Sustainability Champions

Reversing climate change is a daunting task. Governments have too many interests to follow and the climate change discussion is politicised. To make big changes, we need a new and revolutionary idea that supports protecting the environment for us and future generations. A global government that has one goal: protecting the planet. In this episode of Sustainability Champions, I speak with Angus For...

Many buildings today are broken. Frustrated with the way even newly-built offices and skyscrapers waste energy and cause people discomfort, today’s guest set out to find a solution. Mismanaged properties tend to display weird behaviours - like the air conditioning or heating running unnecessarily, using energy and emitting carbon and costing money. In comes Demand Logic’s Building Management Syste...

At Sustainability Champions, we believe many - if not all - of the solutions to reversing climate change and healing the planet are already available. From global energy needs to better insulated housing to planting trees, there are experts and companies all over the world offering remedies to earth’s biggest headache. Local councils and cities can take advantage of these amazing businesses and te...

The average American uses up to 500 single-use plastic bags per year. Unfortunately, most of the bags that are put in the recycling bin aren’t recycled and end up in landfills. Dissolved plastic particles accumulate in oceans, float in the air, and contaminate our food supply. To solve our plastic waste crisis, we need to find reusable options that reduce the amount of plastic we produce and use....

How do we use a crisis to spur change? The Coronavirus epidemic has slashed economic growth and unemployment has risen to never-before seen levels. Crises like these are often a gateway to change, whether political reforms, overthrowing dictators or healing the planet. Today’s guest is an expert on changing our society - and in particular our mindset - where profit has been the ultimate goal. Soci...

It’s estimated that the average meal travels about 1,500 miles to get from farm to plate in the US. What if we could grow most of the fruits and vegetables we eat in the cities where we live? We’re talking about “vertical farming”, a new way of farming indoors that will reduce unnecessary food mileage, use less space, and deliver a higher yield than traditional farming. Because the food is grown i...

If you live in or have been to the UK, you may know that they have the biggest sandwich industry in the world: 80 million pre-made sandwiches are sold every year! During production, the crust and ends of the loaf are cut off and thrown away because they can’t be used in the sandwich. So what can we do about all this bread waste? In this Episode of Sustainability Matters Today, I speak with Louisa...

What if you could easily get from New York to Boston or from London to Manchester in an hour? As populations continue to increase and cities become denser, transportation - whether public or private - is drawn into the limelight of discussions. We want to reduce and avoid carbon emissions from cars, eliminate traffic jams and keep noise pollution to a minimum. Is the future closer than we think? W...

Food Waste is a huge worldwide problem, with both ecological and social consequences. Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and the value of this wasted food is worth over $1 trillion. According to Project Drawdown, reducing our food waste is the third most important solution to preventing climate change. More than 50% of food waste takes place in our homes, so that means we...

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking to pioneers of the meat and seafood industries, who are all creating the future of what we eat. The way meat is currently produced has many unethical and unsustainable flaws, so we look to innovations to find solutions. Cultivated or Cell-Based foods are created by growing meat from the cells of animals, meaning no animals are harmed for its production a...

To fully reduce our carbon emissions and minimize our impact on the planet, it’s important that both small businesses and well-established corporations take action. That includes finding alternatives to supply chains that have huge carbon footprints, reducing production waste and recycling as much as possible. And today’s guest is working on doing exactly that. In this episode of Sustainability Ma...

A kilogram of farmed shrimp may emit up to four times as much carbon as a kilogram of beef.    It’s important when creating a more sustainable food supply that we find ways to disrupt the seafood industry. That way, we can enjoy shrimp dishes while avoiding the negative environmental side effects. Today’s guest is doing precisely that.  In this Episode of Sustainability Matters Toda...

Bees are nature’s “free workforce” – they’re the world's most important pollinators, facilitating plants and crops to grow fruits and vegetables and produce seeds that continue their growth. Bees are also very important to us: one of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators for a successful harvest. Unfortunately, bee populations are declining rapidly due to human actions,...

