Microplastics from European rivers spreading to Arctic seas, research shows

Microplastics from European rivers spreading to Arctic seas, research showsBetter waste management needed to protect Arctic ecosystem, say scientists Microplastics from European rivers are finding their way to Arctic seas, research suggests.These tiny plastic particles, which come from clothing fibres, car tyres, cosmetics and many more sources, have been found across the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water, as well as breathing them in. Microplastics have been shown to harm wildlife but the impact on people is not known, though microplastics do damage human cells in the laboratory.They have also been found in the Arctic, and until now the source of these tiny particles has not been known.A new study in Scientific Reports, led by Mats Huserbråten from the Institute of Marine Research, in Bergen, Norway, suggests particles in the Arctic Ocean, the Nordic Seas and Baffin Bay have spread from Europe.Companies race to stem flood of microplastic fibres into the oceansRead moreThe scientists used modelling to predict how many microplastic particles would be in certain parts of the ocean, and compared it with water samples from these places. Their analysis suggests microplastics have been circulating in the Arctic for at least a decade.To work it out, they combined models of ocean currents between 2007 and 2017 with simulations of floating microplastic movements. Then, they simulated the release of microplastics from 21 major rivers across northern Europe and the Arctic every day over a 10-year period and modelled their movements over decades. After this, they simulated the release of microplastics from 21 major rivers across northern Europe and the Arctic every day over a 10-year period and modelled their movements over decades, then compared the results of their model with the distribution of floating microplastics across 121 seawater samples that were collected from 17 sites off the west coast of Norway between May 2017 and August 2018.They found that most simulated particles drifted along two main pathways after being released from rivers, with 65% drifting along the Norwegian coast towards the Laptev Sea, north of Russia, before going to the Arctic Ocean, across the north pole, then exiting the Arctic Ocean via the Fram Strait east of Greenland. Thirty per cent went in another direction, travelling across Greenland then farther south along the north-east coast of Canada.Analysis of seawater found in each of these areas revealed the distribution of these floating microplastics was consistent with what was predicted by the models.The researchers warned that better waste management is required so the health of the Arctic ecosystem is not compromised.They said: “The equal distribution of sampled synthetic particles across water masses covering a wide time frame of anthropogenic influence suggests a system in full saturation rather than pronounced injection from European sources, through a complex circulation scheme connecting the entire Arctic Mediterranean. “This circulation of microplastic through Arctic ecosystems may have large consequences to natural ecosystem health, highlighting an ever-increasing need for better waste management.”Current methods to reduce microplastic release include adding filters to washing machines to catch particles. They can also be removed by some wastewater and drinking water treatments.TopicsPlasticsOceansArcticnewsReuse this content

International Recycling Group buys 25 acres for $185M Erie facility

Plans to build what’s been called the nation’s largest plastics recycling plant in Erie took a step forward Monday as International Recycling Group completed the purchase of 25 acres of the former Hammermill Paper site.The property was purchased for $1.23 million from SB3 LLC, owned by Erie businessman Samuel P. “Pat” Black, III, and his daughter Sumi James-Black.The sale closed Monday afternoon.More:Breaking the mold: In-depth look at how Erie-based IRG wants to change plastic recycling’s futureThe purchase price represents a tiny fraction of the expected cost of building a plastics recycling facility.But it’s an important step, said Mitch Hecht, a former steel company executive who is chairman and founder of IRG.”Actually owning the site is a really important, concrete step,” Hecht said. “Now we can move forward on negotiations for putting our financing package together. Everything, including permitting and going out for debt and equity financing, is dependent on owning the property”Related coverage:$100 million recycling plant planned for ErieThe recycling plant, which is being built on a federal Opportunity Zone — which provides special tax incentives for those investing capital gains — moved out of the starting gate in 2020 with a combined $9 million investment from Erie Insurance and the Erie-based Plastek Group.At the time of that investment, Hecht was describing the project as a $100 million investment that would create at least 50 jobs.More:History of International Recycling Group included challenges, setbacks en route to ErieThat’s changed.Hecht now pegs the overall investment at $185 million with the expected creation of about 300 jobs.”We have decided to put more investment in value-added downstream manufacturing capacity for value-added materials, Hecht said.”We are not getting into finished product,” he said. “We are not doing anything that is involving chemicals or heat. It’s still basic.”But instead of producing what he described as reground plastic flake, the plant will produce washed ready-to-use resin pellets.The demand for those recycled pellets is rising, Hecht said.”We have seen the market really moving in our favor,” he said. “There is dramatically increased demand for post-consumer resin (plastic) under demand from consumer product companies to increase the recycled content.”More:Rules of recycling in the city of Erie for plastics, papers, metals and other itemsIn an interview in April 2021, Dennis Prischak, CEO of Plastek Group, said his company’s partnership with IRG, “will allow us to dramatically increase the percentage of our products that contain recycled materials.”While plastics recycling efforts have struggled financially in the past, Hecht had said previously that IRG had a market to sell the lowest-grade plastics — which are typically sent to a landfill — to steel mills that can use the blended plastics to take the place of coke in the production of iron oxide.Hecht said he expects that only about 10% of the plastics IRG processes would be used for that purpose.Help from Penn State BehrendMeanwhile, researchers at Penn State Behrend’s School of Engineering recently completed an analysis, looking at the company’s supply chain and how different polymers might be reused or recycled. The second round of research is about to begin.Behrend Chancellor Ralph Ford serves on the board of directors for IRG.Hecht expressed confidence Monday that his plans for the massive recycling facility, previously described as up to 300,000 square feet, will move ahead quickly.He said he hopes to have both debt and equity financing in place by late this year and to break ground by next spring.The goal, he said, is for the plant to be operating by the middle of 2024.If the IRG plant is built as planned it would join a number of other environmentally focused endeavors operating on the former Hammermill site, including Prism Glass Recycling and Hero BX, a biofuels company. Both Hero and Prism are owned by Erie Management Group.Sumi James-Black, interim CEO of Erie Management Group, which owns SB3 Industrial Park said, “The best way for us to support this project and its impact on the community was to offer the property. We look forward to seeing it come to life.”Contact Jim Martin at 814-870-1668 or jmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNMartin.

