Author Archives: David Evans

Water mining near Queensland’s Gondwana rainforest ‘unacceptably risky’, opponents sayCourt will hear appeal over plan to extract 16m litres of water from a site less than a kilometre from Springbrook national park

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A proposed water mining operation – capable of filling more than 32m plastic bottles a year – on the cusp of world-heritage-listed Gondwana rainforest is “unacceptably risky” to the health of the ecosystem, say environmental groups fighting a court battle to block the drilling.On Monday, the Queensland planning and environment court will begin hearings into the plan to extract 16m litres of water from a site 400m from the Springbrook national park. The proposed drilling would take water from an aquifer upstream of Natural Arch and the Twin Falls waterfall.The applicant, Hoffman Drilling, argues the proposal would operate alongside two legacy water mines and have “an insignificant impact” on the environment.
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In 2019 the plan was rejected by the Gold Coast council. Hoffman Drilling is appealing the refusal in court; the case is being jointly defended by the Australian Rainforest Conservation Society.Locals and environment groups say that climate and drought impacts have already been observed at places like Twin Falls and that the rainforest relies on groundwater during periods of low rainfall.Relief as Santos dumps plan to release untreated CSG water near Queensland bum-breathing turtle habitatRead moreThe Gold Coast council’s rejection of the project came amid a severe drought and a heightened period of concern about the impact of water mining – at the time, places like nearby Tamborine Mountain were facing the bizarre situation where the state government was carting emergency water supplies into town, while trucks heading in the opposite direction were taking local water to bottling plants.The state government has placed a moratorium on new water mining applications in the Springbrook and Tamborine Mountain. The Hoffman Drilling application was lodged prior and is not subject to the temporary ban.Aila Keto, the president of the Australian Rainforest Conservation Society, said mining “any volume of water is unacceptably risky”, given the significance of the forest and the threat posed by climate change.“The ecosystems of Springbrook National Park and its surrounds are priceless refuges for a whole host of plants and animals, many of which have ancient lineages and exist nowhere else on Earth,” Keto said.“Australia and the world are in the midst of an extreme biodiversity crisis, which means we have a duty to protect all these refugia as best we can.”Revel Pointon, the managing lawyer at the Environmental Defenders Office, said the high-altitude rainforests of the area have survived largely unchanged because of the wet climate, but they rely on groundwater during dry periods.“The water-mining proposal is particularly concerning to our clients because this world heritage area is already vulnerable to climate change impacts such as droughts, heatwaves, and bushfires of increasing frequency and intensity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Very little is understood about the impacts of groundwater mining on the ecosystems in rainforest like those in Springbrook national park.”The council’s refusal of the project cited the “potential to impact upon the Springbrook Plateau as a major ecotourism destination due to potential impacts upon the significance environmental features of this area and additional regular truck movements”.In documents filed with the court, Hoffman Drilling claimed the development was an appropriate use of the land and that the area is “rich in available groundwater”.New water mines in Gold Coast hinterland barred for a year amid concerns over bottling industryRead more“The recorded rainfall near the land was greater than 3000mm a year, and groundwater recharge from such rainfall would allow the proposed development to operate with an insignificant impact on the groundwater system,” the company said in its application to the court.“There is significant aquifer recharge from incident rainfall in this high rainfall area.“Resource investigations that have been carried out on the land reveal, among other things the land is contained within an area that is rich in available groundwater; and the water quality is suitable to be provided to spring water suppliers.”TopicsQueenslandWaterReuse this content

