Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck’s capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response currently averages around 40 minutes. Firefighters have long understood the math: a spoonful of water in the first second, a bucket in the first minute, a truckload in the first hour. The XPRIZE Wildfire competition is an $11 million global effort to prove that autonomous systems, including AI-enabled drones, ground-based sensor networks, and space-based detection platforms, can collapse that window to 10 minutes. Our guest is Andrea Santy, who leads the program. She came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, where she watched conservation projects fall to wildfire. That experience sharpened her understanding of the stakes: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and parts of tropical East Asia, a single fire can eliminate species found nowhere else on Earth. In cities, it can destroy entire neighborhoods in hours. On January 7, 2025, Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena, destroying more than 16,000 structures, killing 30 people, displacing 180,000 residents, and generating between $76 billion and $130 billion in total economic losses from a single event. Annual U.S. wildfire costs, when healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and rebuilding are included, are estimated between $394 billion and $893 billion. XPRIZE announced the five autonomous wildfire response finalists just over a year after the LA fires: Anduril, deploying its Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones; Dryad, running solar-powered mesh sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage; Fire Swarm Solutions, coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can deliver 100 gallons of water autonomously; Data Blanket, building rapidly deployable drone swarms for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who used multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that can’t be seen from monitoring positions, solving the literal over-the-hill problem that any fire detection system faces.

The conversation covers what the finalists demonstrated during semi-final trials at 40-mile-per-hour winds, why the decoy fire requirement — distinguishing a wildfire from a barbecue, a pile burn, or a flapping tarp — is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how autonomous systems would integrate with existing incident command structures. Santy is direct about where progress is lagging: the testing is ahead of the regulations. Autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft in active fire emergencies require FAA frameworks that don’t yet exist at the necessary scale. There’s also the deeper ecological tension — the growing scientific consensus that many fire-adapted landscapes need more fire, not less, and that indigenous fire stewardship practices developed over millennia have a place alongside autonomous suppression technology. One XPRIZE finalist is already working with an indigenous community in Canada to pilot their heavy-lift drone system in a remote area where that community is exploring how the technology fits their land management approach. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating Forest Service state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out $300 million in forest research funding — maintaining suppression spending while gutting the prevention and detection infrastructure that could reduce what there is to suppress. The engineering, Santy says, has arrived. Whether the institutions can move at the speed the crisis demands is the harder question.

You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally appeared on March 16, 2026.

Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:09

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on 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.

Fire season is coming, and we’re going to dig into how new technology may catch and contain fires in the first few minutes after ignition. There’s a saying among firefighters: you can fight fire in the first second with a spoonful of water, in the first minute with a bucket of water, and in the first hour with a truckload of water. The problem is that by the time most wildfires are detected, minutes have already passed, and in those minutes, under increasingly common conditions, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck’s capacity.

On January 7, 2025, hurricane-force Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena in Los Angeles, and in a matter of hours, more than 16,000 structures were destroyed. Thirty people were killed, and 180,000 residents were forced to flee. The total economic losses are estimated to be between $76 billion and $130 billion from a single fire event. And that was just one week in one city. In 2025, the U.S. recorded more than 61,500 wildfires that burned nearly 5 million acres, leading to annual U.S. wildfire costs of between $394 billion and $893 billion when you factor in the cost of healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and the expensive task of rebuilding entire cities.

So there’s an identifiable gap in the current best practices, which take roughly 40 minutes from ignition to deliver a coordinated response. What if you could cut that to 10 minutes, when only a few buckets of water could extinguish a threat? And what if autonomous systems — AI-enabled drones and ground-based sensor networks — could detect a fire, distinguish it from a prescribed burn, and suppress it before getting a human on the radio?

That’s the challenge behind the XPRIZE Wildfire program, an $11 million global competition now entering its final year, and our guest today is Andrea Santy, the program director leading it. Andrea came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, and before that she spent time at the Smithsonian Institution, leading conservation and academic programs.

On January 29 — just after the one-year anniversary of those LA fires — XPRIZE announced the five finalist teams advancing in the autonomous wildfire response track of the competition. They include:

Andruil, a defense technology company deploying a Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones that watch for fires at the moment they break out;

Dryad, a German company running solar-powered sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage;

Fire Swarm Solutions, a Canadian team coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can carry 100 gallons of water autonomously to the point where a fire begins;

Data Blanket, building a rapidly deployable drone swarm system for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and

Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who partnered with two aerospace companies to use multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that cannot be seen from monitoring locations — because, after all, a lot of fires happen just over the hill.

A separate track of the competition, the space-based wildfire detection and intelligence program, includes 10 finalists from six countries who are heading to Australia in April for their own finals. Those teams will have one minute to detect all fires across an area larger than a state, and 10 minutes to deliver precise reports to firefighting decision-makers on the ground.

We’re going to talk with Andrea about what the finalists demonstrated during live trials, why the decoy fire requirement is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how these autonomous systems would actually integrate with existing wildfire incident command structures. We’ll also dig into the tension between suppression technology and the growing scientific consensus that many landscapes need more fire, not less, and whether indigenous fire stewardship practices have a place in this conversation.

You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire. Can autonomous drones and AI-driven sensor networks actually detect and suppress a wildfire in less than 10 minutes? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Andrea. How are you doing today?

Andrea Santy  5:34

I’m doing great, Mitch. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:34

Well, thanks for joining me. We’ve had XPRIZE leaders on the show a number of times, and you do such interesting work. You announced the finalists just at one year after the catastrophe in LA. How did that reshape the urgency and direction for the XPRIZE Wildfire competition?

Andrea Santy  5:34

It definitely focuses a more intense light on the competition and the need for these solutions. Climate change is driving more intense, more frequent wildfires all around the world, and so I think the urgency was already there. But when you have a disaster at the scale and scope of the LA fires, it absolutely changes the way that everybody thinks about wildfires.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:04

What’s the realistic timeline for these technologies in the competition to potentially start changing the way that we fight fire and the outcomes of those fires?

Andrea Santy  6:14

So I’ll start by saying we were in LA when the fires started. XPRIZE has a lot of LA-based staff, and we’re originally LA-based, and we were having our staff meeting — so our entire staff was there. We knew from our prize that it was going to be very high risk, and so we were in touch with fire chiefs as the fires were starting. We were able to go out and see where the fires had gone through the Palisades and part of the city — basically 24 hours after it had happened.

It really, I will just say, definitely had a huge impact in terms of being able to see a landscape, communities, homes, schools, and businesses that had been devastated. A lot of the technology being integrated with these solutions can be deployed almost immediately. I think that as the fire agencies begin to get their hands on more of this technology, we’re going to have a hopefully relatively quick uptake. Cameras, sensors, satellite data — a lot of this is already being deployed. So we’re looking at how quickly and under what conditions it can help improve our detection. And then we have other components that I would say are going to have a longer timeline to full deployment.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:56

It sounds like part of the problem, then, is just knitting all this together. Does that also apply to areas outside of major cities? Do we have the resources to do this on a nationwide basis?

Andrea Santy  8:10

Yeah, absolutely. We’re doing our testing for our space-based competition in Australia, so we’re looking at how you detect fires over vast areas from satellites as quickly as possible and deliver that information down within 10 minutes, with 15-minute updates. For our autonomous track, we’re testing in Alaska — so it will definitely be a real-world scenario where we can understand the capabilities of these technologies in forested areas, in really vast terrain, and under different environmental conditions. Part of why we’re working with these partners is because they’re great partners, but it also allows us to validate this technology under real-world, challenging conditions.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:03

So how does the wildfire strategy change when this technology is in place? You’ve already mentioned that the climate crisis is accelerating the size and pace of these fires. Is the goal to suppress more fires earlier so that available resources can be deployed to those that actually break out? What’s the big-picture change in policy here?

Andrea Santy  9:26

XPRIZE really decided to double down on early detection and autonomous response, and we have two tracks. I’ll talk about the detection piece first because it’s digestible for everyone. Every wildfire starts small. They don’t start as a huge catastrophe — they start small, often in pretty remote areas. Sometimes they burn really fast, sometimes slower, depending on the conditions. But if you can address a wildfire at its very smallest phase, essentially post-ignition, that gives you the best chance to address it — either through autonomous suppression systems or through your fire service. If you have more eyes, ears, and noses on the landscape, the better your chance of getting that alert as soon as possible, which allows the fire service to decide how to prioritize their resources.

The second component we’re advancing is autonomous detection and response. Sensors and cameras handle the detection; the autonomous response system deploys, verifies there is a fire — that it’s not a barbecue but an actual wildfire that needs suppression — and places suppressant fully autonomously. That’s what we’re going to be testing in Alaska: can they execute this full end-to-end system? Is the technology integrated? Will it reach the scale and scope of the challenge and the geography? Because 1,000 square kilometers — which is our testing area — is roughly the size of San Antonio, Texas. The teams will have to find multiple fires and demonstrate persistent monitoring and persistent response. Imagine having a fire starting in a ravine: if you can get something out there in minutes, your chance of knocking it down — even just deterring the spread enough that firefighters can arrive — we hope will be a game changer.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:13

We’re talking about autonomous drones. But one of the things that happened in the LA wildfire was that Santa Ana winds were so extreme, fixed-wing aircraft couldn’t fly. Can a drone perform in those conditions?

Andrea Santy  12:27

During our semi-final testing, our team traveled the world to observe these solutions in action. While not at scale, each of the five finalists was able to demonstrate that they could detect a fire, navigate to it, and suppress it fully autonomously over a small area. Coincidentally, relatively strong winds followed us — nothing like the Santa Ana winds, but we had 40-mile-per-hour winds pretty consistently during testing. It was odd, but it was helpful in terms of validating the technology.

Because you don’t have a human pilot, it’s not that helicopters and planes can’t fly — it’s that they can’t fly in that type of wind without putting a human at risk. This approach removes at least that human element. It’s going to continue to be a challenge, but many of the drones have a relatively high wind tolerance, and as the technology improves, the systems themselves are providing the input to stay balanced.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:54

These systems are also being combined with sensor networks. Can you talk about how those are being deployed?

Andrea Santy  14:01

Some teams are really focused on ultra-early detection by deploying a sensor network — many, many sensors connected through a mesh network — allowing small, distributed sensors across a large area, which gives you great coverage. All of the different teams are competing under the same scenario, so we’ll get to see which technologies work under which conditions. There’s no single silver bullet that works in every condition, every geography, and every forest type. We’re also working on a pilot phase post-competition so the teams can continue to test and deploy, gaining even better understanding. Building trust with fire agencies — so they know what the technology can do under critical situations — is really important.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:24

Do the fire agencies participate in these trials as well?

Andrea Santy  15:28

Absolutely. We have partners from different fire agencies in Australia — we’re doing our testing with the Rural Fire Service of New South Wales, which is a testing partner. Many of our judges come from different fire agencies across the United States and around the world. From the beginning, that was really an ethos we set forward — making sure this was done hand in hand with the fire agencies.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:59

You’ve mentioned decoy fires. I’m curious how the trials will incorporate them. You mentioned barbecues — are you going to have people setting up small fires to lure the competition’s sensors?

Andrea Santy  16:11

I can’t say too much because testing hasn’t happened — I can’t give away the secret sauce. But yes — the teams do know they will have decoys and will need to ensure their technology ignores them. It can be anything from something flapping in the wind that resembles the color of fire all the way to barbecues or pile burns — anything that would confuse the technology.

Mitch Ratcliffe  16:52

And that could happen any day of the year. Really interesting. One of the most compelling things about the competition is the breadth of sources of ideas and the range of approaches — including even a high school team from Valley Christian High School in San Jose. What does that diversity tell us about where wildfire innovation will actually come from?

Andrea Santy  17:15

At XPRIZE, we believe that ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, and I think XPRIZE Wildfire really demonstrates what that looks like. We had teams from over 55 different countries enter the competition. We currently have six countries represented through our finals teams, and the range spans from Valley Christian — a high school team — through universities, startups, and all the way up to major industry. That truly spans the whole spectrum.

What I really love about our competition is that for many of the teams, this is both a company and a passion. Wildfires happen in so many places, and so many teams have been personally impacted. The high school team talked about growing up in areas where wildfires are a constant presence — they are very cognizant of the need for these solutions. Something remarkable: one in six Americans live in an area of wildfire risk, and 25% of Californians.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:57

It’s a very tangible problem for so many of us, particularly in the West. And the smoke from fires in Canada is now familiar on the East Coast — it’s changed the very shape of life. This is a great place to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my discussion with Andrea Santy. She is Program Director of XPRIZE Wildfire — a competition headed into its final year with two groups of finalists vying to win shares of an $11 million prize to help commercialize their technologies.

Andrea, the autonomous competition requires teams to detect and suppress a high-risk wildfire in a 1,000-square-kilometer area — roughly the size of San Antonio — and do it within 10 minutes, while ignoring decoy fires. That’s four times faster than current best practices. Have any of the teams met that benchmark yet in the trials?

Andrea Santy  19:57

As I mentioned, the five teams advancing to finals all demonstrated they have end-to-end solutions to autonomously detect, navigate, and suppress a fire. Our semi-final testing was at a much smaller scale, and while some teams did it in less than 10 minutes, this finals competition is at a very large scale — and it is going to be challenging. Every XPRIZE is very audacious. We really want to push the limits, but we’re very confident we’re going to have a team that can do it. Still to be seen, but that is what finals is for.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:42

Absolutely. It’s great that we’re testing in such diverse settings. Australia and Alaska seem very different. Is that actually the case, or are wildfire conditions globally roughly the same?

