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A group backed by tech billionaires spent years and $800 million secretly buying up over 60,000 acres of land in Solano County, California, 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The groupwhich calls itself California Forever and is funded by Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs, among othersplanned from the start to build a brand-new city for as many as 400,000 residents. But to do that they needed voter approval to change the countys development rules. Just before heading to the ballot this past November, California Forever yanked its initiative despite spending over $9 million on its campaign. Now it seems California Forever may have found a way to develop the property it owns without needing to win an election. The pulled ballot measure caught the attention of Bret Prebula, the city manager of Suisun City, a small city in the area. It was the trigger, he tells Fast Company, for coming up with the idea to expand the citys borders and annex nearby land as a way to address the citys finances and budget deficit. There is only a small bit of undevelopable marshland to the citys west; to the east are the vast tracts of land owned by the tech titans. Prebula brought his idea to the Suisun City council last year, and in January it voted four to one to explore the possibility of annexing land. It was a heated meeting, with critics bringing up California Forevers likely involvement, but the mayor of Suisun City chastised attendees multiple times that California Forever was not on the agenda. And yet, when Suisun City later sent letters out to property owners surrounding the city, California Forever was the main group that responded to indicate its interest. The map Suisun City produced of what land its looking at annexing is exactly where California Forevers proposed city would be, says Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at The Greenbelt Alliance, which has been leading the opposition to California Forevers development plans. A few weeks later, Rio Vista, another small city in the area, announced it, too, would explore annexation in response to Suisun Citys announcement. The city voted to join the effort to ensure that, as City Manager Kristina Miller said at the meeting, it will have a seat at the table so that, for lack of a better word, we are not on the menu. Many of the councilmembers took the same stance, voicing their opposition to California Forevers plans while saying, in the words of Councilmember Rick Dolk, the city needs to take a defensive position. Indeed, Rio Vistas hand may have been forced: the land Suisun City is looking at annexing thats owned by California Forever goes right up to the citys west border. If it didnt join in, the city could feel the impacts and get none of the benefits, Wilson says. At a meeting in mid-April, the two cities signed a memorandum of understanding to avoid being pitted against each other. Suisun City is also pursuing an agreement with California Forever that would require the group to cover all of the costs of consultants and other needs the cities will have as it explores the idea of annexation so it doesnt have to spend its own money. That could also include an agreement that California Forever wont put another measure on Solano Countys ballot next year as the group vowed to do after it pulled last years initiative. For California Forever, it seems that annexation is the focus right now, says Nate Huntington, resilience manager at the Greenbelt Alliance. Representatives from the group have attended meetings in both cities in which these plans were discussed. In response to a request for comment, a California Forever spokesperson says: We look forward to working with Suisun City, Rio Vista, and Solano County to bring new industries, amazing neighborhoods, and new sources of tax revenue to the region. The annexation process is typically lengthy, often unfolding over several years. Before either city can expand its sphere of influence to include additional territory, the city councils must first vote in favor of the proposal. They must then reach an agreement with the county on how to share property tax revenue. After that, detailed plans and analyses must be developed to outline what the expansion would involve and how the cities would provide municipal services to the new areas. The plan must then be approved by the Solano Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees jurisdictional boundaries. The process also requires a municipal service review, an environmental review, and multiple city council votes. But opponents of California Forevers development plan point out that the group has a track record of trying to do things differently than what is typical. There are roadblocks, but also I think theyve shown theyre really willing to go around the normal process, Wilson says. California Forever is very powerful and they have a lot of resources. Prebula, for his part, sees it similarly, saying that it could make sense, if annexation moves forward, to see if the state legislature will pass legislation shortening the process as it did for the construction of a new NBA stadium. But the deal could be a raw one for the cities if they move forward. Although they would get upfront development fees from California Forever, a fiscal study of the groups ballot initiative commissioned by the county last year found that, had it won and developed the city, the county would over time actually lose $103.1 million, and that was under an arrangement where all tax revenue would have flowed to the county. If the cities go forward with annexation, theyll have to share tax revenue with each other and the county, earning even less. Prebula rebuts those findings, arguing the analysis happened way too quickly and was based on archaic ways of delivering services. Opponents of California Forevers efforts say the annexation plan reflects the groups belief that it cant win at the ballot box, especially when they got off on such a bad start and theres so much distrust, Huntington says. The group kept its plans secret until the New York Times revealed who was behind the land acquisition in 2023. California Forever also sued local ranchers and farmersmost of whom had refused to sell their landalleging they violated antitrust law when they collude[d] by holding out for higher offers and seeking $510 million in damages. Many of those landowners were ultimately forced to settle and give up their property. Jan Sramek, former Goldman Sachs trader and CEO of California Forever, told Fast Company last August that the group would refuse to drop the case. They also say it represents an end-run around the public. If you go the annexation route, there is no vote, noted Duane Kromm, a former member of the Solano County Board of Supervisors who was involved in opposing California Forevers ballot initiative. Prebula argued that county residents voice can be heard without a public vote and that his approach brings more people into the conversation when you have a select group of people who can foster a process and a project. That, he argued, is what democracy is, its just not about a vote. But Wilson argued that its a way to go around the process California Forever should have followed. Its saying you dont care about the publics vote, dont care about the county process, she says. Time and again they seem to just be doing whatever they want and not respecting the people or laws or processes or communities.
