Category Archives: Land

Walking from Mexico to Canada, I suppose, simply wasn’t tedious enough for me. So in late July, just as I reached the northern edge of California during a 2,653-mile thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, I decided to start counting every single scrap of trash I created for an entire month. I carried it all for days on end in a disgusting Ziploc bag stuffed into my backpack—always gross, sometimes embarrassing, permanently revealing.
5 Rules to Reduce Waste on the Trail A thru-hiker’s best tips for decreasing your garbageRead More
For the first three months of my trek, I’d seen trashcans at almost every trailhead or convenience store my fellow Hiker Trash friends frequented, overflowing with our collective refuse. There were snapped trekking poles and overspent hiking shoes, empty pouches of dehydrated food and crumpled vestiges of instant coffee. The sheer quantity was impressive in a Mad Max prequel kind of way. How much stuff, I wondered, was I wasting?
So from Oregon’s enchanting Crater Lake to the faux Bavarian burg of Leavenworth, Washington, I catalogued every bit of my waste, chronicling each outgoing parcel in a single cellphone note that grew so long scanning it began to feel like a personal doomscroll. I trashed nine hummus containers and 30 Ziploc bags, two shoes and 34 cans of stove fuel, beer, and soda water. There were 17 ketchup packets, almost as much hot sauce, and one plastic pint of Southern Comfort. I discarded so many compostable coffee pouches that I could not compost that I now cannot bear to type the number.
On and on it went, from pizza boxes to joint containers, red pepper pouches to two garlic bulbs. By the start of September, I’d somehow discarded 686 separate items, or more than 20 each day. And those were only the ones I remembered to count during a month when I tried to curb my waste. That was less than a quarter of my hike, meaning I’d likely tossed an excess of 3,000 bits of junk overall, more than one per mile. I reached the Canadian border a week later, toting more than a twinge of guilt.
If we hikers, who live outdoors and ostensibly for it, aren’t obsessive stewards of shared resources, how can we expect anyone else to be? We must do better.
Like much of the outdoors industry, hiking has a waste problem. In our dauntless quests to achieve ultralight enlightenment, make four-day food carries less burdensome, or have the latest gear with the most Reddit cred, we have created a slash-and-burn superstructure, where the fulfillment of our goals or ideals trumps their environmental impacts. We purchase the tiniest portions of food. We bail on gear that isn’t perfect or, back home, stockpile things we never again need. We buy more than our bellies can handle in trail towns, gorging until we toss what remains. I confess to it all.
Much of this happens for the sake of convenience, for making a difficult endeavor that much easier. Some of it stems from a deference to apathy, since, as we often shrug, our footprint is so much smaller in the woods than when we’re back in “the real world.”
But if we hikers, who live outdoors and ostensibly for it, aren’t obsessive stewards of shared resources, how can we expect anyone else to be? We must do better. Good news: with a little inconvenience, expense, and planning, we can.

In the waning days of my experiment, I was delighted to learn about another PCT hiker who was paying even more attention to her trash—or, really, her near-complete lack of it. In mid-April, Ana Lucía departed the trail’s southern end, bound north with an unprecedented mission: to hike to Canada without generating any refuse. “Waste-Free PCT,” she dubbed it.
“For me, waste-free means trying not to have a lot going into landfills,” Lucía said in mid-September, less than a month before she reached the trail’s northern terminus. “It’s impossible to be 100 percent waste-free if you’re on a trail, but it’s about being more mindful of the trash you are producing and asking, ‘What can I do better?’”
A 26-year-old native of Mexico City, Lucía fell for hiking and environmental causes in tandem half a decade ago. After learning about the exploitation involved in unsustainable tropical palm oil production, she began changing her habits as a consumer. Vegetarianism and veganism soon followed, as did stints at animal-rehabilitation centers. After reading about “Plastic Free July,” a decade-old international movement involving a month-long pause on plastic, she decided to curb her overall waste dramatically, too.
Meanwhile, Lucía daydreamed about the PCT since she first saw Reese Witherspoon lug her overstuffed bag to the Bridge of the Gods at the end of Wild, soon after the movie’s 2014 release. For years, earning her psychology degree at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a subsequent teaching stint put that ambition on hold. She decided to make her attempt at last in 2021, before beginning a doctorate program in neuroscience.
Ana Lucía in search of a composting coffee shop (Photo: Lucía)
Another obstacle appeared. She couldn’t find anyone who had documented such a waste-free long haul, let alone explained its pragmatic complications. On message boards and blogs, fellow hikers scoffed at the notion—too much work, they concurred, in a world that would go on making waste with or without her. Lucía was torn between hiking the PCT and trying to remain as waste-free as she had learned to become at home. “It felt like doing this dream meant having to renounce my values,” she said.
Rather than give up, she dug in, shaping schemes that would let her pursue both goals. She found a family friend in California who was willing to buy trail mix, peas, and gummy bears in bulk for six months and mail them to isolated trail towns. He even used compostable BioBags and paper tape. She emailed niche brands like Gossamer Gear and Katabatic to inquire about used packs and quilts they could sell her to assist the mission. (Both said yes.) She scoured Reddit boards in search of secondhand supplies, insisting on buying as little new as possible; when she couldn’t find the exact model she wanted, she settled for her second choice.
To offset the expenses of these impracticalities, she also launched a crowdfunding campaign, pledging 26 percent—that is, one percent for every 100 miles she intended to hike—of it to the Mexican Center for Environmental Law. “I wanted to balance out the impact of doing the trail and shipping these boxes by giving,” said Lucía. She ultimately raised more than $4,000.
Lucía couldn’t hike on bulk trail mixes alone. Same as other hikers, she wanted energy bars and dehydrated meals, simply housed in compostable packaging. She found one supplier for each: LivBar, a solar-powered vegan bar maker in Salem, Oregon, and Fernweh Food, a tiny startup in Portland, Oregon, that might just be making the best dehydrated meals on the market right now.
She hauled her used wrappers into trail towns, found coffee shops that composted their grounds, and asked if they would do the same for her packaging. In Northern California, where towns with coffee shops are either limited or very far from trail, she mailed her wrappers to Fernweh founder Ashley Lance back in Portland, reckoning the energy spent doing so meant less waste than throwing them away. Lance composted them in her backyard, then offered the same service to other hikers.
“If you were a guest in your friend’s house, you wouldn’t leave your trash everywhere. Taking care of the trail and making less waste is like paying rent.”
Both Lance and LivBar CEO Wade Brooks admitted to me that the battle to make compostable wrappers common is an uphill one. Brooks, for instance, repeatedly raved about a new machine that would allow LivBar to package its goods with less labor, eventually lowering the price point to be more competitive with the plastic-clad likes of Kind or Clif. Fernweh spends more than a dollar on every meal’s compostable label and wrapper. Despite a price point between $9.50 and $15, Lance still earns only 10 cents per bag.
But they both sensed a mutual momentum, a feeling that the behemoths were paying attention. “Small companies make a change, and big companies see that people are choosing them,” Lance said. “Those companies eventually acquire those habits in their own way.”
Lucía hoped her own journey would inspire similar shifts among hikers. Now that someone had done the work of figuring it out, she suggested, others could more easily follow. Future thru-hikers have already told her she altered the way they will plan their walks. She wondered if trail towns or the Pacific Crest Trail Association might someday install roadside compost or recycling stations.
“Nature is free. It’s not asking anything of you,” said Lucía, who rightly adopted the trail name “Eco” on the PCT. “If you were a guest in your friend’s house, you wouldn’t leave your trash everywhere. Taking care of the trail and making less waste is like paying rent.”

