Author Archives: David Evans

Getty ImagesBy Navin Singh KhadkaEnvironment correspondent, BBC World ServiceChristmas and New Year are party time – an occasion to buy a sparkling new outfit. But clothes with sequins are an environmental hazard, experts say, for more than one reason.1 Sequins fall off”I don’t know if you’ve ever worn anything with sequins, but I have, and those things are constantly falling off, especially if the clothes are from a fast-fashion or discount retailer,” says Jane Patton, campaigns manager for plastics and petrochemicals with the Centre for International Environmental Law.”They come off when you hug someone, or get in and out of the car, or even just as you walk or dance. They also come off in the wash.”The problem is the same as with glitter. Both are generally made of plastic with a metallic reflective coating. Once they go down the drain they will remain in the environment for centuries, possibly fragmenting into smaller pieces over time.”Because sequins are synthetic and made out of a material that almost certainly contains toxic chemicals, wherever they end up – air, water, soil – is potentially dangerous,” says Jane Patton.”Microplastics are a pervasive, monumental problem. Because they’re so small and move so easily, they’re impossible to just clean up or contain.”Researchers revealed this year that microplastics had even been found in fresh Antarctic snow.Biodegradable sequins have been invented but are not yet mass-produced.2 Party clothes – the ultimate throwaway fashionThe charity Oxfam surveyed 2,000 British women aged 18 to 55 in 2019, 40% of whom said they would buy a sequined piece of clothing for the festive season.Only a quarter were sure they would wear it again, and on average respondents said they would wear the clothing five times before casting it aside.Five per cent said they would put their clothes in the bin once they had finished with them, leading Oxfam to calculate that 1.7 million pieces of 2019’s festive partywear would end up in landfill.Once in landfill, plastic sequins will remain there indefinitely – but studies have found that the liquid waste that leaches out of landfill sites also contains microplastics.One group of researchers said their study provided evidence that “landfill isn’t the final sink of plastics, but a potential source of microplastics”.Getty Images3 Unsold clothes may be dumpedViola Wohlgemuth, circular economy and toxics manager for Greenpeace Germany, says 40% of items produced by the clothing industry are never sold. These may then be shipped to other countries and dumped, she says. Clothes decorated with sequins are, inevitably, among these shipments. Viola Wohlgemuth says she has seen them at second-hand markets and landfill sites in Kenya and Tanzania.”There’s no regulation for textile waste exports. Such exports are disguised as second-hand textiles and dumped in poor countries, where they end up in landfill sites or waterways, and they pollute,” she says.”It is not banned as a problem substance like other types of waste, such as electronic or plastic waste, under the Basel Convention.” 4 There is waste when sequins are madeSequins are punched out of plastic sheets, and what remains has to be disposed of.”A few years ago, some companies tried to burn the waste in their incinerators,” says Jignesh Jagani, a textile factory owner in the Indian state of Gujarat.”And that produced toxic smoke, and the state’s pollution control board came to know of it and made the companies stop doing that. Handling such waste is indeed a challenge.”One of the developers of compostable cellulose sequins, Elissa Brunato, has said she began by making sheets of material that the sequins were then cut out of. To avoid this problem, she moved to making sequins in individual moulds.High microplastic concentration found on ocean floorBiodegradable litter backed by Sir David AttenboroughWashed clothing’s synthetic mountain of ‘fluff’5 Sequins are attached to synthetic fibresThe problem is not only the sequins, but the synthetic materials they are usually sewn on to.According to the UN Environment Programme, about 60% of material made into clothing is plastic, such as polyester or acrylic, and every time the clothes are washed they shed tiny plastic microfibres.These fibres find their way into waterways, and from there into the food chain.According to one estimate from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, synthetic textiles are responsible for 35% of microfibres released into the oceans. George Harding of the Changing Markets Foundation, which aims to tackle sustainability problems using the power of the market, says the fashion industry’s use of plastic sequins and fibres (derived from oil or gas) also demonstrates a “deeply rooted reliance on the fossil fuel industry for raw materials”.He adds that clothing production is predicted to almost double by 2030, compared with 2015 levels, so “the problem is likely to only get worse without significant interventions”.

WASHINGTON—A ceremony on the Capitol’s West Lawn to light a 78-foot red spruce from Pisgah National Forest earlier this month heralded the festive holiday season. The tree was one of nearly 5 million Christmas trees harvested in North Carolina this year.

“Our Capitol Christmas tree reminds us of the importance of working together to be good stewards of our environment, so that future generations can enjoy the bounties of forests and Christmases still to come,” said Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina.

The tree will light up the West Lawn until the first week of January, when its wood will be recycled to make musical instruments, according to the U.S. Forest Service. These instruments will be donated to local North Carolina communities.

The tree’s afterlife as newly crafted violins, guitars and mandolins demonstrates one of several sustainable ways to dispose of Christmas trees—a key issue for increasingly climate-conscious consumers weighing the choice between real and artificial trees. 

A survey conducted by the National Christmas Tree Association estimated that almost 21 million trees were purchased in the U.S. in 2021. Around 10 million artificial trees are reported to be purchased each season.

The growth of the artificial tree market has had an acute impact on growers with consumer preferences shifting towards artificial trees over the past 30 years, said Jill Sidebottom of the National Christmas Tree Association.

The reason for the shift is likely multi-faceted. The Association’s survey found that the median price of a real tree in 2021 was $69.50. Higher costs of production and constrained supply means this will likely increase this year, according to a New York Times analysis. The shortage in supply can be partially attributed to planting decisions made a decade ago, the newspaper said. Trees must grow for five to 15 years before they are ready to be harvested.

Artificial trees, which also retailed at a median price of $70 in 2021, may also become more expensive as production and transport costs increase globally. However, these can be re-used for many years, making them more affordable in the long run.

A comparison between real and artificial trees has left some consumers concerned about the sustainability of purchasing real trees. The debate is a nuanced one. Real trees capture and store carbon during their lifetime. However, once cut down for Christmas, their potential to harm the environment depends on those who buy and dispose of them.

According to Ian Rotherham, emeritus professor at Sheffield Hallam University in England and a researcher on wildlife and environmental issues, the comparison must involve more than just the act of cutting down trees. 

“If you’re cutting down a Christmas tree from a mixed-age plantation, where you take some of the trees out and you leave some in, that actually has no impact on the carbon capture of that plantation because the trees will compensate relative to the space that you’ve freed up,” he said. 

Harvesting a large number of trees that are the same size and age at once will have some impact. However, “they will probably then replant another crop into that same space … So, to some extent that will balance, so long as you are then disposing of the tree when you have used it in a responsible way,” he said. 

