A Journey from Grease to Green
In a rapidly changing world, few stories resonate as deeply as the transformation that I had. From the grease-laden world of aircraft mechanics to the verdant fields of sustainable agriculture, my journey is a testament to the transformative power of purpose and passion.
The Air Force is a realm of precision, discipline, and machinery. As an aircraft mechanic, I was deeply entrenched in this world. But life has a way of introducing unexpected turns. An injury on the job wasn’t just a physical setback; it was a moment of introspection. It made me question not just my immediate environment but the broader world around me. Why was I, once covered head-to-toe in grease, now drawn to the world of organics and natural materials?
Moving to Poland was like opening a window to a different world. Here, the connection to the land was palpable. The markets bustled with fresh produce, and the very concept of food was intertwined with community, health, and sustainability. This wasn’t just about buying vegetables; it was a philosophy. It was about understanding where your food came from, respecting the hands that grew it, and recognizing the impact of your choices on the environment.
Today’s world stands at a crossroads. On one hand, we have unprecedented technological advancements, and on the other, we’re witnessing the consequences of unchecked consumption. Forests are depleting, oceans are choked with plastic, and our very way of life is contributing to the planet’s decline. But recognizing the problem is just the first step. The real challenge lies in effecting change. How do we shift from a culture of convenience to one of conservation?
In my quest for sustainable solutions, I was drawn to hemp. This ancient plant, once a staple in cultures worldwide, is making a resurgence. And for a good reason. Hemp is incredibly versatile. As a textile, it’s more durable than cotton, requires less water, and is naturally pest-resistant. Beyond clothing, hemp has the potential to revolutionize industries, from construction to paper production. But perhaps its most significant advantage is its ecological footprint. Hemp cultivation can actively improve soil health, making it a truly sustainable choice.
The solutions to our sustainability challenges lie in a harmonious blend of the old and the new. Traditional practices, like aquaponics, have been around for centuries and offer a blueprint for sustainable agriculture. But to make these practices scalable and accessible, we need to infuse them with modern technology and innovation. It’s not about discarding the old but enhancing it with the new.
Change, especially of the magnitude we’re aiming for, cannot be achieved in isolation. It requires a collective effort. Communities play a pivotal role in this. By supporting local farmers, advocating for sustainable policies, and making informed choices, communities can drive significant change. Every farmer’s market, every sustainable product purchased, and every tree planted adds up. It’s a ripple effect, and it starts at the grassroots.
My journey has been one of discovery, growth, and transformation. From the Air Force hangars to the hemp fields, it’s been a testament to the fact that change is possible. But this is just the beginning. The road to a sustainable future is long and fraught with challenges. However, with determination, collaboration, and a clear vision, it’s a journey worth undertaking.
Sustainability isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a global imperative. Across continents, nations are grappling with the challenges of climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underscore the urgency of the situation, setting ambitious targets for countries worldwide. As a sustainability entrepreneur, I’m acutely aware of the broader context in which I operate. It’s not just about individual choices; it’s about systemic change.
Businesses have a pivotal role to play in the sustainability narrative. From adopting eco-friendly practices to investing in green technologies, companies can be powerful agents of change. As a business owner, I’ve experienced firsthand the challenges and opportunities of integrating sustainability into the core of business operations. It’s not just about profit; it’s about purpose. And in today’s world, businesses that prioritize sustainability not only thrive but also drive positive change in the world.
Michael Klepacz’s story is more than just a personal transformation. It’s a call to action. It’s a reminder that each of us has the power to make a difference. In the choices we make, the products we buy, and the values we uphold, we shape the future. And in this ever-evolving narrative of sustainability, every effort counts.
Cam and Otis Show Transcript.
Otis:
Hey, welcome to the Cam and Otis show. We’re a father-son business podcast where we talk with other lifelong learners about making an impact and solving big problems. Today, we get a good friend of mine and business partner, Air Force veteran, and a couple of other tags that go in there, father, husband, those other things too, other things about our lives. Hanging out with us, Michael Klepacz.
How are you doing, Mike?
