Quick Key Facts
- More than 45 million people bird in the U.S., spending around $41 billion a year on their hobby.
- U.S. ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey published what is largely considered the first modern bird guide in 1889 titled Birds: Through an Opera-Glass.
- Twitching is a type of birding in which participants travel far and wide to see rare species.
- One study found that increasing the number of bird species in a person’s daily life by 10 percent raised their contentment more than increasing their income by 10 percent.
- People who engage in wildlife-based recreation like birding are four to five times more likely to actively promote conservation.
- Bird data posted specifically on eBird now varies from official scientific surveys by only 0.4 percent per year.
- The American Birding Association has crafted a “code of birding ethics” that has three main sections: 1. “Respect and promote birds and their environment;” 2. “Respect and promote the birding community and its individual members;” and 3. “Respect and promote the law and the rights of others.”
- Hummingbirds must drink nectar every 10 to 15 minutes from 1,000 to 2,000 flowers per day.
- One 2013 study found that domestic cats kill 1.3 to four billion birds in the U.S. every year. This makes them likely the leading human-related killer of birds in the country.
- In North America alone. bird populations have declined by 29 percent, or nearly three billion birds, since 1970.
What Is ‘Birding’?
McKinneMike / iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus
Birding is the act of observing and identifying birds in the wild as a form of recreation. This can range from taking note of all the birds who visit a backyard feeder, or traveling across the country to try to see more U.S. bird species than anyone else in a 12-month period, like the characters played by Jack Black, Owen Wilson and Steve Martin do in The Big Year. Birding is a popular pastime: More than 45 million people bird in the U.S., and they spend around $41 billion a year on equipment like binoculars or trips to see birds. In the UK, more people belong to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than all of the country’s political parties put together. While it’s historically been associated with older, wealthier, whiter adults, visible interest in the activity is widening alongside awareness of its many benefits for both birders and birds.
In the past, bird lovers would differentiate between birdwatching and birding, with birdwatching seen as a more amateur and passive observation of birds and birding — defined in this case as going out and tracking down different species — as more serious and active. But in recent years there has been a push to make the community more inclusive by leveling the hierarchy and applying the term “birder” to everyone, since it includes people who perceive birds through senses other than their eyes. Birdability coordinator Freya McGregor has proposed a new definition of birding: Simply, “The act of enjoying wild birds.”
A Brief History of Birding
Humans have probably been observing birds since the beginning of our history as a species. One of the images painted on the walls of the Lascaux Cave in France in 15,000 to 10,000 B.C. was a man with the head of a bird, and some prehistoric artists painted owls in other French caves. However, the hobby we recognize today as “birdwatching” or “birding” evolved over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Birding developed as an alternative to the 19th-century trend of collecting stuffed bird specimens for display or scientific study, as Tim Birkhead details in Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History From Cave Art to Conservation. One early birder, British ornithologist Edmund Selous, converted from stuffing to watching while observing two European nightjars in 1898. “Now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible,” he wrote. In 1901, he published a book called Bird Watching, which is believed to be the first use of that term. Another early proponent of observing over killing was U.S. ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, who published what is largely considered the first modern bird guide in 1889 titled Birds: Through an Opera-Glass, which is still in print! She was also distressed by the killing of birds to decorate hats with their plumage and recommended birdwatching as an antidote: “We’ll take the girls afield, and let them get acquainted with the birds,” she said. “Then of inborn necessity, they will wear feathers never more.”
Selous’ and Bailey’s models of compassionate and curious avian engagement took off on both sides of the Atlantic by the early 1900s, aided by improvements to the design of binoculars over the latter half of the 19th century. Birding saw a boost of popularity during and after World War II as well, driven in part by the publication of more field guides, including James Fisher’s Watching Birds, which sold more than a million copies. The hobby’s popularity continued to soar through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s through to today. Improvements in spotting technology and access to the internet have made it easier to identify birds and share that information with others. Guides have become more extensive, and more birders sharing more information means that people are actually seeing more birds now despite some decreases in populations.
The expansion of air travel and communication technology in the second half of the 20th century has made it easier for people to travel far and wide in search of rare birds. This type of birding has earned its own name: twitching. The term comes from British birder Howard Medhurst, who used to ride on the back of a friend’s motorcycle when their group went to spot birds in the 1950s. When the group reached their destination, he would dismount jerkily and shiver, or twitch, while lighting a cigarette. The rest of the group began to copy his movements and to refer to rare-bird chasing as “to go on a twitch.” Twitchers will often attempt Big Years, in which they try to spot as many different species as they can in a certain area. One innovator of the practice was U.S. businessman Guy Emerson, who spotted 497 species while traveling in North America in 1939. The current international record holder is Arjan Dwarshuis of the Netherlands, who logged 6,852 species in 2016 by traveling to 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica.
In the past several decades, birding has also gotten more diverse. When it first emerged, birdwatching was considered a hobby for the wealthy, especially men. But, as society changed over the 20th century, birding did too, with more women, minorities, and people of all economic classes getting involved. Black Birders Week was launched in 2020 to draw attention to African American bird lovers, and, as of 2023, the leaders of the National Audubon Society and the American Ornithological Society are both women. Molly Adams founded the Feminist Bird Club in 2016 to make birding and the outdoors more accessible to people who might not feel safe accessing it alone and to promote positive change. However, while birding has become more visibly diverse and inclusive in the last decades, if you take McGregor’s definition of “the act of enjoying wild birds,” it’s more likely than not that people of all genders, races, classes, nationalities and identities have been birding under the radar from the beginning. For example, in the early 1800s, rural working class poet John Clare penned detailed descriptions of the nests and habits of birds in the English fenlands based on careful observation. Clare is one of the rare working-class voices to enter the cannon relatively early, but doubtless there were many others whose observations stayed between them and the birds.
What Are the Benefits of Birding?
Birding has many benefits both for the people who do it and what they watch.
Mental and Physical Health
A growing body of research has shown that spending time in nature is good for your mental and physical health, and there is evidence that spending that time birding can be especially healing. One 2022 study found that hearing or seeing birds could boost mood for up to eight hours, both among healthy individuals and individuals with depression. The study controlled for seeing or hearing other natural elements like trees, plants or water and found that noticing birds still made a difference. Another, from 2013, found that participants associated birdsong more than any other natural sound with stress relief and improved attention span. A third, from 2021, found that living near more species of birds was correlated with increased happiness: Upping the number of species by 10 percent raised people’s contentment more than increasing their income by 10 percent. Birding is also good for physical health by encouraging people to spend more time outdoors and to walk or hike to better birding spots. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has even teamed up with doctors in Shetland to prescribe outdoor activities, including birdwatching.
Community
Another way that birding can boost your mental health and overall well-being is by introducing you to a larger community that shares your interest. Most local wildlife refuges or parks, local bird groups, or local chapters of national bird groups will host outings that anyone can join and learn how to spot birds in that area. If you prefer to bird alone, you can also interact with other birders through social media or digital platforms like eBird, where you can both log your own sightings and read what birds others have spotted in your area.
