It is not light reading. Nor short. But before you order anything else on Amazon you might want to at least skim this report:
Amazon has a plastic problem. Oceana analyzed e-commerce and packaging market data1 as well as a recent scientific report, published in Science about predicted growth in plastic waste, that projects plastic pollution of aquatic ecosystems by country2 and found that Amazon has a large and rapidly growing plastic pollution footprint. Continue reading
The Miniature Science series of ads, created last year by the very talented folks at BBDO on behalf of their client ExxonMobil, are snappy.
By now most people who pay attention to climate science are aware of ExxonMobil’s active role in creating doubt about the emerging facts that their own scientists established about mankind’s impact on climate. In addition to actors like that giant petrochemical company, there are also behind-the-scenes, complicit creatives who have provided essential messaging to strengthen the deception. In a new essay, Bill McKibben turns his attention to those folks, and expects accountability:
If money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns, then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling. Illustration by Lia Liao
When “Creatives” Turn Destructive: Image-Makers and the Climate Crisis
Past sins are past no more: an overdue historical recalibration is under way, with monuments being pulled down, dorms renamed, restitution offered. People did things, bad things; even across the span of centuries, they’re being held to account, and there’s something noble about that. The Reverend Robert W. Lee IV, for instance, recently backed the removal of his famous ancestor’s statue from Richmond, Virginia. The memorial, he wrote, “is a hollow reminder of a painful ideology and acts of oppression against black people. Taking it down will provide new opportunities for conversations, relationships and policy change.” Such a response raises an uncomfortable question: What are we doing now that our descendants will need to apologize for? Might we be able to get ahead of the sin this time? Continue reading
I am not a fan of IKEA. That said, I shopped there once, as a younger parent. There seemed no other choice at the time, and I did not regret it until I became more acutely conscious of the perils posed by this business model. Thanks to Olivia Rosane at EcoWatch for sharing this story, which I missed in the Guardian because I scan the Environment section and usually skip the Business section (note to self):
IKEA to Buy Back Used Furniture This Black Friday in 27 Countries
IKEA created the world’s longest outdoor bookcase on Bondi Beach, Australia to celebrate its 30th birthday and promote literacy on Jan. 31, 2010. James D. Morgan / Contributor / Getty Images News
Swedish furniture giant IKEA has a plan to make this year’s Black Friday a little greener.
As part of its bid to become more sustainable, the store will allow customers to sell back their used furniture for up to half of its original price.
“Sustainability is the defining issue of our time and IKEA is committed to being part of the solution to promote sustainable consumption and combat climate change,” UK and Ireland IKEA retail manager Peter Jelkeby told The Guardian. Continue reading
Christian Kroll was inspired to change the direction of his life after travelling through India
I remember testing Ecosia in 2013, when we were based in India. For some reason I no longer recall it did not remain my default search engine then. But after reading again about it now–and more about its founder’s ideas and expectations, and most importantly his actions–I was intrigued enough to do another test. Not exhaustive, but I compared the search results on Ecosia versus Google for a bunch of words and phrases that are of interest to me. Since Ecosia is connected to Bing I did not need to compare those results. Result? I have just made Ecosia my default search engine, for the reasons Mr. Kroll expected I would. And if for any reason I decide to switch back, this time I will report why here. But I do not expect to. This is an attempt to be consistent with my own expectations. Thanks to Suzanne Bearne for bringing this/him back to my attention:
The search engine boss who wants to help us all plant trees
It supports 20 tree-planting projects in 15 different countries. Photo: JOSHI GOTTLIEN.
The BBC’s weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Christian Kroll, the founder and chief executive of internet search engine Ecosia.
Christian Kroll wants nothing less than to change the world.
“I want to make the world a greener, better place,” he says.
