Sustainability In Your Ear

If you hold a 401(k), an IRA, or a single index fund, you own a sliver of hundreds of American companies, yet you almost certainly let someone else decide how those shares vote. Individual investors hold about 25% of all U.S. public equities , more than BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street combined, yet only about one in eight of them votes the shares they own ; the rest of those ballots get cast...

The ocean produces about half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs roughly 30% of the carbon dioxide we emit, and takes up about 90% of the excess heat those emissions trap, according to the United Nations . It is the planet’s largest life-support system — and also its least-funded one. Of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the goal for life below water consistently draws the least money . Canada,...

In South Africa, informal waste pickers recover between 80% and 90% of all plastic and paper that actually gets recycled. There are about 140,000 of these reclaimers, who walk through cities and landfills, pulling trolleys and selling what they collect to make a living. Each person can keep up to 24 tons of material out of landfills every year. Together, they saved municipalities R750 million (abo...

Most school uniforms are retired while they are still perfectly wearable. Children cycle through them on a predictable annual schedule as they grow, which sends a steady stream of usable clothing toward the landfill at the same moment families on tight budgets are paying to replace what their kids have grown out of. The waste side of that equation is substantial: the EPA estimates Americans genera...

About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part yo...

Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, according to The Recycling Partnership . Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three de...

A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai , thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rati...

Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled , according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires r...

An average big-budget movie creates about 3,370 metric tons of CO₂, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance's 2021 report . That’s like driving over 700 gas-powered cars for a year, or about 33 metric tons of CO₂ for each day of filming. A single TV season can have the same impact as 108 cars. With thousands of productions happening every year in North America, Hollywood’s environmental i...

In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and atmospheric CO₂ now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainabil...

$850 billion . That's what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn't look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs hi...

The global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider Electric , works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports mo...

Most business leaders believe sustainability costs money. They’re wrong. The proof is sitting right under their noses, bleeding out quietly as waste, excess heat, and byproducts every day the factory runs. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product. In a sector where resource costs account for more than 50% of...

Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck's capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response currently averages around 40 minutes. Firefighters have long understood the math: a spoonful of water in the...

Cattle are one of the most consequential climate problems hiding in plain sight on the dinner table. Livestock are responsible for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions , according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and cattle alone account for about 65% of that sector's output. Most of it doesn't come from manure or land use — it comes from inside the cow. Approxi...

Forests are vital for people everywhere. They cover about 4.14 billion hectares, roughly a third of the world’s land, and store 714 gigatons of carbon. They also support 80% of land-based biodiversity. However, we are losing 11 million hectares each year to deforestation, and the World Bank expects demand for forest-based products to rise by 400% by 2050. Many industries, from construction to text...

We already have the technology to decarbonize buildings, and many pilot projects have shown it works. So why hasn’t progress toward net zero moved faster? Colin Mangham believes it’s because we’re still using outdated business models to promote new solutions. Colin is the Chief Experience Officer at the US Green Building Council California and leads its Net Zero Accelerator , the first program foc...

The U.S. waste management industry moves more than 290 million tons of municipal solid waste each year. This is a potential trillion-dollar market, but much of the work still relies on paper tickets, clipboards, and spreadsheets. About 10,000 independent haulers handle a large share of collection and materials transfer in the U.S. In this business, a single truck costs $300,000, and profits depend...

Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, is the principal author of a major study published i...

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode . Every gallon of wastewater flowing through a municipal sewer contains recoverable energy, nutrients, and water—assets that the linear "flush and forget" model has long treated as problems to dispose of rather than value to recapture. Meet Kevin Shafer, who has spent more than two decades proving otherwise. As executive direc...

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode . ' Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the  Wall Street Green Summit , he's spent a quarter century con...

Read a transcript of this episode . Subscribe to receive transcripts. What we call waste is really just misallocated feedstock—raw materials waiting to be cycled back into the next generation of products and packaging. According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investor...

Read a transcript of this interview. Amazingly, the same Congressional bill that gutted residential clean energy tax credits also led to a major breakthrough in financing home geothermal systems. Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy , explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for the first time, allow third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. He shares why this polic...

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode .  The ocean provides half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs 30% of our carbon emissions, and helps control the planet's climate. By 2030, it's expected to support a $3.2 trillion Blue Economy. Yet 70% of proven ocean solutions, such as coastal resilience, coral restoration, and marine pollution cleanup, never move past the pilot...

Subscribe  to receive transcripts by email.  Read along with this episode . For 15 years, the Dallas-based climate conference the  EarthX conference  has created space where fossil fuel executives and environmental activists, Republican appropriations chairs and Democratic climate hawks, find common ground. The organization targets three core stakeholders: the corporate world, policymakers, and in...