For every Christmas tree harvested in the U.S., one to three seedlings are planted the following spring, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.

The best option for the environment, in Rotherham’s view, “depends on what you do with it after you’ve used them.”

A real tree that is dumped in a landfill will produce methane as it decomposes. Methane is a greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere. While carbon dioxide has a longer-lasting effect on the climate, methane drives the speed of warming in the near term.

The methane produced by a two-meter tree as it decomposes is equivalent to emitting 16 kilograms of carbon dioxide, according to Carbon Trust, a U.K.-based nonprofit focused on climate change and carbon emissions. If all 21 million U.S. consumers who purchased a real Christmas tree last year disposed of it in landfill, the climate impacts would be the equivalent of 42,283 homes’ energy use for one year, according to an analysis using EPA data.

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Diplomats negotiating guidelines for an international convention on hazardous wastes this month in Switzerland debated a new section on the “chemical recycling” of plastic debris fouling the global environment. 

The 1989 Basel Convention, which seeks to protect human health and the environment against the adverse effects of hazardous wastes, was updated in 2019 when 187 ratifying nations agreed to place new restrictions on the management and international movement of plastic wastes—and to update the treaty’s technical guidelines.

Since then, the plastics industry has tried to quell mounting anger over vast mountains of plastics filling landfills and polluting the oceans by advancing chemical recycling as a means of turning discarded plastic products into new plastic feedstocks and fossil fuels like diesel. 

Scientists and environmentalists who have studied the largely unproven technology say it is essentially another form of incineration that requires vast stores of energy, has questionable climate benefits, and puts communities and the environment at risk from toxic pollution. Some of them even view the inclusion of the chemical recycling language in the implementing guidelines as a threat, although it remains to be seen what that language will ultimately say.

“The text is nowhere near settled,” said Sirine Rached, the global plastics policy coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), which with the Basel Action Network has called chemical recycling of plastics “a fantasy beast that has yet to establish its efficacy and economic viability, while already exhibiting serious environmental threats.”

Rached said the group’s “priority is for the guidance to focus on environmentally-sound management and to refer to technologies only on the basis of sound peer-reviewed references, and not on industry marketing claims, and this involves not speculating on how technologies may or may not evolve in future.”

“The solution is making less plastic,” Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, told a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works at a hearing on Dec. 15. 

U.S. lawmakers are weighing their own ideas for addressing the plastics crisis. “We need to cut plastic production by 50 percent in the next 10 years, and we can do it,” she told them, adding that chemical recycling produces “more fossil fuel and the last thing we need is more fossil fuel.”

Such a dramatic cut in plastic would devastate the economy, said Matt Seaholm, chief executive officer of the Plastics Industry Association, which represents companies that produce, use and recycle plastic. “Our industry wants to recycle more,” and deploying more mechanical recycling and  chemical recycling will help, he told lawmakers. “We love plastic,” he said. “We hate the waste. We need to collect, sort and ultimately reprocess more material.”

Wide agreement exists that the 11 million metric tons of plastic pollution that enters the oceans every year “is devastating,” Erin Simon, head of plastic waste and business for the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group that operates in 100 countries, said in an interview.  “It’s wreaking havoc on our species, our ecosystems and in the communities that depend on them.

“You really do need this coordinated global structure” that treaties can provide, she added. “Because it’s clear that it’s not going to happen just with voluntary initiatives alone.”

Writing Guidelines for Chemical Recycling

The world is making twice as much plastic waste as it did two decades ago, with most of the discarded materials buried in landfills, burned by incinerators or dumped into the environment, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group that represents developed nations. Production is expected to triple by 2060. Globally, only 9 percent of plastic waste is successfully recycled, according to OECD.

Nearly all of the plastic that gets recycled goes through a mechanical process involving sorting, grinding, cleaning, melting and remolding, often into other products. But mechanical recycling has its limits; it does not work for most kinds of plastic and what gets recycled, such as certain kinds of bottles and jugs, can only be recycled a few times.

Chemical recycling consists of new and old technologies, hailed by the industry but seen as an unproven marketing ruse by environmentalists, that governments must now study and regulate if they are to successfully confront a menacing problem that spans the Earth and has even invaded our bodies with microplastic particles.

A Basel Convention committee met in the second week of December in Switzerland to debate whether the Basel treaty’s technical guidelines should be updated to include chemical recycling, which is also sometimes referred to as “advanced recycling,” and if so, under what terms.

The debate occurred within the framework of the Basel Convention and any language on chemical recycling that makes it into its technical guidelines will be seen as acceptable tools for managing plastic waste. The guidelines are likely to carry over into the negotiations over the next two years on an international treaty governing plastic pollution and ongoing plastics manufacturing.

Those treaty talks have barely begun, with a first negotiation session among delegates a few weeks ago in Uruguay. 

The technical guidelines for the Basel Convention are supposed to represent the best available technology for protecting humans from various hazardous wastes, said Lee Bell, an Australia-based policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN). He is also the  co-author of a 2021 IPEN study that detailed how chemical recycling generates dangerous dioxin emissions, produces contaminated fuels and consumes large amounts of energy.

“Many parties and observers are of the view that there is no proof that chemical recycling is what you would call best available technology … or best environmental practice,” he said. 

The concern, he said, is that chemical recycling’s inclusion in the technical guidance “becomes a sort of formal endorsement by the (Basel) convention, and therefore by the U.N.”

It then would be possible for advocates of chemical recycling to point to the Basel technical guidance and say, “‘let’s just adopt those wholesale as part of the new plastics treaty,’” Bell said. “And I think this is exactly what’s going on.”

Stewart Harris, senior director of global plastics policy for the American Chemistry Council, said it’s too soon to say what role chemical recycling might play in a global plastics agreement. But, he said, the Basel Convention technical guidance is important.

“The Basel Convention guidance on the environmentally sound management of plastic waste is a key resource for all countries looking to support the transition to a more circular economy for plastics,” Harris said. “Properly classifying chemical recycling will help governments assess how these technologies fit into national waste management plans.”

In a joint release with the International Council of Chemical Associations following the first round of plastics treaty talks, held Nov. 28 to Dec. 2 in Uruguay, the two industry groups favored an agreement that “moves nations closer to a future where plastics remain in the economy and not in the environment.”

Industry opposes caps on soaring plastic production, which Enck and other environmentalists say is the only way to ultimately solve the environmental crisis that is plastic waste and pollution.

Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics, speaking at a Bennington College seminar in August. Credit: James Bruggers

In the United States, the fight over chemical recycling has occurred in statehouses, local communities, in Congress and inside the Environmental Protection Agency. The American Chemistry Council, a leading industry advocate for chemical recycling, this year celebrated adoption of legislation by 20 states over the past five years aimed at easing regulatory pathways for chemical recycling.

