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• Recent News Stories

• Of Interest

Page Updated:
July 21, 2026

• • Here’s How Your Peanut Butter Jar —
  and Nearly Everything Else — Can Be Recycled

  There’s a Way to Fix the American Recycling System. It Involves AI-Powered Sensors and Massive Machinery

  

  July 21, 2026 -You may laugh. But the peanut butter jar — sticky, messy and, for the recycling inclined, guilt-inducing — represents what’s vexed and broken about our recycling system.

  Properly designed, our recycling system could work more like the one in Germany, where roughly two-thirds of municipal waste (and almost 90 percent of plastic “#1” PET bottles, like those carrying most peanut butter) is recycled. Instead, the patchwork of thousands of local programs in the United States ends up recycling about 24 percent of municipal waste (around a third if composting is included), according to the most recent federal estimates, from 2018.

• • Your Old Phones Are Probably Sitting in a Drawer

  Researchers Say That Is a Bigger Problem Than You Think
  
  {ZME SCIENCE}

  June 24, 2026 -Think about the last smartphone, tablet or smartwatch you stopped using. Odds are it is not in a recycling bin or a new owner’s hands; it is sitting in a drawer.

  From our survey of 4,000 American consumers, we found the single most common thing people did with a device they were finished with was nothing at all: 39% simply stored it. Recycling and reselling, outcomes better for the environment, each accounted for only about 1 in 10 devices. Throwing devices in the trash claimed another 9%.

• • To Complete Its Green Transition, Europe Should Mine Its Own Trash

  Lithium In Old Batteries. Cobalt In Discarded Electronics...

  

  June 2, 2026 -By 2050, recycling could fulfill half of Europe’s demand for critical raw materials, according to a new analysis. The final report of the European Union-funded Future Availability of Secondary Raw Materials (FutuRaM) project provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of what the authors call Europe’s “urban mine”—seven different waste streams that contain materials necessary for green energy, digital technology, and modern industry.

  Critical raw materials are a set of 42 elements identified by EU officials as key to the green transition but vulnerable to supply chain disruptions due to geopolitics. They include materials needed for batteries, electric vehicles, and solar and wind power infrastructure.

• • Why Banning the Recycling Logo is Progress
  In the Fight Against Plastic Waste

  A New California Law Will Ban Companies From Using the Symbol If Their Products Aren’t Commonly Recycled

  

  May 12, 2026 -Most of the plastic waste in California is about to lose the recycling symbol.

  The “chasing arrows” symbol, created in 1970 by a college student inspired by the burgeoning environmental movement, has been stamped indiscriminately on plastic bottles, clamshell takeout containers, chip bags and more for decades. The majority of the items emblazoned with the mark have been virtually impossible to recycle for most people.

• • You Paid to Have Old Clothes Recycled

  Here’s What That Really Means

  
  

  Apr. 26, 2026 -It’s springtime and a lot of us are refreshing our wardrobes, retiring old clothes and picking up new ones for the warmer weather. But can we get rid of the used stuff responsibly?

  While it’s possible, it’s not as easy as a growing number of companies would have you believe. Just drop the used clothes into a collection bin or a prepaid mailer, they say, and they’ll recycle your textiles, keeping them out of landfills.

• • How Seattle’s New Bike Lanes Make the Most of Used Car Parts

  Good Cycling Aided By Recycling
  
  
  

  Dec, 1, 2025 -Cyclists have long helped out their motoring cousins. The nation’s earliest paved roads, including in Seattle, were done by and for bicyclists, and Henry Ford’s first car, the Quadricycle, was basically a four-wheeled Frankenstein bike with a two-cylinder engine.

  Now cars are giving back, with a new type of bike lane barrier being tested in Seattle that’s made from recycled car tires. Each segment of the zipper-like barrier, which are a couple of feet long and 12 inches tall, is made from a full car’s worth of four recycled tires and weighs about 100 pounds.

• • UK Can Create 5,400 Jobs If It Stops Plastic Waste Exports

  Closure of Loophole Making It Cheaper to Export Rather Than Recycle Will Boost Circular Economy
  
  
  

  Nov, 25, 2025 -The UK could end its reliance on exporting plastic waste by 2030 to support the creation of 5,400 new jobs and take responsibility for the environmental impact of its waste, according to research.

