Also this week: We’re getting ready to live without plastic packaging. How hard could it be? Hi, everybody! As the world heats up, we’re seeing the effects in the oceans, which have absorbed about 90 percent of the heat trapped by excess greenhouse gases since midcentury. Our colleague Kendra Pierre-Louis has written two warm-ocean articles […]

Hawaii’s coral reefs are dying, and researchers are a few steps closer to figuring out just how much environmental changes and human interaction affect the ocean’s coral reefs. Researchers from the Ocean Tipping Points project published a new study Thursday after analyzing 10 years of data that examined how sedimentation, development and fishing affect coral reefs in […]

President Moon hopes collaboration with China will improve air quality in the country. South Korean President Moon Jae-in has proposed a joint project with China to use artificial rain in order to reduce air pollution in Seoul. Pollution levels across the Korean Peninsula have soared in recent years. Over the past five days, fine dust […]

World Wide Fund for Nature’s report says since the year 2000, the world has used more plastics than in all the years before. Bags, bottles, straws and plates – about half of the plastic used every day is used only once and then thrown away. This disposal after a single use is causing widespread damage […]

Americans are consuming more and more stuff. Now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics, they’re ending up in the trash. After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities, […]

In Philadelphia, people like to recycle. Together, all 1.6 million of us generate about 400 tons of recyclable material each day. But since last fall, roughly half of the bottles and cans my neighbors and I have placed dutifully curbside in our blue bins every week haven’t made their way to a sorting facility. They’ve […]

Some environmental advocates would like to add another item to Southwest Florida’s things-to-worry-about list: sunscreen. Actually, they’re specifically targeting octinoxate and oxybenzone, two common ingredients in many sun-blocking products. They’ve been blamed for harming the Keys’ cherished coral reef, the only one in the continental United States, and may also accumulate in plankton, the tiny […]

The tourism industry in Hawaii is anticipating a boost from a stretch of Japanese holidays known as “Golden Week” that has been extended this year. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports the four national holidays typically held over seven days are a popular time for Japanese tourists to visit Hawaii. This year the holiday period has been […]

Try going a day without it. I bet you’ll say you can’t, but I’m going to challenge you anyway. Because, what if I told you that just by changing one thing in your life, you could save thousands, perhaps millions of lives? Would you do it? I hope so. The change I’m referring to is […]

The city of Los Angeles’ Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant has long symbolized the absurdity of water policy in the American West. Although the plant generates a volume of water equal to the seventh largest river in the United States, until recently, the city of Los Angeles dumped every drop into the Pacific Ocean. Nonsensically, a […]