Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

Researchers found that small sea creatures exist in equal number with pieces of plastic in parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which could have implications for cleaning up ocean pollution.In 2019, the French swimmer Benoit Lecomte swam over 300 nautical miles through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to raise awareness about marine plastic pollution.As he swam, he was often surprised to find that he wasn’t alone.“Every time I saw plastic debris floating, there was life all around it,” Mr. Lecomte said.The patch was less a garbage island than a garbage soup of plastic bottles, fishing nets, tires and toothbrushes. And floating at its surface were blue dragon nudibranchs, Portuguese man-o-wars, and other small surface-dwelling animals, which are collectively known as neuston.Scientists aboard the ship supporting Mr. Lecomte’s swim systematically sampled the patch’s surface waters. The team found that there were much higher concentrations of neuston within the patch than outside it. In some parts of the patch, there were nearly as many neuston as pieces of plastic.“I had this hypothesis that gyres concentrate life and plastic in similar ways, but it was still really surprising to see just how much we found out there,” said Rebecca Helm, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and co-author of the study. “The density was really staggering. To see them in that concentration was like, wow.”The findings were posted last month on bioRxiv and have not yet been subjected to peer review. But if they hold up, Dr. Helm and other scientists say, it may complicate efforts by conservationists to remove the immense and ever-growing amount of plastic in the patch.The world’s oceans contain five gyres, large systems of circular currents powered by global wind patterns and forces created by Earth’s rotation. They act like enormous whirlpools, so anything floating within one will eventually be pulled into its center. For nearly a century, floating plastic waste has been pouring into the gyres, creating an assortment of garbage patches. The largest, the Great Pacific Patch, is halfway between Hawaii and California and contains at least 79,000 tons of plastic, according to the Ocean Cleanup Foundation. All that trash turns out to be a great foothold for living things.The snail Recluzia species, viewed from the side oral end.Denis RieckViolet snail Janthina species, viewed from the side, with a large bubble raft made from snail mucus emerging from the water.Denis RieckBlue button Porpita species, viewed from above.Denis RieckThe floating anemone Actinecta species, viewed from the side, with the aboral float at the surface.Denis RieckDr. Helm and her colleagues pulled many individual creatures out of the sea with their nets: by-the-wind sailors, free-floating hydrozoans that travel on ocean breezes; blue buttons, quarter-sized cousins of the jellyfish; and violet sea-snails, which build “rafts” to stay afloat by trapping air bubbles in a soap-like mucus they secrete from a gland in their foot. They also found potential evidence that these creatures may be reproducing within the patch.“I wasn’t surprised,” said Andre Boustany, a researcher with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. “We know this place is an aggregation area for drifting plastics, so why would it not be an aggregation area for these drifting animals as well?”Little is known about neuston, especially those found far from land in the heart of ocean gyres.“They are very difficult to study because they occur in the open ocean and you cannot collect them unless you go on marine expeditions, which cost a lot of money,” said Lanna Cheng, a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego.Because so little is known about the life history and ecology of these creatures, this study, though severely limited in size and scope, offers valuable insights to scientists.Blue sea dragons, Glaucus species, viewed from above with dark blue ventral surfaces.Denis RieckBy-the-wind sailor Velella species, viewed from above.Denis RieckA Portuguese man-of-war, Physalia species, viewed from the side, with the float above the surface.Denis RieckA buoy barnacle, Dosima fascicularis, viewed from the side, with aboral white float at the water’s surface.Denis RieckBut Dr. Helm said there is another implication of the study: Organizations working to remove plastic waste from the patch may also need to consider what the study means for their efforts.There are several nonprofit organizations working to remove floating plastic from the Great Pacific Patch. The largest, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation in the Netherlands, developed a net specifically to collect and concentrate marine debris as it is pulled across the sea’s surface by winds and currents. Once the net is full, a ship takes its contents to land for proper disposal.Dr. Helm and other scientists warn that such nets threaten sea life, including neuston. Although adjustments to the net’s design have been made to reduce bycatch, Dr. Helm believes any large-scale removal of plastic from the patch could pose a threat to its neuston inhabitants.“When it comes to figuring out what to do about the plastic that’s already in the ocean, I think we need to be really careful,” she said. The results of her study “really emphasize the need to study the open ocean before we try to manipulate it, modify it, clean it up or extract minerals from it.”Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, disagreed with Dr. Helm.“It’s too early to reach any conclusions on how we should react to that study,” he said. “You have to take into account the effects of plastic pollution on other species. We are collecting several tons of plastic every week with our system — plastic that is affecting the environment.”Plastic in the ocean poses a threat to marine life, killing more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals, according to UNESCO. Everything from fish to whales can become entangled, and animals often mistake it for food and end up starving to death with stomachs full of plastic.Ocean plastics that don’t end up asphyxiating an albatross or entangling an elephant seal eventually break down into microplastics, which penetrate every branch of the food web and are nearly impossible to remove from the environment.One thing everyone agrees on is that we need to stop the flow of plastic into the ocean.“We need to turn off the tap,” Mr. Lecomte said.

