Quick Key Facts
- Despite covering only around 25% of Earth’s land area, mountains host more than 85% of bird, mammal and amphibian species.
- Many of Earth’s rivers begin in mountains, and more than half of all people use freshwater from mountains every day.
- Six of the 20 plant varieties that feed most of the world’s population originate in mountains: barley, sorghum, tomatoes, apples, quinoa and potatoes.
- Mountain visits make up 15 to 20% of global tourism.
- Since 1950, mountains have been heating 25% to 50% faster than the global average.
- Even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, nearly all mountain glaciers will face considerable mass loss by 2100.
- The average Everest climber generates 18 pounds of waste, most of which stays on the mountain.
What Are Mountains and Why Should We Protect Them?
From the Alps and the Andes to Julie Andrews twirling in an alpine meadow in the opening scene of The Sound of Music, mountains have been a powerful force in human history and culture. They dominate our imaginations as they dominate our landscapes, towering over skyscrapers in cities from Tokyo to Seattle and forming islands from Hawaii to Iceland. A mountain, defined as a landmass significantly higher than its surroundings, comes in broadly four types: fold mountains, formed by the movements of tectonic plates; block mountains, created by rocks moving up and down; dome mountains, made from the movement of magma beneath the Earth’s crust and volcanoes.
While mountains are formed by geologic forces deep underground, they create space for unique ecosystems to form high above the Earth. Mountains’ harsh conditions and relative isolation have encouraged and sheltered varied biodiversity.
And what happens on mountains doesn’t stay on mountains. From crucial crops to glacial runoff, mountains have given many gifts to the human and non-human communities that live below them. Yet, society doesn’t treat mountains with the gratitude they deserve, threatening these majestic environments with the climate crisis, resource exploitation, pollution and overtourism. To preserve mountain ecosystems, it’s important for human communities to understand what mountains do for us and, in turn, what we can do for them.
What Are the Main Types of Mountain Ecosystems?
Mountain ecosystems vary wildly in climate and biodiversity. For example, mountains encompass the temperate European Alps and the Desert Mountains of Nevada to island-forming volcanoes like Hawaii’s Kīlauea and the world’s highest peaks in the Himalayas. The ecosystem changes within each individual mountain; this often depends on the altitude. For every 328 feet gained, the temperature falls by 0.9 to 1.1 Fahrenheit, and altitude conditions affect what species can survive and thrive in a particular spot. Similar plants and animals tend to thrive at similar altitudes (and latitudes moving north to south). These ecosystem bands are called life zones — below, we’ll detail out some of the most common.
Montane Forest
The first mountain life zone is the montane forest. Even if a mountain rises out of a lowland forest, the species in the montane forest tend to be distinct from those further below and will have more in common with trees that grow further north. In Europe, North America and temperate Asia, the trees in montane forests are typically conifers such as pines, mountain hemlocks and the unique larches of Washington State’s Cascades, with needles that turn yellow in the fall.
In the Southern Hemisphere’s temperate areas, montane forests are usually made up of one or two broadleaf species, such as eucalyptus in Australia, while in the tropics montane forests are usually evergreen rainforests. One unique tropical and subtropical type of montane forest is the cloud forest. These are evergreen rainforests whose moisture comes from clouds, which envelop the green in a constant mist. The clouds are first intercepted by the mountain slope and then filtered through the leaves. These forests, found in parts of Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Central and Southern Africa and Australia, are known for an abundance of plants like mosses, lichens and orchids that grow on other plants. The unique conditions that form cloud forests mean they’re home to many unique species, such as a carnivorous pitcher plant found in Borneo’s cloud forest called the Nepenthes hurrelliana.
Subalpine Zone
As altitude increases, climate conditions grow more extreme and trees have a harder time surviving. Eventually, they hit a point past which it is too cold, dry and low-oxygen for them to grow. This is called the tree line or timberline, and it typically occurs at the point on a mountain where temperatures during the warmest month average around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The area immediately around the tree line is a transition area between tree-dominated and tree-free ecosystems. This is called the subalpine zone.
The trees that grow in the subalpine zone are often shorter than those below it. Some will grow in the shadow of rocks and won’t grow higher than the rock’s protection. Others will grow out instead of up. These low, wind-twisted trees are called krummholz, the German word for “crooked wood.” Between the krummholz are subalpine meadows where many species of wildflowers flourish, depending on the region. In temperate ecosystems, common flowers are heather, daisies, lupins and pasqueflowers.
Alpine Tundra and Grassland
Above the tree line, conditions grow even harsher, which limits what can grow. The plants that survive grow low to the ground year-round and include grasses, sedges, forbs and lichens. Grasses grow most frequently in alpine meadows, which are created when weather conditions have eroded rocks sufficiently to create soil. Alpine flowers have evolved to have hair on stems and leaves that protect them from the wind. One example is the Edelweiss, or Leontopodium nivale, which grows in the Alps and Carpatihians, a national symbol for several countries in the region. Other alpine flowers have red pigment to help turn the sun’s rays into heat or blue to protect against ultraviolet radiation, such as the Clusius’s gentian in the Swiss Alps.
Many alpine ecosystems around the world will have similar types of plants, including heather, gentians, plantains and buttercups. Tropical alpine regions in the Andes, the Himalayas, East Africa and Pacific islands feature a unique type of plant, a large herb with a rosette structure that can grow to be over 10 feet tall. WWF considers montane grasslands and shrublands to be their own biome. These ecosystems occur all over the world from the Páramo in the Northern Andes to the steppes of the Tibetan plateau. Even higher up, some mountains see ice and snow year-round, conditions that are inhospitable to most life. However, some organisms still find a way, such as ice worms and red algae in the North Cascades or the microbes that have been discovered beneath mountain glaciers.
What Are the Benefits of Mountains?
Mountains have a myriad of benefits, from housing ample biodiversity and providing freshwater to being recreational destinations where people can hike and ski.
Habitats and Biodiversity
Despite only covering around 25% of Earth’s land area, mountains are essential havens for biodiversity, hosting more than 85% of birds, mammals and amphibians and one-third of terrestrial species. They also include almost 25% of the world’s forests. The tropical Andes in South America are home to 45,000 plant species, while the mountains of New Guinea alone host 20,000 plant and animal species. Unique animals that shelter on mountains include iconic species like bighorn sheep, red pandas, orangutans, snow leopards, Rocky Mountain goats, the Himalayan tahr and the California and Andean condors.
The biodiversity importance of mountains comes in part from their elevation and their relative isolation from the landscape below. Their altitude and cooler temperatures allowed them to act as a refuge for cold-weather species as planetary temperatures warmed following the last Ice Age. In more recent history, they provide a haven for species pushed out of the lowlands by human activity. At the same time, the contained environments of mountains enable species to evolve and diverge relatively quickly, so that different but related species can survive on nearby mountain peaks, boosting overall biodiversity. Mountains can also support the biodiversity below them. For example, snowmelt from Mount Kilimanjaro waters the swamps of Amboseli National Park, which shelters 420 bird species and 50 large mammal species.
Water
Mountains are essential to the global freshwater supply, so much so that they’ve known as the “world’s water towers.” Mountains store water in glaciers, snowpacks, lakes and reservoirs that flow downhill at increased rates during warmer weather. Most of the Earth’s largest rivers begin in mountains, and more than half of all people use fresh water from mountains every day for drinking, sanitation, agriculture, electricity, industry, transportation, recreation and fisheries.
Certain ranges are especially important as regional water sources. Scientists have identified 78 mountain “water towers” that are especially vital, providing water to 1.9 billion people. The greatest number of people are dependent on the Indus river system coming out of the Himalayas in Asia. More than 200 million people in the region and 1.3 billion people downstream rely on water from the Hindu Kush-Himalayan mountain region alone, which is sometimes called the world’s “Third Pole” for its abundance of mountain glaciers. Other important “water tower” mountains are the European Alps, the U.S. Rockies and the southern Andes in South America. Cities that rely on mountain water include Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Nairobi and Melbourne.
Food and Flowers
Because their harsher conditions put stress on plants, mountain soil is less nutrient-rich overall than lowland soil. Therefore, mountains aren’t used for agriculture on a large scale. That said, several important food crops and beloved garden flowers originated on mountains. These include six of the 20 plant varieties that feed most of the world’s population: barley, sorghum, tomatoes, apples, quinoa and potatoes. Potatoes, for example, were first domesticated in the Andes around 8,000 years ago. Gardens would also be noticeably less bright without mountains, as many popular flowers originated in mountains. More than 60% of wild tulip species evolved in the mountains of Central Asia.
