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The petrochemical industry produces more than 88 million tons of polyethylene, making it the most common plastic in the world. Scientists have found a new way to upcycle it, according to a study published in Science on Thursday. It could help deal with the growing plastic pollution crisis. Polyethylene comes in several different forms and is used in everything from plastic bags and food packaging to electrical insulation and industrial piping. Since it’s so common and our recycling system is so broken, we end up throwing away a shitload of the stuff. It can end up in landfills or the...

When I grew up, and for most of my life after that, at a grocery store, the clerk would ring up my groceries and put them in a useful paper or plastic bag emblazoned with the store’s motto. I’d take the bag home and use it again. If it was paper, I used it for book covers, storing annual tax-relevant documents, wrapping packages destined for UPS, and holding recycling. If it was plastic, I used it for bathroom garbage bags, packing school lunches, padding breakables for shipping, etc.  All that changed when California decided to "ban the bag." The reason given...

The first-ever highway partially made of reclaimed plastic was inaugurated in Mexico on Nov. 13. The 2.5-mile stretch of highway in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico used 1.7 tons of recycled plastic, or the equivalent of 425,000 plastic packaging units, according to Dow Plastics Technology Mexico. "The advantage of using recycled plastic products is that they can be used on all types of highways, not only in high-performance products, which can extend the life span of any paved road," Paula Sans, Dow Mexico's director of packaging and specialty plastics, said in a release. The newly paved stretch of...

When China announced in January 2018 that it would stop taking Australia's recyclable waste it was a wake-up call for the industry. Now Dr Humphreys sees the mountains of stockpiled plastic as a wasted resource — one he says could be used instead as fuel or remade into new plastic. His Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor (Cat-HTR) does just that through a form of chemical recycling that changes the plastics at a molecular level using hot water at a high pressure to turn them back into oil. "What we're doing is we're simply taking those materials and converting them back to the...

Study explores removal mechanisms, microbial impacts and lifetimes of select microplastics on the ocean surface Florida Atlantic University 216184_web A schematic figure of plastic photo-dissolution and plastic dissolved organic carbon (DOC) biodegradation. Credit: Lee Ann DeLeo Trillions of plastic fragments are afloat at sea, which cause large “garbage patches” to form in rotating ocean currents called subtropical gyres. As a result, impacts on ocean life are increasing and affecting organisms from large mammals to bacteria at the base of the ocean food web. Despite this immense accumulation of plastics at sea, it only accounts for 1 to 2 percent of...

Have you ever seen the 1967 movie, “The Graduate,” where actor Dustin Hoffman, in the role of a young graduate, gets sage advice as to what field he should get into?  "Plastics," young man, is the future was the recommendation.  But where do plastics originate?  Plastics are characterized as polymers.  Polymers are long-chained monomers.  Some examples of monomers are ethylene and propylene.  When these monomers are polymerized they become polyethylene and polypropylene.  From where do these monomers originate?  They are products from oil and gas production. The current crop of Democratic Party presidential wannabees have drunk the Green New Deal (GND) Kool-Aid.  Stop...

As we hit exactly one year mark until the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the countdown has begun—and with that, the unveiling of the medals that the best athletes in the world will take home next summer. The medals boast the classic designs that fans see every four years as stipulated by the Interantional Olympic Committee, according to Tokyo 2020: Nike, the Greek goddess of victory; the name of the host city; and the five Olympic rings. What makes these medals special to Japan, though, is the public input and assistance that went into their creation. For...

The Trudeau government will ban single-use plastics as early as 2021, CBC News has learned from a government source. Plastic straws, cotton swabs, drink stirrers, plates, cutlery and balloon sticks are just some of the single-use plastics that will be banned in Canada, according to the source. This is part of a larger strategy to tackle the plastic pollution problem that the government is expected to announce Monday.

Scientists thought it was bad, but it's even worse than they imagined. Now it's a potential catastrophe that will affect all our lives — unless we take action now. Otherwise, life on Earth will be irreparably harmed. I'm not talking about global warming. I'm talking about global warming part II: microplastics! Today, Fox News reported the release of a "groundbreaking study" of Monterey Bay by the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. A Scripps scientist summarized the findings: "Everywhere we looked and in every animal we looked, we found microplastics!" The accompanying film was oddly irrelevant. It showed ocean waters filled with trash...

