Path to Zero

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. As rocket use grows so does concern about polluting the stratosphere. Small companies are developing innovative solutions to the problem.

This eco-friendly rocket fuel can change the space industry

Environment

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. 

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. As rocket use grows so does concern about polluting the stratosphere. Small companies are developing innovative solutions.

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first  commercial rocket using biofuel.

Rocket launches are gonna increase by some tenfold over the next 10 years. Going from a very small percentage of contribution to climate change to a very large portion. We're doing stuff to make our airplanes more sustainable car transportation more sustainable. What are we doing for rockets? Why is it important to address the issue of sustainability of rocket activities? The stratosphere is a region of the atmosphere that is extremely sensitive to small changes, primarily that's due to the mass of air that's there. You're up at 1/10 to 1 1000 of the pressure when you deposit exhaust products up their, their impact on climate, their impact on ozone is disproportionate. If the surface you've got something that lasts for a few weeks in the stratosphere, you've got something that lasts for a few years. There are two kinds of particles, there are black carbon particles and there are aluminum particles and these particles have a huge lever arm in terms of their influence on climate and ozone because they're in the stratosphere, the same materials emitted at the surface of the earth would have no impact at all. That's where the uniqueness of rockets comes in. There are a variety of rocket fuels that are currently in use very generally. We don't think of the environmental part of it when we think about their uses were thinking primarily about the energy that you get the cost and the safety of those fields across the industry. We're seeing a handful of companies working on bio fuel alternatives. I'm Sasha, dairy and Ceo and founder of Blueshift Aerospace, It was about a decade ago that I started blue shift and it really started on a farm. They have to be my brother's farm and at the time we were testing out a certain type of rocket engine using petroleum fuel. And I sat down my brother's kitchen and I saw the certain substance on his windowsill. He just pulled off the farm a few weeks before and I thought gosh, if this if this could work as well or even close to as well as petroleum alternatives, it's a much more sustainable way of fueling rockets. And so it was like maybe two weeks later we tested out the fuel. Found out not only did it work, it work better than the petroleum that we made history as the very first company to have launched a rocket commercially using a carbon neutral bio derived, non toxic rocket fuel. We saw the media and the public questioning the larger rocket companies, why why aren't you doing things in a more sustainable way? In the past, the space industry has been dominated by a few very large players. Us government soviet government, chinese government. But now space is becoming a free market commercial activity. And so we expect small companies to start to play a role here. Gregory Constantine ceo of their company. Their company is a carbon utilization company that takes carbon dioxide before it's captured from the atmosphere and turns it into useful products that can help shape our future. Yeah. The beauty about working with groups such as Nasa is they're really focused on pushing innovation and pushing research and development. And some of the work that we're doing with them is really geared towards the rocket fuel that we're making from carbon dioxide and how we can optimize the use of the work that is done in academia. And the work that is done in lab doesn't often find its way to commercial realities as well. And because it's a big challenge. Um and so we try to spend a lot of time innovative business solutions as well that allow that innovation to see the light of day in the real world, thankfully some of the work that we're doing with groups like Nasa as well allows us for that research and development into actuality small companies that innovate. If they can innovate and there's all this room for growth, then they can change the face of the space. The biggest challenge right now is the research, we have to understand now what these different propellant types will do in the future. We know that the amount of carbon dioxide put out by a medium sized rocket is about the same as an airline flight. And we know there are thousands of airline flights every day and there are only a few 100 rocket launches each year. So when it comes to the big picture aviation has thousands of times greater impact than spaceflight. But when it comes to the upper part of the atmosphere, there is no aviation, and rockets are the only game in town. The spaceflight industry, It's very small right now. And if it froze that way, we could write the paper and and go home. But we think it's going to grow a lot and that's why we have to get better scientific information.

Shared e-bike companies like Citi Bike aim to improve their goals towards sustainability.

How e-bikes are challenging green transportation 

So our focus on sustainability starts with the product itself. And so we're really focused on getting and putting the best products on the street. And so I think what a lot of folks are advocating for and what they see as the future is that we go from a two car household to a one car household with more trips taken on public transportation by foot, by bike, by electric bike, by cargo bike and by all the other future modes that will be smaller and more efficient. I'm Laura Fox, I'm the general manager of city bike for lift. Citi bike is a part of lift and it's a core part of how lift provides the world's best transportation services in new york city. We've been here for about 10 years already. Uh, D C boston over 10 years. The transportation is the largest sector for emissions that cause climate change and private car ownership is the largest portion of those emissions, so we need to get people to drive less. I really think that e bikes are car killers in the best of ways. Um, there's been a number of studies that have shown that when people buy an e bike themselves that they reduce their driving habits by about 70%. And a lot of the analysis in this space shows that if people just took about 15% fewer car trips, we could reduce overall transportation emissions by at least 12%. Electric micro mobility is the term that's used to describe 2 to 3 wheeled vehicles that are powered by electric battery and typically under a certain weight e bikes, electric scooters. Um, some folks would even call certain lighter weight electric mopeds, electric micro mobility, even though electric bikes have been around in china since the eighties, it really just started taking off in the US about five years ago and really picked up even more during Covid. And during the lockdown oftentimes you can imagine I'm the bike lady in the room who is getting people telling me, oh, that's nice. But no one's going to ride bikes. And I love saying, you know, last 3, 28 million rising 1.3 million unique riders at a time when not many new Yorkers were riding. We really have to optimize the operations themselves to ensure that we're being even as sustainable as we possibly can within the core operations first is one of the core problems of bike share is how do you match supply and demand? Um, and the term that we use to, you know, try to do that is called rebalancing. So bringing bikes from one location and taking them to another, um, or creating more capacity in one location itself. And so bike angels, which is an innovation that we've had in the system for about six years now is a core way that we reduce the vehicle trips required to take bikes from one place to another. My name is Rachel met and I think I started with the bike angels program soon after I became a member last fall, it's just a Gamification of the program where it will show you on the app, all of the docks and it will give a point value to each of the docks. So now I've been a member for over a year, but my membership has been extended by over six months, so I did not just have to pay my annual fee. Again, I don't have to do that for another six months, but I'll continue getting points and that will probably be pushed out and we see that for all the rebalancing work that we need to do across the system to meet supply and man by angels are a third of all of that work, if that reduces the number of lift trucks that have to move bikes around, that's fewer cars on the streets. And I love that as a cyclist and pedestrian to make our streets safer for everyone. A second piece within operations on that sustainability metric is how do we repair as many bikes in the field as we can to reduce the number of bikes that have to come back to depose. And then third is we think about the longevity of the hardware itself. The large majority of the emissions over the life cycle of the bike would be from manufacturing. So to get the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per mile of, over the lifetime, you want to expand the lifespan of that vehicle and that's often a challenge in the context of, because the vehicles are used very intensively, they're kept outside, you know, and sometimes that goal of expanding lifespan is intention with other pressures they might be facing, such as replacing the current fleet with new models that might have improvements or you know, be safer in other ways. And so we continue to bring that mindset of how do we design and pressure, test and reliability, test those products and bring in all of our operating knowledge to know what's going to really last at left in Citi bike, the need to be green and to make money are, you know, combined, right. If we were to put out a bad product or to have inefficient operations, we would lose money. And so really there's great incentives built into the program to deliver on outside of mode shift, which is a core part of the business model to ensure that we deliver the most sustainable operations um for the system. I think that there's a couple of different key parts. When we think about the future of micromobility for city bike, we're in the middle of $100 million investment to double the size of the city bike service area, bringing it to more and more new Yorkers at the end of it will cover 60% of new york city population, the more we can make these options available and make it easier to be environmentally conscious and be sustainable um the more likely more people are to do it. And I think in the future we'll see new types of vehicles, including some that are starting to come out that are enclosed three wheeled vehicles that have the, you know, the sort of footprint more of a bike but are actually like enclosed and protect against the elements. So we may see some evolution. But to date, micro mobility is primarily about electric bikes and electric scooters. And I think the transition toward electric micro mobility is only just beginning.

Companies like Samsung and Fairphone are focused on making products that use recycled and ethically-sourced materials.

Your smartphone is bad for the planet; these companies want to help

Your smartphone is bad for the planet

Samsung and Fairphone are focused on making sustainable products.

there's an unsustainable consumption pattern that's happening. You know, we talk about fast fashion, but fast tech right at their phone, we strongly believe that we want our business to be a force for good and for us that means both environmentally socially, but also financially maybe it's coming off the pandemic, but I think the timing that is really right for these products and I think it's it's good for a company. But I think more importantly, I think it's good for the environment. If you're not considering social and environmental impacts when you're making business decisions, then you're not making fully informed business decisions. Mhm. The electronics industry is notorious for making thin light capable machines when you know, mobile computing started in the 80s. It wasn't something that came into the consciousness of corporations. You know, maybe we should think about the fact that this cobalt mine is in a place that may use a lot of child labor may use a lot of unclean energy to get it out of the earth. We still want thin light fast devices but there's a growing movement that is really interested in how sustainable something is in our few the rapid life cycles and the short lifetime of devices actually is the main problem um designing a device that is meant to last and also building the ecosystem around it that actually a device can last longer by introducing this longer term vision. Um I also start immediately tackling problems not only for the planet, but also for the people in this, in this supply chain. If you look at mobile products, about 80% of the life cycle, greenhouse gas impacts all the way from raw material extraction through production to use and then back around again is in production and so it doesn't make sense, you know, to be throwing these things away, I sat down with Mark Newton who is the head of sustainability for Samsung. Now, Samsung is a massive company. They don't just make smartphones and refrigerators and washing machines and home appliances, they also make semiconductors, they make battery packs for electric vehicles, they're a tremendous company. Their goals are pretty aggressive, so by 2030 they want to become net zero with consumer electronics, they have manufacturing plants, they have locations all over the world and that means that in order to become net zero, they have to essentially work with each individual country to raise up the infrastructure essentially. Samsung is sort of planting the flag and saying, okay, you know, we're going to do this and we're gonna make this happen, sustainability is crucial for tech because of the level of consumption and how integrated tech is into our everyday lives. You know, the most sustainable phone is the one that's in your pocket. It's the one that you can use and repair and change and swap and customize as technology gets better. Fair phone is a company that started in 2013 and their whole model is essentially to provide a smartphone experience, that you know, looks very similar to say, your iPhone in your pocket that incorporates sustainability recycling bility, repairability and even ensuring fair wages for workers Every year. We sell and buy their 4, 1.4 billion smartphones worldwide and we use them around 2-3 years and then after use less than 20% actually is handed in for recycling. It's actually a huge waste machine Plus also these rapid lifecycle said you can imagine the effect it has on the C. +02 and material use, but also the short term focus is quite a big influence on the people working in this supply chain. They're doing something in this space to innovate for long enough that larger companies are coming to them and being like, okay, what have you learned? How did you do this small part that you see here, it makes your phone shake and that's made of constant from here. What can we learn from you so that we can incorporate more sustainable products. You wanted a compromise to be as small as possible because for me, my goal as fair phone is I want my users that they love to keep their phone and use longer. Yet for me, what is beautiful? Is it beautiful? They're just thin thinner, thinnest or is it actually beautiful that say, hey, there's a design idea behind this that cares for the materials for the people working in the supply chain and for the environment. Ace is interesting because they're known mostly for gaming computers. They offer a lot of really innovative stuff in that space. They also work in chromebooks, things that kids use at schools. They're launching their very first sort of 30% post consumer recycled laptop called the vero. We've made sure that it is used to operate able so it's pretty easy to pop in more memory or in a gaming laptop to put a different graphic processor. And so I consider that table stakes today where the customers want that and the idea is over time, there's no premium, you know, it's chicken and the egg as you get scale and you get your production lines up the the added cost to have recycled plastics comes down and after a while it'll be just, you know, I think everyone will have green products. The question is how soon will people have it? We're ready now. And I think some of the competitions maybe a year or two behind Once, it's part of our design criteria. Um, just like energy efficiency and performance and all those things. Just as part of that trade off analysis that we do then it just becomes something that is ubiquitous with the product are buds to pro it has 90% recycled content in the plastic even one generation before we were like really proud to get 20% recycled content and so we know we can do it. I went into this story thinking why hasn't this happened? Like why haven't we seen more green products on the market, all of those sort of different groups are converging to move us towards the future that's a little bit more sustainable from an employment perspective, from a global supply chain perspective from an environmental perspective. The first step is that we want to raise awareness. So we uncover for that complex supply chain and figure out, hey, where are things going wrong? The second step is that we innovate in our company and our supply chain on solutions to the malpractices that we found. But then the third step is that we want to convene other industry players and convince other players, hey, we now have a scalable solution that works, join in one of the things that I'm seeing that's really driving a lot of this is investor interest in the idea that companies that are considering sustainability in their business model are better run companies. It can be commercially successful to make both ethical choices in your supply chain and indeed be a commercially successful company. But I think ultimately, you know, I don't think, I don't think that we're coming out with green product of higher margins and make more money. I think it's just that the market is going to be asking for green and rather being a slow or fast follow, we want to leave the market. I am quite hopeful and I also see the different actors. I see legislation upcoming. I see other companies also moving in this direction. So I really am hopeful that Fair phone is not going to be the exception like we are now, but that we in the in a few years time, this actually will be the more instead of the exception.

