“The wind is my nemesis!” says Jennifer Latour, and rightly so. In her sculptural assemblages, single flowers or small clusters of blooms sprout from tree branches or thick stems, appearing like otherworldly forms standing in the landscape. A soft breeze could topple the Vancouver-based artist’s ephemeral works, scattering their delicate petals and spindly shoots before she has the chance to snap a photo.

These fleeting moments are preserved in Latour’s Bound Species series, which she began during lockdown by piecing together objects found around her home into unconventional, ikebana-style compositions. “During this time, I started having a recurring dream of giant flowers growing around me with multiple species of other flowers growing off one stem. I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams, and this was something I had to test out in real life,” she tells us.

After a few trials, the process clicked. She ideated on the ways different colors and shapes might puzzle together into a sort of hybrid character and envisioned photographing on location, presenting the unorthodox arrangements in stunning, natural settings. When travel became possible, she jumped at the opportunity to bring the sculptures outdoors. That’s when she encountered the wind. “I quickly discovered how much more difficult this was,” she says. “It takes so much more patience and time to make my sculptures out in the wild but all that much more satisfying when it works out!”

Today, Latour continues to venture outdoors and often sources materials from local garden centers, flower shops, and even the occasional grocery store, should the botanicals be locally grown. She assembles each piece by hand, connecting stem to stem in a way that evokes “the interconnectedness found in nature, and serves as a reminder that all creatures are bound simultaneously by both their similarities and their differences.”

With trips planned to Arizona and the U.K. seaside in the coming months, the artist will continue to transform colorful specimens into strange, mishmashed forms. “I dream of taking the work all around the world to the most remote and unique locations,” she adds. “It’s a practice I see myself continuing to create and evolve until either my hands or my body stop working.”

Latour’s images are currently on view in two group exhibitions—Where the Seasons Endure at Gallery COA in Montreal and The House and the Forest at Can Balaguer in Palma, Mallorca—and she’s also planning for a solo show in 2027. Keep up with her travels and projects on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Jennifer Latour Preserves Ephemeral Beauty in Her Otherworldly Botanical Assemblages appeared first on Colossal.

Nature photographer Ansel Adams captured the beauty of the world and, particularly, the American West. In the quote below, he reminded members of the Wilderness Society that we rely on nature not just for food and shelter, but also for inspiration.

We’re on a path to the destruction of most, if not all, of nature’s beauty. Will you leave a world to your descendants without easy access to the extraordinary wonder of nature?

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

This poster was originally published on November 1, 2019.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Ansel Adams on Our Reliance on Nature appeared first on Earth911.

Many people want to install solar panels but their roofs are very shaded. Is it worthwhile to install solar panels?

A chimney casting light-to-medium shade across a rooftop array costs roughly 7% to 9% of the system’s annual production, depending on how the panels are built and wired. That is a real loss, and it is a good deal smaller than most homeowners assume when they look at their roof and decide solar is off the table. Shade remains the most common reason a rooftop system falls short of its production estimate. It is also the design problem the industry has spent the past decade chipping away at, through panel wiring, bypass diodes, and electronics that let each panel work independently.

Meanwhile, the financial picture has moved in the other direction: the 30% federal residential tax credit ended on December 31, 2025, which raises the energy savings bar for what a partially shaded roof needs to deliver. Here is how to tell whether your shaded roof still makes sense, and what to do if it does not.

Measure the Shade Before You Judge It

Eyeballing a roof in July tells you very little about December, when the sun sits lower and shadows run long. Start with a modeling tool and then confirm with a site visit.

• PVWatts, the free calculator from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, estimates annual solar production for any address and lets you edit the azimuth field to test different roof faces. It does not model the shadows of trees in your yard, so treat its number as a guide, not a definitive confirmation of panel performance.
• Satellite and lidar tools estimate shade from surrounding trees and buildings. The Department of Energy maintains a rundown of rooftop solar potential tools, including Google’s Project Sunroof, Aurora Solar, the National Laboratory of the Rockies’ free desktop app System Advisor Model, Energy Sage, and Sun Number.
• An on-roof shade measurement, taken by the installer with a fisheye or handheld solar pathfinder tool, produces the month-by-month numbers a good proposal should be built on. Ask for it. If a quote arrives without one and your roof has obstructions, that is a reason to keep shopping.

Solar Orientation: Your Angle on the Sun

For optimal power production, it’s best to install the solar panels on a south-facing roof. East- and west-facing arrays give up part of the day: east-facing panels produce well in the morning and taper off by late afternoon, and west-facing panels do the reverse. North-facing panels receive almost no direct sunlight, so they are rarely worth installing in the continental United States.

The gap between south and east or west is narrower than it once was, because panels have gotten more efficient and cheaper per watt. Where utilities charge time-of-use rates that peak in the late afternoon and evening, a west-facing array can also be worth more per kilowatt-hour than a south-facing one, even while producing less overall.

Check your utility’s rate schedule before assuming south-facing panels are the only option.

Trees Are Not Just an Obstacle

Trees on the south side of a house block the midday sun that matters most for production, and they also block winter solar gain that would otherwise cut heating use. Deciduous trees shade panels less in winter once their leaves drop, though bare branches still cost you output. Conifers shade year-round. Small ornamentals can be pruned; a mature Douglas fir in not likely to be pruned into cooperation with your energy goals.

Before reaching for a chainsaw, price what the tree is already doing. Research published in Arboriculture & Urban Forestry found that three well-placed trees — two on the west side of a house, one on the east — cut annual cooling energy use by 10% to 50% in California climate zones. Across U.S. cities, the World Resources Institute estimates that urban trees reduce electricity use by nearly 39 million megawatt-hours a year. A tree that shades your west wall through a heat wave may be earning its keep more reliably than the panels it would make room for. Removing canopy also gives up carbon storage, stormwater absorption, and habitat that a rooftop array does not replace.

Selective limbing, rather than removal, often recovers most of the lost production. A certified arborist and your solar installer should be in the same conversation before anything gets cut.

Dormers, Gables, and Chimneys

Roof features throw hard-edged shadows that move across a solar array during the day. There is no clever workaround for a chimney, so you must place panels judiciously; an experienced installer positions panels where shadows fall least, which often means a smaller array than the roof could otherwise hold.

What has changed is how much a shadow costs once it lands. Modules used to be wired as a single series string, so shading a few cells forced a bypass diode to route current around a third of the panel. Today’s panels are cut into two independently wired halves, which limits the lost output when shadows hit them. Annual simulations from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, published by the IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme, put numbers on it for a rooftop array under light-to-medium chimney shading. Figures below are annual energy relative to the same array with no shade at all.

The spread between the worst and best panel design in that scenario is about 2 percentage points of annual output. A small win, but not the difference between a viable roof and a dead one.

Shade Tolerance Is a Panel Feature

Half-cut cells are the default across every major residential manufacturer, so you will get that architecture whether anyone sells it to you as an upgrade. Some manufacturers now build modules with more than the standard three bypass diodes, or use shingled cell layouts that create additional parallel current paths to maximize production in shady settings. Those designs hold onto measurably more output under partial shade, as the table shows.

Efficiency has climbed, too. Most residential modules on the market now convert 20% to 23% of incoming sunlight into electricity, up from roughly 15% a decade ago, and premium products have crossed 25%. LONGi’s Hi-MO 9 Prime, introduced in June 2026 at 25.2% efficiency, is marketed partly on improved shading tolerance; it’s a sign that manufacturers now treat shade as a design problem rather than an installer’s problem.

