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Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen...
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Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.
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16 FEB. 2026 · The U.S. waste management industry moves more than 290 million tons of municipal solid waste each year. This is a potential trillion-dollar market, but much of the work still relies on paper tickets, clipboards, and spreadsheets. About 10,000 independent haulers handle a large share of collection and materials transfer in the U.S. In this business, a single truck costs $300,000, and profits depend on efficient routes. Most haulers do not have access to the digital tools that other logistics industries have used for years. Mike Marmo, CEO and founder of https://curbwaste.com, is building a new operating system to change this. His goal is to create the data foundation needed for the circular economy to work. He is a fourth-generation waste industry professional who started his career as a scale operator at a family transfer station in New York and sold a hauling business in 2021. Since then, he's built CurbWaste into a platform serving more than 150 haulers in 40 states. Its https://curbwaste.com/curbpos for transfer stations tracks inbound and outbound materials with scale integration. It generates automated https://www.usgbc.org/leed diversion reports and https://www.recyclingcertification.org/-certified documentation; the per-load, per-material chain-of-custody data that https://earth911.com/business-policy/extended-producer-responsibility-in-2025-progress-with-more-to-come/ need, as seven states now require producers to fund and document the recycling of their packaging.
Mike made a simple but important point: "Waste is being created when it's being manufactured." The waste management industry reflects the economy and could become the base for a circular supply chain that keeps materials in use. Mike compares this to Amazon, which learned about buyer behavior and then built warehousing, freight, and delivery systems around that knowledge. The waste industry can do something similar. By tracking what is produced, where it goes, and where it ends up, haulers and new operators can work together on a shared digital system that gives full visibility of materials. Mike calls this the "waste meter," and he thinks an AI-powered circular economy could be in place within 10 years. https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2015/the-circular-economy-could-unlock-4-5-trillion-of-economic-growth-finds-new-book-by-accenture estimates that the circular economy could add $4.5 trillion in economic output by 2030, a number supported by the https://climatepromise.undp.org/news-and-stories/transitioning-circular-economy-future-we-cannot-afford-delay. Right now, investment is far below what is needed to reach that potential. CurbWaste is working to build the transparency needed to connect collection and vision, helping turn a fragmented industry into a circular supply chain. To learn more, visit https://curbwaste.com.
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9 FEB. 2026 · Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the https://oceanconservancy.org the principal author of a majorhttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415492122 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies from 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. https://earth911.com/earth-watch/how-much-microplastic-can-kill-ocean-life/ describes this critical study, which found lethal plastic thresholds that could change how we view the plastic crisis.
The study measured how deadly different types of plastic are to sea life, which makes the results especially useful for policymakers. Each finding suggests a clear policy action, such as banning balloon releases like Florida has done, banning plastic bags as in California’s SB 54, or improving how fishing gear is marked and recovered. Still, Erin points out that focusing only on certain plastics is not enough. Her team found that even small amounts of any plastic can be dangerous. As she says, "At the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean," and we need big changes at every stage of the plastics life cycle, from production to disposal.
There's encouraging evidence that interventions work. Communities in Hawaii conducted large-scale beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2025/07/30/science-behind-plastic-pollution/ confirmed that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by 25 to 47%. And Ocean Conservancy's https://oceanconservancy.org/trash-free-seas/international-coastal-cleanup/, now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. These actions address a parallel crisis in human health that is building from the same pollution source. Most of the microplastics now found in humans and around the world began as the same macroplastics that are killing puffins and turtles. As Erin puts it, "I do view this all as part of the same crisis."
You can read the https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2415492122 at pnas.org and learn more about Ocean Conservancy's work at https://oceanconservancy.org.
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2 FEB. 2026 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-making-wastewater-the-foundation-of-a-regional-circular-econom.