Culture
Currently, between 0.3 billion and 2.3 billion people call mountains home. Communities who have lived on mountains for centuries have developed their cultures based on their alpine lifestyles.
The Sherpas live in the most mountainous part of the Tibetan and Nepalese Himalayas. They’ve become so well known for their mountaineering prowess that the term “sherpa” is now used for any mountain guide in the region, regardless of ethnicity. Switzerland’s iconic yodeling singing style originated from shepherds calling to each other across the Alps. In fact, most mountain ranges are home to Indigenous peoples and local communities who depend on them for sustenance and identity.
Many of these communities have developed unique Indigenous knowledge systems, such as languages, traditions and ways to make use of the land. Many cultures also consider certain mountains and glaciers sacred. Mount Kailas in Tibet is honored by Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Bon. Other mountains that hold spiritual significance to different groups include Mount Everest, Mount Fuji, Mount Ararat, Mauna Kea, the Mount Olympus (of Greek mythology) and Mount Shasta, where the Winnemem Wintu people of California believe all of life bubbled up from a mountain spring.
Recreation
Mountains provide ample opportunities for recreation in nature, such as mountain and rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, backpacking, camping, downhill and cross-country skiing, snowboarding and snowshoeing. They also host sites of cultural or historical significance, such as the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, which draws millions of visitors annually. In fact, mountain visits make up 15 to 20% of global tourism. Mountain and snow tourism generated at least $4.9 billion in 2023, which is expected to grow to $8 billion by 2033.
Main Threats to Mountains
When you see craggy peaks towering above the lowlands or spewing ash and lava into the sky, mountains may seem invincible to the whims of humans. Yet their size and power can’t protect mountain ecosystems from the same environmental pressures that human activiy is placing on the rest of the world.
Climate Threats
Scientists have warned that climate change (driven by the burning of fossil fuels), is the greatest threat to mountain ecosystems.
Climate Shift
For every degree that lowlands warm, mountains warm on average 1.8 degrees Celsius. And since 1950, mountains have been heating 25% to 50% faster than the global average. This speed of warming can alter ecosystems faster than plants, animals and humans can adapt, increasing the risk that diseases or invasive species will rise to new mountain life zones and harm native species. The shifting of mountain life zones could threaten unique alpine species with mass extinction.
This rapid warming also threatens the snow and ice that shape alpine life, culture and recreation. One study found that the U.S. ski industry lost $5 billion between 2000 and 2019 due to a lack of snow and the cost of making artificial snow to compensate. Another calculated that 1 in 8 current ski areas wouldn’t get any natural snow cover by 2100. This would threaten local economies that depend on tourism as well as mountain biodiversity, as ski slopes are constructed in higher, more remote areas to chase the remaining snow, shrinking the undisturbed habitats home to mountain life.
Glacier Melt
Perhaps the climate mountain threat that could harm the largest amount of people is the melting of mountain glaciers. This threatens mountains’ status as the world’s water towers, putting the freshwater and energy of over a billion people at risk.
Non-polar glaciers lost around 267 metric gigatons of mass per year between 2000 and 2019 and doubled their rate of thinning during the same time period. A 2023 study found that even if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, nearly half of all glaciers will melt by 2100. If warming is allowed to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius, 68% would melt. If it reached four degrees, 83% would disappear. Beyond the impact on mountain or mountain-reliant communities, the melting of these glaciers would also contribute to sea-level rise, pushing up water levels by just under 4 inches in the 1.5 degrees scenario and 4.5 inches in the 2.7 degrees of warming — submerging an area where more than 10 million currently live.
Mountain Disasters
Warmer temperatures and glacial melt also increase the risk of mountain disasters such as landslides, rockslides and floods. When glaciers retreat and mountain permafrost melts, this can cause flooding, as there is more water running down the mountain more quickly. It can also destabilize the ground, increasing the risk of land movements like landslides, rockslides and avalanches in warm or thick snow. The climate crisis has also increased the risk of a specific type of flood known as a glacial lake outburst flood. These floods occur when glacial meltwater pools in lakes that are then destabilized by an earthquake, rain storm or dam breach, sending massive amounts of water down the hillside. The number, volume and area of these lakes have increased by 50% since 1990, and 15 million people are now threatened by these types of floods, especially in the Himalayas and the Andes.
Other Threats
The high biodiversity of mountain ecosystems also makes them vulnerable to human threats. Because mountain species have evolved to succeed in such unique environments, they can be easily harmed if that unique ecosystem is threatened. For example, the Taita thrush is only found in the Taita hills of Kenya; it can’t survive in the drier grasslands below.
Habitat / Biodiversity Loss
Human activity can threaten mountain ecosystems directly through development, deforestation and the introduction of invasive or pest species. When a larger number of humans move up into the mountains to live or farm, this can displace native plants and animals and increase human-wildlife conflict when the wild mountain species eat crops or livestock. Poachers also target lower mountain mammals.
In the past, mountain forests haven’t experienced aggressive deforestation like lowlands have. However, this is starting to change. Between 2000 and 2018, humans cleared 78 million hectares of montane forest. The main causes of this deforestation were commercial logging, tree clearing for agriculture and wildfires. The most deforested mountain areas tended to coincide with tropical biodiversity hotspots.
One example of this trend is Southeast Asia, which is home to around half of all tropical montane forests. There, upland forest loss has accelerated in the 2010s, accounting for 42% of the region’s total as of 2019. Mountain forest loss can also increase the risk of flooding and erosion, worsening water quality and affecting native flora and fauna. Species that might need to shift their range to accommodate rising temperatures have less habitat to work with. Southeast Asia’s mountain forests are also especially adept at storing carbon compared with lowland forests, so removing them makes it harder to keep both local and global temperatures lower.
Pollution
The main sources of pollution for mountains are human activities like logging, mining, logging, agriculture, grazing and recreation, as well as the transport of smaller pollutants through the atmosphere. Air pollution from urban or industrial centers can travel to mountains, where it not only worsens air quality but also enters plant tissue, soil and water. This pollution has harmed forests in the Carpathian mountains and brought smog to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where at one point ozone had harmed almost half of the black cherry trees and 79% of milkweed plants sampled. Microplastics have also been found high in mountain ranges, from Mount Everest to the Alps.
Overtourism
While mountain recreation can provide an economic boost to local communities and offer visitors a chance to learn about and appreciate mountains, it has a downside. Sometimes, mountain tourists are not as respectful as they should be or tours are not designed to account for the impact of visitors to vulnerable ecosystems.
Increased visitors can bring more construction of tourist infrastructure like ski lodges or cabins, increased vehicle traffic that emits air pollution, noise and light pollution that disturbs animals, problems with proper waste disposal, disturbance of mountain wildlife and negative encounters with local communities.
One example of overtourism gone wrong is Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain from sea level and a major climbing destination. So much waste has accumulated on Everest that it has been called the “world’s highest garbage dump.” Around 100,000 people visit Everest’s Sagarmatha National Park every year, and around 600 try to summit the mountain every climbing season. The average climber generates 18 pounds of waste, most of which stays on the mountain. In addition to larger debris like abandoned tents, oxygen canisters and even dead bodies, climbers also leave behind human waste. With increased melt and runoff from climate change, some of this waste has begun to flow into the local water supply, putting people downstream at risk from dangerous diseases like cholera and hepatitis A.
How to Protect Mountains
Humans have the power to harm mountain ecosystems, but we also have the power to protect them. The decisions we make as citizens, consumers, policymakers and tourists can have a positive impact on these magical environments.
Protecting Mountains From Climate Change
As previously discussed, climate change is one of the biggest threats to mountains and glaciers.
Mitigation
The most important way to protect mountains from the climate crisis is the same as the most important way to protect the entire Earth: We must phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. This means both preventing development of new fossil fuel deposits, replacing oil, gas and coal with renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and transitioning from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles while improving public transportation options. In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends nearly halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The second main driver of the climate crisis is the destruction of natural carbon sinks through deforestation and other forms of land-use change. This means that protecting mountain habitats has a double benefit for mountains: It preserves an individual ecosystem from immediate disturbance and it lowers the impacts of climate change on all mountains.
