What Is the Climate Crisis?
The climate crisis refers to the destabilization of the climate conditions that have allowed human communities and current ecosystems to survive and thrive on Earth. It is caused by a rise in global temperatures that scientists conclude is “unequivocally” driven by human activity — primarily the burning of fossil fuels and secondarily the destruction of forests and other natural carbon sinks. Since humans began using fossil fuels in earnest at the start of the industrial revolution, global temperatures have risen to 1.1 degrees Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 average. Global heating has now reached a rate of increase of more than 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. This warming has already led to the melting of Arctic sea ice, the retreat of glaciers, and more frequent and intense extreme weather events like heat waves, foods and droughts. These events have already claimed lives, driven species to extinction and forced more than 13 million people from their homes in Africa and Asia in 2019 alone. With every further warming increase, the risks of additional harms become ever more severe.
Luckily, there is something we can do about it, but we have to act quickly. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that we must curb greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent of 2019 levels by 2035 in order to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and save hundreds of millions from suffering and poverty by 2050. Unfortunately, temperature projections based on current policies and pledges put the world on track for 2 to 3.2 degrees of warming. The climate crisis is therefore a crisis in two senses of the word. It is both “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger” and “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.” We can choose to drive our gas-powered SUVs down what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the “highway to climate hell,” or we can turn off the ignition, take our feet off the gas pedal and walk together down a greener path.
What Are Greenhouse Gases?
Greenhouse gases get their name because they contribute to something called the greenhouse effect. When the sun’s rays penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere, these gases stop some of the heat from escaping back into space, acting like the walls of a greenhouse. Greenhouse gases already exist in the atmosphere without human intervention, and this is normally a very good thing: Without the greenhouse effect, Earth’s surface temperatures would be around 33 degrees Celsius cooler. However, human activity has released more of these gases into the atmosphere in the last two centuries, throwing the system out of balance, trapping more heat and causing global temperatures to rise.
What Are the Main Greenhouse Gases That Contribute to the Climate Crisis?
There are four main greenhouse gases causing additional warming.
Carbon Dioxide
Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas most responsible for heating the planet. It is a naturally occurring molecule that can be released through events like volcanic eruptions. However, since 1750, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels have increased by 50 percent to reach levels not seen since around four million years ago, when sea levels were as much as 25 meters higher (approximately 82 feet) than today. In 2021, carbon dioxide reached a record 415.7 parts per million. Humans also emitted record levels of carbon dioxide over the past decade — 54 gigatonnes a year between 2012 and 2021.
Methane
Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — producing 28 times more warming than carbon dioxide over a 100 year period. At the same time, it lingers in the atmosphere for much shorter — around 12 years to carbon dioxide’s hundreds. The combination of methane’s potency and shorter lifespan makes reducing methane emissions a strategic priority for limiting global warming in the short term.
Methane is released both naturally — by plants decaying in wetlands — and by human activities including landfills, rice farming, the digestion of livestock animals like cows and the use of fossil fuels. Natural gas is 70 to 90 percent methane. These activities account for 50 to 65 percent of global methane emissions, and overall the gas has caused 30 percent of the post-industrial temperature hike. Indeed, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled, reaching a record 1,908 parts per billion in 2021.
Nitrous Oxide
Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas primarily released by the production and use of agricultural fertilizers, though it is also emitted when fossil fuels or plant matter are burned. It is released naturally as part of the nitrogen cycle, but around 40 percent of current emissions comes from human activity. While it’s been called “a forgotten greenhouse gas” when compared to carbon dioxide and methane, it is still responsible for around 6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also very powerful — a single molecule of nitrous oxide has 300 times the warming potential of a single molecule of carbon dioxide — and it persists in the atmosphere for around 114 years. In 2021, its atmospheric concentration reached a record 334.5 ppb, which is 124 percent of its pre-industrial levels.
Chlorofluorocarbons
Chlorofluorocarbons are the one greenhouse gas that does not occur naturally. They were created for industrial purposes and used as refrigerants, solvents and propellants for spray cans until it was discovered that they were burning a hole in the ozone layer. World leaders came together and agreed to phase out their use under the Montreal Protocol of 1987. It’s a good thing they did, because it turns out that CFCs are thousands of times more effective by mass at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. A study found that the agreement to restrict their use reduced global warming by as much as 25 percent. However, they are still occasionally emitted. A spike in 2013 was tied to illegal use in China that the nation later dealt with, but they are still released from CFC “banks” — pre-1987 insulation or cooling systems that continue to emit the chemicals.
What Are the Main Human Activities Causing the Climate Crisis?
Scientists often refer to “anthropogenic,” or human-caused, climate change. But there are really a few main human activities that are largely to blame.
Burning Fossil Fuels
The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for more than 75 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. This is because fossil fuels are made from dead and decaying lifeforms fossilized over millions of years — and carbon is the building block of life. The carbon that once helped form the DNA and proteins of ancient plants and animals is concentrated by time and pressure into coal, oil and natural gas. When these fuels are burned, that carbon once stored beneath the Earth enters the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Leaks from fossil fuel extraction, production and transportation are also an important source of methane emissions. Many human activities currently rely on fossil fuels, from industry to heating and electricity generation to transportation. We need to find an alternative way to power these activities in order to stop overheating the atmosphere.
Land-Use Change
The second most important contribution to the climate crisis is deforestation, agriculture and other land use change, accounting for around a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions and around 13 to 21 percent from 2010 to 2019. Trees and other plants store carbon in their trunks, leaves and roots and in the soil beneath them. When those trees are cut down or that soil is disturbed, the carbon ends up in the atmosphere and contributes to the climate crisis. What’s more, those trees and plants are no longer there to suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Agriculture
Tree clearing for agriculture drives more than 90 percent of tropical deforestation worldwide. In addition to getting rid of carbon sinks, the global food system emits greenhouse gases through the production and use of fertilizers and the methane-laden burps and manure of cows and other ruminants. The livestock sector as a whole is responsible for between 11.1 percent and 19.6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
What Are the Main Impacts of the Climate Crisis Now and in the Future?
The climate crisis has already impacted every region on Earth. The latest IPCC report finds that both these current impacts and the risks of each increment of future warming are more severe than previously anticipated.