Every gallon of wastewater flowing through a municipal sewer contains recoverable energy, nutrients, and water—assets that the linear "flush and forget" model has long treated as problems to dispose of rather than value to recapture. Meet Kevin Shafer, who has spent more than two decades proving otherwise. As executive director of the https://mmsd.com (MMSD) since 2002, he's transformed an agency once mocked as a symbol of government waste into a national model for sustainable infrastructure, and last year, Veolia designated it as America's first "eco factory."
Milwaukee's circular approach actually predates the term by nearly a century. In 1926, the district began producing https://www.milorganite.com/—Milwaukee organic nitrogen—a fertilizer made from dried biosolids that most utilities simply spread on fields or incinerate. Today, that product returns $11 to $12 million annually to the city's budget while keeping waste out of landfills. Kevin explains that this foundational commitment to doing the right thing has shaped MMSD's culture ever since: 'We just always look at those type of approaches. It's foundational to the district.'
The district's eight digesters at its South Shore plant now generate 80 to 85% of the facility's electricity from biosolids, with enough material left over to continue making Milorganite. Kevin calls it https://earth911.com/business-policy/guest-idea-the-cradle-to-cradle-mindset-is-a-call-for-bold-leadership/ referring to the philosophy pioneered by architect William McDonough, who visited MMSD in 2006 and was intrigued by work that predated his framework by decades. The district is also partnering with regional breweries and food processors, accepting their organic waste streams for co-digestion. This reduces disposal costs for industry partners while increasing energy production—a synergy that Kevin sees as the future of utility operations.
Looking ahead, Kevin's 2035 vision targets 100% renewable energy and a 90% carbon reduction compared to 2005. He argues that utilities should see themselves as anchor institutions with generational responsibilities: 'I won't be here 50 years from now, but MMSD will be.' That long view has attracted new partners. 'All of a sudden they say, oh, here's someone that's thinking a little bit differently about something, and maybe we can help them, or they can help us.' The key barrier to scaling the circular economy, he believes, isn't technology—it's institutional culture and a narrow focus on regulatory compliance rather than systems thinking.
You can learn more about the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District at https://mmsd.com.
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19 ENE. 2026 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-peter-fusaro-wall-street-green-summit.
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Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the https://thewallstreetgreensummit.com, he's spent a quarter century connecting capital to climate solutions. This year's summit, the 25th in its history, will take place on March 10 and 11 in New York. This critical conversation arrives at an historic inflection point: insurance companies are withdrawing from climate-vulnerable states, AI data centers are straining electrical grids, and the economics of clean energy have fundamentally shifted.
The energy transition's bottleneck isn't capital, it's infrastructure. The U.S. went from 110 investor-owned utilities in 1992 to just 40 today, and consolidation meant underinvestment in transmission and distribution. Data centers consumed 2% of U.S. energy demand in 2020; Peter sees that climbing to 10-12% by 2030. Blackouts and brownouts are inevitable, he says. Yet his message is pragmatic optimism: ignore Washington and watch the capital markets and blue states where climate policy is embedded in law. Many companies are "green hushing," quietly pursuing sustainability without public positioning. The energy industry thinks in 40-year cycles, making the current political moment a blip. "I've spent 56 years now in sustainability, before it had a name," he says. "What I've learned is change takes decades."
Peter argues that Wall Street has genuinely internalized climate as systemic risk—not because of ideology, but because of opportunity. "Wall Street likes exchanges, likes to trade, likes volatility, and certainly likes uncertainty," he explains. "What people don't understand about Wall Street, it's about the edge. What's the arbitrage opportunity?" The reinsurance industry has stepped forward aggressively, funding carbon credits and sustainability projects. Peter's recent Earth911 article, "https://earth911.com/business-policy/guest-idea-climate-risk-has-become-a-defining-economic-issue/," explores these themes in depth.
However, he sees natural gas and renewables dominating the next 15 years, while geothermal is enjoying a genuine renaissance. His optimism rests on a demographic bet: "I have a tremendous valuation on young people. I'm 75. They're inheriting this world, and they get the sustainability message globally." The summit attendees includes no government officials and no academics, just people in the trenches building and financing solutions.