Hydrogen fuel cells have several advantages over electric batteries.

Why hydrogen could fuel the future of transportation

this isn't who wins? This is a solving a pathway to dick carbonized transportation. We think electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are complementary when it comes down to it, the objective here has to be transforming our total transportation system and making it a zero carbon path that is commercially viable, deployable across all sections and segments. Mhm There's an awful lot of historic discomfort around things like the hindenburg. That's, that's one of the folks always reference, you know, and what we've seen consistently is that, you know, if you treat hydrogen in a well organized and and respectful manner as we have in all industrial gasses, which is a perfectly reasonable fuel to you, education is critical for people just to even understand that Toyota sells a fuel cell vehicle, it's not just about Toyota to bring the solution, right, This is about the whole hydrogen economy, that's out there, right? So when you think about what makes fuel cell vehicles work is you have to have the hydrogen, you have to have the stations and you have to have the vehicle. So in the same way that we're building momentum, the rest of that hydrogen economy is also building momentum. Now, companies have their own sustainability goals and their own targets, it's the customers and the end users that are actually pulling others forward because they're saying in order for us to meet the goals that we've said to our shareholders by 2030 or 2050 we need to have these technologies, I think that's why people feel like that, the momentum is really here now and the time time is now when we produce hydrogen by electrolysis, you split a water molecule and you split into hydrogen and oxygen and in a fuel cell, what we do is we put our our hydrogen back into the fuel cell And it recombined hydrogen, uh, and the, the oxygen and doing so, an electron runs around an external circuit and that is the electrical charge that you, you you gather, we've been working on fuel cells for about 25 years. So it's not a new thing. The difference between maybe a battery electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles, not that much right. You know, you're using the same sort of electrification. It's got the same electric motor, you're having similar, you know, controls that are on it. It's just the difference of how big of a battery you need on there or if you're using hydrogen as your source of energy to actually move you forward. The advantage of a fuel cell electric vehicle, it can refuel very quickly. So it's a very similar experience to say, a diesel vehicle, you can refuel it in 15 minutes and whether that's a truck or a bus or a train or ferry. And also the higher power requirements because in order to have a fully electric truck, for example, you would have to have a significant amount of batteries that would be heavy and that would reduce the payload. And so all of those customers that are in commercial vehicles and trucks, they're using those trucks for a purpose, right to deliver goods and if you reduce the amount of goods that they're able to deliver, that's a bad business model for them. So, um, in those larger vehicles and applications, that's why our fuel cells are an advantage over battery electric challenges in the fuel cell space has been infrastructure. So you need to be able to refuel these vehicles. That's one thing, the other is the cost, both the initial cost of a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, um, and the total cost of ownership now that's been coming down significantly over time and will continue to do so, I think there's a couple elements. One is the cost of hydrogen itself, Green hydrogen for example, which is hydrogen that would be made from renewable energy. Part of that, we've seen the cost of renewable energy, the wind or solar have obviously come down tremendously. And that's a big input into the cost of producing hydrogen and producing that great hydrogen. So you need the cost of the fuel to come down and then you also need the cost of the equipment with any emerging technology. One of the big challenges is that manufacturing piece. So high cost of manufacturing, especially in in new technologies is quite common. So moving into that industrial scale production, you know, large scale standards that we would see in any other manufacturing industry improvement against, you know, manufacturing errors and things like that drive costs then rather dramatically. So as you have a maturing in the technology and the supply chains around the components improved, you also get significant cost savings there as well as those just pure manufacturing games that we see in every sector. When we think about sort of the generations of developments of fuel cell stacks and modules, we are now getting a point where, you know, we have that level of power and efficiency that are coming out of those platforms to really be a good cost solution for, for the applications that are being put in as a hydrogen economy. You know, we have to think about how all the different sort of players come together and actually help to help the issue. As one team, there's a lot of interest in hydrogen hubs right now, a lot of them around the country, a lot of states and a lot of areas are looking at it. They want to get in on the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen hubs are really important for the industry. For the whole hydrogen an economy. I think the scale, in most cases, you're looking at being able to produce hydrogen on site. We've seen that on a smaller scale at things like a porch. So there's all different kinds of equipment and support. You have the trucks, trucks, they are taking the goods back and forth. But you also have terminal tractors, you also have other pieces of equipment that can be fueled with hydrogen policy or other things make a difference that backing in and encouragement that confidence from from whether it's the state or the federal government or even other entities that want to support this. Just help to give a little bit of a lifting hands and say, hey, we believe in this even in those sort of maybe transitional times to make sure that that were being supported the way to help us see us through to the end. I think water is like that basic fundamental of life. You know, it's like without water, we don't live, right? And I love that it's water that's being used to create this oxygen hydrogen that's being used to sort of support mobility, right? So that for me is like personally a very beautiful picture of this fundamental of life that we need to be standing with. Something that can be fundamental in your mobility and transportation, right? And something that is in abundance here on earth.

Farmers need large retailers like Walmart to push the transition to a more sustainable agricultural future.

Regenerative farming will take multiple stakeholders to take off

Regenerative farming will take many stakeholders to take off

it's true that we have to change the system. But what it means is that we have to change the farms, right? And so what we want is we want integrated farms, we generated farms not regenerative practices, right? Because that's the problem. It's all at the practice level. We are coming to realize that that there is a lot of potential within agriculture to address a lot of our biggest land resource concerns and climate change issues. But there's just not enough emphasis on what it means. If we want to work with agriculture, what does it cost to make that happen? Yeah, I'm laura gentry, I'm the director of water quality research for the Illinois corn growers Association and I'm a soil scientist. So soil scientist studying the chemical, physical and biological properties of our soil. My particular area focuses on agriculture and specifically on maintaining soil quality and soil health. In row crop agricultural, there have been many, many terms for regenerative agriculture. That's sort of the term du jour right now, always the idea is producing safe healthy crops with a reduced environmental impact, maintaining clean water and healthy soils, precision agriculture tools that can help farmers to make better decisions around nutrient utilization, chemical utilization and make sure that more of it ends up in the crop where it's intended versus running off into our water or remaining in our soil. If you really want to be a regenerative, what you have to see is changes in greenhouse gas emissions, right from agriculture and changes in other environmental indicators from habitat water quality, right? It's just such a complex system that if you want to make any change, it's really hard to do that, as just one individual firmer large corporations should be looking to to assist farmers because ultimately they will benefit from from helping us to do well to be competitive, whether they're doing it to be able to make public facing environmental commitments around water quality or climate change or whatever, or whether they're just doing it because they're stakeholders are demanding it. There's plenty of reasons out there for these large corporations to work directly with farmers to help them to have a reduced impact on the environment. My name is Michael Hancock and I oversee implementation of our sustainability in the shows for food and grocery areas globally. At Walmart, we came up with three sustainability initiatives through Moonshot goals and that was really, we want to be powered by 100% renewable energy, We wanted to create zero waste or have zero waste in our supply chains, and then three is we wanted to sell sustainable products that were good people on the planet. The midwest collaborative has eight members from the corporate sector and walmart is one of those and then three of the big Ngos, we really look at the sort of three legs stool of support for farmers and so that is the uh financial support, so that's cost share for, you know, buying a cover crop seed and making sure that they have the right equipment, it's technical support so that they know how to do it and that they can ask questions from agronomists and other farmers do that have been doing this and then it's the social support, that big picture vision is what guides us every day. You can really see significant change in that landscape, um particularly if you're looking at things like water quality, soil health, biodiversity factors, things like that first and foremost is we want to manage the system that we already have in the office today. And so one of the things that we can do on that, because there's a lot of work that can still take place. I think when you take a look at grain rotation or different types of products that can be grown to be able to assist on that, that definitely is really good. We want to be able to minimize the inputs that go into production citizens what were clearly looking to do is to continue to lean in on the current calculators that exists for the science based targets. And as those calculators are developed by the leading scientists that are out there, we will read those tools and the access available to our suppliers. The bigger picture is that if we want to promote a sustainable regenerative system, we should have a more diverse production system reflected in a more diverse retail system, walmart is at the tail end of the supply chain and our greatest power, more design availability or our ability to convene right and send a signal to the marketplace on what we would like to see in terms of practices to deliver on the outcomes that are really going to be necessary to sustain our planet. Consumer pressure is critical in moving USDA and state level policies into A more truly regenerative direction. These big corporations that we can channel, if you will some of these consumer concerns, but everybody has to share some responsibility really. The buck stops with the farmer, everybody upstream of the farmer is looking down their nose going, how hard is it? And you know, why don't you sit down with one of these farmers and talk to them about how hard it is. We're not asking you to give up 15% of your income. Why do you expect that from from farmers? If we are really serious about reducing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, what we need to do is eat less meat, Whatever meat we eat, we need to bring it back as often as possible to pasture. That will reduce the demand for grain as it reduces the demand for grain. It opens up spaces for growing things like being things that human schemes you really can't settle in the margins here. It's a problem solved. We are acutely aware of the impact that we're having on our soils, we do feel a responsibility to be sure that the next generation is going to be able to produce crops, produced food produced fiber and fuel, with the resource that we're leaving behind our soil is a national treasure. We need to maintain it. Yeah.

