The profession of sustainability is changing. It always has been, though this moment feels more fraught than any before it.

Sustainability professionals are being buffeted by countervailing forces: On the one hand, to accelerate progress in reducing emissions and in restoring or regenerating despoiled resources and ecosystems; on the other, to stand down, or at least communicate less, mindful that the political winds are blowing fiercely against corporate climate action and other sustainability initiatives. All this while delivering tangible benefits — financial and otherwise — to their companies.

This is hardly the first challenging moment in sustainable business. I’ve been watching the profession evolve for more than 35 years, the last quarter-century with Trellis Group and its predecessor, GreenBiz. (For the preceding decade, I’d written and published “The Green Business Letter,” a monthly print subscription newsletter.) Indeed, this June marks 25 years since the website GreenBiz.com went live, a moment for us to reflect on all that’s been — and all that’s yet to come.

The 25-year roller coaster

During that time all of us have weathered three recessions, multiple political swings, countless technological breakthroughs, various global conflicts, fickle consumers, impatient investors and a global pandemic. Not to mention continually evolving language we use to describe who we are and what we do, from environmental responsibility and ESG to regeneration and resilience.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride: lots of ups — and more than a few frightening downs.

At Trellis, the runup to our 25th anniversary has been a time to recalibrate our products and services to meet this moment, with all its promise and peril. Last year, for example, we rebranded the company as Trellis Group and launched a vastly improved website. We transformed our seven weekly newsletters into a single daily offering: Trellis Briefing. We also recast our 17-year-old membership group for sustainability executives into Trellis Network, opening its various communities to anyone in a member company who wants to participate.

Now we’re reimagining our events, too.

Starting this fall, three of our events — GreenFin, Bloom and VERGE — will come together as a single, multifaceted event: Trellis Impact, in San Jose, Calif., Oct. 28-30. Starting next year, Trellis Impact will add Circularity to the mix and the event will relocate to San Francisco’s Moscone Center in early summer — June 23-25, 2026. GreenBiz, our flagship event, remains as is, back in Phoenix on Feb. 17-19, 2026.

It’s a big change for us — and for you — and reflects a number of trends.

First and foremost is the realization that the focus of these four event brands — decarbonization, the circular economy, biodiversity, and the finance to pay for it all — can no longer be seen as discrete topics but as inextricably linked. Addressing them in a single, integrated event will enable our community to increase both individual and collective impact.

Moreover, we’ve heard from our community that sustainability professionals need fewer events, not more, given the vicissitudes of travel budgets and time away from home — and, of course, one’s carbon footprint. And that by bringing four events under one roof we will enable their teams to more easily learn and share together about topics, trends and technologies that cut across multiple departments and remits.

We believe that Trellis Impact will be fit for purpose for the years ahead, a more holistic view of the sustainability solutions we all need to go further, faster during this decisive decade to cut carbon emissions.

Make it bigger: Addressing sustainability challenges in concert

It all brings to mind something called the Eisenhower Principle.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th U.S. president, decorated five-star general and World War II hero, considered himself an expert problem solver. He once explained, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

That’s a fitting prescription for today’s world, which has been variously described as a “polycrisis” (crises that interact so that the whole is more overwhelming than the sum of its parts) or “permacrisis” (a world lurching from one unprecedented event to another) — or, most likely, both. Rather than tackle each sustainability challenge individually, we believe it can be more impactful to “make it bigger,” addressing them in concert.

And that by doing so we can help unlock newfound synergies and new business opportunities for companies and their customers, accelerating the positive impacts we all seek.

The post Introducing Trellis Impact 25 to usher in the next phase of sustainability appeared first on Trellis.

From my home in Los Angeles, I witnessed the devastation of wildfires earlier this year and how they underscored the rising urgency to modernize water infrastructure. A slew of dangerous chemicals were released into Los Angeles’ drinking water and stormwater systems during the wildfires, leaving many communities concerned about whether their water was safe to drink. 

