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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zachary Lauer  4:54

Doing great.

Amy Fernandez  4:55

Great, great. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:57

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

Zachary Lauer  5:16

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:09

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

Zachary Lauer  6:30

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:17

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

Zachary Lauer  7:36

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

Amy Fernandez  8:10

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:31

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

Amy Fernandez  8:58

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:51

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

Amy Fernandez  9:56

Yes.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:58

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

Amy Fernandez  10:19

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:39

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

Amy Fernandez  11:49

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

Zachary Lauer  12:22

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:29

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

Zachary Lauer  12:40

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

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

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

Amy Fernandez  14:14

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:35

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

Zachary Lauer  14:57

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:51

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

Zachary Lauer  16:20

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:55

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

Zachary Lauer  18:23

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:34

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

Zachary Lauer  20:02

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

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

Amy Fernandez  21:09

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

Zachary Lauer  21:30

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:36

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

Zachary Lauer  22:43

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:59

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

Amy Fernandez  23:17

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

Zachary Lauer  24:04

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:25

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

Zachary Lauer  24:36

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

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

Amy Fernandez  25:27

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:35

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

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

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

Amy Fernandez  26:30

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:23

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

Amy Fernandez  27:42

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:43

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

Amy Fernandez  29:25

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:28

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

Zachary Lauer  30:39

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:41

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

Zachary Lauer  32:05

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:35

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

Zachary Lauer  33:50

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

Amy Fernandez  34:22

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:04

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

Amy Fernandez  35:08

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:22

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

Zachary Lauer  35:42

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:33

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

Amy Fernandez  36:49

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:18

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

Zachary Lauer  37:18

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:25

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

Amy Fernandez  38:49

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:15

It could go longer.

Amy Fernandez  40:16

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

Zachary Lauer  40:28

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:39

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

Amy Fernandez  41:17

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

Zachary Lauer  41:20

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:49

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

Zachary Lauer  42:04

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:08

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

Zachary Lauer  43:19

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:50

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

Amy Fernandez  43:57

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

Zachary Lauer  44:10

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

Amy Fernandez  44:36

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  44:41

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

Amy Fernandez  44:50

Thank you, Mitch. It’s our pleasure.

Zachary Lauer  44:52

Thank you.

Mitch Ratcliffe  44:53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.

Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn’t carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all “processed,” and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We’re not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.

To learn more about IFT’s work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  (0:09)

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in 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. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

We’re going to talk about food. Food is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, and the climate is now responsible for a growing share of what happens to our food. Food systems face dramatic challenges. Droughts are reshaping olive country in the Mediterranean. Warming oceans are increasing the frequency of shellfish pathogen outbreaks. Hurricanes are taking out manufacturing facilities. Sea level rise may flood key ports where food flows, and fluctuating precipitation is driving mycotoxin contamination in crops. And that’s only a partial list.

The food system must feed 8 billion people while the conditions it was designed for are unwinding underneath it. Meanwhile, the public conversation about food and climate gets stuck at the two ends of the chain: agriculture on one side, consumer choice on the other. But our guest today wants us to pay attention to what happens in between—the processing, packaging, distribution, and storage that turn a fall harvest into something you can eat in February. That middle segment is where a quarter century of food science meets the climate problem, and where most of the practical levers actually live.

Brendan Niemira is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a Chicago-based scientific association that has served as the voice of the global food science community since 1939. Its 200,000-member network spans academia, government, and industry. He stepped into this role on December 1, 2025, after more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, where he led a team of more than 30 scientists, engineers, and students developing tools to kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish.

Brendan’s specialty is non-thermal food safety systems that use cold plasma, high-intensity monochromatic light, irradiation, and pulsed light treatments to disinfect food without cooking it. He’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds patents on the technology, and the 2024 citation rankings place him in the top 0.01% of food scientists worldwide.

Brendan joins IFT at a moment when food science is being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, climate pressure on supply chains, food safety, and resource efficiency is intensifying—the subject of IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap for circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, food waste valorization, and emerging technologies like cellular agriculture and precision fermentation—that is, growing food in vats.

On the other side, the public and political conversation about food is fixated on ultra-processed food, and the MAHA Commission—the Make America Healthy Again Commission—frames processing itself as the central problem rather than part of the solution. IFT has been one of the loudest scientific voices arguing for definitions grounded in nutritional quality rather than processing intensity. That’s a position that’s both scientifically defensible and complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes much of the food industry.

So we’re going to talk with Brendan about what the climate case for a redesign of the food system is, what IFT’s recent white paper does and doesn’t quantify, and where precision fermentation and cellular agriculture actually stand in 2026. We’ll also look into why food safety remains under-researched within climate science, and how IFT is navigating the MAHA debate. To learn more about IFT’s work, visit ift.org; the white paper we’ll be discussing is available there as well.

The climate fight runs through the food we eat, but most of the action is happening in the part of the supply chain that nobody sees. So let’s find out what Brendan Niemira sees right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

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

Brendan Niemira  (4:46)

I’m doing great, Mitch. How are you?

Mitch Ratcliffe  (4:49)

I’m well. It’s a beautiful morning here in Southern Oregon, and I’m excited about this conversation. You spent 25 years at the USDA. What does the food system look like from this new vantage point at IFT? How’s it different from the perspective at the lab bench?

Brendan Niemira  (4:59)

Well, first let me say that I really enjoyed being a scientist for the USDA. There were a lot of great scientists working at the USDA, and I was absolutely proud to be one of them. Even with the recent losses, there are great scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts in different areas of the federal research continuum. The research done in those labs remains a crucial part of the overall science landscape for the US.

My work as a food microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service was focused on food safety and advanced food processing technologies—again, to improve food safety and extend shelf life. Now, as the Chief Science and Technology Officer for IFT, I get to engage with all of the technical areas of food science: microbiology, chemistry, sensory science, sustainability, food laws, and regulations. I also get to engage in the larger space around advocacy and science communication. I get to work with colleagues across the whole food system—all the way from primary producers like farmers and ranchers, to processors, product developers, all the way to nutritionists and retailers. So I get a much bigger-picture view.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (5:56)

When you think of it from that perspective—from the industry side—what do you think the key issues we need to consider as a nation are in our food system as it stands today?

Brendan Niemira  (6:08)

Food has to be safe, healthy, and wholesome, but it also has to be available, it has to be sustainable, and it has to be the kind of food that people will want to eat. It doesn’t matter if you produce something that’s super healthy and even super affordable; if it doesn’t meet the cultural needs of what people want to eat, if it doesn’t meet their expectations for how it looks, how it tastes, how it performs in their lifestyle, then it’s going to stay on the shelves, and all that science that you did to produce this product is not going to be any good, because it’s not going to provide any nutritional benefit to people.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (6:43)

IFT draws a sharp line between food processing—what you do to the ingredients—and food formulation, which is the ingredient list itself. Why does that distinction matter, and why has the public conversation lost that distinction?

Brendan Niemira  (6:56)

Well, we draw that distinction because if you take either one of those aspects alone—just the ingredient list, or just the ingredient processing—neither one is going to give you a complete indication of the healthfulness or the nutrient value of the food. If you use either one just as a simple shorthand—you say, well, there’s a certain thing on the list of ingredients, or a certain thing was done to that stuff—you miss the mark. You’re going to have to take both of them into account to look at the total healthfulness of the food.

Part of the issue with the public conversation is that, frankly, it’s a little bit more straightforward to give short, simple messages about which foods are healthy and which foods are not. Look for this ingredient, or look for that processing step, and it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The fact that it’s simple is true, even if those short, simple messages don’t give a complete or, frankly, a fully accurate picture. Food is more complicated than that, and complicated stories are harder to tell.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (7:53)

Our dialogue is, let’s just say, relatively simplistic right now. Are we diverging from the real issues we need to be exploring as a nation when we talk about the MAHA concerns?

Brendan Niemira  (8:05)

Science communication tries to make complex issues of science and nutrition, nutritional availability—even getting to things like cultural tolerance, cultural acceptability, economics, and all that sort of stuff—it tries to make these very complex issues understandable. Not everybody is a nutritionist; not everybody is an economist. People just want to be able to get food that they want to feed their family. They want it to be safe, they want it to be healthy, they want to be able to afford it, they want to be able to provide for their family, and they want to be able to enjoy it.

Food is about more than just nutrition. Food is about culture, food is about satisfaction, food is about joy. Those are things that simple stories can speak to, but the science behind this can be very complicated. So it’s the job of us here at IFT, and the job, really, of all science communicators, to take these complicated issues and present accurate, factual, complicated science information in a way that people can understand, and that they can use to make decisions on.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (9:08)

Having written about technology and sustainability and a variety of things over the years, I find that one of the challenges is that experts resort to their jargon, partly because it’s shorthand—it makes it easier to say something to somebody else—but it relies on an understanding of that jargon. Are we at an inflection point? I hate to put it this way, but is Bobby Kennedy simplifying this conversation in an important way?

Brendan Niemira  (9:36)

This is why science communication is a distinct discipline. You can be a terrific microbiologist or chemist or toxicologist or nutritionist or economist, but if you’re not able to communicate to people outside of your discipline, then you run the risk of miscommunication, where you’re trying to say something but you’re just not communicating accurately. And unfortunately, you also set up a situation where people can take what you say in your good-faith effort to explain it properly, take a word here or a sentence or a phrase, and things get misunderstood or taken out of context. When people draw conclusions from material that is misinterpreted, then base decisions on that, or policies based on that, you can get to a point where the science is over here, the communication is in the middle, it gets a little bit muddled, and then policies arising from that are based on something not directly related to what the science is actually telling you.

That’s why we try to support good science communication and try to give people tools to communicate the science. At IFT we bring a lot of different scientists together in different disciplines, and we try to give them the tools to make sure that people are understanding their science and connecting on it appropriately.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (10:56)

I think that’s a really important point: that we need to create full access to the conversation, so people who want to dig in further can go further and learn more, in order to deepen their understanding of the decisions they face, either as a consumer or as a policymaker. I’ll just give a quick shout-out to ift.org. We have lots and lots of information—some of which is intended for scientists, technicians, food scientists, and food technologists, and is very jargon-heavy—but we have a lot of information that is intended for the general public to consume, and that is intended for decision-makers in industry, academia, and government.

A moment ago, you talked about the food system needing to be sustainable. A recent meta-analysis found that processing, packaging, transport, and retail steps in the food process account for just a modest share of the overall greenhouse gas footprint of our food system—farm production and distribution account for most of the rest. If most of food’s climate damage is upstream, how big a sustainability lever can processing innovation actually be? Can we really lower the overall impact of our food?

Brendan Niemira  (12:03)

Well, you’re absolutely right, a lot of the impact is on primary production, and that’s why people are also working on reducing the carbon footprint, water usage, and overall sustainability impact at the primary production stage: farms, ranches, fisheries. If you go talk to groups like the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Meat Science Association—all those folks—they are working hard. They’re doing all of that science to develop and implement ways to improve sustainability in terms of carbon footprint, water-use efficiency, land-use programs, wildlife setbacks, insect refugia, and a host of other approaches.

Now, IFT does food. We do food processing, food science, food technology. So we are in the center part of that continuum, but we are actively working with those other scientific organizations to support the work that falls under those sectors, the overall food system, and to improve what we can do in processing, packaging, transport, retail, and so on.

Mitch, I would say this is one of those cases where we can’t allow ourselves to be tripped up by the false thinking that if we can’t do everything, then we shouldn’t do anything. Our Sustainable Food Systems interest group is an active and vibrant part of all the food science that we support. There’s a lot of communication between what they are doing and what other efforts are underway in other societies and other parts of it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (13:26)

Absolutely—we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress. We have to take important steps.

Brendan Niemira  (13:31)

Here at IFT, we’re doing what we can, and we are supporting the other people that are working in their areas as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (13:37)

When I read the white paper that I mentioned in the introduction, there was not a lot of quantified environmental data, but it seems to me that what you’re saying is that that’s an area we really need to dig into now. How do we do that?

Brendan Niemira  (13:50)

It’s by talking to people who are on the ground doing that work. I would not sit back here as somebody who focuses on food production and food science and go talk to a soil scientist and tell them what to do, or what they should be doing, or what I think is most important in their area. When we’re all focused on the same overall goal of improving sustainability and reducing the impact of how we grow, how we harvest, how we process, how we ship, and how we consume our foods, then we need to listen to each other. There are people who have expertise in lots of different areas.

Our food is complicated. People think, well, there’s an apple on the shelf, or there’s some hamburger in the cooler. Food is complicated—it really truly is. And all of the different people that are contributing in all the different ways, all up and down across the food system, the food continuum—we need to draw on their expertise and get together to solve problems that will work across the entire system. If one person working on just one part of it rolls out a solution and says, ‘Yep, I’ve done my thing, and all the rest of you should change to do what I want,’ then that may not be a usable solution, because it breaks other parts of the system. There has to be a holistic approach.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (15:04)

As you say that, I realize how hard it is just to get food from my garden at the beginning of the season onto a plate at the end of the year.

Brendan Niemira  (15:12)

Yeah, and that’s encompassing. There are different people who grow different products, different commodities, different regions. You grow different kinds of tomatoes in different parts of the country, and there are different ways of growing food. Even on a very, very small scale, it gets to be very complicated. You have to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge, a lot of different kinds of infrastructure, a lot of different kinds of expertise and equipment, and so on. Plus, you have to comply with different regulations, different laws controlling different sorts of commodities in different parts of the country at different times of the year. All of this knowledge has to come together and be brought to bear on the problem.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (15:50)

Again, it’s a huge storytelling problem, but we have to look at this as a system rather than a bunch of separate parts that don’t necessarily interact with everything else.

Brendan Niemira  (15:58)

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s all one. That’s why we talk about the food system and the food continuum, because going right from primary production through all the various stages of getting food to you, and then on the back side, taking food waste—say, away from restaurants at their point of sale, point of service, point of consumption—some of those aspects of where the food goes, and what kind of advantages we can gain from paying attention to where those nutrients are ending up.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (16:26)

One of the other—and probably the most shocking—parts of the white paper that I read was how our dietary recommendations are being undercut by climate change. For instance, the Mediterranean diet is recommended; it consists of olives, olive oil, tree nuts. But those come from regions that are warming 20% faster than the rest of the globe. How should we think about US dietary guidelines in terms of how climate stress is going to change the availability of food over the course of the next decades?

Brendan Niemira  (16:58)

I think it starts with a clear-eyed understanding of what it takes to grow, deliver, and consume food. If you’re saying, well, I’m going to lean into one kind of a diet or another—whether it’s the Mediterranean diet or other specialty diets, either recommended by your doctor, by a nutritionist, or recommended by your own cultural or societal predilections—where does that food come from? Is it grown locally? Is it shipped far away? Does it come from other parts of the country? Does it come from other countries?

And then you have to understand: this is what food costs—not just the money, but in terms of the carbon you’re using to produce the food, the water, the land use. Once you have that accurate information and you have an accurate understanding of what goes into producing the food, then you can start to make some other decisions about the health and nutritional benefits of the food that you’re consuming, or one aspect of it, and then you can make other decisions about the other sustainability parts of how you’re getting your food and how you’re eating it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (18:07)

You mentioned the cuts we’ve seen in federal research recently. As a microbiologist, where do you think federal climate-health research should be focused at this point?

Brendan Niemira  (18:17)

My specific work with food microbiology was in food safety, and so I was always very concerned with understanding the risks for human pathogens on foods. Despite the best efforts of food producers, you still do have instances where you have E. coli, salmonella, or listeria on one commodity or another. The way that you respond to that—there’s a sort of three-legged stool of responding to a food safety problem from a microbiology and food safety standpoint.

You can prevent these harmful organisms from being on your food commodity in the first place—that’s called exclusion. That’s where you do water quality monitoring, you do land-use history analysis, you do exclusion activities to make sure that the bad bacteria or viruses or parasites don’t get on the food in the first place.

Then you have containment, which is a monitoring system. That’s where you do continuous testing of foods being produced at the point of production, point of packaging, when they’re in shipping. Sometimes you pull samples, you hold them back a little bit, you test to make sure there are no pathogens on them, and then if you find any, that’s when you do the recalls and the trace-back analysis. Our Global Food Traceability Center at IFT is working very hard to develop protocols so that if we have a problem, we know where it came from, we can trace that back, we can isolate it, and we can contain it.

Then the third leg of the stool is eradication—that is to say, you apply techniques and technologies that will eradicate potential organisms. In one big way, we heat. If you’ve got ground beef, you can cook that ground beef, and you apply a thermal process that kills any potential E. coli or anything that might be on it. Now, heat is one technique, but you can’t apply that to lettuce. That doesn’t really work, which is why my research—and other people’s research—is working on other kinds of processing technologies that you can apply to more sensitive foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, berries, melons, other sorts of more sensitive products. Different kinds of novel sanitizers in the organic space, non-thermal processing technologies, other sorts of interventions that will kill the organism so they can’t cause any harm. So you’ve got exclusion, containment, and eradication, and all these different efforts working together. Those are the kinds of research that you’re going to do to have a good food safety impact.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (20:56)

Well, because exclusion is getting harder—because of the rising temperatures globally encouraging the growth of more pathogens, or at least the propagation of more pathogens—it sounds like that’s raising the bar for containment and recall.

Brendan Niemira  (21:09)

Yeah. If you find yourself in a situation where one of those things is not an option, or you’re not able to do it as well as you were before, then you lean into the other two. If effective technologies for eradication don’t exist, well, that’s where you need to put some research dollars in to create them.

I’ll give you an example. Years and years ago, we had lots and lots of outbreaks on sprouts. Sprouts were the cause of continuous outbreaks again and again, and research was put into place to find: how can we eliminate E. coli and salmonella on sprouts so they can be as safe, healthy, and wholesome as they can possibly be? But just because we were working on eradication steps does not mean we were ignoring the other two. There were things like seed certification processes to make sure the seed coming into these sprouting facilities is as healthy as it can be. There were containment efforts—let’s do better trace-back analysis, let’s do better testing, so that we know what’s on there, so we can act when we find it.

So it’s not a case of, ‘Well, we’re just going to work on one and ignore the other two.’ You’ve got to have an understanding of what the problem is. You can address all the different aspects of science at once. I would say this is one of the issues that happens when you start to see cuts in science: then you have to start making some hard decisions—well, we’re going to dial back on one and we’re going to keep our remaining resources and put them into one of the others. Maybe you’re leaving yourself in a situation where two years from now or five years from now, you might say to yourself, ‘Darn, I really wish we’d been working on that.’

Mitch Ratcliffe  (22:45)

Do you think that the private sector can step into the gap that has opened? Or are we really at a point where we need to seriously reconsider our federal funding for food science research?

Brendan Niemira  (22:55)

Private funding—corporate funding—has always been a huge part of food science research. Companies fund their own research, and then there’s funding through grants and consortia funding larger works. Industry funds provide grants for academic researchers, and academic research is a huge part of this. Government research is a huge part of this. And in a time when you’re looking at research funding that is cut or under threat, one of the unwanted outcomes is that there’s research that’s not being done.

Some of our advocacy priorities at IFT include seeing that we want food science research—including food microbiology, food safety, food toxicology, whether it’s chemical toxicology, chemical safety issues, or biological safety issues. We want to see that funding. We’d like to see it increase, honestly, but at least we’d like to see it not cut. Because you can’t have good data without good science, and you can’t make good decisions without good data. So, if you want to be able to make good decisions and develop good policies, you need good data, and for that, you need good science.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (24:10)

We certainly have had a foundation of solid data in the United States for the past 50 years. I think we’ve got a great sense of the problems that we need to talk about. Let’s take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to come right back and talk more with Brendan.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to the conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a 200,000-member network focused on food production and safety.

Brendan, let’s talk about bugs. The paper discusses a Costa Rican study where they’re taking a variety of food waste to farm edible insects. What’s the realistic potential for adoption of food made of insect protein in the United States, and is there a path even to regulatory approval for that in this day and age?

Brendan Niemira  (25:07)

Okay, here’s the thing. I actually just wrote a book chapter on edible insects and digging into all the ins and outs of this, so I happen to have a lot of this fresh in my mind. There are only a very small number of animals that we can take things that humans can’t eat—like cellulose—and convert. Humans can’t eat grass; humans can’t digest grass or the cellulosic material. Historically, the way that we have made cellulose into something that we can eat is to feed it to an animal and then eat the animal. Right now we do that with cows and other ruminants.

But you can do that with crickets. Crickets have some advantages over cows: they use a lot less space, they have a shorter generation time, so you can be more responsive to market changes, they use less water, they use less energy, and so on. But then at the end of the day, you have this insect protein, and what’s the realistic prospect for that?

I would say that, because of the cultural nature of Western society, Western society does not have a cultural heritage of entomophagy—eating bugs. That’s the Greek word for it. There are other parts of the world that do have a cultural heritage of this, and so they have lower cultural barriers to having insect proteins as part of the diet, either as just edible insects—as a commodity, where you look down and say, hey, here’s a cinnamon-crunch-flavored cricket. These are products that are on the market.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (26:44)

I’ve tried these. They’re not the worst thing in the world, but they’re also not something that most people would pop in their mouth at a movie theater.

