News

You’ve heard about sweeping problems under the rug. Well, how about converting the problem into a broom instead? One Cambodian entrepreneur is doing just that. In a mission to help tackle plastic pollution in his country’s capital city of Phnom Penh, 41-year-old Has Kea has started an upcycling business. In 11 months, his workers turned about 44 tons of plastic bottles into heavy-duty brooms.

The Supreme Court appears ready to limit the Biden administration’s ability to protect the environment once again. This time, several justices expressed skepticism of a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency meant to reduce harmful cross-state air pollution, according to the New York Times’s Adam Liptak. A decision is expected by June.

We breathe, eat and drink tiny particles of plastic. But are these minuscule specks in the body harmless, dangerous or somewhere in between? A small study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine raises more questions than it answers about how these bits — microplastics and the smaller nanoplastics — might affect the heart.

Plastic bills stall, but pollution persists on barrier island in Biscayne Bay.

Researchers from the Ocean Conservancy and the University of Toronto analyzed more than a dozen different types of proteins including seafood, pork, chicken, beef, and tofu. They found microplastics in nearly 90% of the samples they tested and estimated that the average American adult may consume at least 11,000 pieces of microplastics each year.

Over the past several years, U.S. cities and states have passed hundreds of policies restricting the sale and distribution of single-use plastic bags. A new report says these laws have largely succeeded in their goal of reducing plastic bag use.

Single-use plastic bag bans have successfully reduced plastic bag use and associated litter and pollution, a new study has found. Bans in five US states and cities with a combined population of around 12 million people have cut single-use plastic bag consumption by about 6 billion bags per year, according to the research.

Think single-use water bottles are wasteful? Brace yourself — they even exist for dogs. A Reddit user shared a short video of the product, showing water — yes, just water — packaged in disposable plastic bowls. The bowl, for sale at Target, features a label that reads: “[Ready to drink] bowled water for pets. Simply peel off the lid and serve your pet clean water anytime, anywhere.”

Scientists from Columbia University are raising alarm bells about the amount of small flecks of plastic — known as nanoplastics — in bottled drinking water. Their research, which was published on Jan. 8 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that three popular plastic water bottle brands (which went unnamed in the research) had 10 to 100 times greater amounts of nanoplastics than previously estimated.