Five Key Lessons
ESPM 136: Sustainable Industries
Every industry—from apparel to food to transportation—has the potential to change for the better. In the past decade, consumers, nonprofits, and governments have motivated companies to commit to people and the planet, not just profit. Dara O’Rourke, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and former senior principal sustainability scientist at Amazon, prepares students to be leaders in the field of corporate responsibility through his course, Sustainable Industries.
- Think in systems and focus on "hotspots." From resource extraction through disposal, every product accumulates negative impacts. Existing companies should improve the product life cycles that cause the most environmental or social damage—the hotspots—to make the biggest impact. For example, Starbucks’ plant-based alternative menu reduces its use of dairy, which is responsible for the largest portion of its carbon footprint.
- Design for sustainability. After the design phase, 80 percent of a product’s impact has already been locked in. Companies from Apple to Allbirds have worked to minimize the environmental footprint of a product by designing for circularity, zero waste, and zero carbon.
- Sustainable innovations require agility and scale. While startups are well-positioned to develop progressive innovations, industry incumbents are better suited to scale up sustainable initiatives. Electric vehicles will reach widespread adoption through both startups, like Tesla, and established auto companies, like Ford.
- Believe in people power. Consumers, communities, and activists can all play a role in the transition to a green economy. Changes in consumption habits, product or company boycotts, and political organizing can push companies and governments to advance more sustainable options.
- Build in equity. In any industry, sustainable transitions should benefit those most impacted by environmental crises. As companies create social responsibility policies, they must account for input from local communities and support job growth to foster “just transitions” towards more sustainable industries.
Anjika Pai is a senior environmental science major. After graduation, she plans to attend law school and pursue a career in environmental policy. Pai is also the 2022 University Medalist. Learn more about her in this profile on the Berkeley News site.
A new charge on cars
Starting in 2025, San Francisco will begin charging drivers a fee to enter the downtown area during peak hours. This road-pricing strategy—often referred to as cordon pricing—has been used in London, Stockholm, Milan, and other cities to alleviate road congestion and offset the negative environmental and health impacts of vehicle traffic.
But research by Matt Tarduno, an Agriculture and Resource Economics PhD candidate, suggests that these strategies are often too simplistic. The price set by cities sometimes leads drivers to detour around the cordon zone, simply moving congestion elsewhere. And drivers are usually charged the same amount regardless of their vehicle’s fuel efficiency, trip duration, or anticipated route.
Published as a Haas Energy Institute working paper, Tarduno’s research uses data from the Bay Area’s FasTrak system to understand how drivers respond to toll prices and model how cordon zones would impact congestion and pollution.
“Road-pricing models can help address congestion, accelerate the retirement of “heavy polluters” by tying price to fuel efficiency, and push both transit systems and individual drivers toward greener technologies,” said Tarduno. “This research builds on the benefits of traditional road-pricing models while explicitly accounting for the imperfect nature of proposed road-pricing systems.”
Tarduno found that cordon pricing performs better when cities set both off-peak and peak prices, rather than only charging prices during peak hours. In San Francisco, he said, this policy improvement would generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year in avoided traffic slowdowns and air pollution-related health costs. San Francisco drivers also stand to benefit under Tarduno’s peak-pricing proposal: It is two-thirds lower than the city’s current proposed rate. Even though it was modeled using Bay Area data, Tarduno said, his proposed approach can also be deployed by cities across the globe.
— Mathew Burciaga
Reaching the next generation
Tyus D. Williams credits the many hours he spent watching VHS tapes of wildlife experts Jeff Corwin and Steve Irwin with influencing his decision to pursue ecological research.
With heroes like those, it’s no surprise that his first book—Big Cats (A Day in the Life): What Do Lions, Tigers, and Panthers Get up to All Day? (Neon Squid, April 2022)—is geared toward children. Part of the larger A Day in the Life series, the book gives readers a glimpse into the lives of several big cat species over a 24-hour period. Representatives from Neon Squid—an imprint of Macmillan Publishers—asked Williams to contribute to the series after hearing him discuss tigers on a science podcast.
“I stand by the precedent that if you can’t explain your research to an elementary school-aged child, then you probably don’t understand the depth of your research as well as you think you do,” said Williams, who wrote the book while working as a field ecologist in Nevada.
Photo by Adam Sings In The Timber.
Big cats compose just a slice of his overall research. As a graduate student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) working with assistant professor Christopher J. Schell, Williams focuses on how anthropogenic influences affect the interaction and competition between carnivores: a group of species that ranges from bears and wolves to skunks, seals, and weasels.
Writing the book also aligns with his larger efforts of making a direct investment in community outreach. As a science communicator, Williams regularly speaks on podcasts, gives interviews and presentations, and uses social media to break down his research for a broader audience.
“If you had told my childhood self—a young, racially ambiguous Black kid—that he would be cultivating and inspiring the next generation of scientists and researchers, he would have never been able to conceive a future like that,” Williams said.
— Mathew Burciaga
Small trees, big benefits
Clearing California’s forests of dense overgrowth is critical for curbing catastrophic wildfire. But forest restoration—whether through prescribed burning or thinning—is complicated: Treatments are costly, and cutting down or burning vegetation releases stored carbon dioxide, accelerating the impacts of climate change.
An analysis led by ERG PhD candidate Bodie Cabiyo shows how incentivizing industries that convert wood residues into useful products—including biofuels and construction-quality engineered timber—could fund forest-thinning treatments that reduce wildfire risks while preventing the release of extra carbon.
Larger trees can be harvested and sold as lumber, but smaller wood residues produced by forest thinning are often burned or left to decay.
The analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December last year, notes that small trees and wood residues can be mixed with adhesives and compressed into large sheets strong enough for construction. Woody residues can also be converted in biofuel plants to create electricity or liquid fuels, and if these plants are outfitted with carbon capture technology, carbon dioxide can be diverted from the atmosphere during the process.
Cabiyo and his collaborators, including senior author Daniel Sanchez, assistant professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), also propose a model scenario in which the state incentivizes the use of engineered wood in the construction of multi-unit affordable housing.
“If California starts thinning at a large scale, we’re going to be producing a lot more lumber and wood residues,” Cabiyo said. “Using that new material for building affordable housing could produce massive carbon benefits, largely because those buildings otherwise would be built with steel and cement, which have significant carbon emissions associated with them.”
— Adapted from an article by Kara Manke