It always strikes us as amusing how many DIY projects you see online that seem to require more time and more money than it would take to simply buy the thing they’re trying to DIY in the first place. Are we missing the point?

We think that doing things ourselves and taking back the power to create instead of simply consuming is absolutely vital to the green movement. But if you don’t already have the materials and spend a lot of money purchasing craft supplies, does it really make sense to DIY?

These eight projects are true do-it-yourself masterpieces. One-of-a-kind outdoor projects you can make for almost nothing, with supplies you most likely already have or can easily pick up second hand for a song. Roll up your sleeves and let’s get started!

1. Teapot/Teacup Bird Feeder

Do you have one of Grandma’s old tea sets lying around that doesn’t quite fit into the sleek modern aesthetic you’ve been cultivating? Put it to great use by feeding the birds in your area — in style.

Thrift stores are always awash in old china, so if you don’t already have the old tea set, consider going wild and spending a few bucks for this DIY delight. You’ll find blogger Dinah Wulf’s instructions for the teacup bird feeder at DIY Inspired.

Safety note: Use sturdy twine or cord — not chain — to hang the feeder. Birds can catch their toes in chain links, which causes serious injury. The National Audubon Society also recommends cleaning seed feeders every two weeks (more often in hot, humid weather) by scrubbing with soap and water and soaking in a 50-50 vinegar-water solution to prevent the spread of avian disease.

2. Gardening Tool Storage

What on earth do you do with those rusty-as-heck, old-school garden rakes hanging around your garage? Well, if you’re any sort of DIY genius, you press them into service as a gardening tool holder.

The original inspiration for this project came from Beth Logan at Artstuff Ltd., whose blog has since gone offline. For a current walkthrough, see the Repurposed Rake Tool Rack tutorial at DIY n Crafts (project #14 in their roundup of 25 ways to reuse old garden tools). The concept is embarrassingly simple — remove the rake handle, mount the head tines-out on a fence or garage wall, and use the tines themselves as hooks for trowels, gloves, and pruners — but eye-catching enough to make you look like a DIY pro.

3. Bottle Tree

Do you like wine? No, I mean do you really like wine? Do you want a reason to drink more of it? And does your garden need a cute border? This sustainable, upcycled garden border may be just the project for you. You might have to expand your drinking list to include bottles of various shapes, sizes, and colors — but variety is the spice of life.

When friends ask how you managed to collect so many bottles, just laugh gaily and then distract them with your dainty teacup bird feeder. The bottle tree tradition itself runs deep — Mississippi garden writer Felder Rushing traces the practice back through African American Southern folk art and, by his own research, as far as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. See his bottle tree gallery and history for inspiration, or jump straight to his how-to guide for building one out of a cedar snag, rebar, or just about anything else.

4. Colorful Outdoor “Tiles”

If your backyard isn’t perfectly landscaped and manicured, with an impeccably tiled “outdoor living space,” don’t despair. You can use up all those half-empty paint cans and create a Pinterest-worthy colorful backdrop for evenings spent clustered around a fire or barbecue.

Pop a few coats of paint on cement tiles and you have a one-of-a-kind flooring solution. If you rent, the same effect could be achieved on a more temporary basis by letting the kids go wild with sidewalk chalk and create a mosaic masterpiece. Check out Elsie’s Painted Patio Tiles at A Beautiful Mess for the back story on this DIY idea. (Heads up: the original author noted she had to touch up the paint each spring in Missouri winters — a porch and patio floor enamel will hold up better than wall paint.)

5. Home Sweet Gnome

Okay, this one might be the least practical idea of the bunch, but that may be why I love it oh so much. If you have a stump in your backyard and you’re not willing or able to pay the truly insane amount it costs to have it ground down and removed, how about making it into a little gnome home? This is the perfect outdoor project if you have small children in your life.

Construct the trappings of a little house — door, windows, winding garden path — from found objects or natural materials, and affix them to the stump. Bonus points if you don’t tell the kids about this particular DIY project and allow them to simply stumble upon it one day in the garden. My mind would have been blown if I had come across one of these as a seven-year-old. For a step-by-step build, see this Gnome Tree Stump Home tutorial on Instructables.

Safety note: Don’t use an angle grinder to gouge windows or doors into a stump. Use a chisel and mallet for shallow detail work, or attach decorative pieces (driftwood, bark, polymer clay) to the outside instead.

6. Mosaic Stepping Stones from Broken China

Every household eventually accumulates a small graveyard of chipped mugs, a single survivor from a four-piece dinner set, or a beloved teapot with a hairline crack. Rather than tossing them — broken ceramics generally aren’t accepted in curbside recycling — embed them in concrete stepping stones for a garden path that’s genuinely one of a kind.

This pairs beautifully with the teacup project above: any teacups that don’t make it past Project #1 (you will break a few) can come back as paving. The DIY mosaic stepping stones tutorial at Gardening.org walks through the full process — breaking ceramics safely inside a drop cloth, sizing pieces to half-inch to one-inch fragments, pressing them into wet concrete, and sealing the surface so sharp edges don’t cause injury underfoot. Basic mold options include an old cake pan, a plastic plant saucer, or a purpose-built stepping stone form from a craft store.

Safety note: Wear safety glasses and heavy gloves when breaking ceramics. Once cured, run a finger over the surface to check for protruding edges and file or sand any down before placing the stone where bare feet might land.

7. Vertical Pallet Herb Garden

Shipping pallets are one of the world’s most abundant near-free materials. Small businesses, garden centers, and feed stores often have stacks of them out back, and asking politely beats the alternative of seeing them landfilled. Mounted vertically against a sunny wall or fence, a pallet becomes a stacked planter that holds enough herbs to keep a kitchen in basil, thyme, parsley, and chives all season.

Grit Magazine published a clear how-to for a vertical pallet planter — line the back and sides with landscape fabric or heavy plastic to hold soil, fill through the slats, and plant each gap as its own row. The gaps act as natural divisions, so different herbs don’t fight for the same root space.

Safety note: Use only heat-treated pallets for anything edible. Look for the IPPC stamp with the letters HT (heat treated) and avoid any stamped MB (methyl bromide — a fumigant restricted under the Montreal Protocol). Unstamped pallets are unknowns; skip them for food crops. The same heat-treated pallets are fine for ornamental flowers either way.

8. Punched Tin Can Lanterns

Steel food cans — soup, tomato, coffee — are one of the most recyclable materials on Earth, but the recycling-then-buying-something-decorative loop has plenty of slack in it. With nothing more than a hammer, a few nails of varying sizes, and the freezer, an empty can becomes an outdoor lantern that throws constellation patterns across a patio at dusk.

HGTV’s tin can lantern tutorial covers the trick that makes this project work: fill the can with water and freeze it solid before punching, so the ice supports the can wall and prevents denting. Sketch your pattern on paper, tape it to the frozen can, punch through with a nail at each marked dot, and let the ice thaw. Drop in a battery tealight (much safer outdoors than a real flame) and group them along a walkway or down the center of an outdoor table.

The Point of All This

None of these projects requires you to buy more than a tube of waterproof adhesive, a bag of concrete, or maybe a stepping stone mold. The materials — chipped china, leftover wine bottles, empty cans, a forgotten pallet, an old rake — are already in your house or someone else’s. That’s the point. The greenest project is the one that uses what already exists, and the best part is that yours will look like nobody else’s.

Editor’s Note: This article, originally authored by Madeleine Somerville on June 17, 2015, was updated with corrected links and new ideas in May 2026.

The post Outdoor Projects You Can DIY for Almost Nothing appeared first on Earth911.

Recycling helps cut down on waste and lets valuable materials be used again. It reduces the need to mine or extract new resources and keeps materials out of landfills, which lowers the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. But recycling is more than just a process; it’s also a job. Learning how material recovery facilities work and what workers deal with every day can help you recycle smarter and keep these essential workers safe.

Recycling centers, known as material recovery facilities (MRFs), must be profitable, efficient, and safe to stay open and attract good workers. Protecting workers also helps keep costs down, since replacing someone who is injured or burned out is expensive. Representatives from two major waste companies, Rumpke and Waste Management, said that employee safety is their top priority at MRFs, followed closely by keeping the machines running.

Even with these efforts, nine workers died in U.S. material recovery facilities in 2023. The fatality rate for refuse and recycling collectors rose by more than 80% that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This made waste and recycling collection the fourth most dangerous job in the country, after roofers, fishing and hunting workers, and logging workers. Many injuries and deaths are caused by items that should never have been put in a recycling bin.

What Protects Workers on the Floor

MRFs are noisy, dusty, and the work is physically tough. Temperatures inside can change a lot depending on the weather. To stay safe, all workers wear steel-toed boots and high-visibility vests or coats. Hard hats are required whenever workers move through the large sorting buildings.

Many workers wear puncture-resistant gloves, sometimes long enough to cover their forearms, because needlestick injuries happen often. A 2018 study by the Environmental Research & Education Foundation found that 45% of MRF injuries were caused by needlesticks, even though syringes and medical sharps are not allowed in curbside recycling. Make sure to learn how to safely dispose of medical sharps so they never end up in the recycling stream.

All employees get safety training when they are hired, and they receive updates whenever recycling rules change. Managers and supervisors get extra emergency response training, especially because battery fires are becoming more common.

Equipment operators and maintenance workers must be certified to use the machines. When equipment needs repairs, a strict lock out/tag out process makes sure machines cannot restart while someone is working on them.

The Biggest New Threat: Lithium-Ion Battery Fires

The most dangerous thing you can put in your recycling bin is not broken glass or rusty metal. It’s a lithium-ion battery. When these batteries are shaken, crushed, or punctured during collection and sorting, they can go into what the industry calls “thermal runaway,” which releases intense heat and can quickly set nearby paper and plastic on fire.

The National Waste and Recycling Association estimates that over 5,000 fires happen each year at recycling facilities, and many are linked to lithium-ion batteries. Publicly reported fires at MRFs and transfer stations rose by 20% in 2024 compared to the year before, reaching the highest level ever, according to fire detection firm Fire Rover. Fire data for 2025 shows a record 448 reported incidents across North America, and the real number is likely higher since many smaller fires are not reported.

A small fire at an MRF costs about $2,600 on average, but a major fire can destroy a whole facility and cause more than $50 million in damage. In 2021, a battery fire destroyed a transfer station in Klamath Falls, Oregon, causing over $3 million in damage and shutting down the facility for two years. This disrupted recycling collection across the region. The rate of major MRF fire losses has gone up by 41% in the last five years.

A growing problem is disposable vaping devices. These vapes have lithium-ion batteries and there are almost no safe drop-off options in the U.S. About 1.2 billion vapes end up in the waste and recycling stream each year, and throwing them in the trash or recycling bin makes the fire risk much worse.

Never put batteries in the recycling bin.

How Sorting Actually Works

When a truck brings curbside recycling to an MRF, it is dumped onto the tipping floor. Workers first remove anything that clearly does not belong. Over the years, they have found things like dead deer, bowling balls, and full-size vacuums. None of these should be in recycling.

After the first sort, heavy equipment operators and workers with large shovels load the materials onto conveyor belts that go into the automated sorting system. Workers stand along the belts to catch items the machines cannot handle. The machines use spinning screens to separate paper and cardboard, magnets to pull out steel, optical scanners and infrared sensors to identify different plastics, and air jets to separate lightweight materials. Glass falls out on its own because it is heavier.

