Millions of tons of spent solar panels, wind turbine blades and lithium-ion batteries could be wasted in landfills — or put back to use for the clean energy transition.

In the past decade, solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries have boomed in production volume and plummeted in price. That’s enabled many countries to accelerate the transition to lower-carbon electricity. It’s also helped electric vehicles become more mainstream, an important step in the push to decarbonize transportation.

To keep global warming from reaching catastrophic levels, production of these clean energy technologies will need to be scaled up by orders of magnitude in the coming decade.

Making all of this happen should be the first priority of anyone who cares about the fate of life on earth. But there’s another pressing priority that can’t be overlooked: A lot of the equipment that will make this crucial transition possible — and the valuable materials used to make it — could end up in landfills. 

If it’s not reused and recycled, this waste could wreak havoc on ecosystems and communities. It could also mean missing out on an accessible source of critical raw materials like lithium and cobalt, which are costly to mine and often produced in environmentally and socially harmful ways.

Today, the volume of panels, turbine blades and batteries nearing the end of their lives is relatively low. But that’s changing fast. Now is the time to ramp up recycling capacity so that it matches the growth of clean technologies that will occur over the next few decades. 

By 2030, the U.S. is expected to be decommissioning about 1 million metric tons of solar panels per year, said Maria Curry-Nkansah, head of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s circular-economy strategic initiative for advanced energy materials technology — and across the globe, the figure will be about 8 million metric tons a year. The numbers only grow from there. The worldwide total of PV waste could increase nearly tenfold by 2050, to 78million metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency.

Likewise, the roughly 600,000 metric tons of lithium-ion battery waste expected from the first generation of EVs by 2025 is set to grow to 11 million metric tons worldwide by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum. And the volume of wind turbine blades reaching end of life could hit 12 billion metric tons by 2050, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of Sustainable Metallurgy. 

So what can we do today to avoid generating these gargantuan volumes of waste in the future? Experts say the only solution is an aggressive and coordinated effort to set government regulations and establish private-sector investments that enable the recycling of clean energy technologies at massive scale. 

It’s important to point out that there’s a categorical difference between the raw materials of the clean energy economy and those of the fossil-fueled economy. Renewable energy and energy-storage systems don’t burn an irreplaceable resource and cause irreparable harm to the climate and environment in the process. Instead, they capture inexhaustible sources of energy — sunlight and wind. 

But to be considered truly sustainable, these industries need to restructure themselves in ways that allow their products to be recycled at the end of their lives. That’s going to require government mandates to limit their wanton disposal, along with effective regulatory structures to incentivize the private sector to invest in businesses and infrastructure to collect, transport, disassemble, refine, reuse and remanufacture their components. 

It’s also going to demand a lot of innovation, from new technologies for breaking down and reconstituting the components of solar panels, turbine blades and lithium-ion battery cells, to novel approaches to designing products that make their recycling simpler and safer at the end of their lives. 

The underlying challenge of raw materials 

To meet the skyrocketing U.S. and global demand for these clean energy technologies, supplies of key materials must expand dramatically. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts a quadrupling of total mineral demand for clean energy technologies by 2040 under its Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS), the pathway it prescribes for keeping global temperature rise well under 2 degrees Celsius. The projected demand trajectory for minerals used to make EVs and batteries is particularly dramatic — a greater than thirtyfold increase from today to 2040, with lithium demand growing more than fortyfold in the same timeframe.

Recycling and reuse won’t come anywhere close to eliminating the need for mining and processing ever-larger amounts of these core materials. But they can certainly make a dent. 

Take the example of batteries: By 2040, ​“recycled quantities of copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt from spent batteries could reduce combined primary supply requirements for these minerals by around 10%,” according to an IEAreport on clean energy minerals.

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“In the next 10 to 15 years, recycling is a huge component of [sourcing] the materials we’re going to need for this clean energy transition,” said Megan O’Connor, CEO of Beverly, Massachusetts–based battery and minerals recycling startup Nth Cycle. ​“But even if we recycle 100 percent of the lithium-ion batteries we’re making” by 2030, ​“that only gets us approximately 10 percent of the cobalt we’re going to need.” This underscores the fact that recycling will be most effective in tandem with new technologies that reduce or eliminate the need for various metals. 

Mining, refining and transporting raw materials used in clean energy technologies is costly and energy-intensive. It can also be environmentally harmful and subject to unpredictable interruptions in supply. For example, about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it’s mined in ways that harm the environment and have led to human-rights violations. Last year’s White House supply-chain report states that China refines 60 percent of the world’s lithium and 80 percent of the world’s cobalt, which ​“presents a critical vulnerability to the future of the domestic U.S. auto industry.”

Recycling could dramatically reduce those costs and vulnerabilities. For example, this chart from the ReCell Center, a battery recycling consortium led by the U.S. Department of Energy, indicates that a ton of battery-grade lithium could be extracted from 750 tons of lithium brine, 250 tons of lithium ore, or just 28 tons of recycled lithium-ion batteries. The metrics are even better for recycled versus mined and refined cobalt, a key ingredient of today’s most energy-dense lithium-ion batteries.

And the more sophisticated methods of recycling batteries that are beginning to emerge offer the potential to dramatically decrease energy use, water use and emissions of toxic byproducts like sulfur dioxide, according to ReCell.

But a lot needs to happen for these more sophisticated recycling methods to flourish, said Garvin Heath, a senior environmental scientist and member of the resources and sustainability group at NREL’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center. The fundamental barrier right now, ​“especially in the U.S., is that without a government mandate to recycle, there are no economies of scale yet, and costs are high,” he said. 

“We’ve done some cost modeling of PV recycling systems, and indeed, they don’t return the value greater than the cost,” he said. ​“Anecdotally, we’ve heard those costs range from $15 to $30 per module after delivery to the recycling center.” That amounts to roughly one-tenth the cost of a new solar module. 

That’s much higher than the cost to dump the materials in a landfill, Heath said. The secret to making recycling a cost-effective proposition thus lies not only in reducing the costs and increasing the value of recycling but also in increasing the costs of discarding end-of-life clean energy technologies in landfills — or outlawing it altogether. 

The role of regulations

So far, the European Union has taken the global lead in implementing recycling regulations, especially for solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.

For nearly a decade, EU member states have been required to recycle 85 percent of the materials used in solar panels under the EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. The costs of this work are covered by upfront fees on panels entering the European Union, and country-by-country regulations govern how that recycling is managed. The first recycling plant dedicated to PV recycling was opened in France in 2018 by water and waste management conglomerate Veolia, and several more are now being planned. 

Solar panel recycling initiatives in the European Union aren’t yet capturing the full recyclable value of solar panels, however, said Saloni Sachdeva Michael, a solar PV recycling policy expert and German Chancellor Research Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. That’s because the EU’s regulations are based on collecting and recycling a certain percentage of solar panels based on their weight, which allows recyclers to meet the targets by recycling just the glass and aluminum — the heaviest parts of every panel. 

That leaves out the recovery of the critical materials including silicon, copper and silver that are contained in the electricity-generating parts of the panels, she said. ​“There are a number of pilots going on in Europe” to extract these materials economically, ​“but as far as I know there is no commercially scalable process.”

Even so, Europe is still far ahead of the United States, which lacks any federal-level policy or mandate around solar panel recycling. In fact, only 15 states in the U.S. have bans on landfill disposal of electronic consumer devices that could include solar panels, according to a 2021 NREL study.