“The appropriate regulation of this is really critical if you want to scale advanced recycling, and you want to use more recycled material in your products,” Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the chemistry council, told Inside Climate News.

But plastics were never designed to be recycled, and environmental advocates have been fighting back, trying to block new chemical recycling facilities that have been proposed in various states across the country.

In Pennsylvania, a Houston start-up called Encina has proposed a $1.1 billion chemical recycling plant for plastic waste in Point Township that has left local officials and professors at Pittsburgh universities perplexed about whether the company’s plans were at all feasible. Nearby residents, meanwhile, worried about impacts to air, water and quality of life. 

In northeast Indiana, Inside Climate News found Brightmark Energy struggling to get its chemical recycling facility, using a technology called pyrolysis, up and running. The company could not precisely say what percentage of plastic waste it would actually turn into fuel or plastic feedstocks.

Jay Schabel, president of the plastics division at Brightmark, stood amid some of what he described as 900 tons of waste plastic at the company’s new plant in northeast Indiana at the end of July. The plant is designed to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel, naphtha and wax. Credit: James Bruggers

And while Fulcrum BioEnergy does not market its waste-to-jet fuel plant proposed for Gary, Indiana, as chemical recycling, it would employ a similar technical process, gasification. Inside Climate News found that the company’s plans to use municipal solid waste are complicated by an anticipated 30 percent plastic in its feedstock, which reduces carbon benefits and can gum up the production process. In Gary, an environmental justice community, residents have filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the EPA against the state regulators who approved the Fulcrum air permit.

“Technologies that worsen the climate crisis, perpetuate a reliance on single-use plastics, and adversely impact vulnerable communities cannot be viewed as viable solutions moving forward,” a group of 35 members of Congress wrote in July, urging the EPA to fully regulate chemical recycling emissions and to stop working to promote the technology as a solution to the plastics crisis.

A Global Solution

Plastic waste is a global problem and the countries of the world are working on a global solution.

In March, against the backdrop of what U.N. officials described as a “triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature loss and pollution,” the United Nations Environmental Assembly voted to start two years of negotiations for a treaty to end global plastic waste.

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Diplomats negotiating guidelines for an international convention on hazardous wastes this month in Switzerland debated a new section on the “chemical recycling” of plastic debris fouling the global environment. 

The 1989 Basel Convention, which seeks to protect human health and the environment against the adverse effects of hazardous wastes, was updated in 2019 when 187 ratifying nations agreed to place new restrictions on the management and international movement of plastic wastes—and to update the treaty’s technical guidelines.

Since then, the plastics industry has tried to quell mounting anger over vast mountains of plastics filling landfills and polluting the oceans by advancing chemical recycling as a means of turning discarded plastic products into new plastic feedstocks and fossil fuels like diesel. 

Scientists and environmentalists who have studied the largely unproven technology say it is essentially another form of incineration that requires vast stores of energy, has questionable climate benefits, and puts communities and the environment at risk from toxic pollution. Some of them even view the inclusion of the chemical recycling language in the implementing guidelines as a threat, although it remains to be seen what that language will ultimately say.

“The text is nowhere near settled,” said Sirine Rached, the global plastics policy coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), which with the Basel Action Network has called chemical recycling of plastics “a fantasy beast that has yet to establish its efficacy and economic viability, while already exhibiting serious environmental threats.”

Rached said the group’s “priority is for the guidance to focus on environmentally-sound management and to refer to technologies only on the basis of sound peer-reviewed references, and not on industry marketing claims, and this involves not speculating on how technologies may or may not evolve in future.”

“The solution is making less plastic,” Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, told a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works at a hearing on Dec. 15. 

U.S. lawmakers are weighing their own ideas for addressing the plastics crisis. “We need to cut plastic production by 50 percent in the next 10 years, and we can do it,” she told them, adding that chemical recycling produces “more fossil fuel and the last thing we need is more fossil fuel.”

Such a dramatic cut in plastic would devastate the economy, said Matt Seaholm, chief executive officer of the Plastics Industry Association, which represents companies that produce, use and recycle plastic. “Our industry wants to recycle more,” and deploying more mechanical recycling and  chemical recycling will help, he told lawmakers. “We love plastic,” he said. “We hate the waste. We need to collect, sort and ultimately reprocess more material.”

Wide agreement exists that the 11 million metric tons of plastic pollution that enters the oceans every year “is devastating,” Erin Simon, head of plastic waste and business for the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group that operates in 100 countries, said in an interview.  “It’s wreaking havoc on our species, our ecosystems and in the communities that depend on them.

“You really do need this coordinated global structure” that treaties can provide, she added. “Because it’s clear that it’s not going to happen just with voluntary initiatives alone.”

Writing Guidelines for Chemical Recycling

The world is making twice as much plastic waste as it did two decades ago, with most of the discarded materials buried in landfills, burned by incinerators or dumped into the environment, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group that represents developed nations. Production is expected to triple by 2060. Globally, only 9 percent of plastic waste is successfully recycled, according to OECD.

Nearly all of the plastic that gets recycled goes through a mechanical process involving sorting, grinding, cleaning, melting and remolding, often into other products. But mechanical recycling has its limits; it does not work for most kinds of plastic and what gets recycled, such as certain kinds of bottles and jugs, can only be recycled a few times.

Chemical recycling consists of new and old technologies, hailed by the industry but seen as an unproven marketing ruse by environmentalists, that governments must now study and regulate if they are to successfully confront a menacing problem that spans the Earth and has even invaded our bodies with microplastic particles.

A Basel Convention committee met in the second week of December in Switzerland to debate whether the Basel treaty’s technical guidelines should be updated to include chemical recycling, which is also sometimes referred to as “advanced recycling,” and if so, under what terms.

The debate occurred within the framework of the Basel Convention and any language on chemical recycling that makes it into its technical guidelines will be seen as acceptable tools for managing plastic waste. The guidelines are likely to carry over into the negotiations over the next two years on an international treaty governing plastic pollution and ongoing plastics manufacturing.

Those treaty talks have barely begun, with a first negotiation session among delegates a few weeks ago in Uruguay. 

The technical guidelines for the Basel Convention are supposed to represent the best available technology for protecting humans from various hazardous wastes, said Lee Bell, an Australia-based policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN). He is also the  co-author of a 2021 IPEN study that detailed how chemical recycling generates dangerous dioxin emissions, produces contaminated fuels and consumes large amounts of energy.

“Many parties and observers are of the view that there is no proof that chemical recycling is what you would call best available technology … or best environmental practice,” he said. 

