PODCAST · science
Sustainability In Your Ear
by Mitch Ratcliffe
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.
Episodes
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David Fenton on How to Win the Climate Debate
Yale researchers estimate that roughly 80 million Americans are alarmed about climate change. About 40 million of them say they want to be politically active on the issue. But only about 3 million actually are. When that 37 million-American group is asked why they aren’t active, researchers most...
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Building Solar Panel Recycling Capacity with SPR's Brett Henderson
Our guest is Brett Henderson, co-founder and CEO of SolarPanelRecycling.com, or SPR. The company owns and operates plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, with a fourth opening in California this year, each built to run about a million panels a year and to scale to 3 million within six…
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Cody Two Bears on Indigenized Energy's Community-Centric Grid Strategy
Tribal households in the United States carry an energy burden 28% above the national average and endure 6.5 times more power outages a year, and roughly 17,000 tribal homes — housing at least 54,000 people — have no electricity at all, according to the Department of Energy. Those are the...
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GoodPower’s Leah Qusba on Selling Clean Energy as Pocketbook Power
In 2024, 91% of new large-scale renewable projects around the world made electricity for less money than any fossil-fuel option, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Solar power was 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The technology...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Shareholder Democracy and Causeway Impact Founders on Building Shareholder Influence
If you hold a 401(k), an IRA, or a single index fund, you own a sliver of hundreds of American companies, yet you almost certainly let someone else decide how those shares vote. Individual investors hold about 25% of all U.S. public equities, more than BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street...
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Kendra MacDonald Steers to the Blue Economy at Canada's Ocean Supercluster
The ocean produces about half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs roughly 30% of the carbon dioxide we emit, and takes up about 90% of the excess heat those emissions trap, according to the United Nations. It is the planet’s largest life-support system — and also its least-funded one. Of the 17 UN...
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Urban Surfer's Sifiso Gumbi on Organizing South Africa's Recycling System
In South Africa, informal waste pickers recover between 80% and 90% of all plastic and paper that actually gets recycled. There are about 140,000 of these reclaimers, who walk through cities and landfills, pulling trolleys and selling what they collect to make a living. Each person can keep up to...
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Ethan and Desmond Hua Build HOPE for School Uniform Reuse
Most school uniforms are retired while they are still perfectly wearable. Children cycle through them on a predictable annual schedule as they grow, which sends a steady stream of usable clothing toward the landfill at the same moment families on tight budgets are paying to replace what their…
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The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science
About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging,...
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SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work
Less than 2% of Americans can put plastic film in their curbside recycling bin, according to The Recycling Partnership. Meanwhile, the country generates millions of pounds of bags, pallet wrap, bubble mailers, and dry cleaner sleeves every year that machinery at materials recovery facilities is...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating's Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable
A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai, thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His...
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Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging
Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none…
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood
An average big-budget movie creates about 3,370 metric tons of CO₂, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance's 2021 report. That’s like driving over 700 gas-powered cars for a year, or about 33 metric tons of CO₂ for each day of filming. A single TV season can have the same impact as 108...
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Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough
In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and atmospheric CO₂…
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Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns
$850 billion. That's what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn't look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition
The global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider…
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Jasper Steinhausen on Making Sustainability Profitable
Most business leaders believe sustainability costs money. They’re wrong. The proof is sitting right under their noses, bleeding out quietly as waste, excess heat, and byproducts every day the factory runs. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the…
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Sustainability In Your Ear: The XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Heats Up
Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck's capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response...
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The MooBlue Team Keeps The Beef, Without The Burp
Cattle are one of the most consequential climate problems hiding in plain sight on the dinner table. Livestock are responsible for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and cattle alone account for about 65% of that...
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The Forest Stewardship Councils' Path to a Circular Bio-based Future with Loa Dalgaard Worm
Forests are vital for people everywhere. They cover about 4.14 billion hectares, roughly a third of the world’s land, and store 714 gigatons of carbon. They also support 80% of land-based biodiversity. However, we are losing 11 million hectares each year to deforestation, and the World Bank…
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The Net Zero Accelerator's Colin Mangham on Nature's Rules for Building A Sustainable Infrastructure
We already have the technology to decarbonize buildings, and many pilot projects have shown it works. So why hasn’t progress toward net zero moved faster? Colin Mangham believes it’s because we’re still using outdated business models to promote new solutions. Colin is the Chief Experience Officer...