I am neither naïve nor conceited enough to think that hikers eating out of compostable wrappers or frequenting gear exchanges more often will make an appreciable difference in our ballooning environmental calamity. Among our society’s possible causes of death, the inability to find a composting center in some trail town of Southern Appalachia won’t rank at all.
Meanwhile, the picture just gets grimmer: A 2020 study published in Science estimated that the world dropped 5.3 million metric tons of plastic into the ocean in 2016, a number that could increase nearly sixfold in just two decades. The political ambitions of 52 U.S. Senators seem again poised to cripple long-overdue climate reform, even after the United Nations gathered again to fret over our folly. And Saudi Arabia now intends to convert an expired oil rig into an “extreme park,” a seabound monument to our collective ostrich effect.
Why should you care about tampons or toilet paper in the woods or how much plastic you route to landfills when that’s happening? Or when pipelines crisscross the Appalachian Trail and interstate systems, our country’s collective arteries of disposable goods, cleave the Pacific Crest Trail in pieces? I get it.
But in his rambling autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt—the problematic godhead of our public lands, with all their blessings and faults—gets to the essence of why this all matters, even when it’s frustrating or inconvenient or expensive. “The greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a by-product of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing,” he writes. He goes on to quote a friend who ran a mill just north of Damascus, Virginia, arguably the epicenter of Appalachian Trail culture for its legendary hiker hostels and annual Trail Days celebration: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
I choose Roosevelt’s advice. I will find ways to reduce my environmental impact while on trail, though I know my efforts will cost me and will amount to less than a candle’s flicker in a consumerist gale.
I will mail myself bits of bulk toiletries. I will use Ziplocs or BioBags not until they look like a septic tank but instead until the seams split. I will lug a little extra food weight from one stop to the next if it means using a little less plastic and, gradually, reducing what I toss. And I will buy, as best I can, products from manufacturers that agree they can’t change everything but are at least, per Roosevelt, “striving to do what must be done.”
None of this will be perfect. But when I count my trash and scraps on the next trail, I want to feel empowered by what I have fixed, not embarrassed by what I ignored simply for the sake of convenience.

Discarded plastic is hard to ignore in Senegal. The litter can’t go unnoticed on a boat ride to the Unesco world heritage site Goree Island or on the shoreline of la Baie de Hann in the capital of Dakar. The Senegalese government has responded by becoming one of the latest African countries to expand a ban on single-use plastics starting Dec. 31. But the new rule has drawn attention to another problem: access to clean drinking water and the women who make a living filtering, packaging and re-selling tap water in plastic bags across Senegal’s biggest cities. An estimated 30,000 jobs are at risk, according to the Collective of Filtered Water Actors (CAES), a union that represents the industry’s manufacturers and sellers.

