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This story is part of a collaboration between DeSmog, the Investigative Reporting Workshop, and Public Health Watch. This story was updated July 15, 2022.

The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry, and burned tires.

Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, or GCGV, a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames, and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.

The plant is the first joint venture in the Americas between Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a chemical manufacturing giant tied to one of the world’s richest royal families, and Exxon Mobil, America’s biggest energy company. Exxon Mobil built its wealth on drilling for and refining oil, SABIC by making petrochemicals. As climate concerns lead to a slow but steady decline in the demand for oil, the companies’ collaboration represents a shift by the fossil fuel industry. Rather than transforming the fossilized remains of organisms into gasoline and other motor fuels, the Texas plant breaks apart the molecular structure of oil, through a process called cracking, which turns it into the primary ingredient for car seats, single-use plastic bags, plastic coffee cups, and much more.

“It became apparent to me that the fossil-fuel industry is moving toward plastic because they’re losing market share in transportation and energy generation,” said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator with the United States Environmental Protection Agency who now leads the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and teaches at Bennington College.

One primary player in this shift is the House of Saud, the royal family that has ruled since 1902 and named Saudi Arabia in 1932. The family has moved to diversify its economy and the products that come from its vast reserves of oil. The costs and consequences of this diversification ripple far beyond Riyadh, to Texas’ San Patricio County and communities abutting other SABIC facilities in the U.S.

SABIC is a $40 billion company that manufactures chemicals, fertilizers, and plastics and is owned by Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. In May, Aramco became the world’s most valuable company — generating tens of billions of dollars in profits yearly to the Saudi royal family and its kingdom.

How the Saudi royals leveraged their way into American plastic is an indicator of the blurring between state and family that has long characterized the kingdom.

In January 2016, Mohammed bin Salman, then the deputy crown prince, announced that Aramco would be open for the first time in history to an initial public offering, or IPO; 5 percent of its shares would be made available on international financial markets. But in 2018, in a rare rebuke to his son and now his designated heir, King Salman reversed the crown prince’s plans. The king was wary, it was reported at the time, of opening the kingdom’s economic flagship to the transparency and scrutiny required of publicly traded companies. Efforts in motion by some of the world’s largest financiers, eager to profit from what was claimed to be a trillion-dollar asset, were stopped in their tracks.

Aramco pivoted from the thwarted IPO and announced its intention to purchase a 70 percent interest in SABIC, already a major global producer of plastics and petrochemicals, for $69 billion. SABIC was owned at the time by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, or PIF, whose board chairman is the crown prince. The deal would shift funds from one royal-controlled arm of the government, Aramco, to another, the PIF. Karen Young, an analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., has characterized the fund as “the crown prince’s parallel Saudi state.”

By the end of 2019, Aramco would go through with a far more limited IPO, in which 1.5 percent of its shares were made available for purchase only on the Saudi stock market, the Tadawul, which has less rigorous disclosure standards than other international exchanges. That IPO plowed almost $30 billion into Aramco. Thus the crown prince and the royal family profited on both sides of the deal: Almost $70 billion was channeled into the PIF, of which the crown prince is board chairman; and new investments worth billions were channeled into Aramco, of which 98 percent of the shares are owned by the government of Saudi Arabia.

Aramco, the company sitting on the world’s second-largest pool of oil reserves, took majority control of SABIC, one of the world’s top five petrochemical companies, in June 2020. After the deal was completed, a company news release stated that the transaction “enhances Aramco’s presence in the global petrochemicals industry, a sector expected to record the fastest growth in oil demand in the years ahead.” Indeed, the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030 petrochemicals will account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand, and for almost 50 percent of demand by 2050.

A tower flare lights the sky at the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures plant in San Patricio County. Julie Dermansky

The GCGV facility in San Patricio County is called an ethane steam cracker because it heats light hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane to as much as 1,560 degrees Fahrenheit, a process of intense compression and decomposition that “cracks” apart the molecules to create ethylene. Ethylene is converted into polyethylene, a basic ingredient of tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles. Nurdles are molded and reheated into a variety of shapes to create products, such as plastic bags and beverage containers. After what is often a single use, these non-biodegradable products can clog waterways; drift on ocean currents, entangling marine mammals and birds; and accumulate in landfills.

Even before the Texas complex opened, SABIC owned seven manufacturing plants in five U.S. states. SABIC facilities in Indiana, New York, Illinois, and Alabama reported leaks of chemicals associated with cancer, fetal mutations and respiratory ailments, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, also known as TRI. In Ottawa, Illinois, for example, according to the TRI, between 2016 and 2020, a SABIC facility producing plastic resins released an average of 120,512 pounds of styrene each of those five years. Styrene is classified as a possible human carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, and can cause problems such as memory loss, confusion and slowed reflexes, even at low levels.

Last September, the New York State Office of Emergency Management was forced to grapple for days with a plume of styrene vapor leaking from a train car at the SABIC Innovative Chemicals facility in Selkirk. The plant makes, among other things, the plastic additive bisphenol-A, or BPA, a neurotoxin and an endocrine disruptor that can contribute to declining sperm counts in men. After an investigation, the agency levied a $322,400 fine in April against the company for the leak.

In Mount Vernon, in southern Indiana, the SABIC Innovative Plastics facility released an average of 22,690 pounds of ethylbenzene each year between 2016 and 2020. Ethylbenzene is used in the production of styrene and can cause nose and throat irritation and damage to the inner ear. IARC defines it as a possible human carcinogen. The same facility was cited by the EPA for corroded valves and pipes, from which leaked BPA and phosgene, developed as a nerve gas during World War I and now used as an ingredient in the manufacturing of pesticides and plastics. 

Altogether, between 2016 and 2020 the company’s facilities in the U.S. were among the top emitters of at least seven toxic substances documented by the TRI. Those substances include BPA and 1,3-butadiene, a byproduct of plastic resin production classified as a known human carcinogen by IARC.

Over the last decade, SABIC has paid over $1 million in fines for violating EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations for toxic releases at its facilities in Selkirk, Mount Vernon and Burkville, Alabama.

Susan Richardson, a SABIC spokeswoman, said in an email that the company “is committed to protecting and improving the environment in which we operate. As part of this effort, we adhere to the EPA’s TRI reporting requirements and submit the required data to the EPA. As a company we value and are committed to safety.”

In Texas, since the end of December, the GCGV plant has reported eight “emission events,” defined by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, as “unscheduled” and “unauthorized” releases of air contaminants. One event lasted for 24 hours, another for 74, another for more than 300. The most recent was on June 16, when the facility reported releasing 478 pounds of nitrogen oxides, a potential contributor to respiratory disease. On May 3, it released 572 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen.

Horses graze near a wind farm that is next to the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures petrochemical plant in San Patricio County. Julie Dermansky

Richardson referred questions about the events to a spokesperson for Exxon Mobil, the day-to-day operator of the facility. The spokesperson, Julie King, said in an email that Exxon Mobil “is continuously optimizing our processes to minimize emissions, enhance energy efficiency and maintain the highest standards for environmental care. We operate under a stringent state and federal regulatory system, and report emissions to the EPA and TCEQ in a consistent and timely manner in accordance with all applicable laws, regulations and permits.”

Eight emission events in six months, according to Neal Carman, a former Texas air pollution investigator who now works for the Sierra Club, doesn’t bode well for those who live near the plant. “When you’re breathing this stuff,” he said, “it’s microscopic, less than 2.5 microns in diameter, very tiny. It can fly through your nose, right into your lungs” and “into the most sensitive part of your lung tissue, the alveolar sacs.”

