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, ...

Knowing your symbols makes it easier to reuse and recycle. Groups 1, 2, and 5 are easy to recycle curbside, but groups 4, 6, and 7 are more difficult.

This is an excerpt from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. An odd symbol, made up of three arrows arranged in a triangle, began showing up on plastic containers across America in the ...