State and local policies to regulate the use of plastic bags have significantly reduced how many of them are found littered along U.S. shorelines — potentially cutting that type of waste in half in ...

Usually, when rushing to class at the University of Washington, my mind races with what homework I have yet to complete, if my outfit is rain repellent enough, or if I am making it to the lecture on ...

The MVP of the cleaning routine.

When you outlaw or discourage the sale of plastic bags, fewer of them end up as litter on beaches. That’s the intuitive finding of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, which involved an ...

Picking up litter at an Adopt-a-Beach cleanup at Jeorse Park Beach in East Chicago, Indiana, in 2023. A new report by the non-partisan, non-profit group Alliance for the Great Lakes found that 86% of ...

Researchers find that nationwide policies to ban plastic bags may be paying off, with fewer showing up during coastal cleanups. Ever since their invention in 1959, plastic bags have become synonymous ...

For the first time, the amount of plastic litter hiding inside Lake Tahoe has been investigated, and the results aren't good. The popular tourist spot on the northern California/Nevada border contains ...

Litter strewn across Great Lakes beaches is overwhelmingly composed of plastic, a new study from a region-wide beach cleanup group found, signaling a widespread problem for the wildlife and people who ...

Plastic has been found in every single part of the ocean, from the surface to the seafloor and from the tropics to the poles. Land-based sources of plastic account for the majority of this pollution, ...

The lawsuit used a new legal attack that put plastic producers on the hook for its products that end up as trash. A New York state judge dismissed the attorney general’s plastic pollution lawsuit ...

Scientists from N.C. State University released 40 GPS-tracked plastic bottles into Marsh Creek in Raleigh in April and May 2025 to study how litter travels. This is a part of a larger NOAA-funded ...