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 Bernard, Chief Sustainability Officer at the commercial real estate giant CBRE, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
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:
An average big-budget movie creates about 3,370 metric tons of CO₂, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance’s 2021 report. That’s like driving over 700 gas-powered cars for a year, or about 33 metric tons of CO₂ for each day of filming. A single TV season can have the same impact as 108 cars. With thousands of productions happening every year in North America, Hollywood’s environmental impact is hard to overlook. Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, has spent more than ten years helping the industry turn sustainability goals into practical steps that productions can track. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, she shares how to build sustainable practices into film and TV projects from the very start, instead of adding them at the end when most waste has already been created. Zena started Green Spark Group in 2014 after earning a master’s in sustainability and environmental management at Harvard. She pitched Vancouver’s major studios on a simple idea: sustainability can save money. Her first big project, the X-Files reboot, managed to divert 81% of its waste across 40 filming locations. Since then, her certified B Corp consultancy has worked with Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon, and other major studios, and she founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its tenth year.
Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
This conversation comes at an important time. Soon, California’s climate disclosure laws will require studios to report emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain, both before and after filming. Zena points out that while studios are getting ready, most of their suppliers—like small companies that rent generators, handle waste, or provide lumber on tight schedules—are not prepared. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance has released Scope 3 guidance for productions, and updated Scope 1 and 2 guidance came out in August 2025, but there is still no single tool that everyone uses. The real challenge over the next two years will be closing the gap between what studios must report and what their suppliers can provide. Zena also makes a bigger point about culture. After 12 years in the industry, she sees sustainability experts facing the same obstacles again and again because the way content is made hasn’t changed. The day-to-day work is important, but the bigger opportunity is in climate storytelling. Only about 13% of recent top-rated films mention climate change at all. Tracking the carbon footprint of a TV season is important, but what really matters is how a billion viewers see what’s normal on screen. That’s the influence Hollywood hasn’t fully used yet.
To follow Zena’s work, visit greensparkgroup.com. You can also learn more about the conference she started at sustainableproductionforum.com, or listen to her podcast, The Tie-In, which she co-hosts with Mark Rabin.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about film and television, because every film and TV production starts the same way: with a creative vision, a budget, a shooting schedule, and a huge amount of stuff. Generators burn diesel all day and night at shooting locations. Trucks idle as they wait to move between locations. Sets are built from raw materials only to end up in the landfill when filming ends. Craft services rely on single-use items for literally everything that’s placed on the table for the production team.
Now multiply that by the thousands of productions happening in North America each year, and the scale of the problem becomes clear. The average feature film emits 3,370 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is like driving more than 700 gas-powered cars for a full year. And a single season of a TV show can match the emissions of 108 cars — and that’s not even counting the supply chain, everything that comes onto a set and everything that leaves. Hollywood has promised to be more sustainable many times, and our guest today has spent the last 10 years figuring out what it really takes to make these promises come to life in practice.
Zena Harris is the founder and president of Green Spark Group, a certified B Corp sustainability consultancy that she launched in 2014 with a mission to change the environmental impact of entertainment. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard in sustainability and environmental management, and she came to this work not as an environmentalist, but as a systems thinker — someone who spent her early career in engineering and HR identifying where organizations were leaking efficiency and money. But when she moved to Vancouver and discovered that nobody was focused on sustainability in what had become one of North America’s largest film production hubs, she saw a gap and filled it.
For more than a decade, she’s worked with major studios — including Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon — helping them embed sustainable practices in video production projects, and she’s developed measurable goals and built cross-industry collaborations that make lasting change possible.
She also founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its 10th year and has become the industry’s premier gathering place for turning sustainability talk into coordinated action.
We’ll talk with Zena about what it looks like when a production plans for sustainability from the very beginning, instead of adding it on at the end of the process like we usually do with all of our waste. And she’ll explain her idea of radical collaboration and why making real progress in Hollywood requires everyone — that includes unions, guilds, city governments, power companies, and those top-talent stars — to work together. We’ll also discuss how she uses the circular economy on set, the accountability gap that remains even as California’s new climate disclosure laws start to roll out, and whether the same systems-thinking approach can help business outside the film world.
To find out more about Zena’s work and Green Spark Group, visit greensparkgroup.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Hollywood has the power to change how people think about sustainability, but can it also change how it works behind the scenes? Zena Harris is tackling both challenges at the same time. Let’s see what she’s discovered, right after this brief commercial break.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:49
Welcome to the show, Zena. How you doing today?
Zena Harris 3:50
Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m doing great. The sun is shining in Tacoma, Washington, and I’m happy to be talking with you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:59
Well, I’m so happy to hear that you live in Tacoma. I lived there for almost 50 years. It’s a beautiful place, and I’m glad you’ve inherited it. I really like it. But you started your sustainability career in Vancouver, and you had no entertainment experience, and your first project was helping The X-Files reboot series divert material at 40 shooting locations — and you reduced their waste by 81%. What gave you the confidence to, you know, just call and say, ‘Hey, can I make you more sustainable?’
Zena Harris 4:31
It was a little more than that. You know, there was a lead-up to it. I had studied the film and TV industry in graduate school — I did my master’s thesis on it — so I had a little bit of a background. And the reason I studied it in grad school: I was in a sustainability master’s program, and I wanted to figure out how to shift culture. The first thing I thought of was, okay, people watch TV, we all love movies — that’s where I should start digging in to see what they’re doing. And they weren’t doing a ton. They were doing a little bit, but not too much.
So I talked to all the studio reps and found out what was going on and created a whole framework, like you do in graduate school, and wrote it all up. And then I pitched it to every studio. I sent out a white paper, essentially, to all the studios, and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this.’ Flew to LA, met with people in person. And I’m like, ‘I’m in Vancouver. I know it’s a major film hub. Put me to work.’ And one person did. She said, ‘Hey, you know, The X-Files is coming. It’s a big show. We have room in the budget to make this great. Let’s see what we can do.’ And that’s what really got me going.
One of the first people I met in the industry was Kelsey Evans. She is the owner of Keep It Green Recycling, which is a local vendor in Vancouver. Now, I had studied the film and TV industry, I know management practices and sustainability and the science, and she knew — like, really knew — the industry. So we worked together on that production, and we still work together today. She’s a friend of mine. She’s fantastic.
We got a lot of stuff done on that show, and that was my introduction into the film industry in practical terms. Vancouver, because it’s a major film hub, has — let’s just say — 20 shows filming at any given time. Sometimes it’s a lot more. But I knew that the work I was doing on that one show could scale. We needed to do it on all the shows. We needed to engage the industry. We needed to train people. So I started Green Spark Group as a vehicle to do this in the industry more broadly.
I think my past experience — prior to even going to grad school — in HR for a multinational company, and I was also an executive director at an international nonprofit where we had working groups and people from all over the world coming together to solve problems and create programs, all that gave me confidence to step into the film industry, look around, learn from others, apply my skills, and build this momentum locally. The company, locally, ended up — now we work across North America and even in other countries. So it’s been a journey.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:52
Well, you point out that they said, ‘We’ve got room in the budget to make this great,’ but that isn’t always the case. So what’s the pitch to a new client?
Zena Harris 8:00
Yeah, yeah. Well, those are the magic words: ‘We can save you money.’ That is it. That’s it. I mean, look, this has been a movement over the last, let’s say, 12 years — that’s how long I’ve been working in this space. And it’s rare for folks to say, ‘Yeah, we can figure this out in the budget.’ Sometimes it happens, but most people want to know how they can save money. So if you can show them very clearly that they can save money, that pushes the door open. And then you can talk about lots of other things too.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:43
So tell us about The Amazing Spider-Man 2. You saved them a lot of money. How’d you do it, and how much did you save them?
Zena Harris 8:48
I did not work on that. A colleague of mine, Emellie O’Brien, worked on that. That was actually one of the first productions publicized for saving a lot of money. I think they saved something like — well, I have the number here — $400,000. The cool thing about what happened with that, and also what happened with The X-Files and some others shortly thereafter, is that the studio recorded behind the scenes. They interviewed crew members to talk about what they had done. Then they published some of the stats in a case study and a video.
People in our industry love watching videos, right? So we did a behind-the-scenes for The X-Files, which caught lightning in a bottle — really created a whole movement in Vancouver. We showed that little five-minute behind-the-scenes video to everyone, and they saw their peers in that video because they were crew members speaking about what they had done. Things like that really sparked action in people and this excitement that, ‘Wow, things I have seen and kind of felt uncomfortable with — like waste, nobody likes seeing waste — people saw solutions in those videos. People saw themselves, saw their peers, and that inspired action, awareness, intrigue — like all the stuff you would want to create a movement. I can’t say enough about those early videos. They really helped kind of put us on a trajectory for more awareness and more action.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:42
A set is kind of like a microcosm of a city. A lot of stuff comes together and then disperses again. We actually did some consulting a few years ago with Hollywood about recycling the material on site — they use the PCs for the first time and then send them to recycling. It’s amazing how wasteful it could be. Tell us about what happens on a set. What’s the input, and what’s the output?
Zena Harris 11:10
Yeah, you are right. It is definitely akin to a city. I mean, if you think about it, for a large film or TV series, there can be 20 different departments working together to make that project happen. Each of those departments brings in some kind of material, some kind of input. The production office will have lots of office supplies, equipment, office equipment, furniture for the office — that kind of thing. Those things are coming in, and then you use them, and then they go out.
Then you can think of production design and construction. These two departments work really closely together, and they’re the ones creating and then building the sets in the sound stage. You can think about all the materials that might be associated with that. Construction is a big input department, where we’re bringing in lots of wood — and other types of material. It’s not just wood, but essentially we’re building a village inside a sound stage to shoot. And it’s all the wood and any other material that goes into that: wallpaper, paint, all sorts of props, set dressing that will go into that space.
So all that’s coming in, and then we use it for a short period of time, and then we have to do something with it. A lot of times, set walls are kind of standard — they can be reused. These are things that, if we recognize the patterns here, we’re using these things all the time. We’re breaking them down, and then we do something with them. A lot of times the breakdown is fast. You don’t have a ton of opportunity to really think. But if we know that there’s a pattern associated — prep, production, and wrap every single show — we know that we can disrupt that pattern. We can plan for it.
This is where thinking ahead and planning like, ‘Hey, we can reuse these walls. Got a lot of doors here — we’re going to reuse these doors. We’re going to send them to a place that will hold them temporarily, like a reuse center, and then those can be redistributed back into the industry.’ Some productions will store this stuff on their own if they have reshoots they think they might have, or another series they might come along. So all of these are options.
The default historically has been — because this is a dynamic industry, because timelines are short, people need to get out of their stage space — to use it, break it down, put it in the dumpster, get that thing out of here, and move on. So we’re saying there’s another way to do it, and just that alone saves the production a lot of money, because those big dumpsters at the end of it all are expensive to haul away. If we can reduce even a few of those, that is a cost savings, and then that material can be diverted and reused. So everything coming in — food, big material like construction material that people think a lot about, anything coming in — has an opportunity to be diverted, redistributed on the back end. And then that action saves money.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:59
Well, you describe what’s needed as radical collaboration. I’m wondering if you can explain what that means, because Hollywood’s going through a lot of changes right now, and it sounds like sustainability may be the keystone of some new talent or new careers during the production process. So what are the hardest stakeholders in that radical collaboration to get to move from where they are today?
Zena Harris 15:22
Yeah. I think, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and one of the things that I’ve picked up over the years is that people in the industry have been conditioned to point fingers. There are different stakeholders in the industry. Crew will point to the union or the studio, for example, and say, ‘You know, those folks need to do something so that I can integrate sustainable practices.’ The unions will point to crew or studios. The studios will point to production or unions. And so at the end of the day, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We’re kind of swirling in this finger-pointing. And nobody really knows what to do. They’re waiting for something. So progress is slow when you do that.
In order to move the needle, I think one of the things we need to do is actually work together in ways that might seem unconventional or radical. I keep reminding myself of the saying, ‘What got us here won’t take us forward.’ So we have to get over ourselves and do something differently. We know that there’s no single organization that’s going to solve all the problems or change the existing system. We need a different approach, a different narrative around all of this — not just kind of deferring to another stakeholder.
This is what I call radical collaboration, because it’s different. Collaboration between crew and unions and studios and creatives and suppliers and industry organizations — in ways that have been different than we’ve tried before, that really haven’t worked so well, or not to the degree we wanted them to work. So instead of reinventing the wheel on that, we need a whole different tack. I think that in order to see success, we need positive reinforcement for people. We need to actually say, ‘Yes, this worked,’ and in increments too — not just the big things. When people see that positive reinforcement, they actually lean in. They actually have more confidence in what they’re doing. And then this increases momentum. That’s kind of my view of radical collaboration and what I think is needed to keep the ball rolling.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:07
Well, you’re making a really interesting point, which is that people don’t dislike change. They may be a little afraid of it, but they want to see that the extra effort involved in making the change actually is paying off. As the orchestrator of the sustainability activities on set, how do you communicate that to them so that the Teamsters and the members of the Screen Actors Guild all say, ‘Oh, I’m in’?
Zena Harris 18:37
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. You mentioned a couple of different positions there — Teamsters and actors and these sorts of things. Everybody is coming to the production with a different perspective, a different viewpoint, kind of a different mandate within their department. Like, their job is to do this. So everybody sees sustainability in a slightly different way.
One of the things we really strive to do — and I would say this is kind of a standard practice, but what we’re trying to do as a team at Green Spark Group — is go beyond surface-level conversations. Not just say, ‘Here are a few things you could do,’ but really try to have a deeper conversation with people in each of these departments and ask them what they see, what they need to be successful in doing any one of the things that they might want to do differently, and really help them get there. If they’re afraid to talk to someone, well, we’ll help them do that. We will have their back. We will go with them and be a backstop for anything they may not know or feel confident talking about. If it is finding a vendor and they don’t have time to look around, we’ll help them do that.
