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She’s made of (recycled) plastic. Is that fantastic?
Renewable Energy Engineer Barbie has bright blue eyes, a bouncy blonde ponytail that fits neatly beneath her hard hat, and a solar panel that clicks into her plastic hand. Her pink shirt and safety vest are certified CarbonNeutral. Her job is to “reduce the use of fossil fuels and improve energy use,” according to the back of her FSC-certified, 100% recycled cardboard box.
The Barbie is also — in keeping with the four-doll “2022 Career of the Year: Eco-Leadership Team” set she’s a part of — made of “recycled plastic” (except, an asterisk notes, for her head and her hair). You’ve got to wonder what her colleague, Environmental Advocate Barbie, would think of that, though. Fossil fuel companies and major plastic polluters like Coca-Cola have honed in on using and endorsing “recycled plastics,” a material that activists say is a giveaway of greenwashing because it can be highly energy intensive (one type of plastic recycling emits “more greenhouse gases than fossil fuel-fired power plants,” the National Resources Defense Council says), gives the illusion that plastic is more recyclable than it is, and frequently needs to be combined with virgin plastic, anyway.
Poke around Mattel’s recent press releases and website, and you’ll notice a trend. Mega Bloks’ Build & Learn Eco House is “made from … a minimum of 56% plant-based materials” and has added a “Build & Learn Eco House” and the “Grow & Protect Farm” to its line. There is a Matchbox Tesla Roadster (made from 99% recycled materials) and a Recycling Truck (made from “80% ISCC-certified bio-circular plastic”). UNO Cards are now recyclable (they weren’t before?). You can also send old Barbies back to the company to be recycled and buy Barbie Loves the Ocean and Dr. Jane Goodall dolls made from recycled plastic as replacements. The release of each new “sustainable” toy is a further occasion for Mattel to reference its ambition of using “100% recycled, recyclable, or bio-based plastic materials in all its products and packaging by 2030.”
That's a laudable ambition. Yet of all of Mattel’s countless number of toys, only 33 use recycled plastics of some kind right now. And even the few certified as carbon neutral seem to have attained the designation from carbon offsets the company purchased to preserve forests in British Columbia, although, as Bloomberg reports, the auditor general of the Canadian province “questioned the validity” of such offsets back in 2013. The offsets are also very cheap — Bloomberg estimated they cost about $3,000 for one entire product line.
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Plastic toys are ubiquitous: Children in Western nations are estimated to own an average of about 40 pounds of plastic toys, with some 90% of the toys available on the market being made out of plastic. “The toy industry uses 40 tons of plastic for every $1 million in revenues,” The World Counts reports, “and is the most plastic-intensive industry in the world.” But an estimated 80% of toys ultimately end up in landfills, incinerators, or the ocean.
Consumers — and particularly Millennial parents — are aware of the plastic crisis and might feel buyer’s remorse when coming home with yet another landfill-destined doll. “Parents want to know that the products they buy will not harm the environment,” The Toy Association, a trade group, said following a 2019 report. “Offering a toy that is biodegradable or an initiative that encourages toy sharing will appeal to today’s environmentally-conscious consumers.” Another marketing survey concluded that wooden toys — which, anecdotally speaking, are all over my friends’ baby registries and momfluencer feeds — are expected to grow to a $34 billion business by 2031, up from $24.5 billion in 2022.
But plastic toys have dominated for decades both because they’re cheap and easy to make and also, historically, because of their implicit hygiene: They’re easy to clean, durable, and hand-me-downable, without the ick factor of dirty stuffed animals. Their forms can also be more intricate than wood, their colors more eye-catching, and their weight less likely to injure a tiny toe. Plastic is increasingly viewed by modern parents as a potential health risk, though, thanks to headlines about the dangers of microplastics. “Some children are breathing in up to 7,000 microplastic particles a day,” one terrifying study found.
As the world’s second-biggest toy company, Mattel didn’t get where it is today by ignoring the writing on the wall. “When our toys connect to what’s happening in the world, you see significant growth in the company,” Richard Dickson, Mattel’s chief operating officer, told The New Yorker recently. The comment was made in reference to the progressive professions of Barbie dolls (before she was a Renewable Energy Engineer, Barbie had stints as a Robotics Engineer, Music Producer, and Judge), but “what’s happening in the world” also encompasses global plastics treaties, heightened awareness about greenwashing, and the health concerns of regularly sticking plastic toys in your mouth for three or more years. Mattel has quietly worked to establish its environmental and sustainable credibility before the inevitable plastic toy backlash begins in earnest.
Heading off parental ire is simply good business. But if Mattel anticipated the social and cultural empowerment of women with an astronaut Barbie that predated the actual moon landing and a Dreamhouse before most single women could get a mortgage, it also seems to be making moves that precede a sea change in the toy industry — away from virgin fossil fuel products to ones that at least look good on the packaging.
It’s easy to take a cynical view of this. The best outcome, of course, would be the mass realization that American children probably don’t need 40 pounds of toys, although as any parent knows, that’s easier said than done. But the unfortunate truth of the anti-plastic movement is that getting rid of plastic entirely is a near-impossible goal at this juncture: Without a major innovation, the world simply doesn’t have the resources to replace everything that is plastic with an eco- and socially-friendly alternative, and the material is indispensable in many industries, like health care. Though there are all sorts of ideas circulating for a replacement — from algae to mushrooms to milk — the future of plastic is likely something we haven’t fathomed yet. The future of plastic toys, perhaps, is too. For the time being, anyway, that means Barbie is here to stay.
I don’t doubt, though, that when the tide one day begins to turn on using “recycled plastics” in toys, Mattel will be a step ahead, then, too. I can see it now: Biopolymer Designer Barbie will come with a white lab coat, plastic goggles, and a beaker filled with algae that snaps into her perfect, carbon-offset, sustainably upcycled hand.
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.