Today’s inspiration comes from Pope John Paul II’s 1987 homily from his Mass for the Rural Workers: “The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.”

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click to get a larger image.

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For more than 20 years, fisheries managers set Chinook salmon recovery goals, closed fishing seasons, and rationed some tribal catches down to a handful of ceremonial fish. The whole time, ocean fleets off British Columbia and Alaska were killing thousands more of those same salmon each year than the official records showed.

Newly revised data released by Canada through the Pacific Salmon Commission show that ocean fisheries, especially British Columbia’s recreational fishery, intercepted far more Endangered Species Act-listed Puget Sound Chinook than was believed. The under-reporting goes back two decades. The is a wake-up call about Chinook populations, which are still “in crisis,” according to the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office. Because Southern Resident orcas depend on salmon, which sit near their lowest numbers on record, the treaty governing those fisheries is being renegotiated right now.

“We already knew Puget Sound Chinook and Southern Resident killer whales were in crisis,” said Dr. Nick Gayeski, a Senior Ecologist at Wild Fish Conservancy. “Canada’s underestimate of recreational Chinook harvest show that ocean interceptions were substantially higher than previously understood during a critical period for Chinook and killer whale recovery.

A 60% Toll Before the Fish Reached Home

In several Central and North Puget Sound watersheds, including the Nooksack, Skagit, and Stillaguamish rivers among them, revised estimates show Alaska and British Columbia fisheries intercepted more than 60% of returning adult Chinook before the fish ever reached Puget Sound. Distant ocean fleets were taking four to six times more Chinook from those rivers than every Puget Sound tribal, commercial, and recreational fishery combined.

The local cost is stark. In 2025, the Stillaguamish Tribe in Arlington, Washington, reported its ceremonial harvest of just 26 Chinook from a river its people have fished for generations.

The revised data traces to a single change. British Columbia updated the accounting method it had used for roughly 20 years to estimate catch in “mixed-stock” ocean fisheries, where weak and recovering runs from rivers up and down the coast are caught indiscriminately alongside healthy ones. The old method had understated that loss of salmon the entire time, with little public explanation, which is part of why Wild Fish Conservancy frames the episode as a transparency problem, not just a technical footnote.

What the Orcas Lost

The Southern Resident killer whales eat Chinook nearly to the exclusion of everything else, and the shortfall shows in long-term loss of these unique creatures. The most recent annual census, in July 2025, counted just 74 whales; Wild Fish Conservancy put the figure at 76 in mid-2026. Either way, the population has lost roughly a sixth of its members in two decades, and NOAA scientists point to the scarcity of large Chinook as the leading driver of the decline.

Recent modeling in Communications Earth & Environment found that cutting ocean interceptions before the fish reach orca feeding areas could raise Chinook abundance in the whales’ critical habitat by as much as 25%, restoring prey that was being removed at sea while everyone in the fishing community counted on it surviving to spawn.

What the Models Say Comes Next

Long-range projections are sobering under the status quo. A 2025 population model estimated the orcas could decline another 10.6% by 2150 if conditions simply hold at 2010–2020 levels. The same model found the population could grow 17.6% if Chinook productivity doubled, and more than double if specific runs, such as four-year-old Fraser River summer Chinook, rebounded sharply. The future of the whales, in other words, is largely a function of how many adult salmon survive to return.

Another study in Scientific Reports points to a compounding problem. Because ocean fisheries catch Chinook before they finish growing—immature fish can be up to 60% of the ocean catch—this selection contributes to shrinking the body size and reproductive output of future runs. Larger, older females carry more and bigger eggs and reach spawning habitat smaller fish can’t. The researchers found that when fisheries closer to the rivers let those large adults through, they can land greater total weight from fewer fish.

Puget Sound once saw as many as 690,000 Chinook return in a single year. Rebuilding anything close to that won’t come from one fix to a spreadsheet. But the timing matters: the United States and Canada are renegotiating the Pacific Salmon Treaty that governs these ocean fisheries; it’s negotiating window that opens roughly once a decade, and preservation is lever most likely to move the numbers that the models say determine whether salmon and orcas can recover together.

What You Can Do

The highest-leverage actions people can take are collective rather than individual:

• Track the Pacific Salmon Treaty Public comment periods and stakeholder meetings shape where, when, and how ocean harvest happens. Reform that shifts catch toward rivers and estuaries is the change researchers say matters most.
• Support in-river fisheries and tribal co-managers. Catching fewer, fully grown fish closer to home protects both salmon size and the treaty-reserved rights of Puget Sound tribes.
• Ask where and how your salmon was caught. When shopping or dining, look for river- or terminal-caught Pacific salmon over mixed-stock ocean-troll product when you can identify it. It’s a small move, but it nudges demand toward more selective fishing.
• Back habitat restoration in Puget Sound watersheds. Even perfectly counted harvest won’t recover Chinook without cold, clean, connected rivers for them to return to.

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Many of us enjoy adding homegrown herbs, garden fresh tomatoes, and crispy salad greens to our meals, but are limited in what we can grow ourselves. Thankfully, even the most urban yards and patios have the potential for producing relatively high yields. The trick is making every square foot work.

Here are some helpful tactics that can help you cultivate produce in a backyard plot or containers by the door. Many come straight from the intensive-gardening methods that land-grant extension programs have refined for decades.

This guide contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one, Earth911 earns a small commission that helps fund our work.

Choose High-yield Crops

Some vegetables produce more food in a given space than others. This varies by location, depending on your soil, available sunlight, and climate. Create a plan for your garden that takes the characteristics and preferences of crops into account.

In early spring, peas and radishes go in before much else will grow, then yield their spot to a summer crop after harvest. Peas also pull nitrogen from the air through bacteria in their roots — a benefit the next crop can draw on, especially if you turn the spent plants back into the bed rather than pulling them out whole.

Peppers are compact and grow up rather than out. Tomatoes take more room but reward it with heavy yields; on a patio or balcony, look for determinate or bush varieties bred for containers. Pole beans and cucumbers stay space-efficient when trained up a trellis. Tomatoes, peppers, and greens all do well in container gardens.

Kale and Swiss chard produce for months, giving you repeated harvests across the season. Spinach, lettuce, arugula, and baby greens fit into small gaps or along the edges of beds.

Succession Planting

The timing of crops is essential to getting the best harvest. In most areas, gardeners can stagger plantings to get yields of various crops in the same spot at different times. This method, called succession planting, is a great way to make efficient use of space but requires gardeners to pay close attention to what, where, and when they plant.

When a plant is no longer productive, remove it and plant something else that thrives during that part of the growing season. Some seeds will thrive in cold soils, such as spinach, radishes, arugula, peas, green onions, and broccoli. Other plants, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, peppers, eggplant, edamame, and squash, like warmer weather.

Staggered Planting

Plants tend to yield the most at a certain point and then decline. If you space out the planting by two or four weeks, you will sustain a smaller harvest for a longer period of time. This is a good approach if you do not want to preserve the harvest and want to eat as much as possible while it is fresh. Brocolli, carrots, tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, cabbage, onions, and radishes all work well with staggered plantings.

Enrich the Soil

Healthy soil is the foundation of a productive garden. A range of soil amendments, including compost, aged manure, leaf mold, seaweed, fish emulsion, bone meal, and feather meal, raise nutrient levels, and organic matter also helps the soil hold water. A layer of mulch on top feeds the bed slowly as it breaks down while suppressing weeds and locking in moisture.

Skip synthetic pesticides where you can; they suppress the soil microbes that keep a bed productive and can linger in the ground. When you’re unsure what your soil needs, send a sample to your local extension office for testing or use a home test kit or electronic meter, which will flag nutrient gaps and tell you whether the pH sits outside the ideal range.

Minimize Wasted Space

How you arrange plants matters as much as how many you plant. Swapping a square grid for an offset, triangular pattern, with each plant nestled into the gap between two in the row before it, fits more plants into the same area, commonly estimated at 10 to 15% more, while still giving each one its full spacing.

Growing vertically is one of the simplest ways to make more space in a small plot. Tomatoes and vining crops swallow ground when they ramble across it, but a trellis sends them skyward instead. Pole beans spiral around a support on their own, and peas and cucumbers grab on with their tendrils, so all three climb with little help. Even heavyweights like melons, pumpkins, and zucchini will go vertical, provided the frame is sturdy and you tie the vines to it as they grow.

Spacing is always a balancing act. Crowd plants too tightly and they stay small, which defeats the purpose; if a bed looks overplanted, thin out the weakest seedlings. Because paths eat up usable ground, raised beds are a popular way to squeeze the most from a small space.

Choose Crops, Varieties, and Seeds Carefully

Not all veggie seeds are created equal. Some veggies may not prosper in your yard due to climate, soil, and available sunlight. Okra, for example, thrives in high heat and humidity but will barely produce a harvest in colder climates.

If you are just getting started gardening or are new to the area, ask local veteran gardeners about what crops have been most successful for them. Look for garden seeds that were produced in your region for better germination and yields. Faster maturing plant varieties will produce crops more quickly, which helps assist in succession-planting strategies. Heirloom seed varieties that were developed in your area might be especially well suited for your local climate.

Related Reading

• Succession Planting for a More Successful Garden
• Planning a Raised Bed Garden
• Composting at Home: A Natural Way To Revitalize the Soil
• Mulch 101 for a Healthy Garden

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 2, 2020, by Sarah Lozanova, and substantially updated in June 2026. 

The post How To Grow Lots of Veggies in Small Spaces appeared first on Earth911.

Imagine a typical suburban neighborhood. Homeowners are tending their gardens and children are playing outside, but new updates about ocean pollution leave some residents concerned as scientists report about microplastics contaminating even the most remote seafloors and affecting millions of marine life.

However, many  homeowners are unaware that daily activities on their own properties can also contribute to the microplastics problem, regardless of their distance from the sea.

A study from the University of Vienna found that land sources, which include residential areas, account for 20 times more airborne microplastics than oceans. These particles are so small that people and animals can inhale them. The wind can take them far, and then the particles settle in soil and water. It affects both terrestrial and aquatic life. In fact, your home could be generating microplastics right now.

Understanding Microplastics from Land Sources

Microplastics are plastic fragments that measure between one nanometer and five millimeters. Note that a nanometer is a fraction of a human hair’s width. Most of these particles come from the degradation of larger plastic products. Some are made to be small, like the primary microplastics in the form of beads in toothpastes and facial exfoliants.

Plastic materials can turn into particles due to friction, regular wear and abrasion. UV and thermal radiation can also gradually degrade them, and the extent varies depending on the material and weathering conditions. Once microplastics are produced, the wind can lift and disperse them across vast distances. Strong air currents can carry them high into the atmosphere, allowing them to reach even remote environments.

In arid or dry weather, microplastics can mix with dust on soil, roads and other surfaces. Mechanical disturbances, like passing vehicles or agricultural tilling, can cause these particles to rise back into the air.

The Land-to-Air Pathway

How microplastics transition from land to air varies depending on the source. For example, exterior building paints can peel and flake due to UV radiation and weathering. They turn brittle and shed fragments that the wind can disperse.

