Minimize the hassle (and your credit card bills) by planning a staycation instead. Stuck for ideas? Check out Earth911′s handy guide to planning the perfect Valentine’s Day staycation and start saving on cash (without skimping on the holiday fun).

Staycation Tip: Stave off cabin fever on your staycation by spending some time in the great outdoors. Enjoy a picnic in the park, bike an uncharted path or take a walk through a local pop-up park or community garden. Photo: Stock Photo

1. Plan ahead

The best way to plan a satisfying staycation is to duplicate your dream getaway at home. Sit down and think about your ideal Valentine’s Day plans and figure out a way to create alternatives on the cheap.

If you can’t quite afford a five-course meal at the Chateau Marmont, check out our recipe library and prepare a tasty dinner right in your own kitchen. If your Valentine’s Day fantasy involves a pricey spa, try one of our DIY pampering treatments to escape into at-home bliss.

Once you have your plans in line, clear your work schedule, find a sitter for the kids and take a moment to truly enjoy your home with your partner. Turn off the cell phones and don’t check your email for the duration of your at-home vacation to make you feel “away from it all.”

Still craving a real vacay? Cut back on transportation-related emissions (and vacation costs) by choosing a staycation at an inn, lodge or hotel in your area. Check out your region’s tourism website to find lodging near you and use our guide to make sure your pick is eco-friendly. Not sure where to start? A simple Web search with the word “tourism” and your town or region’s name should point you in the right direction.

2. Stay green

Like on any vacation, it may be tempting to let your green habits slip for a long weekend. But resist the urge and keep being green no matter where you go. Whether you stay at a local hotel or your own house, remember to help save water and energy and continue to recycle.

To up the green ante of your staycation, visit green businesses in your neighborhood, or grab a snack at an eco-friendly eatery. If you’re planning a picnic in the park, package your food in reusable containers instead of plastic bags and dine on portable reusable plates, like these from Preserve.

And you can never go wrong with getting outside for an hour or two. Enjoying the outdoors helps you remember why protecting the planet is so important; and you’ll save on energy, too! Instead of setting the thermostat to the perfect temperature and turning on the lights in every room, plan some fun outdoor activities to feel at one with Mother Nature.

Super Bowl decorations, temporary structures and signage are being removed from the streets of Indianapolis and recovered for reuse and recycling. Photo: Flickr/AngieSix

Everything Super Bowl is coming down in Indianapolis, but it isn’t being thrown away. It’s being recycled into wallets, purses, messenger bags and other accessories to benefit a local nonprofit, according to recent news reports.

This week, workers at Lucas Oil Stadium began the arduous task of removing layers of plastic and vinyl sheeting used as decoration, reports local news affiliate WTHR-TV. The Super Bowl numerals on Monument Circle came down on Tuesday, along with dozens of banners and tents downtown, reports RTV6 Indianapolis.

Some items, including NFL Experience equipment, stages and scaffolding used to build a zip line, will be disassembled and reused by the NFL as part of its Environmental Program, RTV 6 reports.

READ: Packers To Recycle Lambeau Field Scoreboards

Other materials, including banner fabric and durable vinyl sheeting, will be donated to People For Urban Progress, a local transit, environmental awareness and urban planning nonprofit, reports the Indianapolis Star.

The nonprofit focuses on employing local artisans while raising funds for better city infrastructure. In 2008, it salvaged roofing materials from the RCA Dome and turned them into memory-making accessories available for purchase.

Accessories made from Super Bowl XLVI decorations will be available online in about a month, WTHR reports. So, keep your eye on the People For Urban Progress online store to snag your own little piece of the Super Bowl!

INFOGRPAHIC: Green Impact of Super Bowl XLVI

Bee My Lovebug set by John & Kira’s

Bee My Lovebug gift set by John & Kira's

These stylish, hand-painted chocolates are almost too cute to eat – almost. Each Bee My Lovebug set is filled with mouth-watering salted caramel touched with fragrant basswood honey from the family-owned Draper’s Apiary.

To create these adorable Honey Caramel bees, John & Kira’s combines 64 percent organic Valrhona chocolate with fresh cream and a touch of sugar for a tasty ganache that’s perfect for love bugs. Choose from nine or 16-piece sets or their massive 27-piece tower.

Price: $26.10 for a 9-piece set

BUY IT HERE

Okabashi’s line of sandals and flip-flops not only contain up to 25 percent recycled plastic, but can be returned to the company for recycling at the end of their useful lives. Photo: Okabashi

Shoes made from recycled materials are not a new green fashion trend: New Balance, Puma and even Manolo Blahnik have all turned waste into new kicks.

But Georgia-based Okabashi goes a step further: Not only are its sandals and flip-flops made from recycled plastic, but the company also takes back its old shoes for recycling at the end of their useful lives.

