Author Archives: David Evans

Sonika Agarwal
Tarleton State University researchers have demonstrated that food-grade plant extracts, especially those from okra, have the power to remove microplastics from wastewater.
The health effects of ingesting microplastics are unclear, but studies suggest that people unintentionally consume thousands of particles every year.
They can be released from your clothing in the washing machine and end up in the city water treatment facility
In the typical wastewater treatment process, microplastics are removed from water by adding flocculants, or sticky chemicals that attract microplastics and form large clumps. The clumps then sink to the bottom of the water and can be separated from it.
Dr. Srinivasan, the Endowed Munson Research Professor of Chemistry at the Texas university, and her team have been investigating more healthy alternatives to the commonly used flocculant, polyacrylamide.
“We think that microplastics by themselves may not be much of a health hazard, but anything they get into or any type of toxic substance that gets attached to them could go inside our bodies and cause problems,” said Associate Professor Dr. Rajani Srinivasan, the principal investigator for the project.
She has studied the use of food-grade plant extracts as non-toxic flocculants to remove textile-based pollutants from wastewater. “I was working with the removal of microorganisms and things like that, and I thought, ‘Why not try microplastics?’”
So she and a team of undergraduate and environmental science master’s students tested polysaccharide extracts from 7 plants: fenugreek, cactus, aloe vera, okra, tamarind, and psyllium. They tested compounds from the individual plants as well as in different combinations.
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They found that polysaccharides from okra worked the best. Paired with fenugreek extract, microplastics could be removed from ocean water, and the okra paired with those from tamarind worked best for freshwater samples.
Overall, the plant-based polysaccharides worked better than, or as well as, the traditional flocculant polyacrylamide.
Importantly, the plant-based flocculants can be implemented in existing water treatment processes.
“The whole treatment method with the non-toxic materials uses the same infrastructure,” said Dr. Srinivasan. “We don’t have to build something new to incorporate these materials for water treatment purposes.”
CHECK OUT: Company Innovates Microplastics That are Biodegradable or Don’t Break Apart At All
She and her team will continue tailoring the ratios and combinations to optimize removal of different microplastic types from a variety of water sources. They also plan to scale up the removal process in field studies outside the lab.
Ultimately, they hope to commercialize the method and remove microplastics from water on an industrial scale.
The study and its results, funded by the National Science Foundation and a water development district in Lubbock, were presented at the March 20-24 spring meeting of the American Chemical Society, according to the University.
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PASS The Okra to Your Friends at the Social Media Table…

