Make Earth Day 2026 the next step in your response to the environmental damage inflicted by recent U.S. policy reversals that have gutted decades of effort to preserve the climate our species—and all of nature—depends on. EarthDay.org has declared this year’s mission, to make “Our Power, Our Planet” the basis of celebrations on April 18th, a day of action, and April 22nd, the traditional date for Earth Day. Don’t just sit and savor nature, step up to the resist the forces dismantling the environmental protections that followed from the first Earth Day in 1970, which led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act, among so many important national efforts.

Post and share Earth911 posters to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Show Up for Planet Earth appeared first on Earth911.

The global market for natural health products now exceeds $300 billion, and parents are leading the charge — looking for gentler, plant-based alternatives to synthetic medicines for their kids. Some natural remedies have centuries of traditional use behind them. Others have meaningful clinical support. And a few carry real safety caveats that are easy to miss when you’re shopping for a more natural medicine cabinet.

Four ingredients cover a lot of ground: coconut oil, essential oils, honey, and apple cider vinegar. Here’s what the evidence says about each, including what to watch out for, especially with younger children.

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1. Coconut Oil

Coconut oil earns its place in a natural medicine cabinet through sheer versatility. Applied topically, it works well as a balm for chapped cheeks, a diaper rash treatment for babies, a soothing after-bath moisturizer for dry skin, and as a carrier oil when diluting essential oils for topical use. It’s also a perfectly serviceable cooking oil — just keep separate containers to avoid cross-contamination between cosmetic and kitchen uses.

Look for unrefined, virgin coconut oil — it retains more of the naturally occurring medium-chain fatty acids (including lauric acid, which has demonstrated antimicrobial properties in lab studies) compared to refined versions. Nutiva Organic Virgin Coconut Oil is a consistently available option.

2. Essential Oils: Effective, But Use With Care

Essential oils are concentrated plant extracts potent enough to have real therapeutic effects, and potent enough to cause real harm if misused. For kids, the most useful are:

• Lavender oil soothes minor skin irritation, helps with relaxation, and has mild antiseptic properties. It’s one of the gentler oils for children. Plant Therapy Lavender Essential Oil is a reputable, widely available option.
• Tea tree oil (melaleuca) is a well-documented antiseptic useful for skin rashes and has shown effectiveness against head lice. NOW Tea Tree Oil is a reliable choice.
• Eucalyptus oil supports respiratory comfort when diffused and can be used in a natural chest rub for older children. Plant Therapy Eucalyptus Globulus is a good starting point. For children under 2, eucalyptus in any form should be avoided. For children ages 2–4, use only with extra caution and well-diluted.

Eucalyptus age limits: Eucalyptus age limits: The blanket warning “never use on children under 10” guidance circulating online is an overstatement. The European Medicines Agency concludes that eucalyptus used by inhalation, topically, or as a bath additive is appropriate from age 4, and that oral use is restricted to age 12 and up. Do not apply near the nose, mouth, or face of any young child. Robert Tisserand and Rodney Young’s Essential Oil Safety (2nd ed., 2014), the field’s standard reference, supports this more nuanced reading.

Lavender and tea tree and hormonal concerns with boys: Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a link between topical use of lavender and tea tree oils and hormonal disruption in prepubescent boys. Aromatherapy (diffusing) is the lower-risk alternative for this age group.

Always dilute essential oils. Undiluted oils should never be applied to a child’s skin. For children under 2, use a 0.5–1% dilution in a carrier oil (like coconut or almond oil). For ages 2–6, 1–2% is appropriate.

No peppermint for children under 30 months. Peppermint oil can increase seizure risk in very young children and should be avoided.

For a comprehensive reference, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s essential oil safety guide for children is a solid starting point. And check with your pediatrician before introducing new oils, especially for children with respiratory conditions.

3. Honey: Powerful Medicine — With A Critical Exception

Raw honey does considerably more than sweeten tea. Applied topically, it’s an effective treatment for acne, particularly raw honey, which retains more antimicrobial compounds. Manuka honey from bees that pollinate the New Zealand mānuka bush  has demonstrated well-documented antibacterial properties and is worth keeping on hand for wound care and throat soothing.

For throat relief, a spoonful of honey dissolved in warm water with lemon is effective for children over 1 year old. Look for raw Manuka honey rather than processed honey in a plastic squeeze bottle, which has been heated and filtered to the point of losing most of its beneficial properties.

4. Apple Cider Vinegar

Apple cider vinegar’s acidic properties make it useful for a handful of topical applications. Two cups diluted in bathwater can help soothe eczema flares; diluted 50/50 with water, it’s effective for sunburn relief and itchy skin.

Its strong taste makes internal use a tough sell for kids, but they can still benefit from external applications. As with honey, quality matters: get an unfiltered, unpasteurized brand that retains “the mother” — the strand-like protein-enzyme matrix that forms during fermentation. Bragg Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar is the go-to product and is widely available.

A note on internal use for older kids and adults: ACV is acidic enough to erode tooth enamel if taken undiluted or frequently. Always dilute in water and consult a healthcare provider before making it a regular supplement.

These four ingredients are a good starting point for your own natural healing remedies. Simple and straightforward, most will be readily available at your local health food store and are a cinch to apply or administer.

Building Your Natural Medicine Cabinet

These four ingredients give you solid coverage for common minor ailments — skin irritation, dryness, colds, scrapes, and more. Most are available at natural grocery stores; the essential oils are easy to find online from reputable brands like Plant Therapy, NOW, and Edens Garden, all of which publish third-party testing data.

Start simple, read the labels carefully (especially age guidance on essential oils), and keep products stored out of reach of young children. When in doubt, your pediatrician is the right call.

Editor’s Note: Originally written by Madeleine Summerville on April 8, 2015, this article was updated in March 2026 to reflect current pediatric safety guidance, including honey/infant botulism warnings and updated essential oil age recommendations.

The post Mother Nature’s Medicine: 4 Natural Remedies for Healthy Kids appeared first on Earth911.

Picture turning yard waste, wood scraps, and farm leftovers into something that stores carbon underground for centuries and improves soil health. That’s the idea behind biochar. While this is true, it doesn’t tell the full story.

For over twenty years, researchers, entrepreneurs, and climate advocates have promoted biochar as a top way to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Early estimates said it could take out 3.4 to 6.3 billion tons of CO₂ each year, which is huge. This excitement led to many scientific papers, startup investments, and carbon credit deals.

But a new analysis in Nature Sustainability from January 2026 says we should slow down. Biochar is real, but the excitement has gotten ahead of the facts. The researchers warn that too much hype could lead to a “boom-and-bust cycle” that ends up hurting the technology.

What Is Biochar?

Biochar is charcoal, but not the kind you use at a backyard cookout. It’s made by heating organic materials such as wood chips, crop waste, or agricultural byproducts in a low-oxygen environment through a process called pyrolysis. The result is a dark, porous, carbon-rich material that resists breaking down in soil for centuries or even millennia.

The inspiration came from an unlikely source: ancient Amazonian soils. Researchers discovered that the region’s famously fertile “terra preta” (Portuguese for “dark earth”) owed its richness to charcoal that Indigenous peoples had mixed into the soil thousands of years ago. That charcoal had survived intact, still improving soil structure and fertility long after the civilization that made it passed into history.

When scientists studied terra preta, they realized that locking carbon in a solid form and burying it in soil removes it from the air for a long time. Biochar looked like a win-win: it could store carbon and help farms. This led to more funding, research, and new companies.

The Numbers That Raised Alarms

The issue isn’t that biochar doesn’t work, but it hasn’t lived up to the early high hopes. The Nature Sustainability analysis by Italian soil scientists Luciano Gristina and Riccardo Scalenghe explains the numbers in detail.

Let’s look at production. All certified biochar facilities in the world make about 350,000 tons each year. That might sound like a lot, but spread over the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of farmland, it’s tiny. The researchers found that this would raise the soil surface by less than one-tenth the width of a human hair per year. This shows how far current production is from what’s needed for climate goals.

