About Earth911

We believe humans can successfully reduce their impact by using less, reusing and recycling more, and constantly making small improvements through their daily decisions at home, while shopping, at work, and at play. More ideas make less waste.

What We Believe

  • Wasting less is a journey and we’re glad you’re along for the ride.
  • Education and community are vital to creating real change.
  • Thousands of individual small changes create a large, positive impact.
  • Your voice can be heard; your actions will make a positive difference.

Our Mission

Earth911.com started its life in the early ’90s as an Arizona-centric recycling database, even before the World Wide Web came along. After 32 years, it remains the largest recycling database in the nation — probably the world. We work every day to help you make small, simple changes that will reduce the environmental impact of your life, work, and shopping. No one is perfect, and everyone can make progress, so we focus on what you can do today by sharing insights into how to measure the carbon footprint of products, services, and lifestyles that need to change for humanity to thrive.

We believe humans can successfully reduce their impact by using less, reusing more, and constantly making small improvements through their daily decisions. Earth911 works to make that complex story something you can understand and help to realize through your everyday actions. Big companies and governments need to change, but they will follow citizens who act and communicate what they value. Your progress requires growing awareness of the consequences of workplace and shopping decisions. These actions most directly shape the human carbon footprint, and small changes by many of us do add up to huge improvements in environmental impacts.

About Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe
Mitch Ratcliffe

Our publisher, Mitch Ratcliffe, is a veteran technology journalist who covered the rise of digital communications starting in the late 1980s. Sustainability has always been a passion, though he freely acknowledges his record is far from perfect. Like you, he is learning and trying to improve his relationship with the environment every day. He got involved with Earth911 because it has the ability to focus attention and resources to answer complicated sustainability questions. Being green takes a lot of research because most of the discipline is only being invented now.

These days, he enjoys hosting Earth911’s Sustainability in Your Ear podcast because it allows for interesting conversations with the next generation of innovators — the ones who will help save humanity from its industrial-era excesses. He loves to find and share those stories with you. Earth911 is for his children, their children and grandchildren, and every family’s future.