$850 billion. That’s what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn’t look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it.

The fix isn’t a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What’s missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object. When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That’s what circularity looks like when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one. Follow Don’s work at WhatTheyThink.com and on X at @DCarli.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:08

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

Let’s take another look at the topic of e-commerce returns and how to reduce them by tuning the economy for less waste. We’re going to start with making what you see online look like what you receive on your doorstep.

Now here’s a number that should stop you in your tracks the next time you shop online: $850 billion. That’s how much retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026. And here’s another number: 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste generated by those returns in a single year — roughly the same as burying 10,500 fully loaded Boeing 747s in the ground. That’s a lot of waste.

Now you might assume that most of these returns are about fit — pants that don’t fit, shoes that pinch. But 22% of consumers report returning items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles categories, where fit isn’t the issue, that percentage climbs even higher. A sofa that passes every quality specification still gets returned because it clashes with the throw pillow that also passed every specification — when they don’t look alike in the home, both can end up in a landfill, because repackaging costs more than recovery.

Today’s conversation is about why that happens and what we can do about it. My guest today is Don Carli. Don’s a good friend and the founder of the consulting firm NEMA Hunter Incorporated. Two of Don’s recent articles on the site What They Think got me thinking about how an apparently esoteric discussion of color calibration and spectral profiles actually represents something much larger — the fine-tuning we can do to the 20th-century industrial system that was never designed to connect digital promises to physical reality.

Don is also a Senior Research Fellow with the nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communication, where he has directed programs on corporate responsibility, sustainability, advertising, marketing, and enterprise communication. He’s also a member of the board of advisors for the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design and a member of the Institute for Supply Management.

So here’s why this matters beyond the print and packaging industry, where Don has spent most of his career. The 20th century built industrial systems optimized for mass production: make a lot, ship it out, and hope people keep it. These systems created enormous efficiencies on the one hand, but they also created enormous waste — often hidden in the seams between suppliers, brands, and retailers, where no single stakeholder owns enough of the problem to force a solution. In fact, it really means nobody lost enough money to care.

What Don’s work reveals is that we now have the technical architecture to fine-tune these legacy systems — not replace them, but recalibrate them. The standards exist. The measurement hardware exists. The digital rendering pipelines exist. What’s missing is the coordination: getting brands, retailers, and others to share data they currently hold separately, and to recognize that the costs they’re each absorbing individually are symptoms of the same system failure — a failure of color calibration.

And this is what sustainability can look like in practice: not moonshot reinventions, but the patient technical work of closing gaps between digital and physical, between specification and reality, and between what we promise customers and what we deliver. If we get this right, we can reduce waste, cut costs, and rebuild trust with consumers who’ve learned to expect that what they see online isn’t quite what they’re going to get.

You can follow Don’s work on X. His handle is @DCarli — that’s spelled D-C-A-R-L-I, all one word, no space, no dash.

So can we calibrate what we see online with what we experience when we open a package, reducing the need to return a purchase? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:29

Welcome to the show, Don. How are you doing today?

Don Carli  4:31

Fantastic, Mitch. I’m really glad to be here with you today and looking forward to the conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:37

Always great to talk with you, Don. This came up in our discussions over the past couple of months, and then I read the article and wanted to follow up. To start off, can you walk us through a typical scenario? A customer orders a navy sectional and a matching throw pillow from different suppliers. They appear to be the same color — they both pass all the quality specifications we’ve talked about — but under the living room lights, the consumer finds they clash. What happened between the approved image and her disappointment? Where did the system break down?

Don Carli  5:15

We’ve all had this experience at some point in our lives. In part, it’s because of the nature of human perception. We would like to think that color is a constant thing, but color is an interaction of multiple variables.

One variable is the light source — specifically, the distribution of wavelengths in that light. As you know, the visible spectrum is a small part of all the radiation there is. There’s ultraviolet light you can’t see, there’s infrared light you can’t see, and then there’s all the colors in between — the ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — the colors we’re familiar with. Every light source has a different distribution of those energies.

Second, the material an object is made of has its own capacity to absorb different wavelengths, and that can vary. So you have variation in the energies emitted by the light source, variation in the energies absorbed and reflected by the object, and then there’s the viewer. Our visual system takes up a big part of our brain — it’s not just our eyes, but our eyes have a lot to do with it. Some of us are colorblind, for example, and in other cases, color is simply not a constant thing.

I worked with the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers for many years — he wrote the book The Interaction of Color. He used to say, ‘When you put one color next to another color, you get a third color for free,’ because those two colors interact with each other.

To put it simply: you put on a pair of socks and a pair of pants in your bedroom under incandescent light. The pants are brown, the socks are brown. You go out into the daylight. The pants look green. The socks are still brown. What happened? The light changed. Because daylight has more energy at one end of the spectrum, it reflects more blue light, making the brown look greener.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:56

That’s really interesting to think about — how we’ve moved from an era of commerce where, say, items in the Sears catalog were originally sketched, versus photographed. As we introduced greater verisimilitude in our catalogs, or on Amazon —

Don Carli  8:17

We set expectations differently. Exactly.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:20

So how should we think about the expectations we’re setting — both as sellers of things and as consumers? How should we be thinking about this?

Don Carli  8:30

In part, most of this is simply not taught. Most students in grade school, high school, or even university are not given any exposure to the psychology of human perception. There’s a physiological and psychological basis to all of this, and we just don’t know about it.

The problem has always existed. What’s happened with e-commerce — and with sophisticated computer graphic rendering of objects that don’t yet exist in the real world but look real — is that we’re setting expectations. On my screen I see this couch. It looks brown. The pillows look brown. So I expect that when they arrive, they’re both going to look brown.

Unfortunately, the lighting in homes now is no longer even incandescent. LEDs have really unusual spectral curves — they can be the problem. If I had been able to see what those items were going to look like under the lighting in my home, I might be less disappointed. I’d say, ‘Oh, wait — they don’t match.’ But in developing the systems for e-commerce, the companies that develop software for rendering — the tools designers use to develop the rendering of images for websites and monitors — simply don’t take these things into consideration.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:10

Our economy was massified in the 20th century but it’s moving toward personalization in the 21st century. And what you’re describing — what you named in the article — is metamerism.

Don Carli  10:21

It’s not my term. It’s metamerism — or ‘metamerism,’ yes. That’s fine.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:27

This phenomenon, combined with changing lighting technology and the changing nature of our homes — which can allow more or less light in, and offer a variable lighting palette —

Don Carli  10:37

A variable lighting palette, yeah.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:38

— suggests that the palette will always be changing. So how do we create consistent expectations among consumers when we’re trying to communicate what we offer?

Don Carli  10:57

Well, standards help to begin with. We do not have a set of coordinated standards today that allow the designer to anticipate the observer’s environment and lighting conditions for a given product. Second, we don’t have standards in place to communicate between what the designer intends and what the manufacturer produces — because it is possible to create pigments and dyes that do not exhibit metamerism. Really.

It’s been standard practice in some industries where it matters. If you go to an informed paint company and say, ‘I want a non-metameric match of this swatch,’ they would use a device called a spectrophotometer, which measures the absorption curve of the pigments employed — so that under any lighting condition, the appearance doesn’t change, because the curves have been matched.

But I can create a match that only looks correct under one light source, which is typically what happens when people revert to either a monitor — which only has three emitters: red, green, and blue — or printing, where typically you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If you want to truly match, you have to match the curve.

New printers being used for digital textiles actually have 10 channels, and it is possible to use pigments across those channels to make the absorption curve of the material non-metameric — or at least less metameric. We’re waiting for standards to come together, and that will only happen, I believe, if the brands suffering the greatest economic loss from this mismatch problem take action to put the requirements in their purchase orders and to support pilots that address that 22% of returns due to color perception that you described.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:27

You do point out that IKEA, Amazon, Wayfair, and others have funded the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group to ensure that products look consistent across different apps and websites. So they want consistency when rendered on a digital screen, but they’re apparently okay with the fact they don’t look the same when they arrive?

Don Carli  13:54

Yes, I like the disconnect. It’s interesting. First of all, it would require collaboration across industry — across groups that don’t typically talk to each other. I don’t think it’s willful. I think it’s more like, ‘Wow, they just haven’t gotten around to that.’ Nobody fully realized how much was at stake. And the potential for a connection between the two standards that do exist is actually very good and straightforward, because they’re both extensible standards.

What’s needed — as I said — is for the businesses that are right now losing approximately $850 billion a year due to returns to ask: How much of that is attributable to consumers who’ve been given permission by e-commerce companies to say, ‘Something doesn’t look right, so I want to return it’? We’ve made it easy to return things.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:09

The customer was always right.

Don Carli  15:11

That’s correct. And it’s going to be hard to put that one back in the bottle. So now we have to ask: out of the $850 billion — which is just the retail cost of the goods, not the cost of reverse logistics, not the cost of reprocessing, not the disposal of that returned product to landfill or incineration — if you take it all together, it’s probably $1.25 trillion, maybe even $1.5 trillion. And if you said, ‘Okay, but how much of that is because somebody said the colors don’t match?’ — even being very conservative, say 10% — that’s still enough money to justify addressing the root cause of the problem.

Mitch Ratcliffe  16:00

$150 to $200 billion….

Don Carli  16:03

Just rounding error, right? So you could say to companies like Adobe — that develop the software for rendering objects that are going to be manufactured — take IKEA as an example. IKEA doesn’t fill its catalogs, whether online or physical (though there’s no longer a physical catalog), with actual photography. Those are computer-generated images. They look real, but they don’t exist in the physical world when rendered. Very often, the product isn’t manufactured until after you’ve bought it — you bought it on the basis of a computer graphic rendering that looks photorealistic. It’s called Physically Based Rendering.

So if those systems were specifying color with the manufacturing process in mind — which is very often digital textiles printing — they could choose their colors to be less subject to metamerism, or even to specifically eliminate metamerism. They could also provide the ability to predict: run the model through a set of tests to see, ‘Is this design going to be subject to metamerism?’ And carry that logic forward to the manufacturer. They’d have to put that in their purchase orders. They’d have to bridge two standards — one called glTF, the other called ICC Max.

The point is, the consumer doesn’t need to know any of this. The consumer needs to understand that it’s possible to make things match under different lighting conditions — or at least to have less divergence from their expectations under different lighting conditions.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:58

I agree that the consumer should be able to expect that. What I hear is that so far, the pain hasn’t been great enough. But we’re also at a point where simply reducing the waste would be worthwhile on its own, with other benefits as well —

Don Carli  18:10

Oh, absolutely. But the financial ones alone —

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:15

The financial ones are enough? Yes. And then all the environmental and social costs of returns on top of that. But let’s talk about how to actually hack toward a solution. Is it possible now — or over the course of the next decade, say — for me to have a phone app that I use in my home? I sample the light in the morning, I sample the light at noon, I sample it at sundown, and in the evening — sometimes with external light, sometimes with just internal. I could say, ‘This is my light profile. Give me things that will look like what I expect.’

Don Carli  19:00

That’s a great question. The question is: would the average consumer go to that extent? Probably not. But the retailer could do what amounts to a survey of the whole home that the products are going to go into. If it’s a major purchase — a couch, carpets, a new home — you could model the interior of that house very easily.

Technologies like Matterport, for example, can scan the interior of a house and give you a virtual view of what it looks like — they use it in real estate all the time. So that’s possible. And it’s also possible to model different lighting scenarios: you say, ‘I’m going to put in LED lighting with variable color temperature, so during the day I may look at it under one light, and at night it’s going to be warmer.’ You can factor in where natural light comes in through windows across the year.

But that may be overkill for most consumers. It might be appropriate for businesses — especially places where the harmony of floor coverings, wall coverings, and furnishing objects matters. Still, it shouldn’t be necessary for the average consumer.

Phones are increasingly gaining the ability to sense color in a spectral sense. I think within three years, that capability should be standard in most phones as a matter of course, and more specialized devices will be available for around $100 if you want them. But I think it’s really incumbent on the retailer and the brands — not on the consumer — to meet expectations first and foremost. And I think an increasing number of consumers who care about environmental and social costs are going to put that expectation on the retailer and the brand: model the environment, predict the degree to which the products being manufactured are subject to metamerism. Those variables can be measured and controlled in design and manufacturing so that the in-home or in-store environment is less subject to lighting variation affecting the perception of color match.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:55

So I think this is a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break, because we’ve set the stage — and the lighting — to talk about what’s going to come next. Let’s figure out the hack. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:13

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with my friend Don Carli. He’s founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York City.

Don, so we understand the variability of light, the variability of settings, the combination of colors — all of these affect our perception of color. And we talked about the fact that phones will have increasing photographic analysis capabilities, so they can sense the full spectrum, not just what we see but the entire range of light affecting our perception. But as you say, it really is incumbent upon the retailer to have a solution that makes something look like my expectation when it arrives at my home. Is this a suggestion that the future of retail is more personalized — that there may be personal shoppers who come to your home early in a brand relationship and do a scan, or who give you the tool? Maybe they send it to you and you return it after completing your color profile. Are we at the beginning of really tuning the economy to deliver exactly what we want so that waste can be reduced?

Don Carli  23:29

I think there are examples of it already in place. There’s a very interesting company that grew out of a team of Navy SEALs and special operations people who had to model environments they were going to enter — and they couldn’t do that using big, complex systems. They needed a hack. They were able to take imagery from various sources and build a 3D model reconstruction of a building so they could plan their approach. One of them left and started a company called Hover.

This isn’t a commercial for Hover, but it’s an interesting case. Hover solved a problem for people who wanted to remodel the exterior of their homes. You could take your phone, take six to eight photos of your house from the exterior, send those photos to Hover, and they would create a 3D reconstruction of your home. Then they worked with manufacturers of siding, roofing, and windows, and allowed the builder to generate not only an estimate of what it would cost to put new siding and windows on your house, but a rendering of what it would look like. The precedent is there: the consumer had the device, nobody had to go out to do an estimate, the contractor loved it because they didn’t have to send anyone to measure — all done accurately using cell phone imagery.

Matterport is another company that makes a device for interiors and does the same thing. And there are small sensors that a retailer could send you that measure color temperature of light — but I don’t think that will be strictly necessary.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:31

Nor necessarily environmentally responsible, to send out loads of sensors.

Don Carli  25:34

Exactly. So for the retailer, like Radio Shack, if it’s an in-store environment, that’s one thing — they do have the ability to simulate different lighting conditions in-store. Think of it like going to an audio shop —

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:54

You can’t do that anymore, but okay.

Don Carli  25:56

Just imagine going to buy a stereo, or to an audiophile shop —

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:03

We’re showing our age, knowing what that is.

Don Carli  26:05

They bring you into a listening room. The point is, it’s constructed for the purpose of evaluating what something is likely to sound like in your home. I think we can do the same thing in-store with variable lighting.

But online is becoming e-commerce where items are never in a store. You order from a computer-rendered image on your screen, and after your order is placed, the item is manufactured. That’s the link that has to be established: the link between the creator of the design for the object and the supply chain instructions provided to the manufacturer, so that the objects are not subject to metamerism — so they are less subject to variation in the lighting conditions in your home. It is a matter of giving the correct instructions about the materials to be used, and specifying how they’re to be measured by the manufacturer. The brands that design the couch, the pillow, the carpet, the curtain, the flooring — they should own the equipment to do the measurement and support the linkage of the standards that communicate how to maintain color consistency across different lighting and viewing conditions, so the consumer isn’t disappointed.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:41

This brings me to another concept you introduced, which is the appearance bill of materials — which is in many ways similar to the digital product passports we’ve talked about on the show a number of times, which describe a product’s components and potentially how to recycle it. But this color profile — what would be involved in making that happen at scale? What would it look like to make that a common practice for a furniture retailer, for instance?

