OTHALO™ has developed a patent-pending technology to manufacture building systems using recycled plastic waste. The main market is the developing world where there is a massive need for affordable houses, refugee shelters, temperature-controlled units for storage of food and medicines, camps (hospitals, schools, temporary living) for disasters and emergency situations. Frank Cato Lahti, has been developing and testing the OTHALO™ technology in partnership with SINTEF in Trondheim and the University in Tromsø since 2014. The company was formally established and patent applications filed in 2019. After years of self-funding the development, OTHALO™ is now in a position to scale up the company, supported by UN-Habitat, global thought-leaders, and many engaged partners. Frank joins us from Vard, Norway, a town filled with legends of magic and the Northern Lights. Listen to his fascinating journey in this episode. For more episodes go to our website:https://www.mindfulbusinessespodcast.com/podcast-1 To learn more about Othalo: https://othalo.com/
https://othalo.com/
https://www.mindfulbusinessespodcast.com/podcast-1
Othalo – The Future of Housing
[Start 00:00:00]
Introduction
Frank Cato Lahti: We want to do something about plastic waste problem before we lose the world. We want to do something about now the housing problem, housing deficiency in the world and the explosion, as I mentioned, 160 million today, 360 million by 2050, that's just in African, Sub-Saharan. And we want to create jobs, a lot of jobs. Because jobs is security and doing something for the planet. And then we have the fourth pillar of the company and the fourth pillar, the corporate social responsibility. These four pillars, we believe will help create stable society. These are really important for us. These values, our partners will have to take on as their own.
Vidhya Iyer: Welcome to Mindful Businesses present by Saraani and I'm your host Vidhya Iyer. In our podcasts, we bring too you brands which are mindful in their practices and processes. A mindful business adopts and imply sustainable social economic and environmental practices.
Today we talk to the passionate Frank Cato Lahti. Founder of Othalo, from plastic waste to modern houses. He joins us from Vardo, Norway, a small island in the Barents Sea. Welcome Frank.
Start of Podcast
Frank Cato Lahti: Thank you Vidhya. It's really nice to be here. I've really been looking forward to this talk.
Vidhya Iyer: I was fascinated when I looked up your town on the globe. You're pretty far up north there.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, we're as far north, as you can get in mainland Europe, we're way above the Arctic circle. And we are the only place in mainland Europe that by definition has the Arctic climate, which is, we have no summer, which means, we don't have over 10 degrees Celsius ever during three summer months, but it's a really nice place. I love getting into history about my hometown, born here. Back to the old Greeks who is visiting here, and they are the first mentioned the holy mountain Domen and described the entrance to the underworld. And they were the first to describe the people who lived here. They met the high fair people lived here, which had no word for war, but that all mastered magic. Throughout history, magic has been a key word for the population up here.
Vidhya Iyer: Do you still see the Aurora Borealis?
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, if it's not snowy or cloudy, we will see the Aurora. I was out to film the Aurora yesterday, but it started to cloud and getting to snow. But up here, over there, Barents Sea and you see the green waves of the Aurora. We call it the curtains waving on the stary night sky. And you have this pink edge of the green curtains, that is amazing. If you don't believe in magic before. I promise you; you believe in magic and something bigger than yourself afterwards.
Vidhya Iyer: Now, back to reality, the real reality. World Bank and Habitat for Humanity, report that as of December 2018, 30% of the urban population lives in a slum. That is every seventh person worldwide lives in a slum, as shocking as a number is, could you just tell our listeners, what is a slum?
Frank Cato Lahti: What is slum? What is the absence of safety? What is the absence of clean water? What is absent of health? What is living in insecure environment? Not being able to have, you know, that English term, my home is my castle. You able to feel safe. What is the absence of safe? That is slum. Health problem or health issues, lack of water. It's a breeding ground for sickness, illnesses, and might be jumping into things now, but during this pandemic, we're in now, the COVID-19, it's been a huge from both National Governments and from the UN. A huge focus or even bigger focus on actually slums, because this is where the poorest and the one who has the less means is pack together. Because in a slum you have one shack, six, eight people living in this one room, bad conditions. You have no clean water. You're not able to maintain….
Vidhya Iyer: Social distancing is non-existent.
