plastic pollution

Emerging research on microplastics suggests they can leak harmful chemicals into the environment. On the East Coast, one researcher is working to understand the impact of these tiny particles — and reckoning with science's colonial legacy at the same time.

The federal government is calling for a new “circular economy” that would rely on massively scaling up existing recycling facilities and still-nascent recycling technologies to keep disposable plastic ubiquitous in our daily lives. But can recycling really save us?

Canada's $28-billion plastics industry has always resisted efforts to curtail production. But with the federal government proposing a ban on certain single-use items and looking to classify plastic as toxic, the pushback has grown even greater.

The Arctic is “pervasively” polluted by microplastic fibres that most likely come from the washing of synthetic clothes by people in Europe and North America, research has found.

Bio-based plastics, most of them compostable to some degree, are proliferating across Canada. Yet millions of compostable cups, containers and bags will probably still end up in landfills. It’s a crisis driven, in part, by bad communication.

A group of more than 60 major American industry associations are trying to stop Canada’s efforts to reduce plastic pollution.

The world is now producing half a trillion plastic water bottles every year, and only nine per cent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled.

In mid January the British Columbia government announced it was looking at a wide ban on single-use plastic grocery bags to put an end to a piecemeal, city-by-city approach to the problem of plastic pollution.

A national ban on many single-use plastics is on track for next year after a government report concluded on Thursday, January 30, 2020, that there is more than enough evidence proving plastic pollution is harmful.

Species are being wiped out at a terrifying rate. Ending the crisis requires swift global action.

The federal government and the provinces are expected to announce plans to work on harmonizing recycling standards following a meeting of environment ministers in Halifax today, June 27, 2019.

Poland Spring announced on Monday, June 3, 2019, a plan to use 100% recycled plastic for all its noncarbonated water containers, a move that comes amid growing concern about plastic pollution.

Canada's environment ministers want to cut in half the amount of garbage this country produces, in a little over two decades.

Cigarettes and their filters made from plastic account for almost 50 per cent of the waste collected along the Vancouver and Victoria shorelines, says a study analyzing data from volunteer coastline cleanups in British Columbia.

For more than 25 years, Ram Nath has lived on the banks of the Yamuna River under a 19th-century iron bridge. Each morning, the wiry man walks a few steps from his makeshift hut and enters the black, sludgy waters of one of India's most polluted rivers. He is fishing for trash.