The reported events, he emphasized, were in addition to emissions allowed under a permit issued to GCGV by the TCEQ. That permit states, for example, that 5,944.74 pounds of volatile organic compounds may be released by the facility hourly. Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, include benzene and 1,3-butadiene, as well as toluene, a chemical that can lead to liver and kidney damage and can harm the fetus of a pregnant woman exposed to it.

“The people who live in these frontline communities face a cocktail of pollutants due to their proximity to the facility,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a professor of biology and director of the Global Public Health Program and Global Pollution Observatory at Boston College. “People who live near a chemical or plastic plant are not just exposed to one chemical in isolation. If a person is exposed to two or three carcinogens at the same time, the aggregate risk is at least as great as the sum of the individual risks.”

Plastic is toxic at every stage of its life cycle, from the volatile compounds used in its creation to its disposal. Many of these synthetic substances are, in the words of one study, “difficult or impossible for nature to assimilate” and degrade the environment. At least 2,400 of the chemicals commonly used in the manufacturing of plastic, according to a study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, are considered “substances of potential concern” by the European Union’s chemical governing body because of their toxicity, persistence in the environment or capacity for accumulating in humans’ and animals’ bodies. At least 35 have earned the EU’s highest levels of concern due to their status as “very persistent and very bioaccumulative”; hundreds more substances commonly used in plastic production have not been studied.

Plastic producers are also potent greenhouse-gas emitters: The more than 30 ethane crackers in the U.S. — of which GCGV is the largest — together released 70 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, according to Beyond Plastics. That amounts to the annual emissions of at least 35 average-sized coal-fired power plants.

While greenhouse gases do their destructive work in the atmosphere, plastic does its damage on Earth. Remnants can be found in the tissues of humans. Nurdles can be found bobbing on ocean currents, clogging the bayous in Texas and Louisiana and polluting almost every beach on the planet. Along the Texas Gulf Coast, a volunteer group embarks on regular “nurdle patrols” to pick up the pellets littering the coastline.

A worker examines piles of pre-production plastic pellets, or nurdles, spilled from railroad cars in the industrial town of Vernon, California, just outside a plastic manufacturing plant. Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Nor is the toxicity spread evenly. Pollution from plastic production in the U.S. is highly concentrated: Just 18 communities, mostly along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, absorb the bulk of the contamination, according to a study conducted last year by Bennington College researchers associated with Beyond Plastics. People who live within three miles of these facilities, they found, “earn 28 percent less than the average U.S. household and are 67 percent more likely to be people of color.”

A study by the Environmental Integrity Project revealed that even in the case of clear violations in Texas communities, the TCEQ rarely enforces emission limits. Less than 3 percent of excess pollution violations — collectively responsible for 500 million pounds of illegal air pollutants — resulted in penalties between 2011 and 2016, the group found.

The permitting process for petrochemical facilities offers a glimpse into the amounts of pollution that are legally, and routinely, allowed in places like San Patricio County. Jane Patton, a New Orleans-based organizer with the Center for International Environmental Law, an organization that uses litigation to force compliance with environmental laws, characterizes the regulatory bodies in Texas and Louisiana as little more than rubber stamps for the oil and gas industry. Polluters, she said, “tell the state regulators who issue permits what they’re going to emit, and then they go about emitting it.” 

In May 2021, the TCEQ issued a permit to GCGV. The permit includes a 15-page list of maximum allowable emission rates for chemicals and gases that the company is allowed to release. The plant can legally release hundreds of pounds an hour of substances like nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, 1,3-butadiene and benzene, from various vents and flares. “The permit allows a huge amount of pollution in this plant,” said the Sierra Club’s Carman. “These are not vitamins and minerals we’re talking about. These are all toxics.”

Errol Summerlin, co-founder of the Coastal Alliance to Protect Our Environment, or CAPE, who testified at public hearings opposing the project, says that on some days, he can hear “the grumble of the factory.” On clear nights, he says, he can see the flares burning, releasing a gas cocktail of carbon monoxide and methane.

Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer and San Patricio County resident, testified at public hearings against the building of the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures plant.  Julie Dermansky

A resident of Portland, Texas, who lives within a few blocks of the plant, said he  can smell its discharges from inside his house. He worries about “the stuff you can’t smell, the particulate matter that gets absorbed into your bloodstream.” The resident requested anonymity because he may need to take advantage of a new Exxon Mobil-sponsored program to buy the homes of those who can’t coexist with the plant. Some neighbors have already taken the money and left. 

“There are some Third World countries that have better regulations than we do here in Texas,” said Elida Castillo, program director for Chispa Texas, an affiliate of the League of Conservation Voters. She lives in Taft, which abuts the rail line that delivers trainloads of nurdles from the GCGV plant to the port of Houston. Neighborhood Witness, a group she co-founded, is a coalition of organizations that encourages people living near petrochemical plants to monitor and report unauthorized emissions.

The TCEQ did not install any air monitors in the area, according to spokeswoman Victoria Cann. She said in an email that the agency relies on three monitoring stations supported by GCGV and Cheniere Energy, which operates a liquefied natural gas export facility in the area. The monitors are administered by the University of Texas at Austin. “We do not own, operate or maintain the data in these monitors,” Cann said.

The monitors do not offer real-time readouts of emission events, said Jennifer Hilliard, an architect who lives in Ingleside, a city on the coast about nine miles from the GCGV facility, and who volunteers with the Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association, or IBCWA, a nonprofit environmental group. Rather, she said, they aggregate the data every two days, which means they could miss individual releases that could be potentially harmful to residents.

To fill the gap, a citizen-science initiative was launched by two local nonprofits, CAPE and the IBCWA. “We’re forced to do this ourselves because the [TCEQ] has refused to do it,” said Patrick Nye, president of the IBCWA.

The groups hired Jackson Seymore, who is on a Ph.D. track in atmospheric chemistry at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. He set up a half-dozen monitors in Portland, Gregory and other locations near the GCGV facility, which started delivering data in mid-May. By early June, the monitors registered a three-hour spike in ozone levels, which, if sustained over time, Nye said, would exceed federal guidelines. Ozone is an ingredient in smog and a respiratory irritant.

The ability to monitor in real time is critical, Hilliard said. Unlike the three monitors sponsored by the companies, the community’s monitors can cross-reference events as they’re happening. “If someone smells something strange or we see an unusual flaring, we can correlate that with the prevailing winds and the monitoring data,” she said.

But the community faces a challenge with its improvised monitors: The sensors they could afford — about $5,000 each — are not nearly sophisticated enough to meet the legal requirements for EPA or TCEQ enforcement. Those monitors can cost 10 times as much, Seymore said. The community groups hope their data can persuade the EPA or the state to install high-quality monitors in the area, now being populated with petrochemical facilities. “In realistic terms, there’s not going to be a magic bullet to solve the community’s fight with the industry,” Seymore said. “But our monitors could be the burglar alarm to get larger interests involved.”

