by Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times, photography by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Times

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In a vast stretch of Central Washington’s high desert, the farms and small towns of Grant County sit on nothing short of a gold mine.

Grant County’s utility district owns two public dams on the colossal Columbia River that are capable of powering more than 1.5 million homes. For decades, this sparsely populated county had enough clean hydroelectricity to meet its own power needs and sell the excess at a low cost across the Northwest.

Then wealthy companies, catering to the insatiable demands of our digital world, arrived in the county. Attracted by the cheap electricity, they built power-guzzling data centers — the warehouses filled with computer servers that back the modern internet. Local officials welcomed the industry’s economic potential.

But with demand soaring and the power from dams finite, Grant County has been forced to look to other sources of energy. The problem is so acute that the county is headed for a daunting choice in the next six years: violate a state green energy law limiting the use of fossil fuels or risk rolling blackouts in homes, factories and hospitals.

High-voltage power lines stretch across the Columbia River at Wanapum Dam, one of two major sources of hydroelectricity for the Central Washington farming community of Grant County.

At least three utilities in other Washington counties are similarly contending with the voracious demands of data centers.

State lawmakers set the stage for this reckoning. In 2019, the Legislature passed a measure to make Washington’s utilities carbon-neutral by 2030. At the same time, in the name of bringing jobs to rural areas, lawmakers encouraged the explosive growth of the data center industry through a massive tax break.

Remarkably, Washington in recent years has gotten a smaller share of its electricity from renewable sources than it did two decades ago, according to the most recent state data. That’s despite the fact the state produces a quarter of the nation’s hydropower.

“Our existing hydro system is pretty much tapped out,” said Randall Hardy, an energy consultant and former administrator of Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that owns Washington’s largest dam. “So you’ve got a dilemma of how you’ll meet this additional load from data centers with clean resources or, frankly, with any resources.”

Artificial intelligence, which requires extraordinary computing power, is accelerating the need to build data centers across the world, and experts say the industry’s global energy consumption as of just two years ago could double by 2026. Data centers also are relied upon every day by businesses and people for internet searches, storing photos on the cloud and streaming videos.

Some states and counties with large data center markets have tried to craft policies to mitigate the impact.

For example, Virginia, home to the nation’s largest market for data centers, has contemplated making them improve energy efficiency and use more green power to qualify for tax breaks. Lawmakers recently ordered an assessment of the industry’s impact on power supply.

Georgia lawmakers went further, passing a bill — ultimately vetoed by the governor — to suspend its tax breaks for data centers while officials completed a study on power impacts.

Meanwhile, Washington undermined an effort to study data centers’ power usage. In 2022, Gov. Jay Inslee, one of the nation’s biggest champions of green energy, vetoed a plan — tucked into legislation that expanded the tax break — to understand how much power data centers consume.

His office defended the veto, saying a study would be duplicative of work underway. Although regional power planners have produced wide-ranging forecasts about data centers’ power use, no one has tracked their rapidly growing energy demands in Washington specifically or the impact of the state’s tax break on its power grid, The Seattle Times and ProPublica found.

In a statement, Inslee’s office said the industry is not driving power problems statewide. When asked whether the state should study data center power usage, given its growth, Anna Lising, Inslee’s top energy policy adviser, said there’s no need. “I’m not concerned because we haven’t had resource adequacy issues or service issues as a result of it,” Lising said.

Inslee’s office said he is aware of the need to bring more renewable energy online, and the state is working on it. The statement said Inslee supports the state tax break but would be “open to considering changes.” He declined to be interviewed.

As temperatures rise and Washington phases out fossil fuels, the need for more clean energy to meet everyone’s power demands becomes increasingly critical.

Wanapum Dam is capable of generating enough power for more than 950,000 U.S. homes.

“You get into this question of equity,” said Kevin Schneider, a senior research fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research facility. “Should people be sitting in overheating houses in order to supply the servers for AI?”

This very dynamic has placed counties like Grant, despite their abundance of clean energy, in the difficult position of finding enough electricity to feed this power-hungry industry. Conversations about potentially costly growth have created rifts between generational farmers and the county’s ever-expanding tech sector, which also has many local supporters.

State Rep. Alex Ybarra, a Republican lawmaker whose district includes most of Grant County, said he believes it’s necessary for the data center industry to continue to grow and considers the state’s climate deadlines unrealistic.

“Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Ybarra said about phasing out fossil fuels on the state’s timeline. “If you want to get rid of natural gas, replace it with something before you change it all out. Because if not, we’ll be stuck.”

Inside Data Centers

Hyperscale data centers, like the ones in Washington’s Grant County, are massive complexes that cover a minimum of 10,000 square feet and store more than 5,000 servers.

(Source: International Data Corporation and reporting by The Seattle Times and ProPublica. Graphic by Mark Nowlin/The Seattle Times.) “Power to the People”

Before the 1930s, most of Grant County had no electricity.

Private utilities refused to serve rural areas like Grant County, tucked between the rugged Cascades and the sun-baked foothills of the Palouse. Frustrated locals banded together to create their own public utility amid a national push for rural electrification often called “Power to the People.”

By the 1950s, the public utility used a federal loan and long-term contracts with utilities west of the Cascades to build one, then two, locally owned hydropower dams. Cheap hydro and the expansion of power lines allowed farmers to install electric irrigation pumps and transform the county from an expanse of desert brush and cheatgrass into one of the nation’s leading potato producers.

Grant County’s Priest Rapids Dam in Mattawa, Washington (first image) and the turbines inside it (second image). Decades ago, the county’s public utility used a federal loan and long-term contracts with other utilities to build Priest Rapids and the Wanapum Dams for hydropower.

Cheap electricity — among the lowest rates in the country — also drew the burgeoning internet industry to the area.

Microsoft and Yahoo in 2006 were among the first to break ground in Central Washington. In 2010, Washington lawmakers, hoping to spur economic growth east of the Cascades, began giving data centers a sales tax break on computer equipment, typically replaced every three to five years, and on their installation. For some companies, that amounted to millions of dollars in savings over time.

Washington eventually became home to at least 87 data centers, according to the industry tracking website Baxtel as of July. Washington is among the top 10 largest data center markets by state, according to Baxtel.

In Grant County, data centers grew to consume more power than any other category of ratepayer, including other industrial customers, residents, farm irrigation, local food processors and commercial businesses, according to utility officials. Data centers in 2022 accounted for nearly 40% of total demand, or about as much as 190,000 U.S. households, according to utility and state data.

Grant County’s power infrastructure, such as the transmission lines across the top of Priest Rapids Dam, once provided most of the electricity used by local ratepayers. Now, with rising demand, the county has turned to “unspecified” sources for 80% of its power.

The increased demand made relying on the county’s traditional source of electricity, the dams, risky, Grant County utility officials said.

So the local utility launched a new arrangement. It signed contracts with big companies that trade in energy, including Shell and Morgan Stanley, agreeing to exchange most of its hydropower for a steady supply of electricity generated by other, “unspecified” sources of energy. Unspecified power comes from the open energy market, where utilities buy available electricity from a mix of fuels. The sources are usually carbon-emitting fuels like natural gas, according to experts.

