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Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, and others have sponsored Materials Recovery for the Future-a research effort to increase the recycling and recovery rates for flexible film and packaging. The group plans to publish results in the second quarter of 2016.

Dell has become the second high-profile company to announce a deal with AirCarbon, an innovative plastic material from Newlight Technologies created by pulling carbon out of the air.

As waste continues to pile up in our landfills, companies are taking a second look at product packaging and devising creative ways to cut back.

This 60-second video is intended to amp up fans for Super Bowl 50 "the Bay Area way." In promotion of the "Play Your Part" campaign, the ad encourages fans to take public transit to the big game, bring their own water bottle, conserve energy, reduce waste, and otherwise contribute to a socially- and environmentally-responsible event. The campaign is part of the San Francisco Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee's larger efforts to make this year's Super Bowl "Net Positive."

Despite a decade of intensifying efforts to slow tropical deforestation, last year was the second-highest on record for tree cover loss, down just slightly from 2016. The tropics lost an area of forest the size of Vietnam in just the last two years.

In the midst of the second-worst year for tropical tree cover loss in 2017, Indonesia saw an encouraging sign: a 60 percent drop in tree cover loss in primary forests compared with 2016.

GlobeScan is pleased to have recently completed a second comprehensive study of seafood consumers globally for The Marine Stewardship Council. We surveyed more than 25,000 consumers in 22 countries and found that a large majority of consumers are increasingly demanding independent verification of sustainability claims in supermarkets (72% this year compared to 68% in our first study in 2016).

The team, at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, is using coffee grounds to clean water, turning the grounds into a foam that can remove heavy metals like mercury. "We actually take a waste and give it a second life," says materials scientist Despina Fragouli. Her team took spent coffee grounds from IIT's cafeteria, dried and ground them to make the particles smaller. They then mixed the grounds with some silicon and sugar. Once hardened, they dipped it in water to melt away the sugar, which leaves behind a foam-like material.

Indonesia has reported a second straight year of declining deforestation, and credited more stringent land management policies for the trend. However, the government's insistence on counting pulpwood plantations as reforested areas has once again sparked controversy over how the very concept of a forest should be defined.

The story that should dominate every end of year round up from every media outlet on the planet came last month in the form of two reports released at the U.N. climate summit in Bonn. The first confirmed atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest levels in at least 800,000 years and possibly 3 million to 5 million years. As Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey said, the last time concentrations of greenhouse gas were as high as they are, sea levels were around 10 meters higher. Up to two meters of sea level rise this century is now entirely plausible. However, the second report was the real kicker. The Global Carbon Project predicted carbon emissions will rise this year after four years when flat emissions fuelled hopes global economic growth and carbon emissions had been decoupled

The Irish declaration follows a similar action from UK's parliament May 1. The governments of Wales and Scotland have also declared climate emergencies.