President Donald Trump’s second term began at a breakneck pace, with a wave of executive orders and other actions imposing tariffs; targeting law firms, universities, and individuals he believed had wronged him while he was out of office; and reshaping the US immigration system.

Nearly a year and a half into his second term, the White House appears to be losing momentum. Much of Trump’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress, the war with Iran has dragged on longer than the administration seems to have expected, and Trump’s proposed “anti-weaponization” fund” went down in flames after some unusual pushback from Republican lawmakers.

To understand the current state of the Trump White House, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Megan Messerly, a White House reporter at Politico, who recently wrote about the “funk” Trump and his staff are in.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You recently wrote for Politico about how the president and his administration are kind of in a funk — and not just over the slush fund fiasco. Remind us how else we’re seeing this funk, for those who have disassociated.

We are now more than three months into the Iran war, and this is just not going anywhere anytime soon. We have seen the president over the last week and a half now say that he’s close on a deal to extend this ceasefire with Iran that still has not come through. There was this two-hour Situation Room meeting on Friday. Nothing came out of that after two hours. 

Talking to folks in and around the White House, they just want to find a face-saving way out of this war, but they have been unable to do that. They’ve been unable to get Iran to agree to something that would open the Strait of Hormuz. And in the meantime, everyone’s just very over it. 

According to my reporting, that’s including staff inside the White House; one of my sources said that pretty much everyone is in a funk and described it as being stuck in this quicksand of Iran.

Is there a legislative funk too with this administration? Because it doesn’t feel like the Trump administration is getting anything done.

That was one of the big things that I was talking to folks about for this story — this idea that Iran has really taken up so much of the president’s time that it is in some ways distracting from some of these other priorities. And that includes the president’s legislative agenda. 

Some allies I spoke with also blamed that squarely on Senate Majority Leader John Thune and said, Thune is being too much of an institutionalist, protecting the filibuster. The president has called for firing the Senate parliamentarian. And so you have a very frustrated Trump, but a frustrated Trump who has rhetorically turned the screws a bit on Thune, but really hasn’t put the full force of pressure on Thune to get his legislative agenda through. 

That includes things like the president has talked a lot about this Save America Act, an elections-focus piece of legislation. That’s one of his top legislative priorities. There’s this housing bill that includes this institutional investor ban that he wants to see across the finish line. And then of course he wants to see security funding for his ballroom/bunker.

It feels like [Trump] doesn’t care about the midterms. But then there’s all the gerrymandering that he’s pushing, which implies that he very much cares about the midterms and his endorsement of candidates. What’s your read on what’s going on with the president when it comes to the midterms?

Yes, it definitely feels like those two things are at odds with one another. 

I think the way that White House allies view it is the president needs to be able to say, I don’t care about the midterms. I don’t care about high gas prices because that language is for Iran. 

He’s saying, I’m willing to take this gamble because he needs Iran to believe that he will take the maximalist position, that he will let gas prices rise however high they need to rise in order to notch a deal. White House allies would say that that’s a negotiating tactic. So what might be helpful rhetorically with Iran is not helpful rhetorically with Republicans as they’re fighting it out in these really key midterm races. 

It feels like it’s such a tough spot that even the things that should be easy wins — like a sesquicentennial concert on the National Mall. What is going on with this concert?

What we’re seeing is even some of those folks now pulling out and saying, “Hey, we were interested in sort of celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, but this is far too political for us. This is not what we wanted. This is not what we signed up for.”

And to me, and many of the folks that I spoke with, this is just such a deviation from where we were at the beginning of the president’s term last year when he was just really taking the culture by storm. He was just steamrolling these law firms and Ivy League institutions, and you’ve seen other pop culture figures come on board to the president’s agenda like Nick Minaj.

This is a moment where the president wants to be taking a victory lap and yet he’s stuck in this quagmire that is Iran, one that he desperately wants to get out of.

And Trump even lost his name on the Kennedy Center? 

This has been one that has been near and dear to the president for months now — his fight to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center and this planned massive renovation of the center, all put on hold by a federal court last week. We saw the president take to Truth Social to express his sincere displeasure at that decision.

Do they have any wins that they should be celebrating right now that they could be parading in front of the American people?

The White House pushed back on my story and said we do have things that we are doing. 

For instance, their efforts to reduce the cost of prescription drugs through TrumpRx and the coming launch of “Trump accounts” for millions of children. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was on the road last week in California and elsewhere touting these investment accounts that are supposed to sort of build generational wealth for the next generation. But that is all getting overshadowed right now by Iran.

But ultimately, I think the challenge, and this is what I hear when I’m talking to regular voters, is, “Okay, these Trump accounts are great, but I’m being crunched right now by the cost of gas, by the cost of my groceries when I’m buying ground beef and it’s $9, $10 a pound.” 

So these wins are great, but when the pressing concern is putting food on the table and making ends meet and paying the bills, that has been cold comfort and that sort of exposes some of the challenge of the White House’s efforts to message here.

Do you think watching some half-naked men brutally beat the living daylights out of each other on the South Lawn will make the president feel better — and on his birthday, no less?

The president is a longtime fan of the [Ultimate Fighting Championship] and we are certainly seeing him celebrate his 80th birthday, which is the day of the UFC fight. In accordance with that, the president is sort of this mercurial figure and something like that really could raise his mood and honestly produce a policy breakthrough, because he has been stuck for so long. 

Talking to allies, I think they think that if the president gets a win, that could sort of put them back on track to passing the president’s agenda. And that could be a policy win or it could just be a triumphant UFC fight on the White House lawn.

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

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

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

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

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

Our social media feeds are being inundated by clips. Big names like Justin Bieber, reality shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and even AI companies like Perplexity — they’re all using bite-sized video segments to advertise themselves on social media. And they’re not just posting from their own accounts; they’re paying thousands of anonymous people to do it for them. 

This practice, a marketing tactic known as clipping, is everywhere — and still spreading. The Verge’s Mia Sato recently wrote a piece breaking down how the practice works and how it might be an existential threat to more nuanced, full-length content. 

Sato spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why everything is a clip now, the companies behind it, and what comes next.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How would you describe what’s happening on our Instagram feeds? 

