Sustainability In Your Ear

Electrification of the world's transportation depends heavily on the ability to build efficient, fast-charging electric vehicle batteries in massive quantities. Meet Andrew Hsieh, founder and CEO of Emeryville, Calif-based Liminal Insights, a developer of EV battery data and analytics tools used to test batteries during manufacturing. Liminal aims to help battery makers make better batteries faste...

Rice farmers have a story to tell about sustainability and innovation. Founded in 1937 in the northern Sacramento Valley of California, Lundberg Family Farms has been committed to leaving the land better than they found it and learning from previous generations. The company, now led by the third and fourth generation of Lundbergs, recently introduced its Regenerative Organic Certified White Basmat...

Turn World Refugee Day into positive action. Join a very special conversation with actor-activist Ger Duany, whose inspiring story of escaping from life as a child solder during the civil war in Sudan to become a model, actor, and international advocate for refugees and environmental responsibility. Ger points out that we are entering an 'Era of Displacement.' This phrase succinctly captures the d...

In the industrial era, home is where the carbon is. The built environment accounts for about 40% of annual CO2 emissions globally. An MIT urban and environmental study recently reported that the materials used to build a new home could generate between 15 and 100 tons of CO2eq. Meet Mike Anderson, CEO and Design Leader at Passive Design Solutions, a pioneer in the industry who has worked on more t...

Finding regeneratively grown agricultural products is getting easier. Our guest today is Wyatt Ball, business development manager for Land to Market. The program focuses on connecting brands, producers, and participants in the food supply chain through their shared concern for land health. The practice of regenerative agriculture first took root in the 1960s and 70s after publisher Robert Rodale c...

Plastic politics are in the news. Three converging debates will shape the future of plastic manufacturing and recycling: At the global level, the United Nations is negotiating the terms of a worldwide plastics treaty, while in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has introduced a draft National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution and the Federal Trade Commission is working on u...

The sustainability community has a carbon fixation, yet non-CO2 emissions, such as methane and nitrous oxide, account for a quarter of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, water, biodiversity, and many other factors contribute to the environmental damage our economy causes. A more comprehensive view of our impacts is needed to consider solutions to the complex, systemic changes nee...

Trvl Channel hosts Ashlan and Philippe Cousteau join a special World Oceans Day conversation with Mitch Ratcliffe and Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske about the rapidly declining krill population in the Southern Antarctic Ocean. These tiny crustaceans that are the keystone of a critical carbon cycle are threatened with extinction from overharvesting to make heart- and brain-healthy Omega-3 o...

Extended producer responsibility, the idea that manufacturers of products and packaging should take responsibility for collecting and recycling the things they make, is a hot topic in the sustainability and business worlds. One EPR bill has passed so far in 2023, Washington State’s SB 5144, which requires battery makers to be responsible for the environmental management of their products. Meet Sco...

Zac Clark, founder and executive director of the HomeMore Project in San Francisco, returns to share an update. The HomeMore Project has distributed several hundred solar-powered backpacks, the Makeshift Traveler, which features a built-in charging station packed with an AM/FM radio, rechargeable flashlight, sleeping bag, and other necessities. When we first talked with Zac in January 2022, when h...

Making circular living easy for people is the key to achieving our sustainability goals. The take-make-waste linear economy has excelled at making the disposal of products and packaging easy, but only if you consider the landfill an environmentally responsible solution (it's not). Now we need to make collecting and reusing items as convenient as tossing packaging in the trash after one use. James...

Is there enough lithium in the United States to fulfill the made-in-America requirements of the Inflation Reduction Act's tax incentive programs for new electric vehicles? The International Energy Agency projects that the world will need 1063 kilotons of lithium in 2040. That’s 48 times the volume of lithium used in EVs and electricity storage in 2020. Where will it come from? Our guest today is J...