You know, people say, ‘Meet you where you are.’ But it’s really going beyond surface-level conversations. It’s really tapping into people’s wants, needs, level of confidence, and helping them grow that and helping them shine in their role — whatever it is. I think that sort of human-centric approach is really helpful, and what really moves the needle, or actually builds trust. Because at the end of the day, we can go in there and talk about all sorts of gear. There’s a lot of gear out there. There’s a lot of batteries out there that are going to save emissions. But I have seen multiple times where batteries have been rented, they sit in the gear truck, and people are afraid to use them. Why is that? Let’s talk about that. Let’s really unpack it, and let’s find a safe space to do it. Maybe it’s that lightweight one over there, and we want to just test it out. Totally cool. Let’s make that happen. What’s it going to take to get there?
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:24
This very meta moment — talking about telling stories to storytellers to get them to change their behavior — is a great place to take a quick commercial break. Folks, we’re going to be right back to continue this really interesting conversation.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with Zena Harris, founder and president of the Hollywood sustainability consultancy — although Vancouver, too — Green Spark Group. Zena, your mission is to change the climate of entertainment, and that has a double meaning that clearly was deliberate. But I’m wondering, in the current environment and thinking about the stories we tell about why we do things, with all the whiplashing political winds of the last couple of years, how has that changed your message and your perception of what Hollywood’s trying to accomplish?
Zena Harris 22:16
Yeah, I mean, I’ve said this a few times. We have a lot of momentum. Right now, in 2026, there are more organizations, there are more people thinking about sustainability, there are more tools out there for people to use. There’s a lot of momentum in the industry. So for us at Green Spark Group, we are on a mission to change the climate of entertainment, and it’s incremental, year over year, year over year — and so we’re still working on it. It’s very relevant for us today.
We have had a hand in changing a lot in the entertainment industry over the last 12 years. We started programs, we’ve created strategic plans for industry organizations and training in the C-suite, and started the industry’s first conference. We’re uplifting people and trying to give a platform to people to collaborate and share their ideas. But there’s a lot of opportunity out there. There are still a lot of people who are new to sustainability, and they need someone to help them make sense of it all. It’s taking all this wonderful information that’s been created by various organizations — and we’ve contributed as well — and distilling it and helping them make sense of it all, make decisions that are in line with their values, and implement the things that they want to implement. Save the money that they can save, that they know they can, when they start doing the math.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:11
Is the money the key thing right now? Is it the sustainable savings, or is it still a commitment to the climate, in the context of, again, all the backlash against the idea of environmentalism?
Zena Harris 24:24
Yeah, I mean, the idea of environmentalism, I think, is kind of in the broader ethos. I think when you get down to talking to people one on one, they want solutions to things — waste they’ve seen, or emissions they’ve encountered on production, or food waste, or whatever it is. Whether they call themselves an environmentalist or they just are a caring and concerned person, everybody wants a positive working experience. And they don’t want that tension internally between, ‘I’m doing this great, creative, wonderful thing in my job, and then I look over here and some negative thing is happening environmentally or whatever.’ People want a holistic, positive work experience. So I think that’s core at the end of the day — to tap into that, and, like I said, just go beyond surface-level conversations and really help people figure that out.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:35
Let me ask about the other side of that equation, about changing the climate of entertainment. Hollywood has enormous cultural reach, but we did a little research and found that only about 10%, 13% was the number we came up with, of recent top-rated films even acknowledge the idea of climate change on screen. Do you hear creatives on the content side talking about climate? Do they ask you? Do they say, ‘You know, this is interesting, I’d like to learn more, and I might tell a story about it someday’?
Zena Harris 26:05
Yeah. I mean, this idea that the industry reach is certainly enormous — the cultural influence of the industry, wherever you’re interacting with it, whether you love a character on screen, whether you follow an actor in real life and kind of just like what they do, whether you follow — like, I’m an operations kind of person, I like looking at how things work and trying to improve that. But this idea of climate storytelling, a lot of people are thinking about it right now. It’s a huge lever. You will hear that batted around a lot. A lot of industry organizations are doing research on it and trying to get into writers’ rooms and in film schools.
There’s a lot of momentum in that space. We have been engaged a few times in that effort, and it’s proven beneficial. So I would say that 13% — there’s a lot of momentum around this subject, and I can see that number increasing over time. People want stories that reflect the current reality they’re feeling in real life. There are a lot of people working in environmental jobs, or in some shape or form, and I think those kinds of professions will be reflected on screen a lot more in the future. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of momentum in that space.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:52
I can see a film about a ranger saving a family from a fire.
Zena Harris 27:57
You can think it, they can do it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:00
Let’s turn back to the operational question, as you pointed out you focus on that. One of the common problems that production has, along with every other business, is trying to fully measure what’s going on. Like we were talking about, this set is this midpoint in a very complex supply chain where stuff has flowed in, now it needs to go somewhere in order to either be reused or appropriately recycled, but we can’t fully measure all that. What’s still in the invisible category of information? In the same sense that Scope 3 emissions are hard for a typical corporation to measure, is there a comparable issue with production sustainability?
Zena Harris 28:36
Oh yeah, 100%. Look, there are always more things to measure. As an industry, we have focused a lot on carbon emissions from things like utilities, fuel, air travel, and accommodations. We have a really good handle on that. But those are, like, four categories, right? And, as you said earlier, materials are coming onto production — food, wood, office supplies, you name it, it comes onto production. So those are the things we don’t have a solid handle on. There’s embedded carbon and all that stuff.
There are also lots of industry tools, industry carbon calculators out there — some measure more than others.
Mitch Ratcliffe (interjects)
Are any of them any good?
Zena Harris (continues)
Yeah, yeah, they’re good. But some have more inputs than others. Some will only measure those four categories that I mentioned. For years, for example, everybody in the industry wants to know the waste diversion rate, right? But nobody focuses on the carbon emissions associated with that material. We just get a diversion rate, and we call it good. So you have to choose: if you want to know all of that, you have to choose a tool that will allow you to input more of that information. And we don’t have a standard tool yet in the industry that everybody uses, so we can compare apples to apples.
We have guidance in the industry, and that’s really helpful. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, which is an industry consortium, has put out guidance on Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. Their Scope 3 guidance is the most recent, and with new information, new methodology, a lot of people don’t really know what to do with that, and maybe aren’t sure which tool to use to capture some of that stuff. So there’s a lot of uncertainty even around the guidance that’s out there. That’s where you can seek out professionals to help you understand all that stuff.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:11
One of the characteristics of the change we’re undergoing right now is the recognition of externalities. And in Hollywood production generally — I have some friends who are in the industry — it seems to me that they focused almost entirely on who was in front of the camera and who was behind the camera, and only now are starting to recognize that they’re part of this deeper supply chain. And now California’s new climate disclosure laws are going to require studios to report indirect, upstream and downstream emissions from every vendor by this year. How’s that going to change? And is the industry actually getting the traction on trying to respond to that requirement?
Zena Harris 31:47
The studios are very aware of this. They’ve been preparing for this. The suppliers upstream, downstream are not as [prepared].
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:58
So how are they not prepared? What do we need to do?
Zena Harris 32:00
Well, they haven’t been tracking.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:10
So they’re the typical company.
Zena Harris 32:13
They are a typical company. These are small companies servicing these projects, these productions. And we’ve been so focused in the industry on pre-production and production — that piece of the content creation process. So if you think of a book that has 10 chapters, we’ve been essentially focusing on one chapter. So you’ve got all of the other ones, and all of the service companies and suppliers and all of that that still incorporates the book, and all of those are contributing in some way.
Now we’ve been collecting data from waste haulers. We’ve been collecting data from people who supply equipment, and even those folks are still trying to get organized with their data. So you can imagine, like every other company, they all have their own operations. So that’s one thing. You can incorporate sustainability into your own company operations, and then you can provide data associated with the product or service that you are providing. And that’s going to matter. Those things roll up into this production reporting, and that production reporting rolls up into the larger studio, who’s going to have to incorporate that into their corporate reporting.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:54
So do you see this regulation as catalyzing the potential for sustainability at scale in entertainment production?
Zena Harris 34:05
Yeah. I mean, I think it provides people a solid talking point to go up and shake the tree a little bit and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to have to be doing this.’ Look, they’re not going to have all the information they need, probably, in year one. So they’re going to take what they do have, and they’re going to estimate probably across their slate. And then they’re going to work really hard to make that better, more accurate in the coming years. So if you’re not asked in year one as a supplier for certain information, you might be in year two and three. It would be wise, I think, to kind of get your house in order and be able to start reporting on these things, even if you’re never asked. It’s good for you as a company, because you start to understand where your waste is, where your emissions lie, and then you can start making changes accordingly. And yes, that stuff saves money. So it’s good for everyone to be thinking about this, whether you’re asked by a studio or not.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:16
Well, that’s really the key — that it’s also rewarding to make that kind of additional positive impact, as well as save some money and make more profit in the long run. I mean, that’s what’s rewarding about progress in general.
Zena Harris 35:30
Totally, totally. It’s a ripple effect, right? And then we just get better as an industry, and then an industry that contributes to broader society.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:40
So after 10 years, how far has the industry come toward the vision that you had when you started Green Spark Group?
Zena Harris 35:50
Oh, gosh. Well, there’s a lot that has happened over these years. Like I said, more people are aware, more people are engaged. But I think that we are swirling within the existing system. Sustainability practitioners that started working on production like I did years ago — we just entered this existing content creation system. And what I’m noticing now is that we’re swirling within the same system. We’re all running up against similar challenges around the world with regard to implementing sustainable practices. So we’re coming up against consistent hurdles, barriers within this system.
For me, that’s an opportunity to look a little bit bigger and say, ‘Okay, well, if we keep running into the same barriers, what if the system shifted? What if the entire system shifted? What are the incentives involved in the system to keep it the way it is?’ And there’s a lot — that’s a whole separate podcast — but all to say, this is where we need to be thinking: how we shift the system, how we have that radical collaboration, how we shift the needle on what suppliers are doing and reporting, and these sorts of things. And that’s what’s going to take us to the next level. We’re going to get over the hump.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:34
So, given that, imagine that you are Zena, goddess of sustainability, and can put your finger on one thing and change it. What would it be, in order to drive much more rapid transition to a more sustainable production environment?
Zena Harris 37:51
I mean, I think it all comes down to the people — the people in the system that are either allowing or not allowing, either making excuses or open to possibility. It all comes down to that. There are some core elements associated with people, behavior change, these sorts of things. I think mindset is core, absolutely core. I think courage — even to talk about this stuff within your small team or your department, or even in a larger conversation — is pretty critical, to voice some things you’re noticing, or what ideas you have for doing things differently. I think that collective confidence — once you do that, people get on board. They come together. Confidence is critical as well. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to take the next step, right? So there are fundamental human elements that need to be developed, to be encouraged, to be demonstrated. And I think that is going to shift the needle.
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:08
It’s a storytelling challenge in a lot of ways. There’s some carrot, there’s some stick, there’s a lot of nuance to that tale that we need to really make embedded into everybody’s approach to thinking about the work. Zena, thanks so much for your time today. How can folks follow both Green Spark Group and the work you’ve done with the Sustainable Production Forum?
Zena Harris 39:28
Sure. You’re always welcome to check out our website, greensparkgroup.com. We post insights there monthly and have a lot of great information for folks. Also on social media at @greensparkgroup — pick a platform, we’re probably on it. And then the Sustainable Production Forum is online as well, sustainableproductionforum.com, and from there you can get to all of their content, videos, anything you want to know is there too.
And I’ll also just give a quick plug for my podcast that I co-host with my longtime friend Mark Rabin. It’s called The Tie-In, and so folks can also check out stories from crew members, from people doing amazing work behind the scenes. We talk to them all there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:21
Zena, thanks so much. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Really enjoyed it.
Zena Harris
Thank you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:31
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, the certified B Corp sustainability consultancy she launched in 2014 to change the climate of entertainment. You can find Zena and her team’s work at greensparkgroup.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. And check out their conference, the Sustainable Production Forum, now in its 10th year, at sustainableproductionforum.com, also all one word, no space, no dash.
I think the headline from Zena’s work is a pitch, not a principle: ‘We can save you money.’ That’s how she opens a conversation with a studio, and it’s why The Amazing Spider-Man 2 became an early case study, based on the work of a colleague of hers at Green Spark who helped that production save roughly $400,000 through sustainable practices. The implications of these savings are clear when you stand next to the dumpster at the end of a chute and watch a village’s worth of lumber, furniture, wallpaper, and props get hauled away to a landfill because the stage needs to be empty by Monday.
The sustainability opportunity in film and TV isn’t a values problem — the industry’s values are already stated on the record. It’s an operational capacity problem, and Zena’s work is translating aspiration into line items a production accountant can track. And that’s to the benefit of the environment, even if it’s not visible on the bottom line.
California’s new climate disclosure laws are about to change the equation, too. Beginning this year, studios will have to report upstream and downstream emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain. That’s the chapter of the book, as Zena put it, that the industry has never actually opened. The studios knew that this is coming, and they’ve been preparing for it. Their suppliers — the small companies servicing productions on short timelines — mostly haven’t. That gap is the real story over the next 24 months in the entertainment sustainability business.
Zena’s advice to suppliers is the same advice my recent guest Steve Wilhite, who leads Schneider Electric’s power management division, offered corporate energy buyers just a few weeks ago: get your house in order now, because even if you’re not asked for data today, you will be in two or three years. The companies that can report cleanly will win work, while those that can’t will become a balance sheet burden to the studios.
A digital nervous system is arriving now in Hollywood, and every waste hauler, every generator rental company, every lumber supplier is becoming a data-producing node in a network that didn’t exist just one or two production cycles ago. California’s environmental policy is forcing that network into being, and once it exists, it will not unbuild itself, because people are going to see the benefits. They’re going to see the savings that we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation.
And after 12 years in the business, I think Zena’s comment near the end of our conversation — that sustainability practitioners in entertainment are ‘swirling within the existing system’ — is important to note. The hurdles they hit on one production look identical to the hurdles they hit on the next, because the content creation system itself hasn’t changed. That’s the green living myth problem I discussed recently with author Michael Maniates, but with a Hollywood accent: individual actors are doing the right thing inside a structure that continues to produce the same outputs by default. And that can easily become disenchanting. On-set greening is necessary and it’s real, but the industry’s deepest cultural lever is the one that we discussed in passing.
