Major beauty brands including L’Oreal and Neutrogena are rolling out a new sustainability scoring system. The EcoBeautyScore will grade products from A (best) to E (worst) in their respective categories based on factors like ingredient sourcing, packaging materials, and what happens to containers when the product’s all used up. The first categories on the docket: shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and facial care products. For now, the stamps are only in the European and U.K. markets, but the consortium behind them has ambitions to take the program global.
It’s almost always better for the climate to retrofit an existing building than to tear it down and start anew, according to a new tool called EcoSphere developed at Notre Dame’s School of Architecture. The reason? You have to account for the “embodied carbon,” which refers to the emissions produced when structures originally go up. “If something from one lifecycle can be put into another lifecycle, then the entire economy, and entire society, will be better off,” Ming Hu, one of the tool’s creators, told one5c last year.
If the U.S. cut military spending by less than 7% each year for a decade, it could reduce energy consumption by nearly 246 trillion British thermal units, according to data published in PLOS Climate. That’s like erasing all the energy the state of Delaware uses each year. “If anything, our findings are perhaps undercounting and underestimating the actual scope of the U.S. military’s contribution to energy consumption and carbon emissions and climate change,” Andrew Jorgenson, study author and founding director of the University of British Columbia’s Climate and Society Lab, tells Grist. Here’s why quantifying the emissions of military activity is so complex.
EV sales took a dip in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2025, but a new report from analysts at Cox Automotive’s Kelly Blue Book is predicting a record pop over the next three months. The federal sunsetting of the $7,500 tax credit on new electric vehicles at the end of September will likely spark a surge of sales through the late summer and early fall, they say. Here’s what to know about cashing in on EV tax incentives before it’s too late.
People who are conscious of their personal climate impact grok the broad strokes of who’s responsible for what: We’re collectively generating too many planet-warming gasses, and richer folks tend to emit a lot more than those in lower income brackets. But the results of a survey in Nature Communications has uncovered a hole in the average person’s perceptions; the researchers found that folks across the board say their own carbon footprint is lower than those of their peers, when that’s rarely the case. They’ve dubbed this chasm the “carbon perception gap.”