Hotter Temperatures
The most obvious impact of the climate crisis is an increase in temperature. Since 1970, global temperatures have increased faster than during any other 50-year period during at least the last two centuries. The last nine years are the nine warmest since record keeping began 143 years ago, and all of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2010. Some scientists think 2024 might be the hottest year yet. How much temperatures continue to rise will depend on how quickly we can wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Policies in place as of 2020 put the world on track for 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, but that could be lowered to 2 degrees Celsius if we cut greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent by 2035 and 1.5 degrees Celsius if we cut emissions by 60 percent by the same date.
More Extreme Weather Events
The climate crisis has already led to more frequent and extreme weather events. The IPCC says it is “virtually certain” that heat waves have become more common and intense in most regions since the 1950s, with climate change the “main driver.” These heat waves have already claimed tens of thousands of lives. Most marine heat waves since at least 2006 were also likely caused by climate change, and these have doubled since the 1980s.
Because warmer air holds more moisture, the climate crisis can also lead to more extreme precipitation events, which have increased in intensity and frequency over most land areas since the 1950s. Hurricanes and other tropical storms have become wetter and more intense. Climate change has led to more or longer droughts in some regions, making the megadrought in the U.S. West 42 percent more severe. Higher temperatures and drier conditions have led to more frequent, larger and longer-lasting wildfires. If the climate continues to warm, combined heat waves and droughts and ideal wildfire conditions are expected to become more frequent. Tropical storms will continue to become more intense.
Ice Melt and Sea Level Rise
Warmer temperatures are melting ice in the world’s mountains and polar regions. The Arctic is warming nearly four times as fast as the global average, and the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost 255 gigatons of ice each year between 2008 and 2016, while Arctic sea ice has declined since 1978, with the rate of decline increasing in the last two decades and 95 percent of the oldest and thickest ice already gone. In Antarctica, ice sheets are melting at a rate of around 150 billion tons per year.
The polar ice sheets hold around two thirds of the globe’s fresh water. When they melt, that water enters the ocean, raising sea levels. To date, their melting has caused around a third of sea level rise since 1993. However, the melting of glaciers and ice sheets had driven the majority of accelerated sea level rise between 2006 and 2015. As of 2018, global sea levels had risen by 0.2 meters (approximately eight inches). In addition to polar melting, the sea level is rising because water expands as it warms. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would raise sea levels by 23 feet, while the melting of all glaciers and ice sheets would raise them by more than 195 feet. While this would occur over a period of centuries, even relatively small amounts of sea level rise can threaten coastal communities with erosion, flooding, saltwater intrusion into aquifers, habitat loss and more powerful storm surges. Sea levels along the coastal U.S. are expected to rise by a foot by 2050 and two feet by 2100.
Mountain glaciers are melting as well — between 85.3 percent of Northern Hemisphere glaciers, including Greenland’s, retreated between 2000 and 2020, and nearly half of non-polar glaciers could melt by 2100 even if temperature rise is limited to 1.5 degrees. This would have devastating impacts on communities that rely on glaciers for water, power and cultural identity.
Ocean Impacts
The ocean has absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat added to the planet in the last decades, with the past 10 years being the ocean’s warmest since the 19th century. Most of this heating is occurring between zero and 700 meters (approximately 2,297 feet) from the surface. In addition to contributing to sea level rise, more intense tropical storms and the melting of sea ice, the additional heat threatens marine biodiversity through deadly marine heat waves. One of the most infamous impacts of these heat waves is coral bleaching, when warmer than average temperatures compel corals to expel the algae that give them both color and food. If temperatures rise to 2 degrees, 99 percent of tropical reefs could be lost. In general, ocean warming last century has combined with the impacts of overfishing to reduce the amount of certain fish species available for fishers.
Heat isn’t the only product of fossil fuel emissions that the ocean absorbs. It takes in around 30 percent of the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere, leading to something called ocean acidification. Carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater into carbonic acid, which further breaks down into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate ions. Through this process, the ocean has gotten about 30 percent more acidic since the industrial revolution. When there is more hydrogen floating around in the ocean, it easily bonds with the carbonate that shell-making animals like corals and oysters need to form their shells. The decrease in carbonate is already impacting these animals, and further acidification could actually dissolve their shells. A more acidic ocean could also harm other animals like clownfish, who struggle to find their ideal habitat during their larval stage when acidity increases.
Biodiversity Loss
The ocean isn’t the only habitat where the climate crisis threatens the abundance and variety of lifeforms. The Earth is currently in the midst of a sixth mass extinction driven by human activity — losing species at a rate 1,000 times greater than any other moment in written history – and the climate crisis is an important contributor to this loss. As many as a million plant and animal species face extinction, several of them within decades.
The climate crisis is making life harder for at least 10,967 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, hastening extinction through extreme weather events, wildfires, and the spread of pests and diseases. As conditions change within a species’ range, some will be able to move into better conditions but not all will be able to relocate quickly enough. A 2020 study found that plants and animals living in areas that saw a significant increase in maximum possible temperature were more likely to be wiped out locally. By 2070, 30 to 55 percent of those species could become entirely extinct depending on how successful we are at controlling emissions.
Food and Freshwater Scarcity
All of these changes to natural processes and ecosystems will not leave human society unaffected. Already, the climate crisis is increasing both food and water insecurity through drought, ocean warming and acidification and the loss of sea ice that Indigenous Arctic communities rely on for hunting. Partly because of climate change, around half of the world’s population endures “severe water scarcity” for at least some of the year.
All of this will only get worse. Around 22 percent of the world’s population relies on glaciers for their primary source of drinking water, and future melting could deprive them of this essential resource. Saltwater intrusion from sea level rise also threatens to inundate the freshwater supply of people living on low-lying atolls. As crop yields decrease as temperatures rise, this could push 43 million people below the poverty line by 2030 just in Africa.
Poverty, Conflict and Displacement
A decrease in water and food resources will inevitably push populations into poverty, exacerbate conflicts between them and force people from their homes in search of a better life. As the climate warms, its impacts will interact more often with other factors like resource competition or political tension to exacerbate conflict. For example, while the civil war in Syria cannot be blamed on climate change alone, there is evidence that it was inflamed by the worst multi-year drought the country had seen in 900 years.
The war sparked a refugee crisis, with 5.5 million Syrians now living in other countries after fleeing the violence. Between 2010 and 2019, extreme weather events directly displaced around 23.1 million people each year. A recent Somalia-based study found that a 50 millimeter reduction in monthly rainfall could increase displacement by a factor of two, and a monthly temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius could increase displacement by a factor of 10. Depending on how much is done to curb emissions, one billion people could be climate refugees by 2050.
