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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture turning yard waste, wood scraps, and farm leftovers into something that stores carbon underground for centuries and improves soil health. That’s the idea behind biochar. While this is true, it doesn’t tell the full story.

For over twenty years, researchers, entrepreneurs, and climate advocates have promoted biochar as a top way to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Early estimates said it could take out 3.4 to 6.3 billion tons of CO₂ each year, which is huge. This excitement led to many scientific papers, startup investments, and carbon credit deals.

But a new analysis in Nature Sustainability from January 2026 says we should slow down. Biochar is real, but the excitement has gotten ahead of the facts. The researchers warn that too much hype could lead to a “boom-and-bust cycle” that ends up hurting the technology.

What Is Biochar?

Biochar is charcoal, but not the kind you use at a backyard cookout. It’s made by heating organic materials such as wood chips, crop waste, or agricultural byproducts in a low-oxygen environment through a process called pyrolysis. The result is a dark, porous, carbon-rich material that resists breaking down in soil for centuries or even millennia.

The inspiration came from an unlikely source: ancient Amazonian soils. Researchers discovered that the region’s famously fertile “terra preta” (Portuguese for “dark earth”) owed its richness to charcoal that Indigenous peoples had mixed into the soil thousands of years ago. That charcoal had survived intact, still improving soil structure and fertility long after the civilization that made it passed into history.

When scientists studied terra preta, they realized that locking carbon in a solid form and burying it in soil removes it from the air for a long time. Biochar looked like a win-win: it could store carbon and help farms. This led to more funding, research, and new companies.

The Numbers That Raised Alarms

The issue isn’t that biochar doesn’t work, but it hasn’t lived up to the early high hopes. The Nature Sustainability analysis by Italian soil scientists Luciano Gristina and Riccardo Scalenghe explains the numbers in detail.

Let’s look at production. All certified biochar facilities in the world make about 350,000 tons each year. That might sound like a lot, but spread over the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of farmland, it’s tiny. The researchers found that this would raise the soil surface by less than one-tenth the width of a human hair per year. This shows how far current production is from what’s needed for climate goals.

Next is the question of carbon storage. Biochar’s actual impact is about a thousand times smaller than early estimates. Even after subtracting the emissions from making it, the net climate benefit is only a few hundred thousand tons of CO₂ at most. For comparison, global emissions are about 36 billion tons each year.

Economics make things even harder. Studies show that feedstock—the raw material for biochar—can make up as much as 75% of the total cost. So, biochar projects only make financial sense if they have free or very cheap biomass, or steady income from carbon credits. Without these, most projects aren’t profitable.

In Southeast Asia, trials showed that adding biochar to farmland produced only modest yield improvements, not nearly enough to justify the cost for smallholder farmers without a subsidy.

Too Many Papers, Not Enough Proof

The researchers have another worry: there is so much research on biochar now that it looks like a bubble.

Scientific papers on biochar have jumped from fewer than 10 a year in the early 2000s to over 1,000 a year by the 2020s. The researchers point out that biochar now gets much more attention than older topics like acid rain, which was a major environmental issue studied for decades.

Much of this increase in papers comes from a small group of very active authors. A 2023 report in Nature found that the number of scientists publishing over 60 papers a year—more than one per week—has almost quadrupled in less than ten years. Biochar is a clear example, with a few names dominating the field and shaping how mature it seems.

There are now warning signs from institutions. According to Clarivate’s Web of Science index, two major journals that published a lot of biochar research, Chemosphere and Science of the Total Environment, were removed from the index for not meeting editorial standards. Investigations found problems like peer-review manipulation, fake reviewer identities, and unusual authorship practices. This shows that the scientific community is starting to push back on a field that may be moving too quickly for the evidence.

The worry isn’t that biochar researchers are being dishonest. It’s that career incentives reward publishing quickly rather than publishing carefully. Field experiments are slow and expensive. Lab results are faster. When the pressure to publish outpaces the ability to verify, fields can develop an inflated sense of their own progress, and then crash when reality catches up. Biochar has value, but it must be scaled to the right size to make environmental and economic sense.

What Would an Effective Biochar Path Look Like?

The Nature Sustainability report doesn’t say biochar is a lost cause. Instead, it suggests the field needs a reset: fewer papers, more checking; less speed, more solid research.

Specifically, the researchers call for:

• Pre-registered trial designs so that results can’t be cherry-picked after the fact
• Open data and public protocols that allow independent researchers to check each other’s work
• Dedicated “verification articles” that reproduce influential findings before new claims pile on top of them
• Funding earmarked for confirmatory studies and even negative results — research that shows what doesn’t work, not just what does
• Evaluation metrics that reward verified contributions over sheer publication counts

The acid rain parallel is instructive. In the 1980s, acid rain was a front-page environmental crisis, the subject of intense scientific and policy debate. It receded from headlines not because the problem was imaginary, but because coordinated policy — cleaner fuels, emissions standards, pollution controls — actually reduced sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Evidence of ecosystem recovery followed. The field moved from alarm to action to outcome, a model worth following.

For biochar, the right approach is to be honest about what it can and can’t do. More real-world projects are now working within these limits.

Five Biochar Projects To Watch

Even with big challenges, some biochar projects around the world are finding success. They usually use local waste materials and earn money from more than just carbon credits.

Exomad Green — Bolivia

Exomad Green is currently the world’s largest biochar producer, operating two facilities that together remove about 260,000 tons of CO₂ per year. The feedstock is sawmill waste, wood residues that would otherwise be open-burned. The material is converted into biochar through pyrolysis, in other words, it is burned. That biochar is then donated to indigenous farming communities to improve degraded soils. In May 2025, Microsoft signed a 10-year agreement with Exomad Green for 1.24 million tons of CO₂ removal; the largest single biochar deal ever made. The model works because the feedstock is genuinely waste material with no better use, and the soil co-benefits for local communities are real and documented.

Pacific Biochar — California, USA

Pacific Biochar has built its model around a genuine dual benefit: it collects organic material from forests with high wildfire risk, reducing the fuel load that makes fires catastrophic, and converts that material into biochar for agricultural use. In 2024, CDR.fyi recognized Pacific Biochar as the global leader in durable carbon removal deliveries, accounting for 21% of total global certified volume. The California focus matters: the state’s wildfire crisis creates a near-endless supply of biomass that genuinely needs to be removed from the landscape, making the feedstock economics unusually solid.