Microfibers from synthetic textiles can shed particles when running a load of laundry. These travel through wastewater and get trapped in treatment plants, a substantial amount ending up in agricultural fields as fertilizer, and microplastics in soil can become airborne through erosion.

Health and Environmental Concerns

Microplastics are physical hazards and toxic chemical vectors across ecosystems. People can consume 74,000 to 121,000 microplastic particles annually through air and food exposure. Inhaled particles can damage the lungs, and their toxic chemicals and additives can contribute to health problems like cancer and reproductive issues. Buildups in the soil and water can contaminate food sources and disrupt ecosystems.

The Home Property Audit: Finding Where Microplastics Are Generated

Here’s a look at the various sources of microplastics around your home and how to check them for particle buildup.

Zone 1: Driveway and Parking Areas

These are typically the areas that generate the most microplastics because of tire wear.

Source	Problem	Scale	Check for
Car tires	Wears down whenever cars accelerate, brake or turn	Can shed 2.8 to 4 kilograms during its lifetime	Black dust accumulation in your driveway edges

Zone 2: Lawn and Landscape Surfaces

These outdoor surfaces can produce a significant amount of microplastics.

Surface	Problem	Scale	Check for
Synthetic turf	Releases particles due to UV radiation, while rubber infill materials degrade	Up to 20,000 artificial turf fibers a day can end up in bodies of water	Black rubber granules migrating beyond the turf area
Plastic landscape edging and weed barriers	Releases microplastics into the soil due to UV radiation	Depends on the material quality and sun exposure	Brittle, flaking plastic edges
Rubber mulch	Degrade over time due to friction and abrasion	Can release a substantial amount, sometimes on par with motorway tire wear	Black dust in the surrounding areas

Zone 3: Outdoor Furniture and Recreation Areas

These surfaces get a lot of use and are often exposed to the elements.

Surface	Problem	Scale	Check for
Plastic furniture	Surface flaking due to UV radiation	Minor compared to turf and tires, but cumulative	Faded, chalky surface and plastic dust when wiping
Playground equipment	Wears down due to friction, abrasion and UV radiation	Minor compared to turf and tires, but cumulative	Shiny wear patterns and rough textures
Trampoline mats and netting	Gradually deteriorates due to UV and friction	Concentrated the microplastic particles due to the enclosed setup	Fraying edges and powder on the surface

Zone 4: Building Exterior and Structures

These areas often bear the brunt of extreme weather.

Surface	Problem	Scale	Check for
Vinyl siding	Releases microplastic particles due to weathering	Wears down slowly but constantly over the building’s lifetime	Fading color and chalky residue
Plastic planters and pots	Degrades due to UV radiation	Minor but avoidable with shade	Brittle, cracking plastic
Outdoor plastic storage sheds	Fully exposed to UV, which can accelerate particle generation	Moderate, depending on the material quality	Fading, surface roughness

Zone 5: Gardens and Growing Areas

These features are often deliberately placed in the sun, which can accelerate plastic deterioration.

Surface	Problem	Scale	Check for
Plastic mulch film	Intended for single-season use, but fragments can remain in the soil afterward	Can be significant in agricultural settings, but moderate in home gardens	Film fragments in soil after removal
Landscape fabric under mulch	Deteriorates over time and mixes with the soil	Depends on the quality, with subpar materials disintegrating faster	Black threads are visible in mulch
Plastic plant pots buried at grade	Degrades due to UV radiation	Minor

The Biggest Culprit — Tire Dust Management

Tire dust is one of the most abundant forms of microplastics in the environment.

Every vehicle in the world creates tire dust whenever it’s on the move. The contact between the rubber tread and pavement creates mechanical shearing and intense frictional heat, which scrapes off microscopic layers of material. Cars can produce roughly 110 milligrams of tire wear per kilometer, which can increase with intense acceleration, braking and turning. It’s no wonder tire particles from vehicles account for 60% of the overall microplastic pollution.

Tire microplastics are roughly 100 nanometers or smaller, which means they disperse easily in the air. What makes these harmful is their hazardous composition. Typical tires are around 24% synthetic rubber, 19% natural rubber and a plastic polymer.

Reduction Strategies for Homeowners

It takes a holistic approach to reduce the tire dust you generate. Consider these strategies:

• Avoid aggressive starts and hard stops, as they generate significant friction.
• Drive at lower, consistent speeds to generate fewer particles.
• Drive on smooth, seal-coated asphalt surfaces whenever possible.
• Use wet cleaning methods in your driveway to capture and wash particles away.
• Plant dense foliage along your driveway edges to capture airborne microplastics.
• Invest in higher-quality tires with slower wear rates.

Tire Dust Management Limitations and Reality

It’s impossible to eliminate tire wear completely because friction is a basic physical requirement for vehicles to roll, steer and brake. Instead, the goal is to minimize unnecessary generation and contain particles before they enter the ecosystem.

For example, direct car wash water with tire particles, brake dust and soap away from storm drains, which lead to local waterways. If possible, you can instead guide the hazardous water toward a sanitary sewer for wastewater.

Synthetic Turf — The Hidden Cost of “Low Maintenance”

Artificial grass is one of the most significant sources of microplastics in residential areas.

Sunlight, temperature fluctuations and mechanical wear, like foot traffic, can splinter artificial grass blades into microscopic fragments. The turf’s infill can also spread beyond the perimeter and pollute nearby soils and aquatic environments. While artificial grass can typically last between eight and 15 years, it can start shedding fibers years before the end.

Health Concerns With Synthetic Turf

Artificial turf and the recycled tire crumb rubber infill it contains include harmful elements, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and heavy metals. Synthetic grass also absorbs heat, and it can get 30-50 °Fahrenheit hotter than natural fields during sunny days. The turf can get hot enough to cause direct contact burns and induce heat exhaustion during hot days. Imagine children who love playing on lawns coming home with burns.

If you’re considering artificial grass for your lawn, here’s a sample breakdown of its typical costs:

• Artificial grass installation: Costs around $5-$20 per square foot, which can cover both materials and labor. Fixed contractor setup and base prep fees can affect the price of smaller projects.
• Maintenance: Deep cleaning, power brushing and infill replacements fall between $300-$800 per year. You can save money if you do these tasks yourself, but you may still need to rent or invest in upkeep equipment.
• Removal and disposal: Standard removal and hauling typically costs $1-$3 per square foot. Contractors may charge more if the job involves specialized hazardous waste disposal.
• Natural grass: Only costs $0.10-$1 per square foot to put down sod and seed. While ongoing watering can increase your consumption, investing in an irrigation system can help you save 20% to 50% on water bills in the long run.

Alternatives to Synthetic Turf

You can have a beautiful yard without generating microplastics with these alternatives:

• Natural grass: Produces biodegradable clippings
• Clover lawns: Drought-tolerant, effective in nitrogen-fixing and rarely needs mowing
• Native groundcovers: Adapted to the local climate and require minimal maintenance
• Decomposed granite or gravel: Permeable and plastic-free
• Mixed approach: Hardscape for high-traffic areas and natural groundcovers for the rest

What to Do If You Already Have Synthetic Turf

Keep your artificial lawn’s microplastic particles minimal with these tips:

• Rinse the turf regularly to prevent synthetic fiber buildup.
• Replace the infill with natural materials whenever possible.
• Contain the edges to prevent infill migration.
• Plan for removal when the synthetic lawn’s lifespan ends.

Material Swaps That Reduce Microplastic Generation

Replacing certain items and features in your yard can minimize the plastic fragments your property generates.

Material	Alternatives	Impact	Cost	Notes
Resin or plastic outdoor furniture	Wood (FSC-certified), metal (aluminum, steel), stone	Eliminates the UV degradation source	Comparable or higher up front, but longer lifespan offsets it	Wood requires sealing or staining, and metal may need rust protection
Plastic landscape edging	Metal (aluminum, steel), stone, brick, wood	Permanent materials don’t degrade	Metal or stone costs more up front but lasts indefinitely	The installation has a similar difficulty level
Rubber mulch materials	Wood chips, bark, straw, leaves	Organic mulches are biodegradable and microplastic-free	Cheaper and available locally	Need replenishment annually (1–3 inches)
Plastic landscape fabric or weed barriers	Cardboard, newspaper, natural fiber mats (jute, coir)	Biodegradable options decompose cleanly	Cheaper or free (cardboard)	Works equally well for initial weed suppression
Plastic plant containers	Terra cotta, ceramic, wood, fiber pots	Reduces the UV degradation source	Similar or slightly higher	Terra cotta is breathable but breakable, while fiber pots are compostable
Plastic playground equipment and play surfaces	Wood, metal	Reduces friction-generated particles	Comparable for new installations	Modern wood or metal equipment meets safety standards
Rubber mulch as groundcover for play areas	Wood chips (playground-certified), sand, pea gravel	Eliminates major particle source	Cheaper	Certified wood chips meet fall-height requirements

Maintenance Practices That Minimize Particle Generation

Learning how to reduce microplastics involves exploring upkeep strategies and determining which one works best for your yard setup.

Cleaning Strategies

Here are practices that trap and isolate microplastics, keeping them from becoming airborne or washing directly into vulnerable ecosystems.

• Opt for wet cleaning methods over dry sweeping, as the latter can agitate settled dust and launch particles into the air.
• Use high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) vacuums when cleaning patios and enclosed areas, as they can safely trap microscopic plastic fragments.
• Direct your wash water to the sanitary sewer to keep it from flowing into the storm drain or seeping into the soil.
• Clean your outdoor furniture regularly to prevent particle accumulation.

UV Protection

Sunlight can cause plastic materials to fade, crack and splinter into tiny fragments, which is why UV protection strategies can help reduce microplastic generation, such as:

• Cover or store outdoor items when they’re not in use.
• Use natural fiber covers instead of plastic tarps to block UV rays without adding synthetic pollutants to your space.
• Invest in shade structures to reduce direct sun exposure and lower heat accumulation, both of which accelerate material breakdown.
• Apply UV-protective sealants to plastic items and surfaces to create an extra barrier against sunlight.

Vegetation Management

Plants can trap and immobilize particles, which keeps them from spreading. Here are strategic vegetation management tips to cultivate extra barriers to microplastics:

• Grow dense plants along high-particle areas, like driveways and roads, to reduce wind speed and trap microscopic fragments.
• Cultivate groundcovers to create a physical mesh at the soil level to lower wind velocity near the ground and stop microplastics from becoming airborne.
• Water your garden, lawn or yard regularly to keep the soil and surrounding foliage damp and ready to capture dust and plastic particles.
• Avoid using leaf blowers, as they can lift and re-aerosolize settled particles instead of removing them.

Seasonal Considerations

With the right seasonal care, you can minimize the mechanical wear and chemical breakdown of synthetic fabrics. Consider these tips:

• Deep clean in spring to remove the plastic particles that winter frost and winds have turned brittle.
• Set up UV protection measures in summer to protect plastic furniture, features and surfaces from solar radiation and high temperatures.
• Remove plastic and sweep up debris before winter storage to prevent freeze-thaw cycles from trapping particles deep in the soil.
• Remove debris and organic matter from your yard before spring meltwater flushes accumulated microplastics into waterways.

