NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company with a $4.3 trillion market capitalization, is hyper-focused on energy efficiency. It claims the world could save 40 trillion watt-hours of electricity annually by using technology accelerated with its graphics processors.

That message is meant to resonate with NVIDIA’s biggest customers — including Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft — which desperately need to speed up AI processing times to have any hope of reaching their emissions reduction pledges.

Compared with rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom, however, NVIDIA’s broader corporate sustainability strategy is immature. Those other companies have worked on emissions reductions in their operations and supply chains for at least five years. NVIDIA’s first emissions reduction targets were validated in early 2025. 

NVIDIA’s new joint development partnership with Intel changes the equation, providing the AI chip leader with access to two decades of institutional knowledge about reducing the emissions, waste and water usage associated with making computer chips.

Fast-growing footprint

NVIDIA’s greenhouse gas emissions doubled from 2023 to 2025, to 6.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to its 2025 sustainability report. Its first absolute emissions reduction target, disclosed in June, calls for a 50 percent cut for its operations (Scope 1) and electricity consumption (Scope 2) by 2030. 

Those emissions are essentially a rounding error in the company’s total carbon footprint: less than 1 percent. That’s because NVIDIA is a “fabless” company, meaning it relies on other companies to manufacture its chips. The other big impact for NVIDIA is the energy its chips use to train AI learning models and run generative AI applications. Both of these fall into Scope 3.

To get a handle on where it might be able to influence cuts in that footprint, NVIDIA committed two years ago to encouraging two thirds of its suppliers to adopt validated emissions reduction targets by 2026. It surpassed the supplier engagement goal a year early with 80 percent for the fiscal year ended Jan. 26. 

NVIDIA hasn’t set an absolute reduction target for its Scope 3 impact. Instead, it has pledged to reduce the emissions intensity from use of its products by 75 percent per PetaFLOP, or one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. “Reducing energy and emissions per computation represents NVIDIA’s biggest opportunity to reduce emissions and to support global sustainability efforts,” the company said in its report.  

NVIDIA plans to start reporting on its new intensity metric in 2026, along with a more comprehensive inventory of its most significant emissions sources.

Best practices to share

Against that backdrop, Intel’s work on reducing the emissions, water usage and waste associated with manufacturing operations will be a benefit when the two start making the new chips promised under their agreement announced Sept. 18. Their $5 billion partnership centers on two areas: data center technology that combines NVIDIA and Intel technology in custom AI offerings and an integrated processor for personal computers. 

Intel’s overall carbon footprint is more than triple that of NVIDIA’s at 25.1 million metric tons. But it would be far larger without the billions of dollars the company has invested in chemical substitutions, energy conservation and process optimization. Intel issued a $1.25 billion green bond in 2022 to pay for these investments; it allocated $845 billion of that amount as of its latest report. 

Those investments are paying off: Intel has cut absolute emissions by 70 percent since its peak year in 2006. It’s looking for another 10 percent reduction before 2030.

About 4 percent of Intel’s emissions come directly from the company’s offices and manufacturing plants, along with the energy necessary to run them, as of Intel’s 2024-2025 corporate responsibility report. Intel estimates that impact would be about 10 times larger without the investments it has made over the past two decades to cut the emissions associated with semiconductor manufacturing. 

Energy conservation is a huge factor in the reductions that Intel has been able to achieve. Between 2020 and 2024, Intel reduced its electricity consumption by 2.4 billion kilowatt-hours. The cost for those projects: $104 million. The money saved: $150 million.

Shared goal: Run chips with less energy

Intel shares NVIDIA’s belief that improving the energy efficiency of its processors will be key to reducing Scope 3 emissions. The company estimates that the chips that it sold in 2024 will contribute 3.2 million metric tons of emissions annually.   

To reduce that number, Intel has pledged to increase the energy efficiency of its chips by tenfold between 2019 and 2030. NVIDIA also strives for continuous improvements but hasn’t publicly declared a similar goal.

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Honda has opened a circular economy center in the heart of Ohio to recycle and repurpose auto manufacturing components. Opened on Sept. 18, the Resource Circularity Center is located between the company’s Marysville and East Liberty auto plants and is thought to be the first dedicated effort by a carmaker to give a second life to things like wrenches, robotics and office chairs, as well as car parts and aluminum wheels.

“What really excites me the most is how can we learn and even unlearn things that we typically experience throughout our acquisition process,” said American Honda Director of Procurement Sustainability Matt Daniel. “We’re really trying to treat the waste that we have not so much as an end, but as a resource that we can recirculate and move back into our operations.”

The Midwest operation opens at a time of renewed focus by policymakers and business leaders on strengthening domestic supply chains, especially as tariffs stress the import-export webs of manufacturers. As transportation has electrified in fits and starts, so have hopes for hubs to recycle electric vehicle batteries in North America. Yet other circular strategies are moving forward in automakers’ long-term plans to drive down climate emissions from their extractive supply chains.

“For it to be sustainable, it has to be both financially beneficial and good for the environment,” Daniel said. “What we’ve learned through this whole thing, at least initially, is there’s a lot more opportunity than we realized.” For example, typically Honda paid a third party to take spent electronics, but now it has found potential takers for free.

Is there gold in circular supply chains?

The high value of parts for repairs and remanufacturing has enabled an independent automotive recycling and dismantling industry to thrive for generations, noted Emil Nusbaum, vice president of strategy, government and regulatory affairs at the Automotive Recyclers Association in Washington, D.C. Moving forward, recovering critical minerals from onboard electronics and batteries presents new opportunities and challenges.

“It’s a reflection of a changing environment where there really is an emphasis on sustainability,” Nusbaum said. “It’s great to see that car manufacturers are starting to recognize the value in reusing, repurposing, and remanufacturing parts and equipment in their supply chains. This helps maximize existing resources and reduce waste.”

