Nearly 30 pounds of old crayons from all over the country land on Kim Martonosi’s doorstep every day. With the help of her kids, she sorts the worn and broken wax sticks by color, melts the bins of blue-greys and light greens and pinks down to a gooey swirl, and shapes the new creations into […]

What to recycle and what not to recycle ─ it’s just so confusing You’ve been living off the grid if you haven’t heard that many restaurants are not automatically giving customers plastic drinking straws. Those straws are the latest thing people want to keep out of landfills. And a landfill is where they would go, […]

They’re the 10 common things that muck up recycling for everybody. We asked professionals: A single lithium battery can burn down a recycling plant. Plastic bags clog machinery. Garden hoses and electric cords do the same. And all of the above contaminates the output of scrap paper and plastic, driving down what that scrap is worth. Bottom line? Take your recycling rejects to an official “drop-off” […]

Residents of Istanbul will now be able to use public transport for free in exchange of empty plastic bottles and cans, the mayor said Friday. Mevlut Uysal announced a new recycling project at a news conference in Istanbul where people will receive free credit on their passenger cards (Istanbul kart) in exchange of bottles and […]

Council officials will search through residents’ rubbish and shame lazy recyclers with a garish sticker on their wheelie bins, under a new WA government waste program. The stickers, of yellow, green or red hands pointing downwards, may be placed on the bins of people who sort waste into the wrong bins. Launched on Thursday, the […]

Households who fail to recycle properly could soon be hit with a fee by their local council in a bid to reduce landfill waste The plans, reported by BusinessWaste.co.uk, would see local authorities charge individuals whose households incorrectly put recyclables into general waste bins, causing a bigger strain on landfill sites. Despite huge increases in […]

Nothing in life is easy. It may seem like something is, but I believe that is just because we’ve been doing whatever it is for a long time. “It’s as easy as riding a bike,” is one of my favorites, for I distinctly remember it not being even the slightest bit easy when my dad […]

Around 90% of American households recycle these days, which is a great thing. There’s just one little thing that needs work. Well, one little thing in addition to getting that number up another ten points. Many of us are tossing things into our recycling bins that we shouldn’t. That’s a big problem because a few […]

Ah, the question we’ve all asked at least once while staring over the recycling bin: “Is [Product X] recyclable?” If only it were a yes-or-no question. The latest effort to define recyclability came in July 2018, when The Association of Plastic Recyclers released a set of four conditions that would determine if plastics are considered […]

In 2010, Pepsi set a goal: The company wanted to help raise the recycling rate for drink containers in the U.S. from around 38% to 50%. The company and PepsiCo Foundation spent $55 million on recycling efforts, from the Dream Machine–a kiosk that with rewards for recycled bottles–to support for the Closed Loop Fund, which […]