November 1st, 2012

Save those candy bags and wrappers, they’re recyclable.

Terracycle has partnered with M&M’s candies to help stem the flow of candy wrapper trash into landfills.

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April 26th, 2012

College students looking for ways to make the world more sustainable found ways to use manure, coal byproducts, rice hulls and even spinach to save energy or create needed products from waste materials.

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November 18th, 2011

Galaxies learned to “go green” early in the history of the universe, continuously recycling immense volumes of hydrogen gas and heavy elements to build successive generations of stars stretching over billions of years, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute

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September 29th, 2010

Recycling in earnest can make a person crazy. Maybe you’ve got curbside pick up for plastic bottles and newspapers. But what about batteries, cell phones, CFL light bulbs, printer ink cartridges, cardboard boxes and old computers? These harder-to-recycle items often comprise the clutter in our garages and mud rooms as they wait patiently for someone to haul them to the appropriate place.
Lowe’s stores are trying to make that task a little easier. The home improvement chain announced today that it has installed 1,700 recycling centers in nearly 1,700 stores across the U.S. that will collect and recycle rechargeable batteries, cell phones, unbroken CFLs and plastic shopping bags.

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April 15th, 2010

Dell and Goodwill Industries International have announced they will extend their Reconnect program, which lets consumers drop off any brand of computers or computer accessories for no-cost recycling, to Canada. Starting this week in Southwestern Quebec and on May 1 in London, Ontario, consumers may drop off used computers for no-cost recycling at Renaissance, a Goodwill affiliate, and Goodwill Great Lakes. The expansion adds to more than 1,900 Reconnect locations throughout the U.S.

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April 6th, 2010

From Green right Now Reports

Whole Foods Market is starting a wine cork recycling program to make it easy for wine enthusiasts to properly dispose of corks. The company said it will accept natural wine corks at all of its 292 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Austin-based Whole Foods Market is partnering with Cork ReHarvest to help collect and recycle the corks.

There are about 13 billion natural corks produced each year. The Mediterranean oak forests that supply cork support one of the world’s highest levels of forest biodiversity and the second-highest number of plant species in the world. Whole foods said that no trees are cut down during cork extraction — instead, bark is hand-harvested every 9 to 12 years.

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March 8th, 2010

From Green Right Now Reports

Garbage Dreams is the paradoxical title of an upcoming PBS documentary on Egypt’s Zaballeen, or in English, ‘garbage people’. The Zaballeen collect the trash in Cairo. They are born into the job and live on the city’s outskirts, within the large garbage village composed of Cairo’s waste.

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February 5th, 2010

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Recycling doesn’t mean settling for something less. It can mean adding value for less. But the end product might even be better than ever. (Hence, the term upcycling.)

But whether a first iteration or an item’s reincarnation is superior hardly matters when the end result makes the owner happy and the object serves its purpose well, maybe even rises above, to a higher calling.

Those who reclaim items for a second or third life are often driven by this reward, the thrill of taking something bound for the trash and rescuing it, restoring it and assigning it to a better life. We’re thinking of artists who meld old garden tools into garden sculpture or carpenters who assemble barn planks into gleaming table tops.

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February 4th, 2010

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

eBay, the giant online garage sale facilitator, and RecycleBank, the company that figured out how to get Americans recycling by offering them consumer rewards, have announced a partnership in which each company will offer incentives to the other companies clients.

Kind of like a swap-meet in the middle of a flea market.

A little history: eBay, the online marketplace that began in 1995, began thinking green in 2007 when a group of employees formed eBay’s Green Team community. The Green Team tries to inspire eBay’s 90 million users to “buy, sell & think green every day” by offering pertinent eco-friendly tips and sustainable advice.

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January 13th, 2010

From Green Right Now Reports

If seeing your discarded household goods, furniture, etc., headed out to the nearest landfill doesn’t make you feel so good about yourself, U-Haul offers an alternative solution.

Don’t want that old couch? A U-Haul customer or employee might. The U-Haul Reuse Program is a national initiative that provides a redistribution network for gently used household items, furniture, sporting equipment and clothing — all kinds of items that might otherwise come to a less environmentally-friendly end.

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November 16th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

If you haven’t seen it, please take a look at our story about America Recycles Day. Find out just how much energy we can save by recycling, a no-brainer if ever there was one.

Last year, a Harris poll found that 91 percent of Americans reported that they recycled. But that figure seemed really high, given the low recycling rates in some cities, like Houston, Dallas, Detroit and Indianapolis. Those were some of the slackers revealed in a study of municipal recycling in 2008 that showed major US cities varied wildly in the amount of recyclables they collected, from San Francisco’s near 70 percent to Houston’s under 3 percent.

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November 12th, 2009

From Green Right Now Reports

Houston-based Continental Airlines today announced a major increase in the amount of waste being recovered in its recycling programs following the company’s decision to put special emphasis on recycling projects.

As the United States prepares to observe “America Recycles Day” on Sunday, Continental said that so far in 2009, it has collected more than 4 million pounds of mixed recyclables from terminal operations at its Houston Bush Intercontinental, New York/Newark Liberty and Cleveland Hopkins hubs – an 800 percent year-over-year increase. Mixed recyclables include newspapers, cans, and plastic bottles contributed by co-workers and customers via designated “EcoSkies” recycling bins in hub airport terminals.

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