While the county as a whole grew far more reliant on unspecified power sources, some data centers in Grant County, including Microsoft’s, secured specialized contracts with the county’s utility for guaranteed access to hydroelectricity, enabling them to bank the renewable energy toward their own climate goals.

Right now, Grant County can produce or import enough power to meet its needs. But the county is experiencing an “energy crunch,” according to internal utility documents. By 2025, swapping out hydro for other sources of power will no longer be enough, according to utility officials and documents. The county will be forced to pay out of pocket for contracts with other power suppliers, build its own new sources of generation or consistently buy power on the open market. That’s risky when demand is high and utilities across the West are searching for energy.

In rural Quincy, Washington, tech companies bought swaths of farmland starting in the 2000s and converted it into data centers, giant warehouses that store computer servers.

Utility officials have been reluctant to blame the dilemma exclusively on the data center industry, which county leaders would like to keep growing in hopes of more jobs and property tax revenue.

But an analysis of electricity data by The Times and ProPublica shows the county’s growth in power demand from 2007 to 2022 roughly equaled the demand now attributable to data centers.

Grant County surveyed residents about the energy crunch last year, hoping to gauge how familiar they were with the county’s need to quickly secure power. The survey produced some shocked responses from ratepayers who said they hadn’t realized how quickly demand was climbing, according to utility documents.

“2025 seems pretty darn soon — that we’d be there that quickly. I knew we were growing and had increased demand for power, I just had no idea it would be that soon,” one customer replied during survey interviews.

It will only get harder by 2030, when Washington’s climate laws require utilities to drastically curtail the amount of fuel coming from unspecified sources.

Ty Ehrman, a senior manager at Grant County Public Utility District, worries it will be impossible to generate enough clean electricity fast enough to meet state mandates.

Sunrise in Quincy, where agricultural facilities meet transmission lines

“You’ve really got to kind of start to wonder if we’re going to end up in a place where we end up with rolling blackouts or unintended outages because we haven’t had the full generation capacity to meet it from the green side,” Ehrman said.

Data centers in neighboring Douglas County, which include cryptomining facilities, used about 39% of the county’s electricity in 2022, according to utility and state data obtained by The Times and ProPublica.

In Seattle, which has several data centers that are much smaller than Grant County’s giant warehouses, the industry used at least 10% of the city’s power in 2022 — enough electricity for roughly 90,000 homes. The amount of power used by data centers grew fivefold since 2016, the earliest year of available data from Seattle City Light, the municipal utility.

Dirty Energy

The energy predicament that places like Grant County are facing was far from the spotlight one sunny afternoon in May 2019, when Inslee stood in a Seattle park to sign legislation cementing Washington’s top spot among climate-conscious states.

Inslee, who co-authored a book in 2007 calling for bold action against climate change and ran for president on climate issues, declared Washington would lead the nation by eliminating carbon-emitting energy sources.

“We aren’t done,” Inslee said. “Our success this year is just a harbinger of successes to come. But we’re ready. We can do this.”

Gov. Jay Inslee shakes then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s hand after signing landmark bills in 2019 to wean Washington off fossil fuels. Rising demand from data centers could affect the state’s clean energy plans. (Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times)

The Clean Energy Transformation Act calls for Washington’s utilities to become greenhouse gas “neutral” by 2030 and to have 100% renewable or noncarbon-emitting power by 2045.

Washington was poised to struggle with this target because of the nature of renewable energy. Hydropower is a finite resource without building new dams — a hard sell because of the impact on endangered salmon. With current technologies, the availability of solar and wind power depends on weather conditions.

The state has added miles and miles of wind turbines and solar farms to its grid in recent years, making up about 9% of its fuel mix in 2022, and is mandating more energy-efficient buildings in the name of power conservation.

But those efforts compete against growing demand not just from data centers but also from the ongoing transition away from gas-powered vehicles, appliances and industries. Decisions like Grant County’s to exchange dam-generated power for unspecified sources have also reduced the amount of hydro in the state’s energy mix.

The Wanapum Dam on the Columbia River is owned by the Grant County Public Utility District. Washington’s dams, including those owned by the federal government, produce about a quarter of the nation’s hydropower.

The net result: The share of hydropower in Washington’s electricity supply fell from an annual average of two-thirds in the early 2000s to just 55% in the five years leading up to 2022, the latest year with data. The share for all renewables fell from 67% to 61%.

Meanwhile, Washington’s reliance on natural gas and unspecified fuels has increased, accounting for about a quarter of the state’s electricity on average from 2018 through 2022.

Washington’s Electricity From Hydropower Has Gone Down While Nonrenewable Sources Have Grown Note: Renewable sources of electricity are hydropower, wind, biomass, geothermal and solar. Nonrenewable sources include nuclear, coal, natural gas, petroleum, waste, landfill gas, cogeneration and others. (Source: Washington Department of Commerce)

The dependence on unspecified fuel became the most pronounced in two Central Washington counties with major data center markets, state data shows. In Grant County, because it sold hydro in exchange for energy from other fuels, more than 80% of electricity came from unspecified sources in 2022.

Douglas County also has experienced rapid growth in data centers, and it had a dramatic drop in its percentage of hydropower.

Microsoft, which built data centers in both counties partly because of hydropower, also understands the limits of this energy source and is “not going to push something until a break,” said Noelle Walsh, who leads the team responsible for the company’s data center operations.

The company has committed to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2030 and recently expanded data center operations in Arizona partly due to constraints on the availability of renewable energy in Washington, Walsh said.

Transmission lines that carry power across the Columbia River Basin run past agricultural fields near Vantage, Washington.

The possibility that data centers would make it harder to phase out fossil fuels rarely came up when lawmakers created and then expanded the tax break that encouraged data center development since 2010.

Reuven Carlyle, a former lawmaker who spearheaded Washington’s clean energy law, said, in hindsight, the cumulative impact has become clear. “The aggregation of demand today — now that is a serious concern,” he said.

The concern finally came onto the Legislature’s radar in 2022, when lawmakers took up the latest proposed expansion of the tax break. They voted to authorize up to $400,000 to study data center power usage in Washington.

“We wanted answers about this industry that we were about to unleash successfully in our state again,” said Rep. April Berg, D-Mill Creek, who sponsored the legislation. She and other lawmakers had heard “anecdotally” about data center power usage but wanted more details, she said. “A study could have come back and said, ‘Here are all the potential issues.’”

Inslee, the leading champion of clean energy goals, stood in the way of doing so in Washington. He vetoed the provision calling for an energy study — one of just 18 full or partial vetoes out of more than 300 bills that crossed his desk that year.

State Rep. Alex Ybarra, right, and Kelley Payne, a spokesperson for the state House of Representatives, lead a tour of Quincy’s state-of-the-art high school, which opened in 2019 and was financed with property tax revenue that city and state officials have attributed to data centers.