Conservation
From its origins as an alternative to specimen collections and a lure away from feathered hats, birdwatching has been closely linked with bird conservation. A 2015 study found that people who engage in wildlife-based recreation activities — including birdwatching — were four to five times more likely to actively participate in conservation activities like donating money, joining environmental groups, working to restore habitat on public lands and lobbying for more wildlife recreation. The three major birding organizations in the U.S. — The National Audubon Society, the American Birding Association (ABA) and the American Ornithological Society — consider conservation a key part of their work and missions. It turns out Bailey was right: When people begin to pay attention to birds, they often become more motivated to protect them and their habitats.
Citizen Science
One important way that birders aid conservation efforts is by providing more information to scientists about birds and their numbers and habits. Determining population trends is essential for conservation, and bird data posted on eBird specifically now varies from official scientific surveys by only 0.4 percent per year. Birders also engage in annual surveys of bird numbers to aid in research. One example is the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. This was started by ornithologist Frank M. Chapman on Christmas Day, 1900, as an alternative to the tradition of hunting birds during the holidays. Now, tens of thousands of citizen scientists participate between December 14 and January 5 every year, and the data helps conservationists track the health of bird populations and determine priorities. Other annual surveys include The Big Sit and the Great Backyard Bird Count.
Are There Any Downsides to Birding?
While birding can have many positives for nature and humans, like any activity, it has drawbacks when participants choose to be less than respectful of nature and other humans. None of these problems are necessarily inherent to the act of looking at birds; they are rather things that birders should be mindful to avoid.
Damaging Species and Ecosystems
While birding has many conservation benefits, it can also harm birds and their habitat if done improperly. For example, some birders will play a recording of a bird they are seeking in order to encourage a response in the wild. This practice has been shown to increase the time some birds spend singing, which could harm them by using up energy and distracting them from other activities. In the age of social media, postings of rare or vulnerable birds can draw large crowds that could disturb or harm them. To address situations like these, ABA has crafted a “code of birding ethics” that has three main sections: 1. “Respect and promote birds and their environment;” 2. “Respect and promote the birding community and its individual members;” and 3. “Respect and promote the law and the rights of others.” Section 1 includes minimizing playback, being careful around nests and roosts and reducing habitat disturbance by sticking to paths and trails.
Taking It Too Far
Birding can turn competitive or obsessive, especially among people who attempt Big Years or travel in search of rare birds. People have missed important family events and put serious relationships in jeopardy. As sites like eBird have made it easier to share information, they have also increased the competitiveness, and sometimes people can be rude to birders who, for example, misidentify a bird in a public forum. The ABA code of ethics applies here too, encouraging birders to “respect the interests, rights, and skill levels of fellow birders” and be welcoming to newcomers.
Environmental Injustice
Birding has historically been seen as a hobby for white and well-off people. Sometimes, people of color can even be harassed when they attempt to spend time in nature, such as the infamous incident in 2020 when a woman called the cops on African American birder Christian Cooper when he asked her to leash her dog in a leash-only area of Central Park. For lower-income people, both purchasing binoculars and finding leisure time can be barriers to birding. There is also a legacy of colonialism and racism in early ornithology. John James Audubon — a prominent 19th century bird artist and scientist who gave the National Audubon Society its name — also owned slaves and embraced scientific racism. In recent years, the birding world has made efforts to reconcile with this history and make the hobby more inclusive. The National Audubon Society considered changing its name, but ultimately decided against it. However, local chapters have abandoned the Audubon name. The American Ornithological Society announced in 2023 that it would change all the English names of birds in its jurisdiction named after people, since many of them were named after controversial figures who had a history of racism. “Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely — and birds need our help now more than ever,” AOS President Colleen Handel said of the change.
How to Get Started
If you are interested in birding, there are many resources available to help you get started.
Where to Find Birds
You can find birds everywhere, but the best place to start is somewhere near home with either green space, open water or both. Some birds, like gulls, crows or mallards, make their presence obvious. For others, you might have to look a little harder. The National Audubon Society recommends taking a moment to clear your head from other distractions, looking at places where birds might perch such as power lines or trees, scanning the landscape slowly, looking with your eyes before trying binoculars, listening for distinctive bird calls and moving on once you have seen a sizable number of birds in one area.
How to Attract Birds
You don’t even have to leave home to bird. Backyard birding is the act of observing birds from your porch or window by enticing them to come to you. The best way to do this is by planting native plants in your yard. This will draw both birds and insects, which the birds can eat. If you decide to install feeders, smaller tubular feeders filled with thistle seed will attract finches, while a larger feeder filled with nuts, fruit and sunflower seeds will be a hit with cardinals, grackles and blue jays. Place your feeders within 12 feet of another feature the birds can fly to if predators approach. This will make them feel safer visiting your home. The most important times to feed birds are during extreme weather events, migration season and late winter or early spring. During the summer, most species can find plenty of food.
The exceptions are nectar-hungry hummingbirds. There are at least 53 species of North American birds that primarily drink nectar, including hummingbirds and orioles. Hummingbirds in particular must drink nectar every 10 to 15 minutes from 1,000 to 2,000 flowers per day. You can plant hummingbird-friendly flowers, but while you wait for them to grow, fill feeders with a mixture of one part white sugar to three parts water. It’s important to remove feeders if you learn of any avian disease outbreaks in your area that your feeders could spread.
How to Identify Birds
There are many digital and paper resources that will help you identify birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app will give you an ID based on a photograph or audio recording of their song. There are also many field guides to birds in your area. Popular books for U.S. birders include The Sibley Guide to Birds, the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, the Golden Guide’s Birds of North America and National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. It’s better to choose a guide with drawings rather than photographs, as artists make sure to include all identifying features that might be obscured by lighting. When you are trying to match a wild bird to a potential ID, it’s important to consider what group it belongs to, i.e. is it a sparrow or an owl; its shape; its size; its behavior; where you are seeing it; when you are seeing it; any distinctive markings; and its song or call.
What You Need
Bird enthusiasts participate in the National Audubon Society’s 117th annual Christmas Bird Count in Anne Arundel County, Maryland on Dec. 18, 2016. Will Parson / Chesapeake Bay Program
You do need a limited amount of gear for birding — most importantly, binoculars. The National Audubon Society offers recommendations for specific models based on how much you want to spend. In general, look for a power of seven or eight and lenses on the wider end that are between 30 and 42 millimeters. In addition to binoculars and a field guide, bring whatever outdoor gear you need to safely and comfortably bird your chosen area. You may also want a notebook to compile a life list of all the different species you see. The Merlin app also allows you to keep a digital record.