Novocarbo — Germany

Novocarbo represents a different economic logic: the “Carbon Removal Park” model, where biochar production is bundled with renewable energy generation. At its flagship facility in Grevesmühlen, Germany, plant residues are converted into biochar using advanced pyrolysis units, and the waste heat from that process — about 6,600 megawatt-hours per year — is piped to roughly 1,800 nearby households for heating. Carbon credits are one revenue stream; district heating fees are another. That diversification makes the project less dependent on voluntary carbon market prices, which can be volatile. Novocarbo secured €27 million in new funding in 2025 to expand the model across Europe.

Aperam BioEnergia — Brazil

Aperam BioEnergia, certified by Puro.earth, is one of the most established biochar projects in the Global South. Operating in Minas Gerais, Brazil, it converts forestry residues into biochar, with plans to produce 30,000 tons annually by 2026. The project has sold more than 100,000 tons of carbon removal credits since 2021 and supports sustainable forest management practices alongside its production. It’s a model that pairs industrial scale with regional feedstock — the biomass inputs are produced nearby, keeping transport emissions low.

Carbonity / Airex Energy — Québec, Canada

Airex Energy’s pyrolysis technology is the backbone of Carbonity’s new facility in Port-Cartier, Québec — slated to become the largest biochar plant in North America. The project, backed by a consortium including Groupe Rémabec and SUEZ, represents roughly CAD 80 million in investment and aims to produce 10,000 tons of biochar in 2025, scaling to 30,000 by 2026. The feedstock is forest residues from the surrounding region. Microsoft has already purchased 36,000 carbon credits from an associated supply deal. The project is notable for its scale, but also carries the scrutiny that comes with large industrial operations in sensitive northern ecosystems.

Local, Small, and Real

These five projects have something important in common. The strongest ones, both economically and environmentally, use waste materials, work close to where those materials come from to cut transport emissions, and find value beyond just selling carbon credits.

That’s the conclusion the Nature Sustainability researchers point toward, even if they don’t say it quite so directly. The biochar projects most likely to survive and do genuine good are the ones that would still make sense even if the voluntary carbon market collapsed tomorrow, because their feedstock is free or nearly free, their soil benefits are real and local, and their energy co-products create additional value.

What likely won’t work is the dream of scaling biochar fast and wide enough to make a big dent in the 36 billion tons of CO₂ released each year. The numbers just don’t add up—not now, and maybe not ever—unless there are big changes in cost, feedstock supply, and how quickly the science can be checked.

That doesn’t mean we should give up on biochar. Instead, we should be clear about what it is: a useful, long-lasting, local way to turn waste into something valuable, with real benefits for farmers and soil, and a real—if small—role in removing carbon. Not everything has to save the world to be worthwhile.

The lesson from the acid rain research and responses fits here too: the goal isn’t to keep chasing new research. It’s to let the evidence catch up, support projects that stand up to close review, and build something lasting. The way forward will include many smaller, local biochar initiatives, not monolithic, world-saving programs that over-promise, threatening a valid carbon sequestration strategy.

What You Can Do

• Support verified projects. If you or your organization purchases carbon offsets, look for biochar credits certified by Puro.earth or Verra with transparent feedstock sourcing and publicly available lifecycle data.
• Ask about feedstock. Not all biochar is created equal. Biochar made from waste materials that would otherwise be burned or decompose has much stronger climate credentials than biochar produced from purpose-grown crops.
• Look for local applications. Some municipalities and agricultural extension programs are exploring biochar for compost enhancement and soil remediation. Local applications with local feedstocks are the most ecologically sound.
• Be skeptical of big numbers. If a company or project claims to sequester millions of tons of CO₂ per year through biochar alone, ask to see the verified delivery data — not just projections.
• Follow the science, not the hype. The International Biochar Initiative maintains a more grounded overview of the field’s actual state of knowledge.

The post Biochar Was a Billion-Ton Dream, the Reality Is More Complicated appeared first on Earth911.

24. That is the average number of electronic devices sitting in a typical American home right now. Phones in drawers, tablets behind the TV, chargers without their devices, and devices without their chargers. Most of those products are headed for a landfill or a shipping container, not a recycler.

Electronics are the fastest-growing solid waste stream on the planet, and U.S. households are an outsize engine. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found that global e-waste reached a record 62 million tons in 2022, which is up 82 percent since 2010, and is rising five times faster than electronics recycling capacity. Americans produce roughly 46 to 48 pounds of it per person per year. Most of those discarded devices contain materials worth real money and environmental harms worth understanding.

The 2022 e-waste pile contained an estimated $91 billion in recoverable metals, according to the United Nations, including roughly $19 billion in copper, $16 billion in iron, and $15 billion in gold. About $62 billion of that value was lost to landfills, incinerators, or unregulated dumping.

Translate that into household terms. The metals in a single discarded smartphone include small but meaningful quantities of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and cobalt. Multiply by the 151 million cell phones, 40 million computers, 20 million televisions, and 23 million small appliances Americans throw away each year, and the unrecovered value runs into the billions for U.S. households alone.

The materials don’t disappear; they just stop circulating. Mining companies extract more virgin gold and copper from the ground while millions of pounds of the same metals sit on shelves in junk rooms and lie fallow in landfills.

What’s Driving the Growth

The average U.S. smartphone replacement cycle has stretched to 3.64 years in 2024, according to Assurant; that’s up from under 3 years a decade ago, yet the underlying hardware can typically last 5 to 7 years with software support. That gap between when consumers upgrade and when the device actually fails is where most e-waste is born.

Behind the phones, a longer parade of devices is generating serious volume. Wearables, smart speakers, e-cigarettes, lithium-powered toys, and cheap rechargeable accessories now show up in municipal waste streams in quantities that did not exist a decade ago. The WHO documented more than 1,000 hazardous substances associated with informal e-waste recycling, including lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants, all of which can leach from devices that are crushed or burned rather than processed properly.

What the U.S. Actually Recycles

The picture here is genuinely confusing, and reporting that pretends otherwise is wrong. The most-cited EPA estimate of consumer electronics recycling puts the U.S. rate at 38.5 percent, but that figure dates from 2018. More recent independent estimates put the actual U.S. rate closer to 15 percent, with global formal recycling at 22.3 percent in 2022. The gap between the two numbers reflects the difference between what enters a recycling program and what actually gets recovered as usable material.