The world has one big chance to eliminate plastic pollution

Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human pla​​centa. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to become plastics in Europe. And much of the plastic waste from Europe and the U.S. streams back toward Southeast Asia, Africa, or South America. Yet the dispersal of plastics and their pollutants, if regulated at all, has been addressed through a patchwork of municipal and national policies and a smattering of uncoordinated international instruments.Early this month, however, following 10 days of late-night negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) passed a resolution mandating the creation of a multilateral treaty to address plastic pollution. One hundred seventy-five nations backed its provisions, which are to be legally binding, rather than voluntary. Once in force, the treaty could be plastics’ symbolic equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and in its provisions, likely even more far-reaching. The meeting ended in an ebullient wave of joy and tired-teary relief.The resolution impanels an international negotiating committee and issues it a broad mandate: a treaty outlining global ground rules to eliminate plastic pollution. Most significant is the breadth of the resolution’s ambition—the committee must consider plastic as more than a matter of marine litter. Rather, the treaty will take on plastics’ entire life cycle—from production and design through use and reuse to disposal and environmental dispersion—and will address plastics’ myriad contributions to the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This treaty could govern not just micro- and nanoplastic pollution, but also the air pollutants, greenhouse-gas emissions, and toxic chemicals associated with plastics. The scope of the work is breathtaking and the timeframe ambitious: just over two years.What transpires between the resolution and the treaty will determine whether the final provisions are likely to make meaningful change. In the coming months, the United Nations Environment Programme will convene a working-group meeting, to include member states and private-sector and civil-society stakeholders, which will set the formal agenda for the negotiations to come. The final treaty’s success will rest on how inclusive a process the working group and negotiating committee follow, and whose experiences are enfolded into its deliberations. The strongest possible treaty will recognize a range of relationships to plastics and its assorted pollutants—including those of constituents who, across time and geography, have borne the heaviest, life-altering burdens of plastics production, and of people who require plastics to live or to earn a living. Plastics have engendered violence, but also resilience and community mobilization to mitigate those harms.The treaty’s strength will come from how negotiators resolve a few key issues. One is whether the treaty will limit pollution by limiting production—to close the tap, as so evocatively signaled by the sculpture, by the artist Benjamin Von Wong, installed outside the UNEA meetings, a floating spigot with a 40-foot torrent of locally gleaned plastic waste. The rate of world plastics production exceeds 400 million metric tons per annum—more plastics have been produced in the past 20 years than in the five decades following World War II. Short-term plastics, which include packaging, now account for about 40 percent of plastics made each year. Absent global controls, plastic production continues to trend upward; by the end of the decade, it is projected to hit 600 million metric tons a year, and 800 million metric tons by 2040. Plastic makers as well as the oil and gas industries, which supply plastics’ feedstocks, will likely fight production limits—especially as oil and gas companies look to plastics as a key area of growth.A weak treaty would lack enforcement mechanisms and focus on technological solutions to plastic waste. Some of the technologies pushed by the industry, based on high-heat waste management, are yet unproven and emit air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Decades of experience and recent modeling, however, have demonstrated that dealing with plastic-related pollution downstream from its source, even with a massive waste-infrastructure build-out, will not keep pace in the long term without policy and other interventions that limit the influx of yet more virgin plastics and related pollutants into the system. And the world knows how to do better. Both the Montreal Protocol, which addresses ozone-depleting pollutants, and the Minamata Convention on Mercury provide models for setting progressive targets that help nations phase out harmful materials.A second key question: How should the treaty address the toxicity of the more than 10,000 additives and other chemicals used in plastic production? Plastics are complex compositions, more than mere polymers. Their base materials are hydrocarbons, some of which are known carcinogens; finished plastics contain a mixture of chemicals—some additives, some residuals, some unintended—which can over time leach into the environment.Going back to the industry’s beginnings, when plastics were products of farms and forests, a network of toxics that served as solvent systems, processing aids, plasticizers, and more made these materials possible while also imposing health costs on workers. Carbon disulfide, used in hard rubber, viscose rayon, and cellophane, harmed generations of workers yet remains in use, notes Paul Blanc, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who has written about this history.Chemical additives in plastics have never been labeled, and most lack adequate health and hazard data. But what scientists know is cause for worry. Common additives used in food containers have been shown to interfere with the endocrine system, which directs human growth, fertility, and metabolism. And some plastics-associated chemicals are so long-lived, mobile, and toxic that they have been regulated under the UN Stockholm Convention, which curbs worldwide production of roughly two dozen persistent pollutants. Wind, weather, and ocean currents concentrate these pollutants in the globe’s upper latitudes, a burden borne by Arctic Indigenous Peoples, whose leadership was instrumental in framing the Stockholm Convention and in calling out how microplastics add to that problem. The interlocking crises of climate change, toxics, and plastic pollution compromise both the way of life and the existence of Sivuqaq’s Yupik people, wrote Delbert Pungowiyi, the president of the Native Village of Savoonga, in the Anchorage Daily News. Just last year, the Stockholm Convention recognized plastic debris as a unique mechanism for transporting pollutants northward.Chemical additives were not included in the final UNEA resolution, says David Azoulay, the director of the Environmental Health Program at the Center for International Environmental Law. But the terms that delegates negotiated ensured that chemicals’ toxic bearing on human health would remain within the treaty’s mandate. The negotiating committee will still, for example, take up supply-chain transparency, sustainable production, product design, circularity, and plastics’ impact on human well-being—all of which additives have a bearing on.A third criterion for the treaty’s success will be how responsive proposed plastics controls are to localized needs. In some communities, plastic has become so unavoidable that scaling back its presence would create new complications. In the Philippines, plastics have squeezed out traditional packaging, such as natural fibers, glass, and paper, and vital commodities are available or affordable only in small plastic packets. In some West African cities, sealed 500 ml plastic sachets are an important source of water. In subsistence economies—for example, in India—plastic carrier bags and other containers are used and reused to purchase essential goods, including rice and even liquids such as oil or kerosene, in low-cost portions.The disability community likewise has crucial insights into what’s possible for plastics, and “can be advocates for the success of solutions that bring everyone along,” as the Reverend Theresa Soto, a disability-community advocate, has noted. Disability can mean that those who most rely on certain plastic technologies are also among the most vulnerable to plastics’ toxic implications, observes the science and technology scholar Jody Roberts. He has written with eloquence about the toxics-plastics nexus that is the flexible plastic feeding tube.These three measures address, in different ways, basic questions of how, what, and who. But the treaty’s success can also be judged on whether it fully acknowledges the long arc of plastics’ exploitative history.Over the centuries, plastics’ burdens have fallen inequitably over the world, compounding preexisting inequities. Sourcing feedstocks for 19th-century plastics led to ecological ruin and deforestation, violent plantation economies, and colonial appropriation of indigenous lands. Across the 20th century, processing plants were overconcentrated in vulnerable communities. Fenceline communities and UN human-rights experts have flagged the environmental racism of siting yet another plastics factory in already overburdened petrochemical corridors, such as the Lower Mississippi Valley. Likewise, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, who live surrounded by Canada’s plastics and petrochemical production, have resisted plastics’ unrelenting emissions and industrial expansion for decades.At the other end of plastics’ life cycle, discards have been dumped onto communities of color in the U.S. or the global South, often on the pretext that recycling it could generate income. But recyclability proved a pipe dream, absent adequate infrastructure and technical and financial support to process a crush of mostly single-use plastics not designed for recovery. Indeed, the very idea of disposability, even recycling, says the multidisciplinary plastics scholar Max Liboiron, is premised on unfettered access to land, often Indigenous land, such as for landfills.The resolution does recognize communities who have been integral to (and yet harmed by) this system—for example, by calling out the vital work performed by 20 million waste pickers, sorters, and recyclers, many of whom belong to marginalized groups, who reclaim much of the world’s plastic discards and have become experts as a result. In apprenticing with plastic-waste pickers and sorters in India, one of us, Dey, observed the highly specialized and efficient systems that waste handlers evolved to identify and classify plastics. Recyclers could bite and differentiate among various finer grades of low-density polyethylene. Sorters could crumple films and tell—by their sound—their polymer lattices. Their systems were far more specific than the resin-identification labels stamped onto plastics by manufacturers.Accordingly, the mandate directs negotiators to consider comprehensive knowledge systems, including best-available science, traditional knowledge, and the expertise of waste workers and indigenous peoples, which in turn presents opportunities for affording rights and developing best practices to deal with complex plastic waste. Even more, recognizing—at a global scale—the hands and bodies that recover plastics through the day and into the night presents an opportunity to advocate for better working conditions, job security, wages, and dignity.There are pitfalls to international negotiation—the need for consensus, compromises driven by member states and trade associations—and the response of producer nations, especially the U.S., the largest contributor to plastic waste, could ultimately shape the treaty’s success. The U.S. has signed other major agreements, including the Stockholm Convention, and then stopped short of ratifying them; this one, too, will require Congress to pass the necessary implementing legislation.Less than three years from now, we will find out whether the international community is up to the task the UNEA has set out. The influx of plastics and associated pollutants into the planetary system, say the scientists Linn Persson, Bethanie Almroth, and their colleagues, now diminishes the planet’s capacity to support life. And onward flow plastics through time, territories, and tissues. But if the treaty responds boldly to its mandate—if its negotiators heed history and hear the wisdom of those most intimately affected—it could offer a new vision for plastics’ place in society and the economy, and by extension, it could well alter the future of humanity and the planet.