In May, the two groups, along with five other Texas-based environmental nonprofits, submitted comments on the TCEQ’s Annual Monitoring Network Plan, which must be filed with the EPA each year. They demanded more substantive government monitoring of the substances that could present a danger to their health, and accused the TCEQ of doing the “bare minimum” to ensure compliance with federal law. “The Coastal Bend region of South Texas is experiencing rapid petrochemical industrial expansion that threatens both air and water quality in residential areas along Corpus Christi Bay,” the filing reads. “This expansion is affecting the city of Corpus Christi and several smaller Texas cities and towns whose citizens may not be aware of the impact of these plants on their health and the environment. … [W]e are concerned that TCEQ is not taking a holistic and equitable view of the state” in the plan, “leaving many communities who lie in the path of this unprecedented petrochemical expansion unmonitored or under-monitored.”

Cheniere Energy has been expanding in San Patricio County, where it operates a liquefied natural gas terminal a few miles east of the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures plant. Julie Dermansky

It angers Castillo that Exxon Mobil and SABIC — two of the world’s richest companies — received major tax abatements, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, from San Patricio County as an inducement to establish the GCGV facility.

In 2017, before construction began, the San Patricio County Commissioners Court agreed to give SABIC and Exxon Mobil a three-year window in which they would be exempted from all county taxes. In years four through 10 of the agreement, they will pay 30 percent of what would otherwise have been assessed.

Gary Moore, a county commissioner whose precinct includes the GCGV plant, said that when SABIC and Exxon Mobil first approached the county, “They wanted discounts all the way through history.” The commissioners court insisted on a 10-year limit for the tax breaks. “I didn’t want to let these big guys run all over us,” Moore said.

The companies relented. The area, with easy access to rail lines and the nearby port in Corpus Christi, was well suited to their plans for an ethane cracker. The county is divided roughly evenly between whites and Latinos, with a median family income of about $56,000 in 2020 — 17 percent below the U.S. median.

Now that the plant is up and running, Moore said, “There’s real cooperation. They’re real community-minded.” GCGV, he said, funded a water-treatment facility in Gregory and contributed to cleaning up a nearby bird sanctuary. Asked about pollution from the plant, he said, “If the TCEQ isn’t upset about it, I’m not going to worry about it.”

In a separate agreement with the Gregory-Portland Independent School District, SABIC received an abatement deal that guaranteed the company a reduced property tax for the first 10 years of the project that would max out at a $30 million valuation, although the facility itself is valued at more than half a billion dollars. Exxon Mobil signed a separate and similar deal with the county.

Gregory-Portland ISD superintendent Michelle Cavazos wrote in a statement that the agreement “was financially beneficial for our school district and its taxpayers in a situation when we knew the company would heavily impact our tax base (with or without an agreement).” Because of residents’ “concern for environmental changes in our local area,” GCGV agreed to install two air monitors on school district property, Cavazos wrote, and established a community advisory panel, on which she sits.

Spokespeople for Exxon Mobil, and SABIC did not respond to questions about the tax abatements.

Castillo is still angry about the deals. “They’ve got billions of dollars,” she said. “That’s nothing like the average person has here.”

Elida Castillo co-founded a group called Neighborhood Witness, a coalition of organizations that encourages people living near petrochemical plants to monitor and report unauthorized emissions. Julie Dermansky

Construction of the GCGV plant, composed of 30,000 metric tons of modules built in China and Mexico, involved a partner – the China State Shipbuilding Corp., or CSSC – sanctioned in an executive order by President Biden last year for its ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The order, issued just after the biggest modules arrived in Texas, prohibited U.S. persons from buying securities issued by CSSC and 45 other entities to “ensure that U.S. investments are not supporting Chinese companies that undermine the security or values of the United States and our allies.” 

Security watches an event celebrating the renaming of the street outside the Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to Jamal Khashoggi Way on June 15, 2022 in Washington, DC. Nathan Howard / Getty Images

Biden promised a similarly hard line against Saudi Arabia while running for president, when he suggested during a debate in November 2019 that he would make the nation’s leaders “pay the price” for their role in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden said there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”

Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, had criticized Crown Prince Mohammed for his repressive human-rights policies in several Post op-eds.

Khashoggi  was beheaded and dismembered at  the Saudi embassy in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. 

In June 2019, Agnes Callamard, a United Nations human rights investigator, announced the results of her inquiry into the Khashoggi murder and asserted that it had been carried out by Saudi agents at the direction of the crown prince. It “is inconceivable,” she concluded, “that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”

When candidate Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” the following November, the royal family was already expanding its U.S. footprint. Its fossil-fuel legacy now stretches from the Ghawar oil fields in Saudi Arabia to the Coastal Bend of Texas and beyond.

Biden is to meet with the crown prince Friday in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to discuss increasing oil exports to offset the impacts of the war in Ukraine, and, as he put it in a Post op-ed, “to strengthen a strategic partnership going forward that’s based on mutual interests and responsibilities, while also holding true to fundamental American values.” The public health and climate fallout from the Saudis’ big bet on plastics does not appear to be on the agenda. 

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Elida Castillo as a community organizer with Chicanos por la Causa. In fact, she is the program director for Chispa Texas, an affiliate of the League of Conservation Voters. 

Castillo said she does not find nurdles on her lawn or in surrounding neighborhoods, as was reported.

Material Research L3C contributed to this story, which was co-published with DeSmog, the Investigative Reporting Workshop and Grist.   

Adjacent to the Hudson River, along the west side of Manhattan, are some of the world’s most valuable commercial and residential properties: townhouses and mixed-use developments like Hudson Yards and much-loved public spaces like Hudson River Park and the Hudson River Greenway, which unite city residents and visitors with the river. But those civic and private investments often end at the water’s edge. Just offshore lie neglected and largely dysfunctional shallow water habitats.

The Hudson River Foundation, where I serve as president, has long sought to address the myriad problems plaguing this vital waterway. Despite substantial progress over the past 40 years, the river continues to carry the burden of polychlorinated biphenyl compounds, or PCBs, that were frequently dumped into it during the 20th century and are likely carcinogenic to humans. Meanwhile, newer toxic chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — known as PFAS and nicknamed “forever chemicals” due to their environmental persistence — are a rising concern. Scientists are finding microplastics throughout the river’s watershed, and combined sewer overflows can render the water unsafe to fish or swim in. The living oyster reefs and seagrass beds that once sustained diverse communities of animals and plants are almost entirely gone. The productive shallows that used to provide refuge for crabs and fish — and buffer the shoreline from storm surges and flooding — have been ravaged by the effects of industrial pollution, development, and wastewater discharge. At a time when the world is facing the ever-growing reality of climate change, much of Manhattan’s natural protections have been lost, leaving behind silt, sand, and mud.

It has become clear to us — and to the many scientists we work with — that the issues facing the Hudson are as complex and intertwined as the species that make it home. Fully functioning shallow water environments like those that once were part of the Hudson River and New York Harbor can reduce damages from storm-driven waves and flooding, and increase resilience to climate change. The vital habitat they provide to the river’s wildlife supports recreation that improves quality of life, and can provide economic and cultural benefits to New York City residents. More generally, healthy coastal ecosystems have been shown to have economic value and enhance people’s connections to nature. Because of that interconnectedness, we’ve come to realize that the challenge of enhancing and restoring these ecosystem features in the Hudson demands a new kind of science — one that is interdisciplinary and nimble enough to inform decisions that are made on short time frames.

The Hudson is not unique in this respect. Environmental problems facing coastal cities are human problems. The more frequent hurricanes that threaten the Gulf Coast, rising sea levels that could place many cities in India, Thailand, and Vietnam under water, and the intense storm surges that have become more common in Manhattan and along the eastern United States — these are more than environmental or oceanographic concerns. They are anthropological, sociological, economic, and cultural. They are about equity and accessibility. And they require concerted efforts to integrate the natural, physical, and social sciences, with their different “ways of knowing” and their different forms of data and analysis.

