The plastic pollution problem is vast and harmful. But The Good Times has reported over the years on various solutions to help tackle the problem. Here’s another remarkable effort: scientists have successfully found a natural product that can be transformed into degradable, digestible polymers (a substance or material, like plastics, that consists of very large […]
In the quest to solve the plastic pollution crisis, organizations of all types are working on solutions. The Good Times has highlighted a few on these pages in the past, such as the Ocean Cleanup removing plastics from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative to remove microplastics from water, bacteria that have […]
Good news arrived recently from The Ocean Cleanup, the non-profit environmental organization that is working to rid the oceans of plastic. It’s conducting the largest clean-up in history, helping to rescue our oceans (see our 2016 story about The Ocean Cleanup). The company announced it had “now officially removed more than 100,000 kg [220,460 lb] […]
An Indian engineer has invented a very quick waste segregator. The TrashBot sorts garbage into metals, plastic, and food waste. It can separate up to 200 tonnes of waste in one operating session, running for 24 hours non-stop, at a cost that is lower than dumping it in landfills. The TrashBot is described by its […]
Australian businesswoman and marathoner Mina Guli is on another mission. The Good Times already featured her incredible accomplishments in 2016 as the Wonder Woman for Water. She is addressing the world’s water crisis through her non-profit, Thirst Foundation, and to bring attention to this issue, on LinkedIn she attests to having “run 100s of marathons […]
The news is full of stories about how plastics are further encroaching into even the most remote regions of the Earth, the latest example being the discovery of microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow, probably the result of traveling through the atmosphere. While the news is indeed dire and the need to curb the production and […]
Companies have produced more than 7 billion tons of plastic since production first started to ramp up in the 1950s. Unfortunately, all manner of plastics, such as helmets, single-use bottles, bottle caps, windsurf boards and even Christmas trees, have been finding their way into waterways and, from there, into the ocean, since the beginning. Up […]
The Seychelles archipelago, located in the western Indian Ocean, some 1,600 kilometers off the coast of East Africa, consists of 115 islands, 72 of which are remote. Mostly frozen in time because it is so difficult to access them, the isolated islands abound with marine life, birds and other animals. For example, Cosmoledo is known […]
Exchanging used plastic bottles for bus rides: that is the innovative strategy to encourage waste recycling, benefiting everyone, that the officials have devised in Indonesia’s second-biggest city, Surabaya, located on the country’s main island of Java. The world’s fourth-most-populated country, Indonesia is home to the largest expanse of tropical rainforest in Asia, but also struggles with […]
Nzambi Matee founded Gjenge Makers in Nairobi, Kenya in 2018, initially to sort and sell plastic waste to other recycling companies. Matee quickly realized that, because her enterprise was collecting waste faster than the recycling companies could use it, she needed to change business models, and fast. She pivoted directly to creating value-added products using […]