Only about 13% of recent top-rated films even acknowledge climate change on screen. The carbon accounting for a single TV season matters, but the cultural accounting — for what a billion viewers see, what they feel is normal, and what film and television characters drive and eat and care about — that’s the lever that this industry hasn’t yet pulled. Production sustainability builds the operational muscle and the credibility, but climate storytelling is where that credibility will be built at scale, because it will spread these ideas, changing not only Hollywood’s practices, but the practices of an entire world. One without the other leaves the most influential narrative engine on the planet running on the old script, and it’s time for a change.
So stay tuned. We’re going to keep talking with people rewriting what’s possible on set and on screen. And could you take a moment to help spread the word about the sustainable future we can build together? You are the amplifier that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please take a look at any of the more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. So please tell your friends, family, and co-workers 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.
What we call waste is really just misallocated feedstock—raw materials waiting to be cycled back into the next generation of products and packaging. According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investors are racing to capture part of that opportunity. Meet Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation at Overlay Capital, an Atlanta-based alternative investment firm whose Waste and Materials Fund is backing both early-stage materials innovators and later-stage recycling operations with established infrastructure. Overlay’s strategy involves investing in innovation and implementation simultaneously—in both startups and established companies—to accelerate progress across multiple layers of the circular economy. It offers a window into where smart money sees the materials transition heading.
Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation at Overlay Capital, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Elizabeth explains that sortation is the biggest bottleneck at the materials recycling facilities (MRFs) your garbage and recycling are sent to after curbside collection. The U.S. is simultaneously the world’s leading exporter of scrap aluminum and the number one importer of finished aluminum, because we’ve lacked domestic sorting capacity. Overlay has invested in companies like AMP Robotics, which recently closed a 20-year contract with SPSA, a southeastern Virginia municipal authority, to sort all recyclables from four to five cities using AI-driven systems. When you fix sortation, she says, you trigger a domino effect: recycling rates climb, landfill life extends, and margins improve as higher-purity materials command premium prices.
Overlay’s portfolio also includes next-generation materials companies united by a common thesis: they must be better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainable than what they replace. Cruz Foam converts chitin from shrimp shells into compostable packaging foam. Simplifyber uses cellulose to create biodegradable soft goods through 3D molding, bypassing traditional textile manufacturing entirely. Terra CO2 just closed a $124 million Series B to scale low-carbon cement technology that could cut into concrete’s 8% share of annual global CO2 emissions. Each uses abundant, waste-derived feedstocks and has achieved or is on a clear path to price parity with incumbents.
Return to one of our most compelling interviews of 2025. Amazingly, the same Congressional bill that gutted residential clean energy tax credits also led to a major breakthrough in financing home geothermal systems. Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy, explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for the first time, allow third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. He shares why this policy change could help ground-source heat pumps grow the way leasing helped rooftop solar. Geothermal heating and cooling is four times more efficient than a furnace and twice as efficient as air-source heat pumps. Yet only about 1% of U.S. homes use it because the upfront costs for new geothermal systems have ranged from $20,000 to $31,000. The new leasing model means new homeowners can get geothermal systems for just $10 to $40 per month on a 20-year lease, which is usually far less than what they save on energy.
Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Dandelion is working with Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the country, to bring geothermal to more than 1,500 homes in Colorado over the next two years. This will be one of the biggest residential geothermal projects in U.S. history. The benefits for the power grid could be even more important than the savings for homeowners. Geothermal systems use only 25% of the peak power that air-source heat pumps need, which is a big advantage as AI data centers increase electricity demand. Yates explains that the Earth works like a huge thermal battery, storing heat in the summer for use in the winter. Geothermal lets utilities reduce peak loads on the grid throughout the year, freeing homeowners from the cost of the most expensive power.
What if the solution to the retail industry’s $890 billion returns crisis wasn’t better logistics, but better logic? Disney Petit, founder and CEO of Liquidonate, is proving that the most sustainable return skips the trip back to a warehouse and goes directly to a community in need. Americans returned nearly 17% of all retail purchases last year, generating 2.6 million tons of landfill waste and 16 million tons of CO2 emissions. Each return costs retailers between $25 and $35 to process, yet 52% of consumers admit to participating in return fraud at least once. Petit witnessed this broken system firsthand as employee number 15 at Postmates, where she built the customer service team and created Civic Labs, the company’s social responsibility arm. Her food security product Bento, which allowed people without smartphones to access free food via text message, won Time Magazine’s 2021 Invention of the Year Award. Now Liquidonate has earned recognition as one of Time’s Best Inventions of 2025.
Disney Petit, founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
Liquidonate integrates directly with retailers’ existing warehouse and return management systems. When a product comes back and can’t be resold—open box, slightly damaged, or simply unwanted—the platform automatically matches it with a local nonprofit or school that needs it. “It’s the same reverse logistics workflow they already use,” Petit explains. “It’s just redirected toward community good instead of going to the landfill.” The platform handles everything: shipping labels, pickup coordination, and tax documentation so retailers can write off donations. Retailers recover logistics costs through tax benefits while communities receive quality products, and millions of pounds of goods stay out of landfills.
To date, retailers using Liquidonate have diverted over 12 million items from landfills, working with more than 4,000 nonprofits across the country. Liquidonate also tackles return fraud by eliminating “keep it” returns, when customers claim they want to return something but are told to keep the item and still receive a refund. “One hundred percent of the time we’re producing a shipping label for a nonprofit who wants that product,” Petit says. “We completely eliminate that keep-it return option, so we eliminate the returns fraud option.” With $900 billion worth of inventory potentially available for redirection, Petit approaches the business through the lens of environmental justice, building a for-profit company designed to prove that doing good and doing well aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re interdependent.
In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and atmospheric CO₂ now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainability industry doesn’t want to talk about: buying green products doesn’t drive the systemic change we need. It might not even be moving the needle. That’s the core argument of Michael Maniates, an environmental social scientist and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael has spent more than 30 years studying why well-intentioned environmental choices at the checkout line fail to add up to real-world emissions reductions, and what kinds of action actually do. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, he makes the case that the most powerful thing an eco-conscious person can do isn’t swap their products. It’s to become an active citizen.
Michael Maniates, author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
The resulting cycle has a name in Michael’s framework: the trinity of despair. Earnest effort. Negligible impact. Creeping anxiety that we can’t turn the corner. People try hard, see little result, feel guilty when they can’t maintain perfection, and eventually burn out — or conclude that meaningful change requires getting every single person on board first. He is a sharp critic of what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has called the ABC model of social change: shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and better Choices will follow. It’s the backbone of most sustainability communications — and, he argues, it’s empirically fragile. Pro-environmental attitudes don’t reliably produce pro-environmental behavior. Yet the model persists in education, marketing, and environmental organizing alike. Why does it keep coming back? Maniates identifies two reasons. First, it’s deeply embedded in the educational system. Second, it sanitizes a genuinely gnarly problem of power and politics into a communication challenge: if we just get more information out there, people will make better choices. That framing shifts blame onto consumers, hides the structural drivers of high-carbon living, and makes life easier for politicians who don’t want to touch the structural stuff.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation. Today we’re going to explore how to have a genuine green impact — whether that stops at making small changes or must involve active political engagement. In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed the $500 billion mark. Sales of reusable water bottles hit $10 billion. Plant-based meat alternatives, electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable phone cases — the shelves are groaning with ways for conscientious consumers to buy their way to a better planet.
And yet global carbon emissions still hit another record high that same year. The concentration of atmospheric CO₂ passed 427 parts per million, and it currently stands at 429 parts per million as I speak. Microplastics are turning up in human brain tissue. So the gap between what we’re buying and what’s actually changing has never been wider — and that gap is exactly where our guest today has spent his career.
Michael Maniates is an environmental social scientist, a senior fellow with the Story of Stuff project, and the author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, published by Polity Press in November 2025. He’s also the co-author of Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits. Before that, he spent more than 30 years teaching environmental studies at Allegheny College, Oberlin College, and the Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where he was the inaugural head of the Environmental Studies program. Right now he’s writing a new book called Stop Wasting Time: Four Paths to Deep Sustainability in Higher Education.
Michael’s central argument is provocative and well-evidenced: the story that we’ve been told about saving the planet through better consumer choices — what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has labeled the ABC model, for Attitudes, Behavior, and Choices — is empirically fragile and strategically dangerous. Decades of research document what scholars call the attitude-behavior gap and the behavior-impact gap. Pro-environmental attitudes don’t reliably produce pro-environmental behavior, and when they do, the aggregate impact on emissions is in most cases negligible.
Michael calls the resulting cycle of earnest effort, negligible impact, and our creeping anxiety that we can’t turn the corner the “trinity of despair.” He proposes a framework of minimum and maximum consumption standards — a floor below which no one should fall, and a ceiling above which individual consumption begins to destroy others’ chances at a good life — and those should be arrived at through democratic deliberation, not expert decree.
Now at Earth911, we publish a lot of green living advice every day: how to recycle, reduce food waste, choose better products, compost, fix what you have, make it last longer. We also consistently urge our audience to engage their elected representatives at every level, because we’ve long recognized that individual action without systemic change only salves individual concerns without actually moving the societal needle on climate. Michael’s research is a sharper version of that perspective, and I invited him to talk with you all because we want every person who reads Earth911 to have the greatest possible impact. If the social science says there are more effective places to invest our environmental energy alongside our daily choices, we want to understand where those places are and how we can get there. Open minds, try more ideas — and trying more ideas is how we will eventually get to less waste overall.
You can find Michael and his work at michaelmaniates.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. So is the living green story we’ve been telling ourselves helping us, or standing between us and the systemic changes we actually need? Let’s find out right after this quick commercial break.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:26
Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you doing today?
Michael Maniates 4:28
I’m doing great, Mitch. Thank you so much for having me.
Well, thank you for joining me. Your work is fascinating, and I can appreciate the challenge of trying to speak to people who want to do the right thing but are not necessarily taking all the steps they need to in order to enact change in the world. So I want to start with a basic question. You don’t argue that making small changes in lifestyle or embracing green products isn’t making a difference — but that it isn’t enough. What is your advice for having a genuine positive impact on the environment?
Yeah, I think buying green and living lean — which is something that so many of us do — can make a difference in our lives for a whole host of reasons. It can help us be more aware of our surroundings. It can help us walk our talk. It often helps us protect our families or friends from toxins, especially if we’re big users of organic foods. But what it can’t do, despite what we often hear as consumers or what we may sometimes say as marketers, is drive that fundamental social transformation for sustainability.
There are a whole lot of reasons for that — reasons I describe in my book, and that others have called out as well. The impact of these green gestures is too small. They don’t deliver meaningful, consistent benefits. What benefits do arise are quickly swamped by expanding economic growth. And oftentimes, the changes we really need to be making just aren’t for sale. So our ability as consumers to drive those changes is difficult at best.
It seems to me that our best chance for making a difference is to start thinking — or maybe just thinking harder — about how to be a citizen in community with others, not as a solitary consumer in the checkout line. That means working with others, where and when we can, to try to shift everyday patterns of life in genuinely sustainable directions, so that acting sustainably becomes, as entrepreneur Paul Hawken once said, natural and normal — as easy as falling off a log — rather than the product of intentionally virtuous acts that are often difficult to sustain. This is really a call for community connection, for becoming a citizen-expert in a particular issue, drawing on one’s own expertise and working with others to try to create new ways of living.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:01
That suggests that the first step is really to see yourself as part of a system. You use vivid metaphors — like “it’s the maze, not the mouse” — and thinking about it from that perspective, how do you suggest someone make that transition? Let’s say somebody who currently invests their environmental energy toward purchases. How should they transform that into a broader, more meaningful response?
Michael Maniates 7:31
Well, it could be — and I do not want to in any way denigrate people’s efforts as consumers. I came up as an energy guy and helped run a community energy project for many years in a small Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania. But at the end of the day, lots of these issues are beyond our ability to address as consumers.
What it really depends on, as I argue in this little book I’ve written, is that one needs to identify where one’s passion is. Let’s say your passion is energy. You’ve outfitted your house, you’re using all the best appliances, maybe you’ve got some solar panels on the roof — you’re doing what you can as an individual consumer. But to really make a difference, to get at that playing field that’s fundamentally tilted toward fossil fuels and an expansionist carbon-emitting economy, it does mean trying to find like-minded people. That can be in your own community, it can be at the national level, it can be networked globally.
The task is to find those people and then begin to experiment — often in your own community initially, but perhaps beyond that — to try to shift subsidies, taxes, the default settings of everyday society. To begin to shift the maze, if you will, rather than blaming individuals for being insufficiently educated or having bad values. I have a chapter in my book titled “Why Environmentalists Don’t Get Invited to Parties.” Nobody wants to have their finger wagged at them.
The goal is to begin to think about how to re-jigger everyday life so that we unconsciously act sustainably, even when we don’t realize it, because that’s just how things are set up.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:51
I’m put in mind of Neo starting to see the Matrix and then being able to interact with and really change it. Your background is interesting — you ran a yogurt shop in Berkeley before becoming an academic, and you worked for Amory Lovins and later Pacific Gas and Electric. How has that non-academic career arc shaped the way you think about systemic change versus individual virtue?
Michael Maniates 10:17
I came up as an adult in the environmental movement in the mid-to-late ’70s as an undergraduate student at Berkeley. My first job, before going to Pacific Gas and Electric, was working for Amory Lovins in San Francisco — for the International Project for Soft Energy Paths.
This tension between systemic change and individual virtue — as I recall it in the late ’70s and early ’80s, they were actually one and the same. Individual virtue around the environment involved brainstorming with others, maybe over coffee or a beer, about how to work together to shift change. There were no green products really to purchase back then. Enacting your environmental concerns as a consumer just wasn’t on the table.
This separation of individual virtue in the checkout line versus thinking about systemic change begins to emerge in the late ’80s, and I think it’s fully entrenched now — to the point where what we’re really looking at is not so much a crisis of democracy but a lack of familiarity with the arts of citizenship. Now we typically don’t know our neighbors. We’re on our devices. We tend to be more isolated. The whole ecosystem of groups that folks might have joined — from the PTA to bowling leagues — has atrophied.