The Indoor-Outdoor Connection

Microplastics can enter your home from outside, and once they settle, the risk of occupants inhaling or ingesting them increases.

How Yard Microplastics Enter Your Home

Microplastics in the environment can get into indoor spaces in various ways. Shoe treads can pick up contaminated dirt and dust and track them into the house. Open doors and windows can let wind-blown microplastics pass through.

Microplastics in the soil and yard debris can stick to your clothes when you work outside. Your pet’s fur and paws can act like static brushes, gathering plastic-laden dirt and dust when they roam your yard.

Indoor Accumulation and Exposure

When synthetic particles infiltrate your home, they can settle in dust and cling to various household items. Carpets and upholstery can trap them. Every time you sit on your plush sofa or walk over a rug, you risk releasing the microplastics that have settled.

Using a non-HEPA vacuum to clean can also blast fine plastic particles back into the air, where they remain suspended for hours. Airborne microplastics typically stay close to the ground. That means crawling toddlers, young children and pets are the ones most at risk of inadvertently breathing them in.

Reduction Strategies for Indoor Spaces

While there’s no telling exactly how much microplastics are present in your home, you can take measures to reduce them. Consider these tips:

• Ask everyone to take off their shoes and leave them at the door.
• Place a coarse scraper mat outside the door to encourage people to loosen the debris in their shoe treads.
• Add a highly absorbent doormat inside the door to trap fine particles before they hit indoor floors.
• Run HEPA air purifiers designed to trap the tiny, floating particles.
• Wipe hard surfaces with a damp cloth and mop before vacuuming to keep microplastics from recirculating into your breathing space.
• Wipe or wash your pet’s paws after every outdoor time.

Ventilation Considerations

Ventilation with microplastics reduction in mind can be tricky. While you need fresh air to reduce plastic fragment concentrations, opening doors and windows also risks letting in particles. The key is to balance filtration. Combine controlled, short bouts of ventilation with aggressive indoor air filtration.

You can run portable HEPA air purifiers. However, if you want a more long-term solution, upgrading your HVAC system to MERV 13+ filters is a good step. Microplastics can bypass common, low-rated filters, which are typically MERV 8 and below. In contrast, higher-rated models can capture most microplastics.

You can also invest in window screens. While they can let in microscopic particles, they’re a good partial barrier against larger bits of dust and macro-debris.

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Microplastic Reduction

Here’s a closer look at how material swaps and mindful changes can help you reduce the microplastics you generate.

High-Cost Swaps With Long-Term Savings

Replacing plastic lawns and furnishings with more natural alternatives may seem expensive up front, but they tend to provide significant savings down the line.

Synthetic turf to natural lawn and similar alternatives
Up-front cost	$2,000–$8,000 removal + $500–$3,000 landscaping
Annual savings	$300–$800 synthetic maintenance vs. $200–$500 natural lawn
Payback	3–7 years, then ongoing savings

Plastic furniture to wood or metal
Up-front cost	20–50% more initially
Lifespan	2–3x longer (15–25 years vs. 5–10)
Net cost	Lower over its lifetime

Moderate-Cost Swaps With Environmental Benefit

These swaps offer excellent environmental benefits without breaking the bank.

Rubber mulch to natural mulch
Up-front cost	Natural is cheaper ($30–$50/cubic yard vs. $100–$200)
Replacement frequency	Annual (natural) vs. every 3–5 years (rubber)
Annual cost	Similar or

Low or No-Cost Changes With Immediate Impact

Integrating these practices into your daily life can give you immediate results at little to no cost. A shoes-off policy and adopting wet cleaning practices are free. Covering outdoor items with natural fiber covers and vegetation may be free or low-cost, depending on what materials you already have.

Prioritizing Investments

Reduction methods have different levels of impact:

• Highest impact: Synthetic turf removal, tire dust management
• Medium impact: Investing in natural furnishings and planters, especially in high-UV areas
• Lower impact: Small item swaps and seasonal considerations
• Free impact: Cleaning and maintenance practice changes

Beyond Your Property — Community-Level Actions

The microplastic problem goes beyond your property line. Here are some ways you and your community can help reduce it.

Municipal Landscaping

Municipal landscaping mitigates microplastic pollution by stopping it at the source. It replaces plastic surfaces with healthy soil and natural vegetation to trap micro-debris. You can help drive changes in it by:

• Advocating for natural materials in public parks to reduce the things that shed fragmented plastics
• Questioning synthetic turf installation in schools, sports fields and other high-traffic, high-UV areas
• Supporting tree-planting programs, which increase biological filters that can also prevent runoff after rain

Storm Drain Management

Urban stormwater runoff can carry microplastics to lakes, rivers, oceans and water reservoirs. Storm drain management helps intercept these particles before they reach vulnerable waterways. You can help promote it by:

• Supporting programs that filter stormwater before waterway discharge, like those that place engineered systems and catch basin inserts into storm sewer networks
• Preventing direct runoff from your driveway to storm drains by grading the ground toward a lawn or gravel pit
• Setting up a rain garden, which helps filter runoff and hold water up to 24-48 hours after rainfall

Road Maintenance

Community road maintenance strategies can intercept tire particles and other microplastics at different stages of their journey. These include street sweeping programs, where mechanical or regenerative-air sweepers regularly travel along curbs to vacuum and sweep up accumulated dirt, debris and tire dust.

Another option is porous pavements with interconnected void spaces that trap particles and allow water to filter through the road surface and into the underlying soil. Finally, vegetation buffers along roadways can catch plastic fibers and settle them into the soil before the water reaches municipal stormwater networks.

Policy Advocacy

Advocating for policies helps translate environmental concerns into enforceable laws. It compels industries and authorities to take responsibility for microplastic pollution at the source by lobbying for systematic changes instead of relying solely on people’s habits. Examples of advocacies worth fighting for include:

• Extended producer responsibility (EPR) for synthetic turf, which shifts the burden of waste management to the manufacturers
• Tire wear particle regulations, which are already emerging in Europe
• Municipal and state building code updates that limit outdoor plastic materials
• Public awareness campaigns, which help build a coalition of voters who can demand legislative action

Measuring Your Impact

Gauging your microplastic reduction methods can help you pinpoint which changes yield the best health and environmental returns.

Qualitative Indicators You’re Reducing Microplastics

Your swaps and practice updates are likely working if you see these signs:

• Less black dust accumulation in driveway edges and other high-impact locations
• Cleaner rainwater runoff
• No visible plastic fragments in garden soil
• Less surface debris on patios and decks

Quantitative Approaches

If you want a more detailed look at the results of your efforts, consider these quantitative approaches:

• Conduct before-and-after air quality testing using specialized equipment.
• Have dust samples analyzed in a laboratory.
• Visually document the material degradation of your plastic items and surfaces.
• Track the replacement frequency of your outdoor items.

Realistic Expectations

You can’t eliminate all microplastics in your property unless you give up a modern lifestyle. Instead, the goal is to reduce as many unnecessary sources as possible. Every swap and habit change matters cumulatively. Also, keep in mind that your personal, more sustainable choices can help drive market shifts toward better materials.

From Yard to Watershed — Why Your Property Matters

Microplastic pollution often starts at home. The great news is that, as a homeowner, you have the power to manage the sources in your property. Ensure every landscaping decision considers your potential microplastic impact on the environment. With consistent efforts and choices, you can influence your neighbors and drive market demands toward more sustainable solutions.

About the Author

Rose Morrison is the managing editor of Renovated Magazine. She has over six years of experience writing about sustainability, circular economy, and better building. When not contributing to various reputable publications and advocating for environmental awareness, Rose loves being outdoors and spending time with her pets.

The post Guest Idea: Home Microplastics Reduction Strategies That Work appeared first on Earth911.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on February 2, 2026.

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It takes roughly 2,700 liters of water to make a single cotton t-shirt, about the same amount the average person drinks over three and a half years. That one garment, bought on impulse and worn a dozen times before it lands in a donation bin (where it’s probably exported abroad and eventually landfilled anyway), was wrung from the earth long before it ever reached your closet.

This is the virgin materials problem: newly manufactured stuff carries an environmental impact filled with complexity, in addition to resulting in waste after only one or a few uses. Most conversations about household waste focus on what leaves the house in the bins, the resulting recycling rates and landfill tonnage. But for four of the most common objects in American daily life — a PET plastic bottle, a cotton t-shirt, a smartphone, and a cardboard box — the story of waste starts not at disposal, but at extraction.

Understanding what goes into making these things from scratch is the first step toward demanding that manufacturers use less of it.

The PET Bottle: Petroleum in Disguise

A standard 16.9-ounce PET water bottle weighs about 12 to 14 grams, and almost all of that is polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic derived from petroleum and natural gas. Making one kilogram of virgin PET generates 2.15 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent. Recycled PET produces just 0.45 kilograms of CO₂e per kilogram, about 79 percent less greenhouse gas, for the same material.

The gap between what’s possible and what’s happening is substantial. According to the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR), the U.S. PET bottle recycling rate fell to 30.2 percent in 2024, below the decade average. The average rPET (recycled PET) content in U.S. PET bottles sits at just 15.9 percent, meaning more than four-fifths of the bottle in your hand is virgin petroleum plastic. Even Coca-Cola, which reported increasing its global recycled packaging content to 28 percent in 2024, simultaneously increased its total virgin plastic consumption to 2.94 million metric tons, up from 2.83 million the year before.

The Cotton T-Shirt: An Invisible Water Debt

Cotton is natural, biodegradable, and breathable. It is also one of the most resource-intensive fibers on earth. According to a 2023 Nature Reviews study on cotton’s environmental impacts, the crop accounts for roughly 3 percent of global agricultural water use despite covering just 2.5 percent of farmland, partly because it’s concentrated in water-stressed regions and because it requires intensive irrigation. The 2,700-liter water cost of a single t-shirt comes from the cotton cultivation stage, which dominates the garment’s lifecycle footprint.

Recycled cotton offers a dramatically different profile. Research by Recover™ and lifecycle analysis firms finds that recycled cotton yarns use 79.1 percent less water than virgin cotton yarns; the savings come almost entirely from skipping crop cultivation. And recovered cotton produces 60.2 percent of the CO₂ a virgin product does. A blended fabric using 70 percent virgin and 30 percent recycled content drives emissions down by 2.2 to 8.6 percent, a meaningful gain from a modest shift.

The problem is scale. Fiber-to-fiber textile recycling — turning old garments into new yarn — remains a small industry. Most “recycled” cotton comes from pre-consumer manufacturing scraps, not post-consumer clothing. A U.S. Government Accounting Office December 2024 report on textile waste found that 17 million tons of textiles were discarded in the U.S. in 2018, 66 percent of them landfilled, with no coordinated federal strategy to change that.

The fast-fashion model has made this worse. U.S. textile waste increased more than 50 percent between 2000 and 2018, driven almost entirely by clothing purchased cheaply and discarded quickly.

