Consumer goods companies measure their plastic output in big numbers. A single international beverage manufacturer, for example, can produce several million tons of plastic packaging in just one year. Now imagine how much plastic must be out there when considering the multitude of other organizations across the globe—and their collective plastic output over the course of several decades.
Companies looking for a win from investors, customers, employees, and the community at large are well-served to get the ball rolling on implementing robust and sound Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) elements into the way they do business. Taking action on your ESG practices is a smart way to not only do good but also do well as ESG provides businesses with benefits across the spectrum of stak...
...And there is no let-up in sight. Plastics production has increased substantially nearly every year since 1950. With more plastic pouring out of manufacturers every day and no path in place to get rid of what already exists, our unsustainable dependence on plastic has led to a mounting environmental crisis. In order to address this issue, it is crucial to modernize mixed plastic recycling and em...
...But methane absorbs heat and radiation at a much higher level than CO2. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Global Warming Potentials (GWP), a system designed to rank and compare the potency of different GHGs, ranks methane at 27 to 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2 over a hundred year period. On a 20-year horizon, methane is 84 times more effective at tra...
In 2019, the United States released around 4.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels alone. This is less than half the amount released by China, the world’s biggest offender at nearly 10 billion metric tons. These two countries alone account for over 40% of global emissions of CO2.
...There have been two significant inflection points in the history of CO2 in the atmosphere. The first was during the industrial revolution when the rise of industry was powered by large-scale burning of fossil fuels. The second – possibly induced by the industrialization of World War 2 – was in the 1940s
