Scientists use satellite technology to spot plastic pollution on beaches

KEY POINTSResearchers used remote sensing to spot plastics on the coastPlastics can be detected despite ‘shape, color or condition’Plastic debris is a ‘globally relevant environmental challenge’: ResearchersA team of scientists utilized satellite technology to find plastic pollution in coastal areas. Their method helped detect plastic that cannot be visibly seen in satellite images.Plastic debris in the marine environment is a “globally relevant problem,” with an estimated eight million tons of debris entering the waters each year, noted the researchers of a study published in Remote Sensing.”At the moment, plastic debris are tracked by passing vessels notifying authorities,” Jenna Guffogg, the study’s lead author and Ph.D. Candidate at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, said in a university news release. “Using satellites will allow more frequent and reliable observations.”According to the researchers, most research using remote sensing to detect debris focus on the ones that are floating in the open water. However, plastics floating on water or are partially submerged tend to have “low reflectance.” Beaches, on the other hand, also “present challenges that are unique from other parts of the marine environment.” It’s also easier to remove the debris on beaches than in the oceans, Guffogg said.

Remote sensing is the process in which the physical attributes of an area are detected by measuring the reflected and emitted radiation from a distance, such as via a satellite or an aircraft. For their work, the researchers used sensing equipment on the beaches of Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands to determine how different types of plastic reflect infra-red light, RMIT noted.”On the beaches of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Henderson Island, in the Indian and Pacific oceans, respectively, a variety of consumer and industrial plastics are found in high concentrations: single-use plastic bottles, containers, unidentified fragments of hard plastics, foams, soft plastic films and industrial fishing debris,” the researchers wrote.They used “spectral library plots” to compare the “reflectance” of weathered and virgin plastics and found “little difference” in the results. According to the university, this means that plastics can be detected remotely “despite the shape, color or condition of the plastic.”The researchers found that about 2-8% of an area must be covered in plastic, depending on the polymer, before it can be “spectrally separated” from an area that only contains sand. Through the method that they used, the researchers were able to spot the plastic waste on beaches that aren’t visible on typical satellite images, the university noted. By knowing where the plastic waste is, efforts can then be focused on those areas to clean them up.In the coming years, satellites with better remote sensing capabilities are set to be launched, Simon Jones of RMIT, the study’s co-author, said in the news release. These could then help improve the technology for better, perhaps global, detection.”We’re developing ways to use these new satellites in the fight against marine waste,” Jones said.”Stopping plastic from entering the ocean is a global challenge,” Guffogg added. “But if we can find and remove them quickly, it’s the next best thing.”

