As readers of our favorite sustainability newsletter —  Trellis Briefing — know well, staying current in this fast-changing field isn’t enough. The most successful professionals stay ahead. That means tracking each new regulation and all emerging tech, not to mention shifts in consumer demand and a crisis that changes daily.

Trellis Briefing offers a unique blend of management advice, regulatory updates, corporate case studies and more makes it a must read for anyone in the industry.

But we’re the first to acknowledge that there are more than a few other newsletters in our sector that we like — and read.

Whether you skim these “subscribes” as you sip your morning coffee or save them for a leisurely weekend scroll, they will keep you plugged into both what is and what’s next. 

If you want clean energy news that cuts to the chase …

Axios Energy takes the ever-changing world of sustainability, from policy moves to corporate shifts, and breaks it all down into bite-size, inbox friendly reports. From renewables to grid tech, Axios Energy is a must for anyone tracking the business of decarbonization. As you peruse their website, you’ll happily note that each read takes no more than three minutes. That’s shorter than the time it takes to brew a cup of joe.

If you want your sustainability news served with a side of global depth and data …

Few sustainability news outlets combine breadth and rigor like Bloomberg Green. From deep dives into the financial side of climate action to people-first stories of adaptation and innovation, its reporting highlights how environmental action is reshaping the economy, politics and culture worldwide. You might find your next sustainability breakthrough within its (digital) pages. 

If you want to follow the money …

Perfect for investors and founders, Climate Tech VC has proven itself a global voice in the business of sustainability. The weekly newsletter tracks deals, trends and venture movement across the industry, pairing data with insight to create the perfect window into where climate capital is flowing.

If you want to know what’s really happening in Washington …

While policies might not always make for attention-grabbing headlines, we’re never ones to discount the importance of staying informed. We believe policy reporting can and should be enjoyable, which is why Power Switch from Politico is on our list. The newsletter delivers sharp, inside-the-Beltway reporting on the political forces shaping today and tomorrow’s environmental scene. 

If you want your climate journalism to replace your daily doomscroll …

Heatmap does what few sustainability publications do: makes its readers laugh. It has carved a niche in the sector that is both entertaining and informative, covering everything from the cultural impact of sustainability to the politics of electrification. The newsletter delivers punchy climate coverage with bright colors, savvy pop culture references and jokes aplenty.

If you want energy media that connects the dots …

Few outlets capture the pulse of clean energy, renewables and the climate revolution like Canary Media. This nonprofit newsroom provides a clear-eyed look at decarbonization — from solar wind to electrification — while explaining what works, what doesn’t and why. The newsletter is committed to bringing solutions to a sector full of questions, connecting policy to technology and technology to people. 

If you want clarity in a feed full of headlines …

Carbon Brief offers its readers a daily breakdown of the biggest stories in sustainability while maintaining a voice that’s clear and factual. If you’re looking for crisp, data-driven stories that prioritize comprehension over haste, you’re in the right place. With charts that cut through the noise, data that doesn’t distort and analysis that connects policy and science, the newsletter delivers evidence-based journalism that keeps readers thoroughly informed without overwhelming them.

If you want to hear unique individual voices …

Climate activist legend Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, brings decades of environmental insight to his Substack, The Crucial Years. With nearly 100,000 subscribers, it reflects on grassroots campaigns, policy battles and big-picture climate trends. Other notable climate apostles: Michael Thomas, whose newsletter Distilled boasts 16,000 subscribers, and Emily Atkin, whose 145,000-subscriber-strong HEATED was termed “impassioned [and] deeply reported” by New York Magazine.

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While there are many personal impacts of climate change, new data shows people are most concerned about one: their health.

Globally, 45 percent of people believe climate change will negatively affect their personal health in the next five years, making health a potential rallying point for climate action, according to Trellis data partner GlobeScan. Additionally, 41 percent expect climate change to worsen their personal safety and well-being, while 40 percent foresee a decline in their emotional and psychological state, highlighting the deep and multifaceted anxieties people associate with climate disruption.

