Sustainability & Environment

Short answer: most baby wipes can’t be composted. The conventional ones contain plastic fibers (polyester or polypropylene) that don’t break down. Some genuinely-compostable options exist but are a small fraction of the market. Here’s how to tell which is which and what to do with each.

Major catering companies handle thousands of events per year — corporate lunches, weddings, conferences, college campuses. The biggest of them have built composting programs that handle hundreds of tons of food waste annually. Here are six worth knowing about, and what they actually do.

Hybrid work and hot-desking changed what employees carry to the office. The pre-2020 setup of one assigned desk with a coffee mug and a personal water bottle doesn’t work when you’re sitting in a different seat every Tuesday. Here’s the modern reusable kit for hot-desking workers.

Most home composting guides tell you to keep dairy out of the pile. The reasoning isn’t that dairy can’t decompose — it can — but that the way it decomposes attracts pests and produces strong smells. Here’s the actual nuance, and what to do with the yogurt that just expired in the back of your…

The 2pm cross-functional meeting in the conference room generates a surprising amount of single-use waste — water bottles, disposable coffee cups, individual snack packaging, paper handouts. Most of it is unnecessary. Here’s a practical setup that runs the same meetings without the trash.

Setting up a restaurant composting program is more operationally complicated than people expect. The waste audit, hauler selection, bin layout, staff training, and contamination management each take real work. Here’s the playbook for restaurants ready to do it properly.

The mountain of plastic confetti generated by New Year’s Eve celebrations and other big events is one of those waste problems hiding in plain sight. Compostable alternatives exist and work — paper, dried petals, leaves, or biodegradable specialty confetti. Here’s how to switch.

Trench composting is the laziest legitimate composting method out there — and that’s meant as praise. You dig a hole in your garden, dump your kitchen scraps in, cover them with soil, and walk away. Six months later your soil is better. No pile to turn, no thermometer, no carbon-to-nitrogen ratio worries. Here’s how to…

Apartment dwellers, urban renters, condo residents — composting is harder for you, but it’s not impossible. The yard-less options range from simple (drop-off at a community garden) to involved (a worm bin under your kitchen sink). Here’s how to figure out which combination works for your situation.

Setting effective sustainability goals requires more than aspirational statements — it requires baseline measurement, appropriate frameworks, specific metrics, multi-year roadmaps, and continuous tracking. This guide walks foodservice operators and other businesses through the complete process from initial baseline assessment through mature multi-year sustainability program.

Greenwashing is when a company makes environmental claims that don’t match what’s actually happening. The patterns are recognizable once you know what to look for. Here’s the rundown of the common tactics and how to evaluate any sustainability claim with reasonable confidence.

Compostable foodware ends up in landfill in most US cities because most US cities don’t have industrial composting infrastructure. The reasons aren’t simple — it’s a chicken-and-egg problem involving capital costs, hauler economics, regulatory frameworks, and political will. Here’s what’s actually going on.