You can learn more at https://thewallstreetgreensummit.com. Earth911 is a media sponsor for the event.
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12 ENE. 2026 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-peter-fusaro-wall-street-green-summit. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts.
What we call waste is really just misallocated feedstock—raw materials waiting to be cycled back into the next generation of products and packaging. According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investors are racing to capture part of that opportunity. Meet Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation at https://overlaycapital.com, an Atlanta-based alternative investment firm whose Waste and Materials Fund is backing both early-stage materials innovators and later-stage recycling operations with established infrastructure. Overlay's strategy involves investing in innovation and implementation simultaneously—in both startups and established companies—to accelerate progress across multiple layers of the circular economy. It offers a window into where smart money sees the materials transition heading.
Elizabeth explains that sortation is the biggest bottleneck at the materials recycling facilities (MRFs) your garbage and recycling are sent to after curbside collection. The U.S. is simultaneously the world’s leading exporter of scrap aluminum and the number one importer of finished aluminum, because we've lacked domestic sorting capacity. Overlay has invested in companies like https://www.amprobotics.com/, which recently closed a 20-year contract with SPSA, a southeastern Virginia municipal authority, to sort all recyclables from four to five cities using AI-driven systems. When you fix sortation, she says, you trigger a domino effect: recycling rates climb, landfill life extends, and margins improve as higher-purity materials command premium prices.
Overlay's portfolio also includes next-generation materials companies united by a common thesis: they must be better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainable than what they replace. https://www.cruzfoam.com/ converts chitin from shrimp shells into compostable packaging foam. https://www.simplifyber.com/ uses cellulose to create biodegradable soft goods through 3D molding, bypassing traditional textile manufacturing entirely. https://terraco2.com/ just closed a $124 million Series B to scale low-carbon cement technology that could cut into concrete's 8% share of annual global CO2 emissions. Each uses abundant, waste-derived feedstocks and has achieved or is on a clear path to price parity with incumbents.
You can learn more about Overlay Capital at https://overlaycapital.com
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29 DIC. 2025 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-dandelion-energy-ceo-dan-yates-on-geothermal-leasing of this interview.
Amazingly, the same Congressional bill that gutted residential clean energy tax credits also led to a major breakthrough in financing home geothermal systems. Dan Yates, CEO of https://dandelionenergy.com, explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for the first time, allow third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. He shares why this policy change could help ground-source heat pumps grow the way leasing helped rooftop solar. Geothermal heating and cooling is four times more efficient than a furnace and twice as efficient as air-source heat pumps. Yet only about 1% of U.S. homes use it because the upfront costs for new geothermal systems have ranged from $20,000 to $31,000. The new leasing model means new homeowners can get geothermal systems for just $10 to $40 per month on a 20-year lease, which is usually far less than what they save on energy.
Dandelion is working with Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the country, to bring geothermal to more than 1,500 homes in Colorado over the next two years. This will be one of the biggest residential geothermal projects in U.S. history. The benefits for the power grid could be even more important than the savings for homeowners. Geothermal systems use only 25% of the peak power that air-source heat pumps need, which is a big advantage as AI data centers increase electricity demand. Yates explains that the Earth works like a huge thermal battery, storing heat in the summer for use in the winter. Geothermal lets utilities reduce peak loads on the grid throughout the year, freeing homeowners from the cost of the most expensive power.
You can learn more about Dandelion Energy at https://dandelionenergy.com.
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22 DIC. 2025 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-earthx-ceo-peter-simek-on-cultivating-bipartisan-climate-strat.
The ocean provides half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs 30% of our carbon emissions, and helps control the planet's climate. By 2030, it's expected to support a $3.2 trillion Blue Economy. Yet 70% of proven ocean solutions, such as coastal resilience, coral restoration, and marine pollution cleanup, never move past the pilot stage. These projects often win awards and get media attention, but then stall because funding systems don't connect working ideas with the cities, ports, and coastal areas that need them. Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy, co-founder and ocean lead at https://www.okhtapus.org, wants to change that. Okhtapus, named with the Persian word for the octopus, uses a model that links what Stewart calls "the three hearts" of successful projects: innovators with proven solutions, cities and ports ready to use them, and funders looking for solid projects.