The Smartphone: A Mine in Your Pocket

A modern smartphone contains approximately 42 distinct minerals, according to the U.S. Geological Survey: gold, silver, copper, cobalt, lithium, tantalum, neodymium, praseodymium, tungsten, and dozens more, each sourced, processed, and assembled from supply chains spanning dozens of countries. The mining footprint behind the device in your pocket is enormous, largely invisible, and mostly goes unrecycled when the phone is discarded.

The rare earth element supply chain is particularly fraught. Nearly 90 percent of the world’s refined rare earth elements are produced in China. For each ton of rare earth elements extracted, mining operations generate up to 2,000 tons of toxic waste, a ratio that makes most other extractive industries look efficient by comparison. The refining processes needed to make electronics-grade elements use harsh acids that contaminate water supplies, and the byproducts often include radioactive materials that require specialized disposal.

Over 1.16 billion smartphones were produced globally in 2023. And only about 15 to 20 percent of e-waste is properly recycled globally, meaning the minerals inside the vast majority of discarded devices are lost forever, even as geopolitical pressure on rare earth supplies has accelerated investment in e-waste recovery as a domestic resource strategy.

An unrecycled smartphone is the clearest case of exorbitant consumption: every device made from virgin materials is a missed opportunity to reduce mining devastation and supply-chain risk simultaneously.

The Cardboard Box: The Good News and Its Hidden Impact

Corrugated cardboard is a success story, with a major caveat. The Fibre Box Association reports that corrugated cardboard is recycled about 90 percent of the time, by far the highest of any packaging material in the U.S. The average corrugated box contains approximately 52 percent recycled fiber, and recycled grades now represent 55 percent of the corrugated packaging market.

The caveat is that the system’s success depends on a continuous supply of virgin fiber. Each time paper fiber is recycled, the cellulose strands shorten and weaken. After five to seven recycling cycles, the fiber degrades to the point where it can no longer support structural packaging. Virgin fiber drawn from tree pulp is what keeps the system strong. Manufacturers blend it in specifically because recycled-only corrugated cardboard often can’t handle the crush weight and humidity stress involved in heavy-duty shipping.

Even in the best-functioning material recovery system in the country, virgin extraction is a structural requirement, not a failure of will. The environmental question for cardboard is less about eliminating virgin fiber and more about the source of that fiber, from sustainably certified forests versus unmanaged harvesting, and whether packaging can be right-sized to reduce total demand.

E-commerce’s explosive growth has pushed corrugated demand sharply upward, adding new pressure on the fiber supply even as recycling rates hold. But, at least we are keeping up with the massive upswing in box use.

What You Can Do

The virgin materials problem is upstream, which means individual action is necessary but not sufficient. These steps will help at home and in the supply chain.

At home:

• Choose beverages in cans or glass when refrigerator space allows; aluminum and glass have higher-quality recycling loops than PET.
• When buying clothing, look for recycled content labels (the Global Recycle Standard certification is the most rigorous). Even a 30% recycled cotton blend is a meaningful improvement.
• Extend smartphone life by two to three years beyond your carrier’s upgrade cycle. The single largest reduction in your device’s mining footprint is simply not buying a new one.
• Return cardboard promptly and dry to curbside recycling. Wet or contaminated cardboard is often landfilled when placed in recycling bins.

At the store and in your community:

• Support brands that publish recycled content percentages, not just “recyclability” claims. The U.S. Plastics Pact’s annual impact report tracks which signatories are meeting commitments.
• Advocate for extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation in your state. EPR programs in Maine and Oregon are beginning to shift packaging costs back to manufacturers and creating economic incentives to use less virgin material.
• For electronics, support Right to Repair legislation and manufacturers that offer take-back and refurbishment programs. Use the Earth911 recycling search to find certified e-waste drop-off locations near you.

Editor’s Note: Where Waste Comes From is an Earth911 series examining the largest sources of household waste — from disposal to extraction.

The post Made From Scratch: The Virgin Materials Price Tag on Four Everyday Products appeared first on Earth911.

This is the second in a series of articles about reducing the amount of the most common materials among household waste.

The top three materials filling American garbage bins are paper, food waste, and plastic. Of the three, plastic may be the most problematic. Not only does its production use nonrenewable natural resources and energy, but unlike paper and food waste, it is neither biodegradable nor easily recyclable. A century ago, plastic was barely a blip in the waste stream. As of 2018, the last time the Environmental Protection Agency counted, it made up about 12% of what Americans throw away.

Going completely plastic-free may be possible, but plastic is so woven into daily life that even the most committed environmentalist has to cut it out in stages. Here are good, better, and best steps you can take to reduce plastic waste. Start wherever you can, and build from there.

Plastic Waste

In 2018, the EPA reported that United States generated 35.7 million tons of plastic waste. Plastic had climbed from 8.2% of what Americans threw away in 1990 to 12.2% in 2018. Most of it comes from durable goods, containers, and packaging.

And recycling barely makes a dent in the plastic tsunami. In 2018, the EPA estimated that only 8.7% of U.S. plastic was recycled. The rate has likely fallen since: after overseas markets closed to American scrap, a 2022 analysis by the advocacy groups Beyond Plastics and the Last Beach Cleanup put it at 5% to 6%. Whatever the exact figure, the rest of our plastic is burned, buried, or lost to the environment.

Beyond the plastic captured in the waste stream, an estimated 8 million metric tons wash into the oceans each year, and millions of pounds end up in the Great Lakes. You may have heard the widely repeated prediction that the oceans will hold more plastic than fish by 2050. It is a striking image, but worth treating with caution: the researchers behind the original numbers have said they were never meant to be projected that far into the future. The direction of the trend is not in dispute, though. The OECD projects global plastic production will nearly triple by 2060 while recycling lags far behind.

Even though plastic does not biodegrade the way natural materials do, it does break apart. As it does, it can release harmful chemicals and shed microplastics, the trillions of tiny fragments that have turned up in the environment, wildlife, drinking water, and even human blood and tissue. They build up in animals that ingest them, and researchers are still working out what that means for human health.

Good

The simplest way to cut most kinds of waste is to recycle, but plastic shows just how hard recycling can be. U.S. plastics recycling is in genuine trouble, partly because of China’s 2018 ban on imported scrap that did not meet strict cleanliness standards. That ban, still in force, reshaped recycling worldwide and left many American communities scrambling to find somewhere to send their plastic.

Some communities still take certain plastics in curbside bins. If yours does, that is a fine place to start. Just avoid wishful recycling, tossing in items you only hope are recyclable. Learn your local rules and follow them closely, because a contaminated load can send an entire batch to the landfill.

Because curbside plastic recycling is so limited, the bigger win is using less plastic in the first place. Start with simple changes to how you shop. Cut single-use plastics: switch to reusable grocery bags, water bottles, and utensils. Before buying plastic household items like storage bins and measuring cups, look for sturdier alternatives. Once those habits stick, you are ready to do better.

Better

To recycle more than your curbside program allows, search the Earth911 recycling database to find a drop-off near you that accepts a wider range of plastics. Set aside a spot in your home or garage to collect those plastics until you have enough to make the trip worthwhile.

As plastic items wear out, replace them with versions made from longer-lasting materials. Browse thrift stores and vintage shops for the kinds of goods people used before plastic took over, and check sites like this one for new plastic-free products.

Tackle one use of plastic at a time: plastic wrap and other food storage containers; straws, toys, and shaving supplies. Pay attention to packaging, one of the biggest sources of household plastic. And try a few homemade cleaners to retire all those plastic bottles and tubs.

Best

By now, the habit that started with bringing your own bags has grown into buying bulk goods in your own reusable containers.

Avoiding plastic packaging entirely usually means stepping away from conventional grocery stores. For some people it also means changing how they eat, trading most prepared and packaged foods for whole ingredients bought in bulk at co-ops or farmers’ markets.

With your everyday habits in place, plan for the less ordinary moments too, like when you fly or host a party.

Going 100% plastic-free is probably impossible today. Plastic hides in places that are easy to miss, such as ballpoint pens and water filters. Some products have no plastic-free version yet, so you will face hard choices about where to make exceptions or do without. When you hit those walls, look for inspiration from people who have already built a sustainable, low-plastic life.

Read part three in this series: Good, Better, Best — Reducing Metal Waste

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on April 13, 2020, and was updated in June 2026.

The post Good, Better, Best: Eliminating Plastic Waste appeared first on Earth911.

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. She 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.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:10

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

The topic is accelerating innovation. When we talk about the climate fight, we usually picture it on land: forests and wildfires, EVs and the power grid, solar panels on roofs everywhere. But the largest climate system on the planet is the one we understand the least, and it covers more than 70% of the Earth. The ocean absorbs our heat, feeds billions of people, moves nearly everything we buy, and it’s been treated for most of human history as something to extract from rather than invest in. And that’s the starting point to change, and Canada is one of the places where you can watch that happen in real time.

My guest today is at the center of this epochal shift. Kendra MacDonald is the CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, a national, industry-led effort to grow what’s come to be called the blue economy. We’ve talked about it on the show several times. Think of it as a table where startups, century-old fishing and shipping companies, Indigenous partners, researchers, and global corporations all sit down together and co-invest in ideas that no single one of them could pull off alone.

Under Kendra’s leadership, that community now spans roughly 1,000 members working together on over 100 projects — everything from graphene hull coatings that cut a ship’s fuel use by making it easier to go through the waves, to wave-power desalination, and an electric lobster boat built in partnership with the Membertou First Nation.

Kendra came to this from 25 years at Deloitte, the global consulting firm, where she last served as Chief Audit Executive. She’s been named to her region’s Top 50 CEO Hall of Fame, and she leads all of this from St. John’s, Newfoundland — a relatively remote vantage point, she’ll tell you, that is a feature, not a limitation of her job. Her thesis in seven words: you can go faster alone, but farther together.

We’re going to test that idea today — on collaboration, on who actually captures the value when small companies scale up, and whether the blue economy can grow and stay healthy at the same time, as well as what it takes to lead through a decade of constant disruption. We’ll get to the conversation right after this brief commercial break.

Hey, welcome to the show, Kendra. How you doing today?

Kendra MacDonald  2:46

I am doing great. How are you?

Mitch Ratcliffe  2:48

I’m doing well, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. You live in a remote location in Newfoundland; I live in a remote location in southern Oregon, and we both somehow stay connected to the world. How do you do that? From your perspective, your seat is quite connected. How do you stay in touch with folks?

Kendra MacDonald  3:05

Yeah, so, certainly virtual. I started this role late in 2018, and by 2020 we were in the middle of the pandemic, and so it became very natural to connect virtually. So I think that has helped — it’s helped us connect across the country, and people got more used to virtual platforms.

But I do also spend a lot of time in person. I’m just coming from — I was in Ottawa, and I was in Halifax, and next week I’ll be somewhere else. So I do try to get face to face with our members as well, which, from St. John’s, Newfoundland — we’re a big country, so St. John’s to Victoria is about a nine-hour trip. Sometimes it’s easier to get to Europe than it is to get across the country. But I do spend a lot of time trying to get with our members, all over.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:49

Your members are all related to the ocean, but why does the ocean belong at the center of the conversation now? For someone who doesn’t live near a coast, what’s the connection they should feel between the ocean, their personal health, and well-being?