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E-Commerce
By 2027, nearly every new home in England might be required to include solar panels. Thats according to a story last month from The Times, which reported that U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to approve a mandate that will require all English homebuilders to install solar panels on the roofs of new properties starting in 2027. The move is part of two wider government plans: decarbonizing Englands grid by 2030 and building 1.5 million new homes by the end of the current parliament. Meanwhile, the U.S. is busy taking aim at clean energy while bolstering fossil fuels. Just last week, President Trump announced that he planned to end the energy efficiency program Energy Star, which curtails household emissions and saves American households $40 billion in energy bills per year. Its a stark picture of how the Trump administration is walking back clean energy initiatives in the name of consumer freedom”at the same time that other countries are moving ahead with ambitious goals to cut emissions. Englands solar plan 2024 was a major year for solar energy around the world. According to a recent study from Solar Power Europe, global solar installations reached nearly 600 gigawatts (GW)a 33% year-over-year increaseand accounted for 81% of all renewable energy capacity added worldwide. A report from Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie shows that, in the U.S., new solar generation capacity far surpassed any other source of electricity in 2024. In the U.K., renewables also reached a record high, totaling 45% of all energy production. Data from the U.K.s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero indicates that solar capacity increased by 1.2 GW in 2024, a 7.5% increase over the course of the year. Still, experts say the rate of solar deployment will need to increase if the U.K. is to meet its 2030 decarbonization goal, which includes a target of 47 GW of added solar. Currently, two in five new builds in England are outfitted with solar panels. Based on documents reviewed by The Times, Starmers soon-to-be-approved building rules will require 99% of new homes to have at least some solar roof paneling beginning in 2027. The changes are expected to cost homeowners between $3,700 and $4,500. Ultimately, though, the change will likely result in savings, as the solar panels are estimated to recoup around $1,100 in energy bills every year. Its an ambitious plan that, if enacted, would go a long way toward helping the U.K. reach its clean energy target. The U.K. takes two steps forward; the U.S. takes two steps back Since entering office, Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he plans to prioritize fossil fuels over renewables, including with an executive order on his first day in office aimed at lifting restrictions on the fossil fuel industry (despite the fact that oil and gas production is at record highs in the U.S.). He has since withdrawn from international climate agreements, curtailed funds for renewable energy projects, and expressed a markedly intense disdain for wind farms. Within his order for Unleashing American Energy, Trump listed the goal of safeguard[ing] the American peoples freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to light bulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and showerheads. Last week, that resulted in the administration announcing plans to scrap Energy Star, a program that helps consumers identify energy-efficient home products like appliances and electronics. Since its inception, Energy Star has saved households and businesses more than $500 billion in energy costs and stopped 4 billion metric tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere. It’s a paradoxical plan that, while framed as a way to give Americans more “freedom,” actively works against Trump’s promise to slash energy prices. The Trump administration has also ignited uncertainty around the future of American solar power. Following the growth of the industry in 2024, solar companies in the U.S. are facing new challenges in 2025namely, price hikes due to Trump’s global trade war. Solar companies that rely on parts from China have already been hit with higher costs due to tariffs. And at the end of April, the U.S. Commerce Department announced plans to impose tariffs of up to a whopping 3,521% on some imports of solar panels from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia, which together account for over 80% of U.S. solar module supply. Still, solar is one of the cheapest forms of energy to deploy. Back in March, multiple solar companies told Fast Company that they felt the business proposition of solar was too strong to be damaged by the new administration. Several experts have warned that solar will be key to powering American data centers and keeping the country ahead in the global AI race. It remains to be seen whether this economic argument will ultimately sway Trump into reconsidering his crackdown on renewables.
