Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

Two nonprofits take different approaches to the problem of removing the 24 billion pounds of plastic that flow into the ocean each year—and face different challenges. Will we ever find a solution that works?
[Photo: courtesy The Ocean Cleanup]
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Communities throughout St. James, St. John the Baptist, and Louisiana’s other “River Parishes”—those located along the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge—shoulder some of the worst impacts of industry in the U.S.
While most of the nation’s residents live with a cancer risk of around six to 25 in a million, throughout this region, cancer risks run significantly higher, reaching 2,000 in a million in part of St. John the Baptist Parish, where a neoprene factory, Denka Performance Elastomer, emits a constant cocktail of chemicals, including carcinogenic chloroprene gas.

As a result, this region of Louisiana has acquired a grim reputation as Cancer Alley. In total, it is home to approximately 150 industrial plants—many of which produce chemicals used to make plastic—stretching across 85 miles of rural land, along both banks of the Mississippi. From the worst-polluted part of the Pacific Ocean, I had traced the destructive path of plastic back to a major source, in the most notoriously toxic region of America’s petrochemical landscape.

On my way to Welcome from New Orleans, in Norco, St. Charles Parish, I drove around two enormous refineries, one owned by Valero and the other by Royal Dutch Shell, and past two chemical plants, on narrow roads lined with sludgy drainage ditches slick with oil. These complexes surround Norco’s few thousand human inhabitants and their homes, shops, restaurants, post office, and places of worship. Norco was named by and for New Orleans Refining Company (NORCO), the town’s earliest industrial inhabitant, in 1916, following its purchase of former plantation land. In 1929, Shell acquired NORCO’s refinery, expanding operations significantly to include production of chemicals used to make plastic, on agricultural land I’d later learn had been wrested from the descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans who had established farms in a community called Diamond.

Diamond, which began as a small Black neighborhood, has been wracked by two lethal explosions at the Shell plant, in 1973 and 1988. Its residents have long suspected that their constant exposure to toxics was making them sick, though health officials have suggested the increased incidence of cancers and other diseases their community has seen could also be caused by smoking and other lifestyle choices. Norco’s white neighborhoods, located farther afield from the town’s most dangerous industrial operations, are less exposed.

Citizen air pollution science 

Diamond once was a vibrant African American community. Today four mostly empty streets remain, running through tidy plots, many barren, a few with still-occupied homes. Diamond is a modern ghost town born out of necessity, as revealed by investigations and justice-seeking efforts spearheaded by Margie Eugene-Richard, an African American woman who grew up just 25 feet from Shell’s Diamond petrochemical plant.Having witnessed Shell’s numerous disasters striking in her own backyard, and the company’s pollution sickening close friends and family members, Richard spearheaded efforts to hold the company accountable.With the help of Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the Sierra Club, and other nonprofit allies, Richard formed a community group called the Concerned Citizens of Norco, which called on residents to gather air samples with “buckets”: low-cost, DIY research tools typically constructed from rigid five-gallon plastic containers, tubes, valves, and Tedlar bags (which are designed to hold volatile gases). Once collected, air is sent to laboratories for chemical analyses.
In 1994, personal injury attorney Ed Masry, who worked with Erin Brockovich, equipped residents of Contra Costa County, California, with the earliest iteration of these buckets to collect polluted air in neighborhoods near Unocal Corporation’s Rodeo refinery. This air-sampling effort helped reveal unchecked air pollution that had sickened thousands of people living nearby. Unocal ultimately settled an $80 million lawsuit paid out to some 6,000 residents. Since, air-sampling kits used by so-called bucket brigades have helped many communities across the US keep tabs on their local air pollution levels and hold industries accountable for violating emissions regulations.
Related: The US falls behind most of the world in plastic pollution legislationDiamond residents used their air pollution data, which revealed concerning levels of toxic chemicals, to take Shell to court, demanding relocation. During many frustrating years of litigation, Shell continued to pollute. Finally, in 2000, after Richard traveled straight to Shell’s top corporate officials working at The Hague, the company made its first buyout offer. But it was offensively low: just $26,000 per property. Richard and her allies kept pushing back to get a fair price for giving up their homes. Finally, in 2002, Shell offered to buy out Diamond’s residents—extending home-improvement loans to the few who chose to stay—and reduce its emissions, formally acknowledging that living in Diamond was too risky. Most people, including Richard, have left Diamond, though Richard would devote her life to advocating for other communities overtaken by industry in the US and abroad.

