Esha Chhabra

Ben Lecomte is spending his summer swimming in trash – literally. So far, he’s found toothbrushes, laundry baskets, sandbox shovels and beer crates floating out in the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The 52-year-old Frenchman is journeying from Hawaii to San Francisco via the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to better understand how plastic is affecting our oceans. He will swim a total of 300 nautical miles, intermittently travelling by sailboat with a crew of 10 the rest of the way.

His swim wi...

To the untrained eye, a $50 cashmere sweater can look from afar much like a $500 sweater. And both products can technically be categorised as “responsible cashmere”, a designation with multiple standards and definitions.
“I am always worried when I see products being sold at prices that do not reflect their true cost,” says Anne Gillespie, director of impact acceleration at global nonprofit Textile Exchange. “Not only does it encourage thoughtless consumption, but it sets up a system that is ...

AUROVILLE, India — In the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo. At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he’ll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants.
He’s worked here for 15 years. But until his early 30s, Varathan mixed chemicals in a conventional clothing factory in the same region of southern India. There he developed a disease that caused layers of his ...

Bia Saldanha has an unusual commute to work. First she crosses the Acre river by boat, surrounded by the green of the Amazon in northwestern Brazil. Then she takes a brisk hike up from the river bed for her monthly meeting with a community of rubber tappers, referred to as seringueros in Portuguese—or as she likes to call them, "guardians of the forest."
This summer, though, it was a difficult commute. Choking skies, laden with ash and smoke from the 7,000 square miles of forest burning in th...

You’ve heard of farm to table, but what about source to table?
In a bid to improve the traceability of supply chains around the world, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has put its considerable weight behind a blockchain-based platform, called OpenSC, that can follow a fish caught in sub-Antarctic waters right from the moment it’s caught to the moment it lands on your plate.
The app uses QR codes to help people learn more about where food comes from, when, how it was produced, and how it travelle...

Getty Images / SUNDAY AGHAEZE / Stringer
When Mark Zuckerberg went to Kenya and Nigeria in 2016, he proclaimed that the future would be built in Africa. That same year, Y-Combinator accepted startups with African roots for its much sought-after accelerator program. But is Africa indeed the next frontier for Silicon Valley?
Not so fast, says Mercy Mutua, an investment manager based in Nairobi. Despite all the fanfare and media coverage, the venture capital scene in Africa, particularly beyond ...

Situated at nearly 7,000 feet, at the base of the Himalayas, is the town of Darjeeling—a former British outpost where the tea industry began to flourish. Here, in the region known for producing the "Champagne of teas", I drove through winding, narrow roads with Jay Neogi, manager of the Monteviot tea estate.
As we made our way through the mountains, Neogi pointed out areas prone to landslides in the monsoons. "A few months later, this will be far messier," he said when I visited in March. Two...

The British drink more than 60 billion cups of tea every year, and it is the second most-consumed drink in the world, after water. Yet the industry has seen little innovation in how the humble tea leaf makes it from the plant to the cup, sometimes many thousands of miles away. Kaushal Dugar, is changing all that.
"The process of getting it to the customer from the tea estate has not changed in nearly 200 years, going back to the days of the British,” says Dugar, who grew up in Darjeeling, a r...