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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. Joining me is Wes Carter, president of Atlantic Packaging. The company established by his grandfather in 1946, it was a newspaper and it evolved over the years through his father really refocusing the company on packaging and packaging solutions. then Wes, in about 2020 during COVID, the lightning bolt struck and he said, "Can we be something more?" That's what today's conversation's going to be about, something more.
Let me read a little bit from their sustainability mission statement. It's going to give you a clue to why this conversation is electric, "We at Atlantic Packaging are committed to creating, supporting and managing sustainable systems and packaging and commerce." And commerce, they have customers kind of large ones, Amazon, P&G Williams-Sonoma, Coke, and so many others. "We acknowledge our unique position in the supply chain and our moral obligation." Yes, their moral obligation, "To do our part in creating a world free of pollution." That is how they became a purpose at the center company. "Our efforts are guided by a regenerative vision for the future of our planet and our children. Through our work with A New Earth Project, the sustainability initiative of Atlantic Packaging, we steward cooperation, collaboration, education, and transition throughout the marketplace. We remain always curious and adaptable to emerging technologies and systems that seek to solve the environmental challenges that harm or destroy our living earth."
We're going to learn so much from this conversation. I know you'll be as excited as I am, so let's get started. So welcome to the show, Wes. Let's just start at the beginning. So can you explain to our listeners what is Atlantic Packaging, what do you do? And then a little bit about your role.
Wes Carter:
Yeah, absolutely. So Atlantic Packaging was actually founded by my grandfather, W. Horace Carter in 1946 as a weekly newspaper. We've got a really amazing beginning, and I'll tell a real brief history. My grandfather started this weekly newspaper in Southeastern North Carolina, and initially he just wanted to be a journalist and was reporting on tobacco farming news. But he had been educated at the University of North Carolina and was a power of the pen, God and country guy, and pretty quickly he became aware that the Ku Klux Klan was really active in his community and he took it upon himself to fight the Klan with his newspaper. So he wrote editorials and articles condemning their activities, and he waged about a three-year campaign, and it was a very harrowing experience for him and his family. They threatened to kill him and burn down his house and kidnap his children, but my grandfather never relented.
And eventually his editorials got picked up by larger newspapers. And finally the FBI contacted him and said, "We really need your help to infiltrate this vigilante group." Which is exactly what they did. And they ended up arresting over 300 Klansmen and imprisoning over 50, including the Grand Dragon who was the head of the Carolina's Ku Klux Klan. And that really broke their back. They were never the same organization in the Southeast. And my grandfather won a Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in 1952. He was 32 years old at the time, and he was the first weekly newspaper to ever win a Pulitzer.
In those days, if you were in the newspaper business, you were also in the paper and office supply business in small town America. And so after he won the Pulitzer, he just got a lot of national recognition. And so the second part of his career while he continued to write the newspaper was to develop this adjacent business selling packaging supplies primarily to the garment industry, the hosiery industry that was migrating from places like New York and Pennsylvania to the southeast. And we had die cutters and printing presses. And so we started selling a lot of converted paperboard for collar strips, for men's shirts and sock and underwear inserts and things like that.
And pretty soon those companies that were buying converted paperboard said, "Hey, Horace, can you also sell us tape and corrugated boxes and bags?" And so this little packaging distribution business grew up around my grandfather's newspaper. My father Rusty, he didn't care much about the newspaper, but my dad's a serial entrepreneur and a brilliant business person. My father took over the business and really focused on the packaging business and really diversified us into a lot of other packaging verticals. So fast-forward to where we are today, we're third generation privately held. We're the largest independent privately held packaging company in America, and we support the packaging needs of consumer products companies and retail brands in basically every industry vertical. Food, beverage building products, automotive, aerospace, e-commerce, medical device, really anybody making anything.
In the mid-'90s, my father made a strategic decision that he didn't want to be in the commodities business, that he wanted to be in more of a value-added type business. And so he invested in a packaging equipment program and really focused our sales efforts around selling equipment and high-performance packaging material to really drive out waste and eliminate damage for our customers as a way to save money. I mean, it was a cost-saving initiative, but I joked with him a lot. I was like, "My dad was doing sustainability before that word was even there."
Carol Cone:
The word was even there. And I love it when you say, "Use less is always the right solution."
Wes Carter:
That's right. So for me, the sustainability program we have today, I really, with my leadership, we built it on top of this use less efficiency model that was already very well established. And today, like you just mentioned, we always say use less is always the right answer. And even when you look at the current EPR laws that are being enacted in places like California and Oregon, the number one priority is source reduction.
Carol Cone:
You're very much like the history of Timberland because the grandfather developed the business and then Herman and Sidney Swartz developed the product, and then Jeff, their son, built in the brand and brought the soul to life.
Wes Carter:
How about that?
