Each year, over 11 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean, which is like dumping a garbage truck full of plastic every minute. For years, we’ve known that marine animals eat this debris, but no one had measured exactly how much plastic it takes to kill them. Dr. Erin Murphy, who leads ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, is the principal author of a major study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team analyzed more than 10,000 necropsies from 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. Earth911’s summary describes this critical study, which found lethal plastic thresholds that could change how we view the plastic crisis.
The study measured how deadly different types of plastic are to sea life, which makes the results especially useful for policymakers. Each finding suggests a clear policy action, such as banning balloon releases like Florida has done, banning plastic bags as in California’s SB 54, or improving how fishing gear is marked and recovered. Still, Erin points out that focusing only on certain plastics is not enough. Her team found that even small amounts of any plastic can be dangerous. As she says, “At the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean,” and we need big changes at every stage of the plastics life cycle, from production to disposal.
There’s encouraging evidence that interventions work. Communities in Hawaii conducted large-scale beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirmed that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by 25 to 47%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. These actions address a parallel crisis in human health that is building from the same pollution source. Most of the microplastics now found in humans and around the world began as the same macroplastics that are killing puffins and turtles. As Erin puts it, “I do view this all as part of the same crisis.”
You can read the full study at pnas.org and learn more about Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00
Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about ocean plastics. Every year, more than 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean. That’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck worth of plastic every minute. And we’ve known for decades that marine animals eat this debris. But until recently, no one had systematically quantified how much plastic it actually takes to kill them.
And the answer is, it turns out, disturbing. Less than three sugar cubes worth of plastic increases an Atlantic puffin’s risk of dying by 90%. A loggerhead turtle reaches the same threshold at about two baseballs worth, and for a harbor porpoise, a mass of plastic roughly the size of a soccer ball can kill. More concerning, at the 50% mortality level — that is, where half the animals who consume the plastic die — the volumes that kill them shrink to less than one sugar cube for a puffin and half a baseball for a loggerhead turtle.
Our guest today, Dr. Erin Murphy, is the manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and lead author of the study that produced these findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team’s research analyzed more than 10,000 necroscopies across 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. It’s the most comprehensive assessment yet of how different plastic types — soft film like bags, hard fragments, synthetic rubber from balloons, and abandoned fishing gear — translate into mortality across marine life.
The findings matter beyond ocean conservation. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found microplastics embedded in human arterial plaque of cardiovascular surgery patients, and those with detectable plastics were 4.5 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death in the following three years. The same polymers killing seabirds and sea turtles — polyethylene, PVC, and their chemical additives — are found in human blood, lungs, liver, and placenta.
Dr. Murphy’s research offers policymakers what they’ve been asking for: science-based data to inform decisions about which plastics to regulate and how aggressively to act. Nearly half the animals in her study that had ingested plastics were threatened or endangered species, and with global negotiations on a binding plastic treaty continuing and extended producer responsibility programs expanding across the United States, the timing of this research could not be more relevant.
So we’ll talk with Erin about what her team found, why balloon fragments are amongst the deadliest items for seabirds, how fishing gear became the leading killer of marine animals, and what her research means for the humans who share a planet and a body burden with these species. You can read the full study at pnas.org and find Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.
So how much plastic is too much for wildlife and for humans? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome to the show, Erin. How you doing today?
Erin Murphy 3:44
I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:46
Well, thank you for joining me, and for this really important research. It was a fascinating read. We wrote it up, and I’m really pleased that you would join us to talk about it today. So can you explain what made this study different from previous attempts to quantify plastics’ lethality to marine life?
Erin Murphy 4:01
Yeah. So first, I’ll specify that we focus specifically on macroplastics, which are just plastics that are bigger than five millimeters in length. There’s more research on how microplastics, which are these smaller plastics, can harm animals, because scientists can study these in laboratory settings. Of course, it’s not feasible or ethical to feed animals like whales, sea turtles, or seabirds large plastic items and study what happens to them in the lab. And so as scientists, we really have to depend on opportunistically collecting dead animals in the environment and looking at what’s inside them to understand what’s happening with these bigger plastics.
And so previous research has looked at these sorts of threats as well, but they focused on fewer species, on smaller geographic areas, and they didn’t differentiate by plastic type, like hard plastics versus soft plastics. So they were really important for laying the groundwork for our larger study. But we were actually able to look globally and look at a broader set of species, and also differentiate by these different plastic types and by species size as well, which allowed us to get at some of these species-level understandings.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:13
So the unfortunate truth is, we are feeding these animals this material by throwing it all away. That is a stark way of starting this conversation. And you use a lot of illustrative examples, like three sugar cubes worth of macroplastic can kill a puffin. How did you arrive at those kind of volume-based comparisons, and why is translating your data into those relatable measures important?
Erin Murphy 5:37
Yeah, so when we did this in the study, we actually looked at the influence of volume based on the animal’s body length. So we reported all of this as a deadly volume per centimeter of body length. But telling people 0.098 centimeters cubed per centimeter doesn’t really mean anything to them. And honestly, when I first got those centimeter-based thresholds, it didn’t mean that much to me.
And so we thought that choosing some iconic species that people could picture would help, but still saying, you know, three centimeters cubed of plastic kills a puffin, or 220 centimeters cubed of plastic kills a loggerhead, doesn’t really paint a picture in people’s heads, and three sugar cubes or a baseball are much easier to picture.
So we chose to do this because I think when people can picture these items, they can really understand that volume, and people do use plastic every single day, and so having volumes like that to compare to allows them to think about how little plastic can kill animals, especially when we compare it to how much we produce or use globally.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:42
Can you put in context how long it takes for a puffin, for instance, to eat that much plastic? What do they eat in a day or a week generally?
Erin Murphy 6:52
Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s actually the next step in our research. So to estimate the risk that something poses to wildlife, we have to understand two things. One is your question: how likely are they to be exposed to this threat? The second is, if they are exposed to it, how likely is it to harm them? And so this research really focused entirely on that second piece.
But to fully understand risk, we have to dig deeper into the first part, and that’s what we call likelihood of exposure. And so for puffins specifically, there’s not a lot of research, but we do know a lot about what species are eating, and we know that different species are more or less likely to eat plastic based on where they live, what they eat, and how they feed. So we’re really excited to be working with some really amazing researchers over the next few years to think about how we can connect exposure for these animals to the lethality and understand risk in a more comprehensive way.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:48
I want to get a sense of what you found. You mentioned in the study that one whale can have a three-gallon bucket in its stomach. What’s the range of objects that you encountered as you were doing the research?
Erin Murphy 8:00
Yeah, this was pretty unbelievable to me, actually, some of the things that we saw in animals, and I’ll just give a few items that stood out to me. But there’s many more. Part of an oar handle from a plastic — or a plastic belt, webbing from the back of a lawn chair, a koozie, rubber pencil topper, fake Easter grass, ice cream tubs, single-use coffee pods, bungee cords, tons of different types of gear, ropes, nets, fishing line.
But I’ll just illustrate kind of how dramatic this can look with one example that really stood out to me, on a sperm whale that researchers in Spain reported on. Sperm whales feed very deep in the ocean, and they use echolocation to find their food. So it may be particularly hard for them to tell plastic from prey. And in this case, it seems like an entire greenhouse washed into the ocean, and this sperm whale happened upon it. It had plastic film cover material for a greenhouse in its stomach, along with a flower pot, a piece of a hose, a plastic burlap sack, plastic craft, and plastic spray bottle, and even fake plastic mulch in its stomach. And unfortunately, this was one of the individuals that did lose its life to plastic ingestion.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:23
That’s — I mean, that’s shocking in so many ways. You found that one in five animals had plastic in their digestive tract when they died. Was this percentage higher or lower, and in the context of your previous answer, more or less shocking than you expected?
Erin Murphy 9:45
Yeah, I think, you know, it was higher than I expected. And it’s funny, because all of our research was based on previous research. It was a meta-analysis. So we collected data from existing literature. And I’d seen some, you know, similar numbers then reported at more local scales. But I think it still really shocked me to look at so many studies and see, you know, for sea turtles, that was one in two. Sea turtles had plastic in their gut. And for seabirds, one in three.
And when thinking about that at a global scale, that felt higher to me than it should be, and I suppose it’s because it is higher than it should be. These really are high ingestion rates. And for some of these individuals, the bulk amount of plastic in their gut, like that sperm whale, is particularly shocking.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:35
I want to step back just for a second and talk about how long this kind of research has been going on. Because when I was a child, oceanography was very much in its infancy. How aggressively are we trying to understand what we’re doing to the ocean environment at this point, and where do you think we are in terms of the long arc of beginning to reach that understanding?
Erin Murphy 10:58
Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever fully understand it, which is one of the things that makes studying the ocean so interesting. It’s so complex and vast. But, you know, we’ve come a long way, and for plastic pollution in particular, the ’70s was really when we started seeing those first reports of animals eating plastics. You know, and it’s been 50 years since then. Now we have evidence of plastic ingestion in more than 1,300 species, and we’re starting to be able to get at these really more complicated analyses that help us understand like the potential quantity that kills an animal, like this one, or what does that mean possibly for populations.
I think the thing that’s been really impressive in the last decade, though, is how much research has been done on plastics. In particular, 10 years ago, roughly, the first study came out by Jambeck et al. that gave us an idea of the amount of plastic that was getting into the environment. And since then, we have learned so much as a scientific community, and people are working really hard to try to understand what these vast amounts of ocean plastic mean for ecosystems, for human health, for fishing industries and other marine industries that really depend on a healthy ocean, and we’ve been doing a lot of research on how to address it. So I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand everything that we’re doing to the ocean, but I think we’re working hard as a scientific community to get there.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:38
It’s really disturbing to think about, because plastic in the 1970s was really only — was 10 years into widespread use, and widespread compared to today is nothing, since half the plastic we’ve manufactured in history has been made since 2002. So it sounds like what we’re really delving into now is a real-time accounting of the damage that we’re doing. How do you as a scientist think about what your goal is in terms of bringing the consequences of our decisions back to the public so we can think about it?