The remainder follows three main paths. Some heads to U.S. landfills, where heavy metals contribute to leachate problems. Some is incinerated, releasing dioxins from PVC and other plastics. And roughly 90 percent of exported e-waste is processed in low- and middle-income countries, where informal recyclers — often including children — strip devices by hand or by burning. A systematic review in PubMed Central links e-waste exposure in children to reduced lung function, altered thyroid function, ADHD, and lower cognitive scores. None of that shows up on the product box when you buy it.

The Household Financial Picture

Households absorb the cost from two directions at once. They pay for new devices that replace working products, and they leave material value on the table when they discard what they own.

A reasonable estimate, using the per-capita value of unrecovered e-waste metals from the UN report and U.S. generation rates, puts the recoverable value sitting in the average American household’s old electronics in the range of several hundred dollars over a few years. That is metal the household paid for, embedded in devices the household paid for, and the household will not recover unless the device reaches a refiner that can extract it.

The cost on the other side — replacement spending — is easier to size at the industry level than the household level. The Consumer Technology Association puts U.S. consumer technology retail revenue at roughly $505 billion in 2024, which works out to nearly $3,900 per household when spread across the 131 million U.S. households tracked by the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. Even allowing for wide variation across income tiers, much of that spending replaces devices that were repairable or still functional.

Right to Repair Is Starting to Bite

The most consequential policy shift on e-waste in the past two years has been the spread of right-to-repair legislation. As of mid-2025, eight states have passed right-to-repair laws covering consumer electronics: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, Washington, and Massachusetts. Oregon’s law, which took effect January 1, 2025, became the first in the country to explicitly ban “parts pairing,” the practice of using software to disable replacement components installed by independent shops.

These laws do not immediately reduce e-waste, but they change the economics. When manufacturers must supply parts, tools, and documentation to independent repairers, the cost of fixing a phone or laptop drops. When repair is cheaper than replacement, more devices stay in service. The Repair Association tracks more than 40 active bills across at least 20 states in 2025.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for electronics covers 24 states, but there is substantial variation in how well-funded and enforced those programs are. A patchwork is still better than nothing, but the absence of a federal framework means a device thrown away in one state may be treated as toxic and a device thrown away in another may end up in a regular dumpster.

What You Can Do

The interventions here are tiered, with very different impacts depending on where you can act.

At home:

• Before replacing a device, check whether repair is feasible — battery swaps and screen replacements are the two most common smartphone failures and both are repairable.
• Sell or donate working electronics rather than storing them. The Earth911 recycling search tool provides local options by ZIP code.
• For batteries, including the lithium cells in earbuds, e-bikes, vapes, and power tools, use The Battery Network (formerly Call2Recycle), the North American battery stewardship program, which operates collection sites at most major retailers.
• For phones specifically, manufacturer trade-in programs (Apple, Samsung, Google) and carrier programs typically capture more material than dropping a phone in a generic recycling bin, because the devices are tested for reuse first.
• Buy refurbished when you can. Certified refurbished phones and laptops are typically 30 to 50 percent cheaper than new and have the same useful life.

In your community:

• If your state hasn’t passed a right-to-repair law, ask your legislators why. The model bill from the PIRG Right to Repair coalition is a good starting reference.
• Support EPR legislation that puts the cost of end-of-life management on manufacturers, not municipalities.
• Push back on devices that are designed against repair — glued-in batteries, paired parts, and service-only components — by buying brands that score well on iFixit’s repairability index.

Individual household action on e-waste matters, but it is not where the leverage lives. Changing product designs and recycling policy, both of which are moving slowly in the right direction, is the path to a more sustainable electronics industry. Your household choices buy time and recover value while the larger system catches up.

The post Electronics: The Fastest-Growing Waste Stream in Your Home appeared first on Earth911.

Revisit a classic episode of Sustainability In Your Ear. Mitch Ratcliffe talks with Jake Felser, chief technology officer at Freight Farms, about the company’s “complete farming system inside a box.” It’s a very big box that includes climate controls and monitoring systems to make farming easy for anyone to do. Freight Farms builds and delivers shipping containers converted into highly efficient hydroponic farms that use LED lighting to grow and deliver fresh produce year-round.

Jake discusses the cost of getting started, how many people are needed to run the farm, and how the built-in automation helps farmers plan a profitable business. Grocers, restaurants, communities, and small farms are using Freight Farms installations at 350 farms in 49 states and 32 countries. The company says most of its customers are new to agriculture and operate right in the urban and rural communities they serve.

Growing and distributing vegetables locally is one of the most effective ways to lower our society’s carbon footprint. While agriculture contributes about 10% of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year, the majority of that is from raising animals. By increasing our consumption of locally grown vegetables, we can improve local health and reduce overall emissions from transportation. It’s not easy to grow food in most cities using traditional methods. The introduction of container farms and vertical farming inside buildings can reshape food deserts and create economic opportunities.

To learn more, visit FreightFarms.com.

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This podcast originally aired in July 14, 2021.

The post Classic Sustainability In Your Ear: Freight Farms’ Jake Felser on Hydroponic Agriculture & Container Farming 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.

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.

If you took one long-haul flight each year for the past decade, the world would eventually pay about $25,000 for it. You won’t see this charge on your credit card, but the cost shows up somewhere—maybe as a hotter field with less rice, a stronger hurricane, or a factory forced to close on days that are too hot to work. This estimate comes from a Nature study published in March 2026 by researchers at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. They created a new way to link damage from specific emissions to certain places and years.

That $25,000 figure is based on the social cost of carbon, a dollar estimate of the harm caused by releasing one ton of carbon dioxide into the air. While it might seem abstract, it is one of the most important numbers in American policy. It helps decide if a fuel-economy rule is worth it and influences permits for pipelines and power plants. Over the last four presidential administrations, this number has been raised, lowered, removed, and brought back. What we think a ton of carbon costs today affects how much the country is willing to do about climate change in the future.

What Is the Social Cost of Carbon?

Think of the cost of carbon like a garbage bill, the metaphor the authors of the Nature study use. When you put trash on the curb, someone has to pick it up, haul it away, and store it somewhere. You pay for that service. Carbon dioxide works the same way, except no one sends an invoice—it’s more like using a credit card, the bill for which your children or great-grandchildren will eventually pay.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, quietly heating the planet, damaging crops, intensifying storms, and wearing down economies. Somebody, somewhere, eventually pays. The social cost of carbon is an attempt to figure out how much.

The number comes from combining climate science with economics. Researchers model how one extra ton of CO₂ affects global temperatures over the next century or two, then estimate how those temperature changes damage human health, farm yields, labor productivity, property, and economic growth. They add up the losses and express them in today’s dollars.