Adaptation
Even if world leaders succeed in winding down the use of fossil fuels and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — something that seems increasingly unlikely — mountain communities will need to adjust to the climate impacts they’re already experiencing and the ones that are projected to continue, such as the loss of nearly half of mountain glaciers by 2100.
Some are already taking action. Resort employees on Switzerland’s Mount Titlis have started covering the mountain’s glacier with protective polyester fleece during the summer. Venezuela is restoring wetlands to deal with water shortages. And in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region of Pakistan, communities are working to establish an early-warning system for more frequent floods. The Adaptation at Altitude program seeks to help mountain communities become more resilient to climate change by researching effective solutions and sharing them across alpine regions.
Unfortunately, the IPCC found that current mountain adaptations are not fast, expansive or substantial enough to respond to a high level of climate risks. Policymakers can boost the adaptive ambition of mountain regions by fostering international collaboration. They can developing holistic projects that consider all the needs of mountain communities, support more research and data gathering and making sure mountain communities have the funds they need.
Protecting Mountains From Other Threats
Beyond climate change, there are other issues that can harm mountains.
Exploitation and Deforestation
Governments, corporations and individuals can take steps to protect mountain ecosystems from exploitation. Research into mountain deforestation found that deforestation was less likely to occur in protected areas, so conserving mountain ecosystems — and safeguarding the land rights of any Indigenous communities that steward them — is one immediate way to prevent further habitat and biodiversity loss.
Scientists say these protected areas should be large enough to give species space to move. Governments can also regulate extractive industries and support ecological restoration and agroforestry efforts. They can plan dams and other infrastructure in such a way that won’t disturb waterflow or wildlife. Restoration or reforestation projects should replant a variety of native species rather than single tree species in monoculture plantations.The international community could also negotiate treaties to specifically protect mountain ecosystems.
Tourism companies can follow best-practices to make sure that they are being mindful of the limits of mountain ecosystems and the rights of local communities. Larger food or lumber corporations can make sure that their supply chains are deforestation-free. Consumers can choose to support companies that respect mountain ecosystems and avoid those that don’t.
Responsible Climbing and Tourism
One of the most important ways individuals can protect mountains is to behave responsibly when they visit them. This means following the principle of “leave no trace” and taking anything you bring to a mountain with you when you leave. Other things you can do are travel during off-peak season or to less popular destinations, rely on non-fossil fuel transport when possible, support sustainable tourism companies, be respectful of Indigenous or local communities you encounter, buy second-hand gear or share equipment with others and spread awareness of these best practices to other hikers. If you are lucky enough to trek Mount Everest, make sure to offset your climb by bringing your waste back down with you.
Takeaway
“The mountains are issuing a distress call,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres at a 2023 United Nations climate change conference.
That distress call comes in the form of melting glaciers, sudden floods, snowless ski slopes and falling forests. If human societies choose to ignore that call, they could usher in a future in which mountains are unrecognizable, as glaciers, snowpacks and entire niches of species disappear. However, if we can learn to work with mountains to stop exploitation, the outlook for mountains might be brighter.
The post What Mountains Provide and Why They Need Protection appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/mountains-protection-conservation-ecowatch.html
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Algenesis & Blueview Launch the Algae-Based Polyurethane Industry
Travel back in time to hear the origin story of Algenesis, which started as two companies in one, a biotechnology innovator and footwear maker. Today, the company is a leading maker of bio-based plastics. In 2023, Algenesis had just begun making a new, sustainable material and found a clever way to prove its utility to get big companies to embrace it. Join the conversation hear why a shoe company was the best a practical application to prove the value of a plant-based, compostable bioplastic foam. Stephen Mayfield, a professor of Biology at UC San Diego and director of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology, invented Soleic, an algae-based rubbery foam material that can be used in footwear, surfboards, and other products in the place of petroleum-based polyurethane foam. He launched Algenesis, a biotechnology-based materials science company to commercialize Soleic.
Note: This article contains affiliate links that help fund our Recycling Directory, the most comprehensive in North America.
But shoe companies did not come running to use Soleic, which biodegrades completely in sea water and compost piles. Along with Algenisis president Tom Cooke, a footwear and apparel industry veteran who had worked for Reef and Vans, Steve launched Blueview Footwear, maker of the world’s first compostable shoe. Steve and Tom join me today to talk about the evolution of Algenesis and Blueview, as well as the many materials Soleic could replace across a variety of product categories. The companies have also developed compostable, plant-based fabrics and a bioplastic waterproofing technology that biodegrades into organic material in a home compost pile. You can learn more about Blueview Footwear at blueviewfootwear.com and its parent company Algenesis Materials at algenesismaterials.com.
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Editor’s Note: This podcast originally aired on February 20, 2023.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Algenesis & Blueview Launch the Algae-Based Polyurethane Industry appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/earth911-podcast-algenesis-blueview-launch-the-algae-based-polyurethane-industry/
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging
Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won’t try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.
Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical’s Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada’s Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald’s extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can’t find another bag in the store that’s labeled the same way.
The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California’s SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.
To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe (0:09)
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Every year, Americans buy roughly 5 billion pounds of fresh produce that’s packaged in flexible plastic — that’s salads, carrots, potatoes, lots of produce. That packaging extends shelf life, reducing food waste, but most of it is made from virgin polyethylene refined from fossil fuels, and almost none of it gets recycled.
My guest today is Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging for the U.S. produce industry. And on December 11 of 2025, Emerald announced a significant milestone: that over the previous year, the company had replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, as you’ll probably hear it in this discussion.
That shift — granted that it’s only a million fewer pounds of plastic packaging in a vast sea of it — is a suggestion of what’s possible in food packaging. However, getting recycled plastic approved for direct food contact isn’t simple. Produce packaging is especially demanding, because shelf life and food safety are not negotiable. The FDA requires rigorous testing to ensure that no contaminants from that PCR migrate into food, and for years, the industry defaulted to virgin plastic because recycled content couldn’t meet those standards reliably at scale.
Emerald is working to change that equation. In collaboration with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, amongst others, they’ve introduced the first 30% post-consumer recycled materials potato bag approved for food contact, and Emerald’s initiative supports Walmart’s Project Gigaton, which aims to eliminate 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the retailer’s supply chain by 2030. Emerald has also partnered with D’Arrigo, the company behind Andy Boy produce, to introduce another 30% PCR bag for romaine lettuce hearts — and that’s a shift that has removed over 600,000 pounds of virgin plastic from the supply chain between June 2023 and 2025.
Emerald is a third-generation, family-owned company based in Union City, California. Kevin brings the perspective of an organization that has operated through six decades of rapid, often revolutionary changes in how Americans buy and consume food. He’s led the company through its evolution from a regional bag manufacturer to becoming an industry leader, pushing the boundaries of sustainable, flexible packaging.
So we’re going to talk with Kevin about what it took to get recycled content into food contact packaging at scale, whether grocery customers are willing to pay more for sustainable options, how California’s recent SB 54 packaging law is reshaping the industry, and whether flexible packaging can ever become truly circular when most curbside programs still don’t accept it. You can learn more about Emerald Packaging at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Empack.com.
Can recycled content packaging go from future milestone to mainstream reality? Let’s find out, right after this. Welcome to the show, Kevin. How you doing today?
Kevin Kelly (3:33)
I’m doing great. How are you?
Mitch Ratcliffe (3:35)
I’m well, I’m well. Thanks for asking, and thanks for joining us. We’ve been working to get together for a few months now, and I’m glad that we actually now have the opportunity to complete the conversation. I’ve shared a summary of Emerald Packaging’s recent activity in my introduction, but could you share the backstory? When did your grandfather start the company?
Kevin Kelly (3:52)
It was actually my father. He started it in 1963 with three partners. They were based in Berkeley, California, and they mainly made — not produce packaging, which is what we specialize in now — they were making bread bags, because they were in the bread district. They were unionized by the bread workers’ union. It was a very different company when they started out. It also had one printing press and two bag machines.