As world drowns in plastic waste, U.N. to hammer out global treaty

After years of largely neglecting the buildup of plastic waste in Earth’s environment, the U.N. Environment Assembly will meet in February and March in the hopes of drafting the first international treaty controlling global plastics pollution.Discarded plastic is currently killing marine life, threatening food security, contributing to climate change, damaging economies, and dissolving into microplastics that contaminate land, water, the atmosphere and even the human bloodstream.The U.N. parties will debate how comprehensive the treaty they write will be: Should it, for example, protect just the oceans or the whole planet? Should it focus mainly on reuse/recycling, or control plastics manufacture and every step of the supply chain and waste stream?The U.S. has changed its position from opposition to such a treaty under President Donald Trump, to support under President Joe Biden, but has yet to articulate exactly what it wants in an agreement. While environmental NGOs are pushing for a comprehensive treaty, plastics companies, who say they support regulation, likely will want to limit the treaty’s scope. At the end of February, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) will tackle a challenging task: the creation of a landmark treaty to control plastic pollution worldwide. While most nations have agreed to participate, the scope and timing of such an agreement aren’t settled, with many countries, environmental NGOs, and the plastics industry expressing widely different ideas as to what should be included.
But with media images rife of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and of the world’s most remote seaside beaches drowning in waste, just about everyone agrees it’s time to act: “The ever-increasing growth in the amount of plastics produced has led to a significant plastic waste generation [problem] that has outpaced society’s ability to manage it effectively,” a U.N. baseline report warned in 2020.
Tallying all sources, “Worldwide, at least 8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the world’s oceans each year — the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the sea every minute,” concluded a key report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released in December. In 2016, the U.S. generated more plastic waste than any other country, exceeding that of all European Union (EU) member states combined, the report stated.
Discarded plastic waste on a city street. At least 8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the world’s oceans each year — the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the sea every minute, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Image by Justin Bautista via Unsplash.
The U.S. Congress commissioned that NAS study, which suggested that the United States establish a national strategy to cope with plastic waste by the end of 2022, with an assessment of progress by the end of 2025. The U.S. currently lags behind the EU and Canada in setting plastic environmental guidelines, acknowledges Margaret Spring, who chaired the academy committee that produced the report. China banned plastic waste imports in 2018 and set a plan to phase out certain plastics by 2025.
While the NAS study relied on U.S. federal data to reach its conclusions and focused on oceans, its experts agree that the plastics problem extends well beyond Earth’s seas, and that any initiative aimed at controlling plastic waste must be based on a global methodology and cooperation in order to succeed.
Figures differ as to which nations pollute the most with plastics, depending on whether production or use is counted, or whether the EU is considered as one entity. China, for instance, accounts for about 30% of plastic production, but only about 20% of global use. Globally, most plastics are manufactured and used in China, Western Europe and the U.S.
“This [NAS] report synthesizes what knowledgeable people already knew,” Spring said. She added: “What haven’t been set [to date] are global goals,” something that a U.N. plastics treaty should address.
How much single-use plastic waste do countries generate? Single-use plastic waste generated per person in selected countries in 2019 in kilograms. Image courtesy of Statista.
A runaway plastics crisis
Estimates vary, but U.N. figures assert that humanity uses 500 billion plastic bags and 17 million plastic oil barrels annually. Some 13 million metric tons of plastic wind up in the oceans every year, and plastic kills 100,000 marine animals annually.
Another U.N. report, released in October, warned that “plastic production has risen exponentially in the last decades. It now amounts to some 400 million tonnes per year. Yet only an estimated 12% of plastics produced have been incinerated and only an estimated 9% have been recycled. The remainder has either been disposed of in landfills or released into the environment, including the oceans. Without meaningful action, flows of plastic waste into aquatic ecosystems are expected to nearly triple from around 11 million tonnes in 2016 to around 29 million tonnes in 2040.”
According to a 2019 report from the Center for International Environmental Law, all this plastic is also contributing heavily to climate change. “At current levels, greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C [2.7°F]. With the petrochemical and plastic industries planning a massive expansion in production, the problem is on track to get much worse,” says the report.
Nations aside, it’s hard to know which of the world’s companies generate the most discarded plastic. Break Free from Plastic (BFP), an NGO and self-described “global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution,” releases an annual estimate based on pieces of trash volunteers collect that can be identified with a specific company. By that measure, junk food packaging is a huge part of the problem, with top polluters at last count being Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever, Nestlé, and Proctor & Gamble.
But the BFP estimate — even though it accounts for brand-name trash in 45 countries — is clearly just that, as it only tallies identifiable garbage that can be found, not what ends up in landfills, incinerators, or bodies of water, such as monofilament and bits of fishing nets. Nor do the rankings consider plastic manufacturers. (Full disclosure: This story’s author holds retirement account stock in the Coca-Cola Company.)
Plastic pollution and juvenile fish in Indonesia. Plastic waste ingested by, or entangled around, aquatic life, is often fatal. Sea turtles, for example, can mistake plastic bags for edible jellyfish. Research suggests that 52% of the world’s turtles have eaten plastic waste, according to WWF. Image by Naja Bertolt Jensen via Unsplash.
Discarded plastic, ranging from food containers to fishing gear, is washing up on shores around the globe, getting eaten by marine life, interfering with navigation, and dissolving into microplastic waste that works its way up the food chain and even into the atmosphere where it may be influencing climate change.
“Plastic pollution can now be found everywhere, from the remote shores of the Arctic to the deepest parts of the ocean. Up to 12 million tonnes of plastic leak into the marine environment annually, harming biodiversity and posing a threat to food security, sustainability and human health,” the Environmental Investigation Agency reported in 2020.
A U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) report issued last October cited the urgent need for a waste treaty. “Plastics are the largest, most harmful and most persistent fraction of marine litter, accounting for at least 85% of total marine waste,” it noted, adding that, “while we have the know-how [to dispose of plastics properly], we need the political will and urgent action by government to tackle the mounting crisis.”
Tropical paradise? A beach cluttered with waste. Unseen are microplastics mingled with sand, which could have a variety of as-yet-unforeseen impacts. Research is underway, for example, to determine whether microplastics mingled with sand could be raising sea turtle nesting beach temperatures. Because the sex of sea turtles is temperature dependent, more females are hatching as global warming (and possibly microplastics) push temperatures higher on the world’s nesting beaches. Today, females outnumber males three to one at many global sites. Image by Dustin Woodhouse via Unsplash.
Challenging negotiations ahead
The UNEA, founded in 2014, meets biennially in Nairobi, Kenya. At previous UNEA assemblies, delegates debated the need for an international plastics agreement but couldn’t agree on a way forward. But international momentum got a big boost in 2019 when the Nordic Council — an association of parliaments from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland, an autonomous region in Finland — called for creating such an agreement.
As a result, featured prominently on the docket for this year’s assembly, slated to run from Feb. 28 to March 2, is the development of a framework for the world’s first ever plastics treaty. The assembly will focus especially on what should be included — and not included.
Past negotiated U.N. environmental treaties cover everything from transboundary air pollution to international transport of hazardous waste (including plastics) and industrial accidents — but they may not provide much groundwork for the plastics treaty process. “None of the existing treaties, each of which has its own specific focus, is a suitable basis for the comprehensive discussions which are necessary to contain and combat the plastic soup,” according to the Plastic Soup Foundation, an Amsterdam-based NGO dedicated to keeping the world’s waters free of plastic.
The UNEA will be considering two competing drafts to arrive at a framework. A more comprehensive one, sponsored by Rwanda and Peru, would try to cope with plastics pollution worldwide from production to disposal. The other, sponsored by Japan, focuses narrowly on oceans and end-of-use.
As representatives of the world’s nations gather this month, plastic manufacturers and oil companies (which provide the petroleum-based raw materials to make plastics), will be taking an interest and want to participate in hopes of influencing outcomes.