Don Carli  28:10

Think of recipes. The way a fabric is produced is changing because of digital printing. We used to make fabric in large quantities using dyes — extremely polluting, very complex — or with high-volume screen printing using fixed screens. Increasingly, fabric printing is achieved digitally, where you can print just one yard or 10 yards of a material using any palette of pigments, matched not just to look correct under one lighting condition, but to look consistent under any lighting condition.

The example of metamerism is: if I have two objects that are supposed to match, and under one lighting condition they do match, but under another they don’t — that is metameric. It changes. But if I blend, or use the right pigment recipe on a given substrate material, they will match regardless of the lighting condition. The pillow matches the couch, the wall covering matches the floor covering.

To do that, you have recipes. I’m going to use this combination of inks, and I have to measure them with a spectrophotometer. The specifier has to tell the manufacturer what the material characteristics are. It’s the same as saying, ‘Use butter, sugar, and flour’ — but not all butter, sugar, and flour are the same. Or like architects who say, ‘Use concrete, aluminum, steel, and wood’ — but what’s the actual recipe for the steel, the concrete, the wood? We have to be more specific at the design and manufacturing stages.

It is kind of like a digital product passport. The standard for glTF, which is used for Physically Based Rendering on monitors, is consistent for rendering on screens — but it doesn’t extend to the world of physical objects, inks, and substrates.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:59

So that’s the link. Thank you. You’ve also pointed out that the GMI certification — which Target, Home Depot, and CVS began to require, and which describes packaging — was broadly accepted once those brands introduced it. Would color matching with the guarantee that it will look like what you saw when you receive it be a significant differentiator — a value-added differentiator — that would set a brand apart if they embraced and practiced it consistently?

Don Carli  31:34

Why not? We know that consumers are disappointed enough to go through the return process — and it’s not simple. It’s an annoyance. You’re putting people out of their way. They want their couch, they want their cushions, they want their floor covering. They don’t want to go through what it takes. It’s going to be another two weeks, and I’ve got to document all of this, and I have a party this Friday — we’re getting married, whatever it is.

So I think the demand is there. And what GMI established reflects something I believe has been true in manufacturing as long as I’ve known it: manufacturers are going to do what their customers call them to do. If the requirement in the purchase order is that you must adopt this standard or use this material, you don’t argue — if you want the work, you do it. But if you leave innovation in materials to manufacturers and expect them to market and sell it, that’s not their strength. They’re not marketers.

On the other hand, retailers and brands are marketers — and ultimately, the cost is not just economic but environmental and social. That’s where I think today’s consumers, if made aware, will be able to apply enough incentive to brands to build those linkages, use those standards to minimize the cost of returns and the environmental impact of returns, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:30

So the cost of these returns — which we’ve estimated in the $1.3 to $1.5 trillion range — who actually ends up paying that? Would solving this problem represent a tangible reduction in costs for consumers overall?

Don Carli  33:47

It is costing consumers in the end. Let’s say a retailer bought the product for 25% of the retail price. So the thing sold for $100 but cost them $25. When they say they lost $850 billion, they’re estimating that at the full retail price — but it only cost them $25.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:19

Of course, because that gives them an advantage in taxes — but if —

Don Carli  34:23

If in fact they’re losing 25% of their sales to returns, that’s still going to factor into what they mark things up to recover those costs. It does impact the cost to consumers in the end. And then there are the real costs associated with reverse logistics — shipping it back from you to the distribution center — and then that has to be reprocessed: someone has to inventory it now that it’s been returned, inspect it to see if it’s viable for resale, find a resale partner. Or, as some retailers now do, they simply keep them in huge containers labeled as ‘lot number four’ and have people bid on them sight unseen — unpack those, find the few things in the box that were worth something, and discard the rest.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:33

So the consumer today expects greater and greater personalization, as you’ve described. On-demand manufacturing is a potentially scalable solution that’s beginning to emerge. But if we don’t master this metameric strategy, returns may actually increase — because the expectation is even greater that it should look exactly like it did when I ordered it.

Don Carli  35:59

Yeah. Appearance mismatch is not the greatest reason for returns — but it’s a substantial percentage.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:12

My point is to think systemically, rather than just about this particular issue. Is this the right time for us to move toward on-demand manufacturing — particularly now that we want to reduce imports? And if we do that, who should convene the effort to create consistent perception of color and quality for that next generation of a much less wasteful economy?

Don Carli  36:43

I think it ultimately falls to the brands and the retailers, as well as the technology providers for rendering — for the design and rendering of the objects — because circularity and circular thinking is a systems design challenge. You want to design the problem out of existence, rather than trying to cope with it downstream.

There’s no question that the greatest potential leverage is through a better design process that anticipates these downstream factors that lead to returns — whatever they are, whether it’s appearance, fit, or any other reason why people return things. The ability to predict through true digital twins of the object is one key element. You need the NVIDIAs of the world, the Adobes, the Hewlett-Packards, and the instrument manufacturers who can measure color and surface characteristics — the things that allow you to define the recipe for making the object, as well as the recipe for rendering it on screen.

Those are the key stakeholders: the brands using those tools, the companies providing those tools, and the standards bodies that help to encode them in open, extensible standards that allow businesses to communicate one-to-many, instead of being locked into proprietary one-to-one communication chains.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:26

If a brand is listening, what should their first diagnostic step be? Where’s the right place to begin?

Don Carli  38:36

The first step, of course, is to have a breakdown of the reasons for returns. If they want to address appearance mismatch, they need to know what percentage of their returns are reported by consumers as: ‘The product I received didn’t meet my expectations in appearance compared to what I saw on my screen or in the store.’ They need to know first: is this a problem big enough to make a business case for addressing it?

In most cases, I think they’ll find that if it’s 10%, 15%, or 20% of returns, that’s material. And if they looked at it not just economically but in terms of environmental and social impact — triple bottom line, if you will — I think they can make a business case for why they should seek out a group of like-minded brands to address the root cause through standards and paid pilot programs with manufacturers: to establish and prove that a workflow is possible, practical, and delivers results that reduce cost in a material way, reduce environmental impact in a measurable way, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:15

You do a lot of product research and market research. Are brands thinking about this?

Don Carli  40:21

Not enough. Not enough. I believe brands like IKEA do take it quite seriously — and maybe that’s one of the luxuries of being a privately owned entity. So I think we can look to brands like IKEA for leadership. They’ve exhibited that in the past and can continue. But one brand can’t solve this. This is a bigger problem than any one brand can handle.

I think the path forward is really through a coalition of brands that work together and share the costs, the risks, and the benefits of connecting these existing standards — to the benefit of not just current consumers, but consumers going forward. And I think it will reduce the impact on the environment, help make better use of our manufacturing capacity and digital technology, and support onshoring more of our production. That’s an important way to minimize risk — not just the risk of returns, but supply chain risk as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:39

What you’re describing is an optimized system that we don’t currently have. I know we’ve only scratched the surface of the color perception problem here, Don. Thank you for helping me understand it. How can folks follow what you’re working on?

Don Carli  41:53

I write on this topic in an industry publication called WhatTheyThink.com. And there is an active discussion taking place within the Khronos Group, 3D Commerce, and related standards bodies about this general concept of Physically Based Rendering. In the printing world, there’s another group called the International Color Consortium — ICC.org — that has been looking at the problem from a manufacturing perspective: how do you manage appearance, not just color but appearance overall, because it’s not only the color of a thing that can differ, sometimes it’s the surface characteristics or texture. These standards take both into consideration.

I think some preliminary discussions are starting to emerge — whether in Reddit or in these two groups, which are open — that are beginning to look at how these things connect.

Mitch Ratcliffe  42:59

There’s a saying that an airplane is a set of standards in flight. What we’re talking about here is the setting of a standard set of expectations about how our economy should work efficiently. I hope folks take to heart what we talked about today. I want to thank you for your time, Don; this was a fascinating conversation.

Don Carli  43:19

I think it can have a profound impact on the amount of waste that goes to landfill, and I think it will also improve the ability to satisfy increasingly conscious consumers along the way. Thank you, Mitch. Take care.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:49

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Don Carli, founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York. Don’s commentary on color perception, metamerism, and the gaps in our digital-to-physical rendering pipeline appears regularly at WhatTheyThink.com — all one word, no space, no dash — and you can follow him on X at @DCarli, that’s D-C-A-R-L-I.

This conversation started with a sofa and a throw pillow that refused to match, and it ended somewhere much larger. The $850 billion in annual e-commerce returns we discussed — growing toward $1.25 to $1.5 trillion when you add reverse logistics and disposal costs — is what happens when a 20th-century industrial system tries to serve 21st-century expectations without changing its underlying architecture. The system was designed to produce at scale and absorb returns as a cost of doing business. The consumer was always right. The platform made returns frictionless. And what got lost in the middle — in landfills, in incinerators, and in the carbon cost of reverse logistics — was invisible to the balance sheet and to the customer who clicked ‘return.’ In other words, we engineered a system to overwhelm people with choice so that they would inevitably buy, but at the cost of tremendous waste.

So Don isn’t just describing a color problem. It’s a calibration problem — and calibration is a systems problem. You heard about all the parts of the solution that are available already. What doesn’t exist is a coordination layer: the shared commitment by brands and retailers to making a product and the recipe for showing it on screen speak the same language, so that it represents things accurately across a variety of different lighting settings.

The transition Don is pointing toward is from mass manufacturing to what we might call calibrated manufacturing — production designed not just to meet a specification, but to meet the specific expectations of one person. Personalized manufacturing. The on-demand, digital-first model that’s already emerging will only work if the variety of perceptions we experience is accounted for from the start. If we move to on-demand without solving the metamerism problem, Don warned, returns will increase, not decrease. We will have built a faster, more responsive system for disappointing people.

The circular economy framing that anchors so much of this podcast is usually applied to materials — keep them in use, close the loop on plastics, design products for disassembly and reuse. But Don’s argument adds a dimension we don’t talk about enough: design for reduced returns is design for circularity too. The waste reduction potential is real, and it needs to happen upstream — at the design and specification stage — before a single unit of the product actually ships.

This is what tuning the economy looks like in practice: not a moonshot reinvention of everything, but the patient technical work of closing the gaps — the many gaps between what we promise and what we deliver as businesses. The leverage points are well defined. Brands and retailers that own product specifications need to bridge the color standards challenge in their purchase orders. And consumers who are already demanding more and returning more can apply market pressure too, especially the growing segment of people for whom systems thinking and environmental impact are part of how they evaluate a brand. But we have to communicate that to the brand and to the policymakers around that market in order to drive systemic change.

Don’s closing thought is what stays with me: when we actually tune the system to deliver what people want and expect, we can stop producing waste that nobody intended and nobody wants. That’s not just good business. That’s what a circular economy looks like in practice when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one — the place where, right now, billions of pounds of material quietly disappear into the ground.

We’ll continue to explore this — we’ll probably have Don back to talk more — and in the meantime, I hope you take a look at our archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, folks, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’re going to want to share with a friend or member of your family. And by the way, writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. 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, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, 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: Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns appeared first on Earth911.

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Can the industry that taught the world to consume help us learn to consume more responsibly? Luke Purdy, Director of Sustainability at one of the world’s leading creative agencies, Wieden+Kennedy, is betting his career on it. After 13 years working on major accounts like Nike and Corona at one of the world’s most influential creative agencies, Purdy did something unusual: he wrote his own job description and asked to become the agency’s first sustainability director. Wieden+Kennedy gave him the job, and in 2023, the agency became the first global advertising network to achieve B Corp certification across all nine offices in seven countries. With brands spending over $700 billion annually on advertising worldwide, the messages agencies craft shape not just what people buy, but how they think about consumption itself.

Luke discusses how he sold sustainability as a business value proposition rather than a compliance issue, why he reports to the CFO instead of the CMO, and how Wieden+Kennedy’s carbon removal program for video productions is changing industry standards. He also tackles thorny questions about greenwashing that can guide which clients agencies should work with, arguing that guiding any company toward sustainability is better than refusing to engage. He shares lessons from helping transform Danish Oil and Natural Gas into Ørsted, one of the world’s leading renewable energy companies, and explains why authentic storytelling beats green leaves and clichés every time. Can advertising agencies avoid greenwashing while still growing their clients’ businesses? And what does it mean when sustainability becomes culture rather than just compliance?

You can learn more about Wieden+Kennedy’s sustainability work at wk.com.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on November 10, 2025.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Luke Purdy, Wieden+Kennedy’s Director of Sustainability, on Advertising’s Power To Change appeared first on Earth911.

A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai, thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rating, drawn from roughly 100 public data points, that measures whether what a company says about its environmental and social performance is consistent with what its audited filings and regulatory disclosures actually show. The premise borrows directly from consumer credit scoring: a FICO score doesn’t tell a lender whether you’re a good person, only whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Martin explains how EarthRating’s “accelerated impact engine” gathers verified data instead of relying on questionnaires, and why the small and mid-sized businesses now caught up in the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK’s Procurement Act 2023 need an affordable way to prove their credentials.

Most sustainability frameworks rely on self-reported questionnaires; EarthRating pulls data from audited annual reports, regulatory filings, press coverage, and marketing materials, then cross-checks them against each other to surface contradictions before they become a regulatory or reputational problem. A near-term emissions target that appears in a press release but not in the audited annual report is exactly the kind of credibility gap the platform is designed to flag. Importantly, EarthRating isn’t measuring environmental impact — it’s measuring whether a company’s story is internally consistent and externally verifiable. That sidesteps the impossible problem of reducing carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable question: are the claims true? That speed and accessibility comes with real caveats, and Martin and I dig into them. A credibility score isn’t an impact score: a small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to electric mowers could rate higher than a multinational with aspirational but unverified net-zero pledges. That’s the right calibration for measuring trust, but it isn’t the same as measuring environmental performance. EarthRating also exists at “Google 1.0,” in Martin’s own words — a launch-stage platform with a proprietary methodology that hasn’t yet been externally audited. Global standards aren’t willed into existence; they’re earned through adoption. The underlying problem EarthRating is trying to solve — making credible sustainability measurement accessible to the businesses that have been priced out of it — is a real one, and worth watching.

To find out more about EarthRating, visit EarthRating.ai.

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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.

We’re going to talk about, well, in a way, credit scores. Every sustainability claim made today faces the same fundamental problem: we lack a credible common language that quantifies a business’s impact on planet and people. A company, of course, can call itself sustainable simply by cherry-picking a single metric, commissioning a favorable audit, or simply repeating the word often enough that it seems to stick.

However, regulatory pressure is tightening. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now covers roughly 50,000 companies, and the UK’s Green Claims Code is actively prosecuting misleading environmental marketing. Here in the United States, the SEC’s climate disclosure rules are still in effect, although they are under attack. Of course, regulation alone doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Businesses, investors, and consumers still lack a fast, affordable, and trustworthy way to evaluate whether a sustainability claim actually holds up.

Our guest today is Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai. It’s an early-stage company building what it calls a universal credibility score for sustainability. The Earth Rating is a 1,000-point scale generated in minutes using AI and verified data from a company. It’s designed to measure, manage, and monitor sustainability performance across businesses of all sizes, from a regional landscaping firm to a global fashion house.

But unlike legacy frameworks built for large corporations with dedicated sustainability teams and consultancy budgets, EarthRating is designed to be accessible to small and medium-sized companies. They constitute the vast majority of economic activity worldwide and have been almost entirely locked out of credible sustainability measurement. EarthRating’s core proposition is that sustainability credibility should work more like a credit score — standardized, legible, and universally available — rather than opaque, expensive, and inconsistent.

