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An Island Crusader Takes On The Big Brands Behind Plastic Waste
In 2015, a paper in Science magazine shocked the world with extraordinary revelations about the extent of the plastic tide. Jenna Jambeck at the University of Georgia, an engineer and waste expert, calculated how much plastic waste was going into the ocean every year. She is the one who came up with the 8 million-ton figure.
- Categories
- Environment
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Enabling the Business of Recycling: How Innovative Public-Private Partnerships Help to Build Sustainable Cities
Conversations around environmental sustainability often reduce the issue to a false dichotomy: better policies vs. better business practices. But in fact, leveraging both the government and business sectors can provide unique benefits, say Jorge Noguera at Mastercard and Caleb Shreve at Global Fairness Initiative. They explore the impact of an innovative public-private partnership linking city governments in Peru with a network of waste-pickers to deliver recycling services to households and businesses.
- Categories
- Environment
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Amazon is investing millions to keep packaging out of landfills
There's plenty of work to be done: The United Nations says about 300 million tons of plastic waste are produced every year, and global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
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Big Problem, Small Solution: Can Do-It-Yourself Processing Machines Help Combat Plastic Pollution?
From the viral video of a diver swimming in a sea of plastic, to National Geographic’s major focus on the topic this year, there’s growing public attention on the problem of plastic waste. So there was plenty of excitement when a Dutch engineer’s do-it-yourself plastic recycling machines started gaining traction around the world. Could the devices empower a global army of small entrepreneurs to turn plastic waste into revenue-generating products? The solution sounds appealing, but when Bali-based social enterprise Kopernik assessed its effectiveness, they came across one small problem.
- Categories
- Environment, Impact Assessment, Technology
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World Environment Day: ‘Our world is swamped by plastic’
Eight million tonnes of plastic dumped into oceans each year, killing marine life and entering the human food chain.
- Categories
- Environment
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These Bold Ideas Aim To Make Plastic Waste A Thing Of The Past
The winners of a recent contest hosted by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation all start with one fundamental concept: We can–and must–replace non-recyclable materials on the market with biodegradable alternatives.
- Categories
- Environment
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Could this 10-year-old fix Pakistan’s waste problem?
"This is a situation you can find across all of Pakistan - these bags are not biodegradable and people carelessly discard them. They don't really think about recycling," Zymal says.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
- Region
- South Asia
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Five Key Building Blocks for Sustainable, Inclusive Recycling Systems
For the past year, a working group formed by the MIT Practical Impact Alliance (an MIT D-Lab program) has been exploring strategies for developing effective inclusive recycling systems in India, Africa and Latin America. The result is the publication of a guide for practitioners that includes five key steps for developing inclusive systems, nine case studies and a tool for promoting recycling systems that benefit all stakeholders.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Environment, WASH
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