The world has one big chance to eliminate plastic pollution

Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human pla​​centa. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to become plastics in Europe. And much of the plastic waste from Europe and the U.S. streams back toward Southeast Asia, Africa, or South America. Yet the dispersal of plastics and their pollutants, if regulated at all, has been addressed through a patchwork of municipal and national policies and a smattering of uncoordinated international instruments.Early this month, however, following 10 days of late-night negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) passed a resolution mandating the creation of a multilateral treaty to address plastic pollution. One hundred seventy-five nations backed its provisions, which are to be legally binding, rather than voluntary. Once in force, the treaty could be plastics’ symbolic equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and in its provisions, likely even more far-reaching. The meeting ended in an ebullient wave of joy and tired-teary relief.The resolution impanels an international negotiating committee and issues it a broad mandate: a treaty outlining global ground rules to eliminate plastic pollution. Most significant is the breadth of the resolution’s ambition—the committee must consider plastic as more than a matter of marine litter. Rather, the treaty will take on plastics’ entire life cycle—from production and design through use and reuse to disposal and environmental dispersion—and will address plastics’ myriad contributions to the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This treaty could govern not just micro- and nanoplastic pollution, but also the air pollutants, greenhouse-gas emissions, and toxic chemicals associated with plastics. The scope of the work is breathtaking and the timeframe ambitious: just over two years.What transpires between the resolution and the treaty will determine whether the final provisions are likely to make meaningful change. In the coming months, the United Nations Environment Programme will convene a working-group meeting, to include member states and private-sector and civil-society stakeholders, which will set the formal agenda for the negotiations to come. The final treaty’s success will rest on how inclusive a process the working group and negotiating committee follow, and whose experiences are enfolded into its deliberations. The strongest possible treaty will recognize a range of relationships to plastics and its assorted pollutants—including those of constituents who, across time and geography, have borne the heaviest, life-altering burdens of plastics production, and of people who require plastics to live or to earn a living. Plastics have engendered violence, but also resilience and community mobilization to mitigate those harms.The treaty’s strength will come from how negotiators resolve a few key issues. One is whether the treaty will limit pollution by limiting production—to close the tap, as so evocatively signaled by the sculpture, by the artist Benjamin Von Wong, installed outside the UNEA meetings, a floating spigot with a 40-foot torrent of locally gleaned plastic waste. The rate of world plastics production exceeds 400 million metric tons per annum—more plastics have been produced in the past 20 years than in the five decades following World War II. Short-term plastics, which include packaging, now account for about 40 percent of plastics made each year. Absent global controls, plastic production continues to trend upward; by the end of the decade, it is projected to hit 600 million metric tons a year, and 800 million metric tons by 2040. Plastic makers as well as the oil and gas industries, which supply plastics’ feedstocks, will likely fight production limits—especially as oil and gas companies look to plastics as a key area of growth.A weak treaty would lack enforcement mechanisms and focus on technological solutions to plastic waste. Some of the technologies pushed by the industry, based on high-heat waste management, are yet unproven and emit air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Decades of experience and recent modeling, however, have demonstrated that dealing with plastic-related pollution downstream from its source, even with a massive waste-infrastructure build-out, will not keep pace in the long term without policy and other interventions that limit the influx of yet more virgin plastics and related pollutants into the system. And the world knows how to do better. Both the Montreal Protocol, which addresses ozone-depleting pollutants, and the Minamata Convention on Mercury provide models for setting progressive targets that help nations phase out harmful materials.A second key question: How should the treaty address the toxicity of the more than 10,000 additives and other chemicals used in plastic production? Plastics are complex compositions, more than mere polymers. Their base materials are hydrocarbons, some of which are known carcinogens; finished plastics contain a mixture of chemicals—some additives, some residuals, some unintended—which can over time leach into the environment.Going back to the industry’s beginnings, when plastics were products of farms and forests, a network of toxics that served as solvent systems, processing aids, plasticizers, and more made these materials possible while also imposing health costs on workers. Carbon disulfide, used in hard rubber, viscose rayon, and cellophane, harmed generations of workers yet remains in use, notes Paul Blanc, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who has written about this history.Chemical additives in plastics have never been labeled, and most lack adequate health and hazard data. But what scientists know is cause for worry. Common additives used in food containers have been shown to interfere with the endocrine system, which directs human growth, fertility, and metabolism. And some plastics-associated chemicals are so long-lived, mobile, and toxic that they have been regulated under the UN Stockholm Convention, which curbs worldwide production of roughly two dozen persistent pollutants. Wind, weather, and ocean currents concentrate these pollutants in the globe’s upper latitudes, a burden borne by Arctic Indigenous Peoples, whose leadership was instrumental in framing the Stockholm Convention and in calling out how microplastics add to that problem. The interlocking crises of climate change, toxics, and plastic pollution compromise both the way of life and the existence of Sivuqaq’s Yupik people, wrote Delbert Pungowiyi, the president of the Native Village of Savoonga, in the Anchorage Daily News. Just last year, the Stockholm Convention recognized plastic debris as a unique mechanism for transporting pollutants northward.Chemical additives were not included in the final UNEA resolution, says David Azoulay, the director of the Environmental Health Program at the Center for International Environmental Law. But the terms that delegates negotiated ensured that chemicals’ toxic bearing on human health would remain within the treaty’s mandate. The negotiating committee will still, for example, take up supply-chain transparency, sustainable production, product design, circularity, and plastics’ impact on human well-being—all of which additives have a bearing on.A third criterion for the treaty’s success will be how responsive proposed plastics controls are to localized needs. In some communities, plastic has become so unavoidable that scaling back its presence would create new complications. In the Philippines, plastics have squeezed out traditional packaging, such as natural fibers, glass, and paper, and vital commodities are available or affordable only in small plastic packets. In some West African cities, sealed 500 ml plastic sachets are an important source of water. In subsistence economies—for example, in India—plastic carrier bags and other containers are used and reused to purchase essential goods, including rice and even liquids such as oil or kerosene, in low-cost portions.The disability community likewise has crucial insights into what’s possible for plastics, and “can be advocates for the success of solutions that bring everyone along,” as the Reverend Theresa Soto, a disability-community advocate, has noted. Disability can mean that those who most rely on certain plastic technologies are also among the most vulnerable to plastics’ toxic implications, observes the science and technology scholar Jody Roberts. He has written with eloquence about the toxics-plastics nexus that is the flexible plastic feeding tube.These three measures address, in different ways, basic questions of how, what, and who. But the treaty’s success can also be judged on whether it fully acknowledges the long arc of plastics’ exploitative history.Over the centuries, plastics’ burdens have fallen inequitably over the world, compounding preexisting inequities. Sourcing feedstocks for 19th-century plastics led to ecological ruin and deforestation, violent plantation economies, and colonial appropriation of indigenous lands. Across the 20th century, processing plants were overconcentrated in vulnerable communities. Fenceline communities and UN human-rights experts have flagged the environmental racism of siting yet another plastics factory in already overburdened petrochemical corridors, such as the Lower Mississippi Valley. Likewise, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, who live surrounded by Canada’s plastics and petrochemical production, have resisted plastics’ unrelenting emissions and industrial expansion for decades.At the other end of plastics’ life cycle, discards have been dumped onto communities of color in the U.S. or the global South, often on the pretext that recycling it could generate income. But recyclability proved a pipe dream, absent adequate infrastructure and technical and financial support to process a crush of mostly single-use plastics not designed for recovery. Indeed, the very idea of disposability, even recycling, says the multidisciplinary plastics scholar Max Liboiron, is premised on unfettered access to land, often Indigenous land, such as for landfills.The resolution does recognize communities who have been integral to (and yet harmed by) this system—for example, by calling out the vital work performed by 20 million waste pickers, sorters, and recyclers, many of whom belong to marginalized groups, who reclaim much of the world’s plastic discards and have become experts as a result. In apprenticing with plastic-waste pickers and sorters in India, one of us, Dey, observed the highly specialized and efficient systems that waste handlers evolved to identify and classify plastics. Recyclers could bite and differentiate among various finer grades of low-density polyethylene. Sorters could crumple films and tell—by their sound—their polymer lattices. Their systems were far more specific than the resin-identification labels stamped onto plastics by manufacturers.Accordingly, the mandate directs negotiators to consider comprehensive knowledge systems, including best-available science, traditional knowledge, and the expertise of waste workers and indigenous peoples, which in turn presents opportunities for affording rights and developing best practices to deal with complex plastic waste. Even more, recognizing—at a global scale—the hands and bodies that recover plastics through the day and into the night presents an opportunity to advocate for better working conditions, job security, wages, and dignity.There are pitfalls to international negotiation—the need for consensus, compromises driven by member states and trade associations—and the response of producer nations, especially the U.S., the largest contributor to plastic waste, could ultimately shape the treaty’s success. The U.S. has signed other major agreements, including the Stockholm Convention, and then stopped short of ratifying them; this one, too, will require Congress to pass the necessary implementing legislation.Less than three years from now, we will find out whether the international community is up to the task the UNEA has set out. The influx of plastics and associated pollutants into the planetary system, say the scientists Linn Persson, Bethanie Almroth, and their colleagues, now diminishes the planet’s capacity to support life. And onward flow plastics through time, territories, and tissues. But if the treaty responds boldly to its mandate—if its negotiators heed history and hear the wisdom of those most intimately affected—it could offer a new vision for plastics’ place in society and the economy, and by extension, it could well alter the future of humanity and the planet.