In LaPlace, St. John the Baptist Parish, a handful of cows languidly roamed a scruffy patch of dead roadside grass at the foot of the steam-ing, gleaming scaffolding of yet another chemical complex. The blue-and-white logo affixed to a large chemical storage tank read “Denka Performance Elastomer.” When I stepped out my car to get a better look at the animals, the sharp scent of industrial emissions stung my sinuses, and my temples began to throb. Almost immediately, I noticed a pickup truck outfitted with security mirrors and flashing lights rolling toward me. I hurriedly snapped a few photos of the cows—and inevitably, the plant—before returning to my car and driving on.

The expanding industrial complex 

Near Garyville, approaching St. James Parish, the landscape and everything that occupied it appeared increasingly sepia toned. The streets, the fences, the houses, the electricity wires, and the grass that miraculously continued to grow—everything was acquiring a rusty tint that intensified in hue when an industrial complex came into view a few miles down the road. This one was a hodgepodge of round-topped domes, silos and pipes, and smokestacks, all coated with a layer of bauxite ore, a red claylike substance used in aluminum refining, imported from Jamaica. Bauxite dust, which often contains traces of heavy metals, is considered an occupational hazard for people who work with the ore. For miles, the clay clung to everything, even the air, which felt gritty inside my mouth. The wind carried the plant’s toxic emissions, sending mercury invisibly into the air and sweeping it across the orange landscape, where it accumulated in the soil, nearby streams and rivers, and the mighty Mississippi.I continued driving past more toxic tailings ponds, more chemical plants, more piles of industrial waste, until I reached the Sunshine Bridge. After crossing the cantilever bridge, I followed River Road past the Mosaic company’s fertilizer and ammonia factory and AmSty’s polystyrene plant to finally arrive in Welcome.When I arrived, I climbed up the grassy levee to take a look at the river. I could see a grain barge loading up against a collection of floating storage containers strapped together like a giant metal raft near the undeveloped bank—just grass and mud and twisting live oaks—most of them dead and crumbling. Upriver, I could see a tangle of thick pipes reaching across the levee and over the highway, supplying petroleum to yet another chemical plant. The site of the proposed plastic factory, an enormous acreage of over-grown grass, was cordoned off by nothing more than a tall, chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire.

Erica Cirino is a science writer and artist who explores the intersection of the human and nonhuman worlds. Her photographic and written works have appeared in Scientific American, The Guardian, VICE, Hakai Magazine, The Atlantic, and other esteemed publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and Safina Center, as well as several awards for visual art.Banner photo: Oil refineries in Louisiana. (Credit: wisepig/flickr)

Tiny bits of plastic are swirling in the sky, and a new model suggests they could be subtly affecting the climate.Like the ash spewed from a supervolcano, microplastics have infested the atmosphere and encircled the globe. These are bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters long, and they come in two main varieties. Fragments spawn from disintegrating bags and bottles (babies drink millions of tiny particles a day in their formula), and microfibers tear loose from synthetic clothing in the wash and flush out to sea. Winds then scour land and ocean, carrying microplastics high into the atmosphere. The air is so lousy with the stuff that each year, the equivalent of over 120 million plastic bottles fall on 11 protected areas in the US, which account for just 6 percent of the country’s total area.In a study published today in the journal Nature, scientists have taken a first swing at modeling how the atmospheric particles could be influencing the climate, and it’s a strange mix of good news and bad. The good news is that microplastics may be reflecting a tiny bit of the sun’s energy back into space, which would actually cool the climate ever so slightly. The bad news is that humanity is loading the environment with so much microplastic (ocean sediment samples show that concentrations have been doubling every 15 years since the 1940s), and the particles themselves are so varied, that it’s hard to know how the pollutant will ultimately influence the climate. At some point they may end up heating the planet.Earth absorbs some of the sun’s energy while also reflecting some of it, an exchange known as radiative forcing. Like other aerosols in the atmosphere, such as dust and ash, microplastics interact with this energy, the modeling found. “They’re very good at scattering sunlight back to space, so we see that cooling influence coming through,” says atmospheric chemist Laura Revell, lead author of the new paper. “But they are also pretty good at absorbing the radiation emitted by the Earth, which means that they can contribute to the greenhouse effect in a very small way.”Like snowflakes, no two microplastics are alike—they’re made of many different polymers, and they come in a rainbow of colors. Fragments chip away as they tumble around the environment, while fibers split over and over again. And each particle grows a unique “plastisphere” of bacteria, viruses, and algae. So when Revell and her colleagues set out to build a model of how they affect the climate, they knew it would be impossible to represent so much diversity. Instead, they determined the general optical properties of fibers and fragments as two main groups—for instance, how well they’d reflect or absorb the sun’s energy. They based their model on pure polymers without pigments, and assumed an atmospheric composition of 100 particles per cubic meter of air. The researchers then plugged all this into an existing climate model, which told them the estimated effect that atmospheric microplastics would have on the climate. 

