Waste more, want not, said no one ever. But, we ve all heard the age old saying, waste not, want not. Whether you learned it from a grandmother saving the inch-long threads left over from mending ...

This is part of an occasional series on zero-waste initiatives. Imagine, producing only a jar’s worth of trash every year. To many, that seems an out-of-reach goal.

Workers carry and organize plastic bottles in the Dongxiaokou village on the outskirts of Beijing. The small village is the destination of much of Beijing's recyclable waste. Roughly 700 families sift ...