Human Health
The Lancet’s 2022 report on climate change and health concluded that human health was already “at the mercy of fossil fuels.” The number of heat-related deaths for people older than 65 increased by around 68 percent from 2000 to 2004 and from 2017 to 2021. Extreme weather events expose people to health hazards like increased wildfire smoke and infectious diseases that spread when drought puts sanitation at risk. Heat waves and other extreme weather events can have a negative impact on mental health, not to mention the growing issue of climate anxiety.
The range of disease-carrying organisms is already expanding as temperatures warm. For example, between 2012 and 2021, the ideal climate for the transmission of dengue by the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes increased by 11.5 percent and 12 percent respectively. In the future, even more climate change could interact with other factors like urbanization to increase the risk of future pandemics.
Who Is Most Responsible?
All of humanity is not equally responsible for the climate crisis. Certain nations, companies and individuals have emitted significantly more greenhouse gases than others.
Countries
Historically, the U.S. is the country that has emitted the most climate-warming emissions, contributing around 20 percent to the total between 1850 and 2021. It is followed by China at 11 percent, Russia at 7 percent, Brazil at 5 percent and Indonesia at 4 percent. The culpability of the latter two is largely because of deforestation. Former colonial and industrial powers Germany and the UK contributed 4 and 3 percent respectively, but this doesn’t include emissions from their overseas colonies. A different set of calculations found that the UK and EU were together responsible for 22 percent of emissions between 1751 and 2017, while the U.S. was responsible for a quarter.
Today, China emits the most of any nation followed by the U.S., India, the EU, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran and Canada. Together, these countries are responsible for more than two-thirds of global emissions, and the top three are responsible for 42.6 percent. In comparison, the 100 least-emitting countries only contribute a modest 2.9 percent.
Companies
Certain companies — especially fossil fuel and meat and dairy companies — contribute disproportionately to the climate crisis because their business models are bound up with either burning oil, gas or coal or clearing biodiversity for agriculture. Only 100 fossil fuel companies — including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron — have contributed 71 percent of global emissions since 1988, one study found. Not to be left out, the top five meat and dairy companies in the world have a carbon footprint equal to Exxon’s.
But the fossil fuel industry’s responsibility extends beyond its product. In recent years, evidence has emerged that most if not all of the major oil and gas companies were aware of the dangers posed by their actions in the 1970s and 80s but instead chose to fund climate denial and lobby politicians against shifting to renewable energy. Based on both their emissions and their political actions, a recent study calculated that the 21 largest fossil fuel companies owe the world at least $5.4 trillion in reparations.
Individuals
For the most part, individuals are not the driving force behind climate change. Even if you drive a gas-powered car an hour and back to work each day or heat your home with electricity from a coal-powered plant, your choices are largely shaped by the economic pressures and energy and transportation infrastructure that scaffolds your life. However, there is an exception: uber-wealthy individuals who ride in private jets and invest in polluting industries.
A 2022 study found that the wealthiest 10 percent of people on Earth were responsible for almost half of global emissions. While there is a large gap between the emissions of individuals in wealthier and poorer countries, there is now a greater gap between the emissions of wealthy and poorer individuals within the same country. The poorest 50 percent of the U.S population, for example, is actually emitting at close to the nation’s 2030 per capita emissions goal, while the richest 10 percent would need to slash their emissions by 86 percent to meet it.
Why Is the Climate Crisis a Social Justice Issue?
The disparity in responsibility for the climate crisis is why the IPCC emphasized climate justice in its most recent report. “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected,” report author Dr. Aditi Mukherji said in a statement upon its release. “Almost half of the world’s population lives in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change. In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions.”
What’s more, the climate crisis can exacerbate existing inequalities, making life harder for racial minorities trapped by historic redlining in urban heat islands, women in agriculture who already face pay discrimination before having to contend with climate shocks or low-income people in previously colonized countries who must now endure drought or severe storms. Responding urgently and equitably to the climate crisis is therefore essential from a social justice perspective, both to avoid the widening of existing gaps and to take the opportunity to close them as we reimagine society along more sustainable lines.
What Has Been Done About It So Far?
The international community has been talking about taking action on climate change since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted. Since then, world leaders have held 27 conferences of the parties to this convention, or COPs, at which they have made varying degrees of progress. Perhaps the most significant COP was COP 21, which met in Paris in 2015. It was here that nations negotiated the Paris Agreement to keep warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and ideally limit it to 1.5 degrees. Nations were supposed to submit voluntary nationally determined contributions (NDC) every five years to say how much they would reduce emissions, with the end goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
To date, the world is not on track to honor the Paris Agreement. For one thing, there is an “implementation gap” as current policies lag behind countries’ NDCs. Policies in place as of 2020 would put the world on track for 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming, while aligning policies with pre-COP26 NDCs through 2030 would limit it to around 2.8 degrees. Since COP26, nations have come forward with more ambitious pledges and net-zero promises. Accounting for these pledges could lower warming to 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius. By considering longer term or net-zero pledges, Climate Action Tracker saw a possibility for 2 degrees of warming, and an even more optimistic 1.8 degrees when including net zero promises in effect or in discussion from around 140 countries.
While existing actions and policies are not sufficient, they have already made a difference. Policies to improve energy efficiency, halt deforestation or develop renewable energy sources have likely prevented several gigatons of carbon dioxide a year from entering the atmosphere. Progress already made has rendered the worst-case emissions scenario, which assumed a 500 percent increase in coal use and projected a 6-degree-Celsius temperature rise by 2100, “exceedingly unlikely.” That said, a 3-degree warmer world would still mean the near eradication of both coral reefs and Arctic sea ice and more days in which heat and humidity would reach dangerous levels for human survival. And the latest IPCC assessment cycle found that the temperature threshold for various risks — such as extreme weather events or threatened systems — was lower than previously estimated. Honoring the Paris Agreement goal is more urgent than ever.
What Still Needs to Be Done?
Climate action falls into two broad categories: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means actively reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stabilize global temperatures, while adaptation means adjusting to the changes in sea level or weather patterns that are already locked in.
Mitigation
The most important thing that can be done to stave off additional climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. This means both not developing any new fossil fuel projects and even ceasing to exploit the deposits that already exist. The IPCC found that emissions from already existing fossil fuel infrastructure would gobble up the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, unless those emissions were somehow offset or removed from the atmosphere with still-unreliable carbon capture technology.
