Why we’re all part of sustainability’s elitism problem

Browse social media on any given day and you’ll notice a glaring disconnect. At a casual glance, the news reveals a polycrisis defined by geopolitical instability, growing inequality, environmental degradation and social polarization. 

In response, corporations generate inspiring content, breathless invitations to bring your whole self to work and C-suite-bylined advertorials peppered with sustainability jargon but lacking in substance. Meanwhile, sustainability practitioners remain embroiled in esoteric debates over climate accounting or impact measurement, all suffused with a broad, inchoate rage against ‘the system’.

You can tell that sustainability is in trouble simply by the fact that numerous articles keep insistently telling us it’s alive and well. But I’m sure you, like us, have numerous examples (or personal experience) where sustainability is being quietly rebranded, shuffled to a less influential location on the organizational chart or quashed outright.

Just five years ago, sustainability was framed as “the right thing to do,” with a watertight win-win business case. Shareholder primacy was seen as regressive and we were all confident that stakeholder capitalism was proceeding inexorably. 

Now, sustainability is fractious, politicized and besieged. The political headwinds are real and blowing harder by the day. Doubling down and resisting this criticism is a natural reaction, and where much of the sustainability community is, quite naturally, focusing. We understand; it’s exasperating to hear more critiques from the very people that ought to be on your ‘side.’

But, there’s little prospect of countering all this criticism, or framing a compelling path forward, unless we acknowledge our own part in getting to this point. (For the avoidance of doubt, the authors of this piece fully acknowledge that we are also part of this problem!)

The elite capture of sustainability 

To understand how we helped fuel  the current situation, let’s start with the idea of elite capture. This  happens when privileged individuals and organizations appropriate tangible and intangible resources for their own benefit. Think of prominent NGOs that spend more time writing grants and presenting in boardrooms than actually helping communities on the ground. The term was first used in the context of foreign aid and more recently has been applied to the social and political realm of ideas, knowledge, expertise, data, brands, and networks. 

In 2025, Musa Al-Gharbi published We Have Never Been Woke, in which he identifies a dominant class he calls ‘symbolic capitalists.’ These are professionals who work with ideas, data, and narratives — journalists, academics, tech workers and non-profit leaders. While symbolic capitalists tend to emphasize egalitarianism and social justice, they’re the primary beneficiaries of the systems of inequality they claim to oppose. Sustainability practitioners sit squarely in this category because sustainability has an elitism problem and it takes several forms.

On the most basic level, we see it when organizations spend a lot of time talking about inequality, climate change and other sustainability concerns, but stop short of taking concrete actions to address these issues. Are you spending a lot of time talking about inclusive communities, while your company doesn’t pay a living wage? 

Next, we see an obsession with obscure, alienating terminology. Sustainability professionals  love to joke about reporting overload and three-letter acronyms, but it isn’t funny. This is a way to make the ideas impenetrable and technical, so that there are professional opportunities for interpreters, in the form of advisors and consultants. Yes, issues like climate change are scientific and technical, but tackling climate change is, above all, a question of social and political organization. If we can’t bring people along with us, all the measurement frameworks in the world aren’t going to help.

Another problem: assessments, certifications and reporting frameworks are squarely designed for the benefit and use of large, Western multinationals. These companies have the capacity and budget to gather and report data, often after hiring expensive communication consultants. 

Little thought has been given to the needs and priorities of smaller businesses, let alone businesses in developing countries. While the drivers behind measuring Scope 3 emissions, to take just one example, are real and understandable, this is also a way to impose controls, costs and liability on smaller and less powerful suppliers. Also, isn’t it a little weird to think of American businesses lecturing companies in Brazil and India on issues like plastic waste?

Open doors or brick walls

It’s important to ask if the corridors of power lead to open doors or brick walls. For example, it’s common to argue that it’s the responsibility of the sustainability team to cover ‘stakeholder engagement’. Implicit in this argument is the notion that if you can delegate responsibility for those inconvenient, annoying, value-sucking stakeholders to a relatively powerless team, the rest of the company is free to focus on its primary goal — maintaining shareholder value.

Even worse, the powerless team in question is highly selective about which stakeholders it deems worthy of attention. We might focus, for example, on a cocoa farmer in West Africa or a factory worker in Bangladesh. To be sure, these human beings are at the forefront of environmental and social risk, and need concrete help. But, when it comes to less photogenic examples, such as coal workers in Pennsylvania or meatpackers in the Midwest, we tend to dismiss their fears of losing jobs and livelihoods, or even frame them as climate deniers.

In short, it’s no wonder many ordinary people consider sustainability to be an irrelevant, elitist waste of money and time. In fact, stakeholders are savvy enough to see when a business is intentionally creating a distracting aura around something. Building trust shouldn’t be treated as a metric, but rather the outcome of consistent actions over time.

