The constant stream of new models, products and processes that are helping organizations extend the useful life of resources and materials while reducing, repurposing and ultimately eliminating waste in all its forms
This is the first in a three-part series from The Recycling Partnership on collaborating to drive effective engagement – and action – around recycling. Attention! Recycling needs you. Wait, we’re still talking about recycling? Yep, and here’s the kicker: While recycling feels universal, it’s currently only functioning at 50 percent of its potential.
The use of post-consumer recycled materials as feedstock for new bottles and cans has become common practice for the beverage industry, but there is still more to be done to reduce waste and increase recycling. Industry giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are working towards overcoming these challenges by supporting eco-innovation and government initiatives. The recipients of PepsiCo’s Zero Impact Fund — an expansion of PepsiCo Recycling’s college and university programs to help bring campus eco-innovations to life — have been announced. Eight colleges and universities will each receive a contribution from PepsiCo to help accomplish their environmental goals:
From 10kg of blueberries to 10-litre tubs of mayonnaise and handmade farmhouse cheese, surplus food is now up for grabs eBay-style, thanks to a new UK-based platform. Using the principles of the infamous auction site, Takestock applies the transaction to solving food waste. The online trading platform efficiently connects owners of surplus stock with buyers, rather than scrapping it.
By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will live in urban centers and that number will have increased by about 3 billion people in the interim – a big challenge and opportunity to feed. One emergent model is indoor farming, aka, vertical farming. Columbia professor Dickson D. Despommier, Ph.D., (now emeritus) at Columbia University Medical School authored “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century,” published in 2010, and is credited with mainstreaming the term vertical farming.
Energy companies are grossly underestimating low-carbon advances with a business-as-usual approach says a new report co-authored by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative. The report also points to the falling costs of electric vehicle and solar technology as having the potential to halt the growth in global demand for oil and coal from 2020, challenging the wisdom of backing fossil fuel expansion.
As the Trump administration threatens to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement and double up on efforts to revive a slowing fossil fuels industry, the rest of the world is pulling out of coal projects and redirecting investment towards renewables in an effort to make good on climate pledges.
Less than a week after its release, the European Commission’s new Roadmap for the EU Strategy on Plastics in a Circular Economy is already coming under fire. According to the Break Free From Plastic Movement, the roadmap fails to get to the root of the plastic problem, and threatens to divert Europe down a less direct — and significantly slower — pathway towards attaining its sustainability goals.
The volume of discarded electronics in East and South-East Asia jumped almost two-thirds between 2010 and 2015, and e-waste generation is growing fast in both total volume and per capita measures, according to new research by United Nations University (UNU).
The City of Phoenix, AZ and Recyclebank, a company that pioneered and patented an education and incentives platform to help cities encourage residents to make sustainable purchasing and disposal habits, formally announced today that they will be teaming up to amplify the city’s “Reimagine Phoenix” initiative, a program aimed at diverting 40 percent of the city’s waste from landfills by 2020.
It was disappointing to see recent figures from the United Kingdom showing that household food waste is on the rise again (although per capita waste is still roughly constant). The UK became a world leader in curbing food waste when, from 2007 to 2012, its households cut the amount of edible food they threw away by 21 percent. This was the result of a government-funded initiative that combined a consumer-facing campaign and a voluntary agreement involving major retailers and brands to help consumers reduce household food waste. But since 2012, progress has stalled, and it now looks as though waste might start going back up.
Sweden has long been well ahead of the curve in terms of activating on sustainability initiatives, particularly when it comes to energy: In 1991, it became one of the first countries to impose a heavy tax on fossil fuels, and in 2012, it reached its 2020 goal to source 50 percent of its electricity from renewables (as of 2016, it had risen to 52 percent – the highest in the EU - with a goal of 100 percent by 2040).
The business case for sustainability, particularly the circular economy, is a strong one, and more and more researching is backing it up. A recent report by the Business & Sustainable Development Commission pointed to sustainable business models as the key to unlocking trillions of dollars in economic opportunities, and WRAP revealed that brands across the UK saved over £100 million simply by reducing food waste.
A new report by the Business & Sustainable Development Commission (the Commission) points to sustainable business models as the key to unlocking US$12 trillion in economic opportunities and creating up to 380 million jobs a year by 2030.
Two recent bits of news from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) point to continued groundwork being laid toward a circular economy in the U.S. and beyond.
According to a new report released by WRAP, retailers and brands across the UK saved over £100 million by reducing food waste.
Procter & Gamble announced today additional investments in recycling and beneficial reuse that will eliminate all manufacturing waste from its global network of more than 100 production sites by 2020. Since P&G began qualifying sites as zero manufacturing waste to landfill, 56 percent of its global production sites have achieved this milestone. Plans are now in place to complete the remaining facilities over the next four years. This means eliminating or beneficially reusing roughly 650,000 metric tons of waste, equivalent to the weight of nearly 350,000 mid-sized cars that would typically go to landfills.
New research from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) warns that the UK risks failing to meet its climate obligations without the help of small businesses. FSB’s latest report, The Price of Power: Energising small business in the next UK Carbon Plan, shows how with improved incentives and fewer barriers, small firms can be key to closing the carbon gap. It calls on the Government to produce urgently a new carbon plan that includes a specific strategy on crucial areas such as microgeneration and energy efficiency across the UK’s small business community.
Today, approximately 40% of the food produced in the U.S. goes to waste and 97% ends up in landfills. There it decomposes and produces methane gas — 25 times more harmful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and a major contributor to global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer. A similar story can be told across the globe. Food waste poses a significant risk to both food security and the planet, but new technologies and creative reuses of waste streams are pushing the food industry towards more sustainable, circular models.
Can capitalism be ethical? This was the question asked by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent lecture in Cambridge (part of Murray Edwards College’s Capitalism on the Edge series). He argued that while capitalism may unarguably deliver ethically desirable outcomes – such as innovations in health and less onerous work – it cannot be ethical per se if, at its core, it is about the ownership of property and its exchange for profit. Such a system, he argued, can’t generate systematic, sustainable answers to questions of social good and therefore be ethical.
It’s no secret that the food industry struggles to control the vast amount of waste it generates. In the United States alone, 30-40 percent of the national food supply (roughly 52 million tons of food) finds its way into landfills every year — a staggering and shocking statistic considering that 1 in 7 Americans don’t have access to affordable, nutritious food.