What I’m really calling for, as others are as well, is a reinvigoration of community connection. These days, around environmental issues, the most prominent environmental story is often “get off the grid, take care of yourself, and shut down.” And surveys show that actively pursuing green behaviors often demobilizes people in terms of their civic engagement.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:59
That seems so counterintuitive — but what you’re saying suggests that we’ve simply oriented ourselves toward ourselves rather than toward the rest of the system we live in, at least around environmental issues.
Michael Maniates 13:14
This really begins to take hold in the mid-to-late ’80s. By ’89 or ’90, the number of consumer goods on the shelf with a “buy this and save the world” green pitch had doubled — and then it doubled again in ’92. And that led us into this isolated, take-care-of-yourself perspective.
Now my students — and folks older than them — find that the easiest way to imagine acting on the environment is by buying green products, and perhaps feeling guilty when they slide off that path of perfection, because you just can’t be perfect.
In the mid-to-late ’80s and early ’90s, I was convinced that if you could just get people to screw in an energy-efficient light bulb today, they’d become energy activists tomorrow. But what academics and marketers both have discovered is that if you come to environmental issues as a consumer first, there is a strong tendency to believe you’ve done your bit by buying green — and so there’s no need to engage in the messier business of meeting new people and trying to find a group to work with. It also separates you from the collective. Political scientists call these “solidarity benefits” — you don’t really get that when you screw in a light bulb.
And finally, this is where my survey and interview work has added something to the literature: if you try to save the world in your own small way through these acts of environmental stewardship, it can lead you to the conclusion that social change happens when you get everybody on board. Because if we’re saving the world through the cumulative effect of small consumption acts, in order to have any appreciable impact, you’ve got to get a lot of people on board. But this view — that you need large majorities before you can drive change — is empirically untrue. That’s not at all how social change happens. In reality, you need 10, 15, 20 percent working strategically, and you’re off to the races.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:06
In fact, I’ve seen research that suggests that if you get to 3.5 percent, you’re well on your way.
Michael Maniates 17:12
Exactly. And I share a variety of these reports and data with students — smart, committed, passionate students both in the US and in Singapore — and they are stunned. They never really got this in their education.
I can appreciate that, because I have an eight-year-old son who, just yesterday for a school assignment, was instructed to write an essay about how we need to reduce our use of single-use plastics in the household in order to address the microplastics problem. But if we really want to get at the microplastics problem, it probably requires some set of agreements on production and on the creation of alternatives, which is beyond what households can drive with their consumption choices. We drive that as citizens, not consumers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:47
The activism you’re describing is interesting to me because I was involved in early privacy discussions and the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — and the EFF made a very conscious decision to focus on thought leadership and not build a broad constituency. That seems to be the modern approach many activist organizations take. How do you recommend an individual engage with companies, or conversely, companies engage with individuals, in order to begin to influence policy? For instance, to reduce the incidence of microplastics?
Michael Maniates 19:14
Well, I don’t think there’s a recipe. I teach a course on this, and the first thing we discuss is that there really are no hard-and-fast recipes in the policy sciences for how to translate one’s own energy — whether that’s an individual or an organization — into policy change.
That said, I think there are first principles. We know that people become engaged as citizens when they identify with groups that are pushing the ball downfield. They engage when there’s a moral claim or a sense of injustice. And they engage when there is some sense that there’s a goal that can be realized and they can be part of reaching it. When you get those three things together, it is like magic.
So with that in mind, individual businesses and entrepreneurs want to be thinking: What problem are we actually trying to solve? And they want to stay completely clear of any narrative that says “engage with my product, get all your friends to do it, and the cumulative effect will be transformative change” — because that kind of narrative propagates a theory of social change that can be debilitating. They need to think about whether there are stakeholder groups they can point people toward, whether there are ways to educate their consumers to think more strategically. I’ll give you one example from the book, which is IKEA.
Michael Maniates 22:22
IKEA does a lot of survey work and publishes the results. In their most recent report, they identified that the two primary reasons people buy green at IKEA are to save money and to drive change. Now, I’m okay with the saving-money part. It’s the “process of social change” framing that I think gets pretty wonky.
What I would say to IKEA is: if you think the problem is climate change, then don’t sell your consumers this living green myth — the idea that they’re part of change by doing these small things. Instead, begin to think strategically about how you can provide information with each purchase, or how through email memberships you can direct people to organizations doing good work, or how you can create a community conversation at the local IKEA store on a Saturday morning — feed everybody a free breakfast and talk about how we try to make a difference in our community.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:42
I mean, Swedish hot dogs — just bring them in.
Michael Maniates 23:45
Or those meatballs would be awesome. But if you really want your commercial enterprise to drive a difference rather than just fatten the bottom line, then you need to be thinking about those kinds of things. There’s no guarantee it’ll succeed, but you’ve got to be committed to it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:16
What you’re describing is, in a way, movement marketing. And you’re a critic of the ABC model of social change — shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and you get better Choices. Why does it keep coming back? What’s the shift we need to make in our thinking?
Michael Maniates 24:38
Sociologists have been scratching their heads for some time about why this ABC model persists. It has been shown again and again, at least around environmental issues, to be woefully inadequate. Education doesn’t reliably lead to changes in attitudes. Changes in attitudes more often than not don’t lead to behavior change, especially if you’re in an environment that privileges a particular way of living. And even if you do change your behavior and make different choices, these are typically too small to make a difference.
So why does it persist? I think it’s deeply ingrained in our educational system. But more importantly, this focus on people’s attitudes and values and behaviors turns a gnarly problem around power and politics and influence into something sanitized: we just need to get more information out there. It shifts blame, hides responsibility, turns consumers into scapegoats, and makes politicians’ lives easier. You can’t blame anyone for wanting to make their life easier — but the sum total is an approach to problem-solving that just isn’t cutting it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:03
Well, the maze is showing signs of stress, and you were relating that you’re in Abu Dhabi today. Tell me what happened in the neighborhood. How do you see the old system — the maze — falling apart?
Michael Maniates 27:16
There are always going to be cracks. We live in complex systems, and these systems have emergent properties. Things happen, opportunities arise. What we see now with the escalation of energy prices is a renewed interest in renewables, EVs, and other possibilities, and a reminder that we remain dependent on the Middle East for oil, directly or indirectly.
My argument all along is that if people are looking for these opportunities — these cracks in the maze — they’ll be surprised at how many they see in their community, their state and nation, and in the world. My concern is that if we’re too busy trying to figure out the best sustainable product to buy, we’re not looking for these larger possibilities.
The systems we live in are actually less stable and less permanent than they seem. Which I think invites all of us to ask: What am I most interested in? Is it food? Is it energy? Is it transportation? And then, how can I begin working with others to figure out where the cracks in the wall are, and try some new things?
There’s probably nothing more rewarding than working in common for the common good. Working with others isn’t always a lovely experience, but more often than not, people will tell you that some of the best experiences of their lives have been joining with others to try to make things happen. It’s that joy of participation, that joy that comes with citizenship, that I’ve tried to talk up as a way of inspiring people to look for action as citizens, rather than as consumers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:44
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Michael Maniates. He’s the author of The Living Green Myth. Michael, before we continue, I want to ask about something you said in the last segment — it sounds like you’re saying that saving money from energy or water efficiency innovations on offer at places like IKEA isn’t necessarily a good thing. Can you break that down for us?
Michael Maniates 32:14
Yeah, I don’t mean to sound dismissive of energy or water efficiency improvements. It would be crazy to argue for a more inefficient system. The point is simply that increased efficiency in resource use almost always produces, over time, greater consumption — not less — either in that resource or as increased consumption elsewhere in the economy that swamps the initial gains. Economists have called this for some time the Jevons Paradox.
When thinking back to IKEA: these resource-efficiency gains are a good thing, and they may put a little lid on consumption for a bit. But at best, that buys us time to be thinking about more fundamental transformations — ones that hardwire reduced material throughput in the economy and give us higher standards of living and better environmental outcomes.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:05
You propose both a floor — a minimum consumption necessary to live a good life — and a ceiling, the maximum at which one’s choices begin to destroy others’ opportunity to make similar choices. The floor sounds easy to sell. How do you make the case for an upper limit in societies that treat unlimited consumption as synonymous with freedom?
Michael Maniates 34:32
That’s the million-dollar question. You’re referring to the book Consumption Corridors, published back in 2021 and available as a free download from the University of Münster. This idea of a corridor — a minimum and a maximum — is moving forward, particularly in Europe, especially around housing and transportation.
The argument isn’t, right off the bat, an environmental one. It says: if we want to pursue the good life — to know we’re living the best life we can in a way that doesn’t hurt other people — then most people would be down with that. No one rolls out of bed in the morning wanting to be complicit in environmental degradation or in making life awful for others.
To your question about how to talk about limits without sounding like you’re taking away people’s freedom: the first thing I’ve learned is that you just need to remind people of what they already know. I have a limit on the amount of chocolate I eat each day or the amount of wine I drink each week — I know if I exceed that limit, it’s not going to be great. My son wants more screen time than I allow him. So I think we’re all kind of aware of that already.
The task is then helping people — as facilitators, not as policymakers talking down to them — begin to think about how floors and ceilings in particular contexts might actually make everybody’s life better. Limits on vacation properties in housing-scarce cities. Congestion pricing. Residential parking permit limits. All of these show that limits can actually help us navigate life in a way that feels just.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:33
In a lot of ways, this is not radical at all. Adam Smith — both Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments — makes these arguments over and over.
Michael Maniates 38:43
Yes. But a lot of Americans perceive these self-imposed limits as constriction, as preventing them from exercising their full freedom. I was really taken by a David French piece in the New York Times about why Americans are so unhappy, even though they’re so rich. When you have a lot of inequality, a portion of consumption becomes relative comparison. If you see somebody else getting a better deal — he uses the example of an airplane where someone cuts the line because they’re a super-tier member — whatever you have starts to feel like not enough.
Inequality, empirically, is one of the major drivers of the overconsumption machine. And yet our level of happiness has stayed flat or declined over the last 20 to 25 years, even as per-capita consumption has risen. If we were consuming more and we were happier, at least we’d be destroying the planet with a little happiness. But that’s not happening.
This is where the consumption corridor notion comes from — which is really beginning to take off in Europe. We may not be talking about hard limits at the top, but rather a set of regulations or incentives that greatly discourage people from continuing to climb the consumption ladder. If you can do that, you begin to reduce the overall disparity in consumption levels, which can slow down this tendency to compare ourselves against one another.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:15
I’ve been reading the philosopher Omri Boehm’s book Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, which anchors on the idea that the recognition of personal dignity is a foundation on which society can be rebuilt inclusively. What would you suggest the foundational value we embrace as a society should be, and how would you integrate that into your relationship with customers, if you were a company?
Michael Maniates 43:07
If we were thinking about human dignity and some degree of justice that we could all sort of get behind, then I think the environmental protection piece takes care of itself to a great degree. Because so much of what we think of as environmental disruption or pollution is really the crap — whether it’s carbon, toxins, or sludge — produced by some people who are consuming a great deal and don’t see the consequences of their actions. That waste flow inevitably gets deposited on less powerful, more defenseless people.
If we take human dignity seriously, we want to create systems whereby the consequences of my consumption choices come back to me, rather than being deposited on others. Then I think that takes care of the business case as well. We don’t want to be creating what economists call “externalities” that are hidden away. Instead, we want to be thinking about modes of production and consumption that embrace circular economy thinking, and that in particular aren’t just driving the consumption machine but are embracing notions of sufficiency as much as efficiency.
Michael Maniates 44:45
Consumption Corridors argues that the minima and maxima should be designed through very deliberative democratic processes — not imposed on us — and you outline a three-stage process for doing that kind of community deliberation. Has it been tried anywhere?
Michael Maniates 45:10
That three-step process: first, pull together people who represent your community and talk about what you care about — your visions and goals for the good life. Step two: let’s think about how we get there for everybody, and that will often focus on not “What do I want?” like a McMansion, but rather “What do I actually need?” The third component is talking about what the community does to get there — through regulation, peer pressure, or taxes — in order to move us toward those goals.
In the Consumption Corridors book, this three-step process is put forward as largely aspirational. But the huge aha moment for me was around the proliferation of citizen assemblies across Europe on climate change. As of 2023, there were more than a dozen EU countries that have consistently run these assemblies — 30 to 200 people, reflecting the heterogeneity of the country, given scientific and technical advice but not told what to do by experts.
What you see again and again is that when you bring regular people together across class and ideological lines and ask “What do we care about?”, most people care about the same things: family, community, love, connection, having a meaningful life. And then when you ask “How are we going to get there?” you find a much higher degree of support for sufficiency measures than experts predict — measures that would really dampen upper-level consumption and redirect those benefits toward people at the bottom.
Mitch Ratcliffe 47:57
Do we have the right political systems or approaches to political deliberation now that we are a deeply connected planet? Could it be radically decentralized while at the same time enabled by global coordination of resources?
Michael Maniates 48:17
One thing that pains me when I travel — I still read books, look out the window, and people-watch, old-fashioned that way — is that everyone is on their devices, completely removed from the people next to them. I love chatting people up on the train or the plane or the bus, and that just doesn’t really happen much anymore.
So the task is for each of us, in our own way, to put the screen down, as I say in my book, and just join a group or a club. I’m inspired by Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone and lamented the loss of social connection. Just put that screen down, go join a group. It doesn’t need to be environmental. Just begin to develop social connections. And then, as you do that, if there are ways of connecting with eco-local initiatives — which are often networked globally but happening locally in your community — being drawn into that can open up lots of possibilities.
The systems of governance we live in have remained largely the same for the last couple of hundred years. But it’s how we have understood our role in that governance system that needs to change. If we care enough to be super-shoppers in the market for the planet, then we need to care enough to bring that energy to bear on actions that are likely going to be more effective for the planet, and in the long run, better for us.
Mitch Ratcliffe 51:04
Based on the way your students behave today — their engagement with these ideas and their approach to developing solutions — what would the world look like in 2040 if they get the resources they need to put their vision in place?