Next is the question of carbon storage. Biochar’s actual impact is about a thousand times smaller than early estimates. Even after subtracting the emissions from making it, the net climate benefit is only a few hundred thousand tons of CO₂ at most. For comparison, global emissions are about 36 billion tons each year.

Economics make things even harder. Studies show that feedstock—the raw material for biochar—can make up as much as 75% of the total cost. So, biochar projects only make financial sense if they have free or very cheap biomass, or steady income from carbon credits. Without these, most projects aren’t profitable.

In Southeast Asia, trials showed that adding biochar to farmland produced only modest yield improvements, not nearly enough to justify the cost for smallholder farmers without a subsidy.

Too Many Papers, Not Enough Proof

The researchers have another worry: there is so much research on biochar now that it looks like a bubble.

Scientific papers on biochar have jumped from fewer than 10 a year in the early 2000s to over 1,000 a year by the 2020s. The researchers point out that biochar now gets much more attention than older topics like acid rain, which was a major environmental issue studied for decades.

Much of this increase in papers comes from a small group of very active authors. A 2023 report in Nature found that the number of scientists publishing over 60 papers a year—more than one per week—has almost quadrupled in less than ten years. Biochar is a clear example, with a few names dominating the field and shaping how mature it seems.

There are now warning signs from institutions. According to Clarivate’s Web of Science index, two major journals that published a lot of biochar research, Chemosphere and Science of the Total Environment, were removed from the index for not meeting editorial standards. Investigations found problems like peer-review manipulation, fake reviewer identities, and unusual authorship practices. This shows that the scientific community is starting to push back on a field that may be moving too quickly for the evidence.

The worry isn’t that biochar researchers are being dishonest. It’s that career incentives reward publishing quickly rather than publishing carefully. Field experiments are slow and expensive. Lab results are faster. When the pressure to publish outpaces the ability to verify, fields can develop an inflated sense of their own progress, and then crash when reality catches up. Biochar has value, but it must be scaled to the right size to make environmental and economic sense.

What Would an Effective Biochar Path Look Like?

The Nature Sustainability report doesn’t say biochar is a lost cause. Instead, it suggests the field needs a reset: fewer papers, more checking; less speed, more solid research.

Specifically, the researchers call for:

• Pre-registered trial designs so that results can’t be cherry-picked after the fact
• Open data and public protocols that allow independent researchers to check each other’s work
• Dedicated “verification articles” that reproduce influential findings before new claims pile on top of them
• Funding earmarked for confirmatory studies and even negative results — research that shows what doesn’t work, not just what does
• Evaluation metrics that reward verified contributions over sheer publication counts

The acid rain parallel is instructive. In the 1980s, acid rain was a front-page environmental crisis, the subject of intense scientific and policy debate. It receded from headlines not because the problem was imaginary, but because coordinated policy — cleaner fuels, emissions standards, pollution controls — actually reduced sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Evidence of ecosystem recovery followed. The field moved from alarm to action to outcome, a model worth following.

For biochar, the right approach is to be honest about what it can and can’t do. More real-world projects are now working within these limits.

Five Biochar Projects To Watch

Even with big challenges, some biochar projects around the world are finding success. They usually use local waste materials and earn money from more than just carbon credits.

Exomad Green — Bolivia

Exomad Green is currently the world’s largest biochar producer, operating two facilities that together remove about 260,000 tons of CO₂ per year. The feedstock is sawmill waste, wood residues that would otherwise be open-burned. The material is converted into biochar through pyrolysis, in other words, it is burned. That biochar is then donated to indigenous farming communities to improve degraded soils. In May 2025, Microsoft signed a 10-year agreement with Exomad Green for 1.24 million tons of CO₂ removal; the largest single biochar deal ever made. The model works because the feedstock is genuinely waste material with no better use, and the soil co-benefits for local communities are real and documented.

Pacific Biochar — California, USA

Pacific Biochar has built its model around a genuine dual benefit: it collects organic material from forests with high wildfire risk, reducing the fuel load that makes fires catastrophic, and converts that material into biochar for agricultural use. In 2024, CDR.fyi recognized Pacific Biochar as the global leader in durable carbon removal deliveries, accounting for 21% of total global certified volume. The California focus matters: the state’s wildfire crisis creates a near-endless supply of biomass that genuinely needs to be removed from the landscape, making the feedstock economics unusually solid.

Novocarbo — Germany

Novocarbo represents a different economic logic: the “Carbon Removal Park” model, where biochar production is bundled with renewable energy generation. At its flagship facility in Grevesmühlen, Germany, plant residues are converted into biochar using advanced pyrolysis units, and the waste heat from that process — about 6,600 megawatt-hours per year — is piped to roughly 1,800 nearby households for heating. Carbon credits are one revenue stream; district heating fees are another. That diversification makes the project less dependent on voluntary carbon market prices, which can be volatile. Novocarbo secured €27 million in new funding in 2025 to expand the model across Europe.

Aperam BioEnergia — Brazil

Aperam BioEnergia, certified by Puro.earth, is one of the most established biochar projects in the Global South. Operating in Minas Gerais, Brazil, it converts forestry residues into biochar, with plans to produce 30,000 tons annually by 2026. The project has sold more than 100,000 tons of carbon removal credits since 2021 and supports sustainable forest management practices alongside its production. It’s a model that pairs industrial scale with regional feedstock — the biomass inputs are produced nearby, keeping transport emissions low.

Carbonity / Airex Energy — Québec, Canada

Airex Energy’s pyrolysis technology is the backbone of Carbonity’s new facility in Port-Cartier, Québec — slated to become the largest biochar plant in North America. The project, backed by a consortium including Groupe Rémabec and SUEZ, represents roughly CAD 80 million in investment and aims to produce 10,000 tons of biochar in 2025, scaling to 30,000 by 2026. The feedstock is forest residues from the surrounding region. Microsoft has already purchased 36,000 carbon credits from an associated supply deal. The project is notable for its scale, but also carries the scrutiny that comes with large industrial operations in sensitive northern ecosystems.

Local, Small, and Real

These five projects have something important in common. The strongest ones, both economically and environmentally, use waste materials, work close to where those materials come from to cut transport emissions, and find value beyond just selling carbon credits.

That’s the conclusion the Nature Sustainability researchers point toward, even if they don’t say it quite so directly. The biochar projects most likely to survive and do genuine good are the ones that would still make sense even if the voluntary carbon market collapsed tomorrow, because their feedstock is free or nearly free, their soil benefits are real and local, and their energy co-products create additional value.

What likely won’t work is the dream of scaling biochar fast and wide enough to make a big dent in the 36 billion tons of CO₂ released each year. The numbers just don’t add up—not now, and maybe not ever—unless there are big changes in cost, feedstock supply, and how quickly the science can be checked.

That doesn’t mean we should give up on biochar. Instead, we should be clear about what it is: a useful, long-lasting, local way to turn waste into something valuable, with real benefits for farmers and soil, and a real—if small—role in removing carbon. Not everything has to save the world to be worthwhile.

The lesson from the acid rain research and responses fits here too: the goal isn’t to keep chasing new research. It’s to let the evidence catch up, support projects that stand up to close review, and build something lasting. The way forward will include many smaller, local biochar initiatives, not monolithic, world-saving programs that over-promise, threatening a valid carbon sequestration strategy.

What You Can Do

• Support verified projects. If you or your organization purchases carbon offsets, look for biochar credits certified by Puro.earth or Verra with transparent feedstock sourcing and publicly available lifecycle data.
• Ask about feedstock. Not all biochar is created equal. Biochar made from waste materials that would otherwise be burned or decompose has much stronger climate credentials than biochar produced from purpose-grown crops.
• Look for local applications. Some municipalities and agricultural extension programs are exploring biochar for compost enhancement and soil remediation. Local applications with local feedstocks are the most ecologically sound.
• Be skeptical of big numbers. If a company or project claims to sequester millions of tons of CO₂ per year through biochar alone, ask to see the verified delivery data — not just projections.
• Follow the science, not the hype. The International Biochar Initiative maintains a more grounded overview of the field’s actual state of knowledge.