Andrea Santy  20:59

Very different. In Alaska, it will be wildfire season, and we’re testing in an area of much lower risk. The vegetation is different. The geography is different. The fuels — the plants and trees — are different. In Australia, the teams will be arriving as it comes out of summer and goes into fall, which means we don’t actually know exactly which specific days we’ll test, because the Rural Fire Service has to execute prescribed burns when it’s safe. We have a two-week testing window, with five planned days of testing, and approximately 20 fires of varying sizes that the teams will need to identify under different conditions and vegetation types.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:11

Let’s talk a bit about the space-based prize. Lockheed Martin is adding a million dollars for the teams that can demonstrate the fastest and most accurate detection. Is detection turning out to be the harder technical problem — or is it the transition from detection to action, that coordination piece we talked about?

Andrea Santy  22:40

Lockheed Martin is supporting the autonomous wildfire response track — which we call Track B. The autonomous track requires teams to detect, navigate, and suppress, with all teams using drones. There’s a lot of different detection technology, from sensors that detect particulates up to cameras, and sensors and cameras mounted on drones.

Getting that detection into these autonomous response systems is really the step change — having something that communicates without human intervention, with drones that can fly under wind conditions and navigate to the right location, confirm there’s a fire, and then suppress it accurately. The teams will be testing on a moving fire — not a barrel of fire, but an actual fire that will be dynamic and small-scale but moving. That’s really challenging and requires quite a bit of system training. During semi-finals, accurately hitting the target was one of the harder challenges.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:43

As you talk about it, it sounds like the transition from detection to addressing the fire appropriately — choosing the right suppression mechanism — is something you’ll continue to work on.

Andrea Santy  24:58

The teams are definitely still working on their systems. They have until June to have all of their systems working. Yeah, it requires a lot of different components.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:20

And obviously that’s part of the bigger challenge — coordinating technological responses to a changing climate and acute situations like fire. As you observe the environment with these systems, are we also potentially identifying opportunities for prescribed burns in order to reduce fire risk?

Andrea Santy  25:45

Absolutely. While our competition is focused on detection and response to incipient-stage wildfires, I do think this technology can be utilized across many different scenarios — including prescribed burns, where you want to monitor large burn areas to ensure nothing escapes. That is definitely a use case, and anything that reduces our risk. Personally, I think it could provide peace of mind: if you have something on hand that can prevent a prescribed fire from spreading when weather conditions change unexpectedly, that’s enormously valuable.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:43

Indigenous communities have managed fire for millennia using these kinds of burning practices. Have you engaged with tribal fire practitioners? Do they see autonomous technology as complementary to, or in tension with, their traditional fire stewardship programs?

Andrea Santy  27:02

We have engaged with some. I was just at a meeting where I was able to meet with a representative from an indigenous community in Canada, and they are actually going to pilot-test one of the team’s technologies — specifically a team with a heavy-lift drone. It was really exciting to talk with them and learn more about how they envision it being used. Their community is quite remote, and understanding how this technology could work within their context was a great conversation.

Mitch Ratcliffe  27:41

When I think about the swarm of drones approach to fire management, the regulatory landscape seems like a significant challenge. The FAA has been grappling with drone airspace management. Does the regulatory framework need to change significantly to accommodate these systems?

Andrea Santy  28:06

That’s an excellent question. Current regulations and protocol don’t allow drones in airspace with manned aircraft. As the technology gets better, there are definitely ways this can happen — there are pilots and tests already occurring with other partners looking at shared airspace for heavy-lift drones operating at higher altitudes. Beyond visual line of sight is one area where the testing is definitely ahead of where the regulations are.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:55

What has your conservation career taught you about how technology deployment can shape our relationship with nature?

Andrea Santy  29:07

I got into this position in part because many of the projects I was working on at the World Wildlife Fund were being lost to wildfire, and I felt we hadn’t really understood the impact of wildfires on conservation. Wildfires are now the main driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo, and parts of tropical East Asia, there’s such critical biodiversity — and I think if we can use technology to monitor these areas, understand where fires are happening, and deploy appropriate responses, my hope is that we can save really, really important places. There are endemic species that only live in very, very small areas, and one fire could wipe out an entire species.

I also worked for a long time on projects where your goal was 20 to 50 years away. Being able to work with XPRIZE, where in three years we’ve seen an absolute transformation in both what the technology can do and how people understand what technology is for — I think we need more of these competitions, more technology applied to conservation problems. I’m really hopeful.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:23

After three years with XPRIZE Wildfire, do you feel like we can turn back the rising incidence of wildfire and all the costs we’re seeing pile up when cities burn?

Andrea Santy  31:35

I think so. Communities and citizens around the world are understanding the problem at a deeper level. This is going to be all hands on deck. You need citizens and homeowners making sure they have zone zero — no vegetation around their homes. You need communities, city and state incentives, industry engagement. You need prescribed fire and better forest management policies that allow good fire on the landscape, and communities that encourage it. All of these factors together are what will get us to a new paradigm.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:29

You mentioned raising awareness — this competition actually sounds like really good TV. Have you thought about how to tell this story of wildfire innovation so that people can get engaged with and behind this kind of activity?

Andrea Santy  32:49

We’ve discussed at length how we would be able to document some of the testing. For the autonomous wildfire response, it is a very big, vast area, and turning it into good TV is probably a step beyond us — but I think the teams have amazing stories to tell. We’re going to capture a lot of imagery to share that story out. We have a resource page that provides a lot of different information to homeowners and individuals about other really amazing organizations doing great work in the wildfire space.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:47

How can our listeners follow along as you complete the project?

Andrea Santy  33:51

We’d love to have them follow along. The easiest way is xprize.org/wildfire — we have lots of information about the competition and the teams, lookbooks to learn about which teams are competing, social media updates, and a newsletter you can subscribe to. During the testing events we’ll be sharing quite a bit of good information. The events are in fairly remote, closed-system locations, so we can’t invite everyone there — but we’ll definitely be exploring how to make sure as many people as possible can get their eyes on what we’re doing.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:42

Andrea, thank you very much for spending time with us today. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

Andrea Santy  34:48

Thank you so much. We hope all your listeners think deeply about wildfire and what they can do. Our goal is that collectively we can all work together to reduce this wildfire risk and keep good fire on the landscape.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:11

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Andrea Santy, Program Director of XPRIZE Wildfire, an $11 million global competition now in its final year. Learn more and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.

This conversation revealed, at least for me, that solutions to wildfire are arriving — but perhaps faster than the systems built to receive them can accept and use them. We’ll need more public funding to deploy these technologies, and right now we’re moving in the wrong direction. As wildfire damage grows, total federal wildfire spending is holding roughly flat at around $7 billion a year. However, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating the Forest Service’s state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out the $300 million in forest research funding that was in the budget previously. So we’re maintaining the suppression budget while cutting the prevention, detection, and research infrastructure that could reduce what we have to suppress.

Fortunately, we have XPRIZE Wildfire to take on some of the burden — but it’s not enough. Consider what Andrea said about early detection: every wildfire does start small. If autonomous systems can get suppressant on a fire quickly enough, it might not even need to be fully extinguished — just deterred enough that firefighters can arrive to finish the job. The technology to do that end-to-end and autonomously is already being demonstrated in the field. But Andrea was equally direct about what’s lagging: the testing is ahead of where the regulations are.

Consider autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft during active fire emergencies. For that to work, the FAA’s frameworks for widespread drone operations need to be reinvented. The recent closure of El Paso International Airport over nearby counter-drone laser testing is evidence of how unprepared we truly are for the innovations that are coming.

In short, the engineering has arrived, but institutions need support to integrate that engineering into their operations. A similar gap is evident in who’s doing the innovating: teams from over 55 countries entered this competition, and a high school team from San Jose made the finals by solving the problem of locating fires beyond ridgelines using multi-sensor triangulation — not because they had institutional backing, but because they had access to a well-defined problem and the drive to solve it, along with the incentive of XPRIZE’s $11 million award.

The XPRIZE premise that ideas can come from anyone, anywhere — it turns out — is literally true. But recognizing that changes nothing if the regulatory, procurement, and deployment systems still favor incumbents and slow-moving approval processes.

Underlying all these challenges is what Andrea brought to this work from nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. The game has changed, but policy is still anchored in now-outdated 20th-century strategies. One fire in the wrong place can drive a species to extinction, or it can burn a city to the ground.

Andrea said she’s hopeful — not because the problem is easy, but because in three years she’s watched a transformation in what technology can do and how people understand what technology is for. That hope is well earned. But it will only translate into outcomes if institutions move at the speed the crisis demands — citizens, homeowners, communities, industries, and policy, all moving together. The competition creates urgency; the systems around it need to act on and use the innovations being delivered.

So stay tuned for more conversations with people actually making sustainability happen, and I hope you’ll check out our archive of more than 540 episodes. There’s something worth sharing with anyone you know. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because, folks, you are the amplifiers that spread ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, and the people you meet on the street that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or wherever they get their podcast goodness.

Thank you 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 Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: The XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Heats Up appeared first on Earth911.

Today’s Earth911 inspiration is from Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and science writer, Natalie Angier: “The beauty of the natural world lies in the details.”

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

The post Earth911 Inspiration: The Beauty of the Natural World appeared first on Earth911.

In 2028, you might notice subtle changes in your grocery runs. Fruits are in cardboard boxes instead of clamshell containers, takeout salads come in fiber bowls and microwaveable meals are tucked in clear or white plastic trays instead of black ones. These subtle shifts may be the result of California’s landmark packaging law, SB 54, whose finalized regulations took effect in May 2026.

Even if you don’t live in California, you will likely still see these changes. Many major manufacturers are reformulating their packaging for everyone rather than creating separate versions. And environmental groups are calling for more rigorous regulations. Oceana, NRDC and the Californians Against Waste Foundation filed suit in San Francisco Superior Court on June 2, arguing the final regulations add exclusions for large categories of plastic packaging, allow producers to claim indefinite exemptions, and fail to guard against technologies the law was designed to restrict.

What SB 54 Actually Requires

To understand why this law is so transformative, consider the scale of the problem it’s aiming to solve. For decades, plastic quietly became the default for packaging. It’s cheap, durable and lightweight. Unfortunately, its explosive growth also created a massive waste crisis.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the trend is taking off. Of all the municipal waste generated in the U.S., plastic waste accounted for 12.2% in 2018, a massive jump from 0.4% in 1960.

Packaging is a major part of this problem, as it’s often used once and then discarded. According to Greenprint, 36% of all manufactured plastic is used for packaging, and a staggering 85% of that material ends up in landfills. In response, California passed SB 54. Its core goals are to cut single-use plastic by 25% by 2032 and to ensure that all single-use packaging sold in the state is either recyclable or compostable.

The key mechanism driving these changes is extended producer responsibility (EPR). In simple terms, this shifts the financial burden of waste management from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce the packaging. This creates a powerful financial incentive for them to use less packaging, design it to be more easily recycled and avoid problematic materials.

The Packaging Materials Likely to Change First

SB 54 sets broad recyclability, compostability and source-reduction requirements that put pressure on hard-to-recycle and problematic materials. EPS food service ware is already restricted in California, while other packaging types may be redesigned, replaced or phased down as producers work toward the law’s 2032 targets.

Category 1: Polystyrene Foam

Commonly known by the brand name “Styrofoam,” expanded polystyrene (EPS) is everywhere. It’s in foam takeout containers, single-use coffee cups, coolers and the crumbly white blocks used as protective packaging.

California prohibits the sale, distribution and import of EPS food service ware. It’s mostly air, making it costly to transport, and it breaks into small pieces that contaminate other, more valuable recycled materials. Plus, research found that exposure to styrene, a key component of polystyrene, is linked to higher risks for lymphoma, leukemia and other health conditions.

The alternatives to EPS are already common. They include molded fiber containers, such as those used in egg cartons, cardboard and other paper-based clamshells, and other paper-based food service ware.

Category 2: Black and Dark-Colored Plastic Food Packaging

This refers to the black plastic used for microwaveable meal trays, the bottom of takeout sushi containers and some produce trays. The problem lies in their color.

Modern recycling facilities use near-infrared (NIR) optical sorters to identify and separate different types of plastic. As Earth911 explains, the sorting machines can’t detect the carbon black pigment used to create the dark color because it absorbs the NIR light. The sorters can’t categorize the materials, so they’re automatically rejected and sent to landfills.

In a few years, you might see clear or light-colored polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic containers replacing black food packaging. Sorters can easily identify them, and they’re among the most valuable plastics to recycle. Aluminum or fiber-based trays may also become a common sight.

Category 3: PVC Clamshells and Blister Packs

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), also known as vinyl, is a rigid plastic often used for clear clamshells that hold berries, salads or bakery items. The blister packs that encase products like toys and batteries also include the material.

PVC packaging could face significant pressure under SB 54 because it’s a major contaminant in the PET recycling stream. Even a small amount of PVC mixed in with a bale of PET can ruin the entire batch, rendering it unusable. The additives that make the plastic flexible also pose health concerns. Research shows that PVC contains phthalates, which are associated with chronic conditions, like diabetes and infertility.

As an alternative, there’s a push for clamshells made from recycled PET (rPET). They look identical but are easier to recycle. You might also see more molded pulp containers and simple cardboard packaging.

Category 4: Oxo-Degradable Plastics

Oxo-degradable plastics are conventional plastics, like polyethylene, with special additives that cause them to break down into smaller pieces when exposed to heat or sunlight. They’re often vaguely marketed as “eco-friendly” or “degradable.”

Oxo-degradable plastics could face significant pressure under SB 54’s recyclability, compostability and anti-greenwashing goals because they’re not truly biodegradable. Instead of breaking down into harmless organic matter, they fragment into microplastics, which creates a much more pervasive and difficult-to-clean-up form of land and water pollution.

This ban is a direct strike against misleading marketing. It reinforces the point that if a product claims to be biodegradable, it must meet rigorous scientific standards.

Product Categories That Will Look Different at the Store

Beyond plastic bans, the law pushes for source reduction and improved recyclability to change the look and feel of packaging in nearly every supermarket aisle. Here are some product categories that may see the most significant changes.