Brendan Niemira  (26:50)

Well, certainly not in the US, and not in most Western societies that derive their cultural heritage from Europe. So if you’re not going to have these things that are identifiable as an insect, could you have insect protein powder as part of an insect supplement? I think these things are still in the market. I’ve tried it. I’ve got insect powder, and—you know, put my money where my mouth is—I’ve made brownies and cookies with cricket powder. They taste like brownies and cookies. It was okay.

As a large-scale process, I think you have to start with the cultural issue and the consumer issue, because if you’re going to make a product that—let’s generalize—very few people want to buy, it’s a very, very niche product. Then you are going to have that process remain a niche process, and so the overall impact on large issues of sustainability, or carbon usage, or moving away from conventional animal sources or plant sources of protein, is going to be kind of limited.

Where you might see much more of a penetration, however, is in taking these insect protein sources and using them as feeds for aquaculture. Right now, fish are not really able to digest soybean meal very well, so you can’t raise fish the same way that you raise cows and chickens. They’re trying to work to breed new kinds of trout, let’s say, that are better able to use soybean meals so you can get some of those economies of scale. But if you can lean into insect protein production, you essentially use the insect farms almost as a kind of bioreactor to turn cellulose—indigestible cellulose—into a digestible form of protein that can then be processed through aquaculture or chicken farms, conventional animal agriculture, that then would go into the human food supply.

I think it is still kind of a long way away, at least in the United States, from a time when insect proteins are going to be a significant or a major part of our daily diet. The FDA rules on insect proteins and edible insects, right now, are that they have to be safe and wholesome. They have to be tested for human pathogens, and so on. These insects have to be in a production facility that is dedicated to that production—they cannot be wild caught. So you can’t just go out into your local meadow and swing a net and start collecting crickets. They have to—

Mitch Ratcliffe  (29:30)

They might be contaminated with pesticides.

Brendan Niemira  (29:33)

Pesticides, who knows—there might be other pathogens on them, there might be fungi on them, there might be potentially heavy metal contamination. So these have to be grown in a dedicated production facility. The FDA is certainly on the ball in terms of having an understanding of the potential risks for some of these things, and they have put rules in place to make sure that if insects are produced as human food, they adhere to safety rules and regulations.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (29:58)

The metaphor of the insect as a bioreactor with legs makes a lot of sense to me. But precision fermentation using bioreactors is another one of the paper’s big bets, and I’ve personally been involved in trying to raise some funding to create dairy proteins using acetate fermentation, which would reduce the need for concentrated animal feeding operations, so dairy’s environmental impact could be drastically reduced. Can you explain how precision fermentation works for our listeners?

Brendan Niemira  (30:30)

Sure, absolutely. Precision fermentation is a really fascinating area of research right now. The work that we’re doing with whole genome sequencing and proteomics and metabolomics has just led to opening a whole new chapter in what we’re doing with fermentation.

What is precision fermentation, versus conventional fermentation? People have been fermenting foods for thousands of years, relying on yeast and bacteria to process raw ingredients and turn them into edible foods—everything from beer to bread to kimchi. Those microorganisms only ate certain things, and from a metabolic standpoint, they only produced certain things. They were useful because they were able to break down cellulose and hemicellulose into digestible sugars for humans. They’re able to take food which was not edible or provided very little nutritive value, into things that do provide nutritive value for us when we consume them.

But because it was gathering wild strains—and even after you get into the Louis Pasteur days of breeding new strains of yeast to make better beer—it was still kind of old-school breeding to get better fermentation cultures. Now, thanks to modern food science, we can really dig into the cellular, molecular microbial ecology. I mentioned whole genome sequencing, microbial community metabolomics, and so on. We can specify what metabolite or nutrient we want to produce, and we can design a multi-species microbial ecology that will produce it, and we can do that based on specific inputs.

Bacteria in the wild almost never live alone. You never have one species of bacteria; you have multiple species of bacteria all working together in conjunction with other kinds of fungi, and so on, to produce lots of different kinds of metabolites. Now we have a much greater understanding of that multi-species microbial economy.

The way I like to think of it is, if you imagine Little House on the Prairie, and you’ve got families—settlers—going out into this wide-open space, and you’ve got 50 families in some state, they establish a town, and that town behaves in a certain way. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if you introduce one person that comes in and opens up a church, and now the behavior of the town changes. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if one person comes into town and opens up a casino. If you have a church and a casino, even though they represent only very minor components of the overall population, they create this incredibly complex interaction—metabolomics, consumption, behavior. You get complex inputs, complex outputs.

Up till the last 10 years, a lot of this stuff has just been so complicated, such a black box. We have a good understanding now—a much clearer understanding. So we can take side-stream products from food processing, we can take waste-stream products from food waste, and we can lean into precision fermentation, design communities of microbes, give them the feedstocks that we want, and we can get valuable nutrients out the other side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (33:48)

What can we make?

Brendan Niemira  (33:50)

Well, if you want to make lactic acid, you want to make certain kinds of vitamins, you want to make certain kinds of proteins, you want to do conversions of things. There are a lot of things that are useful in the food industry. You can make surfactants, you can make flocculants. Flocculants are stuff that, if you’ve got a bunch of solids suspended in material, you add a flocculant, and it causes everything to clump together and drop out, so you get clean water out the other side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (34:19)

So, to put a finer point on it, we can make both food materials and materials that help us process a variety of things, including our waste.

Brendan Niemira  (34:29)

Correct. Absolutely. Flocculants are used very extensively in wastewater production, where you’ve got a lot of suspended organic matter, or you’ve got a lot of other suspended material. You add in some flocculants, all that stuff clumps up, and it drops out, and that really simplifies the process of filtration and cleaning the water, so you can get clean water back into the environment.

From a food standpoint—stepping away from the wastewater stuff—let’s say that you’re producing beer, you’re producing wine, you’re producing yogurt, you’re producing some other kind of liquid product. You might add one of these ingredients to cause oil droplets to remain suspended, or to cause sediments to drop out, or to give you better colors, or to give you different kinds of nutrients, or different kinds of vitamin production. All of these things can be the result of precision fermentation, because we have that understanding of what the microbes are doing, what they’re eating, and what they’re producing.

There’s a lot of research that’s going into this right now to work out those molecular details, those metabolomics details, and the position is to scale it up and then put it through its paces. Let’s get that cost engineering analysis. Let’s scale it up; see what’s it going to cost, where the weak points are, where we need to improve. So that you can then feed into developing a business case around it, selling your product, and working on consumer acceptance to get stuff out in the real world.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (35:51)

Going back to simplification: what we’re talking about is that we have been farming as a species now for 25,000 years with macro-level cattle and products. Where we are moving now is micro-scale relationships with nature that allow us to produce our food and other forms of materials and supplies.

Brendan Niemira  (36:14)

Right. So in conventional agriculture, let’s be generous—there are 50 species of animals that we use in animal agriculture, and these animals are used to take things that we can’t eat and turn them into things that we can eat or things that we want to eat. You’ve got cows, you’ve got chickens, you’ve got hogs, you’ve got goats, sheep, and so on. But it’s a relatively short list.

If you’re going from conventional vertebrate animals to insects, there are thousands and thousands of species of insects, only a small handful of which have really been looked at for optimization. Each one is capable of metabolizing different sorts of things, they live in different kinds of communities. And when you then go to the microbial world, you’ve got millions of kinds of organisms that you can use, and if you look at the different kinds of microbial community combinations, the numbers scale incredibly—like trillions of different kinds of combinations of microbial communities that you can create and cultivate and use in these bioreactor kind of environments, each of which eats different things and produces different things.

The goal is always to produce food and nutrients and food processing materials that are safe, healthy, wholesome, available, and sustainable. When you start to lift your eyes up to the skies and see all the possibilities out there, it really becomes—I don’t want to say magical, because I’m a scientist—but it becomes amazing to think about all the things that we could do if we were able to lean into the kind of science that would allow us to take advantage of all these different things.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (38:02)

It is magical in the sense that Arthur C. Clarke meant it: any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic until it becomes normalized.

Brendan Niemira  (38:11)

Just imagine that you had some kind of a tank and you put in garbage and you get out gumdrops. Wow, that’s magic. Well, okay, obviously we’re oversimplifying, because there are all the various steps involved in that. But at IFT, what we’re trying to do is bring together all of the different food scientists and food technologists who have the knowledge that will allow us to do some of those things—to increase the food supply, make it safer, make it more wholesome, make it more available, and do it in a way that people can access and that they can have knowledge and confidence in using.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (38:50)

Another topic in the paper was cultivated meats, and this is something that we’ve had folks on the show talking about several times. In 2013, a burger grown in the lab cost about $300,000, and it’s under $40 today. We’re talking about meat that is coming out of a lab, not something processed to appear like meat. Where’s that technology realistically today? Because that number is 10 years old.

Brendan Niemira  (39:16)

It’s getting better. I don’t recall exactly what the latest numbers on that are—whether it’s gone down to $20 or $15 or where it is—but this is one of the big areas of technology that people are looking at. Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted this back in 1955, but actually, I believe it was Winston Churchill who predicted this. I’m trying to remember the quote, but he said something like, someday we’re going to be able to raise chicken legs without having to raise a whole chicken.

Are we there yet? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but there’s been a lot of work that’s been done on this. Cellular agriculture, now, to create meat cells, whether they’re from pork or beef or chicken or fish, to grow these out so that they look, taste, perform, and smell like—I’m not saying like the real thing, because they are the real thing, and this is ultimately what it is, but like conventional, traditional things that everybody is used to.

Part of the work that’s gone into it has been to show that, yeah, you can do this—you can produce these, and they look like a burger, tastes like a burger. But can you do it in a way that’s going to allow you to make that available to people, so that it’s not just a very, very billionaire niche novelty product? That’s part of the challenge, but I think that’s part of the challenge with any kind of food technology innovation.

Mitch, you start in the lab, and you begin with saying, well, is this even possible? And once you’ve demonstrated that it’s possible, then you start to develop that out, and you say, well, how do we lean into some of the engineering stuff to make it realistic, and realism falls in—what people will be willing to buy, from a cultural acceptability standpoint, from their expectation of what food is, how much it’s going to cost, how available it’s going to be, and what are the inputs necessary to create it? That’ll dictate a lot of the overall feel and the overall landscape in which these new products are going to operate.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (41:36)

It’s a data problem to a very great degree, and one of the areas the paper goes into in depth is how AI-driven supply chain modeling and various forms of traceability can perform as climate adaptation tools. Where are those technologies actually deployed today at commercial scale that you might be aware of? And do you have any evidence that they’re actually reducing emissions, reducing the overall impact of our food system on the planet?

Brendan Niemira  (42:00)

A lot of the AI tools—I can tell you what the AI tools are doing now, and probably by the time this show airs, they might have changed.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (42:09)

Obsolescence is an hourly thing today.

Brendan Niemira  (42:12)

AI tools are moving so fast. But AI is one of those areas where, if you want to know how much something costs, or how much water you’re using to produce it, or how much of an impact you’re having—being able to go into the data and ask sophisticated questions of complicated datasets is one of the things that AI is very, very good at. It does it quickly, so you can get to: what are the trends, what are the key points, what are the key pain points, where do we need to lean in and do more research and do better, so that we can get a better outcome on the back side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (42:48)

So we’re just beginning in that process, along with the leaps that we’re taking in various forms of fermentation and cellular agriculture. Can you paint a picture of where you think the food system should be in 10 years in order for us to start to transition through the climate era?

Brendan Niemira  (43:06)

The food system should be more holistic. That, I think, is one of the things that will make a big difference in terms of our overall ability to respond to issues of sustainability. It encompasses everything that falls under that. Right now there are disparate areas of science and disparate areas of scientific inquiry that are a little bit isolated.

I like to make the joke: if you’ve got an apple on the tree and you’ve got a bacteria on that apple, it’s a plant pathology problem. But as soon as the apple falls from the tree—well, now it’s a food microbiology problem. You need to get the plant pathologist and the food microbiologist talking to each other so they have an understanding of the continuum. I think if we’re going to respond to these large, complicated problems, then we need to have a greater connection between different areas and different scientific disciplines, so that we can adopt and create that holistic approach.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (44:04)

Well, IFT is doing a lot of work to articulate that. You mentioned ift.org earlier. How do people follow your work? What do you recommend they do to keep track and keep at the cutting edge, so they understand these things as they evolve?

Brendan Niemira  (44:19)

Well, you can join IFT. That’s an easy one. If you go to ift.org, there’s membership information right there. We’re a great group of folks, very active and very involved in all kinds of different areas of food science and food technology. We make a big effort to publicize what we’re trying to do, the science that’s done, the research that we connect. When we have all the different areas—people working within the field of food science come to the meeting and they connect with us—academia, industry, and government members of IFT—when we connect them all together, we publish, like the white papers we’re talking about right now. We do press releases, we do commentary on different things, we engage in media responses, all kinds of stuff. Some of this is kind of hot-button issue of the day, and other times we comment on larger scientific issues—big landscape issues that are going to affect us now and tomorrow, and over the next 20 years.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (45:24)

Well, Brendan, thanks. This has been an eye-opening conversation, really interesting.

Brendan Niemira  (45:27)

Well, Mitch, I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I really appreciate your having me on the show.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (45:34)

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, the Chicago-based scientific society that has connected food scientists across academia, government, and industry since 1939. You can learn more about IFT’s work and read that new white paper we discussed, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, at ift.org.

Most of the climate fight in food is happening in the middle of the supply chain, where the public has almost no visibility, and the policy debate keeps looking somewhere else. Brendan described a three-legged stool for food safety—exclusion, containment, and eradication—noting that as the planet warms, exclusion gets harder. That’s because pathogens can travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to. That single observation reframes food safety as climate adaptation work. And it lands at exactly the moment when federal research capacity at agencies like the USDA Agricultural Research Service is being thinned out. Roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, and the people best positioned to redesign safety and efficiency at the processing, packaging, and distribution layers of our food system are being asked to do more with less.

The first idea worth elevating from our conversation is the distinction that IFT keeps insisting on between food processing and food formulation. In other words, the question of what we should do to the ingredients, instead of what’s included in the ingredient list, is critical to the sustainability and health outcomes of what we eat. Brendan is right that the thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach we see in federal decisions these days may drive engagement, but it confuses policy.

The MAHA Commission’s framing treats processing intensity as the problem, and that collapses a category that includes both deep-fried snack cakes and shelf-stable beans, both ultra-formulated soda and pasteurized milk, into grossly simplified yes-no, us-versus-them choices. That’s not what we need right now.

The climate consequences matter. Many of the technologies that extend shelf life, cut food waste, and reduce cold-chain energy demand involve processing. If we regulate processing, treating it as a proxy for harm, we hobble some of the most useful tools we have for cutting the system’s environmental footprint and improving its safety. IFT’s response—to define nutritional quality by what the food does in the body, not by how it was made—is scientifically defensible. It is also, as Brendan acknowledged in his own way, complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes the companies whose products would be reclassified under any new rule.

The second idea I want to dig into for a moment is microbial agriculture as a structural shift in what farming means. Farming in 50 years will be as unrecognizable to us as today’s agricultural system would be to a farmer plucked from 1890, when 43% of Americans worked on farms. Humans had domesticated perhaps 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, and Brendan’s point is that precision fermentation, built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics, opens up access to trillions of possible microbial community combinations. Precision fermentation can take side streams and waste streams from existing food processing and convert them into all sorts of things—dairy proteins, food ingredients, even in water treatment systems.

That’s a circular bioeconomy story, and one that all of you who’ve been listening for years are aware of. It aligns with the case made by my recent guest, Jasper Steinhausen, that sustainability should be a profitability lever, not just a cost center. We have the opportunity to invent entire new industries here, folks.

The third idea is one that we return to most often, and that’s holism—thinking in systems. The climate problem doesn’t respect the disciplinary boundaries that scientists observe every day. The IFT white paper’s call for AI-enabled supply chain modeling sits right at the center of this argument. That’s not because AI is magic, but because the food system data we rely on is fragmented across many actors who don’t currently talk to each other, and pulling that data into a coherent picture is the kind of work that modern LLMs are actually good at.

The critical issue here is that federal research cuts don’t just slow individual programs—they erode the connective tissue between disciplines, and the connective tissue is where climate adaptation has to happen. Innovation is the product of diverse solutions being combined in new ways, and the most unexpected connections often yield the greatest impact. So we need more cross-disciplinary discussion, not less.

The food system is being asked to feed 8 billion people under conditions that it wasn’t designed for, with less federal science capacity, a public conversation that mistakes processing for poison, and a set of emerging technologies that are scientifically ready but culturally challenging—as our discussion about insect protein showed.

So here’s the headline to remember from my conversation with Brendan Niemira: IFT is making the case that food science is climate science, and we’re going to be watching how that argument lands as the MAHA debate continues, and as the 2026 dietary guidelines evolve. Hopefully they won’t mutate too much.

If this episode gave you something to chew on, please share it with someone in your world to make new connections possible. And would you consider leaving a review of Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or any of the other purveyors of podcast goodness where you can listen to the show? You folks are the amplifiers that help spread more ideas to create less waste. And our archive of more than 550 episodes is there anytime you want to dig deeper.

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

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: IFT’s Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science appeared first on Earth911.

Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, is the principal author of a major study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies from 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. Earth911’s summary describes this critical study, which found lethal plastic thresholds that could change how we view the plastic crisis.

The study measured how deadly different types of plastic are to sea life, which makes the results especially useful for policymakers. Each finding suggests a clear policy action, such as banning balloon releases like Florida has done, banning plastic bags as in California’s SB 54, or improving how fishing gear is marked and recovered. Still, Erin points out that focusing only on certain plastics is not enough. Her team found that even small amounts of any plastic can be dangerous. As she says, “At the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean,” and we need big changes at every stage of the plastics life cycle, from production to disposal.

There’s encouraging evidence that interventions work. Communities in Hawaii conducted large-scale beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirmed that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by 25 to 47%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. These actions address a parallel crisis in human health that is building from the same pollution source. Most of the microplastics now found in humans and around the world began as the same macroplastics that are killing puffins and turtles. As Erin puts it, “I do view this all as part of the same crisis.”

You can read the full study at pnas.org and learn more about Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on February 9, 2026.

Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

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

We’re going to talk about ocean plastics. Every year, more than 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean. That’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck worth of plastic every minute. And we’ve known for decades that marine animals eat this debris. But until recently, no one had systematically quantified how much plastic it actually takes to kill them.

And the answer is, it turns out, disturbing. Less than three sugar cubes worth of plastic increases an Atlantic puffin’s risk of dying by 90%. A loggerhead turtle reaches the same threshold at about two baseballs worth, and for a harbor porpoise, a mass of plastic roughly the size of a soccer ball can kill. More concerning, at the 50% mortality level — that is, where half the animals who consume the plastic die — the volumes that kill them shrink to less than one sugar cube for a puffin and half a baseball for a loggerhead turtle.

Our guest today, Dr. Erin Murphy, is the manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and lead author of the study that produced these findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team’s research analyzed more than 10,000 necroscopies across 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. It’s the most comprehensive assessment yet of how different plastic types — soft film like bags, hard fragments, synthetic rubber from balloons, and abandoned fishing gear — translate into mortality across marine life.

The findings matter beyond ocean conservation. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found microplastics embedded in human arterial plaque of cardiovascular surgery patients, and those with detectable plastics were 4.5 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death in the following three years. The same polymers killing seabirds and sea turtles — polyethylene, PVC, and their chemical additives — are found in human blood, lungs, liver, and placenta.

Dr. Murphy’s research offers policymakers what they’ve been asking for: science-based data to inform decisions about which plastics to regulate and how aggressively to act. Nearly half the animals in her study that had ingested plastics were threatened or endangered species, and with global negotiations on a binding plastic treaty continuing and extended producer responsibility programs expanding across the United States, the timing of this research could not be more relevant.

So we’ll talk with Erin about what her team found, why balloon fragments are amongst the deadliest items for seabirds, how fishing gear became the leading killer of marine animals, and what her research means for the humans who share a planet and a body burden with these species. You can read the full study at pnas.org and find Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.

So how much plastic is too much for wildlife and for humans? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Erin. How you doing today?

Erin Murphy  3:44

I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:46

Well, thank you for joining me, and for this really important research. It was a fascinating read. We wrote it up, and I’m really pleased that you would join us to talk about it today. So can you explain what made this study different from previous attempts to quantify plastics’ lethality to marine life?

Erin Murphy  4:01

Yeah. So first, I’ll specify that we focus specifically on macroplastics, which are just plastics that are bigger than five millimeters in length. There’s more research on how microplastics, which are these smaller plastics, can harm animals, because scientists can study these in laboratory settings. Of course, it’s not feasible or ethical to feed animals like whales, sea turtles, or seabirds large plastic items and study what happens to them in the lab. And so as scientists, we really have to depend on opportunistically collecting dead animals in the environment and looking at what’s inside them to understand what’s happening with these bigger plastics.

And so previous research has looked at these sorts of threats as well, but they focused on fewer species, on smaller geographic areas, and they didn’t differentiate by plastic type, like hard plastics versus soft plastics. So they were really important for laying the groundwork for our larger study. But we were actually able to look globally and look at a broader set of species, and also differentiate by these different plastic types and by species size as well, which allowed us to get at some of these species-level understandings.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:13

So the unfortunate truth is, we are feeding these animals this material by throwing it all away. That is a stark way of starting this conversation. And you use a lot of illustrative examples, like three sugar cubes worth of macroplastic can kill a puffin. How did you arrive at those kind of volume-based comparisons, and why is translating your data into those relatable measures important?