Plastic heaped beside a river. Much of this waste will likely be transported downstream into estuaries and oceans where over time it could degrade into microplastics, whose environmental impacts we have only begun to investigate. Image by Alexander Schimmeck via Unsplash.
The plastics industry seems willing to support an accord — so long as it doesn’t interfere too much with business. The Washington, D.C.-based Plastics Industry Association gave Mongabay a statement reading in part: “We support international cooperation to eliminate plastic leakage into the environment. We encourage solutions that are flexible and relevant to regional context and treat the plastics industry as experts and partners. We caution against heavy-handed restrictions that impede the ability of materials to flow around the world, especially in a time of stressed supply chains. Furthermore, we believe that production or consumption limits on plastics is the wrong approach and would encourage the use of products that are inferior from a performance or sustainability profile and result in major economic harm globally.”
Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a lobbying group that represents plastic manufacturers, also provided Mongabay with a statement, writing that “ACC fully supports the negotiation of a treaty to eliminate plastic waste and accelerate the transition to a more circular economy.” Last September, ACC, along with the International Council of Chemical Associations and the World Plastics Council, agreed on a series of principles for an agreement, including national “flexibility and support” to meet individual nations’ needs, improve “access to waste collection,” and innovate design and recycling.
ACC got part of its wish in December 2020 when the U.S. Congress passed the Save Our Seas Act 2.0, a follow-up on legislation passed in 2018 to protect oceans from plastic waste. Corporations didn’t oppose the bill and President Donald Trump signed it, as it didn’t regulate industry but merely called for more government-sponsored research into recycling, reuse, and making less hazardous products. (Not surprisingly, industry was glad to let the government pay for research rather than spend its own money for that purpose.)
Congress, meanwhile, has not acted on the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act introduced in the current and previous legislative sessions. That bill would put limits on single-use plastic production and add requirements for reuse and recycling.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) suggested in 2020 that a “UN treaty on plastic pollution would benefit businesses as well as the environment. It can create a level playing field across the plastic value chain,” largely by standardizing compliance costs and activities, the NGO suggested.
Plastic in the world: Plastic production by region in 2019 (in percent). Image courtesy of Statista.
The parties prepare
The European Union and 48 countries signed on to an agreement at a ministerial conference last September endorsing the need for a plastics control treaty, stating: “no country can adequately address the various aspects of this challenge alone; hence there is a need to commit to establishing a balanced framework for international cooperation that includes coordinated actions to address the negative impacts of plastic along its life cycle, [and] taking into account local and national circumstances as well as specific needs of developing countries.” At last count, 81 nations have signed on including the U.K. and all EU members, but not the U.S. or China. And according to the WWF Global Plastic Navigator, 161 countries have expressed interest.
Though the U.S. hasn’t signed this U.N. document, the administration of President Joe Biden has agreed to participate in the treaty creation, reversing the Trump administration’s position. (Before the change in presidents, the U.S., one of the biggest plastics polluters, was one of the few countries to actively oppose regulation, which helped set back the international negotiating process.)
One reason for Biden’s delayed signature, and the administration’s failure as of mid-January 2022 to articulate a global plastics control policy: it’s complicated. Twelve federal agencies play a role in determining the U.S. position, ranging from the State Department to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The State Department said in a statement to Mongabay that it “is premature to discuss” matters such as the U.S. position on enforcement, or the degree to which an accord should focus on ocean or all plastic pollution. But the statement indicated the U.S. wants some flexibility, saying “We need to be innovative and account for different national circumstances” and “ensure that countries most in need have the financial resources to implement potential solutions.”
The State Department says it is reviewing NAS findings and recommendations, while also indicating that it wants the agreement to consider all aspects of the plastic lifecycle, noting that it wants countries to consider “circular economy approaches that reduce the lifecycle impacts of plastic” and that some nations “may include restrictions on plastic production and consumption.”
A reminder to modern urbanites: The massive amounts of plastic waste we discard today will live on in the environment for centuries. Image by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.
In a January blog post, Monica Medina, assistant secretary for the department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, listed her four priorities for that bureau, including “seeking global solutions to address the onslaught of plastic pollution that spills into our waterways and oceans and harms biodiversity.”
Many international environmental groups are pushing hard for a tough U.S. stance. “We’ve been convincing hundreds of governments, corporations, NGOs and other stakeholders to try to move the conversation forward,” said John Hocevar, oceans campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “We’ve also been putting a little bit of public pressure on the Biden Administration to get it to campaign about the global threat.
“We need corporations to take responsibility for what they sell and produce and [make] a shift away from single use plastic and a move to reuse,” Hocevar said. “Governments have not done their job to regulate corporations.”
Whatever the UNEA decides in the coming months, “one good thing about the treaty is that it’s a wake-up call for corporations and governments. They all can see the change that is coming. It should prompt them to start taking action now. There’s no reason to wait until we have a treaty adopted to begin working on solutions,” Hocevar said.
A pile of single-use plastic water bottles found during a beach cleanup in Barbados. While cleanup efforts like this one are well intended, and offer good publicity bringing awareness to the problem, they can’t stem the tide of plastic pollution. That must be done at the source and along supply chains. Image by Brian Yurasits via Unsplash.
Plastic waste generation per person, 2010. Image courtesy of Our World in Data.
Hard work ahead
What can we expect of the upcoming U.N. session? What comes after? The immediate goal will be the formation of an intergovernmental negotiating committee to develop a treaty draft.
“I am confident that member states will decide on the path forward that makes a real difference,” UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said in a statement to Mongabay. The goal, she says, is to finalize the treaty language at the next UNEA general session in 2024. “This would make for a highly ambitious timeframe, reflecting member states’ understanding of the urgency to make progress on this critical environmental challenge.”
Andersen says member states will still need to hash out the degree to which the treaty will focus on oceans or worldwide dumping and how to finance the agreement. But she contends it will need to cover the entire plastic lifecycle “from production through disposal and reduction of the leakage of existing plastic currently in the global ecosystem.”
Asked about the risk that nations may underestimate their disposal, she replied, “This is an important issue for member states to deliberate further on.” Nations have expressed “reporting fatigue” on other multilateral environmental agreements, “and this is something we do need to seriously keep in mind as we assess the optimum review process.”
A landfill in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “The ever-increasing growth in the amount of plastics produced has led to a significant plastic waste generation [problem] that has outpaced society’s ability to manage it effectively,” a U.N. baseline report warned in 2020. Image by MARUF_RAHMAN via Pixabay.
Existing international agreements can provide some guidance on matters of enforcement and reporting. But the accord should emphasize convincing nations that their best interests revolve around “a new global plastics circular economy” and switch the emphasis “from enforcement to creating an enabling environment where it is in everyone’s interests to implement the agreement,” Andersen said.
The U.S. and other countries seem intent on the need to act fast and decisively. The State Department, writing to Mongabay, said: “This is an urgent issue that needs urgent attention. We cannot spend years negotiating. We support establishing an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee at UNEA 5.2 [the upcoming February-March meeting], and concluding the negotiations by 2024, which may be in line with the yet to be scheduled UNEA 6 target in both current proposed [Japan and Peru/Rwanda] resolutions.” Time is of the essence, as the tide of global plastics pollution rises ever higher.
Banner image: Some 13 million metric tons of plastic wind up in the oceans every year, and plastic kills 100,000 marine animals annually. Image by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash.
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Project to gauge how well storm drain traps catch litter

