Delaney White

An estimated 12% of global trade worth more than $1 trillion traverses the Red Sea each year. When Houthi rebels started attacking commercial vessels in November 2023, ocean carriers began rerouting container ships around Africa’s Cape of Good Horn rather than through the Suez Canal on voyages from Asia to Europe. That greatly increased travel time and costs. As of March of this year, shipping through the Red Sea was still down 70% from before the attacks began, according to The Economist, with many ocean carriers still avoiding the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which separates the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Peninsula. Maritime Industry Caught in the Crosshairs Houthi rebels launched attacks on ships in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. The Houthis attacked more than 100 cargo ships between November 2023 and January 2025. The attacks, with missiles and drones, sunk two vessels and killed four sailors. In late October 2024, a headline in gCaptain read, “Red Sea Is Now So Dangerous Even NATO Warships Are Avoiding It.” “The United States Navy continues to send warships through the Red Sea, but its mission to protect merchant ships – Operation Prosperity…

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026   I spent today in a room full of people who think about waste for a living. And the word that kept coming up had nothing to do with recycling. It was sovereignty. Here is the situation. The United States imports 95% of its critical mineral supply. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, the stuff inside every battery, every semiconductor, every electric motor. We do not make it, we do not mine much of it, and we do not control the supply chain that delivers it. That is not an energy policy problem. That is a national security problem. Now here is the part that should make you put down your coffee. A ton of smartphones contains dramatically more gold than a ton of mined ore. We are talking about concentrations that make urban mining look like a gold rush compared to digging in the ground. And yet the recovery rate for those materials, once a phone leaves its first owner, drops to around 13%. We are losing roughly 80% of the value sitting in devices right now, in drawers, in closets, in landfills. E-waste is also the fastest growing waste stream…