Sustainability In Your Ear

Our guest, Dr. Joshua Pearce has a DIY approach to solar that he recently described an article on Earth911, DIY Solar Now To Pocket Profits From Solar Energy. Solar installations are a powerful step toward reducing your carbon footprint, but it is a big investment that many Americans are hard-pressed to make. Only about 6% of U.S. homes have installed solar, according to Pew Research. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that by switching homes from oil and gas-generated power to solar could save the U.S. $1.7 trillion in reduced energy and health care costs by 2050. The question is how more of us can get solar installed at affordable costs, and Pearce's new book, To Catch the Sun, offers an answer: DIY installation instructions. You can learn more at https://tocatchthesun.com/

Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske talks with Earth911's Mitch Ratcliffe about how to invest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on the outcome of the United Nations' COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. A consortium of banks controlling more than $130 trillion in assets announced the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero to direct investments into renewable energy instead of fossil fuels extraction. Will the announcement drive higher valuations of GHG companies?We discuss eight companies with negative carbon footprints, including AC Energy Corp, which is headquartered in the Philippines, New Zealand’s Mercury NZ, the Canadian energy company TransAlta Corp, Renova, a Japanese renewables company, the Danish wind turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems, China’s Li Auto, and two American companies, NEXTera Energy and Tesla, where Elon Musk has been on a stock selling spree this week. This is the third in our continuing series about investing for environmental and social progress with Doug Heske. Newday Impact manages a suite of socially and environmentally responsible portfolios.

Earth911 talks with Paul Hawken, a pioneer of living and working sustainably. His work spans ideas, generations, and industries — he is an environmentalist, author, entrepreneur and globally recognized expert on sustainable living. His new book, Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation, continues the work he launched in 2017 with the book Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Every Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. Paul was the founder of Erewhon, an pioneering natural food company, garden and home retailer Smith & Hawken, and Energy Everywhere, a low-cost solar company.You can learn more about Paul at https://paulhawken.com and Regeneration is available now on Amazon, in bookstores and on Audible. Be sure to visit the Regeneration website, https://regeneration.org, where many if the ideas in the book are available to read. He and his team have outlined more of the solutions to the climate crisis than any other source.

Earth911 welcomes David New, founder of Obaggo, a counter-top appliance that turns a variety of plastic films into recyclable pucks that do not jam recycling center equipment. Recycling in the United States is unnecessarily difficult. Plastic, in particular, is hard to sort because of the myriad forms its takes – it is often unlabeled, which means one cannot identify what kinds of plastic needs to be recycled – and finding drop-off locations that accept the material you have can be a matter of luck. If your city doesn’t accept, for instance, plastic film, you’ll few or no options. But that may be changing. Obaggo can compress plastic bags and film, including #2 and #4 plastic shopping bags, Amazon’s recyclable plastic bags, food wrapping and cereal bags that are in boxes of your favorite breakfast.The Obaggo appliance is currently available through Indiegogo for $229 — please note that backing a company on Indiegogo does not always mean you will receive the product. Obaggo offers a potentially groundbreaking change in the recyclability of plastic film. You can learn about Obaggo at https://www.obaggo.com/.

Most of us still struggle to get our heads around the science of climate change, but the impacts are clearly felt almost every day somewhere in the United States. In June, 2021, USAFacts reports, 97 million people in the United States experienced hotter than average temperatures, including record-shattering heat in the West. In August, the data shows 84.8 million Americans — at third of the country - were still suffering from higher than average temperatures. Understanding how persistent but distributed the impact of the climate crisis is helps us internalize the need to make changes in our life. Our guest, Tanveer Ali, is a data visualization analyst at USAFacts. The Bellevue, Wash-based non-profit, founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, recently introduced a convenient way to keep tabs on the consequences of the climate crisis, the Climate in the U.S. experience. It provides regularly updated visualizations of a variety of U.S. climate statistics and useful insights into how life is changing for our neighbors. See the dashboard at https://usafacts.org/issues/climate.

