Earth911 inspirations. Print them, post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day.
Today’s quote is from primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall: “The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
This poster was originally published on May 17, 2019.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: The Greatest Danger to Our Future Is Apathy appeared first on Earth911.
Americans throw out 81.5 pounds of clothing a year; two-thirds of it ends up in landfills. That’s no accident—it’s a fast fashion design principle that many have embraced.
A December 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that textile waste grew by more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2018, while federal agencies still lack a coordinated strategy. As a result, consumers seeking sustainable options carry the burden of finding responsible brands.
Look good and reduce your footprint—you don’t have to choose. The brands below carry recognized certifications, use lower-impact materials, and often sell via Amazon. We’ve updated this list since 2021 to reflect brands still delivering and those raising the bar.
Throughout this list, you’ll see references to GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), Fair Trade Certified, and SA8000. GOTS covers the entire supply chain from farm to finished garment, requiring organic fibers and strict environmental and social standards. Fair Trade and SA8000 focus on worker wages, safety, and conditions. These aren’t marketing claims, they require third-party audits.
This article contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This supports our independent work but does not influence our recommendations or coverage.
Pact offers women a strong foundation for building a sustainable wardrobe. Each garment is crafted from GOTS-certified organic cotton in Fair Trade Certified factories, with certifications updated as recently as 2025. The brand partners with SimpliZero to measure and offset the carbon footprint of individual products, investing in reforestation and renewable energy.
Their organic cotton process uses 81% less water and 62% less energy than conventional cotton farming, a meaningful difference given that a single conventional cotton T-shirt typically requires around 2,700 liters of water to produce.
Standout Pact picks on Amazon:
Seattle-based Girlfriend Collective leads in sustainable activewear. Its fabrics are made from post-consumer plastic bottles, fishing nets, and fabric scraps. They are OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified and BPA-free, making them safer if they end up in a landfill. The brand uses eco-friendly dyes and provides washing bags with each purchase to help reduce microfiber pollution.
On the labor side, Girlfriend Collective holds SA8000 certification, which independently verifies safe working conditions and fair wages. They also run ReGirlfriend, a take-back and recycling program that gives you store credit for returning worn-out pieces. That circular loop — buy, wear, return, recycle — is still rare in activewear.
The brand carries sizes XXS to 6XL and has an Amazon storefront with frequently updated inventory.
Standout picks:
If any brand embodies “timeless,” it’s Eileen Fisher. Since 2013, the company has championed circularity through its Renew take-back program—one of the longest-running garment recycling efforts in American fashion. Send back your worn Eileen Fisher pieces, and they’re cleaned, repaired, and resold or upcycled into new textiles.
As of 2025, 75% of Eileen Fisher’s products use lower-emissions or certified materials, including organic linen, organic cotton, regenerative wool, TENCEL lyocell, and deadstock fabric. The brand holds certifications from GOTS, GRS (Global Recycled Standard), RWS (Responsible Wool Standard), Bluesign, and FSC. It’s also a certified B Corp with published emissions targets.
Eileen Fisher acknowledges it is not currently on track to hit its science-based emissions reduction targets. That’s a candid admission that distinguishes genuine transparency from greenwashing. Their organic linen and TENCEL pieces are particularly durable and environmentally benign: linen requires no irrigation in most growing conditions and generates roughly a quarter of the carbon emissions per pound of fiber as conventional cotton.
Eileen Fisher sells direct at eileenfisher.com with free shipping on U.S. orders.
Los Angeles-based Reformation publishes quarterly sustainability reports that break down water, energy, and carbon footprint per product — a level of granularity that almost no other fashion brand offers. Their key fabrics include TENCEL™ Lyocell, produced in a closed-loop system that recycles 99% of its non-toxic solvent, low-irrigation linen, and Forest Stewardship Council-certified viscose.
In late 2024, Reformation launched its first 100% recycled cashmere sweater line — a blend of 95% recycled cashmere and 5% recycled wool. The brand reports these sweaters produce 96% less carbon and require 89% less water than conventional cashmere. That’s a significant claim, and the brand backs it with third-party verification.
Reformation also partners with ThredUp and Poshmark so you can resell verified purchases directly through those platforms. It also offers a take-back program for Ref sweaters, shoes, denim, and outerwear.
Reformation sells direct at thereformation.com.
Amour Vert (“green love” in French) produces 97% of its garments in California, collaborating with mills to create signature sustainable fabrics such as beechwood modal, GOTS-certified cotton, OEKO-TEX silk, TENCEL, and cupro from cotton waste. The brand recycles nearly all byproducts at its factories.
For every T-shirt purchased, Amour Vert plants a tree in North America through its partnership with American Forests, and has planted more than 220,000 trees to date. Products are made in small batches to limit overproduction, and the brand offers an upcycled clothing collection that transforms discarded materials into new pieces.
Key pieces for the Spring and Summer of 2026 include:
A traditional pair of jeans takes roughly 1,500 gallons of water to produce. Warp + Weft, a family-owned brand, produces jeans using less than 10 gallons of water. By operating a vertically integrated denim mill, Warp + Weft controls every step: utilizing onsite solar panels, a heat recovery system, recycling and treating 98% of water used, and employing dry ozone technology instead of chemical bleaching.
The brand is fully size-inclusive (through 3X for women), and prices stay under $100. Their compliance with International Social and Environmental & Quality Standards is auditable, not self-reported. Warp + Weft has expanded from denim into matching sets, tops, and jackets, making it easier to build a full outfit around their sustainable denim base.
Shop at warpweftworld.com and Amazon.
Karen Kane stands out for its transparent, energy-efficient operations, including LA-based manufacturing, hangar reuse, and sustainable fabric initiatives. The Asymmetric Hem Wrap Top, a signature design, is crafted from 100% TENCEL soft chambray made with FSC-certified wood pulp. This closed-loop process recaptures and reuses solvents, greatly reducing chemical waste compared to traditional rayon methods.
Karen Kane offers a broader range of wardrobe essentials beyond the wrap top, and its women’s collection is available on itssite and select Amazon listings.
Mango is a larger brand, which warrants more scrutiny, but it can also make a positive impact through its environmental commitments. The brand publicly committed to using 100% organic cotton and 50% recycled polyester by 2025, and 100% cellulose fibers with verified sustainable origins by 2030. Their organic cotton pieces, including several denim options, are genuinely certified organic, meaning no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers are used in cultivation.
Mango describes its sustainability journey as ongoing, and it is. Organic cotton still requires significant water input, and a large global retailer faces supply chain complexity that smaller brands avoid. Good On You rates the brand as making progress but “Not Good Enough.” That said, Mango’s organic denim line is worth considering for shoppers who want accessible price points alongside high-quality materials. Organic Mango pieces are available through mango.com.