Two technical choices drive almost every disagreement about the final number:

• Global versus domestic damages. Should the United States count the damage that occurs in India, Brazil, or Bangladesh from American emissions? Carbon mixes in the atmosphere — a ton released in Ohio warms the planet the same as a ton released in Mumbai — so the economic case for global accounting is strong. The political case for domestic-only accounting is that the US government works for Americans.
• The discount rate. This is the trickiest piece. Economists “discount” future damages to express them in present-day dollars. A higher discount rate makes future harm look cheap today; a lower one makes it look expensive. Using a 7% discount rate, $1 trillion in climate damage in 2100 is worth only about $4 billion today. Using 3%, the same damage is worth about $86 billion. Same science, same damage, twenty times the present value.

That second choice, how much weight to give your grandchildren’s losses compared to your own savings, is where climate economics becomes a moral question.

A Short History of a Disputed Number

2008: A Court Forces the Issue

Federal agencies ignored carbon pricing for most of the modern regulatory era. That changed after the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Bush administration over weak fuel-economy standards for light trucks and SUVs. In 2008, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that assigning zero value to carbon emissions in cost-benefit analyses was “arbitrary and capricious.” The court stated: “the value of carbon emissions reduction is certainly not zero.”

That decision created a legal obligation. If federal agencies wanted to write rules that survived court review, they had to put a price on carbon. They just did not yet have one they could agree on.

2009–2016: The Obama Administration Sets the Framework

In 2009, President Obama convened an Interagency Working Group of federal economists and scientists. In 2010, the group published its first official estimate of the social cost of carbon: $21 per ton of CO₂.

In the following years, as climate models were updated, the estimate rose, reaching about $50 per ton (2020 dollars) by the end of the Obama years. This value was based on a 3% discount rate and global damages.

That framework, which involved interagency process and peer-reviewed models with global scope, was used in more than 65 federal rules and 81 subrules between 2008 and 2016. It shaped appliance efficiency standards, power plant emission limits, fuel-economy requirements, and rules governing methane leaks from oil and gas infrastructure. A higher social cost of carbon justified stricter rules. A lower one did not.

2017–2020: The First Trump Administration Rewrites the Math

Within months of taking office, President Trump signed Executive Order 13783, disbanding the Interagency Working Group and withdrawing its estimates. The Trump EPA recalculated the social cost of carbon by counting only US damages and raising the discount rate to 3%-7%. As a result, Obama’s $52 per ton estimate fell to between $1 and $7 per ton.

That lower number was, as Resources for the Future explained, “too low to make climate policies economically justifiable.” Rules that had provided a cost-benefit analysis supporting strict emissions rules under Obama suddenly no longer did so. The Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of Obama’s climate policy, was repealed partly on the grounds that the climate benefits recalculated with the lower number no longer exceeded the costs. According to Scientific American, the change in the social cost of carbon was “determinative” in at least half a dozen petroleum-sector rollbacks during the first Trump term. Simply, it gave emitters an easy out.

2021–2024: Biden Restores, Then Raises, The Price Sharply

Biden reinstated the working group and set an interim value of about $51 per ton, adjusted for inflation. Legal challenges from some states were dismissed.

In November 2023, EPA set a new central estimate for the social cost of carbon: $190 per ton for 2020 emissions, rising to $230 by 2030 and $308 by 2050. This increase drew on updated climate science, new economic models, a lower discount rate of 2%, and two decades of scientific progress clarifying warming’s impact on economic growth, climate-driven mortality, and previously understated risks.

Other governments took note. Canada adopted the updated EPA number in 2023. Germany adapted the underlying model for its own analyses in 2024.

2025: The Second Trump Administration Tries to Erase It

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” which disbanded the Interagency Working Group, withdrew its estimates, and directed EPA to consider eliminating the social cost of carbon from federal permitting and regulatory decisions entirely. The order called the metric “marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.”

In March 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency would “overhaul” the social cost of carbon. In May 2025, a follow-up executive memorandum directed federal agencies to stop factoring climate-related economic damage into their regulations and permitting decisions, except where statute requires it.

Where agencies are still legally obligated to put a number on it, the administration has settled on an interim estimate of as little as $1 per ton of CO₂, a return to the first Trump administration’s methodology, with domestic-only damages and higher discount rates. The companion social cost of methane dropped from $1,470 per ton to $58. In July 2025, the White House guidance went further, instructing agencies that any required analysis  should be limited to “the minimum consideration required to meet a statutory requirement” and, where possible, should not be monetized at all. The practical effect: $1 per ton on paper, $0 in most decisions.

The cycle is now in its third full reversal since 2008. Each time the number changes, so does the federal government’s willingness to regulate emissions.

What the New Research Adds

The new study in Nature does something the federal estimates have never done well: it separates past damage from future damage, and it assigns both to specific emitters. Their framework treats every ton of CO₂ as an asset that pays out negative returns; it’s a garbage bill that keeps accruing interest. Using that framework, they found three things that reshape the conversation.

A ton of CO₂ emitted in 1990 has already caused about $180 in global damages by 2020. That same ton will cause an additional $1,840 in damages between now and 2100 — 10 times more.  Using the authors’ conservative assumptions, which use a 2% discount rate with damages capped at 2100, the social cost of carbon for a ton emitted today is approximately $1,013. That is more than five times the Biden EPA’s $190 estimate, and higher estimates are possible under longer time horizons or lower discount rates.

Settling the bill for climate damage that has already happened would only cover a small fraction of the damage still to come from the same emissions. Past payments do not clear past debts.

Individuals and Corporations Run Up the Carbon Bill

The study also puts numbers on the kinds of choices that fill everyday life.

• One extra long-haul flight per year for a decade produces roughly $25,000 in future discounted damages by 2100.
• Switching from a meat-heavy to a vegetarian diet for a decade avoids about $6,000 in future damages.
• Installing and using a heat pump for a decade results in an additional $6,000 in avoided damage.
• Cutting driving by 10%, another $6,000 less future cost.

At the corporate scale, the numbers are staggering. Emissions from Saudi Aramco’s fossil fuel production between 1988 and 2015 are estimated to cause $64 trillion in cumulative discounted damages through 2100. ExxonMobil’s comparable share: $29 trillion. These are bigger than the annual GDP of most countries.

Today’s Cost, Tomorrow’s Reality

The social cost of carbon can feel like a number on a page in a regulatory document. It is not. It is a bridge between the world you are living in now and the world you will inherit.

