Sustainability In Your Ear

Mitch Ratcliffe
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Earth Sciences
  • Updated Semiweekly

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.

  1. 3d ago

    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 Sustainable Development Goals, the goal for life below water consistently draws the least money. Canada, which has the longest coastline in the world, is trying to flip that equation, and you can watch it happen close to real time. Our guest this week is Kendra MacDonald, CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, a national, industry-led effort to grow what’s come to be called the blue economy. Under her leadership, the Supercluster has grown into a community of roughly 1,000 members co-investing in more than 150 projects. She came to the role after 25 years at Deloitte, where she served as Chief Audit Executive, and she runs it from St. John’s, Newfoundland. The model is built on co-investment: at least two companies put money in, often alongside Indigenous communities, researchers, and global corporations, so no single player carries the risk alone. The projects range from graphene hull coatings that cut a ship’s fuel use to wave-powered desalination and the $4.4 million Membertou Electric Lobster Boat, billed as Canada’s first zero-emission commercial fishing vessel, led by the Membertou First Nation. Kendra’s thesis fits in seven words: you can go faster alone, but farther together. In our conversation, she’s candid about where that gets hard — most of these collaborations are small companies that don’t individually hold every capability, and the upfront work of sorting out who owns which piece of intellectual property is what separates the partnerships that succeed from the ones that stall. She’s just as candid about the catch: the Supercluster is funded by the Government of Canada to de-risk small Canadian firms, and when those firms succeed, they’re often acquired by international buyers — the value-capture problem at the heart of every public innovation program. That tension between strong science and thin capital, she says, keeps her up at night, and it points back to the blue-finance gap. It also shapes how she talks about aquaculture, which in 2022 surpassed wild capture as the world’s main source of farmed aquatic animals, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and is now the fastest-growing source of animal protein. Kendra rejects the idea that ocean health and productivity are in trade-off, arguing that a healthier ocean is more productive. And just before we recorded, the Trump administration reopened nearly half a million square miles of the Pacific to commercial fishing, the third such rollback in little more than a year. One model treats the ocean as a commons to protect and co-invest in; the other treats marine protection as an obstacle to clear. Kendra thinks the contrast opens a door for Canada to lead. To learn more about the Ocean Supercluster, visit oceansupercluster.ca. MacDonald writes about ocean-economy investment on her Substack, Saltwater Signals, and she’s easy to find on LinkedIn.

    44 min

  2. Jun 15

    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 24 tons of material out of landfills every year. Together, they saved municipalities R750 million (about $45 million) in landfill costs in just one year, yet they do this work without recognition, protection, or a formal role in the waste system. Sifiso Gumbi began as a reclaimer at 19, collecting scrap metal in Soweto after school. After 15 years in the informal recycling economy, he founded Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise that believes the people already doing recycling work should be supported and equipped, not replaced. Urban Surfer creates essential tools like PPE and collection trolleys with personalized number plates, helping reclaimers become recognized workers in their neighborhoods. The organization also runs four recycling hubs where reclaimers can sort and bale their materials to sell at better prices, cutting out the middlemen who used to buy their collections for much less than market value.Urban Surfer tracks everything with GPS-enabled trolleys and a live dashboard, and this approach has increased reclaimer incomes by up to 300%. Sifiso talks about why dignity is key to better recycling rates, how aluminum can prices show what gets collected and what ends up in landfills, and what it would take to expand this model across South Africa and the continent. One key idea keeps coming up in the conversation: reclaimers are like an R&D department that no one asks for advice. In South Africa, aluminum cans sell for 28 to 30 rand per kilogram, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that Sifiso says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, materials with lower value end up piling up in landfills, which are quickly filling up in Johannesburg and Gauteng. Companies that want their packaging recovered can learn from the people who decide every day what is worth picking up. Data is also important. Urban Surfer tracks every kilogram by material type and price at its hubs. As carbon and plastic credits become more common, reclaimers will have verified, real-time records of the work they have already done. Sifiso is honest about the challenges: four hubs are not enough for Gauteng, and there are always limits on land and equipment funding. But the bigger challenge is building trust between waste pickers and a public that still sees them as vagrants, and between the informal workforce and the policymakers and companies whose programs will only work if rebates actually reach the people doing the collecting. This conversation asks whether a truly circular economy can be built by supporting the people who are already making it happen. To learn more about Urban Surfer and to explore partnership and sponsorship opportunities that equip reclaimers with trolleys, protective gear, and recycling hub infrastructure visit urbansurfer.co.za. Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

    48 min

  3. Jun 8

    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 kids have grown out of. The waste side of that equation is substantial: the EPA estimates Americans generated about 17 million tons of textiles in 2018, and roughly 11.3 million tons of it was landfilled. Ethan and Desmond Hua, brothers from San Mateo, California, looked at textile waste and the cost of raising a family and saw a single solvable loop. In 2020, while they were still in middle school, they founded the HOPE Uniforms Program — HOPE stands for Help Our Planet Earth — a student-led nonprofit that collects gently used school uniforms families have outgrown and redistributes them, free, to families who need them. What began in one elementary school, run out of the family garage, now serves about 10 schools across three districts. By the brothers' count, HOPE has kept more than 14,000 uniforms out of landfills, redistributed over 12,000 of them, and served more than 1,400 households, saving those families an estimated $141,000. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Ethan and Desmond discuss why reuse sits a rung above recycling, how two teenagers built a multilingual logistics operation with a live inventory system, and what it took to talk Costco into donating 2,000 new uniforms. Ethan's work has earned him a 2025 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes and a Samaritan House Young Samaritan Award. The environmental case rests on a point that's easy to miss: the highest-value thing you can do with a garment is keep it whole and in use. What makes HOPE worth attention is the operations as much as the intent. The brothers engineered the return step directly into the model: families request uniforms through a website available in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese; the uniforms are returned when kids outgrow them; and Ethan and Desmond spot-check and reissue them. That return loop, paired with a deliberate decision to treat families as repeat customers who deserve a dependable service, is what converts a one-time donation into a repeating cycle. The approach is also honest about scale — a garage operation in San Mateo County will not move the national textile-waste numbers on its own. The brothers' wager is replication; Ethan's dream is HOPE in another garage, and then another, and the model is plain enough for a motivated student in another district to copy. Whether thousands of small local loops can add up to a circular economy is the open question this conversation puts on the table. To find out more about HOPE — and to donate uniforms, request them, or start a program in your own community — visit hopeuniformsprogram.com and follow the program on Instagram, @hopeuniformsprogram. If you know a teen making a difference for the planet, the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes recognizes young changemakers each year. And to find reuse, donation, and recycling options for textiles near you, search the Earth911 recycling directory. Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

    44 min

  4. Jun 1

    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, 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

    52 min

  5. May 25

    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 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.

    50 min

  6. May 18

    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 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.

    41 min

  7. May 11

    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 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.

    46 min

  8. Apr 27

    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 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

    46 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

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 regenerating nature.

Information

  • Creator
    Mitch Ratcliffe
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    557
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Internet Media Strategies Inc.
  • Show Website
    Sustainability In Your Ear

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