Michael:
I’m doing good, Otis. Thanks for having me.
Otis:
Oh, man, I’m excited to have you in here because you and I have talked about this, of course. But I still think it’s a fascinating thing that I want our listeners to hear how this happened because folks, if you haven’t looked up Michael yet and seen what he did in the Air Force, he was that guy that was covered in grease. When you think about Air Force airplanes, it’s much different than army trucks, right? Oil and grease and things, but that was him. But now he’s into organics and natural materials. That ain’t even two sides of the same coin. That’s like a coin over here and a piece of two-by-four over there stuff.
Michael how the heck did that happen?
Michael:
Yeah, that’s true. I mean, it’s miles away. The shortest answer possible is, when I was going to high school, I was learning to be an aircraft mechanic, 9/11 happened, the aviation industry took a dive. The best option for me was to join the Air Force so I get a chance to work on “heavies” so that I didn’t have to work my way up, just working on “puddle jumpers”. I had a really cool job for what it was. I worked in isochronial maintenance. Every couple of years, the planes would come to us and we would tear them down over 4-6 weeks, put them back together. I wasn’t like a flight line mechanic. I call them tire kickers. We were inspectors and heavy maintenance. I ended up getting hurt on the job and it really made me reevaluate myself and the career. My nickname was Pig Pen, by the way. It said right on the side of my hard hat, K7 on one side, Pig Pen across the front because I was really constantly covered in grease. I would have to go home and wash myself in GOJO every day from work because the inside of the tail was just disgusting. I loved it, but I really just reevaluated my life. I’m like, I could have loved this career, but being around a bunch of radiation and a bunch of grease and constantly covered inkjet fuel and hydraulic fluid and this and that, I just made a giant leap in the opposite direction.
Cam:
How did you pick that opposite direction? Was it a choice to be opposite? Was it like, I need to get rid of these five things. I’m going to go in the opposite direction of those five things. What was it?
Michael:
The truth is embarrassing, maybe. I had been teaching English for the few months prior in Poland, making $20 bucks an hour, just enjoying this gap year while they were redoing the GI Bill because the new GI Bill, the post-9/11 GI Bill came out finally in 2009. I did a two-year gap year just waiting for it because I got out in 2007. When I was in Poland, I felt great, eating good food and stuff like that. When I got back to the States, I started gaining back weight like crazy and I dove into the whole food system. At the time, not embarrassed to say I was using medical cannabis for medication instead of the, let’s see what was it, steroid, muscle relaxer and painkiller that the VA gave me. I just wanted to use one thing that didn’t destroy my liver. It was July, and this is the part that’s embarrassing. It was July, which is Mulberry season in Ohio. I was at my uncle’s house and I said to him, I said, “Hey, are you going to pick any mulberries this year?” He’s like, “No, you can have at it.” I was like, okay, cool. I went into his garage and I grabbed a wrench and a rope, like a dog bone wrench and a rope, tied the dog bone wrench to the rope and put the tarp under one of the mulberry trees, slung the wrench up in the tree and started tugging on it. I’m just getting rained on by mulberries. I’m just looking around and it just hit me and I was like, this is it. I want to get into sustainable agriculture. I was instantly sold on the idea of all of a sudden becoming like an organic farmer.
Otis:
In Europe, where it’s all about fresh. Even that experience, just when you move to Poland, how is that shift? Because now you don’t stock the refrigerator, you don’t go to the Costco and buy 10 pounds of tomatoes. How was that experience shift to you?
Michael:
Well, okay. It was hard to remember until my mom came to visit for the first time a couple of months ago, and I took her to the grocery store. Or even first and foremost, she’s in my house, and I just have a carton of eggs sitting on top of the microwave. She’s like, Why don’t you have them… They’re on top of the microwave covered in chicken shit. They’re not washed at all. They’re just room temperature chicken shit eggs, the way God intended. I take her to the grocery store and the carrots are dirty, the potatoes are dirty, nothing’s washed. Let’s be honest. Everything is protected by nature’s immune system that marketers and USDA and stuff has decided to rinse off and then you wash the shelf life tank. I don’t think I need to tell you guys, maybe I need to tell your audience, once you wash off that bloom of the egg, it’s done.
