Jake Kheel - Secrets Behind the Caribbean's Most Innovative Resort

A resort that generates 25 tons of waste every single day has two choices: manage it badly or build something worth talking about. Jake Kheel, VP of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, chose the latter. He's back this week to get into the real work: composting at industrial scale, coral reef restoration, a hawk conservation project that now has 150 birds on property, and why climate change has stopped being a future problem for coastal communities and started being a right-now one.Jake breaks down what a VP of Sustainability actually does in the tourism industry: part problem-solving, part what he calls "troublemaking," meaning finding things that are broken and convincing people it's worth fixing them. He's candid about the failures that got him here, including an early composting experiment with worms from his New York City apartment that did not go as planned. The organic waste work took years of hardheadedness and iteration to become what it is now: a composting operation that manages food, manure, and green waste from hotels, an airport, thousands of employees, and an entire residential community. The goal isn't just to handle the waste. It's to close the loop and regenerate soil in the process.Then there's Leo. Leo is a Ridgeway's Hawk, an endemic species once down to roughly 200 breeding pairs, who now serves as an ambassador for a conservation project that started with three birds and has grown to over 150. Jake talks through how Grupo Puntacana partnered with the Peregrine Fund to establish a second breeding population on the resort property, and why taking a hawk to a school or a family farm turns out to be one of the most effective conservation strategies around.Episode in a glance01:32 What a VP of Sustainability Actually Does All Day04:15 Sargassum: The Seaweed Crisis Threatening Caribbean Tourism11:28 The Composting Experiment That Flopped (And What It Eventually Became)18:47 How Kids Are Convincing Their Parents to Compost20:39 Meet Leo: The Ambassador Hawk Winning Over CommunitiesAbout Jake KheelJake Kheel is the Vice President of Sustainability at Grupo Puntacana, a privately held resort and real estate company in the Dominican Republic that has become a benchmark for sustainable tourism in the Caribbean. With degrees from Columbia and Cornell and over 20 years on the ground in Puntacana, Jake leads a wide-ranging portfolio of environmental programs spanning coral reef restoration, composting, wildlife conservation, and sargassum management. He co-directed the award-winning documentary Death By a Thousand Cuts, which explores deforestation and cross-border conflict on the Haitian-Dominican border, and is the author of Waking the Sleeping Giant, a book about mobilizing the private sector for environmental action. His work has been recognized by National Geographic and Condé Nast Traveler.Connect with Jake Kheel and his workInstagram → https://www.instagram.com/jakekheel/?hl=enGrupo Puntacana → puntacana.comWaking the Sleeping Giant → https://www.amazon.com/Waking-Sleeping-Giant-Unlocking-Business/dp/1544520123Death By a Thousand Cuts documentary → https://deathbyathousandcutsfilm.com/Send us a message!