Sustainability In Your Ear

The founders of Cambium Carbon, CEO Ben Christensen and CFO Marisa Repka, explain how they salvage wood from the 36 million trees that fall each year in American cities to create a hyper-local lumber supply chain. Currently, most of those fallen trees are mulched, burned or landfilled, all of which contributes to global warming.  The company's Carbon Smart Wood is sourced from downed trees — also...

Sam Teicher, co-founder and Chief Reef Officer at Coral Vita, a social enterprise that grows resilient corals on land and transfers them to the sea to restore dying reefs, joins Mitch Ratcliffe to discuss ocean restoration. Check out his recent article, Coral Vita and the Vital Importance of Restoring Coral Reefs, on Earth911. More than half of the world’s coral has died since 1970 — if that doesn...

Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske returns to talk about how to design an investment portfolio to achieve environmental improvements in our world. Just as buying sustainable products can help reduce your environmental impact, your investing can change the direction of the economy. And 2021 was the biggest year in the history of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing by more than...

Mike Marsch, the head of solar development at BlueWave, explains how floating solar panels can plan a key role in deliver widely available community and privately owned renewable energy generation capacity. The Boston-based certified B Corp's mission is to “revolutionize energy with simple, powerful solutions.” But solar faces challenges from communities that are concerned about local views, and f...

Our guests, Shannon Bouton, CEO of Delterra, and Ella Flaye, the organization's regional director for Asia, lead the environmental non-profit's “rethinking recycling” initiative in emerging economies. Around the world, more than 2 billion people live without waste removal and recycling services. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Delterra’s recycling and waste management services have scaled...

Jason Gates, CEO of Compology, is taking the recycling battle to the dumpster. Compology makes AI-powered smart cameras that monitor how full dumpsters are and help understand and manage what they contain — the process reduces unnecessary pickups, which lowers fuel waste, and improves the processing of the contents of each bin. There’s no question the current economy is wasteful, but the challenge...

The availability of safe, fresh drinking water will become a more pressing issue as the climate crisis progresses. Our guest today, Rich Razgaitis, started FloWater, a maker of water refill stations that can purify local water, allowing people to refill bottles safely and quickly. The company also sells reverse-osmosis purified water in recyclable, reusable aluminum bottles and a faucet filter att...

Our guest is Alexander Olesen, CEO and founder of Babylon Micro-Farms. The Richmond, Va-based company has developed a hydroponics-based approach to growing produce in enclosed compact systems that are about the size of a large vending machine that can be managed remotely.  It produces as much produce in 15 square feet of space as 2,000 square feet of traditional farmland. The company describes its...

Discussions about the plight of the homeless usually ignore the issue of sustainability, and there are certainly more pressing concerns to be addressed when someone is in crisis. Our guest, Zac Clark of the HomeMore Project, has developed a comprehensive approach to helping the more than 10,000 homeless people in San Francisco escape from living on the street. The project includes a novel, solar-p...

Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske is back for another in our regular series of conversations about Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing. We discuss companies that are working to improve animal welfare, both on the farm and for pets in our homes. The first question today relates to the European Union's recent proposed rule to reclassify natural gas and nuclear power as "sustain...

Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, joins Earth911's Mitch Ratcliffe to talk about his new book, Urgent: Save Our Ocean to Survive Climate Change. He calls on readers to take action in their own lives to reduce their environmental impact and through protest. A controversial figure in the environmental movement because of his willingness to engage in direct action...

Wouter van Tol, head of sustainability at packaging maker DS Smith, is working with new seaweed-based materials to deliver more alternatives to today’s frequently unrecyclable food packaging. The London-based company’s North American unit recently announced an aggressive initiative to adopt seaweed-based fiber in its products. We discuss why it's still hard to recycle even common forms of fiber pa...

Meet Brendan Mehaffy, Executive Director of the City of Buffalo’s Office of Strategic Planning, who explains how the upstate New York city is preparing for and planning for growth as people seek safer places to live as the climate changes. The advent of climate change spells disaster for many regions, especially in coastal regions and the West, where a long-term drought appears to be developing. B...