The post Biochar Was a Billion-Ton Dream, the Reality Is More Complicated appeared first on Earth911.

Spring is officially here, inspiring gardening plans as well as dread of lawn chores. Before you immerse yourself in another year of yard maintenance, we have a question for you: When was the last time you reevaluated your yard maintenance tactics and outdoor plant selections? An environmentally friendly approach to a low-maintenance yard can save you money, time, and effort while it benefits the local ecosystem.

By carefully selecting the right plants, including natives and perennials, you can minimize watering and yearly plantings — resulting in less work for you and a lower water bill. And by employing natural gardening techniques, such as composting and companion planting, you can keep your soil healthy and keep pests away — without chemicals.

Naturally, a healthy and biodiverse yard looks different depending on your climate and region. Are you familiar with the plants that are native to your region? It’s exciting to choose the optimal plants for your garden because you know you’re giving them the best chance of success — plus, you’re helping the surrounding ecosystem.

Before selecting your plants, be sure to check the noxious weed lists or your county extension office to make sure you don’t pick invasive plant species. Some low-maintenance plants may be invasive in your region. For example, English Ivy, an attractive, low-maintenance vine, is an aggressive invader and on the noxious weed of the United States list.

With careful plant selection and eco-friendly gardening strategies, you’ll enjoy a low-maintenance yard, save money, and benefit Mother Earth too! Check out the tips and plant recommendations in the following infographic from HomeAdvisor.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on March 31, 2021, and was updated in April 2026.

The post Infographic: Tips for an Environmentally Responsible, Low-Maintenance Yard appeared first on Earth911.

It’s tough to think about “celebrating” Earth Day after the federal government rolled back over 400 environmental protections in 2025. Earth Day 2026 is a direct response to those changes. This year, organizers aren’t just asking you to reduce, reuse, or recycle. Instead, they want to spark a global response to the renewed influence of the fossil fuel industry.

Earth Day is on Wednesday, April 22, 2026. This marks the 56th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million Americans took to the streets and helped lead to the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the EPA. This year’s theme, Our Power, Our Planet, was announced by EARTHDAY.ORG in January. It puts civic action, rather than personal lifestyle changes, at the center. That’s an important shift.

EARTHDAY.ORG picked Our Power, Our Planet to push back against the idea that environmental progress depends only on who is in federal office. The 2026 manifesto says that people-powered action created these protections in the first place, and that same energy can defend and rebuild them. Small steps still matter, but they need to go hand in hand with political action.

This year’s tone is noticeably more confrontational than past Earth Day framing. Where previous themes, such as “End Plastic Pollution” and “Invest in Our Planet,” emphasized personal and corporate behavior, 2026 is centered on organizing, voter engagement, and policy defense. The official call to action names town halls with elected officials, grassroots campaigns to protect environmental laws, and teach-ins at schools and universities, alongside the more familiar community cleanups and tree plantings.

Portland’s Earth Day event, for example, will be held on April 11 at Parkrose Middle School, takes a similar approach with the theme Earth in Motion. It focuses on everyday choices that link transportation, energy, and food systems. The message is the same: local actions add up.

Earth Week: April 18–25

Earth Day falls on a Wednesday this year, which can make it hard for some people to take part. EARTHDAY.ORG has made April 18, a Saturday, the main action day, with Earth Week running through April 25. If you’re planning or joining an event, you have the whole week to get involved.

You can find free planning toolkits at The Earth Hub, EARTHDAY.ORG’s resource portal. The toolkits include a Community Cleanup Kit, Tree Planting Organizer, Teach-In Curriculum, Town Hall Planning Guide, Peaceful Demonstration Guide, Voter Registration Drive Kit, and Faith Gathering Resources. Each one comes with step-by-step planning materials, promotional templates, and talking points.

Where to Find Events

Organizations across the country are running events through the full month of April. A few highlights:

• The National Audubon Society’s network of over 400 chapters and 31 centers is hosting events in almost every region. Activities include bird walks, invasive species removal days, native plant sales, and family nature days. You can use Audubon’s event finder to locate the nearest activity.

• The Nature Conservancy is offering volunteer habitat restoration opportunities tied to its 75th anniversary, plus free downloadable activity guides for adults and children.

• EARTHDAY.ORG’s Great Global Cleanup connects individuals and groups to organized litter and debris cleanups worldwide.

Actions That Match the Moment

You can also try some of EarthDay.org’s 50 steps to make a positive difference in your daily life. Individual actions still matter, but this year, Earth Day encourages you to think about the impact you’re making. Here’s a helpful way to look at it:

Personal and household

• Join or organize a local cleanup through EARTHDAY.ORG’s Great Global Cleanup or your Audubon chapter.
• Plant native species in your yard or containers. Audubon’s Native Plants Database can help you find the right species for your region.
• Use the Earth911 recycling search to find local drop-off options for hard-to-recycle materials before Earth Day.
• Calculate your carbon footprint with The Nature Conserviancy’s free calculator. Then set one specific reduction goal, such as cutting your driving by a third through better shopping planning, and toss in a few more vegetables to replace some of the meat in your diet.

Community and civic

• Attend or co-host a teach-in at a local school, library, or community center using EARTHDAY.ORG’s free toolkits.
• Contact your U.S. representatives about specific environmental protection rollbacks. TNC’s nature pledge action and Audubon’s climate action pledge both offer easy ways to send an email.
• Organize a voter registration table at any Earth Day event.
• If you own a business or are an employer, use Earth Week to announce or move forward with a specific sustainability goal. This could be a new procurement policy, a waste reduction target, or a plan to switch your fleet to electric vehicles.

Critics of Earth Day have often noted the gap between the day’s symbolic energy and real, lasting change. That criticism is valid. This year’s approach addresses it more directly than most of the past 55 Earth Days. Still, the reality is that one day of awareness, no matter how big, can’t replace ongoing pressure on policies and institutions.

The best thing Earth Day 2026 can do is connect people with organizations that keep working year-round, and encourage you to stay involved after April 22. Look for events that offer ways to keep participating, like joining a chapter, plugging into an advocacy network, or helping out at a community garden throughout the season—not just on one Wednesday in April.

The post Earth Day 2026: Our Power, Our Planet Is A Call To Activism appeared first on Earth911.

Listen to “Earth911 Interview: Coastal Flooding In 2050 With Climate Scientist James Renwick” on Spreaker.

Turn back the clock to hear an early warning from James Renwick, co-author of the upcoming 2021 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) report and head of the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, joins Earth911 to discuss the prospects for coastal flooding due to climate change. He shares troubling but important insights into how much seas have already risen since the 1800s — about one foot — and the potential for up to two feet more flooding in the coming century. He also reports the UNIPCC will acknowledge that the critical 1.5C warming threshold is locked in unless the world takes radical action to reduce emissions immediately. Humanity has already committed future generations to potentially disastrous climate impacts, he says.

Renwick explains how much water is stored in Antarctica and the projections for economic and housing losses along the U.S. East Coast, which is particularly prone to flooding because of the configuration of ocean currents. He also discusses the growing accuracy of climate models and how accelerated warming seen in recent years appears poised to continue speeding ice loss at the poles. But, Renwick argues, the international climate dialogue has shifted from resistance to acknowledgment of climate impacts and growing national and local action, which gives him hope. “Things are moving in the right direction,” he told Earth911’s Mitch Ratcliffe. “But we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

The upcoming COP26 meeting of global leaders, which was postponed to the fall of 2021 due to the pandemic, will feature many nations’ increased commitments to reduce emissions. In the meantime, he urges individual citizens to speak out and choose sustainably produced products, as well as support effective local remediation projects, such as tree-planting programs. Each of us can make a difference. Start your journey with this conversation with Professor James Renwick.

• Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
• Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on January 1, 2021.

The post Classic Sustainability In Your Ear: Coastal Flooding in 2050 With Climate Scientist James Renwick appeared first on Earth911.

Before you throw away that empty soda bottle, wine bottle, or milk carton, think about turning it into a bird feeder.

These seven DIY projects show how to reuse common household items to make useful backyard wildlife stations. There’s something for everyone, whether you’re crafting with kids or have experience with tools. Whenever possible, choose glass instead of plastic. Experts say glass bottles last longer in the sun and are easier to clean than plastic.

This article contains affiliate links that help fund our work.

1. Soda Bottle Bird Feeder

The soda bottle bird feeder is a classic project that’s easy for anyone to make. Start by saving a 1- or 2-liter soda bottle from the recycling bin. Then, find two wooden spoons, dowels, or sturdy twigs from around your home or yard. These will serve as perches for the birds.

To make one, follow the instructions from Gardening Know How: mark two sets of holes at right angles, insert the spoons or dowels, fill the bottle with birdseed, put the cap back on, and hang it up with string or fishing line. If you’re working with young kids, adults should handle the cutting.

If you prefer not to do DIY from scratch, you can buy soda bottle bird feeder kits. Just attach the tray and wire to your own bottle.

2. Milk Carton Bird Feeder

Making a bird feeder from a milk or juice carton is just as easy as using a soda bottle. The Audubon Society even has a version that’s great for kids. Cut a large opening a few inches from the bottom on one side, add a stick underneath for a perch, make two small holes at the top for hanging, decorate it, and fill with birdseed.

Keep in mind that milk cartons don’t last as long as plastic or glass feeders. Watch for signs of wear and replace your feeder when needed. Remember to recycle the old carton.

3. Tray Bird Feeder

If you have leftover wood from a home project, you can make a simple tray feeder using Birds & Blooms’ instructions. You’ll need cedar or pine scraps, an aluminum screen for drainage, panel nails, eye screws, and some chain for hanging. You should also be comfortable using a drill and hammer.

You can also reuse old windows, picture frames, or other wooden items from around the house to make a tray feeder. One Instructables tutorial shows how someone built a feeder from the wooden backing of an old bronze award.

Tray feeders bring in many types of birds, like cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers, and mourning doves. However, they don’t keep out squirrels.

4. Floppy Disk Bird Feeder

If you have some old floppy disks lying around, you can turn them into a retro bird feeder using an Instructables guide.

You’ll need to take apart three disks, remove the magnetic film, cut a window for the seeds, put the pieces together to form a cube, and attach a string for hanging. Use tape or a hot glue gun to hold it together, then add birdseed inside.

5. Self-Refilling Glass Bottle Bird Feeder

This gravity-fed feeder is a smart upgrade from basic designs. Remodelaholic’s wine bottle bird feeder tutorial explains how to build a simple wooden platform with a notched holder that keeps an upside-down glass bottle just above the seed tray. As birds eat, gravity refills the tray with more seed.

You need only a recycled wine bottle (or any narrow-neck glass bottle) and some wood for this project. The screw-based mount makes it easy to remove the bottle for refilling. Use a low- or no-VOC wood sealer to protect the frame.

6. Plastic Bottle Hummingbird Feeder

Want to bring hummingbirds to your yard? Try this Instructables guide for making a hummingbird feeder from recycled plastic containers. It uses a pop bottle and a deli container lid, like the ones from grocery store takeout, with milk bottle caps glued on as feeding ports.

Fill the bottle with hummingbird nectar. The International Hummingbird Society suggests mixing one part white sugar with four parts water. Don’t use food coloring, honey, or artificial sweeteners. The red parts of the feeder attract the birds, not the nectar itself.

If you want something sturdier and easier to clean, Birds & Blooms offers instructions for a glass bottle hummingbird feeder that uses copper wire and a commercial feeding tube. This version takes more effort to make but lasts much longer.

7. Glass Soda Bottle Bird Feeder 

This is a step up in craft and durability, and a good reason to save that glass Jarritos or Mexican Coke bottle. Birds & Blooms’ glass soda bottle feeder tutorial pairs a recycled glass bottle with a chicken feeder base for a sturdy feeder that holds plenty of seed and will last for years.

The most involved step is drilling a hole in the bottle’s bottom using a diamond drill bit under running water to keep the bit cool so the glass doesn’t crack. A steel rod threads through the bottle and into the chicken feeder base, locked in place with a washer and wing nut; a G-hook at the top completes the hanger. To refill, simply unscrew the base, add seed, and reattach.

This DIY project requires comfort with a drill and patience with glass, but the result looks intentional and well-made, not like a weekend craft project. For the nectar-recipe and feeder-cleaning guidance that applies to all glass bottle builds, the International Hummingbird Society’s feeding page and Birds & Blooms’ black oil sunflower seed guide are solid references depending on what you’re trying to attract.

To find out where to recycle glass bottles in your area, check the Earth911 Recycling Directory. Most curbside programs don’t accept them, but many drop-off sites do.

Tips for Bird Feeders

• Clean your feeders every one or two weeks to stop mold and bacteria from harming birds.
• Hang feeders at least five feet above the ground and away from bushes where cats might hide.
• Black oil sunflower seeds attract the most types of birds.
• For hummingbird feeders, change the nectar every two or three days. In hot weather, change it even more often.
• Plastic feeders break down faster than glass ones in sunlight. Check them regularly and replace when needed.

Related on Earth911

• How to Start a Container Garden
• How to Compost at Home
• The Dos and Don’ts of Glass Recycling

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2014, and was most recently updated in March 2026.

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Nevada just shattered its March statewide high temperature record by 6 degrees, which is a ‘72 miles per hour in a school zone’ kind of margin. And it happened during the hottest 11-year stretch in 176 years of recorded temperature tracking.

A mid-March heat wave in the American West pushed temperatures in Laughlin, Nevada, to 106°F, far above the previous March record of 100°F. The fact that this happened in March is alarming, especially since it coincided with a near-total collapse of the region’s snowpack. This sets the stage for an early and possibly severe wildfire season. The heat also fits a troubling trend confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization last week: 2015 through 2025 have been the 11 warmest years ever recorded on Earth.

Usually, temperature records are broken by small amounts. What happened in Nevada last month was very different. Some places broke monthly high temperature records by as much as 8 degrees. Reno had seven days above 80°F in March, compared to the previous record of just two days. “It’s not just that we broke monthly records,” said Nevada State Climatologist Baker Perry, “but it’s by how much we broke the monthly records, and not just in one place.”

A Snow Drought That Wasn’t in the Forecast

The heat wave didn’t hit a typical winter landscape. Nevada was already experiencing what Perry calls an unprecedented snow drought. Even though winter precipitation was close to normal and there were big storms in mid-February, warm, moist air arrived soon after. This caused what the National Weather Service called the second-highest single-day snowmelt ever recorded in the eastern Sierra, only surpassed by flooding in 1997.

Normally, snow melts slowly through April and May, but this year it happened all at once in late February and early March. SNOTEL monitoring stations across Nevada show the impact clearly: 70% of sites in northern and central Nevada now report zero inches of snowpack. That’s not just low—it’s gone. The incidence of drought is closely correlated with rising atmospheric CO2 levels recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which is threatened with defunding by the Trump Administration.

What worries scientists most is the combination of these events. “To have these two unprecedented, exceptional events happening at once is a combination that is particularly concerning,” Perry said.

What This Means for Fire Season

Wildfire risk isn’t only about heat. It depends on the sequence of conditions leading up to fire season, and this year’s setup is especially dangerous.

The snowmelt and early rains caused plants to grow weeks ahead of schedule. This early growth creates lots of fine fuels. As these plants dry out over the spring—now with less moisture from snowpack—they become the kindling that can fuel fast-moving fires.

Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District Division Chief August Isernhagen said the early green-up could lead to conditions we haven’t seen before as fire season approaches. He urged people to be even more careful than in recent drought years.

“The majority of our starts, and nearly all of our catastrophic fires are human caused,” Isernhagen said in a statement from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Mountain forests face another challenge. Dawn Johnson, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the NWS in Reno, explained that losing snowpack this early means heavy timber can become drought-stressed much sooner than usual, turning it into a fire hazard months earlier than normal. A cooler storm pattern expected in early April might bring some relief, but experts warn it may be too little, too late to make a real difference.

Eleven Years. No Exceptions.

The Nevada heat wave wasn’t an isolated event. It happened during the longest stretch of global heat ever recorded.

The WMO’s State of the Global Climate 2025 report, released on March 23, confirmed that every year from 2015 to 2025 is among the hottest ever recorded. Depending on the data, 2025 was either the second- or third-warmest year since records began, with temperatures about 1.43°C above pre-industrial levels. Atmospheric CO₂ reached its highest level in 2 million years, and ocean temperatures set a new record for the ninth year in a row.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres put the streak in stark terms: “When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.”

The report also introduced a new measure called Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI). This tracks the difference between the energy the planet receives from the sun and the energy it sends back into space. In 2025, EEI was at its highest since records began in 1960. Surface temperatures, which get most of the attention, only show about 1% of the planet’s extra heat. Over 91% is absorbed by the oceans, which have taken in the equivalent of about 18 times the world’s total annual energy use each year for the past 20 years. EEI gives a clearer picture, showing that the planet is becoming more out of balance.

“In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding caused thousands of deaths, impacted millions of people and caused billions in economic losses,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She added that the changes driven by human activities “will have harmful repercussions for hundreds — and potentially thousands — of years.”

What’s happening in the Western U.S. matches the WMO’s global findings perfectly. The report highlighted major glacier loss in 2025 along North America’s Pacific coast. These events aren’t separate—they’re both signs of the same warming trend, just showing up in different ways and times.

“We seem to be entering this new era where temperatures will be significantly higher than what they were ten years ago,” said climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick of Australian National University. She explained that the changes of the past three years can only be explained by climate change.

What About the Cold in the East?

This is where things get both surprising and important.

If you live in the Northeast, Midwest, or Southeast, 2025 might not seem like a record-warm year. Some parts of the eastern U.S. have had cold snaps and severe winter weather that made national news. So how does that fit with 11 straight years of record global heat?

This actually makes sense in climate science. Climate change doesn’t warm every place at the same time. Instead, it disrupts atmospheric patterns like the polar vortex, which usually keeps cold air over the Arctic. As the Arctic warms much faster than the rest of the planet—about four times the global average, according to NOAA—the polar vortex weakens and shifts, letting cold air move into areas that don’t usually get it.

In other words, the same forces causing record heat in Nevada are also behind the unusual cold in the eastern U.S. These aren’t opposites—they’re both results of a destabilized climate system. Weather feels local, but our climate is shared. When the West is hot in March and the East is cold, both are signs of the same disrupted system.

What You Can Do

• If you live in the West, check current wildfire risk conditions through the National Interagency Fire Center and understand your local evacuation routes and readiness steps before fire season peaks.
• Lower the risk of starting fires. Most wildfires are caused by people, so be extra careful during high-risk times. Don’t have campfires during bans, avoid dragging chains on your vehicle or trailer, and make sure your equipment doesn’t create sparks.
• Support climate policy at both the state and federal levels. Reach out to your Congressional representatives. The WMO data shows the trend is clear. The decisions we make now will shape how severe fire seasons are in the future.
• Cut your home’s carbon footprint by using energy efficiently, choosing cleaner transportation, and making changes to your diet. One person’s actions won’t solve the global problem, but when many people make changes, it can have a real impact on emissions.
• If you live in the eastern U.S., don’t let cold winters make you ignore climate data. Pay attention to what’s happening across the country—the same atmosphere connects us all.

Related Reading on Earth911

How to Prepare Your Home for Wildfire Season

The post The West Is Burning Before Summer Even Starts, and It’s No Accident appeared first on Earth911.

Today’s inspiration and photo come from Earth911’s Mitch Ratcliffe: “The first step to sustainability is seeing that there is no boundary between you and nature.” This early morning shot of Waughop Lake in Western Washington caught ground fog between a cloudy sky and a perfect reflection in the water below. There is no difference between us and nature, except for the artificial ones we create by imagining boundaries. When we see this essential connection and reverse the artificial disconnections created over millennia, people can imagine a future where we all thrive with a regenerated ecosystem.

Post and share Earth911 posters to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: The First Step To Sustainability appeared first on Earth911.

If you stop commuting, your work-related carbon footprint could drop by more than half. However, this only happens if you make smart choices at home and recognize the growing environmental impact of the digital tools that enable remote work.

Remote and hybrid work have grown rapidly since the pandemic, and research is now reflecting this shift. A 2023 study from Cornell University and Microsoft found that full-time remote workers can lower their work-related carbon footprint by up to 54% compared to office workers. However, this reduction depends a lot on your lifestyle, where you live, and how your home is powered. There is also a new factor to consider: AI tools are now part of most remote work setups, and they bring their own environmental impact that needs attention.

What the Latest Research Actually Shows

The Cornell/Microsoft study is the most comprehensive analysis to date, and its conclusions are more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Remote workers who log four or more days at home each week achieve the biggest emissions reductions — up to 54%. Hybrid workers, depending on arrangement, reduce their footprint by 11% to 29%. But working from home just one day a week? The benefit nearly disappears, largely offset by non-commute trips and residential energy use.

The study’s most surprising finding is that information and communication technology — your laptop, your router, your video calls — has a negligible impact on total carbon footprint compared to commuting and office building energy. The big variables are how you get around on non-work days, whether your home runs on clean energy, and whether your employer reduces office space when people stop working there regularly.

Seat sharing is one overlooked lever: hybrid workers sharing desks under full building attendance can cut office-related emissions by up to 28%. Companies that maintain empty office space for remote employees are effectively double counting their environmental footprint.

A 2025 survey found that 62.3% of Americans believe remote work has had a positive impact on the environment, and 95% of people working from home report that they behave more sustainably without trying by using reusable mugs, reducing printing, and cooking at home. Those behavioral shifts are real, even if they’re harder to quantify than commute math.

The AI Variable Adds Emissions

AI tools are becoming common for remote workers, and they’re not free from an emissions standpoint.

Every AI query you send, whether for a meeting summary, a draft email, or a research lookup, draws power at a data center. A December 2025 study in the journal Patterns estimated that AI systems running in data centers could produce between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons of CO₂ in 2025 alone. Our own coverage of AI’s carbon footprint found that always-on AI agents, the kind that continuously scan inboxes, monitor projects, or run background analysis, can consume orders of magnitude more energy than occasional conversational use.

AI’s efficiency picture is mixed, but improving as chips, data centers, and prompts are refined. Google reported a 33x reduction in energy per median prompt over one year. But historically, efficiency gains in computing are overwhelmed by growth in usage — and AI-assisted remote work tools are proliferating fast. The World Economic Forum said in September 2025 that without intentional design, the hidden carbon footprint of remote digital collaboration could grow unchecked, offsetting the gains from reduced commuting.

For example, on hour-long HD video call can emit between 150 and 1,000 grams of CO₂, depending on how the data center is powered. Switching to standard definition or turning the camera off entirely for large-group updates can dramatically reduce that impact.

Location Still Drives the Math

Where your employees live influences the sustainability calculus more than almost anything else. Urban workers who can bike or take transit to a coworking space on hybrid days often outperform both full-remote and office-commuter models. Suburban and rural remote workers, especially those in single-occupancy gas-powered vehicles, can neutralize the home energy savings quickly.

