Ready to disrupt an industry? You’ve already plucked the low-hanging fruit. It’s time to meet the moment. Drill down, run the numbers and think outside the box. But to truly move the needle, you’ll need to break down silos and align with other game changers.

If the above clichés read like nails on a chalkboard, you’re ahead of the curve (last one) when it comes to recognizing annoying business jargon. The sustainability profession is rife with lingo that lacks specificity, obscures accountability and alienates outsiders. Feel-good adjectives ring hollow. Acronyms distract those not in the know. Worse, the sloppy use of aspirational buzzwords could get you into legal trouble for greenwashing. 

Most of us are guilty at some point, if we’re being honest, and the first step to recovery is recognition. The second step? Memorizing the following glossary — and avoiding the worst offenders in sustainability-speak.

Carbon neutral by 20__ — This means little to a layperson — and less to any professional who knows the difference between principled near-term steps and “progress through offsets.”

Circular — The latest glib term for a complex idea is for too many people synonymous with “recyclable.” Which it’s not — and can’t be if the goal is to create and maintain truly waste-neutral ecosystems.

For a better tomorrow — Picture a sunrise in a fossil fuel ad. Now picture yourself using a less hackneyed phrase.

____________-friendly — Waving is friendly. But whether it’s “earth-,” “eco-” or “carbon-,” it will take much more than Midwestern manners to shift paradigms.

Green — Yes, it’s the color of leaves. But also most slime, some radioactive waste and the odd alien. Something vague enough to cover so much can’t be genuinely meaningful.

Nature-positive/climate-positive — Positive is good! (And too often unquantifiable — or a dodge.)

No net loss — Since when is less bad really a good thing?

Saving the planet — The Earth will be fine. What’s in trouble are humans.

Science-based — Sounds rigorous, but it’s pretty much meaningless unless it’s third-party validated.

Future-proof — Nobody knows what lies ahead, so what makes you think you can brace for it?

Greenwashing — Obviously, excessive usage of this term is not as bad as the act itself but sometimes it sure feels that way.

Leverage — As a noun or verb, this stale chestnut is pretty much on every industry’s Jargon Bingo card. Let’s keep it off ours.

Recyclable — Technically, almost everything is recyclable. Practically, most everything won’t be unless systems exist that make it possible. See also biodegradable and compostable.

Regenerative — Appreciating how natural systems self-perpetuate does not overcome the fact that this term is ill-defined and barely validated.

The post 14 sustainability clichés to retire in 2025 appeared first on Trellis.

The desalination industry is in boom times: Dwindling supplies of freshwater coupled with rising demand are driving annual growth rates near 10 percent. 

The industry, however, consumes large amounts of energy and produces significant amounts of salty wastewater, which isn’t good news for the environment. But an emerging trend — integrating carbon removal into desalination plants — offers hope of blunting those negative impacts.

The trend is visible at a desalination facility in Ma’agan Michael, Israel, where local startup CarbonBlue announced this month that it has begun capturing dissolved carbon dioxide from water flowing through the facility’s inlet pipe. It has multiple rivals in the race to commercialize technology that can be integrated with desalination and other water treatments facilities. These competitors include startups Captura and Ebb Carbon, as well as Capture6, which has plans to work with a desalination plant in South Korea to capture up to half a million tons of CO2 annually. 

Emissions from desalination plants could exceed 400 million metric tons this year, according to projections made in 2022. The theoretical upper limit for carbon removal at desalination plants is more than twice that, noted a recent report on the approach from nonprofit RMI. But limits on the availability of renewable energy to power the process, along with other constraints, mean that carbon removal is unlikely to completely decarbonize the industry. Still, technology from CarbonBlue and others could, if scaled globally, remove hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 annually.

Capturing carbon and cutting costs

CarbonBlue’s approach is well positioned to scale because it also saves money, the company said. The installation at Ma’agan Michael is an initial test designed to capture up to 400 tons annually. The removal takes place in a reactor that uses lime to pull CO2 from the water. Desalination operators already know that lime can reduce the accumulation of organic matter on membranes, alongside other benefits. CarbonBlue’s reactor controls this process and can cut operating costs by almost 8 percent, said Dan Deviri, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

“Our approach is to provide industry with tools to decarbonize, not only without harming the value chain, but actually to make it more profitable,” added Adam Etzion, the startup’s director of marketing and communications.

CarbonBlue’s competitors are pursuing diverse approaches. Captura is headed by Steve Oldham, a carbon removal veteran who previously led Carbon Engineering, a direct air capture company that was acquired by Occidental, a US oil and gas major. The startup uses electricity to trigger reactions that release CO2 from seawater, which is then captured and stored. Capture6 takes the salt extracted during desalination and generates a solvent for use in direct air capture facilities, while Ebb Carbon uses electricity to create alkaline water, which naturally pulls CO2 from the atmosphere.