App makers hope they can encourage eco-friendly habits by making it fun to track and reduce carbon footprints.

Can gaming apps help us reduce our carbon footprint?

the problem we're trying to solve is that we have to reduce global emissions by 40 to 50% in the next eight years so that we can hit our global targets by 2030 and then hit our net zero targets by 2050. And of course we need sweeping policy change. We need companies to be making different choices. We need infrastructure investment, but there's also ways that we, as consumers can accelerate the pace of change. A lot of the changes that need to happen are very, very big structural changes. But obviously there is an element there of behavioral change, what we eat, how much we waste, how energy efficient our homes are. There are things there that we can control, what is our target outcome in this case it's pro environmental behaviors, advantage of games and apps is that they can break down those really big behaviors into achieved football. My name is Katherine Dunn. I am a journalist and I live in London in the UK. I've been an energy reporter in particular, but also kind of a climate reporter for years. I was an editor with Fortune for about three years where I mostly covered climate change and I'm really interested in what it takes for countries. What it takes for economies companies and people to actually kind of meet the goals that we've set out for ourselves when I wake up in the morning. The first thing I have to do is bring my dog for a walk and on that walk. My favorite thing to do is to get a little coffee and stand in the park watching my dog run around barking at all the other dogs causing chaos come in completely ignoring me. How hard is it to bring in a reusable cup, You can see all these little like frictions there where I'm like, okay, I have to find the cup inevitably, I've left it in the bottom of the bag and it's disgusting. I mean it seems kind of crazy that a reusable cup is just such a simple change that you can make and yet I still struggle with it. The problem is that people don't know where to start when it comes to climate change. And so if you want to understand what you can do about climate change, starting with measuring your own personal carbon footprint, probably the best thing to do. So the carbon footprint in simple terms is the carbon connected to anything you do, anything you eat the transit you took that day, the energy used in your home on one level, it's pretty simple, it's the carbon you're kind of responsible for as an individual, but once you start to think about it, you realize that it is like the sum total of everything you interacted with that day, luckily now there are apps for that the climate agenda and changing your behavior, these are tough, long term things to do and so we all need a little bit of support. My name is christian arno Founder of paw prints an app that helps you reduce your carbon footprint, my name is essentially paul and I'm the founder and ceo of Zorro, Zorro is an app that helps you use the power of your spending to take action on climate change. There's a few ways we use Gamification, um one is that your own emissions, you sort of see that progress over time, you can also see your progress versus others, there's the leaderboard and in the context of separate people into teams, I would be more likely to do something because I wouldn't want to let you down. Part of it is making sure that individuals find financial value and and other personal value in it as well. One of the most challenging things about climate change and about carbon is that they're invisible and distributed and Gamification is a way of making that feel immediate and satisfying to someone when they make progress. Gamification is essentially anything designed to make a non gaming activity more fun. My name is Benjamin Douglas, I am a second year PhD student and psychology department at the University of Wisconsin Madison and we study pro environmental behavior and persuasive messaging, essentially behavior change. How do we, how do we motivate people to do things that they might otherwise not do on their own exploring is available, apps on my phone, what you can find even in the app store right now is a lot of apps that will help you calculate your carbon cost effectiveness of an app is going to depend obviously on what's in the app, so if you are using things like points and leaderboards and progress towards all those elements of Gamification, make people want to return and therefore more likely it's going to be successful. There is persuasive evidence that Gamification helps us learn, so it's more fun, then you might actually want to do it. And ideally you would do those to the point where you feel like you've kind of built up a habit, I absolutely think everyone has a part to play in keeping the planet livable. If you're spending money, then you have the power to take climate action. You know, we're only going to vote a few times in the next decade, but we do spend money 2-3 times a day. And so if you spend money, you know how to take climate action, if you have to draw up, we all have a stake in the future, but the reality is that many people in the world have more pressing concerns and that's why I think the reward element of which Gamification is a part is really important to achieving the widespread spread changes over the past several years. Been this increased anxiety and rightly so about the effects of climate change, really, we're seeing across the board is people trying to find any solution that will work. I think people are looking for tools to understand how they can change their emissions and tools to better understand their emissions as well. In a way that feels trustworthy Gamification is one that has potential and because it has the potential to work, you know, it's another area we can explore.

Toxic chemicals in beauty products disproportionately impact people of color, leading to health issues such as infertility and cancer. Here’s how activists and companies in the clean beauty industry are trying to change things.

The fight against toxic beauty

Health

Toxic chemicals in beauty products disproportionately impact people of color, leading to health issues such as infertility and cancer.

I think many consumers feel that if something is available on the shelf at the store, then it's safe. And that's not always the case, we know that people of color are disproportionately affected by toxic chemicals and consumer products across the board. The good news is that the more that we're aware of this, and the more that we're pushing for accountability and change along the supply chain, the more we will have a positive impact and this is solvable. The clean beauty segment or the natural beauty segment is growing rapidly. We can make change in this industry and across industry to ensure that we just clean up our act. Unfortunately, products that are marketed to Women of color often contain more toxic chemicals than products marketed to white women. Whether it's chemical hair strainers that are known to have formaldehyde. We can talk about skin lightening creams that have mercury systems of power and oppression such as racism and Classism and sexism may impact our beauty worms, consequent beauty rituals, chemical exposures as well as health outcomes across a life course, Women of color are major consumers of the beauty industry's. They're not only using more products, but there are likely to be using products that have a greater toxic load. Beauty ideals, both in this country as well as across the globe are very much informed by systems of power and oppression such as structural racism, colonialism and essentially Eurocentric beauty norms really are the pervasive ideal that impacts all of us with white femininity really being at the top of this beauty hierarchy, very lovely crystal right beauty cream. The closer you are to the top of our pyramid, white femininity, the more social and economic benefits you'll be afforded. And so that propagates certain types of products that are heavily promoted, heavily marketed. Two women of color to help them attain that. Look, I'm a black woman. I remember I was 12 years old when I got my first hair relaxer for 20 years. Um I was I was doing that with my hair and I didn't realize the potential health risk seeing the disproportionate youth and products that were marketed to people like me that really hit close to home. Sadly a lot of the chemicals that you would find at a hazardous waste site are also found in our beauty products, largely because they do remain unregulated. So there's lead it's particularly of concern because it can have irreversible impacts on the brain, especially Children's brain. There's mercury, which is also a known human carcinogen. There could be asbestos in talc related products, another known human carcinogen. There's satellites and parabens process of chemicals called endocrine disrupting chemicals which can mimic hormones in our bodies even at small amounts which are particularly of concern to reproduction. So there can be many chemicals in a product that aren't listed on a label. So for example, because of trade Secret laws, companies don't have to disclose the specific chemical ingredients in the fragrances and certain products. So they can just list fragrance, even though fragrance can include 100 different unique chemicals, some of the conditions that disproportionately, for example, impact black women that may be linked to chemicals in these products include asthma related outcomes, pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, pregnancy related complications that may impact maternal mortality, such as pregnancy related hypertension, gestational diabetes, impaired learning and development in Children. As well as a whole host of different types of cancers. Women who used hair relaxing products as a child, they have a 40% greater risk of early onset period, which is a risk factor for breast cancer. The law around beauty products haven't been updated since 1938, that was before World War II. That's absurd to protect consumers, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, respectively. Keep careful watch for harmful ingredients in cosmetics and for misleading claims and advertisements. The FDA, The agency that is supposed to oversee this industry doesn't have quite frankly the power that it needs to actually do anything. The FDA doesn't know how many cosmetics are on the market in this country. It can't do a recall of something. So it's a really weak law basically useless and we really need reform. There have been bipartisan efforts to update that law, but those have failed in the absence of that. Certain states have started regulating what's in Personal care products. So in an under regulated space, what could we do differently to make the space as products possible and advocate for change credo is the largest clean beauty retailer in the United States for credo, the way that we define clean Credo. Clean standard is really the nexus of safety, sustainability and ethics all held within the through line of transparency. The credo Clean Standard is about 28 pages, very comprehensive guideline that all of our brands have to sign and adhere to. We're trying to accelerate companies free formulations and introduction of safer cleaner beauty products for women of color. Clean Beauty should be about creating products that have the lowest environmental impact and lowest health impact. It's not just about eliminating the toxic chemicals But ensuring the youth and the adoption of favorite chemicals. The global beauty industry is at this point over $550 billion beauty is still an emerging part of that. There's more companies that are trying to make green products. There's also retailers that are trying to have an influence on what's being sold on their shelves. So for example, Target and walmart now have chemical policies on the book, 99 cent stores unfortunately don't and that's still a place where a lot of people buy their products. A lot of clean beauty products really are situated or being promoted at higher end stores right, that may not be accessible to many women of color. One of the things that is important to us at E. D. S is that there's a democratization of clean beauty. The process of making clean products for everyone needs to be a holistic one. So certainly we need to be more of a demand and more investment from investors and from brands at the beginning of when they're conceptualizing products, making sure that there are products for everyone, either targeted especially for certain needs, especially textured hair, for example, or making sure that you have a product that can really serve a wide variety of customers. But I also think that we need to invest more in the industry in terms of just really taking a step back and saying, who is at the table, we need more women and more women of color in positions of power, whether that's as an investor or as an entrepreneur or as chemists and formulate Urz, it's time for companies to really recognize that the ingredients that they may have been using all this time, there are better solutions. We absolutely continue to need a sea change across the entire beauty market. So that means every brand, every retailer and every ingredient supplier putting at the core safer ingredients. We're seeing that customers really want safer, more sustainable products, more equitable products, more transparent products and they're willing to reward those companies that are doing that work with their dollars

They’re also less likely to have access to the technology and jobs that would help make a difference.

Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color

Climate change's effects on communities of color


Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color


while climate change is a global phenomenon. To be sure it affects different populations and different groups differently. Conventional climate risk assessment assumes the impacts are the same across the board. The problem is because of inequity, this is simply not true. It really feels like a lot of this technology is going to the rich white green and main, not really to the most vulnerable communities that really need it. Communities of color in the United States are disproportionately affected by the drivers of climate change, greenhouse gasses and air pollution because they're literally living, they are situated next to oil refineries, chemical plants, methane leaks from oil facilities, waste facilities that are also emitting noxious fumes and methane and you know when it comes to women and their exposure to the drivers of climate change to air pollution, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are molecules released during the burning of fossil fuels actually are clearly linked to the occurrence of breast cancer, especially women of childbearing age should be very concerned about this because we've recently discovered that these molecules burned with fossil fuels make their way through the placenta into the exposure with the fetus in fact, and this can have lifelong effects. And then the outcomes of climate change are the things that we are seeing every day now. So extreme weather events like extreme heat events or storms and sea level rise may be the most scientifically supported and substantiated is just the simple rise in temperature and we feel these this rise in temperature most acutely in in cities, cities tend to be much hotter than rural areas and in cities, people of color and poorer people are living in the hottest areas in most cities across this country, around the coast. We have poor communities and communities of color that are living in flood zones and zones of risk for these extreme weather events and storms. They mean they're facing the brunt of climate change and also they have tremendous challenges and recovering from these what's become really chronic events. The problem is that we have built an energy infrastructure relying on fossil fuels that disproportionately affects communities of color, poor communities. That problem is so obvious that it makes the solution obvious, which is empowering those communities to reduce exposures to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and to eliminate some of the emissions that are happening right now To me, the brownfields, the pollution, the asthma that's all been here. I think the piece for me that was sort of adding insult to injury is, you know, we've gotten more than our fair share of the environmental beds Now, all these environmental goods are coming. This green wave of energy efficiency jobs, renewable energy jobs and I'm not seeing or or I wasn't seeing black and brown people happy table. We're trying to turn our attention more to the sense energy justice. Pieces of really thinking about how do we create jobs build wealth and reduce energy burden for communities of color almost. You think of the gold rush in California, We've got a new nation. Energy off the coast of massachusetts in offshore wind like this is for everybody. They're just all these opportunities and jobs. We want everybody to get those jobs, but we want to make sure black and latino and indigenous people are not left out of those fundamentally. If you're a business and you're serious about measuring managing climate risk and tackling climate change, you have to understand the connection between equity and climate work. It's inextricable if you're working on climate solutions in the transportation sector and you don't realize that women around the world globally travel four times further than men, then how can you fully understand how to effectively reduce transportation emissions? The challenge. And of course the opportunity is that women are fundamentally underrepresented across business, across politics, across leadership of all types meaningful progress toward climate action necessitates so much more than simply offsetting carbon emissions. It necessitates fundamentally changing the system that got us here. If we could empower communities who are being disproportionately exposed to actually protect their health and well being, they would be given a critical role to protecting the health and well being of all of us. We need everybody at the table, we need all hands on deck and we need to be intentionally inclusive. The quicker that everyone understands That climate is part of their job, the faster will get to net zero And I also want to extend the argument today, the quicker that people realize that equity is also part of their job, the faster we will get to net zero.

Regenerative building design goes beyond being carbon neutral - it makes a positive impact on the environment.

How architecture can slow climate change

how do we create something that's incredibly unique, ultra sustainable and better to live in than your typical urban multi family building The built environment. So existing stock and obviously everything that's going on with construction itself, responsible for approximately 40% of all global carbon emissions. So on the path to net zero, the sectors obviously got a really clear role to play in mitigating climate change. We're not just talking about the environment, we are talking about human health and we're talking about social impact as well to be a regenerative building. It means that you're making a commitment to having a positive impact in the world when we use the term sustainable. What we're generally referring to is the idea that something is giving back as much as it's taking from the universe. And generally speaking, when we use that term, we're thinking about the environment and when we talk about regenerative, we are talking about positive impact. So it means you're really trying to figure out how is this building going to give back to all of the planetary natural systems? How is it going to literally make people healthier by by interacting with it? By being in it by working in it. And then how is it going to have a positive social impact on the community? How is it going to bring people in to create a sense of belonging to provide jobs that are good jobs. Those are all the ways that we define regenerative design and architecture. Ridge entry design has got a lot of key benefits. It can improve air quality in the immediate area through the use of things like green roofs and skins. If we look at the design of energy systems will generate more energy than it actually needs. The options there for storage and removing the reliance on on grid supply um which then has the same knock on effect of removing the need for the infrastructure that's associated with standard energy delivery methods. And of course all of that has an impact on the local ecosystems through using rainwater storage can actually reduce that. So if he's run off and improve not only the quality of the soil but provides a reduction in the amount of possible water that's required from things like water supply and sewage etcetera as well. So this is a mid rise building that is basically built lot line to lot line. So it's extra edge ultra urban, right? It's on hikes street and capitol hill, the most famous kind of street in Seattle. We built it using traditional techniques, right? So we focus on the areas that have the biggest impact for the least cost. And so what we ended up doing was coming up with ways to do thicker walls with more insulation where needed triple pane windows that have an amazing seal from an energy perspective. So they're very insulating and so we land with this luxury building that's using 60 70 plus percent less energy than any brand new other building that's going on and for just a tiny tiny premium on the cost On the north side of the building. We have a 70-foot mural hand painted by an artist and it's really beautiful and it's got integrated lighting that changes as you walk by it and then, you know, I think that we're very smart about how we pick our finishes and how we do say our cabinets, casework, etc, and our place, we always spend more money on that stuff because it's the thing that people want. So this building a building like soulless while adults are sustainable. There's zero compromise from any perspective for anyone that lives there, right? It's beautiful from the outside, it's beautiful from the inside, but we're not asking higher rent than, you know, any new building around us really. MBS conducts a number of industry reports and we've recently launched the sustainability report for this year. What we found from that was only 14% of the respondents, which were all construction professionals from from around different areas of the sector. We're working on green projects all the time, so it didn't paint a very clear picture that people were doing this continuously. The report asked respondents to explain how important sustainability was to them. eight out of 10, that replied said that sustainability was very important topic to them as a person, which I think links into the human morals of people typically just wanting to do good. However, only four out of 10 said that it was important to their business. Now, this is going to have impact of wide and varied different options, but I think it's gonna be topics around the priority compared to other industry drivers, such as profit margins, delivery times, etcetera. Um, it's gonna sit and maybe compliance as well. It's going to sit maybe lower on the business agenda than it would be to the individual. Um, that's not responsible for keeping the business running. The unfortunate reality is that just because maybe a green building is worth more over time and that it can command higher rent and that it's healthier for us. That doesn't actually create as much market movement as we hoped it would because so many people just don't have the capital to invest in these things up front. We need to change policy and regulation to make that start to be more accessible and more required for the rest of the world. Property taxes are the number one thing that can dramatically move the needle with regard to how does the building Pencil financially. Right. So if you know, you can get a 10%, tax savings for an old sustainable building, that would be enough to make almost everybody do it at the moment, we are still trying to get construction to be sustainable. Obviously, sustainability is effectively the halfway point to regenerative design. However, projects allow it. Um, there's no reason why they can't be hitting the regenerative design requirements. Now we don't feel there has to be any sort of compromise. You can have ultra luxury and ultra sustainable. So just you can have high end buildings that are ultra sustainable and they don't have to cost a huge premium. The amount of energy that you save with smart design, better insulation, better windows, heat pump technology, et cetera. Some of the really kind of blocking and tackling things is significantly more than you saved by simply adding solar panels or something like that. But just incentivize it, incentivizes through tax savings, Incentivize it through less requirement for electrical build up things like this and people will do it. We, as designers and constructors of buildings have a lot of control over the amount of carbon that we are responsible for when we build a building. Because we can make very simple. Oftentimes zero cost decisions to lower our carbon footprint. Just by making a slightly more thoughtful decision about what we put into the building in the first place. Right? Mhm

As crops dry out due to climate change, desperate farmers are turning to technology and policymakers for help.

How changing water supply is reshaping agriculture

this past weekend, friday saturday and sunday was 105108104. Anything that's alive and outside is just being dehydrated as you stand there and watch it even if a plant was standing in in water, the root system cannot uptake the water as fast as it's being dehydrated out of the lead. Yeah, I'm Cody Carson, I am a row crop farmer, uh run some cattle and I have, I grow a lot of crops. I've often said if it's legal and ethical and might make a buck, I've probably tried to grow it at some point. I've been in the Texas panhandle all of my life. We have been in a little bread basket uh that has been a very profitable and and very efficient part of agriculture for the last 50 or 60 years. But what I have known all of my adult life is coming to an end in a rapid change. The limited irrigation is totally restructuring how I farm and then you stack the drought on top of it over the last two or three years. And it has, has been a real eye opener for a lot of us. When I look at what I have done for most of my adult livelihood, it was based on having an adequate amount of irrigation water. And we used to have general rains every spring. You could count on rains every spring, the last several years, there's been nothing average about it with growing population increasing climate variability and growing water demands worldwide. Fresh water supplies are being stressed options or providing safe, clean, reliable water supply will require the adoption of innovations of various sorts. There's a lot of things we now know about how to manage water today, that we didn't know even just a couple of decades ago, we can replenish our groundwater basins to collecting rainwater, we can reuse wastewater. The technology is there, but we need to make sure that the public is confident there is a consensus that at least climate variability seems to be becoming more common, particularly in areas like the southwestern United States. Many scientists expect that we will see longer and more intense periods of drought. What we need is a sense of urgency to bring people together to plan and have the foresight in terms of water supply options further. We also need to have a dialogue about how we use the water. Do we need to have large lawns in residential communities? Or can we think constructively and realistically about more drought tolerant landscape arrangements that are aesthetically pleasing but are more appropriate to the kind of climate we live in. But we need to really expand some political capital and thinking long term about the fact that we want to manage this resource in a way that will ensure that our grandchildren don't have to worry about these problems If this drought continues on. I don't see any recovery. I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel anyway to change what's happening. The people in these small black communities are going to have to reevaluate and rethink what we've done for the last 50 years is not sustainable and and we're going to have to transition That next phase of growth is happening from the mechanization side. If you look at at crop production for the last really 25 years, we are significantly increasing the amount of of things that we are able to harvest from the land with less inputs. When we are able to specifically apply the right amount of pesticide, the right amount of fertilizer and the right amount of water to a very specific plant for a very specific area of a field. Were able to get a whole lot more production out of that particular acre with even less production. The fundamental technology that has led to this is when tractors can drive themselves. When tractors understand where they are in a field using GPS technology, it sort of opens up a lot of different things. When we begin to talk about some of the water specific related issues, there is a growing movement to put sensors into the soil so you can determine what the actual moisture needs are. So, as those irrigation systems are going through the field, they're able to specifically apply the right amount of water only where it's needed and not where it's not needed, that conserves water that conserves fuel that prevents runoff and all the positive things that come out of knowing exactly what what you're applying at the right time in the field. So when a farmer is able to in real time use their tractor and your tractor is able to collect that data. What's going to be able to come out of that integration of data and technology to really produce a lot more crops on the same amount of acre in our goal to be long term viable. I have currently shifted my cropping strategy to what I deem as being long term viable or sustainable. Good for me, financially, good for what fits the climate of my geographical region and good for the soil and the environment in the long term, not just maintaining the soil, but hopefully regenerating the soul. We have to remember that we are all in this together. Water problems are not problems that are limited to certain groups, where they're caused by certain sectors. All of us have to work together to figure out a way to manage are constrained and overstressed water supplies and we need to be prepared to make some changes in our behavior so that from a prudential standpoint, there will be an adequate amount of water for all of us and for all of our grandchildren. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

A growing number of people say they want their last act to have a positive impact on the planet.

The rise of eco-friendly options for your body after death

the current modern burial practices are unsustainable. We have two choices. The first is burial, we take the body, we often improvement that is filling it with formaldehyde, we place the body in the coffin, we placed the coffin in the cement and rebar lined hole in the ground where it then it's for a very long time. The second choice is cremation and that was always seen as the ecological alternative takes about 30 gallons of fuel to perform and puts about £530 of C. 02 into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. If this was about food or about cars, we'd be having this conversation years ago we'd have been talking about solutions to but what we're talking about is dying and this is not a topic anyone wants to touch. Ultimately it's meant we've never come up with reasonable solutions to deal with it. But I think that's changing very, very rapidly and we're going to see a movement come at amazing speed to really upend this industry and change the status quo. I'm john need felt thomas, I am the chief association executive for the Green burial Council International, the Green Burial Council mission and is to promote natural burial practices. The organization has two arms essentially one which certifies green burial providers. Those are green burial places and spaces and products and then an education arm that I serve as the leader of which educates the public and providers about green burial options. So a green burial at its most basic form is a un embalmed body in the ground with a simple covering perhaps a cotton shroud. And then there are natural burial cemeteries which are think of more of a meadow. If you look at the number of natural and green burial cemeteries 2015 is kind of the point. It was really good hard data was being captain of a little over 100. Now there are nearly 350. My name is Phil Olsen and I'm an associate professor in the department of Science and Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. I consider myself a technology emphasis. Um, and one of the main areas of interest for me and my teaching and research or technology is involved in the disposition of human remains. So I think there is this interesting shift going on in the sense of like collective death, right? Kind of understanding ourselves as kind of, you know, being a part of this bigger collective picture. I think we're now thinking about death and scale in a way that we weren't before thinking about death in terms of like the sheer impact of human flesh on the planet and recognizing, oh wait, we have to think about this in a much bigger way. My name is Micah Truman. I'm the ceo of return home and we perform termination which gently transforms human remains into. So in the very beginning, when returned home was founded, our whole purpose was to figure out a way to gently return a person back to the earth and to make sure that the last choice we make on this planet is to get back to it and not to pollute it. And that seems like a simple thing, but there is a lot to do. Their first we developed the science that is the process. And then next we developed the technology on a prototype basis. We made an in vessel technology. Each vessel is eight ft long by 3.5 ft wide by 3.5 ft tall. Um Ultimately, we then made all of that. We fabricated all of that equipment and finally, we outfitted an 11.5 1000 square foot facility in auburn Washington just south of Seattle and built the first large scale interrogation facility in the world. And it's been the work of a lifetime. We place a layer of what we call organics at the bottom of the vessel, alfalfa, straw and sawdust. We placed the body on top of that of those organics. We then fill the rest the rest of the vessel up with the remaining organics. And we put it into our special system that moves oxygen through the vessel. After a month, the body is completely terra mated and what we have left our bones, we reduce those bones into fragments. We left the soil, sit for one more month, which is a total of two months and we have beautiful soil that we can then give back to the family. We are built to transform back. We're meant to go back to the earth. Were literally hardwired to do it. The microbes in our body. But things that digest the food, we can also transform us and return us to the earth. Death and dying is an uncomfortable conversation for for lots of people. So we really have an organization. The Green burial Council encourages lots of pre planning and conversations and we give people tools to to have those conversations. This is not about saying the current funeral industry is wrong and doing everything badly. It's really about providing options. We are very accustomed to a family in funeral service, calling and arranging for the disposition of their loved ones. In our case, it's very common for the person who's dying to call us personally and say this is the only ray of light that's happening for me right now. This is what I'm hoping for. And this allows me to think about the next phase of my of my continuance and that is utterly mind blowing. It ensures that the last act we do on this planet is to get back to it. Yeah, mm hmm.

Social sustainability matters, and a new study finds corporations are falling short.

Many companies failing to live up to promises to prioritize people

Many companies fail to meet promises to prioritize people

Social sustainability matters and corporations are falling short.

Assessing corporate social responsibility

The un Sustainable Development Goals is a set of 17 goals that have been agreed by all un member states are not only about environmental issues, not only about social issues, but actually a mix of both. And in that sense, they cover lots of issues that we would call social sustainability, such as poverty inequality, labor issues, Gender equality issues, etc. So we assessed 1000 companies around the world, and what we found is that 99% of the companies that we assessed. it's actually failing and fulfilling their basic expectations of a socially responsible company from protecting human rights to providing and promoting decent work to act ethically. What we have found is actually companies around the world are failing to live up to the promises they have made to be socially responsible and valuing people. So what we have been looking at is basically how are companies prioritizing people? What did they do to make sure that a year to human rights conventions, what are they doing to make sure that there's equality among their workforce is that they pay people a living wage, And how do they apply ethics? So, we basically looked at these foundations and the sad conclusion is that the 99% of the companies do not have these foundations in place to make sure that people are at the center of this transformation. which means people are going to be left behind. Social sustainability is basically about making societies and communities that thrive and are resilient. We often talk about the footprints of the company and and a company can have positive footprint on society, so their existence and their business operations can lead to people, you know, increasing their competence, it can lead to more collaboration with people. You can even see examples of companies increasing the trust and well being of the society. I think it's right to say that companies have been more sort of forward leaning in dealing with environmental sustainability issues. Part of the reason is that many of these social indicators are more um their long run indicators, it's it's harder to see how a single company is impacting something like the level of inequality in the country or the level of trust in the country. So a little bit more or less transparent one might say, to achieve such a change, you need all the stakeholders to take a different role from the different capacities. Right? So governments have the role of policy making companies also have such a massive influence in the world in the way they operate in the way they use natural resources in the way they treat the people that work for them. So we cannot achieve this global agenda by governments alone. Government needs that business and financial institutions, it's extremely critical that corporations focused on social sustainability. Um I think it's it's not just um something that governments should focus on. It should be corporations, governments, you should have a lot of public private partnerships as well that support this work in the community. So we define social sustainability as making sure that everyone has what they need right that we are supporting communities that are marginalized to make sure that they can be successful today and in the future. We measure success across all of the work that we do from how many people are we skilling including how many people were moving into meaningful jobs, you know? How many people are we supporting with our sustainability initiatives? Right. How many are increasing yields, increase in economic prosperity, increase in income etcetera. So we look at all of the beneficiaries of our programs and we're able to measure progress against all of our commitments and our goals and all of our initiatives. What we're hoping to do with the information we have is that we can inform and empower companies to drive this change fast, but also the stakeholders to help them set the regulatory explorers set the incentives and actually drive the change in the speed that we needed with the urgency we needed. There is no longer a question of why companies should do this, but that the real the conversation is shifting to how companies should be addressing this. This is where we try to provide guidance but also the accountability to make sure that companies actually followed through on that there are probably many reasons why it's so hard to meet the goals for social sustainability that are set for instance in the U. N. S. T. G. I think many companies still believe that it is costly to make the necessary changes for instance, and things like labor practices, you know, and fair trade practices and and so on. And it could also be that regulating at least some of these social sustainability outcomes is harder than regulating things like how much C. 02 do you limit how much water uh you do you use, how much chemicals do you spill or more sort of concrete environmental uh impacts like that. So I think that is probably also part of the reason why we're seeing a little bit of a slow development towards meeting these goals for millions and millions of people living in emerging economies and developing countries. This is a life and death situation. And if we now look post covid, we we can see hunger going up, we see poverty levels going up and this is perhaps the level of urgency that we don't feel in our everyday lives. I think there are a lot of things that we do take for granted right, the ability to have electricity, the ability to have fresh water, the ability to go to school and have a great education. And I think a lot of people don't have access too many of those opportunities like we do, and that's completely tied to why corporations like IBM has to focus on marginalized populations and enable them to have access to skills and to make sure that we're supporting vulnerable communities. And it's also not just about risk mitigation, it's really around making sure that we're supporting the people that need it the most, um, but also looking at opportunities for innovation and new solutions. So this actually benefits corporations in a multiple of ways.

As climate misinformation tactics continue to evolve, social media platforms and new technologies emerge as frontline defenses.

The urgency to combat climate misinformation

You have to take into account the fact that modeling has been wrong for 20 to 30 years, it's always been overestimating the amount of climate change that's actually taken place. A substantial number of have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. Anything we do now going to make any significant difference. What's happening here is there are people who have cultural, political, religious economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another. It used to be that we would find lots of straight up climate denial. So climate change is a hoax. Um you know, it's a conspiracy, et cetera. Now we're seeing that these narratives have shifted from outright denial to something we call delay messaging and delay messaging is all about creating delay in climate action. So that messaging might suggest that particular solutions are in fact the way when we're a long way off having developed them, it might suggest that we in the West, so it shouldn't act until china and India have acted, for example, or it might suggest that certain groups are taking something away from another group or things that are going to cause a diversion and therefore also delaying climate action. If you think about miss informative content, it's often really salacious or really provocative, and that means it gets lots of engagement and get lots of shares and likes or dislikes, people agreeing or disagreeing with it. And that makes it really valuable content for the platforms. And you see it often flies through the recommendation algorithms very quickly. We look to see what is the extent of climate misinformation on the facebook platform, We took 195 known pages and groups That have published climate misinformation in the last 12 months And we analyzed a set of over 45,000 posts from those pages and groups by a crowd tangle. And we just looked at the extent of the climate misinformation from that. We found that there was an estimated between 818,000 and 1.36 million views of climate misinformation every single day. Climate misinformation from the worst pages grew 76.7% in the first nine months of 2021, so it's definitely growing in some sense. And what's more we found that only 3.6% of the content of the climate misinformation that we found has been fact checked, which is Facebook's other initiatives for combating climate misinformation, is to apply fact checking labels. So then the content is defunct in real time. So for Facebook to not recognize this is a bigger problem, It is huge. The technical definition of misinformation is that it's it's false information, but it's agnostic about the intent in the case of climate change, the outcome inevitably is delaying climate action. So the argument might be global warming isn't happening or humans aren't causing it or the impact won't be bad or the solutions won't work. But the conclusion is therefore we shouldn't act on climate change. now in order to adequately tackle misinformation, which is really complicated and interconnected. You need to take this holistic, interdisciplinary approach. So the four D project is a way of coming out misinformation from different angles, and the four Ds stand for detect deconstruct, debunked and deploy. First of all, you need to be able to detect the misinformation uh and detected quickly automatically ideally, because misinformation spread through social media so quickly. So we've trained a machine learning model to be able to automatically detect the different claims of misinformation. Then you need to ascertain the claims misinformation or not, and we use critical thinking methods to do that. Then you need to debunk them, which involves explaining the techniques used to mislead in misinformation. And lastly, having done all that work, you need to get that stuff out to the public. So what I think a lot of people don't understand is that advertising funds the internet, but this funding model is causing huge problems because it's actually incentivizing people to produce this information. So you've got people who actually can fund their entire operations or earn loads more than their peers because they're producing content that is so fallacious. And advertising next to increasingly, brands are recognizing that they don't want to be seen next to uh content that denies that climate change exists or that is showing doubt or conspiracy around climate action, which is essential because, you know, this kind of misinformation causes harm. They don't want to be seen next to what is seen as harmful content increasingly. And so if brands and advertisers pull advertisers pulled their money from particular platforms or particular newspapers or or from particular sites on google that will actually it will shift the information environment and what is profitable, definitely social media platforms should be doing more. And I think that acknowledges to whether it's flagging the misinformation posts or adjusting their algorithm so that they're less likely to go viral or penalizing repeat offenders or posting fact checking authority of information or pushing authority of information forward. There's lots of different tools and I think that should be using all of them. Climate communication science shows that when people see myths about climate change and its impacts or that it whether it exists or not, when people see that misinformation, they tend to uh they'll vote differently, they'll consume differently. They'll think differently about the climate. We can start to see the real world consequences of misinformation can be anything from undermining faith in democracy, undermining faith in the institutions and the processes that are so important to help us solve big things like climate change. And I think unless we get on top of this, we've got problems in the future when we try and create global or local solutions to some of the big problems that you know that we face as humanity, people often ask me and what can we do about climate change. And I think the most important thing we can do is just open our mouths and talk about it. We need to have climate conversations. We need to break climate silence in order to build the social momentum that leads to the political momentum that creates a real change. Mm hmm.

Mangroves grow much faster than terrestrial forests and can sequester 10 times as much carbon.

Blue carbon can change the fight against climate change

Blue carbon is used to refer to Harbin that's related to the ocean and ocean ecosystems. Generally, when we talk about blue carbon, we are talking about tidal wetlands, including mangroves, seagrass meadows and salt marsh, and specifically looking at restoration or conservation of ecosystems that are at threat of being integrated or converted. Mhm compared to all ecosystem types, they represent a pretty small land area compared to like terrestrial forests or grasslands or agricultural land. But they do store a really high amount of carbon for the small area of land that they cover globally. So despite a babe is on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in the municipality of San Antero, Which is really a town of about 30,000 people it's very small, relatively low income. A lot of people there work in fishing agriculture. A lot of people work in the mangroves themselves. In collaboration with conservationists and nonprofit organizations in the region, Conservation International is supporting a project called Viva Mandela. What we are doing in Colombia is ensuring that mangrove forest are maintained, their in order to guarantee that the carbon that those ecosystems are the question is a conserved in that region, the project in a spot to Colombia, is actually the first project that used one of the relatively new blue carbon methodologies, and it's the first one that applies to conservation of tidal wetland ecosystems. Sparta is the first project in the world to have the carbon stored in the trees. The roots, the trunk believes, so it'll fully calculated and given a price on the international market. So far, they've sold 20,000 off that and that money. Eventually, most of it will go into the hands of the community, and part of it has to go to offset the cost of the monitoring and evaluation. By valuing that carbon, you can make sure that you will receive financial revenue to maintain the activities that are needed to conserve the forest in a long term. It surprised me just how integrated it is in the community for being such a groundbreaking project funded by Apple and these international organizations. The Mongol ero, which the mangrove workers will go into the canoes and grow into the mangrove and we'll see certain trees will be marked with spray paint, and those three are marked because the roots are tangled and that prevents the open flow of water into the mangrove and can increase the salinity, which damages the trees. And it's they're less like that. They'll die off. They'll stop capturing carbon so they go in. They hack at the tangled roots to open up the flow of water and make sure that the mangroves stay healthy. I think the conversation around carbon offsetting and using carbon credits has really been growing a lot within the past few years, and especially for what's called nature based solutions. So basically any climate solution that involves a natural ecosystem, the blue carbon ecosystems store the carbon in the sediment, and that is different from the terrestrial forests. That's why blue carbon ecosystems are so important for climate change Mitigation. Mangroves and Wetlands often grow much faster than terrestrial forests and can sequester 10 times as much carbon. They also provide a buffer and storms and flooding and coastal erosion. They provide a habitat for the wildlife that lives there, and they're also the source of employment for the community. Those communities that are part of the project are very poor. We are working with more or less 4000 people in a between into different villages and all of them are considered as one of the poorest communities in the entire Caribbean coast. It will be really important to protect these ecosystems from different threats, that they face things like coastal development, cutting down mangrove to build new hotels or tourism attractions and also things like sea level rise, um, and other changes in the environment that are also related to climate change. So it's potentially really important to helping solve the climate crisis. But there are also a threat because of impacts from climate change. I think, as we kind of move forward with trying to address the climate crisis. One of the most important ways to do that will be by increasing carbon sequestration and um, kind of greenhouse gas emissions removal, actually taking it out of the atmosphere. Tidal wetland ecosystems are always continuing to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and then many of the kind of newer blue carbon solutions like CB farming or help, are also potentially really powerful in doing that. Mhm, mhm, mhm. Yeah,

The price to save the planet is in the trillions and but the path forward is still unclear.

The cost of getting to Net Zero

How much will it cost to save the planet?

the big goal is to keep the temperature from rising Above 1.5°C by the end of this century, in order to do that, the world knows that we have to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and we have to almost have missions within the next decade. This is going to cost trillions of dollars. It's going to be huge reshaping with the global economy. And one of the big question now is, who is going to pay for this? Mhm. I think you've got to begin by unpacking the financial figures because people, you know, people say it was three trillion a year, 100 million a year. To think of it this way Over the next 30 years, the world may have to invest about $3 trillion a year in building a new green economy. And at the core of that is a much bigger electricity system, much better insulated buildings, you know, new ships, new steel mills, etcetera. And by the way about, you know, three quarters of a billion of that is offset by the fact that you stop investing on the fossil fuel side. Within that there's a bit which may be more problematic. I don't know the exact amount, but it's several hundreds of billions, which has to flow to developing countries where it may be less easy to mobilize those private flows of capital. Then within that figure come down to the sort of figure, which is many tens of billions or maybe 100 billion, which really has to be grand subsidies. The rich developed world paying the developing world to do things which aren't economic not saying here I'm going to invest but get a perfectly good rate of return, but we want you to close down coal mines before their end of useful life that's going to cost you something. We're going to help you do it. I have said many times before and I repeat again that delivering 100 billion is absolutely a matter of trust when we get into whose responsibility is to pay for it. One thing that came up from the beginning of Glasgow was this sort of $100 billion which hung over the event like smog and it was for developed countries to developing countries $100 billion a year to help them adapt to the impact of climate change right now on finance, We are $20 billion dollars short Of the 100 billion. And this commitment even then Might only be met in 2023 on adaptation. Arab station finance remains only 25%,, Not the 50 50 split that was promised nor needed given the warming that has already taken place on this earth, the funding for decarbonization is going to have to come from a lot of different places and ultimately it's probably going to have to be a real combination of both private and public funding and technical assistance. Part of the 100 billion U. S dollars would be accessed through the human carnage funds, everything that we do. We don't implement projects or programs or we implement through partnerships that are prioritized by the complete we have one support that we are providing to Malawi morale. It's a least developed country in africa subject to seasonal flooding, a lot of other weather events. While we are providing a network of both hydrological and meteorological uh system through which the garda information about climate and historical data, use that to provide climate information and no taliban. So you translate the climate data into information that it's usable and translatable to the communities. So this is this is quite good in terms of not only improving uh the information to the various stakeholders but also having timely information they can easily plan and it can also warn them in the event of a common uh disaster. Because if you have these predictions then you'll be able to do some evil creation can proper planning for for the communities In order to have any hope of meeting the goal of keeping emissions to around 1.5 by the end of the century, there's a few things that need to happen that most people agree on one of those is cold productions. It really needs to be completely phased out in the next couple of decades. Another thing is, you know, we need to reduce methane which is far more powerful In the atmosphere than carbon emissions. Co two emissions and then we have kind of these bigger structural shifts at the core of the real economy, Things like shipping, concrete, feel how all of this happens In September, we put out a report called, you know, keeping 1.5° alive. Closing the gap and the background to this was as the presidency team of cop 26 the U. K. Government team pulled together all of what are called the NBCS, the nationally determined contributions, the commitments that each nation has made. It was clear that in total they were not big enough to get the reductions in the 2020 is that we need because we need not only to get to net zero by mid century, we need ideally To get emissions down from sort of 40 gigatons today to order of magnitude 22 by 2030. So what our report said is what are believable actions, which could close that gap by far the biggest actually relates to stopping deforestation and starting reforestation number two was beginning the exit from existing coal, not getting rid of all existing cold, but beginning the exit from existing coal, number three was accelerating the process of road transport, electrification. There was then one on cutting methane leaks, one on accelerating progress in hard to abate sectors like steel and cement and shipping and the other was accelerating energy productivity or efficiency improvements where we know there's lots to go for but really quite slow progress. So we set our report that says, look, this is possible. Look at the technologies, look at the costs, they're manageable. Let's see how close we can get to this at Glasgow to close the gap. And a lot of the focus at Glasgow was whether in addition to the formal, nationally determined contributions, there could also be coalitions of the willing, of particular countries signing up to commitments, which would take us some way to close that gap. For me, the question is not, whether or not things are changing, things are changing, money is starting to move, countries are making commitments. You know, the ship is starting to turn. The question is really whether or not it's going fast enough. We have a goal by 2050 and we have a goal by 2030 have emissions and that is an incredibly short time period. And from now on, every single year needs to be a race to meet that goal and and the fake couldn't be higher. You know, it's human life, it's our existence as we know it. That's on the line here

Climate change and government regulation are driving growth in eco-friendly startups and creating new markets for business.

Climate change is supercharging the growth of new markets

sustainability space and impact investing have been around for years. But in this past year we've seen how the new urgency of climate change regulations from around the world and the new generation of startups and ambassadors have really supercharged the growth of new markets, governments and automakers around the world have set ambitious targets to transition to emission three vehicles. Many analysts now warned that we may run into supply issues to be able to meet these targets. There's a number of components in a battery, there's a cathode nano to separator of structure, the electrolyte fluid and then the circuitry and the management of that. The major parts are the raw materials, but it's a principally a lithium battery. I'll say there's three basic traditional ways to get lithium open pit mining of some kind of a resource, whether it's spot you mean or clay. That's a long slow process that takes months from first scoop out of the ground to final product. Then there's the older, more traditional path, which is the large evaporation ponds in south America the Solares, It can take 20-30,000 hectors of land to build the large evaporation ponds and it takes them more than a year from wellhead to finish product. So control thermal resources. We've built our project with very much a serious approach to being environmentally sustainable. The direct extraction processes very rapid, especially compared to both of those. It's about, it's less than one hour from wellhead to finished product. The brian comes under artesian float to the surface. We extract what we're looking for and reinject that back in to maintain fuel pressure So the actual production rate, demand and delivery to the market is extremely quick in comparison will go commercially operational in 2023. And then in 2024 we start producing the lithium chemicals in commercial operation. I think that demand will exceed supply well past 2030. If you just calculate the number of companies that said, We're going to produce this many cars, the industry will eventually catch up But there will be a significant lag over the next. We'll save 5-15 years. Big banks have been investing trillions of dollars in fossil projects alongside their impact investing portfolios, but in recent years we've seen really a number of sustainability focused startups that have grown and matured. An aspiration especially is aiming to go public by the end of this year, aspirations of ways for people and businesses to embed sustainability into what they're already doing on a daily basis with an aspiration spend and save account all of your deposits are fossil fuel free, will never allow any of those deposits to be used to fund oil and gas pipelines and drilling. And you have your debit card. You have a mobile app that allows you to see your own personal sustainability score and make spending decisions Based on how businesses are treating people on the planet. Then we help people going further, we do things like let you plant a tree with every purchase that you make, we call us plan to change and we do that by rounding up that purchase to the nearest dollar, ask questions planted over 35 million trees over the past year. The fact of the matter is, is the major financial institutions in the world are the major drivers of climate change because that's where the money comes from. And so every time you deposit your paycheck into a bank account at a traditional bank, there's a portion of every single one of those dollars that's being used to fund oil and gas pipelines, drilling or other things like that. The biggest banks in the world are investing $10 billion dollars every single day. And that's a big driver of the climate crisis that we're living. We think of aspiration as a company that's in the business of fighting the climate crisis with so many people working or learning from home over the past year, cities worldwide are dealing with increased waste from home deliveries and grocery bags to take out containers and protective masks. Many of today's plastic so are too costly and complex to recycle and end up in landfills, incinerators or our oceans and the robotics is a colorado startup that is applying artificial intelligence to help solve the problem. Mhm There really is value in this plastic, There's value in this metal, There's value in the paper. The challenge has been the cost of separating it out. Getting the plastics by themselves, getting the paper by themselves is quite costly. And so what we get excited about is the idea that technology like ours can significantly reduce the cost of sorting. That now allows you realize that value. The core piece of our technology is really this artificial intelligence that allows us to identify material. You have a camera that sits over a conveyor belt, identifying bottles, cans, paper, you name it, shoes, diapers, you see all sorts of stuff when it sees a piece of material that our system once it will send a signal to a robot that's just a couple of feet down the conveyor belt robot says, okay, there's the bottle I want, it's coming at me at this velocity, it'll be within range in a second or two. It then reaches out, uses a suction base gripper to grab the item and then throws it into a trash can or a bunker where that material is being collected. If you look at recycling facilities all over the world, you see opportunities for tens of thousands of robots and we've deployed, you know, 100-200 robots at this point. So we're just at the front end and facilities are just beginning to understand the implications of robots for their busy. The exciting thing here is not only sort of less stuff going to landfill and less pollution, but in particular, greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced significantly by expansions and recycling. I really believe in my core that technology can help make doing the right thing easier and cheaper. But I think consumer concern is actually driving a lot of what's going on. The pandemic and the accelerated pace of climate change have really supercharged the development of many industries that we've seen over the past year. And these very visible challenges have inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs to come up with solutions, Paving the way for new industries and new markets five and 10 years down the road.