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E-Commerce
Theres no question that Amazon is known for its packaging. Boxes and mailers with the ubiquitous smile logo now dot the porches of every neighborhood in the country. And with the companys 2017 purchase of Whole Foods, it became a major player in food packaging as well, wrapping everything from produce to potato chips. Since then, the chain has expanded to 535 locations and increased its sales 40%. That means that every day, millions of people take home some food wrapped in plastic from Whole Foodsbut probably rarely think about the packaging. But in a nondescript warehouse in a still-industrial part of Seattle, five scientists at Amazons Sustainable Materials Innovation Lab are trying to design a better package.This work is twofold. First, researchers are putting dozens of bio-based plastics through a gauntlet of tests on things like tensile strength, tear strength, and seal strength to see how they compare to their fossil-fuel-based counterparts. Second, theyre working with a handful of partners to make sure that when this packaging hits the market, theres a recycling infrastructure already in place that can support it.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Our long-term objective is to enable simplicity and recycling of plastics in the same way that you have paper today, says Alan Jacobsen, the director of Materials and Energy Sciences at the lab. You dont need to know, is it a 1, 2, 3, 4. You just throw it.The intense focus on circularity sands in stark contrast to the overconsumption that Amazons business model entailsand the vast amounts of junk it distributes, particularly with the recent launch of Haul, where every item is under $20. Jacobsen, for his part, says that he knows people are going to buy products at a range of price points. . . . We try to figure out how to enable that in the most sustainable way. And the company says it intends to make the research and technology available beyond Amazon, which means that if its successful, it could lead to a fundamental change in packagingand recyclingthroughout the economy.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]The challenges of designing food packagingLast October, Amazon announced that it had swapped out all of its plastic fillers with paper, part of its overall commitment to reducing plastic use. Paper isnt just more environmentally friendly than plastic, it also has much higher rates of recycling (68% compared to 6%). When youre at home recycling paper, you just throw it in the bin and you know its going to get recycled, Jacobsen says. Because its easier to recycle, its recycled more.But for some applications, paper just isnt a viable solution. Thats especially true for food packaging because of the physical properties of the material, says Jacobsen. Sometimes this has to do with the tear strength or puncture strength; sometimes it has to do with the moisture barrier properties or oxygen barrier propertiesjust properties that it is not possible for paper to meet.Food packaging has to keep potato chips crispy and pretzels salty and baby carrots wet; it has to be tough enough that a pile of apples dont tear open the bag, with a seal strong enough that frozen peas dont spill all over the floor (while still being easy to open). Food has way more demands of its packaging than something like a book, a tube of lipstick, or even a set of dishes. The default solution to this has always been plastic. But Jacobsen and his team are working on a replacement: biopolyesters. That means the plastic is biodegradable and uses biological materials, waste, or recycled content as the feedstock (or raw material used to make the plastic). [Photo: courtesy Amazon]But this packaging doesnt just have to be developed, tested, and producedAmazon also wants it to be easily recyclable, which is where things get even more complicated. Our current recycling infrastructure is finicky: Its not good at differentiating between different types of plastic, and if it gets confused, it errs on the side of landfill. (Because if the different types of plastic get bundled together, it downgrades the entire bale, which means less money for the recycling facility.)Jacobsen and his team want to eliminate this problem entirely. They want to make biopolyesters that are a blend of feedstocks (including different types of recycled plastic) and then have recycling plants (called materials recovery facilities, or MRFs) be able to take it all in, easily separate it, and find a home for these streams.But one new type of material is not going to work, says Jacobsen. Youre going to need a range of different materials. You often have to blend these materials together. You have to put them in different layers to meet the requirements for a particular application. But most recycling facilities arent set up to deal with these kinds of mixed waste streams in a single piece of packaging. So Amazon is working with a network of other companies to help redesin the plastic recycling infrastructure to make it simple for their designs to always be made into something new.