Category Archives: Plastics

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé named top plastic polluters for third year in a row

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Companies accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, with Coca-Cola ranked No 1 for most littered products

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé have been accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, after being named the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row.

Coca-Cola was ranked the world’s No 1 plastic polluter by Break Free From Plastic in its annual audit, after its beverage bottles were the most frequently found discarded on beaches, rivers, parks and other litter sites in 51 of 55 nations surveyed. Last year it was the most frequently littered bottle in 37 countries, out of 51 surveyed.

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Plastic in paradise: Goldman prize winner’s fight to protect Bahamas

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Kristal Ambrose had to beat prejudices about class and race to change mindsets on the islands

When the latest Goldman prize winner, Kristal Ambrose, began campaigning against plastic waste in the Bahamas, one of the first obstacles she had to overcome was prejudice about class and race.

“You have been around white people too long. We always use plastic bags,” she recalls being told by neighbours in Eleuthera, one of the 30 inhabited islands in the ocean state. “I had to challenge the mindset that only a certain class of people get to care about this stuff. I told them it is not just for tourists. It’s my island and I want to protect it.”

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The Indian school where students pay for lessons with plastic waste

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Villagers once burned the toxic waste as fuel, but a pioneering couple’s radical education model uses it much more creatively

Every morning, students in Assam’s Pamohi village go to school clutching a bag of plastic waste, in exchange for which they will get their day’s lessons.

Akshar School, founded by Mazin Mukhtar, 32, and his wife Parmita Sarma, 30, has turned its pupils into ecowarriors by waiving school fees and helping to stop local people burning used plastic.

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Microplastic pollution found near summit of Mount Everest

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Humans now known to have polluted Earth from deepest ocean to highest peak

Microplastic pollution has been discovered in snow close to the peak of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. With plastic debris revealed in 2018 at the deepest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, it is now clear that humanity’s litter has polluted the entire planet.

The tiny plastic fibres were found within a few hundred metres of the top of the 8,850-metre mountain, at a spot known as the balcony. Microplastics were found in all the snow samples collected from 11 locations on Everest, ranging from 5,300 metres to 8,440 metres high.

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UK to support plans for new global treaty to ‘turn tide’ on plastic pollution

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Lord Goldsmith says Britain, the second biggest per capita producer of plastic waste, could play leading role in tackling crisis

Britain has thrown its weight behind a new global agreement to tackle the plastic pollution crisis, which Lord Goldsmith said would go “far beyond” existing international agreements.

This week, the Guardian revealed there is growing support for such a treaty internationally, but that neither the UK nor the US, the world’s biggest per capita producers of plastic waste, had yet pledged their support.

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US and UK yet to show support for global treaty to tackle plastic pollution

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More than two-thirds of UN member states have declared they are open to a new agreement to stem the rising tide of plastic waste

Support is growing internationally for a new global treaty to tackle the plastic pollution crisis, it has emerged, though so far without the two biggest per capita waste producers – the US and the UK – which have yet to signal their participation.

A UN working group on marine litter and microplastics met at a virtual conference last week to discuss the issue. More than two-thirds of UN member states, including African, Baltic, Caribbean, Nordic and Pacific states, as well as the EU, have declared they are open to considering the option of a new agreement.

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Fish that eat microplastics take more risks and die younger, study shows

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Joint study conducted finds that fish fed a diet including plastic were more likely to be eaten themselves

Microplastics can alter the behaviour of fish, with those that ingest the pollutants likely to be bolder, more active and swim in risky areas where they die en masse, according to a new study.

The survival risk posed by microplastics is also exacerbated by degrading coral reefs, as dying corals make particularly younger fish more desperate to find nutrition and shelter, and to venture into waters where they are more likely to be taken by predators themselves.

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Doe your bit: Japan invents bags deer can eat after plastic-related deaths

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To keep animals safe from rubbish discarded by tourists, a bag has been devised made from milk cartons and rice bran

The famed deer that roam the city of Nara, in Japan, no longer face discomfort – or far worse – after local companies developed a safe alternative to the plastic packaging discarded by tourists that often ended up in the animals’ stomachs.

Last year several of the 1,300 deer that wander around the ancient capital’s central park were found dead after swallowing plastic bags and food wrappers, prompting calls for tourists not to leave their rubbish behind. One of the dead animals had swallowed more than 4kg of rubbish.

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More than 14m tonnes of plastic believed to be at the bottom of the ocean

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Thirty times more plastic on ocean floor than surface, analysis suggests, but more trapped on land than sea

At least 14m tonnes of plastic pieces less than 5mm wide are likely sitting at the bottom of the world’s oceans, according to an estimate based on new research.

Analysis of ocean sediments from as deep as 3km suggests there could be more than 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the world’s ocean than there is floating at the surface.

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‘War on plastic’ could strand oil industry’s £300bn investment

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Major oil firms plan to grow plastic supply to counter impact of shift against fossil fuels

The war on plastic waste could scupper the oil industry’s multi-billion dollar bet that the world will continue to need more fossil fuels to help make the petrochemicals used in plastics, according to a new report.