Even though machines do more of the sorting now, people are still needed for quality control. Computers cannot catch everything. After materials are sorted by type, a baler presses them into large bales. Workers check these bales before they are stacked and shipped to manufacturers who use the materials.

Besides sorting, MRF jobs include machine technicians, maintenance workers, equipment operators, foremen, and housekeeping staff who keep walkways clear to prevent trips and reduce dangerous dust.

What You Do At Home Changes Everything

No two MRFs are exactly the same. They use different equipment and have different buyers for the materials they sort. This is why even nearby communities might not accept the same items for recycling. It can be confusing, but it is very important.

Anything that does not belong in the recycling stream takes extra time to remove and increases risks for workers. Plastic bags and plastic film get tangled around spinning machine parts and can stop the whole sorting line. Shredded paper clogs screens and causes costly shutdowns. When a machine jams, a worker has to climb inside to fix it, which takes time and is truly dangerous.

Here are the easiest ways you can help keep recycling workers safe:

• Do not put batteries in your curbside recycling or trash. Take them to a retail collection site instead.
• Keep plastic bags out of your recycling bin. Bring them back to grocery store drop-off locations.
• Do not put something in the recycling bin just because you hope it is recyclable. If you are not sure, check Earth911’s recycling search or your local guidelines. When in doubt, leave it out.
• Never put medical sharps in the recycling bin. Use a sharps disposal program or a drop-off location instead.

Knowing what belongs in your recycling bin is not just good for the environment. It is also how you help protect the workers who do one of the hardest and most dangerous jobs in the sustainability field.

Editor’s Notes: Originally published March 29, 2022. Updated February 2023. Updated March 2026.

The post How You Can Help Keep Recycling Workers Safe appeared first on Earth911.

Every kilogram of medical X-ray film holds 5 to 15 grams of silver — enough to make tossing those old films in the trash not just an environmental problem, but an outright waste of a recoverable precious metal. Add the fact that it’s also illegal to throw X-rays in the garbage in most jurisdictions, and the case for recycling them becomes urgent.

Millions of Americans still have film X-rays sitting in file folders, shoe boxes, or back-of-drawer oblivion. These relics from a pre-digital era of medical imaging need to be handled safely. Whether you’re a patient trying to clear out a closet or a smaller clinic still managing physical archives, understanding how X-ray film recycling works, why it matters, and who accepts it can help you make a responsible choice that’s good for the environment and, in some cases, your wallet.

What’s Inside an X-Ray Film

X-ray films are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, the same material used in many beverage bottles, coated with an emulsion layer containing silver halide crystals. When the film is exposed to X-ray radiation, those silver halide crystals capture the image by converting to metallic silver to produce the dark-and-light diagnostic image your doctor reads.

That silver content is why X-ray film is worth recycling. A research paper in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering reports that medical X-ray films typically contain between 5 and 15 grams of silver per kilogram of film. That’s the highest silver concentration of any common photographic material and a meaningful quantity: at 2025 silver spot prices hovering around $30 to $35 per troy ounce, a 50-pound box of old hospital films can yield real financial value through silver recovery.

The plastic substrate, once the silver has been stripped out, is recyclable PET. Nothing in a properly recycled X-ray film needs to go to a landfill.

Why You Can’t Just Throw X-Rays Away

Federal and state regulations prohibit tossing X-ray films in the ordinary waste stream for two separate reasons.

First, silver is classified as a hazardous material in landfill environments. When films degrade in landfills, silver leaches into soil and groundwater, where it can harm aquatic ecosystems and contaminate drinking water supplies. The EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act governs how silver-bearing waste must be handled. X-ray films older than 50 years may be made from nitrocellulose, a highly flammable material that requires special EPA-regulated transport and disposal handling.

Second, X-ray films are protected health information (PHI) under HIPAA and its successor, the HITECH Act. That means they cannot simply be thrown out, shredded in a standard office shredder, or otherwise disposed of without ensuring the images and any associated patient data are rendered permanently unreadable. The responsibility for proper disposal falls on whoever has the films, the originating medical facility, or, in some states, the patient themselves.

How X-Ray Film Is Recycled

The modern silver recovery process is efficient and well-established. According to Radiopaedia, the current standard method — called the “wash” process — recovers more than 99.9% of the silver in the film.

The process typically unfolds in four stages:

• Collection and sorting. Films are collected, weighed, and assessed. Films received in paper patient jackets have those jackets separated first. The paper goes to standard recycling centers, and the film is handled separately.
• Shredding and chemical wash. The film is shredded and immersed in a chemical bath of cyanide solution, though some facilities now use alternative reagents to dissolve the silver emulsion from the plastic base.
• Electrolytic silver recovery. Silver is separated from the solution by electrolysis, producing refined silver that can be cast into bars or coins and returned to the industrial silver market.
• PET plastic recycling. The now-clear plastic substrate is baled and sent to PET recyclers for reuse in manufacturing.

HIPAA-compliant recyclers also provide a Certificate of Destruction documenting that all protected health information on the films has been permanently and irrecoverably destroyed, which is essential for any medical facility’s compliance records.

Most New X-Rays Are Already Digital But Film Persists

The vast majority of U.S. hospitals and large imaging centers have completed the transition to digital radiography, which eliminates film entirely. Digital systems transmit images directly to secure electronic health records, reducing cost, storage burden, and chemical waste.

However, film-based imaging persists in several settings, such as some smaller clinics, rural practices, dental offices, veterinary practices, and industrial non-destructive testing (NDT) applications, which continue to use conventional film. If you’re receiving imaging at a smaller or independent practice, it’s worth asking directly: “Do you use digital imaging, or do you still produce physical film?” If the answer is film, follow up with: “What is your policy for recycling X-rays when they’re no longer needed for my care?”

A responsible provider should have a documented recycling process in place. Many do so because the silver recovery value incentivizes facilities to partner with certified recyclers rather than pay for disposal.

Recycling Programs: Who Accepts X-Ray Film

The X-ray recycling landscape is largely served by specialized national companies rather than municipal programs. Most curbside and drop-off programs do not accept X-ray film. Here are reputable options for both medical facilities and individuals.

If you’re a patient with a few old X-rays at home from a broken bone, a dental procedure, or years of routine imaging, the options are more limited than for medical facilities, but they exist.

Most of the major X-ray recycling companies set minimum weight thresholds for free pickup (often 30 to 50 pounds without paper jackets). A typical individual patient’s collection of personal X-rays won’t meet that threshold, so your options include:

• Mail-in services. Many recyclers, including B.W. Recycling/XRayFilmsDisposal.com and X-Ray Films Recycling, accept small-quantity mail-in shipments. You’ll typically pay postage; the recycler may pay you a small amount or simply provide free recycling in return. Contact the provider first to confirm their current individual consumer process.
• Check local hazardous waste events. Some municipal household hazardous waste (HHW) events accept medical imaging film. Check with your county or city’s waste management program. Call ahead to confirm, as not all HHW programs accept X-ray film, and policies vary.
• Return to your provider. Some medical facilities will accept old films for recycling as a patient service. Ask your clinic, hospital, or specialist’s office directly.
• Contact your original imaging center. Many imaging centers retain legal ownership of films they produce, and some will accept returned films for recycling at no cost to the patient. Policies vary, and a call is often worth the time.

Watch for a common source of confusion: HIPAA’s destruction requirements apply to covered entities, such as healthcare providers and insurers, and their business associates, but not typically to individual patients who receive copies of their own records. As a patient, you are not obligated to follow HIPAA disposal procedures for your own X-rays. That said, ensuring the secure destruction of your imaging records remains sound personal data hygiene.

What You Can Do

• Don’t throw X-rays in the trash or recycling bin. They are not accepted in municipal recycling programs and may be illegal to landfill in your state.
• Ask about digital imaging before your next appointment. Confirm whether your provider uses digital or film-based imaging, and ask about their film recycling policy if film is still in use.
• Search for a recycler using Earth911. earth911.com/recycling-search can help locate the few local options for X-ray film in the United States.
• If you’re a patient with personal X-rays, contact a national recycler directly. Most will advise on mail-in options for small quantities. Don’t let confusion leave films sitting in a drawer indefinitely.
• If your facility still uses film, set up a certified recycling program. The silver recovery value offsets the cost of a certified pickup, and a HIPAA-compliant Certificate of Destruction protects your organization from liability.

The post How To Recycle X-Ray Film appeared first on Earth911.

Open the cabinet under almost any kitchen sink, then check the garage shelf and the basement corner. You will likely find the same inventory: half-used cans of paint, a jug of antifreeze, corroded batteries, an aerosol can of something nobody remembers buying. As much as 100 pounds of hazardous material can pile up in a single home, much of it sitting untouched until the residents move out or finally clear the clutter, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

Household hazardous waste, including the paints, solvents, pesticides, cleaners, and automotive fluids that become toxic, corrosive, or flammable when discarded, is among the most loosely tracked streams in the American waste system. Most of it has no producer-funded route to recovery, so it lands in trash cans, storm drains, and back shelves.

One product is the conspicuous exception. Leftover paint, the largest category by volume, now has a working multi-state recycling system operated by PaintCare and funded by the industry. What that system has accomplished points directly at how to handle the rest.

The waste hiding in plain sight

As of 2018, the last year the EPA collected data, the average American generated an average of about four pounds of household hazardous waste a year — roughly 530,000 tons nationally. Paint, used motor oil, batteries, pesticides, and cleaning chemicals make up the bulk of it.

The volume matters less than where it ends up. When these products go down the drain, onto the ground, into a storm sewer, or out with the regular trash, the consequences are not abstract. The EPA warns that improper disposal can contaminate groundwater and surface water used for drinking, corrode plumbing, disrupt septic systems and wastewater treatment plants, injure sanitation workers, and poison children and pets. The chemistry that makes a solvent useful in the garage makes it dangerous in a landfill leachate pond.

The regulatory gap that shaped the problem

Here is the reason so much household hazardous waste goes unmanaged: the federal government does not regulate it as hazardous waste. Under the household waste exclusion in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, waste from routine house and yard maintenance is exempt from the rules that govern industrial hazardous waste. It is overseen only at the state and local level, and treated as ordinary solid waste.

The practical effect is that no business is federally required to take responsibility for these products once a consumer is done with them. Collection and safe disposal fall to municipalities — and to the taxpayers who fund them — if a community offers a program at all. Many offer a single collection day a year, or none. That gap is the backdrop against which paint’s recovery system stands out.

What PaintCare built

Paint manufacturers created PaintCare in 2009, a nonprofit organized through the American Coatings Association to run paint stewardship programs in states that pass paint stewardship laws. When Maryland’s program launched in April 2026, it became the 12th state with a program, alongside the District of Columbia; Illinois had come online only months earlier, in December 2025.

The scale of the program is impressive. PaintCare reports it has managed roughly 85 million gallons of paint, stain, and varnish across its state programs. More than 70 million gallons came through neighborhood drop-off sites and events, and another three million-plus through more than 10,000 large-volume pickups for contractors and institutions with large stockpiles.

Most of what comes back is water-based latex paint, which processors remix into recycled-content paint. In California, leftover paint also becomes retaining wall blocks, landscape stones, and parking stops, a reminder that “recycling” here means real secondary markets, not just diversion from a landfill.

PaintCare offers free, year-round drop-off at paint stores, hardware stores, and municipal facilities replaces the once-a-year collection event.