Carol Cone:
Third generation amazing company. It started in small towns, didn't start with the newspaper, but that yellow boot has just become infamous for its sustainability actions and pull on your boots to make a difference. So I want to ask you, what is your purpose? You're third generation, you have this amazing history, but what is Wes Carter's purpose?
Wes Carter:
Wow, what is Wes Carter's purpose? Believe it or not, I think about that quite a bit. I think about legacy a lot and generational legacy. I think a lot about the world that we're leaving future generations. I've also been a lifelong outdoor person. And so the outdoors informs a lot of who I am and always has. And I was raised by outdoor people, but the early part of my career sustainability was not really on my radar.
About 10 years ago though, really from my trips to go surfing and fishing, I just started realizing that I was seeing a lot of plastic pollution. And I went on a surfing trip to Southeast Asia and it was terrible. I mean, there was plastic all in the lineup. And I remember thinking a lot of what I'm seeing is packaging, and it's not all packaging that we sell, but this problem is being created by the supply chain that we're an integral part of. And at that point, no one was really talking about it. It was like our whole industry had this intentional blind spot that was so ugly that no one wanted to look at it. And as a person who loves the ocean in particular, it just didn't sit well with me.
And I told my leadership, I was like, "I think we need to take responsibility beyond the sale. If we are selling a product that can end up as pollution, then we have an inherent responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen. It doesn't mean we always have to build all that infrastructure ourselves. In some cases we won't be able to, but we can collaborate with our customers, with our suppliers, and with governments too."
And so where Wes Carter's purpose is today, and I think it's more integrated with the greater purpose of our organization and with A New Earth Project, which is the sustainability initiative of Atlantic Packaging. I really believe that all of the problems that exist in the world today can be traced back to misaligned values of industry, where we, for the last several hundred years have been under the delusion that businesses exist primarily to profit.
Carol Cone:
I love it. And I think you just explained what your moral obligation meant.
Wes Carter:
Yes.
Carol Cone:
To do your part in creating a world free of pollution. I'm going to get into the health part because I know that health is a through line. We'll get into that in a minute. And I love this quote that you said, "I want people to be stoked about sustainable packaging." And so we're going to get into some of the stokedness. If you can talk about the solution center, because I thought that is so cool. And then I also want you to talk a little bit about kitchen cabinet distributors because that was an interesting case too.
Wes Carter:
So the Packaging Solution Center, it was and is the crown jewel of Atlantic in many ways, it is the epicenter of our value proposition. And I think, yeah, this August we'll celebrate eight years since we opened the doors.
Carol Cone:
Fabulous.
Wes Carter:
As I mentioned before, in the mid-'90s, my father and his leadership team really charted this course around program selling and driving out waste through technology, through the science of packaging. As that value proposition evolved, it became very consultative where we were working to drive out massive amounts of waste. But as technology evolved in materials and equipment, it became increasingly difficult to be able to articulate in a boardroom with an hour long meeting to a new customer how this worked. It often I think came across as, "I'm not sure I can trust this. This sounds a lot different than just buying on price."
So a few of my leaders, one in particular, Stewart Whitmire, was a big part of the creation of this, said, "The part that we're missing is education. We're not able to educate our customers. And so what if we built a facility that was about education that we brought customers to our facility and really showed them why we were picking certain materials and how we could integrate those materials with technology?." And then that really evolved into testing equipment and validating equipment, which allow us to further optimize because it's one thing to optimize packaging in a manufacturing plant, but to be able to have transportation simulators that we have in a lab environment, we could do a lot more optimization. And we didn't have the pressures of production piling up behind us.
So that was really the inception of the solution center. We do a lot more there now. I mean, we also do a lot of sustainable packaging development there, where customers send us their products and say, "Hey, help us repackage this with fiber based solutions instead of single use plastic," as an example. And we need to be able to do it in an economic way. So the solution center is the place where a lot of that development happens.
Carol Cone:
And I want to talk about a couple things. I just want the listeners to know, you have big customers P&G, Amazon, Williams-Sonoma, and the list goes on and on. I'm also mesmerized by product innovation. So you created... This is really important and kudos, you got an article in Fast Company. You got rid of the six ring plastic soda carrier to create the Fishbone C-Clip. Can you explain what that is? I think that's brilliant that you did that.
Wes Carter:
The six-pack ring, the plastic six-pack ring is kind of the poster child for plastic pollution. It's all the videos of turtles choking. It's always that plastic ring. And I grew up at the beach too, so I've seen this phenomenon in my real life. And so these guys in California that we got connected to invented a paper board beverage carrier. And the design that we finally brought to market was the C-Clip, which captures the can twice, in the middle of the can and at the top. And it's fully curbside recyclable. It is not coated with plastic. It has a nature-based water resistant coating, so it can go into a cooler. And if it ends up in the environment, it breaks down because it's made of nature-based material.