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CurbWaste's Mike Marmo Is Building the Waste Logistics Layer of the Circular Economy
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...
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The Ocean Conservancy's Dr. Erin Murphy Documents the Lethality of Ocean Plastics
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...
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Milwaukee's Kevin Shafer on Circular Thinking in Wastewater Management
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. 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...
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Peter Fusaro's Wall Street Green Summit Explores Financing The Renewables Transition
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. ' 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...
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Turning Waste Into New Products And Packaging With Overlay Capital's Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh
Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe 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…
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Dandelion Energy CEO Dan Yates On How Geothermal Leasing Could Transform Home Heating and Cooling
Read a transcript 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 Dandelion Energy, explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for...
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Okhtapus Cofounder Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy Accelerates Ocean Solutions
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. 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,...
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EarthX CEO Peter Simek on Cultivating Bipartisan Climate Strategies
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. For 15 years, the Dallas-based climate conference the EarthX conference has created space where fossil fuel executives and environmental activists, Republican appropriations chairs and Democratic climate hawks, find common...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Building The Circular Economy With Glacier CEO Rebecca Hu-Thrams
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. 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 Glacier, is deploying AI-powered robotic sorters...
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Examining Colorado's First-Of-Its-Kind EPR Oil Recycling Program With David Lawes
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.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...
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Star's Tech Hando Choi On Inventing A Low-Carbon, Low-Chloride De-Icer Made From Star Fish
Read along with our transcript. What if the solution to winter's infrastructure corrosion and environmentally benign home sidewalk de-icing was an invasive starfish being thrown back into Korea's coastal waters? Hando Choi, president of Star's Tech, joins the conversation to explain how one...
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Liquidonate CEO Disney Petit On Solving The Retail Returns Crisis
Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. What if the solution to the retail industry's $890 billion returns crisis wasn't better logistics, but better logic? Disney Petit, founder and CEO of Liquidonate, is proving that the most sustainable return skips the trip…
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Luke Purdy, Wieden+Kennedy's Director of Sustainability, on Advertising's Power To Change
Can the industry that taught the world to consume help us learn to consume more responsibly? Luke Purdy, Director of Sustainability at one of the world's leading creative agencies Wieden+Kennedy, is betting his career on it. After 13 years working on major accounts like Nike and Corona at one of...
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Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong On Reforesting 3 Billion Acres
Most Silicon Valley CEOs who cash out their stock options start another tech company. Yishan Wong planted trees instead. After helping build PayPal, Facebook, and serving as Reddit's CEO, Wong concluded that humanity's biggest challenge wouldn't be solved with algorithms or network effects—it…
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The Climate Action Network's Pre-COP30 Briefing with Rebecca Thissen
Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the world's climate negotiators will gather in Belém, Brazil this November for COP 30, a summit many are calling a critical juncture for global climate action. After COP 29 in Baku ended with what developing nations called a woefully inadequate $300 billion...
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Buckstop's Alexander Olesen Digs Into Urban Mining
Every solar array, battery system, and EV charger installed over the past decade will eventually need to be decommissioned. Yet there's no unifying system to handle that flow of materials—no operating system for the reverse supply chain that the circular economy depends on. While Americans…
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Culligan CEO Scott Clawson Maps The Future Of Water
Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe to receive transcripts. Turn on any faucet in America, and chances are the water meets federal safety standards. Yet Americans buy 50 billion single-use plastic water bottles annually—enough to circle the Earth 200 times if laid end to end. The bottles...
