In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and atmospheric CO₂ now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainability industry doesn’t want to talk about: buying green products doesn’t drive the systemic change we need. It might not even be moving the needle. That’s the core argument of Michael Maniates, an environmental social scientist and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael has spent more than 30 years studying why well-intentioned environmental choices at the checkout line fail to add up to real-world emissions reductions, and what kinds of action actually do. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, he makes the case that the most powerful thing an eco-conscious person can do isn’t swap their products. It’s to become an active citizen.

The resulting cycle has a name in Michael’s framework: the trinity of despair. Earnest effort. Negligible impact. Creeping anxiety that we can’t turn the corner. People try hard, see little result, feel guilty when they can’t maintain perfection, and eventually burn out — or conclude that meaningful change requires getting every single person on board first. He is a sharp critic of what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has called the ABC model of social change: shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and better Choices will follow. It’s the backbone of most sustainability communications — and, he argues, it’s empirically fragile. Pro-environmental attitudes don’t reliably produce pro-environmental behavior. Yet the model persists in education, marketing, and environmental organizing alike. Why does it keep coming back? Maniates identifies two reasons. First, it’s deeply embedded in the educational system. Second, it sanitizes a genuinely gnarly problem of power and politics into a communication challenge: if we just get more information out there, people will make better choices. That framing shifts blame onto consumers, hides the structural drivers of high-carbon living, and makes life easier for politicians who don’t want to touch the structural stuff.

Find Michael Maniates’ work, including his email to ask your direct questions, at michaelmaniates.com. His book, Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits is available as a free download. The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism was published in November 2025 by Polity Press.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

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 explore how to have a genuine green impact — whether that stops at making small changes or must involve active political engagement. In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed the $500 billion mark. Sales of reusable water bottles hit $10 billion. Plant-based meat alternatives, electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable phone cases — the shelves are groaning with ways for conscientious consumers to buy their way to a better planet.

And yet global carbon emissions still hit another record high that same year. The concentration of atmospheric CO₂ passed 427 parts per million, and it currently stands at 429 parts per million as I speak. Microplastics are turning up in human brain tissue. So the gap between what we’re buying and what’s actually changing has never been wider — and that gap is exactly where our guest today has spent his career.

Michael Maniates is an environmental social scientist, a senior fellow with the Story of Stuff project, and the author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, published by Polity Press in November 2025. He’s also the co-author of Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits. Before that, he spent more than 30 years teaching environmental studies at Allegheny College, Oberlin College, and the Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where he was the inaugural head of the Environmental Studies program. Right now he’s writing a new book called Stop Wasting Time: Four Paths to Deep Sustainability in Higher Education.

Michael’s central argument is provocative and well-evidenced: the story that we’ve been told about saving the planet through better consumer choices — what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has labeled the ABC model, for Attitudes, Behavior, and Choices — is empirically fragile and strategically dangerous. Decades of research document what scholars call the attitude-behavior gap and the behavior-impact gap. Pro-environmental attitudes don’t reliably produce pro-environmental behavior, and when they do, the aggregate impact on emissions is in most cases negligible.

Michael calls the resulting cycle of earnest effort, negligible impact, and our creeping anxiety that we can’t turn the corner the “trinity of despair.” He proposes a framework of minimum and maximum consumption standards — a floor below which no one should fall, and a ceiling above which individual consumption begins to destroy others’ chances at a good life — and those should be arrived at through democratic deliberation, not expert decree.

Now at Earth911, we publish a lot of green living advice every day: how to recycle, reduce food waste, choose better products, compost, fix what you have, make it last longer. We also consistently urge our audience to engage their elected representatives at every level, because we’ve long recognized that individual action without systemic change only salves individual concerns without actually moving the societal needle on climate. Michael’s research is a sharper version of that perspective, and I invited him to talk with you all because we want every person who reads Earth911 to have the greatest possible impact. If the social science says there are more effective places to invest our environmental energy alongside our daily choices, we want to understand where those places are and how we can get there. Open minds, try more ideas — and trying more ideas is how we will eventually get to less waste overall.

You can find Michael and his work at michaelmaniates.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. So is the living green story we’ve been telling ourselves helping us, or standing between us and the systemic changes we actually need? Let’s find out right after this quick commercial break.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:26

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

Michael Maniates  4:28

I’m doing great, Mitch. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, thank you for joining me. Your work is fascinating, and I can appreciate the challenge of trying to speak to people who want to do the right thing but are not necessarily taking all the steps they need to in order to enact change in the world. So I want to start with a basic question. You don’t argue that making small changes in lifestyle or embracing green products isn’t making a difference — but that it isn’t enough. What is your advice for having a genuine positive impact on the environment?

Yeah, I think buying green and living lean — which is something that so many of us do — can make a difference in our lives for a whole host of reasons. It can help us be more aware of our surroundings. It can help us walk our talk. It often helps us protect our families or friends from toxins, especially if we’re big users of organic foods. But what it can’t do, despite what we often hear as consumers or what we may sometimes say as marketers, is drive that fundamental social transformation for sustainability.

There are a whole lot of reasons for that — reasons I describe in my book, and that others have called out as well. The impact of these green gestures is too small. They don’t deliver meaningful, consistent benefits. What benefits do arise are quickly swamped by expanding economic growth. And oftentimes, the changes we really need to be making just aren’t for sale. So our ability as consumers to drive those changes is difficult at best.

It seems to me that our best chance for making a difference is to start thinking — or maybe just thinking harder — about how to be a citizen in community with others, not as a solitary consumer in the checkout line. That means working with others, where and when we can, to try to shift everyday patterns of life in genuinely sustainable directions, so that acting sustainably becomes, as entrepreneur Paul Hawken once said, natural and normal — as easy as falling off a log — rather than the product of intentionally virtuous acts that are often difficult to sustain. This is really a call for community connection, for becoming a citizen-expert in a particular issue, drawing on one’s own expertise and working with others to try to create new ways of living.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:01

That suggests that the first step is really to see yourself as part of a system. You use vivid metaphors — like “it’s the maze, not the mouse” — and thinking about it from that perspective, how do you suggest someone make that transition? Let’s say somebody who currently invests their environmental energy toward purchases. How should they transform that into a broader, more meaningful response?

Michael Maniates  7:31

Well, it could be — and I do not want to in any way denigrate people’s efforts as consumers. I came up as an energy guy and helped run a community energy project for many years in a small Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania. But at the end of the day, lots of these issues are beyond our ability to address as consumers.

What it really depends on, as I argue in this little book I’ve written, is that one needs to identify where one’s passion is. Let’s say your passion is energy. You’ve outfitted your house, you’re using all the best appliances, maybe you’ve got some solar panels on the roof — you’re doing what you can as an individual consumer. But to really make a difference, to get at that playing field that’s fundamentally tilted toward fossil fuels and an expansionist carbon-emitting economy, it does mean trying to find like-minded people. That can be in your own community, it can be at the national level, it can be networked globally.

The task is to find those people and then begin to experiment — often in your own community initially, but perhaps beyond that — to try to shift subsidies, taxes, the default settings of everyday society. To begin to shift the maze, if you will, rather than blaming individuals for being insufficiently educated or having bad values. I have a chapter in my book titled “Why Environmentalists Don’t Get Invited to Parties.” Nobody wants to have their finger wagged at them.

The goal is to begin to think about how to re-jigger everyday life so that we unconsciously act sustainably, even when we don’t realize it, because that’s just how things are set up.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:51

I’m put in mind of Neo starting to see the Matrix and then being able to interact with and really change it. Your background is interesting — you ran a yogurt shop in Berkeley before becoming an academic, and you worked for Amory Lovins and later Pacific Gas and Electric. How has that non-academic career arc shaped the way you think about systemic change versus individual virtue?

Michael Maniates  10:17

I came up as an adult in the environmental movement in the mid-to-late ’70s as an undergraduate student at Berkeley. My first job, before going to Pacific Gas and Electric, was working for Amory Lovins in San Francisco — for the International Project for Soft Energy Paths.

This tension between systemic change and individual virtue — as I recall it in the late ’70s and early ’80s, they were actually one and the same. Individual virtue around the environment involved brainstorming with others, maybe over coffee or a beer, about how to work together to shift change. There were no green products really to purchase back then. Enacting your environmental concerns as a consumer just wasn’t on the table.

This separation of individual virtue in the checkout line versus thinking about systemic change begins to emerge in the late ’80s, and I think it’s fully entrenched now — to the point where what we’re really looking at is not so much a crisis of democracy but a lack of familiarity with the arts of citizenship. Now we typically don’t know our neighbors. We’re on our devices. We tend to be more isolated. The whole ecosystem of groups that folks might have joined — from the PTA to bowling leagues — has atrophied.

What I’m really calling for, as others are as well, is a reinvigoration of community connection. These days, around environmental issues, the most prominent environmental story is often “get off the grid, take care of yourself, and shut down.” And surveys show that actively pursuing green behaviors often demobilizes people in terms of their civic engagement.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:59

That seems so counterintuitive — but what you’re saying suggests that we’ve simply oriented ourselves toward ourselves rather than toward the rest of the system we live in, at least around environmental issues.

Michael Maniates  13:14

This really begins to take hold in the mid-to-late ’80s. By ’89 or ’90, the number of consumer goods on the shelf with a “buy this and save the world” green pitch had doubled — and then it doubled again in ’92. And that led us into this isolated, take-care-of-yourself perspective.

Now my students — and folks older than them — find that the easiest way to imagine acting on the environment is by buying green products, and perhaps feeling guilty when they slide off that path of perfection, because you just can’t be perfect.

In the mid-to-late ’80s and early ’90s, I was convinced that if you could just get people to screw in an energy-efficient light bulb today, they’d become energy activists tomorrow. But what academics and marketers both have discovered is that if you come to environmental issues as a consumer first, there is a strong tendency to believe you’ve done your bit by buying green — and so there’s no need to engage in the messier business of meeting new people and trying to find a group to work with. It also separates you from the collective. Political scientists call these “solidarity benefits” — you don’t really get that when you screw in a light bulb.

And finally, this is where my survey and interview work has added something to the literature: if you try to save the world in your own small way through these acts of environmental stewardship, it can lead you to the conclusion that social change happens when you get everybody on board. Because if we’re saving the world through the cumulative effect of small consumption acts, in order to have any appreciable impact, you’ve got to get a lot of people on board. But this view — that you need large majorities before you can drive change — is empirically untrue. That’s not at all how social change happens. In reality, you need 10, 15, 20 percent working strategically, and you’re off to the races.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:06

In fact, I’ve seen research that suggests that if you get to 3.5 percent, you’re well on your way.