When the federal government uses a low social cost of carbon, or no number at all, it writes rules that allow more emissions. More emissions mean a hotter atmosphere, which means stronger storms, longer fire seasons, lower crop yields, higher air conditioning bills, and more days when outdoor work becomes dangerous. Those consequences do not arrive as a lump sum in 2100.

They arrive gradually, starting now, and compounding in the form of flood and wildfire damage, biodiversity loss, and even defense spending to prevent immigration. The Nature researchers emphasize that their estimates are almost certainly too low because GDP damage functions do not capture losses of biodiversity, loss of cultural homelands, harm to mental health, or many slow-moving impacts such as sea level rise.

When the federal government uses a high social cost of carbon, it writes rules that prevent emissions. Those rules have costs today, sometimes real ones, paid by workers in fossil fuel industries, by consumers adjusting to new standards, by companies retooling their operations. The social cost of carbon does not eliminate those costs. It weighs them against costs that will otherwise fall on other people, in other places, at other times. That weighing is a choice about who counts.

The history traced here is, in that sense, a history of that choice, and none of those decisions are final. Courts have repeatedly ruled that federal agencies cannot treat the value of carbon-emissions reductions as zero. The 2008 ruling that gave rise to this framework is still on the books. Whatever the current administration does, the legal obligation to account for climate damages in cost-benefit analysis remains, and the science underpinning the newer, higher estimates continues to strengthen.

The post The Price Tag on a Ton of Carbon: What It Is, Why It Keeps Changing, and What It Means for Your Future appeared first on Earth911.

The average American household uses about 150 pounds of glass containers each year, but more than two-thirds of that glass never gets recycled into new bottles. This isn’t because people aren’t trying. Glass is now the only common packaging material that costs recycling facilities more to process than they make from selling it, and the U.S. recycling system has been adapting to this problem for the past twenty years.

According to the EPA, the U.S. has recycled about 31 percent of its glass containers for the past ten years. In contrast, the European Union collected 80.8 percent of its glass containers in 2023. This gap isn’t because of how people act, but because of differences in infrastructure, policies, and the fact that glass is heavy, breakable, and not very profitable. As a result, glass no longer fits well in the single-stream recycling system most Americans use.

The math that broke glass recycling

Cullet, which is the industry term for crushed and sorted recycled glass, is a permanent material. It can be melted and reused over and over without losing quality. Adding 10 percent more cullet to a furnace reduces energy use by 2.5 to 3 percent and lowers CO₂ emissions by about 5 percent. If a furnace uses only cullet, it produces about 58 percent fewer emissions than making glass from raw materials like sand, soda ash, and limestone.

These numbers show that glass should be valuable to bottle makers. However, manufacturers want cullet that is color-sorted, clean, and ready for the furnace, which is rarely what comes out of single-stream recycling facilities.

A 2017 analysis by the Closed Loop Foundation found that single-stream glass costs U.S. recycling facilities $150 million each year in equipment damage, transportation, and disposal. On average, a facility loses about $35 for every ton of glass it handles. For example, a transfer station in Washington, D.C. spends about tens of thousands of dollars a year replacing screen baskets damaged by glass shards. When trucks unload, glass shards also get stuck in paper and cardboard, making those materials less valuable.

This is known as the negative-value problem. The glass itself isn’t worthless, because high-quality cullet can be sold. But the way glass is collected usually produces a dirty, color-mixed load, so it often ends up being used as road base, landfill cover when ground into sand-like consistency and laid over the day’s waste, or just thrown away.

How we built a system that loses money

The current U.S. glass recycling shortfall is largely the story of two infrastructure decisions made decades apart.

The first decision was moving to single-stream collection in the 1990s and 2000s. This change increased overall recycling rates but mixed glass with other materials. As a result, glass often arrived at recycling facilities already broken, contaminating other recyclables and damaging equipment designed for paper and plastic.

The second decision was to close glass-only drop-off programs as city budgets tightened. Without dedicated collection routes, like the ones used in Italy, Belgium, and Germany to recycle 90 percent of glass containers, American glass no longer had a clean way to be collected.

The exception is the 10 states with container deposit laws. These states, known for their bottle bills, recycle about 70 percent of beverage containers, which is more than twice the national average of 33 percent. Oregon’s deposit system achieved an 87 percent redemption rate in 2024, the highest in the country. Glass returned through deposit programs is typically clean, sorted, and unbroken — exactly what manufacturers want.

What does glass costs your household?

Consumers end up paying for glass twice. First, the cost of the bottle is included in the price of products like wine, beer, sauce, or seltzer. Second, people pay municipal recycling fees through property taxes, garbage bills, or both. These fees cover the average $ 62-per-ton landfill tipping fee in 2024, plus the extra cost of glass contamination that affects other recyclables.

The exact dollar figure varies wildly by region. New York City’s Department of Sanitation has estimated curbside recycling collection at $686 per ton, a number that includes labor, fuel, and equipment that reaches beyond what households see on their utility bills, but shows up in tax rates.

In states with bottle bills, the economics are different for households. A 5- or 10-cent deposit can be fully recovered, and if the home doesn’t recycle, others can generate income picking it up.

Glass that would have cost the city money instead becomes a small refund for the household and a clean material for manufacturers. This system covers the cost directly through fees for using glass, rather than spreading it across all taxpayers.

Glass emissions matter

Glass furnaces use a lot of energy compared to other packaging processes. Making 1 ton of container glass produces between 0.5 and 1.6 tons of CO₂, depending on the furnace’s efficiency and the amount of cullet used. Each ton of cullet used instead of raw materials saves about 0.67 tons of CO₂ and 1.2 tons of mined sand, soda ash, and limestone. soda ash, and limestone.

If you apply these numbers to the 6 million tons of glass containers that were landfilled in the U.S. in 2018—the most recent year for which the EPA provides data—the country misses out on about 4 million tons of avoided CO₂ emissions each year, plus more than 7 million tons of raw materials that could have been saved. This is a climate cost that the recycling rate alone cannot capture.

The Glass Packaging Institute and Boston Consulting Group have created a plan to raise the U.S. glass recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030. It focuses on expanding deposit programs, building dedicated glass processing facilities, and moving away from single-stream collection where possible. Reaching this goal would nearly double the current recycling rate without requiring people to change what they drink or how often they recycle.

What’s changing, and what isn’t

Seven states, including California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, have passed extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws for packaging. These laws shift the cost of recycling from cities to the companies that sell the bottles. Oregon started enforcing its program in July 2025, and Colorado, Minnesota, and Maryland will phase in their programs by 2028.

