Tag: plastic pollution
Someday, Worms Might Help Recycle Your Dirty Plastic
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.
On an overcast spring morning in 2012, Federica Bertocchini was tending to her honeybees close to where she lived in Santander, on Spain’s picturesque northern coast. One of the honeycombs “was plagued with worms,” says the amateur apiarist, referring to the pesky larvae of wax moths, which have a voracious—and destructive—appetite.
Bertocchini picked out the worms, placed them in a plastic bag, and carried on with her beekeeping chores. When she retrieved the
The World Has One Big Chance to Eliminate Plastic Pollution
Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human placenta. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to