Michael Maniates  17:12

Exactly. And I share a variety of these reports and data with students — smart, committed, passionate students both in the US and in Singapore — and they are stunned. They never really got this in their education.

I can appreciate that, because I have an eight-year-old son who, just yesterday for a school assignment, was instructed to write an essay about how we need to reduce our use of single-use plastics in the household in order to address the microplastics problem. But if we really want to get at the microplastics problem, it probably requires some set of agreements on production and on the creation of alternatives, which is beyond what households can drive with their consumption choices. We drive that as citizens, not consumers.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:47

The activism you’re describing is interesting to me because I was involved in early privacy discussions and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and the EFF made a very conscious decision to focus on thought leadership and not build a broad constituency. That seems to be the modern approach many activist organizations take. How do you recommend an individual engage with companies, or conversely, companies engage with individuals, in order to begin to influence policy? For instance, to reduce the incidence of microplastics?

Michael Maniates  19:14

Well, I don’t think there’s a recipe. I teach a course on this, and the first thing we discuss is that there really are no hard-and-fast recipes in the policy sciences for how to translate one’s own energy — whether that’s an individual or an organization — into policy change.

That said, I think there are first principles. We know that people become engaged as citizens when they identify with groups that are pushing the ball downfield. They engage when there’s a moral claim or a sense of injustice. And they engage when there is some sense that there’s a goal that can be realized and they can be part of reaching it. When you get those three things together, it is like magic.

So with that in mind, individual businesses and entrepreneurs want to be thinking: What problem are we actually trying to solve? And they want to stay completely clear of any narrative that says “engage with my product, get all your friends to do it, and the cumulative effect will be transformative change” — because that kind of narrative propagates a theory of social change that can be debilitating. They need to think about whether there are stakeholder groups they can point people toward, whether there are ways to educate their consumers to think more strategically. I’ll give you one example from the book, which is IKEA.

Michael Maniates  22:22

IKEA does a lot of survey work and publishes the results. In their most recent report, they identified that the two primary reasons people buy green at IKEA are to save money and to drive change. Now, I’m okay with the saving-money part. It’s the “process of social change” framing that I think gets pretty wonky.

What I would say to IKEA is: if you think the problem is climate change, then don’t sell your consumers this living green myth — the idea that they’re part of change by doing these small things. Instead, begin to think strategically about how you can provide information with each purchase, or how through email memberships you can direct people to organizations doing good work, or how you can create a community conversation at the local IKEA store on a Saturday morning — feed everybody a free breakfast and talk about how we try to make a difference in our community.

Mitch Ratcliffe  23:42

I mean, Swedish hot dogs — just bring them in.

Michael Maniates  23:45

Or those meatballs would be awesome. But if you really want your commercial enterprise to drive a difference rather than just fatten the bottom line, then you need to be thinking about those kinds of things. There’s no guarantee it’ll succeed, but you’ve got to be committed to it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:16

What you’re describing is, in a way, movement marketing. And you’re a critic of the ABC model of social change — shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and you get better Choices. Why does it keep coming back? What’s the shift we need to make in our thinking?

Michael Maniates  24:38

Sociologists have been scratching their heads for some time about why this ABC model persists. It has been shown again and again, at least around environmental issues, to be woefully inadequate. Education doesn’t reliably lead to changes in attitudes. Changes in attitudes more often than not don’t lead to behavior change, especially if you’re in an environment that privileges a particular way of living. And even if you do change your behavior and make different choices, these are typically too small to make a difference.

So why does it persist? I think it’s deeply ingrained in our educational system. But more importantly, this focus on people’s attitudes and values and behaviors turns a gnarly problem around power and politics and influence into something sanitized: we just need to get more information out there. It shifts blame, hides responsibility, turns consumers into scapegoats, and makes politicians’ lives easier. You can’t blame anyone for wanting to make their life easier — but the sum total is an approach to problem-solving that just isn’t cutting it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:03

Well, the maze is showing signs of stress, and you were relating that you’re in Abu Dhabi today. Tell me what happened in the neighborhood. How do you see the old system — the maze — falling apart?

Michael Maniates  27:16

There are always going to be cracks. We live in complex systems, and these systems have emergent properties. Things happen, opportunities arise. What we see now with the escalation of energy prices is a renewed interest in renewables, EVs, and other possibilities, and a reminder that we remain dependent on the Middle East for oil, directly or indirectly.

My argument all along is that if people are looking for these opportunities — these cracks in the maze — they’ll be surprised at how many they see in their community, their state and nation, and in the world. My concern is that if we’re too busy trying to figure out the best sustainable product to buy, we’re not looking for these larger possibilities.

The systems we live in are actually less stable and less permanent than they seem. Which I think invites all of us to ask: What am I most interested in? Is it food? Is it energy? Is it transportation? And then, how can I begin working with others to figure out where the cracks in the wall are, and try some new things?

There’s probably nothing more rewarding than working in common for the common good. Working with others isn’t always a lovely experience, but more often than not, people will tell you that some of the best experiences of their lives have been joining with others to try to make things happen. It’s that joy of participation, that joy that comes with citizenship, that I’ve tried to talk up as a way of inspiring people to look for action as citizens, rather than as consumers.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:44

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Michael Maniates. He’s the author of The Living Green Myth. Michael, before we continue, I want to ask about something you said in the last segment — it sounds like you’re saying that saving money from energy or water efficiency innovations on offer at places like IKEA isn’t necessarily a good thing. Can you break that down for us?

Michael Maniates  32:14

Yeah, I don’t mean to sound dismissive of energy or water efficiency improvements. It would be crazy to argue for a more inefficient system. The point is simply that increased efficiency in resource use almost always produces, over time, greater consumption — not less — either in that resource or as increased consumption elsewhere in the economy that swamps the initial gains. Economists have called this for some time the Jevons Paradox.

When thinking back to IKEA: these resource-efficiency gains are a good thing, and they may put a little lid on consumption for a bit. But at best, that buys us time to be thinking about more fundamental transformations — ones that hardwire reduced material throughput in the economy and give us higher standards of living and better environmental outcomes.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:05

You propose both a floor — a minimum consumption necessary to live a good life — and a ceiling, the maximum at which one’s choices begin to destroy others’ opportunity to make similar choices. The floor sounds easy to sell. How do you make the case for an upper limit in societies that treat unlimited consumption as synonymous with freedom?

Michael Maniates  34:32

That’s the million-dollar question. You’re referring to the book Consumption Corridors, published back in 2021 and available as a free download from the University of Münster. This idea of a corridor — a minimum and a maximum — is moving forward, particularly in Europe, especially around housing and transportation.

The argument isn’t, right off the bat, an environmental one. It says: if we want to pursue the good life — to know we’re living the best life we can in a way that doesn’t hurt other people — then most people would be down with that. No one rolls out of bed in the morning wanting to be complicit in environmental degradation or in making life awful for others.

To your question about how to talk about limits without sounding like you’re taking away people’s freedom: the first thing I’ve learned is that you just need to remind people of what they already know. I have a limit on the amount of chocolate I eat each day or the amount of wine I drink each week — I know if I exceed that limit, it’s not going to be great. My son wants more screen time than I allow him. So I think we’re all kind of aware of that already.

The task is then helping people — as facilitators, not as policymakers talking down to them — begin to think about how floors and ceilings in particular contexts might actually make everybody’s life better. Limits on vacation properties in housing-scarce cities. Congestion pricing. Residential parking permit limits. All of these show that limits can actually help us navigate life in a way that feels just.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:33

In a lot of ways, this is not radical at all. Adam Smith — both Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments — makes these arguments over and over.

Michael Maniates  38:43

Yes. But a lot of Americans perceive these self-imposed limits as constriction, as preventing them from exercising their full freedom. I was really taken by a David French piece in the New York Times about why Americans are so unhappy, even though they’re so rich. When you have a lot of inequality, a portion of consumption becomes relative comparison. If you see somebody else getting a better deal — he uses the example of an airplane where someone cuts the line because they’re a super-tier member — whatever you have starts to feel like not enough.

Inequality, empirically, is one of the major drivers of the overconsumption machine. And yet our level of happiness has stayed flat or declined over the last 20 to 25 years, even as per-capita consumption has risen. If we were consuming more and we were happier, at least we’d be destroying the planet with a little happiness. But that’s not happening.

This is where the consumption corridor notion comes from — which is really beginning to take off in Europe. We may not be talking about hard limits at the top, but rather a set of regulations or incentives that greatly discourage people from continuing to climb the consumption ladder. If you can do that, you begin to reduce the overall disparity in consumption levels, which can slow down this tendency to compare ourselves against one another.

Mitch Ratcliffe  42:15

I’ve been reading the philosopher Omri Boehm’s book Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, which anchors on the idea that the recognition of personal dignity is a foundation on which society can be rebuilt inclusively. What would you suggest the foundational value we embrace as a society should be, and how would you integrate that into your relationship with customers, if you were a company?

Michael Maniates  43:07

If we were thinking about human dignity and some degree of justice that we could all sort of get behind, then I think the environmental protection piece takes care of itself to a great degree. Because so much of what we think of as environmental disruption or pollution is really the crap — whether it’s carbon, toxins, or sludge — produced by some people who are consuming a great deal and don’t see the consequences of their actions. That waste flow inevitably gets deposited on less powerful, more defenseless people.

If we take human dignity seriously, we want to create systems whereby the consequences of my consumption choices come back to me, rather than being deposited on others. Then I think that takes care of the business case as well. We don’t want to be creating what economists call “externalities” that are hidden away. Instead, we want to be thinking about modes of production and consumption that embrace circular economy thinking, and that in particular aren’t just driving the consumption machine but are embracing notions of sufficiency as much as efficiency.

Michael Maniates  44:45

Consumption Corridors argues that the minima and maxima should be designed through very deliberative democratic processes — not imposed on us — and you outline a three-stage process for doing that kind of community deliberation. Has it been tried anywhere?

Michael Maniates  45:10

That three-step process: first, pull together people who represent your community and talk about what you care about — your visions and goals for the good life. Step two: let’s think about how we get there for everybody, and that will often focus on not “What do I want?” like a McMansion, but rather “What do I actually need?” The third component is talking about what the community does to get there — through regulation, peer pressure, or taxes — in order to move us toward those goals.

In the Consumption Corridors book, this three-step process is put forward as largely aspirational. But the huge aha moment for me was around the proliferation of citizen assemblies across Europe on climate change. As of 2023, there were more than a dozen EU countries that have consistently run these assemblies — 30 to 200 people, reflecting the heterogeneity of the country, given scientific and technical advice but not told what to do by experts.