So we’re going to talk with Martin about what makes a sustainability score genuinely credible, rather than just another layer of greenwashing; how EarthRating’s methodology handles the inherent incompleteness of any single score across carbon, water, biodiversity, and governance; and what guardrails prevent businesses from gaming the system he’s designing. We’ll dig into who the primary audience for an Earth Rating actually is — whether it’s regulators, investors, supply chain partners, or even consumers — and how the company is thinking about the gap between giving a business a number and actually changing its behavior. We’ll also look at the roadmap: what EarthRating is building, which markets it’s targeting first, and what would have to be true for a startup like this to become the universal standard it’s aiming to be.

You can learn more about EarthRating at EarthRating.ai. EarthRating is all one word, no space, no dash. EarthRating.ai. So can a single AI-powered score do what decades of sustainability frameworks have failed to accomplish — make environmental credibility fast, affordable, and impossible to fake? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:43

Welcome to the show, Martin. How are you doing today?

Martin Johnston  3:45

Oh, yeah, not bad, actually. Thank you very much.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:47

Well, thanks for joining me. We had a really interesting conversation a couple of months ago about what EarthRating is up to. And I want to start off by asking — you’re describing this as a universal credit score for sustainability. What will make EarthRating credible when so many sustainability scores and certifications have been accused of serving mostly as marketing tools?

Martin Johnston  4:07

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the difference between us and other people really is the fact that we can summarize it in three words: we don’t actually ask, we find out. Where most other frameworks are reliant upon questionnaires and self-reporting — and I know a lot of them are now catching up on verifying the data and that kind of stuff — we’ve built an accelerated impact engine that gathers 100-plus data points and feeds them into a scoring system where we can verify what people are saying against what they’re actually doing. We search for verified information and verified data, and therefore what comes out of the platform is quite a good indication of the maturity of where a company is at from a sustainability perspective, based on evidence and based on real data, rather than based on a questionnaire that someone else has filled in for them.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:13

Can you describe briefly what kind of data you get when you make that assessment?

Martin Johnston  5:18

Yeah, I can describe it. Obviously, I don’t want to go too much into detail, but we research the four pillars of sustainability — so human, environmental, economic, and social. Data that comes out includes things like: Is it verified carbon measurement? Do they have a near-term target? Do they have a future target? We then assess whether that is actually verified by an independent body. So it’s not just what the company says about itself — has it actually got third-party endorsement? From there, what we can then look for is any flags or any conflicting statements, because we go into detail from actual reports that have been signed off by their accountancy teams, versus what the press and what marketing materials say. It looks to verify that data and compares the conflicts. So from our point of view, it’s not really a certification. It’s a B2B tool which allows organizations to genuinely use it in an impactful way. It’s not there to scrutinize and be used as a lens so other people can jump on the bandwagon of having a go at businesses who are trying to do the right things and be positive towards the planet and the people who live on it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:40

Roughly how long does it take to establish that score once I decide to do it as a company? What does the timeline look like?

Martin Johnston  6:48

To be honest with you, it varies, but we’re talking minutes.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:52

Minutes?

Martin Johnston  6:53

We’re talking anything up to 10 or 15 minutes. We can do it sometimes in three or four. It depends on the veracity of the information we’re searching for, how much information is available, and whether we have to cross-check that information using our accelerated impact engine. Literally, the speed is how quickly we can ascertain that information — whereas, you know, comparable processes take six to eight weeks for a certification, and 12 months-plus for others.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:27

Sustainability measurement is fragmented across carbon, water, biodiversity, social impact, the human implications that you described a moment ago. How do you handle that kind of inherent incompleteness in any single score? And how does EarthRating express explicitly what it doesn’t measure as well as what it does?

Martin Johnston  7:49

Good question. Well, we’re measuring the credibility — this is our differentiator. We measure the credibility of what an organization is saying, rather than the impact itself. So what we look for is: What does an organization say it’s doing? What claim is it making? And then we offer data to verify that claim. That’s why it’s a credit score in the true sense of the word — a credit score is actually credibility. That’s what credit means. It’s based on the idea of trust: if you are paying back your debts to your financial institutions on a regular basis within the timeframe and show that you can manage your financial responsibilities in a considerate way, you will get a good trust score, which is what a credit score is. That means you are a good opportunity for underwriters to look at and say, ‘Yeah, you’re a good person to loan my money to. I live where I live, I bank with the right bank, I’m on the electoral roll, and I have a credit history of doing the right thing on a timely basis.’ If you take that financial model and recategorize it to sustainability and change the inputs — are the claims credible? Are they historically valuable? Do they prove themselves time and time again, consistently? — when you do that, you build up a nice picture of an organization that you can actually trust on what it’s claiming to do. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:15

That’s interesting. You think about the timeliness of a credit score, which goes down if you don’t use credit. At some point, it will be necessary to be on the system on an ongoing basis. But how frequently would a review be completed? Or is this integrated into the businesses’ systems in such a way that it’s just a continuous score?

Martin Johnston  9:39

Okay, so we’re kind of in launch process at the moment. We’re doing Google 1.0 — not what Google is now, but what Google was back then. For us, we are continuously going to be checking, but continuously means we’ll be giving updates on a quarterly basis to organizations. However, we want to move this to real time, because we believe that, in the words of Douglas Adams, bad news travels fast. If a claim that an organization is making hits the headlines, then that needs to be alerted to the business — just like a credit score has alerts which say somebody’s checked your file, somebody’s looking at your profile, an underwriter or whatever. We think the same process has to happen for businesses to be able to respond quickly and responsibly to potential threats or risks.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:32

I was particularly intrigued by your focus on small business. Can you explain what a landscaping company, for instance, or maybe a regional logistics firm, might actually do with the sustainability score? Who are they going to show it to, and why does it matter to them to do it?

Martin Johnston  10:50

To be honest, this is the current problem for small businesses. Inherently, reporting on sustainability is too costly, too time-consuming, overwhelming, and confusing. The whole thing needs to be looked at from a complexity level. That means that 91% of small businesses do not report on sustainability at all, yet they make up the vast majority of the economies of the world. If you combine the numbers and the impact, and the ability we could give if small businesses have the same opportunities as larger businesses to report on sustainability — and we break those barriers down — then that allows a business to operate in a world where sustainability needs to be taken a lot more seriously. It needs to be shown as innovative and commercially valuable, not just a nice-to-have. In the UK particularly, we’ve got the new Procurement Act, which has come out, and if you cannot show sustainability and the progress of sustainability for your business, you could be excluded from government contracts. You could be excluded from the largest supply chains. Bigger businesses are looking to regulate their supply chains and their ESG claims throughout, because they’re responsible for their own supply chains. That means small businesses, if they can’t do this, might risk losing or reducing their work or opportunities to gain work. And then the biggest thing as well is tender writing. If we can give them an instant ability to showcase where they sit on a maturity level of sustainability, and how easy it is for them to implement a reporting process that takes minutes, not months — not even years — and costs no time at all in terms of labor to produce, then that removes the bureaucracy and the friction that small businesses face when trying to come up with stuff that they’re required to do for procurement.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:56

A credit score is typically paid for by another organization that wants to see how my credit is, or my business’s credit is. What’s the business model? You described it as a B2B metric. Am I going to, when I’m reviewing a supplier, pay you to get a rating?

Martin Johnston  13:11

The idea is that eventually, when we process this out and it’s a bit more mature and the business has grown, then, yeah, we will be hopefully selling the reporting processes that organizations can pay for. But for us, this is a tool for a small business to use to implement and to make sustainability actionable, so they pay for it, and they pay to be on the platform.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:32

Could you also begin to roll up individual entities’ carbon impact? For instance, there’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions, in order to provide some other organization up or downstream visibility into their impact, so they could calculate their Scope 3 score?

Martin Johnston  13:49

Yeah. Well, this is also interesting, because sustainability has a complexity attached to it where consultancy is required for stuff like that. So what we’ve done, and what we are doing, is we’re building a sustainability navigator, which effectively is a tool that sits on a platform. If they need to understand where to go and get their SBTi carbon Scope 1, 2 or 3, or need to do something that requires heavy lifting in terms of what sustainability metrics look like for their business, then our sustainability navigator will point them to the right places without the fees of a consultancy — £800 to £1,500 a day.

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:35

Okay, so this is where the AI comes in. As you’ve developed this guidance you just described, what is it based on — for instance, the SBTi standards? How did you develop the methodology that it’s going to use to coach those small businesses? Because that’s really an interesting opportunity.

Martin Johnston  14:55

Yeah. Well, we’ve been doing sustainability for quite a while, and I’ve looked at all of the frameworks. We haven’t sort of adopted any particular one. But what we do understand is the standardization of questions that are being required through tenders and through responses by businesses. We’ve developed 100-plus data points, which we developed our own over a number of years. It’s proprietary information that we gather. It’s not based on any one framework, but the sustainability navigator will point them to people who actually can help them — organizations that can give guidance in the right way. So that’s what we’ve done. That’s what we’re aiming to do. It’s still in its infancy, and we’re in launch mode, so we’ve got to do more of the doing, rather than more of the talking about what we’re going to do in order to implement this stuff.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:54

It does sound like one of the functions of that AI guidance in the future could be to look across the market space and say, ‘Here’s a partner who can solve this problem for you.’ Becoming the marketplace, in the long run.

Martin Johnston  16:08

No, absolutely not. It’s not a way to become the marketplace at all. It’s a three-in-one platform. It provides a credit score instantly — or almost as instant as you can be — which gives information to an organization showing how well they are performing against the four pillars of sustainability and where the information gaps are. We then have a Green Claims Code checker, so we actually go out and search for: Are they compliant with the Green Claims Code? Is there anything out there that could put them at risk, and is that affecting their credit score effectively? And then we have the sustainability navigator, which can help them correct anything, fill in the gaps, or provide them with information to say, ‘Look, these are the best three things you can do to increase your score and make the immediate impact you need to do.’ We’ve got a growth mindset built into the platform. The idea is to reward the businesses that want to improve quickly and get them on the journey. Because even having a low score — that’s the difference between us and everybody else. There’s no pass/fail. It’s not negative. A low score is, ‘Well done. You’re on the journey.’ It’s not ‘You need to improve.’ It’s ‘You’ve made the step, you’ve made the commitment, you’ve made the positive commitment to actually want to do something that’s positive for your business.’ For me, commercially, sustainability leads to innovation, it leads to cost efficiencies in the long term, and it helps businesses future-proof themselves. So it’s an absolute no-brainer to want to do something that protects the business from itself in the future.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:50

You are at the launch stage, and Google version 1.0, as you just said. What are you finding that early customer discussions are pointing towards in terms of what they’re most interested in — the continuous monitoring, the transparency in their supply chain, getting benchmarked?

Martin Johnston  18:08

The most interesting thing is the fact that we do all the work for them. They’re astonished. They say, ‘Well, what do we have to do?’ And we say, ‘Nothing. You give us your company name, you give us your company registration number, and we do the rest.’ The fact that they don’t have to fill in a questionnaire, the fact it doesn’t take them weeks to produce answers to all of these questions, the fact that it’s not labor-intensive — that’s the game changer, we think, which will be the non-bureaucratic, non-burdensome process that stops businesses from wanting to do good.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:41

Simplification. And we’re talking about an incredibly complex system that’s growing more so all the time, especially with the growing impact of climate change on all of our businesses. This is, I think, a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break. I want to dig into a lot more of this. We’ll be right back. Folks, stay tuned.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Martin Johnson. He’s founder of EarthRating.ai, which aims to make environmental impact an easily measured and understood business metric with a universal credibility score for people and planet. So Martin, as we were talking about, this is an immensely complex problem, and you’re at this early stage, still gathering a lot of interest from organizations. What does your roadmap look like? And what are the particular areas of complexity you think you can tackle in the next 12 to 18 months?

Martin Johnston  19:35

Some interesting questions there. I think you’ve nailed on something — the landscape for sustainability is incredibly complex, and it shouldn’t be. The reality is that it took rocket science to get us off the planet, but we only need trees, water, and air to breathe and live on it. So we need to simplify sustainability, and that’s our purpose. The whole idea is to look at how we can make it easier, simpler, and less complex for businesses to start to report and then create operational efficiencies by making the right decisions for their business. The whole concept of sustainability is really about literally the word ‘sustain’ and ‘able.’ If you aren’t doing the right things, you’re putting your business at risk in the future. There’s supply chain risk, demand risk, regulatory risk, and reputational risk that all need to be put into the mix when you start to think about what the future looks like for your business. For us, the roadmap really is to create a universal — and ‘universal’ doesn’t necessarily mean the same; it means available to every business. Making that available to every business means we need to break those barriers down, which create the complexities, and allow businesses to start doing the right things, rather than spending time, money, and energy on reporting the wrong things. That’s where we need to change the system. We need to create a new operating system for sustainable business. Look at how we can then seriously make inroads, so it becomes almost the standard, if you like, by simplifying sustainability and getting mass adoption as quickly as we can. That’s the aim.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:25

What would you describe as the most important question you can help a business answer about itself or a supplier in the next couple of years? Let’s talk simplification. Bring it down to that level.

Martin Johnston  21:38

I guess the simple question is: if you’re looking to regulate your supply chain and you’re looking to de-risk your supply chain as an organization from above, you need to know that your supply chain is saying what they’re doing and actually implementing what they’re doing — not just saying the right things to help them win tenders, because they’d be putting everybody at risk. So what we’re doing, first of all, is just absolutely putting the credibility back into what sustainability is for businesses and for people. And then what that means for a smaller business who’s looking upwards is that they can show they’re on the journey, show they’re good enough to win and be part of a regulated supply chain, and actually want to be in an ecosystem where businesses think beyond profits and balance sheets — because it’s commercially not astute not to. It’s because it’s commercially the right thing to do.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:43

When we talked a couple of months ago, when we first met, you mentioned that you’re focused on — and this is a quote — ‘detecting credibility gaps early.’ Can you describe what a credibility gap is going to look like in practice, and how your monitoring will catch it, particularly before it becomes a reputational crisis for the company?

Martin Johnston  23:02

Yeah. One of the things we are doing, as I said right from the beginning — and we didn’t make this statement, Douglas Adams did — bad news travels fast. Bad news travels really quickly, and the ability for businesses to put out statements which are unintentionally wrong is where this goes pear-shaped for them. The well-intentioned statement by any large organization is genuinely probably well-intentioned, but when it doesn’t take total impact into consideration, it can then be taken out of context and actually be untrue. That’s where you need to look at the regulatory complexity and the gap in the marketplace. Look at the statements that they’re making applying across the board. So it’s total impact considerations, actually saying, ‘You can’t say that, because over here you’re not doing it.’ That means you can pull out what could be a compliance risk, a damaging reputational risk, and an opportunity for fines risk, and show businesses, ‘This is how you should be rephrasing this, or sourcing some evidence to prove it,’ before you then spend loads of money on an advertising campaign and getting it all wrong.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:26

One of the concerns that a lot of people have when we talk about artificial intelligence and sustainability, frankly, is a credibility problem in and of itself. Models can hallucinate. The training data could be biased, and as you’ve pointed out, verification can be really hard. How do you validate all of the inputs and the AI inference that is applied to those inputs when generating the score?