Robinson Township is a small community of about 15,000 people located west of Pittsburgh, and, like much of western Pennsylvania, it sits atop one of the largest deposits of shale gas in the United States. In 2012, the state assembly passed Act 13, which made it easier for fossil fuel companies to extract gas—in part by limiting the ability of local governments to determine where drilling could take place. Maya K. van Rossum, the CEO of Delaware Riverkeeper Network, was alarmed. “By virtue of this law, you could have an operating drilling-and-fracking well pad in the heart of a residential community, located as close as 300 feet from people’s homes,” she says. Determined to make a change, Robinson Township petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to strike down the zoning law and other provisions of Act 13. “Seven municipalities joined us in our legal action because their authority had been taken from them.”
To make their case, the coalition turned to a long-neglected provision in the commonwealth’s constitution. In 1971, Pennsylvania voters ratified an amendment that established an explicit right to “clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment.” Not only were sections of Act 13 a bad deal, argued Robinson Township, but they were unconstitutional.  
That argument was convincing for four out of the seven judges on the Commonwealth Court, which ruled that two of Act 13’s provisions violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. “I really thought about the power of what we had accomplished,” van Rossum says. “It was a success that we likely would not have been able to accomplish any other way.” 
The victory inspired her to start a movement to get “green amendments” into every state constitution, and soon after, she joined up with environmental groups who were working toward that goal in neighboring New York State. Their effort was supported by groups including the state chapter of the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters, the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, and conservation organizations throughout the state.  
On November 2, New York voters overwhelmingly approved Proposal 2, a ballot measure to establish a right to a healthy environment. More than two-thirds of New Yorkers—a total of 68.9 percent of voters—agreed to add a one-sentence line to the state constitution that reads, “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” 
With the measure’s passage, New York becomes the sixth state to enshrine a right to a clean environment in law (the others, aside from Pennsylvania, are Montana, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Hawai’i). How exactly the amendment will influence environmental protection in New York going forward is unclear. But advocates say the ballot measure’s success is an important step in protecting New York communities from pollution. 
The concepts expressed in the new constitutional amendment have been circulating among environmental groups for several decades, says Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates NY. Per the state’s Bill of Rights, New Yorkers have the right to worker’s compensation, freedom of worship, and even the right to bet on horse races and play bingo. It only makes sense that they would have a right to breathe clean air and drink clean water, Iwanowicz says. But “in the eyes of New York State law, there was no such right.”
Iwanowicz and other advocates first worked with legislators in Albany to introduce a bill to establish a right to a healthy environment in 2017. It quickly passed through the state assembly. But the Republican senate leadership refused to pick it up, Iwanowicz says, “knowing full well that if they brought this up for a vote, it would pass—and pass with bipartisan support.”  
On November 2, New York voters overwhelmingly approved Proposal 2, a ballot measure to establish a right to a healthy environment.
But advocates persisted and managed to pass legislation in 2019 and 2021 to put the issue before New York voters. (Under the New York law, a proposed constitutional amendment has to pass the legislature in two concurrent sessions before it goes to a referendum.) The measure received overwhelming support—passing the assembly 124 to 25 and the senate 48 to 14—but opposition persisted. Opponents argued that the proposed constitutional amendment was too vague and would create unnecessary legal battles. “I’m all for clean air and clean water. Who isn’t?” Daniel G. Stec, a Republican member of the senate, told the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in January. “But in the face of ambiguity you will have distrust, you will have lawsuits, you will have costs, and I’m trying to avoid that.”
The amendment’s supporters and law professors told Sierra that expansive, aspirational language is common in declarations of universal rights. For example, courts are still debating the limits and nuances of the right to free speech, says Iwanowicz. New York’s new constitutional amendment will similarly be shaped on a case-by-case basis. 
“It will be up to the courts to determine what the amendment means,” says Michael Gerrard, a professor of law at Columbia University. “The New York courts could find that it has great force, or not much, or something in between. We don’t know yet.” The particulars will be worked out in the coming years as lawyers invoke the text in their arguments and judges decide how it can be used, Gerrard says.
Pennsylvania provides a case study of how this might play out. Shortly after Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment became part of the commonwealth’s constitution, lawyers put it to the test. “What almost immediately happened is that it got into the courts, and the courts took out a bit of the punch,” says Grant MacIntyre, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. One case in 1973 involved a private landowner who wanted to build a viewing tower next to Gettysburg National Cemetery, which one observer, writing in The New York Times, called “a new low in historical tastelessness.” The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sued on the grounds that the tower would violate Pennsylvanians’ new environmental rights. But the argument failed to convince the judge, and another case the same year established a new legal test that effectively neutered the amendment.  
“In the early cases, the courts were really, really nervous that [the amendment] could shut down economic development,” says John Dernbach, a law professor at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. As a result, the amendment went mostly unused for several decades while Dernbach and others tried to get the courts to take it seriously. The Robinson Township case marked something of a turning point, and environmental lawyers have gradually moved the jurisprudence forward case-by-case since then.
New York’s green amendment was inspired by cases like the water crisis in Hoosick Falls, Iwanowicz says. In 2015, tests of the drinking water there showed high levels of PFOA—a chemical associated with various health risks including cancer—from a nearby plastic-manufacturing operation. Residents in Hoosick Falls ultimately reached a settlement with companies including Honeywell and 3M earlier this year. 
“It’s hard to know how an environmental amendment would have impacted poor decisions that were made in the past,” Iwanowicz says. But “the next time somebody proposes something, we can go to the government and say, ‘You can’t do this because we have this right to clean air,’ or ‘you have to move quicker to clean up my water.’”
The consequences of the new constitutional amendment may not always be straightforward. Things could get tricky in cases where a development proposal might have both positive and negative effects on the environment, says Columbia Law School’s Gerrard. Windmills, for example, are a central component in government plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But they can also kill birds, and residents opposed to building windmills might reference the amendment in their arguments. 
New York’s constitution has an existing set of provisions for conservation, but these have made it the legislature’s responsibility to take action, and so far courts have not required them to do so, says Gerrard. Courts also haven’t given New Yorkers the ability to sue if the legislature doesn’t act. By contrast, “the new amendment does not depend on the legislature; it seems to give power directly to the people,” he wrote in an email.  
As advocates in other states pursue their own version of environmental rights legislation, they will likely see their own conflicts over the particulars of each bill. Van Rossum is now working to get green amendments passed in New Jersey, Maine, and New Mexico. The language is slightly different in each case, which could influence the way different states interpret the amendment.
For van Rossum, getting the wording just right is worth the effort. “We all know in our hearts and our minds, as people here on this earth, that we have inalienable rights to things like clean water and clean air,” she says. “[But] if they’re not enforceable legally, you don’t actually have them.”