There is a way we can make safe meat that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 96% while using 99% less land, 96% less water, and 45% less energy. It won’t use any antibiotics and won’t create future pandemics. This is cultivated meat - meat made from animal cells instead of raising an entire animal. In this Episode of Sustainability Matters Today, I speak with Brian Spears, CEO and Founder of New...

The jewellery industry is one of the world's most unethical productions. From blood diamonds to dirty gold to sweatshops and child labour, it can be incredibly difficult to know where a piece of jewellery comes from. Times have changed - we can no longer find gold or diamonds at the bottom of riverbeds - and miners need to dig deeper. To do so, many large-scale mining firms use a huge amount of ha...

Global demand for seafood is at an all-time high and will most likely continue to rise, as the human population grows. The Coronavirus crisis has uncovered cracks in the American meat supply chain; similarly, our global supply for seafood cannot keep pace with our demand. Populations of marine species have halved since 1970 due to overfishing, illegal fishing, rising ocean temperatures, acidificat...

Reversing climate change and achieving sustainability means analysing every step of our day-to-day lives and finding out how we can reduce our carbon footprint. One of the hidden and elusive contributors to carbon emissions are taxi companies. The transport industry has always been in the spotlight of climate discussions, but the taxi sector is easily overlooked. In this episode of Sustainability...

“We know what causes climate change, and we know how to stop it, what we don’t know is how to pay for the transformation to going carbon neutral.” The words of today’s guest ring true with what we’ve discovered in many episodes of the Sustainability Matters Today podcast: to prevent climate change we need to both reduce humanity’s carbon emissions and offset the emissions we can’t reduce. There ar...

Buildings and their construction produce 39% of global CO2 emissions according to the UN Environment Program. With humanity’s population rising, cities are becoming denser as demand for new property continues to grow. Now more than ever, greater building efficiency is necessary to minimise their carbon footprint. Keeping heating costs low through good isolation, making sure electricity usage is ke...

If you’ve ever moved from one apartment to another, you may be familiar with the chaos that comes with packing a life’s worth of possessions into cardboard boxes. With the millions of families typically moving each year, hundreds of millions of trees must be used to produce the cardboard boxes that are oftentimes thrown away afterwards. This problem also exists - and usually on a significantly lar...

Over the past 10 years, coffee has become an incredibly accessible commodity. Everybody can enjoy the wonderful and varied tastes that come with different intensities and in different forms like an Espresso or a Latte Macchiato. These drinks are now easily made at home, using the little, loud and colourful coffee machine that takes a capsule and makes a perfect caffeinated beverage. Each cup of co...

Happy Earth Day, Champions! “If you like puns, sleeping and sustainability, potentially even in that order – Sheets and Giggles is the brand for you!” A perfect way to introduce this guest and his company! Today, I speak with Colin McIntosh, Founder and CEO of Sheets and Giggles (and, yes that’s a pun), and #Champion of Sleeping Sustainably. Sheets and Giggles makes sustainable, 400-thread count s...

Companies and industries realised one thing: consumers don’t buy many products if the products are built to last. On the other hand, short-lived products will be replaced, so building fragile items means companies create additional “demand” and in the end, more profit. In today’s world, this regular and repeated consumerism has been indented into our lives. From Seasonal Fashion to feeling invigor...

When talking about Climate Change, the elephant in the room is always our carbon emissions. Most of our guests find amazing ways of avoiding pollution altogether, but today’s guest takes a whole new approach: In this episode of Sustainability Matters Today, I interview Louise Charles, Communications Manager at Climeworks and a Champion of Recycling Carbon Dioxide. Founded in 2009 with the aim of c...

Coffee – the world’s favourite energiser – from the streets of Turkey to the cafés of New York, it’s unilaterally enjoyed everywhere. When brewing coffee, thereby extracting the caffeinated aroma from coffee beans, we end up with a waste product of coffee grounds. And with an estimated 2,25 billion cups of coffee made every day, that leaves us with about 500,000 tonnes of wet, waste coffee grounds...