Kendra MacDonald  4:01

That’s a great question. I mean, I think, in terms of — let’s talk about us as people first. Why the ocean matters: if you think about where your goods come from, over 80% of the goods that we get, whether we’re ordering from Amazon or ordering from wherever, they’re coming by sea. So there’s a huge amount of shipping that happens on the ocean. You think about the internet — most of our internet, if you’re getting it from some kind of overseas site, 98% of that is subsea cables that are going underneath the ocean.

If you look at then what the ocean means for the planet: 70%, but two-thirds, of the planet is ocean. About 50% of the oxygen comes from the ocean, so no matter where you are on the planet, oxygen matters. That’s really important, whether you’re close to the coast or you are not. It absorbs 90% of our excess heat, so a lot of the heat regulation is happening in the ocean. But 30% of our carbon — I don’t know about you, I learned in school all about the rainforest. I didn’t learn very much about the ocean, but the ocean actually plays a huge role in terms of being a carbon sink and absorbing excess carbon.

And then, I guess the last one, maybe 80% of our biodiversity on the planet — although some would argue there’s a lot of it undiscovered — but about 80% of biodiversity actually sits in the ocean. So when you talk about health, and we think about a lot of the natural solutions that we’re starting to see, whether that is natural fabrics going into fashion or natural ingredients going into beauty — we’re starting to see seaweed coming into both nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, as well as fertilizers, for example. All of those natural ingredients — increasingly, we’re turning to the ocean.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:40

How does the Ocean Supercluster function to address all of the different kinds of issues that you just described?

Kendra MacDonald  5:46

So that’s a great question. We don’t equally address all of them. Where we really are focused, in terms of trying to grow the ocean economy for Canada, is acceleration of technology commercialization. So the bulk of our projects are in technology commercialization. About 50% of our projects are what’s called domain awareness, or ocean observation — so, how do we understand things better. That has a different flavor.

We are cross-sectoral, so we touch aquaculture, shipping, offshore energy, and we would see different flavors of those technologies being applied. So if you’re an aquaculture farm, you want to make sure that you’re using an underwater drone, for example, to be able to inspect your nets, to make sure that you don’t have escapes. You might be sitting in the Arctic, and you want to better understand what’s happening with the coastline, or be able to monitor diversity.

Increasingly, we’re seeing this trend toward dual-use technologies in defense, for example — so technologies that you can use to find a whale, you could also use, potentially, to be finding a submarine. And then, if you look at offshore wind: how do you do surveys better? How do you remotely monitor infrastructure in the ocean? So there’s all these flavors of how do we better understand the ocean to make better decisions, and also to be able to operate more sustainably across all of these different sectors.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:03

Now, of course, you just described systems in which there are many stakeholders. Who’s involved in all of these conversations? What’s the structure of the investments that allows communities to participate?

Kendra MacDonald  7:14

Yeah, so we are a co-investment model, so we need to have at least two companies that are co-investing. In a lot of cases, we would also have broader collaborators. So if you look at, for example, in the aquaculture space — aquaculture touches a number of communities all along our coast. We would have a project, for example, on the West Coast that would include an Indigenous community as the final operator and participant in the project. So you’ll see the technology providers, you will see the users of the technology, and then, depending on where it is, you will also see a community problem that the solution is trying to solve.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:55

When you joined this industry, were you surprised by the way it actually operates? Is it different than land-centered business?

Kendra MacDonald  8:05

Yes. And no. So, my background — I worked with a large consulting firm, was part of Deloitte. I’m an auditor by background, so I spent a lot of time looking at systems, and I was actually a systems auditor — so, on the information technology side of how information is produced to get to the financial statements. And so I had spent a lot of time looking at digitalization of industries. You’re seeing increasingly digital, whether it’s media or transportation — these trends — and so that same trend is coming into ocean, where you’re seeing more and more instrumentation to be able to get more information, make better decisions, all the same things that we are trying to do in a number of sectors.

Where it gets more complicated is the environment that you’re operating in. So we don’t have a data network now the way that we would — I know there are still remote parts on land, so we don’t have as good a bandwidth — but they get much more remote when you start going on the ocean. You’re trying to now put technologies into salty water, high pressure, low visibility, and so the operating conditions become much more difficult for the types of problems that you’re trying to solve.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:14

This is a national sovereign wealth fund, or a variation thereon. Sovereignty is playing a greater and greater role in geopolitics right now, and you’ve said you can go faster alone but farther together. How does Canada need to work with the rest of the world in order to really leverage the investments that you’re making?

Kendra MacDonald  9:33

So, great question. We are part of what’s called the Blue Tech Cluster Alliance, and Canada right now is chairing that. That includes a number of clusters around the world — so right now it’s Canada, the US, Japan, Ireland, the UK, France, Norway, Portugal, and Spain. I think I got all nine; hopefully I didn’t miss anybody. And so we are constantly looking at how do we create conditions so that the companies can engage with each other and work together to be able to solve global problems, because if you look at the ocean, it’s all interconnected. Decisions that you’re making in one country do eventually work through, around the entire world.

And so, for these big challenges that we’re trying to solve for — can we work together to be able to move faster? Can we bring more breadth of thinking to a problem? I was somewhere the other day, and I said, you know, in some cases we’re competing, in some cases we’re cooperating. And so we’re trying to do that at a national scale, and we are also trying to do that at a global scale. So you are seeing more and more focus on what we call, in our defense industrial strategy, sovereign capabilities — so how do you build the sovereign capabilities, but how do you also work with your partners to be able to learn from each other and be able to go further together.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:53

Collaboration like that isn’t easy. Where do you find that it becomes more difficult? What are the big challenges you’re facing right now?

Kendra MacDonald  11:00

Yes. So collaboration is, I would say, like any other relationship, right? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And I would say the devil is in the details. If you think about your personal relationships — or for me, with my husband — did we spend enough time in advance talking about how we wanted to raise our kids, or where we wanted to live, or whose career was the priority? All of those things. So that plays in. Now, you’re probably not signing on for life when you’re collaborating at a business level, but you need to spend the time really looking at: is what we’re trying to achieve consistent? How do we incent the teams? Are we going to get to a common outcome?

When we collaborate with other governments, for example, you look at political cycles, and at IP sharing — so are we very clear on background IP that we’re bringing, foreground IP, how that IP is being shared or held going forward? We are co-funding, so we fund a portion, the companies fund a portion. Are we clear on who is funding what? What happens if it starts going over budget? What happens if we’re not achieving the outcomes on the timelines that we intended? What happens if one company is achieving their outcomes, but the other one’s not?

And so it really does require a lot of discussion. We now have over 150 projects. You’ve got those that come to the table, I would say, with a light-touch thinking on their collaboration; you’ve got others that spend a lot more time thinking through it. And those ones that spend a lot more time thinking through it — not only do they have a better chance of success, we will often see them recognize the benefits. Because I think one of the key benefits of collaboration: we have a lot of small companies working together, and they don’t have all the capabilities to do everything. We are in a world where getting some of these capabilities is challenging, especially technical expertise. And so now, if you can work with a partner, you can deliver a bigger solution to a broader problem, and that helps you be able to get further than you would be able to get on your own.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:04

97% or so of your projects are actually led by smaller startup businesses. How do you keep those small firms from getting swallowed when they sit down at the table with a multinational who might be a partner?

Kendra MacDonald  13:15

Yeah. So I would say, when we first created the Supercluster, that was one of the big concerns — that you would have these collaborations between small and large, and so the small would be at high risk of losing their IP. I would say we haven’t seen that, partially because we don’t have a lot of large companies; we have a lot of small working with small, so they are more hyper-aware of this challenge. But also, the model was really designed to allow the companies to choose how they bring their IP in, and then how it’s shared going forward. A lot of our larger companies — and maybe it’s just the nature of the companies that we work with — they’re really interested in being first customer or having early access to the data, but they’re not necessarily trying to take over the IP of the company in terms of how it’s designed.

We also do actually have an IP director and some pretty strong guidelines within the program, so that IP director is someone that companies can consult. To make sure that — smaller companies don’t necessarily have the IP expertise — so, how do we help them in thinking through the types of questions they want to be asking? How do we make sure we have an IP chart in every one of our agreements that lays out the background IP and the foreground IP, and then someone that helps the companies to be able to work through that? So it’s not perfect, but we haven’t actually seen, knock on wood, at this point, a lot of concerns around IP going to the larger companies. What we do see is we shine a light on these companies, and then they get internationally acquired. So that is the actual question: how do you maintain the benefits to Canada, in a program that is Government of Canada–funded, in a situation where you’re seeing them scale with funding that comes from somewhere else?

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:00

So would you describe that governance model as templated, applied across all deals, or are each of them negotiated? Is the governance negotiated individually?

Kendra MacDonald  15:09

So I would say there is flexibility within a frame. You have flexibility in terms of how you do the sharing, but everyone has to think through the sharing. Same thing with governance — so we have a steering committee model, and you can think about who’s on that steering committee, and you have some flexibility. And then there is some common reporting. So there is definitely a common structure, and then you have some flexibility within your particular project on how you want to operate with your partners.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:38

Earlier, you mentioned that sometimes collaboration doesn’t work, and that learning is really important to the progress that the industry can make, even though the individual entity didn’t make the success expected. How do you integrate that kind of learning, and what’s your tolerance for risk in the context of the lessons you need to learn about such a big topic that we understand so little about?

Kendra MacDonald  16:02

Yeah, so that’s a great question. We do a number of member education sessions, and talking about experience with collaboration is one of those things. Certainly we spend more time, for example, on collaboration with Indigenous communities, because speed — and speed of trust, and how you engage — is very important for the success of the project. It’s important always, but when you get into more complexity around different cultures, we try to do some education and some help and some learnings there.

And then I would say our evaluators, now that we’re 150-plus projects in, they are getting better at the types of questions to ask. There is a presentation that is done by the various participants, and so you can ask very pointed questions and get a sense of: are these three individual companies that are giving you a presentation, or are they companies that have actually thought this through together — are they synchronized in terms of their responses? You can tell that there is sort of some magical sauce that is already being demonstrated, in how they work together in that presentation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:10

I think we have the lay of the land — or maybe the better way to put it is the contour of the shore. I want to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to be right back to continue the conversation.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue my conversation with Kendra MacDonald. She’s CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster program, and it’s a national, industry-led innovation cluster focused on transforming Canada’s ocean economy through collaboration, technology, and, importantly, sustainability. Kendra, let’s talk about some phrases that listeners should understand, and the first one is sustainable aquaculture, which makes some environmentalists nervous, given the history of the industry. What does getting sustainable aquaculture right look like, and how do you hold the line on that?

Kendra MacDonald  17:58

Yeah, so I think a couple of things are important to understand around aquaculture. The first is that it is already one of the most sustainable sources of animal protein in the world, when you compare it to land-based agriculture, for example. The second is that it has already tipped — so if you look at since 2022, we actually get more of our fish coming out of aquaculture than coming out of wild fishery. So we are predominantly aquaculture around the world. And then the third one, and the World Bank, I think, just came out with this recently: we’re expecting to see possibly up to 22 million new jobs by 2050 in aquaculture. So it continues to be the fastest-growing source of protein.

