Today the UN celebrates Oceans Day and we have a proposition for you: leave your plastic life behind. The introduction of plastics in the 1950’s was celebrated as a huge advance, with TIME Magazine enthusiastically…
Recent plans to clean plastics from the five massive ocean garbage patches could do more damage to the environment than leaving the plastic right where it is. There is no doubt that the focus on cleaning…
A reported 10 billion drink containers are thrown away in Australia every year. Many of these are recycled, but many end up in landfill, on roadsides and in waterways. The danger posed to wildlife by plastic…
Seabirds: the poster children for ocean health. Fishers use them to identify fishing hot spots. Environmental and marine scientists use them as indicators of the condition of the ocean environment due…
Each year around 640,000 tonnes of fishing gear is lost or thrown overboard by the fisheries around the world. These “ghostnets” drift through the oceans and can continue fishing for many years. They kill…
For the past 30 years, South Australians have lived in a state with a “container deposit scheme”. This means on small bottles or cans of water, soft drink, juice or alcohol, consumers pay a 10c deposit…
Between 30 million and 50 million plastic bags enter the environment as litter in Australia each year. These environmentally damaging bags - produced to be used once and then thrown away - are a symbol…
Bisphenol A (BPA) - a chemical used in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics and some epoxy resins – has been in the news quite a bit lately. Headline-grabbing news items have been breathlessly reporting…
Two Australian chemists have won the 2011 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science for the invention of “smart plastic” technology, a technique that revolutionised the way paints, contact lenses, solar cells…
From today, plastic bags are banned in the NT. The ACT will follow suit in November: in 2009 the ACT abandoned its 14-year old “No Waste by 2010” strategy and replaced it with a ban on plastic shopping…