One load of laundry can release up to 1.5 million tiny plastic fibers into the water that drains out of your washing machine. Most water treatment plants can’t catch fibers that small, so they end up in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Scientists now think laundry is responsible for about 35% of the small plastic pieces found in the sea.

That changes what “zero-waste” cleaning actually means today. The plastic detergent bottle is the obvious problem. The hidden problems, including shedding fibers, plastic films sold as “eco-friendly,” mystery fragrance chemicals, and contaminants you’ll never see on a label, are the bigger concern. But here’s the good news: most of the simple ingredients people have used for generations still work, and a few small upgrades make the rest of your routine a lot cleaner.

Cleaning Your Home

Most chemicals in store-bought cleaners haven’t been fully tested for long-term health effects. The EPA’s Safer Choice program certifies products made without ingredients linked to cancer, hormone problems, or harm to wildlife. About 2,000 products carry the label. Almost lost in a 2025 budget cut, the program survived but with fewer staff. Words like “natural” and “green” on packaging aren’t regulated and don’t really mean anything, so look for the Safer Choice label or check the EWG Guide to Healthy Cleaning before trusting a brand.

Making your own cleaners gives you control, cuts packaging, and saves money. The basic kit is short: baking soda for scrubbing, white vinegar for windows and mineral stains, lemon juice for cutting boards, 3% hydrogen peroxide (in a dark bottle) for stains and germs, and castile soap for general cleaning. A spray bottle of half vinegar, half water cleans most surfaces. Reuse jars and spray bottles instead of buying new ones.

One important update: older recipes, including earlier versions of this article, used borax as a staple ingredient. Newer research has changed that advice. Europe added borax to its list of substances of very high concern in 2010 because high doses caused reproductive problems in animals, and California lists it as a reproductive toxin under Proposition 65. Borax isn’t banned in the U.S., but the Environmental Working Group recommends skipping it in homemade cleaners. Plenty of borax-free recipes work just as well.

About killing germs: the popular advice to spray vinegar, then hydrogen peroxide, came from a 1996 study on beef tissue, not on home surfaces. Vinegar at normal household strength doesn’t reliably kill many germs, including norovirus and several drug-resistant bacteria, and it isn’t EPA-registered as a disinfectant. For everyday cleaning, vinegar is fine. When real germ-killing matters, when cleaning up after handling raw meat or during a stomach flu outbreak, use 3% hydrogen peroxide alone or an EPA-registered disinfectant.

Never mix peroxide and vinegar in the same bottle and don’t mix bleach with vinegar or any acid; the gases created when these are mixed is dangerous.

Laundry

The laundry room in a great place to start your zero-waste journey.

Microfibers. Synthetic fabrics like polyester, nylon, and fleece shed tiny plastic threads every time you wash them. France passed a law requiring built-in filters on all new washing machines, which took effect January 1, 2025. California passed a similar law in 2023, but the governor vetoed it. Oregon, New York, and several other states have filter bills moving through their legislatures. Until U.S. machines come with filters, you can use a microfiber-catching laundry bag like Guppyfriend or a Cora Ball, or attach an external filter from Filtrol or PlanetCare to your drain hose. These catch up to 90% of fibers.

“Plastic-free” laundry sheets and pods. Most laundry sheets use a film made from polyvinyl alcohol (PVA or PVOH), which dissolves in water. The cleaning industry says PVA breaks down completely in wastewater treatment, but a 2021 study estimated that about 75% of it passes through treatment plants intact and persists in the environment. The science is debated, but the labels aren’t: if you see polyvinyl alcohol, PVOH, or PVA on the package, the dissolving film is a synthetic plastic. Powdered detergent in cardboard, concentrated liquid in glass, or PVA-free sheet brands are alternatives that avoid this question.

A hidden carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane. This chemical isn’t added to detergent on purpose — it’s a leftover from how certain ingredients are made. Because it’s a contaminant rather than an ingredient, manufacturers don’t have to list it. Independent testing has found it in most conventional detergents. New York finalized rules in September 2024 limiting it to 1 part per million, and the EPA officially called it an unreasonable health risk in November 2024. To avoid it, skip detergents listing SLES (sodium laureth sulfate), “PEG” anything, or ingredients with “-eth-” in the name.

Skip dryer sheets. A University of Washington study found dryer vents emit more than 25 different volatile chemicals when scented detergent and dryer sheets are used together. Seven are classified as hazardous air pollutants. Wool dryer balls reduce drying time and static without coating clothes in chemicals. For scent, put a few drops of essential oil on a damp washcloth and toss it in.

Wash cold. About 90% of the energy a washing machine uses goes to heating water. Switching from warm to cold cycles saves about 3.2 kWh per load, roughly the same as running your fridge for 10 months over a year’s worth of laundry. Cold water also makes clothes last longer and shed fewer microfibers. Modern detergents are designed to clean in cold water. Replace fabric softener with half a cup of white vinegar in the rinse cycle. If you’re shopping for a new dryer, heat-pump dryers use 20–60% less energy than conventional ones.

What You Can Do Today

• Wash in cold water on shorter cycles. Saves energy, money, and reduces microfiber shedding.
• Use a microfiber-catching laundry bag, ball, or external filter.
• Skip dryer sheets and fabric softener. Use wool dryer balls and vinegar instead.
• Read ingredient lists. Avoid SLES and PEG compounds in detergent. Skip products with PVA in their dissolvable film if microplastics matter to you.
• Make your own cleaners with baking soda, vinegar, peroxide, and castile soap. Skip borax.
• Look for the EPA Safer Choice label on store-bought products.
• Never mix bleach with vinegar or any other acid.
• Support state and federal microfiber filter laws so this stops being a consumer-level problem.

Related Reading

• 7 Steps to a Zero-Waste Lifestyle
• How to Safely Dispose of Cleaning Products
• The 30-Day Zero-Waste Challenge: Simple Daily Actions for Beginners

Featured image by Monfocus from Pixabay 

Editor’s note: Originally authored by Sarah Lozanova on May 18, 2016, this article was substantially updated in May 2026.

The post Zero-Waste Cleaning and Laundry Tips appeared first on Earth911.

Today’s quote is from author Ken Webster and philanthropist Ellen MacArthur: “Ordered, complex, intertwined mutually interdependent systems are the new normal.”

Humanity is learning to mimic nature. As we embrace complexity, humanity can evolve new solutions to providing itself food, shelter, and waste elimination.

Ken Webster wrote The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows, which was edited by Ellen MacArthur, founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity committed to creating a circular economy.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day.

This poster was originally published on June 21, 2019.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Complex Is the New Normal appeared first on Earth911.

40 pounds of paper towels per American per year. The United States is the world’s most committed buyer of single-use towels, by a margin no other country approaches. Americans alone consume nearly half of all paper towels produced globally, and Europeans use roughly 50 percent fewer than we do.

Paper towels, facial tissues, toilet paper, and napkins together make up a quietly enormous share of American household disposable spending and a startlingly large share of global forest pulp demand. The U.S. uses about 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year, and producing them consumes roughly 110 million trees and 130 billion gallons of water.

The financial cost lands quietly on households, in $5 four-packs and $20 jumbo packs that add up to hundreds of dollars annually. The environmental cost lands somewhere else entirely: the boreal forest of Canada.

What 13 Billion Pounds Looks Like at Home

The average American household spends meaningfully more than the headline average suggests. Statista’s 2022 data put per-consumer-unit spending on cleansing and toilet tissue, paper towels, and napkins at $114.41. Paper towel users spend closer to $200 per year on disposable towels alone, with many families spending $400 or more. Toilet paper adds another $182 per year on average per household, with that figure rising during and after the pandemic.

Add facial tissues, napkins, and the kitchen-roll runs that don’t show up in pantry inventory, and a typical American family is spending $400 to $700 a year on products designed to be used once and thrown away. Over an adult lifetime, the math compounds: roughly $10,500 on paper towels and $9,500 on tissues per person. Think about that in relation to your monthly salary the next time you shop.

The volume side is just as striking. Americans throw out roughly 3,000 tons of paper towels every single day. Used paper towels can’t be recycled because they’re contaminated with food, grease, cleaning chemicals, or simply too short-fibered after one use, so essentially all of that volume goes to landfill or incineration. EPA’s most recent breakdown shows tissue paper and towels accounting for 3.8 million tons of municipal solid waste, or about 1.3 percent of total MSW generation. While that is a small percentage of total trash, it is a large percentage of single-use, single-purpose throwaway products.

The Boreal Forest Connection

Most of the trees used to make American at-home tissue products come from the Canadian boreal forest, one of the largest intact forest ecosystems on Earth and a globally significant carbon sink. Clear-cut logging for tissue manufacturing now consumes more than one million acres of boreal forest each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

These forests store roughly twice as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests. Each clear-cut releases that carbon and degrades habitat for boreal caribou, billions of migratory birds, and Indigenous communities whose traditional territories overlap with logging concessions.

The NRDC has tracked the paper products supply chain for six years through its Issue with Tissue scorecard, and the 2024 edition shows real movement at the top of the rankings — and continued failure at the bottom.

P&G’s continued reliance on virgin pulp for its flagship at-home brands matters because Charmin, Bounty, and Puffs together command a substantial share of the U.S. retail market. The grade isn’t an abstraction; it tracks the proportion of each brand’s fiber that comes from intact, climate-critical forests rather than recycled content or alternative sources like wheat straw.

Why “Tree-Free” Doesn’t Always Mean “Impact-Free”

Bamboo tissue has become the most visible alternative to virgin pulp in U.S. retail, and it is meaningfully better than virgin forest fiber on most environmental metrics. It is not, however, the most sustainable option available — recycled content is.

NRDC’s hierarchy puts 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper at the top: it requires no new fiber, diverts paper from landfills, uses about 15 gallons of water per roll, and has the lowest carbon footprint. Bamboo uses about 25 gallons of water per roll, requires more processing, and carries a real risk of being grown on land that was previously primary forest, a problem the FSC certification system is meant to address, but which still requires consumers to read labels carefully.

Recycled-content paper towels are widely available, including from Seventh Generation, Marcal, and Trader Joe’s, and they perform competitively with virgin towels for most household uses. The case for switching is straightforward: same function, lower cost over time when bought in bulk, and dramatically lower environmental impact.

What You Can Do

The interventions here are unusually high-leverage at the household level, because per-capita consumption in the U.S. is so far above the baseline of comparable countries.

Replace the highest-volume product first:

• Switch out paper towels for washable cloth towels, microfiber rags, or bar mops for an estimated 80 percent of household uses. Keep a small roll of recycled-content paper towels for genuinely unpleasant tasks ( like wiping up after raw meat, pet accidents, or automotive work.
• Choose 100 percent post-consumer recycled toilet paper brands when available (Seventh Generation, Marcal, Who Gives A Crap recycled line, ARIA). If recycled isn’t available, FSC-certified bamboo is a strong second choice.
• Replace paper napkins with cloth. A set of 12 cotton napkins costs roughly the equivalent of two months of paper napkin spending and lasts for years.

The math on switching is more favorable than the sticker price suggests. Who Gives A Crap’s recycled toilet paper subscription runs roughly $1.03 to $1.29 per double-length roll, comparable to or below mainstream supermarket pricing per sheet. The premium framing of “eco-friendly” tissue products often reflects packaging and marketing more than per-use cost.

Push retailers and manufacturers:

• The NRDC tissue scorecard is updated annually and is the single best public reference for which brands deserve which share of the market.
• Retailer pressure has worked: the 2024 scorecard shows movement at Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific in direct response to consumer and shareholder advocacy.
• For the cardboard tubes and outer packaging, Earth911’s recycling search tool confirms local acceptance; most curbside programs take them, but not all.

Don’t flush, rinse

A modest bidet attachment costs $30 to $80, installs without a plumber on most U.S. toilets, and reduces toilet paper consumption by an estimated 75% or more in households that use it consistently. The water cost of a bidet is roughly an eighth of a gallon per use, vastly less than the embedded water in the toilet paper it replaces.

Paper-product consumption is one of the few household waste categories where a typical American family can cut its environmental and financial footprint by half or more with relatively small behavior changes. The leverage is unusually direct.

The post Paper Towels, Tissues, and Napkins: America’s 13 Billion-Pound Waste Habit appeared first on Earth911.

On April 30, a fusion company took a step that would have seemed like science fiction just five years ago. It applied to connect a 400-megawatt fusion power plant directly to the largest electricity grid in the United States. Commonwealth Fusion Systems told the regional grid operator PJM that it plans to supply fusion-generated electricity from its Virginia plant, the Fall Line Fusion Power Station, aiming to deliver power to the grid by the early 2030s.

