When Geoffrey Coates, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University, gives a talk about plastics and recycling, he usually opens with this question: What percentage of the 78 million tons of plastic used for packaging – for example, a 2-liter bottle or a take-out food container – actually gets recycled and re-used in a similar way?

The answer, just 2 percent. Sadly, nearly a third is leaked into the environment, around 14 percent is used in incineration and/or energy recovery, and a whopping 40 percent winds up in landfills.

Scientists led by a team at Caltech have developed a new method for potentially removing nearly all sulfur compounds from gas and diesel fuel.

Sulfur compounds in fuels such as gasoline and diesel create air pollution when the fuel is burned. To address that challenge, large-scale oil refinery processes remove the majority of sulfur from fuel down to a government-mandated level. The new technique, however, has the potential to reduce sulfur down to a fraction of that amount, which would further reduce air pollution and extend the lifetime of vehicles' catalytic converters, which control tailpipe emissions.

Researchers present recommendations for revision of the EU Water Framework Directive

Ocean acidification (OA) is spreading rapidly in the western Arctic Ocean in both area and depth, according to new interdisciplinary research reported in Nature Climate Change by a team of international collaborators, including University of Delaware professor Wei-Jun Cai.

Meet Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel—a pair of floating, solar and hydro-powered trash interceptors keeping Baltimore’s waters clean. These frankly adorable trash wheels can collect as much as 38,000 pounds of debris in a single day.

Understanding the environmental impact of using oil and gas wastewater as a road treatment may lead to safer water resources and stricter government regulations, according to Penn State researchers.

William Burgos, professor of environmental engineering, and Lara Fowler, senior lecturer at Penn State Law and assistant director of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, will study this impact through research funded by the United States Geological Society.

“In the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, gravel road aggregate has a lot of clay and when you drive over it, it tends to kick up a lot of dust, so they need to use dust suppressants,” Burgos said. “It just so happens that the northwestern portion of the state also has had a lot of oil and gas activity.”

A Brazilian judge temporarily suspended plans to open what would be the largest gold mine in the Brazilian Amazon this week, saying the Canadian company behind the project illegally obtained land and did not adequately address concerns from indigenous communities, according to news reports.

A new study on how ocean currents transport floating marine debris is helping to explain how garbage patches form in the world’s oceans. 

Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and colleagues developed a mathematical model that simulates the motion of small spherical objects floating at the ocean surface. 

A Washington State University study of the chemistry of technetium-99 has improved understanding of the challenging nuclear waste and could lead to better cleanup methods.

The work is reported in the journal Inorganic Chemistry. It was led by John McCloy, associate professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and chemistry graduate student Jamie Weaver. Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the Office of River Protection and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated.

Wastewater from oil and gas operations – including fracking for shale gas – at a West Virginia site altered microbes downstream, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study, published recently in Science of the Total Environment, showed that wastewater releases, including briny water that contained petroleum and other pollutants, altered the diversity, numbers and functions of microbes. The shifts in the microbial community indicated changes in their respiration and nutrient cycling, along with signs of stress.