Yale researchers estimate that roughly 80 million Americans are alarmed about climate change. About 40 million of them say they want to be politically active on the issue. But only about 3 million https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/segmenting-the-climate-change-alarmed-active-willing-and-inactive/. When that 37 million-American group is asked why they aren’t active, researchers most often hear that nobody has asked them. That’s the focus of this week’s conversation on Sustainability In Your Ear. Only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything about climate change on social media, and two-thirds say they rarely or never hear about it from friends or in the media. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry treats persuasion as core business. David Fenton calls the situation unilateral disarmament at a moment when an information war is needed. The crowning result of climate action to date is the Inflation Reduction Act that passed by one vote and was repealed by one vote. A bill you win by a single vote, he says, is a bill you never really won. David founded Fenton Communications in 1982, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes. His campaigns helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, where Yoko Ono's https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/yoko-ono-sean-lennon-put-anti-fracking-message-on-new-york-billboard-120276/ went up along Governor Andrew Cuomo's commute, and helped launch fossil fuel divestment with the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers. His book, https://amzn.to/3UhiAIA, includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who we discuss at length in this thought-provoking interview. He places the blame on climate advocacy spending and, more importantly, the words used to frame the issue. The climate NGO and philanthropic world spends billions a year on policy, law, and science, and spends on communication mainly to raise money from people already on its lists. David traces that to what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong idea reproduces itself because it is correct, and to its corollary, that selling ideas is dirty work beneath serious people. The second is vocabulary. “Net Zero means almost nothing to most people. “Carbon” sounds like an abstraction. And “justice,” in cognitive research, evokes images of the police and courts, not of fairness and a shared mission. We need to pivot to simpler language, like “pollution,” when describing the source of global warming. Pollution is a word nobody defends, and a blanket of pollution trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space is a picture people can easily grasp and act on. Asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer Americans give is “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Earth911 has spent three decades on that vocabulary, and it holds up on its own terms as a materials strategy. Increased curbside recycling participation rates don’t necessarily lead to decarbonizing the grid or the truck fleets. David Fenton’s prescription for listeners is blunter than any campaign plan: talk about it, post about it, and press the funders you know to spend generating public demand for change rather than direct mail fundraising. Learn more about David's work at https://davidfentonactivist.com/, and find his podcast at https://fentonforecast.com/. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L  

Our guest is Brett Henderson, co-founder and CEO of https://solarpanelrecycling.com/, or SPR. The company owns and operates plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, with a fourth opening in California this year, each built to run about a million panels a year and to scale to 3 million within six months when needed. SPR is a https://seia.org/-approved national recycler and partnered with SEIA on the https://solarpanelrecycling.com/2025/02/solarpanelrecycling-com-and-seia-launch-pioneering-residential-solar-recycling-initiative-in-north-carolina/ in the country. Brett came to solar after 18 years in electronics recycling at https://powerhouserecycling.com/, SPR's parent company, and the business started in 2018 with a call from a longtime utility client that had 10,000 panels coming out of a power plant and nowhere to send them. Brett is blunt about the economics: recycling a panel is a negative value proposition, because a panel is mostly glass and glass is cheap. What SPR sells is risk mitigation. Federal rules treat an end-of-life panel as hazardous until testing proves otherwise, most owners have no idea what is inside the modules they bought, and a utility loading thousands of them onto trucks takes on generator liability and Department of Transportation exposure. Aluminum and silver recovery subsidizes the rest. That cost has fallen 42% in 36 months at SPR, driven by rebuilt separation lines and steadier volume rather than any subsidy, and scale is what opens the end markets.

In 2024, 91% of new large-scale renewable projects around the world made electricity for less money than any fossil-fuel option, https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent-of-New-Renewable-Projects-Now-Cheaper-Than-Fossil-Fuels-Alternatives. Solar power was 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The technology that can lower energy bills, keep the grid stable, and create jobs is now the most affordable way to build power almost anywhere. So, here’s the big question our guest faces every day: if clean energy is this good and this affordable, why is it still so tough to get people to support it? Leah Qusba leads GoodPower, a nonprofit focused on strategic communications and research. For almost twenty years, it was known as Action for the Climate Emergency, but it changed its name during Climate Week 2025. Since Leah took over, the group has grown about ten times bigger, built a network of over 8,500 content creators who share facts about renewables, and started running live messaging tests through its Good Data Lab. The new name highlights that renewable power is good power, and the best way to win support is by showing how it affects people’s monthly bills. The decision to rebrand was based on data. Leah’s team learned that words like “climate” and “emergency” can shut down conversations in rural, conservative areas where most new wind and solar projects are built. GoodPower shifted its message to focus on jobs, community investment, and steady power bills. GoodPower also works to fight anti-renewables disinformation, which Leah says spreads fastest in the first day or two after a grid emergency. When https://www.preventionweb.net/news/winter-storm-exposed-grids-real-weakness-lots-old-poles knocked out power in more than 20 states in January, the organization had a few days’ notice and quickly got its creator network ready to “prebunk” the usual claim that renewables caused the blackouts. This strategy, based on the https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/245/, starts with the truth, points out the false claim, and then repeats the truth to make it stick. GoodPower uses the same idea in its AI tools: CleanCast predicts where local fights over new projects might start so communities can get accurate information early, and TrueVoice spots AI-generated comments in public records. Still, Leah says the best messengers are neighbors, since people trust those who share their experiences. For instance, when Boulder City, Nevada’s Republican mayor, Joe Hardy, talks about howhttps://bouldercityreview.com/opinion/we-empower-we-enrich-90991/ helped his town’s budget, it connects with other conservative communities in a way ads can’t.GoodPower’s network of creators shares clean-energy messages through car-repair, food, and gaming videos. Leah calls this the raisin bread theory: the regular content is the bread, and the renewables message is the raisin. For communities already dealing with climate impacts, she highlights groups like https://www.extremeweathersurvivors.org/, which gives wildfire and flood survivors a way to push for policy changes from the ground up. To learn more, visit https://goodpower.org and follow https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahqusba/, where she is active and easy to reach. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L  

