While you may get noticeable joy from feeling the soil outside on your fingers or seeing your first tomatoes pop up on the vine, even indoor gardening can bring some helpful benefits for your well-being, according to a new study.
Researchers from the University of Helsinki, Natural Resources Institute Finland and Tampere University have uncovered the benefits of microbial exposure that happens during urban indoor gardening.
Previous studies have unearthed the benefits of exposure to natural materials rich in microbes, like soil, on the human microbiota, but the researchers in this study looked specifically at whether urban, indoor gardening could have any similar impacts.
When using a microbially rich gardening soil for their indoor gardens, the study participants experienced an increase in microbiota diversity on the skin, plus some anti-inflammatory benefits. The findings were published in the journal Environment International.
“One month of urban indoor gardening boosted the diversity of bacteria on the skin of the subjects and was associated with higher levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines in the blood,” Mika Saarenpää, doctoral researcher from the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, said in a statement.
As Saarenpää explained, these benefits were found in a trial using a growing medium similar to soil found in a forest.
But some participants were given a microbially poor soil made with peat, which is a common type of growing medium that has become controversial. That’s because harvesting peat means destroying peatland ecosystems, an important carbon sink, as reported by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
For the gardeners using a peat-based soil, there were no changes to skin microbiota or anti-inflammatory blood molecules.
Participants used flower boxes and store-bought peas, lettuces, beans, mustard, garlic and ginger plants (in a variety of forms, such as seeds, rhizomes and bulbs). Participants using the microbially rich soil experienced the benefits within only about a month of indoor gardening.
Gardening equipment provided for the participants consisted of a plastic planter, lamp, bulb, spray bottle, crop species and growing medium. Environment International
The increased diversity in skin microbiota is important, as the researchers noted this can contribute to immunoregulation.
“We know that urbanisation leads to reduction of microbial exposure, changes in the human microbiota and an increase in the risk of immune-mediated diseases,” Saarenpää said. “This is the first time we can demonstrate that meaningful and natural human activity can increase the diversity of the microbiota of healthy adults and, at the same time, contribute to the regulation of the immune system.”
As a bonus, the indoor garden required little money or space to start, and many of the participants expressed interest in continuing with their gardens after the experiments ended, with some even planning to switch to outdoor gardening.
“We don’t yet know how long the changes observed in the skin microbiota and anti-inflammatory cytokines persist, but if gardening turns into a hobby, it can be assumed that the regulation of the immune system becomes increasingly continuous,” Saarenpää said.
The post Indoor Gardening Could Help Boost Immune Systems, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/urban-indoor-gardening-immune-health-soil-microbes.html
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: Peter Fusaro’s Wall Street Green Summit Explores Financing The Renewables Transition
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Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the Wall Street Green Summit, he’s spent a quarter century connecting capital to climate solutions. This year’s summit, the 25th in its history, will take place on March 10 and 11 in New York. This critical conversation arrives at an historic inflection point: insurance companies are withdrawing from climate-vulnerable states, AI data centers are straining electrical grids, and the economics of clean energy have fundamentally shifted.
The energy transition’s bottleneck isn’t capital, it’s infrastructure. The U.S. went from 110 investor-owned utilities in 1992 to just 40 today, and consolidation meant underinvestment in transmission and distribution. Data centers consumed 2% of U.S. energy demand in 2020; Peter sees that climbing to 10-12% by 2030. Blackouts and brownouts are inevitable, he says. Yet his message is pragmatic optimism: ignore Washington and watch the capital markets and blue states where climate policy is embedded in law. Many companies are “green hushing,” quietly pursuing sustainability without public positioning. The energy industry thinks in 40-year cycles, making the current political moment a blip. “I’ve spent 56 years now in sustainability, before it had a name,” he says. “What I’ve learned is change takes decades.”
Peter argues that Wall Street has genuinely internalized climate as systemic risk—not because of ideology, but because of opportunity. “Wall Street likes exchanges, likes to trade, likes volatility, and certainly likes uncertainty,” he explains. “What people don’t understand about Wall Street, it’s about the edge. What’s the arbitrage opportunity?” The reinsurance industry has stepped forward aggressively, funding carbon credits and sustainability projects. Peter’s recent Earth911 article, “Climate Risk Has Become a Defining Economic Issue,” explores these themes in depth.
However, he sees natural gas and renewables dominating the next 15 years, while geothermal is enjoying a genuine renaissance. His optimism rests on a demographic bet: “I have a tremendous valuation on young people. I’m 75. They’re inheriting this world, and they get the sustainability message globally.” The summit attendees includes no government officials and no academics, just people in the trenches building and financing solutions.
You can learn more at TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com. Earth911 is a media sponsor for the event.
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The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Peter Fusaro’s Wall Street Green Summit Explores Financing The Renewables Transition appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-peter-fusaros-wall-street-green-summit-explores-financing-the-renewables-transition/
Sustainability is a series of experiments. No one is perfect and too many people don’t try to help the Earth because they think they won’t make a difference. Author Alice Waters reminds us that every tree is beautiful and we can be, too, if we forget perfection and focus on living well: “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is still perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”
Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.
This poster was originally published on November 29, 2019.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: Nothing Is Perfect and Everything Is Perfect appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/living-well-being/earth911-inspiration-nothing-is-perfect-and-everything-is-perfect/
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: USEFULL’s Rob Kutner On Easing Reuse Adoption With Plastic Buy-Backs
The scale of our plastic waste crisis is staggering: the U.S. alone uses over 100 million plastic utensils every day, most of which are used once and tossed into landfills where they’ll persist for centuries. From ocean pollution to overflowing campus dumpsters after lunch rush, single-use packaging defines modern food service—but universities and businesses are under mounting pressure to embrace sustainable alternatives. Tune in to a conversation with Rob Kutner, Chief Revenue Officer at USEFULL, which offers a practical solution to food service waste: a reusable takeout container system designed for the high-volume and fast pace of college cafeterias. USEFULL’s latest move challenges throwaway culture head-on with a plastic buyback program that pays institutional cafeterias to ditch disposables and go reusable.
The company has already made waves at universities like the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, and the University of North Carolina Wilmington, achieving a remarkable 99% return rate for their containers. The economics are compelling. Rather than asking institutions to absorb the cost of switching to sustainable packaging, USEFULL creates financial incentives by purchasing a cafeteria’s existing plastic inventory, removing the sunk costs barrier and providing immediate value to cafeterias ready to make the transition. USEFULL built an ecosystem to improve the convenience of reuse, developing tracking systems, POS integration services, and local washing and inventory management to solve the campus reuse challenge. The timing couldn’t be better. As Bain & Company recently reported, ROI has become the driving force for growing adoption of sustainable practices. As companies recognize the threat to future business performance represented by the take-make-waste economic model, USEFULL demonstrates how simple steps, not grandiose plans for revolution, can create tractable, attractive, and profitable paths to reduced waste. You can learn more about USEFULL’s reusable packaging system and their expanding campus network at https://usefull.us/
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on April 11, 2025.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: USEFULL’s Rob Kutner On Easing Reuse Adoption With Plastic Buy-Backs appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-usefulls-rob-kutner-on-easing-reuse-adoption-with-plastic-buy-backs/
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