Electric vehicles shift that equation, but only if the regional grid is clean. The Cornell study notes that emissions reductions from EVs depend on the extent of power grid decarbonization. A remote worker in West Virginia charging an EV from a coal-heavy grid will not see the same benefit as one in the Pacific Northwest.

There’s also an equity dimension that sustainability analyses frequently miss. A 2023 study in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling found that low-income workers who are least likely to hold remote-eligible jobs shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden in carbon reduction scenarios centered on telework. A green work policy that only works for knowledge workers isn’t a complete climate strategy.

The Home Office Is Where Individuals Have the Most Control

Your home energy source matters most. Workers with solar panels, heat pumps, or access to renewable energy tariffs capture substantially more of the commute-reduction benefit. Those heating with natural gas or cooling with inefficient window units can erode the benefit considerably.

Choosing ENERGY STAR-rated equipment is the baseline. Beyond that, the Cornell study found that non-commute travel is the sleeper variable because remote workers who use their schedule flexibility to run more errands by car, or who move farther from urban centers, can significantly offset what they save by not driving to an office. Bike-accessible errands and transit-friendly neighborhoods matter.

Use AI tools intentionally rather than as a default for tasks you can do quickly without them. Turn off always-on AI agents when continuous monitoring isn’t necessary. Check whether your preferred platforms disclose their energy sourcing, and push the ones that don’t.

What Employers Can Do Differently

Research findings clearly suggest that remote work’s environmental benefits are not automatic. They require active choices by organizations, not just individuals. Companies tracking carbon neutrality should include the emissions of their remote workforce in their accounting, not treat off-site employees as zero-emission by default.

Concrete organizational steps supported by research:

• Reduce or eliminate dedicated office space for fully remote employees; shifting a desk hoteling strategy to make room for people when they are in the office.
• Implement seat sharing for hybrid arrangements in existing offices.
• Incentivize public transit and active commuting for hybrid workers.
• Audit AI tool deployments to understand which agents run continuously and whether batch processing could serve the same function at a fraction of the energy cost.
• Normalize lower-bandwidth video defaults: turn off HD video for large meetings and encourage camera-optional norms for all-hands updates.
• Choose cloud and collaboration platforms that disclose renewable energy commitments, and pressure those that don’t to be transparent.

Actions To Take At Home

The most impactful individual moves, in rough order of significance:

• Power your home using clean energy. Solar panels, a green energy tariff, or a community solar subscription capture the full benefit of eliminating your commute.
• Drive less on days off. Non-commute car trips are the biggest wildcard in remote work emissions. Combine errands, bike when you can, and stay aware of the trips you’re adding back.
• Use AI tools intentionally. Every query has a cost. Treat AI the way you’d treat any other energy-using appliance — useful, but worth using mindfully.
• Lower video call resolution. Switching from HD to SD in video meetings — or turning your camera off for large presentations — can cut conferencing emissions significantly.
• Buy refurbished or Energy Star equipment. A refurbished laptop avoids new materials extraction. Energy Star monitors and peripherals reduce idle-state draw.
• Advocate for your building. If you’re in a hybrid arrangement, push your employer to implement seat sharing and right-size the office footprint.

Related Reading on Earth911

Your AI Carbon Footprint: What Every Query Really Costs

Greening the Cloud: How AI Is Reshaping Data Center Power Demands

What Is the Carbon Footprint of Video Streaming?

Editor’s Note: This article was orginally published on March 13, 2018, and was substantially updated in March 2026.

The post Is Working from Home Really More Sustainable? appeared first on Earth911.

That foam coffee cup, takeout box, or packing block likely won’t be recycled. It’s not your fault; most Americans lack access to recycling systems for these materials. The plastics industry says it’s improving, and that’s true in some ways. But there’s still a gap between industry claims and what people can actually do when taking out the trash.

Before we talk about why foam is hard to recycle, it’s helpful to know what it really is. “Polystyrene” is the material, though it is often referred to by the brand name “Styrofoam,” and it comes in different forms. EPS is the foam used in coffee cups, takeout boxes, and packing blocks. The hard kind, found in utensils and appliance parts, is GPPS or HIPS. Both are polystyrene but need different recycling methods.

The #6 symbol on the foam container only tells you what kind of plastic it is, not if it can be recycled. If you put it in the bin just because you see a number and the recycling arrows, it can actually contaminate your other recyclables, like paper, cardboard, and aluminum, and might cause the whole batch to be rejected.

The Recycling That Happens Without You

The plastics industry recently launched the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance (PSRA), which commissioned a detailed study of where polystyrene foam is actually recycled in the US. Its headline stat: about 105 million Americans — roughly one in three — have access to recycling services that handle at least one type of polystyrene.

That sounds promising. But one must read the fine print to see the whole picture.

The PSRA–RRS Polystyrene End Markets Study, published in February 2026, is the most detailed inventory of US and Canadian polystyrene recycling infrastructure to date. It identified 81 companies handling recovered EPS and XPS foam, with 119 facilities spread across 30 US states and four Canadian provinces. About 52% of those companies are manufacturing end markets, businesses that actually turn recovered foam into new products like transport packaging and insulation.

Most of this recycling happens through business-to-business systems that regular people don’t use. Big retailers, warehouses, and appliance stores create large amounts of packing foam. They have private deals with haulers who collect the foam, compress it into dense bricks called “densified foam,” and send it to manufacturers, mainly to make new packaging and insulation. Some European and Asian companies also import compressed EPS from North America for manufacturing. There are also more than 700 drop-off locations for foam across the country.

Environmental groups note that EPS drop-off access, in stark contrast to industry claims, currently reaches only about 3% of the US population.

Between 2019 and 2023, Foam Recycling Coalition-funded programs nearly doubled the amount collected, according to Waste Dive‘s reporting. The Alliance reported 168.6 million pounds of EPS foam were diverted from disposal in North America in 2022. But it’s largely invisible to consumers, and almost none of it involves your curbside bin.

For the rigid forms of polystyrene, the stuff in your fridge’s vegetable drawer or your blender housing, the recycling picture is much less encouraging. The same PSRA–RRS study found just 45 companies handling recovered GPPS and HIPS in the US and Canada, and only 13% of those actually turning it into new products. Those 45 companies operate just 50 facility sites across 22 US states and four Canadian provinces, compared to 119 facilities in 30 states for foam. Most post-consumer rigid polystyrene that does get recycled comes from medical equipment and e-waste programs, not household recycling.

For consumers navigating this landscape, Earth911’s Recycling Mystery: Expanded Polystyrene offers a practical guide to what’s currently accepted and where it’s accepted.

Why Curbside Doesn’t Want It

Foam is a recycler’s nightmare, and the reason is simple: it’s mostly air.

EPS is about 95% air by volume. A regular collection truck can fill up with foam that weighs almost nothing, so the hauler spends the same amount of money to collect much less valuable material. Also, foam breaks apart easily, and small pieces can mix with paper and cardboard in the same bin, making everything else less valuable.

A 2024 study in the journal ChemSusChem found that processing polystyrene costs about $1,456 per metric ton, more than for most other plastics. This rate works only when there are grants, subsidies, or a guaranteed supply chain in place, but none of those exist at the scale needed to handle all the foam Americans throw away.

What “Chemical Recycling” Can and Can’t Do

You may have heard that polystyrene can be “chemically recycled,” meaning it is broken down by heat into its original building blocks to make new plastic. While that’s technically possible, it’s not happening on a large scale.

The only US facility dedicated to this polystyrene process, run by a company called Regenyx in Oregon, shut down in early 2024. A National Resources Defense Council report from March 2025 found only eight chemical recycling facilities of any kind operating in the entire US. Most of what these plants produce isn’t new plastic; it’s fuel oil, which means the material isn’t really being recycled so much as burned in a different way. The  Regenyx plant generated approximately one ton of hazardous waste for every ton of usable output, a serious problem the industry doesn’t advertise.

