The future of the food supply can be more regional and sustainable. Stephanie Hughes recently launched Raw Bulk Foods Online, an Australian source of zero-waste foods delivered from the farm to the customer’s door. “We exist to clean up the planet [by] delivering your everyday pantry items direct from Aussie farms to your door minus all the junk,” Stephanie explained as part of the company's Kicktarter campaign. While not a sustainable choice for U.S. shoppers, because of the overseas shipping i...
Apr 04, 2022•36 min
Zach Stein, cofounder of Carbon Collective, how to the company's Climate Index can help investors identify ESG investments that accelerate progress toward the zero-carbon economy. Investors can have influence that can reshape business practices. It takes time and energy to understand how companies are changing to reduce their environmental impact, create positive social outcomes and improved transparency and accountability. We also discuss the potential impact of the Securities & Exchange Co...
Apr 01, 2022•32 min
Josh Weber, cofounder and executive chairman of nZero, a Nevada company that tracks Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for large organizations, explains the complexities of tracking corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Tracking emissions is the first step toward business taking responsibility for the previously unacknowledged environmental and social costs of delivering products and services. It will be some time before this information is widely available in useful form for consumers and citizens to hel...
Mar 30, 2022•31 min
Dan Smythe, vice president of retail and hospitality at EPAM, an influential technology and business strategy consultancy, discusses the findings of the Consumers Unmasked 2 survey, which examined changing spending habits and sustainability preferences during the pandemic. He reports that people are actively considering companies’ environmental and social impacts when making purchasing decisions. For example, 46% of survey respondents said they buy sustainable products when the choice is availab...
Mar 28, 2022•29 min
Erin Levine, Resource Recovery Manager at World Centric, a Rohnert Park, Calif.-based manufacturer of 100% compostable tableware and food packaging, joins Mitch to discuss California’s mandatory composting law, SB 1383. After passage in 2016, the new law, known as the Short-lived Climate Pollutant Reduction Strategy, went into effect after five years of preparation on January 1, 2022. SB 1383 requires all businesses, apartment and condo buildings as well as individual homeowners in California ar...
Mar 25, 2022•32 min
David Katz, founder of Plastic Bank, shares his vision for a regenerative society built on grassroots recycling programs that help low-income regions build resilient communities. The Vancover, B.C., startup compensates more than 30,000 plastic recyclers in the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and Egypt. To date, Plastic Bank has stopped over 99 million pounds of plastic waste - the equivalent of more than 2 billion plastic bottles — from entering the world's oceans, and the pace of it collections...
Mar 23, 2022•26 min
Mitch Ratcliffe sits down with Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske to start a two-part ESG investing conversation how to invest to help the future generations meet the unique challenges of the climate crisis and global competition. More than 1.8 billion youth around the world are readying themselves to take their place in their economies and communities. But as we know, today’s challenges are more technologically and intellectually difficult than the ones their parents and grandparents faced....
Mar 21, 2022•51 min
Meet Rayansh Bhavit, a member of Edison, N.J.-based RecycleMyBattery.org, a youth-led program that has collected 150,000+ batteries for recycling. Rayansh recently contributed an Earth911 article about the organization's National Battery Day activities to encourage people to recycle batteries on February 18th. He and the 150 kids who’ve participated in RecyleMyBattery have collected more than 150,000 batteries of various sizes, which they send to the battery industry recycling organization, Call...
Mar 16, 2022•15 min
We talk with Marc Cooke, an advocate for wolf protection and president of Wolves of the Rockies, which is fighting to stop wolf hunting in the West. The Grey Wolf faces extinction, again, after a dramatic recovery over the past 50 years. There were as few as 300 left in the United States when they were added to the Endangered Species List in 1970. By 2019 the total North American population had reached 6,000 and small wolf populations had been reestablished in a dozen states. That year, the Trum...
Mar 14, 2022•29 min
Molly Laverty, Senior Manager of Environmental, Social and Governance at Del Monte Foods Inc., joins us to discuss the company's climate response goals, which include using 25% recycled plastics in packaging. Del Monte Foods is one of the largest food packaging companies in the U.S. and is working to become a sustainable provider of fruits and vegetables through investments in regenerative farming. We talk about the recently released Del Monte sustainability report and its plan for environmental...