Cam:
In your experience, what is the actual cultural difference that you’ve noticed when you went to Poland?
Michael:
Poland is essentially, and I say this very often, it’s the population of California smashed into the size of Ohio, but with a lot more spread out as far as the population goes. And so… There’s this massive acceptance of dirty food. Well, I mean, in America, and I don’t want to go after the bad guy, but it’s marketing. It’s the marketers that made us want this flawless tomato. It’s also the marketers that made us get to this point to where anybody, you go to Subway, and I don’t want to bash on Subway because I like their sandwiches, but look at the middle of their tomato. If it’s got a little whitish to it, you know that it was artificially ripened. They picked it green, put it in a container, shipped it wherever the heck. It didn’t ripen on the vine. In Poland, you can… Most tomatoes still come attached to the vine. They just rip the vine off and you have a six-pack of tomatoes on a vine and you put in your basket. Yes, it’s a completely different paradigm here. Completely different in Europe in general. Eight months out of the year, by all of the subway exits, at least in my neighborhood, there’s a little farmer’s market stand that sets up every day with whatever fresh produce they have. That’s just the so it is and I like it. I don’t like living in the city, but I like that.
Cam:
Small farms check a lot of boxes just because they tend to check those boxes. I think that’s an interesting thing, Michael, with the way you’re talking about it in Poland, is you have this system that naturally developed in a way that it is the more sustainable like that. You don’t have this desire for a national conglomeration of things because you have it local. Because it’s local, you’re tied to it, and you’re more comfortable getting it locally, you’re more comfortable getting it tidy, those kinds of things. You go pick up a potato from a farmer, you’re not going to be as worried about if it’s dirty. You go to Walmart, you get a potato that’s dirty, it starts to raise a few questions. I think it’s interesting to try to tease those out a little bit. Would you say there is a sense of getting into the culture aspect, almost like what national pride do you think is tied to a farm? Because we have this thing in America where we praise farmers for being the great thing, but we also don’t want to talk with them. We don’t want to be around the farmer. We know they provide our livelihood. Is it a little bit more you see the farmer in Poland, you give them a high fives? What’s that cultural difference like in that specific area?
Michael:
Yeah, I think people are proud of their farmers around here. They tend to put up with them. There’s no one honking horns behind tractors here. People wait patiently.
Cam:
That’s a good sign.
Otis:
Yeah, that’s an interesting data point. How many honks of the car behind a tractor to see whether or not there’s acceptance of the farm industry in your country, or your neighborhood, or your state. So count that one out, folks, and let us know. I’m curious where… We’ve been diving into the organic, I don’t even know if we’ve really dived into the organic, but just the natural growing of agriculture. How did that shift into a materials, manufacturing materials business? Because that’s really where you’re focused your effort now. Yeah.
Michael:
Well, the answer for that is… We’ll go back to 2009 when I fall down the rabbit hole of sustainability. I had decided, all right, I’m going to leave Ohio and I’m going to go move to Southern California because things are more progressive there. People actually want organic food. I wanted to go to San Luis Abisbo there for their agriculture program because it was pretty well known for at least being semi-sustainable. That never happened. I never started over there. California didn’t work out the way I planned. I had made an invention at the time for this thing called Hemp Wick because a few months prior, I was being all high and mighty towards my dad for me quitting cigarettes and him not quitting cigarettes. A friend of mine gave me a bunch of organic tobacco and this thing called Hemp Wick to stop him from using his Zippo lighter and inhaling all those fumes. I wanted my dad to be a healthier cigarette smoker. He thought that HempWick was the dumbest idea. He’s like, Why would I use my ZIPPO to light this string just so that I have a safe flame for lighting my cigarette? This is dumb. I invented a Hemp wick dispenser. Fast forward to when I got accepted to a business school in Poland in 2012, moved over here, I continued to work on the concept. Then the business partner and I split. He went off and did it his way, which was I wanted it to be assembled by veterans, made in America, that thing. He just wanted to do some cheap junk from China. We split off. That’s when I got launched into textiles. For me, I became a cannabis entrepreneur. But these days, I don’t call myself a cannabis entrepreneur. I’m a sustainability entrepreneur. Cannabis is one of the paints on the palette, along with linen and nettle and a bunch of other of these bast fiber plants. That’s how that got started. It’s been an adventure.
