Plastic pollution touches nearly every ecosystem on Earth, from deep ocean trenches to mountain snowpack. This archive tracks real progress: policy wins, material innovations, cleanup breakthroughs, and the researchers, companies, and communities driving measurable change. 167 stories and counting.
The new ban will also extend to plastic straws and cutlery, as the nation’s government expands its campaign against single-use plastics, which began in 2019 when it banned plastic carrier bags.
Pilot programs are ongoing in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, and Hawai’i are already seeing promising results.
Similar bans have already been made in Scotland and Wales, while the U.K. government banned single-use plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds in England in 2020.
The Foundation partners with local community and government organizations to stop waste from reaching the ocean, where it degrades and becomes harder to capture and recycle.
Governor Newsom signed a new bill into law that will ban single-use plastic produce bags starting in 2025. The law requires that all such bags be replaced by recycled paper bags or compostable ones.
Since deployment in August 2021, System 002 (or “Jenny”) has now collected 101,353 kg of plastic over 45 extractions, sweeping an area of over 3000km2 – comparable to the size of Rhode Island.
California’s single-use plastic law sets a binding target to cut throwaway plastic 25% by 2032, and it puts the bill where it belongs: on the companies making the stuff. A new producer-led organization will run recycling programs and pay $500 million a year into a fund that helps clean up the mess and address its health impacts. That’s a real shift, because for decades the cost of plastic pollution has fallen on cities and taxpayers, not the businesses profiting from it. As the largest U.S. state, California tends to pull markets and other states along with it — making this a hopeful template for tackling plastic pollution far beyond its borders.
The country generates around four million tons of plastic waste per year, about a third of which is not recycled and ends up in waterways and landfills that regularly catch fire and exacerbate air pollution.
Nzambi Matee’s Nairobi-based company, Gjenge Makers, produces a variety of different paving stones, which are already being put to use to line sidewalks, driveways, and roads.
The Flipflopi team intends to set up a Material Recovery Center for plastics, which will be the first of its kind in the Lamu archipelago and will serve over 140,000 people.