EPR is the policy most likely to change the economics of glass recycling in the next decade. When producers pay recycling costs directly, they have to deal with contamination from single-stream recycling, not the recycling facility. This makes dedicated glass collection much more appealing. The European experience shows that this approach works, but it has not yet been tried on a large scale in the U.S.

What you can do

• Check if your state has a bottle bill. If it does, redeem your deposit for a clean recycling stream and a small refund. If not, look up your local recycling options using the Earth911 recycling search before putting glass in your curbside bin.
• If your area has glass-only drop-off sites, use them. Many cities offer free drop-off locations at transfer stations or grocery store parking lots. The glass collected from these sites is the type manufacturers prefer.
• Rinse your bottles instead of crushing them. Whole bottles are easier to sort than broken pieces. Take off metal lids and recycle them separately.
• Buy refillable bottles when possible. A refilled bottle does not use any cullet, raw materials, or the recycling system. Programs for returnable beer, milk, and water bottles are slowly becoming more common in the U.S.
• Support extended producer responsibility and bottle-bill laws in your state. Most glass that gets recycled in the U.S. today comes from the 10 states with deposit programs. Expanding these programs is the most effective policy change available.

The post Glass: Recycling’s Negative-Value Problem appeared first on Earth911.

From 1980 through 2024, the United States averaged 9 weather and climate disasters per year, each causing at least $1 billion in damage. Over the most recent five years, that average jumped to 23. The country is not facing the same weather it built its infrastructure to handle.

A new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, released May 19, 2026, argues that the way to absorb the coming climate shocks is to stop treating energy and water as separate research problems. The report was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy to guide a proposed Regional Energy–Water Technology Pilot program and makes the case that severe weather, aging infrastructure, electrification, and the explosive growth of data centers have pushed the two systems to a point where failures in one cascade into the other.

Coordinated research across the water and energy infrastructure, the researchers say, is essential for reliability.

How Severe Weather Couples Two Systems Into One Failure Mode

Energy depends on water, and water depends on energy. While this sounds simple, the report shows that the connection between them has become fragile in reality.

Power plants use water for cooling. Hydropower releases water to make electricity. Drinking water systems need electricity to pump, treat, and pressurize water. Wastewater plants also need electricity to prevent pollution in rivers and bays. If any of these links break under stress, the problem spreads to the other systems.

The committee points to Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 as a key example. When ERCOT’s grid failed in Texas, it did more than leave millions without power. It also shut down water treatment and distribution, resulting in boil-water notices for millions of Texans, and left some communities without safe water for days. The report says events like this are likely to happen more often.

The mechanisms behind that expectation are documented across the rest of the report:

• Thermal power vulnerability. From 2000 through 2015, 43 U.S. power plants reported shutdowns due to high water temperatures, most occurring during summer heat waves, drought, or both. Nuclear plants accounted for 25 of those shutdowns.
• Future capacity losses. Modeling cited in the report projects that future water availability and rising temperatures will decrease U.S. national thermoelectric power capacity by an average of 2.5 percent, with individual plant impacts ranging from a 31 percent decrease to a 6 percent increase, depending on location.
• Saltwater intrusion. In South Florida, sea-level rise combined with groundwater pumping is pushing saltwater into freshwater aquifers, forcing the use of energy-intensive reverse osmosis to produce drinking water. The climate impact becomes a permanent energy cost.
• Wildfire feedback loops. Wind-driven contact between vegetation and overhead power lines sparks wildfires. Utilities respond with public safety power shutoffs. The shutoffs strain water systems that need electricity to maintain pressure. Firefighting depletes reservoirs. After the fire, runoff carrying combustion byproducts and damaged pipe materials degrades water quality for months.
• Compound drought and heat. Drought and extreme heat now co-occur more often, simultaneously raising electricity demand for cooling and reducing water available for thermoelectric generation and hydropower. Each stress amplifies the other.

What the Report Recommends

The committee’s main recommendation is for the Department of Energy to create a group of regional pilot projects. Instead of single demonstrations, these would be coordinated investments to test how integrated energy–water solutions work in different parts of the country. For example, drought in the Southwest is very different from flooding in the Gulf Coast or grid failures during cold weather in the Plains.

Two recommendations focus on preparing for severe weather. Recommendation 2-3 says pilot projects should clearly consider the effects of possible extreme events. Recommendation 2-5 goes further by asking DOE to make proactive risk management at the energy–water intersection a main goal of the program. This includes investing in risk assessment, scenario planning, and early warning tools.

The committee is clear about what is at risk. Without careful scenario planning and investment in coordinated solutions, the report says that cascading failures will increasingly threaten economic stability, public health, environmental protection, and national security.

Why This Recommendation Is Vulnerable Right Now

The proposed pilot program falls under DOE’s Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office, which was renamed from the Water Power Technologies Office in early 2026 and reorganized into the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. The office’s framing under the current administration emphasizes affordability, reliability, and energy dominance rather than climate adaptation.

This approach brings both an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is that an energy–water pilot program can be supported for its reliability and economic benefits, without needing to rely on climate-change arguments to gain political support. The risk is that the climate-related research priorities identified by the National Academies committee could be left out of the program if no one outside DOE advocates for them.

The NOAA billion-dollar disasters database, which provided key evidence for the report, was discontinued in May 2025. Climate Central now manages the dataset, but losing the federal version shows how fragile the data infrastructure has become.

It is difficult for research recommendations to carry their full weight when the supporting evidence is being defunded.

What You Can Do

Right now, public pressure on Congress and industry trade groups can influence whether the pilot program is funded, designed effectively, and focused on the climate-related risks described in the report. Here are some concrete actions, listed from most to least impactful:

Contact Your Members of Congress

• Find your representatives. Use house.gov to find your House member by ZIP code, and senate.gov for your two senators.
• Request three specific actions: full funding for the DOE Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office’s regional energy–water pilot program in the next fiscal year; clear language in the appropriations report that directs the program to include the National Academies report’s Recommendations 2-3 and 2-5 on extreme-event risk; and restoration of federal funding for the NOAA billion-dollar disaster tracking and the climate and infrastructure data programs that researchers, utilities, and insurers rely on.
• Make your message local. Members of Congress pay more attention to issues that affect their constituents directly. Mention the energy and water utilities in your area, recent disasters your region has faced, and the local economic impacts. A letter specific to your district is more effective than a general petition.
• Target the relevant Congressional committees. If your member sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, or either chamber’s Appropriations Committee Energy and Water Development subcommittee, your contact carries extra weight.