The Spinelli Complex at Mount Anthony Union High School. Courtesy photo
Mount Anthony Union High School’s main athletic field is in rough shape. Conditions at the Bennington school have been so bad that sports teams cannot use it to practice and use it only for games during the fall season. 
In recent years, that’s prompted the school’s activities director, Ashley Hoyt, to look into the school’s options. On Nov. 2, residents in the school district will vote on whether to spend $3.5 million to upgrade the Spinelli Complex, which includes an upgraded multiuse building, track and, according to a conceptual plan by the engineers, an 82,500-square-foot synthetic turf field. 
While many agree the current field does not work for athletes and coaches, some are raising concerns that synthetic turf could contain the toxic chemical group PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are known to cause an array of harmful health effects, including cancer, when ingested. 
Widespread PFAS contamination in Bennington from the former Teflon coating business ChemFab, owned by Saint Gobain, continues to affect residents, including having a major impact on drinking water. 
In a report sent to school administrators, the manufacturers of the synthetic turf field and track assured MSK Engineering and Goldstone Architecture, who are working on the project, that the materials do not contain the emerging class of toxic “forever chemicals,” and advocates for the field point to existing turf fields elsewhere in Vermont. 
But those who oppose the artificial turf project — including state legislators, a former official with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Vermont Natural Resources Council and Vermont Conservation Voters — say the risks outweigh the benefits. 
They’ve expressed concerns about the most common tests for PFAS in turf, which may not identify the full scope of the chemical class. Jon Groveman, policy and water program director at the Vermont Natural Resources Council, has reviewed the manufacturer’s tests and does not think they’re conclusive. 
The report includes only several dozen chemicals within the PFAS class, but Groveman said there are thousands of others that are not yet regulated. 
“There is, to our understanding, a way to actually do further analysis and certify that there really isn’t any of the thousands of PFAS in the product,” he said. “But that hasn’t been done.”
Earlier this year, Gov. Phil Scott signed Act 36, which bans certain products containing PFAS — such as firefighting foam, food packaging, carpets and ski wax — from being sold in the state. On Monday, federal officials with the Environmental Protection Agency made forward movement on efforts to limit the chemical class in consumer products, The New York Times reported. 
“If it’s present, then Bennington is going to have issues,” said Lauren Hierl, executive director of Vermont Conservation Voters. “Any community choosing to look at this could end up inadvertently bringing PFAS into their community and then having to deal with the potential health and environmental risks that come along with that.”
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, who sponsored Act 36, said legislators need to continue to probe the issue.
“If you look at what the state has done already, we are moving in the direction, more and more and more, of working to keep PFASes out of our environment,” he said. “So as much as we can do, I think we’ll continue to do that.”
Tim Holbrook, chair of the Mount Anthony Union School District, said synthetic turf has become a popular choice for schools in recent years. 
“It isn’t something that we’re inventing,” he said. “There are four or five different high schools in Vermont that have them, and as far as we know, no one’s ever had a problem with them at all.”
The Mount Anthony Union School District Board is scheduled to hear a range of opinions on the matter Wednesday night at its regularly scheduled meeting and plans to hold an additional informational meeting later this month for members of the public. 
Big dirt patch
Andrew Gilbert, a senior at Mount Anthony who plays football and lacrosse, hopes to see a new Spinelli Complex where more teams can play and practice. 
“When you’re in middle school and coming up through elementary school playing sports, especially football, Friday nights on Spinelli — you don’t beat that atmosphere,” he said. 
The soccer and football teams play games on the field, but all practices and all other sports are relegated to other fields to avoid wear and tear that is already causing uneven terrain. Hoyt, the athletic director, said she’s seen that terrain cause injuries. 
“After football and soccer season, the field is totally chewed up,” Hoyt said. “If you were to walk our field, right now, the whole center is just a big dirt patch. There’s uneven surfaces. We don’t even honestly have grass on it at this point.”
Other fields — where practices take place and other sports play — don’t have abundant spectator seating, are not wheelchair-accessible and often flood, she said. 
