Here is a list of things that are thicker than a typical plastic grocery bag: A strand of hair. A coat of paint. A human cornea. High-density polyethylene is a miracle of materials science. Despite ...

Every year, around 500 billion plastic grocery bags are used worldwide. And an estimated 10 million tons of plastic are discarded in the ocean yearly. To help combat this waste, several American ...

Polyethylene plastics — in particular, the ubiquitous plastic bag that blights the landscape — are notoriously hard to recycle. They’re sturdy and difficult to break down, and if they’re recycled at ...

California is banning single-use plastic bags at grocery stores and other retailers, after an earlier ban was blamed for making the waste problem worse. Here, a worker pulls a plastic bag from a ...

Polyethylene plastics -- single-use bags and general-purpose bottles -- are indestructable forever plastics. That also makes them hard to recycle. Chemists have found a way to break down the polymer - ...

The tiny waxworm went from zero to hero in 2017 when researchers discovered the caterpillar could potentially help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: plastic waste. The ...

Limited mobility for nearly all Americans has still meant regular trips to the grocery store. That's right in the wheelhouse for Crown Poly Inc., which provides supermarkets with the Pull-N-Pak ...

People around the world use more than a trillion plastic bags every year. They're made of a notoriously resilient kind of plastic called polyethylene that can take decades to break down. But the ...

Researchers in India have developed a relatively low-temperature process to convert certain kinds of plastic waste into liquid fuel as a way to reuse discarded plastic bags and other products.

Henry Gabriel, Honolulu’s Recycling Program Branch Chief, joins producer/host Coralie Chun Matayoshi to discuss the evolution of and compliance with the City’s nearly decade old “plastic bag ban,” ...

A molecule found in wax-worm saliva has been found to break down one of the most-polluting forms of plastic without the need for high energy inputs. The study, published in Nature Communications and ...