Grid Magazine

Grid Magazine Grid: Toward a Sustainable Philadelphia

🚮 In June 2026, Philadelphia’s current solid waste and recycling contracts are set to end, and a coalition of policymake...
12/02/2025

🚮 In June 2026, Philadelphia’s current solid waste and recycling contracts are set to end, and a coalition of policymakers, industry professionals and advocates hope to use the contract expiration as a lever to fundamentally shift the City’s waste management practices toward circular approaches that include reuse, recycling, repair and composting — while addressing environmental justice issues.

Critics say that the City of Philadelphia has prioritized disposal over alternative waste management strategies such as reuse, recycling and composting for decades. As the City’s first recycling coordinator, Maurice Sampson, likes to say, “The motto of the Sanitation Department is ‘throw trash and look good.’”

Since the pandemic, Philly’s recycling rate has hovered around 12%, refusing to budge even with Mayor Parker’s establishment of an Office of Clean and Green, which purports to exist to tackle the city’s pervasive litter issue and catapult Philly to the “safest, cleanest and greenest big city in the nation.” Advocates like Shari Hersh of Trash Academy question how Philadelphia can be the greenest big city while diverting 12% of its waste and sending 40% to be burned at an incinerator just down the river in Chester, Delaware County.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/12/01/a-bill-could-force-philly-to-stop-burning-trash-and-recycle-more/

✍️ Samantha Wittchen
📸 Photo courtesy of Durrell Hospedale/Philadelphia City Council Flickr

Happy December! It’s time to round out the year — our brand new Education Issue is here 📚About the Issue••••••••••••••••...
12/01/2025

Happy December! It’s time to round out the year — our brand new Education Issue is here 📚

About the Issue
••••••••••••••••
In 2022, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education adopted new environmental literacy and sustainability standards. This is surely important — that all students in Pennsylvania learn about how to protect the environment and live sustainably — but how do we get them to take that education to heart?

All the nature lovers out there know there is more to understanding the world than naming its parts and knowing how they all work together. There is the smell and feel of it all too, plus the sights and sounds that lift the topics off the page or screen and into the real world. There is the sense of wonder at it all, and that wonder can be a powerful motivator to learn and understand.

In this issue, we take a look at an environmental center devoted to building more than just knowledge. We also talk to a teacher about how to connect kids to the natural world, even when they’ve only got the ordinary urban landscape to work with.

We also explore schools themselves as sites of environmental action, both as polluted spaces in need of remediation and as hubs for action to generate renewable energy.

We hope you come away from this issue ready to help learners of all ages connect with their world, and to make sure their world takes care of them.

➡️ Read the full Education Issue now at gridphilly.com!

📸 Cover photo by Chris Baker Evens

11/30/2025

In just a single day in October, 17 birds were killed or stunned by buildings in Center City. Even though that’s a large number, it’s a sharp decline from the same day five years ago, when more than 400 dead birds were found in Center City. It’s a difference that reflects the efforts of Bird Safe Philly over the last five years to prevent migratory bird deaths in the city.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

11/29/2025

In September 2024, Philadelphians saw their monthly water bills jump by about 12%, the second largest rate hike that year of any large water system in the country. This year, rates went up by nearly another 10%, now pushing a typical monthly bill close to $100.

According to Robert Ballenger, an attorney who serves as public advocate before the city’s independent Water Rate Board, we may not have seen anything yet.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

☕ As the holiday season approaches, college campus cafés are preparing for the influx of students ordering coffee and pa...
11/27/2025

☕ As the holiday season approaches, college campus cafés are preparing for the influx of students ordering coffee and pastries to power them through final exams. But once the semester officially ends, what happens to the product that isn’t sold?

That’s what Saxbys cafés across nine states tackled last academic year as they participated in the Inventory Wind-Down Challenge, the second iteration of the Food Saver Challenge held by the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN).