Erin Murphy 13:11
Yeah, that’s why I feel very lucky to work with an organization like Ocean Conservancy. We conduct research that we know governments and decision makers need to help address these problems, and we have a policy team and a communications team that are really well trained on helping us bring this research to the decision makers.
And the type of research we’re doing here, in particular on risk assessments, is something that governments are really craving. They want to set science-based targets as they try to address plastic pollution, and part of that is understanding environmental thresholds that we should be aiming for to better protect marine wildlife, to better protect marine ecosystems.
And so when we do research like this, a big part is getting it into the literature, in this sense to the scientific community, but it’s also working with our policy team and our communications team to make sure the public hears about it, and to make sure that decision makers nationally and abroad hear about the work that we’re doing, and can use this to help inform science-based targets that they’re setting right now.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:22
So one of the materials that you found was most dangerous is rubber, particularly from balloons. It emerged as especially deadly for seabirds, where you estimated that just six pea-sized pieces could create a 90% mortality rate. What’s happening physiologically with balloon fragments that make them so lethal?
Erin Murphy 14:45
Yeah, so if you think about the design of a balloon, they’re super stretchy, and they’re long and they’re thin, and even the fragments seem to have this shape. And so they get stuck at those junctures in the gastrointestinal tract, like between the stomach and the intestine. And the gut moves things along through these wave-like contractions. And it seems like these stretchy materials just kind of stretch with it, and so the gut just isn’t able to move them through as easily. And we see similar things for those plastic bags as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:20
Well, you also point out that sea turtles appear to mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. Is there anything we could do in terms of the chemistry of soft plastics or the appearance of soft plastics to make them less attractive to sea life?
Erin Murphy 15:35
Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a way that we can make them less attractive that I know of. And it’s unfortunate, because we know there are a lot of plastic bags in the environment compared to other plastics. Every year, Ocean Conservancy organizes the International Coastal Cleanup, and plastic bags are consistently in the top 10 items we see most frequently.
That being said, we do know ways of keeping plastic bags out of the ocean and protecting turtles in that way. And so every year — or in this last year, during our Coastal Cleanup — we collected, or our partner organizations collected, more than 1 million bags off our beaches. So this is really important for helping protect ocean animals, because those bags are already very close to their environment, and by removing them from beaches, we prevent them from getting into the ocean.
We also know that plastic bag bans, like the policy that California just implemented, are very effective in reducing the threat that plastic bags pose to marine wildlife, and help by preventing them from getting into the environment in the first place. So there was a recent study published in Science that actually showed that communities that implement bag bans, whether that’s a city, a state, or a country, do meaningfully reduce the amount of plastic bags that end up on beaches by 25 to 47%. So that’s a really significant reduction, and just provides further evidence that we know how to address some of these threats. We have ways of measuring if policies are effective, and it’s really about preventing these bags from getting into the environment in the first place.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:18
Another example of really short-term human thinking is the impact of fishing gear pollution. Can you talk a little about what you found in terms of what’s being tossed overboard by the boats that are hoping to treat the ocean as an ongoing resource and source of living?
Erin Murphy 17:36
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the fishing gear that’s lost is lost on accident. Fishing gear can be really expensive for fishermen. Like crab pots can cost thousands of dollars. And so these are very valuable resources for fishers, and they’re expensive to replace.
But unfortunately, one of the challenges with fishing in turbid and wavy environments around storms, especially with things that are set, is that some gear does get lost. And we did see interactions and ingestion of fishing gear by many of these animals. And partially that’s because gear attracts prey species. So we know that for some animals, they’re more likely to interact with fishing gear, and this isn’t just ingestion, but also being entangled in fishing gear, because, you know, that gear is still fishing. And for a lot of these bigger species, fish are their prey, and so they’re also being drawn to these devices, or this lost gear that might have their food in it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:44
And your study didn’t look at the external plastic lethality, it was only that which was consumed. So we don’t really fully understand what the consequences of, say, for instance, a net lost at sea is for the ocean yet? Or do we?
Erin Murphy 19:01
Yeah, we have — there’s some studies that have looked at this, but this is actually another study we’re working on. So one of the next papers we’re working on right now is looking at entanglement lethality, and that really will be important for understanding the impacts of plastic pollution together, because ingestion and entanglement, when we talk about these bigger plastics, are the two main threats that we see.
Mitch Ratcliffe 19:24
I feel like we’ve got our bearings and can have a really productive conversation. But folks, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my discussion with the Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy, who led a groundbreaking study about the lethal effects of macroplastics in sea life. Erin, nearly half the animals that you studied that had ingested plastics were already listed as threatened. Is plastic pollution accelerating extinction risk, and what species do you feel are most endangered?
Erin Murphy 20:03
Yeah, that’s a great question. Right now, there’s not a lot of research yet on population-level effects of plastic pollution, and our study is really helping build that information out. But it’s just very difficult to understand what’s happening to populations that often we have trouble studying in the first place.
Still, for many marine species, the IUCN Red List notes plastic pollution as a significant threat. Six out of seven sea turtle species are threatened. We saw really high ingestion rates for sea turtles. We know that 5% of the turtles in our data set died from plastic ingestion.
So I think there is a lot of evidence suggesting that this could be contributing to extinction risk. And there are some studies that look at very specific populations that we know are vulnerable, like the Hawaiian monk seal, that have found that plastic pollution is contributing to extinction risk.
And the hopeful piece in the Hawaiian monk seal case was actually that as communities started doing large-scale cleanup efforts in the Hawaiian Islands, they actually saw a rebound of that population. So again, just a reminder that even though we know that this is something that is posing a threat to marine species we really care about, it’s also evidence that targeted and effective intervention strategies can be really important in helping some of these species rebound.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:34
That’s encouraging. So it isn’t as though we’re doomed, or that nature is doomed. We can intervene in our behavior today and make a change for the better in the future. How does the Ocean Conservancy encourage people to do that?
Erin Murphy 21:49
Yeah, so there was a study that we — some of us co-authored, and the Ocean Conservancy supported — that came out in 2020 that looked at what we would really need to do on a global scale to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean meaningfully enough to hit some of our potential targets. And in this case, we were thinking about just returning to 2010 annual leakage rates into the environment.
And what we found is that we really need sweeping change to our relationship with plastic and our waste management systems. And so we found that to achieve this goal, we would need a 40% reduction in plastic production globally. We would need waste management to reach levels of 98 to 99%, depending on the income of the country. And we would need, annually, 40% of waste that gets into the environment to then be cleaned up.
And at Ocean Conservancy, we really work on policy efforts in all three of those big buckets. And so we have the International Coastal Cleanup, but we also work on upstream policies with our policy teams at the sub-national, national, and international levels to try to work towards some of those goals of reducing plastic production and better managing the plastic waste that we do use.
Mitch Ratcliffe 23:10
You used the phrase “our relationship with plastic,” which is an interesting concept. In 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that microplastics were found in human arterial plaque, and that resulted in much higher risk for cardiovascular events. Do you see what you’re studying as a parallel crisis, or the same crisis, just in a different species?
Erin Murphy 23:35
Yeah, I view that — you know, so they were looking specifically at microplastics, and we focused on macroplastics in this study. That being said, most microplastics that are in the environment are breaking off of these larger macroplastics. So in that sense, I do view this all as part of the same crisis, and I think we need to think about all of the harms that plastic materials are causing to human health, to animal health, and to sociocultural outcomes like our marine and terrestrial industries that are affected by plastic pollution, and we need to think about comprehensive policies that are addressing all of those harms.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:17
Are there studies that are showing the same types of impacts from plastic in human and non-human species that we can use to start to tell the story in that same illustrative way that you did with the sugar cube analogy, so that people really take this seriously? I mean, the problem with our society is that we’re accustomed to throwing everything away.
Erin Murphy 24:40
Yeah, so there’s a lot of really great research that’s being done on microplastic exposure in other marine and aquatic organisms, and those are more similar to what’s happening in humans. But that human research, and the research on sort of sub-lethal microplastic risks — like the risks to cardiovascular systems, nervous system, gastrointestinal tracts — those are all pretty new, and so this body of research is really building, and I think we’re going to learn a lot in the next decade.
Mitch Ratcliffe 25:14
Do you see an acceleration of your ability to make those kinds of conclusions — well-grounded conclusions — emerging as a result of the advent of something like artificial intelligence? Are we at the dawn of a scientific revolution?
Erin Murphy 25:33
You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know in what ways AI will change the way that we’re doing research. Definitely, the rate at which we are producing research has increased. There’s more people working on these issues, and the scientific process is really just about iterating as a community and building on what we know. And so I think what we’re seeing here is a large-scale interest in this plastics issue and a big concern by the scientific community and by the public.
And as we learn more, we can answer more complicated questions. And so I was only able to do my work because over the last five decades, people have been studying what plastic is in the animals and reporting on that, and we have thousands of published papers now that tell us about what animals are consuming. And each one of those papers is really important in producing this bigger picture. And as we have, you know, similarly more studies on these sort of individual systems and humans, using model organisms like mice, we will be able to do the same sort of thing of painting this bigger picture for humans as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:48
So as we get this higher-resolution view of what we’re doing, both to the planet and to ourselves, how does Ocean Conservancy potentially use those storytelling opportunities to get us to think about things like plastic bans, or the impact of extended producer responsibility on not just what ends up in the environment, but what we design so that it doesn’t end up in the environment in the future? It’s a big, complicated, multifaceted story. Where are we going?