Okabashi’s line of sandals, which comes in an assortment of styles and colors, are molded from a blend of plastics called Microplast, making them vegan-friendly. While the amount of recycled content in each shoe depends on the material available, an average pair of Okabashi sandals contains 15-25 percent recycled plastic.

When customers are ready to retire a pair of well-worn Okabashis, they can mail their shoes back to the company’s Buford, Ga. factory and receive a coupon for their next purchase. Okabashi’s team cleans the old shoes, grinds them down and blends the recycled plastic pieces with new plastic. The workers then remold the plastic mixture to produce a new pair of sandals, achieving a closed-loop recycling process.

READ: What is a Producer’s Responsibility?

The company also incorporates the plastic scraps leftover from production into the plastic mixture to make new shoes, making their manufacturing process virtually waste-free. The 2 percent of re-ground material that Okabashi can’t recycle in its factory is sent to a partner company to be made into other plastic products.

According to Okabashi, the company recycled over 100,000 pounds of plastic last year, diverting 10 tractor trailers full of waste from landfills.

READ: New Balance Makes Plastic Bottle Sneakers

Priced at $20 or less, each Okabashi sandal is designed for optimal comfort, featuring a massaging insole, arch support and ergonomic foot beds.

Lesley Fullarton and Stephen O'Rourke, employees at Marks & Spencer's Glasgow store, pack unwanted hangers into a cardboard box for recycling. Photo: Marks & Spencer

U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer has recycled 100 million hangers in the last six months, raising more than $588,000 for international children’s charity, UNICEF.

The retailer’s hanger recycling scheme is simple: customers are given the option not to take hangers home, and hangers left behind are reused in-store or recycled, M&S said.

For every £1 saved from hanger recycling, M&S donates £0.50 to UNICEF to fund a new project in the Mymensingh and Dhaka regions of Bangladesh. The program will improve the lives of more than 50,000 people, providing basic needs such as clean water, education and health care, the retailer said.

“We’re delighted this scheme is working so well,” said Kate Bostock, M&S director of clothing and home. “For every customer that doesn’t take a hanger, the environment benefits and one of the world’s leading charities benefits.”

READ: United Colors of Benetton Unveils Biodegradable Hanger

Once they leave stores, unwanted hangers are taken to a factory in North Wales to be hand sorted. All intact hangers are shipped back to M&S garment manufacturers for reuse, and damaged hangers are reground and turned back into new ones. Even cardboard boxes used to ship the hangers are reused at least four times before being recycled, M&S said.

The retailer has collected 650,000 boxes of hangers so far. Two boxes provide enough funds to give a child access to clean water for a month, and 35 boxes could place a child in day care for an entire year, according to UNICEF estimates.

The recycling program continues at M&S, and the company expects to recycle at least 50 million more hangers by July.

READ: Clothing Recycling Funds Charity Programs

Photo: Stock Photo

Starting this week, students from more than 600 colleges will square off to see who can reduce, reuse and recycle the most on-campus waste.

The Alcoa Foundation and Keep America Beautiful provided recycling bins, as well as training and tools for campus facilities managers, as part of the annual university-based competition, RecycleMania.

Schools will distribute recycling bins as they see fit and submit weight data for paper, cardboard, cans and bottles, food waste and general trash each week, KAB said. Totals are tallied weekly on an online scoreboard, allowing participating schools to monitor how their waste measures up to competitors.

READ: National Recycling Competition Kicks Off

This year’s RecycleMania began on Feb. 5 and runs through March 30. More than 5 million students and 1.1 million faculty and staff – hailing from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five Canadian provinces – will compete in nine categories to see who recycles the most per-capita, who produces the least waste and who recycles the largest percentage of their overall waste stream. This year’s competition also includes a new e-waste category, KAB said.

“RecycleMania draws upon the energy of Millennials and their passion for ‘greener’ living to mobilize their peers to reduce waste,” said Paula Davis, president of the Alcoa Foundation. “We are proud to support this initiative and excited to see how creative schools get as they vie for bragging rights to the number one spot.”

READ: College Students On Board to Keep America Beautiful

In 2011, 630 participating colleges and universities collected more than 91 million pounds of recyclables and compostable organics through the challenge. This prevented the release of 127,553 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere, KAB said.

Last year’s top schools included California State University-San Marcos in the Grand Champion category, Union College of Schenectady, N.Y. in the Per Capita Classic and North Lake College of Irving, Texas, winner of the Waste Minimization category.

READ: Cal State San Marcos Students Are Recycle Maniacs

This week, KAB also announced the winners of Recycle-Bowl, the first nationwide recycling competition for elementary, middle and high school students. More than 1,200 schools participated, recycling 2 million pounds of waste. First place went to Marshall Christian Academy in Albertville, Ala., where students recycled 41 pounds of waste per child and reduced garbage pick-ups by half, KAB said.

