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It’s piled up in landfills. It clutters fields and rivers, dangles from trees, and forms flotillas of waste in the seas. China’s use of plastic bags, containers and cutlery has become one of its most stubborn and ugliest environmental blights. Actions to Drastically Reduce Use of Disposable Plastic Items So the Chinese government has introduced measures to drastically cut the amount of disposable plastic items that often become a hazard and an eyesore in the country, even deep in the countryside and in the oceans. Among the new guidelines are bans on the import of plastic waste and the use of nonbiodegradable plastic bags in major cities by the end of this year. Other sources of plastic garbage will be banned in Beijing, Shanghai and wealthy coastal provinces by the end of 2022, and that rule will extend nationwide by late 2025. Serious and Systematic Efforts Previous efforts to reduce the use of plastic bags have faltered in China, but the government has indicated ...

ETH researchers have created an incredibly lightweight 18-carat gold, using a matrix of plastic in place of metallic alloy elements. Leonie van ’t Hag has set to create a new form of gold that weighs about five to ten times less than traditional 18-carat gold.  The conventional mixture is usually three-quarters gold and one-quarter copper, with a density of about 15 g/cm 3 . That’s not true for this new lightweight gold, its density is just 1.7 g/cm 3 . And nonetheless it is still 18-carat gold.  Light Weighting Gold Using Polymer Latex Instead of a metal alloy element, van ’t Hag, Mezzenga and colleagues used protein fibers and a polymer latex to form a matrix in which they embedded thin discs of gold nanocrystals. In addition, the lightweight gold contains countless tiny air pockets invisible to the eye. Gold platelets and plastic melt into a material that can be easily processed mechanically. The Process to Develop the New Gold They added the ingredients to...

A new Stanford study shows mealworms can eat Styrofoam containing a common toxic chemical additive and still can be safely used as a protein-rich feedstock for other animals. Natural Breakdown of Chemicals in Mealworm’s Gut The study is the first to look at where chemicals in plastic end up after being broken down in a natural system – a yellow mealworm’s gut, in this case. It serves as a proof of concept for deriving value from plastic waste. “ This is definitely not what we expected to see. It’s amazing that mealworms can eat a chemical additive without it building up in their body over time. ” said study lead author Anja Malawi Brandon, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. In earlier work, Stanford researchers and collaborators at other institutions revealed that mealworms, which are easy to cultivate and widely used as a food for animals ranging from chickens and snakes to fish and shrimp, can subsist on a diet of various types of plastic. “ ...