Martin Johnston  24:52

Yeah, okay. There is a lot of hallucination in AI, which is why we use it very minimally. The idea is the gathering of the data. If you take a credit score model, it gathers realistic data from all kinds of places. It then aggregates that data, and that aggregated data can give you a very solid viewpoint of what you can do. You can then potentially use AI to look into that data — which you know is correct — to give you the right information much quicker than if you were to do it with human eyes. That’s the thing you have to do: gather the correct data, the right data, and evidence against that data. The other good thing you can do is compare data sources from one to the other, and by doing that, show the gaps from, say, a news source against the annual report. The annual report will be signed off. The annual report will be true. The annual report will have an accountancy stamp all over it to say this is legally correct. So what you need to do is look at the legally correct information, take the legally correct information, benchmark it against marketing information, and showcase where things could go wrong. That is not necessarily a hallucination AI job. That’s just using AI to show how you can display data quicker than you could do in any other way. But you have to still gather the data and gather the data sources, which is why our accelerated impact engine has gathered all of that. It’s taken years to build. It’s not just sticking something into Claude and saying, ‘What do you think of this?’

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:23

Specialized models are going to be particularly important as you think about the emergence of a universal standard, which, of course, you’re trying to build. What has to be true in terms of the technology — our ability to integrate into systems and do these kinds of credibility checks — in terms of regulation? Do you need to have… as you pointed out, the UK government has a new procurement law. The European Union has transparency laws in terms of the sustainability and environmental impact of a variety of products. Is that all moving in the direction to support your work?

Martin Johnston  26:56

No, I don’t think we need more regulation. I really don’t. I think AI maybe needs regulation, but that’s not what I’m about. It’s not what we’re here to talk about at all. I think the point is, sustainability and more regulation, more red tape, will just stop businesses from doing it. The best example of self-regulation we have in this country is the Law Society, and it’s a system which everybody adopts, everybody understands and learns. It’s almost like the industry self-regulating. I think we need to get businesses to understand that they need to self-regulate against stuff. That’s where sustainability can actually start to take a much bigger impact and a much bigger step forward — if we actually lost a lot of the regulation. For example, you have repurpose and recycling, and then so much insurance invalidation from using materials that have been used before, because of the risks involved. Yet the questions behind that are not necessarily commercially correct. It’s just that the risk is too great. So I think regulation, and imposing stuff on businesses — particularly around wanting to be more sustainable — is just another tax that they don’t need. Innovation moving forwards, doing the right things to de-risk their business from future demand, from future supply chain restriction because of global issues around the world that stop things from happening or trap movement from happening, and international trade being available, is something that needs less friction, less friction — rather than more barriers.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:44

In the long term — and I’m asking you to think maybe five or 10 years out in the future — who’s the ultimate consumer of the EarthRating score? Does it include investors, and maybe ultimately consumers who would say, ‘Is this business one that I can trust to be sustainable?’

Martin Johnston  29:00

I think that’s a good question, actually. In five years’ time, the aim really is for us to be globally recognized, like a credit score for environmental and social impact — transparent, credible, and recognized worldwide. We’d love investors and consumers to look at it and back businesses with real sustainability credentials, which doesn’t involve greenwashing. It drives demand for genuine impact. Honestly, if we could build this into finance so the highest scores influence lending — they influence decision-making — so that sustainability becomes a strategic financial advantage, that would be incredible. And to finalize it all off, access for small businesses — giving them the tools and the resources to adopt sustainable business practices — is probably the biggest opportunity for us as a race to make a difference to the planet and the businesses that are on it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:11

Based on what you’ve learned so far, what’s your advice for a small business that’s thinking about its sustainability moves? Where would you urge them to focus first or second?

Martin Johnston  30:22

I’d obviously go and get yourself an EarthRating.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:24

Well, beyond that, what would make their EarthRating score really shine?

Martin Johnston  30:31

Well, I think what they need to do is look at their business model. The best businesses solve problems, and they expressly say so through their brand. For example, you’ve got Tony’s Chocolonely in Europe — I don’t know if you have them in the US — although they exist to eradicate poverty in chocolate supply chains. They’ve got an open supply chain methodology, and they’ve grown exponentially by doing something really positive and being really good, then showcasing the problem they solve for the world through their brand. Patagonia do it as well — ‘Don’t buy this jacket.’ All the best brands are universally challenging what a marketing campaign looks like. But I’m actually going back to what they stand for. Where do they fit into this world, and what difference can they make? A small business should apply the same model: What are you doing? Why are you here? And what difference can you make? Then start championing that, because that’s an authentic positioning that no one can copy. That’s most important for any business — to start operating in a way that amplifies that process, because that means you’ll engage suppliers, you’ll engage partners, you’ll engage opportunities, and create advocates for brands and businesses more than any other way. In doing so, you’ll automatically want to adopt sustainable business practices, which just make you a better business.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:56

I think of an orchestra when you describe that. A lot of people will focus only on the rhythm section or only on the violins because that’s what they do, but they have to see themselves in this larger picture — the way that Patagonia or Tony’s Chocolonely does, where they’re trying to help and create opportunities and solutions for the world, rather than simply meet some demand. As you design EarthRating, how do you describe that vision for your contribution to the larger world?

Martin Johnston  32:23

You just mentioned an analogy I really like — the orchestra. If you take it up to a bigger stage, you know, we’re called Earth, and the only reason we are alive on this planet is because we operate and are located within a larger solar system, where the gravity of the worlds pulls us in a way where we are equidistant from the sun, which allows life and oxygen to exist, right? So if you can take that orchestra analogy and explode it out to the solar system and then bring it back to the planetary system, to the ecosystem — we’re all part of it. It’s really important to understand that, to play a part in its future, we need to think in systems. We need to think system-wide. You can’t operate in isolation, because you just don’t operate within a structure where impact matters — if you don’t understand what your impact is on others.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:21

You’ve got to look up, take a wider view of the world, it sounds like, and I wholeheartedly agree with that perspective. Now you’re early. You’re still collecting a lot of interest from people. How can folks — say, a small business — get involved with EarthRating.ai?

Martin Johnston  33:39

Well, we’ve got a holding website up there, which you can sign up to, and we can get in contact with you. We’ve also got a LinkedIn page, and I think those are the best two ways. Yeah, that’s probably the right way to go — to EarthRating.ai and register interest, and then we can get in contact. We do need adoption at scale. So yeah, one of the things we want to do is to challenge and transform sustainability by simplifying the whole thing and making it easier, more accessible, and more available to a larger audience group than it currently is.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:15

Well, Martin, thanks very much for a fascinating conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:23

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Martin Johnston. He’s the founder of EarthRating.ai, an early-stage company building what it calls a universal credibility score for sustainability claims. You can learn more about Martin and his team’s work at EarthRating.ai. EarthRating is all one word, no space, no dash. EarthRating.ai.

Artificial intelligence has incredible power to find, organize, and systematize large amounts of unstructured information, which humans have plenty of — though its reasoning over that information may not always be sound. AI’s promise for sustainability work, which, as Martin pointed out, is to gather and analyze far more information for contradictions that undermine the credibility of a company’s claims that it achieves a reduced environmental and adverse social impact, is significant. But it’s early days for AI and EarthRating, and they’ve made a lot of promises that we’re going to have to see whether the technology and EarthRating can keep.

EarthRating doesn’t try to measure a company’s environmental impact. It measures whether the claims a company makes about its impact hold up against the evidence available in the public record. So like a FICO score that doesn’t tell a lender whether you’re a good person, this tells them whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. EarthRating proposes to do the same for sustainability claims by pulling roughly 100 data points from audited reports, regulatory filings, news coverage, and marketing materials, and then flagging the gaps between what a company says and what the verifiable record shows.

The promise of a sustainability credibility score generated in minutes, not the six to eight weeks a conventional certification takes, would deliver simplicity. If that works as advertised, it would represent a real application of AI to a problem that has resisted simplification for two decades — the slow, expensive, fragmented mess that sustainability reporting has become. But perhaps we can take simplicity too far.

So two ideas from this conversation come wrapped with a healthy stack of promises still to be kept. The first is the reframe itself — credibility instead of impact. This is interesting because it sidesteps the impossible problem of trying to reduce carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable one: whether a company’s statements are internally consistent and externally verifiable. That has obvious value for procurement teams under, for instance, the UK’s new Procurement Act or the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which now covers about 50,000 companies and is pushing accountability down the supply chain.

But there’s a limit to transparency too. A high credibility score means a company is telling the truth about what it does, but it doesn’t mean the company is necessarily doing enough. A small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to, say, electric mowers and edgers could rate higher than a multinational with ambitious but aspirational net-zero targets that have not been independently verified. That’s probably the right calibration for a trust score, but it’s not the same thing as an environmental performance score. As we’ve discussed with prior guests, the limits of single-metric thinking in a systems world are that every framework leaves something out, and the question is whether the thing it leaves out matters more than the thing it captures.

The second idea is the small business democratization play, and this is where the opportunity is largest and the proof is thinnest. Martin cited a striking number: 91% of small businesses don’t report on sustainability at all, even though they constitute the vast majority of economic activity worldwide. The reasons are exactly as you’d expect — cost, frameworks built for companies with dedicated sustainability teams, and bureaucracy that is overwhelming for a regional logistics firm or a five-person landscaping outfit. If EarthRating can give those companies a credible, low-friction way to participate in regulated supply chains and government tenders, it solves a real economic exclusion problem.

But the platform is, in Martin’s own words, at Google 1.0. And I was there when Google 1.0 was launched, and it did some important and interesting things that set it apart. But it was a launch-stage project with a proprietary scoring methodology — the PageRank algorithm — that wasn’t yet externally audited, and it had no business model. They were still trying to work that out. The vision for EarthRating to become a global standard that influences lending decisions and consumer trust is genuinely interesting, but global standards aren’t willed into existence by founders. They’re ratified by customers, by usage, embraced by regulators, and ultimately require widespread education to ensure that the seal of approval it grants is well understood in the market and not just another meaningless symbol or certification.

So let me add one note of friction here. Martin made the case that sustainability needs less regulation, not more, and that self-regulation is the path forward. I don’t think the historical record supports that argument. The real reason that small businesses are suddenly facing sustainability scrutiny at all is because of the regulation. The UK Procurement Act, the EU’s wide-ranging environmental and circular economy programs, and the SEC climate disclosure rules here in the United States are pushing sustainability reporting down the supply chain. EarthRating exists in a market that regulation created. That’s not a knock on the product — it’s an observation about the soil that it must grow in.

So count me intrigued, but with asterisks. An AI-powered credibility score for sustainability claims is a useful idea, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that have been left on the sidelines of the reporting economy. Whether EarthRating becomes a standard or is absorbed by a larger framework is a question only adoption will answer, and so we’ll be watching.

Hey, and would you do me a favor? If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, please share it with a friend or a family member. You folks are the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends and family that they can check out more than 550 episodes in our archive and hear us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform does help people find us. Thank you for your support.

I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will 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: EarthRating’s Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable appeared first on Earth911.

On February 12, 2026, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stood next to President Trump and called the repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” He was likely correct. With this move, the legal basis for all federal greenhouse gas regulation for cars, power plants, and oil fields was removed at once.

This headline-making move was just the most visible part of 14 months of steady rollbacks of U.S. environmental and public health protections, often couched in language about saving tax dollars and reducing regulation, but ignoring the rising cost of healthcare, insurance, and environmental damage caused by the policies. Since Inauguration Day 2025, the Trump administration has issued many executive orders and regulatory actions affecting air quality, water protections, toxic chemicals, wildlife habitat, and climate and health science.

Scientists, former EPA officials, and public health researchers have documented the consequences, which include more cases of childhood neurological damage and tens of millions of acres of wetlands left unprotected from pollution. Earth911 assembled this timeline of major actions and what research says about their likely effects.

January 20, 2025: Inauguration Day Shock and Awe

On his first day in office, Trump signed 26 executive orders, several of which quickly changed U.S. environmental policy. Experts in environmental law called this a “flood the zone” strategy, meant to overwhelm environmental groups and courts so they could not respond to every action at once.

Key Day-One actions included:

• EO 14154, “Unleashing American Energy”: Declared a national energy emergency, directed the EPA to review and potentially revoke the Endangerment Finding, ordered a moratorium on all new offshore and onshore wind leases, instructed agencies to expedite fossil fuel permitting, and directed the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to rescind its NEPA implementing regulations within 30 days.
• EO 14148, “Initial Recissions of Harmful Executive Orders”: Revoked nearly 80 Biden administration executive orders, including all climate-focused orders and the Justice40 environmental justice initiative.
• EO 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs”: Directed each federal agency to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” effectively shuttering EPA’s environmental justice programs overnight.
• Paris Agreement withdrawal (EO 14162): Trump formally directed the UN to begin withdrawal proceedings from the Paris Agreement, repeating his first-term move. The U.S. withdrawal took effect in January 2026. According to the UN Environment Programme’s 2025 Emissions Gap Report, the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is projected to add an additional 0.1°C of warming to global temperature trajectories—in a world already tracking toward 2.3–2.8°C of warming this century.
• “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential“: This executive order directed agencies to maximize oil, gas, mineral, and timber extraction in Alaska, reconsider Arctic National Wildlife Refuge protections, and expedite LNG permitting. Later followed by Interior Secretary Burgum announcing plans to open 13 million acres of ecologically sensitive Alaskan lands for drilling.

Dan Esty, a professor of environmental law and policy at Yale University, told ABC News that the administration had a clear strategy: “There are a number of more subtle actions that the Trump administration has taken that also have considerable corrosive effect on our efforts to promote action on climate change and a sustainable future more broadly.” He warned that less visible rollbacks, such as regulatory delays, staff cuts, and limiting science, would add to the impact of the major executive orders in ways the public might not notice.

January 21–31, 2025: Building the Deregulatory Machine

January 21: EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” revoked EO 12898, the 1994 Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to identify and address disproportionate environmental burdens on communities of color and low-income communities, which was the cornerstone of federal environmental justice policy for three decades.

January 28: EPA delayed the effective dates of four rules to March 21, 2025, including a Toxic Substances Control Act rule on trichloroethylene (TCE), a carcinogen linked to cancer, liver damage, and Parkinson’s disease, and revisions to air quality model guidance that states depend on for pollution planning.

January 31: EO 14219, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘DOGE’ Deregulatory Initiative” required federal agencies to identify 10 existing rules to eliminate for every single new rule promulgated. This “10-to-1” deregulation mandate structurally incentivized agencies to gut established protections regardless of their public health record.

February–March 2025: EPA’s Demolition Agenda Goes Public

On March 12, 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that EPA would formally reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding and simultaneously unveiled plans to review 31 major environmental regulations for rollback.

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” Zeldin said in a press statement. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” It would be another year before, again, Zeldin touted an even bigger deregulatory move.

The 31 targeted regulations included:

• Carbon pollution standards for coal and gas power plants
• Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for coal-fired power plants
• National ambient air quality standards for particulate matter (soot)
• Methane emissions rules for oil and gas operations
• Vehicle greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards
• Wastewater discharge limits for coal plants
• Wetlands and waterway protections under the Clean Water Act

Responding to Zeldin’s announcement, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers Mary Rice and Amruta Nori-Sarma warned in public commentary that repealing the Endangerment Finding alone would eliminate legal obligations to cut emissions from the transportation sector—the largest single source of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution—with cascading effects on climate-related public health harms including heat illness, worsening wildfires, and more severe flooding.

Also in March, EPA began dismantling its Office of Research and Development (ORD), removing all career scientific leadership and halting the publication of internal research. The Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a nonpartisan group of hundreds of former EPA staff, later warned in a February 2026 report that “political leadership is steering the agency away from its responsibility to protect human health and the environment.”