Never do this:  Pour paint, solvents, or automotive fluids down the drain, onto the ground, or into a storm sewer, and never put liquid hazardous products in the trash. Keep products in their original, labeled containers, and never mix incompatible chemicals.

Who pays — and why that is the whole point

PaintCare is funded by a small fee added to new paint at the point of sale. In Maryland it runs from 50 cents to $2.25 per container depending on size, with no fee on containers a half-pint or smaller. That fee is the visible cost to a household. It is also the mechanism that makes the system work. Maryland’s law requires that 90% of residents live within 15 miles of a collection site.

This is a proven example of extended producer responsibility (EPR), the principle that the cost of managing a product at end of life should be built into the product rather than dumped on the general taxpayer. The fee funds the drop-off network, the transportation, the processing, and public education. The result is a closed loop where the people buying paint fund the recovery of paint, and the system is convenient enough that people use it.

The larger savings can’t be easily quantified: paint kept out of waterways, landfill liabilities avoided, and disposal costs lifted off municipal budgets that would otherwise carry them. Those benefits are real even when they resist a tidy per-household number.

What paint reveals about the rest

Paint is one category in a cabinet full of them. Batteries, electronics, pharmaceuticals, mattresses, and packaging are all moving toward producer-funded recovery in various states, and paint is the proof of concept that the model scales. When a modest fee funds genuinely convenient collection, such as with bottle deposit programs, material that used to vanish into the trash or the storm drain starts coming back instead.

When New Hampshire’s governor vetoed a paint stewardship bill in 2026, the stated reason was that the fee amounted to a new tax on residents. But it is not a new cost so much as a reassignment of one: the public already pays to manage household hazardous waste, less efficiently, through municipal collection days and the environmental cost of the paint that never gets collected. EPR makes that cost visible, attaches it to the product, and buys a far more effective recovery system with it.

The question is not whether households pay to deal with leftover paint — they always have — but whether that payment buys a system that works.

PaintCare’s record across 12 states and the District of Columbia is the strongest available evidence that it can. Scaling the model to the rest of household hazardous waste, and to the states that still lack a paint program is the clearest path to closing the gap that federal law left open.

The post PaintCare Reveals How Household Hazardous Waste Recycling Can Grow appeared first on Earth911.

More than 400,000 tons of release liner waste are generated in the United States every year — and the vast majority ends up in the landfill. You know these slick sheets: they’re the backing on address labels, shipping labels, postage stamps, and every sticker you’ve ever peeled. They look like paper, they tear like paper, but your recycling bin can’t process them like paper.

Label backing sheets, known in industry as release liners, are a hybrid material that confounds conventional recycling systems. Understanding why helps you avoid contaminating your curbside bin, and points toward where real solutions are emerging.

What Makes Release Liners So Hard to Recycle

The paper component of most label backing sheets is called glassine, a highly processed, translucent paper whose fibers have been flattened and aligned to create a smooth surface. Glassine has uses in food wrappers, pastry bags, and envelopes, but its compressed fibers yield very little usable pulp in the recycling process. The paper market runs on fiber strength, and glassine simply doesn’t have it.

The second problem is the coating. Release liners are treated with a release agent — almost always silicone — that prevents labels from permanently bonding to the backing. This silicone layer is what allows you to peel cleanly. It’s also what makes recycling nearly impossible at most facilities; the coating can’t be removed without specialized processing, and when it contaminates paper recycling streams, it degrades the quality of the resulting pulp and can jam machinery.

A third issue is material variation. Some liners use plastic film made from PET (#1 plastic) or polypropylene (#5 plastic) instead of paper as their base, adding another layer of complexity. Without knowing what type of liner you have, there’s no reliable way to route it into a specialized program.

Industry data suggests that historically only about 1–1.5% of liner waste has been recycled. More recent label industry reports put the overall global recycling rate at around 35%, but that figure is heavily skewed by industrial-scale programs in Europe and at large commercial facilities.

For the consumer peeling address labels at home, the recycling rate is effectively zero.

The Bottom Line for Consumers: Not Curbside

Label backing sheets from home use, such as the backing sheet from a page of address labels, the liner from a sheet of postage stamps, the wax paper-like sheet from a roll of stickers, do not belong in curbside recycling. Placing them in the recycling bin contaminates cleaner paper streams and does not help the material reach an appropriate end market.

The exception is if you can verify that your liner is an uncoated, matte paperboard with no silicone feel. That type may be recyclable as regular paper in some municipalities, but it’s uncommon for consumer label products. When in doubt, trash it — a wrong recycling choice is worse than no recycling choice.

Don’t put silicone-coated liners in composting either. The coating prevents biodegradation and will contaminate the compost.

The Label Industry Responds

The past two years have brought significant movement on release liner recycling, almost entirely at the commercial and industrial scale — so, still not helpful for curbside recycling but it promise more mail-in options.

The Tag and Label Manufacturers Institute launched its Liner Recycling Initiative (LRI) in 2024, partnering with paper mill Sustana Fiber. Sustana’s mills in De Pere, Wisconsin and Levis, Quebec can process white silicone-coated paper release liner and remove silicone alongside inks and other contaminants. The LRI is running regional pilots in Chicagoland and the Northeast U.S., with aggregation drop-off locations in Boston, Buffalo, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Wallingford CT, and three Canadian cities.

Avery Dennison’s AD Circular program, which connects commercial label brands and large businesses in the U.S. with vetted recycling providers for liner waste, is designed to kickstart a circular economy in label backing. The company has also partnered with Mitsubishi Chemical’s Polyester Film division for a closed-loop PET liner recycling program. These programs are designed for businesses generating consistent volumes of liner, not for household use.

UPM Raflatac’s RafCycle program provides a similar commercial liner recycling network in the U.S. and Canada, converting used liners into recycled paper, insulation material, and other products.

In 2025, labeling company SATO launched a recycling program at its Kitakami, Japan facility to recycle approximately 19 tons of silicone-coated release liners annually.

Sustainable Alternatives Are Growing

The most direct solution to the release liner problem is eliminating the liner altogether. Linerless label technology applies a special release coating directly to the face of the label, allowing rolls to wind without sticking to adjacent layers. These labels generate no backing waste, and rolls contain significantly more labels per roll, reducing material use and shipping weight.

For consumers who buy labels directly for home organizing, shipping, or small business use, EcoEnclose offers a patent-protected Zero Waste Release Liner made from 100% post-consumer waste that is curbside recyclable alongside regular paper. Their shipping labels, product labels, and sticker sheets use this liner. It’s the only liner of its kind currently available at consumer scale.

What You Can Do

• Do not put label backing sheets in curbside recycling or compost — silicone coatings contaminate both paper and compost streams.
• If you produce label liner regularly at a business, check the TLMI Liner Recycling Map at com for aggregation sites near the Northeast or Midwest U.S. pilots.
• Look for linerless label options when purchasing labels for shipping, home organization, or small business use. They cost roughly the same and eliminate the waste problem entirely.
• If sustainable sourcing matters to you, EcoEnclose‘s Zero Waste Liner products are curbside recyclable, a rare consumer-accessible option.
• Reuse intact backing sheets as non-stick craft surfaces, interleaving material, or temporary labels before discarding.

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An average big-budget movie creates about 3,370 metric tons of CO₂, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance’s 2021 report. That’s like driving over 700 gas-powered cars for a year, or about 33 metric tons of CO₂ for each day of filming. A single TV season can have the same impact as 108 cars. With thousands of productions happening every year in North America, Hollywood’s environmental impact is hard to overlook. Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, has spent more than ten years helping the industry turn sustainability goals into practical steps that productions can track. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, she shares how to build sustainable practices into film and TV projects from the very start, instead of adding them at the end when most waste has already been created. Zena started Green Spark Group in 2014 after earning a master’s in sustainability and environmental management at Harvard. She pitched Vancouver’s major studios on a simple idea: sustainability can save money. Her first big project, the X-Files reboot, managed to divert 81% of its waste across 40 filming locations. Since then, her certified B Corp consultancy has worked with Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon, and other major studios, and she founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its tenth year.

This conversation comes at an important time. Soon, California’s climate disclosure laws will require studios to report emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain, both before and after filming. Zena points out that while studios are getting ready, most of their suppliers—like small companies that rent generators, handle waste, or provide lumber on tight schedules—are not prepared. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance has released Scope 3 guidance for productions, and updated Scope 1 and 2 guidance came out in August 2025, but there is still no single tool that everyone uses. The real challenge over the next two years will be closing the gap between what studios must report and what their suppliers can provide. Zena also makes a bigger point about culture. After 12 years in the industry, she sees sustainability experts facing the same obstacles again and again because the way content is made hasn’t changed. The day-to-day work is important, but the bigger opportunity is in climate storytelling. Only about 13% of recent top-rated films mention climate change at all. Tracking the carbon footprint of a TV season is important, but what really matters is how a billion viewers see what’s normal on screen. That’s the influence Hollywood hasn’t fully used yet.

To follow Zena’s work, visit greensparkgroup.com. You can also learn more about the conference she started at sustainableproductionforum.com, or listen to her podcast, The Tie-In, which she co-hosts with Mark Rabin.

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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 talk about film and television, because every film and TV production starts the same way: with a creative vision, a budget, a shooting schedule, and a huge amount of stuff. Generators burn diesel all day and night at shooting locations. Trucks idle as they wait to move between locations. Sets are built from raw materials only to end up in the landfill when filming ends. Craft services rely on single-use items for literally everything that’s placed on the table for the production team.

Now multiply that by the thousands of productions happening in North America each year, and the scale of the problem becomes clear. The average feature film emits 3,370 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is like driving more than 700 gas-powered cars for a full year. And a single season of a TV show can match the emissions of 108 cars — and that’s not even counting the supply chain, everything that comes onto a set and everything that leaves. Hollywood has promised to be more sustainable many times, and our guest today has spent the last 10 years figuring out what it really takes to make these promises come to life in practice.

Zena Harris is the founder and president of Green Spark Group, a certified B Corp sustainability consultancy that she launched in 2014 with a mission to change the environmental impact of entertainment. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard in sustainability and environmental management, and she came to this work not as an environmentalist, but as a systems thinker — someone who spent her early career in engineering and HR identifying where organizations were leaking efficiency and money. But when she moved to Vancouver and discovered that nobody was focused on sustainability in what had become one of North America’s largest film production hubs, she saw a gap and filled it.

For more than a decade, she’s worked with major studios — including Disney, NBCUniversal, and Amazon — helping them embed sustainable practices in video production projects, and she’s developed measurable goals and built cross-industry collaborations that make lasting change possible.

She also founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its 10th year and has become the industry’s premier gathering place for turning sustainability talk into coordinated action.

We’ll talk with Zena about what it looks like when a production plans for sustainability from the very beginning, instead of adding it on at the end of the process like we usually do with all of our waste. And she’ll explain her idea of radical collaboration and why making real progress in Hollywood requires everyone — that includes unions, guilds, city governments, power companies, and those top-talent stars — to work together. We’ll also discuss how she uses the circular economy on set, the accountability gap that remains even as California’s new climate disclosure laws start to roll out, and whether the same systems-thinking approach can help business outside the film world.