Individual purchasing choices alone won’t fix a 17-million-ton textile waste problem. But they shape markets, and markets respond. Here’s how to shop with more impact:
The post 8 Sustainable Women’s Fashion Brands for Spring & Summer 2026 appeared first on Earth911.
Turn back the clock to hear an early warning from James Renwick, co-author of the upcoming 2021 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) report and head of the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, joins Earth911 to discuss the prospects for coastal flooding due to climate change. He shares troubling but important insights into how much seas have already risen since the 1800s — about one foot — and the potential for up to two feet more flooding in the coming century. He also reports the UNIPCC will acknowledge that the critical 1.5C warming threshold is locked in unless the world takes radical action to reduce emissions immediately. Humanity has already committed future generations to potentially disastrous climate impacts, he says.
Renwick explains how much water is stored in Antarctica and the projections for economic and housing losses along the U.S. East Coast, which is particularly prone to flooding because of the configuration of ocean currents. He also discusses the growing accuracy of climate models and how accelerated warming seen in recent years appears poised to continue speeding ice loss at the poles. But, Renwick argues, the international climate dialogue has shifted from resistance to acknowledgment of climate impacts and growing national and local action, which gives him hope. “Things are moving in the right direction,” he told Earth911’s Mitch Ratcliffe. “But we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
The upcoming COP26 meeting of global leaders, which was postponed to the fall of 2021 due to the pandemic, will feature many nations’ increased commitments to reduce emissions. In the meantime, he urges individual citizens to speak out and choose sustainably produced products, as well as support effective local remediation projects, such as tree-planting programs. Each of us can make a difference. Start your journey with this conversation with Professor James Renwick.
Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on January 1, 2021.
The post Classic Sustainability In Your Ear: Coastal Flooding in 2050 With Climate Scientist James Renwick appeared first on Earth911.
Out of 52 climate targets needed to reach net zero by 2050, only six are on track or have been met. The other 46 are behind, failing, or marked as Code Red. This is according to the Speed & Scale tracker, a detailed public scorecard that measures if the global economy is cutting emissions fast enough.
The tracker is part of an initiative started in 2021 by investor John Doerr, known for backing Google and Amazon early on. He used Silicon Valley’s Objectives and Key Results method to tackle the climate crisis. The 2026 edition comes with a new letter from Doerr called “Let’s Build, Friends, Build,” a call to focus on the need to build solutions. As he puts it, pledges alone won’t cool the planet—real progress comes from cutting emissions.
Speed & Scale breaks down decarbonization into 10 main goals, such as electrifying transportation and investing in clean energy. Each goal has measurable key results with targets for 2035 and 2050. Progress is rated on a five-level scale, from Achieved to Code Red. Code Red is the worst rating and is given to areas with over 3 gigatons of yearly emissions and little or no progress.
The 2026 update now uses Climate TRACE, a satellite and AI system, instead of UN country reports to measure emissions. This change raised the baseline from 59 gigatons in 2019 to 74 gigatons in 2024. The increase is not due to a sudden jump in emissions, but because TRACE finds fossil-fuel activity that country reports often miss. Atmospheric CO₂ is now at 429 parts per million, which is about 53 percent higher than before the industrial era.
The key results that are on track have one thing in common: clean technology has become the cheaper choice. Electric vehicles show this best. There were about one million EVs on the road ten years ago, but now there are over 50 million. EVs make up more than 20 percent of new car sales worldwide and over half in China. In the first nine months of 2025, enough solar and wind power was built to stop the growth of fossil fuels in electricity. According to BloombergNEF, solar costs have fallen by 84 percent since 2010.
There are now three million more clean-energy jobs than fossil-fuel jobs worldwide, according tothe International Energy Agency. For the 249 Fortune Global 500 companies that report their direct emissions (Scope 1 and 2), those emissions have dropped by 23 percent since 2019. However, Scope 3 emissions, which include supply chain and product use, make up about 95 percent of their total and are not decreasing as quickly.
Methane emissions from oil and gas operations are still going up, even though the IEA says 75 percent could be cut using current technology, often at a net savings. Methane is about 80 times more powerful than CO₂ over 20 years, making it the most cost-effective way to cut emissions, yet progress is going in the wrong direction.
BuildingMost building heating and cooling still relies on fossil fuels, even as a million new buildings are added each month. Heavy industry is also behind: there are no commercial-scale zero-carbon steel plants and only one net-zero cement facility in the world. The tracker says we need 700 steel and 300 cement plants by 2035. Industrial agriculture and livestock are also rated Code Red. Carbon removal is far behind too—by 2025, just over one million metric tons have been removed, according to CDR.fyi, but the plan calls for 14 billion tons per year by 2050.
Where Each Objective Stands
| Goal | On Track | Not On Track |
| Electrify Transportation | Cars | Planes and ships failing |
| Decarbonize the Grid | Solar & wind | Methane and buildings Code Red |
| Fix Food | None on track | Farming and meat Code Red |
| Protect Nature | Gradual | 18 soccer fields of tropical forest lost per minute in 2024 |
| Clean Up Industry | Pilots only | Steel, cement, plastics all Code Red or failing |
| Remove Carbon | Afforestation | Scale roughly 10,000x short |
| Politics & Policy | EU NDC aligned | U.S. has no national commitment; carbon pricing failing |
| Movements → Action | Clean-energy jobs achieved | Voter salience, air quality, education lagging |
| Innovate | Electricity and EV costs | Industrial heat, steel, cement, hydrogen all failing |
| Invest | None on track | Fossil-fuel subsidies still exceed clean-energy incentives |
In his new letter, Doerr says the climate challenge is now shaped by three main forces: rising demand for electricity, the global politics of clean-tech manufacturing, and falling costs thanks to market forces. He writes, “We cannot cut fossil fuels without building the alternative.” The updated tracker shows this change. While the 2021 plan focused on percentage reductions, the 2026 version spells out what needs to be built: 600 million EVs, 700 zero-carbon steel mills, and 30,000 TWh of solar and wind power.
Doerr also shares the toughest update: Speed & Scale now says keeping global warming to 1.5°C is no longer possible. Five more years of rising emissions have used up the remaining carbon budget. The new goal is to stay below 2°C, with the U.S., EU, and China aiming for net zero by 2050.
The post The World Has a Decarbonization Scoreboard. Here’s What It Says. appeared first on Earth911.
Today’s inspiration and photo come from Earth911’s Mitch Ratcliffe: “The first step to sustainability is seeing that there is no boundary between you and nature.” This early morning shot of Waughop Lake in Western Washington caught ground fog between a cloudy sky and a perfect reflection in the water below. There is no difference between us and nature, except for the artificial ones we create by imagining boundaries. When we see this essential connection and reverse the artificial disconnections created over millennia, people can imagine a future where we all thrive with a regenerated ecosystem.