These wildfires shone a light on whether our water systems are equipped to handle disasters. As wildfires grow more frequent and intense, it becomes even more urgent to adapt our water infrastructure to meet this new reality. Much of the nation’s water infrastructure is nearing the end of its lifespan. And yet, modernizing drinking and wastewater systems could exceed $744 billion in costs over the next 20 years.  

Between the urgent need to upgrade decades-old systems and the rising impacts of climate-driven weather extremes, the vast networks of pipes, treatment plants, and drainage systems across the U.S. are under immense strain. 

Uncertainty around legislation and funding

Federal and state legislation and funding could put a significant dent in addressing critical water infrastructure needed to support economic growth and communities. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, for example, earmarks $50 billion for water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure upgrades. As of November, about $41 billion had been awarded for the measure, which garnered broad business support. 

States, meanwhile, also have pushed for water infrastructure improvements. Last year, California voters authorized $10 billion in spending on environmental projects, with nearly $4 billion for projects dedicated to improving water quality and protecting the state from floods and droughts and restoring rivers and lakes.  

But there is rising uncertainty surrounding such funding due to the dynamic situation in Washington. As this plays out, it’s crucial for companies and investors to take advantage of private sector opportunities to drive innovation, partnerships and investments in climate-resilient water infrastructure. 

This work strengthens water supplies for businesses and fuels economic activity: investments in new and improved water systems could annually contribute more than $220 billion to the U.S. economy and create about 1.3 million new jobs.

Private sector opportunities

For many decades, municipal bonds have been a critical tool for shoring up water infrastructure. Today, green bonds can offer investors a powerful opportunity to finance water and wastewater management projects that promote climate adaptation and resiliency. Certification frameworks such as the Climate Bonds Initiative provide criteria ensuring these investments go toward water infrastructure projects aligned with environmental goals. 

Companies — from data centers to agriculture — that need clean water to operate also have a role to play in ensuring the water systems they depend on are reliable and built to endure weather extremes. This shared interest in resilient water infrastructure presents an opportunity for businesses to work with peers, governments and other stakeholders on projects that prevent water service disruptions and higher costs to businesses and communities. 

Moving past traditional approaches

As we work to strengthen our water infrastructure system to meet a new climate reality, we must also think beyond traditional approaches. Nature-based water systems and solutions can play a critical role in managing water and restoring and protecting ecosystems within watersheds that help filter and transport clean water. Holistic approaches such as wetland protection and restoration help strengthen water systems against the growing pressures of extreme weather.

Some companies are leveraging partnerships to accelerate and broaden the impact of these solutions. Olam, a food ingredients and agri-business company, has partnered with the USDA Forest Service, National Forest Foundation, and Knorr (a Unilever Brand) on restoration projects to improve resilience, including potential impacts of severe wildfire, in California’s Pine Flats watershed.

Through the California Water Resilience Initiative, companies such as Ecolab and General Mills are working with the Pacific Institute to build corporate support for projects and policies addressing strained water resources in the state, including efforts to restore ecosystems. 

Companies can also support federal policies that help modernize water infrastructure. Global water technology company Xylem, for example, lobbied for the 2016 passage and implementation of the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act), which provides grants to improve infrastructure resiliency in disadvantaged communities. 

The Los Angeles fires are just the latest example of how climate disasters are pushing America’s aging water systems to the brink. We need an all hands-on deck approach, with innovative solutions and funding, to upgrade and replace the nation’s network of water infrastructure at the pace and scale that ensures the long-term health and safety of communities and the economy.

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“This has the potential to be very big.”

That was agriculture sustainability expert Andy Beadle’s conclusion after wrapping up the first insetting project executed by his employer, chemicals giant BASF. 

The project, which funded the production of crops with a dramatically reduced carbon footprint, is an example of the surge of interest in the use of insetting in food and agriculture. The process, which allows companies to help suppliers cut emissions and claim an associated emissions reduction, is taking off after years of work to formulate the rules that govern it. 

To learn more about how this project worked, Trellis asked Beadle to walk us through the key steps.