The 79% Nobody Talks About

Here’s a number worth sitting with: only 21% of all residential recyclables in the US actually get recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership’s 2024 State of Recycling Report — one of the most comprehensive independent analyses of the US system.

What about the other 79%? Most of it is lost at home before it ever reaches a recycling facility. People might not have access to a recycling program, might not know what their local program accepts, or just don’t take part. The report, along with EPA plastics data, shows that the overall US plastic recycling rate is only about 5–6%. For foam, which most curbside programs don’t accept, this gap at the household level is even harder to close. The industry’s solution is drop-off programs, but these require people to know where to go, make a special trip, and bring clean, uncontaminated foam. That’s asking a lot.

The Recycling Partnership says the biggest problem in the US recycling system isn’t technology or end markets. It’s getting people involved, and the main way to do that is through funding for education and outreach, which most municipalities lack. The EPA’s 2024 Recycling Infrastructure Assessment estimated it would take $36–$43 billion to upgrade the US system by 2030. A Resource Recycling summary found that nearly half of US states don’t even track how many curbside programs they have. You can’t fix a system if you aren’t measuring it.

How The U.S. EPS Recycling Rate Compares

The US lags well behind other wealthy countries when it comes to foam recycling.

Market data compiled through 2023 indicate that EPS recycling rates for comparable packaging are approximately 88% in South Korea, 83% in Taiwan, and 68% in Japan. Europe averages around 40%, though that figure masks wide variations. Some countries, including Portugal and Norway, approach 90% recovery rates, largely driven by fish box collection programs, while thers sit well below the average. North America comes in at roughly 31%, and that figure is almost entirely commercial collection programs, not household recycling.

It’s worth noting that all of these figures come primarily from GESA (the Global EPS Sustainability Alliance) and affiliated national industry groups, organizations with a direct stake in presenting favorable data. Independent verification is limited.

Japan’s foam recycling program has been running since 1978, and the country’s EPS industry group reports an effective utilization rate of 94.2% in 2024. That “effective utilization” figure includes incineration with energy recovery, not just mechanical recycling. South Korea made packaging producers legally responsible for recycling costs as early as 2000, a policy approach called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). The US has no federal EPR law for packaging and only seven states that have passed one so far.

Overall, the US ranked 30th in the world on the 2024 Environmental Performance Index’s waste recovery score. Germany, Japan, South Korea, and most of Western Europe all rank higher.

The Biggest Companies Are Giving Up on Foam

One of the clearest signs about foam’s future isn’t coming from regulators. It’s coming from the brands that use it.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), which tracks voluntary sustainability commitments from over 1,000 companies representing about 20% of global plastic packaging production, released its final progress report in late 2025. Since 2018, signatory companies have removed over 775,000 metric tons of the most problematic plastics, including polystyrene and PVC, from their packaging entirely.

The EMF classifies certain polystyrene formats, especially foam foodservice containers, as plastics that should be eliminated rather than recycled. In its framework for problematic plastics, it consistently identifies these materials as candidates for phase-out, not circularity. That’s the stated view of an organization whose members include Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and L’Oréal.

Meanwhile, those same companies are falling short of their overall recycled-content targets for plastics. The share of recycled plastic in the broader global packaging market barely moved — from 3.4% to 4.2% — even as committed companies tripled their own use of recycled content. As Chemical & Engineering News reported in November 2025, plastics recycling is struggling across the industry.

Voluntary commitments move the leaders, but they don’t move the system.

States Are Banning Expanded Polystyrene

Twelve states and three US territories have chosen not to wait for the recycling system to improve. They’ve banned foam food containers completely, and Earth911 tracks these changes. Oregon, California, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Hawaii all joined the ban list as of January 1, 2025.

California’s law included a recycling test: foam producers had to show a 25% recycling rate by January 2025 to keep selling EPS foodware in the state. When CalRecycle reported to the legislature that the industry had fallen far short—the rate was about 6% when the law passed—foam containers were effectively banned.

Not every ban effort has succeeded. Montana’s legislature passed a phase-out bill in spring 2025 — only to have the governor veto it. And while a federal “Farewell to Foam Act” has been introduced in Congress, it hasn’t passed.

Globally, the bans are further along. The EU banned foam food containers in 2021. Canada followed with federal legislation in 2022. Over 97% of Australians now live somewhere with an EPS ban in place, according to Wikipedia’s phase-out tracker.

What Would Actually Fix Polystyrene Recycling

The most honest answer is that recycling alone won’t solve the foam problem. But better policy can.

The Recycling Partnership’s EPR analysis finds that states with Extended Producer Responsibility laws have recycling rates up to 3 times higher than those without them. EPR generates funds for consumer education, access, and infrastructure that cash-strapped municipalities can’t provide on their own.

The PSRA’s end markets study is candid about what’s missing for rigid polystyrene. For GPPS and HIPS to be recycled at scale, the industry needs to solve a chicken-and-egg problem. Sorting facilities won’t invest in the equipment without a guaranteed buyer for the output, and buyers won’t commit without a reliable supply. The study’s concrete suggestion is to offer subsidies per pound to sorting facilities that would need to separate polystyrene from mixed plastic streams. Without that financial nudge, the economics don’t work.

As Earth911 has reported on Oregon and Maine’s early EPR programs, the results so far are encouraging, though implementation is still in early stages. Seven states now have packaging EPR laws, including Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington, and more are considering them.

The broader lesson is that without policy structures that change the economics, including embracing EPR, mandatory recycled content standards, or bans, voluntary action produces incremental progress against a systemic problem. As Chemical & Engineering News reported, even companies with strong sustainability commitments are falling short.

What You Can Do At Home

Find a drop-off:

• Search Earth911 for EPS foam drop-off locations near you. These are separate from your curbside bin — call ahead to confirm they accept your specific type of foam.
• For foam meat trays, most facilities won’t take food-soiled containers, so they must be clean and dry.
• Retailers like The UPS Store accept clean packing peanuts for reuse.

Cut foam out of your routine:

• Bring your own insulated mug to the coffee shop instead of accepting a foam cup.
• When ordering takeout, ask for paper or compostable containers.
• When shipping things, use crumpled newspaper, shredded paper, or molded pulp instead of foam peanuts.

Push for better policy:

• Find out whether your state has a packaging EPR bill pending. If it does, contact your representative in support. The trend is moving in that direction.
• Support Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation in your state, which shifts the cost of recycling infrastructure from municipalities to the companies that make the packaging.

Related Reading on Earth911

• Recycling Mystery: Expanded Polystyrene
• EPS Foam Packaging & Products Bans Expand to Oregon, California, and Three Other States
• Extended Producer Responsibility in 2025: Progress, With More to Come
• Learning from Maine and Oregon’s EPR Programs
• The State of Plastic Bans in the United States
• Infographic: Plastic Recycling Codes

The post The State of Polystyrene Recycling In 2026 appeared first on Earth911.

Americans throw out 81.5 pounds of clothing a year; two-thirds of it ends up in landfills. That’s no accident—it’s a fast fashion design principle that many have embraced.

A December 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that textile waste grew by more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2018, while federal agencies still lack a coordinated strategy. As a result, consumers seeking sustainable options carry the burden of finding responsible brands.

Look good and reduce your footprint—you don’t have to choose. The brands below carry recognized certifications, use lower-impact materials, and often sell via Amazon. We’ve updated this list since 2021 to reflect brands still delivering and those raising the bar.

Throughout this list, you’ll see references to GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), Fair Trade Certified, and SA8000. GOTS covers the entire supply chain from farm to finished garment, requiring organic fibers and strict environmental and social standards. Fair Trade and SA8000 focus on worker wages, safety, and conditions. These aren’t marketing claims, they require third-party audits.

This article contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This supports our independent work but does not influence our recommendations or coverage.

1. Pact — GOTS-Certified Organic Cotton Basics and Dresses

Pact offers women a strong foundation for building a sustainable wardrobe. Each garment is crafted from GOTS-certified organic cotton in Fair Trade Certified factories, with certifications updated as recently as 2025. The brand partners with SimpliZero to measure and offset the carbon footprint of individual products, investing in reforestation and renewable energy.

