Notably absent from the debris was plastic from nations with lots of plastic pollution in their rivers. This was surprising, says Egger, because rivers are thought to be the source of most ocean plastic. Instead, most of the garbage-patch plastic seemed to have been dumped into the ocean directly by passing ships.This suggests that “plastic emitted from land tends to accumulate along coastal areas, while plastic lost at sea has a high chance of accumulating in ocean garbage patches”, Egger says. The combination of the new results and the finding that fishing nets make up a large proportion of the debris indicates that fishing — spearheaded by the five countries and territories identified in the study — is the main source of plastic in the North Pacific garbage patch.

Every 60 seconds the equivalent of a lorry-load of plastic enters the global ocean. Where does it end up? Right now, researchers simply don’t know. But in a bid to help find out, an ESA-led project developed floating transmitters whose passage can be tracked over time, helping in turn to guide a sophisticated software model of marine plastic litter accumulation.

European farmland could be biggest global reservoir of microplastics, study suggests

Polypropylene containers are autoclavable. The recommended autoclave cycle for empty containers is 121°C at 15 psi for 20 minutes. Care must be taken to allow free air circulation into and out of vessels during the autoclave cycle, especially during the venting and cooling stages. If the container is not properly vented, collapse or implosion (sometimes confused with melting) can occur. When autoclaving bottles and carboys, the cap threads must be completely disengaged from the container; the cap can be set loosely over the mouth opening at a rogue angle to ensure the threads don’t inadvertently engage. Once the container is completely cooled, the cap can be aseptically tipped into place and tightened down.

Take “biopolymers” for example. These naturally-derived materials are biodegradable, but they typically require the searing heat of an industrial composting facility to fully decompose. In many U.S. cities, these facilities do not exist – and placing them in the recycling bin isn’t the solution, either.

we are changing all our traditional teabags into a new type of paper that is entirely plant based and fully biodegradable when placed into local authority composting.

Last year, Nestlé used 1.7 million tonnes of plastic packaging

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art

simulate the activated sludge process of a municipal waste water treatment plant and so better understand the fate of nanoplastics in urban environments

it has become a seemingly essential part of our life. It helps us to preserve food, keep warm, communicate with the world and much more

Although ostensibly inert, like Chernobyl’s ‘undead’ isotopes, plastics are in fact intensely lively, leaching endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Plastic time is described as unanticipated, un-reflexive and fluid, as the “experience of temporal ‘scraps’, of gapsin the schedule”, and as “the negative space of busyness”[p. 233]. Plastic time flies under the radar, being unplanned and non-immersive, and associated with neither productivi-ty nor leisure. It is interruptible, but can also expand until some other activity presents itself.

Accord-ingly, and in the interests of exploring how broader shifts in time use have may coevolved with digital technologies, we now look to work by Rattenbury et al. [37], which relates the always-on quality of digital technologies to more gen-eral shifts in the organization of everyday life. These are changes that have resulted in a temporal experience that they describe as plastic, a temporal experience that is both shaped by and shapes the use of digital technologies.