Altasea at the Port of Los Angeles is looking to become the Silicon Valley for blue economy startups and investors.

A small legion of blue economy investors and enthusiasts look to validate a growing new market

Altasea aims to be a global hub for blue economy startups

Altasea is looking to become the Silicon Valley for blue economy startups and investors.

Uh huh. I think there's nothing more important than the human race to rethink the way that we're using the planet. You see all these problems because the ocean is really yelling at us to do something and we have to pay attention all theses mission is to facilitate scientific research, to facilitate job generation at the port of Los Angeles and underlining the whole mission is to inspire the next generation to look to the blue economy for well paying job. Yeah, So the warehouse that were in opened in 1915 and was used for trade in transit, you'll see railroad tracks on each side of this building, but it's 100 and 80,000 square feet. It's kind of warehouse just doesn't exist anymore. The whole property is 35 acres and it's 4100 linear feet of dock space. It's perfect for what we want to do, which is create the biggest water cooler for the Blue Economy. The emerging sustainable blue economy. Mhm. The blue economy is actually a cross industry cross disciplinary all encompassing term that is related to everything about sustainable ocean solutions. Mhm. It looks at things like ports and shipping, transportation, the decarbonization of shipping. It is related to the coastal economy and tourism. It is also related to water and energy. Marine energy, wave energy, but it all coalesces around thinking about the ocean and thinking about ocean solutions and the role the ocean economy plays in these industry sectors also see as an umbrella organisation is really critical to what we do at grade theory because we are the entrepreneur ecosystem piece connecting the research to the commercialization to the industry. We're adventure advisory firm that is really focused on supporting engineering and science. Lead entrepreneurs in a number of disciplines, but all of it coalescence around solutions for the blue economy. We're super involved with a number of universities and startups. One led by U. S. C. On a kelp initiative to take the research that's going around, help to find commercial applications in food and pharmaceuticals. Help is huge. In fact we're building USCs seaweed lob here so we will bring jobs that will get tastier way jen is on the way. Mhm. Agriculture is a sustainable way to feed a growing population. I think the best definition for agriculture is the controlled cultivation of a marine animal, whether that's a pearl mussel and moisture, a fish, a sea sponges, sea squirt et cetera. Were taking an animal and reforming it just in the ocean um which has a lot of benefit. We don't use any fresh water so we can serve fresh water, we don't really use any external energy so we can serve energy, you know, muscles in particular, sequester carbon from the ocean, They capture harmful elements and filter amount. Um They improve the water quality and the clarity and they create an environment for other animals to thrive as well. You know, they create artificial reefs, multi trophic environments and not just mussel farming. A lot of marine farming does the same thing. Yeah, aquaculture hasn't taken off in the U. S. Because there's no understanding of how it's done, there's really no pathway to establish it. Um Land based farming has become something that feels natural and has felt natural for several 100 years now. The machinery, the techniques, the industry, the distribution, the sales, it's all familiar, it's all comfortable. Best way to explain agriculture in the U. S. It is a lemonade stand in the neighborhood. Yeah, so one of the biggest challenges in the blue economy is all related to funding. A lot of the solutions that they're coming up with are not easily defendable in a capitalistic business model. So that scalability and finding the funding to transition from out of the lab and into the market continues to be a challenge. Were still doing a lot of educating to the investor community. Most investors understand that we have to look to a low to no carbon uh industry, it's just we have to do that. And the best solutions for that are in the ocean. I actually think that the message about the emerging blue economy is getting very strong and more competitive. There is more interest and understanding and care for and thought about the ocean then I've ever seen in my entire life. It is now becoming important to people who don't live right on the water. People are trying to understand who don't sail or surf kayak that can only help this whole explosion in interest globally

Stricter policies on recycling have accelerated a growth in recycling tech startups.

A global recycling crisis is fueling innovation

it is a major global pollution crisis of an enormous scale and the underlying issue here is our broader economic system, which is a take make and waste system. If we continue on this trajectory with the exponential growth of plastic that we're seeing now, there will be more plastics in our oceans than fish. By 2050. Wasteful system is harming biodiversity is contributing to the climate crisis is wasting a lot of finite resources, but also on a, on the economic point of view, the plastics that we're wasting is $100 billion worth of materials that is lost to our global economy every single year. There really is value in this plastic, there's value in this metal, there's value in the paper. The challenge has been the cost of separating it out. Getting the plastics by themselves. Getting the paper by themselves is quite costly. So as you bring that cost of sorting down, you'll find more and more materials start to become profitable to recycle. And so what we get excited about is the idea that technology like ours can significantly reduce the cost of sorting. That now allows you to realize that value. The core piece of our technology is really this artificial intelligence that allows us to identify material, we have a camera that sits over a conveyor belt, identifying bottles, cans, paper, you name it when it sees a piece of material that our system. Once it'll send a signal to a robot that's just a couple of feet down the conveyor belt. The robot says, okay, there's the bottle I want. It then reaches out, uses a suction based gripper to grab the item and then throws it into a receptacle where that material is being collected. We can provide all sorts of information to the recycling facilities about how efficient their operations are, where the material is going. But just as important as we can identify the material at the brand level and even at the school level and once we know that we know a lot about that object that lets us do is when we separated out, we can say, we know for this whole ton of plastic you may be selling it is you know, 98% number one plastic, it is 2% number five plastic. And by the way, all of the contaminants that are in there here is what they are now as a buyer of that material, I can be sure about the quality and I can be sure that it's going to meet the chemical requirements uh for whatever and good I want to make, we're really at the front end of this process and facilities are just beginning to understand the implications of robotics for their business. We buy now all know that recycling is one part of the solution, but we won't recycle way out of that and we also need to really look upstream and think about how to deliver products to consumers without generating packaging waste and and one of the options to do that is reused models and reusable packaging and the loop platform, for example, is one of these models, which we would call kind of return models where products are delivered to consumers, they consume the actual product that is in the packaging and the reusable packaging is taken back, is cleaned, is refilled and can be used over and over again. You know, we vilify plastic today, but don't think plastic is necessarily evil. I don't think metal is evil. I think using them once is the wrong in loop. Instead of the consumer owning the package, the consumer borrows the package and the package is always property of the manufacturer. And then they're financially motivated, forget sustainability, financially motivated to make them long lasting and durable and even potentially brings new features to the package, like keeping things fresh longer. Cools longer, warm longer. All these things you couldn't do in disposable. We do see large businesses also play an important role here because in the end, they are still the ones defining how the vast majority of packaging and plastic products put on the market are designed and in particular the brands and the retailers here are crucial because they are the ones who decide what materials they use, how their products and packaging is designed, how their business model is set up. Is it a single user reused model? We vote for the future we want with money multiple times a day with what we buy because what manufacturers and retailers are looking at is not to sell us what we don't want that to figure out what we want to give it to us. So if we change our desires, things on the shelf will change full stop. It's not about simply trying to eliminate all packaging or recycled packaging at the expense of creating much more food waste. We need to think about how can we deliver food to consumers in a way that does not generate packaging waste appeal is an edible plant derived coding that extends the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables. The product is manufactured as a powder and then mixed in solution with water and spray, then lightly dried onto the produce upstream. So we partner with produce suppliers. Packers, growers, distributors, importers in some instances to integrate our application systems into their packing lines. By applying the product, we're able to extend the shelf life, such that produce last up to 2 to 3 times longer and it can reduce waste can create other sustainable outcomes. Plastic packaging has sometimes been seen as sustainable alternatives to food waste and that's not necessarily greenwashing. There's this tension between the environmental impacts of food waste and then environmental impacts of plastic packaging. Food waste contributes 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and really the best way to reduce those emissions is to prevent food waste from happening in the first place. If we're eliminating food ways for eliminating all of the upstream resources, use transportation emissions, everything that goes into the one third of food that grown for consumption that goes to waste. The issue we're facing is of an enormous scale. And the journey towards creating a fully circular economy for plastics is is a multi decade journey that we're in a lot still needs to be done. But there's also encouraging signals of a lot of these discussions happening, businesses raising their ambition level, so there's definitely still a lot to be done too early to celebrate victory here, but really encouraging signs that it's accelerating. Yes.

Leaders from Anheuser-Busch and Gap, Inc. weigh in.