To find out more about Zena’s work and Green Spark Group, visit greensparkgroup.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Hollywood has the power to change how people think about sustainability, but can it also change how it works behind the scenes? Zena Harris is tackling both challenges at the same time. Let’s see what she’s discovered, right after this brief commercial break.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:49

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

Zena Harris  3:50

Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m doing great. The sun is shining in Tacoma, Washington, and I’m happy to be talking with you.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:59

Well, I’m so happy to hear that you live in Tacoma. I lived there for almost 50 years. It’s a beautiful place, and I’m glad you’ve inherited it. I really like it. But you started your sustainability career in Vancouver, and you had no entertainment experience, and your first project was helping The X-Files reboot series divert material at 40 shooting locations — and you reduced their waste by 81%. What gave you the confidence to, you know, just call and say, ‘Hey, can I make you more sustainable?’

Zena Harris  4:31

It was a little more than that. You know, there was a lead-up to it. I had studied the film and TV industry in graduate school — I did my master’s thesis on it — so I had a little bit of a background. And the reason I studied it in grad school: I was in a sustainability master’s program, and I wanted to figure out how to shift culture. The first thing I thought of was, okay, people watch TV, we all love movies — that’s where I should start digging in to see what they’re doing. And they weren’t doing a ton. They were doing a little bit, but not too much.

So I talked to all the studio reps and found out what was going on and created a whole framework, like you do in graduate school, and wrote it all up. And then I pitched it to every studio. I sent out a white paper, essentially, to all the studios, and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this.’ Flew to LA, met with people in person. And I’m like, ‘I’m in Vancouver. I know it’s a major film hub. Put me to work.’ And one person did. She said, ‘Hey, you know, The X-Files is coming. It’s a big show. We have room in the budget to make this great. Let’s see what we can do.’ And that’s what really got me going.

One of the first people I met in the industry was Kelsey Evans. She is the owner of Keep It Green Recycling, which is a local vendor in Vancouver. Now, I had studied the film and TV industry, I know management practices and sustainability and the science, and she knew — like, really knew — the industry. So we worked together on that production, and we still work together today. She’s a friend of mine. She’s fantastic.

We got a lot of stuff done on that show, and that was my introduction into the film industry in practical terms. Vancouver, because it’s a major film hub, has — let’s just say — 20 shows filming at any given time. Sometimes it’s a lot more. But I knew that the work I was doing on that one show could scale. We needed to do it on all the shows. We needed to engage the industry. We needed to train people. So I started Green Spark Group as a vehicle to do this in the industry more broadly.

I think my past experience — prior to even going to grad school — in HR for a multinational company, and I was also an executive director at an international nonprofit where we had working groups and people from all over the world coming together to solve problems and create programs, all that gave me confidence to step into the film industry, look around, learn from others, apply my skills, and build this momentum locally. The company, locally, ended up — now we work across North America and even in other countries. So it’s been a journey.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:52

Well, you point out that they said, ‘We’ve got room in the budget to make this great,’ but that isn’t always the case. So what’s the pitch to a new client?

Zena Harris  8:00

Yeah, yeah. Well, those are the magic words: ‘We can save you money.’ That is it. That’s it. I mean, look, this has been a movement over the last, let’s say, 12 years — that’s how long I’ve been working in this space. And it’s rare for folks to say, ‘Yeah, we can figure this out in the budget.’ Sometimes it happens, but most people want to know how they can save money. So if you can show them very clearly that they can save money, that pushes the door open. And then you can talk about lots of other things too.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:43

So tell us about The Amazing Spider-Man 2. You saved them a lot of money. How’d you do it, and how much did you save them?

Zena Harris  8:48

I did not work on that. A colleague of mine, Emellie O’Brien, worked on that. That was actually one of the first productions publicized for saving a lot of money. I think they saved something like — well, I have the number here — $400,000. The cool thing about what happened with that, and also what happened with The X-Files and some others shortly thereafter, is that the studio recorded behind the scenes. They interviewed crew members to talk about what they had done. Then they published some of the stats in a case study and a video.

People in our industry love watching videos, right? So we did a behind-the-scenes for The X-Files, which caught lightning in a bottle — really created a whole movement in Vancouver. We showed that little five-minute behind-the-scenes video to everyone, and they saw their peers in that video because they were crew members speaking about what they had done. Things like that really sparked action in people and this excitement that, ‘Wow, things I have seen and kind of felt uncomfortable with — like waste, nobody likes seeing waste — people saw solutions in those videos. People saw themselves, saw their peers, and that inspired action, awareness, intrigue — like all the stuff you would want to create a movement. I can’t say enough about those early videos. They really helped kind of put us on a trajectory for more awareness and more action.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:42

A set is kind of like a microcosm of a city. A lot of stuff comes together and then disperses again. We actually did some consulting a few years ago with Hollywood about recycling the material on site — they use the PCs for the first time and then send them to recycling. It’s amazing how wasteful it could be. Tell us about what happens on a set. What’s the input, and what’s the output?

Zena Harris  11:10

Yeah, you are right. It is definitely akin to a city. I mean, if you think about it, for a large film or TV series, there can be 20 different departments working together to make that project happen. Each of those departments brings in some kind of material, some kind of input. The production office will have lots of office supplies, equipment, office equipment, furniture for the office — that kind of thing. Those things are coming in, and then you use them, and then they go out.

Then you can think of production design and construction. These two departments work really closely together, and they’re the ones creating and then building the sets in the sound stage. You can think about all the materials that might be associated with that. Construction is a big input department, where we’re bringing in lots of wood — and other types of material. It’s not just wood, but essentially we’re building a village inside a sound stage to shoot. And it’s all the wood and any other material that goes into that: wallpaper, paint, all sorts of props, set dressing that will go into that space.

So all that’s coming in, and then we use it for a short period of time, and then we have to do something with it. A lot of times, set walls are kind of standard — they can be reused. These are things that, if we recognize the patterns here, we’re using these things all the time. We’re breaking them down, and then we do something with them. A lot of times the breakdown is fast. You don’t have a ton of opportunity to really think. But if we know that there’s a pattern associated — prep, production, and wrap every single show — we know that we can disrupt that pattern. We can plan for it.

This is where thinking ahead and planning like, ‘Hey, we can reuse these walls. Got a lot of doors here — we’re going to reuse these doors. We’re going to send them to a place that will hold them temporarily, like a reuse center, and then those can be redistributed back into the industry.’ Some productions will store this stuff on their own if they have reshoots they think they might have, or another series they might come along. So all of these are options.

The default historically has been — because this is a dynamic industry, because timelines are short, people need to get out of their stage space — to use it, break it down, put it in the dumpster, get that thing out of here, and move on. So we’re saying there’s another way to do it, and just that alone saves the production a lot of money, because those big dumpsters at the end of it all are expensive to haul away. If we can reduce even a few of those, that is a cost savings, and then that material can be diverted and reused. So everything coming in — food, big material like construction material that people think a lot about, anything coming in — has an opportunity to be diverted, redistributed on the back end. And then that action saves money.

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:59

Well, you describe what’s needed as radical collaboration. I’m wondering if you can explain what that means, because Hollywood’s going through a lot of changes right now, and it sounds like sustainability may be the keystone of some new talent or new careers during the production process. So what are the hardest stakeholders in that radical collaboration to get to move from where they are today?

Zena Harris  15:22

Yeah. I think, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and one of the things that I’ve picked up over the years is that people in the industry have been conditioned to point fingers. There are different stakeholders in the industry. Crew will point to the union or the studio, for example, and say, ‘You know, those folks need to do something so that I can integrate sustainable practices.’ The unions will point to crew or studios. The studios will point to production or unions. And so at the end of the day, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We’re kind of swirling in this finger-pointing. And nobody really knows what to do. They’re waiting for something. So progress is slow when you do that.

In order to move the needle, I think one of the things we need to do is actually work together in ways that might seem unconventional or radical. I keep reminding myself of the saying, ‘What got us here won’t take us forward.’ So we have to get over ourselves and do something differently. We know that there’s no single organization that’s going to solve all the problems or change the existing system. We need a different approach, a different narrative around all of this — not just kind of deferring to another stakeholder.

This is what I call radical collaboration, because it’s different. Collaboration between crew and unions and studios and creatives and suppliers and industry organizations — in ways that have been different than we’ve tried before, that really haven’t worked so well, or not to the degree we wanted them to work. So instead of reinventing the wheel on that, we need a whole different tack. I think that in order to see success, we need positive reinforcement for people. We need to actually say, ‘Yes, this worked,’ and in increments too — not just the big things. When people see that positive reinforcement, they actually lean in. They actually have more confidence in what they’re doing. And then this increases momentum. That’s kind of my view of radical collaboration and what I think is needed to keep the ball rolling.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:07

Well, you’re making a really interesting point, which is that people don’t dislike change. They may be a little afraid of it, but they want to see that the extra effort involved in making the change actually is paying off. As the orchestrator of the sustainability activities on set, how do you communicate that to them so that the Teamsters and the members of the Screen Actors Guild all say, ‘Oh, I’m in’?

Zena Harris  18:37

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. You mentioned a couple of different positions there — Teamsters and actors and these sorts of things. Everybody is coming to the production with a different perspective, a different viewpoint, kind of a different mandate within their department. Like, their job is to do this. So everybody sees sustainability in a slightly different way.

One of the things we really strive to do — and I would say this is kind of a standard practice, but what we’re trying to do as a team at Green Spark Group — is go beyond surface-level conversations. Not just say, ‘Here are a few things you could do,’ but really try to have a deeper conversation with people in each of these departments and ask them what they see, what they need to be successful in doing any one of the things that they might want to do differently, and really help them get there. If they’re afraid to talk to someone, well, we’ll help them do that. We will have their back. We will go with them and be a backstop for anything they may not know or feel confident talking about. If it is finding a vendor and they don’t have time to look around, we’ll help them do that.

You know, people say, ‘Meet you where you are.’ But it’s really going beyond surface-level conversations. It’s really tapping into people’s wants, needs, level of confidence, and helping them grow that and helping them shine in their role — whatever it is. I think that sort of human-centric approach is really helpful, and what really moves the needle, or actually builds trust. Because at the end of the day, we can go in there and talk about all sorts of gear. There’s a lot of gear out there. There’s a lot of batteries out there that are going to save emissions. But I have seen multiple times where batteries have been rented, they sit in the gear truck, and people are afraid to use them. Why is that? Let’s talk about that. Let’s really unpack it, and let’s find a safe space to do it. Maybe it’s that lightweight one over there, and we want to just test it out. Totally cool. Let’s make that happen. What’s it going to take to get there?

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:24

This very meta moment — talking about telling stories to storytellers to get them to change their behavior — is a great place to take a quick commercial break. Folks, we’re going to be right back to continue this really interesting conversation.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with Zena Harris, founder and president of the Hollywood sustainability consultancy — although Vancouver, too — Green Spark Group. Zena, your mission is to change the climate of entertainment, and that has a double meaning that clearly was deliberate. But I’m wondering, in the current environment and thinking about the stories we tell about why we do things, with all the whiplashing political winds of the last couple of years, how has that changed your message and your perception of what Hollywood’s trying to accomplish?

Zena Harris  22:16

Yeah, I mean, I’ve said this a few times. We have a lot of momentum. Right now, in 2026, there are more organizations, there are more people thinking about sustainability, there are more tools out there for people to use. There’s a lot of momentum in the industry. So for us at Green Spark Group, we are on a mission to change the climate of entertainment, and it’s incremental, year over year, year over year — and so we’re still working on it. It’s very relevant for us today.