  The report said up to 15 new recycling facilities could be built by the end of the decade, attracting more than £800m of private investment. The increase in capacity would help generate almost £900m of economic value every year, providing at least £100m in new tax revenues annually.

• • Exxon and California Spar in Dueling Lawsuits Over Plastics

  Exxon Accused the State’s Attorney General and Four Nonprofit Groups of Defamation After They Sued Over Recycling Claims
  
  
  
  

  Sept. 1, 2025 -Did California’s attorney general and several other groups defame Exxon Mobil when they sued the oil giant last year over its role in widespread plastic pollution?

  That was the question looming over a recent hearing in federal court in Beaumont, Texas, where Exxon Mobil has countersued Attorney General Rob Bonta of California and the nonprofit groups, accusing them of mounting a conspiracy to destroy its recycling business. Exxon’s aggressive move signaled a sharp escalation by the oil giant as it tries to ward off similar suits in the future

• • Treating Empty Bottles Like
  Lottery Tickets Could Transform Recycling

  When Offered a 1-in-10,000 Chance of Winning $1,000 Instead of a Guaranteed 10 Cent Refund, People Recycled 47% More Bottles
  
  
  
  

  July 8, 2025 -The chance at an unlikely but substantial monetary reward gets people more jazzed about recycling than a small but certain reward, according to a new study. The findings suggest that implementing “bottle lotteries” as part of deposit return schemes could increase recycling rates, at no extra cost to local governments.

  Two trillion beverage containers are produced every year, but only 34% of glass bottles, 40% of plastic bottles, and 70% of aluminum cans get recycled. Fifteen countries, 11 U.S. states, and 12 Canadian provinces have bottle-deposit refund systems in which a small sum (about 5 to 45 cents) added to the price of each beverage sold is refunded when people return the empty container for recycling.

• • New York City Has a Trash Problem

  A Packaging Reduction Bill Could Help
  
  

  June 14, 2025 -New York City knows it has a waste management problem. The average city household generated 1,899 pounds of trash in 2023. Only around 17 percent of the city’s curbside waste is recycled, despite efforts to change, such as the city’s 2020 plastic bag ban.

  Much of the city’s solid garbage and waste, if it is not incinerated, ends up in large landfills upstate, in neighboring states including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and further south in Virginia.

• • A Norwegian City Uses Vacuum Tubes to Whisk Waste Away

  Their Way of Saying Trash Sucks
  
  

  June 10, 2025 -The medieval heart of this 955-year-old city is home to one of the most high-tech waste management systems in the world.

  Beneath the cobblestones lies a network of tubes that sucks trash out of the city with the force of half a million household vacuum cleaners. Residents access the tubes by way of receptacles designated for garbage and recycling, each programmed to automatically release their contents when full.

• • Large-Scale Recycling of Modern Textiles is Now in Sight

  Fast Fashion Creates Mountains Of Polyester-Cotton Textile Waste—a New Recycling Method That Separates and Recycles the Two Materials Could Be What the Industry Needs.
  
  

  Feb. 13, 2025 -Look through your closet and you’d be hard-pressed to find a fabric that is not a blend of multiple fibers. The most common is a cotton-polyester blend: a soft comfortable material that is cheap to boot. Which is why it has become the darling of the fast fashion industry.

  The downside of this modern fashion is that blended fabrics are difficult to recycle. Over 99% of the over 113 million tons of textiles the world produces today ends up burned or landfilled.

• • Water You Can Become 'Tired' Of

  Researchers Devise a Unique Upcycling Use for Old Tires
  
  

  Nov. 7, 2024 - About 4 billion tires sit in landfills and junkyards around the world, according to the Tire Industry Project. From there, they leach many harmful chemicals and small microplastic pieces into the environment. Finding a way to recycle old tires is on many a scientist’s agenda.