Taipei, April 30 (CNA) The manufacturing, import and sale of food packaging containing polyvinylchloride (PVC) will be banned in Taiwan starting in July 2023, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) announced on Friday.Wang Yueh-bin (王嶽斌), executive director of the EPA Recycling Fund Management Board, explained that although it is less commonly used compared to the past, plastic containers using PVC can still be found on some dairy packaging.PVC packaging can release plasticizers when used to store liquids, and overexpose to the substance can lead to the risk of cancer when the liquids are consumed, Wang said, noting that this plastic material may also contain stabilizers which can also harm people’s health.When burned, PVC containers can release dioxins and heavy metals, and while incinerators use filters to catch these materials, contaminated ashes might still leach into the ground to pollute the environment, he added.The ban on PVC packaging has already become an international norm, the EPA official said, citing South Korea and New Zealand as one of them.With this new measure, Wang said Taiwan can expect to reduce some 79 metric tons of PVC food packaging every year.According to the EPA, the ban on PVC packaging will fall under Article 21 of the Waste Disposal Act, which stipulates that for articles such as packaging or containers that pollute the environment, “the central competent authority may officially announce their prohibition of use and the restriction of manufacturing, import and sales of such items.”When the ban gets underway in July next year, the EPA said people caught selling PVC food packaging will be fined anywhere between NT$1,200 (US$40.74) and NT$6,000, while those caught manufacturing and importing such items will be subject to a NT$60,000-NT$300,000 fine.

Americans are recycling far less plastic, according to an analysis published Wednesday, with rates falling below 6 percent in 2021. The new findings come as this waste has rebounded from the pandemic, despite global efforts to curb pollution.The research from Beyond Plastics and the Last Beach Cleanup aims to shed light on the state of recycling in the United States given a delay in federal reporting. The Environmental Protection Agency last published recycling rates in 2020 based off data through 2018 and did not update it last year.Drawing on the most recent EPA data available and last year’s plastic-waste exports, the new report estimates that Americans recycled 5 to 6 percent of their plastics, down from the 8.7 percent in 2018. But the real figure could be even lower, it added, given factors such as the plastic waste collected for recycling that is “sent to cement kilns and burned.”“The plastics industry must stop lying to the public about plastics recycling. It does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that,” said Judith Enck, who heads Beyond Plastics and served as a regional EPA administrator during the Obama administration. “Instead, we need consumer brand companies and governments to adopt policies that reduce the production, usage and disposal of plastics.”Though plastics use fell in the early days of the pandemic, consumption has surged along with economic activity. Meanwhile, plastic waste exports — which the authors said are counted toward recycling numbers without proof — have plummeted in the wake of import bans by countries such as China and Turkey.Plastics production in on track to unleash more emissions than coal-fired power plants by the end of the decade, research has found, with the industry emitting at least 232 million tons of greenhouse gases each year.Millions of tons of plastic end up in the oceans each year, ensnaring turtles and other wildlife. Even Mount Everest has not escaped microplastics pollution. The United States contributes most to this deluge, according to a National Academy of Sciences study, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person.Postcards from the town in Japan that’s aims to produce zero waste — and is nearly thereAt the current rate of emissions, the world will burn through its remaining “carbon budget” by 2030 — putting the ambitious goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) irrevocably out of reach, according to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change.In an emailed statement, the EPA told The Washington Post it is “aware of the report and will review the data.” The agency said it expects to update its “Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling” webpage later this year.According to the United States’ first national recycling strategy, the EPA is aiming to achieve a 50 percent recycling rate by 2030. Some critics faulted that strategy for not taking aim at current levels of plastics production.The nation’s plastic recycling rate peaked at 9.5 percent in 2014, according to EPA data, “although that number also counted U.S. exported material as recycled when it was largely burned or dumped,” the report states.High recycling rates for other materials such as post-consumer paper, cardboard and metal “prove that recycling can be an effective way to reclaim valuable natural material resources,” the report said. “The problem lies not with the concept or process of recycling but with the material itself — it is plastic recycling that has always failed.”Plastics, the vast majority of which are made from fossil fuels, can take hundreds of years to decompose. Rather than fully degrade, plastic breaks down into smaller pieces called “microplastics.” Over the course of a lifetime, individuals on average unknowingly consume more than 44 pounds of microplastics.Globally, only 9 percent of plastic is recycled, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) first Global Plastics Outlook, which was published in February. Fifty percent ends up in landfills, 19 percent is incinerated, and 22 percent is “mismanaged” and ends up in uncontrolled dump sites, is burned in open pits or ends up as litter.