Earth911 talks about the challenge of making ethical and environmentally responsible investment decisions with Newday Impact CEO Doug Heske. Newday Impact is a financial services company that creates and manages a variety of socially and environmentally themed portfolios, which make it easy to invest to support your values. We dig into choosing stocks based on the greenhouse gas emissions produced by agriculture and agribusiness, with a quick look at the progress at Whole Foods and Amazon.The news here is not good – industry continues to churn out more CO2 each year rather than less and Newday’s opinion of the companies we’ll discuss today reflects that lack of progress. We focus on Simply Good Foods (SMPL), Xylem (XYL), Darling Ingredients (DAR), Hain Celestial Group (HAIN), Bunge (BG), Novozymes (an OTC-traded Danish company, NVZMY) and the biggest of the big, Amazon (AMZN). Download the Newday Impact app to explore the portfolios and invest.This conversation, recorded on October 29, 2021, does not represent an endorsement of any company or stock. We recommend you do extensive  research before making any investment.

Our guest, Chris Orestis, is the president of Retirement Genius and a nationally recognized expert on retirements issues. Every generation will feel the impact of climate change, and at a time when demographics are already working against the rising tide of seniors they need to factor in new risks during their retirement. While Millennials, Gen Z and children face long-term impacts on their health, economic opportunities and lifestyles, retiring Baby Boomers must also reckon with the consequences of extreme heat, the potential for disruption of their lives by wildfire, food shortages and the economic impact of climate change on their retirement nest egg. How should older people be rethinking their assumptions about retirement? What changes to existing plans should Boomers be making? We’ve got the guy with the answers.

As the world prepares for the United Nations’ COP26 climate change conference, we talk with Rick Wayman, the new CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration (F4CR). They are working to return atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-Industrial Era levels by 2050. Members of the F4CR team have been on the show many times to discuss carbon capture and sequestration, an approach to permanently removing excess atmospheric CO2 that stores carbon in the ground or uses it to make new products and materials, from vodka to concrete. Earth911's Mitch Ratcliffe recently moderated a session about mining the sky for the F4CR’s annual Second Annual Climate Restoration Forum.World leaders are meeting this week in Glasgow, Scotland, to set emissions goals to prevent catastrophic climate change. Rick explains that a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 is critical to preventing warming in excess of 1.5C, at which climate change could reach a devastating tipping point. Carbon capture and sequestration technology is evolving quickly and may represent an important tool in humanity's response to rising CO2 levels. But first we need to stop the rising emissions from rich and poor countries in an equitable way. That’s where COP26 comes into play, it is the world’s last chance to agree on the path to an equitable transition to renewable energy. To learn more about F4CR, visit https://foundationforclimaterestoration.org/.

LastObject cofounder Isabel Aagaard joins us to talk about the company’s latest product, the LastPad, a reusable menstrual pad made to be washed and reused up to 240 times. Single-use menstrual pads are a huge waste issue, representing a large share of ocean waste and producing billions of loose plastic wrappers, coated paper and the pads themselves every year. The LastPad comes in three sizes, including panty liners and overnight pads and the inner layer is made from bamboo, while the outer is polyester. LastObject launched the LastPad through Kickstarter and more than 46,000 people backed the project. Isabel shares how LastObject uses crowdfunding campaigns to co-design products with the consumers who will use them.

Ronald Rael, cofounder of 3D-printed wood maker Forust and chair of the Architecture department at the University of California Berkeley College of Environmental Design joins Mitch Ratcliffe. Ronald co-invented a method for printing wood with realistic grain using sawdust and lignin, the natural adhesive in wood.Forust's 3D-printing system can mimic the natural grains and colors of different species, including rare rosewood, mahogany and ebony that are the cause of widespread deforestation. Because it is printed, Forust wood can be shaped for use in furniture or and printed to service as a structural support in building — it opens a whole spectrum of novel applications of wood in construction. Learn about the potential uses of Forust's “digitally rematerialized wood.”