Beginning to fix elitism

As a start, we might focus on whether a business pays a living wage to its workers and contractors. We might also focus on employee ownership models, and look more closely at incentive and reward structures. If these efforts lack credibility, perhaps the social impact or community engagement programming is just a virtue-signaling effort.

We might also focus more intently on what a company’s government relations and lobbying efforts look like, and to what degree the company is facilitating or encouraging the political practices its sustainability report aims to tackle. 

We might also acknowledge and give credit to the companies that are honest about failure and complexity, and approach neat, curated accounts of achievements with much more skepticism. We might even look at how much effort and budget is spent measuring and reporting issues, rather than addressing them.

Most of all, we might stop lecturing and educating, and start listening and learning. What do organizations in emerging markets have to teach large, Western multinationals? What can we do to avoid dumping responsibility and liability onto suppliers and communities at the forefront of the problems we caused?

As many of the core underlying assumptions behind sustainability continue to dissolve, it’s time for more reflection, more plain language and a direct focus on fairness, basic dignity and respect. There isn’t a simple way out of the political mire, but this would be a good start.

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How Natural Fiber Welding will use its second chance

On Jan. 14, investors rescued Natural Fiber Welding from the edge of bankruptcy. The startup’s narrowed focus — from a stable of offerings to a single product that’s ready to sell — reflects both the promise and tough economics of building sustainable materials.

Natural Fiber Welding had grown since 2015 to become a darling in the congested space of next-generation materials innovators. The company raised $224 million from Peoria, Illinois, far from the venture capital in-crowd.

Brand insiders and materials science nerds praised its alternatives to fossil-fuel materials used in fashion, cars and furniture. NFW’s Mirum plant “leather” appeared in Stella McCartney bags, Allbirds sneakers and watch straps for IWC Schaffhausen.

In its first eight years, Natural Fiber Welding ballooned from 12 employees to 320, running a 175,000 square-foot plant.

“Our recipes work inside everybody’s factories, and that means we can have an impact at the biggest scale, at the scale of billions of people,” founder Luke Haverhals said in a video in September 2024 that announced NFW as an Earthshot Prize finalist. The previous March, the startup had raised $23.7 million, a hopeful sign after two layoffs in 2023.

Last-hour rescue

By the end of 2024, however, the company let go of another 91 workers.

After a decade of building new materials and brand partnerships, NFW hit a wall.

“We had put a lot of eggs in a basket for BMW and for a consumer electronics company, and those did not come to fruition in a timely way,” NFW Chief Scientist Aaron Amstutz said of attempts to deliver Mirum at scale. In 2022, NFW’s biggest chunk of funding, $85 million, involved BMW iVentures and Ralph Lauren.

Amstutz continued. “You’re a startup, you have burn, you have lots of employees, and so you look at the books and you say, ‘Okay, it’s not working. We can’t raise money against continuing to push the timeline out.’”

In early September 2025, CEO Steve Zika announced a plan for an “orderly wind down of operations.”

“NFW’s story reflects a broader pattern we see across sustainable materials,” noted Katrin Ley, managing director at Fashion for Good of Amsterdam, “leading technology with genuine potential, but navigating the gap between proof-of-concept and commercial scale, and facing cost-premiums along the way.”

“We all kind of expected it,” said Amstutz. “We were literally three hours away — we were planning on filing bankruptcy on Friday afternoon.”

But Zika asked the team to wait for the weekend. “‘I think there’s a few people sniffing around that might be interested,’” Amstutz recounted Zika saying.

That Saturday, investors called.

Months later, on Jan. 14 Provest Equity Partners with CTW Venture Partners announced an undisclosed investment NFW.

Suhas Uppalapati, managing partner of Provest Equity Partners, praised the startup’s “breakthrough science paired with real industrial relevance.” He became NFW’s new chairman, a role formerly held by Zika.

Meanwhile, escaping bankruptcy allowed NFW to keep its equipment and intellectual property. “That continuity is helpful,” Amstutz said. “We’ve got these other materials, other technologies, but we’re figuring out how we can do it lean, mean and profitable along the way. We need to bring a whole bunch of people back.”

Biobased soles

Sneakers by Bared Footwear of Australia, which has used Pliant in its outsoles for two years. Credit: Bared Footwear

New focus

Moving forward, Natural Fiber Welding is focusing on its most profitable offering, Pliant. The outsole material grew out of a request in 2020 from Eric Liedtke, CEO and co-founder of Unless Collective, to help make an all-natural lifestyle shoe.

Losing Pliant would have been a “huge step backwards” for Bared Footwear, according to its Founder and CEO Anna Baird. Pliant “aligns perfectly with our mission to create shoes that will one day break down without leaving behind microplastics,” she said, praising its performance and durability.

