Companies Hope to Turn Trash into Treasure

More and more consumers are worrying about the environment, and companies are taking note. According to a 2015 Nielsen study, 58 percent of people willing to pay more for a product were influenced by a brand being environmentally friendly. This ecological purchasing influence coincides with many new companies making innovative products with recycled material. Although it's hard to know definitively if these two trends are linked, Billy Pizer, a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke and a faculty fellow at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, tells Yahoo Finance that companies increasingly appeal to consumers' environmentally friendly nature. "[Consumers] just care more about the environment," Pizer said. "Environmental problems are more palpable now than they were 10 or 15 years ago."