Erin Murphy  5:37

Yeah, so when we did this in the study, we actually looked at the influence of volume based on the animal’s body length. So we reported all of this as a deadly volume per centimeter of body length. But telling people 0.098 centimeters cubed per centimeter doesn’t really mean anything to them. And honestly, when I first got those centimeter-based thresholds, it didn’t mean that much to me.

And so we thought that choosing some iconic species that people could picture would help, but still saying, you know, three centimeters cubed of plastic kills a puffin, or 220 centimeters cubed of plastic kills a loggerhead, doesn’t really paint a picture in people’s heads, and three sugar cubes or a baseball are much easier to picture.

So we chose to do this because I think when people can picture these items, they can really understand that volume, and people do use plastic every single day, and so having volumes like that to compare to allows them to think about how little plastic can kill animals, especially when we compare it to how much we produce or use globally.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:42

Can you put in context how long it takes for a puffin, for instance, to eat that much plastic? What do they eat in a day or a week generally?

Erin Murphy  6:52

Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s actually the next step in our research. So to estimate the risk that something poses to wildlife, we have to understand two things. One is your question: how likely are they to be exposed to this threat? The second is, if they are exposed to it, how likely is it to harm them? And so this research really focused entirely on that second piece.

But to fully understand risk, we have to dig deeper into the first part, and that’s what we call likelihood of exposure. And so for puffins specifically, there’s not a lot of research, but we do know a lot about what species are eating, and we know that different species are more or less likely to eat plastic based on where they live, what they eat, and how they feed. So we’re really excited to be working with some really amazing researchers over the next few years to think about how we can connect exposure for these animals to the lethality and understand risk in a more comprehensive way.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:48

I want to get a sense of what you found. You mentioned in the study that one whale can have a three-gallon bucket in its stomach. What’s the range of objects that you encountered as you were doing the research?

Erin Murphy  8:00

Yeah, this was pretty unbelievable to me, actually, some of the things that we saw in animals, and I’ll just give a few items that stood out to me. But there’s many more. Part of an oar handle from a plastic — or a plastic belt, webbing from the back of a lawn chair, a koozie, rubber pencil topper, fake Easter grass, ice cream tubs, single-use coffee pods, bungee cords, tons of different types of gear, ropes, nets, fishing line.

But I’ll just illustrate kind of how dramatic this can look with one example that really stood out to me, on a sperm whale that researchers in Spain reported on. Sperm whales feed very deep in the ocean, and they use echolocation to find their food. So it may be particularly hard for them to tell plastic from prey. And in this case, it seems like an entire greenhouse washed into the ocean, and this sperm whale happened upon it. It had plastic film cover material for a greenhouse in its stomach, along with a flower pot, a piece of a hose, a plastic burlap sack, plastic craft, and plastic spray bottle, and even fake plastic mulch in its stomach. And unfortunately, this was one of the individuals that did lose its life to plastic ingestion.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:23

That’s — I mean, that’s shocking in so many ways. You found that one in five animals had plastic in their digestive tract when they died. Was this percentage higher or lower, and in the context of your previous answer, more or less shocking than you expected?

Erin Murphy  9:45

Yeah, I think, you know, it was higher than I expected. And it’s funny, because all of our research was based on previous research. It was a meta-analysis. So we collected data from existing literature. And I’d seen some, you know, similar numbers then reported at more local scales. But I think it still really shocked me to look at so many studies and see, you know, for sea turtles, that was one in two. Sea turtles had plastic in their gut. And for seabirds, one in three.

And when thinking about that at a global scale, that felt higher to me than it should be, and I suppose it’s because it is higher than it should be. These really are high ingestion rates. And for some of these individuals, the bulk amount of plastic in their gut, like that sperm whale, is particularly shocking.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:35

I want to step back just for a second and talk about how long this kind of research has been going on. Because when I was a child, oceanography was very much in its infancy. How aggressively are we trying to understand what we’re doing to the ocean environment at this point, and where do you think we are in terms of the long arc of beginning to reach that understanding?

Erin Murphy  10:58

Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever fully understand it, which is one of the things that makes studying the ocean so interesting. It’s so complex and vast. But, you know, we’ve come a long way, and for plastic pollution in particular, the ’70s was really when we started seeing those first reports of animals eating plastics. You know, and it’s been 50 years since then. Now we have evidence of plastic ingestion in more than 1,300 species, and we’re starting to be able to get at these really more complicated analyses that help us understand like the potential quantity that kills an animal, like this one, or what does that mean possibly for populations.

I think the thing that’s been really impressive in the last decade, though, is how much research has been done on plastics. In particular, 10 years ago, roughly, the first study came out by Jambeck et al. that gave us an idea of the amount of plastic that was getting into the environment. And since then, we have learned so much as a scientific community, and people are working really hard to try to understand what these vast amounts of ocean plastic mean for ecosystems, for human health, for fishing industries and other marine industries that really depend on a healthy ocean, and we’ve been doing a lot of research on how to address it. So I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand everything that we’re doing to the ocean, but I think we’re working hard as a scientific community to get there.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:38

It’s really disturbing to think about, because plastic in the 1970s was really only — was 10 years into widespread use, and widespread compared to today is nothing, since half the plastic we’ve manufactured in history has been made since 2002. So it sounds like what we’re really delving into now is a real-time accounting of the damage that we’re doing. How do you as a scientist think about what your goal is in terms of bringing the consequences of our decisions back to the public so we can think about it?

Erin Murphy  13:11

Yeah, that’s why I feel very lucky to work with an organization like Ocean Conservancy. We conduct research that we know governments and decision makers need to help address these problems, and we have a policy team and a communications team that are really well trained on helping us bring this research to the decision makers.

And the type of research we’re doing here, in particular on risk assessments, is something that governments are really craving. They want to set science-based targets as they try to address plastic pollution, and part of that is understanding environmental thresholds that we should be aiming for to better protect marine wildlife, to better protect marine ecosystems.

And so when we do research like this, a big part is getting it into the literature, in this sense to the scientific community, but it’s also working with our policy team and our communications team to make sure the public hears about it, and to make sure that decision makers nationally and abroad hear about the work that we’re doing, and can use this to help inform science-based targets that they’re setting right now.

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:22

So one of the materials that you found was most dangerous is rubber, particularly from balloons. It emerged as especially deadly for seabirds, where you estimated that just six pea-sized pieces could create a 90% mortality rate. What’s happening physiologically with balloon fragments that make them so lethal?

Erin Murphy  14:45

Yeah, so if you think about the design of a balloon, they’re super stretchy, and they’re long and they’re thin, and even the fragments seem to have this shape. And so they get stuck at those junctures in the gastrointestinal tract, like between the stomach and the intestine. And the gut moves things along through these wave-like contractions. And it seems like these stretchy materials just kind of stretch with it, and so the gut just isn’t able to move them through as easily. And we see similar things for those plastic bags as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:20

Well, you also point out that sea turtles appear to mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. Is there anything we could do in terms of the chemistry of soft plastics or the appearance of soft plastics to make them less attractive to sea life?

Erin Murphy  15:35

Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a way that we can make them less attractive that I know of. And it’s unfortunate, because we know there are a lot of plastic bags in the environment compared to other plastics. Every year, Ocean Conservancy organizes the International Coastal Cleanup, and plastic bags are consistently in the top 10 items we see most frequently.

That being said, we do know ways of keeping plastic bags out of the ocean and protecting turtles in that way. And so every year — or in this last year, during our Coastal Cleanup — we collected, or our partner organizations collected, more than 1 million bags off our beaches. So this is really important for helping protect ocean animals, because those bags are already very close to their environment, and by removing them from beaches, we prevent them from getting into the ocean.

We also know that plastic bag bans, like the policy that California just implemented, are very effective in reducing the threat that plastic bags pose to marine wildlife, and help by preventing them from getting into the environment in the first place. So there was a recent study published in Science that actually showed that communities that implement bag bans, whether that’s a city, a state, or a country, do meaningfully reduce the amount of plastic bags that end up on beaches by 25 to 47%. So that’s a really significant reduction, and just provides further evidence that we know how to address some of these threats. We have ways of measuring if policies are effective, and it’s really about preventing these bags from getting into the environment in the first place.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:18

Another example of really short-term human thinking is the impact of fishing gear pollution. Can you talk a little about what you found in terms of what’s being tossed overboard by the boats that are hoping to treat the ocean as an ongoing resource and source of living?

Erin Murphy  17:36

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the fishing gear that’s lost is lost on accident. Fishing gear can be really expensive for fishermen. Like crab pots can cost thousands of dollars. And so these are very valuable resources for fishers, and they’re expensive to replace.

But unfortunately, one of the challenges with fishing in turbid and wavy environments around storms, especially with things that are set, is that some gear does get lost. And we did see interactions and ingestion of fishing gear by many of these animals. And partially that’s because gear attracts prey species. So we know that for some animals, they’re more likely to interact with fishing gear, and this isn’t just ingestion, but also being entangled in fishing gear, because, you know, that gear is still fishing. And for a lot of these bigger species, fish are their prey, and so they’re also being drawn to these devices, or this lost gear that might have their food in it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:44

And your study didn’t look at the external plastic lethality, it was only that which was consumed. So we don’t really fully understand what the consequences of, say, for instance, a net lost at sea is for the ocean yet? Or do we?

Erin Murphy  19:01

Yeah, we have — there’s some studies that have looked at this, but this is actually another study we’re working on. So one of the next papers we’re working on right now is looking at entanglement lethality, and that really will be important for understanding the impacts of plastic pollution together, because ingestion and entanglement, when we talk about these bigger plastics, are the two main threats that we see.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:24

I feel like we’ve got our bearings and can have a really productive conversation. But folks, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my discussion with the Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy, who led a groundbreaking study about the lethal effects of macroplastics in sea life. Erin, nearly half the animals that you studied that had ingested plastics were already listed as threatened. Is plastic pollution accelerating extinction risk, and what species do you feel are most endangered?

Erin Murphy  20:03

Yeah, that’s a great question. Right now, there’s not a lot of research yet on population-level effects of plastic pollution, and our study is really helping build that information out. But it’s just very difficult to understand what’s happening to populations that often we have trouble studying in the first place.

Still, for many marine species, the IUCN Red List notes plastic pollution as a significant threat. Six out of seven sea turtle species are threatened. We saw really high ingestion rates for sea turtles. We know that 5% of the turtles in our data set died from plastic ingestion.

So I think there is a lot of evidence suggesting that this could be contributing to extinction risk. And there are some studies that look at very specific populations that we know are vulnerable, like the Hawaiian monk seal, that have found that plastic pollution is contributing to extinction risk.

And the hopeful piece in the Hawaiian monk seal case was actually that as communities started doing large-scale cleanup efforts in the Hawaiian Islands, they actually saw a rebound of that population. So again, just a reminder that even though we know that this is something that is posing a threat to marine species we really care about, it’s also evidence that targeted and effective intervention strategies can be really important in helping some of these species rebound.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:34

That’s encouraging. So it isn’t as though we’re doomed, or that nature is doomed. We can intervene in our behavior today and make a change for the better in the future. How does the Ocean Conservancy encourage people to do that?

Erin Murphy  21:49

Yeah, so there was a study that we — some of us co-authored, and the Ocean Conservancy supported — that came out in 2020 that looked at what we would really need to do on a global scale to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean meaningfully enough to hit some of our potential targets. And in this case, we were thinking about just returning to 2010 annual leakage rates into the environment.

And what we found is that we really need sweeping change to our relationship with plastic and our waste management systems. And so we found that to achieve this goal, we would need a 40% reduction in plastic production globally. We would need waste management to reach levels of 98 to 99%, depending on the income of the country. And we would need, annually, 40% of waste that gets into the environment to then be cleaned up.

And at Ocean Conservancy, we really work on policy efforts in all three of those big buckets. And so we have the International Coastal Cleanup, but we also work on upstream policies with our policy teams at the sub-national, national, and international levels to try to work towards some of those goals of reducing plastic production and better managing the plastic waste that we do use.

Mitch Ratcliffe  23:10

You used the phrase “our relationship with plastic,” which is an interesting concept. In 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that microplastics were found in human arterial plaque, and that resulted in much higher risk for cardiovascular events. Do you see what you’re studying as a parallel crisis, or the same crisis, just in a different species?

Erin Murphy  23:35

Yeah, I view that — you know, so they were looking specifically at microplastics, and we focused on macroplastics in this study. That being said, most microplastics that are in the environment are breaking off of these larger macroplastics. So in that sense, I do view this all as part of the same crisis, and I think we need to think about all of the harms that plastic materials are causing to human health, to animal health, and to sociocultural outcomes like our marine and terrestrial industries that are affected by plastic pollution, and we need to think about comprehensive policies that are addressing all of those harms.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:17

Are there studies that are showing the same types of impacts from plastic in human and non-human species that we can use to start to tell the story in that same illustrative way that you did with the sugar cube analogy, so that people really take this seriously? I mean, the problem with our society is that we’re accustomed to throwing everything away.

Erin Murphy  24:40

Yeah, so there’s a lot of really great research that’s being done on microplastic exposure in other marine and aquatic organisms, and those are more similar to what’s happening in humans. But that human research, and the research on sort of sub-lethal microplastic risks — like the risks to cardiovascular systems, nervous system, gastrointestinal tracts — those are all pretty new, and so this body of research is really building, and I think we’re going to learn a lot in the next decade.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:14

Do you see an acceleration of your ability to make those kinds of conclusions — well-grounded conclusions — emerging as a result of the advent of something like artificial intelligence? Are we at the dawn of a scientific revolution?

Erin Murphy  25:33

You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know in what ways AI will change the way that we’re doing research. Definitely, the rate at which we are producing research has increased. There’s more people working on these issues, and the scientific process is really just about iterating as a community and building on what we know. And so I think what we’re seeing here is a large-scale interest in this plastics issue and a big concern by the scientific community and by the public.

And as we learn more, we can answer more complicated questions. And so I was only able to do my work because over the last five decades, people have been studying what plastic is in the animals and reporting on that, and we have thousands of published papers now that tell us about what animals are consuming. And each one of those papers is really important in producing this bigger picture. And as we have, you know, similarly more studies on these sort of individual systems and humans, using model organisms like mice, we will be able to do the same sort of thing of painting this bigger picture for humans as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:48

So as we get this higher-resolution view of what we’re doing, both to the planet and to ourselves, how does Ocean Conservancy potentially use those storytelling opportunities to get us to think about things like plastic bans, or the impact of extended producer responsibility on not just what ends up in the environment, but what we design so that it doesn’t end up in the environment in the future? It’s a big, complicated, multifaceted story. Where are we going?

Erin Murphy  27:17

Yeah, that is true, and I am not the policy expert at Ocean Conservancy, but the work that they do is amazing. And they, you know, they go and they talk to the public about these issues and educate the public through blogs and other resources to make sure that people understand the scale of the problem. And they work really closely with local decision makers who are interested in addressing these problems and help them develop bills, help them build support for bills. And, you know, we’ll meet with legislators and other leaders to help them kind of understand the reason that these policies are useful.

So Ocean Conservancy in the last 10 years has done a lot of work on state bills, like helping to push forward California’s SB 54, or specific bills that are targeting problematic plastics. Like recently, Florida passed a balloon release ban. Ocean Conservancy was also really involved in pushing that.

And I think we have seen with plastic pollution — what, for me, one of the things that’s most comforting in studying plastic pollution is actually that people do really seem to care about this issue and do seem willing to make change. So when people find out what I research — strangers — they always tell me about what they’re doing to reduce their plastic footprint, and I think that’s just a sign that there is appetite for change, and people want to understand how to do it. And as an organization, we’re just trying to leverage that passion and that stewardship that does kind of inherently exist in people, especially when they see the plastics that they’re using, and use that and sound science to help develop policies that can actually make a change on this issue.

Mitch Ratcliffe  29:06

Building on what you mentioned a moment ago, based on your findings about which plastics are the most lethal, it sounds like it’s a blend. But should policymakers prioritize specific materials, or just look at broad categories? No more of this type.

Erin Murphy  29:23

I think we need to do both. So we did find that different plastics pose different levels of risk, and I think there’s policies that are smaller and easier to implement, like balloon release bans and bag bans, that are effective in targeting some of these problematic plastics specifically. You know, using that Hawaiian monk seal example as well, having very targeted and strategic cleanups can be really important for protecting animals at sea turtle nesting beaches or seabird nesting areas. There’s these areas that we know are of particular importance for animals.

But still, the total plastic thresholds that we found were also low, and we see all types of plastics in these animals. So at the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we do need sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal, to meaningfully address this issue and protect our oceans.

And it takes longer to implement these policies because it does require some pretty extensive system-wide changes. But I think policies like California’s SB 54, which aims to reduce 25% of single-use plastics used, that’s really a step in the right direction. And so our policy team is on the front lines of making sure that that bill is fully implemented and that we understand the benefits of that policy by monitoring outcomes and effectiveness of it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:56

You mentioned earlier that on the International Coastal Cleanup Day, which is a distributed event all over the world but a day, they collected more than a million plastic bags last year. Is the goal in the long term to no longer need to do those cleanups? Or do you anticipate that we’re always going to be needing to do those cleanups?

Erin Murphy  31:18

Yeah, I think unfortunately, at this point, it’s hard to imagine a world where cleanups aren’t necessary. I think when we did that study in 2020, that was led by Lau et al., it was pretty alarming to see how much we would have to reduce plastic production and how well we would have to manage waste to no longer need cleanups at all, and we really did find that cleanups needed to be an important part of this solution.

And there’s already a lot of legacy plastics in the ocean. So I think as far as we can look forward, cleanups will always be an important part of the suite of solutions that we use.

They’re also really effective for monitoring what’s happening in our ocean. So I mentioned earlier that study that was published in Science that showed that plastic bag bans are effective. We were really excited to see that they actually used Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup data to do that analysis, and it really just emphasizes the value of citizen science. When you go out and collect data during a cleanup on your beach, we can see what changes occur through time in terms of what debris you’re seeing, and that helps us better understand whether it’s targeted policies or these broader policies, if they’re being effective or not.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:42

What does the Ocean Conservancy do to help people do citizen science beyond the International Coastal Cleanup?

Erin Murphy  32:49

So that program has been going on for 40 years, and that’s really, in terms of citizen science, our main body of work. But we are interested in having citizens engage in other ways. So we often have — you can sign up for our newsletter and get information about opportunities to call your senators or write your senators or legislators about important ocean issues that are coming up.

And we also just have a lot of educational material so that people can start their own cleanup events, or find cleanup events to participate in, so that individuals can be engaged in being part of the solution.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:31

You’ve mentioned a couple of items of research that you are beginning to pursue now. But if you had unlimited resources for the remainder of your career, what would you like to investigate and build on those findings with?

Erin Murphy  33:44

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to imagine unlimited resources, especially now, I know. But yeah, you know, we already started working on answering some of these next questions that are remaining for us, and I’m really excited about the work that we’re going to be doing over the next three to five years. And I will not be surprised if, you know, this body of work, trying to understand what’s happening to ocean animals, becomes a career-long question for me.

But in the short term, the things we’re really trying to get at is, first, that entanglement piece, which you mentioned — what is the lethality of plastic entanglement. And we also just launched a working group with scientists from all over the world to take what we have learned about the lethality of plastic ingestion and to build out, include what we are learning right now in our research about entanglement, and then bring in that exposure piece.

So that question you asked earlier about how much plastic is a puffin eating, how often does it have a lethal dose — that’s really what we want to get at. We want to know if we have an idea of what’s in the environment, how likely is that to have population-level effects for species? How likely are they to eat a lethal dose? How likely are they to die? And are we worried about populations because of this?

And right now, governments around the world are really trying to determine how to effectively address plastic pollution, and these sorts of comprehensive risk assessments are really helpful in setting targets. And so that’s really what I want to keep getting at: How can we take everything we know and help decision makers better understand, you know, a reasonable goal? Because a perfect goal is an ocean with no plastic, and I think we have to keep working towards that collectively. But it’s also really important to understand what species are being adversely affected and what we can do to immediately protect them now.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:46

Well, it’s a multi-generational challenge, and I really applaud the work that you’re doing. How can folks keep up with the work that you’re undertaking?

Erin Murphy  35:55

Yeah, we have a brand new website at oceanconservancy.org, and we have a lot of information there, you know, specifically on what our plastics team is doing, but on what our entire organization is doing in terms of bills that we’re working on. They can also sign up for our newsletter to get information about what the organization is working on, and that will give them ample opportunities to participate in being part of the solution to the plastics crisis.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:20

Erin, thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation and an encouraging one.

Erin Murphy  36:26

Thank you. It was great to be here.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:34

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Dr. Erin Murphy, manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and she’s the lead author of the recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that quantifies, for the first time at this scale, how much plastic it takes to kill seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals.

You can explore the Ocean Conservancy’s wide-ranging work and sign up for a beach cleanup event at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.

