green infographics

Ever wonder about the journey your phone book has taken to arrive at your door, or what happens once it it’s recycled?

Check out the green practices employed by Dex for its directories before and after delivery. Not someone who uses phone books? Just visit the National Yellow Pages consumer choice opt-out site and opt out of receiving them, or customize your delivery options so that you only get the books you want.

Finally… After almost 50 years of dependence on foreign sources to meet our growing energy needs, our country is finally in a position to begin reversing the trend. Through advances in drilling technology, discoveries of new oil and natural gas reserves and swift progress in the renewables sector, the United States is setting a course for energy self-sufficiency.

The complex story of energy in America and making it relevant to an increasingly distracted public remains one of our biggest challenges as energy industry communicators. In the information economy, there’s a lot of loose change. Content that lacks context. A rapidly growing punditocracy. An immense amount of noise.

Someone has to break through.

In the spirit of this endeavor, we created the United States of Energy map, the first data visualization piece of its kind to comprehensively detail our nation’s vast and diverse energy portfolio...

Just how far down do oil wells actually go? We will show you...

At the vehicletakeback.co.uk they will collect and recycle your scrap cars in accordance with the end of vehicle life directive.

Find more details at the infographic...

The Town Square Initiative is a yearlong volunteer effort in which Gensler designers set out to unearth and re-imagine unexpected open space in cities around the globe. All 43 Gensler offices were invited to participate in the conceptual project, in which we challenged our designers to identify open space in the city and reimagine it as a town square.

Visit the link for more images, diagrams and information on Gensler New York’s design of their future city.

An infographic explaining the benefits of going green for small business.

Why does sustainable architecture matter in small business?
Learn the answer(s) with this infographic from Autodesk.

Up until the mid-1980s, the United States was the lead global producer of rare earth elements — materials that are used to make the technology that powers everything from laptops to hybrid cars — and have come to define our high-tech lives. Now, America is 100 percent dependent on imports of these elements and China is the primary world supplier. How does China's domination impact the future global supply of rare earth elements?

A new interactive project from Google, NASA and the US Geological Survey.

Since the 70s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been amassing satellite images of our planet as part of the Landsat program, revealing a record of change over time: cities expanding, lakes and forests disappearing, new islands emerging off the coast of rising metropolises like Dubai. These historic pictures show stunning change across the earth's surface, in both our natural environments and our man-made ones.

Three decades of global change can be viewed digitally in a recent project between NASA, the USGS, TIME, Google, and theCREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon. Landsat images taken between 1984 and 2012 have been converted into a seamless, navigable animation built from millions of satellite photos. As Google wrote this morning on its blog: "We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public."

Visit the link for more details and to view a few of the GIFs Google has created showing some of the most startling pockets of change...

Composting is the combining and managing of specific waste materials so that they decompose. Once the materials are mixed together, microbes in the soil will start to breakdown the waste and turn it into the nutrient rich material that helps plants grow.

By composting, you are not only creating something that helps keep plants healthy, but you are keeping compostable waste products like food scraps and yard waste out of landfills.

This infographic reviews the dos and dont’s of composting, where and how to compost, what to compost and what not to compost. You can also download a PDF of the poster.

The market’s perverse water pricing creates opportunities for businesses that look beyond the market and consider the true cost of H20.

The environmental and social costs of global business water use add up to around $1.9 trillion per year, according to new research.

Some of these external water costs already are being internalized and hitting bottom lines: Just last year, the worst drought in the United States in 50 years sent commodity prices skyrocketing. Companies, especially those in the food, beverage and apparel sectors whose margins and supply chains are tightly linked to agricultural commodities, can use the true cost of water to get ahead of the trend of external costs increasingly being internalized through regulations, pricing or shortages...

A new study finds that it is possible to greatly slow the rate of sea level rise, which is one of the biggest threats global warming poses, by cutting “short-lived climate pollutants,” which warm the climate on timescales of a few weeks to a decade, in combination with reductions in long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).

The study found that reducing emissions of these short-lived climate pollutants, including soot and methane, by 30 to 60% by 2050 would slow the annual rate of sea level rise by about 18% by 2050. Combining reductions in short-lived pollutants with decreasing CO2 emissions could cut the rate of sea level rise in half by 2100, from 0.82 inches to 0.43 inches per year, while reducing the total sea level rise by 31% during the same period.

Related research by Climate Central scientists shows that the emissions reductions would potentially benefit more than 2 million Americans by 2100, who might otherwise be living below sea level at that point...