Just Six Companies Create About a Quarter of Global Plastic Waste, Survey Finds
Courtesy Break Free from Plastic This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The more plastic a company makes, the more pollution it creates. That seemingly obvious, yet previously unproven, point, is the main takeaway from a first-of-its-kind study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Researchers from a…
Flaring and Venting Causes Two Premature Deaths a Day, Study Finds
Zuma This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Meeka Outlaw spent most of her childhood growing up in a South Philadelphia rowhouse that was essentially sandwiched between an oil refinery and an electrical power plant. Less than a mile north of her home on Latona Street, there’s…
Wait, Tampons Weren’t Being Tested With Human Blood?
Mother Jones illustration; Getty Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Until last week, no study had ever been published that tested period products—tampons, pads, discs, cups, and underwear—using human blood. A team of four women just changed that. On August 7, Dr. Bethany Samuelson Bannow…
How the American Diet Turbocharges COVID-19
Wren McDonald Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.Before the coronavirus hit in early 2020, a quieter epidemic was already taking its toll across the United States: the near-universal prevalence of diet-related maladies. More than half of…
Car ‘Splatometer’ Tests Reveal Huge Decline in the Number of Insects
A truck driver cleans dead bugs off his windshield at a truck stop in Baytown, Texas. Brett Coomer/AP This piece was originally published in The Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership. Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites…
The Bizarre Trump-Fueled Backlash to Healthy School Lunches
Party of One Studio Back in 2010, then–first lady Michelle Obama launched a nefarious scheme to turn school cafeterias into liberal indoctrination zones. Or at least that’s how Obama’s right-wing opponents portrayed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a law she spearheaded that gave the National School Lunch Program its first nutritional update in more than…