Inslee’s office justified it by saying the Northwest Power and Conservation Council was already doing the work that was needed.

The council does release regional power use forecasts, including for the data center industry based on limited publicly available information and utility trends.

But the provision that Inslee vetoed was intended to provide answers that the council has not, its sponsors said: information specific to Washington’s data center industry and how the state’s tax incentives impact the power grid. The bill also included language designed to ensure the research wasn’t duplicative of the council’s work.

The council’s forecasts for data centers this year were wide-ranging, where lawmakers had hoped for more precise data to inform future policy decisions.

Sen. Matt Boehnke, who co-wrote the study provision, said he was shocked and frustrated by Inslee’s veto of a provision approved with bipartisan support. Lawmakers had been in touch with the governor’s office while writing the bill, he said.

“Why veto it last-minute? Why not work with us to amend it?” said Boehnke, a Richland Republican.

When asked about the impact of data centers on the ability of utilities to meet Washington’s clean energy mandate, Inslee’s office said that the increased use of unspecified power is driven by Grant and Douglas counties. Both have large data center markets.

Inslee’s office said in its statement that Grant County’s choice to swap hydro for energy from unspecified fuel sources was “a business decision” by the utility and that it is still responsible for complying with the state’s green energy law.

Asked to comment on the governor’s office’s position, officials in Grant County said they made choices they felt were necessary to keep the lights on.

While Washington lawmakers didn’t get the study of state power use they authorized, the numbers for the region as a whole are eye-popping.

The power and conservation council predicted this month that by 2029, data centers in the Northwest could grow to use more electricity than the average annual consumption of Puget Sound Energy, the region’s largest utility with more than 1.2 million residential, commercial and industrial customers.

That’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. On the high end, the council estimated that power-guzzling data centers could push the grid past its limits in just five years.

“The power demand from data centers,” said Hardy, the former Bonneville Power Administration official, “combined with other growing demands, and with that transition from fossil fuels to renewables, will inevitably lead to big rate increases.”

Unease in Grant County

In Grant County, the rise of data centers has created a sense of unease for some residents.

In October, rumors about major rate hikes targeting Grant County’s data centers started to spread after utility Commissioner Nelson Cox said he supported doubling their rates. The utility wasn’t considering such a proposal — the comment was meant to “shock and awe” and spark conversation, Cox later said — but data center lobbyists and executives rallied.

Microsoft operates one of the largest data centers in Quincy. The nondescript campus houses giant warehouses and diesel-powered backup generators.

“If we are to have any chance of stopping this, WE NEED TO PACK THE COMMISSION ROOM ON TUESDAY 10/24,” read an email from Ryan Beebout, a vice president at Sabey, a Seattle-based company that owns data centers across the state. The email, obtained by The Times and ProPublica through a public records request to the utility, went out to a coalition of Central Washington data centers that included executives at Microsoft and Yahoo. Beebout and Sabey did not respond to requests for comment.

Representatives from data center companies filled the commission chambers for the October meeting and pushed back against rate hikes for industrial customers.

Grant County Public Utility District Commissioner Nelson Cox, a farmer, rattled some data center operators last fall after he suggested doubling the industry’s power rates. His comment was only meant to “shock and awe,” Cox later said.

Cox cut in. The timing of this entire discussion wasn’t right, the utility commissioner said, noting that it was the middle of harvest season, when farmers couldn’t take time to show up. He encouraged representatives from agriculture and tech to attend a November meeting.

Come November, the commission chambers of the Grant County Public Utility District were as crowded as longtime employees had ever seen them. Half the room wore dirt-covered work boots and flannel shirts; the other half wore loafers and pressed button-downs.

Grant County needed to raise power rates, commissioners said. How the utility would implement the increases turned into a debate over identity, pitting farmers against tech workers. The leading proposals that were on the table would hit farmers harder than data centers.

Murray Van Dyke runs his tractor on the alfalfa fields of his family farm near Quincy in March. He and fellow farmers attended a Grant County Public Utility District meeting in November to voice concerns about the possibility of new electricity rate hikes amid the growth of data centers.

Murray Van Dyke, a hay and alfalfa farmer in his 70s, stood up and asked to speak. The need to build costly new infrastructure, a key factor behind talk of rate hikes, was driven by “one area of our town that uses a lot of power,” Van Dyke said, a reference to data centers.

Van Dyke and other farmers shared concerns about being asked to bear the costs. “We’re just trying to be fair,” he later told The Times and ProPublica.

High-power transmission lines run between an Amway manufacturing facility, left, and a Microsoft data center, top left. The rising use of artificial intelligence is expected to increase demands for power.

As local utilities like the one in Grant County grapple with the impact data centers are having on the electrical grid, one influential Washington lawmaker is rethinking whether the state should promote the industry’s growth through tax breaks.

Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, the majority floor leader, voted in favor of the data center tax break in 2022. But given the state’s goals for electrification and moving away from carbon, he said he doesn’t find the industry’s economic development promises as compelling as he once did.

“It doesn’t any longer seem like it’s a great idea to put a bunch of super energy-hungry data centers in the middle of the state using a lot of our clean electricity,” Pedersen said.

About the Data

The Washington Department of Commerce collects from public and private utilities annual data tracking the fuel used to deliver electricity to their customers. The data — available for 2000 through 2022 — breaks down a utility’s fuel mix into categories that include hydropower, natural gas and nuclear energy.

Some electricity falls into the category unspecified, used for power purchased from an open market across the region. The power is untraceable as it is made up of a mix of available fuels. Experts say that most of that fuel is typically natural gas.

Before 2018, Washington officials used an industry formula to break down how much unspecified fuel came from each of the named categories of fuel sources. The state abandoned the effort because the formula wasn’t necessarily an accurate way to attribute fuel sources, said Glenn Blackmon, Washington’s energy policy manager.

Coincidentally, local data from Grant County shows 2018 was also a year when its use of unspecified power jumped after signing additional contracts to sell most of its hydro supply. The numbers indicate that the growth statewide that year was not merely attributable to Washington’s change in accounting methods. Increases in unspecified power use by Chelan and Douglas counties came well after the accounting change.

Because water levels fluctuate from year to year, the amount of hydropower generated in Washington varies. Blackmon said it’s best to compare 2016 and 2022, the recent period when water levels were most stable. The share of hydropower in the state’s electricity mix dropped 10 percentage points. The overall share of renewables also declined.

Without statewide figures on data center power usage, The Times and ProPublica attempted to track trends by collecting data from a handful of public utilities with large data center markets, including Grant County’s. Many utilities do not track data centers, and such data is not available from private utilities.

Seattle City Light, the municipal utility, doesn’t track all data centers but formulated its best estimate of their energy use at our request.

Eli Sanders contributed research while a student with the Technology, Law, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

Our early human ancestors were likely meat scavengers, not hunters. And that’s for one pretty simple reason: we just weren’t equipped to make the kill, research suggests.

