Waste

"According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new. This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi."

"The United States and Japan joined 18 other countries yesterday in backing the creation of a new international "framework" to curb ocean plastics after rejecting a stronger Canadian proposal on the same topic last year."

"Canada plans to ban some single-use plastics like straws, bags and cutlery by early 2021 to reduce non-recyclable waste and protect the world’s oceans, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday."

"Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an interview Monday that he will emphasize the importance of curbing marine debris during an upcoming summit with his Group of 20 counterparts in Japan, rather than seeking new action on climate change."

"The U.S. government on Wednesday will reclassify some of the nation’s most dangerous radioactive waste to lower its threat level, outraging critics who say the move would make it cheaper and easier to walk away from cleaning up nuclear weapons production sites in Washington state, Idaho and South Carolina."

"Oregon will ban restaurants from automatically offering single-use plastic straws under a measure passed by lawmakers, making it the second state to enact restrictions on plastic straws."

"Malaysia will send as much as 3,000 tonnes of plastic waste back to the countries it came from, the environment minister said on Tuesday, the latest Asian country to reject rich countries’ rubbish."

"They call it “e-waste recycling.” But what happens inside Asia’s underground scrapyards looks more like crude alchemy. Men and women, faces swaddled in cloth, hunch over steel furnaces."

"A total of 1.6 million Americans live next to the most polluting incinerators in the country, with lower-income and minority communities exposed to the vast majority of pollution coming from these waste-burning plants."

"New York’s Suffolk County had a trash problem. Facing brimming landfills and public pressure, legislators took a first-in-the-nation step: They banned plastic bags. But what the county saw as part of the solution, the plastics industry took as a threat."