Frank Cato Lahti: It's non-existent and you have this pack shack upon shack. This is breeding grounds for epidemics, that is this most. I would say the scariest thing. And even again, maybe I'm jumping into things now, slums, we tend to think about slum as you are living in normal house. We have running water, we have healthcare, we have everything we need, and we believe that slum is poor people. Of course, we know that there are health issues. They're not able to have that. Keep the social distancing required, being a breeding ground for diseases. It also affects, as you said, one in seven living slums, but even the six others can be affected by slums since it's a breeding ground for other diseases, which hit anyone worldwide.
Vidhya Iyer: For people in the Western Countries who haven't seen a slum, the first time they ever saw a slum was probably in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. I'm not sure if you're aware of that. It was shot in one of the largest slums in Asia, Dharavi in Mumbai and most of the slums, they're not typically dangerous. Most homes don't even have locks. The neighbors are very supportive of each other, and they are extremely, extremely poor people who struggle with everyday living, you know, going to work. Some are manufacturing units, which who manufactured their own home, small-scale cottage industries. And so, it is a completely different perspective than the high crime poor areas that we see in other parts of the world. So, a slum is typically in the urban population, right?
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, strangely slum is an urban both situations, and living. What we've seen today is, we have a population growth, we also have urbanization where people move from the more rural areas, but actually are able to maintain better living. And even though it might be poor, but as people tend to move into more urban areas, which creates slums. The promise of a better life, jobs often in the biggest cities, it's really strange to see that slums grow into what we're seeing now. We've been discussing this with the UN, but as Africa, which we have until now had the main focus. And in particular, we started out in Kenya, in Nairobi. We had this firsthand view and discussion and the UN showed us the slum keyboarder in Nairobi. And you see that, yes, we have a huge population growth in Africa as well.
The population is growing more and more, goes into the big urban cities, urban centers. And that actually magnifies the problem of population growth because population growth in the rural areas could be somewhat positive, but somehow, we tend to gather, as human beings we tend to gather in these huge cities with just heightened the problem and that, to me, it puzzles me, but it might be because I'm actually not very urban myself, living in a small town. And that heightens the problems. More and more people, both by population growth and by migration tends to end up in slumps. And that has huge impact in both the local economies. It has a huge impact in health problem, health issues. So, we magnify our own problem. In most countries, we see this migration into the urban areas from the rural areas and that magnifies the problem even in industrial countries, like India, 1.3 billion people, if I'm not mistaken. It has the same amount of population as the entire continent of Africa. And when you have the migration of that amount of people into the more urban areas, that would create all sorts of trouble and the dream of having a better life, it dies.
Vidhya Iyer: It's, really, really tough. And I remember I used to take the bus to college and my bus used to go right through Dharavi, the slum that we spoke about. And it was rough, even for me to see the conditions in which the kids go to school, women are going about their jobs. It's very, very tough to see. It starts to get these desensitized, even though I was seeing it every single day, you know, so let's talk about what is the meaning of the word Othalo?
Frank Cato Lahti: Othalo is an old, old Norse, Norwegian name. We believe that, our technology, the vision behind, is to make impact. And the meaning of the word Othalo, the name is seen as the expansion of the light of individuals and collective human consciousness against the forces of ignorance and the darkness of the world. That's a deep meaning. It actually says that we want to make lives better. We want to make people have a beautiful, meaningful, safe life. We want to be part of people's lives. We want to make a difference. We want people to look at the waste as a resource. We need to change the way we see the entire world, the use of resources and the name Othalo actually incorporates all of these things, but Othalo as a company going to make change. But when I say we, I mean, all human being.
Vidhya Iyer: You're sitting way, way north. How did you get connected to the problem?
In Africa?
Frank Cato Lahti: I'll take you through, how this came about. Bit about my background. I've been working for the armed forces or the government my entire grown life. I had suffered from PTSD from one of my tours in a war zone and had to leave the army. Moved back home to the Artic, which I've described. And I really, really love, and I live like 30 meters from the ocean. And during the winter storms, the ocean just fills the beach with plastic waste. We are a small island with 2000 people living. We don't produce that much waste. It's not possible, and it made me think, this is not right. We have to do something about it. If we feel the impact as far north, as you can get, how do people elsewhere in huge urban population with not thousands, but millions of people. That creates a lot of waste, that makes a problem and started checking things out. I have a building energy engineer degree and have space technology degree and started to think, how can we solve this menace? That plastic waste is, because the entire world is suffocating. The environment, the animals, the plants, the soil is suffocating. The water, the ocean, it said that by 2050, we will have more plastic in the ocean than we have fish, that is scary. We need to do something that actually has an impact. And with my travels abroad, I've seen the lack of housing, proper housing. As you mentioned, we talked about slums, whether it's an Asia, whether it's even in Europe, Africa, South America, the need for housing is immense. What if we could use the plastic waste to solve another problem? Use that resource. That's how this came about, because we need to sort things out in a way that we are able to deal with immense problems, because it needs to have volumes. Okay, I don't mean to offend anyone, but it is a limit to how many flower pots we can create and use even worldwide. So, you need something which makes an impact. So, I started based on my knowledge in building technology to see how we could make something strong enough out of plastic.