Cam:
There’s a lot of big problems in agriculture. There’s a lot of problems when it comes to sustainability and textiles and those. How do you view that path forward to making an impact on those problems? Whether just your business plan or if you want to take it bigger on that either. But just how do you see yourself making an impact on that change?
Michael:
One of the things that… There were a few things that really shocked me when I first started going into it. Thing number one is how many planets worth of resources were presently using as humans. Americans are one version. Americans use six planets. If everyone lived like Americans, we’d be using six planets worth of resources. For me, until we’re at 0.999999 planets worth of resources used per year, it’s unsustainable. Because I believe as human beings, we’re creative, but we’re also lazy. We need to use that creativity, like with aquaponics, to leverage nature to make it… We can work with nature to make things better. We can work with nature to make things more regenerative, to make things more natural. I don’t think that organic food should be a luxury item. I tend to look at how we did things 300 years ago. I’m not saying that life was better 300 years ago. We all know that it wasn’t. But if we look at some of the ways that we did stuff back then with the knowledge that we have today, I think we can make massive leaps forward. For me, my mission in life is basically sustainable cellulose. This is cellulose, my paper is cellulose, hemp, linen, cotton is pure cellulose. But the problem with cotton is it takes so many pesticides, herbicides, and a ton of water to grow. That’s what makes linen better than cotton. But cotton or hemp is better than linen because it’s more drought tolerant. There’s so many different ways to attack this. But yeah, the hill I will die on is sustainable cellulose.
Cam:
That makes me think, and I know we talked about this on the call you and I had a few weeks ago, but I brought up the idea of the wizard versus the prophet. I think it’s a really interesting thing when you start getting into sustainability because you’re one of the people and the smartest people I always talk with about these things see both of those paths. For the listeners, the concept there is basically the prophet is the person who goes and says, We need to go back 300 years, thousand years. That’s when everything was perfect. That’s when there wasn’t pesticides, when there wasn’t this. Everything was perfect back then. We had to go back. The wizard is the futureist who just says, Look, we’ll invent our way out of anything. I can say anything. We’ll figure this problem out. It’s not a problem at all. I think there’s a really interesting thing because you get those two camps and there’s interesting ideas in both camps. But what you’re talking about there, Michael, is connecting the two. Going back and saying, look, this is how they did aquaponics in Mexico City. I’m thinking of what Mexico City was before the Spaniards came, sorry. But they were farming like crazy there in aquaponics. Now we could take that with modern science and do so much more. In your opinion, what do you think is the barrier from connecting those two dots? Because you and I both intuitively connected those two as we found agriculture. Why do you think people don’t?
Michael
Well, firstly, I want to say that they believe the Hanging Towers of Babylon was Aquaponics. They can’t prove it, but that’s what they think. I don’t know. Are we all just not so disconnected from our food system? You know what I mean? I think kids these days, and I feel old saying it, the number one response of the career that they want to be is a YouTuber or influencer or whatever. Where I come from, people are proud to learn a trade. I don’t know if it’s that way in New York City. I don’t know if it’s that way in L.A. I don’t know if it’s that way in Miami or Seattle. I find that people want to go to universities, spend a bunch of money to get some strange career and be disconnected. We’re all now disconnected from nature, right? But there’s also complete backlash for it. There’s also the complete opposite happening. There are people going back to nature and trying to start little one-acre market gardens and all this other stuff. There is both sides of it. I hope one day that I start seeing aquaponic greenhouses on top of McDonald’s roofs, stuff like that. That’s what I want.
