President Trump has made sweeping efforts to scrap Obama-era environmental protections, but the current administration’s latest moves are oddly specific. The National Park Service (NPS) announced Wednesday that it has rescinded the 2011 “Water Bottle Ban” that allowed parks to prohibit the sale of disposable plastic water bottles. That same day, news emerged that the […]
Costa Rica wants to become the world’s first country to achieve a comprehensive national strategy to eliminate single-use plastics by 2021. The Central American nation intends to replace these wasteful, ocean-clogging items—such as plastic store bags, straws, coffee stirrers, containers and plastic cutlery—for biodegradable or water-soluble alternatives, or products made of renewable materials (think plant […]
By Marnie Cunningham The Pacific nation of Vanuatu is addressing its waste problem by banning certain plastic items. Prime Minister Charlot Salwai made a public declaration on Independence Day (July 30) that they would be phasing out the use of plastic bags and bottles. According to the Vanuatu Daily Post, PM Salwai stated in his […]
Fresh after meeting its 100 percent renewable energy milestone, LEGO is making progress towards its 2030 goal of replacing 20 types of its traditional, petroleum-based bricks with sustainable alternatives. Quartz reports that the 84-year-old Danish toymaker is experimenting with bioplastics, which is made from plants or other biodegradable materials. The biggest challenge is finding a […]
By Tim Radford Scientists have calculated yet another item on the human shopping list that makes up the modern world: plastics. They have estimated the mass of all the plastic bottles, bags, cups, toys, instruments and fabrics ever produced and tracked its whereabouts, as yet another index of the phenomenal change to the face of […]
In this video posted to Facebook by Krystal Gamage, two fishermen off the coast of Owls Head, Maine, find a baby seal trapped in plastic fish netting. What happens next is worth watching until the end. Even in the waters of the Antarctic, long thought to be pristine, plastic pollution has recently been measured at […]
Of all the plastic products we use and take for granted, plastic drinking straws are among the most unnecessary. Designed to be used once and discarded, their only real purpose is to keep your mouth from touching a glass or ice. It made more sense in the days when contaminated vessels were more of an […]
A golden retriever in China has been trained to remove plastic bottles from rivers. In the Jiangsu Province, this dog retrieves about 20 to 30 bottles each day, and has already removed more than 2,000. According to the Guardian, Chinese consumers bought 73.8 billion bottles of water in 2016, China accounted for 28 percent of […]
A lot of attention is paid to the floating junkyards on our high seas, but a new study highlights how the problem of marine plastic goes much deeper. Australian researchers were surprised to find high concentrations of microplastics embedded in the seafloor along the southeast coast of Australia. Scientists with the Institute for Marine and […]
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