Over a span of nearly 70 years, United States water consumption has jumped 127 percent. Sadly, there is actually less clean water available worldwide. How major of a problem is this? A whopping 10 percent of the total population doesn't have access to clean drinking water. Thankfully, recent initiatives to "save" water and provide more people with better access are picking up in a big way. For example, Colgate recently entered a partnership with The Nature Conservancy, and is working their "Save Water" initiative in no small way.

First, try to recycle all the product packaging that the item comes in, from the cardboard box to the plastic sleeve. And finally, check out companies like Terracycle that offer recycling programs for things like mascara tubes and lotion bottles.  I am very proud that, on my business card, alongside my title of “Publisher.” It also says “Office Composter and I set up a full- scale recycling and zero waste program. Visitors dig it!

When we think about sustainability, we often think of preserving natural resources while trying to minimize our human impact on the environment, but it is also a term that can used to qualify the economic, environmental and social health of individuals and communities. In the U.S. and around the world, there is inequality, poverty, political unrest, lack of access to fresh food, clean water and education and other sustainable development issues. How do we improve the quality of life for people on the planet?

BUCKS COUNTY, PA (CBS) — St. Katharine Drexel Catholic School in Southampton, Bucks County made child’s play of a recycling challenge last school year, and now has a brand new playground made of recycled oral care products to show for it.

Packaging can earn a wide range of awards and that's all well and good, but there’s a globally known organization, the United Nations (New York City), that’s not usually associated with awards for packaging developments.

Recycling has become much more popular than it was decades ago, especially since most of us have become more conscientious of our limited resources. Therefore, recycling has become a staple in most people’s daily lives, making it a greater importance that businesses large and small make recycling a natural part of their daily operations.

Who in the world would ever invest in worm poop? In the very beginning it was pretty much just one person, Tom Szaky, who began by investing his time and energy in 2002 as a Princeton University freshman. Szaky had seen friends in his hometown of Montreal feed kitchen scraps to worms in a composting box and then put the worm poop into the soil of their indoor plants, which were thriving. Szaky thought that the worms could be put to some profitable use. The summer of his freshman year he contracted with the university’s food services department to compost food waste. In his sophomore year he borrowed $30,000 from his family to form TerraCycle.

I recently experienced some great customer service, via Twitter no less, and I thought it would be worth writing a quick blog post about.

Waste recycling pioneer TerraCycle, a brainchild of a young Canadian entrepreneur that has grown to become a global leader in the hard-to-recycle waste, has been named a winner of the United Nations (UN)'s Momentum for Change Lighthouse Activity award.

Efforts began this year to clean up those pesky cigarette butts that line the streets of San Francisco, especially the busier commercial corridors here in the Richmond District.