Canada Just Announced a Ban on Single-Use Plastics. That’s a Big Deal for Our Oceans.

On Monday morning, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government will move to implement a federal ban on single-use plastic items within the next two years.
“We need to cover all of Canada with this decision — and that’s why the federal government is moving forward on a science-based approach to establishing which harmful single-use plastics we will be eliminating as of 2021,” the prime minister said.
Trudeau’s office did not immediately provide details on which specific single-use plastics might be prohibited under the ban. CBC News, citing a governmental source, reported that items such as “cotton swabs, drink stirrers, plates and balloon sticks” might become illegal under the new federal law.   
Canada’s announcement comes just a few months after the European Union moved to implement a similar ban on single-use plastics. Frans Timmerman, an EU official who championed the passing of the plan through the continental parliament, celebrated its passing as a major step toward saving our planet’s oceans.
“Today we have taken an important step to reduce littering and plastic pollution in our oceans and seas,” Timmerman said. “We got this, we can do this. Europe is setting new and ambitious standards, paving the way for the rest of the world.”
Experts estimate that as much as 8 million tons of plastic waste find their way to our oceans each year. That waste kills an estimated 100 million animals annually, imperiling entire ocean ecosystems. According to Ocean Conservancy, an environmental advocacy group, plastic waste has been found inside of 60 percent of seabirds and 100 percent of sea turtles who mistook the pollution as a source of food.
Many of the sea creatures who don’t die from the plastic they ingest experience extreme pain and distress. One viral video with millions of views shows a marine biologist struggling for eight minutes to dislodge a plastic straw stuck inside the nostril of a sea turtle, which writhes in agony and bleeds profusely.
By themselves, the Canadian and EU bans won’t be the solution that saves millions of marine animal lives from a potentially excruciating death due to plastic ingestion. However, the proposed restrictions represent a meaningful step forward — and all other nations should take note. Only through cooperation on a global scale can humankind stop millions more tons of plastic waste from finding its way to our water. 
Whether the United States’ leaders will follow suit on the federal level remains to be seen, though some of our nation’s cities and states have placed limited bans on specific items like plastic bags and straws.

People Are Helping Animals Cross Highways — and That’s Great for Humans, Too

Drive south on U.S. Route 441 from Gainesville, Florida, and you’ll come across vast expanses of wetland. In the morning, the spiky purple flowers of pickerelweeds bloom as the sun rises over the horizon of Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. Come sunset, the sky turns into a watercolor of pastels where sandhill cranes fly in search of a place to rest. And lurking among it all, tucked among the grasses and slithering beneath the swampy water, is a who’s-who of Florida’s finest: the American alligator, mole salamander, Florida softshell turtle and green anole lizard.
But divert your eyes to the pavement barreling by, and you’re bound to see casualties. Frogs, salamanders, alligators and other creatures risk their lives crossing the highway while on the hunt for dinner or when traveling to mate and lay eggs. For years, thousands of animals were killed along the route, and the road gained a well-earned reputation as a death zone.  
So to prevent the high rate of animal casualties, the Florida Department of Transportation in 2000 built eight wildlife culverts for the animals to crawl through.
It worked.
A year after installing the underpasses, mortality rates had dropped drastically, from 2,411 to 158 animals — a decrease of 93.5 percent.

animal culverts
Constructing animal-only culverts under busy roadways reduces wildlife-vehicle collisions.

