Wiki_Universe

The market’s perverse water pricing creates opportunities for businesses that look beyond the market and consider the true cost of H20.

The environmental and social costs of global business water use add up to around $1.9 trillion per year, according to new research.

Some of these external water costs already are being internalized and hitting bottom lines: Just last year, the worst drought in the United States in 50 years sent commodity prices skyrocketing. Companies, especially those in the food, beverage and apparel sectors whose margins and supply chains are tightly linked to agricultural commodities, can use the true cost of water to get ahead of the trend of external costs increasingly being internalized through regulations, pricing or shortages...

Communicating visually is one of the most effective ways to explain complex concepts and relationships, and can be a great way to explain your services/products and create valuable site content.

Visit thelink for a list of tools you can use to create visualizations, or simply use to communicate visually with your teammates.

"Resources for Rethinking is a project developed by Learning for a Sustainable Future. It provides teachers access to lesson plans, curriculum units and other teaching resources that integrate environmental, social and economic spheres through learning that is interdisciplinary and action oriented."

This infographic from Metrofax highlights the benefits of going green in the workplace:  Waste-conscious companies can increase revenue, reduce disposal costs, and save resources.

Tech enthusiasts like ourselves tend to spend more on electronics and upgrade more often than the average consumer, but as tech has grown more mainstream than ever, and with product cycles accelerated on the mobile market, electronic waste is becoming an equally expanding issue.

There is a lack of consensus as to whether the term (e-waste) should apply to resale, reuse, and refurbishing industries, or only to product that cannot be used for its intended purpose. Informal processing of electronic waste in developing countries may cause serious health and pollution problems, though these countries are also most likely to reuse and repair electronics.

All electronic scrap components may contain contaminants such as lead, cadmium, beryllium, or brominated flame retardants. Even in developed countries recycling and disposal of e-waste may involve significant risk to workers and communities and great care must be taken to avoid unsafe exposure in recycling operations and leaching of material such as heavy metals from landfills and incinerator ashes.

This infographic puts e-waste figures in perspective...

No matter what happens, there will always be a demand for data visualization tools. Data on its own can be pretty boring and brightening it up with images and other visual tools, it can make normally inaccessible information much easier to digest. (Editor’s Note: It’s also great for information reading literacy, and the new Common Core demand for multimedia “texts.”)

There are a number of fantastic tools out there that will present your data in an accessible manner. All of the tools listed below are free and chances are you’ve used one or two of the tools mentioned before.