Why Oak Island is looking 18 miles off its coast for sand to nourish its eroded beach – Wilmington StarNews Online
Faced with an eroding beach, Oak Island wants to pump fresh sand onto its oceanfront. But finding a viable sand source might mean going a long way offshore…
Under pressure from activist investors, big brands agree to report and reduce plastics use – Grist Magazine
Shareholder advocacy groups have already won plastics-related concessions from companies including Disney, Hormel, and Choice Hotels…Globally, two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic enter the ocean every minute, and plastics and petrochemical companies are planning to make even more of the material over the coming decades…
Extreme Summer Heat Threatens Coral Replanting Effort – Scientific American
A marine heat wave last year undercut efforts to regrow coral reefs off Florida’s coast. Conservationists are worried this year could be problematic, too…
Dammed but Not Doomed – Hakai Magazine
As dams come down on the Skutik River, the once-demonized alewife—a fish beloved by the Passamaquoddy—gets a second chance at life…
Nanoplastics linked to heart attack, stroke and early death, study finds – CNN
People with microplastics or nanoplastics in their carotid artery tissues were twice as likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die from any cause over the next three years than people who had none, a new study found…“To date, our study is the first that associated the plastic contamination with human diseases,” said Raffaele Marfella, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine…
Microplastics found in every human placenta tested in study – the Guardian
Scientists express concern over health impacts, with another study finding particles in arteries…The scientists analysed 62 placental tissue samples and found the most common plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may be linked to clogging of the blood vessels…
It’s not just toxic chemicals. Radioactive waste was also dumped off Los Angeles coast – the Los Angeles Times
For decades, a graveyard of corroding barrels has littered the seafloor just off the coast of Los Angeles. It was out of sight, out of mind — a not-so-secret secret that haunted the marine environment until a team of researchers came across them with an advanced underwater camera…Startling amounts of DDT near the barrels pointed to a little-known history of toxic pollution…but federal regulators recently determined that the manufacturer had not bothered with barrels. (Its acid waste was poured straight into the ocean instead.)…
Coral bleaching is now so extreme, scientists had to expand their scale for it – the Washington Post
For more than a decade, marine experts have relied on an alert scale from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to signal how much stress ocean heat is putting on corals and what risk there is for bleaching. The highest on the two-level system, Bleaching Alert Level 2, has for years represented coral catastrophe. That has sufficed — until last summer…
Reduce, reuse, redirect outrage: How plastic makers used recycling as a fig leaf – NPR
Former industry officials have said the goal was to avoid regulations and ensure that demand for plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, kept growing. Despite years of recycling campaigns, less than 10% of plastic waste gets recycled globally, and the amount of plastic waste that’s dumped in the environment continues to soar..