We have had a hand in changing a lot in the entertainment industry over the last 12 years. We started programs, we’ve created strategic plans for industry organizations and training in the C-suite, and started the industry’s first conference. We’re uplifting people and trying to give a platform to people to collaborate and share their ideas. But there’s a lot of opportunity out there. There are still a lot of people who are new to sustainability, and they need someone to help them make sense of it all. It’s taking all this wonderful information that’s been created by various organizations — and we’ve contributed as well — and distilling it and helping them make sense of it all, make decisions that are in line with their values, and implement the things that they want to implement. Save the money that they can save, that they know they can, when they start doing the math.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:11

Is the money the key thing right now? Is it the sustainable savings, or is it still a commitment to the climate, in the context of, again, all the backlash against the idea of environmentalism?

Zena Harris  24:24

Yeah, I mean, the idea of environmentalism, I think, is kind of in the broader ethos. I think when you get down to talking to people one on one, they want solutions to things — waste they’ve seen, or emissions they’ve encountered on production, or food waste, or whatever it is. Whether they call themselves an environmentalist or they just are a caring and concerned person, everybody wants a positive working experience. And they don’t want that tension internally between, ‘I’m doing this great, creative, wonderful thing in my job, and then I look over here and some negative thing is happening environmentally or whatever.’ People want a holistic, positive work experience. So I think that’s core at the end of the day — to tap into that, and, like I said, just go beyond surface-level conversations and really help people figure that out.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:35

Let me ask about the other side of that equation, about changing the climate of entertainment. Hollywood has enormous cultural reach, but we did a little research and found that only about 10%, 13% was the number we came up with, of recent top-rated films even acknowledge the idea of climate change on screen. Do you hear creatives on the content side talking about climate? Do they ask you? Do they say, ‘You know, this is interesting, I’d like to learn more, and I might tell a story about it someday’?

Zena Harris  26:05

Yeah. I mean, this idea that the industry reach is certainly enormous — the cultural influence of the industry, wherever you’re interacting with it, whether you love a character on screen, whether you follow an actor in real life and kind of just like what they do, whether you follow — like, I’m an operations kind of person, I like looking at how things work and trying to improve that. But this idea of climate storytelling, a lot of people are thinking about it right now. It’s a huge lever. You will hear that batted around a lot. A lot of industry organizations are doing research on it and trying to get into writers’ rooms and in film schools.

There’s a lot of momentum in that space. We have been engaged a few times in that effort, and it’s proven beneficial. So I would say that 13% — there’s a lot of momentum around this subject, and I can see that number increasing over time. People want stories that reflect the current reality they’re feeling in real life. There are a lot of people working in environmental jobs, or in some shape or form, and I think those kinds of professions will be reflected on screen a lot more in the future. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of momentum in that space.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:52

I can see a film about a ranger saving a family from a fire.

Zena Harris  27:57

You can think it, they can do it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:00

Let’s turn back to the operational question, as you pointed out you focus on that. One of the common problems that production has, along with every other business, is trying to fully measure what’s going on. Like we were talking about, this set is this midpoint in a very complex supply chain where stuff has flowed in, now it needs to go somewhere in order to either be reused or appropriately recycled, but we can’t fully measure all that. What’s still in the invisible category of information? In the same sense that Scope 3 emissions are hard for a typical corporation to measure, is there a comparable issue with production sustainability?

Zena Harris  28:36

Oh yeah, 100%. Look, there are always more things to measure. As an industry, we have focused a lot on carbon emissions from things like utilities, fuel, air travel, and accommodations. We have a really good handle on that. But those are, like, four categories, right? And, as you said earlier, materials are coming onto production — food, wood, office supplies, you name it, it comes onto production. So those are the things we don’t have a solid handle on. There’s embedded carbon and all that stuff.

There are also lots of industry tools, industry carbon calculators out there — some measure more than others.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (interjects)

Are any of them any good?

Zena Harris  (continues)

Yeah, yeah, they’re good. But some have more inputs than others. Some will only measure those four categories that I mentioned. For years, for example, everybody in the industry wants to know the waste diversion rate, right? But nobody focuses on the carbon emissions associated with that material. We just get a diversion rate, and we call it good. So you have to choose: if you want to know all of that, you have to choose a tool that will allow you to input more of that information. And we don’t have a standard tool yet in the industry that everybody uses, so we can compare apples to apples.

We have guidance in the industry, and that’s really helpful. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, which is an industry consortium, has put out guidance on Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. Their Scope 3 guidance is the most recent, and with new information, new methodology, a lot of people don’t really know what to do with that, and maybe aren’t sure which tool to use to capture some of that stuff. So there’s a lot of uncertainty even around the guidance that’s out there. That’s where you can seek out professionals to help you understand all that stuff.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:11

One of the characteristics of the change we’re undergoing right now is the recognition of externalities. And in Hollywood production generally — I have some friends who are in the industry — it seems to me that they focused almost entirely on who was in front of the camera and who was behind the camera, and only now are starting to recognize that they’re part of this deeper supply chain. And now California’s new climate disclosure laws are going to require studios to report indirect, upstream and downstream emissions from every vendor by this year. How’s that going to change? And is the industry actually getting the traction on trying to respond to that requirement?

Zena Harris  31:47

The studios are very aware of this. They’ve been preparing for this. The suppliers upstream, downstream are not as [prepared].

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:58

So how are they not prepared? What do we need to do?

Zena Harris  32:00

Well, they haven’t been tracking.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:10

So they’re the typical company.

Zena Harris  32:13

They are a typical company. These are small companies servicing these projects, these productions. And we’ve been so focused in the industry on pre-production and production — that piece of the content creation process. So if you think of a book that has 10 chapters, we’ve been essentially focusing on one chapter. So you’ve got all of the other ones, and all of the service companies and suppliers and all of that that still incorporates the book, and all of those are contributing in some way.

Now we’ve been collecting data from waste haulers. We’ve been collecting data from people who supply equipment, and even those folks are still trying to get organized with their data. So you can imagine, like every other company, they all have their own operations. So that’s one thing. You can incorporate sustainability into your own company operations, and then you can provide data associated with the product or service that you are providing. And that’s going to matter. Those things roll up into this production reporting, and that production reporting rolls up into the larger studio, who’s going to have to incorporate that into their corporate reporting.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:54

So do you see this regulation as catalyzing the potential for sustainability at scale in entertainment production?

Zena Harris  34:05

Yeah. I mean, I think it provides people a solid talking point to go up and shake the tree a little bit and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to have to be doing this.’ Look, they’re not going to have all the information they need, probably, in year one. So they’re going to take what they do have, and they’re going to estimate probably across their slate. And then they’re going to work really hard to make that better, more accurate in the coming years. So if you’re not asked in year one as a supplier for certain information, you might be in year two and three. It would be wise, I think, to kind of get your house in order and be able to start reporting on these things, even if you’re never asked. It’s good for you as a company, because you start to understand where your waste is, where your emissions lie, and then you can start making changes accordingly. And yes, that stuff saves money. So it’s good for everyone to be thinking about this, whether you’re asked by a studio or not.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:16

Well, that’s really the key — that it’s also rewarding to make that kind of additional positive impact, as well as save some money and make more profit in the long run. I mean, that’s what’s rewarding about progress in general.

Zena Harris  35:30

Totally, totally. It’s a ripple effect, right? And then we just get better as an industry, and then an industry that contributes to broader society.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:40

So after 10 years, how far has the industry come toward the vision that you had when you started Green Spark Group?

Zena Harris  35:50

Oh, gosh. Well, there’s a lot that has happened over these years. Like I said, more people are aware, more people are engaged. But I think that we are swirling within the existing system. Sustainability practitioners that started working on production like I did years ago — we just entered this existing content creation system. And what I’m noticing now is that we’re swirling within the same system. We’re all running up against similar challenges around the world with regard to implementing sustainable practices. So we’re coming up against consistent hurdles, barriers within this system.

For me, that’s an opportunity to look a little bit bigger and say, ‘Okay, well, if we keep running into the same barriers, what if the system shifted? What if the entire system shifted? What are the incentives involved in the system to keep it the way it is?’ And there’s a lot — that’s a whole separate podcast — but all to say, this is where we need to be thinking: how we shift the system, how we have that radical collaboration, how we shift the needle on what suppliers are doing and reporting, and these sorts of things. And that’s what’s going to take us to the next level. We’re going to get over the hump.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:34

So, given that, imagine that you are Zena, goddess of sustainability, and can put your finger on one thing and change it. What would it be, in order to drive much more rapid transition to a more sustainable production environment?

Zena Harris  37:51

I mean, I think it all comes down to the people — the people in the system that are either allowing or not allowing, either making excuses or open to possibility. It all comes down to that. There are some core elements associated with people, behavior change, these sorts of things. I think mindset is core, absolutely core. I think courage — even to talk about this stuff within your small team or your department, or even in a larger conversation — is pretty critical, to voice some things you’re noticing, or what ideas you have for doing things differently. I think that collective confidence — once you do that, people get on board. They come together. Confidence is critical as well. If you don’t have it, you’re not going to take the next step, right? So there are fundamental human elements that need to be developed, to be encouraged, to be demonstrated. And I think that is going to shift the needle.

Mitch Ratcliffe  39:08

It’s a storytelling challenge in a lot of ways. There’s some carrot, there’s some stick, there’s a lot of nuance to that tale that we need to really make embedded into everybody’s approach to thinking about the work. Zena, thanks so much for your time today. How can folks follow both Green Spark Group and the work you’ve done with the Sustainable Production Forum?

Zena Harris  39:28

Sure. You’re always welcome to check out our website, greensparkgroup.com. We post insights there monthly and have a lot of great information for folks. Also on social media at @greensparkgroup — pick a platform, we’re probably on it. And then the Sustainable Production Forum is online as well, sustainableproductionforum.com, and from there you can get to all of their content, videos, anything you want to know is there too.

And I’ll also just give a quick plug for my podcast that I co-host with my longtime friend Mark Rabin. It’s called The Tie-In, and so folks can also check out stories from crew members, from people doing amazing work behind the scenes. We talk to them all there.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:21

Zena, thanks so much. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Really enjoyed it.

Zena Harris 

Thank you.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:31

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, the certified B Corp sustainability consultancy she launched in 2014 to change the climate of entertainment. You can find Zena and her team’s work at greensparkgroup.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. And check out their conference, the Sustainable Production Forum, now in its 10th year, at sustainableproductionforum.com, also all one word, no space, no dash.

I think the headline from Zena’s work is a pitch, not a principle: ‘We can save you money.’ That’s how she opens a conversation with a studio, and it’s why The Amazing Spider-Man 2 became an early case study, based on the work of a colleague of hers at Green Spark who helped that production save roughly $400,000 through sustainable practices. The implications of these savings are clear when you stand next to the dumpster at the end of a chute and watch a village’s worth of lumber, furniture, wallpaper, and props get hauled away to a landfill because the stage needs to be empty by Monday.

The sustainability opportunity in film and TV isn’t a values problem — the industry’s values are already stated on the record. It’s an operational capacity problem, and Zena’s work is translating aspiration into line items a production accountant can track. And that’s to the benefit of the environment, even if it’s not visible on the bottom line.

California’s new climate disclosure laws are about to change the equation, too. Beginning this year, studios will have to report upstream and downstream emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain. That’s the chapter of the book, as Zena put it, that the industry has never actually opened. The studios knew that this is coming, and they’ve been preparing for it. Their suppliers — the small companies servicing productions on short timelines — mostly haven’t. That gap is the real story over the next 24 months in the entertainment sustainability business.