“Despite the stark failure of plastics recycling, the plastics, packaging, and products industries have waged a decades-long misinformation campaign to perpetuate the myth that plastic is recyclable,” the report states.In late April, California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened an investigation into fossil fuel and petrochemical industries’ role in “causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis.” Bonta’s office issued a subpoena to ExxonMobil, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, seeking information into its efforts to mislead consumers about the efficacy of plastics recycling.Not a single plastic service item “has even been recyclable” by the legal definition outlined by the Federal Trade Commission “green guides,” the report found, including the polypropylene cups and lids touted by Starbucks.In March, the United Nations adopted a first-of-its-kind, legally binding treaty to “end plastic pollution.” The details of the treaty will be hashed out by 2024.

Pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastics, nanoparticles, and other potentially toxic synthetic materials are being released into the environment in ever greater amounts. A recent study warns that action is needed to better monitor and understand their impacts on terrestrial mammals in the tropics.Mortality and mass die offs could result, but sublethal effects — such as reduced fitness or fertility — are perhaps of greater concern in the long-term, warn experts.In the research, scientists raise concerns over an increasing load of chemicals released into the tropical environment, with little monitoring conducted to understand the impacts on wildlife.Another study released this year reported that the novel entities planetary boundary has been transgressed. Novel entities include pesticides and other synthetic substances. The boundary was declared breached because scientific assessments can’t keep up with new chemicals entering the environment. Tropical mammals are living in an ever-changing chemical landscape warns a recent study, with wildlife increasingly exposed to an array of plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and nanoparticles. The recent study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, warns that this underrecognized threat requires urgent action.
Colin Chapman, a biologist and professor at George Washington University, and his colleagues reviewed the body of scientific literature investigating the scope of the “chemical landscape” inhabited by tropical terrestrial mammals. A recurrent theme: a paucity of studies covering the topic offered only glimpses of the effects of pollutants.
“As a society we are intentionally poisoning tropical wildlife,” Chapman told Mongabay. “We don’t know the effects of it, but we know we’re poisoning them. We know we’re poisoning ourselves and despite this knowledge, we’re not acting.”
Research in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna biome found that lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) accumulate pesticides and heavy metals, causing concern about potential health impacts. Image by Bernard DUPONT via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Living in a chemical world
Earlier this year, an international group of researchers centered around the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) warned that the manufacture, use and disposal of synthetic chemicals — referred to by scientists as novel entities — has passed a crucial and dangerous environmental threshold, threatening “a safe operating space for humanity.” The novel entities pollution problem is just one of nine planetary boundaries — six of which, including climate change, have already seen their safe limits violated by human actions.
In 2019, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimated that the global chemical industry’s production capacity had reached 1.2 billion tons. In 2017, that industry was worth 5.68 trillion, a figure projected to double by 2030. In declaring the breach of the novel entities planetary boundary in January 2022, researchers emphasized that it has become impossible for science to assess the rapidly widening stream of existing and new chemicals entering the environment.
A variety of pollution routes exist in the tropics and elsewhere. Pesticides, for example, are being applied to agricultural lands at ever-greater rates. Previous estimates suggest a rate of around 2 million tons annually, though a recent study suggests 4 million tons are now used each year. Likewise, treated sewage that is spread as fertilizer can leach a harmful pharmaceutical cocktail and concentrated heavy metals into soils and groundwater. Plastics are released into the air when disposed of by burning, and also enter soils and waterways when thrown away, where they deteriorate into microplastics.
