Color-Coded Recycling Bins in Hamburg America was among the first leaders in curbside recycling. However, it now falls short in global recycling efforts. The current system is outdated. The most recent major recycling reform was when Congress enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976 to address growing municipal waste. Since then, land waste laws have only become more flexible. In 2018, only 32.1% of municipal waste in the US was recycled or composted. By con

A radon test kit, the kind Ithaca could require before any lease is signed. The first time I toured a house in Collegetown, the landlord ran through the checklist every Cornell student learns by the second week of the search: water pressure, window locks, smoke detectors, and whether the basement smells like mildew. Nobody said the word radon. I did not think to ask, and no law in New York required anyone in that hallway to bring it up. However, just because you will not fi

To work together effectively to address climate change, we ought to change the way we discuss it. Almost every week, a new infographic circulates on Instagram Stories, often featuring bold text and a somber image, highlighting the worst impacts of climate change. Infographics and other communication efforts like these seem to be widespread on social media, news outlets, and in group chats. Although well-intentioned, this negative, emotion-based communication may be counterpro

A high-speed train in Taiwan that is similar to the fleet of vehicles planned for California’s high-speed rail. For years, progressives and environmentalists have understandably promoted California’s massive $40 billion high-speed rail proposal as the most transformative transportation development in America and a long-overdue project that will help to reduce the disparity between the United States and other developed countries in terms of miles of high-speed track. While Cal

A wind energy farm in Haiyan, Jiaxing, China. As nationalist sentiment and political tensions continue to permeate across the planet, multinational cooperation in the fight against climate change has clearly become less of a priority for most major powers. The 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report ranked “geoeconomic confrontation” as the number one short-term threat, trumping “extreme weather events” and “pollution,” which fell from second to fourth and sixth

Data center infrastructure in the United States. In Lansing, New York, a town of roughly 12,000 just north of Ithaca, New York, hundreds of residents packed into a middle school auditorium last fall. They were there to confront representatives of a company most of them had never even heard of. TeraWulf, a digital infrastructure company, had signed an 80-year contract on 183 acres at the old Cayuga coal plant site to build a data center—a facility housing the servers that po