Earth911.com's Sustainability In Your Ear Mitch Ratcliffe

With the rise of recommerce, parents can find and buy top brands' children's products — from toys and clothing to furniture and car seats — at a deep discount. Our guest today is Shraysi Tandon, cofounder and CEO of Kidsy, a dealer of new and open-box children's products that is growing fast. According to TechCrunch, the company reached an annual revenue run rate of $1 million only a few months after going live, and its backers are a Who's Who of tech and sustainability investors. Shraysi comes from a journalism background at Bloomberg and ABC News, and her experience making a documentary on child labor shaped the Kidsy business plan. She says the "beautiful surprise" she found when starting Kidsy was the ease with which a company can begin sustainably and get on the path to constant improvement. That means we can retire environmentally irresponsible practices across the economy.
 
Children's products are a circular challenge since states sometimes ban used items, as we heard in our recent conversation with IKEA's U.S. Sustainability Manager, Mardi Ditze. Kidsy's strategy focuses on capturing unsold goods from retail and opened but unused items. It's part of the $761 billion recommerce movement with special requirements, and we'll explore how Kidsy ensures products are safe and clean, as well as the challenges of competing with established E-commerce companies. You can learn more at kidsy.co

IKEA is a global retail and furniture giant that has grown up with the modern era, defining a spare but elegant Nordic style that influences many of our homes. Mardi Ditze, IKEA's Country Sustainability Manager, joins the conversation to discuss how the company partners with customers to reduce, reuse, and recycle across its products' lifecycles. Mardi leads the IKEA team that is creating and implementing IKEA's climate goals, which include designing all products for a circular lifecycle, using renewable or recyclable materials in all its products by 2030, developing new circular services and the business models to support them, and collaborating with other organizations to lead the way to a sustainable economy by example.

Mardi explains the business benefits of IKEA's Buy Back and Resell program, which does not markup used goods when reselling them, and how providing free replacement parts deepens customer relationships. She also addresses global retailers' challenges when interacting with the fractured local recycling infrastructure in different U.S. communities. IKEA has partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to develop a circular economy glossary, which integrates into its marketing, customer communications, and retail experiences. IKEA's massive, multifaceted stores may be a model for spurring local innovation simply through its ability to connect flows of materials to collection programs and processors that will keep wood, metal, glass, and more in use over many generations of products. You can learn more about IKEA and its sustainability efforts at https://www.ikea.com/us/en/this-is-ikea/sustainable-everyday/

Consumer Reports and Breakthrough Energy recently put numbers on the social cost of carbon, calculating the cost for an American child born in 2024  due to climate change. They found that an American child will face $500,000 and a million dollars in higher cost of living and reduced income during their lifetime as the planet warms, life and food supplies are disrupted, and returns on investments fall.  Consumer Reports’ Senior Policy Analyst for Transportation and Energy Chris Harto, who led the research work for the nonprofit magazine, joins the conversation to discuss the economic consequences of a warming planet. Chris discusses the findings and shares Consumer Reports' climate action services, and tips on how to reduce today's impact from home energy and commuting to help relieve our children and their descendants of the burden of climate change.  ''

The social cost of carbon typically described in the aggregate, as representing trillions of dollars in added cost of living for future generations. The Biden administration pegs the social cost of carbon to a ton of emissions, currently pricing the future cost at $51 per ton of CO2 emitted today; more than ten times higher than the Trump era’s $5 per ton estimate but far below science based estimates of $185 per ton, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Resources for the Future. So, It’s hard to imagine the actual impact on us, or our grandchildren. The article, Climate Change Could Cost Each American Born Today $500,000, is available at https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/climate-change/the-per-person-financial-cost-of-climate-change-a6081217358/

The fashion industry is responsible for as much as 10% of annual CO2 emissions and an immense amount of waste that chokes landfills, rivers, and beaches worldwide. Too much of our clothing is made from oil-based textiles, like polyester. Tessa Callaghan, cofounder and CEO of Keel Labs, has been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader for her contributions to plant-based fashion. The Morrisville, North Carolina-based early-stage startup has developed a kelp-based alternative called Kelsun. According to the company, Kelsun is a compostable, soft natural fiber that can be integrated into the clothing production system with no changes. The result is clothing as comfortable and durable as those made with water-intensive cotton or oil-based textiles.

After beginning her career in the fashion industry, Tessa recognized the growing demand for sustainable alternatives to clothing that’s bad for the environment at every step in the lifecycle. Keel Labs converts kelp into Kelsun, and the resulting fiber is compostable at the end of its useful life, making it a potentially circular material we can be proud to wear. You can learn more about Keel Labs at https://www.keellabs.com/

The Endangered Species Act (ESA), passed in 1973 and signed into law by Republican Richard Nixon, has been a bulwark against unrestrained deforestation and development for over 50 years. It has protected and helped restore 1,700 species that teetered on the brink of extinction but returned to viable populations. Author Lowell Baier was a young lawyer in Washington, D.C., when the law passed and has worked for 60 years at the leading edge of environmental law, including leading the first President Bush's conservation policies in 1989. Tune into this critical discussion to learn from Lowell's work on a comprehensive history of the ESA in two volumes, The Codex of the Endangered Species Act and his just-released book, Earth's Emergency Room: Saving Species As The Planet And Politics Gets Hotter. 

Lowell explains the origins of the law during the 1960s and 70s Green Revolution and the revitalization of the ESA in the Clinton era, which made it more effective and responsive in the face of climate change. A post-partisan movement, Conservation Without Conflict, is now working in Washington to pass new legislation, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, to expand funding to support state and federal species restoration programs—Lowell Baier's books are available on Amazon and the Powell Books website.

Tune in to a special Earth Day 2024 episode about accelerating the path to a circular economy. Sustainability In Your Ear Mitch Ratcliffe shares lessons he learned at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's circular economy-focused REMADE conference, which met at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington DC earlier this month. Scientists and business leaders gathered to discuss and share research about enabling a circular economy. REMADE focuses on reducing waste and creating circular systems in the industry, which accounts for 30.2% of annual human CO2 emissions — and the conference has a decided tilt toward recycling, specifically industrializing it at a massive scale so that consumers no longer need to learn materials sort them at home for better recycling. As you'll hear, that requires an enormous investment, and it's a form of technological utopianism promising solutions so simple people don't have to think about it. Many of the scientific presentations at the event explored advanced recycling technologies for plastics, textiles, and metals, industrial decarbonization techniques, and how to design products for easier recyclability. These important and compelling initiatives will move us toward a make-recapture-remake approach to the products humans rely on daily.