Honda’s news follows a move by Toyota Group’s procurement and logistics house in July to purchase steel recycler Radius Recycling of Portland, Oregon. Radius has sites for self-service automotive recycling as well as scrap recycling and vehicle shredding.

“Building on our longstanding relationship, this acquisition will help expand our circular economy initiatives, enhance the supply of high-quality recycled resources and deliver better solutions for our customers and our planet,” stated President and CEO Naoyuki Hata of Toyota Tsusho, a subsidiary of Toyota Group, whose targets for carbon neutrality by 2050 are validated by the Science-based Targets initiative (SBTi). Toyota aims to reduce climate emissions by 30 percent across its supply chain, logistics and dealerships.

Driving decarbonization

Honda’s circularity center is not about car-to-car recycling. However, Daniel is studying alignment with the company’s “horizontal” recycling strategy to recover value for new products from end-of-life vehicles. “Whether it’s an industrial motor, or a robot that we’re focused on on the indirect side of a vehicle,” he said, “in many cases we’re talking about the same raw materials, steel, aluminum, through various grades, copper and plastics.”

The work serves Honda’s corporate strategy of carbon neutrality by 2050. (Honda submitted a net zero target several years ago under an earlier framework of the SBTi.) By that year, the brand also hopes to reach zero industrial waste and purchase 100 percent materials that are either “recycled, reused or otherwise lower-impact.”

The plan’s two phases include acquiring “pioneering capabilities” and preparing circular business models, products and innovations into the early 2030s. That would lay the groundwork for Phase 2, a business transformation.

Inside the Honda Resource Circularity Center. Credit: Honda

Evolving circular procurement

American Honda’s CEO Noriya Kaihara two years ago asked Daniel to lead the creation of a resource-circulation “roadmap” for indirect goods. 

“He grabbed a table and a chair in a conference room out in California, and he said, ‘For things like this,’” Daniel said. “And that was basically all I had to work with. I said, ‘Well, that’s great. I’ve got two questions: One, what is resource circulation? And two, why me? I’m a procurement guy and spent my whole career acquiring things, and now you want me to figure out how to get rid of things.’”

That led Daniel and a handful of others to create the circularity center. They prioritized recovering steel, aluminum, copper; equipment and spare parts that service it, as well as parts within its dealer network.

As items arrived in cardboard, polystyrene or plastic bags, the group explored creative and potentially profitable reuses for packaging, too.

More than a century ago, Ford fashioned charcoal from sawmill waste leftover from the hardwood that made up Model Ts. That later spawned the Kingsford brand. “That mindset is what we’re trying to replicate within our circularity center,” Daniel said.

Honda’s center shares elements of municipal sorting plants for curbside-collected bottles and cans. “It’s a little bit cleaner, though,” Daniel said. Nearby logistics company NK Parts handles and sorts materials. An AI tool scrapes data from supplier websites to speed up identification.

If there’s no internal purpose for waste that reaches end-of-use at Honda facilities, Daniel’s team turns to partners, potentially including eBay. The center will also dismantle and recycle service parts from Honda dealerships around the country.

Another Honda project has investigated turning scrap leather from a seating factory in Mexico into new items, like luggage tags. Other circularity efforts involve chemical sorting, nylon recycling, closed-loop plastics and rare earth reuse technologies.

Daniel believes the resource center’s benefits can apply to other industrial goods businesses facing tremendous cost pressures. There’s always more room to shave waste from a supply chain, he said. “Looking across the company for those opportunities to consolidate and have a set strategy is really going to pay dividends in the long run.”

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The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of their companies or Trellis.​

A couple years ago, when Van and his colleague presented before Microsoft’s Sustainability Connected Community, they weren’t delivering a typical corporate presentation. Instead, they were educating fellow employees about how their company’s membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was actively undermining the climate goals they cared about. After several months of a campaign explaining the Chamber’s history of fighting climate legislation, hundreds of Microsoft employees were ready to sign their “Escape the Chamber” petition, ultimately spurring the company to conduct a public audit of its trade association memberships.

Meanwhile, across Silicon Valley, Sam faced a different challenge at Alphabet. Despite working for one of the most forward-thinking companies in tech, he discovered that every single retirement investment option in their 401(k) included oil and gas stocks. His campaign to change this — complete with financial analysis, an employee petition, and stakeholder meetings — eventually led Alphabet to add its first fossil-fuel-free retirement option.

Collectively, we represent more than 15 years working in tech. And while neither of our day jobs involves sustainability, we’ve become seasoned advocates for climate action in our workplaces. Our experience reflects a growing movement of employee advocates pushing for change from within some of the world’s most influential companies.

The rise of workplace climate advocacy

Data confirms what we’ve witnessed: Employee climate engagement is surging. A 2024 survey of more than 1,700 professionals found that 77 percent of employees are unhappy about their employers’ lack of climate action. And according to Deloitte’s 2023 CxO Sustainability Report, 59 percent of leaders say employee activism caused them to increase sustainability efforts, with nearly a quarter describing the impact as substantial. 

This represents a fundamental shift in how climate advocacy happens — from external pressure to internal organizing — despite significant headwinds facing ESG initiatives that have forced many companies to dial back public sustainability commitments. 

After years of campaigns, petitions and stakeholder meetings, we’ve learned that successful employee climate advocacy requires more nuance than most people expect. Specifically: 

Don’t assume the sustainability team will automatically be interested

This might be our most surprising lesson: Your company’s official sustainability team may not immediately embrace grassroots efforts. When Van’s group initially approached Microsoft’s sustainability department about their U.S. Chamber of Commerce campaign, they encountered unexpected resistance. The sustainability team was focused on hitting specific carbon reduction targets and worried that a public campaign against trade associations could complicate their relationships with key stakeholders. They weren’t being obstructionist because they had legitimate concerns about how an employee campaign might affect their ability to work with industry partners on carbon reduction initiatives. Thus, Van and his colleagues had to demonstrate that their approach would actually support their goals and not undermine them.