Erin Murphy 27:17
Yeah, that is true, and I am not the policy expert at Ocean Conservancy, but the work that they do is amazing. And they, you know, they go and they talk to the public about these issues and educate the public through blogs and other resources to make sure that people understand the scale of the problem. And they work really closely with local decision makers who are interested in addressing these problems and help them develop bills, help them build support for bills. And, you know, we’ll meet with legislators and other leaders to help them kind of understand the reason that these policies are useful.
So Ocean Conservancy in the last 10 years has done a lot of work on state bills, like helping to push forward California’s SB 54, or specific bills that are targeting problematic plastics. Like recently, Florida passed a balloon release ban. Ocean Conservancy was also really involved in pushing that.
And I think we have seen with plastic pollution — what, for me, one of the things that’s most comforting in studying plastic pollution is actually that people do really seem to care about this issue and do seem willing to make change. So when people find out what I research — strangers — they always tell me about what they’re doing to reduce their plastic footprint, and I think that’s just a sign that there is appetite for change, and people want to understand how to do it. And as an organization, we’re just trying to leverage that passion and that stewardship that does kind of inherently exist in people, especially when they see the plastics that they’re using, and use that and sound science to help develop policies that can actually make a change on this issue.
Mitch Ratcliffe 29:06
Building on what you mentioned a moment ago, based on your findings about which plastics are the most lethal, it sounds like it’s a blend. But should policymakers prioritize specific materials, or just look at broad categories? No more of this type.
Erin Murphy 29:23
I think we need to do both. So we did find that different plastics pose different levels of risk, and I think there’s policies that are smaller and easier to implement, like balloon release bans and bag bans, that are effective in targeting some of these problematic plastics specifically. You know, using that Hawaiian monk seal example as well, having very targeted and strategic cleanups can be really important for protecting animals at sea turtle nesting beaches or seabird nesting areas. There’s these areas that we know are of particular importance for animals.
But still, the total plastic thresholds that we found were also low, and we see all types of plastics in these animals. So at the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we do need sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal, to meaningfully address this issue and protect our oceans.
And it takes longer to implement these policies because it does require some pretty extensive system-wide changes. But I think policies like California’s SB 54, which aims to reduce 25% of single-use plastics used, that’s really a step in the right direction. And so our policy team is on the front lines of making sure that that bill is fully implemented and that we understand the benefits of that policy by monitoring outcomes and effectiveness of it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:56
You mentioned earlier that on the International Coastal Cleanup Day, which is a distributed event all over the world but a day, they collected more than a million plastic bags last year. Is the goal in the long term to no longer need to do those cleanups? Or do you anticipate that we’re always going to be needing to do those cleanups?
Erin Murphy 31:18
Yeah, I think unfortunately, at this point, it’s hard to imagine a world where cleanups aren’t necessary. I think when we did that study in 2020, that was led by Lau et al., it was pretty alarming to see how much we would have to reduce plastic production and how well we would have to manage waste to no longer need cleanups at all, and we really did find that cleanups needed to be an important part of this solution.
And there’s already a lot of legacy plastics in the ocean. So I think as far as we can look forward, cleanups will always be an important part of the suite of solutions that we use.
They’re also really effective for monitoring what’s happening in our ocean. So I mentioned earlier that study that was published in Science that showed that plastic bag bans are effective. We were really excited to see that they actually used Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup data to do that analysis, and it really just emphasizes the value of citizen science. When you go out and collect data during a cleanup on your beach, we can see what changes occur through time in terms of what debris you’re seeing, and that helps us better understand whether it’s targeted policies or these broader policies, if they’re being effective or not.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:42
What does the Ocean Conservancy do to help people do citizen science beyond the International Coastal Cleanup?
Erin Murphy 32:49
So that program has been going on for 40 years, and that’s really, in terms of citizen science, our main body of work. But we are interested in having citizens engage in other ways. So we often have — you can sign up for our newsletter and get information about opportunities to call your senators or write your senators or legislators about important ocean issues that are coming up.
And we also just have a lot of educational material so that people can start their own cleanup events, or find cleanup events to participate in, so that individuals can be engaged in being part of the solution.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:31
You’ve mentioned a couple of items of research that you are beginning to pursue now. But if you had unlimited resources for the remainder of your career, what would you like to investigate and build on those findings with?
Erin Murphy 33:44
Yeah, it’s pretty hard to imagine unlimited resources, especially now, I know. But yeah, you know, we already started working on answering some of these next questions that are remaining for us, and I’m really excited about the work that we’re going to be doing over the next three to five years. And I will not be surprised if, you know, this body of work, trying to understand what’s happening to ocean animals, becomes a career-long question for me.
But in the short term, the things we’re really trying to get at is, first, that entanglement piece, which you mentioned — what is the lethality of plastic entanglement. And we also just launched a working group with scientists from all over the world to take what we have learned about the lethality of plastic ingestion and to build out, include what we are learning right now in our research about entanglement, and then bring in that exposure piece.
So that question you asked earlier about how much plastic is a puffin eating, how often does it have a lethal dose — that’s really what we want to get at. We want to know if we have an idea of what’s in the environment, how likely is that to have population-level effects for species? How likely are they to eat a lethal dose? How likely are they to die? And are we worried about populations because of this?
And right now, governments around the world are really trying to determine how to effectively address plastic pollution, and these sorts of comprehensive risk assessments are really helpful in setting targets. And so that’s really what I want to keep getting at: How can we take everything we know and help decision makers better understand, you know, a reasonable goal? Because a perfect goal is an ocean with no plastic, and I think we have to keep working towards that collectively. But it’s also really important to understand what species are being adversely affected and what we can do to immediately protect them now.
Mitch Ratcliffe 35:46
Well, it’s a multi-generational challenge, and I really applaud the work that you’re doing. How can folks keep up with the work that you’re undertaking?
Erin Murphy 35:55
Yeah, we have a brand new website at oceanconservancy.org, and we have a lot of information there, you know, specifically on what our plastics team is doing, but on what our entire organization is doing in terms of bills that we’re working on. They can also sign up for our newsletter to get information about what the organization is working on, and that will give them ample opportunities to participate in being part of the solution to the plastics crisis.
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:20
Erin, thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation and an encouraging one.
Erin Murphy 36:26
Thank you. It was great to be here.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 36:34
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Dr. Erin Murphy, manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and she’s the lead author of the recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that quantifies, for the first time at this scale, how much plastic it takes to kill seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals.
You can explore the Ocean Conservancy’s wide-ranging work and sign up for a beach cleanup event at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.
The numbers Erin and her colleagues reported should stop us in our tracks. The volumes we heard about are disturbing, but imagine — one in five animals had plastic in their gut when they died. For sea turtles, it was one in two. What makes that study especially useful for policymakers is its differentiation by plastic type. Rubber fragments can be targeted because balloons are the deadliest material for seabirds. Soft plastics like bags are the top killer for sea turtles. Ghost fishing gear poses the greatest risk to marine mammals like whales. And each of these findings points to a specific, actionable policy lever: balloon release bans like Florida’s recent legislation, bag bans like California’s, and better gear-marking and recovery programs for the fishing industry.
But the targeted approach is only part of the answer. As Erin emphasized, the total plastic thresholds her team found were low across the board, meaning that every type of plastic poses a threat. “At the end of the day,” she said, “there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we need to do sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal.” That’s a very important quote. Keep it in mind.
A 2020 Ocean Conservancy-backed study quantified what “sweeping” means: a 40% reduction in global plastic production, waste management reaching 98 to 99% effectiveness in its collection and processing of plastic so it doesn’t reach nature, and annual cleanups of the 40% of plastic that still escapes into the environment — and that’s just to return to the 2010 leakage rates.
So that brings us to the elephant in the room — or maybe more to the point, the sperm whale with an entire greenhouse in its stomach — the global plastics treaty negotiations. Which were supposed to deliver a binding international agreement, collapsed in August 2025 in Geneva after oil-producing nations blocked provisions that called for production caps and toxic chemical phase-outs. More than 100 countries in the group known as the High Ambition Coalition were pushing for full life-cycle regulation for plastics, but the requirement that the negotiations reach a consensus gave a handful of petrochemical states an effective veto power. And effective it was.
So between the Busan round in late 2024 and the end of the Geneva talks in 2025, an estimated 7.4 million more metric tons of plastic entered the ocean. The world currently produces more than 460 million metric tons of plastic annually, and only 9% of that is being recycled. Every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks of plastic is dumped into our oceans, rivers, and lakes.
However, the collapse of the treaty talks does not mean the end of progress. Erin pointed to evidence that targeted interventions can work. For example, communities in Hawaii conducted large beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirms that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by between 25 and 47%. California’s SB 54 law aims to cut single-use plastics by 25%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, which is now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. That cleanup data, collected by citizen scientists worldwide, is a research tool providing the time-series evidence that tells us whether policies are working.
So here’s what I want you to leave with from this conversation. Erin’s research focuses exclusively on acute mortality from ingested macroplastics — that’s obstruction, perforation, and torsion of the digestive tract. It does not capture the chronic effects of plastic and chemical exposure or entanglement, which her team will study next. That means the lethal thresholds that she reported likely underestimate the total harm plastic inflicts on marine life.
And the parallel crisis in human health is building from the same source of pollution, which has scattered microscopic shards of plastic across the planet, from the seas to the highest peaks. Most of these microplastics began as macroplastics, like those that are killing puffins and turtles. They break down in the environment into fragments small enough to enter our bloodstream, lungs, liver, and even women’s placentas. As Erin put it, it is all a part of the same crisis.
