“Turkmenistan has started plugging the mega-leaks of methane that spew from its ageing oil and gas facilities, the latest UN data shows, in a move hailed as a breakthrough.

Methane, also called natural or fossil gas, is a potent greenhouse gas. It traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide and causes 25% of global heating today. Stopping leaks can be quick and cheap and, because methane breaks down in the atmosphere far quicker than CO2, this has a rapid impact, with some experts calling it the climate 'emergency brake'…

Turkmenistan had now stopped eight leaks by repairing corroded pipes, faulty wells and failing flares…

In March 2023, the Guardian revealed Turkmenistan had the most super-emitting methane leaks in the world. It then revealed in May that the methane emissions alone from the nation’s two main fossil fuel fields caused more global heating in 2022 than the entire carbon emissions of the UK…

The findings caused a furore in Turkmenistan, prompting the government to engage with the UN, the EU and other nations and institutions to try to end the leaks, according to sources in the capital, Ashgabat. In December 2023, Turkmenistan joined the global methane pledge, two years after it had launched.”

From The Guardian.

“China's air and water quality continued to improve in the first seven months of 2026, as the country strengthened efforts to curb air pollution and protect water resources, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said on Thursday.

The average density of PM2.5, a key indicator measuring air pollution, dropped by 1.8 micrograms per cubic meter in the first seven months of the year compared with the same period last year, a decrease of 6.2 percent, Huang Runqiu, China's ecology and environment minister, told a news conference.

In the same period, the proportion of days with good air quality rose by 3.9 percentage points year on year.”

From China Daily.

“Encounters with the metropolis’s most unloved rodent are a familiar story for New Yorkers, who live in a city some estimate has one rat for every three people. But the rats, by at least one measure, are losing ground.

New York City is on track to record the fewest reported rat sightings since the pandemic. Rat sightings have dropped 22% in the first seven months of 2026 compared with the same period last year, according to data from 311, the non-emergency service portal used to report rodents and request inspections. Sightings typically peak in the summer months, before declining through fall and winter.

The reports have fallen year-over-year every month since November 2024. The city’s Sanitation Department credits the decline to a push started by former Mayor Eric Adams, who declared a 'war on rats' in 2022 and began efforts to starve the city’s rodent population of food.

The city installed around 1,100 Empire Bins – large on-street trash bins – in Manhattan Community Board 9, which includes West Harlem, as a pilot program in 2025. The Sanitation Department’s First Deputy Commissioner Javier Lojan said the pilot’s budget was $2.1 million during a City Council committee hearing in March.

The area’s trash has been fully containerized since June 2025, and reported sightings fell 34% in the first seven months of 2026 compared with last year. Residents say the bins have had a major impact.”

From Bloomberg.

“Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of modern life—in water bottles, shopping bags and car dashboards. But once discarded, it is among the hardest materials on Earth to recycle. Most recycling processes require plastics to be sorted by type first, a step that is both labor-intensive and costly. As a result, only 9% of discarded plastic is actually recycled, while 79% is dumped in landfills and another 12% is incinerated, releasing carbon dioxide in the process.

Now, a team co-led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea has demonstrated a new chemical approach that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics directly into high-purity hydrogen fuel at temperatures far below conventional gasification. The process locks carbon dioxide away as a solid mineral without releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows that alkaline thermal treatment (ATT)—a process in which sodium hydroxide reacts with organic material under heat to drive hydrogen production—can efficiently handle mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) waste in a single reactor, yielding hydrogen gas with purities exceeding 90% without requiring any sorting of plastic types.”

From Phys.org.