Their organic cotton process uses 81% less water and 62% less energy than conventional cotton farming, a meaningful difference given that a single conventional cotton T-shirt typically requires around 2,700 liters of water to produce.

Standout Pact picks on Amazon:

• The Pact Organic Cotton Women’s Ruffled Maxi Dress is made from 100% organic cotton double gauze and is machine washable.
• Pact’s Organic Cotton Women’s Fit & Flare Halter Dress, which features 95% organic cotton and 5% elastane
• The Organic Cotton Women’s Lightweight Jacket, featuring 97% organic cotton, is a great layering piece.
• Check out Pact’s Organic Cotton Women’s Gauze Wide Leg Pantsmade from 100% organic cotton with a smocked elastic waistband

2. Girlfriend Collective — Recycled Activewear with Radical Transparency

Seattle-based Girlfriend Collective leads in sustainable activewear. Its fabrics are made from post-consumer plastic bottles, fishing nets, and fabric scraps. They are OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified and BPA-free, making them safer if they end up in a landfill. The brand uses eco-friendly dyes and provides washing bags with each purchase to help reduce microfiber pollution.

On the labor side, Girlfriend Collective holds SA8000 certification, which independently verifies safe working conditions and fair wages. They also run ReGirlfriend, a take-back and recycling program that gives you store credit for returning worn-out pieces. That circular loop — buy, wear, return, recycle — is still rare in activewear.

The brand carries sizes XXS to 6XL and has an Amazon storefront with frequently updated inventory.

Standout picks:

• Girlfriend Collective High-Rise Skort is crafted from recycled polyester sourced from certified post-consumer plastic bottles and features useful hidden pockets.
• Browse Girlfriend Collective’s full Amazon store for leggings, sports bras, and shorts.

3. Eileen Fisher — Circular Fashion and B Corp Commitment

If any brand embodies “timeless,” it’s Eileen Fisher. Since 2013, the company has championed circularity through its Renew take-back program—one of the longest-running garment recycling efforts in American fashion. Send back your worn Eileen Fisher pieces, and they’re cleaned, repaired, and resold or upcycled into new textiles.

As of 2025, 75% of Eileen Fisher’s products use lower-emissions or certified materials, including organic linen, organic cotton, regenerative wool, TENCEL lyocell, and deadstock fabric. The brand holds certifications from GOTS, GRS (Global Recycled Standard), RWS (Responsible Wool Standard), Bluesign, and FSC. It’s also a certified B Corp with published emissions targets.

Eileen Fisher acknowledges it is not currently on track to hit its science-based emissions reduction targets. That’s a candid admission that distinguishes genuine transparency from greenwashing. Their organic linen and TENCEL pieces are particularly durable and environmentally benign: linen requires no irrigation in most growing conditions and generates roughly a quarter of the carbon emissions per pound of fiber as conventional cotton.

Eileen Fisher sells direct at eileenfisher.com with free shipping on U.S. orders.

4. Reformation — Carbon-Tracked Dresses and Recycled Cashmere

Los Angeles-based Reformation publishes quarterly sustainability reports that break down water, energy, and carbon footprint per product — a level of granularity that almost no other fashion brand offers. Their key fabrics include TENCEL™ Lyocell, produced in a closed-loop system that recycles 99% of its non-toxic solvent, low-irrigation linen, and Forest Stewardship Council-certified viscose.

In late 2024, Reformation launched its first 100% recycled cashmere sweater line — a blend of 95% recycled cashmere and 5% recycled wool. The brand reports these sweaters produce 96% less carbon and require 89% less water than conventional cashmere. That’s a significant claim, and the brand backs it with third-party verification.

Reformation also partners with ThredUp and Poshmark so you can resell verified purchases directly through those platforms. It also offers a take-back program for Ref sweaters, shoes, denim, and outerwear.

Reformation sells direct at thereformation.com.

5. Amour Vert — Made in California, Plant a Tree With Every Tee

Amour Vert (“green love” in French) produces 97% of its garments in California, collaborating with mills to create signature sustainable fabrics such as beechwood modal, GOTS-certified cotton, OEKO-TEX silk, TENCEL, and cupro from cotton waste. The brand recycles nearly all byproducts at its factories.

For every T-shirt purchased, Amour Vert plants a tree in North America through its partnership with American Forests, and has planted more than 220,000 trees to date. Products are made in small batches to limit overproduction, and the brand offers an upcycled clothing collection that transforms discarded materials into new pieces.

Key pieces for the Spring and Summer of 2026 include:

• Victoire Wide Leg Pants feature organic cotton and a TENCEL blend, a versatile year-round foundation for your look.
• The Verona Blazer is made from organic cotton and TENCEL to deliver an office-appropriate, seasonless look.
• The Sloan Skirt uses TENCEL from sustainably sourced wood pulp to provide moisture-wicking comfort.

6. Warp + Weft — Size-Inclusive Denim Under $100

A traditional pair of jeans takes roughly 1,500 gallons of water to produce. Warp + Weft, a family-owned brand, produces jeans using less than 10 gallons of water. By operating a vertically integrated denim mill, Warp + Weft controls every step: utilizing onsite solar panels, a heat recovery system, recycling and treating 98% of water used, and employing dry ozone technology instead of chemical bleaching.

The brand is fully size-inclusive (through 3X for women), and prices stay under $100. Their compliance with International Social and Environmental & Quality Standards is auditable, not self-reported. Warp + Weft has expanded from denim into matching sets, tops, and jackets, making it easier to build a full outfit around their sustainable denim base.

Shop at warpweftworld.com and Amazon.

7. Karen Kane — Ethical Production and TENCEL Chambray

Karen Kane stands out for its transparent, energy-efficient operations, including LA-based manufacturing, hangar reuse, and sustainable fabric initiatives. The Asymmetric Hem Wrap Top, a signature design, is crafted from 100% TENCEL soft chambray made with FSC-certified wood pulp. This closed-loop process recaptures and reuses solvents, greatly reducing chemical waste compared to traditional rayon methods.

Karen Kane offers a broader range of wardrobe essentials beyond the wrap top, and its women’s collection is available on itssite and select Amazon listings.

8. Mango — Organic Denim and a Declared Sustainability Road Map

Mango is a larger brand, which warrants more scrutiny, but it can also make a positive impact through its environmental commitments. The brand publicly committed to using 100% organic cotton and 50% recycled polyester by 2025, and 100% cellulose fibers with verified sustainable origins by 2030. Their organic cotton pieces, including several denim options, are genuinely certified organic, meaning no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers are used in cultivation.

Mango describes its sustainability journey as ongoing, and it is. Organic cotton still requires significant water input, and a large global retailer faces supply chain complexity that smaller brands avoid. Good On You rates the brand as making progress but “Not Good Enough.” That said, Mango’s organic denim line is worth considering for shoppers who want accessible price points alongside high-quality materials. Organic Mango pieces are available through mango.com.

What You Can Do To Lower Your Impact

Individual purchasing choices alone won’t fix a 17-million-ton textile waste problem. But they shape markets, and markets respond. Here’s how to shop with more impact:

• Look for GOTS, Fair Trade Certified, or B Corp status. These require third-party audits, not just brand claims.
• Prioritize longevity. A $90 Eileen Fisher linen shirt, worn 200 times, has a far lower footprint than a $20 fast-fashion top, worn 7.
• When you’re done with clothes, resell on ThredUP, Poshmark, or TheRealReal before donating. Secondhand marketplaces keep clothing in circulation longer.
• Use Earth911’s recycling search to find textile recycling options in your area. Only about 15% of U.S. textiles are currently recycled.
• Check takeback programs before you throw anything out. Eileen Fisher Renew, Girlfriend Collective’s ReGirlfriend, and Reformation’s takeback initiative all exist for exactly this reason.

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