Nurdles: the worst toxic waste you’ve probably never heard ofBillions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous When the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean in May, Sri Lanka was terrified that the vessel’s 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil would spill into the ocean, causing an environmental disaster for the country’s pristine coral reefs and fishing industry.Classified by the UN as Sri Lanka’s “worst maritime disaster”, the biggest impact was not caused by the heavy fuel oil. Nor was it the hazardous chemicals on board, which included nitric acid, caustic soda and methanol. The most “significant” harm, according to the UN, came from the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets: nurdles.Since the disaster, nurdles have been washing up in their billions along hundreds of miles of the country’s coastline, and are expected to make landfall across Indian Ocean coastlines from Indonesia and Malaysia to Somalia. In some places they are up to 2 metres deep. They have been found in the bodies of dead dolphins and the mouths of fish. About 1,680 tonnes of nurdles were released into the ocean. It is the largest plastic spill in history, according to the UN report.Nurdles, the colloquial term for “pre-production plastic pellets”, are the little-known building block for all our plastic products. The tiny beads can be made of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other plastics. Released into the environment from plastic plants or when shipped around the world as raw material to factories, they will sink or float, depending on the density of the pellets and if they are in freshwater or saltwater.They are often mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other wildlife. In the environment, they fragment into nanoparticles whose hazards are more complex. They are the second-largest source of micropollutants in the ocean, by weight, after tyre dust. An astounding 230,000 tonnes of nurdles end up in oceans every year.Like crude oil, nurdles are highly persistent pollutants, and will continue to circulate in ocean currents and wash ashore for decades. They are also “toxic sponges”, which attract chemical toxins and other pollutants on to their surfaces.“The pellets themselves are a mixture of chemicals – they are fossil fuels,” says Tom Gammage, at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international campaign group. “But they act as toxic sponges. A lot of toxic chemicals – which in the case of Sri Lanka are already in the water – are hydrophobic [repel water], so they gather on the surface of microplastics.“Pollutants can be a million times more concentrated on the surface of pellets than in the water,” he says. “And we know from lab studies that when a fish eats a pellet, some of those pollutants come loose.”Nurdles also act as “rafts” for harmful bacteria such as E coli or even cholera, one study found, transporting them from sewage outfalls and agricultural runoff to bathing waters and shellfish beds. The phenomenon of “plastic rafting” is increasing.Yet nurdles, unlike substances such as kerosene, diesel and petrol, are not deemed hazardous under the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO’s) dangerous goods code for safe handling and storage. This is despite the threat to the environment from plastic pellets being known about for three decades, as detailed in a 1993 report from the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency on how the plastics industry could reduce spillages.Now environmentalists are joining forces with the Sri Lankan government in an attempt to turn the X-Press Pearl disaster into a catalyst for change.When the IMO’s marine environment protection committee met in London this week, Sri Lanka’s call for nurdles to be classified as hazardous goods attracted public support, with more than 50,000 people signing a petition. “There is nothing to stop what happened in Sri Lanka happening again,” says Gammage.Last year there were at least two nurdle spills. In the North Sea a broken container on the cargo ship MV Trans Carrier lost 10 tonnes of pellets, which washed up on the coasts of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In South Africa, a spill in August 2020 came after an accident in 2018, which affected up to 1,250 miles (2,000km) of coastline. Only 23% of the 49 tonnes that were spilled were recovered. In 2019, 342 containers of plastic pellets spilled into the North Sea. Awareness is growing about the huge threat posed by the tiny pellets. Last year two environmental protesters in the US were charged under a Louisiana state law with “terrorising” a plastics industry lobbyist when they left a box of nurdles outside his house as part of a campaign to stop the Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics opening a factory in Louisiana.The nurdles came from another Formosa plant in Texas, which had spilled vast amounts of the pellets into Lavaca Bay on the Gulf of Mexico (Formosa agreed to pay $50m to settle a lawsuit for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act). The charges against the activists, which carried a 15-year prison term, were later dropped.Such incidents are preventable, campaigners say. “The sinking of the X-Press Pearl – and spill of chemical products and plastic pellets into the seas of Sri Lanka – caused untold damage to marine life and destroyed local livelihoods,” says Hemantha Withanage, director of the Centre for Environmental Justice in Sri Lanka. Consumption of fish, the main protein source for 40% of Sri Lankans, has reduced drastically, he says. “It was a huge accident and unfortunately there’s no guidance from the IMO.”Classifying nurdles as hazardous – as is the case for explosives, flammable liquids and other environmentally harmful substances – would make them subject to strict conditions for shipping. “They must be stored below deck, in more robust packaging with clear labelling,” says Tanya Cox, marine plastic specialist at the conservation charity Flora & Fauna International. “They would also be subject to disaster-response protocols that can, if implemented in the event of an emergency, prevent the worst environmental impacts.”Welcome to the ‘plastisphere’: the synthetic ecosystem evolving at seaRead moreBut the nurdle can has been kicked down the road, with the IMO secretariat referring the issue to its pollution, prevention and response committee, which meets next year. Campaigners said it was disappointing that the Sri Lankan proposal was not properly discussed. The EIA’s Christina Dixon said: “The attitude of the committee members was extraordinary and showed a callous disregard for plastic pollution from ships as a threat to coastal communities, ecosystems and food security. This is simply unacceptable.”Meanwhile, the cleanup continues in Sri Lanka. Some of the 470 turtles, 46 dolphins and eight whales washing ashore have had nurdles in their bodies, says Withanage. While there is no proof the nurdles were responsible, he says: “I’ve seen some of the dolphins and they had plastic particles inside. There are 20,000 families who have had to stop fishing.“The fishermen say when they dip [themselves] into the water, the pellets get into their ears. It’s affected tourism, everything.”TopicsPlasticsSeascape: the state of our oceansPollutionSri LankaMarine lifeWildlifeOceansTravel and transportfeaturesReuse this content

