Chain dollar stores are inundating America’s communities. In both small towns and urban neighborhoods, they are edging out locally owned businesses, freezing out entrepreneurs, and shifting profits ...

Click on image to download the fact sheet. As lawmakers have grown increasingly serious about addressing Amazon’s harms, Amazon has sought to portray itself as beneficial to independent small ...

New York is facing an affordability crisis rooted in a deeper problem: too many essential systems are controlled by distant corporations. This has left residents with high grocery and energy costs, ...

Across coastal New England and NYC, 37 organizations received grants of $10,000 each to support new or existing composting projects. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) is proud to announce ...

ILSR has conducted a sweeping investigation that reveals Amazon has quietly become a major force in how cities, counties, and school districts purchase basic supplies — and that its tightening grip is ...

To illuminate how consolidation shapes food access, ILSR created an interactive map that shows food deserts alongside the location of different types of grocery stores — independent, small chains, ...

Millions of Americans live in communities that are both low-income and lacking a grocery store, also known as food deserts. Not having a place to buy fresh food nearby imposes a daily hardship and ...

Netanel Hutman undertook a review of the recent literature on single-stream recycling collection systems for the Waste to Wealth Initiative at ILSR. The following are conclusion from this review.

Big Waste dominates every aspect of solid waste and recycling practice and policy. The top four consolidated companies earn $30 billion of the $70 billion economic sector. Big Waste companies own or ...

For all of its reach, Amazon, the company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1995 as an online bookstore, is still remarkably invisible. It makes it easy not to notice how powerful and wide-ranging it has ...

AI technology and large language models are growing in popularity. Also growing is the technology’s detrimental effect on the environment. Each query into ChatGPT, to use one example, requires ...

Rooftop solar saved not just panel owners, but all California customers $2.3 billion on utility bills in 2024, according to a blockbuster new report. The study found that the rooftop panels saved ...