By Mark Agnew

Hong Kong open-water swimming race organiser and environmental entrepreneur Doug Woodring has been given a place in the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF). He has been at the forefront of initiatives to develop the sport and protect the marine environment, the IMSHOF said. Woodring, who used to work at Merrill Lynch Asset Management, started his journey to environmental activism when he began to organise swimming events.

By Steve Munatones

“Who knew that diving among a bunch of plastic trash would become the catalyst for Doug Woodring to eventually be nominated and voted in as an Honor Administrator in the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame? That is the long road that Doug has taken from diving along the coastlines of Asia to being inducted in the Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” asked Steven Munatones.

By Plasticity Forum

Asia has the trifecta when it comes to plastic pollution – high-levels of concentrated environmental impact; limited infrastructure; and a USD$21.1Bn market for recovered plastic, of which USD$4.2Bn is unmet (1).

By Doug Woodring and Trish Hyde

Modern economic theory maintains that countries should optimize the trade of global goods and services by embracing other nations’ competitive advantages—letting others excel where their advantages exist. What it did not account for is the trade of “bads” between nations, whereby a country sends unwanted materials (in this case, waste) to another’s shores to take advantage of that country’s competitive advantages (low labor costs and lax environmental enforcement). This trade of bads was widely adopted in the case of waste recovery and recycling partly because developed countries haven’t established on-shore solutions for processing at the same rate they’ve created trash, due to high processing costs within their borders.