Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

Microplastics in sewage: a toxic combination that is poisoning our landGeorge MonbiotPolicy failure and lack of enforcement have left Britain’s waterways and farmland vulnerable to ‘forever chemicals’ We have recently woken up to a disgusting issue. Rather than investing properly in new sewage treatment works, water companies in the UK – since they were privatised in 1989 – have handed £72 bn in dividends to their shareholders. Our sewerage system is antiquated and undersized, and routinely bypassed altogether, as companies allow raw human excrement to pour directly into our rivers. They have reduced some of them to stinking, almost lifeless drains.This is what you get from years of policy failure and the near-collapse of monitoring and enforcement by successive governments. Untreated sewage not only loads our rivers with excessive nutrients, but it’s also the major source of the microplastics that now pollute them. It contains a wide range of other toxins, including PFASs: the “forever chemicals” that were the subject of the movie Dark Waters. This may explain the recent apparent decline in otter populations: after recovering from the organochlorine pesticides used in the 20th century, they are now being hit by new pollutants.Microplastics found deep in lungs of living people for first timeRead moreBut here’s a question scarcely anyone is asking: what happens when our sewerage system works as intended? What happens when the filth is filtered out and the water flowing out of sewage treatment plants is no longer hazardous to life? I stumbled across the answer while researching my book, Regenesis, and I’m still reeling from it. When the system works as it is meant to, it is likely to be just as harmful as it is when bypassed by unscrupulous water companies. It’s an astonishing and shocking story, but it has hardly been touched by the media.We are often told that the microplastics entering the sewage system, which come from tyre crumb washing off the roads, the synthetic clothes we wear and many other sources, are a wicked problem, almost impossible to solve. But a modern, well-run sewage treatment works removes 99% of these fibres from wastewater. So far, so good. But – and at this point you may wish to decide whether to laugh or cry – having screened them out of the water supply, the treatment companies then release them back into the wild. In the UK, of the sewage sludge screened out by treatment works, 87% is sent to farms. The microplastics so carefully removed from wastewater by the treatment process are then spread across the land in the sewage sludge the water companies sell to farmers as fertiliser.Then what happens to them? Some – perhaps most – wash off the soil and into the rivers: in other words, whether sewage is screened or not, the microplastics it contains end up in the same place. Others accumulate in the soil.It’s hard to decide which is worse. Experiments show how microplastics cascade through soil food webs, poisoning some of the animals that inhabit it. When they decompose into nanoparticles, they can be absorbed by soil fungi and accumulated by plants. We currently have no idea what the consequences of eating these contaminated crops might be.The testing of sewage sludge has not been updated since 1989, so there is no checking for plastic particles or most other synthetic chemicals. A study commissioned but then kept secret by the government found that the sewage sludge being spread on our farmland contains a remarkable cocktail of dangerous substances, including PFASs, benzo(a)pyrene (a group 1 carcinogen), dioxins, furans, PCBs and PAHs, all of which are persistent and potentially cumulative.Where did they come from? Because our waste streams are not separated and poorly regulated, anywhere and everywhere. The major source of PFASs in sewage is probably the building trade. “Forever chemicals” are found in paints, sealants and coatings, caulks, adhesives and roofing materials. Evidence sent to me by an industry insider suggests that regulators the world over turn a blind eye to liquid waste disposal on construction sites. Tools are washed and surfaces sprayed with water that’s then poured down the drain. Without regulation, contractors have no incentive to use technologies that ensure liquid waste is contained. Why go to this expense if your competitors don’t have to?Raw sewage ‘pumped into English bathing waters 25,000 times in 2021’Read moreCould this story get any worse? Oh yes. Microplastics are sometimes spread deliberately on the soil by farmers, to make it more friable. Across Europe, thousands of tonnes of plastic are also added to fertilisers, to prevent them from caking; or to delay the release of the nutrients they contain. Fertiliser pellets are coated with plastic films – polyurethane, polystyrene, PVC, polyacrylamide and other synthetic polymers­– some of which are known to be toxic and all of which disintegrate into microplastics. It is almost unbelievable that the deliberate contamination of agricultural soils with persistent and cumulative pollutants is both widespread and legal.This practice, as well as the spreading of contaminated sewage sludge, urgently needs to be stopped, before large tracts of farmland become unusable, and the damage to ecosystems, from soil to sea, irreversible. It’s tragic that the nutrients in sewage sludge can’t safely be used, but it seems to me that there’s no immediate solution, in our dysfunctional system, but to incinerate it. Only when toxic, accumulating chemicals are banned, waste streams separated and proper tests conducted will sewage be safe to spread.Right now we are poisoning the land and, in all likelihood, poisoning ourselves. It could turn out to be one of the most deadly issues of all. And hardly anyone knows.
George Monbiot will discuss his book Regenesis at a Guardian Live event on Monday 30 May. Book tickets in-person or online here

