They say one man's trash is another man's treasure and for Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, that couldn't be more true.
Seamstresses in South Africa turn recycled materials into rugby balls just in time for the World Cup.
Majora Carter recounts her remarkable journey from penniless student to green pioneer.
Two years ago this month, Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke dropped a bomb on the retailing world by announcing that the company would spearhead an audacious effort to create a "sustainability index" that would reassure the environmental and social impact of every product sold in its stores. Though the move was generally praised by environmentalists, Wal-Mart had not suddenly turned green -- it turns out a vast amount of money is to be made by reducing energy and waste up and down the supply chain. As the world's largest company, Wal-Mart had the clout to enforce its implied threat, later made explicit by Duke's lieutenants: Treat the planet well and get prime access to its 200 million customers each week; pollute and despoil, and you will be shunned.
Cradling your heap of plastic, you approach the bins, hastily inspecting each item for the number molded on the bottom.
It's like an Easter egg hunt for grownups.
A Wisconsin mother spends six years creating a prom dress made out of Starburst wrappers for her daughter. KARE reports.
In February, we learned that Ziploc and RecycleBank have joined forces for a recycling program for Ziploc bags. I knew that Ziploc and other sandwich bags were recyclable, but I didn't know how easy it was.
Soledad O'Brien reports on where things stand on the eve of the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.
Mayor Melissa Blake's favorite spot in this oil sands boomtown used to be an island at the convergence of two rivers.
The classic "Seinfeld" episode "The Bottle Deposit" will be 15 years old in May. In honor of Kramer and Newman's ill-fated trip to Michigan in a mail truck full of bottles and cans they hoped to redeem for dimes, let's take a look at why Michigan's bottle deposit is so high.
When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes take us to a campground called Paradise Park. It was a little camp in the California foothills: a woodsy reserve dotted with old oak trees sloping down to a well-shaded river.
Nairobi slum residents burn trash for cooking and hot water. CNN's Isha Sesay reports.
On the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, mountains of trash are piling up along the dusty streets and footpaths of Africa's largest slum.
Long before I was dispelling eco-advice, I worked as a dog walker while in graduate school, and one of my charges was a Great Dane -- so I know how big a task cleaning up after your pooch can be. Pooches produce an average of 274 pounds of waste a year. (I'm guessing that amount is doubled for bigger dogs like Great Danes.)
Being environmentally friendly is the de facto mindset of most people today. Many cities provide recycling bins for their residents. Gym goers carry around reusable water bottles instead of disposable plastic ones. Businesses proudly tell their customers that their shopping bags are made from 100 percent recycled material. As a whole, we've all gone green.
In the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, some of the community's poorest women are taking part in project that is spreading the true meaning of the holiday season. In 2001, an Anglican missionary from Australia started the Kibera Paper Card Project to help disadvantaged women in the sprawling Kibera slum.
Women living in a Kenyan slum are making and selling greeting cards, CNN's David McKenzie reports.
We've all had to get rid of spent lithium-ion batteries from laptops and cell phones so it's natural to worry about the ones in electric cars.
'Tis the season to be jolly, and unfortunately, to toss also out a lot of trash.
Trevyn McGowan of "Source Design" is on a mission to bring South African design to the rest of the world.
Reusable grocery bags. Online media. Concentrated laundry detergent in small packages. All are good for the environment because they reduce waste, but they're a threat to the business of collecting and disposing of garbage.
Starbucks may soon serve your morning coffee in a used paper cup that has been recycled into a new paper cup, as the coffee chain aims to ensure that 100% of its cups are reusable or recyclable by 2015.
Cobblestone streets, sidewalk cafes and public art have helped Quebec City earn the moniker, "Paris without the jetlag." The thriving urban agriculture scene, local boutiques and restaurants, electric buses and green hotels should inspire a new nickname: "Europe without the carbon footprint."
Daylight savings rolls around again this weekend.
An electronic waste recycling program, designed to provide inmates in federal prisons with jobs and skills, posed a serious health threat to inmates and prison staff for several years, a new Justice Department report says.