Per Sky History, our ancestors did have strong teeth and jaws, but they didn’t have much in common with natural-born carnivores, like tigers. But that didn’t matter—because they lived among tigers (saber-toothed ones, to be exact) who could do the killing on their behalf. And after that, the early humans would come along and scavenge the meat from the leftover carcass. 

Back then (and we’re talking nearly 2 million years ago), meat was only an occasional supplement to a diet predominantly made up of plant-based foods, like seeds, flowers, tubers, and fruits.

Pexels

So, does this mean we’re not supposed to eat meat? After all, it was the big cat carnivores who developed the in-built tools to hunt and tear it apart—not us. But that said, our ancestors were smart enough to find it, work out how to cook it, and, in the end, their bodies could digest it, too. So does that mean we should keep eating it?

To state the obvious, a lot has changed in 2 million years. Our ancestors couldn’t fathom an industrialized concentrated animal feeding operation, for example, cramped with thousands upon thousands of animals awaiting slaughter. And they likely couldn’t picture the destruction we modern humans have caused the environment either.

The situation has changed, and so maybe our eating habits should, too. But not completely—animals might be off the table, but that doesn’t mean the meat is going anywhere.

Are humans supposed to eat meat?

The answer to this question depends entirely on who you ask. Animal-rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for example, maintains that our natural instincts are actually telling us not to consume meat. 

“Most humans are revolted by the sight of blood, intestines, and raw flesh and can’t tolerate hearing the screams of animals being ripped apart,” it notes. “The bloody reality of killing and eating animals is innately repulsive to us.”

Others maintain it’s not that simple, and that our biology has evolved in a way that enables us to digest animal flesh without getting sick. And after we were scavengers, we learned to hunt for ourselves, proving that PETA’s theory is perhaps not true for our ancestors. Or at least, it didn’t repulse them enough to stop doing it altogether.

“Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores,” notes Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil in an excerpt of his book, Should We Eat Meat?: Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory, published in Scientific American. “Our enzymes evolved to digest meat whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth,” before adding that the development of cooperative hunting also played a role in the “development of language and socialization.”

However, Smil goes on to address the fact that while we may have evolved to eat meat, the way we produce it now has undeniably become a significant burden on the planet. And it’s true: if we don’t change the current system of CAFOs and mass slaughter, we’re going to have big problems. In fact, we already have big problems.

Why the way we eat meat needs to evolve once more

Right now, in the US alone, there are millions of land animals waiting to be slaughtered, and their flesh will be made into everything from chicken nuggets to pork chops to beef burgers. Most of them come from CAFOs, also known as factory farms. In fact, in the US, research suggests that 99 percent of all animal products can be traced back to factory farms.

On these farms, animals are kept in cramped, industrialized conditions. Multiple reports suggest that factory-farmed chickens have little more space to turn around than the size of an A4 sheet of paper, for example. 

Animal agriculture is also a leading driver of deforestation and rising emissions. Over the course of one year, just one cow will emit around 220 pounds of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas, which is around 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat. 

Other environmental issues associated with animal agriculture and factory farming include river and lake pollution, ocean dead zones, and soil erosion. And yet, the meat industry is still growing. Right now, it’s worth more than $897 billion.

Beyond Meat

But there is a solution. And it works for those who want to keep meat in their diet and those who don’t: alternative proteins.

Alternative protein can take many forms, but one of the most popular is plant-based meat. This involves taking plant-based ingredients and turning them into a product that looks, cooks, and tastes like meat, only without the animal. This market is growing, too. In the next decade, it may even hit $162 billion, according to some reports.

Cultivated meat is another form of alternative protein. And like plant-based meat, it aims to give the same texture, taste, and experience as traditional meat, only instead of real, farmed animals, it’s grown from animal cells in bioreactors. In June 2023, the US became the second country in the world, after Singapore, to give cultivated meat the seal of approval.

It might seem strange and futuristic, but alternative protein is just another step in meat’s evolution. At first, we scavenged it, then we hunted it, and after that, we farmed it. And then we farmed it, and farmed it, and farmed it some more. But now, it’s time to embrace some new ways of creating our much-loved meat. Because regardless of whether or not we were supposed to eat it in the first place, the bottom line is, today, it’s not going anywhere. And if we don’t change soon, our appetites are going to cost us the planet. 

This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

Plastic pollution is a pressing global issue with significant environmental and health impacts. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), humans produce more than 430 million metric tons of plastic annually, with two-thirds of this being short-lived products that soon become waste. 

This waste often ends up in the ocean, contributing to the estimated 19 to 23 million metric tons of plastic that enter aquatic ecosystems each year.

The production of plastic is one of the most energy-intensive manufacturing processes, generating 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 alone. Once discarded, plastics can take hundreds of years to break down, and their persistence in the environment poses a severe threat to wildlife. 

Ron Lach/Pexels

Millions of animals, including birds, fish, and marine mammals, die each year due to entanglement or ingestion of plastic debris.

Concerned about our massive plastic problem? Zero-waste stores can help. 

These stores, which aim to reduce or eliminate plastic waste, are gaining traction in various communities across the country. Zero-waste grocery stores offer a sustainable alternative to traditional supermarkets, allowing shoppers to purchase food and other products without the accompanying plastic packaging. 

What can you expect to find at these stores? We turned to Larasati Vitoux, owner of Maison Jar in Brooklyn, NY, to find out. 

Maison Jar: a zero-waste store grows in Brooklyn

In March 2022, Vitoux opened Maison Jar in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn as a way to import sustainability concepts from her home country to the United States.

“I am originally from France, and during my time back in France, I experienced shopping at zero-waste grocery stores,” Vitoux tells VegNews. “I enjoyed the eco-friendly and minimalist approach, as well as the sense of community.” 

The concept of zero-waste stores is well-established in Europe, but when Vitoux returned to New York, she found there was only one similar store in the entire city. This gap in the market motivated her to establish Maison Jar.

Here, shoppers bring their own clean containers to fill with the various bulk products available, reducing single-use packaging and promoting a zero-waste lifestyle. 

Upon entering, customers weigh their containers at the provided scales and note the weight to ensure they only pay for the product itself, not the container. They then fill their containers with a wide range of bulk products.

Maison Jar

“We are a refillery, meaning we sell most of our products in bulk and encourage customers to bring their own containers,” Vitoux says. “We work with vendors that provide products with minimal packaging and have closed-loop systems, such as our coffee suppliers who use a bucket system for deliveries.”

At checkout, the container’s weight is subtracted from the total weight to determine the final price, allowing for a seamless and waste-free shopping experience.

Maison Jar

In general, zero-waste stores like Vitoux’s are stocked with a variety of foods that can help you live your best zero-waste life. These range from grains and legumes, such as quinoa, rice, lentils, and chickpeas, to nutrient-dense nuts and seeds such as almonds and chia seeds. 

Dried fruits, including apricots and dates, offer convenient snacking options, while spices and herbs add flavor to meals without plastic packaging. 

