This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment.

When I visited my friend in Scotland, I was amazed to see how little waste from her family of four actually went into the garbage can. Besides their good habits of buying items with minimal packaging, ...

California’s familiar milk cartons, long stamped with the chasing-arrows recycling logo, are suddenly at the center of a high-stakes test of what “recyclable” really means. A shift in how the state’s ...