Canada announced Monday it will ban the production and import of “harmful single-use plastics” starting in December in an effort to curb plastic waste and pollution. The new guidance bans plastic checkout bags, cutlery, food containers, ring carriers, stir sticks and straws, with few exceptions.

A fish-shaped robot that can collect tiny pieces of plastic waste has been developed by scientists at Sichuan University, China. The bot uses light from a laser to flap its tail side-to-side and has a body that can attract molecules found on microplastics, causing them to stick to it as it swims past.

The U.S. Interior Department, which helps oversee the country's national parks, says it is planning to phase out single-use plastics on its land and facilities by 2032. The agency would be tasked with finding alternative materials to disposable plastics, such as cutlery, bags, cups, bottles, straws and food containers, it announced Tuesday in honor of World Ocean Day.

Beetle larvae survived on a polystyrene-only diet due to the enzymes in their guts, which may eventually be harnessed in plastic-upcycling bioreactors.

We’ve supersized our capacity to ship stuff across the seas. As our global supply chains grow, what can we gather from the junk that washes up on shore?

Earth has a plastics problem, and not many great options to solve it. Plastic is everywhere: food, toiletries, and cleaning products come encased in it; our toothbrushes and children’s toys and disposable coffee lids are made of it; and we carry groceries and dispose of trash in bags of it. It’s impossible to avoid. Yet we don’t often think about the fact that these items will still be around hundreds of years from now.

California’s attorney general on Thursday subpoenaed ExxonMobil as part of what he called a first-of-its-kind broader investigation into the petroleum industry for its alleged role in causing a global plastic pollution crisis, allegations that the company called meritless.

A new breakthrough could offer hope in the battle against plastic pollution - an enzyme which ‘eats’ plastic and could help to break down single-use drinks bottles. More than 400 million tons of plastic waste are produced each year, the overwhelming majority of which ends up in landfills, the University of Portsmouth researchers say.

While the billions of tons of plastic products produced in the "Plastic Age" of the last half-century have drastically changed the way we live for the better, the plastic waste that has made it into the environment is posing new challenges for nature.

World leaders will come together online and in Nairobi, Kenya, next week, in what is described as a “critical moment” in progress towards the first ever global treaty to combat plastic waste. Inger Andersen, director of the UN Environment Programme, said an agreement at the UN environment assembly could be the most important multilateral pact since the Paris climate accord in 2015.

The plastic packaging of the products we buy online is actually hiding a major environmental problem, a new report showed. Amazon, considered the world’s largest retailer, was responsible for 211,000 metric tons (465 million pounds) of plastic packaging waste last year, 10,000 tons (22 million pounds) of which ended up in the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems.

People with inflammatory bowel disease have 50% more microplastics in their faeces, a study has revealed. Previous research has shown that microplastics can cause intestinal inflammation and other gut problems in laboratory animals, but the research is the first to investigate potential effects on humans. The scientists found 42 microplastic pieces per gram in dried samples from people with IBD and 28 pieces in those from healthy people.

Five years ago, scientists digging through soil and sludge around a plastics recycling center in Japan discovered a bacterium that was feeding on the popular packaging material PET as an energy source, with help from a pair of purposely evolved enzymes. A fascinating discovery at the time, a new study has shown this to be part of a much wider trend in which such plastic-degrading enzymes are increasing in numbers and diversity in response to plastic pollution around the world.

Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study. The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.

One of the major concerns surrounding plastic pollution is that microplastics may work their way from the ocean or soil, into tiny organisms, up the food chain and onto our plates. However, scientists are still unsure what ingesting microplastics actually does to human health.

About 360 Million years ago, a toxic material that could not easily be broken down arose on planet Earth. The stuff would persist for thousands of years, amassing on land (and especially in forests) in daunting piles. These mounds stuck around for millions of years, so long that a heap of them fossilized. Today, humans dig up these deposits to burn as fossil fuel.

The US is the world’s biggest culprit in generating plastic waste and the country urgently needs a new strategy to curb the vast amount of plastic that ends up in the oceans, a new report submitted to the federal government has found.

Pascal Hagmann lowered a manta trawl — a ray-shaped, metal device with a wide mouth and a fine-meshed net — off the side of his sailboat and into the blue waters off the coast of Marseille, France. Then he motored around at 3 knots. The manta trawl skimmed along the surface, taking in gulps of seawater and catching whatever was floating inside it.

It's been nearly a decade since Boyan Slat announced at age 18 that he had a plan to rid the world's oceans of plastic. Slat, now 27, is a Dutch inventor and the founder of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

Tonnes of plastic waste from a burning container ship is washing ashore in Sri Lanka in what’s likely the nation’s worst beach pollution crisis to date, a senior environmental official told AFP on Saturday.