That strategy seems to have paid off: revenue has grown 45% since 2019, according to Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s senior vice president of communications and sustainability. In that same period, he says, Pandora has cut emissions by 17% across the board.

“We can grow and become more sustainable at the same time,” he says. Adopting sustainable practices was a natural next step in Pandora becoming “future-proof,” he adds. “It’s not something that we did as a marketing play. We’re quite aware that many consumers are very interested in sustainable options . . . but it’s more something that we did to stand strong as a brand overall.”

Whatever the reason, the moves make Pandora stand out. And they have helped earn it the number two spot in the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking, all the way up from 48 in 2025.

The fashion industry contributes up to 8% of global emissions, but a minority of brands are committed to incorporating circular processes. According to the 2022 S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment, which surveyed 70 brands in the textile, apparel and luxury goods industry, 44% of brands had at least one circular fashion program in place.

Pandora isn’t alone in its sustainability ethos. Some of the biggest brands in fashion have launched recycling initiatives in recent years. The German athletic apparel giant Puma, for instance, now uses polyester textile waste saved from factory off-cuts, faulty goods and used clothes to make new garments under the brand’s Re:Fibre program. On average, about 25% of Puma’s products contain recycled materials.

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Inditex Corp., the parent company of Zara, aims to use only textiles that have a low environmental impact by 2030. The brand claims to have used 39% recycled fibres in 2024. It is also working to scale up purchases of recycled materials – such as fibre made from cotton-rich textile waste and polyester made from textile waste – through offtake commitments. The brand also has several eco-certifications, including the Recycled Claim Standard.

Kering S.A., the holding company that owns some of the largest luxury brands, including Gucci, also carries a Recycled Claim Standard certification. The company works with Econyl, a brand-name nylon made from waste products, and partners with start-ups such as Worn Again, which has developed the technology to create fabric from non-reusable textiles.

A steep hill to climb

Despite these types of initiatives – several of which are still in their infancy – the overwhelming majority of textile waste ends up in landfills. According to Boston Consulting Group, only 12% of global textile waste is reused, with less than 1% recycled into new fibres. When it comes to jewellery, recycled gold makes up a larger percentage of the overall supply than recycled silver but these metals are still being mined extensively.

Pandora mostly deals with silver, which makes up about 67% of the brand’s product volume. “The world is not very good at recycling silver,” Twomey-Madsen says, adding that the metal often ends up in the landfill through electronic waste.

Pandora’s big bet on sustainability pays off

It took four years for the brand to completely transition into recycled metals. The process required Pandora to convince its suppliers – 40 total – to source recycled metal certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council Chain of Custody standard. The transition will add an additional US$10 million to annual operating costs, which includes investing in new equipment for suppliers to establish a separate recycled-metal process from their non-recycled metals.

That’s a cost of doing sustainable business that Pandora is willing to pay, Twomey-Madsen says. The added benefit, he says, is that Pandora’s suppliers can now offer recycled metals to other brands, too. “It’s available now for other companies that want to do the same. And I think that’s something that you encounter in these circularity changes,” he says. “These value streams aren’t really established yet. So when you go first, you need to invest in making that happen.”

Ayesha Habib is a Vancouver-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve and Chatelaine.

The post These big retail brands are rallying around circular fashion appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The founders of Red Leaf Pulp say they’ve figured out how to make high-quality pulp from agricultural by-products rather than wood from trees, and they’re ready to start producing at scale. The company’s first-of-a-kind pulp mill, slated to begin construction in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the first quarter of 2026, will manufacture what it calls “climate-positive, non-wood pulp” using a process that consumes 95% less water and 70% less energy than traditional mills – all while running on electricity generated by burning biomass from its own waste stream.

“We think there’s nothing in Canada that’s as sustainable as this project, in terms of what we bring in upstream and downstream benefits,” says William Walls, vice president of strategy and development, in a phone interview. He claims that the carbon footprint of Red Leaf’s wheat straw pulp is a third that of regular wood pulp.

Red Leaf has earned the confidence of investors, raising $42 million in five years, most of it from the container company Dart, as well as about $8 million in government funding and a $1-million angel investment. Walls calls it “probably one of the best-funded cleantechs in Canada.” The company used the funding to build a demonstration plant in Alberta, where it has been testing its process and selling its products for different applications. Once operational in 2028, the facility is expected to convert 400,000 tonnes of straw into 200,000 tonnes of market pulp annually.

There’s a lot for investors to like. For example, Red Leaf doesn’t need to develop any equipment to run its patented process for “making the straw act like a wood chip,” Walls says. They use conventional equipment for wood pulp mills made by Valmet, one of the biggest pulp and paper equipment manufacturers on the planet.

Red Leaf sources directly from farmers and accepts all varieties of leftover wheat straw, as well as oats, barley and flax, much of which would often otherwise be burned or left to lie on the field. This creates a new revenue stream for farmers and positions them in a circular economy, while ensuring a reliable supply of pulp for Red Leaf’s new mill.

An opening in the pulp market

The introduction of wheat straw pulp comes amid an ongoing decline in the supply of “economically viable timber,” which has been devastating for Canada’s forestry industry and prompted one B.C. lumber mill to close in November. The main culprits are wildfires, which consumed 17 million hectares in 2022, and invasive insect infestations, which killed 13 million hectares worth of trees the same year. Those disruptions, plus a reduction in the allowable cuts, caused the whole forestry sector to contract by 22% in 2023 and have shrunk the available wood fibre for products like pulp and pellets by more than 40% in British Columbia since 2018. To make matters worse, the United States raised its duties on softwood lumber to 20.6% last July.

The constrained fibre supply in Canada’s forestry sector creates an opening for Red Leaf, but the company sees its role as complementary rather than competitive, spokesperson Elle Kreitz says in an email: “Red Leaf introduces new, non-wood fibre into an already integrated system, helping to relieve supply demand pressures without competing for forest resources.”