The concern, he said, is that chemical recycling’s inclusion in the technical guidance “becomes a sort of formal endorsement by the (Basel) convention, and therefore by the U.N.”

It then would be possible for advocates of chemical recycling to point to the Basel technical guidance and say, “‘let’s just adopt those wholesale as part of the new plastics treaty,’” Bell said. “And I think this is exactly what’s going on.”

Stewart Harris, senior director of global plastics policy for the American Chemistry Council, said it’s too soon to say what role chemical recycling might play in a global plastics agreement. But, he said, the Basel Convention technical guidance is important.

“The Basel Convention guidance on the environmentally sound management of plastic waste is a key resource for all countries looking to support the transition to a more circular economy for plastics,” Harris said. “Properly classifying chemical recycling will help governments assess how these technologies fit into national waste management plans.”

In a joint release with the International Council of Chemical Associations following the first round of plastics treaty talks, held Nov. 28 to Dec. 2 in Uruguay, the two industry groups favored an agreement that “moves nations closer to a future where plastics remain in the economy and not in the environment.”

Industry opposes caps on soaring plastic production, which Enck and other environmentalists say is the only way to ultimately solve the environmental crisis that is plastic waste and pollution.

Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics, speaking at a Bennington College seminar in August. Credit: James Bruggers

In the United States, the fight over chemical recycling has occurred in statehouses, local communities, in Congress and inside the Environmental Protection Agency. The American Chemistry Council, a leading industry advocate for chemical recycling, this year celebrated adoption of legislation by 20 states over the past five years aimed at easing regulatory pathways for chemical recycling.

“The appropriate regulation of this is really critical if you want to scale advanced recycling, and you want to use more recycled material in your products,” Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the chemistry council, told Inside Climate News.

But plastics were never designed to be recycled, and environmental advocates have been fighting back, trying to block new chemical recycling facilities that have been proposed in various states across the country.

In Pennsylvania, a Houston start-up called Encina has proposed a $1.1 billion chemical recycling plant for plastic waste in Point Township that has left local officials and professors at Pittsburgh universities perplexed about whether the company’s plans were at all feasible. Nearby residents, meanwhile, worried about impacts to air, water and quality of life. 

In northeast Indiana, Inside Climate News found Brightmark Energy struggling to get its chemical recycling facility, using a technology called pyrolysis, up and running. The company could not precisely say what percentage of plastic waste it would actually turn into fuel or plastic feedstocks.

Jay Schabel, president of the plastics division at Brightmark, stood amid some of what he described as 900 tons of waste plastic at the company’s new plant in northeast Indiana at the end of July. The plant is designed to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel, naphtha and wax. Credit: James Bruggers

And while Fulcrum BioEnergy does not market its waste-to-jet fuel plant proposed for Gary, Indiana, as chemical recycling, it would employ a similar technical process, gasification. Inside Climate News found that the company’s plans to use municipal solid waste are complicated by an anticipated 30 percent plastic in its feedstock, which reduces carbon benefits and can gum up the production process. In Gary, an environmental justice community, residents have filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the EPA against the state regulators who approved the Fulcrum air permit.

“Technologies that worsen the climate crisis, perpetuate a reliance on single-use plastics, and adversely impact vulnerable communities cannot be viewed as viable solutions moving forward,” a group of 35 members of Congress wrote in July, urging the EPA to fully regulate chemical recycling emissions and to stop working to promote the technology as a solution to the plastics crisis.

A Global Solution

Plastic waste is a global problem and the countries of the world are working on a global solution.

In March, against the backdrop of what U.N. officials described as a “triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature loss and pollution,” the United Nations Environmental Assembly voted to start two years of negotiations for a treaty to end global plastic waste.

Keep Environmental Journalism AliveICN provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going.Donate Now

