With every breath you take, you’re inhaling a lot more than just the oxygen your lungs crave. Particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, ozone—all pollutants known to damage the heart and lungs—probably enter your body, too.

Nepal will make the Everest region a plastic-free zone by 2020 by banning single-use plastics, a move that will curb excessive pollution on the highest point of the Earth’s surface. The executive council of Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality in Solukhumbu district reached this decision on Wednesday, the Efe news reported.

Some 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a township adjacent to a state forest, oil and gas giant Royal Dutch Shell is building a sprawling new plant to support what it sees as the future of its business: making millions of tons of new, virgin plastic.

It turns out you don't need to smoke for a lifetime to get emphysema. Just breathing polluted air can give it to you, according to a new study.

With the world’s population and greed growing at an exponential rate, the world is getting hotter, crowded and more polluted. The symbols…

Smog can spike during hot days. A new study finds that the effects of breathing air pollution may be cumulative. Long-term exposure may lead to lung disease, even among people who've never smoked.

Disease-causing air pollution remains high in pockets of America – particularly those where many low-income and African-American people live, a disparity highlighted in research presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York. The nation’s air on the whole has become cleaner in the past 70 years, but those...

A new way to decompose microplastics could help clear waterways of these tiny bits of trash, which may pose health risks to people and other animals. Water treatment plants typically aren’t equipped to filter out microplastics, such as exfoliating beads or flakes broken off larger pieces of garbage, like water bottles.

The Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces are asking scientists and engineers for help to develop a viable and cost-effective way to clean up space debris. While natural celestial bodies like asteroids and comets are considered debris, there is also a host of earthly objects polluting the cosmos — including inactive satellites and fragments leftover from their disintegration, such as screws and paint chips.

The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The true number is likely to be many times higher, as only a small number of foods and drinks have been analysed for plastic contamination. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed.

A Cornell-Environmental Defense Fund research team has found there is more methane being emitted from the ammonia fertilizer industry than the EPA had estimated for all industrial processes in the U.S.

The Gulf of Mexico could see one of its largest dead zones on record this summer, according to researchers.

It was once a shoreline buried by enough trash to render it invisible, warranting the unfortunate nickname “toilet bowl”. Now the Philippines' Manila Bay beach is unrecognisably clean compared with a few months ago, a transformation so sudden and extreme that it brought tears to the eyes of residents.

Antibiotic pollution can fuel drug resistance in microbes. A global survey of rivers finds unsafe levels of antibiotics in 16 percent of sites.

Globally, we are ingesting an average of 5 grams of plastic every week, the equivalent of a credit card, a new study suggests. This plastic contamination comes from "microplastics" -- particles smaller than five millimeters -- which are making their way into our food, drinking water and even the air. Around the world, people ingest an average of around 2,000 microplastic particles a week, according to the study by the University of Newcastle, in Australia.

In June 1969, a fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River—the last in a series of big blazes spanning decades—spurred the government to make sweeping environmental changes that altered the course of the country. By Vince Guerrieri.

A sign on an upside-down dumpster spelled the end of Pearl Pai’s long romance with plastics recycling. For years, Pai and her family generated almost no trash. She carefully washed, sorted and bagged hard-to-recycle items and drove them two towns over from her home in Berkeley, California, to the area’s best recycling center.

Results suggest environmental factors could play a role in female reproductive health

The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.

In a mission to clean up trash floating in the ocean, environmentalists pulled 40 tons (36 metric tons) of abandoned fishing nets this month from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Mariners on a 140-foot (43-meter) cargo sailboat outfitted with a crane voyaged from Hawaii to the heart of the Pacific Ocean, where they retrieved the haul of mostly plastic fishing nets as part of an effort to rid the waters of the nets that entangle whales, turtles and fish and damage coral reefs.