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Amazon is facing vote from its shareholders and environmentalists this week over its use of plastic packaging.

Seattleites may have caught wind of the campaign around Amazon already, through billboards and yard signs featuring turtles caught in plastic. The message: stop using its flimsy plastic packaging that too easily ends up in marine ecosystems.Amazon began its annual investors meeting at 9 a.m. Wednesday. It was expected to advise shareholders to vote “no” on a resolution that would require the corporation to cut down plastic pollution. The resolution would require the company to take two steps it never has before on plastics. Those are: disclose how much plastic packaging it uses, and strategize how to move away from the thin, landfill bound packaging it uses now. The backers say there is hope for this to pass.

“In India, legislation was passed that required Amazon to move away from plastic packaging, and they’ve since done so,” says Sara Holzknecht with the group Oceana.Oceana has researched Amazon’s use of plastic packaging worldwide and is backing this resolution. They also helped run the public campaign that had Seattle homeowners placing yard signs with a plea to Amazon.Holzknecht says Amazon is one of the largest corporate users of flimsy plastics, which are hard (if not impossible) to recycle curbside. She says its partly a business case for the corporation. “Amazon, with its resources, is certainly an industry leader in a lot of ways and could be innovating away from plastics and away from paper mailers.” Again, she says, it has already made innovations in India when it was legally bound to.A report from Oceana estimates that up to 22 million pounds of Amazon’s plastic packaging ended up in marine ecosystems in 2019. Another way of putting it, says Holzknecht, is that in 2020 alone “the company used enough plastic to encircle our globe nearly 600 times in the form of plastic air pillows.”

Amazon executives argue the company is already committed to addressing plastic pollution. But, Amazon is lobbying shareholders to vote no.Amazon executives say, in a letter to investors, they share the concerns outlined in the resolution and are engaged in efforts to develop recycling infrastructure. In addition, the company says it plans to replace its mailing envelopes with a recyclable padded mailer by the end of this year in the U.S.The resolution, if passed, would require the company to strategize how it could reduce plastic use by at least one-third.