Higher efficiency matters most where shade is an issue, because it lets you reach your target system size using the smaller patch of roof that stays sunny.

Microinverters and Optimizers

Module-level power electronics are the standard sales answer to shade. In a conventional array, panels are wired together in a chain, and every panel in that chain has to run at the same electrical setting — so one panel sitting in shade holds back the sunlit ones alongside it. Two products break that link. Microinverters convert each panel’s output into household AC current right on the roof. DC optimizers let each panel run at whatever setting suits the light falling on it, then pass the power along to a single inverter. Both work, and the size of the benefit depends heavily on how much shade you actually have.

An NREL side-by-side test of two identical 8 kW arrays found that microinverters increased production by 3.7% under light shading, 7.8% under moderate shading, and 12.3% under heavy shading compared with a conventional string inverter. The ZHAW modeling points the same direction with more granularity:

• Light shading: a single chimney throwing a small shadow. A plain string inverter with good panels performs as well as or better than an optimized system, because the electronics add roughly 2% in conversion losses of their own.
• Medium shading: a chimney plus a vent pipe, or a dormer clipping a few modules. Putting optimizers only on the affected panels delivers the best result. Shade-resistant modules with extra bypass diodes are the better buy when a whole group of panels is affected.
• Heavy shading: a dormer plus a neighboring building. An optimizer on every panel will pay for itself. Expect annual output to land 10% or more below an unshaded equivalent even so.

Two cost details rarely make it into a sales pitch. Optimizer datasheet efficiency figures are measured in an operating mode that does not reflect daily rooftop conditions, so real-world performance consistently runs below reported level. And electronics sitting on a hot roof may need replacement sooner than the inverter would; asking about a warranty is worthwhile before you buy.

Other Locations for Solar Panels

A shaded roof does not have to be the only site on the property. Panels can go on a garage, a carport, a ground mount in a sunny corner of the yard, an awning, or a pergola. Ground mounts and carports add cost, including for racking, footings, a trench for the wire run, but they let you point the array wherever the sun is, at whatever tilt you want, and they remain accessible for cleaning and repair.

These structures can perform a second role, as a solar carport can shades a vehicle and host an EV charger where the power is generated. A pergola with panels overhead can cool a patio. Where roof shade is the constraint, these extra uses can be what makes the numbers work.

Subscribe to a Community Solar Project

Community solar farms let households subscribe to a share of an off-site array and receive credits on their utility bill, with no equipment on the property. They remain the most practical option for renters, apartment dwellers, and anyone whose roof loses the shade argument.

The solar industry has matured considerably since this article first ran. The Department of Energy counts at least one community solar project in 44 states plus the District of Columbia, with 24 states having passed enabling legislation that encourages or requires the programs, and 19 states plus D.C. maintaining policies for low-income household participation. States with enabling legislation generally have more projects and more open subscriptions.

However, solar growth is uneven. Cumulative U.S. community solar capacity passed 10 gigawatts in late 2025, according to Wood Mackenzie and the Coalition for Community Solar Access, but annual installations fell 25% that year as adoption in New York and Maine slowed. Analysts expect 12% growth in 2026, led by Illinois and the Mid-Atlantic, followed by an average 5% annual contraction through 2030 in existing state programs. Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and Colorado host the largest community solar cluster.

Review a community solar subscription agreement the way you would a lease. Check the term length, the cancellation terms, whether the credit is priced at the retail rate or a value-stack formula, and whether the savings are guaranteed or estimated.

The Federal Math Changed in 2026

The 30% Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D applied to systems placed in service through December 31, 2025. The credit is not available for any property placed in service after that date. Homeowners who bought and installed in time can still carry unused credit forward against future tax years. Anyone buying a system with cash or a loan in 2026 gets no federal credit.

Two paths remain. Third-party ownership, such as through a lease or power purchase agreement, leaves the system in the developer’s hands, and the commercial credit the developer claims can be passed through to you as a lower monthly payment. State and utility incentives, net metering rules, and low-income programs are untouched by the federal change and vary widely; your state energy office is the place to check. Consult a tax professional about your own situation rather than relying on an installer’s summary.

For a shaded roof, the practical benefits of incentives and low-income programs is straightforward. Losing 8% to 12% of production to shade was easier to absorb when the federal government covered nearly a third of the cost. Now, these local and private subsidies are important to making the payback numbers work; however, as energy prices rise, solar will only continue to outperform fossil fuel-generated electricity on price.

Where to Start

• Run your address through PVWatts to establish a best-case production estimate, then ask installers to show their shade measurement and explain the gap.
• Get at least three quotes, and make each one specify panel model, inverter or optimizer configuration, and modeled annual production in kilowatt-hours.
• Ask what the array would produce without the electronics upgrade. If the difference is small, the upgrade may not be worth its cost or its replacement risk.
• Price selective tree pruning against tree removal, and against simply accepting lower production. Bring an arborist into the decision.
• Look at the garage roof, the yard, and the driveway before concluding the property cannot host solar.
• Check whether your state has a community solar program with open subscriptions. For many shaded roofs, that is the option that pencils out.

Related Reading on Earth911

• The Ultimate Guide to Solar Panels
• Community Solar Farms: How They Work

Editor’s Note: Originally published by Sarah Lozanova on August 6, 2019, this article was substantially updated in July 2026.

The post Is My Roof Too Shaded for Solar Panels? appeared first on Earth911.

Renovating a home is a great opportunity to make a home more functional, improve comfort, and revitalize drab spaces. It is also a chance to keep a remarkable amount of material out of the ground.

The EPA estimates the United States generated 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris in 2018 — more than twice the volume of municipal solid waste that year — and demolition accounts for more than 90 percent of it. About 145 million tons of that went straight to landfills.

A green approach to contracting and choosing materials helps trim that waste stream and makes your home more water- and energy-efficient. One thing has changed since this article first ran: the federal tax credit that used to subsidize efficiency upgrades expired at the end of 2025, so the money math on some of these decisions now runs through state and utility programs instead. More on that below.

Apply these green tips during the planning phase of your home renovation project, whether you do the work yourself or hire a contractor.

Repurpose When Possible

Begin by exploring what existing materials and fixtures can be repurposed, donated, and recycled before sending them to a landfill.

Cabinetry, lighting fixtures, flooring, and plumbing fixtures can sometimes be refinished and repaired for a new look. Consider replacing inefficient appliances and plumbing fixtures to save money and resources in the long run instead of replacing cabinets and counters.

Donate Unneeded Materials

You can donate items that are still in good condition but don’t suit the needs of your project. The Habitat for Humanity ReStore network accepts a variety of appliances, building materials, furniture, and more, and its donation guide explains what individual stores will and won’t take.

Replace Inefficient Toilets & Appliances

Toilets are the single largest use of water inside most homes. A WaterSense labeled toilet uses no more than 1.28 gallons per flush, 20 percent below the federal standard of 1.6 gpf, and the EPA estimates the average family saves close to 13,000 gallons and more than $170 a year by replacing old, inefficient models. Older toilets can use as much as six gallons per flush.

One detail worth knowing if you are shopping for a dual-flush model: the EPA changed the specification in 2025. The full-flush mode itself must now come in at 1.28 gpf or less, rather than averaging a big flush against two small ones. Some dual-flush toilets that carried the label a few years ago no longer qualify.

