While people may disagree about the best ingredients for their favorite barbecue dishes, everyone can agree that pieces of plastic do not belong in pulled beef. That’s why grocery chain H-E-B is recalling 6.4 tons of shredded beef with barbecue sauce shipped to its stores. [More]
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Half Of The 18.3 Trillion Pounds Of Plastic Produced Was Created In Last 13 Years
By 7.20.17
The next time you go to throw out a piece of plastic packaging, imagine it resting atop a pile containing the 10.8 trillion pounds of plastic trash we’ve produced in the last six decades. [More]
Worms That Eat Through Plastic Bags Could Help Cut Down On Pollution
By 4.24.17
Plastic bags clog up our gutters, landfills, and waterways, but researchers hope that plastic-munching worms may hold a secret to making these messes more manageable. [More]
José Olé Frozen Taquitos Recalled Due To Possible Rubber And Plastic Pieces
By 3.27.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
When mass-producing packaged foods, one of the goals is to keep pieces of the processing equipment out of the food. A plant that makes José Olé products came up short of that aspiration, resulting in a recall of 17.5 tons of taquitos that could contain pieces of plastic and rubber. [More]
Breakfast Burritos Sold At Trader Joe’s Recalled For Plastic Pieces
By 3.17.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
What goes in a breakfast burrito? According to the label on the store-brand breakfast burritos sold at Trader Joe’s, the ingredients include eggs, potatoes, cheese, and turkey bacon on their labels. The label does not mention clear plastic pieces, but at least three TJ’s customers have turned up this unwanted surprise ingredient. [More]
Walmart To Pay $1M For Mislabeled “Degradable” Plastic Products
By 2.2.17
When you buy something that says it’s “biodegradable” or “compostable,” you expect it to be just that. But that wasn’t necessarily the case at some California Walmart stores, where the big box retailer has agreed to pay $1 million to resolve claims that it sold misleadingly labeled items. [More]
Brewery’s Edible 6-Pack Rings Designed To Feed Marine Life Instead Of Killing It
By 5.19.16
If you’re like me, once a six-pack of soda or beer is gone, leaving behind only plastic rings, you can’t help but be seized by the urge to snip them apart, an urge likely fueled by grade school lessons about what can happen when they find their way to the sea, and marine animals get tangled up in them. One brewery has created edible six-pack rings that are designed to feed aquatic wildlife if they end up in the ocean, and eliminate the need for all that snipping. [More]
LEGO Investing $150M To Develop Sustainable Non-Plastic Materials For Brick-Making
By 6.24.15
Last year, LEGO made 60 million blocks out of the same plastic material the Danish company has been using since 1963. But the bricks of our childhood could one day be of a different substance, as LEGO has plans to spend a bunch of money figuring out how to develop new sustainable materials to replace plastic. [More]
McDonald’s And Cargill Say They Didn’t Put Plastic In Japanese McNugget
By 1.14.15
Things aren’t going well at McDonald’s Japan recently. From the incident where a human tooth turned up in a customer’s food to the shards of plastic found in nuggets and ice cream to the French fry shortage that caused the chain to airlift a metric ton of fries into the country, it’s not surprising that consumers are staying away. Now there’s news about that nugget incident that blames either McDonald’s or the customer for the plastic nugget incident. [More]
McDonald’s Japan Serves Up Food Containing Plastic Shards, Human Teeth
By 1.7.15
Here in the United States, McDonald’s is busy assuring us that their chicken nuggets are definitely made out of chicken. Over in Japan, the company has a different challenge: assuring the public that their food does not contain pieces of vinyl or human teeth. That’s in addition to the ongoing fry shortage due to a potato shortage in Japan. [More]
Visa Launching PayPal-Like V.me Service Next Year
By 11.17.11
Visa will roll out its V.me online payment service early next year. The company, which announced plans for the service in March, has also launched a developer program to help merchants incorporate its payment systems into their web sites and other products. [More]
This Isn't A Water Bottle, It's More Of A Bottle-Shaped Plastic Bag
By 3.2.11
Sure, we should all use less plastic. But Mike writes that he bought a case of Aquafina that he thinks takes reducing plastic too far. The bottles collapse on themselves, leak, and generally don’t do the job for which they’re intended.
[More]
Brownsville, Texas, The Latest Place To Ban Plastic Bags
By 9.10.10
Shoppers in Brownsville, TX, should start investing in reusable shopping bags. Starting Jan. 5, most stores will be banned from using plastic bags and people will be charged an extra dollar for every transaction in which they use plastic bags. [More]
Giant Mass Of Garbage Found Swirling In Atlantic
By 3.5.10
Giant garbage vortexes aren’t just for the Pacific anymore, scientists reported there’s one in the Atlantic Ocean too. East side! [More]
Consumer Advocate/Plastics Industry Showdown In California
By 6.30.09
Ten years ago, Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports and owner of Consumerist) warned us all about the potential danger from bisphenol A (BPA) leeching from plastic containers into our food. It’s only in recent years that municipalities got around to banning the chemical—at least in containers designed for use by infants and small children.
Can Branding Sex Up Tap Water?
By 6.26.09
City officials in Venice have come up with a novel plan for getting consumers to break the bottled water habit: they’ve branded their tap water Acqua Veritas and created a slick ad campaign around it.
A Visual History Of Credit Cards From 1951-Today
By 6.7.09
Credit cards weren’t always the adorable little pocket debt machines that they are today. They weren’t even plastic until AmEx decided to class things up in 1959. Travel back to the good old days when credit cards were a “ticket for anyone to spend freely and decide when was best to pay it back” with this revealing photo set from Slate.
Plastics Industry: Reusable Bags Are Bacteria Traps That Will Kill You And Your Family
By 5.24.09
Those green reusable bags that are all the rage? The plastics industry this week released a study concluding that they are nothing more than bacterial totes, which might be scary if it were true. BarfBlog looked at the study’s methodology and then ate through its main points.