Pliant is made with the same “natural fiber welding” process behind the company’s first creation, Clarus, a natural-fiber alternative to polyester or nylon. The technology fuses natural fibers or polymers — tree rubber, in the case of Pliant — using heat and pressure, without fossil-fuel-based binders or glues.

“We have figured out how to vulcanize rubber without using those nasty petrochemical accelerators,” Amstutz said. “My shelves are full of health supplements and vitamins and plant extracts, and we’ve limited ourselves to those ingredients.”

From lifestyle to performance shoes?

Overseas partners in Vietnam will mold the Pliant compound later this year to be used for outsoles in shoes that will sell in 2027.

Amstutz is also developing a compound for the performance-shoe market..

“Right before this, I was molding in our lab,” he said in a video call.

With hundreds of millions of shoes made and discarded every year, soles are a focus of brands and retailers who are trying to reduce their materials emissions. The nonprofit Fashion for Good is leading the Next Stride collaboration with Adidas, Target and Zalando to understand the impacts of sole biomaterials and close pricing gaps with conventional options.

The $26 billion market for shoe sole materials in 2024 could reach $40 billion by 2032, according to Data Bridge research. Global Growth Insights projects 11 percent annual growth in “sustainable” footwear sales from 2024 to 2033.

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Funding for decarbonization is more accessible than companies think

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

Thanks to an increased push for transparency in corporate climate actions, customers and regulators alike have caught on to a chronic pattern of promises being made and forgotten. Key climate standard-setters stepped up in 2025 by pushing a shift from ambition to accountability. Notably, SBTI’s significant proposed revisions to the Corporate Net Zero Standard would improve progress reporting and even add a cost-per-tonne mechanism to create responsibility for ongoing emissions.

As we enter this new chapter, more companies will want to offer proof of follow-through in the form of empirical data showing that they’re adopting climate solutions. The subset of companies with an internal carbon price embrace the understanding that to put forth a credible climate strategy, details are key. In addition to showing whether companies are backing their targets with actions, details tell what companies are doing, and make it possible for learning to take place across companies.

This sort of data can be hard to capture and assess because approaches vary widely. But it’s possible. We recently analyzed the climate funding data of nearly 130 of the consumer brands that earned The Climate Label certification in 2025. The results show how they’re choosing to fund decarbonization, and preview the power that this type of data could have if collected at a larger scale.

Clearing the bar without breaking the bank

To earn The Climate Label, brands must make concrete investments in climate solutions, at a level proportionate to their carbon footprint. The level is based on a minimum internal carbon price of $15, which is applied to every tonne of their GHG emissions. The resulting dollar amount is known as a climate transition budget (CTB). Companies can only count verified decarbonization projects towards the CTB.

Last year, 96 percent of the 128 companies that earned the certification exceeded the minimum CTB of $15. Even counting companies that far exceeded the $15 per tonne level, median climate transition funding equaled just 0.3 percent of revenues, and 8 out of 10 brands met the CTB minimum for less than 1 percent of revenues.

While companies’ absolute emissions and total climate spend varied widely, CTB levels as a share of revenue showed little relationship to industry, company size or emissions profile. A meaningful level of funding for decarbonization may be more financially accessible than many companies assume.

Paying for value chain projects

A common criticism in corporate sustainability is that companies will usually opt for the easiest option—carbon credits—while continuing to make ambitious climate claims. The data, however, suggests the opposite.

Free to meet their CTBs with a mix of value chain projects and market-based mechanisms, certified companies directed an average of 70 percent of their funding into projects that involved corporate facilities and supply chains. This pattern held steady, regardless of sector or annual revenues, which ranged from a few million to hundreds of millions of dollars. Many companies noted they could better support their overall business strategy and long-term emissions reduction goals by making value chain investments.

Nonetheless, not all organizations have “shovel-ready” value chain projects at all times, particularly in the early stages of climate planning. As such, the flexibility to account for ongoing emissions by using market-based instruments, both within and beyond their value chains, remains important, and ensures that money continues to flow into climate solutions of some type.

An additional amount of funding in the 5 to 10 percent range on average went into efforts to build capacity for future value chain climate projects. Taken together, the allocations to direct mitigation efforts and capacity-building initiatives counter the notion that companies tend to rely too much on carbon credits, and instead point to a shift toward deeper, longer-term emissions reductions embedded within business operations.

Low carbon materials dominate value chain investment

As companies tackle their hard-to-abate Scope 3 emissions, they often seek to source low-carbon materials as a replacement for higher-carbon alternatives. This decarbonization lever received the greatest share of value chain funding. Adopting lower carbon materials is possible on a shorter timeline, compared to more complex operational or capital projects.