The same efficiency logic applies to washers and dishwashers. When deciding whether to replace an appliance, compare its water and energy consumption to new models before you commit. A recently manufactured dishwasher, for example, may use half the energy of one installed 20 years ago.

Find Salvaged Materials

Home renovation projects that use salvaged materials can have unique character and charm. When shopping for new materials, explore where you might use reclaimed items instead. Look on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, your local Buy Nothing group, the ReStore, or a salvage yard. Active demolition sites are worth a visit, too; contractors will often part with trim, brick, or fixtures rather than pay to haul them away.

Use Natural Finishes & Products

Many paints, varnishes, stains, and flooring materials release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that degrade indoor air quality, and concentrations indoors routinely run higher than outdoors. Whenever possible, select finishes labeled low- or zero-VOC and look for products certified to a Green Seal standard. Ventilate well during and after application regardless of the label.

Look for Certified Green Products

Use Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood products to confirm that lumber, plywood, and flooring came from responsibly managed forests. Look for ENERGY STAR appliances, which meet more stringent energy-efficiency requirements than the federal minimum.

ENERGY STAR itself had an eventful year. The administration proposed eliminating the program in 2025; Congress instead appropriated $33 million for it in the fiscal 2026 spending package. In March 2026, EPA and the Department of Energy signed an agreement making DOE the lead agency that manages the program. The label remains a useful way to assess products even if where its specifications and staffing will be located is still unsettled.

For a broader view of what makes a building material defensible, the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED v5 rating system, which was ratified in April 2025 and open for certification since that November, organizes its materials credits around embodied carbon and ingredient disclosure. Homeowners can’t realistically chase LEED points on a bathroom remodel, but two of the product labels it recognizes are easy to check on a spec sheet: Cradle to Cradle Certified and Declare, which functions as a nutrition label for building products.

Reduce Construction Waste & Debris

Using salvaged materials for your renovation project typically generates less packaging waste. It also feeds a recovery stream that already works better than most people assume: of the 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris generated in 2018, roughly 455 million tons were directed to a next use rather than disposal, mostly as aggregate material.

The materials that often are landfilled are the ones worth planning around. Wood, gypsum drywall, asphalt shingles, and brick and clay tile all end up in landfills at high rates, so ordering carefully and finding a home for the leftovers makes more difference than it does with concrete or metal.

When purchasing new materials, look for items with as little non-recyclable packaging as possible. Consider donating surplus materials or finding new ways to make good use of them when your renovation is complete, and check Earth911’s recycling search for local options before anything goes in a dumpster.

Make Energy-Saving Improvements

Is your home properly insulated and air sealed? Are there rooms with drafts or uneven temperatures? A renovation creates an excellent opening for home performance work, because the walls are already coming apart. An infrared camera or a professional home energy audit is a good way to learn where your home is losing energy before you close anything back up.

Replace any soiled or ineffective insulation, seal gaps and cracks, and consider replacing leaky or single-pane windows. Whenever possible, choose insulation products that contain natural materials, do not contain harmful flame retardants, and do not off-gas VOCs.

You’ll need to budget for this work differently than you would have in 2024. The 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, which returned up to $3,200 a year on insulation, windows, heat pumps, and energy audits, was terminated for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The 25D residential clean energy credit ended on the same date. What survived is the Inflation Reduction Act’s Home Energy Rebates that provide up to $8,000 for whole-home efficiency retrofits and up to $14,000 for electrification. The program is administered state by state and generally limited to households with incomes below 150 percent of local median income.

These rebates, which can be exhausted during the year, are first-come, first-served, so availability is uneven. California’s single-family electrification rebates were fully reserved by February 2026 and moved to a waitlist; Colorado is running staged regional rounds; Oregon launched in spring 2026; Texas and Tennessee had not opened to applicants as of mid-2026.

Start with your research with the state energy office, confirm whether pre-approval is required before you buy equipment, and stack utility rebates on top. Several states disqualify projects that were purchased before the paperwork went in.

Conserve Water

Do your sinks have water-saving fittings, and are your showerheads efficient? A standard showerhead uses 2.5 gallons per minute; a WaterSense labeled model uses no more than 2.0 gpm and must pass spray force and coverage testing to earn the label. The EPA calculates the average family can save 2,700 gallons of water and more than 330 kilowatt-hours of water heating energy per year with the swap.

A renovation is also the right moment to chase down leaks. Household leaks waste roughly 180 gallons a week, and a running toilet flapper or a dripping supply line is far easier to find and fix while a plumber is already on site.

These steps, and many more, can turn your home improvement project into an environmental improvement outcome.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on October 30, 2019, and was most recently updated in July 2026.

The post Nine Tips for Greening a Home Renovation Project appeared first on Earth911.

In late June 2021, air temperatures in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia soared past 113°F in a heat wave unlike anything seen before. Hundreds of people lost their lives. In the weeks after, another impact appeared: evergreen forest canopies turned brown across an area as large as Rhode Island.

Scorching, described as a type of leaf death caused by thermal damage and hydraulic failure during extremely warm drought conditions in Nature Climate Change, is a sign of a problem now showing up in backyards and city parks. Two other papers in the same journal highlight a tough truth for tree lovers: extreme heat can directly harm leaves, and scorching damage often looks like early fall, but it is actually an injury the tree may carry for years. Learning to spot the difference and changing how we water, mulch, and plant is becoming a normal part of tree care.

Heat Can Damage a Leaf on Its Own

A tree cools itself much the way we sweat. It draws water up from its roots and releases it through pores in its leaves, a process called transpiration, and the evaporation carries heat away from leaf tissue. When soil water runs short, or the air simply gets too hot, transpiration can’t keep pace, leaf temperatures spike, and cells begin to die. Michigan State University Extension describes exactly this: when transpiration can no longer cool a leaf, high temperatures damage the tissue directly.

For decades, summer canopy browning was read mainly as a symptom of drought. Research on the 2021 heat dome complicates that picture. In their Nature Climate Change assessment, Michael Paul Nelson and Christopher Still report that the dominant driver of the die-off was extreme heat cooking leaf tissue: browning developed rapidly even in stands with adequate soil moisture, and it concentrated on the south- and west-facing slopes that absorbed the most sun.

The authors compare the event to coral bleaching, which is a quick, heat-driven breakdown that reveals a limit once thought to be far away. Trees that had survived for centuries proved out to be vulnerable to temperatures just a few degrees higher than they had ever experienced. The authors say extreme heat should be seen as its own type of disturbance, different from slow, ongoing stress.

Why Brown Leaves in July Behave Differently Than Fall Color

Autumn color is a controlled process. As the days shorten and cool, a tree deliberately breaks down chlorophyll and pulls nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients back out of its leaves into its twigs and roots, banking them for spring before the leaves drop. Scientists call this senescence, and it is essentially an act of saving.

Heat scorch is a different process. In a 2026 Nature Climate Change letter, a group of researchers explained that severe heat and water stress can kill leaf tissue suddenly, sometimes in just a few hours, with little or no chance for the tree to recover nutrients. The leaf turns brown and dies before the tree can take back what is inside it.

The consequence reaches into the seasons that follow. A tree that senesces normally enters winter with its pantry stocked. A tree that scorches loses both the leaves and the nutrients they held, and can head into the next growing season depleted, with less capacity to leaf out, photosynthesize, and recover. Repeated scorching, the authors caution, can progressively drain those reserves and wear down a tree’s resilience.