So one of the most encouraging things that Erin said was also the simplest. When strangers learn about what she studies, they stop and they tell her what they are doing to reduce their plastic footprint. That instinct to environmental stewardship is a real and powerful phenomenon, even if it’s currently being actively suppressed by governments. And the public’s will to protect nature is the foundation that policy, science, and investment will ultimately build on.
The ocean doesn’t need our sympathy. It needs a 40% cut in plastic production, waste systems that actually work, and the political will to treat a binding plastics agreement as a matter of human survival rather than an inconvenience for a few petrochemical companies. Until international negotiations deliver that agreement, the work continues at every other level: state legislatures, coastal cleanups, citizen science, and research programs like Erin’s that give decision makers the evidence-based targets that they’ve been asking for.
So stay tuned, folks, for more conversations about the solutions that can still turn this crisis around. And I hope you’ll take a moment to take a look at any of the more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Take the time to share just one of them with your friends or your family. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family, and co-workers they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you all 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 and its oceans. Have a green day.
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Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: GoodPower’s Leah Qusba on Selling Clean Energy as Pocketbook Power
In 2024, 91% of new large-scale renewable projects around the world made electricity for less money than any fossil-fuel option, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Solar power was 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The technology that can lower energy bills, keep the grid stable, and create jobs is now the most affordable way to build power almost anywhere. So, here’s the big question our guest faces every day: if clean energy is this good and this affordable, why is it still so tough to get people to support it? Leah Qusba leads GoodPower, a nonprofit focused on strategic communications and research. For almost twenty years, it was known as Action for the Climate Emergency, but it changed its name during Climate Week 2025. Since Leah took over, the group has grown about ten times bigger, built a network of over 8,500 content creators who share facts about renewables, and started running live messaging tests through its Good Data Lab. The new name highlights that renewable power is good power, and the best way to win support is by showing how it affects people’s monthly bills. The decision to rebrand was based on data. Leah’s team learned that words like “climate” and “emergency” can shut down conversations in rural, conservative areas where most new wind and solar projects are built. GoodPower shifted its message to focus on jobs, community investment, and steady power bills.
GoodPower also works to fight anti-renewables disinformation, which Leah says spreads fastest in the first day or two after a grid emergency. When Winter Storm Fern knocked out power in more than 20 states in January, the organization had a few days’ notice and quickly got its creator network ready to “prebunk” the usual claim that renewables caused the blackouts. This strategy, based on the Debunking Handbook, starts with the truth, points out the false claim, and then repeats the truth to make it stick. GoodPower uses the same idea in its AI tools: CleanCast predicts where local fights over new projects might start so communities can get accurate information early, and TrueVoice spots AI-generated comments in public records. Still, Leah says the best messengers are neighbors, since people trust those who share their experiences. For instance, when Boulder City, Nevada’s Republican mayor, Joe Hardy, talks about how solar and storage helped his town’s budget, it connects with other conservative communities in a way ads can’t.
GoodPower’s network of creators shares clean-energy messages through car-repair, food, and gaming videos. Leah calls this the raisin bread theory: the regular content is the bread, and the renewables message is the raisin. For communities already dealing with climate impacts, she highlights groups like Extreme Weather Survivors, which gives wildfire and flood survivors a way to push for policy changes from the ground up.
To learn more, visit goodpower.org and follow Leah Qusba on LinkedIn, where she is active and easy to reach.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:10
Hello! Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. And I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today. Let’s talk about accelerating that shift to renewables in detail.
The technology to lower our energy bills, build a more secure grid, and create millions of jobs already exists. Renewables are now the cheapest and fastest power to deploy almost anywhere on the planet, so here’s the puzzle my guest today wrestles with every single day. If the solutions are this good and this affordable, why is it so hard to build public support for them?
Part of the answer is that we’re trying to make the case for sustainable technologies in an openly hostile environment. Federal climate policy has been rolled back, and there are coordinated disinformation campaigns ready to blame wind and solar within hours of any grid emergency, whether or not the facts support those accusations. And the social platforms where most people get their information will quietly bury anything labeled climate, handing it only to people who already agree that it’s a concern. The audiences you need to reach most never see your message about sustainability.
Leah Qusba has built a career breaking through the noise to reach audiences intent on climate progress. She’s the CEO of GoodPower, an organization you may have known until recently as Action for the Climate Emergency, or ACE. She’s led it for more than 15 years, growing it roughly tenfold into one of the sharpest media and research operations in the climate space, and she runs real experiments on what messaging actually changes behavior, working with thousands of content creators to carry the conversation to people the movement has never reached before. Her own path started along Wisconsin’s Fox River, in a stretch of water she played in as a kid that later became an EPA Superfund site before she finished high school.
We’re going to explore how to sell the benefits of clean energy when the word climate itself becomes a liability, and how you fight disinformation when a lie travels faster than the truth, and why Leah ultimately believes affordability, not alarm, is the door most people will actually walk through when asked about climate. So, what can we do to shift the climate conversation? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 2:41
Leah Qusba, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?
Leah Qusba 2:45
I’m doing great. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe 2:46
Well, I’m well, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. It’s always interesting to speak to somebody who’s been dedicated to climate awareness for so long. You grew up in Wisconsin’s Paper Valley, and a river you played in, the Fox, became an EPA Superfund site while you were in high school. How much of your work derives from the experience of having played in that river, which was polluted and needed a cleanup?
Leah Qusba 3:10
Yeah, I certainly didn’t know it at the time, growing up in small-town USA in northeastern Wisconsin. I think it has impacted me dramatically and greatly. I kind of look back — it’s over, you know, 25 to 30 years ago at this point. I look back at that time and think, wow, there’s nobody organizing people around that type of environmental disaster. People were angry, they felt powerless. It took over a decade, and then the EPA said, well, we did our best, we can’t really fully clean this up in terms of all the PCBs in the river. So I look back on that time, and I think it did set me on the path that I’m on today.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:52
We know so much more about the world, and part of the experience of living by a river that turned out to be so polluted is your own recognition. How do you use that approach to storytelling to help other people make the leap to understand where we are with regard to the climate?
Leah Qusba 4:09
Well, I often think about my dad, and what’s interesting about my dad is he’s a staunch conservative — he believes climate change is not man-made — and he recently became a supporter of solar, not because of me, not because of his own daughter’s influence, but actually his HVAC guy has a side business doing rooftop solar, and it was that conversation that convinced my dad. So I think what I take away is: rural speaks to rural, conservative speaks to conservative, neighbor speaks to neighbor.
I think in an internet environment where people trust what’s on the internet less and less, and with the rise of artificial intelligence and related content, I think all we have left is really each other, and so we really leverage that. How do we find stories of communities that already have solar, wind, and batteries, for example, to demystify what these technologies are for a neighboring town, county, or state? It really works.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:11
In September, you changed the name of the organization from Action for the Climate Emergency to GoodPower. What stopped working about the words climate emergency?
Leah Qusba 5:21
Yeah, I mean, I think as the years went on and we were using this brand, we don’t want to fall into traps where climate, decarbonization, and energy issues are sort of unfairly politicized as left versus right. When we say words like climate in a rural conservative community, that can be a non-starter. When we say things like emergency, do we fall into the trap of being climate alarmists, as we have been dubbed? There’s a different way — there’s a bigger-tent approach where, depending on the audience you’re speaking to, there’s different ways in to showing the economic promise of the energy transition.
Right, what do communities get? Jobs, community investment, long-term leases for farmers and landowners that are, you know, nervous private equity is coming to buy their land for an Amazon logistics warehouse or a data center or something like that. So I think for us, our brand wasn’t working for enough of the American people, especially where, you know, ground zero for the energy transition happens to be rural red America, where a lot of this infrastructure needs to be built and is being built.
So we did it because we wanted a bigger tent that more people could get under and feel a sense of belonging — that, wow, I see something for me in the energy transition. I see something for me in what community benefits I could potentially reap from decarbonized power being built in my town or community. So it was really about creating that bigger tent for more people to get under.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:51
Well, your dad’s experience is recognizing that there’s economic opportunity in advanced technology. Funny thing, it wakes you up to the opportunity, but it doesn’t address the fact that we’re being told that there’s a crisis all the time, and one of the issues that I seem to run into a lot is that even within the climate community there are very rigid differences of opinion about where to focus our effort and investment. How has the movement torn itself apart to a degree, even as it establishes real credibility because of the fact of the climate changing so rapidly?
Leah Qusba 7:25
I mean, when you just break it down to scientific terms, right? Climate change happens very slowly, and then all at once, I think, is the famous quote, right? How did I go broke? It started slowly, and then all at once. I think for us, what we have learned — we’ve been in business for about 18 years, and I’ve been at GoodPower for about 17 of those years — the number one voting issue, cycle after cycle, and now even young people in 2024, in the last presidential, even young people rated the economy as number one. Usually they’re voting on values issues, you know, racial justice and all sorts of other things. They rated the economy. So the economy isn’t working for most people. Nearly 70% of us in the US live paycheck to paycheck.
So we really, at GoodPower, recognize that people want immediate change. How are my energy bills going to go down? Why are prices at the gas pump going up and down like the stock market? Why aren’t they more predictable? The answer: homegrown power — solar, wind, batteries. It’s not exposed to global commodity risks like oil and gas, right? There’s no far-off war that is going to make the cost of the wind and the sun, which happen to be free — there is no fuel cost — it’s not going to make those go up and down in that way.
So I think it’s about connecting the everyday experiences and things people are constantly worried about. How am I going to keep my job? Am I going to be laid off? Will I be able to afford groceries this week? My energy bill doubled in the last year, and there’s no sight. How do we look at the energy transition as unlocking this generational economic opportunity, right? This potential economic renaissance for the middle class. It’s not just saving money and having more predictability and control and autonomy around one’s bills. It’s also about the wealth regenerating and the economic investment.