Engage Industry Where It Already Has Standing

The report often points out that professional associations are some of the most trusted ways to move energy–water research from policy into real-world practice. Members of these groups can advocate for change from within.

• If you work in or with a water utility, ask whether your utility is engaging with the American Water Works Association’s Water 2050 initiative and its sustainability and resilience strategic priority. Urge utility leadership to file public comment in support of the DOE pilot program through AWWA’s federal advocacy channels.
• If you work in or with an electric utility, groups like the Edison Electric Institute, American Public Power Association, and National Rural Electric Cooperative Association all have federal advocacy programs. Supporting coordinated energy–water research matches their members’ interests in reliability and stable rates, especially as data centers increase demand.
• If you are a utility customer, remember that public utility commissions and city councils decide water and electric rates and approve investments in resilience. Speaking up at resource planning hearings is one of the few times residents can directly influence how utilities prepare for severe weather. Support the Research and Data Infrastructure
• Defend the data. Climate Central’s takeover of the billion-dollar disasters database is useful but does not substitute for the federal data infrastructure that utilities, insurers, and grid operators depend on. Write to your representatives in support of restoring NOAA’s climate and weather data programs in the next appropriations cycle.
• Use and reference the report. The National Academies report is free to download. If you work in planning, journalism, policy, or research, its approach to viewing energy-sheds alongside watersheds offers a helpful perspective that can influence local decisions.
• Pay attention to your state’s utility regulators. State public utility commissions are now key places where decisions about resilience investments for extreme events are made. Their meetings are open to the public, their decisions depend on public comments, and they often do not get the attention they deserve considering the money they manage.

The National Academies committee chose its words carefully when talking about climate change. While the word climate appears often, the report focuses on risk, extreme events, changing conditions, and resilience in uncertain times. No matter what language is used in future funding debates, the facts remain: heat waves and droughts are happening more often and together, hurricanes are getting stronger faster, wildfires are starting earlier and burning larger, and the country’s energy and water infrastructure was built for a climate that is now gone.

The report is valuable because it goes beyond just describing the problem. It offers a specific federal solution: a regional pilot program at DOE that can help close the gap. Whether this program is created as the committee intended will partly depend on how many people push for it.

The post Energy and Water Need to Be Researched Together: Contact Your Representatives appeared first on Earth911.

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

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zachary Lauer  4:54

Doing great.

Amy Fernandez  4:55

Great, great. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:57

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

Zachary Lauer  5:16

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:09

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

Zachary Lauer  6:30

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:17

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

Zachary Lauer  7:36

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

Amy Fernandez  8:10

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:31

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

Amy Fernandez  8:58

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:51

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

Amy Fernandez  9:56

Yes.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:58

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

Amy Fernandez  10:19

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:39

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

Amy Fernandez  11:49

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

Zachary Lauer  12:22

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:29

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

Zachary Lauer  12:40

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

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

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

Amy Fernandez  14:14

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:35

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

Zachary Lauer  14:57

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:51

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

Zachary Lauer  16:20

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:55

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

Zachary Lauer  18:23

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:34

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

Zachary Lauer  20:02

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

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

Amy Fernandez  21:09

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

Zachary Lauer  21:30

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:36

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

Zachary Lauer  22:43

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:59

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

Amy Fernandez  23:17

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

Zachary Lauer  24:04

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:25

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

Zachary Lauer  24:36

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

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

Amy Fernandez  25:27

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:35

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

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

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

Amy Fernandez  26:30

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:23

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

Amy Fernandez  27:42

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:43

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

Amy Fernandez  29:25

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:28

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

Zachary Lauer  30:39

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:41

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

Zachary Lauer  32:05

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:35

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

Zachary Lauer  33:50

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

Amy Fernandez  34:22

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:04

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

Amy Fernandez  35:08

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:22

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

Zachary Lauer  35:42

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:33

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

Amy Fernandez  36:49

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:18

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

Zachary Lauer  37:18

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:25

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

Amy Fernandez  38:49

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

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:15

It could go longer.

Amy Fernandez  40:16

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

Zachary Lauer  40:28

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:39

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

Amy Fernandez  41:17

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

Zachary Lauer  41:20

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:49

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

Zachary Lauer  42:04

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

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:08

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

Zachary Lauer  43:19

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  43:50

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

Amy Fernandez  43:57

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

Zachary Lauer  44:10

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

Amy Fernandez  44:36

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

Mitch Ratcliffe  44:41

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

Amy Fernandez  44:50

Thank you, Mitch. It’s our pleasure.

Zachary Lauer  44:52

Thank you.

Mitch Ratcliffe  44:53

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In parts of coastal North Carolina and Texas, homeowners who were paying one rate for property insurance in 2019 are now paying double, and that’s after adjusting for inflation.

A February 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the most thorough federal analysis of homeowners insurance markets in years, confirms what many Americans in hurricane, wildfire, and tornado-prone areas already know: the cost and availability of home insurance now depends on climate risk. Nationally, premiums only slightly outpaced inflation from 2019 to 2024. But in high-risk areas, homeowners are seeing price jumps that are changing where people can afford to live, own property, and even stay insured.

The National Average Hides the Real Story

At first glance, the national data seems manageable. The GAO found that the average U.S. homeowners’ insurance premium, adjusted for inflation, rose only 3 percent between 2019 and 2024, going from $2,743 to $2,829 in 2024 dollars. The South reported higher premiums than other regions, but the national average stayed mostly steady.

But when you look at the data by ZIP Code, the story changes. In the same period, many coastal areas in North Carolina and Texas saw premium increases of more than 50 percent after adjusting for inflation. Some places in Palm Beach County, South Florida, also had big jumps. At least 10 ZIP Codes in North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Florida, and California saw increases over 25 percent above inflation in just the last five years.

Wind Costs Far More Than Wildfire — For Now

The GAO used statistical modeling to show how disaster risks raise premiums, and the results are clear. Homes in areas with severe or extreme wind risk pay about 58 percent more, or $1,294 extra per year, compared to similar homes with only major wind risk. Moving from major to severe wildfire risk adds about 8 percent, or $181 per year, to premiums.

This difference shows how much damage wind events like hurricanes can cause. According to GAO data, ZIP Codes with severe or extreme wind or wildfire risk saw premiums rise 6 to 10 percent each year since 2021. In comparison, areas with major risk saw increases of only 1 to 4 percent per year. Over six years, an 8 percent annual increase adds up to a total increase of 59 percent.