Michael Maniates 51:31
I’m going to be a little bit of a downer here, and that’s not my natural thing. I’ve never belonged to the apocalyptic camp of environmentalism. I take a page out of Kim Stanley Robinson’s book — the Hugo Award–winning sci-fi writer many of your listeners may know from The Ministry for the Future.
I was on a panel with Stan some years ago at the Worldwatch Institute, and he was making the case that whether it’s “too late” depends entirely on your time horizon. If you’re thinking about the next 10 years, the trajectory on ice loss, climate change, biodiversity erosion, and global market forces that poorly account for ecological goods and services — it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. But if you take the long view — if you say that in four or five generations, things are going to be much better, and we understand ourselves as beginning to set in motion ideas, technologies, business practices, values, and governance systems that will bend the arc of human experience toward a peaceful coexistence with the nonhuman world — if you think of it that way, then we are blessed to be on the planet at this point.
We are in a situation where our progeny, four or five generations from now, will say: “Those people living in 2024 and 2025 — they had a lot on their plate, but despite that, they still rolled up their sleeves and got the ball rolling. They took the long view, and they made things happen.”
I don’t preach this perspective to my students, but when they come to me knowing about the trends we’re seeing converge, I share that perspective with them: hope is a verb. Make something happen, knowing that down the line, people will thank you for that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 54:42
It puts me in mind of meeting Jane Goodall, who radiated that active hope — and it’s so important to keep that in mind as we continue to move through this process of losing what we currently have, while building something that’s profoundly better. Michael, it’s been a great conversation. How can folks follow along and reach out to you?
Michael Maniates 55:20
If they want to go to my website, michaelmaniates.com, they’ll see my email information. They can also Google me. Feel free to drop me a note — it would be my pleasure to respond to folks and assist anyone with questions: regular people looking to make a difference, businesses or entrepreneurs trying to figure out what the academic literature might tell them about how to put their aspirations into tangible action, or anyone else. I’d be delighted to chat.
Mitch Ratcliffe 56:00
Well, Michael, thanks so much for your time today.
Michael Maniates 56:03
Thank you, Mitch.
Mitch Ratcliffe 56:09
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Michael Maniates. He’s an environmental social scientist, senior fellow with the Story of Stuff project, and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism, published by Polity Press. You can find it online at Amazon, Powell’s Books, and other fine booksellers. You can also find Michael’s work at michaelmaniates.com.
This conversation might feel uncomfortable for anyone who’s ever felt kind of proud while recycling — and I include myself in that group. Michael has spent decades looking at the evidence and has reached a conclusion that many in the sustainability community avoid: changing consumer behavior alone is not an effective environmental strategy. Aspiration is not enough. Real impact requires action combined with policy to create widespread change. In other words, you have to redesign society, not just start rebuilding it from the inside. We actually have to do both.
Global carbon emissions reached another high in 2024, and atmospheric CO₂ at this moment is at more than 429 parts per million — even with a $500 billion market for eco-labeled products, the climate trends have not improved. Michael explains that this is not because people lack the right values. The real issue is the system, not the people. The maze, not the mouse.
Europeans tend to act more sustainably because they live in cities with good public transit and strong recycling programs — in other words, the maze is configured for sustainability. By contrast, Americans live in a system that makes sustainable choices harder, and yet they’re still blamed for their decisions when they don’t make the right ones. So they’re caught in a kind of double bind.
Michael points to what he calls the deepest failure: the fact that people put in real effort, then see little impact, and feel growing anxiety as the gap between effort and results remains wide open. The reason this gap remains is the belief at the heart of consumer sustainability — the idea that if enough people make the right purchase, their choices will add up to real change. Michael’s research shows that this idea is not supported by evidence. It leads to burnout and distracts from the more effective work of active citizenship.
Michael’s argument isn’t that individual action is worthless. It’s that individual action in community with others, oriented toward shifting what he calls the default settings of everyday life, is more powerful than individual action in the checkout line alone. Social change research consistently shows that committed minorities of 10 to 20 percent of a population, working strategically, can drive structural transformation. What keeps that full potential from being realized is the competing narrative that you need super-majorities and overwhelming consensus before anything can change — a theory that conveniently lets the system off the hook while exhausting everyone who’s trying to change it.
The Consumption Corridors framework — built on democratic deliberation over the floor below which no one should fall and the ceiling above which individual consumption begins to compromise everyone else’s opportunity — may sound radical until you notice where it’s already happening: congestion pricing, vacation home restrictions, residential parking permit limits. Citizen assemblies in more than a dozen European countries have repeatedly shown that when ordinary people cross class and ideological lines to discuss what they actually care about, they tend to converge on the same things — family, community, connection, and a decent life — and with that in common, they tend to produce stronger sufficiency measures than experts predict.
Michael’s closing thoughts stuck with me: in four or five generations, people are going to look back and wonder if those of us who understood the stakes actually took action. Kim Stanley Robinson’s view — that it’s not too late if we think in terms of generations instead of the decades immediately ahead — this kind of hope can become real, not just a slogan, because long-term thinking always asks us to do more, not less. And that’s why human society makes progress.
So stay tuned. We’re going to keep talking with thinkers and doers who are rewriting the rules of what’s possible. And I hope in the meantime you’ll take a look at the archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear and share a few of them with your friends. Take some action. Write a review on your favorite podcast platform — that will help your neighbors find us. Because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste.
Please tell your friends, family, co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.
$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.
Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter Inc. and columnist for WhatTheyThink.com, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
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.
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 global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider Electric, works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports more than 40% of the Fortune 500 with energy procurement and sustainability strategies, managing over $50 billion in annual energy spending. His experience shows something that pledges and press releases often miss: the biggest challenge for corporate sustainability is not money, technology, or political will. The real issue is the gap between ambition and the ability to deliver. Companies are making Science-Based Targets commitments faster than they are building the infrastructure to meet them. Scope one and two emissions are being managed better, but scope three emissions, which come from a company’s supply chain, still present a systems problem that no single company can solve alone. Schneider’s zero-carbon supplier program suggests what it takes to close this gap. When the company started its own effort to cut emissions from its top 1,000 suppliers by 50% in five years, all 1,000 signed up within two weeks. However, about 84% of them did not fully understand what they had agreed to. Achieving success meant creating measurement tools, education programs, and action plans to help the whole ecosystem, not just individual companies.
Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider Electric, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
This critical conversation explores how renewable energy is bought, including the difference between physical and virtual power purchase agreements. Steve also explains why the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) market became more complex as it grew, and why 10% fewer renewable deals closed in 2025 compared to 2024, as tech companies used up available clean energy. He also addresses a key question in clean energy: is AI helping the environment overall, or do its energy needs still outweigh its efficiency benefits? Schneider processes over a million energy invoices each month, and about 50,000 of them had issues that took 10 to 15 business days to resolve. Now, a team of AI systems can handle these in seconds. Accurate energy consumption and billing data directly affect emissions reporting, energy efficiency, and money-saving market decisions. He describes Schnieder’s approach as “frugal AI”: using the right-sized models for each task, running them on clean energy, and choosing simple solutions over complex ones. Looking ahead, electrification is building a global digital energy network in which every meter and adjustment contributes to a new system independent of central plants. As intelligence spreads, power can shift to consumers, communities, and businesses. Schneider is enabling this shift by building a mesh grid in which each point both produces and consumes energy, coordinated by AI. These changes fundamentally reshape the global energy landscape. The central question: will we intentionally build this new, distributed system, or will we repeat centralized patterns digitally?
To learn more about Schneider Electric’s sustainability efforts, visit se.com.
Most business leaders believe sustainability costs money. They’re wrong. The proof is sitting right under their noses, bleeding out quietly as waste, excess heat, and byproducts every day the factory runs. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product. In a sector where resource costs account for more than 50% of total operating expenses — compared to less than 25% for salaries — that’s not a compliance problem or a branding challenge. It’s a structural, strategic failure that most business leaders have never been trained to see. Jasper Steinhausen spent two decades watching that failure play out across more than 100 companies in the Nordic countries. He came to sustainability not from the environmental side, but from marketing, where the core lesson was that people act on what they care about, not on what you think they should care about. When he started connecting the dots between resource-flow analysis and business strategy, the conversation changed. Leaders who tuned out every sustainability pitch suddenly leaned in when the frame was cost reduction, supply chain resilience, and competitive advantage. The “green” problem turned out to be a business problem in disguise — and a solvable one. That reframing is in his book, Making Sustainability Profitable: A Leader’s Guide to Growing a Thriving Business That Makes the World a Better Place. A free digital copy of the book is available at freebook.scoreapp.com — Jasper recommends starting with Chapter Three.
Jasper Steinhausen, Founder and CEO of Business With Impact and author of Making Sustainability Profitable, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
The argument Jasper makes is structural. Today’s business leaders have been trained rigorously in managing time and money, but almost never in managing material flows, even though materials dwarf payroll in the cost structure of most manufacturing companies. The result is a generation of leaders who are leaving more than half their cost base strategically unmanaged. The narrative problem compounds the structural one. When every leader wakes up believing sustainability is a cost, a constraint, and a compromise, they never get to the question of whether it might be something else. Jasper’s idea, which he posts about on LinkedIn and tests with clients ranging from small manufacturers to government advisory roles, is that the narrative is the first hurdle. The mental transformation has to precede the business transformation. Companies that clear that hurdle and start treating sustainability as an innovation platform consistently find themselves with a layer of competitive advantage their rivals haven’t even thought to open. Our conversation also covers the greenwashing trap, and how to avoid it by going around it entirely. The problem with leading on sustainability as a marketing message, Jasper argues, is that it inverts the logic. The job isn’t to convince customers to care about the planet. It’s to identify the problem they’re already trying to solve and deliver a better solution. Once that happens to be more sustainable because sustainability, done right, produces better outcomes. “Impact follows perceived value,” he says. A water company with a genuinely pure, chemical-free source doesn’t lead with environmental stewardship. It leads with safer drinking water for your kids. The sustainability isn’t hidden — it’s structural. It’s why the product delivers what it promises. Communicating it means doing what you say, saying what you do, and backing every claim with data and a visible roadmap. That’s not a compromise. That’s the only version of sustainability communication that survives contact with a skeptical market.
You can learn more about Jasper’s work at bwimpact.com and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.
Today we’re going to talk about sustainable business — making it sustainable, making it profitable; in other words, making it a business. Many people still believe that sustainability is just a cost center: a compliance hassle, a PR move, or something that hurts profits. This belief has kept many companies from joining the green transition. Instead, they’re waiting for rules to change or for others to show how it works. But the data tells a different story, and according to our guest today, when manufacturers in Denmark account for all their inputs, more than 20% of raw materials they purchase never reach a finished product. Instead, they bleed out as waste, excess heat, and other byproducts. That’s not just an environmental problem — that’s money leaving through a hole in the floor. And it points to something deeper: sustainability, when done right, isn’t a cost to be managed. It’s a source of competitive advantage that most business leaders have not yet learned to see.
So I’m joined today by Jasper Steinhausen, founder and CEO of Business With Impact, and the author of the book Making Sustainability Profitable. Jasper is a longtime circular economy business consultant to businesses in the Nordic countries. Over the past two decades, he’s worked with over 100 companies and has served as an advisor to the Danish government’s Green Transition Fund. He’s developed a framework — the Impact Blueprint — that guides business leaders through five key actions connecting sustainability with growth, resilience, and profit. Companies that use it have reported their best financial results ever.
So let’s talk with Jasper about common mistakes small and medium-sized companies make when starting with sustainability, how circular economy thinking is really about using resources better and making more profit, and how companies that go beyond compliance can stand out from the competition. We’ll also try to get into some tougher questions: Why isn’t the business case catching on faster? How do you tell real sustainability from greenwashing? And can businesses move quickly enough to meet what science says is needed?
To learn more about Jasper’s work, you can visit bwimpact.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. You can find his book Making Sustainability Profitable on Amazon or at your local bookseller. If sustainability is truly a profit driver hiding in plain sight, why do so many business leaders still see it as a burden, and what would it take to change that? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 2:58
Welcome to the show, Jasper. How are you doing today?
Jasper Steinhausen 3:01
Thank you, Mitch. I’m doing really, really well. Looking forward to having this conversation with you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:06
Well, thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. You know, like myself, you’ve been working for 20 years or so at the intersection of sustainability and business strategy. I’m wondering — was there a moment, or maybe a specific client, that made the bell ring for you, that these two things are intimately connected?
Jasper Steinhausen 3:23
Well, for me, the problem is that most people tend to focus on only one problem at a time, right? We tend to isolate problems, especially those we don’t quite understand. And that’s not just a sustainability thing — that’s just how our brains work. But the reality is that sustainability integrates into so many areas in a business, as you probably realize yourself.
And I’ve always been looking at the positive side of things, looking for the opportunity. At some point, back in the mid-2000s or so, I was very much into climate. This was heading up towards COP 15 in Copenhagen, so climate was the thing — also for me. I started looking at climate as the opportunity to innovate and to rethink, and thereby to solve more than one problem at the same time, because there was lots of stuff that needed fixing.
My experience from working in marketing right after I left university was that the more I talked to people about what they care about, the more they listened. So I started connecting the dots: what are the types of problems they do care about? Because a lot of people don’t necessarily care enough about sustainability — it’s not their top priority. So I started to look at it this way: What if I get curious, try to understand what your top priority is, and then figure out how climate — or sustainability, or whatever your slice of this pie is — intersects with that problem? And then speak to solving that problem in a way that also has impact. Basically turning sustainability into the toolbox and using it to solve the problems people actually care about.
And things started moving more easily. Conversations were more interesting to people. From there, I’ve just been refining that process for — yeah, 20-plus years.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:32
Well, as you say, there are a lot of problems, and the range of challenges a business or policymaker faces today is growing constantly. What do you find the primary motivation is — is it profitability, or is it a combination of financial sustainability and a genuine desire to do better? Where does the motive lie these days?