Zena’s advice to suppliers is the same advice my recent guest Steve Wilhite, who leads Schneider Electric’s power management division, offered corporate energy buyers just a few weeks ago: get your house in order now, because even if you’re not asked for data today, you will be in two or three years. The companies that can report cleanly will win work, while those that can’t will become a balance sheet burden to the studios.

A digital nervous system is arriving now in Hollywood, and every waste hauler, every generator rental company, every lumber supplier is becoming a data-producing node in a network that didn’t exist just one or two production cycles ago. California’s environmental policy is forcing that network into being, and once it exists, it will not unbuild itself, because people are going to see the benefits. They’re going to see the savings that we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation.

And after 12 years in the business, I think Zena’s comment near the end of our conversation — that sustainability practitioners in entertainment are ‘swirling within the existing system’ — is important to note. The hurdles they hit on one production look identical to the hurdles they hit on the next, because the content creation system itself hasn’t changed. That’s the green living myth problem I discussed recently with author Michael Maniates, but with a Hollywood accent: individual actors are doing the right thing inside a structure that continues to produce the same outputs by default. And that can easily become disenchanting. On-set greening is necessary and it’s real, but the industry’s deepest cultural lever is the one that we discussed in passing.

Only about 13% of recent top-rated films even acknowledge climate change on screen. The carbon accounting for a single TV season matters, but the cultural accounting — for what a billion viewers see, what they feel is normal, and what film and television characters drive and eat and care about — that’s the lever that this industry hasn’t yet pulled. Production sustainability builds the operational muscle and the credibility, but climate storytelling is where that credibility will be built at scale, because it will spread these ideas, changing not only Hollywood’s practices, but the practices of an entire world. One without the other leaves the most influential narrative engine on the planet running on the old script, and it’s time for a change.

So stay tuned. We’re going to keep talking with people rewriting what’s possible on set and on screen. And could you take a moment to help spread the word about the sustainable future we can build together? You are the amplifier that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please take a look at any of the more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. So please tell your friends, family, and co-workers they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

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

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood appeared first on Earth911.

Today’s quote is from author Ken Webster and philanthropist Ellen MacArthur: “Ordered, complex, intertwined mutually interdependent systems are the new normal.”

Humanity is learning to mimic nature. As we embrace complexity, humanity can evolve new solutions to providing itself food, shelter, and waste elimination.

Ken Webster wrote The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows, which was edited by Ellen MacArthur, founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity committed to creating a circular economy.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day.

This poster was originally published on June 21, 2019.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Complex Is the New Normal appeared first on Earth911.

The PlayStation 4 sold approximately 117 million units over its lifetime, making it one of the best-selling consumer electronics products ever made. By 2025, Sony was winding down support for the platform, and tens of millions of those devices are now moving toward disposal. Only 22.3 percent of global e-waste reaches formal recycling, according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024. The rest ends up in landfills, incinerators, or informal processing abroad.

The PS4 is one example of a pattern that repeats across every major console cycle. Gaming hardware is a significant and growing contributor to the e-waste stream, and the rate at which old devices are replaced consistently outpaces any manufacturer recycling effort.

What Goes Into a Console

A modern gaming console contains gold, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, lithium, cobalt, and cadmium, along with processed plastics and specialized circuit components. Extracting and purifying those materials involves complex global supply chains that frequently release hazardous compounds, including arsenic and mercury, into surrounding ecosystems. Some raw materials, including tungsten and gold, are sourced from regions linked to civil unrest and documented human rights concerns.

A life-cycle analysis of the PlayStation 4 found that manufacturing and shipping a single unit produces roughly 89 kilograms of CO2 equivalent. That figure does not include the energy consumed during years of use, the disposal of the device, or the environmental cost of the controller, cables, and accessories that accompany it.

When a household upgrades at a console launch, that manufacturing footprint is reset. The previous device is set aside, and producing the new one requires that same chain of extraction, processing, and shipping to start over.

The Scale of the Disposal Problem

The PS4’s long lifecycle shows how slowly hardware actually exits households. As Game File reported, roughly half of Sony’s 118 million monthly active PlayStation users were still on the PS4 years after the PS5 launched, largely because the newer console offered too little improvement to justify the cost. By 2025, that transition was finally underway, moving tens of millions of PS4 units toward disposal at scale.

The same dynamic has played out in every previous generation. Xbox One units are now reaching end of life. Nintendo Wii U consoles predated them. Devices accumulate in closets for years before they eventually reach the waste stream.

U.S. gaming consoles consume roughly 34 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, with an estimated 24 million metric tons of carbon emissions associated with that use. On the disposal side, the $91 billion in recoverable metals sitting in the 2022 global e-waste pile, most of it lost to informal processing or landfill, reflects a recycling gap that gaming hardware contributes to.

Mid-Generation Upgrades Add to the Problem

Beyond full generational cycles, manufacturers have introduced mid-cycle hardware refreshes. The PS4 Pro, Xbox One X, and PlayStation 5 Pro each offered improved performance for players who already owned the previous model. Unlike a full generation transition, these upgrades carry no technical requirement to stop using the older device. A 2016 analysis noted that mid-generation consoles encourage disposal of hardware that remains fully functional, without the platform incompatibility that at least makes a generational upgrade necessary for some players.

Trade-in programs offer credits toward the new device, but the value paid for an older console is typically far below its replacement cost. The traded-in unit often passes through several resale steps before eventually reaching the waste stream.

Where Manufacturer Responsibility Falls Short

Sony and Microsoft have both published sustainability commitments. Microsoft has pledged to make its Xbox division carbon negative by 2030. Newer console models include energy-saving standby modes. A 2021 National Resources Defense Council analysis, however, found that those modes go largely unused, with most players defaulting to instant-on settings that consume significantly more electricity.

On device disposal, no major console manufacturer has a take-back program at the scale of the devices it sells. There is no PS4 collection initiative, no Xbox One recovery program. The burden of keeping those devices out of landfills falls primarily on individual consumers.

Gaming Without Dedicated Hardware

Some gaming takes place without any dedicated hardware at all. Browser-based gaming platforms run on devices people already own, whether that is a laptop, phone, or tablet. Platforms like Poki, which reached 100 million monthly players and recorded one billion gameplays in a single month in 2025, offer over 1,500 titles that load in a browser without installation. That approach avoids the manufacturing footprint of a dedicated gaming device and the upgrade cycle that follows it.

Browser gaming is a small fraction of the overall market. Most gaming still runs on dedicated consoles and high-performance PCs. But it is one example of a model where play does not require a purpose-built device.

What You Can Do

Extending the life of current hardware has more impact than any individual recycling action. Beyond that, there are a few practical steps.

• Keep hardware longer. A console used for eight years instead of five spreads its manufacturing footprint over a longer period. Mid-generation refreshes are optional upgrades, not replacements.
• Find a recycler. Earth911’s recycling search tool accepts “game consoles” as a search term and returns local drop-off options by ZIP code. Best Buy and Staples accept gaming hardware for recycling at no charge.
• Use certified recyclers. The e-Stewards certification identifies recyclers that meet standards for safe handling and do not export devices to informal processing sites, where hazardous materials can harm workers and nearby communities.
• Buy refurbished or previous-generation. A PS4 in 2026 runs the vast majority of available titles. Buying one secondhand extends the life of an existing device at no additional manufacturing cost.
• Donate working hardware. Organizations like PCs for People accept game consoles. A device that still functions is more useful rehomed than processed for scrap.

Gaming consoles are consumer electronics, and they carry the same end-of-life problems that come with any complex device. The upgrade cycle moves faster than recycling infrastructure can accommodate. Understanding that gap is a starting point for making different choices about when to upgrade, where to bring old hardware, and what to buy next.

About the Author

This sponsored article was written by Christopher Baude.

The post Guest Idea: Gaming’s Console Upgrade Cycle Is a Growing E-Waste Problem Nobody Talks About appeared first on Earth911.

A single load of synthetic laundry can shed hundreds of thousands of plastic microfibers into wastewater. Multiply that by the roughly 300 wash cycles an average U.S. household runs each year, and the case for rethinking laundry gets concrete fast—not just the detergent itself, but the chemistry that rinses out, the plastic that carries it home, and the residue that stays on fabric after the cycle ends.

We’re Orange House, a plant-based cleaning brand built around food-grade orange oil. We wanted to share how we think about the trade-offs in sustainable laundry—concentration, packaging, residue, and third-party testing—because the answers aren’t always the obvious ones, and because consumers deserve more than a “natural” label to go on.

Why we built our formulation around orange oil

We chose orange oil as a primary active ingredient because of its natural performance as a grease-cutting and stain-removing agent. For us, it represents a conscious move away from chemical-heavy conventional systems while still delivering the cleaning results families expect. Plant-based doesn’t have to mean underpowered.

But we also know that sustainability in laundry isn’t defined by a single ingredient. Every wash cycle contributes to environmental pressure in two main ways: the chemical substances released into wastewater, and the residues that stay behind on fabric in direct contact with skin. A good formulation has to address both.

Some laundry additives—especially fabric softeners and certain enhancers—can coat fabric surfaces and remain even after rinsing. The American Cleaning Institute has published guidance on how these products interact with fibers. We optimized our detergents to clean effectively and rinse away thoroughly, which reduces residue build-up over repeated washes.

Trace impurities: why we test for 1,4-dioxane

Product safety isn’t just about what goes into a formula—it’s also about what slips in during manufacturing. 1,4-dioxane is a well-known example. It’s not an ingredient; it’s a byproduct that can form during the production of certain surfactants and foaming agents, and the EPA classifies it as a likely human carcinogen.

Since December 31, 2023, New York State law has required that finished household cleansing products sold in the state contain no more than 1 ppm of 1,4-dioxane—the strictest such limit in the country. We test against that benchmark.

Our finished-product testing was performed by Intertek Testing Services Taiwan Ltd. using a method aligned with USP-NF 2023 <467> for residual solvents, analyzed by Headspace Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (Headspace GC-MS). Testing was conducted between March 20 and March 27, 2026, with a limit of quantitation of 0.5 ppm. Under those conditions, 1,4-dioxane was not detected in our final formulation.

For us, sustainable laundry means more than a “natural” label. It’s a commitment to minimizing total material usage and reducing cumulative chemical exposure over time—and being willing to publish the data that shows it.

The packaging trade-off most brands skip

Packaging is where a lot of laundry sustainability claims fall apart. Every detergent bottle eventually becomes waste, and highly diluted formulas compound the problem: more bottles per year, more transportation weight, more emissions per wash.

We addressed this with a concentrated format—including our 4-liter design—that delivers more washes per container. Increasing efficiency per use reduces the number of bottles a household goes through annually, which is a straightforward way to cut plastic waste without asking consumers to change their routines.

We’ll be candid about a trade-off other brands sometimes obscure. Paper-based detergent containers can appear more environmentally friendly, but many of them require internal plastic linings that make them difficult to recycle in practice. A single-material plastic that actually gets recycled in local infrastructure can have a better real-world outcome than a multi-material paper container that ends up in landfill. Neither option is perfect; we chose the one we believe performs best in the waste stream most of our customers live in.

Testing for sensitive skin

After washing, trace detergent components can remain embedded in textile fibers. For people with sensitive skin or atopic dermatitis, residual detergent has been linked to skin barrier irritation. That’s why residue behavior matters as much as the active ingredient list.