The numbers Erin and her colleagues reported should stop us in our tracks. The volumes we heard about are disturbing, but imagine — one in five animals had plastic in their gut when they died. For sea turtles, it was one in two. What makes that study especially useful for policymakers is its differentiation by plastic type. Rubber fragments can be targeted because balloons are the deadliest material for seabirds. Soft plastics like bags are the top killer for sea turtles. Ghost fishing gear poses the greatest risk to marine mammals like whales. And each of these findings points to a specific, actionable policy lever: balloon release bans like Florida’s recent legislation, bag bans like California’s, and better gear-marking and recovery programs for the fishing industry.

But the targeted approach is only part of the answer. As Erin emphasized, the total plastic thresholds her team found were low across the board, meaning that every type of plastic poses a threat. “At the end of the day,” she said, “there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we need to do sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal.” That’s a very important quote. Keep it in mind.

A 2020 Ocean Conservancy-backed study quantified what “sweeping” means: a 40% reduction in global plastic production, waste management reaching 98 to 99% effectiveness in its collection and processing of plastic so it doesn’t reach nature, and annual cleanups of the 40% of plastic that still escapes into the environment — and that’s just to return to the 2010 leakage rates.

So that brings us to the elephant in the room — or maybe more to the point, the sperm whale with an entire greenhouse in its stomach — the global plastics treaty negotiations. Which were supposed to deliver a binding international agreement, collapsed in August 2025 in Geneva after oil-producing nations blocked provisions that called for production caps and toxic chemical phase-outs. More than 100 countries in the group known as the High Ambition Coalition were pushing for full life-cycle regulation for plastics, but the requirement that the negotiations reach a consensus gave a handful of petrochemical states an effective veto power. And effective it was.

So between the Busan round in late 2024 and the end of the Geneva talks in 2025, an estimated 7.4 million more metric tons of plastic entered the ocean. The world currently produces more than 460 million metric tons of plastic annually, and only 9% of that is being recycled. Every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks of plastic is dumped into our oceans, rivers, and lakes.

However, the collapse of the treaty talks does not mean the end of progress. Erin pointed to evidence that targeted interventions can work. For example, communities in Hawaii conducted large beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirms that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by between 25 and 47%. California’s SB 54 law aims to cut single-use plastics by 25%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, which is now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. That cleanup data, collected by citizen scientists worldwide, is a research tool providing the time-series evidence that tells us whether policies are working.

So here’s what I want you to leave with from this conversation. Erin’s research focuses exclusively on acute mortality from ingested macroplastics — that’s obstruction, perforation, and torsion of the digestive tract. It does not capture the chronic effects of plastic and chemical exposure or entanglement, which her team will study next. That means the lethal thresholds that she reported likely underestimate the total harm plastic inflicts on marine life.

And the parallel crisis in human health is building from the same source of pollution, which has scattered microscopic shards of plastic across the planet, from the seas to the highest peaks. Most of these microplastics began as macroplastics, like those that are killing puffins and turtles. They break down in the environment into fragments small enough to enter our bloodstream, lungs, liver, and even women’s placentas. As Erin put it, it is all a part of the same crisis.

So one of the most encouraging things that Erin said was also the simplest. When strangers learn about what she studies, they stop and they tell her what they are doing to reduce their plastic footprint. That instinct to environmental stewardship is a real and powerful phenomenon, even if it’s currently being actively suppressed by governments. And the public’s will to protect nature is the foundation that policy, science, and investment will ultimately build on.

The ocean doesn’t need our sympathy. It needs a 40% cut in plastic production, waste systems that actually work, and the political will to treat a binding plastics agreement as a matter of human survival rather than an inconvenience for a few petrochemical companies. Until international negotiations deliver that agreement, the work continues at every other level: state legislatures, coastal cleanups, citizen science, and research programs like Erin’s that give decision makers the evidence-based targets that they’ve been asking for.

So stay tuned, folks, for more conversations about the solutions that can still turn this crisis around. And I hope you’ll take a moment to take a look at any of the more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Take the time to share just one of them with your friends or your family. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. 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 all 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 and its oceans. Have a green day.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: The Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy Documents the Lethality of Ocean Plastics appeared first on Earth911.

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

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

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

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Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09

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

Today we’re going to talk about 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

1. 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.

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Jasper Steinhausen on Making Sustainability Profitable appeared first on Earth911.

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

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

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

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

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

In South Africa, informal waste pickers recover between 80% and 90% of all plastic and paper that actually gets recycled. There are about 140,000 of these reclaimers, who walk through cities and landfills, pulling trolleys and selling what they collect to make a living. Each person can keep up to 24 tons of material out of landfills every year. Together, they saved municipalities R750 million (about $45 million) in landfill costs in just one year, yet they do this work without recognition, protection, or a formal role in the waste system.

Sifiso Gumbi began as a reclaimer at 19, collecting scrap metal in Soweto after school. After 15 years in the informal recycling economy, he founded Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise that believes the people already doing recycling work should be supported and equipped, not replaced. Urban Surfer creates essential tools like PPE and collection trolleys with personalized number plates, helping reclaimers become recognized workers in their neighborhoods. The organization also runs four recycling hubs where reclaimers can sort and bale their materials to sell at better prices, cutting out the middlemen who used to buy their collections for much less than market value.

Urban Surfer tracks everything with GPS-enabled trolleys and a live dashboard, and this approach has increased reclaimer incomes by up to 300%. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Sifiso talks about why dignity is key to better recycling rates, how aluminum can prices show what gets collected and what ends up in landfills, and what it would take to expand this model across South Africa and the continent.

One key idea keeps coming up in the conversation: reclaimers are like an R&D department that no one asks for advice. In South Africa, aluminum cans sell for 28 to 30 rand per kilogram, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that Sifiso says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, materials with lower value end up piling up in landfills, which are quickly filling up in Johannesburg and Gauteng.

Companies that want their packaging recovered can learn from the people who decide every day what is worth picking up. Data is also important. Urban Surfer tracks every kilogram by material type and price at its hubs. As carbon and plastic credits become more common, reclaimers will have verified, real-time records of the work they have already done. Sifiso is honest about the challenges: four hubs are not enough for Gauteng, and there are always limits on land and equipment funding.

But the bigger challenge is building trust between waste pickers and a public that still sees them as vagrants, and between the informal workforce and the policymakers and companies whose programs will only work if rebates actually reach the people doing the collecting. This conversation asks whether a truly circular economy can be built by supporting the people who are already making it happen.

To learn more about Urban Surfer and to explore partnership and sponsorship opportunities that equip reclaimers with trolleys, protective gear, and recycling hub infrastructure visit urbansurfer.co.za.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:10

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 waste pickers.

The way most of us picture recycling is a municipal one — a truck, a sorting facility, a system run by a city or a company — but across much of the world, that’s not the right picture. In South Africa, the overwhelming majority of plastic and paper that actually gets recycled is recovered not by any formal program, but by informal waste reclaimers, an estimated 140,000 people who move through cities and landfills on foot, pulling trolleys, collecting and sorting recyclable material, and selling it to survive. Each one diverts as much as 24 tons of waste from the country’s landfills every year. Collectively, they’ve saved municipalities hundreds of millions of rand in landfill costs and built the backbone of a recycling economy, all without recognition, protection, or a place in the official system.

It is some of the most environmentally valuable work being done anywhere, and it’s performed by some of the most marginalized people in the country. Reclaimers face social stigma and frequent harassment, and they work in unsafe conditions, exposed to chemicals and traffic. And because they are unorganized, they are often exploited by the middlemen, who buy their materials for a fraction of what it’s worth. The environmental service they provide is quite literally free, and the people providing it are largely invisible to the public they serve.

Our guest today has spent 15 years trying to change that. Sifiso Gumbi is the founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise built on the simple conviction that the people already doing the work of recycling should be supported, equipped, and recognized, not replaced. Urban Surfer designs and provides the tools of the trade, starting with a collection trolley developed alongside reclaimers over two years and 50,000 kilometers of real-world use, and that’s complete with a personalized number plate that gives its owner a sense of belonging and a measure of public legitimacy. The organization runs sorting and baling camps that connect reclaimers to offtake agreements and producer responsibility rebates, cutting out the middlemen and raising what reclaimers actually earn. It offers training, protective equipment, and mental health support, and it tracks the whole operation through GPS-enabled trolleys and a live reporting dashboard, turning work that was once invisible into measurable, documented impact.

Running underneath all of this is a word that Sifiso returns to again and again in his speeches and writing: dignity. Urban Surfer’s mission is framed not first in tons diverted, but in belonging — the right of a reclaimer to be seen as an essential worker rather than a nuisance, with a special focus on women and youth, who make up much of this workforce. That framing has earned Sifiso recognition as South African Environmentalist of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year, a TEDx Johannesburg stage appearance, and the endorsement of city and provincial governments that now rely on his data to plan their own waste systems.

So, we’ll talk with Sifiso about what 15 years among reclaimers has taught him that no policy paper could, why he believes dignity and recognition are inseparable from recycling rates, and how a better trolley changes the way a person is treated on the street. We’ll also dig into how his camps and offtake deals reshape reclaimers’ income, why he built a data infrastructure into grassroots work, and how he persuades corporations to see reclaimers as partners rather than a line item. Then there’s the big argument that his work makes: that a genuinely circular economy has to be built on the people who already live in it, not by bypassing them.

To learn more about Urban Surfer, visit urbansurfer.co.za — Urban Surfer, all one word, no space, no dash. That’s urbansurfer.co.za. What would it take to see the people who already recycle most of a nation’s waste not as invisible labor, but as the foundation for the circular economy? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Sifiso. How are you doing today?

Sifiso Gumbi  4:36

I’m doing amazing. How are you, Mitch?

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:38

I am well. I am well. Now, you’re in Johannesburg, and you’ve spent 15 years working alongside informal waste reclaimers in South Africa. Can you take us back to that moment when you first realized that there was an opportunity and a need to organize informal recycling?

Sifiso Gumbi  4:53

I was 19 when I realized, because that’s when I was really starting out, you know, into the whole space as a waste reclaimer. And the one thing I realized was that I could actually grow within, you know, the industry, because I could just see all around me. Growing up — I come from Soweto — we used to have a massive challenge with illegal dumping sites, and on close examination of all the waste, you know, that was being dumped, it was actually waste that one could, you know, actually recycle. And what I then realized was that, you know, there will always be waste for as long as there are people, because for as long as there are people, there’ll always be consumption. And I just saw this as an opportunity that really guaranteed a career for me, because all I needed was, you know, access to the waste.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:41

You literally saw a greenfield opportunity in waste — that there was just so much of it lying around of value that it could be, if organized correctly, a lot more valuable to the waste reclaimer, and there’s sufficient profit for you to grow an organization.

Sifiso Gumbi  5:59

Absolutely, that’s what it was. I didn’t realize the many challenges I was going to come across as, you know, an informal reclaimer.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:07

For listeners who have never seen South Africa, can you explain the society in which a reclaimer works, and what a typical day looks like for one of them?

Sifiso Gumbi  6:16

So, a typical day for a reclaimer — they start their day very early. We do have a waste management system here in South Africa. Each metro has one, and each local municipality has one. So, how it works is that there’s a municipal bin truck that comes through on every business day to collect waste. The municipal bin truck will come and collect a bin, it gets tipped into a truck, which is a compactor truck, and that truck takes all of that waste to the landfill. So they usually come in the morning, so your typical waste picker has to get to the bin before the municipal truck gets there.

So a day in the life of a South African waste picker consists of waking up very early, so that you can get to people’s bins before the municipal truck gets there, you know, open those bins and literally go through such bins to recover recyclable waste material before the municipal bin truck gets there. And then from there you load it up in a makeshift trolley using bulk bags that, you know, are normally used for sugar, soy, maize, even manure. I think maybe you do use those bulk bags in America, but that’s what waste pickers use here in South Africa. So they use them as containers to load up all the collected recyclable material.

Then from there, the material is taken to informal waste sorting sites. You know, they don’t sort where they collect. So where they collect, they just collect everything and just tie it up into the bag, load it up on the trolley, pull the trolley to, you know, whatever informal setting they have — any piece of land that they find, they use for sorting. So there the sorting takes place: you know, the plastics are separated, the paper is separated, the metal is separated, aluminum is separated. And then once the material is separated and carefully segregated, it is then, once a week, sold off to the buyback centers or the neighboring recycling companies.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:27

So does that produce a better-sorted load for the recycling off-takers, the organizations that buy the material? It sounds like it’s competing with the municipal system to do a better job of sorting.

Sifiso Gumbi  8:39

The municipal system is not concerned about the recovery of waste for recycling. The municipal system is mainly concerned with the recovery of waste for disposal, so that the waste is removed from, you know, people’s backyards and, you know, people’s bins. So that’s what it’s all about, you know. For the longest time — the City of Johannesburg, the City of Ekurhuleni, the City of Tshwane, I can think of all the major metros and all the local governments — we’ve relied heavily on the use of landfill space, which we are now running out of. So, the system was really simple: collect and dispose. Waste pickers are the only ones that are collecting for value, you know, and collecting with the intent of recycling, because that’s their livelihood. They actually make their money from the recycling. The municipality really doesn’t, and they didn’t really care about that, you know, because they make their money anyway.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:33

So, in a way, this is a self-organizing solution for recycling that was simply being ignored by government.

Sifiso Gumbi  9:39

Absolutely. It’s been around for more than 30 years, largely informal — I would say totally and absolutely informal. If you look at the current South African statistics, when it comes to recycling, the main contributors are waste pickers. The reason why we have a recycling rate at all is due to the efforts of, you know, informal waste pickers.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:01

So these people do really, really important work, and your tagline is empowering people and transforming waste, but you talk a lot about dignity, not just recycling rates. Why is dignity at the center of how you think about this work?

Sifiso Gumbi  10:17

Because that’s where we have to start. Before we get to anything else, we need to first recognize waste pickers, not only as essential environmental custodians, but firstly as people. Dealing with waste reduces you to a level, especially in this country — and I think it may be the same thing in other countries — it reduces you to a state where people don’t even see you as a human being. They see you as a vagrant, they see you as the scum of the earth, because no one wants to, like — I mean, if you think about it, no one wants to deal with rubbish, no one wants to deal with waste, no one wants to handle all of that grimy stuff, you know. So when you do, instead of being recognized and applauded for, you know, such a huge sacrifice, one is usually seen as being of the same value as that waste you are dealing with.

So the first thing, you know, we try and advocate for is the humanization and dignity of reclaimers. And how do we do that? Firstly, it’s by kitting them out, or providing them with the correct PPE, so that they are presentable and they are more approachable and they are more visible and they’re more humanized. Because most waste pickers you come across, they deal with waste on a daily basis, so of course they won’t look as glamorous as someone who drives an Uber or someone who works at a restaurant or someone who works at a hotel or someone who works at a factory, you know. They’re waste pickers, they deal with waste, you know. So usually, you know, because they don’t earn even as much, you know, their clothing items are usually soiled, the way they look is usually dirty, because of the work that they do. You know, if you deal with a mechanic, a mechanic looks like a mechanic — he will be covered in oil. If you’re dealing with a waste picker, a waste picker will look like a waste picker, because he has to deal with waste on a daily basis, you know. And because of that image, you know, the public perception around waste pickers is really, really negative.

So we advocate for their dignity and recognition first, before anything else. We want people to understand the work that waste pickers do, we want people to understand that waste pickers are humans, we want people to understand that they’re doing an amazing job, not only for these communities that do not see them as people, but for the environment as a whole.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:30

What you’re describing is so important to understanding where the opportunity to raise up people lies in the circular economy. I’ve been involved in a little bit of this kind of work in South America, and the organization that I was consulting with paid a generous rate to trash pickers. They supported local programs that included decorating their trolleys, which gave them a real sense of pride that recognized their humanity, as you’re talking about. Tell us about how you work with a group of reclaimers to develop the trolleys that make their work easier.

Sifiso Gumbi  13:07

The first trolley that we developed was an amazing solution, and I’ll touch base on that as I expand into the whole picture that I’m going to paint for you. Most waste pickers use makeshift solutions. From the trolleys that they use — it’s all makeshift — to the PPE that they come across. They don’t have any PPE, you know, so if they find an apron that, you know, is protective gear, anything to use — from even a, we call them balaclavas here in South Africa, some people call them ski masks, you know — they wear those as protective wear. So it’s all very makeshift.

So we decided to engage them and understand, you know, what type of trolley they would, you know, like to have, and you know, what features it would have. And we realized that most of the reclaimers we were, you know, interviewing at the time were camping in open fields. And they did that because one would leave their respective township to go and try and, you know, make a living from recovering waste from the affluent neighborhoods like Sandton and Bryanston, you know, all these fancy suburbs, you know, that are away from the townships. That’s where they usually find the most waste. And because it’s so far from the township, they were now forced to, you know, camp in the open, you know, to store their recyclables, sort their recyclables, and then maybe sell their recyclables. So they couldn’t, after collecting, take their recyclables back to their townships, because the townships are like 30 kilometers away, or even more.

So, one of them said — I think several of them said — you know, if I could perhaps be able to sleep inside my trolley, that would be amazing. And so we designed a trolley that, firstly, could accommodate a bulk bag that was specifically designed to store recyclable material, you know, that could fit the trolley and carry as much as 300 kilograms onto the trolley. Secondly, we then came up with a solution to have a foldable tent that one can, you know, keep in a compartment on the trolley as they go out to collect on their daily activities, and then later on, one could be able to deploy that tent over the trolley, and they could have overnight shelter as they camped in whatever spaces they had found to store their recyclables in and camp. So when we started out, all of our trolleys had shelter — those temporary tents they could put up at night, impermeable to water, so they were protected whenever it was raining, and quite warm enough for winter.

But with that solution, what we found was that most of the reclaimers became really comfortable with that functionality in their trolleys, and they then ended up using those trolleys as mobile homes instead of using them for recycling. So what they would do is that they would park those trolleys, you know, with the tent fully set up, and then take their makeshift trolleys and go into the field to collect recyclables, which created a massive problem now for the municipality, because all of a sudden now you have all these, you know, temporary homes springing up all over the show, and we unfortunately had to cut that solution.

Sifiso Gumbi  16:30

So, what we now do is the trolleys that we roll out to reclaimers, they have personalized plates that have the waste picker’s nickname, you know, for relatability, and they also have a back panel that usually has a logo of, you know, whatever sponsor, you know, comes in to help us, you know, on a project that supports reclaimers. So what we found is that people really love the number plates and the look of the trolley, so it allows the public to get to know their neighborhood reclaimer without necessarily talking to them — because you see the trolley, it’s written “Sifiso,” then you’re like, oh, that guy is Sifiso, he’s been operating in my area the entire time. And then the other thing we have — we have GPS trackers fitted on each trolley, so as to track the movements of all the reclaimers. We are very big on data, so that we know where they are at any given time, and should there be any case in any neighborhood that they operate in, we are able to maybe, with authorities, share that. Okay, maybe at this point one of our reclaimers was there — perhaps ask him what happened there. So the reclaimers have become an added security feature, or like an intelligence network for civilians, you know, in that.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:46

Could you also use that system to deploy people to where there is uncollected material?

Sifiso Gumbi  17:52

Absolutely, we can. As a matter of fact, we are getting requests, you know, from community associations to come and collect from them, so whenever they do, we just send through the nearest reclaimer.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:07

You have the sorting and baling camps — are these sort of ad hoc homes for these communities of mobile workers? Tell us about how that works, and particularly, how do you aggregate enough material that you can pay them a better rate than the middlemen who would have purchased this material before?

Sifiso Gumbi  18:25

So we have recycling hubs that we’ve set up with the idea and clear understanding that, you know, most of the reclaimers we support not only just need collection equipment and PPE, but they also need working facilities where they can store their material and sort it. So now, what we have added into those facilities is processing machinery, so that the reclaimers don’t only just sort the material, but they are able to have access to a baling machine, which then compacts their material. And once the material is compacted, they can sell it to the recyclers, the recycling companies, at a better price, because they are no longer selling loose material.

So one thing we also organize for the reclaimers is corporate collection sites where they can collect from and have more access to waste. So we try and give them as much access to collection volumes as possible, because the more waste they collect, the more money they make. But the challenge is that we are only sitting on four recycling hubs so far, and there are so many waste collectors in Gauteng alone, not even mentioning in the country, so we’ve barely scratched the surface. So these recycling hubs are a great need for many of the other, you know, waste collectors, and it’s a bit of a challenge right now for us to, like, get access to land. And even if we do get access to land, we’re in constant need to perhaps get a funder to help us buy equipment, to help us set up the structures on site, and to bring in all the other necessary infrastructure to make a recycling hub operational.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:07

I hear the beginning of an approach that would allow companies to partner with informal recyclers to collect even specialized materials, like e-waste, for instance, to create a local closed-loop system. But that also suggests that needs to happen everywhere. Do you see Urban Surfer as a model for an infrastructure to enable the circular economy globally?