Jasper Steinhausen 5:56
Well, it depends. Usually I just start by asking people: What are your top priorities right now? What do you really want to succeed with? Not necessarily in sustainability, but where’s your head on the line — what have you promised the board, or your senior leadership, or whoever I’m speaking to in the organization? So rather than having a conversation around sustainability, I find it more interesting to have a conversation about what we really want to achieve.
But I do find that many leaders feel a fairly significant pain around the gap between the values they live by in their private life — the choices they make about food, cars, travel, housing, what they buy, what they choose to repair — and their professional life. In their private life, they make conscious, deliberate choices that factor in sustainability. Then they go to work for eight or nine hours a day, and there they just can’t connect the dots. So they’re basically living a split, unable to live up to their values in their professional life — which is a big part of your life. And that’s painful.
So for some there is an underlying personal pain point, but it always comes back to: I’m being measured on delivering business results. And if you’re not in a company that’s advanced and mature in sustainability — where it’s an integrated part of the brand — well, then it’s a distant second to cutting costs, increasing sales, and attracting talent. So to come back to your question: the short answer is that it’s the business side for the vast majority, but a lot of them have a personal drive underneath. They just can’t connect the two, so they don’t even try. When I help them do that, it becomes a real personal relief as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:30
So what would you say is the most common objection you hear when you make the argument to, say, a room full of CEOs that sustainability can be profitable? Is there a common myth you can dispel right off the bat?
Jasper Steinhausen 8:42
Yeah, I guess they don’t say this, but I’m pretty sure they think it — “BS, this can’t be true” — though they’re polite people and don’t say it to my face. But the thing is, I’ve asked people on every continent, and I get the same response: sustainability is a problem, it’s expensive, it’s hard for business, and you have to compromise in so many ways. That seems to be the decisive narrative globally on what sustainability is.
The reality is that sustainability delivers competitiveness. It drives down cost. It drives innovation. It fuels engagement — and engagement equals productivity, less sick leave, attracting talent, more innovation. And combine all those, as you advance further and further, it also starts to lead to increased customer loyalty, because you make better solutions and find people and companies who see that alignment. There is so much business value to be gained, and people just don’t get that.
When we make what I call a mental transformation — before we’re capable of doing a business transformation — it’s kind of like all of a sudden thinking: well, what have I been thinking for all these years? You can read more about this process in Making Sustainability Profitable.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:31
Well, you’re describing the recognition of a series of connections that constitute the system in which the business does its work — whatever that work might be. And one of the things that was interesting, and why I wanted to talk with you, is that you frame this all initially as a waste issue. I was surprised by the Danish manufacturing results you reported — that 20% of raw materials never make it into the product or service. For business leaders who haven’t thought about it that way, how does framing sustainability primarily as a resource-efficiency problem change the conversation? Does it make it easier to take that first step?
Jasper Steinhausen 11:08
Well, it’s a really good question. In general, it shifts things quite a lot. The thing is that business leaders don’t really know how to deal with resource flow strategically, and there’s a reason for that. From around the early 1950s to the early 1970s — what’s often referred to as the golden age of capitalism — there was a notion of seemingly endless abundance in energy and materials, and prices just kept falling. So it became less of a strategic issue and more like a cost of operations, something to hand down the chain to the head of manufacturing or wherever it sits today. In leadership literature, it gradually disappeared as a strategic topic, meaning that today’s leaders have never really been trained to strategically look at the flow of resources. They focus mainly on the flow of time and the flow of money.
So through no fault of their own — because nobody ever taught them, it was never part of their education or their portfolio — now this massive area has been ignored. I once had an opportunity to dig into Danish national statistical data — about ten years ago, though I’m quite sure the picture is the same today, perhaps even more significant. Less than 25% of costs go to salary. A bit more than 50% is tied to resources. If you combine these two things — it’s kind of mind-blowing. More than 50% of all costs are not part of leadership’s strategic focus. Let’s leave that for listeners to chew on, because that’s insane when you look at it like that. But it kind of just disappeared.
So when I come in and help rewire this connection — have them look at where the resource flows are — it becomes quite easy to see that there are things really going wrong in how we produce today. When I look at a company or a value chain, I basically see money bleeding out all over the place. If I’m asking how we can increase competitiveness and reduce cost, the first thing I’d say is: well, why don’t we start by stopping some of these holes? And the response is: “Oh, yeah, okay — I hadn’t thought about that.” Because that’s just how things run. Procurement procures, manufacturing produces, sales sells, everybody’s busy, the cost structure is baked into the price, and that’s it. Just intercept a bit and show them what it really is, and it’s kind of “holy moly.” And then you can start doing things.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:39
Well, you’re describing what happens when suddenly the water is off and you recognize you’ve been counting on it without thinking about it for a long time. Each organization within the entity is in its own silo, focused on its own thing. So how do you move from being reactive to being proactive about sustainability? What does the sweet spot look like in practice?
Jasper Steinhausen 14:58
Yeah, well, I guess you could say that things move a little more easily once you align strategy and offering, and you and your team are working toward something bigger than yourselves. As some of your listeners probably know, we understand quite a lot about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And we know that when we contribute to something beyond ourselves — something bigger — it feels really good.
So if you’re in a company that’s not just about profit, but also a profitable way to be part of making the world a better place — in whatever area fits that company — we can all see that a lot of things in this world are out of balance and moving in the wrong direction, whether that’s climate change, biodiversity, plastics, the amount of chemicals, or something in the social space. Whatever is your flavor, that’s up to you. And the second you can see: “Now I’m part of a team or a culture or movement that’s actually taking some real steps” — and you’re leveraging the full power of a business to do it — it becomes this massively leveraged change. You make better products because you use sustainability as an innovation platform. You put customers’ problems at the center, so you come up with solutions that are better for clients and better for the planet. Your team becomes more engaged, stays longer, works harder. And that’s why they beat the competition. It’s simply a better way of doing business.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:15
Well, you see yourself within a larger system and a bigger context, and that allows you to find greater motivation as well as more opportunities for innovation. Can you share the principles of the Impact Blueprint — the five steps a leader listening right now on their commute can identify and potentially apply when they get to the office?
Jasper Steinhausen 17:39
Sure. There are five steps: mindset, mission, mapping out a course to move toward it, actually doing stuff, and then going out and talking about it. You can read through all of them in depth in Making Sustainability Profitable — and I’d be happy to gift your listeners a digital copy. Check the show notes for a link to download a free copy.
The mindset step is a lot of what we’ve already been talking about: shifting out of “it’s bad, costly, and a compromise” and into the opportunity space. Don’t start with “what environmental problems should I solve?” Start with “what business problem am I most focused on solving?” and then look at that through the lens of sustainability or resource flow. How does that intersect with the problem? Don’t go in thinking it’s more costly — it’s an innovation game. Find ways to make better solutions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:11
Great. We’ll include a link in the show notes.
Jasper Steinhausen 19:15
Perfect. Just read Chapter Three — that’s about a 20-minute read and you’ll be all good to go.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:23
Chapter Three. Check it out.
Jasper Steinhausen 19:23
Check it out. The mission step is figuring out why we’re all doing this. What’s the bigger thing? Where do we want to go with this? Say you’re a smaller company, or founder-led, or owner-operated — where do I really want to go with this? What’s important to me? And making sure that matches with the business. You can look at a SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — and then match that with what’s personally important to you. Kind of like legacy thinking: what would you like to be known for? Is it children? Is it animals? Is it climate change? And then make sure those match, so you don’t choose an impact area you have no ability to actually move.
I’ve worked with clients who really wanted to do something on climate, but had a business with a very insignificant direct climate impact, or where the impact was tied into a supply chain where they had zero ability to influence anything, because they were a small company with giant suppliers on the other side of the world. So you need to match those things so you actually choose something that gives you a real chance of working on sustainability in a way that also improves your business.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:56
And those two — mindset and mission — are a great place to anchor the rest of the conversation. What is the minimum viable move in terms of its ability to catalyze the passion you’re talking about for making the world a better place, while balancing the day-to-day challenge of covering payroll at the end of the month? Is there some initial investment or activity that takes you out of your comfort zone — where the silos stop you in your tracks?
Jasper Steinhausen 21:41
Well, you’re very right that getting out of the comfort zone is part of it. I find that the absolute majority of leaders don’t know how to lead sustainability — they see it as this separate thing.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:54
And I would argue that they may not even know how to lead.
Jasper Steinhausen 22:00
Point taken — yes, duly noted. And especially for smaller businesses. A lot of founders or engineers who suddenly have 20 people on their hands are struggling just to keep everything going. Some even dream about going back to being in the weeds doing the actual work rather than all this leadership stuff. So, yeah.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:28
The lone innovator is often where a lot of us begin this journey.
Jasper Steinhausen 22:32
Exactly — true. But what I would say is that there’s a lot you can do that doesn’t require big, long-horizon investments. The story about sustainability is very often that it’s about investing for the long view or future-proofing. But what I sometimes refer to as the “brilliant basics” — not a phrase coined by me, but still very valid — is to look at your company and see what you’re going to keep doing for a very long time. You’re going to keep taking raw materials, running them through process A, B, and C, and turning out a product for your customers. And your customers will keep wanting good quality, reliability, and the best possible price. OK — so here is something you can invest in, because it’s going to be ongoing. Are you doing it the right way?
And again, back to the resource flow and waste issue: you are not doing it the right way if you’ve never really looked at it. Unless you’re a very high-volume, low-margin Walmart-type operation that scrutinizes every penny — or you’ve been on the brink of bankruptcy — odds are good you’ve never really looked hard at this. When the Ukraine war broke out four years ago, what we saw here in Europe was a massive, near-overnight increase in energy prices. All of a sudden, companies saw a doubling or more of their energy costs, and for many, that was lethal. All hands on deck.
And within weeks, so many things were changed — none of which required big new investments. It was just smarter practice: let’s produce at night when energy is cheaper; maybe we don’t need the temperature at 98 degrees — maybe 92 is fine. All these things that were never looked at, because it wasn’t on the radar. You can do a lot of that. The minimum viable move is really just getting the basics right.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:41
So you’re describing that moment of crisis when the reframing is almost automatic — because you don’t have control anymore. This is also a great place to take a quick commercial break, folks, because the wheels have been clipped off the plane. Will we land it? We’ll find out right after a quick commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:08
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my discussion with Jasper Steinhausen, author of Making Sustainability Profitable and founder and CEO of Business With Impact. So Jasper, one of the testimonials I read about your work is that in a single coaching session, you reframed an entire business through your questions. What do those questions look like when you sit down with somebody who says, “I know I need to do something — I think it might be sustainability.” How do you drill in to find out what they can actually do?
Jasper Steinhausen 26:41
Well, I can walk you back to that specific session, because I think it’s a story that underpins quite well what we’ve been talking about. So it’s a company that sells a water product of really, really high standard, and the founder is passionate about sustainability — but they were struggling a bit with getting traction in the marketplace and getting people to support it, whether that was investors, partners, or whatever. She was clearly more passionate about the sustainability part than a lot of the peers around her that she was trying to persuade.
But the thing is, she had really, really clear water — one of the few sources that could actually claim it was not contaminated with any man-made substances: no plastics, no chemicals, no PFAS, nothing. So I thought: what if we reframe this not as “a sustainable source” but as “better for your health”? How many people walk around caring about what they eat and drink? How many are worried about chemicals in their bodies or in their children? If this was the truly safe source of drinking water, what would that look like compared to pitching it as “the sustainable drinking water”? And she was like —
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:31
However — does that get them away from sustainability as a focus of the company? How do you avoid repositioning defocusing the mission?
Jasper Steinhausen 28:46
Well, the thing is that in order to deliver on that promise, she had to maintain exactly those sustainability standards. I was just reframing from selling the “green” solution to selling the value that comes out of doing that work.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:03
Back to what I was asking about. So is leading with sustainability the wrong way to think about this, generally?
Jasper Steinhausen 29:12
It depends on your target market. So if you’re targeting people like you and me, it’s probably a good idea to lead with sustainability, because when I’m looking for something, my starting point is: where can I find anyone who’s done something remotely interesting in terms of sustainability? But the majority of people don’t start there. So if it’s green versus better, I’ll almost always go with better. What’s the better outcome that comes out of it?
In the water story, the pitch is cleaner and safer drinking water — P.S., it also happens to be sustainable. And that’s why she would not bottle it in plastic, obviously, because micro-plastics would migrate in and destroy the quality of the product. So it has to be in glass bottles — but you’re still not devaluing your mission. You’re just reframing the value. And basically it goes like this: impact follows perceived value. The job is to figure out what your ideal client perceives as valuable right now, and then show how your sustainable practice supports that. How do my choices become a reason for you to feel more confident in the product — because it helps you with the problem you know you have? And I know that, at the same time, it’s also good for climate or for whatever else. But that’s the icing on the cake.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:05
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that basing your product positioning on your own preference can be very challenging, because your preference and values may not map to the market’s. In this case, people are thirsty. They want good, clean, healthy water. Some of them — maybe not even most of them — want it delivered sustainably. Is it really important to lead with sustainability in any way, shape, or form? Or is that a subterranean activity? The thinking should be: let’s do this sustainably — but we don’t necessarily need to pitch that upfront. Let your quality speak first: you’re going to drink good, clean water; it won’t harm your kids; and, by the way, we’re going to be able to continue doing this without having destroyed nature.
Jasper Steinhausen 31:57
Yeah, I would probably go with something like that — but it depends on the room. Say I’m pitching this at Patagonia’s annual leadership assembly. Well, it’s probably a good idea to start by saying this is an amazing, sustainable product. They’re exactly the right audience for that. So it’s audience first — it’s page two of any book on selling.
So if people are on their commute back to the workplace thinking “what do I do?” — it’s just business. Sales is sales. Marketing is marketing. Innovation is innovation. What you can see is that sustainability is just an extra layer in the toolbox — and it’s one you probably haven’t utilized, and one that most of your competitors have never even thought about. That’s why you can beat the competition: by starting to utilize a layer in the toolbox nobody else is looking at, to develop better solutions, better business, lower costs, and more innovation.