The company believes its wheat pulp should telegraph its authentic sustainability, so they’re not going to dye it bright white, which has long been an industry norm. Red Leaf advertises its pulp as possessing a “natural golden tone” – one that doesn’t require a harmful bleaching process to achieve.

A starring role for lignin

Red Leaf also plans to sell the lignin – a component of plant cell walls that gives them their structure – separately as a stand-alone product. Straw has less lignin, so it’s easier to separate out, Walls says. Lignin comes out of the pulp process as a sludgy brown by-product that’s already a popular binder in animal feed and is considered eco-friendly because it diverts waste that would otherwise contaminate waterways.

But Walls sees much more potential for the sticky residue. Non-toxic but also not directly digestible, there is evidence that lignin has some health benefits as a food additive, and it can also be used in other industries as a natural bonding agent for materials manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. There are also emerging applications in batteries and bioplastics.

“It’s like a unicorn. We’re selling it for more than twice as much money as the pulp,” Walls says. “But someday down the road it may be that this thing is called Red Leaf Lignin and the pulp is the by-product.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights.

The post This Canadian start-up makes pulp from straw instead of wood, and it’s ready to scale appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But instead of using energy to cool their servers, some companies are trying to recover heat and put it to use. “What we try to do,” says Sacha van Geffen, a lead engineer at Leafcloud, “is actually see if we can place some of those compute resources that generate a lot of heat really close to a place where heat is needed.”

Leafcloud is an Amsterdam-based cloud services company that turns waste heat into warm showers through a distributed network of servers, or “leaf sites.” To do this, Leafcloud uses off-the-shelf components to build heat-waste-recovery systems inside the technical rooms of facilities like large apartment complexes, swimming pools or retirement homes, van Geffen says. The heat captured from the servers is used to produce hot water for the building.

Leafcloud isn’t the only company putting heat waste to work. U.K. company Heata offers a similar service to individual homeowners. The 2025 Paris Olympics pool was partially heated from data-centre servers run by the company Equinix. In Brooklyn, Bathhouse uses waste heat from Bitcoin mining rigs to warm its spa pools. Nexalus in Ireland harnesses heat waste to improve efficiency and lower data-centre energy consumption.

Heat waste from computing workloads is considered low-grade heat, meaning anything less than 100°C. “With low temperature grades,” says Amin Mohammadi, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s Laboratory for Alternative Energy Conversion, “converting that energy to thermal energy or cooling energy would be the best option that you have.” In other words, it’s too gentle to be converted to electricity such as with steam from a boiler, but with the help of heat pumps, it’s perfect for making a hot shower or keeping interiors toasty on a cold day. 

There are data centres and centralized district heating systems working together, too, such as Stockholm Exergi or Denmark’s Fjernvarme Fyn. This application could play an important role in heat-waste recovery from the growing demand for computing capacity. A recent Leafcloud white paper outlined that different thermal outputs could be optimized for different applications: high-performance computing for higher heat-waste temperatures, such as 60°C to 80°C, could be sent to district heating, whereas standard servers that produce temperatures in the 40°C to 60°C range could be used for building heat. 

The pieces are already in place to start making a difference. Leafcloud and other companies can capture heat waste now and without complex infrastructure that would otherwise take years to build out, such as constructing a data centre or retrofitting pipe systems for larger-scale municipal heating. By placing the heat source close to where it will be used, overall efficiency is improved, because it avoids the energy loss that occurs when heat has to move through a large system, Mohammadi says. 

In addition to heat-waste recovery, van Geffen says that Leafcloud’s distributed server system has other benefits. Using residual heat onsite not only reduces the reliance on other energy sources needed to heat water, such as natural gas; it also reduces costs. In a world where our data is so often controlled by secretive corporations, installing local servers in basements in Europe offers security and control, van Geffen says: “What we are offering is sovereign data storage, where the heat is also put to a good use.”

The post Companies are finding creative ways to use heat from data centres appeared first on Corporate Knights.

East of San Antonio in Bexar County, 500 electric vehicle batteries at the end of their automotive lives will soon be repurposed to provide energy storage for Texas’s electric grid, a California company, B2U Storage Solutions, announced on August 29.

The batteries, housed in 21 cabinets the size of shipping containers, create a second life for the technology made from critical minerals, including lithium, nickel and cobalt, for another eight years, says Freeman Hall, co-founder and CEO.

Once the site is built and in operation later this year, the batteries will charge when there is an excess of renewable-energy production on the grid and the cost of power is cheap. The Texas facility will have a total capacity of 24 megawatt hours.

B2U Storage Solutions, based in Los Angeles, plans to deploy three more grid-storage projects in Texas throughout the next year, totalling 100 megawatt hours across the state, the company says. Assuming the average household uses 30 kilowatt hours per day, it’s enough energy to power 3,330 homes for a day, Hall says.

The site near San Antonio will interconnect to the CPS Energy distribution system, one of the nation’s largest city-owned utility companies. “We’re really helping to pioneer and demonstrate to the automotive industry that repurposing makes a lot of sense for a pretty healthy number of batteries before they’re truly ready for end of life and recycling,” Hall says in an interview.

An epiphany in novel energy storage

Hall and chief operating officer Michael Stern began building industrial-scale solar projects almost 20 years ago in the California cities of Palmdale, El Centro and Mojave, installing some 100 megawatts, or enough electricity to power more than 15,000 homes. But soon, as more solar began connecting to the grid, their bids to utilities were undermined by a developing  “duck curve” – industry shorthand for when higher penetration of renewables on the grid depresses energy prices during sunlit hours followed by a cost spike in the evening as there’s a loss of sun.

“That’s what inspired us to realize that we needed to add storage to our projects,” Hall says. “Along the way, we had an epiphany.”

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In looking for battery storage options for their solar projects, the two developers realized that the first wave of commercial EV batteries were beginning to wrap up their roughly 10-year automotive life. Aware of research that these batteries’ state-of-health, measuring the difference between a new battery and a used one, circled up to 80%, Hall and Stern hypothesized that they could build technology to use the battery packs as they came from the vehicle, avoiding any repurposing costs.

