Sustainability In Your Ear

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 Commission. Meet Eric Leveridge, the Pacific Environment Lead at Ship It Zero, a nonprofit coalition of environmental, public health, and shipping experts. The organization reports that the shipping emissions of just 15 retail companies, including Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart, Amazon, and Target, are responsible for 12.7 million tons of CO2 and as much particulate pollution as the entire U.S. mining industry.Eric also digs into recent news that Amazon reversed its Climate Pledge commitment that would have made half of its shipping emissions-free by 2030. As reported by Business Insider, Amazon's reason was, "We realized that it no longer made sense to have a separate and more narrow Shipment Zero goal that applied to only one part of our business, so we've decided to eliminate it." Ship It Zero called on Amazon to reinstate its 50% net-zero shipping goals. Shipping has many routes to lower emissions, including the use of hydrogen- or ammonia-based fuels, augmenting engines with wind power, and the addition of emissions scrubbing technology that captures and sequesters carbon, sulfur oxide, and nitrous oxide emissions instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. Eric joins us to explore the challenge of lowering retailers' shipping-related emissions and tell us about Ship It Zero's recommendations.You can learn more at https://shipitzero.org/, which features several helpful ebooks for those who want to read up on shipping emissions and pollution.

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. SuperCircle launched in 2022 to a massive problem, managing recycling logistics and textiles processing for the retail industry. The company recycled more than 700,000 garments last year using new sorting steps and technologies to separate organic and synthetic fabrics and identify items that can be resold. You can learn more about SuperCircle at https://supercircle.world/

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, especially for smaller lawns. According to the National Resources Defense Council, gas mowers, edgers, trimmers, and blowers are noisy, and their two-stroke engines pollute 20 to 300 times more than a car per hour of operation. A 2011 Environmental Protection Agency report concluded that gas lawn equipment emits large amounts of three volatile organic compounds that are known carcinogens, Benzene, 1,3 butadiene, and formaldehyde. The environment and our neighborhoods would be better off without gas-powered lawn equipment.Tobie has covered appliances, generators, lawnmowers, and much more for more than 30 years and is one of the most tuned-in observers of the electrification of consumer products. We'll find out why Consumer Reports concludes that gas yard equipment still has the advantage in some cases and explore the key features and functionality to look for when choosing electric alternatives to polluting gas equipment. Check out the electric yard equipment brands she discusses when shopping, including Ryobi, Kobalt, Stihl, Greenworks, Husquarvana, and eGo.To find a collection of Consumer Reports reviews of electric lawn tools, visit Gas Vs. Electric Lawn Mower: Which is Better? (membership is required to see product ratings).

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 ingredients and come in aluminum bottles that customers rinse and return for refilling when empty. When a customer runs low, they order a new bottle that arrives before they run out along with a return mail label; after swapping the pump to the new container, the empty is placed in the shipping box to send the battle back to Plaine Products for cleaning, refilling, and use by another customer.Imagine the circular economy, a world in which everything we buy and use is collected, recycled, composted, or passed on for continued use to lower our environmental impact. The vision sounds a long way off, and it may be a long time until everything can be recycled or composted economically. Among companies, Walmart, Kroger, and Burger King are pioneering circularity through Loop, a consortium of consumer packaged goods brands spearheaded by specialty recycler Terracycle. Loop has not disclosed how much packaging it has prevented from reaching the landfill. To date, Plaine Products has prevented more than 547,000 plastic bottles from being used once and tossed or escaping into nature as pollution. Lindsey also discusses how more than 270 retail stores now offer Plaine Products refill stations.Plaine Products has created a special 20% discount for Earth911 readers -- visit the site and enter the discount code "Earth911" when checking out. Learn more about the company at https://www.plaineproducts.com/This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase an item through one of these links, we receive a small commission that helps fund our Recycling Directory.

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 local generation and a new concept, the microgrid. These local generation and storage systems may be connected to or operate independently from the regional electric grid. Rod Matthews, cofounder and CEO of Brevian Energy, a renewable energy technology company based in Vista, California, joins the conversation to discuss microgrids for business. While the decision to electrify still makes eminent sense, the incentives for business adoption of solar, wind, and microgrids are changing. California's net metering 3 decision will reduce prices paid to individuals and businesses that sell their excess energy back to the grid.A microgrid can be as small as a single business or home and offers a different relationship with electricity, freeing the owner from the arbitrary price increases imposed by remote electricity generation providers. As we embed solar generation into our built environment, vehicles, and appliances and gadgets in offices and homes, we may enter a glut condition when moving power where it is needed remains challenging. As the nature and placement of electric generation evolve, understanding microgrids' role in power distribution and economics. Just as the net was initially engineered to survive a nuclear war, we can re-engineer the power grid to provide reliable power in an era when six- and seven-hour blackouts due to a single fuse failing or extreme heat causes a utility to turn off transmission lines have become, if not every day, increasingly familiar inconveniences. You can learn more about Brevian Energy at https://www.brevianenergy.com/

