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 sustainable — whether it can be recycled conveniently or composted to return the material to nature wi...
May 19, 2023•39 min
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.), supports a bill called the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, which prioritizes lower gas prices over...
May 15, 2023•43 min
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” facility last year. All the metals, circuit boards, plastics, and other materials in the electronics it...
May 12, 2023•32 min
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 serving as largely self-sufficient electric grids, and our ability to place efficiency-enhancing functi...
May 08, 2023•40 min
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 Perrysburg, Ohio, maker of durable solar panels and solar glass using thin-film photovoltaic technologies,...
May 05, 2023•47 min
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 camelina to produce more oil for a variety of uses. Since he last talked with us two years ago, Yield10 h...
May 01, 2023•31 min
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, L'Oreal, and Turner Broadcasting, among others, to develop a new approach to growing and selling fre...
Apr 28, 2023•33 min
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. But will the industry be a good neighbor to the human communities and the natural world? That's the qu...
Apr 24, 2023•40 min
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 accelerating the pace of electrification of transportation and modernization of the electric grid to ...
Apr 21, 2023•37 min
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 be shared, and a new financing option can help. Meet Ezra Goldman, cofounder and CEO of Upshift, a Sa...
Apr 19, 2023•34 min
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 time, the company had been operating a test facility for a couple of years. Nexus Circular developed...
Apr 17, 2023•41 min
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 WET. Our guest, Lynn Mueller, CEO of Vancouver, BC-based SHARC Energy Systems, is a pioneer of WET t...
Apr 14, 2023•31 min
Take a deep dive into plastic recycling and the environmental impacts of plastic, aluminum and glass beverage containers. A recent lifecycle analysis published by the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR), the industry group whose members made the 485 billion polyethylene terephthalate, or #1 plastic, bottles that lined the shelves of groceries and convenience stores around the world during 2021. These bottles and frequently end up as litter in the environment. Lauren Laibach...
Apr 10, 2023•42 min
Earth Day 2023, which takes place on April 22, marks the 53rd year that people have come out into the streets to rally for planetary responsibility, joined park and environmental cleanups, and participated in climate learning events. The first Earth Day was the largest public demonstration in history as of that that time. Michael Karapetian, the Great Global Cleanup Campaign Coordinator for Earth Day Network explains how to participate in this year's Great Global Cleanup events, which will be fo...
Apr 07, 2023•29 min
eBay estimates that sales of used goods on the site earned $4.6 billion in 2022 and avoided sending 73,000 tons of usable products to landfills, which contributed to reducing carbon emissions by 1.6 million tons. Renee Morin, Chief Sustainability Officer at eBay, returns to the show to discuss the findings of the 2022 eBay Recommerce Report, a survey of more than 11,000 small sellers on the marketplace. Forty-two percent of the people surveyed said they rely on eBay to earn extra cash and 56% sa...
Apr 03, 2023•33 min
If we intend to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the future of local transportation must look a lot different than today’s car- and heavy vehicle-dominated traffic. The U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy reports that 64% of trips, across all types of transportation, involve traveling less than 5 miles. Only 2% of trips reach more than 50 miles. Local transportation is ripe for reinvention and my guest today is working to introduce electric bikes and light vehicles ...
Mar 31, 2023•43 min
Is plastic recycling at a turning point? Meet Emmanuel Ladent, CEO of Carbios , a Clermont-Ferrand, France-based company that has developed an enzymatic plastic recycling technology that promises to make plastic a circular material with 95% yields, comparable to aluminum. The C arbios technology recycles polyethylene terephthalate, or clear and colored PET , better known as Plastic #1 , which is the basis for making billions of single-use bottles and thermoform containers for produce, as well as...
Mar 27, 2023•33 min
Women bring the skills, perspectives, and emotional intelligence necessary to achieving the green transition, addressing food shortages , and equitable financing . Women are 49.7% of the world’s population, but only 1.9% of venture capital investments in 2022 were placed with women-led startups. Patience Marine-Ball and Ruth Shaber, coauthors of The XX Edge: Unlocking higher returns and lower risk , join Mitch Ratcliffe to discuss the power and impact of women in business and other leadership ro...
Mar 24, 2023•52 min
Some of the dirtiest, plastic polluted waters lie at the heart of major cities, in ports, marinas and where wastewater enters the environment. They are hard to keep clean because of constant activity that adds new waste to waterways. The work is wet, cold and dirty, which makes port and marina cleanups an ideal job for robots. Meet Michael Arens, cofounder and CEO of Clean Earth Rovers , a Cincinnati, Ohio-based startup that makes two robotic devices for cleaning and monitoring coastal waters. M...