Check out RecycleMania online to view a full list of participating schools and track progress in real time.

Three years ago, Kate Drane was living in Chicago, working at a law firm as a recruiter and environmental initiatives coordinator.

“I was passionate [about sustainability], but I wasn’t educated enough about it,” Drane says.

While attending a graduate school fair, she happened to stop at the booth for San Francisco’s Presidio Graduate School and learned about their MBA in Sustainable Management, a business degree integrated with environmental principles. Realizing this program was exactly what she needed to help her become a more effective sustainability leader, she applied to the school, and within a few months, moved to California to start her “green MBA.”

Now Drane, who graduated from the Presidio last year, is launching a green business venture with four of her fellow Presidio alums: The Can Van, a mobile beer canning service that aims to bring Bay Area craft beers to a wider audience, while reducing the beverage’s environmental impacts.

Drane is part of a growing number of professionals who pursue a Masters in Business Administration to advance their sustainability careers and hone their skills for implementing environmental programs. Many of these eco-minded individuals are turning to dedicated green MBA programs like the Presidio’s degree or traditional MBAs that offer a strong sustainability or corporate responsibility focus.

The list of dedicated green MBA programs has grown over the last few years – from the Presidio’s program to the Bainbridge Graduate Institute’s MBA in Sustainable Business and Colorado State University’s MBA in Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise. But the number of traditional MBA programs that offer sustainability-related curricula is also on the rise, according to Maggie Davies, deputy director of Net Impact, a network of business professionals and students who want to harness the power of the private sector to achieve global sustainability.

The organization, which publishes an annual guide profiling MBA programs’ commitment to sustainability and corporate responsibility, has seen a 171 percent increase in the number of traditional MBA programs offering sustainability coursework in the five years they’ve published the “Business as UNusual” guide, Davies said.

Green MBAs vs. traditional MBAs: What’s the difference?

So what’s the difference between a dedicated sustainable MBA program and a conventional MBA with a sustainability concentration?

While every degree is different, Jennifer Taylor, chief operations officer at the Presidio Graduate School, sums up the distinction when describing her school’s MBA in Sustainable Management.

“We’re not offering an MBA program with a sustainability concentration. We’re offering an MBA with sustainability woven throughout the entire curriculum – from beginning to end,” she says.

Though Presidio students take classes that sound like they came from the standard MBA course book – Managerial Accounting and Micro- and Macroeconomics – students learn how these topics relate to environmental and social responsibility during their lessons.

More particular to Presidio’s program, the school emphasizes hands-on, experiential learning and requires students to complete four consulting projects during their time at the school. Students are paired with either a company or nonprofit and apply their sustainability and business expertise to real-life projects in the areas of operations, marketing, finance and strategy.

Presidio also offers a dual MBA/Masters in Public Administration (MPA) in Sustainable Management to students interested in both the public and private sectors.

READ: Degrees in Sustainability: Risky or Worth It?

Across the San Francisco Bay, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business is an example of a top-notch business school that offers coursework and projects in sustainability and corporate responsibility rather than a dedicated green MBA.

“[Students] can tailor their coursework to focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability,” says Jo Mackness, executive director of Haas’ Center for Responsible Business. “They have to take Haas’ core classes, but they can place an emphasis on CSR and sustainability.”

In the Center’s popular Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility and Projects class, teams of students work directly with major firms like Hewlett-Packard, Levi Strauss & Co. and Wells Fargo to address real-life pressing business issues and to plan and implement CSR projects.

Haas also gives its students opportunities to partner with small businesses and budding entrepreneurs at the school’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship. Through the Center’s Clean Tech to Market program, business students build out the strategy to take the new clean technology, developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to the marketplace.

The following is an op-ed piece by Wes Muir, director of communications for Waste Management. It does not describe the views or opinions of Earth911.

For better or for worse, garbage can be heavy, wet and bulky. This has presented a challenge for cities, private citizens, businesses and waste collectors alike since the days of horse-drawn waste collection vehicles. This year, a new waste collection vehicle could change the landscape of waste collection for the better in the United States.

For decades, European cities have used a technologically unique vehicle called the “Rotopress” in the collection of waste, and this year, for the first time, Waste Management will introduce the Rotopress in North America. The Rotopress’ distinctive design improves collection efficiency and mechanical reliability, as well as reduces odor and noise in comparison to traditional collection trucks.

Improved design

The Rotopress, designed by German company Faun, has a cylindrical barrel that rotates waste like cement in a cement mixer. This rotating barrel mixes dry and wet waste, reducing free liquid in the system and distributing the weight of the waste more evenly within the barrel. This mixing process virtually eliminates leakage from the waste, which cuts down on odor and wear-and-tear on the machine caused by corrosion. The even distribution of waste also allows the vehicle to carry more waste per trip and decreases stress on the mechanisms.