How to Get Involved
Chances are, there are other birders in your area. The National Audubon Society has a guide to its local chapters here, the ABA has a list of birding clubs and organizations by state here, and the Feminist Bird Club here. Many of these local groups will advertise bird outings on their websites or social media pages in local parks that you can attend to get started or meet other birders. You can also sign up for their email listservs. Many will share opportunities to advocate for birds in your town, city or state as well.
How to Protect Birds (So You Can Keep Watching Them!)
Conservation is so important to birding that the ABA’s ethics code calls on birders to “support the conservation of birds and their habitats” and “Engage in and promote bird-friendly practices whenever possible.”
From Window Strikes
Building strikes killed an estimated median of 599 million birds in the U.S. in 2017. You can prevent birds from crashing into your own home by identifying large windows or windows near feeders and decorating them with vertical markings two inches by two inches apart. Adding screens can also be an effective deterrent. At night, bright lights during migration season can pull birds from their route and make them more likely to crash into the illuminated buildings. In addition to switching off your own lights during peak migration, you can advocate for your city or town to participate in a Lights Out initiative to reduce urban light pollution in spring or fall.
From Cats
One 2013 study found that domestic cats kill 1.3 to four billion birds in the U.S. every year. This makes them likely the leading human-related killer of birds in the country. While most of these deaths are caused by feral cats, there are things pet owners can do to protect birds. The most important thing is keeping your cats indoors. If that’s not possible, make sure your yard has lots of shrubs or bushes where smaller animals can hide. Place feeders or bird baths 10 to 12 feet from where cats could hide and take down your feeders if your cat is killing birds. If you want to get a cat, adopt a shelter animal to prevent it from ending up on the streets, and never abandon cats outside.
From Pesticides
Pesticide poisoning killed a median 72 million U.S. birds in 2017. Anticoagulant rodenticides can harm or kill birds of prey when they eat rats that have ingested them. To avoid this, manage rodents in alternative ways by not leaving out food, dismantling potential nesting spots and using non-lethal trapping methods. Herbicides and insecticides, especially neonicotinoids, can also harm birds. Avoid using pesticides on your own garden, and, when possible, choose organic produce to support pesticide-free agriculture.
From Habitat Loss
While numbers are difficult to ascertain, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes that habitat loss is the leading threat to birds. Human activity clears or disturbs forests or converts wild areas to farmland or human developments. In the U.S., 4.8 million acres of wild land were converted to agriculture between 2007 and 2018. This reduces the amount of land available for winter breeding and feeding for migratory birds. You can push back against habitat loss by planting native species; creating habitats like brush piles in your yard; avoiding raking; advocating for the protection or restoration of ecosystems on a local, state and national level; and choosing brands of coffee or beef that are grown in ways that don’t harm birds.
From Climate Change
The National Audubon Society found that rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis put two-thirds of North American bird species at risk of extinction as their ranges shift due to changing conditions. However, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would improve the situation of 76 percent of vulnerable species and keep almost 150 species from extinction risk. The only way this will happen is if human societies and governments swiftly phase out fossil fuels and end the destruction of natural carbon sinks like forests. You can advocate for climate action on a global, national, regional and local level and take steps to reduce your own carbon footprint by, for example, reducing car and plane travel and cutting your home’s emissions by taking steps to improve its energy efficiency.
Takeaway
In North America alone, bird populations have declined by 29 percent, or nearly three billion birds, since 1970. The biodiversity and climate crises mean that birds are perhaps more threatened than ever. Yet more and more people are learning to appreciate them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people turned to birding as an infection-safe activity, and sales of bird seed and feeders took flight. The more people who take up birding, the more people who will grow aware of birds and the threats they face and have a strong personal motivation to protect them. So if you’re thinking of giving birding a try, go ahead and install a feeder or upload Merlin. At the least, you will make your own life more interesting. At the most, you may be inspired to help save the world.
The post Birding 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
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Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating’s Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable
A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai, thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rating, drawn from roughly 100 public data points, that measures whether what a company says about its environmental and social performance is consistent with what its audited filings and regulatory disclosures actually show. The premise borrows directly from consumer credit scoring: a FICO score doesn’t tell a lender whether you’re a good person, only whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Martin explains how EarthRating’s “accelerated impact engine” gathers verified data instead of relying on questionnaires, and why the small and mid-sized businesses now caught up in the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK’s Procurement Act 2023 need an affordable way to prove their credentials.
Most sustainability frameworks rely on self-reported questionnaires; EarthRating pulls data from audited annual reports, regulatory filings, press coverage, and marketing materials, then cross-checks them against each other to surface contradictions before they become a regulatory or reputational problem. A near-term emissions target that appears in a press release but not in the audited annual report is exactly the kind of credibility gap the platform is designed to flag. Importantly, EarthRating isn’t measuring environmental impact — it’s measuring whether a company’s story is internally consistent and externally verifiable. That sidesteps the impossible problem of reducing carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable question: are the claims true? That speed and accessibility comes with real caveats, and Martin and I dig into them. A credibility score isn’t an impact score: a small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to electric mowers could rate higher than a multinational with aspirational but unverified net-zero pledges. That’s the right calibration for measuring trust, but it isn’t the same as measuring environmental performance. EarthRating also exists at “Google 1.0,” in Martin’s own words — a launch-stage platform with a proprietary methodology that hasn’t yet been externally audited. Global standards aren’t willed into existence; they’re earned through adoption. The underlying problem EarthRating is trying to solve — making credible sustainability measurement accessible to the businesses that have been priced out of it — is a real one, and worth watching.
To find out more about EarthRating, visit EarthRating.ai.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about, well, in a way, credit scores. Every sustainability claim made today faces the same fundamental problem: we lack a credible common language that quantifies a business’s impact on planet and people. A company, of course, can call itself sustainable simply by cherry-picking a single metric, commissioning a favorable audit, or simply repeating the word often enough that it seems to stick.
However, regulatory pressure is tightening. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now covers roughly 50,000 companies, and the UK’s Green Claims Code is actively prosecuting misleading environmental marketing. Here in the United States, the SEC’s climate disclosure rules are still in effect, although they are under attack. Of course, regulation alone doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Businesses, investors, and consumers still lack a fast, affordable, and trustworthy way to evaluate whether a sustainability claim actually holds up.
Our guest today is Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai. It’s an early-stage company building what it calls a universal credibility score for sustainability. The Earth Rating is a 1,000-point scale generated in minutes using AI and verified data from a company. It’s designed to measure, manage, and monitor sustainability performance across businesses of all sizes, from a regional landscaping firm to a global fashion house.
But unlike legacy frameworks built for large corporations with dedicated sustainability teams and consultancy budgets, EarthRating is designed to be accessible to small and medium-sized companies. They constitute the vast majority of economic activity worldwide and have been almost entirely locked out of credible sustainability measurement. EarthRating’s core proposition is that sustainability credibility should work more like a credit score — standardized, legible, and universally available — rather than opaque, expensive, and inconsistent.
