A new breed of cowboy is changing how ranching is being done in the American West, and managing the land in benevolent and environmentally sensitive ways because they think it will help them survive – and make money.
UK-based designer Yu-Chang Chou hopes to help stem the flow of single-use packages - like Amazon.com boxes - through a new design that can be reused 200 times. He calls it the Repack bag. Once the package is emptied, it can be folded and tossed in a nearby mailbox to return to the post office for someone else to buy and use.
Intel's new $1 billion chip factory in Vietnam, about 10 miles from downtown Ho Chi Minh City, embraces environmental and sustainability measures far beyond those required by Vietnam's laws. Intel didn't have to go to these lengths, but the motivation for these measures is simple, said the complex's general manager: "It turns out, what's good for the environment is also good for business."
Africa produces 70% of the world's chocolate and 60% of the world's vanilla crop, yet the continent makes just 1% of finished chocolate bars, which leaves very little profit for the essential farming communities. Now, an innovative company started by former Peace Corps volunteers is disrupting that market spiral to make the world's best chocolate bars -- and make a difference -- in Madagascar.
The definition of what it means to be sustainable in the 21st century needs to be broadened to include a skyscraper's ability to sustain the human spirit, says a design director at Gensler. Imagine energy efficient towers whose walls might slide open, allowing office workers to step outside, into the sky, for a breath of fresh air. Towers where seasonal gardens grow vertically and where friends might meet by a kumquat tree on the 68th floor for a cup of coffee on a beautiful spring day.
A young start-up called Mango Materials has won a Green Challenge prize of $630,000 for its plan to use bacteria to turn the most abundant organic compound on earth, methane, into a biodegradable material that would be a low cost substitute for plastic.
Since 2003, the United States Postal Service has reduced its energy use by 26 percent. Energy efficiency improvements at the USPS's 33,000 buildings have saved enough energy to meet the power needs of 90,000 households for a year. In 2011, alone, the USPS saved $22 million with its 1 trillion BTU reduction in energy use.
The small city of Kalundborg, 64 miles west of Copenhagen, was the first municipality to have engineered a symbiotic relationship between all its industries so that the excess heat, water, waste and other resources leftover become feedstock for other industries and farms, creating a closed loop system.
In a milestone Saturday for sustainable aviation, China became the latest nation to transport passengers on a commercial airline flight powered by used cooking oil.
3M announced this week a new sourcing policy that ensures all the virgin wood fiber going into its paper-based products and packaging comes from sources that protect forests and respect human rights.
Keurig coffee fans might love the convenience of the single-cup system, but the amount of plastic being thrown into landfills was worrying the rest of us. Now the coffee-selling giant has announced a recyclable coffee pod that may ease customers' guilt.
More and more, we're seeing brilliant uses for household items once discarded as trash. You will never look at coffee grounds the same way.