Today, we have 32 bag-making machines, seven printing presses, and I don’t know how many other machines, and about 250 employees. It became a family business in ’93, and then gradually the other siblings retired, and I’m the last one here. So we’ve got a wonderful staff behind us — very creative, very technical, and best of all, they’re very detailed, which I’m not, which is why we’ve been having problems getting together for a couple of months.
Mitch Ratcliffe (4:52)
Tell me, how has the company changed since you’ve been involved with it? Obviously you just described a massive transition. But why the sustainability focus? When did that take hold?
Kevin Kelly (5:05)
Well, I started worrying about sustainability and packaging back in 2000, believe it or not, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board did a study of what was in landfills, and it turned out that plastic was a lot of what was in landfills, especially the ground covering that the agricultural industry uses in their growing operations. And so we started, with a bunch of California companies back then, having a conversation with the American Chemistry Council, which I can’t stand — I’m just going to be upfront about it — about creating a recycling system in California, because you could tell in the early 2000s this moment was coming. I mean, maybe it was a distant moment, but it was coming.
And the ACC told us absolutely not. The resin companies wanted nothing to do with fees. So really, back then, a bunch of small plastics companies in California couldn’t do anything if the ACC wouldn’t let us do anything. They had that much influence amongst both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
And so from there, I was sort of an orphan for a long time, you know — trying this, trying that. Worked with potato-based films, worked with PLA, polylactic acid. Tried different approaches. And then finally, a few years ago, post-consumer recycled resin became, I think, more affordable. It’s still about three times, four times the cost of virgin resin, but blended with virgin resin, I thought it was an affordable option now.
Trying to get people to buy anything that they can’t pass on — what a lot of people don’t know is that CPGs have year-long contracts with retailers, and there’s no causes for price increases, including acts of war, acts of God, supply disruption. So a lot of these companies are getting killed right now, but that’s another story for another day. They have no way to really pass on increases. And Walmart’s always said, we want sustainable packaging — we want it for free. They don’t say free; they say we want it for the same price as what we’re paying right now, which I take to mean free. They’ve gotten a little bit better in that stance, by the way, but there was really no way to pass things on.
So finally, in 2023, I just said, damn it. I’ve been working on this issue in one form or another for most of my career in packaging. I’m just going to do it. And so we convinced a customer to take their entire line and put 30% PCR in it, and we ate the cost of it. That was about 400,000 pounds of PCR right there. And from there, we attracted the interest of other companies. Some companies have taken surcharges, but PCR has really become our thrust at this point.
We’re still working with a lot of compostable options — in other words, experimenting — because at 5x, 6x, 7x, 10x, it’s still a very difficult proposition for most companies to take on. Companies with big margins, or specialty companies that don’t have year-long contracts, they have a little bit more leeway in this area, I think. But compostables remain — I’m not going to call it a pipe dream, because I’m feeling like the extended producer responsibility programs are making it more feasible — but they’re just not there yet.
Mitch Ratcliffe (8:39)
You’ve removed more than a million pounds of virgin plastic from your supply chain so far with recycled material, and that’s just within the last couple of years. How did you have to change the company to embrace the PCR process and address customer concerns about food safety?
Kevin Kelly (8:57)
Well, those are two great questions. I’ll break it down on a couple of different levels. Internally, when you’re the CEO of a family-run business and you say, hey, let’s go do this, people tend to start going and doing it. And there was a great deal of enthusiasm amongst the troops anyway about taking on a real project and commercializing it. So within the company, there wasn’t much opposition.
Now, Kevin walking into a room and saying, hey, there’s this really great technology — there’s a company, Circulus, that’s got an operation out in the Central Valley of California, about two hours away — let’s start working with them. Well, then my poor Director of Operations, Michael Rincon, has to make it happen. And PCR is an animal all its own. In terms of production runs, there’s a lot of variation within loads, for instance — not just between loads, but within. It causes a lot of carbon buildup on the extrusion lines, and so you have to shut down and clean them every eight hours. There’s much greater waste because of the variation within the loads, and so on and so forth. So we had a lot of learning on the production side in order to make this happen. We’re still learning.
But the other piece there has been the inconsistency amongst suppliers. Everybody talks about recycling and packaging, and yet you go to recycling conferences, and all you hear and all you really read about are the financial problems of recycling companies. The end markets really still aren’t there for them. In the case of PET, they’re competing with overseas supply that’s much cheaper. And so getting a consistent source as one company after the other goes out of business has been tough. So that’s been a challenge.
Our customers — they took us at our word that it was safe. They wanted to see what the process for ensuring that it was food-grade PCR was, you know — what were our certifications, what were the certifications of our suppliers, and then how did we trace within loads? Because the last thing you want is food-grade mixing with non-food-grade.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:18)
You make this point already, and it was a question I wanted to dig into a bit, which is: with PCR, the sources are very mixed. Where does the feedstock come from? Is it from previously used film, or are we talking about other sources as well?
Kevin Kelly (11:33)
No, you’re talking, in the case of food-grade — you’re talking previously sourced film for, you know, plastic wrap around pallets. It’s not the salad bag that’s being brought back to the store and the store drop-off thing.
Mitch Ratcliffe (11:51)
And so this is largely a procurement management issue for you. And do you do a lot of testing of the material you get, or is this something that you take as certified? And is there a certification that you can rely on?
Kevin Kelly (12:04)
Well, I think that’s been one of the problems. You have this sort of nebulous process where a company that is making food-grade PCR — it’s nebulous. It just sounds strange. It’s not what I’m used to. When I’m used to certifications, they go to the FDA, they submit samples, they submit their process, and the FDA will come back and say — give you what’s called a letter of no objection, which hardly sounds like an endorsement, a stamp of approval. It’s like, we got no objection. So I think that process really actually has to be cleaned up.
There has to be some way — the Biodegradable Products Institute, there has to be some way of certifying companies and periodic testing that goes beyond us testing our incoming material. We’re a $90 million company. We have the ability to do some testing, and we do, but really we’re relying on Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals to do what they say they’re doing, which is sourcing pallet wrap, washing it, washing it again, drying it, repelletizing it, drying it again, to drive out any impurities. So it is a difficult process. We have to have possession from them of the chain going all the way back to the source, but that’s a lot of documentation, and I think that’s where companies have come to rely on mass balance. But mass balance doesn’t tell you anything about food-grade, non-food-grade, and it’s also, of course, been manipulated by companies in ways that have undermined a process that could otherwise be helpful.
Mitch Ratcliffe (13:58)
Thinking about what you just said — is a transparency movement needed in order for PCR materials to be truly understood, both by the manufacturer who’s going to use the material and the consumer in the long run? Do we need that kind of full life cycle accounting to be available to say this plastic has gone through these steps, so people have confidence about the food safety issues?
Kevin Kelly (14:22)
I think so. I’m trying to imagine in my head how we would do that. That’s why there’s people smarter and greater than I involved in these things. But I think some way of tracing back, or some way of testing, or more periodic testing. Or, for instance, you could say, Emerald Packaging, you have to test your material 10, 15 times a year, submit, and it has to be done. You know, actually, that doesn’t work. I’m trying to think of a way you could possibly do it, you know, so that it’s absolutely ironclad. I’m going to say, I don’t quite know how you would do it, but I would frankly prefer that, because I know I’m making all efforts to use food-grade PCR, right? We’re documenting, we’re maintaining all of our documentation, and we’re working only with suppliers that we’ve gone and visited and certified ourselves.
There are other companies, especially at the beginning when we came out, who were saying — you can make a plastic that has three to five layers in it, right? You’re using one plastic on the surface, something in the middle, and another plastic on the surface. And they would say, well, we’re using PCR; it doesn’t have to be food-grade, because we’re putting it in the middle. You know, that protects it. And the company buying — particularly, say, in the produce industry — who aren’t educated in these things might think that that sounds reasonable. It’s not, of course, because whatever you put in the middle migrates to the surface. So if you’ve got contaminants in the damn thing, you know they’re going to get out of the middle eventually and end up on the surface, and then end up on the food.
And so we had to do a lot of customer education about what they had to get from their supplier in order for them to be reasonably certain that they were using food-grade PCR versus just any old derelict PCR that came from materials that are fine in a garbage bag, but not fine touching food. That education process largely then fell on us. I think we’re so early in this — I, you know, frankly, haven’t been able to find another bag or package in the store that says it uses food-grade PCR. We’re sort of like the canary in the coal mine. A lot of what one might hope would be coming from an industry organization, or the FDA, or a California certifying government body, or a government body that would be checking, you know, whether things were food-grade or not — randomly off the store shelf — all that’s fallen on us.
