Episodes

  • The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science

    The Institute of Food Technologists' Brendan Niemira on Why Food Science Is Climate Science
    Jun 1 2026
    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, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT's new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn't used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn't carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all "processed," and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We're not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.To learn more about IFT's work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    52 mins
  • SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work

    SiYE Interview - Trex Makes Circularity Work
    May 25 2026
    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 designed to reject. The plastic film problem has been the recycling industry's white whale for three decades — too contaminated for most processors, too light for most economics. But more than 30 years ago, Trex Company, then a small operation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, decided to build its supply chain around exactly this material. By the end of 2024, Trex had upcycled more than 5.5 billion pounds of waste plastic film into composite decking and had become one of the largest plastic film recyclers in North America. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Amy Fernandez, Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer, and Zachary Lauer, Chief Operations Officer at Trex, discuss how the company designs an entire manufacturing process around feedstock variability, why Trex indexed its 2024 sustainability report to IFRS standards before any US regulator required it, and what has to happen for old Trex decks to become new Trex decks.

    Most manufacturers spend their engineering effort narrowing input tolerances. Trex went the other direction. Zach described thousands of recipes the production lines can run through, swapping between cleaner stretch film one day and heavily contaminated industrial trimmings the next. Artificial intelligence reads each feedstock stream in real time and adjusts extrusion temperatures and line speeds to keep the finished board within specification. In 2024, the company sourced over 1 billion pounds of reclaimed PE film and wood scrap, including 377 million pounds of waste plastic, through a national collection network of more than 10,000 retail drop-off locations and hundreds of school and community partners enrolled in its NexTrex program. The company is also preparing for the first generation of Trex decks, which are reaching replacement age, and its manufacturing lines can reabsorb the company's own boards. The recycling bottleneck is contractors pulling up old decks who don't want to sort screws from boards. Underneath all of it is a point worth lingering on: Trex's poly feedstock isn't priced off a barrel of crude, which means in a period of reshoring, tariff volatility, and oil-market disruption, recycled supply chains are structurally more stable than virgin ones, not less.

    To find out more about Trex and its sustainability work, visit trex.com. The 2024 Sustainability Report is available on the company's investor relations site.
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    50 mins
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating's Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable

    Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating's Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable
    May 18 2026
    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 London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rating, drawn from roughly 100 public data points, that measures whether what a company says about its environmental and social performance is consistent with what its audited filings and regulatory disclosures actually show. The premise borrows directly from consumer credit scoring: a FICO score doesn't tell a lender whether you're a good person, only whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Martin explains how EarthRating's "accelerated impact engine" gathers verified data instead of relying on questionnaires, and why the small and mid-sized businesses now caught up in the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK's Procurement Act 2023 need an affordable way to prove their credentials.

    Most sustainability frameworks rely on self-reported questionnaires; EarthRating pulls data from audited annual reports, regulatory filings, press coverage, and marketing materials, then cross-checks them against each other to surface contradictions before they become a regulatory or reputational problem. A near-term emissions target that appears in a press release but not in the audited annual report is exactly the kind of credibility gap the platform is designed to flag. Importantly, EarthRating isn't measuring environmental impact — it's measuring whether a company's story is internally consistent and externally verifiable. That sidesteps the impossible problem of reducing carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable question: are the claims true? That speed and accessibility comes with real caveats, and Martin and I dig into them. A credibility score isn't an impact score: a small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to electric mowers could rate higher than a multinational with aspirational but unverified net-zero pledges. That's the right calibration for measuring trust, but it isn't the same as measuring environmental performance. EarthRating also exists at "Google 1.0," in Martin's own words — a launch-stage platform with a proprietary methodology that hasn't yet been externally audited. Global standards aren't willed into existence; they're earned through adoption. The underlying problem EarthRating is trying to solve — making credible sustainability measurement accessible to the businesses that have been priced out of it — is a real one, and worth watching.

    To find out more about EarthRating, visit EarthRating.ai.
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    41 mins
  • Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging

    Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging
    May 11 2026
    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 of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won't try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.[

    Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical's Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada's Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald's extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can't find another bag in the store that's labeled the same way.