Financial vulnerability is also a concern, although less so than physical or emotional impacts, with 37 percent of respondents believing their financial situation will deteriorate due to climate change. This reinforces the tension between recognizing climate risks and hesitating to make financial sacrifices to address them. 

What this means

Health concerns are emerging as a strong personal link to climate change and a major opportunity to drive action. People are more worried about the effects of climate change on their health and well-being than on their finances, making health a powerful and universal motivator. Framing climate change as a public health issue shifts the conversation from distant environmental threats to immediate personal impacts such as cleaner air, safer water and reduced risk of disease. Highlighting these tangible benefits can make climate action more relatable and widely supported, helping to engage people beyond traditional environmental audiences.

Based on GlobeScan’s Societal Shift project, which surveyed nearly 32,000 people in 33 countries in July and August 2025.

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Rebecca White grew up in West Texas cotton country, so she understands firsthand how climate stresses and volatile markets threaten the crop. Now, as chief product officer of the agtech startup Avalo, she hopes to help future-proof cotton from seed to field.

Avalo uses machine learning to accelerate what Gregor Mendel once did with peas. Its AI analyzes plant genomes and recommends which plants to crossbreed for desired fiber traits, sometimes even multiple qualities at once. In the process, Avalo says it enhances genetic diversity and helps farmers generate value through low-chemical, regenerative practices.

The pitch to fashion brands and mills: fibers tailored for softness, breathability, dye-readiness and other properties. “When we look at genetics for our seeds, we’re talking to spinners, millers and brands about what is important in the fiber characteristics for them,” White said.

Avalo’s momentum includes hiring Tricia Carey as chief commercial officer in April, a signal of ambitions to commercialize and connect with brands. The veteran of Lenzing, Gap and Levi’s earned industry respect trying to save Renewcell, the Swedish textile recycler reborn as Circulose after its bankruptcy.

White expressed hope for helping farmers stressed by a variety of factors, including the decline of cotton in fashion, capricious weather patterns worsened by climate change and volatile tariff policies. “If we’re not taking care of farmers, then they’re not going to farm anymore,” she said.

Competitors

Avalo raised $11 million in a Series A round in March, part of about $15 million total raised to date. (It also has support from Coca-Cola Ventures for sugar cane genetics.) The amount is modest next to peers in the biotech-for-ag space:

• Indigo Ag (Boston) has raised roughly $1.5 billion, including a large 2023 round with Google Ventures participation, to track and monetize regenerative agriculture practices for multiple crops.
• Puna Bio (Buenos Aires and San Francisco) makes microbial seed coatings from extremophile organisms to boost yields. Its $25.7 million in funding includes support from the Gates Foundation.
• Galy (Boston) cultures cotton and other fibers in bioreactors, backed by $65.9 million in funding, including a Series B raise from Breakthrough Energy Ventures in 2024.

White says Avalo’s focus on using genetics to help farmers maximize yields and build soil health can ultimately complement other technologies such as those of Indigo Ag and Puna Bio.

“It’s great that there are those kinds of initiatives, but it’s still high risk,” said Margaret Bishop, an assistant professor at the New School in New York City. “You’ve got to have the investors and build out the supply chain.”

In the field

Avalo aims to enable sustainable farming practices already familiar to growers in arid regions around Lubbock. Delivering improved fiber quality with plant strains suited to local conditions could help farmers earn more for lower-emission cotton, while also assisting mills and brands to cut Scope 3 supply-chain emissions.

Unlike traditional ag models that sell seeds plus chemical inputs, Avalo’s team wants to work toward a future with fewer herbicides and pesticides, developing varieties with built-in resistance.

Although its seeds start in a lab, Avalo relies on open-air field trials, where bees pollinate plants. “We’re really trying to bring genetic diversity back into the fold, because traditional breeding programs tend to weed diversity out in an attempt to keep things simple and more streamlined,” said Avalo Chief Marketing Officer Nick Schwanz.