The tunnels underneath U.S. 441 are known as wildlife crossings, and they allow animal populations to safely migrate across habitats without the constant threat of speeding vehicles. Each day more than 1 million vertebrates are run over in the United States, and an estimated 1 to 2 million collisions happen every year between large animals and cars.
But the crossings, which can also take the form of under- and overpasses, serve a more important purpose than keeping individual animals alive and your car dent-free: Each wildlife crossing connects islands of isolated habitats intersected by roads, bridges and other manmade structures. Florida’s efforts are part of a bigger push by conservationists to protect wildlife corridors, or stretches of habitats that connect populations of animals, which in turn helps protect the region’s biodiversity.
After a recent United Nations report found that roughly 1 million species worldwide are threatened with extinction, constructing wildlife crossings has become even more urgent. After all, the main drivers of extinction are man-made (think exploiting natural resources, climate change and pollution). Shouldn’t the solution also be?
Ron Sutherland, the chief scientist at the Wildlands Network, an organization that fights species extinction, highlighted the ways habitats are currently fragmented: Roads often cut across wildlife corridors, agriculture has cleared tremendous amounts of habitat, and urban sprawl keeps, well, sprawling. The goal of wildlife crossings is to reconnect habitats with their native animal populations. Doing so allows for gene flow, an essential ingredient of biodiversity. Without different populations to mate with, animals are forced to inbreed, leading to the eventual collapse of their population.
“We really do see wildlife corridors and road crossings as a core solution for stopping the biodiversity extinction crisis,” Sutherland said in an email.

SAVING MONEY — AND BIODIVERSITY

If protecting species isn’t enough, Sutherland emphasized the financial incentive to build crossings. The price of hitting an animal can cost motorists and taxpayers a pretty penny — deer collisions run about $8,000, elk an average of $25,000, and moose upward of $44,000 when factoring in things like human injury and vehicle repair, according to the Western Transportation Institute.
“So even a million-dollar wildlife road crossing structure can pay for itself in public benefits over the course of just a few years,” Sutherland told NationSwell. “They’re in the public interest, and they’re in the interest of saving biodiversity.”
From salamanders in Massachusetts to cougars in California, researchers have recorded lower collision rates and high animal usage after crossings are built.

wildlife crossing
WIldlife crossings, like this one in Canada, helps connect animal populations separated by highways, bridges and other structures.

Perhaps the most popular and well-studied example is the network of wildlife crossings at Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies. In the 1980s, due to increased traffic on the Trans-Canada Highway, officials expanded the road from two lanes to four. Transportation planners and scientists drafted a solution to minimize the effect the expansion would have on wildlife. From 1996 to 2014, six wildlife overpasses and 38 underpasses were built along the border of Banff and Yoho national parks.
Subsequent studies showed that the designated crossings reduced animal-vehicle crashes by 80 percent. Since 1996, an estimated 150,000 animals have used the crossings, including grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars, moose, elk and deer.
Wyoming is home to another successful project. The Path of the Pronghorn, a 170-mile wildlife corridor, gives pronghorns, ungulates and other species a safe way to cross a major highway as they migrate each spring to give birth and seek out the freshest, most nutrient-rich food. After two wildlife overpasses and an underpass were built, animal-vehicle collisions were reduced by 70 percent.
Wildlife crossings are achieving their goals, said Sutherland. “Species are moving across them, and the economic data indicates [the crossings] basically pay for themselves if you put them in the right places.”

PROTECTING HABITATS THROUGH POLICY

But crossings are just one stick in a bundle of solutions, said David Willms, senior director for Western Wildlife and Conservation at the National Wildlife Federation. He stressed that it’s challenging and costly to build enough of them to completely mitigate the effects of new roads and other construction projects.
It’s clear that crossings work. But just as important is passing legislation that protects habitats before roads are built and wildlife is disconnected. For example, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, introduced in Congress in May, would establish, protect and maintain corridors at the local, regional and national levels. If passed, it would establish a science- and data-driven system of designation for land that would prevent activities like oil drilling and mining. It would also create funding for wildlife crossings and other projects.
Laws protecting wildlife are already being passed at the state level, including in New Mexico and New Hampshire. A handful of other states are considering similar legislation.
“We have the technology now to identify those spots, and we have the case studies now to show that those crossings work,” said Willms. “Those are two bigs pieces of the puzzle. Now you just need the political will to get the funding in place to get more of them.”
Because corridors often overlap with publicly and privately owned lands, other solutions rely on the support of landowners — for example, working with farmers in a way that protects the wildlife habitats on their lands without affecting their business operations. “I haven’t found a landowner yet that doesn’t recognize the value of these wildlife corridors,” Willms said.
Sutherland said it’s an issue that people across all regions and political beliefs are supporting. In more conservative western states, “there’s been an increasing recognition that elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelope and other species need to migrate in the interest of saving biodiversity.” In response, those states are working to identify and protect the large expanses of land that still exist. In the east, where habitats are particularly broken up, he admits the approach is more piecemeal. In those states, Sutherland said, it’s more a question of, “Can we stitch things back together again into a network of habitats that would be enough to save species?”
Still, Sutherland has faith. At the Wildlands Network, he and other conservationists are working to create the Eastern Wildway, a habitat network that extends from Florida to Quebec. “It is a grand and ambitious plan that would take decades to achieve, but the benefits for nature and people would be immense,” Sutherland said. A stretch of land like this would protect thousands of species.

