Earth911.com's Sustainability In Your Ear

Food production is one of the most impactful forces shaping our environment, responsible for approximately a quarter of annual global carbon emissions, deforestation, and soil depletion, among other impacts. However, a new generation of food and snack companies is stepping up to change the narrative, working to make food production a force for regeneration, sustainability, and environmental stewardship. Tune into this discussion with Keith Bearden, CEO of Alter Eco Foods, a snack and chocolate maker on a mission to positively impact the planet's regenerative agriculture, climate-neutral products, and reduced waste. Founded with a vision to create delicious food that benefits people and the environment, Alter Eco has pioneered transitioning cacao farmers to regenerative practices, and it has achieved climate-neutral certification while innovating in more sustainable and compostable packaging. Dive into how Alter Eco works to make a difference and lead the way for the food industry. 

Keith explains that consumers and influencers actively campaign for environmentally responsible foods, clothing, and products in every other category. And it is working, albeit never as fast as we might like, but the transition is underway. Retailers are stocking their shelves with more sustainable products and companies, at least the enlightened ones, are recognizing the benefits of transparency — not just with consumers but among companies in the same supply chain — which will ultimately lead to effective reductions in emissions across the economy. You can learn more about Alter Eco Foods, its chocolate, and granola products at https://www.alterecofoods.com/

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Being a consumer in an advanced economy—or any economy these days—is challenging because you cannot keep up with the ever-changing range of ingredients and materials in the products at the store. For example, thousands of new chemicals are registered annually. Still, many more compounds that could be harmful are introduced and used in manufacturing. These chemicals can harm our health and the environment. However, many tools for interrogating our world and the products we buy are emerging, offering insights into our lifestyles' health and environmental impact. Meet Stephen Fuller, Senior Criteria Manager at TCO Development, a globally recognized certification organization promoting sustainable practices for technology products based in Stockholm, Sweden. With over 350,000 chemicals in use today and only a tiny fraction of those subjected to risk assessment, TCO has developed disclosures of the chemicals used in information technology products. In 2015, the organization introduced an Accepted Substance List, a catalog of safer alternative chemicals vetted by organizations like GreenScreen and ChemFORWARD. TCO hopes to drive semiconductor, computer, phone, and TV manufacturers to adopt materials that meet rigorous environmental and social responsibility standards.

IT buyers in a market-based economy need valid, transparent sources of information to make informed buying decisions. Yet the complexity of, and constantly evolving technologies used in technology products makes keeping abreast of what is safe for humans and nature a constant challenge. TCO Development, GreenScreen, and ChemFORWARD have built a collaboration that helps enterprise IT buyers exert their desire to use safer alternatives to toxic chemicals, and those insights are filtering down to consumer electronics buyers. Stephen explains that TCO Development is still working to make the Accepted Substances List a standard for appliances like TVs, toasters, or microwaves so that everyone can join the call for safer electronics. Once TCO's product passport has become a widely accepted tool for understanding the chemicals in our technologies, buyers, not the producers, will be empowered to track what chemicals they are exposed to and advocate — through their spending and conversational influence—for the least harmful, least environmentally damaging practices. You can learn more about TCO Development and the Accepted Substances List at https://tcocertified.com/

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The sharing economy can be a platform for keeping products in circulation and out of landfills until they are no longer usable and must be recycled. If we can get more uses out of things we currently throw away, we can reduce the need to extract raw materials from the Earth. Meet a pioneer in sharing, Daan Weddenpohl, founder and CEO of Peerby, an innovative Dutch platform at the forefront of the sharing economy. Peerby connects people within neighborhoods and communities, enabling them to share items that would otherwise remain underused, such as household tools, appliances, and recreational equipment. Peerby promotes sustainable consumption by reducing the demand for new products and fosters social connections among community members. Daan launched Peerby with the belief that shared resources and connected communities could make a significant positive impact on the environment, economy, and society at large. Peerby has grown into a platform that addresses the local challenge that underlies global over-consumption and waste. We delve into Peerby’s service, the challenges and opportunities of the sharing economy, and Daan’s insights on the future of sustainable living and community-focused innovation. 