I’m from a rural community. These communities are emptying out. Young people are leaving. They need investment. They need new schools, new infrastructure, new roads. Farmers are struggling — hundreds close every year in the US. Well, great: let’s farm 300 acres of solar, along with my 3,000 acres of soybeans and corn. When I have a rough year, the solar still pays the bill. So I think there’s incredible economic potential here, and that hasn’t really been communicated effectively.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:39
You argue that renewable power is good power, but at the same time, as you just pointed out, our energy bills are going through the roof. Are you arguing for truly distributed energy generation, or are you saying that there is a path to a collectively owned — whatever form that takes — infrastructure that allows us to really meet the electrical demands of the era we’re entering?
Leah Qusba 10:00
I think that’s a false choice. Our position is all of it. We are huge proponents of distributed energy resources, dispatchable power, some of the virtual power plant policies and investments that we’ve seen. We’re huge proponents of utility-scale and community-level renewable projects. We think battery energy storage — when you pair that, right, that’s the invention of the battery — is how we get to more reliable power. So all of it. I think we need all of it.
I think, you know, global energy volatility is really a hidden tax on American families that people are really exhausted having to pay, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis where everything else is going up — healthcare, housing, groceries. When energy goes up, by the way, everything else goes up too. So I think it’s the predictability, it’s having more control and not being at the whims of these sort of global markets and importing that volatility into people’s lives that already feel chaotic.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:59
And yet we need to press through the capital investment phase of this with determination, and it seems like the determination is being shaken by, let’s say, people at the White House. How do you tell a story in the face of such rigorous and often completely misleading responses from the other side of the political argument?
Leah Qusba 11:20
Well, I think the American people are pretty smart. Only 40% of Republicans actually approve of their own president’s energy policies right now. That’s from GoodPower’s own national poll we did with the University of Chicago back in mid-March. So there’s extremely low approval. People understand — they feel it. You have to fill your gas tank up, right, probably once, maybe twice a week. If you’re going on vacation, a lot more than that. You have to pay that energy bill and open it up, or go online and pay it every month. So it’s in your face constantly. Nobody’s seeing change, and when you have only 40% of your own party approving your energy policies and your agenda, that’s pretty abysmal.
So I think, from my perspective, when we look at the sort of all-of-government approach to kill renewables, we’re choosing energy winners and losers, and Americans are left kind of holding the bill. It’s simple economics 101 here — supply and demand. If we’re restricting the fastest, most affordable electrons from coming online, which happen to be from solar, storage, and wind right now, we’re going to drive up bills. I mean, my 11-year-old daughter would understand the economics of that.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:28
AI is going to play a big part in how we ultimately tell the story, and part of the solution in terms of how we optimize everything that we do — simply because we have visibility into how things work in ways we would never have been able to pre-AI. How do you integrate that part of the story, that some of this investment is necessary to develop the intelligence that is going to help us untangle the crisis that we face?
Leah Qusba 12:53
I think the stark reality is that data centers are highly unpopular right now, and land use in general — land use projects across the country are really facing increasing public opposition. I am seeing some really bright lights within the news cycle around land-use development that is being done very responsibly, transparently, in an innovative way. I think about some of the Google data center announcements recently in the MISO region, where they’re looking creatively at how do we get electrons through virtual power plants, how do we invest in infrastructure, how do we invest in community benefits, how do we procure clean electrons to power our digital infrastructure. So I think there are some really good actors out there lifting up those stories where these developments are happening in a very positive way.
I think we can look to the utility-scale renewable energy sector — I mean, this is a lot of GoodPower’s work — but just telling the stories: people have reaped enormous benefits and are very happy with this infrastructure when it’s done in the right way, and it’s transparent, and it’s with stakeholder input. I think there’s a way to do land use that can be really uplifting to communities, but getting their input and involving them as stakeholders, I think, is absolutely essential.
I think the other piece of the story that we forget: big tech, right — technology has been the number one global procurer of decarbonized electrons on planet Earth for the last 15 years. So in other words, the growth of the renewable energy sector has been commensurate with the growth and advancement in the sort of digital revolution and technology. So again, there’s a right way to do it, and if we can uplift stories of where the community is on board with this infrastructure — because they’ve been consulted and they’ve gotten to weigh in, and they’re really getting a good deal out of it — I think the more we can do that, the better off we’ll be.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:47
On the other hand, AI is also part of the problem, because it is used by algorithms to direct people away from the issue. You’ve said that when you mention climate in a video, it immediately gets relegated to a pile of links to people who already agree. In other words, we’re talking to the converted. How do you articulate that to somebody who is focused on the concerns they have about their community — particularly a rural community, where I live in one as well — when talking about the need for the investment in electrification and AI, which is also potentially part of the problem that we face in terms of being relegated to pools of people who agree and never get the opportunity to evangelize to others?
Leah Qusba 15:28
We don’t say anything to rural communities. We let rural communities talk to each other, so that’s what we enable. We basically find stories that are under-told and under-platformed. For example, here’s a farmer in rural Oklahoma, in western Oklahoma. They’ve had wind on their land for 20 years, put their kids through college. They were able to keep their generational farm that was handed down to them for six generations, and they wouldn’t have been able to keep it without the wind industry, right? So that could be very convincing to another farmer who’s facing closure in a neighboring plains state, or even within the Midwest generally.
So brands, I think, need to say less. I think what we need to do more of is find and mine those stories where the projects were built responsibly, the land-use development was done in a way that enriched the community and, you know, consulted the community. How do we find those stories? We’ve produced hundreds of these now over the last five years, all over the United States, all over Brazil, the UK, right, where we were trying to really build positivity and social permission and social acceptance of this infrastructure. The stories are all out there, and it’s just about platforming and telling them and breaking through when we see this news cycle that has been so anti-renewable from this particular administration. This is the counterbalance. Just go and ask the communities, and they’ll tell you how they feel about this infrastructure.
Mitch Ratcliffe 16:55
Can you give an example of a story that, for lack of a better word, sells the idea of economic prosperity built on renewables?
Leah Qusba 17:03
Yeah, I mean, really authentic, genuine stories. I’m thinking of a story from Mayor Joe Hardy in Boulder City, Nevada. Mayor Hardy is a Republican. He’s a staunch conservative. His story is about how economically secure Boulder City, Nevada, is for the next 25 years. He talks about solar and storage. He takes us out to the fields and shows us what that looks like, and that the community has no economic worries in terms of property tax revenue, and where those revenues are going, and how it’s investing in community infrastructure, schools, etc.
I think of another story in Oklahoma, of a school superintendent who talks about how the community benefit agreement that they signed with this wind developer built a new school, and what that means for children in a community that has not seen a lot of investment over the last few decades. And then we have countless stories of farmers, landowners, neighbors to these projects who talk about the community benefits agreements — what’s in them: long-term leases, new infrastructure, donations of emergency management vehicles, police cars, fire trucks.
And again, when you position the community as a stakeholder and it’s transparent and you consult them, we can strike deals here that really work for the industry and for building decarbonized power, and that really work for people in the communities who feel like, “Wow, I’m being invested in, I’m not being extracted from.” We’re not replicating those systems of extraction; we’re investing in building something together. I think that’s really special.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:35
Is there a risk in the movement swinging so hard toward pocketbook messaging that it no longer talks about climate, or clean in contrast to the dirty systems — or is that exactly the point?
Leah Qusba 18:45
I also think this is a false question, because we do talk about climate. It’s important to talk about climate. 8% of voters under 35 rated climate as their number one issue in 2024. So a front-door climate message, and increasing the awareness and the pie — you know, the slice of people who are really motivated by a climate message that’s front-door — I think there is a huge audience out there. We speak to that audience.
I think the point is, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution, right? The internet and social media are increasingly fractured. Audiences are tribalized. Knowing what platform you’re on and who you’re speaking to — once you know that information, you should have a very sophisticated segmented strategy. How do we connect audience to messenger and message? If you’re trying to have a silver bullet, sort of, you know, one campaign to rule them all, I think that’s a recipe for failure, and in fact you can have polarizing effects. You can make people feel less inclined to support energy and climate policies that are going to drive forward a decarbonized economy by not having the right messenger, or even a polarizing messenger that could make them more entrenched in that opinion. So I think you can do more harm than good in some cases.
I think having empathy — whether you’re talking to somebody on the left side of the ideological spectrum or the right side of the ideological spectrum, or somewhere in between — really knowing who those people are and what moves them and what they’re about, and really trying to seek to understand them and not label them as something other, or “these are not my people.” I kind of hear a lot of that sometimes. Everybody’s our people. If you’re a person, you’re our people. And I think there’s a way to speak to literally anybody about these issues in a way that’s going to land with them, and that’s really the science of communication.
Mitch Ratcliffe 20:37
To be a people person takes real work, especially when you’re telling stories. There’s a lot to unpack in this strategy. Let’s take a quick commercial break and come back to continue this fascinating discussion. Stay tuned, folks.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s continue the conversation with Leah Qusba. She is CEO of GoodPower, which is a strategic communications nonprofit working to highlight the need for and benefits of renewable energy. Leah, how do you see the world of storytelling changing because we have the tools that AI unlocks to target and reach people better? Or are we going to be overwhelmed by misinformation? I’m just — where should we set the bar in our expectations about the future of storytelling?
Leah Qusba 21:25
What a deep and complex and fascinating question. So let me start with the platforms themselves, where people are now using Claude and ChatGPT and other AI platforms almost as Google search platforms, right? So they’re looking for information. So I think one way that we’re using these tools is really, how do we set the terms of what information comes up when people are searching around: is solar good or bad? You know, will this raise my bills, lower my bills? Right, so it’s basically like SEO, but for these AI platforms — it’s called AEO and GEO. So how do you do search optimization and get the facts, not the fiction, to pop up in search results? So we do some of that work, going to the source of when people are searching, what information are they getting.
