One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

Getting microbes to eat plastic is a frequently touted solution to our growing waste problem, but making the approach practical is tricky. A new technique that impregnates plastic with the spores of ...

Collaboration is key to making plastic use greener as soon as possible. Our experience yields tips on how to set up industry–academic partnerships. Collin P. Ward is an associate scientist in ...

At Austin Resource Recovery in Texas, styrofoam is densified so it can be recycled. While hot, the gooey substance looks like octopus arms squeezing out of a machine. “From here we take these, and we ...

Moving towards a more sustainable, eco-friendly lifestyle is something that's important to me, as I know it is for a lot of people. One way I've been trying to achieve this goal is by cutting way back ...

On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic that result when larger pieces are broken down. And they are everywhere. They’re in our oceans and mountains; they ...

America has long had a plastic problem. It's an urgent question — what do we do with the 40 million tons of plastic waste we produce annually? One year of plastic waste is roughly enough to smother ...

This article originally appeared on ProPublica. Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup. It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first ...