Mitch Ratcliffe (17:18)
That’s a huge undertaking, and I can understand now why it’s three or four times more expensive to use this material. How did you make the case to Wada Farms or D’Arrigo that this was a good choice? Was it a sustainable, moral suasion argument, or was it a consumers-are-going-to-love-you-for-this? How did you bring them on board?
Kevin Kelly (17:39)
For me, it starts with: this is a great way to make your packaging more sustainable. It starts with the moral argument that I always begin with — that, because that’s where I come from. I know one should be thinking about these things as huge marketing opportunities, and they are, I suppose. But for me, it’s really about: what can packaging do to move the needle on becoming more environmentally friendly? You know, I guess that just comes out of familial commitment, having to look your kids in the eye and tell them you’re actually doing something versus not. And so I always begin the conversation there.
And then I go to the marketing question — consumers will love it. And, oh, by the way, you know, Walmart has a program — that they’ve revised somewhat — but they have a program really emphasizing post-consumer resin in Walmart brand. And so this is something that will please Walmart, especially if the upcharge is very small or there’s no upcharge at all. And in the case of Wada Farms, that’s the sale they really took to Walmart. And whoever the purchasing person at Walmart on the other end was knew about the Walmart program, was committed to the Walmart program, and so jumped on the opportunity. That doesn’t always happen, but they did, and they saw it both, I think, as an internal possibility to fulfill an internal commitment to the environment, but also a way to market potatoes to consumers using packaging that was more environmentally friendly.
Mitch Ratcliffe (19:27)
If we don’t make this transition, what’s the outcome for the economy in the long term? Do we essentially choke ourselves on our waste? How do you envision the benefits of the sustainable packaging movement alleviating the crisis that we’re entering?
Kevin Kelly (19:45)
I think that the crisis operates on many different levels, right? So let’s sort of back up a little bit. You have the greenhouse gas crisis, you have the waste crisis, and they intersect, obviously, but they’re two distinct things.
And so in the case of some packaging, I believe there’s an argument to be made that it actually does reduce food waste and therefore greenhouse gas. The State of Oregon looked at that question in 2017 in a little-known study that came back and said, in the balance, produce packaging, for instance, reduces greenhouse gas through reduction of food waste, food preservation, shelf life extension, more than it actually contributes to greenhouse gas in the production thereof. So there’s this single study floating out there that says that. It’s not true in the case of every kind of packaging.
You can certainly ask yourself — and I’m not going to get into this debate — whether we need Ho Hos and Twinkies or not, and whether we need them wrapped, therefore, to get them. So, you know, there is this question on the store shelves of where is packaging beneficial and where it isn’t.
I think PCR moves the needle a little. I think it tells you where we are in this process. When one turn of this is close to being circular, right? Maybe we’ve, like, rounded the bend — one of the hundreds of bends to go to actually form a complete circle. But it’s a start. I mean, which is the way, I guess, we sort of have to look at it.
If you’re over in my world, the thing about sustainable packaging, and I think this has been true for the last 20 years, is that the technologies exist today to take the entire packaging world into compostable packaging. We’d then be choking on compostable packaging. But, you know, we’d need a lot of home compost, obviously, to deal with billions of pounds of compostable packaging. I mean, the infrastructure doesn’t exist, so on and so forth. The point I’m making here is the technology has been there. The question throughout has been, who’s going to pay for it?
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:22)
I think this is an absolutely critical question, and one we hear about with the green premium. I want to dig into this, but we’re going to take a quick commercial break, folks. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned.
Mitch Ratcliffe (22:37)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue talking with Kevin Kelly. He is the CEO of Emerald Packaging in Union City, California, and we’re talking about the company’s investments in developing more sustainable food packaging options. Kevin, you mentioned that the flexible packaging recycling infrastructure in the United States is, let’s just say, still very limited. Most curbside programs don’t accept it. As you look at the material flow in your industry, are there new business opportunities in collection and processing that you see people missing, that they should be stepping into?
Kevin Kelly (23:12)
Well, I think you’re being generous when you say it’s limited. It’s virtually nonexistent, right? I mean, let’s be — the store drop-back, drop-off program is a nice — I don’t know, it’s nice, but imagine if everybody took their bags back to the store and Safeway became a solid waste dump. You know, it’d be a wake-up call to everybody.
But at any rate, I think there’s a big business opportunity in recycling, period. The issue has been on that end of things — the end markets. Okay? So you have recycled material. Where does it go? In a free market economy, you’re dealing with virgin material that’s cheaper than its recycled cousin. How do you create markets — not just create markets so that you attract capital into the recycling business, especially now where so many recyclers are going belly up because the end markets don’t exist and there’s too much competition for materials that can actually be used and resold? Which is true in the food-grade PCR business as well. I mean, how many loads of pallet wrap can you get out of a Walmart distribution center? There’s a lot of competition for what are called clean bales. They’re super expensive, and then you have to be able to turn around and sell that at a profit.
The perfect example is Circulus, which was a company that was created to make PCR, including food-grade PCR. They put a gorgeous facility in the Central Valley — some of the most sophisticated machinery I’ve ever seen in my life. And I love manufacturing lines. They put another one in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and they were going to put one in Georgia that I think they’re finally going ahead with. Was backed by venture capital — backed by a group out of Texas. And I think they looked at it as, wow, look at these EPR programs. There’s going to be a real opportunity here. And I’d say three years ago, I would have thought the same. They lasted about 18 months. And venture capital, private equity — which would be one source of capital in order to build out, you know, a private recycling system — recognized that they weren’t going to make any money soon. I always said I wanted to be the second or third owner of Circulus, because I was convinced, you know, within a few months of getting to know the market, that they were going to not make it, and that the private equity, which wants to see instantaneous returns, wasn’t going to be able to put up with the ups and downs of the current recycling system.
So they ended up selling out to Dow Chemical. You know, Dow Chemical has kept the operation going. They’ve put some money into it. They closed — I should say they closed the facility in central California. They kept the Ardmore facility going. They’re building the facility in Georgia. How much money will Dow put in to expand it? You know, they haven’t shown a great appetite to do so. The resin company that has probably put the most money in is Nova Chemicals, up in Canada, which sort of makes sense, because you have well-developed EPR programs in Canada, right? You have mandates around recycled material use in some provinces, and so Nova’s got a pretty good market just there in order to be able to sell the material.
Again, I think — you know, businesses sometimes don’t like to hear this, but the word “mandate” is going to be probably the savior of recycling in the United States, because governments mandating post-consumer resin use will drive a market and a viable one, because companies will have to actually use the material in order to hit the mandate.
Mitch Ratcliffe (27:35)
So with EPR laws taking off across the country — but particularly California’s SB 54, that requires a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 (so six years from now), and it has minimum recycled content thresholds in law as well. How has that changed the game? Are we moving in the right direction? Do you see that policy starting to come into place to put the weight behind the spear?
Kevin Kelly (28:02)
Good question. I think that SB 54 might actually do the opposite. Why? Because, in the original regulations, if a company used PCR, they were given a pound-for-pound credit against their fees. That got wiped out. And now, the overall program — if you get the mandate — is to reduce plastic use by 10%, the use of virgin plastic, by a certain date. I think it’s 2028. The low-hanging fruit there is, say, agricultural film, or something that is using a lot of plastic where you can use non-food-grade material all day long, and it doesn’t have to be widely used across the supply chain. 8% or 10% is an easy number to hit.
The fees themselves are small enough — believe it or not, even at, say, 60 cents a pound or 80 cents a pound for the worst sort of materials, mixed materials — that it doesn’t make sense to switch to food-grade PCR, which is still, you know — the differential before we went into the war was around $1.30 a pound between it and virgin material.
And so I think the regulation writers have to be more cognizant about the economics and the financial incentives that are being set, both within the fees and within the regulations themselves, in terms of using PCR or compostables as an offset. And one of the problems there — I think you get to the crux of this — is that there’s not a lot of conversation between all parties. The regulators aren’t talking — we’re just now starting, and, you know, it’s shame on both parties. We’re just now starting to talk to CAA, and we’re just now starting to talk to CalRecycle, and we’re really just now beginning to explain the economics of PCR within the structure of an EPR system. And I wish we had had these conversations a year, a year or two ago. It’s hard for CalRecycle to find us. It’s hard for us to find them in the mix. We’re small. I think we’ve come to more prominence because of the food-grade PCR use, and the fact that we’re one of the few doing it, and so folks have begun approaching us.