Despite a clear preference for low-carbon materials, it’s not clear that companies prioritize them based on their cost effectiveness. To document these initiatives, companies reported the estimated GHG savings of each initiative they invested in, along with price premiums. Costs per tonne ranged widely — from a few dollars per tonne to tens of thousands of dollars. Lower carbon metals and direct energy switching offered the most cost effective reductions, whereas lower carbon plastics and rubber offered the least cost effective reductions.

This exercise offered a side-by-side look at the costs of GHG abatement and helped companies understand how low carbon materials compare to other initiatives within their portfolio of decarbonization efforts. The insights can shape how these and other companies choose to allocate limited decarbonization budgets.

More project-level data is needed

Across the wider community of businesses actively involved in the climate transition, a majority aren’t well positioned to compare and identify projects with the lowest cost GHG abatement potential, because such comparative data doesn’t exist. Yet.

There is a significant opportunity to bring more climate transition funding data into the public domain by documenting it at the project level, across more companies and more projects. 

Doing so would demystify many questions about cost effectiveness, and help sustainability professionals with their climate transition planning — leading to better outcomes from their climate initiatives.

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Story as strategy: What climate fiction teaches us about communicating sustainability

As a professional storyteller, I found this episode of our Two Steps Forward podcast particularly engaging. I once thought I understood the basics: Make it accurate, make it relevant, make it human.

Then my co-host Solitaire Townsend and I discussed her new novel — a work of “cli-fi” (climate fiction). And she sharpened the lesson for me in ways that everyone working in sustainability communications would be wise to heed.

In this episode, we talked about her remarkable new novel, Godstorm — but the most useful part of the conversation wasn’t about the book’s alternative Roman Empire or its sword-wielding heroine. It was about what writing fiction taught her about what makes any story actually work. (Godstorm is currently sold in hard copy only in the U.K. and Australia; it is available in the U.S. as a Kindle e-book.)

Solitaire’s biggest takeaway is deceptively simple: Stories are not about issues. They are about people — not systems, trends, frameworks or even impacts.

People.

That sounds obvious, until you look closely at most sustainability communications. We routinely aspire to tell stories when we’re actually merely presenting information: emissions trajectories, regulatory developments, technology roadmaps, ESG metrics.

All are important. Most are necessary. And little of it, on its own, is storytelling.

An emotional journey

As Soli put it in our conversation, a real story is an emotional journey — someone starts in one place and ends in another, changed by what happens along the way. If no one changes, if no one struggles, if no one feels conflicted or afraid or hopeful or determined, we’re not telling a story. We’re delivering content.

It’s a truth long understood by the best climate fiction writers — from Neal Stephenson’s sprawling, systems-level futures to Kim Stanley Robinson’s deeply human portraits of people living inside planetary change. What makes their work resonate isn’t the science (although it’s rigorous), but the fact that we experience it through characters we come to know and care about.

She shared an example that should be required listening for anyone working in climate, health or policy communications. She recently trained medical professionals in the Global South who were deeply knowledgeable about climate-related health impacts, i.e., heat stress, asthma, air pollution and other mortality risks.

They had the data. They had the charts. They had the statistics. And none of it landed.

Then she asked them to tell the story of one patient. A child with worsening asthma who lived beside a busy road. A worker admitted multiple times for heat exhaustion. Voices broke. Emotion surfaced. Attention sharpened. The same facts, suddenly unforgettable.

Earning attention

That’s the gap we still haven’t closed in sustainability. We talk endlessly from our heads — science, economics, technology, risk. But the connection to hearts — bodies, families, dignity, fear, love, identity — is often treated as optional or manipulative or “too soft” for serious discourse. It isn’t. It’s the connective tissue that makes any of the rest of it matter.

There’s another lesson here that’s equally important: Attention is earned. People don’t owe us their focus simply because climate change is an urgent and existential threat. If we want attention, we must offer something in return — narrative, tension, character, emotion, meaning. That’s as true for a podcast, a Trellis article, a corporate sustainability report or a government climate strategy.

And perhaps the most encouraging insight of all: Storytelling is not a gift bestowed at birth. It’s a skill, and it can be honed. Soli talked openly about spending years studying craft — reading, taking courses, rewriting, learning the rules before learning how to bend them. (Helpfully, she holds two master’s degrees: in sustainability and Shakespeare.)

That’s good news. It means every sustainability professional, every journalist, every communicator — everyone — can improve at this.

If sustainability is going to prevail in a time of backlash, fatigue and fragmentation, we won’t get there with more data or factual narratives. We’ll get there through a storm — not of outrage, but of stories: human stories, told well.

The Two Steps Forward podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and other platforms — and, of course, via Trellis. Episodes publish every other Tuesday.

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Polyester recycler Reju picks Eastman Kodak site for first American plant

The former locus for Kodak film production is Reju’s choice for its first U.S. textile recycling plant. The startup has selected Rochester, New York, as the first site for a $390 million facility that would advance a North American circular economy for polyester.