The importance of sustainable supply chains

Features

maybe the last time you went to a story about a piece of assemble yourself furniture, right? You open the box, there's hundreds of pieces. Each of those pieces was manufactured somewhere before it ended up in that box. And it's made of raw materials that were sourced in some way, whether it was horse products, whether it was metal, that was mind all of that is a supply chain. And so when you're making a decision as a consumer, there's a huge supply chain system that brought that product to the shelf and how products are made, how they're transported and sold. All of those have huge environmental impact, Roughly 90% of a consumer products impact is happening in the supply chain. You know, we started to look at how companies are incorporating sustainability. I think even as soon as nine years ago there's sustainability was on the radar, but it was a very superficial kind of adoption, right? You know, fast forward over the last decade or so, as I say, that both the recognition of their role, but also, you know, the actual public awareness about the scope of impact of supply chain. Both of those have kind of converged, right? You know, I think there was even accelerating factor of covid 19 where, you know, people ran out of toilet paper and they realized that was a function of supply chain so that became uh that supply chains are critical, they have big impacts, they can be disrupted. And so I think all of these converging factors have led to this point now where I see the for around supply chain sustainability as the highest it's ever been. The pandemic and other disruptions like climate change are starting to expose that we also need resilient supply change, not just efficient supply change. And so really thinking about how do we build in that resiliency? How do we build sustainability into those decisions to make sure not only that we have affordable products, but it's also doing it in a way that we know that they'll be there when we need them most. Yeah, our supply chain is incredibly complex. It spans many geographic locations, um it touches the lives of millions of people, both directly and indirectly. And so I think the biggest challenges where do you choose to focus that has the largest impact? We used the expression from dirt to shirt. We think about the actual soil that the fibers come out of the growing process. We have a strong commitment by 2030 to be water resilient across our entire supply chain and by 2050 to actually being water net positive. We also think about renewable fibers. And so we've been engaged in many cellulose fibers and making sure that they're coming from renewable plants that have a fast growth life cycle. This is really important when you look at recycled fibers, which we use quite a bit of and how you think about virtuous cycle of a full fledged cycle doesn't end when we're done wearing it. How do we take and actually reuse that clothing as well? We purchased everything there is to buy from hops, barley, all of the ingredients, the warehousing, everything we need to sell the beer. So everything that is needed to run a growing company sustainability. To put it simple is good for business. It attracts down, it helps us to empower corporate reputation. It is more and more demanded and expected by investors and consumers. And then last, but definitely not least doing what's right for the environment. It's cheaper than not doing it. Think for a long time climate change was seen as something far off in the future. We had plenty of time to address it, and I think now we're seeing ice caps melting, right, increases in wildfires, more powerful hurricane, right? More droughts, more blood. We're all experiencing that in our daily lives and I think that's making all of us, and especially younger generations far more aware of the impact. And I think empowered to want to do something about it because they have a long life in front of them. And a lot of that is translating into the company's they're supporting in the product that they're purchasing at the end of the day. When you think about your demand, it begins and ends with what your consumer wants and our consumers in this day and age are asking they want to wear their values. They're telling us that they want to know not only that their product was made in a sustainable way, but how it was made, who was made by and that those processes have been end to end sustainable and representative of the life they want to lead in their community. That means making sure that we are thoughtful about the economics and the ecosystems that we impact. It's really important when we think about longitude of our business as well as the economics of our business for us, we are doing this because it's essential to the survival of our business. We can make beer without barley cannot make beer without water. So if we have a water crisis, there's no more beer. Whether it's a brewery, whether it's a wholesaler, they are all part of making this happen. The reality is consumers expect a lot from companies and trust in a company in a brand is really important and tightly connected to repeat purchases, right? And having that sales both consistent and growing. He also need companies to use their most powerful tool, which is policy advocacy. It's great if one company is doing what they need to do. But as a planet, we need everyone there and policy is an important tool to help get us to that Global pollution sustainability is not just about doing good for our communities and all the peoples lives. We touch. It's also good business practice. And if this is where your consumer wants to go, this isn't an option. It isn't something you can just pay lip service to. You need to go do it and you need to do the hard work, which is often innovation. It's not only doing good for the world we live in, but it's doing right for your company as well and all of your stakeholders. Yeah.

New Belgium Brewing's CEO says his company can't afford to ignore climate change.

Consumers want eco-friendly beer

Consumers have a lot of choices when it comes to beer. There's 8000 craft breweries ever take in the United States today and it's a category consumers really like to engage in consumers, relish that opportunity to research the breweries and understand who they're spending their money with. We have an obligation to the communities that were part of and yes to our shareholders as well, to address climate in a rapid, meaningful way. Because the longevity of our businesses depend on it as well as our co workers and employees here depend on us having a business as well. Yeah, yeah, we care a lot about the community or surrounding areas and making sure that they prosper in the future. And I think because breweries are so essential to communities, they really focus on those types of things. We make an agricultural product, so having access to clean water, having access to great hops, great barley. This is critical to us making a great product and consumers see the impact of climate change in their everyday lives and they are willing to support companies and brands that are taking real authentic, serious action to help reduce the problems and address climate change. The three main ingredients that go into beer waters wide, but barley and hops, the two main ingredients in beer has something in common and that is. Those two ingredients are almost exclusively used only for beer. Hops are very centralized in their production area and very centralized in the number of hot growers. There are barley is completely the other way and that is that there are thousands of growers that sell to malting companies. Fire and drought are two of the biggest risks to us from climate change. We need fresh crops every year to be able to continue to brew beer. You start out buying grain and £55 bags and then you graduate to £2000 bags and then now you know where we are, where a railcar picks up the grain, it drops, it probably three miles from here and a truck takes it dumped in our silo. I think our silos hold £50,000 of grain. So as you get bigger, you're able to leverage more and more things, you sort of move further and further to doing it more efficiently and more sustainably. We've done things like giving our spent grain farmers were now testing out uh nitrogen instead of CO two and some of our process, we're doing things like solar panels, like all those things, but the list will just keep going on and on and on. But it's really fun stuff because there's always new innovations that are kind of working their way down from the big guys to the small guys like us where they actually become accessible. New Belgium's goal is to be carbon neutral by 2030 and we recently had fat tire become the first certified carbon neutral here in the United States. New Belgium was the first wind powered brewery back in 1998. They have a huge solar array here at our brewery in Fort Collins, but we're continuing to invest in on tight renewables as well. Many of our emissions are tied to systemic issues. They're tied to the electric grid, they're tied to farming practices, They are tied to transportation issues. And so new Belgium is not in a position to solve any of those on its own. And so we use advocacy as a way to help rally other brewers, but frankly other businesses because we can't solve them. As I said individually, we, we actually need to collective and we need government policy and government regulations to really help us get after solving some of these bigger drivers of our own greenhouse gas emissions. We work with all of our vendors from the very, very beginning part of our RFP processes, a questionnaire that asked them questions about how they're being sustainable, what their goals are, what they plan to do in the next 5, 10 years to make sure there is sustainable company. And sometimes we do things on our own, even if our vendors are not perfect, we spend time with the Department of Energy, Os you Oregon State University and our local community college to come here and audit what we do and also audit how we worked with our vendors to find how we can optimize. I think the impetus for change is coming from consumers. I think it's coming from companies, I think it's also coming from shareholders and investors. We need to be thinking about true long term sustainability of our businesses and our organizations, which means it has to be top of mind with the Internet, with social media with sort of transparency over the last especially 20-30 years, consumers now can actually understand the positive and negative externalities. I think that is one of the greatest things that we have now is transparency of what actually is happening behind the scenes for a product to eventually get produced. Now we have this remarkable vehicle of the Internet and social media and low cost ways that small producers can say, here's my product, here's why it's different, here's what I care about and here's why you should buy it. There's a belief that medium sized businesses, small businesses as well can't afford regulation or policy around climate. The voice I bring that is we're actually the businesses who can't afford climate change. Were the people who are going to pay more for raw ingredients or will be cut off entirely from certain ingredients relative to bigger players who are out there. And so without addressing this, the economy is going to have fewer successful small businesses than it does today. That is the greatest part about being a small business in this time in this age is that we have the ability to shine a light, We have the ability to tell our story. We have the ability to show consumers, hey, why are you going to buy uh my product that might be a little bit more expensive, but here's what I'm doing both in my company, for my employees, for my community and for the environment. And you can make the choice if you want to support this. And thankfully, consumers are choosing to support the people and the companies and the brands that they believe in. And that's uh pretty special time, I think to be running a small business in America. Yeah.

Fashion emits as much carbon as Germany, the UK and France combined.

Startups are helping the fashion industry go green

if you handle this to someone and you said shut your eyes and feel this material and tell me what you have in your hand, they would say it's a piece of love it. That is rather amazing because it's made of mushrooms. So the fashion industry has a very specific role and crucial role to play in uh in the global, global path towards sustainability. Because where we stand right now is the industry is commissioning roughly two billion tons of CO two, which is roughly 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions that we have, which is roughly equivalent to watch Germany UK and France in totality would emission together. So this is a lot. So there is significant and urgent need for action, which I believe also starting to really think in with executives across the industry, everybody uses textiles. We are all wearing clothes right now. We all carry bags, we all wear shoes, textiles are one of the most pervasive categories of product on earth. When you, when you look at the entire value chain of fashion, roughly, 40% of all emissions are somewhat related to the material. Use over 75% of all governments are theoretically produce a bubble out of alternative fibers or retractable fibers, But actually below 10% today are produced out of these types of fibers. So the full value train is about rethinking every activity through a sustainable doing and bolt thread. A startup organization is a fantastic partner in rethinking and innovating where materials come from and ultimately what impact they have on the planet. And the first iteration of that in the partnership is utilizing mycelium. Mycelium is the roof structure of a mushroom. So it's what you, you see a mushroom as it grows out of the ground or it grows up the side of a tree. The mycelium is everything you don't see that is under the ground. We grow our mycelium on a specialty mushroom farm. These things are grown in the dark, what you would see when you open the door after they're finished growing are these trays with fluffy layer on top of the tray, It looks and feels and squishes just like marshmallow. A lot of transformation happens between that marshmallow and the leather. It's no secret that growing animals has a very large environmental footprint. You know, it takes a year to grow up house. That is a big, long, impactful process. We can grow this product in less than a week. The first product that we decided to use the milo material on is this dan smith. So the milo stan smith has just been launched and as it's an exploration of using this new material, we could only make a small amount of cares and we put those pears out to test them. And now we're working on the next steps of how we can scale that product. We are working today with Adidas, caring, lulu, lemon and Stella McCartney. I think traditionally we like to think of these people as being competitors, but they actually, when you put them in a room and they're all working towards the common goal, they actually can collaborate. We don't have all the answers and we need partnerships to help fund the way forward for sustainability. We recognize that both reds needs the support and the investment to get that innovation up and running so that we can be at the point of scaling it. Ultimately, the investors have a critical role to play all of these innovations are largely driven by startups, often in collaboration with big brands for the investment requirements and that's where these brands are just invaluable. If we were simply a group of scientists in a lab would come up with a novel material, how would an investor really know that we might be capable of taking its market? I think, in our industry, it's up to leadership, That's what's going to make a real difference. We have to start changing the objective that we put forward for our company, and if we can work together, that's when we'll really start to make the difference. Yeah.

Path to Zero

This eco-friendly rocket fuel can change the space industry

Latest episode

BluShift made history in 2021 for launching the first commercial rocket using biofuel. As rocket use grows so does concern about polluting the stratosphere. Small companies are developing innovative solutions to the problem.

Episodes (21 episodes)

This eco-friendly rocket fuel can change the space industry

How e-bikes are challenging green transportation

Your smartphone is bad for the planet; these companies want to help

Why hydrogen could fuel the future of transportation

Regenerative farming will take multiple stakeholders to take off

Can gaming apps help us reduce our carbon footprint?

The fight against toxic beauty

Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color

How architecture can slow climate change

How changing water supply is reshaping agriculture

The rise of eco-friendly options for your body after death

Many companies failing to live up to promises to prioritize people

The urgency to combat climate misinformation

Blue carbon can change the fight against climate change

The cost of getting to Net Zero

Climate change is supercharging the growth of new markets

A small legion of blue economy investors and enthusiasts look to validate a growing new market

A global recycling crisis is fueling innovation

The importance of sustainable supply chains

Consumers want eco-friendly beer

Startups are helping the fashion industry go green