We subjected our detergent to a Human Repeat Insult Patch Test (HRIPT), a standard dermatological evaluation. The test ran for six weeks across 108 participants, including people with sensitive skin, and used repeated exposure followed by a controlled challenge phase. Under the test conditions, no signs of irritation or sensitization were observed.

Our goal isn’t to eliminate chemistry—it’s to optimize it. Our micellar orange oil technology combines citrus oil with molecular structures that encapsulate and remove dirt using less detergent per wash. Orange House detergents are dermatologically tested and carry the USDA Certified Biobased Product label at 85% biobased content, verified through the USDA BioPreferred Program’s ASTM D6866 testing protocol.

What to look for in any sustainable detergent

The broader point we want to leave you with: choosing a better detergent comes down to informed decision-making, not marketing claims. Whether or not you choose Orange House, these are the questions worth asking about any product on the shelf.

• Concentration: How many loads per container? More concentrated formulas mean less plastic, less shipping weight, and lower emissions per wash.
• Packaging honesty: Is the container actually recyclable in your local system—or is it multi-material packaging that sounds greener than it performs?
• Residue and rinse-out: Does the formula rinse cleanly, or does it coat fibers with additives you’ll end up wearing?
• Third-party testing: Has the finished product been tested for trace contaminants like 1,4-dioxane by an accredited lab? Is the data published?
• Independent certifications: Look for labels that require third-party verification—USDA Certified Biobased Product, EPA Safer Choice, or dermatological testing with disclosed protocols.

Innovation in formulation and packaging design can align real cleaning performance with environmental responsibility. We built Orange House to prove that. But even if the detergent you choose isn’t ours, asking these five questions pushes the category in the right direction—one load at a time.

About the Author

This sponsored article was written by the Orange House team. Orange House is a plant-based cleaning brand whose products are formulated around food-grade orange oil and tested to meet New York State’s 1,4-dioxane standard. Learn more at orangehouse.com.

The post Guest Idea: How to Choose a Laundry Detergent That’s Better for the Planet appeared first on Earth911.

Paper is one of the easiest materials to recycle, and Americans are still pretty good at it. We are also still throwing away tens of millions of tons of it every year.

Paper and paperboard make up roughly a quarter of municipal solid waste in the United States, it is the single largest category by weight. Eliminating paper waste entirely would take a Herculean effort for most households, but whether you want to do good, better, or best, you can cut what you use and recycle more of what you don’t.

The Numbers

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s last comprehensive accounting of municipal solid waste, released in 2020 with 2018 data, pegged total MSW generation at 292.4 million tons — about 4.9 pounds per person per day. Paper and paperboard accounted for 23.1% of that total, or 67.4 million tons. (EPA has not published an updated edition of the Facts and Figures report since.)

More recent data comes from the paper industry itself. The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) reported that about 46 million tons of paper were recycled in the United States in 2024 — roughly 125,000 tons every day — which resulted in a paper recycling rate of 60% to 64% and a cardboard recycling rate of 69% to 74%. Both figures slipped compared to 2023, primarily because exports to Asia softened. Domestic mills, meanwhile, used 1.29 million more tons of recycled paper than the year before, and recycled fiber’s share of all fiber used at U.S. mills reached 44.4%, its highest in two decades.

AF&PA changed its methodology in 2024 to report rates as ranges rather than single numbers and to factor in recycled fiber that arrives in the country inside imported packaging. That makes year-over-year comparisons messier than they used to be, but it also makes the numbers more honest. The headline takeaway has not changed: paper is still one of the most recycled materials in the United States, and overall paper waste has been declining since around 2000 as digitization eats into print volumes.

With paper still filling roughly a quarter of our garbage cans, there is plenty of room to do better.

Good

You can take simple steps to reduce the paper you use, and curbside paper recycling remains widely available across most U.S. communities. AF&PA reports that 79% of Americans have access to community residential-curbside recycling for paper and cardboard. Recycling clean paper takes almost no effort and makes a meaningful difference.

Here is how to be good about paper waste:

• Recycle paper through your curbside program. It is the simplest single thing you can do.
• Recycle only clean paper. Wishcycling of food-soiled paper can contaminate an entire load.
• Cancel print subscriptions you no longer read and switch to digital editions of newspapers and magazines.
• Set your printer to two-sided printing by default, and reuse paper as scratch paper before recycling it.
• Choose paper products made with post-consumer recycled content. Recycled-content packaging now makes up nearly half the fiber used at U.S. paper mills.

Better

If you want to do better than good — or if your community has limited curbside service — a little extra effort goes a long way. Contact your local solid waste utility to let them know you value recycling (your garbage bill should tell you whom to call). To do better, you’ll need to recycle more types of paper and start replacing single-use paper with reusable alternatives:

• Use the Earth911 recycling locator to find drop-off options for paper your curbside program won’t take, such as paperback books, gable-top cartons, aseptic drink boxes, shredded paper, and more.
• Compost what you can’t recycle. Dirty paper towels, disposable napkins, paper plates, and pizza boxes don’t belong in the recycling bin, but they break down well in commercial composting or a home compost bin.
• Skip the paper-or-plastic dilemma at checkout with reusable shopping and tote bags.
• Replace paper-bag lunches with a lunchbox or furoshiki wrap, which doubles as reusable gift wrap.
• Digitize what you reasonably can. Use note-taking apps and electronic calendars in place of notebooks, and sign up for electronic billing and digital magazine subscriptions.
• Cut the junk mail at the source. Register your mail preferences with DMAchoice, which is now operated by the Association of National Advertisers, for a small fee that covers a 10-year listing. To stop prescreened credit and insurance offers, use the credit bureaus’ OptOutPrescreen service or call 1-888-567-8688.

Best

Because paper is one of the more easily recyclable materials, paper products are often the greener choice in head-to-head comparisons with plastic. So while plastic-free is a popular goal, almost no one seriously attempts a paper-free lifestyle, and you don’t need to.

To get to zero waste, do what you can to eliminate avoidable paper and recycle the rest. If you have already worked through the Good and Better tiers, you’ll notice that food packaging accounts for most of the paper waste you have left.

• Zero waste grocery shopping requires a real shift — seeking out bulk stores, carrying reusable containers, and cooking more from scratch. The payoff is a dramatic reduction in paperboard packaging.
• Cutting pizza boxes and takeout containers means cooking more meals at home. The packaging savings are significant; the takeout habit is harder to break.
• Rethink napkins, tissues, and paper towels. Cloth napkins are the easiest swap; handkerchiefs take more getting used to. Breaking the paper towel habit usually means buying a stack of cloth shop towels or microfiber cloths and learning to grab those instead.
• Toilet paper is a tougher ask. Bidets, including affordable seat attachments, are the most effective way to cut household toilet paper use. If that’s a stretch, switching to bamboo or recycled-content toilet paper is a meaningful step down from virgin tree fiber.

What You Can Do This Week

• Audit your recycling bin once. If half of what’s in there isn’t paper or cardboard, your sorting habits are leaving easy wins on the table.
• Spend ten minutes registering with DMAchoice and OptOutPrescreen. Junk mail volumes drop within two to three months.
• Use the Earth911 recycling search to find a drop-off for the paper categories your curbside program rejects — shredded paper and gable-top cartons are the two most commonly missed.
• Replace one disposable paper product in your kitchen with a reusable alternative this month. Cloth napkins or shop towels are the lowest-friction starting points.

Editor’s note: This article was originally authored by Gemma Alexander on April 6, 2020, and was substantially updated in May 2026.

The post Good, Better, Best — Cutting Down Paper Waste appeared first on Earth911.

You spend about a third of your life in your bedroom, and the air quality there could be quietly harming your health. A 2025 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: Global, which looked at data from 3,399 U.S. adults, found that higher levels of bedroom allergens were strongly linked to trouble sleeping, diagnosed sleep disorders, snoring, and the use of sleep medication. These allergens aren’t coming from outside; they’re already present in your mattress, curtains, and the air you breathe.

Dust mites, pet dander, mold spores, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are some of the most common bedroom pollutants. Unlike outdoor allergens that come and go with the seasons, these are problems all year long. Because they build up right where you sleep for seven to nine hours each night, their effect on your sleep is much greater than daytime exposure. Here’s what research shows now and what you can do about it.

The Allergen-Sleep Connection Is Worse Than Most People Know

A 2024 review in Nature and Science of Sleep explained how this works: exposure to allergens causes nasal inflammation, which narrows the nasal passages, disrupts airflow, and leads to more brief awakenings during sleep. People with allergic rhinitis are also much more likely to develop obstructive sleep apnea, not just snoring. In one controlled study, patients with allergies were almost four times more likely to have serious REM-stage sleep problems than those without allergies.

The effects go beyond just feeling tired. Sleep problems caused by allergens are linked to weaker immune function, higher cortisol levels, and greater risk for heart problems, and these issues add up over time. Lowering the amount of allergens in your bedroom isn’t just a nice idea—it’s important for your health.

Mind Your Mattress

The highest concentration of allergens in most bedrooms is found right where you sleep. The American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology says dust mites are one of the most common indoor allergens in the U.S. They thrive in the warm, humid environment of bedding and mattresses. These tiny creatures, which are related to spiders, feed on dead skin cells and produce allergen proteins (Der p 1, Der p 2) that can trigger immune reactions.

The solution is physical, not chemical. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology strongly recommends using allergen-proof covers for mattresses and pillows. These tightly woven covers block dust mite allergens from reaching you while you sleep. Washing sheets and pillowcases in hot water every week is also advised. The water temperature is less important than once believed, but drying at high heat (130°F or above) is very effective at killing any remaining mites.

If your pillows can’t be washed, replace them every two years. After that, the amount of allergens inside is high, even if you use covers. When it’s time to get a new mattress, choose one that is certified organic or low in VOCs to avoid adding chemical emissions to the mix of allergens.

Humidity is the Key Variable

Dust mites don’t drink water; they absorb it from the air. When relative humidity (RH) is above 50%, dust mites reproduce more quickly. The EPA recommends keeping indoor humidity between 30% and 50% to control both dust mites and mold. Keeping RH below 50% lowers mite survival, and staying below 35% for most of the day can almost wipe them out.

A digital hygrometer, which costs less than $15 at most hardware stores, is an easy way to monitor bedroom humidity. If your bedroom often measures above 50%, which is common in coastal areas, during humid summers, or in older homes, a dehumidifier or a well-maintained air conditioner can help a lot. High humidity also speeds mold growth, worsening the allergen problem.

Add a HEPA Air Purifier

New research has made the benefits of air purifiers clear. A 2024 review in Indoor Air found that using HEPA filters in bedrooms led to real improvements in allergy symptoms and quality of life, especially for airborne allergens like pet dander and pollen. Dust mite allergens are harder to remove because they stick to larger particles that settle quickly, but a HEPA purifier still lowers the total amount of allergens in the air, which is important when you’re breathing it all night.

When buying a bedroom air purifier, choose one with a True HEPA (not “HEPA-type”) certification, a CADR rating that matches your room size, and a sleep mode that keeps noise below 30 dB. If you have new furniture or recently painted walls, pick a model that also has an activated carbon filter to help with VOCs.

Clean Up Your Curtains — or Replace Them

Soft window coverings collect allergens easily. Fabric curtains hold onto dust, mold spores, and outdoor pollen that comes in through open windows, and they release these particles whenever they’re moved. If you use fabric curtains, wash them once a month during allergy season and keep windows closed when pollen counts are high. You can check local pollen levels on AirNow.