Major oil companies, including Saudi Aramco and Royal Dutch Shell, plan to spend about $400bn (£300bn) to help grow the supply of virgin plastics by a quarter over the next five years, to compensate for the impact of electric vehicles and clean energy technologies on demand for fossil fuels.

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The plastic we use unthinkingly every day is killing our planet – and slowly but surely killing us | Andrew Paris

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As researchers, we have been shocked to find the most remote depths of the Pacific Ocean polluted by our plastic. And it will outlive us all.

Another bottle. Yet another one. We are 200km from land, in the middle of the South Pacific, and this is the third bottle we’ve found already this morning.

Everywhere is plastic.

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Small crustacean can fragment microplastics in four days, study finds

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‘Completely unexpected’ finding is significant as harmful effects of plastic might increase as particle size decreases

Small crustaceans can fragment microplastics into pieces smaller than a cell within 96 hours, a study has shown.

Until now, plastic fragmentation has been largely attributed to slow physical processes such as sunlight and wave action, which can take years and even decades.

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‘Swim happy!’: family save bear found swimming with a plastic jar on its head – video

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A family were fishing on a lake in Wisconsin when they spotted a bear with a plastic jar stuck on its head. After several attempts at moving their boat next to the bear and removing the jar, they were finally able to free the animal. 'Never dreamt we would ever do this in our life time,' Tricia Hurt wrote on Facebook. 'Out on Marshmiller Lake yesterday with Brian Hurt and Brady Hurt when we spotted this poor bear. He made it to shore after all that'

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How do you deal with 9m tonnes of suffocating seaweed?

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Across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, scientists are developing alternative sustainable solutions to the golden tide of Sargassum

The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, first detected by Nasa observation satellites in 2011 and now known to be the world’s largest bloom of seaweed, stretches for 5,500 miles (8,850km) from the Gulf of Mexico to the western coast of Africa.

Millions of tonnes of floating Sargassum seaweed in coastal waters smother fragile seagrass habitats, suffocate coral reefs and harm fisheries. And once washed ashore on Mexican and Caribbean beaches, this foul-smelling, rotting seaweed goes on to devastate the tourist industry, prevent turtles from nesting and damage coastal ecosystems, while releasing hydrogen sulphide and other toxic gases as it decomposes.

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Plastic superhighway: the awful truth of our hidden ocean waste

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Solving the issue of waste in our seas turned out to be more complex than scrounging for bottles off the beach, Laura Trethewey found

We called the competition Who Found the Weirdest Thing? So far, the entries that day were a motorcycle helmet, a lithium battery covered with scary stickers asking that we return it to the military, and a toy dinosaur.

The dinosaur was warm from the sun and starting to degrade. The ocean had smoothed and worn down its edges. Rocks and sand had crosshatched its skin. It was missing a hind leg. On one side it was dark grey; the sun had bleached its opposite flank white.

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Malawi factories ordered to close after ignoring plastics ban

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Activists welcome move but say government is still dragging its feet over crackdown on waste in lakes and waterways

The Malawian government this week ordered the closure of factories belonging to two major plastic producers for flouting the country’s plastics ban.

The companies – OG plastics and City Plastics – were found to still be manufacturing thin plastics, often used to make plastic bags, despite a ruling last year that banned its production, import and use.

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Microplastic pollution in oceans vastly underestimated – study

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Particles may outnumber zooplankton, which underpin marine life and regulate climate

The abundance of microplastic pollution in the oceans is likely to have been vastly underestimated, according to research that suggests there are at least double the number of particles as previously thought.

Scientists trawled waters off the coasts of the UK and US and found many more particles using nets with a fine mesh size than when using coarser ones usually used to filter microplastics. The addition of these smaller particles to global estimates of surface microplastics increases the range from between 5tn and 50tn particles to 12tn-125tn particles, the scientists say.

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The end of plastic? New plant-based bottles will degrade in a year

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Carlsberg and Coca-Cola back pioneering project to make ‘all-plant’ drinks bottles

Beer and soft drinks could soon be sipped from “all-plant” bottles under new plans to turn sustainably grown crops into plastic in partnership with major beverage makers.

A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels.

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Microplastics discovered blowing ashore in sea breezes

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Finding could help solve mystery of where plastic goes after it leaks into the sea

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mismanaged waste could be blowing ashore on the ocean breeze every year, according to scientists who have discovered microplastics in sea spray.

The study, by researchers at the University of Strathclyde and the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées at the University of Toulouse, found tiny plastic fragments in sea spray, suggesting they are being ejected by the sea in bubbles. The findings, published in the journal Plos One, cast doubt on the assumption that once in the ocean, plastic stays put, as well as on the widespread belief in the restorative power of sea breeze.

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Microplastics found in greater quantities than ever before on seabed

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Currents act as conveyor belts that concentrate microplastics in hotspots, study suggests

Scientists have discovered microplastics in greater quantities than ever before on the seabed, and gathered clues as to how ocean currents and deep-sea circulation have carried them there.

Microplastics – tiny pieces of plastic less than 5mm in size – are likely to accumulate most densely on the ocean floor in areas that are also biodiversity hotspots, intensifying the damage they may do to marine ecosystems, according to the research.

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