376 | To Sell Sustainability, Don't Talk About Sustainability with Josh Dorfman
What if the key to scaling climate solutions wasn’t about convincing people to care about sustainability—but about building products and partnerships that simply work better for everyone?
This is the provocative question we explored with Josh Dorfman on the latest Awarepreneurs podcast episode.
Bio: Josh Dorfman is a climate entrepreneur, author, and media personality. He is the CEO and host of Supercool, a media company covering real-world climate solutions that cut carbon, increase profits, and enhance modern life. Josh was previously the co-founder and CEO of Plantd, a carbon-negative building materials manufacturer, which was named to Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies in 2024. He has founded two modern design sustainable furniture companies, directed Vine.com, an Amazon e-commerce business specializing in natural and organic products, and served as the CEO of The Collider, the nation’s first innovation center for climate resilience and adaptation. Additionally, Josh was previously known as The Lazy Environmentalist, a media brand he developed into an award-winning television series on Sundance Channel, a daily radio show on SiriusXM, and two popular books.
His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, TechCrunch, Fast Company, and Reuters. Josh has also made regular appearances on national television and radio programs, including Morning Joe, Fox & Friends, and NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the only guest to ever ride a bike onto The Martha Stewart Show.
This episode is sponsored by the coaching company of the host, Paul Zelizer. Consider a Strategy Session if you can use support growing your impact business.
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Transcript of Sustainability Interview with Josh Dorfman
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcript and the below summaries by Castmagic for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
You can read the full transcript of this episode here
Key Takeaways in Sustainability Interview with Josh Dorfman
Here are the 3 key takeaways from the Awarepreneurs episode featuring Josh Dorfman on Sustainability with quotes that illustrate each point.
Sell Sustainability by Focusing on Value, Not Just Sustainability:
Josh emphasizes that while sustainability is important, it shouldn’t be the primary selling point—especially when working with large, mainstream companies. Instead, climate-positive products and innovations must compete on aspects like quality, efficiency, and supply chain reliability to appeal to the broader market and drive real impact.
"Sustainability was a door opener and I think it still is today. It can potentially start a conversation. It's not necessarily the best way to even start a conversation, but potentially there can be some alignment there... It's really strategic in the supply chain. And we, and we understood that very early. We were building a modular technology with a different input grass. We can grow in far more places than you can plant trees. It gives us much more flexibility with them in their supply chain to plug in the, that can give them a strategic advantage."
Strategic Partnerships are Critical for Scaling Impact:
The right kind of strategic partnership—built on mutual benefit, trust, and a phased approach—can enable startups and climate ventures to scale, avoid pitfalls, and achieve broader industry adoption. Success depends on building relationships at multiple levels, delivering consistent value, and demonstrating reliability over time.
"You want to be able to spend as much time getting to know that organization as you can at many as many levels of the organization as you can... And what's equally important to getting all the, in the, the either the purchase dollars or the, the investment dollars into a company, I think is staging the right milestones to say go on a, on a journey together... We see, okay, yeah, these guys are really bought into what we're doing and they see, oh, this young company can really execute and you start to forge bonds that really become deeper."
Optimism and Innovation are Driving a New Era in Climate Solutions:
Josh underlines that the world is in a new moment—a phase of rapid adoption and real innovation in climate tech. Solutions are scaling, making a tangible impact on profitability and quality of life, and offering reasons for renewed optimism. The focus is now on building better products and systems that happen to be sustainable, rather than leading with doomsday narratives.
"We are in as this guy Keith Zeim Zakheim, who runs a, an ad marketing agency around climate called Antenna calls the age of adoption. And I think that's right. All of this is underway, but underrepresented. Super Cool, the company I started aims to chronicle what's happening. Case study these technologies and solutions that are working, that are out there for business leaders and decision makers so that they could say, oh, I didn't know about this company... That is our theory of change, that all of these solutions are underway, they are underrepresented in the media, but they are amounting to really systemic change that's underway in our society and our civilization."