The company taps into public seed banks and private collections to study more than 500 cotton varieties. These include both wild and “feral” types, i.e. onetime commercial strains that naturalized over decades.

“The oldest one that we have is from the 1920s,” White said. “We put them all together in various different locations, and we see how they do in those different environments, and that helps us interpret the underlying genetic information.”

Natural and synthetic pressures

In fashion, cotton and polyester have traded places in dominance over the past 60 years. Polyester and other fossil-based synthetics now make up about 59 percent of the global fiber market, while cotton accounts for roughly 19 percent, according to the Textile Exchange 2025 Materials Market Report.

Virgin synthetics generally carry a higher greenhouse-gas footprint, but cotton’s cultivation uses more land and water. Cotton-growing regions in the U.S., India, Brazil and Pakistan face future uncertainty from increased droughts, rains and flooding.

Cotton uses as much as 11 percent of the world’s pesticides, and chemical weed control remains common, harming soil microbomes.

Brand pressure and regenerative shifts

Sustainability advocates argue that retailers and brands must rethink how they work with farmers, supporting transitions to regenerative and climate-resilient cotton. The Sustainable Cotton Challenge led by Textile Exchange has gathered 138 brands, from Levi Strauss to Kering, committed to sourcing certified environmentally responsible cotton by the end of 2025. Yet only about 22 percent of participating brands met that goal by the end of 2024.

Avalo positions itself as the bridge between regenerative farming and brands’ sustainability ambitions, aiming to give both sides a shared language and measurable results.

“Farmers know what happens to their cotton up to the point where it leaves the warehouse,” White said. “They produce it, they harvest it. It goes to a gin, it gets bailed, and then it goes to the warehouse, and then it’s sort of off in the ether for them.”

The opposite is true for the brands, who only tend to see the cotton after it lands at the spinner. “The brands are closer together in a perspective of sustainability with farmers than they think that they are,” she added. “The more that we can bring that understanding together, I think the more successful programs like ours will be.”

“It’s super early to know how much that’s going to speed up the development of new seeds, but really exciting if they can,” said Debra Guo, the cotton and crops lead at the Textile Exchange.

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This week, some 2,000 folks — businesspeople, NGO leaders, academics and others — are gathering in Bentonville, Arkansas, to mark the 20th anniversary of a seminal moment in the short history of sustainable business: a speech by the CEO of Walmart.

On Oct. 23, 2005, Lee Scott stood on the stage of the auditorium in Walmart’s Home Office to talk about “21st Century Leadership.” In a rare moment, the famously improvisational CEO held a script in his hands and read it word for word to ensure every sentiment was well articulated.

In the speech, Scott acknowledged the breadth of his company’s challenges, referencing “jobs, healthcare, community involvement, product sourcing, diversity, environmental impact: all the issues that we’ve been dealing with historically from a defensive posture.”

All of them, he said, “represent gateways for Walmart in becoming the most competitive and innovative company in the world.”

He reframed Walmart’s role, pledging ambitious sustainability leadership, and linked social and environmental stewardship with business efficiency while committing to workforce improvements.

Lasting influence

Scott committed the company to three ambitious environmental goals:

• Obtain 100 percent of the company’s energy from renewable sources
• Create zero waste
• Sell products that “sustain our resources and environment”

Walmart views its sustainability journey through three distinct eras. Source: Walmart

“These goals are both ambitious and aspirational, and I’m not sure how to achieve them, at least not yet,” Scott said. “This obviously will take some time.”

Those three goals set in motion myriad initiatives, partnerships and collaborations that have demonstrably moved the needle on Walmart’s footprint and have influenced other companies — suppliers, competitors and others — to follow along.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken to nearly a dozen current and former Walmart employees as well as activists, academics and other observers. My quest: to assess the impact and influence of Scott’s speech, including its three sustainability commitments.