So the two solar developers purchased 300 Nissan Leaf batteries. The carmaker had run into a powertrain warranty issue with the world’s first mass-market EV, as the range they promised in the lease with the customer fell short. To fix the warranty and guarantee, Nissan swapped out the battery packs and found themselves with thousands of batteries that were still useful, Hall says, just not for driving. The batteries still had thousands of cycles left in a less-demanding scenario, like stationary storage for renewable energy.

That’s when the solar developers initiated the EV-pack storage technology fundamental to B2U, which currently operates three facilities using retired batteries from electric vehicles like Teslas, the Honda Clarity and the Nissan Leaf in California.

B2U’s technology allows the company to buy the retired EV battery packs without having to modify them, creating large-scale storage projects for less than if they were installing new batteries.

A coming wave of available energy storage

The global electric car fleet reached almost 58 million by the end of 2024, or about 4%  of all cars on the road, according to an International Energy Agency 2025 EV report. It’s more than triple the amount of electric cars in 2021.

The batteries in electric vehicles are typically replaced once they reach around 70 to 80% of their capacity as their range begins to diminish. As more EV batteries retire throughout the coming decade, the second-life EV battery market is forecasted to grow into a US$4.2 billion industry by 2035, according to a December report by IDTechEx, a technology market research firm.

You haven’t heard about it much to date. But you will be hearing a lot more about it going forward.

 – Freeman Hall, co-founder and CEO, B2U Storage Solutions

As the burgeoning industry in the United States advances, second-life battery reuse will become less expensive to operate, the report says, as new technology develops and speeds up the process. For instance, quality assurance currently can take hours to complete, but the report suggests that soon technology will pare the process down to minutes. These cost savings will be especially important as loans and incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act that supported a growing domestic recycling industry expire.

The opportunities within Texas’s competitive, wholesale grid market are what led Hall and his company to consider operating outside of their California headquarters, Hall says.

As a storage power generator, B2U is able to sell power after cheaply charging it and provide ancillary services to the grid, or get paid by the grid operators to help curb frequency deviations and imbalances.

Batteries have made significant capacity contributions within Texas’s electric grid in recent years and have been credited with helping prevent summer blackouts by bolstering grid reliability. Nearly 4,000 of the 9,600 megawatts of capacity added to the grid since last summer came from energy storage, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

The latest interconnection report shows that more than 700 stand-alone battery-storage projects and more than 300 battery-plus-solar projects are in line to connect to ERCOT.

Last year, another California-based company, Element Energy, began storing electricity using 900 second-life EV batteries within ERCOT. The West Texas site totals 53 megawatt hours of storage capacity, making it one of the nation’s largest retired EV battery projects, according to Element.

Solving the technical challenges for second-life batteries

B2U manages more than 2,000 retired batteries through its system, which coordinates the performance of the batteries, cabinet and overall power plant. The data they collect in real time allows them to monitor the temperature of the battery packs and voltage levels. The firm has another 2,000 end-of-automative-life batteries at some stage of deployment, Hall says, that will soon be ready to plug into the grid.

Each time the firm receives a batch of EV batteries, B2U performs its own diagnostic tests, with some 5 or 6% rejected because of substandard health.

The testing, coupled with how they configure the batteries in their cabinets, allow the retired batteries to operate despite variance in their capacities. In laymen’s terms, if a weaker battery has charged up and reached its voltage limit, the way B2U links their battery packs ensures that the stronger batteries can keep charging until they’re full. “That’s kind of key to solving the problem of second-life batteries,” Hall says.

Repurposed EV batteries aren’t something you hear of much in ERCOT, or in other grids across the United States. As one of the early innovators, it’s taken B2U nearly five years to get the core technology ironed out, cost effective and ready to scale, Hall says. He says they got their timing just right. Since they started B2U in 2019, EV car sales in North America have nearly tripled. It means a steady flow of retirement-ready batteries available for their next career stabilizing the grid and staving off early recycling of critical minerals.

“You haven’t heard about it much to date,” Hall says of second-life EV battery use. “But you will be hearing a lot more about it going forward.”

Arcelia Martin is an award-winning journalist at Inside Climate News. She covers renewable energy in Texas from her base in Dallas.

The post Used EV batteries are poised to play a bigger role in grid-scale energy storage appeared first on Corporate Knights.

According to those who study consumer habits, millennials and Gen Zs are looking for two things when they go shopping: sustainability and individuality. One jewellery company is capturing hearts and wallets by offering both.

Pandora, launched as a family-run jewellery shop in Copenhagen in 1982, has grown to become the world’s largest jewellery maker, by pieces sold. And unlike much of its industry in recent years, Pandora’s star is rising. As competitors like Tiffany and Signet see diminishing returns, Pandora ended 2024 with 31.7 billion krone (US$4.5 billion) in annual revenue, representing 13% organic growth.

These figures reflect a major turnaround. In 2019, following several years of declining sales, Pandora embarked on a new strategy: to expand its product line beyond the luxury charm bracelets for which it had become famous and go all in on sustainability. It established three new priorities: to decarbonize, push circularity and promote a more diverse corporate culture.

Six years later, Pandora’s charms, which can be engraved and assembled to create personalized pieces, are just one element in its full palette of fine jewellery. And the company is aspiring to the highest sustainability standards in its field. Since 2021, it has used only lab-grown diamonds – to avoid concerns about blood diamonds and inhumane labour practices – and since 2024, exclusively gold and silver in recycled form. 

According to Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s senior vice president of sustainability, the transition to recycled metals took four years to complete and required 100 additional staff: a relatively small investment for a company with some 37,000 employees worldwide.

More than 40 of Pandora’s suppliers – both smelters and producers of clasps and chains – had to change their processes to meet its new standards (which are issued by the Responsible Jewellery Council), but they were persuaded to do so by the volumes in question.

Pandora claims that its annual purchase of roughly 340 tons of recycled silver, sourced from electronics, silverware, manufacturing waste and old jewellery, accounts for some 6% of the total global market. 

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The shift away from newly mined metals will reduce greenhouse gas emissions across its supply chain by 58,000 metric tons annually by the company’s estimates: roughly the equivalent of taking 6,000 gas-powered cars off the road. It’s also costing Pandora some US$10 million annually, largely in premiums paid to suppliers to help them adjust. It’s “a cost we are willing to absorb” Pandora CEO Alexander Lacik told The New York Times last year.

While sustainability may be front of mind for younger buyers, Lacik admits that the average jewellery shopper is looking primarily at design and price. But even if customers weren’t clamouring for it, Pandora’s sustainability push has proven a sound business decision; according to its 2024 annual report, the company has grown by 45% since 2019. No doubt, others in the industry are watching with interest. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Pandora’s big bet on sustainability pays off appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“Waste has always been inflicted upon the margins,” said Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of the new book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future. Waste, he writes, is often exported from rich countries to poor ones, a phenomenon known as “toxic colonialism.”

“Too often waste is ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ We think about throwing things away, but don’t really understand where away is or who the people are on the other side.”

Wasteland is an exploration of those places and people on the other side. In the course of his reporting, Franklin-Wallis, an editor at British GQ, visits a 69-acre landfill outside New Delhi, where waste pickers expertly sort a dizzying array of plastics, an incinerator west of London that burns 430,000 metric tons of garbage each year, and a Superfund site in Oklahoma, where workers are turning toxic mining waste into asphalt.

If consumers understood the true economic and environmental toll of the waste we produce, he argues, we would behave differently.

Humans produce about 2 billion tons of solid waste each year, according to the World Bank, and only about one-fifth of all that waste is recycled or composted. All those tossed plastic Coca-Cola bottles, Shein leggings, old iPhones and food scraps take a staggering environmental toll. The solid waste industry accounts for 5% of global greenhouse emissions, which, as Franklin-Wallis notes is more than the shipping and aviation industries combined. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which collects some of the estimated 11 million tons of plastic waste thrown into the oceans each year, is about twice the size of Texas.

Humans have always created waste. As Franklin-Wallis writes, “Archeologists, those ancient dumpster divers, have reconstructed our history from trash: discarded weapons, smashed pots and urns, food scraps with bite marks still noted in the bones.”

But the introduction of consumer plastics in the years following World War II changed everything. Today, more than one million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute. More than half of fabric fibers — which clog waste streams like Ghana’s Kpone landfill — are now derived from plastics.

Those cheaper materials, paired with outsourced labor, efficient manufacturing and reduced trade barriers, caused the price of consumer goods to plummet. The amount of waste produced by the average American — on average, the world’s most wasteful consumer — tripled between 1960 and 2010. “The explosion of consumer plastic required a total reconfiguring of the waste stream,” Franklin-Wallis said.

Inundated with waste, in the 1980s, Western countries began exporting trash and recycling. Between 1988 and 2018, China received about 47% of all global plastic waste for recycling. Then, in January 2018, Beijing suddenly banned the importation of most types of plastic waste through a policy known as “National Sword.” The materials flooded into countries in Southeast Asia — Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand — which, one by one, enacted their own bans against the imports.

As he reported on the fallout from “National Sword,” Franklin-Wallis developed an appreciation for how complex the waste industry is. “The supply chain that takes apart our stuff is sometimes just as complicated as the ones making them in the first place,” he said. “We’re talking about a multi-billion dollar industry involving millions of people.”

In Ghana, just miles away from the now defunct Kpone landfill, Franklin-Wallis visits Kantamanto, one of the region’s largest second-hand clothing markets, where vendors sell an estimated 15 million garments a week. He meets with nearby electronics importers who resell electronic waste, or e-waste, (in this case, laptops from Holland) to local schools.

“A lot of the people in this system are doing it to make money, and it has benefits — it also has drawbacks we need to find ways to mitigate,” he said. E-waste, for example, is the fastest growing and most valuable waste stream in the world by weight, but the practice of dismantling and recycling the goods can leach toxic chemicals, including lead.

In the course of reporting Wasteland, Franklin-Wallis began to rethink his own consumption practices. He swapped out his plastic toothbrush for a bamboo one. He learned to sew so he could fix his clothes rather than buy new ones. He started buying more of his kids’ clothing and toys secondhand.

But he cautions against narratives that place the blame for the waste crisis at the individual level. “There have been these very successful drives to convince us that [the waste crisis] is the fault of individuals,” he said.

The supply chain that takes apart our stuff is sometimes just as complicated as the ones making them in the first place.

In the 1950s, the Keep America Beautiful program, whose founders included the American Can Company and Coca-Cola, launched clean-up campaigns across the country and coined the term “litterbug” to help the companies producing waste evade public scrutiny. Franklin-Wallis compares that campaign to the way British Petroleum popularized the term “carbon footprint.”

As Franklin-Wallis sees it, governments need to regulate the companies producing waste — including fossil fuel giants who are turning to plastic production to hedge against falling oil demand.

Several companies have signed on to Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) plans, in which companies that produce waste pay into waste management systems — although those funds seldom reach the lower-income countries that are often the final destination for these products, Franklin-Wallis said. Many governments have also passed Right to Repair legislation, which is aimed at reducing electronics waste.

And earlier this month, United Nations negotiators released a draft of the global plastics treaty, which, among other things, outlines a plan to reduce the manufacture of new plastics.  Nonetheless, consumers still need to understand the true impact of their waste.

Changing consumer behavior will require a crackdown on greenwashing, Franklin-Wallis said. Contrary to popular belief, most plastics are not recyclable (unregulated labeling may lead consumers to believe otherwise) and plastics that are labeled as compostable often do not disintegrate as promised, to name just a few examples.

