By Christopher Thompson Single-use plastic is clogging oceans and landfills. The industry that makes it has waged a decades-long campaign to keep it on the market.New York’s Suffolk County had a trash problem. Facing brimming landfills and public pressure, legislators took a first-in-the-nation step: They banned plastic bags. But what the county saw as part […]

By Christopher Thompson Production must end now, says first ever estimate of plastic’s cradle-to-grave impact The proliferation of single-use plastic around the world is accelerating climate change and should be urgently halted, a report warns. Plastic production is expanding worldwide, fuelled in part by the fracking boom in the US. The report says plastic contributes […]

By Ryan Johnson One of the challenges with plastics is that even those marketed as recyclables are not used again. Only less than a third of recyclable plastic is repurposed after the recycling process, and the rest are either disposed of as non-recyclable waste or incinerated. A new breakthrough, however, offers hope to this problem. […]

By Christopher Thompson Sure, we all know there’s always more fish in the sea. But there’s also plenty more plastic garbage. Since 1957, scientific gear used to measure plankton in the north Atlantic Ocean has been clogged by plastic trash some 669 times. Almost all of those snarls have occurred since the late 1990s, showcasing […]

By Christopher Thompson It’s the first state to prohibit restaurants, caterers, coffee shops and grocery stores from using the to-go foam containers because they cannot be recycled locally. Democratic governor, Janet Mills signed the bill on Tuesday and the law will come into full effect in 2021. Styrofoam (or polystyrene) is a form of plastic […]

By Ryan Johnson The waters of the Gulf of Mexico are warm and welcoming. Even during the dead of winter, Floridians enjoy higher temperatures swimming than New Yorkers on land in spring. We share the area with a marvelous array of wildlife, including dolphins—long, strong sleek creatures who speed by in pods, their jutting fins, […]

In a Comment in this issue of The Lancet Planetary Health, Jessica Bogard and colleagues discuss the role of fish and seafood in future sustainable diets. They highlight some of the benefits of consuming seafood as a major source of dietary protein, as well as the challenges involved in measuring its true sustainability. The UN […]

In a major breakthrough, instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) — used to survey plankton population since 1931 — have accidentally recorded the history of plastic in oceans. CPRs are torpedo-like devices that have been in use since 1931 to survey plankton populations. In recent years CPRs have been constantly tormented by large fishing […]

Handwritten journals from 50s show how plastic problem has grown to global emergency A trove of data showing when the Atlantic began choking with plastic has been uncovered in the handwritten logbooks of a little-known but doggedly persistent plankton study dating back to the middle of the last century. From fishing twine found in the […]

Plastic floating in the sea is costing human society “hundreds if not thousands of billions of dollars” every year, including loss of tourism revenue and reduced productivity. The “perceived risk” of the contamination of seafood with microplastic may also be detrimental to the seafood industry, whilst the presence of marine litter can impact physical and […]