Earth911.com's Sustainability In Your Ear

Electric vehicles are taking market share away from internal combustion competitors, with new plugin vehicle registrations in 2023 growing 45% yearly and accounting for 18% of all vehicle sales worldwide this year. U.S. EV sales hit 7.9% of all new car sales over the past three months. In Silicon Valley-speak, EVs are nearly across the chasm, the point at which a new product category is poised to displace older products rapidly. You're probably asking, "Can I afford one?" Our guest, Peter Glenn, CEO of EV Life, is working to make the answer to your question an affordable "Yes." EV Life works with EV shoppers to pre-qualify them for a loan, then applies available rebates and the federal tax credit that buyers typically have to wait to claim on their federal and state taxes to lower their monthly EV payments.The financialization of life over the past 50 years has delivered mixed results for consumers. As Peter explains, those tools could be turned to positive use by connecting car owners to savings, reduced charging costs, and other benefits based on the ability to track vehicle use, the EV's ability to send power to the grid when parked, or potentially by passing the value of carbon emissions avoided to the vehicle owner. That requires a more connected lifestyle, which represents a new co-ownership scenario — we may own the car but have committed to sending the used battery to a processor who will pay us today or over time for the lithium they will recover when the vehicle reaches the end of its useful life. EV Life was born with a mission to help people find the information they need to buy the right electric car for their needs. You can learn more at EVLife.co

Business may be the most potent force in the world, perhaps more poweful than government. The largest corporations—only 20 companies— are responsible for one-third of carbon emissions, and some firms carry more economic heft than many nations. For example, Apple earned $99 billion in net income in 2022, and if Apple were a nation, it would rank 67th in the world if compared to the GDP of other countries. The Climate Crisis and its related food, water, and immigration impacts present the most significant challenge business has ever faced. Can business deliver a better world and equitable society while avoiding a global economic collapse? The Activist Leader: A New Mindset for Doing Business, a new book by our guests Jon Miller and Lucy Parker, reports that business has the tools. Now, the will to lead is required.Lucy and Jon outline a simple challenge for leaders and people who want to become business leaders: they must adopt a new mindset and the ability to think like an activist about the role a business plays in the world. That’s a tall order in a fractured political environment in which critics from the extremes of the political spectrum monitor every word for controversy. It takes courage to be an activist leader, and that’s a topic worth exploring in a world that needs businesses to step up to their responsibility for the system that produced climate change. You can find The Activist Leader: A New Mindset for Doing Business at Amazon, Powell’s Books, and local bookstores.

Savannah Seydel, vice president of sustainability and impact at Better Earth, a maker of compostable tableware and food service packaging, is on a mission to remove petroleum-based plastics and PFAS-treated fiber from our food packaging choices. Food packaging and service ware are two of the largest sources of plastic pollution. The rise of compostable alternatives to petroleum-based plastics could change the character of food service materials, making restaurants, cafeterias, and food delivery packaging part of the circular economy, where materials flow from nature to human use and back to nature again. Better Earth makes a wide range of hot and cold food packaging using renewable, sustainably grown fiber and PLA, an industrially compostable bio-plastic — this packaging now represents about 8% of the food service industry.Better Earth sells packaging to businesses, not consumers. The company has established an in-house design studio that creates packaging and circular services. For example, they’ve partnered with farmers in their Atlanta office to source fiber from switchgrass and other cover crops, which provides new revenue streams to support family farms. Better Earth also works to develop collection programs that get recovered packaging and food waste into the composting system and, ultimately, back to the farms where it can nourish the soil. Savannah describes their Field to Food to Field strategy as “borrowing biological resources and putting them back again.” You can learn more about Better Earth at https://becompostable.com/

Trek Bicycle has introduced a certified pre-owned bike program, Red Barn Refresh, and recently published its 2023 Sustainability Report. Eric Bjorling, Trek's Director of Brand Marketing and Public Relations, returns to Sustainability In Your Ear to discuss the company's progress and what it has learned on the path to greater sustainability. Two years ago, Eric said Trek was starting to move fast and take real action to reduce its environmental impact. Since then, the company has committed to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 68% compared to 2021 levels by 2032 and Scope 3 emissions by 30%. Like many companies, Trek's Scope 3 emissions related to its supply chain and distribution system account for more than 95% of its annual cumulative emissions. Consequently, Trek declared frankly in its latest sustainability report that it continues to explore its impact and strategies for achieving net-zero emissions, so it has yet to set a goal. There's no doubt that a bike is a much better transportation choice than a car, and Trek is taking steps to reduce the impact of its bikes, packaging, and retail locations. We might all learn something, so let's get on our bikes and ride.

The rise of fast fashion resulted in a tidal wave of clothing in the world’s landfills. Even traditional fashion choices can increase your environmental footprint if not selected using sustainable criteria, cared for and washed correctly, and worn until you donate or recycle it. Meet Erin Houston, cofounder of Wearwell, a woman-owned company that helps customers choose sustainable clothing, accessories, and shoes, as well as resell used items they no longer want to wear. Erin and her team carefully design the Wearwell catalog to feature responsibly manufactured fashion, clothing from certified B Corporations that mix profit with social impact, as well as from women- and block-owned fashion lines for women of all sizes. The company also offers a recommerce option, Wearwellagain, that provides customers free shipping of pre-loved clothing, shoes, and accessories and awards between 5% and 15% off their next purchase. The question is whether humanity can find satisfaction in making the clothing we buy last longer. Much of the problem is due to the focus on shopping rather than wearing and caring for clothing. The change we need to make is to place the emphasis not on how many clothing pieces we acquire but instead on making them last. Recommerce, selling used items that others can wear, is a potential source of satisfaction for the shopper craving change. Wearwellagain and similar services could enable the constant exchange of clothing to satisfy the need for novelty — but limiting shipping and other recommerce-related environmental impacts will be a challenge until we achieve a carbon-neutral transportation infrastructure. There are many changes to make and myriad opportunities for new businesses. You can learn more about Wearwell at https://www.shopwearwell.com/

