Keep America Beautiful‘s new “I Want to be Recycled” campaign aims to empower consumers by teaching them that by recycling they can help create new products and strengthen their local economy. Brenda Pulley, Senior Vice President, Recycling, at Keep America Beautiful, understands that many feel like recycling is a burden, but in their hearts they truly want to do the right thing. If any organization can pull off a successful recycling campaign, it’s Keep America Beautiful. The organization has 60 years of experience as a leader in anti-litter campaigns.

“People really do not want to be wasteful,” Pulley reveals. “They need to be encouraged to recycle with the right message and need to have easily accessible recycling information on what, when and where to recycle.”

Chicago is a major hub for a number of airlines, and with not one, but two world-class airports in the city, it is also one of the busiest aviation centers in the world. Chicago Department of Aviation‘s Deputy Commissioner of Sustainability, Amy Malick, is tasked with keeping the tremendous footprints of Chicago’s airports as green as possible. Chicago’s O’Hare International is the second-busiest airport in the world — more than 67 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of cargo passed through its concourses in 2012. Across town, Midway Airport, which Malick refers to as the “busiest square mile in aviation,” serves more than 19.5 million passengers annually. The Sustainable Airports Manual, developed in Chicago in 2003, is now the go-to resource for building and redeveloping airports the environmentally sustainable way.

“Aviation in general probably doesn’t have the greenest reputation in the world,” Malick admits. “We do operate these massive, 24/7, mission-critical facilities that are always going. Our focus has been to reduce the impact of all of those things that go into running an airport on a daily basis.”

As General Motors‘ Manager of Waste Reduction Efforts, John Bradburn examines “resources that are out of place” (what most people would call “waste”) and tries to manage them in a better way. Across the globe, GM has 107 different operations that operate landfill-free. GM recycles 2.5 million tons of materials on average every year. End-on-end, these materials could wrap around the globe at the equator — truly an astounding feat. Bradburn notes that these recycled resources present a significant amount of revenue, but, perhaps surprisingly, that is not GM’s end goal.

“We average around $1 billion a year revenue from those various [recycled] commodities,” Bradburn says. “Our long-term goal is to generate zero revenue. The reason for that is because we would consume the materials within the process — that’s the goal. All of our products that we use in our processes are utilized in that process, therefore [GM can] become more efficient.”