Sifiso Gumbi  20:31

100%. So, the one thing that we’ve been able to crack on the ground is we have managed to become the bridge between the formal side of things and the informal side of things. So informal recycling people work as individuals — they are barely organized, they’re just concerned with their survival. So, how we’ve come in, we’ve now become the bridge between the private sector and the informal sector, we’ve become the bridge between the government and the reclaimers on the ground. So definitely, from what we have done in our own capacity, with a very small team and quite limited resources, I think our model is well proven and is well positioned to be the blueprint for replicating the same solution globally.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:22

This is a fascinating opportunity. I want to take a quick commercial break, and we’re going to come back to continue the conversation. Stay tuned, folks.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue the conversation with Sifiso Gumbi. He is the founder of Urban Surfer, which organizes informal recyclers in South Africa. Sifiso, the first time I became aware of informal trash pickers was actually in San Francisco, and it was common for older Asian women to pick bottles out of everybody’s trash before it was collected, just as you described earlier. But what I noticed is they all got on buses and then went to the most dangerous neighborhood in the city to sell their bottles, and I always wondered why nobody enabled them to drop it at an aggregation point where they would be able to collect sufficient volume to make a good profit on the material, while paying those women a fair rate for what they had collected. You’ve built this GPS-tracked trolley system, you’ve got live reporting — that’s a lot of technology for grassroots work. Following on the conversation we were having before the break, how do you see using technology, or technology’s ability to let us see into deep, complex problems, to organize a new recycling system?

Sifiso Gumbi  22:40

Listen, Mitch, we are living in a digital age, and I think the aggregation of data is quite essential, especially when you are dealing with projects like the ones we are involved in. Firstly, we saw it quite important for us to have a live data reporting system and also to fit GPS trackers on the trolleys of all the reclaimers that we support, because, one, if we are working with a project sponsor, we need to have a system that is able to measure the impact and the progress of each project that we have activated. It is important, one, to know how far waste pickers travel, where they collect, how frequently they collect from those neighborhoods. That, for one, gives us the pattern and actually gives us the general idea of, okay, which neighborhoods produce the most waste, because waste pickers only target the neighborhoods that produce the most waste, you know. So, for future reference, that data can help us maybe engage such communities more, and perhaps workshop them on how to better separate their waste, so that they help the reclaimers to collect more waste. Right.

Secondly, we record all the volumes that are brought in by our vast network of reclaimers. In all of our recycling hubs, we record the volumes of what recyclable materials they bring in — is it plastic, is it paper, and what quantity? And then, secondly, we record how much they’ve made from each recyclable item. So there’s a lot of, you know, solutions that have been brought in, like carbon credits, plastic credits, and because we already have all the data, we are in a position to bring those solutions in and have them as add-on incentives for reclaimers through the data that we collect from them — which includes the miles they cover, the volumes they recover — that can be packaged and perhaps accredited as a carbon credit that reclaimers can almost immediately start benefiting from, or it can also be credited as a plastic credit that waste pickers can start benefiting from, and which they should be benefiting from. They did the—

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:01

Work.

Sifiso Gumbi  25:02

They did the work, you know. So it was important for us to collect the data from the very beginning, so that when all of these solutions come to the fore, we already have all the data, and this is transparent data, this is real-time data. There’s absolutely no greenwashing, and these are accurate volumes. So, with that data, we are hoping maybe in the future to use it as leverage to have waste pickers benefit, you know, from all there is to benefit within the climate resilience and sustainability space.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:38

You’re describing a remarkably advanced view into the reverse logistics economy, and I can imagine reclaimers organizing to address what we would think of in Uber terms as surge opportunities — a major football match, for instance — you could send people in to collect particular sets of material, and you have almost unprecedented visibility into local material flows. Are you also thinking about using that data as the basis for providing research, both to government and to corporations, about where those materials might be for profitable recovery?

Sifiso Gumbi  26:16

Absolutely. I mean, if we’re really talking about closing the loop, the best people to talk to, as far as R&D is concerned — let’s say you have a new product on the market, and you are looking for the best packaging solution. For one, the packaging for your product — you must make sure that it can be easily recovered for recycling, and the best people to engage on that are the waste pickers themselves, because they’ll tell you that, okay, this I can definitely recover, and this is how much I will get from it. So, if I’m well incentivized on that, you’ll definitely get to see the circular economy activated with whatever packaging material you put out into the environment. But because currently no one is really engaging, you know, the main volume drivers on the ground, people are mainly concerned with certifications, ISO standards, and this and that. But if you take a closer look at what is currently being produced as packaging material for most of the items that we consume as households, it’s only a limited portion that actually circles back into production. The rest is piling up in our landfills. And why is that? Because there isn’t any incentive for the waste pickers to collect that, you know, as a recyclable material. There isn’t.

Now, in South Africa, the best material, or the hot material, like, right now, to collect as a waste picker is aluminum cans. Aluminum cans are collected so effectively and aggressively, it is difficult to find one on the ground, just as it is difficult for one to pick up $1 in today’s economy, like, on the floor, right. Why is that? It is largely driven by the incentive behind collecting just a kilogram of aluminum cans. Currently, in South Africa, you collect a kilogram of aluminum cans, you can get up to 28 rand, or even 30 rand a kilo. Now, if you have 30 rand, that is enough to buy you a bunny chow and even a Coke.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:23

What you’re describing is a world where we actually pay attention to the flow of materials, ultimately recognizing the value of the people who do that work. As you talked about earlier, the reclaimers face a lot of hardship — there’s the stigma of the job, the dirtiness of the job it’s associated with — but they’re harassed, a lot of them struggle with mental health issues because of the tensions of the work, and I found this in some of the philanthropic consulting I’ve done: people in many of these communities don’t trust outsiders. How do you help them work with these corporations in a way that they don’t feel like they potentially are going to be exploited?

Sifiso Gumbi  29:00

And that’s where we step in, you know. I get interviewed quite a lot. There’s a lot of media houses that want to come and interview, you know, reclaimers, you know, on site, but because they’ve been ridiculed and humiliated by the public so long, whenever someone comes and wants to stick a camera in their faces, it feels as if they are just parading them like freaks to the public, you know, because of the current stigma that is still active even today by the public. It is very difficult for them to trust anyone, and we have now established ourselves to a point where we are one of the main mouthpieces for them. And as much as I would like for them to open up a bit more, I think it will take more engagement on the ground — engagement by industry drivers, you know, CEOs, you know, ministers. We need to see more ministers visiting waste-picking camps. We need to see more CEOs engaging with waste pickers on the ground. They need to start feeling comfortable with the powers that be, even with the general public, you know, because they still aren’t, you know.

I still get a lot of, I still get a lot of hate, man. People say, “Hey, you need to make sure these people get out of the road, you need to get these people away. These people are vagrants, these people are dangerous.” You know, so we need a whole lot more engagement, we need a whole lot more interaction, you know, just with the public, with waste pickers, you know, at the heart of the discussions, at the heart of the engagement. I think we need to first get that right. We need a reconciliatory exercise: first reconcile the waste pickers with the public, and then reconcile the waste pickers with the policymakers, then reconcile the waste pickers with, you know, the relevant corporations that are interested in supporting their work. We need to get to that first before they can ease up to the idea of allowing anyone to come and be in the space and understand the work that they do.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:00

Looking at projections about the value of the circular part of the economy — the collection and reuse components — the projections are, even just in the United States alone, between $1.5 and $2.2 trillion a year in value. Globally, it’s probably two or three times that. If you organize this class of people and give them the economic power, do you see those ministers in particular, but also corporate leaders, as feeling threatened by the rise of that power? Is that something that you need to help them overcome?

Sifiso Gumbi  31:37

They shouldn’t be threatened at all, Mitch. They shouldn’t be threatened. I think it’s an exciting opportunity. I think even for, you know, the corporations — I mean, as it is right now, Coca-Cola can tell you how many cold drink bottles or cans they produce, but they can’t tell you how many cold drink bottles or cans they’ve actually recovered back. They can only tell you the kilograms that they’ve recovered back, right, but they can’t really tell you how many of what they’ve produced that they’ve actually recovered back. They don’t even report along those lines, you understand. But if they were to start supporting reclaimers, they will know exactly that. If I produced one bottle of cold drink, right, and from the factory it left and it went to one province in South Africa, and it was bought by a client, perhaps, in that province — what happened to that bottle after the client was done consuming the contents of that Coke bottle? They will know right to a T, and they would know that, hey, that bottle registered back into our factory.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:40

Well, and we’ve had conversations with GS1, which is the global nonprofit that runs the Universal Product Code system, and they have the ability now to track to unit level an individual can — we made it here, it was picked up here. Do you think that the reclaimers could scan every can that they picked up in order to get to that granularity of reporting that you’re describing?

Sifiso Gumbi  33:04

Absolutely, if they’re incentivized for it, definitely. Because, I mean, GS1 — I know about GS1 very well — but their technology, which is amazing, if you ask me, can only go so far. They are missing that element of including the people that are actually tasked, or appoint themselves, as the first responders to the waste.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:27

There’s a bigger idea in everything we’re talking about, and that’s that the people already doing this work should be built into a new system rather than replaced by it. Absolutely. How do you think about reclaimers as the foundation for the real circular economy? And this kind of goes back to the question I was asking about the threat that ministers might feel. They also represent, as they organize and become more prosperous, a new voting bloc — or is that exactly the voting bloc that people should be thinking about cultivating, because it represents the future of our economy?

Sifiso Gumbi  33:57

Mitch, there’s already more than 100,000 reclaimers — I could say half a million, just a ballpark figure — here in South Africa. South Africa has a high unemployment rate, especially amongst the youth and women, you know. And already there’s this massive opportunity in waste. There’s a massive opportunity in waste that, if formalized, could really present an opportunity for people to sustain themselves at a massive scale. Right, what does that do for a government? The government can start accumulating data that they can use for their reports whenever they meet at the next COP in Geneva. They can use that data to say, okay, we have empowered X amount of people, and they are collecting X amount of waste, and as far as our carbon objectives and our climate action objectives are concerned, this is where we are, and this is where we’re going. But currently, right now, it’s a top-down approach where people are just making estimations at the top. There isn’t any real work that is being done to support those on the ground who are actually doing the real work, you know.

So, it’s an opportunity for the ministers, it’s an opportunity for the business people, it’s an opportunity for everyone. I think there isn’t any threat. If anything, there’s a big opportunity — there’s a really positive story, you know, to be achieved from all this, and South Africa has an opportunity to become the leading country as far as that is concerned. And that can be used as a blueprint, you know, to get all the other developing countries within Africa to also steer their climate objectives, their carbon objectives, and also, you know, deal with their high unemployment rate. You know, it gives us an opportunity also to explore other technologies and explore what other recyclable material we can get — you know, what can we do with carbon waste, what can we do with this, what can we do with that. But all it needs is just a little bit of support for those on the ground, you know, understanding the foundation, you know, of those dynamics, and then from there, a lot will be achieved, Mitch, I promise.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:05

I am really struck, particularly, by the opportunity for youth and women to build the foundation for economic progress. We’ve had Georgie Badiel, the model, on several times, and she has run a program in Burkina Faso through the Georgie Badiel Foundation where women are trained to build local solar-powered water wells. But Georgie’s point is that once they have that income, that ability, and those skills, which they can sell in other contexts — so, you know, people in town need something fixed, now these women know how to do it — that drives local economies and women’s services, hairdressers, things like that. So you actually start laddering up the local opportunity. How do you see reclaiming as potentially a path out of poverty for a young person or a woman?

Sifiso Gumbi  36:50

Look, it was a path out of poverty for me, because I started in high school, Mitch. I was able to buy myself sneakers every now and then, you know, all due to the fact that I was, you know, I would say, ambitious enough to see that, okay, I could make a bit of money from collecting scrap metal, you know — and I bought my first smartphone from that. So, there’s a real opportunity for families to feed themselves. There’s a real opportunity for even varsity students to, you know, be able to support themselves while going through varsity. There’s an opportunity for one to even establish a career in this thing, because, you know, I’m here, you know, getting interviewed by you today because I walked the journey, you know. I established a career for myself within it, so you can even grow within recycling, because, you know, it’s not just recycling — there’s a broader activity even beyond that.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:46

The economy extends into that population, the population contributes back to the economy. It’s a virtuous circle.

Sifiso Gumbi  37:53

Absolutely. It’s really an opportunity that is so untapped, and it’s just waiting for everyone to come to the party.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:06

Sifiso, when you’re standing in front of an audience, like when you presented at TEDx, what do you want people to take away? What’s the most important point that you would like them to understand about the opportunity that we’re talking about?

Sifiso Gumbi  38:18

What I really try and perhaps galvanize people around is to start caring about how we — or how you, as the public — affect the environment that we live in. You know, we live in a world where everyone is concerned about the materialistic value of everything. No one is really concerned about the material once they’ve had their way with it, or once they’ve used it, you know — out of sight, out of mind. You buy the bar of chocolate today, open it up, eat it, you throw away the wrapper. What memory do you keep? How sweet the chocolate was, how delicious it was. But no one ever pays any attention to what happens to the wrapper, because once you’ve put it in the bin, it’s out of sight, out of mind. Right now, there is a group of people that are actually concerned with what happens to that wrapper — that chocolate wrapper that you toss in the bin — because that wrapper is their livelihood. That’s their salary, that’s their bread.

What I want people to see is that those people are not vagrants, those people are not animals — those people are actually essential. I always equate their value to that of bees, because without bees there’s no pollination, without pollination there’s no plants, and with no plants, we all die. Without waste pickers there’s no recycling — yeah, in South Africa, you know, it’s a fact. Without waste pickers there’s no recycling, and without recycling, then all the landfills would have been filled up by now. Joburg is running out of landfill space. Gauteng, as a whole, is running out of landfill space. South Africa, as a whole, is in trouble, you know, with landfill space, and the only people that are delaying the crisis are waste pickers. So, what I always try and get people to see is that, hey, those people matter.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:13

Dignity for a set of critical workers whose work is not currently recognized, but such an important mission. What’s next for Urban Surfer, and how can people find out more about the program and support the work?

Sifiso Gumbi  40:27

We are trying to get as much support to replicate, you know, the model nationally. We want to touch as many lives as we can, we want to support as many reclaimers as we can, equip as many reclaimers as we can. So, as far as the mission goes, what we’re largely focused on right now is just expanding nationally within the next few years, and perhaps, you know, throughout Africa, to also start supporting the other reclaimers, even outside of our borders.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:59

Can people simply send financial support to help you accelerate the project?

Sifiso Gumbi  41:04

You know, that is actually something we’ve never thought about, like GoFundMe. We’ve never had, like, a donation wallet. We always, like — maybe whenever we find a project, we identify a group of reclaimers that need to be supported. What we would do then is we draft the proposal, and then we’d approach maybe corporate SA, or perhaps government, or perhaps public benefit organizations, or PBOs, or NPOs to say, hey, can you come in and support us? We’ve never really thought about how we can perhaps get the public involved as far as donating to the cause, you know. So, maybe that’s something worth considering.

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:39

I certainly think your site is packed with insight that people would be happy to support, and so I encourage you to think about that. But Sifiso, this has been an absolutely inspiring conversation. I thank you for your time.

Sifiso Gumbi  41:52

Thank you for providing the platform, Mitch, and for helping us, you know, crystallize, you know, the message and get it out there to the masses. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  42:11

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Sifiso Gumbi. He is the founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, the Johannesburg-based social enterprise that equips, organizes, and advocates for the informal waste reclaimers who recover most of that country’s recyclable material. And you can learn more about Sifiso’s work at urbansurfer.co.za. It’s a great site — check it out. There’s a lot of fascinating stories.

Let’s start with the fact that reframes our perspective on recycling, because we look at this from an advanced recycling — even though it needs a lot of work — perspective here in the United States. Between 80% and 90% of South Africa’s post-consumer plastic and paper that actually gets recycled is recovered by informal waste pickers, and that’s according to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Sifiso put it plainly: the municipal system collects waste simply to dispose of it, and reclaimers collect it for the value, and that value is passed on to the rest of society in the form of materials that stay in circulation. The country has a recycling rate at all because more than 100,000 people decided, one trolley at a time, that other people’s bins were their livelihood. Now, it’s not a glamorous job, but neither was recycling when it started in the United States, and frankly, it probably isn’t considered that glamorous by most people today. South Africa’s system was self-organized over 30 years while the government ignored the issue, and Sifiso’s 15 years inside it began at age 19, when scrap metal collected after school bought him his first smartphone.

Material recovery is driven by incentives, and the proof is lying on the ground — or rather, it isn’t, as Sifiso said. Aluminum cans fetch 28 to 30 rand per kilogram in South Africa right now, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that he says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a $1 bill on the sidewalk. Materials with weak incentives pile up in landfills, and Johannesburg and Gauteng are running out of space. The lesson is simple: if you’re a company that doesn’t want to bury its customers in waste, when you’re designing your packaging to be recovered, ask the waste pickers what they’ll bend down for, and what picking it up must pay for them to be attracted to do so. They are the R&D department that nobody consults. And meanwhile, brands chase certifications without constructing the reverse logistics infrastructure that makes a recyclability claim legitimate. There’s so many things labeled as recyclable, but you have to have a system nearby you in order for it to be collected and processed. As extended producer responsibility programs expand, the incentive structures at the street level will determine whether those policies result in more material recovery or just more paperwork.

Next, let’s talk about that data layer that Sifiso talked about. Urban Surfer fitted GPS trackers to its trolleys, and they log every kilogram by material type and price across all of its recycling hubs. Sifiso built that infrastructure before carbon credits and plastic credits arrived on the market, and that means when those instruments mature, reclaimers hold verified, real-time records of work that they’ve already performed. As he said, we can have a recycling system with no greenwashing, based on actual transparent data that everybody could see. That’s the same verification standard that my recent guest, Martin Johnston of EarthRating.ai, argued that sustainability reporting lacks, and here it’s being built from the ground up by the people with the most to gain from that information being believed. The unit-level vision could go even further. A beverage company today can report kilograms recovered — it’s referred to generally as mass balance reporting — but it can’t tell you how many of its own bottles, or which bottles, actually came back. Reclaimers scanning what they collect as they collect it could close that reporting gap, but they need to be paid for that data, and it’s not expensive.

And the last and most important idea is that dignity is a design requirement, not a slogan, when building a circular economy.

Mitch Ratcliffe  46:12

Urban Surfer trolleys carry personalized number plates with each reclaimer’s nickname, so a neighborhood comes to know them as workers rather than strangers to fear. And the hard limits that Sifiso points out are trust and scale. Integration of last-mile services — or, in the circular context, the first mile of that return journey that packaging takes — requires a reconciliation of the public, policymakers, and recycling workers, and it’s time to unlock these opportunities to collect and keep materials in use, as well as pay a fair rate, to keep our world cleaner than it currently is. A circular economy can be built on the people who already live it, and that’s the argument that Urban Surfer makes with data, trolleys, and baling machines. So, we’ll be watching whether that model can be replicated nationally and across Africa, and whether EPR rebates and plastic credits actually reach the hands doing the collecting. Stay tuned.

If this conversation changed how you’ll think the next time that you toss a wrapper, share it with someone else who needs to meet the people on the other side of the bin. And you can help the show, too, with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or any of the podcast host sites. You folks are the amplifiers who spread more ideas to create less waste, and our archive of more than 550 episodes is waiting on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate you helping spread the word.

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

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Urban Surfer’s Sifiso Gumbi on Organizing South Africa’s Recycling System appeared first on Earth911.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

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

Today, we’re going to take another dive into the circular economy, this time about how we manage our waste collection and processing systems. The U.S. waste management industry moves more than 290 million tons of municipal solid waste a year. It’s a potential trillion-dollar market, yet much of it still runs on paper, tickets, clipboards, and spreadsheets. Roughly 10,000 independent haulers handle a significant share of American collection and materials transfer, and they work in a business where a single truck costs $300,000 and profitability depends on route efficiency. Yet most of these haulers lack access to the digital infrastructure that other logistics-centric industries adopted a decade ago.

Now that society recognizes the immense value in waste—that it’s not just something to dispose of as quickly and quietly as possible, to manage for profitable reuse in a growing circular economy—the waste management industry is in the midst of a vast upgrade.

And our guest today is Mike Marmo, the CEO and founder of CurbWaste, an end-to-end operating system built for independent waste haulers. Mike is a fourth-generation waste industry professional. His great-grandfather started in the business, and Mike started his career working at a family transfer station in New York. Then he built his own collection and disposal hauling company called Curbside, and when COVID shutdowns wiped out three months of construction-dependent revenue, he pivoted to focus on the software platform his hauling company had built. He sold that hauling business in 2021 and has spent the years since building CurbWaste into a platform that now serves more than 150 haulers across 40 states, from five-truck family operations to 200-vehicle regional fleets.

CurbWaste brings order management, real-time dispatch, route optimization, automated invoicing, driver apps, and e-commerce into a single cloud-based platform. Its CurbPOS point-of-sale system for transfer stations tracks inbound and outbound materials with scale integration, and uses weighted averages by material type to generate automated LEED diversion reports and Recycling Certification Institute certified documentation. In other words, it helps a hauler qualify for environmental incentives that gives contractors and developers defensible, third-party verifiable proof that their construction waste was actually diverted from a landfill. And that, too, creates another economic opportunity.

The per-load, per-material chain-of-custody data is what the emerging extended producer responsibility programs that we’ve discussed many times need, as seven states now require producers to fund and document the collection, sorting, and recycling of their packaging. So if you put this operating system under the circular economy, you start to track the value flow, and that means more value can be recognized and rewarded.