A fact sheet, published alongside a number of other documents related to the project on the board’s website, said artificial turf has become more popular because it’s free of fertilizer and pesticides, it reduces water and maintenance costs, and it increases the amount of possible playing time on the field. It also says that the fields “result in fewer injuries because of the improved and level playing surface,” but studies have shown that synthetic turf can cause higher rates of lower-extremity injuries. 
In February 2020, the school board convened an ad hoc committee, which included coaches, administrators, board members and community members, to review the options for upgrading the turf field. Hoyt said they looked at natural turf, but even what she calls the “Cadillac” of grass fields wouldn’t have enough playability and durability. 
“The field would still need tons of upkeep and maintenance,” she said. “We’d still be painting the field multiple times a week. That just wasn’t something that we wanted.”
The committee voted unanimously to recommend an artificial turf in March 2021. In September, MSK Architects and Goldstone Architecture presented a feasibility study to the board. The vote is scheduled for Nov. 2. 
“The board has been very, very clear that they do not want to have a field that has the potential to harm anybody,” Holbrook said. “That certainly is paramount.”
Environmental concerns
Environmentalists have raised a list of concerns about the proposed field that range from microplastics pollution to the temperature of turf fields and the risk of PFAS contamination. PFAS has been identified in various types of turf across the country. 
Scientists with the Children’s Environmental Health Center of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have raised concerns about children’s exposure to recycled rubber, which is often included in turf.
“Everything that we’ve learned from working on these issues with a coalition of people throughout the country is that these risks are not worth taking,” Groveman said. “The more we learn about these chemicals, the more dangerous we find out they are.”
Hierl, with Vermont Conservation Voters, said she’s concerned about disposing of the synthetic material when the turf’s lifespan is over — school board documents say the turf would likely last around 15 years with proper maintenance. 
Hierl serves on the Montpelier City Council, where the wastewater treatment facility is accepting landfill leachate from Coventry. Discharge from Montpelier’s facility already has high readings of PFAS. 
“It creates these ripple effect problems downstream,” she said. “For us, it’s trying to assess, what are the costs and benefits and the risks that you’re taking on and would want any community to have their eyes wide open.”
Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison, said both the Legislature’s Health and Welfare Committee and the Natural Resources Committee and Energy Committee, which he chairs, have been working to reduce the presence of toxic chemicals in the state — and particularly at schools. Burlington High School had to relocate after PCBs were found at the campus, he said. 
“I’m thinking about prudence and liability,” Bray said. “I just would want to be very careful about bringing anything potentially toxic into the state, period, and most specifically to a school. And then Bennington itself has a very sensitive history on PFAS.”
‘It’s just ironic’
Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration and is now a senior fellow at Bennington College, said she recommends against synthetic turf, which she described as a “plastic shag carpet.” 
She’s concerned about PFAS, she said, but she also has other concerns. Synthetic turf also creates hotter surfaces and contributes to microplastic pollution. She believes plastic turf fields should be banned in the state.
“It’s just ironic that a community that’s been so negatively impacted by toxic chemicals in drinking water would even consider putting this type of material on playing fields for children,” she said. 
Town officials have asked whether PFAS entering the environment could impact Saint Gobain’s responsibility to clean up existing pollution in Bennington. Peter Walke, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, said the situation likely wouldn’t affect an existing settlement between the company and the state.
If there were a PFAS release from the school, Walke said, and it affected wells included in the settlement, Saint Gobain could request that the school help pay for the cleanup. 
“We don’t see that as likely,” he said. “The school is in an area where water lines either already existed or will be extended to cover the impacted wells from the PFAS contamination, so we don’t anticipate that being a significant issue.”
Campion wonders who would hold responsibility for cleaning up potential pollution — a cost he said should not fall to taxpayers. 
“I think we all really believe kids deserve a great space to play on and to explore athletics,” Campion said. “But it has to be safe. It absolutely has to be safe for kids, and it absolutely has to be safe for the environment today and going forward.”