Reju has set a 2029 deadline to open a 450,000-square-foot facility that would handle 300 million pieces of clothing a year. It would occupy 18.9 brownfield acres on the 1,200-acre Eastman Business Park, originally opened by photography pioneer George Eastman in 1890. The park is home to more than 100 companies, including Reju partner Eastman Kodak as well as materials science, advanced manufacturing and chemicals businesses.

Reju, with offices in Paris, belongs to Dutch oil and gas company Technip Energies, whose technology for polymerization sits in about 1,000 polyester factories around the world. IBM originally developed Reju’s processes, which break down polyester fibers and build them back up into new polyester. The tech can manage polyester-cotton blends, too.

Polymer ‘masters’

“We’re, let’s say, the masters of the universe when it comes to how to polymerize,” said CEO Patrik Frisk, a former CEO of Under Armour.

Rochester follows Reju’s two existing plants, including at Chemelot Industrial Park in the Netherlands. The other, in Frankfurt, began shipping material to customers last year, according to Frisk.

“It’s ticking all of the boxes that we’re looking for,” Frisk said of the upstate New York site. These included proximity to a chemical park — for infrastructure access — and potential suppliers of waste, as well as supportive state and regional government, he added.

“Reju’s ambitious project will create approximately 70 new jobs at Eastman Business Park, and will show how smart investments can turn waste into opportunity, further supporting our state’s overall green economy efforts and creating a brighter future for everyone,” stated New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

Reju is continuing partnerships with Goodwill, Waste Management and other organizations that began in 2024. Waste Management has sent the company material from its curbside collection pilot programs. One such effort, in Troutdale, Oregon, ends this spring after a year of collecting clothes, linens and towels from households.

Regional circular economies

Reju has numerous rivals in its vision for a domestic circular economy for textiles. H&M-backed Syre of Sweden is developing one of several would-be “gigascale” plants by 2032. The opening date for one, in North Carolina, has been moved to 2026 from 2025.

As polyester recycled from bottles is falling out of favor among circular-economy advocates, more brands are looking to Reju and others, including Circ and Ambercycle, to provide lower-carbon polyester that derives from fashion waste instead of virgin oil. Reju says it has extensive downstream engagements with brands.

A backlash against polyester is building among consumer advocacy groups wary of the long-term effects of microfiber pollution. “We should try to use less polyester,” Frisk said. “But knowing this industry the way I know it, that is most likely not going to happen.” However, not all polyester is created equal, according to Frisk, and engineering “great polyester” can result in fibers that shed less.

In October, Reju brought together 12 fiber production, weaving and recycling companies to engage around emerging regulations, including the EU’s new extended producer responsibility rules for textiles. Their group, Circular Textile Coalition, was Reju’s response to a European Commission request to hear from more companies in textile circularity.

“This whole interest around circularity nearshoring and reshoring is real,” Frisk said. “It’s now becoming something that you should consider, for any size of brand.”

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Former Novo Nordisk exec to chair GRI standards board

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has confirmed Susanne Stormer, a former Novo Nordisk sustainability leader and PwC partner, as chair of the 15-person Global Sustainability Standards Board. 

Stormer’s appointment is effective April 1. She succeeds Carol Adams, Emeritus Professor of Accounting at Durham University Business School in the U.K., who held the role for the past three years.

GRI’s methodologies are used by more than 14,000 companies as part of disclosures on environmental, social and governance topics. That makes it one of the most widely used resources for voluntary reporting alongside ones from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the International Sustainability Standards Board.

Stormer was the vice president of corporate sustainability at pharmaceuticals maker Novo Nordisk for 13 years before heading to PwC in Denmark, where she represented the consulting firm’s sustainability services. 

While at Novo Nordisk, she led the process to integrate ESG disclosures into the company’s annual report.

Stormer has a long history of working on governance issues through organizations including the International Governance Network and the governance committee for the OECD.

She was closely involved with the development of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards and was a founding member of an international council created to align disclosure frameworks on behalf of sustainability practitioners weary of using disparate methodologies.

Stormer is currently Leader in Residence at the Copenhagen Business School, responsible for strengthening the institution’s ties to the business community. 

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Canopy calls for $2 billion to advance low-carbon packaging and textiles

Making materials for fashion and packaging from crop and textile waste instead of trees from at-risk forests will require $78 billion globally by 2033, according to Canopy. To step in that direction, the Vancouver nonprofit announced a $2 billion blended-finance model to advance next-gen materials in India.

That nation needs up to $15 billion to shift industries toward adopting waste-based cellulosic materials, according to the initiative. So far the plan has secured $500 million, blending grants and capital. A mix of public and private investors is expected to contribute the rest. Large global brands are involved in the project, which would eventually be replicated internationally.