What you see again and again is that when you bring regular people together across class and ideological lines and ask “What do we care about?”, most people care about the same things: family, community, love, connection, having a meaningful life. And then when you ask “How are we going to get there?” you find a much higher degree of support for sufficiency measures than experts predict — measures that would really dampen upper-level consumption and redirect those benefits toward people at the bottom.

Mitch Ratcliffe  47:57

Do we have the right political systems or approaches to political deliberation now that we are a deeply connected planet? Could it be radically decentralized while at the same time enabled by global coordination of resources?

Michael Maniates  48:17

One thing that pains me when I travel — I still read books, look out the window, and people-watch, old-fashioned that way — is that everyone is on their devices, completely removed from the people next to them. I love chatting people up on the train or the plane or the bus, and that just doesn’t really happen much anymore.

So the task is for each of us, in our own way, to put the screen down, as I say in my book, and just join a group or a club. I’m inspired by Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone and lamented the loss of social connection. Just put that screen down, go join a group. It doesn’t need to be environmental. Just begin to develop social connections. And then, as you do that, if there are ways of connecting with eco-local initiatives — which are often networked globally but happening locally in your community — being drawn into that can open up lots of possibilities.

The systems of governance we live in have remained largely the same for the last couple of hundred years. But it’s how we have understood our role in that governance system that needs to change. If we care enough to be super-shoppers in the market for the planet, then we need to care enough to bring that energy to bear on actions that are likely going to be more effective for the planet, and in the long run, better for us.

Mitch Ratcliffe  51:04

Based on the way your students behave today — their engagement with these ideas and their approach to developing solutions — what would the world look like in 2040 if they get the resources they need to put their vision in place?

Michael Maniates  51:31

I’m going to be a little bit of a downer here, and that’s not my natural thing. I’ve never belonged to the apocalyptic camp of environmentalism. I take a page out of Kim Stanley Robinson’s book — the Hugo Award–winning sci-fi writer many of your listeners may know from The Ministry for the Future.

I was on a panel with Stan some years ago at the Worldwatch Institute, and he was making the case that whether it’s “too late” depends entirely on your time horizon. If you’re thinking about the next 10 years, the trajectory on ice loss, climate change, biodiversity erosion, and global market forces that poorly account for ecological goods and services — it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. But if you take the long view — if you say that in four or five generations, things are going to be much better, and we understand ourselves as beginning to set in motion ideas, technologies, business practices, values, and governance systems that will bend the arc of human experience toward a peaceful coexistence with the nonhuman world — if you think of it that way, then we are blessed to be on the planet at this point.

We are in a situation where our progeny, four or five generations from now, will say: “Those people living in 2024 and 2025 — they had a lot on their plate, but despite that, they still rolled up their sleeves and got the ball rolling. They took the long view, and they made things happen.”

I don’t preach this perspective to my students, but when they come to me knowing about the trends we’re seeing converge, I share that perspective with them: hope is a verb. Make something happen, knowing that down the line, people will thank you for that.

Mitch Ratcliffe  54:42

It puts me in mind of meeting Jane Goodall, who radiated that active hope — and it’s so important to keep that in mind as we continue to move through this process of losing what we currently have, while building something that’s profoundly better. Michael, it’s been a great conversation. How can folks follow along and reach out to you?

Michael Maniates  55:20

If they want to go to my website, michaelmaniates.com, they’ll see my email information. They can also Google me. Feel free to drop me a note — it would be my pleasure to respond to folks and assist anyone with questions: regular people looking to make a difference, businesses or entrepreneurs trying to figure out what the academic literature might tell them about how to put their aspirations into tangible action, or anyone else. I’d be delighted to chat.

Mitch Ratcliffe  56:00

Well, Michael, thanks so much for your time today.

Michael Maniates  56:03

Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  56:09

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Michael Maniates. He’s an environmental social scientist, senior fellow with the Story of Stuff project, and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, published by Polity Press. You can find it online at Amazon, Powell’s Books, and other fine booksellers. You can also find Michael’s work at michaelmaniates.com.

This conversation might feel uncomfortable for anyone who’s ever felt kind of proud while recycling — and I include myself in that group. Michael has spent decades looking at the evidence and has reached a conclusion that many in the sustainability community avoid: changing consumer behavior alone is not an effective environmental strategy. Aspiration is not enough. Real impact requires action combined with policy to create widespread change. In other words, you have to redesign society, not just start rebuilding it from the inside. We actually have to do both.

Global carbon emissions reached another high in 2024, and atmospheric CO₂ at this moment is at more than 429 parts per million — even with a $500 billion market for eco-labeled products, the climate trends have not improved. Michael explains that this is not because people lack the right values. The real issue is the system, not the people. The maze, not the mouse.

Europeans tend to act more sustainably because they live in cities with good public transit and strong recycling programs — in other words, the maze is configured for sustainability. By contrast, Americans live in a system that makes sustainable choices harder, and yet they’re still blamed for their decisions when they don’t make the right ones. So they’re caught in a kind of double bind.

Michael points to what he calls the deepest failure: the fact that people put in real effort, then see little impact, and feel growing anxiety as the gap between effort and results remains wide open. The reason this gap remains is the belief at the heart of consumer sustainability — the idea that if enough people make the right purchase, their choices will add up to real change. Michael’s research shows that this idea is not supported by evidence. It leads to burnout and distracts from the more effective work of active citizenship.

Michael’s argument isn’t that individual action is worthless. It’s that individual action in community with others, oriented toward shifting what he calls the default settings of everyday life, is more powerful than individual action in the checkout line alone. Social change research consistently shows that committed minorities of 10 to 20 percent of a population, working strategically, can drive structural transformation. What keeps that full potential from being realized is the competing narrative that you need super-majorities and overwhelming consensus before anything can change — a theory that conveniently lets the system off the hook while exhausting everyone who’s trying to change it.

The Consumption Corridors framework — built on democratic deliberation over the floor below which no one should fall and the ceiling above which individual consumption begins to compromise everyone else’s opportunity — may sound radical until you notice where it’s already happening: congestion pricing, vacation home restrictions, residential parking permit limits. Citizen assemblies in more than a dozen European countries have repeatedly shown that when ordinary people cross class and ideological lines to discuss what they actually care about, they tend to converge on the same things — family, community, connection, and a decent life — and with that in common, they tend to produce stronger sufficiency measures than experts predict.

Michael’s closing thoughts stuck with me: in four or five generations, people are going to look back and wonder if those of us who understood the stakes actually took action. Kim Stanley Robinson’s view — that it’s not too late if we think in terms of generations instead of the decades immediately ahead — this kind of hope can become real, not just a slogan, because long-term thinking always asks us to do more, not less. And that’s why human society makes progress.

So stay tuned. We’re going to keep talking with thinkers and doers who are rewriting the rules of what’s possible. And I hope in the meantime you’ll take a look at the archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear and share a few of them with your friends. Take some action. Write a review on your favorite podcast platform — that will help your neighbors find us. Because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste.

Please tell your friends, family, co-workers, and 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 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: Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn’t Enough appeared first on Earth911.

Most of us feel a small sense of satisfaction when we take out the recycling. Whether you set materials on the curb, bring electronics to a drop-off center, or schedule a rubbish pickup in London, it can feel like the final step in doing the right thing.

That moment is just the beginning of a complex journey. Once your recyclables leave your hands, they enter a global system shaped by local policies, international markets, technology, and consumer demand.

Understanding what happens next is key to becoming a more informed and effective recycler.

Step 1: Collection and Transportation

After recyclables are collected from homes, businesses, or drop-off points, they are transported to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). The type of collection system your community uses — single-stream (all recyclables in one bin) or multi-stream (separated by material) — significantly affects what happens next.

Single-stream systems are convenient for households, but they often result in higher contamination rates. When paper, plastics, metals, and glass are mixed together, broken glass can embed in paper fibers, food residue can spoil cardboard, and plastic bags can tangle machinery. That contamination increases processing costs and can cause entire batches of recyclables to be diverted to landfill.

Transportation also has an environmental cost. Trucks burn fuel, and in rural areas recyclables may travel long distances before reaching a sorting facility. Efficient routing and cleaner vehicle fleets can reduce this footprint, but the logistics of waste collection remain an important piece of the sustainability puzzle.

Step 2: Sorting at the Materials Recovery Facility

Once recyclables arrive at an MRF, they are unloaded onto a tipping floor and fed onto conveyor belts. From there, a combination of human workers and automated systems separates materials by type. Here’s how the sorting typically works:

• Screens and trommels separate items by size and shape.
• Magnets pull out ferrous metals like steel.
• Eddy current separators eject non-ferrous metals such as aluminum.
• Optical sorters use infrared technology to identify different types of plastics.
• Air classifiers help separate lightweight materials from heavier ones.

Despite advanced technology, human oversight is still essential. Workers remove contaminants, such as plastic bags, food waste, garden hoses, and other non-recyclable items that can damage equipment or reduce material quality.

The goal at this stage is to produce clean, marketable streams of materials — bales of cardboard, aluminum, PET plastic, HDPE plastic, and so on. The cleaner the input, the higher the value of the output.

Step 3: Processing into Raw Materials

After sorting and baling, materials are sold to reprocessors. These facilities transform recyclables into raw materials that manufacturers can use to make new products.

Paper and Cardboard

Baled paper is shredded and mixed with water to create pulp. Contaminants like staples, tape, and plastic coatings are removed. The clean pulp can then be turned into new paper products, from packaging to tissue. However, paper fibers shorten each time they are recycled, which means paper can only be recycled a limited number of times (typically five to seven cycles) before the fibers become too weak for reuse.

Plastics

Plastics are more complicated. Different resin types — such as PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) — must be separated because they melt at different temperatures and have different properties. After sorting, plastics are washed, shredded into flakes, melted, and formed into pellets. These pellets become the feedstock for new plastic products.

However, not all plastics are equally recyclable. Flexible films, multi-layer packaging, and mixed plastics are often difficult or uneconomical to process. Even when technically recyclable, they may lack strong end markets.

Glass

Glass is crushed into cullet, cleaned, and melted down to form new bottles or jars. Unlike paper and plastic, glass can be recycled indefinitely without losing quality. In practice, however, much collected glass is downcycled into road aggregate or construction fill rather than new containers, limiting its closed-loop value. However, contamination — especially ceramics or heat-resistant glass — can disrupt the process.