‘The waste industry is absolutely replete with greenwashing,” Franklin-Wallis said. “If we just get some truth out into the system, it will make people reckon with the waste that we’re creating.”

This article by Nexus Media News is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The post A look at the secret world where our waste ends up appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Inside their postcard of a home, the family enjoyed a lifestyle not so different from ours in North Toronto. Except for one thing: nothing in that house was wasted. Once a month, a garbage truck trundled down the ribbon of road running through the valley and the four-member family contributed their monthly yield: one small shopping bag of trash.

An environmentalist at heart, my mother came home bursting with inspiration. Henceforth, we were going to shoehorn our North Toronto lifestyle into Black Forest standards of sustainability. But try as we might – recycling scraps of cellophane, crushing cardboard boxes, patching pants – it couldn’t be done. Not even close. Our weekly garbage bins – like those of our neighbours – remained full to overflowing, and when Toronto introduced recycling bins in 1988, they were too.

Cities are incredibly wasteful places. They generate mountains of garbage: discarded items of all kinds, many still containing most of their value. And then there’s the waste that results from poor policy and planning: roads clogged with single-driver SUVs, suburbanites commuting hours to work, the unhoused having to pitch tents in parks for lack of affordable housing. Wastes of time and space, of human potential and planetary health.

Among economists, there’s a growing consensus that the inherently wasteful linear model that has defined industrial production and economic growth for the last two centuries – of take, make, use and lose – is no longer tenable. In its stead, a circular model is being proposed, one that “uses less materials, for longer, again and again,” in the words of Joanne Gauci, a senior policy advisor to Metro Vancouver. In 2013, Metro Vancouver launched the National Zero Waste Council, which aims to promote circularity in Canadian cities by bringing municipal leaders together with representatives of government, business, academia and the non-profit sector.

It’s a global trend; Swiss-based sustainable building materials firm Holcim, which has developed a “Circular Cities Barometer,” counts Delhi, Lagos, Bogotá, Wuhan and Manila among the most circular cities in the world. Isolating the metrics on the Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities Index that reflect circularity – consumption-based emissions, water usage and waste generated – the cities that rise to the top include the likely Nordic candidates, but also Auckland (New Zealand), Arequipa (Peru) and Taichung (Taiwan). And while waste reduction is a higher priority in high-income countries – which account for 16% of the world’s population but 34% of its waste – the balance is set to shift.

The World Bank expects that as their populations and economies grow, low-income countries will assert waste dominance, tripling their current levels of production by 2050. By then, South and East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will likely be the world’s most prodigious waste-producers in absolute terms: a serious problem, as most disposal in these regions takes the form of open dumping.

Atinuke Chineme is tackling the challenge already. Having grown up in Nigeria, she is now working on a biowaste treatment project on the outskirts of the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, while pursuing a doctorate in environmental design at the University of Calgary. For this pilot project, members of a women’s collective gather organic waste from local markets and deposit it in purpose-built bins to be broken down by the famously voracious black soldier fly. The process is an odourless, contained alternative to open dumping that yields commercial by-products: the fly’s protein-rich larvae, which is used as animal feedstock, and rich soil for fertilizer.

“In the West, the focus is on the technological aspects of the circular economy. In the Global South, it’s more on the biological cycle,” says Chineme, who considers the circular economy an “internationally accepted term” for what she would otherwise call traditional practice. “It’s good for us to realize the value in what we already have. We’ve always known that waste can be used,” she says.

This perspective has long since been lost in high-income countries. Contrary to our righteous self-image as stewards of a vast natural landscape, Canadians are among the world’s most wasteful citizens, consuming more materials, water and energy per capita than almost any other country, according to a 2021 report by the Council of Canadian Academies. Canada tops the charts for waste per capita, followed by Bulgaria and the United States, and almost three-quarters (73%) of waste in Canada is incinerated or ends up in landfill, which in turn accounts for 24% of the country’s methane emissions.

It’s good for us to realize the value in what we already have. We’ve always known that waste can be used.

 

–Atinuke Chineme,University of Calgary

Stockholm, which ranks first on Corporate Knights’ index again in 2023, benefits from Sweden’s long embrace of circularity: from the country’s deposit system on bottles and cans, which dates from the 1980s, to the 2017 tax reform that favours second-hand purchases and repairs, to the 2018 creation of a national advisory group that integrates circularity into government policy. But the European city that has embraced circularity most ambitiously is Amsterdam, which, in 2020, resolved to halve its use of natural resources by 2030 and achieve complete circularity and climate neutrality by 2050. It is the first city to attempt to implement British economist Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” economic model: an aspirational schematic that constrains economic activity to the sweet spot between an ecological ceiling of natural limits (represented by the doughnut’s outer ring) and a social foundation of basic human needs and rights (the inner ring).

For some, models of doughnuts and circles are just old wine in new bottles, fancy riffs on the folk wisdom of doing more with less. But at the very least, the push toward a non-linear economic model is impelling cities to take stock. The City of Toronto, for instance, established a dedicated circular economy team within its Solid Waste Management Services division in 2018, one of the first municipalities in North America to do so. Three years later, it generated a baseline report that shows how materials flow through the city in three key sectors: waste management, food and construction.

Colourful diagrams illustrate where the city’s annual 2.1 million tonnes of waste come from, and where they end up. It’s instructive; the bulk (60%) of the city’s waste is generated by non-residential sources: institutions, businesses and industry, construction and demolition. Most of that waste is handled by private contractors looking for the cheapest disposal option, which is generally landfill. So, try as the city may to increase the portion of residential waste that it diverts from landfill and into recycling programs (currently 53%), the lion’s share of its waste problem will remain unresolved until it gets other levels of government and the private sector on board: “radical collaboration” is what Gauci says the circular economy demands.

