Waste

A billion dollars in unwanted American dollar coins sits in specially-made vaults the size of soccer fields in Texas and Baltimore and other undisclosed locations. They're heavily guarded -- according to NPR's Planet Money team, even journalists must be watched carefully as they check out the...

If you've ever cooked a meal for a family made up of more than one person, there's a good chance you've become intimate with a problem that plagues the entire world: wasted food. According to a new report released last week from the United Nations, one-third of all food produced for human...

No, Seattle-based Starbucks won't be adopting a comprehensive recycling plan -- only 11% of shareholders voted for that. The global coffee shop chain, which has been spending much of its marketing money on promoting its "Shared Planet" initiatives lately, believes it's doing enough.

As we celebrate Earth Day this week, Joe Jenkins wanted to remind people of one of our most accessible, money-saving natural resources. Jenkins is the father of the Humanure human composting toilet, a non-flushing, all-natural commode that allows you to save your excrement and use it for...

For the past two years, I've been chasing down a crazy goal: to reduce my family's trash enough that I could call the company which collects our garbage and tell it that, instead of picking up our one 32-gallon can every week, we'd need the service only once a month. Even though we've always been...

Consider the disposable diaper. It's part engineering marvel, a mechanism that takes one of the most foul side effects of parenthood and absorbs it into a small, manageable, plastic-wrapped package. But it's also part environmental catastrophe. The average baby makes nearly 6,000 diapers dirty...

It's still October and already schedules are filling up with things to do to prepare for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, Hanukkah and more. On top of the normal things that need done -- changing your oil, sending out cards, finding time to work out -- you still need to shop for gifts,...

On Monday, Thomson Reuters released "Where Can $700 Billion in Waste Be Cut Annually from the U.S. Healthcare System," a white paper exploring American health-care costs. The report identified six factors -- administrative inefficiency, provider inefficiency, lack of care coordination, unwarranted...

This is a round-up of the most popular finance links from Tip'd, the social media site for finance, in the past week. This week's stories include a list of Tweeters every money nerd should know, how to get a free major in finance using open courseware, and the skinny on the rumored "world currency"...

Now that Obama is in control of the government, one of the big priorities of animal advocates -- even bigger than getting the Obama family a shelter dog -- is the elimination of the USDA's Wildlife Services Department, which spends $117 million a year in a Sisyphean quest to exterminate predators....