Metals

Aluminum and steel are highly valuable and can be recycled repeatedly without degradation. Recycling aluminum, for example, uses significantly less energy than producing it from raw ore. This makes metal one of the most successful recycling categories.

Step 4: The Role of Global Markets

Recycling is not just a local activity; it is deeply connected to global commodity markets. For years, many countries exported large volumes of recyclable materials overseas for processing. China’s 2018 National Sword policy, which banned imports of most recyclable materials and set strict contamination limits, reshaped this landscape, forcing exporting countries to improve domestic sorting and reduce contamination.

When demand for recycled materials is strong, recycling programs thrive. When commodity prices drop, municipalities may struggle to cover processing costs. This economic reality explains why some communities adjust accepted materials or emphasize contamination reduction campaigns.

In short, your recycling bin is connected to international supply chains and market dynamics that most people never see.

Step 5: E-Waste Is A Special Case

Electronic waste follows a different and often more complicated path. Devices like smartphones, laptops, and televisions contain valuable metals — including copper, gold, and rare earth elements — but also hazardous substances such as lead and mercury.

Responsible e-waste recycling involves:

• Manual disassembly to recover components.
• Shredding and separation of materials.
• Specialized processes to extract precious metals.
• Safe handling of toxic elements.

Improperly managed e-waste can end up in informal recycling sectors, where unsafe practices harm both workers and the environment. That’s why certified electronics recyclers are critical for ensuring materials are recovered responsibly.

The Contamination Problem

One of the biggest threats to effective recycling is contamination. When non-recyclable items are placed in recycling bins — often with good intentions — they can cause entire loads to be rejected.

Common contaminants include:

• Plastic bags in curbside bins.
• Food-soiled containers.
• Garden waste.
• Diapers and textiles.
• Tanglers like hoses and cords.

Reducing contamination requires clear communication, consistent labeling, and public education. The more accurately we sort at home, the more likely materials are to be successfully recycled.

The Energy and Climate Equation

Recycling generally saves energy compared to producing materials from virgin resources. For example:

• Recycling aluminum saves 90–95% of the energy required for primary production.
• Recycling paper reduces the need for logging and lowers water usage.
• Recycling plastics can cut greenhouse gas emissions compared to manufacturing new resin from fossil fuels.

However, recycling is not a silver bullet. The environmental benefits depend on clean material streams, efficient processing, and strong demand for recycled content.

Beyond Recycling: Moving Up the Waste Hierarchy

While recycling is important, it sits below reduction and reuse in the waste hierarchy. The most sustainable product is often the one that was never made. Choosing durable goods, repairing items, and embracing refill systems can significantly reduce the volume of materials entering the waste stream.

When disposal is necessary, understanding the journey of recyclables can help us make smarter decisions. Proper sorting, supporting recycled-content products, and advocating for better waste infrastructure all play a role.

The Takeaway

The path from your recycling bin to a new product is far more complex than it appears. It involves advanced technology, human labor, global trade, and shifting economic conditions. Each stage — collection, sorting, processing, and manufacturing — presents both opportunities and challenges.

By learning what happens after recyclables leave our homes, we can improve our habits and strengthen the system as a whole. Recycling doesn’t end at the curb; it continues through a chain of processes that depend on informed, engaged consumers. And when we understand that journey, our small daily actions gain greater meaning — and greater impact.

About the Author

This sponsored article was written by Deian Kace.

The post Guest Idea: What Really Happens After You Drop Off Recycling? appeared first on Earth911.

Every year, Americans bury an estimated two million tons or more of used clay cat litter — clay that was strip-mined from the ground, trucked across the country, scooped once, used by a cat, and thrown away. It does not biodegrade, so it sits in the landfill essentially forever. And that is just the cat.

Pets belong to the household waste stream, even though we rarely add them to the tally. About 94 million U.S. households keep a pet, and the roughly 68 million dogs and 49 million cats among them, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2025 survey, generate three large and mostly invisible waste streams: cat litter, dog waste and the bags that carry it, and the packaging that food and treats arrive in. Each one carries a cost at the kitchen counter and a much larger one at the national scale.

The Clay Nobody Thinks About

Conventional clumping litter is sodium bentonite, a clay valued for the way it seals around moisture. Getting it out of the ground means strip mining, and industry estimates put U.S. clay mined for litter at roughly five billion pounds a year. A single cat works through about 28 pounds of clay litter a month — close to 336 pounds a year — and none of it breaks down once discarded.

The household cost is real too. Litter runs roughly $180 to $480 a year for one cat, and multi-cat homes multiply that spending into the thousands of dollars annually. Spread across roughly 49 million cats, litter alone is a multi-billion-dollar annual purchase, a recurring spend on a product whose useful life is measured in days and whose afterlife is measured in centuries.

Plant-based alternatives, such as corn, wheat, walnut sshells, recycled paper, or and even tofu, cut the mining and landfill burden, though they vary in price, dustiness, and clumping performance. The table below compares the common options on the dimensions that matter for waste.

Litter type	Made from	End of life	Waste trade-off
Clay (clumping)	Strip-mined sodium bentonite	Landfill; does not biodegrade	Highest mining and landfill footprint
Silica crystal	Mined silica gel	Landfill; inert	Lighter per use, but still mined and landfilled
Plant-based (corn, wheat, wood, paper, tofu)	Renewable crops or recycled fiber	Compostable in principle — but not with cat feces	Lowest extraction footprint; disposal still constrained by Toxoplasma risk

One caution applies across every type: cat feces can carry Toxoplasma gondii, so even a compostable litter should never be flushed or composted for a food garden.

A Million Bags a Day

America’s dogs produce an estimated 10.6 million tons of waste a year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each dog generates about three-quarters of a pound a day and classifies pet waste as a nonpoint source of pollution. Left on the ground, it washes into storm drains, carrying pathogens and the nutrients that fuel algae blooms downstream

Then there is the bag. A study in the journal Environmental Pollution estimated that dog waste bags amount to roughly 415 billion worldwide each year, the equivalent of 0.76 to 1.23 million tons of plastic waste. Standard plastic bags can persist in a landfill for centuries, so the daily ritual of picking up after a dog quietly builds an enormous, near-permanent plastic stockpile that goes to landfills.

“Compostable” and “biodegradable” labels muddy the picture. Most municipal composting programs will not accept dog waste, so certified-compostable bags usually end up in the same trash stream as plastic bags, where landfill conditions do not break them down. In short, the label promises an outcome that the disposal system rarely delivers.

The disposal options that reduce harm are narrower than the marketing suggests. Flushing pet-safe waste, where local rules and septic systems allow it, routes the material to wastewater treatment rather than the landfill. In-ground pet-waste digesters can break down waste on-site for homeowners with yard space. Bagging and trashing remains the default for apartment dwellers, in which case a thin conventional bag and a premium compostable bag are typically sent to the same landfill.

The Pouch That Can’t Be Recycled

Food and treats arrive in some of the hardest-to-recycle packaging in the grocery aisle. The Pet Sustainability Coalition estimates that about 300 million pounds of pet food and treat packaging waste are generated by homes in the U.S. each year; more than 99% of it is landfilled.

The culprit is multilayer flexible packaging — pouches, treat bags, and kibble bags that fuse plastic, foil, and film into a single barrier that curbside systems cannot separate. Only about 2% of U.S. households have curbside access for film and flexible packaging, according to the Recycling Partnership, and material tossed in the wrong bin tangles sorting equipment at recovery facilities.

The picture is shifting. As of October 1, 2025, seven states had enacted comprehensive packaging extended producer responsibility laws — California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington — that move recycling costs onto producers. These regulations are already nudging brands toward easier-to-recycle mono-material bags. Store drop-off film programs and mail-in services for pouches and treat bags can fill some of the gap, but have not gained sufficient traction to make a substantial difference.

What You Can Do

Litter:

• Switch to a plant-based litter, such as corn, wheat, walnut, or recycled paper, where it works for your cat, to cut both mining and landfill volume.
• Buy larger packages to reduce packaging per pound, and scoop daily rather than dumping the whole box to stretch each batch. Never flush cat waste or compost it for edibles because of the Toxoplasma risk.

Dog waste:

• Treat “compostable” bag claims with skepticism unless you have a pet-waste digester or a municipal program that actually accepts dog waste; otherwise, the bag and the waste both go to landfill.
• Always pick up. Pet waste is a documented water pollutant, not fertilizer.

Packaging:

• Check store drop-off bins for clean film, and use mail-in programs for pouches and treat bags. Look up local options with Earth911’s recycling search.
• Favor brands moving to mono-material recyclable bags, and support packaging EPR laws that are already reshaping what shows up on the shelf.

The post What Pet Waste Costs: The Litter, Bags, and Packaging Filling America’s Landfills appeared first on Earth911.

Every year, American golfers lose an estimated 300 million golf balls, according to research by the Danish Golf Union — and that figure, dating to 2009, is almost certainly too low. A 2024 CNN investigation using updated participation data estimated the U.S. number could now exceed 1.5 billion annually, with the global total up to 3 billion. Made from synthetic rubber cores and plastic polymer covers, each of those balls can take 100 to 1,000 years to decompose, leaching microplastics and chemicals into soil and water along the way.

But lost balls are just one piece of golf’s environmental footprint. The sport’s real sustainability challenge spans water consumption, chemical runoff, habitat disruption, and carbon-intensive manufacturing. The good news: a growing wave of innovations — from recovered ball resale to fully biodegradable alternatives to course-level conservation programs — is giving golfers real options for reducing their impact.

Golf’s environmental footprint: beyond the lost ball

The environmental impact of golf extends well beyond what ends up in the rough. U.S. golf courses collectively use approximately 1.5 billion gallons of water per day, with individual courses in arid regions consuming over a million gallons daily during summer months. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) reported in December 2025 that the industry has reduced total water use by 31% since 2005 — real progress, but the baseline remains enormous.

Chemical inputs compound the water problem. According to CBC reporting on golf course maintenance, more than 50 pesticides are commonly used in the industry, and when turf is mowed to the low heights golfers expect, stressed grass requires even more chemical intervention. These inputs can migrate into nearby waterways and groundwater.

Then there’s the equipment itself. Manufacturing a single golf ball involves synthesizing polybutadiene rubber for the core and ionomer or urethane plastic for the cover, with the supply chain spanning mining, polymer synthesis, and transoceanic shipping — most golf balls are manufactured in Southeast Asia. When those balls are lost to water hazards, forests, and coastal environments, marine researcher Matthew Savoca of Stanford University estimated that tens of thousands of tons of debris enter U.S. ecosystems every year from lost golf balls alone, posing ingestion risks to marine life and contributing to microplastic pollution.