For fifty years, fusion has been the subject of energy jokes, always said to be 30 years away. Now, that timeline is finally starting to change. Private fusion companies have raised about $9.8 billion so far. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has officially separated fusion from fission in its rules, and at least three U.S. companies are actively seeking permits or building grid-scale plants. This progress does not guarantee that commercial fusion will arrive on time.

Still, by 2026, the policy, funding, and engineering questions are no longer just theoretical. Today’s decisions will shape how the next decade of clean energy develops.

Fusion vs. Fission: Two Opposite Reactions

Both fusion and fission release energy from atomic nuclei, but they do so in opposite ways.

Fission is the reaction in every commercial nuclear plant operating today, which splits a heavy atom (typically uranium-235 or plutonium-239) into lighter fragments, releasing energy and a cascade of neutrons that sustain a chain reaction.

Fusion does the inverse: it forces two light nuclei together to form a heavier one. Most fusion designs use deuterium and tritium, both of which are isotopes of hydrogen. The reaction produces helium plus a high-energy neutron, releasing energy in the process. It is the same reaction that powers the Sun.

The practical differences are important. Fission needs a certain amount of fuel and a controlled chain reaction. If cooling fails, leftover heat can cause a meltdown, as happened at Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Fusion does not require a chain reaction or a critical mass, so it does not melt down. The plasma created by fusion reactions must be kept at about 100 to 200 million degrees Celsius for the reaction to continue. If those conditions change, the reaction stops on its own.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) found that fusion machines do not produce the kind of residual heat that requires emergency cooling. That is why, in 2023, it decided to regulate fusion as a byproduct material rather than as a power reactor.

Environmental Impacts: Where Fusion and Fission Diverge

During normal operation, neither fusion nor fission plants release carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. The main environmental concerns are about waste, managing fuel cycles, and the materials used to build each type of reactor.

Fission’s Long Tail

Spent nuclear fuel from fission reactors contains isotopes that remain hazardous for very long periods. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of roughly 24,100 years; uranium-235, about 700 million years. Cesium-137 and strontium-90 — major radiological contributors in spent fuel — have half-lives near 30 years but require shielded storage for centuries. The global inventory of spent nuclear fuel exceeds 400,000 metric tons, and no country has yet opened a permanent geological repository, although Finland’s Onkalo facility is near operational status.

Fission also requires uranium mining, milling, and enrichment. These are energy-intensive steps that affect land use, water, and create waste. After a plant is built, decades of carbon-free electricity can help balance out those early impacts, but the effects are real and mostly felt near mining communities.

Fusion’s Smaller, Shorter Footprint

A fusion reactor mainly produces helium, a valuable element, as direct waste; it is a non-toxic and non-radioactive gas. The main radiation concerns relate to two other sources: tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope used as fuel, and the reactor’s structural materials, which become radioactive over time as they are hit by high-energy neutrons during operation.

Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years. This is short for nuclear materials, but still long enough that any release into the environment is a real concern. Tritium can combine with water to form tritiated water, which living things can absorb. The main way to manage this is to contain and recycle tritium within a closed fuel loop. Reactor structures, usually made of special steels and ceramics, become radioactive during use. When removed, they generally become safe to handle within 50 to 100 years, which is much shorter than the thousands of years needed for fission waste.

Fusion also avoids the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation that comes with fission. Fusion systems do not use fissile material, so there is no uranium enrichment, no plutonium production, and no chain reaction that could be used for weapons. This is one reason the NRC decided that fusion’s risks are more like those of particle accelerators and medical isotope facilities than those of traditional nuclear plants.

The Environmental Caveats

Saying fusion is environmentally clean does not mean it has no environmental impact. There are three  concerns that anyone interested in sustainability should consider:

• Tritium is scarce. Worldwide, civilian tritium stocks are only about 25 to 30 kilograms, mostly made as a byproduct of Canada’s CANDU heavy-water fission reactors. Many of these reactors are set to retire this decade. A 1-gigawatt fusion plant would use more than 50 kilograms of tritium each year. The industry plans to make tritium inside the reactor by lining the walls with lithium, but this has never been proven to work at commercial scale.
• Lithium-6 and the Minamata problem. To breed tritium effectively, reactors need lithium enriched in the rare isotope lithium-6, which represents only about 7.6 percent of natural lithium. The old industrial process for separating it, called column exchange or COLEX, uses a lot of mercury and is now banned for new use under the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Right now, only Russia and China are thought to produce enriched lithium-6. Cleaner methods are being developed, but supply chain issues remain a real challenge.
• Neutron damage and decommissioning. The 14-MeV neutrons generated by deuterium-tritium fusion damage reactor materials more than fission neutrons do. Reactor walls and components will need to be replaced from time to time, producing low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste that must be managed. Over a plant’s lifetime, fusion produces more waste by weight than fission, but the radioactivity fades much faster.

Where Commercialization Stands in 2026

Fusion is now much more than a single lab experiment. According to the Fusion Industry Association’s 2025 Global Industry Report, there are 53 private fusion companies that have raised a total of $9.77 billion. Of that, $2.64 billion came in the 12 months ending July 2025, the second-largest yearly increase since the report started. The F4E Fusion Observatory said that by September 2025, total global private fusion funding was about $15.2 billion.

Three U.S. companies are now further along than the rest:

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (Massachusetts and Virginia)

Commonwealth, which started at MIT, is building a tokamak—a doughnut-shaped magnetic chamber—called SPARC at its Devens, Massachusetts, campus. The demonstration machine is about 75 percent finished and is expected to start operating by late 2027. If SPARC achieves net energy gain, the company plans to build the 400-megawatt Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia. Google and the Italian energy company Eni have already signed agreements to buy power from that plant. An application to connect to the grid filed in April 2026 is the first step in a process that will take four to six years before approval. Without the grid connection, there’s no place for the electricity generated to go.

Helion Energy

Everett, Washington-based Helion uses a different approach called a field-reversed configuration, which aims to generate electricity directly from the fusion reaction’s magnetic field and avoids using a steam turbine. It has signed the world’s first fusion power purchase agreement, promising to deliver 50 megawatts of fusion electricity to Microsoft data centers starting in 2028. Helion began construction of the Orion plant in Malaga, Washington, in July 2025 and obtained its Conditional Use Permit from Chelan County in October 2025. Its prototype, Polaris, has reached plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius. Many see the 2028 deadline as ambitious.

Inertia Enterprises

Inertia was founded in 2024 to bring the laser-driven inertial confinement method, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, to market. In April 2026, it announced a $450 million funding round and one of the largest public-private research partnerships in the history of DOE national labs. The company is working with LLNL to scale up the fusion-target manufacturing techniques used in NIF’s December 2022 ignition shot, which was the first lab experiment to achieve target gain by producing 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy from 2.05 megajoules of laser energy.

ITER and the International Track

ITER, an international tokamak project involving 35 countries and being built in southern France, updated itsrelease schedule in 2024. The first plasma is now expected in the mid-2030s, with operation starting in 2035 and full deuterium-tritium fusion beginning in 2039. ITER will not produce electricity, but it is still the most ambitious test site for the physics and engineering challenges that future commercial fusion plants will face.

The Regulatory Picture: Fusion Is Not Fission

In April 2023, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission unanimously voted to regulate fusion machines under 10 CFR Part 30 — the byproduct materials framework that already governs particle accelerators, medical isotope facilities, and industrial irradiators — rather than under the regime that governs fission reactors. Congress reinforced this approach in the bipartisan ADVANCE Act of 2024.

In February 2026, the NRC released its proposed rule to formalize this framework. The rule focuses on regulating tritium handling, neutron-activation products, and waste streams, instead of emergency cooling systems, because fusion machines do not create the leftover heat that fission reactors do. This is a significant policy change that addresses fusion’s real risks directly, which can speed up permitting for serious developers but also means those developers must clearly show their safety plans.

The Skeptical Case

Fusion’s commercial supporters are confident, but not everyone agrees. Daniel Jassby, who spent 25 years as a fusion researcher at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that fusion plants will need a lot of support infrastructure, even when the reactor is not running. He also says they may need more workers than fission plants of similar size and could create more low- to intermediate-level waste than fission, although the waste is much less radioactive.

The Sierra Club’s 1986 policy on fusion is still in place; it raised concerns about tritium release, decommissioning costs, and whether fusion is a better investment than renewables. A more recent Sierra Club essay says things have changed enough to reconsider fusion, but questions about cost, fuel-cycle viability, and how soon fusion can be deployed are still unanswered.

Even within the industry, 83 percent of fusion companies surveyed in 2025 said securing investment remains a major challenge. They estimate they need another $77 billion to build the first commercial plants, which is about eight times the money raised so far.

What This Means for the Energy Transition

The reason to pay attention to fusion in 2026 is not that it will solve the climate crisis this decade. Solar, wind, batteries, geothermal, and existing nuclear plants are already helping, with falling costs and a 15-year head start. The real point is that the next decade’s electricity demand, driven by AI data centers, the electrification of heating and transport, and industrial decarbonization, will require a diverse mix of reliable, low-carbon sources.

If fusion works at scale, it can provide reliable electricity with low emissions over its life, create little long-lived waste, and carry a low risk of nuclear proliferation. Whether fusion makes it to the grid by 2030 depends on scientists, funding, and regulations aligning. Maybe Helion, possibly with a smaller-than-promised first delivery, will win the race. Commonwealth’s Virginia plant in the early 2030s will need its grid interconnection process to move on schedule. Other players will follow later. None of these events is a sure thing.

The post The State of Fusion Energy in 2026: Real Reactors, Real Grids, Real Caveats appeared first on Earth911.

Paper is one of the easiest materials to recycle, and Americans are still pretty good at it. We are also still throwing away tens of millions of tons of it every year.

Paper and paperboard make up roughly a quarter of municipal solid waste in the United States, it is the single largest category by weight. Eliminating paper waste entirely would take a Herculean effort for most households, but whether you want to do good, better, or best, you can cut what you use and recycle more of what you don’t.

The Numbers

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s last comprehensive accounting of municipal solid waste, released in 2020 with 2018 data, pegged total MSW generation at 292.4 million tons — about 4.9 pounds per person per day. Paper and paperboard accounted for 23.1% of that total, or 67.4 million tons. (EPA has not published an updated edition of the Facts and Figures report since.)

More recent data comes from the paper industry itself. The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) reported that about 46 million tons of paper were recycled in the United States in 2024 — roughly 125,000 tons every day — which resulted in a paper recycling rate of 60% to 64% and a cardboard recycling rate of 69% to 74%. Both figures slipped compared to 2023, primarily because exports to Asia softened. Domestic mills, meanwhile, used 1.29 million more tons of recycled paper than the year before, and recycled fiber’s share of all fiber used at U.S. mills reached 44.4%, its highest in two decades.

AF&PA changed its methodology in 2024 to report rates as ranges rather than single numbers and to factor in recycled fiber that arrives in the country inside imported packaging. That makes year-over-year comparisons messier than they used to be, but it also makes the numbers more honest. The headline takeaway has not changed: paper is still one of the most recycled materials in the United States, and overall paper waste has been declining since around 2000 as digitization eats into print volumes.

With paper still filling roughly a quarter of our garbage cans, there is plenty of room to do better.

Good

You can take simple steps to reduce the paper you use, and curbside paper recycling remains widely available across most U.S. communities. AF&PA reports that 79% of Americans have access to community residential-curbside recycling for paper and cardboard. Recycling clean paper takes almost no effort and makes a meaningful difference.

Here is how to be good about paper waste:

• Recycle paper through your curbside program. It is the simplest single thing you can do.
• Recycle only clean paper. Wishcycling of food-soiled paper can contaminate an entire load.
• Cancel print subscriptions you no longer read and switch to digital editions of newspapers and magazines.
• Set your printer to two-sided printing by default, and reuse paper as scratch paper before recycling it.
• Choose paper products made with post-consumer recycled content. Recycled-content packaging now makes up nearly half the fiber used at U.S. paper mills.

Better

If you want to do better than good — or if your community has limited curbside service — a little extra effort goes a long way. Contact your local solid waste utility to let them know you value recycling (your garbage bill should tell you whom to call). To do better, you’ll need to recycle more types of paper and start replacing single-use paper with reusable alternatives:

• Use the Earth911 recycling locator to find drop-off options for paper your curbside program won’t take, such as paperback books, gable-top cartons, aseptic drink boxes, shredded paper, and more.
• Compost what you can’t recycle. Dirty paper towels, disposable napkins, paper plates, and pizza boxes don’t belong in the recycling bin, but they break down well in commercial composting or a home compost bin.
• Skip the paper-or-plastic dilemma at checkout with reusable shopping and tote bags.
• Replace paper-bag lunches with a lunchbox or furoshiki wrap, which doubles as reusable gift wrap.
• Digitize what you reasonably can. Use note-taking apps and electronic calendars in place of notebooks, and sign up for electronic billing and digital magazine subscriptions.
• Cut the junk mail at the source. Register your mail preferences with DMAchoice, which is now operated by the Association of National Advertisers, for a small fee that covers a 10-year listing. To stop prescreened credit and insurance offers, use the credit bureaus’ OptOutPrescreen service or call 1-888-567-8688.

