38 FOR LEADING BUSINESS TOWARD PLASTIC ALTERNATIVES, AT SCALE

Few things make America’s plastic addiction seem as urgent as walking through a Phoenix-area Sprouts Farmers Market with Troy Swope, cofounder and CEO of Footprint, a plant-based packaging company using technology to wean corporations off single-use plastics. Sprouts is a natural-food chain that collects waste to be recycled at each of its 30 stores, and last year averaged more than 1,000 pounds of recycling per location every day—meaning that what we are observing represents the best of many bad options in the grocery business.

We pass plastic milk jugs, plastic chip bags, cardboard pasta boxes with tiny plastic display windows, plastic bags containing chopped lettuce, and clear plastic egg cartons. “So much waste,” Swope groans, in his trademark plastic kills T-shirt.

Sprouts cofounder Kevin Easler, who is now the CEO of sustainable-business investment company Zenfinity Capital and chair of Footprint’s board, has joined us for this stroll. He points out a mountain of strawberries in plastic clamshells: “This one drives me crazy,” he says. All too often, “grocers go to their suppliers and say, ‘Put it in something besides plastic,’ and the suppliers go, ‘There is nothing else.’” Plus, he adds, in the case of the strawberries, “plastic encourages mold.”

Swope eyes a boxed water that markets itself as Earth-friendly. “Not only does