But in general, you know, having conversation with the packaging industry has been not that fruitful for regulators for decades, and so it isn’t a conversation that most have sought out. You know, even if there’s one or two of us out there who would like to genuinely have it and like to genuinely engage, it’s hard to find us in the mix of “nos” that the American Chemistry Council throws out there for every proposal for reform. So that’s a — I don’t know if the answer is discombobulated or not, but I’m finding that there’s not an easy answer to any of these questions. There has to be a thoughtful answer. To be thoughtful, you have to understand the packaging and the market and the prices within the market, and folks are very often unwilling to talk about prices and where they are today, and where they might be if we actually scale a proper recycling system, with proper PCR manufacturing, and then a proper end market. Those are the kind of conversations I think that need to be had in every state across the country that’s developing an EPR program.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:07)
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I’m surprised to hear that those conversations didn’t happen as we were preparing for SB 54 to go through the legislative process. But let me ask this: if, in fact, all the pieces fall into place — regulatory, there’s demand, and so forth — can you get past 30% PCR in this packaging? Is this a technical limit or a supply limit at this point?
Kevin Kelly (32:34)
It’s a technical limit.
Mitch Ratcliffe (32:36)
It’s a technical limit. So where can we go?
Kevin Kelly (32:39)
Right now, we’ve pushed to 50%. So we’re not at 100, and that’ll take, you know, some time. I think that would take several years, just given variations inside loads. But I think 50% is possible. It’s not the best-looking plastic on Earth, you know, but it’s certainly a reduction in virgin resin, and it is technically possible with the right company producing low-variation, high-grade PCR. And there are some out there who do that. So we found you can push it along.
I wouldn’t want to stake a claim and say all my packaging is going to be 50% PCR today, because I don’t think we could find enough consistent material, you know, to come up with 20 million pounds of PCR capable of creating 50% PCR packaging. I just wouldn’t want to do it. I think 30% is comfortable, and frankly, above what most companies are willing to attempt, which is around 20.
Mitch Ratcliffe (33:52)
Why is that?
Kevin Kelly (33:54)
It’s — I think this is where we get into, as a smaller, family-owned business, we can de-emphasize profit a little bit and say, okay, we’re going to push this to the technical limit that we’re comfortable with, and we’re going to accept more downtime for cleaning and dealing with loads that might require a lot more babysitting through the production process. We’re willing to do that. I think a lot of companies — once you, you know, if you’re owned by private equity, if you’re publicly owned, it’s a different calculus than the calculus we make. And I think that’s one of the benefits of smaller family-owned businesses. You know, if the family has a sense of social responsibility.
Mitch Ratcliffe (34:44)
Do you think that, in the private equity-dominated world that we’re in right now, we lack the sufficient patient capital to achieve a circular economy in the long term? Or are enough sources of capital starting to migrate toward this in response to things like the war and onshoring our supply chains and so forth, to get us there sometime within our lifetimes —
Kevin Kelly (35:08)
Yours and mine?
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:09)
Yeah, recognizing we’re both of a certain age.
Kevin Kelly (35:12)
My children’s, sure. You know, I’m 65. I don’t see it, unfortunately, happening in my lifetime. Now, I didn’t think I’d see an American Pope in my lifetime either, so there are surprises in the world.
Mitch Ratcliffe (35:30)
Miracles do happen.
Kevin Kelly (35:31)
They do. So I think, all things being possible, I would feel very comfortable saying my 25-year-old kids will live in a very, very different economy than the one I do today. And, you know, I think we do have to get past the private equity mindset. In fact, you know, the problem with where the social goals of society have gone, and where private equity has gone, has really shifted things far more, as you allude to, you know — getting returns within five years and flipping the company and, you know, doing this and doing this and doing this. It’s not worried, really at all, about social responsibility. So that’s where state mandates, I think, come into play, because you impose those upon companies that might not otherwise wish to engage them.
Mitch Ratcliffe (36:27)
When you imagine a grocery shopper picking up a bag of potatoes or romaine hearts, and they see that it’s made with PCR — what do you want them to understand about what that actually means to them and their health and the environment?
Kevin Kelly (36:42)
Well, I want them to know that it doesn’t affect their health in any particularly bad way. So we want them to feel comfortable that the recycled material is, in fact, food-grade, and what’s touching the food isn’t going to somehow, you know, introduce cadmium into their bodies, something like that. So you’d certainly want that — the bare minimum.
Then, I think, you next want them to know that this is a nice step along the road to a better, environmentally friendly packaging world, and that by buying this packaging and not that packaging, they’re choosing to support it. You see that most clearly in the experiment that Taylor Farms is doing at certain grocery stores with the fiber tray, fiber clamshell. You can choose the all-plastic one, or you can pay 10 cents more and actually get a little bit less spinach. Which one are you going to choose? And the consumer actually has been going for that fiber tray.
Mitch Ratcliffe (37:50)
All the data says that the consumers want those kinds of things.
Kevin Kelly (37:54)
They’re willing to pay a little bit more, or they’re willing to take a little bit less for themselves to participate, right? I mean, they feel like, okay, I’m shopping, but I’m actually making a statement in buying this and not that. So I think that allowing consumers to participate in building the world that they would like to build is important messaging that companies should be creating and making, in terms of marketing, what they’re trying to sell. Because you do want consumers to feel good about what they’re buying, but you want them also to be supporting the world they want, and the world we’d all like to see — which is a far more environmentally friendly one than the one we’re in today.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:42)
Well, we can hope and we can work. As Jane Goodall said, hope is an active verb. It’s not something you sit back and wait for the results of.
Kevin Kelly (38:49)
That’s good.
Mitch Ratcliffe (38:51)
How can our listeners follow Emerald Packaging’s progress? Where should they tune in?
Kevin Kelly (38:56)
Well, I think we keep updates going on our website. I do a lot of interviews, and as we make progress, I tend to write about it or talk about it. Most of the articles about us, or information about us, eventually turns up in our news, the news part of our website. Or I started to use LinkedIn — we’re not a big company, so we’re not, you know, doing advertising on social media, or advertising on television, or anything like that. But we do try to get the word out there about what we’re doing and what we see as possible, both when it comes to PCR, when it comes to EPR laws, and when it comes to compostable materials.
Mitch Ratcliffe (39:43)
Well, Kevin, I hope that talking today helped spread the story, and I really appreciate it. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thanks very much.
Kevin Kelly (39:50)
Oh, I thank you, and thanks for putting up with the complexities of the conversation. I think we captured that pretty well.
Mitch Ratcliffe (40:02)
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, and the company that has now replaced more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene with post-consumer recycled material, or PCR, in food contact bags that you can buy at Walmart through Wada Farms, and Andy Boy romaine hearts packages. You can learn more about Emerald and Kevin’s work at empack.com — that’s all one word, no space, no dash. Emeraldpackaging.com.
The headline here isn’t that million pounds, even though that’s an encouraging piece of news. The headline is that Kevin started having this conversation in 2000, when the California Integrated Waste Management Board first measured plastic in landfills and asked the American Chemistry Council whether the industry might participate in a recycling system. And of course, the answer from the industry was no. Now, 26 years later, Kevin’s family-owned bag maker has become, in his own words, the canary in the coal mine for food-grade PCR — because no industry body, no FDA process beyond that letter of no objection we heard about, and no California regulator has built the certification, testing, or chain-of-custody infrastructure this circular economy needs to scale.
Emerald is doing the customer education itself, walking produce companies through the difference between food-grade PCR and what Kevin colorfully called “any old derelict PCR,” which can be kind of gray. You’ve seen this in some Coke bottles, for instance. That gap between what is technically possible and corporate aspirations is the real story behind the million pounds of diverted plastic waste.