Last December, I testified in the US Senate at its first-ever public hearing about plastics. I called for a 50 percent reduction in the nation’s production of plastics over the next decade. That was immediately met with criticism by the plastics and chemical lobbyists. These lobbyists are not the ones living in East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment spewed dangerous chemicals into the air, soil, and water. They’re not the ones living in neighborhoods next to railroad tracks. They’re not the ones facing health risks from plastic production plants in their backyards every single day.The East Palestine disaster was a direct result of the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and plastic. The hazardous chemicals being transported by the derailed train — including vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen — are used to make PVC, the world’s third most used type of plastic, typically used in pipes to deliver drinking water, packaging, gift cards, and toys that kids chew on.So let’s be clear about what happened this month in Ohio: Thousands of residents were ordered to evacuate — all to make PVC plastics. People reported rashes, headaches, and other symptoms associated with chemical exposure — all to make PVC pipes used to deliver drinking water, when alternatives to PVC piping exist. Thousands of fish in nearby streams were killed — all to make plastic toys our children play with and chew on. Ohioans’ drinking water may have been threatened — all to make cheap vinyl shower curtains.When I talk to restaurant owners about the need to eliminate plastic packaging, they often say they use plastic because it’s cheap. Don’t tell residents of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania that plastics are cheap — or the people of Louisiana and Texas, living in the shadow of where PVC is manufactured.Plastic’s risks to human health shouldn’t be understated. Long-term exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with lymphoma, leukemia, and cancers of the brain and lungs. It can increase the risk of miscarriage and birth defects in pregnant women. Experts have advised East Palestine farmers and other residents to test their wells over the next few months in order to protect the health of both people and livestock. A Cornell University scientist stated that nearby soil should be tested to make sure crops aren’t contaminated.Plastic is not cheap. Just ask the Americans living this nightmare. No parent should have to worry about their little ones digging in the dirt or splashing around in the local creek. Residents will be dealing with this toxic train derailment for years to come.They deserve better. We all do. Plastic threatens human health at every stage of its life cycle, from the toxic substances released into the air during fossil fuel extraction, to the dangerous transport of these chemicals, to the plastic particles and toxins we consume from our food and drinking water, to the hazardous emissions from facilities burning or burying the waste after consumer use.East Palestine made headlines because most people don’t expect these strikingly obvious displays of chemical contamination from plastic. However, in areas like Louisiana’s Cancer Alley — an 85-mile stretch of petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River — the danger is a daily reality. It consists primarily of Black and low-income neighborhoods, which suffer from an unusually high number of cancer cases on top of the constant threat of chemical accidents.Plastic is not cheap. And Americans will continue to pay the price as plastic production grows. In East Palestine, residents should be provided with long-term medical monitoring and Norfolk Southern Railway should be held fully accountable for all costs, including damages to natural resources.On a national level, labor unions must be taken more seriously when they express safety concerns — and guaranteed more time off. Congress needs to stop caving to railroad industry lobbyists and require braking improvements and tighter regulation of rail cars.Finally, our national leaders must pass federal policies reducing the production and use of unnecessary plastic. PVC is a great place to start — Taiwan, Korea, and New Zealand have already banned it in food packaging. In Massachusetts, state Representative Michael Day introduced a bill to reduce packaging and some of its toxic substances. The bill bans PVC and PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals”) in all consumer packaging.Big Plastic has spent decades distracting the public from the industry’s responsibility in the plastic pollution crisis — which is also a climate and health crisis — and their lobbyists continue to shape legislation that prioritizes profits over people. It’s time our elected officials put their collective foot down, hold companies accountable, protect people from plastic, and pass policies curbing plastic production. Americans deserve better.Judith Enck is a former EPA regional administrator, the president of Beyond Plastics, and a professor at Bennington College.