I think then, you know, we think about AI as a technology when it’s really a set of complementary capabilities, right? We’ve got automation — how do we automate the tedious and repetitive things that humans don’t want to do, so we can focus on higher-level creative work? Predictive — right, how do we forecast where siting and permitting battles are going to be through 2030 around clean energy projects, or where opposition might be forming? So how do we predict the future? And then we’re all familiar with the generative capabilities around doing better analysis and communications and content creation, etc. And the way we look at these capabilities at GoodPower, it’s less about a single piece of technology; it’s about leveraging these capabilities to build custom models. So I can walk you through a few pieces of those technologies that we’ve sort of housed.
One product is called CleanCast, and this is a piece of predictive, AI-enabled technology. It helps us forecast where the renewable energy industry might build their projects, so it pipes in public opinion research from local counties, it pipes in the governmental, environmental, and regulatory constraints that might exist. Are there existing bans and moratoria? How does that state do permitting? Does it do it at the county level through a county commission, or is it a state process through a PUC or PSC? So all sorts of intelligence to help us predict: where are these projects going to be built? What’s the prime location? Can we get there first and inoculate the public to disinformation? Can we make them resilient and less vulnerable to disinformation?
The disinformation we see out there is astounding. There was a disinformation cluster last week trying to scare potato farmers, saying Frito-Lay won’t buy your potatoes if you host solar on your land, because they’ll have glass shards in them — your potatoes will have glass inside from the solar panels. We traced this disinformation to some potato trade industry associations that are funded predominantly by the fertilizer industry, and fertilizer is petrochemicals, right? So if you follow the money — how do we anticipate where disinformation or opposition is going to be? Where is the industry going, and how do we get there first? Generally, people remember what they hear first, right? So before the public understanding hardens around the disinformation, how do we get there first? So that’s an example of one product. I have a few more I could share with you as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:41
Well, you also have a small army in what you call the Creator Collective — 8,500 creators, 350 to 400 million followers in food and fashion and gaming and all the things that creators do. How does the sustainability message travel through a network like that? Maybe the message begins with a car influencer, then you run into it in a fashion commentary as well.
Leah Qusba 25:03
Well, I think, going back to your previous question around the tribalization problem on social media — like, how do we break through when the algorithms just sort us into the, you know, left-of-center green climate bucket? We don’t want to be sorted into that bucket. So creator marketing is a way to get around that. We don’t generally lead with a sustainability message with everyone. We lead with the message we think is going to work with that audience.
So if we’re trying to reach a bunch of car bros or commuters that really could save thousands of dollars annually from switching to an EV — maybe they live in a rural commuter town, they drive to the city for work — we want to hire a bunch of car bros, right, creators that are talking about fixing cars, and they slip EV messaging into their regular content streams that are more entertaining for their audience. We call it the raisin bread theory, where most of the content stays the bread, and you’re sprinkling in the raisins.
You could apply this to any one of these content verticals. If we’re talking about regenerative agriculture and getting toxic chemicals out of our food supply, MAHA moms are a great example — suburban white women in the MAHA movement, right? We want to find a bunch of them, or doctors and nurses who are really universally credible messengers who talk about health content. So depending on the audience and the campaign’s goals, we look into that community and we decide: okay, who do we want to engage for this campaign, and who’s the right credible messenger for the audience?
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:26
So would you describe that as: you coordinate and plan a sequence of messages? Or is this something that continues to happen organically based on your urging?
Leah Qusba 26:35
We do both. We do long-term campaigns that are multi-year, sort of patient-capital investments to changing an entire community’s way that they think about these technologies, where maybe there was a huge gap in understanding. One example would be: over 55% of Americans say they’ve never or rarely even heard about battery energy storage. They don’t know what it is. Great — it’s a fantastic opportunity to provide some baseline education to a huge group of people, where these projects are probably going to be built. We can get there first, before any disinformation gets out around these projects.
Then we have things that are more reactive and tied to the news cycle. So, almost two decades I’ve been in this work, and we keep losing during these rapid-response, sort of high-attention moments. The wildfires in LA are a really great example from last January, and we actually lost that narrative — DEI was blamed, that we were too busy with DEI in California to, you know, do proper forest management. It was ridiculous, but when you looked online and did advanced social listening analysis of the narrative, there were more mentions where the disinformation around DEI took over the conversation, instead of “hey, climate change is making these disasters more costly, more dangerous, and by the way, insurers are leaving the market in California.” Who’s holding the bag for that? It’s not the polluters that caused the problem; it’s the ratepayers, the premium holders that live in that state. So how do we make those connections? So there’s both a rapid-response element where we’re gathering this intelligence from the news cycle and responding, and then there’s more long-term strategies that we’re building as well.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:14
Talk a little about the rapid response. In January, Winter Storm Fern caused up to $6.7 billion in damage, and there were a lot of disinformation initiatives around that storm almost immediately, and they were blaming wind and solar for the grid not having stayed as resilient as it needed to be, ignoring the fact that it’s an ancient grid. What does an effective, fast counter-messaging effort look like? How do you move the truth at the speed of a lie when lies are propagating so quickly?
Leah Qusba 28:46
We actually did a rapid-response activation with our creator community that last weekend in January — I remember that vividly — and because Winter Storm Fern was a forecasted storm, we actually had a few days of lead time, so it wasn’t a same-day activation. We could plan and really activate our community.
So what we did: we used the best practices — sort of the gold standard for inoculation, or prebunking, is another way you can name it. It’s to prepare the audience for disinformation they might see, so that when they see it, it bounces off of them instead of sinks into them. So we follow the Debunking Handbook, and there’s a way to do it where you’re not reinforcing the disinformation. There’s a huge risk in social science of actually reinforcing the lie if you don’t do it in the right way, in terms of introducing the truth, talking about the disinformation, and ending with the truth. We call it the truth sandwich.
So we did that. We activated a couple dozen creators who got millions of views on their content, basically saying, look, the lights are going to go out because of this storm. It’s affecting over 20 states. It’s happening this weekend. If you see blaming or scapegoating — that, oh, the power went out because of those unreliable renewables — don’t be fooled, that’s not the reason. It’s actually inter-regional transmission in our aging grid, and literally frozen coal and gas supply.
And we can look back — we had people who went through Winter Storm Uri. We had some Texas moms who were in our rapid-response creator community that could talk about their own experience. Oh, the same thing: Governor Abbott actually said disinformation on national television in Texas, saying, “Oh, those frozen wind turbines, that’s why the lights went out.” So we actually had people from Winter Storm Uri, who went through that in ’21, that were part of this collection of creators that were activated and were able to speak to their own experience — that, oh, every time there’s extreme weather and the lights go out, renewables are scapegoated. Don’t be fooled, that’s not what it is, it’s this. And so it was very effective.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:45
Now, you do a lot of randomized trials of different kinds of messaging, and I’m wondering if there’s an example of something that you didn’t expect to work but really did when you put it in the market — or conversely, something you thought was a surefire win that didn’t work at all.
Leah Qusba 30:59
You know what was surprising? We saw a speech that was televised on the Senate floor with Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii. He was giving a speech on the Senate floor around how the Trump administration’s policies to block renewable energy were driving up the cost of electricity and utility bills for Americans, and that that will continue to happen. We said, wow, this is great — most people in our testing think Congress isn’t talking about these issues. So we said, why don’t we give this speech to our creators, have them clip it up and add some commentary to it, and we’ll have a bunch of them share it. And then we’ll do a randomized control trial, where the treatment audience saw the content — one of the pieces of creator content — and the control group saw nothing, or a placebo. Let’s see how this works.
And our research question was: does this help Democrats, or does it help Republicans? Like, what happens when we have people in Congress talking about this? And it turns out not only was it extremely effective at solidifying the idea that these policies to block renewables from being built are driving up bills — so it was very effective at education and awareness — it was very bad for the Republican party generally. Eleven points we were able to get in the treatment group on disfavor for how Republicans were handling energy policy and utility issues. So we found that to be fascinating. We didn’t think a single exposure of a speech of somebody in Congress talking about these issues would be that effective, or have that outsized of an impact.
Mitch Ratcliffe 32:27
One of the things I noted: you started off focused primarily on youth climate education, but as you pivot toward everyone’s energy bill — which is a very dinner-table kind of 30s-and-40s, you-got-kids, you-got-to-think-about-this-stuff kind of problem — how do you stay relevant to youth who continue to grow up into what they can see plainly is a crisis, but that is increasingly being cast as a pocketbook issue?
Leah Qusba 32:53
I think what’s fascinating, and the unique part of this story, is that I’ve been at GoodPower almost the entire time, so many of the young people I personally worked with in high school are now into their 30s. They’re working for social impact investors, they’re working at the EPA, they’re working for big foundations, some are working for hyperscalers and AI companies, and what’s fascinating is they’re taking those values around these issues into their professional lives.
I think, you know, this idea of kind of growing up and maturing within the movement — and I think post-COVID, when we see how COVID really affected the youth movement in general, and college campus organizing: nobody was in person, and you kind of got to be in person to do organizing, to build those relationships and pass the baton to underclassmen, etc. So I think, for us, seeing some of these young people mature themselves into the professional working world — this generation has now permeated the private sector, the public sector, and they’ve carried this sort of generational youth climate movement, sparked by Sunrise, you know, sparked by our organization, Power Shift Network. They have a whole new view, I think, that they’re bringing into corporate America right now, around their values and around how much they prioritize climate and energy policies that make sense.