    The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California's SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.
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    46 mins
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood
    Apr 27 2026
    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 cars. With thousands of productions happening every year in North America, Hollywood’s environmental impact is hard to overlook. Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, has spent more than ten years helping the industry turn sustainability goals into practical steps that productions can track. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, she shares how to build sustainable practices into film and TV projects from the very start, instead of adding them at the end when most waste has already been created. Zena started Green Spark Group in 2014 after earning a master’s in sustainability and environmental management at Harvard. She pitched Vancouver’s major studios on a simple idea: sustainability can save money. Her first big project, the X-Files reboot, managed to divert 81% of its waste across 40 filming locations. Since then, her certified B Corp consultancy has worked with Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon, and other major studios, and she founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its tenth year. This conversation comes at an important time. Soon, California’s climate disclosure laws will require studios to report emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain, both before and after filming. Zena points out that while studios are getting ready, most of their suppliers—like small companies that rent generators, handle waste, or provide lumber on tight schedules—are not prepared. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance has released Scope 3 guidance for productions, and updated Scope 1 and 2 guidance came out in August 2025, but there is still no single tool that everyone uses. The real challenge over the next two years will be closing the gap between what studios must report and what their suppliers can provide. Zena also makes a bigger point about culture. After 12 years in the industry, she sees sustainability experts facing the same obstacles again and again because the way content is made hasn’t changed. The day-to-day work is important, but the bigger opportunity is in climate storytelling. Only about 13% of recent top-rated films mention climate change at all. Tracking the carbon footprint of a TV season is important, but what really matters is how a billion viewers see what’s normal on screen. That’s the influence Hollywood hasn’t fully used yet.To follow Zena’s work, visit greensparkgroup.com. You can also learn more about the conference she started at sustainableproductionforum.com, or listen to her podcast, The Tie-In, which she co-hosts with Mark Rabin.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    46 mins
  • Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough

    Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough
    Apr 13 2026
    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 now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainability industry doesn't want to talk about: buying green products doesn't drive the systemic change we need. It might not even be moving the needle. That's the core argument of Michael Maniates, an environmental social scientist and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael has spent more than 30 years studying why well-intentioned environmental choices at the checkout line fail to add up to real-world emissions reductions, and what kinds of action actually do. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, he makes the case that the most powerful thing an eco-conscious person can do isn't swap their products. It's to become an active citizen.

    The resulting cycle has a name in Michael's framework: the trinity of despair. Earnest effort. Negligible impact. Creeping anxiety that we can't turn the corner. People try hard, see little result, feel guilty when they can't maintain perfection, and eventually burn out — or conclude that meaningful change requires getting every single person on board first. He is a sharp critic of what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has called the ABC model of social change: shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and better Choices will follow. It's the backbone of most sustainability communications — and, he argues, it's empirically fragile. Pro-environmental attitudes don't reliably produce pro-environmental behavior. Yet the model persists in education, marketing, and environmental organizing alike. Why does it keep coming back? Maniates identifies two reasons. First, it's deeply embedded in the educational system. Second, it sanitizes a genuinely gnarly problem of power and politics into a communication challenge: if we just get more information out there, people will make better choices. That framing shifts blame onto consumers, hides the structural drivers of high-carbon living, and makes life easier for politicians who don't want to touch the structural stuff.

    Find Michael Maniates' work, including his email to ask your direct questions, at michaelmaniates.com. His book, Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits is available as a free download. The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism was published in November 2025 by Polity Press.
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns

    Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns
    Apr 6 2026
    $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 looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it.

    The fix isn't a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What's missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object.

    When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That's what circularity looks like when it's applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one.

    Follow Don's work at WhatTheyThink.com and on X at @DCarli.
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    49 mins
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition
    Mar 30 2026
    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 Electric, works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports more than 40% of the Fortune 500 with energy procurement and sustainability strategies, managing over $50 billion in annual energy spending. His experience shows something that pledges and press releases often miss: the biggest challenge for corporate sustainability is not money, technology, or political will. The real issue is the gap between ambition and the ability to deliver. Companies are making Science-Based Targets commitments faster than they are building the infrastructure to meet them. Scope one and two emissions are being managed better, but scope three emissions, which come from a company's supply chain, still present a systems problem that no single company can solve alone. Schneider's zero-carbon supplier program suggests what it takes to close this gap. When the company started its own effort to cut emissions from its top 1,000 suppliers by 50% in five years, all 1,000 signed up within two weeks. However, about 84% of them did not fully understand what they had agreed to. Achieving success meant creating measurement tools, education programs, and action plans to help the whole ecosystem, not just individual companies.

    This critical conversation explores how renewable energy is bought, including the difference between physical and virtual power purchase agreements. Steve also explains why the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) market became more complex as it grew, and why 10% fewer renewable deals closed in 2025 compared to 2024, as tech companies used up available clean energy.He also addresses a key question in clean energy: is AI helping the environment overall, or do its energy needs still outweigh its efficiency benefits? Schneider processes over a million energy invoices each month, and about 50,000 of them had issues that took 10 to 15 business days to resolve. Now, a team of AI systems can handle these in seconds. Accurate energy consumption and billing data directly affect emissions reporting, energy efficiency, and money-saving market decisions. He describes Schnieder's approach as "frugal AI": using the right-sized models for each task, running them on clean energy, and choosing simple solutions over complex ones. Looking ahead, electrification is building a global digital energy network in which every meter and adjustment contributes to a new system independent of central plants. As intelligence spreads, power can shift to consumers, communities, and businesses. Schneider is enabling this shift by building a mesh grid in which each point both produces and consumes energy, coordinated by AI. These changes fundamentally reshape the global energy landscape. The central question: will we intentionally build this new, distributed system, or will we repeat centralized patterns digitally?

    To learn more about Schneider Electric's sustainability efforts, visit se.com.
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    54 mins