Microplastic waste has become a serious threat to the ecosystem — plastic pollution in particular has grown exponentially in the past decade within Virginia, leading to disruption of the Chesapeake Bay and other large bodies of water. University researchers explain the significant harm that microplastics can have on the environment, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, and discuss plans of action to combat this detrimental effect. 
Microplastics are categorized as plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in size. These often enter the ocean through sewage systems and infiltrate soil and the air we breathe. Initially, researchers only knew of microplastics as the microscopic particles formed by larger plastic waste that was broken down by the sun. However, new findings have confirmed that microplastics come from the synthetic fibers in clothing and microbeads from cosmetic products, such as face exfoliants.

Research on microplastics is minimal, and as a result, researchers do not know the specific effects microplastics have on the environment. For other environmental issues such as landfill waste, pollution and the lack of fossil fuels, researchers have come up with timelines and proposed action plans — this has not yet been developed for microplastics, however. 
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce has voiced concerns about the lack of a large-scale and long-term collective database that contains visual survey information of microplastics along coasts and in the open ocean in order to support microplastic research. As a solution, the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information created the Marine Microplastic Database this year, a publicly accessible and regularly updated collection of global microplastic data from researchers around the world. 
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed Executive Order 77 in March, which outlines a plan to phase out single-use plastics and reduce solid waste at state agencies. In response to the order, the University created a single-use plastic reduction policy, which began with eliminating plastic waste in dining halls and replacing single-use plastic with sustainable and reusable takeaway containers and compostable silverware. The University is also looking into expanding their composting facilities and minimizing plastic bag use under this initiative. 
Similar initiatives have been implemented throughout the nation, and environmental concerns based on plastic pollution have pushed retailers to provide more sustainable bag options, pilot the trend of reusable containers and make plastic straws a rarity. Environmentally-conscious consumers have even boycotted stores that utilize single-use plastics.
Large plastics make their way into the ocean frequently and are easier to remove from the water compared to microplastics, which must be either filtered out of the ocean or entirely prevented from entering the ocean.
The existence of plastics in large bodies of water results in a multitude of issues — notably, the disruption of the ecosystem when animals ingest plastics and release toxic gas and foods containing tiny plastics. 

Asst. Engineering Prof. Lindsay Ivey-Burden has conducted research in environmental engineering — specifically engineering for a more sustainable future. Ivey-Burden explained further how these unsustainable materials end up in our environment. 
“When anything with synthetic fibers and polyester goes in the washer, the fibers sort of come out and they form very small micro [and] nano-plastics,” Ivey-Burden said. “And so then that goes into the wastewater system and back into the environment.”
Another way microplastics enter our oceans is through cosmetic products, especially those labeled as exfoliants. Exfoliants contain microbeads, which produce an abrasion towards the skin that removes dead skin cells from the surface of the face. These microbeads easily pass through household water filter systems and travel to large bodies of water.
In Virginia specifically, this affects the coast and its marine life. One of the most common ways microplastics damage the coastal system is through the oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. 
“Microplastics in the water make it much harder for [the oysters] to filter the water — which they’re supposed to do because they’re trying to eat all the algae — and they end up eating a bunch of plastic instead of algae,” Ivey-Burden said.
This leads the oysters to be put under an immense amount of stress. In order to fulfill their nutritional needs, they must filter through much more water in order to consume enough algae due to the alarming algae-plastic ratio present in the bay. 
Certain areas of the Chesapeake Bay also serve as hot spots for microplastics, acting as breeding grounds for chemicals and diseases that are picked up by microplastics and transported into the bay. Shorelines and underwater grass beds are the most common hot spots because it is easy for microplastics to settle in these areas. The black sea bass — a local fish commonly served at restaurants in coastal Virginia — is just one of the marine animals that feed near these hotspots and ingest the microplastics. 
While studies show that most microplastics do not move to the muscle tissue of fish — the part consumed by humans — scientists are still concerned with the effect of microplastics on human health. It is difficult to determine the individual impacts of these plastics on consumers as we are constantly in contact with microplastics, from bottled and tap water to clothing. Additionally, researchers know very little about the levels of toxicity that can hurt humans as well as how food chain processes may affect the toxicity of plastics.
Environmental and material scientists have been researching the toxicity of plastic materials and the solutions needed to decrease this toxicity to people and the environment. 
Researchers have explored solutions to microplastic waste, but some of these solutions are costly and may cause further destruction to the environment. Water filtration systems, for example, are one of the most discussed solutions. Filtration systems utilizing magnets, tiny nets and vacuums have all been tested by different researchers, but it is nearly impossible to filter out such small pieces of plastic without filtering out very crucial marine organisms as well. 
Robert Hale, microplastic expert and head researcher at the Virginia Institute for Marine Science, explained that implementing a filtration system is not realistic. 
“There are not just microplastics in the ocean, there are other organisms — especially floating organisms — that will get weeded out too,” Hale said. “There is just no way for these filters to sort effectively.”
Other solutions, such as creating more sustainable clothing, eliminating single-use plastics and establishing filtration systems in washing machines are all viable and would have a large impact on microplastic waste. However, from a cost standpoint, the likelihood that the general public will react favorably to increased taxes as a way to fund initiatives that stop plastic waste is very low. 
“The cost efficiency of plastic ends up feeding the monster and makes it very difficult for big corporations to increase production costs in order to be more environmentally friendly,” Hale said.
In order to eliminate microplastics, scientists agree that toxic additives that are in plastic waste must first be removed. Assoc. Engineering Prof. David Green has been studying plastic waste for much of his career, specifically plastic as a material and the microscopic properties associated with it. 
“By trying to remove certain additives that have proven to be toxic — things like car plasticizers, stabilizers and pigments — and making this plastic particle, but trying to design it so that when it gets wet and it gets into the landfill, that it doesn’t degrade off,” Green said.
Green also agreed that general reduction of plastics would help to eliminate microplastics. The elimination of single-use plastics at the University is a plan that, if modeled at other universities across the country, could make a big difference.

