Whether we can recycle plastic or not depends on what it’s made of (because there are many different types of plastic), if it’s sufficiently clean and if enough people will buy recycled products.
Australia’s Soft Plastics Taskforce has been under pressure to fill the vacuum left by the demise of REDcycle. But this time the small trial announced for Melbourne has the potential to succeed.
United Nations efforts to advance a global treaty on plastic pollution echo past multilateral agreements that tackled ozone layer depletion and acid rain.
A team of scientists has developed a method for creating a new class of plastic materials that are potentially more recyclable than single-use plastics.
As a sustainability researcher, I know how quickly we could make big changes to reduce plastic pollution. Here’s what we – both individually and globally – should be doing more of, and what to avoid.
Promoting small actions, such as reducing plastic use, can be a useful entry point for other actions around climate change. It’s an example of ‘positive spillover behaviour’.
The recovery rate from construction and demolition waste has been rising steadily in Australia. However, the use of recycled materials is still not the norm across the construction industry.
Apartments have lower waste recycling rates than houses, which means the growing numbers of apartment dwellers could add to Australia’s waste management crisis. But there are solutions to the problem.
Representatives of 175 countries voted to start developing a global treaty to reduce plastic waste. Treaties addressing mercury, long-range air pollution and ozone depletion offer some lessons.
An estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the ocean each year – equivalent to dumping in a garbage truckload of it every minute. A new report calls on the US to help stem the deluge.
After soil, water and food, microplastics have now entered the atmosphere, where they influence the climate system and may even change atmospheric chemistry.