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By the 14th day of pregnancy, the particles were almost impossible to find. Whatever the plastic had done to these mice, it had done before the pregnancy began, and something else was carrying the…
Wash a fleece jacket and a little of it leaves with the water. The plastic threads that come off are too small to notice, and they head down a drain, through a treatment plant and eventually out to…
A bubble barrier is a simple piece of equipment. Air is pushed into the water at the bottom of a channel and rises as a wall of bubbles, and plastic drifting down with the current is meant to be…
A bumblebee working a city park on a hot afternoon is not dealing with one problem at a time. The air can carry ozone, a gas that forms when sunlight works on traffic exhaust. The flowers, the water…
Sable shearwaters in Australia are swallowing far more plastic than they were before 2022, while the overall share of birds carrying any plastic at all has remained steady for 16 years. That is the…
Rivers carry far more microplastic into the ocean than most earlier estimates suggest, and rainfall drives sharp spikes in what they deliver, researchers at Peking University reported Sept. 10 in the…
Pull a sweater over your head, tug a cotton shirt from the dryer, and you release a small cloud of fibres too fine to see. If the garment is polyester, we have learned to worry about that cloud:…
Stopping all new plastic from entering the ocean by 2050 would still leave microplastic accumulating in it, a modeling study published Sept. 12 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment…
Earthworms fed polystyrene microplastic for six days ended up with fewer living immune cells, and fewer still when the plastic carried an antioxidant additive, a team at the University of Bayreuth…
Switzerland puts a great deal of engineering between its households and its lakes. Wastewater runs through a treatment plant before it reaches a river, and the country knows roughly what comes out…
Drop a bottle cap into a river and follow it. Within days it can be out at sea, and on the way the water around it turns from fresh to fully salty. It does not travel empty. To anything small enough,…
A plastic crate that spends a summer in the yard comes back faded and chalky. Leave it there for a few more summers and it turns brittle, then starts to crumble. Manufacturers have a standard fix for…