We're so attached to plastic, but we're careless consumers. Waste plastic is entering our ecosystems and food chains with untold consequences. Cleaning up our polluted world of plastic may seem a noble, but thankless task. However, some people are seeing economic opportunity in the mission.

Plastic Bank, a social enterprise from Canada, is monetizing plastic recycling while empowering those most affected by the waste. It works to prevent waste plastic from entering oceans by encouraging people in developing countries to collect plastic from their communities in exchange for cash, food, clean water or school tuition for their children. After collection, plastic is weighed, sorted, chipped, melted into balls and sold on as“raw material”to be made into everything from bottles for cleaning products to clothing.

“I saw in large quantities; I saw an opportunity,”CEO David Katz told the audience at the Sustainable Brands Oceans conference in Porto, Portugal on November 14.“We reveal the value in this material,”he added.

Plastic Bank was founded in 2013 and launched on the ground operations in 2014 in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western, Hemisphere, where close to 60% of the population live under the poverty line. As result of poor waste disposal and recycling infrastructure (基础设施)，plastic waste enters rivers or is burned and poses the health threats to the local residents.

The company says i has over 2,000 collectors working in the country, with its full- time collectors on average 63% above the poverty line thanks to the income they make from the project. Through its app based payment system, many collectors now have bank accounts for the first time, and are able to ultimately escape ultra poverty.

“Nothing we're doing is against the laws of physics,”said Katz. “All the technology exists for us to solve and save the world. It's only creative thought.”

A woman was walking her dog along a beach in New Zealand in late June when she saw something that looked like a white ball in the sand. It turned out to be a young Emperor Penguin that was lost. At his age, he should have been close to the Antarctic, swimming for fish and playing on the ice floes (冰川). But this penguin started swimming north and just kept going.

The penguin attracted a lot of attention in New Zealand. It has been 40 years since an Emperor Penguin was last seen there. Researchers at the Department of Conservation were called in. They decided to watch the penguin closely, but not to disturb it in any way. Many New Zealanders came to Peka Peka Beach to look at the elegant penguin. They were careful to keep their dogs away from him so he wouldn’t be frightened.

The public nicknamed the animal Happy Feet. Researchers started to notice that Happy Feet didn’t seem well. It turned out that he had been eating the sand from the beach, likely thinking it was snow.

The public raised more than 11, 000 pounds for an operation to get the sand out of his stomach. The operation was a success, and Happy Feet was taken to a zoo in Wellington, NZ. A group of experts met to decide how to help Happy Feet return to the wild.

Last Sunday, they put him on a boat called the Tangaroa, in a specially built ice-filled box and took him out into the Southern Ocean, southeast of New Zealand. There, they released him into the ocean, which is his natural habitat. He took one last look at his human helpers and then dived into the ocean.

“Emperor Penguins spend their first five years at sea,” said Peter Simpson of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. “What happens now is up to the penguin.”

Happy Feet was fitted with a satellite transmitter (发射机) so they can monitor his progress using the Internet. So far, the trackers show that he swam northeast for a little while before getting his bearings and heading south.

When a dog looks at you with big puppy-dog eyes, it’s hard for you to go away, and you may speak out “Awww” without hesitation. However, there’s a reason why you find a dog’s stare so attractive. That sweet stare actually causes the release of a particular hormone, or chemical messenger in the body. This hormone creates feelings of affection in humans. The same thing happens to dogs when people look back at them. Scientists believe this helps people and their four-legged friends bond, or feel connected. Scientists have wondered what causes dogs to lovingly stare at their owners. To find out, a team of researchers from Azabu University in Japan studied 30 owners and their dogs.

The researchers found that after the pets and their owners spent half an hour together, both showed a rise in oxytocin (催产素). One key role of this hormone in many animals is to promote bonding, like that between a mother and newborn. The increase of oxytocin didn’t happen, though, when scientists repeated the experiment with wolves and the humans who had raised them.

A second experiment also found that if dogs were given oxytocin, they looked at their owners longer. Scientists aren’t sure exactly why, but this reaction occurred only with female dogs. Their owners’ oxytocin levels also rose as a result.

The result of these experiments might help answer an age-old question: How did the fearsome wolf ancestor of modern dogs turn into man’s best friend? Takefumi Kikusui, an animal scientist who worked on the study, thinks that the change happened when dogs first became domestic (驯养的).

According to Kikusui, there may have been a small group of wild dogs that were naturally friendlier. “Humans are very sensitive to eye contact. By using this special communication tool, the dogs are able to win over our hearts. If they are more likely to make eye contact, it would be easier for them to bond with dog owners,” Kikusui said.