As long as there has been marine life, there has been marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of death and waste sinking from the surface into the depths of the sea.The snow begins as motes, which aggregate into dense, flocculent flakes that gradually sink and drift past the mouths (and mouth-like apparatuses) of scavengers farther down. But even marine snow that is devoured will most likely be snowfall once more; a squid’s guts are just a rest stop on this long passage to the deep.Although the term may suggest wintry whites, marine snow is mostly brownish or grayish, comprising mostly dead things. For eons, the debris has contained the same things — flecks from plant and animal carcasses, feces, mucus, dust, microbes, viruses — and transported the ocean’s carbon to be stored on the seafloor. Increasingly, however, marine snowfall is being infiltrated by microplastics: fibers and fragments of polyamide, polyethylene and polyethylene terephthalate. And this fauxfall appears to be altering our planet’s ancient cooling process.Every year, tens of millions of tons of plastic enter Earth’s oceans. Scientists initially assumed that the material was destined to float in garbage patches and gyres, but surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic. A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.Marine snow, one of the primary pathways connecting the surface and the deep, appears to be helping the plastics sink. And scientists have only begun to untangle how these materials interfere with deep-sea food webs and the ocean’s natural carbon cycles.“It’s not just that marine snow transports plastics or aggregates with plastic,” Luisa Galgani, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University, said. “It’s that they can help each other get to the deep ocean.”Marine snow-makingPlastic waste washing up on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Surface surveys have accounted for only about one percent of the ocean’s estimated plastic.Agung Parameswara/Getty ImagesThe sunlit surface of the sea blooms with phytoplankton, zooplankton, algae, bacteria and other minuscule life, all feeding on sunbeams or one another. As these microbes metabolize, some produce polysaccharides that can form a sticky gel that attracts the lifeless bodies of tiny organisms, small shreds of larger carcasses, shells from foraminifera and pteropods, sand and microplastics, which stick together to form larger flakes. “They are the glue that keeps together all the components of marine snow,” Dr. Galgani said.Marine snowflakes fall at different rates. Smaller ones have a more languid descent — “as slow as a meter a day,” said Anela Choy, a biological oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bigger particles, such as dense fecal pellets, can sink quicker. “It just skyrockets to the bottom of the ocean,” said Tracy Mincer, a researcher at Florida Atlantic University.Plastic in the ocean is constantly being degraded; even something as big and buoyant as a milk jug will eventually shed and splinter into microplastics. These plastics develop biofilms of distinct microbial communities — the “plastisphere,” said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term. “We sort of think about plastic as being inert,” Dr. Amaral-Zettler said. “Once it enters the environment, it’s rapidly colonized by microbes.”A sample of South Atlantic water containing plankton and microplastics. Ocean plastics commonly develop a filmy “plastisphere” of distinct microbial communities.Morgan Trimble/AlamyMicroplastics can host so many microbial hitchhikers that they counteract the natural buoyancy of the plastic, causing their raft to sink. But if the biofilms then degrade on the way down, the plastic could float back up, potentially leading to a yo-yoing purgatory of microplastics in the water column. Marine snow is anything but stable; as flakes free-fall into the abyss, they are constantly congealing and falling apart, rent by waves or predators.“It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” said Adam Porter, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s a black box in the middle of the ocean, because we can’t stay down there long enough to work out what’s going on.”To explore how marine snow and plastics are distributed in the water column, Dr. Mincer has begun to sample deeper waters with a dishwasher-size pump full of filters that dangles on a wire from a research boat. The filters are arranged from big mesh to small to filter out fish and plankton. Running these pumps for 10 hours at a stretch has revealed nylon fibers and other microplastics distributed throughout the water column below the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.But even with a research boat and its expensive and unwieldy equipment, an individual piece of marine snow is not easily retrieved from deep water in the actual ocean. The pumps often disturb the snow and scatter fecal pellets. And the flakes alone offer little insight into how fast some snows are sinking, which is vital to understanding how long the plastics linger, yo-yo or sink in the water column before settling on the seafloor.“Is it decades?” Dr. Mincer asked. “Is it hundreds of years? Then we can understand what we’re in here for, and what kind of problem this really is.”Instant marine snowExperimental “mesocosms” created by the researcher Luisa Galgani and her team on the Greek island of Crete, to mimic and observe marine snow. “In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system,” she said.Luisa Galgani, Chiara Esposito, Paraskevi PittaTo answer these questions, and work within a budget, some scientists have made and manipulated their own marine snow in the lab.In Exeter, Dr. Porter collected buckets of seawater from a nearby estuary and loaded the water into continuously rolling bottles. He then sprinkled in microplastics, including polyethylene beads and polypropylene fibers. The constant churning, and a squirt of sticky hyaluronic acid, encouraged particles to collide and stick together into snow.