Beyond the bold policies, lofty aspirations and savvy entrepreneurs, there has to be a fundamental shift in mentality

 

It also requires bold policy. San Francisco has paved the way in waste reduction with a steady stream of initiatives, beginning with a 2003 Zero Waste resolution to stop landfill dumping by 2020. In 2009, it passed a mandatory recycling and composting ordinance for all residences and businesses, the first of its kind in the U.S. It also set fees for garbage collection higher than those for recycling and composting and calibrated residential bin size to its priorities: recycling at 64 gallons, composting at 32, garbage at 16. Unlike most North American cities, which contract out waste management to multiple companies, San Francisco has an exclusive relationship with one, making it easier to align priorities. While San Francisco didn’t meet its 2020 target, it’s getting there, currently diverting more than 80% of its waste from landfill; New York City’s diversion rate, by comparison, is 17%.

Despite these kinds of gains, sustainability experts agree that of the three Rs, the emphasis must now be on the first two: reduce and reuse. The notion that recycling would be a waste panacea – allowing us to have our consumption cake and eat it too – has gone up in smoke. Metro Vancouver, with one of the most successful recycling programs in Canada, is diverting only 65% of the 450 kilograms that its citizens throw out annually, into recycling programs. And even when those programs work like well-oiled machines, as Recycle BC does, only a fraction of the recycled material (46%, in the case of recycled plastics) is being recovered in a usable form. The rest ends up in landfill: 976,230 tonnes of solid waste in 2021.

To some, “reduce” implies loss, economic contraction, fewer shiny new things. A 2021 report published by the National Zero Waste Council suggests otherwise, estimating that 20,000 jobs and $41 billion in revenue could be generated through 15 “interventions” such as mandating the minimum recycled content in plastic, insisting that buildings be designed for disassembly, and facilitating the repair and reuse of appliances and furniture. On top of that is the climate case: the 4.9 million tonnes of CO2 emissions and 4.9 million tonnes of waste that such measures would spare.

Gauci points to a growing number of Vancouver businesses that are thriving from the regenerative economy – like ChopValue, which converts used chopsticks into furniture and now has locations across seven countries, and Unbuilders, which dismantles and salvages the reusable elements of homes slated for demolition.

But beyond the bold policies, lofty aspirations and savvy entrepreneurs, there has to be a fundamental shift in mentality: from the Costco logic of buying more because it’s cheap, to buying less because what we have is dear. We can’t shop our way out of this problem. A wholesale switch to electric vehicles does nothing to address the problem of congestion, whereas more HOV lanes, ride-sharing apps and better public transit does. This is where cities can take the lead: modelling fairness and efficiency, encouraging less wasteful behaviour, making the most of what they have.

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post These circular cities want to send landfills to the trash bin of history appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Steel is one of the world’s most carbon-intensive products (accounting for roughly 7% of human-produced CO2 emissions, the International Energy Agency’s Iron and Steel Technology Roadmap says), so having a corporation that makes steel products top Corporate Knights’ Global 100 ranking of the world’s most sustainable companies may seem surprising.

However, during its long history, Schnitzer Steel has developed into a global leader in the collection, processing and sale of the world’s most recycled product: steel. The company generates most of its revenues from recycling steel and other metals. And about a third comes from forging recycled scrap steel into finished products in electric arc furnaces that are powered by hydropower, making the metal extremely low carbon.

It’s only the second recycling company and the first steelmaking company to earn the top spot in the Global 100 since its inception in 2005, highlighting the growing importance of both the circular economy and low-carbon metals in creating a more sustainable future.

The company’s rise to the top of the ranking has been rapid. Last year was the first time it appeared in the index, when it placed 15th. While Schnitzer’s business model leaves it well placed to embrace sustainability, the spark for its current performance came almost a decade ago when the company launched what it called a sustainability framework.

“We’ve been recycling for about a century,” says Tamara Lundgren, Schnitzer’s CEO, chair and president. “But how do we incorporate that into a framework that our employees, suppliers, investors and communities can identify with? Weaving the bigger picture together with the specific targets into everything we do is what has allowed us to garner this honour.”

In 2019, the company set about bolstering its framework by adopting specific goals and metrics to track progress. These included reducing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions from recycling operations by 25% from 2019 levels by 2025, and reaching net-zero GHG emissions for all operations (steel manufacturing, metals recycling and auto dismantling) by 2050.

“For an ‘old economy’ company to be recognized as a sustainability leader is a great example of how sustainability principles can be successfully applied to an industrial company.”

—Tamara Lundgren, CEO, Schnitzer Steel

Schnitzer has not set specific Scope 3 emissions targets yet because it’s working through how best to account for and verify the emissions inventory data of the various external operations in its supply chain, Lundgren explains. “Once we have our arms around that information, we can confidently set and publish science-based Scope 3 targets. In the meantime, we are still pursuing Scope 3 emissions-reduction initiatives that provide low- and net-zero-carbon solutions for our customers. Our GRN Steel product offering is a good example of such an initiative.”

This year, Schnitzer’s emissions were 24% lower than in 2019, its baseline year when it started tracking its GHGs. This reduction has come from the introduction of measures such as investments in best-available-technology emission control systems that, at the company’s Oakland, California, facility, reduce its Scope 1 emissions by around 3,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. Other measures include improved energy efficiency, the use of alternative fuels and resource-conservation projects.

For all its sustainability credentials, the company’s operations aren’t without environmental impact. Recycling metals, while essential to the circular economy, can be a hazardous business. Its Pick-n-Pull car recycling subsidiary paid US$2.5 million in 2022 to settle allegations from 14 district attorneys in California that the company had illegally disposed of toxic materials and had stormwater pollution issues. “When contacted by prosecutors, Pick-n-Pull promptly implemented improved procedures and practices relating to their hazardous waste disposal,” said Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton.