Now, having said that, agriculture has been around much longer, and so has developed maybe more sustainability practices. Aquaculture is trying really hard to catch up really quickly. And so we need to make sure — and any of the aquaculture farmers I talk to recognize they want to make sure — that it is sustainable. So you are seeing a lot of technology solutions that are being brought to make sure that it is doing more good than harm, whether that is genomics, for example. We have a project on the West Coast that is looking at how do you look at genomics data to be able to improve animal health. We have a project that is looking at alternative sources of food — so how do you create a different food out of methanol as an input — because fish feed is part of the big footprint of aquaculture.

How do you reduce the die-offs, which is another big risk? That’s tied to environment, so now you’re seeing a change — the heating of waters that happens really quickly, and then you end up with a die-off. So how do you manage the cages? How do you manage the environmental monitoring and tracking to be able to reduce that risk? So it is already a sustainable source of food; we need to do much better, or continue on that journey as fast as we can, to make sure that the aquaculture farms are minimizing their input. So it is definitely a concern to continue to monitor, but I think there’s been a lot of progress made and will continue to be made.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:16

We’ve had a few folks who work in the area on the show, and of course it remains controversial as to whether or not we’re recreating the concentrated animal feeding operations that we have on land in the sea. The next phrase that I want to ask you about is the blue economy, and that can sound to a lot of people like a license to industrialize the ocean. How do you think in terms of keeping growth and protection from becoming a zero-sum trade-off in the projects that you fund?

Kendra MacDonald  20:42

Well, that’s a great question. So, just as we launched in 2018, the High Level Panel on Sustainability for the Ocean at that time had 18 countries — it continues to increase in terms of the number of countries that are involved — and they really talked about protection, production, and prosperity as interlinked. And so that is one of the things that we really focus on. It’s not always that we have our environmental objectives and our economic objectives linking, but actually, a healthier ocean is also a more productive ocean. So that’s one of the things that we focus on: if we can improve the health of our ocean, that actually also improves the economic output of the ocean, which is really important.

I think the other piece that is really important is — and the High Level Panel came out with a report that said about a third to half of the solutions around improving the overall sustainability and health of the planet come from ocean solutions, whether that is offshore energy or more sustainable protein or carbon dioxide removal. So we need ocean to be a really important part of the overall health-of-the-planet conversation. So what excites me is, because they come together, a lot of the solutions that we see are, as a minimum, trying not to cause harm, and in a lot of cases trying to leave the ocean better than they found it, in terms of the solutions they’re developing.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:05

We touched on sovereignty in the first segment, and I want to ask about this in the context of the fact that most of the ocean is not owned by anybody — it isn’t claimed by anybody. How do we avoid a tragedy of the commons as we move toward a more comprehensive aquacultural solution to humanity’s food and protein needs? In particular, are there treaties? Are there agreements that we need to have in place, or are we setting the stage already with the legislation and agreements that are in place now?

Kendra MacDonald  22:38

Yeah, so there are a number of agreements that are in place, and this is not my area of expertise, but, for example, I just completed my master’s, and I did one of my courses on maritime law. So you look at hundreds and hundreds of years of law trying to govern international shipping, which is very international in terms of moving through international waters as well as moving through international ports. You are seeing it now — so in January, they approved, through the United Nations … a lot of the agreements need to be agreed to, obviously, by multiple countries, and so the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement was approved. So, how do we manage and protect biodiversity in our common waters?

You’re also seeing the conversation play out in the Arctic, as more waters are becoming more accessible — and so what does that mean in terms of rights and access? I haven’t seen it play out as much in terms of food, particularly; I see it much more in terms of things like carbon dioxide removal solutions and protection of biodiversity. But how we use those waters as they become more accessible, as we have more technology, as we have more instrumentation, and how we work together, is really important, and it does require international agreement. And so, how do we get — especially in this moment in time that we’re in — how do we get the international alignment that we need to protect our ocean and manage what happens in the deep ocean, at the same time as we have a shift in the geopolitical environment?

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:07

The times we’re in are challenging. The Trump administration, the week that we’re speaking, removed fishing protections in three protected marine areas, with — for lack of a better word — a rogue regime stirring up the entire sustainability conversation globally. Is this an opportunity for Canada to step forward, in Mark Carney’s terms, for a middle power to consolidate a bloc and really begin to lead the world in a different direction?

Kendra MacDonald  24:35

So, I think so. I think that Canada was working hard to step forward already, and this allows us to provide additional leadership in this space. We have seen, with the Ocean Supercluster and just the growth in the blue economy overall, that Canada has some really strong capabilities. You talk about marine protected areas as a perfect example — so we have worked hard in terms of increasing our marine protected areas. Now, looking at how do you monitor and actually ensure the effectiveness of those areas — I think that’s really important as well.

But yes, I think we are seeing more interest in working with Canada, and interest in Canadian technologies. I used to say, you know, internationally, no one’s really paying attention to what’s going on in Canada. I think that has changed in terms of what we are seeing, and so there is an interest. I think the US is still an important part of the Canadian conversation — they are important neighbors, they are an important market — but I do think that Canada has a strong … we’re seeing the whole climate conversation moving, but we have a strong reputation for clean tech, and I think clean tech and ocean tech very much align, and so there’s an opportunity to lead a broader conversation around the world.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:49

Is more capital flowing to Canada now that the United States is a place where international investors are treading more carefully?

Kendra MacDonald  25:57

That’s a great question. Certainly, the flow of capital is a huge focus for us, and continues to be a challenge for our companies. So I think, on the one hand, there is more interest. On the other hand, you are seeing a slowdown in access to capital overall, you’re seeing a change in some of those models, and you’re seeing — certainly in sustainable solutions, in some of these big areas — the whole blue finance conversation is really accelerating. So Sustainable Development Goal 14, which is life below water, is the least funded of the Sustainable Development Goals. And so there is a tremendous focus on being able to increase the creativity of financial models — it hurts my accountant heart to say “creativity” — but trying to find better ways to bring philanthropic dollars and the capital markets together to be able to fund some of these solutions.

So that is a beyond-Canada challenge. Capital continues to be a challenge. How do we help our companies scale in Canada? We don’t have the funds focused on the blue economy the way that you are seeing them now emerge in a number of countries, certainly in Europe, for example. But more broadly, there’s a bigger push to be able to get more investors to be focused on the blue economy — opportunities, but also challenges.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:16

When I was doing some of the reading to get ready for this conversation, I noticed that you said the shipping sector’s decarbonization efforts are not as slow as they used to be, which is sort of faint praise. What’s actually changed, and how do you see Canada leading that movement versus being one of the followers — or is being an important follower more important?

Kendra MacDonald  27:36

Yeah, so I think we are not as big a player in the international shipping space, but what is driving that is international regulations. You have seen a bit of a slowdown in terms of the push to decarbonization, but the International Maritime Organization is really pushing for decarbonization. You are also seeing the bigger companies, as they’re focused on their supply chain and decarbonizing throughout their supply chain, that that also puts a push on the shipping companies in terms of dealing with decarbonization.

You are also seeing an acceleration of some of the solutions that are being developed to help, because it’s considered a hard-to-abate industry. The alternative fuels conversation continues to move forward, so you are seeing this focus in the short term on how do you improve operational effectiveness — so something like better prediction of weather. If you can change the route just a little bit, you can actually save on diesel, and that obviously helps with emissions. We have a project in ports that is actually looking at how do you park the boats more effectively in the ports to be able to reduce emissions, how do you move the cargo around more efficiently to be able to reduce emissions. So there’s an operational effectiveness piece, but then there is this broader agenda of how do you get alternative fuels that are significantly less emissions.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:55

We’ve been talking in various ways about systems throughout this conversation, and you’ve made a lot of comments about women’s leadership and also the AI readiness gap, which, if we can solve it, will allow us to see into those systems much more deeply than we do now. What are you seeing in those areas, and what would you say to a female leader who is hesitating at the edge of a hard decision right now — where they don’t necessarily feel like they have the data, or they feel like they have the data, but not the commitment of a group of stakeholders? What’s your advice?

Kendra MacDonald  29:26

Yeah, so I would say dig in and try it. I wouldn’t necessarily say that for the big-ticket item to start with — so ideally you are doing some testing and things before you get to that item — but adoption is a huge challenge when it comes to AI. And I can speak to that, certainly, from a Canadian perspective, because Canada are leaders in AI research, and yet we are much slower to adopt the technology. And that’s not just an AI problem; we see that in a lot of technologies that Canada has developed, that they’re slow to adopt. But we know that AI is fundamentally changing, or going to fundamentally change, the way that businesses operate.

I think we’re in an interesting moment in time where companies are looking and saying, well, I’m not sure I’m getting the value of the spend, I’m not sure that we’re actually measuring the productivity savings, I’m doing pilots, but I don’t necessarily have enterprise-wide impact. And so if you, as a female leader, can really cut through the noise, continue to experiment, and really try to reinvent — I heard a futurist speak the other day, and they said, you know, use a comic strip to reinvent what the world could look like. So how do you fundamentally reinvent what the world could look like, and then start experimenting to be able to get there?

But I think the key thing is, nobody should say — no one is an expert. We don’t have a lot of experts; we’re all learning through this journey together. So make sure that you stay on the learning journey, and don’t just stay on the side waiting for it to all play itself out, because then you will be too far behind.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:59

Do you feel like AI is a key to unlocking the major challenges that we face, or is the jury still out?

Kendra MacDonald  31:07

I think, in my experience — you talked about the internet — in my experience with technology, it is less about the technology, and it’s more about being able to articulate the challenges. I think what AI allows is a very powerful technology that can tackle these challenges, maybe in a way that other technologies previously couldn’t. I went through the blockchain and cryptocurrency, when that was happening; the internet, when it came in — it was going to fundamentally change businesses. I think the hard part is actually defining the problem. And so I think if you can better define the problem — I don’t think it’s just about the technology, I actually think it’s about the business models. It is about the overall systems and processes that surround it.

If we focus only on the technology — and I think that’s the moment that we’re in, as companies are trying to find their AI strategy — well, it’s not. It’s a business strategy that’s enabled by AI. You might not need an agentic AI; you might just need a much more powerful database and analytics tool that doesn’t take you right out on the edge of the technology, but would be much more efficient in solving your problem. And so that’s the trick: stepping back and saying, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? Globally, what are the problems that we’re trying to solve? And then how do we bring these much more powerful tools to be able to solve that problem in a different way?

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:24

What does Canada’s ocean economy look like in 2035 if things go the way that you would like them to go? And what’s different? What does it mean for the rest of the world, not just for Canada?

Kendra MacDonald  32:37

That’s a great question. So we’ve actually set ourselves an ambition, 2035, which is five times growth. Canada has the longest coastline in the world, and we have the fourth-largest ocean territory, but we don’t even contribute world-average percentage to our GDP. So we are definitely under scale, and so we’re working very, very hard to be able to grow our ocean economy. And so I think, if we do that — although if we grow by five times, it’s still a relatively small percentage of the $3 trillion US dollar economy that’s expected by 2030, and in fact even bigger; they’ve got now projections out to 2050.