“I also want to prove that there is a more ethical alternative to the kind of greedy capitalism that is coming close to destroying the planet.” Continue reading
Thanks as always to Bill McKibben, in particular this time for disguising a podcast recommendation (click the image above to go to the website of the podcast) as a recommendation for regulating Facebook:
What Facebook and the Oil Industry Have in Common
Why is it so hard to get Facebook to do anything about the hate and deception that fill its pages, even when it’s clear that they are helping to destroy democracy? And why, of all things, did the company recently decide to exempt a climate-denial post from its fact-checking process? The answer is clear: Facebook’s core business is to get as many people as possible to spend as many hours as possible on its site, so that it can sell those people’s attention to advertisers. (A Facebook spokesperson said the company’s policy stipulates that “clear opinion content is not subject to fact-checking on Facebook.”) This notion of core business explains a lot—including why it’s so hard to make rapid gains in the fight against climate change. Continue reading
Bureo is news to us, and we like good news. We are always on the lookout for fellow travelers, and while Tin Shed Ventures is by no means new it is news to us. And newsworthy based on the partners they have chosen:
Tin Shed Ventures is Patagonia’s corporate venture capital fund, which invests in start-ups that offer solutions to the environmental crisis. Originally launched as $20 Million and Change in May 2013, Tin Shed Ventures partners with businesses focused on building renewable energy infrastructure, practicing regenerative organic agriculture, conserving water, diverting waste and creating sustainable materials. Continue reading
Amazon workers lead a walk out to demand that leaders take action on climate change in September. Photograph: Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images
We hope someone in the upper ranks of Amazon is listening:
Hundreds of workers defy Amazon rules to protest company’s climate failures
Employees ‘needed to stand up for what’s right’ despite policy barring workers from speaking about business
Hundreds of Amazon employees defied corporate policy to publicly criticize the company for failing to meet its “moral responsibility” in the climate crisis.
More than 340 tech workers at Amazon used the hashtag #AMZNSpeakOut in public statements that condemn the company for not taking sufficient action on the climate crisis. Continue reading
Damon Winter/The New York Times
He may be late, but better that versus never. Investing with consideration for the environment seemed obvious long ago to some, but not to the decision-makers who most count–those whose investment decisions impact generations to come. Presumably, from the size of fund he manages, one of the most respected investors has decided to do the right thing as best he can, and that may be huge:
BlackRock Will Put Climate Change at Center of Investment Strategy
In his influential annual letter to chief executives, Larry Fink said his firm would avoid investments in companies that “present a high sustainability-related risk.”
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of BlackRock, plans to announce Tuesday that his firm will make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal.
BlackRock is the largest in its field, with nearly $7 trillion under management, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit. Continue reading
‘The Arctic refuge is not just a piece of land with oil underneath. It’s the heart of our people; our food security, way of life and very survival depends on its protection.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Thanks to the Guardian for this op-ed by Bernadette Demientieff:
Goldman Sachs agreed to stop funding Arctic drilling. Will other banks join them?
If banks destroy our homeland, they’ll have the Gwich’in Nation, and the millions of Americans who stand with us, to answer to
Last fall, I traveled more than 4,000 miles from my home in Alaska to meet with major banks and urge them to help protect the Arctic national wildlife refuge from destructive oil drilling and exploration. In all the years I’ve worked to defend this place, we’ve been focused on trying to make our voices heard by leaders in the White House or in Congress, and I never thought I’d be sitting in a conference room on the 43rd floor of Goldman Sachs’ global headquarters in downtown New York, talking about the Arctic refuge. Continue reading
Foodrunners may have the unusual problem of overabundance, in the form of waste and generous people donating their time. Thanks to Marisa Endicott (again) and Mother Jones for bringing this organization to our attention.
Alleviating hunger, one volunteer and donor at a time:
Tech Company Free Meals Beget a Lot of Leftovers. Meet the Man on a Mission to Rescue Them.
Food Runners saves extra grub before it’s wasted, and delivers it to hungry mouths.
Marisa Endicott
Tso loads his car with Tetris-like precision. Marisa Endicott
I meet Les Tso on a corner in San Francisco’s SoMa district on a wet Thursday afternoon. He pulls his silver Isuzu SUV into an alley. “Today because it’s the first rain, people are going to be driving cluelessly—there are a lot of Uber and Lyft drivers that come from out of the area,” Tso warns me. “Makes it more exciting, I guess.”
Tso picks up donations from an average 16 places a day. Marisa Endicott
Tso works as a driver for Food Runners, a nonprofit that picks up leftover food from grocery stores, companies, events, and restaurants and brings it to organizations working to feed the hungry. For four hours every weekday, Tso braves the worst of Bay Area traffic to makes his 80 to 90 pickups (an average of 16 a day), primarily from tech companies—including Google, Juul, and LinkedIn—that have become an omnipresent force in the city. Continue reading
Heroes who made it happen, and here is a bit of the story, thanks to Sierra Club:
The Fashion Executives Who Saved a Patagonian Paradise
Tompkins Conservation donations are the largest act of wildlands philanthropy in history
THE MINISTER of public lands was about to arrive, a television crew in tow, so everything had to be just right. It was 8:15 on a summer morning in February, and the office of Tompkins Conservation outside the Chilean hamlet of El Amarillo was hive-busy. The philanthropy’s controller was hunched over a laptop filled with spreadsheets. A supervisor was giving orders to groups of men in blue coveralls. Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the organization’s president, sat at a conference table toggling between a pair of laptops and her cellphone. Continue reading
Shell said last year that divestment had become a material risk to its business.’ Shell’s Brent Bravo oil rig arrives on Teesside for decommissioning, June 2019. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Bill McKibben explains the movement and its best chance of success:
Divestment works – and one huge bank can lead the way
On 15 October, the European Investment Bank meets to decide its policy on fossil fuels. The hand of history is on its shoulder
Millions of people marched against climate crisis over the past two weeks, in some of the largest demonstrations of the millennium. Most people cheered the students who led the rallies – call them the Greta Generation. But now we’ll start to find out if all their earnest protest actually matters.