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Airborne microplastic sampling under way at Kaitorete Spit in Canterbury, New Zealand. Credit: Alex AvesAdvertisement
Microplastics—minuscule bits of bottles, bags, synthetic fibers and other plastic waste that have broken up in the environment—are influencing Earth’s climate as they circulate through the atmosphere. Like other aerosol particles, both natural and synthetic, microplastics seem to have an overall cooling effect (albeit a small one), according to the first study to look at the possible climate effects of airborne microplastics. The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings, published on Wednesday in Nature, show the urgent need to get a better handle on how much plastic debris is in the air, where it is and what it is made of in order to better pin down its climatic influence.

Microplastics are yet another kind of particle that humans are adding to the atmosphere “that has a climate impact. And that is big, and that is important, and we need to start accounting for that” when examining factors that affect Earth’s climate, says Deonie Allen, a microplastics researcher at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. “This is the paper that opens that door,” adds Allen, who was not involved in the new study but has worked with the authors on other research.

All kinds of plastic waste crumble into smaller and smaller pieces when exposed to sunlight, wind, rain and other environmental conditions. Plastic’s generally low density means these fragments can easily be picked up by winds and blown around the world. In recent years, scientists have even found microplastics on remote mountain peaks and in the Arctic.

It occurred to researchers—including Laura Revell, an atmospheric scientist at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury and one of the new study’s authors—that all those particles swirling around the globe would intercept sunlight, as do other aerosols such as dust, sulfates and black carbon. This ultimately influences temperatures on Earth’s surface. Sulfates, for example, scatter radiation, exerting a cooling effect. Black carbon, on the other hand, absorbs visible and infrared radiation, warming the atmosphere.

But unlike sulfates or black carbon, plastic is not one material but hundreds. It encompasses a multitude of different polymers, as well as the chemicals and pigments that are added to them. Microplastic particles also come in a wide array of sizes and shapes. “That makes them particularly tricky,” Revell says. Her team’s study only considered noncolored fragments and fibers shed by synthetic fabric because they were the only materials for which the researchers had information on radiative properties. These particles scatter ultraviolet and visible light and absorb infrared light. When the scientists included these interactions in global climate models, they could estimate the particles’ net impact on Earth’s energy balance—which was a very slight cooling. The study estimated so-called effective radiative forcing (ERF), a measure of changes in Earth’s energy balance. Microplastics had an ERF of about –0.75 milliwatt per square meter, whereas all other aerosols have an ERF between –0.71 and –0.14 watt per square meter. (There are 1,000 milliwatts in one watt.) At the global level, warming from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere overwhelms these cooling influences.

But microplastics could have localized cooling or warming effects depending on how they vary from place to place: there are higher concentrations over some cities, for example. “The regional effects of aerosols can be significant” even when the overall global effect is low, says climate scientist Bjørn Samset, who studies aerosols at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo and was not involved with the new study.

The exact effect on temperature can vary depending on how many particles are involved, how high in the atmosphere they are and numerous other variables. Because Revell and her co-authors wanted to take a first stab at addressing the question of climate influence, they assumed a uniform concentration of one microplastic particle per cubic meter of air throughout the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Even the limited concentration studies done to date show huge variations, however, from as low as 0.01 particle per cubic meter over parts of the Pacific Ocean to as high as 5,550 particles per cubic meter over Beijing. Studies have used different methods of sampling and detection, some of which miss the smallest plastic particles. In the studies that have used more sensitive methods, the tiniest particles made up half of what was found. And scientists do not yet know how many microplastics may be present at higher levels of the atmosphere, where their effects could be different.

Factoring in pigments and other additives could also change the effect they have. Pigments, for example, would generally increase light absorption, which would tend to warm the atmosphere. Revell says there is simply not yet enough information available to draw such conclusions. And then there are organic materials that could alter things by glomming on to plastic particles, as well as the ways these particles may interact with other atmospheric chemicals or influence cloud formation. “We still don’t know much about how they actually behave in the atmosphere,” Revell says.

Though the overall effect she and her colleagues have calculated is small, compared with that of other aerosols, “it is big enough to be quantified,” Allen says, adding that this shows the need to fund more and better monitoring of atmospheric microplastics. Rather than microplastics being a separate problem, she says, the results “securely cement [them] in the climate change argument.”

Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)Andrea Thompson, an associate editor at Scientific American, covers sustainability. Follow Andrea Thompson on TwitterCredit: Nick HigginsRecent Articles by Andrea ThompsonRisk of Dangerous Heat Exposure Is Growing Quickly in CitiesHow Climate Change Helped Fires Cross the Sierra Nevada for the First TimeHere’s How Much Food Contributes to Climate Change

A disturbing image has exposed a huge hidden issue with Australia’s vaccine rollout amid a desperate push to find a solution.Doctors and nurses are joining the war on waste after disturbing images reveal a grim plastic waste problem that has made worse by the Covid pandemic.The scale of the problem – about 70 million pieces of plastic in landfill – is more evident now than ever with the healthcare system relying on single-use plastic during the Covid vaccine rollout.Images shared by NSW Circular, a government funded organisation that promotes recycling, have given a grim insight into the mammoth amount of syringe caps being discarded.Each jab involves a range of single-use plastics, including syringe caps and the syringe itself which add up to hundreds of kilos.And NSW Circular is desperate to do something about it.The organisation is working with St Vincents for a recycling trial, during which, they collected 80,000 pieces of plastic waste that weighed 205kgs – equivalent to 41,000 plastic bags.The scheme has since expanded to include a vaccine hub in Newcastle, where 170kg of plastic caps from Covid jabs have been collected in just a few weeks.NSW Circular said collecting waste produced from the vaccine rollout across NSW’s public health system could save nearly 70 million pieces of plastic from landfill – this would total about 150 tonnes.But the challenge is figuring out what to do with it.While the group flagged that clinical waste cannot be recycled, between 40 and 60 per cent of non-clinical waste was being thrown away. If that was recovered, NSW Health could save between $2-3 million a year which could be spent elsewhere.“If the estimated recyclable waste currently going into clinical waste streams was recovered, NSW hospitals could create annual savings equivalent to the cost of hiring 40 nurses,” NSW Circular said.One of the solutions is turning plastic parts into roller doors.NSW Circular joined forces with AllMoulds Plastic’s founder Scott Cantrill who has turned the 80,000 pieces of plastic from St Vincent’s Hospital into parts for roller doors and plastic caps that go on bolts.The plastic caps are then being purchased Ocycut – a Sydney company that makes parts for wind turbines. NSW Circular said it set out to prove it was possible for the healthcare sector to recycle without compromising health or safety.

