Puget Sound microplastic pollution “everywhere we’ve surveyed for it”

By Tad Sooter 16 May 2018 BREMERTON (Kitsap Sun) – Walk any Puget Sound beach and you’re bound to find plastic garbage —  a soda bottle, a chunk of foam, maybe a dog’s lost chew toy. But that’s just the plastic pollution you can see. The results of a recent volunteer-powered research project suggest there […]

Bitcoin mining consumes as much energy as the country of Ireland

By Paris Martineau 16 May 2018 (The Outline) – In addition to being insufferable, Bitcoin is also absolutely terrible for the environment. According to a letter published today in the energy journal Joule by financial economist and blockchain specialist Alex de Vries, the Bitcoin network is consuming roughly 2.55 gigawatts annually, at the absolute minimum. […]

Recycling, once embraced by businesses and environmentalists, now under siege – “Recycling as we know it isn’t working”

By Bob Tita 13 May 2018 (The Wall Street Journal) – The U.S. recycling industry is breaking down. Prices for scrap paper and plastic have collapsed, leading local officials across the country to charge residents more to collect recyclables and send some to landfills. Used newspapers, cardboard boxes and plastic bottles are piling up at […]

Actors were paid to support Entergy’s power plant at New Orleans City Council meetings – “They paid us to sit through the meeting and clap every time someone said something against wind and solar power”

By Michael Isaac Stein 4 May 2018 (The Lens) – Last October, about 50 people in bright orange shirts filed into City Hall for a public hearing on Entergy’s request to build a $210 million power plant in eastern New Orleans. Their shirts read, “Clean Energy. Good Jobs. Reliable Power.” The purpose of the hearing […]

Single-use plastic has reached the world’s deepest ocean trench

18 April 2018 (UNEP) – A new article, Human footprint in the abyss: 30 year records of deep-sea plastic debris, reveals human activities are affecting the deepest part of the ocean, more than 1000km from the mainland.Plastic pollution is emerging as one of the most serious threats to ocean ecosystems. World leaders, scientists and communities […]

Trump White House quietly cancels NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System – “We really shoot ourselves in the foot if we let other people develop the technology”

By Paul Voosen 9 May 2018 (Science) – You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a […]

WHO report: 90 per cent of world population breathes polluted air

2 May 2018 (UN News) – In a call for Member States to take action urgently, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, warned that air pollution “threatens us all, but the poorest and most marginalized people bear the brunt of the burden.”According to WHO’s ambient air quality database, despite some improvements, pollution levels […]

EPA chief Pruitt overrules staff, gives Wisconsin’s Walker, Foxconn big break on smog

By Michael Hawthorne 2 May 2018 (Chicago Tribune) – The Trump administration on Tuesday exempted most of southeast Wisconsin from the latest federal limits on lung-damaging smog pollution, delivering a political victory to Gov. Scott Walker as he makes a new Foxconn Technology Group factory the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.By dramatically reducing the size […]

Photo gallery: The uninhabited island that’s home to 37 million pieces of trash

By Melia Robinson 22 April 2018 (Busniess Insider) – A small island smack in the middle of the South Pacific has never been inhabited by people — and yet, its white sand beaches are home to more than 37 million pieces of junk.Every day on Henderson Island — one of the most remote places on […]

Researchers measure record concentration of microplastic in Arctic sea ice – “No one can say for certain how harmful these tiny plastic particles are for marine life, or ultimately also for human beings”

24 April 2018 (AWI) – Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have recently found higher amounts of microplastic in arctic sea ice than ever before. However, the majority of particles were microscopically small. The ice samples from five regions throughout the Arctic Ocean contained up to 12,000 […]

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