An estimated 20,000 metric tons of trash from the Guatemala City landfill flows down the Motagua River into the Caribbean each year, where it washes ashore on Honduran beaches and forces residents to form cleanup efforts.While cleanup efforts are a good temporary solution, the root cause of the problem is poor waste management infrastructure at the landfill, something that has proven extremely difficult to address due to complex social issues and the cost of relocating waste disposal sites to other parts of the country.The trash also comes from illegal dumping along the river.As a stopgap, some stakeholders are focused on catching the trash in the rivers before it can reach the ocean. GUATEMALA CITY — After heavy rains, hotel workers and other residents in Honduras walk up and down beaches picking up everything from plastic bottles to toys to medical waste. They’ve become experts at garbage cleanup. It piles up in the sand if they don’t move quickly, and then tourists might complain or even stop coming, which could be disastrous for the many residents who rely on work in local hotels and shops.
Some towns on Honduras’s Caribbean coast have banned single-use plastics and implemented more rigorous recycling plans. But the trash keeps coming. A lot of it, it turns out, doesn’t come from the locals, but rather from landfills and illegal dumping sites hundreds of miles away, in inland Honduras and neighboring Guatemala.
“It goes into the food chain and even disrupts coral,” says Jenny Myton, the conservation program director at the Coral Reef Alliance. “This affects everything — animal life and health, but also the economy and tourism.”
Guatemala’s 485-kilometrer (300-mile) Motagua River is one of the biggest conduits of this torrent of waste. An estimated 20,000 metric tons of trash from the Guatemala City landfill and illegal dumping sites flows into the river on its way to the Caribbean each year. Ocean currents push it northeast, where it washes up on the beaches of Tela and other Honduran towns. The rest of it can stay floating out at sea for as long as six months before sinking to the bottom.
The problem has elicited cleanup efforts, recycling programs and garbage divergence plans by everyone from local communities to international NGOs. But many of them also admit that these are only temporary solutions. The root cause of the problem — garbage collection and storage at landfills across the region — will be much harder to make right.
“A new waste management plan must be set up for Guatemala and Honduras, including both citizens and industries,” a 2020 study on waste management in the region said. “Recycling and integrated waste management systems should be implemented everywhere within a country (including smaller towns and villages in the mainland).”
Fixing the landfill
The Guatemala City landfill is located in the Zone 3 neighborhood in the city’s north, and takes in everything from food waste to plastic to medical equipment — and not just from the city proper. Thirteen surrounding municipalities also rely on the landfill as their principal disposal site, which then feeds into the local watershed and ultimately pollutes the Caribbean hundreds of miles away.
Landfills may just look like simple holes in the ground where waste piles up. But they’re actually complex operations with sophisticated technology, intended to prevent waste from creating public health issues and environmental harm. Modern landfills usually include multiple “cells” for controlled dumping, a drainage and rainwater collection system, and a network of pipes and vents to prevent the buildup of methane gas, which is emitted as organic waste breaks down over time.
But the landfill in Guatemala City is decades behind technologically. Garbage piles up dozens of meters high, so unstable that it can shift like an ocean current, swallowing up garbage pickers unexpectedly. The lack of methane vents can lead to gas buildup, fires and toxic smoke.
And the lack of a formal water drainage system has led to a naturally flowing river of contaminated liquids moving out of the dump.
“I’ve rarely seen such a blatant and concrete example of unintended consequences,” said Trae Holland, executive director of Safe Passage, an NGO working in the area. “From a sanitation and waste management standpoint, the medieval approach in Guatemala City is transcending its physical location to become an international problem.”
Trash floating in the Caribbean. (Photo courtesy of Caroline Power)
Guatemala City municipal authorities didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for comment about what it’s doing to actively address waste management at the landfill. Some organizations tell Mongabay they’ve worked closely with officials to improve the situation, saying they want this problem gone as much as anyone else does. Others say there’s little evidence that the government is taking any environmental action whatsoever.
In recent years, the government pushed back the landfill so it wasn’t encroaching on residential buildings. It decorated the entrance gate with flowers. But the prevailing waste management strategies appear to have gone unchanged.
“It’s this Arcadian paradise,” Holland says. “The front looks like the entrance to a university now that the garbage has been pushed away from the front. This is obviously not solving any problems, right? It’s just a PR move.”
But problems at the dump aren’t just technological. They’re also wrapped up in the political and social struggles of the country. It’s expensive and controversial, for example, to create a new landfill somewhere else. Zoning can be complicated, not only because the area must be strategically located to mitigate environmental hazards, but also because nearby residents and businesses would fight back against the plans.
Unregulated dumping has given rise to an entire informal economy for the impoverished residents of Zone 3, with families entering the landfill each day to pick out plastics and other items that can be sold to middlemen recyclers. Children used to pick trash out of the river, a practice that’s now banned. Gangs oversee a lot of what’s bought and sold there, complicating efforts by groups looking to help struggling families.
During the pandemic, the landfill shut down several times, putting so much stress on trash pickers that several households reported suicides by family members, Holland says. Gangs couldn’t collect extortion fees, which led to kidnappings of children and retaliatory violence.
As difficult as the last several years have been, Holland says, the pandemic may have gotten city officials’ attention for the better and may, in the long run, lead to improved waste management.
“The municipality, I can tell you right now, woke up to some of the issues in that community and in that zone that they were ignoring before,” he says. “And I feel very strongly, in fact, that that’s going to be a net positive.”
Temporary solutions
With systematic changes to the Guatemala City landfill slow to come, some stakeholders have shifted their focus downriver, where the trash is freer from the same complex social and political issues.
The Ocean Cleanup, an international organization engineering creative ways to remove plastic from the oceans, came to Guatemala in 2018 in hopes of developing a method for intercepting the trash on the Motagua River.
“If something is done about the source, that would be ideal, but I think we have to recognize that the brunt of this is more complicated than that,” CEO Boyan Slat tells Mongabay. He adds, “We asked ourselves, what is the fastest, most cost-effective way to stop this plastic from going into the ocean?”
Slat, a Dutch entrepreneur, founded The Ocean Cleanup when he was just 18, after having gone viral for a TEDx talk about what innovative technologies can bring to conservation efforts. His organization has raised millions of dollars since then, but has also been criticized for its flawed technology and lack of results.
In Guatemala, its pilot project involved installing “Interceptor 006,” a fence 50 meters (164 feet) wide and 8 m (26 ft) high that’s designed to catch plastic in its mesh while letting the water through.
The Interceptor 006 catching garbage during its trial this year. (Photo courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup)
In a video released by The Ocean Cleanup, the trash fence starts out looking like it’s going to succeed. The trash stops at the fence and starts to build up, with the water passing through free of plastic. But after a while, the sheer magnitude of trash gets to be too much and the infrastructure starts to bend. Then holes form and the plastic pushes through.
“We thought we truly cracked the nut,” Slat says, “that we collected what’s roughly a million kilos [2.2 million pounds] of plastic … and then seeing a big chunk of that disappear again, almost literally slipping through our fingers. In the matter of two hours, we went from the highest high to a substantial low.”
The Ocean Cleanup is working on a new type of interceptor that hasn’t operated anywhere else, and which will look “evolutionary rather than revolutionary” when compared to the previous one, Slat says. However, he doesn’t divulge any details about its design.
He also says the organization is working with local partners to develop recycling and incineration programs as well as methods of waste fraction (the sorting of waste into biodegradables, glass, batteries and other categories).
The Guatemala 2.0 solution, as Slat calls it, should be ready by the end of the first quarter of 2023. And while it won’t solve the waste management issues at the landfill or stop illegal dumping at different points along the Motagua River, it should help slow the amount of trash entering the Caribbean.
Banner image: Trash floats near a boat in the Caribbean. Photo courtesy of Caroline Power. 
Citation: Kikaki, A., Karantzalos, K., Power, C. A., & Raitsos, D. E. (2020). Remotely sensing the source and transport of marine plastic debris in Bay Islands of Honduras (Caribbean Sea). Remote Sensing, 12(11), 1727. doi:10.3390/rs12111727
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Electronic cigarettes heavily marketed via single-use flavored products are increasingly popular. These products require disposal of large amounts of hazardous waste, including huge quantities of lithium, a resource in demand for electric car batteries and rechargeable electronics for laptops and mobile phones.Even as vaping use grows, an estimated 6 trillion “traditional” cigarettes are still smoked annually; 4.5 trillion are thought to be discarded into the environment each year. Researchers and activists emphasize that the tobacco industry is responsible for considerable harm to nature and human health.Traveling along the supply chain, tobacco production and consumption has consequences for forests, oceans, the climate, and for farmers and their families who produce the crop — all to an extent not yet fully known or understood.Efforts are underway to rein in some of these negative impacts against the backdrop of an industry accused of consistently greenwashing to conceal an environmental footprint that is harming both nature and public health. Vaping for a day and tossing it away is all the rage. Electronic cigarette sales have boomed in recent years, with single-use, throwaway devices growing in popularity, particularly among youth in some countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. This new, trendy face of the tobacco industry — touted for creating a smoke-free, but not tobacco-free, world — carries a heavy, and yet unquantified, environmental burden.
A recently published probe by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 150 million disposable vapes are tossed out every year in the U.S. alone. Amounting to five every second, this consumption produces vast amounts of e-waste, sending up to 30 metric tons of lithium to U.S. landfills annually — enough to provide batteries for around 6,000 electric vehicles. Lithium is a vital ingredient in rechargeable electronics, including laptops and cellphones.
