Earth911 Podcast: Thinking Zero Waste With Sarah Currie-Halpern

Practical progress toward a sustainable lifestyle, whether you are an individual or a business, will always be unique to your situation, but you can base your choices on lessons learned by others. Tune into a conversation with Sarah Currie-Halpern, Co-Founder of Think Zero LLC, a consultancy that helps businesses, institutions, and households reduce waste and embrace sustainable practices. With a focus on practical, actionable solutions, Sarah and her team work to make sustainability accessible to many clients. Sarah shares travel tips to keep in mind to reduce your impact on the ground in other cities and countries. Taking a water bottle, reusable utensils, and a coffee cup can eliminate the single-use stuff you’ll find at many hotels and resorts. Check out Ecohotels.com and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s guidance. You will discover insights that can pierce the veil of greenwashing by travel marketers with the information you find there.

Sarah draws on her waste management work in the office of the Mayor of New York to discuss the potential for applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the flow of materials to landfill. According to several studies, AI could consume up to 10% of electricity generated by the end of the decade. AI can be a powerful tool, but many companies focus on delivering trivial consumer convenience using the technology. Finding your next favorite social video or saving the effort involved in changing the channel on your TV are not worthwhile applications of technology that could be applied to, for example, developing fire suppression materials that are free of the toxins and heavy metals dumped in waves of red on cities in the Los Angeles basin amid this year’s wildfires. We can and will use AI to invent new, sustainable materials, sort reusable materials out of the waste stream, and much more. Still, we should not see every question humans pose, like “What’s on TV tonight?” handed to AI to resolve. If information is the new oil, we can use AI more judiciously than we did with petroleum during the Industrial Age. You can learn more about Sarah and her work at Think Zero at https://www.thinkzerollc.com/

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