As for state-level solar recycling policies, only Washington state has passed a law to require solar manufacturers to cover the costs of recovering and recycling solar panels, and implementation of that law has been delayed for years. U.S. solar leader California has recently taken the less aggressive but still useful step of categorizing solar panels as ​“universal waste,” which could make collection and recycling less costly and complex than for items categorized as hazardous waste. New York state is exploring a similar change. 

Lithium-ion battery recycling policies are also far more advanced in the EU than in the U.S., NREL’s Heath said. In Europe, the EU has a litany of requirements for the reuse and recycling of battery materials, as well as requiring manufacturers to design batteries to be more easily recycled and mandating that new batteries include a minimum amount of recycled content. By 2027, battery and vehicle manufacturers will need to provide easily accessible information on the quantities and sources of cobalt, lithium, nickel and lead in every battery sold. 

Adding to an existing framework of regulations, these new mandates are spurring significant investments in battery recycling in Europe. Umicore, the Belgium-based global minerals and materials processing company, launched the world’s first industrial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility in 2011. It now recovers copper, cobalt and nickel in volumes of 7,000 metric tons per year, and has expanded into lithium recovery as well, a company spokesperson said in an email. Umicore has inked battery recycling agreements with automakers Audi, BMW, Volkswagen and Tesla in Europe.

The U.S., by contrast, doesn’t even have consistent state-by-state regulations for the collection and disposal of batteries used in consumer electronics, let alone EV batteries. No federal or state laws require the recycling of EV batteries or assign responsibility for funding that recycling, Heath said. California is the furthest ahead in developing such regulations; it has an advisory group that recommended policies on EV battery recycling to the state legislature earlier this year. North Carolina and New Jersey have also created similar commissions. 

At the federal level, a bill that would set up a similar task force to develop regulatory pathways for battery recycling has so far failed to advance in Congress. The infrastructure law passed by Congress in 2021 contained several billion dollars in R&D grants for battery recycling and materials processing, but it lacks funding for scaling up recycling. 

This slow progress could put U.S. automakers and battery manufacturers at risk of being disadvantaged in markets like the EU that set strict recyclability and recycled-content mandates on products being sold within their borders, said Emily Burlinghaus, a German Chancellor Fellow based at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies. ​“The EU is the second-largest market for EV sales,” she said. 

In the absence of a U.S. tracking and compliance mandate for sustainable battery manufacturing, the Global Battery Alliance, a group of more than 100 institutions including U.S. automakers and miners like Tesla, Rivian, and Controlled Thermal Resources, is stepping in to develop a ​“battery passport” program that could fill in the gaps, Burlinghaus pointed out. 

If U.S.-based recyclers are ever to gain a global competitive standing, regulatory support will be vital. Today, most electronics recycling is done outside the U.S., much of it in environmentally hazardous ways. China, which dominates the world’s primary lithium-ion battery materials industry, also hosts the majority of the world’s nascent lithium-ion battery recycling capacity. 

“There are lots of critical pieces of the supply chain — not just mining, not just refining — that have gone to China,” Nth Cycle’s O’Connor noted. ​“Now we’re trying to claw it back.” 

The economics of recycling clean energy technologies

Regulations are essential to spur the growth of the complex chain of businesses needed to drive down recycling costs, said Thea Soule, chief commercial officer at Ecobat. A global recycler of lead-acid car batteries, Ecobat is now applying what it has learned in its main line of business to the task of recycling lithium-ion batteries. 

“When we think about the economies around recycling [lead-acid] batteries, the ability for technology to catch up with the inherent value of that metal was crucial to create this positive feedback loop” of scale and profitability, Soule said. 

About 99 percent of all lead-acid batteries are recycled in the U.S. today, she said. That’s the result of decades of public policy and private-sector investment working together. Most states prohibit the disposal of lead-acid batteries in landfills, and many require auto dealers or manufacturers to retrieve and recycle them. Most lead-acid batteries share the same simple roster of materials and form factors, allowing simple disassembly, often in automated facilities. 

Those processes are tightly regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to mitigate risks to workers and the environment. And the lead that comes out the other end is of high quality, allowing it to be sold for a tidy profit. 

But lithium-ion batteries are a far different prospect. They include a multitude of different chemistries that are under continuous development and come in different form factors, from consumer electronics and power tools to EVs and stationary storage applications. The U.S. lacks any common regulations or standards for how lithium-ion batteries can be diverted to recyclers in volumes needed to reach profitable scale.

What’s more, lithium-ion batteries can overheat, catch fire and explode if improperly handled, earning them a ​“hazardous materials” designation from the EPA. Developing standards to manage the collection, transportation and secondary-market creation for end-of-life EV batteries ​“is a big piece of the challenge,” Curry-Nkansah said. 

The uncertainty, risk and complexity of managing this type of waste make it hard for any single company to confidently invest in the lithium-ion recycling chain. To date, the U.S. recycling rate for lithium-ion batteries of all categories is less than 20 percent, Soule said. 

“That statistic is a lot different in Europe because of the regulations around recycling and end of life,” which ​“encourage a nascent market to become efficient and allow the technology to catch up,” she said. 

The U.S. landscape is starting to change on this front, though, driven by the Biden administration’s efforts to secure domestic battery manufacturing and supply chains and a growing recognition from U.S. automakers of the importance of building recyclability into their plans. 

Li-Cycle, a startup that went public via special-purpose acquisition company merger last year, has a deal with Ultium Cells, the battery joint venture of General Motors and LG Chem, and is planning a recycling facility near Ultium’s Ohio battery plant. It’s also working with mining giant Glencore, which invested $200 million in Li-Cycle last month. 

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel that raised more than $700 million from investors, is planning to invest more than $1 billion in facilities to produce battery anodes and cathodes from recycled and ​“sustainably mined” materials. It has a partnership with Ford and is working with Ford and Volvo to fund the free collection of spent EV batteries in California. (Read more about Li-Cycle, Redwood and other companies recycling lithium-ion batteries.)

Both of these startups are promising their technologies can recover, on average, more than 95 percent of the valuable constituent materials of lithium-ion batteries. But they haven’t yet revealed data on the costs of their recycling processes or sourcing batteries. 

A recent analysis from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a leading global metals analysis firm, identified what it called the ​“multiple threats” that might prevent lithium-ion battery recycling from reaching scale and profitability in the U.S. They include low collection rates from customers, a highly heterogeneous range of battery chemistries and formats to deal with, and a varied and uncertain value for the metals that can be recovered from the process. 

“This variability around what is a lithium-ion battery makes it difficult for you to value and perform the operation of recycling, because your extraction techniques can vary widely,” Ecobat’s Soule said. 

Can these processes of collection, transport, disassembly and core recycling produce end materials at a price the market can bear? It’s a highly complex calculation. The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has developed a tool to model battery recycling costs and environmental impacts dubbed EverBatt. It can put some hard figures to the task of assessing the cost-effectiveness of various recycling approaches at different scales and stages of process improvement, as well as under a variety of pricing scenarios for different metals and chemicals. 

In an ironic twist, some efforts to lower upfront costs and environmental impacts of the raw materials used in clean energy technologies may also reduce their recycling value. Lithium-ion battery makers are working on designs that use less cobalt and more lower-cost metals like zinc or iron, for example — a step that could significantly reduce the costs and harms stemming from cobalt mining, but also remove one of the highest-value metals from the list of those that can be recovered by recyclers. 