Vidhya Iyer: So, is it a Patented Technology? Do you have the knowledge in material science? You have knowledge building; you have the common sense of what the problem is and trying to solve. So how did you think of the material and its technology patented?
Frank Cato Lahti: The question I get a lot, plastic, how's that possible? We've actually building house out of plastic is not new. There was even experimenting on it in the sixties, in the Soviet Union, started experimenting with it, but it's been hard to make something properly. It was costly, and that is one of the reasons we use waste to make resources, to build houses based on a patented as you asked for. There's a patented technology, which we using here in Norway. Partnering up with SINTEF, which is the research and approval company, which is renowned in Europe. So, it's a structure itself, which is patented. The system itself, at this moment, we're able to use about 75% of all plastic, different types of plastic into the system to create the building technology. So, it's a three-part system and you have to use particular plastic for the particular parts to make it strong and sustainable.
Vidhya Iyer: So, your saying, though you use 75% of all kinds of plastics. You probably make different products depending on their strength and capable?
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, exactly. This is strong, and this use, right. We could build bridges of it. And here you have all sort of plastic, is a different plastic, which is used for insulation. So, we have taken different strengths and values out of the different kinds of plastic to particular use these for different part, whether it's insulation, the load carrying system, the outer shell to make it feel like standard normal house. It's strong, I was about to swear now, is a north Norwegian way of doing it, when we emphasize something, but it's strong. It can carry almost anything.
Vidhya Iyer: Yeah, it's fascinating how tough plastic can be. A weird thing, you have plastic bags and wrappers, but when do bring it all together. So, are they any adhesive or is just a hundred percent plastics, which is compressed with heat?
Frank Cato Lahti: We plastic out the plastic types that has the properties we need, and it's brought together with heat. And we have some additives which is checked for, we have always taken care about their health issues, so we don't do anything wrong. But they have tested this far, it's fireproof, it will self-extinguish. That's really important with plastic because you don't want any poisonous fumes. You don't want plastic to drip, so it's very important. It's a lot of things you have to take into consideration. It's not just the strength, but it's a health issue as well.
Vidhya Iyer: Yeah, how did you make it fireproof? That's fascinating because that was my next question. Because wooden houses are bad enough, but a plastic house is even worst.
Frank Cato Lahti: Together with SINTEF and some of our research partners, we have found the recipe that will make this self-extinguish. It will melt without any fumes, if you put a high temperature, like a torch on it. But it won't take fire, it won't melt. It will just melt where you have the fire. But the moment you remove it, it's self-extinguished. Because we use the European Norwegian in building requirements as a standard. And it has to do with the load bearing construction, has to stand long enough for people to evacuate during a big fire. And the values are different depending on what kind of building it is. It's one story, two story, three stories, four stories, is it hospitals, school, nursery, its different, so we always work towards these. These are all goals when we use SINTEF as our main partner on that. To have everything documented and approved by Norwegian and European standards.
Vidhya Iyer: Yeah, and there are so many things that you don't think of when you're just starting off with the material. And then as you go deeper, because we've spoken now, two or three times, and every time I find so much more about your product, and of course I am fascinated every time. I'm like, oh my God, this too. It's exciting always to talk to you, but you have a partner in this project, an architect from Denmark.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, he's actually from Belgium, but he has offices in Sweden, Denmark. He's a world-renowned architect.
Vidhya Iyer: What's his name?
Frank Cato Lahti: Julian De Smedt, and he has some really great project behind him worldwide.
Vidhya Iyer: How did you find him?
Frank Cato Lahti: It's quite a recent, if I could call it that. We started out, there was UN Habitat Day, the 5th of October, we started planning this long time ago. We wanted to have a [Inaudible 00:20:03] in place in Nairobi, in UN Habitat compound to show off UN Habitat Day, but then COVID came, weren’t going anywhere. So, things changed and I got phone from the UN. Frank, you can’t come there, it will be an online event, but if you could make a film, a movie. Showing this, showing your visions, your architecture, your thoughts about it. That would be great because we could show this online. It is the same day as it's been fine for a while. The UN would tell the world that we partner up with Othalo. So, okay, we have to a movie, we have to actually focusing on a digital platform so that we could show what we're all about. We contacted a film company to have them make this film, short film.