In October, CurbWaste closed a $28 million Series B round led by Socium Ventures—that’s the venture capital arm of Cox Enterprises—bringing its total funding to $50 million. The investment is fueling AI-powered business intelligence tools designed to give independent haulers the kind of data-driven decision making that larger competitors like Waste Management and Republic Services have built in their own proprietary systems.

We’ll talk with Mike about what it takes to digitize an industry that’s resisted technology adoption for decades, how CurbPOS’s materials tracking could extend from LEED compliance into EPR reporting and regional materials flow planning, and whether a network of independent haulers on a shared platform can become a connective tissue for an emerging circular economy supply chain. And finally, what is AI actually delivering for waste operations today compared to the hype we’re hearing?

You can learn more about CurbWaste at curbwaste.com—CurbWaste is all one word, no space, no dash.

So, can a software platform that modernizes independent hauling also help build the data infrastructure for the circular economy? Let’s find out right after this quick commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Mike. How you doing today?

Mike Marmo  4:42

I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:44

Doing well. It’s a beautiful day here in Southern Oregon, and I know in New York City you’re getting through the snow.

Mike Marmo  4:51

Yes, it’s really cold.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:53

I want to start off with this question, and it goes back to the fact that your great-grandfather started this business, or started in this business. Walk us through the paper and digital processes that recycling operations have been using, and how CurbPOS changes their day-to-day work.

Mike Marmo  5:07

Yeah. So my family had grown up in this, you know, been in this business. I had grown up in this business. Actually, my first job, I was a scale operator starting at a transfer station. And when I was working there, everything was pen to paper. You know, we used a traditional scale ticket. We would put it through this, you know, the EXP printer.

And, you know, within that first year of really working there, I started to realize how difficult it was and how much manual work was happening. You know, a lot of the requests that we were getting at that facility—it was a C&D facility—a lot of the requests we were getting were for LEED, or for something that was related to a regulatory compliance effort, and to get all that information was fairly difficult. So we, you know, at that point, I really understood kind of where the waste industry was relative to the technology around me and my regular day-to-day life, and when I started a waste company, and then ultimately ended up starting a software company, I really saw it at scale, working with a lot of companies around the country that are starting pen to paper or operating off kind of archaic systems.

And so when we originally built CurbWaste and then the CurbPOS product, which is for the transfer stations and recycling centers, we really hyper-focused on automating tasks and making sure that everything was as digital as possible for aggregation of data. So I think we’re starting to see adoption along the way, and I think the waste industry is progressing, but ultimately, I think a digital experience is necessary. And I think it’s for the future of the industry and for the future of the way that we operate in our waste streams. I think it’s critical.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:45

When you pivoted from moving trash to selling software, how did that change your view of the system that you’d been working in?

Mike Marmo  6:52

Yeah, so New York, obviously, is fairly unique. We were operating the five boroughs, and there are many limitations, regulatory compliance. It’s very difficult to navigate logistically—you know, so many people, and limited parking, limited space, very tight. So you know, when you’re operating in that bubble, you don’t have a lot of options on how you have to operate. You have to be really, really good and really, really pointed.

But then once we moved into the software space, and we started to see, you know, around the country, how people operate, the term I like to use always is “local,” because it really is. You know, we’re all fundamentally doing the same thing. We’re all picking up garbage. We’re all bringing it to facilities. They’re processing materials. But the way they do it, or the nuances around that workflow, are very different, depending on where you are.

And the example I’ll use is like, you know, you have New York City—again, that’s like a very tight space, limited space, lot of people. And then you’ll operate with a company down in Alabama or Mississippi that has a big urban sprawl, and they have different types of issues, different types of problems. And so everybody’s trying to do the best they can from a service perspective. But ultimately, it really is dependent on where you are regionally. And I think that’s where dynamic software and the ability to be dynamic really provides a lot of value overall.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:04

The old approach to this business was you had a landfill and you had a certain number of years to fill it, and so you were managing filling a hole rather than extracting value from the waste stream. How have you seen that transition change the focus of the business that you’re trying to support with software?

Mike Marmo  8:21

So I think, I mean, maybe I can take a step back into the history a little bit. To your point, I think waste used to be volume-based. It was very much like, I charge a price per yard, I dump for price per yard. And there was a simplicity in that. But I think it also led to—kind of, the way that pricing was done was, again, very volume, and it was very simple.

When the industry moved into weight and it started to weigh materials—and obviously within that, the kind of correlation of commodities being pulled out and the value in the global supply chain—there was a shift in the industry where some of the waste haulers still were pricing or stuck in a volume-based framework, but the facilities were pricing off of tonnage.

And there was an evolution that happened over time. So what you end up seeing is like, if you order a dumpster, for example, and a dumpster has a certain amount of price and allowable tonnage, and then you’re pricing off a matrix format for additional tonnage—the industry shifted. There was a shift in the way that the industry actually started to work.

So now what ends up happening in that framework is, some landfills, you know, big facilities, certain markets have a lot of land and a lot of sprawl, and they have big holes with long lifespans. Whereas other markets don’t have any landfills, or have many landfills closing because they’re running out of space, and they’re moving to intermodal, or they’re moving to, again, like MRFs. There’s been more focus on bringing materials back into the supply chain. So I think we’re still seeing that shift happen. It’s still moving in that direction.

And I think, again, like I always say, waste is a utility that’s not measurable, and I think that’s the main problem. And in order to do this well, you need to have a unit of measurement, a single point of truth. And so that’s why I think software comes into play. It’s able to aggregate a bunch of data—operational data, but also data that’s related to the material and waste streams—and be able to measure what’s going on, and then be able to make better business decisions and better regulatory decisions on the long term.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:23

CurbPOS tracks inbound and outbound materials at these transfer stations. When a truck dumps a load, what’s the data capture process, and how granular does it get in terms of the materials that you can classify and identify? And then what does that enable in terms of value extraction?

Mike Marmo  10:38

It all depends. It really depends on the market. Some, it hits the floor and then it just gets, you know, taken out to the next place. Other markets will obviously run it across a belt, pull out commodities. So there’s something measurable that’s happening.

I think, you know, the age of technology now, you can do things like material recognition—AI being able to do material recognition and get components of that. Obviously, the certification bodies like RCI and LEED that are helping to kind of audit and make sure that there’s an evaluation period of whatever they’re saying they did, or whatever they’re pulling out of the stream.

But the inbound-outbound correlation is really what matters. Because when you’re coming onto the scale and you’re getting weighed and you’re putting it on the floor, once it hits the belt, we can then take the outbounds and create that mapping of, okay, this material, amount of material came in that day, this load hit the floor, and then this is what was distributed out. And then we can show you what a recycling rate was. I still think there’s more to be done there. I do think that cameras and AI can measure that when it hits the ground, but I think the industry is moving in the right direction overall.

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:52

Let’s step back a little bit from the industry to, let’s say, a five-truck family operation that’s never used anything except maybe QuickBooks to do some invoicing. What is the actual on-ramp to CurbPOS look like for them? How does it change their business?

Mike Marmo  12:09

Yeah, so I think if you’re a hauler, you’re going to be on the CurbWaste product. If you’re transitioning to be on the CurbPOS product—but really, around implementation, I think that’s actually a natural point where people start thinking about software as a hauler. You know, you really want to be cost-efficient in the early days, and so sometimes software might be out of the price range. But I think as you start to grow, and you’re seeing that incremental growth, what most haulers are looking for at that point is efficiency and visibility.

So what software is able to do—operationally, it’s allowing you the ability to be efficient and to be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, and then it’s also giving you insights into what’s measurable, so that you can keep investing in the things that are working. That’s hard in the waste business overall, but it’s a good way to start.

When you go through change management, change is hard all the time. Like, if you have a process that’s working, and it’s, you know, the kind of old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” You hit a certain point where you have to make a decision about what you want—what is the motivating factor of the business? So are you trying to grow, or are you just trying to maintain where you are? Most people that are entering business and entrepreneurship are trying to grow. So then it becomes about scale. It becomes about, I need to maximize and focus on the most important thing, and I can’t do everything. And eliminating manual tasks allows you to scale more efficiently.

So you go through the buying process and you find the right fit for the software that you need in the moment of which you need it. But you also need to consider what you can scale into as you grow. And then you go through a process of entering orders, getting training, training the drivers, training the staff, making sure everybody understands how the system works. But then there’s a transition period. We stick with them, we make sure that everything is going the way that we hoped it would go, what the project plan said, and you’re supporting them along the way. But at a certain point, the system is running for you, and then they’re off to the races and they continue to scale.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:53

One of the major changes in the industry that’s driving this transition is the introduction of extended producer responsibility laws, which require, for instance, you’re measuring material type, the weight, its recyclability, and whether it’s recycled, and getting verification of that diversion from landfill. Was that in your head when you started thinking about developing CurbWaste, or is this an opportunity that’s just sort of emerged conveniently at the same time?

Mike Marmo  14:20

100%. When we got into this, the grander vision was the interconnectivity of the supply chain from a data perspective. So the way I kind of like to normalize it is, you have a generator, you have a collector—a hauler—you have a disposal site, and then ultimately end use, right? But it’s end of life. So does it go back into the supply chain through the circular economy? Does it end up in the hole? Whatever that is. There’s usually that period of time where the life cycle has ended.

So the way we thought about it was, well, where can we focus energy from a software perspective? I view the haulers and the transfer stations and the disposal centers as the core of the data set. So we really want to be hyper-focused on aggregating data and providing value in those areas. But ultimately, the idea was to interconnect the generation piece to the rest of it. So when we started, we really stayed focused on that part—the collector and the disposal. But now we’re starting to migrate into the generator piece, to really connect the data sets. And to your point, show where material is being generated, how it’s being generated, where it’s going, and ultimately where it ends up. That’s the measurement of the utility. That’s the waste meter. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:31

We’ve had a number of sorting and hauling folks on the show, as well as a lot of other thinkers on this topic of the circular economy. So building on this reality in which you’ve got verification that materials have been moved to a particular place and at a particular pace, do you imagine it’s possible to actually plan regional material flows, to really turn the circular economy on in its full flower?

Mike Marmo  15:55

Yes, I do. It’s a lofty goal. A lot has to happen. But I do believe that that’s possible. And the analogy I like to use is something like Amazon. Amazon was able to understand from a retail component, like, what buyer behavior was. They were able to leverage data around buyer behavior, and then they were able to integrate themselves into the supply chain—the freight forwarding, the warehousing, the ultimately last-mile delivery.

And they do it so well. The reason why you’re able to get something in the same day is because they were able to connect all those pieces and understand the output. I believe that the waste industry can achieve that. And so that was a core part of what we are trying to do. You have to walk before you run. You can’t do everything all at once. And again, this is a business, right? Like, if I sign up a hauler and I can’t run their business, then the workflows—you have to build a foundation before you build the house. But I think the long-term vision is the ability to do exactly what you just said.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:03

Millions of people come to Earth911’s database to find out what to do with specific materials, and one of the things they’re interested in is getting the right material to the right place, so that it is actually recycled. And what you just described in the context of Amazon, for instance—should we not be thinking about putting everything in a single bin? But could we, in an economically viable way, actually have specialized collection that would produce a cleaner load?

Mike Marmo  17:33

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I saw as a waste hauler that I struggled with was, we’re making decisions—whether regulatory or whether it’s, you know, just in general—like, if you’re trying to be a good actor and try to do the right things, but it’s not rooted in much data. And so what I tried to say was, well, if we can’t measure it, then how do you action it?

And I think the first step, the first thing that everybody should be paying attention to is, how do we measure this? Like, what are we actually looking at? What is the scope of the effort? I don’t think anybody could tell you that, but I think there are ways to do it. And I think, as you have—we like to refer to ourselves as a system of action. You have to have a single point of truth. And when you have a single point of truth, you can then make action against it. So data is the most important thing right now. Data aggregation is the most important thing.

To your point, you did say something that’s really important that I think gets missed as well, which is, it has to be economically viable. There has to be ROI associated. And so a lot of times, what ends up happening is you get a compliance or regulatory effort that doesn’t really take into account the business criteria, and then people are resistant to it, because the business still has to run—it’s a for-profit entity. We want to take the opposite approach. We want to provide value and find ROI in the haulers’ work. Work alongside them, work alongside the transfer stations, work alongside the landfills. Understand how they’re thinking about their business, and really get down into the KPIs of their ROI, and then funnel that back up to the generators and say, here’s how they make money, here’s what’s valuable to them. How can we work together to make that make sense?

I think there’s a way to do that, and it’s just about visibility. It’s transparency, it’s visibility, it’s getting people on the same page. And working together is really what we need to do.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:05

So here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say you look to the one organization in the world right now that has the greatest visibility into what’s flowing into homes, and that’s Amazon, like we were just talking about. Could you partner with Amazon to say, we know you’re delivering this much cardboard, this much plastic waste, and so forth into this region, and then plan a hauling solution in response to that?

Mike Marmo  19:29

That’s right. That’s the end goal. That’s probably the last step, the last piece of the puzzle. But that’s exactly what you want to do. You know, waste is being created when it’s being manufactured, right? Like, ultimately, when it starts, at that point is when we know what the waste stream is going to look like. But again, if you have nowhere for it to funnel in, and you have nowhere to measure it, it’s disjointed. You have to have an integratable solution to be able to even do that. So yes, that is the goal. But ultimately, we have to start at the foundational level.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:58

Yeah. We’re moving to a more planful economy, and there’s a lot to unpack in that idea. Let’s take a quick commercial break. We’re gonna come back to this fascinating conversation. Folks, stay tuned.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my discussion with CurbWaste CEO Mike Marmo. He’s a fourth-generation waste industry veteran whose AI-augmented CurbPOS system automates recycling operations. So, Mike, until recently, the waste management industry has been resistant to digitization. Let’s just put it that way. And there’s a massive change ahead. What do you see in terms of a new generation of leadership and the way they think emerging as this industry grows?

Mike Marmo  20:43

Yeah, I think tech adoption in general runs through cycles, right? You have your early adopters, people that see the value. Usually, that’s someone that understands that they have to differentiate. That’s helping at the market. I was at that at one point—when you’re competing with 200 haulers in New York, you have to figure out a way, right? So tech, for me, was the way that I differentiated myself.

So you start with those, and what you’re really doing is you’re proving the ROI, you’re proving the case. You’re building case studies around, okay, this is providing value in this particular area, but you’re also identifying the meaningful pain points of what they’re experiencing. I think a lot of times, if you talk to a waste hauler, maybe generally they’ll say, like, things are working. But if you really get down into it, pull back the layers, there’s always a pain point. There’s always something they’re trying to solve for.

But when you see margin shrinking, you have to either try to drive net new revenue, or you have to be able to save in a certain area. So then what ends up happening naturally is that people start paying attention and they say, okay, this person is growing. They’re growing 30% year over year. What’s driving that growth? And eventually you get adoption. In that way, you get that mass adoption. But some people don’t want to take the risk. They want the other people to take it first and have that proof point. But then it kind of accelerates, and that’s when you start to get into that hyper-growth, hyper-adoption phase.

I think we are very, very close to that. I think what’s happening is people are paying attention to what’s going on. From a tech perspective, it is moving at hyper speed at this point, and so the world is evolving at such an incredibly fast rate that anybody that doesn’t adopt will ultimately fall behind at some point. So I think the waste industry historically has been a little behind, but I don’t anticipate that being the case for the long term.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:23

When you raised your Series B, you said that you wanted patient capital that understands that this industry won’t transform overnight. And in the context of what you just said about everything changing at hyper speed, why patient? And how does that transformation happen in practice? And what do you see as the timeline?

Mike Marmo  22:41

It’s pretty simple. I think I alluded to this earlier. You have to build the foundation before you build the house. You can’t build the roof first, right? You have to build the foundation. And a lot of waste haulers—you have a varying degree of waste haulers around the country that are like two-to-three-truck operations all the way up to 30,000-truck fleets, right? So you have to meet them where they are. If you cannot run the business for them in a meaningful and impactful way, then you’ve already failed. There’s nothing that you can do that will really help them unless you pick a niche part of their business. And we have a lofty goal of being an operational management system. We want to be able to run the entire business on the platform.

So you have to start there. And when I say patient capital, there’s a lot of effort that goes into building those workflows, not just surface level, but adding depth, adding nuance and depth, to make sure the system is dynamic but rigid. You don’t want data to be wrong, and you don’t want it to get convoluted, but you want it to be dynamic enough to meet the need in the market. So that takes time. You have to learn. You have to listen. You have to pay attention to what’s going on. You have to be a really, really good partner to the waste hauler. They have to trust you and believe in you.

So that part of it is like the first step into the rest. But in conjunction with that, you have to be forward looking. You have to be looking at the things that they’re not paying attention to, the things that they don’t know, because they’re in the weeds dealing with the day-to-day. They’re dealing with servicing their customers, they’re dealing with the community, they’re dealing with building the business that they’re focused on. So it’s our job as a tech partner to be able to say, this is where the industry is moving, here’s what this is going to lead to, here’s the vision, and hopefully get people to sign up to that and believe in that.

So when we brought in a partner, we articulated that. I think a lot of times, when you bring on venture capital or any funding, they’re expecting this major hyper growth. But if you want to achieve what we’ve been speaking about thus far, you need to get things right, and you need to make sure that you’re building the foundation correctly.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:40

You’re leaning into AI. Does that mean that you’re training models to become an expert in managing waste or hauler processes? Where’s the focus of your training?

Mike Marmo  24:51

It’s really in a couple different areas. I think what we really preach out there in the market is, AI for the sake of AI means nothing. Like, AI is cool. It’s great. It can provide you really meaningful value in certain areas of your life. And I think it’s going to be transformative, without a doubt. But in our industry, waste haulers don’t really care about necessarily putting something in because it’s flashy and nice and cool. They want it to provide value.

And so when we think about AI, we think about manual tasks. We think about repeatable tasks. We think about infinite-scale areas of their business that we’re solving an immediate pain point, or that they can scale with for the remainder of time, because that thing is going to happen all the time. So an example of that would be, how are we ingesting orders from multiple channels to create efficiencies? How are we setting up call centers? How are we transcribing phone calls for customer support and customer success?

And then I think what you’re referring to on the learning side is the gluing of traditional machine learning and algorithmic types of optimizations—for example, like route optimization—gluing it to historical behavior and being able to say, here’s the nuances, here’s when the person never puts their garbage out on time, here’s where this street is closed, but it doesn’t show you that in the map. Just certain things that dispatchers know, that tribal knowledge, that they understand their market, that an algorithm is not going to understand. And that’s where AI can layer in and learn behavior and then make better recommendations.

So it’s not an overnight thing. You have to have the data. It’s only as good as the data. So we’re really focused on the infrastructure architecture, making sure that we’re aggregating that data appropriately, and then learning on that data in order to make sure that we’re giving them the best option for success, or the best decision-making process, or the most optimal insight that we can provide.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:42

So what’s an example of an AI-driven recommendation that one of your haulers has used to make a decision that they wouldn’t have otherwise?

Mike Marmo  26:50

Yeah, I think, like, operationally, or just anything that we can do that’s kind of AI-powered—

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:56

One that was a material difference for the hauler. What do you point to as an example when you’re talking to other haulers?

Mike Marmo  27:04

Yeah, let’s—I’ll probably say two. I think first, let’s just talk about—we’ve talked about change management. I think right now, internally, we’re really hyper-focused on making sure that we can create a really nice change management experience of adopting software. So we do a ton around AI data migrations, so that when we’re taking data out of a system, we’re able to map it in a quick and easy way that they can understand it, but also do structured cleanups of that data to make sure that they’re getting what they want into the new system. It seems like a small thing, but it’s a very challenging thing when you’re going through a long change management process. So that’s an immediate impact to the hauler, that they feel more comfortable in that change.

The second thing is, anything agentic that we build is going to provide value to the pain point that they’re trying to solve for. So whether that’s migrating data from one place into another—being able to take data out of a CRM or being able to put it into an ERP—meaningful value. You’ve just eliminated a manual task that they would have to do over and over and over again. That’s repetitive, that’s manual, and it applies. So it’s a really good method in providing ROI, because you can just say, that work is never going to be done again. That agent will work in that and do that for you with conviction.

But I think longer term, things like we talked about—service verification, material recognition, route optimization—those are efforts that we have to make meaningful investments in, that’ll be coming down the pike.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:29

You know, as I listen to your description of this, and I think about the U.S. recycling system, which is, as you’ve pointed out, filled with small, private recyclers and haulers looking for ways to plug into, for instance, the growing extended producer responsibility infrastructure that’s emerging around us—I’m reminded of eBay. Is CurbWaste aiming to become a marketplace layer where those independent operators can begin to identify and plug into broader materials flows?

Mike Marmo  29:00

It’s on our radar. Like I said, I think a marketplace, to me, again, is really indicative of the behavior and the learning and understanding what’s going on. So right now, core focus is just visibility. I think we have to create the transparency layer first before anything else.

But yes, I would say, a marketplace, the ability to understand who’s best—like, RCI is a great example. I mean, RCI, when you’re partnering with LEED and you’re trying to find RCI facilities to establish those LEED points, that’s an area where we can help and say, this facility is in this area. Partner. We’re driving revenue for our customer base. We’re saying this RCI facility is on our platform. We can measure it. We can automate that process. We can get that LEED report to the right person in the right moment and give that level of visibility through dashboards or anything that we’re building at a customer-facing level.