You can often see the difference on the leaf itself. The Morton Arboretum notes that scorch usually starts at the tips and edges, which are the parts farthest from the veins and the last to get water. The damage then moves inward, leaving leaves dry, brittle, and sometimes curled. It is worst on the side of the tree facing the sun, wind, or heat reflected from pavement or a brick wall. On evergreens, needles turn brown from the tip downward.

During a heat wave, hold off on these tree care activities to preserve your trees:

• Nitrogen fertilizer pushes tender new growth that demands more water the tree can’t spare.
• Cuts stimulate growth and can expose shaded bark to sudden, direct sun.
• Moving a tree severs roots when it needs every one of them.
• Shallow daily sprinkling. It trains roots to stay near the hot surface instead of reaching for cooler, deeper moisture.

That advice to skip fertilizer, pruning, and transplanting until the heat passes comes from the Oregon State University Extension Service, which gets many questions like these whenever the temperature rises.

In the Amazon, the Forest Fights Back With New Chemistry

When a tree is stressed by heat and drought, it reacts not just through its leaves but also through its chemistry, releasing volatile organic compounds. Some of these act as defenses, while others serve as signals. A study published in Communications Earth & Environment observed this response across the entire Amazon.

During the record 2023–2024 El Niño, which was the most severe drought ever recorded in the Amazon basin, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry sampled the air above the canopy. Emissions of sesquiterpenes, a type of reactive compound trees produce as stress defenses, surged 122 percent over the course of the event. Then, as the rains returned, the forest started releasing three heavier “sesquiterpene alcohols,” primarily a compound called beta-eudesmol, that had not previously been recorded above the forest. The researchers interpreted the shift as a stress-defense response that outlasted the drought itself, perhaps in an attempt to make clouds form over the forest.

Because sesquiterpenes and their heavier alcohols are highly reactive, they contribute to the atmospheric chemistry that creates aerosols and helps form clouds. This means a drought that changes a forest’s emissions could, in theory, affect the weather above it. The study shows this chemical shift, but the effects on climate are still unknown.

The trees in your yard do something similar on a smaller scale. Heat and drought change how a forest behaves, even affecting the chemistry of the air above it, often in ways we cannot see.

Greening Globally, Cooking Locally

Zoom out, and the planet looks, improbably, greener. A separate 2026 Nature Climate Change review notes that vegetation has been expanding across much of the globe for decades, driven largely by rising carbon dioxide acting as a fertilizer for plant growth.

That overall trend exists alongside the problems we see in our own yards. Global greening happens over decades and over continents, while a deadly afternoon can happen in just a few hours to a single group of trees. A global average temperature does not protect an individual maple when its leaves reach a local breaking point. A warmer climate can bring more greenery overall and more sudden, local die-offs in the same year.

The baseline behavior of trees is changing as well. When the USDA updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map in 2023, about half the country moved into a warmer half-zone, and the map was about 2.5°F warmer than the 2012 version of an analysis led by the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University. These zones track winter cold, not summer heat, so they do not measure the risk discussed in this article directly. Still, they clearly show that the climate our trees were planted in is not the same as the one they face now.

What You Can Do

You can’t lower the temperature, but you can change the odds for the trees you tend. The work involved must be focused on the trees you already have, the ones you plan to plant next, and the canopy your neighborhood shares.

For the trees already in your yard

• Water deeply and infrequently. Colorado State University Extension suggests roughly 10 gallons per week for every inch of trunk diameter for trees that don’t get lawn irrigation, or about 20 gallons a week for a 2-inch trunk. Deliver it slowly with a soaker hose or a hose set to a trickle, spread out under the canopy where the feeder roots live, not piled against the trunk.
• Check before you water. Push a screwdriver or soil probe 6 to 8 inches down; if it comes out damp, wait before watering. Deep, occasional soaking builds deep roots. Frequent surface watering does the opposite, ultimately starving trees of nutrition because their root systems are atrophied.
• Mulch, but keep it away from the trunk. A 2- to 4-inch layer of wood chips or bark over the root zone helps keep soil temperature steady and slows evaporation. Leave a few inches of bare ground around the trunk so the bark does not rot, and avoid piling mulch up like a volcano.
• Water in the morning. Early watering gets moisture into the soil before the day’s heat pulls it back out.
• Focus on the most vulnerable trees. Young and newly planted trees, as well as any tree surrounded by pavement, a driveway, or a south-facing wall, are the first and hardest hit by heat. Give these trees extra attention when water is limited.
• Shade the small ones. For a young or newly planted tree, temporary shade cloth rigged on a frame can cut the heat load during a severe spell without stopping airflow.

For what you plant next

• Plant in fall or early spring, not mid-summer. New roots need mild weather to establish before they’re asked to survive a heat wave.
• Choose trees that fit the site and will thrive in the coming decades. Pick species that have done well in hotter, drier summers in your area, and think about where a small tree’s shade will fall as it grows. Species that are likely to scorch, like many maples and birches, commonly struggle in paved, heat-reflecting areas. Save those spots for tougher, heat-adapted trees.
• Diversify. A mix of species means no single pest, disease, or heat event can take out the whole block at once.

For your parks and neighborhood

• Water the public trees, too. Young street and park trees rarely get watered during heat waves. A few buckets from a neighbor can keep a new tree alive; many cities run “adopt-a-tree” watering programs worth joining.
• Support more tree canopy and fair access to it. Tree cover acts as cooling infrastructure. A World Resources Institute review of 806 cities found that more canopy lowers midday land-surface temperatures by about 2.7°F, and the shade under a mature tree feels much cooler than open pavement. However, this cooling is not shared equally, as lower-income neighborhoods usually have much less tree cover.
• Close the loop on the debris. Fallen leaves and chipped branches make excellent free mulch; put them back under your trees. For yard waste you can’t reuse, find local composting and green-waste drop-off through Earth911’s recycling search.

The Trees, and Humans, Are Moving Into a New Climate

For many people, a familiar tree is more than just part of the landscape. It can mark a season, a street corner, or a childhood memory. Seeing a tree turn brown at the wrong time brings a real sense of loss, a feeling that researchers writing in Nature Climate Change are starting to recognize as part of the human impact of climate change.

We can’t hand our trees back the climate they were planted into. We can give them water at the right depth, shade when the heat spikes, and smarter choices about what goes into the ground next. For a lot of trees, that is enough to change whether they make it through.

The post When the Canopy Turns Brown: Caring for Trees in Extreme Heat appeared first on Earth911.

In 1979, Hazel Johnson went door to door through her Chicago neighborhood with one question: how many people in your household have cancer? Nearly every neighbor had an answer. Johnson’s public housing complex had been built on top of a former industrial waste dump. Moreover, more than 50 landfills, a chemical incinerator, steel mills, and abandoned toxic sites, were located within a few miles.

Hazel Johnson founded People for Community Recovery that year. By 1991, she was recognized as the Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement. She died in 2011, but the pattern she documented is still very much alive.

Across the United States, the people who live closest to landfills, waste transfer stations, and trash incinerators are, overwhelmingly, Black, Latino, and low-income. This is not an accident. Decades of research, government data, and community testimony point to the same conclusion: where the waste goes is a choice, and communities with less money and political power have repeatedly been left out of making it.

When everyone shares the burden of environmental damage, the politics of waste will change.