The recovered ball market: reuse at scale

The simplest way to reduce golf ball waste is to keep existing balls in play. The recovered golf ball industry has grown into an estimated $200 million annual market, with professional divers and retrieval companies pulling millions of balls from water hazards each year. An estimated 100 million balls are recovered and resold annually in the U.S. alone.

Companies like LostGolfBalls.com, operated by PG Golf, a subsidiary of Titleist, sell roughly 50 million recovered balls per year. Independent testing has shown that recovered balls in good condition perform comparably to new ones — and at a fraction of the cost. A dozen quality recovered Pro V1s can sell for $10–18 versus $50+ new, making reuse both the greener and more affordable choice.

Recovered balls are still made from the same non-biodegradable materials. They’ll eventually re-enter the waste stream. But extending each ball’s useful life by one or more rounds meaningfully reduces demand for new manufacturing and keeps plastic out of ecosystems longer.

Innovations changing golf’s environmental equation

Biodegradable golf balls. Several companies are now teeing up balls designed to decompose in weeks or months rather than centuries. These products aren’t yet approved by the USGA for competitive play, and most achieve roughly 70% of the distance performance of premium conventional balls. But for practice sessions, waterfront driving ranges, and casual rounds, they eliminate the lasting environmental damage of a lost ball entirely.

Course-level conservation programs. The Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program (ACSP) for Golf Courses, endorsed by the U.S. Golf Association, certifies courses that demonstrate high standards in wildlife habitat management, water conservation, chemical use reduction, and environmental planning. Over 2,100 courses in 24 countries participate, though that’s still less than 2% of worldwide courses. Audubon International’s Monarchs in the Rough program is also helping hundreds of courses create habitat for endangered monarch butterflies in out-of-play areas.

Water conservation technology. The GCSAA’s December 2025 survey documented a 31% reduction in water use since 2005 across U.S. golf facilities, driven by precision irrigation systems, drought-resistant turf grass varieties, and conversion of managed turf to natural rough. Two-thirds of the reduction came from more efficient application rather than simply reducing irrigated acreage.

Five ways to reduce your impact as a golfer

Buy recovered balls. The single easiest step is to play with recovered golf balls from companies like LostGolfBalls.com. You’ll save money and reduce demand for new manufacturing. At higher handicap levels, there’s no meaningful performance difference.

Play Audubon-certified courses. Look for courses certified through the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program. These facilities have demonstrated measurable commitments to water conservation, habitat protection, and chemical use reduction. If your home course isn’t certified, ask the superintendent why not.

Support Extended Producer Responsibility. EPR legislation would require golf ball manufacturers to take responsibility for end-of-life collection and recycling. Several U.S. states are expanding EPR frameworks to cover more product categories — sporting goods could be next. Contact your state legislators to advocate for including golf equipment in EPR programs.

Recycle your other golf gear. Clubs, bags, shoes, and gloves all have recycling and donation pathways. Check Earth911’s recycling search for local clothing recycling and donation options, donate usable equipment to organizations like The First Tee or Goodwill, and look for brands using recycled materials in apparel and accessories.

Golf is played across 84% of the world’s countries, though roughly 80% of courses are concentrated in just 10 nations. That concentration means targeted action by players, course operators, and manufacturers in the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, can have outsized impact.

Choosing recovered balls and playing courses that invest in conservation are all choices available to every golfer today. The sport doesn’t have to leave a permanent mark on the landscape.

About the Author

This sponsored article was written by John Cunningham, a sports writer with a journalism background and a strong passion for analytical storytelling. He breaks down matches, odds, and betting trends in a way that both newcomers and seasoned bettors can easily understand. John’s work blends data-driven insights with engaging narratives that bring sports to life.

The post Guest Idea: The Hidden Environmental Cost of Lost Golf Balls 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.

More than 25,000 square miles of the U.S. Great Basin, an area nearly twelve times the size of Yellowstone, has flipped from native sagebrush to invasive annual grassland over the past three decades, much of it without ever burning. The change is amplifying the Western fire season. Researchers using satellite data found that fire is no longer required to convert these landscapes; once the grasses arrive, the fire follows.

Grasses occupy a unique position in our climate. They are everywhere — pastures, lawns, prairies, savannas, roadsides — and they are easy to overlook precisely because they are so familiar. However, the world’s grasses are responding to warmer temperatures, shifting precipitation, and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide in ways that are reshaping ecosystems and fire regimes from the Mojave Desert to the slopes above the fire-scorched community of Lahaina in Hawaii.

The story of climate change and grass is, increasingly, a story about what burns, when, and how often.

A different kind of fuel

Wildfire science has long focused on forests, but the dominant fuel type driving change in the American West today is not timber. It is grass, particularly fine, dry, non-native annual grass that cures by early summer and carries flame between shrubs that would otherwise be too widely spaced to burn together.

Cheatgrass greens up earlier than native bunchgrasses, drawing down soil moisture and nutrients before native species start to grow. It then dies in early summer, leaving a continuous, dry, highly ignitable mat across landscapes that historically had patchy fuels and infrequent fires. The Bureau of Land Management found that areas invaded by cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) are roughly twice as likely to burn as uninvaded land, and that cheatgrass now dominates or is a meaningful component of vegetation on roughly 52 million acres of the Intermountain West, up from roughly 31.5 million acres mapped in 2000 using satellite imagery.

A 2013 study, later supported by broader analyses, found that fire return intervals are now two to four times more frequent in cheatgrass-dominated landscapes than in intact sagebrush steppe. In 2019, ecologist Emily Fusco and her colleagues published the first national-scale analysis of the problem in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They looked 12 invasive grass species across 29 U.S. ecoregions, and found that eight significantly increased fire occurrence by up to 230 percent, and six increased fire frequency by up to 150 percent.

“This work shows that invasive species are one of the ‘big three’ ways that people are changing fire regimes,” senior author Bethany Bradley told reporters when the study was published. “Climate change more than doubles the likelihood of fire, human ignitions triple the fire season, and now we can add invasive species fueling fires.”

How climate change rewires the grass life cycle

Grasses are unusually responsive to climate change. Three variables — temperature, the timing and form of precipitation, and atmospheric CO₂ — interact in ways that often favor invasive annuals over the perennial natives they displace.

A decade-long warming experiment published in Frontiers in Plant Science by the U.S. Geological Survey tracked cheatgrass through three climate manipulations on the Colorado Plateau. Plots warmed by 4°C above ambient temperatures saw the vegetative growing season shorten by about 12 days; at 2°C, by about 7 days. Cheatgrass compressed its life cycle, finishing seed production and dying earlier in the summer. That sounds like bad news for cheatgrass, until you remember that an earlier, drier death means earlier, drier fuel, set down before the peak of the fire season.

Cheatgrass has another advantage native species lack: phenotypic plasticity. The Frontiers researchers concluded that the plant’s “phenotypic plasticity … may make the plant particularly adept at dealing with extreme interannual climate variation,” allowing it to respond to shifting climate cues that native bunchgrasses cannot. When native grasses fail to keep up with earlier springs and longer dry seasons, cheatgrass moves into the gap, adding fuel for fires.

Precipitation patterns matter as much as temperature. A long-term study in Global Change Biology of more than 10,000 wildfires across the Great Basin between 1980 and 2014 found that area burned in any given year was strongly predicted by precipitation in the previous one to three years. Wet years build fuel; the next dry year burns it. As the climate delivers more whiplash between wet winters and intense summer drought, the cycle accelerates.

Rising atmospheric CO₂ adds another wrinkle. Grasses use one of two photosynthetic pathways — C₃ (most cool-season grasses, including cheatgrass) or C₄ (most warm-season prairie grasses) — and both grow more efficiently as CO₂ climbs. A study in Nature examined a Wyoming CO₂ enrichment site, finding that elevated CO₂ improved water-use efficiency enough to partly offset the drying effect of warming;later research showed similar benefits for C₄ grasses. In short, more CO₂ means more grass, and more grass means more fuel.

Grasslands will not simply grow more biomass and burn more. Nature’s rules governing which grasses dominate where, and when each one cures, are being rewritten in real time. The species best equipped to exploit the new rules are, very often, the ones accelerating the grass-fire cycle.

Lahaina and the human-grass-fire cycle

On August 8, 2023, downed power lines sparked dry vegetation on a fallow hillside above Lahaina, Maui. By nightfall the fire had killed at least 102 people and become the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. A Washington Post investigation later confirmed the inferno began on land covered in non-native grasses, relics of sugar plantations that closed in the 1990s.

Hawaiʻi has experienced a roughly 400 percent increase in the typical area burned annually over the past century, and roughly a quarter of the state’s land area is now covered in flammable invasive grasses, according to the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council. Guinea grass (Megathyrsus maximus), buffelgrass (Cenchrus ciliaris), molasses grass, and fountain grass are the dominant culprits — all introduced for pasture or ornament, all now spreading on lands no one is actively managing.

“The main factor driving the fires involved the invasive grasses that cover huge parts of Hawaii, which are extremely flammable,” Clark University climatologist Abby Frazier told ABC News in the days after the fire. University of Hawaiʻi fire scientist Clay Trauernicht had been warning about exactly this scenario for years; in a 2018 letter referenced in Smithsonian Magazine, he wrote: “Just like with climate change, we know what steps will reduce the risk of wildfire. But actually taking these steps will require reinvesting in and, frankly, reimagining our individual and collective responsibility for the larger landscape.”

The Lahaina disaster is now considered a defining example of what ecologist Emily Fusco and her co-authors call the “human–grass–fire cycle,” the recognition that invasive grasses, human ignition sources, and a warming, drying climate are not separate problems but a single coupled system. People plant or spread the grasses (often inadvertently). The grasses build continuous fuel beds. Climate change extends the burn season. Human infrastructure provides the spark. The fire returns the landscape to grass-favored conditions, and the cycle tightens.

All the factors are rising, increasing the chance that a region will see a grass-fed fire.

Beyond the West

It would be reassuring if this were a regional problem. It is not. The U.S. Geological Survey has documented invasive grasses altering fire cycles in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast as well. Cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica) is reshaping fire behavior in Southern pine forests; silk reed (Neyraudia reynaudiana) more than tripled fire frequency in the South Florida areas Fusco’s team studied. Mediterranean grass (Schismus barbatus) tripled fire occurrence in the Sonoran Desert.

Native grasslands face their own pressures. C₄ tallgrass prairie species like big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) differ markedly in drought tolerance from co-occurring species like little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium); during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, little bluestem replaced big bluestem across much of the tallgrass prairie, driving the kind of species reshuffling that more frequent drought is likely to drive again.