Post and share Earth911 posters to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.
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The built environment, particularly office buildings other urban facilities, are responsible for 39% of the global energy-related emissions, according to the World Green Building Council. About a third of that impact comes from the initial construction of a building and the other two-thirds is produced over the lifetime of a building by heating, cooling, and providing power to the occupants. Our guest today is leading a key battle to reduce the impact of the built environment. Tune in for a wide-ranging conversation with Rob Bernard, Chief Sustainability Officer at CBRE Group Inc., which manages more than $145 billion of commercial buildings, providing logistics, retail, and corporate office services across more than than 100 countries.
Rob cut his sustainability teeth at Microsoft, as its Chief Environmental Strategist for 11 years, as the company was developing its world-leading approach and collaborating with other tech giants to lobby for policy and funding to accelerate progress. He discusses CBRE’s Sustainability Solutions & Services for commercial building owners, as well as the accelerating progress for renewables, carbon tracking, and economic, health, and lifestyle benefits of living lightly on the planet. You can learn more about CBRE and its sustainability services at cbre.com
Take a few minutes to learn more about making construction and building operations more sustainable:
Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on April 15, 2024.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Making Billions of Square Feet of Commercial Space Sustainable with CBRE’s Rob Bernard appeared first on Earth911.
More than 25,000 square miles of the U.S. Great Basin, an area nearly twelve times the size of Yellowstone, has flipped from native sagebrush to invasive annual grassland over the past three decades, much of it without ever burning. The change is amplifying the Western fire season. Researchers using satellite data found that fire is no longer required to convert these landscapes; once the grasses arrive, the fire follows.
Grasses occupy a unique position in our climate. They are everywhere — pastures, lawns, prairies, savannas, roadsides — and they are easy to overlook precisely because they are so familiar. However, the world’s grasses are responding to warmer temperatures, shifting precipitation, and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide in ways that are reshaping ecosystems and fire regimes from the Mojave Desert to the slopes above the fire-scorched community of Lahaina in Hawaii.
The story of climate change and grass is, increasingly, a story about what burns, when, and how often.
Wildfire science has long focused on forests, but the dominant fuel type driving change in the American West today is not timber. It is grass, particularly fine, dry, non-native annual grass that cures by early summer and carries flame between shrubs that would otherwise be too widely spaced to burn together.
Cheatgrass greens up earlier than native bunchgrasses, drawing down soil moisture and nutrients before native species start to grow. It then dies in early summer, leaving a continuous, dry, highly ignitable mat across landscapes that historically had patchy fuels and infrequent fires. The Bureau of Land Management found that areas invaded by cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) are roughly twice as likely to burn as uninvaded land, and that cheatgrass now dominates or is a meaningful component of vegetation on roughly 52 million acres of the Intermountain West, up from roughly 31.5 million acres mapped in 2000 using satellite imagery.
A 2013 study, later supported by broader analyses, found that fire return intervals are now two to four times more frequent in cheatgrass-dominated landscapes than in intact sagebrush steppe. In 2019, ecologist Emily Fusco and her colleagues published the first national-scale analysis of the problem in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They looked 12 invasive grass species across 29 U.S. ecoregions, and found that eight significantly increased fire occurrence by up to 230 percent, and six increased fire frequency by up to 150 percent.
“This work shows that invasive species are one of the ‘big three’ ways that people are changing fire regimes,” senior author Bethany Bradley told reporters when the study was published. “Climate change more than doubles the likelihood of fire, human ignitions triple the fire season, and now we can add invasive species fueling fires.”
Grasses are unusually responsive to climate change. Three variables — temperature, the timing and form of precipitation, and atmospheric CO₂ — interact in ways that often favor invasive annuals over the perennial natives they displace.
A decade-long warming experiment published in Frontiers in Plant Science by the U.S. Geological Survey tracked cheatgrass through three climate manipulations on the Colorado Plateau. Plots warmed by 4°C above ambient temperatures saw the vegetative growing season shorten by about 12 days; at 2°C, by about 7 days. Cheatgrass compressed its life cycle, finishing seed production and dying earlier in the summer. That sounds like bad news for cheatgrass, until you remember that an earlier, drier death means earlier, drier fuel, set down before the peak of the fire season.
Cheatgrass has another advantage native species lack: phenotypic plasticity. The Frontiers researchers concluded that the plant’s “phenotypic plasticity … may make the plant particularly adept at dealing with extreme interannual climate variation,” allowing it to respond to shifting climate cues that native bunchgrasses cannot. When native grasses fail to keep up with earlier springs and longer dry seasons, cheatgrass moves into the gap, adding fuel for fires.
Precipitation patterns matter as much as temperature. A long-term study in Global Change Biology of more than 10,000 wildfires across the Great Basin between 1980 and 2014 found that area burned in any given year was strongly predicted by precipitation in the previous one to three years. Wet years build fuel; the next dry year burns it. As the climate delivers more whiplash between wet winters and intense summer drought, the cycle accelerates.
Rising atmospheric CO₂ adds another wrinkle. Grasses use one of two photosynthetic pathways — C₃ (most cool-season grasses, including cheatgrass) or C₄ (most warm-season prairie grasses) — and both grow more efficiently as CO₂ climbs. A study in Nature examined a Wyoming CO₂ enrichment site, finding that elevated CO₂ improved water-use efficiency enough to partly offset the drying effect of warming;later research showed similar benefits for C₄ grasses. In short, more CO₂ means more grass, and more grass means more fuel.
Grasslands will not simply grow more biomass and burn more. Nature’s rules governing which grasses dominate where, and when each one cures, are being rewritten in real time. The species best equipped to exploit the new rules are, very often, the ones accelerating the grass-fire cycle.
On August 8, 2023, downed power lines sparked dry vegetation on a fallow hillside above Lahaina, Maui. By nightfall the fire had killed at least 102 people and become the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. A Washington Post investigation later confirmed the inferno began on land covered in non-native grasses, relics of sugar plantations that closed in the 1990s.
Hawaiʻi has experienced a roughly 400 percent increase in the typical area burned annually over the past century, and roughly a quarter of the state’s land area is now covered in flammable invasive grasses, according to the Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council. Guinea grass (Megathyrsus maximus), buffelgrass (Cenchrus ciliaris), molasses grass, and fountain grass are the dominant culprits — all introduced for pasture or ornament, all now spreading on lands no one is actively managing.
“The main factor driving the fires involved the invasive grasses that cover huge parts of Hawaii, which are extremely flammable,” Clark University climatologist Abby Frazier told ABC News in the days after the fire. University of Hawaiʻi fire scientist Clay Trauernicht had been warning about exactly this scenario for years; in a 2018 letter referenced in Smithsonian Magazine, he wrote: “Just like with climate change, we know what steps will reduce the risk of wildfire. But actually taking these steps will require reinvesting in and, frankly, reimagining our individual and collective responsibility for the larger landscape.”
The Lahaina disaster is now considered a defining example of what ecologist Emily Fusco and her co-authors call the “human–grass–fire cycle,” the recognition that invasive grasses, human ignition sources, and a warming, drying climate are not separate problems but a single coupled system. People plant or spread the grasses (often inadvertently). The grasses build continuous fuel beds. Climate change extends the burn season. Human infrastructure provides the spark. The fire returns the landscape to grass-favored conditions, and the cycle tightens.
All the factors are rising, increasing the chance that a region will see a grass-fed fire.
It would be reassuring if this were a regional problem. It is not. The U.S. Geological Survey has documented invasive grasses altering fire cycles in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast as well. Cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica) is reshaping fire behavior in Southern pine forests; silk reed (Neyraudia reynaudiana) more than tripled fire frequency in the South Florida areas Fusco’s team studied. Mediterranean grass (Schismus barbatus) tripled fire occurrence in the Sonoran Desert.
Native grasslands face their own pressures. C₄ tallgrass prairie species like big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) differ markedly in drought tolerance from co-occurring species like little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium); during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, little bluestem replaced big bluestem across much of the tallgrass prairie, driving the kind of species reshuffling that more frequent drought is likely to drive again.
A 2025 study used species distribution models for 37 grasses and projected that C₄ species will retain higher habitat suitability in a warmer future while many C₃ species will decline. Because the C₄ species projected to take over tend to be less flammable than the C₃ species they replace, the same study found elevated CO₂ raised water-use efficiency enough to lower leaf-level flammability for some species, a rare piece of cautious good news in a literature dominated by bad.
There is no clean fix for a feedback loop, but there are well-tested intervention points in grasslands management. Federal agencies are scaling up restoration. The BLM launched the Restoration for Resilience program, funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act (both laws’ funding is under attack), is targeting 21 priority landscapes across the West for invasive species removal and native reseeding. Researchers at the University of Wyoming are leading the IMAGINE partnership to translate management science into guidance for land managers facing annual grass invasion.
On private land and at the wildland-urban interface, the highest-leverage actions are simpler than they sound: maintain native or low-fuel vegetation, remove invasive grass thatch before fire season, and create and maintain fuel breaks. Pre-emergent herbicides applied promptly after fires can give native perennials a fighting chance; without that intervention, burned landscapes in cheatgrass country tend to convert permanently to annual grassland.
The post When the Lawn Becomes the Fuse: How Climate Change Is Rewiring Grass and Wildfire appeared first on Earth911.
About 2.4 billion bottles of nail polish are sold around the world each year, with more than 600 million bought in the U.S. alone. Most Americans who use nail polish have eight to twelve bottles at home. When a color is no longer wanted, almost none of these bottles can go in the recycling or regular trash.
Nail polish contains solvents, plasticizers, and resins that are considered household hazardous waste (HHW), just like oil-based paints and pesticides. State and local rules, based on federal law, decide how it should be handled. The good news is that by 2026, more brand take-back programs and beauty recyclers are giving people better options than waiting for a rare HHW collection day.
A regular bottle of nail polish is about 70% solvents, usually ethyl acetate, butyl acetate, and sometimes toluene, mixed with film-formers, plasticizers, and pigments. These solvents are flammable, and some plasticizers are linked to reproductive harm. Dried polish acts like a thin layer of car paint. The U.S. EPA says household hazardous waste includes products that are ignitable, corrosive, reactive, or toxic. Nail polish burns easily and is toxic, so many local programs, from Sonoma County to the City of London, list it as hazardous waste.
Three ingredients in nail polish have raised the most concern and are called the toxic trio: toluene, which can harm development and the nervous system; formaldehyde, which is a known cancer risk; and dibutyl phthalate (DBP), which can affect reproduction. The European Union banned DBP in cosmetics in 2004. The U.S. does not have a similar federal ban, but most big brands have changed their formulas. In 2023, California took an extra step by regulating toluene in nail products.
Changing the formula does not always remove all harmful chemicals. A 2026 study in Science of the Total Environment, using tests from the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, looked at 178 nail products of different types. The researchers found 29 different chemicals, including toluene, formaldehyde, and methyl methacrylate. In 92% of the products, chemicals were found that were not listed on the label. Products for children had the same chemical levels as those for adults.
A separate study by California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control in 2012 found that 10 out of 12 products labeled as “toluene-free” still contained toluene, with levels ranging from 42 ppm to 177,000 ppm. Five out of seven products claiming to be free of the toxic trio actually contained at least one of those chemicals. Labels like “3-free,” “5-free,” and “10-free” are now common. These labels are not regulated by the federal government and often do not match what is found in lab tests.
Gel polish has its own set of chemical issues. In September 2025, the EU banned trimethylbenzoyl diphenylphosphine oxide (TPO), which helps gel polish harden under UV light, because it was classified as a category 1B reproductive toxicant. This ban stops both the sale and professional use of gels with TPO in all 27 EU countries. However, TPO is still legal in the U.S.
What Not to Do With Old Polish
Never pour leftover polish or remover down the sink, tub, or storm drain. The solvents can harm septic systems, damage wastewater treatment plants, and end up in rivers or lakes. Do not put liquid polish in your regular trash or recycling, since it can leak and harm sanitation workers or contaminate other materials. Also, do not try to burn polish to dry it out faster, because the solvents catch fire easily and the fumes are toxic.
Programs Worth Knowing About
Some brands and salon companies now have special take-back programs for nail polish. Most of these programs accept bottles from any brand, not just their own. While they do not cover every U.S. zip code and often require shipping, they are a better option than throwing polish in the landfill.
Côte Beauty Recycling Program. The Los Angeles-based clean-beauty brand partners with PACT Collective, a nonprofit focused on hard-to-recycle beauty packaging, to accept nail polish bottles from any brand by mail. Côte instructs consumers not to rinse the bottles because the polish is upcycled into industrial paint. Ship bottles to Côte Beauty Recycling Program, 11601 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 1750, Los Angeles, CA 90025. The brand offers loyalty discounts on future purchases for participants.
Zoya Earth Month Exchange. Zoya, a New Jersey-based 10-free nail polish brand, runs an annual nail polish exchange each year around Earth Day. Recycling customers can order Zoya shades at a discount and mail in their unwanted polishes from any brand. Zoya disposes of the returned bottles through a commercial hazardous-waste handler and, in some years, donates usable polishes to local causes. Outside the promotion window, the exchange is not active, so timing matters.
