What one town learned by charging residents for every bag of trash

To help increase housing stock, New Rochelle, NY streamlined the development approval process and made it easier to approve many housing units at once, allowing the city to add roughly 4,500 new housing units over the last decade. However, local residents worry about being priced out of the area as people move from Manhattan in search of more affordable housing.

Refrigerants being used in old air conditioners or grocery story cooling systems leak into the atmosphere contributing to global warming. Tradewater, a company in Illinois, picks up these containers, destroys the refrigerants, gives them cash, and then sells them as carbon offset credits. They collect up to 250,000 pounds of refrigerants per year, but there is still more out there. Supermarkets in the United States could switch to more natural refrigerants, but barely 1 percent are known to have done that. Getting rid of these refrigerants can be an important solution to combating climate change.

With a little strategic planning, cities can nurture biodiversity in the urban environment. “Sometimes, small actions can bring incredible results,” says Antonio Morcillo, deputy director for conservation of green areas and urban trees in Madrid. The city is allowing the Manzanares River to flow, spontaneous vegetation to grow, and opening hundreds of birdhouses and insect hotels to counteract habitat loss.

Paris has become a leader in reducing food waste by passing legislation that requires large grocery stores to donate leftover food or compost it. Since 2016, this measure has saved over 10 million meals a year. In Philadelphia, where 326,000 people experience hunger and 300,000 pounds of food is thrown away monthly, the city is looking to France as an example for what it hopes to accomplish.

In a randomized experiment in western Uganda, scientists demonstrated the effectiveness of paying rural farmers not to chop down trees since deforestation contributes to CO2 emissions worldwide. They studied for two years the declines in forest cover between a control group (no payment) and the participant group (paid). Building on a United Nations project in which wealthy nations pay poorer ones in an attempt to equalize the costs of responding to climate change, the outcome of the project proves the existence of a low-cost environmental policy solution to stemming rising global temperatures.

In 2016, California adopted a law to reduce the amount of organic waste in state landfills by 75 percent, which led cities and counties to develop their own organic waste diversion programs, such as organic waste collection and edible food recovery. In 2022, 11.2 million tons of organic waste were diverted, while 201,000 tons of edible food were recovered that year.

New Jersey voters approved an amendment that removed cash bail so people would no longer be incarcerated because they couldn’t afford to pay it. Now, the courts evaluate each person’s risk to the public, of skipping trial, and of reoffense to determine whether they are held in detention until their trial.

In response to a tight housing market that's left locals with few options to buy a home, communities like Truckee, Calif. instituted short term rental regulations intended to curb purchases by part-time residents. But there's not enough data to prove that these rules are having the intended effect, and in many communities, housing prices haven't budged.

A decade after California established its forest offset program as a way to incentivize saving trees to store carbon, a new analysis shows that it might not be working. Loopholes in the program allow for people to claim credits for trees that aren’t delivering the carbon benefits they should and ultimately results in companies emitting more pollution than is being stored. While this program has provided economic benefits for several Indigenous tribes, some argue that “the program creates the false appearance of progress when in fact it makes the climate problem worse.”

Across the world, countries are reckoning with its astounding single-use plastic bag waste by instituting legislation that taxes or all-out bans them. Research has shown that taxing the bags has been a more effective strategy with less unintended consequences, as banning often leads to a sharp increase in thicker plastics or paper bags. In places that have instituted the tax, they’ve seen a 40 percent decrease in usage, and arguably more importantly, a cultural shift away from single-use plastics.