In March, the United Nations’ Environment Assembly adopted a landmark resolution, supported by 175 countries, to end plastic pollution with a legally binding treaty.

Negotiations, expected to take two years, began this week. As a group of nine international experts on plastic pollution from eight countries, we’ve recently argued in a letter to the journal Science that this treaty must cap plastic production and regulate the chemicals they contain.

Here’s why.

COLOMBO — A year since the sinking of the cargo ship the X-Press Pearl, Sri Lanka continues to clean its beaches of the plastic pellets that the vessel was carrying, and still trying to claim compensation for the environmental damage wrought.

An expert committee investigating the extent of damage to the country’s marine and coastal environment has now concluded the disaster to be the worst in terms of chemical and plastic pollution of the sea. That’s according to Ajith de Alwis, co-chair of the X-Press Pearl damage assessment committee and a professor of chemical and process engineering at the University of Moratuwa.

The committee has submitted its assessment report to the Attorney General’s Office for use in claiming compensation from the Singapore-based operators of the ship.

“However, the report is only the first edition of the damage assessment, and further assessments would continue based on the monitoring,” De Alwis told Mongabay.

Maritime law expert Dan Malika Gunasekera said Sri Lankan authorities have taken a long time to file for compensation and are reluctant to go through years of strenuous legal battles in international courts. Sri Lanka has obtained an interim payment of $3.7 million in damages, but the country could claim as much as $5 billion to $7 billion, according to Gunasekera.

With Sri Lanka currently mired in the worst economic crisis in the country’s history, those higher numbers would prove a much-needed injection of foreign currency. But further delays would diminish the cash-strapped island’s chance of getting sufficient compensation for the environmental damage, Gunasekera told Mongabay.

Worst plastic marine pollution event

X-Press Pearl was carrying 1,486 containers when it caught fire off Colombo on May 20, 2021, and began sinking. Eighty-one of the containers were labeled hazardous, and the cargo included 25 metric tons of nitric acid — a key ingredient in the production of explosives, and touted as a possible factor for the fire. There were several explosions, and it took more than a week to bring the fire under control. Attempts to tow the vessel to deeper waters failed, and the freighter finally sank on June 2, 2021, a few kilometers off Sri Lanka’s western coast.

The ship was also carrying 400 containers of nurdles, the plastic pellets from which all manufactured plastic goods are made. The spill of the more than 50 billion pellets made this the worst plastic marine pollution event in the world, with the pellets quickly spreading along the beaches of Sri Lanka’s western coast.

The government carried out an initial cleanup of the beaches, but subsequent cleaning was done by volunteers like the Pearl Protectors, a youth organization.

“We had 28 major cleaning operations on main beaches and could collect as much as 1,500 kilograms [3,300 pounds] of nurdles,” said Muditha Katuwawala, coordinator of the Pearl Protectors.

But more nurdles keep washing up on the beaches, and with the island currently experiencing the southwest monsoon, nurdles that had initially sunk to the seabed or were trapped in underwater structures such as corals have been washed free and are making landfall.

“So it needs to be continuous work” cleaning up the beaches, Katuwawala said.

The Pearl Protectors, like other volunteer organizations around the program, are suffering from the economic crisis. The cost of organizing has doubled in the span of the last few months, with inflation hitting a record 39% in May. The country has defaulted on loan payments for the first time, while the local currency, the rupee, has nosedived against the U.S. dollar.

Salvage operation

As for the wreck of the X-Press Pearl, it’s now being salvaged by the Shanghai Salvage Company (SSC), which was handed the task by the ship’s owners, Singapore-based X-Press Feeders. In a statement, X-Press Feeders said the salvage operation includes round-the-clock monitoring to deal with debris or other pollutants that may get dislodged during the operation. It also said regular water sampling will be carried out at the site, and that any oil spills will be responded to immediately.

According to SSC, the X-Press Pearl’s hull has essentially broken in half, so the wreck will be recovered as two separate sections. Operations were suspended at the end of April due to rough seas caused by the southwest monsoon.

Cleanly separating the two halves of the hull is due to start in November, after the monsoon, while the actual lifting is expected to begin in February 2023. The final phase, to be completed by September 2023, will see the wreck completely dismantled, recycled, and disposed of.

Lack of baseline studies

Terney Pradeep Kumara, a marine biologist who previously headed Sri Lanka’s Marine Environment Protection Agency (MEPA), said it’s important to collect data during the salvation operation that can serve as evidence linking the environmental pollution to the X-Press Pearl. In the aftermath of the ship accident, marine biologists noted an unusually high number of sea turtle mortalities, which they suspect was the result of the pollution, but for which they currently lack definitive evidence.