Quantifying the dangers of plastic pollution in the seas and nature, a team of researchers in a new study estimates that about half of the world’s seabirds have ingested plastic additives. The researchers from Japan, the United States and other countries studied 145 seafowls of 32 species from 16 areas of the world. They found brominated flame retardants …

Continue reading “Plastic pollution making its way into bodies of wildlife, humans”

Info

As the rest of the world is beginning to realize that fracking comes with more downsides than upsides, Australia is readying itself for a fracking boom, eyeing basins on Indigenous land.

13 hours ago

#australia, #climate, #gas, #plastic

Fabrice Monteiro’s best photograph: a spirit emerges from a rubbish dump in Senegal ‘The model is holding a child’s doll, looking out over the wreckage. It represents the future generations we’re condemning to environmental catastrophe’Outside Dakar, Senegal’s capital, is a rubbish dump with its own name: Mbeubeuss. The land on which it sits was once flat swampland. It began as a landfill site in 1968; today, it is a mountain of rubbish. It has accumulated so much plastic waste from the city that to reach it you have to drive on a road of compacted trash.This is not the Africa I grew up in. As a child here in the 1970s and 80s, it was not like this. But when I returned in 2012, I was shocked at what I found. Here in Senegal, there was plastic waste everywhere – at roadsides, in trees, everywhere. The younger generation don’t know any different: it’s just part of their environment now. I decided I wanted to shoot a series to raise awareness of environmental issues in Senegal, in the hope that people would realise that things do not have to be this way. I wanted to connect environmental issues with the cultural interests of the population, and started researching animism – the belief that objects and the natural world are imbued with spirits.Animism is connected to nature: it was about praising nature in all its different elements, working with it not against it, and living in harmony with it. Much of that was lost with globalisation and the modern way of living. With this series, I wanted to create a series of spirits sent by Mother Earth to warn humankind about its neglect and destruction of the environment.Each of the shots in the series addresses one environmental concern: coastal erosion, oil spills, sanitation and the burning of the land for agriculture, for example. But this image, the first I shot for the series, was about plastic consumption.I had the idea to make a dress that was a continuation of the trash mountain, so it looked as though this spirit was emerging from the piles of rubbish. I collaborated with a Senegalese stylist called Doulsy who had been working with recycled materials and can sew pretty much anything: he was the perfect person to create this costume. It needed to have a sense of scale: the model is sitting on a barrel of oil to give that height to the figure. We wanted to strike a balance between working with abandoned materials and making something that looked like a fashion editorial.But more than anything this image is a message: the model is holding a child’s doll, looking out over the wreckage. It represents the future generations that we’re condemning to environmental catastrophe through our overconsumption.At first, I only intended to make 10 images. They were all going to be shot in Senegal, and distributed to people here. But I felt uneasy when the work was finished: it felt like I was drawing attention to Africa for the wrong reasons. I was concerned it made the continent look uniquely polluted, as though this isn’t a problem all over the world. The only reason Europe doesn’t look like this is because it ships its waste out to us.So I continued the series, shooting all over the world, from Australia and the destruction of the coral reefs to the US and the damage wrought by coal mining. My work is about unity, about revealing the ways in which we are all connected, to each other and to nature. Taking this series global helped achieve that.My work has always been a mix of different things, a kind of blending of different disciplines and cultures denoted in the French word métissage. I’m European and I’m African. I grew up in a culture heavily influenced by voodoo, while also reading western comics. I’m a fashion photographer but I’m also an industrial engineer. My work represents all of that.Across all I do, I’m interested in identity and how we separate ourselves from those we consider the “other”. Throughout history, humankind has created an idea of the other in order to justify his or her exploitation. It is an idea that was central to slavery and colonialism. But it’s also at the heart of our approach to the environment. Only because we see ourselves as apart from the natural world, or superior to it, can we continue to treat it this way.Today, people talk about the anthropocene era: a geological term for a time in which nature is being fundamentally changed by humanity. But it suggests that humanity as a whole, not the specific capitalist system we have created, is the problem. In fact, it is the system that is the problem, and the system that needs to be opposed.Fabrice Monteiro’s CVBorn: Namur, Belgium, 1972.Trained: Self-taught.Influences: Alexander McQueen, Malcolm Ferdinand.High point: “Realising that I can make a living from my creative work.”Low point: “Working on environmental subjects and understanding how dire the situation is. It scares me.”Top tip: “Always try to explore outside boundaries.” Fabrice Monteiro has been shortlisted for Prix Pictet prize, to be announced on 15 December. The work of all 12 shortlisted artists will be at the V&A, London, from 16 December.TopicsArt and designMy best shotPhotographySenegalAfricaPlasticsPollutionfeaturesReuse this content