From recycling to a circular economy? 

Finding ways to recycle solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other clean-energy products as they’re made today is a pressing issue. But just as important is redesigning products on the front end so that their end-of-life recyclability is as simple and cost-effective as possible. 

“We need a well-considered approach that includes applying circular-economy principles for resource management and supply-chain resiliency,” Curry-Nkansah said. NREL’s research on the circular economy for clean energy materials is aimed at developing new materials with lower costs and lower environmental impacts and extending their useful lives. It also promotes the concepts of ​“remanufacture” and ​“reuse” — disassembling and putting back together products and their individual components without breaking them down to their constituent elements, as recycling does.

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NREL’s circular-economy work also includes research into how to make products that use fewer and different materials in ways that reduce total carbon and waste emissions, as well as how to more efficiently manage their decommissioning, collection and transport to lower the costs of returning them to the supply chain. 

In terms of batteries, NREL has been focusing much of its research on ​“direct recycling,” Curry-Nkasah said — a term for a process that leaves battery cathodes intact instead of shredding them so they can be reused in new batteries. This can allow for the reuse of a broader array of battery component materials, including cathodes for battery chemistries such as lithium iron phosphate that are cheaper to produce but worth less to recyclers. 

The EU’s battery regulations take circularity into account with their emphasis on designing lithium-ion EV batteries that can both use recycled content and be more easily recycled at end of life. Umicore, BMW and Swedish lithium-ion battery manufacturer Northvolt are working on a ​“closed life-cycle loop” battery facility aimed at putting these principles into practice. 

A number of researchers and companies are exploring how to design solar panels made of more durable and less toxic materials in configurations that allow for easier disassembly or simpler reuse or recycling options. Manufacturers of wind turbines are undergoing similar efforts with composite fiberglass blades, which are difficult and costly to disassemble or recycle today.

To make all of this happen, manufacturers of solar panels, wind turbine blades and lithium-ion batteries will need compelling reasons to prioritize these potentially costly design and materials decisions. That will require public policies that discourage private-sector parties from ignoring these factors in a quest to lower costs and compete for market share, and encourage them to work together on designing products that offer financial as well as environmental rewards. 

The ultimate goal is to create a true ​“circular economy” for these devices, Heath said. ​“We have to [recycle] — eventually products get to end of life.” But given the massive growth in clean energy technologies and the resulting demand for raw materials, ​“recycling should be the last choice, basically.”

Solarcycle is proud to support Canary’s Recycling Renewables series. Solarcycle offers solar asset owners a low-cost, eco-friendly, comprehensive process for retiring solar systems. We pull out valuable metals such as silver, silicon and aluminum and have the technology to recycle 95% of panels currently in use. Follow Solarcycle on LinkedIn as we ramp up to meet this pivotally important challenge at giga-factory scale.

This story originally appeared at Canary Media and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story, of which Real Leaders is a member.

Can blockchain help save the environment? Phil Rickard thinks so.

Rickard is the founder and CEO of Nature’s Vault, a Canadian company that has developed a blockchain-based investment platform to accelerate the funding of impact investments to combat climate change and ecosystem damage. 

The firm’s initial focus is on deploying a “Legacy Token” to tackle the environmental impacts of gold mining. But Rickard believes that the same technology and vision can be a solution for other natural resources projects to mitigate climate change, water issues, and other environmental challenges.

The Legacy Token launched last quarter will monetize the preservation of in-ground gold deposits at a mine in the Thunder Bay area of Ontario, Canada. The token finances the preservation of gold in the ground, thus avoiding the environmental impact of physical mining. Rickard says it is the world’s “first zero-carbon gold preservation linked investment.”

Keeping gold in the ground represents a unique and needed opportunity for the industry. 

“The simple reality is that 50 percent of gold mined — all with negative environmental impact—is collecting dust in bank vaults. Leaving it in the ground is nature’s vault,” says Rickard. “It’s time for the industry to evolve, and blockchain technology enables us to hasten that evolution by monetizing the store of value of gold without destroying the environment.”

A Personal Evolution

The genesis of Nature’s Vault reflects a personal evolution for Rickard. A philosophy-major-turned-entrepreneur born in Calgary, Alberta, Rickard spent his formative years in Indonesia and has also lived in Boston and Singapore. 

Rickard credits his eclectic career in Fintech, artificial intelligence (AI), and traditional hard rock mining for giving him a unique perspective on how to integrate blockchain and tokenization into natural resources. But it was a conversation with his teenage daughter that, in part, spurred the launch of Nature’s Vault. 

“I was investing in coal mining at the time, and my daughter said to me, ‘Can I tell my friends you’re a banker? It’s a bit embarrassing that you’re in the coal mining industry,'” he recalls. “I laughed it off at the time, but when your children are uncomfortable with your career, it makes you rethink your priorities.”

From there, Rickard visited the Lihir open-pit gold mine in Papua New Guinea — one of the largest in the world and a remarkable feat of engineering — but also a significant scar on the earth. “Seeing that made me think: Is there a way to realize the value in minerals like gold without digging them up?”    

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Here’s how the Nature’s Vault blockchain-based platform aims to tokenize the planet’s natural resources and unlock the value of gold assets at the Pistol Lake mine in Canada.

• Nature’s Vault acquired the rights to an estimated 150,000 ounces of gold in the Pistol Lake mine. The mineral resource estimate was produced by an independent 43-101 Technical Report, the standard geological disclosure rule in Canada. Nature’s Vault has created “Legacy Tokens” representing an allocation of these unmined gold deposits. Each token equals 0.01 grams of gold.
• Nature’s Vault will only tokenize up to 80% of the gold, ensuring that it never allocates more gold than is present in its deposits.
• The initial Legacy Token offering to investors will launch in Q3 on a Tier 1 digital asset exchange and has already kicked off an oversubscribed private sale round.  
• With a goal to achieve a net-zero future, Nature’s Vault is also exploring ways for token holders to earn carbon credits from avoided mining.

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A Golden Climate Opportunity

The global mining industry is ripe for the disruption that Nature’s Vault suggests. According to McKinsey, mining is currently responsible for 4% to 7% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In addition, S&P Global estimates that mining one ounce of gold causes the emission of up to 800kg of greenhouse gases. While the industry is actively working to adapt to lower emissions, it’s also racing to scale up the production of clean-energy metals essential to the transition to a low-carbon future. Caught between these somewhat conflicting priorities, miners must rapidly find new ways to reduce their overall carbon footprint.     

Tokenizing ESG

Looking to the future, Rickard sees multiple scenarios for the Nature’s Vault platform. With a recent seed funding round, the firm’s focus is firmly on executing the Legacy Tokens. On the horizon, he believes tokens could be leveraged to enable ESG investors to buy and invest in a range of projects to address environmental and social equity challenges — from reforestation projects in Indonesia to carbon offsets earned from avoiding gold mining. 

“We are bringing our breakthrough approach to tokenizing ESG projects to help mitigate climate change in a transparent manner via distributed ledger technology and a platform that can be replicated and scaled up for future growth.”

Seven new environmental books offer practical advice, lessons from successful conservation projects and inspiration in troubled times.

These are the times that try our souls — and our Facebook feeds.