So we’re going to talk with Martin about what makes a sustainability score genuinely credible, rather than just another layer of greenwashing; how EarthRating’s methodology handles the inherent incompleteness of any single score across carbon, water, biodiversity, and governance; and what guardrails prevent businesses from gaming the system he’s designing. We’ll dig into who the primary audience for an Earth Rating actually is — whether it’s regulators, investors, supply chain partners, or even consumers — and how the company is thinking about the gap between giving a business a number and actually changing its behavior. We’ll also look at the roadmap: what EarthRating is building, which markets it’s targeting first, and what would have to be true for a startup like this to become the universal standard it’s aiming to be.
You can learn more about EarthRating at EarthRating.ai. EarthRating is all one word, no space, no dash. EarthRating.ai. So can a single AI-powered score do what decades of sustainability frameworks have failed to accomplish — make environmental credibility fast, affordable, and impossible to fake? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:43
Welcome to the show, Martin. How are you doing today?
Martin Johnston 3:45
Oh, yeah, not bad, actually. Thank you very much.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:47
Well, thanks for joining me. We had a really interesting conversation a couple of months ago about what EarthRating is up to. And I want to start off by asking — you’re describing this as a universal credit score for sustainability. What will make EarthRating credible when so many sustainability scores and certifications have been accused of serving mostly as marketing tools?
Martin Johnston 4:07
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the difference between us and other people really is the fact that we can summarize it in three words: we don’t actually ask, we find out. Where most other frameworks are reliant upon questionnaires and self-reporting — and I know a lot of them are now catching up on verifying the data and that kind of stuff — we’ve built an accelerated impact engine that gathers 100-plus data points and feeds them into a scoring system where we can verify what people are saying against what they’re actually doing. We search for verified information and verified data, and therefore what comes out of the platform is quite a good indication of the maturity of where a company is at from a sustainability perspective, based on evidence and based on real data, rather than based on a questionnaire that someone else has filled in for them.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:13
Can you describe briefly what kind of data you get when you make that assessment?
Martin Johnston 5:18
Yeah, I can describe it. Obviously, I don’t want to go too much into detail, but we research the four pillars of sustainability — so human, environmental, economic, and social. Data that comes out includes things like: Is it verified carbon measurement? Do they have a near-term target? Do they have a future target? We then assess whether that is actually verified by an independent body. So it’s not just what the company says about itself — has it actually got third-party endorsement? From there, what we can then look for is any flags or any conflicting statements, because we go into detail from actual reports that have been signed off by their accountancy teams, versus what the press and what marketing materials say. It looks to verify that data and compares the conflicts. So from our point of view, it’s not really a certification. It’s a B2B tool which allows organizations to genuinely use it in an impactful way. It’s not there to scrutinize and be used as a lens so other people can jump on the bandwagon of having a go at businesses who are trying to do the right things and be positive towards the planet and the people who live on it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:40
Roughly how long does it take to establish that score once I decide to do it as a company? What does the timeline look like?
Martin Johnston 6:48
To be honest with you, it varies, but we’re talking minutes.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:52
Minutes?
Martin Johnston 6:53
We’re talking anything up to 10 or 15 minutes. We can do it sometimes in three or four. It depends on the veracity of the information we’re searching for, how much information is available, and whether we have to cross-check that information using our accelerated impact engine. Literally, the speed is how quickly we can ascertain that information — whereas, you know, comparable processes take six to eight weeks for a certification, and 12 months-plus for others.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:27
Sustainability measurement is fragmented across carbon, water, biodiversity, social impact, the human implications that you described a moment ago. How do you handle that kind of inherent incompleteness in any single score? And how does EarthRating express explicitly what it doesn’t measure as well as what it does?
Martin Johnston 7:49
Good question. Well, we’re measuring the credibility — this is our differentiator. We measure the credibility of what an organization is saying, rather than the impact itself. So what we look for is: What does an organization say it’s doing? What claim is it making? And then we offer data to verify that claim. That’s why it’s a credit score in the true sense of the word — a credit score is actually credibility. That’s what credit means. It’s based on the idea of trust: if you are paying back your debts to your financial institutions on a regular basis within the timeframe and show that you can manage your financial responsibilities in a considerate way, you will get a good trust score, which is what a credit score is. That means you are a good opportunity for underwriters to look at and say, ‘Yeah, you’re a good person to loan my money to. I live where I live, I bank with the right bank, I’m on the electoral roll, and I have a credit history of doing the right thing on a timely basis.’ If you take that financial model and recategorize it to sustainability and change the inputs — are the claims credible? Are they historically valuable? Do they prove themselves time and time again, consistently? — when you do that, you build up a nice picture of an organization that you can actually trust on what it’s claiming to do. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:15
That’s interesting. You think about the timeliness of a credit score, which goes down if you don’t use credit. At some point, it will be necessary to be on the system on an ongoing basis. But how frequently would a review be completed? Or is this integrated into the businesses’ systems in such a way that it’s just a continuous score?
Martin Johnston 9:39
Okay, so we’re kind of in launch process at the moment. We’re doing Google 1.0 — not what Google is now, but what Google was back then. For us, we are continuously going to be checking, but continuously means we’ll be giving updates on a quarterly basis to organizations. However, we want to move this to real time, because we believe that, in the words of Douglas Adams, bad news travels fast. If a claim that an organization is making hits the headlines, then that needs to be alerted to the business — just like a credit score has alerts which say somebody’s checked your file, somebody’s looking at your profile, an underwriter or whatever. We think the same process has to happen for businesses to be able to respond quickly and responsibly to potential threats or risks.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:32
I was particularly intrigued by your focus on small business. Can you explain what a landscaping company, for instance, or maybe a regional logistics firm, might actually do with the sustainability score? Who are they going to show it to, and why does it matter to them to do it?
Martin Johnston 10:50
To be honest, this is the current problem for small businesses. Inherently, reporting on sustainability is too costly, too time-consuming, overwhelming, and confusing. The whole thing needs to be looked at from a complexity level. That means that 91% of small businesses do not report on sustainability at all, yet they make up the vast majority of the economies of the world. If you combine the numbers and the impact, and the ability we could give if small businesses have the same opportunities as larger businesses to report on sustainability — and we break those barriers down — then that allows a business to operate in a world where sustainability needs to be taken a lot more seriously. It needs to be shown as innovative and commercially valuable, not just a nice-to-have. In the UK particularly, we’ve got the new Procurement Act, which has come out, and if you cannot show sustainability and the progress of sustainability for your business, you could be excluded from government contracts. You could be excluded from the largest supply chains. Bigger businesses are looking to regulate their supply chains and their ESG claims throughout, because they’re responsible for their own supply chains. That means small businesses, if they can’t do this, might risk losing or reducing their work or opportunities to gain work. And then the biggest thing as well is tender writing. If we can give them an instant ability to showcase where they sit on a maturity level of sustainability, and how easy it is for them to implement a reporting process that takes minutes, not months — not even years — and costs no time at all in terms of labor to produce, then that removes the bureaucracy and the friction that small businesses face when trying to come up with stuff that they’re required to do for procurement.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:56
A credit score is typically paid for by another organization that wants to see how my credit is, or my business’s credit is. What’s the business model? You described it as a B2B metric. Am I going to, when I’m reviewing a supplier, pay you to get a rating?