Tenoverten. The clean-beauty nail salon Tenoverten partners with Chemwise, a chemical recycling and disposal company, to take old polish bottles of any brand at its salon locations. Chemwise stores the collected polish in temperature-controlled facilities and aggregates it into batches that are reformulated as paint for industrial equipment. Bottles, caps, and brushes are recovered separately.
PACT Collective beauty drop-offs. PACT Collective, founded in 2021 by Credo Beauty and MOB Beauty, now operates more than 3,300 drop-off bins at retailers including Ulta Beauty (about 1,350 U.S. stores), Credo Beauty, Sephora, and partner brand locations. Important caveat: PACT bins accept hard-to-recycle beauty packaging — pumps, tubes, caps, lipstick bullets — but explicitly exclude liquid nail polish and polish remover because they are hazardous. Empty, rinsed polish bottles may or may not be accepted depending on local rules. For full bottles, route through Côte’s mail-in program (which uses PACT infrastructure on the back end) or a municipal HHW facility.
Beauty packaging is one of the hardest types of waste to recycle. PACT says that over 120 billion beauty packages are made worldwide each year, but only about 9% get recycled. Most are too small, made of mixed materials, or too dirty for regular recycling. Liquid nail polish is especially tough to recycle, which is why special brand programs are important.
If a mail-in program isn’t a fit, every U.S. county has some form of household hazardous waste handling — though access varies dramatically. Some counties operate year-round permanent facilities; others run one-day collection events two or three times a year; rural areas may require appointments or shared regional sites. Earth911’s recycling search directory is the most comprehensive U.S. database, listing more than 100,000 collection points across 350+ material categories. Enter a ZIP code and “nail polish” to find the nearest option.
Before driving over, call ahead. HHW facilities almost always restrict drop-offs to residents of the county or city that funds them, and they often limit the quantity accepted per visit. Some charge a small fee; many do not. Bring polish in its original bottle, sealed tight, and place bottles inside a sturdy box or bag in case of leaks. While there, it’s a sensible trip to combine: leftover paint, motor oil, garden chemicals, expired medications, and old batteries are typically accepted on the same visit.
Throwing away polish should be the last resort. A better solution is to buy less polish and pick formulas with fewer hazardous ingredients from the start. Earth911 has a guide to safer nail polish alternatives, including water-based and lower-chemical brands. There are a few trends to keep in mind.
Mini-bottle subscriptions and seasonal color trends encourage people to buy and throw away polish more often. In the U.S., about 600 million bottles are sold each year, even though most polish users already have eight to twelve bottles at home. This demand adds up and increases waste.
Water-based polishes have much fewer solvents and are easier to take off without acetone, but they do not last as long and cannot fully replace gel polish. “10-free” or higher polishes are better than regular ones, but DTSC studies warn that the label does not tell the whole story. Ingredients can vary by brand, and unwanted chemicals may still be present even after reformulation.
Nail polish remover should be handled with the same care as nail polish. Most removers with acetone are flammable and are also considered hazardous waste. Let cotton balls and pads soaked with remover dry out completely in a well-ventilated area before throwing them away. Any leftover remover should be taken to the HHW facility with your old polish.
Editor’s Note: Originally published on February 21, 2015, this article was updated in May 2026.
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You spend about a third of your life in your bedroom, and the air quality there could be quietly harming your health. A 2025 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: Global, which looked at data from 3,399 U.S. adults, found that higher levels of bedroom allergens were strongly linked to trouble sleeping, diagnosed sleep disorders, snoring, and the use of sleep medication. These allergens aren’t coming from outside; they’re already present in your mattress, curtains, and the air you breathe.
Dust mites, pet dander, mold spores, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are some of the most common bedroom pollutants. Unlike outdoor allergens that come and go with the seasons, these are problems all year long. Because they build up right where you sleep for seven to nine hours each night, their effect on your sleep is much greater than daytime exposure. Here’s what research shows now and what you can do about it.
A 2024 review in Nature and Science of Sleep explained how this works: exposure to allergens causes nasal inflammation, which narrows the nasal passages, disrupts airflow, and leads to more brief awakenings during sleep. People with allergic rhinitis are also much more likely to develop obstructive sleep apnea, not just snoring. In one controlled study, patients with allergies were almost four times more likely to have serious REM-stage sleep problems than those without allergies.
The effects go beyond just feeling tired. Sleep problems caused by allergens are linked to weaker immune function, higher cortisol levels, and greater risk for heart problems, and these issues add up over time. Lowering the amount of allergens in your bedroom isn’t just a nice idea—it’s important for your health.
The highest concentration of allergens in most bedrooms is found right where you sleep. The American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology says dust mites are one of the most common indoor allergens in the U.S. They thrive in the warm, humid environment of bedding and mattresses. These tiny creatures, which are related to spiders, feed on dead skin cells and produce allergen proteins (Der p 1, Der p 2) that can trigger immune reactions.
The solution is physical, not chemical. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology strongly recommends using allergen-proof covers for mattresses and pillows. These tightly woven covers block dust mite allergens from reaching you while you sleep. Washing sheets and pillowcases in hot water every week is also advised. The water temperature is less important than once believed, but drying at high heat (130°F or above) is very effective at killing any remaining mites.
If your pillows can’t be washed, replace them every two years. After that, the amount of allergens inside is high, even if you use covers. When it’s time to get a new mattress, choose one that is certified organic or low in VOCs to avoid adding chemical emissions to the mix of allergens.
Dust mites don’t drink water; they absorb it from the air. When relative humidity (RH) is above 50%, dust mites reproduce more quickly. The EPA recommends keeping indoor humidity between 30% and 50% to control both dust mites and mold. Keeping RH below 50% lowers mite survival, and staying below 35% for most of the day can almost wipe them out.
A digital hygrometer, which costs less than $15 at most hardware stores, is an easy way to monitor bedroom humidity. If your bedroom often measures above 50%, which is common in coastal areas, during humid summers, or in older homes, a dehumidifier or a well-maintained air conditioner can help a lot. High humidity also speeds mold growth, worsening the allergen problem.
New research has made the benefits of air purifiers clear. A 2024 review in Indoor Air found that using HEPA filters in bedrooms led to real improvements in allergy symptoms and quality of life, especially for airborne allergens like pet dander and pollen. Dust mite allergens are harder to remove because they stick to larger particles that settle quickly, but a HEPA purifier still lowers the total amount of allergens in the air, which is important when you’re breathing it all night.
When buying a bedroom air purifier, choose one with a True HEPA (not “HEPA-type”) certification, a CADR rating that matches your room size, and a sleep mode that keeps noise below 30 dB. If you have new furniture or recently painted walls, pick a model that also has an activated carbon filter to help with VOCs.