Measuring greenhouse gas emissions, sometimes known as "carbon accounting," is the hottest topic in business. Regulators now require companies to report their emissions along with other environmental impacts. Consumers have also made clear that they want low-impact products and services. Meet Lucas Fraser, founder of Breeze, a carbon tracking tool for small and medium-sized businesses that measures Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Breeze is an easy-to-use platform that provides locally relevant results based on various energy sources in a region and by types of products purchased and used in a business.We used Breeze to profile Earth911's carbon impact, and the free version provided a useful estimate we can use to make changes -- that's information every business needs. Despite the International Energy Agency's projections that carbon emissions will peak by the middle of this decade, the agency reports that CO2 emissions reached a record 37 billion tons in 2022. It is time to stop talking about reductions and start achieving them. While reducing carbon emissions is critical to preventing more global warming, we also need better insights into other environmental impacts, such as water use, raw materials extraction, and waste created in manufacturing and distribution, to fully understand the opportunities to reduce society's impact on nature. You can learn more about Breeze at https://mybreeze.io

Reducing the number of solo drivers in and around cities and the emissions associated with commuting and shopping make a positive difference for the environment and human health. Meet Nanci Fitzgerald, President and CEO of The Rideshare Company. This nonprofit organization develops ridesharing services for companies, governments, and residential facilities. Founded in the 1980s, The Rideshare Company has created rideshare programs that, between July 1994 to December 2022, provided more than 20 million trips, eliminating 699 million miles traveled. Ridesharing reduced the cost of maintaining its vehicles by $13 million and saved 32.9 million gallons of gas, which prevented 354,475 tons of CO2 emissions. 40 years of ridesharing history demonstrates how the potential for sharing assets, like cars and busses, has evolved — there are many alternatives to ownership of things that are used only part of the day or even less frequently. If we can do a better job of organizing shared travel, the potential benefits are vast.The U.S. Census reports that the average commute time in the nation was 27.6 minutes in 2019, the last year before COVID-19 disrupted lives and changed work and travel. Almost 10% of workers told the Census in 2019 that they traveled more than an hour to work. Companies and governments are asking people to return to the office, and too often, they drive alone in a car. There are better ways to travel involving ridesharing and organized commuter programs, such as those provided on and around a corporate campus. The challenge is organizing those programs and finding participants, which is the Rideshare Company's forte. You can learn more about The Rideshare Company at https://www.rideshare.com/

Meet Vivian Tai, Director of Innovation at GS1 US, the American division of GS1, a nonprofit organization you interact with daily and probably do not know by name. Its product, the Universal Product Code, or UPC barcode, is on virtually everything you buy and could power your participation in the circular economy. The original UPC barcode transformed shopping in the 1970s, first providing retail workers the ability for retail checkers to scan into the inventory management and point of sale systems, then later allowing self-checkout by shoppers. GS1's internal mantra is the identification of everything makes anything possible. The organization's new GS1 Digital Link Standard uses scannable QR codes to connect and track products, even specific individual units produced across the entire lifecycle.The evolution of circular products will grow on scannable codes, something every one of us with a phone in our pocket. The combination of a smartphone and QR code could unlock closed-loop recycling to ensure that companies who make or distribute products and packaging can take responsibility for the materials they use at every step, ultimately reducing the need to extract raw materials to lower humanity's environmental footprint. You can learn more about GS1 US and its technology at https://www.gs1us.org/

Water is getting more expensive as drought spreads due to climate change, and in the Western U.S., scarcity continues to drive water prices higher. Meet Shane Dyer, CEO of Irrigreen, a precision irrigation company that recently released its first product for the home. Think of the Irrigreen sprinkler system as inkjet printing applied to putting water exactly where needed to keep a yard green or a garden productive. A smartphone app helps you map your yard to tell the system where and how much water is needed. Irrigreen’s control system also accesses local weather information to adjust watering to optimize soil moisture.The website in2013dollars.com reports that the cost of water across the country has increased by 3,968% since 1952 and continues to rise by 5.36% a year. Whether you are concerned about the environment or your pocketbook, it’s a good time to think about cutting water use in the yard, showering, doing the dishes, or washing clothes. Irrigreen’s use of machine learning, what most people call Artificial Intelligence today, to precisely control water application provides practical data about measurable water and water-bill savings results. You can learn more about Irrigreen at https://irrigreen.com/

The rise of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles will require a transformation in battery technology, the charging infrastructure, and the electric grid. Sam Abuelsamid, Principal Analyst for E-Mobility at Guidehouse Insights, joined the conversation to discuss electrification issues, from battery technology and mobility to smart cities and the distributed energy grid evolving around us. Sam explains that recycling will be essential to making enough batteries for the growing electric and hybrid fleet without rampant extractive mining. Guidehouse recently published a report called Developing Solutions for Recycling End-of-Life EV Batteries.EVs acccounted for 14% of all new cars sold globally in 2022, and the International Energy Agency estimates that sales will increase by another 35% to 18.9% this year. China accounts for more than half of global sales. In the United States, 7.2% of car sald in the first quarter of this year were EVs. Plug-in hybrids represented about 13% of sales — so about 20% of all cars sold will need new battery technology. As we’ve heard during previous interviews, the battery supply chain is still forming, and lithium and several critical minerals are still in short supply. You can learn more about Guidehouse Insights at https://guidehouseinsights.com/