Daan describes his goal for Peerby as making it a Netflix for stuff, and the question is whether the digital infrastructure can help make physical assets as widely available at low cost as Netflix has made movies and television shows. To do so, we must first virtualize the physical economy, and we’ve heard from organizations like GS1 and TCO that they are working to launch product passports that document where products are manufactured, how the raw materials are sourced, and the distribution networks that deliver them to the consumer. Once we document product lifecycles, it is possible to manage their use, reuse, and even recycle them when they become unusable to reduce the extraction of raw materials and the carbon impact of the things that support our lives. But it takes an essential first step, the choice by people in their homes and workplaces to make what they have last longer, to share items like a drill or a truck to minimize the surplus inventories of material goods that have come to define consumerism in the 21st Century. You can learn more about Peerby at https://www.peerby.com/

Sustainability In Your Ear welcomes back oceanographer and author John Englander, who last visited with us in February 2023. John is the author of two pivotal books on Sea Level Rise, High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis, which explores the science behind rising seas and its far-reaching impacts on society, and Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward, which offers a comprehensive look at how individuals, businesses, and governments can adapt to this unavoidable reality. He recently gave a talk at the U.S. Naval Academy and shares the reaction he heard from admirals and strategists charged with protecting U.S. interests a sea. John delivered a stark warning about the accelerating rate of sea level rise, emphasizing the vulnerabilities of the Antarctic ice sheets—particularly the Thwaites Glacier, which also known as the "Doomsday Glacier." He warned that the collapse of the Thwaites alone could lead to significant sea level rise within the next few decades, with profound implications for global military operations, coastal infrastructure, and international security.

Sea level rise is the permanent change humans will live with for centuries, probably millennia, because the oceans have absorbed most of the heat trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. Average sea surface temperatures have climbed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius, or 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The Arctic is warming four times faster, about 3 degrees Celsius since 1980, and that has raised sea levels by between 21 and 24 centimeters, or about nine inches, in the same period. John also shared recent warnings about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which drives circulation of seawater globally. Until we lower emissions sufficiently to stop glacial melting, sea level will only rise more and ports, infrastructure, and entire economies will deal with the threat of disruption. Learn more about the organization he cofounded, the Rising Seas Institute, at https://risingseasinstitute.org/. It became a program of Nova Southeastern University on November 1, 2024.

The climate crisis cannot be solved by one person, one organization, one company, or one government. A network of collaboration is being built, and nonprofits often serve as the connective tissue. Our guest today Brett Jenks, is the CEO of Rare.org, a global conservation and development organization dedicated to empowering communities in the world's most biologically diverse regions to sustainably manage their natural resources. Under Brett’s leadership, Rare has grown from a small nonprofit into a global leader in conservation, with a $30 million annual budget and active projects across 60 countries. Rare’s efforts span a variety of critical areas, including Fish Forever, the world’s largest coastal fishery recovery effort; Lands for Life, a climate-smart agriculture program; the groundbreaking Center for Behavior & the Environment, which merges behavioral science with conservation; and Climate Culture, a strategy designed to help the U.S. meet its Paris Agreement targets.

Beyond his leadership of Rare, Brett is also an innovator in the for-profit sector with the Meloy Fund, a blue economy investment vehicle that supports a growing portfolio of companies, including several focused on sustainable fisheries in Southeast Asia and EverForest, a video game that turns virtual actions into real-world tree planting. Brett shared seven ideas Americans can act on to change their environmental impact. You can learn more about Rare at https://rare.org/ and about the Meloy Fund at https://www.meloyfund.com/

The water crisis is one of the most pressing issues facing our planet, with climate change, population growth, and pollution threatening the availability of clean water worldwide. One company working to tackle this problem head-on is Spout Water. This California-based startup has developed an innovative solution, the Spout Monolith, a sleek kitchen device that produces pure drinking water from the moisture in the air. Spout founder and CEO Reuben Vollmer joins the conversation to explain how a personal challenge began his mission to solve water scarcity and quality issues. Reuben recently contributed an article to Earth911, mapping his journey into the world of water. It started with an unexpected letter his family received during a drought in 2010, warning that their olive farm's well could be restricted. 

Water production and distribution needs a good swift kick in the form of a surprising alternative to how we've done it during the Industrial Era. The Spout Monolith may be one kick in our complaisance. We are surrounded by water in the atmosphere. A June 2022 study by the University of Reading in the United Kingdom found that total atmospheric water vapor is increasing by about 1% a decade due to warming climates. One percent may not sound like much, but the United States Geological Survey reports that the planet's atmosphere contains 12 trillion gallons of water, so one percent more water vapor represents 120 billion gallons. That one-percent increase in atmospheric water vapor per decade means that between 2010 and 2050, as much as 480 billion gallons of additional water vapor will migrate into the air, around half of today's annual human consumption of freshwater. You can learn more about the company and preorder a Monolith with a $100 discount using the code "MITCH911" at https://www.spoutwater.com/

The global food system is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for about 25% of annual anthropomorphic CO2 emission, the unfortunate, planet-warming exhaust of our industrial society. But what if we could eat our way out of the climate crisis? Author Mark J. Easter joins the conversation to talk regenerative farming and his new book, The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos. He explores how we can change our diets to help restore the environment  — he gets to the roots of the challenge, a failure of industrial farming. As an ecologist who has spent years studying the carbon footprint of food at Colorado State University, Mark connects the dots between what we eat, how it’s produced, and its impact on our planet.