The lesson: Sustainability teams are juggling multiple priorities and stakeholder relationships. Employee advocates need to make a compelling business case showing how their initiative advances — rather than competes with — existing sustainability efforts.

Lean on outside experts and external resources

Both of our campaigns found breakthroughs came from partnering with established climate organizations. Sam’s fossil-free 401(k) campaign exemplifies this perfectly. Instead of building financial arguments from scratch, his team partnered with As You Sow, a nonprofit specializing in shareholder advocacy and sustainable investing.

As You Sow provided comprehensive research on fossil-fuel-free fund performance, analysis of fiduciary duty considerations, and template language for the internal business case. They also connected the Alphabet team with employees at other companies who had run similar campaigns.

Sam estimates they probably saved six months of research time by partnering externally. In addition, having a credible external partner gave the Alphabet campaign legitimacy. They weren’t seen as just passionate employees with an idea, but employees who were presenting research-backed recommendations from recognized experts.

The lesson: Finding credible outside experts and organizations to help boost your argument can go a long way, and save you time. 

Recognize that building community is harder than you think

Everyone knows building community is important, but few appreciate how challenging it becomes in the modern workplace. In an era of Slack overload and meeting fatigue, creating sustained engagement around any cause requires serious strategy.

Both of our successful campaigns recognized that people need multiple ways to engage at different commitment levels. Microsoft’s Sustainability Connected Community created what Van calls an engagement ladder — from email subscribers to active chapter leaders. New members might start by attending virtual presentations, then join working groups and eventually take on leadership roles.

Successful community building requires infrastructure, from dedicated Slack channels to regular programming to clear pathways for involvement. We’ve both learned to celebrate small wins and maintain momentum during setbacks. After all, creating change in a corporate environment is a marathon, not a sprint. And the community you do build is what sustains you through the long stretches where it feels like nothing is happening.

The lesson: Don’t assume passion translates into sustained participation. Just because people care about climate change doesn’t mean they’ll automatically show up to meetings and volunteer. 

The way forward

As employee climate advocacy continues growing, our experiences at Microsoft and Alphabet offer a template for others. The most successful efforts combine external expertise with internal community building, approach sustainability teams as potential allies rather than automatic supporters, and focus on concrete, achievable goals that align with broader business objectives.

As traditional ESG initiatives face headwinds, employee-driven climate action may represent the most sustainable path forward for corporate environmental progress. For employees ready to take action, our message is clear: Find your partners and don’t be discouraged if progress comes slowly. The most important climate work in corporate America may not be coming from the C-suite. Instead, it’s coming from passionate employees who refuse to wait for someone else to solve the problem.

The post The employee climate advocacy playbook: Lessons from inside Microsoft and Alphabet appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

For many companies thinking about climate change, carbon accounting is hot right now. 

But most of the attention focused on accounting is really about improvements to existing carbon reporting frameworks. Both reporting and accounting have important roles to play in the push for decarbonization, but failing to understand the difference between the two will lead to compromised emissions management approaches that don’t stand a chance of arriving at their desired net-zero destinations. 

We know this because reporting has been driving emissions information for the past three decades and yet greenhouse gases continue to rise and carbon markets continue to falter. The distinction may at first appear trivial but when it comes to climate, the difference between reporting and accounting frameworks marks the difference between hitting targets versus simply setting them. 

Terminology 101 

Climate-related reporting is a more general phenomenon than accounting. Reports can be based on qualitative disclosures, quantitative numbers, such as Scope 2 and Scope 3, that have no underlying basis in an accounting-system, or on accounting-based numbers. Greenhouse gas reporting frameworks count emissions according to a standardized set of rules to produce documentation that’s useful for three primary activities:

  • Fulfilling a policy or voluntary requirement such as inventories and disclosure
  • Enabling advocacy
  • Documenting emissions alignment such as matching inventories to targets 

Carbon accounting, on the other hand, requires every anthropogenic emission to be counted and fully allocated. The numbers must be accurate, verifiable, comparable, mutually exclusive across arm’s-length entities, collectively exhaustive and policy agnostic. In fact, only once policy-agnostic accounting has been put in place can emissions information-based laws and regulations be effective in steering high-emitting sectors through a decarbonization transition. 

The primary purpose of a carbon accounting framework is to inform capital allocation decisions. It serves three critical functions:

  • Unlocking investment for decarbonization through performance-based competition
  • Facilitating demand for carbon removal through asset-liability matching
  • Supporting accountability mechanisms, including governable net zero

Neither good nor bad

Reporting and accounting are neither inherently “bad” or “good,” but their application in specific contexts lead to different outcomes. In the case of greenhouse gases, reporting frameworks allow emissions (and reductions) to be counted multiple times or in some cases, not at all. Such indeterminate overcounting (or undercounting), along with the allowable use of estimates, averages and flexible boundaries, prevent competition for decarbonization while also obstructing the advancement of carbon removal that scientists deem necessary. 

Reporting frameworks, which range from ISO standards to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, allow emissions to exist on multiple “ledgers” at once and disappear by moving them beyond the reporting boundary. Companies can use reporting frameworks to produce “balance sheets” where emissions are labeled as “assets” and traded in the form of an avoidance. This is what makes the reporting/accounting paradigm so confusing; the terminology sounds the same but their effect on global emissions management is dramatically different. 

In an accounting system, ledgers are used to record all anthropogenic emissions and can be added up to form a single record of global carbon stocks and flows. The E-ledgers Institute’s algorithm (of which I sit on the board) uses three types of journal entries. One to account for purchased emissions that transfer between a seller and a buyer; another for direct emissions transferred between the emitter and a geological carbon equity account; and a third to allocate emissions within a company to its products.

