Overview
It probably comes as no surprise that industry accounted for 23% of U.S. emissions in 2019 according to the EPA, primarily from burning fossil fuels for energy. (This also includes emissions from using chemical reactions to transform raw materials into goods.) Globally, that figure is 21%. It's sometimes overwhelming to go into a big box store and really think about the incredible wealth of items and how they all got there, from the extraction and processing of the raw materials, to using electricity to turn those materials into parts, to assembling those parts into consumer goods, to packing, boxing, and shipping those goods across the world. When the Ever Given cargo ship got stuck in the Suez Canal in March of 2021, backing up similar ships in its wake, the magnitude of our consumption and the global complexities of the supply chain became starkly clear. And then there’s the issue of what happens to all those products when they have served their purpose and we no longer need them. We have a serious problem with waste, particularly plastic waste, on a global scale. To help mitigate climate change, we need to rethink the supply chain from top to bottom, and to thoughtfully examine the ways we consume goods in our everyday lives.