So if you’re tired of the horrors unfolding hour after hour on social media and TV news, stop doomscrolling and point your eyes somewhere more useful: seven new environmental books that offer vital lessons on saving the planet and the creatures that live here.

Some of these books — all of which have come out since the beginning of the year — provide practical advice for people working in specific conservation areas. Others offer experience that we can put to good use in multiple avenues. All offer inspiration at a time when that’s all too fleeting — and important to hold on to. John R. Platt, editor of The Revelator — a news and ideas initiative of the Center for Biological Diversity — shares his top picks.

The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet

by Leah Thomas

The Revelator’s take: If you’ve ever heard the term “intersectional environmentalism,” you have Thomas to thank. The writer-activist focuses on the relationship between social justice and the environment, and she has a lot to say and learn from in this vital new book.

From the publisher: “From the activist who coined the term comes a primer on intersectional environmentalism for the next generation of activists looking to create meaningful, inclusive and sustainable change. Thomas shows how not only are Black, Indigenous and people of color unequally and unfairly impacted by environmental injustices, but she argues that the fight for the planet lies in tandem to the fight for civil rights; and in fact, that one cannot exist without the other. An essential read, this book addresses the most pressing issues that the people and our planet face, examines and dismantles privilege and looks to the future as the voice of a movement that will define a generation.”

Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

by John W. Reid and Thomas E Lovejoy

The Revelator’s take: Lovejoy, a groundbreaking biologist, died late last year, but his ideas and influence live on. They’re also more important than ever, with deforestation increasing both in rate and climate impact.

From the publisher: “Megaforests serve an essential role in decarbonizing the atmosphere — the boreal alone holds 1.8 trillion metric tons of carbon in its deep soils and peat layers, 190 years’ worth of global emissions at 2019 levels — and saving them is the most immediate and affordable large-scale solution to our planet’s most formidable ongoing crisis. Reid and Lovejoy offer practical solutions to address the biggest challenges these forests face, from vastly expanding protected areas, to supporting Indigenous forest stewards to planning smarter road networks.”

Effective Conservation: Parks, Rewilding and Local Development

by Ignacio Jiménez

The Revelator’s take: This book speaks to a specific type of reader — the people directly working on conserving parks — but shouldn’t that be all of us, anyway?

From the publisher: “Jiménez offers a pragmatic approach to conservation that puts the focus on working with people — neighbors, governments, politicians, businesses, media — to ensure they have a long-term stake in protecting and restoring parks and wildlife. This highly readable manual, newly translated into English after successful Spanish and Portuguese editions, provides a groundbreaking and time-proven formula for successful conservation projects around the world that bring together parks, people and nature.”

Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction

by Helen Anne Curry

The Revelator’s take: As we’ve written, agricultural crops face increasing pressure from climate change, pathogens and other threats, and the wild varieties of these common foods may provide the answer to avoiding mass hunger.

From the publisher: “Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world’s most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.”

Was It Worth It? A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home

by Doug Peacock

The Revelator’s take: I’ve been dipping in and out of this beautifully produced book ever since I received a review copy a few months ago. At 80 Peacock has a lot to say as he looks back in a way that helps us look forward.

From the publisher: “In a collection of gripping stories of adventure, bestselling author Doug Peacock — loner, iconoclast, environmentalist and contemporary of Edward Abbey — reflects on a life lived in the wild, considering the question many ask in their twilight years: Was It Worth It?”

Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities

edited by Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, Chris Fremantle and Aviva Rahmani

The Revelator’s take: Here’s another way to stop doomscrolling by breaking out your pens, markers and paint (or graphics software if you’re digitally inclined) and getting ready to make a difference.

From the publisher: “How do we educate those who feel an urgency to address our environmental and social challenges? What ethical concerns do art-makers face who are committed to a deep green agenda? How can we refocus education to emphasize integrative thinking and inspire hope? What role might art play in actualizing environmental resilience? Compiled from 67 members of the Ecoart Network, a group of more than 200 internationally established practitioners, Ecoart in Action stands as a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges.”

The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird

by Jack E. Davis

The Revelator’s take: The new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea feels especially timely, with several new bird extinctions announced last year and the need to counter those losses with tales of conservation success.

From the publisher: “Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves — monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents — The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.”

John R. Platt is the editor of The Revelator. An award-winning environmental journalist, his work has appeared in Scientific American, Audubon, Motherboard, and numerous other magazines and publications.

This story originally appeared in The Revelator and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Just four years after launching a pilot plant in Canada, Li-Cycle has raised US$500 million from high profile investors to build out EV battery recycling plants and hubs across the U.S.

There’s no shortage of evidence that the electric vehicle market hit some kind of inflection point in the last year or so. But for Ajay Kochhar, the CEO and co-founder of Li-Cycle, the telling detail was buyer response to General Motors’ very first e-Silverado. The initial production run sold out in 12 minutes on the day it went up for sale in early January – and this is for a pickup that won’t roll off the assembly line until 2024. “Consumers,” as he says, “are speaking.”

And Kochhar is listening. Just four years after launching a small pilot plant in Kingston, Ontario, Li-Cycle has emerged as a formidable player in the nascent EV-battery recycling industry. Now publicly traded (LICY: NYSE), the company quickly raised more than US$500 million from investors. Last year, it secured another US$150 million in strategic infusions from global battery-maker LG Energy Solution, a partner in a newly announced $4.9-billion EV-battery plant in Windsor, Ontario, and Koch Strategic Platforms to build three large facilities in Alabama, Arizona and upstate New York. (While the oil and gas empire run by the Koch family has lobbied heavily against climate action, Koch companies have been investing in a number of renewable sector start-ups of late.)

With early-stage backing from Carnelian Energy Capital, a Houston venture fund, last spring the company also inked a deal with Ultium, the sprawling EV-battery joint venture established by GM and LG Chem, to set up a processing facility within a huge new Ohio battery-plant complex. The value of its planned capital investments is now almost half a billion dollars. As Li-Cycle has told investors, it expects to be recovering battery-grade materials from the equivalent of 60,000 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries annually by 2023.

Investors aren’t the only ones paying attention. In its national blueprint for lithium batteries for 2021 to 2030, the U.S. government puts a heavy strategic emphasis on recycling lithium-ion EV batteries, citing research showing that batteries that use recycled materials can cut costs by 40%, water consumption in the production process by 77% and energy use by 82%.

Not surprisingly, Li-Cycle’s sector is rapidly becoming a very crowded space, attracting China’s battery giant CATL (which currently claims to recycle enough lithium for 200,000 EVs per year), as well as huge investments by multinationals like Nissan, BASF and Tesla, via Redwood Materials, a battery-recycling company founded by a Tesla co-founder. All this activity is being driven in part by the relative scarcity of both lithium and cobalt, another ingredient of lithium-ion batteries, as well as the car industry’s efforts to achieve carbon reduction targets. Meeting those targets pivots on transitioning to electric power but also on contending with the pollution and emissions associated with mountains of used batteries. “It’s a make-or-break moment for the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers],” says Kochhar. “They’re looking at recycling as a way to reach net-zero and have a domestic supply source instead of going to the ends of the earth.”

