If the United States went shopping in your store, it would leave with five bags, drop two in the parking lot, and leave them there. This may seem crazy, but as a country, we leave a full 40 percent of our food uneaten. And it’s not just food going in the trash: Up to about one-fifth of U.S. cropland, fertilizers, and agricultural water go towards growing food that’s ultimately wasted. Food waste is responsible for at least 2.6 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to more than that of 37 million cars), and wasting less food was ranked third of 100 solutions to climate change by Project Drawdown.

Last week, the Climate Collaborative hosted an introductory webinar on how companies can begin addressing climate change. We were lucky to have Pure Strategies’ Managing Director, Tim Greiner and Happy Family Organics’ Sustainability Director, Katie Clark join us to share their insights on why climate action matters within companies and their expert advice on how companies can create a strategic approach to climate action and which tactics can set them up for success.

This week, we hosted a webinar featuring Walmart on Project Gigaton, an ambitious effort on their part to work with suppliers to slash a gigaton of emissions from their supply chain by 2030--an amount equivalent to Germany's annual emissions. 

This goal is an important precedent from the world's largest retailer, not least because the majority of corporate emissions lie in the supply chains. In fact, supply chain emissions are four times larger, on average, than that of companies' direct operations.(1) 

The latest in our series of ReCAP meetings, aimed at supporting retailers in overcoming challenges to climate action, focused on how retailers can reduce the emissions of the buildings they operate in through direct actions and landlord engagement. 

We were lucky to have CC partner IMT join for the webinar. If you missed it, I encourage you to watch the recording here.

I’m pleased to share that this year the Climate Collaborative will be launching a Consumer Engagement Working Group, aimed at supporting our network of companies in having meaningful conversations about climate change with the people buying their products.

Trayak is offering an opportunity for Climate Collaborative packaging-committed companies to engage in two package climate optimization studies. Each study will focus on working directly with one company to optimize an identified packaging type to reduce climate-related impacts; these two projects include:

• A short packaging optimization engagement to be completed by October 2019.
• A longer packaging optimization engagement to be completed by the summer of 2020.

Today is Earth Day, a day that causes all of us working on climate to pause, assess how we are doing, celebrate wins, and challenge ourselves to do more. Three years ago on Earth Day, the historic Paris Climate Accords were signed, setting out the first truly global effort to drawdown emissions; and next year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Earth Day holiday.