In the E-ledgers framework, emissions are recognized as E-liabilities and only removals can be recognized as E-assets. All emissions are counted only once so that at the geological scale assets = liabilities + equity. 

Implications for carbon markets

Perhaps the most important distinction between reporting and accounting frameworks is their implications for carbon markets. 

Carbon markets built on reporting systems lack integrity and enable a kind of shell game in the form of credit boundary design. That’s because reporting systems lead buyers and sellers to make claims based on reputational authority. Reputational authority is primarily derived from narrative arguments over additionality, permanence and leakage. The result: Carbon markets built on reporting frameworks are self-referential, highly gameable and prone to collapse. 

The voluntary market was designed to be “better than nothing” in the absence of climate regulation. They offered a way to finance mitigation before governments acted, to reward early movers and to mobilize capital around a shared sense of urgency. To drive toward net zero, however, carbon markets can no longer depend on credibility narratives. They need something more stable, such as the laws of physics. 

A carbon market built on an accounting system facilitates instruments with atmospheric authority — verifiable increases in carbon reserves that are tied to durable reduction of atmospheric emissions. Just as important, and more immediately, an accounting-based market facilitates investment in avoided emissions by capitalizing performance improvements in the form of lower E-liabilities. And through the principle of impairment, accounting provides guidance for recognizing and replacing a sudden loss in asset value thereby enabling the pursuit of permanence while opening markets for nature-based carbon removal.

Accountability: The ultimate imperative 

Only an accounting system can provide a true and fair basis against which regulatory and voluntary mechanisms can durably hold emitters accountable. Feasible accountability mechanisms, such as carbon-border adjustments, product-intensity standards, supplier contracts and auditable voluntary net-zero claims, are ready for action. 

Although sustainability professionals working today might not connect the dots to recent history, the U.S. stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent global depression was caused in part by a lack of accountability, as firms reported whatever profits, expenses, assets and liabilities they pleased. Then a group of committed academics, accountants, executives and philanthropists got together to create the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Financial accounting standards have endured because they enable decision-making and accountability. They allow investors to allocate capital based on accurate and comparable information rather than self-referential reputational claims. 

To hit net zero targets, firms need GAAP for climate. Those defending carbon reporting frameworks are understandably afraid and skeptical. But steering with reporting frameworks won’t drive down emissions in the real economy. For that we need accounting. It’s a boring, centuries-old technology — but it’s the only one capable of filling the gap between ambition and action. 

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Cows, sheep and goats are culpable for most of fashion’s methane emissions, according to a new report. Leather, wool and cashmere produce 75 percent of the industry’s super-pollutant although they only make up 3.8 percent of its overall materials, the nonprofit Collective Fashion Justice has found.

There’s been scant focus on fashion’s methane footprint, as net-zero efforts mostly center on carbon dioxide. However, if the industry fails to slash methane by at least 30 percent, those emissions will be equivalent to the emissions of France in 20 years, warned the Sept. 15 report, “Now or never: A first methane footprint for the fashion industry.”

Although methane has caused 30 percent of the total rise in the planet’s temperature, cuts now can deliver faster near-term reductions. (Methane heats the atmosphere about 85 times as much as a ton of CO2 does in their first two decades of their existence, but CO2 is 30 times worse over a century.)

And as brands have churned out more fashions, faster, over the past half decade, the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions from raw materials leaped by 20 percent, according to the Textile Exchange’s 2025 Materials Market report released Sept. 18.

Collective Fashion Justice urges businesses to opt for recycled sources instead of new animal products. “When we look at a whole host of environmental factors, recycled wool, plant-based materials and other non-animal and non-fossil materials typically perform far better overall,” said Emma Håkansson, the group’s founder and director.

The fix?

The organization’s findings — and its call to halt the use of virgin materials — continue longstanding debates over the lifecycle impacts of raising animals for leather and textiles. They also raise the question of what brands can realistically achieve today, given the relative scarcity of lower-carbon materials.

The report also called for industry to support innovators in “next-generation” fibers based on plants, fungi and waste. However, these are mostly unavailable at scale now. Less than 1 percent of all fibers derive from textile-to-textile recycling.

Nor should companies favor fossil synthetics instead, Håkansson added. “This is not an either-or situation. We must move beyond our reliance on both of these unsustainable material sources,” she said.

Moreover, Håkansson says that even when brands use third-party certified, climate-friendly practices — standards from the Leather Working Group, Responsible Wool and Good Cashmere — very little is improved. With wool, for instance, they neither address the land footprint nor the methane from sheep exhaling and passing gas, in her estimation. The same applies to leather, which depending on one’s perspective is either an innocent byproduct or an enabling “co-product” of the beef industry.

On the other hand

Collective Fashion Justice, an Australian advocacy group with a longtime focus on animal welfare, engaged researchers from Cornell University and New York University on the methodology.

That said, some experts take issue with the report’s conclusions.

Methane is important but needs to be contextualized relative to the industry’s total greenhouse gas footprint, according to Joël Mertens, director of Higg Product tools at Cascale. The Oakland, California, nonprofit, formerly the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, counts large brands among its 300 member organizations.

Credit: Collective Fashion Justice

“Within that context,” said Mertens, “the total greenhouse gas emissions of animal-derived raw materials (including sheep wool, cashmere and leather) account for a much smaller portion of industry emissions; just under 3.5 percent. By comparison, impacts relating to garment manufacturing are 8 percent, and textile dyeing and finishing are 55 percent.”

Lightening leather

Leather creates 54 percent of the industry’s methane, followed by 16.8 percent for wool and 4.3 percent for cashmere, according to Collective Fashion Justice.

Leather uses waste hides from the beef industry, which the United Nations says is responsible for 14 percent of global climate emissions. Most of its footprint comes from cattle raising, which drives deforestation. Tanning and finishing bring more pollution.

​​Fashion businesses addressing those impacts include Coach, part of the Tapestry group, and Dr Martens, by buying “wet blue” hides leftover from beef, from U.K. startup Gen Phoenix.