Continue reading
Cleaning plastic waste from the oceans is an ever-present issue. We thank the UN News for sharing this example of collaborations that inspire present and future action.
Boat made of recycled plastic and flip-flops inspires fight for cleaner seas along African coast
After completing a historic 500km journey from the Kenyan island of Lamu to the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, the world’s first ever traditional “dhow” sailing boat made entirely from recycled plastic, known as the Flipflopi, has successfully raised awareness of the need to overcome one of the world’s biggest environmental challenges: plastic pollution.
The Flipflopi Project was co-founded by Kenyan tour operator Ben Morison in 2016, and the ground-breaking dhow was built by master craftsmen Ali Skanda, and a team of volunteers using 10 tonnes of recycled plastic.
The boat gets its name from the 30,000 recycled flip-flops used to decorate its multi-coloured hull. Continue reading
In my occasional posts about Amazon over the past few years, it is becoming clear to me that I am concerned about the dangers that come from some of the foundational principles of business management, such as excellent customer service, and scale. I have not read his new book yet, but I listen to and read Tim Wu whenever I see an opportunity. His publisher has this to say:
So, I look forward to learning more about it. Today’s episode of The Daily has useful commentary on Amazon-related topics. Thanks to David Leonhardt for bringing Tim Wu’s new book to my attention:
The Monopolization of America
In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show.
The popular telling of the Boston Tea Party gets something wrong. The colonists were not responding to a tax increase. They were responding to the Tea Act of 1773, which granted a tea monopoly in the colonies to the well-connected East India Company. Merchants based in the Americas would be shut out of the market.
Many colonists, already upset about taxation without representation and other indignities, were enraged. In response, dozens of them stormed three ships in Boston Harbor on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, and tossed chests of East India tea — “that worst of plagues, the detested tea,” as one pamphlet put it — into the water.
A major spark for the American Revolution, then, was a protest against monopoly. Continue reading
Credit Photo Illustration by Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
Thanks to Jonah Engel Bromwich for asking it clearly:
Is Your Salad Habit Good for the Planet?
Popular fast-casual chains brag of sustainability, as customers toss their compostable and recyclable bowls into the trash with wild abandon.
One word: plastic.CreditPhoto Illustration by Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
Every weekday, shortly after 11 a.m., a line forms at the Broadway and 38th Street location of Sweetgreen, the eco-conscious salad chain. By noon, the line has usually tripled in size. It often takes more than 15 minutes to get to the front.
The scene is similar at the Chop’t at 41st and Broadway, or the Dig Inn on West 38th, or the Just Salad one block south. In the heart of Midtown Manhattan, the evidence is hard to dismiss: Greens, once so unappetizing that parents all over the country had to beg and bribe their children to eat them, have never been hotter. (Almost as hot: their denser, younger cousin, grains.) Continue reading
What gets measured gets managed. In the realm of climate science, national governments have the scale and responsibility to be involved in measurement. But if a skeptic is in charge of the government apparatus, good luck with that. With the national government of one of the big carbon footprint countries abandoning science and dropping out of the fight to reduce climate change, one of that country’s biggest companies is stepping up to offer an alternative. It may be too little too late but under the circumstances we may have no choice but to cheer it on:
Google’s New Tool to Fight Climate Change
The company will begin estimating local carbon pollution from cities around the world.
In the next decade or so, more than 6,000 cities, states, and provinces around the world will try to do something that has eluded humanity for 25 years: reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere and cause climate change.
The city-level leaders overseeing this task won’t have the same tools available to their national peers. Most of them won’t have an Environmental Protection Agency (or its equivalent), a meteorological bureau, a team of military engineers, or nasa. So where will they start? Never mind how to reduce their city’s greenhouse-gas emissions; how will they know what’s spewing carbon dioxide in the first place?
