Earth911.com's Sustainability In Your Ear

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/

For many of us, the Climate Crisis looks like a brick wall, something the internal combustion-driven economy will slam into and total the system we grew up in. John J. Berger, Ph.D., author of Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth, explored the path forward without getting up with the doom-saying that discourages people from taking action. While John warns of the consequences of continued inaction, his travels and research uncovered stories about progress in turning the built environment green, sustainable business erupting in the Red States, and the many changes in our infrastructure, business, and government practices that are being pioneered around the world, and the changes we can all make in our buying, diet, and when we vote.Translating our aspirations for a sustainable life as individuals into social change is more complicated than at any time in history. Not only are we more connected, but we are also inundated with fear-based storytelling that doesn't help us make better decisions. John's travels at the frontline of the green transition show that the future can be brighter, better, and more equitable than today's economy, which is slowly starving due to the pollution and global warming it has produced. Living sustainably, taking responsibility for the environmental impact of a business, and communities making investments in renewable, circular economy infrastructures are showing the way to a post-fossil fuel world. Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth is available on Amazon, at Powell's Books, and in local bookstores.

Smart homes are commonplace today. Now, the intelligent yard is poised to join the mix. Meet Graham Hine, CEO of ePlant, which recently introduced the TreeTag. This solar-powered monitor is attached to a tree to monitor its health and send updates wirelessly to a phone. TreeTags are placed onto the side of trees using a screw and measure minor size fluctuations in trees. For example, the bark's contraction can indicate stress, such as a lack of water. The TreeTag includes an accelerometer to detect movement patterns that may suggest instability and a humidity sensor to augment local weather data. The TreeTag employs artificial intelligence to process and transmit its data to the cloud. You can talk to your tree using ChatGPT as an interpreter. The experience is like chatting with a friend, but it might be about how much water the tree needs to be healthy or a report on its growth and the carbon it has captured as it grows.ePlant is among the most intriguing and fun devices we've seen this year. Technology can help us see the environment in new ways, bolstering our senses with data that lets us identify biases so that we can respond to climate change, local extreme weather, and drought thoughtfully and efficiently. Solar-powered devices like TreeTag, if manufactured with minimal environmental impact, can expand our sensory engagement with the health of forests, orchards, and suburban yards to reduce overwatering, preserve tree and plant species struggling with local weather changes, and potentially increase the yield of food produced per gallon of water used. You can learn more about ePlant at https://www.eplant.com/

The circular economy is a vision for a world in which the materials used in the products and packaging we purchase flow perpetually through the economy, used over and over instead of being tossed into landfills and replaced with newly mined, refined, and processed stuff. Recycling, an industry with about 50 years of history, is considered an essential feature of the circular economy, but it is just one option. Our guest, Knoxfill founder Michaela Barnett, recently wrote an article for The Conversation that convincingly argued that recycling has struggled to live up to the circular vision. She says the three Rs — reduce, reuse, and recycle — are insufficient to make the circular economy go round. Michaela started Knoxfill, a retail store in Knoxville, Tennessee, that offers refillable and sustainably made products for hair care, home cleaning, skincare, and the kitchen. Michaela and her team at Knoxfill offer local delivery and a “mobile refillery,” kind of like a food truck for refills, to make reuse and refilling available as widely as possible within their communities — by keeping the supply chain short using local products and refusing to ship nationally, they help reduce not just plastic consumption but also carbon emissions and other impacts of our daily lives. You can learn more about Knoxfill at https://knoxfill.com/Take a few minutes to find your local refill options at https://www.litterless.com/ or https://directory.refillerycollective.com/ and start to change your take-make-waste buying to reduce your impact.

Robin Wiener, president of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), joins the conversation to explore the evolution of the circular economy and how the role of recycling will evolve. Today’s recycling infrastructure is closely aligned with the waste management system. There are growing signs that the reuse of products is essential and that recycling services can be built into the product lifecycle as the last step when no more reuse is possible. But the challenge recyclers face, along with the rest of us, is the limited range of choices in recyclable materials used in products and packaging. Consumer goods and packaging companies must simplify their designs, abandoning hard-to-recycle materials that cannot be processed by the equipment currently available in local recycling facilities.Recycling has gotten a bad rap in recent years, and only sometimes for good reasons. Robin explains that when we talk about the overall plastic recycling rate, which is an abysmal five to six percent, we miss that some materials, like PET beverage bottles, are collected and processed at much higher rates. Many materials can be collected at even higher rates when states put deposit programs in place to encourage their return for recycling. For now, each of us can look closely at products before we buy them to understand whether we can recycle them when finished using them. You can learn more about ISRI at https://www.isri.org/

Society is moving from sustainability naive to sustainably native, a new era in which the language, practices, and values of sustainable thinking will be taken for granted. When we have a shared language, changes start to happen- a trend we can see emerging now. Solitaire Townsend, author of The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix The Future, has written a guide to using the many threads of transformation that are already weaving the circular economy, albeit often behind closed doors and never as fast as all of us would like. The Solutionists documents how debates about the value of ESG reporting and what factors it should account for, whether only the financial risk faced by companies or the full spectrum of environmental impacts a company or country creates, is representative of a transition in which people with vision, grit, good humor, and the soul to roll with rapid changes can change the world for the better.Solitaire recounts hundreds of interviews and projects that show the progress and hope that can lead to a profound change. That change is not guaranteed, but as she writes near the end of the book, "Being a successful Solutionist means stepping up to conversations that challenge you, with an openness to learn." It's an uncomfortable time, and the curious, driven leader can make vast changes real for their organization and community. You can find The Solutionists at Amazon, Powell's Books, and local bookstores.