If you have allergies, hard-surface window coverings are often a better choice. Blinds or shades made from wood, aluminum, or wipeable fabric can be cleaned with a damp cloth instead of needing to be washed. They give you the light control you want for sleep without collecting as many allergens as fabric curtains.

Avoid VOCs in the Sleep Space

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from paint, particleboard furniture, and foam mattresses aren’t technically allergens, but they can cause similar breathing problems and make things worse if your airways are already irritated by other allergens. The EPA says particleboard, carpet glue, and regular paint are major indoor sources of these chemicals.

Here are some practical steps:

• Pick solid wood furniture instead of composite or MDF when you can. Secondhand solid wood from thrift stores is often cheaper than new particleboard.
• Choose low- or zero-VOC paints, and let new furniture air out in a well-ventilated area for a few days before moving it into your bedroom.
• If you’re buying a new mattress, look for certifications like GOLS (Global Organic Latex Standard) and GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), which mean less chemical off-gassing.

Keep Pets Out of the Bedroom

This advice is tough for pet owners, but the science is clear. Pet dander, which is made up of tiny flakes of skin from cats, dogs, and other animals, is a strong and long-lasting allergen. It sticks to surfaces and can stay in the air for hours. The 2025 NIH bedroom allergen study found that pet allergens were among the top exposures linked to sleep disorders. Even if you start keeping pets out of the bedroom, leftover dander can remain for months unless you clean thoroughly.

If you can’t keep pets out of the bedroom all the time, run a HEPA air purifier nonstop, wash your bedding every week, and vacuum floors and furniture with a HEPA vacuum at least twice a week.

Steps You Can Take: An Anti-Allergen Checklist

• Encase your mattress and pillows in allergen-impermeable covers rated for dust mite protection
• Wash sheets and pillowcases weekly; dry at 130°F or higher
• Replace non-washable pillows every two years
• Monitor bedroom humidity with a hygrometer; keep it between 35–50%
• Use a dehumidifier or AC if needed to stay below 50% RH
• Add a True HEPA air purifier sized for your room and run it continuously
• Replace fabric curtains with wipeable blinds or hard-surface shades, or wash curtains monthly
• Keep windows closed on high pollen and high mold-count days
• Keep pets out of the bedroom, or at minimum off the bed
• Choose low-VOC paint and solid wood furniture over particleboard for the sleep space
• Vacuum with a HEPA-rated vacuum at least twice per week

You can’t control allergens everywhere, but your bedroom is where you spend the most time breathing the same air. Making improvements there can have a big impact on how well you sleep and how you feel in the morning.

Related Earth911 Articles

• 10 Sustainable Mattress Companies
• Designing an Ideal Bedroom for Green Sleep
• 10 Sustainable Pillow Companies
• Where Do VOCs Lurk in Your Home?

Editor’s Note: Originally written by Jenna Cyprus on April 6, 2020, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.

The post Don’t Let Allergens Interfere With Your Sleep appeared first on Earth911.

About two tons of satellite material burns up in Earth’s atmosphere every day. That is the steady-state exhaust of a single company’s broadband network, SpaceX’s Starlink, operating at its current scale. Each vaporized spacecraft leaves behind aluminum oxide, lithium, copper, and a growing list of metals the upper atmosphere has never had to contained in these quantities before.

We’re following a familiar human pattern. A commons, like the low earth orbit (LEO) region of space, is declared abundant. Commercial activity scales faster than science can measure the consequences. Governance lags by a decade or more. By the time the damage is legible, it is already expensive to reverse.

We did this to rivers in the 19th century, to the atmosphere in the 20th, and to the deep ocean in a quiet accumulation that stretched across both. A new peer-reviewed analysis published in Advances in Space Research makes clear that LEO is now on the same trajectory, and the chemistry is moving faster than the regulation.

An Atmosphere Already Dominated by Human Metal

The paper, an update to a 2021 study, reassesses how much spacecraft material is now being injected into the mesosphere and lower thermosphere as satellites and rocket stages burn up on reentry. The comparison it draws is that for several metals commonly used in spacecraft, anthropogenic injection now rivals or exceeds the natural input from meteoroids.

What was already true in 2021 is more true now. The researchers incorporate direct observations from stratospheric aerosol sampling — work led by Daniel Murphy at NOAA and published in PNAS in 2023 — which confirmed that roughly 10 percent of stratospheric aerosol particles now contain aluminum and other metals traceable to satellite and rocket-stage burn-up. For decades, the natural baseline was micrometeoroid ablation, what space sent naturally toward our planet. Earth sweeps up roughly 30 to 50 metric tons of cosmic dust every day, a steady rain of mostly sand-grain-sized particles left over from comets and asteroids. Those grains hit the upper atmosphere at speeds between 11 and 72 kilometers per second, vaporize in a thin layer between about 75 and 110 kilometers altitude, and seed the mesosphere with iron, magnesium, silicon, sodium, and trace amounts of nickel, calcium, and aluminum. This process has been running for the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet. The metal layers it produces in the upper atmosphere are well-mapped; they are the chemistry the stratosphere evolved with.

Aluminum is a useful tracer because it is a small share of the natural input. Cosmic dust is dominated by silicates and iron, with aluminum running on the order of one to two percent by mass. So when researchers began detecting elevated aluminum in stratospheric aerosol particles in the early 2020s, the signal was unambiguous — meteoritic infall could not account for it. The source had to be terrestrial in origin, vaporized at altitude. Spacecraft, in other words.

Human vehicles have become a second, larger source.

The near-term trajectory is worse. Researchers at the University of Southern California documented an eightfold increase in stratospheric aluminum oxide between 2016 and 2022, corresponding almost exactly to the ramp-up of Starlink and other satellite megaconstellations. In 2022 alone, reentering satellites released an estimated 17 metric tons of aluminum oxide nanoparticles — raising total atmospheric aluminum input about 29.5 percent above natural levels.

The Ocean Parallel

Consider the deep ocean in the 1960s. Dumping was legal, monitoring was barely funded, and the prevailing assumption was that the ocean was big enough to absorb anything. We now know the answer to that assumption after finding microplastics in Mariana Trench amphipods, pharmaceutical residues in Arctic sediment cores, and PFAS in polar bear blood.

Low Earth orbit is in the 1960s-ocean phase. The prevailing assumption among launch operators is that satellites that burn up are satellites that disappear. Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in global politics and international law, put this directly in a 2024 interview with Scientific American: “There’s this widespread assumption that something burning up in the atmosphere disappears, but, of course, mass never disappears.”

What it does instead is change form. A 250-kilogram satellite, typically about 30 percent aluminum by mass, generates roughly 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide nanoparticles as it ablates through the mesosphere. Those particles are small enough — 1 to 100 nanometers — that they can drift in the stratosphere for decades before settling. Aluminum oxide is not inert. It catalyzes the chlorine reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone, the same chemistry the Montreal Protocol was designed to stop. Crucially, the particles are not consumed in those reactions; they continue to destroy ozone molecules for the duration of their atmospheric lifetime.

The Scale Is Not Hypothetical

As of April 2026, SpaceX alone operates more than 10,000 active Starlink satellites, roughly two-thirds of all functioning spacecraft in orbit. The company has launched over 11,700 total, with about 1,500 already deorbited and replaced. Starlink satellites are designed for a five-year operational life, which means the constellation is, by design, a continuous churn: launch, operate, burn, launch again.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Eutelsat’s OneWeb, and a growing roster of Chinese state-backed constellations are moving toward similar architectures. The European Space Agency now tracks roughly 40,000 objects in low Earth orbit, about 11,000 of them active payloads, the rest debris or derelict hardware. Statistical models from ESA estimate another 130 million fragments smaller than one centimeter, each traveling fast enough to destroy whatever it hits.

Research published in Geophysical Research Letters projects that once currently planned megaconstellations are fully deployed, roughly 912 metric tons of aluminum will reenter the atmosphere every year, producing around 360 tons of aluminum oxide annually. A separate NOAA modeling study published in 2025 found that sustained alumina injection at expected 2040 levels could alter polar vortex speeds, warm parts of the mesosphere by as much as 1.5°C, and measurably impact the ozone layer.

Two Kinds of Pollution, One Commons

The orbital damage is happening on two fronts simultaneously, and they reinforce each other.

Atmospheric injection is the slow-accumulating chemistry problem. Every satellite that completes its mission becomes tomorrow’s stratospheric dust. A newly upgraded lidar system at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany can now simultaneously detect lithium, sodium, copper, titanium, silicon, gold, silver, and lead in the upper atmosphere — each element a chemical fingerprint for specific spacecraft components. On February 20, 2025, the instrument registered a sudden spike in lithium vapor that researchers traced to a Falcon 9 upper stage reentering overhead.

The measurement capability is arriving just as the pollution is scaling.

Orbital debris is the faster-moving physical problem. SpaceX reported that its Starlink satellites executed 144,404 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the first half of 2025, due to collision warnings every couple of minutes, for six months straight — three times the previous rate. Two Starlink satellites have fragmented in orbit in the past four months, each creating a trackable debris field. Space is getting filled with junk that led to the International Space Station performing avoidance maneuvers twice in a single six-day window in November 2024, and again in April 2025.

Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the debris-tracking firm LeoLabs, told IEEE Spectrum that certain orbital altitudes at 775, 840, and 975 kilometers have already passed the debris-density threshold where collisions generate fragments faster than atmospheric drag can remove them. This is known as the Kessler syndrome, proposed by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in 1978, and it is no longer hypothetical in every band.

“Some operators in low Earth orbit are ignoring known long-term effects of behavior for short-term gain,” McKnight said, “Some will not change behavior until something bad happens.”

The Governance Gap

There is no body that regulates the cumulative atmospheric impact of satellite reentries. No operator is required to submit an environmental impact assessment for a constellation’s aggregate burn-up.

The FCC licenses spectrum.

National launch authorities license liftoff.

Debris mitigation guidelines from the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space are voluntary, and compliance is inconsistent. The chemistry of the upper atmosphere is, in regulatory terms, nobody’s jurisdiction.

The United Nations Environment Program took a first step in late 2025, releasing a report titled Safeguarding Space: Environmental Issues, Risks and Responsibilities. It framed space debris and atmospheric injection as “emerging issues” deserving the attention international bodies already give to ocean pollution and transboundary air quality. This is the same framing UNEP used for atmospheric ozone depletion in the 1970s before the Montreal Protocol. Measuring something does not fix it. But it is the necessary precondition for fixing it — and for the first time, the measurement infrastructure is catching up to the pollution.

The Counter-Case, Honestly

Not every specialist agrees the situation is as urgent as the headlines suggest. A skeptical review published in March 2026 argued that the Kessler cascade framing oversimplifies a risk that plays out on timescales of decades to centuries, and in specific orbital bands rather than across all of LEO. The review is right on one narrow point: the ISS has operated continuously at 400 kilometers since 2000, its debris risk is managed in real time, and the environment is not in a runaway state.

What the skeptical case does not resolve is the atmospheric chemistry. The Kessler debate is about whether low-earth orbit becomes unusable. The alumina question is about whether the recovery of the ozone layer — a genuine success story of international environmental governance — is quietly being undone from above. Those are different problems. The first might take a century. The second is already measurable and is projected to worsen within fifteen years.

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