mule deer
Mule deer often have to jump fences or navigate around other structures along their migration routes.

But Willms countered that there often isn’t enough research to know what specific routes and corridors need protection.
For example, a key migration corridor for mule deer in Wyoming was accidentally discovered just seven years ago. Researcher Hall Sawyer believed a herd of mule deer was residential. He put GPS collars on a few deer and discovered that the animals were actually migrating a grueling 150 miles each year, from the Hoback region near Jackson down to the Red Desert. On the journey, the deer were met with man-made obstacles like fencing, roads and urban sprawl. That data helped push the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to designate the area as a migration corridor, which informs land management decisions such as adding animal-friendly fencing and creating protected areas.
“We’re closer to the beginning than we are to the end, because there’s just so much more research that can be done,” Willms said. “These crossings are invaluable and certainly scalable.”

CORRECTING FOR A CHANGING CLIMATE

Part of that research involves understanding how climate change will impact animals’ migratory paths. Historically, species respond to changes in the climate by moving and migrating to other areas in search of their preferred conditions.
Climate migration has been on the radar of scientists for decades, said Sutherland, but the issue has become more central as the pace of climate change accelerates. “Not only are humans causing climate change to happen much faster now, but we’ve broken up the landscape into small pieces where there are not very many opportunities for species to migrate like they used to.”
That means that in addition to protecting existing wildlife corridors, conservationists and their allies need to find ways to reconnect swaths of land that have been siphoned into ever smaller slices.
According to Sutherland, it’s not enough to simply fight climate change in an effort to stymie it. “It’s already happening,” he said, “and so we need a network of habitats to allow for that adaptation.”
More: Montana’s Progressive Road Design Accommodates Wildlife
 

Think Before You Toss: How Anyone Can Fight Food Waste

Each year, Americans throw out 1.3 billion tons of food. That’s a staggering amount of waste that ends up in the garbage heap instead of on the plates of hungry people who need it. 
But there are ways you can fight food waste — and with less effort than you might think. A few of the easiest can be done right at home (think composting and pickling or jamming produce before it goes bad). You also could sign up for a subscription service that delivers ugly or misshapen — but otherwise still delicious — produce that’s often bound for the landfill. Other ways to help: Consider donating to a food donation nonprofit and supporting policies that address food waste on a local and national level.
To learn more about how you can help, watch the video above.
More: Fighting Food Waste, One Sector at a Time

Could One Parking Lot Feed a City? They’re Betting on It

In a parking lot in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, there’s a 20-acre farm. But there’s no soil or tractors in sight. Instead, 10 bright white shipping containers occupy the asphalt.
The lot is contested space in a major city like Brooklyn. But Square Roots isn’t using it for parked cars. It’s using the space to grow herbs. The company has deliberately chosen the middle of an urban environment, and its goal is to feed the city that surrounds it.
“We’re literally in a parking lot of an old Pfizer pharmaceutical factory. We’re across the road from the Marcy [housing] project. We’re within a subway ride of 8 million people in New York,” Tobias Peggs, a co-founder of Square Roots, told NationSwell.
Square Roots, a vertical farming company, runs its operation out of the refurbished containers. Its goal is to make local food accessible to everyone.
A lack of fresh produce is a major problem for many residents in urban areas like New York, where over 16 percent of the population is food insecure. And for those who do have access to fresh produce, chances are it traveled hundreds of miles before ending up at the grocery store.
This leads to a variety of problems. People living in food deserts generally rely on processed foods and have higher health risks than those who can afford weekly trips to Whole Foods. Transporting vegetables and fruits around the world has a hefty carbon footprint and nutritional values quickly diminish after produce is picked.
And as the world’s population grows to 10 billion by 2050, our food output will need to drastically increase — by an estimated 70 percent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Square Roots’ founders think they may have found a solution to the aforementioned problems.
“Rather than shipping food from one part of the planet to the next, what if you could just ship environmental data?” Peggs asked. “And recreate climates from all over the world, but recreate those climates in your backyard.”
Square Roots relies on technology to create each crop’s ideal environment in every container. The humidity, temperature, water and light are all controlled. The farms are connected to the “cloud,” which provides accurate, real-time information on each crop.
And the setup is yielding results. When Square Roots first grew basil it took 50 days. Now the growth cycle is just 28 days. By tracking light, heat and water, it can adjust each variable and create the conditions under which each crop grows best.