The Numbers Behind the Pattern

The data are hard to dismiss. More than half of all Americans living within about 2 miles of a hazardous waste facility are people of color. In 2022, half of all people living within one mile of a Superfund site (the most contaminated waste sites in the country, requiring federal cleanup) were people of color. Black Americans are 75% more likely than white Americans to live in what researchers call “fenceline communities,” meaning they live close enough to a polluting facility that they experience direct, ongoing exposure to its emissions and waste.

Trash incinerator siting shows the same pattern. Of the 68 remaining incinerators still operating in the United States, 15 of the 20 largest are located in majority Black and Latino communities. They are the oldest and dirtiest waste-burning programs. Their emissions include particulate matter, mercury, dioxins, and lead, which drive higher rates of asthma, respiratory disease, and heart problems in surrounding neighborhoods.

Illegal dumping makes the problem worse in the same communities. In one major American city, all ten neighborhoods with the highest rates of illegally dumped garbage were at least 60% Black or Latino. City wards where people of color make up the majority accounted for 79% of all illegally dumped waste. This is garbage generated elsewhere and transported to places where enforcement is weakest and political pressure is lowest.

Following the Path of Least Resistance

Researchers have a name for what happens in waste facility siting: “the path of least resistance.” A study by the University of Michigan and University of Montana tracked 30 years of data and found that industries seeking sites for hazardous waste operations consistently targeted minority and low-income communities because of politics. Wealthier, predominantly white communities organized and pushed back. “Not in my backyard” pressure worked for them. The facilities moved on to communities with less power to say no.

This unfair distribution of environmental health impacts plays out in specific, documented ways. When a scrapyard closed in a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side, the same company got permits to open a new one on the city’s predominantly low-income, Latino Southeast Side. That area now hosts 250 EPA-regulated facilities and has become the only industrial corridor in Chicago zoned for hazardous-waste storage. Residents filed a civil rights complaint alleging the permitting process discriminated against them.

A 2025 study on landfill siting in South Carolina confirmed that Black and Hispanic residents were consistently more likely to live near landfills, and that lower-income households faced the same pattern. Of the two factors, race was the stronger predictor.

Three Communities, One Story

Cancer Alley, Louisiana

An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is home to roughly 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations, reportedly the largest concentration anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The people who live along this corridor are predominantly Black, and cancer rates in some communities along the river run up to 47 times higher than the level the EPA considers acceptable.

Sharon Lavigne has lived in St. James Parish her whole life. When a company proposed building a $1.25 billion plastics plant on land her ancestors once farmed, she founded the activist organization Rise St. James. After years of organizing, the plant was stopped. But as another resident told Human Rights Watch in 2024: “We’re dying from inhaling the industries’ pollution. I feel like it’s a death sentence.”

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawsuit by Cancer Alley residents could proceed, finding that their claims reflected a “longstanding pattern and practice of racially discriminatory land-use decisions.”

The Ironbound, Newark, New Jersey

Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood is a dense, mostly Latino community boxed in by highways and the Passaic River. Its residents have been fighting the area’s large trash incinerator for nearly four decades.

Community activist Maria Lopez-Nuñez describes the neighborhood as a place “deemed ‘these lives don’t matter as much.’” In June 2025, a state commission approved a fourth gas-fired power plant in the neighborhood, adding to a pollution burden that residents say is already more than the community can bear.

Altgeld Gardens, Chicago, Illinois

In 1987, Hazel Johnson and 16 other protesters blockaded a new hazardous-waste landfill at the edge of Altgeld Gardens, turning away 57 trucks for more than 5 hours. All 17 were arrested.

The action stopped the landfill from opening and pushed the city toward a moratorium on new waste sites. Today, Johnson’s daughter, Cheryl, has taken over leadership of People for Community Recovery. In 2025,  the Chicago Sun-Times found that federal rollbacks of EPA environmental justice programs are directly threatening the protections her mother spent her life fighting for.

The Health Costs Nobody Tallies

Living near waste facilities causes measurable harm. Studies link proximity to municipal landfills with low birth weight, bronchitis, and shortness of breath. Long-term exposure to hazardous waste sites is associated with cancer, neurological damage, and developmental delays in children.

These health burdens pile up. Waste facilities tend to push out health-promoting businesses, such as clinics, grocery stores, and parks. A 2025 analysis in Environmental Research found that the negative effects of living near waste infrastructure fell most heavily on lower-income communities of color, with no corresponding economic benefit flowing back to those communities.

Robert Taylor, founder of Concerned Citizens of St. John in Cancer Alley, has described the unbearable human cost of environmental injustice: “Seeing my family and community, especially the young kids, get sick and die is so painful, especially because this is all preventable.”

What’s Holding Back Change

Environmental justice advocates are careful to separate symptoms from causes. Individual facility decisions are symptoms, they argue, but the causes go deeper: zoning laws concentrate industrial uses in low-income areas, permitting processes allow public comments without giving communities real political power, and there has been a steady rollback of federal environmental justice enforcement since early 2025.

One key federal protection has already been weakened. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits programs that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race. But in August 2024, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a permanent injunction barring the EPA from enforcing its disparate-impact rules under Title VI, which would have allowed communities to challenge a new facility on the grounds that it added to a discriminatory pattern of siting decisions.

In November 2024, the EPA’s independent advisory council recommended requiring cumulative impact assessments before new waste facilities are granted a site approvals, meaning regulators would have to account for all existing pollution in a community before adding more. That recommendation has not been adopted.

The EPA’s EJScreen mapping tool, updated in July 2024 but now hidden after recent EPA decisions, lets anyone enter a ZIP Code to see how much pollution burden their community already carries. The data made the pattern visible, but now the Trump Administration wants America to look away.

What You Can Do

The biggest fixes require policy changes, stronger enforcement, and political will. But individuals have real roles to play, from cutting the total waste that needs to go somewhere to supporting the communities on the front lines.

As an individual or household:

• Reduce waste at the source. Every pound diverted by buying less, repairing more, or choosing durable goods is one less pound that ends up in a landfill or incinerator somewhere. Other articles in this series cover the highest-impact categories: food, flexible plastic packaging, textiles, and electronics.
• Demand the EPA restore access to the EJScreen tool. It shows environmental burden by location. Understanding the pattern in your area is the first step toward acting on it.
• Recycle accurately. When household recycling bins are contaminated with the wrong materials, recyclable material often ends up in landfills and incinerators. Use the Earth911 Recycling Search to find verified drop-off locations for hard-to-recycle items.

At the community and policy level:

• Support extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws in your state. These laws shift waste management costs back to manufacturers, reducing the volume of low-value material flowing into community-level infrastructure. Oregon, Colorado, California, Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington have active packaging EPR programs.
• Push for cumulative impact standards in permitting decisions. New waste facilities should not be approved without accounting for all the pollution a community already carries.
• Support frontline organizations directly. People for Community Recovery, Rise St. James, Concerned Citizens of St. John, and similar groups do the sustained, ground-level work that makes policy change possible. They need resources.
• Attend public comment periods for waste facility permits in your region. Regulatory agencies are legally required to hold these hearings. Showing up is one of the few moments where community voices have a formal role in the process.

The post The Path to Sharing Environmental Burdens Fairly appeared first on Earth911.

The U.S. recycling industry generates $184 billion annually and supports more than 603,000 jobs built on infrastructure that the federal government estimates is only half-ready for the growing waste challenge as it needs to be.