Otis:
All that American made stuff, because we’re a consumer-driven people, we look at it and say, I can buy that ball cap for 25 bucks that’s made in Taiwan, or I can buy Deans for 30 bucks. How patriotic am I going to be? It’s the same thing when they talk about a hemp shirt as opposed to whatever material this is. It’s really soft, but I don’t know what material it is, but I like it. How do you shift people in that sense?
Michael:
You know, the same people who convinced us that we need pretty tomatoes are the same people that need to convince us that the single credit cards worth of plastic we eat every month or so because of microplastics and our environment isn’t worth it anymore. I don’t know. There’s got to be some turning around. I feel like it’s a tough conversation because most of this climate change stuff and pollution stuff and whatever, it’s all based on guilt. No one changes because of guilt. No one changes because of finger pointing. You know what I mean? If anything, they just dig in their heels. I’ve been thinking about it for a really long time. Okay, so, for example, we’ve been working on a yoga mat prototype that’s completely plant-based, and it slips on the floor. It doesn’t grip the floor. It’s natural. Whereas synthetic yoga mats, they grip the floor, they’re made out of rubber. They’re made out of crazy toxins. For me, and I don’t really want to say this out loud, but it’s hypocritical. It’s hypocritical that you got these yoga types who fly over to India to become Namaste and stuff, and all of their gear is plastic, right?
Cam:
Yeah.
Michael:
But I’m not going to get any clients being like, Oh, you hypocrite. You better use my yoga mat. You better feel bad about your stuff and come buy mine. It doesn’t work.
Cam:
Could you talk a little bit about the sustainable difference of using hemp instead of cotton or different things like that? Just to flip that, if we took 1% of hemp and put it into all these other textiles that don’t use it, what impact do you see?
Michael:
There’s a bunch of different talking points, right? From the paper point of view, if you look at over a 50-year period, well, there’s a bunch of different arguments for and against it. Over a 50-year period in the forest, you’ll get X tons of cellulose. But at the same time, the forestry people say, well, you’re only interacting with that space once every 50 years. Whereasif you were to grow across 50 years hemp every year in the same place, then obviously you have sowing, harvesting, this and the other thing, but you still get more cellulose. That cellulose is recyclable up to eight times, whereas tree cellulose is recyclable up to three times. Now, they say that hemp is also four times more durable than cotton. Part of that is that the cotton fiber itself, you get pilling with cotton because the fibers themselves are so short. Those are those just those little ends of the fiber is starting to rub up against each other and making those little balls on your clothing. Hemp doesn’t do that. One thing that hemp does do is wrinkle. So linen and hemp can get a little wrinkly, and that’s okay. This was pressed until I put my leather jacket on and rode my motorcycle here. That’s fine. And you’re using less water, right? So the amount of water, I can’t remember the number, but the amount of water to grow and process cotton is extraordinarily higher than with hemp and linen. So yeah, for me, it’s just interesting. The last point about cotton versus hemp, when you’re growing for textiles, you almost do not need any herbicides when it comes to hemp because the seed rate per yard is so high and the plant is so aggressive that everything gets shaded out. Like nothing can survive under a canopy of 20-foot-tall hemp, period. Whereas if you look at all of the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc, used for cotton, it’s crazy.
Otis:
I just want to say this. Here’s a deeper philosophical point to this, folks, and that is, just because it’s a big problem doesn’t mean don’t attack it because small movements, small things, changing small amounts, even if it’s Ball Arena only sells soda and beer in aluminum cups now because aluminum is 98% recyclable or whatever that math is. But that’s a change. That’s a significant change from what it was two years ago with the paperwax cups that you just throw out and they just become trash. These little small things make a difference to solve that problem.
Cam:
Pick one piece of the problem and go solve it. To put it to a Tribe and Purpose spin, where your purpose is, where your skill set is, go solve that problem. That’s how get action.
Otis:
Hey, Michael, this has been great, man. A long time coming. I’m glad we did this today. Truthfully, I’m feeling another one coming around in another six months or a year or so because it’s just so interesting to dive into all these bits and pieces about sustainability.
Michael:
I’d be honored.