The ORD’s closure eliminated the internal scientific capacity to assess pollution risks for mercury, PFAS, air toxics, and wildfire smoke.

April 2025: Coal Revival, Mercury Exemptions, and Public Lands

April 8: Trump signed executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, expediting coal mining permits on federal land and directing federal agencies to maximize coal extraction. This directly contradicts global energy market trends: the International Energy Agency reports that renewable electricity is now cheaper than new coal in every major market.

April 2025: EPA solicited exemption applications from coal- and oil-fired power plants seeking waivers from the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) via email—an unprecedented process that environmental groups called an open invitation for polluters to self-select out of public health rules. By May, EPA had granted exemptions to 68 power plants covering facilities in 45 states.

The health risks of weakening MATS are well known. Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury in the U.S., a dangerous neurotoxin that harms brain development in fetuses and young children. The Sierra Club found that going back to pre-2024 MATS standards would let the dirtiest coal plants release 50% more mercury. Arsenic and chromium, which are also covered by MATS, are linked to cancer, heart disease, and birth defects. Moms Clean Air Force director Dominique Browning put it simply, saying that “No amount of mercury is safe for babies’ developing brains.”

On April 17, Trump signed a proclamation that opened parts of the Pacific Islands Heritage National Marine Monument to commercial fishing. This 500,000-square-mile area west of Hawaii is home to protected turtles, whales, and endangered Hawaiian monk seals. Research shows that marine protected areas usually help fishermen by letting overfished stocks recover, which is the opposite of how the administration described the change.

May–July 2025: PFAS Rollbacks, NEPA Gutted, Wetlands Threatened

May 14: EPA announced plans to eliminate drinking water standards for four short-chain PFAS chemicals (PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and GenX), reversing Biden-era standards designed to protect millions of Americans. The agency also proposed extending compliance deadlines for the two standards it retained (PFOA and PFOS). According to the Environmental Working Group, an estimated 41 million people will drink PFAS-contaminated water for at least two additional years due to these delays. PFAS chemicals are linked to cancer, immune suppression, thyroid disruption, and developmental harm in children.

May 2025: EPA terminated more than $15 million in PFAS research grants—including grants to universities studying PFAS contamination of agricultural land and drinking water—even as the agency publicly claimed commitment to addressing the PFAS crisis. ProPublica’s investigation found the EPA had also requested three court delays in litigation over PFAS Superfund designation, signaling unwillingness to enforce the designation that would make major polluters financially liable for cleanup.

May 28: The Council on Environmental Quality formally withdrew all NEPA guidance dating back to 1977, revoking the regulatory framework agencies had used for 50 years to assess environmental impacts of federal projects. Under the rollback, federal agencies are no longer required to assess climate impacts, cumulative pollution burdens, or environmental justice considerations when approving oil, gas, and mining projects. Earthworks described the change as eliminating the public’s right to know about pollution in their communities before projects are approved.

June 11: EPA Administrator Zeldin proposed to repeal the Carbon Pollution Standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, which were finalized in 2024. Power plants are a top source of both greenhouse gas emissions and co-pollutants—including soot and smog-forming nitrogen oxides—that directly harm respiratory health.

July 29: EPA formally proposed to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding, releasing a draft rule that cited a five-scientist Department of Energy “Climate Working Group” report as scientific support. The report was subsequently rebutted point-by-point by 86 scientists from academia, government, and industry, who concluded the DOE report “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation” and does not meet standards appropriate for policy support. A federal judge later ruled the DOE violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act in convening the group.

July 18: EPA exempted three additional coal plants—in Ohio, Illinois, and Colorado—from MATS compliance deadlines, expanding the exemption program that now covers a substantial share of the nation’s remaining coal fleet. Texas data cited by NRDC found that six power plants that received presidential exemptions collectively increased their sulfur dioxide emissions by 48 percent in a single year.

August–October 2025: Staffing Gutted, Science Suppressed

By September 2025, EPA employment had fallen from more than 17,000 to 15,166 staff, a reduction of nearly 2,000 employees in less than a year. The Fish and Wildlife Service lost 1,817 staff; the National Park Service lost more than 2,700; and the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service together shed over 7,000 workers. The Sierra Club documented that a spending bill passed the House cutting the Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget by 44 percent, which advocates warned would hamstring the agency’s ability to list endangered species.

EPA directed its in-house career scientists to stop publishing their research, removed the agency’s scientific integrity policy from its website, and proposed to zero out the budget for ORD’s research functions on PFAS, air pollutants, and wildfire smoke. According to Earthjustice, EPA also created a new office nominally focused on science but placed it directly under the Office of the Administrator, removing independent scientific oversight.

In September, 2025, EPA proposed to eliminate the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which requires approximately 50 categories of large industrial facilities to disclose their emissions annually. The reporting program is the primary source of facility-level emissions data used by researchers, regulators, and investors to track industrial pollution. Without it, independent monitoring of whether industry is reducing emissions becomes functionally impossible.

November–December 2025: Water Protections and Vehicle Standards Targeted

On November 17, 2025, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a new “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule that would dramatically narrow which wetlands and waterways receive federal Clean Water Act protection—going further than even the 2023 Supreme Court Sackett decision required. The proposal would exclude groundwater, interstate waters that lack continuous surface flow, and tens of millions of acres of seasonal wetlands and headwater streams from federal jurisdiction.

A 2025 analysis by NRDC found that between 38 million and 70 million acres of wetlands could be at risk of unregulated pollution or destruction under the proposed rule. “This is one of the most significant setbacks to clean water protections in half a century,” said Betsy Southerland, former director of EPA’s Office of Science and Technology. Wetlands help filter drinking water, absorb floodwaters, and support fisheries and biodiversity. These roles are even more important as climate change leads to stronger storms.

December 3: The Department of Transportation proposed rolling back Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for model years 2022–2031, reversing efficiency targets set under both Obama and the first Trump administration. The proposal would significantly slow the transition to electric vehicles, increasing long-term fossil fuel demand and tailpipe pollution. Transportation represents 30 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—the largest single economic sector.

Also, last December, the EPA published a final rule weakening nitrogen oxide standards for new power plants, reducing projected reductions from 2,700 tons per year (as originally proposed) to just 300 tons by 2032. Nitrogen oxides are a primary precursor of ground-level ozone (smog), which aggravates asthma, reduces lung function, and is linked to premature death.

February 12, 2026: The Endangerment Finding Falls

On February 12, 2026, the Trump administration finalized the repeal of the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases—the legal determination, developed by 31 climate scientists and reviewed by NASA, NOAA, the USDA Forest Service, and other federal agencies, that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The repeal simultaneously eliminated vehicle house gas emission standards.

Scientists responded loudly. Benjamin DeAngelo, who led the original 2009 document, told Earth.Org: “Looking back on the original 2009 Endangerment Finding, and all of the supporting science and responses to comments, the entire record still holds up incredibly well.” Professor Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said there is “no legitimate scientific rationale” for the EPA’s decision. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine independently reviewed the finding in 2025 and concluded it was accurate and stood the test of time.

The Brookings Institution noted that the repeal’s internal logic—that U.S. vehicle emissions alone are too small to justify regulation—could be extended to justify eliminating any individual sector’s emissions rules, effectively making all sectoral climate regulation legally indefensible. The Rhodium Group estimated U.S. emissions would now decline to only 26–35% below 2005 levels by 2035, compared to 32–44% with regulations in place—a gap of hundreds of millions of tons of additional CO2 annually.

Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the repeal’s systemic significance as a loss of  “the foundation on which all of the other regulations rest.” A 2025 study cited by TIME magazine found that air pollution from oil and gas operations is responsible for more than 91,000 premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional health incidents across the U.S. each year, with Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic communities consistently most affected.

February 2026: Mercury Standards Repealed

In the same period, EPA announced the repeal of the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, reverting to weaker 2012-era limits. The Environmental Protection Network warned the repeal “will allow hundreds of facilities across 45 states to avoid meeting critical safety standards—jeopardizing public health, degrading ecosystems, and disproportionately harming children, pregnant people, and communities already overburdened by pollution.”

The rollback of mercury standards especially affects subsistence fishing communities, including many tribal nations, and low-income households that rely on fish for protein.

Mercury builds up in fish tissue, so even small increases in mercury in the environment lead to more human exposure. A substantial body of peer-reviewed research, including a 2016 PNAS study and a 2021 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health white paper, has shown that the mercury-related health benefits of MATS are orders of magnitude larger than the EPA estimated in its 2011 analysis, yet the EPA continued to rely on that outdated science to justify weakening the rule.

What Experts Say: The Cumulative Public Health Toll

The Environmental Protection Network’s February 2026 report identified 12 high-risk pollutants that are gaining “new life” due to weakened, delayed, or rescinded regulations. The list includes brain-damaging mercury and pesticides in food, hormone-disrupting phthalates in consumer products, cancer-causing PFAS in drinking water, lead, arsenic, and trichloroethylene in water, and carcinogens benzene, formaldehyde, and vinyl chloride in air, along with heart- and lung-damaging soot and smog.

“Political leadership is steering the agency away from its responsibility to protect human health and the environment,” said EPN senior director Marc Boom. “Making Americans safer is a choice, and EPA’s current leadership has chosen to make Americans sicker.”

“When people of expertise and competence leave the government, you cannot find them and rehire them and reassemble them into teams very quickly,” said former EPA Deputy Administrator Stan Meiburg, cautioning that the scientific case for re-regulating after the current administration ends will be even more difficult than it was in 2009. John Holdren, former White House science advisor, echoed this concern: “It has long been understood that good policy depends on careful analysis and good science, and we’re seeing the capacity to deliver that foundation systematically undermined.”

What You Can Do

Federal protections are now weaker, but actions by individuals, communities, and states can still help reduce exposure and push for stronger protections. Here are steps you can take at each level:

For your household:

• Install a certified water filter (NSF/ANSI 53 or 58) to reduce PFAS, lead, and other contaminants from tap water. The Environmental Working Group’s PFAS filter guide identifies tested filters that achieve near-100% removal of PFAS. For background on what you’re filtering out, see Earth911’s “How to Reduce Your Exposure to Toxic PFAS”.
• Check your local air quality daily at AirNow.gov, particularly if you live near industrial facilities, highways, or coal plants. On high-pollution days, reduce outdoor exercise and keep windows closed.
• Reduce fish consumption from water bodies with mercury advisories. Find your state’s current advisories through the EPA’s fish advisory database before eating locally caught fish. For more on sustainable seafood choices, see Earth911’s “How You Can Help Protect Our Oceans”.
• Reduce household PFAS exposure by avoiding non-stick cookware, water-resistant clothing treated with PFAS finishes, and microwave popcorn bags. Earth911’s “PFAS Contaminants: Where They Came From, Why They Persist & What We Can Do” covers the full landscape of exposure sources and emerging remediation approaches.

For your community:

• Submit public comments on pending EPA rulemakings—including the proposed WOTUS rule and PFAS reporting rollback. Find open comment periods and submit directly at regulations.gov. To understand what’s at stake for wetlands specifically, see Earth911’s interview “Exploring America’s 110 Million Acres of Wetlands”.
• Contact your state environmental agency to understand whether your state has adopted stronger standards. Many states—including California, New York, and Oregon—maintain air and water protections that exceed weakened federal minimums. Find your state agency through the Environmental Council of the States directory.
• Support organizations litigating these rollbacks: Earthjustice, NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and state attorneys general coalitions are all actively challenging these rules in court.

At the policy level:

• Contact your senators and representative through congress.gov and urge them to codify key environmental protections, including the statutory basis for greenhouse gas regulation, removing them from executive discretion.
• Track rollbacks and lawsuits in real time through NRDC’s White House Watch tracker, the Climate Action Campaign’s rollback tracker, and the Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program’s policy tracker.

Since the 1970s, when democracy functions, the nation has unequivocally emphasized human and environmental protection, which was a product of a bipartisan approach led by a Democratic Congress and Republican presidents, from Nixon to Bush II. Make your voice heard in the 2026 midterm elections.

The post Counting The Growing Cost of President Trump’s Environmental Policy appeared first on Earth911.

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The ocean provides half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs 30% of our carbon emissions, and helps control the planet’s climate. By 2030, it’s expected to support a $3.2 trillion Blue Economy. Yet 70% of proven ocean solutions, such as coastal resilience, coral restoration, and marine pollution cleanup, never move past the pilot stage. These projects often win awards and get media attention, but then stall because funding systems don’t connect working ideas with the cities, ports, and coastal areas that need them. Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy, co-founder and ocean lead at Okhtapus, wants to change that. Okhtapus, named with the Persian word for the octopus, uses a model that links what Stewart calls “the three hearts” of successful projects: innovators with proven solutions, cities and ports ready to use them, and funders looking for solid projects.

The first Okhtapus Global Replicator will launch in 2026. It will bring groups of proven innovators to work on important projects in specific places, such as a single port city like Barcelona, where Okhtapus already has strong partnerships, or a group of Caribbean islands facing similar problems. The aim is to have enough successful projects that funders stop asking “where are the deals?” and start saying “we’ve got enough.” The platform focuses on late-stage startups and scale-ups, not early-stage ideas. Stewart calls these the “Goldilocks zone”—solutions that are proven enough to copy but still need funding and partners to grow. By combining several solutions for different locations, Okhtapus can offer investors portfolios that fit their needs and make a real difference in cities, ports, and island nations.

Stewart has spent 20 years working where climate resilience and policy meet. He was part of President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, led policy and investments at the Resilient Cities Network, and is now Managing Director of the World Ocean Council. “Ten years from now, if this is done fast enough,” Stewart said, “we should have pushed hard enough on the funders and the system to change it. What we don’t know is whether we’ll get to the solution status fast enough for some of these tipping points.”

To find out more about Okhtapus, visit okhtapus.org.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on December 22, 2025.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Okhtapus Cofounder Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy Accelerates Ocean Solutions appeared first on Earth911.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on December 15, 2025.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthX CEO Peter Simek on Cultivating Bipartisan Climate Strategies 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.

Every gallon of gasoline burned in a small generator releases about 20 pounds of CO₂. For campers, that also means noise, fuel handling, spill risk, and combustion exhaust in the places people visit for cleaner air.

A portable power station is not impact-free. Batteries require minerals, manufacturing, shipping, and responsible recycling. But when the right unit replaces generator fuel, especially when paired with solar panels, it can cut on-site emissions while keeping phones, lights, coolers, cameras, and medical devices running.

The market now includes models from EcoFlow, Jackery, Bluetti, Anker, and newer brands. Picking well means more than buying the largest battery. It means choosing enough capacity, fast enough charging, durable battery chemistry, and a clear end-of-life pathway.

Why Campers Are Moving Beyond Gas Generators

Traditional gas generators burn fuel, producing carbon monoxide, and often breaking campground noise rules. They also require fuel cans, oil changes, and careful outdoor placement.

A portable power station uses a rechargeable battery instead. There is no combustion exhaust at the campsite and no carbon monoxide from operation. You should still keep any power station dry, uncovered, and within its recommended temperature range, but the air-quality difference is clear.

Solar charging is the most direct path to displacing generator fuel without simply moving the emissions elsewhere. The displaced-emissions math starts with a simple formula: gallons of gasoline avoided × about 20 pounds of CO₂ = displaced combustion emissions. If your camping season avoids 10 gallons of generator fuel, that eliminates roughly 200 pounds of CO₂ that would have been released at the tailpipe, along with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and hydrocarbon pollution.

The actual reduction in emissions depends on whether the battery is charged from solar panels, which produce no fuel emissions during use. Grid charging shifts the emissions from the campsite to the power plant, and the actual footprint depends on the local energy mix. A battery station charged from coal-heavy grid power is cleaner at the campsite but not emission-free overall.

