To understand Elliot Groman‘s passion for living green, you have to go back to his early days, when he got interested in recycling and reuse possibilities while working as an engineer in the Russian army. Now the President of SpinGreen, a textile-recycling company, Groman looks for ways to increase textile recycling rates by spreading awareness and making recycling easier. Groman dubs textiles “the forgotten recyclable,” as Americans throw out 21 billion pounds of clothes a year, though 95% to 100% of that could be recycled.

“We educate, we donate, we innovate and we’re totally transparent,” Groman says of SpinGreen. “The industry has morphed into a situation where there are [clothing recycling] boxes all over the place. [SpinGreen] decided to incentivize people to help kickstart textile recycling.”

Al Weinrub helps the Local Clean Energy Alliance, a Bay Area-based organization, bring local renewable energy resources into communities in a beneficial way. The alliance’s goal is to harness energy sources locally as a means of equitable wealth for urban communities and to help communities realize that not all renewable energy is created equal.

“Climate justice is the preeminent issue of our time,” Weinrub states. “There is a very strong inequality in the notion of what’s happening with the climate. We don’t look at greenhouse gas reductions as a technical thing. We have to deal with all of the social inequalities if we’re ever going to survive.”

It was a decade ago that Laura Klein, co-founder/Editor-in-Chief of Organic Authority and owner of EcoSalon, was in culinary school looking at the comparison between organic and conventional food. She posed a simple question: “Why is organic food superior in flavor and quality?” Her paradigm shift started right then. Today, Klein investigates America’s burgeoning food crisis and ways to combat it via her online magazine about delicious food and healthy living with organic recipes, articles, how-to primers, cooking videos and more.

“One of the simplest ways people can improve the quality of their health is just to upgrade the quality of their food,” Klein explains. “It doesn’t have to be expensive [and] it can be really easy. You’ll actually find that you feel better, your energy will increase and you’ll start to really get to know your food.”

After gaining valuable experience dealing with sustainability issues from his long run as a corporate counselor, Rich Fischer joined Clover Technologies, an organization that provides remanufactured products to companies that sell them under their own brand names. Clover offers a sustainable solution in the products themselves — they collect, clean, replace parts, refill and reseal ink cartridges to return to the marketplace — an environmentally superior and better economic choice compared to brand new cartridges.

“Recycling is part of the landscape now,” Fischer says. “The real gains are to be made in finding the opportunities for reuse and repurposing, which essentially avoids the breaking down of the materials to start with.”