Mar 20, 2023•34 min
Meet Journalist Esha Chhabra , who spent a decade exploring the world for examples of social ventures , businesses that blend profitability with creating equitable human outcomes for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other publications. In her new book, Working To Restore: Harnessing the Power of Regenerative Business to Heal the World , she describes her journeys and the entrepreneurs and activists people she met in the US, India, Africa, and the fjords of Scandinavia. ...
Mar 17, 2023•36 min
As the economy turns sour, do shoppers still value sustainability when making decisions about what to buy? We welcome back Dan Smythe, Vice President of Retail and Hospitality Consulting at EPAM Continuum , to discuss the final installment of their Consumers Unmasked project . The four-part study of shoppers’ values and the important factors in their buying decisions has trcked consumer sentiment in the U.S., Britain, and Germany as the pandemic peaked and began to pass. Over the past year, we’v...
Mar 13, 2023•36 min
Let’s venture into the history of trees , wood, and the axe. Everywhere humans have gone they’ve mowed trees down to make tools, homes, fires, bridges, buildings, even railroad tracks — yes, the first railroads often ran on wooden rails, as author John Perlin explains in a new edition of his classic book, A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization . First published in 1989, A Forest Journey has been rereleased in an expanded, beautifully illustrated edition by Patagonia . An...
Mar 10, 2023•44 min
Stories and the way the press reports them shape our perception of the world and the Climate Crisis. While most major media companies have started to pay close attention to climate issues in recent years, often setting up their first environmental or climate desks, these beats are still understaffed to address the complex environmental narrative Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation, and Andy Lee Roth, associate director of the program, wrote an ...
Mar 06, 2023•54 min
The future of modern life turns in large part on making the packaging and delivery of the food and products we buy more sustainable and, eventually, environmentally neutral or positive. Our guest today, Robert Lilienfeld, is the executive director of SPRING , the Sustainable Packaging Research, Information and Networking Group, a Denver-based think tank that provides expert advice and commentary on creating sustainable and regenerative product packaging. He discusses his work with consumer goods...
Mar 03, 2023•39 min
If environmentally responsible, sustainable business were baseball, my guest Gil Friend would be as familiar a name as Babe Ruth. In 2011, Gil was named to first class of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals Sustainability Hall of Fame. He is the founder and CEO of Natural Logic , a sustainable business strategy consultancy, and Critical Path Capital , a private equity firm, as well as a recent addition to Earth911’s board of advisors. Since the 1970s, when he discovered the...
Feb 27, 2023•44 min
Sea level rise due to melting glaciers on Greenland and in the Arctic and Antarctic could force the relocation of 267 million people and entire cities located less than 2 meters — 6.5 feet — from today’s waterline by 2100. Oceanographer John Englander has raised the alarm about sea level rise in his books, High Tide on Main Street and Moving to Higher Ground . John runs the Rising Seas Institute and leads regular visits to Greenland to spur awareness of the accelerating loss of its glaciers. We ...
Feb 24, 2023•47 min
Algenesis is two companies in one, a biotechnology innovator and footwear maker. Making a new, sustainable material often requires the inventor to prove its utility before big companies will embrace it. Join the conversation for a story of discovery and finding a practical application to prove the value of a plant-based , compostable bioplastic foam. Stephen Mayfield, a professor of Biology at UC San Diego and director of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology, invented Soleic, an algae-b...
Feb 20, 2023•38 min
The UK took a huge step toward reducing its single-use plastic pollution. Starting in October 2023, a variety of single-use items such as plastic cutlery, plates, bowls, polystyrene cups, cotton swabs and balloon sticks will be banned. Fines of up to 10% of the UK revenue generated by the business that distributes these items and prison time for repeat offenders are part of the new draft legislation. Sarah Weller, the International Coastal Cleanup Manager at The Ocean Conservancy, join us to dis...
Feb 17, 2023•33 min
How can we reduce the environmental impact from constructing and operating buildings ? In 2021, construction and building operations account for 37% of global CO2 emissions, hit an all time high of 10 gigaton of CO2 emissions, about two percent higher than pre-pandemic levels. We talk with Tommy Listroth, founder and CEO of Green Badger , a software-as-a-service company that provides management tools for sustainable building projects and to support LEED certification efforts, about the steps to ...
Feb 13, 2023•37 min
How can we eliminate food waste created by restaurants, institutional cafeterias, and retail grocers? According to the National Conference of State Legislators, food waste is a plague in our supply chains. Farms contribute 16% of total food waste and businesses another 39%, while households waste 43% of the food lost before it is consumed. Chris O’Brien joined the podcast to discuss processing food waste into soil supplement, a fuel source, and animal feed. He is the founder and CEO of Hungry Gi...
Feb 10, 2023•37 min