Soft window coverings collect allergens easily. Fabric curtains hold onto dust, mold spores, and outdoor pollen that comes in through open windows, and they release these particles whenever they’re moved. If you use fabric curtains, wash them once a month during allergy season and keep windows closed when pollen counts are high. You can check local pollen levels on AirNow.
If you have allergies, hard-surface window coverings are often a better choice. Blinds or shades made from wood, aluminum, or wipeable fabric can be cleaned with a damp cloth instead of needing to be washed. They give you the light control you want for sleep without collecting as many allergens as fabric curtains.
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from paint, particleboard furniture, and foam mattresses aren’t technically allergens, but they can cause similar breathing problems and make things worse if your airways are already irritated by other allergens. The EPA says particleboard, carpet glue, and regular paint are major indoor sources of these chemicals.
Here are some practical steps:
This advice is tough for pet owners, but the science is clear. Pet dander, which is made up of tiny flakes of skin from cats, dogs, and other animals, is a strong and long-lasting allergen. It sticks to surfaces and can stay in the air for hours. The 2025 NIH bedroom allergen study found that pet allergens were among the top exposures linked to sleep disorders. Even if you start keeping pets out of the bedroom, leftover dander can remain for months unless you clean thoroughly.
If you can’t keep pets out of the bedroom all the time, run a HEPA air purifier nonstop, wash your bedding every week, and vacuum floors and furniture with a HEPA vacuum at least twice a week.
You can’t control allergens everywhere, but your bedroom is where you spend the most time breathing the same air. Making improvements there can have a big impact on how well you sleep and how you feel in the morning.
Editor’s Note: Originally written by Jenna Cyprus on April 6, 2020, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.
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Every pair of jeans you buy took roughly 2,000 gallons of water to produce. Every cotton t-shirt, about 700 more. The clothes you wear are the second-largest consumer of water among all industries, and fashion as a whole generates as much carbon as international aviation and maritime shipping combined. Where and how you shop makes a big difference for the planet that you want to get outside, into nature, and enjoy.
Men’s clothing brands are making the moves to reduce damage to the nature. They’re using organic and recycled fibers, paying fair wages, publishing their supply chains, repairing garments for free, and planting trees. Some are even rethinking what fabric itself can be made from.
Still, fast fashion is growing by more than 10% each year and could double to $291 billion by 2032. Only 0.3% of textile fiber worldwide is recycled, and 85% of discarded clothing in the U.S. goes to landfills. The brands here are working hard to change that, which is why they deserve your support.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s A New Textiles Economy report says that if we doubled how often we wear each piece of clothing, greenhouse gas emissions from clothing would drop by 44%. The best way to help is to use what you already have. After that, buying from brands that are truly making an effort is the next best step. Here are 12 such brands.
This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase an item through the Amazon links below, Earth911 receives a small commission that helps fund our Recycling Directory. If you don’t return an item, Amazon shipping is typically more efficient than retail shopping.
Nudie Jeans has built one of the most honest sustainability programs in denim. Their 2024 report shows that 93% of fiber usage is organic, Fairtrade, or recycled cotton, and in 2024 they finalized their first garments made from regenerative organic cotton—farming that doesn’t just avoid harm but actively rebuilds soil health. They also run 33 free-for-life repair shops across 20 cities, repaired 68,342 pairs of jeans in 2024, and sell pre-owned jeans directly on their site. If you want denim that’s designed to be worn, repaired, and worn again rather than replaced, this is the brand.
The Gritty Jackson is Nudie’s main men’s jean, with a regular straight fit made from 100% organic cotton. It now comes in styles that use the new regenerative organic cotton. Buy directly from Nudie to use their repair program, or find them on Amazon.
Asket operates on a simple premise, that the most sustainable garment is one you already own. So, the Swedish brand makes a permanent, no-new-seasons collection and publishes the full CO₂ impact and material traceability of every single product on its website. No other brand in this guide is more transparent about what your clothes are made of and what it cost the planet to make them.
The Oxford Shirt comes in seven colors, is made from 100% yarn-dyed cotton, and carries a disclosed CO₂ impact of 5.5 kg per shirt. It’s the kind of shirt you buy once and wear for a decade. Asket ships directly to the U.S and offers full transparency data for your purchase.
prAna is a great choice for men who want clothes that work for hiking, yoga, or a night out. The brand uses recycled and organic fibers, supports Fair Trade, and shares full supply chain details, including factory names and conditions. Since being bought by Columbia Sportswear in 2014, prAna has kept its focus on sustainability and uses bluesign® certified fabrics.
The Stretch Zion Pant II is prAna’s top men’s pant, made from recycled nylon and bluesign® certified. It’s built for climbing and hiking but comfortable enough for travel. You can find it on Amazon.
tentree has planted over 120 million trees in 13 countries and aims to reach one billion by 2030. That’s ten trees for every item sold. The brand is a certified B Corp, has been carbon-neutral since 2022, and uses organic cotton, TENCEL™ lyocell, hemp, and recycled polyester. They also run a Circularity program that takes back clothes from any brand for resale or recycling. In 2024, they funded 100 beehives at planting sites in Kenya to help support local communities after reforestation projects end.
The Juniper Classic Hoodieis made from recycled polyester and organic cotton. It’s a simple, versatile layer that comes with tentree’s tree-planting promise. You can find it on Amazon.
Warp + Weft might be the most underrated brand here. While regular jeans use about 1,500 gallons of water to make, Warp + Weft jeans use less than 10. They treat and recycle 98% of their water, power their mill with solar panels, and use Dry Ozone technology instead of chemical bleaching. All their pieces cost under $100 and come in sizes up to 3X, making sustainable denim more accessible. Their Fall 2024 collection added stretch corduroy, knit denim, and a new relaxed-fit men’s jean.
The GRR Relaxed Jean has a mid-rise and loose leg, made from Warp + Weft’s low-water denim. You can find them on Amazon.
Everlane ranked first in Remake’s 2024 Fashion Accountability Report, beating 52 other brands and earning its highest score ever. Their 2024 impact report shows that 90% of their materials now meet lower-impact standards, and they have cut Scope 1–3 emissions by 52% since 2019. The ReNew collection, made from recycled plastic bottles and fishing nets, has grown, and 95% of the cotton Everlane uses is certified organic, regenerative, recycled, or farm-traceable. A 2020 labor scandal still affects their “radical transparency” claims, and their goal of 100% preferred materials by the end of 2025 is still in progress. Still, the data shows real improvement.
Made from 100% recycled materials and bluesign®-approved dyes, the ReNew Fleece Jacket is the updated staple of the ReNew collection. It’s versatile enough for layering in spring and fall.
