What are Micro-Plastics? Micro-plastics have not been defined in particular. They are just tiny particles that result from the disintegration of bigger plastic materials. However, most researchers say that any plastic smaller than 5 millimetres in size is a micro-plastic. Hence, these are really, really teeny-tiny! Plastics are made up of polymers, which are derived from fossil fuels. A whole lot of chemicals are added to the polymers—close to 10,000—to ensure that a given plastic has the desired properties...

Plastic pollution creates an evolutionary trap for young sea turtles, says a new study. The study is done by researchers from the University of Exeter, UK. The study included 121 sea turtles from five of the world’s seven species: green, loggerhead, hawksbill, olive ridley, and flatback. They found plastic inside juvenile turtles along both the east and west coasts of Australia. Sea turtles usually hatch on beaches and spent their early years traveling on ocean currents...

Dr Rajagopalan Vasudevan proves how even an individual effort can clean the face of our country, as he invents new ways to reuse plastic for roads and buildings. One day, a professor of Chemistry was watching TV. He saw a doctor blaming plastic for water pollution. This set him wondering—how can plastic cause pollution when it is chemically a hydrocarbon and insoluble in water! The doctor was of course mistaken but his concern was genuine: plastic is an environmental nuisance. Polybags have infested our marketplaces, are swallowed by cattle, clog drains, choke ponds… 

A walk on the beach is an insight not just into our leisure but also into our addiction to plastic. More than 80 lakh tonnes of plastic is dumped into the oceans every year. Sea creatures often mistake plastic for food and die because of it. Sea turtles are probably the most gullible creatures of the sea. Why? Well, that’s because they are likely to confuse plastic floating in the ocean for food and eat it, says a recent article published in the Science News magazine. However, in the poor creature’s defense, they are not the ones filling our oceans with plastic...

We have evolved over crores of years and invented plastic items and materials along the way to make our lives easier. Some of these have become a threat to life on Earth today

Can leaves be a better alternative to plastic plates that are non-biodegradable? Read on to find what lesson the character learnt in the story!

We may be a speck in the universe, but the universe is nothing without the sum of the specks. When Dr Rajagopalan Vasudevan, a chemistry professor at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, invented a technology to use plastic waste in making roads, he did not know how impactful his lab experiment will become...

It is estimated that over 40 billion plastic kitchen utensils—including 14–18 billion plastic spoons—are produced every year. Given our low rate of reusing and recycling them, most of this cutlery ends up in landfill sites, or worse, in oceans and lakes! Here, they contaminate the land and soil for at least 450 years—the time plastic takes to degrade. Simply put, this is a recipe for disaster! But there are edible alternatives, read on...