If you hold a 401(k), an IRA, or a single index fund, you own a sliver of hundreds of American companies, yet you almost certainly let someone else decide how those shares vote. Individual investors hold about https://www.asyousow.org/press-releases/2023/4/27/esg-proxy-voting-web-app-empower-retail-investors-proxy-season-2023, more than BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street combined, yet only about https://thirdact.org/act/vote-your-shares/; the rest of those ballots get cast by a handful of asset managers and the proxy advisory firms they rely on, deciding who sits on corporate boards, how executives are paid, and what a company owes its workers, its customers, and the climate. This week’s two guests want to put that voice back in owners’ hands. https://www.shareholderdemocracy.org, co-founder of the nonprofit https://www.shareholderdemocracy.org, is building the machinery to let everyday investors delegate their proxy votes to a civil-society organization they already trust, such as a labor union, a faith community, an environmental group, choosing a representative once and changing it whenever they want. https://www.causewayimpact.com, CEO of https://newdayimpact.com and its https://www.causewayimpact.com platform, comes at the same problem from the engagement side, channeling revenue from values-aligned portfolios into work with https://newdayimpact.com and connecting investors and donors to the causes — and companies — they care about. Grant is building the rights layer that gets a vote counted; Doug is building the engagement layer that turns it into a continuing conversation with management. Their conversation brings the challenge into focus. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, learn how the proxy vote problem undercuts foundations whose endowments quietly vote against the shareholder proposals their own grantees are writing — one side of the house funds the change while the other votes it down, because the signal most managers are rewarded for is next year’s return. Coordinating millions of small owners across thousands of ballots was mechanically impossible for most of the last century, but the internet collapsed the cost of communication and AI is collapsing the cost of reading thousands of ballot items at once, which is what makes the idea newly buildable. Grant is quick to add that the vote is leverage, not the destination, because most of the value in corporate governance is created in dialogue with management. He is candid about the limits: one share, one vote will never be pure democracy. The thread the conversation dives into governance ideas pioneered by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, who built a global network by getting rival banks to share sensitive data around one shared purpose. Hock's “chaordic” thinking blends chaos, and offers a model that Grant and Doug believe is finally buildable for shareholders. To learn more about Shareholder Democracy and delegate your proxy votes — or, if you have a brokerage account, to try the pilot that auto-forwards your ballots to the new voting platform — visit https://www.shareholderdemocracy.org. To explore Newday Impact Investing and the Causeway platform for values-aligned investing and giving, visit https://www.causewayimpact.com. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

The ocean produces about half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs roughly 30% of the carbon dioxide we emit, and takes up about 90% of the excess heat those emissions trap, https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/ocean. It is the planet’s largest life-support system — and also its least-funded one. Of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the goal for life below water https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/10/sustainable-development-goal-14-un-ocean-conference-2025/. Canada, which has the longest coastline in the world, is trying to flip that equation, and you can watch it happen close to real time. Our guest this week is Kendra MacDonald, CEO of https://oceansupercluster.ca, a national, industry-led effort to grow what’s come to be called the blue economy. Under her leadership, the Supercluster has grown into a community of roughly 1,000 members co-investing in more than 150 projects. She came to the role after 25 years at Deloitte, where she served as Chief Audit Executive, and she runs it from St. John’s, Newfoundland. The model is built on co-investment: at least two companies put money in, often alongside Indigenous communities, researchers, and global corporations, so no single player carries the risk alone. The projects range from graphene hull coatings that cut a ship’s fuel use to wave-powered desalination and the https://oceansupercluster.ca/project/canadas-ocean-supercluster-announces-4-4m-membertou-electric-lobster-boat-commercial-demonstration-project/, billed as Canada’s first zero-emission commercial fishing vessel, led by the Membertou First Nation. Kendra’s thesis fits in seven words: you can go faster alone, but farther together. In our conversation, she’s candid about where that gets hard — most of these collaborations are small companies that don’t individually hold every capability, and the upfront work of sorting out who owns which piece of intellectual property is what separates the partnerships that succeed from the ones that stall. She’s just as candid about the catch: the Supercluster is funded by the Government of Canada to de-risk small Canadian firms, and when those firms succeed, they’re often acquired by international buyers — the value-capture problem at the heart of every public innovation program. That tension between strong science and thin capital, she says, keeps her up at night, and it points back to the blue-finance gap. It also shapes how she talks about aquaculture, which in https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/fao-report-global-fisheries-and-aquaculture-production-reaches-a-new-record-high/en as the world’s main source of farmed aquatic animals, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and is now the fastest-growing source of animal protein. Kendra rejects the idea that ocean health and productivity are in trade-off, arguing that a healthier ocean is more productive. And just before we recorded, the Trump administration https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/executive-proclamation-restores-commercial-fishing-in-pacific-marine-monuments-unlocks-economic, the third such rollback in little more than a year. One model treats the ocean as a commons to protect and co-invest in; the other treats marine protection as an obstacle to clear. Kendra thinks the contrast opens a door for Canada to lead. To learn more about the Ocean Supercluster, visit https://oceansupercluster.ca. MacDonald writes about ocean-economy investment on her Substack, https://saltwatersignals.substack.com, and she’s easy to find on https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendra-macdonald-40b574.

In South Africa, informal waste pickers recover between 80% and 90% of all plastic and paper that actually gets recycled. There are about 140,000 of these reclaimers, who walk through cities and landfills, pulling trolleys and selling what they collect to make a living. Each person can keep up to 24 tons of material out of landfills every year. Together, they https://www.hippo.co.za/urban-surfer/ (about $45 million) in landfill costs in just one year, yet they do this work without recognition, protection, or a formal role in the waste system. Sifiso Gumbi began as a reclaimer at 19, collecting scrap metal in Soweto after school. After 15 years in the informal recycling economy, he founded https://www.urbansurfer.co.za, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise that believes the people already doing recycling work should be supported and equipped, not replaced. Urban Surfer creates essential tools like PPE and collection trolleys with personalized number plates, helping reclaimers become recognized workers in their neighborhoods. The organization also runs four recycling hubs where reclaimers can sort and bale their materials to sell at better prices, cutting out the middlemen who used to buy their collections for much less than market value.Urban Surfer tracks everything with GPS-enabled trolleys and a live dashboard, and this approach has increased reclaimer incomes by up to 300%. Sifiso talks about why dignity is key to better recycling rates, how aluminum can prices show what gets collected and what ends up in landfills, and what it would take to expand this model across South Africa and the continent. One key idea keeps coming up in the conversation: reclaimers are like an R&D department that no one asks for advice. In South Africa, aluminum cans sell for 28 to 30 rand per kilogram, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that Sifiso says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, materials with lower value end up piling up in landfills, which are quickly filling up in Johannesburg and Gauteng. Companies that want their packaging recovered can learn from the people who decide every day what is worth picking up. Data is also important. Urban Surfer tracks every kilogram by material type and price at its hubs. As carbon and plastic credits become more common, reclaimers will have verified, real-time records of the work they have already done. Sifiso is honest about the challenges: four hubs are not enough for Gauteng, and there are always limits on land and equipment funding. But the bigger challenge is building trust between waste pickers and a public that still sees them as vagrants, and between the informal workforce and the policymakers and companies whose programs will only work if rebates actually reach the people doing the collecting. This conversation asks whether a truly circular economy can be built by supporting the people who are already making it happen. To learn more about Urban Surfer and to explore partnership and sponsorship opportunities that equip reclaimers with trolleys, protective gear, and recycling hub infrastructure visit https://www.urbansurfer.co.za. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L  