Ahead of talks on a new plastics treaty, nations are split over whether to target reductions in the amount of plastic that is produced or just to try and stop it from polluting land and sea.In their submissions to talks taking place in Paris in May, the majority of European and African countries push for cuts to the supply of plastic while the US and Saudi Arabia focus instead on tackling plastic pollution.
The European Union’s submission says: “While measures on the demand side are expected to indirectly impact the reduction of production levels, efforts and measures addressing supply are equally needed, to cope with increasing plastic waste generation.”
It suggested several options to cut plastic production, including global targets to cut a certain percentage by a given year or nations putting forward their own targets.
The UK calls for governments to adopt legally binding targets to “restrain” plastic production and consumption while the African group lists restraining plastic production and use as an objective.
A group of countries calling themselves the “high-ambition coalition” echo the EU’s suggestion of a global target to reduce production.
The US is not one of the members (light blue) of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (Photo credit: High Ambition Coalition/Screenshot)
Production taboo
But major oil and gas producers like the USA and Saudi Arabia did not call for cuts in plastic production.
They focus on tackling plastic pollution through recycling and waste disposal.
The US says the treaty should be “country-driven”, “flexible” and that its preamble could include “the beneficial role of plastic, including for human health and food safety”.
In its submission, China – the world’s largest plastic producer – said “a variety of economic and market tools could be adopted in an integrated manner to reduce production and use of plastic products”.
The coalition of small islands (Aosis), many of whom are particularly vulnerable to climate change, did not call for production cuts in their submission either.
UAE minister calls for “phase out” of oil and gas
Their legal adviser Bryce Rudyk told Climate Home that small islands’ focus was reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in the sea.
He said islands were concerned that reductions in plastic production “may actually increase the cost of the plastic that small islands would utilise”.
“We have to think of it as an environmental, economic, social, political trend,” he added. “Kind of like climate change, this is not just a wholly environmental problem”.
Campaigners enthused
Environmental campaigners praised the EU’s proposals. Andres Del Castillo from the Center for International Environmental Law told Climate Home it was a “strong step”. He added that “if the plastics treaty is to meaningfully address plastic pollution, it will be critical for more countries to adopt similar positions that address the early stages of the plastics life cycle”.
Christina Dixon, who follows plastics treaty talks for the Environmental Investigation Agency, said it sent “a clear signal that the EU member states are leaders who are not willing to play with a Paris-style agreement like some of the lower ambition countries have indicated in their submissions”.
But she warned that, as in climate talks, the question of who finances action on plastics is key.
“First step”: Reformers react to World Bank plan to free up climate spending
The EU must support a dedicated multilateral fund to finance action in developing countries, she said.
“It’s great to have targets but if there’s no money for implementation you’re setting up to fail”, she added.
Fossil fuel lifeline
As well as polluting land and sea, plastics are responsible for an estimated 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions through their lifecycle.
If plastics were a country, they would be the fourth biggest polluter after just China, the USA and India.
They are made from oil and gas, potentially offering a lifeline to the sector as climate action cuts demand for fossil fuels as a source of energy.
Dividing lines
At the last set of talks in Uruguay last year, nations were divided along similar lines.
A group calling itself the “high-ambition coalition” argued for a top-down treaty that binds all to certain measures while the US, Saudi Arabia and most of Asia wanted a bottom-up treaty like the Paris Agreement.
The European Union is facing attempts to weaken its power to vote on behalf of its member states in treaty negotiations.
Governments aim to set up a treaty by 2024 and begin holding annual Cop-style talks between treaty members after that.

Environmental advocates are celebrating in Laguna Beach — but it won’t be with balloons.The hilly seaside city known for stunning ocean views and rolling bluffs is weighing a plan to ban the sale and public use of balloons to curtail the risk of devastating wildfires and eliminate a major source of trash floating near the community’s scenic shores.The Laguna Beach City Council is expected to vote Tuesday on the proposal to ban in public the popular mainstay of birthday and graduation parties, whether inflated with helium or not. The move in the community of 23,000 people 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles comes as several California beach cities have limited balloons and the state enacted a law to regulate the types made of foil.“This is the beginning,” said Chad Nelsen, chief executive of the nonprofit environmental organization Surfrider Foundation, adding that he sees momentum to weed out balloons that tangle with turtles and sea lions much like he did with the effort to phase out single-use plastic bags. “We’re chipping away at all these things we find and trying to clean up the ocean one item at a time.”ADVERTISEMENTEnvironmental advocates are taking aim at balloons, arguing they’re a preventable cause of coastal pollution that threatens animals and seabirds. Balloon debris can tangle wildlife or be ingested by animals that mistake it for food, and more than 3,000 pieces of balloon litter were picked up on ocean beaches by volunteers in Virginia over a five-year period, according to the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration

We don’t often think of plastics as having “fingerprints.” But they do. And, as we continue to find microparticles in unexpected places — from local anchovy and seabird guts to the deepest trenches of the ocean — identifying those fingerprints is increasingly important.Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and MBARI recently published an open-access library — a collection anyone can use for free — of the chemical fingerprints of microplastics and other particles that are commonly found in and around the ocean. Researchers can use the library to figure out what kind of plastics are entering the ocean, where they are coming from and what we can do to keep them out in the future.
Scientists estimate that more than 11 million tons of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans every year — the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute.
Those plastics get weathered and eroded down into microparticles the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen or nearly-invisible fibers. They are ingested by marine mammals, permanently entering the food chain. Study after study has confirmed that microplastics are a global problem. But to address it, scientists need to know which plastics are moving from land into water.
Collecting chemical ‘fingerprints’
“Identifying microplastics is actually not as easy as it sounds,” said Emily Miller, lead author of the study. “The most accessible tools scientists have — a microscope and our eyes — can be deceiving.”

