Forget everything you know about recycling and Dumpster diving. “Garbage Moguls” (8 p.m., National Geographic) looks at entrepreneurs and innovators who see gold in them thar landfills. Major retailers have embraced their efforts to turn trash into cash.

Wal-Mart sells their line of kites made entirely out of old cookie wrappers. “Moguls” focuses on the office squabbles and tensions between the artistic types and money people, engineers and marketers. It may be the first show of any type to document a meeting between Wal-Mart’s notoriously stingy buyers and a group of venders selling products made entirely out of garbage.

• Pirates are back in the news, and a timely “Secrets of the Dead” (7 p.m., PBS, check local listings) recalls one of the biggest and baddest pirate stories of them all on “Blackbeard’s Lost Ship.”

While watching last week’s pirate drama, my mind recalled my fifth-grade history class and tales of Barbary pirates and marines storming “the shores of Tripoli.” But as tonight’s “Secrets” reminds us, pirates had been a problem for Americans well before the United States even existed.

A villain stranger than fiction, Blackbeard (1680?-1718) attacked and plundered merchant ships off the East Coast. At his notorious height, his pirate fleet managed to blockade the port of Charleston, S.C., looting ships and taking prominent citizens hostage.

But not long after, his boat sank off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. In the late 1990s, marine archaeologists discovered the watery remains of his pirate flagship “Queen Ann’s Revenge.” Treating the ruins like a crime scene, they will determine whether Blackbeard’s ship ran aground in foul weather or whether he had the vessel intentionally sunk in a final act of treachery against his own crew.

• Have infomercials, once considered the cheesiest form of advertising and programming, finally gotten some respect? They’ve certainly received attention. “Pitchmen” (9 p.m., Discovery), the docudrama about the genre, returns for second week. And Darren Rovell hosts “As Seen on TV” (8 p.m., CNBC), a look at the $150 billion industry that has brought us the Snuggie, ShamWow and the Ginsu Knife. He interviews giants of the industry, including Ron Popeil, Billy Mays, A.J. Khubani, Scott Boilen and Ed Valenti.

Logic might suggest that debt-ridden consumers would avoid impulse buys in troubled times. But the near-ubiquity and pop-cultural stardom of the Snuggie suggests that folks will buy from infomercials even in the teeth of a recession.

• For most programs, the “clip show” is a cheap and easy way to squeeze an original episode out of previously aired material. But “Lost” (8 p.m., ABC) is not just any program, and if any show could benefit from a little retrospection and illumination, it is this one. Since the series returned in January, time has shifted repeatedly. Characters now dwell simultaneously in entirely different decades. Dead characters have returned, and everything has gotten more baffling even as more has been revealed. I, for one, could use a little reorientation.

Tonight’s other highlights

• Jennifer Beals guest stars on “Lie to Me” (7 p.m., Fox).

• Ron Eldard guest stars on “Law & Order: SVU” (8 p.m., NBC).

• Two face elimination on “American Idol” (8 p.m., Fox).