And so I think, in that situation, Canada is — certainly in terms of the Arctic conversation, half of our coastline is in the Arctic, and the Arctic will continue … I mean, imagine what the Arctic looks like in 2035. So industry is different, community is different, and I think we can be a big part of the leadership in that conversation, but also with the capabilities that we have around ocean technology, and making sure that we are relevant to industries all around the world. So it means a lot more domestic activity in Canada. It means using our own waters to be able to have aquaculture — aquaculture is a very small percentage of our overall coastline — so stronger domestic, but also stronger leadership in terms of exporting those capabilities to the rest of the world, and being a key player in the Arctic conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:02

What keeps you up at night when you’re thinking about Ambition 2035? What are the things that need to go right that are absolutely critical to the success — not just of that plan, but of our transition to a more sustainable economy overall?

Kendra MacDonald  34:16

Yeah, so our ability to scale solutions is maybe the number one thing that keeps me up at night, in terms of how do we ensure that we are not just bringing solutions to a certain size and then they’re going somewhere else to scale, or they’re not scaling at all. So we have — I talked about this challenge — how do we get enough blue financing to be able to scale the solutions that we need, whether that’s food, whether that’s energy, etc., across the sectors? I think it’s quite lumpy in terms of which ocean sectors get funding and which ones do not. And so, you know, there’s lots of great ideas out there, but can we scale the ones that we need for the planet that we want, fast enough?

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:04

How do we scale while also recognizing that local ecosystems are unique? In other words, how do we avoid turning the ocean into the monoculture environment that land-based agriculture is?

Kendra MacDonald  35:17

Yeah, so that’s a great question. I think community. So I had the opportunity to spend some time in South Africa, with Ocean Innovation Africa, and the number of things that they are doing in the ocean economy — and I spent some time in Northern Canada, and it was surprising, the parallels in the community conversation. And so, how do you make sure — the ocean touches so many communities, it is rural and urban, it is all along our coasts — how do you make sure that how you do that is inclusive of those communities, and the needs of those communities, and is right-sized for the needs of those communities?

So if you look at here, we have Fogo Island and the Fogo Island Inn and the Shorefast Foundation, and one of the things that they’re focused on, in working with communities, is there’s not a same-size-fits-all in terms of meeting community needs, economic development, inclusion, and capacity building — but that we need to be thinking that through as we build out these solutions. I think communities is a key part of this, but I think ocean is a key part of the solutions for sustainable, prosperous communities.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:29

The Ocean Supercluster does a lot of work. It’s really interesting. How can people follow along as you continue to move this rock up the hill?

Kendra MacDonald  36:36

Absolutely. So you can certainly find us easily on oceansupercluster.ca, and we have a newsletter that you can sign up for to get more information. I also personally write on some of the opportunities — certainly investment opportunities — in the ocean economy. I have Saltwater Signals, which is my Substack that I write, and so between those two, you should be able to find lots of information. If, for whatever reason, you can’t, I’m also very easy to find on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out to me and get more information.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:08

Kendra, thanks so much. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Really appreciate the time today.

Kendra MacDonald  37:12

Thank you.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:19

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Kendra MacDonald, CEO of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, a national, industry-led effort to grow the blue economy by getting startups, century-old fishing and shipping firms, Indigenous partners, researchers, and global corporations to co-invest in projects. You can learn more about the Supercluster’s roughly 1,000 members and 150-plus projects at oceansupercluster.ca — Ocean Supercluster is all one word, no space, no dash. And Kendra writes about ocean economy investments on her Substack, which is called Saltwater Signals.

The ocean covers more than 70% of the planet, produces about half the oxygen we breathe, and absorbs something like 90% of the excess heat and a third of the carbon that we put into the atmosphere. We’ve spent most of human history treating the ocean as a place to extract from rather than to invest in or to preserve, and frankly, it was a pretty big thing, and we were overawed by it. But now we have a better understanding of how the systems work. Kendra’s model is a wager that the way to change that is structural, not inspirational. You can go faster alone, she says, but farther together. And the interesting part is what “together” actually requires, and that’s where I want to spend these few minutes.

First, she said, the devil’s in the details. Collaboration in the blue economy doesn’t succeed because everyone loves the ocean; it succeeds because partners do the unglamorous upfront work of establishing who owns background IP, who owns foreground IP, who funds what, and what happens when a project runs over budget — as well as what happens when one company hits its milestones and the other doesn’t. These are the kinds of rules of the game that make it feasible to play for small and large companies, communities, and investors. Kendra said her Ocean Supercluster evaluators have gotten good enough, 150 projects in, that they can sit through a pitch and tell whether three companies actually planned together or just showed up in the same room and tried to make a sale. The ones who did the hard prenuptial work aren’t only more likely to succeed, they are more likely to capture a larger share of the benefit.

That’s a lesson that travels well beyond saltwater. It’s the same discipline that Kevin Shaffer of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District described when we talked in January about how wastewater utilities build successful cross-sector partnerships. The value is real, but only if the governance is there first.

Then there’s the limits of any early-stage accelerator. The capital can only go so far, and Kendra gets points for raising that issue before I did. The Supercluster is funded by the Government of Canada to de-risk small Canadian companies, and it works. In her words, the program shines a light on those companies, and they get acquired internationally, scaling on capital from foreign investors. That’s the value-capture problem at the heart of every public innovation program: the country that pays to nurture a technology isn’t guaranteed to be the country that profits when it scales.

It connects to the bigger gap that she flagged: blue finance. Sustainable Development Goal 14 — that’s life below water — is the least funded of all the SDGs, and the funds dedicated to the ocean economy that are emerging in Europe haven’t really emerged in Canada yet. You can build the best pipeline of companies in the world and still watch the returns sail off into another harbor, or have no financing show up in the first place, so that things don’t get off the ground. That tension between strong science and thin capital is the thing that she says keeps her up at night, and it should keep policymakers up at night as well.

Finally, the reframe I want all of us to think about is that health and productivity are not a trade-off. In fact, they cannot be if we’re going to survive as a species. The fear baked into the phrase “blue economy” is that it’s a license to industrialize the ocean, and Kendra’s answer is that a healthier ocean is a more productive ocean, and she frames protection and prosperity as interlinked rather than opposed. And I don’t think that’s rhetoric.

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:17

Aquaculture quietly passed a milestone in 2022: for the first time, farmed aquatic animals outproduced wild-caught fish — that is, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization — and the sector is now the fastest-growing source of animal protein on the planet. Whether that growth recreates the worst of factory farming or leaves the water better than it found it depends entirely on whether we accept her premise that the two goals pull in the same direction. And that’s also the circular economy logic that Elizabeth Blankenship Singh of Overlay Capital described during another interview earlier this year. She said the system only works long-term when doing the right thing and making money are united in a clear mission.

There’s a sharp edge under all of this, and it’s why the timing of this conversation matters. The week that we recorded, the Trump administration in Washington signed a proclamation reopening nearly half a million square miles of Pacific Ocean to commercial fishing, and that was the third such rollback in 16 months. So you have one model that treats the ocean as a commons to protect and co-invest in, and another that treats marine protection as an obstacle that must be cleared out of the way. Kendra thinks this opens a door for Canada — with its longest coastline in the world and a credible clean-tech reputation — to lead a different conversation than the one that’s starting in Washington. And perhaps so, but leadership in the blue economy will be measured the same way Milwaukee’s Kevin Shaffer measures a utility’s value to the community: not by what you announced, but by what’s still standing two or three decades from now. Canada has set itself a 2035 goal to grow its blue economy fivefold, and we’ll be watching to find out whether the capital shows up to match that amazing coastline.

Hey folks, if this conversation gave you something to think about, please share it with one person who would find it useful, because you folks are the amplifiers that spread more ideas to create less waste, and word of mouth is how this show reaches its next listener. You’ll find more than 500 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear waiting for you in our archives on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Please subscribe and leave a review, and pass an episode along. Thanks for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Kendra MacDonald Steers to the Blue Economy at Canada’s Ocean Supercluster appeared first on Earth911.

A new Ellen MacArthur Foundation report argues that the materials we can actually regrow, including cotton, wood, leather, and rubber, have been mostly left out of circular thinking. Closing that gap could be worth trillions of dollars and help meet a meaningful share of our climate targets.

A single-use cup made from corn and a jacket built to last 20 years from regeneratively grown cotton can both wear the label “bio-based” and count toward a country’s green-economy goals. Only one of them actually keeps materials in use. That gap is the subject of Circular by Nature, a recently released report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) prepared with the Circular Economy Coalition for Latin America and the Caribbean.

For years, circular-economy policy has focused on finite materials such as metals, plastics, and glass, the things we dig up once and cannot replace. Renewable materials we grow have mostly been treated as a swap-in for fossil-based stuff and little else. The report makes a simple case: treating renewable materials  merely as organic substitutes for synthetics wastes their biggest advantage. Grown and used well, they can move through many lives and then return safely to the soil.

Two Green Ideas That Rarely Talk to Each Other

Start with the term. Bio-based materials are made entirely from renewable biological sources. Plants, animals, algae, and many other useful industrial materials require no fossil ingredients. Think wood, paper, cotton and other natural fibers, natural rubber, and leather. They feed huge industries: fashion, packaging, furniture, construction, and transportation.

To see how policy handles these materials, the EMF analyzed 13 national circular-economy strategies and 18 separate “bioeconomy” frameworks, the agriculture, forestry, and industrial policies that govern the production of goods. Despite appearing to be two sides of the circular coin, these two worlds — circular and bio-based economies — run on parallel tracks that rarely intersect, and each has a blind spot that mirrors the other.

Circular-economy strategies that mention bio-based materials at all treat them as substitutes for fossil inputs. They say little about how those materials are grown, reused, or returned to the ground. Bioeconomy policies have the reverse problem: they reward replacing fossil inputs with biological ones, but not keeping those materials in circulation. A bio-based single-use product can tick a bioeconomy box while working against circular goals. The result, the report concludes, is a generation of policy that optimized linear bio-based systems rather than redesigning them to enable reuse.

Both worlds also tend to overlook a quieter opportunity: secondary feedstocks, such as crop residues, sawdust, and food-processing byproducts, can become inputs for new materials rather than being burned or landfilled. With circular thinking, these organic materials can produce more products from the same acre of land, reducing the need to clear new ground. The report argues that capturing value like this should be designed into the system from the start, not bolted on at the end.

Renewable Comes With a Catch

“Renewable” is not the same as limitless. Bio-based materials are replenished only when the ecosystems that produce them are given the space and time to regrow. When extraction outpaces recovery, soil degrades, forests fall, and land is converted, making a renewable resource finite as the ecosystem loses its productive capacity. Swapping a fossil material for a biological one, in other words, is not automatically a win. It depends on land use, local ecology, and the full life cycle.