And once you’ve done that, there’s a completely separate discussion: how much do you want to flag this externally? That comes back to who your target market is. Some you want to flag it a lot. Others — maybe not. “I’m trying to sell this to the White House right now, okay, I probably shouldn’t lead with sustainability. Let’s save that for later.” But if I’m selling to Patagonia, I probably want to flag it quite a lot. That’s a different discussion. You use the toolbox to make the better solution, and then you make a choice about whether and how much to flag it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:02
Well, in a lot of ways, what you’re doing is going around the greenwashing problem by actually focusing on why you’re making the decision. Greenwashing is a credibility killer in this space. If you were to go to Patagonia and say “we’re sustainable,” and it turns out you’re generating vast amounts of PFAS you’re dumping into the local water supply — you’re done with that audience. How do you recommend companies communicate sustainability in an authentic way, without making exaggerated claims? Because often, at the beginning of the process, they’re talking about their long-term goal rather than how they’re actually performing today. How do you begin that reveal in a way that lets people see you’re making progress, but without overpromising?
Jasper Steinhausen 34:51
Yes. If I should put this in really plain English: do what you say, say what you do, and be able to back it up with data. End of story. You could add: please don’t lie. In Europe, there’s regulation against this — it’s tied into marketing law. So making false claims is just breaking the law, the same as trying to sell liquor to minors.
But the key thing is: always be specific. Stay away from the generics — “I’m sustainable,” “I’m green,” whatever. No. We have done this specific thing. The problem is that when sustainability is pursued mainly as a branding exercise, because companies still believe it’s costly for business and the only return is PR — they try to push the envelope as far as possible. And that’s where all the greenwashing problems come from.
Whereas, if you go about it the way we’ve been discussing, the approach is: What are the three to five biggest business problems we have? What are the three to five biggest problems our clients have? Go to work on those. If you solve one of a customer’s biggest priorities, you don’t go out and say “this is amazing for climate.” You go out and say “we just fixed your problem — and, by the way, it’s also better for the climate.” See Chapter 3 of Making Sustainability Profitable for a full walk-through of this approach.
So there are three things to try to get at least a dash of in your communications. First, the mission — the bigger picture, the roadmap, the plan, whatever you call it. Show that this isn’t a standalone thing; it’s one in a series, and here’s what you plan to do next year and the year after. Then spend the majority of your time on the actual results: we have removed X, optimized Y, extended product life by Z. And be able to back it with data. In Europe, you need trusted third parties to verify the data. I’m not sure about the regulations on your end —
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:02
— here, we don’t have regulations anymore. Makes it easier, doesn’t it? Ha. You made reference earlier to potentially selling to our White House — which I’d argue is a fool’s gambit, because you’ll get stabbed in the back. But sorry, folks — it’s true. Do you see, in this environment of political pushback against sustainability, that the green transition is actually taking deeper hold — not just in Europe, but in business everywhere — because of the underlying resource-cost crisis you’ve been talking about? If we don’t find ways to reuse and reduce the cost of virgin material extraction, prices will just keep going up. Are we on the path to a greener, more environmentally responsible economy, or is it more talk than action?
Jasper Steinhausen 39:06
Well, that’s a really good question. There’s a long-form answer and a short form. Which one do you want?
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:13
Let’s go short — we’ve been talking for a while, and the commute for our listener is probably getting close to an end.
Jasper Steinhausen 39:19
I think we are nowhere near realizing the potential, simply because way too few people have the right understanding of what this is all about. There’s a great misconception we’ve referred to a couple of times, and that’s really what’s holding us back. It’s what makes politicians pass the wrong type of laws and legislation; it’s what makes decision-makers pull back again. It’s somewhere between tragic and hilarious — because in the name of cutting costs and increasing competitiveness, we’re ignoring one of the most powerful levers available to do exactly that. This is probably one of the biggest opportunities to increase competitiveness in our time, rivaled only by AI. And yet, because we don’t understand it, we’re removing focus from it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:20
That’s a really important point — and it goes all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. You’re in your silo, focused on your particular challenge. If you just look up a little and see the synergistic opportunities in thinking across silos — first to reduce waste overall, and potentially even to begin regenerating nature by putting raw material back into it — that can be transformative.
One problem a lot of businesses have is that they think of the circular economy only as waste management or recycling. How do you talk about that with your clients? How do you make the case for a full life-cycle approach versus “I took care of my part of the job, I hope somebody else does theirs”?
Jasper Steinhausen 41:15
Well, basically — if they’re not ready to talk circularity, I don’t talk circularity. I might get there eventually, but I use different words. If the reason for taking materials back is to get cheaper or less risky raw materials — because right now they’re sourcing everything from the other end of the world, and we’ve all learned that international supply chains are far more fragile than we thought, what with wars and conflicts and all of that — then perhaps the smarter move is to start sourcing from more regional waste streams. OK, well, then maybe we’re talking about de-risking the supply chain, or cutting cost through access to cheaper raw materials. Whatever it is, I try to listen, tune in, and translate.
I’ve trained myself to speak the language of the CFO, CEO, CTO, head of manufacturing, and sales — whatever the role, I can probably find my way into it. The goal is to make sure they feel they’re on their own turf. In reality, I’m just getting them to use my tools — they’re just not necessarily aware of it. And if they are ready to talk circularity, great — we can go as deep as you like. But for most, that’s not the case.
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:09
Well, you’re hitting on the opportunity of the times, really — the era of code-switching, being able to move from one dialogue to another while maintaining continuity. That’s the authenticity piece, the non-greenwashing part we were discussing a moment ago. If this business case is so compelling, why isn’t every company doing it? What’s the real barrier — is it knowledge, lack of incentives, the need for a new culture, or the need to connect with a bigger culture than your organization? How would you encapsulate that for a business leader who asks?
Jasper Steinhausen 43:49
Well, my analysis is that the single biggest — or perhaps the first — hurdle to get over is changing the narrative. When every business leader wakes up every morning thinking “this is bad for business, this is costly, and it’s going to restrict me and force me to compromise” — and then sits down and thinks “OK, I’m trying to cut costs, trying to find new creative ways to expand into new territory” — they immediately think: “I’m probably not going to use this tool, because I know it’s more costly. It restrains me, and I’m trying to create maneuvering space.” When they think that’s what sustainability is, it never fits the purpose.
The reality is, it fits the purpose extremely well. But nobody knows why — which is also why I spend so much time pushing this narrative by posting six days a week on LinkedIn and being lucky enough to be invited onto programs like this. We need this change in narrative, because otherwise people never even get started. They never get to ask the questions. They never open their eyes to realize: “Huh, that’s strange — maybe we should have a look at this.”
Mitch Ratcliffe 45:19
And it’s because, in a lot of ways, we tell ourselves the same old stories — both because they’re comfortable and because you don’t have to explain them to anyone. As you think about the transition we need to make, what’s that one factor you would urge a business leader to consider as they think about the story of their business — is it the missed opportunity to do the world-improving work they want? Is it missed profitability? Or something else?
Jasper Steinhausen 45:51
Well, in the world of today — where competition is as fierce as it’s ever been for most — I would probably lead with the business side. Just: stop wasting money all the time. Stop that. So you could start by simply looking at what percentage of your overall cost is tied to resources, and how much of what you buy is turning into waste.
Waste is the most expensive and idiotic thing we can create. First, you pay good money to get raw materials. Then you pay people and equipment to work on them. You also pay for marketing, advertising, and sales. And by the time you’re nearly done, some of all of this is lost — and then you pay somebody to come and take it away. It’s lose, lose, lose, lose all the way through. And it’s also bad for the world.
So if we could just eliminate some of that, you’ll save money in procurement. You’ll save money in wasted time, salary, machinery, energy — all of it. And you’ll do a really, really good thing for the planet. And you can turn that into part of your story as well — your people will love you for it, and your clients potentially will too, depending on how you position it. It could turn a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose into a win, win, win, win. Or you could stay where you are and just be damned ineffective. It’s up to you.
Mitch Ratcliffe 47:41
I almost don’t know how to follow that last line — because that is the “I’m just going to stick to my guns” approach I hear from so many business leaders: “I don’t have time for that.” But when you open your thinking to new options, almost invariably, any business can recover. How can folks keep up with your thinking? Where can they see you? Posting on LinkedIn every day?
Jasper Steinhausen 48:03
Yeah, it’s fairly simple, because there’s only one person called Jasper Steinhausen. So if you find me on LinkedIn, I’d really love to have you following and engaging with my content. Hopefully there will be something that inspires you. And, as I said, I’ll be happy to gift you a copy of the book — check the show notes for a link to download a free copy. Start with Chapter Three, as we talked about.
Mitch Ratcliffe 48:29
Well, thank you, Jasper, for your time today. It’s really been a great conversation. I appreciate it.
Jasper Steinhausen 48:34
Likewise, likewise. And thank you for doing all of this. Thank you.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 48:43
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Jasper Steinhausen — sorry about mispronouncing his name earlier, by the way. He’s founder and CEO of Business With Impact and the author of Making Sustainability Profitable. You can learn more about his work at bwimpact.com — all one word, no space, no dash. And you can download a free digital copy of his book at freebook.scoreapp.com. When you do, check out Chapter Three first.
Jasper’s reframing of sustainability as a resource-efficiency problem hiding in plain sight is an effective tool for sustainability advocates in any organization. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product — instead, they bleed out as waste, excess heat, and byproducts. And by the way, you can also be wasting electricity excessively or burning too much coal. Don’t do that. That’s money leaving through a hole in the floor, not to mention an environmental impact too long ignored by business.
But as Jasper points out, this isn’t a failure of character on the part of business leaders. It’s a failure of training and culture. Ever since capitalism began, it has ignored the importance of resource costs. Sure, people talk about it — but when you actually look at it, we waste so much it’s insane. Today’s leaders have been schooled in managing time and money, but almost never in managing material flows, even though resource costs dwarf payrolls and account for more than 50% of the total cost in the average manufacturing company.
The second takeaway I urge you to think about is Jasper’s argument that the single biggest barrier to a green transition isn’t regulation, capital, or technology — it’s a narrative problem. In other words, we have to tell the story that becomes behaviors, repeated over and over to become culture. When every business leader wakes up believing sustainability is a cost, a constraint, and a compromise, their mental calculation about its value is over before it begins. Jasper’s bet is that once companies make the mental transformation — recognizing waste reduction, supply-chain resilience, and innovation capacity as the actual deliverables of a sustainable practice — the business case becomes self-evident. The companies that crack this beat the competition simply by using a layer of the strategic toolbox other companies never bother to open.
Finally, there’s the idea that runs counter to much sustainability advocacy: leading with sustainability as a primary value in your marketing is often the wrong move. Jasper’s principle that “impact follows perceived value” makes the job of the sustainable business clear — it isn’t to convince the market to care about the planet; it’s to identify the problem the customer is already trying to solve, and then bring a sustainable practice to bear on that problem in a way that makes the solution visibly better. That water company with the purest, chemical-free source doesn’t lead with environmental stewardship — it leads with safer drinking water for your kids. Sustainability is structural: it goes deeper than product messaging to why the product delivers what it promises. But it’s best positioned as a consequence of quality, not a call to conscience. Yes, it works with some consumers — like myself, who really pay attention — but for most people, we need to lead with quality. And that distinction matters, especially now, because greenwashing remains one of the fastest ways to destroy trust with an audience that cares most about the environment.
Jasper’s suggestion that you should do what you say, say what you do, and back it with data summarizes the challenge for any sustainability effort — whether it’s an internal initiative or the basis for a major product launch. Communicate specific results, not general claims, which we see far too often from companies pitching stories to Earth911. Anchor your results in a visible roadmap, so that your progress today can be seen as the first accomplishment on your road to a more sustainable world — not just the first in a long series of promises not yet kept.
So here’s the tension worth sitting with. Jasper’s model depends on business leaders choosing to look up from their siloed priorities long enough to see the resource flows bleeding money all around them. The global narrative that sustainability is a burden rather than a tool is nowhere near being corrected. It’s still driving policy decisions, investment decisions, and competitive strategy in the wrong direction. The irony is almost painful: in the name of cutting costs and increasing competitiveness, companies are ignoring one of the most powerful levers available to do exactly that — reducing resource costs by eliminating waste.
The window to act is open — wide open — and people are screaming for us to do better. The question is whether enough leaders will decide to stop leaving money and a livable planet on the cutting-room floor. We’ll keep talking with the leaders who do see the light and use it to illuminate the waste we can no longer afford — as a species, as a society, and as an economy.
I hope you’ll also take a look at our archive of more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’ll want to share. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, family, co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we’ll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
On February 12, 2026, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stood next to President Trump and called the repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” He was likely correct. With this move, the legal basis for all federal greenhouse gas regulation for cars, power plants, and oil fields was removed at once.
This headline-making move was just the most visible part of 14 months of steady rollbacks of U.S. environmental and public health protections, often couched in language about saving tax dollars and reducing regulation, but ignoring the rising cost of healthcare, insurance, and environmental damage caused by the policies. Since Inauguration Day 2025, the Trump administration has issued many executive orders and regulatory actions affecting air quality, water protections, toxic chemicals, wildlife habitat, and climate and health science.
Scientists, former EPA officials, and public health researchers have documented the consequences, which include more cases of childhood neurological damage and tens of millions of acres of wetlands left unprotected from pollution. Earth911 assembled this timeline of major actions and what research says about their likely effects.
January 20, 2025: Inauguration Day Shock and Awe
On his first day in office, Trump signed 26 executive orders, several of which quickly changed U.S. environmental policy. Experts in environmental law called this a “flood the zone” strategy, meant to overwhelm environmental groups and courts so they could not respond to every action at once.
Key Day-One actions included:
EO 14154, “Unleashing American Energy”: Declared a national energy emergency, directed the EPA to review and potentially revoke the Endangerment Finding, ordered a moratorium on all new offshore and onshore wind leases, instructed agencies to expedite fossil fuel permitting, and directed the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to rescind its NEPA implementing regulations within 30 days.
EO 14148, “Initial Recissions of Harmful Executive Orders”: Revoked nearly 80 Biden administration executive orders, including all climate-focused orders and the Justice40 environmental justice initiative.
EO 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs”: Directed each federal agency to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions,” effectively shuttering EPA’s environmental justice programs overnight.