It’s basically the TL;DR-ification of the entire internet. It truncates everything we make and it all goes down to “We need a way for people to discover our content.” And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. 

Think about the politics videos. You see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Or sports highlights from the game the night before. You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. A major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, to put on Reels, to put on YouTube Shorts.

What made you want to write about this now? 

The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of Clavicular. 

Clavicular is really a great example where the point of his online existence is clips rather than the full live streams. They know him through these disembodied short videos of this other thing that exists, but nobody is seeing. And you have this person who comes from obscurity into getting a 60 Minutes interview. 

I wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the internet and how people are working to go viral.

Is there a difference between the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and what Clavicular is doing?

Clavicular is basically the industrialized version of a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically. The difference is that there’s an ecosystem under it that is paid. 

For the month between March and April, I believe there were something like 1,600 clippers working on his behalf, generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views, and all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely a scale game. It’s a hundred percent trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms. These pseudo-anonymous accounts are profiting based on how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds.

How much money is there to be made here?

[Clavicular] oversees 62,000 clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month. He claims the average is around $3,000 a month. It’s not nothing. Is it enough to support a family? Can you support a family on clips? Maybe not. But brands are paying companies like this clipping platform; [they] basically say, here’s $10,000, make us go viral.

What kinds of companies are paying for this service?

I was kind of surprised by how many household names were using this type of service. RuPaul’s Drag Race. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity. Dan Bongino, former second in command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full-time podcaster. I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game. Political candidates, which really gets weird. So it really spans different industries. There’s definitely a variety.

When I’m scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something being put in front of me is an ad because it’ll say ad, but I don’t know when I’m seeing something organically or when I’m seeing something that’s been paid to be elevated into my feed. And I imagine it’s the same on Instagram or TikTok? That you’re seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed? 

Yeah, and I think one of the things that clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content.

One rule of thumb that I like to share is, you can probably picture it now, you’re scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast. The background is black, and on the black background there will be a caption that’s like, “I can’t believe bro said that. Shocked emoji.” You know what I mean?

I’ve seen that before. And then watch the video. And then nothing shocking is said, and I’m just like, “I hate the internet.”

There’s a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips. One of the campaigns that I found was promoting Perplexity via Joe Rogan’s podcast because Perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about Perplexity, and it would be hard, unless you checked the hashtags, to see that it was a paid piece of content. Buried in the hashtags, it says ‘Powered by Perplexity’, ‘hashtag sponsored’. 

Even that is a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, including, like I mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. 

It is really the Wild West because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they’re paying these accounts.

Can I read you the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote? That I sent to many people to be like, how depressing is this?

Yes, please.

“But overindexing on the clipped version means eventually, the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped, complete content in the first place.”

That is really sad. 

Whoever wrote that.

That’s crazy.

It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are, like, artful. 

Yeah. I will say, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this. 

I’m a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short-form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences, and I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it.

I wonder if you think — from having written this piece on “The Clippening,” as you call it — if this is just our moment or if this is our forever,

For me, it’s really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so dominant right now. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should completely put their trust into the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don’t want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it. 

I think the balance is, if you’re someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever, you maybe need to be on short-form video. But how do you make it so the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality, where the clips are the justification rather than creating the longer version, the real art or the real journalism or whatever? How do you avoid that as much as possible?

Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck’s capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response currently averages around 40 minutes. Firefighters have long understood the math: a spoonful of water in the first second, a bucket in the first minute, a truckload in the first hour. The XPRIZE Wildfire competition is an $11 million global effort to prove that autonomous systems, including AI-enabled drones, ground-based sensor networks, and space-based detection platforms, can collapse that window to 10 minutes. Our guest is Andrea Santy, who leads the program. She came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, where she watched conservation projects fall to wildfire. That experience sharpened her understanding of the stakes: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and parts of tropical East Asia, a single fire can eliminate species found nowhere else on Earth. In cities, it can destroy entire neighborhoods in hours. On January 7, 2025, Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena, destroying more than 16,000 structures, killing 30 people, displacing 180,000 residents, and generating between $76 billion and $130 billion in total economic losses from a single event. Annual U.S. wildfire costs, when healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and rebuilding are included, are estimated between $394 billion and $893 billion. XPRIZE announced the five autonomous wildfire response finalists just over a year after the LA fires: Anduril, deploying its Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones; Dryad, running solar-powered mesh sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage; Fire Swarm Solutions, coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can deliver 100 gallons of water autonomously; Data Blanket, building rapidly deployable drone swarms for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who used multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that can’t be seen from monitoring positions, solving the literal over-the-hill problem that any fire detection system faces.

The conversation covers what the finalists demonstrated during semi-final trials at 40-mile-per-hour winds, why the decoy fire requirement — distinguishing a wildfire from a barbecue, a pile burn, or a flapping tarp — is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how autonomous systems would integrate with existing incident command structures. Santy is direct about where progress is lagging: the testing is ahead of the regulations. Autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft in active fire emergencies require FAA frameworks that don’t yet exist at the necessary scale. There’s also the deeper ecological tension — the growing scientific consensus that many fire-adapted landscapes need more fire, not less, and that indigenous fire stewardship practices developed over millennia have a place alongside autonomous suppression technology. One XPRIZE finalist is already working with an indigenous community in Canada to pilot their heavy-lift drone system in a remote area where that community is exploring how the technology fits their land management approach. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating Forest Service state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out $300 million in forest research funding — maintaining suppression spending while gutting the prevention and detection infrastructure that could reduce what there is to suppress. The engineering, Santy says, has arrived. Whether the institutions can move at the speed the crisis demands is the harder question.

You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.

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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.

Fire season is coming, and we’re going to dig into how new technology may catch and contain fires in the first few minutes after ignition. There’s a saying among firefighters: you can fight fire in the first second with a spoonful of water, in the first minute with a bucket of water, and in the first hour with a truckload of water. The problem is that by the time most wildfires are detected, minutes have already passed, and in those minutes, under increasingly common conditions, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck’s capacity.