“We obviously don’t have 300 meters of a tube to make it sink,” Dr. Porter said. “By rolling it, what you’re doing is you’re creating a never-ending water column for the particles to fall through.”After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake. His team found that every type of microplastic they tested aggregated into marine snow, and that microplastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene — normally too buoyant to sink on their own — readily sank once incorporated into marine snow. And all the marine snow contaminated with microplastics sank significantly faster than the natural marine snow.Tubes of marine snow in the lab of Adam Porter at the University of Exeter in England. “It’s not as simple as: Everything’s falling all the time,” Dr. Porter said.Adam PorterDr. Porter suggested that this potential change of the speed of the snow could have vast implications for how the ocean captures and stores carbon: Faster snowfalls could store more microplastics in the deep ocean, whereas slower snowfalls could make the plastic-laden particles more available to predators, potentially starving food webs deeper down. “The plastics are a diet pill for these animals,” said Karin Kvale, a carbon cycle scientist at GNS Science in New Zealand.In experiments in Crete, with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, Dr. Galgani has tried mimicking marine snow on a larger scale. She dropped six mesocosms — huge bags that each contained nearly 800 gallons of seawater and recreated natural water movement — in a large pool. Under these conditions, marine snow formed. “In the field, you mostly make observations,” Dr. Galgani said. “You have so little space and a limited system. In the mesocosm, you are manipulating a natural system.”Dr. Galgani mixed microplastics into three mesocosms in an attempt to “recreate a sea and maybe a future ocean where you can have a high concentration of plastic,” she said. The mesocosms laden with microplastics produced not just more marine snow but also more organic carbon, as the plastics offered more surfaces for microbes to colonize. All this could seed the deep ocean with even more carbon and alter the ocean’s biological pump, which helps regulate the climate.“Of course, it’s a very, very big picture,” Dr. Galgani said. “But we have some signals that it can have an effect. Of course, it depends on how much plastic there is.”A plastic feastVampire squids, which live in deep waters, were collected from a contaminated patch of the Atlantic Ocean and found to have alarmingly high levels of plastic in their stomachs. Steve Downer/Science SourceTo understand how microplastics might travel through deep-sea food webs, some scientists have turned to creatures for clues.Every 24 hours, many species of marine organism embark on a synchronized migration up and down in the water column. “They do the equivalent of a marathon every day and night,” Dr. Choy said. Guilherme V.B. Ferreira, a researcher at the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, wondered: “Is it possible they are transporting the plastics up and down?”Dr. Ferreira and Anne Justino, a doctoral student at the same university, collected vampire squids and midwater squids from a patch of the tropical Atlantic. They found a plethora of plastics in both species: mostly fibers, but also fragments and beads.This made sense for midwater squids, which migrate toward the surface at night to feed on fish and copepods that eat microplastics directly. But vampire squids, which live in deeper waters with fewer microplastics, had even higher levels of plastic, as well as foam, in their stomachs. The researchers hypothesize that the vampire squids’ primary diet of marine snow, especially meatier fecal pellets, may be funneling plastics into their bellies.“It’s very concerning,” Ms. Justino said. Dr. Ferreira said: “They are one of the most vulnerable species for this anthropogenic influence.”Ms. Justino has excavated fibers and beads from the digestive tracts of lanternfish, hatchetfish and other fish that migrate up and down in the mesopelagic, 650 to 3,300 feet down. Some microbial communities that settle on microplastics can bioluminesce, drawing in fish like a lure, said Dr. Mincer.In the Monterey Bay Canyon, Dr. Choy wanted to understand if certain species of filter feeders were ingesting microplastics and transporting them into food webs in deeper water. “Marine snow is one of the major things that connects food webs across the ocean,” she said.The large, mucusy house of a deep-sea larvacean. When the larvaceans move out, their microplastic-laden houses sink into the deep.NOAA Ocean ExplorationDr. Choy zeroed in on the giant larvacean Bathochordaeus stygius. The larvacean resembles a tiny tadpole and lives inside a palatial bubble of mucus that can reach up to a meter long. “It’s worse than the grossest booger you’ve ever seen,” Dr. Choy said. When their snot-houses become clogged from feeding, the larvaceans move out and the heavy bubbles sink. Dr. Choy found that these palaces of mucus are crowded with microplastics, which are funneled to the deep along with all their carbon.Giant larvaceans are found across the world’s oceans, but Dr. Choy emphasized that her work was focused on the Monterey Bay Canyon, which belongs to a network of marine protected areas and is not representative of other, more polluted seas. “It’s one deep bay on one coast of one country,” Dr. Choy said. “Scale up and think about how vast the ocean is, especially the deep water.”Individual flakes of marine snow are small, but they add up. A model created by Dr. Kvale estimated that in 2010, the world’s oceans produced 340 quadrillion aggregates of marine snow, which could transport as many as 463,000 tons of microplastics to the seafloor each year.Scientists are still exploring exactly how this plastic snow is sinking, but they do know for sure, Dr. Porter said, that “everything eventually sinks in the ocean.” Vampire squids will live and die and eventually become marine snow. But the microplastics that pass through them will remain, eventually settling on the seafloor in a stratigraphic layer that will mark our time on the planet long after humans are gone.