Heavy industries like shipping, steel and plastics have long opted out of climate action. That is starting to change.This article is part of our latest DealBook special report on the trends that will shape the coming decades.Heavy industry uses roughly 149 million terajoules of energy annually, or about 700 times more power than the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. The sector’s sheer scale makes reducing its carbon emissions difficult.It would require incredible amounts of heat and power for manufacturing and methods to store vast amounts of power for jets, tankers, and trucks. Trillions of dollars in global assets would need to be retired. And the main sectors in play — aviation, shipping, steel, plastics, aluminum, cement, chemicals and trucking — represent massive swaths of the economy, making it a political third rail of climate change action.But a combination of policy work, technological leaps and industry collaborations has made previously improbable changes into rallying points for more action.“You’ve actually got to move the whole economy,” said Helen Clarkson, the chief executive of Climate Group, a global nonprofit. “We don’t just get a free pass because it’s more difficult.”RMI, an organization in Colorado focused on sustainability that was previously known as the Rocky Mountain Institute, estimates that steel production, shipping, aviation and trucking alone contribute 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and if left untouched, will eat up twice the remaining global carbon budget to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050.There are still immense hurdles, including funding, policy support and unsolved technological challenges. But coalitions and industry groups, including the Energy Transition Commission, which released a 2018 report about such a transition, and Mission Possible Partnership (with support from RMI) have created detailed road maps for sector transformation. The Climate Group’s Steel Zero plan to build demand for carbon-free steel, begun in December, would have been ignored a few years ago, Ms. Clarkson said, but already counts leading global construction firms as supporters.Can some of history’s highest-polluting industries be trusted? Cate Hight, a principal at RMI, admits that greenwashing is possible. But the improving accuracy of digital tools that third-party groups use to track emissions means corporations can be held more accountable.To understand how rapidly the ground is shifting, look at steel, a global industry synonymous with smokestacks and responsible for 7 percent of CO2 emissions. Green steel isn’t just a vision, but a reality.Monica Quinteiro, a site manager for the steel maker SSAB, holds up a piece of H.B.I. (hot-briquetted iron) outside the Hybrit pilot facility in Sweden. Hybrit is a fossil-free steel process.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeginning in 2016, the Swedish steel maker SSAB began developing a fossil-free steel process called Hybrit, which is being tested by the automakers Volvo and Mercedes-Benz.The pilot process, where iron ore is refined, or reduced, with green hydrogen and renewable energy into oxygen-free sponge iron, which is then shaped with electric arc furnaces into finished steel, will scale up to an operational commercial plant by 2026, which will produce 1.35 million tons of sponge iron annually, said SSAB’s chief technology officer, Martin Pei. Competitors such as ArcelorMittal, Midrex and U.S. Steel have also invested in cutting carbon.Though positive, these steps represent just a start. The Mission Possible Partnership, a climate alliance between industrial leaders, financiers and policy groups like RMI, estimated that the steel industry needs to invest $30 billion every year just to meet increased demand; another $6 billion is needed to make that all net-zero compliant. Green hydrogen presents a particularly lofty challenge; decarbonizing all heavy industry with this high-potency option would require so much electricity that current global electrical generation would need to double, according to RMI.Other heavy industry sectors have focused first on reducing rather than completely eliminating their carbon output.Understand U.S.-China RelationsCard 1 of 6A tense era in U.S.-China ties.