The plastics industry says it has a clever solution to the plastics crisis

Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.Every week, carefully sorted piles of plastic waste adorn curbsides across the country, waiting for pickup. It once went overseas, but now China and other former importers have banned or imposed prohibitive costs on shipments, having concluded there is little to do with the stuff. Cities have cut back collection schemes, leaving straws, bottles, utensils, and other detritus to pile up in warehouses or be disposed of as trash.
Those systems, in theory, created a destination for plastics aside from landfills, assuaging consumer guilt about using polluting—and practically indestructible—products. But as the bottom fell out of the international market, an inconvenient truth was highlighted: Most plastics are impervious to traditional recycling.

What we built in terms of waste management systems—be it landfills, be it incinerators, be it curbside recycling systems—doesn’t really work well for plastic. That’s now come back to bite us.”
In response to the crisis, the plastics industry is pushing investments in so-called chemical recycling, hoping to give plastics a new, guilt-free life cycle. To understand what this means, let’s look at how plastics are made. The material is formed when many small hydrocarbon molecules from oil, called monomers, bond to create long chains, like dancers joining hands in a chorus line—a process called polymerization. The nature of the monomers and the configuration of the chemical bonds determine the kind of plastic (or polymer) produced, just as dancers’ costumes and positions define their look onstage.
Traditional recycling does not break apart the polymer molecules. Instead, it simply heats the plastic until it melts, reshaping the liquid into a different object. But the process inevitably degrades the polymer chains, resulting in inferior recycled products. Plastic bottles might get downcycled into textile padding that, in turn, has no further destination other than a landfill. Of the billions of tons of plastic ever made, Geyer and two colleagues estimated in 2017 that only about 9 percent has been recycled. The rest has been incinerated or, more often, just dumped—at best into landfills, at worst into trash piles that can leak into rivers and streams.
In contrast, in its ideal form, chemical recycling depolymerizes those chains—like making the dancers release each other’s hands—to reassemble them as useful chemical compounds or pristine, good-as-new polymers. The Plastics Industry Association has hailed the technology as “essential to ensuring that plastics stay out of the environment, while also creating new products and economic growth opportunities that benefit society.”
At least, that’s the sales pitch. In reality, chemical recycling as it is performed today almost always refers to one of two very similar processes, pyrolysis or gasification, that rely on temperatures of over 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit to break plastics down into base components. The result is a mixture of hydrocarbons—some of which may be polymerized into more plastic. The rest are likely to be burned as fuel that is often more toxic than its virgin counterpart since it’s laced with residual contaminants like flame retardants. As chemist Susannah Scott of UCSB says, “This is greenwashing; this is not true recycling.”
Scott is one of a growing number of researchers exploring how to make chemical recycling more sustainable. Instead of ripping up polymer chains into heterogeneous fragments, a better process would perform microsurgery to dissect them into reusable molecules. In theory, we could accomplish this either by producing alternative polymers that can more easily be recycled chemically or by using waste polymers to make other, valuable chemicals—an approach known as upcycling.
In 2020, two prestigious international scientific journals explored each technique. In Nature, researchers unveiled two plastics similar to existing polyethylenes that are used in everything from reusable plastic cups to pipes. The new substances, when gently heated in ethanol for a few hours, dissolved into their monomer blocks—units that, in theory, could be infinitely reusable. Meanwhile, in Science, Scott and her team, whose research has been supported by both federal and petrochemical funding, described an upcycling process that transformed waste polyethylene into molecules commonly used as detergents but avoided the extreme heat, crude oil, and toxic chemicals that usually go into their production. The details still need to be ironed out, but she believes that if a reaction looked commercially promising, companies could quickly rework their processes.
Not everyone agrees. Many environmentalists argue that chemical recycling simply provides political cover for the continued production of plastics and the fossil fuels it takes to make them. Consumers shouldn’t be fooled by a solution to plastics that, well, involves plastics. Andrew Rollinson, the author of a report for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, has found that chemical recycling is energy-intensive and costly—so it irks him that both industry and government are investing heavily in the process instead of just reducing or eliminating plastics.
“Some really innovative, clever chemical engineers are coming up with some really promising technologies,” concludes Roland Geyer, the industrial ecologist. “Do I think that will make the entire problem go away? Absolutely not.” *
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the source of the final quote. It is Roland Geyer’s quote.