Earth911’s reporting bears this out. Many plant-based “vegan leathers” still rely on a plastic coating for durability, which undercuts the “eco-friendly” pitch. And compostable bioplastics generally break down only inside industrial composting facilities, an infrastructure that most communities still lack. The EMF report makes the same point: that an end-of-life claim like “compostable” means little unless the system to deliver it actually exists at scale.

What a Circular Bio-Economy Actually Looks Like

The report lays out five design rules for bio-based materials and products, held together by a sixth, social commitment. In plain terms, it recommends:

• Grown to heal the land. A name for materials that come from regenerative farming and forestry, using methods like agroforestry that rebuild soil and biodiversity, or from leftover residues, so new production does not clear more land. Shoppers need this guidance to choose regenerative products.
• Made without toxic ingredients. A product should use no “substances of concern” that poison the soil when the material returns to it.
• Built to last and be repaired. Companies should embrace durable, modular, fixable designs reinforced by rental, resale, and product-as-a-service models that keep goods in use.
• Reusable across industries. Industries need to break out of their supply-chain siloes. Wood, for example, might serve in construction, then become furniture, then yield energy from incineration only once its useful life is truly spent — that could be 100 years or more in a circular economy.
• Recoverable at end of life. The EMF urges that products be designed so materials can be recycled, composted, or returned to nutrients; again, the infrastructure for recovering these materials must exist.

Underneath all five sits an important social rule: fair and inclusive value chains. Bio-based production happens on land tied to farmers, rural and Indigenous communities, and even waste pickers. The report treats their rights, knowledge, and fair pay as part of the design, not an afterthought.

Picture a sneaker. Its cotton is grown regeneratively, its rubber tapped from Amazonian trees by local harvesters, its “leather” made from pineapple leaves or mushrooms, its dyes non-toxic. It is built to be resoled and repaired, rented or resold, and finally composted, and comes with a digital product passport, a scannable record of what it is made of and how to recover it, traveling alongside it.

It’s Already Happening

This is not a thought experiment. Gucci is investing in regenerative wool across roughly 115,000 hectares of pastureland through a partnership with the fiber brand NATIVA, runs repair centers to extend the life of its goods, and, according to the report, recently launched a denim line made with 76% regenerative cotton and 24% recycled fiber.

In Brazil, the fashion retailer Lojas Renner owns Repassa, a resale platform open to any brand. In 2023, the platform kept about 600,000 items out of landfills, saved an estimated 1.3 billion liters of water (roughly 340 million gallons) and avoided nearly 5,900 tons of carbon dioxide.

In India, the materials startup MYNUSCo turns crop waste that farmers would otherwise burn into bio-composite pellets that replace plastic. By the EMF’s account, it pays farmers two to three times what the biofuel market offers, roughly doubling some rural incomes, and supplies a network of small manufacturers.

The Dutch furniture maker Royal Ahrend, meanwhile, leases office furniture, refurbishes returned pieces for resale, and feeds wood scrap into recycled-content chipboard that can run as high as about 80% recycled material.

The Trillion-Dollar Case

The EMF argument is not charity, but economics. The report cites a World Economic Forum estimate that a “nature-positive” economic shift could represent about $10 trillion in opportunities worldwide each year by 2030. It also notes that the benefits of bio-based manufacturing tend to ripple outward: each direct job in the sector supports roughly 1.79 additional jobs across farming, logistics, and services.

There is a resilience payoff, too. Regenerative growing methods that improve soil health and water retention tend to produce steadier yields, and a more varied mix of crops lowers the risk that one bad harvest or price spike could disrupt an entire supply chain. For countries that mostly export raw commodities, the report argues, processing biomass into higher-value materials at home can diversify national income and create skilled jobs that shipping raw crops never will.

The climate math is just as striking. The European Commission estimates that bio-based products could save up to 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year in the European Union by 2030. The report points to analysis suggesting a broader shift to a bioeconomy could deliver up to a third of the emissions cuts needed to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping materials in use longer eases pressure on land, while composting and regenerative growing pull carbon back into the soil.

Five Things Governments Can Change

To achieve an integrated bio-based circular economy, the report offers five connected policy moves.

• Set design standards that make regeneration a requirement, not a bonus, and require traceability.
• Rewrite “waste” rules so usable biomass is not dumped or burned by default, and open clear pathways for second uses.
• Shift the money by redirecting farm subsidies toward regenerative practices, cutting taxes on repair and reuse, charging producers fees scaled to how circular their products are, and phasing out subsidies that lock in linear production.
• Invest in the missing pieces: composting plants, biorefineries, fiber-to-fiber recycling, and the skills to run them.
• Coordinate across ministries and borders so definitions and certifications align, rather than multiplying compliance costs.

More than 100 countries now have circular-economy roadmaps or action plans, up about a third since 2024. The report’s point is that those plans will fall short of their potential as long as the renewable half of the material world keeps getting treated as an afterthought.

What You Can Do

• Buy for the long haul, and buy used. Choose durable, repairable goods, and shop resale platforms before buying new.
• Repair before you replace. Extending a product’s life is almost always lower-impact than recycling it.
• Read the fine print on “compostable” and “biodegradable.” Confirm a local facility actually accepts the item before you toss it in the bin. Check options through Earth911’s Recycling Search.
• Be skeptical of “plant-based” and “vegan” labels. When considering alternative leather and packaging, ask what the material actually is and whether it is coated in plastic.
• Support regenerative producers. Seek out brands and local farmers using practices that rebuild soil rather than deplete it.
• Back the policy plumbing. Composting infrastructure, right-to-repair laws, and producer-responsibility programs are what let individual choices add up.

Related Reading

• The Forest Stewardship Council’s Path to a Circular, Bio-Based Future
• Regenerative Agriculture to Restore Our Earth
• Bioplastics, Biodegradable Plastics, and Compostable Plastics: What’s the Difference?
• Shopping for Plant-Based Leather

Editor’s Note: Feature image courtesy of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The post The Circular Economy Has a Blind Spot: The Stuff That Grows Back appeared first on Earth911.

By the end of this century, hotter nights could cost the average person roughly 16 hours of sleep a year, and the children set to lose the most rest are concentrated in the regions least able to cool down. That estimate comes from a new analysis in Nature Sustainability that traces an uncomfortable chain of cause and effect from a warm bedroom all the way to a smaller paycheck decades later.

Warmer nights shorten sleep. Less sleep in childhood blunts cognitive development. Weaker cognitive development drags on lifetime earnings. Tallied across the globe under a high-emissions scenario, the researchers put the price of all that lost sleep in the trillions of dollars, with the heaviest burden falling on countries that contributed least to the warming. The effect on any one child is small. The aggregate, and the way it widens the gap between rich and poor regions, is the story.

From a hot night to a smaller paycheck

The study, led by Bowen Chu and colleagues at Nanjing University, links together three relationships that other researchers had already documented separately: how temperature affects sleep duration, how childhood sleep affects measured IQ, and how IQ tracks with lifetime economic productivity. Chaining them together produces a single projection that describe what a warming climate could do to human capital in the aggregate and individual earning potential for future generations.

Measured against a 2001–2010 baseline, and assuming people make no effort to adapt, excess sleep loss reaches about 16.4 hours per person per year by the 2100s under the highest-emissions pathway, which could warm the world 2.4°C by 2060; the equivalent of erasing roughly two full nights of sleep over the course of a year. The largest projected impacts cluster in southern and eastern Africa and southern and eastern Asia.

From there, a commentary accompanying the study lays out the downstream impact. The average per-person loss of IQ could be about 0.026 points in high-income settings and 0.058 points in lower-income ones. While that may seem modest at the individual level, which considered alongside a global economic cost due to lost intelligence on the order of $2.86 trillion in the 2100s, the consequences of a warming world are dire.

The research is an attempt to quantify a cascading series of impacts that, if no effort to reduce global warming takes place, will come to pass; it is not a forecast set in stone.

Why heat robs you of rest

To fall asleep and stay there, your core body temperature has to drop, and it keeps falling to a low point in the early hours of the morning, in step with your circadian rhythm. A warm room blocks that decline, and the brain struggles to reach its deepest, most restorative stages. As Cleveland Clinic sleep specialist Michelle Drerup has put it, “Heat is a huge disruptor for REM sleep.”

The damage isn’t shared evenly. The research consistently finds that older adults, women, people in lower-income countries, and those already living in hot climates lose the most sleep when nights warm. These are the same groups that tend to have the fewest resources to cool down.

The cooling trap

The obvious fix is air conditioning, and the study’s “no adaptation” assumption is where reality gets complicated. Yes, AC keeps bedrooms cool, but where the electricity is generated from fossil fuels it adds to the emissions driving the warming, and the refrigerants inside many units are themselves potent greenhouse gases. AC is also least available in the lower-income, hotter regions the study flags as most exposed.

That is the uncomfortable core of the finding. Adaptation strategies exist, but they are unevenly distributed, and the cheapest, most universal lever is the one that shrinks the problem at its source by reducing atmospheric CO₂ levels. The 16-hour figure is tied to a high-emissions future; lower-emissions pathways bend the curve down. The harm, in other words, is partly a choice.

What You Can Do

For a cooler night’s sleep, starting tonight:

• Aim cool. Sleep guidance generally points to a bedroom around 65°F as the sweet spot, within a band most experts place between roughly 60 and 68°F.
• Block the day’s heat. Close curtains and blinds against direct sun, and keep windows shut when it’s hotter outside than in. Sunlight both warms the room and suppresses the melatonin that helps you drift off.
• Flush heat at night. When the outside air finally cools, open up and cross-ventilate with one fan pushing hot air out a window, another drawing cooler air in. A bowl of ice in front of a fan is a low-tech way to chill the breeze.
• Take a warm shower one to two hours before bed. It sounds backward, but passive body heating triggers the blood-vessel dilation that sheds core heat afterward. A 2019 meta-analysis found a 10-minute warm bath or shower of about 104–108°F, timed one to two hours before bed, shortened the time it took to fall asleep. In extreme heat, a lukewarm rinse is easier to tolerate and still helps you cool off.
• Go breathable, and go low. Lightweight cotton bedding and sleepwear beat heat-trapping synthetics. Heat rises, so a lower floor or a mattress closer to the ground will help you sleep cooler.

For your home and your footprint:

• Reach for fans, shading, and insulation before the air conditioner, and keep any AC you do run efficient — right-sized, well-maintained, and turned down when nights allow.
• Lean on low-tech cooling strategies during milder stretches so cooling energy is reserved for the genuinely dangerous days.

In youe community:

• Support community cooling centers and urban tree canopy and heat-island reduction, which protect the people who have no home cooling at all — the same groups the research identifies as most exposed.
• Keep the scenario in view. The projected harm scales with emissions, so the most effective response to lost sleep at the population level is the same one that addresses heat itself: cutting carbon fast enough to keep the high-warming pathway from arriving.

Related Reading

• Heat Wave Health Risks: Safety Tips for Extreme Heat
• Climate Crisis: Keeping Cool Without Air Conditioning
• Cutting the Climate Impact of Your Air Conditioner

The post Climate Change Is Stealing Our Sleep — and the Economic Impact Could Reach the Trillions appeared first on Earth911.