Waste

"In places like Indonesia, plastic refuse is often burned in unregulated low-tech furnaces that pose grave health risks."

"When former top Environmental Protection Agency official Judith Enck noticed a cavalcade of chemical and plastics industry lobbyists visiting the agency’s Washington headquarters in February, she wondered what could be up."

"The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to remove air emission regulations from plastic pyrolysis plants, also known as chemical or advanced recycling facilities, that essentially burn plastic to make fuel."

"A new label promises single-use cups are recyclable. But that doesn't mean they actually get recycled."

"It’s been a decade since farmers began to learn that contamination from PFAS unknowingly spread across their property could devastate their lives and livelihoods, but Maine is showing it’s possible to keep farms going despite the problems caused by the “forever chemicals.”

"Cahokia Heights, ​a Black Illinois community, was already drowning in sewage. Now it faces the loss of crucial federal repair money."

"A Wisconsin project dubbed the “world’s largest manure biogas project” emits nearly 5,000 metric tons of climate-warming methane annually, roughly equivalent to emissions from 30,000 gasoline-powered vehicles, according to state data that adds to concerns about the impacts of large-scale manure digesters."

"Factory farms in California routinely avoid pollution regulations intended to protect the state’s water, finds a new white paper out of Stanford. Ten million tons of animal manure in the Golden State are unaccounted for, the report finds, thanks to a combination of non-compliance, non-enforcement and opaque disclosure rules."

"Oklahoma took on an ambitious project to catalog all of the state’s injection wells, which shoot toxic waste generated by oil drilling back into the ground. Despite records showing risk of drinking water pollution, the state chose not to act."

"The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination"