Author Archives: David Evans

On a warm windy day in early April, Jace Tunnell steps out of his car at Morgan’s Point, a spit of land that juts out into the Houston Ship Channel in Texas. Tunnell, a marine biologist and reserve director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, sets his watch and gets to work, walking along the high-tide line and picking up every plastic pellet he can see.The tiny pellets, known as nurdles, are the starting point in the creation of vast amounts of plastic products, and those, in turn, are part of a web of plastics that encircles the globe. Tunnell steps and bends, filling his palm, as he has done on beaches across the country. Each pellet is a data point about plastics. It’s joined by others collected as university students dip nets into the waters of the North Atlantic, satellite instruments measure light reflecting off plastic debris afloat on the ocean, and scientists drop GPS-tagged bottles into India’s Ganges River.Together, all these researchers are helping to illuminate a complex and growing plastics-pollution problem that is transforming life across the planet. Of the 9.2 billion tonnes of non-recycled plastics produced between 1950 and 2017, more than half was made in this millennium and less than one-third is still in use1 (see ‘The plastic wave’). Of the waste, nearly 80% has been buried in landfill or found its way into the environment, and a scant 8% recycled1. By 2060, plastic waste could triple from 2019 levels, and carbon emissions from the full life cycle of plastics are expected to more than double, according to a report this year2 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. By mid-century, nearly half of the growth in demand for oil could be driven by plastics. Around the world, people and countries are saying: enough.

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In March, after nearly 30 years of researchers warning that plastics were a growing global problem, 175 nations voted in Nairobi to create a legally binding international plastics treaty. Negotiations start in earnest in Uruguay on 28 November.United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has proclaimed it “the most important deal since the Paris Agreement”. The Nairobi resolution calls for full-life-cycle assessments, from fossil-fuel well heads — where 99% of the raw materials for plastics originate — to final disposal. The resolution also requires action plans at national, regional and international levels that work towards preventing, reducing and eliminating plastic pollution.Yet the only way to ensure that a treaty — expected to be completed by the end of 2024 — is effective is to know where plastics come from, where they go and who’s responsible, every step of the way.“If we don’t have a baseline,” says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association (SEA) in Falmouth, Massachusetts — an organization that has been monitoring ocean plastic since 1986 — “then we’ve got no measuring stick for progress.”Research surgeResearch on plastics pollution has exploded in the past decade, part of a growing body of studies revealing the biological, ecological and human-health consequences of synthetic polymer products that were nearly non-existent a century ago. There has been a slew of reports just in the past few years addressing different aspects of the pollution problem, including ones from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)3 and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)4. These reports echo the language of the Nairobi resolution in calling for a better understanding of the life cycle of plastics. “The idea is to capture the full scope of impacts from plastic,” says David Azoulay, director of environmental health and managing attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) in Geneva, Switzerland, which has produced multiple reports on plastics.The NASEM report, released earlier this year, argues that the United States should establish a strategy by the end of 2022 for reducing plastic waste in the ocean, focusing on six stages of the problem, from production and product design to waste management. It also identifies knowledge gaps at each step and recommends moving to a circular economy — in which materials such as plastics are reused rather than thrown away. “How could we define avoidable, unnecessary and problematic plastics to start pushing them towards elimination?” asks Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer at Monterey Bay Aquarium in California and chair of the committee behind the report.
Landmark treaty on plastic pollution must put scientific evidence front and centre
That will demand unprecedented collaborations between scientists, citizens, policymakers and chief executives, because government and corporate data about the production and movement of plastics are riddled with gaps. Given that, researchers will play an especially important part in helping to collect the baseline data necessary to make the goals of a global plastics treaty meaningful and measurable.“You can’t manage the thing you can’t measure,” said Law.Nurdle huntTen minutes into his plastics hunt, Tunnell stops collecting and counts his bounty: 98 nurdles, cupped against the wind in the palm of his hand. “Houston has 55 production facilities,” Tunnell says. “We know almost all are losing pellets.”Today’s haul is an average one for these Gulf of Mexico beaches, although there was a 10-minute survey that yielded 328,000 pellets, after a container of nurdles spilled into the Mississippi River earlier this year. In Sri Lanka last year, a cargo ship carrying an estimated 75 billion nurdles sank offshore, coating beaches with thick layers of the plastic pellets, according to local reports and UNEP.Tunnell will enter the data into the citizen-science app he created, called Nurdle Patrol. So far, more than 6,000 volunteers in 19 countries have pulled 1.8 million nurdles out of the environment and made note in the app. Nurdle Patrol data have aided in succesful lawsuits against companies in Texas and South Carolina over releases of plastic pellets into the environment.Along with Nurdle Patrol, many other efforts are working to get a grip on the extent of plastic pollution. The UNEP report recognized 15 major monitoring programmes that focus on marine litter, and many of these crowdsource citizen-science data for researchers.There is the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project, which partners with organizations to monitor shorelines in nine countries and uses the Marine Debris Tracker app. Another, Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, started as a local campaign in Texas in 1986 and has grown to include 152 countries and 9 million volunteers, who can now enter data through the Clean Swell app for researchers to use. But even with all of these efforts, there is still no baseline for data. Researchers say that these citizen-science endeavours are positive steps but are limited in capturing the full scope of how much plastic is out there.“If you look at the data from citizen science,” says Alexander Turra, an oceanographer at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, “they are all concentrated in the north, not in the south.” They also tend to be located in easy-to-reach places.Even where data are available, arriving at a baseline remains a challenge on two fronts: standardizing methodologies for collecting data and agreeing on a place to share them. Recognizing the challenges of a single global (or even national) database, the NASEM report calls for tracking and monitoring systems that are scientific, adaptable and complementary.

Members of the Sri Lankan military clean up thick layers of plastic nurdles that washed up on beaches after a container ship sank offshore in May 2021.Credit: Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty

To deal with the disparities, the UN and other organizations have created guidelines for data collection, which has “contributed significantly to promote method harmonization”, says Daoji Li, director of the Plastic Marine Debris Research Center at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and a reviewer of the UN guidelines.Li’s university established a centre to train scientists from across Asia in sampling techniques and measurements, he says, in the hope of bringing congruity to data across the region, including data from countries now receiving the bulk of the world’s plastic waste. Despite the big data gaps and lack of consistent methodologies, some researchers say there’s enough information to start identifying plastic pollution hotspots. “That is often a common trope, that we don’t have standard methods, so the data’s no good,” says marine ecologist Chelsea Rochman at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was one of the first to push for a global plastics agreement.“Even if the emissions inventory isn’t perfect, if you’re using a harmonized protocol, you should at least be able to detect a difference,” she says of the plastics data. And with that ability, it’s possible to identify upward and downward trends and who the leaders and laggers are, crucial for enforcing a global treaty.Lack of transparencyReaching upstream in the plastics production line presents a different challenge for researchers. The lack of transparent data on production was one of the key knowledge gaps identified in the NASEM report, which focused on the US role in global ocean plastic waste. The attention on the United States is warranted; it generates more plastic waste than any other nation and even beats the entire European Union (see ‘Tops in trash’).

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Despite the proprietary nature of company data, some researchers have tried to assess what enters the waste stream. Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia in Athens, published a landmark study in 2015, estimating that 8 million tonnes of plastic enter the world’s oceans every year5. But she recognizes the study’s limitations, partly because of this lack of transparency. Both she and Spring lament the inability, for example, to pin down data on polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the ubiquitous plastic used for soft-drink bottles and other common items.Researchers worry that public discussions focus on recycling and ways to deal with the plastic once it has reached the consumer — ideas promoted by industry — rather than who is creating all the plastic and where it’s going. Hence the emphasis in the NASEM report and global talks on circular-economy design strategies that address that first stage in the plastic life cycle, production.“We care so much about this material in the environment — that’s when we’re getting outraged,” Jambeck says. “But we don’t care about it before that point. If you want to prevent it from getting in the environment, we have to care so much more about it upstream, and track that data.”Once plastic enters the waste stream, researchers rely heavily on the UN Comtrade database, which tracks publicly available plastic-waste data, to monitor where it goes and measure it over time and space. Yet Comtrade data neglect to track the ultimate environmental fate of plastics, and the data are only as strong as the official government trade and customs information from which they are derived.

A bulldozer moves plastic and other rubbish in 2021 at a waste facility in San Francisco, California.Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty

“There are a lot of invisible plastics,” says Azoulay, with many gaps and inconsistencies in the data. Australia, for example, banned the export of plastic waste but still allows the export of compacted waste bound for cement kilns in Asia, which is classified as refuse-derived fuel. “That doesn’t show up as plastic in Comtrade data,” Azoulay says. Nor does plastic packaging, which accounts for 42% of non-fibre plastic resin.In 2018, a seismic shift jolted the plastics industry: China implemented its National Sword programme, banning the import of most plastic waste. The country had taken in 45% of the world’s plastic waste since 1992. Then it shut its doors. Overnight, it reorganized the global movement of plastics, shifting final destinations for waste to Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India. Unexpected events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war further complicated plastic production and movement. And as new countries get inundated with plastic waste that they don’t have the facilities to handle, they often implement bans, but enforcement remains questionable.Given this void, organized crime increasingly controls the trade in illegal plastic waste, according to the global police agency INTERPOL, making data even more difficult to capture. Plastics are misdeclared, concealed or shipped by circuitous routes to evade detection, amassing a carbon footprint that goes far beyond that from the plastics’ original utility, which is already hefty.In an attempt to stem the tide, in 2019, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal approved an amendment that categorizes plastics as hazardous waste, subject to tracking and reporting. A weakness of the convention is that the United States, with its enormous amounts of plastic waste, is not a signatory. Inside the country’s borders, the US Environmental Protection Agency classifies plastic as municipal solid waste, not a hazardous substance, so minimal tracking is required. But there is pressure to reclassify plastics as toxic, following the lead of the Basel Convention and countries such as Canada, which made the change last year. Likewise, plastic construction waste is left out of the accounting.With all these missing pieces, sometimes it’s on-the-ground activists who fill data gaps. Like the one who discovered that what should have been a shipment of paper arriving in a port in East Java, Indonesia, was permeated with plastics. This was just one of many examples cited at a press event in June, when the non-profit Basel Action Network (BAN), a plastics and toxic materials watchdog group based in Seattle, Washington, presented a dismal first-year report card on the Basel amendment. BAN founder and executive director Jim Puckett reported that countries were refusing to implement or enforce the new rules. The violations, he said, “threaten the integrity of the agreement”.The mislabelled shipment to Indonesia was just a hint of the plastic deluge hitting the country; the amount of plastic waste Indonesia imports more than doubled in 2021 compared with 2020. Southeast Asia is just one of many regions being inundated with plastic waste, and this is exacerbating global inequalities in pollution. It extends to all stages of the plastics life cycle, from oil-and-gas extraction to the siting of plastic production facilities to the management of waste. “There is a plastics tsunami already happening on the ground” in Africa, says Leslie Adogame, executive director of Sustainable Research and Action for Environmental Development Nigeria, a think tank in Lagos.
How to globalize the circular economy
Countries taking in plastic waste are often not where the plastic was produced or used. And many countries at the tail end of the plastics life cycle lack the capacity to train customs inspectors or build state-of-the-art recycling facilities. This “makes Africa a dumping ground”, Adogame says, and similar stories are emerging from southeast Asia and Latin America, in what has been described as ‘waste colonialism’. All of this exacerbates the unknowns about where plastics are ending up.These limitations are playing out in the data collection as well. Turra says that Brazil’s ocean-monitoring resources are a tiny fraction of what the United States devotes. But, rather than trying to measure everything, he advocates training people who are already in the field to gather simplified data. Is a beach very clean, very dirty or somewhere in between? That level of detail is enough, he says.Tracking dataOthers agree that, given the mounting plastic pollution crisis and the continuing struggle to fill data gaps, it is essential to focus attention on a few key areas. “It’s an absolute necessity to prioritize,” Spring says. “To do that, you’ve got to identify the biggest source hotspots.”At the same time, developments in technology are opening up avenues for collecting data. One method that shows promise is putting GPS trackers in plastic-waste shipping containers, says Puckett. “That really follows the waste all the way,” he says. “That’s the future.” Such tracking can help to monitor plastic-waste violations, and improve researchers’ knowledge of how plastics move globally.
The urine revolution: how recycling pee could help to save the world
An international team led by women, and partially funded by the National Geographic Society, fitted satellite tag devices into 500-millilitre PET bottles and dropped them into the Ganges River. The project is studying 40 sites along the river, ranging from rural to urban, both before and after the monsoon rains. Sampling revealed that three-quarters of the waste flushed downstream by the rains was plastic6. The team and other researchers dropped tagged bottles in the Ganges delta, and watched one travel more than 2,800 kilometres over the course of 3 months, swirling along the Indian coastline7. In the open ocean, GPS devices are helping to track the estimated 50 million kilograms of plastic fishing gear that is abandoned, lost or dumped annually, and also often left out of plastic-pollution accounting.Tracking data are also coming from sensors on satellites, aircraft, drones and ships. Researchers are using the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 pair of satellites, for example, to identify slicks of marine litter that accumulate on the ocean’s surface. Satellite imagery and machine learning are still in the early stages of being calibrated by human observation on ocean expeditions.Researchers hope that the momentum building around the global plastics treaty will help to unify the disparate bits of information into a coherent image that guides policy in a meaningful way. They also hope that policies will be adaptable so that they improve with better plastics knowledge.“We know what a lot of this stuff is, and governments need to prioritize it and industry needs to be willing to adapt,” says Rochman. “Watching where climate change is, and all of the data that’s coming out, and the actual disasters we’re seeing around the world that are the consequences of us not moving fast enough,” she says, “I don’t want us to do that with plastic.”

Credit: Westend61 / Getty Images

Corporate pledges to lower plastic pollution are not translating into lower plastic pollution, according to a new study published in One Earth.

According to the research, done by a US-based team of researchers, voluntary commitments made by the world’s biggest companies emphasise plastic recycling, over lowering plastic production.

While recycling is considered an important part of a circular economy, the Ellen MacArthur foundation estimates that 80% of a product’s environmental impacts are determined when it’s being designed.

As of 2015, only around 9% of the world’s plastic was recycled. Most (79%) went to landfill, while 12% was incinerated, venting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The researchers, who are based at Duke University, US, examined the commitments made by 974 of the world’s biggest companies, including the top 300 of the Fortune 500; companies with over $10 billion in revenue participating in voluntary environmental programs; and companies thought to have a large impact on plastic pollution.

They found that 72% of these companies had made some form of commitment to reduce plastic pollution.

But, analysing each pledge qualitatively, the researchers found large gaps in companies’ plans.

For instance, under 10% of companies that weren’t in voluntary environmental programs (most companies in the study) targeted virgin plastics, made from fossil fuels.

Of the 36 companies in the study that had signed on to these programs, which provide environmental standards for companies to meet, just over 30% targeted virgin plastics.

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Most companies focussed on increasing the recycled content of their plastics, rather than emphasising re-use of items.

Read more: Experts use model to offer radical solution to plastic waste: don’t reduce – just stop

The researchers also noted a focus on “lightweighting”: making the same products out of smaller and lighter amounts of plastic.

“The Coca-Cola Company, for example, is selling their product in lighter and smaller plastic bottles and improving upon recycling rates by investing in larger recycling facilities,” write the authors in their paper.

“This lightweighting of plastic is considered an insufficient response because companies may reinvest these savings into markets that involve new plastic products and/or increase the total mass of plastic produced,” they add.

“It is logical for businesses to start reducing plastic where it is easiest. For example, increasing the recycled content of plastic and particularly reducing plastic in their products and packaging are obvious first steps to take,” says Associate Professor Bodo Lang, a lecturer in social and sustainable marketing at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who was not involved in the study.

But, says Lang, it’s more difficult or expensive to implement more powerful ideas to reduce plastic.

“Truly game-changing ideas, such as transitioning from a linear economy to a circular economy, have much potential but are far more complex, costly and time intensive. Purchasing items and discarding them when they are no longer needed is our dominant consumption paradigm at present.

“Having a circular approach, which requires different business models, often enabled by legislation, is far less common despite its potential to significantly reduce plastic waste.”

At the moment, roughly 11 million tonnes of plastic flows into the ocean each year, and this number is expected to almost double by 2040. A UN report suggested earlier this year that stopping this trend could save governments US$70 billion.

A relatively uncharted island entirely made of trash, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an enigma. Still, reducing its size is an even bigger mystery.

The Ocean Cleanup is an organization using high-tech tools to remove trillions of pieces of plastic pollution and other trash that make up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — but what happens to this waste once it gets collected from the ocean?

How big is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is a floating vortex of debris in the North Pacific Ocean. It spans 1.6 million square kilometers (or over 600,000 square miles) from California to Japan with Hawaii in the middle.

The trash found in the GPGP varies in type and size, but the majority of it is made of plastic. 

Microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic — make up only 8% of the GPGP’s total mass, but they have an outsized effect. Of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the GPGP, 94% are microplastics. 

Plastic pollution in the ocean threatens marine life in several ways — poisoning and starving fish, bleaching coral, and harming reefs.

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Oceanic plastic is one of the most troubling pollution issues we face today, not only because it disrupts ocean ecosystems but also because it’s very challenging to collect and get rid of. 

Unlike other materials, plastics don’t decompose — they continuously break down into microplastics but never truly disappear. The sometimes microscopic-sized microplastics swirling within our striated, vast, and deep oceans make collecting oceanic plastic pollution nearly impossible.

What is The Ocean Cleanup?

The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit that uses various technologies to collect trash from our oceans and intercept it in rivers before it enters our oceans. 

The Ocean Cleanup’s System 002, also known as “Jenny,” is a focal point for supporters and critics. Jenny uses two fuel-powered ships to tow a U-shaped catchment system across the ocean’s surface. Once Jenny fills up with debris, it brings the garbage to a larger boat where it’s unloaded and carried ashore.

What happens to all the trash in the GPGP?

The Ocean Cleanup claims that it recycles a majority of the plastic it collects. The organization says it uses some of the plastic to create “durable and valuable” products.

The remaining unrecyclable, unusable plastic debris gets incinerated to generate electricity, as Dezeen reported. This process of turning waste into energy is known as thermal recycling.

Yet some experts are unsure of The Ocean Cleanup’s approach to reducing oceanic plastic pollution. Journalist Cristina Gabetti told Dezen that The Ocean Cleanup’s claim about recycled plastic sounded “very optimistic.” This remark could be rooted in the fact that very little plastic — only about 5% in the U.S. — actually gets recycled. 

Another area of concern is turning plastic waste into energy. It’s been shown that thermally recycling plastic releases toxins and pollutants into our air, soil, and water, ultimately threatening human health.

How do we tackle plastic pollution?

Though The Ocean Cleanup has faced its fair share of criticism, it’s removing debris in the ocean that harms marine life.

“I think they’re coming from a good place of wanting to help the ocean, but by far the best way to help the ocean is to prevent plastic from getting in the ocean in the first place,” Miriam Goldstein, director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, told Reuters last year.