Vidhya Iyer: So, to be digitized model of the house, which they would showcase at the event.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, we've got to the film company. The ways of the universe, I can't explain it any other way.
Vidhya Iyer: Magic. Yeah.
Frank Cato Lahti: It's magic because what I got to understand or know that this project, it touches people. The world is having, the focus of the world, the humanity is changing. We know we have to take care of the Earth or Mother Gaia. I'm a spiritual person myself, and I really do believe that good things will come around when you have good intentions. And the film company, the owner of the film company actually had done a project with Julien when they met earlier and he said, “This is our really good ID for Julien.” And called him up. Julien is based now in Sweden, where he has bought an area, where he is working towards sustainability, he wants to try different things. And he saw this project, we talked about it and he was really keen on it, really in on it and wanted to join. That's how we met Julien, and then the UN, the 6th of October, announce the partnership. And since then, and if anyone of the 300 mails, I haven't been able to respond to yet. I have about 300 mails, I'm behind answering emails.
Vidhya Iyer: I must say, I'm honored that you have to squeeze me in when you have so much work.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, it's been crazy since the 6th of October. If you Google Othalo, every week, there's some new media who caught this, had an article, World Economic Forum, CNN, it's been all over the world. It's been crazy.
Vidhya Iyer: So, when did you start exactly, 2019 or 2018?
Frank Cato Lahti: I started the company in April, 2019. That’s correct, because companies about soon to be two years old, I've started with technology. The first, call it, the first footsteps. Checking things out, experimenting, testing for myself, before I started working towards the patent, it was in 2014. So, I wanted to check out that it was possible before I started a company.
Vidhya Iyer: How did you check it out?
Frank Cato Lahti: First, I did some tests myself, if my idea is actually worth anything. You know, being the garage inventor, where you do testing, and then you involve people. You travel around with your first prototypes under your arm and visit people who actually have the knowledge. And I've had people, one of Norway's biggest plastic producers up here in my home, at my house. I went down to him with my first prototype, just to show the strength of it. It was just made, just to show the principles and he said, “You're really into something.” And then, about a year later, he came up here. Saw my first two proper handmade prototypes. And he said, “Frank you got no idea what you actually can accomplished here.” And to be honest, I hadn't.
My vision is what's been driving me all the time. The technology has been the means of the vision. And part of the vision is, we're not a profit maximizing company. It's doing good, which is important. Leaving the Earth, a better place than it was when I grew up or it has become. And as I said, I am a spiritual man. And how strange it is, there's a lot of spirituality in this way of how things have come about. And when he came up here, he looked at a couple of prototypes and he was really keen on it. And since then, that's when he started the company. I had the approval or a backing I needed. To be honest, with all the coverage and attention and emails I've gotten since the 6th of October, it's even more inspiring. And especially, I have had a couple of email from small kids. The youngest was six years old.
Vidhya Iyer: It must make your day?
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, it really, when kids of today, they're really aware of where we at as a planet and the humanity and the plastic problem. Getting a bit move it here, feel me eye’s watering now. Kids, thank you for this and I’m really happy because they see this as a solution for something they're really scared of. That’s most rewarding thing ever. I've gotten a lot of emails from professionals and investors, and they are always nice, but from the kids, it really moved me.
Vidhya Iyer: The kids, because it's authentic. So, describe Othalo? How is it? Is it very flexible based on the space that you have? Is it modular? What do you [Inaudible 00:26:55] Describe an Othalo home for me? What is an Othalo home look like? Walk me through it.
Frank Cato Lahti: Okay, what is an Othalo home? At this stage we are focused on, and now we're going into the physical. We have like one bedroom, two bedrooms, three bedrooms. We have a standard because it's all about making things as cheap as possible because it's affordable housing. It's been defined by the United Nations at a price range, and were well under those costs, they put up. If you live in an Othalo home, you wouldn't know that it would be Othalo home, it would be your home. It's a normal house. It looks, feels like any normal house. It has a bathroom, bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and it's all sustainable. Everything from the sanitary system, we looking at off-grid solutions for electricity and energy. We are also looking for this product. I've been talking to several partners, potential partners that can have vertical garden to grow vegetables and greens using, collected rainwater. We have tested that together with the UN and depends on whether you have a large community, the size of the community. We can use the sanitary system, the toilet waste, turn it into bio gas, which could be used. So, we're looking into a sustained.