In The Blue Plate, Mark plumbs the concept of regenerative agriculture and carbon farming—showing how these practices can not only reduce the carbon footprint of food but also actively restore ecosystems. From the smallest urban farm to sprawling agricultural lands, he argues that how we grow, process, and distribute food holds tremendous potential for climate solutions. For instance, he reports on the innovative use of cover crops and perennial grains like Kernza, a perennial grain, which has been shown to pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil—effectively turning farming into a climate-positive practice. Mark’s journey from greenhouse gas accounting to becoming an advocate for low-carbon meals is filled with fascinating insights into how the food system shapes the world we live in—and how, with the right approach, it can help reverse some of the damage done to the environment. You can find The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos at Amazon, Powell's Books, and your local bookseller.

Consumers and grocers who want to verify the quality of the beef they sell are asking for increased supply chain transparency. Vivian Tai, Director of Innovation at GS1 US visited with Earth911 in February 2024 to introduce GS1's Digital Link advanced universal product code and returns to talk beef transparency with Jayson Berryhill, cofounder of Wholechain, who worked with GS1 to develop a new standard for cattle traceability using innovative blockchain technology. Wholechain Cattle Traceability is a system for verifying compliance with various standards, including animal welfare and feeding practices. Wholechain’s blockchain-based system ensures that information about the entire supply chain—such as where the cattle were raised, what they ate, and their treatment in life—can be tracked and authenticated.

We explore how their collaboration will provide you with more information and how Wholechain’s platform might be used to calculate environmental impacts, such as deforestation and methane emissions, while helping companies comply with regulations that shape the world’s food supply, like the Food & Drug Administration’s Food Safety Modernization Act Rule 204, which requires business to maintain records of food production, processing, and distribution to enable rapid identification of contamination sources during a foodborne illness outbreak. We’ll also discuss how Wholechain’s blockchain technology could expand beyond cattle to other industries, creating more transparent, sustainable, and circular global supply chains. You can learn more about Wholechain at https://wholechain.com/ and about GS1’s traditional rectangular bar codes and next-generation 2D QR code, GS1 Digital Link at https://www.gs1us.org/

David Katz, founder and CEO of Plastic Bank, returns to talk with Mitch Ratcliffe about the groundbreaking social enterprise's effort to transform plastic waste into economic opportunity. Plastic Bank has created a “global bottle deposit program" that partners with companies to incentivize the collection of ocean-bound plastic in vulnerable communities. Plastic Bank provides vital income while reducing plastic pollution, with over 3 billion plastic bottles already intercepted from entering our oceans.

Since David last visited with Earth911, there has been a lot of growth and, recently, Plastic Bank introduced a subscription program that small businesses can join to support better plastic collection.David explains that regeneration as a practice can provide prosperity for all. In the face of the systemic trainwreck threatening human, animal, and aquatic life on the planet, we need not just a recycling system but a functioning society built on shared values, not exclusion from the opportunity to earn, influence the direction of our communities, or the right to a healthy environment. You can learn more at https://plasticbank.com/

Meet David Steinman, an environmental activist, investigative journalist, and author who has worked to expose the dangers of chemical toxins in everyday life. Steinman's bestselling 1990 book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, highlighted the hidden chemical dangers in our food. In his latest book, Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins, examines how everyday products contribute to this health crisis and offers practical advice for parents to reduce their children’s exposure to these hidden dangers, creating a safer environment for the next generation. Cancer cases in people under 50 increased by 79% between 1990 and 2019, according to several studies and a research report published in Nature found that more than half of the cancers it studied, eight of 14 illness, were related to the digestive system. Highly processed foods and many apparently natural products that are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides not disclosed on labeling, are making us sick.
 
The rising incidence of childhood illnesses, including developmental and behavioral disorders, which experts increasingly link to environmental factors. For example, exposure to pesticides, particularly organophosphate (OP) pesticides, has been linked to an increase in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reduced cognitive function in children. David's new book also explores the role of nature in the developing personality and as an antidote for some of the harms chemicals cause in childhood. David explains that parents can be diligent on a budget, so consider adding a water filter on your faucet and filtering the air in your home — inexpensive options available to almost all families — and choose organic produce at the grocery store. Most importantly, you can take action by taking kids outside, writing letters demanding better regulation of chemicals and becoming a citizen enforcer, calling out dangerous toxic products in your community. You can find Raising Healthy Kids: Protecting Your Children from Hidden Chemical Toxins on Amazon and at Powell’s Books.