Ocean scientists agree that in order to have a lasting positive impact on marine life, oceans, and the planet, we need to scale back our use of plastic. Besides creating less plastic waste, another way we can keep it out of the ocean is to collect it before it enters our oceans. This is what projects like The Ocean Cleanup’s river interceptors and Baltimore’s infamous Mr. Trash Wheel are actively working to do.

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A pair of common murres rescued from local beaches rest at Native Animal Rescue in Live Oak. (Shmuel Thaler — Santa Cruz Sentinel)

SANTA CRUZ — In a study published in early November, UC Santa Cruz researchers examined how much microplastic is present in the Monterey Bay and some of its inhabitants, and found that the tiny pieces of plastic pollution are not only prevalent in the water, but also in the fish and seabirds they studied.
“There’s been very little work understanding how much microplastic seabirds are ingesting because it’s not easy to do,” said Myra Finkelstein, adjunct professor at UCSC’s microbiology and environmental toxicology department. “When a bird eats a bottle cap and dies, you can see the bottle cap when you study the bird, but these are small microparticles.”
Although Finkelstein served as the study’s senior author, the microplastic research was spurred by former UCSC grad student and current fellow at the State Water Resources Control Board, Sami Michishita. The study’s goal was to find the prevalence, composition and estrogenic activity of microplastic in the Monterey Bay. Microplastic is plastic debris smaller than 5 millimeters in length, which is about the thickness of a pencil eraser.
Anchovies surround a sea lion spotted from Monterey Bay Whale Watch’s Sea Wolf II boat. Jodi Frediani Photography 
In order to understand the bigger picture around these tiny particles, Michishita and her collaborators took water samples from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory and in Santa Cruz at the Long Marine Laboratory, and focused on two species often found in the bay, northern anchovies and the seabird known as the common murres.
“Common murres are a resident species in the Monterey Bay and are around all the time,” said Finkelstein. “We thought they would be a good representative species for what’s happening in the bay, and anchovies are a big part of their diet.”
As Finklestein mentioned, measuring the amount of microplastic in the anchovies and birds is not an easy task. In order to measure the prevalence in the fish and bird carcasses donated to the study, researchers used chemicals to literally digest the digestive tracts of the two species. They then filtered out and analyzed the found particles with a method called Raman spectroscopy to identify whether they were plastic or another material such as cotton. The microparticles were also separated into categories of fiber, fragment, foam, film or bead. About 80% of the microparticles were fibers.
RELATED: Whales off California coast eat 10 million pieces of tiny plastic pollution a day, new Stanford study estimates
The researchers found that about 60% of anchovies and 100% of common murres studied had man-made microparticles present in their digestive system with about 60% of those particles identified as plastic with Raman spectroscopy. They also found about 2 particles per 1,000 liters from the seawater samples.
Among the particles found in the common murres, about 25% displayed estrogenic activity, which means the microplastic particles could leach chemicals and disrupt the hormonal systems of birds and humans.
“Many studies have shown that seabirds and other marine animals eat a lot of plastic, but what is it doing to them?” said Finkelstein. “A lot of compounds that are part of the plastic matrix are xenoestrogenic, which means they mimic estrogen, so they can combine to your estrogen receptors and cause things to happen that can have downstream effects for hormone, immune and reproductive function.”
Having studied the macroplastic pollution at the Midway Atoll and elsewhere, Finkelstein said she was not surprised to find the widespread occurrence of microplastic in the Monterey Bay, but was shocked to discover that every single seabird in the study had microparticles in their digestive tracts.
That was more than I would have thought, especially because studies that have looked at larger pieces of plastic, found low plastic ingestion rates in the murres, but I think that’s because we weren’t looking small enough,” said Finkelstein. “As our methods to detect smaller pieces of plastic become better, we are going to start finding them everywhere we look.”
Because of the ubiquity of plastic pollution globally and in the Monterey Bay, Finkelstein stressed the need for society to make sweeping changes in order to combat plastic pollution. She suggested that concerned individuals can think about filtering wastewater from their washing machines and supporting policies and companies that aim to curb plastic use.
“It’s important for us as a society to think about how we can move away from plastic and find alternatives because it’s just going to get worse,” said Finkelstein. “We have to prioritize innovation to move away from a plastic world.”

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Thousands of marine mammals, reptiles, fish and birds die every year, usually from starvation, after mistaking plastic waste for food. Key points:Technology now exists to embed plastic with code that can be traced back to its manufacturerResearchers are advocating for the development of cheap, accessible devices to read the code, and hold manufacturers responsible for their pollutionThe technology, combined with a strong legal framework, could force manufacturers to redesign products and phase out single-use materialsThe United Nations has described plastic pollution as a global crisis, with microplastics discovered from the deepest oceans, to near the top of Mt Everest.So what if there was a way to trace plastic back to its manufacturer, and even to hold them responsible for its clean-up?There’s now an emerging area of technology that makes it possible to embed a traceable code, which researchers have likened to plastic “DNA”, into plastic polymer. In a recent paper published in Polymer Chemistry, researchers have rallied the polymer-chemistry community to work towards embeddable codes for plastic, that can be read on small handheld devices in the field, and ideally even on mobile phones. “Currently, to read out a code by itself requires multi-million-dollar equipment and specialist, physical chemists,” said Christopher Barner-Kowollik, a co-author on the paper and macromolecular photochemistry researcher at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).”What we are proposing is, we need either a small handheld device or even a mobile phone [to read the code].”And that could have some powerful implications.Firstly, say a whale washes up on a beach with a gutful of plastic. Or another turtle is found with a straw lodged in its nostril.