Earth911 talks with Lisa Ryden, Sustainable Development Director at Tetra Pak, the world's largest carton manufacturer about its 2021 corporate sustainability report and the steps the company is taking to reduce its environmental impact. Tetra Pak has established itself globally, selling 183 billion cartons in 2020. The brand name has become synonymous with cartons in many regions, where they are...

Scott Lively is the co-founder of the largest organic and grass-fed beef producer in the United States, Raise American, and is the author of a new book, For the Love of Beef: The Good, the Bad and the Future of America’s Favorite Meat. America has a massive appetite for beef. It’s a $111 billion-a-year industry that accounts for almost 5.4 million jobs, and Americans consume about 57 lbs. a year p...

Shannon Lohr, founder of Factory45 sits down with Earth911's Mitch Ratcliffe to talk transparency in fashion labeling. Fashion is one of the most environmentally harmful industries on the planet because it has focused on delivering “fast,” short-lived products made to be worn a few times and discarded. Factory45 has worked with more that 500 sustainable fashion entrepreneurs to develop a responsib...

We sit down for another responsible investing conversation with Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske. The topic is investing to ensure enough clean water is available for humans, animals and vegetation around the world. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that $472.6 billion of investment is needed by 2035 to continue providing clean safe drinking water, and the o...

 The electrification of the economy depends on reliable access to a collection of valuable but environmentally damaging metals, including lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese. We talk with Megan O’Conor, cofounder and CEO of Nth Cycle, a Beverly, Mass-based startup poised to disrupt the metal recycling industry with an electro-extraction system that can operate in very small facilities spread all...

The cost of energy-efficient upgrades prevents many businesses from reducing their environmental impacts. We talk with Al Subbloie, CEO of Budderfly, a fast-growing energy-efficiency-as-a-service company, with an audacious solution for businesses that want to be more sustainable -- it pays for lighting, heating/cooling, renewable electricity sourcing and other upgrades, then collects a share of th...

Reforestation is hot topic. More companies and people taking steps to plant trees contribute to restoring the environment. Matt Hill is the Chief Environmental Evangelist at One Tree Planted, one of the oldest and largest tree-planting non-profits. Matt discusses the best practices for reforestation programs and how long trees must be monitored to provide supporters confidence that the trees they...

Our guest, Dr. Joshua Pearce has a DIY approach to solar that he recently described an article on Earth911, DIY Solar Now To Pocket Profits From Solar Energy. Solar installations are a powerful step toward reducing your carbon footprint, but it is a big investment that many Americans are hard-pressed to make. Only about 6% of U.S. homes have installed solar, according to Pew Research. The U.S. Dep...

Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske talks with Earth911's Mitch Ratcliffe about how to invest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on the outcome of the United Nations' COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. A consortium of banks controlling more than $130 trillion in assets announced the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero to direct investments into renewable energy instead of fossil fuel...

Earth911 talks with Paul Hawken, a pioneer of living and working sustainably. His work spans ideas, generations, and industries — he is an environmentalist, author, entrepreneur and globally recognized expert on sustainable living. His new book, Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation, continues the work he launched in 2017 with the book Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever...

Earth911 welcomes David New, founder of Obaggo, a counter-top appliance that turns a variety of plastic films into recyclable pucks that do not jam recycling center equipment. Recycling in the United States is unnecessarily difficult. Plastic, in particular, is hard to sort because of the myriad forms its takes – it is often unlabeled, which means one cannot identify what kinds of plastic needs to...

Most of us still struggle to get our heads around the science of climate change, but the impacts are clearly felt almost every day somewhere in the United States. In June, 2021, USAFacts reports, 97 million people in the United States experienced hotter than average temperatures, including record-shattering heat in the West. In August, the data shows 84.8 million Americans — at third of the countr...