The term “sustainability” gets thrown around a lot nowadays, but there is much merit to the pursuit of sustainability across industries. At its core, sustainability is defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Our economy is inherently tied to the resources we have available, and there are many ways to dig into business stories under the umbrella of sustainability. Today we’re sharing a roundup of topics at the intersection of sustainability and business that you should watch in 2025.
Who knows – maybe you’ll find your next story on this list!
Return of the plastic straw
Although they make up less than 1% of the 8 million metric tons of plastic waste entering our oceans each year, plastic straws have become something of a symbol for efforts to reduce plastic waste, particularly single-use plastics. The Trump administration appears set to change this.
Though discussions on reducing single-use plastics were already happening in the 2000s, a viral video from 2015 where a marine biologist pulled a plastic straw out of a sea turtle’s nose is often attributed to an increase in action on the issue due to the powerful public response. Recent studies have also warned that single-use plastics may contribute to the accumulation of microplastics and nanoplastics within the human body, including in the brain, heart, and lungs.
Seattle became the first major U.S. city to ban plastic straws in 2018 following the city’s broader Zero Waste Resolution. Many other places in both the U.S. and abroad have followed suit since then, including the EU in 2021. Work to eliminate single-use plastic waste continued under the Biden administration, with the goal of phasing out “single-use plastics from food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035.”
The Trump administration is now reversing this stance, with President Trump stating, “It’s a ridiculous situation. We’re going back to plastic straws,” while signing an order directing federal agencies to stop purchasing paper straws.
While neither is recyclable, paper straws take up to six weeks to decompose whereas plastic straws take about 200 years. The exact number of straws used each day in the U.S. is unknown, but the figure has been claimed to be anywhere from 170 million to 500 million per day. Even as other alternatives exist such as glass, stainless steel, silicone, bamboo, and pasta straws, it’s said that plastic straws account for up to 99% of the $3 billion global drinking straw market according to a 2014 article.
As for the subject of marine life, the Associated Press shared the following comment from Trump at a White House announcement: “I don’t think that plastic is going to affect the shark very much as they’re eating, as they’re munching their way through the ocean.”
No slowing down on solar
According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2024 report published in October 2024, solar power is projected to become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2031. Though a small town in Michigan used to be the largest producer of solar polysilicon – the vital component to producing solar panels – the U.S. is barely on the map when it comes to solar power today. So, what happened?
Until about 2005, solar polysilicon was produced by only seven companies, with Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. in the U.S. leading production. This was quite lucrative for these companies, especially as solar began to be more widely utilized as an alternative energy source. But as solar polysilicon prices soared, Chinese companies spotted an opportunity in the solar market.
Polysilicon plants opened rapidly across China, and supply quickly outpaced demand. These Chinese companies sold at much cheaper price points, halving the costs of their competitors, and a trade war materialized with heavy tariffs being placed from the U.S. upon China and vice versa. Profits for U.S. companies dropped in the midst of this trade war, and investors began pulling out of the industry. Chinese companies gained an increasingly large share of the solar market, allowing them to have a major hand in policy development that now impacts the global market. China produces by far the most solar panels globally – so much so that multiple countries have even called for China to cut back – and produces over 90% of global solar polysilicon today.
Solar panels are now a small fraction of the cost they were in the early 2000s. Though the U.S. has largely still pushed for oil and gas energy (and will likely continue to do so under the Trump administration), other countries around the world have embraced solar as an alternative energy source. In fact, last year 13 countries in the EU produced more electricity with solar and wind than they did with fossil fuels for the first time ever.
In the U.S., wind is currently the largest single source of renewable energy, accounting for about 10% of electricity in the country. An executive order signed by President Trump in January has paused any new permits and leases for wind projects on public lands and federal waters. Though there is no evidence that wind power harms marine life, this was cited as a major reason behind the executive order. As China and other countries continue to push for onshore and offshore wind energy, this could prove to be another renewable energy source that the U.S. falls behind in developing.
Big data’s consumption of energy
In addition to clean energy efforts for the sake of sustainability, many companies are exploring renewable energy sources as a way to power the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
As reported by Bloomberg, the number of data centers either built or in development around the world has nearly doubled since 2015, with the current global count at over 7,000. As data centers continue to pop up seemingly overnight, many find the massive energy demand their operation requires is “now outstripping the available power supply in many parts of the world.” The power demand can even exceed that of entire cities.
The company Tract announced a purchase in August of last year of over 2,000 acres of land in Buckeye, Arizona, where the company plans to build “one of the largest data center parks in the United States.” They hope to secure up to 1.8 gigawatts of power to support up to 40 individual data centers. According to a CNBC analysis, a data center campus using one gigawatt of power is “roughly equivalent to a city of around 1.8 million people.” For comparison, the most recent census population estimate for Phoenix, the capital of Arizona and the fifth-largest U.S. city, is 1.65 million people.
The demands don’t stop at electricity either. Data centers need to stay cool to operate, typically requiring a lot of water. This usage can add up quickly – for example, the Washington Post found using Chat GPT-4 to generate a single 100-word email uses the equivalent of over one bottle of water.
On a large scale, this can have a huge impact on an area’s water reserves. After a lawsuit, The Oregonian found Google’s data centers in The Dalles, Oregon were consuming a quarter of the town’s water supply. Though Google’s remarks on the issue compared it to a golf course being built in the Southwest, The Oregonian spoke with John DeVoe, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group WaterWatch, who said that regardless of how people feel about the level of water usage, the fact remains that the area is already in short supply when it comes to water and “there simply isn’t enough water to add major new users like Google.”
Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta continue to race ahead, each claiming they will reach zero emissions by 2030 and boasting of already utilizing renewable energy. However, the areas where they are building data centers are increasingly having to rely on fossil fuels to make up for the increased power demands. Even while some argue that the increased toll will push countries to adopt clean energy faster, developing the infrastructure of systems to incorporate them takes years, and the energy toll from data centers is here now and rapidly growing by the day.
Other topics to watch
Currently, drivers in the U.S. can get up to $7,500 in a federal tax credit for buying or leasing an electric vehicle (EV), though President Trump has suggested this is a wasteful program that he would like to cut. Trump has also turned an eye to adjusting emissions standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency and is trying to block California’s 2035 ban on gas-powered vehicles.
Some worry that the clean car rollbacks will introduce higher prices, more pollution, and make the U.S. less competitive in the global market. It’s forecasted that EVs will make up about 10% of vehicle sales this year in the United States. Other countries see a larger share of vehicle sales as EVs – Norway, for example, is at the top of the list with nine out of every ten cars sold in the country being EVs.
In addition to what we’re emitting through the vehicles we drive, there’s also a lot to watch when it comes to our standing conservation efforts.
The federal worker layoffs have hit many agencies, with one being the National Park Service (NPS). On February 14, roughly 1,000 NPS employees were laid off as part of President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency’s effort to downsize the federal workforce.
Proper staffing is essential for national parks to direct visitors, collect entry fees, undertake preventative maintenance to keep trails safe and other areas properly cared for, as well as respond to emergencies when people are in danger. The staffing shortages are already being felt, as several parks have had to decrease hours, delay reservations, or have experienced significantly longer wait times for park entry.
In addition to conserving national land and wildlife, national parks offer public health benefits and play a vital economic role. A 2022 study found that parks and green spaces provide benefits such as increased physical activity, lower anxiety, and greater social connections. According to the NPS, activity in 2023 alone amounted to 325 million visitors, supported 415,000 jobs, and created $55.6 billion in economic output in the national economy. There’s now worry about parks becoming less accessible to the public, not being properly maintained, or outright being lost to development like drilling and mining.