Martin Johnston 13:11
The idea is that eventually, when we process this out and it’s a bit more mature and the business has grown, then, yeah, we will be hopefully selling the reporting processes that organizations can pay for. But for us, this is a tool for a small business to use to implement and to make sustainability actionable, so they pay for it, and they pay to be on the platform.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:32
Could you also begin to roll up individual entities’ carbon impact? For instance, there’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions, in order to provide some other organization up or downstream visibility into their impact, so they could calculate their Scope 3 score?
Martin Johnston 13:49
Yeah. Well, this is also interesting, because sustainability has a complexity attached to it where consultancy is required for stuff like that. So what we’ve done, and what we are doing, is we’re building a sustainability navigator, which effectively is a tool that sits on a platform. If they need to understand where to go and get their SBTi carbon Scope 1, 2 or 3, or need to do something that requires heavy lifting in terms of what sustainability metrics look like for their business, then our sustainability navigator will point them to the right places without the fees of a consultancy — £800 to £1,500 a day.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:35
Okay, so this is where the AI comes in. As you’ve developed this guidance you just described, what is it based on — for instance, the SBTi standards? How did you develop the methodology that it’s going to use to coach those small businesses? Because that’s really an interesting opportunity.
Martin Johnston 14:55
Yeah. Well, we’ve been doing sustainability for quite a while, and I’ve looked at all of the frameworks. We haven’t sort of adopted any particular one. But what we do understand is the standardization of questions that are being required through tenders and through responses by businesses. We’ve developed 100-plus data points, which we developed our own over a number of years. It’s proprietary information that we gather. It’s not based on any one framework, but the sustainability navigator will point them to people who actually can help them — organizations that can give guidance in the right way. So that’s what we’ve done. That’s what we’re aiming to do. It’s still in its infancy, and we’re in launch mode, so we’ve got to do more of the doing, rather than more of the talking about what we’re going to do in order to implement this stuff.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:54
It does sound like one of the functions of that AI guidance in the future could be to look across the market space and say, ‘Here’s a partner who can solve this problem for you.’ Becoming the marketplace, in the long run.
Martin Johnston 16:08
No, absolutely not. It’s not a way to become the marketplace at all. It’s a three-in-one platform. It provides a credit score instantly — or almost as instant as you can be — which gives information to an organization showing how well they are performing against the four pillars of sustainability and where the information gaps are. We then have a Green Claims Code checker, so we actually go out and search for: Are they compliant with the Green Claims Code? Is there anything out there that could put them at risk, and is that affecting their credit score effectively? And then we have the sustainability navigator, which can help them correct anything, fill in the gaps, or provide them with information to say, ‘Look, these are the best three things you can do to increase your score and make the immediate impact you need to do.’ We’ve got a growth mindset built into the platform. The idea is to reward the businesses that want to improve quickly and get them on the journey. Because even having a low score — that’s the difference between us and everybody else. There’s no pass/fail. It’s not negative. A low score is, ‘Well done. You’re on the journey.’ It’s not ‘You need to improve.’ It’s ‘You’ve made the step, you’ve made the commitment, you’ve made the positive commitment to actually want to do something that’s positive for your business.’ For me, commercially, sustainability leads to innovation, it leads to cost efficiencies in the long term, and it helps businesses future-proof themselves. So it’s an absolute no-brainer to want to do something that protects the business from itself in the future.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:50
You are at the launch stage, and Google version 1.0, as you just said. What are you finding that early customer discussions are pointing towards in terms of what they’re most interested in — the continuous monitoring, the transparency in their supply chain, getting benchmarked?
Martin Johnston 18:08
The most interesting thing is the fact that we do all the work for them. They’re astonished. They say, ‘Well, what do we have to do?’ And we say, ‘Nothing. You give us your company name, you give us your company registration number, and we do the rest.’ The fact that they don’t have to fill in a questionnaire, the fact it doesn’t take them weeks to produce answers to all of these questions, the fact that it’s not labor-intensive — that’s the game changer, we think, which will be the non-bureaucratic, non-burdensome process that stops businesses from wanting to do good.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:41
Simplification. And we’re talking about an incredibly complex system that’s growing more so all the time, especially with the growing impact of climate change on all of our businesses. This is, I think, a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break. I want to dig into a lot more of this. We’ll be right back. Folks, stay tuned.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Martin Johnson. He’s founder of EarthRating.ai, which aims to make environmental impact an easily measured and understood business metric with a universal credibility score for people and planet. So Martin, as we were talking about, this is an immensely complex problem, and you’re at this early stage, still gathering a lot of interest from organizations. What does your roadmap look like? And what are the particular areas of complexity you think you can tackle in the next 12 to 18 months?
Martin Johnston 19:35
Some interesting questions there. I think you’ve nailed on something — the landscape for sustainability is incredibly complex, and it shouldn’t be. The reality is that it took rocket science to get us off the planet, but we only need trees, water, and air to breathe and live on it. So we need to simplify sustainability, and that’s our purpose. The whole idea is to look at how we can make it easier, simpler, and less complex for businesses to start to report and then create operational efficiencies by making the right decisions for their business. The whole concept of sustainability is really about literally the word ‘sustain’ and ‘able.’ If you aren’t doing the right things, you’re putting your business at risk in the future. There’s supply chain risk, demand risk, regulatory risk, and reputational risk that all need to be put into the mix when you start to think about what the future looks like for your business. For us, the roadmap really is to create a universal — and ‘universal’ doesn’t necessarily mean the same; it means available to every business. Making that available to every business means we need to break those barriers down, which create the complexities, and allow businesses to start doing the right things, rather than spending time, money, and energy on reporting the wrong things. That’s where we need to change the system. We need to create a new operating system for sustainable business. Look at how we can then seriously make inroads, so it becomes almost the standard, if you like, by simplifying sustainability and getting mass adoption as quickly as we can. That’s the aim.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:25
What would you describe as the most important question you can help a business answer about itself or a supplier in the next couple of years? Let’s talk simplification. Bring it down to that level.
Martin Johnston 21:38
I guess the simple question is: if you’re looking to regulate your supply chain and you’re looking to de-risk your supply chain as an organization from above, you need to know that your supply chain is saying what they’re doing and actually implementing what they’re doing — not just saying the right things to help them win tenders, because they’d be putting everybody at risk. So what we’re doing, first of all, is just absolutely putting the credibility back into what sustainability is for businesses and for people. And then what that means for a smaller business who’s looking upwards is that they can show they’re on the journey, show they’re good enough to win and be part of a regulated supply chain, and actually want to be in an ecosystem where businesses think beyond profits and balance sheets — because it’s commercially not astute not to. It’s because it’s commercially the right thing to do.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:43
When we talked a couple of months ago, when we first met, you mentioned that you’re focused on — and this is a quote — ‘detecting credibility gaps early.’ Can you describe what a credibility gap is going to look like in practice, and how your monitoring will catch it, particularly before it becomes a reputational crisis for the company?