Mar 09, 2022•22 min
Dr. Anja Malawi Brandon, an advisor to the Plastics Pact and U.S. Policy Analyst for the Ocean Conservancy, joins Mitch Ratcliffe to discuss three areas for potential progress in reducing our dependence on plastic and improving recycling rates. She explains how the Plastics Pact, a consortium of 100 companies, NGOs and governments, that has a plan for transforming the plastic recycling infrastructure by 2025. The organization recently released a list of "unnecessary plastics" that they recommend...
Mar 07, 2022•31 min
Wake Smith, author of Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention, shares his assessment of the climate response the strategies and technologies that can be used to end CO2 emissions and restore the planet to pre-industrial climate conditions. He is a lecturer on climate interventions at Yale and a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He explains that we're not making sufficient progress on reaching net-zero ...
Mar 02, 2022•38 min
Kathleen Rogers, president of the Earth Day Network, joins us to talk about the goals for Earth Day 2022, which takes place on April 22. This year’s programs will focus on investing in the planet, from making sustainable choices among ESG stocks, as well as how to invest in a better future by getting involved in activism, taking action to create healthy communities, and the changes each of us can make to reduce our impact. We discuss the state of the climate crisis and the results of the United ...
Feb 28, 2022•32 min
Judi Townsend, founder of Oakland, Calif-based Mannequin Madness, is on a mission to keep mannequins in use to reduce the environmental impact of the retail industry. The shop sells full mannequins, dress forms, torsos and butts, limbs, replacement parts and even dog and cat mannequins. Mannequin Madness is recycling more than 100,000 lbs. of mannequins each year and it has grown into a thriving business since it was founded in her backyard more than 20 years ago. Her customers include retailers...
Feb 23, 2022•24 min
Stephen Crolius is the co-founder and president of Carbon Neutral Consulting, a New York-based sustainable business consultancy. He and his team recently released The Ammonia Report, an analysis of the prospects for using ammonia as a maritime fuel instead of heavy fuel oil, the petroleum-derived traditional source of maritime energy. So much of what we buy today is shipped halfway around the world. Sometimes, the components of a product are shipped from the U.S. to Asia, processed and then ship...
Feb 21, 2022•36 min
Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske returns to talk about investing to create a sustainable, circular and equitable economy that we can hand to our children and grandchildren with a sense of pride. This week we’re looking at diversity, equity and inclusion (often shortened to “DEI”), the idea that the dignity and value of every person that must underlie a just society. Doug’s team at Newday Impact has developed methodologies to identify companies that are making genuine progress on DEI issues...
Feb 18, 2022•42 min
How do you reduce your digital life’s environmental impact? Making changes to reduce your environmental impact around the house is straightforward — you can eat less meat, reduce your purchases of single-use plastic or turn down the thermostat by a few degrees to make a difference. But when you go online, there aren’t many obvious choices to cut your impact. Enter Ecosia.org, which has planted more than 143 million trees to offset the environmental impact of web searches. Christian started Ecosi...
Feb 16, 2022•29 min
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 referred to as “urban wood” — and it can be used in furniture and buildings in place of trees from cl...
Feb 14, 2022•26 min
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’t set alarm bells ringing, consider that a University of California Santa Barbara study published i...
Feb 07, 2022•30 min
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 twice the previous record, with $120 billion flowing into the green economy, according to Bloomberg....
Feb 04, 2022•38 min
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 floating solar has been opposed by vacation destinations along coasts. We must overcome some of those...
Feb 02, 2022•26 min
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 over these last few years and currently serve nearly 50,000 people, with plans underway to reach a q...
Jan 31, 2022•29 min
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 remains to figure out where that waste is located and how to reduce it, recycle it and return it to...
Jan 26, 2022•26 min
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 attachment the remove many of the impurities that can still be found in U.S. drinking water. We discuss...
Jan 24, 2022•29 min
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 product as a “cloud-based vertical farm” that provides expert cultivation advice and cues about when...
Jan 21, 2022•24 min
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-powered backpack made of recycled plastic, the Makeshift Traveler, which he describes as a “temporary...
Jan 19, 2022•29 min
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 "sustainable" bridge technologies to the post-carbon economy and how that might impact ESG investor's decisi...
Jan 17, 2022•32 min
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, Paul argues it is time for humans to change their relationship with nature and rejoin the bigger w...
Jan 12, 2022•30 min
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 packaging, like the cardboard boxes used for e-commerce order deliveries (not enough infrastructure fu...
Jan 10, 2022•33 min
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. But in some regions reaching across the northern U.S., cities are poised for what could be a migratio...
Dec 15, 2021•28 min