1. Fresh Produce Section

Plastic clamshells stacked high with fruits, single-use plastic bags for loose greens and vegetables, and foam trays wrapped in plastic film often dominate this area. In time, those clamshells may be replaced by ventilated cardboard boxes or molded fiber punnets. The foam trays will disappear in favor of recyclable cardboard trays.

Stores will shift from single-use plastic produce bags to paper bags. Some may also market reusable mesh produce bags for purchase. Shoppers might also notice packaging-related changes in price or availability as brands and shops transition to compliant materials.

2. Prepared Foods and Deli

Deli and prepared food sections are typically a sea of clear plastic containers for items like potato salads, soups and pre-made meals. Fiber-based bowls and containers will likely replace them. They may be lined with a thin, plant-based, compostable polylactic acid (PLA) layer to handle wet foods. Lids will also transition to either compostable versions or more easily recycled plastic types.

Be aware that these fiber containers may not keep food as fresh as their airtight plastic counterparts. You can transfer leftovers into your own glass or durable plastic containers at home to maximize freshness. Expect businesses to update their packaging between 2028 to 2030.

3. Personal Care Products

Virgin plastic bottles, tubes and jars fill the health and beauty aisles. One of the first changes you’ll likely see among them is their labels, which may soon include marks like “made with X recycled plastic.”

California packaging rules already include a 25% postconsumer-material compliance option for some rigid plastic packaging containers. SB 54 adds broader pressure for covered packaging to become recyclable or compostable and meet rising recycling rate targets by 2032. While there is no  have 2027 to 2032 to gradually transition their products.

More brands might offer in-store refill stations or sell smaller, concentrated pods that you can mix with water in a reusable bottle at home. As noted by experts in sustainability, a well-designed refill system reduces the need for single-use plastics entirely, which in turn conserves resources.

4. Takeout and Food Service

Getting takeout usually also means receiving assorted packaging, from foam containers to non-recyclable black plastic bowls. SB 54 pushes for standardization. Restaurants will be heavily incentivized to adopt packaging that is either widely recyclable, like aluminum foil containers, or certified as commercially compostable, such as unlined fiber containers.

This will result in clearer and more reliable disposal instructions. The goal is to eliminate the guesswork, making it obvious whether your takeout container belongs in the recycling bin, the green waste bin or the trash.

5. Online Shopping Packaging

Shipping tiny items with a ton of air pillows, bubble wrap or foam peanuts is a common practice for online shops. It keeps the parcel safe, but generates significant unnecessary waste. The law targets this “void fill.”

Expect a dramatic shift to paper-based interior packaging. This includes crumpled kraft paper, die-cut cardboard inserts and other materials that can be tossed directly into your curbside recycling bin along with the box itself. While some major retailers, such as Amazon, have already begun this transition voluntarily, the law makes it mandatory for all companies shipping products in or to California. Full compliance is expected by 2032.

The Timeline — When to Expect Changes

The massive changes SB 54 requires won’t happen all at once. The law establishes a multiyear road map for producers to adapt. Here are key deadlines to keep in mind as you watch these changes appear on local store shelves.

While SB 54 puts the primary responsibility on producers, you, as a consumer, have a crucial role. Being an informed shopper sends powerful market signals that can accelerate the transition to better packaging. Here’s how you can do that.

1. Identify Compliant Packaging

Look for clear labeling that indicates progress. This can include phrases like “100% recycled content” or a “how to recycle” label that gives specific disposal instructions. For items claiming to be compostable, look for an official certification logo.

Look for ASTM D6400 certification. According to the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF), this standard indicates the plastic is biodegradable and will break down under the high-heat conditions of a municipal or industrial composting facility. That means the item will not break down in your backyard compost pile or in a landfill.

Be skeptical of vague, uncertified claims like “eco-friendly,” “earth-conscious” or “biodegradable” without a specific certification logo as proof.

2. Support Brands Making Early Changes

Every purchase you make sends a data point to retailers and manufacturers. By choosing products from companies that are proactively adopting more sustainable packaging, you are casting a vote for those practices.

Many manufacturers are already publicizing their efforts to comply with and even exceed new standards. For example, Faerch, a packaging company, has already committed to producing CPET trays with at least 40% rPET. Meanwhile, massive consumer brand Unilever has publicly updated its packaging processes around a reduction, circulation and collaboration-based strategy.

3. Understand Disposal During the Transition

Remember that recyclability is local. A package might be technically recyclable, but that’s meaningless if your local facility doesn’t have the equipment or end-market to process it. Check your city or waste hauler’s website to determine the exact materials they accept for recycling.

Compostable plastic and fiber products are designed to break down in the high-heat environment of a commercial or industrial composting facility. They will not break down in a landfill or a typical backyard compost pile. If your community doesn’t offer a green waste program that accepts food service ware, these items currently belong in the trash.

4. Advocate for Better Implementation

If your community lacks robust recycling or commercial composting services, let your local representatives know that you support investment in these areas. Better infrastructure is key to reaching the 65% recycling rate goal.

State bodies like CalRecycle are required to have public comment periods as they refine the rules. You can submit comments to encourage strong enforcement and prevent industry-friendly loopholes.

The Ripple Effect — Other States Watching California

SB 54 is not an isolated event. It’s part of a growing trend of states taking legislative action on plastic waste and promoting producer responsibility.

States With Similar Legislation in Progress

Several states have either already passed or are actively considering similar EPR laws for packaging. New York is a major state to watch. It has a proposed bill that sets EPR as its core framework, signaling a similar policy direction on the East Coast.

In the Pacific Northwest, Oregon is leading with its Recycling Modernization Act. Like SB 54, it encourages manufacturers to use sustainable materials by making them financially responsible for funding improvements to the state’s recycling system. States like Colorado, Maine and Vermont have also passed their own forms of EPR for packaging.

What Interstate Coordination Means

For a company that sells products in all 50 states, managing different packaging requirements and fees for each state is a logistical and financial nightmare. It is far more efficient to design a single package that meets the strictest regulations in the country, California in this case, and then sell that same package everywhere. Because of this market reality, California’s law effectively sets the bar for the entire nation.

There’s also potential for regional harmonization. As California, Oregon and Washington all implement similar laws, a powerful “West Coast” standard may emerge. This can put even more pressure on national brands to adopt a single, high standard for their packaging.

Federal Inaction Driving State Action

In the absence of a single federal EPR framework for packaging, states are creating their own rules. This has led to the current “patchwork” of different state-level regulations. The National Conference of State Legislatures notes that California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland and Oregon have enacted packaging EPR legislation, creating a state-by-state policy landscape for producers to navigate.

The Greenwashing Concerns — What to Watch Out For

A new law means new marketing. As companies scramble to comply with SB 54, many will make bold environmental claims. Some are legitimate, but others can be misleading. This practice is known as “greenwashing.” Here’s what to watch out for so you can tell the difference.

1. Material Switching That Doesn’t Solve Problems

Be wary of companies replacing a banned material with a new one that has its own, sometimes hidden, set of environmental problems. A prime example is the confusing world of “bioplastics.”

On the surface, bioplastics sound great. They come from renewable resources like cornstarch rather than fossil fuels and are designed to break down naturally under the right conditions. However, just because a material is “plant-based” doesn’t automatically make it better. The full environmental impact of growing the crops, processing the material and what happens to it after disposal is complex.

A study revealed that some certified compostable bags actually contain more chemical additives than conventional plastic bags. They can exhibit moderate toxicity to marine plankton, proving that even “eco-friendly” alternatives need scrutiny.

2. False Equivalencies

A classic example is a paper coffee cup or soup container. It looks like paper, so it feels recyclable. However, its invisible inner plastic lining makes it a mixed material that most paper recycling facilities cannot recycle.

Some marketers might label a product as “biodegradable” to make consumers feel good about throwing it away. But nothing, not even food scraps, is designed to biodegrade in a modern, oxygen-deprived landfill. The claim is technically true in a lab but practically meaningless in the real world.

3. Third-Party Certifications That Matter

The best way to cut through confusing marketing claims is to look for logos from independent, third-party organizations. These groups have verified a product’s claims against a rigorous, scientific standard.

For any product claiming to be compostable, look for the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) logo. This is the gold standard in North America and proves a product will break down safely in a commercial composting facility.

For recyclability, check for the How2Recycle label. This label provides clear, honest instructions on which parts of a package are recyclable, which need to be taken to a store drop-off and which belong in the trash.

4. Questions to Ask Brands

Don’t be afraid to ask brands specific questions via social media or email. Here are a few sharp questions to get real answers:

• Is this packaging accepted for recycling in the majority of curbside programs in California?
• What exact percentage of post-consumer recycled content does this packaging contain?
• Your package is labeled ‘compostable.’ Can you confirm it is BPI Certified to the ASTM D6400 standard?

The Long-Term Vision—What Success Looks Like

SB 54 will fundamentally redesign California’s relationship with single-use packaging. Here’s a look at what a successful circular economy looks like a decade from now with this law in effect.

2032 Targets and Beyond

For 2032, the targets are to achieve a 25% reduction in the total amount of plastic packaging sold and a 65% recycling or composting rate for all remaining packaging. Hitting a 65% recycling rate for packaging is a monumental challenge. Current recycling rates for plastics are extremely low, often in the single digits.

As experts frequently point out, even when a plastic type is recyclable, only a fraction is recyclable in actual practice. This is due to challenges in sorting, contamination from food residue and a lack of stable end-markets to turn the old plastic into new products.

The law includes provisions for regulators to set even stricter targets in the future. If California meets its 2032 goals, the next step could be pushing for even higher recycling rates or further reductions in plastic use.

Infrastructure Investments From EPR Fees

The law doubles as a funding mechanism. The EPR fees paid by producers will create a multimillion-dollar annual fund dedicated to improving the system.

A huge portion of this money will go to cities and counties to upgrade their material recovery facilities (MRFs). This means investing in better sorting equipment, like more advanced optical sorters and robotics, to capture more materials. These funds will also be used to expand access to commercial composting programs, enabling more residents to properly dispose of compostable food service ware.

Expected Behavioral Shifts

The goal is to make sustainable choices the default, easy option for consumers. Imagine subscribing to a service where restaurants serve your food in durable, stainless steel containers that are later picked up, professionally washed and reused.

For products like hand soap, cleaning supplies and shampoo, the vision is to shift away from buying a new plastic bottle every time. Instead, you’ll have a single bottle at home that you can refill from bulk bins at the grocery store or with small concentrate pods sold in paper packaging.

What This Means for a Circular Economy

In a true circular system, design eliminates waste. Products and packaging are intentionally created from the start to be easily disassembled and either recycled back into the same product or safely composted back into the earth. This is the long-term vision of SB 54. It’s a shift where producers are fully responsible for the entire life cycle of their products, keeping valuable materials in the economy and out of landfills and oceans.

Practical Shopping Guide

Small, intentional choices can make a big difference. Consider these tips on your next shopping trip.

• Produce: Choose loose fruits and vegetables whenever possible and bring your own reusable mesh bags. If you need a container, look for produce in cardboard punnets or molded fiber trays instead of plastic clamshells.
• Dairy: When you have the option, choose milk in returnable glass bottles or paper cartons. Pick one large, recyclable tub over multiple single-serving cups for yogurt, cottage cheese or sour cream.
• Meat and seafood: Visit the butcher or seafood counter and ask for your items to be wrapped in butcher paper. This avoids non-recyclable foam trays and plastic film that are common in the self-serve section.
• Packaged goods: For pantry staples like sauces, beans and vegetables, prioritize glass jars and metal cans, as both have high recycling rates. For pasta, cereal and other dry goods, choose brands that use boxes made from 100% recycled cardboard.
• Personal care: The most sustainable option is often a solid bar, as it eliminates plastic packaging. If you prefer liquid products, look for brands that offer durable bottles with a clear and easy refill system.
• Cleaning products: Many brands offer cleaning products as small pods or tablets that you mix with water in a reusable spray bottle at home. This eliminates the need to ship water across the country and buy a new plastic bottle every time.
• Takeout: Bring your own containers when possible and support restaurants that use compostable packaging.

The changes you see in California are a preview of a nationwide trend, with brand choices and feedback shaping how fast they happen. The transition period has already begun. Contribute to the shift by making smarter, more informed choices on your next shopping trips. Aim to reduce your overall consumption and reuse items as many times as you can before worrying about recycling.

Additional Resources

• CalRecycle SB 54 Implementation Timeline
• How2Recycle Label Guide
• California Composting Facility Finder
• Certified Composting Facilities in the U.S.

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: California Recently Finalized the Nation’s Strictest Plastic Packaging Rules Change Shopper Expectations appeared first on Earth911.

Revisit an influential conversation that anticipated the growth of Extended producer responsibility (EPR), the idea that manufacturers of products and packaging should take responsibility for collecting and recycling the things they make. It was a hot topic in the sustainability and business worlds in 2023, and has become law in seven states. One EPR bill had passed in 2023, Washington State’s SB 5144, which requires battery makers to be responsible for the environmental management of their products. Meet Scott Cassel, founder and CEO of the Product Stewardship Institute, a nonprofit that advocates and consults to develop circular economy solutions and extended producer responsibility legislation. Scott and PSI were key players in the Washington legislation.

A typical concern promoted by companies about proposed EPR laws is the cost to the consumer. However, history shows that, for example, bottle deposit systems improve collection rates substantially. States with bottle bills collect 65% of bottles, while those without collect about 24% — bottle bills more than double collection rates. Columbia University research estimated a maximum increase in monthly grocery bills of $4 per household with robust EPR programs in place. The environmental benefits of EPR are clear, but the economic impact is most impressive. As part of the economy shifts to managing and moving products back to manufacturers for recycling, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that materials moving job jobs will grow by 6.5% by 2031, or about 861,000 new jobs. And as many as 304,000 new repair, maintenance, and waste management jobs are also expected by 2031. The Circular Economy is full of opportunity and the potential to create a more equitable nation. You can learn more about Scott and the Product Stewardship Institute at productstewardship.us.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on June 5, 2023.

