Think about the products you use every day at home. The hand soap. The cleaning spray. The sponge for the dishes. The face cream. The toothpaste.

Why do you buy certain brands, with certain packaging and certain ingredients?

Whether it's because they were the products of our childhood, or the advertising has convinced us, or the price is just too convenient, we may not spend much time questioning our purchase decisions. It feels like consumers are pushed towards disposable items that contain powerful chemicals that may not necessarily be good for people or the environment.

But is there another way?

In this week’s episode, Giulia speaks to Ira Guha, founder at Asan, to challenge the consumer products status quo through the lens of the menstrual cup.

They explore the history of menstrual products, including their environmental and health impacts, and the issue of period poverty. Ira shares insights on the need for education and behaviour change to promote reusable options, which are not often displayed in shops and pharmacies, remaining a bit of a “secret”.

Breaking the taboo surrounding menstruation ignites the discussion on the vast array of reusable products. By opening up to other people who menstruate, we can discover that they are more environmentally friendly, and arguably more comfortable, than what the status quo has us believe.

This blueprint can be applied to all those products that we use on a daily basis. Can you make the switch to a reusable option today?

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Is ESG really “dead,” or are we asking the wrong question?

Perhaps, we should examine what it takes to run a truly responsible business in today’s high-risk environment.

This week, Giulia is joined by Steve Kenzie, executive director of the UN Global Compact Network UK, to explore how the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative is pushing companies beyond paper commitments and into real accountability.

It is tempting to think that ESG acronyms, ratings, and disclosure frameworks capture what responsibility means. Meanwhile, as Steve explains, the underlying pressures – climate change, inequality, resource stress – are not going away.

Business as usual is untenable. The companies that survive will be those that embed principles, acknowledge trade-offs, and act with long-term value in mind.

In the first episode of Season 5, we explore why debates over ESG branding miss the real sustainability pressures, how the UNGC helps businesses align with global needs, and what needs to change to scale true sustainable practices.

This is a reality check – and a call to courage – for leaders navigating backlash, complexity, and the quiet temptation to wait it out.

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At the heart of Shaken Not Burned is sustainability literacy. But not in the sense of teaching acronyms or repeating headlines. What we mean is something bigger: the skills to understand how systems really work – and how to change them.

The same skills that help you spot greenwash or untangle climate policy are the ones we all need to face today’s challenges: misinformation, polarisation, geopolitical shocks, even the cracks in democratic norms.

Here’s the thing: we don’t need more theories telling us where we should be. We need the how. How do we move from brilliant ideas and elegant frameworks to action that actually changes things?

We are placing power at the core of our project. Not power as something distant or elite, but power as agency. Knowing where you stand, what you can influence, and how your actions ripple through the system. That shift – from paralysis to agency – is the foundation for resilience and change.

This season we’ll be exploring how people are already doing it. Different approaches, different products, different ways of thinking – but all rooted in action, not theory.

Whether you’re running a business, allocating capital, or simply trying to build a better future, Season 5 is about finding your leverage points and learning how change actually happens.

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What does it take to scale real-world climate solutions fast?

In this episode, we explore what happens when you treat climate action like an engineering challenge, not just a moral imperative.

Joining us is Nick Wirth, aerodynamicist, engineer, and former Formula One team owner turned cleantech entrepreneur. Today, he’s applying high-performance engineering to supermarkets, trucks, and buildings through Wirth Research, saving clients energy costs and cutting emissions with every installation.

Nick walks us through his journey from designing wind-tunnel-free F1 cars to developing AirDoor and EcoBlade, technologies which are now being used across the UK retail sector to cut heating and cooling loads by up to 70%.

We explore why sustainability only scales when it delivers a strong return, how overlooked retrofits could unlock widespread adoption of heat pumps, and what supermarkets reveal about behavioural economics and invisible design.

The good news is that the business case is stronger than ever. The challenge now is moving fast enough, and thinking big enough, to match the moment.

Nick’s story is a powerful reminder that many of the answers we need already exist. What’s missing isn’t innovation but implementation at scale. Listen in, and find out what it looks like when a Formula One mindset meets a broken energy system – and decides to rebuild it.

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Let’s step out of the ESG echo chamber and into a much bigger conversation: what are the real limits of our planet and how close are we to crossing them? Life on Earth has remained stable for the last 12,000 years, but that stability is starting to unravel.