A plastic factory feels the sting of rising energy prices

Long before President Vladimir V. Putin unleashed his war on Ukraine, Mosharraf Khalid was already contending with an expensive, bewildering and unrelenting assortment of problems afflicting the global supply chain.His company, Royal Interpack North America, makes plastic packaging for fresh fruit. Last year, its raw materials were routinely stuck for weeks on container ships left floating in traffic jams off the overwhelmed port of Long Beach. This past week, Mr. Khalid’s business was hit with another confounding variable when President Biden announced a ban on imports of Russian oil.Mr. Biden’s oil ban is not expected to leave the United States short much crude. But less oil landing on world markets — the result of the American ban on Russian sales — spells higher energy prices everywhere. It also means higher prices for petroleum products like plastic, whose prices track oil. Even the recycled plastic chips that Mr. Khalid’s company depends on as the primary ingredient for its packaging containers will cost him more.“The price is going to go up,” Mr. Khalid said. “It’s going to be a dramatic change. It’s going to hit us again.”The travails of his factory in Riverside, a sprawling city tucked in the desert east of Los Angeles, signify the stakes for the global economy, as the United States, Europe, Britain and other major powers seek to weaken Russia in a bid to reverse its lethal assault on its sovereign neighbor. A collection of sanctions engineered to damage Russia’s economy will spread the pain around the world, most directly in the form of higher energy prices. That will intensify the strains on economic growth while heaping fresh trouble atop the Great Supply Chain Disruption set off by the pandemic’s impact on commerce, factory production and worldwide transport.A worker unloading an empty roll of plastic. The price of plastic is likely to rise with higher oil costs.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesThe soaring costs spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine have added to the pain of supply chain issues for Royal Interpack.Mark Abramson for The New York Times“Energy goes into so many other materials,” said Willy C. Shih, an international trade expert at Harvard Business School. “Everywhere you look, there’s going to be inflationary pressure.”Natural gas — another big Russian export spiking in price — is a central element used to make a vast range of plastics. It is also a key ingredient for fertilizers, so the costs of producing grains like soybeans, corn and wheat will climb, Mr. Shih added. Meat raised on these grains will climb, too, along with bread.The global economy is expected to expand by 3.4 percent this year, according to an estimate released by S & P Global Economics on Wednesday. That represented a slight downgrade from previous forecasts, reflecting the impact of higher energy prices on the most exposed regions of the world, like Europe, which relies heavily on Russian suppliesBefore the pandemic, Mr. Khalid’s job as operations manager at Royal Interpack was a largely straightforward enterprise. Container ships delivered a steady stream of recycled plastic chips from Thailand to the Port of Long Beach. Trucks ferried them to his loading dock in Riverside.Inside, 120 workers ran machines that melted the chips and rolled them into sheets of plastic, spooling them onto coils, like huge rolls of plastic wrap. Other devices pressed the sheets into plastic containers that hold strawberries, raspberries and other fresh fruit for giant retailers like Dole and Driscoll’s.Production was predictable and even.But early last year, the first significant crisis unfolded. Royal Interpack struggled to secure enough silicone, a synthetic element that it uses to prevent plastic sheets from sticking together.To deal with a shortage of silicone, Mosharaff Khalid, Royal Interpack’s operations manager, bartered with another plant. In return, he shared extra cardboard tubes.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesTypically, ordering more silicone entailed waiting perhaps a week for the goods to arrive by truck from the company’s supplier in Atlanta. Suddenly, Mr. Khalid was waiting for three months. His supplier advised that it could not produce more because it was itself waiting for shipments of a key chemical.Seeking help, Mr. Khalid reached out to another factory in Riverside that also makes plastic fruit packaging. The other plant had extra silicone and was willing to share. In return, Mr. Khalid relieved his neighboring plant of its own shortage: He shared extra cardboard tubes he uses as the core for rolls of plastic sheets. Barter staved off disaster for both operations.Meanwhile, the price of wooden pallets was tripling. Royal Interpack stacks its materials and finished products on pallets, allowing forklifts to move them through its warehouse. Even at astronomical prices, pallets were hard to find.By the middle of last year, the company was running low on plastic chips as its imports languished on incoming container vessels turned into floating warehouses off the port of Long Beach.The journey from Thailand had typically taken a month to complete. Now it was taking two and three times as long.Royal Interpack’s containers hold strawberries, raspberries and other fresh fruit for giant retailers like Dole and Driscoll’s.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesThe factory needs six tractor-trailers of plastic chips a day to satisfy demand for its wares, but only four or five were coming in.By October, more than 50 container vessels were marooned off the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, awaiting their turn to dock. Mr. Khalid’s plant was dangerously close to exhausting its supply of plastic. Alarmed, he cut production by one-fifth. He scrambled to identify domestic suppliers. He found one, but the upheaval in the market sent the price soaring by some 70 percent over the past year.Determined to avoid further shortages, Mr. Khalid resolved to stockpile his most critically needed materials. That filled his warehouse to capacity — a new challenge to navigate.The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns.

Study examines insects' role in plastic pollution

When plastic debris pollutes soil ecosystems, some insects may play a role in spreading it by breaking it down into microplastic particles. A new study sheds light on this dynamic by looking at a variety of soil invertebrates—such as the Zophobas morio beetle larva shown here—and their taste for polystyrene. (Photo by Max Helmberger)
By Paige Embry
Paige Embry
Microplastics permeate the world. They can float through the air and have been found in Antarctic ice, the deep ocean, drinking water, and inside an array of animals. Microplastic pollution, mostly in the oceans, has been getting a lot of attention in the last few years but microplastics’ ubiquity means that scientists researching them have to find ways to limit contamination—and assess its extent when it inevitably happens. Max Helmberger, a Ph.D. student in entomology at Michigan State University, has researched several soil-dwelling organisms’ ability to create microplastics from larger plastic debris. He says labs have had to come up with “all sorts of creative solutions” to the contamination problem, with at least one dying all their lab coats bright pink so it would be obvious when bits invade a sample. Helmberger says, “Being persnickity is kind of a must in microplastic research because microplastics are everywhere.”
Max Helmberger
Microplastics come in two basic forms: primary and secondary. Primary microplastics are ones that are manufactured in sizes smaller than 5 millimeter (think sesame seed). Nurdles, the pre-production pellets used to make plastic products, are an example of a primary microplastic. Secondary microplastics are tiny bits that have broken off larger pieces. It is this second type of microplastic that Helmberger and colleagues recently studied in relation to insects and other invertebrates. Findings from their research were published in February in the open-access Journal of Insect Science.
Helmberger and his colleagues wanted to look at an array of different types of soil-dwelling organisms and assess their ability to fragment plastic in a fairly short period of time. His chosen animals were Acheta domesticus (a house cricket), Oniscus asellus (an isopod, sometimes known as a sowbug or woodlouse), Zophobas morio larvae (a beetle), and Cornu aspersum (a snail). Helmberger put each animal in an “arena”—a small glass jar. The bottom was filled with plaster of Paris and topped with sand that had been heated to 500 degrees Celsius to burn off organics and plastics. The animals went into the jar with pieces of both pristine and weathered polystyrene, along with one oat flake of real food to sustain them. He left them there for 24 hours.
To explore the role insects and other invertebrates may play in spreading plastic pollution in soil ecosystems by breaking it down into microplastic particles, researchers placed various organisms—such as this house cricket (Acheta domesticus)—in glass-jar arenas with a small amount of food and a piece of polystyrene foam for 24 hours. Afterward, the researchers counted the number of microplastic particles in the animal feces, the sand, and within the dead animal itself. (Photo by Max Helmberger)

