Background Articles

A new paper warns that a growing reliance on trash is leading to more human-bear conflict

Banned goods would include disposable plastic straws, plates, glasses, lids and appliances; coffee capsules; cotton swabs; opaque and colored PET (thermoplastic polyester) bottles; boxes and packs for tobacco products; blister packaging (except for medicines); egg cartons; and several types of bags.

The landfill in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, is overfull, but the hamlet can’t open a new landfill until it can pay to decommission the old one, says hamlet Mayor Harry Towtongie. A new environmental report says bad dumps are a problem in all of Canada's Inuit regions.

Scientists have discovered microplastics in rainwater and snow, in remote parts of Russia. The researchers first started looking into the pollution in 2020, and they have determined that the small fibers were carried to the remote wilderness by air currents.

At the outset, it seemed that there might be an environmental silver lining to the global pandemic. However, the same cannot be said for our oceans, which have been hard hit in recent months. COVID-19 triggered an estimated global use of 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves every month. If we stitched together all of the masks manufactured already, and projected to be produced, we’d be able to cover the entire landmass of Switzerland.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

Dumps are often chock-full of plastic and, as a new survey shows, polar bears are ingesting a lot of it. In an analysis of the stomach contents of 51 polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea, researchers led by Raphaela Stimmelmayr, a wildlife veterinarian with Alaska’s North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, found that 25 percent of the bears had plastic in their stomachs.

Researchers looked inside the stomachs of 34 spotted seals that were collected in Gambell and Shishmaref in 2012 and 2020. Of those, 33 contained microplastics.