On January 7, 2025, hurricane-force Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena in Los Angeles, and in a matter of hours, more than 16,000 structures were destroyed. Thirty people were killed, and 180,000 residents were forced to flee. The total economic losses are estimated to be between $76 billion and $130 billion from a single fire event. And that was just one week in one city. In 2025, the U.S. recorded more than 61,500 wildfires that burned nearly 5 million acres, leading to annual U.S. wildfire costs of between $394 billion and $893 billion when you factor in the cost of healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and the expensive task of rebuilding entire cities.

So there’s an identifiable gap in the current best practices, which take roughly 40 minutes from ignition to deliver a coordinated response. What if you could cut that to 10 minutes, when only a few buckets of water could extinguish a threat? And what if autonomous systems — AI-enabled drones and ground-based sensor networks — could detect a fire, distinguish it from a prescribed burn, and suppress it before getting a human on the radio?

That’s the challenge behind the XPRIZE Wildfire program, an $11 million global competition now entering its final year, and our guest today is Andrea Santy, the program director leading it. Andrea came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, and before that she spent time at the Smithsonian Institution, leading conservation and academic programs.

On January 29 — just after the one-year anniversary of those LA fires — XPRIZE announced the five finalist teams advancing in the autonomous wildfire response track of the competition. They include:

Andruil, a defense technology company deploying a Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones that watch for fires at the moment they break out;

Dryad, a German company running solar-powered sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage;

Fire Swarm Solutions, a Canadian team coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can carry 100 gallons of water autonomously to the point where a fire begins;

Data Blanket, building a rapidly deployable drone swarm system for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and

Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who partnered with two aerospace companies to use multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that cannot be seen from monitoring locations — because, after all, a lot of fires happen just over the hill.

A separate track of the competition, the space-based wildfire detection and intelligence program, includes 10 finalists from six countries who are heading to Australia in April for their own finals. Those teams will have one minute to detect all fires across an area larger than a state, and 10 minutes to deliver precise reports to firefighting decision-makers on the ground.

We’re going to talk with Andrea about what the finalists demonstrated during live trials, why the decoy fire requirement is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how these autonomous systems would actually integrate with existing wildfire incident command structures. We’ll also dig into the tension between suppression technology and the growing scientific consensus that many landscapes need more fire, not less, and whether indigenous fire stewardship practices have a place in this conversation.

You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire. Can autonomous drones and AI-driven sensor networks actually detect and suppress a wildfire in less than 10 minutes? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

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

Andrea Santy  5:34

I’m doing great, Mitch. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:34

Well, thanks for joining me. We’ve had XPRIZE leaders on the show a number of times, and you do such interesting work. You announced the finalists just at one year after the catastrophe in LA. How did that reshape the urgency and direction for the XPRIZE Wildfire competition?

Andrea Santy  5:34

It definitely focuses a more intense light on the competition and the need for these solutions. Climate change is driving more intense, more frequent wildfires all around the world, and so I think the urgency was already there. But when you have a disaster at the scale and scope of the LA fires, it absolutely changes the way that everybody thinks about wildfires.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:04

What’s the realistic timeline for these technologies in the competition to potentially start changing the way that we fight fire and the outcomes of those fires?

Andrea Santy  6:14

So I’ll start by saying we were in LA when the fires started. XPRIZE has a lot of LA-based staff, and we’re originally LA-based, and we were having our staff meeting — so our entire staff was there. We knew from our prize that it was going to be very high risk, and so we were in touch with fire chiefs as the fires were starting. We were able to go out and see where the fires had gone through the Palisades and part of the city — basically 24 hours after it had happened.

It really, I will just say, definitely had a huge impact in terms of being able to see a landscape, communities, homes, schools, and businesses that had been devastated. A lot of the technology being integrated with these solutions can be deployed almost immediately. I think that as the fire agencies begin to get their hands on more of this technology, we’re going to have a hopefully relatively quick uptake. Cameras, sensors, satellite data — a lot of this is already being deployed. So we’re looking at how quickly and under what conditions it can help improve our detection. And then we have other components that I would say are going to have a longer timeline to full deployment.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:56

It sounds like part of the problem, then, is just knitting all this together. Does that also apply to areas outside of major cities? Do we have the resources to do this on a nationwide basis?

Andrea Santy  8:10

Yeah, absolutely. We’re doing our testing for our space-based competition in Australia, so we’re looking at how you detect fires over vast areas from satellites as quickly as possible and deliver that information down within 10 minutes, with 15-minute updates. For our autonomous track, we’re testing in Alaska — so it will definitely be a real-world scenario where we can understand the capabilities of these technologies in forested areas, in really vast terrain, and under different environmental conditions. Part of why we’re working with these partners is because they’re great partners, but it also allows us to validate this technology under real-world, challenging conditions.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:03

So how does the wildfire strategy change when this technology is in place? You’ve already mentioned that the climate crisis is accelerating the size and pace of these fires. Is the goal to suppress more fires earlier so that available resources can be deployed to those that actually break out? What’s the big-picture change in policy here?

Andrea Santy  9:26

XPRIZE really decided to double down on early detection and autonomous response, and we have two tracks. I’ll talk about the detection piece first because it’s digestible for everyone. Every wildfire starts small. They don’t start as a huge catastrophe — they start small, often in pretty remote areas. Sometimes they burn really fast, sometimes slower, depending on the conditions. But if you can address a wildfire at its very smallest phase, essentially post-ignition, that gives you the best chance to address it — either through autonomous suppression systems or through your fire service. If you have more eyes, ears, and noses on the landscape, the better your chance of getting that alert as soon as possible, which allows the fire service to decide how to prioritize their resources.

The second component we’re advancing is autonomous detection and response. Sensors and cameras handle the detection; the autonomous response system deploys, verifies there is a fire — that it’s not a barbecue but an actual wildfire that needs suppression — and places suppressant fully autonomously. That’s what we’re going to be testing in Alaska: can they execute this full end-to-end system? Is the technology integrated? Will it reach the scale and scope of the challenge and the geography? Because 1,000 square kilometers — which is our testing area — is roughly the size of San Antonio, Texas. The teams will have to find multiple fires and demonstrate persistent monitoring and persistent response. Imagine having a fire starting in a ravine: if you can get something out there in minutes, your chance of knocking it down — even just deterring the spread enough that firefighters can arrive — we hope will be a game changer.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:13

We’re talking about autonomous drones. But one of the things that happened in the LA wildfire was that Santa Ana winds were so extreme, fixed-wing aircraft couldn’t fly. Can a drone perform in those conditions?

