According to official data, air pollution levels in Milan — including fine particulates — have been among Europe’s highest for February.
Fine particulate matter poses the most health risks because it can go deep into the lungs and even make its way into the bloodstream.
“It stinks! I smell a constant stench of smog, I cough, I feel my throat burning,” said Pietro De Luca, a Milan resident who frequently considers relocating with his family to get away from the intense pollution and accompanying health risks, as Reuters reported.
To reduce their exposure, some residents of the fashion and finance capital of Italy have taken to wearing face masks outside.
Mayor of Milan Giuseppe Sala disputed IQAir’s designation of the city’s air quality as “unhealthy,” calling it “the usual impromptu analyses made by a private body,” reported The Guardian.
IQAir uses “governmental stations and low-cost sensors owned by citizen scientists around the world: a combined total of over 80,000 locations” in gathering its data, the air quality monitor’s website says.
On Tuesday, the air pollution in Milan and neighboring cities in Italy’s northern Lombardy region triggered measures limiting ultra-polluting vehicles during the busiest daytime hours, Reuters reported. Nearly a third of the country’s population — 17 million people — lives in the region’s Po Valley.
Satellite image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission shows smog and mist blanketing the Po Valley on Jan. 29, 2024. European Space Agency
“In Milan you have to try and survive in this swamp for five days a week, and get yourself out for the weekend to get a breath of fresh air,” said former Milan resident Roberto Lorenzutti, who now lives in Sardinia, as reported by Reuters.
In 2020, the European Union Court of Justice found Italy in breach of the EU’s clean air regulations.
The area’s pollution issues come from its industrial and agricultural activities, which are compounded by air being trapped in the valley, according to Valentina Bosetti, a Bocconi University professor of environmental and climate change economics.
A 2023 investigation by The Guardian discovered that more than one-third of residents of the valley and its surrounding areas were breathing air that contained four times the limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the most hazardous airborne particulates.
Despite calling IQAir’s classification of the region “unreliable,” regional environmental protection agency ARPA-Lombardia said the air quality in Milan had recently been above a 2.5 particulate matter (PM) limit, The Guardian reported.
Last year’s levels for PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and PM10 in Milan all breached WHO’s guidelines, said Italian environmental nonprofit organization Legambiente, as reported by Reuters.
Regional councilor for the environment Giorgio Malone said the problem has been going on for a long time, but that over the course of the last two decades there has been a 45 percent reduction of concentrations of NO2 and a 39 percent reduction of PM10, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, Elena Eva Maria Grandi, environment councilor in Milan, requested more direct cooperation between regional and municipal authorities in evaluating emergency measures to deal with the high pollution levels. Milan is set to co-host the next Winter Olympics in 2026. “Current pollution thresholds are fully unsatisfactory to protect our health, this is what the World Health Organization says,” said Anna Gerometta, president of Italy Citizens for Air, as reported by ABC News.
The post Milan Inundated With High Air Pollution Levels and Smog appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/milan-air-pollution-levels.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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