Sustainability In Your Ear

Bevi, an office water dispenser company, has saved more than 180 million plastic bottles from landfills. Earth911 talks with Sean Grundy, cofounder and CEO of Bevi, about the company's mission to deliver sustainable and healthy water, with or without flavoring. They developed a networked water dispenser that can be installed in an office to distill and carbonate tap water, adding natural flavors for about one-third the cost of a can or bottle or soda.Grundy explains how Bevi has measured many aspects of its supply chain to understand its CO2 emissions. Its water flavorings bags and boxes, equipment, and delivery services through local partners are optimized to reduce emissions. He also explains the motivations business must embrace to win and keep dedicated employees who care about the environment. Bevi's commitment to sustainability grew out of the founding team's values, but he says they find their customers purchase its water services also embrace a concern to the environment. Check out Bevi for a fresh, sustainable drink of water.Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

The recycling industry, like the rest of the world, is coping with the massive disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe Pickard, the chief economist of the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), shares his insights into how recycling will change as a new normal emerges after the pandemic. Even as homeowners and apartment-dwellers send more recyclables through curbside programs, the commercial recycling market has slowed with closures and declining manufacturing. The results are that overall recycling rates have fallen in most states, such as California and Oregon.After closures, many recycling programs are re-opening with new employee safety programs. And recycling firms will fail. Those without the cash to get through the crisis are at the greatest risk, Pickard explains. Recyclers are wrestling with the changing requirements for the Payroll Protection Program loans from the Small Business Administration, but before the pandemic investments in U.S. recycling was on the increase. Perhaps the "new normal" will be a more efficient and innovative recycling infrastructure.Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

Are you thinking about shopping with home delivery during the lockdown? You need to know Loop, the home grocery delivery service that picks up and recycles what you buy when you are done. Earth911 talks with Benjamin Weir, North American business development manager at Loop. Launched by Terracycle, the innovative recycling company, Loopstore.com offers 173 food and personal care products to customers in the U.S. Northeast and in France. Like the traditional milkman, Loop drops off and picks up product packaging. The packages are cleaned and reused by Terracycle. No mess, lots less recycling hassle.Loop has developed new returnable and reusable packaging for products that include a steel Häagen-Dazs ice cream pint, Tide purclean detergent, Love Beauty Planet personal care products. Customers receive their orders in an insulated tote bag, which is picked up when full by UPS and returned to Terracycle. Weir explains that customers typically have two totes “in motion.”The company will expand service in the U.S. and Europe during 2020, it also is working to expand its product selection. We also discuss how Loop is working with its partners to reduce customer and worker exposure to potential coronavirus infection.Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

The Earth911 team gathers, again, from the far corners of this isolated country to talk about the opportunities to improve our lives and reduce our impact on the planet in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown. Join Mitch Ratcliffe and Sarah Lozanova for a conversation about keeping sane and adding sustainability education for your kids while stuck at home. We also talk more about the phenomenal evidence from the pandemic that many individual actions, such as reducing driving and closing ports, have had on environmental quality around the world. Los Angeles' air is cleaner than any time in memory, the water in Venice is clear, and the Earth is shaking less. We can all clearly see that millions of small changes add up.We also urge you to get ready to participate in Earth Day online. This is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a massive citizen action that gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. Because of the COVID-19 crisis, this year's plan to get one billion people onto the streets for Earth Day have been moved online. Earth911's Gemma Alexander explored the online programs for Earth Day Foodprints for the Future, Earth Challenge, EARTHRISE, and Great Global Cleanup you can join during the week of April 22nd. If you are stuck at home, do something for your planet!And we answer your Earthling Questions! This week, learn how to dispose of weed killer containers, whether it is a good idea to crush soup cans before recycling, and how a hair salon can start recycling effectively.

Begin building resilient communities based on a thorough awareness of nature, Aris Popadopoulos, founder of the Resilience Action Fund, a non-profit that provides information, educational information, and research to communities. As rising sea levels threaten coastal communities and extreme weather increases inland, Popadopoulos advises homeowners and renters to become more aware of the at-risk locations near them to avoid direct damage due to climate change.Popadopoulos, who is active in Miami-area resilience planning and a World Trade Center attack survivor, is the author of Resilience -- The Ultimate Sustainability: Lessons from Failing to Develop a Stronger and Safer Built Environment. He shares how king tides, which flood parts of Miami regularly, are already mapping the future of habitable land in his home town. We also discuss progress or the lack thereof in Houston and other parts of the country.If you are considering a new home, take a few minutes with the Resilience Action Fund to learn what risks to look for, how to ensure you receive all the information you need to make a location decision and start building your resilient foundation for life in the 2020s.