High schoolers volunteering with Cape Fear River Watch pick trash out of a storm drain to prevent it from getting into waterways. Photo courtesy Cape Fear River Watch
Cape Fear River Watch is launching a new project to cut down on the amount of litter getting into the Atlantic Ocean.
The nonprofit organization has purchased catch basins that are set to be installed in a handful of storm drains in Wilmington and Leland, the town that sits west across the Cape Fear River, to intercept litter from getting into the river.
The “80% Project” — a title referencing estimates that 80% of marine litter comes from land-based sources — will study the effectiveness of LittaTraps, catch basins designed by a New Zealand-based company called Enviropod.
Cape Fear River Watch received a grant of a little more than $9,500 to purchase four of the mesh, basket-like traps, which are designed to sit inside stormwater drains. The grant, funded by the Jandy Ammons Foundation, will also cover the cost of signage that will be placed at the drains where the traps are installed.
The traps capture trash and other debris carried by stormwater from getting into a drainage system.
Robb Clark, Cape Fear River Watch’s water quality programs manager, is overseeing the project, which entails tracking for one year what kind of trash and how much of it is captured by the traps.
The traps are to be emptied weekly, and trash and debris, such as leaves and other yard debris, captured at each drain will be sorted and then weighed.
Clark said that by tracking by weight the amount of trash collected from the LittaTraps, the organization will have reliable data on how much trash is being caught before it enters the river and, ultimately, the ocean. That information could turn out to be a major selling point to municipalities to budget for future investment in additional traps.
Officials in Wilmington and Leland have agreed to install traps in two storm drains. The city and town determine in which drains to place the traps, which are to be maintained by Cape Fear River Watch for one year.
Adrianna Weber, Leland’s town engineer, said in an email that if the traps are a success, “the Town will absolutely look into continuing the use of these devices and similar technologies.”
“We want to keep our community and the waterways in and surrounding our community safe and clean,” she said in the email. “LittaTraps are just one way to help accomplish this goal for our residents and the natural habitats around Leland. The Town regularly checks and cleans stormwater catch basins; therefore, the maintenance of the LittaTraps would align well with our current maintenance operations.”
Leland partners with Cape Fear River Watch to host two stream cleanups each year.
“Anywhere there are public roads and rights-of-way there is always the possibility of trash accumulating over time, but fortunately, the Town does not currently have any major issues with trash and litter,” Weber said. “Maintaining clean roadways, waterways, and public areas is important to the Town and something we maintain focus on through programs like our regular street sweeping and stream clean-ups.”
During a March 27, 2021, cleanup along Mill Creek in the Surgeon Creek watershed, about 140 pounds of bagged trash, about 70 pounds of recycling, and 100 to 150 pounds of miscellaneous trash was collected, including a flat-screen television, car seats, cushions and a large pallet, according to a report provided by Weber.
In May, about 130 pounds of bagged trash, 20 pounds of recycling and 150 to 200 pounds of miscellaneous trash, including wood, shingles, metal car parts and furniture, were picked up along Navassa Road near the creek.
Last year, more than 7,000 pounds of trash was collected from monthly litter sweeps hosted by Cape Fear River Watch, Clark said.
“The vast majority of litter that we find in our watersheds is plastic of some kind,” he said. “Cleanups alone are a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. I could do cleanups every day and we would still be behind. You need structural solutions like this to intercept litter that the cleanups are just not going to be able to get.”
A storm drain near Greenfield Lake in Wilmington. This curb inlet drains immediately into Greenfield Lake, the consequences of which can be seen in the form of trash floating on the water. Photo courtesy Cape Fear River Watch
LittaTrap’s mesh basket is designed to capture and retain 100% of plastics and “other gross solids over 5mm,” according to Enviropod’s website.
Plastics in the ocean are a global problem.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an organization made up of more than 1,400 government and civil society organizations, at least 14 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year.
Clark said he isn’t aware of municipalities on the East Coast using LittaTraps, but there are communities on the California coast that do.
In 2020, the California State Water Board certified Enviropod’s LittaTrap FC, or full capture, basin insert as a full capture device for trash treatment control.
The traps are available in three standard sizes to fit various catch basin structures. Custom designs and filter liners designed to capture different pollutants are also available.
Cape Fear River Watch will likely purchase liners designed to capture generic litter, such as plastic bottles and bags, Clark said.
Liners must be replaced every three to five years and cost about $30 each.
“As for the maintenance itself, they only recommend you need to go into them quarterly,” Clark said. “That’s not a lot of labor and time input. It’s very hands off. They’re designed to hold up to 600 pounds of litter or debris.”
Clark said he hopes the traps will be installed some time in February.
“Wilmington has a pretty massive (litter) issue,” he said. “I anticipate that to increase year after year based on the way Wilmington’s population is increasing. It’s important to keep these things out of the river. We get our drinking water from the Cape Fear River.”