In India, the large mammals see trash in village dumps as a buffet, but researchers found they are inadvertently consuming packaging and utensils.Some Asian elephants are a little shy about their eating habits. They sneak into dumps near human settlements at the edges of their forest habitats and quickly gobble up garbage — plastic utensils, packaging and all. But their guilty pleasure for fast food is traveling with them — elephants are transporting plastic and other human garbage deep into forests in parts of India.“When they defecate, the plastic comes out of the dung and gets deposited in the forest,” said Gitanjali Katlam, an ecological researcher in India.While a lot of research has been conducted on the spread of plastics from human pollution into the world’s oceans and seas, considerably less is known about how such waste moves with wildlife on land. But elephants are important seed dispersers, and research published this month in the Journal for Nature Conservation shows that the same process that keeps ecosystems functioning might carry human-made pollutants into national parks and other wild areas. This plastic could have negative effects on the health of elephants and other species that have consumed the material once it has passed through the large mammals’ digestive systems.Dr. Katlam first noticed elephants feeding on garbage on trail cameras during her Ph.D. work at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was studying which animals visited garbage dumps at the edge of villages in northern India. At the time, she and her colleagues also noticed plastic in the elephants’ dung. With the Nature Science Initiative, a nonprofit focused on ecological research in northern India, Dr. Katlam and her colleagues collected elephant dung in Uttarakhand state.The researchers found plastic in all of the dung near village dumps and in the forest near the town of Kotdwar. They walked only a mile or two into the forest in their search for dung, but the elephants probably carried the plastic much farther, Dr. Katlam said. Asian elephants take about 50 hours to pass food and can walk six miles to 12 miles in a day. In the case of Kotdwar, this is concerning because the town is only a few miles from a national park.“This adds evidence to the fact that plastic pollution is ubiquitous,” said Agustina Malizia, an independent researcher with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina who was not involved in this research but studied the effects of plastic on land ecosystems. She says the study is “extremely necessary,” as it might be one of the first reports of a very large land animal ingesting plastic.Plastic comprised 85 percent of the waste found in the elephant dung from Kotdwar. The bulk of this came from food containers and cutlery, followed by plastic bags and packaging. But the researchers also found glass, rubber, fabric and other waste. Dr. Katlam said the elephants were likely to have been seeking out containers and plastic bags because they still had leftover food inside. The utensils probably were eaten in the process.While trash passes through their digestive systems, the elephants may be ingesting chemicals like polystyrene, polyethylene, bisphenol A and phthalates. It is uncertain what damage these substances can cause, but Dr. Katlam worries that they may contribute to declines in elephant population numbers and survival rates.“It is known from other animals that their stomachs may get filled with plastics, causing mechanical damage,” said Carolina Monmany Garzia, who works with Dr. Malizia in Argentina and was not involved in Dr. Katlam’s study.Other animals may consume the plastic again once it is transported into the forest through the elephants’ dung. “It has a cascading effect,” Dr. Katlam said.Dr. Katlam said that governments in India should take steps to manage their solid waste to avoid these kinds of issues. But individuals can help, too, by separating their food waste from the containers so that plastic does not end up getting eaten so much by accident.“This is a very simple step, but a very important step,” she said.“We need to realize and understand how the overuse of plastics is affecting the environment and the organisms that inhabit them,” Dr. Mealizia said.

May 23, 2022 11:32 5 min read Visiting the Galápagos Islands — the Ecuadorian archipelago made famous by British geologist and naturalist Charles Darwin, and known for its giant tortoises — is no easy task. If the exorbitant airfares (an average of USD 400 for a round-trip from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city) do not deter visitors, the entry fees (USD 100 for most tourists aged over 12), multiple forms, and airport security might.  The Galápagos slap hefty fees on tourists as a way of financing biodiversity conservation services and controlling the influx of people to the ecologically-sensitive islands. Since 1998, the Galápagos have been run under a… Access all of The Brazilian Report Already a subscriber? Log In

Plastic particles smaller than 5mm (known as microplastics) are well-documented pollutants in ocean and freshwater habitats. The discovery of microplastics in the most remote rivers of the Himalayas and the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean has sparked widespread concern. But how much microplastic lies closer to home – buried in the soil where food is grown?

Our latest study estimated that between 31,000 and 42,000 tonnes of microplastics (or 86 trillion – 710 trillion microplastic particles) are spread on European farmland soils each year, mirroring the concentration of microplastics in ocean surface waters.

The cause is microplastic-laden fertilisers derived from sewage sludge diverted from wastewater treatment plants. These are commonly spread on farmland as a renewable source of fertiliser throughout European countries, in part due to EU directives that aim to promote a circular waste economy.

As well as creating a massive reservoir of environmental microplastics, this practice is effectively undoing the benefit of removing these particles from wastewater. Spreading microplastics onto farmland will eventually return them to natural watercourses, as rain washes water on the surface of soil into rivers, or it eventually infiltrates groundwater.