Increasing agricultural production and pharmaceutical use in tropical countries (even in remote parts of the Brazilian Amazon), combined with often lax regulations that enable the use of chemicals banned elsewhere, can heighten risk. Knowledge of the environmental impacts of all these chemical pollutants is not new, says Chapman, but research in tropical regions is lagging.
The studies and reports that do exist often focus on cases of intentional killings of wildlife using chemicals, or unintentional mass killings. Recently in India, for example, vultures died en-masse due to pesticide poisoning inadvertently spread to kill stray dogs. While such events can grab headlines and researchers’ attention, Chapman is equally concerned by systematic and prolonged chemical exposure which could cause sublethal effects.
A howler monkey (Alouatta palliata). Analysis of the feces of primates in protected areas in Costa Rica and Uganda by Michael Wasserman and his colleagues found exposure to chemical pollutants. Impacts on health and fitness are currently not known. Photo courtesy of Michelle Benavidez Westrich.
Looking beyond the lethal
Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental chemist and professor in environmental medicine and pediatrics at New York University’s Langone Health, who was not involved in the study, agrees that all this chemical exposure is troubling. Currently, far more is known about sublethal effects in humans than in wildlife populations, he states: “Sublethal health effects such as reduced reproduction, suppressed immune system and altered endocrine functioning can impair survival of wildlife and can disrupt ecosystem structure and function.”
A study published last year found that consumption of fruit contaminated with deltamethrin, an agricultural insecticide, could effect reproduction in fruit-eating bats due to oxidative stress in their testes “even in low, commercially prescribed concentrations”, the authors write.
Work by Chapman and Michael Wasserman, a co-author of the recent paper, who is with the University of Indiana’s Primate Environmental Endocrinology Laboratory, indicated that chemicals, including legacy and current use pesticides and flame retardants (some recognized as endocrine disruptors), are present in the tropics. They’ve been detected in the air in and around Las Cruces and La Selva Biological Stations in Costa Rica, and at Kibale National Park in Uganda. A follow-up study found traces of these chemicals in the feces of primates such as red colobus, chimpanzees and red-tailed monkeys. Yet, no one knows the effect of these chemical exposures on these species, Wasserman adds.
“Did the animal live a little bit less? Did they get cancer? [Did exposure] cause increased mortality?” Chapman wonders, but these are questions which remain unanswered for most exposed species, including primates. It’s unlikely species are going to go extinct due to chemical pollution, he adds, but exposure could hinder conservation efforts.
Research indicates that endangered mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei) in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park are being exposed to pesticides via the cultivation of tea and the consumption of contaminated plant leaves. This could have “potential health risks” for adults and juveniles, the study concluded, though the full extent of harm is still unknown. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
Michael Bertram, an ecotoxicologist and researcher with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, studies the impact of chemical pollution on animal behavior, another realm in which research is lacking, and he is also concerned. “The [paper’s] authors rightly point out that although large-scale wildlife die-offs are a clearly observable and alarming sign of the presence of chemical contaminants at toxic levels in ecosystems, it is much more common for wildlife to be exposed to an invisible mixture of multiple chemicals, [reducing their resilience as they face] other stressors such as habitat loss and climate change.”
While many of the potential pathways of chemical exposure are enumerated by the study, more exist, Bertram says. For example, research shows that fish species accumulate chemicals in high concentrations which could then be passed up the food chain.
“Tropical mammals that consume tainted fish or other aquatic prey, drink contaminated water, or come into contact with contaminated sediment, will therefore be exposed to potentially harmful contaminants,” Bertram reports. “The fact that Chapman and colleagues provide such a comprehensive list of pathways by which tropical animals can be exposed to contaminants, but still many more pathways exist, is indicative of the scale of the problem with which we are confronted.”
An additional concern is the synergistic impact of chemical pollution when combined with other stressors.  Wholesale conversion of forest to agriculture, or the eating away at forest edges by fields, pastures and roads, can ramp up chemical exposure, says Wasserman: “The more you fragment a landscape, the more edge there is where you have contact between human dominated landscapes in the forest, and therefore more places for all those novel entities to enter the ecosystem.”
Climate change can also interact with chemical pollution in multiple ways, exacerbating or altering the effects of some contaminants. Chapman’s study cites the example of global warming-triggered forest fires leading to deaths due to smoke inhalation among elk populations.