Vidhya Iyer: Fully circular home, shall we say?
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, is a circle home. It's a circle way of living. And we have to move into that kind of, and that's really important. I want to go back to the slums and slums, the social houses, the affordable housing, low-income houses. Doing it correctly, which is part of our vision, is that they would be from being in the back of sustainability and technology. It would be a forefront for sustainability, they will be cutting edge. They would take massive leaps and lead in the way of living for the future and for the health of the planet. We couldn't do that here in Europe for example, that wouldn't be possible. And we're also looking into, I wouldn't go into that, but were will looking into way of, let's say, producing electricity in a way that where the houses is actually of electricity producer, which could be used as a way of financing your own home. So, the house will finance itself, by producing energy.
Vidhya Iyer: Yeah, by sending the electricity that you generate with your solar panels back to the grid. So, it will offset some of the cost of your housing.
Frank Cato Lahti: Exactly, so we're looking into ways of doing this now. We have some partners who could help us realize that.
Vidhya Iyer: Exciting, coming to the just the very practical part of it. Would these homes be like modular and be able to be put together on site? How would it work?
Frank Cato Lahti: Oh yeah, yeah. Going back to what I talked about earlier on, when I talked about the plastic waste, we see, we see that the magnitude of the problem and in need of housing, as in Africa, south of Sahara. Housing deficiency in the area south of Sahara is today 160 million homes by 2050, it is 360 million, okay. We can't build houses in a traditional way and hope to cope with the needs. I will say it might be a detour, but if you will humor me on this one. I was in Kenya and then it went to Mumbai, talk with some of my investors. I was to go to a meeting in Dubai, which had to do with the researching process and in Abu Dhabi at that time, there was The World Urban Forum.
I just landed in Dubai. And then the UN called me, “Frank you have to be in Abu Dhabi at five. There's someone I want you to meet.” Go to the hotel in Dubai, ran up, changed into my suit, jumped in a taxi and took the taxi to Abu Dhabi and came into the Congress Center there and was met by UN. And he brought us into a room where there was ministers and leaders from 33 African Countries, which they had briefed about Othalo. And it was an amazing moment. It really got to you, because it was heartfelt. They saw that as a solution to a problem, the problem all countries have, which is on the top agenda. But the reason why I brought you to Abu Dhabi is to question, how do you do this? Is to build it onsite, or is it modular? And being in this meeting, World Urban Forum was also the CEO of Shelter Afrique, Andrew Chimphondah. I hope I pronounced that correctly
Because he really deserves it. Talk to us, we're really interested in this. Because he said, “We have been using $2 billion to build houses, affordable housing in Africa in the last few years, it's not possible to build affordable housing with traditional technology and traditional material, it's not possible.” And this is to answer your question, you have to do this in a way that makes impact. It has to be an industrialized process. You have to be able to produce masses of houses, and that is what we do. You manufacture, it's a modular, its panels, which interlocks. You just produce the houses, one small factory, it’s as a manual labor factory. Will produce about 7.8 houses per eight-hour shift per day. It will produce thousand, 60 square meter buildings per shift, per eight-hour shift per year. And it will be taken on ship or truck or moved to the building site. We would love to have the factories as close to the building size as possible. It has to do with sustainability, less commission. So, we don't call our carpenters, carpenters, they're fitters. They go in and they put up houses. It's modular, it's ready to go. The first test that we did, we put up the walls before lunch and the roof after lunch, so it should be quick.
Vidhya Iyer: Incredible.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah.
Vidhya Iyer: And because often these people don't have spaces to move out and stay while your house is being built. You have to like probably do it, finish it during the working day so that not to be able to displace them. How tall can these houses be?
Frank Cato Lahti: The UN have asked us to get it varies for four storey or base plus three. You know we call it four storey, but you would call it three storey, wouldn't it? Yeah, the ground the ground floor plus three.
Vidhya Iyer: The ground floor plus three, is sort of more universal way.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah.
Vidhya Iyer: You said that these were homes. Is there a way these modular homes can be customized because the house in Africa is different than a house in India or within Africa different context? That's very
Frank Cato Lahti: That’s very Important. We talked about Julien, which is an architect, but what's really important is this is one of the core elements in our vision. Everything we do should be based as a local knowledge, local history, local culture. In Africa, it wouldn't be wrong to say Africa because Africa is huge. And different culture nations would like to have different because it has to be familiar. And as in India, they wouldn't want to live in the same house as I do here in [Inaudible 00:36:02] because it has no cultural background, no historical background. So, the system allows us to build the things the way you want to have it.