Again, that’s work that doesn’t have to be done manually. That’s something that can happen in automation. That’s probably the first natural step. And we are doing some meaningful work with RCI and LEED. But long term, I think, yes, to your point, we want to get to a visibility layer, a waste meter layer, for anybody that wants it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:10

That transparency that you’re describing is going to be particularly important to producer responsibility organizations, the entities that are standing up to fulfill EPR requirements. Are you talking with them about how you can facilitate the management of their specific materials?

Mike Marmo  30:28

Yes, we are very much in discovery and in conversation with people that are obviously interested and incentivized to want to work with us and try to achieve this vision. So we do talk to people, and we do try to understand, what visibility do they want? What would they love to see? What is a utopian point of view? I mean, product is always something that we’re always forward looking on, right? What’s being built today is actionable. It’s already been validated. Now it’s about, what are we going to build in the future? We’re probably talking a few years down the road. I think we still have a lot to do on the workflow side. But yes, we are always keeping these teams informed and making sure that they’re aligned with where we’re going.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:06

You’ve raised $50 million to date. Do you see a substantial amount of capital sitting out there waiting for this efflorescence of data visibility to take hold, so that they can begin to mine the material value in the economy?

Mike Marmo  31:21

Yes. I mean, our Series B was led by the venture arm of Cox Enterprises, and it was a very big part of their thesis. They saw the vision. They aligned with it. We were able to move quickly. But it really was rooted in the fact that they’ve been seeking this type of solution internally. They’ve been trying to figure out how to get more visibility into their own efforts as it relates to sustainability. So yes, I think we will continue to build. We have to fund the business in order to build the products and achieve the dream that we want to. We do believe that this can be a very big business, but ultimately, we are still aligning on that mission statement and that vision of giving the true visibility and measurement of the waste industry.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:00

We’ve been looking kind of over the horizon without a clear timeframe. But let me ask you this: in 10 years, will we have an AI-enabled circular economy running, or will it still be in the process of being constructed?

Mike Marmo  32:12

I think it will be there. Yeah, in 10 years, I think it will be there. I think, you know what I know internally of where we are—we are not that far off. We have spent the last four years on the workflows. We are starting to see the data benefit of that. I think in the next 10 years we will 100% have it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:33

So how does that change the economy of the United States?

Mike Marmo  32:37

You know, that’s the part that I’m not 100% sure. I’ve been operating under the mission statement of this dream and this vision. I do think that it’s going to ultimately make us rethink how we think about waste.

You know, you have electricity, right? You can measure it. You can go onto your portal and see how much you’re consuming. You can measure water. You can measure all the things that you’re using on a day-to-day basis. The waste industry is a part, a core part, of our infrastructure. It’s a core part of our society. You can even look historically and say, when waste stops getting picked up, it can crumble a society. It can crumble a city. I mean, New York City went through that in the strike, and recently in Boston they went through it.

So there’s meaningful implications to the societal impact that waste has. And sometimes I think that gets taken for granted. And I think what we really want to focus on is showing that—getting all the waste haulers in our community, which I really think we’re building, is a really great community of waste haulers that are forward thinking, that want to be a part of that mission, and try to show people how critical this industry is, and also all the things and all the information and insights that can come out of it.

So yeah, it’s very mission-driven. It’s a very personal journey. It’s a very mission-driven journey. But ultimately, I think we have to break it down into its parts, phase out what the goals are, and then get to a point where we can show people how important it actually is.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:05

This is a huge vision. How can our listeners keep track of your part of the story?

Mike Marmo  34:10

Well, I mean, obviously we post whatever we have to post on our website, so that’s a good place—at curbwaste.com—but also, anybody can reach out to us. I mean, we are very much trying to be an advocate of the industry, and we’re very much trying to be people that can be thought leaders and really speak about what we’re trying to achieve here. We’re very transparent, we’re very honest, we’re very true to who we are. So we love interacting with people in the space. We have people come to our office often. We have people talk to our team often. So for me, it’s reach out. Reach out on LinkedIn, reach out on the website. You can reach out by any means necessary.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:48

Mike, thanks very much. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

Mike Marmo  34:52

Thank you. I really appreciate you having me.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:08

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Mike Marmo. He’s CEO and founder of CurbWaste, and a fourth-generation waste industry professional who’s building the CurbPOS system, an end-to-end operating system for independent waste haulers. You can learn more about the company and its work at curbwaste.com—CurbWaste is all one word, no space, no dash.

Mike said something during the conversation that I encourage you to sit with: waste is being created when it is being manufactured. Now, that’s a deceptively simple observation, and it reframes everything with regard to how we think about the leftovers of the take-make-waste economy. The moment a product rolls off the line, its waste stream is determined—its packaging, what you need to do with it, the end-of-use disposition of the product itself, and the materials that will need to be collected, sorted, and either returned to the supply chain or, unfortunately, sometimes buried in a hole. If you can accept that premise, then the waste management industry isn’t simply a downstream result of the current economy. It’s a mirror that we need to look into to see the potential value to be recovered next week, next month, next year, or decades from now, when materials can no longer serve their current purpose.

Mike also pointed to what happens when waste stops moving. In 1968, New York’s sanitation workers walked off the job for nine days—just nine days—and 100,000 tons of garbage piled up chest-high on sidewalks. Rats swarmed into the city’s best neighborhoods, and New York declared its first public health emergency since the 1931 polio epidemic. And just last summer, when Teamsters struck against Republic Services in the greater Boston area, trash went uncollected for more than two months across 14 communities. Dumpsters overflowed behind restaurants. The rodent population exploded, and schools faced the start of their school year buried by rotting waste. As Mike put it, when waste stops getting picked up, a society can crumble.

And that fragility reveals something profound about society’s relationship with the materials from which it is constructed. We’ve built a civilization on the assumption that waste must disappear—that it’s someone else’s problem, and that it is best put out of sight and kept out of mind. We’ve treated waste as dirty, shameful, and beneath notice. That cultural contempt has real economic consequences, because it means we’ve systematically underinvested in the infrastructure that manages the material afterlife of everything that we produce and consume.

Now just imagine what happens when waste is no longer something to dispose of, but something that it’s important to recover. When the 290 million tons of municipal solid waste moving through U.S. systems each year is finally understood not as a cost center, but as part of the supply chain—a feedstock stream worth tracking, optimizing, and monetizing with the same sophistication we bring to any other logistics challenge. That’s when the world CurbWaste wants to enable and its staggering economics will come into being.

Accenture research projected that the circular economy could generate $4.5 trillion in additional economic output by 2030 and as much as $25 trillion by 2050. The United Nations Development Program has endorsed that same $4.5 trillion figure, noting that the transition would simultaneously cut emissions, create stable jobs, and open new green markets all over the world. Market analysts are converging on figures that describe an enormous circular economy. King’s Research projects it will reach nearly $2.9 trillion by 2031, while a more conservative estimate from Next Move Strategy Consulting pinpoints $1.3 trillion in projected value by 2030—so that even the lowest projections represent a doubling or tripling of the current waste market’s value in just five years.

The point is that we’re dramatically underinvesting relative to the opportunity. CurbWaste’s CurbPOS is just getting started on the path to connecting waste generators to local haulers, closing the loop that Mike described, from the point a product is manufactured to the end of its life and, ideally, back into the supply chain.

Mike’s Amazon analogy is the right way to frame this. Amazon took the time to understand buyer behavior first, when they were just selling books, and then they connected warehousing, freight forwarding, and last-mile logistics based on the knowledge of the consumer’s needs. The waste industry can follow the same logic: identify what’s being generated, where it flows, and where it ends up, ready for collection. Then the challenge is plugging the myriad gaps in our collection infrastructure by connecting independent operators—new startups—to materials that they can monetize, using a shared digital infrastructure. Right there you can see the necessary transparency layer, the marketplace layer, that turns a fragmented collection system into the connective tissue for a circular supply chain.

And that’s the signal that can transform waste into value, and that will drive new revenue for state and local collection and processing companies under extended producer responsibility programs, and ultimately lead to planned regional materials flows that citizens don’t pay for, that companies exploit because it’s profitable.

So when waste stops being considered the dirty result of our consumption and starts being recognized as valuable—when society looks at what it throws away with the same interest it brings to what it buys—we will have a fundamentally different relationship with the material world. One that recognizes that the people who move and manage our waste are operating a utility as essential as electricity or water. And that’s the story that will help unfold and explore here on Sustainability In Your Ear.

So stay tuned. And folks, would you take a moment to check out our archive of more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear? We’re in our sixth season, and I guarantee you there’s an interview that you’ll want to share with one of your friends. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your 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 for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: CurbWaste’s Mike Marmo Is Building the Waste Logistics Layer of the Circular Economy appeared first on Earth911.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:10

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in 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, and it’s one I particularly enjoy — talking to a young person. Well, actually, two of them, making a positive impact.

Textile waste has become one of the most stubborn problems in the American waste stream. Americans throw away roughly 17 million tons of clothing every year, and a great majority of it ends up buried in landfills, where natural fibers slowly decompose and release methane — a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Over a century, as things break down in a landfill, clothing is uniquely wasteful, because so much of what gets discarded is still perfectly usable, and it’s simply been outgrown, or it’s gone out of style, or fallen out of someone’s rotation.

And the environmental cost we pay is paid twice: once when a still-good garment is thrown away, and again when a brand-new one is manufactured to replace it, consuming water, energy, and raw materials in the process. And nowhere is that double cost more visible than with children’s school uniforms. Kids outgrow them on a predictable annual cycle, long before the clothing wears out. And for families on a tight budget, replacing a uniform every year is a recurring expense that arrives whether the household can afford it or not.

The result is a steady stream of good clothing headed for the trash and a parallel stream of families struggling to pay for its replacement — two problems that, looked at the right way, turn out to be each other’s solution. And our guests today saw that connection when they were still in middle school.

Ethan and Desmond Hua are the founders of HOPE — H-O-P-E — the HOPE Uniforms Program. HOPE stands for Help Our Planet Earth, a student-led nonprofit that they launched in 2020 in San Mateo, California. The idea was simple: collect gently used school uniforms that families had outgrown and redistribute them for free to families who need them.

What began in a single elementary school run out of the family garage has grown into an operation serving 10 schools across three districts, and to date, HOPE has kept more than 14,000 uniforms out of landfills, redistributed over 12,000 of them back to families, and served more than 1,400 households, saving those families an estimated $141,000 in clothing costs along the way.

The spark, as Ethan has said, was a single moment: a classmate came to school in shorts on a cold day because he couldn’t afford another pair of pants to last until laundry day. And from that, Ethan and Desmond built something with real operational sophistication — an online request system with a live inventory tracker, and a website in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese to reach every corner of his multilingual community. They’ve since secured a donation of 2,000 brand-new uniforms from Costco, and their work has earned Ethan a 2025 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, a Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award, and coverage on national television.

So we’re going to talk with Ethan and Desmond about what started it all, why reuse is one of the most underrated tools in the sustainability toolkit, and the environmental case for keeping a garment whole and in circulation rather than recycling or replacing it. We’ll dig into how they built a real logistics operation as teenagers and why they made the program multilingual from the start, as well as how they designed it so that asking for help feels routine rather than uncomfortable. And we’ll look ahead at what’s next for HOPE, and what they’d tell any listener sitting on an idea but waiting for money, permission, or someone else to go first.

So, to learn more, visit hopeuniformsprogram.com. That’s all one word, no space, no dash — hopeuniformsprogram.com. And if you’re a teen making a difference for the planet, check out the Barron Prize at barronprize.org. Again, all one word, no space, no dash — barronprize.org — to learn how to enter your work for recognition by the Gloria Barron Prize program.

Can a teenager with a garage, a good idea, and a little persistence really make a dent in two of our most intractable problems at once — textile waste and the cost of raising a family? Let’s find out, right after this.

Mitch Ratcliffe 4:30

Welcome to the show, Ethan and Desmond. Hey, introduce yourselves so people can recognize the difference.

Ethan Hua 4:42

Hi, I’m Ethan. I just graduated as a senior.

Desmond Hua 4:46

My name is Desmond, and I just finished my freshman year at Aragon High School.

Ethan Hua 4:51

And we’re the co-founders of the HOPE Uniforms Program, HOPE standing for Help Our Planet Earth.

Mitch Ratcliffe 4:56

You guys have done some amazing work already, and I just want to start off by — tell me about how this started. You saw a classmate come to school in shorts, and it was a cold day, and he was wearing them because they couldn’t afford a pair of pants until laundry day. What went through your mind, and how did you come to the conclusion, “I can solve that problem”?

Desmond Hua 5:13

Well, I guess what went through our minds was that when we were in elementary school, when we saw our friends, we realized that we outgrow so much clothes ourselves when we grew up, and we wondered, what do we do with them when we outgrow them? So when we went — how do…

Ethan Hua 5:27

…they go?

Desmond Hua 5:28

Yeah, like to—

Ethan Hua 5:29

Narnia. Like, some place.

Desmond Hua 5:33

Yeah. So when we went home, we talked to our parents, and we asked them, where does our clothes go? And they said we used to just throw them away, don’t usually have a better purpose. So me and my brother wanted to give them a new life, something to reuse those uniforms, and so we actually founded HOPE around five years ago.

Ethan Hua 5:54

One of the biggest travesties that we saw in these uniforms is that they’re very reusable, they’re gently used, there’s nothing wrong with them, and it’s a shame that, with this little time that we spent with the uniform, they’re going thrown away — when they’re able to be perfectly used and given a second life. In fact, we tell that these uniforms not only have a second life in them, but a third life and a fourth life as well, and because of that, it just seemed like a shame to be tossed away after one single use.

Mitch Ratcliffe 6:23

You picked the name “Help Our Planet Earth,” but this program obviously does something else. It helps families just as much as the planet. Which did you really feel like was the right focus at the time you launched?

Desmond Hua 6:34

I think the main focus at first was our community, because we, you know, grew up in the elementary school. But then at the same time our mission was also helping the earth, because this cause not only impacted the community, but also took out over 40 tons of textile waste from the landfills — 40 metric tons of textile waste, or 30, 30 metric tons of textile waste out of the landfills. So we wanted to cover both aspects while we’re doing HOPE.

Ethan Hua 7:06

So yes — when we first addressed this problem, the community, it was based on a problem that we experienced, that we witnessed from peers. However, we did act, because we’re Scouts, and we’ve been part of the Scouting program since kindergarten, so we have a lot of sustainability virtues instilled in us, like Leave No Trace principles, and we thought that there’s something we can give back to the environment.

Mitch Ratcliffe 7:33

Clothing reuse, thrift shopping, is a big deal these days. Is clothing reuse gaining traction? Is it becoming cool to say these clothes are being reused? Or is that still a point of resistance in people who you might give a uniform to?

Ethan Hua 7:48

I think that there’s, in the youth, there’s a little disparity, but I guess between the youth and the more grown-up adults. We live — me and Desmond live — 10 minutes away from San Francisco, and some people don’t know this, but San Francisco is one of the thrifting capitals of the nation, and because of that, it’s very trendy. I thrift. A lot of kids love thrifting as a hobby; it’s something fun to do on the weekends, so there’s nothing wrong with thrifting. However, there are certain stigmas surrounding getting used clothes, and it’s understandable.

However, to combat that, what we do is, once we get our donations from the community, we process them, we check them for any rips, stains, tears, make sure they’re gently used. We want these families to have — we want these uniforms to have — many, many lives, not just one life or two. We’re in for the long, the long sustainable impact, long-term impact. Because of that, we check them, and what we pride ourselves in is ensuring that our families are repeat customers.

So we get all our uniforms from families all across the community — we get them from families who no longer need to use their uniforms — so we receive them through donation bins in each of our partner schools’ offices. We drop them off in these wooden bins that we’ve built, and then once we take these uniforms back, we process them, we do the check, as I said. And on our website, a family would request, okay, I need three articles of size-medium white polo tops. And our website is multilingual, because we serve a very diverse customer base across the community, across the Bay Area.

And on these websites we see, okay, this family at so-and-so school needs this amount of uniforms at this size. Let’s go check our inventory — a spreadsheet of all the uniforms we have in our inventory. Currently, we have roughly 2,000; it’s all sitting in our garage. And then we refill this order, we put it in the bag, we drop it off to the school, and these families would receive them. And, say, it’s probably six months down the line, hopefully: they wear the uniforms, they take good care of them, and they outgrow them, and at this point they’re back at stage one. The family goes, “Hey, at least out of four, I have these uniforms that they’ve outgrown — what do I do with them?” And they send it back to us.

So because of that, we want to make sure these uniforms are kept very nice, they’ve been spot-checked, so the families are happy with their services and they will reuse us in the future, thereby forming an eco-friendly cycle — a long-term sustainability impact.

Mitch Ratcliffe 10:31

So, by getting them involved in the return process too, you’re also reinforcing the value of reuse, and that makes it feel more normal to them to get what would, in earlier generations, be described as hand-me-downs. Does that activation of their concern about the planet play a big part in that messaging?

Ethan Hua 10:49

We try to include that message — we do include that messaging in all our announcements. That’s one of our main selling points. However, it’s hard to beat the word “free” when it comes to advertising to the community, especially when it’s across different cultures or languages — Spanish, Chinese, and English. It’s a lot more direct to say, hey, we have free uniforms that are reused through our program, and it’s a really cool benefit that we prevent them from going to landfills. One of our most proud statistics, actually — Des, you might want to share the statistics. Yeah, okay. So the reason why I’m sharing this with you is that, since inception, we have diverted roughly 14,900 garments from landfills and given back out to the community roughly 12,700 uniforms. Desmond, do you want to share our most proud statistics that sprung up from that?

Desmond Hua 11:45

So I think we’ve roughly also helped around 1,400 families, and we’ve also saved families around $140,000 through uniforms, so they don’t have to keep buying uniforms over and over as they grow up. Also, the methane equivalent to carbon emissions is around 3,000 kilograms, and, as I said, the 30 metric tons is saved from the landfills through HOPE’s Uniform Program, and those are some of our proudest statistics.

Ethan Hua 12:16

When we — so this is our message to the community — when we usually talk about HOPE, we mention the 30 to 30,000 methane-equivalent carbon emissions avoided from landfill diversion. So when uniforms reach landfills, what someone might ask is, why are they so harmful to the atmosphere? The answer to that question is that when they sit in these landfills, over time they decompose — first goes the cotton, then go the poly fibers, the plastics — and throughout the years it takes for a uniform garment to decompose, it releases harmful greenhouse gases, such as methane. Especially methane: methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide to our atmosphere, and throughout these many years it just releases more and more of these gases, and it builds up, adding to the greenhouse effect, warming up our planet.

Mitch Ratcliffe 13:08

Both of you have articulated a number of benefits and a number of the concerns that people should be aware of. You mentioned that “free” is the driving force in a lot of this — the messaging, and the reuse generally. When you think about how your generation is growing up in a world where it’s very difficult to be unaware of the environmental consequences of our life, are we beginning to see a change in their relationship with materials like clothing that you see as promising for a more sustainable economy?

Desmond Hua 13:42

I feel like I would say so, because — I think not just here, but around the world — there’s many ways people are trying to find ways to reuse, recycle, and, right, there’s like new methods, and, I guess, new technology now that we’re able to access, to find ways to reduce carbon emissions and make things more eco-friendly.

Ethan Hua 14:07

Just to specify your question — are you asking, is the next generation more willing to reuse?

Mitch Ratcliffe 14:13

More willing to reuse, but also, to what Desmond was just saying — are we also seeing a generation grow up that recognizes they have tools to do things with material that we weren’t able to do before? When I was growing up, there was a garbage can and there was nothing else. Now there’s a recycling bin too. How do you imagine the world will be configured to support what your generation recognizes it needs to do with regard to reuse, with creating a circular economy?

Ethan Hua 14:42

I think, of course, we’re a lot more well-equipped to deal with the climate crisis, and, more importantly, a lot of people are a lot more aware. For example, we know a lot about the textile world because we run a uniform organization. But one thing that we’ve noticed has taken on in the industry is that a lot more fabrics have been developed to become more eco-friendly, such as hemp. Hemp is a little coarse of a fabric, so… very comfortable, but it’s all plant-based. Well, it’s a lot more plant-based than just microfibers and plastics, and it’s very durable as well, and it seems like that could be a possible trend, and something that the textile industry is going towards in the future. So, trends like that — just seeing things like that — it’s very encouraging to see that there are good people concerned about our future and thinking of keeping that in mind.

Mitch Ratcliffe 15:48

So, you’ve run this out of your family’s garage, as you said, but you’ve also built an inventory management system. Tell us about how you learned to run an operation like this, because that’s another key to unlocking the potential your generation has to make a really massive difference in the way the economy runs.

