plastic

Ecology: The Keystone Science

A missing piece from most critiques of modern capitalism revolves around the misunderstanding of ecology. To put it bluntly, there will be no squaring the circle of mass industrial civilization and an inhabitable Earth. There is no way for energy and resource use, along with all the strife, warfare, and poverty that comes along with it, to continue under the business as usual model that contemporary Western nations operate under.

A Fatal Incompatibility: Big Business and Human Survival

Dramatic as the title of the article is, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not hyperbole or hysterics. It is the only logical conclusion one can arrive at if one analyses the facts of our current situation as a species.
Commerce has existed for thousands of years, with private and government-owned companies providing goods and services for sale, largely unregulated for most of that time. Of course, government has always had the capacity to intervene where business practices have been found to be unsafe or unethical, for the protection of society.

EU Proposes Ban on Single-Use Plastics

(CD) — In a move welcomed by conservationists, the executive arm of the European Union (EU) on Monday proposed a ban on 10 common single-use plastics that, together with fishing gear, account for about 70 percent of marine litter across Europe. 500,000 tonnes of EU plastic waste end up in the sea every year.Building on our #PlasticsStrategy, we're tackling […]

Nature’s Breaking Point

Ever wonder how the classical philosophers/economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo would view today’s credo of infinite economic growth, forever more, above and beyond yesteryear.  Well, in a word, they would be horrified. Ricardo, similar to the father of capitalism Adam Smith, believed in the concept of a “stationary state” when the land gets fully exploited and material progress comes to an end.

A Giant Crowdfunded Machine Is About to Begin Cleaning up the Pacific Garbage Patch

(ANTIMEDIA) — Scientists with the Ocean Cleanup Company are gearing up to tackle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an expanse of garbage in the Pacific Ocean that contains as many as 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and spans 617,763 square miles. Using a device designed by 23-year-old inventor Boyan Slat, who dropped out of an aerospace engineering program in […]