Air Date: Week of April 1, 2022

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East Antarctica is typically seen as very stable; the recent ice shelf break up is the first humans have ever observed in the half-century since satellites began to imaging Antarctica. (Photo: NASA, Public Domain)
On this week’s trip beyond the headlines, Host Steve Curwood is joined by Environmental Health News’ Weekend Editor Peter Dykstra to discuss an ice shelf break-up in typically stable East Antarctica. Then, the two look at the promises of fast-food companies to get PFAS chemicals out of their packaging. Finally, the pair look back in history at how plastic pollution in the Indian Ocean complicated the search for debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Transcript

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.
And on the line now from Atlanta, Georgia is Peter Dykstra. Peter’s an editor with Environmental Health News, that’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. And he’s here to tell us what’s going on beyond the headlines. Hi there, Peter. How you doing?
DYKSTRA: Well, hi, Steve. We got some foreboding news this past week from East Antarctica, considered to be the most stable region in the face of climate change of either the Arctic or the Antarctic. An ice shelf the size of New York City collapsed in East Antarctica. And that can only mean bad news for the contributions of the Arctic and the Antarctic, to global warming or climate change, or whatever we want to call it. But it’s a crisis.
CURWOOD: Yeah. And it’s funny this happened right around the equinox, the sun shining equally on the southern hemisphere, and the northern hemisphere in the polar regions. And there were heat waves in both places, Peter at this time.
DYKSTRA: Up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal in parts of Antarctica. And less than that, but still near-record setting warmth in the Arctic at the end of the Arctic winter.CURWOOD: And of course now this is the collapse of an ice sheet already on the water that’s not going to raise sea levels. But this trend continues, the glaciers behind it, that’s not good news, Peter. Maybe you have something to cheer me up?
DYKSTRA: Well, if you’re a fast food consumer, and I’m not saying that you are: Burger King, and Chick-Fil-A committed to removing those so called forever chemicals from their food packaging. Restaurant Brands International, which is the company that owns Burger King, and Popeyes, and Tim Hortons, those delightful doughnuts from Canada, announced plans a week ago to eliminate both per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the ones we know as PFAS, from all consumer packaging by the end of 2025.
CURWOOD: Hey, Peter, my excuse for hitting those fast food places: you know, as a reporter out there doing journalism and you’re there late at night and guess what’s open late at night or the first thing in the morning?

