Waste Not WHY Not

Nature Nate is back for his take on COP30 in Belém, Brazil!. COP30 (November 10-21, 2025) has just wrapped up. Nate shares thoughts on COP30, with a recap on his attending Climate Week NYC 2025. The geopolitical context of COP30 was front and center. The billion-dollar shortfall in the UN budget and the near-empty Loss and Damages Fund presented a major challenge. The U.S. had pulled o...

One fine day in December 2018, Nate Maynard and Emily Y. Wu met over a coffee in downtown Taipei. The two talked about podcasting and sustainability. By Christmas, Nate, Emily, and Emily (Pearson) had recorded the first episodes of “Waste Not Why Not”.  “Waste Not Why Not” - a sustainability podcast - was the first original show from Ghost Island Media. It debuted on Earth Day in 2019. Since then,...

For this final part of our COP28 mini-series, Nature N8 attends his last day at COP28. He chats with Tanmatra Bhanti, Manager of Policy & Partnerships at Rare, and Alfredo M Coro II, Municipal Mayor of the Municipality of Del Carmen, Siargao Islands in the Philippines. Nature N8 gives his final thoughts at COP. What is it for, who is it for, what's achieved there, and what's greenwashing in to...

Nature N8 spends another day at COP28 in Dubai where he continues to go behind the scenes giving his thoughts, explaining some of the cool exhibits, and speaking with participants from Taiwan.  This episode includes interviews from: Katie Liu, New Taipei City representative Chia Wei Chao, Research Director at the Taiwan Climate Action Network Cammie Lu, Mom Loves Taiwan Association Emmanuel Fromon...

Skip to 4:00 minutes for Nate live from Dubai! Go behind the scenes at COP28 with Nate where he gives his thoughts, what he hopes to see, and what cool stories he can find. Nature Nate is back! He jump-starts this new season by going to COP 28, what might be the most important climate negotiations ever…or not. Also, listen in to hear some updates about the show and its upcoming season. This is Was...

Tony Rinaudo is an Australian agronomist widely known as the “forest maker”. He's lived and worked in Africa for decades where he put into a forest restoration practice called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). FMNR has restored 6,000,000 hectares of land and over 200 million trees in Niger, vastly improving the livelihood of millions. Today, Nature N8 and Tony talk about inspiration, lif...

Today’s piece is guest-produced by students at Minerva University - a four-year, US accredited college where the students are on semester-abroads all the time. In Fall 2022, more than a hundred Minerva students spent time in Taiwan. Nate was a mentor to four students who wanted to make a podcast on sustainability. And here’s the result! A VEGAN STORY - TAIWAN Despite the recent rise of popularity...

Happy lunar new year from all of us at Ghost Island Media! At time of this new years greetings recording, we didn't know yet of the mass shooting in Monterey Park in California that took the lives of 10 people on new years eve, Saturday, January 21, 2023. Our deepest condolences to families affected by the horrific tragedy. Our hearts are with our Asian American community. We have new shows waitin...

Joshua Sam Miller is a musician, a filmmaker, a conservationist, a yogi, and a collector of ocean sounds and peoples. He’s performed at COP as well as at Burning Man.  Today, N8 talks to Joshua about mindfulness, meditation, breathwork, the healing power of ocean sounds, and how something silly now, may end up being something you do for a living later on.  If you liked the music track at 11:44 - 1...

Last month, Taiwan’s largest green energy event took place in Taipei connecting the domestic renewable energy industries with their international counterparts. So obviously, Nature N8 had to go. This year, Energy Taiwan had 5 categories: solar, wind, smart storage, emerging power and net zero Taiwan. This year, N8 saw bigger booths, plenty of renewable technologies, and goats. Yes, real goats. The...

The climate crisis came into full view this summer as countries across Europe experienced record-high temperatures in July. In the UK, a train track caught on fire, and an airport runway melted. In France, they called it a “heat apocalypse.” But while Europe is trying to deal with 40-47 degree celsius weather, we need to remember that things have been bad for a long time now. In 2016, parts of Ind...

Double Dribble is a fashion & accessories brand that upcycles basketballs. The founders come from product design, but they’re now trying to design a new system for upcycling sports waste. Today, we bring you “The Incinerator” - a game show where a circular economy startup goes in front of a panel and gets their ideas burned and turned into better ideas. (Cheat sheet: Circular Economy = Environ...

