Researchers found plasticoral on Okinawa beaches, where heat-altered plastic had become fused with coral rubble in a strange new form of pollution.

A Philippine charity that began with five women clearing a vacant lot in Manila in 1998 has been named a finalist for the 2026 Earthshot Prize, the environmental award founded by Prince William, for its work preventing plastic and organic waste from reaching landfills, waterways and the ocean. The Philippines produces more ocean plastic than any other country on earth, and its rivers continue to choke under thick layers of plastic. The Pasig, which runs through Manila, is among the most polluted waterways in the world and every storm season brings images of plastic washing over shorelines and clogging flooded streets across the capital. Mother Earth Foundation has spent about three decades building an answer to that crisis, an effort that has now brought it close to the award. The organisation has been turning ordinary villages into working models of a waste system. "We manage the waste where it is generated," Sonia Mendoza, the foundation's co-founder and chair, tells The Independent. "The people are made responsible for the waste that they generate." Mendoza says the model built by her foundation can be replicated not just across the Philippines, but in other Asian cities suffering from uncontrollable plastic pollution. At the...

“We thought this was the worst-case scenario, as a fledgling of that size couldn’t survive eating any more. We were wrong.” <span class="fr-mk" style="display: none;">&nbsp;</span> “From 2023 to 2026, the record for the most plastic ingested by these birds has been broken year after year. The plastic crisis is only getting worse, but we’re acting nowhere near fast enough to try and tackle it.” A diet of plastic Bond and his colleagues at the Adrift Lab have been monitoring the amount of plastic being ingested by sable shearwaters nesting on Lord Howe Island, off the eastern coast of Australia, since 2007. By bringing together a team of ecologists, ecotoxologists, and statisticians, amongst others, they have been able to collect the longest-running time series of plastic ingestion in any seabird species anywhere in the world. This latest study collates 16 years’ worth of that data to show how the trend in plastic ingestion is occurring over time. And it’s not looking good. While for the first 10 years the mass and number of pieces of plastic found in the bellies of shearwater chicks fluctuated, in recent years there has been a dramatic uptick. This culminated in 2025 when a chick was...

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This Plastic item is sold by MagicSeaFox. Ships from United Kingdom. Listed on Sep 7, 2026

Ocean plastic pollution is accidentally on the menu for southern giant petrel chicks. Even small nibbles of it may affect their physiology during development, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and Argentina's National Research Council (CONICET). Lea este comunicado de prensa en español. Southern giant petrels are not of high conservation concern globally, but they are particularly susceptible and useful sentinels for understanding how ocean plastic pollution affects wildlife. With a range stretching from Antarctica to Chile, Argentina, Africa and Australia, these large birds frequently forage at the sea surface, where floating plastic tends to accumulate. Adults can accidentally transfer plastic they eat to their chicks when they regurgitate food. The study, published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, detected plastics in more than 71% of chicks. This suggests that most petrel chicks are inadvertently fed plastic by their parents. To understand the effects of ingesting plastic on the chicks’ health, the researchers sampled and examined southern giant petrel chicks at two key stages of development during 2022 and 2023 in Patagonia, Argentina. “We found that it doesn’t take a stomach full of plastic to leave a biological signal,” said corresponding author Marcela Uhart, a...