To cut down on plastics pollution, says Matt Kopac ’09, sustainable business and innovation manager at Burt’s Bees, we need a fundamentally different approach to sustainability.

We talked to Elliott Mainzer ’98, who recently began a role overseeing California’s electrical grid, about the progress he’s witnessed and the challenges that remain in creating a fully sustainable energy network.

The ubiquitous blue bin for single-stream recycling obscures a set of tradeoffs and challenges, including contamination that complicates processing and lowers the value of recyclable materials.

Robert Klee, a lecturer at Yale and the former commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, says that state-level approaches to the climate crisis provide a roadmap for a 10-year, trillion-dollar effort to put the U.S. on a path to decarbonization.