Andrea Santy  12:27

During our semi-final testing, our team traveled the world to observe these solutions in action. While not at scale, each of the five finalists was able to demonstrate that they could detect a fire, navigate to it, and suppress it fully autonomously over a small area. Coincidentally, relatively strong winds followed us — nothing like the Santa Ana winds, but we had 40-mile-per-hour winds pretty consistently during testing. It was odd, but it was helpful in terms of validating the technology.

Because you don’t have a human pilot, it’s not that helicopters and planes can’t fly — it’s that they can’t fly in that type of wind without putting a human at risk. This approach removes at least that human element. It’s going to continue to be a challenge, but many of the drones have a relatively high wind tolerance, and as the technology improves, the systems themselves are providing the input to stay balanced.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:54

These systems are also being combined with sensor networks. Can you talk about how those are being deployed?

Andrea Santy  14:01

Some teams are really focused on ultra-early detection by deploying a sensor network — many, many sensors connected through a mesh network — allowing small, distributed sensors across a large area, which gives you great coverage. All of the different teams are competing under the same scenario, so we’ll get to see which technologies work under which conditions. There’s no single silver bullet that works in every condition, every geography, and every forest type. We’re also working on a pilot phase post-competition so the teams can continue to test and deploy, gaining even better understanding. Building trust with fire agencies — so they know what the technology can do under critical situations — is really important.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:24

Do the fire agencies participate in these trials as well?

Andrea Santy  15:28

Absolutely. We have partners from different fire agencies in Australia — we’re doing our testing with the Rural Fire Service of New South Wales, which is a testing partner. Many of our judges come from different fire agencies across the United States and around the world. From the beginning, that was really an ethos we set forward — making sure this was done hand in hand with the fire agencies.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:59

You’ve mentioned decoy fires. I’m curious how the trials will incorporate them. You mentioned barbecues — are you going to have people setting up small fires to lure the competition’s sensors?

Andrea Santy  16:11

I can’t say too much because testing hasn’t happened — I can’t give away the secret sauce. But yes — the teams do know they will have decoys and will need to ensure their technology ignores them. It can be anything from something flapping in the wind that resembles the color of fire all the way to barbecues or pile burns — anything that would confuse the technology.

Mitch Ratcliffe  16:52

And that could happen any day of the year. Really interesting. One of the most compelling things about the competition is the breadth of sources of ideas and the range of approaches — including even a high school team from Valley Christian High School in San Jose. What does that diversity tell us about where wildfire innovation will actually come from?

Andrea Santy  17:15

At XPRIZE, we believe that ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, and I think XPRIZE Wildfire really demonstrates what that looks like. We had teams from over 55 different countries enter the competition. We currently have six countries represented through our finals teams, and the range spans from Valley Christian — a high school team — through universities, startups, and all the way up to major industry. That truly spans the whole spectrum.

What I really love about our competition is that for many of the teams, this is both a company and a passion. Wildfires happen in so many places, and so many teams have been personally impacted. The high school team talked about growing up in areas where wildfires are a constant presence — they are very cognizant of the need for these solutions. Something remarkable: one in six Americans live in an area of wildfire risk, and 25% of Californians.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:57

It’s a very tangible problem for so many of us, particularly in the West. And the smoke from fires in Canada is now familiar on the East Coast — it’s changed the very shape of life. This is a great place to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my discussion with Andrea Santy. She is Program Director of XPRIZE Wildfire — a competition headed into its final year with two groups of finalists vying to win shares of an $11 million prize to help commercialize their technologies.

Andrea, the autonomous competition requires teams to detect and suppress a high-risk wildfire in a 1,000-square-kilometer area — roughly the size of San Antonio — and do it within 10 minutes, while ignoring decoy fires. That’s four times faster than current best practices. Have any of the teams met that benchmark yet in the trials?

Andrea Santy  19:57

As I mentioned, the five teams advancing to finals all demonstrated they have end-to-end solutions to autonomously detect, navigate, and suppress a fire. Our semi-final testing was at a much smaller scale, and while some teams did it in less than 10 minutes, this finals competition is at a very large scale — and it is going to be challenging. Every XPRIZE is very audacious. We really want to push the limits, but we’re very confident we’re going to have a team that can do it. Still to be seen, but that is what finals is for.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:42

Absolutely. It’s great that we’re testing in such diverse settings. Australia and Alaska seem very different. Is that actually the case, or are wildfire conditions globally roughly the same?

Andrea Santy  20:59

Very different. In Alaska, it will be wildfire season, and we’re testing in an area of much lower risk. The vegetation is different. The geography is different. The fuels — the plants and trees — are different. In Australia, the teams will be arriving as it comes out of summer and goes into fall, which means we don’t actually know exactly which specific days we’ll test, because the Rural Fire Service has to execute prescribed burns when it’s safe. We have a two-week testing window, with five planned days of testing, and approximately 20 fires of varying sizes that the teams will need to identify under different conditions and vegetation types.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:11

Let’s talk a bit about the space-based prize. Lockheed Martin is adding a million dollars for the teams that can demonstrate the fastest and most accurate detection. Is detection turning out to be the harder technical problem — or is it the transition from detection to action, that coordination piece we talked about?

Andrea Santy  22:40

Lockheed Martin is supporting the autonomous wildfire response track — which we call Track B. The autonomous track requires teams to detect, navigate, and suppress, with all teams using drones. There’s a lot of different detection technology, from sensors that detect particulates up to cameras, and sensors and cameras mounted on drones.

Getting that detection into these autonomous response systems is really the step change — having something that communicates without human intervention, with drones that can fly under wind conditions and navigate to the right location, confirm there’s a fire, and then suppress it accurately. The teams will be testing on a moving fire — not a barrel of fire, but an actual fire that will be dynamic and small-scale but moving. That’s really challenging and requires quite a bit of system training. During semi-finals, accurately hitting the target was one of the harder challenges.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:43

As you talk about it, it sounds like the transition from detection to addressing the fire appropriately — choosing the right suppression mechanism — is something you’ll continue to work on.