Can companies build circular services into their customer experience to earn a trusted relationship with the 81% of consumers who say they will buy more products and services from brands that help them live sustainably? We often talk about the Circular Economy and its benefits for people and the planet. Still, for many, the circular economy sounds like a lot of additional work to sort and drop off...

A few states are pioneering the rise of compostable packaging and building a composting infrastructure. World Centric's Resource Recovery Managers Erin Levine and Elly Ventura share the lessons the compostable packaging leader is learning as California, Colorado, and other states introduce composting and extended producer responsibility programs for fiber and plastic packaging. Making packaging su...

Over the past two years, the United States made a significant investment to improve industries and protect the environment. The funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could help reduce the country's carbon emissions by 50% in 2030. However, a new debate is happening in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. House Majority Leader, Steve Scalise (R, La....

Electronic waste is a global problem. Despite the immense value of the gold and other critical minerals they contain, 80% of computers, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and other electronics end up in landfills. But we can do better. Meet Aaron Kamenash, the founder and chief innovation officer at Camston Wrather, a Carlsbad, California, e-waste recycler that launched its first “green smelter” fac...

How can we sustainably harvest more energy and move it to where it is needed? The United States' annual energy consumption requires about one-quarter of one percent of the 174 petawatts the Sun sends to Earth daily. The prospect of new solar generation capacity created by placing transparent solar cells on windows and other surfaces will transform how we think about power management, buildings ser...

When we talk about solar energy, most of us think of the traditional silicon-based photovoltaic cells that Jimmy Carter famously installed on the roof of the White House in 1977. They have become fixtures in homes, businesses, and large-scale solar farms. But in the future solar technology could generate energy on almost any surface or window. Aaron Bates, founder and CEO of Toledo Solar, a Perrys...

The future lies in our farmlands — as the fossil fuels industry fades, crops like camelina, a flowering seed oil plant from the Meditteranean region, may serve as a source of plant-based sustainable airline fuels, feedstock for making bioplastics and nutritional oils. We welcome back Dr. Oliver Peoples, president and CEO of Yield10 Bioscience, to discuss the company’s progress in engineering camel...

Vertical farming, the emerging indoor approach to growing greens and other vegetables, has begun to transform agriculture. This food revolution is starting from the center of cities, where unused industrial space is now being converted to grow produce for local consumers. Marc Oshima, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of AeroFarms brings a career's worth of marketing experience at Toys R Us,...

Carbon removal strategies will play an essential role in drawing down CO2 levels. A carbon removal industry is developing that includes natural options like planting trees and restoring prairies and wetlands, pulling CO2 from the atmosphere with Direct Air Capture, and various technical approaches that engineer changes in the environment or rely on injecting CO2 into deep geological structures. Bu...

Energy generation and distribution are experiencing the kind of disruption that transformed many other industries over the past 20 years. But the electric grid is a stubbornly rigid physical infrastructure that will require vast investments to modernize. Dr. Tim Lieuwen, Regents’ Professor and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech, joins the conversation to discuss a...

Transportation in the modern world needs to make more sense. We pay tens of thousands of dollars for vehicles that sit unused about 95% of the time. We have designed an infrastructure based on car-centric population centers that have become hard-wired into the map and prevent the evolution of flexible alternatives to the internal combustion vehicle. With logistics and cloud technology, a car can b...

The evolution of plastic recycling is essential to cleaning up a plastic-addicted world and eliminating the need for oil extraction. Meet Jodie Morgan, CEO of Nexus Circular, who discusses the company's progress and a flurry of news that has placed it at the forefront of the next generation of plastics recycling. In June of 2021, we talked with Jeff Gold, founder and CEO of Nexus Circular. At the...

Wasted energy flows into the environment all over the world, and an immense 247 trillion gallons of wastewater heated to an average temperature of 60.8F contributes to warming local waterways and the oceans. We could recapture the heat energy for other uses before returning water to rivers, lakes and the oceans. The process of harvesting that lost energy is known as wastewater energy transfer, or...