Credits are critical for some

In addition to saving money for desalination plants, CarbonBlue plans on selling carbon credits. Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers founded by Shopify, Google and others, pre-purchased 400 credits from the startup in 2023. 

Credit revenue will be more important to some rivals, promoting some recent eye-catching deals: Captura said in March that it had contracted to sell 30,000 credits to Japanese shipping company Mitsui O.S.K. Lines. And last October, Ebb Carbon inked a 350,000-credit, 10-year agreement with Microsoft. (Both companies’ technology can be deployed at different types of water treatment facilities, so the credits may not fund projects at desalination plants.)

The cost-per-ton of these deals was not disclosed, but Oldham and Deviri said current credit prices were in the range of hundreds of dollars per ton. All the startups expect costs to fall dramatically. Oldham said the company’s models project a price between $100 and $150, and Deviri said he sees a pathway to less than $100.

Barriers to scale

The work at Ma’agan Michael does not mean that CarbonBlue is ready to start delivering credits, however. Like other carbon removal companies that rely on lime —including Seabound, which uses the substance to capture CO2 from ship exhausts — CarbonBlue’s process won’t be carbon negative until it can find a sustainable means of producing the feedstock. Current methods rely on heat generated by fossil fuels and produce around 0.8 metric tons of CO2 for every ton of lime. Deviri said his company is building a facility that will produce lime with 40 percent lower emissions than conventional processes, which it will use to supply the Ma’agan Michael reactor in 2026.

Availability of clean power may also hamper scaling. All the processes require significant amount of power and are only carbon negative if renewables are used. The RMI report noted that removal technologies that rely on electrochemical separation of seawater currently consume 1.9 to 2.8 megawatt-hours of electricity for every ton of CO2 removed, equivalent to two to three months of electricity consumption by an average American household. That will likely fall as the technologies become more efficient, but by how much? The magnitude of those efficiency gains may be critical in determining the extent to which carbon removal can lessen the environmental burden of the desalination industry.

The post How a new process could help decarbonize the desalination industry appeared first on Trellis.

Send news about sustainability leadership roles, promotions and departures to [email protected].

Allbirds Director of Sustainability Aileen Lerch has left the San Francisco-based footwear company to become net-zero program manager at Meta.

Lerch exited Allbirds in June, according to a short LinkedIn update she posted recently announcing her new position. Meta declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss personnel moves.   

Allbirds has not hired a new sustainability head yet. It is evaluating leadership needs for this function, the company said through a spokeswoman.

“Sustainability is not a standalone function, but an integral part of every role at Allbirds — from product designers, to material experts, to marketing,” she said.

Lerch, who reported to Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio, was responsible for strategy, reporting and developing partnerships to advance its decarbonization agenda. She was hired in January 2020 to develop the company’s rigorous life-cycle assessment methodology, which Allbirds publishes for others to borrow. 

Allbirds uses a software management tool called Carbonfact to closely measure the potential impact of materials substitutions and other decisions. “Why do we even measure these carbon footprints?” Lerch said during the May 2024 episode of the Climate Pioneers interview series. “The key reason is so that we can understand hotspot areas and actions that we can take to make change.” 

The company is pushing to reduce the average footprint for its shoes to 5.5 kilograms per pair by the end of 2025. The industry average is 14 kilograms. In February, it shipped a limited production run of Moonshot, which Allbirds describes as the first “net-zero carbon shoe.”

Allbirds prioritizes the use of natural materials, such as wool from sheep raised on farms that use regenerative agricultural practices, or bioplastics made from captured methane. These factors aren’t generally selling points for the company’s footwear, but they are part of its mission despite a struggle to grow revenue since going public in November 2021. Sales slipped 25.4 percent in 2024 to $189.9 million.

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Scope 3 emissions are a headache in food and agriculture. Large supermarkets stock tens of thousands of products containing multiple ingredients. And food companies have supply networks that span large farming cooperatives and smallholders in developing nations. 

Obtaining primary emissions data from every node in this network is impossible, forcing companies to rely on “spend-based” accounting — use of crude emissions factors to convert dollars spent on an item into an estimate of the emissions generated in its production. This obscures emissions hotspots and makes it difficult for companies to collaborate with suppliers on emissions-reduction projects.

Thankfully, change is afoot. A growing number of initiatives are now focused on making detailed, supplier-specific data available for more and more ingredients and products. Here are three recent developments worth keeping an eye on.

UK retailers are using digital twin technology to track supply chains

Several major U.K. retailers, including Tesco and M&S, track supply chain emissions using technology developed by Mondra, a London-based startup. Retailers link product management systems with Mondra, which creates a digital twin of the company’s supply chain, analyzes the ingredients and draws on a database of emissions factors to calculate carbon footprints for specific products. Mondra defaults to generic emissions factors, but suppliers can log on to the system to add primary data. 