Best

Because paper is one of the more easily recyclable materials, paper products are often the greener choice in head-to-head comparisons with plastic. So while plastic-free is a popular goal, almost no one seriously attempts a paper-free lifestyle, and you don’t need to.

To get to zero waste, do what you can to eliminate avoidable paper and recycle the rest. If you have already worked through the Good and Better tiers, you’ll notice that food packaging accounts for most of the paper waste you have left.

• Zero waste grocery shopping requires a real shift — seeking out bulk stores, carrying reusable containers, and cooking more from scratch. The payoff is a dramatic reduction in paperboard packaging.
• Cutting pizza boxes and takeout containers means cooking more meals at home. The packaging savings are significant; the takeout habit is harder to break.
• Rethink napkins, tissues, and paper towels. Cloth napkins are the easiest swap; handkerchiefs take more getting used to. Breaking the paper towel habit usually means buying a stack of cloth shop towels or microfiber cloths and learning to grab those instead.
• Toilet paper is a tougher ask. Bidets, including affordable seat attachments, are the most effective way to cut household toilet paper use. If that’s a stretch, switching to bamboo or recycled-content toilet paper is a meaningful step down from virgin tree fiber.

What You Can Do This Week

• Audit your recycling bin once. If half of what’s in there isn’t paper or cardboard, your sorting habits are leaving easy wins on the table.
• Spend ten minutes registering with DMAchoice and OptOutPrescreen. Junk mail volumes drop within two to three months.
• Use the Earth911 recycling search to find a drop-off for the paper categories your curbside program rejects — shredded paper and gable-top cartons are the two most commonly missed.
• Replace one disposable paper product in your kitchen with a reusable alternative this month. Cloth napkins or shop towels are the lowest-friction starting points.

Editor’s note: This article was originally authored by Gemma Alexander on April 6, 2020, and was substantially updated in May 2026.

The post Good, Better, Best — Cutting Down Paper Waste appeared first on Earth911.

Fifty-seven countries representing roughly a third of the global economy walked into a coal port and agreed it was time to leave coal, oil, and gas behind. This is not the beginning of a joke. They did it without the United States, China, India, Russia, or Saudi Arabia in the room; and that was the point.

The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands in Santa Marta, Colombia, from April 24 to 29, was conceived as an end-run petrostates that have stalled U.N. climate talks for three decades. It opened against the backdrop of the Iran war, the largest oil supply disruption in history, and a growing sense in capitals from Manila to Madrid that fossil fuel dependence is no longer just a climate problem, it is a national security concern.

Whether Santa Marta marks a genuine inflection point or another diplomatic detour will depend on what the participating governments do in the next 18 months. But the debate has shifted, and that matters to the climate and U.S. energy policy.

A Coalition of the Willing, Sitting in a Circle

The Santa Marta format was deliberately unlike a United Nations Conference of Parties, or COP. Instead of plenary speeches and bracketed text, ministers and envoys sat in small circles, discussing issues with civil society and Indigenous representatives in the room. Officials, according to Carbon Brief’s on-site reporting, described the conversations as “refreshing,” “highly successful,” and “groundbreaking.”

The guest list was as much a statement as the agenda. Colombia and the Netherlands invited countries that had backed a roadmap for a fossil fuel phase-out at COP30 in Belém last year. China, India, Russia, the United States, and the Gulf states were not on the list. Co-host Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister, told reporters the goal was to avoid “a rehashing” of Belém and to gather a “coalition of the willing.” Among those willing were several major fossil fuel producers, including Australia, Norway, Canada, Colombia itself, and Nigeria, which acknowledged the contradictions in their own economies but committed to the conversation.

Panama’s special climate representative, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, speaking at the opening plenary, captured the mood: “For 34 years, we have negotiated the symptoms of the climate crisis and bulletproofed its cause. Thirty-four years of pledges. And where are we now? Economies built on fossil fuels are unraveling in real time. Fossil fuels are not just dirty. They are unreliable, they are dangerous, and they must end.”

The Iran War Changed the Game

The conference happened in the long shadow of the Iran war. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global oil and significant LNG volumes pass, triggered what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Brent crude hit $144 per barrel earlier this spring. U.S. gasoline averaged $4.10 a gallon. The Philippines declared an energy emergency. Pakistan moved to a four-day public sector workweek to conserve fuel.

Those disruptions reframed the energy transition argument. UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte told Santa Marta delegates it “would be irresponsible to ignore the second fossil-fuel crisis in five years,” referring to the war in Ukraine and now Iran.

“Price volatility and dependence on imports are structurally and unacceptably impacting our economies,” Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven told the attendees. “We need to move away from fossil fuels not only because it is good for the climate, but because it strengthens our energy security.”

U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell made the same point earlier this spring at a meeting with the IEA in Paris, telling reporters that the war is “supercharging” the energy transition. The IEA reports that the Iran war has “thoroughly upended” the global outlook for oil consumption, with global demand now projected to contract by 80,000 barrels per day in 2026, the first annual decline since the 2020 pandemic. The IEA had projected growth of 730,000 barrels per day before the war began.

The shift is showing up in trade flows. Chinese exports of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles rose 70 percent year over year in March, according to energy think tank Ember, with EV exports up 140 percent.

“The era of fossil fuel security is over,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in a statement that week. “the era of clean energy security must come of age.”

What Santa Marta Produced

Santa Marta wasn’t a treaty negotiation, and the co-hosts were clear that it would not produce binding commitments. What it did produce was a structure for making progress. The closing plenary on April 29 announced four concrete deliverables:

• A second conference in 2027, co-hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland—an explicit pairing of a small island state and a high-income country to signal the coalition’s membership.
• A workstream to develop national fossil fuel transition roadmaps, supported by a new global science panel. France and Colombia each released their own roadmaps during the conference.
• A financial reform project focused on identifying fossil fuel subsidies and addressing the debt traps that constrain developing countries. Supported by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
• An effort to decarbonize trade, supported by the OECD, with the goal of building toward a “fossil fuel–free trade system.”

The new Science Panel for Global Energy Transition was launched at the academic pre-conference. It will be based at the University of São Paulo and will involve 50 to 100 scientists. Unlike the U.N.’s seven-year assessment cycle, the panel intends to produce annual updates and country-specific analysis on request. Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute and Carlos Nobre of the University of São Paulo, who launched it, framed the panel as deliberately independent of government line-by-line approval, which is a major change from the U.N. model.

A science pre-conference also produced a synthesis report from roughly 400 scientists with 12 “action insights,” including explicit recommendations to halt all new fossil fuel expansion and to prohibit fossil fuel advertising on the grounds that fossil fuels are health-harming products. A separate roadmap, led by Professor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, outlined how Colombia could cut energy emissions to 90 percent below 2015 levels by 2050, with net economy-wide savings of about $23 billion annually by mid-century.

The Brazilian COP30 presidency has committed to building these inputs into an “informal” fossil fuel roadmap to be presented at COP31 in Turkey this November. That handoff is the test. Santa Marta produced a process; COP31 will reveal whether the process has political weight.

The Limits Of Cooperation

It would be easy to oversell this. Santa Marta gathered representatives of roughly a third of the global economy. The other two-thirds, including the world’s top two emitters and its largest oil producer, the United States, were absent. Tuvalu’s climate minister Maina Talia, who will co-host the 2027 conference, told Climate Home News that the criteria for invitations would have to change “If we are missing out the main players in the discussion, then we are moving in a loop, he said. “We need to find somehow how we can engage with [them], because there is no point in talking to ourselves.”

The Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative, a binding legal instrument that 18 nations have backed, did not appear in the final report. None of the workstreams has enforcement mechanisms. And the same Iran war that is accelerating renewable adoption is also being used by some governments, including the Trump administration, as justification to roll back climate policy and expand domestic fossil fuel production. Energy security can be argued in either direction. Which argument wins is a political fight, not a technical one.

Canada’s opening statement at the conference was widely noted for managing to avoid the words “fossil fuels” entirely—a reminder that even among the willing, willingness varies.

And outside the venue, Colombian mining unions protested the conference, holding signs that read “More oil, less Petro.” Colombia heads into a presidential election in late May, and President Gustavo Petro’s successor is not guaranteed. The durability of the Santa Marta process depends on a level of continuity that no single host country can guarantee.

Why It Still Matters

Santa Marta is not the moment fossil fuels ended. It is the moment a critical mass of governments stopped pretending the COP process alone could end them. That is a meaningful diplomatic shift. For three decades, the industry’s biggest structural advantage at U.N. talks has been the consensus rule: any single petrostate could block any binding language on production. Santa Marta is the first serious attempt to route around that veto.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis made it impossible for finance ministers, defense ministers, and central bankers to keep treating fossil fuel dependence as a separate file from national security. The IEA’s Fatih Birol called the situation the “greatest global energy security challenge in history.” Solar and battery costs that have fallen 80 percent and 90 percent, respectively, over the last decade made the alternative real. Santa Marta gave that combination a forum.

Whether the world is actually pivoting away from fossil fuels faster is something we will measure in pipeline cancellations, capital flows, and emissions curves over the next several years—not in conference communiqués. But the rhetorical floor moved in Santa Marta. “Fossil fuel” went from a phrase carefully edited out of negotiated text to the title of a conference that 57 governments showed up to. Coalitions of the doers tend to start small and either grow or fade. This one is worth watching.

What You Can Do

Individual action alone will not phase out fossil fuels. But the policy decisions that will, especially over the next 18 months heading into COP31, are shaped by sustained public pressure and personal choices that signal demand:

• Track the workstreams. Santa Marta’s three workstreams (national roadmaps, finance, trade) and the Brazilian COP30 presidency’s informal fossil fuel roadmap will be the substantive deliverables to watch ahead of COP31. Climate Home News, Carbon Brief, and the Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative all publish detailed updates.
• Ask your representatives where they stand. In the U.S., neither party invited Santa Marta participants. State and city governments, however, can join subnational coalitions like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. Local action remains the most practical lever.
• Reduce your own exposure to oil price volatility. Heat pumps, EVs, and rooftop or community solar are the household-scale equivalent of energy security policy. Federal tax credits remain available for many of these in 2026, though the IRA framework is under active threat—worth acting before that changes.
• Support utilities and pension funds that are divesting from fossil fuels. Where you have a vote, whether as a customer, a shareholder, or a pension participant, ask whether the organization is screening for fossil fuel transition risk.
• Donate or volunteer with groups doing transition work. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, Climate Action Network, and Indigenous-led organizations like the Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon were central to making Santa Marta happen.

The post Santa Marta May Be the Moment the World Started Walking Away From Fossil Fuels appeared first on Earth911.

Travel back in time to hear the origin story of Algenesis, which started as two companies in one, a biotechnology innovator and footwear maker. Today, the company is a leading maker of bio-based plastics. In 2023, Algenesis had just begun making a new, sustainable material and found a clever way to prove its utility to get big companies to embrace it. Join the conversation hear why a shoe company was the best a practical application to prove the value of a plant-based, compostable bioplastic foam. Stephen Mayfield, a professor of Biology at UC San Diego and director of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology, invented Soleic, an algae-based rubbery foam material that can be used in footwear, surfboards, and other products in the place of petroleum-based polyurethane foam. He launched Algenesis, a biotechnology-based materials science company to commercialize Soleic.

Note: This article contains affiliate links that help fund our Recycling Directory, the most comprehensive in North America.

But shoe companies did not come running to use Soleic, which biodegrades completely in sea water and compost piles. Along with Algenisis president Tom Cooke, a footwear and apparel industry veteran who had worked for Reef and Vans, Steve launched Blueview Footwear, maker of the world’s first compostable shoe. Steve and Tom join me today to talk about the evolution of Algenesis and Blueview, as well as the many materials Soleic could replace across a variety of product categories. The companies have also developed compostable, plant-based fabrics and a bioplastic waterproofing technology that biodegrades into organic material in a home compost pile. You can learn more about Blueview Footwear at blueviewfootwear.com and its parent company Algenesis Materials at algenesismaterials.com.

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Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on February 20, 2023.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Algenesis & Blueview Launch the Algae-Based Polyurethane Industry appeared first on Earth911.

24. That is the average number of electronic devices sitting in a typical American home right now. Phones in drawers, tablets behind the TV, chargers without their devices, and devices without their chargers. Most of those products are headed for a landfill or a shipping container, not a recycler.