Microplastics filtered from sewage sludge at the wastewater treatment plant.
James Lofty, Author provided

Wastewater treatment plants remove solid contaminants (such as plastics and other large particles) from raw sewage and drain water using a series of settling tanks. This produces an effluent of clean water that can be released to the environment. The floating material and settled particles from these tanks are combined to form the sludge used as fertiliser.

We found that up to 650 million microplastic particles between 1mm and 5mm in size entered a wastewater treatment plant in south Wales, UK, every day. All of these particles were separated from the incoming sewage and diverted into the sludge rather than being released with the clean effluent. This demonstrates how effective default wastewater treatment can be for removing microplastics.

At this facility, each gram of sewage sludge contained up to 24 microplastic particles, which was roughly 1% of its weight. In Europe, an estimated 8 million to 10 million tonnes of sewage sludge is generated each year, with around 40% sent to farmland. The spreading of sewage sludge on agricultural soil is widely practised across Europe, owing to the nitrogen and phosphorus it offers crops.

UK farms also use sewage sludge as fertiliser. In our study, the UK had the highest amount of microplastic pollution within its soils across all European nations (followed by Spain, Portugal and Germany). Between 500 and 1,000 microplastic particles are applied to each square metre of agricultural land in the UK every year.

The relative microplastic burden on European farm soil from direct recycling of sewage sludge.
James Lofty, Author provided

A poisoned circular waste economy

At present, there are no adequate solutions to the release of microplastics into the environment from wastewater treatment plants.

Microplastics removed from wastewater are effectively transported to the land, where they reside until being returned to waterways. According to a study conducted in Ontario, Canada, 99% of microplastics in agricultural soil were transported away from where the sludge was initially applied.

Until then, they have the potential to harm life in the soil. As well as being easily consumed and absorbed by animals and plants, microplastics pose a serious threat to the soil ecosystem because they leach toxic chemicals and transport hazardous pathogens. Experiments have shown that the presence of microplastics can stunt earthworm growth and cause them to lose weight.

Microplastics can also change the acidity, water holding capacity and porosity of soil. This affects plant growth and performance by altering the way roots bury into the soil and take up nutrients.

There is currently no European legislation to limit the amount of microplastics embedded in sewage sludge used as fertiliser. Germany has set upper limits for impurities like glass and plastic, allowing up to 0.1% of wet fertiliser weight to constitute plastics larger than 2mm in size. According to the results from the wastewater treatment plant in south Wales, applying sewage sludge would be prohibited if similar legislation were in place in the UK.

For the time being, landowners are likely to continue recycling sewage sludge as sustainable fertiliser, despite the risk of contaminating soils and eventually rivers and the ocean with microplastics.