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Glacierdesigning robots to go through the trashMuch of the recycling infrastructure in the United States is built on MRFs. These massive warehouses take in gobs of recyclingcardboard boxes and wine bottles and take-out containers and everything in betweenand sort hundreds of tons of waste each day. But in the course of that sorting, a lot of otherwise recyclable stuff can get missed or thrown out, maybe because the machines cant tell what it is, maybe because it gets mixed in with other items. That means a lot of theoretically recyclable materials get sent to the landfill, and also that a lot of bundles of recycled plastic are too degraded with other materials to be properly reused. Glacier, a San Francisco-based company that Amazon invested in last fall, designed a robot to eliminate these pain points. It can sort through more than 30 different types of material, meaning the end bales are more accurate, and fewer items get trashed. (One company, for example, added a Glacier robot, and found that its paper bales were 17% more pure as a result.)[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Our society tends to view recycling as a nice alternative to landfilling our trash, says Rebecca Hu-Thrams, one of the cofounders. [But] we very much see recycling as an absolutely crucial pillar of societys necessary transition toward circular manufacturing. In other words, recycling is at its core a way to get your hands on more raw feedstocks, more materials to turn into new stuff.Hu-Thrams referenced a customer in the Midwest that installed one of Glaciers AI cameras on whats known as a last chance line, where all the trash leaves the facility and theres one more shot to pick out recyclable items. This facility quickly realized that about two-thirds of its total leakage was coming from beverage bottles; when they identified where and why this was happening, they were able to fix the issue. So in the span of a couple of weeks or less, they actually are now on track to rescue 15 million more of these PET bottles every single year that wouldve ended up in landfill, says Areeb Malik, Glaciers other cofounder.[Image: courtesy of the author]Amazon plans to install one of these robotic systems in its lab next month. The goal is that as they develop new biopolyesters that are a mix of materials, they can simultaneously be training the system to recognize them and mark them as recyclablenever getting confused and thinking they belong in the trash.We want to make sure that once the materials are out in the market, we know that theyll be identified in these systems right away, says John Shane, a principal materials engineer who worked in Amazons lab for three years. And well be able to generate data sets here that we can share with Glacier and then they can share with their customers. As that information is fed back to the companies, theyll ideally be able to design packaging thats easier to recycle (and better identified by the robot).Thats a huge priority for Amazon, which plans to share what it learns from its biopolyester development. We dont want to own the IP and keep it to ourselves, says Jacobsen. We want everybody to have access; we have no financial motivation.[Photo: Amazon]EsterCycledesigning chemicals to break down the plasticsBut even if Glaciers tech scales up and is able to identify much more theoretically recyclable plastic, the current recycling infrastructure isnt necessarily able to transform that into new products. And thats the problem EsterCycle is trying to solve. The Denver-based startup spun out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory last August, after completing a successful project with Amazon on mixed recycling waste. Julia Curley was a postdoctoral researcher at NREL working on the project; shes now EsterCycles founder and only full-time employee. Curley stresses that EsterCycle isnt looking to upend traditional recycling processesits developing an entirely new one. The goal is to be additive to the current system, taking what MRFs now see as contaminated, lower quality plastic and transforming it into materials that can be made into new products.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Our existing system essentially collects bales of similar plastic; shreds, washes, and melts it; and then turns it into something new: Its a mechanical process. EsterCycle, on the other hand, is working on chemical recycling. Plastics are made of these long chains of molecules called polymers, Curley says. And what were doing is actually cutting that chain into its individual components, kind of like taking apart a large string of Legos into its individual pieces. And then they can be remade into new plastics. (Some environmental groups criticize wide-scale chemical recycling as being a pipe dream of Big Oil, although most of the research in this area thus far solely relates to fossil-fuel-based plastic.)This will be especially relevant for compostable plastics, which are commonly used in food packaging. While this is still a small portion of overall plastic (just 1%, as of 2024), its projected to keep increasingand our current infrastructure isnt designed to recycle it. Curley says that currently, if too much of it is in a recycling bale, it will significantly lower the quality and price that a MRF can ask for it. Commercial composters, meanwhile, often dont accept it either, because of contamination issues, or because theyre skeptical that it actually breaks down.EsterCycle is now using a lot of these compostable plastics as feedstocks to demonstrate how well its chemical process works at breaking them down and making them usable for the supply chain. As EsterCycle breaks down these kinds of plastics, the resulting building blocks can be sold to any kind of manufacturer. The idea is that they can be drop-in additions to existing manufacturing, meaning the process doesnt have to change at all, Curley says.