Tobias Peggs dives into the technology behind Square Roots’ operations.

Once a month, Square Roots invites people from across New York’s five boroughs to look inside the business’s operations. Visitors trickle in, and I watch as they munch on the 28-day-grown basil, chives and mint while learning about Square Roots’ operation.
“We picked them yesterday,” a farmer said.
After a quick overview of the program, we head outside for the main attraction a peek inside the farm.
Peggs commands the crowd. Eager for the big reveal, he opens the heavy, metal doors. A pink glow cascades over us energy-efficient light that helps the herbs grow.
Peggs dives into the science. “Basically, when you study photosynthesis, plant growth, the plant doesn’t absorb the full spectrum of white light. The plant only absorbs certain spectrums of light. A lot of red and a lot of blue. What we’re able to do in the farm is really control that light spectrum and only give the plant the spectrum of light that it needs.”
Efficiency is at the core of Square Roots’ operations. Besides refurbishing old shipping containers, each farm uses 90 percent less water than a similarly sized outdoor farm. There’s no soil; instead, the plants are fed nutrient-rich water. The containers also boast energy-efficient LED lights, and there are rumors of adding solar panels to power them. The produce is then biked to grocery stores across Manhattan and Brooklyn, which cuts back on emissions from transportation.
The result is a higher yield with fewer resources. Currently, the farms grow herbs, like mint, basil and chives; and greens, like romaine, gem and Tuscan kale. Peggs says the farms can grow practically anything. Strawberries, eggplants, beets, radishes and carrots are on its horizon.
But the catch is that each type of produce has unique energy requirements. One of the main criticisms of vertical farming is its lack of variety. Most vertical farms focus on lettuces and herbs because those greens have the largest output and highest profitability. Denser crops require more sunlight. That means more energy, and therefore, higher costs and more emissions.
Paul Gauthier, an associate research scholar at Princeton and founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project, researches vertical farming’s sustainability.
“In terms of carbon emission, it’s actually better to have your lettuce transported from California to New York if your [vertical farming] energy is coming from any fossil fuel,” he told NationSwell. “The energy consumption in a vertical farm in New York would be so high that you would produce more CO2 for lettuce than you [would] if you ship it from California.”
But if the energy is coming from renewable sources, then vertical farming is a competitive player.
It comes down to fueling these farms with the right energy and using efficient light.
Gauthier believes that vertical farms and other small, high output farms will be a key factor in feeding the world — but only if the crop variety grows.
“We won’t feed the world with lettuce,” he said.
A farmer harvests basil in Square Roots’ vertical farm.