Emerald Packaging’s home state, California, can teach the rest of the country. You may remember my recent conversation with Zena Harris of Green Spark Group, in which California’s climate disclosure law is forcing a digital nervous system into being across Hollywood’s supply chain — and that regulation is doing what regulation is supposed to do. But, as Kevin said, SB 54 may do the opposite. The law mandates a 65% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 and sets a minimum PCR threshold. But Kevin pointed out that a pound-for-pound PCR credit, which would have encouraged people to replace virgin polyethylene with PCR, was wiped out of the rulemaking, so the fees are low enough that companies can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film collection and other low-hanging fruit, without actually addressing food-grade PCR. And yet, several years after the law was passed, conversations are just starting between CalRecycle, the California Air Resources Board, and packaging makers.
A mandate without the right price levers doesn’t drive the necessary transition. It delivers the cheapest path to compliance. And that’s a useful warning for every other state currently writing extended producer responsibility laws — including California, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota — where the design choices are being made right now that will determine whether or not food-grade PCR ever becomes economical at scale, or stays stuck in the boutique end of the market.
And a third point is the one that I’m going to be pondering after this conversation, and that is about Circulus. It’s a PCR plant in California’s Central Valley that was backed by Texas private equity and was supposed to be the supply-side answer to food-grade PCR, and it lasted only 18 months before Dow Chemical bought what remained, closed the California facility, while keeping an Oklahoma one running and moving slowly on a third site in Georgia. Kevin’s argument is that family-owned manufacturers, who can de-emphasize quarterly profit, are doing more to push PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund our energy and sustainability transition.
That maps closely to the lessons from my recent conversation with Disney Petit at LiquiDonate — circular infrastructure works when there is an immediate economic pull, as her platform creates by saving retailers money the day they sign up, and it stalls when investors are asked to wait for a market that requires a mandate, a law, to exist. So the case for patient capital is also a case for mandates designed well enough to create the demand that patience requires.
The billions of pounds of produce packaging that are shipped each year is not a problem one bag maker, one retailer, or one state can solve. And the 25-year arc of Kevin’s career argues that we’ve been waiting for the wrong thing. The technology has existed. It does exist now. The willing operators have existed — a few of them. But what’s been missing is the policy architecture, the certification backbone, and the capital structure that would let these operators do at scale what one family-owned company has now proven is possible at 30% PCR levels in produce packaging. The next legislative cycle in every EPR state is where that may be decided, and we’ll be tracking it on the show.
So stay tuned, folks. And if this conversation moved you, could you do one thing for the show this week? Pick a single episode from the archive of more than 550 interviews and send it to just one person who hasn’t heard us yet. A short review on your favorite podcast platform is the other way to help, because folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, your co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.
Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we’ll be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-emerald-packaging-ceo-kevin-kelly-delivers-recycled-produce-packaging/
Just over half the country is officially in drought, and about 155.7 million Americans—almost seven million more than last week—are now affected. The U.S. Drought Monitor’s April 23 report shows that 52.46% of the United States and Puerto Rico, and 62.78% of the Lower 48, are experiencing moderate drought or worse. According to NOAA, this is the worst spring drought on record for the continental United States.
This drought is not limited to one region. The Southeast just had its driest September-through-March since records began in 1895. The Colorado River system is only 36% full. Texas is 77% in drought, and Corpus Christi’s reservoirs have dropped to nearly 9%. Nebraska experienced its largest wildfire ever, fueled by dry grasslands. Oregon’s snowpack reached zero on April 1. In California, Tahoe City Cross melted completely by March 8, 40 days earlier than usual, after a record-breaking March heat wave caused rapid melting of an already low snowpack across most of the West.
The common factor is that from January through March, precipitation was below 70% of average across the lower 48 states, setting a new record. As a result, water restrictions are now broader and, in many places, more severe than usual.
The National Picture
The headline numbers come from the U.S. Drought Monitor, which is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center, USDA, and NOAA. As of April 21, drought conditions had worsened across the South, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, High Plains, and West, with a 2.9% increase in coverage over the past week and an 11.7% increase over the past month. The Northeast and parts of Texas and the eastern Plains saw modest improvement; everywhere else trended drier.
Two main climate factors have caused this record drought. First, La Niña led to less rainfall from January to March, with totals below 70% of average—the lowest since records began in 1895, just surpassing the previous low in 1910. Second, spring temperatures in the Central Plains, Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic were 5 to 10 degrees above normal, which sped up soil moisture loss and increased evaporation. This drought is not just about low rainfall; high temperatures are also drying out what little moisture remains.
The effects of the drought are already clear in the number of wildfires. By mid-April, over 1.7 million acres had burned across the country, nearly double the 10-year average. Nebraska’s Morrill Fire, which burned more than 640,000 acres in March, was the largest in the state’s history. In southeastern Georgia, the Highway 82 Fire destroyed at least 54 structures in Brantley County, which was the first county in the Southeast to reach exceptional drought (“D4”).
Southwest: The Colorado River Approaches a Threshold
The Colorado River Basin is facing water shortages not seen in modern times. The Bureau of Reclamation says the system is at about 36% of capacity. Lake Powell is only 23% full, and Lake Mead is about one-third full. Spring runoff into Lake Powell is expected to be just 22% of average. If this continues, 2026 could be one of the driest years in over sixty years, possibly even drier than 2002, which was the previous record.
In response, the Bureau of Reclamation announced in April that it plans to cut Lake Powell releases to 6 million acre-feet, the lowest in decades. They will also move water from Flaming Gorge to keep Lake Powell high enough for Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydropower. The dam provides electricity to about five million people, but water levels could drop too low by December if things do not improve. The seven states that share the Colorado River have not agreed on new rules for after 2026, when current guidelines expire. The Interior Department has said it may set new rules on its own if no agreement is reached this summer. Western states could be heading toward a conflict over water.
Local water restrictions are getting stricter. In March 2026, Erie, Colorado, moved to a Level 4 Emergency, the highest stage, which bans all residential sprinkler use. Aurora has completely banned new turf lawns. Denver Water started Stage 1 restrictions, asking residents to cut both indoor and outdoor water use by 20% until October 1. Along the Rio Grande, Elephant Butte is at 12.6% capacity, Falcon at 19.2%, and Amistad at 31.4%.
California: Permanent Rules Meet a Fourth Dry Year
California’s situation is more complex than just being in drought or not. In January 2026, the Drought Monitor showed no part of California in drought for the first time in 25 years. By April, Southern California was facing its fourth straight year of below-average rainfall. The statewide snowpack was only 18% of normal, and the State Water Project will limit water releases to 30% of normal.
What’s notable is that California’s restrictions no longer depend on whether a drought is officially declared. After the 2012-2017 drought, the state moved to a permanent year-round conservation framework codified by state law AB 1572 and the State Water Resources Control Board’s “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” rules.
Statewide baseline rules apply every year, regardless of conditions: no hosing down driveways or hardscape; no irrigation within 48 hours of rainfall; no irrigation runoff into streets or storm drains; mandatory shutoff nozzles on hoses; and recirculation requirements for fountains and decorative water features.
On top of these restrictions, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, issued a Level 1 conservation notice in March 2026 to all 26 city and county agency members. State enforcement of the new water-budget rules is paused until 2027 to give utilities time to adjust.
California is in for a dry summer this year.
Southeast: A Recharge Season That Failed
The Southeast, usually a humid region, is now facing a record drought. Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina all had their driest September-through-March since 1895. Normally, the region relies on December through March to restore soil moisture, streamflows, and groundwater, but this year, that recharge mostly did not occur.
The result, as of April: 100% of North Carolina, 99.95% of Virginia, 99.34% of South Carolina, 98.99% of Florida, 98.13% of Georgia, 93.65% of Tennessee, and 88.66% of Alabama are in drought. In Georgia, extreme drought now covers 71% of the state, the highest reading since 2012. Some monitoring stations with 75 or more years of data are recording their driest six-month periods on record. Drought watches are active across Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama, with mandatory rules likely if late-spring rainfall doesn’t materialize.
Texas and the Southern Plains: Cities at the Edge
Texas is 77% in drought as of mid-April. The Coastal Bend story is the one to watch closely. Combined storage at Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi has fallen to 8.7% as of April 2026 — among the lowest levels ever recorded. Corpus Christi has been under Stage 3 mandatory restrictions since December 2024, the most severe stage in the city’s standard drought contingency plan, which is triggered when combined reservoir storage drops below 20% capacity. Stage 3 bans all outdoor irrigation, home vehicle washing, and most non-essential outdoor water use; second and subsequent violations carry fines up to $2,000 each.