Companies face growing demands from consumers, government, and NGOs to reduce their carbon footprint, decrease their overall environmental impact, and to provide just work conditions. Ramprate.com, an innovative sourcing advisory firm that pioneered data services based on renewable energy, has launched a scoring system to track the impacts at every step in a company's supply chain, Syzygy Sourcing Impact. As Ramprate explains it, the world is in the midst of a statistical revolution that will help to optimize human productivity to live prosperpously within the planet's carrying capacity.The Ramprate team partnered with CSRHub.com and others to examine the financial, environmental, and social responsibility performance of more than 1,300 companies to develop the Syzygy system. We talk with founder and CEO Tony Greenberg and chief strategy officer Alex Veytsel about how Ramprate evolved from helping its clients reduce telecommunication costs to tackling climate impacts from energy use, transportation, and every other facet of corporate sustainability. It's a high-concept conversation that you'll come away from with ideas to help your business become more sustainable. Consumers should listen, too, because Syzygy and other scoring systems will eventually inform how products are labeled to convey environmental impacts, safety, and social responsibility.Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

The Earth911 gang assembles in a time of crisis. Maybe we aren't The Avengers, but we have proof from the pandemic that many individual changes in behavior can add up to massive changes in environmental impact. The coronavirus has halted life in many parts of the world, driving down pollution levels and raising sustainability red flags as oil prices drop, plastic has come back in vogue, and the plans for Earth Day 50 on April 22nd go virtual.Dive into this week's conversation about green COVID-19 prevention, how to use coronavirus disruption to reset your life for sustainability, and to plan your Earth Day activities. In this week's Earthling Questions, we explain how to reuse pill bottles to fight disease around the world, what to do with unwearable used clothing, and the right way to recycle of the HDPE bag inside your cereal box.Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

New York City's Earth Day celebrations are among the largest in the world. Earth911 talks with John Oppermann, executive director of Earth Day Initiative, which produces the annual events. The 50th anniversary of Earth Day physical events have been canceled, but Oppermann's team has set up a virtual event, including speeches, interactive presentations, and booths that you can stroll from home. Learn about climate change and the steps you can take to reduce your impact, then find organizations to support and join.We talked before the coronavirus pandemic resulted in lockdowns across the country. Oppermann discussed the many options we have to be better stewards of the Earth. Spend this 20 minutes to prepare for your virtual participation in Earth Day 50, it will help make an even bigger difference than the physical event.Join the conversation and share your thoughts with the community in our Earthling Forum.

The Earth is our shared home, and that insight can help save the world, Dr. Anita Sanchez explains in this thoughtful conversation with Earth911. The author of The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times shares her lifelong investigation of our interconnectedness, traversing Mohican, Hopi, and Buddhist thought to suggest four key actions for making climate change personal. She links four essential indigenous ideas, our power to forgive the unforgivable, to heal, our essential unity, and the power of hope to four simple actions we can take as individuals and communities to restore the planet.

The annual challenge of keeping walkways and drives clear of snow has a terrible environmental impact. In colder regions, a single household will use between 200 lb.s and 800 lbs. of salt each year, which leads to chloride contamination in lakes, streams, and groundwater. PlaySafe Ice Blocker is a new chloride-free anti-icing liquid that is safe for the environment, pets, and your children. Earth911 talks with Mitch Vestal, founder of PlaySafe about how to de-ice safely the rest of this Winter and next year.The inefficiency of chloride de-icing salts, which work in narrow bands of temperatures, results in most of the material running off or remaining in your lawn. Rock salt must first become liquid before it can work, which is why so much salt is left over after the snow is gone. Vestal explains how one gallon of PlaySafe Ice Blocker can replace up to 200 lbs. of rock salt de-icer. PlaySafe can be sprayed on walkways and driveways to prevent ice from forming during a storm, and it leaves a light slush that is easier to remove than partially melted ice.