Lithium, a metal found in abundance in Chile, Australia and China, has long been recognized for its ability to pack a lot of energy into relatively small volumes – hence its widespread use in consumer electronics. When Elon Musk began building EVs, he reckoned he could use lithium-ion batteries to power his vehicles, with modules consisting of stacks of the sorts of batteries used in laptops. Since the original Tesla debuted in 2006, demand for lithium has been climbing a steep growth curve. “In 2019 the installed capacity of lithium-ion batteries in the world exceeded 700 [gigawatt hours],” noted a 2021 life-cycle-analysis report prepared by Circular Energy Storage, a U.K. consultancy. “Of this 51% was installed in light or heavy duty electric vehicles. The same number in 2015 was 19% and in 2010 it was less than 1%.” Commodity prices for clean energy minerals have also soared, setting off something of a geopolitical sprint to secure access to both lithium and cobalt, the lion’s share of which is found in mines in the Republic of Congo. China has been busy snapping up global lithium resources (it recently acquired a Canadian lithium mine).

New mines often face heavy opposition (environmental protests in Serbia earlier this year over a proposed Rio Tinto lithium mine led to cancellation of the project). With surging EV demand over the next decade, the major challenge, according to a 2021 paper in Nature, will be scaling up the mining and production of lithium, which is itself an energy intensive process. And a bit further out, the accumulation of out-of-service batteries could begin to look like yet another geyser of post-consumer waste.

In short, the theoretical case for recycling seems obvious and important, not just for environmental reasons but to mitigate the geopolitical conflicts associated with lithium and cobalt mining.

However, EV battery recycling is a complicated proposition, for both electrochemical and logistical reasons. “This was a constant question for us,” says Kochhar, a chemical engineer who led a lithium study for a cleantech consulting arm of Hatch, the engineering giant, before co-founding Li-Cycle. “People would ask, what would happen with the used batteries?”

Unlike conventional car batteries, used EV batteries are not a uniform size, often weigh hundreds of kilograms and, in many cases, are integrated into a vehicle’s chassis or power train. While an EV battery may last more than a decade, the spent version still contains plenty of energy, enough to inflict serious harm on handlers. The first order of business for recyclers, therefore, is to drain the residual power, which can be done in various ways, including submerging them in an electrolyte, as Li-Cycle does. Recyclers then need to remove the plastic casing and reprocess the battery’s exposed innards, including the metals they’re made of: lithium, cobalt, nickel and other elements.

There are various techniques: exposing this material to extremely high heat or, as Li-Cycle does, “shredding” it into what’s known as a “black mass” – a confection of metallic crumbs that can be separated into its component metals and used as feedstock to make new batteries. But before any of this can occur, recycling firms need to secure supplies of used EV batteries. Although that process may be more straightforward than has been the case with consumer electronics, which often don’t end up in a recycling stream at all.

Li-Cycle’s secret sauce, which appears to have attracted investor attention, has more to do with the logistics of recycling heavy car batteries than with the electrochemical processes involved. The company opted to parse the whole process into what it calls a “spoke and hub” model. Some of the company’s plants – the “spokes” – will collect, drain and mechanically shred spent batteries, with the valuable residue – the black mass – shipped to a large centralized metallurgical facility in Rochester, New York, where that material is separated back into its component metals. These will then be sold back to the battery manufacturers or carmakers.

“This is reverse logistics,” Kochhar explains. “You don’t want to be transporting these massive batteries cross-country. It’s going to cost a lot, won’t be safe, and our customers like LG and GM – they won’t do that, right? That’s where our spoke comes in.”

This approach, he adds, has been designed to minimize emissions – a lot less shipping, no burning, and reclaiming the scrap generated by the shredding process. The company’s strategy is to construct 20 spoke plants and four hub facilities worldwide over the next three years. Li-Cycle also claims that its process generates 25 to 30% less life-cycle carbon than other battery recycling techniques.

For all of Li-Cycle’s bullishness about its future, there are still many tough questions hovering over this piece of the EV revolution. Among them: will recycling provide enough lithium and cobalt to meet future demand, or whether reprocessing aging EV batteries is better for the planet than other uses for the residual power in these objects, such as stationary energy-storage applications like back-up power instead of diesel generators.

Finally, we need to ask what role public policy plays in this story. The European Union will phase in tough recycling requirements by 2030. The Biden administration, as part of its lithium battery blueprint, calls for incentives to achieve 90% recycling for consumer electronics, EVs and grid storage batteries by 2030, as well as federal requirements to ensure that recycled metals are in fact used to make new ones. (Clean Energy Canada, a Simon Fraser University think tank, has called for a similar policy framework for an EV-battery supply chain that, to date, does not exist).

Kochhar, for his part, wants Li-Cycle to be driven by market forces and not subsidies. Which is fair enough, but it’s difficult to argue that public policy shouldn’t play some role in ensuring that these heavy, chemically volatile objects stay out of landfills – the final destination of countless numbers of smartphone batteries.

“How do you get those materials back from consumers?” he says. “That’s a big challenge.”

This story originally appeared in Corporate Knights and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

This story title is not a rude or hysterical question. It’s not an alarmist plea for protection against a theoretical future threat. It’s a now question.

‘It is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.’ — Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ 2021.

In the early 1980s, US playwright Larry Kramer penned an article he furiously titled “What are you doing to save my fucking life?” Kramer was writing on behalf of gay men like himself who were dying of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids) in growing numbers. Kramer’s ire was primarily directed at the US government, clinical researchers and the big pharmaceutical companies that manufacture medicines.

But it was also aimed at other Aids activists who Kramer condemned for being quiescent and captured.

Anger can be life-saving energy and it took the unfiltered anger of activists like Kramer, who died in 2020, to bring into being organisations like Act-Up (the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) and catalyse a political movement around Aids. As the epidemic spread, so did activist organisations and, over the next 15 years, Aids activism spread to developing countries, inspiring activists and organisations including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which I helped found in faraway South Africa in 1998.

With hindsight, we can see how targeted anger helped shatter the inertia and complacency around HIV/Aids; it shattered a status quo that would otherwise have allowed queers and poor black people to die, if they would only have stayed quiet about it. By 2022 savvy activism has contributed to saving 50 million lives by compelling the development of political will by governments and the United Nations. Activism also put Big Pharma under sufficient pressure to make their drugs affordable to poor people in developing countries, forcing the funding and rollout of antiretroviral treatment programmes even to the most discarded populations.

Today, in the face of the climate catastrophe, people in developing countries and people of colour in rich countries, those who bear the brunt of inequality (as we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic), might well be demanding the same answer about global heating. Let’s say it again: 

“What are you doing to save our fucking lives?” 

This is not a rude or hysterical question. It’s not an alarmist plea for protection against a theoretical future threat. 

It’s a now question. 

In 2018 alone, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), 17.2 million people in 144 countries were internally displaced due to natural disasters. In the decade between 2008 and 2018, says the IDMC, climate change forced the migration of 265 million people. 

‘Climate refugees’, to put it impolitely.

By 2021 it was calculated that climate change was already causing five million excess deaths a year. The vast majority of these deaths occur in developing countries, where poor people continue to die prematurely of the things they usually die of: except there’s a new determinant in town — climate change. 

And, as the latest (April 2022) IPCC report shows, inaction means it’s only going to get worse. And worse.

But because these excess deaths are out of sight, and rarely attributed to climate change, they are kept out of the media and so mostly out of mind of the world’s elites. Western governments and the multilateral institutions of the UN that they have captured have yet to develop a conscience over the untold harm their carbon emissions are causing.