‘Not having a baseline of the environmental conditions has been one of the biggest challenges in doing this environmental assessment,” said Prasanthi Gunawardene, the other co-chair of the X-Press Pearl damage assessment committee. There were about 30 different subcommittees with members from different fields, and getting input from different government agencies in the monitoring process was a challenge, Gunawardene told Mongabay.

Banner image of a cluster of nurdles found on Sri Lanka’s southern coast. Seabirds and crows often mistake these nurdles for food, because they resemble fish eggs. Image courtesy of the Pearl Protectors.

Leipzig researchers have found an enzyme that rapidly breaks down PET, the most widely produced plastic in the world. It might just eat your old tote bags.

While scavenging through a compost heap at a Leipzig cemetery, Christian Sonnendecker and his research team found seven enzymes they had never seen before.

They were hunting for proteins that would eat PET plastic — the most highly produced plastic in the world. It is commonly used for bottled water and groceries like grapes.

The scientists weren’t expecting much when they brought the samples back to the lab, said Sonnendecker when DW visited their Leipzig University laboratory.

It was only the second dump they had rummaged through and they thought PET-eating enzymes were rare.

But in one of the samples, they found an enzyme, or polyester hydrolase, called PHL7. And it shocked them. The PHL7 enzyme disintegrated an entire piece of plastic in less than a day.

To test the rate at which the seven enzymes broke down PET, Sonnendecker and his team added a mixture of water, a phosphate buffer, which is often used to detect bacteria, for example, and the new enzyme to seven individual test tubes

After adding the mixture to the test tubes, the team added tiny slivers of PET plastic to each container to see how quickly it took to degrade

Two enzymes ‘eat’ plastic: PHL7 vs. LCC

PHL7 appears to ‘eat’ PET plastic times faster than LCC, a standard enzyme used in PET plastic-eating experiments today.

To ensure their discovery wasn’t a fluke, Sonnendecker’s team compared PHL7 to LCC, with both enzymes degrading multiple plastic containers. And they found it was true: PHL7 was faster.

“I would have thought you’d need to sample from hundreds of different sites before you’d find one of these enzymes,” said Graham Howe, an enzymologist at Queens University in Ontario, Canada.

Howe, who also studies PET degradation but was not involved in the Leipzig research, appeared to be amazed by the study published in Chemistry Europe.

“Apparently, you go to nature and there are going to be enzymes that do this everywhere,” said Howe.

PET plastic is everyone

Although PET plastic can be recycled, it does not biodegrade. Like nuclear waste or a nasty comment to your partner, once PET plastic is created, it never really goes away.

It can be refashioned into new products — it’s not hard to create a tote bag from recycled water bottles, for example. But the quality of the plastic weakens with each cycle.

So, a lot of PET is eventually fashioned into products like carpets and — yes — an exorbitant number of tote bags that end up in landfill sites.

There are two ways to look at solving this problem: The first is to stop production of all PET plastic.

But the material is so common that even if companies stopped producing it immediately, there would still be millions of empty soft drink bottles — or tote bags fashioned from those bottles — lying around for thousands of years.

This is what a grape container looks like after it’s been treated with the enzyme PHL7 — the white particles are leftover terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol, chemicals that can be used to create brand new PET rather than a lower quality version

The second way is to force the plastic to degrade. Scientists have been trying to find enzymes that will do that for decades and in 2012 they found LCC, or “leaf-branch compost cutinase.”

LCC was a major breakthrough because it showed that PETase, a component of LCC, can be used to degrade PET plastic when it is combined with another enzyme known as an esterase.

Esterase enzymes are used to break chemical bonds in a process called hydrolysis.  

Scientists working on LCC have found that the enzyme does not differentiate between natural polymers and synthetic polymers — the latter being plastic. Instead, LCC recognizes PET plastic as a naturally occurring substance and eats it like it would a natural polymer.

Engineering the enzyme

Since the discovery of LCC, researchers like Sonnendecker have been looking for new PET-eating enzymes in nature. LCC is good, they say, but it has limitations. It is fast for what it is, but it still takes days to break down PET and the reactions have to occur at very high temperatures.

Other scientists and researchers have been trying to figure out how to engineer LCC to make it more efficient.

A French company called Carbios is doing that. They are engineering LCC to create a faster, more efficient enzyme.

Elsewhere, researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have created a PET-eating protein using a machine learning algorithm. They say their protein can degrade PET plastic in 24 hours.

David Zechel, a professor of chemistry at Queen’s University said these approaches always start with something that is known — the researchers don’t necessarily find anything new, but work to improve what has already been discovered.