The first challenge, won by Crust Bakery, was a competition between various food businesses in Philadelphia. Caterers, grocery stores, bakeries and cafés competed to reduce their organic waste or divert it from landfills through strategies like composting, donating and even creating new recipes using food scraps.

For the second challenge, things worked differently: Instead of having different businesses compete, SBN partnered with Saxbys, and the coffee chain had its café locations compete against each other to earn the most points for waste reduction practices. That friendly competition was a great fit for Saxbys, says Rebecca Nichols Franqui, program and membership manager at SBN, since it operates on an experiential learning model, in which most cafés are located on college campuses and are run fully by students.

“They got really invested. They cared deeply and really had fun with it,” says Nichols Franqui. “Lots of them really did embrace the topic and the cause in general of preventing food waste.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/11/01/saxbys-coffee-reduces-food-and-coffee-waste-on-college-campuses-during-food-saver-challenge/

✍️ Julia Lowe
📸 Photo courtesy of Saxbys

🍫 Ebo Nunoo’s grandfather was part of a generations-long line of cocoa farmers in rural Ghana. In search of more opportu...
11/25/2025

🍫 Ebo Nunoo’s grandfather was part of a generations-long line of cocoa farmers in rural Ghana. In search of more opportunity, he moved his family to Accra, the nation’s capital, and became a shoemaker. Decades later, his grandson Ebo left Accra for the United States to attend college and find his own opportunities. It’s unlikely that any family member would have predicted that the profession Nunoo would eventually pursue would involve Ghanaian cocoa.

Ebo Nunoo’s path to becoming a chocolatier was anything but direct. Unable to afford completing his college degree in Illinois, Nunoo and his older brother went East looking for work, eventually settling in Philadelphia. Nunoo married and built a corporate career in client relations, brokerage services and retirement portfolio management. The birth of their daughter in 2018 led Nunoo and his wife to examine their hectic two-career lifestyle. “I realized I wanted to start living the life that I wanted our daughter to see me in. For me, that life meant to slow down, to be present, to be with her and with my family.”

His first step was enrolling in the entrepreneurship program at Temple University to complete his undergraduate degree. The idea for Xoxoa came to him as a byproduct of a business competition he won at the Fox School of Business. He then began a multiyear immersion in all things chocolate.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/11/01/xoxoa-chocolate-brings-entrepreneur-back-to-his-roots/

✍️ Marilyn Anthony
📸 Tracie Van Auken

🎛️ Modern and boxy, with a silver exterior and sharp, clean edges, it’s hard to believe that Kitchen Korners in Mayfair ...
11/24/2025

🎛️ Modern and boxy, with a silver exterior and sharp, clean edges, it’s hard to believe that Kitchen Korners in Mayfair used to be a run-of-the-mill Northeast Philadelphia garage. What’s inside is just as surprising: a state-of-the-art kitchen facility, where local entrepreneurs, caterers, food packagers and other like-minded culinary purveyors can create their products safely and cleanly.

An independently owned, shared-use, multipurpose food contractor business, Kitchen Korners is the brainchild of Alonzo Coates, a local businessman looking to transform the Philly culinary industry by helping fledgling food entrepreneurs launch their businesses.

“We know how difficult a process this can be and we want to offer people a better way to be successful,” he says.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/11/01/kitchen-korners-incubates-philly-culinary-businesses/

✍️ Daniel Sean Kaye
📸 Jared Gruenwald

NextFab Holiday Gift Guide: Philly Holiday Jawns•••Shop items that capture the heart, humor, and iconic sights of Philly...
11/21/2025

NextFab Holiday Gift Guide: Philly Holiday Jawns
•••
Shop items that capture the heart, humor, and iconic sights of Philly — perfect for decking your halls or gifting a piece of home.

Featuring:
Girl Holding a Pen
Jawnaments
G + RIZZ
Fishtown Signs

➡️ View the full 2025 NextFab Holiday Gift Guide at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/11/01/nextfab-holiday-gift-guide-2025/

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