Opinion: Biodegradable beads help reduce Mardi Gras plastic pollution

The floats have passed through, the barricades have been taken down and the king cake has been eaten. While we recover from the exhaustion of Mardi Gras, most of us aren’t thinking about the environmental effects of this Louisiana tradition, but we should be.Mardi Gras necklaces have been thrown at parades since 1871, originally made of glass beads and tossed with doubloons and other knickknacks. The glass has now been replaced with plastic, and the necklaces are thrown alongside stuffed animals, cups, hats, candy and more. The tradition of Mardi Gras beads is well known throughout the country, but what is less known is what happens to those beads after the parades are over.In New Orleans, parades follow routes all through the city, and the loaded storm drains are evidence of the effects these seemingly harmless beads have on the environment. In 2018, New Orleans city workers collected 93,000 pounds of Mardi Gras beads from the drainage system. That’s almost 47 tons.

Not only do the beads block flood waters from flowing through the drains, but they also release small amounts of lead into soil and water. Children take home these colorful necklaces of toxic metal and flame retardants, which have been linked to birth defects, asthma, reproductive issues, liver toxicity, learning disabilities and cancer.While it is important to keep up Mardi Gras traditions, it is far more important to protect parade goers, bead collectors and the environment. Drainage systems are in place as protection from flooding and pollution, the functionality of which New Orleans desperately needs.
To fight back against Mardi Gras waste, the Young Leadership Council of New Orleans launched the Mardi Gras Recycling Initiative. This initiative encourages people to reuse their beads, invest in sustainable beads and volunteer to clean up after the Mardi Gras festivities. The city also offers recycling along parade routes and donation sites though The Arc of Greater New Orleans.More recently, there has been a push for the use of sustainable beads. As a response, Noble Plastics—a company based in St. Landry parish—has assisted LSU professor Naohiro Kato in the creation of a biodegradable bead. The beads themselves are made of microalgae grown in tanks on campus, which is then processed and dried in Kato’s lab. The microalgae are paired with compostable plastic, molded and strung on hemp string. While untreated plastic beads take many years to decompose, Kato’s beads will degrade in less than two years.As of now, a single sustainable necklace costs a whopping $5, but this didn’t stop the Krewe of Tucks and Krewe of Freret from stocking up this past Mardi Gras season. 500 strands of Kato’s beads were thrown in New Orleans this year. If the popularity of these microalgae beads grow, Kato hopes he can mass produce them and reduce prices to between 20 and 50 cents per necklace.Kato’s new biodegradable bead provides a way to protect Mardi Gras traditions while also protecting our state’s environment and residents. Sustainable parade practices help us highlight the green in the Mardi Gras colors we cherish so dearly in Louisiana.Mia Coco is a 19-year-old political communications student from Alexandria.

Rush of lawsuits over plastic waste expected after ‘historic’ deal

Rush of lawsuits over plastic waste expected after ‘historic’ dealLike Paris climate agreement, treaty could provide tool to hold firms and states to account, say legal experts A series of lawsuits against plastic producers and governments is expected after a “historic” international agreement on waste, say legal experts.Last week, world leaders agreed to draw up a legally binding treaty over the next two years that covered the full lifecycle of plastics from production to disposal. The move was described by the head of the UN Environment Programme as the most important multilateral environmental deal since the Paris agreement in 2015.And, like its climate counterpart, the new treaty could provide an essential tool to hold governments and companies accountable for their environmental impacts.An imminent case in the Philippines could set an important precedent. Last year, a coalition of individuals and environmental groups led by the marine conservation group Oceana Philippines filed a petition accusing the Philippine government of failing to tackle the “unabated production, use and disposal of plastic” over the past two decades.The group claims a law requiring the country’s public waste body to review, update and enforce a list of products that are not environmentally friendly has never been implemented despite being passed in 2001. The result of this, it say, is “the unabated emission of millions of tons of plastic waste into every nook and cranny of the Philippine archipelago”.The petitioners, who include people who are catching fewer fish, having trouble conceiving or being affected by worsening floods aggravated by plastic pollution, say the government’s inaction is breaching their constitutional right to a healthy environment.The Philippine supreme court has accepted the case, which goes to trial later this month.Carroll Muffett, the president of the US-based Center for International Environmental Law, said it was “beyond any doubt” there would be more lawsuits on plastics in future, pointing to the “small but accelerating” body of litigation already in North America.The coffee company Keurig Green Mountain recently agreed settlements in both the US and Canada with a consumer and regulator respectively after being challenged on claims about the recyclability of its disposable coffee pods. The company paid out millions of dollars and has to change the language it uses on its packaging.Earth Island Institute, a California-based environmental group, has filed three separate lawsuits against producers of plastic goods. In 2020, it began suing Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestlé and other large companies for creating a plastic pollution “nuisance”. The following year Earth Island Institute brought another lawsuit against Coke as well as BlueTriton Brands (formerly Nestlé Waters North America), claiming the companies falsely portrayed themselves as environmentally friendly despite being huge plastic polluters. The companies argue they are all taking action to reduce their plastic use, improve collection and try to find policy resolutions with legislators.All three cases are still pending, but at least two will be heard in state courts, which in general have been more sympathetic than federal courts towards environmental litigants.According to Rosa Pritchard, a plastics lawyer at the environmental law charity ClientEarth, plastics-related litigation is already on the rise. “Plastics production – big oil’s plan B – is increasingly in the spotlight for its contribution to climate change.”ClientEarth is taking legal action to stop the petrochemicals group Ineos building a giant plastics plant in Belgium,Pritchard said the Paris agreement had “provided an essential tool” to hold governments and corporations accountable for their contribution to climate change. “A robust treaty on plastics could also have this impact” alongside further waste and climate laws being introduced across Europe, she added.As well as using the law to challenge plastic production, ClientEarth will be focusing its efforts on industry greenwashing. It has already reported Ahold Delhaize, one of the world’s largest grocery retail groups, to the Dutch financial regulator for allegedly failing to disclose key information on the company’s use of plastics or to report plastic-related risk to its investors. The company has said that it reports annually on the progress it is making with regards to reducing its plastic use and is focusing on those areas where it can have a direct impact, such as improving packaging, phasing out single-use plastic and recycling plastic waste from its sites.Muffett said: “Communities and states affected by plastics are going to be learning from the lessons of climate litigation and looking at the industries and actors that are playing a role in that crisis. A lot of different people are affected in very different ways, and that means that the potential avenues for litigation are actually very substantial and very diverse.”In a stark parallel to the misinformation campaigns on climate crisis supported by the fossil fuel industry, Muffett said there was mounting evidence that plastic producers had known for a very long time it accumulated in the environment and that they had sought to shift the blame to consumers: “It’s just a matter of when the additional dots get connected.”Muffett said the commitment to make a legally binding plastics treaty signalled an important shift in political and public debate. “It means that the era of unrestricted plastic production, use and disposal has a limited lifetime, so everyone working in those sectors is going to have to address that reality very soon – and if they fail to do that a new litigation risk will arise.”TopicsPlasticsnewsReuse this content