Take, for example, a $5.5 billion project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that would deepen shipping lanes in the New York-New Jersey Harbor in order to accommodate the next generation of cargo vessels. The project would remove millions of pounds of rocks and sediment from the channels that wind through the Narrows and the Kill Van Kull to the major New Jersey and New York shipping terminals. Much of the dredged material produced in the deepening project will be clean, and the USACE is actively considering what beneficial uses could be realized. Could that clean rock be relocated a bit further up the Hudson? And if so, could it form a foundation upon which a renewed natural community and ecosystem could thrive on the west side of Manhattan?

The productive shallows that used to provide refuge for crabs and fish — and buffer the shoreline from storm surges and flooding — have been ravaged by the effects of industrial pollution, development, and waste water discharge.

To begin to understand how beneficial this hard substrate could be, the Hudson River Foundation asked a group of scientists — biologists with expertise in oysters and fish, an engineer who studies hydrodynamics and river restoration, and an expert in urban sustainability and resilience — to consider what would happen if the soft, muddy bottom was replaced with those rocks. Working together, the group refined a conceptual tool, a deceptively simple diagram, showing the relationships and feedbacks that would occur. Their diagram showed that as clean rock became colonized with oysters and other organisms, it would create a habitat for more mobile bottom dwellers like crabs and juvenile fish. The enhanced habitat would also modify sediment accretion, attenuate waves, and over time attract coastal wildlife.

These links extended well beyond ecological relationships. The group of scientists determined that these natural communities and shallow water enhancements also benefit human communities. A healthy shallow water ecosystem creates opportunities for fishing and boating and improves the aesthetics of this busy shoreline. In doing so, it provides economic and cultural benefits to New York City residents: It’s nicer to look out at a shoreline teeming with wildlife than a muddy wasteland.

Everything about this equation seems simple. Adding rocks to the shallows isn’t the most complicated maneuver, and the team’s diagnostic model isn’t a complex equation. But the impact of this kind of thinking is vital. An interdisciplinary, team-based approach not only can enumerate the ecological and social value of a deceptively simple action like placing rocks in the shallows; it can also add a compelling rationale for decision makers to support comprehensive approaches to large scale environmental projects.

If we’re going to succeed at problems like adapting to climate change, protecting clean water supplies, and preserving biodiversity, we all need to think differently, work collaboratively, and commit to learning as we go.

Whenever we alter an environment — above or below the waterline — we impact the humans, animals, fish, and flora on either side. The success of an intervention depends in great part on the information and analyses that inform the decision making. Yes, this calls for data about things like flooding, fisheries, and water quality. But it also calls for economic and social data that can provide insights about human communities and what they care about. Crucially, if these data and analyses are to fully illuminate an action’s potential benefits and tradeoffs, they can’t remain siloed by discipline. Solutions to environmental problems demand that we merge and build on the accomplishments of discipline-specific research in new ways that transcend the boundaries we have historically drawn between the “natural” and “human” worlds.

To achieve these changes, both researchers and funders have to think about their work differently. Researchers have to find common purpose and learn to work with colleagues who understand the world in different ways. Reviewers and funders have to incentivize these collaborations and be willing to fund risky, unconventional projects, especially in the realm of climate and the environment. With this funding must come support to help researchers from disparate disciplines learn how to work together effectively. Interdisciplinary collaboration calls for team members to do more than just listen to each other; it requires intentional processes designed to help each team member understand languages and norms used in fields outside of their own, and it calls for the group to work collectively to develop a shared language and approach that can provide insightful and actionable information.

The collaborative work being done to restore the Hudson River is just a start. If we’re going to succeed at problems like adapting to climate change, protecting clean water supplies, and preserving biodiversity, we all need to think differently, work collaboratively, and commit to learning as we go. Our knowledge, history, beliefs, culture, and social and economic structures will help to shape and define the big environmental challenges we will face in the coming decades. To give ourselves the best chance of solving those problems, we must be willing to look at them, together, in new ways.

Jonathan Kramer, Ph.D., is a marine and environmental scientist whose recent work has focused on catalyzing interdisciplinary team-based socio-environmental research. He is currently the president of the Hudson River Foundation, based in New York City.

Look down. You may not see the soil beneath your feet as teeming with life, but it is.
Better scientific tools are helping us understand that dirt isn’t just dirt. Life in the soil includes microbes like bacteria and fungi; invertebrates such as earthworms and nematodes; plant roots; and even mammals like gophers and badgers who spend part of their time below ground.
It’s commonly said that a quarter of all the planet’s biodiversity lives in the soil, but that’s likely a vast understatement. Many species that reside there, particularly microorganisms such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and protists, aren’t yet known to science.
“Published literature has only just begun to unravel the complexity of soil biological systems,” a 2020 study by researchers from University of Reading found. “We barely know what is there, let alone their breadth of functional roles, niche partitioning and interaction between these organisms.”
But what scientists do know is that healthy and biodiverse soil communities support a wide variety of functions that sustain life on Earth. That includes nutrient cycling, food production, carbon storage and water filtration.
What happens belowground supports life aboveground. And not surprisingly, if that underground biodiversity is threatened, so are the important functions that soil performs.
“When soil organisms begin to disappear, ecosystems will soon start to underperform, potentially hindering their vital functions for humankind,” wrote researchers in a 2020 Science study.

Pesticides being sprayed at the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge in Calif. Photo: Don McCullough (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Unfortunately there’s evidence that soil biodiversity is decreasing today — how badly is still a matter researchers are working to determine. By just one metric, studies found that 60–70% of soils in the European Union are now unhealthy.
The threats there — and across the world — are numerous.
The Reading University researchers narrowed them down to five main areas:

Human exploitation, including intensive agriculture, pesticides, fertilizers and genetically modified organisms.
Land-use change like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and soil sealing.
Soil degradation from compaction, erosion, and loss of nutrients.
Climate change, which influences temperature and moisture.
The growing threat from plastic pollution.

“Land changes [like intensive agriculture] are right up there with climate change,” says Diana H. Wall, a biology professor at Colorado State University and director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. “Because what we’re doing is tearing up the soil. And that’s the habitat for all these species.”
When we lose biodiversity in the soil it leads to a decrease in the soil’s ability to withstand disturbances — that could cause a loss of important functions and even more biodiversity.

Much like new molecular tools have helped researchers understand the microbiome in people’s guts, scientists can now also learn much more about the tiny organisms living in the soil, says Wall. But while research about soil biodiversity is growing, there are still significant knowledge gaps.
A 2020 study on “blind spots” in global soil biodiversity and ecosystem function found that most research focused on a single sampling event and didn’t study how soil changed in the same area over time, which the authors say is “essential for assessing trends in key taxa and functions, and their vulnerability to global change.”
The research has also been geographically unbalanced, they found. Temperate areas, which include broadleaved mixed forests and the Mediterranean, have received more study than many tropical areas, tundra or flooded grasslands.
This is not a new problem: Another study revealed that we lack historical information on soil biodiversity that would make it possible to understand baselines on previous land cover and local drivers of biodiversity. Without understanding past conditions, it’s not clear how things are changing or why.
Knowledge gaps aren’t just limited to science, either. When it comes to policy, national and international bodies lack systematic ways to monitor and protect soil biodiversity.
“At the global scale, soil biodiversity is still a blind spot: most Parties of the Convention on Biodiversity neither protect soils nor their biodiversity explicitly,” found a study published in April in Biological Conservation.
CIAT researchers are collecting data on soil erosion as part of the Africa Rising Initiative. Photo: 2015CIAT/Georgina Smith (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Efforts to better study and protect soil biodiversity have begun to ramp up.
One is the Soil Biodiversity Observation Network (Soil BON), co-led by Wall, which is a coordinated global project to monitor soil biodiversity and ecosystem function to help inform policy.
Wall also leads the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, a volunteer scientific network of
more than 4,000 researchers who are studying the vulnerability of belowground biodiversity. The group recently sent a letter to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity urging action to protect soil biodiversity.
“Knowledge of the importance of the vast diversity of fauna and flora that inhabit soil and sustain all life aboveground should be recognized and included in global policies for the protection, restoration, and promotion of biodiversity,” the group wrote.
Europe isn’t waiting for the U.N. to take action.
The Farm to Fork Strategy, part of the European Green New Deal, calls for better soil protection, including cutting pesticide use in half by 2030. The European Union also launched the Zero Pollution Action Plan for Air, Water and Soil that aims to improve soil quality. And the EU could push further action with a planned Soil Health Law in 2023.
And while soil health demands more big government efforts, there are a lot of changes at the local level and by industries that could help.
In urban areas, pavement that has sealed off soil can be removed and replaced by vegetation. The construction of green roofs and gardens rich in plant diversity can aid soil biodiversity, too.
Farmers, Wall says, have also expressed increasing interest in soil regeneration and carbon sequestration. “There are definitely things that you can do to return the organic matter to the soil,” she says. “What we want is good cover for soil so it doesn’t blow away or wash away. And we also want to make sure that we’re not just cutting vegetation down to bare ground.”
Scandinavian Green Roof Institute. Photo: International Sustainable Solutions (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Society also needs to be mindful of the chemicals that we use in our homes, farms and cities, she says: “Pollution in soil is very bad for the organisms that live in the soil, and it’s bad for any that may have a pupating cycle in the soil.”
Soil biodiversity can recover after industrial or agricultural sites are taken out of production, but it may happen slowly and require specialized restoration efforts. In those cases, “microbial transplants together with seeding of target plant species might help speed up these processes,” suggests a 2019 study co-authored by Wall. “Even small changes, which often come at little monetary cost, may increase soil biodiversity and ecosystem services.”
And an even smaller change is also important — getting people to notice and appreciate the role healthy soil plays in our lives and why it’s so vital we protect it.
“Something that we really ought to realize is that soil isn’t forever,” Wall says. “Soils are vulnerable, and we know that worldwide. Pay attention to the life beneath your feet — it’s fragile.”

Why It’s Time to Include Fungi in Global Conservation Goals

Workers removed garbage from Brazil’s Negro River in June following rains that raised water levels. Some governments are implementing laws tackling plastic pollution.

Edmar Barros/Associated Press

A few states and some countries are passing laws to combat plastic waste.
California is the fourth US state that will make companies pay for packaging waste.
Canada and India have banned the production and import of certain single-use plastic products. 

Listen to The Refresh: Insider’s real-time news podcast.

The first half of 2022 has seen a wave of new policies cracking down on plastic pollution in the US and countries like Canada and India. In recent weeks, California became the fourth state that will force companies to pay for cleaning up packaging waste, while Canada and India have banned the production and import of certain single-use plastic products. Advocates say the momentum feels like a turning point in the global fight to eliminate the eight million metric tons of plastic waste that flows into oceans each year. According to the United Nations, this is the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck every minute. The vast majority of plastic never gets recycled and ends up in landfills, in incinerators, or as litter on land and in waterways. The US is the world’s largest contributor to the problem despite representing less than 5% of the global population.”The public is increasingly making the connection between plastic and so many other issues, which is expanding the coalition of groups and individuals who care deeply about this,” Anja Brandon, a US plastics-policy analyst at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, said. “That, in turn, is expanding the number of policymakers who recognize plastic pollution as critically important.” 

Brandon said those connections include how plastic is made from the fossil fuels that drive the climate crisis. Local governments in the US often build plastic-manufacturing plants, landfills, and incinerators in marginalized communities, which then disproportionately expose these communities to pollution. Researchers are also discovering tiny particles of plastic — known as microplastics — in human blood and stool, raising questions about potential health effects.The sustainability push has led some big brands and plastic makers to promise to make more recyclable or compostable packaging and to channel money toward local infrastructure so producers can get their materials back and reuse them. “We’re investing in new technology to make sure the percent of recycled content in packaging increases and designing things to be lighter,” Jen Ronk, the senior sustainability manager at Dow North America Packaging & Specialty Plastics, said. The company also pledged to spend more than $1 billion on efforts to manage plastic waste. Here’s a rundown of the latest action: 

CaliforniaOn June 30, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the most aggressive restrictions on plastic in the country into law. By 2032, producers must use 25% less plastic in packaging for items like shampoo, food containers, and cups. Ocean Conservancy estimates that this provision alone will reduce plastic production by 23 million tons, or 26 times the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge. By the same date, at least 65% of plastic must be recycled, a major jump from the less than 15% that is recycled today. “We know that to reduce the plastic-pollution crisis, we have to make less in the first place and reuse more through a circular economy,” Brandon said, adding that the California law is the first to address both sides of that equation. 

Plastic makers will pay $5 billion into a state fund to mitigate the environmental and health impacts of pollution from their products, as well. The industry will pay for collecting, sorting, and recycling waste through a fee on packaging, which will shift the burden away from taxpayers who now fund municipal-waste management. That policy, known as extended-producer responsibility, has picked up steam over the last year as Maine, Oregon, and most recently Colorado, passed similar legislation.  Colorado In June, the state passed its own extended-producer responsibility law that slaps a fee on packaging such as bottles, food wrappers, and cardboard to help fund recycling and keep waste out of landfills. Colorado’s statewide recycling rate for all materials is 15%, less than half the national average of 32%. The law itself doesn’t set mandatory recycling targets, but brands and packaging makers have to develop some for 2030 after they form a nonprofit to run the new recycling program.

The law got rare public endorsements from big business, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Walmart. They joined forces with environmental groups like Recycle Colorado, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club. CanadaOn June 22, the government announced it would ban companies from making and importing certain single-use plastics by the end of the year as part of a sweeping effort to fight pollution and the climate crisis.Most plastic grocery bags, silverware, and straws fall under the ban, with a few exceptions for medical needs. According to the government, Canadians throw away more than 3 million tons of plastic waste every year and the country only recycles about 9% of it. 

“Companies don’t make Canada-specific packaging or US-state specific packaging,” Brandon said. “They are trying to maximize efficiency in a globalized supply chain, so these policies will have far-reaching ripple effects.”India On July 1, India’s government announced a ban on single-use plastics covering 19 items that are most likely to wind up as litter, such as straws, cups, and some disposable bags. The ban makes it illegal to make or import these products.According to the Associated Press, thousands of other plastic items aren’t covered, though the federal government has set recycling targets for manufacturers.  According to its federal pollution watchdog, India generated more than 4.1 million metric tons of plastic waste in 2020. 

This decade the country is also trying to reduce the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of gross domestic product — known as carbon intensity — by 45%. Curbing plastic manufacturing can help India meet that target, said advocates of the ban.

