Plastic

As useful as plastics are in our everyday life, they’re difficult to recycle, with most ending up in landfill or the environment. Now, researchers in Japan have used a novel catalyst to recycle a common plastic into useful products like fuel and wax.

A team has developed a process that turns waste plastic into an adhesive that's more valuable. The goal was to find ways to "upcycle" plastics by putting them to new uses while preserving the properties that made them attractive in the first place.

In an effort to better understand how microplastics are absorbed by organisms in aquatic environments, scientists have carried out a study that shows how a coating of biomolecules can act as a "Trojan horse" that sneaks them into living cells.

Making plastic materials out of biomass offers a number of environmental benefits, but these bioplastics tend to underperform in a few key areas. Scientists may have found a solution to one such shortcoming; the inability to contain boiling liquids.

A new study has shed further light on the way plastic waste moves through the marine environment with the use of tagged plastic bottles. The bottles were dropped into the Ganges river and some ended up thousands of kilometers away.

The Futuro is a rare UFO-like home that has gained cult status since its construction back in the 1960s. If you've always wanted to live in a house that looks like something from The Jetsons, you may be in luck as a model has come up for sale.

As part of its mission to tackle plastic pollution in the marine environment, The Ocean Cleanup project plans to sell goods made from the waste it recovers to fund its ongoing operations, and has just unveiled its very first product.

In order to keep water from evaporating from the soil, farmers often cover the ground around their crop plants with sheets of polyethylene plastic. There could soon be a more eco-friendly alternative, though, in the form of soybean oil-coated sand.

Laundry cycles see our clothes shed huge amounts of microplastic fibers into the wastewater and scientists have now made an effort to quantify this, estimating that millions of metric tonnes of synthetic fibers have entered waterbodies since 1950.

What kind of threat can tiny plastic fragments pose to the health of living organisms? Scientists have turned to human tissue for answers, and discovered evidence of plastic fragments in every single sample they studied.

A new study has cast doubt over one method of cleaning up ocean plastics in floating trash-collection barriers, finding that these devices are unlikely to put a dent in the overall problem, even if left to run well into next century.

A new study mapping the movement of plastic waste has projected that 1.3 billion tonnes of it will be dumped on land and in the oceans by 2040, unless some significant steps are taken to address the trend.