The Jan. 21 announcement, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, included the Laudes Foundation of Amsterdam as well as the Singapore-based No.17 Foundation and investment firm Tsao Pao Chee.

Forests can’t supply enough trees to meet the demand across the fashion, packaging and construction industries, a Jan. 15 report by Canopy and Finance Earth warned. A United Nations projection of 14 percent growth in extreme forest fires by 2030 adds to the pressure.

“If companies and investors stay locked into business-as-usual wood sourcing, they are signing up for higher costs, greater supply vulnerability and growing regulatory and reputational risk,” stated Nicole Rycroft, Canopy founder and executive director. “This exposes businesses unnecessarily, given there is a clear exit ramp with next-gen and alternative sources.”

Next-gen materials use 4 metric tons fewer climate emissions than those derived from virgin tree pulp, according to Canopy.

Why India

In India, the initial $2 billion would enable 1.5 megatons of next-gen materials production, reaching $15 billion, to enable 10 million megatons by 2033.

India produces 8 megatons of textile waste each year. “Many agricultural residues are still being burned on the fields, when we know they can be used more sustainably, cutting air pollution and scaling a sustainable supply chain for paper, packaging and textiles,” stated Canopy’s Strategic Lead, Global Investments Zoë Caron. In addition, burning crops, such as the stubble from spring wheat harvests and from rice paddies in the fall, kills an average 150 people every day in India.

The $2 billion would be best used to scale up “somewhat mature technologies with the greatest odds of success and a reasonable decarbonization impact,” according to Lux Research Analyst Marcian Lee.

Focus on Canopy

Canopy strives to “unlock” the investments and infrastructure to make forest-friendly, next-generation materials the norm. The nonprofit works with more than 950 brands to shift wood-material supply chains toward sourcing practices that protect biodiversity.

In November, eight brands including Victoria’s Secret and Marc O’Polo joined Canopy programs to commit to stop using material sourced from threatened forests in their paper packaging and textiles.

In fashion, textiles derived from wood are increasingly being made without hurting such forests. One decade ago, no producers of manmade cellulosic fibers (MMCF) were using such practices. By 2025, however, 70 percent were, according to Canopy’s Hot Button report in October.

“It’s hard to overstate the scale and pace of the transformation we’ve seen in the MMCF supply chain in the past nine years,” Canopy’s Rycroft said. Transparency and circularity are mainstreaming for such materials in fashion, and next-generation textiles are starting to be integrated as well, she added.

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Amazon, eBay and Etsy help put Tesla trucks on the road

Roughly 40 new all-electric trucks will soon be working the route between Houston and Dallas thanks to a pilot program that aggregates demand from companies seeking to decarbonize their shipping emissions.

Amazon, eBay and Etsy are among the companies involved in the initiative, which will enable the San Francisco-based startup Nevoya to begin deploying new Tesla Semi trucks later this year or early next. The fleet of Class 8 vehicles — the largest truck classification — is expected to travel up to 7 million miles annually and avoid an estimated 60,000 metric tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions across the multi-year contracts with participating buyers. All charging will be covered by renewable energy certificates.

Participating companies do not need to actually send shipments on the trucks to benefit from the emissions savings. Under the scheme, which is organized by the nonprofit Center for Green Market Activation (GMA), Nevoya will sell “environmental attribute certificates” (EACs) representing the emissions savings independently of contracts for freight. Buyers then deduct the emission savings represented by the certificates from their Scope 3 emissions, and retire the certificates to prevent further use.

Aviation playbook

Similar “book and claim” schemes are already being used to fund decarbonization of maritime shipping, cement, iron and other sectors. One well-established scheme — the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, a project co-managed by GMA, Environmental Defense Fund and RMI — has aggregated $550 million in demand for sustainable aviation fuel certificates since 2021. Amazon and Visa are among its members

Like these other areas, road freight is challenging to decarbonize in part because zero-emission options come with a premium. Battery electric trucks usually cost about twice as much as equivalent internal combustion vehicles, according to the GMA. The need to create charging infrastructure and purchase renewable electricity can further increase the price.

There are companies willing to pay these premiums for at least some shipments, but they often struggle to find zero-emissions options because less than 1 percent of new heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. are electric. The book-and-claim approach solves this problem by aggregating demand across interested companies, regardless of their ability to access electric trucks.

Scaling the project

GMA described the purchase of trucking EACs as a pilot and said it planned on further developing the project. One move that would accelerate progress would involve leading standard setters integrating EACs into their guidelines — something the Science Based Targets initiative is considering. “That will provide stakeholders with confidence in the accountability of these solutions,” said Andre de Fontaine, GMA managing director.