In order to have a 50 percent shot at the 1.5 target, greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 60 percent by 2035. This can be achieved by shifting rapidly to renewable sources of energy like wind and solar, replacing gas-fueled cars and trucks with electric vehicles and improved public transit, designing more sustainable cities, boosting the energy efficiency of buildings, decarbonizing industry, making agriculture more sustainable, protecting and restoring natural carbon sinks like forests and actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through carbon capture and storage.
Adaptation
Human activity has warmed the atmosphere enough that some climate impacts are already occurring and likely to continue. However, we can change how we design communities and infrastructure to make them more resilient to these changes. For example, the Billion Oyster Project in New York is restoring the city’s oyster reefs in part to protect it against storm surges and sea level rise, while the government of California is learning from the once-banned Indigenous practice of controlled burns to prevent larger fires. Farmers on the coast of Vietnam have begun keeping bees to help with mangrove restoration instead of gathering dwindling snails and crabs, while El Salvador is protecting itself from floods and landslides by restoring its surrounding forests.
When it comes to adaptation, there is still more work to be done. The 2022 UN Adaptation Gap report found that 84 percent of countries participating in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had some kind of adaptation plan, up 5 percent from the year before. However, funding for adaptation in the Global South is five to 10 times less than it needs to be, and the gap is widening instead of shrinking.
Political and Social Change
The climate crisis isn’t merely a technological problem caused by how we power our daily lives. It’s a political problem caused by an economic and political system that often prioritizes the short-term profits of large corporations over the long-term well-being of communities and ecosystems and considers nature as “resources” to be exploited for economic gain.
Therefore, solving the climate crisis means making fundamental changes to the way we write our laws and structure our society. This could include things like giving rights to nature, so that communities have a legal recourse to protect forests from destruction or waterways from pollution, or ideas like degrowth and doughnut economics that seek to reorganize the economy around meeting everyone’s essential needs without overtaxing our planetary support system. Many activists are calling for ideas like a Green New Deal or a just transition that would use mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis as an opportunity to address and resolve long-standing inequalities and make sure that when we transition to a new form of energy, no one is left behind.
Takeaway
The climate crisis may be the single greatest challenge humans have faced as a species. Every day seems to bring a new unprecedented weather event or another study warning about unsustainable emissions use or unavoidable climate impacts. But that doesn’t mean we should give up hope. While not everyone is equally to blame for climate change, everyone can play a role in the solution, from reducing one’s carbon footprint to experimenting with alternative, more sustainable forms of community to participating in climate activism to put pressure on world leaders or fossil fuel executives. The good news is that many climate solutions — from clean energy to urban trees — would make the world healthier, greener, more just and all around more pleasant to live in. Change is inevitable, but if we come together to stop burning fossil fuels and adapt in a way that prioritizes the most vulnerable among us, there’s still a chance that it can be change for the better.
The post Climate Crisis 101: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on EcoWatch.
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Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click to get a larger image.
This week’s quote from author and PBS host Steven Johnson gives us confidence that the post-carbon economy can be achieved: “[E]very now and then, some individual or group makes a leap that seems almost like time traveling.”
This poster was originally published on August 9, 2019.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: Steven Johnson — Innovation Is Like Time Travel appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/inspire/earth911-inspiration-steven-johnson-innovation-is-like-time-travel/
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Plastic Bank’s David Katz on Grassroots Recycling Solutions
Turn back the clock to our first conversation with David Katz, founder of Plastic Bank. He shares his vision for a regenerative society built on grassroots recycling programs that help low-income regions build resilient communities. The Vancover, B.C., startup compensates more than 30,000 plastic recyclers in the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and Egypt. To date, Plastic Bank has stopped over 99 million pounds of plastic waste — the equivalent of more than 2 billion plastic bottles — from entering the world’s oceans, and the pace of its collections is accelerating. The people who collect plastic are paid for the material they deposit at more than 511 Plastic Bank branches. Katz’s team has partnered with more than 200 companies, including Procter & Gamble, HelloFresh, L’Oreal, and Coca-Cola, to create circular economies in plastic packaging.
Their next goal is to capture 10 billion bottles, which still represents only 1.7% of the 583 billion produced in 2021, according to Euromonitor. David explains that a shift in mindset from extractive ownership to regenerative stewardship can break the economic mold and bring prosperity in regions where so much valuable material currently is treated as waste. Plastic Bank uses a blockchain-based data collection and reporting system that helps collectors track their earnings and which provides transparency and traceability for the plastic captured. Plastic Bank works with plastic recyclers to convert the collected bottles into SocialPlastic, a raw material for making new products. They sell plastic #1, #2, and #4 to industry to recover their costs. You can learn more about Plastic Bank at plasticbank.com.
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on March 23, 2022.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Plastic Bank’s David Katz on Grassroots Recycling Solutions appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/earth911-podcast-plastic-banks-david-katz-on-grassroots-recycling-solutions/
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns
$850 billion. That’s what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn’t look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it.
The fix isn’t a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What’s missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object. When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That’s what circularity looks like when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one. Follow Don’s work at WhatTheyThink.com and on X at @DCarli.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:08
Hello — good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Let’s take another look at the topic of e-commerce returns and how to reduce them by tuning the economy for less waste. We’re going to start with making what you see online look like what you receive on your doorstep.
Now here’s a number that should stop you in your tracks the next time you shop online: $850 billion. That’s how much retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026. And here’s another number: 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste generated by those returns in a single year — roughly the same as burying 10,500 fully loaded Boeing 747s in the ground. That’s a lot of waste.
Now you might assume that most of these returns are about fit — pants that don’t fit, shoes that pinch. But 22% of consumers report returning items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles categories, where fit isn’t the issue, that percentage climbs even higher. A sofa that passes every quality specification still gets returned because it clashes with the throw pillow that also passed every specification — when they don’t look alike in the home, both can end up in a landfill, because repackaging costs more than recovery.
Today’s conversation is about why that happens and what we can do about it. My guest today is Don Carli. Don’s a good friend and the founder of the consulting firm NEMA Hunter Incorporated. Two of Don’s recent articles on the site What They Think got me thinking about how an apparently esoteric discussion of color calibration and spectral profiles actually represents something much larger — the fine-tuning we can do to the 20th-century industrial system that was never designed to connect digital promises to physical reality.
Don is also a Senior Research Fellow with the nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communication, where he has directed programs on corporate responsibility, sustainability, advertising, marketing, and enterprise communication. He’s also a member of the board of advisors for the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design and a member of the Institute for Supply Management.
