In a landfill, a plastic bottle can take more than a thousand years to break down. But a new process can transform polyethylene plastic in days, using bacteria to eat the waste and then turn it into a ...

Plastic is an essential material in the modern world, but it's also environmentally costly to produce and a major pollutant. A material called pyridinedicarboxylic acid, or PDCA, could help address at ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. One of the primary reasons plastic has become such a relied-upon material in our lives is because of how cheap it is to make, and ...

Polystyrene is made from styrene building blocks and is the most widely used plastic in terms of volume, for example in packaging. Unlike PET, which can now be produced and recycled using ...

Plastic pollution is one of the most defining environmental challenges of our time. Despite efforts to recycle or responsibly dispose of plastic, vast garbage patches in the oceans continue to grow, ...

At the urging of the plastics industry, the USDA is considering allowing materials such as bioplastic cups, coffee pods and compostable plastic bags into the organic compost waste stream. Farmers and ...

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In recent years, at least a half-dozen countries have embraced plastics made with an additive intended to break them down into carbon dioxide, water and harmless organic ...

Plastics make up approximately 5–12 % of global waste generation, constituting around 20–30 % of waste by weight. Alarmingly, about 60 % of plastics end up as plastic waste (PW) in the environment. 2 ...

It’s hard to imagine a time before traditional plastics became commonplace for many single-use food packaging and food-contact applications. It’s even harder to imagine a time without them using ...

Plastic is pretty awful. Despite being in many reusable containers, or just in disposable containers like water bottles, plastic as a material is one of the worst for the environment. In fact, we're ...