The center also plans on combining book-and-claim agreements with more traditional contracts that involve companies paying directly for zero-emissions shipping.

“Layering book and claim into these efforts can increase asset utilization — trucks and chargers — lowering overall costs for all buyers,” said de Fontaine. “As costs decrease, we expect more shippers to get involved, increasing demand and, in turn, driving greater production and deployment of zero-emission heavy-duty trucks.”

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L’Oreal invests in 13 startups to speed materials innovation

L’Oreal spends more than $1.5 billion on research and development annually, with the goal of using plants, minerals and recycled materials for 75 percent of its ingredients by 2030. 

It is also investing close to $120 million on outside help through L’Accelerator, a five-year program to recruit entrepreneurs seeking to commercialize technologies that address the cosmetics company’s climate, nature and circular materials goals.  

L’Oreal has selected 13 companies for the first phase of the program, which kicked off in mid-January. It hasn’t disclosed how much funding is dedicated to participants but plans to work with five annual cohorts during the lifetime of the program.

Each entrepreneur participates in a 12-week program at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where they’ll learn skills such as how to pitch potential investors, sales plan development, financial and budgeting strategies, negotiating methods and so forth. From there, they’ll team with L’Oreal brands for field tests that last between six and nine months.  

L’Accelerator caters to companies with market-ready solutions that need more resources to reach commercial scale in the form of management coaching, funding and corporate pilots for their solutions, said L’Oreal Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer Ezgi Barcenas.

“We’re really looking for what I would call later-stage companies that are really at an inflection point,” she said. “They’ve created a product and they’re really looking for a customer to come in to design that product or put it into a use case — an application for that customer.”

Approximately 66 percent of L’Oreal’s products meet its 2030 ingredients commitment, and the company is looking outside its own R&D team for a spectrum of other business process and materials innovations that can help close the gap.

‘Test small, learn fast and iterate’

Each L’Accelerator relationship will be managed by an internal sponsor chosen from teams across the company including the supply chain organization, brand managers, R&D and finance, Barcenas said. 

More than 80 L’Oreal employees were involved with selection and will continue to be involved in the relationships. That model mimics one in the 100+ Sustainability Accelerator initiative that Barcenas oversaw at her previous employer, beverage company AB InBev.   

Ten of the 13 companies chosen for the first L’Accelerator cohort are developing sustainable packaging and materials alternatives, including Pulpex, which is working on recyclable paper bottles.  

Pulpex is a venture spun out of adult beverage company Diageo, which has been testing fiber-based alternatives to glass and plastic bottles. The U.K. company has amassed an appreciable sum of financial backing, including more than $83 million from the U.K. and Scottish governments to build a factory in Glasgow, Scotland, scheduled to open in the second quarter. 

The venture is considering a business model in which it will license its technology to packaging companies and manufacturers looking for fiber-based alternatives, said Scott Winston, managing director and chief science and sustainability officer at Pulpex. One thing the company is studying with L’Oreal is whether its packaging is more appropriate for business-to-business or business-to-consumer applications.

“It’s not about the technical functionality, it’s about the execution,” he said.

What makes L’Oreal’s initiative radical is a willingness to sprint at the speed of a startup, Winston said: “There has usually been a mismatch between how fast entrepreneurs work and the usual processes of a large company. This program will test small, learn fast and iterate.”  

Success metrics

Some L’Accelerator participants could eventually see the relationship evolve into a commercial contract after their pilot is complete. L’Oreal may also consider taking an equity stake, but its larger interest is in accelerating commercialization of the technologies to help reduce costs across the cosmetics industry. 

“I would say that we are really being intentional about the partners we’re selecting but also telling the world that this is not only for L’Oreal,” Barcenas said.

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The danger of putting a price on the planet

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

I have a simple rule of thumb that if a problem lingers for a while even after many smart folks have tried to solve it, then there’s probably something wrong with the framing of the problem.  

We seem to be at that stuck point with the multi-decadal effort to bring economy into balance with ecology – a goal that’s obvious to folks that come from the frame of recognizing that human life will struggle unnecessarily on a planet burdened with degraded air, water and soil resources, and not really on the radar for folks who see economic growth as an unalloyed good that eventually solves all problems.

But the frame is broken at a deeper level. Capitalism is the organizing paradigm of the global economy, which means it organizes much of our thinking by default. Even though we’ve tried to protect nature via carbon markets and other mechanisms, those efforts, while valiant, have inherent flaws. Why? Because it puts a price on that landscape because if a more profitable form of exploitation came around, the same calculations could be used to justify further exploitation.

Such unexamined assumptions are at the core of why our systems are breaking down right now. We’ve turned everything into capital to feed into the capitalistic algorithm. 