Most school uniforms are retired while they are still perfectly wearable. Children cycle through them on a predictable annual schedule as they grow, which sends a steady stream of usable clothing toward the landfill at the same moment families on tight budgets are paying to replace what their kids have grown out of. The waste side of that equation is substantial: the EPA estimates Americans generated about 17 million tons of textiles in 2018, and roughly 11.3 million tons of it was landfilled. Ethan and Desmond Hua, brothers from San Mateo, California, looked at textile waste and the cost of raising a family and saw a single solvable loop. In 2020, while they were still in middle school, they founded the https://www.hopeuniformsprogram.com/ — HOPE stands for Help Our Planet Earth — a student-led nonprofit that collects gently used school uniforms families have outgrown and redistributes them, free, to families who need them. What began in one elementary school, run out of the family garage, now serves about 10 schools across three districts. By the brothers' count, HOPE has kept more than 14,000 uniforms out of landfills, redistributed over 12,000 of them, and served more than 1,400 households, saving those families an estimated $141,000. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Ethan and Desmond discuss why reuse sits a rung above recycling, how two teenagers built a multilingual logistics operation with a live inventory system, and what it took to talk Costco into donating 2,000 new uniforms. Ethan's work has earned him a 2025 https://barronprize.org/meet-the-winners/2025-winners/ and a https://samaritanhousesanmateo.org/. The environmental case rests on a point that's easy to miss: the highest-value thing you can do with a garment is keep it whole and in use. What makes HOPE worth attention is the operations as much as the intent. The brothers engineered the return step directly into the model: families request uniforms through a website available in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese; the uniforms are returned when kids outgrow them; and Ethan and Desmond spot-check and reissue them. That return loop, paired with a deliberate decision to treat families as repeat customers who deserve a dependable service, is what converts a one-time donation into a repeating cycle. The approach is also honest about scale — a garage operation in San Mateo County will not move the national textile-waste numbers on its own. The brothers' wager is replication; Ethan's dream is https://www.hopeuniformsprogram.com/, and then another, and the model is plain enough for a motivated student in another district to copy. Whether thousands of small local loops can add up to a circular economy is the open question this conversation puts on the table. To find out more about HOPE — and to donate uniforms, request them, or start a program in your own community — visit https://www.hopeuniformsprogram.com/ and follow the program on https://www.instagram.com/hopeuniformsprogram/. If you know a teen making a difference for the planet, the https://www.barronprize.org/ recognizes young changemakers each year. And to find reuse, donation, and recycling options for textiles near you, search the https://search.earth911.com/. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, https://recyclingpartnership.org/state-of-recycling-report-download/. Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three decades — too contaminated for most processors, too light for most economics. But more than 30 years ago, https://www.trex.com/, then a small operation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to build its supply chain around exactly this material. By the end of 2024, Trex had upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film into composite decking and had become one of the largest plastic film recyclers in North America. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Amy Fernandez, Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer, and Zachary Lauer, Chief Operations Officer at Trex, discuss how the company designs an entire manufacturing process around feedstock variability, why Trex indexed its 2024 sustainability report to https://www.ifrs.org/sustainability/knowledge-hub/introduction-to-issb-and-ifrs-sustainability-disclosure-standards/ before any US regulator required it, and what has to happen for old Trex decks to become new Trex decks.   Most manufacturers spend their engineering effort narrowing input tolerances. Trex went the other direction. Zach described thousands of recipes the production lines can run through, swapping between cleaner stretch film one day and heavily contaminated industrial trimmings the next. Artificial intelligence reads each feedstock stream in real time and adjusts extrusion temperatures and line speeds to keep the finished board within specification. In 2024, the company sourced over 1 billion pounds of reclaimed PE film and wood scrap, including 377 million pounds of waste plastic, through a national collection network of more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and hundreds of school and community partners enrolled in its https://nextrex.com/. The company is also preparing for the first generation of Trex decks, which are reaching replacement age, and its manufacturing lines can reabsorb the company's own boards. The recycling bottleneck is contractors pulling up old decks who don't want to sort screws from boards. Underneath all of it is a point worth lingering on: Trex's poly feedstock isn't priced off a barrel of crude, which means in a period of reshoring, tariff volatility, and oil-market disruption, recycled supply chains are structurally more stable than virgin ones, not less. To find out more about Trex and its sustainability work, visit https://www.trex.com/. The https://online.flippingbook.com/view/269689989/ is available on the company's investor relations site.

A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of https://earthrating.ai/, thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rating, drawn from roughly 100 public data points, that measures whether what a company says about its environmental and social performance is consistent with what its audited filings and regulatory disclosures actually show. The premise borrows directly from consumer credit scoring: a FICO score doesn't tell a lender whether you're a good person, only whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Martin explains how EarthRating's "accelerated impact engine" gathers verified data instead of relying on questionnaires, and why the small and mid-sized businesses now caught up in the EU's https://finance.ec.europa.eu/capital-markets-union-and-financial-markets/company-reporting-and-auditing/company-reporting/corporate-sustainability-reporting_en and the UK's https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/54/contents need an affordable way to prove their credentials. Most sustainability frameworks rely on self-reported questionnaires; EarthRating pulls data from audited annual reports, regulatory filings, press coverage, and marketing materials, then cross-checks them against each other to surface contradictions before they become a regulatory or reputational problem. A near-term emissions target that appears in a press release but not in the audited annual report is exactly the kind of credibility gap the platform is designed to flag. Importantly, EarthRating isn't measuring environmental impact — it's measuring whether a company's story is internally consistent and externally verifiable. That sidesteps the impossible problem of reducing carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable question: are the claims true? That speed and accessibility comes with real caveats, and Martin and I dig into them. A credibility score isn't an impact score: a small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to electric mowers could rate higher than a multinational with aspirational but unverified net-zero pledges. That's the right calibration for measuring trust, but it isn't the same as measuring environmental performance. EarthRating also exists at "Google 1.0," in Martin's own words — a launch-stage platform with a proprietary methodology that hasn't yet been externally audited. Global standards aren't willed into existence; they're earned through adoption. The underlying problem EarthRating is trying to solve — making credible sustainability measurement accessible to the businesses that have been priced out of it — is a real one, and worth watching. To find out more about EarthRating, visit https://earthrating.ai/.