Two years after launch, 90 percent of all grocery market sales in the U.K. involve a product that’s covered by Mondra, said Ian Piddock, the company’s head of product marketing.

Once retailers have visibility across their supply chains, they can then identify potential emissions cuts. Piddock said that Tesco, an early partner on development of the technology, has used Mondra to reformulate its private-label lasagna ready meal to reduce the emissions associated with the product by 18 percent.

By the end of 2026, Piddock expects retailers to begin reporting reductions in total Scope 3 emissions that they have achieved using the system.

Granular data is being integrated into carbon accounting platforms

HowGood is a food systems intelligence company that maintains a database of 90,000 agricultural emissions factors. It’s won customers such as Nestlé and Chipotle by researching specific regions and suppliers to produce increasingly granular data on ingredients. 

“We have over 250 sweeteners in the database that you can pull from,” said Michael Streitberger, HowGood’s head of partnerships. “When you select sugar, you’ve got 40 plus locations of where you could source that sugar, all with different emissions factors and metrics.”

Companies use HowGood’s data to assess the emissions associated with potential new projects. Thanks to a partnership announced earlier this year, customers of Watershed, a leading provider of carbon accounting software, are also using it to compile Scope 3 inventories and identify emissions hotspots that can be the focus of reduction efforts. 

The Watershed link-up is one of around a dozen such partnerships that HowGood has with carbon accounting systems from Persefoni, Salesforce and others.

Retailers unite to simplify data requests

Many retailers want better emissions data from suppliers, but exactly what they want differs from company to company. If retailers could coalesce around an agreed-upon set of questions, suppliers could avoid duplicate efforts and prepare a single set of answers for all to use.

That was the goal of a project by the Consumer Goods Forum, a global trade group for the industry. Working with the consultancy BCG, the forum’s Climate Transition Coalition, which includes Ahold Delhaize, Tesco and other retailers, began by looking for commonalities between the data requests that the companies were making to suppliers. 

“These went from one retailer asking ‘Are you SBTi validated?’ to another asking 160 questions in an Excel file,” said Sharon Bligh, the forum’s director of health and sustainability.

The diversity meant that a single unified data request was deemed impractical. But the coalition was able to agree on the Common Data Framework, which launched in June. The framework defines three levels of sustainability maturity — dubbed Foundational, Expanded and Granular — and specifies a single set of questions for suppliers for each level.

The Foundational and Expanded questionnaires allow data to be aggregated by supplier or commodity, for example, whereas Granular retailers require suppliers to report data from specific plots of land. When verifying the information, Foundational requesters accept self-reported data, while third-party certification is required at the Expanded level and satellite imagery or other more specific data for Granular reporting.

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The solar and wind industries have never looked more vulnerable.

Just weeks ago, Congress passed a policy and budget package billed as fiscal reform that, in reality, takes direct aim at clean energy. Critical tax credits are set to sunset in 2027. Foreign content rules that will sharply increase the cost of new projects arrive just as we need to bring huge amounts of new capacity online. Experts warn of 830,000 jobs lost, skyrocketing energy bills and investor confusion.

Clean energy entrepreneurs are resilient. We have all ridden the “solar coaster” over the past two decades. But like hope, resilience isn’t a strategy. We are no longer operating under the radar. Powerful interests have put our industry in the crosshairs. It’s time we take full responsibility for our political license to operate.

This isn’t a policy accident. It’s a calculated attack by our political opponents, threatening not only the economic and social upside of the clean energy transition but also the ability of U.S. companies to secure reliable, advanced energy technologies that future-proof their operations.

And the hardest truth? It passed because we were unprepared.

Despite clear wins in cost, innovation and job creation, renewables remain politically underpowered. Our trade associations play a vital role. But we now spend less on influence and education than we did a decade ago, while our opposition spends more than ever. Real political power demands more: smarter communications, grassroots organizing, clean energy champions in elected office at every level — and above all, money.

It’s time for a wartime footing

The new budget bill wasn’t a victory for the fossil fuel industry. Rather, MAGA politics beat us, by out-organizing, out-communicating and outlasting us in the places where power is actually decided.

We must adopt a wartime footing. Survival requires unity, speed and resourcefulness. Political power can no longer be optional. It must be treated as essential infrastructure.

Wartime footing doesn’t mean panic. It means clarity of purpose and firm resolve. It means that every employee, CEO, subcontractor and policymaker understands they are part of something bigger.

We’ve seen this before. When Saudi Arabia flooded the oil market in 2014 to crush U.S. fracking, American drillers responded like it was a hurricane. They cut costs, consolidated and coordinated — from city halls to Congress. They didn’t just survive. They adapted and came back stronger.