And on the side of the poor, there isn’t enough anger yet. So there isn’t enough action.

Political will to confront the climate crisis

In his 2021 book How to Spend a Trillion Dollars: The 10 Global Problems we can actually fix, Rowan Hooper states the obvious. He provides evidence to show there is no technical or economic barrier to a just energy transition: “The barrier is political, at every level.” 

I say obvious because after 20 years of law-abiding activism, and in the face of incontrovertible science, by now it should be clear that, just as with the Aids epidemic, political will to seriously confront the climate crisis will not develop spontaneously from above. It will come only after a fight that will have to be driven by a historically unprecedented mobilisation of citizen activists from below.

Tragically though, at this moment the climate movement feels a bit stuck. There’s lots of outrage and theatre, but not enough movement-building. Why?

Throughout history, civil society has been a weather vane for emerging issues. This is because it is always closer to ground zero than governments. It senses issues before they become “ISSUES”; it uses activism to force them on to the agenda of the media and later government. 

However, activism too is usually coloured by class and privilege. To be successful in changing the world it too has to go through its own evolution, and whether it does (or not) determines its impact.

In this sense, climate and environmental activism are no different from Aids activism. 

Its modern incarnation began in the 1960s. Starting in the North (long before it was felt as an issue in developing countries) it was catalysed by exposés like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the first (largely overlooked) warnings from scientists about the dangers of global heating. 

By the early 2000s, a revolution was under way. For example, in his book Blessed Unrest, environmentalist Paul Hawken claimed that by 2007 there were one to two million organisations across the globe working on environmental justice: optimistically, he called this “the largest social movement in history” claiming that it was “restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the world.” 

But Hawken’s predictions underestimated the challenges. Environmental movements remained marginalised, stigmatised and (in parts of the world) persecuted until, in the past decade, a new radicalism erupted through campaigns like the Extinction Rebellion and youth movements like #FridaysForFuture inspired by Greta Thunberg. 

At every stage, activists have sought to inject urgency, boldness and imagination into official processes and there’s no doubt they have had an impact. Incrementally, their influence has been felt in multilateral fora like the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, leading to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and later the Paris Agreement struck in 2015. 

Most recently activists descended on COP26, held in Glasgow in November 2021, and organised the largest ever Global Day of Action for climate change with an estimated 100,000 people taking to the streets in Glasgow.

But it wasn’t enough. That is why, just like the Aids movement before it, the climate justice movement is now having to face up to its demons. 

When the Aids movement began in the mid-1980s it too was located in developed countries among middle-class people who found it outrageous to contemplate dying in their twenties and thirties. Their campaigns were inspiring but Aids activism only acquired its political and moral power when it became a representative global movement. 

That took more than a decade.

The same is happening with the climate crisis. Even though people in the global South are bearing the brunt of climate death and disruption, and are the least protected against future cyclones and storms (literally), in my part of the world activists are still having to fight for basic political freedoms, as well as for socioeconomic rights such as access to sufficient food, clean water, healthcare and basic education.

To the Global South the climate crisis is often hard to distinguish from the other depredations of authoritarianism, capitalism and corruption that are causing mass hunger, disease, violence and other miseries.  

In South Africa, the most unequal country in the world according to the World Bank, mass unemployment (now 35.3%) together with inequalities in access to health, education and food are still front of mind. Or front of belly. 

Only recently has there been a spurt in climate-related activism.

In the past six months, NGOs initiated successful public interest litigation to challenge #DeadlyAir pollution in the province of Mpumalanga (where coal-fired power stations have made the air pollution as bad as anywhere in the world); to halt Amazon’s attempts to build a new Africa HQ on a historic wetland in central Cape Town and against Shell’s efforts to conduct a seismic survey for fossil fuels off the West Coast of South Africa. 

Organisations such as the Amadiba Crisis Committee, based in rural villages in a part of the Eastern Cape, who are fighting to stop the mining of ecologically sensitive areas are valorised as Davids in a fight against multinational Goliaths. 

And so, belatedly, activism is catalysing government action on the climate crisis. In 2020 a Presidential Climate Commission was established; in 2021 South Africa adopted a more ambitious target for reducing its carbon emissions and a Climate Change Bill is expected to be passed by Parliament before the end of the year.  

Yet the climate justice movement still only numbers several thousand people and has not taken root in trade unions, faith-based organisations or poor communities — even though these are the people most at risk.

The trillion-dollar question is how climate activism in SA and internationally, goes to scale and unleashes its power.

2020s or bust: Scaling up and building power

Up to now, climate activists have worked from the same activist toolbox as the Aids movement; using protest, civil disobedience and litigation; mobilising the media; shaming politicians and fossil-fuel tsars; building alliances with scientists and sympathetic governments from countries that have recognised their vulnerability, like Small Island States.

But despite these commendable efforts, it’s not enough. 

The too-little-too-slowly responses to climate activism have exposed the extent to which Western governments in particular will promote the form but deny the fruits of participatory democracy. This exposes the extent to which Big Fossil Fuels have captured and corrupted politicians of all persuasions. 

In the face of Aids activist pressure, Big Pharma eventually had to drop prices and profits on essential antiretroviral drugs. But Big Fossil Fuel is proving a more difficult foe than Big Pharma. 

If the aim of advocacy is to shift policy and practice, then climate activists are fast discovering that there is some practice beyond their reach. Witness, for example, the gulf between US President Biden’s convenient rhetoric on climate change and his timid practice. 

Even in a relatively new constitutional democracy like SA’s, where Big Fossil is less well embedded in political structures, and where there exist enormous opportunities for creating jobs and new economic pathways through renewable energy, the violence of inaction goes on. 

Here Big Fossil is propped up by a faction in the governing ANC that is still committed to mining coal and other fossil fuels. At its worst, it has resorted to murder. At its mildest, it has tried to cloud issues by accusing environmental activists of having an “imperialist agenda” and representing “colonialism of a special type”.

This would be laughable if it wasn’t catastrophic because, in this standoff, civil society does not have the luxury of much time to refine its strategy and ‘theory of change’. In developed and developing countries alike, climate change is now triggering a vicious spiral that is a threat to even the attenuated democratic freedoms we have now. 

What do I mean?

In July 2019 Phillip Alston, then the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, issued a report to the UN Human Rights Council on Poverty and Climate Change that joined the dots between climate catastrophe, human rights and the future of democracy.

Eschewing the use of expletives a la Kramer, Alston warned of states responding to climate change “by augmenting government powers and circumscribing some rights”; he predicted “immense and unprecedented challenges to governance”; and that “growing inequality and of even greater levels of deprivation among some groups will likely stimulate nationalist, xenophobic, racist and other responses”.

In parts of the world Alston’s hypothesis is already being borne out and — should we need further persuasion — Covid-19 has been a salutary lesson of how, in this age of anxiety and anger, governments respond to crises by limiting, not deepening, democratic rights.

These are reasons why I believe we are at a watershed moment for climate activism. 

Temporarily knocked back by Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, civil society now needs to use democracy to its full potential. But side by side with this it will have to build its political power. It will have to reach and convince tens of millions, not tens of thousands. While keeping focus it will have to ally with class struggles for social justice and equality. It will have to move from mobilising fear to mobilising hope, popularising and persuading people of feasible alternatives and forcing political will.

