Tag Archives: sustainability

In 1919, an entrepreneur named Nils Halvorsen Norheim set up an automated factory for making flatbreads near Barkåker in Norway, the first of its kind in the country. A century on, his great-great-granddaughter found herself peering into an oven in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, doing some baking of her …

Lego has built an empire out of plastic. It was always thus. The bricks weren’t originally made from wood, or metal, or some other material. Ever since the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, bought Denmark’s first plastic-injection molding machine in 1946, Lego pieces have been derived from oil, a fossil …

The world goes through hundreds of billions of single-use coffee cups every year—and most aren’t recycled. So major coffee chains’ switch to paper cups is a good step, right? Not quite. A recently published study shows that paper cups can be just as toxic as conventional plastic ones if they …

The way we build our cities turns them into unbearable heat-trapping greenhouses — a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. As global temperatures rise, some cities could become unliveable unless we learn how to cool them sustainably. Mashable’s How to Change a City series dedicates three of its …

Deep-cleaning my house tends to leave me with a lot of plastic bags, paper, and plastic containers to throw away. It got me wondering how I could make my cleaning routines less wasteful. Scientists are developing new ways to recycle plastic, but it's not an Earth-friendly material, and cleaning supplies …