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Terracycle Founder Tom Szaky On Building A Service-Centered Circular Economy
Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe to receive transcripts. For decades, our relationship with waste has been defined by disposability and denial. The disposability of everything from coffee cups and cigarette butts to smartphones, and the denial about where it all goes when we're done...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Heather Terry's Regenerative Journey At GOODSam Foods
The global food system stands at a crossroads. Climate change is reshaping where crops can grow, trade disputes threaten supply chains, and smallholder farmers who produce much of our food often have the least power in the system. Meet Heather Terry, founder and CEO of GoodSAM Foods, and discover...
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SePRO's Mark Heilman On Phosphorus, Waterways, And Invasive Species
Every summer, the same devastating story repeats across America: lakes that families have cherished for generations suddenly turn toxic green. Half a million people in Toledo lose their drinking water when Lake Erie blooms with poison algae. Or, Florida's red tide costs the state billions in lost...
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Author and Activist Bill McKibben Brings The Sun
Solar and wind have become the cheapest sources of power in human history, but political headwinds threaten to derail the fastest energy transformation ever recorded. At this crucial juncture, how do we ensure America doesn't surrender its technological leadership in clean energy to nations more...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Carbonfuture is Building the Trust Infrastructure for Carbon Removal
The carbon removal industry stands at a crucial crossroads. While cutting emissions remains essential, avoiding catastrophic warming now requires pulling billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere permanently. But as this nascent field grapples with questions of legitimacy, scalability, and...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Author Topher McDougal Asks If Earth Is Evolving A Planetary Consciousness
What if Earth is developing a planetary collective intelligence emerging from the convergence of ecological crisis, new global information systems, and the data-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence? This provocative question drives economist Topher McDougal's book, Gaia Wakes…
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Author Kelsey Timmerman's Journey to Find Farms Regenerating Earth
The scale of agriculture's environmental impact is staggering. According to the EPA, agricultural runoff is the leading cause of degraded water quality in rivers and streams. Today's farming practices lead to 1.70 billion tons of U.S. topsoil annually, and agriculture produces 31% of human...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: USEFULL's Rob Kutner On Easing Reuse Adoption With Plastic Buy-Backs
The scale of our plastic waste crisis is staggering: the U.S. alone uses over 100 million plastic utensils every day, most of which are used once and tossed into landfills where they'll persist for centuries. From ocean pollution to overflowing campus dumpsters after lunch rush, single-use...
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Sustainability In Your Ear: Carbon Direct Chief Scientist Julio Friedmann on the Path to Carbon Removal
The scale of our climate challenge is staggering: humans have pumped 1.6 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air and oceans since 1750, and we're adding another 40 billion tonnes every year. Even with dramatic emissions reductions, we're still on track to blow past 1.5 degrees of warming,...
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Earth911 Podcast: Kelly Ramsey on Life as a Hotshot Firefighter and the Burning Reality of America's Wildfire Crisis
What does it take to stand on the front lines of one of the most dangerous and increasingly common realities of our climate crisis era? Discover the intense world of elite wildland firefighting with Kelly Ramsey, the first woman in about a decade to join the Rowdy River Hotshots, a pseudonymously...
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Earth911 Podcast: Implasticfree.com's Simona Paganetto on Building a Plastic-Free Marketplace One Brand at a Time
What if the solution to our plastics crisis isn't just about individual behavior change but building entirely new marketplaces that make plastic-free living accessible and transparent? On this episode of Earth911's Sustainability In Your Ear, discover the grassroots approach with Simona…
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Earth911 Podcast: Terviva’s Marc Diaz Introduces the Pongamia, a Tree for the Climate Crisis
As climate change accelerates and traditional crops face mounting pressures from drought, extreme weather, and soil depletion, innovative solutions are emerging from unexpected sources. Explore the soil-restoring potential of the pongamia tree with Marc Diaz, Chief Commercialization Officer at...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Mitch Ratcliffe
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Sustainability In Your Ear have?
Sustainability In Your Ear currently has 562 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Sustainability In Your Ear about?
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...
How often does Sustainability In Your Ear release new episodes?
Sustainability In Your Ear releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 562 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Sustainability In Your Ear?
You can listen to Sustainability In Your Ear on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Sustainability In Your Ear?
Sustainability In Your Ear is created and hosted by Mitch Ratcliffe.
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