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Abstract

CBS 8’s Chief Meteorologist Karlene Chavis breaks down how to filter out our oceans biggest problem: cigarette butts.

SAN DIEGO — Beach cleanups are common along our coastline, and the most reported pollution problem are cigarette butt filters. They are a costly health hazard for not just us, but the environment. 

Travel from storm drains to beaches

Whether the filters are put out in the sand or make the journey inland from areas like Downtown San Diego through storm drains, they will also find a way onto our beaches. I took a stroll along the sands of Ocean Beach with Mitch Silverstein. He is with the San Diego Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. It did not take long to find cigarettes butt, and I mean a lot of cigarette butt, pollution. 

“How far did we walk? 100 feet and we got 50 butts. That’s crazy. It’s nuts, it’s nut balls,” said Silverstein. “The beach is not an ashtray.”

I asked Silverstein and Dr. Thomas Novotny, who was also present for this all too familiar show and tell, what do you say to people who believe “well I’m only putting out one cigarette butt, where’s the harm?”

“One, there’s six trillion cigarettes manufactured globally, you put one, the next guy puts one, the next million people put one, and what we find is that a third of all the beach litter picked up from the beaches is cigarette butts,” said Novotny.

Number 1 marine pollution

Novotny is the Professor Emeritus at the San Diego State University School of Public Health. This environmental concern is echoed by many organizations including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA, citing cigarette butts as the number one marine pollution in the world. 

Novotny refers to cigarettes as a teabag of toxins citing the seven thousand chemicals found in them, including 50 of which are capable of causing cancer. And to top it off, these filters, that have all those toxins locked in, are single use plastics. Don’t let the appearance of a paper lining fool you.

“The filter, which is the most picked up item of the cigarette butts is plastic. It doesn’t bio-grade, it stays in the environment. It gets squashed, broken up into small pieces and is retained as microplastics in the environment as well. Both have a chemical and plastic pollution with cigarette butts,” said Novotny.  

Microplastics

To better illustrate how microplastics get dispersed into our environment, Mitch Silverstein uses a piece of Styrofoam as an example.

“It is the most easy to see example of how one piece of plastic, this from a cooler, instantly turns into thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces. It becomes indistinguishable from the sand,” said Silverstein as he breaks apart the chunk with his hand.

Once broken down, but not gone, the microplastics associated with cigarette filters become imbedded in our environment and even us.

“It’s also a sponge for toxins. So, it soaks up toxins. Fish eat it and we eat that fish, and we get those toxins, and we get that plastic. So, we’re eating it,” said Silverstein.

Taking action 

When it comes to putting out this issue, Novotny advocates for an upstream way of preventing this top pollution. He wants legislation passed that would ban the sale of filter cigarettes, citing the filter itself has no health benefits.

“It is not just the environment, if we can reduce tobacco use in any way, even a small percentage we are going to improve the health of Californians, reduce the cost of healthcare, reduce the cost that is involved in cleaning up beaches and urban environments and just spoiling the natural environment that we have,” said Dr. Novotny. 

Mitch Silverstein echoes this sentiment on the ban with involvement on a local and State level. 

“We can try to blame litterbugs all we want, but at the end of the day, we need to hold the producers responsible and we need to prevent every single cigarette from having a plastic butt, where evidence is overwhelming that it’s hazardous waste and highly likely to end up in our environment,” said Silverstein. 

Unfortunately, on a State level, a bill is introduced during every legislative session that never makes it out of the committee process. Mitch says pushing for this policy change is going to come down to the data, and we can help.

“We have a great tool, Surfrider — any individual can have an account and add to the data that we collect because we need to show policy makers the data. You know, not just come out and say, “hey, you know I feel like the ocean is being polluted”. We know it and we have the numbers to back it up.”

WATCH RELATED: Students practice conservation with Trout in the Classroom (April 2022).

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Plastic pollution is so insidious that it has entered even the most sacred of places. In 2012, a seal washed ashore in Massachusetts because its stomach was inflamed by all the plastic it had swallowed; seven years later a submarine diving to the bottom of America’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench, discovered a plastic bag; and as recently as March a study revealed that three out of four people have microplastics in their blood.
RELATED: What is microplastic anyway? Inside the insidious pollution that is absolutely everywhere
Since microplastics are so small that they have entered our blood — plastic particles are by definition less than 5 millimeters in length — it stands to reason that they have contaminated the most pristine human locales on the planet. A new study published in the journal PLOS One confirms that this is indeed the case, as scientists from the Palau International Coral Reef Center studied the pristine reef area of the tiny, remote island republic, which lies east of the Philippines and north of New Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. Mixed in with the beach sand, seawater and natural sediments, the scientists found a troubling number of microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs), or plastic particles that are far tinier than 5 millimeters in length.

“Plastic is literally everywhere — it is not just in the streets and oceans; it is in the food that we eat, the water we drink, and the very air that we breathe.”

“This study shows that plastic pollution must be considered in environmental studies even in the most pristine locations,” the authors explain in their abstract. “It also shows that NPs pollution is related to the amount of MPs found at the sites. To understand the effects of this plastic pollution, it is necessary that the next toxicological studies take into account the effects of this fraction that makes up the NPs.” In fact, the authors zeroed in on the threat posed by nanoplastics as one of the chief takeaways from their research.

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“They are more dangerous because of their size and concentration,” Christine Ferrier-Pages from the Centre Scientifique de Monaco, and one of the co-authors of the study, told Salon by email. “It is estimated that NPs are 100 times more abundant than MPs and in addition, due to their small size, they can enter the cells and provoke quite a lot of damages.”
Ferrier-Pages added, “Plastics, especially microplastics and even more nanoplastics, enter the marine food web at each level of the food web and accumulate in the higher trophic levels, i.e. fish and other commercial organisms. Nowadays, it has been shown that many commercial fish are contaminated, and by eating these fish, plastics are also transferred to humans. The problem with plastics is that there are hundreds of tons of plastics entering the sea each year, and for the moment, there is no good tool to get rid of these plastics.”
John Hocevar, a marine biologist and director of Greenpeace’s oceans campaign, echoed this chief concern when speaking to Salon by email — namely, that plastic pollution appears to last forever.
“Plastic doesn’t go away, it just breaks down into smaller fragments and disperses,” Hocevar explained. “In many ways, this means that plastic gets more dangerous over time. The throwaway packaging we use today adds to the plastic bottles and bags we used decades ago. Today, plastic particles pervade the atmosphere, raining down on even the most remote mountains and islands. Microplastics are also now saturating our oceans, where they are often eaten by marine life or washed ashore.”
Hocevar praised the new study for reinforcing this point, since “much of the plastic washing up in Palau was produced, used, and discarded thousands of miles away.”
Christopher Chin, Executive Director of The Center for Oceanic Awareness, Research, and Education (COARE), also praised the study, observing that it confirms “not only the ubiquity of plastic pollution, but also its inequity; ocean states [like Palau] and those in the global south face a  disproportionate impact from plastic pollution.”
“The public should not only be more aware about microplastics and nanoplastics, we should all be alarmed,” Chin told Salon. “Plastic is literally everywhere — it is not just in the streets and oceans; it is in the food that we eat, the water we drink, and the very air that we breathe.” He drew attention to a study which found that humans typically eat roughly one credit card’s worth of plastic every week.
Given how humans are chomping down plastic without even realizing it, perhaps it is hardly surprising that the reef organisms of Palau aren’t doing much better.
“On the reef organisms, we have performed some studies on corals, which have been published previously in different journals,” Ferrier-Pages explained. “We have shown for example that nanoplastics induce coral bleaching, the loss of the symbiotic algae by corals. As the symbionts provide corals with most of their food requirements, bleached corals enter into starvation. We have also demonstrated that microplastics can reduce coral calcification — the deposition of their hard skeleton.”
For more Salon articles about plastic pollution:

