New bioplastics are being made in laboratories from straw, wood chips and food waste, with researchers aiming to replace oil as the source of the world’s plastic. The new approaches include genetically modifying bacteria to eat wood and produce useful chemicals. But the bioplastics are currently significantly more expensive to make than fossil fuel-based plastics. Land and seas around the world, from high mountains to deep oceans, have become polluted with plastic, prompting major public concern. The world has produced 8bn tonnes of plastic since the 1950s and demand is still rising.

The food court at Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto used to generate 120 bags of garbage a day. Now it produces just three — despite the fact that it serves noodles, fried chicken, burgers and other fast foods to 24,000 customers a day. "It actually just goes to show the type of waste that is here in the food collection or after you finish your meal — how much of that is actual garbage," said Claire Santamaria, the mall's general manager.

In a bid to stop stockpiling garbage in Thailand, the government plans to ban imports of plastic and electronic waste. The environment minister has called on the Thai recycling industry to use domestic scrap first.

July signifies the beginning of environmental campaigns heavily focused on the issues of plastic output. Devised as a mechanism to shed much-needed light on the direness of plastic pollution, #NoPlasticJuly engages social media users and pushes the issue in front of the unaware. A key driver for #NoPlasticJuly is prompting people to share their own plastic reductions. But, this has transgressed the intended direction of the month and become a show in greenwashing and a PR move.

What happens after you flush it?

Recycling is primarily an environmental issue, right? Wrong. In this modern age of disposability and rapid turn-over, recycling is no longer just about saving the planet, it's about feeding ever-growing economic demand. As Antony Funnell reports, the sheer enormity of the global recycling industry is challenging our understanding of terms like 'waste' and 'rubbish'.

Did Kim Jong-Un recycle your old laptop? That's the question hovering over last week’s news that Chinese authorities had recently broken up an e-waste smuggling ring responsible for delivering 72,000 metric tons of prohibited junk via North Korea to China’s shores in 2013.

Russell Leon works under the cover of darkness as part of a small crew sworn to secrecy. He is a bayakou, a manual laborer who empties the cesspools that collect deep bogs of human waste under Haiti’s back-yard latrines. In a country with no working sewers and roads that are often too ramshackle for tanker trucks, he is the sanitation infrastructure, charged with climbing down into concrete or earthen holes and scooping out the ordure with a plastic bucket.

The region—which makes up a large chunk of central Romania—is rich in gold, and a bunch of mining companies are keen to lock down their share of the action.

Coffee pods are really popular right now. Sales of single-serve coffee—the kind first popularized in the US by Keurig, and widely known as K-cups—have more than tripled since 2011, MarketWatch reported in November. As of a year ago, 13% of Americans drank a coffee made in a single-cup brewer each day, according to a survey by the National Coffee Association. K-Cups alone now account for more than a quarter of the US market for ground coffee.

We, as a nation, are amassing huge collections of dildos, pocket pussies, and butt plugs. But as sex toys are becoming more common, there is still no easy way to recycle them. Our increasing comfort with item-assisted sexual pleasure isn’t keeping up with our increasing desire to live sustainably. Sex toys are often made with a variety of specialized materials to make them soft and/or non-porous (which means they won’t trap bodily fluids).

Plastic trash has always been a huge environmental problem, especially when the ocean is involved. But few states have seen the impact of maritime pollution quite like Hawaii. Now, Hawaii has become the first state to officially implement a ban on plastic bags at checkout counters. "Being a marine state, perhaps, we are exposed more directly to the impacts of plastic pollution and the damage it does to our environment," Sierra Club of Hawaii director Robert Harris, said in 2012.

James Dyson invented the best vacuum cleaners. Now, with the M.V. Recyclone barge, he's applying the same ideas to sucking up plastic pollution from the world's rivers. We talked to him about his plans.

ts wares splayed in dazzlingly pink neat rows, this is the remote forest depot where thousands of phone booths go to die. Some 3,000 pink and yellow boxes are stored at the secluded site near Berlin - and they are being sold to the public for as little as £250 each.

Something could be missing from your next electric bill: a fee that electric customers have been paying for 31 years to fund a federal nuclear waste site that doesn't exist. The Energy Department will stop charging the fee by court order Friday. It's only a small percentage of most customers' bills, but adds up to $750 million a year. The fund now holds $37 billion.

