Green Column: Raising Awareness of Plastic Waste

Everyday our plastic waste makes its way from land to sea through stormwater runoff, rivers, wind, or just chance. And since at least the 1970s researchers have been attempting to quantify just how much and where it's going. The most recent attempt, which was published on June 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that the number in surface waters is anywhere from 7,000 to 35,000 tons, surprisingly, "far less than expected," according to the study authors.

Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When I started visiting our Santa Monica office, I was thrilled to get up early (I was on East Coast time) and go down to the beach to body surf.

Goa State Pollution Control Board signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a cement company to use the plastic waste generated across the state.

A few years ago, photographer Jeremy Underwood visited the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site in Texas and was shocked to find the beaches nearby overrun with plastic, wood, metal, and other debris.

THIS is an unusually busy moment in the unhappy history of efforts to curb climate change. In two weeks at the end of June the world’s three biggest polluters unveiled carbon-reducing measures. In China and America these are more ambitious than previous policies. But they fall far short of what is needed to rein in the relentless rise in global carbon emissions.

Just when our biggest banks thought they were out of the woods and into the money, the official consensus in their favor begins to crack. The Obama administration’s publicly stated view – from the highest level in the White House - remains that the banks cannot or should not be broken up.  Their argument is that the big banks can be regulated into permanently low risk behavior.