The team are testing a “pre-treatment” that is applied to soft drink bottles, like this one in the jar, before it’s degraded by the enzyme PHL7

This type of engineering is important as researchers try to create the optimal enzyme to degrade PET, said Zechel.

Sonnendecker’s work shows that “we haven’t even remotely scratched the surface” in terms of the potential of naturally occurring enzymes “with respect to PET,” he said.

Bottles still don’t biodegrade

Sonnendecker’s newly discovered enzyme has its limitations, too. It can break down the containers you buy your grapes in at the grocery store, but it can’t break down a soft drink bottle. Not yet.

The PET plastic used in drink bottles is stretched and chemically altered, making it tougher to biodegrade than the PET used in grape containers.

In tests, Sonnendecker’s team has developed a pre-treatment that is applied to PET bottles, making it easier for the enzyme to degrade the plastic. But that research has yet to be published.

With industry help, said the researcher, technology using PHL7 to break down PET at a large scale could be ready in around four years.

Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany

• 

  Indonesia: Exchanging plastic for books

  Small initiative, big impact

  Every weekday, Raden Roro Hendarti loads up her three-wheeler with reading material and drives to the village of Muntang. There she collects trash from the village children, and lends them books in exchange. It’s a small initiative that has a big impact, making children in the region more aware of their environment. Plastic waste is a major problem in Indonesia, especially in remote rural areas.

• 

  Indonesia: Exchanging plastic for books

  Plastic exchange

  People rush over as soon as she arrives. A lot of children are already waiting, lining up to get one of her coveted books. These are handed out in exchange for plastic cups, bags, and other trash, which Raden collects on her three-wheeler. She then brings it to her colleagues, who sort it and take it to be recycled or sold on.

• 

  Indonesia: Exchanging plastic for books

  Kilos of plastic waste

  Raden collects around 100 kilograms (220 lbs) of trash like this every week. “To fight climate change and save the Earth, we also need to deal with our waste,” she says. Every day the initiator of the “Trash Library” weighs the plastic she has collected, to maintain an overview and keep a record of how much is gathered over time.

• 

  Indonesia: Exchanging plastic for books

  Browsing together

  The children love the little mobile library. “When there’s too much trash, our environment gets dirtier and dirtier, and it’s not healthy. That’s why we go looking for trash, so we can use it to borrow books,” the children say. Even after school, they’re still sitting together, browsing through their reading material.

• 

  Indonesia: Exchanging plastic for books

  Children’s books, not video games

  Raden Roro Hendarti is not only happy to be encouraging children to read more. Because of her initiative, they also spend less time playing games online. “Let’s establish a culture of learning from an early age to mitigate the damage done by the online world,” she says. The problem of children becoming addicted to online gaming has got worse during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 

  Indonesia: Exchanging plastic for books

  Mission to improve literacy

  Many schools in Indonesia have been closed for a long time because of the pandemic. This has had serious consequences. A World Bank report warns that more than 80% of young people in Indonesia may be missing out on learning to read to OECD minimum standards. By transporting up to 6,000 books a day in her three-wheeler library, Raden Rodo Hendarti is doing what she can to help.

  Author: Julie Huehnken

After recycling’s failure to appreciably reduce the amount of plastic the U.S. throws away, some states are taking a new approach, transferring the onus of recycling from consumers to product manufacturers.

In the past 12 months, legislatures in Maine, Oregon and Colorado have passed “extended producer responsibility” laws on packaging. The legislation essentially forces producers of consumer goods — such as beverage-makers, shampoo companies and food corporations — to pay for the disposal of the packages and containers their products come in. The process is intended to nudge manufacturers to use more easily recyclable materials, compostable packaging or less packaging.

Now, the New York legislature is deliberating two extended producer responsibility bills as its session nears its June 2 close. Lobbying by business and environmental groups has been particularly intense around details such as what recycling goals must be met and who sets them. Industry and environmentalists alike believe that when a state as big as New York adopts a law, it creates a template or standard that other states might adopt too.

“I’m exhausted,” said Judith Enck, founder and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, who has been lobbying legislators on the issue. “If you have a state the size of New York get it wrong on extended producer responsibility, it would have a ripple effect on other states.”

What would this approach look like?

Extended producer responsibility — the ungainly name comes from a 1990 paper by Swedish academics Thomas Lindhqvist and Karl Lidgren — took root in Europe 30 years ago. Many U.S. states have such policies for e-waste and mattresses. But their adoption for packaging is fairly recent in the U.S., and those programs won’t be fully up and running for years.

While each state’s legislation varies, the system generally works like this:

• Beverage companies, shampoo-makers, food manufacturers and other producers will keep track of how much of each sort of packaging they use.