That gap between what the system does and what it could do represents one of the clearest unspent investments in the American economy. The EPA’s 2024 recycling infrastructure assessment puts the cost of closing it at $36.5 to $43.4 billion, which the agency estimated was enough to raise the national recycling rate from 32% to 61% and recover an additional 82 to 89 million tons of material every year.

The U.S. currently spends more than $250 billion annually managing solid waste. An investment in better collection and processing can pay for itself quickly, and then keep paying dividends in cash and reduced environmental impacts.

Households Can’t Recycle as Easily as Trashing Waste

Before the economics, let’s look at the experience in communities: access to recycling in the United States is neither universal nor equitable. The EPA found that 6% of homes have no recycling service. Roughly 40% lack recycling services that are meaningfully equivalent to trash pickup; they can’t set a bin at the curb and have it collected on a schedule.

Rural and lower-income communities are disproportionately underserved. Households without curbside collection must drive materials to drop-off sites, which may be a realistic option for some, but acts as an effective barrier for others. The result is that the 32% national recycling rate reflects not just individual behavior, but the infrastructure decisions (and non-decisions) that preceded it.

The reality of U.S. waste collection is obscure, because many parts of the nation don’t maintain data about their collection and processing infrastructure. Of the 59 states and territories that responded to the EPA survey, 48% don’t collect data on the number of curbside programs operating in their jurisdictions, and 37% don’t track drop-off programs. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and states aren’t measuring.

The Recycling Economics Demand a Modernized System

The $36.5 to $43.4 billion investment needed to make U.S. recycling competitive with the rest of the world falls into two main categories. Roughly $22 to $28 billion would fund curbside collection expansion, drop-off upgrades, and modernization of materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to handle the full range of packaging materials in the waste stream. The remaining $14 to $16 billion would address organics, such composting infrastructure and anaerobic digestion for food scraps and yard waste, which currently account for more than a quarter of what goes to landfill.

What does that investment yield? According to the Recycled Materials Association’s 2024 economic impact study, the existing recycling system already generates $184 billion in annual economic activity. The 175,000 Americans directly employed in the industry average more than $100,000 in total wages and benefits; these are jobs that require skilled labor and tend to stay local. Doubling the system’s capacity would drive job growth and related investments in local collection and processing.

The long-term cost comparison is even more striking. A World Economic Forum analysis projects that continuing with current waste management practices will cost more than $417 billion per year by 2050, a $165 billion increase from 2020. The infrastructure investment the EPA is describing is one-time capital spending. The savings are recurring, and the jobs created are a source of economic opportunity.

Rising Disposal Costs Signal Future Landfill Shortages

The cost side of the equation is moving in recycling’s favor. The average U.S. landfill tipping fee — what municipalities and haulers pay to deposit a ton of waste — reached $62.28 per ton in 2024, a 10% increase from the year before and the steepest annual jump since 2022. In short, we are running out of landfill space. In the Northeast, average tipping fees run over $80 per ton. As disposal costs rise, the cost-benefit analysis for materials recovery improves in proportion, even before accounting for the commodity value of recovered materials.

Tipping fees are a useful market signal pointing to a circular future, when burying or burning waste becomes expensive enough that diverting it becomes economically rational for municipalities. Several cities and counties have found that recycling programs with high diversion rates lower their net waste management costs, even after accounting for the added cost of program operations.

Composting is seeing a similar shift. As landfill operators in high-fee regions turn away organics or charge premium rates for wet material, commercial and municipal composting operations are becoming genuinely competitive alternatives. The infrastructure investment the EPA is describing would accelerate this shift rather than waiting for market pressure to do the work slowly.

What the Money Would Actually Build

It helps to be specific about what “infrastructure investment” means in practice:

MRF upgrades: materials recovery facilities sort and separate mixed recyclables into commodity streams that can be sold for profit. Many existing MRFs were designed for a different mix of materials than what households generate today, such as thinner plastics, smaller form factors, and more flexible film. Optical sorting technology and updated equipment can dramatically improve both recovery rates and material quality, but the capital costs often exceed municipal budgets, even though the programs will turn a profit in the long run..

Curbside collection expansion: in rural areas and low-density suburban zones, the per-household cost of traditional curbside routes is high enough that service has never been offered. Regional collection systems, hub-and-spoke drop-off networks, and consolidation of collection contracts across county lines can make service viable in areas that currently have none.

Organics processing: food scraps and yard waste make up 28% of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream by weight, according to 2018 EPA data, the most recent available from the agency. Composting and anaerobic digestion can divert most of that material while producing either compost for agriculture or biogas for energy. Neither requires advanced technology, just facilities and collection infrastructure that most communities lack.

What You Can Do

Individual recycling behavior matters, but in this case, advocacy for systemic investment matters more. The access gap won’t close through consumer choice alone.

• At home: Recycle what your program accepts, correctly. Contamination from wishcycling — putting non-recyclables or dirty materials into curbside bins — drives up processing costs and can render entire loads unusable. Use Earth911’s recycling search to confirm what’s accepted in your area before you bin it.
• At the household level: Compost food scraps if your municipality offers pickup or if you have space to do it at home. Diverting organics from the landfill is one of the highest-impact actions available to most households, both to reduce methane emissions and for producing soil amendments that sequester carbon.
• At the community and policy level: Contact your municipal waste management department or local elected officials and ask specifically about infrastructure investment plans. The EPA report gives local advocates a concrete ask: expanded curbside access, MRF modernization funding, and organics collection. Federal infrastructure dollars are available for these projects; the question is whether local officials are pursuing them.
• Support extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation: Several states have passed or are considering laws that shift the costs of recycling infrastructure to producers of packaging and products, rather than placing the full burden on municipal budgets. EPR programs in California, Colorado, Maine, and Oregon are early models worth watching and supporting.

The post Waste Collection is the Public Investment That Pays for Itself appeared first on Earth911.

Stand in any forest and look up, and it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the swaying of tall trees and their elegant canopies casting shade onto the woodland floor. But imagine being an ant or beetle and peering up at the stems of wild geraniums, garlic, or buttercups and experiencing the same sensation. For photographer Theo Bosboom, this ground-level view of flowers and plants gave rise to a series that captures them in the way we might photograph a grove of towering, ancient sequoias.

Traversing local landscapes around his home in the Netherlands and sometimes venturing across the border into Germany or Belgium, Bosboom explores forests, dunes, public parks, roadside verges, and virtually any place that flowers grow. These excursions also sparked concern at the lack of pollinators he found among the flowers. “At times, it was eerily quiet,” he shares in the preface for his book, Flowerscapes, A Bug’s Eye View. “This matches recent studies showing that the numbers of flowers and insects have declined sharply across Western Europe over the past decades.”

There are a lot of reasons for the steep drop in insect populations, not just in Europe but around the world. Most of the reasons stem from human activities such as agriculture, pesticides, urban development and habitat destruction, pollution, and changing temperatures as a result of the escalating climate crisis.

Bosboom finds reasons to hope, however. He has observed how the Netherlands has adopted more environmentally friendly road management practices, and how people are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of native plants and wildflowers in supporting not only insect populations but entire ecosystems.

The diversity and resilience of flowers really struck a chord with Bosboom, who says, “The endlessly surprising perspectives completely captivated me, and I found myself constantly marvelling at their beauty, elegance, and strength.” He was also drawn to reducing his environmental impact by working more locally, sticking to destinations he could reach on foot or by bike or with just a short drive.