Crows trained to clean up cigarette butts on Swedish streets

Tired of cigarette butts littering their streets, one Swedish city is handing over the solution to the birds.
A startup company in the city of Södertälje, near Stockholm, has designed a machine that will feed crows a little bit of food for every cigarette butt they bring back and deposit in the device.The company, Corvid Cleaning, believes their device could help save the city money when it comes to cleaning up the unsightly refuse.In fact, founder Christian Günther-Hanssen told The Guardian he expects that crows could cut the city’s butt removal budget by 75 per cent.[embedded content]The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation says the city of Södertälje spends about $2.7-million on street cleaning per year, and that more than one billion cigarette butts are flicked onto Sweden’s streets annually. Story continues below advertisement

Günther-Hanssen told Swedish online news site The Local that he only uses wild birds for his business and that any participating crows are “taking part on a voluntary basis.”He said because crows are so intelligent, they can be trained quite quickly using a step-by-step method.“They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other. At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish,” he said.

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Plastic pollution causes damage akin to climate change, report shows

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Plastics clampdown is key to climate change fight, EU environment chief says

A volunteer shows ear sticks and plastics after a garbage collection, ahead of World Environment Day on La Costilla Beach, on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Rota, Spain June 2, 2018. REUTERS/Jon NazcaRegister now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comRegisterBRUSSELS, Feb 1 (Reuters) – Progressive reduction of fossil fuel-based plastics is crucial to tackling climate change, the EU’s top environmental official said, ahead of a United Nations meeting to launch talks on a world-first treaty to combat plastic pollution.Plastics production is becoming a key growth area for the oil industry as countries seek to shift away from polluting energy sources, but plastic waste is piling up in the world’s oceans and urban waterways and choking its wildlife. read more Last month, a study of ice cores revealed traces of nanoplastics in both polar regions for the first time.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comRegister”The biggest topic is, at the end of the day, oil use for plastic production,” said EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius amid preparations for the U.N. Environment Assembly summit starting in Nairobi on Feb. 28.”If we want to reach our decarbonisation goals for 2050, clearly we have to decrease steadily the use of fossil fuels, and one of the areas here as well is plastics,” he told Reuters in an interview.Sinkevicius said restricting virgin plastic production was “inevitably an important part” of a global treaty, but it was not yet clear what binding or voluntary requirements would be agreed.”I believe in binding measures more, but of course we’ll have to see what our international partners have to say,” he said.Petrochemicals, the fossil fuel-based building blocks for products including plastics and fertilisers, are expected to account for more than a third of global oil demand growth by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.Consumer brands including Coca Cola (KO.N) and PepsiCo (PEP.O) have said the UN pact should include cuts in plastic production, although that could face resistance from oil and chemical firms and major plastic-producing countries like the United States.Other options for the UN deal could include improving waste collection and recycling, or developing plastics that are easier to reuse – although Sinkevicius said recycling alone could not rein in the plastic pollution crisis.”There’s no way that with this increased waste pile-up, that we will recycle our way out of it,” he said.The 27-country EU banned single-use plastic items such as cutlery and straws n 2021. France went further this year, banning plastic packaging for nearly all fruit and vegetables.(This story refiles to remove superfluous word ‘as’ from second paragraph)Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comRegisterReporting by Kate Abnett; additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici; editing by Philip Blenkinsop and John StonestreetOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

‘Everyone’s looking for plastic.' As waste rises, so does recycling

DAKAR, Senegal — A crowd of people holding curved metal spikes jumped on trash spilling out of a dump truck in Senegal’s biggest landfill, hacking at the garbage to find valuable plastic.Nearby, sleeves rolled up, suds up to their elbows, women washed plastic jerrycans in rainbow colors, cut into pieces. Around them, piles of broken toys, plastic mayonnaise jars and hundreds of discarded synthetic wigs stretched as far as the eye could see, all ready to be sold and recycled.Plastic waste is exploding in Senegal, as in many countries, as populations and incomes grow and with them, demand for packaged, mass-produced products.This has given rise to a growing industry built around recycling plastic waste, by businesses and citizens alike. From Chinese traders to furniture makers and avant-garde fashion designers, many in Senegal make use of the constant stream of plastic waste.Garbage trucks entering the massive Mbeubeuss landfill in Dakar, which the government plans to close and replace with smaller sorting centers.Waste pickers, scrubbers, choppers and haulers at the dump constitute an informal economy that supports thousands of families.Mbeubeuss — the dump site serving Senegal’s seaside capital of Dakar — is where it all begins. More than 2,000 trash pickers, as well as scrubbers, choppers, haulers on horse-drawn carts, middlemen and wholesalers make a living by finding, preparing and transporting the waste for recycling. It adds up to a huge informal economy that supports thousands of families.Over more than 50 years at the dump, Pape Ndiaye, the doyen of waste pickers, has watched the community that lives off the dump grow, and seen them turn to plastic — a material that 20 years ago the pickers considered worthless.“We’re the people protecting the environment,” said Mr. Ndiaye, 76, looking out at the plastic scattered over Gouye Gui, his corner of the dump. “Everything that pollutes it, we take to industries, and they transform it.”Despite all of the efforts to recycle, much of Senegal’s waste never makes it to landfills, instead littering the landscape. Knockoff Adidas sandals and containers that once held a local version of Nutella block drains. Thin plastic bags that once contained drinking water meander back and forth in the Senegalese surf, like jellyfish. Plastic shopping bags burn in residential neighborhoods, sending clouds of chemical-smelling smoke into the hazy air.Senegal is just one of many countries trying to clean up, formalize the waste disposal system and embrace recycling on a bigger scale. By 2023, the African Union says, the goal is that 50 percent of the waste used in African cities should be recycled.Despite an increase in recycling, plastic waste litters the landscape. Bags dangle from cacti at the beach at Bargny, on the outskirts of Dakar.Children taking part in a weekly community effort to gather plastic on the beach in Bargny.But this means that Senegal also has to grapple with the informal system that has grown up over decades, of which the grand dump at Mbeubeuss (pronounced Mm-beh-BEHSE) is a major part.The recycled plastic makes it to enterprises of all stripes across Senegal, which has one of the most robust economies in West Africa.At a factory in Thies, an inland city known for its tapestry industry to the east of Dakar, recycled plastic pellets are spun out into long skeins, which are then woven into the colorful plastic mats used in almost every Senegalese household.Workers stripping reusable plastic from mats at the Sosenap factory, which recycles plastic to make mats and carpets in Diamniadio, on the outskirts of Dakar.Models posing in front of strips of recycled plastic from the Sosenap factory in December as part of Dakar Fashion Week.Custom-made mats from this factory lined the catwalk at Dakar Fashion Week in December, focused this time on sustainability and held in a baobab forest. Signs were constructed out of old water bottles. Tables and chairs were made of melted down plastic.The trend has changed the focus of the waste pickers who have worked the dump for decades, gleaning anything of value.“Now everyone’s looking for plastic,” said Mouhamadou Wade, 50, smiling broadly as he brewed a pot of sweet, minty tea outside his sorting shack in Mbeubeuss, where he has been a waste picker for over 20 years.Adja Seyni Diop, sitting on a wooden bench by the shack in the kind of long, elegant dress favored by Senegalese women, agreed.The main event at the outdoor venue for Dakar Fashion Week in December, which had a theme of sustainability.When she first began waste picking, at age 11 in 1998, nobody was interested in buying plastic, she said, so she left it in the trash heap, collecting only scrap metal. But these days, plastic is by far the easiest thing to sell to middlemen and traders. She supports her family on the income she makes there, between $25 and $35 a week.Mr. Wade and Ms. Diop work together at Bokk Jom, a kind of informal union representing over half of Mbeubeuss’s waste pickers. And most of them spend their days searching for plastic.A few days later, I bumped into Ms. Diop in her workplace — a towering platform made entirely of rancid waste that is so hostile an environment that it is known as “Yemen.” I almost didn’t recognize her, with her face obscured by bandannas, two hats and sunglasses, to protect her against the particles of trash blowing in every direction.Around us, herds of white, long-horned cattle munched on garbage as dozens of pickers descended on each dump truck emptying its load. Some young men even hung from the tops of trucks to catch precious plastic as it spilled out of the trucks, before bulldozers came to sweep what remained to the edge of the trash mountain.Adja Mame Seyni Diop, 34, began picking waste at age 11. She still does this work and is also a spokeswoman for an association of waste-pickers at the Mbeubeuss dump.Ms. Diop was hardly recognizable in the gear she wears to protect herself from the trash particles blowing around. She used a mosquito net to wrap up a giant bale of her wares.Most of the pickers who target plastic, like Ms. Diop, sell it, at about 13 cents a kilogram, to two Chinese plastic merchants who have depots on the landfill site. The merchants process it into pellets and ship it to China to be made into new goods, said Abdou Dieng, the manager of Mbeubeuss, who works for Senegal’s growing waste management agency and has brought a little order to the chaos of the landfill.Senegal is flooded with other countries’ plastic waste as well as its own.China stopped accepting the world’s unprocessed plastic waste in 2018. Casting around for new countries to export it to, the U.S. began to ship plastic to other countries, including Senegal.But that is beginning to change, too, as the Senegalese government appears to be cracking down on plastic waste coming from abroad. Last year, a German company was fined $3.4 million when one of its ships was caught trying to smuggle 25 tons of plastic waste into Senegal.The Mbeubeuss dump opened in the 1960s and is now considered an environmental hazard and a threat to human health.Washing pieces of plastic for recycling and sale at the Mbeubeuss dump. These days, plastic is the easiest thing to sell to middlemen and traders.In the past two years, the number of trucks coming to Mbeubeuss daily has increased from 300 to 500.But the government says that in a few years, the giant landfill will close, replaced by much smaller sorting and composting centers as part of a joint project with the World Bank.Then, most of the money made from plastic waste will go into government coffers. The waste pickers worry about their livelihoods.Mr. Ndiaye, the last of the original waste pickers who came to Mbeubeuss in 1970, surveyed what has been his workplace for the past half-century. He remembered the large baobab under which he used to take tea breaks, now long dead, replaced by piles of plastic.“They know there’s money in it,” he said, about the government. “And they want to control it.”But Mr. Dieng, the government dump manager, insisted that the pickers would either be given jobs at the new sorting centers, “or we help them find a job that will allow them to live better than before.”That doesn’t reassure everyone.“There are many changes,” said Maguette Diop, a project officer at WIEGO, a nonprofit organization focused on the working poor worldwide, “and the place of the waste pickers in these changes is not clear.”For now, though, hundreds of waste pickers have to keep on picking.Dodging bulldozers, piles of animal guts and cattle, with curved metal spikes and trash bags in their hands, they head back into the fray.Waste pickers worry they will lose their livelihoods if the government closes the dump. Mady Camara

