Shareholder Activists Push Fast Food Chains to Commit to Climate Targets

A utility company in Framingham, Massachusetts, worked with climate advocates to build a unique geothermal heating and cooling project that spans a whole neighborhood. A group of residential and commercial buildings share the infrastructure necessary to harness stable underground temperatures for heating and cooling, which reduces their greenhouse gas emissions and energy bills.

A direct carbon capture plant in Iceland sucks carbon dioxide out of the air, mixes it with water, and pumps it underground to help combat climate change. When the mixture reaches the basalt bedrock, it causes a chemical reaction that turns the carbon into a solid so it can be stored underground in the porous rock.

Thermal storage technologies are lowering businesses’ energy costs and carbon emissions while reducing strain on the grid during peak times. Two hotels in California implemented a system that makes ice when energy demand is low and uses the ice during peak demand times to cool the building.

In Gateshead, England, Lanchester Wines keeps its storage warehouse at a stable temperature year-round using geothermal heat from an abandoned coal mine nearby. The water that naturally floods the mine is geothermally heated below ground, then a heat pump system pulls that water to the surface to transfer that heat to the warehouse.

The nonprofit PR3 is working to standardize reusable packaging systems for businesses like coffee shops and grocery stores to make them easier to scale and adopt as a replacement to single-use materials.

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.

Seaweed is emerging as a solution to Maine's shifting climate and economy, providing alternative industries for ocean farmers and also supporting land farmers' climate initiatives. While still in piloting stages, studies have shown up to 50 percent reductions in methane on New England cow farms that incorporate seaweed into feed.

Following the success of New York City's divestment of pension funds from fossil fuels, a process that started in 2015, other cities around the US are exploring ways to achieve net-zero portfolio emissions. In most cases, the divested pension funds have performed at least as well financially as a city’s non-divested funds.

Three startups in Houston are using a technique similar to fracking, a practice used in the oil and gas industry, to store renewable energy without batteries. They use excess renewable energy to pump pressurized water into manmade caverns underground. When energy is needed, they open the caverns, sending the water back to the surface to turn a turbine and generate power.

A brewery and a winery in Oregon are setting the standards and building the infrastructure for a reusable glass bottles system to reduce their environmental impacts. They sell their products in bottles that customers are incentivized to return so they can be cleaned, refilled, and sold again.