The ocean temperature is rising, and that’s killing corals. But scientists are finding out that some corals can resist climate change. So if we wanted to make sure that at least some corals survive in the future, which species should we save?  We are at a coral lab to speak to Shashank Keshavmurthy at the Biodiversity Research Center at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He’s setting up an experiment to s...

A new, knowledge-filled, episode on corals is coming your way, but to prepare you for it, we bring you an old episode to catch you up to speed. Happy World’s Ocean Day! Corals are dying. By 2050 we probably won’t have any corals left in our oceans. So scientists around the world are trying to figure out how to regrow coral reefs, and some have even turned to 3D printing for coral resto...

Solar is - in some places in the world - the cheapest energy, even cheaper than coal and oil with fossil fuel subsidies. Solar is inexpensive, inoffensive, inexpensive. But it wasn’t always this easy. Investing in solar used to be risky business. What happened? Welcome to class SEI101: Solar Energy Investment. Today, we speak to Mark Oei, an investor of real estate and clean energy. He&rsquo...

From building dirt bikes to supercars, to something that may or may not be on Mars right now, Azizi Tucker has done it all. Being environmentally conscious has been a theme of his career, but his real focus? It’s been about making better products. But his products have a side effect of massively reducing pollution. Azizi Tucker is a tinkerer, racer, engineer, and entrepreneur. Tucker raced m...

What does “good” look like? And what does “wonderful” look like? What does a “wonderful green building” look like? How do they make us happier?  We call up Professor Vivian Loftness, former head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, National Board of the US. Green Buildings Council, the American Institute of Architects, and Internatio...

Taiwan's seeing an uptick of COVID the past two weeks. And while that's happening, our new season launch is pushed to May 3. In today's home recording, Nate reflects the past 3 years of the podcast and of his own work.  For our sister shows in our network, search Ghost Island Media. Support “Waste Not Why Not” on Patreon https://patreon.com/wastenotwhynot Follow us on Twitter @was...

As promised, we’ve new episodes coming to you, starting April 22, Earth Day, aka our third anniversary! Get ready for a 5-part mini series with the American Institute in Taiwan.  It’s a really fun mini series. The Waste Not Why Not team visited a green building. I got to test drive an electric dirt bike. We saw a coral being stress tested in a lab. We talk to solar and money peopl...

Angela Chao was a rising senior at National Taiwan Univ (NTU) when she made this episode for “In Training 小鬼登島” - a Ghost Island Media program for and by emerging creators / interns. Angela worked on Waste Not Why Not, cares a lot about the environment, and wanted to explain to her friends #circulareconomy. This episode was nominated for a Sustainable and Constructive News Award (2...

California is leading the United States into the solar panel revolution. And spoilers: it’s actually quite boring. Or at least, that's what an OG environmentalist would say.  This episode, Nature N8 walks us through the process of installing solar panels on his parents’ roof, in the Californian suburbs. He explains the financial magic of solar, compares it to industrial scale inst...

N8's visiting home in San Diego!  Don't worry though, the show's not ending, and he promised he will write us regularly.  For other environmental podcasts, check out the Climactic Collective and the signatories of Podcasters Declare .   For our sister shows in our network, search Ghost Island Media . Support “ Waste Not Why Not ” on Patreon. Follow us on Twitter @wa...

This week, we bring back Emily Cardinali on the show! She was our very first editor, and she had really wanted to report on sustainable menstrual products. So, after our interview with Isabel Aagard last episode, we reached out to Emily about her own experiences with green tampons.  N8 and Emily discuss the guilt on half of our human population, tips on identifying sustainable products, and t...

We don’t all have to be sustainability consultants in order to save the environment. You can keep doing what you’re good at - and apply your expertise to environmental problems. That’s how Isabel stepped into circular design.  Isabel Aagaard is an entrepreneur and product designer. She founded LastObject two years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark, with a mission to eliminate singl...

Today’s show is a cross over with The Taiwan Take . Taiwan’s next referendum will soon vote on activating the nation’s fourth nuclear plant, as well as constructing a natural gas plant on an algal reef that's critical for Taiwan’s biodiversity. These decisions come as governments around the world are scrambling to meet the demands of the Paris Agreement, and as environmenta...