And numerous innovators are engineering new materials to mimic leather by using mycelium, apples and cacti, but still in small volumes.

Woolly impacts

Wool comprises .9 percent of fibers in fashion but spews disproportionate emissions and hurts biodiversity, according to the methane report.

John Roberts, managing director of Woolmark in Australia, begs to differ. “Wool is a natural, renewable, biodegradable and recyclable fiber,” he said. Producers are exploring feed additives such as algae, as well as sheep breeding and farm efficiencies to cut emissions.

The beef industry is, too. However, wool differs from chemically intensive leather making.

“Wool itself is composed of 50 percent organic carbon by weight, which is naturally sequestered from the atmosphere by the plants that sheep eat,” said Nica Rabinowitz, the Climate Beneficial Verified and supply chain development manager of Fibershed, which helps farmers adopt regenerative practices.

Recycled wool slashes CO2 by 94 percent compared with virgin fiber, according to Patagonia. The brand, alongside VF Corporation’s Smartwool and Icebreaker, is also among the larger buyers of Responsible Wool Standard wool.

In other second-life wool practices, Eileen Fisher patches and reworks marred sweaters and sources recycled material from ReVerso in Italy, which also sells to Patagonia, Gucci and Stella McCartney.

Cutting cashmere

Cashmere is only found in .02 percent of materials in fashion, according to the Textile Exchange. However, the fiber has a far greater methane intensity per kilogram than leather and wool, the report found.

Among brands tackling its footprint: Los Angeles-area company Reformation eliminated virgin cashmere entirely from its collections. It sources deadstock for sweaters and trims.

And one more thing

Beyond the materials, Collective Fashion Justice demanded for companies to tackle the 20 percent of fashion’s methane, which comes from material processing and fabrication in supply chains that rely heavily on coal and gas. 

“Brands must also switch to renewables across their value chains and support manufacturing partners to do so,” Håkansson said.

Efforts in progress include the Future Supplier Initiative by the Fashion Pact and the Apparel Impact Institute, which have signed on H&M, Group, Gap and others to directly fund suppliers’ renewable energy transitions.

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Companies from across the food and agriculture sector unveiled new initiatives this week in a bid to boost the already substantial expansion of regenerative agriculture across North America.

Regenerative methods offer huge potential benefits. By reducing tillage, changing grazing patterns, planting cover crops and deploying other techniques, producers can boost yields and save on fertilizer costs. And because the methods also cut farmland emissions and sequester carbon in soils, food companies and retailers see reductions to Scope 3 inventories, which include upstream emissions from producers.

Adoption is growing but varies widely. While just over a quarter of cropland acres were managed using no-till in 2022, the year of the most recent Department of Agriculture census, cover crops were planted on less than 5 percent of that same area. Two key barriers to further scale, cost of deploying regenerative methods and a lack of expertise among producers, were among the focus areas for the partnerships announced this week.

The new initiatives

  • McDonald’s is investing more than $200 million over the next seven years to accelerate regenerative grazing and wildlife conservation on ranches spanning 4 million acres and up to 38 states. A group of McDonald’s suppliers, including Cargill and Coca-Cola, will provide additional funding to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a conservation organization that will award grants to support ranchers.
  • PepsiCo, Unilever and others will provide financial and strategic support to farmer organizations working to scale regenerative methods among local producers. Phase one of the program, known as Supporting Trusted Engagement and Partnership (STEP) up for Agriculture, includes three groups assisting farmers in Canada and the U.S. Two philanthropic funders, the Platform for Agriculture and Climate Transformation (PACT) and the PepsiCo Foundation, will also provide backing.
  • Danone and Ahold Delhaize U.S.A., a retailer that owns Food Lion, Giant Food and other chains, are investing an undisclosed sum in supporting dairy farmers in Danone’s supply chain to reduce methane emissions. The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit, will contribute technical and financial expertise.

Why the investments make sense

The multi-party nature of these collaborations reflects a growing awareness of the potential of regenerative agriculture to safeguard food production, reduce emissions and benefit farmers. Agriculture giant ADM, for instance, said earlier this month that it hit its target of deploying regenerative practices on 5 million acres a year ahead of schedule. PepsiCo’s support for STEP up for Agriculture is linked to its commitment to scale regenerative agriculture to 10 million acres by 2030.

For Ahold Delhaize U.S.A., the Danone partnership is an opportunity to learn about specific interventions that reduce methane emissions from dairies — including better management of manure — and the extent to which those methods can reduce the retailer’s Scope 3 numbers. 

“Part of the learning is how do we translate what we do on farm into our reporting,” said Kendrick Repko, vice president for health and sustainability at Ahold Delhaize U.S.A. “Because currently we use a spend analysis type of calculation. So as our sales grow our emissions grow, and we don’t have a good mechanism at the moment to translate the on-farm reductions into our overall emissions. That’s something our team is evaluating and seeing how we can get a better tool to get to that more granular level.”

On the Danone side of the partnership, the work will help underpin an industry-leading target of reducing methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. “We really need to work across the value chain and collaborate in order to get right our minus 30 percent goal,” said Melanie Chow Li, the company’s vice president for mission and sustainability.

Working with North American farmers is another benefit, she added: “Over 90 percent of our ingredients are sourced from U.S.-based farms and 100 percent of our milk is U.S.-based. By working on regenerative agriculture practices through this partnership, we’re strengthening the domestic supply chain and finding a way to build long term resilience in these locations. I think that’s ultimately where multi-faceted value-chain partnerships have a lot of value.”

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The climate crisis isn’t just playing out in the atmosphere — it’s streaming, too. From near-future dystopias to family-friendly docuseries, the small screen offers a surprisingly rich medium for exploring the human stakes of environmental change. 