A highly radioactive substance, emitting in some places radiation 100 times the permitted amount, has been discovered in the canton of Bern, Swiss media reporte

The Industrial Revolution changed modern life in an untold number of ways. Unfortunately, not all of them were positive, including the large-scale production of pollution. While it may not be instantly noticeable in some areas, that doesn’t change the fact that our world has been irreparably altered by all of the toxic substances that have now made it into our air, soil, and groundwater.

What refuse in India's streets reveals about America’s hidden trash problem

Will.i.Am introduces the EKOCYCLE Cube 3D printer. The EKOCYCLE Cube is not just another tool for making, it is a revolutionary tool for RE-making, and encourages and helps us to change the way we think about recycling by transforming post-consumer waste into new and beautiful objects.

Since 2007, one of America's top exports to China has been... trash. Yes, trash. That includes everything from scrap metal and paper to cardboard and crumpled soda cans. The United States sold $10.8 billion worth of metal and paper scrap to China in 2011.

So much of the food we eat these days is encased in plastic. And behind it is a whole lot of research and innovation. We dive into some of the materials that keep food fresh and portable.

The five major oceanic gyres make up about a quarter of the Earth’s surface. Underneath the apparent chaos of the world’s weather, the gyres turn like clockworks, driven by the sun and the Earth’s rotation. A bit of flotsam entering the current off the coast of Brazil might make it all the way to West Africa and then bob on back to where it started in about three years.

For a long time, Toronto has enjoyed a reputation as a safe, clean city — you know, that whole "New York run by the Swiss" idea. And frankly, we prided ourselves on being better than those who simply drop their garbage on the street.

After U.S. and allied warplanes destroyed a key bridge carrying 15 oil and gas pipelines in northern Iraq during the 2003 conflict there, officials in Washington and Baghdad made its postwar reconstruction a top priority. But instead of spending two months to rebuild the span over the Tigris River at an estimated cost of $5 million, they decided for security reasons to bury the pipelines beneath it, at an estimated cost more than five times greater.

Americans love their dogs, but they don’t always love to pick up after them. And that’s a problem. Dog feces left on the ground wash into waterways, sometimes carrying bacteria — including antibiotic-resistant strains — that can make people sick. Now scientists have developed a new genetic test to figure out how much dogs are contributing to this health concern, according to a report in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Almost 40% of the world’s waste ends up in huge rubbish tips, mostly found near urban populations in poor countries, posing a serious threat to human health and the environment

It would serve Americans greatly to take a page out of Sweden’s book about recycling their waste.

A small mountain of Vancouver garbage rotting on the Manila waterfront has morphed into a diplomatic row as Philippine authorities demand Canada repatriate its “junk.”

After watching this video, no one should doubt Bill Gates’ commitment to raising awareness of the issues around sanitation and its importance to economic and social development in emerging markets. In the video, Gates drinks water made from human waste to prove that the technology developed by Janicki Bioenergy, a small engineering firm based outside of Seattle, works. Sanitation in developing countries is a huge problem. Poor waste disposal causes the deaths of hundreds...

Pollution has turned the sacred waters into a lethal cocktail of industrial and human waste. Can the river be saved? Nearly 13,000ft up in the foothills of the Himalayas, Amod Panwar, an Indian hotel owner and devout Hindu, reverently places offerings of almonds, sultanas and a coconut into the water cascading from an icy cavern known as Gaumukh, the “cow’s mouth”.

The biggest per-capita tallies were in countries known for environmental consciousness, such as Norway and Denmark, with Britain fifth and US ninth on the UN list.

A formidable glitch occurred just as the United States prepares to embark on a multi-billion-dollar program to restart production of nuclear weapons. An explosion at an underground waste dump in New Mexico—complete with some sky-high kitty litter—is highlighting the dangers inherent not only in the weapons of mass destruction themselves but in the deadly wastes their development has left over the past 75 years.

Adidas, in partnership with a nonprofit called Parley for the Oceans, has created a shoe that is made entirely from ocean trash and creates zero waste. The company plans to release a line of shoes made like this later this year.

The European Parliament on Thursday (9 July) urged EU countries to cut down on waste by getting supermarkets to give their unsold food to charities, rather than destroy it.

United Airlines is partnering with California-based Fulcrum Bioenergy to make alternative jet fuel from food scraps, farm waste, and animal fat.