The Song Summit isn’t just about music.
While the Song Summit’s name implies songwriters and live performances, it’s more than that, said co-founder Ben Anderson.
“We look at it as who will be our wellness headliners and who will be our culinary headliners and who will be our music headliners,” he said.
Sustainability is also another Song Summit pillar, and that was evident in the “Healthy People, Healthy Planet,” one of three lab discussions, which included “Be the Dog: Emotional Sobriety and the Art of Being,” by Chef Andrew Zimmern, and “Vinyl & Vittles Vol. 1,” with Chef Sean Brock and KRCL radio DJ Eugenie Jaffe, held Friday at the Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium.
The “Healthy Planet” discussion, sponsored by the Song Summit Foundation, which gives a leg up to rising musicians, featured one-time Parkite Wes Carter, president of Atlantic Packaging and founder of its A New Earth Project initiative, and Antonio Nuño, co-founder of Someone Somewhere, a sustainability-minded company based in Mexico that works to pull local artisans out of poverty through their manufacturing of eco-friendly products.
Carter started off the conversation and told the story of his Atlantic Packaging, North America’s largest family-owned industrial packaging company, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year.
“We service packaging needs in food, beverage, apparel, building commerce,” he said. “For most of our history, we have focused on technical packaging to help customers drive out waste through efficiency by utilizing technology.”
Sustainability came into the picture nearly a decade ago out of Carter’s love for outdoor recreation.
“I’m a skier and snowboarder, but I grew up on the coast of North Carolina where I like to say, ‘Salt water was the backdrop of my youth,’” he said. “So, I grew up surfing and salt-water fishing.”
During a surfing trip to the Indian Ocean, Carter saw an abundance of plastic pollution in the water.
“While it wasn’t packaging our company sells, it was maybe an unintended consequence of the industry we’re a part of,” he said. “I recognized at that moment that if we, as an industry of packaging companies and consumer products companies, didn’t begin to acknowledge the materials (we used) were creating radical problems for the environment and make changes, the problem would get a lot worse.”
When Carter returned to the states, he talked with his leadership team.
“I said, ‘What if we, as a large packaging company with strong ethical values that are passionate about the outdoors and have a quality health and wellness program, decided to become a catalyst in driving change in our industry?’” he said. “I really felt like the best way to do that was to innovate new materials that were more in harmony with nature.”
From that day, Atlantic Packaging began to use nature as that model, Carter said.
“We talk about circularity, and we tend to forget that the blueprint for sustainability and circularity is the natural world,” he said. “There is plenty of trash in nature. Things rot and die, but there is zero waste. I believe that blueprint is telling us that we need to think about the materials we create as human beings more relationally.”
Carter and his team began to find ways to use nature-based materials and integrate them into the company’s current supply chain.
“We wanted to not only create healthier packaging, but create healthier products and food supply for generations to come,” he said.
In 2022, Atlantic Packaging launched its New Earth Project initiative, a movement designed to “eliminate plastic pollution, accelerate regenerative innovation and protect the well-being of people and planet for generations to come,” Carter said.
“As part of that, we embrace storytelling and working with enlightened brands, especially in the outdoor industry,” he said. “Their packaging tells a story about their environmental ethics, and we use the powers of the media to scale that message.”
Health is one of the initiative’s main principles, Carter said.
“It’s a practice, but it certainly isn’t perfect, but I like to believe we’re going in the right direction,” he said.
Nuño, whom Carter admires for his grass-roots approach to Someone Somewhere, then discussed his story, which he said is not just one of sustainability, but of humans.
“Someone Somewhere is a company I co-founded with two of my best friends,” he said. “We met each other when we were 5 years old. So we’ve been together for a long time.”
When the three — Nuño, Fátima Álvarez and Enrique Rodríguez — were 14, they started going on trips to different Indigenous communities around Mexico and surrounding countries, according to Nuño.
“It was very clear that nature was a big part of (those places), and we learned that 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is safeguarded by Indigenous communities,” he said. “(We also learned that) it was very clear that it is very hard to live in one of these communities because there is a huge lack of job opportunities.”
Most of the men are farmers, and most women are artisans who learned their crafts from their mothers or grandmothers, Nuño said.
“When we looked deeper into the artisan universe, we (found) there were more than 200 million rural artisans in Latin America, Africa and Asia,” he said. “(The artisan universe) is the second largest source of employment on these continents after agriculture, and 90% of them are women who invest 90% of their income in their kids.”
Once Nuño and his friends learned this, they began working on a way to connect these women to the world’s market to help create change in the lives of their kids.
“That was the first half of the equation,” he said.
After living in these communities over time, Nuño and his friends started to understand the consequences of climate change.
“We began to see how climate change (affects) the harvests, and for those living in extreme poverty, climate change can be disastrous,” he said. “They may not get the money they were counting on if a harvest goes bad.”
Diving deeper into climate change, Nuño found much of it was a result of pollution from plastics and polyester, and the women were making their products out of those materials.
“Most of these artisans are also part of the textile and apparel industry, which is the second-largest polluter and producer of waste water,” he said. “So there was something happening there we could change that would have a social impact and also an environmental impact. We asked, ‘What if those Indigenous artisans could become the solution of the fashion industry’s pollution problem?’”
The first thing Someone Somewhere did was change the materials these artisans used.
“That’s why we created CircuLoom, in which we take textile waste from different brands and make yarn for artisans in these communities to make different types of fabrics, which women use to make products,” he said.
The first partnership they formed was with Delta Airlines, which provides amenity kits for its passengers.
“We ended up recycling more than 4 million pounds of textile waste that ended up in these kits instead of ending up in landfills and the ocean,” Nuño said.
Gator Cases is another Someone Somewhere collaboration that works on creating handcrafted musical instrument bags from loomed cotton and macrame.
Someone Somewhere also made the Song Summit merchandise, including T-shirts and other accessories, according to Nuño.
In addition to Delta, Someone Somewhere’s biggest partnership is with the Raíces de México soccer-jersey collection with Adidas.
In Mexico, soccer is the biggest thing, Nuño said, and the Mexico jersey is the second-most recognized symbol after the flag.
“I did a post on social media that said, ‘What if the next jersey was hand-embroidered by artisans?’ and the post went viral,” he said. “In one day it reached 1 million people, and Adidas reached out the next day to make this a reality.”
The two companies spent two years working to create this collection, which generated jobs for 150 artisans, of whom 100% were women, according to Nuño.
“The collection sold out in Mexico and the United States in less than 24 hours, but we didn’t want this to be a one-time campaign,” he said. “So, we decided to build something that would last for years and change lives.”
Nuño has already seen some of the rewards of these ongoing projects.
“I started getting messages from these artisans who ask me about what kinds of computers they should get for their kids who are about to study engineering,” he said. “One generation ago, no kids could finish high school. And these are the stories that inspire us to do this work every day.”
Today Someone Somewhere upcycles more than 1 million pounds of cotton and polyester a year, and IKEA is one of the businesses that donate their waste and unsold products, Nuño said.
“Today, more than 3,000 people are breaking the poverty cycle through this model, and we are working with 15 Indigenous communities,” he said. “And many artisans are making enough to buy land and protect it. This is our story, and I’m very happy to be here to share it.”
For information about Someone Somewhere, visit someonesomewhere.com.
For information about Atlantic Packaging, visit atlanticpkg.com.
For information about Song Summit, visit songsummit.com.