Paris Agreement withdrawal (EO 14162): Trump formally directed the UN to begin withdrawal proceedings from the Paris Agreement, repeating his first-term move. The U.S. withdrawal took effect in January 2026. According to the UN Environment Programme’s 2025 Emissions Gap Report, the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is projected to add an additional 0.1°C of warming to global temperature trajectories—in a world already tracking toward 2.3–2.8°C of warming this century.
“Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential“: This executive order directed agencies to maximize oil, gas, mineral, and timber extraction in Alaska, reconsider Arctic National Wildlife Refuge protections, and expedite LNG permitting. Later followed by Interior Secretary Burgum announcing plans to open 13 million acres of ecologically sensitive Alaskan lands for drilling.
Dan Esty, a professor of environmental law and policy at Yale University, told ABC News that the administration had a clear strategy: “There are a number of more subtle actions that the Trump administration has taken that also have considerable corrosive effect on our efforts to promote action on climate change and a sustainable future more broadly.” He warned that less visible rollbacks, such as regulatory delays, staff cuts, and limiting science, would add to the impact of the major executive orders in ways the public might not notice.
January 21–31, 2025: Building the Deregulatory Machine
January 21: EO 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” revoked EO 12898, the 1994 Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to identify and address disproportionate environmental burdens on communities of color and low-income communities, which was the cornerstone of federal environmental justice policy for three decades.
January 28: EPA delayed the effective dates of four rules to March 21, 2025, including a Toxic Substances Control Act rule on trichloroethylene (TCE), a carcinogen linked to cancer, liver damage, and Parkinson’s disease, and revisions to air quality model guidance that states depend on for pollution planning.
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” Zeldin said in a press statement. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” It would be another year before, again, Zeldin touted an even bigger deregulatory move.
The 31 targeted regulations included:
Carbon pollution standards for coal and gas power plants
Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for coal-fired power plants
National ambient air quality standards for particulate matter (soot)
Methane emissions rules for oil and gas operations
Vehicle greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards
Wastewater discharge limits for coal plants
Wetlands and waterway protections under the Clean Water Act
Responding to Zeldin’s announcement, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers Mary Rice and Amruta Nori-Sarma warned in public commentary that repealing the Endangerment Finding alone would eliminate legal obligations to cut emissions from the transportation sector—the largest single source of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution—with cascading effects on climate-related public health harms including heat illness, worsening wildfires, and more severe flooding.
Also in March, EPA began dismantling its Office of Research and Development (ORD), removing all career scientific leadership and halting the publication of internal research. The Environmental Protection Network (EPN), a nonpartisan group of hundreds of former EPA staff, later warned in a February 2026 report that “political leadership is steering the agency away from its responsibility to protect human health and the environment.”
The ORD’s closure eliminated the internal scientific capacity to assess pollution risks for mercury, PFAS, air toxics, and wildfire smoke.
April 2025: Coal Revival, Mercury Exemptions, and Public Lands
April 8: Trump signed executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, expediting coal mining permits on federal land and directing federal agencies to maximize coal extraction. This directly contradicts global energy market trends: the International Energy Agency reports that renewable electricity is now cheaper than new coal in every major market.
April 2025: EPA solicited exemption applications from coal- and oil-fired power plants seeking waivers from the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) via email—an unprecedented process that environmental groups called an open invitation for polluters to self-select out of public health rules. By May, EPA had granted exemptions to 68 power plants covering facilities in 45 states.
The health risks of weakening MATS are well known. Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury in the U.S., a dangerous neurotoxin that harms brain development in fetuses and young children. The Sierra Club found that going back to pre-2024 MATS standards would let the dirtiest coal plants release 50% more mercury. Arsenic and chromium, which are also covered by MATS, are linked to cancer, heart disease, and birth defects. Moms Clean Air Force director Dominique Browning put it simply, saying that “No amount of mercury is safe for babies’ developing brains.”
On April 17, Trump signed a proclamation that opened parts of the Pacific Islands Heritage National Marine Monument to commercial fishing. This 500,000-square-mile area west of Hawaii is home to protected turtles, whales, and endangered Hawaiian monk seals. Research shows that marine protected areas usually help fishermen by letting overfished stocks recover, which is the opposite of how the administration described the change.
May 14: EPA announced plans to eliminate drinking water standards for four short-chain PFAS chemicals (PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and GenX), reversing Biden-era standards designed to protect millions of Americans. The agency also proposed extending compliance deadlines for the two standards it retained (PFOA and PFOS). According to the Environmental Working Group, an estimated 41 million people will drink PFAS-contaminated water for at least two additional years due to these delays. PFAS chemicals are linked to cancer, immune suppression, thyroid disruption, and developmental harm in children.
May 2025: EPA terminated more than $15 million in PFAS research grants—including grants to universities studying PFAS contamination of agricultural land and drinking water—even as the agency publicly claimed commitment to addressing the PFAS crisis. ProPublica’s investigation found the EPA had also requested three court delays in litigation over PFAS Superfund designation, signaling unwillingness to enforce the designation that would make major polluters financially liable for cleanup.
May 28: The Council on Environmental Quality formally withdrew all NEPA guidance dating back to 1977, revoking the regulatory framework agencies had used for 50 years to assess environmental impacts of federal projects. Under the rollback, federal agencies are no longer required to assess climate impacts, cumulative pollution burdens, or environmental justice considerations when approving oil, gas, and mining projects. Earthworks described the change as eliminating the public’s right to know about pollution in their communities before projects are approved.
June 11: EPA Administrator Zeldin proposed to repeal the Carbon Pollution Standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, which were finalized in 2024. Power plants are a top source of both greenhouse gas emissions and co-pollutants—including soot and smog-forming nitrogen oxides—that directly harm respiratory health.
July 29: EPA formally proposed to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding, releasing a draft rule that cited a five-scientist Department of Energy “Climate Working Group” report as scientific support. The report was subsequently rebutted point-by-point by 86 scientists from academia, government, and industry, who concluded the DOE report “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation” and does not meet standards appropriate for policy support. A federal judge later ruled the DOE violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act in convening the group.
July 18: EPA exempted three additional coal plants—in Ohio, Illinois, and Colorado—from MATS compliance deadlines, expanding the exemption program that now covers a substantial share of the nation’s remaining coal fleet. Texas data cited by NRDC found that six power plants that received presidential exemptions collectively increased their sulfur dioxide emissions by 48 percent in a single year.
By September 2025, EPA employment had fallen from more than 17,000 to 15,166 staff, a reduction of nearly 2,000 employees in less than a year. The Fish and Wildlife Service lost 1,817 staff; the National Park Service lost more than 2,700; and the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service together shed over 7,000 workers. The Sierra Club documented that a spending bill passed the House cutting the Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget by 44 percent, which advocates warned would hamstring the agency’s ability to list endangered species.
EPA directed its in-house career scientists to stop publishing their research, removed the agency’s scientific integrity policy from its website, and proposed to zero out the budget for ORD’s research functions on PFAS, air pollutants, and wildfire smoke. According to Earthjustice, EPA also created a new office nominally focused on science but placed it directly under the Office of the Administrator, removing independent scientific oversight.
In September, 2025, EPA proposed to eliminate the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which requires approximately 50 categories of large industrial facilities to disclose their emissions annually. The reporting program is the primary source of facility-level emissions data used by researchers, regulators, and investors to track industrial pollution. Without it, independent monitoring of whether industry is reducing emissions becomes functionally impossible.
November–December 2025: Water Protections and Vehicle Standards Targeted
On November 17, 2025, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a new “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule that would dramatically narrow which wetlands and waterways receive federal Clean Water Act protection—going further than even the 2023 Supreme Court Sackett decision required. The proposal would exclude groundwater, interstate waters that lack continuous surface flow, and tens of millions of acres of seasonal wetlands and headwater streams from federal jurisdiction.
A 2025 analysis by NRDC found that between 38 million and 70 million acres of wetlands could be at risk of unregulated pollution or destruction under the proposed rule. “This is one of the most significant setbacks to clean water protections in half a century,” said Betsy Southerland, former director of EPA’s Office of Science and Technology. Wetlands help filter drinking water, absorb floodwaters, and support fisheries and biodiversity. These roles are even more important as climate change leads to stronger storms.
December 3: The Department of Transportation proposed rolling back Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for model years 2022–2031, reversing efficiency targets set under both Obama and the first Trump administration. The proposal would significantly slow the transition to electric vehicles, increasing long-term fossil fuel demand and tailpipe pollution. Transportation represents 30 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—the largest single economic sector.
Also, last December, the EPA published a final rule weakening nitrogen oxide standards for new power plants, reducing projected reductions from 2,700 tons per year (as originally proposed) to just 300 tons by 2032. Nitrogen oxides are a primary precursor of ground-level ozone (smog), which aggravates asthma, reduces lung function, and is linked to premature death.
February 12, 2026: The Endangerment Finding Falls
On February 12, 2026, the Trump administration finalized the repeal of the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases—the legal determination, developed by 31 climate scientists and reviewed by NASA, NOAA, the USDA Forest Service, and other federal agencies, that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The repeal simultaneously eliminated vehicle house gas emission standards.
Scientists responded loudly. Benjamin DeAngelo, who led the original 2009 document, told Earth.Org: “Looking back on the original 2009 Endangerment Finding, and all of the supporting science and responses to comments, the entire record still holds up incredibly well.” Professor Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said there is “no legitimate scientific rationale” for the EPA’s decision. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine independently reviewed the finding in 2025 and concluded it was accurate and stood the test of time.
The Brookings Institution noted that the repeal’s internal logic—that U.S. vehicle emissions alone are too small to justify regulation—could be extended to justify eliminating any individual sector’s emissions rules, effectively making all sectoral climate regulation legally indefensible. The Rhodium Group estimated U.S. emissions would now decline to only 26–35% below 2005 levels by 2035, compared to 32–44% with regulations in place—a gap of hundreds of millions of tons of additional CO2 annually.
Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the repeal’s systemic significance as a loss of “the foundation on which all of the other regulations rest.” A 2025 study cited by TIME magazine found that air pollution from oil and gas operations is responsible for more than 91,000 premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional health incidents across the U.S. each year, with Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic communities consistently most affected.
February 2026: Mercury Standards Repealed
In the same period, EPA announced the repeal of the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, reverting to weaker 2012-era limits. The Environmental Protection Network warned the repeal “will allow hundreds of facilities across 45 states to avoid meeting critical safety standards—jeopardizing public health, degrading ecosystems, and disproportionately harming children, pregnant people, and communities already overburdened by pollution.”
The rollback of mercury standards especially affects subsistence fishing communities, including many tribal nations, and low-income households that rely on fish for protein.
Mercury builds up in fish tissue, so even small increases in mercury in the environment lead to more human exposure. A substantial body of peer-reviewed research, including a 2016 PNAS study and a 2021 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health white paper, has shown that the mercury-related health benefits of MATS are orders of magnitude larger than the EPA estimated in its 2011 analysis, yet the EPA continued to rely on that outdated science to justify weakening the rule.
What Experts Say: The Cumulative Public Health Toll
The Environmental Protection Network’s February 2026 report identified 12 high-risk pollutants that are gaining “new life” due to weakened, delayed, or rescinded regulations. The list includes brain-damaging mercury and pesticides in food, hormone-disrupting phthalates in consumer products, cancer-causing PFAS in drinking water, lead, arsenic, and trichloroethylene in water, and carcinogens benzene, formaldehyde, and vinyl chloride in air, along with heart- and lung-damaging soot and smog.
“Political leadership is steering the agency away from its responsibility to protect human health and the environment,” said EPN senior director Marc Boom. “Making Americans safer is a choice, and EPA’s current leadership has chosen to make Americans sicker.”
“When people of expertise and competence leave the government, you cannot find them and rehire them and reassemble them into teams very quickly,” said former EPA Deputy Administrator Stan Meiburg, cautioning that the scientific case for re-regulating after the current administration ends will be even more difficult than it was in 2009. John Holdren, former White House science advisor, echoed this concern: “It has long been understood that good policy depends on careful analysis and good science, and we’re seeing the capacity to deliver that foundation systematically undermined.”
What You Can Do
Federal protections are now weaker, but actions by individuals, communities, and states can still help reduce exposure and push for stronger protections. Here are steps you can take at each level:
Check your local air quality daily at AirNow.gov, particularly if you live near industrial facilities, highways, or coal plants. On high-pollution days, reduce outdoor exercise and keep windows closed.
Reduce fish consumption from water bodies with mercury advisories. Find your state’s current advisories through the EPA’s fish advisory database before eating locally caught fish. For more on sustainable seafood choices, see Earth911’s “How You Can Help Protect Our Oceans”.
Reduce household PFAS exposure by avoiding non-stick cookware, water-resistant clothing treated with PFAS finishes, and microwave popcorn bags. Earth911’s “PFAS Contaminants: Where They Came From, Why They Persist & What We Can Do” covers the full landscape of exposure sources and emerging remediation approaches.
For your community:
Submit public comments on pending EPA rulemakings—including the proposed WOTUS rule and PFAS reporting rollback. Find open comment periods and submit directly at regulations.gov. To understand what’s at stake for wetlands specifically, see Earth911’s interview “Exploring America’s 110 Million Acres of Wetlands”.
Contact your state environmental agency to understand whether your state has adopted stronger standards. Many states—including California, New York, and Oregon—maintain air and water protections that exceed weakened federal minimums. Find your state agency through the Environmental Council of the States directory.
Support organizations litigating these rollbacks: Earthjustice, NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and state attorneys general coalitions are all actively challenging these rules in court.
At the policy level:
Contact your senators and representative through congress.gov and urge them to codify key environmental protections, including the statutory basis for greenhouse gas regulation, removing them from executive discretion.
Since the 1970s, when democracy functions, the nation has unequivocally emphasized human and environmental protection, which was a product of a bipartisan approach led by a Democratic Congress and Republican presidents, from Nixon to Bush II. Make your voice heard in the 2026 midterm elections.
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.
Andrea Santy, program director of XPRIZE Wildfire, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.
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.
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.
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