So here’s why this matters beyond the print and packaging industry, where Don has spent most of his career. The 20th century built industrial systems optimized for mass production: make a lot, ship it out, and hope people keep it. These systems created enormous efficiencies on the one hand, but they also created enormous waste — often hidden in the seams between suppliers, brands, and retailers, where no single stakeholder owns enough of the problem to force a solution. In fact, it really means nobody lost enough money to care.
What Don’s work reveals is that we now have the technical architecture to fine-tune these legacy systems — not replace them, but recalibrate them. The standards exist. The measurement hardware exists. The digital rendering pipelines exist. What’s missing is the coordination: getting brands, retailers, and others to share data they currently hold separately, and to recognize that the costs they’re each absorbing individually are symptoms of the same system failure — a failure of color calibration.
And this is what sustainability can look like in practice: not moonshot reinventions, but the patient technical work of closing gaps between digital and physical, between specification and reality, and between what we promise customers and what we deliver. If we get this right, we can reduce waste, cut costs, and rebuild trust with consumers who’ve learned to expect that what they see online isn’t quite what they’re going to get.
You can follow Don’s work on X. His handle is @DCarli — that’s spelled D-C-A-R-L-I, all one word, no space, no dash.
So can we calibrate what we see online with what we experience when we open a package, reducing the need to return a purchase? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:29
Welcome to the show, Don. How are you doing today?
Don Carli 4:31
Fantastic, Mitch. I’m really glad to be here with you today and looking forward to the conversation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 4:37
Always great to talk with you, Don. This came up in our discussions over the past couple of months, and then I read the article and wanted to follow up. To start off, can you walk us through a typical scenario? A customer orders a navy sectional and a matching throw pillow from different suppliers. They appear to be the same color — they both pass all the quality specifications we’ve talked about — but under the living room lights, the consumer finds they clash. What happened between the approved image and her disappointment? Where did the system break down?
Don Carli 5:15
We’ve all had this experience at some point in our lives. In part, it’s because of the nature of human perception. We would like to think that color is a constant thing, but color is an interaction of multiple variables.
One variable is the light source — specifically, the distribution of wavelengths in that light. As you know, the visible spectrum is a small part of all the radiation there is. There’s ultraviolet light you can’t see, there’s infrared light you can’t see, and then there’s all the colors in between — the ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — the colors we’re familiar with. Every light source has a different distribution of those energies.
Second, the material an object is made of has its own capacity to absorb different wavelengths, and that can vary. So you have variation in the energies emitted by the light source, variation in the energies absorbed and reflected by the object, and then there’s the viewer. Our visual system takes up a big part of our brain — it’s not just our eyes, but our eyes have a lot to do with it. Some of us are colorblind, for example, and in other cases, color is simply not a constant thing.
I worked with the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers for many years — he wrote the book The Interaction of Color. He used to say, ‘When you put one color next to another color, you get a third color for free,’ because those two colors interact with each other.
To put it simply: you put on a pair of socks and a pair of pants in your bedroom under incandescent light. The pants are brown, the socks are brown. You go out into the daylight. The pants look green. The socks are still brown. What happened? The light changed. Because daylight has more energy at one end of the spectrum, it reflects more blue light, making the brown look greener.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:56
That’s really interesting to think about — how we’ve moved from an era of commerce where, say, items in the Sears catalog were originally sketched, versus photographed. As we introduced greater verisimilitude in our catalogs, or on Amazon —
Don Carli 8:17
We set expectations differently. Exactly.
Mitch Ratcliffe 8:20
So how should we think about the expectations we’re setting — both as sellers of things and as consumers? How should we be thinking about this?
Don Carli 8:30
In part, most of this is simply not taught. Most students in grade school, high school, or even university are not given any exposure to the psychology of human perception. There’s a physiological and psychological basis to all of this, and we just don’t know about it.
The problem has always existed. What’s happened with e-commerce — and with sophisticated computer graphic rendering of objects that don’t yet exist in the real world but look real — is that we’re setting expectations. On my screen I see this couch. It looks brown. The pillows look brown. So I expect that when they arrive, they’re both going to look brown.
Unfortunately, the lighting in homes now is no longer even incandescent. LEDs have really unusual spectral curves — they can be the problem. If I had been able to see what those items were going to look like under the lighting in my home, I might be less disappointed. I’d say, ‘Oh, wait — they don’t match.’ But in developing the systems for e-commerce, the companies that develop software for rendering — the tools designers use to develop the rendering of images for websites and monitors — simply don’t take these things into consideration.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:10
Our economy was massified in the 20th century but it’s moving toward personalization in the 21st century. And what you’re describing — what you named in the article — is metamerism.
Don Carli 10:21
It’s not my term. It’s metamerism — or ‘metamerism,’ yes. That’s fine.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:27
This phenomenon, combined with changing lighting technology and the changing nature of our homes — which can allow more or less light in, and offer a variable lighting palette —
Don Carli 10:37
A variable lighting palette, yeah.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:38
— suggests that the palette will always be changing. So how do we create consistent expectations among consumers when we’re trying to communicate what we offer?
Don Carli 10:57
Well, standards help to begin with. We do not have a set of coordinated standards today that allow the designer to anticipate the observer’s environment and lighting conditions for a given product. Second, we don’t have standards in place to communicate between what the designer intends and what the manufacturer produces — because it is possible to create pigments and dyes that do not exhibit metamerism. Really.
It’s been standard practice in some industries where it matters. If you go to an informed paint company and say, ‘I want a non-metameric match of this swatch,’ they would use a device called a spectrophotometer, which measures the absorption curve of the pigments employed — so that under any lighting condition, the appearance doesn’t change, because the curves have been matched.
But I can create a match that only looks correct under one light source, which is typically what happens when people revert to either a monitor — which only has three emitters: red, green, and blue — or printing, where typically you have cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If you want to truly match, you have to match the curve.
New printers being used for digital textiles actually have 10 channels, and it is possible to use pigments across those channels to make the absorption curve of the material non-metameric — or at least less metameric. We’re waiting for standards to come together, and that will only happen, I believe, if the brands suffering the greatest economic loss from this mismatch problem take action to put the requirements in their purchase orders and to support pilots that address that 22% of returns due to color perception that you described.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:27
You do point out that IKEA, Amazon, Wayfair, and others have funded the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group to ensure that products look consistent across different apps and websites. So they want consistency when rendered on a digital screen, but they’re apparently okay with the fact they don’t look the same when they arrive?