We’ve rounded up a list of shows that sustainability professionals will appreciate — or at the very least, appreciate debating in Slack threads. Are we suggesting you turn your next team meeting into a watch party? Not exactly. But if you do, we’ll bring the popcorn.

Families Like Ours (2024)

Netflix 

In a crisis underlined by facts and figures, Families Like Ours takes the personal route. Set in a not-so-distant-future Denmark, the series follows ordinary people as they face a climate disaster that forces them from their homes and their routines. Schools shut down, grocery stores go out of business, and neighbors pack their bags. Lauded as “grimly prophetic” by Stephanie Bunbury in her Deadline review, Families Like Ours asks audiences to imagine a world where “climate refugee” doesn’t just describe “them.” but all of us. 

Snowpiercer (2020-24)

Apple TV

Trellis readers may already be familiar with this one, as its film “parent” graced our 9 Meaningful Movie Nights for the Sustainability Minded list. The series expands on Bong Joon-Ho’s masterfully crafted world of social and economic stratification. In a dystopian (near) future, the cast of Snowpiercer travels the world on a perpetually moving train. Each car acts as a class divider: “trailies” relegated to the back, with scarce resources and abysmal conditions, riders in the front living in luxury. Inevitably, in a claustrophobic setting that houses privilege and scarcity, a rebellion arises. If the train is a metaphor, the message is clear: When disaster strikes, inequality is magnified. 

Silo (2023)

Apple TV

Based on a trilogy of books by Hugh Howey, this series takes us deep underground, to where a group of survivors seeks shelter from a world poisoned by nanobot outfall. Though  they’ve managed to create a self-sustaining community, there are, of course, cracks beneath the surface (literally). Silo asks relevant questions about the aftermath of disaster: Who controls information after things go awry? How far should authority go to protect us? Does the drive for self-preservation clear the way for fascism?  

Extrapolations (2023)

Apple TV

This eight-part anthology imagines a future reshaped by rising seas, global pandemics, and accelerating tech. Each episode of Extrapolations stands alone while threading into a larger story arc and timeline, reminding us that every individual action ripples outward. The cast is stacked — Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Sienna Miller, Kit Harington — but the most memorable presence is the climate-changed world itself: disturbingly plausible and uncomfortably close.

Our Planet II (2023)

Netflix

This follow-up to the acclaimed Our Planet, and again narrated by Sir David Attenborough, zeroes in on animal migrations in a warming world. From African elephants to Alaskan crabs, Our Planet II captures the way creatures adapt — or don’t — when climate change disrupts ancient patterns. As you’d expect, the visuals are breathtaking, even if they are of ecosystems falling apart, which makes watching equal parts awe-inspiring and sobering.

The Swarm (2023) 

Hulu and European platforms

What happens when Mother Nature has finally had enough? The Swarm offers one answer: a world in which marine life coordinates deadly attacks on humans. Whales sink boats, crustaceans overtake beaches and mysterious entities threaten to end life as they know it for city residents. Adapted from Frank Schätzing’s global bestseller, the edge-of-your-seat eco-horror is a plea to reconsider humanity’s arrogance towards nature before it’s too late. 

Down to Earth with Zac Efron (2020 – 2022)

Netflix

Yes, Zac Efron, but beneath the celebrity gloss is a surprisingly earnest exploration of sustainability in action. From permaculture farming in Costa Rica to renewable energy in Iceland, Down to Earth With Zac Efron pairs globe-trotting adventure with digestible lessons in environmental best practice. Full disclosure: the critics were mixed. But, trust us, it’s breezy and watchable and way more informative than you might expect. 

Japan Sinks: 2020 (2020)

Netflix

Based on Sakyo Komatsu’s novel, this animated series starts off with a bang — or more specifically, an earthquake. What begins as a survival story focused on the Mutou family quickly unfolds into a broader exploration of grief, identity and resilience. Japan Sinks: 2020 pulls audiences in as much with sweeping landscapes and brave stunts as with heartwarming displays of humanity. Although met with contempt from Japanese audiences for its criticism of the country, the series was nominated for two Crunchyroll Anime awards and won the 2021 Annecy Jury Prize for a Television Series.

The Commons (2019-20)

Apple TV and Prime Video

Set in a near-future Sydney scorched by heatwaves, The Commons is a smartly drawn drama that centers on a single woman’s struggle with fertility amid ecological collapse and creeping authoritarianism. As personal and political crises collide, she finds herself grappling with questions of increasing urgency: Should we bring new generations into such a damaged world? Where is the line between protection and overreach? 

Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990-96)

Apple TV and Prime Video

Before “climate anxiety” was even a term, this Saturday morning cartoon was teaching kids about pollution, deforestation and renewable energy. With its gloriously ‘90s aesthetic, Captain Planet and the Planeteers follows a team of teens as they summon our green-mulleted eco-hero to battle corporate polluters and toxic villains. Like its successor Wild Kratts, the series targets younger viewers, but revisiting it now offers both a dose of camp and a reminder to start environmental education early. 

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Companies that do business in Europe face new regulations poised to dramatically reshape the fashion industry. 

As of Oct. 1 — in the middle of Paris Fashion Week — many brands in France will have to publish an “eco-score” of their products’ contributions to the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, on Sept. 5, the European Union passed a directive requiring textile companies to bear the responsibility for what happens to their goods after use. It’s the biggest extended producer responsibility (EPR) law for fashion, following California’s similar Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024.

All of this adds increased pressure to the sustainability and supply chain teams of apparel and footwear businesses in Europe. For example, the 130 signatories to the UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action agreed to halve their emissions by 2030. However, the sector has only achieved 8.6 percent of that goal, a short-term step toward net zero by 2050, according to the Apparel Impact Institute.

EPR in the EU

The European Parliament’s directive aims to slash the nearly 7 million metric tons of textile trash generated annually, most of it mixed into household waste.

