Sweden has some of the best recycling rates on the planet. Over 95% of glass gets recycled there, and 85% of newspapers, 70% of metal and 65% of plastic (half of that is burned). And Sweden doesn't stop - this month it adds soft plastic packaging to...

In its article on the "third generation" of bike sharing programs, the New York Times profiled Barcelona's Bicing in particular as demonstrating the success of bike sharing in getting people out of their cars and all over their cities.

The first generation of bike sharing started...

All of us in the green movement who woke up Wednesday to the flood of hopeful feeling cascading through the country (and the world) in the wake of Barack Obama's historic win, are waking up Thursday to another kind of feeling. A feeling between, "Where do we go...

If you are one of the few U.S. citizens to have not yet noticed all that media exhorting you to get out and vote, well, now's the time, and it is running out. If like great numbers of us, you've already punched in, mailed in or clicked...

It's Halloween, so lots of green-loving sites (and one very Big Box store, Best Buy) are taking on the so-called power vampires - those appliances in our home that suck just a little bit of power all the time unless they are completely unplugged.

The little bits...

Mortgages to help buyers take a bit of extra loan money to make energy efficiency improvements to their homes have been around since the Carter Administration. Yet these "green" mortgages have never really taken off - and aren't even a blip in the over $10 trillion mortgage market,...

Hooray! None other than Time magazine is talking about the importance of green collar jobs to a rebuild of the economy, discussing some of the ideas author Van Jones outlines in his new book The Green-Collar Economy.

As Jones sees it, well-paid jobs such as retrofitting...

Anybody whose 401K didn't have a sinking spell last week is a very lucky person. The rest of us took our lumps and got over it. Well, maybe not all of us.

It turns out that one of San Diego's fast-growing businesses, called Sarah's Smash Shack, is...

The idea of greening cities is not new, but it may be approaching a renaissance.

In the 1970s, the oil crisis unleashed many things, including a visionary idea of cities becoming solar-powered, neighborhood-centric, green-roofed oases (instead of polluted, congested, soul-deadening wastelands as they were sometimes depicted).

Activist and...

Amid the negative economic forecasts - housing prices continuing to fall for a while, credit markets taking their time to stabilize - there are also positive trends. Jobs may be scarce, but a massive embrace of clean energy and efficiency may be a good way to stimulate entirely...

There is a certain topic that deserves, but probably will fail to get much play in the presidential and vice-presidential debates. That is how to achieve growth that is good, and at the same time, green.

Economy - GDP and growth - tend to trump environmental and social...

It's hard to focus on anything else but elections and the state of the economy, yet sadly the media mainstream and the candidates seem to speak in the same old cliches. Bailing out the bankers for billions and giving the bill over to the taxpayers. Remember that $1,200...

Famed prognosticator Faith Popcorn says we've already been living in a culture of recession for the last few months - and finding "creative, innovative and even desperate ways to manage [our] lives in new ways." According to Faith, though it's a painful process, we'll probably all emerge...

In his forthcoming book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing The World, newcritics.com writer Tom Watson says super-wired Americans can wield extraordinary influence through their net-based social networks.

And the rapid global growth in the use of mobile telephony for sending short text messages (also known as...

In the U.S. we've looked to places like Portland, Seattle and even Austin, Texas for the crunchy-granola thinking on sustainability. But now, nearly a year-and-a-half after Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched New York's sustainability push called PlaNYC 2030, the Big Apple has a shot at becoming the nexus...

Following the daily news, and especially in the realm of climate and environment, can be and frequently is a big bummer. Sarah Palin's bear-draped office sofa can make you either want to laugh or weep, but her views on polar bears do only the latter. And trying...

Wal-Mart. Can you remember a time when that name, and all it conjures, didn't even exist outside the teeny town of Bentonville?

Now Wal-Mart has an environmental footprint equal to small nations. Wishing Wal-Mart would disappear won't make it so, and probably wouldn't change the simple fact that...

Here's a simple question: How many of us ever leave the house these days empty-handed? The answer is practically no one. Even little kids these days are decked out with gear - back packs and hockey sticks, ballet slippers and Blackberrys. And celebrities - with someone else doing...

Once again, the Danes come out on top in the 2008 World Values Survey's happiness statistics. How is it that this chilly, windy nation of five-and-a-half million souls has climbed to the top again and again during the survey's 27-year history?

The survey's creator, University of Michigan political...

Not surprisingly, our world is awash in disposable plastic cutlery. Google Answers' best estimates put annual production at about 40 billion pieces in the USA alone. Seem outrageous? Just tally your own consumption, or that of your office, in a two-week span and then calculate your personal...