In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/ now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainability industry doesn't want to talk about: buying green products doesn't drive the systemic change we need. It might not even be moving the needle. That's the core argument of https://michaelmaniates.com, an environmental social scientist and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael has spent more than 30 years studying why well-intentioned environmental choices at the checkout line fail to add up to real-world emissions reductions, and what kinds of action actually do. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, he makes the case that the most powerful thing an eco-conscious person can do isn't swap their products. It's to become an active citizen. The resulting cycle has a name in Michael's framework: the trinity of despair. Earnest effort. Negligible impact. Creeping anxiety that we can't turn the corner. People try hard, see little result, feel guilty when they can't maintain perfection, and eventually burn out — or conclude that meaningful change requires getting every single person on board first. He is a sharp critic of what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has called the https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652610001551 of social change: shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and better Choices will follow. It's the backbone of most sustainability communications — and, he argues, it's empirically fragile. Pro-environmental attitudes don't reliably produce pro-environmental behavior. Yet the model persists in education, marketing, and environmental organizing alike. Why does it keep coming back? Maniates identifies two reasons. First, it's deeply embedded in the educational system. Second, it sanitizes a genuinely gnarly problem of power and politics into a communication challenge: if we just get more information out there, people will make better choices. That framing shifts blame onto consumers, hides the structural drivers of high-carbon living, and makes life easier for politicians who don't want to touch the structural stuff. Find Michael Maniates' work, including his email to ask your direct questions, at https://michaelmaniates.com. His book, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/download/cf629636-2af8-45e6-8edf-418fe1599ecc/book/pdf is available as a free download. https://amzn.to/47Nhh8p was published in November 2025 by Polity Press. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

https://whattheythink.com/articles/129325-the-850-billion-retail-return-problem-nobody-owns-yet/. That's what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn't look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. https://whattheythink.com/articles/author/222/, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it. The fix isn't a moonshot. The relevant standards — https://www.khronos.org/gltf/ for digital rendering and https://www.color.org/iccmax/index.xalter for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What's missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The https://www.khronos.org/3dcommerce/ has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object. When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That's what circularity looks like when it's applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one. Follow Don's work at https://whattheythink.com/articles/author/222/ and on X at https://twitter.com/DCarli. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

The global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at https://www.se.com, works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports more than 40% of the Fortune 500 with energy procurement and sustainability strategies, managing over $50 billion in annual energy spending. His experience shows something that pledges and press releases often miss: the biggest challenge for corporate sustainability is not money, technology, or political will. The real issue is the gap between ambition and the ability to deliver. Companies are making Science-Based Targets commitments faster than they are building the infrastructure to meet them. Scope one and two emissions are being managed better, but scope three emissions, which come from a company's supply chain, still present a systems problem that no single company can solve alone. Schneider's zero-carbon supplier program suggests what it takes to close this gap. When the company started its own effort to cut emissions from its top 1,000 suppliers by 50% in five years, all 1,000 signed up within two weeks. However, about 84% of them did not fully understand what they had agreed to. Achieving success meant creating measurement tools, education programs, and action plans to help the whole ecosystem, not just individual companies.  This critical conversation explores how renewable energy is bought, including the difference between physical and virtual power purchase agreements. Steve also explains why the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) market became more complex as it grew, and why 10% fewer renewable deals closed in 2025 compared to 2024, as tech companies used up available clean energy.He also addresses a key question in clean energy: is AI helping the environment overall, or do its energy needs still outweigh its efficiency benefits? Schneider processes over a million energy invoices each month, and about 50,000 of them had issues that took 10 to 15 business days to resolve. Now, a team of AI systems can handle these in seconds. Accurate energy consumption and billing data directly affect emissions reporting, energy efficiency, and money-saving market decisions. He describes Schnieder's approach as "frugal AI": using the right-sized models for each task, running them on clean energy, and choosing simple solutions over complex ones. Looking ahead, electrification is building a global digital energy network in which every meter and adjustment contributes to a new system independent of central plants. As intelligence spreads, power can shift to consumers, communities, and businesses. Schneider is enabling this shift by building a mesh grid in which each point both produces and consumes energy, coordinated by AI. These changes fundamentally reshape the global energy landscape. The central question: will we intentionally build this new, distributed system, or will we repeat centralized patterns digitally? To learn more about Schneider Electric's sustainability efforts, visit https://www.se.com.

Most business leaders believe sustainability costs money. They’re wrong. The proof is sitting right under their noses, bleeding out quietly as waste, excess heat, and byproducts every day the factory runs. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product. In a sector where resource costs account for more than 50% of total operating expenses — compared to less than 25% for salaries — that’s not a compliance problem or a branding challenge. It’s a structural, strategic failure that most business leaders have never been trained to see. https://bwimpact.com/about-us/ spent two decades watching that failure play out across more than 100 companies in the Nordic countries. He came to sustainability not from the environmental side, but from marketing, where the core lesson was that people act on what they care about, not on what you think they should care about. When he started connecting the dots between resource-flow analysis and business strategy, the conversation changed. Leaders who tuned out every sustainability pitch suddenly leaned in when the frame was cost reduction, supply chain resilience, and competitive advantage. The “green” problem turned out to be a business problem in disguise — and a solvable one. That reframing is in his book, https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sustainability-Profitable-thriving-business/dp/1781337780. A free digital copy of the book is available at https://freebook.scoreapp.com/ — Jasper recommends starting with Chapter Three. The argument Jasper makes is structural. Today’s business leaders have been trained rigorously in managing time and money, but almost never in managing material flows, even though materials dwarf payroll in the cost structure of most manufacturing companies. The result is a generation of leaders who are leaving more than half their cost base strategically unmanaged. The narrative problem compounds the structural one. When every leader wakes up believing sustainability is a cost, a constraint, and a compromise, they never get to the question of whether it might be something else. Jasper's idea, which he posts about on LinkedIn and tests with clients ranging from small manufacturers to government advisory roles, is that the narrative is the first hurdle. The mental transformation has to precede the business transformation. Companies that clear that hurdle and start treating sustainability as an innovation platform consistently find themselves with a layer of competitive advantage their rivals haven’t even thought to open. Our conversation also covers the greenwashing trap, and how to avoid it by going around it entirely. The problem with leading on sustainability as a marketing message, Jasper argues, is that it inverts the logic. The job isn’t to convince customers to care about the planet. It’s to identify the problem they’re already trying to solve and deliver a better solution. Once that happens to be more sustainable because sustainability, done right, produces better outcomes. “Impact follows perceived value,” he says. A water company with a genuinely pure, chemical-free source doesn’t lead with environmental stewardship. It leads with safer drinking water for your kids. The sustainability isn’t hidden — it’s structural. It’s why the product delivers what it promises. Communicating it means doing what you say, saying what you do, and backing every claim with data and a visible roadmap. That’s not a compromise. That’s the only version of sustainability communication that survives contact with a skeptical market. You can learn more about Jasper’s work at https://bwimpact.com/ and connect with him on https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaspersteinhausen/. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L  

Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck's capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response currently averages around 40 minutes. Firefighters have long understood the math: a spoonful of water in the first second, a bucket in the first minute, a truckload in the first hour. The https://www.xprize.org/competitions/wildfire competition is an $11 million global effort to prove that autonomous systems, including AI-enabled drones, ground-based sensor networks, and space-based detection platforms, can collapse that window to 10 minutes. Our guest is Andrea Santy, who leads the program. She came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the https://www.worldwildlife.org/, where she watched conservation projects fall to wildfire. That experience sharpened her understanding of the stakes: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and parts of tropical East Asia, a single fire can eliminate species found nowhere else on Earth. In cities, it can destroy entire neighborhoods in hours. On January 7, 2025, Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena, destroying more than 16,000 structures, killing 30 people, displacing 180,000 residents, and generating between $76 billion and $130 billion in total economic losses from a single event. Annual U.S. wildfire costs, when healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and rebuilding are included, are estimated between https://headwaterseconomics.org/natural-hazards/wildfire-risk-to-communities/. XPRIZE announced the five autonomous wildfire response finalists just over a year after the LA fires: https://www.anduril.com/, deploying its Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones; https://www.dryad.net/, running solar-powered mesh sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage; https://www.fireswarm.ca/, coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can deliver 100 gallons of water autonomously; https://datablanket.com/, building rapidly deployable drone swarms for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from https://www.valleychristian.net/ in San Jose who used multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that can't be seen from monitoring positions, solving the literal over-the-hill problem that any fire detection system faces. The conversation covers what the finalists demonstrated during semi-final trials at 40-mile-per-hour winds, why the decoy fire requirement — distinguishing a wildfire from a barbecue, a pile burn, or a flapping tarp — is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how autonomous systems would integrate with existing https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/nims/incident-command-system. Santy is direct about where progress is lagging: the testing is ahead of the regulations. Autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft in active fire emergencies require https://www.faa.gov/uas/advanced_operations/beyond_visual_line_of_sight that don't yet exist at the necessary scale. There's also the deeper ecological tension — the growing scientific consensus that many fire-adapted landscapes need more fire, not less, and that https://www.ipmkn.org/fire practices developed over millennia have a place alongside autonomous suppression technology. One XPRIZE finalist is already working with an indigenous community in Canada to pilot their heavy-lift drone system in a remote area where that community is exploring how the technology fits their land management approach. Meanwhile, the Trump administration's FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating Forest Service state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out $300 million in forest research funding — maintaining suppression spending while gutting the prevention and detection infrastructure that could reduce what there is to suppress. The engineering, Santy says, has arrived. Whether the institutions can move at the speed the crisis demands is the harder question. You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire and follow the finalists at https://www.xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.

Cattle are one of the most consequential climate problems hiding in plain sight on the dinner table. Livestock are responsible for roughly https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/FAO-Report-Greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agrifood-systems/en, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and cattle alone account for about 65% of that sector's output. Most of it doesn't come from manure or land use — it comes from inside the cow. Approximately one billion cattle on the planet burp around 3.7 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent emissions annually, more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. A growing number of researchers and companies are focused on a deceptively simple approach: change what a cow eats. A red seaweed called Asparagopsis taxiformis contains bromoform, a compound that blocks the enzymes used by methane-producing microbes in the rumen. Today's guests didn't learn about this from a graduate seminar. They're high school students, and they built an idea for their first company around it. Every January, I judge a Shark Tank-style competition that caps a month-long entrepreneurship program at the Bush School in Seattle. This year, a pitch by three students stopped me cold. Zara, Ellie, and Kai Aizawa are the co-founders of MooBlue, whose tagline — Cut the burp, keep the beef — got a laugh, but whose business concept is entirely serious. Kai is heading to Haverford College in the fall. Zara and Ellie are still freshmen. MooBlue proposes harvesting Asparagopsis from the Mediterranean, where it is an invasive species currently harming marine ecosystems, processing it into an oil-based feed additive and building a certification and labeling system so consumers can identify beef and dairy products raised using reduced-methane feeds. What struck me wasn't just the idea. It was the depth of the research: from the biochemistry of rumen fermentation to the intellectual property landscape to a two-segment go-to-market strategy targeting large corporate operations and family farms. They covered the competitive white space, the supply chain, the financial incentives for farmers, and the consumer psychology of premium labeling, all with the ease of people who had genuinely internalized what they were talking about. The conversation shows that the internet has exploded ceiling of what a curious teenager can discover. When Zara, Ellie, and Kai needed to understand the biochemistry of enteric fermentation, they found recent, peer-reviewed research. When I was their age, those journals would have been available only at a university library, if they existed at all. Today, a high school freshman in Seattle can find a paper out of, understand the biochemistry well enough to explain it clearly, and build a company around the discovery. That changes what a generation can imagine. And it may change what we can collectively accomplish.You can learn more about the Bush School's entrepreneurship program at https://www.bush.edu/. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