The post Best of Earth911 Podcast: The Product Stewardship Institute’s Scott Cassel on Growing Extended Producer Responsibility appeared first on Earth911.

Editor’s Note: This is a sponsored posting.

Curbside food scrap collection has spread fast. BioCycle’s nationwide survey counted 14.9 million U.S. households with access to food waste collection in 2023, up 49 percent from 10 million two years earlier.

Getting those bins used is the harder part. Reported participation runs from near-universal in a handful of cities to under 30 percent in others. That gap matters. Food waste is about 24 percent of what U.S. municipal landfills take in, and the EPA estimates it accounts for 58 percent of the fugitive methane those landfills release. An unused green bin isn’t a neutral outcome.

Quick definition first, since the name varies. The green bin is the curbside cart for household organics: food scraps, plus yard trimmings and food-soiled paper depending on your program. It’s collected separately from trash and recycling and sent to a composting or anaerobic digestion facility instead of a landfill. It isn’t green everywhere. Toronto runs a Green Bin program, New York City uses brown ones, and elsewhere it’s the organics cart, the compost cart, or the food scraps cart. What matters is where the material ends up, not the color.

Why People Quit the Green Bin

Households opt out for a long list of reasons: confusion about what’s accepted, forgetting collection day, plain inconvenience. I’d add one that gets less attention because it’s unglamorous. The bin gets disgusting, cleaning it turns into a recurring chore, and eventually the chore wins.

I’ll be straight that this is a hypothesis, not a documented finding. I haven’t found a study that isolates bin cleaning as a reason people quit. What I’ve got is the pattern I hear from customers constantly. But there’s evidence that making the job less unpleasant moves the numbers.

In 2023–24, Essex County Council in the UK ran a year-long Food Recycling Project. It delivered a package to more than 375,000 households: a sticker for the general waste bin, an information leaflet, and a free roll of compostable liners. Food recycling tonnage rose an average of 21 percent against a control group in the first three months after delivery, more than double the council’s 10 percent target.

The liners were one piece of that package, running alongside a media campaign, so the case study can’t tell us how much of the gain they drove on their own. What it does show is that handing people a tool to keep the mess contained belongs in the mix alongside better signage. It also shows the limit. Free liner giveaways are a subsidy most households will never get.

So the question isn’t whether a cleaner, contained bin helps people stick with the program. Plainly it does. The question is how you get there when nobody’s handing out free bags. That’s the gap BagEZ fills.

Doing More With Less

BagEZ holds a standard bag open inside the green bin, 13 gallons (49 liters) and up. Food scraps go into the bag, not against the cart. Everything stays contained, and the bin stays clean and dry. That’s aimed straight at the reason people give up: the cleaning.

It’s a folding steel rack with clips that lock the bag to the frame. The handles grip the bin’s rim and hold the bag open and suspended. On collection day you pull off the clips, seal the bag, and lift out the frame before setting the bin at the curb.

The size is up to you, and the data says most kitchens don’t need much. The MITRE-Gallup survey, the largest U.S. household food-waste study to date, surveyed nearly 10,000 households and put the average household’s food waste at 6.2 cups a week, or about 8.8 cups once you count peels, cores, and bones. That’s a bit over half a gallon. Even a household running well above average isn’t close to filling a big curbside cart with food scraps. So size the bag to your kitchen, not your bin. A 13-gallon bag is plenty for most households, it costs less than lining a full cart, and a right-sized bag is also what makes the odor tricks below work. Size up if your program takes yard trimmings too, or if collection runs every other week.

One caveat before you change anything: check what your program accepts. Liner rules vary a lot across North America. Some programs take certified compostable bags only, some want paper or newspaper, some want food scraps loose in the cart. A bag your hauler doesn’t accept can get your cart skipped and the whole load flagged for contamination. Earth911’s recycling search is a good place to start: earth911.com/recycling-search

After collection, a wipe with vinegar and water handles anything that’s built up. On a bin that’s stayed dry, that’s a seasonal job, not a weekly one, and you never have to drag out the hose.

The Green Bin Yuck Factor

Ever notice the puddle in the bottom of your countertop organics caddy after you pull the bag? That’s mostly moisture coming out of the food itself. Produce is largely water, and as it breaks down that water gets released.

The same thing happens in the curbside bin, at a bigger scale. Bags of scraps keep releasing moisture as they sit, and when a bag rests against the bottom and sides of the bin, that liquid builds up into the sticky residue that smells and makes the bin dirty.

BagEZ works differently because the bag never touches the bin. The frame holds it up and lets air move all the way around: underneath, the sides, everywhere. Condensation on the outside of the bag has nowhere to pool. It evaporates instead of collecting at the bottom, and the walls stay dry.

A right-sized bag makes the odor tricks work better, too. A sprinkle of baking soda in the small contained space around the bag does more than the same sprinkle spread thin across a big empty floor. Less smell, fewer flies. Fewer flies, no maggots.

Some people use food-grade diatomaceous earth against fly larvae. DE works by drying insects out, and it stops working the moment it gets wet, so a dry bin is a precondition for it doing anything at all. Same story as the baking soda: it only earns its keep in a dry, contained gap.

Two more that help, cheap. A few sheets of newspaper under the bag catch drips if a bag ever fails. And a cloth sachet of peppermint and cloves tied to the outside of the bin throws off raccoons and rodents, which hunt almost entirely by smell. A bin that doesn’t smell like food stops being worth their trouble.

Why It Works

The infrastructure is already there. The bins are at the curb, the trucks run, and the environmental case, going by the numbers up top, isn’t in question. What’s been missing is a cheap, fast way to keep the bin clean enough that people don’t quietly give up on it.

A reusable steel frame that holds a bag open sounds too simple to matter. That’s sort of the point. The bin stays clean, the habit stays easy, and food scraps end up where they’re meant to.

Set it next to the alternatives and the difference is in how each one works. Bin cleaning services deal with the problem after it happens, on a schedule, for a recurring fee. Full-size liners cost money every week and are sized to the bin, not to what you actually throw out. A frame is a one-time buy that works with the bag size your household already uses.

A green bin program only works if people keep using it, and people keep using what doesn’t gross them out. That’s the hinge the whole thing turns on. Take away the wet mess on the walls and most of the reasons to quit go with it: nothing pooling at the bottom, nothing to hose out, no smell pulling animals across the yard. The bin stays clean on its own, week after week, with a bag you were going to buy anyway.

Size it to your kitchen instead of your bin, clip it to the frame, and the green bin stops being the chore you avoid. Find it at bagez.com.

About the Author

This sponsored article was written by Sean Rana, the founder of BagEZ, a Canadian company behind the steel hanging bag frame that keeps garbage and green bins clean without special liners or ongoing costs, and works for waste and storage on the go.

The post Guest Idea: Green Bins Are Spreading Faster Than the Habit of Using Them appeared first on Earth911.

Yale researchers estimate that roughly 80 million Americans are alarmed about climate change. About 40 million of them say they want to be politically active on the issue. But only about 3 million actually are. When that 37 million-American group is asked why they aren’t active, researchers most often hear that nobody has asked them. That’s the focus of this week’s conversation on Sustainability In Your Ear. Only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything about climate change on social media, and two-thirds say they rarely or never hear about it from friends or in the media. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry treats persuasion as core business. David Fenton calls the situation unilateral disarmament at a moment when an information war is needed. The crowning result of climate action to date is the Inflation Reduction Act that passed by one vote and was repealed by one vote. A bill you win by a single vote, he says, is a bill you never really won David founded Fenton Communications in 1982, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes. His campaigns helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, where Yoko Ono’s “Imagine There’s No Fracking” billboard went up along Governor Andrew Cuomo’s commute, and helped launch fossil fuel divestment with the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers. His book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who we discuss at length in this thought-provoking interview.

He places the blame on climate advocacy spending and, more importantly, the words used to frame the issue. The climate NGO and philanthropic world spends billions a year on policy, law, and science, and spends on communication mainly to raise money from people already on its lists. David traces that to what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong idea reproduces itself because it is correct, and to its corollary, that selling ideas is dirty work beneath serious people. The second is vocabulary. “Net Zero means almost nothing to most people. “Carbon” sounds like an abstraction. And “justice,” in cognitive research, evokes images of the police and courts, not of fairness and a shared mission. We need to pivot to simpler language, like “pollution,” when describing the source of global warming. Pollution is a word nobody defends, and a blanket of pollution trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space is a picture people can easily grasp and act on.

Asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer Americans give is “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Earth911 has spent three decades on that vocabulary, and it holds up on its own terms as a materials strategy. Increased curbside recycling participation rates don’t necessarily lead to decarbonizing the grid or the truck fleets. David Fenton’s prescription for listeners is blunter than any campaign plan: talk about it, post about it, and press the funders you know to spend generating public demand for change rather than direct mail fundraising. Learn more about David’s work at davidfentonactivist.com, and find his podcast at fentonforecast.com.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:09
Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Or good evening, wherever you are on 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. Thank you for joining the conversation today. Let’s talk about how to win the fight for planet and people. We already know what to do about climate change. The clean energy solutions exist. They’re the cheapest form of power on Earth, and the warning signs, from fires and floods to the rising costs of food and insurers walking away from whole regions, are impossible to miss. And yet, after decades of effort, only about a quarter of Americans are deeply engaged with the urgency of climate action, and just half are even concerned. So here’s the puzzle that my guest today, David Fenton, has wrestled for more than 50 years. If the danger is this clear and the answers are this good, why has the movement failed to bring the public along?

Part of the answer is that we’re making the case in openly hostile territory. Federal climate policy has been rolled back. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades manufacturing doubt about global warming, and its allies are ready to blame wind and solar within hours of any grid emergency, whether or not the facts support it. The social platforms where most people get their news quietly bury anything labeled climate, showing it only to the people who already agree. And if you’re a climate-concerned person, the audiences that you most need to reach will never see those messages. As David puts it, we’re in a propaganda war with the fossil fuel industry, and we’re not even on the battlefield.

David Fenton has spent his life trying to change that. He started as a teenage high school dropout, shooting photographs of the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers for the underground press in the 1960s. He co-produced the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden, and in 1982 he founded Fenton Communications, the first public relations firm in America built solely for progressive causes.

Over four decades, his work has helped free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, helped ban fracking in New York, and helped launch the fossil fuel divestment movement in partnership with the Rockefellers. In fact, the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune as the messengers for the movement. And now he’s distilled it all into a book called The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator. And that includes a foreword by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. We’re going to explore how to speak to people’s hearts before their heads, and why “make polluters pay” travels farther than “net zero by 2050,” as well as how to fight disinformation when a lie outruns the truth, and how to win over conservatives without bending the facts. So, what does a lifetime of victories and hard-won failures teach us about protecting the planet and democracy itself in this pivotal moment? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.

David Fenton, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?

David Fenton  3:15
I’m feeling sustained. Thank you. How are you? Sustained.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:17
Good. I’m doing well. It’s a beautiful day here in southern Oregon, and I know in Berkeley it’s probably a nice morning as well.

David Fenton  3:25
It’s a little foggy, and that’s good. We are avoiding the heat waves of the rest of the country.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:30
Twain’s observation about San Francisco is always kind of a satisfying one when you get there, but you hear about it and you think, “Gosh, it must be cold.”

David Fenton  3:38
Yeah, well, colder is a little better right now, given what’s going on in our overheated world.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:44
Absolutely. Hey, look, you’ve spent 50 years working on trying to change the world, to put it mildly. And in the book, you turn the lens on the movement itself, calling the climate crisis the biggest communication failure in the history of progressive advocacy. Why does so much of the fault lie on our side of the conversation?

David Fenton  4:04
Well, it’s not only on our side, but everybody talks correctly about the fault of the corporate polluting interests that have confused everybody and spread all this propaganda and intentional lying, the biggest criminals of all time, in my opinion, at least measured by impact, but our movement bears some responsibility also. You know, I mean, just look at the data. You know, only 12% of Americans say they ever see anything at all about climate change on social media, their main source of news increasingly. Only, let’s say, two thirds, according to the Yale research, say they rarely or never see or hear anything about climate change from their friends or in the media.

You know, the environmental groups do a lot of great things: policy, law, science. But they don’t communicate. They don’t spend money on communicating, by and large, even though they’re very wealthy. They have huge budgets. They don’t value that, you know. As we all know, they only go out to communicate with their members to raise money, not to educate or get people involved in action. When people say that they rarely or never see or hear anything about this, that’s a failure.

And at the same time, the fossil fuel industry is very focused on propaganda and communication. They’re building up all these online influencers. They’ve always had a natural focus on this, and we’re practicing what, in the main, I would call a unilateral disarmament in the information wars. And you know, you can’t decarbonize the economy at the speed we need to according to physics without the public being on board. You know, we saw this when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act passed by only one vote, and when you win only by one vote, you’ve won nothing permanent. And in my opinion, it’s an indicator that you have not done enough to get the public on your side, and that’s why Trump was able to repeal most of it by one vote. So if we’re winning and losing by one vote, we’re losing.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:22
But do you feel, because of the one vote that still separates the two sides of the country, so to speak, that there is a lot of opportunity for real permanent change still ahead?

David Fenton  6:33
Absolutely. You know, I’m very optimistic because you know the data shows we can help people understand what this is simply, in ways that speak to their concerns about their health and their children and their property and their jobs and their prosperity and their security. But we don’t, by and large. I mean, first of all, we don’t reach people hardly at all, and then when we do, our language is an obstacle. We do not speak in terms that people can understand or that speak to their values and their everyday concerns. You know, like take the term net zero. Nobody knows what the hell that means. You know, people really do not know what carbon is, sorry. And so the whole, you know, and climate justice, that’s another one. You know, as I tell people, if you want climate justice, please don’t call it that, because nobody knows what it means. And you know, if you look at the science of cognition and linguistics, when you say the word justice, what comes into people’s head is the police and the court. So you’re confusing the hell out of people.