Vidhya Iyer: And I think even the fact that the weather, if you have flat rooms where there are torrential rains, it's quite pointless.
Frank Cato Lahti: And that's what we're working together with SINTEF is actually, it's way different to build houses up here in Northern part of Norway, where we have quite dry weather, but cold. And then you go to Sub-Saharan Africa, in the lowlands where you have really and India, where you have really hot moist weather. And then you get into the high lands in Africa where you have temperature and dry. So, you have to take all these into considerations in where you build, not only the houses, but the communities and that's where we talk. Why I mentioned it has to be based on the cultural background because their houses today, wherever you travel around the world, it has come about due to the weather, the climate, the temperature, everything is put together to create a house.
Vidhya Iyer: Now to create a home?
Frank Cato Lahti: To create a home, exactly.
Vidhya Iyer: When you see yourself in five years, how much of this problem do you think, say you pick only Africa, you'll be able to solve with the waste we have, with the production capacity you have, and you'll have to train people to put together these houses too.
Frank Cato Lahti: Yeah, we have to train people to [Inaudible 00:37:41] we have made ourselves a real yearly goal. And it's always in the start. It's it moves slowly, but what we see happen today, we want to have produce put up 1 million houses within the next five years. And nobody has ever done that for us, but we can't do it ourselves. That's wouldn't be possible. We need partners. We need partners worldwide, who will, what should I call it?
Vidhya Iyer: To walk the journey with you, to run with you, to collaborate with you.
Frank Cato Lahti: We will have to collaborate but they will have to also use our values, because that's important. This is not mainly okay, it has to be sustainable, also in economically. And the shareholders and investors, of course, I know they want the money back and if not sustainable in an economic way, it wouldn't be sustainable and make a difference in the world today.
Vidhya Iyer: So, what you're saying, you want to partner with stakeholders, collaborators who have your own values, not only of being sustainable.
Frank Cato Lahti: Exactly.
Vidhya Iyer: But profit, not being the main motive.
Frank Cato Lahti: No, I've said no to several investors who wanted to get in because they see this as a big, big opportunity to make money. But we are not into profit maximizing. We have four pillars. If I could talk about the four pillars, because it tells something about, we are. We want to do something about plastic waste problem before it ruins the world. We want to do something about the housing problem, housing deficiency in the world and the explosion, as I mentioned, 160 million today, 360 million by 2050. And that's just in Africa, Sub-Saharan. And we want to create jobs, a lot of jobs because jobs is security. And it also has to do with their feeling of self-worth, who am I? People should be proud. They should be proud in their lives, feel safety, economical security. They want to have a job where they're doing good. They're producing houses, they’re doing something with the plastic waste problem. They're doing something for the planet.
And then we have the fourth pillar of the company and the fourth pillar, the corporate social responsibility. We want to give back, that's what I mentioned, not a profit maximizing because we want to make sure that people have the security back in life, that they have health care, so we will have health insurance. We want to make sure that people have retirement plan. So, we have to have something to do with that. We have to give back, so people going to old age having the security. And it also has to do with, if you look throughout, especially in Africa, where actually a lot of kids is a way to take care of oneself, to ensure a safe old age. Because if you're able to have a pension plan, you're able to, maybe you will see less growth in population growth. You have to think about education, both for the workers and for the workers children, and especially women's jobs, create jobs for women, that is really important. And these values, these four pillars, we believe will help create stable society. These are really important for us. These values, our partners will have to take on as their own.
Closing
Vidhya Iyer: It's been fascinating talking to you, it's been inspiring talking to you. We wish you all the best on your journey and hope we can reconnect maybe in a year to see how things are going.
Frank Cato Lahti: Hopefully, if things get, as we've been talking about Vidhya, you'll be walking besides me, yeah, beside me.
Vidhya Iyer: Thank you again.
Frank Cato Lahti: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Vidhya Iyer: If you're the creator of a mindful brand or would like to recommend a mindful brand to be featured on our show, please send us a message on our Facebook or Instagram page. Like and review our podcast on any of the podcast apps that you listen to. For more information and insight about this episode, go to Mindful Businesses Podcast on our Instagram or Facebook page. This is Vidhya Iyer for Mindful Businesses.
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