The first Okhtapus Global Replicator will launch in 2026. It will bring groups of proven innovators to work on important projects in specific places, such as a single port city like Barcelona, where Okhtapus already has strong partnerships, or a group of Caribbean islands facing similar problems. The aim is to have enough successful projects that funders stop asking "where are the deals?" and start saying "we've got enough." The platform focuses on late-stage startups and scale-ups, not early-stage ideas. Stewart calls these the "Goldilocks zone"—solutions that are proven enough to copy but still need funding and partners to grow. By combining several solutions for different locations, Okhtapus can offer investors portfolios that fit their needs and make a real difference in cities, ports, and island nations.
Stewart has spent twenty years working where climate resilience and policy meet. He was part of President Obama's Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, led policy and investments at the https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org, and is now Managing Director of the https://worldoceancouncil.org. "Ten years from now, if this is done fast enough," Stewart said, "we should have pushed hard enough on the funders and the system to change it. What we don't know is whether we'll get to the solution status fast enough for some of these tipping points."
To find out more about Okhtapus, visit https://www.okhtapus.org.
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15 DIC. 2025 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-earthx-ceo-peter-simek-on-cultivating-bipartisan-climate-strat.
For 15 years, the Dallas-based climate conference the https://earthx.org/ has created space where fossil fuel executives and environmental activists, Republican appropriations chairs and Democratic climate hawks, find common ground. The organization targets three core stakeholders: the corporate world, policymakers, and investors seeking startups where environmental solutions are baked into the bottom line. Peter Simek, EarthX’s CEO, explains how reframing climate action around shared values—stewardship, economic opportunity, and love of the land—unlocks support that crisis messaging alone cannot reach.
The doom story doesn’t sell, Simek explained. “We’re not motivated as a species by doomsday language. It puts people in fight-or-flight mode.” He points out how climate became an identity issue, tangled up in culture-war debates over hamburgers and gas-powered trucks, when the real conversation should center on clean air, clean water, and protecting the places we love. “The EPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Act were passed during the Nixon administration,” he notes. “There are ways to message this that appeals across lines.”
Simek bets heavily on bottom-up action as EarthX works to build bridges. States, cities, and private capital often move faster than federal mandates, he argues, and they’re harder to reverse with a single executive order. Texas leads the nation in renewable energy deployment because wind and solar make bottom-line sense. “Even as there’s a policy turn against it, there’s still the driving reality that solar and wind are viable energy sources,” he says. A new event in 2026, the EarthX Institute, will focus on two policy priorities: nuclear energy, where bipartisan consensus is growing, and urban biodiversity.
Whether conversations at forums like EarthX translate into policy velocity that matches the pace of climate impacts remains to be seen. Simek says he stays focused on tracking downstream results, specifically the investments funded, the coalitions built, and the policies incubated from the local level up. “It’s about finding those ways in which there’s common sense, common ground, common values,” he says. “Elements to talking about nature and the environment that no one can really disagree with.”
Learn more about EarthX and its upcoming April 2026 conference at https://earthx.org/.
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8 DIC. 2025 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-glacier-ceo-rebecca-hu-thrams-on-how-to-build-an-advanced-manu.
The raw material for a $2 trillion circular economy is already flowing through recycling facilities. But how do we capture and use it? Rebecca Hu-Thrams, co-founder and CEO of https://endwaste.io, is deploying AI-powered robotic sorters at material recovery facilities (MRFs) across the country, processing recycling for one in 10 Americans. Her robots use computer vision trained on more than 3 billion images of waste to identify and sort over 70 different materials—picking 45 items per minute, 24/7, in conditions that would exhaust or injure human workers. As much as 80% of what Americans put in blue bins never gets recycled. The culprit is outdated technology at MRFs, the vast sorting operations struggling with a labor crisis so severe that facilities often refill the same sorting job five times a year. The work is dangerous, with injury rates twice that of construction. Rebecca, a first-generation American who grew up washing margarine tubs for reuse, saw an opportunity to apply cutting-edge technology to what she calls "the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet." The results are tangible. At oneDetroit MRF, an AI camera on a residue line revealed the facility was losing massive amounts of PET bottles to landfill, material they suspected was slipping through but had never quantified. By adding a single sorter based on that data, they achieved a two-thirds drop in PET sent to landfill and earned $138,000 in additional annual revenue.