LifeLabs thinks climate-controlled fabric is the future of outdoor gear

Imagine this: you worm out of your winter sleeping bag, brush off frozen condensation, and pull on a thin baselayer—which instantly warms your skin by 18 degrees. For sticky summer days, you’ve got a different solution: a shirt that leaves your body four degrees cooler than even the lightest wicking tee.
Sound like wishful thinking? It’s not. It’s real tech, and it’s here.
Behind these wonder fabrics is the lab of Dr. Yi Cui, the Harvard-educated, Stanford-employed materials science and engineering researcher who first conceived of the idea. Not for outdoor use, mind you, but for a much more noble cause: to forestall the climate crisis.
The idea came to him in 2014. That year, the U.S. Department of Energy released an EPA study reporting that most people spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors—and subsequently realized that the American electrical grid could crash under that kind of dependence, especially as global temperatures continue to rise. The DOE started offering grants to anyone who could find a solution.
Cui read the report, and immediately had an idea: instead of making the electrical grid or HVAC systems more efficient, why not address the problem at a more fundamental level?
“I thought, ‘Why don’t we make our textiles better?’” he says. “If your clothes keep you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, you can turn down your [thermostat] and save a lot of energy.” Clothing, he figured, could be a grassroots solution to saving the world.
Cui applied for a grant, won it, and went on to patent his new fabric technology. After the three-year grant was up, he brought the project to Meng Sui, a chemist and nanotechnology expert who’s now the CEO of technology incubator EEnotech.
“She helped build the initial team of scientists and engineers who turned the technology into a commercial prototype,” Cui explains. Ultimately, the lab ended up with 11 patents.
So how exactly can fabric get that techy? Buckle in.
When you’re standing still, up to 60 percent of your body heat is emitted in the form of infrared radiation (IR). Most fabrics absorb a good deal of that IR, which is one of the reasons it’s hard to stay cool on hot days even with the thinnest of T-shirts on.
LifeLabs’ cooling fabric, called “CoolLife,” is woven from polyethylene (PE), the same stuff plastic grocery bags are made of. LifeLabs claims it’s the only known textile that’s “thermally transparent,” thanks to a unique chemical bonding structure that doesn’t absorb IR. This means that way more body heat can pass straight through the fabric without getting trapped close to your skin. In contrast, most other activewear fabrics rely on large pores or a mesh-like weave, which only let a fraction of infrared radiation escape.
Incidentally, if you’ve used a filmy plastic produce bag, you know PE is not only thermally transparent but visually transparent. This was Cui’s first hurdle, seeing as he wasn’t trying to get into the lingerie business. So, he invented “nanoporous PE,” a yarn whose plasticky threads are filled with little bubbles, like privacy glass.
WarmLife Jacket (Photo: LifeLabs)
The brand’s other fabric, called “WarmLife,” is a little different. The threads are made of recycled polyester rather than PE, and coated with a thin layer of aluminum nanoparticles. Plenty of other companies have used aluminum reflective technology before—like Rab, with its Mythic Ultra 360 sleeping bag, or Columbia, with its line of Omni-Heat jackets. But these technologies use dots or laminated patterns, which aren’t breathable and can only cover a small surface area without feeling clammy Thus, they only trap a small amount of IR radiation. (In lab testing, wearers reported very little difference in warmth when they wore plain cotton shirts versus shirts with traditional reflective coatings.)
But with LifeLabs’ patented take, aerosolizing nozzles spray aluminum nanoparticles directly onto the garment, achieving nearly 100-percent coverage while maintaining breathability. The coating, which is permanently embedded in the textile, reflects 90 percent of the body’s infrared output back toward the wearer. It’s supposedly very effective: a WarmLife shirt retains just as much heat as a comparable layer three times as thick. The upshot? In theory, a baselayer with the same warmth as a sweater.
Clothing, he figured, could be a grassroots solution to saving the world.
Think about it. In the winter, 10 to 15 percent of extra metabolic energy expenditure comes from moving around in thick clothing. With WarmLife fabric, your snowshoeing or ski-touring tights might be as warm as thick fleece leggings. Your midlayer, once a synthetic-filled puffy, could just be a long-sleeved tee. With way less bulk and weight, you could go further, faster. Without cumbersome layers to fuss with, it could be possible for dabblers and first-timers to stay more comfortable in colder temps.
CoolLife, on the other hand, offers slightly more modest benefits, which makes sense given that it’s a lot easier to keep a heat-producing body warm than it is to cool it down. But four degrees of cooling could mean the difference between going for that trail run when you might have otherwise picked the treadmill. Or pushing yourself harder on that hike without worrying so much about overheating. And, of course, there’s the thermostat thing—setting your thermostat at 66 degrees Fahrenheit versus 70 degrees Fahrenheit makes a big difference in energy savings.
All of this was promising enough to lure Scott Mellin, then VP of mountain sports at The North Face, to helm the LifeLabs team. At the time, Mellin had nearly 35 years of a storied outdoor industry career behind him and had a pretty good gig. But this was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“When I understood what this was, I had a discussion with my wife,” Mellin says. “I told her, ‘This feels like a once-in-a-100-year opportunity. This is a chance to really reinvent apparel.’”
Needless to say, he took the job.

