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The European parliament has overwhelmingly backed a wide-ranging ban on single-use plastics in an effort to tackle pollution in seas, fields and waterways. Under the proposed directive, items such as plastic straws, cotton swabs, disposable plastic plates and cutlery would be banned by 2021, and 90% of plastic bottle recycled by 2025.

The government has charted a zero-waste plan that aims to abolish single-use plastic by 2030. Malaysia is the first country in Southeast Asia to take bold action to tackle plastic pollution.

The Coca-Cola Company, General Mills, Kraft Foods and the other 300-plus food companies that are members of the Grocery Manufacturers Association will soon lobby the US food safety regulator and Congress for a single federal standard covering oversight and labeling of new genetically modified foods, Reuters reports.

Rogers Family Company has developed a single-serve coffee product that it says is 97 percent biodegradable.

Two of the world's leading sustainability certification bodies, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ, plan to merge later this year in an effort to simplify the certification process for sustainable agriculture. Under the name Rainforest Alliance, the organization create a single global certification standard by 2019 that will streamline certification for farmers and empower companies to build more responsible supply chains, more efficiently.

The final straw: Ben & Jerry's announces plan to eliminate single-use plastic in Scoop Shops worldwide

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

The EU's Plastics Strategy aims to cut out non-recyclable plastics by 2030, while cutting down on single-use plastics and restricting microplastics, all by establishing a new circular economy around the material. The strategy lays out a few key steps to achieve this. The first is to introduce new rules on packaging that improve their recyclability and increase the demand for recycled plastics, thereby making recycling profitable for businesses.

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.

Logging emissions is an important step in securing the transparency that China needs to solve its pollution problems, Mr. Ma argues. Among the harmful pollutants are air particles known as PM2.5, which can enter deep into the lungs and even into the bloodstream. In an interview, he talked about the considerable progress he sees in the Chinese government's approach to air pollution, but also how concerns about social unrest continued to constrain discussion of pollution's damage to public health. Before 2013, levels of PM2.5 [the finest and deadliest particulate matter] were not monitored or made public in a single city. Now it's monitored and released in more than 400 cities. China has entered an era when air quality information is released. It's much more transparent. The 11th and 12th Five-Year Plans only referred to "emission reduction targets," so local governments could play games by claiming they had reduced emissions. Now, by saying by what year the PM2.5 must be below a certain amount, it's much harder to fake. The 13th Five-Year Plan is a progressive plan because it says that the public has the right to participate, to monitor, and that it's the public's right to know.

The energy sector accounts for around one-third of global CO2 emissions. Thus, countries' urgent need to combat climate change is strongly related to energy companies' ability to change from 'black' to 'green.' A Danish example is DONG Energy. The company says its cut in CO2 emissions from electricity and heat production accounts for more than half of the Denmark's total CO2 reduction from 2006 to 2014. But how can one single company cut more than half of a country's CO2?

Carbon permit prices slumped 29% in a single day's trading this week, the biggest decline in nearly a year. The move wiped out price gains stemming from the European Union's efforts to address a permit glut, raising fresh questions about the carbon market's potential to reduce greenhouse emissions

A new product could help people in remote, parched places gain easy access to clean drinking water. The Warka Water, a 30-foot-tall tower shaped like a vase, uses a straw mesh and a nylon net to capture airborne humidity in the form of dew, which it then collects for human use. The device can reportedly gather more than 25 gallons of potable water in a single day, even in desert conditions

When Mexico City's new international airport is finished in four years, it will be one of the largest in the world, spanning over half a million square meters. It will also be the most sustainable airport ever built. Instead of a group of average warehouse-like terminals, the airport will use a single giant structure wrapped in a unique skin that lets in natural light and air, collects rainwater, and provides incredible views of planes circling the sky.

Deforestation due to palm oil production is the single biggest threat to orangutans, but new deforestation-free standards that cover about 60% of the industry could help secure the primate's future. "We can now break the link between palm oil and the extinction of orangutans," says Michelle Desilets, executive director of the Orangutan Land Trust.

Norsepower Oy and Bore say the sea trial of Norsepower's Rotor Sail - a new wind propulsion technology for ships - verified by NAPA and supported by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, confirm fuel savings of 2.6 percent using a single small Rotor Sail on a route in the North Sea. With these fuel savings, the technology has a payback period of 4 years, the companies say.

China expects to launch a national carbon market in 2016, drawing together regional pilot projects into a single unified marketplace. The new carbon trading system will be the world's biggest emissions market

Mayor Bill de Blasio banned the possession, sale, or provision of polystyrene-based foam containers and loose fill packaging in New York City. The measure will go into effect on July 1, 2015.

The recycling industry is wasteful and ineffectual, and it will prove neither economically nor environmentally sustainable, writes John Tierney. You'd have to recycle 100,000 plastic bottles to offset the emissions from a single business-class transatlantic flight, and you probably wouldn't turn a profit in the process, Tierney notes. "How can you build a sustainable city with a strategy that can't even sustain itself?" he asks.