(For more backstory behind the speech, see this 2015 piece marking its 10-year anniversary.)

From pariah to partnerships

Until Scott’s speech, Walmart had little to do with sustainability. “We were doing our best to stop legislation that was warranted about runoff on parking lots from fertilizer,” Andy Ruben, who’d become Walmart’s first chief sustainability officer a year earlier, told me. “That’s what was going on in sustainability. It was a ticking time bomb of one more black eye the company could experience.” Everything else had been on the table, he said, such as the company’s impact on Main Street and on its labor force.

“But not this.”

Elizabeth Sturcken, vice president for net zero ambition and action at the Environmental Defense Fund, who has engaged with Walmart for nearly two decades, put it more bluntly: “They were a pariah.”

The year 2005 had already been a pivotal one for corporate sustainability. A few months earlier, for example, GE had launched Ecomagination. Other executives — Mark Tercek at Goldman Sachs, John Browne at British Petroleum, Jorma Ollila at Nokia, Jeff Immelt at GE, Chad Holliday at Dupont, Jim Rogers at Duke Energy and Bill Ford at Ford — were making headlines for their commitments.

For Scott, the time seemed right for a bold move.

‘A generous C’

So, how has the company fared? Scott’s three goals are still largely works in progress. Here are some stats, most culled from the company’s fiscal 2025 ESG Report:

• 48.5 percent of Walmart’s global electricity needs are supplied by renewable energy.
• 43.3 million acres of land has been “more sustainably managed, protected or restored.”
• Its Scope 1 and 2 emissions are 18.1 percent lower than the 2015 baseline.
• The company’s Scope 3 emissions have ratcheted up about 4 percent over the past two years, though its intensity — emissions per dollar of revenue — declined about 6 percent over that period.
• 83.5 percent of Walmart’s global operational waste has been diverted from landfills and incineration.
• 82.6 percent of its private brand plastic packaging is “designed for recycling.”
• 95.1 percent of Walmart U.S. fresh and frozen seafood, both wild-caught and farmed, was reported by suppliers as “more sustainably sourced.”

True, some of this language — “more sustainably,” for instance — is squishy at best. And transparency is sometimes lacking. For example, Project Gigaton, launched in 2017, blends reduced, avoided and sequestered emissions in its reporting and does not fully delineate each category with transparent, publicly verifiable breakdowns.

Still, these data points cover a two-decade period in which the company’s global revenue, adjusted for inflation, grew 44 percent, to $681 billion for fiscal 2025. That means that even as the company grew, several of its impacts didn’t.

Scott’s speech planted the seeds for a bumper crop of company initiatives. Some, such as its Sustainability Index (to establish a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of products) and its Sustainable Value Networks (collaborations with suppliers, nonprofits and other stakeholders to improve product environmental performance) became part of the fabric, ran their course or morphed into other initiatives. Others, such as Project Gigaton, with the goal of removing a billion metric tons of greenhouse gases from Walmart’s supply chain, continue to be showcased by the company.

As graded by Jon Johnson, a professor in the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, who’s been following the company for decades, “I would give them an A or A-minus on their waste and energy goals. I give them a C on their product goals, and that would be a generous C.”

Source: Walmart

Listening to critics

Assessing Walmart’s impact epitomizes the glass-half-full/half-empty challenge of sustainable business: Should a company be assessed on progress made or on work still to be done? That debate is particularly relevant to some of the world’s largest brands — McDonald’s, Amazon, Microsoft and others. For critics, it can be more rewarding to knock these companies’ failings — or fault the capitalist system within which they operate — than to acknowledge their achievements, however imperfect.

(This dilemma is highlighted in our Chasing Net Zero series, which examines companies’ progress, or lack thereof, in meeting emissions-reduction goals.)

In the case of Walmart, there’s been plenty to criticize: its low wages, which can cost taxpayers by increasing the need for public assistance programs among employees; an anti-union stance that chills worker organizing and protest; weak traceability of deforestation in its supply chain; packaging and waste goals that rely on voluntary supplier actions; chemical safety transparency gaps across its sprawling private-label and supplier networks. The list of perceived shortcomings goes on.

