Christopher Joyce

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China is no longer taking the world's waste. The U.S. recycling industry is overwhelmed — it can't keep up with the plastic being churned out. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem.

As consumers rebel against plastic waste, there's a growing question: Do we invent something people can toss without harming the environment or do we change people by giving them a chance to reuse?

Plastic waste litters cities, oceans and even the air. Largely overlooked is how making plastic affects the environment. Plastic is a big contributor to global warming. So are its alternatives.

Entrepreneurs are eager to find substitutes for plastic that naturally degrade. One option is a "natural" plastic made by microbes and then eaten by them. But the process is still in the early days.

Giant gyres of plastic in the ocean grab headlines, but it's the tiny bits of plastic that scare scientists. And they've made their way everywhere, a new study finds — including in our seafood.

It was the biggest extinction in Earth's history. A new Smithsonian exhibit notes that some of the same things that killed over 90% of ocean species 250 million years ago are happening now.

The Cocos Keeling Islands make up barely 6 square miles in the Indian Ocean. It's a good place to measure debris because almost no one lives there. Scientists were flabbergasted by what they found.

Until now, the only Denisovan remains came from a cave in Siberia. The new find is "much more complete," one expert says.

Tiny fragments broken down from larger pieces of plastic have already been found in rivers, lakes, oceans and in agricultural soil. But very few studies of wind-borne microplastic have ever been done.

Islands in Southeast Asia were clearly important in the evolution of early humans, say scientists who have turned up 50,000-year-old remains of what they suspect is a previously unknown human species.

The number of alien species, likely brought by ship traffic, stunned scientists. And they suspect that the foothold of such creatures may have been underestimated in other tropical habitats, too.

Last year, China drastically cut back its imports of plastic waste to recycle. Now the U.S. and other wealthy nations must figure out what to do with their discards.

The notion that there might be some new kind of killer whale emerged in 1955, when photos from New Zealand showed a bunch of unusual-looking whales stranded on a beach.

How can I find out if my plastic waste is really being recycled What makes some plastic recyclable and some not? Here are answers from the NPR correspondents working on "The Plastic Tide" series.

The last five years are also the five hottest years on record for average global temperature, according to scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Alex Weber discovered more than 50,000 balls in the ocean near coastal California golf courses. When golf balls degrade, as these were doing, they release plastic particles and toxic chemicals.

A young island man came to Manila for college and found a morass of plastic waste. Now he's found ways for Manila's poorest people to dig out, and shown how multinational companies create the problem.

To really understand the plastic problem in countries like the Philippines, you have to understand how consumer goods there are packaged.

Every year, 8 million tons of plastic wash into the oceans. The biggest sources are in Asia. In the Philippines, one man is going head-to-head with multinational corporations to stop the plastic tide.