I used plastic food containers for most of my life — they’re affordable and accessible at most of the grocery stores I frequent. But, in recent years I’ve learned more about the potential dangers ...

UC Santa Barbara researchers and their colleagues estimate that without intervention, plastic pollution is on track to double by 2050. But in a study published in the journal Science, these same ...

Plastic is cheap to make and shockingly profitable. It’s everywhere. And we’re all paying the price. On a Saturday last summer, I kayaked up a Connecticut river from the coast, buoyed by the rising ...

Two decades ago, Germany set up a simple scheme to reduce plastic waste. When people buy drinks in a disposable plastic bottle, they pay a small extra fee and get that back by depositing the used ...

WUHAN, CHINA - OCTOBER 29: (CHINA OUT) A worker sorts used plastic bottles at a plastics recycling mill which is ceasing production as the global financial crisis starts to bite in China's recycling ...

More than 400 million metric tons of plastic is produced annually, and only a small fraction is recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, or leaks into the natural environment, which is impacting ...

The world’s oceans are polluted by a “plastic smog” made up of an estimated 171 trillion plastic particles that if gathered would weigh around 2.3 million tons, according to a new study. A team of ...

A 2024 study by the French NGO Agir pour l’Environnement found that repeatedly opening and closing plastic soda bottles significantly increased the number of microplastic particles in the beverages.