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.

By Mark Agnew

The ATIR coastal rowing race is simultaneously being hosted on rowing machines in the ATIR Global Erg Challenge. Competitors from around the world can sit in the gym and row on a pre-recorded video that matches their speed via an app called Kinomap. One such man is Erden Eruc, who will be rowing around the Island from Seattle. The American is no stranger to pulling oars, as he rowed unsupported across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans. “I think I have the mental stamina, but I dread the experience,” he said, adding that even when training for Ocean rowing he never spent more than 40 minutes on a rowing machine.

By Doug Woodring

Plastic pollution in waterways and coastlines is an overall system failure of how we design, use and dispose of materials. The myriad of lightweight, durable plastics makes it incredibly hard to recover and sort these resources into usable quantities of similar polymer types. This reduces its embedded value and incentive for collection. The lack of localized recycling facilities in smaller cities, municipalities and rural areas exacerbates low recycling rates. By not having even basic recycling systems and relatively simple equipment in place, the opportunity to create value from our waste is lost.

By GreenBiz

This is where investors such as Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, or Goldman Sachs, with its new environmental investment policies, will begin to make a difference in who they chose to invest in. It is not worth their time, or investor's money, to be caught out on a limb on such a large-scale, obvious "hot topic" that has the potential to ignite, regardless of what "tradition" says along the way.