Every year, people in the United Kingdom throw away around 96 billion pieces of plastic packaging—an average household tosses 66 pieces every week. Almost half of this packaging waste ends up being incinerated, while a quarter is buried in landfills, according to a May 2022 survey by Everyday Plastic and Greenpeace. The scale of the waste is hard to fathom.“The plastics crisis can be daunting,” says Insiya Jafferjee, the CEO and cofounder of packaging company Shellworks. Speaking at WIRED Impact in London this November, Jafferjee said that even small, seemingly simple pieces of plastic—such as scoops included in baby formula packaging—result in hundreds of millions of pieces of plastic waste every year. Shellworks was created to start making a dent in the amount of plastic packaging that gets thrown away. To do so, Jafferjee and cofounder Amir Afshar developed an entirely compostable material that can be used to package goods.Dubbed Vivomer, the company’s material is created from microbes found in the soil and marine environments and can be shaped into solid jars or containers, as well as more flexible droppers that release liquids. “The catch, or the benefit of this, is that if you throw this jar away, the very same microbes in the soil and the marine environment will see it, recognize it as its food essentially, and break it down,” Jafferjee says.ContentThis content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.The packaging doesn’t need any special environment to degrade: It can be composted at home or in industrial recycling. If a Vivomer product is thrown away with regular trash, Jafferjee says, it will still degrade, and it doesn’t produce any microplastics in the process. Depending on the size of the packaging, it can take anywhere between a year and five years to degrade.Jafferjee told WIRED Impact that since Shellworks was founded in 2019, it has faced multiple challenges. While creating its proof of concept, the team worked in a shed and had to use machinery it was able to get for free. Then, on the eve of its first major delivery, an electrical fire decimated the firm’s stock. It has since learned to outsource manufacturing and started producing products en masse.The company’s most significant order to date, Jafferjee says, was recreating the packaging for beauty brand Haeckels’ skincare products. In total, it produced more than 300,000 Vivomer items for 100,000 products, designed to hold everything from face creams and serums to oils and exfoliating powders. “We’re trying to scale,” Jafferjee says. To tackle the plastics crisis, scale is needed.

ZSL, Alice ChamberlainBy Nayana Mena BBC NewsThousands of pieces of plastic debris from all over the world have washed up on a remote South Atlantic island, according to conservationists.Litter found on the south-western coast of Ascension Island has been traced back to countries including China, Japan and South Africa, they say.The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) team spent five weeks assessing the extent of plastic pollution there.More than 900 species of marine life are at risk, they reported.Ascension Island has a wealth of species native to the island that have been affected by plastic pollution, such as the land crab, frigate bird and various species of sharks, turtles, fish and seabirds.The remote British-owned island has been subject to many schemes aiming to conserve its natural biodiversity, launched by the government as well as independent groups.”There is too much plastic being used badly,” Fiona Llewellyn, a marine biologist at the ZSL Marine conservation team, told the BBC.”It was heart-breaking seeing the state of the plastic over there,” she said, adding that big brands and governments needed to be made to account for the mess.Ms Llewellyn and her fellow researchers found 1,000 pieces of plastic waste in just one beach hut and more than 7,000 pieces in total during the expedition. ZSL, Alice ChamberlainThe small island, with a population of just 800 people, is concerned by the crisis. Only a small amount of plastic that washes up on its shores is coming from the island itself. Ms Llewellyn said: “It’s easy to see that most of it is coming from elsewhere.”Animals are ingesting the plastic and getting tangled in it, which can cause harm. There are growing concerns around microplastics and how they work their way up the food chain.The types of plastic commonly found on the island’s coastline include plastic bottles, hard plastic fragments that have broken down, fishing gear and cigarette butts.Much of the waste ends up beached on rugged cliffs that are hard and dangerous to reach. “It was really challenging straggling down the rock faces to get to this shoreline and count all the plastic that was there,” she said.The ZSL Marine conservation team worked with the Ascension Island government’s conservation team, St Helena National Trust, St Helena’s government, the University of Exeter and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela University in a collaborative effort to tackle plastic pollution.The total project will last for three years and consists of monitoring the currents and movement of water, identifying the plastic bottles and assessing their expiry and production dates to distinguish when they might have entered the water and where from.ZSL, Alice ChamberlainMore on this storyPlastic pollution from bottle to bin26 February 2018Companies sign up to cut plastic pollution26 April 2018Can seaweed help end plastic pollution?15 November 2021Micro-plastic pollution29 January 2013