“Our top sellers are classic products like extra virgin olive oil, nuts, and grains,” Vitoux says. “There is a noticeable trend towards healthier snacking options, such as energy chunks and snacks with no added sugar.”

“Our customers enjoy cooking and prefer buying simple ingredients rather than ultra-processed foods,” she says.

Zero-waste stores also carry flour, baking supplies, various pastas, vegan snacks such as granola, and loose-leaf tea and coffee, all available in bulk to support a sustainable lifestyle.

Zero-waste vegan food finds

In addition to these staples, Maison Jar also offers produce sourced from local farmers and purveyors.

“Most of our food items are organic, about 95 percent. We also prioritize local and seasonal produce as much as possible,” Vitoux says. “Being eco-friendly is crucial, and we work with vendors that have closed-loop systems to minimize waste.”

Rind

Vitoux also stocks vegetarian deli items, including vegan cheeses from New York companies such as Rind and Bandit, another sustainability move that encourages consumers to explore alternatives to dairy cheese, which is more eco-intensive than plant-based alternatives. 

“The plant-based cheeses we carry are very popular,” Vitoux says. “As a French person, I can be picky with my cheese, and they are really good.”

Over the course of two years in business, Vitoux observed a few key trends. “Customers have been asking for more variety in grains, like sorghum, bulgur, and farro,” she says. “There’s also a trend against ultra-processed food because people are becoming more aware of its links to health issues.”

And while shopping at zero-waste stores can be pricier than traditional mega supermarkets, Vitoux makes sure to continue to incentivize more shoppers to consider zero-waste stores. 

“We host a monthly ‘Refill Happy Hour,’ offering 20 percent off any refills,” Vitoux says. “It’s a great way for us to give back to our customers and encourage sustainable shopping habits.”

Maison Jar

Ultimately, Vitoux is hopeful that Maison Jar and zero-waste stores like it can chip away at the plastic crisis. “We want to empower our customers to make the right choices and be aware of their impact,” she says. “We’re not here to finger-point; we’re here to provide alternatives and support.”

More zero-waste stores to try

Currently, there are approximately 1,300 zero-waste stores in the US, varying in size and offerings. Here are just eight of the zero-waste stores which, akin to Maison Jar, are hoping to make plastic waste obsolete.

re_grocery

1re_grocery 

Los Angeles, CA

Re_grocery offers more than 500 refillable bulk goods and a variety of sustainable products. The store encourages customers to bring their own containers to reduce waste and stocks various vegan essentials, including grains, legumes, nuts, and dried fruits. Re_grocery also features eco-friendly personal care items and household products.

2Package Free Shop

New York, NY

This store focuses on eliminating single-use plastics and offers a variety of sustainable products. In addition to food items, Package Free Shop sells personal care and household products, making it a one-stop shop for zero-waste living. Customers can find items like reusable straws, stainless steel food containers, and toxin-free personal care products. 

The Package Free Shop’s initiatives have already diverted over 75 million units of trash from landfills since its launch in 2017.

The Refill Shoppe

3The Refill Shoppe

Ventura, CA

The Refill Shoppe offers a selection of more than 80 eco-friendly personal care and cleaning products in bulk. including shampoo, conditioner, lotion, bath gel, dish soap, laundry detergent, and more. It also offers customization options like adding scents, colors, and essential oils to most products.

As its name suggests, customers are encouraged to bring their own containers to refill or purchase reusable ones in-store. 

4Precycle

Brooklyn, NY

Precycle is a zero-waste grocery store that emphasizes reducing packaging waste. The store offers a variety of staples, including grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and dried fruits, along with specialty goods such as jars of pickled items. It also sells its own reusable totes with compartments to sort your zero-waste goods. 

Fillgood.co

5FillGood

Richmond, CA

FillGood is an online zero-waste store that offers home delivery in the San Francisco Bay Area. The store stocks bulk food items, including grains, pasta, and baking supplies, as well as personal care and cleaning products. In 2022 alone, the store diverted more than 190,000 single-use plastics from the waste stream. 

6Simply Bulk Market

Longmont, CO

Simply Bulk Market offers more than 500 bulk food items, including 100 jars of spices, 10 varieties of oats,  16 types of beans, and 18 kinds of rice, alongside cereals, nuts, and trail mix. The store also features eco-friendly household products, such as bulk bars of soap, liquid soaps, skincare products, shampoo, detergent, and cleaners. 

The Zero Market

7The Zero Market

Denver, CO

This store offers more than 1,200 products aimed at promoting a zero-waste lifestyle, including bulk foods, as well as personal care items and household products. Notably, The Zero Market stocks toxin-free, preservative-free, and cruelty-free body care products, alongside eco-friendly household items, all available without disposable packaging. 

8The Wally Shop

Brooklyn, NY

An online zero-waste grocery delivery service that operates primarily in New York City, The Wally Shop offers a variety of bulk foods, including grains, legumes, and fresh produce sourced from local farmers’ markets and bulk stores.

Items are delivered in reusable containers such as glass jars, cotton mesh bags, and tote bags, which the company collects for reuse with future deliveries. This model eliminates disposable packaging and reduces the carbon footprint by using bicycles for delivery.

This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

According to one 2015 study, more than half of all Americans suffer from galeophobia. It sounds a little like a rare disease, but it’s actually not a physical ailment at all. It simply means to be terrified of sharks. In fact, the same study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans will not swim in the ocean because they are too afraid of the apex predators. But while movies like Jaws have painted an aggressive, malevolent image of sharks, they actually aren’t a major threat to us. When it comes to humans threatening sharks, however, the story is quite different.

Every year, there are fewer than 10 deaths globally due to shark attacks on humans. To put that in perspective, around 2,000 people die every year from being struck by lightning. This means that a human’s chance of dying from a shark attack is beyond minimal. For sharks, the odds aren’t so good.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare reports that every year, humans kill around 100 million sharks. It’s a devastating amount, especially considering that sharks are incredibly important for the overall health of the ocean. Here’s why we really need sharks, even if we are afraid of them, as well as some of the biggest threats facing populations today, from finning to overfishing.

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The shark finning industry

Shark fin soup has been eaten in China for centuries. It’s a delicacy, thought to have several medicinal benefits. But making the dish—a type of broth with fibrous shark fin noodles and chicken stock—relies on the brutal practice of finning sharks. This usually involves fishers catching them from the ocean, slicing off their fins, and then throwing them back overboard, where they will eventually bleed to death.

But not all of this happens off the coastlines of Asia, where demand for the dish continues to rise. Last year, one report revealed that half the shark fin trade is coming from Europe. Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, and France were all named in the report as some of the most significant players in the market. From 2003 to 2020, Spain imported 51,795 tonnes of shark fin to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

This global trade is putting immense pressure on sharks, which are disappearing from our oceans rapidly. “Although many place the burden of change on the consumptive countries, primarily in Asia, equally responsible for declines in shark populations are all countries with internationally operating fishing fleets and trade in shark products,” Stan Shea from the Bloom Association, a Hong Kong marine conservation nonprofit, told the Guardian.