Forests are vital for people everywhere. They cover about 4.14 billion hectares, roughly a third of the world’s land, and store 714 gigatons of carbon. They also support 80% of land-based biodiversity. However, we are losing 11 million hectares each year to deforestation, and the https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/240231467291388831/pdf/106467-REVISED-v1-PUBLIC.pdf demand for forest-based products to rise by 400% by 2050. Many industries, from construction to textiles and automotive, are turning to wood fiber to replace fossil-based materials. Yet, a 2023 https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023 that over 90% of materials entering the global economy come from nature and end up in landfills. This approach is not sustainable. If we do not change how we use and reuse fiber, forests will be depleted faster than they can recover.   Today’s guest, Loa Dalgaard Worm, leads the https://fsc.org/en/circularity. This innovation team, launched in 2023, is updating a certification system that was originally designed for a linear economy 30 years ago. Her team is working to add circular business models, like take-back, repair, and leasing, to FSC’s chain-of-custody standard, which already includes 70,000 companies worldwide. They are also creating a framework to certify agricultural leftovers, such as wheat straw, rice husks, and coffee chaff, as alternative fibers for pulp-based products. This helps reduce the need for new forest fiber. Loa’s boldest idea is a royalty system that would pay forest owners a small fee each time fiber from their forest is reused or recycled into a new product. Currently, forest owners are paid only once, when they harvest a tree, and do not receive ongoing rewards for protecting ecosystems, conserving biodiversity, or supporting communities. Companies buying recycled fiber would pay for verified origin data, which they increasingly need to meet the https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/forests/deforestation/regulation-deforestation-free-products_en and other international standards. The pieces for this plan are coming together. FSC already runs https://fsc.org/en/fsctrace, a blockchain-based traceability platform, and works with https://worldforestid.org/ on isotope testing that can identify a fiber’s origin within about 15 kilometers. They also partner with https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/forestry/overview to improve earth observation capabilities.   “We used to be able to do this,” Loa says about circularity, pointing out that remembering old habits, not just inventing new ones, is key to sustainability. “Our parents knew how to repair things. My grandmother knew how to mend all of her clothes.” FSC’s circularity work is focused on rebuilding the systems needed to help us relearn how to reuse and repair on a large scale. Loa hopes to test the royalty system within two years and present it to FSC’s General Assembly for discussion by 2029. The big question is whether institutions and markets will move quickly enough to protect forests. To learn more about the FSC Circularity Hub, visit https://fsc.org/en/circularity or email the team at mailto:[email protected]. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L  

We already have the technology to decarbonize buildings, and many pilot projects have shown it works. So why hasn’t progress toward net zero moved faster? Colin Mangham believes it’s because we’re still using outdated business models to promote new solutions. Colin is the Chief Experience Officer at the https://usgbc-ca.org/ and leads its https://www.netzeroaccelerator.org/, the first program focused only on net-zero innovation for buildings. Since 2019, the accelerator has helped over 100 companies in a six-month program that stands out by putting real technology pilots into actual buildings with dedicated partners, then tracking the results. This approach has led to more than 60 pilot projects in California and beyond, providing the proven results that founders and investors need to move forward. Colin offers a unique mix of experience to this field. He has served as Chief Marketing Officer at four growing companies, co-founded and led Morpho Energy, which helps put unused commercial rooftops to work for solar, and he is a certified https://biomimicry.org/ specialist, which shapes what he teaches founders. He often thinks about beavers, which are keystone species that create habitats for others by building their own homes. As he tells entrepreneurs, “This thing that you’re creating, it should also create better living environments for the people and the neighboring organisms all around you.” It’s an approach that applies systems thinking to business strategy, leading to companies that differ from the typical Silicon Valley disruptors. To learn more about the Net Zero Accelerator, visit https://www.netzeroaccelerator.org/. Learn about the US Green Building Council of California at https://usgbc-ca.org/.

The U.S. waste management industry moves more than 290 million tons of municipal solid waste each year. This is a potential trillion-dollar market, but much of the work still relies on paper tickets, clipboards, and spreadsheets. About 10,000 independent haulers handle a large share of collection and materials transfer in the U.S. In this business, a single truck costs $300,000, and profits depend on efficient routes. Most haulers do not have access to the digital tools that other logistics industries have used for years. Mike Marmo, CEO and founder of https://curbwaste.com, is building a new operating system to change this. His goal is to create the data foundation needed for the circular economy to work. He is a fourth-generation waste industry professional who started his career as a scale operator at a family transfer station in New York and sold a hauling business in 2021. Since then, he's built CurbWaste into a platform serving more than 150 haulers in 40 states. Its https://curbwaste.com/curbpos for transfer stations tracks inbound and outbound materials with scale integration. It generates automated https://www.usgbc.org/leed diversion reports and https://www.recyclingcertification.org/-certified documentation; the per-load, per-material chain-of-custody data that https://earth911.com/business-policy/extended-producer-responsibility-in-2025-progress-with-more-to-come/ need, as seven states now require producers to fund and document the recycling of their packaging. Mike made a simple but important point: "Waste is being created when it's being manufactured." The waste management industry reflects the economy and could become the base for a circular supply chain that keeps materials in use. Mike compares this to Amazon, which learned about buyer behavior and then built warehousing, freight, and delivery systems around that knowledge. The waste industry can do something similar. By tracking what is produced, where it goes, and where it ends up, haulers and new operators can work together on a shared digital system that gives full visibility of materials. Mike calls this the "waste meter," and he thinks an AI-powered circular economy could be in place within 10 years. https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2015/the-circular-economy-could-unlock-4-5-trillion-of-economic-growth-finds-new-book-by-accenture estimates that the circular economy could add $4.5 trillion in economic output by 2030, a number supported by the https://climatepromise.undp.org/news-and-stories/transitioning-circular-economy-future-we-cannot-afford-delay. Right now, investment is far below what is needed to reach that potential. CurbWaste is working to build the transparency needed to connect collection and vision, helping turn a fragmented industry into a circular supply chain. To learn more, visit https://curbwaste.com. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the https://oceanconservancy.org the principal author of a majorhttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415492122 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies from 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. https://earth911.com/earth-watch/how-much-microplastic-can-kill-ocean-life/ describes this critical study, which found lethal plastic thresholds that could change how we view the plastic crisis. The study measured how deadly different types of plastic are to sea life, which makes the results especially useful for policymakers. Each finding suggests a clear policy action, such as banning balloon releases like Florida has done, banning plastic bags as in California’s SB 54, or improving how fishing gear is marked and recovered. Still, Erin points out that focusing only on certain plastics is not enough. Her team found that even small amounts of any plastic can be dangerous. As she says, "At the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean," and we need big changes at every stage of the plastics life cycle, from production to disposal. There's encouraging evidence that interventions work. Communities in Hawaii conducted large-scale beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2025/07/30/science-behind-plastic-pollution/ confirmed that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by 25 to 47%. And Ocean Conservancy's https://oceanconservancy.org/trash-free-seas/international-coastal-cleanup/, now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. These actions address a parallel crisis in human health that is building from the same pollution source. Most of the microplastics now found in humans and around the world began as the same macroplastics that are killing puffins and turtles. As Erin puts it, "I do view this all as part of the same crisis." You can read the https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415492122 at pnas.org and learn more about Ocean Conservancy's work at https://oceanconservancy.org.