  Now, researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada have turned old tires into a material that produces clean water by harnessing solar energy. Their new floating device can purify over 3.5 liters of water a day, for only 0.86 per liter. What’s more, it also generates a small amount of electricity, the team reports in the journal iScience

• • Recycling Rare Earth Materials
  From Wind Turbines and Electronics

  An Iowa Company is Doing Just That
  
  

  Oct. 28, 2024 - Engineers at Critical Materials Recycling break apart circuit boards, old transmissions and decommissioned wind turbines to extract and recycle rare earth materials.Most recycling facilities extract things like copper and aluminum from the same scraps, but few know how to break down the batteries, meaning those rare earth material components are often lost.Rare earth materials are a series of elements with properties like conduction or magnetism that make them essential to electronics. They’re also part of the 10%-15% of wind turbine materials that are not currently recycled.

• • Those Keurig Coffee Pods?

  They’re Not So Recyclable
  
  

  Sep. 10, 2024 -The SEC on Tuesday charged Keurig Dr Pepper, (KDP) the maker of popular K-Cup single-use coffee pods, with making inaccurate claims about the recyclability of the plastic pods.

  The fine, $1.5 million, is small for one of the world’s largest beverage companies. KDP has a market capitalization of more than $50 billion.

• • Most Plastic Bottles Can Only Be Recycled Once, But...

  Scientists Find A Way to Recycle Plastic Indefinitely
  
  

  Sep. 6, 2024 -Plastic bags, bottles, and containers may soon get a second life, thanks to a new chemical process developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. This innovation not only breaks down two of the most common plastics — polyethylene and polypropylene — but does so in a way that allows them to be transformed back into their original building blocks, ready for reuse in new plastic products.

• • Houston’s Plastic Waste

  Waiting More Than a Year for ‘Advanced’ Recycling...
  
  

  Aug. 24, 2024 -When the news crew showed up outside a waste-handling business that’s failed three fire safety inspections and has yet to gain state approval to store plastic, workers quickly closed a gate displaying a “no trespassing” sign.

  Click now for more.

• • Finding a Way to Recycle Clothes

  Scientists Might Have the Answer
  
  

  July 5, 2024 -Nearly all your clothes will wind up burned or in a landfill — but scientists are coming up with new ways to recycle those fabrics into new clothes or useful products.

  A critical step, though, will be figuring out how to handle blended fabrics that combine different materials, mainly cotton and polyester, into one piece of cloth. Once the fibers are blended together, it’s hard to separate one material from the other so that each can be recycled separately.

• • One Man’s Trash . . .

  Mining Landfills
  For Metals and Energy
  
  

  Sep. 1, 2018 -In a village 60 miles east of Brussels, a Belgian company is fighting to launch an experiment with the future of rubbish disposal. Group Machiels, a waste-management company, wants to excavate millions of tons of decades-old waste buried in one of Europe’s largest landfills and turn it into renewable energy and building materials.

• • How to Recycle Your Christmas Lights

  Wishing the Earth a
  Merry After Christmas
  
  

  Sep. 2, 2021, - It doesn't feel right to put Christmas lights in a trash can. Maybe they've stopped working, or maybe you're replacing incandescent lights with safer, more energy-efficient LEDs. In any case, after brightening so many holiday seasons over the years, it can seem a little cold and unceremonious to just throw them away.

  Fortunately, we now have several options for recycling old Christmas lights, helping our hard-working bulbs and diodes avoid the landfill while also sparing the environment from their toxic and non-biodegradable components.

• • Don’t Just Recycle - TerraCycle

  Closed-Loop Solutions

  TERRACYCLE - TerraCycle's goal is to focus on hard-to-recycle materials, developing circular solutions for otherwise linear systems. Today they recycle millions of pounds of such material on a weekly basis, diverting it from our landfills and incinerators.

  When looking at a new waste stream we first focus on moving it from a linear disposal system to a circular one, and then over time to a platform that is as closed loop as technically possible.

• • What We Can Recycle?

  13 Household Items You
  You Might Not Know You Could Recycle

  -The recycling basics are pretty easy: put paper, plastic, and glass in their appropriate containers so your local recycling center can process them correctly.

  But what do you with those odd (yet somehow everyday) household items filling up our drawers, closets, and garages? While we don’t want to throw them away in the trash, we’re not sure what to do with them. Thanks to this helpful little infographic, you can now take care of your toothbrushes, toilets, and tennis balls with ease!

  Click now for the Live Brighter blog.

