In a landfill, a plastic bottle can take more than a thousand years to break down. But a new process can transform polyethylene plastic in days, using bacteria to eat the waste and then turn it into a ...

Plastic is an essential material in the modern world, but it's also environmentally costly to produce and a major pollutant. A material called pyridinedicarboxylic acid, or PDCA, could help address at ...

Polystyrene is made from styrene building blocks and is the most widely used plastic in terms of volume, for example in packaging. Unlike PET, which can now be produced and recycled using ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. One of the primary reasons plastic has become such a relied-upon material in our lives is because of how cheap it is to make, and ...

At the urging of the plastics industry, the USDA is considering allowing materials such as bioplastic cups, coffee pods and compostable plastic bags into the organic compost waste stream. Farmers and ...

Materials scientists are cooking up environmentally friendly polymers from natural sources like silk, plant fibers and whole algae. Economics and acceptance remain hurdles. By Boyce Upholt / Knowable ...

Binghamton PhD student Tianzheng Liu, left, and Department of Biomedical Engineering Professor Sha Jin have developed a method to turn food waste into biodegradable plastic. According to the U.S.

Plastics make up approximately 5–12 % of global waste generation, constituting around 20–30 % of waste by weight. Alarmingly, about 60 % of plastics end up as plastic waste (PW) in the environment. 2 ...

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In recent years, at least a half-dozen countries have embraced plastics made with an additive intended to break them down into carbon dioxide, water and harmless organic ...

It’s hard to imagine a time before traditional plastics became commonplace for many single-use food packaging and food-contact applications. It’s even harder to imagine a time without them using ...