Martin Johnston 23:02
Yeah. One of the things we are doing, as I said right from the beginning — and we didn’t make this statement, Douglas Adams did — bad news travels fast. Bad news travels really quickly, and the ability for businesses to put out statements which are unintentionally wrong is where this goes pear-shaped for them. The well-intentioned statement by any large organization is genuinely probably well-intentioned, but when it doesn’t take total impact into consideration, it can then be taken out of context and actually be untrue. That’s where you need to look at the regulatory complexity and the gap in the marketplace. Look at the statements that they’re making applying across the board. So it’s total impact considerations, actually saying, ‘You can’t say that, because over here you’re not doing it.’ That means you can pull out what could be a compliance risk, a damaging reputational risk, and an opportunity for fines risk, and show businesses, ‘This is how you should be rephrasing this, or sourcing some evidence to prove it,’ before you then spend loads of money on an advertising campaign and getting it all wrong.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:26
One of the concerns that a lot of people have when we talk about artificial intelligence and sustainability, frankly, is a credibility problem in and of itself. Models can hallucinate. The training data could be biased, and as you’ve pointed out, verification can be really hard. How do you validate all of the inputs and the AI inference that is applied to those inputs when generating the score?
Martin Johnston 24:52
Yeah, okay. There is a lot of hallucination in AI, which is why we use it very minimally. The idea is the gathering of the data. If you take a credit score model, it gathers realistic data from all kinds of places. It then aggregates that data, and that aggregated data can give you a very solid viewpoint of what you can do. You can then potentially use AI to look into that data — which you know is correct — to give you the right information much quicker than if you were to do it with human eyes. That’s the thing you have to do: gather the correct data, the right data, and evidence against that data. The other good thing you can do is compare data sources from one to the other, and by doing that, show the gaps from, say, a news source against the annual report. The annual report will be signed off. The annual report will be true. The annual report will have an accountancy stamp all over it to say this is legally correct. So what you need to do is look at the legally correct information, take the legally correct information, benchmark it against marketing information, and showcase where things could go wrong. That is not necessarily a hallucination AI job. That’s just using AI to show how you can display data quicker than you could do in any other way. But you have to still gather the data and gather the data sources, which is why our accelerated impact engine has gathered all of that. It’s taken years to build. It’s not just sticking something into Claude and saying, ‘What do you think of this?’
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:23
Specialized models are going to be particularly important as you think about the emergence of a universal standard, which, of course, you’re trying to build. What has to be true in terms of the technology — our ability to integrate into systems and do these kinds of credibility checks — in terms of regulation? Do you need to have… as you pointed out, the UK government has a new procurement law. The European Union has transparency laws in terms of the sustainability and environmental impact of a variety of products. Is that all moving in the direction to support your work?
Martin Johnston 26:56
No, I don’t think we need more regulation. I really don’t. I think AI maybe needs regulation, but that’s not what I’m about. It’s not what we’re here to talk about at all. I think the point is, sustainability and more regulation, more red tape, will just stop businesses from doing it. The best example of self-regulation we have in this country is the Law Society, and it’s a system which everybody adopts, everybody understands and learns. It’s almost like the industry self-regulating. I think we need to get businesses to understand that they need to self-regulate against stuff. That’s where sustainability can actually start to take a much bigger impact and a much bigger step forward — if we actually lost a lot of the regulation. For example, you have repurpose and recycling, and then so much insurance invalidation from using materials that have been used before, because of the risks involved. Yet the questions behind that are not necessarily commercially correct. It’s just that the risk is too great. So I think regulation, and imposing stuff on businesses — particularly around wanting to be more sustainable — is just another tax that they don’t need. Innovation moving forwards, doing the right things to de-risk their business from future demand, from future supply chain restriction because of global issues around the world that stop things from happening or trap movement from happening, and international trade being available, is something that needs less friction, less friction — rather than more barriers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:44
In the long term — and I’m asking you to think maybe five or 10 years out in the future — who’s the ultimate consumer of the EarthRating score? Does it include investors, and maybe ultimately consumers who would say, ‘Is this business one that I can trust to be sustainable?’
Martin Johnston 29:00
I think that’s a good question, actually. In five years’ time, the aim really is for us to be globally recognized, like a credit score for environmental and social impact — transparent, credible, and recognized worldwide. We’d love investors and consumers to look at it and back businesses with real sustainability credentials, which doesn’t involve greenwashing. It drives demand for genuine impact. Honestly, if we could build this into finance so the highest scores influence lending — they influence decision-making — so that sustainability becomes a strategic financial advantage, that would be incredible. And to finalize it all off, access for small businesses — giving them the tools and the resources to adopt sustainable business practices — is probably the biggest opportunity for us as a race to make a difference to the planet and the businesses that are on it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:11
Based on what you’ve learned so far, what’s your advice for a small business that’s thinking about its sustainability moves? Where would you urge them to focus first or second?
Martin Johnston 30:22
I’d obviously go and get yourself an EarthRating.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:24
Well, beyond that, what would make their EarthRating score really shine?
Martin Johnston 30:31
Well, I think what they need to do is look at their business model. The best businesses solve problems, and they expressly say so through their brand. For example, you’ve got Tony’s Chocolonely in Europe — I don’t know if you have them in the US — although they exist to eradicate poverty in chocolate supply chains. They’ve got an open supply chain methodology, and they’ve grown exponentially by doing something really positive and being really good, then showcasing the problem they solve for the world through their brand. Patagonia do it as well — ‘Don’t buy this jacket.’ All the best brands are universally challenging what a marketing campaign looks like. But I’m actually going back to what they stand for. Where do they fit into this world, and what difference can they make? A small business should apply the same model: What are you doing? Why are you here? And what difference can you make? Then start championing that, because that’s an authentic positioning that no one can copy. That’s most important for any business — to start operating in a way that amplifies that process, because that means you’ll engage suppliers, you’ll engage partners, you’ll engage opportunities, and create advocates for brands and businesses more than any other way. In doing so, you’ll automatically want to adopt sustainable business practices, which just make you a better business.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:56
I think of an orchestra when you describe that. A lot of people will focus only on the rhythm section or only on the violins because that’s what they do, but they have to see themselves in this larger picture — the way that Patagonia or Tony’s Chocolonely does, where they’re trying to help and create opportunities and solutions for the world, rather than simply meet some demand. As you design EarthRating, how do you describe that vision for your contribution to the larger world?