What is the biggest threat to sharks? 

The shark finning industry is, without a doubt, one of the biggest threats facing the world’s shark populations right now. But it is far from the only threat. The shark liver oil industry is also responsible for driving up demand for shark fishing, and so is the shark meat market. Just like a shark fin, shark meat is considered a delicacy in a number of countries, including India, Japan, and Iceland, where fermented shark (called kæstur hákarl) is a national dish.

All of this contributes to overfishing, which is the biggest threat facing sharks right now. And the consequences are serious: in the past five decades, shark populations have declined by 70 percent, notes Greenpeace. “When it comes to solving the problem of overfishing sharks, every country has got a role to play,” the environmental nonprofit says. “No single country, nor cuisine, can be blamed for the staggering number of sharks being killed every single year–but every country can step up to solve this problem.”

Strict rules and legislation around the import and trade of shark products need to be implemented, notes Greenpeace. And for the sharks that are left, we must protect them by creating a “network of ocean sanctuaries across the world,” it adds.

It’s important to note that it’s not just the industries specifically targeting sharks that are blamed for their decline. Millions of these marine predators also end up as accidental bycatch, fatally caught in fishing nets meant for other fish. But whether they become soup, meat, oil, or accidentally caught in a net, sharks are suffering. And that’s not just an ethical crisis, but also an environmental one, too.

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Why are sharks key to a healthy ocean?

Sharks are apex predators, which are also known as the “top” predators. This means that they are at the very top of the food chain, apart from humans, they’re not actively hunted by any other animals around them. Because of this, they play a very important role in maintaining underwater ecosystems—they help to control prey numbers, which in turn, regulates the amount of smaller predators in the ocean.

“The removal of an apex predator can have knock-on effects on the entire ecosystem, including the landscape,” science writer and animal behavior researcher Leoma Williams notes for BBC Wildlife.

“For example, when grey wolves were hunted to extirpation in Yellowstone National Park the population of elk, their primary prey soared,” she continues. “This in turn led to the overgrazing of woody trees such as aspen and willow. Beavers declined as a consequence of this, as they depend on willow to survive the winter.”

The same thing is happening in the ocean, except it’s not grey wolves, it’s sharks, and instead of elk, it’s fish-like groupers. The groupers eat the smaller fish, the ones that help to manage microalgae and coral, and the entire ecosystem, and the health of coral reefs (which are vital in tackling the climate crisis), becomes under threat.

But there are efforts underway attempting to counteract the impact of shark overfishing. One initiative, called ReShark, is defined as an “international, collective effort to recover threatened sharks and rays around the world.” 

Right now, it’s raising 500 endangered baby zebra sharks, all of which were born in captivity. In time, it will release them back into the wild in an attempt to combat the detrimental impacts of habit degradation and the shark finning trade. After that, the sharks will be monitored to see if the population recovers, but the group also aims to educate local communities about why sharks are so ecologically important.

You can find out more about ReShark and the vital work it’s doing to restore shark populations here.

This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

by Rob Davis, ProPublica, and Matthew Kish, The Oregonian/OregonLive

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Eight years ago, the world’s largest sports apparel brand made a bold commitment. Nike was embarking on what it called a moonshot: doubling its business while halving its impact on the warming planet.

To get there, then-CEO Mark Parker said the Oregon-based company’s innovations in environmental sustainability would become a “powerful engine for growth,” a catalyst capable of changing industries. The company’s chief sustainability officer at the time, Hannah Jones, said achieving the goal would take “innovation on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

Nike’s Sustainable Innovation team embodied the commitment. It looked for environmentally friendly new materials, like leather made from kelp and foams made from plants, that could replace some of the hundreds of millions of pounds of rubber, leather and cotton used in traditional Nike products. It assisted in testing and refining the foam in the new Pegasus 41 that Nike says cut the carbon footprint of the shoe’s midsole by at least 43%.

So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.

It was the first in a series of deep cuts that one former Nike employee called “the sustainability bloodbath.”

With sales flatlining, Nike executives in December announced a plan to cut costs by $2 billion over three years. Those cuts have dealt a big blow to Nike’s sustainability workforce.

Nike has laid off about 20% of employees who worked primarily on its sustainability initiatives, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found. Roughly another 10% left voluntarily or were transferred to other jobs. The cuts to its sustainability staff of about 150 people were far deeper than Nike’s 2% reduction companywide and 7% reduction at its Oregon headquarters.

The estimates are based on state employment records, a review of LinkedIn posts and interviews with more than 10 current and former Nike staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to the media or are looking for jobs in the industry.

“I’m truly shocked that so many sustainability roles would be eliminated,” said one person who was laid off. “I would have never thought that from the industry leader. Never in a million years.”

Given Nike’s leadership and investment, their retreat is unfortunate, especially in light of the scale and urgency of the challenge.

—Ken Pucker, professor of practice at Tufts University

Nike’s elimination of such a substantial share of its environmental sustainability staff is a stunning turn in the company’s 52-year history. After emerging from the shadow of labor abuses in its foreign factories in the 1990s, the apparel behemoth helped spark the corporate responsibility movement. As the public’s attention turned to corporate impact on the environment, a chastened Nike aimed to lead.

But before the layoffs, Nike had missed its own targets for reducing its contribution to global warming. Its emissions have instead grown slightly since 2015.

Nike today is losing market share and is likely trying to prioritize the short-term financial results Wall Street wants over sustainability’s longer-term payouts, said Ken Pucker, a former executive with the Timberland shoe brand and a professor of practice at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.

“Given Nike’s leadership and investment, their retreat is unfortunate, especially in light of the scale and urgency of the challenge,” Pucker said.

The company’s stock price has been cut in half since late 2021, including an almost 20% drop in late June, a day after executives forecast a sales decline this year.

Get in Touch

ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive plan to continue reporting on Nike and its sustainability work, including its overseas operations. Do you have information that we should know? Rob Davis can be reached by email at rob.davis@propublica.org and by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at +1-503-770-0665. Matthew Kish can be reached by email at mkish@oregonian.com, by phone at +1-503-221-4386, and on Signal at +1-971-319-3830.

Nike would not address the news organizations’ estimates of job cuts when asked about them.

Jaycee Pribulsky, who was named Nike’s chief sustainability officer in February, said she was confident in the sustainability team Nike has in place and described Nike’s current strategy as “embedding” the work throughout the company. In other words: making sustainability everyone’s job as opposed to solely assigning it to a dedicated staff.

“We’re not walking away from sustainability,” Pribulsky said. “I mean, full stop. We are committed.”

The sweeping job cuts touched numerous layers of the organization. Attorneys and finance, waste and packaging specialists who worked in sustainability were laid off. Nike eliminated two of just five people working to trace the origins of the hundreds of millions of pounds of materials it uses. The company is legally prohibited from importing products containing cotton connected to forced Uyghur labor in China and has promised not to use leather that contributes to deforestation in the Amazon.

