A check engine light for your phone
A phone’s screen and battery are the most-likely components to go kaput, but each time you fix either you’re keeping a kilogram of e-waste from hitting the landfill. A new app from iFixit—a resource that helps people repair their devices—can keep tabs on battery health, which will help you trade up before your device powers down on you.
In addition to power-pack checkups, the app includes step-by-step repair how-tos, tutorials to diagnose issues, and a chat assistant called FixBot that can talk you through everything. We realize everyone’s a bit wary about the climate impacts of too much AI, but this is an idea we can get behind. Spread over the lifetime of a phone, the emissions associated making a new device are around four times those that come from using it—even if that use includes a handful of AI-assisted searches a day.
What you can do: Take care of your electronics to extend their lives as long as possible. That includes keeping them clean, updated, and in good repair. You can also give the iFixit app a try: Download it for iOS and Android.
A would-be solution, turned microplastic supervillain
Critics have been crying foul on recycled polyester for years. They’ve flagged it as a greenwashing tactic deployed to keep spinning the cycle of overconsumption, and pointed out that turning empty beverage bottles—the feedstock for most recycled poly—into t-shirts cuts the material’s potential useful life short.
A new report commissioned by the Changing Markets Foundation has added a line to the material’s rap sheet: microplastic mega-source. The researchers put 51 garments from Adidas, H&M, Nike, Shein, and Zara through a normal wash cycle and found that those made from recycled polyester shed 55% more microplastic particles than those made from virgin material on average.
What you can do: Avoid any polyester—paritculary the recycled variety—as much as possible and revamp your laundry routine to minimize how much microplastic sudsing up your duds creates. Here’s how.
EPA websites revise climate science
Despite months of public bluster from the Trump administration, the EPA’s website has continued to get the basics of climate change right—including, crucially, the link between human-caused carbon emissions and a warming atmosphere. As of last week, however, the agency’s page on the causes of heating cites “natural processes” like shifts in Earth’s orbit and volcanic activity.
Those edits are part of a sweeping batch of changes, including the all-out deletion of at least 80 pages about the climate crisis. There had been prior edits, but watchdogs say this round is different, because it not only ignores settled science but also nixes resources on the effects of economic risks of human-caused warming. “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care,” Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, told Grist.
What you can do: Support groups working to restore and maintain publicly available, science-based climate information. The team at climate.us, for instance, is working to get a range of scrubbed resources back online.
Can sports mascots spark conservation?
One-in-four professional sports teams around the world has name or a logo inspired by a wild animal, and a disproportionate number of those critters are vulnerable or endangered, according to a tally published this month in the journal BioScience. (See ‘em all mapped out here.)
This, the authors posit, is an opportunity. “This emotional connection between fans and the animals that represent their teams could be harnessed to support conservation at scale,” study author Ugo Arbieu told Anthropocene. The researchers, however, aren’t prescriptive about what that could look like, but rather see their study as a first step in getting sports organizations to see conservation as part of their environmental agendas.
What you can do: One of your ride-or-die teams on the list? Consider writing a letter to the front office to ask what they’re doing to support the fauna whose likeness they use.