Electronics are the fastest-growing solid waste stream on the planet, and U.S. households are an outsize engine. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found that global e-waste reached a record 62 million tons in 2022, which is up 82 percent since 2010, and is rising five times faster than electronics recycling capacity. Americans produce roughly 46 to 48 pounds of it per person per year. Most of those discarded devices contain materials worth real money and environmental harms worth understanding.

The 2022 e-waste pile contained an estimated $91 billion in recoverable metals, according to the United Nations, including roughly $19 billion in copper, $16 billion in iron, and $15 billion in gold. About $62 billion of that value was lost to landfills, incinerators, or unregulated dumping.

Translate that into household terms. The metals in a single discarded smartphone include small but meaningful quantities of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and cobalt. Multiply by the 151 million cell phones, 40 million computers, 20 million televisions, and 23 million small appliances Americans throw away each year, and the unrecovered value runs into the billions for U.S. households alone.

The materials don’t disappear; they just stop circulating. Mining companies extract more virgin gold and copper from the ground while millions of pounds of the same metals sit on shelves in junk rooms and lie fallow in landfills.

What’s Driving the Growth

The average U.S. smartphone replacement cycle has stretched to 3.64 years in 2024, according to Assurant; that’s up from under 3 years a decade ago, yet the underlying hardware can typically last 5 to 7 years with software support. That gap between when consumers upgrade and when the device actually fails is where most e-waste is born.

Behind the phones, a longer parade of devices is generating serious volume. Wearables, smart speakers, e-cigarettes, lithium-powered toys, and cheap rechargeable accessories now show up in municipal waste streams in quantities that did not exist a decade ago. The WHO documented more than 1,000 hazardous substances associated with informal e-waste recycling, including lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants, all of which can leach from devices that are crushed or burned rather than processed properly.

What the U.S. Actually Recycles

The picture here is genuinely confusing, and reporting that pretends otherwise is wrong. The most-cited EPA estimate of consumer electronics recycling puts the U.S. rate at 38.5 percent, but that figure dates from 2018. More recent independent estimates put the actual U.S. rate closer to 15 percent, with global formal recycling at 22.3 percent in 2022. The gap between the two numbers reflects the difference between what enters a recycling program and what actually gets recovered as usable material.

The remainder follows three main paths. Some heads to U.S. landfills, where heavy metals contribute to leachate problems. Some is incinerated, releasing dioxins from PVC and other plastics. And roughly 90 percent of exported e-waste is processed in low- and middle-income countries, where informal recyclers — often including children — strip devices by hand or by burning. A systematic review in PubMed Central links e-waste exposure in children to reduced lung function, altered thyroid function, ADHD, and lower cognitive scores. None of that shows up on the product box when you buy it.

The Household Financial Picture

Households absorb the cost from two directions at once. They pay for new devices that replace working products, and they leave material value on the table when they discard what they own.

A reasonable estimate, using the per-capita value of unrecovered e-waste metals from the UN report and U.S. generation rates, puts the recoverable value sitting in the average American household’s old electronics in the range of several hundred dollars over a few years. That is metal the household paid for, embedded in devices the household paid for, and the household will not recover unless the device reaches a refiner that can extract it.

The cost on the other side — replacement spending — is easier to size at the industry level than the household level. The Consumer Technology Association puts U.S. consumer technology retail revenue at roughly $505 billion in 2024, which works out to nearly $3,900 per household when spread across the 131 million U.S. households tracked by the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. Even allowing for wide variation across income tiers, much of that spending replaces devices that were repairable or still functional.

Right to Repair Is Starting to Bite

The most consequential policy shift on e-waste in the past two years has been the spread of right-to-repair legislation. As of mid-2025, eight states have passed right-to-repair laws covering consumer electronics: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, Washington, and Massachusetts. Oregon’s law, which took effect January 1, 2025, became the first in the country to explicitly ban “parts pairing,” the practice of using software to disable replacement components installed by independent shops.

These laws do not immediately reduce e-waste, but they change the economics. When manufacturers must supply parts, tools, and documentation to independent repairers, the cost of fixing a phone or laptop drops. When repair is cheaper than replacement, more devices stay in service. The Repair Association tracks more than 40 active bills across at least 20 states in 2025.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for electronics covers 24 states, but there is substantial variation in how well-funded and enforced those programs are. A patchwork is still better than nothing, but the absence of a federal framework means a device thrown away in one state may be treated as toxic and a device thrown away in another may end up in a regular dumpster.

What You Can Do

The interventions here are tiered, with very different impacts depending on where you can act.

At home:

• Before replacing a device, check whether repair is feasible — battery swaps and screen replacements are the two most common smartphone failures and both are repairable.
• Sell or donate working electronics rather than storing them. The Earth911 recycling search tool provides local options by ZIP code.
• For batteries, including the lithium cells in earbuds, e-bikes, vapes, and power tools, use The Battery Network (formerly Call2Recycle), the North American battery stewardship program, which operates collection sites at most major retailers.
• For phones specifically, manufacturer trade-in programs (Apple, Samsung, Google) and carrier programs typically capture more material than dropping a phone in a generic recycling bin, because the devices are tested for reuse first.
• Buy refurbished when you can. Certified refurbished phones and laptops are typically 30 to 50 percent cheaper than new and have the same useful life.

In your community:

• If your state hasn’t passed a right-to-repair law, ask your legislators why. The model bill from the PIRG Right to Repair coalition is a good starting reference.
• Support EPR legislation that puts the cost of end-of-life management on manufacturers, not municipalities.
• Push back on devices that are designed against repair — glued-in batteries, paired parts, and service-only components — by buying brands that score well on iFixit’s repairability index.

Individual household action on e-waste matters, but it is not where the leverage lives. Changing product designs and recycling policy, both of which are moving slowly in the right direction, is the path to a more sustainable electronics industry. Your household choices buy time and recover value while the larger system catches up.

The post Electronics: The Fastest-Growing Waste Stream in Your Home appeared first on Earth911.

About 14.7 million American children under age 6 have all their parents working, so most spend their days outside the home, usually in child care. These settings have an environmental impact that many parents never notice, including diapers, food waste, cleaning products, art supplies, packaging, and the indoor air children breathe for hours each day.

Daycare is one of the most important places in a young child’s life. The habits children learn there, like how they deal with waste, connect with nature, and what they expect from their food, often come home with them. This means a daycare’s approach to sustainability matters for families, not just for the center itself. The good news is that about 70% of a typical preschool’s waste can be reused, recycled, or composted, so most centers can make big improvements without spending a lot.

This guide explains what to look for in a daycare, how to encourage changes at your child’s current center, and which areas—like diapers, food, indoor air, and outdoor time—parents can influence most.

The Footprint Nobody Talks About

Diapers are a huge part of the problem. Americans throw away about 20 billion disposable diapers each year, adding up to around 3.5 million tons of landfill waste. They are the third most common consumer item in U.S. landfills. The EPA says each diaper can take up to 500 years to break down and releases methane as it decomposes.

Food waste is also a big issue in early childhood settings. One U.S. study found that childcare programs throw away about 43% of the food they serve. A Finnish study showed that childcare centers waste more food per meal than restaurants or schools. When you add this up across thousands of centers, the loss of resources like carbon, water, and money is huge.

The largest U.S. study to measure environmental contaminants in childcare facilities found formaldehyde levels exceeded California’s chronic exposure guideline in 87% of centers tested, and indoor particulate matter exceeded 24-hour standards in nearly half. Sources include cleaning products, air fresheners, off-gassing furniture, art supplies, and pesticides used inside the building. Children, who breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults do, absorb more of the toxins they inhale. Most daycares have limited budgets and staff who are already busy. Still, small changes across many centers can make a big difference. Parents who notice these problems can help centers that want to improve but need support.ds an ally.

If You’re Still Choosing a Center

A center’s commitment to sustainability during licensing often shows how they operate every day. When you visit, ask clear questions. For example, “Do you compost food scraps?” gives you more information than asking, “Are you eco-friendly?”

Questions worth asking on a tour:

• How is food waste handled — composted, donated, or trashed?
• What cleaning products do you use, and are they third-party certified?
• How much time do children spend each day outdoors, and in what conditions?
• How are art supplies, books, and toys sourced — new each year, or rotated and shared?
• Do you have a recycling system the children participate in?
• What’s your policy on pest control and air freshening?

One credible signal to look for is the Eco-Healthy Child Care endorsement, a national program from the Children’s Environmental Health Network that has endorsed more than 1,500 facilities across the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Endorsed centers comply with at least 24 of 30 best practices covering pesticides, lead, art supplies, plastics, cleaning chemicals, and outdoor exposure. The program’s standards have been adopted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children as part of its accreditation criteria, and several states (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Utah) recognize it within their quality rating systems.

If a center can’t give specific answers to your sustainability questions, that tells you something. It doesn’t mean you should rule them out, but it suggests that any green changes may need to start with parents.

If Your Child Is Already Enrolled

Begin by talking to the director, not the classroom teacher. Directors make decisions about purchases, vendors, and staff training. Bring specific suggestions instead of general concerns. For example, asking, “Would you consider switching to a third-party-certified cleaning product?” is helpful, while “Can you be greener?” is too vague.

It helps to assume the director wants to improve but faces real limits. Offer to help with the work. Most centers will accept support that they don’t have time to organize on their own.

Rethinking the Diaper Question

If your center only allows disposable diapers, ask for the reason. Some states have strict rules about cloth diapers in group care, but many centers use disposables simply out of habit, not because of regulations.

Cloth diaper services, which handle laundry and delivery in bulk, address most of the staffing and hygiene worries that make centers choose disposables. More centers now accept plant-based or biodegradable disposables, which use less plastic but still go to landfills. These are better, but not a complete solution.

If your center won’t change its diaper policy, try suggesting a diaper recycling program if one is available nearby. Industrial diaper recycling is still uncommon in the U.S., but it exists in some parts of Europe and is growing.

Food Waste and What Kids Actually Eat

Food waste reduction is the single most effective change centers can make. It saves money, lowers methane emissions from food in landfills, and, when done openly, teaches children about food sources and the meaning of waste. Centers usually overestimate how much children eat and underestimate how much is thrown away. Simply starting to measure food wasted each day alone tends to drive a 20–30% reduction. A few tips can help:

• Serve family-style. Children who serve themselves take less and eat more of what they take, compared to pre-portioned meals.
• Compost on-site or partner with a local hauler. Many municipalities now have small-business composting service.
• Source from local farms when seasonal and affordable. CACFP-funded programs have flexibility here that many directors don’t realize.

When packing food from home, stick to the basics: whole fruit is better than packaged slices, reusable containers are better than single-use bags, and a thermos of water is better than a juice box. The goal isn’t perfection, but to cut down on single-use packaging, which makes up a big part of a center’s daily waste.

The Indoor Air Conversation

Improving indoor air is where parent advocacy can make the biggest difference for children’s health. Most directors are open to change once they understand the issue. Children spend over 90% of their time indoors, and the air quality depends on choices about cleaning products, furniture, art supplies, and pest control.

Concrete requests that work:

• Switch to Green Seal- or EPA Safer Choice-certified cleaning products. They cost roughly the same as conventional products and dramatically reduce exposure to volatile organic compounds.
• Eliminate air fresheners and scented plug-ins. “Fragrance” can include hundreds of undisclosed chemicals, and the underlying odor problem is almost always solved better by ventilation.
• Adopt integrated pest management instead of routine pesticide spraying. IPM uses traps, sealing, and sanitation first; pesticides are a last resort.
• Choose water-based, low-VOC paints and finishes during any renovation.
• Open windows when the weather allows. Mechanical ventilation in older buildings is often inadequate; outdoor air, even in mild urban areas, is usually cleaner than indoor air, which is often laden with cleaning residues and off-gassing from furniture.

These changes are inexpensive, easy to implement, and directly improve children’s breathing health. They also usually lower the number of sick days, which directors appreciate.

The case for getting children outside has shifted from a wellness argument to a developmental one. A 2022 review of nature-based early childhood education found consistent positive associations with self-regulation, social-emotional development, nature-relatedness, and play interaction. A 2024 study at the University of Minnesota Duluth found that nature-based preschool practices supported self-regulation development, particularly for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

This is important because outdoor time is often the first thing dropped when schedules get busy. Speaking up for outdoor time and helping make it easier for the center supports both sustainability and better education.

Practical contributions parents can make:

• Help build raised garden beds. Children who grow food eat more of it and waste less.
• Donate weather gear. Many centers cite “the kids don’t have rain boots” as a real barrier.
• Organize a parent work day. Remove invasive plants and add native species to outdoor play areas.
• Source loose parts for playgrounds. Logs, stumps, and large stones support unstructured nature play.