https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-making-wastewater-the-foundation-of-a-regional-circular-econom. Every gallon of wastewater flowing through a municipal sewer contains recoverable energy, nutrients, and water—assets that the linear "flush and forget" model has long treated as problems to dispose of rather than value to recapture. Meet Kevin Shafer, who has spent more than two decades proving otherwise. As executive director of the https://mmsd.com (MMSD) since 2002, he's transformed an agency once mocked as a symbol of government waste into a national model for sustainable infrastructure, and last year, Veolia designated it as America's first "eco factory."   Milwaukee's circular approach actually predates the term by nearly a century. In 1926, the district began producing https://www.milorganite.com/—Milwaukee organic nitrogen—a fertilizer made from dried biosolids that most utilities simply spread on fields or incinerate. Today, that product returns $11 to $12 million annually to the city's budget while keeping waste out of landfills. Kevin explains that this foundational commitment to doing the right thing has shaped MMSD's culture ever since: 'We just always look at those type of approaches. It's foundational to the district.' The district's eight digesters at its South Shore plant now generate 80 to 85% of the facility's electricity from biosolids, with enough material left over to continue making Milorganite. Kevin calls it https://earth911.com/business-policy/guest-idea-the-cradle-to-cradle-mindset-is-a-call-for-bold-leadership/ referring to the philosophy pioneered by architect William McDonough, who visited MMSD in 2006 and was intrigued by work that predated his framework by decades. The district is also partnering with regional breweries and food processors, accepting their organic waste streams for co-digestion. This reduces disposal costs for industry partners while increasing energy production—a synergy that Kevin sees as the future of utility operations. Looking ahead, Kevin's 2035 vision targets 100% renewable energy and a 90% carbon reduction compared to 2005. He argues that utilities should see themselves as anchor institutions with generational responsibilities: 'I won't be here 50 years from now, but MMSD will be.' That long view has attracted new partners. 'All of a sudden they say, oh, here's someone that's thinking a little bit differently about something, and maybe we can help them, or they can help us.' The key barrier to scaling the circular economy, he believes, isn't technology—it's institutional culture and a narrow focus on regulatory compliance rather than systems thinking. You can learn more about the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District at https://mmsd.com. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-peter-fusaro-wall-street-green-summit. ' Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the https://thewallstreetgreensummit.com, he's spent a quarter century connecting capital to climate solutions. This year's summit, the 25th in its history, will take place on March 10 and 11 in New York. This critical conversation arrives at an historic inflection point: insurance companies are withdrawing from climate-vulnerable states, AI data centers are straining electrical grids, and the economics of clean energy have fundamentally shifted. The energy transition's bottleneck isn't capital, it's infrastructure. The U.S. went from 110 investor-owned utilities in 1992 to just 40 today, and consolidation meant underinvestment in transmission and distribution. Data centers consumed 2% of U.S. energy demand in 2020; Peter sees that climbing to 10-12% by 2030. Blackouts and brownouts are inevitable, he says. Yet his message is pragmatic optimism: ignore Washington and watch the capital markets and blue states where climate policy is embedded in law. Many companies are "green hushing," quietly pursuing sustainability without public positioning. The energy industry thinks in 40-year cycles, making the current political moment a blip. "I've spent 56 years now in sustainability, before it had a name," he says. "What I've learned is change takes decades." Peter argues that Wall Street has genuinely internalized climate as systemic risk—not because of ideology, but because of opportunity. "Wall Street likes exchanges, likes to trade, likes volatility, and certainly likes uncertainty," he explains. "What people don't understand about Wall Street, it's about the edge. What's the arbitrage opportunity?" The reinsurance industry has stepped forward aggressively, funding carbon credits and sustainability projects. Peter's recent Earth911 article, "https://earth911.com/business-policy/guest-idea-climate-risk-has-become-a-defining-economic-issue/," explores these themes in depth. However, he sees natural gas and renewables dominating the next 15 years, while geothermal is enjoying a genuine renaissance. His optimism rests on a demographic bet: "I have a tremendous valuation on young people. I'm 75. They're inheriting this world, and they get the sustainability message globally." The summit attendees includes no government officials and no academics, just people in the trenches building and financing solutions. You can learn more at https://thewallstreetgreensummit.com. Earth911 is a media sponsor for the event. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://youtube.com/@elkcreeknotes?si=OYncOJMSzZ857f4L

https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-dandelion-energy-ceo-dan-yates-on-geothermal-leasing. https://magic.beehiiv.com/v1/d7da504b-6636-4a49-a9d5-3a3bcaa5c798?email=%7B%7Bemail%7D%7D to receive transcripts. What we call waste is really just misallocated feedstock—raw materials waiting to be cycled back into the next generation of products and packaging. According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investors are racing to capture part of that opportunity. Meet Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation at https://overlaycapital.com, an Atlanta-based alternative investment firm whose Waste and Materials Fund is backing both early-stage materials innovators and later-stage recycling operations with established infrastructure. Overlay's strategy involves investing in innovation and implementation simultaneously—in both startups and established companies—to accelerate progress across multiple layers of the circular economy. It offers a window into where smart money sees the materials transition heading.   Elizabeth explains that sortation is the biggest bottleneck at the materials recycling facilities (MRFs) your garbage and recycling are sent to after curbside collection. The U.S. is simultaneously the world’s leading exporter of scrap aluminum and the number one importer of finished aluminum, because we've lacked domestic sorting capacity. Overlay has invested in companies like https://www.amprobotics.com/, which recently closed a 20-year contract with SPSA, a southeastern Virginia municipal authority, to sort all recyclables from four to five cities using AI-driven systems. When you fix sortation, she says, you trigger a domino effect: recycling rates climb, landfill life extends, and margins improve as higher-purity materials command premium prices.   Overlay's portfolio also includes next-generation materials companies united by a common thesis: they must be better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainable than what they replace. https://www.cruzfoam.com/ converts chitin from shrimp shells into compostable packaging foam. https://www.simplifyber.com/ uses cellulose to create biodegradable soft goods through 3D molding, bypassing traditional textile manufacturing entirely. https://terraco2.com/ just closed a $124 million Series B to scale low-carbon cement technology that could cut into concrete's 8% share of annual global CO2 emissions. Each uses abundant, waste-derived feedstocks and has achieved or is on a clear path to price parity with incumbents. You can learn more about Overlay Capital at https://overlaycapital.com. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOEAu3yE_OGPAQR9o8o9XeA/