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 House recently released a report, "Why lifecycle solutions are needed to tackle marine plastic pollution." He and his coauthors argue that many solutions are available but require increased investment in the collection and processing of plastic with transparency about the performance at every step in the process to create accountability. The report argues that plastic pollution, which costs society more than $100 billion a year due to health and environmental damage now, will continue to grow until emerging strategies pioneered in Europe, Japan, and Chile — along with new ideas and technologies — to prevent plastic from reaching the ocean. In other words, we have many of the ideas and technologies necessary, and it's a matter of putting them to work while continuing to learn and improve the system.More than two billion people live without access to waste collection services. Plastic pollution is growing with the volume of plastic produced, which has grown by 4.4% annually since the global financial crisis in 2007. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Global Plastics Outlook reports that 22 million tons of plastic pollution entered the environment in 2019. If society continues plastic business as usual, 44MM tons will pollute the world's waters, land, and animal bodies by 2060. You can read the report at https://circulareconomy.earth/publications/why-lifecycle-solutions-are-needed-to-tackle-marine-plastic-pollution

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 need to mine raw bauxite, the ore aluminum is made, and saves 14,000 kWh of energy, enough electricity to power one U.S. home for an entire year. But the Environmental Protection Agency's last aluminum recycling statistics, from 2018, show that only 50.4% of drink cans distributed in the U.S. were recycled. And across all uses of aluminum, only 34.9% of the material is recycled. Recycling results in the United States do not compare favorably with Europe, where recycling rates are consistently above 70%, or China and Brazil, which reported they recovered 99.5% and 96.5% of aluminum beverage cans, respectively.Crown has announced carbon reduction and environmental goals, known as the Twentyby30 Goals. The company has reduced Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions, those directly and indirectly associated with its manufacturing activities, by 12% since 2019 while growing production by 8 billion cans -- its carbon intensity is decreasing. However, Crown's Scope 3 emissions rose by 25%. Like many companies, Scope 3 is where much of Crown's opportunity to improve lives in the coming years. The company also recently reported that it has increased the use of renewable energy to 34% on the path to 75% renewable use by 2030 and has reduced volatile organic compound emissions by 6% since 2019. The company's internal efforts focus on activating and educating employees in dozens of manufacturing and office locations around the globe to make business decisions based on environmental impacts.You can learn more about Crown at https://www.crowncork.com/. The mention of cork in the URL reflects its legacy as Crown Cork & Seal Company, founded in 1892.

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 Mateo, CA-based B-Stock Solutions, which specializes in liquidating unwanted inventory for online and physical retailers. From the top 10 U.S. retailers, such as Walmart, Amazon, GameStop, and Costco, to small entrepreneurs looking to fill their shelves, businesses around the world use B-Stock to sell and buy returned and unsold merchandise, which is auctioned off or sold directly from the retailers’ distribution center at a fraction of the retail price.A mind-boggling 21% of online purchases were returned during the 2021 holiday season — which suggests that the cost of returns at Amazon, which does not disclose its return volume, could have reached more than $98 billion in 2021. About a third of the items returned are burned to generate energy, which is the epitome of wastefulness and a symptom of very short-sighted thinking. Add to the idea that useful returned products are burned the carbon footprint of a return trip from the buyer’s home, and you can see how returns can almost double or more the environmental impact of a purchase. In the face of a rising tide of returned and excess inventory, giving those products a second chance at a useful life is critical to lowering the GHG emissions generated by our economy. Explore the crooked path of “reverse-logistics” and how the secondary market can help create a more circular economy. To learn more about B-Stock and, if you are looking to start a small retail or e-commerce business, shop the excess inventory, visit https://bstock.com

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 ocean plastics for recycling that it sells to companies committed to using post-consumer recycled, or PCR, plastics in new products and packaging. Oceanworks has developed a network of partners that collect and recycle plastics found on beaches and in waterways around the world, which the Oceanworks Guaranteed label can identify — these programs’ environmental, social, and recycling practices are reviewed regularly. Oceanworks can provide end-to-end audits of its plastics supply chain to inform packaging designers about where the materials they choose are collected, processed, and remanufactured.Oceanworks Guaranteed® certified recycled plastics are used in Glad to be Green products, Sperry Seacycled sneakers, Delta Faucets’ Ocean Plastic Shower Head, and many other products. While shoppers can browse these products at Oceanworks’ website, the real action happens in the company’s online materials catalog. It sells recycled PET (#1), HDPE (#2), and Polypropylene (#5) plastics, as well as recycled yarns and fabrics, bottles, and zippers made from ocean plastics. Product designers and the teams responsible for packaging get access to a wide range of materials that contribute to a cleaner world as long as they continue to be recycled responsibly. We discuss the National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, the potential for “advanced recycling” technologies that promise to make plastic as recyclable as metals, and the environmental and recycling impacts of plastics and the additives they contain.You can learn more about Oceanworks at https://oceanworks.co/

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 Labs recently released “A drawdown-aligned framework for the Gaming industry,” a set of recommendations on how gaming companies help solve climate change through not just actions to reduce their emissions but by encouraging gamers to embrace environmental responsibility during gameplay. Two contributors to the guide, Aiyana Bodi, Sr. Associate at Drawdown Labs, and Paula Escuardra, a Sr. UX Strategist for Cloud Gaming at Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, join the conversation to discuss the new recommendations.Even if the gaming industry accounts for only a fraction of one percent of total annual emissions, every slight improvement in efficiency will contribute to progress. More importantly, the example set by the tech industry can inspire changes in other companies that want to remain competitive and attractive to climate-concerned customers. The lessons learned from gaming’s transition can inspire changes in renewable energy, inform the development of a comprehensive approach to measuring Scope 3 emissions in other industries, and demonstrate the financial and brand benefits of becoming environmentally responsible. Read the report at https://drawdown.org/publications/a-drawdown-aligned-framework-for-the-gaming-industry, and learn more about Project Drawdown, which was founded by environmentalist Paul Hawken, at https://drawdown.org