A 2025 study used species distribution models for 37 grasses and projected that C₄ species will retain higher habitat suitability in a warmer future while many C₃ species will decline. Because the C₄ species projected to take over tend to be less flammable than the C₃ species they replace, the same study found elevated CO₂ raised water-use efficiency enough to lower leaf-level flammability for some species, a rare piece of cautious good news in a literature dominated by bad.

What can be done

There is no clean fix for a feedback loop, but there are well-tested intervention points in grasslands management. Federal agencies are scaling up restoration. The BLM launched the Restoration for Resilience program, funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act (both laws’ funding is under attack), is targeting 21 priority landscapes across the West for invasive species removal and native reseeding. Researchers at the University of Wyoming are leading the IMAGINE partnership to translate management science into guidance for land managers facing annual grass invasion.

On private land and at the wildland-urban interface, the highest-leverage actions are simpler than they sound: maintain native or low-fuel vegetation, remove invasive grass thatch before fire season, and create and maintain fuel breaks. Pre-emergent herbicides applied promptly after fires can give native perennials a fighting chance; without that intervention, burned landscapes in cheatgrass country tend to convert permanently to annual grassland.

What You Can Do

• Identify before you pull. Before treating any grass, confirm the species. Several U.S. states maintain online invasive plant atlases; the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council and USDA’s invasive grass list are good starting points.
• Maintain defensible space. If you live in a fire-prone area, keep grass mowed below four inches within 30 feet of structures and remove cured fuels before the dry season.
• Resist the urge to plant non-native ornamentals. Fountain grass, pampas grass, and several other landscape favorites are listed as moderate to high fire-hazard species and often escape cultivation.
• Replant natives after disturbance. Whether the disturbance is fire, construction, or removal of an invasive stand, native perennial bunchgrasses re-establish slowly and benefit from active reseeding.
• Support landscape-scale work. Most invasive grass control is too big for any single landowner. Support local fire-safe councils, conservation districts, and state-funded restoration programs that operate at the watershed or basin scale.

The post When the Lawn Becomes the Fuse: How Climate Change Is Rewiring Grass and Wildfire appeared first on Earth911.

Every year, Americans toss out about 17 million tons of textiles, and most items left in donation bins don’t find a new home. Now, more mail-in programs are stepping in to take your old clothes, keep them out of landfills, and reward you—often with store credit or cash-like rewards you can use at familiar brands.

The programs listed here include options that take any brand or condition—even socks and stained T-shirts—as well as brand-specific trade-ins that give you real money for quality items. While none of these fully solves fashion’s waste problem, and some have fees or important details to check, each offers a more responsible choice than tossing clothes in the curbside bin. With the right program, your rewards can even cover your costs or more.

1. Trashie Take Back Bag — The Any-Brand, Any-Condition Option

Trashie ships a prepaid, prepackaged bag that holds up to 15 pounds of clothing, shoes, accessories, and home textiles from any brand, in any condition, including single socks, worn-through T-shirts, and bedsheets. A single Take Back Bag runs $20, though they are frequently on sale, and earns $5 in TrashieCash redeemable for deals at partners including Sephora, Nike, Starbucks, Allbirds, and Cozy Earth.

If you want to recycle often, Trashie Unlimited costs $68 a year and gives you unlimited bags, plus bigger rewards as you go. You get $5 for your first bag, $15 more at your fifth bag (for a total of $26), and by your tenth bag, you’ve earned back your membership with $68 in TrashieCash. After that, every bag earns you extra. Trashie reports that 95% of what they receive is repurposed, reused, or recycled, sorted into over 600 categories.

Best for: that pile of clothes you’ve been meaning to deal with for months, especially items too worn out to donate.

2. Retold Recycling — Subscription Bags With Curated Partner Rewards

Retold Recycling uses a subscription model. Their annual plan costs $99 and comes with six pre-labeled, prepaid bags—three to start, then one each quarter—each holds about five pounds of textiles. You earn Retold Rewards worth about $15 per bag, which you can use at partners like Dropps, Allyoos, Me Mother Earth, and Plaine Products. There’s also a quarterly plan for $24.75 every three months, with the same rewards per bag.

Retold accepts all textiles, including clothing, household linens, and fabric scraps, from any brand. Its recycling partners sort items by fiber content, quality, and style, with the company stating that items are kept out of landfill except when materials like leather, coated textiles, or neoprene can’t be processed. Consumer Reports said only Retold subscribers earn the rewards credits; one-time bag buyers don’t.

Best for: people who want to recycle regularly and like getting discounts at smaller sustainable brands instead of big retailers.

3. Patagonia Worn Wear — Real Trade-In Value for Well-Made Gear

Patagonia’s Worn Wear offers the best payouts if you have Patagonia items. Go to their website, take a quick quiz to check if your items qualify, print a shipping label, and send in your clean, working Patagonia jackets, fleece, pants, packs, and more. You’ll get credit as a gift card to use online or in Patagonia stores.

Trade-in values are usually about 20% of the original price. According to Patagonia’s FAQ, credits can go up to $180 for high-value items, with jackets earning between $10 and $200, and wheeled bags between $45 and $90. Sometimes, they run promotions that double your credit, so keep an eye out for those.

Keep in mind, Worn Wear only takes Patagonia-branded gear that’s still in good, usable shape. They don’t accept underwear, swimwear, or wetsuits. If your items don’t qualify, they’ll either send them back or recycle them for free.

Best for: people clearing out Patagonia gear they no longer need and who already shop at Patagonia.

4. ThredUp Clean Out Kit — Cash or Credit for What Actually Sells

ThredUp is a consignment service, not recycling: the company pays you for items it can resell, and routes the rest to donation or recycling partners. Order a Clean Out Kit, fill it with women’s or kids’ clothing in excellent or like-new condition, and ship it in. Payouts scale with listing price, from low single-digit percentages on inexpensive items to as much as 80% on premium and designer brands like Lululemon or Gucci.

You can get paid in cash or as store credit at ThredUp or partner brands like Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta, Madewell, Janie and Jack, and Reformation. If you pick store credit, you usually get a 15–20% bonus. Be aware that ThredUp takes a $14.99 processing fee from your earnings per bag, and if you want any rejected items sent back, there’s a $10.99 fee. This program isn’t for fast fashion—items from those brands or heavily worn clothes are usually rejected.

Best for: closets with name-brand, current-season women’s and kids’ clothes in good shape—not for stained T-shirts.

5. ReGirlfriend — Closed-Loop Recycling for Activewear

Girlfriend Collective, an athleisure brand, offers ReGirlfriend—a mail-in program run with SuperCircle. You can send in clean clothes from any brand and get $10 in store credit for each Girlfriend item or $5 for each non-Girlfriend item, up to 10 pieces per shipment. There’s a $15 deposit to print your shipping label, but you get it back if you make a purchase within 30 days.

You’ll get personalized discount codes for up to 30% off your next Girlfriend order. For example, a $30 credit needs at least a $100 purchase to use the full amount. Items are sorted for reuse when possible, or they’re recycled, upcycled into new yarn or fabric, or downcycled for industrial uses if they can’t be resold.

Best for: people who already shop at Girlfriend and want a mail-in option for activewear and basics from different brands.

Quick Comparison

• Accepts any brand in any condition: Trashie, Retold, ReGirlfriend
• Brand-specific only: Patagonia Worn Wear (Patagonia gear), ThredUp (women’s and kids’ name-brand resale)
• Cash payout possible: ThredUp (via consignment)
• Store credit only: Trashie, Retold, Patagonia Worn Wear, ReGirlfriend, ThredUp (credit option)
• Highest potential payout: Patagonia Worn Wear for premium Patagonia items; ThredUp for current-season designer women’s clothing

Get Ready for Mail-In Recycling Success

• Sort your clothes before sending them. Items in good enough shape to resell or donate are worth more on ThredUp, Patagonia Worn Wear, or at a local consignment shop. Clothes that are worn out or off-brand are better suited for Trashie, Retold, or ReGirlfriend.
• Consider whether a subscription makes sense for you. Trashie Unlimited is worth it if you send about 10 bags a year. Retold’s annual plan can earn you up to $90 in partner rewards. If you won’t fill several bags, it’s better to skip the subscription.
• Pick store credit if you already shop at that brand. ThredUp’s 15–20% credit bonus and Patagonia’s double-credit promotions can boost your payout, but only if you were planning to spend there anyway.
• Don’t mail clothes that your city already recycles. Many places offer curbside textile pickup or special drop-off bins. Use the Earth911 Recycling Search to find local options before paying to ship clothes out of state.
• Check the details on fees. ThredUp charges a $14.99 processing fee, Patagonia deducts $7 for shipping, and ReGirlfriend requires a $15 refundable deposit. Make sure to consider these costs before you decide.
• Try to buy less in the first place. No mail-in program can make up for the impact of owning lots of fast fashion. The best thing you can do is choose fewer, longer-lasting clothes.

The post 5 Places to Mail In Your Old Clothes and Earn Rewards appeared first on Earth911.

Americans threw away 12.1 million tons of furniture in 2018, the most recent year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measured the category. About 9.7 million tons went straight to a landfill. Less than half of one percent was recycled.

The jobs that support the fastest, cheapest way to keep that sofa or dresser out of the dump — paying someone to fix it — have been disappearing for a generation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts roughly 22,500 upholsterers still working in the United States and projects the occupation will shrink more through 2034. Refinishers, frame menders, and the small repair shops they anchored are vanishing alongside them.

Furniture’s waste problem and the collapse of the repair trades are the same story told from two ends.

What is in the 12.1 million tons

The EPA’s 2018 Advancing Sustainable Materials Management report tracked the fate of furniture and furnishings, including sofas, tables, chairs, dressers, and mattresses, at end of life. In 1960, Americans discarded 2.2 million tons of these items per year. By 2018, the figure had grown 5.5 times, to 12.1 million tons, even as recycling rates for paper, metals, and yard trimmings climbed.

The results are discouraging:

• 80.1% landfilled (about 9.7 million tons)
• 19.5% combusted for energy recovery
• only 0.3% is recycled

Paper and paperboard, by contrast, are recycled roughly 68% of the time, and about 50% of aluminum cans are turned into new packaging. Furniture barely registers. The category was not designed for recovery: composite wood, polyurethane foam, polyester batting, springs, staples, and flame-retardant fabrics arrive at end of life as a tangled bundle that no current system can economically separate.

