The scourge of plastic waste is blighting the environment in Malaysia and numerous initiatives aimed at weaning consumers off using disposable plastic bags have borne mixed results. Now comes another such initiative, this time by the British supermarket chain Tesco. In its “unforgettable bag” campaign, which has been set in…

Much of plastic pollution comes from a simple source: plastic packaging. Plastic is a cheap and versatile substance that can be readily made and used. Then again, it can just as easily be dumped after a singe use, which has led to massive amounts of plastic waste befouling more and…

We all love our daily cups of tea. Well, many of us do. But what we may not realize is that many of those cups of tea may not be all that good for the environment. And it isn’t just because tea cultivation may be done in environmentally harmful ways….

Plastic bags sure can come in handy. We can pick them up freely at stores and shops, carry our goods in them, and then dispose of them without a second thought. The trouble, of course, is that they are a scourge on the environment. Discarded mounds of non-biodegradable bags add…

As if warming water temperatures were not bad enough for them, the region’s fragile coral reefs are facing an existential threat from another source: plastic waste. Reefs in the Asia-Pacific region have been swamped with billions of pieces of plastic waste, large and small, which has increased the threat of…

Often it seems we’re drowning in waste. In some cases, literally so. In the world’s seas and oceans, plastic waste has been accumulating at alarming speeds, engulfing large swathes of water and choking marine life in the process. On land too, there is way too much waste, putting great strains on…

Plastic waste is everywhere, but several countries, from Malawi to Morocco, have made plans to phase out plastic shopping bags and other disposable items. Now, following in their footsteps, Great Britain is planning to enact new measures aimed at weaning customers off disposable plastic products that are chucked out after…

Plastic bottles and bottle caps. Plastic candy wrappers and plastic shopping bags. Plastic cups and plastic boxes. Plastic shoes and plastic flip-flops. Plastic cigarette lighters and plastic toothbrushes. There are billions upon billions of such random pieces of plastic waste floating around in the ocean and marine animals have ended…

It’s not as if we’ve needed any more confirmation that plastic pollution is a terrible scourge on the environment and a threat to human health. But here it comes some more evidence anyhow: microplastics have been contaminating sea salt. Each year a staggering 12.7 million tons of plastic ends up…

Sabah is known for a number of things: its world-renowned biodiversity, its stunningly beautiful landscapes, its diving havens of marine beauty … and its rampant plastic waste. Despite frequent educational campaigns, locals continue littering with wanton abandon. Most of these campaigns, well-intentioned as they have been, have failed to make…

You know the feeling, that sinking feeling: you head down to a nearby beach for a bit of sunbathing, swimming or lying on the sand … only to find the beach overrun with other people and strewn with rubbish. We’ve all been there, yes. Wouldn’t it be great if we could make it…

A solution to the scourge of plastic waste around the planet may come from an unlikely source: worms. Wax worms, to be precise. Federica Bertocchini, a European scientist who is an amateur beekeeper, recently discovered that Galleria mellonella grubs, which are small parasitic creatures that feed on beeswax inside honey combs, also chow down…

We are what we eat, a saying goes. We are also what we do. And what we do is continue to pollute our oceans and wind up eating poisoned fish as a result. There is some irony in that: the pollutants that we release wantonly into our seas often end…

Insufficient waste management has long plagued Malaysia. So have the mounting piles of waste in its myriad forms: food waste, plastic waste, electronic waste. Over the past decade or so alone municipal solid waste has doubled. Much of that waste ends up at landfills, from where it continues to leach…

One hundred million tons. That’s how much plastic we produce globally each year with most of it ending up as waste adding to the massive amounts of plastic trash already piled up in mountainous landfills or suffocating marine life in vast atolls of toxic flotsam. It gets worse. Some 95%…

We all know the drill: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Except, of course, that by and large Malaysians continue to be laggards when it comes to recycling. Only a mere 15% of solid waste was collected for recycling all of last year. Perhaps a solution to all those growing mounds of non-biodegradable…