Don Carli 13:54
Yes, I like the disconnect. It’s interesting. First of all, it would require collaboration across industry — across groups that don’t typically talk to each other. I don’t think it’s willful. I think it’s more like, ‘Wow, they just haven’t gotten around to that.’ Nobody fully realized how much was at stake. And the potential for a connection between the two standards that do exist is actually very good and straightforward, because they’re both extensible standards.
What’s needed — as I said — is for the businesses that are right now losing approximately $850 billion a year due to returns to ask: How much of that is attributable to consumers who’ve been given permission by e-commerce companies to say, ‘Something doesn’t look right, so I want to return it’? We’ve made it easy to return things.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:09
The customer was always right.
Don Carli 15:11
That’s correct. And it’s going to be hard to put that one back in the bottle. So now we have to ask: out of the $850 billion — which is just the retail cost of the goods, not the cost of reverse logistics, not the cost of reprocessing, not the disposal of that returned product to landfill or incineration — if you take it all together, it’s probably $1.25 trillion, maybe even $1.5 trillion. And if you said, ‘Okay, but how much of that is because somebody said the colors don’t match?’ — even being very conservative, say 10% — that’s still enough money to justify addressing the root cause of the problem.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:00
$150 to $200 billion….
Don Carli 16:03
Just rounding error, right? So you could say to companies like Adobe — that develop the software for rendering objects that are going to be manufactured — take IKEA as an example. IKEA doesn’t fill its catalogs, whether online or physical (though there’s no longer a physical catalog), with actual photography. Those are computer-generated images. They look real, but they don’t exist in the physical world when rendered. Very often, the product isn’t manufactured until after you’ve bought it — you bought it on the basis of a computer graphic rendering that looks photorealistic. It’s called Physically Based Rendering.
So if those systems were specifying color with the manufacturing process in mind — which is very often digital textiles printing — they could choose their colors to be less subject to metamerism, or even to specifically eliminate metamerism. They could also provide the ability to predict: run the model through a set of tests to see, ‘Is this design going to be subject to metamerism?’ And carry that logic forward to the manufacturer. They’d have to put that in their purchase orders. They’d have to bridge two standards — one called glTF, the other called ICC Max.
The point is, the consumer doesn’t need to know any of this. The consumer needs to understand that it’s possible to make things match under different lighting conditions — or at least to have less divergence from their expectations under different lighting conditions.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:58
I agree that the consumer should be able to expect that. What I hear is that so far, the pain hasn’t been great enough. But we’re also at a point where simply reducing the waste would be worthwhile on its own, with other benefits as well —
Don Carli 18:10
Oh, absolutely. But the financial ones alone —
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:15
The financial ones are enough? Yes. And then all the environmental and social costs of returns on top of that. But let’s talk about how to actually hack toward a solution. Is it possible now — or over the course of the next decade, say — for me to have a phone app that I use in my home? I sample the light in the morning, I sample the light at noon, I sample it at sundown, and in the evening — sometimes with external light, sometimes with just internal. I could say, ‘This is my light profile. Give me things that will look like what I expect.’
Don Carli 19:00
That’s a great question. The question is: would the average consumer go to that extent? Probably not. But the retailer could do what amounts to a survey of the whole home that the products are going to go into. If it’s a major purchase — a couch, carpets, a new home — you could model the interior of that house very easily.
Technologies like Matterport, for example, can scan the interior of a house and give you a virtual view of what it looks like — they use it in real estate all the time. So that’s possible. And it’s also possible to model different lighting scenarios: you say, ‘I’m going to put in LED lighting with variable color temperature, so during the day I may look at it under one light, and at night it’s going to be warmer.’ You can factor in where natural light comes in through windows across the year.
But that may be overkill for most consumers. It might be appropriate for businesses — especially places where the harmony of floor coverings, wall coverings, and furnishing objects matters. Still, it shouldn’t be necessary for the average consumer.
Phones are increasingly gaining the ability to sense color in a spectral sense. I think within three years, that capability should be standard in most phones as a matter of course, and more specialized devices will be available for around $100 if you want them. But I think it’s really incumbent on the retailer and the brands — not on the consumer — to meet expectations first and foremost. And I think an increasing number of consumers who care about environmental and social costs are going to put that expectation on the retailer and the brand: model the environment, predict the degree to which the products being manufactured are subject to metamerism. Those variables can be measured and controlled in design and manufacturing so that the in-home or in-store environment is less subject to lighting variation affecting the perception of color match.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:55
So I think this is a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break, because we’ve set the stage — and the lighting — to talk about what’s going to come next. Let’s figure out the hack. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:13
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to my conversation with my friend Don Carli. He’s founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York City.
Don, so we understand the variability of light, the variability of settings, the combination of colors — all of these affect our perception of color. And we talked about the fact that phones will have increasing photographic analysis capabilities, so they can sense the full spectrum, not just what we see but the entire range of light affecting our perception. But as you say, it really is incumbent upon the retailer to have a solution that makes something look like my expectation when it arrives at my home. Is this a suggestion that the future of retail is more personalized — that there may be personal shoppers who come to your home early in a brand relationship and do a scan, or who give you the tool? Maybe they send it to you and you return it after completing your color profile. Are we at the beginning of really tuning the economy to deliver exactly what we want so that waste can be reduced?
Don Carli 23:29
I think there are examples of it already in place. There’s a very interesting company that grew out of a team of Navy SEALs and special operations people who had to model environments they were going to enter — and they couldn’t do that using big, complex systems. They needed a hack. They were able to take imagery from various sources and build a 3D model reconstruction of a building so they could plan their approach. One of them left and started a company called Hover.
This isn’t a commercial for Hover, but it’s an interesting case. Hover solved a problem for people who wanted to remodel the exterior of their homes. You could take your phone, take six to eight photos of your house from the exterior, send those photos to Hover, and they would create a 3D reconstruction of your home. Then they worked with manufacturers of siding, roofing, and windows, and allowed the builder to generate not only an estimate of what it would cost to put new siding and windows on your house, but a rendering of what it would look like. The precedent is there: the consumer had the device, nobody had to go out to do an estimate, the contractor loved it because they didn’t have to send anyone to measure — all done accurately using cell phone imagery.
Matterport is another company that makes a device for interiors and does the same thing. And there are small sensors that a retailer could send you that measure color temperature of light — but I don’t think that will be strictly necessary.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:31
Nor necessarily environmentally responsible, to send out loads of sensors.
Don Carli 25:34
Exactly. So for the retailer, like Radio Shack, if it’s an in-store environment, that’s one thing — they do have the ability to simulate different lighting conditions in-store. Think of it like going to an audio shop —
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:54
You can’t do that anymore, but okay.
