Huge corporations attract a lot of attention in the sustainability sphere. They can generate enormous quantities of waste, but also they have the purchasing leverage to effect real change -- and still turn a healthy profit.

As one of the biggest of the big, Amazon recently released its 2025 sustainability report (which includes Whole Foods Market) highlighting continued decreases in the share of shipments using plastic delivery packaging, largely by substituting paper mailers. But the company's volumes of single-use plastics were flat on the year in North America, which represents 92% of the e-commerce giant's consumption.

Over the past five years, Amazon has provided some sustainability data -- following pressure from NGOs and others -- but still has some ways to go before arriving at true transparency. Read more in my story here!

My household has a ton of drink cans that have been sitting outside for a loooong time from hoarding. A lot has collected dirt or even are filled with dirt. How clean would I have to get them to be recycled or to sell? I dont just want to throw them away cause I feel wasteful but I want to start cleaning the yard. Im in the NC area, biggest city closest to me is Winston Salem but its still 40min drive and my car is small so I couldn't take a ton in a trip. Thank you for any advise.

Hey everyone
I am a buyer of all type of battery scrap in bulk

If anyone is selling that material or had any reference feel free to reach me

PS. I’m also into battery manufacturing and into the business of fresh lithium cells of A Quality

Many organizations eventually retire large numbers of servers and hard drives as part of their IT asset lifecycle.

We've been comparing different physical destruction workflows and recently documented a continuous hard drive destruction system designed for both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDDs. It supports continuous operation, a 240 mm feed opening, approximate output pieces of 20 × 120 mm, and optional features such as DVR recording, counting and degausser integration.

I'm curious how organizations in different countries handle retired enterprise HDDs.

Do you typically use:

Physical shredding

Degaussing

Certified destruction services

Drive crushing

Another method?

I'd be interested in hearing about different workflows and best practices.

We've recently organized our hard drive destruction product line into a single selection guide, and it reminded me that different storage media often require completely different destruction methods.

For example:

• Integrated degaussing + shredding for server HDDs
• Dual-motor industrial shredders for high-volume destruction
• Desktop machines for HDDs and SSDs
• Compact units designed specifically for HDD platters

The guide compares motor power, supported media, and equipment configurations rather than presenting everything as one solution.

Out of curiosity:

How do organizations in your region typically handle end-of-life hard drives?

Do they prefer on-site destruction, off-site services, or physical shredding after degaussing?

Hey! I'm working on registering Hourglass Recycling as an official nonprofit — we collect glass to keep it out of landfills since most curbside programs don't take it anymore.

Right now I'm looking for people to host a collection box in their neighborhood — basically just a drop-off point people nearby can bring glass to. Good if you:

• Need volunteer/service hours for school
• Want real experience helping run a nonprofit
• Just care about recycling and want to help out

Down the line I'll also need help with things like scaling up operations and managing our data/tracking systems, so if that's more your speed, let me know too — always looking for people long-term, not just one-time help.

DM me or comment if you're interested and I'll get you set up.

Hello, hopefully this is the right place to ask this sort of question. I did search through the community posts first but didn't come across anything specifically helpful.

I have a ton of various glassware acquired or abandoned to me over the years and I've been trying to find out if recycling glassware is generally possible. I've come to realize just reading through some posts here that glass recycling is quite complex, and I'm aware that recycling in the U.S. is a whole mess in and of itself.

My main issue is I don't want to donate more glassware to places that receive truckloads full of people's old dishes and glasses regularly. It seems to me that donating is the end all be all for these types of items, and every thrift I visit is chock full of the same dishes for months at a time. Do people thrift dish/glassware as often as it's donated?

Donation is my last resort, and I do plan to check with my city and their recycling situation, but in general, is recycling glassware just not as doable as typical recycling goes?

Hey everyone,

I run a small-to-medium plastic recycling business. Currently, I source mixed plastic scrap from 4–5 local collection hubs (kabadiwalas) and an aggregator.

Right now, we are dealing with tons of heavily mixed plastics every month—a cocktail of PET, HDPE, LDPE, PVC, ABS, PP, Crystal/PS, and others.

Here’s my main bottleneck: We rely almost entirely on manual labor for segregation.

While my team does their best, manual sorting is fast becoming a massive headache. It's slow, prone to human error, hard to scale, and limits how deep we can clean and separate the materials to get top value.

I’m looking to upgrade our process and modernise our operations. I’d love to hear from other recyclers, engineers, or waste management pros on how you're solving this:

• What technology/machinery are you using? Are you using NIR (Near-Infrared) optical sorters, sink-float density tanks, electrostatic separators, or newer AI-driven vision systems?
• Entry-level vs. Advanced Tech: What offers the best ROI for a growing business that isn't ready for a multi-million-dollar automated plant yet? (e.g., portable NIR handheld scanners, basic density separation, line layouts?)
• Workflow & Process: How do you structure your sorting line? Do you do a rough manual pre-sort followed by machine sorting, or vice-versa?
• Best Practices for Hard-to-Separate Mixes: How are you reliably separating tricky mixes like ABS vs. PP vs. PS/Crystal?