Five Specs That Decide Your Camping Experience

Choosing the right portable power station starts with five practical specs.

Battery Capacity

Capacity, measured in watt-hours (Wh), determines runtime. A 1,024Wh unit can run a 50W mini fridge for roughly 17 hours, or recharge phones, cameras, and a laptop through a weekend. Bigger is not always greener: unused capacity adds weight, cost, and manufacturing impact.

Output Wattage

Output determines what you can run at once. Coffee makers, kettles, pumps, and cooking appliances can each draw 500W to 1,500W or more. Check surge wattage requirements for your appliances and devices, because fridges and pumps often spike briefly at startup, sapping the battery more quickly.

Charging Speed

Faster charging can improve the camping experience, especially when you need a quick top-up before departure, a short recharge during a stop, or fast power recovery on multi-day trips.

However, fast charging time should be considered together with real input conditions. For example, the EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus can charge from 0% to 100% in 56 minutes with 1,500W AC input, but many campground pedestals, shared circuits, or older home outlets may not consistently provide that level of power, so actual charging time varies.

Weight and Weather Protection

For car camping, users can usually tolerate some extra weight, but a portable power station under 30 pounds is easier to carry, load into a vehicle, and move around the campsite.

For weather protection, portable power stations often use a layered design, with the core battery pack and battery management system receiving higher protection first.

For example, the EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus battery pack and BMS are rated IP65, helping them resist dust and low-pressure water jets while protecting the most critical energy storage and control components. However, the overall unit enclosure is rated IP20, so it is best used in a dry, well-ventilated environment away from direct rain exposure. This helps protect the ports, display, and external electrical components while extending the overall lifespan of the device.

Battery Chemistry and Lifecycle

Many current camping models use lithium iron phosphate, or LiFePO4/LFP. Compared with older nickel manganese cobalt batteries, LFP generally offers longer cycle life, strong thermal stability, and a cathode chemistry that avoids cobalt and nickel. That is helpful from a lifecycle perspective, but it does not make the battery impact-free.

The most sustainable unit is one that is right-sized, used for years, charged as cleanly as practical, and recycled properly.

End-of-Life Matters

Lithium batteries should never go into household trash or curbside recycling. Damaged or improperly handled lithium batteries can cause fires in waste trucks and recycling facilities, and the materials inside — including lithium, cobalt, and nickel — are valuable enough to recover through proper channels.

Start here: Enter your ZIP Code in the Earth911 Recycling Search to find a battery drop-off location near you. You can also use The Battery Network’s drop-off locator (formerly Call2Recycle) to locate participating retailers like Best Buy, Home Depot, and Lowe’s that accept rechargeable batteries.

If your portable power station is damaged, swollen, or no longer functioning, do not open it yourself. Contact the manufacturer or your local household hazardous waste program for safe handling instructions.

Some manufacturers also offer brand-specific return programs. For example, EcoFlow’s Trade-In Program allows eligible owners to return older EcoFlow portable power stations for store credit toward an upgrade. Jackery and Bluetti both provide recycling guidance through their support channels, though dedicated take-back infrastructure varies by region.

Whatever brand you choose, check whether the manufacturer offers a return, trade-in, or recycling pathway before you buy. A durable power station paired with a clear end-of-life route is a better environmental choice than a cheaper unit that eventually becomes e-waste.

How the Top Camping Models Stack Up

The cycle-life row deserves a closer look. A 4,000-cycle rating to 80% remaining capacity is not the same as 4,000 cycles to 70%+ remaining capacity. Jackery markets the Explorer 1000 v2 as LiFePO4, and its official spec lists 4,000 cycles to 70%+ capacity. Buyers should compare the retained-capacity percentage, not just the cycle number.

Best for Off-Grid and Multi-Day Trips: EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus

The DELTA 3 Plus is strongest where performance and sustainability overlap: fast AC charging, high solar input, long cycle life, and expansion. Its 1,000W solar input is especially important for off-grid camping because a battery can only replace generator fuel if it can recover enough energy during the day. EcoFlow’s 4,000-cycle-to-80% LFP rating and Trade-In Program also support the product’s environmental positioning beyond the first few trips.

Best for Lightweight Portability: Jackery Explorer 1000 v2

Jackery’s Explorer 1000 v2 is lighter and simple to use, with slightly more listed capacity than the EcoFlow unit. It is a good fit for campers who prioritize portability and moderate loads, but its 70%+ retained-capacity threshold is worth noting when comparing long-term value.

Best for Budget-Conscious Campers: Bluetti AC70

Bluetti’s AC70 is smaller and lighter, with enough power for phones, lights, cameras, fans, and efficient coolers. Its lower capacity can be a benefit for campers with modest needs — less battery material, lower cost, and less unused capacity to carry. The trade-off is a 1,000W AC output ceiling that limits high-draw appliances.

Match the Unit to Your Camping Style

Weekend Car Camping

For two or three nights, a 700–1,100Wh power station usually covers lights, phones, cameras, a fan, and an efficient cooler. The Bluetti AC70 works for lighter loads; the EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus adds more output and solar recovery headroom.

Extended Off-Grid Trips

For four nights or more, solar input becomes critical. A unit with 500W or higher solar input can recover meaningful energy during a few hours of strong sun. The DELTA 3 Plus reaches up to 1,000W across dual MPPT inputs, making it better suited to campers trying to avoid generator backup.

RV and Overlanding

RV and overlanding setups need more careful sizing. Before buying, confirm continuous AC output for your largest appliance, enough capacity for overnight loads, expandable storage if your power needs may grow, and pass-through charging if you need to use devices while recharging.

Three Mistakes First-Time Buyers Make

1. Ignoring charge conditions. Fast charge times depend on input wattage. Confirm the power required to hit the advertised number.
2. Overbuying capacity. Bigger batteries weigh more, cost more, and carry a larger manufacturing footprint. Buy enough capacity, not the most capacity.
3. Skipping solar compatibility. Without enough solar input, a power station is just a battery that slowly drains. For off-grid camping, solar recovery is what turns it into a practical generator replacement.

Pack the Right Power

The best portable power station is the one that matches your real camping habits. Weigh capacity against portability, check output against your appliances, verify charge conditions, and consider the full lifecycle: chemistry, cycle life, solar charging, and end-of-life handling.

For campers who want quieter, cleaner trips without oversizing their setup, the comparison above points toward the EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus for its combination of fast AC and solar charging, expandable capacity, a 4,000-cycle LFP battery rated to 80% retention, and a manufacturer-backed trade-in pathway. Its 1,000W solar input, in particular, makes it the most practical option here for replacing generator fuel on multi-day trips. That said, each unit in this comparison fills a different camping niche — weigh your own trip patterns, power needs, and budget to find the best fit.

About the Author

This sponsored article was written by Kevin Zhao.

Related Reading

• The Earth911 Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Guide
• Portable Solar Energy Systems for Home and on the Go
• How To Prepare for Increasingly Common Blackouts

The post Guest Idea: How to Choose the Best Portable Power Station for Camping appeared first on Earth911.

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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.

Americans throw away roughly 100 billion plastic bags a year, and most curbside programs won’t take a single one of them. Plastic film, those bags, the pallet wrap in the back of the stores, the bubble mailers, the dry cleaner sleeves, the overwrap on a case of bottled water — all of this has been the recycling industry’s white whale for decades. It jams machinery at materials recovery facilities, contaminates other waste streams, and ends up in landfills and oceans, and increasingly that plastic, especially microplastic, ends up in human tissue.

Meanwhile, the lumber industry sends sawdust to landfills by the truckload, and old orchards full of dying trees become a disposal problem for farmers. Two waste streams nobody wants, generated at industrial scale with very few takers. But more than 30 years ago, a small company in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia looked at both of those streams and saw raw material. Today, that company has upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film and sourced over a billion pounds of waste wood in 2024 alone, and as a consequence, they’ve built one of the largest plastic film recycling operations in North America, all in service of making something as ordinary as backyard decking.

The deck happens to last about 25 to 50 years, requiring no staining, no sealing, and competes head to head with pressure-treated lumber on a price and performance basis. The sustainability story isn’t a marketing layer on top of the product, it is the product. And we’re talking about Trex, Trex decking.

Our guests today run two of the most consequential functions inside Trex. Amy Fernandez is Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary, and Chief Sustainability Officer at Trex Company Incorporated, the world’s largest manufacturer of wood-alternative composite decking and railing. She holds the unusual combination of legal and sustainability oversight at a moment when these two domains are converging fast, with the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, California’s climate disclosure laws, and the SEC’s evolving stance all reshaping what public companies must say about their environmental performance. In 2024, Trex indexed its sustainability report to the IFRS standards before being required to, which tells you something about how Amy thinks about the relationship between disclosure, governance, and competitive position.

She’ll be joined today by Zachary Lauer, who is Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Trex, where he oversees manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, and research and development. His teams run plants in Virginia and Nevada, and they’re bringing a major new facility online in Little Rock, Arkansas, having built the operational machinery that turns approximately 95% recycled and reclaimed content into a product that has to perform outdoors for half a century. The R&D side of his portfolio is where Trex has cracked feedstock streams that other recyclers can’t process, including industrial film trimmings, end-of-life packaging from food and chemical manufacturers, and dunnage returns from distribution partners. All this work happens at the intersection of material science, logistics, and the unglamorous reality that recycled inputs don’t behave like virgin ones. It’s more expensive sometimes to recycle this stuff.

We’ll talk with Amy and Zach about how Trex actually makes its products, where the materials come from, and what it has taken to build a national feedstock network through the NexTrex program, a collection program spanning more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and nearly 1,000 schools and community organizations. We’ll dig into a harder question, too: why Trex’s absolute emissions rose alongside production growth in 2024, and what the company is doing about end-of-life recycling of Trex boards now that the first generation is reaching replacement age, and what other manufacturers can learn from a company that is building a recycling infrastructure before there’s a market to feed it.

To learn more about Trex and its sustainability work, visit trex.com. So, circularity is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Trex was practicing it before the word existed. Let’s find out what three decades of doing that work has taught Amy Fernandez and Zach Lauer, right after this.

Welcome to the show, Amy Fernandez and Zachary Lauer. How are you doing today?

Zachary Lauer  4:54

Doing great.

Amy Fernandez  4:55

Great, great. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:57

Well, thank you for joining me. And Trex does such interesting work. I mean, you were demonstrating what circularity means before the word had any cultural traction. I know you weren’t there at the beginning, but was this framed internally as an environmental project or as a sourcing strategy? Just the recognition that there was this massive volume of feedstock there that could be used.

Zachary Lauer  5:16

It was initially an environmental initiative by our founder, Roger Wittenberg. You know, he was bothered by the fact that there was no way to recycle or reuse his bread bags, and he wanted to formulate a product of value from that. He went through a couple of iterations and partnered with some other people, and they decided to turn it into composite decking and market it that way. Ever since that, it’s been part of our DNA, and we were always looking to extract value out of waste streams, you know, that aren’t currently used, and we continue to develop the next generation of materials out there that we can extract value from and create a great product from.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:09

These days — just last week, a couple of weeks ago, we talked with the CEO of Emerald Packaging, who’s also looking for recycled PE to use in their products. There’s competition for this feedstock now. How has that changed the way that Trex organizes its efforts to collect and bring this to the three different locations you manufacture the decking?

Zachary Lauer  6:30

So, you know, with opportunities and growth in this space, one of the things that has developed over time, over the last 10 to 15 years, is the growth in the availability of recycled polyethylene films from distributors. Right, as Amazon grows and direct shipments to homes grow, the materials that are used continue to expand. So that’s opened up markets for increased stretch film and those types of materials. But as those markets grow, we often go deeper and deeper into the stream, more contaminated into the stream, to go after material streams that most people can’t deal with or process.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:17

Well, one of the benefits of this kind of recycling is that you don’t have a lot of health-quality, you know, food-contact kinds of restrictions, and so forth with the plastic. You mentioned contamination. Just how contaminated can the loads be for Trex in order to make a viable product?

Zachary Lauer  7:36

We grade our materials on a scale of 5 to 15% contamination. We can go deeper than that. The contamination that we typically find in our streams are metals, non-ferrous metals, other forms of plastic, polypropylene, polystyrene, and those types of material, paper, cardboard. And so we’re able to design processes that can accommodate those and process those materials. Out-sorting is still critical to the long-term viability.

Amy Fernandez  8:10

Oh, yes. And we can go more contaminated depending on what that contamination is. So if it’s paper, we can handle more of that. If it’s metal, it’s a bit harder to handle. So the type of contamination also matters in terms of, you know, at what level we can accept that contaminated poly.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:31

Amy, the 2024 sustainability report describes the program as a win-win for both business and society at large. As we all know, we live in a time where that’s a contested idea — that sustainability is a good thing for the economy. What’s the most concrete way that you explain or demonstrate that the business case and the environmental case are genuinely the same for Trex, that this is an inseparable configuration?

Amy Fernandez  8:58

Yeah, you know, a really good example was our last earnings call. And during that call, you might have heard our CFO started talking about the price of PVC and virgin materials and the volatility associated because of their connection to oil. So that’s one very recent concrete example of the fact that, because our material is this poly that we recycle, we’re not as exposed to that volatility that you might get from those virgin streams. And so that is truly one of those competitive advantages that we have — that we recycle this material, and we can make a beautiful, well-performing product out of it. That is the business case. So you see it through these little examples.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:51

So in an era of reshoring, you’re actually in a position to be even more competitively advantaged.

Amy Fernandez  9:56

Yes.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:58

Amy, you stepped into the CSO role while also serving as Chief Legal Officer, and that’s a combination that’s becoming more common as sustainability disclosure is shifting from voluntary to regulated. How has all of the upheaval in the regulatory environment that we live in changed Trex’s approach over the past year or two in terms of what you report and what you tell customers?

Amy Fernandez  10:19

Trex has always been a highly ethical company, and so we do what’s right. And if you’re founded in doing the right thing, you’re not as subject to these whims of, you know, what’s happening either politically or, you know, with changes with government regulations, things like that. And so because we’re grounded in this reality of, we’re not going to go out there and start talking about targets that we don’t think are achievable — so when it was, you know, common to start saying “by 2030” or “by 2050” or whatever dates companies were out there saying “we’re going to get to this target” without actually having a plan to get there, Trex would never do that.

And so one of the things that you would see is that we get asked questions: “Why don’t you have targets?” And it’s because our target is to continuously keep improving from a very solid base that we have, but we’re not going to put an unrealistic number out there just to try to get points. So the regulatory changes don’t affect us as much when we start from that just basic ethical “do the right thing, disclose important information that we think our investors, our communities, others want to see, want to know that is true and not misleading in any way.”

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:39

From a marketing perspective, saying that you live by a higher standard is pretty effective. Do you think it’s necessary to be a lawyer to be a chief sustainability officer these days?

Amy Fernandez  11:49

No, not at all. And actually, I think the only reason that we did decide to put it this way — yes, of course, I do have the regulatory mindset, but I also have a passion for this, right? I mean, I joined this company because it is something that is important for me personally. And so the chief sustainability officer could have lived in other places and just been informed by legal the way that I inform other functions in this company. But I basically raised my hand for it and said, I think it lives well here, and I have a passion for it.

Zachary Lauer  12:22

It resided in other areas in our business as well, right, under other people that have that same passion.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:29

So, Zach, what happens between the time when a plastic bag is dropped at one of the 10,000 grocery stores that collect bags and a finished Trex board leaving the factory? Can you walk us through that process?