State-level disaster costs also play a role. The GAO found that when a state’s average disaster-related costs rose from $25 billion to $35 billion between 2018 and 2023, premiums went up by about 8 percent, or $170 more per year. This happens because insurers update their loss estimates after big disasters. One insurer told the GAO it raised its wildfire risk assumptions for California after the major fire seasons in 2017 and 2018, even before the devastating 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.

Affordability Is Worst Where Income Is Already Stretched

Premium burden, which is the cost of insurance compared to median household income, highlights how climate change is hitting low-income communities hardest. In 2023, Florida, Louisiana, and Oklahoma had the highest premiums relative to income, just as they did in 2019. According to the GAO, states where premiums take up more than 10.6 percent of median income are considered to have a “very high” burden. Florida falls into this category.

The people paying the most for insurance are often those who have the fewest options to move or insure themselves. High insurance costs in risky areas often go hand in hand with lower incomes, older homes, and less access to federal help. Researchers call this a climate-driven affordability crisis.

When Private Insurance Disappears

Rising premiums are just one issue. In some high-risk areas, private insurers are not only raising prices but also leaving the market. The GAO tracked the market share of state FAIR plans and beach plans, which are the “insurers of last resort” for homes that can’t get regular insurance, from 2019 to 2023. Nationally, their combined market share almost doubled, going from about 1.4 percent to 2.5 percent of homes.

California’s numbers tell the story. The state’s FAIR Plan, which covers wildfire risk, grew from about 200,000 residential policies in 2020 to around 450,000 by 2024. About 78 percent of this growth happened in ZIP Codes with major or severe wildfire risk. After the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, enrollment jumped another 43 percent between September 2024 and December 2025, according to Insurance Journal. Even low-risk urban properties are ending up on the FAIR plan as insurers withdraw from whole regions.

Florida and Louisiana have the highest FAIR plan market share among states with these programs. North Carolina’s beach plan, which covers coastal areas, leads all beach plans by market share. All three states face high Atlantic hurricane risk.

Regulation Is Part of the Problem Too

Insurance policies are regulated by each state, and the GAO found that how long it takes to approve premium increases affects policy availability. States where regulators take longer to approve these requests often have more homeowners who can’t get private insurance. The GAO found that every extra 60 days in approval time was linked to about a 0.5 percentage point increase in the state’s FAIR plan market share.

Colorado’s median approval time from 2020 to 2024 was 331 days, the longest in the country. California’s was 305 days. When insurers can’t adjust rates quickly enough to reflect actual risk, some of them exit the market rather than underwrite policies at a loss. This is the dynamic that partly drove the California insurance exodus before the state’s Sustainable Insurance Strategy reforms announced in 2023, which allowed catastrophe modeling and reinsurance costs to be factored into rate-setting, practices already standard in most other states.

Insurers Are Losing Money — Just Not How You Think

Insurers lost money on homeowners insurance underwriting in 22 out of 30 years from 1995 to 2024, with an average annual loss of 4.2 percent. The worst years matched up with major disasters like Hurricanes Fran (1996), Sandy (2012), Harvey, Irma, Maria (2017), and the Maui wildfires (2023).

However, insurers offset underwriting losses with investment income, so the situation isn’t as bad as it seems—they are still highly profitable. In 2024, homeowners insurance had a $1.8 billion underwriting loss, but $8.8 billion in investment income turned it into a $6.9 billion profit overall. The industry is still profitable, even as rates rise and coverage becomes harder to obtain. Insurers say risk-based pricing is needed for long-term stability, but critics believe profitable insurers could do more to keep coverage available in high-risk areas.

Allianz SE board member Günther Thallinger told Capital&Main.com that climate change is a “systemic risk that threatens the very foundation of the financial sector,” and added that “a house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged.” The insurance crisis is a credit crisis in slow motion.

What States and the Federal Government Can Do

The GAO asked state regulators, insurance industry groups, and consumer advocates about eight possible federal policy options. Most agreed that the best approach is to focus on mitigation programs that help homeowners make their properties more disaster-resistant.

The GAO recommends Alabama’s Strengthen Alabama Homes program as a model. Since 2011, it has given grants to about 10,000 homeowners to upgrade their roofs to FORTIFIED standards, and another 45,000 have upgraded without grants. Alabama requires insurers to give premium discounts for FORTIFIED homes, making the upgrades a good investment. A 2025 study found that FORTIFIED roofs had fewer and less severe losses after Hurricane Sally, even with higher wind speeds. The National Institute of Building Sciences found benefit-cost ratios from 1.5 to 28, depending on wind speed.

As of now, at least 18 states have introduced bills in 2026 to reform insurance programs and include mitigation measures. These efforts build on a 2025 Colorado law (HB25-1182) that requires insurers to be open about their risk models and to discount premiums for homeowners who take mitigation steps.

The GAO listed eight federal policy options that Congress could consider, and your opinion matters. These options include tax deductions or credits for mitigation upgrades and insurance premiums, federal funding for infrastructure, a federal reinsurance program, community-based disaster insurance, and changes to how insurers’ reserves are taxed.

You can contact your U.S. senators and representative to share your views on where federal money should go. Mitigation incentives have wide support and are the most practical short-term step. Direct federal insurance programs are more debated, but if you think the private market has failed in your area, make that clear. The House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee are the main places for these discussions. You can find your members at congress.gov.

What You Can Do Now

• Check your disaster risk. First Street Technology’s Risk Factor tool gives property-level wildfire, flood, and wind risk scores. This is the same data source the GAO used.
• Look into the FORTIFIED standards. The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) certifies FORTIFIED construction for roofs, homes, and commercial buildings. Some states offer grants or require insurers to give discounts for certified homes.
• Learn about your state’s FAIR plan. If you can’t find private coverage, your state might have a FAIR plan or beach plan as a last resort. These plans usually offer less coverage and cost more than private insurance, but they provide insurance when no other options exist.
• Review your current insurance coverage. Many homeowners don’t realize they are underinsured. Check your dwelling coverage limit and compare it to current replacement costs, which have gone up a lot since 2020 due to construction inflation.
• Get involved with your state legislature. Insurance reform is happening in many states right now. Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Hawaii are working on bills that link insurance to mitigation in 2026. You can find your state insurance commissioner at naic.org.
• Support federal funding for mitigation. FEMA runs several pre-disaster mitigation grant programs. Community investments in things like firebreaks, levees, and better building codes help lower the basic risk that affects everyone’s insurance premiums.

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