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 […]
Plastic waste has become a scourge of the Earth, polluting waterways and creating garbage patches in the oceans, the largest of which is in the Pacific Ocean. According to National Geographic: “While many different types of trash enter the ocean, plastics make up the majority of marine debris for two reasons. First, plastic’s durability, low […]
Guatemala is using plastic to trap plastic in its rivers. How? With plastic “biofences”. This video, produced by the World Economic Forum, circulated rapidly worldwide earlier this year. It shows the plastic-catching barriers stopping floating trash. This simple structure keeps 60% of the plastic from reaching the seas that lead to the ocean. Guatemala is […]