Defining capital

To set the stage, let’s remember that a simple working definition of capital is “an asset that has been given intentionality.” This is clear when we see how we characterize terms such as “investment capital” versus “operating capital.” The words “investment” and “operating” tell us what the intentionality of the capital is. But we’ve now done this conceptual conversion into capital for nearly everything. So people are now “human capital,” and the natural environment becomes “natural capital.” 

It’s worth noting that we’ve already made a deeply consequential decision in adopting this framing. When something becomes capital, it becomes easier to interface with the capitalistic optimization algorithm. Anything that has been characterized as capital can be traded off against other forms of capital. 

The capitalistic efficiency algorithm doesn’t have any intrinsic values or aesthetics; it moves relentlessly to places where the numbers look better. That’s why it feels obvious in this economic framing that if AI can be more efficient than human capital, then our aesthetics and values around avoiding mass layoffs and economic chaos will have little sway. The capitalistic algorithm will dominate without active effort to the contrary. 

Similarly, even if we value a natural landscape for the value of its natural capital and environmental services, the capitalistic algorithm will absolutely drive the demolishing of that natural system if something of greater economic value can be wrung from the same landscape. In short, one of the important decisions we’ve applied very little direct agency to is the basic decision around which aspects of life we allow to be cast as capital.

Saying no to the algorithm

We can say “no” to this process. We’ve done it before: For example, the sale of human organs is banned worldwide. We decided that the value of the organs that grow inside our bodies is something that should be completely outside any system of capitalist exchange. It’s easy to imagine the horrific chaos that would arise if people’s organs were allowed to be part of capitalist exchange. There are humans valued so little by the economy that their value as exchangeable organs would exceed the value of their economic contribution. 

If you think capitalism is incapable of this cruelty, remember that we’ve literally done it in recent world history in the form of chattel slavery. When people and their bodies become property, or body parts become a form of harvestable and exchangeable capital, then don’t be surprised when slaves’ teeth are pulled to replace one’s own lost teeth (a la George Washington). All of this is facilitated when people and their bodies can be owned by others as just another part of their total “capital.” We’ve similarly been enabling the dismembering of the ecosystem function as we de-dimensionalize the natural environment into capital in the flattest sense.

The viewpoint that nature is just another form of capital is at the heart of the climate crisis. The capitalistic efficiency algorithm doesn’t care about the function of natural systems, only what can be done to improve margins and scale production. In prioritizing, our economic endeavors often sever essential connections that then destabilize the metabolisms of natural systems (biology and hydrology). 

We’re now living in the collective breakdown of these systems from having lived this “nature as capital” viewpoint for several decades. Many of us have lived in the current system our entire lives so we’re not fully aware of other possible system designs. But there are many other possible viewpoints worth exploring.  

Seeing nature differently

Many indigenous cultures around the world are in deep alignment with nature, understanding humans as part of a broader natural system where they hold responsibility to learn from and give to their lands. It’s so widely observed that it’s almost a universal attribute of the longest lasting indigenous cultures — because living on land successfully for hundreds to thousands of years without despoiling it almost always necessitates the deep listening and observation, wisdom-building and care work that we see in so many cultures.

By comparison, in many Western traditions, humans put themselves at the top of a hierarchy of control that helps to justify narratives around the extraction and exploitation of nature. Concepts of “right” hierarchy and “civilized” domination are the go-to narrative justification for exploitation, whether toward natural resources or toward people via hierarchical concepts such as racism, religious superiority and social class superiority. 

In the recent Western system, there are always some humans who are allowed to be exploited more than other humans. This creates tension with ideas such as fundamental human rights. At least when systemic exploitation is happening to other humans, they can work to speak up and politically organize. When this domination worldview is applied to animals, plants, lakes, mountains, the atmosphere and minable ores, they can’t push back or speak up the way humans can. 

The further assumption that everything “below us” in our conceptual hierarchies can be characterized as capital and exploited opens pathways to creating real damage — whether what we see as “below us” is a factory worker or a pine tree. Sometimes the first time we hear the voice of ecological collapse is when the degradation forces us to leave the area or stops us from being able to safely drink the water.

So what can we do instead? First, don’t fall into the unconscious assumption that everything needs to be capital. Second, we’re at a point in history where we scientifically understand how many natural systems support healthy air, water, soil, biodiversity and people. We can use that knowledge to decide that some subsets of this function are so essential that they’re categorized as our core life support system and shouldn’t be haphazardly exposed to capitalistic exploitation.  

While that may sound overly protectionist, the need is obvious if we bring the example closer to home. What if literally every breath your lungs take could be monetized and access to the service could be shut off upon delinquent payment? This business would, of course, have incredible annual return rates and is obviously morally bankrupt. The life support system that the planet provides us is just as essential as breathing, and if we can get to this level of scientific and moral clarity, then we can start putting nature into a framework that will allow us to be here for the long haul.

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