plastic
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Doing your wash is hurting the planet, and it’s not because you’re using hot water
Sorry to have to bum y'all out, but here is a new way that we are all destroying the planet without even realizing it: by washing our clothes. And, yah, I know you wash your clothes in cold water, but I'm not talking about the energy your machines use. I'm talking about how whenever you wash clothes made of synthetic fibers, tiny bits of plastic flake off and get flushed with the wash water into the sewage system.
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Ask Umbra: What's up with plastic made from plants?
Grist's new head honcho can't get his head around compostable, plant-based plastic. Umbra breaks it down.
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Well, that's one way to recycle your bottle caps
This Chuck Close-style self-portrait by Mary Ellen Croteau is entirely made of discarded bottle caps. (A lot of them are from sodas, but deodorant caps, childproof pill container lids, soap bottle-style pumps, and tops from bottles of saline solution and eyedrops are also represented, along with probably many more.) This is possibly not a practical recycling solution for everyone, but you gotta admit it looks amazing.
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Ask Umbra on whether balloons are eco-friendly
Is there such a thing as a balloon that doesn't blow? Ask Umbra bursts a few bubbles.
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How do you calculate your plastic footprint?
Companies are on board with reporting their carbon usage, but what about the amount of plastic they produce? It's a different sort of problem than carbon emissions, but although the negative impacts of humanity's plastic habit have been known for years, the amount being used is only increasing.
This fall, the Hong Kong-based Ocean Recovery Alliance is moving forward with its Plastic Disclosure Project, which will ask companies to calculate and disclose their "plastic footprints," just as they report their carbon footprints. -
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Your next plastic cup could be made out of fish
Plastic is actually a pretty revolutionary material — we wouldn't want to go back to a time before it existed (just a time before people started throwing it in the ocean). But it's made from petroleum, and we haven't really got any to spare. So viable plastic alternatives — corn plastic, algae plastic, chicken feather […]
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The plastics industry will do anything to keep you using plastic bags
Plastic bags are the genital warts of litter -- they're incredibly widespread, nearly impossible to get rid of, and can lead to much worse problems down the line. The only thing that works is prevention -- i.e. not using them in the first place. But the plastics industry doesn't take too kindly to that. Here's a sampling of the tactics the industry has used to keep people from weaning themselves off plastic bags:
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British kids build greenhouse out of plastic bottles
What do you do with the empty plastic bottles that you really shouldn't have been drinking out of, anyway? These British school children spent a year and half collecting 1,500 of them and used the bottles to construct a greenhouse, in which they are very successfully growing tomatoes.
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Here's what an hour's worth of ocean trash looks like
This artwork by Chris Jordan is made up of 2.4 million pieces of plastic, all collected from the Pacific Ocean. (You can see details here.) This is already staggering, but it's actually only a fraction of what gets pumped into the ocean every hour. If every one of these pieces were a pound of plastic, […]
