The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) appointed Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University Medical Center to its Healthcare Facility Advisory Board to help the council set priorities and steer the agenda towards its mission of inspiring and enabling sustainable, cost-effective recycling solutions for plastic products and materials used in the delivery of healthcare.

It turns out that small- and medium-sized brick and mortar companies can use analytical tools just as the largest corporations can-or the hottest Web-based social media start-ups or the biggest intelligence agencies with three-letter names.

Advances in analytic technologies and business intelligence are allowing CIOs to go big, go fast, go deep, go cheap and go mobile with business data.

Two years ago, the director of sustainability at a $1bn consumer-products company suggested the corporate budget committee add a new criterion in deciding which capital projects to approve: the project's environmental impact. The director devised a metric for measuring the impact in categories such as water usage, waste reduction, packaging and carbon emissions. The idea saved $20m the first year.

A rise in cargo theft reporting is attributable to improved collaboration and data sharing between the insurance and transportation industries and law enforcement, according to a report from CargoNet.