I think they’re also living in a world where they can’t attain the same things their parents did financially. They can’t own a home, they can’t afford to buy a car, or even move out of their parents’ house. So I think our messaging around the economy — I think it works for young people that have kind of grown up in this movement and are very angry, like most Americans are, around this cost-of-living crisis.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:37
The number of jobs represented by the capital that is being held in abeyance because of the misinformation must be incredibly frustrating for younger people. I mean, we can see the explosion of economic opportunity that would happen — it might look more like China, for instance. I was reading your 2030 plan; you’re leaning into AI and product development and breakthrough technology, and I’m wondering what those breakthrough technologies that you think are most important to understanding where we can go might be.
Leah Qusba 35:07
I think geothermal is really fascinating. Of course, anything that is zero carbon, I think, is really interesting to our organization when we think about the climate problem and decarbonizing the global economy. I think it’s a very nascent technology, so there’s some fair criticism there, but I would say uniquely it has this bipartisan support because it uses the same rigging and tools and equipment and skills as the fossil fuel industry, right — oil and gas and fracking workers. So I think there’s incredible bipartisan support as well, and I think as these technologies mature, we’ll be in a front-row seat, kind of looking and seeing how these develop and mature over time.
When we think about artificial intelligence tools, we think about it in a bit of a different way. I think one pervasive issue we’re seeing right now is AI manipulation and fabricated opposition in local siting — so AI-generated comments flooding decision-makers, and they don’t know what’s real and who’s real. So we built a product for that called TrueVoice that separates authentic local input from AI-manufactured opposition. We’re going to give it to community stakeholders, county commissioners, public service commissioners, the developers — everybody deserves to know: okay, what’s the probability that there was AI manipulation on this docket, and now how much do we weigh this? Maybe it’ll create new systems of what we prioritize and how we gather community input. Maybe there’ll be a premium on in-person hearings and showing up, you know, and reinvesting in local organizing.
So I think our use of these tools is really around identifying the cracks that could become fissures that could become huge cliffs for the work that we do in our pathway to accelerating decarbonization — and how do we fit within those, and how do we problem-solve and deliver solutions that don’t just solve our own problems at GoodPower, but sort of solve big, big systemic, sectoral problems.
Mitch Ratcliffe 37:04
As you think about where we are right now, and everything you just said in the context of what we’re looking toward in terms of the world we want to build — what are you most hopeful about right now?
Leah Qusba 37:13
Well, I think the market forces, much to President Trump’s chagrin, are just too strong to stop the industry. You know, we have a deadline coming up on July 4, where the PTC and ITC — right, if you haven’t begun substantial construction, and now this is being litigated, or this 5% test, you know, have you spent 5% of the project budget — you will not be eligible for the PTC and ITC, these important tax credits that make these projects more lucrative and more profitable and more desirable from a financial investment perspective.
But when you look at the impacts of this sort of arbitrary deadline that we’re all racing toward — yes, Rhodium Group says, you know, the industry is going to take a hit, and a lot fewer projects will be built, there’ll be more consolidation — but the industry is too mature, and decarbonized power is too attractive and affordable and clean and just desirable and homegrown and stable and secure. There’s just too many good things, I think, wrapped up in decarbonized power to stop it.
I think the same is true for electric transportation. If we look to the global south — we work in the global south and non-OECD economies — where you see these two-wheelers and people buying electric vehicles in droves, because they don’t want to import this volatility of the global oil market into their households either. We look to food and agriculture, the MAHA movement of regenerative agriculture, the best carbon capture solution nature offers. People don’t want poison in their food, and we’re seeing a movement around that, and we’re seeing people get very exhausted and disgusted with, you know, the administration’s actions with Monsanto recently.
And so I think there is too much momentum for any one person or one administration to stop what’s happening right now. Can we throw roadblocks? Can we create friction? Can we run interference? Of course. We see our role as removing those bottlenecks, and kind of the counterbalance to that. So I think that gives me hope. The question is, how much time will it take? Time is our greatest enemy, and if we can save time, I think that’s the point. That’s where we avoid the worst consequences, and we seize the most opportunity. So how do we save time?
Mitch Ratcliffe 39:22
How does the adaptation story fit into what you’re doing today? Obviously, we’re going to need to prepare for this.
Leah Qusba 39:28
I think there are fantastic organizations out there working more on adaptation, disaster relief, mutual aid — community-based organizations that are doing a lot of that work. I think it’s hugely, hugely important. We’re going to need to figure out how to live and thrive and support people. The stories out of New Orleans, you know — hey, people have to move; this is going to be us; we’re going to lose 60 miles inland, right? So it has to happen. That’s not work that GoodPower is leading.
There’s a group of organizations, and also environmental disaster survivors. Extreme Weather Survivors is a great organization led by a dear friend of mine named Sierra Kos. They’re doing incredible work to really platform disaster survivors and what it’s like to live through wildfires, lose everything, lose your insurance — what does it look like to be on the front lines of these climate consequences, and how do we really tell those stories and use them, I think, as a warning signal, but also as an education tool to move local, state, and federal policies further toward supporting people.
I think the last thing I’ll say is some of the insurance subrogation laws that are being proposed in Rhode Island and New York, California, Hawaii. These are some of the leadership states saying, wait a second, polluters caused this knowingly for four decades — why are my constituents being left holding the bag? Why are they footing the bill when this industry was complicit? There’s actually a huge state policy movement right now called insurance subrogation, where insurance companies can actually go and make the industry pay for this and clean up — have a superfund, basically, where these companies pay into it, and when these disasters happen, they have to help clean it up, and that bill should not go necessarily to the community or the homeowner. And the insurance companies, too, I think, always get the blame and the ire, but as this continues to happen, that market is going to be more and more difficult over time. So I think having a solution where those most responsible and complicit with driving this situation are also going to be helping to pay for it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 41:46
Leah, thanks so much for this incredibly inspiring conversation. How can folks keep track of what GoodPower is up to?
Leah Qusba 41:52
Oh, good. Go to goodpower.org. We’d love to hear from you. You can contact us, you can reach me on LinkedIn, where I’m active as well, and we’d love to be in touch. Thanks for having me.
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:02
Thank you very much for spending time with us today.
Leah Qusba 42:04
Take care.
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Mitch Ratcliffe 42:11
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Leah Qusba. She’s CEO of GoodPower, the climate and media research organization known until recently as Action for the Climate Emergency, and you can learn more about Leah and her team’s work at goodpower.org. GoodPower is all one word, no space, no dash — goodpower.org.
Let’s consider what it means when an organization that spent 18 years with the words climate emergency in its name concludes those words themselves have become an obstacle to connecting with an audience. Now, this was a data-driven decision. Only 8% of voters under 35 rated climate as their top issue in 2024, and young people ranked the economy first and most important. And that’s the movement’s critical base. If it’s to transform this economy, affordability is what people — especially young people, who want to buy their first home, want to buy their first EV, or would like to be able to put their kids through school. Those folks are the ones who are going to make the change that we’re talking about, who are going to vote — both with their wallet and at the ballot box — for a new world. GoodPower’s rebrand is a bet that the movement can meet them at the crossroads of economics and sustainability.
Leah accurately described global energy volatility as a hidden tax on American families. Every far-off war and commodity swing shows up in the utility bill and at the pump, while wind and sun carry no fuel costs at all. There’s only the capital investment involved in building the solar and wind systems in the first place; then you get free power. But with oil, those taxes are effectively paid to companies, not governments. And as we heard in last week’s interview with Shareholder Democracy’s Gabriel Grant, shareholders have not yet leveraged their voting power to exert control over the companies whose stocks they own, and those companies are ultimately accountable to those shareholders.
When you see the problem through the lens of the Trump administration’s hypocritical approach to market competition, in which they suppress emerging technology, the renewables argument becomes simple supply-and-demand mathematics. The fastest, cheapest form of energy is being blocked from coming to market, and the result is rising rates rather than economic resilience. This isn’t the proverbial 500-miles-per-gallon carburetor purportedly suppressed by the oil industry in the 1970s. This is a real technology ready to reduce the cost of living while doing immense good for the environment, and people see this. GoodPower’s polling with the University of Chicago found just 40% of Republicans approve of their party’s current energy policy.
There’s a real tension as we continue to reinvent the economy, and Leah’s decision to lean entirely on pocketbook messaging is a clear path to building support for solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewables, which will only become more plentiful, not run dry, over the next century, like fossil fuels ultimately will. Leah’s answer is audience segmentation: one message — a front-door climate message — for the audience that wants one, the people who are already convinced and who want to share that message; and on the other side, economics-based messaging for everyone else. The messenger now matters more than the message, and in an era of influencers, this really comes through bright and clear.
Leah’s father, a conservative who doubts human-caused climate change, went solar because his HVAC contractor made the case — not his daughter, who runs one of the country’s largest climate communication shops, but an HVAC contractor. As Leah said, rural speaks to rural, neighbor speaks to neighbor, and GoodPower has operationalized that instinct at scale. They have a creator collective of more than 8,500 content makers with a combined audience in the hundreds of millions, and they’re slipping what Leah calls raisins of clean energy content into the bread of car videos, food channels, and gaming streams. And they measure it. That’s a discipline that separates persuasion from wishful thinking. What you can measure, you can change. It remains too rare in a movement that too often assumes its urgent warnings will carry the day by themselves.
The last idea to revisit is a leading indicator, and that is that artificial intelligence has become the new front line of the information fight, on both sides of the aisle.