What You Can Pack from Home

What you do as a parent may not have as much impact as center-wide changes, but you can control it. The goal is to reduce single-use packaging in your child’s daily routine.

• Stainless steel or silicone snack containers. They survive being dropped, kicked, and chewed.
• A reusable water bottle. The juice-box equivalent in landfill waste over a daycare year is striking.
• Whole fruit instead of pre-cut packaged fruit cups.
• Cloth napkins or beeswax wraps in lunchboxes.
• Send clearly labeled hand-me-down clothes. Daycares go through clothing faster than almost anywhere else.

Helping the Center Help Itself

Most U.S. daycares are small, independent, and have limited funding. The average child care worker earns about $14.60 an hour. Free help and materials are not just appreciated; they are often the only way a center can start a sustainability project.

Donations that make the biggest difference include:

• Children’s books about nature, recycling, and food systems for the classroom library.
• Clean recyclable materials — cardboard tubes, egg cartons, glass jars — for art projects and sorting activities.
• Compost bins, indoor recycling stations, or rain barrels.
• Native plant starts from your own garden in spring.

But don’t forget to donate time:

• A Saturday building or repairing outdoor play structures.
• Running a parent fundraiser specifically for a sustainability upgrades, such as air purifiers, a compost system, and raised beds.
• Connecting the director with your municipal recycling or composting program.

When the Center Pushes Back

Some directors will see your interest as helpful, while others may feel it questions their judgment. Both responses are understandable. How you frame the conversation often decides whether it is productive or not. What tends to work is an offer, not a demand: “I’d love to help with this — what would make it easier for you?

If a center keeps refusing to discuss sustainability and it’s important to your family, that tells you something about whether it’s the right fit. Choosing a daycare is a major decision about your values, so it’s worth careful thought.

No single parent or center can solve the issue of daycare sustainability alone. But when parents ask good questions, offer real help, and choose centers that care, it adds up. This is already changing the industry.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on May 21, 2021, this article was substantially updated in May 2026.

The post How To Help Your Child’s Daycare Be More Sustainable  appeared first on Earth911.

Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won’t try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.

Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical’s Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada’s Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald’s extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can’t find another bag in the store that’s labeled the same way.

The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California’s SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.

To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe (0:09)

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

Every year, Americans buy roughly 5 billion pounds of fresh produce that’s packaged in flexible plastic — that’s salads, carrots, potatoes, lots of produce. That packaging extends shelf life, reducing food waste, but most of it is made from virgin polyethylene refined from fossil fuels, and almost none of it gets recycled.

My guest today is Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging for the U.S. produce industry. And on December 11 of 2025, Emerald announced a significant milestone: that over the previous year, the company had replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, as you’ll probably hear it in this discussion.

That shift — granted that it’s only a million fewer pounds of plastic packaging in a vast sea of it — is a suggestion of what’s possible in food packaging. However, getting recycled plastic approved for direct food contact isn’t simple. Produce packaging is especially demanding, because shelf life and food safety are not negotiable. The FDA requires rigorous testing to ensure that no contaminants from that PCR migrate into food, and for years, the industry defaulted to virgin plastic because recycled content couldn’t meet those standards reliably at scale.

Emerald is working to change that equation. In collaboration with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, amongst others, they’ve introduced the first 30% post-consumer recycled materials potato bag approved for food contact, and Emerald’s initiative supports Walmart’s Project Gigaton, which aims to eliminate 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the retailer’s supply chain by 2030. Emerald has also partnered with D’Arrigo, the company behind Andy Boy produce, to introduce another 30% PCR bag for romaine lettuce hearts — and that’s a shift that has removed over 600,000 pounds of virgin plastic from the supply chain between June 2023 and 2025.

Emerald is a third-generation, family-owned company based in Union City, California. Kevin brings the perspective of an organization that has operated through six decades of rapid, often revolutionary changes in how Americans buy and consume food. He’s led the company through its evolution from a regional bag manufacturer to becoming an industry leader, pushing the boundaries of sustainable, flexible packaging.

So we’re going to talk with Kevin about what it took to get recycled content into food contact packaging at scale, whether grocery customers are willing to pay more for sustainable options, how California’s recent SB 54 packaging law is reshaping the industry, and whether flexible packaging can ever become truly circular when most curbside programs still don’t accept it. You can learn more about Emerald Packaging at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Empack.com.

Can recycled content packaging go from future milestone to mainstream reality? Let’s find out, right after this. Welcome to the show, Kevin. How you doing today?

Kevin Kelly (3:33)

I’m doing great. How are you?

Mitch Ratcliffe (3:35)

I’m well, I’m well. Thanks for asking, and thanks for joining us. We’ve been working to get together for a few months now, and I’m glad that we actually now have the opportunity to complete the conversation. I’ve shared a summary of Emerald Packaging’s recent activity in my introduction, but could you share the backstory? When did your grandfather start the company?

Kevin Kelly (3:52)

It was actually my father. He started it in 1963 with three partners. They were based in Berkeley, California, and they mainly made — not produce packaging, which is what we specialize in now — they were making bread bags, because they were in the bread district. They were unionized by the bread workers’ union. It was a very different company when they started out. It also had one printing press and two bag machines.

Today, we have 32 bag-making machines, seven printing presses, and I don’t know how many other machines, and about 250 employees. It became a family business in ’93, and then gradually the other siblings retired, and I’m the last one here. So we’ve got a wonderful staff behind us — very creative, very technical, and best of all, they’re very detailed, which I’m not, which is why we’ve been having problems getting together for a couple of months.

Mitch Ratcliffe (4:52)

Tell me, how has the company changed since you’ve been involved with it? Obviously you just described a massive transition. But why the sustainability focus? When did that take hold?

Kevin Kelly (5:05)

Well, I started worrying about sustainability and packaging back in 2000, believe it or not, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board did a study of what was in landfills, and it turned out that plastic was a lot of what was in landfills, especially the ground covering that the agricultural industry uses in their growing operations. And so we started, with a bunch of California companies back then, having a conversation with the American Chemistry Council, which I can’t stand — I’m just going to be upfront about it — about creating a recycling system in California, because you could tell in the early 2000s this moment was coming. I mean, maybe it was a distant moment, but it was coming.

And the ACC told us absolutely not. The resin companies wanted nothing to do with fees. So really, back then, a bunch of small plastics companies in California couldn’t do anything if the ACC wouldn’t let us do anything. They had that much influence amongst both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.

And so from there, I was sort of an orphan for a long time, you know — trying this, trying that. Worked with potato-based films, worked with PLA, polylactic acid. Tried different approaches. And then finally, a few years ago, post-consumer recycled resin became, I think, more affordable. It’s still about three times, four times the cost of virgin resin, but blended with virgin resin, I thought it was an affordable option now.

Trying to get people to buy anything that they can’t pass on — what a lot of people don’t know is that CPGs have year-long contracts with retailers, and there’s no causes for price increases, including acts of war, acts of God, supply disruption. So a lot of these companies are getting killed right now, but that’s another story for another day. They have no way to really pass on increases. And Walmart’s always said, we want sustainable packaging — we want it for free. They don’t say free; they say we want it for the same price as what we’re paying right now, which I take to mean free. They’ve gotten a little bit better in that stance, by the way, but there was really no way to pass things on.

So finally, in 2023, I just said, damn it. I’ve been working on this issue in one form or another for most of my career in packaging. I’m just going to do it. And so we convinced a customer to take their entire line and put 30% PCR in it, and we ate the cost of it. That was about 400,000 pounds of PCR right there. And from there, we attracted the interest of other companies. Some companies have taken surcharges, but PCR has really become our thrust at this point.

We’re still working with a lot of compostable options — in other words, experimenting — because at 5x, 6x, 7x, 10x, it’s still a very difficult proposition for most companies to take on. Companies with big margins, or specialty companies that don’t have year-long contracts, they have a little bit more leeway in this area, I think. But compostables remain — I’m not going to call it a pipe dream, because I’m feeling like the extended producer responsibility programs are making it more feasible — but they’re just not there yet.

Mitch Ratcliffe (8:39)

You’ve removed more than a million pounds of virgin plastic from your supply chain so far with recycled material, and that’s just within the last couple of years. How did you have to change the company to embrace the PCR process and address customer concerns about food safety?

Kevin Kelly (8:57)

Well, those are two great questions. I’ll break it down on a couple of different levels. Internally, when you’re the CEO of a family-run business and you say, hey, let’s go do this, people tend to start going and doing it. And there was a great deal of enthusiasm amongst the troops anyway about taking on a real project and commercializing it. So within the company, there wasn’t much opposition.

Now, Kevin walking into a room and saying, hey, there’s this really great technology — there’s a company, Circulus, that’s got an operation out in the Central Valley of California, about two hours away — let’s start working with them. Well, then my poor Director of Operations, Michael Rincon, has to make it happen. And PCR is an animal all its own. In terms of production runs, there’s a lot of variation within loads, for instance — not just between loads, but within. It causes a lot of carbon buildup on the extrusion lines, and so you have to shut down and clean them every eight hours. There’s much greater waste because of the variation within the loads, and so on and so forth. So we had a lot of learning on the production side in order to make this happen. We’re still learning.

But the other piece there has been the inconsistency amongst suppliers. Everybody talks about recycling and packaging, and yet you go to recycling conferences, and all you hear and all you really read about are the financial problems of recycling companies. The end markets really still aren’t there for them. In the case of PET, they’re competing with overseas supply that’s much cheaper. And so getting a consistent source as one company after the other goes out of business has been tough. So that’s been a challenge.

Our customers — they took us at our word that it was safe. They wanted to see what the process for ensuring that it was food-grade PCR was, you know — what were our certifications, what were the certifications of our suppliers, and then how did we trace within loads? Because the last thing you want is food-grade mixing with non-food-grade.

Mitch Ratcliffe (11:18)

You make this point already, and it was a question I wanted to dig into a bit, which is: with PCR, the sources are very mixed. Where does the feedstock come from? Is it from previously used film, or are we talking about other sources as well?

Kevin Kelly (11:33)

No, you’re talking, in the case of food-grade — you’re talking previously sourced film for, you know, plastic wrap around pallets. It’s not the salad bag that’s being brought back to the store and the store drop-off thing.

Mitch Ratcliffe (11:51)

And so this is largely a procurement management issue for you. And do you do a lot of testing of the material you get, or is this something that you take as certified? And is there a certification that you can rely on?

Kevin Kelly (12:04)

Well, I think that’s been one of the problems. You have this sort of nebulous process where a company that is making food-grade PCR — it’s nebulous. It just sounds strange. It’s not what I’m used to. When I’m used to certifications, they go to the FDA, they submit samples, they submit their process, and the FDA will come back and say — give you what’s called a letter of no objection, which hardly sounds like an endorsement, a stamp of approval. It’s like, we got no objection. So I think that process really actually has to be cleaned up.

There has to be some way — the Biodegradable Products Institute, there has to be some way of certifying companies and periodic testing that goes beyond us testing our incoming material. We’re a $90 million company. We have the ability to do some testing, and we do, but really we’re relying on Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals to do what they say they’re doing, which is sourcing pallet wrap, washing it, washing it again, drying it, repelletizing it, drying it again, to drive out any impurities. So it is a difficult process. We have to have possession from them of the chain going all the way back to the source, but that’s a lot of documentation, and I think that’s where companies have come to rely on mass balance. But mass balance doesn’t tell you anything about food-grade, non-food-grade, and it’s also, of course, been manipulated by companies in ways that have undermined a process that could otherwise be helpful.

Mitch Ratcliffe (13:58)

Thinking about what you just said — is a transparency movement needed in order for PCR materials to be truly understood, both by the manufacturer who’s going to use the material and the consumer in the long run? Do we need that kind of full life cycle accounting to be available to say this plastic has gone through these steps, so people have confidence about the food safety issues?

Kevin Kelly (14:22)

I think so. I’m trying to imagine in my head how we would do that. That’s why there’s people smarter and greater than I involved in these things. But I think some way of tracing back, or some way of testing, or more periodic testing. Or, for instance, you could say, Emerald Packaging, you have to test your material 10, 15 times a year, submit, and it has to be done. You know, actually, that doesn’t work. I’m trying to think of a way you could possibly do it, you know, so that it’s absolutely ironclad. I’m going to say, I don’t quite know how you would do it, but I would frankly prefer that, because I know I’m making all efforts to use food-grade PCR, right? We’re documenting, we’re maintaining all of our documentation, and we’re working only with suppliers that we’ve gone and visited and certified ourselves.

