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PODCAST

Sustainability In Your Ear

Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.

science earth sciences

All Episodes

40:26

Sustainability In Your Ear: The XPRIZE Wildfire...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/03/16

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

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44:54

The MooBlue Team Keeps The Beef, Without The Burp

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/03/09

Cattle are one of the most consequential climate problems hiding in plain sight on the dinner table. Livestock are responsible for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and cattle alone account for about 65% of that sector's output. Most of it doesn't come from manure or land use — it comes from inside the cow. Approximately one billion cattle on the planet burp around 3.7 gigatons of CO₂-equivalent emissions annually,

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51:05

The Forest Stewardship Councils' Path to a Circular...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/03/02

Forests are vital for people everywhere. They cover about 4.14 billion hectares, roughly a third of the world’s land, and store 714 gigatons of carbon. They also support 80% of land-based biodiversity. However, we are losing 11 million hectares each year to deforestation, and the World Bank expects demand for forest-based products to rise by 400% by 2050. Many industries, from construction to textiles and automotive, are turning to wood fiber to replace fossil-based materials. Yet, a 2023

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51:15

The Net Zero Accelerator's Colin Mangham on Nature's...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/02/23

We already have the technology to decarbonize buildings, and many pilot projects have shown it works. So why hasn’t progress toward net zero moved faster? Colin Mangham believes it’s because we’re still using outdated business models to promote new solutions. Colin is the Chief Experience Officer at the US Green Building Council California and leads its Net Zero Accelerator, the first program focused only on net-zero innovation for buildings. Since 2019, the accelerator has helped over 100 companies

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42:13

CurbWaste's Mike Marmo Is Building the Waste...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/02/16

The U.S. waste management industry moves more than 290 million tons of municipal solid waste each year. This is a potential trillion-dollar market, but much of the work still relies on paper tickets, clipboards, and spreadsheets. About 10,000 independent haulers handle a large share of collection and materials transfer in the U.S. In this business, a single truck costs $300,000, and profits depend on efficient routes. Most haulers do not have access to the digital tools that other logistics

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43:41

The Ocean Conservancy's Dr. Erin Murphy Documents the...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/02/09

Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, is the principal author of a major study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies

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42:58

Milwaukee's Kevin Shafer on Circular Thinking in...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/02/02

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.Every gallon of wastewater flowing through a municipal sewer contains recoverable energy, nutrients, and water—assets that the linear "flush and forget" model has long treated as problems to dispose of rather than value to recapture. Meet Kevin Shafer, who has spent more than two decades proving otherwise. As executive director of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) since 2002, he's transformed an agency once

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47:32

Peter Fusaro's Wall Street Green Summit Explores...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/01/19

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.'Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the Wall Street Green Summit, he's spent a quarter century connecting capital to climate solutions. This year's summit, the 25th in its history, will take place on March

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43:31

Turning Waste Into New Products And Packaging With...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2026/01/12

Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe to receive transcripts.What we call waste is really just misallocated feedstock—raw materials waiting to be cycled back into the next generation of products and packaging. According to research by the World Economic Forum and United Nations Development Programme, the circular economy could unlock $4.5 trillion in new global value by 2030, and investors are racing to capture part of that opportunity. Meet Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh, Director of Innovation

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37:49

Dandelion Energy CEO Dan Yates On How Geothermal...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/12/29

Read a transcript of this interview.Amazingly, the same Congressional bill that gutted residential clean energy tax credits also led to a major breakthrough in financing home geothermal systems. Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy, explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for the first time, allow third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. He shares why this policy change could help ground-source heat pumps grow the way leasing helped rooftop solar. Geothermal heating

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58:52

Okhtapus Cofounder Stewart Sarkozy-Banoczy...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/12/22

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode. The ocean provides half the oxygen we breathe, absorbs 30% of our carbon emissions, and helps control the planet's climate. By 2030, it's expected to support a $3.2 trillion Blue Economy. Yet 70% of proven ocean solutions, such as coastal resilience, coral restoration, and marine pollution cleanup, never move past the pilot stage. These projects often win awards and get media attention, but then stall because funding systems

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45:17

EarthX CEO Peter Simek on Cultivating Bipartisan...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/12/15

