Bacardi rum bottles, Skittles sweet wrappers, designer water bottles -- a bevy of companies are developing biodegradable plastic packaging they say is better for the environment than traditional plastics.. Bacardi says its biodegradable bottle for spirits will hit the shelves this year.
A major power outage crippled several of Argentina's provinces on Wednesday, including parts of Buenos Aires, plunging millions of people into darkness for at least two hours as summer temperatures soared, officials said.. Argentina's undersecretary for energy Santiago Yanotti told the C5N network that power demand had soared due to the high temperatures.
A new Moai, one of Easter Island's iconic statues, was found in the bed of a dry laguna in a volcano crater, the Indigenous community that administers the site on the Chilean island has said.. The statue was found on February 21 by a team of scientific volunteers from three Chilean universities collaborating on a project to restore the marshland in the crater of the Rano Raraku volcano.
Joe Biden is expected to issue his first presidential veto after the US Senate voted Wednesday to overturn a Labor Department rule allowing pension funds to consider progressive principles in investment decisions.. The Labor Department reinstated the rule in November, undoing a push by former president Donald Trump to penalize fund managers considering climate change in their decision-making.
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres urged countries Wednesday to agree a "robust and ambitious" treaty to protect the high seas, as time starts to run out for negotiators. . The high seas begin at the border of countries' exclusive economic zones, which extend up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from coastlines.
Conservationists were celebrating Wednesday the first sightings in 24 years of the dusky tetraka, a yellow-throated songbird native to Madagascar for which ornithologists had feared the worst.. The last documented sighting of dusky tetraka, in 1999, was in the rainforests of northeastern Madagascar, one of the world's most diverse biodiversity hotspots with hundreds of unique vertebrate species.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is to make a second attempt on Thursday to blast off for the International Space Station carrying two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and the second Emirati to voyage to space.. NASA astronauts fly regularly to the station on Russian Soyuz craft.
Toilet paper is an unexpected source of potentially harmful "forever chemicals" in wastewater across the globe and could be leaching into soils via sewage, a new study on Wednesday said. . The synthetic chemicals are present in soil and waterways across the globe, and a new study on Wednesday found that toilet paper "should be considered as a potentially major source" of PFAS in wastewater treatment systems.
A first count of trees in Africa's drylands has enabled scientists to calculate how much carbon they store and could help devise better conservation strategies for the region and beyond, a study said Wednesday.. "(It) tells us about the carbon cycle and how much carbon we have in trees is mitigating climate change and our abuse of fossil fuels," Compton Tucker, co-lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, told AFP. Dryland trees capture carbon for much longer than grasses and other non-woody species in the region, even if individually they do not store huge amounts.
An exceptionally long La Nina weather phenomenon that intensified drought and flooding is finally ending, the United Nations said Wednesday -- but what comes next might bring its own problems.. "The first triple-dip La Nina of the 21st century is finally coming to an end," said WMO chief Petteri Taalas.
