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Days before this week's Alaska Forum on the Environment, the EPA said it was sending half of the people who had planned to attend. The nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, President Trump's pick to head the EPA, is still pending confirmation.

EPA Halves Staff Attending Environmental Conference In Alaska

The Trump administration's transition officials ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to cut its presence at the event. The team cited travel costs in explaining the abrupt move.

Chew On This For Earth Day: How Our Diets Impact The Planet

The foods we choose to put on our plates — or toss away – could have more of an ecological impact than many of us realize.

A man wearing a protective mask looks at piled-up trash in New York City on April 24. Cities are struggling with collection as the volume of residential garbage surges during the stay-at-home era.

'Hard, Dirty Job': Cities Struggle To Clear Garbage Glut In Stay-At-Home World

As people stay at home, they are putting out more trash, from pizza boxes to cardboard delivery boxes. That's putting a big strain on residential garbage collectors.

One man's sewage is another man's drinking water. As wastewater comes through this pipe, straw-like filters get rid of any contaminants wider than a human hair. That's just one step of the purification process.

Here, Drink A Nice Glass Of Sparkling Clear Wastewater

Silicon Valley will soon open up a high-tech water recycling facility, capable of turning treated sewage into crystal clean water. In theory, it should be better than what comes out of kitchen sinks today. The purification is tough, but the hardest challenge is convincing people to drink it, even as freshwater becomes more scarce.

How Fossil Fuels Helped A Chemist Launch The Plastic Industry

A century ago, people relied on nature to make basic things: toothbrushes were made of silver, combs were made of ivory, and clothes were made of cotton. In a lot of ways, life as we know it today, is possible because of plastic. We can now afford phones, computers and medical devices in part because of one chemist's discovery a century ago. But his descendants have some regrets.

The rendering industry likes to call itself the world's oldest recycling system. Nearly 100 percent of processed pigs will eventually get used — as meat and in uses as varied as medicine and pet food.

Everything But The Squeal: How The Hog Industry Cuts Food Waste

Large-scale hog operations get a bad environmental rap. But when it comes to processing the animals, the industry is a model of efficiency, making use of every last bit in sometimes surprising ways.

Farmer Kevin Sullivan put solar panels on a portion of his property in Suffield, Conn.

For New England Farmers Looking To Make Ends Meet, The Sun Provides A Harvest

Farmers in New England are renting parts of their land to solar energy developers, allowing the farmers to earn some much-needed extra money. But not everyone is happy about the trend.

Experts say pledges at COP26 won't be enough to stop extreme climate change

On Tuesday, countries at the global climate summit COP26 pledged to cut back on heat-trapping methane emissions and do more to fight deforestation.

A Wisconsin-based surfer's quest to create a more eco-friendly board

The Great Lakes don't readily evoke images of surfing and surfboard-making, but a surfer in Wisconsin is on an eco-friendly mission to change that.

The recipe for tomato feta pasta that briefly took over TikTok comprises of oven-roasted feta, tomatoes and garlic, which is mixed with pasta and topped with parsley.

'Garbage trends' clog the internet — and they may be here to stay

Sea shanties, the word "cheugy," feta pasta and "RushTok" were all fleeting internet obsessions over the past year. But what do such "garbage trends" say about our cultural condition?

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