Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Why Plastic Is Building Up at Recycling Centers and Catching Fire.

Recycling plants are amassing millions of tons of plastic bottles, the Environmental Protection Agency says, with some becoming part of a growing problem of toxic fires at these plants, according to data provided by environmental advocates. Critics say beverage companies should be doing more to make their products more recyclable.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

The Titans of Plastic: Pennsylvania Becomes the Newest Sacrifice Zone for America’s Plastic Addiction.

For the residents who live nearby, Shell’s big bet on plastic represents a new chapter in the same story that’s plagued the region for decades: An extractive industry moves in, exports natural resources at a tremendous profit—most of which flow to outsiders—and leaves poverty, pollution, and illness in its wake. First came the loggers, oil barons, and coal tycoons. Then there were the steel magnates and the fracking moguls. Now it’s the titans of plastic.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Researchers Are Examining Plastic’s Many Hazards to Human Health

A panel of researchers is comprehensively analyzing the multiple hazards that plastic poses to human health throughout the material’s life cycle. The study is examining the human health effects from fossil fuel extraction for use as plastic feedstocks, everyday use and disposal of plastic, and plastic pollution, the researchers say in a paper.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

To Reduce Plastic Waste, Make Producers Responsible for It (Guest Opinion by Judith Enck)

Seen any plastic waste littering your favorite lakeshore, park or neighborhood lately? You’re not alone — largely because less than 6% of the plastic we produce is actually recycled. Unlike metal, glass, paper and cardboard, plastics — which are made from a byproduct of hydrofracked gas plus a variety of toxic chemical and colorants — are neither feasible nor economical to recycle.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Collision Course: Will the Plastics Treaty Slow the Plastics Rush?

The interlacing pipelines of a massive new plastics facility gleam in the sunshine beside the rolling waters of the Ohio River. I’m sitting on a hilltop above it, among poplars and birdsongs in rural Beaver County, Pennsylvania, 30 miles north of Pittsburgh. The area has experienced tremendous change over the past few years — with more soon to come. The ethane “cracker plant” belongs to Royal Dutch Shell, and after 10 years and $6 billion it’s about to go online. Soon it will transform a steady flow of fracked Marcellus gas into billions of plastic pellets — a projected 1.6 million tons of them per year, each the size of a pea.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

It’s Time for Dry Cleaners to Stop Using Plastic Film

There’s that unpleasant moment when you get home from the dry cleaner: You remove the plastic film covering your clothes, and since most curbside recycling programs won’t accept it, you have no choice but to throw it in the trash and feel guilty about how you’re contributing to the plastic pollution crisis. You’re right to worry. Every year, dry cleaners use more than 300 million pounds of this plastic film in the U.S. alone. (They are sometimes known as poly bags because they are made from a kind of plastic known as polyethelene.) The vast majority—96%—will end up in a landfill or the ocean, where it will slowly break into particles that eventually end up in the food chain, and inside animals and humans. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Watertown Resident Expands Efforts to Curtail Use of Plastics

Several years ago, Watertown’s Eileen Ryan pushed for Watertown to pass a plastic shopping bag ban, and now she has expanded her efforts statewide. In April, she founded Beyond Plastics Greater Boston, a local chapter of the national group Beyond Plastic. “After we passed the ban (in 2016) we all patted ourselves on the back and thought we did a great job. We really noticed that there are fewer plastic bags in the river, in trees around Watertown,” Ryan said.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

To Cut Plastic Waste Out of Your Life, Start Small

As soon as Carolyn Armstrong started looking for plastic in her life, she realized it was absolutely everywhere. There are the plastic water bottles and straws, of course, but also makeup, clothing, laundry detergent, food wrappers and packaging. “Everything that we use is encased in plastic,” Armstrong says. “Sometimes, I go to the grocery store and take pictures of the fruit that is behind the plastic and I email the store and say: ‘Please stop doing that!’

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Environmental NGO Urges Restaurants to Reduce Use of Plastics

The global fight to reduce the use of plastics is coming to restaurants, as Beyond Plastics, a civil action movement to fight plastic pollution from the US state of Vermont, has released a guide for eateries to reduce their dependence on plasticware. "Everything plastics, especially those which are difficult to recycle – it should be out of the door," said Megan Wolff, Beyond Plastics policy director and author of the guide.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Bring Out the China, Hold the Plastic, Activists Advise Restaurants

Bring out the real silverware and glasses and hold the plastic utensils. That’s the theme of a new free guide that an environmental group has put out advising restaurant operators on how they can reduce their use of plastics. “Restaurants, in particular, have a big role to play in addressing our plastic pollution crisis,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator as well as the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, which aims to reduce the amount of fossil fuel-based plastic that goes into the waste stream.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Beyond Plastics Releases Free Guide to Help Restaurants Reduce Use of Plastics

After years of pandemic-driven take-out orders, many consumers whose drawers are overflowing with plastic straws, disposable plastic cutlery, and single-use plastic packets of ketchup, soy sauce, and mustard are clamoring for less plastic with their food. Fortunately, a new guide called “Hold The Plastic, Please - A Restaurant’s Guide To Reducing Plastic” released today from Beyond Plastics offers restaurants detailed, practical, and inspiring advice for how to reduce the use of plastic in their operations and how to effectively convey those changes to customers, reporters, and the general public.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Albany Shoppers Return Plastic Packaging to Market 32

On Saturday, shoppers with signs returned plastic packaging waste from Market 32, in an effort to highlight the urgent need for a packaging reduction act in the state legislature. Organizers said excessive single-use plastic packaging is a growing global environmental crisis.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

As Alarm Over Plastic Grows, Saudis Ramp up Production in the US

The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry, and burned tires. Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, or GCGV, a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames, and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Beyond Plastics: The Myths and Truths About Recycling, and Potential Solutions

The pervasiveness of plastic has become a global concern. An estimated 242 million metric tons of it is generated every year, and the United States is one of the top generators. While recycling sounds like a simple solution, it’s not. Plastic recycling has proven to be ineffective, as evidenced by a shocking statistic from Our World in Data: Out of the 5.8 billion metric tons of plastic waste generated between 1950 and 2015, only about 9% of it has been recycled. The rest has been left to be incinerated, landfilled, or littered. On top of that, a more recent report from nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup and advocacy group Beyond Plastics found that number to be even lower, with only 5% to 6% of the U.S.’s plastic waste converted into new products in 2021.

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Andrew Craigie Andrew Craigie

Judith Enck: SCOTUS Curtails Biden’s Climate Goals

The recent decision from the Supreme Court limits the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. It’s being described as a ‘gut punch' by some environmental activists. Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator, joined Errol to react to the ruling, explain how the Biden administration can move forward despite it and discuss what it means for New York.

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