Everyday Plastic calls supermarket takeback schemes a diversion and says there is too much plastic packaging
Seventy per cent of soft plastic collected in supermarket recycling schemes and tracked after collection ended up being burned, an investigation by campaigners has found.
By placing trackers inside packages of soft plastic that were collected by Sainsbury’s and Tesco in July 2023 and February 2024, campaigners found that most of them ended up being incinerated rather than recycled.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
10/01/2024 - 01:00
Fifteen of the nimble, tree-climbing mammals were released last month at secret locations in Devon
Fifteen pine martens are darting through the woods of Dartmoor for the first time in 150 years after the rare but recovering species was reintroduced into south-west England.
The nimble, tree-climbing mustelids were released last month at secret locations in the steep, tree-lined valleys of Devon in what conservationists are hailing as a historic step in the restoration of the region’s woodlands.
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10/01/2024 - 00:00
A project on Spain’s Costa Brava is reviving dwindling populations of the prized seafood – and keeping small-scale fishers in business
Clinging to almost vertical cliffs on the Costa Brava in north-east Spain, the resort of l’Estartit has a dramatic location but the real drama is unfolding under the waves, where an innovative approach to ancient techniques is helping to revive declining populations of prized cuttlefish
Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) are a valuable catch for Spanish fishers and a popular dish, either on their own or as a key ingredient in seafood paella. However, their numbers have declined on the Catalan coast through a combination of pollution and unregulated recreational fishing.
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10/01/2024 - 00:00
Kew study reveals areas with at least 100,000 undiscovered plant species – most likely to be under threat of extinction
Botanists have identified 33 “dark spots” around the world where thousands of plant species are probably waiting to be discovered, according to new research.
From a palm tree in Borneo that flowers underground to a Malagasy orchid that spends its life growing on other plants, researchers are still making dozens of new species discoveries every year.
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09/30/2024 - 20:27
This blog is now closed
Burke accuses Dutton of trying to ‘throw kerosene’ on public debate over Middle East
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National weather forecasts
Sticking with the weather, here’s a look at the forecasts across Australia’s capital cities today:
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09/30/2024 - 17:39
It’s difficult to overstate how rapidly Australians have embraced solar power – there’s now more rooftop solar than coal-fired power. The key question is what policymakers can learn from its success
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Australia was a different place in 2011. Julia Gillard’s Labor government, the Greens and a couple of country independents were rewriting the country’s climate policies, including introducing a world-leading carbon pricing system and creating three agencies to back it up.
Those organisations – the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Climate Change Authority – have survived and help shape the investment and policy landscape. The carbon pricing system – falsely described as a tax – famously didn’t.
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09/30/2024 - 16:14
Bethany Beach firefly, found in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, faces dangers to habitat because of climate change
The US government is seeking to consider a firefly species as endangered for the first time, according to a proposal from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Bethany Beach firefly, found in coastal Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, is facing increasing dangers to its natural habitat because of climate change-related events. They include sea level rise, which is predicted to affect all sites within the known distribution by the end of the century, and the lowering of groundwater aquifers.
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09/30/2024 - 12:53
Birds outnumber residents in Hilario Ascasubi, after deforestation leads them to seek food, shelter and water
The town of Hilario Ascasubi near Argentina’s eastern Atlantic coast has a parrot problem.
Thousands of the green, yellow and red birds have invaded, driven by deforestation in the surrounding hills, according to biologists. They bite on the town’s electric cables, causing outages, and are driving residents around the bend with their incessant screeching and deposits everywhere of parrot poo.
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09/30/2024 - 11:29
Asteraceae, a family of flowering plants which includes daisies, sunflowers and asters, are the most diverse group of flowering plants in the world. This plant family comprises around 34,000 species, some of which are well-known, such as artichokes, chamomile, dahlias and lettuce. An international research team has now compiled and analyzed a new global database on the distribution and evolutionary history of all Asteraceae species. The researchers found that an unexpectedly high number of evolutionary events -- known as 'speciation' where a new species of plants evolves from a common ancestor -- occurred in the aster family within relatively short time periods on many islands worldwide.
09/30/2024 - 10:00
We learn about butterflies when we are small because it is foreshadowing: you too will change. But they are an imperfect metaphor for what it feels like to live
The very funny naturalist and writer Redmond O’Hanlon was on a sandbank on the edge of a river in Borneo when hundreds of butterflies started to fly towards him and his travel companion and landed on their boots, trousers, and shirts, and “sucked the sweat from our arms.”
He watched them for a while – “there were Whites, Yellows and Blues, Swallow-tails, black, banded, or spotted with blue-greens” – and then stood up and brushed them off gently.
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