Customer demand

BASF’s insetting work is motivated by demand from customers and partners that want to cut Scope 3 emissions, said Beadle. The Science Based Targets Initiative does not allow offsets to be used to meet interim net-zero targets, so companies are looking instead to invest in emissions reduction projects within their value chains. 

BASF is well placed to help deliver such projects because it’s connected to farmers through its work selling fertilizer and other agricultural inputs. It has also developed a life-cycle assessment tool known as AgBalance, which can be used to model the impact that a specific intervention on a farm — a reduction in fertilizer use, for example —  will have on the carbon footprint of the crops grown there.

In this case, the on-farm work took place on barley fields in Ireland and was funded by Belgium-based Boortmalt, a leading provider of malted barley to whiskey distilleries and other food companies.

Generating the credits

Many regenerative agriculture techniques have the potential to cut farmland emissions. After talking to barley farmers, Beadle’s team settled on a cover crop, which is planted after the barley has been harvested; and straw retention, which involves leaving a fraction of crop residues on the field. Both practices are known to increase soil carbon and, as a co-benefit, limit soil erosion.

Before asking farmers to get involved, BASF needed to be confident of two things: that the company could accurately measure the carbon savings and that the credits generated would be registered and tracked. “We can’t have that ton of carbon being sold multiple times because it’s a real reputational risk,” explained Beadle. “Not just for the BASF brand; it would also be a reputational risk for any of the customers we work with.”

To ensure the credits withstood scrutiny, BASF aligned the project with a methodology developed for the voluntary carbon market — titled VM0042 Improved Agricultural Land Management — by Verra, a key standard-setter for the market. Among other things, the methodology includes rules for how soil carbon levels should be measured before and after regenerative practices are applied. In this case, representative soil samples taken at the beginning and end of the project were fed into software developed by Regrow, a company that models agriculture supply chains, to estimate soil carbon across all the fields involved.

The whole process — from the project plan through to the credits that BASF claims were generated by the interventions — then needed to be audited and approved by SustainCERT, a non-profit that verifies carbon projects. “They will randomly select farmers and ask them, ‘So you said you grew, show me the receipt that you bought cover crops that went from here to there’,” said Beadle. Once SustainCERT had signed off, the credits — which BASF calls “Verified Impact Units” — were placed on the auditor’s registry.

Assessing the potential

The monitoring period for the intervention wrapped up in late 2023. Earlier this month, BASF and Boortmalt announced the results: 722 tCO2e saved by the 12 participating farmers. That alone isn’t significant; Ireland’s agricultural sector emits around 20 million tCO2e annually. But at a farm level, emissions associated with the crop were cut by nearly 90 percent. Most of the change came from carbon dioxide was captured from the atmosphere and stored in the soil, said Beadle.

BASF now has a slew of other insetting projects in the works, including a project with a major European bakery, rice farms in Japan and another barley company. Given the tight margins and unpredictable nature of farming, producers are cautious about adopting new techniques. But there is potential for huge growth, noted Beadle.

“No farmer is going to immediately say to me, ‘Here, have my whole farm, let’s do it,” he said. “Everybody wants to start small. They want to really see what they’re getting. They want to see how they can then use that. But if I look at the projected plans, we are talking over hundreds of thousands of hectares in Europe moving forward.”

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Moth holes and merlot stains usually send shirts to the trash, but these imperfections are leading to new creations at Eileen Fisher. The company’s Mended collection of blatantly repaired, patched or merged clothes is launching March 27, selling new white linen shirts concocted from pre-worn ones.

These and other Mended items — which will only be produced by the tens and sold online — will make up a small fragment of Eileen Fisher’s robust repair and recycling efforts. But they are part of the company’s grander ambitions: to reduce its footprint, inspire change in the industry, cater to customer preferences and continue to set the pace in this burgeoning sector.

“The work that we do is leading the way for other brands to follow us,” said Carmen Gama, Eileen Fisher’s director of circular design. “Right now, it does not contribute to the bottom line but we’re building customer loyalty.”

