"Have you been hearing about plastics, especially microplastics, lately?” I asked my husband. He spends a lot of time reading online, so he is often my gauge for column topics. I wondered what he had ...

While plastics are very useful on their own, they can be much stronger when reinforced and mixed with a range of fibers. Not surprisingly, this includes the thermoplastic polymers which are commonly ...

A shocking new study has claimed that the human brain is becoming contaminated with growing amounts of microplastics, with concentrations skyrocketing in just the past few years. However, some have ...

Plastics are durable and strong, which is great while they’re being used but frustrating when they end up in the environment. Scientists at RIKEN in Japan have developed a new type of plastic that’s ...

A tractor making piles of compost. Firms are developing bacteria and enzymes that might one day be used to break down microplastics in compost. Credit: Shutterstock Synthetic polymers have been on the ...

MIT engineers turn plastic waste into strong building parts that could solve housing crisis and reduce environmental impact ...

Plastics are synthetic or semi-synthetic materials made from polymers, which are long chains of molecules typically derived from petroleum, natural gas, or other organic sources. Plastics are ...

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, ...

Plastic waste has long outpaced our ability to deal with it, largely because the most common packaging plastics are hard to recycle together. A new generation of catalysts is starting to change that ...