Author: Greenpeace

Washington, DC (April 21, 2023)-In response to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) release of the Draft National Strategy for Reducing Plastics and Other Waste in Waterways and Oceans, John Hocevar, Greenpeace USA’s Oceans Campaign Director, said: “It is encouraging to see the EPA’s proposal to reduce the production and consumption of single-use, unrecyclable plastic products. We also welcome the increased emphasis on environmental justice, as low-income communities – especially people of color – are the most harmed by plastic production, use, and disposal. We can’t protect our communities or the environment from plastic pollution unless we drastically reduce plastic production and use, and this draft is a step in the right direction.”

Authors: Dr. Anna Reade, Avinash Kar, Dr. Veena Singla

California’s SB 54 was a big step forward on plastics last year—it addressed our ever-growing piles of plastic waste and the fact that very, very little (less than 9% according to estimates) was getting recycled. Negotiated between industry, environmental advocates, and legislators, it represented significant progress on addressing waste and making the companies that generate waste responsible for dealing with it. BUT . . . it did not address another important dimension of the plastics crisis we face—toxic chemicals. That’s where Assemblymember Rivas’ AB 1290 comes in. It would phase out a number of unnecessary and problematic plastics in packaging, particularly those associated with health harms. 

Author: Oceana

Oceana is calling on Amazon shareholders to protect the oceans by supporting a resolution that asks the company to develop a plan for reducing its growing plastic packaging footprint. The resolution will be voted on for the third year in a row at Amazon’s annual meeting on May 24. In 2022, support for the proposal increased by over ten percentage points from the previous year – securing 48.9% of the vote. The measure would have passed if company insiders had supported the resolution. Amazon’s plastic packaging waste grew by 52.5% from 2019 to 2021, according to recent reports from Oceana. 

Author: Freddy Pawle

An aerial shot has revealed the scale of Australia's major supermarket chains' failure to recycle plastic waste. Taken above a warehouse in Marsden Park, in Sydney's north-west, the shot reveals hundreds of bales of soft plastics that were left unrecycled by the now-defunct REDCycle. REDCycle was tasked with collecting and recycling plastics that were placed in branded bins outside of major supermarket chains Woolworth's, Coles and Aldi. 

Author: Becky Ferreira

Marine species that are normally found close to shore have been surviving for years in the open ocean on rafts made of plastic waste, reports a new study. The discovery exposes novel ecosystems that are now emerging due to widespread human pollution. A surprising variety of coastal animals—including mollusks, anemones, and crustaceans—were found living, and even reproducing, on floating plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an ocean gyre between Hawaii and California that contains an estimated 80,000 tons of accumulated trash, according to the new research. 

Author: Mark Smulian

Farmers are burning agricultural plastics illegally because of regulatory loopholes and lack of monitoring, the Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) has said. It said mismanagement of agriplastic waste occurred across the UK food supply chain, with farms producing 135,500 tonnes a year of contaminated agricultural plastic waste. The EIA – an international body that monitors waste crime mainly in relation to wildlife – cited data from the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management that only 20-30% of farm plastic is reprocessed while the rest is disposed of, including by illegal burning, burying, dumping or export.

Author: Ciara Nugent

A huge plume of smoke, visible from miles around, continues to billow over a plastics recycling plant in the city of Richmond, Indiana, where a fire broke out Tuesday afternoon. Some 2,000 people living within half a mile of the facility were forced to evacuate to escape harmful fine particulate matter and potentially toxic chemicals in the air, and building debris falling on their lawns. Once lit, plastic fires are incredibly tough to put out, and officials say the plant will burn for several more days.

Author: Omar Jimenez, Bonney Kapp, Sara Smart, Brenda Goodman, Michelle Krupa and Holly Yan, CNN

Richmond, Indiana — CNN — The raging fire shooting toxic smoke from an eastern Indiana recycling plant has forced thousands of people to evacuate and countless more to wonder what the impacts might be to their health and environment. Plastics were among the items that started burning Tuesday at the Richmond plant. And the thick, black column of smoke that rose from the site is “definitely toxic,” Indiana State Fire Marshal Steve Jones said. “There is a host of different chemicals that plastics give off when they’re on fire, and it’s concerning,” Jones said Tuesday evening. He said the fire will likely burn for days.

Author: Arleigh Rodgers

RICHMOND, Ind. (AP) — A major industrial fire fueled by tons of scrap plastics in an Indiana city was close to being extinguished Thursday after burning for more than 48 hours, though an evacuation order for people living near the disaster remained in place, authorities said. Richmond officials also disclosed more details about the city’s dealings with a man who was operating the business where the fire occured. They said Seth Smith was barred from accepting more plastics for resale, following a 2020 cleanup order, but he was allowed to keep selling a vast collection still on hand.

Author: Eric Ralls

Since the dawn of the plastic era in the 1950s, humanity has manufactured a staggering 8.3 billion tons of plastic, with an additional 380 million tons produced annually. Despite recycling efforts, only 9% of this plastic is repurposed, leaving the remainder to infiltrate our environment.  Plastic pollution has pervaded every corner of the earth, from the deepest ocean trenches to the peak of Mount Everest, and alarmingly, it has made its way into the tissues of humans and other organisms.

Author: James Bruggers

The dense black smoke from a fire at a plastics recycler in Richmond, Indiana, that began Tuesday afternoon and continued burning on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 nearby residents, was  dramatic, but far from an isolated incident in the world of facilities that store or recycle vast quantities of plastic waste. There are hundreds of such fires in the United States and Canada every year and most of them never make the news, said Richard Meier, a private fire investigator in Florida who worked 24 years as a mechanical engineer in manufacturing, including in plastics companies.

Author: Charlotte Elton

Rome will send 900 tonnes of rubbish to Amsterdam every week starting this month. The Italian capital is drowning in trash. The city’s four million residents produce more household waste than it can dispose of. Starting from mid-April, a special-purpose train will transport some of this rubbish 1,700 km north to Amsterdam for incineration.

Author: Sharon Lerner

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is facing a lawsuit filed by a community group and questions from a US senator over the agency’s approval of fuels made from discarded plastic under a program it touted as “climate-friendly”. The new scrutiny is in response to an earlier investigation by ProPublica and the Guardian that revealed the EPA approved the new chemicals even though its own scientists calculated that pollution from production of one of the plastic-based fuels was so toxic that one in four people exposed to it over their lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals, and it’s higher than the lifetime risk of cancer for current smokers.

Author: Graham Readfearn

New stockpiles of soft plastics from the failed REDcycle recycling scheme have been uncovered as the work to develop an alternative program continues. The program was wound up in November 2022 after it emerged that plastics consumers had returned to supermarkets to be recycled were instead put into storage. In a joint statement, Coles and Woolworths said REDcycle – which has since gone into liquidation – had been “stockpiling soft plastics without our knowledge”.