Earlier this year, another investigation found that the equivalent of 10 metric tons of lithium is thrown into the trash in the U.K. every year, even as demand for this precious material continues sky rocketing. The International Energy Agency and other bodies have warned that lithium shortages could lie ahead as supplies become stretched.
Vaping is increasingly popular and touted as a means to quit smoking. Long-term health consequences are still poorly understood, say experts. The environmental consequences of thousands of single-use, battery-driven, and plastic-laden devices may make vaping even more environmentally hazardous than standard cigarettes. Image courtesy Lindsay Fox via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
“Little is documented about the harmful effects on the environment brought about by the production of these devices, but the disposal of e-cigarette cartridges and batteries represents a major environmental concern,” reads a report published earlier this year by the World Health Organization. “The majority of plastic e-cigarette liquid cartridges are not reusable or recyclable and end up in gutters, streets and waterways.”
These consumer devices come with an environmental impact that has yet to be fully accounted for, say experts. But it is well established that they use precious resources required for humanity’s transition to green economies. They also are laden with plastics, toxins and metals that represent a burgeoning and potentially explosive waste problem, for which e-cigarette manufacturers have provided little consumer guidance.
As such, e-cigarettes have been classified as a “rising environmental threat,” but they are only part of the global harm linked to the tobacco industry.
Cigarette butts are one of the most commonly found trash items in ocean cleanups. In 2020, the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup program collected nearly 1 million butts, dwarfing the number of plastic bottles, the second-highest trash item. Waste related to electronic cigarettes is a growing concern. Image courtesy of Brian Yurasits/Ocean Image Bank.
Tobacco and its Earth impacts
Long before that moment when a spent e-cigarette is tossed away and discarded in the gutter or in a trash can, tobacco leaves a long trail of environmental damage.
All along its supply chain, from cultivation to post-consumer waste, “tobacco harms our environment, and destroys our forests, uses our safe drinking water, and pollutes our air,” Ruediger Krech, director of public health at the WHO, told Mongabay in an interview. These multiple impacts continue growing, which, “of course, is adding unnecessary pressure to our planet’s already scarce resources and fragile ecosystems.”
According to researchers and activists, tobacco is implicated in adding pressure to violating at least five critical planetary boundaries: impacting Earth’s biosphere integrity, climate change, the release of “novel entities” (including toxic pollutants), freshwater use, and land-system change.
Research by Nick Voulvoulis, deputy director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, assessed the tobacco supply chain and found that in terms of climate, the industry as a whole emits an estimated 84 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent each year; that’s comparable to a country such as Peru’s carbon emissions.
Water use, too, is enormous: 22 billion liters (5.8 billion gallons) are used along the tobacco supply chain annually, roughly equivalent to the municipal water use of the U.K.
In addition, up to 5% of global deforestation is associated with tobacco farming, either to clear land for new farmland, or for the wood needed to carry out the curing process. A report by the WHO and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that 200,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) are cleared each year for tobacco, driving habitat and biodiversity loss.
Tobacco fields in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Tobacco growing accounts for an estimated 30% of the country’s deforestation, according to estimates. Image courtesy of PROGGA.
The brunt of this environmental harm is felt in developing countries — including China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Zimbabwe — where the majority of tobacco cultivation and cigarette production now occurs: “Tobacco competes with essential commodities for resources and places significant pressures on the health of our planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants,” Voulvoulis’s study states. His research estimated that converting the land currently used for tobacco to food crops could feed 20 million people.
While this research sheds light on a vast range of environmental harm, it is by no means comprehensive. Voulvoulis said his life-cycle analysis likely “underestimated some of the impacts.” Plastic pollution from cigarette butt disposal, for example, was not included, nor were harms related to electronic cigarettes.
Tobacco control experts and researchers say the industry frequently downplays the environmental damage linked to its products along the supply chain, claiming that greenwashing is common and that industry efforts are insufficient in the face of tobacco’s environmental toll.
“We need to unravel these tactics that the tobacco industry is using. Very often they try to greenwash their reputation as a sustainable and eco-friendly industry,” said Krech. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
The industrywide response to such charges can be summed up by what a Japan Tobacco International spokesperson wrote in an email to Mongabay, detailing action to reduce carbon emissions and address other environmental concerns. “As a company, we have a responsibility to operate sustainably, minimize our environmental impact, and contribute positively to the communities we operate in … We aim to reduce the impact of our own operations and our supply chain on the environment, by implementing best practices and encouraging innovation.”
A tobacco warehouse in Malawi. The country grows more than 90,000 metric tons of tobacco per year and is one of Africa’s largest exporters. Production is linked to a range of health risks for farmers along with environmental impacts, such as deforestation. It is estimated that around 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of forest are lost due to tobacco per year in Malawi. Image courtesy of Marcel Crozet/International Labour Organization via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Butts: The most ubiquitous polluter
The world has long been hooked on tobacco, but there are some signs this addiction is waning, if only slightly. Globally, prevalence of tobacco use is falling and now is below 20% of the population, according to the Tobacco Atlas; It estimates there are around 1 billion smokers and 200 million who use “other tobacco products.
“We are definitely seeing overall declines in adult prevalence, which is splendid, and I would say significant declines,” said Jeffrey Drope, co-author of the report and a tobacco control expert at the University of Illinois. “That said, we still have a billion smokers. So, it’s not like our work is done. That’s a lot of smokers.”
Those billion or so smokers puff on an estimated 6 trillion cigarettes per year, mostly using cigarette filters composed of plasticized cellulose acetate. As many as 4.5 trillion cigarettes butts are discarded into the environment, amounting to nearly 800,000 metric tons of waste ending up in streets, on beaches, and in oceans. Contrary to common belief, these filters do not fully biodegrade; instead they break up slowly over time into smaller fibers and microplastics. Thus, experts say, they contribute to an already massive global plastic pollution problem that has sparked urgent U.N. treaty negotiations.
Cigarette butt harm doesn’t stop at the plastic, says Thomas Novotny, co-director of San Diego University’s Center for Tobacco and the Environment. They are packed with thousands of chemicals, toxins, and even heavy metals which continue leaching once disposed of.
Dannielle Green, a marine ecologist at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K., reviewed the evidence of cigarette butt pollution in terrestrial and aquatic environments, and she underlines the potentially lethal and sublethal impacts these can have on species: “There’s evidence for reproductive rate effects, … changes in growth, malformations and developmental impacts.”
Research has shown nicotine and other chemicals in cigarette butts are toxic to “microbes, plants, benthic organisms, bivalves, zooplankton, fish, and mammals,” but warn that “critical” knowledge gaps remain. Wider ecosystem-level impacts, says Green, are among those. The concern around e-cigarette disposal and their chemical impacts is thus occurring in the context of an already massive load of environmental harm.
Used cigarette filters can contain thousands of chemicals and contribute to global plastic pollution, say experts. They are also widely perceived to hold health benefits for smokers, reducing exposure to toxins and health issues such as cancer: this too is false, say health experts, and is not based on scientific evidence, in what is dubbed “filter fraud.” Image courtesy of Craig Dennis via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Producing a green sickness
Smoking sickens and kills people — lots of them. More than 8 million people die due to smoking every year, according to estimates, with massive economic costs attached.
But these health impacts run deeper, and go beyond those who consume the product, say experts. Researchers and activists in tobacco-growing countries describe a situation whereby many tobacco farmers become ensnared in a cycle of farming that is not only potentially damaging to their and their families’ health and the environment, but is also rarely financially viable.
In Brazil, Marcelo Moreno, a public health expert with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, studies the health impacts of tobacco farming. He explains that tobacco farmers face multiple health issues due to exposure to pesticides and other chemicals at higher rates than other crops, while long, arduous work results in musculoskeletal issues and chronic pain. In addition, a condition known as green tobacco sickness — a form of acute nicotine poisoning — is often prevalent, understudied, and underreported among tobacco farmers in many producer countries — a disease often exacerbated by a lack of suitable protective equipment.
Due to the intensive demands of farming and production of tobacco falling on family farms, child labor is said to be rampant in the tobacco industry, exposing children to these varied health risks.
According to a U.S. Department of Labor report, “Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor,” children on tobacco farms in producer countries such as Indonesia are “exposed to pesticides, work long hours, carry heavy weight, and work in extreme heat, among other activities.” In the U.S., which continues to be a major producer of tobacco, child labor and labor violations are also reported.
Brazil is one of the world’s largest tobacco producers. Data related to environmental harm are limited, says Marcelo Moreno of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, but tracking health issues impacting farmers there gives an indication of widespread and heavy use of agrochemicals. Research by Moreno and others suggests the prevalence of pesticide poisoning and green tobacco sickness grew between 2010 and 2019, but remained underreported. Image courtesy of Marcelo Moreno.
A study published in 2021 from southern Brazil, where most of the country’s tobacco is produced, found “a high prevalence of [green tobacco sickness], pesticide poisoning, respiratory, and musculoskeletal problems” among child workers.
