Grist
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Here’s How the Plastic Industry Thinks We Can Solve the Waste Crisis
In the time it takes you to read this sentence — say, four seconds — the world produces nearly 60 metric tons of plastic, almost entirely out of fossil fuels. That’s about 53,000 metric tons an hour, 1.3 million metric tons a day, or 460 million metric tons a year. Those numbers are fueling widespread…
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How the Recycling Symbol Became Meaningless
It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer. The…
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Bottled Water Contains 100 Times More Plastic Particles Than Previously Thought
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. At this point, it’s common knowledge that bottled water contains microplastics — fragments of the insidious material that can be as small as a bacterial cell. But the problem is much worse than previously known: It turns out that bottled water…
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The Ominous Link Between Rare Disease Outbreaks in 2023
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. A 16-month-old boy was playing in a splash pad at a country club in Little Rock, Arkansas, this summer when water containing a very rare and deadly brain-eating amoeba went up his nose. He died a few days later in the…