Oh Good, Hurricanes Are Now Made of Microplastics – Wired Magazine
When Hurricane Larry made landfall two years ago, it dropped over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day. It’s another ominous sign of how plasticized the environment has become…
Yet Another Problem With Recycling: It Spews Microplastics – Wired Magazine
An alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater…
Bio-Based Plastics Aim to Capture Carbon. But at What Cost? – Wired Magazine
Growing crops to make plastic may theoretically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, but at an enormous environmental cost…bio-based plastics are problematic for a variety of reasons. It would take an astounding amount of land and water to grow enough plants to replace traditional plastics — plus energy is needed to produce and ship it all…But let’s say there was a large-scale shift to bioplastics — what would that mean for future emissions? That’s what a new paper in the journal Nature set out to estimate…
Humans Have Broken a Fundamental Law of the Ocean – WIRED
“The world that I grew up in is gone,” says Kristin Kaschner, a marine ecologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany.