Certification Setting

MUNCAR, Indonesia ― You smell the beach here before you see it. The stench of decay hits you at around 100 yards. A layer of plastic trash several feet thick covers the black sand. Millions of moldy diapers, ratty shopping bags, sauce and sugar packets, degrading detergent bottles, old shoes and toys clump together at the water’s edge. In March, when HuffPost visited,   the beach wasn’t even at its worst. Seasonal rains had washed much of the debris carpet out to sea, said Khoirul Anam, head of the town’s association of fishermen. “The plastic is so deep it makes the sea shallow,” he added. This beach in Muncar, an otherwise picturesque fishing town in the East Java province, is a garbage hotspot. Muncar sits at the mouths of four rivers, which carry waste from dozens of small towns, villages and factories to the sea. Thousands of tons of plastic flow out from the port each year, mixing with yet more industrial and household trash that washes over from the neighboring island o

A ban on mega-landlords and a rental freeze are two ideas being hotly debated. BERLIN ―  A sea of placards streamed across Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, a large public square under the shadow of the city’s massive TV tower, with bold messages daubed in paint and printed across placards. “The City Belongs to Us!” “My Home, Not Your Profit!” “I Don’t Want to Move!” Thousands of people took to the streets in Germany’s capital city on Saturday to protest the rapidly rising cost of apartments in Berlin. “There were old people, young people, families, there were even homeowners … it was basically a snapshot of the entire population of Berlin,” said 77-year-old Barbara von Boroviczény, one of the activists involved in organizing the protest as part of grassroots campaign group Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Berlin, like many cities around the world, is in the tight grip of a housing crisis. For many years, it was seen as a cheap haven for artists and travelers. After the fall o

A new study gives clues on how wind can carry tiny pieces of plastics far far away. WESTEND61 VIA GETTY IMAGES New research indicates that winds blew microplastics from big cities such as Barcelona to the French Pyrenees, with hundreds of new particles found in each square meter daily.  This story was produced and originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. At the top of the French Pyrenees, not far from the border with Spain, is a virtually pristine clearing, home to snow and a weather station — but mostly feet upon feet of snow. The nearest road closes in the winter. The most substantial town within 60 miles tallies just 9,000 people. Look closely at the landscape, though, and you’ll see the place is covered in plastic. Between November 2017 and March 2018, researchers gathered water from the weather station’s collectors and searched for  microplastics  — bits less than a fifth of an inch