Vermont Green Football Club announced its launch Oct. 12, bringing sustainability into sports and semi-professional soccer to Burlington.  The club starts in May 2022 and will play its home matches at UVM’s Virtue Field. Vermont Green intends to use its platform to focus on environmental justice and sustainability by partnering with environmental justice organizations and selling sustainably-sourced merchandise, according to the club’s website.  “We felt that [environmental justice] was the perfect lens, the perfect way to talk about the issues, to bring awareness to the issues, and to think strategically about how do we as a club put forward solutions to some of these things,” Chief Purpose Officer Keil Corey said. 

If the Royal Mint’s plans are successful, it could soon turn Apples and Androids and Dells into sovereigns and Britannias and even circulating coinage.  The Royal Mint on Oct. 20 announced that it signed a partnership with Excir, a Canadian-based technology startup, to recycle precious metals (and eventually base metals) from electronic waste.  The pioneering technology allows the Royal Mint to recover gold and other precious metals from discarded electronic devices such as mobile phones and laptops.  The Royal Mint said the partnership would allow it to bring a “world first” technology to the United Kingdom.

It was the first time executives of the top oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, BP America and Chevron – and the heads of the American Petroleum Institute (API) and Chamber of Commerce answered questions about climate change in Congress under oath. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said at the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing that oil companies have started to improve their talking points around climate change.

Leaders of the Group of 20 rich countries will recognise this weekend that urgent steps must be taken to keep in reach the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to a draft statement seen by Reuters.  “We commit to tackle the existential challenge of climate change,” said the draft of the communique to be issued at the Rome summit, seen as a key stepping stone ahead of a broader United Nations climate summit next week in Scotland.  The leaders will say they recognise that the impacts of climate change if warming can be held at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels are “much lower” than at 2 degrees and that “immediate action must be taken to keep 1.5 within reach.”

As HPE closes out the 2021 fiscal year, it expects supply chain challenges to remain an issue for at least another six months, the company said Thursday.  “We continue to navigate the industry-wide supply chain challenges that have been worsening lately,” CFO Tarek Robbiati said during the company’s Securities Analyst Meeting. “With materials in short supply and logistic costs rising, we expect the supply chain issues will likely take well into the second half of the next calendar year to begin abating.”  At the same time, the company expects to end the fiscal year with even higher backlogs than it did at the beginning of Q4.

The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Inc. (CASIS), manager of the ISS National Lab, today announced a sustainability challenge in partnership with leading global prestige beauty brand Estée Lauder. The ISS National Lab Sustainability Challenge: Beyond Plastics aims to utilize the orbiting laboratory to advance sustainability research that addresses the plastics dilemma. The Sustainability Challenge is an open solicitation for U.S. entities to propose flight projects that leverage the space station to tackle plastics waste and enable scientific or technological advancements that improve Earth’s environment. Building on the brand’s long-term sustainability goals, Estée Lauder intends to provide funding to support one or more flight projects awarded through this Sustainability Challenge.

Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc. has once again been recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its efforts to reduce emissions and operate sustainably. The agency named Old Dominion a recipient of its 2021 SmartWay® Excellence Award, marking the seventh consecutive year the less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier has earned the honor. Old Dominion accepted the award during a virtual ceremony on October 27.

Cracked phone screens could become a thing of the past thanks to breakthrough research conducted at The University of Queensland. The global team of researchers, led by UQ’s Dr Jingwei Hou, Professor Lianzhou Wang and Professor Vicki Chen, have unlocked the technology to produce next-generation composite glass for lighting LEDs and smartphone, television and computer screens (Science, “Liquid-phase sintering of lead halide perovskites and metal-organic framework glasses”).

Sustainable Development has three interconnected pillars: environmental, economic, and social. The environmental pillar is related to ecosystem protection, conservation of natural resources, and minimizing environmental damage. The economic pillar is related to the development of profitable solutions and enabling growth. The social pillar is related to human rights, equity, and equal opportunity for people of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions, and nations of origin.  Each pillar is fundamental in creating a more sustainable future, however, in recycling, most of the discussion around program improvement remains in the environmental and economic sectors, not the social. 

In an internal email to employees, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that development of the Raptor rocket engine that will power the Super Heavy/Starship launch system is in “crisis,” adding the company risks bankruptcy if the company can’t turn the situation around, according to media reports.
The problems pose a risk not only to SpaceX and its multi-billion dollar Starlink satellite broadband program, but to Musk’s plans to colonize Mars and NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon. The U.S. space agency has awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a lunar lander based on the Starship vehicle.

