
As Just Transition Alliance (JTA) prepares for 2025, our team is celebrating this year’s progress and preparing to help allies worldwide win the social, economic, and environmental justice struggles that define the coming era.
We share this update with deep gratitude for your support, your partnership, and your shared commitment to a just transition. You made our essential progress possible in 2024.
This year, we continued all of the thoughtful, behind-the-scenes work that helps our allies win. That includes our education and training program, which trained one hundred fifty US-based labor and environmental justice leaders to play more active, effective roles in the just transition movement. Our Training for Organizers helped local Labor-EJ partnerships develop a shared agenda informed by the needs of workers, communities, and the environment. And our Just Markets training helped participants spot the connections between their local economies, their health, and the environment, equipping organizers to demand changes that remake the role of dollar stores in their communities.
Based on feedback from the farmworkers, women, immigrant justice advocates, steelworkers, and other labor leaders who participated, we’re preparing to exponentially increase these trainings in 2025.

José Bravo with Líderes Campesinas Ramona Felix, Paula Placencia, and Claudia Quezada. Photo credit: Lara Aumann
Also this year, JTA advanced two far-reaching projects that helped our allies see and pursue their shared interests, building power in global arenas to support inspiring, measurable progress toward a just transition.
It’s game-changing news, and we’re proud to share it with you.
Uniting Workers and Communities for a Just Transition
A just transition creates a humane path for all. It’s led by frontline workers, Indigenous Peoples, and fenceline communities who’ve endured the worst harm of the extractive, exploitative economy. It flows across borders. It creates opportunities for allies to strategize, disagree constructively, build trust, and commit to shared ideals. It builds and focuses broad, grassroots power.
The beating heart of JTA’s work is the behind-the-scenes efforts that manifest as solidarity in action. Our evolving partnerships with two allies tell the story of this year’s efforts to build grassroots power.
First, a little context: we’ve been organizing and preparing with our allies to stand for worker, environmental, and economic justice in two global decision-making arenas. One is next year’s UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP 30) – the pivotal thirtieth annual meeting of world leaders who gather to shape and negotiate global responses to climate change. Also far-reaching is the UN’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution – where leaders from around the world convene to shape the world’s response to the plastic pollution crisis. Because both are high-stakes opportunities (and threats) for our movement, we focused this year on strengthening relationships and strategy to demand a just transition in these arenas in 2024 and 2025.
Our Partnership with International Alliance of Waste Pickers
The International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP) is a global union federation established to protect the economic and physical health of waste pickers. It represents over 460,000 workers in thirty-four countries, including in the Global South.
IAWP members play essential roles in carbon emissions reduction, materials management, and local zero waste economies. As managers of the reuse and repurpose streams, they hold valuable expertise that has informed JTA’s work on plastics and strengthened our positions on the global plastics treaty.

Waste pickers and allies stand together at INC-5. Photo credit: Taylor Cass Talbott
In 2024, IAWP and JTA invested deeply in our partnership, building trust, a thoughtful shared agenda, and collective demands that have already helped us partner effectively on global stages.
With this preparation, IAWP, JTA, and the Indigenous Environmental Network arrived at the fifth UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC 5) with a common agenda that equipped us to readily expose each false solution that corporate profiteers proposed at the forum. We also hosted an official UN side event to channel our partners’ momentum for the incorporation of just transition priorities in the Global Plastics Treaty. These discussions packed the house with national delegates, Indigenous Peoples, waste pickers, labor federations, and frontline and fenceline organizations.
As the next INC meeting in 2025 approaches, we’re strengthening our solidarity with allies, fortifying the existing just transition provisions in the draft agreement, and closing the loopholes that industry continues to open in order to inject false solutions into the global plastics treaty.
Our Partnership with Labor Network for Sustainability
Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) is a US-based advocate for a worker-friendly transition to a climate-safe economy. LNS, JTA, and our partners are part of a broader just transition cohort that is preparing to take advantage of strategic opportunities at COP 30.

From left: Joshua Dedmond (LNS), Nona Chai (JTA), Lara Aumann (JTA), Ananda Lee Tan (JTA), José Bravo (JTA), Liz Ratzloff (LNS) at the IEN PME.
This year, JTA and LNS agreed to shared vision, processes, strategies, and priorities. To keep us aligned and to build momentum for our agenda at the global summits, we’ve planned a series of five intergenerational, multi-racial, gender-diverse forums next year for organizers on the frontlines of pollution, poverty and climate chaos.
We are prepared to enter COP 30 aligned on a dozen priorities that will shape a just transition. For example, we’re building strategies to shift narratives from “jobs vs the environment” to “communities and workers united for a just transition.”
Supporting Community-Based Zero Waste Victories
Workers and EJ communities are uniting to transform our economy, and JTA is proud to bring together these natural allies so that people and ecosystems thrive.
“Zero waste” is a vision for the far-reaching changes our labor and environmental justice allies are leading. It’s defined by a simple goal – to address the root problem of our dangerously broken waste stream system by recovering and reusing as much material as possible when we make and use things.
JTA allies Valley Improvement Projects (VIP) and East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ) are implementing an ambitious shift to a zero waste model in California’s Central Valley. One of several successes of this comprehensive effort is the closure of a municipal solid waste incinerator that burned household trash and emitted toxic dioxins.
Because the facility provided local jobs, JTA brought VIP and the Teamsters together in early 2024 to explore their shared interest in the closure of the facility and the adoption of a zero waste plan (which will create more jobs than the incinerator). In a victory for workers, community members, and the zero waste movement, the incinerator facility was finally shuttered in December 2024! JTA was proud to support VIP and the Teamsters in this visionary alliance.

José Bravo and waste worker leaders meeting in the Philippines. Photo credit: Ananda Lee Tan
This summer, JTA gathered in the Philippines with waste workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. It was a valuable opportunity to build relationships with global waste workers and the communities most harmed by the waste and plastic pollution crisis. We also participated in the Philippine National Waste Worker Alliance’s (PNWWA) launch of a national legislative campaign for waste worker justice and zero waste economies built on just transition principles. We were awed and humbled.
We also attended the Zero Waste Academy in the Philippines. A cutting-edge program committed to workers, community, and the environment, the Academy offers another exemplary model for a just transition. Our visit gave us a glimpse of new possibilities for door-to-door waste collection, recycling, and composting programs with the capacity to collect data on the range of disposable plastics in the local waste stream and on the companies most responsible for the plastic pollution crisis. Their work is an inspiring, powerful reminder that we can have jobs for the environment.
Two Visions. One Worth Following.
Corporate profiteers insist that we must accept their pollution, their exploitation, and their false solutions to the social and environmental crises they’ve caused. This is our only choice, they say, because we can’t transform our economy.
But the monumental victories of our allies show us that we can redefine possibility. Their visionary progress deepens and enriches every aspect of the Just Transition Alliance’s work. Zero waste is reality, not fantasy. A just transition will be also.
As we recreate the world we need, let’s look to the best, brightest visions for people and the planet. They’re here within our grasp.
The JTA team can’t wait to continue our work for a just transition in 2025.