Andrea Santy  24:58

The teams are definitely still working on their systems. They have until June to have all of their systems working. Yeah, it requires a lot of different components.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:20

And obviously that’s part of the bigger challenge — coordinating technological responses to a changing climate and acute situations like fire. As you observe the environment with these systems, are we also potentially identifying opportunities for prescribed burns in order to reduce fire risk?

Andrea Santy  25:45

Absolutely. While our competition is focused on detection and response to incipient-stage wildfires, I do think this technology can be utilized across many different scenarios — including prescribed burns, where you want to monitor large burn areas to ensure nothing escapes. That is definitely a use case, and anything that reduces our risk. Personally, I think it could provide peace of mind: if you have something on hand that can prevent a prescribed fire from spreading when weather conditions change unexpectedly, that’s enormously valuable.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:43

Indigenous communities have managed fire for millennia using these kinds of burning practices. Have you engaged with tribal fire practitioners? Do they see autonomous technology as complementary to, or in tension with, their traditional fire stewardship programs?

Andrea Santy  27:02

We have engaged with some. I was just at a meeting where I was able to meet with a representative from an indigenous community in Canada, and they are actually going to pilot-test one of the team’s technologies — specifically a team with a heavy-lift drone. It was really exciting to talk with them and learn more about how they envision it being used. Their community is quite remote, and understanding how this technology could work within their context was a great conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:41

When I think about the swarm of drones approach to fire management, the regulatory landscape seems like a significant challenge. The FAA has been grappling with drone airspace management. Does the regulatory framework need to change significantly to accommodate these systems?

Andrea Santy  28:06

That’s an excellent question. Current regulations and protocol don’t allow drones in airspace with manned aircraft. As the technology gets better, there are definitely ways this can happen — there are pilots and tests already occurring with other partners looking at shared airspace for heavy-lift drones operating at higher altitudes. Beyond visual line of sight is one area where the testing is definitely ahead of where the regulations are.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:55

What has your conservation career taught you about how technology deployment can shape our relationship with nature?

Andrea Santy  29:07

I got into this position in part because many of the projects I was working on at the World Wildlife Fund were being lost to wildfire, and I felt we hadn’t really understood the impact of wildfires on conservation. Wildfires are now the main driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo, and parts of tropical East Asia, there’s such critical biodiversity — and I think if we can use technology to monitor these areas, understand where fires are happening, and deploy appropriate responses, my hope is that we can save really, really important places. There are endemic species that only live in very, very small areas, and one fire could wipe out an entire species.

I also worked for a long time on projects where your goal was 20 to 50 years away. Being able to work with XPRIZE, where in three years we’ve seen an absolute transformation in both what the technology can do and how people understand what technology is for — I think we need more of these competitions, more technology applied to conservation problems. I’m really hopeful.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:23

After three years with XPRIZE Wildfire, do you feel like we can turn back the rising incidence of wildfire and all the costs we’re seeing pile up when cities burn?

Andrea Santy  31:35

I think so. Communities and citizens around the world are understanding the problem at a deeper level. This is going to be all hands on deck. You need citizens and homeowners making sure they have zone zero — no vegetation around their homes. You need communities, city and state incentives, industry engagement. You need prescribed fire and better forest management policies that allow good fire on the landscape, and communities that encourage it. All of these factors together are what will get us to a new paradigm.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:29

You mentioned raising awareness — this competition actually sounds like really good TV. Have you thought about how to tell this story of wildfire innovation so that people can get engaged with and behind this kind of activity?

Andrea Santy  32:49

We’ve discussed at length how we would be able to document some of the testing. For the autonomous wildfire response, it is a very big, vast area, and turning it into good TV is probably a step beyond us — but I think the teams have amazing stories to tell. We’re going to capture a lot of imagery to share that story out. We have a resource page that provides a lot of different information to homeowners and individuals about other really amazing organizations doing great work in the wildfire space.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:47

How can our listeners follow along as you complete the project?

Andrea Santy  33:51

We’d love to have them follow along. The easiest way is xprize.org/wildfire — we have lots of information about the competition and the teams, lookbooks to learn about which teams are competing, social media updates, and a newsletter you can subscribe to. During the testing events we’ll be sharing quite a bit of good information. The events are in fairly remote, closed-system locations, so we can’t invite everyone there — but we’ll definitely be exploring how to make sure as many people as possible can get their eyes on what we’re doing.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:42

Andrea, thank you very much for spending time with us today. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

Andrea Santy  34:48

Thank you so much. We hope all your listeners think deeply about wildfire and what they can do. Our goal is that collectively we can all work together to reduce this wildfire risk and keep good fire on the landscape.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:11

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Andrea Santy, Program Director of XPRIZE Wildfire, an $11 million global competition now in its final year. Learn more and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.

This conversation revealed, at least for me, that solutions to wildfire are arriving — but perhaps faster than the systems built to receive them can accept and use them. We’ll need more public funding to deploy these technologies, and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction. As wildfire damage grows, total federal wildfire spending is holding roughly flat at around $7 billion a year. However, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating the Forest Service’s state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out the $300 million in forest research funding that was in the budget previously. So we’re maintaining the suppression budget while cutting the prevention, detection, and research infrastructure that could reduce what we have to suppress.

Fortunately, we have XPRIZE Wildfire to take on some of the burden — but it’s not enough. Consider what Andrea said about early detection: every wildfire does start small. If autonomous systems can get suppressant on a fire quickly enough, it might not even need to be fully extinguished — just deterred enough that firefighters can arrive to finish the job. The technology to do that end-to-end and autonomously is already being demonstrated in the field. But Andrea was equally direct about what’s lagging: the testing is ahead of where the regulations are.

Consider autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft during active fire emergencies. For that to work, the FAA’s frameworks for widespread drone operations need to be reinvented. The recent closure of El Paso International Airport over nearby counter-drone laser testing is evidence of how unprepared we truly are for the innovations that are coming.