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Novamontdesigning packaging to be recycledNovamont, an Italian company, has been working on biodegradable and compostable products since its launch in 1990and its exactly the kind of company that might buy those building blocks. Its Mater-Bi is used in things like shopping bags and packaging; while it was originally made out of fossil-fuel-produced polyesters, the company has been working to increase the amount of renewable content in this material. While EsterCycle isnt yet sending its feedstock their way, the idea is that ultimately, Novamont and similar companies would be able to seamlessly incorporate those biopolyesters into their products. In the meantime, Amazon and Novamont are testing out bio-based plastic grocery bags in Amazon Fresh stores in Valencia, Spain. That was a great application where paper was being used and it wasnt meeting the requirements, Jacobsen says. The grocery bags were being put in the fridge before being delivered to customers and because of the moisture, they were falling apart when people took them out. Switching to the plastic bags has made it better for the folks that are delivering them and improved it all around.In the U.S., Jacobsen and his team have been testing out produce bags made from biopolyesters at some Whole Foods locations and at Amazon Fresh stores in the Seattle area. There, they have QR codes where customers can give feedback on the bags.The Amazon lab collects that feedback, shares it with Novamont, and then they keep iterating on the design until it gets closer to what they want. We learned that lettuce wilted faster [in the early bags], says Jacobsen. Is it the end of the world? Probably not, but to some customers, its not ideal. Researchers at the lab could then take that feedback and reexamine the moisture barrier properties in the bags to see how that element could be adjusted. Once these bags have been used, the goal is that theyre fed back into the recycling stream. To that end, Novamont is also conducting trials with one of Glaciers AI models to ensure that the bags can be properly sorted once they reach a MRF. And then, of course, the ideal is that EsterCycle would be able to chemically break down the bags to be fed back into Novamonts production system.[Photo: courtesy Amazon]Designing a better recycling systemno matter whos in the White HouseMany of these developments are still years from being widely used in the market. That would seem compounded by the fact that the Trump administration appears actively hostile toward anything that benefits the environment and is cutting funding and staffing at research institutions across the country. (Just last week, 114 people were fired from NREL as part of massive cuts to the Department of Energy.)Jacobsen admitted that its a bit of a wait-and-see period, and notes that while their funding isnt necessarily dependent on the government, they do partner with government labs where theres an opportunity to accelerate progress. He hopes that will continue to be possible over the next four years. [Image: courtesy of the author]The Glacier team, meanwhile, is cautiously optimistic about what Trump means for their business. Recycling in the waste industry as a whole tends to be extremely bipartisan, says Glaciers Hu-Thrams. Whether youre thinking about recycling from a climate crisis mitigation angle, or an onshoring and workforce development and job creation angle, theres so many reasons why advancing recycling infrastructure and recycling efficiency is a really, really good thing to do for our society. Much of this work is also done at the state and local level, where decisions are more insulated from Trumps rhetoric and slapdash executive orders. Thats where Jacobsen hopes to make the most progress, noting that cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver are interested in incorporating these products into their recycling infrastructure. It can be a bit jarring to try to square the innovations coming out of Jacobsons teamand the genuine passion that they have for a fossil-fuel-free supply chainwith Amazons position as the largest online seller of stuff in the U.S. But our addiction to consumptionand Amazons commitment to fulfilling itmeans that this cycle is unlikely to end anytime soon. Ensuring that its not wrapped in plastic made from fossil fuels is a big deal. And if theyre successful at transforming food packaging, it has implications far beyond just what we eat.
Category:
E-Commerce
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