the recycling industry, but we took them to Puerto Barrios where I was living, so they could see the problem. And it was massive. We took boats onto the ocean facing the coastline, and I was remembering saying it looked like a thin layer of snow on top of the beach. That's how much plastic pollution there was. It was crazy. We went to the beach, and I'm not kidding you, some of the mounds of plastic were up to my hip. And it wasn't just plastic, it was anything you could imagine was on those beaches, TVs, computers, front bumpers of cars, shoes, sandals, textile waste. Amazing. They returned to Florida and I didn't hear from them after a couple of days. I was like, hey, I thought you had a great visit. I'm still here to support. You know, we just want to know if there's still an opportunity for you to open operations. A week later, I still didn't hear from them. So I wrote them on WhatsApp and sent them an email. They said, Hey, can you help on the phone call in an hour? I'm like, sure. So they apologized for waiting for so long, but they said that they were negotiating internally to offer me the position of ocean manager of Guatemala and the legal representative to help establish the entity in Guatemala, which totally kept me off guard because number one, I didn't hear from them for a week, but I was not expecting that. And then two, just two months earlier, I just wrote them a Facebook message. So it was like, this is crazy. We opened operations with me and three locals. But from August until November, three employees to over 50. And we have three different locations along the coast of the Caribbean. And we were collecting thousands of pounds a day. It was amazing, amazing impact right away. I knew the impact that Four Ocean would give Guatemala just because of their big social media following, but I didn't know necessarily or like the social impact it would have. Because they hire locals wherever they work, and having over 50 employees, paying them a fair living wage, that means more than minimum wage, and 100% of health insurance. So everything they were making, they were bringing back home 100%. There's one story that really sticks out. When we expanded operations to this little remote village, you can get to by boat, the first person that was in standing in line, his name was Santiago. And his story was he woke up at four o'clock in the morning just to get there at seven and walk over 20 kilometers to get there. And after we expanded to that village, he walked that every day.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

And then there's one day where he said, Hey, uh, he told like the the the leader of the team, hey, when's Kevin Daniela coming again? He was super excited to show us something and I didn't know what it was. And he purchased his motorcycle so he could get to work a lot faster.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

It was just those impacts, you know, like people were building homes, like, you know, fixing their homes, helping their families with, you know, if there's medical issues, that that salary really helped them a lot. And that's really what really stuck with me during the five years that we operated. We collected over four million pounds of plastic and trash. We upcycled, recycled, or disposed of everything responsibly in country. Not one pound went back to a dumper landfill. And that's the problem within Guatemala, is where all this trash is coming from. The big dump site in Guatemala City is in zone three, and there's a little river that's underneath it called the Rio Las Bacas. So when it rains, all that trash gets flushed out to the Rio Las Vacas and then meets with the Rio Matagua. The Rio Matagua winds about 400 kilometers within the country to the Caribbean coast that borders Honduras at the end, and it ends up into the ocean, and the ocean brings it to the coastline. So that's the trash issue in Guatemala.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

And when 4Ocean first started, the conversations weren't around the plot, the problem. Now, alliances have formed, other organizations have come to Guatemala like 4Ocean and then invested a lot of money to really help stop the issue from happening. So it's not going to be solved fast, but at least right now, the conversations are being had with the local leaders, national, national leaders in the government and private sector. So it's great to see that the impact that 4Ocean has had over the five years of working, helping all these families, like the story of Santiago. There's many more. And it was just amazing being being a part of that, not knowing the other impact that 4Ocean was going to have prior to them coming.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

So, like you said, 4Ocean is is kind of like a finite amount of time, right? They typically come in and help, and then it's, you know, uh And now you've got you're just like, what else can I do to make an environmental impact in this wonderful country that I love? Which is how you kind of turn to like there's a whole nother type of waste that you're seeing, and you're like, but rather than just getting rid of it, I think we can do something useful with it. So this is the pineapple connection. So tell us about this.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Sure. My wife had this idea before I met her, and I remember one of our first dates, she told me about this project that she wanted to bring. But when 4Ocean came to Guatemala, this kind of got pushed aside. But also with 4Ocean coming, it really pushed it to fruition because not only were we collecting plastic at trash, like I said before, over 150,000 pounds of textile waste was collected, and over 500,000 pounds of shoes, sandals, and crocs was collected during my time with 4ocean. And to seeing the impact of textile waste, uh, you know, we wanted to bring this project of the pineapple fiber uh to fruition because, you know, a lot of the polyester blends aren't econom or environment friendly. They're not biodegradable. So, you know, having uh bring something more sustainable to the textile industry like pineapple fiber and 100% biodegradable is great. So, what we do is we partner with small to medium-sized pineapple growers in and around Guatemala City. Because right now, before they plant new crops, they spray a bunch of chemicals and burn everything. So we offer them a service to go into their fields, a cleaning service, free, to take those plants where we extract the pineapple fiber from the long leaf of the pineapple plant. And any waste that's accumulated during a process, we convert to natural fertilizer, to give back to those growers to rejuvenate the soil because they've been burning it for so long. Because the soil is really bad right now. So this is going to really help with their product productivity of harvesting the pineapple fruit. We took a lot of principles from Four Ocean, not any, not only in the environment impact, but the social impact. We hire mainly women and youth in the communities where we work. A lot of single women don't have the same opportunities as they would in other areas because jobs are scarce. So we focus on the single women area to work with us and youth, you know, that really community engagement, not only with the growers, but the community where we work. So a lot of people are really happy with us, not only the growers, but the community. So what we do after extracting the fiber, there's a small process that we have to do to soften it for it to be blended with other fibers, like cotton. So this is our blended cotton yarn with pineapple fiber and also fabric as well.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

You have literally thought of everything on that. I think like someone who has seen, like, oh, you know, we can turn pineapples into fiber, but you're like, no, how can I help the growers? How can I help the community by offering jobs and living wages? Like all of these things that you're doing, it's it's so much more than just taking waste and turning it into wearables. I'm just so thankful for you as a human and for your wife and how much you guys care and and for coming and telling everybody this inspiring story. I think that the listeners who listen in, they're working at their nonprofit because of the mission, right? Sometimes we need that reminder. And we're in the middle of doing the stuff we don't want to do, like administrative work or dealing with long hours, like to remember this is why, right? So I know that you feel that very deeply in your heart and it comes across in your storytelling. So glad that you decided to share the story with us.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Well, get thanks for giving me a platform to tell the story. It's just, you know, giving me an opportunity to tell people what I'm doing in Guatemala. And if it inspires someone that's kind of in my situation in another country that, you know, is looking to maybe make an impact where they're living. If this inspires them, then I've done my job.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

And for everybody who's listening, thank you again for joining us this week. This is your weekly reminder to hydrate and practice self care. These stories are meant to make you feel more connected to this industry and the people in it. And Kevin, you have definitely done this for us today. So thank you for that. Thank you all for listening. So glad to have you all here, and we'll see you next week.