Like a child’s haul of candy on Halloween, the environmental news over the past few months has been a mixed bag. First the treats, starting with the news that 36 companies around the world have pledged to transition to 100% renewable energy, some as soon as 2020. Last month nine additional companies took the pledge, including Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Proctor & Gamble and Starbucks. The pledge, called RE100, was introduced by The Climate Group, an international non-profit, to highlight the investment that forward-looking companies are making in addressing climate change.

Just last week Royal Dutch Shell announced they were abandoning “for the foreseeable future” their plans to drill for oil in the Arctic. After lobbying relentlessly for permission to drill and spending more than $7 billion on the effort, Shell was forced to face some hard facts: the operation proved wildly expensive, the test wells provided marginal results, and the environmental movement made a compelling argument against what seemed increasingly like a desperate and ill-conceived effort.

There’s also progress on the plastic microbeads issue that I wrote about last year. Commonly added as an exfoliating or scrubbing ingredient in toothpastes, soaps, shampoos and body scrubs, these tiny plastic beads are accumulating in our waterways and harming fish and other wildlife. Toxic PCBs and chemicals such as flame retardants adhere to their surfaces and make their way into the food chain, according to the 5-Gyres Institute, which monitors plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. Despite fierce opposition from manufacturers, including the above-mentioned Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, the California legislature has voted to join six other states in banning the sale of personal care products containing plastic microbeads. California’s action is especially significant because the state represents approximately one-eighth of the total U.S. market for these products; that buying power means companies will be forced to eliminate microbeads altogether or risk losing a huge segment of their consumer base. New York’s proposed ban on microbeads was blocked from making it to the floor of the state Senate last year after winning unanimous approval in the Assembly. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has vowed to keep trying. In the meantime, we can do our best to avoid products containing polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and nylon.

And now the fuzzy lollipop in the treat bag: a study by researchers at Yale reveals that Americans are sending twice as much trash to landfills as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has previously estimated. The study used actual documented tonnage of material going to landfills, which the EPA began requiring in 2010, instead of the estimates reported indirectly to the EPA in earlier years. For 2012, the study concluded that Americans sent 289 million tons of waste to landfills, more than twice the EPA’s estimate, and the number rose in 2013. We are recycling significantly less than we thought we were—a dirty trick on ourselves and the next generation. I know we can do better.