Don Carli 25:56
Just imagine going to buy a stereo, or to an audiophile shop —
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:03
We’re showing our age, knowing what that is.
Don Carli 26:05
They bring you into a listening room. The point is, it’s constructed for the purpose of evaluating what something is likely to sound like in your home. I think we can do the same thing in-store with variable lighting.
But online is becoming e-commerce where items are never in a store. You order from a computer-rendered image on your screen, and after your order is placed, the item is manufactured. That’s the link that has to be established: the link between the creator of the design for the object and the supply chain instructions provided to the manufacturer, so that the objects are not subject to metamerism — so they are less subject to variation in the lighting conditions in your home. It is a matter of giving the correct instructions about the materials to be used, and specifying how they’re to be measured by the manufacturer. The brands that design the couch, the pillow, the carpet, the curtain, the flooring — they should own the equipment to do the measurement and support the linkage of the standards that communicate how to maintain color consistency across different lighting and viewing conditions, so the consumer isn’t disappointed.
Mitch Ratcliffe 27:41
This brings me to another concept you introduced, which is the appearance bill of materials — which is in many ways similar to the digital product passports we’ve talked about on the show a number of times, which describe a product’s components and potentially how to recycle it. But this color profile — what would be involved in making that happen at scale? What would it look like to make that a common practice for a furniture retailer, for instance?
Don Carli 28:10
Think of recipes. The way a fabric is produced is changing because of digital printing. We used to make fabric in large quantities using dyes — extremely polluting, very complex — or with high-volume screen printing using fixed screens. Increasingly, fabric printing is achieved digitally, where you can print just one yard or 10 yards of a material using any palette of pigments, matched not just to look correct under one lighting condition, but to look consistent under any lighting condition.
The example of metamerism is: if I have two objects that are supposed to match, and under one lighting condition they do match, but under another they don’t — that is metameric. It changes. But if I blend, or use the right pigment recipe on a given substrate material, they will match regardless of the lighting condition. The pillow matches the couch, the wall covering matches the floor covering.
To do that, you have recipes. I’m going to use this combination of inks, and I have to measure them with a spectrophotometer. The specifier has to tell the manufacturer what the material characteristics are. It’s the same as saying, ‘Use butter, sugar, and flour’ — but not all butter, sugar, and flour are the same. Or like architects who say, ‘Use concrete, aluminum, steel, and wood’ — but what’s the actual recipe for the steel, the concrete, the wood? We have to be more specific at the design and manufacturing stages.
It is kind of like a digital product passport. The standard for glTF, which is used for Physically Based Rendering on monitors, is consistent for rendering on screens — but it doesn’t extend to the world of physical objects, inks, and substrates.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:59
So that’s the link. Thank you. You’ve also pointed out that the GMI certification — which Target, Home Depot, and CVS began to require, and which describes packaging — was broadly accepted once those brands introduced it. Would color matching with the guarantee that it will look like what you saw when you receive it be a significant differentiator — a value-added differentiator — that would set a brand apart if they embraced and practiced it consistently?
Don Carli 31:34
Why not? We know that consumers are disappointed enough to go through the return process — and it’s not simple. It’s an annoyance. You’re putting people out of their way. They want their couch, they want their cushions, they want their floor covering. They don’t want to go through what it takes. It’s going to be another two weeks, and I’ve got to document all of this, and I have a party this Friday — we’re getting married, whatever it is.
So I think the demand is there. And what GMI established reflects something I believe has been true in manufacturing as long as I’ve known it: manufacturers are going to do what their customers call them to do. If the requirement in the purchase order is that you must adopt this standard or use this material, you don’t argue — if you want the work, you do it. But if you leave innovation in materials to manufacturers and expect them to market and sell it, that’s not their strength. They’re not marketers.
On the other hand, retailers and brands are marketers — and ultimately, the cost is not just economic but environmental and social. That’s where I think today’s consumers, if made aware, will be able to apply enough incentive to brands to build those linkages, use those standards to minimize the cost of returns and the environmental impact of returns, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:30
So the cost of these returns — which we’ve estimated in the $1.3 to $1.5 trillion range — who actually ends up paying that? Would solving this problem represent a tangible reduction in costs for consumers overall?
Don Carli 33:47
It is costing consumers in the end. Let’s say a retailer bought the product for 25% of the retail price. So the thing sold for $100 but cost them $25. When they say they lost $850 billion, they’re estimating that at the full retail price — but it only cost them $25.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:19
Of course, because that gives them an advantage in taxes — but if —
Don Carli 34:23
If in fact they’re losing 25% of their sales to returns, that’s still going to factor into what they mark things up to recover those costs. It does impact the cost to consumers in the end. And then there are the real costs associated with reverse logistics — shipping it back from you to the distribution center — and then that has to be reprocessed: someone has to inventory it now that it’s been returned, inspect it to see if it’s viable for resale, find a resale partner. Or, as some retailers now do, they simply keep them in huge containers labeled as ‘lot number four’ and have people bid on them sight unseen — unpack those, find the few things in the box that were worth something, and discard the rest.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:33
So the consumer today expects greater and greater personalization, as you’ve described. On-demand manufacturing is a potentially scalable solution that’s beginning to emerge. But if we don’t master this metameric strategy, returns may actually increase — because the expectation is even greater that it should look exactly like it did when I ordered it.
Don Carli 35:59
Yeah. Appearance mismatch is not the greatest reason for returns — but it’s a substantial percentage.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:12
My point is to think systemically, rather than just about this particular issue. Is this the right time for us to move toward on-demand manufacturing — particularly now that we want to reduce imports? And if we do that, who should convene the effort to create consistent perception of color and quality for that next generation of a much less wasteful economy?
Don Carli 36:43
I think it ultimately falls to the brands and the retailers, as well as the technology providers for rendering — for the design and rendering of the objects — because circularity and circular thinking is a systems design challenge. You want to design the problem out of existence, rather than trying to cope with it downstream.
There’s no question that the greatest potential leverage is through a better design process that anticipates these downstream factors that lead to returns — whatever they are, whether it’s appearance, fit, or any other reason why people return things. The ability to predict through true digital twins of the object is one key element. You need the NVIDIAs of the world, the Adobes, the Hewlett-Packards, and the instrument manufacturers who can measure color and surface characteristics — the things that allow you to define the recipe for making the object, as well as the recipe for rendering it on screen.