Another benefit, Gama explained, is that because Eileen Fisher handles so many products after use, it enjoys a competitive advantage over other companies scrambling to satisfy California’s new extended producer responsibility (EPR) law, which requires brands to manage worn apparel.

Setting a slower pace

“In Eileen Fisher’s case, repair is a signal that its clothing is worthwhile, well made and timeless,” said Ken Pucker, an advocate for sustainable fashion and former Timberland executive who teaches business at Dartmouth and Tufts universities. “It is a throwback to how clothing used to be worn and reworn.”

Eileen Fisher’s concept of “a simple wardrobe” generally seeks to encourage consumers to buy a small number of long-lasting items and to influence other businesses to slow their pace of material waste. The privately held B Corporation doesn’t share sales figures but has withstood the winds of fast fashion for 41 years by espousing circular economy concepts. Three years ago, the Eileen Fisher Foundation issued a 135-page, anti-waste playbook for the industry.

The Irvington, New York, company hopes to popularize creative reuse, repair and deconstruction of clothes, just as it was a pioneer in branded resale. Eileen Fisher was among the few brands offering consumer takeback and resale in 2009, Gama noted. The effort, later called Renew, expanded nationally in 2013. With branded resale normalizing, Eileen Fisher began exploring how to manage unsellable inventory, according to Gama. She joined the brand a decade ago to oversee managing damaged takeback items, from design to production. Her approaches included mending, over-dyeing and remanufacturing “special collections.”

Last year, the company took back 300,000 items, up nearly 10 percent from two years earlier. From 2009 to 2023, the Renew program collected more than 2 million units of apparel and re-sold 660,885 of them. Taken-back goods also wind up warehoused, donated, repurposed or downcycled into shoddy fibers for auto carpets or seating. In addition, Eileen Fisher works with partners Re-Verso in Italy and Hallotex in Spain to create fiber-to-fiber recycled sweaters.

The Mended collections

The Mended collections focus on garments that can’t be fixed or laundered but are otherwise serviceable. Most garment repairs strive to restore to “good as new” condition, which Eileen Fisher also does for customers. By contrast, the Mended approach draws attention to the former flaws with visual mending, such as paneling or patchwork. It echoes the wabi-sabi concept in Japan of finding beauty in flaws. 

The clothes can be made whole again, but there is such a thing as too many moth holes. “The team really does try their best to cover them all,” Gama said. “They try to match the exact same color of the sweater, and that’s why sometimes these things take a lot of time.”

For upcoming Mended collections, Eileen Fisher will make about 75 white linen shirts in March, followed by 120 dyed linen shirts in May. It’s overdyeing shirts for April, with partner Botanical Colors of Seattle, to hide stains. October will feature outerwear and November will see a cashmere sweater. “These collections are very small right now, but if we see a lot of interest from our customers, we can start scaling volume,” Gama said.

Eileen Fisher’s latest creation is merging two linen shirts into one. “For these white shirts, we are grabbing one that is very damaged, and then just cutting some of those panels and adding them to the next one,” Gama said. “They’re very simple and elevated. And actually, you can’t tell that this is a repaired garment. It looks new by itself.”

A unique appeal, and costs

Most businesses that make mending and reconstruction a feature, rather than a bug, do so on an even smaller scale, such as Eva Joan in Brooklyn or Suay in Los Angeles. The Welsh brand Toast offers a visual repair program. One corporate example is The North Face, which sells Remade puffer jackets that mix the non-matching sleeves and bodices of used jackets.

“I see so many people looking for customized, one-of-a-kind items, especially younger kids, teenagers,” said Cynthia Power, a consultant to apparel companies who worked for more than a decade at Eileen Fisher. “When you combine a quality item with a beautiful, visual mend, you all of a sudden have an incredibly high quality item that no other person has. That’s an incredible feeling and experience.”