Rush of lawsuits over plastic waste expected after ‘historic’ deal

Rush of lawsuits over plastic waste expected after ‘historic’ dealLike Paris climate agreement, treaty could provide tool to hold firms and states to account, say legal experts A series of lawsuits against plastic producers and governments is expected after a “historic” international agreement on waste, say legal experts.Last week, world leaders agreed to draw up a legally binding treaty over the next two years that covered the full lifecycle of plastics from production to disposal. The move was described by the head of the UN Environment Programme as the most important multilateral environmental deal since the Paris agreement in 2015.And, like its climate counterpart, the new treaty could provide an essential tool to hold governments and companies accountable for their environmental impacts.An imminent case in the Philippines could set an important precedent. Last year, a coalition of individuals and environmental groups led by the marine conservation group Oceana Philippines filed a petition accusing the Philippine government of failing to tackle the “unabated production, use and disposal of plastic” over the past two decades.The group claims a law requiring the country’s public waste body to review, update and enforce a list of products that are not environmentally friendly has never been implemented despite being passed in 2001. The result of this, it say, is “the unabated emission of millions of tons of plastic waste into every nook and cranny of the Philippine archipelago”.The petitioners, who include people who are catching fewer fish, having trouble conceiving or being affected by worsening floods aggravated by plastic pollution, say the government’s inaction is breaching their constitutional right to a healthy environment.The Philippine supreme court has accepted the case, which goes to trial later this month.Carroll Muffett, the president of the US-based Center for International Environmental Law, said it was “beyond any doubt” there would be more lawsuits on plastics in future, pointing to the “small but accelerating” body of litigation already in North America.The coffee company Keurig Green Mountain recently agreed settlements in both the US and Canada with a consumer and regulator respectively after being challenged on claims about the recyclability of its disposable coffee pods. The company paid out millions of dollars and has to change the language it uses on its packaging.Earth Island Institute, a California-based environmental group, has filed three separate lawsuits against producers of plastic goods. In 2020, it began suing Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestlé and other large companies for creating a plastic pollution “nuisance”. The following year Earth Island Institute brought another lawsuit against Coke as well as BlueTriton Brands (formerly Nestlé Waters North America), claiming the companies falsely portrayed themselves as environmentally friendly despite being huge plastic polluters. The companies argue they are all taking action to reduce their plastic use, improve collection and try to find policy resolutions with legislators.All three cases are still pending, but at least two will be heard in state courts, which in general have been more sympathetic than federal courts towards environmental litigants.According to Rosa Pritchard, a plastics lawyer at the environmental law charity ClientEarth, plastics-related litigation is already on the rise. “Plastics production – big oil’s plan B – is increasingly in the spotlight for its contribution to climate change.”ClientEarth is taking legal action to stop the petrochemicals group Ineos building a giant plastics plant in Belgium,Pritchard said the Paris agreement had “provided an essential tool” to hold governments and corporations accountable for their contribution to climate change. “A robust treaty on plastics could also have this impact” alongside further waste and climate laws being introduced across Europe, she added.As well as using the law to challenge plastic production, ClientEarth will be focusing its efforts on industry greenwashing. It has already reported Ahold Delhaize, one of the world’s largest grocery retail groups, to the Dutch financial regulator for allegedly failing to disclose key information on the company’s use of plastics or to report plastic-related risk to its investors. The company has said that it reports annually on the progress it is making with regards to reducing its plastic use and is focusing on those areas where it can have a direct impact, such as improving packaging, phasing out single-use plastic and recycling plastic waste from its sites.Muffett said: “Communities and states affected by plastics are going to be learning from the lessons of climate litigation and looking at the industries and actors that are playing a role in that crisis. A lot of different people are affected in very different ways, and that means that the potential avenues for litigation are actually very substantial and very diverse.”In a stark parallel to the misinformation campaigns on climate crisis supported by the fossil fuel industry, Muffett said there was mounting evidence that plastic producers had known for a very long time it accumulated in the environment and that they had sought to shift the blame to consumers: “It’s just a matter of when the additional dots get connected.”Muffett said the commitment to make a legally binding plastics treaty signalled an important shift in political and public debate. “It means that the era of unrestricted plastic production, use and disposal has a limited lifetime, so everyone working in those sectors is going to have to address that reality very soon – and if they fail to do that a new litigation risk will arise.”TopicsPlasticsnewsReuse this content