Those are the key stakeholders: the brands using those tools, the companies providing those tools, and the standards bodies that help to encode them in open, extensible standards that allow businesses to communicate one-to-many, instead of being locked into proprietary one-to-one communication chains.
Mitch Ratcliffe 38:26
If a brand is listening, what should their first diagnostic step be? Where’s the right place to begin?
Don Carli 38:36
The first step, of course, is to have a breakdown of the reasons for returns. If they want to address appearance mismatch, they need to know what percentage of their returns are reported by consumers as: ‘The product I received didn’t meet my expectations in appearance compared to what I saw on my screen or in the store.’ They need to know first: is this a problem big enough to make a business case for addressing it?
In most cases, I think they’ll find that if it’s 10%, 15%, or 20% of returns, that’s material. And if they looked at it not just economically but in terms of environmental and social impact — triple bottom line, if you will — I think they can make a business case for why they should seek out a group of like-minded brands to address the root cause through standards and paid pilot programs with manufacturers: to establish and prove that a workflow is possible, practical, and delivers results that reduce cost in a material way, reduce environmental impact in a measurable way, and have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the ability to attract consumers for whom systems thinking and circularity matter.
Mitch Ratcliffe 40:15
You do a lot of product research and market research. Are brands thinking about this?
Don Carli 40:21
Not enough. Not enough. I believe brands like IKEA do take it quite seriously — and maybe that’s one of the luxuries of being a privately owned entity. So I think we can look to brands like IKEA for leadership. They’ve exhibited that in the past and can continue. But one brand can’t solve this. This is a bigger problem than any one brand can handle.
I think the path forward is really through a coalition of brands that work together and share the costs, the risks, and the benefits of connecting these existing standards — to the benefit of not just current consumers, but consumers going forward. And I think it will reduce the impact on the environment, help make better use of our manufacturing capacity and digital technology, and support onshoring more of our production. That’s an important way to minimize risk — not just the risk of returns, but supply chain risk as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:39
What you’re describing is an optimized system that we don’t currently have. I know we’ve only scratched the surface of the color perception problem here, Don. Thank you for helping me understand it. How can folks follow what you’re working on?
Don Carli 41:53
I write on this topic in an industry publication called WhatTheyThink.com. And there is an active discussion taking place within the Khronos Group, 3D Commerce, and related standards bodies about this general concept of Physically Based Rendering. In the printing world, there’s another group called the International Color Consortium — ICC.org — that has been looking at the problem from a manufacturing perspective: how do you manage appearance, not just color but appearance overall, because it’s not only the color of a thing that can differ, sometimes it’s the surface characteristics or texture. These standards take both into consideration.
I think some preliminary discussions are starting to emerge — whether in Reddit or in these two groups, which are open — that are beginning to look at how these things connect.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:59
There’s a saying that an airplane is a set of standards in flight. What we’re talking about here is the setting of a standard set of expectations about how our economy should work efficiently. I hope folks take to heart what we talked about today. I want to thank you for your time, Don; this was a fascinating conversation.
Don Carli 43:19
I think it can have a profound impact on the amount of waste that goes to landfill, and I think it will also improve the ability to satisfy increasingly conscious consumers along the way. Thank you, Mitch. Take care.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 43:49
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Don Carli, founder of NEMA Hunter, a market research and product design advisory firm in New York. Don’s commentary on color perception, metamerism, and the gaps in our digital-to-physical rendering pipeline appears regularly at WhatTheyThink.com — all one word, no space, no dash — and you can follow him on X at @DCarli, that’s D-C-A-R-L-I.
This conversation started with a sofa and a throw pillow that refused to match, and it ended somewhere much larger. The $850 billion in annual e-commerce returns we discussed — growing toward $1.25 to $1.5 trillion when you add reverse logistics and disposal costs — is what happens when a 20th-century industrial system tries to serve 21st-century expectations without changing its underlying architecture. The system was designed to produce at scale and absorb returns as a cost of doing business. The consumer was always right. The platform made returns frictionless. And what got lost in the middle — in landfills, in incinerators, and in the carbon cost of reverse logistics — was invisible to the balance sheet and to the customer who clicked ‘return.’ In other words, we engineered a system to overwhelm people with choice so that they would inevitably buy, but at the cost of tremendous waste.
So Don isn’t just describing a color problem. It’s a calibration problem — and calibration is a systems problem. You heard about all the parts of the solution that are available already. What doesn’t exist is a coordination layer: the shared commitment by brands and retailers to making a product and the recipe for showing it on screen speak the same language, so that it represents things accurately across a variety of different lighting settings.
The transition Don is pointing toward is from mass manufacturing to what we might call calibrated manufacturing — production designed not just to meet a specification, but to meet the specific expectations of one person. Personalized manufacturing. The on-demand, digital-first model that’s already emerging will only work if the variety of perceptions we experience is accounted for from the start. If we move to on-demand without solving the metamerism problem, Don warned, returns will increase, not decrease. We will have built a faster, more responsive system for disappointing people.
The circular economy framing that anchors so much of this podcast is usually applied to materials — keep them in use, close the loop on plastics, design products for disassembly and reuse. But Don’s argument adds a dimension we don’t talk about enough: design for reduced returns is design for circularity too. The waste reduction potential is real, and it needs to happen upstream — at the design and specification stage — before a single unit of the product actually ships.
This is what tuning the economy looks like in practice: not a moonshot reinvention of everything, but the patient technical work of closing the gaps — the many gaps between what we promise and what we deliver as businesses. The leverage points are well defined. Brands and retailers that own product specifications need to bridge the color standards challenge in their purchase orders. And consumers who are already demanding more and returning more can apply market pressure too, especially the growing segment of people for whom systems thinking and environmental impact are part of how they evaluate a brand. But we have to communicate that to the brand and to the policymakers around that market in order to drive systemic change.
Don’s closing thought is what stays with me: when we actually tune the system to deliver what people want and expect, we can stop producing waste that nobody intended and nobody wants. That’s not just good business. That’s what a circular economy looks like in practice when it’s applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one — the place where, right now, billions of pounds of material quietly disappear into the ground.
We’ll continue to explore this — we’ll probably have Don back to talk more — and in the meantime, I hope you take a look at our archive of more than 550 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear. We’re in our sixth season, folks, and I guarantee there’s an interview you’re going to want to share with a friend or member of your family. And by the way, writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us — because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you, folks, 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, 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.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-don-carli-on-tuning-what-we-see-online-to-reduce-ecommerce-returns/
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