• • Recycling For Kids (1)

  Having Children Take
  Respnsibility for a Clean Planet

  Fun Presentation and Game about Recycling - Natural Resource Facts about Paper and Aluminum and How To Recycle for Kids - Green Living Strategies Presented by Children of the Earth United - Environmental Education for Kids of all Ages, Teachers and Families.

• • Recycling For Kids (2)

  Children Learning About Recycling
  and Having Fun at the Same Time

  Nico is on a quest to help save the planet! He’s passionate about sharing his knowledge of recycling with everyone, so join Nico on his journey to reduce, reuse and recycle with tips and fun activities. Once you have the practices down, you can share your recycling knowledge with your family and friends too!

  
  Learn more about Nico by clicking now.
• • Check Out This Recycled "Green" House

  Modern Recycled Container House in South
  Africa Operates 100% Off Grid

  Mar. 10, 2017- Sustainable design has taken longer to get off the ground in South Africa largely due to expensive construction methods.

  When Johannesburg-based Architecture For A Change (A4AC) took on the challenge of building a modern green home in the country, they aimed to make the house not only environmentally friendly but also affordable. They cut costs by using upcycled shipping containers and other repurposed materials to build Cliff House, a lifted flying container house with an economical, energy-efficient design.

• • From Trash to Building Material

  What Is Poly Brick?

  It's a revolutionary building material made from 100% recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate Polymer. It is translucent, naturally insulated, and durable. The modular 3-D honeycomb self-interlocking structure makes it extremely strong without any chemical adhesives, while weights only 1/5 of the standard curtain wall systems.

• • It’s Not Just Trash Anymore

  One Person’s Trash is
  Another's Renewable Energy

  The practical benefits of organic products don't necessarily end when it goes down the drain or into the trash. There is quite a bit of useful energy left in the items we discard.

• • More About Plastic Waste

  Pollution
  (And What We Can Do About It)

  Plastic is literally at our fingertips all day long. Keyboards. framed computer monitor, mice. The amount of plastic we encounter daily doesn\’t end there. Chances are, you can relate. Plastic is an epidemic.

  But where does all this plastic go?

• • Plastic Bottles Become Shoes and More

  Timberland Transforms Recycled Plastic
  Bottles Into Shoes and Bags

  Mar. 3, 2017- For its latest collection, Timberland is turning to the bottle—the plastic bottle, that is. The outdoor-wear maker has teamed up with Thread, a Pittsburgh, Penn.-based manufacturer of sustainable fabrics, to transform plastic bottles from the streets and canals of Haiti into a dapper collection of footwear, bags, and T-shirts.

• • A State-by-State Guide to Landfill Bans

  What’s Banned in Landfills:
  A State-by-State Guide

  Earth91/ Nov. 27, 2017 - In some cases, it’s not about whether you should recycle an item, but instead whether you must.

  That’s because in the U.S., there are no federal laws regarding recycling. There wasn’t even a law regarding waste generation until the Solid Waste Disposal Act in 1965, which eventually became the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and set procedures for landfills and collection of household waste.

  This means any items banned from landfills are decided at the state (or, in some cases, city) level. Only one U.S. state, Montana, currently does not have any landfill bans.

• • Beer Waste Into Clean Water+

  Microbes Turn Beer Waste
  Into Clean Water, Energy

  November 1, 2015 -Cambrian Innovation is extracting clean water and energy from waste streams at two California breweries with a secret set of microbes.

• • Yes, Pizza Boxes Can Be Recycled After All

  An We Thought
  That We Couldn't

  SIERRA Magazine, July 28, 2020 -When Eric Nelson looks back on his years as a waste reduction manager at the University of Kansas, what stands out are the pizza boxes. "One year, there was a first-week event for all the clubs and organizations," he told me on a phone call from Lawrence. "I think Pizza Hut sent over like 500 medium one-topping pizzas." That was great for the hungry college students, not so much for Nelson, who spent the evening schlepping 500 pizza boxes to the dumpster "because we couldn't recycle pizza boxes."

  It's advice from the dawn of curbside recycling: Don't put your pizza box in the blue bin because the greasy cardboard and cheese scraps make it unrecyclable. For years, conscientious recyclers followed this advice, and tens of billions of pizza boxes were sent to landfills and incinerators. The intentions were good, but it turns out that the advice wasn't.