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and several Costa Rican entities will remove approximately 200 thousand tons of non-recyclable plastics that are not correctly disposed of and do not reach sanitary landfills.
UNDP launched the joint Plastic-Free Landscapes Project, through which they will coordinate efforts to eliminate tons of harmful plastics from terrestrial and marine ecosystems by 2030.
The presentation of the project was made in San José, where it was explained that the processing plant in Pedregal, Heredia province, will receive most of the non-recoverable plastics to transform them into raw material for construction using CRDC technology.
In addition, they indicated that barriers would be installed in rivers to collect plastics and accelerate the cleaning process. They urged recycling companies, the private sector, organizations, and citizens to join in recovering non-valuable plastic so it can be used in construction materials.
UNDP also revealed that plastic pollution is one of humanity’s greatest environmental challenges and represents a significant threat to vulnerable populations living near rivers or dependent on coastal or marine ecosystems in Costa Rica.
Moreover, according to the Ministry of Health, more than 40 tons of plastic waste are not recovered or captured by the collection and recycling systems every day, which means that 314 thousand tons of plastic waste have escaped into the environment so far this century.
The UNDP resident representative in Costa Rica, José Vicente Troya, stated that his vision is to make Costa Rica the first country in the world to solve the plastic problem.
“We have formidable allies, and we want to organize a national campaign in which no one is left behind by participating in a historical solution that can inspire the rest of the world,” he noted.
Plastic-Free Landscapes Project proposes the installation of four plastic waste collection fences in four of the most polluted rivers in Costa Rica:
Virilla in San Antonio BelénGrande Tárcoles in OrotinaParismina in the CaribbeanTérraba in the Southern Zone
David Zamora, Pedregal’s commercial director and CRDC’s technical director highlighted the positive impact of this alliance.
“This alliance will provide a definitive and sustainable solution to all plastic waste, allowing Costa Rica to continue to position itself as a world leader in sustainable development and environmental protection,” said Zamora.

Air Date: Week of July 8, 2022

stream/download this segment as an MP3 file

Plastic fork with seaweed. Single-use plastic utensils are difficult to recycle and can take up to 1,000 years to decompose. (Photo: Ingrid Taylar, Flickr, CC)
To help curb the plastic pollution crisis, the US Department of Interior will phase out single-use plastic products sold and distributed in national parks and other federal public lands it oversees. Christy Leavitt, Plastics Campaign Director at Oceana, joins Host Bobby Bascomb to talk about how the phase out could work and why it matters.

Transcript

CURWOOD: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley studios at the University of Massachusetts Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood,
BASCOMB: And I’m Bobby Bascomb. Roughly 40% of all plastic produced worldwide each year is thrown away after just one use.And while things like plastic forks, straws and bags may be used for only a moment, they can stick around for up to a thousand years before they decompose.Less than 6% of plastics in the US is recycled, meaning most plastic waste is incinerated, landfilled, or winds up in our oceans.Seeking to curb such waste, Canada has announced a phaseout of the manufacture and import of common single-use plastic starting at the end of 2022 and culminating by the end of 2025.Plastic is made from oil and gas, a major resource for Canada which is one of the world’s largest producers of oil.Still, Prime Minister Trudeau says phasing out single-use plastic is a worthy aim, as the ban would eliminate close to 3 billion pounds of plastic waste over the next decade.
TRUDEAU: Plastic pollution is a global challenge. You’ve all heard the stories, and seen the photos. And to be honest, as a dad it’s tough trying to explain this to my kids. How do you explain dead whales washing up on beaches around the world, their stomachs jam-packed with plastic bags? Or albatross chicks photographed off the coast of Hawaii, their bodies filled to the brim with plastic they’ve mistaken for food? How do I tell them that against all odds, you’ll find plastic at the very deepest point of the Pacific Ocean, 36,000 feet down?
BASCOMB: The U.S. Interior Department has announced a goal to phase out single-use plastics sold and distributed in national parks and other public lands it oversees, but so far the Forest Service under the Agriculture Department has yet to follow suit.The parks system alone had nearly 300 million visits last year and had to deal with some 70 million pounds of plastic waste.
For more, I’m joined now by Christy Leavitt, Plastics Campaign Director at Oceana. And by the way, we should disclose that Oceana is a supporter of Living on Earth through Sailors for the Sea. Welcome to Living on Earth, Christy!
LEAVITT: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
BASCOMB: So what exactly does this announcement entail? And how significant is it?
LEAVITT: This is a big announcement from the Department of Interior and the Biden administration. So on June 8th, on World Oceans Day, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland committed to phasing out single use plastic products in our national parks and other public lands overseen by the Department of Interior. So what she did was she issued a secretarial order that calls for the department to reduce the procurement, sale and distribution of single use plastic products and packaging on all Interior Department-managed lands and buildings by 2032.
BASCOMB: Now, the goal here is to phase out plastic by 2032, as you just mentioned, but that’s a full decade away. Why does it have to take so long? And what needs to happen between now and then?
LEAVITT: Yeah, well, we are hopeful that they will move quickly to phase out some of the worst, the most problematic, single-use plastics as quickly as possible. Our understanding is that it’s going to take them up to 10 years to deal with some of the specific concession contracts that they have. But we definitely know they’re interested in moving quickly, and we will be following up to make sure that they do move as quickly as possible.
BASCOMB: Well, what kind of impact does plastic waste currently have in our public lands and waters?
LEAVITT: Just to give you the scope of the problem, as we look at our oceans is that every year, 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean. And to put that in perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to dumping two garbage trucks full of plastic into the ocean every minute. And it’s not just harming our oceans, but it’s also our climate and our health and our communities and our public lands. Basically, no place on earth is untouched by plastic. And we’re finding it in our national parks and other public lands. And it has a couple of impacts there. One impact is that nobody wants to look and see single use plastic water bottles or plastic straws or other plastic as they’re exploring the beautiful places like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. And then it’s also harmful for the ecosystems there. So not only are there the big pieces of plastic, so the plastic bag, or the plastic water bottle, but it also, plastic breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastic, that then can get into the soil, can get into the air. That’s what we’re finding in rain; we’re even finding it in human blood and in our lungs, too. So we’re finding it everywhere, including in our national parks.

Water bottles for sale in Death Valley National Park, California. Sales of single-use products such as these are slated to end by 2032 in all Department of Interior facilities including in national parks. (Photo: Courtesy of Oceana)

BASCOMB: And to what degree is that potentially a threat to wildlife? You know, the very reason that we’re going to these national parks?
LEAVITT: It is a big problem for wildlife. So not only can wildlife get entangled, or ingest plastic, but the same thing is happening with microplastics, where they might be eating it, they might be, you know, breathing it in, those sorts of things, too. So it’s a problem for wildlife. And when we talk about our national parks, there’s more than 400 different national park units around the country. Some of them are the really big parks, like Grand Teton National Park, and some of them are smaller areas. But 88 of the National Parks are ocean and coastal parks. So they’ve got a direct impact on what’s happening in our oceans as well as our coastal Great Lakes too. So the plastic, if plastic is going out there, it’s gonna end up in our oceans. And Oceana did a survey a few years ago, we pulled together a report that looked specifically at what was happening with animals in US waters. And we found nearly 1800 animals — these were marine mammals, so dolphins, whales, as well as sea turtles — had been harmed by either ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic in US waters since 2009.
BASCOMB: And of course, those are just the ones that we know about and documented, you can be sure the number’s much, much higher.
LEAVITT: That is definitely true. Those are only the ones that people were able to see and observe. But there’s a lot more animals that are being impacted by plastic.

