Plastic Waste

Sydney to London on plastic fuel
Sydney is the departure point of the world's first flight using a fuel made from “end of life” plastic. Later this year British pilot Jeremy Rowsell plans to fly back home from Australia in a single engine Cessna, which normally runs on diesel, according to a report by Business Green.
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Beijing vending machines turn plastic into profit
Ten machines, the size of big refrigerators, have been deployed at major subways and bus stops around China’s capital, Beijing, which turn trash into treasure while encouraging the public to recycle and sort garbage.
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Plasticity Forum Rio
Where there’s a will, there’s a way - plastic at Rio+20
Anna Beech, Civic Exchange
June 18, 2012
The Rio+20 Earth Summit begins in two days time. It provides a platform for world leaders, the private sector, NGOs, campaign groups and many others to come together to discuss how to develop a green economy, how to eradicate poverty and what an institutional framework for sustainable development would look like. For the third Earth Summit (the 2nd was in Johannesburg 10 years ago) there are seven priority areas: decent jobs, energy, building sustainable cities, food security and sustainable agriculture, water, oceans and disaster readiness. That’s a lot to cover in three days.
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Sample from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
There’s a bug in my plastic soup!
CleanBiz.Asia Staff
May 10, 2012
The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), also know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has grown 100-fold in the last 40 year and is now roughly the size of Texas, according to a new report by a team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The scientists warns that the NPSG is now a killer soup of microplastic – particles smaller than five millimetres – that threatens to alter the open ocean's natural environment. The United Nations Environment Programme says that, on average, around 13,000 pieces of plastic litter are found in every square kilometre of sea, but the problem is worst in the North Pacific.
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Plastic industry fights back over Manila's food packaging rules
The plastic industry has launched an offensive against the use of brown paper bags and recycled newspapers  to wrap food—environmentalists’ proposed alternatives to plastic bags that are known to pose a huge threat to the environment, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
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24 billion plastic bags saved in three years
In the three years that the ban on free plastic bags has been in effect, China has reduced its usage of plastic bags by 24 billion, and plastic consumption has dropped by 600,000 tons, which is equal to saving 3.6 million tons of oil or 5 million tons of standard coal, said Li Jing, an official of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), on May 26.
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