There are other companies, especially at the beginning when we came out, who were saying — you can make a plastic that has three to five layers in it, right? You’re using one plastic on the surface, something in the middle, and another plastic on the surface. And they would say, well, we’re using PCR; it doesn’t have to be food-grade, because we’re putting it in the middle. You know, that protects it. And the company buying — particularly, say, in the produce industry — who aren’t educated in these things might think that that sounds reasonable. It’s not, of course, because whatever you put in the middle migrates to the surface. So if you’ve got contaminants in the damn thing, you know they’re going to get out of the middle eventually and end up on the surface, and then end up on the food.

And so we had to do a lot of customer education about what they had to get from their supplier in order for them to be reasonably certain that they were using food-grade PCR versus just any old derelict PCR that came from materials that are fine in a garbage bag, but not fine touching food. That education process largely then fell on us. I think we’re so early in this — I, you know, frankly, haven’t been able to find another bag or package in the store that says it uses food-grade PCR. We’re sort of like the canary in the coal mine. A lot of what one might hope would be coming from an industry organization, or the FDA, or a California certifying government body, or a government body that would be checking, you know, whether things were food-grade or not — randomly off the store shelf — all that’s fallen on us.

Mitch Ratcliffe (17:18)

That’s a huge undertaking, and I can understand now why it’s three or four times more expensive to use this material. How did you make the case to Wada Farms or D’Arrigo that this was a good choice? Was it a sustainable, moral suasion argument, or was it a consumers-are-going-to-love-you-for-this? How did you bring them on board?

Kevin Kelly (17:39)

For me, it starts with: this is a great way to make your packaging more sustainable. It starts with the moral argument that I always begin with — that, because that’s where I come from. I know one should be thinking about these things as huge marketing opportunities, and they are, I suppose. But for me, it’s really about: what can packaging do to move the needle on becoming more environmentally friendly? You know, I guess that just comes out of familial commitment, having to look your kids in the eye and tell them you’re actually doing something versus not. And so I always begin the conversation there.

And then I go to the marketing question — consumers will love it. And, oh, by the way, you know, Walmart has a program — that they’ve revised somewhat — but they have a program really emphasizing post-consumer resin in Walmart brand. And so this is something that will please Walmart, especially if the upcharge is very small or there’s no upcharge at all. And in the case of Wada Farms, that’s the sale they really took to Walmart. And whoever the purchasing person at Walmart on the other end was knew about the Walmart program, was committed to the Walmart program, and so jumped on the opportunity. That doesn’t always happen, but they did, and they saw it both, I think, as an internal possibility to fulfill an internal commitment to the environment, but also a way to market potatoes to consumers using packaging that was more environmentally friendly.

Mitch Ratcliffe (19:27)

If we don’t make this transition, what’s the outcome for the economy in the long term? Do we essentially choke ourselves on our waste? How do you envision the benefits of the sustainable packaging movement alleviating the crisis that we’re entering?

Kevin Kelly (19:45)

I think that the crisis operates on many different levels, right? So let’s sort of back up a little bit. You have the greenhouse gas crisis, you have the waste crisis, and they intersect, obviously, but they’re two distinct things.

And so in the case of some packaging, I believe there’s an argument to be made that it actually does reduce food waste and therefore greenhouse gas. The State of Oregon looked at that question in 2017 in a little-known study that came back and said, in the balance, produce packaging, for instance, reduces greenhouse gas through reduction of food waste, food preservation, shelf life extension, more than it actually contributes to greenhouse gas in the production thereof. So there’s this single study floating out there that says that. It’s not true in the case of every kind of packaging.

You can certainly ask yourself — and I’m not going to get into this debate — whether we need Ho Hos and Twinkies or not, and whether we need them wrapped, therefore, to get them. So, you know, there is this question on the store shelves of where is packaging beneficial and where it isn’t.

I think PCR moves the needle a little. I think it tells you where we are in this process. When one turn of this is close to being circular, right? Maybe we’ve, like, rounded the bend — one of the hundreds of bends to go to actually form a complete circle. But it’s a start. I mean, which is the way, I guess, we sort of have to look at it.

If you’re over in my world, the thing about sustainable packaging, and I think this has been true for the last 20 years, is that the technologies exist today to take the entire packaging world into compostable packaging. We’d then be choking on compostable packaging. But, you know, we’d need a lot of home compost, obviously, to deal with billions of pounds of compostable packaging. I mean, the infrastructure doesn’t exist, so on and so forth. The point I’m making here is the technology has been there. The question throughout has been, who’s going to pay for it?

Mitch Ratcliffe (22:22)

I think this is an absolutely critical question, and one we hear about with the green premium. I want to dig into this, but we’re going to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned.

Mitch Ratcliffe (22:37)

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue talking with Kevin Kelly. He is the CEO of Emerald Packaging in Union City, California, and we’re talking about the company’s investments in developing more sustainable food packaging options. Kevin, you mentioned that the flexible packaging recycling infrastructure in the United States is, let’s just say, still very limited. Most curbside programs don’t accept it. As you look at the material flow in your industry, are there new business opportunities in collection and processing that you see people missing, that they should be stepping into?

Kevin Kelly (23:12)

Well, I think you’re being generous when you say it’s limited. It’s virtually nonexistent, right? I mean, let’s be — the store drop-back, drop-off program is a nice — I don’t know, it’s nice, but imagine if everybody took their bags back to the store and Safeway became a solid waste dump. You know, it’d be a wake-up call to everybody.

But at any rate, I think there’s a big business opportunity in recycling, period. The issue has been on that end of things — the end markets. Okay? So you have recycled material. Where does it go? In a free market economy, you’re dealing with virgin material that’s cheaper than its recycled cousin. How do you create markets — not just create markets so that you attract capital into the recycling business, especially now where so many recyclers are going belly up because the end markets don’t exist and there’s too much competition for materials that can actually be used and resold? Which is true in the food-grade PCR business as well. I mean, how many loads of pallet wrap can you get out of a Walmart distribution center? There’s a lot of competition for what are called clean bales. They’re super expensive, and then you have to be able to turn around and sell that at a profit.

The perfect example is Circulus, which was a company that was created to make PCR, including food-grade PCR. They put a gorgeous facility in the Central Valley — some of the most sophisticated machinery I’ve ever seen in my life. And I love manufacturing lines. They put another one in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and they were going to put one in Georgia that I think they’re finally going ahead with. Was backed by venture capital — backed by a group out of Texas. And I think they looked at it as, wow, look at these EPR programs. There’s going to be a real opportunity here. And I’d say three years ago, I would have thought the same. They lasted about 18 months. And venture capital, private equity — which would be one source of capital in order to build out, you know, a private recycling system — recognized that they weren’t going to make any money soon. I always said I wanted to be the second or third owner of Circulus, because I was convinced, you know, within a few months of getting to know the market, that they were going to not make it, and that the private equity, which wants to see instantaneous returns, wasn’t going to be able to put up with the ups and downs of the current recycling system.

So they ended up selling out to Dow Chemical. You know, Dow Chemical has kept the operation going. They’ve put some money into it. They closed — I should say they closed the facility in central California. They kept the Ardmore facility going. They’re building the facility in Georgia. How much money will Dow put in to expand it? You know, they haven’t shown a great appetite to do so. The resin company that has probably put the most money in is Nova Chemicals, up in Canada, which sort of makes sense, because you have well-developed EPR programs in Canada, right? You have mandates around recycled material use in some provinces, and so Nova’s got a pretty good market just there in order to be able to sell the material.

Again, I think — you know, businesses sometimes don’t like to hear this, but the word “mandate” is going to be probably the savior of recycling in the United States, because governments mandating post-consumer resin use will drive a market and a viable one, because companies will have to actually use the material in order to hit the mandate.

Mitch Ratcliffe (27:35)

So with EPR laws taking off across the country — but particularly California’s SB 54, that requires a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 (so six years from now), and it has minimum recycled content thresholds in law as well. How has that changed the game? Are we moving in the right direction? Do you see that policy starting to come into place to put the weight behind the spear?

Kevin Kelly (28:02)

Good question. I think that SB 54 might actually do the opposite. Why? Because, in the original regulations, if a company used PCR, they were given a pound-for-pound credit against their fees. That got wiped out. And now, the overall program — if you get the mandate — is to reduce plastic use by 10%, the use of virgin plastic, by a certain date. I think it’s 2028. The low-hanging fruit there is, say, agricultural film, or something that is using a lot of plastic where you can use non-food-grade material all day long, and it doesn’t have to be widely used across the supply chain. 8% or 10% is an easy number to hit.

The fees themselves are small enough — believe it or not, even at, say, 60 cents a pound or 80 cents a pound for the worst sort of materials, mixed materials — that it doesn’t make sense to switch to food-grade PCR, which is still, you know — the differential before we went into the war was around $1.30 a pound between it and virgin material.

And so I think the regulation writers have to be more cognizant about the economics and the financial incentives that are being set, both within the fees and within the regulations themselves, in terms of using PCR or compostables as an offset. And one of the problems there — I think you get to the crux of this — is that there’s not a lot of conversation between all parties. The regulators aren’t talking — we’re just now starting, and, you know, it’s shame on both parties. We’re just now starting to talk to CAA, and we’re just now starting to talk to CalRecycle, and we’re really just now beginning to explain the economics of PCR within the structure of an EPR system. And I wish we had had these conversations a year, a year or two ago. It’s hard for CalRecycle to find us. It’s hard for us to find them in the mix. We’re small. I think we’ve come to more prominence because of the food-grade PCR use, and the fact that we’re one of the few doing it, and so folks have begun approaching us.

But in general, you know, having conversation with the packaging industry has been not that fruitful for regulators for decades, and so it isn’t a conversation that most have sought out. You know, even if there’s one or two of us out there who would like to genuinely have it and like to genuinely engage, it’s hard to find us in the mix of “nos” that the American Chemistry Council throws out there for every proposal for reform. So that’s a — I don’t know if the answer is discombobulated or not, but I’m finding that there’s not an easy answer to any of these questions. There has to be a thoughtful answer. To be thoughtful, you have to understand the packaging and the market and the prices within the market, and folks are very often unwilling to talk about prices and where they are today, and where they might be if we actually scale a proper recycling system, with proper PCR manufacturing, and then a proper end market. Those are the kind of conversations I think that need to be had in every state across the country that’s developing an EPR program.

Mitch Ratcliffe (32:07)

Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I’m surprised to hear that those conversations didn’t happen as we were preparing for SB 54 to go through the legislative process. But let me ask this: if, in fact, all the pieces fall into place — regulatory, there’s demand, and so forth — can you get past 30% PCR in this packaging? Is this a technical limit or a supply limit at this point?

Kevin Kelly (32:34)

It’s a technical limit.

Mitch Ratcliffe (32:36)

It’s a technical limit. So where can we go?

Kevin Kelly (32:39)

Right now, we’ve pushed to 50%. So we’re not at 100, and that’ll take, you know, some time. I think that would take several years, just given variations inside loads. But I think 50% is possible. It’s not the best-looking plastic on Earth, you know, but it’s certainly a reduction in virgin resin, and it is technically possible with the right company producing low-variation, high-grade PCR. And there are some out there who do that. So we found you can push it along.

I wouldn’t want to stake a claim and say all my packaging is going to be 50% PCR today, because I don’t think we could find enough consistent material, you know, to come up with 20 million pounds of PCR capable of creating 50% PCR packaging. I just wouldn’t want to do it. I think 30% is comfortable, and frankly, above what most companies are willing to attempt, which is around 20.

Mitch Ratcliffe (33:52)

Why is that?

Kevin Kelly (33:54)

It’s — I think this is where we get into, as a smaller, family-owned business, we can de-emphasize profit a little bit and say, okay, we’re going to push this to the technical limit that we’re comfortable with, and we’re going to accept more downtime for cleaning and dealing with loads that might require a lot more babysitting through the production process. We’re willing to do that. I think a lot of companies — once you, you know, if you’re owned by private equity, if you’re publicly owned, it’s a different calculus than the calculus we make. And I think that’s one of the benefits of smaller family-owned businesses. You know, if the family has a sense of social responsibility.

Mitch Ratcliffe (34:44)

Do you think that, in the private equity-dominated world that we’re in right now, we lack the sufficient patient capital to achieve a circular economy in the long term? Or are enough sources of capital starting to migrate toward this in response to things like the war and onshoring our supply chains and so forth, to get us there sometime within our lifetimes —

Kevin Kelly (35:08)

Yours and mine?

Mitch Ratcliffe (35:09)

Yeah, recognizing we’re both of a certain age.

Kevin Kelly (35:12)

My children’s, sure. You know, I’m 65. I don’t see it, unfortunately, happening in my lifetime. Now, I didn’t think I’d see an American Pope in my lifetime either, so there are surprises in the world.

Mitch Ratcliffe (35:30)

Miracles do happen.

