Your article (Plastic plague: tiny particles can reach anywhere on the planet, say scientists, 16 April) says that “about 335m tonnes of plastic is produced each year, and while it degrades extremely slowly it can be broken into smaller and smaller pieces”. It adds that these pieces are now being blown around the world by […]

Plastic ring carriers and shrink wrap will be removed from multipacks of all Diageo beer products, including Guinness and Harp. The maker of Guinness has announced it is ditching plastic beer packaging in favour of recyclable and biodegradable cardboard. Plastic ring carriers and shrink wrap will be removed from multipacks of all Diageo beer products […]

Permafrost samples suggest Arctic is 2 C warmer than previous record highs thousands of years ago New research suggests Canada’s Arctic is the warmest it has been in 10,000 years — and the temperatures are still climbing. The study was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications. Researchers studied permafrost samples in the Yukon […]

No one is coming to save us. Mass civil disobedience is essential to force a political response Had we put as much effort into preventing environmental catastrophe as we’ve spent on making excuses for inaction, we would have solved it by now. Everywhere I look, I see people engaged in furious attempts to fend off […]

ancy stepping out of your bed onto the ocean floor? European carpet company Sedna can help to make that happen. Using recycled fishing nets collected from the sea bed, Sedna makes five different carpet ranges: Varuna, Kai, Moana, Mazu, and Yara. Each of the mythology and ocean-inspired ranges is made from Econyl yarn, spun from […]

Bioplastics could potentially be worse for the environment than conventional plastics, according to recycling expert Arthur Huang. Switching to plastic made from plants instead of fossil fuels would require vast amounts of farmland, Huang said. This could could cause environmental problems and deprive humans of food. Huang, founder and CEO of circular-economy engineering company Miniwiz, […]

Study creates blueprint to safeguard marine life and enable ocean recovery Academics have mapped out a network of sanctuaries they say are required to save the world’s oceans, protect wildlife and fight climate breakdown. The study, ahead of a historic vote at the UN, sets out the first detailed plan of how countries can protect […]

Plastics are excellent materials: extremely versatile and almost eternally durable. But this is also exactly the problem, because after only about 100 years of producing plastics, plastic particles are now found everywhere — in groundwater, in the oceans, in the air, and in the food chain. Around 50 million tonnes of the industrially important polymer […]

The United States—and the world—is facing a plastics crisis. Experts predict that if we continue using plastics at the current rate without proper disposal, there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. The problem has only gotten worse after China stopped accepting contaminated recycling last year. The United States used to […]

An unanswered question about Westeros’s past could be the key to really understanding the metaphor everyone assumes the HBO epic is founded upon. I hope that someday I find out what happened to Valyria. There are a lot of other lingering mysteries left in Game of Thrones, the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A […]