Did you know that around 90% of the world’s population lives within walking distance of a river system? Many people’s lives depend on how healthy these rivers are. “If rivers are unhealthy, people risk being unhealthy too”, said Zach Green, President at Be Alive Studios. “And so, we need to come together to do something about it.”
One of the initiatives that aims to do just that is Rivers are Life (RaL). Dow is a founding member of RaL, a platform for creating a human connection with rivers around the world, to inspire the need to improve, protect and preserve them. By demonstrating the many ways in which they reveal their beauty and wonder, the life and our own lives carried in or upon their waters, they inspire us collectively to act and treat them as the valuable resources they are.
In this episode of the Seek Together podcast, ‘Water & Waste’, I ask our guests about the challenges, but also positive actions that contribute to cleaner rivers around the globe to help people understand their impact on river systems and inspire them to take action.
Zach Green: “I strongly believe in the power of storytelling to help educate audiences around the world. In sharing the stories of our waterways and those working to protect them, we can help increase awareness around the importance of our planet’s rivers while driving innovative solutions, inspiring sustainability, and curbing waste.”
In this podcast episode, we also discuss the latest RaL film called ‘Keepers of the North’ that was created to showcase a collaborative project to clean up Alaska’s gulf coast. John Holm, Vice President Strategic Initiatives at PYXERA Global: “We are a non-profit organization aiming to help solve the world’s most pressing challenges, one community at a time. We really look at uniting the public, private and social sectors together to work consistently on how we can solve collective problems but at a community level. For the project in Alaska, we brought together an all-star project team including The GoAK, First Mile, Alliance to End Plastic Waste, Dow, the Center for Regenerative Design & Collaboration and Fedex.”
Wendy Takeguchi from the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, of which Dow is a founding member: “We worked together to develop a sustainable solution to turn marine trash into a usable product. In this case, it was possible to transform historically hard-to-recycle plastic into RESIN8, a building material that can improve the performance of concrete and asphalt.”
Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you’ll enjoy listening to the Seek Together Podcast!