Nau started in Portland in 2005 with the goal of proving that business could be a force for environmental good. Now owned by South Korean outdoor company Black Yak, the brand continues to make versatile performance-lifestyle clothing from recycled polyester, organic cotton, TENCEL, and ethically sourced Merino wool, using PFC-free coatings instead of the persistent chemical water repellents most outdoor brands still rely on.
The Aeroshell Hooded Shirt is made from recycled nylon and works well for both city commutes and weekend hikes. You can find Nau on Amazon.
Thought Clothing, formerly Braintree, is a UK brand built on natural, traceable fibers: hemp, organic cotton, TENCEL, bamboo, recycled polyester, and Merino wool. Their packaging is compostable cornstarch or recycled paper. Hemp is the standout material here—it requires roughly 300–500 liters of water per kilogram to grow, compared to nearly 10,000 liters for conventional cotton. If you’re looking for warm-weather shirts that wear well and wash easy, Thought is worth the international order.
The Kinley Golf Course Bamboo Socks in Cobalt Blue are a standout from Thought’s men’s sock line — a golf-course-ready pattern built from a blend of 53% bamboo-derived viscose, 28% recycled polyester, 16% organic cotton, and 3% elastane. Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing renewable crops on the planet, and in fabric form, it delivers genuine performance benefits: the material is naturally breathable, antibacterial, and antifungal, with zero plastic packaging. £7.95 direct from thoughtsocks.com, with international shipping available.
Pact is the easiest brand to start with on this list. They use GOTS-certified organic cotton, Fair Trade Certified™ factories, offer optional carbon offsets at checkout, and use 100% post-consumer recycled packaging. Their prices are much lower than most sustainable brands. Pact covers the basics: underwear, t-shirts, socks, and pants. If you’re just starting to move away from fast fashion and don’t want to spend $100 on a hoodie, this is a good place to begin.
The Daily Twill Midweight Pant is an organic cotton trouser with an elastic waistband and drawcord—equally at home at a desk or on a trail. Their Backyard Collection adds organic cotton shorts and button-ups for summer. Find Pact on Amazon.
PANGAIA has moved well beyond the recycled cashmere hoodie it was known for in 2021. The brand now functions as a material science company developing fibers from seaweed (C-FIBER™), fruit waste (FRUTFIBER™), nettles (PANettle™ Denim), and plant-based nylon ((gaia)PLNT). Their PPRMINT™ natural peppermint oil treatment discourages odor-causing bacteria, which means you wash less, and every wash avoided is microplastics not released into waterways. If you want to wear something genuinely on the frontier of what sustainable textiles can be, this is your brand.
The DNA Hoodie is made from 50% organic cotton and 50% recycled cotton, with an oversized fit and PPRMINT™ treatment. It’s PANGAIA’s most accessible men’s item and a highlight of their collection. Also consider the 365 Hoodie, which comes in C-FIBER™ and recycled cotton blends.
Outerknown was co-founded by 11-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater in 2015 and has become one of the most respected men’s sustainable brands in the U.S. Its reputation comes from its supply chain, not just its founder. The brand claims to be the first built on a full commitment to sustainability, using Regenerative Organic Certified® cotton, Fair Trade Certified™ factories, and full transparency about where products are made. Outerknown also has a Pre-Loved resale program for used items.
The Blanket Shirt is Outerknown’s most iconic piece and deserves its reputation. Made from 100% organic cotton BlanketWeave™ twill with buttons from nuts, it’s built to be the shirt you reach for constantly and wear for years. Available in more than 20 colors and patterns. Also worth considering: the S.E.A. Jeans made from organic cotton denim in a Fair Trade Certified factory. Find Outerknown on Amazon.
No brand on this list is perfect. Every piece of clothing has some environmental impact, and “sustainable” is a spectrum, not a certification. Still, all 12 of these brands are making real, documented efforts to improve: better materials, better factories, more transparency, and in some cases, taking back clothes when you’re done with them.
Buy less and wear your clothes longer. When you do shop, choose brands that can show where their products come from and what their impact is on the planet. That’s the whole approach.
Editor’s Note: Originally published on March 19, 2021, this article was updated in March 2026.
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The global market for natural health products now exceeds $300 billion, and parents are leading the charge — looking for gentler, plant-based alternatives to synthetic medicines for their kids. Some natural remedies have centuries of traditional use behind them. Others have meaningful clinical support. And a few carry real safety caveats that are easy to miss when you’re shopping for a more natural medicine cabinet.
Four ingredients cover a lot of ground: coconut oil, essential oils, honey, and apple cider vinegar. Here’s what the evidence says about each, including what to watch out for, especially with younger children.
| Note: A trained medical professional is always your best resource for treating serious ailments. This article provides general information, not medical advice. Never delay or ignore professional care based on something you read online. |
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Coconut oil earns its place in a natural medicine cabinet through sheer versatility. Applied topically, it works well as a balm for chapped cheeks, a diaper rash treatment for babies, a soothing after-bath moisturizer for dry skin, and as a carrier oil when diluting essential oils for topical use. It’s also a perfectly serviceable cooking oil — just keep separate containers to avoid cross-contamination between cosmetic and kitchen uses.
Look for unrefined, virgin coconut oil — it retains more of the naturally occurring medium-chain fatty acids (including lauric acid, which has demonstrated antimicrobial properties in lab studies) compared to refined versions. Nutiva Organic Virgin Coconut Oil is a consistently available option.
Essential oils are concentrated plant extracts potent enough to have real therapeutic effects, and potent enough to cause real harm if misused. For kids, the most useful are:
Eucalyptus age limits: Eucalyptus age limits: The blanket warning “never use on children under 10” guidance circulating online is an overstatement. The European Medicines Agency concludes that eucalyptus used by inhalation, topically, or as a bath additive is appropriate from age 4, and that oral use is restricted to age 12 and up. Do not apply near the nose, mouth, or face of any young child. Robert Tisserand and Rodney Young’s Essential Oil Safety (2nd ed., 2014), the field’s standard reference, supports this more nuanced reading.
Lavender and tea tree and hormonal concerns with boys: Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a link between topical use of lavender and tea tree oils and hormonal disruption in prepubescent boys. Aromatherapy (diffusing) is the lower-risk alternative for this age group.
Always dilute essential oils. Undiluted oils should never be applied to a child’s skin. For children under 2, use a 0.5–1% dilution in a carrier oil (like coconut or almond oil). For ages 2–6, 1–2% is appropriate.
No peppermint for children under 30 months. Peppermint oil can increase seizure risk in very young children and should be avoided.
For a comprehensive reference, Johns Hopkins Medicine’s essential oil safety guide for children is a solid starting point. And check with your pediatrician before introducing new oils, especially for children with respiratory conditions.
Raw honey does considerably more than sweeten tea. Applied topically, it’s an effective treatment for acne, particularly raw honey, which retains more antimicrobial compounds. Manuka honey from bees that pollinate the New Zealand mānuka bush has demonstrated well-documented antibacterial properties and is worth keeping on hand for wound care and throat soothing.