It’s tempting to treat climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and land use as separate “issues,” each with their own strategy, timeline, and department. But that’s not how Earth works, and businesses that think that way are flying blind.

In this week’s episode, Felicia speaks with Dr. Katherine Richardson, Earth system scientist, professor of biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the architects of the Planetary Boundaries framework.

We explore why six of the nine planetary boundaries have already been breached and what that really means for our future. Katherine explains how Earth system science reframes sustainability, moving us beyond the idea of simply doing less harm toward a far more urgent goal: staying within the planet’s safe operating space.

We may be overdue for a social tipping point, and business leaders can help accelerate that shift. We ask what executives actually need to understand about science (hint: it’s not the chemistry), and examine how outdated metrics, short-term thinking, and misaligned incentives keep many companies stuck, while others are quietly forging a different path.

This episode is a wake-up call, but also a message of hope. Change is happening, albeit not fast enough. But as we’ve learned from smoking bans to seat belts, social tipping points often come quickly if enough of us help push.

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From climate volatility to food insecurity and antibiotic resistance, the global food system is at a breaking point. Industrial agriculture contributes up to 25% of global emissions, drives biodiversity loss, and strains farmers with volatile prices and precarity.

It’s clear we need to change how food is made, not just how it's consumed: one bold solution is clean agriculture.

In this week’s episode, Felicia speaks with Jim Mellon, entrepreneur, investor, and executive chairman of Agronomics, a company backing cellular agriculture and precision fermentation to create meat, dairy, eggs, and oils, without animal cruelty, deforestation, or ultra-processed additives.

Agronomics is invested in companies such as Meatly, BlueNalu, Liberation Labs, and Clean Food Group, aiming to industrially replace high-impact ingredients such as palm oil, dairy proteins, and even bluefin tuna with bio-identical, lower-impact alternatives.

In this episode, we unpack what clean agriculture really means, and why it’s fundamentally different from plant-based food and from GM. We explore its potential to cut emissions, reduce antibiotic use, ease pressure on land, and stabilise food prices in an era of growing volatility.

Jim Mellon why new fermentation infrastructure is critical, what investors often misunderstand about this emerging sector, and how dogs might just be the unlikely bridge to a cleaner, more sustainable future for meat.

Whether you care about emissions, animal welfare, farmer livelihoods, or just the price of chocolate, this episode makes the case for why clean agriculture might just be the food system moonshot we need.

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The world needs to plug a biodiversity finance gap worth $700 billion per year to effectively protect and restore nature, according to the United Nations. This issue is garnering more attention as sustainability efforts have evolved from reducing carbon emissions to protecting nature – moving from ‘do no harm’ to taking positive action.

A turning point was the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to which most countries agreed in 2022, defining biodiversity commitments, pushing for reporting and regulation and calling for more than $200 billion from public and private capital.

One potential solution is raising financing through biodiversity markets. But establishing biodiversity credits isn’t as simple as carbon credits: a tonne of CO2 emitted has the same impact globally, while nature and biodiversity impacts are very specific and local.

The history of the development of the carbon markets has had its own challenges, as they were fraught with significant controversies, raising concerns about the same issues developing in the biodiversity markets. In this week’s episode, Giulia explores this new space with Simas Gradeckas, founder at Bloom Labs.

The conversation touches upon the role of corporate responsibility in addressing biodiversity loss, ethical considerations surrounding projects in the Global South and putting a price on nature, the differences between compliance and voluntary markets, and the future prospects for scaling biodiversity finance.

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There’s no denying that continuing to treat the natural world as we do will lead to ecological breakdown. We don’t seem to take into account how our consumption of natural resources affects the planet – which, ultimately, may stop providing those resources in the first place.

UK economist Kate Raworth has developed a model, called doughnut economics, which provides an alternative system where humans can thrive without breaching planetary boundaries. In her landmark book, “Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist,” she suggests seven transformation points in our current economic system.

In this week’s episode, Giulia explores this framework with Carolina Eboli and Jo Woods, board members of the London Doughnut Economy Coalition. The interview covers the Coalition’s work at a local level, engaging communities in South London while acknowledging the urgency to maintain a global perspective in addressing these issues.

The conversation also touches upon the challenges for businesses in integrating the doughnut principles in their operations. While some companies have successfully implemented them, adopting this mindset isn’t straightforward, as each business navigates its unique context. Yet, this shouldn’t discourage action; ultimately, operating within planetary boundaries means future-proofing and building an organisation for the 21st century and beyond.

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