Several fast-food corporations have made commitments to removing PFAS and other toxic chemicals from their packaging. (Photo: Marco Verch, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

DYKSTRA: Yeah, I’m a bit of a hypocrite too, because we know the different ways that particularly consumption of beef can hurt our global climate as quickly as it can hurt our own bodies. There are other firms that have been on top of this as well. McDonald’s last year, said that they had eliminated quote a significant subset of PFAS in its packaging. They committed to removing it all by 2025. And a couple of years ago, Taco Bell made a similar pledge, stating that quote, PFAS, phthalates and Bisphenol A will be removed from all consumer facing packaging materials,
CURWOOD: Which of course leaves open what happens in the kitchen and in the back office. Now, PFAS chemicals aren’t good for us. They’re associated with cancers and low birth weight and and that sort of thing.
DYKSTRA: All manner of reproductive issues, as well as some types of cancer. We’re finding out just how damaging they are. We’re also finding out just how absolutely ubiquitous they are in the supply chain for so many food products.
CURWOOD: Well, Peter, I’m waiting for you to tell us a story as to how we can get that stuff out of our bodies. But for now, take a look at your history books there and tell me what you see.
DYKSTRA: We’re only going back eight years for an item that you’d be surprised has such a big environmental connection. But in March 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went down over the Indian Ocean, triggering an absolute frenzy of searching and an equal frenzy in the media. But then on April 2, 2014, the searchers for the wreckage of Malaysian Flight 370 reported a new problem. Radar and satellite imagery couldn’t distinguish between all of the routine floating garbage we had put in the Indian Ocean and the floating garbage that could indicate the wreckage of a Boeing 777 aircraft. It’s a troubling precedent for search and rescue. It’s another troubling precedent, for that matter, for ocean-borne garbage. And to me, it’s just one stunning way that we’ve managed to fill the oceans with our own garbage.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing in March of 2014, and search-and-rescue efforts were stymied by an overabundance of marine garbage. (Photo: Laurent Errera, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

CURWOOD: Right, and a lot of it that’s floating there is made from plastic, which comes from fossil fuels, and we also have a bunch of carbon dioxide garbage in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. One has to wonder how helpful fossil fuels are for our civilization these days.
DYKSTRA: Well, consider this. It was only a quarter century ago that we began to realize that the oceans were suffering from those two things. We thought the oceans were much too huge for little old us to pollute them with garbage or acidify the oceans with fossil fuel deposition, particularly from coal. But both of those things have revealed themselves to be serious problems as we look to the future environmental health of Earth.
CURWOOD: Okay, Peter. Well I’m looking for a fossil-free, PFAS-free and Arctic friendly burger someplace.
DYKSTRA: Make mine to go.
CURWOOD: Peter Dykstra is an editor with Environmental Health News, that’s EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. We’ll talk to you again real soon.
DYKSTRA: All right, Steve. Thanks a lot. We’ll talk to you soon.
CURWOOD: And there’s more on these stories at the Living on Earth website. That’s LOE.org.
 

Links
AP News | “Ice Shelf Collapses in Previously Stable East Antarctica” KTLA 5 | “Fast-Food Chains Vow To Nix ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found In Wrappers” The Christian Science Monitor | “Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Search Reveals Extent of Ocean Garbage”