The average American home produces 533 million microfibers annually, according to a 2019 study by Ocean Wise. CiCLO, a new polyester and nylon additive, promises to make those microfibers biodegrade in landfills or water, potentially eliminating these microplastic pollutants. Meet Andrea Ferris, CEO and cofounder at Intrinsic Advanced Materials, maker of CiCLO, a nutrient that attracts microorganisms to the weakest points in a synthetic fiber, where they feed and break down the material. According to the company, the result is a textile that decomposes as quickly as natural fibers like wool. CiCLO has been certified by OEKO-TEX ECO PASSPORT as not harmful to human health. While we must reduce the use of synthetics, it is also beneficial to make those materials we use less damaging when they escape into nature. Synthetic textiles are a plague, starting with shoppers who buy, wear, and discard clothing at an unprecedented rate. Too often, clothing becomes waste in the environment. Consumers wear fast fashions an average of only seven times before discarding them. CiCLO is an intriguing solution for the clothes that end their useful life in the landfill or as litter — it could help reduce the long-term impact of materials that escape into nature. You can learn more about CiCLO and Intrinsic Advanced Materials at https://ciclotextiles.com/

Scott Graybeal, CEO of Caelux, sits down to talk about perovskites-based nanotechnology that can improve the performance of silicon solar panels to produce 30% more power from the sun at a 10% lower cost than traditional panels. Caelux recently closed an additional $12 million in funding to build a manufacturing facility that will produce up to 100 MW of generation capacity. The $370 billion Inflation Reduction Act has reportedly been followed by between $213 and $511 billion in private investment, with hundreds of new solar, battery, and other cleantech facilities launched last year. It’s a remarkable time to be in green technology because, as Scott explains, the U.S. has embraced an industrial vision and invested in making it happen for the first time since the Eisenhower Administration. Silicon-based solar panels have made tremendous progress since they came to public attention when the Carter Administration first installed them on the roof of the White House. The cost of electricity they generate has fallen by 99% as silicon solar panels achieved 20% efficiency. Perovskite, a calcium titanium oxide-based nanomaterial, can convert up to 30% of the sun’s light into electricity, and recent research suggests they could become two-and-a-half times more efficient in the next few years.You can learn more about Caelux at https://caelux.com/

What is the most used material in the world? Cement, the basis for building most of the modern world, was invented during the Roman Empire and remains the most used material worldwide. In 2021, cement accounted for 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions globally, about 4.3 % of all greenhouse gas generated that year. Meet Grant Quasha, CEO of Eco Material Technology, a New York-based maker of low-carbon cement and materials for making concrete. Eco Material reengineered the Roman method of making pozzolanic cement using processed fly ash generated by industrial processes. The company uses a low-temperature process to remove carbon when making PozzoSlag®. This material can replace a significant portion of the portland cement required to make durable concrete used in buildings and bridges. The resulting concrete carries an embodied carbon footprint 95% lower than traditional portland cement. During the conversation, Grant explains that billions of tons of fly ash from the Industrial Era can be recovered to make low-carbon concrete. While the prospect of lowering annual CO2 emissions associated with building homes, skyscrapers, and roads by 95% is sufficiently important to justify enthusiasm about this technology, the opportunity to mine the residual fly ash pollution created and dumped during the Industrial Era should get everyone’s attention. Society can do more than paper over environmental damage while continuing to build and expand a sustainable infrastructure — we can restore nature, making cities and their suburbs greener.You can learn more about Eco Materials Technologies at https://ecomaterial.com/

Farmed salmon has been touted as a solution to food scarcity as the world turns to eating more seafood. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that seafood production must increase 29.3% by 2030 to meet demand. Our guest today is Simen Sætre, who coauthored The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore with journalist Kjetil Ostli. The book examines the salmon farming industry in Norway in the 1960s. It is a history of the business and a chronicle of the many unanticipated consequences of fish farming, including the use of chemicals in fish feed that harm aquatic and human health, a pandemic of sea lice infections in farmed and wild fish, and the competition between salmon farms and human food supplies, particularly in Africa. The intense pollution and inhumanity associated with large-scale cattle, pork, and poultry operations, known as CAFOs, are being translated to increase the production in salmon farming. Simen discusses how humans have started down the path to creating CAFOs in the sea. Still, he remains hopeful that wild salmon can be restored. You can find The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore at Amazon, Powell’s Books, and local booksellers.