Installing additional water fountains, such as this one at Grand Canyon National Park, can help reduce the need for single-use plastic bottles by making it easier for visitors to refill reusable bottles. (Photo: Michael Quinn / NPS, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

BASCOMB: Now, of course, plastic is made from fossil fuels, and the production of plastic and the plastic itself is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet. And as we know, climate change is one of the biggest threats to our national parks. To what extent, do you think that was maybe a factor in Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s decision here to phase out plastics on our public lands?
LEAVITT: Yeah, our national parks are definitely faced with extraordinary adaptation challenges. So it’s a critical problem. And it’s definitely something that the Department of Interior and the Biden administration overall are looking at solutions to the climate crisis. As you mentioned, plastics have a big impact on climate. Almost all plastic is created from fossil fuels. So throughout its entire existence, plastic is creating climate changing greenhouse gases, so it’s extracted from, whether it’s from oil and gas, that extraction creates greenhouse gases; then the production of plastic creates more; they’re transported; they then break down in landfills or they’re incinerated or burned. So throughout its whole life, that plastic is creating more and more greenhouse gases. And I don’t think most people think of that plastic bottle or that plastic bag as coming from fossil fuels, but it is. And in fact, if plastic was a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
BASCOMB: So how will phasing out single use plastic and the national parks and public lands actually work? What might a visitor see that might be different?

According to Christy Leavitt, every year around 33 billion pounds of plastic enter the oceans worldwide. That’s about two garbage trucks full of plastic every minute. (Photo: Courtesy of Oceana)

LEAVITT: I think some of the things that visitors will see at national parks will be more refillable water stations. So rather than buying a plastic water bottle, there’ll be stations at all of our national parks and other Department of Interior sites where you can go and refill your reusable water bottle. There’ll also be inexpensive water bottles for sale, so if you didn’t bring a water bottle, you’ll be able to purchase one right there. And you could use it over again and again. There’s already some of that happening at national parks and this will expand it even more. There are a lot of national parks, you can buy food, whether lunch or for dinner. Some of those are cafeteria style. Some of those are restaurant style. And they can move to reusable plates and dishes and cups and utensils. So they’ll need to create systems to be able to wash all those dishes. But it will be able to make sure that we’re not using single use plastic products in those places.
BASCOMB: Now, from what I understand many of the gift shops and food vendors in the national parks are actually concessionaires who contract with the National Park Service. So how might this affect them?
LEAVITT: Yes, that is definitely the case where a lot of the restaurants or gift shops are being run by concessionaires. And so they will need to make these changes, they’ll need to get rid of unnecessary single use plastic products, whether it’s in Yosemite or a National Seashore or another wildlife refuge.
BASCOMB: Christy, what kind of public support or, for that matter, pushback have you seen for this plan to phase out single use plastic in the parks?

Christy Leavitt is Oceana’s Plastics Campaign Director (Photo: Courtesy of Oceana)

LEAVITT: We know that people love their national parks, as we’ve been talking about a bit here. And we did a survey earlier this year. And we found that 82% of American voters would support a decision by the National Park Service to stop selling and distributing single use plastics at our national parks. So that’s a very high level of support, it’s bipartisan support. So definite interest in protecting our national parks from single use plastic.
BASCOMB: Christy Leavitt directs the plastics campaign at Oceana. Christy, thank you so much for your time today.
LEAVITT: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.
 

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E&E News | “National Parks to Phase Out Single-Use Plastics” Read about Secretary Haaland’s order to phase out single-use plastics About Canada’s single-use plastics ban About Christy Leavitt

Ottawa recently announced it will phase out some single-use plastics by 2025, but finding sustainable alternatives is trickier than you might think.The ban, which targets six categories of plastics, is part of an effort by the Liberal government to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030. A study commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada showed that, in 2016, Canadians threw away three million tonnes of plastic waste, only nine per cent of which was ultimately recycled. The rest ended up in landfills, waste-to-energy facilities or the environment, where it can harm wildlife while taking hundreds of years to break down.One of the single-use items on the banned list is the plastic checkout bag that many Canadians use for groceries and other kinds of shopping. Up to 15 billion plastic checkout bags are used every year in the country, according to government data.They’re also one of the major sources of plastic litter found on shorelines. In 2021, almost 17,000 plastic bags were collected during community cleanups.Even before the federal government’s move, some jurisdictions including P.E.I., Nova Scotia and a number of B.C. communities had already banned single-use plastic bags. Some major retailers such as Sobeys and Walmart have also stopped offering them.The majority of Canadians are shifting away from single-use plastic bags, too. In a 2019 survey, 96 per cent of respondents said they used their own bags or containers when grocery shopping, though only 47 per cent of those said they always did so.Examining the full life cycle The challenge for eco-conscious shoppers is that alternatives to single-use plastic bags also leave an environmental footprint.A 2020 study by the UN Environment Program analyzed the findings of seven life cycle assessments (LCAs) on shopping bags published since 2010. An LCA assesses the environmental impacts of a product or services from, essentially, cradle to grave. This includes: Raw material extraction.Production.Logistics and distribution.Use.End-of-life.The study found the environmental ranking of bags varies depending on which criteria you consider. For example, one type of bag may score well in cutting down on litter but be a poor option when it comes to water and land use to make it.The number of times a reusable bag is used is also crucial, the study found. On the lower end, a paper bag needs to be used four to eight times to have less impact on the climate than a single-use plastic bag. Meanwhile, a cotton bag needs to be used 50 to 150 times to be environmentally superior, according to the study.Given the impacts from all life cycle stages, one of the best options for shoppers would to skip the bag altogether whenever possible, said Tony Walker, an associate professor of environmental studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax.”Reducing consumption of anything and everything is key because everything requires resources and energy to produce,” said Walker, who advised the federal government on its Zero Plastic Waste Agenda and Oceans Plastics Charter.If you do need a plastic bag alternative, here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of some common options.Cotton bagThe cotton bag has greater environmental impacts than other types of bags during production due to the high amount of energy required to grow, irrigate and fertilize the cotton.However, its durability lends itself to hundreds, even thousands, of uses, which makes it an environmentally friendly alternative, says Walker.As well, cotton bags are made from a renewable resource and are degradable at end of life, though the 2020 UN study notes it matters how it is disposed. Waste incineration for cotton bags is climate neutral and therefore a better option than landfilling, where the study says degradation of the cotton releases methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.Paper bagPaper bags have a few things going for them: they can decompose easily, they can be put in compost bins depending on your jurisdiction and they can be recycled as paper, says Walker.However, like cotton, they demand quite a bit of energy to produce. They also require forestry products as raw materials and take more fuel to transport than other, lighter materials.Tony Walker, an associate professor of environmental studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, advised the federal government on its Zero Plastic Waste Agenda and Oceans Plastics Charter.