Marine plastic pollution is a massive environmental issue, with a plastic smog of an estimated 170 trillion particles afloat in the world's oceans. This highlights how urgently we need to develop ...

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Did you know that plastics can be welded, like metal? It's a pretty common practice in the automotive industry. But this doesn't apply to all ...

A prototype sensor being developed by sensor manufacturer IDEC (Sunnyvale, CA) uses light to differentiate among three different types of plastic. Aimed at the recycling industry for accurately ...

Recycling plastics is challenging, but new technology could produce high-quality materials for car and computer components, all while helping tackle the pollution crisis. Discarded plastics, which can ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Large proportions of plastic waste don't get recycled. Westend61 via Getty Images Plus In 1950, global plastic production was ...

Barcode readers excel at quickly identifying groceries and other products. Could a similar idea work at industrial recycling ...

Seven different kinds of microplastics have been discovered in human penises for the first time. The tiny fragments, formed when plastic products break down in the environment, were found in four of ...

A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics. The catalytic process, developed at the ...

Recycling polyolefin plastics is inefficient and costly because their strong bonds make them hard to break down and require tedious pre-sorting. The future of plastic recycling may soon get much less ...

Plastics are produced in large volumes and often have short service lives, leading to resource waste and pollution when they are not managed and/or recycled. However, the heterogeneity of plastic ...

Micro- and nanoplastics are now popping up everywhere: in seawater, snow, food and even in our bodies. The very smallest ...

In this video, we explore methods for identifying different types of plastic, focusing on elastomers, thermosetting plastics, and thermoplastics, along with the Resin ID codes (recycling symbols) when ...