Chris Baker - Invisible Heroes 10

Invisible Heroes 10 - Chris Baker

So Energy

A social change strategist and serial entrepreneur (he is also the founder of Change Please, a social enterprise that trains homeless people as baristas), Chris is someone who strongly believes in the power of small changes to make a big difference. We talked to him about tackling deforestation, how he pivoted his business when the pandemic hit, and how to overcome feelings of powerlessness.

Can you tell us about your current work; what do you do, and what are the steps you’ve taken that led you to where you are today?

I’m one of the founders of Serious Tissues, the UK’s first carbon neutral toilet paper.

Between myself and my three other co-founders we’d worked on a few projects in the social enterprise space before, and were starting to get increasingly concerned about climate change and deforestation. Between the four of us we’ve got eight children so the time came when we wanted to do something to act on our concerns for the future, and toilet roll seemed like a good place to start!

We discovered that toilet paper accounts for around 20% of global deforestation, with 10 million trees cut down every year to manufacture it. I found it staggering that a tree could be turned into a single-use product - and even more ludicrous when you consider that we can make toilet paper from recycled paper that’s already in the supply chain, from things like office supplies.

At Serious Tissues we plant a tree for every roll of paper we sell; in the last year we’ve planted around 350,000 trees, so we’re really starting to see momentum ramping up. In fact we’ve recently been looking at some figures for our forthcoming impact report, and we found that every week we’re planting the equivalent of three Hyde Parks!

In terms of my career journey, I spent close to 20 years in marketing and advertising, working on everything from big global brands to small charities. As a strategist, my focus was on solving problems. During this time my passions and interests gradually began moving more towards social challenges; it’s all very well developing an ad campaign to sell a bag of crisps, but something that helps address social issues was far more interesting to me.

With that in mind, while I was still at the agency I had an idea for a coffee business that trained homeless people as baristas. We teamed up with the Big Issue and found a coffee partner who were already starting to do amazing things, led by Cemal Ezel, to create Change Please, and have gone on a pretty amazing journey in the six years since then. Having started out with a single cart in Covent Garden in 2015, our coffee is now stocked in Sainsburys, and it will soon have over 75 sites as we’ve just taken over AMT coffee. Change Please will also be the first coffee served in space with Virgin Galactic. Which is pretty cool!

When the pandemic hit last year, Serious Tissues pivoted to bring forward its redirect profits towards the NHS. Can you tell us a bit about that time?

Serious Tissues was in development mid-2019; we had the product and were ready to launch at the start of 2020 - then of course the pandemic hit and with it, amongst other things, a huge toilet roll shortage. We had all this product ready and waiting to go so we made the decision to go ahead with our launch, but to redirect all our profits to the NHS.

It showed us how important it is to be adaptable, especially during such uncertain times. Ultimately, making that last-minute change wasn’t that difficult. Because we already had our core guiding principle in place - that if you get someone to make a small change in how they spend their money, you can make a change in the world - we were able to pivot relatively easily.

You’re clearly someone who believes in the power of simple products and concepts to make massive change - how do you overcome feelings of powerlessness in tackling huge environmental and social problems?

Having worked in strategy I’ve spent a lot of time learning about behavioural economics; we have all these different inbuilt biases that mean we behave in a certain way. One of the things that’s been good about having that understanding is that when you can observe certain behaviours in yourself, you can begin to diagnose why we might act in a certain way.

Global warming is absolutely terrifying, make no mistake. But understanding things like the ostrich bias (a cognitive bias that means we bury our heads in the sand) is very useful in terms of not becoming overwhelmed by the things that feel scary and out of our control.

I believe that if you try and do everything at once it makes it feel impossible and insurmountable. It’s about breaking down the simple tasks that a single person can do, and seeing those add up. If you’d said to me at the start of the year that we’d have planted over 300,00 trees in a year, and that next year that will tip into the millions if we continue on our trajectory, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I also believe in the power of individual behaviour - and in particular our choices around where we spend our money. We get to vote maybe ten times in our lives, but we are spending money constantly. And while our vote may or may not make a difference, how we spend our money makes a massive difference, because power follows money.

For most people there’s probably ten easy switches they can make right now that will make a positive difference. Switching to a renewable energy supplier is one example.

If you could encourage readers to make one small change to their day-to-day lives in order to positively impact the planet, what would it be?

Becoming more mindful about how you spend your money is the key. There are lots of brands offering a more positive impact. It might take a bit of effort to find them but once you have, those brands will become your new default. It’s easy to get lost in political nuance and blaming different groups, an ‘us versus them’ mentality. But fundamentally, if you move where the money is going, you can change the world.

I’d also add that switching your toilet roll supplier is a good place to start - though of course I’m biased! Serious Tissues also offers a soap and laundry product that is focused on removing ocean plastic. For every pack we sell we recover 1kg of ocean-bound plastic which is the equivalent of 50 plastic bottles or 500 crisp packets. It’s an example of an approach which will scale really quickly, once we start to pick up a bit of momentum as we have done with the toilet paper.

What was the book/podcast/show that got you through lockdown?

I’m going to be honest here - I’ve got three kids aged five and under so at the moment the only things I’m watching are programmes like Hey Duggee.

I’d love to have the time to listen to more podcasts and read books, but at the moment it’s not a reality. I’ll get back to it at some point!