Author: Meera Subramanian, Nature

On a warm windy day in early April, Jace Tunnell steps out of his car at Morgan’s Point, a spit of land that juts out into the Houston Ship Channel in Texas. Tunnell, a marine biologist and reserve director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, sets his watch and gets to work, walking along the high-tide line and picking up every plastic pellet he can see.

Author: Dustin Godfrey

Burnaby firm Golden Trust Trading is being sued for millions of dollars by two separate shipping companies claiming it was responsible for docking fees in Thailand for plastic it had reportedly exported to the country.

Author: Matthew Campbell, Bloomberg

About two years ago, Vinyou Jiaramankong learned his neighborhood was changing. Next to the 40-year-old’s neat house in the southern suburbs of Bangkok, a storage yard was being converted into a plastic recycling factory. Shielded by high walls that extended directly to the edge of Jiaramankong’s property, the facility would take in used plastic, melt it down, and run the resulting mixture through an extruder.

Authors: Chris Vedelago and James Dowling

Australia’s largest plastic bag recycling program has collapsed amid revelations hundreds of millions of bags and other soft plastic items dropped off by customers at Coles and Woolworths are being secretly stockpiled in warehouses and not recycled.

Author: Amy Gibbons

British plastic waste is still being illegally dumped and burned abroad, contributing to “shocking” and “irreversible” impacts on human health and the environment, MPs have heard. A cross-party committee is calling for a blanket ban on UK plastic waste exports by 2027 after finding the “dirty trade” is leaving behind toxic traces on foreign soil linked to cancer, liver disease, skin lesions and abnormal foetus development.

Author: U.K. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee has called for a ban on the export of all plastic waste from the UK by 2027 to reduce the country’s contribution to global plastic waste pollution. The ban should be part of a strategy to use less plastic, re-use more of it, and boost recycling, the committee said in a report – The price of plastic: ending the toll of plastic waste – which is published today (under embargo – attached above).

Author: Gerald Stoiber, translated from German

Around 700 tons of plastic waste from Austria were illegally exported to Malaysia. For this, an ex-manager and the intermediary of the business have to answer in court. It was a report by the environmental organization Greenpeace that got the ball rolling.

Author: Leslie Kaufman

“I’m, like, really freaking out.” It’s a late night in April, and Tom Szaky, the founder and chief executive officer of TerraCycle Inc., is on my video screen. His mussed shoulder-length hair is spilling over a zip-up hoodie. Unusually, he’s in supplicant mode.

Author: Mitra Nazar

Bags full of finely chopped plastic lie on the side of a provincial road just outside Adana, Turkey. Farmer Izzettin Akman sees it being dumped regularly, often at night. He cut open bags to see what's inside.

Author: Mark Smulian

A parliamentary committee has condemned the Government's efforts to tackle rising waste crime, describing them as slow, aimless and ineffective. Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chair, Labour’s Dame Meg Hillier, said: “Currently [Defra’s] approach to large parts of waste crime is closer to decriminalisation."

Author: Louis Gore-Langton

The ongoing saga of corruption allegations against TerraCycle’s UK operations was brought to a head last night in BBC Panorama’s investigation Recycling: Where Does My Rubbish Go? Company CEO Tom Szaky was confronted with evidence that his UK waste handler is a sanctioned criminal, that his business system’s collection and recycling rates are extremely low, and that the scheme is likely misleading consumers.