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Happy Earth Day! Landfills across the country are filled with cardboard, paper and plastic waste, the leftovers of our purchasing that’s only gone up along with rising e-commerce sales. Some 56% of the 110 million tons of paper and cardboard waste produced in the U.S. in 2019 ended up in landfills, according to an analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory late last year. And the situation with plastic waste is even more problematic.
That’s why it was good to see the impact of Amazon’s proprietary AI model for cutting packaging waste—eliminating the need to figure out what to do with it later. Launched in 2019, the AI model, which it calls the Package Decision Engine, is now helping to save at least 500,000 tons of packaging a year, according to company data. “This allows us to make these decisions at scale,” Kayla Fenton, a senior manager on Amazon’s packaging innovation team, told Forbes.
Amazon does not disclose how many tons of packaging materials it uses to ship 20 million packages a day in 19 countries, making it tough to know how significantly the AI model has reduced its total packaging use. But experts said that it’s substantial—and that they expect other retailers and consumer goods companies to follow. “There is a large opportunity not only for Amazon but for the whole industry to use AI to reduce packaging waste,” said Rafael Auras, a Michigan State University professor of packaging sustainability.
The Big Read
Forbes illustration by Cecilia Runxi Zhang; Photo by Shaun Pettigrew is a commercial Advertising Photographer bas/getty images
Green Hydrogen’s Hype Hits Some Very Expensive Hurdles
Clean hydrogen has been heralded as a carbon-free fuel that’s key to efforts to remediate the climate crisis. It could help clean up dirty industries like chemical and steel production, be a source of clean transportation fuel and help the U.S. hit a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But getting things started isn’t going so well.
After years of hype, fundraising and billions of dollars of federal support to get a green hydrogen market off the ground, there’s growing pessimism over how fast the carbon-free fuel can ramp up. Frustrated by proposed guidelines for a crucial government incentive that they deem too strict, companies including ExxonMobil and Plug Power are threatening to scrub or delay big hydrogen projects.
“Two years ago this was super-hyped. It was like, everybody's exuberant,” Raffi Garabedian, CEO of Electric Hydrogen, told Forbes. “People have started realizing this is really hard.”
Hot Topic
XPrize CEO Anousheh Ansari
Getty Images for Global Learning XPRIZEXPrize CEO Anousheh Ansari on $100 million prize for carbon removal
Since the original Ansari XPrize for suborbital spaceflight in 2004, your foundation has branched out to many areas to help startups trying to solve big problems. You’re preparing to announce finalists in May with new ideas for carbon removal. How’s that competition progressing?
We started with over 3,000 teams. We’ve awarded $20 million already to teams that have made it to the semifinals. Now we have to select the top 20 that have the best chance of demonstrating kiloton-level carbon capture in one year. Those 20 teams will have rigorous testing over a one-year period to announce the winners.
The winners will split $100 million?
$20 million has already gone out, so we have $80 million left. One team, the top team, will receive $50 million, and three other teams will each receive $10 million. That will be announced next year. We want to spread the love to more teams. Our problems are so big they cannot be solved by just one company.
The $100 million purse was pledged by Elon Musk and his foundation. Have you received the funds?
We’re a year away from awarding prizes so we've received all the funds needed for the competition. We're holding the prize purse in a secured account for the winners.
Who will do the scientific and commercial assessment of proposals?
It’s a large team that we assemble. Some are people at the XPrize, but we don't test or judge ourselves. We bring in third-party experts. For this particular prize, there are four types of solutions that have been allowed to enter. They can be ocean-based solutions; nature-based solutions; mineralization; and direct air capture. We needed experts in all four areas and have a team of consultants and experts that we're hiring. Once we have the 20 finalist teams, they’ll do periodic site visits to do measurements over time to capture their data and validate the data on-site.
In addition to carbon removal, what are the other sustainability-related XPrizes?
We've expanded into seven domains. Climate and energy is one of our most active, along with this competition, the carbon competition. We also have biodiversity and conservation, where we have a rainforest competition to identify biodiversity in the rainforest and protect it, as well as a wildfire detection and suppression competition that’s active right now. We have food, waste and water as another active domain. We have an alternative protein for white meat that’s active and which we're awarding this year.
And we just announced our $119 million competition, our largest prize ever, for seawater desalination at scale. Similar to the carbon competition, we're asking people to scale up desalination solutions to be affordable for countries in the global south and with the lowest cost possible sustainable energy. They also have to deal with the brine issue so the salt is not put back into the sea because it kills biodiversity.
What Else We’re Reading
Climate change damage could cost $38 trillion per year by 2050, study find
CO2 is a floating plant fertilizer that worsens wildfires by helping plants grow
EPA will make polluters pay to clean up two ‘forever chemicals’
The pensioners and babies behind a new era of climate lawsuits
Dubai’s ‘Sustainable City’ was supposed to start a trend. It hasn’t yet
What China’s EV buyers’ remorse means for the world
Jeff Bezos will give away $100 million for AI-based solutions to climate change
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