Now in its fifth year, the Re|focus Sustainability & Recycling Summit has become an essential, not-to-be-missed event for thought leaders in the plastics industry. Produced by the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS), Re|focus is a solutions-driven event that equips attendees with the resources and connections they need to meaningfully advance sustainability throughout their organization.
Our industry is turning a corner, moving from one that aspires to sustainability to one that puts our commitment to recycling and reusing into action. Re|focus will continue to challenge brand owners, processors, engineers, product developers, and the entire supply chain to refocus on product design, technology, and manufacturing with an eye toward recycled and sustainable content, designed for recycling and sustainability.

In kicking off its annual 11.11 global shopping event, now in its 13th year, Alibaba Group CMO Chris Tung took the opportunity to  highlight that the main focus for this year’s shopping event would be sustainability.  “We are making sustainability at the heart of the festival,” he told media during a virtual press event.  “We believe that behavioural change is essential to ensuring a sustainable future, which is why as the creator and leader of the 11.11 festival, Alibaba aims to play an important role in driving those positive changes.”

There is no shortage of early-stage startups developing software applications to support carbon accounting and emissions management — there’s even one, Sinai Technologies, working on analytics to help businesses set an internal price on carbon.  As corporate interest in integrating and managing sustainability metrics intensifies, however, the category is attracting the notice of much more established enterprise software players.

SABIC, a global leader in the chemical industry, launched today a new portfolio of bio-based ULTEM™ resins that offer sustainability benefits while delivering exactly the same high performance and processability as incumbent ULTEM materials. These breakthrough polyetherimide (PEI) materials are the first certified renewable high-performance, amorphous polymers available in the industry. Using a mass balance approach[1], for every 100 kg of ULTEM resin produced, SABIC replaces 25.5 kg of fossil-based feedstocks with bio-based materials derived from waste or residue, such as crude tall oil from the wood industry. This advanced offering is a drop-in material option for current ULTEM materials and can support customers’ sustainability goals for challenging applications in consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, and other industries where high temperature, dimensional stability or demanding mechanical performance is required.

The fashion for «conscious» consumption drives the majority of buyers to the idea of replacing animal products with technological progress. The grocery basket choice varies based on the personal capabilities of the body or environmental conditions, as well as compassion for the animals.  As a result, not only will plant-based products continue to displace other positions from stores, but there will also be tremendous innovations in the generation and laboratory cultivation of cellular meats, seafood and dairy products.  This article touches on meat products. According to the Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the demand for meat in 2050 will double, and the ability to produce enough food will simply be impossible.

Traditional Owners say the resources company attempting to frack in the Beetaloo basin hung up on them and ignored their questions at the company’s Annual General meeting on Wednesday.  Traditional Owners and Native Title holders including Aunty Naomi Wilfred, Aunty Gillian Limmen and Alawa Elder Aunty May August attended Origin Energy’s Annual General Meeting via teleconference.  The group intended to voice concerns about what they call a lack of free and informed prior consent for the resources company’s fracking project on their Country.  They said they were shown “disgraceful” disrespect by those conducting the meeting.  Aunty May was allegedly hung up on when she reached the front of the queue and moved to the back of the queue.

Education Scotland is delighted to announce the winners of the Learning for Sustainability Awards.  The awards – held in partnership with the Daily Record – recognise the amazing achievements of Scotland’s people and the settings, schools and communities that have demonstrated passion and commitment to building a socially-just, sustainable and equitable world.  The COP26 Summit beginning next week provides a unique opportunity to recognise and celebrate innovation in the Scottish education system and our commitment to Learning for Sustainability (LfS). Within Scotland’s curriculum, LfS is recognised as an entitlement for all learners and a recent international PISA study showed that our learners are world-leading global citizens.

The carbon-intensive production of plastics is on pace to emit more greenhouse gases than coal-fired power plants within this decade, undercutting global efforts to tackle climate change, a report released on Thursday said. The report by Bennington College and Beyond Plastics projected that the plastic industry releases at least 232 million tons of greenhouse gases each year throughout its lifecycle from the drilling for oil and gas to fuel its facilities to incineration of plastic waste. That is the equivalent of 116 coal-fired power plants.  “The scale of the plastics industry’s greenhouse gas emissions is staggering, but it’s equally concerning that few people in government or in the business community are even talking about it,” said Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics. Also, the report found that petrochemical facilities tend to be clustered in just 18 largely low-income and minority communities, where 90% of the pollution occurs.

The global climate crisis we are facing is impacting society, business and our environment. It is widely accepted that there needs to be radical change to the way we do business with an immediate focus on the next decade. We need to put in place more sustainable systems, that will allow us to meet the climate change targets set by the Paris Accord. Across the globe, businesses, both small and large, are making changes to the way they function to reduce their carbon impact and operate in a manner that will allow them to remain investible.  This event will look at BT’s climate action journey. Having set its first carbon reduction target in 1992, BT was one of the first companies in the world to set a science-based target aligned to a 1.5 degree pathway.