But there’s debate on whether these ventures are affordable or realistic.
For example, Square Roots’ lot in Brooklyn cost about $1.5 million to build, which was funded by Peggs, the former CEO of Aviary, a photo-editing program, and Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s little brother, who sits on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX. So the idea that shipping container farms are scalable feels a little out of reach for the average person or company.
But the cost hasn’t deterred interest. This year Square Roots partnered with Gordon Food Services, which is the largest food distribution company in North America. This partnership will put Square Roots containers across the country.
Even as the company scales, it won’t reach every demographic. A $3 an ounce, basil isn’t something that’s going to solve America’s food deserts.
Peggs stressed that we’re just not there … yet.
“The reality today is that we’re right at the beginning of the technology road map here. Right at the beginning.”
Square Roots isn’t the only private urban farming company that’s professing scalability. Urban farms, such as AeroFarms and Bowery Farming, are currently attracting lots of attention for their potential to make local food available to everyone. According to AgFunder, agriculture-tech startups raised $16.9 billion in support in 2018. And investors, like Google Ventures and IKEA, have poured millions of dollars into supporting those initiatives.
And urban farming is likely to take root in the coming years. A study published in 2018 on Earth’s Future, found that if urban farming is fully implemented around the world, it could account for 10 percent of the global output of legumes, roots and tubers and vegetable crops — 180 million tons of food every year.  
“Not only could urban agriculture account for several percent of global food production, but there are added co-benefits beyond that, and beyond the social impacts,” Matei Georgescu, a co-author of the study, told City Lab.
Peggs and Gauthier agree that there isn’t one clear cut solution. Instead, it’s going to take a combination of urban and traditional farming to feed the world in the future.
“The very clear position here is that the more of us working to get people connected to locally grown food the better,” said Peggs.
More: Five Apps for the Tech-Savy Environmentalist

‘Climate Apocalypse Chic’ and 7 Other Ways Art Tackles Climate Change

When scientists, activists and journalists talk about climate change, they tend to use alarming numbers, large statistics and scary graphs. But around the world, some artists are working to translate intimidating facts and figures into something understandable on a human scale. Whether it’s via theater, fashion or street art, these artists challenge how we look at our world’s future and our role in it.

Saving Coral Reefs

Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures support the conservation and growth of coral reefs around the world. DeCaires Taylor, a marine conservationist, sculptor and scuba diver, has planted his work in places like the Maldives, Florida, Grenada and the Bahamas.
Many of his sculptures are shaped like humans — an intentional visual connection between people and marine life. The sculptures are made from a nontoxic pH-neutral concrete, with rough textures that encourage coral to grow. The sculptures start as stone but within just a few years, the work comes to life. Coral flourishes, fish find homes and crustaceans settle into the statues, sustaining life in areas where the reefs are vanishing.

Hadestown

Written by Anaïs Mitchell and directed by Rachel Chavkin, Hadestown brings an unlikely subject to a large stage.
The latest Broadway hit is rooted in climate change mayhem. It’s a 21st-century spin on two classic Greek myths, where Hades, Persphone, Orpheaus and Eurydice all head to the underworld and back.
“Strange things happen in the world these days,” Eurydice sings in her opening lines. “Fall comes early. Spring comes late. One day summer comes, the next she goes, any way the wind blows.”

Before It’s Too Late

Climate change is expected to hit Miami especially hard.
Before It’s Too Late is a Miami-based initiative that sits at the intersection of art, technology and science. One of its projects, Miami Murals, uses augmented reality to transform Miami street murals. Hold your phone up, and the mural comes to life. Ocean waves slowly fill the screen and a yellow canary warns you about upcoming environmental threats. The user has two choices: They can look at our projected bleak future or pick “Be the Change,” which illustrates a healthy future, complete with wind turbines and smiling manatees.
The project started when Before It’s Too Late founder and CEO Linda Cheung noted a divide between scientists and citizens. Her murals are a place where those populations can connect and ignite social change through empathy.

Unfortunately, Ready to Wear

During February’s Fashion Week, Milk Gallery in New York hosted a new line of clothing called, Unfortunately, Ready to Wear. Created by Luka Sabbat as a collaboration between the Natural Resources Defense Council and Milk Studios, the conceptual line was designed as clothing for a future impacted by climate change. The collection is complete with fireproof jackets, storm-warning headphones and a backpack that transforms into a sleeping bag.
“We’re going at this from a different angle than I think most environmental organizations have ever done,” Rhea Suh, president of NRDC, told Fast Company. “Honestly, I think we need to be a lot more creative about how we reach out to new audiences.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ6i12HHIO_/

Sean “Hula” Yoro

Street artists around the world are using art to raise awareness of climate change, but Sean “Hula” Yoro incorporates an element of nature into each of his works. His more famous murals involve tidal waves: Yoro sits on a surfboard and paints as the tides rise and fall. Yoro also paints on natural surfaces, like glaciers and trees, where the art quickly weathers away. Each piece is intended to spark a sense of urgency.  
“It is important now more than ever to try to circulate positive environmental messages through art in order to combat the recent oppression of climate change research,” he told CNN. “I worry that we have taken for granted our natural world and if we wait any longer the negative effects will be irreversible.”