Zachary Lauer  12:40

Yeah, you’ve kind of highlighted the ends of that value chain, right? From the pickup to the actual product that goes to the customer. We actually have over 15,000 collection points across this country that come back to centralized collection points, and then actually make their way to our recycling facilities, where the cleaner films are put directly into our production lines, and the more contaminated films go into a reprocessing operation that turns it back into a pellet.

But the most challenging engineering point for us in this entire value chain is actually at the extrusion production line, and managing variation in the streams. We call it recipes, and we have a rolodex of thousands of recipes that can be used in the production process. I liken it to a cooking analogy. Today we’re baking with wheat flour, and tomorrow we might be baking with almond flour.

And so we’ve used a lot of technology to help us — machine intelligence, artificial intelligence — to help us manage those recipes. And not only does it help us manage the streams coming into the production lines, those raw materials, but then it modifies the process parameters, the cooking temperatures, and the speeds in order to process those streams. So that’s where the complexity is for us.

Amy Fernandez  14:14

We design our own equipment. And I mean, we don’t — you can’t just buy this equipment from equipment manufacturers. So being able to design and set up this equipment to be able to process this changing raw material stream continues to be one of our areas of excellence.

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:35

That’s fascinating. The idea that if you had a different kind of fiber, for instance, coming in — you brought in a chipped orchard as a source — that you’d have a different recipe, but you’re producing a product that is consistent in its standards and specifications. That’s, I mean, Zach, that’s got to be very complicated. You mentioned AI. Was this possible before AI, or slower before AI?

Zachary Lauer  14:57

No, we still did it, but we had to program a lot more, right, and program the intelligence on the line a lot more. It’s just becoming more rapid as we can read those streams and read the variation in line. It just makes that reaction quicker and faster for us on those production lines to do that. But no matter what our recipe is for the day, to your point, Mitch, it comes out a consistent product at the end.

And it just shows that we design our product around variability. Whereas most people focus on reducing variation in their raw material streams, we’ve designed our whole manufacturing process around being flexible and adapting to material streams — not only the ones we use today, but the ones we’ll use in the future.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:51

The other area where you’ve got that kind of volatility is in the volume of recycled polyethylene that you’re bringing in. You had a big year in 2022; it went down by almost 100 million — excuse me, 100 million pounds — the next year, and then recovered, not quite back to the 2022 range, in ’24. What’s behind that volatility? Is it competition for feedstock? The fact that retailer collection participation changes? The contamination rates?

Zachary Lauer  16:20

A lot of things go into it. But what I tell people is, don’t equate our collection volume to our consumption volume. You know, one of the unique challenges about being a recycler is the fact that it’s a winner-take-all market. When you pick up an account, maybe a large grocery store, it’s like picking up the trash — you have to be there and you have to collect it regularly. Service is key. So there could be times when there is more availability or more collection in a period, and you have to accept it.

So how we manage that volatility, or, you know, the changes that can occur from year to year or season to season, is we do a very good job of long-term demand and supply planning in this space, and combining that with our space planning, and then we kind of layer in anticipated regulatory, market, and consumer preference changes into that. And so there could be a period where we see maybe a deficit or a surplus, and we will go in and consume that and store it for a future period, or there just could be a surge in a particular market where there’s the availability and you just have to be willing to take it. And that’s difficult to absorb — those huge swings like you mentioned — into your supply chain without having a plan.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:55

You just said “as a recycler,” but should we be thinking about this in general as simply part of the manufacturing process — going back to onshoring and keeping more materials in country and reusing them across a wider variety of production streams? How does Trex think about organizing the wider material flow rather than recycling programs in the United States? What have you learned that we should be applying as a nation?

Zachary Lauer  18:23

You know, I think you have to be intentional if you’re going to enter into a stream where you’re going to recycle or pull materials out there. We’ve focused our effort on North America, right? And we do take collection from other areas, but it’s rare. And we adapt our collection based on changing preferences. So, Mitch, what I mean by that is, you know, one year we could be doing a lot of store collection or distribution collection, but then all of a sudden in a region of the country, regulation changes, or things change, and we go more to the recyclers for our material.

We continuously monitor and adapt to the changes that we see there, because our desire is to keep our supply chains as close to our factories as possible. We bear the cost of the freight, right? And we bear the entire cost of the supply chain. We develop the supply chain, and so we’re continuously looking at ways to optimize that and keep our costs manageable.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:34

As you say, you’ve built this vast alternative collection system — 10,000 retail drop-off locations, you’ve got 84 grassroots community partners, there’s 936 schools that were involved as of 2024. What strategies did you have to develop in terms of communicating to the public what they should put in those bins at stores so that you get a clean load? And does that actually impact the quality of the materials you receive?

Zachary Lauer  20:02

It does. From our foundation, education has been key, right? So this has been a marketing and supply chain integrated strategy from the very beginning. And so we utilize things like our NexTrex program to educate students, to educate communities, and motivate them to recycle and incentivize them to recycle. But we’ve also at the same time incentivized our value chain or our supply chain to collect and be a part of it.

And some of that education is based on teaching people what can be used and how it can be used, and to let them know it’s actually being turned into a product that they can later consume and use. But we also come alongside other businesses to support their environmental sustainability goals as well. Most of our partners want to do the right thing too, and sometimes it only takes a little bit of incentive to get them to participate in this program that we have.

Amy Fernandez  21:09

And Zach, why don’t you add also a little bit about the logistics piece of this, because — so you talked about marketing and supply chain, but part of the supply chain was the logistics with the trailers and how we track them, and time them, and send them out at appropriate, you know, to basically maximize our efficiency in getting the materials.

Zachary Lauer  21:30

Yeah. So we also help our supply chain collect this material. We provide those that are willing to collect with balers to bale this, so that we’re efficient in hauling materials back. We also are very good at calculating what collection will be like in certain areas, and where to leave trailers, and where to incentivize them to backhaul to certain locations.

Right, the grocery stores, for example, they’re backhauling anyway to their warehouses — corrugate, all these other materials — so we take advantage of that backhaul to get to their distribution centers, and then collect from those points where they can fill a trailer within a couple of days. And we manage that entire network of trailers and supply chain, and we ensure that they’re weighed out before they hit the road, so that we’re optimizing the cost of bringing those materials in as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:36

Does that mean that you generally collect this material at a lower rate than most of the industry could possibly achieve at this point?

Zachary Lauer  22:43

That’s correct. Because we’re getting it directly from the source versus maybe through a waste collector or a municipal recycling facility where it’s already been handled a couple of times, and the cost could be higher.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:59

Amy, it doesn’t sound like it, but I want to ask about this — do the partners also come to you asking about getting credit for this, ESG credit, carbon credits, and so forth? Are you starting to hear that kind of conversation about how we can create further incentives within the collection economy?

Amy Fernandez  23:17

So we’re not starting to hear that yet, unless it’s come through Zach’s team. But as far as I know, we’re not hearing that. We are, though, starting to explore, for example, those companies that do want to say that their plastic is recyclable, because, as you know, all these regulations are coming out around that. If they want to put, for example, the NexTrex logo on there, and can assure that we’re picking it up. If we pick it up, it gets to our manufacturing site. So people that have put those trackers and things like, “Is my bag actually going to get where it’s supposed to go?” — we find them, they get to us. And so that’s part of it, is to support their recycling claims. We’re starting to get some questions and conversations about that.

Zachary Lauer  24:04

The other incentive too, Mitch, is for a lot of these individuals: they have their own goals, and one of those is to minimize what goes to the landfill. And so they’re also incentivized to not throw it away, and so we can help in that process too — we can help meet that need.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:25

I know neither of you is in the marketing organization, but when people encounter a Trex deck, do you want them to think about the fact that it’s recycled? Do you want them to identify with the circular process?

Zachary Lauer  24:36

We do, and it is meaningful to the consumer. You know, if you were to have asked that question when I just joined Trex — and I’ve only been here 10 years — that, you know, that may have been, you know, it was still in the top 10 of the consumer preference, but it was around eight or nine. That continued to climb up the ladder, and it is in the top five of what the consumer is looking for when they’re looking for a product.

It’s a luxury product that lasts an extremely long time, and they can feel good about the product that they’re purchasing when they do it. And Trex obviously leads in this space with our recycled content on our decking products.

Amy Fernandez  25:27

We still start with performance and aesthetics, but sustainability is right there, right along with it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:35

I have to admit, I do stand on my deck and think about the fact it’s recycled. This is a great place to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to be right back to continue this conversation. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re talking with two of Trex Company’s leadership team: Amy Fernandez, she’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief Legal Officer, and I’m forgetting one other at Trex, and Zachary Lauer, who’s Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer. We’re talking about how Trex has built one of the largest recycling systems in the United States to source materials for its composite decking products.

Amy, Trex in 2024 decided to embrace the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards, which were not mandated by the federal government as a requirement. What drove that choice? Why are you getting ahead of the game?

Amy Fernandez  26:30

There’s a big difference between complying when you’re required to comply and adopting best practices proactively. And in looking at the IFRS disclosure standards, it is a best practice. It’s benchmarking using globally consistent frameworks. It’s, you know, well recognized. It is a good-faith process that shows rigor. And so we’re not going to wait for a US regulation to force us to do something when, again, like I mentioned before, it’s just the right thing to do, and it’s a good framework, because it’s recognized globally. So although we are a US company, we do still have, you know, investors, customers, and others globally that are connected with Trex, so we want to be able to reach them.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:23

Did taking that higher road require more work? Were there things about your business that the IFRS framework forced you to confront and address that you wouldn’t have otherwise? And this obviously would be of interest to other companies that are thinking about whether or not to pursue them.

Amy Fernandez  27:42

Well, we are looking at some of the gaps in there, right? So our scope three, for example, we’re working on that now, and we’re going to get limited assurance from some auditors just to start. That’s something that isn’t required yet in the US, but under IFRS it is a best practice. So we’re starting to work on that now, because that is one of our gaps with alignment to that framework.

And then the other piece of this too is the rigor around any financial planning related to sustainability risk. So by doing that benchmarking, we were able to identify where we have maybe some best-practices gaps — not regulatory gaps, of course, because we’ve already talked about, this isn’t required — but best practices. And what do we want to start doing, and what might be helpful for everybody that’s looking at Trex, right? Our employees, our prospective applicants, our investors and our communities. So that is part of what we’re finding from this exercise.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:43

I also noted that Trex’s scope one and two emissions — you mentioned scope three a moment ago — have risen about 17%, partly due to greater volume and partly due to greater energy use. As you grow as a business — and this is one of those challenges that I think the sustainably-minded confront, which is, these companies are going to produce more carbon but less carbon relative to other alternatives — how do you talk to investors and within the organization itself about that rising net impact, and how do you rationalize that given your desire to reduce environmental impact?

Amy Fernandez  29:25

Yeah. You hit the nail on the head, right? When we bring on more production lines — so we did bring more on in ’24 than what we had in ’23, which accounted for a big portion of that increase that you saw in ’24. And then we also, by adding Little Rock, the Little Rock plant into the network — although we don’t have production there, we’re still using energy while we’re, you know, bringing it up. And so you’re absolutely right that because we are running more, that is going to require more energy.

But we’re trying to improve our efficiency of what we’re using. We’re also looking at our network and the grids and the energy available across Nevada, Arkansas, and Virginia, because they’re not all the same. So we’re going to start looking at where we can optimize that as an entire network. And, you know, just be working on that equipment that we talked about earlier that we design ourselves — what else can we put in there in order to reduce the energy use there?

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:28

Zach, what are the carbon intensity goals? I know you don’t necessarily state public goals, but how do you work toward reducing carbon intensity as a continuous improvement operation?

Zachary Lauer  30:39

So we’re always looking at how we’re manufacturing, and throughout the entire supply chain how we’re — I mentioned before, are we getting the maximum weight per load that we’re hauling? And on a per-pound basis of raw materials, we will actually, Mitch, fine or reduce the cost of what we’ll pay if the loads aren’t maximized and optimized.

But when we look at our manufacturing, we want it to be the lowest possible consumption of energy, because energy is expensive, right? And we want to be as efficient with that equipment as possible. Technology is going to continue to help us get there with that. But also, we drive our facilities off of manufacturing efficiencies, and our goal every year is to keep on getting faster, better, and higher, so that content per pound, that content per linear foot — because it is better and better every year. And that’s a focus for us.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:41

When you enter a new location like the Little Rock plant that you’ve launched, which is purportedly — I haven’t seen the results yet, but supposed to drive 7.4 million kilowatt-hours in annual energy savings and reduce the use of water through a closed-loop recycling system — how do you decide what efficiency investments are going to pay back fast enough to justify the initial investment?

Zachary Lauer  32:05

Well, you know, not everything we do has a great — you know, our goal is for everything we do to have a great return on invested capital, but there are some things that you do just because it’s the right thing to do. One of those areas that’s difficult to get tremendous payback on is water, right? Water is generally still relatively inexpensive in this country. Now, we all know that water is becoming more and more of a challenge.

But a lot of what we do is not just motivated by the return on invested capital, it’s that we’re motivated by doing the right thing. Our employees live in the communities that we operate in. They take a lot of pride. A lot of people come to work for Trex for what we’re doing. Our brand equity is enhanced by what we do and how we go about doing it — not just what, but how we go about doing it.

And our employee brand matters in the communities that we’re in, because labor is extremely competitive in this nation. And somebody that goes to work and feels the impact of what they’re doing is valuable to the community as well — is important to us, and helps us recruit. We have a lot of people that apply to Trex merely because we do things responsibly, we do recycle. So it doesn’t only matter to our consumers, it matters to our employees as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:35

Does the board have a set of “we do the right things” heuristics that they apply to some of these decisions, when you come and say, “Well, we need to do this, and it’s going to be more expensive”? How do they, as a group, create a systematic approach to making the right decision?

Zachary Lauer  33:50

We’re looking at it on an enterprise level, Mitch, where we’re looking at that return on invested capital at an enterprise level. And we will more than offset with our efficiency projects and our cost savings projects and those items on capital that allow us to do these types of things. And so we, for lack of a better term, try to overachieve in some areas to make sure that we can cover our bases in other areas.

Amy Fernandez  34:22

And our nominating and corporate governance committee is the one that gets a sustainability report every quarter. So every meeting we’re reporting on these metrics. Some of these metrics being very important — like our 95% recycled and reclaimed content in our composite decking — maintaining that is something that we report to them every quarter. We also report to them what we just talked about, our energy use, so there’s various metrics that we’re reporting to them.

And so it’s not only just that board-level oversight of our capital, it’s also the nominating and corporate governance committee oversight of our sustainability targets. So you’ve got two lenses looking at it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:04

Do you tie executive compensation to success on those metrics as well?

Amy Fernandez  35:08

We do not. We do not. Our executive compensation — it’s in our proxy statement, but no, there is not a modifier or a target for that. No, it’s overall company performance.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:22

One of the changes that I noticed recently is that between 2022 and 2024, the NexTrex program recovered six times as much material as it did just two years before. What drove that growth, and where do you see a ceiling, potentially, in what NexTrex can deliver?

Zachary Lauer  35:42

Yeah. So when it comes to the NexTrex program, in 2025 we collected over 4 million. In 2026 we’re on trend to get pretty close to 6 million. You know, as we continue to expand the opportunity to rural communities and other avenues to capture this material, it’s just part of our supply chain. As you mentioned before, as competition enters in the space, we’re already moving into the future on different collection points and then different materials.