https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-dandelion-energy-ceo-dan-yates-on-geothermal-leasing of this interview. Amazingly, the same Congressional bill that gutted residential clean energy tax credits also led to a major breakthrough in financing home geothermal systems. Dan Yates, CEO of https://dandelionenergy.com, explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for the first time, allow third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. He shares why this policy change could help ground-source heat pumps grow the way leasing helped rooftop solar. Geothermal heating and cooling is four times more efficient than a furnace and twice as efficient as air-source heat pumps. Yet only about 1% of U.S. homes use it because the upfront costs for new geothermal systems have ranged from $20,000 to $31,000. The new leasing model means new homeowners can get geothermal systems for just $10 to $40 per month on a 20-year lease, which is usually far less than what they save on energy.   Dandelion is working with Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the country, to bring geothermal to more than 1,500 homes in Colorado over the next two years. This will be one of the biggest residential geothermal projects in U.S. history. The benefits for the power grid could be even more important than the savings for homeowners. Geothermal systems use only 25% of the peak power that air-source heat pumps need, which is a big advantage as AI data centers increase electricity demand. Yates explains that the Earth works like a huge thermal battery, storing heat in the summer for use in the winter. Geothermal lets utilities reduce peak loads on the grid throughout the year, freeing homeowners from the cost of the most expensive power.   You can learn more about Dandelion Energy at https://dandelionenergy.com. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOEAu3yE_OGPAQR9o8o9XeA/

https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-earthx-ceo-peter-simek-on-cultivating-bipartisan-climate-strat. For 15 years, the Dallas-based climate conference the https://earthx.org/ has created space where fossil fuel executives and environmental activists, Republican appropriations chairs and Democratic climate hawks, find common ground. The organization targets three core stakeholders: the corporate world, policymakers, and investors seeking startups where environmental solutions are baked into the bottom line. Peter Simek, EarthX’s CEO, explains how reframing climate action around shared values—stewardship, economic opportunity, and love of the land—unlocks support that crisis messaging alone cannot reach. The doom story doesn’t sell, Simek explained. “We’re not motivated as a species by doomsday language. It puts people in fight-or-flight mode.” He points out how climate became an identity issue, tangled up in culture-war debates over hamburgers and gas-powered trucks, when the real conversation should center on clean air, clean water, and protecting the places we love. “The EPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Act were passed during the Nixon administration,” he notes. “There are ways to message this that appeals across lines.” Simek bets heavily on bottom-up action as EarthX works to build bridges. States, cities, and private capital often move faster than federal mandates, he argues, and they’re harder to reverse with a single executive order. Texas leads the nation in renewable energy deployment because wind and solar make bottom-line sense. “Even as there’s a policy turn against it, there’s still the driving reality that solar and wind are viable energy sources,” he says. A new event in 2026, the EarthX Institute, will focus on two policy priorities: nuclear energy, where bipartisan consensus is growing, and urban biodiversity. Whether conversations at forums like EarthX translate into policy velocity that matches the pace of climate impacts remains to be seen. Simek says he stays focused on tracking downstream results, specifically the investments funded, the coalitions built, and the policies incubated from the local level up. “It’s about finding those ways in which there’s common sense, common ground, common values,” he says. “Elements to talking about nature and the environment that no one can really disagree with.” Learn more about EarthX and its upcoming April 2026 conference at https://earthx.org/. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOEAu3yE_OGPAQR9o8o9XeA/

https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-glacier-ceo-rebecca-hu-thrams-on-how-to-build-an-advanced-manu. The raw material for a $2 trillion circular economy is already flowing through recycling facilities. But how do we capture and use it? Rebecca Hu-Thrams, co-founder and CEO of https://endwaste.io, is deploying AI-powered robotic sorters at material recovery facilities (MRFs) across the country, processing recycling for one in 10 Americans. Her robots use computer vision trained on more than 3 billion images of waste to identify and sort over 70 different materials—picking 45 items per minute, 24/7, in conditions that would exhaust or injure human workers. As much as 80% of what Americans put in blue bins never gets recycled. The culprit is outdated technology at MRFs, the vast sorting operations struggling with a labor crisis so severe that facilities often refill the same sorting job five times a year. The work is dangerous, with injury rates twice that of construction. Rebecca, a first-generation American who grew up washing margarine tubs for reuse, saw an opportunity to apply cutting-edge technology to what she calls "the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet." The results are tangible. At oneDetroit MRF, an AI camera on a residue line revealed the facility was losing massive amounts of PET bottles to landfill, material they suspected was slipping through but had never quantified. By adding a single sorter based on that data, they achieved a two-thirds drop in PET sent to landfill and earned $138,000 in additional annual revenue. But Glacier's robots do more than sort. They create an intelligence layer for the circular economy, generating data about what's actually in the waste stream—down to specific brands and packaging designs. Amazon, which has invested in Glacier through its Climate Pledge fund, is using this data to understand what design features make packaging easier or harder for AI to detect, moving from "technically recyclable" to "provably recyclable." With https://earth911.com/business-policy/extended-producer-responsibility-in-2025-progress-with-more-to-come/ (EPR) laws spreading across the U.S., this kind of brand-level accountability will become table stakes. Rebecca notes that EPR has improved recycling rates by over 40 percentage points in parts of Europe. Glacier's vision is to transform recycling from a reactive cost center into advanced manufacturing, built on three pillars: a reliable data layer, consistent automation, and higher-quality feedstock. "MRF managers show up to work, turn on the lights, and hold their breath and wait to see what new, crazy things come down their conveyor lines," she said. "What I hope is true for recycling in the coming years is that producers are making things designed to be really easy to recycle." We're still in the early steps of a long recycling evolution, but the gap between where we are and a truly circular economy may close faster than the past 60 years of recycling's progress would suggest. You can learn more about Glacier at https://endwaste.io. - Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/earth911-com-sustainability-in-your-ear/id1384301001?mt=2 - Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on https://www.spreaker.com/user/earth911, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-Earth911com-Sustain-29715785/, or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOEAu3yE_OGPAQR9o8o9XeA/