Sustainability In Your Ear

Smart homes are commonplace today. Now, the intelligent yard is poised to join the mix. Meet Graham Hine, CEO of ePlant, which recently introduced the TreeTag. This solar-powered monitor is attached to a tree to monitor its health and send updates wirelessly to a phone. TreeTags are placed onto the side of trees using a screw and measure minor size fluctuations in trees. For example, the bark's co...

The circular economy is a vision for a world in which the materials used in the products and packaging we purchase flow perpetually through the economy, used over and over instead of being tossed into landfills and replaced with newly mined, refined, and processed stuff. Recycling, an industry with about 50 years of history, is considered an essential feature of the circular economy, but it is jus...

Robin Wiener, president of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), joins the conversation to explore the evolution of the circular economy and how the role of recycling will evolve. Today’s recycling infrastructure is closely aligned with the waste management system. There are growing signs that the reuse of products is essential and that recycling services can be built into the produc...

Society is moving from sustainability naive to sustainably native, a new era in which the language, practices, and values of sustainable thinking will be taken for granted. When we have a shared language, changes start to happen- a trend we can see emerging now. Solitaire Townsend, author of The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future, has written a guide to using the many threads of trans...

The average American home produces 533 million microfibers annually, according to a 2019 study by Ocean Wise. CiCLO, a new polyester and nylon additive, promises to make those microfibers biodegrade in landfills or water, potentially eliminating these microplastic pollutants. Meet Andrea Ferris, CEO and cofounder at Intrinsic Advanced Materials, maker of CiCLO, a nutrient that attracts microorgani...

Scott Graybeal, CEO of Caelux, sits down to talk about perovskites-based nanotechnology that can improve the performance of silicon solar panels to produce 30% more power from the sun at a 10% lower cost than traditional panels. Caelux recently closed an additional $12 million in funding to build a manufacturing facility that will produce up to 100 MW of generation capacity. The $370 billion Infla...

What is the most used material in the world? Cement, the basis for building most of the modern world, was invented during the Roman Empire and remains the most used material worldwide. In 2021, cement accounted for 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions globally, about 4.3 % of all greenhouse gas generated that year. Meet Grant Quasha, CEO of Eco Material Technology, a New York-based maker o...

Farmed salmon has been touted as a solution to food scarcity as the world turns to eating more seafood. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that seafood production must increase 29.3% by 2030 to meet demand. Our guest today is Simen Sætre, who coauthored The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore with journalist Kjetil Ostli....

The pace of renewable energy investments has gained momentum over the past decade. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Investment 2023 report, $2.8 trillion will be invested this year in energy, including fossil fuels, with almost 61% dedicated to clean energy. Meet investor Ben Wolkon, a founding partner at MUUS Climate Partners. The firm invests to accelerate renewabl...

The landscape of environmental disclosure is changing fast. Go behind the scenes at Climate Week in New York to hear the introduction of a potentially transformative environmental reporting tool, the Ecological Benefits Framework (EBF). Created by the environmental storytelling studio The Lexicon, led by Douglas Gayeton, the EBF aims to go beyond Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporti...

Dams are more common than you think. Author Steven Hawley reports that 58,500 large dams worldwide have trapped 3,155 gigatons of sediment, meaning they are rapidly filling up and will eventually become useless for storing water or generating electricity. Steven's new book, Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World, was published by Patagonia. A wide-ranging study of the many impacts of...

Since it started measuring waste diversion from landfills in 2006, when it recycled only 4.6% of materials collected, Seattle's Lumen Field has increased its recycling, composting, and donations efforts to avoid sending 90% of the waste generated by fans to the dump. Meet Christy Briggs, Logistics and Sustainability Manager at First & Goal Incorporated, who leads Lumen Field's recycling and ot...

Owen Barrett, cofounder and president of Rayven, is working to make it easy for individuals to invest in apartment buildings to accelerate the pace of energy upgrades and renewable energy adoption. Electrification of the nation's apartment buildings, moving them away from heating and energy generated from fossil fuels, is critical to achieving national carbon emissions reduction goals for 2030. Ra...