Martin Johnston 32:23
You just mentioned an analogy I really like — the orchestra. If you take it up to a bigger stage, you know, we’re called Earth, and the only reason we are alive on this planet is because we operate and are located within a larger solar system, where the gravity of the worlds pulls us in a way where we are equidistant from the sun, which allows life and oxygen to exist, right? So if you can take that orchestra analogy and explode it out to the solar system and then bring it back to the planetary system, to the ecosystem — we’re all part of it. It’s really important to understand that, to play a part in its future, we need to think in systems. We need to think system-wide. You can’t operate in isolation, because you just don’t operate within a structure where impact matters — if you don’t understand what your impact is on others.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:21
You’ve got to look up, take a wider view of the world, it sounds like, and I wholeheartedly agree with that perspective. Now you’re early. You’re still collecting a lot of interest from people. How can folks — say, a small business — get involved with EarthRating.ai?
Martin Johnston 33:39
Well, we’ve got a holding website up there, which you can sign up to, and we can get in contact with you. We’ve also got a LinkedIn page, and I think those are the best two ways. Yeah, that’s probably the right way to go — to EarthRating.ai and register interest, and then we can get in contact. We do need adoption at scale. So yeah, one of the things we want to do is to challenge and transform sustainability by simplifying the whole thing and making it easier, more accessible, and more available to a larger audience group than it currently is.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:15
Well, Martin, thanks very much for a fascinating conversation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:23
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Martin Johnston. He’s the founder of EarthRating.ai, an early-stage company building what it calls a universal credibility score for sustainability claims. You can learn more about Martin and his team’s work at EarthRating.ai. EarthRating is all one word, no space, no dash. EarthRating.ai.
Artificial intelligence has incredible power to find, organize, and systematize large amounts of unstructured information, which humans have plenty of — though its reasoning over that information may not always be sound. AI’s promise for sustainability work, which, as Martin pointed out, is to gather and analyze far more information for contradictions that undermine the credibility of a company’s claims that it achieves a reduced environmental and adverse social impact, is significant. But it’s early days for AI and EarthRating, and they’ve made a lot of promises that we’re going to have to see whether the technology and EarthRating can keep.
EarthRating doesn’t try to measure a company’s environmental impact. It measures whether the claims a company makes about its impact hold up against the evidence available in the public record. So like a FICO score that doesn’t tell a lender whether you’re a good person, this tells them whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. EarthRating proposes to do the same for sustainability claims by pulling roughly 100 data points from audited reports, regulatory filings, news coverage, and marketing materials, and then flagging the gaps between what a company says and what the verifiable record shows.
The promise of a sustainability credibility score generated in minutes, not the six to eight weeks a conventional certification takes, would deliver simplicity. If that works as advertised, it would represent a real application of AI to a problem that has resisted simplification for two decades — the slow, expensive, fragmented mess that sustainability reporting has become. But perhaps we can take simplicity too far.
So two ideas from this conversation come wrapped with a healthy stack of promises still to be kept. The first is the reframe itself — credibility instead of impact. This is interesting because it sidesteps the impossible problem of trying to reduce carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable one: whether a company’s statements are internally consistent and externally verifiable. That has obvious value for procurement teams under, for instance, the UK’s new Procurement Act or the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which now covers about 50,000 companies and is pushing accountability down the supply chain.
But there’s a limit to transparency too. A high credibility score means a company is telling the truth about what it does, but it doesn’t mean the company is necessarily doing enough. A small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to, say, electric mowers and edgers could rate higher than a multinational with ambitious but aspirational net-zero targets that have not been independently verified. That’s probably the right calibration for a trust score, but it’s not the same thing as an environmental performance score. As we’ve discussed with prior guests, the limits of single-metric thinking in a systems world are that every framework leaves something out, and the question is whether the thing it leaves out matters more than the thing it captures.
The second idea is the small business democratization play, and this is where the opportunity is largest and the proof is thinnest. Martin cited a striking number: 91% of small businesses don’t report on sustainability at all, even though they constitute the vast majority of economic activity worldwide. The reasons are exactly as you’d expect — cost, frameworks built for companies with dedicated sustainability teams, and bureaucracy that is overwhelming for a regional logistics firm or a five-person landscaping outfit. If EarthRating can give those companies a credible, low-friction way to participate in regulated supply chains and government tenders, it solves a real economic exclusion problem.
But the platform is, in Martin’s own words, at Google 1.0. And I was there when Google 1.0 was launched, and it did some important and interesting things that set it apart. But it was a launch-stage project with a proprietary scoring methodology — the PageRank algorithm — that wasn’t yet externally audited, and it had no business model. They were still trying to work that out. The vision for EarthRating to become a global standard that influences lending decisions and consumer trust is genuinely interesting, but global standards aren’t willed into existence by founders. They’re ratified by customers, by usage, embraced by regulators, and ultimately require widespread education to ensure that the seal of approval it grants is well understood in the market and not just another meaningless symbol or certification.
So let me add one note of friction here. Martin made the case that sustainability needs less regulation, not more, and that self-regulation is the path forward. I don’t think the historical record supports that argument. The real reason that small businesses are suddenly facing sustainability scrutiny at all is because of the regulation. The UK Procurement Act, the EU’s wide-ranging environmental and circular economy programs, and the SEC climate disclosure rules here in the United States are pushing sustainability reporting down the supply chain. EarthRating exists in a market that regulation created. That’s not a knock on the product — it’s an observation about the soil that it must grow in.
So count me intrigued, but with asterisks. An AI-powered credibility score for sustainability claims is a useful idea, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that have been left on the sidelines of the reporting economy. Whether EarthRating becomes a standard or is absorbed by a larger framework is a question only adoption will answer, and so we’ll be watching.
Hey, and would you do me a favor? If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, please share it with a friend or a family member. You folks are the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends and family that they can check out more than 550 episodes in our archive and hear us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform does help people find us. Thank you for your support.
I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.
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Today’s quote is from author Ken Webster and philanthropist Ellen MacArthur: “Ordered, complex, intertwined mutually interdependent systems are the new normal.”
Humanity is learning to mimic nature. As we embrace complexity, humanity can evolve new solutions to providing itself food, shelter, and waste elimination.
Ken Webster wrote The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows, which was edited by Ellen MacArthur, founder of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity committed to creating a circular economy.
Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day.
This poster was originally published on June 21, 2019.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: Complex Is the New Normal appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/living-well-being/earth911-inspiration-complex-is-the-new-normal/
Last Updated on May 14, 2026
Meal planning is a great way to reduce both packaging waste and food waste, because you’re thinking ahead. It can also help keep grocery costs down because you’re actively planning the menu for the week, not making impulse buys.
But a lot of people (myself included) fail at it for one simple reason: We’re thinking about meals and not ingredients.
For example, if my meal plan says Tuesday is lasagna night, how will I know if I’m still craving that by Tuesday? Keeping a flexible meal plan will help you succeed.
