Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

In the mountain towns of Telluride and Mountain Village, locals are going beyond banning plastic bags and are thinking bigger about how to reduce single-use plastic. The Telluride Venture Accelerator focuses on bringing “startups in the plastics-alternative market” to Colorado. A local committee is also finding ways to encourage businesses to change their plastic habits, and together the local government initiatives and environmental startups will change consumption habits regionally.

Groups and businesses across the country are encouraging cities to sell or recycle urban wood instead of sending it to a landfill. Many have started small businesses that turn the wood into products like furniture.

The Community Interest Company, run by volunteers, organized the Chiswick Flower Market to revitalize the local economy. The eight flower markets that were held increased foot-traffic to local businesses by about 70% compared to non-market Sundays. Of the over 60 vendors, 65% were based locally. The market made a £12,000 profit, which is being reinvested in community sustainability projects. Sustainability and reducing the market’s carbon footprint are priority initiatives.

In Sweden, waste is not just waste, or so the country explains with a total of 34 waste-to-energy power plants that turn garbage into electricity. With an already staggering low percentage of waste ending up in landfills, 50 percent of the portion that does is transformed into energy through an incineration process that plays a large part in heating many homes throughout the winter.

In response to the growing concern about the world's water supply, a movement known in the United States as "One Water" has taken shape and is gathering momentum on a mission to halt floods, droughts and water pollution.

In cities all around the world, locals as well as tourists struggle to find adequate public restrooms. In Bremen, Germany, a creative partnership is solving the public restroom problem. “The Nice Toilet” initiative allows the local government to pay small businesses a stipend in exchange for putting a sign in their window notifying visitors of their public toilets. The government saves money, businesses make money, and visitors are happier.

Many argue that the Burning Man festival has become an exclusive and wasteful indulgence for the wealthy - an opinion that was exacerbated this year when thousands of perfectly good bicycles were left among the debris in the desert. But a few enterprising individuals and organizations saw an opportunity to aid the victims of hurricanes Irma and Maria by rescuing, fixing, and transporting the abandoned bikes to communities where many people had lost all other forms of transportation, stifling their recovery efforts. Now hope is being restored for some, two wheels at a time.

P&G, the manufacturer of popular shampoo Head & Shoulders, is teaming up with a recycling business and waste management company to turn discarded plastic found on the beaches of France into special edition shampoo bottles. Although the impact is small in terms of bottles produced, the amount of recycled content is a "technological breakthrough" compared to what other companies have achieved.

Throughout India, wastepickers – people who scour landfills for garbage they can sell to recyclers – live at the bottom of society. But the city of Pune did something radical: with the help of a collective, they did away with expensive garbage trucks, and now all household garbage is collected by wastepickers with pushcarts. Pune saves millions of dollars each year and recycles more – and the wastepickers have decent wages and social standing. The concept is now spreading globally.

Clean Ocean Sailing is a volunteer-based organization that boats to largely inaccessible parts of Cornwall’s coasts to pull plastic pollution out of the ocean and off the beaches using kayaks, rowboats, and physical labor.