Supermodel Georgie Badiel Liberty, who has graced the covers of magazines and in advertising worldwide, turned her celebrity to solving water scarcity challenges in her native country, Burkina Faso. In 2015, she launched the Georgie Badiel Foundation to bring wells, sanitation, solar-generated electricity, and community gardens to 10 million Burkinabé who lack access to clean water. The wells are...

The founder of the national Green Amendments movement, Maya van Rossum, returns to discuss Held vs. Montana, a lawsuit brought by 16 teenagers demanding the enforcement by state agencies of regulations that ensure their right to a clean and healthy environment. Montana is one of three states that have a Green Amendment in its state constitution. She was in the courtroom during the testimonial phas...

The UN's International Maritime Association reported in 2020 that the shipping industry — the ships moving freight between the continents — accounts for 2.89% of annual global CO2 emissions. Between 1990 and 2020, shipping volumes "more than doubled," according to Statista, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, shipping grew faster, at as much as 16.4% a year, according to the U.S. International Trade...

SuperCircle, a textiles recycling startup, has cracked the circular economy code for fashion brands. Meet the cofounders, Chloe Songer and Start Ahlum, who cofounded SuperCircle, which provides clothing takeback and recycling services to leading clothing brands, including tentree, Reformation, Mate the Label, and the circular sneaker brand Thousand Fell, which they also cofounded in 2018. SuperCir...

Welcome to the hottest part of Summer, when the heat and smoke season may have you looking at your yard and thinking that it's time to upgrade from gas lawn equipment to electric, or to go back to manual tools. Tobie Stanger, a senior editor at Consumer Reports, joins the conversation to talk about the independent, nonprofit product review site's decision to endorse electric lawn equipment, especi...

How does a small startup launch a mail-back recycling program to deliver circular products that massive brands struggle to make? Meet innovator Lindsey McCoy, who started Plaine Products with her sister, Alison, in 2017. Today, Plaine Products offers 16 fully circular personal care products, including shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, and lotion. These personal care products are made with vegan i...

Renewable energy will reconfigure the nation's electricity infrastructure, a relic from an era of centralized power generation when coal, gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear generation created massive amounts of power in one location for distribution across thousands of square miles. These times call for a different approach to electricity distribution, which mixes national and regional grids with loc...

A new global plastics treaty due to take effect in 2025 will reset the world's strategy for reducing and reversing plastic's environmental and health impacts. Get a primer on the politics and issues defining the agreement from Dimitris Faloutsos, Head of Transboundary Waters at the United Nations' Global Water Partnership (GWP). The Global Water Project and London-based policy institute Chatham Ho...

How can we make one of the most recycled materials more sustainable? Meet Jennifer Bogs, director of global sustainability at Crown Holdings Inc., one of the largest aluminum can manufacturers worldwide at $12.9 billion in annual sales. The aluminum industry famously claims that 75% of all aluminum ever produced; it's a highly recyclable material. Reusing one ton of aluminum reduces by 8 tons the...

Recommerce is on the rise as retail locations struggle to attract customers after the pandemic, they are running short of backroom storage space while dealing with a rising tide of returned items. The situation is even more challenging for e-commerce companies, where returns accounted for $741 Billion in lost revenue, the National Retail Federation recently reported. Meet Marcus Shen, CEO of San M...

According to the World Economic Forum, between 75 and 199 million tons of plastic waste are floating in and polluting the world’s oceans. The 5 Gyres Institute reports that the volume of plastic entering the seas doubles every six years. There are genuine efforts to develop circular, sustainable packaging amid waves of greenwashing claims. Meet Vanessa Coleman, CEO of Oceanworks, which collects oc...

U.S. gamers generate 24 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, according to a 2019 study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That’s about the same greenhouse gas impact as the annual emissions from five million cars. And with more than 3 billion gamers worldwide, game developers and the datacenters they rely on need to make rapid changes to reduce their footprint. Drawdown Lab...