The household cost of fast furniture

A 2024 Level Frames analysis of EPA waste data and consumer survey responses found Americans spend roughly $2,750 a year combined on furniture, decor, and trend-driven replacement, with more than a third of those purchases prompted by social media.

The replacement cycle has accelerated. The RE Store, a Bellingham, Washington, reuse retailer that has tracked the category for years, reports that flat-pack pieces from major retailers are typically engineered to last about five years, and design trends now turn over every 10 months or so.

A $150 particleboard dresser tossed when it is three years old costs the household $50 per year of use, before delivery, assembly time, or hauling fees on the back end. Then, they have to pay to have it hauled away or to drop it at a landfill.

The repair trade collapse

For most of the 20th century, furniture was assumed to be repairable. Upholsterers, cane weavers, frame menders, and refinishers anchored a network of independent shops in nearly every American city. That network has thinned to a trickle.

BLS data from 2023 counts 22,519 upholsterers nationwide, with employment in the industry projected to decline through 2034 even as the overall workforce grows. Furniture refinishers and woodworking craftspeople are following the same downward arc. The culprit is particleboard, which can be used to make a side table that costs less than the labor to repair a comparable solid-wood piece; consumer expectations shifted accordingly and people got used to tossing, not repairing, their furniture.

The result is a market failure. EPA’s 0.3% recycling figure reflects a recycling system that cannot disassemble furniture profitably. Curbside programs cannot accept bulky composite goods, like a couch or end table. Few municipalities run dedicated furniture diversion programs. And the repair sector, which once extended product life, has been priced out of business.

Fast furniture is the engine

Two retailers shape the modern category. IKEA accounts for about 7.5% of the global furniture market and recorded roughly 915 million store visits in 2025. Wayfair generated $11.8 billion in revenue in 2024, much of it from drop-shipped flat-pack goods. The category they popularized — engineered wood, foam, and laminate furniture, sold cheaply and shipped flat — has reshaped consumer expectations and what ends up in the landfill.

Particleboard and medium-density fiberboard (MDF) bind wood chips with urea-formaldehyde resins. Oklahoma State University Extension reports these boards continue off-gassing formaldehyde for months to years after manufacture, adding to indoor air pollution alongside volatile organic compounds in polyurethane foam and finishes. The same chemistry that makes the boards cheap to produce makes them impossible to recycle: no mill will accept resin-saturated chips as feedstock.

Upstream impacts are substantial as well. The World Wildlife Fund estimates illegal logging accounts for 15% to 30% of globally traded wood, with furniture among the largest demand categories. A figure circulating in industry blogs suggests that furniture accounts for “12% of global greenhouse gas emissions” is not supported by primary IPCC or peer-reviewed sources and is omitted here; the more defensible claim is that the sector is a meaningful, though not dominant, contributor to forest loss and embodied carbon emissions.

The aggregate numbers

Globally, the European Union generates about 10.78 million tons of furniture waste a year, roughly matching the U.S. figure. The UK alone discards 670,000 tons — about 22 million individual pieces — and recycles only 17% of it. In both, most discarded furniture is judged to be reusable or repairable at the point of disposal.

Even in environmentally progressive Europe, policy responses are uneven. France runs a mature furniture-specific Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program in which manufacturers fund repair, reuse, and recycling networks.

No U.S. state has followed the EPR path for general furniture. The closest equivalent is the Mattress Recycling Council, which operates in California, Connecticut, Oregon, and Rhode Island under producer-funded laws that recover about 80% of a mattress’s components. California’s mattress fee were increased to $18 per unit in April 2026.

What you can do

Furniture is one of the few household waste categories where individual action significantly outperforms recycling infrastructure, because the most consequential step happens before purchase.

Before you buy

• Choose solid wood over particleboard for high-use pieces. Solid wood can be sanded, refinished, and re-glued; composite cannot.
• Look for verified certifications: CertiPUR-US for foam, GREENGUARD Gold for low emissions, FSC for responsibly sourced wood. None are perfect, but each rules out the worst offenders.
• Buy used. Estate sales, consignment stores, Habitat for Humanity ReStores, and online resale platforms move millions of pieces a year that would otherwise enter the waste stream.

Before you toss

• Search for local upholsterers and refinishers before disposal. Many small cities still have a practitioner or two who are not visible online.
• Donate functional furniture to Goodwill, Salvation Army, ReStores, women’s shelters, or refugee resettlement organizations.
• Recycle mattresses through Bye Bye Mattress if you live in California, Connecticut, Oregon, or Rhode Island. Other states offer limited drop-off only.
• Find local disposal and reuse options through the Earth911 recycling search.

At the policy level

• Furniture EPR legislation has been proposed in several U.S. states and could move the financial burden of disposal upstream, where it influences product design. France’s model is the working precedent.

12.1 million tons of furniture waste need not be a fixed feature of American life. It is a downstream consequence of design decisions, retail incentives, and the slow disappearance of a trade. Each of those is reversible, but only if the household, the manufacturer, and the policymaker each carry their share.

The post Fast Furniture and the 12-Million-Ton Reckoning appeared first on Earth911.

I must admit, I still get excited when an online order arrives at my doorstep, sometimes within hours or the next day.

But once I open the box and unpack everything, I often find myself standing over the recycling bin wondering what to do with all the packaging. In that moment, the convenience of fast delivery starts to feel connected to a bigger question about the environmental trade-offs behind the products and services we rely on every day.

The infrastructure behind that convenience — trucks, warehouses, packaging, construction — carries real environmental costs in carbon emissions, material waste, and single-use plastics. But the more immediate place most of us can act is closer to home: in our own yards and landscapes, where small choices compound across neighborhoods and watersheds. Everything from groceries and meals to home and garden products can be delivered within hours, thanks to the rise of quick commerce.

But every product has a lifecycle, from production and transport to packaging, use, and disposal. Recognizing these lifecycle impacts builds lifecycle awareness and helps people see the environmental costs behind convenience. These impacts appear at both the city scale and in our own homes and landscapes, where small choices can add up.

Guides like Earth911’s Sustainable Guide to Amazon Shopping highlight simple ways we as consumers can reduce waste and make more eco-friendly purchasing decisions.

Your Yard as a Microcosm

After more than 20 years working as a landscape designer, I’ve come to see the yard as a small-scale version of larger systems. The way you choose to manage it – often for the sake of convenience – can quietly add to broader environmental harm. However, a few ideas you can shift your perspective:

• Rainwater management: Rain gardens slow water and allow it to soak into the soil, reducing runoff rather than sending it quickly into streets and storm drains.
• Native plant species: Choosing regionally adapted plants can reduce the need for routine spraying while supporting pollinators and local ecosystems across property lines.
• Natural predators: Instead of spraying for mosquitoes, bring natural predators to your yard like dragonflies.

Quick-Fix Lawn Care and Ecological Trade-Offs

Many homeowners want a perfectly green, neatly trimmed lawn, and quick-fix products promise fast results. Fertilizers, weed killers, and insect treatments can make a yard look good quickly. But those short-term improvements can come with longer-term environmental costs.

• Synthetic fertilizers: Quick-release nitrogen promotes rapid turf growth but can contribute to nutrient runoff, reduced soil microbial diversity, and dependency on repeated applications.
• Herbicides and pesticides: Broad-spectrum chemical treatments eliminate target weeds or insects but can also affect beneficial organisms, including pollinators and soil life.
• Monoculture turfgrass: Large expanses of single-species lawns provide minimal habitat diversity compared to mixed plantings, reducing food sources for bees and other insects.
• Runoff of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides: Kill aquatic life as the runoff heads into storm drains and into our rivers, lakes and the ocean.
• Excessive water use: Maintaining a constantly green lawn often requires frequent irrigation, increasing water demand on the infrastructure, and also contributing to runoff.

The scale of chemical use in American lawns is significant. According to the CDC, Americans apply roughly 75 million pounds of pesticides annually on residential landscapes. As Scientific American reports, when those chemicals reach waterways, they enter the food chain; fish ingest them, become diseased, and humans who eat those fish can become ill as a result.

Alternative Approaches: Lower-Impact Lawn and Landscape Practices

Instead of relying on chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, adopting lower-impact landscape practices that support soil health while reducing water use, emissions, and chemical inputs.

• Reduce lawn area: Replacing sections of grass with native plant garden beds, ground covers, or pollinator gardens lowers water use and fertilizer demand.
• Clover or mixed lawns: Clover naturally fixes nitrogen in the soil, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers while supporting pollinators.
• Xeriscaping: Drought-tolerant plants and water-efficient design reduce irrigation requirements.
• Electric lawn equipment: Battery-powered mowers and other lawn care tools eliminate gasoline emissions and reduce air and noise pollution.
• Soil-first maintenance: Aeration, compost amendments, and organic soil enrichment strengthen soil structure and reduce dependence on chemical inputs.

The Waste Behind Landscaping and Exterior Home Projects

Landscaping upgrades and exterior home projects often leave behind leftover materials that are tossed in the trash. Many of these materials end up in landfills, and some can eventually make their way into rivers and streams.

Landscaping plastics: Plastic landscape edging, irrigation tubing, landscape fabric, and synthetic turf backing can remain in landfills for decades because they do not easily break down.

Chemical contamination risks: Treated wood materials such as old railroad ties were commonly preserved with creosote and may release harmful compounds if improperly discarded.

Hazardous household materials: Leftover paint, adhesives, and sealants often require special disposal through hazardous waste programs to prevent soil and groundwater contamination.

If you have leftover plant containers after planting and are unsure what to do with them, read Earth911’s How to Recycle and Reuse Garden Plug Trays.

Reduced Labor, Reduced Ecological Feedback

Modern conveniences have reduced the physical labor required to maintain landscapes, and with it, the direct, sensory contact people once had with soil, plants, and seasonal cycles. Robotic mowers, automated irrigation, and app-controlled sprinkler systems can keep a yard looking maintained without the homeowner ever kneeling in the dirt.

That disconnect matters. Gardeners who work hands-on with their soil tend to notice changes — a drop in earthworm activity, an unusual pest, soil that’s become compacted or hydrophobic — before those conditions worsen. Ecological feedback is harder to receive when the landscape is managed at a distance. Spending even occasional time in direct contact with your yard, pulling weeds, turning compost, or simply observing what’s growing, rebuilds that feedback loop and makes sustainable choices more intuitive.