Now, when you talk about pollution, which is the cause of this, everybody knows what you’re talking about. And the other great thing about the word pollution is that no one will ever defend it. Pollution is never good. No one ever likes it. So, you know, we know from the research that the best language and imagery to explain what we’re doing to the Earth to people is that we have put a blanket of pollution around the Earth that’s trapping heat that used to go back out to space, and everybody can see that. That activates existing mental frames. People know what pollution is. They know what a blanket looks like. They know what a blanket does. It traps heat. So all that heat energy that used to go back out to space is now making it hotter, duh. So that’s how we need to talk about this, but we don’t.

So another thing, you know, stop me from rambling on here too much, is that people learn from influencers and characters and personalities, and we don’t build hardly any up. Al Gore has, you know, long faded from predominant view. Bless him, he did a great job. But where are influencers? You know, we have them in the wings, and we have no infrastructure to create more visibility for them, and we don’t think it’s important. So you know, I’ve written about, why is this? Why does the climate community, the vast NGO and philanthropic enterprise behind it, and it is vast, it’s very, you know, it’s many billions of dollars a year, why, excuse me, why doesn’t it value communicating and getting the public on board to demand change?

So, the best answer I’ve found comes from the great Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, and he says that people who study the humanities, the sciences, and the law (I’m talking to you, Bill Gates) have what Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy.

That is the idea that a great piece of science or a great policy idea is going to magically reproduce itself because of its sheer intrinsic engineering brilliance, and this is a false view. The world does not work that way, and there is a corollary view to the Enlightenment fallacy, which is that selling ideas is dirty, manipulative, and beneath us, and we don’t do that even truthfully. So contrast that, Lakoff does, with the people who go to business school. That’s who we’re up against largely, who study cognitive and marketing science, and who, in most cases, except the finance guys, have to sell products and services to advance their careers, so they have a natural tendency and inclination to engage in public persuasion to succeed, and it’s very profitable for them. You know, do marketing and public confusion and propaganda, and you can avoid regulations on your industry, or get yourself a multibillion-dollar tax cut.

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:25
Thank you. That’s a great kickoff because you covered about half the questions I wanted to talk about. But let’s go back and unpack some of that stuff.

David Fenton  11:32
Sure.

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:33
Money was where you started, with money in politics, and you closed with business people earning a profit. So money is a theme here. Is the problem partly, and I find that I am consistently put off by the number of requests for money I get daily, is the problem money in politics in the first place? Should Citizens United be repealed?

David Fenton  11:59
Absolutely, of course. You know, we’re supposed to have a democracy, which means one person, one vote. But because of our very corrupt and very partisan, sadly, Supreme Court, they’ve turned it into one dollar, one vote. That is not what the founders intended, and that’s not a democracy. That’s a kleptocracy. So yes, this is a fundamental problem, but that’s a surmountable problem. You know, if you create a mass movement.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:34
What would it look like to show up and create that mass movement?

David Fenton  12:37
Well, we’ve seen it many times before. You know, I’m very privileged. At age 74, I’ve seen and participated in a number of mass movements fighting the odds and winning. You know, we stopped the Vietnam War. We overcame segregation in the South. We got gay marriage. We got compassionate care to HIV victims. You know, on and on and on. There have been a lot of victories. We legalized marijuana. You know, we’ve certainly vastly improved the status of women and gays, and civil rights in our country. We have a long way to go, but it’s nothing like it was.

So these were all the results of mass movements, and there will be a mass movement to save a livable Earth. That’s going to happen. The weather’s going to make it happen. The problem, of course, as you know from the physics, is that we wait too long to let it happen spontaneously instead of nurturing it. It could be too late. So I’m confident it’ll happen, but we’re not building the infrastructure and creating the demand for it to the degree that we could, and it would cost a fraction of the philanthropic and NGO spending on climate and the environment today if it was directed to that.

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:01
Well, so how do you win that business person over to the idea that there is more profit in a more sustainable, renewable energy-based economy?

David Fenton  14:09
Well, that’s happening more and more because, of course, as you know, almost all new investment in energy is going into clean energy and storage. So the market is doing that more than people know. Actually, you know, the industry, the renewable power industry, has done a very bad job of marketing. It’s kind of, you know, shell-shocked and browbeaten and keeping its head down. There is a new effort underway called Amped, amped.org, to have the industry do more sophisticated communications and to stop getting punched in the face so much.

You know, all this ridiculous stuff. Offshore wind kills whales, a meme brought to you by the people that don’t give a crap about whales. You know, or well, all the mining for solar panels and batteries, which of course is a tiny, tiny fraction of the drilling and mining for fossil fuels. I mean, these people are shameless, and they’re good at it, and we don’t counter them hardly at all.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:21
One of the issues is sort of the preponderance of bad news, and I think back to Love Canal galvanized the environmental movement in there in the 80s.

David Fenton  15:31
Sure.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:32
And now, you know, Altadena burns to the ground, Pacific Palisades burns to the ground, wildfires everywhere. I literally was evacuated because of a wildfire a couple of weeks ago.

David Fenton  15:42
Oh, wow, sorry.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:43
And well, we made it. My house is here. When you mentioned Vietnam, for instance, I mean, we lost about 58,000 Americans in Vietnam. But because of pollution from oil and natural gas, about 91,000 people die every year in the United States, and an additional 15,000 because of the wildfire smoke and the particulates that people are inhaling. What do we do to focus the potential rage that would change things?

David Fenton  16:11
Yeah, well, again, only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change and clean energy on social media. Two thirds say that they rarely or never see or hear anything about it in the media or from their friends. It’s not an issue people talk about, and that’s all overcomeable. We have no infrastructure, no marketing campaign, no persuasion campaign, none, zero, zilch at any scale to do something about this, so you can’t expect people to mobilize and organize when you have one side of an information war confusing them and reaching them all the time, and the other side quiet, basically, and underfunded.

And it’s especially tragic because in the digital communication age, we know exactly how to reach people. It’s not expensive, really, compared to the money we’re spending on other things. We know how to do it. We have all the data. There’s a great group called Potential Energy Coalition, run by a former branding guy, corporate branding guy. They have all the data. They know exactly what messages work with which audiences, but nobody is deploying it. So this is the problem. You know, there are other problems, of course, in the digital age. People sometimes feel that clicking on something is the same thing as activism, which it isn’t. But you know, I mean, here’s another issue.

So according to the Yale research, the Yale Center on Climate Change Communication, there are approximately 80 million Americans who are in the category of alarmed about climate change, and half of them, 40 million people, say they want to be politically active on the issue, but only 3 million of them are politically active on it. And by the way, that’s about the combined mailing list of the environmental groups asking you for money. So then, when they ask the 37 million who want to be politically active and aren’t, why aren’t you? You know what the number one answer they get is: nobody has asked me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:23
They’ve only asked for money.

David Fenton  18:25
The 37 million, they even haven’t asked them for that. So, in other words, you have an infrastructure failure. We are not reaching our own base, and our own base, according to Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale, is the largest potential issue public in the country, other than abortion, much bigger than the NRA and guns. But it’s not being organized. I mean, ask yourself: if you wanted to go take effective climate action today, where would you go? What website would you go to? What social media channel would you go to? Where would you go?

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:06
Yeah, I have to say that in order to act, other than going to the website where I can send a note to my representative in Congress, not a lot of places come immediately to mind because everything is so diffuse.

David Fenton  19:19
That’s right. So no one’s building up a trusted brand, a trusted organization to do that. We could, of course, we could, and you know that speaks to a whole other issue, which is, I think we’re past peak crazy wokeness in the progressive nonprofit world, but we still have a lot of it.

You know, the language problem is big, as I mentioned, but there’s also a dogmatic problem and an ideological problem. You know, if you are stressing racial and gender divisions in your communication, you’re not going to unite people against a common enemy, so not that those subjects aren’t important. Everybody’s identity is important, but we’re not going to win by appealing to subgroups. We’re going to win by assembling majorities.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:18
We have to think of a big tent.

David Fenton  20:20
That’s right, and we need, and look, you know, we could win conservatives too. No one has a program to do that at any scale. Now, I’ve conducted experiments where I’ve bought videos on climate change into the social media feeds of conservatives, and the videos feature conservatives explaining how global warming threatens conservative values, and they’re very effective, but no one does it.

So if you’re a conservative or Republican in your filter bubble, all you ever see is that climate change is a hoax. So what do you think you’re going to believe if that’s the only information that ever reaches you? Okay, so we could disrupt that. You can buy advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you know all these platforms. The Russians do it, but we don’t.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:18
David, you’ve ignited a great conversation. I want to take a quick commercial break, and we’re going to be right back to continue the conversation. Stay tuned, folks.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with author and progressive activist David Fenton, whose new book, The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, is a guide for multi-generational campaigns for a rational climate response. David, you mentioned social media and buying advertising there, but one of the problems, and not just for advertising, but just individual posts, is that when you use the word climate, it ends up being routed to the people who already care about climate. How do you communicate when the name of the problem that you’re addressing is buried?

David Fenton  22:07
Well, first of all, you can buy access to people who aren’t in that bubble. You can just pay for it, and it’s not expensive. And of course, with digital communications, you can test your messages and content to see what really works before you pay to scale it. So it’s not an excuse, you know.

And there is something else, which is, I think that we need to put more pressure on the tech platforms and companies, and by the way, also on the television networks, which are not irrelevant as people may think. You know, I mean, the TV networks are big on TikTok as sources of news, and they don’t ever, hardly ever, link extreme weather to pollution from fossil fuels. So, you know, these people can be pressured. The problem is, the only people that pressure them are the right. We don’t, because again, our community doesn’t think you need to sell ideas. We think that’s dirty and manipulative.

But by the way, you know, thanks for mentioning my book. You know, I also have a podcast now called The Fenton Forecast on all platforms, and we’re looking at the future of climate and AI and health and democracy and all these issues.

Mitch Ratcliffe  23:27
You’ve got a rule: fight falsehood immediately, and that’s because a lie will harden into a truth the more times it’s seen. But now a lie outruns the truth by a pretty wide margin, largely because the other side pays for it to do so. What’s your playbook for fighting disinformation? How’s it changed, particularly as a result of AI and the ability to amplify everything?

David Fenton  23:48
Well, it’s not only that they pay for it; they’re unified, and we’re the Tower of Babel. So you know, the Koch-funded conservative infrastructure of all their think tanks and influencers and podcasts and you know all of it. You know, they speak to the same topics and messages on a daily and weekly basis. They meet. They coordinate. They’re in lockstep, and that’s very important because the cognitive science is very clear. The way people learn is from significant amounts of repetition of simple messages. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Simple, simple, simple, simple, simple.

And by the way, most people in our community hate that. We hate simplifying things. We’re not rewarded for it, and we hate repeating ourselves. But that’s what works, and they understand it, so they organize their field to do that. And we’re, you know, everybody on their own doing their thing. So that’s one big problem. I mean, even in our scientific community, there’s no unity of discourse or language or imagery that would help a lot. Nobody organizes it, so, and we could pay for it also.

Now AI is a whole other thing, of course, and you know I don’t have all the answers to that, but I do think that eventually we are going to have to have laws in this country that demand that AI-generated content is labeled as such, and we also should have laws that to be on a social media platform, you have to prove you are a human, not a Russian bot. We’re going to go through a lot of hard times, and eventually we’re going to end up regulating these platforms. You know, you see the difference. Look at why are the Europeans so much more focused on appropriate levels of regulation of social media, and they have some rules about media in general. It’s because they went through fascism and the Holocaust, and they saw how unchecked demagoguery can kill millions. So they’re focused on this, and we’re still in a frontier, false idea of freedom model. And but it’s not going to last.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:17
When you say that people on the left don’t like to repeat themselves, it really comes home for me because I hate repeating myself. And George Lakoff, who wrote the foreword to your book, in addition to being somebody you talk about, has argued that there are two kinds of minds politically, or two moral worldviews, that are based on different models of the family. One’s the strict father; the other is the nurturing parent. And Lakoff’s work on metaphor and how it informed our relationship with the world, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, is a brilliant, brilliant book. And his book on mathematics just blew my mind 20, 30 years ago. But I’ve never really agreed with that bicameral mind idea. How does that framework change the way you think about talking to people about climate?

David Fenton  27:03
Okay, so you left out a third category from Lakoff, which are the biconceptuals, he calls them. So Trump’s the conservative strict father. The father’s always right. White people on top. Man on top. That’s conservative morality, and the nurturing parent, that’s, you know, we kumbaya feel-good liberals. But the swing voters are the people who have both neural networks, and they either can be activated depending on the language and personalities they are exposed to.

For example, in an election campaign, so take for example James Talarico in Texas, who’s running for Senate. So he’s attracting lots of swing and independent voters and some Trump voters because he’s activating the nurturing, caring, love thy neighbor, actual Christian side of their brains. So I think that the job here is to activate and mobilize the base and win over a significant number of the biconceptuals, and then you have an enduring majority. So I think that’s how I use his framework.

You know, of course, the reason we don’t like repetition and simplicity is in academia, you’re not rewarded for that. You’re rewarded for specialization. Yeah. You know, the smaller the better. So yeah, it’s bad training. It really is.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:41
Two of your signature wins turned on the messenger who delivered the message, not just the message. One was the Rockefellers divesting from fossil fuels, and the other was Yoko Ono put up a billboard on Governor Cuomo’s commute that said, “Imagine there’s no fracking.” And as I read about that in the book, I was thinking of McLuhan and his argument that the medium is the message, but it sounds like we’ve moved to the messenger is the message. Is that the case?

