Senior Hong Kong epidemiologist Ben Cowling analyses the spread of coronavirus and the efforts to contain it; the German team forecasting which airports will see carriers of the virus; SCMP China desk editor Teddy Ng details the crisis for Beijing following the death of Dr Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who attempted to warn the world of coronavirus; SCMP journalist Phoebe Zhang on life in quarantine in Shenzhen, high-tech response with robots and drones and the impact of Taylor Swift's fan club…

Reporting on the coronavirus outbreak: voices from inside Wuhan; how Hong Kong's history with SARS influences behaviour today; forecasts for the duration and spread of the virus and updates on the race for vaccines and treatments. Presented by Mimi Lau and Laurie Chen, featuring Echo Xie, SCMP journalist, mainland China; Ian Young; SCMP journalist, Vancouver; Elizabeth Cheung, SCMP health reporter, Hong Kong.

South China Morning Post reporters and editors discuss the outbreak of coronavirus from Wuhan, the stories they are covering and the misinformation and conspiracy theories they are confronting on social media both in mainland China and the west. Finbarr Bermingham speaks with Teddy Ng, Mimi Lau and Laurie Chen from the SCMP China desk. Get the latest updates and news from: www.scmp.com

The full extent of the global crisis of plastic in our oceans was revealed in studies by Professor Jenna Jambeck and her team from the University of Georgia. Their calculations that there were five grocery sized bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world made headlines around the globe.

What are we going to do about all this plastic?

It’s going to take more than just banning the use of plastic drinking straws, and this final episode takes you to meet some people who…

Find out what happened when two Chinese cities - Taipei and Hong Kong - took very different approaches to recycling and waste disposal, and how they brought vastly different results.

In the process you’ll find out that a song known by Americans and Australians as signifying ‘ice cream’ means something entirely different in Taiwan, and it’s also one of the reasons why the Taipei government managed to boast of zero waste going to landfill in 2014.

China’s National Sword policy has had a…

While the world struggled to cope with the changes wrought by China’s National Sword policy, some 26 million people in Shanghai had a challenge of their own starting in July of 2019.

It was a new policy aimed at changing how Shanghai collects and deals with its waste, and brought in a new system of four bins which separated wet, dry, toxic and recyclable materials. The residents and netizens greeted this new system with many different reactions, memes and quips on social media, all boiling…

New Year’s Day in 2018 was the first day of a new policy introduced in China, called National Sword. Its impact would be felt by households across the US and Australia, by local, state and national governments and by entire industries that would be left teetering on the brink of collapse.

The shock to domestic kerbside recycling programmes continues to reverberate - but it’s not all bad news. It’s led to innovation, investment and a serious rethink of what we throw into the recycling bin.

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In this bonus episode of the Behind the Tariffs podcast series, attention turns to what has changed in the year since the US-China trade war began. Finbarr Bermingham and Naomi Ng look at what the world can expect following the underwhelming outcome of the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the Osaka G20 meeting, and find out how the ongoing battle of tariffs and trade barriers will have an impact on the 2020 US presidential election.

Arnold Kamler, CEO of the largest bicycle…

What does it take to get an exclusion from US tariffs? More to the point, what do a breast pump, a soldering iron, a guitar tuner and a salad spinner have in common?

Each of these items has been granted an exclusion from tariffs by the Office of the US Trade Representative, and Naomi Ng heads off on a hunt for the Hong Kong engineer who owns the patent for the salad spinner.

Her search brings her to the office of Gigi Wong, and an education in what the salad spinner can tell us about…

One woman in Philadelphia is trying to live the American dream as an innovator, manufacturer and CEO of her own company. Another woman in Hong Kong is running a company established by her father, exporting gaming hardware to the US. Both have found that their businesses may no longer be viable as a result of the trade war - either because of tariffs or from a slightly more oblique concept known as “non-tariff barriers”.

Listen in as Sherrill Mosee talks us through her decision to have her…