Military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to use waste methods that expose troops to potentially toxic emissions without fully understanding the effects, according to a new government audit obtained by CNN.
Cell phones have become one of the most ubiquitous hallmarks of life in the 21st century, but they aren't necessarily good for the environment.
The California State Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill that would ban the use of plastic bags by retailers in the state, including grocery stores, convenience stores and drugstores. This year's Senate session ends Tuesday, so it's the last opportunity for the Senate to pass the bill.
A few years ago, the folks at the Good News Project were looking for another fundraiser that would bring them some needed cash.
I'm one of those people who won't throw out electronics just because they're outdated.
Oil dumped at a landfill in Harrison County, Mississippi, is drawing controversy. WLOX's Dave Elliott reports.
When Mississippi attorney Tim Holleman was approached by furious community officials in Gulfport to stop BP and its contractor from dumping tar balls and oil-stained byproducts into a local landfill, he sent out an e-mail asking if there were alternatives to deal with the waste.
CNN's Randi Kaye reports BP is dumping spill waste at a Mississippi landfill against a town's wishes.
What happens to all the tar balls, oily sand and vegetation, and soiled gloves and suits from the thousands of temporary BP workers who've been working to clean up beaches along the Gulf of Mexico?
Archaeologists unearth an 18th century ship in lower Manhattan. CNN's Mary Snow goes to the scene of the discovery.
The hull of a ship likely made in the 1700s was discovered at the World Trade Center site Tuesday. Archaeologists say that it probably was sunk there in the effort to add land to Manhattan in the early 19th century.
A field in the heart of the English countryside has been transformed into a sea of shimmering light thanks to one designer and 600,000 unwanted CDs.
In the wake of Thursday's iPhone 4 launch frenzy lies as trail of unloved, no-longer-needed iPhones cast off by owners trading up for the shiny new model.
Shoppers in Austin, Texas may wind up losing the right to use plastic at the checkout line -- and that doesn't mean credit cards.
Whether they're waiting in line Thursday for a new iPhone 4 or grabbing other recent smartphone offerings such as the Droid Incredible or Microsoft's Kin, plenty of folks will be saying goodbye to their old phones in coming days.
Question: My office serves catered lunches every day, and the company provides plastic plates and cutlery. I've been eating the lunches for years, and yesterday, when I walked out of the conference room where the food is kept, I noticed the overflowing garbage can in the corner stuffed to the gills with plasticware.
Traveling around the world with children is difficult enough, but attempting it without using motorized transport is even more of a challenge.
Believe it or not, climate change and "Peak Oil" are not the biggest problems facing the 21st century.
Question: I'm relatively new to the green product scene and have a question that might seem eco-elementary but has never really been explained to me. What's the difference between pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled content?
CNN's Stephanie Elam shows us a young designer who turns old duds into eco-friendly fashion.
Spending 21 months redesigning a shoebox might not seem like the most effective use of a person's time, let alone a multinational company.
A critical look at what we consume, where it comes from and where it goes after we are done with it.
Mark Ashley watches with a weary eye whenever flight attendants walk up and down the aisles of a plane to collect the trash on his flights.
The champions at the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver can stand on the podium proud of their achievements, but the eco-minded among them can be extra proud that their medals are made with traces of precious metals recovered from e-waste.
If you ask someone if they want something green for Christmas, they're likely to ask for tens and twenties. But some of us wouldn't mind getting gifts that are good for the planet as well as our lifestyles.
At a Best Buy store in Roseville, Minn., the traffic in electronics travels a two-way street. Out the door go flat-screen TVs, netbooks, and iPhones. In comes junk -- and plenty of it: TVs that can't decode digital signals, outmoded desktop computers, even the occasional eight-track tape player or ham radio.
A Morris Plains, New Jersey, woman got an early birthday present on Monday when local sanitation workers found her wedding and engagement rings after sifting through 10 tons of garbage.
This primer reminds you of what you can and can't recycle -- and why.
