Episodes

  • Earth911 Podcast: Meet Carbon Capture Innovator Varin Sikka, Barron Prize Young Hero Prize Winner

    Earth911 Podcast: Meet Carbon Capture Innovator Varin Sikka, Barron Prize Young Hero Prize Winner
    Feb 3 2025
    Climate Change has terrible impacts today, and youth coming of age face depressing prospects. However, they are stepping up to the challenge and could see the fruits of their efforts in a restored climate during their lifetime. Climate restoration requires extraordinary efforts of young people, who are already leading the charge. On this episode, Sustainability In Your Ear introduces another winner of the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, which recognizes each year a dozen youth for their innovation and action. The program considers kids between 8 and 18. In 2024, one of the remarkable individuals awarded $10,000 by the program is Varin Sikka, a 16-year-old innovator from California. Varin has invented AirCat, a groundbreaking Direct Air Capture (DAC) system designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale. He's doing more than imagining the technology. Varin has a 3D-printed home version and is working with Siemens Energy after taking AirCat to the COP28 meeting in Dubai held in 2023.Varin was motivated to develop the AirCat by the apocalyptic wildfires that brought red skies to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2020. On today's show, he shares how he came to be a 16-year-old inventor, the feelings his friends have about climate change, and the advice he would give youth who feel climate anxiety: Get involved. This year's awards will be announced in the fall. Fiction writer T.A. Barron created the prize and named the program after his mother to help inspire kids to make a positive difference in the world. You can learn more about the Gloria Barron Prize, and if you are between 8 and 18 years old, consider entering to be considered for the 2025 awards at https://barronprize.org/ Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTubeCheck out previous Earth911 interviews about carbon capture technologiesBest of Earth911 Podcast: Nikki Batchelor and Mike Leitch Share XPRIZE Carbon Removal ProgressEarth911 Podcast: Talking Carbon Capture Investments with Rick ParnellEarth911 Podcast: Talking Eco-Anxiety and Carbon Capture With the Foundation for Climate Restoration’s Dr. Erica DoddsEarth911 Podcast: Global Thermostat’s Graciela Chichilnisky on Distributed Carbon Capture EconomiesBest of Earth911 Podcast: Nikki Batchelor and Mike Leitch Share XPRIZE Carbon Removal ProgressBest of Earth911 Podcast: Author Peter Fiekowsky on Climate RestorationTalking Direct Air Capture of Atmospheric CO2 with Peter FiekowskyBest of Earth911 Podcast: How To Build a Just & Equitable Carbon Removal IndustryBest of Earth911 Podcast: Dr. Marcius Extavour on the $100M XPRIZE Circular Carbon Network Competition
    Show more Show less
    32 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: Eco-Stylist Garik Himebaugh On Creating Your Sustainable Style

    Earth911 Podcast: Eco-Stylist Garik Himebaugh On Creating Your Sustainable Style
    Jan 27 2025
    Meet Garik Himebaugh, the founder of Eco-Stylist.com, a site dedicated to promoting sustainable fashion choices. Garik's journey into the world of sustainable fashion began with a background in peace studies and an MBA, and he discovered social entrepreneurship as a grad student and launched Eco-Stylist in 2018. There, he helps consumers make informed, sustainable fashion choices with a directory of brands that meet his criteria for ethical production and environmental responsibility.encouraging individuals to "dress like you give a damn." He was kind enough to contribute a recent article on Earth911, How to Build the Sustainable Wardrobe of Your Dreams. He points to how the fast fashion crisis is burying some countries in the global south in synthetic trash that can take decades or centuries to breakdown into potentially toxic plastic byproducts. Garik joined the Sustainability In Your Ear conversation to discuss how to check the sustainability claims made by clothing companies, the power of reuse and upcycling as a way to reduce your personal environmental impact, and his favorite responsible fashion brands, including Adelante, Outerknown, Naadam, and Patagonia.Fast fashion is a plague on the planet and your wallet. Fast fashion is responsible for approximately 10% of global carbon emissions and nearly 20% of wastewater production, according to the World Economic Forum. The World Resources Institute reports that producing just one cotton shirt uses approximately 713 gallons of water — that’s enough water to meet one person's drinking needs for over two years. But, hey, you get a $10 shirt instead. The fast fashion industry is so destructive that the U.S. Government Accounting Office wrote in December 2024 that the nation needs a coordinated effort to reduce textile waste and promote recycling. But we can dress for success and the planet. Garik explains that the brands he admires “take responsibility for their clothes” by making them with organic and sustainable materials, providing repairs and take-back programs, as well as delivering durable products that can be made to last. You can learn more about sustainable fashion and shop Garik's curated selection of clothing at https://Eco-Stylist.com.Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTubeCheck out previous Earth911 interviews about sustainable fashionEarth911 Podcast: EVRNU’s Stacy Flynn On Creating Circular Fiber For Sustainable FashionBest of Earth911 Podcast: The Apparel Impact Institute’s Kurt Kipka Maps the Path to Sustainable FashionEarth911 Podcast: tentree CEO Derrick Emsley on Sustainable Fashion & ReforestationBest of Earth911 Podcast: Keel Labs’ Tessa Gallagher Introduces Kelsun Kelp-Based TextilesBest of Earth911 Podcast: Mike Baker’s ReCORK Recycling Puts The Circular Into FootwearBest of Earth911 Podcast: Cotapaxi Partners With Customers & Suppliers To Achieve Sustainability
    Show more Show less
    38 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: Thinking Zero Waste With Sarah Currie-Halpern