Three top sustainability executives left, including Noel Kinder, its previous chief sustainability officer, who announced his retirement at age 52 in February.

We’re not walking away from sustainability. I mean, full stop. We are committed.

—Jaycee Pribulsky, Nike chief sustainability officer

Nike by then had already moved sustainability down in the corporate hierarchy. In 2011, Jones, who held the top sustainability job for nearly 14 years, said that her team had gone from obscurity to reporting directly to Nike’s CEO. By the time Kinder left, the position was reporting to the chief supply chain officer, who reports to the marketplace president, who reports to the CEO.

Kinder has since given several talks without addressing the cuts to his former employer’s sustainability staff. But in a June 6 webinar, he said any company’s sustainability strategy depends on what its senior leaders do “from a business strategy standpoint.”

“And this actually happened at Nike,” Kinder said, “where a change in business strategy, or a change in financial objective, directly impacted the sustainability strategy, and frankly in a negative way. And so, there, it is what it is.”

Kinder did not say when that happened. He later told the news organizations he was not referring to any particular moment in his career at Nike.

“Sustainability was a priority at Nike for the nearly 25 years I was there regardless of the ups and downs of the business,” he said. “It was very much part of the fabric of the operating rhythm.”

Noel Kinder, then-chief sustainability officer for Nike, left, at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit in 2019 with Marissa McGowan, then-senior vice president for corporate responsibility at PVH Corp. (Ole Jensen/Getty Images for Copenhagen Fashion Summit)

To understand the impact of the cuts to Nike’s sustainability staff, it helps to look at the enormous task assigned to a group of 30 Nike employees in the spring of 2023.

The Carbon Target Setting Working Group began gathering every other Wednesday, 90 minutes by Zoom and in person, to develop a detailed plan to drastically shrink Nike’s carbon footprint. As participants in the international Science Based Targets Initiative, Nike and 5,000 other companies pledged to match the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. Nike promised to reduce its emissions by 30% by 2030 throughout its supply chain.

With the deadline fast approaching, Nike’s climate working group debated possible investments to reach its targets, according to two people involved in the process. Should Nike buy renewable natural gas? How much should it invest in healthier agricultural practices? How much should it spend on renewable fuels for its shipping container vessels?

The group calculated the tonnage of emissions that would be reduced by eliminating the paper stuffed into the toes of shoes. It outlined savings from what employees called “light-weighting” shoe boxes, a strategy to use less materials and reduce freight shipping weights. Those seemingly small changes add up when multiplied across millions of products.

A composite image Nike used to promote the Nike One Box, an effort to move from two boxes to one when shipping shoes (Nike)

The result was a plan so important that it would eventually require executive approval and the Nike board’s review. It was still being finalized when the staffing cuts began, the two sources said.

About half of employees involved in Nike’s carbon target planning were laid off or transferred to non-sustainability jobs, according to two sources the news organizations used to identify names. The list included some members who would have been responsible for implementing the steps recommended for ratcheting down emissions.

“Now you have a stool with one leg missing,” one participant said.

Asked about the status of the 2030 plan and how the company would reach its goals for emissions reductions with fewer sustainability employees working on them, Pribulsky said work on the 2030 goals continues.

“We’re committed to continue our journey from a greenhouse gas and a carbon reduction emissions perspective,” she said.

And this actually happened at Nike, where a change in business strategy, or a change in financial objective, directly impacted the sustainability strategy, and frankly in a negative way. And so, there, it is what it is.

—Noel Kinder, Nike’s former chief sustainability officer, in a June webinar

The carbon work that remains is substantial. Nike’s global operation spans more than 600 contract factories concentrated in Vietnam, China and Indonesia, countries heavily dependent on coal-fired power. Nike has said its carbon footprint equates to that of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, a city of roughly 1 million people.

Nike has made progress by powering its own office buildings and distribution centers with renewable energy. But the production and shipping of sneakers and apparel by suppliers and contractors accounts for 99% of its emissions. Nike’s total carbon pollution has been declining since 2020, but it is still just 1.6% lower than when Parker challenged Nike to halve its footprint in 2016.

The cuts to Nike’s sustainability staff come as multinational companies face increasing mandates to disclose their climate risks, trace the origins of their raw materials and deliver the carbon reductions they promise.

Some of Nike’s smaller competitors are doing better. Germany-based Puma has approached the moonshot that Nike missed, saying it has reduced its carbon footprint by almost a third while more than doubling revenues since 2017.

Still, few fashion companies are on target to achieve the reductions needed to prevent severe impacts to the planet, said Achim Berg, a former senior partner with the consulting giant McKinsey & Co.

“If you have conversations with CEOs in the industry, they will admit that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish what has been committed to years ago,” said Berg, who oversaw McKinsey’s apparel, fashion and luxury practice. “Realistically, we’re going to see a wave of companies changing the targets or postponing the timeline.”

If the industry doesn’t act with more urgency, Berg said, “we can write off all the targets, because nobody’s even close. We need to recognize this.”

Nike’s retreat from sustainability threatens to upend its carefully crafted image as a brand working to address climate change, not one that is making it worse.

The company took a huge public relations hit in the 1990s after reports emerged about its contract factories in Asia using child labor, physically abusing workers and paying as little as 20 cents an hour. Co-founder Phil Knight ultimately admitted the company had problems, saying in 1998 that Nike’s products had become synonymous with “slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.”

The company began issuing public reports that detailed issues its auditors identified in suppliers’ factories and laid out how it would address them. It became the first in its industry to disclose its finished product suppliers.

Nike employees also saw an opportunity to get ahead of negative headlines on another issue of social concern: the environment.

“We were learning from the mistakes made in the reaction to the labor issues that we needed to go on the offense,” said Sarah Severn, who spent two decades working to lessen Nike’s environmental impact before leaving in 2014. “We were much more aggressive about it and conscious that if those things didn’t get addressed, it would just add more problems to the company’s reputation.”

Factory workers make shoes for a Nike supplier in Indonesia in 1992. Foreign factory conditions in the 1990s created a public scandal that led the company to pledge to do better. (Tim Jewett/The Oregonian)

Executives including CEO John Donahoe have described the company’s aspirations today as something like a virtuous circle, a closed loop that includes turning plastic bottles and trash into Olympics medal-podium jackets and futuristic shoes inspired by the scarcity of living on Mars. Innovating ways to waste less, make lighter shoes and use fewer materials doesn’t just save on carbon emissions. It saves money.

Nike’s marketing machine has amplified the message of sustainability in pitches before the Summer Olympics, an event that sneaker companies consider an unparalleled opportunity to launch new products. Nike’s chief design officer in 2020 called it “a moment for us to telegraph our intentions as a company.”

Ahead of the 2012 London Games, Nike introduced Flyknit, one of its most successful sustainable innovations, a lightweight, woven top part of a sneaker that reduced waste and became a $1 billion business within four years.

Before the 2016 Rio Games, Nike highlighted AeroSwift, a lightweight fabric made from recycled plastic bottles.

In 2020, it was the Space Hippie, a shoe made from recycled factory scraps. Vogue magazine said Nike’s new shoe was its “most sustainable yet.” Harper’s Bazaar called it “game-changing.”

Donahoe highlighted the new shoe during one of his earliest media appearances as CEO. Speaking on CNBC in February 2020, Donahoe praised Nike’s innovation in sustainability and said the company was making significant investments in it.

“The consumer increasingly cares about sustainability, and so they’re looking to companies like Nike to lead on this dimension,” Donahoe said.

That night, Donahoe sat next to the rapper Drake and other luminaries at a colorful New York Fashion Week runway show highlighting Nike’s environmental priorities around the Olympics.

Nike CEO John Donahoe, second from right, with, from left: fashion editor Edward Enninful; late fashion designer Virgil Abloh; pop star Rosalía; rapper Drake; and gymnast Gabby Douglas. They gathered for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic collection fashion show at New York Fashion Week in 2020. (Bennett Raglin/Getty Images)

Looking back on how good Nike’s sustainability work has been for its business, the recent staff cuts make little sense, said Tensie Whelan, director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business.

“It’s just bizarre to me that Nike would want to step back, having been the leader,” Whelan said. “If they’re moving away from sustainability driving innovation, that is the Nike brand. What does it become then?”

This April, when Nike revealed its new outfits for athletes in the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, Donahoe returned to CNBC. The CEO didn’t talk about the Space Hippie, the shoe that won critical acclaim. Just two Space Hippie models remained available on Nike’s website recently. Both were being advertised at a big discount.

Donahoe talked about what Nike needed to do differently. Just four months after his company killed its Sustainable Innovation team, Donahoe repeatedly said “disruptive innovation” would drive growth.

He didn’t use the word sustainability once.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Matthew Kish is a reporter covering the sportswear industry for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Contact him at mkish@oregonian.com or @matthewkish.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

In November 2022, President Joe Biden hosted a number of high-profile guests at his first state dinner at the White House. To mark the event—which was attended by French president Emmanuel Macron and intended to celebrate the relationship between France and the US—around 200 live lobsters were flown in from Maine, the heart of the US lobster industry before they were killed and served with caviar.

But the choice to serve lobster at the prestigious event sparked controversy. Many activists and environmentalists, for example, were outraged. Not just because research suggests boiling lobsters alive is inhumane due to the creature’s capacity to feel pain, but also because catching them in their masses is having a major impact on another species: the North Atlantic right whale. 

In 2021, scientists revealed that there were likely only around 340 North Atlantic right whales left in the ocean. And the following year, Seafood Watch, an organization that offers science-based seafood recommendations, added American Lobster to its “Avoid” list. The two events were intrinsically connected: the way that lobsters are caught is entrapping right whales and it isn’t helping their already delicate chances at survival.

Here’s more about why it’s time to stop eating lobster for the sake of the whales, as well as where to buy vegan lobster the next time a craving hits.

Are lobster traps killing whales?

The American lobster industry is a big market; in 2022, a record $725 million worth of the crustaceans were brought into Maine’s docks. But the way that these lobsters are caught, with pots on the seafloor connected by lines on floating buoys, is devastating the right whale population. The marine creatures get trapped and tangled up in these lines, which causes lacerations on their skin and makes it difficult for them to rise to the surface to breathe.

Speaking to The New York Times, Amy Knowlton, one of the New England Aquarium’s senior scientists, said that watching right whales get stuck in lobster lines was a “heartbreaking sight.” “They often are under significant stress, frantically thrashing and desperately trying to shake the gear off of their bodies,” Knowlton said. She added that these entanglements are the leading threat to the species.

And, according to activists, the US Senate isn’t helping the situation. Aside from feasting on lobster dinners, politicians have actively made things worse by including a provision in the year-end funding budget that allows lobster harvesters to keep using equipment that is dangerous to right whales for several more years, until 2028 at least.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, this has potentially condemned the North Atlantic right whale to extinction. The senators responsible for the provision were New York’s Chuck Schumer and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, who has since retired from his position. “What a horrific legacy to leave to one’s grandchildren,” Brett Hartle of the Center for Biological Diversity said, as per The Guardian.

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What would happen if the right whale went extinct?

It’s difficult for right whales to bounce back from the brink, and that’s because their reproduction rates are very low. It takes a long time for a mother right whale to have a baby, with pregnancies lasting around a year. After that, it’s usually another three years before they have another calf, and sometimes it can be longer.

There have been minor improvements in recent years, but not enough to save the population just yet. In 2018, there were no right whale calves born, but in 2021, 13 were born, and in 2022, researchers spotted eight new babies. Moira Brown of the Canadian Whale Institute told CBC that entanglements cause the whales stress, which can impact the rate at which they reproduce. Other threats include strikes from ships, as well as the climate crisis, which impacts their feeding areas.

If the right whale population can’t recover, the species will go extinct. And the consequences of that will be devastating. Not only because it would be humanity’s fault, but also because it would disrupt important marine ecosystems. According to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, right whales redistribute nutrients throughout the ocean through, well, their poop. And when they die, they also help out other organisms in the ocean, by providing them with a food source.

Where to buy vegan lobster

Saving the right whales is going to take several different solutions, one of which involves regulating the lobster industry, and changing the way these shellfish are caught. But, really, the world doesn’t need to eat lobster at all. The vegan seafood industry is growing, and some reports predict it could even hit more than $1.3 billion by 2031.

Right now, there aren’t as many vegan lobster products out there as there are plant-based shrimp or tuna alternatives, but as research and development in the area continue, that’s likely to change. But if you’re craving lobster now, and you don’t want to hurt the whales, you do have other options. These brands all sell vegan lobster. Plus, you could also make it at home, following this recipe for easy vegan lobster rolls, for example.

@rabbitholelife/Instagram

1 Lily’s Vegan Pantry

New York-based Lily’s Vegan Pantry, which used to be known as May Wah Vegetarian Market, offers a wide range of different vegan seafood products, and lobster is no exception. The brand’s plant-based version of the crustacean is made with yam flour. It’s even shaped like a lobster, and cooked in the same way, too, in boiling water (only you can be sure there’s no suffering going on).
Get it here

NoPigNeva

2 NoPigNeva

Online marketplace NoPigNeva strives to offer vegans, vegetarians, and flexitarians an easy plant-based shopping experience. Its main goal is to provide an ethical alternative to every food craving you could ever have, including the products that are hard to find, like vegan lobster. The brand’s offering is the same as Lily’s Vegan Pantry’s, and aims to give you “a little taste of Maine without a trip to the ocean.”
get it here

Lord of Tofu

3 Lord of Tofu

Vegan brand Lord Of Tofu aims to provide Germany, France, and Switzerland with some of the best meat alternatives, using, you guessed it, tofu. Its range includes everything from vegan cheese to barbecue products and even “vegan sea cuisine.” The latter includes tofu-based shrimp, tuna, salmon, and, of course, lobster.
get it here

This post was originally published on VegNews.com.