“Richard Thompson, a British marine biologist who devoted his career to studying plastic waste, has long wondered how well biodegradable shopping bags actually degrade. So in 2015, he and his graduate students at Plymouth University buried a collection of bags labeled as biodegradable in the school’s garden. Three years later, when the bags were dug up, they not only had remained intact, they still could carry almost five pounds of groceries.” NatGeo: Biodegradable shopping bags buried for three years still work. (Sadly, your hope that this could be a solution to the plastic problem is also not biodegradable — although it can and will be recycled.)

+ CityLab: What If Air Conditioning Could Help Stop Climate Change Instead of Causing It? “The concept, called crowd oil, is still theoretical and faces many challenges. But in these desperate times, crowd oil might have a place in the fight to curb climate change.”