When all this was initially pitched to me by an especially glib PR guy, I was skeptical. I’ve been testing and writing about gear for the better part of a decade, and I’ve heard countless claims about supposed fabric-science breakthroughs. I can’t name one that lived up to the hype.
So, I accepted a sample of a CoolLife long-sleeve with low expectations. It looked like any other wicking synthetic tee, but I did notice almost immediately that it felt different—sort of like touching the cool side of a pillow.
For two weeks, I wore my sample while traveling through Russia and training with the Russian national ice-climbing team for a story. I wore it to work out, chase metros and trains, and climb long, overhung routes at an outdoor climbing wall in Kirov in full sun—only to find that during it all, the shirt remained cool to the touch.
At home in Colorado, I’ve taken it hiking and trail running. I’m a pretty sweaty person, and this is the first time in my life I’ve been able to charge a trail in 75-degree weather in a long-sleeved shirt without feeling the need to rip it off.
The shirt’s not perfect—it isn’t very stretchy, and the cut makes it look like the uniform pajamas of some kind of hip boarding school. But the performance perks are hard to argue. Like polyester, PE is wicking and quick to dry (I found my back sweat evaporated after just ten minutes in the shade, albeit in Colorado’s drier climate). But unlike polyester, it’s waterproof, has better UPF protection, and doesn’t seem to retain stink despite the fact that there’s no specific anti-odor treatment. Even after wearing it for three weeks of international travel without washing it, my shirt didn’t take on odor.

OK, now ignore all this technological promise for a second. In a world where clothing is thrown out to the tune of about 80 pounds per person per year, do we need to be making more new products?
Nicole Bassett, co-founder of the Renewal Workshop, has asked herself that same question. Once a sustainability director for prAna and a social responsibility manager for Patagonia, Basset partners with brands to refurbish and resell used clothing to keep it out of landfills.
“I spent my whole career looking for more sustainable materials and reducing the impact of the things we make. But the reality of the question here is: Do we have enough things?” Basset says. “After all, 60 percent of the environmental impact of a product is just in making it.”
Products woven from natural, renewable fibers like wool or organic cotton are no exception. Both require huge water and energy inputs to make. Besides, the hard truth is that if we want high-performing, sustainable outdoor gear, we’ll never be able to rely on organic fabrics alone. They just don’t have the same durability, water-resistance, light weight, or quick-drying properties.
For those reasons, synthetics aren’t going anywhere. And virgin synthetics—those freshly made from fossil fuels as opposed to recycled—aren’t either. That’s because people are slow to come around to the look—and sometimes the feel—of recycled fabrics, even those that are widely available like recycled polyester. And while the upcycled or pre-owned gear market is gaining steam, Basset says it doesn’t solve for one of the biggest reasons people buy clothes: to express themselves, experiment with style, and engage with the art form that is fashion.
“I spent my whole career looking for more sustainable materials and reducing the impact of the things we make. But the reality of the question here is: Do we have enough things?”
So, LifeLabs argues, if people are going to keep buying new stuff (and they are) you might as well make new stuff out of whatever material is the lesser evil. And according to an analysis of Higgs Index reports—the gold standard for measuring materials sustainability—PE has a lower carbon footprint than any other synthetic material on the market, including recycled polyester.
Still, LifeLabs has ambitious plans to keep its products out of landfills. Right now, its first batch of CoolLife products (which launched in October 2021) are made of PE-nylon blends. (WarmLife products are made with recycled polyester and recycled aluminum.) By 2022, though, Mellin says the brand plans to make all threads, glues, and fabrics in CoolLife products from 100-percent PE. That would mean they’re 100-percent recyclable—throw one old shirt into a mechanical recycler and get one new shirt out the other end, minimizing material waste.
LifeLabs isn’t the first brand to pursue product circularity in this way. Patagonia, for example, recycles its own T-shirts. The brand also partners with Infinited Fiber, a Finnish recycler that can turn pretty much anything—including cardboard and agricultural waste—into a soft, cotton-like fabric it calls Infinna, which Patagonia plans to use in T-shirts starting in spring of 2022. In spring 2020, The North Face started making 100-percent polyester sleeping bags and tents that are both fully recycled and recyclable. And in spring of 2021, Salomon released the Index.01, the first fully recyclable running shoe. By 2025, the brand aims to have 100 percent of new products be part of a circular economy.
While LifeLabs hopes to start incorporating recycled PE into CoolLife clothing as early as this year, Basset has her doubts. After all, just because something is recyclable doesn’t mean people will actually recycle it.
“I also think that for small brands, there’s a huge challenge to make [product] circularity viable,” Basset says. That’s because recycling facilities need tons of volume to make a partnership deal worth their while. “They want hundreds and thousands of pants coming in at a regular interval,” says Basset—not just a few stragglers from a capsule collection. The volume issue, incidentally, has been a problem for most of the other brands listed above, she says.
But since PE is widely available from other industrial sources, it’s possible that LifeLabs could still pull off the robust recycling program it’s hinting at, though that remains to be seen.
Sustainability targets aside, LifeLabs’s technology alone could leave it poised to fundamentally alter the outdoor apparel landscape. The brand has released a small collection of everyday products like lifestyle tees, jackets, and sleepwear (again, hitting sort of a weird urban style niche, but we can probably expect this to expand as they add more products). Climbing and running collections are due this coming spring, with ski and snowboard gear to follow. And in the future, Mellin says, customers can expect even more variations on the technology. He mentions a hiking shirt with a cooling lower back and warming sleeves. Or shells with both warming and waterproofing components.
“We’re hybridizing these material combinations really quickly to reach what’s essentially the nirvana of temperature homeostasis,” Mellin says. “We’re going to create new classifications of product that no one has even imagined.”