It will be a struggle for and over power. This means that much like generations of freedom fighters against racism in South Africa and elsewhere, climate activists may have to take risks with their own freedom or risk losing both the possibility of climate justice and the bigger battle for democracy. 

The stakes could not be higher.

Mark Heywood is a social justice activist and the editor of Maverick Citizen. He was a co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and several other civil society organisations.

This story originally appeared in Daily Maverick and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Sustainability and combating climate change are among the most critical global issues today. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals underscore this point. Nowhere is that more evident than in small island nations and territories.

Reliance on outside sources for many goods (including food) and services, challenges with waste management, susceptibility to hurricanes and extreme weather events, and economic dependence on tourism can make these communities especially vulnerable. Island Green Living Association, a nonprofit on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, was created to expand sustainability and combat the fallout from these looming issues. Perusing their tax returns shows nearly zero expense for development/fundraising as a volunteer board manages it.

Sixty-seven percent of St. John is preserved as national parkland. But with more than a million visitors a year, hundreds of times greater than the number of residents, St. John is at risk. The territory’s natural beauty attracts travelers, but these visitors are also a threat, causing increased pollution and a burden on resources. Since St. John is the smallest and least developed of the three U.S. Virgin Islands (which include St. Thomas and St. Croix), it’s the organization’s primary focus to institute meaningful change throughout the territory and ultimately serve as a roadmap for other locales throughout the world.

With its motto of “rethink, reduce, reuse, recycle,” Island Green Living has made significant strides in promoting sustainability. Its success has been collaborating with public and private entities and NGOs, forming solid partnerships, and engaging the community. 

“We cannot succeed alone,” explains Harith Wickrema, board president of Island Green Living. “Engagement is critical. We’ve made it a point to connect with the local community, including schools, businesses, those in government, and nonprofits, as well as larger entities outside the territory. A recent example is our collaboration with PADNOS, a Michigan-based recycling company, on our new Ocean-Bound Plastics Recycling Program, which debut in February 2022.”

Island Green Living’s priority is to eliminate the use of disposable plastics whenever possible. The Ocean-Bound Plastics Recycling Program, a first for the island, allows plastic that is already part of the waste stream to be reclaimed and recycled rather than polluting the land and sea. PADNOS provided Island Green Living with a baler retrofitted inside a converted shipping container, so the processing operation is fully self-contained. They also contributed to a new pick-up truck and provided dedicated bins placed at popular trash collection sites throughout the island. In addition, PADNOS has committed to purchasing and transporting recyclable material on deadheaded shipping containers – containers that otherwise would have returned empty. 

The collaboration goes beyond PADNOS. Island Green Living was able to secure the commitment of Governor Albert Bryan Jr., Senate President Donna Frett-Gregory, and Congresswoman Stacey E. Plaskett, who serves as the territory’s representative in the U.S. House, to support the measure and attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony. This created excitement and awareness in the community, accentuating their dedication to expanding sustainability. 

“There must be a commitment to make recycling a priority. And as leaders, we must find ways to make it a reality,” said Frett-Gregory. “We have the vision; we just need the will.”

“We need to be intentional with our consumption and actively engage in recycling to reduce pollution, protect our beautiful environment, and fight the climate crisis to ensure we sustain the planet for future generations,” Plaskett stated at the event.

“We aren’t just in recovery; we are rebuilding the Virgin Islands,” Governor Bryan emphasized. “We are building for the future.” 

Grassroots tactics also included outreach to local schools to encourage single-use plastics collections, signage creation, an essay contest, and more. Island Green Living representatives visited the school to educate the student body on the program. They have also forged awareness campaigns with local businesses and the general public starting with an open house and tour on the day of ribbon-cutting and regular community events. Encouraging residents and tourists to volunteer at the facility to have hands-on engagement has also been very popular.  

Island Green Living has initiated similar tactics with its other sustainable programming, turning what many would consider “waste” into a resource while collaborating with outside entities for funding and support. Island Green’s Aluminum Can Recycling Program has collected, crushed, and recycled nearly 1.3 million cans; the Resource Depot thrift shop has kept more than 650,000 pounds of used building materials & household items from the landfill; and the Brush Chipping Program has processed more than 4,000 cubic yards of green and brown debris to date, allowing this rich resource to remain on the island rather than being shipped to the landfill. Island Green arranged free Sustainable Deconstruction workshops late last year, providing instruction on recovering materials for reuse during demolition projects – a potential avenue for green career advancement. They have sponsored aquaponics and hydroponics farming programs at a local school. The board president sits on the governor’s Agricultural Plan Task Force, designed to expand sustainable agriculture in the territory. 

In addition to education, the organization has also found it helpful to support sustainable legislation. For example, Island Green Living led the effort for a local law banning the “Toxic 3 Os” of oxybenzone, octinoxate, and octocrylene in sunscreen, which is devastating to coral marine life, and human health. They continue to educate on the use of safe mineral sunscreens, partnering with Hawaii and 60 other entities on filing a Citizen Petition calling on the FDA to recall these toxins nationally. In addition, they were among the architects of the territory’s bans on disposable plastic bags and straws. 

“Cooperation and education are key,” added Wickrema. “We are firm believers that once people understand the damage their actions can cause and how they can make a difference, they will be part of the solution. But it’s opening those doors and making those connections that is everything.”

A trash-eating boat could clean up the world’s rivers.

A Dutch foundation devoted to fighting plastic pollution in the world’s oceans has unveiled a new device designed to stop it from reaching the sea in the first place: by collecting and cleaning plastic waste from major rivers. The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-governmental organization, best known for its attempts to collect and clean plastic from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” says it has been testing a system based on similar principles — a floating barrier to collect plastic passively — for use in rivers.

“To solve the plastic pollution problem, we need to do two things: Clean up what’s already in the oceans and prevent more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place,” says 25-year-old founder Boyan Slat (pictured above). The system has already been tested on rivers in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Malaysia, with two more planned for Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and the Dominican Republic. According to Slat, 1 percent of rivers are responsible for 80 percent of the pollution in the world’s seas. “That makes finding a solution to the problem of plastic pollution emanating from rivers quite achievable,” he says. The venture has attracted $1 million in funding from the Benioff Ocean Initiative, and the ocean trash will be transformed into quality, sustainable products, that will be sold to fund the project.

In 2006, I hosted a dinner after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore’s seminal documentary on the climate crisis. 

We went around the table for everyone’s reaction to the film’s urgent message. When it came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary, she declared with her typical candor: “I’m scared, and I’m angry.” Then she added, “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.”

The conversation stopped cold. All eyes turned to me. I didn’t know what to say.

As a venture capitalist, my job is to find big opportunities, target big challenges, and invest in big solutions. I am best known for backing companies like Google and Amazon early on. But the environmental crisis dwarfed any challenge I’d ever seen. Eugene Kleiner, the late cofounder of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley firm I’ve been with for 40 years, left behind a set of 12 laws that have stood the test of time. The first goes as follows: No matter how groundbreaking a new technology may seem, make sure customers actually want it. But this problem led me to invoke a lesser-known Kleiner law: There is a time when panic is the appropriate response.

That time had come. We could no longer afford to underestimate our climate emergency. To avert irreversible, catastrophic consequences, we needed to act urgently and decisively. For me, that evening changed everything.