Streamlined mechanics

The corkscrew design of the rear loading-truck has no blades and fewer moving parts than conventional haulers. This simple design ensures that fewer pieces get jammed, diminishing repair costs and inconvenience caused by vehicles pulled out of service. The “decoupled chassis” of the tractor trailer swivels on a hinge, allowing drivers to safely negotiate small residential roads and commercial alleys.

READ: A Day in the Life of a Recycling Driver

Increased fuel efficiency

The vehicle’s ability to carry up to 4 tons more waste than a conventional collection vehicle means that they take fewer trips to the landfill, which saves fuel. On top of that, the Rotopress is operated by a compressed natural gas (CNG)-powered truck, which emits nearly zero air particulate matter and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25 percent. These vehicles will add to Waste Management’s fleet of more than 1,400 CNG-powered vehicles, progressing toward the company’s sustainability goal to reduce fleet emissions by 15 percent and increase fleet efficiency by 15 percent by 2020.

This new vehicle will be piloted in San Diego, Sacramento, Milwaukee and Camden, N.J., so keep an eye out for them in your neighborhood.

Show your Valentine (and the planet) a little love by choosing a gift that gives back. Photo: Flickr/Valdiney Pimenta

As you’re browsing the Web for that perfect Valentine’s Day gift this week, why not choose a gift that gives back? Here are three fun ways to help the environment and your community while showing your honey you care.

1. Shop for a cause

A growing number of online retailers allow shoppers to donate to charitable causes. So, why not check them out for your Valentine’s Day giving?

Gifts that Give offers more than 100 top brands and donates 20 percent of all proceeds to your charity of choice. Select from national groups like Habitat for Humanity and Save the Whales or local organizations like parks departments, neighborhood PTAs and community groups.

Greater Good donates between three and 50 percent of the retail price of purchased products to nonprofits like The Rainforest Site, The Hunger Site and Ecology Fund.

GoodShop and We-Care allow you to peruse hundreds of online merchants, like Amazon and Zappos, and donate a percentage of each purchase to the charity of your choice. Causes include the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Environmental Working Group and Best Friends Animal Society.

READ: Facebook Game Upcycles Trash For Charity

2. Buy local, support fair trade

Support your community or a community overseas by choosing local or fair trade merchants this Valentine’s Day.

Start by browsing through a few mom-and-pop shops or farmer’s markets in your area. A leisurely stroll down your town’s main street could yield a bouquet of stunning local flowers, a found-object watch or a handmade picture frame that’s perfect for your honey.

If local shops don’t suit your fancy, consider choosing a fair trade gift instead. Fair trade refers to a system of buying and selling goods in a way that workers, farmers and communities are paid a fair wage. And you can often find loads of unique handmade gifts crafted from recycled or sustainable materials.

For a gift that benefits artisans (and makes your sweetie smile), check your town or city’s business directory for a fair trade shop in your area. Or browse one of the dozens of online fair trade retailers – like Seven Hopes United, Ten Thousand Villages and Fair Trade USA.

INFOGRAPHIC: Buying Fair Trade vs. Local

3. Go unconventional

If you’re so over those tired bouquets and candy boxes, consider a slightly more unconventional gift this year. Making a charitable donation in your loved one’s name is a great way to show you care (without adding to the pile of stuff in your junk closet).

Try adopting an endangered species for your special someone through the World Wildlife Fund, saving an acre of rainforest through CREA or giving a chicken to a hungry family through Heifer International.

Want a physical gift to exchange on the big day? The Arbor Day Foundation will plant a tree in your sweetie’s name and allow you to choose from dozens of adorable cards for your donation.

READ: Recycle Reusable Bags For Charity

Homepage Image: Flickr/sonictk

To curb waste, toothpaste giant Colgate-Palmolive Co. has partnered with TerraCycle on the Colgate Oral Care Brigade® since 2010 - a collection program that provides a second life for toothbrushes, floss containers and toothpaste tubes and caps. Photo: Flickr/theimpulsivebuy

Colgate-Palmolive Co. has pledged to reduce the waste it sends to landfills by 15 percent by 2015, according to the company’s latest sustainability report.

In the report, the company also committed to cutting the environmental impact of products and packages by 20 percent by 2015 through increasing the use of sustainable materials and recycled content.

In addition to cutting packaging weight, Colgate hopes to increase post-consumer plastic content to an average of 30 percent in all PET bottles by next year to meet sustainability goals.

The company’s recent global redesign of some toothpaste tubes and caps reduced consumption of non-renewable energy and natural resources by 30 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by about 50 percent, the report said.

The company also plans to reduce water and energy consumed in the manufacturing of its products by 40 percent and 20 percent respectively, according to the report.

READ: Pantene To Use Sugarcane Plastics in Packaging