From start to finish, making alcoholic beverages asks a lot from the environment. It takes about 20 gallons of water to produce a single eight-ounce serving of beer and 30 gallons per five-ounce serving of wine. Then there’s the glass and aluminum production for alcohol containers, the plastic and cardboard for packaging, and energy consumption for home and retail refrigeration. Many types of alcohol are only made in one or a few places—tequila in Mexico, scotch in Scotland, bourbon in Kentucky—requiring long-distance transportation to reach consumers.The most common ingredients in alcohol production—grapes, wheat, barley, hops, sugar—are some of the most water- and energy-intensive crops on the planet. Brewing and fermenting also require huge amounts of energy. While specific estimates of the alcoholic beverage industry’s carbon footprint are not available, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says the wider food and beverage industry is one of the most unsustainable in the world, contributing to an estimated 60 percent of biodiversity loss and 30 percent of emissions-driven climate change worldwide. Alcohol makes up about 16 percent of the U.S. beverage industry by volume, according to Park Street, a Florida-based firm that provides logistical support to alcohol companies.As climate change closes in, affecting every part of beverage producing, from agriculture to trucking, could these long-enduring practices spell an end to cheap beer on tap? Not necessarily; help is on the way. Innovations and technologies are emerging to reduce the environmental footprint of the alcoholic beverage industry, while some large manufacturers are taking steps to make production more sustainable. Here are a few examples.Tackling transportationIn 2010, after hiking to the top of a mountain in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, Patrick Tatera really wanted a beer. Knowing that it’s about 95 percent water, Tatera, whose background is in chemical engineering and mathematics, started to ponder how he could dehydrate beer for easier transport and then rehydrate it when he was ready to drink it.Tatera began experimenting and realized that a technology that could do this on a large scale could impact the entire beer industry, which is plagued by an inefficient distribution chain, according to Gary Tickle, the CEO of Sustainable Beverage Technologies, or SBT, the company Tatera went on to form.Global transportation accounts for an estimated 20 percent of beer’s carbon footprint. Beer, wine, and other alcoholic beverages are generally shipped in climate-controlled vehicles to prevent spoiling. “There’s a lot of stainless steel, water, and air being shipped around the country and around the world by virtue of the technology that’s being used today,” Tickle says. Tatera developed a process called BrewVo, which creates highly concentrated beer that can be transported at one-sixth the weight and volume of traditional beer. The BrewVo process is similar to traditional brewing except that the beer goes through multiple rounds of it. The final product of each brew cycle is sent through a BrewVo unit, which separates out the water and alcohol. “Everything else, all the good stuff that we typically find in the body of the beer,” such as the flavor from the hops and grain is shipped in plastic bags instead of cans, bottles, or kegs, according to Tickle.At its destination—a bar or local brewery—it’s mixed at a ratio of one part bulk beer, six parts water, alcohol if desired, and then carbonated. It can then be sold as beer. BrewVo’s beer products are available at several bars in Denver, Colorado; the company is working to open a bar in South America, and soon will partner with Sleeping Giant, a brewer in Colorado, to scale up production.Hoppiness from yeastAnother sustainable solution for the beer industry came to life in 2013. Charles Denby was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley studying how to genetically engineer yeast to make biofuels. In his spare time, he was brewing beer. He learned something in the process: Hops, which give beer its distinctive aroma and flavor, are one of the most expensive parts of the process. A pound of hops, which can make anywhere from about 10 to 25 gallons of beer depending on the recipe, can cost upwards of $15. Hop production is also a water hog. Growing one pound takes about 300 to 450 gallons of water depending on local weather and soil conditions, according to studies in Washington and Oregon, two of the largest hop-producing states. Denby applied his expertise in yeast genetics and synthetic biology to making beer.He thought, “What if I just got the yeast to do it; we can cut out all of that agriculture and all that cost,” Denby says.Denby and his Berkley colleague, Rachel Li, set to work engineering a strain of yeast that would produce terpenes, the chemical compounds in hops responsible for the “hoppy” flavor. In 2018, Denby and Li reported their success in Nature. In fact, beers brewed with the strains of yeast they developed tasted even hoppier than traditional beers, according to results of a double-blind taste test reported in the study.The pair went on to create Berkeley Yeast. But despite the promise of their innovation, the hops substitute wasn’t immediately taken up in the industry, according to Denby.“When you have an application that can replace or reduce the reliance on agriculture, but people have been using agriculture for centuries to do the job that you are replacing or improving, it takes a little while. In the beer industry in particular, a lot of these breweries already have contracts where they have hops on contract for the next five years,” Denby says. To overcome that stumbling block, the company instead promoted its yeast-derived flavors as a lower-cost, dependable alternative to hops. Today, Berkeley Yeast supplies brewer’s yeast to hundreds of breweries, Denby says, and has expanded into the wine industry.  Carbon-neutral productionWhile start-ups such as Tatera’s SBT and Denby’s Berkeley Yeast look to create innovative solutions, other beverage companies are shifting their entire production processes to be more environmentally friendly.Diageo, one of the largest multinational beer and spirit producers in the world, owns over 200 well-known alcoholic beverage brands, including Guinness, Don Julio, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, and Crown Royal, and has pledged to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.To do that, says Kirstie McIntyre, the company’s Global Sustainability Director, Diageo is taking a multi-pronged approach. Increasing efficiency is one way—upgrading equipment, improving building insulation, and speeding up the production process. The company captures and reuses heat energy, which is required in several stages of production. Diageo also uses renewable energy sources such as biomass generators fueled by byproducts from the brewing and distilling processes and waste products from farming hops, barley, and other ingredients to generate energy and electricity on site.So far, Diageo has three carbon-neutral distilleries and is working to make their other 150 production sites worldwide carbon-neutral in the coming years. “It’s not a one size fits all. You can’t do the same thing in every single site,” McIntyre says. “We will go through that same hierarchy within each site, no matter how big or small, no matter how new or old, and we will work through all of that. ” In early September, Diageo’s strategy to reach net zero emissions was certified by the Science Based Targets initiative, a joint effort by CDP Worldwide, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute, and the World Wide Fund for Nature, which helps the private sector lower its emissions. Net-zero is achieved when a company eliminates its emissions, or offsets them by planting trees, for instance, so that it doesn’t add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Momentum for sustainability in the alcoholic beverage industry seems to be growing as emerging innovations take hold and well-known brands work to reduce their environmental footprint. “This truly is a global opportunity, says Tickle. If you think about this industry, it really hasn’t changed a lot in many hundreds of years. We think that this really is the first unique opportunity to truly upend an industry.”

