Good news from Antarctica: researchers have examined emperor penguins and found no evidence of microplastics in their stomachs. The study, conducted by the University of Basel and the Alfred-Wegener Institute, is an important assessment of environmental pollution at the South Pole.
Read the full story here: https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/Emperor-Penguins-Still-Free-of-Microplastics.html
via The Guardian
Microplastic contamination has been reported in beef and pork for the first time, as well as in the blood of cows and pigs on farms.
Scientists at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) in the Netherlands found the particles in three-quarters of meat and milk products tested and every blood sample in their pilot study.
Read the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/08/microplastics-detected-in-meat-milk-and-blood-of-farm-animals
via Phys.org
What seems like a win-win for a pair of pressing environmental problems describes a Rice University lab’s newly discovered chemical technique to turn waste plastic into an effective carbon dioxide (CO2) sorbent for industry.
Rice chemist James Tour and co-lead authors Rice alumnus Wala Algozeeb, graduate student Paul Savas and postdoctoral researcher Zhe Yuan reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano that heating plastic waste in the presence of potassium acetate produced particles with nanometer-scale pores that trap carbon dioxide molecules.
Read the full story here: https://phys.org/news/2022-04-lab-hard-to-process-plastic-carbon-capture-master.html
The push for a global coherent strategy to tackle ocean plastic pollution is gaining momentum amidst failure by some of the world’s biggest polluters to endorse a United Nations-led process to enact a treaty.
Following shortly after World Ocean Day, environmentalists, conservationists and some countries have renewed calls for a global treaty on plastic pollution. Their hope is that a treaty could help contain the growing menace of plastic waste, which is clogging oceans and having adverse impacts on the environment, marine life, human health and economic activity.
Read the full story here: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/ngos-and-governments-push-for-world-treaty-on-plastic-waste
via Chemistry World
Scientists in the UK have genetically engineered Escherichia coli to transform plastic waste into vanillin. ‘Instead of simply recycling plastic waste into more plastic, what our system demonstrates for the first time is that you can use plastic as a feedstock for microbial cells and transform it into something with higher value and more industrial utility,’ says Stephen Wallace from the University of Edinburgh. The biotransformation ‘isn’t just replacing a current chemical process, it’s actually achieving something that can’t be done using modern synthetic methods.’
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the most widely used types of plastic. Most existing recycling technologies degrade PET into its substituent monomers, ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid, then repurpose them in second-generation plastic materials. Wallace and Joanna Sadler, also at the University of Edinburgh, want to upcycle these monomers into alternative products.
Read the full story here: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/genetically-engineered-microbes-convert-waste-plastic-into-vanillin/4013767.article
via The Denver Channel
We know pollution is a problem, and we know waste ends up in our waterways. But it’s hard to quantify exactly how much waste and where it’s coming from. A new, first-of-its-kind data tool aims to change that by letting us see how much plastic is being dumped, and what’s being done about it.
“A lot of the waste is generated on land and ultimately can end up in the oceans being brought through rain and wind and rivers and other forms of direct dumping that produces between 19 and 23 million metric tons of plastic waste entering our oceans and lakes and rivers every single year,” said Molly Morse, project scientist at UC Santa Barabara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative.
Read the full story here: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/new-tool-highlights-the-worlds-ocean-pollution-problem
via Forbes
The covid pandemic increased the amount of plastic used globally in our efforts to try to keep Covid-19 from spreading.
Plastic gloves, plastic bags instead of canvas shopping bags, plastic in face mask fibers, plastic face shields and even those syringes the medical professionals use to vaccinate us all. Plastic water bottles, more takeout food in Styrofoam containers, more plastic garbage bags as we cleaned more and took out the garbage more often, and don’t forget all that bubble wrap for all those online orders….Think about what plastic you used over the past 15 months, for example. Now multiply that times 320 million Americans or 7+ billion people worldwide.
Read the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanmichelson2/2021/06/09/national-oceans-day-and-the-plastic-pandemic-what-will-you-do/
via JDSupra
On April 13, 2021, Montana State University (MSU) researchers from its Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering published an article entitled “Biomineralization of Plastic Waste to Improve the Strength of Plastic-Reinforced Cement Mortar.” The study evaluates calcium carbonate biomineralization techniques applied to coat plastic waste and improve the compressive strength of plastic-reinforced mortar (PRM), a type of plastic-reinforced cementitious material (PRC).
Read the full sotry here: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/msu-researchers-publish-study-on-8199658/
via DOGO News
The invention of plastic has been a double-edged sword for humanity. While the cheap, versatile material has made life convenient, it is virtually indestructible and takes centuries to decompose. Since avoiding plastic is impossible, companies worldwide are coming up with innovative ways to repurpose the millions of tons of polymer waste that end up in our landfills annually. Among the latest is California-based TechniSoil Industrial, which has devised an ingenious way to reuse plastic waste to repave roads.
Road resurfacing is an expensive undertaking that starts with using special equipment to extract and grind the topmost 3-to-6 inches of asphalt. Since the recycled material is not strong enough to use on its own, half of it is discarded and replaced with fresh hot asphalt. The combined product is mixed with bitumen — a sludge-like petroleum residue that acts as a binding agent — and relaid on the surface. Repaving a single lane mile requires 42 truckloads of new material and hauling out a similar amount of unusable waste.
Read the full story here: https://www.dogonews.com/2021/1/29/california-company-hopes-to-pave-the-worlds-roads-with-recycled-plastic
via Fox29.com
Oceana analyzed e-commerce and packaging market data as well as a recent scientific report, published in Science about predicted growth in plastic waste and found that Amazon has a large and rapidly growing plastic pollution footprint.
“Amazon has a plastic problem,” Oceana wrote in the report released on Dec. 15. “Oceana estimates that in 2019, up to 22.44 million pounds of Amazon’s plastic packaging has ended up in the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems as pollution. This amount is roughly equivalent to a delivery van’s worth of plastic being dumped into major rivers, lakes, and the oceans every 70 minutes.”
Read the full story here: https://www.fox29.com/news/oceana-report-says-amazon-has-a-plastic-problem-pollutes-oceans-with-22-million-pounds-of-plastics-per-year
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