Nic Esposito wants to reimagine the retail industry; he believes that people, profits and the planet would benefit from leaving business as usual behind. That’s where Circa Systems comes in. Esposito founded the Philadelphia-based company in 2023 to create a more sustainable, local retail model, allowing paying members to purchase and swap mostly used products
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Tim Eads pulls out his box cutter, slices a panel from a flattened cardboard box and then feeds it through a tabletop perforator. What goes in as waste comes out as packing material. What began as a way to source more-sustainable packing material for Tuft the World, the rug tufting company Eads owns with his
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Sitting by the front door at my house are a couple bags of old toys. The next time one of us plans to be near the Goodwill, we’ll drop them off. A few weeks ago I bought our oldest (11) a new/used bike from Neighborhood Bike Works and dropped off two outgrown ones that had
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My boomer dad doesn’t do social media. So when he wanted to unload a decades-old desk ill-suited to his new condo, he went old school: He posted a flier on the bulletin board at MOM’s Organic Market in Bryn Mawr. “Free to a good home: pine desk in good condition.” He included the desk’s dimensions,
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In Johanna Dunn’s Belmont Hills studio, rich upholsteries abound: lush reds, animal prints and houndstooth mingle with florals, tweeds and blackout curtains. Her slow-fashion company, City Totes, specializes in artistically crafted bags made from reclaimed fabrics. Dunn, 55, loves finding materials destined for the trash and designing a new life for them. Over the past
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Glass is 100% recyclable: it can be melted over and over again to form new glass products without any loss in quality. Most of it is not recycled, however, despite the fact that the planet is running out of the sand necessary to make glass and other products. The opportunity for glass recycling, therefore, is
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The Rounds launched in Philadelphia in 2019 with a very simple mission — to make home delivery of what they call “the boring stuff” as sustainable and as effortless as possible. “It’s hard to ask people, even those that are as sustainability minded as our members, to make big sacrifices in the name of sustainability,”
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In July 2020, after spending several months of the pandemic wondering whether her trash and recycling would be picked up, Sarah Ausprich was frustrated. When it was collected, Ausprich, a resident of Philly’s East Passyunk neighborhood, watched sanitation crews repeatedly combine her trash and recycling in the same truck. Disillusioned by curbside collection, she decided
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It was almost 15 years ago that Van Jones wrote his book “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems,” and not quite four years ago that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey introduced the outline for the Green New Deal. The green economy was the holy grail, but now in
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Grid spoke in October with Samantha Wittchen, director of programs and operations at Circular Philadelphia, which she cofounded (with Grid’s Nic Esposito) in June 2021. Circular Philadelphia aims to drive the growth of a thriving circular economy in Greater Philadelphia through advocacy, education, infrastructure development and collaboration. The following interview has been edited for length
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Since Philadelphia’s 30th Street Amtrak Station announced in late March that it would switch from steam power to gas boilers, activists have been pushing back on the station’s claims that the move aligns with a sustainable future for the city. “That is simply a false narrative,” Clean Air Council Executive Director Joseph Minott says. “Everyone
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