HighWaterLine

It’s hard to understand how rising water levels will directly impact a city simply by looking at a map. When you can physically stand in a place that will someday be underwater, it becomes a lot more realistic.
HighWaterLine is an attempt to do just that. Artist Eve Mosher, with the help of a line marker (the machines used to paint football fields), walks across cities, in her wake a blue line marking each city’s flood zone.
“I realized that while I didn’t have the skills to be a lobbyist, lawyer, or politician, I didn’t have the money to make huge investments or sway opinion, but what I did have was creativity and my art,” she writes on her website.
Mosher started the project in 2007 in New York City. Since then, HighWaterLines can be found in Philadelphia, Miami, Delray Beach and Bristol.

Chart Art

Jill Pelto’s art draws from her scientific research around the world. Whether it’s studying mountain glaciers in British Columbia or the Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, the destinations paired with climate data inspire her art.
“I make and read a lot of graphs, yet I forgot that many people do not,” Pelto told Vice. “Using actual information … provided an intellectual context to my work while my illustrations around the graphs created an emotional story that can inspire people to promote environmental justice.”

These hands support a building in Venice, which is one of the cities most susceptible to climate change.

Support

In 2017, Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn installed a pair of giant hands in Venice’s Great Canal. The hands appeared to “support” a building that dates to the 14th century. The installation, entitled Support, was part of the 2017 Venice Biennale, and it represented the threat climate change poses to the city and the power humans have to stop it.
Venice is highly vulnerable to climate change and sea-level rise. It frequently experiences “acqua alta,” or high waters, where the city floods up to 60 times each year.
Quinn’s hands, which were based on the shape of his children’s hands, symbolize unification and the work we have to do to support future generations. “At once, the sculpture has both a noble air as well as an alarming one … the hands symbolize tools that can both destroy the world, but also have the capacity to save it,” Quinn writes on his website.
More: 5 Very Simple, Practical Things You Can Do to Curb Climate Change

Snuffing Out Light Poverty

When Jessica O. Matthews was 19, she attended a family wedding in Nigeria. During the ceremony, the power abruptly went out. It rattled Matthews — but not her relatives. They simply connected a backup diesel generator and continued with the wedding.
“You’ll get used to it,” a family member assured her.
But during the remainder of her time in the country, Matthews didn’t see why she — or anyone else — had to. This power outage wasn’t an anomaly. Her relatives and others in the community were regularly plagued by unreliable electricity, sometimes struggling just to juice up a cell phone.
“I knew this was a larger problem,” said Matthews.
And this problem has a name: “light poverty.” 1.3 billion people around the globe — one in every five — lack access to electric light, and it affects more than the occasional wedding. Without regular electricity, a community’s safety, health, educational and economic goals all suffer.
“Access to clean power has always been a human right — now more so than ever, as it’s become the foundation in which we operate and live our lives today,” Matthews said. “Whether it’s power to turn the lights on so you can read, powering your cell phone to call family, turning on your laptop to run your business or fueling connectivity and 5G — if you don’t have reliable power, you have nothing.”
After returning to the U.S., Matthews created the Soccket, a soccer ball that doubles as a portable generator. It was “the kick start of a movement to address the issue of reliable power on a larger scale,” she said.
But two years ago, Matthews realized she hadn’t yet solved the problem for her family in Nigeria.
“Ultimately, the problem is and always was an infrastructural issue,” said Matthews. To truly extinguish light poverty, she needed to pivot to infrastructure.
Matthews changed course, transforming her previous startup into Uncharted Power, a company that develops power infrastructure and provides power services to people around the world.
Today, Matthews and her team build, own and operate renewable power infrastructure,providing energy that’s both clean and low cost. Currently, they’re in the U.S. and the Caribbean and are planning to expand across sub-Saharan Africa.
Matthews, who counts both Beyoncé and Bill Nye as her role models, isn’t intimidated by the challenge.
“In order to solve the biggest problems, we need as many people as possible believing that they have the agency and impact to be part of the solution,” she said. “We need to make things more accessible, more tangible and collectively pull people in. I try to do that.”
Meet more environmental innovators here.