Once you have a meal plan you love, you can get to actually prepping your ingredients for the week. Here’s how I create a weekly meal planning system that I can actually stick to. Bonus? My tips for actual meal prep!
meal planning vs. prepping
Lets first take a moment to separate these two terms, as I’ll be talking about both.
Meal planning is simply the act of planning out what you’ll eat for the week. This can be in regards to your breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even snacks.
Meal prepping is when you cook your food for the week in advance. If you’d like to meal prep, it’s a good idea to have a meal plan. However, you don’t have to meal prep to meal plan.
Both help you save money and reduce waste in the long run. For example, lets say you want carrot soup on the menu this week. Knowing the ingredients you need to make it helps you stick to a grocery budget. Plus, you can save even more by using up whatever’s already in your fridge!
RELATED: How I Cut My Grocery Bill to $300 a Month
meal planning
how do you create a meal plan?
The first step is to make a master list of all of your favorite recipes. The ones that you love, the ones your family loves, and most importantly – the ones you know how to cook.
Here are a few of my favorites for inspiration:
- Shepherds Pie
- Burgers
- Mac & Cheese
- Quesadillas
- Fajitas
- Chicken/Eggplant Parm
- Lasagna
- Fried Rice
- Beef/Mushroom and Broccoli
- Cheese Steak/Balsamic Mushroom Subs
- Sloppy Lentil Joes
- Caeser Salad
You can write these on a notepad, on your phone, or on the computer. Refer to this master list whenever you’re planning meals for the week – and don’t be afraid to add meals to it over time.
It’s also a good idea to jot down some of your favorite breakfasts, lunches, and snacks – not just dinner. This will help you better plan your grocery haul for the week ahead.
Try to stick to one particular day to grocery shop every week – be it on Tuesday nights or Saturday mornings. Whatever works for you.
You’ll want to check the calendar and make sure there’s no upcoming events in the week ahead. This will keep you aware which nights you won’t be cooking.
You may also want to factor in weather and seasons – for example, I love eating soup on cold days! But hot days, I’d prefer something lighter, like a tofu stir fry.
Now comes the fun part – actually writing your meals for the week! Make sure you have that master list of recipes you made on hand, then start jotting down what dinners you’d like to eat.
You don’t have to set specific days for when you serve these meals, unless you want to. Feel free to shuffle the meals around, depending on what you’re in the mood for.
Next, make a grocery list based on the meals you’ve written down. You can organize the list into sections of produce, pantry, protein, etc.
For me, proteins will include beans, lentils, seitan and hummus. And for produce, I always try to stick to what’s currently in season – like sweet potatoes in the fall, lettuce in the summer.
Once you’ve done your shopping, you can come home and prep a few items to make your life easier during the week. For example, if one of your recipes calls for kale, having it washed, chopped, and properly stored will make it super easy to add into your cooking.
what about breakfast, lunches and snacks?
For me, breakfast, lunch and snacks are often more consistent than dinner. I could eat a sandwich every single day and be happy.
Peanut butter and jelly with chips was my go-to lunch from elementary to high school. So I’ve decided to lean into that, focusing on simple breakfasts and lunches that keep me full.
Knowing what you like to eat is a good place to start! I love high protein yogurt jars for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, sliced apples, hummus, and chopped veggies for snacks.
If I don’t prep these items ahead of time, I have a bad habit of waiting until 2PM to eat. Which leads to really poor food choices.
If you’re also like this, chances are meal planning and prepping doesn’t have to just begin and end with dinner.
Figure out what it is you struggle with most before deciding which foods, ingredients, and meals to prep for the week. Ask yourself what would be more convenient to have ready to grab-and-go: breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snacks? Perhaps a combo of the four?
Your job and schedule can also influence this decision. For example, if you’re working from home, you may have more time to whip up breakfast than someone who needs to be at work at 8AM.
meal prepping
I personally like to meal prep ingredients instead of meals to give myself freedom and reduce waste. This helps get food on the table fast.
And always check your fridge and pantry before grocery shopping. Try planning your menu around what’s already available, then grocery shop for the rest of the ingredients you’ll need to complete each dish.
I recommend dedicating 2-3 hours a week to meal prep. You can make it fun by turning on the TV, listening to music or a podcast. For me, meal prepping means peeling and chopping carrots, washing and cooking my vegetables, etc.
However, feel free to make full-on meals if you know you won’t have time otherwise. I’ll do this with my breakfast yogurt jars, veggie sandwiches, and snacks on a Sunday afternoon.
Setup glass snapware to contain whatever it is you’re making, and always ask yourself if you have a carb, a protein, a fat, and fiber. This will keep your meals balanced and help you stay full longer.
And if you’re short on time, just focus on getting your vegetables all washed, chopped, and stored in glass containers. No need to cook anything. This will make your life so much easier when you go to cook after a long day at work.
mistakes to avoid
Here are a few mistakes to avoid when it comes to meal planning and prep:
- Not checking your weekly schedule first.
- Using containers that don’t seal or close properly.
- Making cuisines and recipes outside your comfort zone / your family’s preferences.
- Making servings too big or too small.
- Trying to do it all (maybe start out by prepping just one or two meals for the week instead of all 5 days)
how to keep it budget-friendly
Definitely work with what’s in season! I find that shopping for tomatoes in summer tends to be cheaper than in winter, because there’s an abundance of them.
Always try to prioritize local farmers markets and CSA boxes whenever possible. You can also try growing your own produce, joining a local community garden, or even just doing an herb container garden to save money.
Also, shopping at low-cost grocery stores or farmers markets can help cut costs. Looking for discounts, coupons, and sales is also ideal.
I love shopping the discount section of my grocery store – sometimes they’ll have imperfect produce at half price, and I always scoop that up first.
You’ll want to also prioritize what’s in your fridge already, and what’s about to go bad. Have some sad looking celery? Toss it into a soup for the week. Stale bread? French toast casserole it is for breakfast.
And factor in leftovers too! If you have some rice that needs to be used up, make sure to prioritize a dish in the beginning of the week that requires it.
That goes double for food scraps – don’t toss out all your vegetable ends and peels. You may be able to make them work overtime by making veggie stock for your meal prepping!
You may also be surprised at what’s edible – like beet tops, carrot tops and celery leaves. Here are some other recipes to help you reduce food waste.
benefits of meal prep
There are so many benefits to meal prepping, but the biggest one is peace of mind. You don’t have to think about what you’ll eat every single day, because half (or all!) the work is done for you.
And, if you’re checking your pantry and fridge before meal prep, you’re probably reducing a lot of food waste. Because you’re going to prioritize using up what you have.
Some more benefits to meal prepping include:
- Big time saver.
- Helps prevent drive thru or take out orders because you have food at your fingertips.
- You’ll know exactly what goes into your food.
- Zero waste food, so little to no waste.
Prefer video content? Check out my tips for crushing meal prep below!
What are your meal planning and prepping tips? Let me know in the comments!
The post My Weekly Meal Planning System That Prevents Food Waste appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
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