In short, the engineering has arrived, but institutions need support to integrate that engineering into their operations. A similar gap is evident in who’s doing the innovating: teams from over 55 countries entered this competition, and a high school team from San Jose made the finals by solving the problem of locating fires beyond ridgelines using multi-sensor triangulation — not because they had institutional backing, but because they had access to a well-defined problem and the drive to solve it, along with the incentive of XPRIZE’s $11 million award.

The XPRIZE premise that ideas can come from anyone, anywhere — it turns out — is literally true. But recognizing that changes nothing if the regulatory, procurement, and deployment systems still favor incumbents and slow-moving approval processes.

Underlying all these challenges is what Andrea brought to this work from nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. The game has changed, but policy is still anchored in now-outdated 20th-century strategies. One fire in the wrong place can drive a species to extinction, or it can burn a city to the ground.

Andrea said she’s hopeful — not because the problem is easy, but because in three years she’s watched a transformation in what technology can do and how people understand what technology is for. That hope is well earned. But it will only translate into outcomes if institutions move at the speed the crisis demands — citizens, homeowners, communities, industries, and policy, all moving together. The competition creates urgency; the systems around it need to act on and use the innovations being delivered.

So stay tuned for more conversations with people actually making sustainability happen, and I hope you’ll check out our archive of more than 540 episodes. There’s something worth sharing with anyone you know. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because, folks, you are the amplifiers that spread ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your 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 wherever they get their podcast goodness.

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: The XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Heats Up appeared first on Earth911.

Death doulas, also called end-of-life doulas, wear many hats. In helping patients and their families prepare for a peaceful end of life, they can offer solace and companionship, handle logistics, mediate with medical staff, and more.

As my colleague Anna North reported recently, public interest in the job is growing. Celebrities like actor Nicole Kidman and director Chloé Zhao have spoken about training to become death doulas, and the hospital drama The Pitt recently featured a death doula character.

“The interest from celebrities mirrors interest that we’re seeing from the population as a whole,” North told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “There’s been a rising interest in death doulas in recent years, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic began, when so many people were forced to encounter death at the same time.”

Noel spoke with North and a death doula, Jane K. Callahan, for a recent episode of Today, Explained.

Callahan, who works in Durham, North Carolina, and wrote A Death Doula’s Guide to a Meaningful End, shared the experiences that made her want to be a death doula, what the job entails, and how the “death-positive” movement encourages us to acknowledge our inevitable demise and prepare for the best death we can imagine for ourselves.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Why do you do this work?

In 2009, I got a call that my mother was in the hospital. She would end up dying two weeks later. I was 27 years old. And that was my first exposure to anything involving death and dying. And during those two weeks, I realized how broken this healthcare system is when it comes to helping people die versus fixing them. 

I didn’t understand what was happening to my mother’s body, because I had no knowledge of how the body dies. It was hard to get a direct answer from a doctor. In fact, no one told me until toward the end that she was dying. I was waiting for her to be discharged. 

I sat with that for a couple of years, and, eventually, I got pregnant, and I had my son. And when I gave birth to my son, I did not have a birth doula. I didn’t really understand what that was. A lot of things went wrong. So, I started researching birth doulas and realized that would’ve really helped. That’s how I found out that there are death doulas, which are based on the birth doula model. I realized those were all the things that were missing in the last two weeks of my mother’s life. So, I attended a training, and I started volunteering with hospice, and I’ve been doing that for eight years.

Do you think that you are more comfortable with death than most people?

I think I’ve gotten comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is really the main skill of being a doula. We’re not untouched by the work we do. I have moments where losing someone I’ve worked with is very hard, and watching them suffer and die is very hard. But you start to accept the reality of it through learning how to sit with discomfort.

Do you think that being in close proximity to death changes the way you think about being alive?

Absolutely. In Bhutanese culture, they’re encouraged to think about death five times a day. Do I think it’s mentally healthy to just spend your entire day every day thinking about death? No, that’s not healthy. It’s also not really possible. But, I think being consistently aware of the fact that we’re not here for very long, and that it can end at any time — today, even — makes you appreciate what you have. 

Since I’ve started doing this work, I have found myself being a lot more present in my everyday life and appreciating small things. Definitely more gratitude and more awareness.

I think that one of the many things that freaks us out about death is the finality of it. The sense of, “Oh, I will never see this person again.” 

I wonder whether you have ideas about where we go after we die and if there’s something in there that you find comforting.

Yes, but I will say, as a disclaimer, doulas are trained not to answer that question. When a client asks you, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” you should really reflect it back on them and say, “Why is that important to you?” 

When someone is scared and unsure, maybe even desperate, they see doulas as a guide, and your answer has an influence. And doulas are not meant to influence people. Doulas are meant to facilitate what someone wants. By sharing my opinion directly with a client about what I believe, there’s potential there to influence them and their journey towards the end of life. And so, I try to steer the conversation away from my beliefs, because, really, what I’m there for is them, and their beliefs, and their values, and goals. 

But, I will say, before I started this work, I was a hardcore atheist. I am not anymore. I am not going to pretend I have any idea what happens, but I’ve seen enough in the dying process and in death itself that there’s something I just can’t put my finger on. But I just cannot say that there’s nothing.

What is it that’s making you think that?

You know, when someone is in what we call active dying — which, by the way, can last up to two weeks, dying can be a long process — the person looks different. It’s the same person. Their body’s still working to a different degree obviously, but something looks different. Something feels different. 

And there’s a point where someone loses consciousness, and you can just feel, and I know this is not very scientific, but you can just feel like they’re halfway somewhere else. And right before the moment of death, there’s almost like a brightening of the person, kind of like this clarity in appearance is the best way I could explain it. 

I don’t want to say glowing, but when you see someone who’s in love, and they just look different — it’s kind of like that. And after they die, in those minutes, their face has not changed at all. They’ve just died, but something looks and feels different. 

And do you find that comforting to a degree?

I think there’s always going to be a fear if the light switch turns off and there’s nothing. But I see that as kind of a win-win situation, because if there’s nothing, then I’m not going to know what I’m missing. And if there’s something, then, great.

What’s the best part of this work, and what’s the worst part?