A few years ago, Schnitzer Steel was also involved in a legal dispute with the Oakland Athletics baseball team over the presence of a metals shredding plant near the team’s proposed new ballpark on the waterfront. An appeals court ultimately sided with the company.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Schnitzer’s approach to sustainability has ultimately paid off, with the company returning a top-quartile performance on a range of Global 100 indicators. It saw a 74% increase in energy productivity over last year and made significant improvements in water (69%) and carbon (55%) productivity. It also scored well for its proportion of non-male board members (five out of nine are women) and racially diverse executives, while it also saw a significant drop in its worker injury rate. The company’s ranking also received a boost by its linking of its CEO’s pay to the achievement of sustainability targets (11% of variable compensation is tied to reaching these goals) and its policy of offering paid sick leave.

As for the profit side of things, last year was the second-best year in the company’s history. “Our people and planet goals are clearly not coming at the expense of profit,” Lundgren says.

“For a company that is 116 years old and that many consider to be ‘old economy’ to be recognized as a leading force in sustainability is a great example of how sustainability principles can be successfully applied to an industrial company.”

Schnitzer’s ascension to the top of the Global 100 is also quite timely, given the recent focus on how to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries, including steelmaking, and the importance of metals in the energy transition. Lundgren points out that technologies of the future like electric vehicles, wind turbines and battery storage are more metals-intensive than their fossil-fuel-powered predecessors.

Yet there is still a widespread ignorance of the importance of recycling steel, copper, aluminum and nickel – all of which Schnitzer recycles using its advanced metal recovery systems – in the energy transition, Lundgren adds.

“There has been underinvestment in metals and mining for years, and there are shortages of some critical ferrous and non-ferrous metals, which we recover and recycle,” she says.

“We can’t eliminate these shortages, but we can alleviate them. Metals recycling is one of the foundational pillars for global decarbonization.”

The post How a one-man scrap metal recycler became the world’s most sustainable corporation appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, he set in motion a seeming avalanche of public and private investment in climate solutions, including those focused on the building sector, which accounts for about 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The bill will allocate US$391 billion toward climate solutions, including new tax credits for residential energy retrofits, energy efficiency rebates and a range of related measures, such as new energy efficiency standards for air conditioners and other HVAC equipment. There’s also funding for retrofits, updated building energy codes, and deductions for commercial buildings that reduce their energy consumption.  

The Inflation Reduction Act’s impact extends across the 49th parallel, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has sought to make sure that the unprecedented public funding in the U.S. doesn’t suck green investment out of Canada, including investment that will decarbonize buildings.  

Herewith, a sampling of what 2023 may have to offer in the world of green buildings. 

Green ‘proptech’

Private equity has increasingly sought out “proptech” ventures, and especially green proptech – technologies designed to improve the environmental performance of buildings. A/O PropTech, a venture capital firm specializing in this space, reported recently that this sector has clocked an 84% annual growth rate over the past five years, with US$4.5 billion allocated globally, much of it landing in European cities. A/O PropTech itself has a stake in 22 firms, including property-management software platforms, electrical-appliance control systems and various planning analytics tools.  

According to a new market analysis entitled The Future of Building in a Low Carbon World, the company says it sees investment opportunities in the coming years in a range of construction-related verticals, such as green procurement software, architectural software that enables low-carbon design approaches, and emerging building materials. In particular, A/O predicts further innovation in the design of modular housing, citing the US$1.6 billion invested in the prefab (aka modular construction) industry in 2022, which was two-and-a-half-times more than the previous year.  

The modular construction sector – which relies on factory-built components and assembly to drive up productivity and quality control – has generated a lot of attention recently as pressure to accelerate the development of affordable housing builds due to skyrocketing real estate prices and rents in many cities. Modular construction is also associated with cleaner construction as it can be done faster, and with reduced waste and emissions.  

Carbon disclosure makes for green buildings

The push in recent years to build more energy efficient buildings can inadvertently boost the use  of carbon-intensive construction materials, like certain types of insulation. Similarly, urban intensification, which reduces transportation-related carbon, also tends to drive up the use of carbon-intensive materials, like concrete, steel and glass.  

Efforts to push developers to assess and disclose the embodied carbon in their projects, and then report on the energy performance of their buildings, have gained some traction in recent years, for example with New York City’s Local Law 97, which mandates asset managers to begin filing assessments of energy consumption by 2025. The Toronto Green Standard, updated in May 2022, now requires developers to measure and disclose embodied carbon if they want to qualify for certain rebates for green building projects. And Canada’s federal government in late 2022 established an embodied carbon standard for its own construction projects. 

Interestingly, large asset managers are the ones pushing for more disclosure and better reporting. In an October 2022 report entitled Full Disclosure, the Canada Green Building Council, representing firms with $110 billion in assets, called on governments to establish building-energy disclosure guidelines and mandate data sharing as a prerequisite for approvals. “Data transparency and benchmarking can help guide energy and emissions reductions, and more broadly, can aid in the development of effective policies and programs,” the report said. All the members have vowed to make their own data – good, bad or ugly – public.  

Circular construction

Data and disclosure aren’t the sole drivers. As cities move to intensify, there’s growing interest in recycling construction debris from older buildings as a means of reducing construction-related emissions. But as The New York Times reported in a widely read October 2022 feature, circular-economy-minded Dutch architects and builders increasingly look to “urban mining” as a means of sourcing cast-off materials – like discarded clothing refashioned into insulation – for new projects.  

Amsterdam has gone one step further, by monitoring its circular economy performance and making the results public. The city’s first pass was self-critical. “Despite many initiatives, the bulk of Amsterdam’s economy is still based on intensive primary material consumption.” As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.  

Renewables paired with storage

The growth of solar is on a steep upward trajectory, driven by falling prices, expanding incentives and, in some jurisdictions, including Tokyo and parts of the EU, mandates on new construction. But with the proliferation of electric vehicles and thus demand for renewable electricity, combining solar panels with utility-scale storage is poised to see accelerated growth in the next several years. Indeed, the expanded role of solar and storage will enable more homes and commercial buildings to transition to electric heat.  

