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Sustainability In Your Ear

Sustainability In Your Ear

著者： Mitch Ratcliffe
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 Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.Copyright 2025 Internet Media Strategies Inc. マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 地球科学 生物科学 科学 経済学
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  • Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong On Reforesting 3 Billion Acres

    Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong On Reforesting 3 Billion Acres
    2025/11/03
    Most Silicon Valley CEOs who cash out their stock options start another tech company. Yishan Wong planted trees instead. After helping build PayPal, Facebook, and serving as Reddit's CEO, Wong concluded that humanity's biggest challenge wouldn't be solved with algorithms or network effects—it would be solved by restoring the planet's forests at an unprecedented scale. Mitch Ratcliffe sits down with Wong to discuss Terraformation, the company he founded in 2020 with an audacious mission: restore 3 billion acres of native forest worldwide—an area larger than the entire United States.

    Planting a trillion trees isn't just about seeds in the ground. It's about solving bottlenecks like funding gaps that leave 95% of qualified forestry teams without resources, seed shortages, lack of infrastructure and technology, gaps in tracking and verification. Terraformation built a support system that includes modular seed banks, solar-powered nurseries, open source forest management software, which is called Terraware and a seed to carbon forest accelerator that's modeled on tech startup accelerators. Since founding Terraformation, Wong has enabled the planting of over 4.7 million trees across 394 species, established 19 seed banks and 21 nurseries and created more than 798 jobs.

    "We made Terraware not because this is the most genius piece of technology that will change the world," Yishan explains. "We said, hey, let's just help forestry teams achieve certain basic necessary activities." Unlike commercial timber plantations that prioritize fast-growing monocultures, Terraformation focuses on biodiverse native forests. Native tree species can support an order of magnitude more life than non-native species because they've co-evolved over millions of years. "Trees are the anchor species for a forest ecosystem," he added. "What you're doing is you're growing trees as the anchor species so that all of the other life in that forest ecosystem comes back."

    Terraformation recently won the Keeling Curve Prize and the G20's RestorLife Award. The company also received recognition at the Global Sustainability Awards, winning SME Company of the Year. Yishan explains why a former Reddit CEO believes in low tech solutions that are the right approach to climate change, how Silicon Valley's lessons about scaling systems could apply to reforestation and what it takes to build an organization designed to be replicated rather than defended. You can learn more about the company at Terraformation.com.
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    48 分
  • The Climate Action Network's Pre-COP30 Briefing with Rebecca Thissen

    The Climate Action Network's Pre-COP30 Briefing with Rebecca Thissen
    2025/10/27
    Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the world's climate negotiators will gather in Belém, Brazil this November for COP 30, a summit many are calling a critical juncture for global climate action. After COP 29 in Baku ended with what developing nations called a woefully inadequate $300 billion annual commitment—far short of the $1.3 trillion economists say is needed—can multilateral climate negotiations still deliver the justice and transformation the climate crisis demands? And with 71% of climate finance currently provided as loans rather than grants, how is the debt crisis crushing developing countries' ability to invest in climate action?

    Rebecca Thissen, Global Advocacy Leader for Climate Action Network International, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to unpack what's really at stake in Belém. With a background in International Public Law and years in the trenches of climate justice advocacy, Thissen works at the intersection of finance, economics, and climate action to ensure money flows where it's needed most. She discusses the just transition work program, Brazil's controversial Tropical Forests Forever Facility, the International Court of Justice's groundbreaking ruling on climate obligations, and why only 10% of countries showed up with their nationally determined contributions. Climate Action Network represents nearly 2,000 organizations across 130 countries, making it the world's largest coalition working on climate change. You can follow their daily updates during COP 30 through their newsletter ECO at climatenetwork.org.

    Read a transcript of this episode. Subscribe to receive transcripts by email.
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    47 分
  • Buckstop's Alexander Olesen Digs Into Urban Mining

    Buckstop's Alexander Olesen Digs Into Urban Mining
    2025/10/20
    Every solar array, battery system, and EV charger installed over the past decade will eventually need to be decommissioned. Yet there's no unifying system to handle that flow of materials—no operating system for the reverse supply chain that the circular economy depends on. While Americans recycle 97% of vehicles, we recycle less than 20% of electronics, leaving valuable critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and gold to languish in warehouses or end up in landfills. The electronics embedded in our built environment represent the richest mining scene on Earth, yet we treat these refined materials as waste rather than the valuable resources they are. Meet Alexander Olesen, co-founder and CEO of Buckstop, an urban mining company launched in early 2025 to build what he calls "the intelligence layer for the circular economy." He previously founded Babylon Micro Farms, which develops distributed vertical farming systems, and he returns to Sustainability In Your Ear to share his new mission: creating a sustainable end-of-use solution for every electronic device on Earth.

    Buckstop took just three months to deploy its "algorithmic assay," a method of deconstructing finished goods into their raw materials and critical minerals at scale, something that wasn't possible to do efficiently before the advent of AI. The result: asset owners can now see the granular value of their deployed electronics in unprecedented detail. The scrap value of electronics typically yields only 1-5% recovery, but resale value can reach 20-30%. For Fortune 500 companies with billions in fixed assets, that circularity delta represents enormous value currently being destroyed.

    Olesen's approach draws directly from his decade-long experience as an OEM manufacturing vertical farming equipment with 1,200 unique components. "Why is there no comprehensive end-of-life solution for technology assets?" he asked. Every hardware entrepreneur he knew in renewables, robotics, and distributed systems faced the same problem.

    Buckstop's model draws inspiration from an unlikely source: Kelley Blue Book. "Kelley Blue Book was the data stream that formalized the aftermarket for vehicles," Olesen notes. Before that standardization, people would leave cars rusting by the roadside. Today, the automotive industry is the most circular industry on the planet. Olesen believes the same transformation is possible for the electronics industry. The platform currently focuses on renewable energy infrastructure—solar panels, batteries, inverters—but Buckstop's long-term vision extends to one day tracking all electronic assets. As Olesen puts it: "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." That measurement is where circularity begins.

    You can learn more about Buckstop and access the beta assessment tool at buckstop.com.
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    35 分
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