“We’re not a perfect company,” acknowledged Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart’s current CSO. “One of the things that is pretty deep at Walmart, though, is really listening to everybody, to critics and to stakeholders.”

Ken Cook agrees. As president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an advocacy group that focuses on environmental and public health issues, he has been engaging Walmart for much of the past two decades, with notable successes. For example, a 2014 EWG campaign led to Walmart requiring suppliers to limit or eliminate a set of “priority chemicals” in products it sells, particularly in household cleaning, personal care and beauty and cosmetic items. The company also agreed to recognize EWG Verified as part of its sustainability standards, meaning vetted products would be listed as complying with Walmart’s “Built for Better” criteria.

Cook noted that Walmart’s scale gave NGO standards such as his meaningful reach. “EWG is not interested in things that don’t make landscape-level changes,” he said. “This is what Walmart has provided.”

Another supportive group is EDF, which in 2007 opened an office in Bentonville adjacent to Walmart headquarters, the first NGO (and still one of the few) to do so.

Sturcken cited Walmart’s 2017 chemical footprint goal, aimed at restricting over 2,700 harmful chemicals in household products, as one example of the retailer’s influence. “You got very real ripple effects throughout the entire industry,” she said, citing Target and Dollar General as examples of retailers that followed suit.

“These past 20 years of work that Walmart has done on sustainability has transformed a generation of business,” Sturcken said. “They prioritized and democratized sustainability.”

Still, she added: “Walmart is not a sustainable company. They’re falling behind in their operational goals. And they’ve always had a big challenge and needed to do so much more on product sustainability and their supply chain.”

Mixed results on sustainable products

For Johnson, like for so many others, Scott’s speech “made the possibility that companies taking sustainability seriously could have substantial impact beyond government regulation,” he said. In 2009, Johnson co-founded The Sustainability Consortium, an ambitious effort to measure and standardize product impacts across consumer goods supply chains, launched in collaboration with Walmart.

That quest — the third of Walmart’s original goals, to sell more sustainable products — is arguably the most ambitious and the least fulfilled. Walmart has never adequately raised the subject in the buying rooms, where its buyers meet daily with suppliers’ representatives, Johnson said.

“Our task was to create a measurement reporting system for consumer goods,” he explained. He and his team at The Sustainability Consortium developed metrics that assess the impacts of products throughout their life cycle, “a good scientifically grounded system for understanding what those claims actually mean and whether they are meaningful,” as he put it.

“Walmart never used that information to make procurement decisions at any scale that had the effect we were hoping it would,” he added.

One issue may have been failing to prioritize the most environmentally problematic products. “We probably looked at every product as an opportunity to make it better,” Matt Kistler, Walmart’s second CSO, told me. “And there’s some products where the juice was not worth the squeeze. We should have been more focused.”

There were successes. In 2008, for example, Walmart phased out large bottles of laundry detergent, replacing them with compact versions that are now the industry standard, saving shelf space, labor, shipping emissions and costs. Compact fluorescent light bulbs were another bright spot. In late 2006, the company announced a goal to sell 100 million of them by the end of 2007 to save consumers money and reduce emissions, a goal achieved ahead of schedule.

But other products and packaging remain stubborn — plastics, in particular. Although Walmart has set ambitious targets, actual reduction in plastic packaging weight has been challenging, especially given business growth and the addition of packaging types, such as those used in e-commerce.

Can system transformation be scaled?

Taking the full measure of Walmart’s impacts turns out to be a complicated affair. For each shortcoming, there are unheralded successes.

For example, “We were late and slow on paying our people what they needed,” said Leslie Dach, who in 2013 stepped down from his role as Walmart’s executive vice president, where he oversaw sustainability, among other things. “I think we could have done more about people’s way of living.”

