Honolulu has a huge trash problem, so City Councilman Donovan Dela Cruz introduced a bill that would require building permit applicants to submit plans that would prove reuse or recycling of 60% of any demolished and dismantled materials.

Each day about 600 trucks from Amsterdam and 18 other cities drive up a huge ramp to the waste-to-fuel power plant, which lies in the western dockyards of this city of 750,000. The two incineration plants, built in 1993 and 2007, turn about 1.4 million tons of garbage into electricity.

To those Americans who dismiss Europe as a backward, leftist, and socialist land, I say, back off—the business leaders I met and to whom I listened at the GRI Conference would run circles around my business school professors and most managers across the pond! To those Europeans who slam America as a consumer-frenzied, overindulged society, I say, not so fast: based on the crowds I saw in the shopping areas and the lines I saw in the stores, I think both sides of the Atlantic know how to spend a buck (or Euro).

This is tonight on PBS: thanks to a GGP reader who kindly passed it on! I saw Garbage Dreams, a documentary at Turning the Tide, a great conference put on by the Institute at Golden Gate, the think tank for the National Parks Conservancy. It is about the Zabaleen people of Cairo, they collect and [...]

How We Live, the searing portrait of how some of Armenia’s poorest are living on society’s margins, is open one more evening, Sunday, April 18, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. Sara Anjargolian’s photos portray the searing, cruel struggles that several Armenian families confront daily.  The exhibit’s curator is Narineh Mirzaeian, a Los Angeles-based designer and [...]

It’s been a month since our trip to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a trip that still has me exuding enthusiasm for that region of the country. Our second week was especially unique, as we spent it in Mangue Seco, a tiny remote peninsula a two hours’ drive and a boat ride away from Salvador. Because [...]