By Constant Méheut and Catherine Porter
The New York Times
PARIS>> Danone, the French dairy giant, is being taken to court by three environmental groups who say it has failed to reduce its plastic footprint sufficiently, in a lawsuit challenging corporate social responsibility in the face of...
By Hiroko Tabuchi
© The New York Times Co.
With the bang of a gavel made of recycled plastic and a standing ovation, representatives of 175 nations agreed Wednesday to begin writing a global treaty that would restrict the explosive growth of plastic pollution.
The agreement commits nation...
Polystyrene products banned starting in ’24
By Alex Burness
The Denver Post
Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law Tuesday that’s meant to force Colorado businesses and consumers to reduce their use of single-use plastic and polystyrene products.
“We know that plastic pollution affect...
The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch non-profit organization that made waves in 2015 with its grand plans and new approach to ridding the oceans of plastic, last weekend launched the world’s first ocean cleanup system from the San Francisco Bay. “System 001”headed to a location 240 nautical miles offshore f...
It may be time to sound the alarm and possibly try and find a cleaning solution. A recent study shows that there is much more plastic polluting the world’s oceans than researchers have previously estimated. And the number is staggering.
In what is being described as the most comprehensive m...
A major new study of the world's oceans has reached a shocking conclusion: Thanks to humans, there are now over 5 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing more than 250,000 tons, floating in water around the world.
With a global population of about 7.2 billion, that's nearly 700 pie...
Who's flushing plastic pollution into the oceans, creating tiny time bombs that kill fish, birds and sea turtles ingesting what they think is food? That question has been around since 1997, when the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" was discovered, and a new mathematical model could provide the tool nee...
To reduce fire hazard in the United States, wildland managers often utilize the silvicultural practice of mechanically cutting woody shrubs and suppressed trees (ladder fuels). These cuttings and other post-logging debris are then burned during periods of low fire danger in order to dispose of...
According to a new study, 99% of plastic waste that enters the ocean cannot be located. While initially hearing that there's less plastic in the ocean than we believed sounds like great news, it's actually a frightening prospect. After all, if the plastic isn't in the ocean ... where is it going?!
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Some Norwegian participants in last week’s oceans conference in the U.S. said international policymakers demonstrated a commitment to ocean health but more research is needed to show how emerging Arctic industries affect nearby water ecology.
The two-day “Our Ocean” conference ...
Earth now has five or six major ocean garbage patches, and new research suggests they'll continue growing for 'at least the next thousand years.'
After a yacht captain stumbled across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 1990s, scientists soon began finding similar patches of plast...
California has become an interesting test-case for both approaches to one plastic problem.Back in 2006, California passed a law that mandated a system for recycling plastic shopping bags. Today, supermarkets and other large stores have receptacles where plastic bags can be returned for recycling.
H...
New research suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant.
The work is not nearly enough to prove a link, but it adds to "the biological plausibility" that...
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will study a remote island used as an airstrip in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands that is often littered with plastic debris, the first step in a process that could eventually place it on the list of the country’s most hazardous sites.
In a let...
There's more plastic floating around the ocean than any other type of marine debris—that we know. What's harder to figure out is just how much is out there. A recent survey of marine plastic debris found something surprising: Nearly 99% of it was missing.
"We were expecting values in excess of one ...
When did everything become Plastic?
When I was a kid, we collected shells on the beach, not plastic trash. There wasn't enough disposable plastic in those days for plastics to collect on the beaches. Plastic bags came into heavy use in American grocery stores when I was in high school in the late '...
We use plastics in our everyday life to put our things in when we only need something completely temporary. It is also because we would like to be able to know how to properly dispose these things because these can be considered harmful to the environment. It is really something that you need to con...
Very exciting news for Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles City Council voted on Tuesday, June 18 to approve a ban on single-use plastic shopping bags. The Council voted 11 to 1 in favor of the ordinance, and a final vote is scheduled for next week. Last year, the Council voted 13 to 1 to move f...