Any advice, equipment recommendations, or lessons learned from your own facilities would be massively appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

does anyone know how to safely discard an old phone’s swollen battery? i know i shouldn’t just throw it in the bin and would like to know if there are specific places i should discard it at. Thanks!

My wife’s uncle just passed away and was living at his mother’s house who left there to live in a nursing home. So that house is 6 hours away from us and my wife and her dad went to go clear out stuff they were keeping before they put the house on the market and they got a quote from 1800 got junk to get rid of the rest of the stuff they didn’t take and they wanted $11,000!!! That is complete insanity. It’s a one floor maybe 1100 sq ft house. Has anyone had to go through something like this when a relative passes away and you need to throw away stuff that’s left over in the house? We don’t live near there so it’s not as simple as just putting certain furniture on Craigslist or on the side of the road (it’s a retirement community)

Most of us have old newspapers, cardboard, plastic bottles, metal, and e-waste lying around at home. Instead of letting it pile up, I booked a doorstep scrap pickup.

The process was simple:

📦 Scheduled a pickup

⚖️ Transparent weighing

💸 Instant payment

♻️ Waste recycled responsibly

It made me realize that waste isn't really waste—it's value waiting to be recovered.

Curious to know:

Do you sell your household scrap regularly?

What's the biggest challenge you've faced with scrap collection in your city?

Waste Out. Value In. 🌱

I live in a townhouse complex in Northern California with shared recycling bins. There are VERY clear parameters for what is/is not recyclable. Unfortunately, every week I take my clean recyclable items to the bins and find kitchen garbage bags filled with some recyclable items…and also garbage. So I open the bags and sort them properly into my garbage can or back into the recycling bin. The weekly bonus is that I acquire free kitchen garbage bags and have not needed to purchase them for years. Tonight’s additional bonus was that there randomly was—what seemed to me—to be a perfectly usable large bowl that I will wash and incorporate into my kitchen. Win/win imho

https://reddit.com/link/1uytug5/video/92u4tvm3wqdh1/player

i have like 30 various desktop pcs and laptops that fully work but i have NOTHING to do with them what should i do????

I feel like I see studies like this all the time but nothing really happens in the near future. Can someone smarter than me tell me if this has legs??

Flip over almost any plastic container and you will find the word 'recyclable' in small print. Most of us have been rinsing and sorting and dragging bins to the curb for years, trusting that word. Here is the thing that does not get printed next to it: less than 10 percent of all the plastic ever made has been recycled even once. Not 10 percent this year. Ten percent. Ever.

In a lot of markets, a container can legally carry that word if a recycling program exists somewhere, not necessarily one that serves your building, your city, or your country. The company printing the label knows this. There is no fine when the bottle ends up in a landfill anyway. The label stays clean. You did your part. The system never did its part.

And here is where it gets worse. Plastic that does not get recycled does not sit politely in a landfill. It fragments into microplastics, and microplastics travel. They have been found in human blood, in lungs, in breast milk. The New England Journal of Medicine reported in 2024 that microplastics have been found in human arterial plaque, linked to a significantly higher risk of heart attack and stroke. The plastic you sorted responsibly may already be inside people you love.

So what does a bottle that is actually built for that reality look like? GreenFrog Packaging makes BioBottles®, bottles where the difference is built into the bottle itself, not printed on the label. Where conventional plastic fragments into microplastics and persists in the environment for an estimated 400 to 500 years, BioBottles® convert into a substance that bacteria consume into biomass, water, and CO2. Independent lab testing shows BioBottles® break down roughly 90 times faster than ordinary plastic. And if your local recycling program actually works, BioBottles® flow through standard recycling streams too. Local programs may vary.

The claim on a BioBottles® container is short: 'No microplastics. Please recycle.' That is a promise about what the bottle does after you are done with it, which is honestly the only part that matters. Not the three seconds you spend reading the label at the shelf.

I wrote a longer piece on this if you want the full picture, including why the 'recyclable' word became a marketing cost instead of a standard, and what it means that consumers are starting to ask a different question entirely. Full article: https://blog.gogreenfrog.com/why-are-consumers-demanding-biobottles

Happy to dig deeper if anyone's curious.

When you sell recyclables, you deserve to see the exact weight and know you're being paid fairly—no guesswork, no hidden deductions.

At My Waste Matters, transparency comes first: every kilogram is visible, every payment is accountable.

Either put them in a recycling bin or straight up leave them outside the bin.