About a third of the food produced around the world goes to waste, and much of it ends up in landfills—where it becomes a source of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Eliminating waste is the ultimate solution, but some will always remain. For that there is a solution that nearly anyone can do: composting.Composting turns rotting garbage into a valuable soil enhancer that helps plants thrive. Farmers call it “black gold.” And whether you compost in your backyard or at a community facility, experts say it will reduce your trash and in a small way help fight climate change.“Don’t be afraid of it. It’s relatively easy. It’s not without its missteps but those are easily learned and corrected,” says Bob Rynk, lead author of The Composting Handbook and a professor emeritus at SUNY Cobleskill. What happens in a compost pile?Food turns into compost through the hard work of small microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. “When you have a compost pile, you become a microbe farmer. You’re managing microbes,” says Rhonda Sherman, a composting expert at North Carolina State University. “And what do microbes need? They need the same things we do. Which is air, water, food, shelter.”On a small scale, in your backyard or neighborhood, a compost pile should consist of three things: food scraps, water, and dry, woody material like yard trimmings or raked leaves.Yard trimmings are frequently referred to as “browns” and are high in carbon. Food scraps are called “greens” and are high in nitrogen. A compost pile should typically have twice as many browns as it does greens. Aside from preventing a pile from turning into a sloshy mess, browns are bulkier and create space for oxygen to move throughout the pile. That oxygen helps tiny microbes decompose food waste through a process called aerobic digestion. In landfills, deep piles of trash prevent oxygen from reaching decomposing food, and it’s instead broken down by microbes that can survive without air. The anaerobic digestion practiced by those microbes produces methane. In contrast, as aerobic microbes break down waste—”first, easier sugary compounds, and then proteins and fats, and then finally fiber,” says Rynk—they emit carbon dioxide, which is also a greenhouse gas, but less potent than methane.The microbes also give off heat, and in a large, well-managed pile, that heat can reach over 130 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to kill pathogens. The fresh compost left after several months is in a slower state of decomposition; it’s rich with microorganisms and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. How to make a successful pileAt home, you should stir or mix the pile periodically and keep it damp. Both those steps will speed up the decomposition process. The stirring allows oxygen to reach all the nooks and crannies, and the dampness assures survival of the microorganisms, which need moisture to live.In fact, the most common reason backyard compost piles are unsuccessful is because they are too dry. But don’t drown the pile—adding more greens, which contain moisture, may be enough. If not, spraying water gently over the pile should do the trick.Wring out a wet sponge and observe its only slightly damp texture: “That’s what your compost pile should look like and feel like,” Sherman says. “You can see that it’s moist, but it’s not dripping all over.” Sherman says she urges people to maintain compost bins that are about three feet high so they can accumulate enough heat—but to keep them in the shade, where they won’t dry out.“People think they have to put it in the sun so it will heat up. That’s a myth! The action of the microorganisms heats up the materials in the bin,” she says.Not all food scraps are recommended for a backyard compost pile. The remains of fruits and vegetables are typically safe to toss in the pile, but uneaten meat or dairy are more likely to smell and attract pests. They also contain higher levels of fat, which take longer to break down. While it’s not uncommon to see rodents in a compost bin, turning the pile regularly prevents them from creating nests, and compost can effectively be made in enclosed bins. The Environmental Protection Agency has a more detailed list of items that shouldn’t be tossed in a compost pile. It includes items like yard trimmings treated with pesticides that might kill microorganisms. The food waste show here has been collected from residents of Lyon, France, and will be processed at a commercial composting facility. By adding food waste collection to regular recycling and trash collection programs, cities can reduce the overall amount of trash sent to landfills.Photograph by Nicolas Liponne, Hans Lucas/ReduxPlease be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Some communities are now offering food scrap bins alongside those for trash and recycling. Food scraps collected at the city level typically go to a large industrial composter where items are often shredded or chopped at arrival and processed at high temperatures. Composting at this level might be done in large piles or in silos. Because they send food waste to industrial compost facilities, municipalities tend to accept a wider variety of scraps than what you can throw in your backyard, and regulations vary by city. If you don’t have a backyard, access to a city-run food scrap service, or simply don’t want to mess with a compost pile, many urban gardens and farmers markets accept compost.And if you’re concerned about odor from keeping compost on your countertop or in your kitchen before moving it to a larger compost pile, Sherman says putting food scraps in the freezer is a “game changer.” By freezing your scraps, you hit pause on the decomposition process and prevent odors from forming. How do you compost with worms?  Composting with worms, or vermicomposting, produces an even more valuable soil enhancer. Worms digest scraps and excrete castings that are rich in plant nutrients. Researchers are also finding that the living microorganisms found especially in vermicompost can help protect crops from common diseases and reduce the need for herbicides and pesticides. Yet even though earthworms are sometimes found naturally at the bottom of a compost pile, they should not be added to a large, hot backyard compost bin. Earthworms don’t have lungs and instead breathe through their skin, which needs to remain moist to prevent them from drying out and dying. While a compost bin should be damp, it’s typically not moist enough for earthworms to survive. Instead, says Sherman, worms should be contained in smaller bins less than two feet high. Because they thrive in smaller spaces, earthworms can easily be contained in an enclosed bin under a kitchen sink or on an apartment balcony, making vermicomposting a potential option for people without backyards. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a tutorial here showing how to build a worm bin at home. What do you do with biodegradable/compostable food packaging?Products labeled “compostable” or “biodegradable,” such as packaging material or utensils, are becoming more popular, but are meant to be processed at an industrial composting facility. Ian Jacobson, the president of Eco-Products, a compostable product maker, says his company sold 200 products in 2010, but now offers more than 450. Compostable-labeled containers can be anything from paper and sugarcane-based bagasse to bioplastic, which is plastic made from plants like corn. Some, but not all are certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), the largest certifier of compostables, which tests compostable products to ensure they can be processed at commercial facilities. Takeout food containers are often made of compostable paper. But if “you just toss the container in your compost bin, it’s just going to sit there,” says Sherman. Shredding the container into small pieces, no bigger than two inches, will give microbes a better chance at breaking it down. Even then, it may not break down easily. While a well-managed backyard compost pile can achieve high temperatures, the hotter temperatures at an industrial facility will break down material more effectively. Sherman also points out that compostable paper products like newspaper or paper towels can get “mushy” and compacted in a compost pile, preventing aeration.Food packaging made from bioplastics are not compostable in a home bin because they often have strong polymer bonds that can only be broken down in an industrial facility. However, not all bioplastics can be processed by commercial composters because some bioplastics contain toxic chemical additives to waterproof them or give them strength. (Learn more about bioplastics here.)How does composting help the environment? In 2018, the U.S. produced nearly 300 million tons of trash, about 4.9 pounds per person. After paper products, food was the second highest category of waste, comprising about 21 percent of what we throw away and increasing the size of landfills, the source of 34 percent of methane emissions.When done at a large scale, composting can make a dent in emissions. San Francisco, which established mandatory city-wide composting in 2009, has been able to divert 80 percent of its waste from landfills every year, more than 2.5 million tons overall.One estimate from the Natural Resources Defense Council finds that San Francisco’s composting laws reduced the equivalent of 90,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, the same number of emissions as about 20,000 passenger vehicles.In addition to reducing landfill emissions, compost makes soil healthier. When layered on top of soil in a garden or on a farm, the organic matter found in compost improves unhealthy soils. It also helps bind soil particles together and holds more water. Better soil helps support plant growth, which can help sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Stronger, nutrient-rich soil also reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticides, which are pollutants themselves and are often produced with destructive mining practices and a high carbon footprint. In fact, the only downside to composting may be the “ick factor.” On that point, Sherman says not to worry. “It’s not stinky, it’s not gross. And once a week I go to my backyard compost bin. It takes me three minutes to compost. I just really try to encourage people. I try to tell people it’s so easy to do.”