My partners and I made climate a top priority. We got serious about investing in clean and sustainable technologies — or “cleantech,” as they’re known in Silicon Valley. We even brought in Al Gore as the firm’s newest partner. But despite Al’s excellent company, my journey into the world of zero-emissions investing was pretty lonely at first. After the iPhone debuted in 2007, Steve Jobs invited us to launch our iFund for mobile apps from Apple’s headquarters. We were hearing great pitches from mobile app startups; I could see opportunities left and right. 

So why commit a chunk of capital to the uncharted territory of solar panels, electric car batteries, and meatless proteins? Because it seemed like the right thing to do, for the firm and for the planet. I thought the cleantech market was a monster in the making. I believed we could do well by doing good. 

We pursued mobile apps and climate ventures at the same time, despite doubters on both fronts. Our mobile app investments gave us a burst of quick wins. Our climate investments were slower out of the gate, and many of them failed. It’s hard to build a durable company under any circumstances, and doubly hard to build one to take on the climate crisis.

Kleiner Perkins got beaten up in the press. But with patience and persistence, we stood by our founders. By 2019, our surviving cleantech investments began to hit one home run after the next. Our $1 billion in green venture investments is now worth $3 billion. But we have no time for a victory lap. As the years roll by, the climate clock keeps ticking. Atmospheric carbon already exceeds the upper limit for climate stability. At our current pace, we will blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the Earth’s pre-industrial mean temperatures — the threshold, scientists say, for severe planetary damage. The effects of runaway global warming are already plain to see: devastating hurricanes, biblical flooding, uncontrollable wildfires, killer heat waves, and extreme droughts.

I must warn you up front: We’re not cutting our emissions fast enough to outrun the damage on our doorstep. I said this in 2007, and I say it today: What we’re doing is not nearly enough. Unless we course correct with urgent speed and at massive scale, we’ll be staring at a doomsday scenario. The melting polar ice caps will drown coastal cities. Failed crops will lead to widespread famine. By midcentury, a billion souls worldwide could be climate refugees.

Fortunately, we have a powerful ally in this fight: innovation. Over the past 15 years, prices for solar and wind power have plunged 90%. Clean energy sources are growing faster than anyone expected. Batteries are expanding the range of electrified vehicles at an ever-lower cost. Greater energy efficiency has sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

While a good many solutions are in hand, their deployment is nowhere near where it needs to be. We’ll need massive investment and robust policy to make these innovations more affordable. We need to scale the ones we have — immediately — and invent the ones we still need. In short, we need both the now and the new.

So where’s the plan for getting the job done? Frankly, that’s what’s been missing: an actionable plan. Sure, there are lots of ways on paper to get to net-zero carbon emissions, the point where we add no more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than we can remove. But lists of goals are not plans. A long menu of options, however excellent they might be, is not a plan. Anger and despair aren’t plans; neither are hopes and dreams.

A plan is only as good as its implementation. To achieve this monumental mission, we’ll need to hold ourselves accountable every step of the way. That’s the great lesson I learned from my mentor, Andy Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel. It’s a mantra I’ve seen proven over and again: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

To execute a plan, we need the right tools. In my previous book, Measure What Matters, I outlined a simple but powerful goal-setting protocol that Andy Grove invented at Intel. Known as OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, they guide organizations to focus on a few essential targets, to align at every level, to stretch for ambitious results, and to track their progress as they go — to measure what matters.

Now I’m proposing we apply OKRs to solve the climate crisis, the greatest challenge of our lifetimes. But before going all in (and this is an all-or-nothing proposition), we must answer three basic questions.

Do we have enough time? We hope so, but we’re fast running out of it.

Do we have much margin for error? No, we don’t. Not anymore.

Do we have enough money? Not yet. Investors and governments are stepping up. But we’ll need a lot more funding, from both public and private sectors, to develop and scale technologies for a clean economy. Most of all, we’ll need to divert the trillions spent on dirty energy over to clean energy options and use that energy more efficiently.

To put our plan into action, we need all hands on deck. Above all, we’ll need to execute our plan with unprecedented speed and unprecedented scale. That’s what matters most.

I’m not here to prod consumers to change their behavior. Individual actions are both needed and expected, but they won’t be nearly enough to reach this huge goal. Only concerted, collective, global action can get us past the finish line in time.

I might seem an unlikely advocate for this call to action. I’m an American, a citizen of the biggest historic polluter on Earth. I am an affluent white man, born in St. Louis, Missouri, from a generation whose negligence helped create this problem in the first place.

In my 15 years on this path, I’ve collected my share of scar tissue. Cleantech ventures demand more money, more guts, more time, and more perseverance than just about anything else. Their horizons stretch longer than most investors can stomach. The washouts are acutely painful. But the success stories — however few and far between — are worth all the setbacks and then some. These companies are more than turning a profit. They are helping to heal the Earth.

Entrepreneurs are those hardy individuals who do more with less than anyone thinks possible — and do it faster than anyone thinks possible. Today, bold risk-takers are innovating like mad as they rewrite the rules to avert a climate apocalypse. We need to bottle their entrepreneurial energy and distribute it as widely as we can to governments, companies, and communities worldwide.

A plan is not a guarantee. A timely transition to a net-zero future is no sure thing. But though I may be less optimistic than some, consider me hopeful — and impatient. With the right tools and technology, with precision-honed policies, and most of all with science on our side, we still have a fighting chance. But the time is now.

A swimming pool prank gone wrong would prove to be an accident that changed Mina Guli’s life. she hurt her back so badly that doctors told me she’d never run again. challenged to create a stunt that would capture the world’s attention around the global water crisis, her global, ultra-running campaign for water was born.

“I knew that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. That I was going to dedicate my life to solving our water crisis. At that point I knew that I would do whatever it takes to make that happen. I don’t want this future for the next generation,“ says Mina Guli.

Guli is a global leader, entrepreneur, water advocate, and ultra runner, dedicated to raising awareness around the global water crisis. Though she wasn’t a runner to begin with, after a life-changing accident dictated she might never run again, Mina decided to prove her doctors wrong. She created an opportunity to push herself beyond what she thought possible to highlight a bigger cause — water scarcity. In 2016, to bring attention to the global water crisis, Mina ran 40 marathons across 7 deserts on 7 continents in 7 weeks. Along the way, she interviewed locals and water experts. Her goal was to tell the stories of people affected by the crisis and those working to solve it. Another running awareness project was the #RunningDry movement — 100 marathons in 100 days. And another recently completed run was the 6 River Run, along the banks of 6 of the world’s greatest rivers, across 6 continents, in 6 weeks — inspired by the UN’s 6th Sustainable Development Goal — Clean Water & Sanitation.

“It’s so weird for me to be in this situation where running has become what I do,” she says. “I did it because we needed to have a way to create a hook for people to pay attention to water. I wanted to show that we should go beyond our comfort zones to do things that are meaningful. I wanted to show that every one of us is capable of things that we have never dreamt of. I want to show that you don’t have to be anyone to be someone.” Mina stresses that water is one of the biggest risks facing society today, and that the ramifications of the global water crisis should be a great cause for concern. By 2030 there’s forecast to be a 40% gap between the amount of water we need and the amount of water available. Motivated by the perceived inaction she sees around her, Mina has dedicated her life to this problem. Her non-profit, Thirst, raises awareness of the water crisis among the next generation. 

“I don’t want the next generation to grow up and have their future limited by their ability to access water, they should only be limited by their ability to dream the dreams that they want to dream.”