Maybe Google will do it for them. Or, at least, do it with them.
Google has started estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for individual cities, part of what it recently described as an ambitious new plan to deploy its hoard of geographic information on the side of climate-concerned local leaders. Continue reading
We first heard the name of the farmer on a favored music-oriented podcast, and then the name of his farm. After listening to his story, and his musical tastes, we had to learn more:
Self-confessed veg nerd, Guy Singh-Watson has over the last 30 years taken Riverford from one man and a wheelbarrow delivering homegrown organic veg to friends, to a national veg box scheme delivering to around 50,000 customers a week.
Guy is an inspirational, passionate, opinionated and admired figure in the world of organic farming, who still spends more time in the fields than in the boardroom. Continue reading
Tim Brooks, Lego’s vice president for environmental responsibility, says the company emits about a million tons of carbon dioxide each year. Credit Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times
For a company, and a product, that has been a part of so many lives for so long–and especially one whose name means to play well, it is still a shock to be reminded of their carbon footprint. And three years after first reading about their commitment, it is good to read details of their plan and progress:
Lego Wants to Completely Remake Its Toy Bricks (Without Anyone Noticing)
At Lego, petroleum-based plastics aren’t the packaging, they’re the product — and the bricks making up these dinosaurs have barely changed in more than 50 years. Credit Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times
BILLUND, Denmark — At the heart of this town lies a building that is a veritable temple to the area’s most famous creation, the humble Lego brick. It is filled with complex creations, from a 50-foot tree to a collection of multicolored dinosaurs, all of them built with a product that has barely changed in more than 50 years.
A short walk away in its research lab, though, Lego is trying to refashion the product it is best known for: It wants to eliminate its dependence on petroleum-based plastics, and build its toys entirely from plant-based or recycled materials by 2030. Continue reading
This National Public Radio (USA) story led us to the video above, and then the source website, where we discovered several initiatives that are worth a closer look:
Ocean action: In 2017, Carmel-by-the-Sea’s City Council voted to require that restaurants stop using single-use plastic straws and utensils and instead provide only compostable to-go serviceware—and only upon request. The law took effect in the spring of 2018. The impetus came from a group of fifth-grade students from Carmel River Elementary School. They spoke at community forums and Carmel City Council meetings to advance the idea. Mayor Steve Dallas later credited them with playing a pivotal role in getting the ordinance enacted. “When it finally passed, the students were ecstatic,” says teacher, Niccole Tiffany, of her students. “It was a big lesson on the power of kids’ voices in actively creating change.” (Read more of her story here)
Thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for programs that inspire local citizens, especially youth, to environmental activism like this:
Saving Our Seas One Sip at a Time with “No Straw November”
Ocean action: Shelby O’Neil, a high school student from San Juan Bautista, created a successful campaign called “No Straw November,” asking people to pledge not to use plastic straws for one month. She’s earned national exposure through the Martha Stewart Living magazine and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. She convinced Alaska Airlines to ditch plastic straws and toothpicks on all its flights (a story picked up by Fortune magazine). Shelby was even flown to the headquarters of Delta Airlines to promote her campaign; spoke at Dreamforce, the annual user conference hosted by Salesforce.com in San Francisco; and won unanimous California Coastal Commission support for “No Straw November.” But she didn’t stop there. “For a Girl Scout Gold Award, I created a nonprofit called Jr Ocean Guardians,” says Shelby, “teaching younger schoolchildren the importance of the oceans and how they can help.” Continue reading
Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and chief executive of Chobani, arrived in the United States 24 years ago with $3,000 to his name. He now runs a company with annual sales of $1.5 billion.CreditCole Wilson for The New York Times
A few contributors on this platform are children of immigrants. Some are immigrants. And we love Greek yogurt. And we love a good shepherd to riches story. So, why not celebrate one of our own, so to speak?
Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani Talks Greek Yogurt and the American Dream
A Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent, Mr. Ulukaya brought Greek yogurt to the mainstream. Along the way, he began hiring refugees, a move that drew threats from fringe websites and far-right commentators.
Hamdi Ulukaya arrived in the United States in 1994 with $3,000 in his pocket. He was an immigrant from Turkey, hoping to learn English and find his way in a new country.
Today, Mr. Ulukaya is a billionaire. Chobani, the Greek yogurt maker he founded in 2007, has annual sales of about $1.5 billion, and Mr. Ulukaya owns most of the privately held company. Continue reading