How the chemicals industry’s pollution slipped under the radar While the industry has an important role to play in moving to low-carbon economies it’s also hugely carbon intensive and predicted to become more soIt’s one of the biggest industries in the world, consumes more than 10% of fossil fuels produced globally and emits an estimated 3.3 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, more than India’s annual emissions – yet the chemicals sector has largely slipped under the radar when it comes to climate.The shipping industry faces a climate crisis reckoning – will it decarbonize?Read moreThis sprawling industry produces a huge range of products, many of which support other industries – pesticides for agriculture, acids for mining, lubricants for machinery, ingredients in cleaning agents, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and plastics.While the industry has an important role to play in moving to low-carbon economies – providing coatings for solar panels, lightweight plastics to reduce vehicles’ energy consumption and insulating materials for buildings – it’s also hugely carbon intensive and predicted to become more so. Oil companies have been betting on chemicals as a way to remain profitable as the world pledges to turn away from fossil fuel energy. The International Energy Agency predicted that petrochemicals could account for 60% of oil demand in the next decade.The chemicals sector is the largest industrial user of oil and gas but it has the third-largest carbon footprint – behind steel and cement – because only about half of the fossil fuels that the industry consumes are burned for their energy. The rest is used as feedstock for products such as plastics with the emissions released only when these products reach the end of their lives, for example, when waste plastic packaging or an old mattress is incinerated.Lowering the industry’s emissions is possible but technically daunting. Plus this large, complex industry, which supports millions of jobs worldwide, has significant political and economic clout. “They’ve become a bit of an untouchable sector for many politicians,” said Jan-Justus Andreas, who leads industrial policy at the Norwegian environmental non-profit Bellona Europa.Yet the chemicals industry is finding itself increasingly under scrutiny – both from nations that need to meet ambitious emissions reduction targets and from researchers, scientists and campaigners calling on the industry to cut its polluting products.Moving away from dirty energyOne way to lower emissions is to focus on chemical plants – improving efficiency and switching to low-carbon energy.Most of the industry’s direct carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels to power chemical transformations, many of which take place at high temperatures and pressures. These emissions could be significantly reduced if the industry moves away from dirtier fuels such as coal.If renewable wind or solar energy is available, certain chemical processes that are already driven by electricity, such as the production of chlorine used to make other materials such as PVC pipes or solvents like chloroform, could immediately become low carbon. And chemists continue to look for ways to power traditionally heat-driven chemical transformations with electricity instead – such as the process of converting nitrogen to ammonia, mostly used for fertilizer, which requires temperatures of about 500C (932F).While chemical companies are counting on efficiency improvements and investing in renewable energy to meet their climate goals, many chemical products themselves cannot be decarbonized because they are made of carbon, said Martin Scheringer, an environmental chemist at the public research university ETH Zurich.Removing fossil fuels from the raw materials used to create carbon-based chemicals and materials is crucial, said Jonatan Kleimark of the non-profit ChemSec. Kleimark likens products made from fossil fuels – such as clothes, toys and paints – to a carbon debt, because the carbon embedded within them will only be emitted in the future. “The longer we wait to change, the larger debt we will build, and that will be very hard to do something about if we don’t start,” Kleimark said.Are clothes made from recycled materials really more sustainable?Read moreTo stop adding to this debt, chemicals and materials could be made with sources of carbon that are already above ground, such as plants. Bioplastics – made with plant materials such as sugar, corn or seaweed – are booming, for example, as companies and scientists try to remove fossil fuels from plastic production.Another idea is to turn waste products into raw materials for the chemical industry. Chemists have been using agricultural waste or waste plastics – even the ultimate waste material, carbon dioxide – as feedstocks. A Berlin-based startup, Made of Air, is attempting to create plastics from wood waste, while an Icelandic company, Carbon Recycling International, turns captured carbon dioxide emissions into methanol, used in fuels and for making other chemicals such as formaldehyde.‘Why don’t you deal with someone else first?’But all these ideas – especially those involving a shift in feedstocks – are very hard to implement.Technologies to turn agricultural or plastic waste into new chemicals are still unproven on a large scale and using carbon dioxide as a raw material will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy.Manufacturers making products with plants rather than fossil fuels need to ensure that they do not create new problems through deforestation, destroying wildlife habitat, raising food prices or increasing the use of water or pesticides. Biomass resources also tend to be more spread out, whereas traditionally, chemical plants stay close to where fossil fuel resources are easily accessible.“With renewable feedstocks, you will need to reestablish new supply chains,” said Zhanyun Wang, a senior scientists at ETH Zurich. In addition to delivering a steady stream of renewable raw materials to chemical plants, the new supply chains would need to be competitive with well-established ones making products from fossil fuels at low prices, Wang said.The clean power infrastructure requirements alone are tremendous. Electrifying Europe’s chemicals sector would require 4,900 terawatts of renewable electricity, according to an estimate by the European Chemical Industry Council, almost double the total amount of electricity Europe generated in 2019.“If you are a lobbyist for the chemical sector, showing those numbers helps you to put your head down again and say, ‘Look, firstly I’m too important and valuable, and secondly, it’s really, really difficult to deal with me, so why don’t you deal with someone else first,’” Andreas said.Currently, that someone else refers to the cement and steel industries, said Andreas. The internal competition between the three industries to avoid scrutiny is unhelpful, he said, because they could benefit from developing an industrial strategy together.The exhaust gases from steel and cement plants could serve as valuable feedstocks for chemical plants. All three industries need large-scale renewable electricity or carbon capture facilities, which require significant investment. The financial risks involved in building these new facilities could be mitigated, Andreas said, if the new facilities serve multiple operations instead of a single steel mill or fertilizer plant.Governments could also help build the necessary infrastructure or help companies gain access to renewable feedstocks, said Rebecca Dell, who directs the industry program at the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation.But with less than 30 years to 2050, time is short. If there are no delays, typically, it takes about seven years for companies to get a new process up and running, Dell said. “We have to move a lot faster.”Simplifying productsOne important, but neglected, lever for cutting emissions from the chemical sector is to simply use and produce fewer chemicals. “That would lead very directly to a reduction in CO2 emissions and also reduce the toxification of humans and the environment,” Scheringer said.The overuse of materials such as plastics, fertilizers and other synthetic chemicals has caused devastating effects on ecosystems and human health. Plastic debris chokes waterways and wildlife, fertilizer-laden runoff from fields can cause algal blooms and create dead zones in coastal areas.These impacts have led policymakers and consumers to cut back – for instance, many cities and countries now have prohibitions on some single-use plastics. “It’s an attempt to reduce plastic itself as a pollutant in the landscape, more than concerns about greenhouse gases, but we can make simultaneous progress on more than one front,” said Dell.Studies have also found that being more precise about applying fertilizer could save farmers money and keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.It is less straightforward to cut back on some of the chemicals that are used to make consumer products, but Scheringer, Wang and others have proposed a way to start. Alarmed by the dangers of some cancer-causing PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”, researchers have suggested eliminating PFAS from their “nice-to-have” applications – such as nonstick cookware, long-lasting mascara, or water-repellent surfer shorts that don’t need the level of high performance that “forever chemicals” confer.‘Forever chemicals’: the hidden threat from the toxic PFAS on your shelfRead moreThe researchers recommend that “forever chemicals” be used only in really important products, such as protective gear or medical devices that save lives. The same philosophy could be applied to identify and eliminate other chemicals that have been unnecessarily formulated in products, such as adding antimicrobials to soaps that can already kill germs.Simplifying the chemical ingredients in products has an added benefit: they are easier to take apart or recycle when they are no longer useful. Wang points to the example of carbon black, the chemical used as a pigment in food takeout boxes. The pigment serves no technical function other than providing colour and it is used because food looks more appealing set against a black background, Wang said. But the pigment also means the takeout boxes are invisible to devices that use light to sort plastics at sorting facilities, making them impossible to recycle.The chemical sector is producing more than consumers need, Wang said: “The business model is driven by how many chemicals you sell, it’s not necessarily driven by the added societal value of the chemical.”But the “enormous demand” for products is also a big driver – and perhaps harder to address, said Kleimark. “We’re standing in front of a really, really big challenge because there we cannot rely on technologies, but on changing the way we do things today.”TopicsEnvironmentGreen lightClimate crisisGreenhouse gas emissionsChemistryCarbon capture and storage (CCS)PlasticsOil and gas companiesfeaturesReuse this content