Desmond Hua 16:06

I think, in the beginning, in order to talk to families and reach out to families, we actually had to do a really slow system where we just had to email back and forth. We realized, you know, if we want the operation to grow or to improve, it would require a much more mechanical process. So I think we started to use a spreadsheet, taking everything that came in, managing how much of each uniform we have, roughly, and what we’re giving out. So, like, we have a spreadsheet of our entire inventory, and even when we do orders to give out to families, we keep track of everything we give out. So I think, in order for us to have a mechanical process and to know what we have and how much we can help the families, and remove gas emissions — that’s how the spreadsheet would really help, because it just keeps everything in track.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:11

So, how do you deliver the uniform once you have that need identified? Is it — you hand it to them, or do they pick it up?

Desmond Hua 17:21

So we actually drop it off at their school’s front office, and they can just pick it up at the school.

Ethan Hua 17:29

We send them an announcement to come pick it up, as well as the school does, to their emails.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:33

So, is it getting easier with the new tools — the vibe-coding tools and things like that — for you to start to solve some of these problems? Have you explored them?

Ethan Hua 17:42

Oh, yeah. We have automation. We have, like, automated emails to the families that, yes, your order is in queue, it’s coming up, we’re working on it, and we have ways to let them know that, yeah, your order is ready for pickup. And social media is a very great tool for that — we use Instagram. Follow us on our HOPE Uniforms Program Instagram. It’s a very good way to let families know en masse. And one thing that I’d like to add to Desmond’s point: in our journey of collecting uniform orders from families, originally in 2020 when we started this program, we were doing it by email — literally one-on-one email chains, so we’re managing 50 email chains at once, which was very logistically challenging. On top of that, we’re receiving emails not even in English — we’re in Chinese, in Vietnamese, in Spanish — so, using Google Translate, it was just a lot of steps to take to get to the final product of getting the uniforms to the family.

Desmond Hua 18:47

Yeah.

Ethan Hua 18:47

And because of that, we set up this multilingual website to help us address the multilingual, cultural diversity in our community, which was very helpful.

Mitch Ratcliffe 18:57

I guess the question I want to get to before we take a quick commercial break is: do you think the satisfaction that both of you are expressing about the impact you’re having — as well as the satisfaction people have in participating in the program — is the catalyst for jump-starting thousands of local programs to solve thousands of different problems across the country? Like keeping uniforms in circulation, but potentially collecting a lot of other things for reuse?

Ethan Hua 19:23

Is it worth it? Is that your question?

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:24

Is this the kind of thing that can inspire people to solve local problems? Do you have a template here for a solution to jump-starting the circular economy in the many small places it needs to happen?

Ethan Hua 19:38

I think it matters — or, I think true sustainability is very hard to reach. When I hear the word “sustainability” nowadays, I think of words like gourmet and adventure. What do I mean by that? So, if you look at the Merriam-Webster definition of adventure, you see it connotes risk-taking and danger, yet when you go on adventure travel, it’s rarely ever dangerous. And for gourmet — if you eat a gourmet burger at a restaurant, sometimes it’s not even that tasty, yet it’s still labeled as gourmet. Same thing with sustainability. When you hear the word “sustainability” — sustainability buildings, for example — yes, they might be carbon-neutral, yet the process to get these net-carbon-zero buildings, it’s not sustainable, like all the building practices; it takes a lot of energy and resources to get that building to energy perfection, as you could say.

And likewise, in the real world, achieving true sustainability is very, very hard, and clothing is one of these things that we noticed could have a cyclical life cycle, and being able to be reused for these many, many life cycles. Again, we’re long-term impact; it’s something that you could reuse many times, not just one or two. So, yes, I think that we are jump-starting and inspiring a lot of grassroots efforts in achieving these reuse programs. Not everything can be reused, though. However, the idea, and getting it into people’s minds, is, I think, the biggest, most important part.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:16

And then we’ll start to solve problems. So, this is a great conversation. I want to take a quick commercial break. Folks, we’re going to be right back to continue the conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:28

Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. Let’s continue the discussion with Ethan and Desmond Hua, who created Help Our Planet Earth, or HOPE — a clothing reuse program that helps teens in need while reducing the volume of textile waste headed for landfill. And Ethan was a 2025 winner of the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes. Ethan, what has that recognition — as well as the Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award that you won — done for the program? Are you getting more attention now?

Ethan Hua 21:55

Yes, we are getting more attention. The biggest thing this exposure has helped us with is that it gives us credibility to talk to new schools, and then it’s just really helpful, because when we first started this program, we started with one school — me and Desmond’s elementary school — and we started by announcing it just to the couple of families at our school, saying that we have this program available, it’d be pretty cool for the environment and for other families, if you could help out. And now, instead, with this exposure to the Gloria Barron Prize and Samaritan House, and our interviews on ABC, NBC — it just helps us a lot, because schools were like, okay, these guys are legit, they’re really in the business of helping the community, they’ll do their job, and they’ve been verified by all these organizations. And because of that, it’s all the easier to spread and make a bigger impact on the community.

Mitch Ratcliffe 22:55

So, how big can this get before you outgrow your garage, and your parents say, “Look, that’s just too many uniforms”?

Ethan Hua 23:02

Well, I would say — I’m not exactly sure about the limit, that’s a good question. Yeah, it’s certainly going to reach a limit, and I think the beauty about HOPE is that anyone can do it. Yes, me and Desmond, we do have backgrounds in scouting, and we have strong sustainability virtues, however, that does not make us that unique, and students like us could take on the program. And in the long term, what I think would be great is if we could spread HOPE to other districts — like, other districts beyond what we can manage — and we’ll have HOPE in another garage.

Desmond Hua 23:47

Yeah.

Ethan Hua 23:48

And then maybe another one. And I think that is what makes HOPE — I think that is the biggest impact that HOPE could have: it’s not, of course, only the environmental impact of diverting uniforms from landfills and saving them from decomposing into the atmosphere, but it’s also putting the idea in other kids’ minds that they could do something as well. And I see a lot of kids in the Bay Area having a lot of reuse programs, like saving food waste, or other service projects in parks. I think that’s very, very powerful — just the fact that you’re doing it, and you’re telling other people about it. It puts the idea in kids’ minds, saying, I could do something like that as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe 24:29

Well, you’re also creating new communities by connecting different lingual groups — you do English, Spanish, Mandarin on the site right now. As you think about the various communities you serve and the reuse challenges that are emerging all around you — the Bay Area being a hotspot for a variety of new trends in the world — how would you use a multilingual website and other services to help people understand what they could do together to solve some of our environmental problems?

Ethan Hua 25:00

So what we like to do is fully contextualize the problem. It’s very important for families to understand that this is an issue, in order for them to fully appreciate their usage of our services. Going back to our number-one most serious statistic — the 30 metric tons of carbon emissions prevented through uniform reuse — we tell families this. We need to fully explain what goes behind that 30 metric tons. So that 30 metric tons represents the 12,700 uniforms that we’ve given back to the community; this represents all the carbon that would have gone into making 12,700 uniforms, but was saved because they used one that was pre-existing. So this carbon waste includes — when we try to calculate a rough estimate — all the carbon used through all the land that it takes to grow the cotton for these uniforms, all the water that was used to grow the cotton, all the pesticides, all the chemical dyes used to dye the uniforms, the energy that goes into making it in the factory, and all the car emissions that are emitted through that, the transportation costs to the store. It’s a long laundry list of all the things that go into making a uniform. Although it’s a lot of carbon going into a uniform, just a rough estimate, it adds up — it does make a really sizable difference when you add up all the 12,000 uniforms. And it’s important to tell the families that, because if they don’t understand what it means to reuse the uniform, then they won’t understand the true impact of their actions, and I want them to appreciate it.

Mitch Ratcliffe 26:48

Well, so that’s really what I’m getting at. Are there other areas where you can see being able to tell that story in a variety of languages, rather than just in English, which shuts out a lot of people, that we could start to activate within many communities a lot of different circular cycles? Not just uniforms, but maybe school supplies that go unused, and so forth. Have you thought about what else HOPE could eventually manage within the circular economy?

Desmond Hua 27:16

Definitely, I think so. Actually, recently I’ve been trying to expand to some schools in San Jose. They actually do especially have a need for uniforms, and seeing that, I think it’s definitely a school that would appreciate getting free uniforms. And seeing that, I think if we showed them the true meaning of what we’re trying to aim for — which is helping, or helping Planet Earth — I think the families would be more willing to, first of all, help with the eco cycle, which is donating back to HOPE, where we can, and then we can give back to them. So it’s like a process. So, but yes, there’s definitely schools around here that would appreciate HOPE.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:06

Now, Ethan, you’ve said that meaningful change doesn’t take a lot of resources or institutional backing — just an idea and the willingness to act. For someone who’s listening, who has an idea but assumes that they need a lot of money or some permission to get started, what would you tell them?

Ethan Hua 28:23

I remember when me and Desmond started, we were very, very scared talking to adults in that moment, but deep down, we knew what we were doing was good. It was good for the community. It was going to be a benefit for the community and the environment. We didn’t have any doubt about that. Our biggest fear was that, right now, we’re just going to say the wrong thing and embarrass ourselves, but deep down we knew that it was an ultimate good — there’s no way that it couldn’t be an ultimate good for the community. And I think most people do understand: if they’re trying to launch an initiative, and it truly is a net benefit for the community, I think people deep down know what’s good, and I would say, keep pushing on that feeling.

Mitch Ratcliffe 29:21

If a student wanted to start something like HOPE in their own district, where would you point them, so they could take a first step? What did you learn that allowed you to confidently pursue that vision you just described?

Ethan Hua 29:35

It’s like — you want to foster your idea in an environment where you know it will succeed. At first, you always want to start strong, you always want to start in a community where you understand your community 100%. So we started ours in our elementary school. We knew the principal, we spoke Chinese — it was a Chinese-immersion school — so we knew that we could address this community. And I want everyone to address their own community at first. Help your community first, make sure it survives — sorry, let me say, make sure it survives, make sure it grows — until you can expand to other areas that you know can be helped.

Mitch Ratcliffe 30:21

Knowing a community is something that a lot of brands wish they could do, and you managed to get Costco to give you 2,000 new uniforms. How did that relationship emerge, and is that potentially a pointer to the new relationships you could build in order to take HOPE to the next level?

Desmond Hua 30:40

Well, what we did with Costco is, both of us actually reached out to the CEO, Ron Vachris, and we asked him if, in our local Costco area, they had any extra uniforms they could possibly donate to us.

Mitch Ratcliffe 30:57

Wait — so you sent an email to the CEO of Costco?

Desmond Hua 31:00

So what we did is, we actually reached out to Ron Vachris, the CEO of Costco, and we told him that we had such a low supply of uniforms at that time, and for—

Ethan Hua 31:11

—the back-to-school season. Yeah, our most popular demand season is back-to-school.

Desmond Hua 31:16

Yeah, so we reached out to him asking if he had any extra uniforms he could possibly donate to HOPE’s Uniform Program, and he actually responded saying yes, he does have surplus inventory. And so—

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:31

—I think that’s a nervy move, but boy, congratulations.

Desmond Hua 31:35

Thank you. Yeah, both of us. Yeah.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:37

That says a lot about the potential for an initiative like yours to make a difference in the world.

Desmond Hua 31:44

Yes, that actually does show — when you try to reach out, and when you have a good cause, whether it’s in the community or in the world, I think reaching out to people who could help you is definitely a thing that — it’s like an opportunity for you to expand and to improve the initiative, or your passion.

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:05

Ethan, you’ve just graduated from high school. What’s next for you?

Ethan Hua 32:10

So, in the fall, I’ll be attending Wharton at UPenn. And I think, if there’s one thing I’d like people to know about me, it’s that I enjoy addressing unmet needs in the community with self-sustaining solutions. With HOPE, I’ve done that; and in my work at the San Mateo–Foster City School District, I built a repository of Eagle Scout projects in order to create an outlet for schools to get their service projects out to the community, and to help other scouts like us find their Eagle Scout projects. By the way, an Eagle Scout project is the final step a scout can take in their scouting journey to achieve the rank of Eagle, which is the highest rank.

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:55

Desmond, what are your plans? I mean, you’ve got a couple more years of high school, but what are you thinking about doing?

Desmond Hua 33:00

Well, first of all, for HOPE, I think my mission is to keep expanding HOPE into further areas — even though I may not be as familiar with the communities, I want to reach out to as many people and families as I’m able to help, beyond the San Mateo–Foster City School District. I guess outside of HOPE, I would also love to continue Boy Scouts as the senior patrol leader this year. The senior patrol leader is basically — it’s like a CEO; not CEO, club president — yeah, the highest rank.

Ethan Hua

I’m very proud of Desmond.

Desmond Hua

Yeah, yeah. So I think — he’s been a senior patrol leader, and I’m going to be one this year, so being in that position, leading younger scouts and showing them the right path, I think that’s going to be a really fun experience. That’s what I’m looking forward to this year, too.

Mitch Ratcliffe 33:52

So, Ethan, you’re going to business school, and based on what both of you are saying, leadership is really that instigator of the change that you want to see in the world. Is business the primary lever that you see as our opportunity for change?

Ethan Hua 34:07

Yes. In fact, I think that business is going to be the discipline that helps push the world to be more sustainable. If you think about it, all too often the careers that attack the climate crisis are very siloed — for example, politicians in their chambers, engineers in their labs, or lawmakers in their courts — but all too often these disciplines are not very interconnected and working together in unity to address these issues. And I think that business is something that — its profit is what connects all these efforts together. It’s what pushes people to attempt to create a greener world: financial incentives. Okay, let me give you an example: the solar panel industry. Families would be less incentivized to purchase a solar panel for their home if they didn’t understand that it would save them money in the long term. Because they understand that solar panels will save them money on their electricity bills, they’re like, okay, not only does it save me money, but it’s also a lot greener for the planet. So because people have that — it’s an example of the power of financial incentives to motivate people to join sustainable causes. I think that’s why that cause and effect is what interests me in pursuing business.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:31

Do you see that as the pursuit of vast wealth, or distributed prosperity?

Ethan Hua 35:38

Distributed prosperity. I think that financial incentives are what’s going to push sustainable efforts, and that’s kind of how HOPE is founded upon, too — free uniforms for families who then don’t have to go out and spend roughly $100 a year per child, with the added benefit that it saves landfill waste.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:02

So obviously there’s a lot of opportunity in front of you, and for HOPE. What are you thinking about growing into, and where can people find out how to donate, or to request uniforms, or maybe just make a contribution to help make this bigger?

Desmond Hua 36:18

I think just helping out HOPE in general. First of all, donating to HOPE is a really big thing. Contacting HOPE — of course, we have a multilingual website, so visiting that, we have all the info on where to donate, where to request. But I think also what we’re trying to aim for is expanding into bigger schools, where we reach out with HOPE, with our mission, to help out families that, like you said, need uniforms, so they don’t have to spend that $100 to $200 every single year.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:57

So, Ethan, how can people track what you all are doing and get involved?

Ethan Hua 37:01

Follow our Instagram, @hopeuniformsprogram. Stay on our website; we update our statistics there. You can find out a lot more about how we started this, where we are, and why we do what we do, on our website. We provide it so that families across the community, no matter what language they speak, can understand us — understand our story, understand our passion, our mission.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:27

Congratulations, gentlemen, to both of you, for an immense good that you have brought into the world. And I wish you both the greatest success in the future. And Ethan, enjoy Wharton.

Ethan Hua 37:38

Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:46

Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Ethan and Desmond Hua. They are brothers who founded the HOPE Uniforms Program. HOPE is short for Help Our Planet Earth, and that’s a student-led nonprofit that collects gently used school uniforms and redistributes them free to families who need them. You can learn more about their work at hopeuniformsprogram.com. That’s all one word, no space, no dash — hopeuniformsprogram.com.

And if you know a teenager doing this kind of work, the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes is something you should point out to them. Ethan was recognized by the program last year, and you can learn more about the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes at barronprize.org. Again, all one word, no space, no dash — barronprize.org, and Barron has two R’s.

The circular economy won’t be built only in boardrooms and at pilot plants; it will also grow from the grassroots, in garages like the one we’ve heard about today. That happens when people recognize human needs and take steps to address them. Ethan and Desmond started HOPE in 2020 while they were still in middle school, after a classmate showed up in shorts on a cold day. That’s a failure of material flows, in the same sense as when a species within an ecosystem struggles because something further up or down the food chain is disrupted.

Ethan kept returning to the idea that the highest-value thing you can do with a uniform is keep it whole and keep it in use, flowing through the economy. Keep the garment in circulation, and you can avoid a variety of environmental impacts, including the water used to grow the cotton, the pesticides, the oil drilled to create the synthetic textiles, the dyes, the factory energy, and the freight emissions produced simply by transporting a uniform to the store. We’ve trained a generation to feel good about the recycling bin, but reuse sits a rung above recycling, and textiles are only the clearest case for it. Americans throw away something like 17 million tons of clothing every year, most of it still wearable.

HOPE’s answer to that isn’t a new material or a chemical process; it’s a reverse-logistics system — a community solution based on a phone number and a website — that keeps uniforms in use. And you’ll note that HOPE is building a closed loop, not a one-way consumption model. That’s an important shift. Families request uniforms through the website; the uniforms come back when kids outgrow them; and the brothers spot-check and then reissue them for another use.

Ethan and Desmond built in the return mechanism, and that’s important. It’s a blocker that many big players are running into. Think back a couple of weeks ago to my conversation with Amy Fernandez and Zach Lauer of Trex, the synthetic decking company. They struggle to recapture material because contractors don’t want to separate old Trex decking from the sprues and connectors used to make the deck in the first place. HOPE started by making returns routine and building a solution for getting the material back, and then communicating about the services in three languages, so that no family is shut out. They also refuse to treat what they’re doing as charity, focusing on raising the service experience for families, which is the basis for long-term engagement and long-term behavior change.

Ethan said his goal is distributed prosperity, and that echoes the idea shared by many of our guests, that sustainability can be a profitability lever rather than a cost center, even while creating social benefits. Ethan’s pitch is that HOPE is replicable — a model that other communities can use. As he said, anyone can do it, and the dream is HOPE in another garage, and then another. And I think Desmond’s comment that the biggest impact isn’t the uniforms diverted, it’s putting the idea in another kid’s head that they could do this too — that’s an important point. We can spread this virally. We’re building the systems for the next generation, not the last.

When I was growing up, there was a garbage can, and nothing else — no recycling bin, no curbside pickup. The recycling system that we know today, the one that we take for granted, didn’t exist even within living memory. It’s going to be built again by another generation, piece by piece, by people who start small and local and don’t wait for permission to do so. And, of course, we have to acknowledge this: the scale of challenges and adverse environmental impacts faced by this generation is daunting. But every system we now treat as permanent was once somebody’s improbable idea, run out of a garage, a church, a basement, or a classroom.

What Ethan and Desmond have proven at the scale of San Mateo County is that circular economies are waiting for people willing to do the unglamorous work of moving material back to where it’s needed. Ethan heads off to Wharton this fall with a thesis already tested in the field: the belief that business is a lever for prosperity. And that’s the important point. We’ll be watching where they take HOPE, and who copies them.

And if this conversation gave you something to think about, please share it with a young person in your life who’s sitting on a great idea. You folks are the amplifiers to spread more ideas and create less waste, and I hope you’ll take a moment to share one of the more than 550 episodes in our archive to help others get up to speed on recycling, circularity, and sustainable business. Please point your friends, family, coworkers, and the people you meet on the street to Sustainability in Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer, and if you take a moment to leave a rating or review, that will go a long way toward helping others find the show.

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

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Ethan and Desmond Hua Build HOPE for School Uniform Reuse appeared first on Earth911.

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

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

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

January 20, 2025: Inauguration Day Shock and Awe

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

Key Day-One actions included:

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

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

January 21–31, 2025: Building the Deregulatory Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 31 targeted regulations included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August–October 2025: Staffing Gutted, Science Suppressed

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

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

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

November–December 2025: Water Protections and Vehicle Standards Targeted

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

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

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

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

February 12, 2026: The Endangerment Finding Falls

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

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

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

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

February 2026: Mercury Standards Repealed

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

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

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

What Experts Say: The Cumulative Public Health Toll

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

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

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

What You Can Do

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

For your household:

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

For your community:

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

At the policy level:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation. Today we’re going to explore how to have a genuine green impact — whether that stops at making small changes or must involve active political engagement. In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed the $500 billion mark. Sales of reusable water bottles hit $10 billion. Plant-based meat alternatives, electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable phone cases — the shelves are groaning with ways for conscientious consumers to buy their way to a better planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:26

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

Michael Maniates  4:28

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

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:01

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

Michael Maniates  7:31

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:51

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

Michael Maniates  10:17

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:59

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

Michael Maniates  13:14

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:06

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

Michael Maniates  17:12

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:47

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

Michael Maniates  19:14

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

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

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

Michael Maniates  22:22

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  23:42

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

Michael Maniates  23:45

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:16

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

Michael Maniates  24:38

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:03

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

Michael Maniates  27:16

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:44

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

Michael Maniates  32:14

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:05

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

Michael Maniates  34:32

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:33

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

Michael Maniates  38:43

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  42:15

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

Michael Maniates  43:07

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

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

Michael Maniates  44:45

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

Michael Maniates  45:10

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  47:57

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

Michael Maniates  48:17

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  51:04

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

Michael Maniates  51:31

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

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  54:42

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

Michael Maniates  55:20

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  56:00

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

Michael Maniates  56:03

Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  56:09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please tell your friends, family, co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.

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