That same year in Vancouver, British Columbia, several iPad shoppers at Future Shop and Best Buy stores said they opened the Apple packaging to find plastic bags filled with modeling clay.

CNN: Open that iPad before you buy it

The team of 15 girls from various departments under the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) collected, during a 15-minute exercise, 53 aluminium cans, 45 plastic bottles, nearly 30 plastic fragments including bags, packaging, bottle tops, five large aluminium food trays and about 25kg of fishing nets and nylon ropes.

UNESCO: Social and Human Sciences

Piles and piles of plastic bottles, bags, Styrofoam, packaging material and other household trash can be seen as a permanent fixture.

FORBES: Could a closed-loop system be the solution to reducing waste?

Mr. KEVIN SWIFT (American Chemical Council): Food packaging, all sorts of films, trash bags, diapers, toys, housewares, crates, drums, bottles.

NPR: Energy Costs Drive Up Prices of Nearly Everything

But Arends does delve into an important issue: no growth in revenue as the volume of actual trash disposed of has declined in the U.S. Manufacturers are using less packaging, consumers are re-using grocery bags, and little-by-little that overwhelming urge to reduce, re-use, recycle has gone from social movement to second nature for a lot of people.

FORBES: Connect

And in one of the week's more unusual stories, we reported on a public housing extension in Italy that was made from plastic shopping bags and other bits of non-renewable packaging.

ENGADGET: Inhabitat's Week in Green: ten earth activities, transnatural stools and wood ash bike frames