The bigger concern is what happens next. City models now predict a Level 1 Water Emergency by September 2026, when the water supply could be just 180 days from running out. On April 28, 2026, the City Council postponed a vote on a proposal that would require everyone—residents, businesses, and industry—to cut water use by 25% if Level 1 is declared. Many residents at the meeting said this cut would be impossible unless industrial users reduce even more.
If Corpus Christi runs out of water—a scenario city officials now consider possible—it would be the first modern American city to face this. There is no guidebook for what to do. In the worst case, the city could see rolling water shutoffs by district, water delivered by tanker trucks, and even managed evacuations. The largest industrial users, such as petrochemical refineries, would likely lose access to water first, potentially leading to lawsuits.
In other parts of Texas, Dallas has had a permanent rule since 2001 that only allows watering lawns two days a week, and no irrigation is allowed between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. from April to October. In Oklahoma and Kansas, the Ranger Road Fire—the largest U.S. wildfire of 2026 so far—burned 283,283 acres in February, killed hundreds of livestock, and led to burn bans across central and eastern Oklahoma.
High Plains: Dust, Fire, and Lake Beds
Nebraska is experiencing conditions that one state climatologist said are unlike anything seen before. Fifty-six percent of the state is in extreme drought, similar to 2012 but with warmer temperatures. The Morrill Fire started in March and quickly spread through dry grasslands, burning over 640,000 acres—the largest wildfire in Nebraska’s history. In Sheridan County, some landowners say their private lakes have dried up completely for the first time since 2012.
The Black Hills in South Dakota are now in extreme drought. In southern Nebraska, southwest Kansas, and southeast Colorado, low rainfall combined with high temperatures and evaporation have made spring planting difficult in many areas. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that streamflows are below or much below normal across southwestern South Dakota, southern Nebraska, and central and western Kansas.
Mandatory urban restrictions in this region are still relatively rare, but burn bans are widespread, and ranchers are culling cattle herds rather than feeding them on pastures with no grass.
Pacific Northwest: A Snow Drought, Not a Rain Drought
The Pacific Northwest had more precipitation this winter than the Southwest, but most of it fell as rain instead of snow because of record-warm temperatures. This has caused a snow drought rather than a rain drought. Since the region relies on snowpack for summer water, this is a serious problem.
Across the broader Columbia River Basin, snowpack ranks in the second percentile. On April 8, Washington’s Department of Ecology declared a statewide Drought Emergency, citing snowpack at just 53% of the median and projected summer water supply below 75% of normal in many basins, including the Yakima. Junior water-rights holders in the Yakima Basin are projected to receive only 44% of their allotment. Idaho is facing what could be its fourth consecutive drought year in its northern basins.
For the Northwest, the effects go beyond just this summer. New research from Oregon State University predicts that by the end of the century, water will move from precipitation to streamflow about 18% faster on average. This happens because there is less snow and more rain, so water moves through the system more quickly instead of slowly melting from snowpack. As a result, there could be about 50% less water in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs during the summer growing season.
The shift toward earlier runoff seen in 2026 is not a one-time event. It is a preview of the more severe impacts that climate change could bring.
Where Restrictions Are Active
This is a partial snapshot as of April 27, 2026. Local utilities update stages weekly. Verify before relying on these figures.
| Region | Location | Stage / Action | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southwest | Erie, CO | Level 4 Emergency | All residential sprinklers banned; most severe Front Range stage |
| Southwest | Aurora, CO | Stage 1 + turf ban | New turf lawn installations prohibited |
| Southwest | Denver, CO | Stage 1 (through Oct. 1) | Watering schedule by address |
| California | MWD Southern Calif. region | Level 1 conservation notice | Issued March 2026; covers 19M residents |
| California | San Francisco (SFPUC) | Level 2 | Tied to Hetch Hetchy levels |
| California | Sacramento | Stage 2 | Folsom Lake at 48% |
| Southeast | SW Florida (SWFWMD) | Phase III (Apr 3 – Jul 1) | Possible extension if summer rains fail |
| Southeast | Raleigh, NC | Mandatory Stage 1 (from Apr 20) | Odd/even address watering schedule |
| Southeast | Valdosta, GA | Mandatory 1-day/week (from Apr 15) | First Georgia city to move to mandatory rules |
| Texas | Corpus Christi | Stage 3 — Reservoir Crisis | Reservoirs at 8.7%; 25% cut planned for September |
| Texas | Dallas | Permanent 2-day/week | Ordinance since 2001; no irrigation 10am–6pm Apr–Oct |
| Pacific NW | Washington (statewide) | Drought Emergency (Apr 8) | Snowpack at 53% of median; Yakima Basin junior rights cut to 44% |
| Pacific NW | Oregon (snow drought) | No statewide order yet | Snow water equivalent at zero percentile on April 1 |
What You Can Do
Households use about 10% of all water in the U.S. Agriculture is still the biggest user, but in cities with restrictions, saving water at home can help prevent stricter rules, fines, or limits on businesses. The EPA’s WaterSense program says the average American family uses about 300 gallons a day, and simple upgrades can cut indoor use by 35%.
Indoor (immediate, no cost):
- Check your home for leaks. On average, American homes waste over 11,000 gallons a year from running toilets and dripping faucets. A single toilet leak can waste 200 gallons a day. To test for leaks, put food coloring in the tank—if it shows up in the bowl without flushing, you have a leak.
- Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth or shaving. This can save 8 to 10 gallons per person each day.
- Only run your dishwasher and washing machine when they are full. You can also skip pre-rinsing dishes.
- Take shorter showers. Reducing your shower by two minutes with a standard showerhead can save about 5 gallons of water.
Indoor (small investment):
- Install WaterSense-labeled fixtures. Faucet aerators and showerheads use at least 20% less water and are inexpensive. The average family can save about 3,500 gallons of water and 410 kWh of energy each year just by using these.
- Replace any toilet made before 1992. Older toilets use 4 gallons per flush, while WaterSense models use 1.28 gallons or less.
Outdoor (where most savings can happen):
- Outdoor irrigation uses nearly 9 billion gallons of water a day nationwide. It makes up about 30% of household water use, and up to 70% in dry areas. Water your yard before sunrise or after sunset to reduce evaporation.
- Consider replacing your lawn with drought-tolerant plants that are suited to your region. This type of landscaping uses less than half the water of a traditional lawn. Many cities, such as Aurora, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, offer rebates for replacing turf.
- Install a smart irrigation controller with a rain shutoff or soil moisture sensor. These devices adjust watering based on real conditions instead of following a set schedule.
- Add 2 to 3 inches of wood chips as mulch to your flower beds and vegetable gardens. This helps reduce evaporation and keeps weeds down.
Community and policy:
- Find out your utility’s current drought stage and the rules that apply. Most utilities post this information online and let you report water waste, like irrigation during banned hours or broken sprinklers spraying onto pavement.
- If you’re in an HOA, know your rights. California’s AB 1572 and Texas Property Code §202.007 prohibit HOAs from fining residents for brown lawns during active water restrictions. Other states are following this example.
- Pay attention to how agriculture and industry use water in your area. While homes use only about 10% of water, decisions about the other 90%—used by farms and businesses—will shape whether household conservation efforts make a lasting difference.
The Big Climate Picture
Some may see the 2026 drought as just a mix of La Niña, a warm winter, and early snowmelt, with rain expected to return as conditions change and an El Niño watch begins for late summer. While this is partly true, the bigger pattern—record warmth, snow falling as rain, earlier and faster runoff, and reservoirs unable to keep up as demand rises during hotter, longer summers—is what climate science has predicted for nearly twenty years.
Lake Powell is at 23%. Oregon’s snowpack is gone. North Carolina is completely in drought. Corpus Christi is preparing for the chance of running out of water. These are not separate stories. They are all part of the same story, showing what aridification looks like when it becomes a daily reality instead of just a forecast.
Editor’s note: Drought conditions are evolving weekly. Statistics in this piece are current as of the U.S. Drought Monitor release dated April 21–23, 2026. Local water restrictions change frequently — verify with your utility before relying on the figures cited here.
The post The 2026 Drought, Region by Region appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/earth-watch/the-2026-drought-region-by-region/
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