This dangerous form of farming doesn’t result in financial gains in many cases, says Drope: “In some countries, [farmers] are literally going into debt each season, but because they’re in these contractual relationships [with tobacco companies], they’re obligated in the next growing season to continue to grow tobacco,” he said. “So, they’re trapped. They’re trapped in a brutal debt cycle in some countries.”
In a study released last year, researchers in Bangladesh concluded that family labor, land and environmental costs drive down any profitability for farmers, stating that “tobacco cultivation is not as beneficial as popularly perceived.”
According to the Bangladesh-based tobacco control group PROGGA, the list of environmental concerns linked to farming include deforestation, overuse of pesticides, land degradation, and water pollution. Around 30% of the country’s deforestation is estimated to be driven by tobacco, and it contributed to the ecological decline of the country’s Halda River, a vital breeding habitat for Indian carp.
Tobacco farmers in Bangladesh. Research suggests that when accounting for a range of factors, including the impact on the environment, tobacco farming is not as profitable as is claimed. Experts say this is the case in other producing countries. Image courtesy of Magalie L’Abbé via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
This pattern plays out in other producing countries. Experts describe tobacco as a “fickle” crop requiring vast amounts of agrochemicals which over time can deplete soils, and it’s one that demands the use of vast amounts of wood to be burned in the tobacco curing process. To meet and combat wood demand, reforestation efforts have taken place in some locations. In Zimbabwe, for example, a report published earlier this year states such efforts “are not widely implemented” and are “largely inadequate.” Critics argue that tobacco company efforts at corporate social responsibility often amount to little more than industry promotional activities conducted in many producer countries.
Little data exist on the environmental impact of tobacco farming in Brazil, one of the world’s largest tobacco producers, but Moreno says the health impacts are indicative: “We know that tobacco farming is damaging to the environment, but we cannot precisely say how it occurs,” he said. “We can say if these people are contaminated then [the farms] use massive quantities [of agrochemicals] that can obviously contaminate water and soils.”
Kevin Genga, an environmental activist and anti-tobacco campaigner in Kenya, paints a similar picture, underlining that chemicals used by the industry degrade soils. “You find that when they use too many chemicals the soil structure gets to be overutilized,” he said. “After maybe two, three or four seasons of doing that activity, these soils cannot be self-dependent to yield crops that are consumed by the community.”
A past industry-funded report carried out in Bangladesh, Brazil and Kenya sought to identify if tobacco farming prevents “farmers and rural communities from prospering.” “Overall, we found no evidence of this. In fact, among our samples, tobacco growing appears to play an important role in the livelihoods of tobacco farmers and labourers” in the three countries, the report states. “Some issues” were found, including “small-scale land and forest clearance, incidents of child labour and green tobacco sickness.”
Tobacco farmer in Brazil. Experts state that due to a confluence of health hazards, demands on family work, environmental harm, and more, tobacco farming is often barely profitable for farming families in developing countries. Image courtesy of Rachel Gurgel.
Kicking the (cigarette) butt habit
At the opposite end of the supply chain, Novotny and others are categorical in their assertion that to solve the cigarette butt pollution problem, cellulose acetate filters must be banned as a single-use plastic. Tobacco control groups are aiming to have these filters written into the global plastics treaty currently under discussion. Such a move is “perhaps the fastest and easiest” way to address issues of “global public and environmental health,” tobacco control groups said in a recent statement.
That position is not supported by some in the industry: “Banning the use of cellulose acetate filters, before viable alternatives come to market, will do little to help the environment, but will instead risk driving consumers to purchase illegal cigarettes,” wrote the spokesperson from Japan Tobacco International.
Non-cellulose acetate biodegradable filters have been proposed to beat the plastic problem. But while these would reduce plastic pollution, they won’t necessarily solve chemical pollution, says Green, due to leaching of accumulated toxins. In fact, though research on this new type of filter is limited, a study published in 2021 suggests they may contain higher concentrations of metals and metalloids, potentially worsening their impacts.
That’s an issue, acknowledges Tadas Lisauskas, co-founder and CEO of Greenbutts, a biodegradable filter company. But he defends his company’s focus on solving the plastic problem: “If you’re producing fewer metric tons of plastic, that’s automatically going to be a plus for the environment,” he said.
Greenbutts, a corporation, proposes making biodegradable filters as a solution to cigarette plastic pollution. Tadas Lisauskas, co-founder and CEO, acknowledges, however, that the new filters do not solve resulting chemical pollution. His company, he states, is undertaking “joint development projects” with the tobacco industry’s “top three”; conversations spurred on by the ongoing negotiation of a global single-use plastic treaty and measures implemented to curb tobacco-related pollution in the European Union. Image courtesy of Greenbutts.
The only way to eliminate the persisting chemical pollution, he said, would be to “do away with cigarette smoking,” something his company does not advocate: “We don’t want to change people’s behaviors,” Lisauskas explained. “People have been smoking for millennia, that’s not going to change.”
Novotny, who is also the founder of the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project, labels biodegradable filters as a “distraction” from the wider issue: “[T]hese butts are still contaminating the environment with the chemicals that exude from them,” he said. “This solution benefits the tobacco industry and not smokers or the environment. It will encourage people to smoke and to discard toxic butts.”
“We want there to be a global effort to eliminate tobacco use and [eliminate] the enormous health burden that filtered, unfiltered, or biodegradable filtered cigarettes continue to [have] impact[ing] humankind,” he added.
Some critics also call for a ban on disposable electronic cigarettes, for youth-attracting flavors to be outlawed, or for the products to be far more strictly regulated. “First of all, there needs to be much more in the public awareness of how environmentally disrupting these novel products like e-cigarettes are,” WHO’s Krech said. “We think that they need to be strictly regulated as well because they endanger wildlife with the plastics, nicotine, heavy, metals, the lead, the mercury, and the lithium.”
Nicotine expelled from consumers’ bodies can pass into waterways via wastewater; an estimated 80% of the world’s waste flows into the environment untreated. A review published this year states that “despite being in low concentrations and having low bioaccumulation potential, monitoring [nicotine and alcohol] occurrence remains important given their potential toxic effects.” Most nicotine studies are conducted in developed countries and further research is needed “especially in developing countries where most wastewater flows untreated into the environment and where such studies are lacking.” Image courtesy of Aviavlad via Pixabay (Public domain).
Kicking the tobacco-growing habit
To effectively tackle the environmental and social harm done by tobacco growing, advocates say farmers should be supported to find alternative cash crops. That in turn would address food security issues.
Next year’s World No Tobacco Day, to be held May 31, 2023, is centered around possible alternatives to tobacco land use. Redirecting and regenerating land to produce food instead of tobacco is key to providing sustainable solutions for farmers and the environment in many parts of the developing world, said the WHO’s Krech.
Last year, a partnership between the WHO, the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization launched a “Tobacco-free farms” project to work with farmers to swap their tobacco crops for iron-rich beans. That project has already supported more than 1,000 farmers in quitting tobacco growing across Kenya. By March 2022, more than 135 metric tons of beans were produced, a figure that has now risen to around 400 metric tons, said Joyce Nato, the WHO’s lead on the project.
“We help our tobacco farmers to move away from tobacco farming to alternative livelihoods, and we are ready to support them [all the way] to the market, which has always been an issue,” Nato said in an interview. And these innovative farmers aren’t only harvesting beans. They “can later on choose other alternative value chains they want to grow.”
Plans are afoot to introduce this particular project to other counties, and to launch a similar initiative in Zambia, another major tobacco producer where there’s appetite for change: “So, we feel that this is a big success!” Nato said.
“We must stop tobacco growing, because it is not beneficial to the farmers, it’s only beneficial to the industry,” Nato concluded, adding that what is good for the social and economic well-being of farmers will also benefit the environment — helping protect soils, water, and the climate: “Tobacco is a contributor to that [harm]. Tobacco growing is a contributor to environmental hazards.”
There are more than 1 billion smokers worldwide and a further 200 million or so who consume tobacco by other means, such as electronic cigarettes. Tobacco use is well known as a health hazard. The environmental impacts along the product’s supply chain are less well known but considerable; with effects on forests, biodiversity, water, climate change, and more. Image courtesy of nextpageplease via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Banner image: Every year, volunteer beach cleaners pick up millions of cigarette butts; it’s estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are released into the environment each year. Contrary to common belief, standard cigarette filters are not fully biodegradable. Researchers and activists point out that “downstream approaches” such as cleanups are not sufficient to stem the tide of tobacco-related pollution and they’re calling for a ban on filters. Image courtesy of Marevivo Onlus/Ocean Conservancy.
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A group of 24 U.S. senators and representatives are calling on the Biden administration to set legal standards to reduce plastic pollution at home and abroad.
The letter, sent on December 20, points to the recently introduced “Protecting Communities from Plastics Act” bill, which would require a mandatory reduction in single-use plastics, address pollution in environmental justice communities by pausing plastic facilities’ permitting and implementing stricter rules for current petrochemical plants, and would invest in research to better understand the human health impacts of plastic production and waste.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), builds upon the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, which was introduced in 2020. The four lawmakers also spearheaded the letter to President Biden, which was co-signed by 20 others, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“These types of actions show leadership and demonstrate that the U.S. is eager and supportive of policies that will meaningfully reduce plastic pollution,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter to President Biden.

