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A big retailer, a scrappy startup and a third-party fair trade certifier weigh in on sourcing organic, fair trade, eco-friendly flowers.

Article from 2007 on Disney's Steamboat Ventures investing in a startup called EdgeCast which leased a facility in Seattle operated by Switch and Data (SDXC).

One is an eyesore and a health hazard, the other one is plain dirty. So what do you get when you combine processed scrap tires with diesel fuel? In what might be a case of two wrongs making a right, Australian startup Green Distillation Technologies (GDT) has shown that it is possible to get a cleaner blend of fuel by combining oil derived from old tires with diesel.

Two weeks ago, this new shoe was three plastic water bottles. After ground-up bottles are turned into recycled filament fiber and delivered to a factory, a San Francisco-based startup uses a proprietary process to 3D-knit the fiber into a seamless, essentially waste-free shoe.

The material is ultra tough, durable, and lightweight, and it may be the future of outdoor apparel if Patagonia and a California startup have their way.

The world's two largest bottled water companies, Danone and Nestlé Waters, have teamed up with a California startup to develop and launch at commercial scale a PET plastic bottle made from 100 percent biobased material.

Boston-based startup Cambrian Innovation has come up with water-cleaning technology that uses microbes to turn dirty water into clean energy. Cambrian has federal and private equity funding, including $365,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency. "It's where we will go in the future, where waste is a resource and we don't just want to get rid of it, we want to get energy out of it," said April Richards of the EPA's small-business innovation-research program

Palm oil production is a big business in Malaysia and Indonesia, but environmental pollution is one of the industry's biggest problems. A Silicon Valley company hopes to turn that problem into a profit by converting wastes from palm oil production into fuel

Nike identified water inadequacy and resource cost volatility among the risks, opportunities and challenges surrounding its business. This became the driving force behind the forging of the relationship between Nike and Dutch award-winning startup DyeCoo, a Dutch company that launched the world's first ever industrial dyeing machine that uses high pressure carbon dioxide (CO2) as a replacement for water to dye polyester.

Startup company Solidia Technologies and the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) have partnered to accelerate the development of cement that can reduce the carbon footprint of concrete by up to 70 percent.

From industry giants thinking beyond freshwater to startups tackling the wastewater, here are the names to watch.

President Barack Obama will today order government agencies to reduce their carbon emissions by 40% over the next decade. That won't put a big dent in total U.S. emissions, but could give clean-tech startups and energy providers an important boost. "We can drive substantial reductions across the entire federal footprint and ... leverage both innovation and investment in the private sector," said White House senior adviser Brian Deese.

Sustainable food startup Impossible Foods received $108 million in series D financing, which expands its total funding to $183 million. The company is developing meat and dairy alternatives from plant ingredients.

The acclaimed fashion company behind Gucci and Saint Laurent teams with a startup accelerator to find the next big thing in circular, durable and decarbonized fashion.

Packaging remains a considerable challenge for businesses looking to reduce their impacts, but innovators such as food-service supplier Eco-Products and Finnish startup Sulpac are helping to accelerate the transition to lower-impact models through cross-industry partnerships and sustainable packaging solutions.

The problem of ocean waste, particularly the plastic variety, is a big one, and many creative people are working on ways to clean it up. Finding ways to repurpose the plastic debris collected from the ocean is one component of that, and the U.S.-based startup ByFusion has responded with technology that recycles ocean plastic into durable construction blocks. This way, the plastic waste can be repurposed permanently, rather than being used to create another disposable plastic item that might wind up right back in our precious waterways.

Technology that compresses plastic waste items turns them into blocks suitable for construction, providing a permanent way to remove discarded plastic from the environment. The RePlast system developed by New Zealand-based inventor Peter Lewis is said to be nearly 100% carbon neutral and doesn't require the plastic to be sorted or washed.

NIFORM now aims to get 2,000 backers by the end of the Kickstarter campaign. Each UNIFORM tee is made from premium fabrics, including 100 percent African organic cotton and a blend of nylon, silk, and 63 percent recycled beechwood. The UNIFORM t-shirts are being sold exclusively through Kickstarter until July 17.

Worn Again has developed a first-of-its-kind textile-to-textile chemical recycling technology . the aim is for this unique process to enable the 'recaptured' polyester and cellulose from cotton to be spun into new fabric, creating a circular resource model for textiles. H&M and Kering's PUMA brand will monitor the testing.

By sharing a pool of kegs rather than owning their own, over 200 leading craft brewers have helped reduce their collective carbon footprint by over 3 million kg of CO2e in 2013. These findings, based on a study by John Heckman, Ph.D with PE International and commissioned by MicroStar Logistics, will be used as a benchmark to help the craft beer industry further minimize its carbon footprint each year.