Earth911.com's Sustainability In Your Ear

Being a consumer in an advanced economy—or any economy these days—is challenging because you cannot keep up with the ever-changing range of ingredients and materials in the products at the store. For example, thousands of new chemicals are registered annually. Still, many more compounds that could be harmful are introduced and used in manufacturing. These chemicals can harm our health and the environment. However, many tools for interrogating our world and the products we buy are emerging, offering insights into our lifestyles' health and environmental impact. Meet Stephen Fuller, Senior Criteria Manager at TCO Development, a globally recognized certification organization promoting sustainable practices for technology products based in Stockholm, Sweden. With over 350,000 chemicals in use today and only a tiny fraction of those subjected to risk assessment, TCO has developed disclosures of the chemicals used in information technology products. In 2015, the organization introduced an Accepted Substance List, a catalog of safer alternative chemicals vetted by organizations like GreenScreen and ChemFORWARD. TCO hopes to drive semiconductor, computer, phone, and TV manufacturers to adopt materials that meet rigorous environmental and social responsibility standards.IT buyers in a market-based economy need valid, transparent sources of information to make informed buying decisions. Yet the complexity of, and constantly evolving technologies used in technology products makes keeping abreast of what is safe for humans and nature a constant challenge. TCO Development, GreenScreen, and ChemFORWARD have built a collaboration that helps enterprise IT buyers exert their desire to use safer alternatives to toxic chemicals, and those insights are filtering down to consumer electronics buyers. Stephen explains that TCO Development is still working to make the Accepted Substances List a standard for appliances like TVs, toasters, or microwaves so that everyone can join the call for safer electronics. Once TCO's product passport has become a widely accepted tool for understanding the chemicals in our technologies, buyers, not the producers, will be empowered to track what chemicals they are exposed to and advocate — through their spending and conversational influence—for the least harmful, least environmentally damaging practices. You can learn more about TCO Development and the Accepted Substances List at https://tcocertified.com/Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube

The sharing economy can be a platform for keeping products in circulation and out of landfills until they are no longer usable and must be recycled. If we can get more uses out of things we currently throw away, we can reduce the need to extract raw materials from the Earth. Meet a pioneer in sharing, Daan Weddenpohl, founder and CEO of Peerby, an innovative Dutch platform at the forefront of the sharing economy. Peerby connects people within neighborhoods and communities, enabling them to share items that would otherwise remain underused, such as household tools, appliances, and recreational equipment. Peerby promotes sustainable consumption by reducing the demand for new products and fosters social connections among community members. Daan launched Peerby with the belief that shared resources and connected communities could make a significant positive impact on the environment, economy, and society at large. Peerby has grown into a platform that addresses the local challenge that underlies global over-consumption and waste. We delve into Peerby’s service, the challenges and opportunities of the sharing economy, and Daan’s insights on the future of sustainable living and community-focused innovation. Daan describes his goal for Peerby as making it a Netflix for stuff, and the question is whether the digital infrastructure can help make physical assets as widely available at low cost as Netflix has made movies and television shows. To do so, we must first virtualize the physical economy, and we’ve heard from organizations like GS1 and TCO that they are working to launch product passports that document where products are manufactured, how the raw materials are sourced, and the distribution networks that deliver them to the consumer. Once we document product lifecycles, it is possible to manage their use, reuse, and even recycle them when they become unusable to reduce the extraction of raw materials and the carbon impact of the things that support our lives. But it takes an essential first step, the choice by people in their homes and workplaces to make what they have last longer, to share items like a drill or a truck to minimize the surplus inventories of material goods that have come to define consumerism in the 21st Century. You can learn more about Peerby at https://www.peerby.com/

Sustainability In Your Ear welcomes back oceanographer and author John Englander, who last visited with us in February 2023. John is the author of two pivotal books on Sea Level Rise, High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis, which explores the science behind rising seas and its far-reaching impacts on society, and Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Sea Level and the Path Forward, which offers a comprehensive look at how individuals, businesses, and governments can adapt to this unavoidable reality. He recently gave a talk at the U.S. Naval Academy and shares the reaction he heard from admirals and strategists charged with protecting U.S. interests a sea. John delivered a stark warning about the accelerating rate of sea level rise, emphasizing the vulnerabilities of the Antarctic ice sheets—particularly the Thwaites Glacier, which also known as the "Doomsday Glacier." He warned that the collapse of the Thwaites alone could lead to significant sea level rise within the next few decades, with profound implications for global military operations, coastal infrastructure, and international security.Sea level rise is the permanent change humans will live with for centuries, probably millennia, because the oceans have absorbed most of the heat trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. Average sea surface temperatures have climbed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius, or 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The Arctic is warming four times faster, about 3 degrees Celsius since 1980, and that has raised sea levels by between 21 and 24 centimeters, or about nine inches, in the same period. John also shared recent warnings about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which drives circulation of seawater globally. Until we lower emissions sufficiently to stop glacial melting, sea level will only rise more and ports, infrastructure, and entire economies will deal with the threat of disruption. Learn more about the organization he cofounded, the Rising Seas Institute, at https://risingseasinstitute.org/. It became a program of Nova Southeastern University on November 1, 2024.

The climate crisis cannot be solved by one person, one organization, one company, or one government. A network of collaboration is being built, and nonprofits often serve as the connective tissue. Our guest today Brett Jenks, is the CEO of Rare.org, a global conservation and development organization dedicated to empowering communities in the world's most biologically diverse regions to sustainably manage their natural resources. Under Brett’s leadership, Rare has grown from a small nonprofit into a global leader in conservation, with a $30 million annual budget and active projects across 60 countries. Rare’s efforts span a variety of critical areas, including Fish Forever, the world’s largest coastal fishery recovery effort; Lands for Life, a climate-smart agriculture program; the groundbreaking Center for Behavior & the Environment, which merges behavioral science with conservation; and Climate Culture, a strategy designed to help the U.S. meet its Paris Agreement targets.Beyond his leadership of Rare, Brett is also an innovator in the for-profit sector with the Meloy Fund, a blue economy investment vehicle that supports a growing portfolio of companies, including several focused on sustainable fisheries in Southeast Asia and EverForest, a video game that turns virtual actions into real-world tree planting. Brett shared seven ideas Americans can act on to change their environmental impact. You can learn more about Rare at https://rare.org/ and about the Meloy Fund at https://www.meloyfund.com/