Reflections on NY Climate Week 2026
At Climate Week 2025, actionable solutions were the scarce resource. So naturally, this year, New Earth Ventures and Atlantic Packaging showed up in the rooms that mattered, alongside the peers we most respect – other funds, family offices, corporates, and conservation organizations – to offer concrete steps to address the global plastic waste crisis.
The sense that we’re all in this together was real, and the collaborative spirit was one of the best parts of the week. But we also noticed something that has stayed with us. In many of those rooms, we felt like the minority in one specific way: we were among the few offering solutions.
Much of the week was spent describing the problem
The scale of the challenge, the urgency, and the gap between where we are and where we need to be are all well documented, and there is real value in naming them. Climate Week can work a bit like group therapy: it’s a relief to be among people who care as much as you do. But naming a problem isn’t solving it, and the hours spent on diagnosis are hours not spent on deployment.
But the conversation is shifting to what makes sense for industry too, and that’s good
Underneath the diagnosis, we heard something encouraging: more people are asking what actually works for business. At NEV, we invest in the future of packaging, supply chain and manufacturing, and we are backed by Atlantic Packaging, the largest family-owned packaging company in North America. With 80 years of perspective, we believe that the inventions that will move the needle are not climate solutions for the sake of climate alone, adopted at the expense of the business. Technologies that will thrive are business solutions that also happen to solve the problem: lower cost, better performance, stronger supply chains, new revenue, reduced risk.
Our first-ever NY Climate Week event was packed, and proved we can offer concrete solutions with our business partners .
On September 22, we co-hosted a panel with Minderoo Foundation, How We End Packaging Waste This Decade: The Role of Industry. Wes Carter (Atlantic Packaging), Anne Bedarf (Colgate-Palmolive), Myra Foster (Sealed Air), and Dave Ford (Circle) represent the broader industry itself: the people who make, fill, sell, and recover packaging every day. They didn’t spend their time on the size of the problem. They focused on cross-industry collaborations that can be acted on now, and on what it takes to make them work commercially. The full room told us there is real appetite for this kind of conversation.
We want to help change the conversation to actionable next steps by next year
It would be easy to leave Climate Week energized and move on. We’d like to do something different: be more deliberate about bringing solutions into rooms that are still working toward them. That means showing up with specifics, making introductions that lead to pilots, and being honest about what makes the economics work. It also means welcoming more business leaders into this conversation by meeting them where they are.
If we were the minority offering solutions this year, we’d like to help change that.
The real work starts after the week ends
We’re committed to engaging with our partners and friends from NYCW 2026 to radically innovate in packaging and the supply chain. If you’re building something, backing something, or running a business that could be part of the solution, we’d like to hear from you.
Thank you to Minderoo, our panelists, and everyone who included us in vital conversations.