Biotech startup FutureBio, the first tenant of UC Berkeley’s Bakar Labs for Energy and Materials, hopes to produce and ...

To date, several different microorganisms have been found to participate in the biodegradation of various synthetic plastic materials following their isolation from the soil of plastic-dumping sites, ...

The Earth is covered in plastic—and we keep making more of it. Caitlin Saks and Arlo Pérez Esquivel join chemist Malika Jeffries-EL in her Boston University lab to explore just what it takes to break ...

The world has a big plastic problem that it's yet to fix. We're trying to reduce our reliance on plastic, but that's seemingly impossible in modern society. The material is too important for our daily ...

And, as usual, we’ll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well. Plastic is a synthetic material, meaning that it’s made by combining man-made chemicals, instead of existing naturally. Natural ...

The enzyme-enhanced plastic film had the same strength and flexibility as a standard plastic grocery bag. UC Berkeley photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering Some single-use plastics have been replaced ...

A lot has changed in the sixty years since those cinematic words were expressed in Goodbye Columbus. The financial efficacy of a cheap material has given way to environmental concerns, after all, much ...

Plastic bags that claim to decompose might not actually be degrading in the way you might expect. A recent study has shown that some "biodegradable" plastic bags are surviving up to three years. The ...

Plastic accumulation poses both environmental and health challenges, yet conventional mechanical recycling has limited efficiency for plastics as it can compromise physical properties of the materials ...

Deep within the world's oceans lurk marine bacteria armed with plastic-munching enzymes, their evolution seemingly sculpted ...

The tiny waxworm went from zero to hero in 2017 when researchers discovered the caterpillar could potentially help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: plastic waste. The ...