The U.S. is the top consuming country of plastic and is one of the “leading drivers of this crisis,” they write.

Plastic pollution treaty 

The letter follows the first meeting of the international Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, a group convened by the United Nations to develop a global plastics treaty, which concluded its first (largely procedural) session earlier this month.“In light of the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which continues to work to develop an internationally legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, U.S. leadership in reducing environmental harm from plastics has never been more critical,” the members said in their letter.

Plastic pollution and our hormones

[embedded content]The letter also comes on the heels of testimony from Environmental Health Sciences’ founder and chief scientist Pete Myers to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment & Public Works last week. Myers warned the committee that chemicals in plastic can block, mimic, increase or decrease our body’s hormones. Properly functioning hormones are vital for our health, and exposure to these chemicals is linked to a host of health problems including cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, impaired brain development and reproductive issues, among others.“Each year, nearly 11 million metric tons of plastic waste flow into the ocean from land-based sources alone. Without immediate action, that number is expected to triple by the year 2040,” the lawmakers wrote. “There is growing scientific evidence that microplastics, and the toxic chemicals they contain, are impacting human health to degrees not yet understood.”

Leadership on plastic pollution 

Beyond the health impacts, the lawmakers point out the plastics sector is set to account for 20% of oil demand by 2050, and remains a key driver of greenhouse gases and climate change.“We need to take leadership and urgent action, starting here at home, to protect our communities, our economy, and our climate from the continued threat from plastics,” the lawmakers wrote. See the full letter.From Your Site ArticlesRelated Articles Around the Web