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Recycling is paying off for Apple - to the tune of about $43.6 million in gold. According to Apple's environmental responsibility report, the company recovered 2,204 pounds (a little over a ton) of gold from recycled electronic devices last year from its take-back initiatives and other recycling events. The take-back initiatives allow customers to drop off Apple products at stores or mail them in to be recycled.

According to Apple's environmental responsibility report, the company recovered 2,204 pounds (a little over a ton) of gold from recycled electronic devices last year from its take-back initiatives and other recycling events. The take-back initiatives allow customers to drop off Apple products at stores or mail them in to be recycled.

After almost two years of research and collaboration with a variety of partners, social enterprise Fairphone is pleased to announce it has successfully established the first pilot supply chain for Fairtrade-certified gold for the electronics industry. Fairphone is now the world's first Fairtrade-licensed consumer electronics manufacturer to support responsible gold mining in Peru with the production of the Fairphone 2.

Just weeks after the UN Secretary General released a report detailing sluggish progress on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), efforts are underway to bolster support for their widespread adoption. Gold Standard - a standard and certification body established by the WWF - has launched the Gold Standard for the Global Goals, a new standard to quantify, certify and maximize the contributions of climate and development interventions toward the Paris Climate Agreement and the SDGs

Tiffany & Co., Target and Helzberg Diamonds have committed to more sustainable gold and metals mining.

While the usual culprits such as farming, ranching and logging are well known, gold mining is fast extending its destructive reach into some of the world's most untouched landscapes, according to research published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

C&A is the world's first retailer to offer jeans that are completely Cradle to Cradle CertifiedTM at the Gold level. Designed in partnership with Fashion for Good, a global platform that aims to make all fashion good, the jeans were made with completely sustainable materials and were produced in compliance with the high Cradle to Cradle CertifiedTM Gold level.

The medals in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be maybe just a little more hard-earned than usual: The Japanese organizers are hoping to source the medals from e-waste, stripping gold, silver, and bronze from old gadgets and cellphones.

A shopping center in Thousand Oaks, Calif., has been named the first BREEAM USA In-Use certified building in the country, a designation for sustainability efforts at pre-existing nonresidential structures. The Oaks Shopping Center features 6,000 solar panels, LED lighting, a mixed-materials recycling campaign and more to help minimize the building's environmental impact.

Microsoft has achieved the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council's Gold Level of Zero Waste Certification for its Redmond corporate campus by diverting at least 90% of onsite waste from landfills. Microsoft is the first technology company in the country to achieve this certification.

General Motors' enterprise data center in Detroit cut energy consumption 70% by installing a flywheel for battery-free backup power and implementing in-row cooling techniques. The facility also achieved LEED Gold certification.

Staples earned the World Packaging Organization's Gold Award for implementing packaging that reduced the company's carbon footprint by 25,000 metric tons per year and cut corrugated cardboard consumption 20%. Staples worked with Packsize International to develop and implement the new packaging.

The clock for corporates looking to get a handle on supply chain conflict minerals is starting to tick much louder. With just one year to go before stricter reporting is required by the Securities and Exchange Commission, many companies are still struggling to trace their sources for metals such as gold, tungsten, tantalum and tin, according to an analysis of reports submitted for the most recent reporting period.

The proposed Pebble Mine in southwestern Alaska is a project of almost unfathomable scale. The Pebble Limited Partnership intends to excavate a thick layer of ore - nearly a mile deep in places - containing an estimated 81 billion pounds of copper, 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, and 107 million ounces of gold. The mine would cover 28 square miles and require the construction of the world's largest earthen dam - 700 feet high and several miles long - to hold back a 10-square-mile containment pond filled with up to 2.5 billion tons of sulfide-laden mine waste. All this would be built not only in an active seismic region, but also in one of the most unspoiled and breathtaking places on the planet - the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to the world's most productive salmon fishery. Composed of tundra plain, mountain ranges, hundreds of rivers, and thousands of lakes, the greater Bristol Bay region encompasses five national parks and wildlife refuges, and one of the largest state parks in the U.S.

While the focus of the NFL world this week-and thus our coverage-has been in San Francisco, with an estimated 1,000,000 people visiting Super Bowl City in the Embarcadero and Moscone Center for NFL Experience, today, finally, the whole show moves down the interstate to Santa Clara and Levi's (LEED Gold) Stadium, where the Panthers will take on the Broncos. Most of today's Green-Sports coverage is Levi's Stadium-based as well:

Increasing the recycling rate to 100 percent industry-wide could generate an estimated $10 billion in cost savings and natural capital benefits, according to Trucost. For example, creating better closed-loop processes for reusing gold would have a bottom-line benefit of almost $100 million compared with $14.6 million at current recovery levels, according to the Trucost data.