“This is just one of many examples where one form of environmental change, in this case climate change which increases the likelihood and severity of fires, drives an increase in another form of environmental change, the contamination of air (and water) with particulate matter,” says Bertram. But once again, the impacts of potentially toxic forest fire smoke on tropical mammals has not been well documented.
Research in protected areas in Costa Rica and Uganda indicates pollution from pesticides and flame retardants. Photo courtesy of Michael Wasserman.
Monitoring health, researching effects
Clearly, tropical mammals face an ever-escalating chemical crisis, yet how serious this problem may be, remains unclear. Chapman and Wasserman urge further research and long-term monitoring to better understand the issue, but until more studies are done, they say, the precautionary principle should be implemented regarding chemical use.
“I think studying this in wild primates has a lot of potential,” notes Wasserman. “They are the ideal biosentinel for understanding exposure to novel entities, but also for human health concerns.”
Long-term monitoring of wildlife population health would not only aid in understanding and quantifying the scale and impact of chemical pollution, but also provide an early warning system for detecting emerging diseases, adds Chapman — a particularly relevant sensing system in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
NYU’s Kannan agrees that chemical impacts on tropical wildlife require far more study. “We need to grow and support a future generation of researchers in the area of wildlife ecotoxicology,” he states. “Furthermore, interdisciplinary research on the topic is needed which requires collaborations with wildlife biologists, veterinarians, toxicologists, chemists, and more importantly, community engagement and support.”
International bodies such as UNEP and the International Panel on Chemical Pollution have made similar calls for interdisciplinary research, and are working towards the development of a Global Science-Policy Panel to address the issue.
Meanwhile, Chapman and his colleagues are actively investigating levels of plastics and pesticides in the feces of primates at over 20 sites in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. This far flung effort, Chapman adds, is an example of the kind of research and monitoring needed in the long-term to truly understand the chemical landscape in which tropical mammals are now living.
“In order to act in an informed way, we need to have the infrastructure, the research capacity [and] more information about sublethal effects,” he concludes. “We have to revamp how that information is being collected and scale up that information.”
Banner image: Mountain gorillas thrive on rainforest foliage, but if that foliage happens to be tea leaves sprayed with pesticides on national park-adjacent plantations, they can be poisoned. Image by Ludovic Hirlimann via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Citations:
Bertram, M. G., Martin, J. M., McCallum, E. S., Alton, L. A., Brand, J. A., Brooks, B. W., … Brodin, T. (2022). Frontiers in quantifying wildlife behavioural responses to chemical pollution. Biological Reviews. doi:10.1111/brv.12844
Chapman, C. A., Steiniche, T., Benavidez, K. M., Sarkar, D., Amato, K., Serio-Silva, J. C., … Wasserman, M. D. (2022). The chemical landscape of tropical mammals in the Anthropocene. Biological Conservation, 269, 109522. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109522
Oliveira, J. M., Lima, G. D., Destro, A. L., Condessa, S., Zuanon, J. A., Freitas, M. B., & Oliveira, L. L. (2021). Short-term intake of deltamethrin-contaminated fruit, even at low concentrations, induces testicular damage in fruit-eating bats (Artibeus lituratus). Chemosphere, 278, 130423. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.130423
Wang, S., Steiniche, T., Romanak, K. A., Johnson, E., Quirós, R., Mutegeki, R., … Venier, M. (2019). Atmospheric occurrence of legacy pesticides, current use pesticides, and flame retardants in and around protected areas in Costa Rica and Uganda. Environmental Science & Technology, 53(11), 6171-6181. doi:10.1021/acs.est.9b00649
Wang, S., Steiniche, T., Rothman, J. M., Wrangham, R. W., Chapman, C. A., Mutegeki, R., … Venier, M. (2020). Feces are effective biological samples for measuring pesticides and flame retardants in primates. Environmental Science & Technology, 54(19), 12013-12023. doi:10.1021/acs.est.0c02500
Wu, D., Li, Q., Shang, X., Liang, Y., Ding, X., Sun, H., … Chen, J. (2021). Commodity plastic burning as a source of inhaled toxic aerosols. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 416, 125820. doi:10.1016/j.jhazmat.2021.125820
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Researchers hope the enzymes could create a truly circular system for the PET plastics that are still manufactured.
[Source Photos: rawpicel and rawpixel]
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