It will require brands and retailers to pay third parties to handle the clothes, shoes, accessories, blankets and curtains they have sold. That will fund producer responsibility organizations (PRO) that collect, sort, reuse or recycle the materials on the ground.

With this law in place, producers will essentially be paying for merchandise to flow through takeback collection infrastructure that the EU began requiring in January under its 2018 Waste Framework Directive.

Fees are supposed to be higher for products that are harder to reuse or recycle, and lower for circular items that include durability, repairability, recyclability and safer materials.

This leaves businesses that sell or ship fashion to Europe with a new checklist: audit product portfolios, engage PROs, design for circularity, prepare compliance systems and budget accordingly.

However, the new rules don’t go into effect immediately. Member nations have 30 months to adapt the directive to meet their individual concerns and requirements. This could take years, leaving businesses with runway to plan.

By March 2028, however, they are supposed to have the EPR pieces in place and begin reporting on the volumes of goods collected. 

Smaller businesses selling less than $890,220 per year have an additional 12-month grace period.

As with all regulatory sausage making, particularly in Europe, the directive leaves many details TBD. Unknowns include the extent of fees and fines for failing to comply, 

The H&M Foundation has publicly endorsed EPR regulation, and other brands have exercised their support through involvement in collective groups advancing sustainability in the industry, including Global Fashion Agenda and Fashion for Good.

Backers hope the results will include accelerated investments in recycling, design for durability and secondhand markets.

However, the European Branded Clothing Alliance (EBCA) and Amfori trade association have argued against the rules, warning of the high costs of compliance and needless complexity.

What could EPR look like in practice in each country? France and Netherlands, which already have EPR laws in place, offer clues. 

France, which introduced its version in 2007 and updated it in 2020 for clothes, shoes and household linens, bans destroying unsold goods and requires labeling around recycled content and the potential presence of microplastics. 

Producers and distributors pay fees that help sorters and recyclers, but complaints about inadequate support forced France earlier this year to provide $58 million in aid.

One PRO, Refashion, helped collect 268,161 metric tons of some 833,000 tons sold on the market in 2023. That’s a 32 percent collection rate, which the law demands to reach 60 percent by 2028. 

A depiction of a price tag with an eco-score in France. Credit: Agence de la transition écologique

Eco-cost rule in France

As part of the 2021 Climate and Resilience Law requiring environmental labeling, France on Sept. 4 shared the final text for its eco-score rule.  

It applies to any company manufacturing, distributing or importing clothes in and into the nation. Companies must consider a life cycle assessment that takes into account 16 environmental factors. These include the contributions to climate change as well as the acidification and eutrophication of the oceans, freshwater pollution and the use of fossil fuels. 

The result is a weighted score for the coût environnemental, or environmental cost for apparel with at least 80 percent textile materials. Shoes, leather accessories, personal protective equipment and used goods are exempt. 

The French government uses a calculator called Ecobalyse to estimate the impacts of products. Third parties such as Carbonfact offer benchmarking tools as well.

For the next year, it’s voluntary for brands to calculate and publish the scores. However, they’re forced to do so if they already publish their carbon footprints or other environmental metrics. 

Full enforcement follows in October 2026. At that time, a third party may impose its own eco-score upon the products of brands that fail to comply. Businesses that don’t cooperate face fines of 5 percent of annual revenue or could be forced to pause their sales. 

Meanwhile, France has been cracking down on hyper-fast fashion under the same Climate and Resilience Law. On June 10, the nation voted to essentially ban direct-to-consumer companies with practices like Shein’s and Temu’s from advertising if they encourage overconsumption. Designing for disposability is a no-no, and violators face fines or sanctions.

The post Europe and France tighten textile rules: What to know appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

For more than two decades, sustainability fellowships have helped people launch or advance their careers by offering training, support and paid work at host organizations. Yet demand far exceeds supply, and options for mid-career professionals are limited. 

A growing wave of career accelerators is filling this gap by providing structured training, hands-on experiences, community and job-search support designed for those professionals. While some participants enroll in these programs to transition into the sustainability field, an increasing number of practitioners are using them to build new skills or move into a new area of sustainability.    

Below are six career accelerators, listed in order of the next cohort start date. Be sure to do your research so you can identify the program(s) that offer the best hands-on experiences and depth of training you want and the community that can best connect you with opportunities right for you .  

Sustainability career accelerators

Terra.do Climate Change: Learning for Action Fellowship

Program overview: Learning for Action fellows build a foundational understanding of climate science, impacts, politics, equity and economics and then focus on an area that matters most to them. Guided by expert mentors and supported by a global peer community, fellows uncover how their unique skills can translate into meaningful climate action.

Curriculum highlights: Climate foundations; solutions and systems; action and adaptation

  • Audience: Professionals and entrepreneurs across industries
  • Hands-on experience: Individual and team projects; personal climate action plan
  • Timing: 12 weeks, 6-10 hours per week
  • Location: Virtual
  • Tuition: $1,990 with merit and geography based scholarships available
  • Next cohort start date: Oct. 20

Climate Drift Career Accelerator

Program overview: The eight-week core program includes daily live sessions with venture capitalists, founders and operators sharing where they need help scaling today’s most promising climate solutions. Climate Drifties, as they’re known, also receive a week of pre-work, bonus weeks and deep dives into “this matters right now” topics, mentor sessions with the founders and access to an active senior leadership community.

Curriculum highlights: Sector deep-dives; cross-cutting climate solutions; timely issues

  • Audience: Senior career professionals shifting into climate roles or expanding into new areas of climate
  • Hands-on experience: A climate challenge project from your sector of choice
  • Timing: 8-12 weeks, 5-15 hours per week 
  • Location: Virtual
  • Tuition: $2,000 with scholarships available
  • Next cohort start date: Mid-October

Design Your Climate Career by Voiz Academy

Program overview: Participants in the Design Your Climate Career program complete a step-by-step, AI-enabled job search experience designed to help them navigate the sustainability job market. The program, of which I’m a co-founder, includes personalized coaching to identify ideal roles, a skills-gap analysis, project simulations to build role-specific technical skills and support in translating prior experience into a climate career narrative for successful job applications.