Article produced in partnership with Mirai, Toyota’s very own Vehicle of Change. The power to change the world belongs to everyone who dreams about what’s next. NationSwell and Toyota teamed up to find 10 environmental entrepreneurs who are building solutions today that will change the world tomorrow. 

That’s the Last Straw

Chelsea Briganti, who was born and raised in Hawaii, has always loved the ocean — but not the volume of plastic that washes up on the once-pristine shoreline. “By 2050, there may be more plastic than fish in the ocean by volume,” she said.
While some innovators focus on removing the debris that’s already polluting our water and land, Briganti is taking a different tack: rethinking the wasteful nature of consumer goods.
“If we only plan to use something once, why do we build it to last forever?” Briganti asked. Her company, LOLIWARE, is doing just the opposite: designing single-use plastics to disappear.
She’s starting small — with edible straws. And while straws might seem too trivial to matter, the environmental impact could be colossal.
By some estimates, as many as 500 million plastic straws are briefly used — and then discarded — each day in the U.S. alone. They break down into tiny “microplastics” — finer even than powdered sugar — that find their way not only into marine life, but also sea salt and even tap water.
Briganti first became interested in the waste-free movement in 2010 while studying industrial design at Parsons School of Design. Together with classmate Leigh Ann Baker, she created an edible cup from gelatin for a food competition.
The duo kept experimenting with other materials, eventually landing on a tastier formula made from seaweed and organic sweeteners. (The idea ended up on one of the most-watched episodes of “Shark Tank.”) But in order to make a bigger impact, Briganti and Baker decided to think smaller — by creating edible straws.
Although the LOLIstraw feels like plastic, it is actually seaweed-based. Available in flavors like rose, mango or vanilla, it can be eaten after use. Or, if thrown away, it breaks down in 60 days.
Briganti understands that building a more sustainable future requires system-wide innovations. And while behavioral changes like the widespread adoption of composting are crucial, so is adapting to sustainable products — like the LOLIstraw.
For the record, Briganti said she has nothing against straws.
“My problem is with unsustainable goods which aren’t fit for a purpose,” she clarified. “We want people to enjoy being sustainable and not think of it as a trade-off to the things they know and love. LOLIstraws are a healthy example of how we can transition to products that are simply better for us and the planet.”
This winter, LOLIWARE’s first orders will ship to early adopters like Marriott and Pernod Ricard, as well as eco-conscious individuals who supported the company during online campaigns. Next up are more “biodigr(edible)” products intended to replace other single-use items like utensils and cup lids.
What’s LOLIWARE’s biggest challenge? “Moving fast enough to address a problem that’s at such massive scale,” said Briganti. “We’ve developed a solution. Now it’s just a race against the clock to replace the toxic plastic straws polluting our environment.”
Meet more environmental innovators here.

Article produced in partnership with Mirai, Toyota’s very own Vehicle of Change. The power to change the world belongs to everyone who dreams about what’s next. NationSwell and Toyota teamed up to find 10 environmental entrepreneurs who are building solutions today that will change the world tomorrow. 

Solar Power to the People

Five years ago, Steph Speirs was working to bring solar power to a rural Indian village when she realized that she was installing a technology that most people in the U.S. could only dream of.
“We went to the middle of nowhere,” she said, “and realized that back home in America there are so many people who were locked out of accessing solar power.”
If a village in India could do it, why couldn’t more American homes make use of solar energy? The answer turned out to be complex: The majority of Americans are renters or condo owners who don’t have the right to install solar panels on a shared roof space. Some own their homes, but their roofs aren’t well-suited for solar exposure. And others just don’t have the startup funds.
“You have to be a unicorn to get solar in this country,” Speirs said.
One solution is the community solar farm: a solar energy plant that individuals can subscribe to cooperatively, like a farm share. That’s the solution Speirs and her co-founders Sandhya Murali and Steve Moilanen are working to promote with their startup, Solstice.
“We didn’t invent community solar — it was an idea that’s been taking hold across the country,” Speirs said. “But we were one of the first companies to work on it, and specifically the first to use software innovation and financial innovation to allow everyone to access it, including low-income Americans.”
Meet more environmental innovators here.