    Earth911 Podcast: Thinking Zero Waste With Sarah Currie-Halpern
    Jan 20 2025
    Practical progress toward a sustainable lifestyle, whether you are an individual or a business, will always be unique to your situation, but you can base your choices on lessons learned by others. Tune into a conversation with Sarah Currie-Halpern, Co-Founder of Think Zero LLC, a consultancy that helps businesses, institutions, and households reduce waste and embrace sustainable practices. With a focus on practical, actionable solutions, Sarah and her team work to make sustainability accessible to many clients. Sarah shares travel tips to keep in mind to reduce your impact on the ground in other cities and countries. Taking a water bottle, reusable utensils, and a coffee cup can eliminate the single-use stuff you’ll find at many hotels and resorts. Check out Ecohotels.com and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s guidance. You will discover insights that can pierce the veil of greenwashing by travel marketers with the information you find there.

    Sarah draws on her waste management work in the office of the Mayor of New York to discuss the potential for applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the flow of materials to landfill. According to several studies, AI could consume up to 10% of electricity generated by the end of the decade. AI can be a powerful tool, but many companies focus on delivering trivial consumer convenience using the technology. Finding your next favorite social video or saving the effort involved in changing the channel on your TV are not worthwhile applications of technology that could be applied to, for example, developing fire suppression materials that are free of the toxins and heavy metals dumped in waves of red on cities in the Los Angeles basin amid this year’s wildfires. We can and will use AI to invent new, sustainable materials, sort reusable materials out of the waste stream, and much more. Still, we should not see every question humans pose, like “What’s on TV tonight?” handed to AI to resolve. If information is the new oil, we can use AI more judiciously than we did with petroleum during the Industrial Age. You can learn more about Sarah and her work at Think Zero at https://www.thinkzerollc.com/
    • Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.
    • Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
    Show more Show less
    35 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: Our 500th Episode with Bad Naturalist Paula Whyman

    Earth911 Podcast: Our 500th Episode with Bad Naturalist Paula Whyman
    Jan 13 2025
    We celebrate a milestone episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, our 500th program since we launched in 2018, with an in-depth conversation with Paula Whyman, author of the captivating collection of essays, Bad Naturalist. It's a tale about her purchase and efforts to restore a couple hundred acres of meadowland in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia that had once been a farm and orchard. Paula's stories explore the complex interplay of identity, vulnerability, and the natural world with wit, depth, and an eye for natural detail. Paula's book reflects on the connection between our internal lives and the landscapes we inhabit—how nature becomes a mirror for our thoughts, decisions, and personal change. She explains how she learned about the land, the flora, and fauna in the meadow through conversations with scientists, conservation experts, and her neighbors.

    Paula's decision to move to and take care of, in the sense that she is preserving and restoring, a plot of land represents a new option for people who, enabled by digital technology, can stay connected to the economy and earn a living while investing their time and energy in a new, local relationship with land and people. You can find Bad Naturalist on Amazon, at Powell's Books, or your local bookstore now. Sign up for her Bad Naturalist newsletter, which she describes as updates from a writer "stuck in bramble, stinking of bear poo," at https://paulawhyman.com.
    Show more Show less
    47 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: DC Water Goes Bloom With Biosolids-Based Fertilizers

    Earth911 Podcast: DC Water Goes Bloom With Biosolids-Based Fertilizers
    Jan 6 2025
    Start the new year with a dive into the world of biosolids—a potentially transformative way to turn sewage that traditionally is seen as waste into a valuable material for sustainable agriculture. With the appropriate precautions, humans can turn our ickiest stuff into inexpensive fertilizer for farms and homes. Humans have been using their excrement as fertilizers for millennia. At scale, biosolids-based fertilizer would be a big step toward comprehensive circular approaches to human waste. However, it is a plan with challenges related to the presence of PFAS, the forever chemicals attracting growing concern as they are found in everyone’s bodies only about 90 years after they were invented. Tune into a conversation with Chris Peot, the Director of Resource Recovery at Bloom, and April Thompson, Senior Director of the program operated by DC Water, the public utility responsible for providing drinking water and wastewater collection and treatment services in the nation’s Capitol. Chris is a pioneer in water utility and biosolids management, with decades of experience as a civil engineer. He led the development of Bloom, combining technology, science, and engineering to create a sustainable solution that changes how we think about resource recovery and green energy. April has been instrumental in shaping Bloom’s products and overcoming the challenges of marketing something often misunderstood as “icky” waste. They discuss the science, innovation, and market dynamics behind Bloom.