Curriculum highlights: Career strategy and positioning; job search tools and techniques; role-specific professional certifications

  • Audience: Mid- to senior-level professionals pursuing new roles or advancing their skills
  • Hands-on experience: Job search asset development projects; roll-based project simulations
  • Timing: 8-weeks, 6-8 hours per week
  • Location: Virtual 
  • Tuition: $2,450
  • Next cohort start date: Nov. 1

OnePointFive Academy

Program overview: One Point Five Academy is an advisory firm that teaches professionals its proven approach to driving net-zero projects from start to finish. Participants are guided through the five-step OnePointFive Pathway for decarbonizing operations and embedding sustainability into business strategy while learning the tools, frameworks and terminology used in today’s top sustainability roles. 

Curriculum highlights: Climate strategy and decarbonization; measurement and reporting; consulting and workforce trends

  • Audience: Early- to mid-career professionals or those transitioning into climate roles or consulting
  • Hands-on experience: Labs with carbon management tools, deep dives with industry practitioners and executives
  • Timing: 8 weeks, approximately 54 hours total
  • Location: Virtual
  • Tuition: $1,990 with scholarships available
  • Next cohort start date: Early 2026

The Climatebase Fellowship

Program overview: Climatebase fellows develop a comprehensive understanding of climate drivers and solutions across major sectors through the lens of policy, technology, finance and human rights. Early-stage founders are able to collaborate within the Climatebase community to refine their ideas, find co-founders or form their founding teams. 

Curriculum highlights: Climate and energy systems; sustainable solutions; built environment and adaptation

  • Audience: Those seeking their first job in climate, looking for new career-enhancing skills or founding a startup
  • Hands-on experience: Capstone project; early-stage startup development
  • Timing: 12 weeks, 7-10 hours per week
  • Location: Virtual
  • Tuition: $1,990 with need-based financial aid available
  • Next cohort start date: Early 2026

Clean Energy Leadership Institute Fellowship

Program overview: Clean Energy Leadership Institute fellows learn how to think critically about current energy policy and market structures. They examine existing and historical inequities, identify barriers to clean energy deployment and innovation, develop holistic solutions toward an equitable energy transition, and build the relationships necessary to scale solutions. Fellows practice their skills in public speaking, persuasive writing and business pitching.  

Curriculum highlights: Energy systems and technologies; energy policy and justice; leadership and finance

  • Audience: Early-career to mid-level professionals with experience in clean energy or other climate experience and an interest in clean energy
  • Hands-on experience: Activities and workshops; capstone project
  • Timing: 16 weeks, 6-10 hours per week
  • Location: Virtual or in-person in the Bay Area, Chicago, New York or Washington, DC
  • Tuition: $3,500 to $5,500 with financial assistance available to those who qualify 
  • Next application deadline: Early 2026

The post 6 accelerator programs to advance your sustainability career in 2025 appeared first on Trellis.

After several years of stuttering progress, the idea that carbon credits can be used to fund regenerative agriculture took a leap forward this week with the release of what might be the largest tranche of farmland credits. In a separate move, a national government announced that it would buy hundreds of thousands of credits from another project developer.

Danish startup Agreena said Monday that the carbon credit registry Verra had verified its work with farmers in 10 European nations, resulting in the release of 2.3 million credits. Farmers earned the credits by deploying regenerative agriculture techniques on close to 4 million acres over the past three years. The methods, including the use of cover crops and reduced tillage, store carbon in soils and reduce emissions from farmland operations. Potential co-benefits include improved yields and better water retention.

Radisson Hotel Group and Ryanair are among 15 companies that have purchased credits, said Simon Haldrup, Agreena CEO and co-founder.

Price points

The news is the latest milestone for a field that previously promised more than it delivered. A flurry of soil carbon startups launched at the start of the decade, but delays ensued after Verra and other registries took longer than expected to approve projects. This May, the U.S.-based project developer Indigo Ag issued 500,000 credits — its fourth annual batch — and said that farmers in its network, which spans 28 states, had stored almost a million tons of carbon dioxide in soils. The following month, Agoro Carbon, another soil carbon startup, announced a deal to deliver 2.6 million credits to Microsoft over a 12-year period.

“Soil carbon and regenerative ag fits the bill with a lot of the corporate buyers,” said Haldrup. “Both from a carbon and integrity perspective, but also from all the co-benefits and a reasonable price point.”

Haldrup declined to share the price of Agreena’s credits, noting that the company is still working to understand the market. Rather than sign long-term offtake agreements, as have become common in other areas of the carbon market, Agreena will be relying on spot market sales in the immediate future. Ewan Lamont, head of sustainability solutions at Indigo Ag, told Trellis in May that his company’s most recent credits cost between $60 and $80 per ton.

National interest

Another buyer with confirmed interest in the sector is the government of Singapore. Boomitra, a project developer that works with farmers in lower-income countries, said Monday it will deliver 625,000 soil carbon credits to the government between 2026 and 2031. The credits will be generated by paying ranchers in Paraguay to use regenerative grazing practices and will be used by Singapore to help meet its Paris Agreement emissions commitment.

The surge in interest is in part due to increasing confidence in the models used to estimate the carbon removals and avoided emissions associated with regenerative agriculture. Yet questions remain about the long-term capacity of farm and ranch soils to store carbon, as well as the reliability of the models. Soil sampling is the most accurate method for measuring soil carbon, but it is too expensive to carry out on every field.

Holdrup said Agreena took 200,000 samples last year across its network and collected 100 data points from each field, including information from farmers on crops planted, tillage and fertilizer use. Satellite imagery is also used to confirm where and when specific crops were planted.

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