plastics

Restaurants and grocery stores worry about a supply of alternative products as the government announces details of its ban on single-use plastics. in Toronto. June 20, 2022.Steve Russell | Toronto Star | Getty ImagesCanada is banning the manufacture and import of single-use plastics by the end of the year, the government announced on Monday, in a major effort to combat plastic waste and address climate change.The ban will cover items like checkout bags, cutlery, straws, and food-service ware made from or containing…

Canada is companies from producing and importing a handful of single-use plastics by the end of the year, reports. Among the items the country won’t allow the production of include plastic shopping bags, takeout containers and six-pack rings for holding cans and bottles together. The federal government will subsequently prohibit the sale of those same items in 2023, with an export ban to follow in 2025. The one-year gap between the initial ban and the one that follows is designed to give businesses in Canada enough…

Plastic and other debris on the beach on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Photo: Caleb Jones (AP)Hundreds of millions of people visit U.S. national parks every single year. They take photos, they hike, they soak in the sights… and they leave behind single-use plastic items.All around the majestic expanses of protected wilderness, there are plastic bottles lyingin grass, wrappers floating in rivers, and disposable bags tangled in tree branches. To combat this, the U.S. Department of the Interior…

Broken plastics are a fact of life these days. Plastics tend to break either through being dropped or misused, or through old age.My weapon of choice in the war against waste and sending things to the landfill has been cyanoacrylate adhesive -- this stuff goes by many names, such as instant glue, power glue, or superglue Also, because the resin is thicker, you can use it to build up the repair better and more easily than with cyanoacrylate (you can add some baking soda to cyanoacrylate to achieve the same result, and it…

If humanity is ever going to curb our waste problem, we’ll need to get creative with recycling and reusing materials. In a new study, researchers at Rice University and Ford’s Research and Innovation Center have demonstrated how waste plastic from old cars could be used to make graphene foam that can then be used in new cars.The study advances a technique called flash joule heating, which the Rice team first demonstrated in 2020 to make graphene out of waste materials like food scraps, plastic and old tires. The waste…

Visual of two variations of the catalyst, with a segment of the shell removed to show the interior. The white sphere represents the silica shell, the holes are the pores. The bright green spheres represent the catalytic sites, the ones on the left are much smaller than the ones on the right. The longer red strings represent the polymer chains, and the shorter strings are products after catalysis. All shorter strings are similar in size, representing the consistent selectivity across catalyst variations. Additionally,…

NREL Calculates Lost Value of Landfilled Plastic in U.S.With mountains of plastic trash piling up in landfills and experts anticipating that there will be more plastics in the ocean by weight than fish by 2050, the enormous environmental threat posed by plastics is widely acknowledged. The scientific community is less familiar with the lost energy opportunity. In a nutshell, plastic waste also wastes energy.Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that the…

The idea of deploying enzymes to break down plastic waste is gaining momentum through a string of breakthroughs demonstrating how they can do so with increasing efficiency, and even reduce the material to simple molecules. A new study marks yet another step forward, with scientists leveraging machine learning to engineer an enzyme that degrades some forms of plastic in just 24 hours, with a stability that makes it well-suited to large-scale adoption.Scientists have been exploring the potential of enzymes to aid in…