At the same time, he pointed out, “We followed a progressive agenda in sustainability, in women’s economic empowerment, in bringing manufacturing back from China,” including a 2013 initiative to reshore $50 billion worth of manufactured goods from that country.

Other initiatives have received relatively little media attention. One is the Gigaton PPA, which in part provides training and resources to help suppliers invest in renewable energy, including helping them reduce barriers to sourcing renewables. Walmart has worked with HSBC to launch a sustainable supply chain finance program to offer early payment to suppliers that set science-based targets or clear a CDP score threshold. Its Circular Connector, launched in 2022, aims to accelerate innovation in sustainable and circular packaging.

All of these and more, says CSO McLaughlin, are part of a bigger change the company is undergoing.

“The easier things have been tackled,” she said. “We’re now in the throes of true system transformation, and that’s hard work. At the heart of it, we’re talking about shifting the way that system functions so that it is elevating and regenerating people and the planet. That has to be the way that it works or it’s not sustainable.”

A regenerative Walmart? Stay tuned.

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Startup Electra is building a Colorado demonstration facility that will produce 500 tons of low-carbon iron annually, backed by a $50 million grant from Breakthrough Energy and corporate contracts with Meta, Nucor, Toyota Tsusho and Interfer Edelstahl Group.

The 130,000-square-foot facility in Jefferson County is scheduled to open by mid-2026. It will also benefit from an $8 million state tax credit, the maximum amount available under the Colorado Industrial Tax Credit Offering, which has allocated up to $168 million through 2032 for projects that reduce manufacturing energy loads.

Nucor, the largest U.S. steel producer, which uses largely recycled scrap, will buy some of Electra’s iron. Electra also has contracts with two big steel distributors, Toyota Tsusho and Interfer Edelstahl Group, as well as other companies that Boulder-based Electra declined to name. Social media company Meta will buy the environmental attribute certificates related to Electra’s production, which it can use to claim emissions reductions related to data center construction.  

The corporate contracts were crucial for the $50 million grant commitment by Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, which funds first-of-a-kind manufacturing projects to help early-stage companies build stronger commercial cases.

“We like to fund projects that derisk technology and move it up the curve,” said Mario Fernandez, head of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst.

Tough economics

Electra uses a low-temperature process to refine iron ore — one that relies on chemistry and renewable electricity rather than a blast furnace fired with coke, a carbon-heavy form of coal. The steel industry, where much of this iron is used, contributes almost 8 percent of global emissions. 

Startups like Electra and established players such as ArcelorMittal are working on low-carbon or near-zero steel, but progress has been slow because of the furious pace of construction in countries like China and India and an onerous tariff landscape.

Electra has raised $214 million, not counting the recent grant, from investors including Breakthrough Energy’s venture arm and the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, which has invested in low-carbon cement and steel to help decarbonize data center construction. (The company will be featured in an Oct. 29 session about “Scaling Low-Carbon Steel” at Trellis Impact 25 in San Jose, California.)

Several buyer coalitions have formed to send early buying signals: both General Motors and Ford Motor, for example, have committed to shifting some of their procurement to favor low-carbon steel.  

A lot more supply is needed to meet those promises. It takes at least 1.5 tons of iron to make steel the conventional way, and far less, about 0.60 tons, for steel produced using an electric arc furnace, the process that Nucor uses. A typical U.S. steel plant produces close to 2 million tons annually.

Electra’s initial production at this site wouldn’t fill the construction needs of a hyperscale data center, which might require as much as 20,000 tons. Toyota Tsusho, part of the Toyota Group, plans to sell Electra’s iron for automotive use, while Interfer will target other speciality applications. Electra is also exploring how its iron might be used in magnets and batteries.

The goal at Electra’s site in Jefferson County, near Denver, is to calibrate the company’s processes and test the purity of its product. “We are on track, and this is an important step,” said Kellyn Blossom, head of policy and communications at Electra. “We are hitting our marks and feel confident that we will meet this demand.”  

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