David Fenton  29:08
More, yeah, because as trust in institutions has declined, including traditional media institutions, what trust remains is in people, is in individual influencers online, including some celebrities like take Taylor Swift or people like that. So yes, whereas the media used to be the message, it’s increasingly what we call parasocial influencers, people that you trust and who you follow.

So the fossil fuel industry is building up a bunch of these people. You can see it. In fact, right now there is a torrent of horrible disinformation on climate on Elon Musk’s racist platform. It’s unbelievable. The worse the fires get, the hotter it gets, the more torrent of bullshit is on X. And a lot of it comes through, “Well, I used to be a climate activist, and I’ve seen the light. Fossil fuels are the greatest thing ever.” We have nobody like, so we have some incredible talent. Like, have you ever heard of Dr. Katharine Hayhoe?

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:25
Oh, sure. Yeah.

David Fenton  30:26
Okay. So she’s a Christian evangelical climate scientist at Texas Tech University. Her husband’s an evangelical preacher. She’s amazingly talented, and she has no help online, none. She has no video team, no social media team, no PR firm, no strategist. She does it all by herself. And because she’s so good, she has a million followers. She’d have 15 or 20 million, in my opinion, if she had help.

And here’s a comment on the philanthropic community and its prioritizing communication. Here we have this proven talent, and she can’t raise hardly any money to get a team because we don’t value this work.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:13
What you’re describing is this talk of authenticity. That person represents the real, and I buy into it. What makes a messenger land, and how do you find the right one?

David Fenton  31:23
Well, she lands. We’ve proven it. I’ve done focus groups with her videos and online dial testing, and there are, you know, there are TV meteorologists who are really, really good at this. You know, former Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, he’s terrific at the clean energy side of this. The founder of Amped, Steve McBee, is really a terrific spokesperson. You know, Michael Mann, the climate scientist, he’s very talented. There’s a young scientist, Marcius Extavour, who’s really effective. There’s a number of them, but they have no help. Let’s get them some help.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:04
The other issue that seems to be activating everyone, left and right, is concerns about the state of our democracy. And in fact, it ranks right up there with climate change. How do you see the fight for climate and democracy potentially merging in some way in order to make this into one struggle for a major change in the way we do things?

David Fenton  32:22
Yeah, I think that will happen. You know, we have fossil fuel industry evil billionaires, and now, unfortunately, we have Silicon Valley fascist evil billionaires, and these people are corrupting the democracy, and they’re also threatening people’s health and homes and livelihoods and prosperity and children and their lungs, so and their ability to get insurance. And you know, it’s like the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in the 1940s. He said, you know, you could either have a democracy or you can have great concentrations of wealth, but you can’t have both.

So I think that this is all going to merge into a movement to have checks and balances on private power, which we’ve had before. Teddy Roosevelt broke up the monopolies and the trusts. You know, the top marginal tax rate in this country used to be functionally 70% under Eisenhower. It was 90, but functionally it was 70. That made owners of companies invest in their workers and businesses rather than give all the money to the government.

So actually, the whole ideology about taxes is backwards, so yeah, you know, there’s this tax on billionaires on the ballot in California this November. I think it’s very likely to pass, and it’s kind of sad to watch some of these billionaires. They’re so upset. It’s 1% a year for five years, guys. You know, this is half what you pay your hedge fund managers, and you pay them that even if they lose money. So it’s, you know, the wealth inequality is corrupting, and there are some good billionaires, you know, who fund a lot of great things, but this is distorted, and you can’t have a functioning democracy with this degree of disparity.

So yeah, I think it’s all going to change. I’m really confident it’s all going to change. History shows that periods of great income concentration lead to rebellion, and periods of less income concentration, just like periods of fascism and repression, never last. They lead to rebellions and it collapses. But the real problem, as you know, is we are running out of time to save a livable Earth and climate because the carbon dioxide stays up there for millennia, and this is the worry. Will this happen in time? And that’s up to us.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:03
That’s the nail we have to figure out how to drive home. And Franklin Roosevelt, the other one, there’s an apocryphal story about him after coming to office. The Depression was underway. He brought the richest people in the world, in the country, to the White House and said, “Look, we have to do something about this, or they’re going to kill you. What is it going to take to …”

David Fenton  35:26
I want. There’s another meeting that Franklin Roosevelt had when he first took office. He brought in all these progressive and labor leaders, and they all laid out what they wanted him to do. And Roosevelt looked at them and said, “I agree with you on everything. Now go out and make me do it.” So that’s the job.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:49
Well, okay, but what event catalyzes that moment here in the United States? Do we have to wait for the ultimate disaster?

David Fenton  35:55
You know, the disasters are happening all around us.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:58
That’s the problem. It’s just, it’s …

David Fenton  36:02
Okay, but back to, there’s nothing on social media. There’s almost nothing in the regular media about this at all. But there’s certainly nothing simply linking the pollution from oil, coal, and gas to these weather disasters. So this is not something that people really know at a deep enough level.

You know, When you ask Americans what causes climate change, you know the number one answer you get: it’s caused by the ozone hole, which it isn’t. And when you ask them how to solve it, the number one answer you get, 40%, is reduce, reuse, and recycle, which won’t solve it. So you have climate illiteracy, which we could fix, and until we do, we won’t get action.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:52
For someone listening right now, what is the one thing you would urge them to do?

David Fenton  36:56
Talk about it. Talk about it. Talk about it. Post about it. Get everybody to talk about it. We have an emergency that people aren’t talking about. That’s not good.

And I think that, pressure any philanthropies, philanthropists, and NGOs that you know to devote more of their resources to creating public demand. Public knowledge and public demand is what we lack. We don’t lack solutions; we lack demand.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:30
David, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can people follow your work and tune into the podcast?

David Fenton  37:35
So The Fenton Forecast is on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and all the major platforms. The website’s fentonforecast.com. The website for my book is davidfentonactivist.com. Davidfentonactivist.com. And if anybody wants to write to me, it’s hello at fentonforecast.com. Hello at fentonforecast.com.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:01
David, I hope you get a lot of mail. Thanks so much for your time today.

David Fenton  38:05
All right, thank you. Let’s stay in touch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:07
I’d love to.

David Fenton  38:07
Okay, bye.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:14
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with David Fenton, the founder of Fenton Communications, author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator, and host of The Fenton Forecast. You can learn more about David’s work at davidfentonactivist.com. David Fenton Activist is all one word, no space, no dash. DavidFentonActivist.com, and you can find the podcast at fentonforecast.com, which is also all one word, no spaces, no dash. Fentonforecast.com.

So, 50 years of campaigning from No Nukes to the fight over fracking in New York, and here’s the verdict that David brings back: the climate movement is losing an information war because it showed up for the fight with ideas, not effective messaging. 12% of Americans say that they ever see anything about climate change on social media. Of the roughly 40 million Americans who say they want to be politically active on climate, only about 3 million follow through with action. And when researchers ask the other 37 million why they aren’t involved, the top answer is that nobody has asked them. Well, that’s not a public opinion problem. It’s an organizing failure based on overreliance on mailing-list-based fundraising. You’ve got to give people something to do, not just ask them for money to do something for them.

So let’s start with where the money goes. Climate philanthropy and the NGOs that it funds are very good at policy, law, and science, and they spend almost nothing on persuading the public that any of that matters. David traced that to what George Lakoff calls the Enlightenment fallacy, the belief that a strong policy argument will spread on its own just because it’s correct, in addition to the corollary that selling ideas is beneath serious people. I hear a version of this every week on the show. We are not short of solutions. We cover them constantly: heat pumps, geothermal networks, sorting technology that can pull a specific polymer out of a mixed stream. What we are short of is the 40 million voices that make any of it politically survivable. The Inflation Reduction Act passed by one vote and was gutted by one vote. And David’s read is that a bill that you win by one vote is a bill that you never really won. And so far, that’s proven to be true.

Now another point cuts closer to home for those of us who care about this. When Americans are asked how to solve climate change, the most common answer is reduce, reuse, and recycle, and bully for them. I believe that that is part of the solution. Earth911 has spent three decades on exactly that vocabulary, and I’m not going to pretend that it has succeeded. Recycling is a material strategy. It’s a big one because most of what we call consumption is really extraction, processing, and transportation, as well as the emissions embedded in the goods we buy, and they’re a bigger share of the national footprint than most people assume. But no rate of curbside recycling participation decarbonizes the grid or the fleet that delivers the products to us and takes it away, including for recycling.

David’s fix is to stop leading with the words that failed to gain cognitive traction. Net zero means almost nothing to most listeners. Carbon, which is the basis for life, is a mystery to most people. Pollution, however, is a word nobody defends, and David’s description of a blanket of pollution around the Earth that traps heat is a picture people already have in their heads. That’s worth borrowing and worth testing in conversations with your friends and family.

And finally, it’s time to look closely at the messenger economics that are involved in this new communications conflict. Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals, some of them pretty shady, and the fossil fuel side is investing in individuals. They’re hiring them, while our side leaves the best communicators to fend for themselves. David’s example of Katharine Hayhoe, the evangelical climate scientist with about a million followers who has no video team, no social team, and no strategist, is an example of that. Meanwhile, the clean energy industry, after years of taking punches over whales and mining, has launched another advocacy platform, Amped, in May of this year. Take a listen to my recent conversation with GoodPower’s Leah Qusba, who is working the same strategy from the tools end of the equation. That is, with AI-assisted tools for spotting anti-renewables messaging and responding to them.

And to David’s caution, I would add another: attention purchased is not the same as earned trust. Industry-funded persuasion carries a credibility discount, and the parasocial channel can cut both ways. The influencer who tells you that they gave up being a climate activist after seeing the light is using the exact same machinery in our minds. Money buys reach, but it doesn’t necessarily buy a message or messenger people will continue to believe. So here’s the number that I’m going to be watching for this year, and it’s not the number of gigatons of carbon or the gigawatts of energy, but whether a single large climate funder moves serious money into permanent communications infrastructures. And by the way, I am hearing rumors that there is one big one out there looking at a $300 million campaign. The 37 million wannabe climate advocates are still waiting to be asked, and they need to be equipped with messages and tools they can use to take action. So we’re going to continue to watch this story and share progress as it develops.

Hey, if this conversation gave you something to argue with, send it to somebody who will argue back and leave us a review while you’re there, folks. You’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste, and there are more than 560 episodes in the Sustainability In Your Ear archive to share with your friends, your family, and coworkers. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, and any other purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate you spreading the word.

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. In fact, let’s advocate for it. Have a Green Day.

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: David Fenton on How to Win the Climate Debate appeared first on Earth911.

Ask an AI chatbot a simple question, and its answer uses about as much electricity as a microwave running for one second.

Now give that same AI a big job and let it work on its own. This is called an agent. It plans its own steps, searches the web, tries things, and keeps going until it thinks it is done. One of those jobs can use as much power as running your laptop for almost six hours. Same technology. Very different bill.

That difference introduces a new choice with considerable environmental impact, and it was identified after the research many commentators on AI keep quoting was published. Moreover, electricity is also only part of the story. The rest of the cost is in water systems, on your monthly power bill, and in local tax revenue, which is where the real fight over AI is happening right now.

This article is not an argument for or against using AI. It is a look at AI’s environmental cost, where those costs land, and who gets to decide. With AI poised to transform life, if not make and unmake fortunes, we want to equip you to make better-informed decisions about how to use AI, or whether to accept a plan to build a data center in your community.

AI Wins By a Mile?

In February 2024, researchers at three universities published a comparison in the journal Scientific Reports. They found that an AI writing one page of text emits 130 to 1,500 times less carbon dioxide than a person writing the same page.

Here is how they got there. An AI query produces about 2 grams of carbon dioxide, including its share of the energy used to train the model. A person writing the same page produces about 1,400 grams.

But consider how they calculated the figure for the person. They took the average American’s total yearly carbon footprint, which is roughly 15 tons, and divided it by the number of hours in a year. That gives about 1.7 kilograms an hour. Then they charged the writer for the 48 minutes it took to create the page.

Readers caught the problem right away. Comments posted on the study’s web page pointed out that people emit carbon whether or not they are writing. The writer does not disappear when an AI takes over her work. She still heats her house. She still drives to the store. Those 15 tons go into the air either way.

What actually changes is the electricity her laptop used for the job. Over a multi-day project, that comes to about 2 kilograms of CO2 emissions, not the 36 kg the study’s method assumed.

The Rematch, With the Answers Graded

In November 2025, the same journal published a direct response. Its author, Nolan Woo, said the first study skipped the most important question: whether the AI’s work was any good.

So he set up a test with graded answers and factored in the time and energy to arrive at correct answers into the total emissions. He used programming problems from a national high school computing contest, which come with automatic pass-or-fail scoring. After running four different AI models against the coding challenges, he fed the errors back into the AI and asked it to try again, up to 100 times.

The results differed based on the AI model used:

• The smallest model, when it got the answer right, put out 20% to 59% of what a human programmer’s computer would.
• A larger model, like ChatGPT or Claude, produced five to 19 times as much as the human.
• Failed attempts used 8 times as much energy as successful attempts.

What drove emissions was not the model’s size or cost. It was how many tries it took to get the job done.

There is one more detail that is easy to miss. Woo could barely run the comparison at all. Across 4 years of contests, the AI solved every problem in only one of them. Most of the time, it simply could not do the work. However, recent models have dramatically improved their coding capabilities over the past year, achieving above 95% accuracy, according to Stanford University’s AI Index Report.

Then Agents Changed the Math

Both studies measured a single question and a single answer. That is not how people use AI in 2026. Today’s tools plan, search, read, revise, and loop, sometimes for hours. Jobs where AI reasons through many steps can use hundreds or thousands of times more energy than simply generating text.

A team at KAIST, South Korea’s top engineering school, measured the “hidden energy” cost of AI. Using a model similar in size to commercial ones, they found that a single-agent job used an average of 348 watt-hours. That is 136 times what the same model used to answer a single, simple question.

Two things explain where the power goes. These agentic tasks take much longer, up to 154 times longer, and involve many AIs performing different parts of the job. The team found that the chips doing the work sat idle for more than half the test, still drawing power while waiting for a web search or a program to finish.

In other words, more than half of the energy bill goes to expensive hardware sitting idle. On the other hand, the International Energy Agency found the technology is becoming more efficient an April 2026 report, saying that, “Measured per individual task, the energy efficiency of AI is improving at a rate unprecedented in energy history.” There is a lot of waste in the current infrastructure that will be wrung out simply to cut the cost of running AI, which will make it more profitable — it’s still a money-loser on the whole today — and lower its environmental cost.

The Break-Even Point

Put it together, and you can find the point where AI stops being the cleaner choice.

Picture a research project that would take a person 20 hours to complete. They will read about 40 sources and write a 5,000-word report. Count only what that job adds: the laptop, the monitor, and their share of the pollution from building them. That comes to roughly 2 kilograms of carbon.

So how many AI agent requests does it take to pass the 2 kilogram mark? It depends on how clean the power is at the data center.

That bottom row matters. Big AI data centers tend to get built where power is dirtier than average. One 2026 study found the electricity serving them runs about 48% dirtier than the national average.

Most serious AI research jobs today use far more than 11 requests.

The Catch Nobody Catches

Every version of these analyses that favors AI rests on one assumption: that the machine replaces the person’s hours rather than adding to them.

The evidence says otherwise. We work harder and longer with AI.

A National Bureau of Economic Research study, which is still under review and therefore not fully validated, found that people heavily exposed to AI at work put in an extra 3.5 hours a week. Surveys by two staffing and consulting firms also found that only about a quarter of employees turn AI time savings into personal time. The rest gets filled with more work.

Say an AI workflow produces 3 times as much as a person would. If it gets used 3 times as often because it is now fast and cheap, you are at 9 times as often.

This is an old pattern known as Jevons’ Paradox. In 1865, an economist named William Stanley Jevons noticed that more efficient steam engines did not reduce the amount of coal Britain burned. Cheaper power just meant more uses for it, and coal use climbed for decades.

Water Impacts

Water comes up in almost every local fight over data centers, and the number people quote is usually the smaller one. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that U.S. data centers used about 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023 to cool their buildings. While annual water use at data centers is less than a single day’s irrigation of the nation’s corn crops, according to Orennia, that could double or even quadruple by 2028.

The bigger number is the one almost nobody reports. Producing the electricity those data centers use took roughly 211 billion gallons of water. That is about 12 times the cooling number. Power plants are the largest user of fresh water in the country, and every data center owns a share of that through its power bill.

A data center can switch to air cooling and then honestly say it uses almost no water on-site. But its real water footprint has not changed at all. Only a data center powered by clean energy without evaporative cooling brings both numbers down.

What companies report is patchy. Google said its data centers used 7.7 billion gallons worldwide in 2024. Its Council Bluffs, Iowa, site alone used about a billion gallons. In Texas, 83% of the state’s 341 data centers had not filed required water reports.

Industry groups point out, correctly, that all data center water use together is still under 1% of the country’s total. Both things are true. The national average is not much comfort to a town in the Arizona desert.

The Charge On Your Power Bill

The cost that moved fastest from technical detail to kitchen table argument is the price of electricity.

Here is how it works. PJM is the company that runs the power grid for 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. Every year it holds an auction, paying power plants to promise they will have electricity available on the hottest and coldest days. Those payments get added to customer bills.

That auction price rose from about $29 per unit for 2024-2025 to about $329 per unit for 2026-2027. The independent monitor that watches PJM’s market found data centers caused 63% of one year’s jump. That works out to $9.3 billion collected from customers. The Natural Resources Defense Council projects that the average family in the region will pay about $70 more per month by 2028.

The evidence is showing up in utility bills across the country. Customers of Pepco in Washington, D.C., saw about $21 a month added. Home electricity rates in Ohio and Pennsylvania rose by 9% and 14% over the past year.

The industry says that is only half the picture. Virginia’s state watchdog agency, JLARC, found that data centers support about 74,000 jobs and $9.1 billion annually for the state economy. It also noted most of that comes from building them, not running them. Developers also argue that adding one large customer can spread the grid’s fixed costs across more people and lower everyone’s rate. That can be true. It depends entirely on how the contract is written.

States are testing whether the grid can be managed to segregate household power and its price from energy destined for data centers. Virginia set up a separate rate category for data centers. Ohio approved a rule requiring 12-year contracts and minimum payments for the biggest users. The idea in both cases is to have the new demand pay for the power plants it requires, rather than spreading that cost to everyone.

Why Towns Are Saying No

All of this has produced the biggest fight over land use in recent American memory. Data Center Watch, a group that tracks local opposition, counted at least 75 projects worth about $130 billion blocked or delayed in just the first 3 months of 2026. That roughly matches all of 2025. The number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833, spread across 49 states. Over 300 related bills were filed in statehouses in the first 6 weeks of the year.

Opposition to data centers crosses party lines, which is rare for environmental issues. Republican officials tend to focus on tax breaks and strain on the power grid. Democrats tend to focus on water and pollution. But they end up voting the same way.

Two towns show what happens next, and each story ended differently.

Tucson, Arizona, is a winner. Amazon wanted a 290-acre campus that could have grown to 10 buildings. The project moved through Pima County under a confidentiality agreement signed in 2023 that hid Amazon’s involvement from the public and even from some elected officials. County supervisors approved a land sale in June 2025 without knowing the full picture. When residents found out how big it was, more than 1,000 of them packed a hearing. That August, the city council voted unanimously to end the project, refusing to annex the land or supply city water. The developer called it a missed chance at millions in tax revenue and thousands of jobs.

Then the developer bought the land anyway, under a different company name, and moved the project just outside the city limits, where the council’s vote did not apply. The organizing worked, but the city’s authority to stop the project ended at the edge of town.

Saline Township, Michigan, is the harder story. In September 2025, both the planning commission and the township board voted against rezoning 575 acres of farmland for a $16 billion data center tied to OpenAI and Oracle. Two days later, the developer sued the township. It argued that because the township had no land zoned for industry at all, it was illegally shutting out a use it could not ban.

The township, with about 2,900 residents, could not afford a long court fight. It settled within weeks. Construction started in November. Residents negotiated about $14 million in community benefits, including funding for the fire department and farmland protection. One township supervisor voted against the settlement and was the only one to do so.

Both fights are now happening at a much bigger scale. In Virginia, a coalition of data center companies, chambers of commerce, and construction unions spent months defending a multibillion-dollar tax break in a television ad campaign. Nationally, a political group called Leading the Future launched with $140 million to back pro-AI candidates, including $50 million each from a venture capital firm and OpenAI’s president. Employees at AI companies started their own group, the Guardrails Alliance, raising small donations to push back.

New York recently became the first state to pause new large data center construction. At least 19 Michigan towns passed their own building freezes after Saline.

What You Can Do

Your own choices matter less here than the infrastructure decisions do. But your use of AI will ultimately shape how widespread the data center infrastructure becomes.

• Match the tool to the job. A quick chatbot question costs a few grams of carbon, about what a car puts out in 2 seconds. Handing that same question to an agent for 100 steps can cost 19 kilograms, or about 47 miles of driving.
• Stop the loops. Failed and repeated tries drove emissions more than anything else. If a tool is spinning without getting anywhere, shutting it down is both the sensible move and the low-carbon one.
• Smaller is not always better. A small model that fails 20 times can put out more carbon than a big model that gets it right once.
• Read your power bill. Auction costs usually appear as a separate line item, often called a capacity charge. If you live in one of those 13 states, that line is where data center demand reaches you.
• Go to the utility hearing, not just the zoning meeting. State utility commissions decide who pays for new power plants, and those meetings take public comment. That is where the question of who bears the cost is actually settled.
• Ask what confidentiality agreements cover. Several of these fights turned on residents learning that their own officials had signed away the right to say who the customer was. Any resident can ask that at a public meeting.
• Ask who is counting, and how. When you see a claim that AI is a thousand times cleaner than a person, check whether someone put that person’s commute and house on the bill. That one choice changes the answer enormously.

Your Next Choice Matters

For quick, clear jobs an AI handles on the first try, it really is the lower-impact choice. For open-ended research where an agent must loop, search, and correct itself, the person is currently cleaner, and the gap grows with every extra step.

The bigger point is that the energy used per question is not the number that matters most. Where the data center gets built, which utility serves it, whose water it draws, and who signs the power contract will shape AI’s environmental cost far more than any efficiency improvement. Those are public decisions. They get made in rooms that take public comment. And right now, they are getting made very fast.

The post Understanding the Environmental and Community Impact of AI and Data Centers appeared first on Earth911.

A dozen Grade A eggs peaked at roughly $6.22 in March 2025. In June 2026, the same dozen averaged $2.14.

That swing explains most of what happened in American backyards over the past two years. Bird flu emptied commercial henhouses, prices spiked, hatcheries sold out by February, and roughly 11 million U.S. households ended up keeping chickens. Prices have since collapsed, and the arithmetic has flipped back. The risk side of the ledger, meanwhile, has gotten heavier: H5N1 “Bird Flu” has killed two U.S. backyard flock owners since 2024, and a cluster of Salmonella outbreaks traced to backyard poultry has sickened more than 800 people so far this year.

Here is what the chicken economics and the cautions look like in 2026.

The Price Signal That Built the Boom, Then Reversed It

Retail egg prices rose 32.2% in 2022, 1.4% in 2023, 8.5% in 2024, and 21.9% in 2025, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) drove nearly all of it. Since the outbreak began in February 2022, the virus has affected more than 166 million birds across commercial and backyard flocks, including chickens, turkeys, ducks, pheasants, and geese.

As birds stopped dying, supply caught up with demand. USDA logged fewer new HPAI detections in the first quarter of 2026 than in the same period of 2025, and replacement pullets were plentiful enough to cover both routine flock turnover and unpredictable losses. Retail egg prices in May 2026 were 35.2% lower than a year earlier. ERS now forecasts a 30.4% decline for the full calendar year, with the prices paid to farmers down 82.9%.

The American Pet Products Association counted about 11 million U.S. households keeping backyard chickens in early January 2025, nearly double the 5.8 million reported in 2018. Feed stores across the country sold out of chicks weeks before their traditional spring “chick days,” and hatcheries reported order volumes up 80% or more. Everyone wanted birds.

As prices normalized through 2026, first-time buyers thinned out and most chick sales shifted back to existing keepers replenishing their flocks. The takeaway for anyone considering a flock now: the case for backyard chickens is a bet on egg-price volatility, and that bet just went the other way.

How Many Birds Do You Actually Need?

USDA projects 21.5 dozen table eggs will be available per person in 2025, rising to 22.9 dozen in 2026m, or roughly 260 to 275 eggs a year for the average American. That is how much supply is available, not a measure of what any given household eats, but it is a reasonable planning figure.

Commercial layers averaged 300 eggs each in 2025. Backyard flocks do not match that. University of Minnesota Extension notes that hens begin laying around six months and can keep laying for five to 10 years, with peak production in the first two. Plan on 180 to 250 eggs per hen in those peak years, tapering afterward, with a winter slowdown unless you add supplemental light to your coop.

So one productive hen roughly covers one person’s egg consumption during her best two years, and rather less after that. You’ll want to budget for more birds than the arithmetic suggests, or decide in advance what happens when a hen stops laying. They don’t make good eating, but can serve as the makings for delicious soup stock.

Meat is a different order of magnitude. The U.S. produced 102.7 pounds of broiler meat per person in 2025 and is forecast at 102.8 pounds in 2026, making chicken the most-consumed animal product in the country.

Dressed weight runs about 70% to 75% of live weight, so at four to five pounds of live bird, replacing a year of one person’s chicken consumption takes roughly 30 birds. Extension guidance on raising broilers is worth reading before you try. Meat breeds are not laying breeds, most broilers are processed before they are a year old, and the meat from a retired layer is considerably tougher than what you buy at the store.

What Your Local Code Says

Check your municipal ordinance before you buy anything. Rules vary enormously and change often.

City flock caps commonly land between four and eight hens, frequently scaled to lot size. Roosters are prohibited in most residential zones. Coop setbacks, which are typically 10 to 25 feet from property lines and sometimes 40 to 50 feet from a neighbor’s dwelling, are standard, as are permits, annual fees, rear-yard-only placement, and prohibitions on on-site slaughter or egg sales.

Homeowners association covenants can be stricter than city code and are enforced separately. Several states have recently passed laws preempting outright municipal bans on small hen flocks, so a rule you looked up three years ago may no longer be current.

Running the Numbers in 2026

The right comparison is against the eggs you buy, not the cheapest carton in the cooler. USDA’s weekly Egg Markets Overview for mid-July 2026 put the average advertised retail price at $1.02 per dozen for conventional caged eggs and $2.65 for UEP-certified cage-free, with organic priced higher still. If you are a pasture-raised or organic buyer, the math looks very different than it does for a commodity-egg household.

The first five rows are calculated from BLS and USDA price data and Extension production ranges. The last two are ranges widely reported by hobbyist cost guides and vary substantially by region, coop choice, and feed quality; treat them as a starting point, not a budget. Oklahoma State Extension publishes an enterprise-budget method for backyard hens that tracks fixed and variable costs per coop across a three-year horizon.

At 2026 prices, a small flock’s output roughly covers its own feed in a good year and does not repay the coop. When compared with cage-free and organic prices, the gap narrows considerably. For example, when eggs cost $6 a dozen in March 2025, the flock pays for itself inside two seasons. But these numbers hold only over the course of a year, because feed and other costs may change, so here’s the real finding: backyard flocks are a poor hedge against grocery inflation and a solid hedge against grocery disruption.