Even in this enlightened age of recycling, a majority of all bottles and cans end up in landfills. More than 200 billion beverage containers are sold each year in the U.S., says the nonprofit Container Recycling Institute, but fewer than 75 billion are recycled. That isn't just bad for the environment -- it's money left on the table.
Jude Ndambuki's Help Kenya Project sends discarded computers to Kenyan students, who plant trees in exchange.
Jude Ndambuki teaches high school chemistry, but when he's not in class, you might find him Dumpster diving for discarded computers.
CNN's Anna Coren visits a recycling plant outside of Tokyo to see what happens to your old mobile phone.
Clouds of black smoke from burning plastic hang over the sites of Nigeria's vast dumps, as tiny figures pick their way through slicks of oily water, past cracked PC monitors and television screens.
Black employees at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, waste transfer plant were harassed, humiliated and discriminated against by their supervisor for decades, says an attorney representing two workers who filed a complaint against the city.
Danny Seo is a green lifestyle expert who champions green consumerism.
One FSB 100 company has grown by grabbing a giant share of something almost nobody else wants to touch -- garbage. Not just any trash, but gooey oil-refinery sludge, contaminated Superfund mystery material and radioactive protective clothing. American Ecology specializes in processing (and in some cases recycling) some of the nastiest hazardous waste there is, including low-level radioactive waste and PCBs.
Weeping. Wailing. The fetal position. Any of those would have been a fitting response to the collapse of equities -- and virtually every other asset class -- in 2008 and early 2009. For many, the S&P 500 index's most recent crater on March 9 took on near-talismanic significance. You could almost hear the pleading: Please let that be the bottom. Please let that be the bottom. For now, the spring rally has held, with a euphoric 40% jump in the S&P from its March low to June 1.
It was supposed to be a pleasant surprise, but turned into the shock of a lifetime.
A woman in Israel unknowingly throws away her mom's mattress filled with nearly a million dollars.
The world's oceans are full of trash, causing "tremendous" negative impacts on coastal life and ecology, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
The next time you go to throw away your old mobile phone, Gert-Jan van Breugel hopes you bury it in a garden instead of tossing it in a garbage can.
Last year, downtown Atlanta lost a convention to another Southern city because the visiting group perceived the other city as "greener" than Atlanta. The loss propelled Holly Elmore into action.
CNN photojournalist William Walker takes us the city that many hope will one day have zero waste.
In the lodging world, green has gone mainstream. Once chided for being wasteful, the big hotel chains are now constantly trying to one-up each other with smart eco-design upgrades and stringent water and energy conservation policies.
The truck driver kept his hand on the horn, but resorted to shifting into first gear and used the full weight of his container truck to force his way through the over-crowded and narrow market street.
Environmentalists warn of a mounting environmental disaster from e-waste sent to Africa, CNN's Christian Purefoy reports
CNN's Richard Quest previews the environment special Business Traveller show.
In April, CNN Business Traveller examines the impact of the global economic downturn on the travel industry's efforts to go green.
In early 2008, Sander Coovert was feeling pretty good about his business, Absolute Tile and Stone. The previous year had ended with sales up 27%, to $2.8 million, at the St. Louis company, which cuts tile and slabs of marble and granite and installs them in residential kitchens and bathrooms. That year Coovert, 40, saw his largest profit ever. But by the end of 2008, as the housing bubble burst and the recession hit, revenue dropped to $2.1 million and the company lost money.
In a sprawling former suitcase factory in New Jersey, a camera crew is filming entrepreneur Tom Szaky and his company, TerraCycle, for a new reality TV show. Ten of the recycling firm's 46 employees sit around a table awaiting Szaky's next challenge. "So, guys," says Szaky, reaching into the pocket of his corduroy jacket and tossing a used toothbrush onto the table. "What are we going to do with this?"
Robert Swan's life reads like a boy's own adventure tale with a modern eco-twist.
When Lynn Heinisch and her neighbors in Atlanta's Lake Claire neighborhood take their recycling to the curb for pickup each Thursday, they cross their fingers and hope for the best.
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|