Cheryl Auger was stunned this month when one of her Pasadena neighbors and friends received a flier in the mail featuring her state assemblyman, with a line stating, “Higher taxes on plastic products will enrich corporate interests with no guarantee of reducing plastic waste.” Although she didn’t know it at the time, Auger’s friend was on the receiving end of a plastics industry campaign to pressure state lawmakers into weakening proposed restrictions on single-use containers, which legislators are mulling in bill form and which could become a November ballot measure. “What is surprising to me is a lack of culpability ,” said Auger, a plastic waste activist.The mailers, sent by a group calling itself the Environmental Solutions Coalition, assert without attribution that bans on single-use plastics “will have a devastating impact on working families” by driving up costs for consumers. Unmentioned in the mailings are that plastics manufacturers and other industries are financing the coalition. The fliers are all aimed at Democrats, largely in Southern California, possibly an attempt to pressure them into derailing the November ballot measure by enacting watered-down legislation the industry can accept.“I interpret it as a message, as a warning to members of the Legislature,” said Assembly Member Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), whose constituents received one of the mailers. “If that’s the intent, it’s backfired because it’s made us even more committed to trying to pass meaningful legislation to crack down on plastic pollution.”In the current legislative session, lawmakers are working on a bill designed to reduce plastic waste. If they are unable to draft legislation by June 30, the issue will go straight to voters as a ballot measure.The initiative, the California Recycling and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act, would require all single-use plastic packaging and food ware used in California to be recyclable, reusable, refillable or compostable by 2030. Single-use plastic production would have to be reduced by 25% by 2030. The costs of the program are to be borne by the producers and distributors of single-use plastics, and the language explicitly states the costs cannot be passed on to the consumer. Climate & Environment Big fight brewing over California ballot measure to reduce single-use plastics Environmentalists and industry are at odds over a November ballot initiative that would reduce single-use plastics and polystyrene food containers. U.S. industries for decades have formed seeming “grass-roots groups” to push agendas such as lower taxes and fewer restrictions on tobacco and pollution. The groups behind the Environmental Solutions Coalition include the California Business Roundtable and the American Chemistry Council, which includes plastics manufacturers and oil companies. Members of the coalition have stated they’d prefer to see the issue settled in the Legislature. The coalition’s mailers targeted constituents of at least five lawmakers — Assembly Members Gabriel, Chris Holden (D-Pasadena), Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella), Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks) and Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda). None were consulted before their images were included in the mailers, according to Michael Bustamante, a spokesman for the coalition. Holden could not be reached for comment, and Garcia’s office said it was unaware of the fliers.Irwin sent a statement saying she preferred a legislative solution to the problem of plastic waste, and as yet has not “taken a position on the single use plastics initiative.” Bauer-Kahan said she had never heard of the Environmental Solutions Coalition, “nor have I had any conversations with them regarding any initiative.” She said she supported a reduction of single-use plastics and she has consistently supported legislation to “curb plastic pollution.”Like his colleagues, Gabriel said he wants the Legislature to solve the issue, but described the mailers and intimidation campaign as “unsettling” and “confusing.”“As a pure matter of politics, I think it’s a very poorly done piece,” he said about the flier’s messaging. “I don’t know anyone who can figure out exactly what it’s trying to communicate.”In California and some other states, plastics restrictions are gaining momentum because of evolving research into their health and environmental impacts. Plastics never fully degrade. They just break down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics. These particles often contain harmful chemical additives such as flame retardants or plasticizers. Reports suggest that humans consume roughly a credit card’s worth of microplastic each week.Over the last year, research has shown the presence of these particles in human blood, healthy lung tissue and meconium — the first bowel movement of a newborn. They are also found in marine organisms, ocean water, air and soil.Some researchers project that by 2050, there may be more plastic by weight in the world’s oceans than there are fish. Climate & Environment State accuses Exxon Mobil of deceiving public, perpetuating ‘myth’ of plastics recycling

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta claims Exxon Mobil and other corporations have perpetuated the ‘myth’ that recycling will solve the plastics crisis. Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, said he found it revealing that the plastics industry decided to hide behind layers of trade associations and front groups, instead of making its pitch directly to voters. “This kind of deceptive action is exactly the issue that the attorney general raised a couple weeks ago,” said Lapis, whose nonprofit group has advocated on waste and recycling issues since 1977.Last month, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, announced a first-of-its kind investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries for their alleged role in causing and exacerbating a global crisis in plastic waste pollution. Bonta accused them of “perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.”Bustamante, the spokesman for the Environmental Solutions Coalition, also was unable to succinctly sum up the message of the fliers, but said they targeted legislators in the Los Angeles area who he considered “part of a common-sense coalition.” He said the mailer was sent to the constituents of lawmakers who “have historically been on the record as paying very close attention to the kinds of things and issues that could increase costs to their constituents.” The fliers do not explicitly mention the pending legislation or the initiative, but stated that “adding billions of dollars in higher costs on the backs of working families is the wrong way to do it.”Auger, a cybersecurity specialist who co-founded a refill store in Pasadena to help consumers reduce plastic waste, said she was not completely surprised by the front group’s scare tactics. The industry, she said, has “stymied anything significant on plastics since the 1990s.”