Department of Energy's scientists announced this week that they have designed a plastic that can be recycled over and over again. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in Nature Chemistry that they had designed new plastic, called polydiketoenamine or PDK, that could be disassembled down to the molecular level and reassembled into different shapes, textures or colors multiple times. Modern-day plastics are reinforced with chemicals to make them more resilient and often end up making the material more difficult to fully recycle. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... Even the most recyclable plastic is only being...

After the athletes cross the finish and excitement of any marathon has died down, what’s left is an aftermath of waste. Bottles and cups litter the course, raising questions about the environmental impact of the bottles and cups used for hydration and left tossed to the side. This year, London Marathon officials are implementing measures to cut down on this waste—something they hope to expand upon in the future. They have a goal of zero waste by 2020, so a lot of changes will be made. And it will start with runners eating their water bottles. Yep, eating their water...

For more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from? The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion. From the stray...

New sustainable biopolymer technology may one day free the world of its worst pollutant Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University Summary: A new Tel Aviv University study describes a process to make bioplastic polymers that don't require land or fresh water — resources that are scarce in much of the world. The resulting material is biodegradable, produces zero toxic waste and recycles into organic waste. FULL STORY: The invention was the fruit of a multidisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Alexander Golberg of TAU's Porter School of Environmental and Earth Sciences and Prof. Michael Gozin of TAU's School of Chemistry....

“One Word: Plastics.” Yes, just 51 years after the 1967 film “The Graduate”, “plastics” just may be the future of environmental scares, eclipsing the man-made climate scare. But this “plastics crisis” attempts to make people “feel guilty and worried about a ‘crisis’ which isn’t actually real,” according to a blockbuster new report by a team of international scientists. There is evidence that some climate activists are seeking to elevate the plastic ‘crisis’ above the climate ‘crisis.’ Former Vice President Al Gore’s producer of his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” — Hollywood eco-activist Laurie David — has been test-marketing the plastic...

Open a bag of frozen shrimp from Walmart. Toss the packaging in the trash. Two routine tasks, but they represent final commercial destinations for ethane molecules freed from Texas shale, a journey that has not only taken them hundreds of miles to Houston’s massive petrochemical complex, but also around the world and back again in the carefully choreographed dance of global supply chains. Each day, hundreds of trucks and rail cars move pellets of ethane-derived polyethylene from petrochemical plants, such as Exxon Mobil's in Mont Belvieu, to the Port of Houston. There, the pellets are loaded by the ton onto...

Plastic straws may soon be contraband in Hallandale Beach. All five commissioners gave initial approval to a citywide ban shortly after midnight Thursday.

Want to sip a refreshing beverage this summer? If environmental zealots and sycophants get their way, you won’t be allowed to sip it through a plastic straw. Actress Nina Nelson and other celebrities made a video claiming that plastic straws kill sea life: “In the USA alone, over 500 million straws are being used every single day, most of which are going into our oceans.” “I will stop sucking,” vowed the celebrities. In obedient response, Seattle banned plastic straws, and other places plan to follow. Starbucks, Hyatt and Hilton are all abandoning straws. Katy Tang, of San Francisco’s Board of...

A Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant's new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Right now, Starbucks patrons are topping most of their cold drinks with either 3.23 grams or 3.55 grams of plastic product, depending on whether they pair their lid with a small or large straw. The new nitro lids meanwhile weigh either 3.55 or 4.11 grams, depending again on lid size. (I got these results by measuring Starbucks' plastic straws and lids on two seperate scales, both of which gave me the same results.) This means customers are at best breaking...

Late April saw the entrance of a heavyweight amid the handful of much smaller companies staking out the new territory of industrial additive manufacturing. Jabil, a $19-billion global enterprise with around 180,000 employees and over 100 facilities in 29 countries, announced the launch of the Jabil Additive Manufacturing Network as a “digital thread” to connect its additive manufacturing operations around the world, including those at its subsidiaries Nypro and Jabil Green Point, while aligning with Jabil’s software and services for supply-chain management, product development, and engineering/design. Jabil, which operates 15,000 CNC mills along with thousands of injection machines and hundreds...

The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug. The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at...