Article produced in partnership with Mirai, Toyota’s very own Vehicle of Change. The power to change the world belongs to everyone who dreams about what’s next. NationSwell and Toyota teamed up to find 10 environmental entrepreneurs who are building solutions today that will change the world tomorrow. 

Fighting Fire With Finance

Like many Californians, Zach Knight is getting used to parts of the state being regularly engulfed in flames. Wildfires have become an apocalyptic feature of life on the West Coast, driven by a few hundred years of forest mismanagement.
Unlike many environmental problems, this one has a clear remedy. Thousands of acres of forest land have to be rehabilitated. Trees need to be thinned and controlled burns introduced regularly. One problem: the U.S. Forest Service is spending so much of its budget putting out fires that there isn’t enough money left to do the work that would prevent them.
“This is no longer a science problem,” said Knight. “It’s actually a finance problem.”
It’s a problem that Knight and his startup, Blue Forest Conservation, have set out to solve. He and co-founders Leigh Madeira, Nick Wobbrock and Chad Reed, all Berkeley business school alumni, designed a new financial product that could help speed up forest restoration by decades or even centuries. Investors who buy “forest resilience bonds” can pay for forest rehabilitation up front, seeing a return on their investment as other organizations that also benefit from forest reclamation pay the bond down.
Their idea is already being put into action: This summer, a $4 million bond will pay for the National Forest Foundation to restore 5,000 acres of the Tahoe National Forest. The investors — CSAA Insurance Group, Calvert Impact Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation — will see a four percent return in annual payments from a water utility and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Knight said that the success of the bonds depends on getting organizations to realize how much they can benefit from forest restoration. Water and electric utilities, flood control districts, state agencies and private companies like breweries all benefit from cities that are protected from fires, an improved job market and cleaner water and air. “All of these also benefit from this work, but haven’t been paying for it in the past,” Knight said.
Convincing these groups that financially supporting this work will pay off might be an easier sell as wildfires continue to devastate the California landscape. “This is not an anomaly, it’s a problem that’s really getting worse,” Knight said. “We’re not having more fires — we’re having fewer, bigger fires.”
Native American communities used controlled fire as an agroforestry tool, promoting a varied ecology and preventing larger blazes, Knight said. But after 1911, federal law forbade starting any fires on public forest lands — leaving forests unnaturally packed with tinder. This has become a deadly problem when combined with climate change: 12 of California’s 15 largest wildfires have occurred since 2000, and 460,000 acres burned last summer alone.
Thinning forests costs about $1,000 per acre, and the U.S. Forest Service has a backlog of 82 million untended acres. So if we’re going to fight wildfires in a meaningful way, Blue Forest Conservation’s innovation might be the way forward.
Meet more environmental innovators here.

Article produced in partnership with Mirai, Toyota’s very own Vehicle of Change. The power to change the world belongs to everyone who dreams about what’s next. NationSwell and Toyota teamed up to find 10 environmental entrepreneurs who are building solutions today that will change the world tomorrow. 

Chemistry Magic, Made From Old Plastic

Less than 10 percent of plastic waste is recycled and few solutions exist to renew low-value plastics, like soda bottles, gum wrappers and trash bags.
Renewlogy has developed a system that changes low-value plastic back into its basic molecular structure. This allows non-recycled plastic waste to be converted into new products, such as high-value fuels.
The team at Renewlogy has opened two commercial facilities in Salt Lake City and Nova Scotia. Each facility processes 10 tons of plastic each day and converts them into 60 barrels of fuel.  
Meet more environmental innovators here.

Produced in partnership with Mirai, Toyota’s very own Vehicle of Change. The power to change the world belongs to everyone who dreams about what’s next. NationSwell and Toyota teamed up to find 10 environmental entrepreneurs who are building solutions today that will change the world tomorrow.