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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

What happens after you flush it?