Now it’s renewable energy’s turn. The real fight isn’t in Washington anymore. It’s in statehouses, utility commissions, local permitting battles and public opinion. Congress dropped a bomb, but we can decide where the next battle is fought.

States are the new battleground

This war isn’t over. The balance of power has shifted to the states. From California’s interconnection queue to Texas’ battles over distributed generation, the policies shaping our future are local. State commissions, permitting boards and zoning councils are often dominated by NIMBY voices or fossil-backed interests. We can’t let that stand. That’s where the public is, where the friction lives and where our momentum is strongest — if we show up.

California shows both the risk and the opportunity. With federal support retreating, Sacramento now bears national leadership responsibility. SB 541, led by Senators Josh Becker and Henry Stern, offers a blueprint: lowering costs by enabling smart batteries, EV chargers and thermostats — the same technologies that the Trump administration has penalized. California is doubling down on flexibility, affordability and grid resilience while others retreat.

But the stakes are rising. Grids everywhere are straining from heat waves, AI-driven demand and aging infrastructure. One in six U.S. families is behind on its utility bills. Clean, distributed power must now move from backup to backbone and prove it works at scale.

Meanwhile, Texas offers a case study in post-partisan progress. In the last legislative session, three Senate-passed anti-renewable bills died in committee after a coalition of clean energy employers, rural co-ops and oil and gas groups mobilized. They warned lawmakers that blocking renewables would stall economic growth and raise energy costs.

ERCOT’s numbers back them up: blackout risk fell from 12 percent to 0.3 percent over the last year as solar and battery capacity surged. Prices stayed 24 percent below the national average.

This wasn’t luck. It was organizing. Texas shows that when renewables are treated as infrastructure, not ideology, practical policy follows. That’s the model to replicate.

A worrying shift in public support

Policy isn’t the only thing under pressure. Public support is slipping. A recent AP-NORC poll shows declining enthusiasm for solar tax credits and offshore wind, even among Democrats. Pew reports that Republican support for solar farms has dropped 20 points since 2020. Over 15 percent of U.S. counties have banned or blocked utility-scale clean energy projects.

This isn’t a blip. It’s a warning. Clean energy has the economics. But our narrative is losing ground. And that has political consequences.

When support weakens, it becomes easier for opponents to repeal incentives or spread disinformation. Without voter pressure, lawmakers face no cost for siding with fossil fuel interests. If we lose the cultural narrative, we lose the political mandate.

Four moves to win the political war

1. Shape public opinion with a coordinated media strategy
Too many Americans still believe wind and solar are more expensive than coal, or that batteries aren’t safe. That’s not just a messaging problem; it threatens deployment. The industry needs a unified, well-funded communications strategy to shift public perception and tell powerful stories: EVs keep our air clean, rooftop solar cuts monthly bills and batteries provide resilience in blackouts. Public sentiment isn’t a side issue. It’s core political infrastructure.

2. Mobilize at the grassroots
Showing up means having a steady, local presence. Solar installers at rate hearings. Co-op members writing op-eds. Students organizing school campaigns. When neighbors speak up about energy choices, elected officials listen. We need real people with real stakes, backed by training and support, making their voices heard.

3. Align with workers and consumers — always
Every clean energy message should start with American workers and American families. Clean energy must prioritize good jobs and lower costs. These aren’t competing goals — they’re reinforcing. We can grow union careers and cut monthly bills. Projects from Intersect Power, Form Energy and the DOE Loan Programs Office prove it’s already happening. Every message and policy should reflect that reality.

4. Elect supporters
We need more elected officials who’ve built clean energy firsthand. Leaders like Illinois Rep. Sean Casten, California Rep. Mike Levin and New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich bring practical expertise to public service. Developers, entrepreneurs and installers should be encouraged to run in both parties. No one speaks for this work better than those who’ve done it.

Most importantly: fund the fight

None of this matters without resources. The opposition funds advocacy like it funds pipelines. We treat it like a line item to minimize. That must change. We need to invest in organizing, education, regulatory strategy and legal defense exponentially to what we now spend.

Let’s be clear: the Big Beautiful Bill didn’t pass on merit. It passed because we didn’t have the power to stop it.

We’ve already won the battlefield of economics. But politics is not won by Moore’s Law; it’s won by muscle. If we don’t adopt a wartime footing and build the political infrastructure to match, we risk losing everything we’ve created.

But we won’t. Because we’ve learned. This industry is filled with builders—of projects, companies, careers and futures. Now we must build political power too. That means starting small, scaling fast and staying with it for the long haul. We know how to deploy capital, manage timelines and build coalitions. Let’s bring those skills to organizing and show what happens when clean energy fights back.

The post Trump is trying to kill the renewable energy industry. Here’s how to fight back appeared first on Trellis.