Kevin Kelly (35:31)

They do. So I think, all things being possible, I would feel very comfortable saying my 25-year-old kids will live in a very, very different economy than the one I do today. And, you know, I think we do have to get past the private equity mindset. In fact, you know, the problem with where the social goals of society have gone, and where private equity has gone, has really shifted things far more, as you allude to, you know — getting returns within five years and flipping the company and, you know, doing this and doing this and doing this. It’s not worried, really at all, about social responsibility. So that’s where state mandates, I think, come into play, because you impose those upon companies that might not otherwise wish to engage them.

Mitch Ratcliffe (36:27)

When you imagine a grocery shopper picking up a bag of potatoes or romaine hearts, and they see that it’s made with PCR — what do you want them to understand about what that actually means to them and their health and the environment?

Kevin Kelly (36:42)

Well, I want them to know that it doesn’t affect their health in any particularly bad way. So we want them to feel comfortable that the recycled material is, in fact, food-grade, and what’s touching the food isn’t going to somehow, you know, introduce cadmium into their bodies, something like that. So you’d certainly want that — the bare minimum.

Then, I think, you next want them to know that this is a nice step along the road to a better, environmentally friendly packaging world, and that by buying this packaging and not that packaging, they’re choosing to support it. You see that most clearly in the experiment that Taylor Farms is doing at certain grocery stores with the fiber tray, fiber clamshell. You can choose the all-plastic one, or you can pay 10 cents more and actually get a little bit less spinach. Which one are you going to choose? And the consumer actually has been going for that fiber tray.

Mitch Ratcliffe (37:50)

All the data says that the consumers want those kinds of things.

Kevin Kelly (37:54)

They’re willing to pay a little bit more, or they’re willing to take a little bit less for themselves to participate, right? I mean, they feel like, okay, I’m shopping, but I’m actually making a statement in buying this and not that. So I think that allowing consumers to participate in building the world that they would like to build is important messaging that companies should be creating and making, in terms of marketing, what they’re trying to sell. Because you do want consumers to feel good about what they’re buying, but you want them also to be supporting the world they want, and the world we’d all like to see — which is a far more environmentally friendly one than the one we’re in today.

Mitch Ratcliffe (38:42)

Well, we can hope and we can work. As Jane Goodall said, hope is an active verb. It’s not something you sit back and wait for the results of.

Kevin Kelly (38:49)

That’s good.

Mitch Ratcliffe (38:51)

How can our listeners follow Emerald Packaging’s progress? Where should they tune in?

Kevin Kelly (38:56)

Well, I think we keep updates going on our website. I do a lot of interviews, and as we make progress, I tend to write about it or talk about it. Most of the articles about us, or information about us, eventually turns up in our news, the news part of our website. Or I started to use LinkedIn — we’re not a big company, so we’re not, you know, doing advertising on social media, or advertising on television, or anything like that. But we do try to get the word out there about what we’re doing and what we see as possible, both when it comes to PCR, when it comes to EPR laws, and when it comes to compostable materials.

Mitch Ratcliffe (39:43)

Well, Kevin, I hope that talking today helped spread the story, and I really appreciate it. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thanks very much.

Kevin Kelly (39:50)

Oh, I thank you, and thanks for putting up with the complexities of the conversation. I think we captured that pretty well.

Mitch Ratcliffe (40:02)

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, and the company that has now replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, in food contact bags that you can buy at Walmart through Wada Farms, and Andy Boy romaine hearts packages. You can learn more about Emerald and Kevin’s work at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Emeraldpackaging.com.

The headline here isn’t that million pounds, even though that’s an encouraging piece of news. The headline is that Kevin started having this conversation in 2000, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board first measured plastic in landfills and asked the American Chemistry Council whether the industry might participate in a recycling system. And of course, the answer from the industry was no. Now, 26 years later, Kevin’s family-owned bag maker has become, in his own words, the canary in the coal mine for food-grade PCR — because no industry body, no FDA process beyond that letter of no objection we heard about, and no California regulator has built the certification, testing, or chain-of-custody infrastructure this circular economy needs to scale.

Emerald is doing the customer education itself, walking produce companies through the difference between food-grade PCR and what Kevin colorfully called “any old derelict PCR,” which can be kind of gray. You’ve seen this in some Coke bottles, for instance. That gap between what is technically possible and corporate aspirations is the real story behind the million pounds of diverted plastic waste.

Emerald Packaging’s home state, California, can teach the rest of the country. You may remember my recent conversation with Zena Harris of Green Spark Group, in which California’s climate disclosure law is forcing a digital nervous system into being across Hollywood’s supply chain — and that regulation is doing what regulation is supposed to do. But, as Kevin said, SB 54 may do the opposite. The law mandates a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 and sets a minimum PCR threshold. But Kevin pointed out that a pound-for-pound PCR credit, which would have encouraged people to replace virgin polyethylene with PCR, was wiped out of the rulemaking, so the fees are low enough that companies can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film collection and other low-hanging fruit, without actually addressing food-grade PCR. And yet, several years after the law was passed, conversations are just starting between CalRecycle, the California Air Resources Board, and packaging makers.

A mandate without the right price levers doesn’t drive the necessary transition. It delivers the cheapest path to compliance. And that’s a useful warning for every other state currently writing extended producer responsibility laws — including California, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota — where the design choices are being made right now that will determine whether or not food-grade PCR ever becomes economical at scale, or stays stuck in the boutique end of the market.

And a third point is the one that I’m going to be pondering after this conversation, and that is about Circulus. It’s a PCR plant in California’s Central Valley that was backed by Texas private equity and was supposed to be the supply-side answer to food-grade PCR, and it lasted only 18 months before Dow Chemical bought what remained, closed the California facility, while keeping an Oklahoma one running and moving slowly on a third site in Georgia. Kevin’s argument is that family-owned manufacturers, who can de-emphasize quarterly profit, are doing more to push PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund our energy and sustainability transition.

That maps closely to the lessons from my recent conversation with Disney Petit at LiquiDonate — circular infrastructure works when there is an immediate economic pull, as her platform creates by saving retailers money the day they sign up, and it stalls when investors are asked to wait for a market that requires a mandate, a law, to exist. So the case for patient capital is also a case for mandates designed well enough to create the demand that patience requires.

The billions of pounds of produce packaging that are shipped each year is not a problem one bag maker, one retailer, or one state can solve. And the 25-year arc of Kevin’s career argues that we’ve been waiting for the wrong thing. The technology has existed. It does exist now. The willing operators have existed — a few of them. But what’s been missing is the policy architecture, the certification backbone, and the capital structure that would let these operators do at scale what one family-owned company has now proven is possible at 30% PCR levels in produce packaging. The next legislative cycle in every EPR state is where that may be decided, and we’ll be tracking it on the show.

So stay tuned, folks. And if this conversation moved you, could you do one thing for the show this week? Pick a single episode from the archive of more than 550 interviews and send it to just one person who hasn’t heard us yet. A short review on your favorite podcast platform is the other way to help, because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we’ll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging appeared first on Earth911.

Cement and concrete production accounts for about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is twice as much as in 1990 due to increased construction worldwide. The surfaces under your patio, walkway, or driveway contribute to this, especially when rainwater runs off instead of soaking into the ground.

Since Earth911 first published this guide seven years ago, it has become much easier to find information about sustainable paving. Permeable paver systems made from recycled plastic are now easy to find online and in stores. Carbon-cured concrete pavers are being used in more commercial projects, and there are more recycled-glass and recycled-rubber options than before. While some information is still missing, homeowners now have real choices. Here’s what to look for, what to avoid, and what’s worth buying.

This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase an item through one of these links, we receive a small commission that helps fund our work.

Why Pavement Choices Matter More Now

Two environmental problems converge underfoot. The first is embodied carbon. Cement is responsible for roughly 90% of concrete’s carbon emissions, and the world produced more than 4 billion metric tons of it in 2022. The second is stormwater. Conventional impervious paving funnels rain into storm drains, picking up oil, metals, and tire residue along the way. Permeable pavement can reduce surface runoff by up to 85% compared to traditional pavement, and EPA-monitored studies have documented removal efficiencies of 82–95% for sediment, 65% for total phosphorus, and 80–85% for total nitrogen.

Some U.S. cities now require a certain amount of permeable paving in new parking lots and walkways. Many also offer stormwater fee credits or tax incentives for homeowners who install permeable surfaces. Before starting your project, check with your local stormwater utility. You might be able to save money.

The Greenest Paver Is Often the One You Don’t Buy

Using reused materials is still the most environmentally responsible choice. Salvaged brick, reclaimed flagstone, and broken concrete (also called “urbanite”) were made long ago, so their manufacturing emissions are already accounted for. You can find these materials at architectural salvage yards, through demolition contractors, or at Habitat for Humanity ReStores.

If you can’t use salvaged materials, look for options with three key features: high recycled content, permeability, and enough durability to last for decades and spread out the carbon impact.

How To Compare Pavers

Permeability

Pavement that lets rainwater Pavement that allows rainwater to pass through helps prevent flooding, refills groundwater, and filters out pollutants before they reach streams. The words pervious, permeable, and porous are often mixed up, but they mean different things. Pervious concrete and asphalt let water go through the material itself. Permeable pavers are solid blocks with gaps filled with gravel. Porous or open-cell pavers use grids that hold gravel or grass.specifics, not adjectives. “Eco-friendly” means next to nothing in legal terms, but “made from 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE” is a claim you can evaluate. Reputable manufacturers will state the percentage and source of recycled material on the product page or a downloadable spec sheet.

Embodied Carbon

Carbon-cured concrete pavers are a newer option. Companies like CarbonCure and Solidia add captured CO₂ to the concrete as it cures, locking it in permanently. A study in the journal PNAS found that each kilogram of these pavers keeps about 0.07 to 0.21 kg of CO₂ out of the air. This is helpful, but not as much as some “carbon-negative” marketing suggests. The same study found that pavers made with carbonated aggregates, from companies like Blue Planet and Carbon8 Systems, do even better, storing about 0.4 to 0.77 kg of CO₂ per kilogram.

End-of-Life Recyclability

Pavers can last for decades, but eventually they need to be replaced. HDPE plastic pavers can be recycled in some areas, depending on local programs. Concrete and brick can be crushed and reused as aggregate. Composite pavers made from mixed plastic and rubber are the hardest to recycle because most facilities can’t process them, and most manufacturers don’t have take-back programs.

Paver Types: 2026 Update

Permeable Plastic Grid Systems

Open-cell grids made from recycled HDPE or polypropylene are now the easiest sustainable pavers to find. They can flex with frost, support vehicles if installed correctly, and can be filled with gravel for a solid look or with soil and grass for a softer appearance.

Notable products available on Amazon:

• TRUEGRID PRO LITE: Made in the USA from 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE, they are rated for 120,000 lb loads, and their surface infiltration rates exceed 800 inches per hour.
• TRUEGRID PRO PLUS: Heavier-duty 1.8″ depth version rated for 250,000+ lb loads. These pavers are suitable for parking lots and equipment yards.
• Vodaland EasyPave: 100% recycled PPE plastic available in 2″ depth in black, gray, or green, these pavers can be filled to handle up to 80,000 lbs., depending on base.
• Vodaland HexPave: These hexagonal recycled-plastic grids feature an abrasion-textured top to prevent slips on slopes. They run shallower with a 1″ depth and support only a 27,000 lb load capacity.
• ModuTile Permeable Pavers: Made with recycled HDPE, ModuTile are rated at 87% porosity and work well as grass or gravel pavers.

Permeable Concrete Pavers

Solid concrete blocks separated by aggregate joints. Best for homeowners who want a traditional paver look, these are solid concrete blocks with gaps filled by gravel. They are a good choice if you want a classic paver look while also managing stormwater. Unilock still offers permeable options on the East Coast and Midwest. Belgard now shares some sustainability data on its website, but details about recycled content are limited.

County Materials’ REJUVENATE pavers (launched in June 2025) and Techo-Bloc’s systems are also worth a look, and they allow water to drain through. GraniteCrete uses pre-consumer recycled aggregate, gypsum byproduct, fine clays, and organic pigments; the spent material can be pulverized and remixed. These materials perform best in moderate climates. To learn more bout pervious concrete in general and find local craftspeople, visit the American Concrete Pavement Association‘s contractor directory.

Carbon-Cured Concrete Pavers

CarbonCure’s technology is licensed to dozens of precast manufacturers in North America. Solidia’s low-lime cement is licensed to producers including CalPortland and is used in pavers and blocks across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

A note on claims: Peer-reviewed analysis is the most reliable filter for environmental claims. Carbon-cured concrete pavers are typically sold through commercial precast suppliers rather than retail; ask local masonry yards whether they stock CarbonCure-licensed product.

