Around The Web

It's not as easy to recycle your takeaway coffee cup as people may have thought.

Most people willing to swap to supermarkets trying to improve farming standards, survey finds

Shoppers around the world overwhelmingly support high animal welfare standards for pigs, and most would also be prepared to change their supermarket habits in response, an international survey on pork consumption has found.

Seven out of 10 people questioned said they found the manner in which pigs are reared for slaughter on some factory farms “upsetting”, “wrong” or “shocking”, after being shown photographs of some pig-keeping conditions in the online poll. The survey highlighted practices such as sows kept in small cages, antibiotic use, as well as tail-docking, teeth-grinding and castration, sometimes without pain relief.

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The Ontario government has released a framework for its voluntary offset programme, approving three quantification methodologies under an ‘open architecture’ approach that doesn’t limit project types.

It might be mid-Autumn, but bushfires are still threatening homes and livelihoods across the country.

Blockchain-based carbon credit platform Poseidon has committed to spend its first tranche of cash to buying Peruvian REDD credits from UK-based Ecosphere+, as part of an initiative offering a voluntary carbon credit platform for retailers.

New research shows that fire follows fire in the Australian Alps, and old-growth forests are less flammable. Philip Zylstra, Research Fellow, flammability and fire behaviour, University of Wollongong Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

The launch of the Tess mission to find new worlds beyond our Solar System is delayed by 48 hours.

Science created a 'wonder material' in plastic; now nature is helping to unmake it.

New York's grid operator has floated options for how the state might apply a carbon price to the price of traded electricity in concert with RGGI, with one alternative requiring that power suppliers provide more data than is currently required.

The breakthrough, spurred by the discovery of plastic-eating bugs at a Japanese dump, could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.

The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.

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Calaya the gorilla gave birth for the first time in nine years at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

Justin Trudeau is bailing out a Texas oil billionaire. He should be bailing out Canada’s workers and the climate.

Last Saturday, Indigenous leaders stood arm-in-arm in front of the gates of Kinder Morgan’s pipeline worksite in Burnaby, British Columbia.

For weeks before, hundreds of non-native people – environmentalists, federal parliamentarians Elizabeth May and Kennedy Stewart, even an engineer formerly employed by the Texas oil corporation – had marched to the same place. In each case, police approached, read aloud their violation of a no-go zone, and arrested and shackled them.

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Purchase of a soundproof booth for EPA chief violates federal law that prohibits spending more than $5,000 on office improvements

An internal government watchdog says the Environmental Protection Agency violated federal spending laws when purchasing a $43,000 soundproof privacy booth for administrator Scott Pruitt to make private phone calls in his office.

The Government Accountability Office issued its findings on Monday in a letter to Senate Democrats who had requested a review of Pruitt’s spending.

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EU carbon prices briefly climbed to a new seven-year high above €14 on Monday, gaining for the seventh consecutive session as observers pointed to further gains.

With Australia’s beaches and oceans covered in rubbish, Tangaroa Blue volunteers spend days trying to clean things up. While these images are not beautiful or professionally taken, they are the harsh reality of the world’s plastic pollution problem.

• ‘Plastic is literally everywhere’: the epidemic attacking Australia’s oceans

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UK astronomer Bill Chaplin demonstrates the noises that stars make and why this is useful to know.

Biodiversity concerns prompt emergency plan to use ferrets to round up the few rabbits left

It is not a pastime for which rabbits usually require much encouragement. But a mystery depletion in numbers on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog has led to an emergency effort to coax the local population into breeding … well, like rabbits.

Ferrets are being deployed to chase the reluctant remaining animals out of their warrens and into the hands of conservationists, who are bringing them together, safe from the stress of predators, in the hope that romance will blossom.

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The Tess mission will survey nearly the entire sky and is expected to find thousands of new worlds.

Oil companies? The government? The public? All of the above share the blame.

There are numerous ongoing legal challenges in an effort to determine who’s responsible for climate change. Exxon is under investigation by state attorneys general, cities are suing oil companies over sea level rise costs, and Our Children’s Trust is suing the federal government for failing to protect their generation from climate change. At the heart of these legal challenges lies the question – who bears culpability for climate change and liability for its costs and consequences?

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US Military drones will be put to work on farms throughout Queensland and the Northern Territory.