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.For 15 years, the Dallas-based climate conference the EarthX conference has created space where fossil fuel executives and environmental activists, Republican appropriations chairs and Democratic climate hawks, find common ground. The organization targets three core stakeholders: the corporate world, policymakers, and investors seeking startups where environmental solutions are baked into the bottom line. Peter Simek, EarthX’s

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46:33

Sustainability In Your Ear: Building The Circular...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/12/08

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.The raw material for a $2 trillion circular economy is already flowing through recycling facilities. But how do we capture and use it? Rebecca Hu-Thrams, co-founder and CEO of Glacier, is deploying AI-powered robotic sorters at material recovery facilities (MRFs) across the country, processing recycling for one in 10 Americans. Her robots use computer vision trained on more than 3 billion images of waste to identify and sort

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35:56

Examining Colorado's First-Of-Its-Kind EPR Oil...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/12/01

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.Americans dispose of approximately 1.3 billion gallons of used motor oil annually, but only about 800 million gallons get recycled, and most of that is burned as fuel rather than re-refined into new oil. The plastic packaging oil comes in is more problematic: most curbside programs won't accept them because residual oil contaminates other recyclables. What happens when the companies that make motor oil embrace extended producer

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33:39

Star's Tech Hando Choi On Inventing A Low-Carbon,...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/11/24

Read along with our transcript.What if the solution to winter's infrastructure corrosion and environmentally benign home sidewalk de-icing was an invasive starfish being thrown back into Korea's coastal waters? Hando Choi, president of Star's Tech, joins the conversation to explain how one region's invasive species problem can become another's environmental breakthrough. The company developed ECO-ST, a de-icing product made from starfish skeletons that not only melts ice faster than conventional

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34:40

Liquidonate CEO Disney Petit On Solving The Retail...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/11/17

Subscribe to receive transcripts by email. Read along with this episode.What if the solution to the retail industry's $890 billion returns crisis wasn't better logistics, but better logic? Disney Petit, founder and CEO of Liquidonate, is proving that the most sustainable return skips the trip back to a warehouse and goes directly to a community in need. Americans returned nearly 17% of all retail purchases last year, generating 2.6 million tons of landfill waste and 16 million tons of CO2 emissions

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47:17

Luke Purdy, Wieden+Kennedy's Director of...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/11/10

Can the industry that taught the world to consume help us learn to consume more responsibly? Luke Purdy, Director of Sustainability at one of the world's leading creative agencies Wieden+Kennedy, is betting his career on it. After 13 years working on major accounts like Nike and Corona at one of the world's most influential creative agencies, Purdy did something unusual: he wrote his own job description and asked to become the agency's first sustainability director. Wieden+Kennedy gave him the job,

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47:41

Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong On Reforesting 3...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/11/03

Most Silicon Valley CEOs who cash out their stock options start another tech company. Yishan Wong planted trees instead. After helping build PayPal, Facebook, and serving as Reddit's CEO, Wong concluded that humanity's biggest challenge wouldn't be solved with algorithms or network effects—it would be solved by restoring the planet's forests at an unprecedented scale. Mitch Ratcliffe sits down with Wong to discuss Terraformation, the company he founded in 2020 with an audacious mission: restore 3

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47:18

The Climate Action Network's Pre-COP30 Briefing with...

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/10/27

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the world's climate negotiators will gather in Belém, Brazil this November for COP 30, a summit many are calling a critical juncture for global climate action. After COP 29 in Baku ended with what developing nations called a woefully inadequate $300 billion annual commitment—far short of the $1.3 trillion economists say is needed—can multilateral climate negotiations still deliver the justice and transformation the climate crisis demands? And with 71% of climate

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35:24

Buckstop's Alexander Olesen Digs Into Urban Mining

Sustainability In Your Ear ·

2025/10/20

Every solar array, battery system, and EV charger installed over the past decade will eventually need to be decommissioned. Yet there's no unifying system to handle that flow of materials—no operating system for the reverse supply chain that the circular economy depends on. While Americans recycle 97% of vehicles, we recycle less than 20% of electronics, leaving valuable critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and gold to languish in warehouses or end up in landfills. The electronics embedded in our

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545 results

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