The best part of this work is the huge difference that doulas can make for patients and families at the end of life. Losing someone you love and losing your own life is sad. Sometimes, it’s even tragic, but when a doula is involved early enough in the process, it does not become a trauma. And that is absolutely what is happening to families without death doula care.

The thing that I don’t like about this work is, because there’s not enough awareness of us, because people are referred to hospice way too late, I’m often called at the 11th hour when a family is in crisis, and there’s only so much I can do to help. 

That’s hard, because I’m very aware of how differently that could have gone if there had been a more timely referral to hospice, if there had not been high levels of denial.

What would it look like for this, in your view, to be better?

I think that our healthcare system is focused on curing and fixing, and doctors will internalize death as a medical failure. We have to shift how we care for someone when they’ve reached the end of the road. We’re already seeing that shift in the growing presence of palliative care, which is a great field.

As far as working with a doula, doulas are not covered by insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. And so, that means doulas either work pro bono or offer a sliding scale, or they only serve the people who can afford a doula. And that can exacerbate the division we’re seeing with the haves and the have-nots in having a good death.

Are you able to make a living doing this? Are you pro bono? How does your life work?

I do charge sometimes, if the family has sufficient funds. I don’t charge a lot of the time. And that is a personal choice, and I’m acknowledging I have the ability to do that. 

There are people who can make a living off this. I would say that’s mostly possible in large metropolitan areas where there’s a huge number of people. I think that’s far less possible in smaller towns. Only so many people are dying. Only so many dying people know about a doula or want a doula. And only so many of those people can afford one.

What’s it like to get trained as a death doula? Do you end up with a certificate or a degree?

There’s pros and cons to that. Right now, there is no national standard. There are not even state standards for death doula work, and there is no formal or formally recognized licensure. That’s part of why we’re not reimbursed right now.

What you’re seeing is you have a couple of major organizations who offer trainings across the country, and then, increasingly, you’re seeing a lot of death doula schools pop up online. 

These courses vary in their content, and their quality, and in how much they cost. Every curriculum has its own content. There are things some curriculums touch on that others may not. Some people will take the training and immediately market themselves as doulas to their community. But there’s no clear pathway to hands-on mentorship, or apprenticeship, or anything like that.

Can you tell me about someone that you’ve worked with, someone who stands out in your mind?

I’ve been doing this for eight years, so, a lot of people. I think there was one family that I learned a lot from, and that’s primarily because they engaged me early enough, which is not as common. 

It was two adult children, and they reached out to me. Their mother had terminal cancer. She was still being treated with chemo. She had some other health issues, and her teams were not speaking to each other. She was low income, and there were issues with her housing. There were issues with her being able to get transportation to her chemo appointments. Both of her adult children were working full time. One was dipping into the 401k to pay for mom’s care. Another one took a second job driving Uber at night to pay for mom’s care. And there was tension within the family. 

And so, we come in and, as doulas, we can do some of the logistical stuff: Do you have your advanced directives? And then we worked on logistical issues, like “let’s find ways for you to get transportation to your appointments.”

Once she enrolled in hospice — and this is a very common misunderstanding with families — most people get home hospice, which means they die in their own homes, and the hospice team comes to them. Many people think that that means 24/7 care. It does not. A nurse will come to your house, toward the end, one hour a day. The other 23 hours are on the family, who have no caregiver training. And if they don’t have money for that, then there’s a problem. 

And then also creating what we call a vigil plan or a death plan. I talked to the dying woman about what kind of environment she would want: “Well, I love country music.” So we made sure we had her favorite country musicians playing. Any kind of scents? She loved roses, so we had a rose candle. She wanted fuzzy socks and a fuzzy blanket. She really liked that feeling for her comfort. We talked about, “do you want to be touched?” “Yes, hold my hand, but don’t touch my feet.” 

Some people want all their friends and family coming and going, and laughing, and telling stories, and looking at photos, whereas other people, like this woman, said, “I want my dignity, and when I start going into active dying, I really just want these couple of people around me. I don’t want anyone else coming in and out.” 

It’s really about giving what control is left in these situations to the dying person. And it’s also about avoiding panic and chaos by thinking ahead and talking these things through. If I’m having a conversation with you, then you’ve never died before, so you may not know what to think about and what to ask. You don’t know what you don’t know. And doulas who have that experience know how to help you think about planning for the most peaceful death possible. 

It’s so cool how much you learn about people. Some people want everybody coming in and out, and talking, and laughing. And other people, I imagine, find that exhausting. People are very different in life. And it is just so cool to hear you talk about how different people are in death, as well.

Yeah, I have my whole death plan. I want lots of plants around me, because I like plants. And then, have you ever been really sick with the flu or cold, and you wake up in the middle of the night ,and there’s no sense of time and it’s just horrible? Well, I want to have Christmas lights, because I associate those with comfort and coziness.

The thing is, it asks us to have an imagination about our own death. And that’s really challenging for some people. And doulas, a skilled doula will be able to help someone open that door at a pace that works for them.

One of the values of doulas outside of patient work is this public education about, “Hey, we do have to think about these things if we want the best for ourselves.” This is the death-positive movement. That’s what it’s referred to. Educate yourself, have these conversations, normalize talking with your parents about what they want at the end of life instead of guessing. 

The death-positive movement isn’t asking people to be excited and happy about dying. All it is asking people to do is understand that this is an inevitability. It is part of being a human being. And you can also still be scared, and you can also still grieve the fact that this ends one day. You can have both. And I think I exist in both.

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

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

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:08

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:29

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

Don Carli  4:31

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:37

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

Don Carli  5:15

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:56

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

Don Carli  8:17

We set expectations differently. Exactly.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:20

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

Don Carli  8:30

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:10

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

Don Carli  10:21

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:27

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

Don Carli  10:37

A variable lighting palette, yeah.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:38

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

Don Carli  10:57

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:27

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

Don Carli  13:54

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:09

The customer was always right.

Don Carli  15:11

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  16:00

$150 to $200 billion….

Don Carli  16:03

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:58

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

Don Carli  18:10

Oh, absolutely. But the financial ones alone —

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:15

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

Don Carli  19:00

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:55

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

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:13

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

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

Don Carli  23:29

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:31

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

Don Carli  25:34

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:54

You can’t do that anymore, but okay.