Baca dalam bahasa IndonesiaOcean diving began as a hobby for Swietenia Puspa Lestari.Key points:A climate activist says an increasing number of young Indonesians feel “eco-anxiety” “Eco-anxiety” is a source of stress caused by concern over the impacts of climate change Young Indonesians are taking action to tackle climate change as a way to manage this anxietyBut after a decade, she saw more rubbish than colourful fish underwater so started to feel anxious.”I found so much plastic waste, mainly from single-use plastics such as packaging and straws,” she said.Ms Lestari, an environmental engineer, decided to tackle the pollution problem so founded Divers Clean Action six years ago.Now, the organisation has more than 1,000 volunteers across Indonesia.

This year, each of us will throw out, recycle, or shove into a desk drawer an average of 16.8 pounds of old phones, laptops, toasters, and other electronics and appliances, according to the UN — a whopping total of 63.3 million tons of electronic waste worldwide.That waste can end up in massive digital dumps in the Global South, exposing children who pick out valuable metals from the trash to more than 1,000 toxic substances.With just more than 17% of that e-waste recycled, advocates are urging producers and consumers to make sure those defunct electronics don’t end up in landfills or collecting dust in the basement. As we transition to more renewable forms of electricity and transportation, which require metals like lithium and copper, experts say it’s more important than ever that we recycle smartphones and batteries.”It’s a call on consumers to return their electronics because without that, the alternative is the need to mine the materials, which is a lot more environmentally damaging,” said Pascal Leroy, director general of the nonprofit WEEE Forum, during a press conference held Wednesday to promote International E-waste Day.

Toxics from handling e-waste

Electronic waste, or “e-waste,” is not a new challenge — picture discarded rusted washing machines and refrigerators.But the amount of e-waste we’re creating each year has been on the rise. In 2019, 59 million tons of e-waste were created around the world, up more than 20% in just five years, according to the United Nations.Some countries — especially in Europe — have relatively successful e-waste takeback programs. But “the amount of e-waste is growing so rapidly that even the growth (of recycling) that we are experiencing at a global scale is being outpaced,” said Kees Baldé, a senior program officer at the United Nations University’s Sustainable Cycles Program, during the press conference.The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans throw out more than 151 million cellphones a year. The agency says that recycling a million of those phones would recover 35,000 pounds of copper and 772 pounds of silver. Large appliances like fridges and stoves still make up the bulk of e-waste by weight, according to the WEEE Forum.Related: E-waste grew 8 percent in just 2 years. Just one-fifth was recycled.Improper e-waste disposal brings with it a host of environmental and human health concerns.Because of their small hands, kids often work to recover valuable materials from digital dumpsites in Asia and Africa, exposing them to heavy metals like lead and mercury and other toxic chemicals, according to the WHO. Meanwhile, pregnant people who sift through e-waste at these sites are at greater risk of having a stillbirth or premature birth, and of having babies born with neurodevelopmental issues linked to lead exposure. The U.S. has not signed the Basel Convention, which prohibits countries from sending hazardous waste abroad unless recipients have agreed to accept it.

Policies to deal with e-waste  

Like with many environmental issues, Europe is ahead of the United States in addressing e-waste. The EU requires electronic product manufacturers to design products so that they can be repaired, and to put in place electronics takeback and recycling programs. EU citizens also have guaranteed access to free e-waste recycling programs — something not guaranteed in the U.S. These efforts have led to 55% of e-waste in Europe being properly recycled, Leroy said at the press conference.While it’s been illegal to dump e-waste in the United States since the 1970s, states have largely been left on their own to figure out what to do about mounting electronic waste. 25 states and the District of Columbia have put e-waste laws in place, but experts say a more comprehensive approach is needed.Recently, the “right to repair” movement has gained momentum to ensure that customers have access to the software and other tools needed to repair their own cars and electronics, or to seek out independent, and typically cheaper, mechanics and repair shops to do so for them. Elizabeth O’Reilly, head of environmental compliance at WEEE Ireland, said a focus of e-waste reduction efforts where she lives has been training a new generation of appliance repair technicians.For individuals wanting to recycle e-waste, the Consumer Technology Association has an interactive map that you can use to find out where to drop off your e-waste. Banner photo: Women sorting Plastics for melting on the outskirts of Guangzhou, China. (Credit: baselactionnetwork/flickr)