Very little of plastic we recycle is actually removed from the waste stream.

So many things we buy come packaged in plastic containers or wrappers that are meant to be used once, thrown away and forgotten ― but they don’t break down and can linger in the environment long after we’re gone. It’s tempting to think that we can recycle this problem away, that if we’re more diligent about placing discarded bottles and bags into the curbside bin, we’ll somehow make up for all the trash overflowing landfills, choking waterways and killing marine life.

What happens after you flush it?

Recycling is primarily an environmental issue, right? Wrong. In this modern age of disposability and rapid turn-over, recycling is no longer just about saving the planet, it's about feeding ever-growing economic demand. As Antony Funnell reports, the sheer enormity of the global recycling industry is challenging our understanding of terms like 'waste' and 'rubbish'.

Did Kim Jong-Un recycle your old laptop? That's the question hovering over last week’s news that Chinese authorities had recently broken up an e-waste smuggling ring responsible for delivering 72,000 metric tons of prohibited junk via North Korea to China’s shores in 2013.

Russell Leon works under the cover of darkness as part of a small crew sworn to secrecy. He is a bayakou, a manual laborer who empties the cesspools that collect deep bogs of human waste under Haiti’s back-yard latrines. In a country with no working sewers and roads that are often too ramshackle for tanker trucks, he is the sanitation infrastructure, charged with climbing down into concrete or earthen holes and scooping out the ordure with a plastic bucket.

The region—which makes up a large chunk of central Romania—is rich in gold, and a bunch of mining companies are keen to lock down their share of the action.

Coffee pods are really popular right now. Sales of single-serve coffee—the kind first popularized in the US by Keurig, and widely known as K-cups—have more than tripled since 2011, MarketWatch reported in November. As of a year ago, 13% of Americans drank a coffee made in a single-cup brewer each day, according to a survey by the National Coffee Association. K-Cups alone now account for more than a quarter of the US market for ground coffee.

We, as a nation, are amassing huge collections of dildos, pocket pussies, and butt plugs. But as sex toys are becoming more common, there is still no easy way to recycle them. Our increasing comfort with item-assisted sexual pleasure isn’t keeping up with our increasing desire to live sustainably. Sex toys are often made with a variety of specialized materials to make them soft and/or non-porous (which means they won’t trap bodily fluids).

Plastic trash has always been a huge environmental problem, especially when the ocean is involved. But few states have seen the impact of maritime pollution quite like Hawaii. Now, Hawaii has become the first state to officially implement a ban on plastic bags at checkout counters. "Being a marine state, perhaps, we are exposed more directly to the impacts of plastic pollution and the damage it does to our environment," Sierra Club of Hawaii director Robert Harris, said in 2012.

James Dyson invented the best vacuum cleaners. Now, with the M.V. Recyclone barge, he's applying the same ideas to sucking up plastic pollution from the world's rivers. We talked to him about his plans.

ts wares splayed in dazzlingly pink neat rows, this is the remote forest depot where thousands of phone booths go to die. Some 3,000 pink and yellow boxes are stored at the secluded site near Berlin - and they are being sold to the public for as little as £250 each.

Something could be missing from your next electric bill: a fee that electric customers have been paying for 31 years to fund a federal nuclear waste site that doesn't exist. The Energy Department will stop charging the fee by court order Friday. It's only a small percentage of most customers' bills, but adds up to $750 million a year. The fund now holds $37 billion.

A highly radioactive substance, emitting in some places radiation 100 times the permitted amount, has been discovered in the canton of Bern, Swiss media reporte

The Industrial Revolution changed modern life in an untold number of ways. Unfortunately, not all of them were positive, including the large-scale production of pollution. While it may not be instantly noticeable in some areas, that doesn’t change the fact that our world has been irreparably altered by all of the toxic substances that have now made it into our air, soil, and groundwater.

What refuse in India's streets reveals about America’s hidden trash problem

Will.i.Am introduces the EKOCYCLE Cube 3D printer. The EKOCYCLE Cube is not just another tool for making, it is a revolutionary tool for RE-making, and encourages and helps us to change the way we think about recycling by transforming post-consumer waste into new and beautiful objects.

Since 2007, one of America's top exports to China has been... trash. Yes, trash. That includes everything from scrap metal and paper to cardboard and crumpled soda cans. The United States sold $10.8 billion worth of metal and paper scrap to China in 2011.

So much of the food we eat these days is encased in plastic. And behind it is a whole lot of research and innovation. We dive into some of the materials that keep food fresh and portable.

The five major oceanic gyres make up about a quarter of the Earth’s surface. Underneath the apparent chaos of the world’s weather, the gyres turn like clockworks, driven by the sun and the Earth’s rotation. A bit of flotsam entering the current off the coast of Brazil might make it all the way to West Africa and then bob on back to where it started in about three years.