Northampton, a town of 29,000 people in Western Massachusetts, is home to a Coca-Cola plant that churns out several of Coke’s fruit juice lines. And that plant is also churning out wastewater that is becoming to expensive for Northampton’s wastewater treatment facility to process. Rising costs and the possibility of tensions increasing between a city…

Two years ago I predicted this would be the Brazilian Decade, and so far Brazil’s stunning success has proven me correct. It is not just about the large international events like the World Cup and Olympics that are on the calendar in 2014 and 2016. Brazil has become a creditor nation; once a net food…

Companies and the office managers that keep them humming have strived for paperless offices for several years. The reality, however, is that old habits die hard for several reasons: many of us just do not like to read data on monitors, endless meetings require charts and proposals, you cannot highlight a screen, and not everyone…

Plastic has long made a huge difference in the medical industry with a staring role in the prevention of the spread of infectious diseases. With the benefits, of course, come massive amounts of waste, from single use syringes to inhalers to dialysis tubing. Meanwhile plastic is integral to the entire medical industry’s supply chain, and…

With global demand for electronics surging – especially for tablet computers like Apple’s iPad – these gadgets’ sophistication and long battery life have created a huge market for rare earth minerals, often associated with global conflicts. Elements like copper and even rarer tungsten, neodymium, dysprosium, coltan, and terbium are tagged with the “conflict” label because…

There is often talk about how technology is a steppingstone to a cleaner economy. Nevertheless, computers, wireless devices, and communications systems all have an impact on global resources. For large companies, energy efficiency initiatives have involved far more than turning off the lights at the end of the workday or to shut off computer monitors…

After months of speculation, the coveted iPhone 4 is now available through Verizon. Market observers believe that Verizon could sell as many as 25 million of these gadgets in 2011 alone, as almost one-third of the company’s subscribers indicate that they will definitely switch to the iPhone this year.

As municipalities ponder how they can stretch tight budgets as well as do their part to address growing concern over climate change risks, one English town’s council has come up with a creative, perhaps peculiar, solution.

It was not that long ago when T. Boone Pickens ranked up there on television air time with the Snuggie and the Ped Egg. His commercials, or infomercials, promised that the wind corridor in the central United States, paired with natural gas, would wean the U.S. off of fossil fuel imports and push the country…

Home gardening has surged in the past couple of years. Plenty of reasons account for the partial shift from factory farm to backyard farm: concern over nutrition, environmental issues, and economic worries.