It’s become widely accepted that plastic waste is a gigantic global problem. But is it a climate-change problem, too? Answers to this trickier question are becoming clearer, as these articles demonstrate.

“How the fossil fuel industry is pushing plastics on the world,” Katie Brigham, CNBC. An excellent place to start. The 15-minute video is a little more informative than the text, but either will grab your attention and arm you with lots of useful, though troubling, information.

“How bad are plastics, really? They’re harmful to health, environment, and human rights – and now poised to dominate this century as an unchecked cause of climate change,” Rebecca Altman, The Atlantic. This long, thorough, and intriguing article tells the history of plastics and elucidates the many different problems they cause. (Access to a few Atlantic stories each month is available without a subscription.)

“Fossil fuel industry sees the future in hard-to-recycle plastic,” Deirdre McKay, The Conversation. A short, informative call to see plastic and climate as “two inseparable parts of the same problem.”

“Trash and burn: big brands stoke cement kilns with plastic waste as recycling falters,” Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman, John Geddie, Valerie Volcovici, Reuters Special Report. Burning plastic to make cement? What could possibly go wrong? Dealing with one problem, in this case, creates others, adding both carbon dioxide and toxins to the air.

To learn more, take a look at any of several recent reports about links between plastics and climate change – or articles about them. All are reasonably accessible to non-specialists.

“Plastics & Climate, The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet,” CIEL (Center for International Environmental Law)“Reckoning with the U.S. role in global ocean plastic waste,” National Academies Press. About this government-mandated report, see Tik Root in the Washington Post or Melissa Gaskill in Texas Climate News.“The new coal: plastics and climate change,” Jim Vallette and others, Beyond Plastics. About this report from a research center at Bennington College, see Maya Yang in The Guardian or Elizabeth Gribkoff in The Daily Climate.“World talks on a treaty to control plastic pollution are set for Nairobi in February. How to do so is still up in the air,” James Bruggers, Inside Climate News. What can be done? Global policy people are on the case, but the way forward is anything but simple or uncontroversial.“Plastics are worse than you think. The solutions are better,” Claire Elise Thompson, Grist (Fix Solutions Lab). Some encouraging developments that could give us all better options for daily life.

This series is curated and written by retired Colorado State University English professor and close climate change watcher SueEllen Campbell of Colorado. To flag works you think warrant attention, send an e-mail to her any time. Let us hear from you.