Op-ed: Why the chemical industry is an overlooked climate foe — and what to do about it

Climate change is quickly evolving into climate catastrophe, and there’s a narrow window of time to do something about it. While the world works on solutions, there’s surprisingly little focus on the chemical industry, which accounts for roughly 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions — as well as other environmental harms.
Weak or nonexistent regulations of the industry have led to widespread cancer, respiratory illnesses, and even facility explosions, primarily in low-income communities and communities of color.
But the industry essentially has a free pass to continue business as usual — it just keeps on keepin’ on, with little accountability.
The same holds true when it comes to the industry’s contributions to our warming planet, which is happening in three major ways:
First, fossil fuels are the “feedstocks” for chemical manufacturing, meaning that oil, natural gas and coal are used as raw material for chemicals. Global plastic production relies heavily on fossil fuel feedstocks and is expected to grow by 40% by 2030. That will bring more environmental problems. Around 98% of single-use plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and it releases greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its life cycle. Only a small amount of plastic products are recycled. Most end up in landfills or the environment, and nearly one-quarter is incinerated, releasing millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide and other harmful air pollutants.
Second, fossil fuels power chemical manufacturing. Some of the most commonly manufactured “primary” chemicals, like ethylene, propylene, benzene, toluene, ammonia and methanol, account for two-thirds of the energy used by the industry, according to the International Energy Agency.
While the industry has implemented some energy efficiency measures and low-carbon technology, direct carbon dioxide emissions from chemical production have continued to increase.
Third, the chemical industry contributes to climate change by producing chemicals that are themselves potent greenhouse gases. For example, hydrofluorocarbons, used as refrigerants and foam-blowing agents, are 3,800 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide.
Under the Kigali Amendment of the Montreal Protocol, countries have committed to cutting production and consumption of HFCs by at least 80% by 2047. And just this year, the EPA announced a goal to reduce U.S. production. But this may create new problems. For example, some proposed plans for capturing HFCs (rather than replacing them with safer chemicals that don’t harm the climate) will result in emissions of other hazardous air pollutants like chloroform, hydrochloric acid, chlorine and hydrogen fluoride. All of these hazardous air pollutants contribute to the cumulative burden faced by fenceline communities.
Finally, not only does chemical production and use contribute to climate change — the intensifying weather patterns of climate change will worsen the industry’s environmental and public health impacts. Chemical and petrochemical facilities are concentrated along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana: the very same areas that are and will be hit hard by hurricanes, flooding and sea-level rise. Many of these facilities are unprepared for these effects, increasing the risk of catastrophic chemical disasters — predominantly in communities of color and low-income communities.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of aboveground storage facilities containing hazardous chemicals — such as arsenic, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene — are NOT subject to state or federal rules designed to prevent and mitigate spills.https://t.co/C9tYm94kIP
— Center for Progressive Reform (@CPRBlog) December 22, 2021

Ultimately, to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, limit the risk of chemical disasters, and begin to remedy a legacy of environmental injustice, we must significantly reduce and replace the use of fossil fuels in every part of the chemical industry, which needs a systemic overhaul.
It’s a mighty task. Only a handful of more than 40,000 chemicals on the market have ever been restricted; even asbestos hasn’t been fully banned. There are still almost 3.5 billion pounds of hazardous releases to the environment every year. The United States is covered with 1,300 toxic “Superfund” sites, plus thousands more contaminated sites.
But that hasn’t stopped affected communities and organizations from banding together to say enough is enough. Recently a group of more than 100 health, science and environmental justice groups called for a transformation of the chemical industry with the release of the new Louisville Charter.
Named after an area in Kentucky with 11 industrial facilities that release millions of pounds of toxic air emissions every year — disproportionately impacting people of color — the Charter’s 10 principles outline a vision for how to overhaul chemical policies in favor of safety, health, equity and justice, and how to avoid false solutions that simply shift harms to other people and places.
These principles include calls to reduce or eliminate fossil fuel use, substitute toxic chemicals with safer alternatives, remedy environmental injustice, end subsidies for polluting companies, and give communities and workers information about chemical risks and the ability to act upon these disclosures.
We can make gains to achieve these goals if Congress passes the Environmental Justice for All Act and the Build Back Better Act, which would advance the some, but not all, of the Charter’s principles. More action is needed, and the Charter can guide the way.
Whether it’s to solve climate change, stop toxic chemicals from bombarding overburdened communities, or reduce hazardous substances in household products, we need to start replacing harmful chemicals with safe alternatives. No more free passes.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or its employees.

It’s Time to Stop Rolling the Dice on Chemical Disasters