Sometimes fixing one garment takes an entire day, which adds costs, Gama added. “It does take a lot of resources to do that, but it’s part of our value to offer these types of services to our customers, because we really want to tell the story that we are here to try to extend the life cycle of this garment as much as we can,” she said.

Making items last as long as possible has real environmental consequences. For example, a single cotton shirt may require hundreds of gallons of water to make. Repairing a T-shirt instead of buying one new saves about 17 pounds of CO₂, roughly equivalent to driving a gas-powered car for 20 miles, according to a February report by the nonprofit Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP).

Takeaways

Gama shared tips for other apparel companies interesting in reducing their footprints with circular-economy programs: 

• Set priorities. “Circularity can be completely overwhelming,” she said. Therefore, Gama advised, it’s important to pick a focus, such as materials or handling at the end of life. “Because if you are an established brand it’s not easy to just switch and become circular. It’s baby steps.”
• Be open and flexible. “We’ve been able to streamline a lot of these operations because we’re constantly talking to new innovators and service providers,” she said. “And if we find that it doesn’t work to do something outside we bring it back in house.”
• Consider end of life at the beginning. “The more we know about the end of life solutions, the better it can inform the designers, so by the time that garment comes back to us it’s already kind of thought through.”

The post Lessons from Eileen Fisher’s newest circular collection appeared first on Trellis.

EPA Chief Lee Zeldin announced what he’s calling the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” within the EPA by overhauling 31 environmental rules dating back to the Obama-era.

“[The EPA’s] announcement could put millions of Americans’ health in jeopardy and is antithetical to EPA’s core mission, said Conrad Schneider, U.S. senior director at the Clean Air Task Force. “Deregulating emissions from power plants, oil and gas facilities, cars, trucks, and more, is dangerous and erroneous action that will hurt American’s safety and wellbeing.”

Some of the rules facing overhaul include:

• Power plant emissions regulations (Clean Power Plan 2.0): On May 1, 2024, President Joe Biden’s EPA released the Clean Power Plan 2.0, requiring coal plants set to retire before 2035 and 2040 to reduce emissions by 16 percent; any coal plants operating past 2040 are expected to reduce emissions by 90 percent.
• Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP): The Obama-era rule GHGRP requires large emitters, fuel and industrial gas suppliers to report greenhouse gas emissions and other relevant information to the EPA.
• Steam Electric Power Generating Effluent Guidelines: Updated in 2024, the rule places strict guidelines on the level of toxins released in wastewater associated with coal plants.
• Technology Transition Rule: This rule sets limits on technologies that emit hydrofluorocarbons in specific sectors, requiring businesses to transition to more efficient models of the tech as its developed.
• 2009 Endangerment Finding: This Obama-era regulation classifies carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as a public heath threat.

“The EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars,” Zeldin said, without offering evidence, in a video posted along with the EPA’s statement.

It’s important to clarify that none of these regulations have been changed as of yet. Zeldin merely announced his intention to “reassess” specific programs in the near future. But even the potential of changing regulations for which corporations and utilities have had to reconfigure their operations is destabilizing. And while some may find it easier to adjust to a change in relatively recent policy, Obama-era regulations have been business-as-usual for more than 15 years.

In any case, there is no definitive timeline for these changes. And it’s likely that dismantling the reported 31 rules will be a complicated process slowed by lawsuits.

“Before finalizing any of these actions, the law says EPA must propose its changes, justify them with science and the law, and listen to the public and respond to its concerns,” said Jackie Wong, senior vice president for climate and energy at NRDC in a statement.

The extent to which the EPA or the Trump administration will follow the law remains an open question.

What’s next

For sustainability professionals, the EPA’s announced intentions — and potential for pushback — promise regulatory uncertainty. That will mean disruption to both day-to-day business operations and long-term planning. Any investments or actions intended to comply with Obama- or Biden-Era rules may be obsolete if the relevant regulations are stripped down or removed altogether. In short, this development leaves many professionals with a giant question mark on their 2025-2026 budgets moving forward.

Trellis will continue to monitor the story as it progresses.

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