Recycled-Glass Pavers

More pavers are now being made from discarded glass. FilterPave’s Glass Series, for example, uses 40% recycled glass and 60% local stone, held together with a polymer binder. Each square foot of these pavers reuses about 40 beverage bottles. They have porosity rates of 38% to 48%, can handle foot traffic and light vehicles, and add a unique look to your yard. Wausau Tile’s Washed Glass and Blasted Glass series and Tile Tech’s Recycled-Glass pavers also use crushed glass in concrete, which can help your home or building earn LEED credits.

Recycled Rubber Pavers

These pavers are made from old tires. They are lightweight, slip-resistant, and comfortable to walk on. You can find them easily on Amazon.

• Rubberific Dual-Sided Square Pavers feature 16″ x 16″ x 3/4″ tiles made from 100% recycled rubber, sold individually for small patios and walkways.
• Aspire Pavers (formerly AZEK Pavers) are made from up to 95% post-consumer recycled tire rubber and plastics. The company reports diverting 500 tires and 1,500 plastic containers per 1,000 square feet of installed pavers. They are sold through DecksDirect and authorized dealers; also available in a permeable variant.

Recycled tire products carry an environmental and health asterisk. Peer-reviewed research published in 2024 showed that end-of-life tire materials, including pavers and crumb rubber, can release polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and 6PPD-quinone, a tire additive byproduct that is acutely toxic to salmon.

Two practical takeaways: don’t install tire-rubber pavers near vegetable gardens or salmon-bearing waterways, and choose rubber products that are tested and labeled for low VOC and metal release. The EPA’s tire crumb research is the most-cited federal source.

Reclaimed Brick and Stone

Reclaimed brick and stone are still the best low-carbon option. They are easier to find now at architectural salvage yards, through demolition contractors, and on online marketplaces. Try to find reclaimed materials from your area to cut down on transport emissions.

Buying Guide: Quick Comparison

What You Can Do

• Salvage first. Check architectural salvage yards, Habitat ReStores, and local demolition contractors for reclaimed brick and flagstone before buying anything new.
• Choose permeable when stormwater is the issue. For driveways and parking pads in particular, permeable plastic grid systems filled with gravel are the most cost-effective DIY option.
• Read recycled-content claims carefully. Demand specifics: percentage, source (post-consumer vs. pre-consumer), and material type. Vague “eco-friendly” labels aren’t enough.
• Ask about end-of-life handling. Pavers last for decades, but eventually come up. Single-material pavers (HDPE, concrete, brick) are easier to recycle than composites.
• Avoid tire-rubber products near food gardens or fish-bearing streams. The leaching risk is small but documented; site them where runoff doesn’t enter sensitive systems.
• Check for stormwater incentives. Many municipalities offer fee credits or rebates for permeable installations. Call your local stormwater utility before you start.
• Ask about carbon-cured concrete locally. CarbonCure and Solidia have licensed producers in many U.S. regions. Your local masonry supplier may carry it without prominently advertising it.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally authored by Gemma Alexander on May 20, 2019, and substantially updated in May 2026.

The post The Search for Sustainable Pavers appeared first on Earth911.

Want to save time, money, and energy all while adding convenience to your life? Something as simple as using smart plugs throughout your home can help achieve these goals.

The average U.S. household has roughly 65 devices plugged in around the clock, quietly drawing about 770 kilowatt-hours of phantom power every year, about enough to run a refrigerator for nine months. At today’s average residential electricity rate of 17.47 cents per kilowatt-hour, that’s roughly $135 a year wasted on devices nobody uses.

Smart plugs are the simplest, cheapest way to stop electricity waste. The arrival of Matter, the cross-platform smart home standard backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung, and the maturing of the low-power Thread wireless protocol mean a smart plug bought today should outlast the app it shipped with and work across whatever smart home ecosystem you switch to next. This updated article covers what changed, what to look for now, and which models are worth installing in 2026.

This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase an item through one of these links, we receive a small commission that helps fund our work.

How Smart Plugs Work

A smart plug sits between a wall outlet and whatever you plug into it — a lamp, a coffee maker, a space heater, an entertainment center. Inside is a relay that opens or closes the circuit on command, plus a wireless radio that listens for those commands from your phone or a smart speaker. Some plugs add an energy meter that reports real-time wattage and cumulative kilowatt-hours back to the app.

Older smart plugs relied entirely on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and the manufacturer’s cloud services, which meant a server outage or a Wi-Fi hiccup could leave you unable to turn off your lamp. Matter-certified plugs communicate locally over your home network and continue working even when the internet drops. Thread-based plugs go further, forming a self-healing mesh network in which each plugged-in device acts as a relay for the next, extending range and cutting response time, so there’s less waiting for your smart home app to make your smart home work.

In late 2022, the Connectivity Standards Alliance released Matter 1.0, an open, royalty-free standard meant to end the era of locked smart home ecosystems. Matter-certified plugs pair with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings simultaneously, and it is configured by scanning a single QR code. No brand-specific app required, no separate hub for each platform.

Matter has matured quickly. Version 1.4 added home energy management as a first-class device category and introduced certified routers and access points that double as Thread border routers. Version 1.5, published in November 2025, expanded support to cameras, soil moisture sensors, and additional energy management features. As of 2026, Thread border router certification requires Thread 1.4, which lets security credentials to be passed between platforms, so a plug added through Apple Home can also be controlled from a SmartThings hub.

A Matter plug bought in 2026 should still work in 2030, even if you switch from an Amazon Echo to a HomePod or add a SmartThings station. By contrast, a proprietary Wi-Fi plug from a brand that goes out of business or sunsets its app is a paperweight. That’s a real consideration in a category where startups have come and gone — Wink, Insteon, and others left users stranded when their cloud services shut down.

How Much Energy They Actually Save

Smart plugs save energy only when you use them deliberately. The plug itself draws roughly 1 to 2 watts of standby power, so each one adds about $1.50 a year to your bill before it does any work. That cost is recovered many times over if the plug is used to schedule, monitor, or kill standby loads.

Three smart plug features do most of the work:

1. Cutting Standby Loads

The U.S. Department of Energy and the Natural Resources Defense Council estimate that standby power — the electricity devices draw when they’re switched off but still plugged in — accounts for 5% to 10% of residential electricity use, and as much as 23% in homes packed with always-on electronics. The NRDC estimates the national wasted energy spending at about $19 billion a year, or roughly $165 to $440 per household. Older devices, gaming consoles, set-top boxes, and audio equipment are the worst offenders.

A smart plug with energy monitoring lets you spot which devices are draining power in standby and either schedule them off overnight or kill the circuit entirely. One reviewer found an old gaming console drawing 50 watts in standby mode, which costs is about $45 a year at average rates.

2. Scheduling and Off-Peak Shifting

Scheduling a coffee maker, towel warmer, or seasonal lights to run only when needed is the simplest savings case. The bigger one is shifting flexible loads — EV chargers, dehumidifiers, pool pumps — to off-peak hours when many utilities offer lower rates and the grid is running on cleaner sources. Earth911’s reporting on vampire loads walks through which household devices are worth targeting first.

3. Smart Plugs can Catch Failures Early

This is the underrated benefit. A refrigerator that suddenly draws 40% more power, a sump pump that’s cycling too often, or a freezer running 24/7 because the door seal failed will all show up in an energy-monitoring plug’s history before they show up on your utility bill. For appliances that fail gradually, the plug is a cheap diagnostic tool.

2026 Performance Standards: What to Look For

The smart plug market has consolidated around a handful of meaningful specifications. A plug bought in 2026 should meet most of these:

• UL or ETL safety certification. This is non-negotiable. Uncertified plugs from unknown brands have been linked to overheating and fires; in 2023 the CPSC announced a recall of Emporia smart plugs over electric shock hazards, and counterfeit electrical products remain a documented risk. Look for the printed UL or ETL mark on the device itself, not just the listing page.
• 15-amp / 1,800-watt rating. Standard for U.S. plugs and sufficient for nearly any single-outlet appliance. Be cautious about controlling space heaters with smart plugs, even at this rating; high-draw devices running for hours can stress the relay.
• Matter certification. Look for the Matter logo (three arrows forming a triangle) on the plug packaging.
• Real energy monitoring. Look for plugs that report actual wattage and cumulative kilowatt-hours, not estimated usage based on assumed device profiles. This is the feature that turns a smart plug into a savings tool rather than a convenience gadget.
• Local scheduling stored on the plug itself continues running when the internet drops. Cloud-only schedules don’t.
• Compact form factor. Older plugs were bulky enough to block the second outlet on a duplex receptacle. Slim designs from Kasa, TP-Link Tapo, and Eve now fit two per outlet.
• Thread support is optional but useful. Thread plugs use less power than Wi-Fi, respond faster, and strengthen your mesh as you add more. They require a Thread border router, which is built into most current Apple, Google, and Amazon hubs.

Recommended Models for 2026

These picks are organized by use case rather than ranked overall. Prices and availability checked April 2026; verify before purchase.

Best Cross-Platform Pick: Kasa KP125M

The Kasa KP125M was one of the first Matter-certified plugs with proper energy monitoring and remains the best balance of features in 2026. It works with Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and SmartThings via Matter to track real-time and historical wattage in the Kasa app. It stores schedules locally and is compact enough to stack two in a duplex outlet. UL-certified, 15A/1800W. Around $20 per plug in 2-packs and 4-packs. The Chinese manufacturer, TP-Link, has had its U.S. market presence scrutinized for security concerns — worth considering if that’s a priority for your household.

Best for Apple Home and Thread Mesh: Eve Energy

Eve Energy (Matter) runs over Matter and Thread, joining a Thread mesh automatically to act as a router for nearby devices. Eve’s privacy posture is unusual: no cloud, no account registration, no telemetry, so you can use it without fear of digital surveillance of your home. The energy monitoring is granular enough to capture small changes in appliance behavior, and the app provides detailed cost projections. UL-certified, 15A/1800W. Premium-priced at closer to $40 per plug, but the Thread support and privacy stance justify it for households committed to a local-first smart home.

Outdoor Use: Wyze Plug Outdoor

For holiday lights, pool pumps, garden features, and string lights, the Wyze Plug Outdoor offers two independently controlled, weather-sealed outlets with energy monitoring, a built-in light sensor, and IP64 water resistance. It works with Alexa and Google Assistant, operating from -4°F to 120°F. Typically priced between $25 and $30. Note that Wyze has had several security incidents over the past few years, which is worth weighing for indoor cameras, but matters less for an outdoor plug controlling lights.

Simplest Alexa-Only Setup: Amazon Smart Plug

If your household is already deep in the Alexa ecosystem and you want zero-configuration setup, the Amazon Smart Plug pairs automatically with Echo devices and works through the Alexa app, with no separate setup required. While it provides n o energy monitoring, this Alexa-only costs around $20. The simplest option, but the least flexible if you ever switch ecosystems.

The Bigger Picture

Smart plugs are a small intervention. Cutting standby load might save a household $50 to $200 a year — meaningful, but a fraction of the savings available from more efficient HVAC, water heating, and appliance choices, which together account for the majority of residential electricity use. The case for smart plugs is less about that one number and more about the visibility they provide. Most households have no idea which devices are responsible for their bills until they get the data.

The category also has a larger-grid story. Smart plugs that can shift flexible loads to off-peak hours give utilities and grid operators tools to balance demand without building more peaker plants, particularly relevant as electrification of heating and transportation drives residential demand growth. Check out our conversation with ecobee’s Sarah Colvin, which to go deeper into how distributed smart devices are starting to function as grid resources, not just consumer conveniences.

What You Can Do

• Audit before you buy. Walk through your home with a notepad and list devices that run on standby, such as entertainment systems, gaming consoles, printers, set-top boxes, microwaves with clocks, or anything with an LED that stays lit. Those are your first smart plug candidates.
• Start with one Matter plug with energy monitoring. Use it as a diagnostic tool for a week on each of your top suspects before installing a full set. The data will tell you which loads are worth automating.
• Build schedules around the loads you actually use. A coffee maker that runs from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., an entertainment system that powers down at midnight, and holiday lights on a sunset-to-11 p.m. window. Aim for the plug to spend most of its time off.
• Check for utility rebates. Many U.S. utilities offer rebates on energy-monitoring devices and smart home products that participate in demand-response programs. Your provider’s website or ENERGY STAR’s rebate finder is the place to start.
• Don’t put high-draw appliances on smart plugs. Space heaters, window AC units, and other devices that draw near the 15A rating for hours at a time stress the relay and pose a real fire risk. Use a hardwired smart switch or a smart breaker for those instead.
• Verify safety certification on the physical product. The UL or ETL mark should be printed on the plug itself. If it’s not, return it.

Editor’s Note: Originally written by Sandi Schwartz on March 29, 2023, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.

The post How To Save Energy in Your Home With Smart Plugs appeared first on Earth911.