Easy-to-use detergent pods have become ubiquitous in American homes, containing just the right combination and amount of cleaning agents to leave clothes fresh and dishes sparkling. But now a debate is raging over whether they may contribute to the growing plastic pollution problem that threatens human health and the environment.An eco-friendly company that sells cleaning products and advocacy groups petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday to take action against the use of the “plastic film” that surrounds the pods, arguing that the material does not completely break down in water as advertised. The petition urges the agency to require health and environmental safety tests for polyvinyl alcohol, also known as PVA or PVOH, which encases the pods. The petition calls on the EPA to remove the compound from its Safer Choice and Safer Chemical Ingredients lists until the tests are conducted and PVA is proved safe.Blueland, a company which sells a “dry-form” laundry detergent tablet, has spearheaded the effort to subject pods to greater federal scrutiny. Its actions have angered major players within the cleaning-products industry, including a trade association and the manufacturer of the film used in detergent pods.“Polyvinyl alcohol is a polymer, so by definition it is a plastic — it’s a synthetic petroleum-based plastic,” said Blueland co-founder Sarah Paiji Yoo.Yoo added that she and others at the New York City-based company view the popular pods and newer laundry detergent sheets that use PVA as “arguably worse than straws.”“At least with a straw you can look at it and know like, ‘Okay, this is trash. I should put this in the trash can,’ ” she said. “These pods and sheets are plastics that are designed to go down our drains and into our water systems that ultimately empty out into the natural environment,” she said.Asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson said the agency “will review the petition and respond accordingly.”From national parks to the deep sea, plastic pollution is showing up wherever scientists lookPVA, which is also used in the textile industry, has been widely regarded as safe. In addition to being included on the EPA’s Safer Chemical Ingredients list, the compound is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in food packaging, dietary supplements and pharmaceutical products. The Environmental Working Group has also rated PVA as a low-hazard ingredient in personal care products.What’s more, single-dose detergent pods that use PVA are often considered to be a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional liquid products that come in plastic containers.Research touted by the American Cleaning Institute, or ACI, a trade group, suggests that at least 60 percent of PVA film biodegrades within 28 days and 100 percent of the film within 90 days. The group says water containing the dissolved film will go to wastewater treatment plants, where bacteria and other microorganisms break down the material “through natural biodegradation.”Blueland commissioned and helped fund a peer-reviewed study last year that challenges that claim. Its petition, which is supported by several organizations dedicated to fighting plastic pollution, cites the study’s estimate that about 75 percent of PVA from laundry and dishwasher pods remained intact after passing through conventional wastewater treatment.“It is now urgent for the scientific community to focus its attention on these new emerging pollutants,” said Stefano Magni, an assistant professor of ecology in the biosciences department at the University of Milan who has studied the compound’s possible toxicity but was not involved in the study commissioned by Blueland. “Indeed, a huge amount of PVA is annually produced, placed on the market and then used and released in the environment,” particularly in aquatic ecosystems.Charles Rolsky, co-author of the Blueland-funded study and a senior research scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, said that earlier research suggesting PVA could leave no trace over time often involved conditions that typically aren’t found in the real world. Those results could lead consumers to believe that a pod product using PVA film may “seem more eco-friendly and biodegradable than it actually is,” he added.Yoo said that “at this point, there are probably millions of consumers who are buying these sheets or pods thinking they’re doing a really great thing for the planet. They’re converting into these products because of the sustainability messaging, because of the plastic-free messaging, but unbeknownst to them, they’re actually sending plastic particles down their drains.”Trying to shop sustainably? Here’s what you need to consider.Fully biodegrading PVA requires the presence of the right species and concentration of microorganisms, which also have to be trained to break the compound down, Rolsky said. And there isn’t “a single wastewater treatment plant in the United States where water sits with those microbes for anything close to 28 days,” he said. “At most, it might be a week, but more realistically it’s days to hours.”While more research is needed on PVA’s potential effects on humans and the planet, the concern is that the film is “very similar to conventional plastics that we see on a regular basis,” Rolsky said. But there’s one major difference, he said: PVA “just happens to be water soluble.”He compared PVA’s ability to dissolve to pouring salt into water. “The salt will disappear, but you can still very much taste the salt itself, even though you can’t see it.”A growing body of research suggests that plastic pollution can have serious health and environmental effects, including those posed by the ability of small plastic particles to absorb chemicals, contaminants and heavy metals and move those harmful substances up the food chain. But evidence of the potential effects of PVA “are scarce,” said Magni, who co-authored a study that did not find toxic effects associated with the compound in fish embryos and a species of water flea. He added that environmental tests of PVA are “urgently needed.”Both MonoSol, the Indiana-based company that manufactures the wrapping, and the ACI rejected the call for federal officials to regulate use of the film in consumer goods.In a statement, Matthew Vander Laan, MonoSol’s vice president of corporate affairs, called the petition a “publicity stunt” and accused Blueland of “exploiting the credibility of the EPA in pursuit of its own commercial goals.”“Decades of study, including evaluations by the EPA, FDA, regulatory and certification bodies around the world, have proven the safety and sustainability of PVA,” Vander Laan said.Meanwhile, the ACI issued a lengthy statement that highlighted benefits of PVA film and supporting research findings. The trade association also reiterated its criticisms of the research commissioned by Blueland, noting that the study “presents a flawed model based on theoretical assumptions and uses flawed data in that model.”“Because this chemistry has enabled these innovative laundry and automatic dishwashing product formats, it is extremely disappointing to learn about the misinformation that is being spread about PVA/PVOH,” the ACI statement said.But Rolsky said that he and other experts are calling for more research: “PVA shouldn’t be vilified.”“We can’t speculate,” he added. “We have the tools to do the analysis. We should do the analysis and learn how it actually behaves.”Magni agreed. Research into this and other water-soluble polymers is “in the zero year,” he said. “There is still everything to do.”

