News

Mekong countries urged to fight plastic pollution in rivers

Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia have been asked to adopt stronger solutions to deal with plastic pollution in the Mekong River and its tributaries. The Mekong River Commission (MRC) said in a Wednesday report that the four member countries should establish a “joint, permanent mechanism to ...

VnExpress

Ho Chi Minh City’s plastic ‘habit’ leaves piles of waste

Kieu Anh Tran heads down a small alley to her workshop in Ho Chi Minh City’s Binh Thanh District. Inside, her team is busy washing used plastic tarpaulins, cutting patterns, and sewing the discarded material into backpacks, tote bags, and wallets. In Vietnam’s southern city and ...

Govi Snell

We need new weapons against packaging waste

Last month, researchers found microplastics — small, microscopic pieces of plastic fragments — within human lungs for the first time. This comes on the heels of news that microplastics were found in human blood, which may travel around the body and enter organs. Microplastics find their ...

SIMON BALDWIN

Consumption of plastics doubles in Myanmar amid pandemic: environmental group

According to Thant Myanmar, the consumption of plastic has doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic in Myanmar. Ma The Su Aye, manager of Thant Myanmar’s Rural Waste Management, told DMG that the increase was due to the increasing use of plastics, which are currently being used during ...

Development Media Group

Plastic waste imports are 'unwanted'

More than 100 environmental groups have called on the government to prohibit the import of plastic waste and instead encourage the use of domestic plastic waste for recycling as a way to safeguard the environment and promote the circular economy. The network of 107 civil society ...

POST REPORTERS

Cleaning up our act

For Southeast Asian countries, the meaning of regional connectivity and integration goes beyond their vision of development and economic progress. Interconnectedness also applies when discussing disasters and environmental degradation. One example is transboundary haze, the top-of-mind term for the raging forest fires on Sumatra or Kalimantan ...

ISMIRA LUTFIA TISNADIBRATA

Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers

The problem with plastic waste just got more complicated—and so did the effort to stanch its flow into the world’s oceans. Rivers are the primary conduits for plastic waste to the seas. In 2017, two separate groups of scientists concluded that 90 percent of river-borne plastic ...

LAURA PARKER

Google helps tackle plastic pollution in the Mekong River, aided by machine learning

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has partnered with Google to fight plastic pollution in the Mekong River, leveraging citizen science and machine learning to understand the magnitude of the problem impacting the longest river in Southeast Asia. Aided by technical advisory support from Google, the CounterMEASURE ...

James Henderson (Channel Asia)

Sweden supports Thai partnership for plastic reduction

With support from the Swedish government, the Solid Waste Management Association, Thailand (SWAT) is launching its Plastic Footprint Reduction Project to reduce ocean plastic pollution The project is under the framework of the United Nations Environment Programme’s SEA circular project and initiated by the Coordinating Body on the ...

Mette Larsen

Plastic Pollution: We Need To Act Now

The Great Pacific garbage patch is a collection of plastic and floating trash with two enormous masses of ever-growing garbage. The patch consists of finger-sized bits of plastic – often microscopic particles, chemical sludge, wood pulp, and other debris trapped by the northern circulating currents ...

The ASEAN Post Team

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