Redesigning Convenience: Small Changes That Add Up

When we develop an understanding of lifecycle impacts, consider embracing practices that translate your lifecycle awareness into small adjustments that support healthier landscapes and ecosystems:

• Soil testing before fertilizing to prevent unnecessary nutrient application and reduce chemical runoff.
• Compost amendments improve soil structure and reduce reliance on synthetic additions.
• Deep, infrequent watering encourages deeper roots and lowers overall water use.
• Native plants reduce water use (and your water bill) while supporting pollinators.
• Durable tools over disposable kits decreases plastic waste and material turnover.
• Purchase planning can avoid excess mulch, soil, paint, and irrigation components from entering landfill.

Convenience is embedded in modern life, from online shopping and fast delivery to automated lawn care systems and disposable home improvement materials. If you’re like me, the next time a package arrives at your doorstep, the excitement of opening it can also be a reminder to think about what happens next.

Small choices, from recycling packaging to making more sustainable lawn and landscape decisions, can reduce waste and protect soil, water, and local ecosystems. When multiplied across communities, these everyday decisions can lead to meaningful environmental progress.

About the Author

This guest article was written by Harley Grandone, a writer and landscape designer. After 20+ years of being a landscape designer, she loves combining writing with her love of the industry.

The post Convenience Comes at the Environment’s Expense appeared first on Earth911.

Corrugated cardboard makes its way from warehouse to mill in about two weeks. In contrast, plastic packaging can take centuries to break down, and even the most optimistic estimates say only 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic is actually recycled. This difference highlights both the promise and the challenges of creating a circular packaging economy.

Back in April 2020, when this article first appeared, the recycling industry was still struggling after China banned imported recyclables in 2018. Around that time, DS Smith opened its first North American recycling plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, marking the first closed-loop corrugated packaging system. Five years later, the circular packaging sector has become a $245 billion global market and is expected to nearly double by 2034.

However, growth does not always mean true circularity. The gap between what companies promise and what recycling systems actually deliver is under more scrutiny than ever.

How the Recycling Loop Works and Where It Breaks

Many people picture recycling as a simple process: items go from the curbside bin to a materials recovery facility (MRF) and then become new products. In reality, the process is more complicated. Mixed curbside collections have about a 25 percent contamination rate in baled recyclables from MRFs, so more sorting is needed before they can be turned into new materials. In the past, this extra sorting was often done cheaply in other countries.

After China stopped buying U.S. recyclables in 2018, the U.S. was left with about a third of its collected materials and no place to send them. This led to a crisis: many communities lost their recycling programs, and it became obvious that the U.S. needed more domestic processing and cleaner materials from better recycling programs.

Paper and corrugated cardboard are still the big success stories in circular packaging. In 2024, the U.S. recycled over 33 million tons of cardboard, or about 90,000 tons each day, reaching a recovery rate between 69 and 74 percent, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. The share of recycled paper used at U.S. mills has grown from 36.6 percent in 2005 to 44.4 percent in 2024.

Aluminum also does well, with the average beverage can containing about 73 percent recycled material.

Plastic is still a major challenge. Only about 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic packaging is recovered and made into new packaging or products.

A Growing Market With Caveats

Europe is leading the way in recycling growth, thanks to strict regulations. North America is catching up through corporate ESG commitments, extended producer responsibility programs, and state-level policies.

Paper-based packaging leads in circular packaging revenue, making up about 40 percent of the global market in 2024. This is due to advances in fiber recovery technology and the fact that consumers are used to recycling cardboard. Reusable and refillable packaging is growing quickly, but it is still a small part of the market. As a result, the food and beverage sector makes up nearly 47 percent of circular packaging demand, and packaging companies are teaming up with recyclers to meet this need.

Industry consolidation signals how seriously investors have bet on this sector. In July 2024, Smurfit Kappa completed its acquisition of WestRock to form Smurfit WestRock, one of the world’s largest paper-based packaging companies, with $32 billion in combined revenue and 100,000 employees across 40 countries. Separately, International Paper announced an agreement to acquire DS Smith in a deal valuing DS Smith at approximately $9.9 billion. These deals suggest that fiber-based, recyclable packaging is a durable growth market.

The DS Smith Model, Five Years Later

In March 2020, DS Smith opened its first North American recycling plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, right next to an existing paper mill and corrugated packaging facility. These three sites could make, use, collect, and recycle corrugated boxes in about two weeks, creating a true closed loop. DS Smith got clean materials from distribution centers, packaging facilities, and retailers instead of mixed curbside collections, which helped keep contamination low.

Since then, this model has grown significantly. DS Smith, now part of International Paper, and other companies have shown that fiber-based packaging circular systems can work on a large scale. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2024 Global Commitment Progress Report, which covers over 1,000 organizations representing 20 percent of global plastic packaging production, noted that companies like Amcor have “doubled the share of recycled content in their plastic packaging, making as much progress in four years as in the four decades before,” according to EMF leader Rob Opsomer.

Where Optimism Meets Reality

But the numbers are more complex than market growth projections suggest. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) found that the 2025 targets set by its member companies in 2018—to cut virgin plastic use by 18 percent, reach 26 percent recycled content, and achieve 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging—are now mostly out of reach without major changes. Together, these companies have avoided using 9.6 million tons of virgin plastic since 2018, but that is less than 3 percent of annual plastic production. At the same time, the overall market increased plastic packaging use by 8 percent.

Scaling up reusable packaging has been especially hard. Even though 64 percent of EMF Commitment participants have started pilot programs, reuse models make up only 1.3 percent of packaging, according to the Foundation’s 2024 analysis. The main obstacles are structural: the U.S. lacks a shared reverse logistics system, does not offer enough consumer incentives, and has no binding policies to make reuse practical.

Greenwashing has made the credibility problem worse. In October 2024, the legal advocacy group ClientEarth released a report saying that vague plastic recycling claims, like “100-percent recyclable” and circular loop images, mislead consumers about the real environmental impact of products and violate UK and EU consumer protection laws.

“The thing that blew my mind,” said Myles Cohen, founder of consulting firm Circular Ventures, at the September 2024 Packaging Recycling Summit, “is that in the company’s defense, they argued, ‘Hey, our statements were just classic puffery.’” Cohen called greenwashing “a pet peeve that damages not just individual companies but the packaging and recycling industries as a whole.”

Consumer trust is clearly declining. According to 2024 data, 32 percent of Americans now doubt that curbside recycling works, up from 14 percent four years ago. A related trend called “greenhushing” has also appeared, where brands stop talking about their sustainability progress to avoid criticism.

What Actually Works

Not all circular packaging strategies are equally effective. The evidence shows a clear ranking of materials:

• Fiber-based packaging, like corrugated cardboard and paperboard, has proven circularity supported by real infrastructure. The DS Smith model is successful because it uses clean materials and relies on commercial, not residential, collection systems.
• Aluminum is the most valuable recyclable material. Recycling just one can saves as much energy as half a gallon of gas. Beverage cans contain 73 percent recycled content, and steel cans are recycled at an 80 percent rate, so metal packaging truly supports a circular system.
• Reusable packaging is most effective in closed-loop commercial settings, such as logistics, food service, and institutional supply chains. It does not work as well in consumer retail or quick-service restaurants, where returning packaging is expensive and unreliable.
• Compostable packaging is only a limited solution. More industry analysts are skeptical because most communities do not have home composting, industrial composting facilities often reject packaging, and composting creates greenhouse gases instead of recovering materials.
• Plastic recycling needs a very specific approach. PET bottles and HDPE containers are recycled more successfully than most other plastics. Flexible plastics like films, pouches, and sachets are still mostly unrecyclable on a large scale and often end up polluting the environment.

The EPA estimates that updating U.S. recycling infrastructure will cost between $36.5 and $43.4 billion, mainly for better packaging recovery, more composting capacity, and improved plastics processing. This investment has been slow to happen because there are no binding policy requirements.

The E.U. Regulatory Push and the U.S. Gap

Europe has moved decisively. The E.U.’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) requires 70 percent of all packaging waste to be recycled by 2030, with plastics recycling rates targeted to double to 55 percent. Member states must cut packaging waste per capita by 15 percent by 2040 versus 2018 baselines. The European Commission is also requiring products claiming to be biobased, biodegradable, or compostable to meet minimum, verifiable standards to combat greenwashing.

In the U.S., California is leading the way with extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws and the new Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosures Act, both aimed at reducing greenwashing in sustainability claims. However, there is little action at the federal level.

At the November 2024 Busan negotiations for a UN Global Plastics Treaty, countries failed to reach a binding agreement. This has left a major policy gap and prevents a coordinated global effort.

What You Can Do

If you want to make a positive difference, it helps to be both a conscious shopper and an active citizen. Here are some steps you can take in your daily life:

• Choose fiber and aluminum products. Corrugated boxes, paperboard, and aluminum cans have real end-of-use recycling systems. Recycling these materials truly closes the loop.
• Don’t just trust the label. “Recyclable” does not always mean it can be recycled where you live. Check if your local program accepts the material, and use Earth911’s recycling search to see what is accepted in your area.
• Focus on reducing packaging, not just recycling. Buying products with less packaging, choosing concentrates, or picking refillable options has a bigger environmental impact than recycling alone.
• Support EPR policies. Extended producer responsibility moves recycling costs from cities and taxpayers to the companies that create packaging. This is a structural solution that market growth alone cannot achieve.
• Ask companies for details. If you see vague claims like “eco-friendly” or “100-percent recyclable,” ask questions: Where is it recyclable? What infrastructure is used? What percentage of the material is actually recycled? Demand clear, verifiable answers.

If you value the environment, keep a variation on Smokey Bear’s familiar advice in mind: Only you can prevent the economy from burning down the planet. Your response needs to combine thoughtful choices when shopping with active communication with friends, family, the businesses you frequent, and the representatives you elect.

Editor’s Note: This article, originally authored by Gemma Alexander on April 14, 2020, was substantially updated in April 2026.

The post Where Is The Circular Packaging Economy In 2026? appeared first on Earth911.

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

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

Cleaning Your Home

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

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

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

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

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

Laundry

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You Can Do Today

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

Related Reading

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

Featured image by Monfocus from Pixabay 

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

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

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

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

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

The Recycling That Happens Without You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Curbside Doesn’t Want It

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

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

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

What “Chemical Recycling” Can and Can’t Do

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

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

The 79% Nobody Talks About

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

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

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

How The U.S. EPS Recycling Rate Compares

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

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Companies Are Giving Up on Foam

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

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

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

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

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

States Are Banning Expanded Polystyrene

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

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

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

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

What Would Actually Fix Polystyrene Recycling

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

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

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

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

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

What You Can Do At Home

Find a drop-off:

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

Cut foam out of your routine:

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

Push for better policy:

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

Related Reading on Earth911

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

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