Carol Cone:
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Can you talk a little bit about health and health as a through line. And how far back, I think it was 2012, that you started looking at the health of your people, because you can't have a healthy company if you don't have healthy people.
Wes Carter:
About 15 years ago when I first moved to Charleston, I found myself in a yoga studio and that practice just super resonated with me, and I got very dedicated to yoga. And the practice itself really helped me become healthier but it also put me into a community of like-minded people. And so I met acupuncturists and dieticians and meditation coaches, and it improved my life so much. That holistic way of looking at health improved my life so much.
And we didn't have anything like that corporately at all. And I also realized that I've got a very diverse population and most of my employees just don't have access to the resources that I have. And I felt like there has got to be a way to create a program to bring these resources to a broad employee base. And so I launched a health and wellness program. We require an annual biometric screening and the people that discovered, "Hey, I'm diabetic and I didn't know it." I mean, there's dozens and dozens of those examples, blood pressure issues that were undiagnosed. But ultimately that health and wellness, especially over the last 12 or 13 years now, has become foundation for our culture. And so to me, the sustainability thing, it grew out of that soil, that health, wellness, cultural soil that we had cultivated, we were able to plant seeds for sustainability that grew really naturally. And then all of a sudden I just started to see it. I'm like, "Wait a second, health is not just about human health. Health is planetary."
And it also doesn't just apply to how we treat our employees, or not even just apply to the products we bring to market. We also want healthy relationships with our vendors and suppliers. We don't want to be a kind of company that's auctioning off our business every year. We believe that long-term gains are better than short-term wins.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, I just have to say that the way you think, which is really important for our listeners, is that you are becoming a magnet for talent. In some of your articles and such, you say people, great people come to you because they look at what you're doing not only in the sustainable packaging, but also in the New Earth Project, the sustainability that is, whether it's programs or plastic pollution reduction or such, you have a culture that is a magnet. That's why I say you're mesmerizing, you're incredible. So let's go to the... It's called A New Earth project, not The, it's A. and its founding was right during COVID where there was was a collision, a good collision between sustainability and e-commerce. So can you explain how you really got religion and you have your packaging and your influencers are extraordinary.
Wes Carter:
So it was a variety of factors, and it wasn't like a strike a lightning, it really happened organically. But we have a great e-commerce customer who is in the outdoor industry, and the head of sustainability called me and said, "Wes, we want to transition to all fiber-based packaging. Our CEO is really concerned about the brand image given that we're an outdoor brand and the amount of single-use, non-recyclable packaging that we are sending to our customers." And this brand, big outdoor brand that I loved. And I said, "You know what? This is getting ready to happen at scale."
And I sat back and I said, "We have all these resources at Atlantic. We need to create an initiative to make sustainable packaging sexy. We need to find a way for..." Because at that point in time, a lot of companies were seeing sustainability as sort of, "We're being pushed to do this. It's expensive." And I said, "You know what? We need to connect this to brand. We need to convince our customers that sustainability is good for their brand and their packaging is the most tangible brand asset they have outside of their product. I mean, it tells the consumer what their ethics are, especially in the world of environmental ethics."
A New Earth Project. A lot of people were like, "Where'd you get that name from?" I just finished reading Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth. And that book blew my mind. And there's something deeply spiritual about this workaround sustainability and about reconnecting to the sacredness of life. And I think Mr. Tolle would probably agree with that. And so it wasn't just that it was a good book. That book really articulates a lot of these core principles, really on a personal level. But what I've come to understand is the inner work influences all the outer work. I mean, inner mastery, I believe is fundamental for business success, especially in the world we're living in today.
Carol Cone:
Oh, your storytelling is profound. You have the eight-part series, you have the plastic pollution piece, which was amazing, but then you also have your explainers, so you get down to the B2B. So you're breaking up your audiences and you're talking to them in a style that really does tell great stories, and you're influencing the consumer by being stoked versus fear.
Wes Carter:
Yeah, I mean, ultimately if you want to change the world, you're not going to do it by scaring people to death. You might change a little bit of behavior, but I firmly believe people change through inspiration and the power of positivity and hope, and that's what we're trying to create.
Carol Cone:
Oh, it's great. And some of it was, well, some of your senior team and, "Well, we added this client and this technology," and whatever. But then you had snippets from your advocates and your surfers and your skiers and your snowboarders and your mountain bikers, and they just said, "Sustainable packaging is awesome."
Wes Carter:
And it is.
Carol Cone:
The sustainability industry is, "Oh, this is boring and this is B2B and there's nothing here." And you've taken it and you've humanized it, and you've become a magnet not only for internal talent, but for your partners, your companies to say, "Hey, is there another way to do this? And can we do more with less?" Which is brilliant. Can you talk a little bit about how you're tying the health through line to the sustainability, A New Earth Project, how that's connected?