The massive scaling up of renewables is a necessary step in the energy transition but not sufficient, given issues with intermittent supply. Local grids, feeling the pinch from increased electricity demand, need new deployments of both local renewables and storage systems that can store and then provide off-peak power. “By 2025, over 29% of all new behind-the-meter solar systems will be paired with storage, compared to under 11% in 2021,” according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. “The utility-scale market is also recognizing the benefits of pairing solar with storage, with over 45 [gigawatts] of commissioned or announced projects paired with storage, representing over 50 [gigawatt hours] of storage capacity.” 

Storage initiatives come in many flavours – battery farms, pumped hydro (surplus power used to pump water into reservoirs), or the production of green hydrogen for fuel cells with industrial–scale electrolyzers. In its 2022 budget, Canada’s federal government introduced a 30% tax credit for companies developing battery storage and clean hydrogen solutions. The Biden administration in 2021 pumped US$9.5 billion into clean hydrogen development, with more expected under the Inflation Reduction Act. However, clean hydrogen for home energy is not yet a slam dunk. A much-hyped “world-first” project in Scotland, to use green hydrogen to replace natural gas, has succumbed to delays and technical problems.  

Investor interest in offshore wind will also drive investment in storage and green hydrogen production. According to a 2022 year-end review by the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the amount of offshore capacity in the development pipeline grew 13%, with more than 40,000 megawatts planned or under construction. The demand will be stoked by tax credits and grants enabled by the Inflation Reduction Act. The European Union and the United Kingdom have 100 gigawatts of offshore planned by 2030 – enough to power 75 million homes. Despite its extensive shoreline, Canada lags behind the U.S., with 5 GW of offshore wind to be built off the coast of Nova Scotia by 2030.  

The surge of investment that will be unleashed this year by the Inflation Reduction Act comes at a fortuitous moment, as it dovetails with critical refinements in renewable energy systems, green building technology and consumer/developer attitudes about why decarbonizing the built environment is a critical piece of the fight to reverse the climate crisis. Perhaps 2023 will be the year when all the pieces begin to fit together.  

The post Four ways 2023 could be a game changer for green buildings appeared first on Corporate Knights.

One disturbing consequence of the pandemic has been the mountains of single-use plastic it has generated.

In January, Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical unveiled a bold initiative to tackle this problem with plans for a US$1-billion plant in France that each year will turn up to 160,000 tonnes of plastic waste currently sent to landfills or incinerators into brand-new packaging and textile materials. Some of the world’s largest users of plastic containers, such as Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder and Danone, have signed up as suppliers.

The French plant – like a smaller one under construction in Tennessee – will use Eastman’s polyester renewal technology, which breaks down hard-to-recycle carpets, textiles and containers into their molecular building blocks, then reassembles the material into new plastics. The company claims that the process can be used repeatedly on the same materials with no loss of quality. It estimates that the combination of its technology and France’s renewable energy resources will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared with other recycling methods.

The company’s head of plastics, Scott Ballard, told a Tennessee TV station: “What we’re trying to do is make it easier … for governments to create infrastructure to recycle.

Because with this technology, that waste becomes valuable, [so] we can pay money for it as a feedstock, as opposed to them having to pay to dispose of it.”

Eastman’s project, which will benefit from French government incentives, is an encouraging sign that the fight against plastic pollution is gathering steam. Last November, a study for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that the pandemic has generated more than eight million tons of plastic waste, mostly from hospitals.

More than 70 prominent consumer-goods companies came together in January to call for a global treaty to fight plastic pollution. The signatories, including Unilever, Walmart, Ikea and Coca-Cola, urged governments to adopt a wide range of policies to “keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment, reduce virgin plastic production,” and decouple plastic-production fossil fuels.

Such initiatives are sure to face pushback from powerful fossil-fuel and chemical industries that supply the raw materials for plastics. They would be wise to recognize, however, that the tide is not moving their way. Projects like Eastman’s will hopefully persuade businesses in many other sectors that the future lies in ever more efficient recycling.

Zero: Keurig

Speaking of recycling… Coffee-machine maker Keurig boasts on its website that by using its K-Cycle program, corporate customers can fully recycle every one of its single-use coffee pods. By 2020, the Massachusetts-based pioneer of single-serve coffee makers had diverted 136 million pods, weighing more than 2.7 million kilograms, from landfills by composting the grounds and filters and recycling the plastic and aluminum packaging.

But there’s a snag for those of us who use Keurig pods at home. The company reached a settlement with Canada’s Competition Bureau in January over what the bureau described as “false or misleading” claims about the recyclability of K-Cup pods. Under the deal, Keurig agreed to pay a $3-million penalty, donate $800,000 to a charity focused on environmental causes, and cover the costs of the bureau’s investigation. It must also reword its claims about the pods’ recyclability, and change their packaging accordingly.

Within a few weeks of the settlement, Keurig Canada had put up a banner on its website, noting that “Keurig K-Cup pods may not be recyclable in your area; check with your local municipality for more information.” A link gave more details of the settlement.

Alerted by researchers at the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre, the bureau found that Keurig pods are not widely accepted by municipal recycling programs outside British Columbia and Quebec. It also concluded that Keurig’s claims give the impression that coffee drinkers can prepare the pods for recycling simply by peeling off the lid and emptying out the grounds, when, in fact, some recycling programs require more steps.

“False or misleading claims by businesses to promote ‘greener’ products harm consumers who are unable to make informed purchasing decisions,” noted Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell. Such claims, he added, also hurt suppliers of rival products that are less environmentally damaging.

Of course, Keurig is not alone in promising more than it delivers. The University of Victoria group found that Toronto’s solid-waste department recovers about 90 tonnes of coffee pods annually from a variety of brands that clog its recycling system.

The Competition Bureau’s statement announcing the settlement ended on a note of appreciation for the company’s “voluntary cooperation in resolving this matter.” Even better, Keurig and other pod makers could avoid the problem by making only refillable pods.

The post Heroes and Zeros: Eastman Chemical vs. Keurig appeared first on Corporate Knights.