Mitch Ratcliffe 46:29
People now ask Claude and ChatGPT whether solar will raise their electric bills, so GoodPower practices answer engine optimization to make sure accurate information surfaces in the first AI response. Its CleanCast tool predicts where siting battles over solar installations, wind installations, and so forth will erupt, so that developers can inoculate communities before disinformation arrives — like the recent industry-funded campaign that told potato farmers that solar panels would result in glass shards in their crops. Another tool that GoodPower has come up with, the TrueVoice tool, launching now, separates authentic public comments from AI-manufactured opposition flooding county permitting dockets and congressional mailboxes.
So one of the good things about AI, at least, is that it allows us to cut through a lot of the noise that we’re being flooded with. But look, this is an arms race, and Leah is candid about the tools being young. These are nascent movements and a nascent set of technologies we’re building on. But the prebunking playbook worked with Winter Storm Fern in January, when creators reached millions with the truth about the aging grid before the wind-turbine scapegoating could harden into what would be perceived as truth by many people. There’s a clear strategic method evolving in real time, and we will keep tracking that race for the American mind here on Sustainability In Your Ear.
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Thanks for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and of course, let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
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This week’s quote is a Somali proverb: “Be a mountain or lean on one.”
Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click to get a larger image.
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Ballet flats have long been a staple in my wardrobe, but in the past few years have experienced a significant resurgence — and for good reason. The right pair can be practical, versatile, and oh so chic through days at work, with family, or out for the evening. But finding that “just right” set that’s well-crafted and sustainably made can be a whole other story. That’s why this sustainable flats guide exists.
Comfort, style, sustainability, and longevity are a lot to ask in a shoe, but I don’t believe it’s too much. It just takes some extra digging. And thankfully, I’ve done that digging for you. Because I get it! I want a flat that looks beautiful. I want a flat that’s made responsibly in line with my values. I want a shoe I can actually wear for my life. And I want that shoe to be worth the investment — it has to last. That’s why I vetted through dozens of brands to create this curated list of flats.
What Makes a Flat More Sustainable?
Material Sourcing
Footwear is a tricky category when it comes to sustainable fashion because we ask a lot of our shoes. We wear them in rain or sunshine, paved paths and cobblestone, day in and day out for years. And through it all, they have to remain beautiful. Because when they’re unwearable, there’s not much left to do with them: there is no viable footwear recycling today. Anywhere that calls it “shoe recycling” is really repurposing that footwear. But once it can no longer be worn, it’s simply trash.
In other words, our shoes need to be incredibly durable, even though the most durable materials don’t always come with the lightest footprint. In footwear, when we talk about durability, we usually rely on leather or high-performance synthetic materials. Leather can hold up with many years of wear, getting more beautiful with wear, and is easy to repair when needed. Synthetic materials are also durable, particularly for withstanding the elements like snow and rain.
But sourcing these materials conventionally is highly polluting — so how can we source these materials better?
For synthetics, we have recycled options. Today, that’s largely recycling from plastic bottles, which isn’t without it’s controversies, but there is much innovation happening in the industry around true textile-to-textile recycling.
For leather, I look for:
- Vegetable-tanned (rather than chromium tanned)
- Locally-sourced leather (more traceability), and/or
- Leather Working Group certified leather, which covers responsible management of water, energy, and waste; safe chemical management, traceability of the raw material, and occupational safety for workers.
Notably, there is no certification for animal welfare, so these are imperfect systems. But the alternative is footwear made from synthetic plastic materials or vegan leather alternatives that don’t yet meet the same durability standards as leather. Sustainability within today’s constraints requires trade-offs.
That said, there is always secondhand leather — by buying shoes secondhand you can access the quality of leather without adding further demand for the material.
Responsible Manufacturing
When considering responsible production practices, I look for first and foremost: transparency. Seeing what the brand shares about their material sourcing, their process, and who made their shoes where. And then I look at the details of that process: were the shoes made locally or within a geographic region? How are the workers paid and treated — and under which conditions do they work?
And, sometimes a brand employs an out-of-the-box approach to manufacturing entirely. There are a few slow fashion footwear brands challenging the traditional fashion system of ordering in mass quantities before demand is assessed —which inevitably leads to overproduction. These brands use an “on demand” model instead, producing their shoes only after they’ve been ordered. This reduces the risk of overproduction (i.e. producing more than what gets sold) while also encouraging more thoughtful consumption. You can’t impulse buy a pair of Mary Janes that you have to wait 8 weeks for.
Wearable and Beautiful
The most perfectly environmentally sustainable flat in the world is useless if no one wants to wear it. And as I mentioned earlier, footwear cannot be recycled into new footwear at the end of its life, so we want our shoes to last a really long time. That means they need to be design forward and comfortable, too.
My Top Picks for More Sustainable and Ethical Flats
Keeping all of that in mind, these more sustainable flats brands meet this criteria, albeit to various extents. Some err more on comfort while some more on style. Some have admirable levels of transparency and social impact, while other brands have more of a focus on their ecological impact. I’ve included descriptions alongside each brand as well as a summary of conscious qualities so you can find a brand that meets your priorities best. And, of course, a price range so you know what makes sense for your budget as well.
Some that this guide includes affiliate links which means we may earn a commission if you shop through these links. As always, brands featured in shopping guides are brands that meet our strict sustainability criteria that we think you’ll love.
1. ALOHAS
Spanish brand ALOHAS flips the typical fashion production system on its head with its on-demand model.
Instead of overproducing thousands of shoes to later discount them, ALOHAS does the exact opposite. Its newest styles are available for pre-order at a discount of 30%, so the footwear brand can more accurately forecast demand. Then the shoes — like their flats — are primarily made by local artisans in Spain and Portugal. The brand regularly shows the behind the scenes of their production on their social media.
Conscious Qualities: On-Demand Production, Locally Made
Size Range: EU 35-42 (US 5-11)
Price Range: $195-$225
2. Rothy’s
If you’re looking for flats for all-day wear at work or running errands, Rothy’s is my recommendation with their cushy insoles. The brand makes their more sustainable flats from recycled plastic bottles, as well as materials like hemp and merino wool, but they still look sleek enough for the office.
While I might not wear Rothy’s flats to a fashion event (I prefer smooth leather for more elevated occasions), they are more than stylish enough to wear to most of my real-life scenarios. My favorite part about Rothy’s, though, is that they are machine washable.
Materials: Recycled & Natural Materials, Owns One Factory (undisclosed percentage of production)
Size Range: US 5-13
Price Range: $99-$165
3. Vivaia
Vivaia has the most adorable sustainable Mary Janes made from recycled plastic bottles. The adjustable straps and arch support make Vivaia’s Mary Janes suitable for all-day comfort, even if your feet are typically prone to slipping out of flats.
This vegan footwear brand also makes square-toe and pointed-toe flats for a more elevated look. And of the several recycled plastic bottle footwear brands on the market today, Vivaia tends to have the most elevated designs in my opinion.
Conscious Qualities: Vegan, Recycled Materials
Size Range: US 5-11
Price: $97 – $116
4. The RealReal
The RealReal is an authenticated luxury resale platform with contemporary, designer, and high-end luxury brands. Depending on your priorities you can find shoes in anywhere from pristine condition (but higher priced)) to “fair” or even “as is” for the largest discount from full price.
You don’t always have as many options aesthetically when shopping more sustainably, so I like to go to The RealReal when I’m looking for specific styles. I was recently looking for Mary Janes with feminine detailing and came across Larroude Flats on The RealReal, where I purchased a pair of neutral scalloped accent flats. (Pictured here!)
Conscious Qualities: Secondhand
Size Range: US 3.5-14
Price Range: $9+
5. ESSĒN
ESSĒN elegant, minimalist footwear is artisan handcrafted from Leather Working Group-certified leather in solar-powered facilities in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Each shoe also comes with a product passport where you can view the step-by-step journey that product took through the brand’s supply chain from raw material to manufacturing to packaging and distribution.
Beyond transparency and responsible manufacturing, ESSĒN’s slow fashion business model prevents overproduction by operating on a made to order basis. Meaning while sizes and styles are predefined, the shoes are only produced after they’ve been ordered.
Conscious Qualities: LWG Certified, Supply Chain Transparency, On Demand Production
Size Range: EU 35-44 (US 4-13)
Price Range: $295-$450
6. Allbirds
Another comfort-first footwear option besides Rothy’s is Allbirds. The brand creates lightweight, super smooth and breathable flats from tree fibers, aptly called “Tree Breezers”. The (washable) shoes are also soft enough to wear without socks.
The Allbirds Tree Breezers are far more comfortable than typical flats, though I find that the Rothy’s are slightly comfier.
Conscious Qualities: Natural materials (FSC-Certified eucalyptus, castor mean oil, sugarcane EVA)
Size Range: US 5-11
Price Range: $105-$125
7. Darzah
Fair trade certified by Fair Trade Federation, Darzah’s ethical flats are entirely hand-embroidered and handcrafted in Palestine from locally sourced leather.
The tatreez flats from this nonprofit are embroidered by refugee and low-income women artisans in the West Bank with this traditional Palestinian techniques.
Conscious Qualities: Sustains Heritage Crafts, Fair Trade Certified
Size Range: EU 36-41 (US 6-10)
Price Range: $199 – $209
8. Nisolo
If you’re seeking a quality pair of classic leather flats ideal for your capsule wardrobe, Nisolo is a strong pick. Nisolo’s flats are handcrafted by artisans using leather sourced from a Leather Working Group certified tannery.
I’ve been wearing my Nisolo shoes for many years and can attest to their quality and durability.
That said, the brand has recently turned over to new ownership and now has significantly less information about their sustainability and ethics in their supply chain. I will be keeping a close eye on this brand to see if it continues to uphold the values Nisolo has long held.
Conscious Qualities: LWG-Certified, Artisan Handcrafted
Size Range: US 5-11
Price: $138 – $198
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