• These producers will reimburse government recycling programs for handling the waste, either directly or through a consortium called a “producer responsibility organization.”

• Fees will be lower for companies that use easily recyclable, compostable or even reusable packaging, a mechanism that supporters say will provide incentives to adopt more sustainable practices.

• Recycling centers will use the money to cover their operating costs, expand outreach and education, and invest in new equipment.

“We think corporations will produce less virgin materials because they are charged by the amount they put out there, and certainly less eco-unfriendly materials,” said New York state Sen. Todd Kaminsky, a Democrat from Long Island who sponsored one of the bills pending in Albany.

To consumers, the recycling system would pretty much stay the same. But the packaging around consumer products would likely look different. If the incentives worked, there’d be less packaging overall, and whatever packaging that would be used would be made more often of compostable or easily recyclable materials, such as glass or aluminum.

“Packaging doesn’t have to be the way we know it,” Kaminsky said. “Why in a box of cereal is there packaging within other packaging? You know, you reach into the box, and there’s a sleeve containing Cheerios or something. But when you get potato chips, it’s just in the sleeve. There’s no box around it. Why is that?”

Recycling isn’t enough to reduce plastic waste

Recycling rates in the U.S. have stagnated over the past decade at around 30% to 35% across all materials in the waste stream; the recycling rate of plastics — a growing form of packaging — is much lower. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2018 that only 8.5% of plastic refuse was recovered to produce new products. (Two environmental groups recently estimated the real recycling rate to be even lower, given that not all recovered plastics end up being recycled.)

The burden of recycling falls not just on consumers to sort their containers properly, but also on cities and counties, where officials once thought recycling could pay for itself. But that has not been the case, especially because of recent decisions by China and other Asian countries to refuse to accept plastic waste imports. In 2021, the WWF calculated that the management of plastic waste costs about $32 billion a year worldwide.

The Business Council of New York State, which represents 3,500 companies and chambers of commerce, opposes both measures that have been advanced in Albany.

“Such radical change will be costly, will carry its own risks of unintended consequences, and simply is not necessary to improve the state’s recycling and waste reduction outcomes,” the business group said in an open letter.

But some national corporations and plastics manufacturers have been more supportive, to an extent. The Recycling Partnership, a group funded by corporations such as General Mills, Coca-Cola and Exxon Mobil (which, as an oil and gas company, provides the raw materials for plastics), has endorsed the idea, so long as producers maintain some control over the fees and targets in the new system. (Exxon Mobil is a financial sponsor of NPR.)

“How could you possibly run a system of this scale and get companies ultimately to change their packaging design, possibly shift to using more sustainable materials — how could we possibly do that without their participation?” said Michael Washburn, a senior policy adviser at the organization.

The question of just how or whether companies get to regulate themselves is the biggest point of contention in the New York legislature right now. Kaminsky’s bill, which the Recycling Partnership supports, calls for producers to come up with their own targets, both for how much recyclable material will be used in their packaging and for how much of their packaging will be recycled. Those targets would then be reviewed by an advisory board of representatives from environmental groups and recycling agencies, as well as manufacturers. Ultimately, these plans would be approved by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

The rival bill, sponsored by Assemblymember Steven Englebright, also a Long Island Democrat, stipulates those targets directly. Companies would have to decrease the amount of their nonreusable packaging by 50% over the first 10 years. (Both bills make exceptions for small businesses.)

“We need specific requirements,” said Enck, who is also a former EPA official and favors Englebright’s bill over Kaminsky’s. “You just don’t hand the keys of the car over to the plastics industry. We wouldn’t expect the tobacco industry to solve the problem of smoking. Why would we expect the packaging industry to solve the problem of overpackaging?”

Some people don’t think this is the way to go

Some government watchdogs are skeptical about the whole concept of extended producer responsibility. Germany, which adopted the policy in the early 1990s, is well known for its high recycling rates. But those rates count waste-to-energy, which requires incineration, as a form of recycling, and the country is still one of the world’s highest plastics consumers per capita.

“The Americans are saying, ‘It’s successful.’ Well, it’s not successful,” said Neil Seldman, director of the Waste to Wealth Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

(Germany, however, does not require manufacturers to reduce their packaging the way that Englebright’s bill would.)

California could take a slightly different approach this fall to reduce packaging and increase recycling. A measure on the ballot there would impose an extended producer responsibility system on the state in conjunction with a 1-cent fee on every piece of single-use plastic packaging.

In New York, lobbyists on both sides of the issue say negotiations are underway to get some sort of bill passed in the week remaining in the current legislative session. And if that doesn’t happen, they say they will be back next year with another push.