For throat relief, a spoonful of honey dissolved in warm water with lemon is effective for children over 1 year old. Look for raw Manuka honey rather than processed honey in a plastic squeeze bottle, which has been heated and filtered to the point of losing most of its beneficial properties.
| Critical Safety Warning — Honey and Infants: The FDA, CDC, and American Academy of Pediatrics all recommend that honey never be given to children under 12 months of age — in any form, including baked goods, cereals, or foods that contain honey as an ingredient. Honey can harbor Clostridium botulinum spores, which can cause infant botulism, a serious and potentially fatal illness. Infants’ digestive systems are not mature enough to neutralize the spores. This restriction applies to raw honey, pasteurized honey, and honey in cooked or processed foods. After age 1, honey is safe. |
Apple cider vinegar’s acidic properties make it useful for a handful of topical applications. Two cups diluted in bathwater can help soothe eczema flares; diluted 50/50 with water, it’s effective for sunburn relief and itchy skin.
Its strong taste makes internal use a tough sell for kids, but they can still benefit from external applications. As with honey, quality matters: get an unfiltered, unpasteurized brand that retains “the mother” — the strand-like protein-enzyme matrix that forms during fermentation. Bragg Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar is the go-to product and is widely available.
A note on internal use for older kids and adults: ACV is acidic enough to erode tooth enamel if taken undiluted or frequently. Always dilute in water and consult a healthcare provider before making it a regular supplement.
These four ingredients are a good starting point for your own natural healing remedies. Simple and straightforward, most will be readily available at your local health food store and are a cinch to apply or administer.
These four ingredients give you solid coverage for common minor ailments — skin irritation, dryness, colds, scrapes, and more. Most are available at natural grocery stores; the essential oils are easy to find online from reputable brands like Plant Therapy, NOW, and Edens Garden, all of which publish third-party testing data.
Start simple, read the labels carefully (especially age guidance on essential oils), and keep products stored out of reach of young children. When in doubt, your pediatrician is the right call.
Editor’s Note: Originally written by Madeleine Summerville on April 8, 2015, this article was updated in March 2026 to reflect current pediatric safety guidance, including honey/infant botulism warnings and updated essential oil age recommendations.
The post Mother Nature’s Medicine: 4 Natural Remedies for Healthy Kids appeared first on Earth911.
Every year, Americans bury an estimated two million tons or more of used clay cat litter — clay that was strip-mined from the ground, trucked across the country, scooped once, used by a cat, and thrown away. It does not biodegrade, so it sits in the landfill essentially forever. And that is just the cat.
Pets belong to the household waste stream, even though we rarely add them to the tally. About 94 million U.S. households keep a pet, and the roughly 68 million dogs and 49 million cats among them, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2025 survey, generate three large and mostly invisible waste streams: cat litter, dog waste and the bags that carry it, and the packaging that food and treats arrive in. Each one carries a cost at the kitchen counter and a much larger one at the national scale.
Conventional clumping litter is sodium bentonite, a clay valued for the way it seals around moisture. Getting it out of the ground means strip mining, and industry estimates put U.S. clay mined for litter at roughly five billion pounds a year. A single cat works through about 28 pounds of clay litter a month — close to 336 pounds a year — and none of it breaks down once discarded.
The household cost is real too. Litter runs roughly $180 to $480 a year for one cat, and multi-cat homes multiply that spending into the thousands of dollars annually. Spread across roughly 49 million cats, litter alone is a multi-billion-dollar annual purchase, a recurring spend on a product whose useful life is measured in days and whose afterlife is measured in centuries.
Plant-based alternatives, such as corn, wheat, walnut sshells, recycled paper, or and even tofu, cut the mining and landfill burden, though they vary in price, dustiness, and clumping performance. The table below compares the common options on the dimensions that matter for waste.
| Litter type | Made from | End of life | Waste trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clay (clumping) | Strip-mined sodium bentonite | Landfill; does not biodegrade | Highest mining and landfill footprint |
| Silica crystal | Mined silica gel | Landfill; inert | Lighter per use, but still mined and landfilled |
| Plant-based (corn, wheat, wood, paper, tofu) | Renewable crops or recycled fiber | Compostable in principle — but not with cat feces | Lowest extraction footprint; disposal still constrained by Toxoplasma risk |
One caution applies across every type: cat feces can carry Toxoplasma gondii, so even a compostable litter should never be flushed or composted for a food garden.
America’s dogs produce an estimated 10.6 million tons of waste a year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each dog generates about three-quarters of a pound a day and classifies pet waste as a nonpoint source of pollution. Left on the ground, it washes into storm drains, carrying pathogens and the nutrients that fuel algae blooms downstream
Then there is the bag. A study in the journal Environmental Pollution estimated that dog waste bags amount to roughly 415 billion worldwide each year, the equivalent of 0.76 to 1.23 million tons of plastic waste. Standard plastic bags can persist in a landfill for centuries, so the daily ritual of picking up after a dog quietly builds an enormous, near-permanent plastic stockpile that goes to landfills.
“Compostable” and “biodegradable” labels muddy the picture. Most municipal composting programs will not accept dog waste, so certified-compostable bags usually end up in the same trash stream as plastic bags, where landfill conditions do not break them down. In short, the label promises an outcome that the disposal system rarely delivers.
The disposal options that reduce harm are narrower than the marketing suggests. Flushing pet-safe waste, where local rules and septic systems allow it, routes the material to wastewater treatment rather than the landfill. In-ground pet-waste digesters can break down waste on-site for homeowners with yard space. Bagging and trashing remains the default for apartment dwellers, in which case a thin conventional bag and a premium compostable bag are typically sent to the same landfill.
Food and treats arrive in some of the hardest-to-recycle packaging in the grocery aisle. The Pet Sustainability Coalition estimates that about 300 million pounds of pet food and treat packaging waste are generated by homes in the U.S. each year; more than 99% of it is landfilled.
The culprit is multilayer flexible packaging — pouches, treat bags, and kibble bags that fuse plastic, foil, and film into a single barrier that curbside systems cannot separate. Only about 2% of U.S. households have curbside access for film and flexible packaging, according to the Recycling Partnership, and material tossed in the wrong bin tangles sorting equipment at recovery facilities.
The picture is shifting. As of October 1, 2025, seven states had enacted comprehensive packaging extended producer responsibility laws — California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington — that move recycling costs onto producers. These regulations are already nudging brands toward easier-to-recycle mono-material bags. Store drop-off film programs and mail-in services for pouches and treat bags can fill some of the gap, but have not gained sufficient traction to make a substantial difference.
Litter:
Dog waste:
Packaging:
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