The miracle material has made modern life possible. But more than 40 percent of it is used just once, and it’s choking our waterways.
Precious Plastic | Reducing plastic waste, everywhere
Join a global community reducing plastic waste. Build open-source recycling machines, learn from 40K+ recyclers and turn waste into products. Free to start.
Plastic Recycling Is a Problem Consumers Can't Solve
Even if you put everything into the right blue bins, a lot of plastics will end up in landfills and the ocean. Consumers can't solve this problem.
US drinking water quality: exposure risk profiles for seven legacy and emerging contaminants
Advances in drinking water infrastructure and treatment throughout the 20th and early 21st century dramatically improved water reliability and quality in the United States (US) and other parts of the world. However, numerous chemical contaminants from a range of anthropogenic and natural sources continue to pose chronic health concerns, even in countries with established drinking water regulations, such as the US.
Birds of a Feather Eat Plastic Together: High Levels of Plastic Ingestion in Great Shearwater Adults and Juveniles Across Their Annual Migratory Cycle
Limited work to date has examined plastic ingestion in highly migratory seabirds like Great Shearwaters (Ardenna gravis) across their entire migratory range. We examined 217 Great Shearwaters obtained from 2008–2019 at multiple locations spanning their yearly migration cycle across the Northwest and South Atlantic to assess accumulation of ingested plastic as well as trends over time and between locations. A total of 2328 plastic fragments were documented in the ventriculus portion of the gastrointestinal tract, with an average of 9 plastic fragments per bird. The mass, count, and frequency of plastic occurrence (FO) varied by location, with higher plastic burdens but lower FO in South Atlantic adults and chicks from the breeding colonies. No fragments of the same size or morphology were found in the primary forage fish prey, the Sand Lance (Ammodytes spp., n = 202) that supports Great Shearwaters in Massachusetts Bay, USA, suggesting the birds directly ingest the bulk of their plastic loads rather than accumulating via trophic transfer. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy indicated that low- and high-density polyethylene were the most common polymers ingested, within all years and locations. Individuals from the South Atlantic contained a higher proportion of larger plastic items and fragments compared to analogous life stages in the NW Atlantic, possibly due to increased use of remote, pelagic areas subject to reduced inputs of smaller, more diverse, and potentially less buoyant plastics found adjacent to coastal margins. Different signatures of polymer type, size, and category between similar life stages at different locations suggests rapid turnover of ingested plastics commensurate with migratory stage and location, though more empirical evidence is needed to ground truth this hypothesis. This work is the first to comprehensively measure the accumulation of ingested plastics by Great Shearwaters over the last decade and across multiple locations spanning their yearly trans-equatorial migration cycle and underscores their utility as sentinels of plastic pollution in Atlantic ecosystems.
Appropriate Measures — Real Life
Changing the tech we use is not enough to mitigate the environmental and social harm of mass technology
Yesterday's "plastics" are today's crypto tokens | TechCrunch
What "The Graduate" can teach about today's cryptocurrencies
Nightmares on wax: the environmental impact of the vinyl revival
From toxic wastewater to greenhouse gas emissions, the boom in vinyl has dangerous effects – but streaming isn’t as clean an alternative as it looks
Characteristics of ‘early adopters’ of water treatment capacity needed to remove PFAS and other emerging contaminants in the United States
Larger CWS were 7–8 times more likely than smaller systems to adopt advanced treatment processes over 2004–2022. , Past work shows exposures to drinking water contaminants can differ among regions with varying sociodemographic composition, in part due to disparities in siting of pollution sources. Drinking water treatment by reverse osmosis, ion exchange, or activated carbon has been recommended by United States (US) regulatory agencies for community water systems (CWS) with elevated concentrations of emerging chemical toxicants such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). However, barriers faced by CWS in implementing such technologies are not well understood. Here we used a national scale ( n = 36 611 CWS) Kaplan–Meier “survival” analysis, as well as adjusted piecewise logistic regression models, to retrospectively examine characteristics of CWS that were “early adopters” of these treatment technologies between 2004–2022. Results showed the largest CWS serving >100 000 customers adopted the treatment technologies considered here 7–8 times faster than small and very small CWS serving <3300 customers from 2004–2022. Nationally and for a case study of CWS with elevated PFAS concentrations, the odds of CWS adopting the treatment technologies considered in this study between 2004–2022 were significantly lower (10–25%) for each 10% higher proportion of non-Hispanic Black residents. Results were generally consistent when focusing on CWS with prior MCL violations and in CWS across different US regions , system sizes, and source water types. The proportion of American Indian and Alaskan Native residents was also inversely associated with adoption of the treatment technologies for certain groups of CWS. These results suggest managerial and financial barriers to removal of high levels of emerging contaminants in drinking water may be most pronounced for some small CWS and those serving selected historically marginalized communities.
What happens when you spend a year using science to improve your brain
How plastic is the brain?
Socioeconomic Disparities in Exposures to PFAS and Other Unregulated Industrial Drinking Water Contaminants in US Public Water Systems
Treatment Processes Reported by US Public Water Systems (2004-2020)
This repository holds records on treatment processes and objectives reported by United States (US) public water systems from 2004-2020. These data were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request made to the US Environmental Protection Agency in June 2020. Data were reported quarterly. Please refer to the associated publication (Liddie et al., 2026) for additional details on these data. Please cite both this repository and the publication if you use or refer to these data.
The “Anthropocene”
Human activities are exerting increasing impacts on the environment on all scales, in many ways outcompeting natural processes. This includes the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds which are not produced by nature, such as for instance the...
All my trash for a year fit into two plastic bags. Here’s how I did it.
Giving up plastic forks, new clothes and even toilet paper for an exercise in conservation.
The Trillion-Gallon Question: What if California’s Dams Fail? (Published 2023)
One superstorm could send walls of water sweeping through populated areas. There’s not much time to act.
I love the building on this idea here, it’s like using LLMs for code flippantly is this generation’s version of single-use plastics. Convenient, cheap for now, but with many negative externalities
Ross Wintle
Having fun reading and writing today. LLMs are not just machines. They are machine-building machines! This comes with way more responsibility. And understanding it may change how you use them.