Also, keep track of the costs the spreadsheets usually miss: predator-proofing after the first raccoon kills a layer; veterinary care, which most keepers never budget for; boarding or a neighbor when you travel; and the years a hen lives past her productive peak.

The Bird Flu Calculus

Wild birds are the primary vector for HPAI, carrying the virus in their droppings and contaminating shared water sources, particularly during spring and fall migration. People spread it too, on boots, clothing, equipment, and vehicles that have not been cleaned.

Since March 2024, 71 human cases of influenza A(H5) have been reported in the United States. Three of those occurred in backyard flock owners, and two of the three were fatal — one in Louisiana in early 2025 and the other in Washington in November 2025. The CDC’s assessment of risk to the general public remains low, but it does not apply to someone handling sick or dead birds without protection.

What Flock Owners Know, and Don’t

CDC surveyed 638 backyard flock owners across 48 states between July and December 2025 and published the results in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in May 2026. Nearly all respondents — 94% — had heard of avian influenza. The knowledge gaps showed up in the specifics:

• Only 32% correctly identified all the signs of infection in birds. Another 13% did not know the signs at all.
• 27% did not know the signs and symptoms in humans. Just 16% identified all of them, including the non-respiratory ones, such as pink or watery eyes, diarrhea, and vomiting that are easy to mistake for the ordinary flu.
• 54% reported that wild birds could, or sometimes could, reach their flock’s food or water, the single most direct exposure pathway.
• 71% had no veterinarian to consult about their flock.
• 77% considered themselves at low risk of infection, and only 28% were somewhat or very concerned about avian influenza for their own health.

Respondents who knew more about the disease were significantly more likely to say they would use protective equipment around sick birds. Knowledge and protective behavior track together, which is the practical argument for reading the guidance before you need it.

The Four Steps USDA Recommends

USDA’s Defend the Flock program condenses backyard biosecurity into four habits. None of them are expensive.

• Clean up. Disinfect equipment, footwear, and clothing used in poultry areas daily or after each use. Store feed where wild birds and rodents cannot reach it. Keep water and bedding clean.
• Suit up. Keep dedicated boots for the coop and a footbath to disinfect them. Wear gloves or sanitize hands entering and leaving. Give visitors disposable shoe covers, and keep visitors to a minimum.
• Divide up. Separate species. Use covered enclosures and netting so domestic poultry and wild birds never share air, ground, feed, or water. Waterfowl can carry avian influenza without appearing sick, so mixed flocks raise the stakes.
• Brush up. Learn the signs, monitor your birds daily, keep health records, isolate anything that looks wrong, and know who to call before you need to call them.

Warning: Know the Signs and the Phone Number

Signs of avian influenza in birds: sudden or unexplained death, lack of energy or appetite, difficulty breathing, nasal discharge, a drop in egg production, and diarrhea.

Do not handle sick or dead birds, their litter, or contaminated water without personal protective equipment. Report sick or dead birds to your state veterinarian or to USDA at 1-866-536-7593.

If a backyard flock tests positive for HPAI, it is depopulated. Owners should keep wearing protective equipment in contaminated areas until infected birds, eggs, feces, and litter are gone from the property. Decide now whether you are prepared for that outcome.

CDC maintains specific guidance for backyard flock owners on which protective equipment to use and how to put it on and take it off without contaminating yourself or your house. Gear worn in the coop does not come indoors.

The Salmonella Problem Nobody Budgets For

Bird flu gets the headlines. Salmonella does the damage. As of July 27, 2026, CDC is investigating eight multistate outbreaks tied to contact with backyard poultry: 814 people sick across 44 states and one U.S. territory, 201 hospitalizations among those with information available, and one death in Washington. A quarter of the patients are children under five.

Among patients who owned poultry, 84% had gotten their birds since January 1, 2026, most often from agricultural retail stores. Investigators matched outbreak strains to seven hatcheries, and in five states found the same Salmonella inside the boxes used to ship chicks from hatcheries to stores. Several of the strains carry predicted resistance to antibiotics commonly used to treat severe infections, including ampicillin, ceftriaxone, and ciprofloxacin.

Outbreaks track the spring chick-buying season every year. In 2025, backyard-poultry-linked Salmonella sickened more than 500 people in 48 states, hospitalized 125, and killed two. Healthy-looking birds shed the bacteria; visible cleanliness tells you nothing.

Household Rules That Work

• Wash hands with soap for 20 seconds after touching birds, their supplies, or their eggs. Do it every time, no exceptions.
• Keep a dedicated pair of coop shoes that never come inside the house.
• Keep birds and their equipment out of the house entirely. No brooders in the kitchen.
• Children under five should not handle chicks, ducklings, or anything in the birds’ environment. The same caution applies to adults over 65 and anyone immunocompromised.
• No kissing or snuggling birds, and no eating or drinking around them.
• Collect eggs often, discard cracked ones, refrigerate promptly, and cook until both yolk and white are firm.

CDC’s backyard poultry health guidance covers the full list of precautions. Post it in the coop.

The Environmental Ledger

Earlier versions of this article estimated that backyard eggs carry roughly one-third the carbon footprint of commercial eggs. That figure does not survive scrutiny, and we are retiring it.

Feed dominates an egg’s footprint. The production of feed grains accounts for the large majority of total emissions in most life-cycle assessments. Backyard flocks almost always eat the same commercially formulated feed as commercial hens, without the scale efficiencies farmers enjoy, and they lay fewer eggs per pound of feed consumed. Fewer eggs from the same input means higher emissions per egg, not lower. No peer-reviewed U.S. life-cycle assessment of backyard flocks exists.

The largest global meta-analysis of food-system impacts puts eggs at roughly 4.7 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per kilogram and poultry meat at about 9.9, against roughly 60 to 99 for beef and about 1 for peas. Eggs are already among the lower-impact animal proteins, which means the headroom for improvement by switching production systems is narrower than it looks.

Where a backyard flock genuinely earns its environmental keep:

• Feed displacement. Every pound of kitchen scraps and pasture forage a hen eats is a pound of purchased feed she doesn’t, and feed is where the emissions live. This is the best environmental impacdt lever available to a small keeper.
• Manure on site. Composted chicken litter is a genuine soil amendment that displaces purchased fertilizer instead of entering a waste stream.
• No packaging, cold chain, or transport. While small in absolute terms because transport is a minor share of food emissions, the benefit of avoiding packaging, refigeration in the supply chain, and fuel impacts are real, and entirely yours to claim.
• Pest control. Hens working a garden bed are an excellent substitute for insecticide application.
• Low-input housing. Salvaged coop materials, the deep litter method, and skipping supplemental heat all cut embodied and operating emissions.

Ultimately, the enjoyment you get from caring for a flock will be the greatest reward. The environmental benefits are the bow on top of the personal satisfaction of reaching into a nest and pulling out a fresh egg.

What You Can Do

Before you buy birds

• Read your city or county ordinance and your HOA covenants. Verify both directly with the issuing authority because information sites can go stale fast.
• Compare the cost against the eggs you actually buy, at today’s prices, not last year’s headline numbers.
• Confirm you can meet the biosecurity bar: a covered run, feed and water inaccessible to wild birds, dedicated footwear, and a place to put gear on and take it off.
• Find a veterinarian who sees poultry before you have a sick bird. Most keepers don’t, and it shows up in how late problems get caught.
• Ask the hatchery or retailer about their Salmonella controls and NPIP participation, and plan for the birds’ full lifespan, not just their laying years.

Every day

• Clean up, suit up, divide up, brush up: USDA’s four habits, done consistently, are most of the protection available to a small flock.
• Wash hands for 20 seconds after any bird contact and keep coop shoes outside.
• Watch for sudden death, lethargy, labored breathing, nasal discharge, a drop in laying, or diarrhea. Isolate the bird and report it to your state agricultural agency.
• If you develop flu-like symptoms, red or watery eyes, or gastrointestinal symptoms after handling birds, tell your clinician about the bird exposure. That detail is what triggers the right test.

To shrink your egg footprint

• Feed safe kitchen scraps and let hens forage to displace purchased feed.
• Compost litter or run a deep litter system rather than bagging waste.
• Build with salvaged materials and skip supplemental heat in all but extreme climates.
• If the economics don’t work for you, buying cage-free, pasture-raised, or local eggs still moves the same levers without the biosecurity burden.

Related Reading

• Your Own Nest Egg: Keeping Backyard Chickens
• Repurpose Chicken Litter
• Go Green: Keeping Chickens Can Help
• Humane Shopping

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Gemma Alexander on July 7, 2020, and was substantially updated in July 2026. 

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Nature photographer Ansel Adams captured the beauty of the world and, particularly, the American West. In the quote below, he reminded members of the Wilderness Society that we rely on nature not just for food and shelter, but also for inspiration.

We’re on a path to the destruction of most, if not all, of nature’s beauty. Will you leave a world to your descendants without easy access to the extraordinary wonder of nature?

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

This poster was originally published on November 1, 2019.

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When most of us think of landfills, we think of rotting disposable diapers, apple cores, and old clothing. Our thoughts don’t usually turn to discarded construction materials. However, the U.S. generated 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste in 2018, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That’s more than double the amount of municipal solid waste generated annually.

A lot of wood, concrete, bricks, glass, asphalt, and plastic are going to landfills instead of being recycled or reused. This creates a massive opportunity for improvement. Repurposing materials is a great way to reduce the ecological impact of a project. Demolition waste can be artfully repurposed in home remodeling, construction, and landscaping projects, adding beauty and charm. Reclaiming waste also helps you save money, as many people go into debt when constructing and remodeling homes.

Here are some easy strategies to help you get started.

Plan Ahead

Reclaiming materials typically takes more time than just buying new items. And it requires more planning.

It is challenging to take a cookie-cutter approach to salvaged materials. When constructing or remodeling your home, you may need to customize it to the available materials. One method is to analyze what materials are available and then plan your project design accordingly. The opposite approach is to design your project and then collect the needed reclaimed materials. When taking the latter approach, it is helpful to rely on salvaged materials that are more commonly available.

Regardless, planning ahead and having plenty of storage space is helpful.

Check Whether Your City Requires Deconstruction

A growing number of cities now require that old houses be taken apart by hand rather than knocked down, which puts far more salvaged material into circulation. Portland, Oregon, passed the first such ordinance in 2016. Today it requires deconstruction of any house or duplex built in 1940 or earlier, and the work must be done by a certified deconstruction contractor who documents every salvaged board.

San Antonio has gone furthest. Under the third phase of its ordinance, which took effect January 1, 2025, mechanical demolition is off the table for any single-family home, multi-unit building, or accessory structure built in or before 1945 anywhere in the city, and in or before 1960 in protected areas. City officials report that contractors recover about 70% of a building’s weight, with more than half of that going to reuse rather than recycling.

More than half a dozen cities from Pittsburgh to Boulder have adopted their own versions, and the ReBuilding Center and other reuse nonprofits are pushing for mandatory salvage minimums to make the rules bite. For anyone hunting materials, the practical upshot is simple: if your city has an ordinance, more old-growth lumber, doors, trim, and fixtures are moving through local salvage yards than used to.

Find Good Sources of Salvaged Materials

One of the easiest ways to find free materials and to prevent them from going to landfills is to visit demolition sites. This can be a great source of windows, doors, woodwork, fixtures, and even appliances. Construction sites can be excellent sources of surplus or slightly damaged materials and supplies. Construction dumpsters are often packed with useful materials.

It is essential to speak with the foreman to get permission before taking any materials. If you are seeking something specific, ask the contractors working on-site if they have found that window or door you want. They might be willing to set materials aside for you. But again, ask for permission first.

Antique malls, architectural salvage stores, and home improvement donation centers are good sources of anything from windows and doors to hardware, tile, and plumbing fixtures.

The Habitat for Humanity ReStore network is another valuable source of new and used building materials, and the proceeds benefit a good cause. Build Reuse, the national nonprofit for building material reuse, maintains a membership directory that will point you to salvage stores and deconstruction contractors in your region. ReuseWood.org, a directory built by the American Wood Council and Canadian Wood Council with Build Reuse, lets you search by ZIP code for barn wood, timbers, millwork, flooring, and reclaimed doors and windows.

Peer-to-peer platforms have become the fastest way to find one-off pieces. Craigslist, Freecycle, Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor, OfferUp, and local Buy Nothing Project groups all turn up leftover tile, cabinets, pavers, and lumber from neighbors’ finished projects. Setting up saved searches and alerts beats checking in occasionally, since good material moves within hours.

Some people even purchase properties with reclaiming the materials in mind. For example, old barns are filled with gorgeous weathered lumber that can be deconstructed and repurposed.

Utilize Repurposed Materials

Beautify your home with reclaimed and repurposed wood beams and ceramic tiles.

Use cleaned-up bricks recovered from construction debris to create patios, pizza ovens, and pathways, and other attractive features for your new home.

Repurpose shipping containers to make storage sheds. Or stack them to make multi-tiered structures, like a guest room.

Use crushed concrete as aggregate for walkways and driveways.

Sinks, vanities, bathtubs, cabinets, shower stalls, light fixtures, and even toilets can be repurposed.

Find Supplies with Recycled Materials

There are also some construction materials available on the market made from recycled materials.

Plastic bottles are recycled to make composite lumber or bricks, and recycled glass is made into tile and countertops. Old newspapers or blue jeans are made into insulation products, and cork bottle stoppers can make flooring and panels. Purchasing these materials might not be as economical but it does conserve resources.

Using salvaged materials in construction and renovation projects adds character and is a great way to reduce waste. And having an eye for reuse helps conserve precious resources and protect the environment.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on October 3, 2019, this article was updated in July 2026.

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