How Much Plastic Can You Eliminate From Your Life? Does It Make An Impact?

Philadelphia’s ban on businesses’ use of single-use plastic bags reduced plastic bag use by 94%. The ban also extended to paper bags not made of recycled content.

Climeworks is focusing on pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air to store or reuse in some capacity as a way to lower global greenhouse gas emissions. The Swiss company has 16 plants around Europe, with their biggest one in Switzerland that removes 900 tons of carbon dioxide a year that is then sold to Coca-Cola Co. to put in soft drinks or to local industrial greenhouses for plant growth. Scaling the operations to capture more carbon is costly, but the startup recently raised $76 million from investors.

A handful of sustainability-oriented startups are working with concrete companies around the world to reduce their carbon footprint. The concrete & cement industry is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions; however, with technologies that capture CO2 within solid concrete, some companies have been able to decrease their emissions, while improving efficiency in the process.

To the two social entrepreneurs who founded nonprofit Feedback, the massive amounts of food waste being tossed into landfills in the UK and USA each year was a mounting challenge that required a creative solution. So they founded Toast Ale, a craft brewing company that not only reduced food waste by using unwanted bread from bakeries to brew their ales, but helps bring awareness to the issue through the brand, which is growing in popularity.

An economic shift to renewable energy could take decades, but thanks to rapidly evolving disruptive technologies, dropping prices of solar and wind power sources, and increasing market demand for green business, the new age of renewable energy could encompass the world economy much more quickly.

While international initiatives have helped curb carbon emissions in numerous sectors like forestry, manufacturing, and energy production, two of the biggest CO2 contributors have remained unchecked on the sidelines until recently: shipping and aviation. Thanks in part to the Paris Agreement, these industries are starting to be held accountable for their contributions to climate change, and to implement solutions such as improved practices and policies, biofuels, and more efficient technologies.

An abandoned, flooded mine in Bishrampur, India, is now an eco-tourism site where visitors can take a boat ride to a floating restaurant and locals breed fish. The new facilities offer employment for some of the residents who were left out of work when the mine closed.

The Community Climate Collaborative is working to wean local businesses from fossil fuels. 16 members of the Green Business Alliance pledged last spring to cut their carbon pollution by 45% by the end of 2025. The Alliance is more than halfway there — already achieving a 28% reduction.

As governments and businesses make pledges to cut their carbon emissions, planting tress has become a popular solution to combat the effects of climate change. But tree-planting schemes take time and proper management to actually be effective. Many efforts have failed to take some key factors into consideration, including types of trees, location, and even community-involvement.

For over a decade, environmentalists, Indigenous tribes, ranchers, politicians, scientists, and fishers in the Pacific Northwest have been able to defeat more than 20 proposals from coal and oil firms to ship fossil fuels from their ports. Through protests, public hearings, and petitions to government agencies, activists blacked almost every fossil fuel effort in the region between 2004 and 2017.