Each year, Climate Week NYC brings together more than 100,000 people in more than 1,000 events across the city to discuss climate challenges, explore solutions, and spur action. Participants come from industry, academia, philanthropy, nonprofits, government, and finance and venture capital. And this year, the mix included a strong, cross-campus presence from MIT. The MIT community could be seen multiple days during Climate Week, with appearances by Evelyn Wang, vice president for energy and climate, at the official opening ceremony discussing artificial intelligence and the climate equation; an event co-hosted by MIT and the Bezos Earth Fund on climate innovation; and 14 sessions organized by the MIT Climate Project and eight MIT departments, labs, centers, and initiatives ' including the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Open Learning, the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), the MIT Climate Policy Center, and the Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Center for Social Impact....

Establishing a human presence on the moon will require state-of-the-art spacecraft, spacesuits, life-support systems, and some of the most sophisticated technology humans have ever built. It will also require figuring out where to put the garbage.A future lunar outpost will receive a steady stream of supplies from Earth, bringing packaging and other materials that could quickly become a mountain of waste. Meanwhile, astronauts will need tools, replacement parts, and materials to maintain the outpost, and shipping supplies from Earth is astronomically expensive. An MIT student team has won first prize in a NASA competition for developing a way to turn that trash into useful materials for lunar living.The Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ) team was named first-prize winner in both the Prototype and Digital Twin tracks of NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge. The challenge ' part of NASA's Centennial Challenges series ' asked participants to design and develop solutions that can reuse, recycle, or upcycle space waste and improve the sustainability of longer-duration lunar missions. Teams were encouraged to envision solutions that not only addressed recycling in deep space, but could also have applications on Earth.The CERBERUZ team's system turns otherwise unusable waste into new composite materials, grinding it down, melting it, and molding it into useful parts. The approach reduces the need for costly shipments from Earth and keeps bulky packaging from piling up in lunar landfills.'Waste packaging materials will inevitably accumulate when a lunar outpost is built, and at the same time, outpost construction and maintenance will require a steady supply of new materials, including replacement parts,' says George Lordos, a research scientist in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and System Design and Management, and the lead advisor for the CERBERUZ team. 'Recycling waste materials into such parts can help reduce materials needed to be launched from Earth.'Waste not, want notCERBERUZ separates non-biological waste into two streams: thermoplastics and everything else. All materials are then ground into a fine powder and mixed together. The powder mixture is loaded into an injection molding machine, where the thermoplastics melt with the remaining materials suspended in the molten plastic. The mixture is finally injected into a mold, producing high-quality composite parts that can be quickly and reliably replicated....

This week: the gap between ESG disclosure and ESG verification, and why it matters for every portfolio that relies on the numbers. Here's the front page. Paid subscribers can download the full newspaper edition at the bottom of this post. The answer depends on who you count. Among the 1,400 largest listed companies in G20 markets, 75% had some sustainability data assured in 2024. But assuring a single metric counts. Across 56,565 reports from 14,512 companies, only 42.9% carried any assurance statement at all. And most of that is light. Of the reports where the level could be read, 88.6% got only limited assurance: the assurer says nothing came to its attention, after mostly asking questions. Just 8.7% got reasonable assurance, the standard we expect for financial statements. That is roughly 4% of the whole sample. Why does this matter so much for investors' Because audit is what turns a company's claim into something you can price. Financial statements earned that trust through mandatory audit, liability and enforcement. ESG data now drives index weights, fund labels, loan pricing and bank capital, without the same scaffolding....

According to the 2026 State of Supply Chain Sustainability report from the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab, which surveyed 1,810 supply chain professionals across 91 countries, 83 percent rate sustainability as important or very important to long-term business success, the highest level in the report's seven-year history. But commitment, the report reveals, is not the same as capacity. While 59 percent of respondents report becoming more committed to sustainability following recent U.S. policy shifts that deprioritize environmental concerns, the same organizations are being forced to compromise those commitments. Sixty-eight percent report that tariff uncertainty has compelled them to delay, scale back, or abandon sustainability strategies. Nearly one-third have seen tariff-related disruptions actually increase their operational emissions. "Commitment is strong, measurement is expanding, and AI is accelerating," says Sreedevi Rajagopalan, director of the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab and lead author of the report. "What comes next is harder: converting commitment into accountability, operational integration into strategic decision-making, and incremental decarbonization into genuine transition."...