Wes Carter:
Yeah. Well, I mean, fundamentally there's a lot of ways it's connected, but certainly partnering with the outdoor industry, I mean, if you're an elite outdoor athlete, health is pretty fundamental. And one of the beautiful things about outdoor athletes too is they overwhelmingly care about the environment.
And so having individuals that were representing Atlantic and representing A New Earth Project, that health was fundamental to their careers and to who they were as human beings, that was a big piece of it. And then ultimately the biggest through line though is we began to look at the materials that we were bringing to market and say, "Are these materials fundamentally healthy?" And we created new earth approved packaging, packaging solutions for a healthy planet. And we came up with some criteria that we... So as an example, there's three primary criteria. One, all of the materials have to be made from a feedstock that can be regenerated in one human life, a nature-based feedstock that can be regenerated in one human life. Then all of our solutions had to either be recyclable or home compostable.
Third, they had to be not antagonistic to the planet, to wildlife, to ecosystems. And so those are our three governing principles that we analyze, all the materials that we sell and everything that we bring to market. But again, I see health through so many different lenses, and ultimately I believe that we as human beings have often forgotten that we are nature not something separate from it. And our health and well-being, our mental health, our emotional health, our spiritual health is absolutely integrated with the health of the ecosystems that we live in. And if we destroy those ecosystems, we are destroying ourselves on every level, not just our physical health.
Carol Cone:
That's amazing. You are a true environmental steward. If you are talking to a colleague maybe around your age, maybe they're in a private company or a public company and they want to connect the culture to sustainability, to the business, they want to innovate. What are two or three recommendations that you have to these leaders?
Wes Carter:
Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, you've got to really evaluate the inner culture of your organization, like, "What do we represent and what greater good do we want our organization to serve?" A packaging company serves as the greater good versus an automotive company. There can be different greater goods. There needs to be. There's a spectrum of greater good, but really first establishing what do we serve and who do we serve and how do we serve? And I think those are fundamental questions we have to ask beyond, "We want to have a profitable company."
Now, hey, profit's not a dirty word. I want a profitable company. I want a highly profitable company. Profit is the engine. It's the fuel that keeps things running. And profit is the reward for doing things the right way and innovating the right way, but ultimately defining what your greater good is is really important. And I also think that all organizations have an inherent responsibility to caretake the health and wellbeing of their employees. Because when you create a culture of health and wellbeing, healthy employees, they show up, healthy employees are loyal, healthy employees, they think creatively, they work well together. It is fundamental to problem solving to have healthy, creative, engaged employees.
Carol Cone:
Great. Okay, so this has been an amazing conversation and I can't wait to see future product innovations and partnerships and as well incredibly great videos, and we're going to link to your YouTube channel as well. You get the last word, Wes Carter, what do you want to leave with our listeners?
Wes Carter:
Well, a few things. One, just thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure. I always appreciate the opportunity to tell our story. At A New Earth Project our tagline is, we do this together. And I think that's what I would leave your listeners like, no company, no individual can do this alone. If we want to save this planet and save ourselves, it's going to be a team effort, and we need the best and the brightest collaborating for these common good initiatives, and it's going to take all of us. And that's a beautiful thing.
I mean, I can think of no greater generational legacy than being the generation of human beings that woke up and redirected our world, our industry, our technology and the direction of life. And if we can do that, the generations, our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, our great-great-grandchildren will celebrate this era when we change the world. And it's possible, it's very possible, but it takes commitment and vision and a shared value set. We need shared values, and it's one of the things that we're working on right now to really try to establish what are those shared values?
To me, health, shared value. Authenticity, shared value. Sustainability, shared value. If as an industry, and I don't just mean the packaging industry, I mean the entire global supply chain, if we can start to coordinate around deep spiritual truths about what it means to even exist while we are actually here, then I believe we can really change the world. But I think we have to embrace that this is a spiritual thing by its very nature, and that's how I view it every single day.
Carol Cone:
That's absolutely beautiful. Wes Carter, you are amazing. I know you hear that all the time, but you're so genuine and you've created a culture. I mean, this is about... You are a purpose at the center company.
More people need to know about you, and I trust that our listeners from Purpose 360 are going to be so delighted you're going to be inundated with questions and speaking opportunities. And your goodness is just fantastic, and we look forward to helping others hear about you and to sharing with your incredible vision and philosophies.
Wes Carter:
Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. If there's anything amazing, it's the group of people that are around me. We have an incredibly talented, dedicated group of people that really believe in what we're doing. And I happen to be the voice, but there is a tremendous community of amazing human beings around me that make this happen, and they really deserve all the credit.
Carol Cone:
Super. Okay, thanks so much.
Wes Carter:
Thank you very much.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenny at Carol Cone On Purpose. Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
This transcript was exported on Apr 08, 2025 - view latest version here.
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