And where we see — just this grassroots reference that you’re talking to — non-grocery, non-distribution, non-traditional space, this could get to 20 million pounds or greater for us over the next 10 years.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:33

As extended producer responsibility laws come into effect in various states, does that represent competition for the material, or could Trex even become part of the producer responsibility organization solution to collection and processing of materials within the state?

Amy Fernandez  36:49

Yeah, I mean, we’re in conversations with some of those folks about what they think they might be doing in the states that are starting to implement some of these, or, you know, discussing implementing some of this legislation. But we haven’t really seen that we’re going to have significant impact at all to Trex. There’s just, you know, given where we source our materials from, we’re not really seeing competition resulting from that legislation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:18

How do you see the NexTrex model continuing to evolve? Do you want to expand geographically, or is there potential for collecting other materials?

Zachary Lauer  37:18

Yes, I mean, we’re continuously working on the next-gen and the gen-after-that materials. We have a very extensive materials program here to evolve that. But we will continue to reach out to rural communities and those communities that aren’t served as strongly with collection points, and continue to expand those collection efforts nationally.

There’s probably only five to six states that we don’t even have a grassroots collection point in — we’re almost nationally covered in every state with these. And we set targets every year for this team to grow those programs. We have specific people that are dedicated to establishing these programs in underserved collection areas, and they have aggressive targets, and they’re passionate people.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:25

Let me ask about the other side of the recycling equation here, which is, with many of the earliest Trex decks coming to the end of their expected life, reaching replacement age, what do you have to do in terms of policy partnerships and pricing to create a closed-loop solution to recycle those materials as well, so that old Trex decks become new Trex decks?

Amy Fernandez  38:49

So we have the manufacturing capability to reuse our material, so that isn’t the hurdle. The hurdle is at that collection stage. And when you have a contractor that is replacing a deck, they don’t want to sort, so they want to just have everything in there. And right now that is the hurdle — it’s the sorting piece of it, because we can recycle our own decking, but we can’t take — we talked about metal earlier, right? That’s something that we’re not going to be able to use. So that’s where the challenge is.

And what we’ve done is we’ve partnered with, for example, one of our distributors. We partnered with them to bring back truckloads of material back for recycling. So we’re trying to work with our distribution network. We do merchandising, and so for those, we’re able to get that back from our merchandising vendor to send scrap back to us. And then we’re also able to implement some communication around — if there is a big job, let’s start trying to get that product back to Trex so that we can recycle it.

That being said, anecdotally, I hear from friends that have had their first-gen Trex deck, and it is still looking beautiful. So although the warranties are 25 to 50 years, you know, we don’t —

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:15

It could go longer.

Amy Fernandez  40:16

It could go much longer. And so it’s a matter of, you know, starting to see, well, how can we start to put in place a program for when these do start to get replaced or age out?

Zachary Lauer  40:28

But we would use our network to do that reverse collection, right? The network that distributed would be the means to recollect it back.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:39

That makes complete sense. For years, Earth911 has worked with Owens Corning on driving collection of shingles, but it’s interesting because shingle collection has spikes — extreme weather events, hurricanes, and so forth. And so they focus on communities and regions that are subject to disaster. It gives them the opportunity to get people to sort at a time when there’s a vast volume of material. Have you analyzed opportunities for that kind of optimized, focused geographic collection? Maybe a little ticky-tacky question, but I’d be curious.

Amy Fernandez  41:17

I hadn’t thought of it, and now that you mention it, I will.

Zachary Lauer  41:20

We’ve typically looked at our partners in the value chain for that versus external, you know, for those opportunities. So, and taking advantage of those backhauls and those types of situations, we already have trucks delivering. Can we have trucks collecting? The other thing — as we talked about the rural communities too, we’ve looked at offering the opportunity at those rural collection sites to take back product as well, because we already have trucks and trailers there.

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:49

If you were speaking with a manufacturer in another category, say textiles or electronics or other kinds of building materials, and they asked you what the single most important thing Trex got right early on, what would you tell them?

Zachary Lauer  42:04

We designed the manufacturing process, and we designed the supply chain to support it, from the very onset. And we had the mindset from the very onset that the variation was going to be there — figure it out. And through the decades we have refined the ability to do that. So we always had that end in mind: no matter what, we were going to figure out a way to do this. And we specifically designed our manufacturing processes and our collection processes to support that end-to-end supply chain to do that.

And the other thing that’s unique, and what I would recommend, is we’ve never depended on a middle partner or middle player in this chain. So as our collection may change over time, as our material streams change, I don’t have to go find somebody that can do that for me, right? I’m just modifying what I do today to a different material stream.

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:08

Are there moves you made that you wouldn’t recommend that others copy, because maybe it worked only because of where Trex was at the time? Are there ways to get into a blind alley and get stuck there?

Zachary Lauer  43:19

I really can’t think of any. You know, regardless, we’ve always tried to locate our facilities close to our raw material streams that allow us to maintain our 95% recycled content of materials in our decking. And so we specifically saw where we locate our plants to optimize that feed of material.

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:50

Well, Amy and Zach, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can folks keep up with what Trex is doing?

Amy Fernandez  43:57

We’ll be publishing our sustainability report as usual, probably sometime in that July timeframe, so be on the lookout for that next one. Our website — NexTrex is on our website as well, so those are probably the best places.

Zachary Lauer  44:10

Yeah. I mean, our website, and especially the NexTrex link there, has, you know, great videos and just great learning for people, and social media, right, is powerful too, for our NexTrex and our branding. So those are all platforms that we utilize to inform and educate, so that people can participate in the value chain and participate in this endeavor.

Amy Fernandez  44:36

Yep. So trex.com, Why Trex? The first link under that is sustainability.

Mitch Ratcliffe  44:41

Well, we will point folks to that. This has been a fascinating conversation, and really so impressive — what Trex has accomplished. Thanks so much for your time today.

Amy Fernandez  44:50

Thank you, Mitch. It’s our pleasure.

Zachary Lauer  44:52

Thank you.

Mitch Ratcliffe  44:53

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Amy Fernandez, Chief Legal Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer, and Zach Lauer, Chief Operations Officer at Trex Company, the largest manufacturer of wood-alternative composite decking in the world. And you can learn more about Trex and NexTrex collection programs at trex.com — that’s T-R-E-X, folks, trex.com.

You know, for the second time in less than a month, we’ve spoken with a company whose leaders chose to do the right thing regarding their environmental impact, and as a result, built a successful business from it. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, explained how they use recycled polyethylene in food packaging just a couple of weeks ago. But Trex got there in 1996, before “circular economy” was a phrase that anyone used in a boardroom, or, well, almost anywhere outside of a small cadre of design and architectural thinkers. Three decades later, it’s upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of plastic film and runs roughly 95% recycled and reclaimed content into its products. And I think, most impressively, operates one of the largest plastic film recycling operations in North America.

The sustainability work and the business are the same thing. It’s not a different choice to become sustainable — it’s part of the underlying philosophy of the company, and that’s the headline here. The structural insight is that Trex designed its manufacturing processes around variations in feedstocks, instead of trying to standardize and therefore eliminate the use of most of the material that they would receive. Zach described a rolodex of thousands of recipes that the production lines run through, swapping feedstocks the way that a baker swaps wheat flour for almond flour, for instance. And machine intelligence is making it easier to read the stream in real time and adjust temperatures and speeds on the line.

Most manufacturers spend their time narrowing input tolerances, but Trex developed tolerance for inputs that nobody else wanted and made it profitable. That’s a different theory of operations, and it explains why the company can go deeper into contaminated film streams — the dunnage returns that we heard about, the industrial trimmings, the bubble mailers that went to landfill before. Other recyclers walk away from this stuff, but Trex embraces and uses it. The lesson for any building products, textile, maybe electronics manufacturer thinking about recycled content is that variability is the design constraint. Solve for that first, or the supply chain will keep breaking on you.

Trex’s poly feedstock isn’t priced off a barrel of crude, which means in a period of reshoring, tariff uncertainty, and due to the war in Iran, oil-price swings, the recycled-content company holds a competitive advantage the virgin-material companies cannot match. And this is the version of the climate story that doesn’t get told often enough: recycled supply chains can be more stable than virgin ones in a volatile economy, not less.

So it’s refreshing to hear Trex acknowledge that the loop isn’t closed yet. The first generation of Trex decks is reaching replacement age — though I have to admit that my deck is looking pretty good at almost 20 years old — and the manufacturing side can reabsorb this material, but the recycling bottleneck is contractors pulling up those old decks who don’t want to sort the screws from the boards. And Amy named this directly. That’s the kind of candor that builds trust with the audience, and it points to the next phase in the circular economy work that requires leaping into the messy human logistics of deconstruction, sorting incentives, and reverse-haul economics.

Trex’s instinct to use its existing distribution backhauls is the right one, and it’s the model that other durable-goods manufacturers will need to copy if extended producer responsibility laws keep expanding state by state.

Two interviews this month with companies that chose the harder path early and now hold more defensible market positions. That isn’t a coincidence. It’s a leading indicator of which businesses get to keep operating in the climate economy that’s arriving right now. We’ll keep tracking the manufacturers building the infrastructure before the regulations force them to, because they’re the ones writing the playbook that everyone else will be reading in five years.

So stay tuned, folks. And hey, if today’s conversation gave you something to think about, share this episode with someone in your life who’s wondering whether sustainability and business strategy can actually be the same thing. And it turns out, in some companies, they already are. Folks, you’re the amplifiers — to spread more ideas to create less waste. And there are more than 550 episodes in our archive waiting for you on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, and other purveyors of podcast goodness, whatever you prefer.

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

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Trex Makes Circularity Work appeared first on Earth911.

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What we call waste is really just misallocated feedstock—raw materials waiting to be cycled back into the next generation of products and packaging. According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investors are racing to capture part of that opportunity. Meet Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation at Overlay Capital, an Atlanta-based alternative investment firm whose Waste and Materials Fund is backing both early-stage materials innovators and later-stage recycling operations with established infrastructure. Overlay’s strategy involves investing in innovation and implementation simultaneously—in both startups and established companies—to accelerate progress across multiple layers of the circular economy. It offers a window into where smart money sees the materials transition heading.

Elizabeth explains that sortation is the biggest bottleneck at the materials recycling facilities (MRFs) your garbage and recycling are sent to after curbside collection. The U.S. is simultaneously the world’s leading exporter of scrap aluminum and the number one importer of finished aluminum, because we’ve lacked domestic sorting capacity. Overlay has invested in companies like AMP Robotics, which recently closed a 20-year contract with SPSA, a southeastern Virginia municipal authority, to sort all recyclables from four to five cities using AI-driven systems. When you fix sortation, she says, you trigger a domino effect: recycling rates climb, landfill life extends, and margins improve as higher-purity materials command premium prices.

Overlay’s portfolio also includes next-generation materials companies united by a common thesis: they must be better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainable than what they replace. Cruz Foam converts chitin from shrimp shells into compostable packaging foam. Simplifyber uses cellulose to create biodegradable soft goods through 3D molding, bypassing traditional textile manufacturing entirely. Terra CO2 just closed a $124 million Series B to scale low-carbon cement technology that could cut into concrete’s 8% share of annual global CO2 emissions. Each uses abundant, waste-derived feedstocks and has achieved or is on a clear path to price parity with incumbents.

You can learn more about Overlay Capital at overlaycapital.com.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on January 12, 2026.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Turning Waste Into New Products And Packaging With Overlay Capital’s Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh appeared first on Earth911.

The global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider Electric, works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports more than 40% of the Fortune 500 with energy procurement and sustainability strategies, managing over $50 billion in annual energy spending. His experience shows something that pledges and press releases often miss: the biggest challenge for corporate sustainability is not money, technology, or political will. The real issue is the gap between ambition and the ability to deliver. Companies are making Science-Based Targets commitments faster than they are building the infrastructure to meet them. Scope one and two emissions are being managed better, but scope three emissions, which come from a company’s supply chain, still present a systems problem that no single company can solve alone. Schneider’s zero-carbon supplier program suggests what it takes to close this gap. When the company started its own effort to cut emissions from its top 1,000 suppliers by 50% in five years, all 1,000 signed up within two weeks. However, about 84% of them did not fully understand what they had agreed to. Achieving success meant creating measurement tools, education programs, and action plans to help the whole ecosystem, not just individual companies.

This critical conversation explores how renewable energy is bought, including the difference between physical and virtual power purchase agreements. Steve also explains why the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) market became more complex as it grew, and why 10% fewer renewable deals closed in 2025 compared to 2024, as tech companies used up available clean energy. He also addresses a key question in clean energy: is AI helping the environment overall, or do its energy needs still outweigh its efficiency benefits? Schneider processes over a million energy invoices each month, and about 50,000 of them had issues that took 10 to 15 business days to resolve. Now, a team of AI systems can handle these in seconds. Accurate energy consumption and billing data directly affect emissions reporting, energy efficiency, and money-saving market decisions. He describes Schnieder’s approach as “frugal AI”: using the right-sized models for each task, running them on clean energy, and choosing simple solutions over complex ones. Looking ahead, electrification is building a global digital energy network in which every meter and adjustment contributes to a new system independent of central plants. As intelligence spreads, power can shift to consumers, communities, and businesses. Schneider is enabling this shift by building a mesh grid in which each point both produces and consumes energy, coordinated by AI. These changes fundamentally reshape the global energy landscape. The central question: will we intentionally build this new, distributed system, or will we repeat centralized patterns digitally?

To learn more about Schneider Electric’s sustainability efforts, visit se.com.

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The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric’s Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition appeared first on Earth911.

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What if the solution to the retail industry’s $890 billion returns crisis wasn’t better logistics, but better logic? Disney Petit, founder and CEO of Liquidonate, is proving that the most sustainable return skips the trip back to a warehouse and goes directly to a community in need. Americans returned nearly 17% of all retail purchases last year, generating 2.6 million tons of landfill waste and 16 million tons of CO2 emissions. Each return costs retailers between $25 and $35 to process, yet 52% of consumers admit to participating in return fraud at least once. Petit witnessed this broken system firsthand as employee number 15 at Postmates, where she built the customer service team and created Civic Labs, the company’s social responsibility arm. Her food security product Bento, which allowed people without smartphones to access free food via text message, won Time Magazine’s 2021 Invention of the Year Award. Now Liquidonate has earned recognition as one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2025.

Liquidonate integrates directly with retailers’ existing warehouse and return management systems. When a product comes back and can’t be resold—open box, slightly damaged, or simply unwanted—the platform automatically matches it with a local nonprofit or school that needs it. “It’s the same reverse logistics workflow they already use,” Petit explains. “It’s just redirected toward community good instead of going to the landfill.” The platform handles everything: shipping labels, pickup coordination, and tax documentation so retailers can write off donations. Retailers recover logistics costs through tax benefits while communities receive quality products, and millions of pounds of goods stay out of landfills.

To date, retailers using Liquidonate have diverted over 12 million items from landfills, working with more than 4,000 nonprofits across the country. Liquidonate also tackles return fraud by eliminating “keep it” returns, when customers claim they want to return something but are told to keep the item and still receive a refund. “One hundred percent of the time we’re producing a shipping label for a nonprofit who wants that product,” Petit says. “We completely eliminate that keep-it return option, so we eliminate the returns fraud option.” With $900 billion worth of inventory potentially available for redirection, Petit approaches the business through the lens of environmental justice, building a for-profit company designed to prove that doing good and doing well aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re interdependent.

Nonprofits and schools can sign up for free at liquidonate.com. Retailers interested in partnering can reach out to partners@liquidonate.com.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on November 17, 2025.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Liquidonate CEO Disney Petit On Solving The Retail Returns Crisis appeared first on Earth911.