The chemical fingerprinting technique, called “Raman spectroscopy,” is much more accurate.
It’s fairly straightforward — scientists isolate a piece of suspected microplastic from an animal gut or ocean water or sediment. They shoot a laser at it. The sample scatters the laser light in a characteristic way depending on how its molecules are arranged.
The microscope collects that scattered light and graphs it as a “spectrum.” It looks something like an ECG, with wavy lines and peaks at some points. And it’s unique to the material.
Chris French, the laboratory director at Eurofins S&N Labs and a study coauthor, said getting the spectrum, or the fingerprint, is the easy part. Figuring out what material the fingerprint belongs to is the challenge.
“You can take a spectrum but it’s practically meaningless unless you have a database to go back and do the fingerprint matching,” he said.
Researchers take a spectrum, compare it to libraries of the spectra of known materials and look for a match — just like a detective might compare a fingerprint from a crime scene to a database of human fingerprints.
The fingerprint tells you what the material is, which can point to a source.
“For example, polyethylene is commonly used in disposable water bottles, nylon is a common plastic used to make fishing line, and polyvinyl chloride is frequently used in agricultural irrigation,” said Miller. In some cases, a material could even be traced back to the company that made it.
But the libraries aren’t accessible to everyone.
“Nearly all spectra reference libraries are locked behind expensive paywalls,” said Miller.
Eurofins S&N Labs, a lab that specializes in identifying mystery particles, did the spectroscopy work for the study. S&N Labs has the equipment and the know-how, but even they have to pay for access to a paywalled spectral library. They pay almost $10,000 a year — a cost that gets passed down to their users.
S&N Labs has thousands of users across many industries. But they rarely see academic or marine debris researchers — probably because of the high costs. A single identification request can cost anywhere from $550 to $3,000. So if a researcher opens up a stranded marine animal and wants to know what all those plastic particles are inside, they have to be very selective about which particles they send in.
“It can be prohibitively expensive for research labs,” said French. “And, right now at least, research labs and universities are the only people who seem to be interested in characterizing” marine debris.
“Ocean plastic pollution is a global crisis and we need to remove the barriers so that researchers all over the world can help find solutions,” said Miller.
So the team created a library specific to marine debris that anyone can use. It’s only the second open-access Raman spectroscopy library to date.
What’s in the library?
To build the new library, the researchers tested samples with known identities: pristine plastics in new condition — things like coffee cup lids, electrical tape, pill bottles and styrofoam boxes — plus old, weathered things picked up from fishery environments and beaches — balloons, straws, bike innertubes, dock lines and a Lego tire.
Including the weathered polymers was an important advance for marine debris researchers. “You won’t find anything (in a commercial library) that has been sitting on the beach for three years,” said French.
Miller said when you’re looking at little microparticles collected from the environment they aren’t necessarily all plastic, so they also added biological things to the library — clam, crab and shrimp shells, purple sea urchin spines, kelp, and bone fragments from various marine species.
They scanned 79 materials in all. For each one, the team scanned the sample 100 times to produce 100 spectra, then averaged those scans together to get a single fingerprint. Then they added that fingerprint to the library for anyone to use.
The full library was published in Nature’s Scientific Data journal in December.
“It’s not a huge database that we helped create, but on the other hand, you won’t probably find more than 100 different types of polymers out on the beach,” said French. “I think for what its intended use is it’s a very comprehensive database.”
A week of storms left trash and plastic debris at the Seal Beach jetty in Seal Beach in 2019. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG) 
Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove who was not involved in the study, commented: “If we’re going to mitigate this issue we need to figure out what the main sources are.”
Savoca studies how organisms interact with their environments and the human impact on those environments. He recently published a study showing that whales off the coast of California coast eat up to 10 million pieces of microplastics a day.
Savoca said including weathered materials was the study’s big, important advance. “What you’d find in the environment are materials that are degraded and fragmented and weathered,” he said. “The open-access part is nice, but I would argue that the libraries that exist are not super realistic to what you’d find in the real world, and this is bringing us closer to what you’d find in the real world,” said Savoca.
The Monterey-based researchers plan to use the library to identify particles pulled from the deepest parts of the Monterey Bay. The ultimate goal: keeping plastic out of the ocean in the first place.
“Once we have these plastic identities, we can trace the source of the pollution, and finally we can begin to manage the pollution pathway that enters the ocean,” said Miller.
Some interventions and management strategies have already begun to work.
States with “container deposit legislation,” or “bottle bills,” have much smaller percentages of beverage containers in their marine debris, based on data from NOAA’s Marine Debris Program. In other words, regulating specific plastics does help to keep them out of the ocean.
Miller hopes that more labs will continue to create and add to open-source libraries like this one. As libraries grow, scientists will have to standardize things like data collection and processing protocols so that the spectra are comparable and useful.
“The microplastics research community is in the beginning phase of making this type of research accessible to all,” she said. “We are putting this open-source library out into the world for others to use, but it is only one step. We need other community members to continue to contribute spectral libraries.”
The field of studying microplastics in the environment only emerged over the last decade, but it’s growing at a very rapid rate. “The community is growing so quickly that more and more people are going to find this useful over the coming months and years,” said Savoca. “I think it’s great that people in Monterey Bay are doing this work because it’s a really great system to study this problem in.”