When laundry pods were first advertised a decade ago, they were hailed as a marvellous way to reduce wasted use of powdered and liquid detergent by having precise load measurements.

Since then, they have become an essential household purchase, with more than 20 billion being used in the United States every year.

But as consumers become more environmentally aware, there are questions about the chemical composition of some of these pods, and whether they are contributing to micro-plastic pollution in our rivers and oceans.

Sarah Paiji Yoo, the CEO and co-founder of the eco-friendly cleaning product firm Blueland said “there’s a lot of confusion” about the green credentials of the many laundry and dishwasher detergent pods currently on the market.

But she added that all of the leading brands sell pods that come wrapped in a plastic film called polyvinyl alcohol, which is sometimes known as PVA.
“Many companies are focusing on getting rid of the plastic packaging and replacing them with cardboard boxes, but they are completely avoiding the fact that the product itself, which is going down the drain is made of plastic,” she told Forbes.
She said the plastic components dissolve into the water, which eventually end up either in a wastewater treatment facility or in some cases being discharged straight into the sea.
Paijii Yoo said both she and Blueland co-founder and CCO John Mascari have spoken to industry veterans and people who work at such facilities, who have said there is a “high likelihood” that these polyvinyl particles are not being treated correctly.
“The conditions to degrade this polyvinyl alcohol are not being met,” she said. “These conditions include an exposure to a specific type of bacteria that can degrade this material. In addition, the polyvinyl needs to be exposed to this bacteria for a certain amount of time.”

But she added many wastewater facilities work on a two to three-hour timeframe, and after that the treated water is discharged into rivers, canals of the sea.
“Once it gets into the natural world, it works its way into our food systems through the soil or drinking water,” said Mascari. “Then it gets really problematic.”
To this end, Blueland have launched a formal action to petition the EPA to prohibit the use of plastic film (PVA) in consumer-packaged goods.
The company has been joined in this petition by 5 Gyres, Plastic Oceans International, and the Shaw Institute.
It follows the publishing of the Plastic Oceans International study – Degradation of Polyvinyl Alcohol in US Wastewater Treatment Plants and Subsequent Nationwide Emission Estimate – published in the International Journal of Environmental and Public Health and commissioned by Blueland that shows that over 75% of intact plastic particles from laundry and dishwasher pods persist in our oceans, rivers, canals and soil.
Paiji Yoo said the EPA has the authority to test and restrict chemical substances that are widely used, and polyvinyl alcohol falls within its remit.
“We feel the EPA should acknowledge that polyvinyl alcohol is a plastic that’s designed to go down our drains,” she said.
“If there isn’t sufficient information on the effects of the manufacture or distribution of this product, then they should require testing to be conducted on the human health and environmental impacts of it.”
Despite the scale of the plastic pollution problem, both her and Mascari remain “incredibly optimistic” that change is possible, pointing to previous decisions to ban or halt production of microbeads and plastic straws.
“As entrepreneurs, we’re naturally optimistic individuals, which is very helpful in this environment. We hope that it can really kick off a broader conversation around greenwashing and the hidden nature of the plastic that may exist in the everyday products that we use.
“Most people don’t realise that plastic is often an ingredient in many personal care and beauty products that we consume. It’s not just plastic bottles that need to be questioned.
“But in the case of polyvinyl alcohol, the information is out there. We should not be putting this into our wastewater. And it’s a very easy switch for many people. We could turn this thing off overnight if we could just defer the attention to the issue.”

By Jon Hurdle for Inside Climate News Reid R. Frazier / StateImpact Pennsylvania Nurdles on Ferrycraigs Beach on the Firth of Forth, Scotland. Environmentalists fear nurdle pollution in Pennsylvania will increase with Shell’s new ethane cracker in southwestern Pa. November 15, 2022 | 5:00 AM Scientists have recently become aware that tiny fragments of plastic …

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