Purchase Flowerscapes, A Bug’s Eye View on Bosboom’s web shop, where you can also purchase prints, and explore much more of his work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Theo Bosboom Takes a Bug’s-Eye View in His Perspective-Shifting ‘Flowerscapes’ appeared first on Colossal.

The biggest climate decision at your next cookout is not the grill you buy. It is what you put on the grates. A backyard charcoal barbecue for four people can release as much greenhouse gas as an 80-mile car drive; and most of that comes from the meat, not the fuel, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food.

Grilling season is back, and a new grill is a chance to cut the emissions from summer entertaining. But the fuels are only part of the story, and the rankings have shifted since this guide first ran. The U.S. power grid has gotten markedly cleaner, which changes the case for electric grills. Before you head to the store, it helps to understand the carbon impact of charcoal, wood pellets, propane, natural gas, electricity, and solar — and where each one actually lands. And if you’re replacing an old grill, don’t forget to recycle the one you’re retiring.

Start With What’s on the Grates

Cook from scratch and you’re already ahead. Preparing a meal from whole ingredients rather than processed food can lower its global warming and human toxicity potential by up to 35%, according to a study in the Journal of Cleaner Production. That doesn’t make a barbecue carbon-free, though — and the single largest lever you control is protein.

The Sheffield team compared three grilled meals and found the gap is dramatic. A beef-heavy cookout was the most carbon-intensive option they measured, while swapping beef burgers for chicken cut the barbecue’s emissions by roughly a third, and a fully plant-based spread cut them by more than half. The lifecycle impact of the food, especially red meat, typically dwarfs the footprint of the fuel used to cook it. A burger’s beef carries far more embodied carbon than the propane needed to char it.

Put plainly: grilling more vegetables, chicken, or plant-based options is the highest-impact change most people can make at a cookout. The fuel decisions below matter — they’re just the second-biggest lever, not the first.

The Burning Truth About Fuels

Grilling is a science, as any grill master knows. A meal for four takes roughly 30 minutes to an hour on the grates, and different fuels need different lengths of time to reach cooking temperature. The estimates below assume about one hour of cooking to make dinner for four — your actual results will vary with the grill and fuel you use.

Charcoal: The Most Polluting Choice

Dinner for four needs about 300 square inches of grill space for meat, vegetables, and warming buns. Charcoal runs about 30 briquettes per 100 square inches, so you’ll need roughly 90 pieces. At an average briquette weight of about 0.8 ounces, that’s about 4.7 pounds of charcoal for the meal.

Charcoal carries two carbon costs: the embodied carbon of making the briquettes and the emissions from burning them. Manufacturing is the hidden problem. Charcoal is produced by heating wood in a low-oxygen kiln until moisture and volatile compounds cook off, leaving nearly pure carbon, and only about 20% to 35% of the original wood’s energy survives the process. The rest burns off during production. Estimates put the manufacturing footprint at roughly 3.5 to 7 pounds of CO2 per pound of charcoal, before you ever light the grill.

Burning the 90 briquettes for an hour adds about 21 pounds of CO2, plus roughly 0.79 pounds of carbon monoxide and 1.6 pounds of particulate matter. All told, a single charcoal cookout for four exceeds 28 pounds of CO2 along with other pollutants and is by far the most polluting way to grill. Eric Johnson’s lifecycle comparison in Environmental Impact Assessment Review reached a similar verdict: charcoal’s carbon footprint is roughly three times that of liquefied petroleum gas.

There’s a footprint upstream of your patio, too. Worldwide, woodfuel harvest, which includes wood used to make charcoal, accounts for about 30% of the estimated 2.1 billion tons of CO2 released annually by forest degradation across developing countries, according to research published in Carbon Balance and Management. In parts of Africa, charcoal production now rivals outright deforestation as a driver of forest loss. The wood in a U.S. bag of briquettes may be sourced differently, but the global picture is a reminder that “natural” charcoal is not the same as low-impact.

Wood Pellets: Second Place, by a Wide Margin

Wood pellets are a popular charcoal alternative, and some grillers treat them as a low-carbon, renewable fuel. Cooking on a 300-square-inch grill takes about two pounds of pellets.

Embodied carbon varies widely with the wood used, the manufacturing process, and how far the pellets travel. In general, a pound of pellets carries about 0.09 pounds of embodied carbon and produces about 1.8 pounds of CO2 when burned — putting our four-person dinner at roughly 3.78 pounds total. Because pellets burn cleaner than charcoal, the meal generates only a few grams of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and nitrogen and sulfur compounds. Pellets are the second-worst option on this list, but at a fraction of charcoal’s impact.

The Lower Footprint of Cooking With Gas

Propane and natural gas grills carry a lower environmental impact than charcoal and pellets, mostly because they heat fast and switch off the moment you’re done. That control over cooking time makes a real difference — charcoal keeps throwing off heat and emissions long before the grates are ready and well after the food comes off. Gas also keeps far more of its energy: propane retains roughly 90% of its energy from wellhead to grill, against charcoal’s 20% to 35%.

A propane grill uses about a half pound of propane for the 30 minutes our four-person meal needs. Including the embodied carbon of producing and delivering the fuel, that session totals about 1.99 pounds of CO2.

Natural gas usually requires a gas line plumbed to the home, so propane is more convenient for many grillers. A 30-minute cook uses roughly 1.2 pounds of natural gas, for a footprint of about 1.73 pounds of CO2. One caveat worth naming: natural gas systems can leak methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2 over the short term, which the combustion math above doesn’t capture.

Electric Grilling Has Quietly Become a Top Choice

For years the conventional wisdom held that electric grills were the dirtiest option, citing a 2003 Oak Ridge National Laboratory analysis from an era when coal dominated the power grid. That conclusion no longer holds, because the grid underneath it has changed.

In 2023, generating a kilowatt-hour of U.S. electricity produced about 0.81 pounds of CO2 on average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — down sharply from the coal-heavy mix of two decades ago, and still falling. The EPA’s emissions database shows grid carbon intensity dropping again by an average of about 3% from 2023 to 2024 as wind, solar, and natural gas displace coal.

Run the math on a modern electric grill, which draws roughly 1.5 to 1.8 kilowatts, and an hour of cooking on the average U.S. grid now produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 to 1.5 pounds of CO2. That puts it below propane on the typical grid — and well below charcoal — with one feature no fuel-burning grill offers: it gets cleaner every year on its own, as the grid decarbonizes, the same logic that drives heat pumps and electric vehicles. If your power comes from a cleaner-than-average source — rooftop solar, a green-power plan, or a state rich in hydro, wind, or nuclear — the number drops further still. Pair an electric grill with a solar generator and you approach a genuinely zero-carbon cookout.

The honest tradeoff is flavor and feel. Electric grills heat with coils or elements rather than open flame, so they don’t impart the same smoke, and purists notice. Cast-iron grates can deliver sear marks, and add-on smoking accessories help, but this is the option where the cooking experience differs most from a traditional grill.

Solar Cooking: Zero Fuel, Real Limits

Solar ovens use reflectors to concentrate sunlight on a sealed cooking chamber, making a meal with no fuel and no direct emissions. They excel at slow, moist, flavorful cooking — think baking and braising more than searing.