A new exhibition ‘mingles the jolt of the dystopian with the lure of beauty’, writes Diane Cole.A strangely appealing sculpture – of a giant tree-like monument composed of swirling coils of black plastic, planted in a bed of bright green moss that creeps its way up to the structure’s tip, and peppered throughout with purplish-pink orchid blooms – has been luring passersby to stop in their tracks and peer through the store-front windows of the Weinberg/Newton Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. Many find themselves so engaged with the incongruous mix of the natural and the synthetic that, rather than walking on, they walk into the gallery itself to find out more, according to gallery director Nabiha Khan-Giordano. And when they do, they also recognise the familiar scent of fresh rain diffused into the air.
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Human/Nature is an interactive, sensory-immersive exhibition currently on display at the non-profit gallery, and presented in partnership with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organisation that identifies the impact of man-made threats on our world. It’s a show designed to connect, educate, and engage viewers with the urgent issues of climate change. Throughout, the show mingles the jolt of the dystopian with the lure of beauty – a primal reminder of what’s at stake that urges us forward to preserve what we have and, more than that, support and pursue actions that can help sustain us into the future. From that perspective, its purpose is not to shock us into action so much as to instil urgency and motivate us, asking: if we don’t act now, when will we?
Yet that question itself leads to another one: can art exhibits and projects stir action to help mitigate climate change? “Art can do what the scientists can’t do,” says Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin: make accessible, relatable, and understandable the abstract-sounding science of climate change. Rather than push us away from acting to mitigate the menacing future the studies warn we’re trending to, art can invite us to come closer, and help us envision a different future that we can also help shape.Monument by Regan Rosberg combines black plastic with moss and orchids to startling effect (Credit: Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago, IL. Photography by Evan Jenkins)Monument, the show’s centrepiece, created by Denver-based artist Regan Rosberg, is only one example of how artists can translate abstract-seeming scientific research into striking works that connect us viscerally with the climate changes we’re grappling with. “You walk in and see the beautiful sod and the orchids, and you smell the aroma of the forest, and then you realise those swirling pieces are plastic, so ugly and so beautiful at the same time,” says Bronson.This quizzical kind of beauty is, in fact, part of Rosberg’s artistic strategy. “I try to hook people with beauty, first because it’s needed and second, it’s a way to engage people and keep them interested.” She additionally engages people with the rain scent she has created to diffuse through the gallery. “Scent is directly tied to memory,” she points out, and this particular scent is one that humans are particularly attuned to as part of our evolutionary make-up.
This scent that conjures both nature and memory helps evoke a sense of empathy, connection and wonder, she says. With their attention and their emotions thus captured, viewers then feel more comfortable delving deeper into the meanings behind the contradictions embedded in the piece. Rosberg explains that moss is a highly adaptive species that is 350 million years old. Orchids, too, are highly adaptive, its origins also dating back millions of years. They represent the many species that have evolved and survived over eons. “These are living things that can teach us to adapt and be resilient,” Rosberg says. But they are co-existing alongside this giant mass of plastic. “Often we use plastic for two seconds, but it can last for 1,000 years.”
Dual purpose
Enmeshing and entangling those materials together dramatises where we are now, she says: living in a world where dystopian fears can overwhelm our sense of hope, and paralyse our ability to act. Holding both the dystopian and hope at the same time can be scary, she acknowledges. What good art can do, though, is provide the perspective that allows us to recognise that resilience is possible and that we can act, and there are many ways to do so.
That is in fact one of the show’s main points, says its curator Cyndi Conn. “So much of the conversation now has the message that we’re beyond the point of saving. That’s the headline. But it’s not hopeless. We’re at a crossroads. The exhibit is very candid about how grave the situation is. But we also show the beauty and the resilience of the planet.”Karen Reimer uses textiles to create data visualisations showing the effects of climate change (Credit: Monique Meloche Gallery/Weinberg/Newton Gallery/ Photography: Evan Jenkins)Strolling from one gallery room to the next, visitors encounter one artwork after another posing this duality, each in its own way. There are colourful, comfy-looking textured quilts by Chicago-based artist Karen Reimer that incorporate into their designs small-scale maps and graphs charting the extending reach of climate change. Reimer calls these “data visualisations” that both map – and make it easier to grasp – the impact of climate change. “We can’t look at a list of numbers giving daily temperatures for 100 years and understand it without a lot of mental process effort,” she said at an artists’ panel sponsored by the gallery (and available online), “but we can look at a line graph and see that continual rise in temperature much more quickly and easily.” Embedding the information within shimmering textiles allows visitors to approach and begin to digest the reality that scientific research can make dauntingly abstract. 
Next up: delicate still-life watercolours by San Diego-based Laura Ball that depict entangled plants and animals engaged in – is it play, or is it an intricate dance of mutual destruction? Or perhaps their fight is based on adaptation as they evolve into an unknown future. “Most of the animals she incorporates are facing extinction. This is a reminder of the preciousness of biodiversity,” Conn says.Laura Bell’s watercolours show endangered animals in the form of a ‘mandala’, or sacred symbol (Credit: Weinberg/Newton Gallery/ Photography by Evan Jenkins)A continuous slide show presents powerful images taken by Donovan Quintero, a photojournalist for the Navajo Times (Diné bi Naaltsoos), documenting the dystopian-looking realities caused by drought, over-mining, wildfires and toxic waste dumps throughout the distressed lands of the Navajo Nation. The images seem surreal: the fire erupting like a distant volcano in the background of one photograph; then the mist of dust that enshrouds a riverbed; followed by a landscape of once-green land that is now a dried yellow-brown patchwork of cracks and creases. But the images depict reality, compelling us to confront how bias leads to a neglectful disregard that in turn amplifies the devastation of climate change on minority communities. Yet resilience resides in the images of the people who endure despite water shortages and lost grazing lands, and continue working to seek solutions.Donovan Quintero’s photos reveal the impacts of climate change on Navajo communities (Credit: Donovan Quintero/Weinberg/Newton Gallery)The show also includes an inventive array of reimaginings of the Doomsday Clock: the iconic symbol created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to alert humanity to our unceasing countdown to catastrophe, as gauged by the concurrent threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, disruptive technologies and Covid-19. Its current setting in its countdown to oblivion: 100 seconds from midnight.
As re-envisioned by the French collective Obvious working with the Russian photographer Stas Barnikas, the clock now tracks climate change. Super-imposed on the clock is a continuously changing video montage. It is an amalgam of Barnikas’s photographs documenting the changes already wrought on the remote landscapes of the Arctic, further transformed through an artificial intelligence algorithm devised by Obvious, to provide a glimpse of the future that is at once eerily beautiful and devastatingly empty.French art collective Obvious and Russian photographer Stas Barnikas have reimagined the Doomsday Clock (Credit: Weinberg/Newton Gallery/ Photography by Evan Jenkins)New York-based artist Matthew Ritchie has created a three-part piece collectively called “This world, this garden, this time, or never again (Proposal for a world garden, a living clock)”. It begins with an eye-catching blue-yellow-green-brown watercolour map of the globe viewed as if from space, with 12 anchor-like arrows pointing around its clock-like shape at each hour of the clock to a ballooned caption that has scribbled within a possible action that could turn a potential “doomsday clock” into the “life clock” of the title. (An example: One o’clock is “Increase carbon-neutral power generation to meet current needs of wind and solar.”)Matthew Ritchie’s version of the clock suggests collective actions that could be taken to tackle climate change (Credit: Weinberg/Newton Gallery/ Photography by Evan Jenkins)The second piece is a sober black-and-white vinyl version containing the same information, this time clearly and boldly printed and impossible to mix. The caption reads: “Unlike the doomsday clock, the goal of the ‘life clock’ is to build out collective action from the centre, moving simultaneously in all directions, with each proposal presented in response to a planetary boundary collapse.” Finally, the third piece is a blank clock that invites viewers to add post-it notes suggesting their own ideas and suggestions for fighting climate change; it is now almost entirely covered with messages in response.Rosberg’s Dear Future video features a range of ‘letters to the future’ (Credit: Weinberg/Newton Gallery/ Photography by Evan Jenkins)Rosberg similarly invites viewers to engage and respond to her video Dear Future, also included in the show. It is a narrated selection of the more than 150 letters from artists, activists, scientists, biologists, children and teachers, among others, that she has gathered, with each letter addressing the way climate change has affected their views of the future. Readings from the letters, that range from the hopeful to the poignant to the tragic, are interspersed with photos Rosberg took documenting the environmental changes she saw during her artist’s residency in the Arctic. At the show’s conclusion, viewers are invited to sit at a nearby desk and write, by hand, their own letters to the future. Those who write a letter receive a small vial containing the scent Rosberg created for Monument. So many people have contributed their thoughts, Rosberg has been asked to provide more scent as the show continues.
Before visitors leave the exhibition, they are given the chance to write to their elected representatives. They can also pause and learn from ongoing videos featuring a range of scientists and others presenting, on a more personal level, what they are doing. By all measures, the show is getting its message across. Attendance numbers rose so high that the exhibition was extended by a month, and the responses to individual artworks keep growing. And the show is sparking conversation among those who visit. “I’ve been present when people start talking about how climate change is personally affecting them,” Khan-Giordano says.But the realities facing us remain. “If we do nothing, we are in danger,” Bronson says. At the same time, she continues, “What we’re seeing on climate does give me optimism: you can see political parties globally responding… Even in the United States business community, you see a greater sense of urgency from 20 years ago… But we need to move faster.”
Can artists provide the inspiration for that push? “Art can be a punch in the gut,” says Conn. “But it does not have to be horrifying. It can also be inspiring. There is also a place for optimism. Because if we don’t have optimism, we won’t take action.”
Human/Nature is at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery in Chicago until 16 April.
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