Don Carli  25:56

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:03

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

Don Carli  26:05

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:41

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

Don Carli  28:10

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:59

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

Don Carli  31:34

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:30

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

Don Carli  33:47

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:19

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

Don Carli  34:23

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:33

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

Don Carli  35:59

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:12

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

Don Carli  36:43

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:26

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

Don Carli  38:36

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:15

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

Don Carli  40:21

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:39

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

Don Carli  41:53

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  42:59

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

Don Carli  43:19

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

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:49

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll continue to explore this — we’ll probably have Don back to talk more — and in the meantime, I hope you take a look at our archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, folks, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’re going to want to share with a friend or member of your family. And by the way, writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

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

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns appeared first on Earth911.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The built environment, particularly office buildings other urban facilities, are responsible for 39% of the global energy-related emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. About a third of that impact comes from the initial construction of a building and the other two-thirds is produced over the lifetime of a building by heating, cooling, and providing power to the occupants. Our guest today is leading a key battle to reduce the impact of the built environment. Tune in for a wide-ranging conversation with Rob Bernard, Chief Sustainability Officer at CBRE Group Inc., which manages more than $145 billion of commercial buildings, providing logistics, retail, and corporate office services across more than than 100 countries.

Rob cut his sustainability teeth at Microsoft, as its Chief Environmental Strategist for 11 years, as the company was developing its world-leading approach and collaborating with other tech giants to lobby for policy and funding to accelerate progress. He discusses CBRE’s Sustainability Solutions & Services for commercial building owners, as well as the accelerating progress for renewables, carbon tracking, and economic, health, and lifestyle benefits of living lightly on the planet. You can learn more about CBRE and its sustainability services at cbre.com

Take a few minutes to learn more about making construction and building operations more sustainable:

• Earth911 Podcast: Cityzenith’s Michael Jansen Uses Digital Twins to Reinvent Urban Planning
• Earth911 Podcast: Concrete.ai CEO Alex Hall On Mixing Embodied Carbon Out Of the Built Environment
• Best of Earth911 Podcast: Lowering Construction Impacts With Green Badger’s Tommy Linstroth
• Best of Earth911 Podcast: William Ulrich on Learning From Y2K To Design the Circular Economy
• Best of Earth911 Podcast: Autodesk Spacemaker Aides Building Efficiency With AI Insights
• How to Assess Your Business’ Environmental and Social Impacts
• Passive House Design: Changing the Future of New Home Construction

• Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.
• Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube.

Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on April 15, 2024.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Making Billions of Square Feet of Commercial Space Sustainable with CBRE’s Rob Bernard appeared first on Earth911.

The Democrats’ call for Americans to “protect democracy” from candidate Donald Trump fell flat in the 2024 presidential election. Over and over, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris said that Trump and other Republicans represented an existential threat to the political system, calling out things like Project 2025 and the extreme anti-immigration aims of aides like Stephen Miller, and predicting a more authoritarian second term if Trump were to be reelected.

More than a year into Trump’s second term, we should acknowledge that they were right.

Trump has drastically expanded his executive authority, targeted his enemies using the traditionally apolitical Justice Department, marginalized Congress in the build up to another war in the Middle East, and engaged in a midcycle redistricting effort meant to win the midterm elections before they begin. 

In short, Trump is behaving less like a democratically elected leader — and more like an authoritarian — than ever. At the same time, the Democrats’ “save democracy” message seems to have hit a brick wall, and issues like tackling affordability and the cost of living are rising on the priority list. I don’t think that’s because Americans don’t care about democracy. I think it’s because they want to see the system improved, not just protected.

More than 60 percent of Americans are unsatisfied with democracy as-is, per Gallup polling. And all across the country, I hear the desire for more creativity from both parties in proposing solutions to the major issues driving our politics, as well as a call to improve democracy by making it more responsive to everyday people. So much of the current malaise is driven by an electorate that feels without agency, written out of the process in selecting the president (the Electoral College), in Congress (gerrymandering), or in the Supreme Court (lifelong terms).

So this week on the America, Actually podcast, I talked with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, about the state of Trump’s redistricting efforts and ways we can “improve” democracy, not just protect it.

Here’s three things she pointed out:

1) The primary process has been corrupted

Walter argues that the primary system — created over a century ago to wrest nominations away from party bosses in smoke-filled rooms — has a new kind of dysfunction. “The primary process has become as corrupted as it was back then,” she told, pointing to a flood of outside money “attached either to an issue or a corporate interest,” and a primary electorate that skews “very far left or right.” 

Her proposed fix: a single national primary day — rather than months of state-by-state primaries — with an open ballot, where “every voter is allowed to vote. … You don’t have to be a Democrat or a Republican.” It won’t solve everything, she concedes, “but it at least addresses one of the major problems.”

2) Gerrymandering could erase majority-minority districts

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has, by Walter’s count, handed Republicans something like a four-to-six-seat advantage in the redistricting wars. In the short term, maps in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama “basically took three Black-majority districts, two of which were represented by Black members of Congress, and made them safely Republican.” (Though Alabama’s new map is still being litigated.)

But the longer-term threat is bipartisan: She warns the same logic could push Democrats to break up their own majority-Black and majority-Hispanic seats in order to spread those voters into more winnable districts. 

“How far will Democrats be willing to go to expand their advantage in states where they have majority Black or majority Hispanic seats?” she asked — a “real messy” conundrum where both parties may decide minority representation isn’t the priority.

3) Not all reforms work

Reforms alone don’t cure the malaise, Walter cautioned, pointing to California as the cautionary tale. The state has a wish list of electoral reforms — open top-two primaries, easy registration, mail-in voting, ballot initiatives — but as Walters says, “It doesn’t mean that the state is governed better.”

The incentive structure itself is broken, she says: A member of Congress who “keeps your head down and gets stuff done” gets nothing; instead, it “benefits those who make the most noise, do the most damage, refuse to do any sort of compromising.” Until that changes, she told me, “you can create all the reforms you want, but if people feel like the system is broken, they’re not going to participate.”

As always, there’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.