    Bloom and DC Water’s path to being a self-sustaining, closed circular system that processes post-consumer wastewater to make fertilizer and capture heat to generate renewable energy should inspire cities nationwide. Chris and April explain that sewer systems are remarkable geothermal (Vancouver, B.C. powers part of the city using heat from its waste management systems) and materials resources that are often ignored despite being directly underfoot in every city and town. Looking past the ick-factor most of us associate with human waste and everything else we flush down the sink and toilet, to see it as a resource and energy flow can reorient our perspective. We need to think like nature does — if nature can be said to think as we do —to find ways to collect and use wasted materials and energy. Nothing in nature is wasted, but nature had billions of years to evolve species to fill every niche where life-supporting stuff was available, while humans have only decades to innovate processes and business models to prevent waste and the pollution it creates. You can learn more about Bloom fertilizers at https://bloomsoil.com/
    Show more Show less
    39 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: Tim Montague Talks Clean Power Hour And Economic Competitiveness

    Earth911 Podcast: Tim Montague Talks Clean Power Hour And Economic Competitiveness
    Dec 9 2024
    The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law contributed much-needed progress but has not completed the transition — only approximately 21% of total utility-scale electricity generation in the United States comes from renewables. According to the World Resources Institute 31 gigawatts of solar energy capacity was installed in the U.S. in 2023, up 55% compared to 2022. But now we are entering the second Trump era, facing an administration that, despite its hostility to renewables oversaw a 12% decrease in emissions during the first Trump Administration. Is renewable energy unstoppable? Tim Montague, a trusted advisor in the solar and energy storage industries, host of the Clean Power Hour podcast, and an advocate for clean energy innovation, says the transition is inevitable. Whether you have access to locally produced solar power, community solar programs, or the ability install photovoltaic panels on your home or business, the investment will pay off financially and environmentally. Twenty-four states have community solar regulations and 42 states have some form of net-metering legislation in place, though many receive low ratings from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s https://freeingthegrid.org/.The green transition question is whether the United States will be a leader or a laggard, and if a laggard, how we will ultimately be competitive in a world where photos, not fossil fuels, drive the engines of industry and transportation? As Tim explains, U.S. scientists and engineers have invented most of the clean technologies in use but have not consistently turned them into commercial successes. Yet, Northern European countries and China are racing ahead with the transition — and China now leads the world in the export of electric vehicles. Economic and political leadership in the world are built on innovation, including the integration of natural climate restoration practices into the electric grid, industrial production, and foreign policy strategies if we want to emerge from the fossil fuels era as a leader. Tim’s Clean Power Hour podcast spotlights the people, technology, and policies reshaping the energy industry. Covering topics like distributed versus centralized solar systems, cutting-edge battery storage innovations, and the economic benefits of renewables, Tim plumbs the depths of the complex and rapidly evolving world of clean energy. You can hear the show, and check out the Brooklyn Solar episode that Tim suggests as a starting point for your listening, at https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/Subscribe to Sustainability in Your Ear on iTunes and Apple Podcasts.Follow Sustainability in Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube.Listen to related episodesEarth911 Podcast: Brevian Energy’s Rod Matthews on the Changing Economics of MicrogridsBest of Earth911 Podcast: The Strategic Energy Institute’s Tim Lieuwen on Accelerating US ElectrificationBest of Earth911 Podcast: Putting Solar Generation Everywhere With Ubiquitous Energy’s Veeral HardevBest of Earth911 Podcast: Amptricity CEO Damir Perge Introduces Solid-State Battery Storage for Home & BusinessBest of Earth911 Podcast: Guidehouse Insights’ Sam Abuelsamid Maps the Future of EV Battery InnovationBest Earth911 Podcast: Peter Glenn on Financing Your EV Life
    Show more Show less
    41 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: Alter Eco Foods CEO Keith Bearden Is All-In On Regenerative Chocolate Farming

    Earth911 Podcast: Alter Eco Foods CEO Keith Bearden Is All-In On Regenerative Chocolate Farming
    Nov 25 2024
    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/
    • Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
    • Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
    Show more Show less
    40 mins
  • Earth911 Podcast: Making IT Product Chemical Impacts Transparent With TCO Development's Stephen Fuller

    Earth911 Podcast: Making IT Product Chemical Impacts Transparent With TCO Development's Stephen Fuller
    Nov 18 2024
    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/
    • Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
    • Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
    Show more Show less
    41 mins