But Glacier's robots do more than sort. They create an intelligence layer for the circular economy, generating data about what's actually in the waste stream—down to specific brands and packaging designs. Amazon, which has invested in Glacier through its Climate Pledge fund, is using this data to understand what design features make packaging easier or harder for AI to detect, moving from "technically recyclable" to "provably recyclable." With https://earth911.com/business-policy/extended-producer-responsibility-in-2025-progress-with-more-to-come/ (EPR) laws spreading across the U.S., this kind of brand-level accountability will become table stakes. Rebecca notes that EPR has improved recycling rates by over 40 percentage points in parts of Europe. Glacier's vision is to transform recycling from a reactive cost center into advanced manufacturing, built on three pillars: a reliable data layer, consistent automation, and higher-quality feedstock. "MRF managers show up to work, turn on the lights, and hold their breath and wait to see what new, crazy things come down their conveyor lines," she said. "What I hope is true for recycling in the coming years is that producers are making things designed to be really easy to recycle."
We're still in the early steps of a long recycling evolution, but the gap between where we are and a truly circular economy may close faster than the past 60 years of recycling's progress would suggest. You can learn more about Glacier at https://endwaste.io.
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1 DIC. 2025 · https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/ to receive transcripts by email. https://elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com/p/sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-david-lawes-of-the-lpma-on-oil-recycling?utm_source=elkcreeknotes.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=sustainability-in-your-ear-transcript-david-lawes-on-colorado-s-motor-oil-epr-program.Americans dispose of approximately 1.3 billion gallons of used motor oil annually, but only about 800 million gallons get recycled, and most of that is burned as fuel rather than re-refined into new oil. The plastic packaging oil comes in is more problematic: most curbside programs won't accept them because residual oil contaminates other recyclables. What happens when the companies that make motor oil embrace https://earth911.com/business-policy/extended-producer-responsibility-in-2025-progress-with-more-to-come/ (EPR) laws that require recycling the oil and the containers it comes in? David Lawes, CEO of the https://interchange360.com (LPMA), is leading what could become a national model for extended producer responsibility. Colorado just became the testing ground. In September 2024, five major oil companies—BP Lubricants, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Valvoline—founded LPMA as an independent producer responsibility organization.
Colorado gave producers a choice: join the Circular Action Alliance, which manages all packaging and printed paper recycling in the state, or develop their own sector-specific program that demonstrates better outcomes. LPMA chose the independent path, arguing that petroleum packaging requires specialized handling that general-purpose programs can't provide efficiently. Lawes brings two decades of EPR policy experience to the role, including a decade regulating EPR programs in Canada. The program he ran in British Columbia achieves a 96% recycling rate for oil containers—compared to less than 1% in most U.S. states. "This is not about skirting the law or finding an easier pathway," Lawes explains. "It is about meeting the same results in an industry-friendly way."If Colorado's model works, it could reshape EPR programs nationwide. We discuss why petroleum packaging can't be managed through curbside programs, what lessons from Canada's more developed EPR system apply here, and whether the U.S. needs national recycling standards to harmonize the patchwork of state regulations.
You can learn more about LPMA at https://interchange360.com.
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Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen...
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Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.
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Información
| Autor | Mitch Ratcliffe |
| Organización | Internet Media Strategies |
| Categorías | Ciencias de la tierra , Empresa , Naturaleza |
| Página web | Earth911.com |
| mitch@ratcliffe.com |
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