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PlasRecycle has built the UK's first facility for reprocessing post-consumer polythene bags and packaging films to produce a plastic granulate that can be used for making new bags.

Australian researchers say they have found a way to recycle plastic shopping bags into high-tech carbon nanotubes. That might reduce manufacturing costs in such fields as electronics, medicine and energy.

W Hotels Worldwide, in partnership with Coca-Cola and music artist will.i.am, says it will soon use sheets and bedside chargers made in part with recycled plastic bottles.

W Hotels Worldwide has announced a new partnership with global music artist and entrepreneur will.i.am and Coca-Cola to shake up the hotel industry. The partners wil bring the EKOCYCLE brand to W Hotel rooms around the world by re-making their beds with new bed sheets which are made in part with rPET (polyester partially made using recycled plastic).

As engineers work to find new ways to pull some of the trillions of pieces of plastic trash out of the ocean, companies are coming up with new uses for it. Like soap bottles, surfboards, and now shoes: Adidas just released a new prototype for a sneaker woven entirely out of ocean trash.

Thanks to a study published today in the journal Science, we finally have an estimate. Are you sitting down? Humans release between 5.3 million and 14 million tons of plastic into the ocean annually.

Efforts are underway to develop plans for cleaning up the world's marine garbage patches, but the scale of the problem makes conventional cleanup technologies impractical. What's really needed is a change in attitude among the people producing the waste in the first place, writes Anja Krieger. "Redefining what kinds of plastic products we really need, and how to regulate, use and dispose of them, will be at the core of the answer," she argues.

Dow Chemical and the Ocean Conservancy explain why they have formed an unlikely alliance to prevent plastic from choking the world's oceans.

By April of this year, its 600-plus Scoop Shops around the world will only offer wooden spoons, rather than plastic ones. Paper straws will also only be available upon request.

In a statement provided to EcoWatch, Greenpeace criticized Nestlé's statement for not including clear targets or a timeline to reduce and eventually phase out single-use plastics.

Environmental group Greenpeace on Thursday accused Nestle of not doing enough to reduce single-use plastics polluting landfills and oceans.

The 18 billion pounds of plastic that end up in the ocean each year are "just the tip of the iceberg," the caption says.

India turned their hosting of this year's World Environment Day into far more than a symbolic act when it announced plans Tuesday to eliminate all single-use plastics by 2022, UN Environment reported.

Ford is developing new foam and plastic car components made from carbon dioxide. It expects the new biomaterials, produced by Novomer and still undergoing testing, will be in Ford production vehicles within the next five years.

The ocean's value has been estimated as high as $24 trillion, yet despite its inherent connections to the health and well-being of wildlife, humans, and the global economy, it continues to be overexploited and polluted. Plastic pollution and shark killing are two major problems that could be - at least in part - alleviated by new materials: a seaweed-based biodegradable plastic packaging, and a sugarcane-based alternative to a widely used moisturizer normally derived from shark liver oil.

CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that "almost all" commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens-even when they weren't exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun's ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner's research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

The US Federal Trade Commission has taken action against six companies - ECM Biofilms, American Plastic Manufacturing, Champ, Clear Choice Housewares, Carnie Cap and AJM Packaging - for making false environmental marketing claims.

The oceans are crammed with floating junk, including thousands of pieces of plastic per square mile of water, the U.N. says. In a bid to raise awareness of the problem, Adidas has developed a prototype sneaker made mostly from recycled floating plastic. 

The Urban Algae Folly gazebo at Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy, is covered in algae-filled ethylene tetrafluoroethylene plastic that may herald the future of green building. The spirulina in the plastic membranes absorbs carbon dioxide and produces oxygen while expanding more as sunlight intensifies to provide shade.