The limits are practical. It takes a genuinely sunny day to reach broiling or grilling temperatures, output drops with the light, and solar cookers don’t produce the signature grill lines many cooks prize. As a complement to another method — or for the right dish on the right afternoon — solar is unbeatable on carbon. As an everyday grill replacement for most households, it’s a harder sell than a clean-grid electric model.

The Carbon Impact of Grilling

A season of cooking 45 meals using each of the options we’ve reviewed will produce the following emissions:

• Charcoal: 1,260 lbs. of CO2, plus other pollutants
• Wood Pellets: 170 lbs. of CO2, plus some other pollutants
• Propane: 90 lbs. of CO2
• Natural Gas: 78 lbs. of CO2
• Solar: No CO2

Stretch these single-meal figures across a season of 45 cookouts and the differing environmental become starkly evident. The table below assumes the same four-person meal each time, cooked on the average U.S. grid for the electric estimate.

What You Can Do

If you’re buying a new grill

• Consider electric first. On today’s grid it beats propane, and it keeps improving as power generation cleans up, with no equipment swap required.
• If you want flame, choose gas over charcoal. Propane and natural gas heat fast and shut off instantly, cutting both fuel use and emissions.
• Recycle the grill you’re replacing rather than sending it to landfill. Check Earth911’s recycling locator for locations near you that accept grills, metal, or appliances.

If you’re keeping the grill you have

• Cook with the lid down to trap heat and burn less fuel per meal.
• Preheat for about 10 minutes instead of 20, and turn a gas grill off the moment the food is done.
• If you grill on charcoal, skip lighter fluid and use a chimney starter — a metal cylinder lit with a sheet of newspaper, usually under $20. Choose lump charcoal over briquettes, ideally from a brand that names its wood source, and light only as much as you need.

The change that beats all of the above

• Grill more vegetables, chicken, and plant-based options. Shifting even a few beef meals to chicken or veggies each season cuts more emissions than switching fuels does. The food is the bigger lever.
• Cook from scratch with whole ingredients to trim the lifecycle footprint of the meal itself.

The grilling choices you make this summer carry a long-term climate cost, or savings. Pick the cleaner fuel where you can, rethink what goes on the grates, and the backyard barbecue stays exactly as good while asking a lot less of the planet.

Related Reading

• Recycling Mystery: Barbecue Grills
• Solar Ovens Cook Food Almost Anywhere
• What Is Embodied Carbon?
• Recycling Mystery: Propane Tanks

Editor’s Note: Originally published on May 31, 2023, this article was substantially updated in June 2026.

The post Choose the Right Type of Grill for Your Sustainable Summer appeared first on Earth911.

For more than 20 years, fisheries managers set Chinook salmon recovery goals, closed fishing seasons, and rationed some tribal catches down to a handful of ceremonial fish. The whole time, ocean fleets off British Columbia and Alaska were killing thousands more of those same salmon each year than the official records showed.

Newly revised data released by Canada through the Pacific Salmon Commission show that ocean fisheries, especially British Columbia’s recreational fishery, intercepted far more Endangered Species Act-listed Puget Sound Chinook than was believed. The under-reporting goes back two decades. The is a wake-up call about Chinook populations, which are still “in crisis,” according to the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office. Because Southern Resident orcas depend on salmon, which sit near their lowest numbers on record, the treaty governing those fisheries is being renegotiated right now.

“We already knew Puget Sound Chinook and Southern Resident killer whales were in crisis,” said Dr. Nick Gayeski, a Senior Ecologist at Wild Fish Conservancy. “Canada’s underestimate of recreational Chinook harvest show that ocean interceptions were substantially higher than previously understood during a critical period for Chinook and killer whale recovery.

A 60% Toll Before the Fish Reached Home

In several Central and North Puget Sound watersheds, including the Nooksack, Skagit, and Stillaguamish rivers among them, revised estimates show Alaska and British Columbia fisheries intercepted more than 60% of returning adult Chinook before the fish ever reached Puget Sound. Distant ocean fleets were taking four to six times more Chinook from those rivers than every Puget Sound tribal, commercial, and recreational fishery combined.

The local cost is stark. In 2025, the Stillaguamish Tribe in Arlington, Washington, reported its ceremonial harvest of just 26 Chinook from a river its people have fished for generations.

The revised data traces to a single change. British Columbia updated the accounting method it had used for roughly 20 years to estimate catch in “mixed-stock” ocean fisheries, where weak and recovering runs from rivers up and down the coast are caught indiscriminately alongside healthy ones. The old method had understated that loss of salmon the entire time, with little public explanation, which is part of why Wild Fish Conservancy frames the episode as a transparency problem, not just a technical footnote.

What the Orcas Lost

The Southern Resident killer whales eat Chinook nearly to the exclusion of everything else, and the shortfall shows in long-term loss of these unique creatures. The most recent annual census, in July 2025, counted just 74 whales; Wild Fish Conservancy put the figure at 76 in mid-2026. Either way, the population has lost roughly a sixth of its members in two decades, and NOAA scientists point to the scarcity of large Chinook as the leading driver of the decline.

Recent modeling in Communications Earth & Environment found that cutting ocean interceptions before the fish reach orca feeding areas could raise Chinook abundance in the whales’ critical habitat by as much as 25%, restoring prey that was being removed at sea while everyone in the fishing community counted on it surviving to spawn.

What the Models Say Comes Next

Long-range projections are sobering under the status quo. A 2025 population model estimated the orcas could decline another 10.6% by 2150 if conditions simply hold at 2010–2020 levels. The same model found the population could grow 17.6% if Chinook productivity doubled, and more than double if specific runs, such as four-year-old Fraser River summer Chinook, rebounded sharply. The future of the whales, in other words, is largely a function of how many adult salmon survive to return.

Another study in Scientific Reports points to a compounding problem. Because ocean fisheries catch Chinook before they finish growing—immature fish can be up to 60% of the ocean catch—this selection contributes to shrinking the body size and reproductive output of future runs. Larger, older females carry more and bigger eggs and reach spawning habitat smaller fish can’t. The researchers found that when fisheries closer to the rivers let those large adults through, they can land greater total weight from fewer fish.

Puget Sound once saw as many as 690,000 Chinook return in a single year. Rebuilding anything close to that won’t come from one fix to a spreadsheet. But the timing matters: the United States and Canada are renegotiating the Pacific Salmon Treaty that governs these ocean fisheries; it’s negotiating window that opens roughly once a decade, and preservation is lever most likely to move the numbers that the models say determine whether salmon and orcas can recover together.

What You Can Do

The highest-leverage actions people can take are collective rather than individual:

• Track the Pacific Salmon Treaty Public comment periods and stakeholder meetings shape where, when, and how ocean harvest happens. Reform that shifts catch toward rivers and estuaries is the change researchers say matters most.
• Support in-river fisheries and tribal co-managers. Catching fewer, fully grown fish closer to home protects both salmon size and the treaty-reserved rights of Puget Sound tribes.
• Ask where and how your salmon was caught. When shopping or dining, look for river- or terminal-caught Pacific salmon over mixed-stock ocean-troll product when you can identify it. It’s a small move, but it nudges demand toward more selective fishing.
• Back habitat restoration in Puget Sound watersheds. Even perfectly counted harvest won’t recover Chinook without cold, clean, connected rivers for them to return to.

The post For Two Decades, the Salmon Count Was Wrong and Puget Sound’s Orcas Paid the Price appeared first on Earth911.