  New research reveals that, so long as you remove all the pizza, the cardboard container that held your Veggie Supreme can be readily recycled into something new.

• • An New Role for Discarded Plastics

  Netherlands: Plastic Roads to
  Be Made From Recycled Ocean Waste

  Sept 16, 2016 - After the floating farm, Rotterdam will be the first city in the world that plans to build roads using plastic waste rescued from the oceans. These are polymer blocks, reminiscent of Lego pieces with which we played as a kid, and presented as the ecological alternative to stop pouring concrete.

• • 3D Printing Our Way Out of Waste

  Is 3D Printing the
  Answer to Plastic Waste?

  January 29, 2015,  -You’ve probably heard a lot about 3D printing in the last few years. "Printing" is sort of a misnomer. Also referred to as "additive manufacturing," it’s the process of creating an object from a digital file by layering filaments to form the finished product. It’s been hyped as a revolution that will make conventional manufacturing obsolete, allowing people to create the products and tools they need in their own homes.

• • Canon™ Cartridge Recycling

  Canon Environmental Technologies, Inc.

  In 1990, Canon introduced a cartridge recycling program for all-in-one laser beam printer toner cartridges through its Clean Earth Campaign Program. The goal of the program is to achieve zero landfill waste by reusing parts, recycling materials, and employing energy recovery. Canon’s all-in-one cartridges have components that can be recycled and reused by Canon.

• • Electronics Recycling

  Recycling Electronic Waste
  Responsibly: Excuses Dwindle

  Maybe you replaced old electronics over the holidays or you’re just sweeping out the old and ushering in the New Year. Either way, you’ll need to do something with your old devices. For everyone’s sake, including Mother Nature’s, try to get rid of your old technology the right way.

  Click now to read how
  and watch the video.

• • Light From Discarded Batteries

  Discarded Laptop Batteries Keep the Lights On

  Millions of discarded batteries have more than enough life to power home lighting for one year, researchers in India say.

  Many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in poor countries, researchers at IBM say.

• • The LandfillHarmonic

  There's No Such Thing As Waste

  Click now to watch this entertaining video and see what we mean.

• • Self-Destructing Plastics & Recycling Awareness

  Self-Destructing Plastics and Recycling?

  CleanTecnica , Aug. 15, 2018  - Evian says it will produce all its plastic bottles from 100% recycled plastic by 2025. Starbucks made headlines this summer with its pledge to eliminate plastic straws by 2020. British supermarket Morrisons said it would bring back “traditional” brown paper bags for loose fruit and vegetables, which means that 150 million small plastic bags will be removed from circulation. But is any of this foot-stomping about plastics really enough? Isn’t it time for to ask the world’s scientists to research and develop polymers or plastics with built-in self-destruct mechanisms?

  Interested? Click now for whole story.

• • The Last Straw

  Make the Last Straw You Got From
  a Restaurant Your Last One

  A disposable plastic straw is used on average for a whopping 20 minutes. It’s longer than the four-second lifespan of the plastic stirrer you may use to swizzle your coffee or tea, but 20 minutes is still just a tiny fraction of the several hundred years it could spend in a landfill.

  One straw may seem insignificant, but consider this: someone who uses one straw a day for the next decade will toss 3,650 pieces of plastic into the landfill—and there’s a chance that plastic may get lost along the way and end up in the ocean.

• • Using Bugs to Clean Up Waste

  Dong Energy Funds
  First Power Plant Using
  Bugs to Clean Up Waste

  July 1, 2016- Dong Energy A/S’s REnescience plant in northern England will use enzyme technology to “wash”; organic matter from unsorted waste, creating a slurry that can be turned into a gas for use in power generation or motor fuels, said their VP of commercial bioenergy at Novozymes.

• • CO2 As a Refrigerant

  A Good Use for CO2

  Volkswagen, Daimler, Audi, BMW and Porsche have announced plans to develop CO2 technology as a more climate-friendly refrigerant for air conditioning systems.

  VW says CO2 as a refrigerant — also known as R744 — has lower greenhouse gas effects than conventional refrigerants, with a GWP (Global Warming Potential) value of 1, or 99.3 percent below the European Union-specified GWP limit of 150.