United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity. Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimize human impacts. The goal of the U.N. meetings, running through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last fall without agreement on a final treaty. “The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep sea fishing, mining, plastic pollution, climate change,” and other human disturbances, he said.ADVERTISEMENTThe U.N. talks will focus on key questions, including: How should the boundaries of marine protected areas be drawn, and by whom? How should institutions assess the environmental impacts of commercial activities, such as shipping and mining? And who has the power to enforce rules?“This is our largest global commons,” said Nichola Clark, an oceans expert who follows the negotiations for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. “We are optimistic that this upcoming round of negotiations will be the one to get a treaty over the finish line.”The aim of the talks is not to actually designate marine protected areas, but to establish a mechanism for doing so. “The goal is to set up a new body that would accept submissions for specific marine protected areas,” Clark said.Marine biologist Simon Ingram at the University of Plymouth in England says there’s an urgent need for an accord. “It’s a really pressing time for this — especially when you have things like deep-sea mining that could be a real threat to biodiversity before we’ve even been able to survey and understand what lives on the ocean floor,” Ingram said.Experts say that a global oceans treaty is needed to actually enforce the U.N. Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge

Allegheny County Council could consider a ban on single-use plastic bags at checkouts. The council’s Committee on Sustainability and Green Initiatives held a hearing about the issue on Wednesday, where they heard from experts and residents about how they might address plastic pollution in the county.According to environmental advocacy group Penn Environment, Pennsylvanians use an estimated 4.75 billion single-use plastic bags annually, few of which are ever properly recycled. Plastic also breaks up into microplastics, tiny particles of plastic that have been found in local waterways and even in humans.Of the nearly 7,000 pounds of trash collected during an audit by Allegheny CleanWays in 2019, the “vast majority” of it was plastic, said the group’s executive director Myrna Newman.“Because we use [plastic products] in so many parts of our lives, and often for just a few minutes before throwing them away, there is no ‘away,’” Faran Savitz, a zero waste advocate with Penn Environment, told the committee. “If it’s ending up in a landfill, if it’s ending up in our rivers, our parks, upstream, up street, these plastic products are hurting us.”Pittsburgh City Council passed legislation to ban the use of single-use plastic bags in city limits last year. It will go into effect this spring.Councilor Erika Strassburger, who sponsored the bill, walked committee members through the process City Council undertook before passing their ban. After months of discussions with unions, environmental groups, business owners and others, the final legislation banned single-use plastic bags. Instead, shoppers or customers getting takeout from a restaurant must bring their own reusable bag or pay a 10-cent fee to receive a paper bag.County Council members said they still have a lot of questions about how a similar ban would be successfully implemented in Allegheny County, which includes 130 municipalities. But Council member Anita Prizio, who chairs the Sustainability and Green Initiatives committee, said council is “very seriously” considering a ban on single-use plastic bags.